I will explore how Cultural Criminology (CC) could be of use in the understanding of the radical group Antifa. To what extent can CC add to our knowledge of Antifa? As part of this essay other theories from authors such as Weber and Spencer will also be looked at to see if they reinforce some of the insights.
Abstract
American politics, which has been a huge influence on world politics in general, has become increasingly vitriolic in the last few years. American politics has always been raucous, and in the sixties and seventies was extremely violent. However there is a possibility that the new American political violence is different to what has gone before. The difference may be that violence itself has become more accepted in political discussion and advocacy, compared to the 60’s and 70’s. The discourse has become more aggressive, and the notion of using physical violence against an opponent has almost become respectable. Antifa openly advocates violence in political activity. The dissertation represents an attempt to find a theoretical approach to this phenomenon using Cultural Criminology.
Rationale
In this project I will explore the extent to which CC might provide a useful research strategy for the analysis and evaluation of Antifa. I will look briefly at other theoretical insights to see if they can be reinforced by linkage with CC.
It has been argued that certain political groups on the left have shifted towards violence and have become extremists, provoking the police, starting riots, and using tactics to silence the opposition. In this project I want to investigate this violent political activist group, who were disavowed by many on the left and labelled as a Terrorist Group by the US Government (Petitions.whitehouse.gov, 2018) The project will contain analysis and evaluation of the following:
1. History of Antifa, where they started, where they are now
2. Ideology. Activities, and theoretical interpretations
3. An analysis of Antifa based on Cultural Criminological theories, with specific reference to the riots in Charlottesville and Berkeley, in partial relation to other theories, exploring how CC might be used to explain them
Introduction
CC is a field of study which focuses on the study of crime and deviance through the lenses of culture/ societal setting. Culture itself is of course difficult to define, but generally maybe described as the values, meanings, and practices through which people make sense of the world (O’Brien, 2005)
CC in a postmodern world puts a lot of emphasis on globalisation, fluidity, and transition. It focuses on power relations and symbolism to explain crime and deviance. It is sociological in emphasis and is critical of what it considers to be the crudely empirical ‘number- crunching’ and ‘control’ schools of criminology that became especially influential in the 1980’s and onwards. Deviance, which is central to CC, is an action or behaviour that does not conform to social norms, so behaviour that is unusual may be considered deviant (Potter, 1993).
Through the CC approach we can gain insight into why laws are made and broken, and how norms are created (Alicke and Rose, 2012). The Chicago School of Criminology has been a key influence in the development of CC. CC draws from cultural studies, critical theory and ethnographic methodologies. CC was developed by Ferrell & Sanders (1995) and employed as well by Redhead and Kane in the late 90’s. Three decades before Ferrell & Sanders gave more attention to the role of culture in crime, Cohen in 1971 wrote of subjective meaning in culturally informed criminological issues (Cohen, 1971). CC expands the agenda that Cohen wrote about by including and exploring complex attributions and the importance between media, political affiliations, subcultures, etc. Generally the field takes into account factors that give identity and meaning to groups. Theorists also argue that culture is the result of social factors like class and ethnicity. (Ferrell, Hayward and Young, 2008, p2) CC acknowledges the importance of popular culture constructions and the portrayal of cultures in the mainstream media. Cultural Criminology also takes account of the development of globalisation and modernity in society, which leads to uncertainty and diversity in society, ultimately leading to the phenomenon explained as Drift and Vertigo by Jeff Ferrell.
There are a number of influences on the development of Cultural Criminology. CC as a school of thought was heavily influenced by the Chicago School of Criminology. Chicago was a rapidly evolving and growing city due to globalisation and immigration. Many European refugees fled the World Wars and moved to the United States, and many of them to Chicago. The rise in population and in crime has oriented the students of Chicago University to study society and find the common ground for crime. The students used ethnography to study people in their natural setting, without being interrupted, and have studied the way groups behave. The study of the context of crime and also the use of ethnography were key factors in the Chicago School that influenced CC.
Another big factor leading to the development of CC was a reaction against the kind of pragmatic, positivist criminology that arose in the late twentieth century. The larger history of criminology helps us to understand this.
