Antifa, communist revolutionaries following Vladimir Lenin’s model for communist revolutions is an apt description of the reality of Antifa, in my opinion. Vladimir Lenin believed that evolutionary progress toward communism at the national and international levels was too slow. He devised revolutionary dictatorial plans to hasten the process culminating in communist parties and revolutions in Russia, China, and countless other nations around the world. In his book, THE ORIGIN OF RUSSIAN COMMUNISM, Nicolas Berdyaev’s discussion of Lenin’s personality and revolutionary concepts explains the success communist revolutions around the world. Lenin’s attitude toward the Czar’s Russia was tempered by the execution of his brother as a terrorist which also resulted in a cynically placid attitude regarding mankind. He was not an anarchist but required order and discipline among his followers. In his speeches and writings, he appealed, to labor, discipline, responsibility, knowledge and learning, and positive constructiveness, not simply destruction. Lenin checked the collapse of Russia by despotism and tyranny using cruel policies he considered unavoidable in a revolution. He was only interested in seizure of power. Lenin dedicated himself to developing the technique of revolutionary conflict. He held a totalitarian view of life necessary for the struggle focusing revolutionary energy. Lenin permitted any method in the fight to achieve revolution. To him ‘good’ was everything which served the revolution including fraud, deceit, violence, and cruelty;Revolutionarie’evil’ everything which hindered it. To Lenin, Marxism is above all the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He was not a democrat; but he asserted the principle of a selected minority. His plan of revolution did not include development of consciousness among vast masses of workmen. Lenin’s purpose was formation of a strong party representing a well-organized and iron disciplined minority relying upon the strength of its integrated revolutionary dictatorship over life as a complete whole. The very organization of the party, which was centralized in the extreme, was a dictatorship over every member of the party. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party provided the pattern of the future organizational dictatorship of the communist party but also to the dictatorship of the communist dictator over the party membership. The plan for the Bolshevik Revolutionaries of Russia formulated by Lenin became the plan for Communist revolutions throughout the world.
To understand my characterization of Antifa as communist revolutionaries, it is necessary to understand the nature of the communist revolutions in Russia and China. Lenin envisioned Russia as the seat of world government based on the portion of Marxist philosophy suggesting the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin selected, trained, and developed a cadre of communist revolutionaries who would be responsible to indoctrinate and train party activists in the tactics of dictatorial revolution. Party leaders were told that authoritarian rule and government control of the entire economy would be needed to secure the benefits of communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only then would the proletariat share equally in the benefits of production.
In 1895, Lenin helped organize Marxist groups in the capital into the &lig;Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, which attempted to enlist workers to the Marxist cause. In 1902, he published a pamphlet titled What Is to Be Done? which argued that only a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries could bring socialism to Russia. Early on, Russian socialists were divided. Lenin’s Bolsheviks advocated militarism while the other group advocated a democratic movement toward socialism. Lenin made the split official at a 1912 conference of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin garnered popular support for his revolution with calls for &lig;peace, land, and bread. The 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre and subsequent Russian revolution were the first of a series of events that eventually led to the Soviet Union. On Bloody Sunday, hundreds of unarmed Russians protesting years of food shortages and costly wars were killed or wounded by the czar’s troops. Russia entered WW I in 1914 and suffered disastrous military losses, economic duress, and extensive food shortages. After WW I, the next Russian revolution stated in early 1917 and Czar Nicholas abdicated the throne. Later that year, Lenin led the Bolshevik revolution, a nearly bloodless coup d’état against a series of representative assemblies, or Dumas established by Czar Nicholas II. At the end of 1917, civil war started between the Red Army, the Bolsheviks, and the White Army, a coalition of monarchists, capitalists, and democratic socialists. In mid-1918, the Bolsheviks executed the Czar and his entire family. The civil war lasted until 1923 when Lenin’s communist revolutionaries defeated the White Army and established the Soviet Union.
