Antifa is Anarchist

US president Donald Trump recently designated antifa a terrorist organization. Antifa is a loose social movement based around opposition to right-wing politics. For Trump the move is mostly an extension of his attempt to turn the United States into a right-wing autocracy, similar to Orban's Hungary and Putin's Russia. MAGA designates antifa (short for anti-fascist) as terroristic, not because it opposes political violence, but because as a social movement directed against right-wing politics, antifa represents a diffuse opposition to its illiberal conservative and ethnocratic agenda. In this social vision civil rights and separation of powers are obstacles to the exclusion of alien elements from other nations, and which do not assimilate into the native culture of US conservative nationalism, and they are to be removed to ensure the cultural domination of white, straight, male, and cisgendered naturalized Americans. This is why Antifa has been a boogeyman of the American right since 2016.

Sometimes liberals will deny the existence of antifa as an organized political movement which threatens the social vision of the American right-wing or declare that antifa is simply opposition to fascism and count themselves among its ranks. However, antifa is not simply opposition to fascism. Fascism is a specific permutation of far-right politics which after threatening the European world-order between the World Wars, has largely been sidelined as a moral aberration. Today most elements on the far-right oppose fascism because of its association with atrocities like the holocaust. Despite the fact that liberal scholars often label any version of right-wing authoritarianism "fascist" fascism demands a totalitarian subjugation of all individuals and social forces to the rebirth of the national community and the corresponding destruction of capitalism's economic materialism and international legal structure which puts limiting conditions on national sovereignty. The far-right today is by contrast dominated by conservative forces which oppose all forms of revolutionary social transformation, whether from the right, or left.

Conservatism is by definition against fascism, in principle as much as it opposes socialism, since the point of conservative politics is to defend existing communal, cultural, and political traditions from visionary political actors and social movements who seek their overthrow. Conservatives are not thereby antifa, neither are liberals. Antifa as a social movement is constituted by an opposition to right-wing politics justified by an Anarchistic opposition to all forms of social domination. While "domination" has a negative moral connotation in modern culture, most political ideologies are not against it. Instead, they seek to defend certain forms of domination against others. Conservatives, for instance, desire forms of social control which punish, or eliminate those who deviate from the social traditions that are constitutive of the community's success.

Liberals, although being adherents to the political ideology most connected to the idea of political liberty in popular culture, seeks forms of social control which bind individuals to tacit social agreements which are supposed to guarantee rights for the entire community. Fascists seek forms of social control which constantly mobilize the national community toward greatness and eliminate elements present within, but nevertheless essentially outside of the national community. Nationalism in general seeks forms of social control which monopolize political power in the hands of a national community. Socialism is the only ideology which seeks a permanent end to all forms of social control in favor of a freely organized human community.

Even within socialism, however, Anarchism is the version of socialism which denies the use of structures of social control to bring about that free community. Anarchists call for the immediate construction of that free community and the immediate and simultaneous destruction of all structures of command and obedience. So, Anarchism is the only political ideology which consistently repudiates social domination. It is this radical repudiation of social control which animates antifa as a social movement, for instance in its tactic of deplatforming in which right-wing extremists are forcibly marginalized from platforms of political expression and mobilization.

The Anarchistic orientation of antifa is the reason why antifa, even when it seeks to deplatform the far-right, resists all calls for and attempted limitation of political expression by the coercive top-down force of the state. Although the right and political center have often joined hands in criticizing deplatforming as an assault on free speech, antifa is in fact doing what's necessary to protect free speech, that is using social opposition to marginalize forms of politics which seek to limit political expression while also refusing the power of the state over such expression. The far-right has no use for free speech outside the context of opportunistic appeals to be allowed to build their movements in the open. Their political program is directed at the radical limitation of political expression designed to equalize the distribution of social wealth and power. This can not only be seen in Trump's designation of antifa as a terrorist organization, but also in his administration's directive to use opposition to Christianity, patriotism, and capitalism as justification for political repression.

Antifa, in line with its Anarchistic orientation, does not oppose the far-right merely on the grounds that it seeks the wrong kind of social domination and control. It does so on the grounds that the far-right from illiberal conservatives to fascists represents the prospect of the intensification of structures of social domination through more extreme forms of cultural exclusion, wealth inequality, and political authoritarianism. This means that liberals who merely want to limit structures of social control to the enforcement of tacit social agreements around human rights and centralist socialists, such as Marxist-Leninists, who desire to wield structures of social control such as the state in an ill-thought-out attempt to create a world without such structures are excluded from counting themselves as members of antifa. For Antifa and Anarchists more broadly it does not matter if police beat us in the name of human rights, tradition, national rebirth, or socialism. We want a world where there are no police to beat us, or anyone else. That is the vision of antifa.

Sources
Anarchism: Key Concepts, Honeywell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy1eRCYS08w&t=11s&pp=ygULYW50aWZhIHZpY2U%3D
Fascism: Key Concepts, Griffin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkv8lHqZ6mQ&pp=ygUWdHJ1bXAgYW50aWZhIGFsamF6ZWVyYQ%3D%3D
https://libcom.org/article/why-no-platform-still-relevant-and-trouble-liberal-anti-fascism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/search/r?entry=/entries/liberalism/&page=1&total_hits=274&pagesize=10&archive=None&rank=0&query=liberalism
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/2/headlines/trump_directive_classifies_anti_capitalism_and_anti_american_views_as_domestic_terrorism