The latest trend on social media is to declare, “I am Antifa.”
I reject authoritarianism in all its forms, whether it comes from the left or the right. Why would anyone not afflicted by an authoritarian impulse pledge allegiance to an irrational, militant, paramilitary movement? Such behavior reflects the psychopathology of a corporate state-managed society.
As Michael Parenti once observed about the rational use of irrationalism, those who wield power often mobilize irrational popular forces to weaken the modern nation-state that constrains their global ambitions. Parenti himself was a partisan who failed to see this tendency on the left. Even my hero George Orwell fell into this trap earlier in his life (which Antifa clowns on X take great pains to tell me—as if I didn’t know).
If one truly wishes to oppose corporate-state domination, why side with emotionally volatile extremists? People really can’t see Antifa today prancing about in animal costumes as the emotionally dysregulated misfits that they are? Why not instead join with humanity and reason—championing democratic-republicanism and the classical liberal values that made the West the freest and most advanced and prosperous civilization in history?
Why such hostility toward the Enlightenment? Have those who declare themselves Antifa allies ever examined their motives? Have they taken any time to study the social psychology of the movement with which they align themselves?
What they would find if they did is that their worldview fallaciously treats the principles of democratic-republicanism and classical liberalism—freedom of conscience, speech, and press; the right to peaceful assembly; individualism; privacy—as mere ideological constructs of Western imperialism, devised to justify political-economic domination and cultural hegemony.
Viewed through the warp of postmodernist ideology, such values obscure systems of exploitation by portraying Western norms as the only legitimate form of governance, thereby discrediting non-Western political traditions and social arrangements—as if universal rights were not subject to objective, scientific inquiry.
It’s indeed curious that many who claim to follow Karl Marx—who believed in science and a universal species-being—now insist that these “universal” rights serve only to perpetuate Western influence and suppress indigenous autonomy, thus valorizing backward and primitive belief systems.
For those who don’t know, Marx’s concept of species-being (Gattungswesen) refers to humanity’s essential nature as a conscious, creative, and social species capable of shaping the world through purposeful labor.
In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argued that humans realize this essence through productive activity expressing both individual and collective potential—a premise he sought to (and did) establish scientifically, and from which Maslow’s hierarchy of needs later follows.
Of course, Marx was a critic of imperialism, but he did not reject the Enlightenment. He believed that the elements of false universality projected by bourgeois ideology needed to be overcome by realizing the Enlightenment’s rational, universal human ideals in practice, not by discarding them. Marx was a child of the Enlightenment, not an opponent of it. Today’s antifascist is a postmodernist.
Remember, Marx was, in his foundations, a republican and a child of the liberal Enlightenment, even though he went beyond both in his vision of a future society without designing that society, since it would be built by the people democratically. His political formation was in the context of a movement steeped in republican humanism, civil liberty, and rational critique of monarchy and clerical authority. Marx was a journalist and democratic reformer, demanding freedom of the press, constitutional government, and civic participation—all classic liberal and republican ideals. He wrote a letter praising Lincoln for his efforts to save the American Republic from the racist and transnational aspirations of the Democratic Party.
Yet from the standpoint of contemporary “antifascism,” resisting or dismantling these principles and values—even by coercive means—is recast as an act of “decolonization” and “self-determination” against an allegedly oppressive, imperial order, appropriating Marx’s righteous opposition to the exploitation of man by man to upend the Enlightenment.
The corruption that has estranged humanity from its species-being will not be overcome by rejecting the Enlightenment or individualism. It will be overcome by embracing reason and working peacefully to build a world that meets the needs of all—without sacrificing human essence on the altar of primitive and quasireligious ideology.
Antifa has it backward. Those who embrace antifascism as currently conceived (since, of course, any reasonable person is antifascist) are not defending rational individualism but succumbing to a form of nihilism—a political and moral pathology masquerading as liberation.
This is why Antifa draws like flies emotionally dysregulated misfits, who are used by corporate elites as weapons in the disordering of the West. To what end? A transnational system in which humanity will be managed on high-tech estates to preserve the power and wealth of a global oligarchy.
The false consciousness is profound on today’s left. They don’t know what they’re fighting for, and so they fight against their own material interests. We see the same thing in the Islamic world. Hence, the affinity between the so-called antifascist and the openly declared real-world clerical authoritarians in Muslim-majority countries (hence the peril of Islamization of the West).
This is why the greatest postmodernist of them all, Michel Foucault—the Father of Queer Theory—was sympathetic to Islamism. He saw in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 a “political spirituality”—a collective uprising that rejected both Western liberalism and Marxist materialism.
Foucault was enchanted by the way Islamists mobilized religious belief as a form of resistance to “Western-imposed modernity” and the Shah’s “technocratic regime.” Foucault viewed revolution as an alternative to Western political rationality—a rebellion against what he saw as the “disciplinary power of modernity.” Foucault’s texts are seductive. They are fraught with danger.
This is the world Antifa wants for us. Rather than oppose the corporate-state technocratic organization sought by today’s social democrats, to detangle corporate power from republican governance and restore the Enlightenment, and continue with the final liberation of mankind from unreason, they condemn the Enlightenment altogether and seek the destruction of the nation-state. This is why the Democratic Party is dissimulating the terrorism Antifa represents. The Party also seeks a transnational world.
As for Marx, yes, he wanted a world without nation-states. Here, he was naive. However naive he was about this, he did not want a stateless world ruled by corporate actors. He wanted a stateless world with rational democratic processes as its foundation. There’s no path to that world through so-called antifascism. There is only madness and unfreedom to be found there. And those irrationalisms begin as soon as we start our walk down that path.
freedom and reason 