ANTIFA origins
Executive summary
Antifa traces its lineage to interwar European anti-fascist movements—especially Italian and German resistance in the 1920s–1930s—and to later revivals in postwar Europe and the U.S., with modern American manifestations emerging from 1980s anti-racist organizing and newer groups adopting the Antifa name in the 2000s [1] [2] [3]. What today is called “Antifa” is not a single organization but a decentralized, ideologically varied set of activists who draw on those historical precedents while clashing over tactics, targets, and public portrayal [4] [5].
1. Origins in Europe: the 1920s–1930s fight against fascism
Anti-fascist activity began as a political response to Mussolini’s Italy and to the rise of Nazism, with organized groups—most notably Antifaschistische Aktion in Germany—forming in the early 1930s and supplying the language, symbols and tactical memory later activists would reuse [1] [6] [7]. Histories emphasize that those early antifascists ranged from liberal republicans to communists and anarchists and, in some cases, took up arms or paramilitary tactics in the face of state-backed fascist violence, a context that shaped the moral imagination of later movements [7] [5].
2. Postwar continuities and West German rebirths: 1960s–1980s
Scholars trace contemporary antifa’s visual identity and some tactics to postwar and late‑20th‑century West German autonomist and squatter scenes of the 1960s–1980s rather than to a continuous organizational line from the Weimar-era Antifaschistische Aktion, a distinction that matters for understanding ideological shifts toward anarchism and autonomism in later antifa currents [8] [5]. Those European networks re-emerged to confront new forms of organized racism—skinheads and neo‑Nazis—providing a living template that transnational activists would adapt [9] [6].
3. U.S. genealogy: Anti‑Racist Action to Rose City Antifa
In the United States, modern antifa activity is commonly traced to Anti‑Racist Action in the late 1980s, a movement born out of punk and anti‑skinhead organizing that mixed direct action and community defense; Rose City Antifa (founded 2007 in Portland) is the oldest U.S. group to explicitly use the “antifa” label, and both fed the revival of the name and tactics in later years [9] [3]. That lineage explains why many American antifa adherents come from anarchist, socialist or militant anti‑racist milieus rather than from mainstream electoral politics [1] [9].
4. Decentralized movement, contested tactics
Multiple official and academic accounts characterize antifa not as a hierarchical organization but as a decentralized movement or ideology: independent groups and individuals share methods and goals but lack central leadership, which complicates both public understanding and law‑enforcement responses [3] [4]. Tactics range from nonviolent community organizing and deplatforming to confrontational direct action and occasional property damage or street clashes; historians like Mark Bray argue most activity is nonviolent, but critics emphasize the episodes where violence has occurred [1] [4] [5].
5. Public controversy, politicized framing, and rare lethal violence
Antifa’s prominence surged after confrontations such as Charlottesville in 2017, and its name has since been used as a political cudgel—labeled by some conservative politicians as a terrorist threat despite the movement’s lack of formal structure—while security analysts and some officials caution against treating it as a single organized extremist group [2] [3] [4]. Research shows fatal violence attributed to antifa adherents in recent U.S. history is extremely rare—CSIS notes a single fatal attack linked to a self‑identified antifa supporter in 2020—yet isolated incidents shape media and political narratives far beyond their statistical weight [4].
6. What “origins” mean for understanding antifa today
Claims about “Antifa” often collapse distinct eras and geographies into a single monolith; careful accounts differentiate 1920s–30s anti‑fascist militancy, 1960s–80s European autonomism, and late‑20th/early‑21st century U.S. anti‑racist organizing—each a source of symbols, tactics and ethos that informed the others without producing a single, continuous organization [6] [9] [5]. Sources used here provide a consistent picture: antifa is a historical and contemporary constellation of anti‑fascist activism, decentralized and ideologically diverse, whose origins are plural and layered rather than singular.