After Germany and its allies were defeated in WWII, Joseph Stalin who succeeded Lenin in Russia, expanded communist rule to countries invaded by Germany in Eastern Europe. The result was establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, and the beginning of the &lig;Cold War. During the Cold War, Russia also attempted to expand its influence into the Middle East, North Africa, Viet Nam, and Latin America through militant communist revolutions. On June 12, 1987, United States President Ronald Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” during a speech delivered in West Berlin. Of course, President Reagan was referring to the wall dividing Germany and Berlin into Eastern Communist and Western Free Democratic sides. The wall was built by the Communists to prevent those on the east from escaping to freedom in the west. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed because it was economically unable to sustain its Cold War military expenditures and support for communist revolutions around the world. From the time of the communist revolution in Russia to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the laboring proletariat of Russia and Eastern Europe never shared equally in the benefits of production or experienced promised freedom from exploitation. They just exchanged bourgeoisie capitalist for totalitarian communist overlords. Sadly, for the people of Russia, they have fallen under a new dictatorship led by a former communist, Vladimir Putin.
After a decade of agitation and riots culminating with a military revolt in 1911, the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing, ended with a revolution resulting in formation of the Republic of China on January 1, 1912. A republican government was established. In 1919 while involved in their civil war, Russian Communists sent a delegation to China to recruit leaders to communism. Chen Duxiu, a leading Chinese intellectual was recruited and became the founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), formally established in 1921. Chen was a Leninist supporting eventual world revolution. In their search for Far-East allies, Russian communists also determined that Sun Yat-sen, the first provisional President of the Republic of China, would accept communist support for his party, the Kuomintang or KMT, while it solidified its control of China. The KMT would later become the Chinese Nationalist Party. Chen and his Russian allies thought that their communists could control Sun and his nationalist. After Sun’s death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek became the leader of the KMT and started a purge of the Communists. By 1927, the two-part Chinese civil war was raging.
The Nationalist expelled the Communists from the KMT; and in many cities communists were massacred. In this purge, the CCP lost approximately 15,000 of its 25.000 members. The remainder of the CCP fled into the countryside. To prepare for future battles, the CCP formed the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army of China, better known as the “Red Army.” Mao Zedong, or Mao Tse-tung, was appointed provisional commander of the Red Army in August. Mao’s Red Army unsuccessfully attempted to defeat the nationalist in the cities of Hunan and Changsha. He retreated with his decimated forces into the nearby mountains. In the rural areas and mountains, Mao centralized power, trained a cadre of disciplined professional communist revolutionaries, organized the peasants, and built bases of operation and headquarters that he expanded during and after the Japanese invasion. By 1935 Mao had become the party’s Politburo Standing Committee leader and Red Army commander.
The war with Japan lasted from 1937 to 1945. The Communists and Nationalists paused their civil war and joined forces to fight the Japanese, but skirmishes between the two occurred throughout the war. By 1940, cooperation had almost ceased, and the war was fought separately by Communists and Nationalists. The Chinese Nationalist Army took the brunt of the fighting with the Japanese and suffered greatly. The CCP used the end of the war to expand its territory. The Japanese invasion stirred a sense of nationalism among peasants which they previously lacked and set the stage for a communist revolution. The CCP had a doctrine, long-term objectives, a clear political strategy, disciplined leadership, and an army. After the defeat of Japan in WWII and Japan’s withdrawal from China in 1945, Mao became Chairman of the CCP. For about a year the Communists and Nationalists negotiated unsuccessfully for peace.
When the Chinese civil war resumed, the Nationalists had a 3-1 military advantage. The Nationalists prevailed militarily for the next two years of civil war conquering cities while failing to gain control rural territory, CCP strongholds. Nationalists also failed to gain popularity due to corruption. The CCP withdrew tactically from the cities while launching intellectual and student &lig;direct action protests against the Nationalists in the cities. The protests were met with heavy-handed suppression. Corruption and heavy-handedness caused division in Nationalist leadership resulting in desertion of nearly two-thirds of the Nationalist military by early 1948. In the fall of 1948, Chiang Kai-shek determined that he could regain the advantage with one significant battle in Manchuria. Although the Nationalist army was numerically superior, they were soundly defeated. Consequently, the remaining 600,000 Nationalist troops and about 2 million sympathizers retreated to the island of Taiwan. On October 1, 1949, Chairman Moa Zedong officially proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at Tiananmen Square.
The foreign policy of the PRC was not as hostile to the non-Asian world as USSR foreign policy was to most of the world including China. The PRC pursued economic and technological development, global economic intervention, and international diplomacy rather than the global revolutionary intervention and weapons exports preferred by Russia. In 1972, Richard Nixon became the first President to visit the PRC. In December 1978, China announced the Open-Door Policy. For the first time since the CCP won their civil war, the PRC was opened to foreign investment. The normalization of ties culminated in 1979, when the U.S. established full diplomatic relations with the PRC. In 1983, the US State Department changed its classification of China to “a friendly, developing nation” thereby increasing the amount of technology and armaments that could be sold to China as a deterrent to potential USSR hostilities. In 1986, China gained observer status with The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT, an international treaty lasting from 1948 to 1994 to promote trade and economic development by reducing tariffs and other restrictions. GATT was superseded by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.