In the late 20th century a variety of criminological styles had influenced the study of crime. We had criminology focusing on the individual, in late 19th century and early 20th century we had Cesare Lombroso write about the Criminal Man (Lombroso and Lombroso, 1972)and Criminal Woman (Lombroso et al., 2004) and almost every question that Lombroso raised about mental illness and crime are questions that we still ask ourselves today.
Another style of Criminology in the 19th and the early 20th century was Classical Criminology, influenced by utilitarianism they proposed penal reform in Europe, usual punishment for crime was death. Jeremy Bentham (Robbins, Bentham and Mack, 1963) argued that humans had pleasure/pain motivators when it came to committing a crime, if the pleasure outweighs the pain, a person will most likely commit the crime. The focus was on individuals making choices to commit crime. To prevent people from committing crime, punitive action was deemed essential for deterrence.
Positivist criminology, instead sought to find hidden factors and group factors that went beyond individual agency, in early 20th century defeated classical criminology, crime was no longer punished as punitively and now biological and or social factors were blamed for the actions of the individuals and groups. Increasingly positivism made use of statistical techniques, imitating the techniques of natural sciences like physics, chemistry and biology.
Through the influence of the Chicago School of Criminology (Jeffery and Vold, 1958) we see that that use of ethnography is crucial to understand society or groups of people who share certain characteristics. Crime and crime control are being seen now as the means assigned by culture. CC has developed in reaction to certain strands of positivist and classical criminology that focused on quantification and “hard” empiricism and crime control. Max Weber’s theories also greatly contribute to our understanding of Antifa. His main focus on society was the understanding of rationalisation, modernity and disenchantment. (Kauffmann, 2009) Weber has identified enchantment and disenchantment in the era of modernity and post modernity. Weber can be linked to CC if crime is viewed as a way to seek thrills (Berger, 2016), and an attempt to rediscover “magic” in a world of cold rationality and “disenchantment”. Technological advances and increasing knowledge have both been a blessing and a curse on modern society.
Literature Review
Crime can be seen as culture, or culture can be seen as a creator of crime through the lenses of CC. Crime as culture can be observed among subcultures, where crime is a group activity which is caused by the identity of the group. Within criminal subcultures there is a certain set of values, norms, language and appearance that members have to adopt and the crimes that come along with it. (Ferrell and Sanders, 1995)
Criminal subcultures can be shaped by gender, class and various other inequalities. Other things we need to take into account are the authorities who label these subcultures as criminal. Media is responsible for building up the image, the constructions in CC and what perceptions the general public has on certain groups.
Media also plays a huge role in antagonising groups, by looking back at the 50’s and 60’s we can see how moral panic was caused and social problems were blamed on “evil” groups. The media reported violence committed by Hell’s Angels in America whose equivalents were the mods and the rockers in the UK (O’Malley, 1988). By using biased words such as evil and using biased sources in order to criminalise such groups, the public’s opinion of the rockers were now changed and they associated them with deviancy and criminal activities.
CC has admitted that it’s hard to precisely define what is culture (O’Brien and Yar, 2008). In a postmodern world it puts a large emphasis on globalisation, fluidity, and transition. CC can be considered as one of the most extreme forms of ethnography, as it has the most complex relationship to it. Through ethnography academics can study and observe groups of people, which can vary in sizes, and in an era of globalization, it is important to observe how society is drifting. As we know, ethnographical studies were prioritised by the Chicago School of Criminology, whereby researchers discovered a way of studying society through direct observation, which is observing people in their natural setting, without disturbing them. It is interesting that Chicago in the 1940’s received many refugees from Europe during the 2nd World War, (Kivisto, Persons and Pinderhughes, 1988) and because of this Chicago has become ethnically diverse, and so displayed many of the characteristics of a fluid diverse world, as in globalisation (Marks and Grossman, 1991). Ethnography is the best way to observe a group of people and their behaviour, and has been used with animals as well, trying to observe their behaviour in their natural setting. In this project ethnography has not been used, since it would be dangerous to attend any events with a group such as Antifa who are known to have committed violent attacks. Ethnography is a good option to study groups of people, it is best to combine ethnography with CC, to understand the origin of the behaviour. Nonetheless, although circumstances prevent the use of ethnography on this occasion, the dissertation can assess the viability to the future cultural criminology studies in this area.
