Antifa

Antifa is not an organization. The Congressional Research Service describes it as a decentralized movement of independent, like-minded local groups and individuals, with no unifying organizational structure, no shared list of opponents, and no central body whose statements bind anyone else. Groups adopting the label vary in what they do and whom they target.

Origins and the date question

This page carries no founded year, because the movement does not have one that can be stated honestly.

Adherents place themselves in a tradition running back to opposition groups in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In the United States, CRS traces the activism to antiracists who mobilized in the 1980s against racist skinhead, Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi organizing. The oldest U.S. group to use “antifa” in its name is Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon, founded in 2007. U.S. antifa groups became widely known only after the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017.

An earlier version of this page dated the movement to 2016. Nothing supports that date, and CRS contradicts it.

Stated obligations and tactics

CRS reports that U.S. adherents have articulated four shared obligations: to track the activity of groups they identify as fascist, to oppose their public organizing, to support antifascist allies who are attacked or arrested, and not to cooperate with law enforcement. Movement literature described in the same report urges building an online and social media presence, monitoring self-described white nationalists, staging counter-demonstrations, pressing venues to cancel events — “no-platforming” — removing opponents’ flyers, publishing identifying information about perceived opponents, and self-defense training.

CRS notes that publishing identifying information has in some instances targeted people misidentified as opponents, and that activists doing this work state an intention to avoid that outcome.

Violence and the designation question

CRS states that much antifa activity is nonviolent protest, and that some adherents are willing to commit crimes, including violent ones. It records specific incidents, among them a 2012 attack by Anti-Racist Action — now the Torch Network — on a meeting of white supremacist groups near Chicago.

On May 31, 2020, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that the United States would designate antifa a domestic terrorist organization. CRS notes that the FBI confirms antifa adherents are subjects of ongoing domestic terrorism investigations but declines to designate any domestic organization a “domestic terrorist organization”, and that the federal definition of domestic terrorism describes conduct rather than ideology. There is in any case no organization to designate, which is the practical difficulty the report identifies.

Reading the sources

The two book-length accounts approach the movement from different positions. Bray’s is a history by an author sympathetic to it; Vysotsky’s is an ethnographic study. Both are cited here so the page does not rest on a single perspective, and neither is treated as settling the contested questions.