Antifa Does Not Exist

Imaginary Communist Distraction

Echo of the partisans. Via Padova, Milano.

By John Foster

Maybe the right needs Antifa more than it ever needed the Soviet Union.

Communism was, at least, cumbersome. It built factories, printed money, and sent ambassadors. Antifa, by contrast, is clean and portable. It can be everywhere and nowhere, like a gaseous ideology of menace.

For a century, actually existing communism—wretched, corrupt, unfree, yet somehow still other—cast a counter-light across the capitalist world.

It was the bad conscience of liberalism: a rival system that, by virtue of existing, demanded justification from its counterpart.

The Cold War was not just a geopolitical struggle; it was an argument about which civilisation deserved to survive. Capitalism could afford moral lapses so long as it could point east and say, “At least we’re not that.”

Then the wall fell, the Soviet experiment collapsed into kleptocracy, and capitalism was left alone with itself. Some people claimed that history had ended, which is another way of saying that the argument was over. But that type of argument can never truly end, because systems, like psyches, require antagonists.

That’s why, after communism died, it did not stay dead. Like any good ideological formation, it left behind an afterimage, a spectral shimmer in the collective retina.

In the void where communism used to stand, the far right began to imagine its replacement: a miniature spectre, capable of haunting the present without ever becoming real. Enter Antifa: not a party, not a program, not even a coherent movement, but a signifier of negation, a blank through which every anxiety about resistance could be projected.

Ernst Nolte, the historian who started a national scandal in West Germany during the 1980s by suggesting that the Holocaust was a “copy” of Bolshevik terror, anticipated this structure of thought. Nolte’s argument—criticised, rightly, as moral inversion—was that fascism’s crimes were reactive, its atrocities defensive.

The extermination of the Jews, he proposed, was not a sui generis evil but an echo of earlier Soviet horrors. This was more than historical revisionism; it was psychological realism turned inside out. The fascist, in Nolte’s telling, becomes the traumatised subject, responding to leftist provocation. The aggressor becomes the victim of fear.

Fast-forward a few decades, and you can hear the same melody transposed into a minor American key. Right-wing pundits who speak of “Antifa violence,” “radical left mobs,” or “terrorist cells in black hoodies” are performing a Noltean manoeuvre: they make right-wing aggression look like a nervous twitch, a reasonable reflex. The militias are only arming themselves because “the left wants to destroy our way of life”. The insurrection on 6th January, 2021, was merely pre-emptive.

The projection is total: fascism is absolved by imagining its enemy into being.

Antifa therefore serves as the objet petit a of the reactionary psyche: the little thing that makes all this repression necessary, that keeps the narrative taut, that explains why the state must forever defend itself from an enemy that never quite materialises. The old world feared the red flag soaring above the Kremlin; the new one trembles at graffiti on a courthouse wall.

The collapse of the historical antagonism between capitalism and communism left the former without its mirror. In the mirror’s absence, it began to hallucinate. Every ruling ideology needs its negative: liberalism had the Jacobin, capitalism had the communist, the bourgeois order had the anarchist bomb-thrower. Now we have Antifa, the screen memory of a system afraid to look at its own reflection.

The brilliance of the Antifa myth lies in its flexibility. It can absorb any image: the protester in Portland, the student in a keffiyeh, the gender-studies major with a megaphone.

As a signifier, Antifa’s function is not descriptive but prophylactic. The point is to prevent recognition. Every society built on inequality must eventually explain why the people who protest inequality are illegitimate. The Antifa label does that work automatically. To call someone “Antifa” is to declare that they exist outside the social contract, already criminal, already violent, already condemned.

In this way, the right’s fixation on Antifa facilitates a political economy of deflection. The populist right depends on a low-grade civil war of perception: chaos, threat, crisis. Yet it cannot admit that its own paramilitaries, its own adherents, its own movement supply that chaos. So it invents a scapegoat from negative space.

When Proud Boys brawl in the street, the right describes their behaviour as a confrontation with Antifa. When police crack skulls at protests, it’s “Antifa infiltration.” As was the case for Ernst Nolte’s revisionist account of the Holocaust, the violence of the right is rewritten as self-defence against an invisible menace.

And because the menace is invisible, it must be rendered visible through surveillance, data collection, and public spectacle. Whole cottage industries have arisen to map Antifa networks. Cable hosts trace lines between graffiti in Atlanta and anarchists in Berlin. Politicians cite online memes as proof of international coordination.

What began as a meme becomes a justification for state power, an excuse for new forms of policing and domestic spying. The FBI, which couldn’t find a motive for someone who shot up a synagogue, somehow discovers elaborate “Antifa funding chains.”