The Godfathers of CC are Jock Young and Jeff Ferrell say that under the boredom that modernity has brought us, rebellion and excitement are often seen as a virtue, and society forms political and cultural mass rebellions, as a way to bring excitement to our lives. To understand this boredom caused by modernity, we need to look at Jeff Ferrell’s work about Drift and Vertigo. (Ferrell, 2012) According to Ferrell, Drifters are generally the newer generations, who don’t have a stable position, have part time jobs, don’t have an income as valuable as previous generations and buying a house, having a stable career is not guaranteed even if you finish a college degree. Unemployment and freelancing have become part of a world adrift (Shaffir, Ferrell and Hamm, 1999). The second aspect of Drifters is migration, moving from rural to urban areas, from country to country. Vertigo refers to those who have a stable life, but are surrounded by more and more options, made known to them through media and despite their relative security are more uncertain of their position in society as it is rapidly changing due to globalisation. People who are in vertigo are often scared by the drifters, because drifters appear in their stable world, which makes that society not so stable anymore, but it is abundant, changing, and slowly shifting into a different type of society due to the many different people that reside in multicultural cities, shaped by globalisation and impermanence. (Britton, Ferrell and Websdale, 2000) The average vertigo person would often have conflicting sentiments about the drifters. Vertigo people being faced with a lot of options are faced with the prospects of becoming drifters and facing uncertainty and change. Like the drifters, who often migrate in search of a better life, or change many jobs in search of a better one, they do hope to improve their overall life quality. Vertigo people have a choice to try out other options, do internships abroad, or migrate themselves. The abundance of choice and all the different good and bad outcomes their lives can embrace are what draw the vertigo to become a drifter.
Discussion
History of Antifa
To understand who Antifa are today, we need to understand where they come from, and how they formed. Antifa goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, forming in the 30s as a counterculture to Mussolini’s fascism and later German fascism. Counter culture can be described as the people who oppose the dominant values and behaviour in society, often they are the young people opposing the government. As a response to the fascism that derived from Italy and spread to Germany, people in Germany had responded by forming the Antifaschistische Aktion, or Antifa for short, which were a militant anti-fascist network. The network was formed in the 1930’s when tensions were high between the Nazis and leftists. (Bray, 2017) After the fall of Hitler the Antifa members usually consisted of war veterans, social democrats, and communists. They included the Communists and Social Democrats, who gained popularity after the fall of the Third Reich, Hitler’s Reign.
It is significant for Antifa’s tactics and ideology that in 1936 in London, Communists and Anarchists united; outraged they were standing up against British Union of Fascists, also known as the Battle of Cable Street. Protesters formed a blockade and resorted to violence and beat members of this group and police officers as well. Protesters used homemade bombs, and burned a lorry. In French, British, and American areas Antifa groups had begun to recede in 1945.
Years later, in 1980s Antifa in Germany has no historical connection to the movement; it is a product of an autonomist movement in West Germany. One of the biggest antifascist campaigns in Germany in recent years was the effort to block annual Nazi rallies in the East German city of Dresden. In October 2016 Antifa campaigned on the occasion of the anniversary of reunification of Germany on 3rd of October, to protest German nationalism, and were violent in doing so. The American Antifa of the early 21st Century has been inspired by the tactics of the original German organisation. Peter Beinart writes that in the US in the late 1980 s left wing punk fans formed a group called “Anti-Racist Action” based on the theory that Americans maybe are not so familiar with the term fascism (The Atlantic, 2017).
According to Mark Bray, the author of The Antifa Handbook these activists gained popularity and tried to attract youth with alternative bands in the 90s so that others cannot recruit those people. The motto of Antifa activists was “we go where they go” in order to disrupt any event where the opposition were holding events.
Contemporary Antifa is using the same tactics of disruption, by protesting against free speech when there are members of the alt right who want to hold a speech, like at Berkeley with Milo Yiannopulous.