In 1989, as many one million students began nearly two months of protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Protests spread to as many as 400 Chinese cities. Grievances included inflation, corruption, greater accountability, constitutional due process, democracy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech. In mid-June, CCP leaders ordered the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) to clear the square and end other demonstrations throughout the country. While the PLA was clearing the square, the famous &lig;Tank Man photo of one man standing in front of a line of tanks appeared worldwide. The photo came to represent the repressive nature of China under the CCP. The toll of the subsequent massacres was disputed and ranged from hundreds to thousands of protester deaths and injuries. Subsequently, the CCP made widespread arrests of protesters and supporters, expelled foreign journalists, strictly controlled coverage of the events in the domestic press, strengthened the police and internal security forces, and demoted or purged officials it deemed sympathetic to the protests. These restrictions have continued to this day. The west responded with temporary arms and trade embargos and strained diplomatic relationships. China became a pariah state for a relatively short period of time.
Since Tiananmen, China has worked domestically and internationally to reshape its image from a repressive regime to a benign global economic and military partner. In my opinion, the Chinese image and reality are not synonymous. CCP efforts to soften its world reputation and make significant internal economic changes were successful and culminated in admission of China to the World Trade Organization WTO in December of 2001. China has been able to maintain &lig;friendly developing nation&lig; status granted by the US in 1983 in the WTO. This status has given China enormous economic advantages while competing with &lig;developed nations like the United States.
While Russia and China pursued different strategies regarding the spread of communism internationally following their respective revolutions, their internal revolutionary plans were virtually identical. Both communist revolutions followed popular revolutions against monarchies and subsequent establishment of weak representative republican governments. These governments failed to resolve the economic problems caused by their respective monarchies which allowed communist revolutionaries to gain popularity with promises of &lig;peace, land, and bread. In both Russia and China, the people felt that they were being exploited by the wealthy and ruling classes. Both communist revolutions followed the model developed by Lenin. Lenin and Moa spent considerable time selecting and training a small cadre of disciplined professional communist revolutionaries completely dedicated to a totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat. This cadre of revolutionaries agreed with Lenin that ‘good’ was everything which served the revolution including fraud, deceit, violence, and cruelty; ‘evil’ everything which hindered it. Both revolutions sustained heavy initial losses which hardened the resolve of their leaders and members. These hardened survivors became even stronger leaders who were sent throughout their countries to establish revolutionary cells in both urban and rural parts of their countries as these movements grew. These communist revolutionaries were ready and willing to fight and die for the cause.
My characterization of Antifa as communist revolutionaries is, in my opinion, accurate. Antifa has at least 200 affiliated groups or cells in the United States. The Wikipedia Antifa article is a contradiction in terms. The first paragraph of the article states, &lig;It is highly decentralized and comprises an array of autonomous groups that aim to achieve their objectives through ¦both nonviolent and violent direct action rather than through policy reform. This description parrots the mainstream news, media, academic, progressive, and Democrat view of Antifa. My question is which came first, &lig;the chicken or the egg? Did these groups write the article, or do they parrot what the article says as the reality of Antifa for public consumption, mere propaganda? Antifa agrees with Lenin and Mao when they claim that &lig;policy reform is too slow and change must be forced through &lig;non-violent and violent direct action. Although the article claims that Antifa is composed of &lig;highly decentralized¦ autonomous groups, these &lig;groups are organized to achieve &lig;their objectives which implies common objectives; and &lig;their direct actions are conducted to achieve &lig;their objectives. When Antifa cells, or &lig;groups, arrive in cities throughout the United States, sometimes internationally, unload rental trucks full of riot gear, march under the same flag with trained precision to &lig;direct action events, &lig;protests, and conduct disciplined &lig;violent direct action that includes political violence, assault, arson, and property destruction, We the People are told that Antifa is an ideology not an organization.
In the section of the Antifa article titled &lig;Public reactions, &lig;Academics and scholars appear to justify a vigilante view of Antifa’s &lig;violent direct action as follows:
&lig;Historian Mark stated that ‘[Given] the historical and current threat that white supremacist and fascist groups pose, it’s clear to me that organized, collective self-defense is not only a legitimate response, but lamentably an all-too-necessary response to this threat on too many occasions.’