The irony transcends satire: the state that ignored white supremacist violence for decades now spends its time chasing after teenagers in black hoodies.

There is also pleasure in this fantasy, a libidinal economy of fear. The image of the faceless leftist haunts conservative media like a fetish: masked, ungovernable, maybe attractive behind their anonymity. The repression of desire always returns in costume.

The far right’s erotic obsession with domination finds its mirror image in the black bloc: the forbidden body, the lawless thrill, the suppressed wish to burn it all down. They need Antifa not just as an enemy, but as a dream. The anarchist becomes the shadow-ego of the authoritarian, the thing he must destroy because he secretly envies it.

The result, predictably, is moral panic. Every protest becomes a security crisis; every sign of resistance becomes potential terrorism. The discourse slides from politics to pathology. “Antifa” explains everything that cannot be explained otherwise: why cities burn, why youth are disaffected, why capitalism feels hollow. The more the system decays, the more desperately it invents saboteurs to blame.

In the United States, the Antifa myth has migrated from talk radio to the halls of power. What began as internet folklore now circulates through police briefings, state legislation, and presidential rhetoric.

Trump’s 2020 threat to designate Antifa a terrorist organisation was absurd on its face—there is no central body to designate—but it revealed a deeper instinct: the desire to criminalise opposition itself. In the years since, that instinct has matured into policy. Republican governors have introduced “anti-riot” laws so broadly written that any protest against police violence could qualify. Local police departments run “counter-Antifa” trainings while right-wing militias network with each other on public forums with impunity.

The genius of this arrangement is that it keeps the machinery of repression humming without ever naming the real threat. The Department of Homeland Security can issue warnings about “left-wing extremism” while quietly acknowledging that far-right violence kills far more people. Cable news can devote hours to hypothetical “Antifa buses” invading small towns, while actual armed groups patrol polling stations. The state performs its neutrality by policing shadows.

This inversion has a long pedigree in American politics. The Red Scare of the twentieth century turned labour organisers into “foreign agents.” The war on drugs turned poverty into pathology. Now the war on Antifa turns dissent into terrorism.

Each of these moral panics serves the same function: to transform structural crisis into personal deviance, to treat oppositional politics as crime. The difference is that in the past, the enemy at least existed. There truly were communist parties, unions, and underground movements. The current panic about Antifa, on the other hand, is pure projection: a reaction formation to the void where collective opposition used to be.

The right’s rhetorical strategy borrows directly from counterinsurgency doctrine. Identify an amorphous enemy, declare a permanent emergency, and expand state power in the name of order. The trick is to convince liberals to go along. And they usually do.

Mayors who claim to defend civil rights call in riot cops to protect property. Democratic governors sign “anti-mask” bills aimed not at white supremacists but climate activists. The phantom of Antifa thus performs its double service, simultaneously justifying repression and disciplining reformers. After all, who wants to be mistaken for a terrorist?

Meanwhile, real violence proceeds in plain sight. Far-right militias recruit openly. Police fraternities share memes of “hunting season,” reducing impoverished minorities to the status of animals. Legislators invoke “defence of civilisation” to strip trans people of healthcare.

But the news cycle prefers the mask and the Molotov. The spectacle of imagined left violence is easier to film, easier to condemn, and infinitely renewable. Every smashed window becomes proof of conspiracy; every protest becomes an excuse for a crackdown.

And yet, even as the fantasy metastasises, it reveals the right’s underlying fragility. You invent enemies when you can no longer govern; you hallucinate conspiracies when the social order you purport to defend no longer believes in itself. The obsession with Antifa is, finally, an admission of weakness. A confident ruling class does not need to chase shadows.

What we are watching, in real time, is the transformation of the American state into its own parody of totalitarianism: a system that claims to protect freedom by inventing endless threats to it.

The left’s disorganisation, the vacuum of alternative politics, only makes the illusion more seductive. Without communism to blame, without unions to fear, without even a coherent social movement to negotiate with, the ruling order must turn inward, creating enemies out of air. Antifa is that air, that phantasm, that convenient condensation of anxiety.

And perhaps that is the real irony. The antifascists of the twentieth century fought in the streets and alleyways against dictators. Their descendants today are accused of terrorism merely for opposing fascism’s ghost. The far right, in turn, fights imaginary communists to distract from its own authoritarianism.

It’s a hall of mirrors in which every reflection insists on its innocence. Outside, though, the world burns quietly: privatised, policed, and ever more unequal.

Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.