Ideology of Antifa
Antifa is anarchist yet also communist in its ideology, puritan and authoritarian. What unites both strands is opposition to capitalism, conservatism and traditional, individualist western values. Antifa has been considered to be a counter culture since it has started as a group and a movement since the 1920s and it has appeared yet and yet again in accordance with the political environment. Antifa arises whenever the conservative government is in power, and it is an ideology which struggles against a conservative and capitalist government. The roots of Antifa have often seemed to merge with communism and the Democratic Party of the respective country it emerged in, like the US Democratic Party in America, or the German Democratic Party in Germany; and it has had a great impact on the ideology of the existing political groups it allied itself with. From what is found in the articles, videos, the mind of an Antifa member is judgemental and disdainful and is prone to labelling all opponents in the most negative way, from the viewpoint that Antifa is on the right side of history. (Bray, 2017)Most members hold the belief that they are the new counter culture, and that Trump “is literally Hitler” and everyone who disagrees with them is a “Nazi” and a “fascist”. Due to historical analogies that they often use they believe that history is repeating itself, and that they have to use force, whatever resources they have to stop the right-conservative-republicans from rising to power (Stonestreet, 2017). Because they see the conservatives as the most evil, they feel like they can legitimize their use of violence, they believe that force is legitimate and good in itself. In the Anti-Fascist Handbook it is clear that Antifa has a goal of overthrowing right wing politics and capitalism, ensuring that a socialist/anarchist system can take its place. Anti-fascists are socialists, communists yet also anarchists, which are at least partly contradictory attributes, although the two approaches can overlap, and have quite often been combined in practice (The Anarchist Library, 2018). It is a proposal for people on the left to unite in order to overthrow fascism, or what the left perceives as fascism. It features a pro-multicultural agenda, which attracts a lot of young people who share the same values. It advocates for minorities, the acceptance of gender fluidity, and is pro social justice (sisypheannews, 2017). It could be argued that Antifa recently went from being the counter culture to being the “militant wing” of the elites revolted by the election of Trump; many mainstream commentators have expressed tacit or open support for Antifa violence. Antifa members still claim that it is not an organised group, despite the fact that its members often appear to be highly disciplined when in action and although reports show that there is no worldwide Antifa organisation with leaders, instead we have small Antifa groups organising in small neighbourhoods or on university campuses.
Antifa has become an ideology and due to the World Wide Web, but it is not a group in the normal sense. Members of Antifa claim to not be an organised group, but we have to further examine their claim, due to the nature of their actions and their military style appearances at rallies, further investigation is needed, because their actions on those occasions are not those of an unorganised group. It has no uniform apart from black clothing, you can’t join, you don’t have an official website or leader of the Antifa, though some people do try to make groups and make websites for it to be more stabilised, for example the Boston Antifa Facebook Group, but this needs further research. It can be argued that this could be a cover story to cover their organisational network, and that would explain how they manage to gather, get together, act in unity and be disciplined. Antifa is mainly a movement, and to be a part of the movement, you have to accept this ideology and you have to take “antifascist actions”. These Antifa actions consist of stepping up against fascism “By Any Means Necessary” as written by Mark Bray. Fascism is defined very loosely, and often includes many people who are amazed to be described as such. Their slogan is not to be confused with the group “By Any Means Necessary” who are run by Yvette Felarca. (Bamn.com, 2018)By any means necessary what they mean is, the use of violence, infiltrating Alt right groups, emailing the employers of people who are on the right, and emailing conference centres and hotels if there is to be a far right speech or meeting to be taking place. Mark Bray analyses historically how Anti-Fascist organisations have infiltrated the opposition in countries such as Italy and Germany.
Antifa claims to be protector of the working people, protecting them from police violence, from fascism, racism, and dangerous groups on the alt right. Since Antifa apparently doesn’t have a structure, it tends to organise locally as a response to issues that they find within their community (riots in Charlottesville for example). These issues can be demonstrations, speeches on university campuses, or other social events where they think that the alt right may gather to discuss/radicalise.