Alexander Reid Ross has argued that Antifa groups represented ‘one of the best models for channeling the popular reflexes and spontaneous movements towards confronting fascism in organized and focused ways.'”
Historian and Dissent magazine editor Michael Kazin wrote that ‘non-leftists often see the left as a disruptive, lawless force. Violence tends to confirm that view.’ Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat was ‘worried that antifa’s methods could feed into what she said were false equivalencies that seek to lump violence on the left with attacks by the right.'”
Excuse me, but violence is violence. Supporters of law and order understand this simple concept about right and wrong. Violence is violence! Violence by those on the left is equivalent to violence by those on the right. Clear thinking adults understand that these are not &lig;false equivalencies. Furthermore, the statement by Ruth Ben-Ghiat supports my contention that academics and scholars and most of the news media on the left support and encourage &lig;violent direct action, riotous actions perpetrated by Antifa. My contention that Antifa are communist revolutionaries acting as vigilantes is further supported by the following statement by Peter Beinart:
“Antifa believes [that]¦ in the name of protecting the vulnerable, antifascists have granted themselves the authority to decide which Americans may publicly assemble and which may not.
Antifa is organized as a vigilante group of communist revolutionaries.
At this point in this discussion, I must state unequivocally that I abhor all forms of white supremacy and racism. The first section of the article, what most people read, also states, &lig;Some scholars argue that Antifa is a legitimate response to the rise of the far right and that Antifa’s violence such as milkshaking is not equivalent to right-wing violence. Scholars tend to reject the equivalence between Antifa and white supremacism. Antifa &lig;direct action is described as milkshaking not the reality of Antifa members beating men and women to a pulp, setting fires, destroying businesses, attacking law enforcement officers, headquarters and other government buildings including courthouses. Leftist &lig;expects and news media expect us to believe what they tell us about Antifa not what we see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. Again, these are the tactics of communist revolutionaries. One last question, &lig;In the last fifty years, what &lig;white supremacist group or groups have caused one billion dollars in damages throughout the United States over a single summer?
According to the article, individuals involved in Antifa hold left-wing anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-state views. Most Antifa members are anarchists, communists, and other socialists who describe themselves as revolutionaries, communist revolutionaries in my opinion. The idea of direct action is central to the Antifa movement. The term &lig;direct action is used by political activists to describe economic and political acts requiring physical power to achieve their goals which are opposed by authorities. Antifa often engages in &lig;violent direct action, political violence, assault, arson, and property destruction, riots to the &lig;politically incorrect. Scott Crow says that Antifa adherents believe that property destruction ds not “equate to violence.” According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University, San Bernardino, Antifa activists feel the need to participate in violent direct actions because “they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So, they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist. Therefore, according to Antifa, our government and the media are racist and must be confronted by &lig;violent direct actions. The idea that our government and media are racist is consistent with the ideas of Marxist Critical Race Theorists and Black Lives Matter activists. Violent direct action also describes the tactics of the communist revolutionaries during the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions.
The article also describes the organizational structure and membership of Antifa as loosely affiliated with no national chain of command. Antifa groups share “resources and information¦ across regional and national borders through loosely knit networks and relationships of trust and solidarity.” According to Mark Bray, members have &lig;high expectations of commitment to Antifa and each other. Activists typically organize protests via social media, websites, peer-to-peer networks, or encrypted-texting services. Antifa activists dress in black and cover their faces to thwart surveillance and create a sense of equality and solidarity among participants. The progressive news media and the left would have We the People believe that Antifa is just an ideology because its 200 plus cells do not have a Lenin, Moa, or Duke to lead a united front in their &lig;direct action campaigns. However, their cell leaders share resources and information, organize by social media, websites, peer-to-peer networks, or encrypted-texting services; and they are joined by high expectations of commitment and solidarity to Antifa and each other. As Lenin required, Antifa cell leaders and members are a &lig;disciplined cadre of professional revolutionaries. Antifa is operated by a committee or council of cell leaders, a board of directors, not a commander, CEO, or chairman. Consequently, Antifa is an international anarchist, communist, organization with a significant operation in the United States. Antifa employs the tactics of the early phases of the communist revolutions in Russia and China. Antifa are vigilante communist revolutionaries.
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