A Network of Solidarity and Support: Interview with Todd from Antifa International
In eight years of working together, the Antifa International collective has engaged in an astonishing range of projects. They’re the ones who organize the International Antifascist Defense Fund as well as the International Day of Solidarity with Antifascist Prisoners, a T-Shirt of the Month project to support local groups around the world, a timeline, map and annual report documenting violent hate crimes around the world, and the all-purpose website deathtofascism.com, which offers a variety of resources to people doing antifascist work.
In mid-May, I was able to sit down with collective member Todd to talk about the group itself, the current state of far-right and antifascist organizing, and the relationship between international solidarity and local organizing, among other things.
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Can you break down what Antifa International is?
Antifa International is an antifascist social media collective. We have about seven members, maybe nine in Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Greece, and Taiwan. The purpose of the collective is to use social media to spread news about antifascist actions and things that would be of interest to antifascists, promote the tenets of antifascism, and provide support for antifascists globally.
We started in 2014 because we saw that a lot of antifascist stuff was happening around the world, but wasn’t really getting out there. It was kind of localized because antifascists weren’t networking or connecting with each other very well. So we see ourselves as broadcasting that information, but also promoting antifascism and supporting those groups. Right now, we’re on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Kolektiva, and YouTube and between those five channels, we have about 85,000 followers. Tumblr is still our most popular, if you believe that.
After about a year of doing social media work, we realized we had gained a lot of interest and were starting to build connections and networks and thought “well, we can expand this and do actual projects to support antifascists.” So we started the International Antifascist Defense Fund in 2015. That’s been our biggest success, for sure. We’re going on our seventh year with that project. I think we’ve donated something like $175,000 to over 600 antifascists in 22 different countries.
What’s great about that project is it’s extremely democratically run. Anyone can make a request for support and then everyone who’s donated at least twenty bucks is invited to join the Decisions Crew and participate in discussions about how the Defense Fund is run. That’s probably 600 people that regularly get the email and just lots of people that want to get more involved in antifascism.
Are you looking for or open to new people joining the core group?
So far is it’s been invite-only. Because it’s primarily a social media collective, we’ve paid attention to social media accounts, so like “oh, this person seems on-the-ball and sort of aligns with our politics,” so we’ll send them an invite. But we’re also very interested in helping projects get up and running.
As a specifically international organization, how do you balance the need for both international solidarity and connections to local communities?
It’s part of the reason we started this project. There’s a very American bias to antifascist coverage just because, you know, it’s the center of the universe and so much stuff is coming out from the States that was really very different from what was happening elsewhere. So that was getting out, but I don’t think information was really coming in to US antifascists about what was happening elsewhere in the world. And there’s some amazing things happening! So part of our project was to balance that out so there is a more international scope and it’s easier to access information internationally and also collaborate with antifascists internationally.
Interestingly enough, out of the nine or ten members in our crew, none of them are in America. So, it helps us have more international perspective or flavor. I think our coverage on Twitter from our Swedish member, for example, is phenomenal and not stuff you’re getting from anywhere else. Our member in Taiwan teamed up with some people in Vietnam and ran this antifa fundraiser livestream over Christmas. It was amazing! It was like nine hours, a televised spectacular. So I think it’s extremely important to build international ties among antifascists.
At the same time, we’re cognizant that most antifascism happens locally. And I think by promoting examples of what antifascists have done locally, it will help inspire people about what they can do in their own communities. I can think of a great example: there’s a young trans woman in Nyköping, Sweden, a small town, and we did an interview with her about how she got her crew together and ran the local fascists out of the town, basically. It’s things like that that I think other people can take and run with in their own communities.
How do you think about who does and doesn’t get support? I know that there’s the Decisions Crew, so it’s not entirely up to the core group, but with a stated mission of supporting antifascists around the world, how do you even determine what constitutes antifascist work? Because it doesn’t look the same in all places and all situations.
It’s tricky! And there have been some hot debates about that with the Decisions Crew — about what is or is not antifascist work. It’s not always cut and dry, but fascism isn’t cut and dry either. It’s a chameleon, really. As a recent example, we did an Antifa Shirt of the Month thing to support antifascist groups in Ukraine that are actually fighting the Russian invasion and there was some disagreement within the collective about whether or not that was an appropriate thing to do, whether or not it was a clear antifascist situation. In the end, we talked to everyone and we reached a position that people feel comfortable with. So we try to resolve those things through consensus.
Personally, I look at antifascism through the lens of the saying “respect existence or expect resistance.” I think if people are actively engaged in undermining people’s right to exist as who they are: fascist. That’s fascist to me. Because fascists are not always going to say “yes, we’re fascists.” So you have to look at what fascism does to determine really who they are and then who’s resisting that. It’s a little opaque, but that’s why we still have fascism today: because it’s able to shift into whatever’s going on in the times and conceal itself.
But I also think it’s important to build — this is a big buzzword for me — a genuine anti-racist, anti-fascist culture in your locality and just make it not okay to espouse fascist beliefs in your community. And there’s a number of different ways that you can do that. Part of our collective’s raison d’être is to provide examples of that happening in local communities so other people can take those ideas and run with them.
That shiftiness on the far right been a major problem in Germany, for instance, where anti-vaxx people and QAnon and Reichsbürger types have kind of melded together. It does make the whole thing very difficult to cope with because it’s so hard to pin down.
It’s really interesting, on the left there’s this sort of ideological orthodoxy or puritanism almost, where it’s like, “if you’re not completely aligned with everything I believe as a leftist, I will not work with you, period. I will condemn you.” I’ve done that. And on the right, people are like, “okay, we hate child molesters and pedophiles. Oh, you’ve been arrested for child grooming? It’s okay, we’ll just ignore that.” They don’t care. “Just come with us on this one thing. We don’t care who you are.” And I don’t think that’s a good idea, but at the same time, that plus not being afraid to mobilize during Covid means they’ve really out-organized us in the last two or three years, which is terrifying. We’ve got a lot of ground to gain.
Last question: what can people outside of your crew do to support your work?
Oh my god! Where to begin? They could definitely support some of our projects. The Defense Fund is a great place to start. They could find us online and share what we have on social media. Deathtofascism.com is sort of our one-stop-shop for resources and stuff people can print out. We’re happy to give people advice if they want to start their own crew.
Our whole idea is to support other antifascists. So if they need help finding people locally or they want to support a project we’re doing that supports antifascists, that’s excellent. They can support the Shirt of the Month. That money goes directly to local antifascist crews around the world.
Ultimately, it’s not about personalities. We just want to get the work done. We don’t want any focus on ourselves.
