Back in March 2026, the Re-imaging Anti-Fascism (RAF) Commune of Plan C published it’s first issue of its tabloid. We distributed 5,000 free copies on the huge Together Alliance march, aiming to connect to a new generation of anti-fascists. We also sold 5,000 copies through our online shop. As the RAF Commune starts work in issue 2, we will be publishing the pieces on our website.
Let’s start with a definition….wtf is fascism and why does it exist?
Fascism is a political movement that emerged in Italy in the 1920s. It came at a time following the revolutionary events in Russia of 1917, and the mass uprisings of workers and peasants against the Tsarist regime. Fascism was a reaction from sections of the ‘petit bourgeois’ (small business owners) and the big capitalists to prevent the same thing happening there. At the same time, Hitler and his Nazi party were organising in Germany, a country in a deep economic depression. Over in Spain, General Franco and his ultra-conservative Catholic movement organised a coup against the democratically elected Republican government. Millions mobilised to fight against the coup, in particular the mass anarchist union, the CNT, that took over the running of Barcelona and organised militias along with socialists and communists. The ganging up of Italian fascism and German Nazism in Spain, and the duplicity of the Soviet Union, led to the defeat of the anti-fascist forces and laid the groundwork for WWII.
At the core of fascism is its unwavering belief in authoritarianism and hierarchy, enforced patriarchal roles for women, its hatred of organised working-class movements, and its use of violence – from the streets to the state – to reach its objectives. The murder of millions of Jews, Roma, Queers, Communists, and Anarchists shows what it is capable of, of what any authoritarian regime once in control of the state can do.
But fascism should not be seen as something that just happened here in Europe. The methods, tactics, and ideology of fascism began with the colonial expansion of European nations into Africa, India, and the Americas, where genocide and exploitation were the norm. Fascism is colonialism come home to Europe.
We must understand fascism not as a fixed idea, but as an ever-changing and mutating political form. It is in times of crisis that it emerges, but it is also a constant tendency in capitalist societies as a force to reassert domination and control by the wealthy in order to maintain the privileges and power of the system. As discontent rises, and life becomes more insecure as the climate catastrophe deepens, we are faced with the very real prospect of this becoming the future that is supported by the capitalist class.
From fringe movements, to taking state power, “fascism” and it’s descendents are back on the world stage. Our history is filled with heroic struggles of ordinary working class people taking action together, and fighting back. We are that new generation taking up the struggle, and we must rise to the challenge in defining a new anti-fascist future.
Nationalism is on the rise…
Nationalism across the world has become the stock response to the failures of neoliberal globalisation. On a state level, separate ruling classes are pulling apart. From a globalised American empire, we seem to be moving into a multipolar world of rival great power nationalisms with the threat of more and bigger wars on the horizon. But also on a popular level across the world, various forms of nationalism and racism have captured people’s imaginations as all promises of the globalisation era have shown themselves to be hollow. We live in a zombie neoliberalism, which no one even pretends is going to offer any kind of better future but that no one has any real alternative to either. Unrestrained capitalism has gifted us massive inequality and the tech billionaire overlords who sit on top of the pile are turning to fascism to protect themselves. Post-war social democracy already looks like an anomalous blip in history, and now we are left wondering if liberal democracy is going to start looking like that too. The co-ordinates of the post-war world that we took for granted might not be around for too much longer.
The broader context of all of this is that the planet is on fire. The ruling classes have largely given up on any idea of stopping it. They know half the world will collapse and a massive refugee crisis is coming, but for now they’re largely planning for a hotter, more genocidal twenty-first century. Gaza shows the future they are planning for half the world. And Gaza also shows how we will be expected to sit and watch this future unfold, how they are trying to train us to shrink the circle of those we regard as fully human. For those who speak out, for those who act, there is the label of “terrorist”. We already see how surveillance and authoritarianism are going to be a necessary part of the state’s management of this future reality: a massively and growingly unequal world of warring states on a burning planet.
The border regime is central to all of this. Across the world, states enforce borders to control the flow of restless people and the border determines who can legitimately be subject to murderous violence – who counts as human. But what starts at the border bleeds into wider society. Paranoia about immigrants is inculcated in us all. Border forces raid our communities. It turns out the border is everywhere and the border that separated “us” from “them”, that seemingly protected us and guaranteed our rights while stripping them of theirs – this line now comes closer and closer to home.
Fascism seems not only to be rapidly encroaching on us, but also to be popular. Reform are polling at 30% of the vote and now run ten entire councils. Like watching a car crash in slow motion, we seem to be inexorably moving towards Farage as PM while we sit seemingly powerless to stop it. While we’re waiting, Starmer is going to do half the things Reform want, supposedly in order to stop them. In summer 2024, the worst racist pogroms in 100 years swept the country and Starmer’s response was to start channeling Enoch Powell, talking about the “incalculable damage” immigration had done to Britain.
Since protests broke out in Epping in July 2025, we’ve seen a relentless wave of large and often violent demonstrations against asylum hotels – week in and week out, up and down the country – with far-right demonstrators attempting to break into or set fire to hotels when they could get close enough, as well as violently assaulting hotel residents, employees and counter demonstrators. In the North of Ireland, starting in Ballymena, there were two weeks of a racial pogroms last summer that successfully drove large numbers of migrants out of towns in the North. For months, our towns and cities have been festooned with nationalist flags launched by the far-right “Raise The Colours” movement, marking territory and signalling with a not very subtle dog-whistle who is welcome and who is not.
In the midst of this, Tommy Robinson’s “Unite The Kingdom’” demonstration in September 2025 was by far the largest far-right event in British history, bringing around 150,000 people to listen to Elon Musk tell them that “violence is coming” and to “fight back or die”. And in this hothouse of mainstreamed bigotry, fascist parties like Homeland and Patriotic Alternative are also recruiting, growing and flourishing, as even more extreme variants like White Vanguard and Aryan Front emerge to the right of them. All of this has been accompanied by a steady, often unacknowledged, drumbeat of rising racist violence, and especially Islamophobia – in the last year there have been dozens of attacks on mosques, including an attempted axe attack in Manchester, arsons in Peacehaven and Maida Vale, and bombing attempts in Leeds and Belfast.
Tommy Robinson has another demonstration planned for 16th May 2026 and it would seem foolish to bet that we will necessarily get through this summer without a repeated wave of racist riots.
Actually Existing Anti-Fascism…
Antifascism with a capital A is barely managing to respond to the multi-pronged fascist surge. It frequently struggles to muster the energy, coordinate or mobilise a comparable number of people to the far-right. Nevertheless it is a concept with wide appeal when couched in broad terms. However, for years antifascism in the UK has been trapped between two models: that of the SWP-dominated Stand Up To Racism and that of largely anarchist-oriented autonomous antifascists. SUTR is the inheritor of the tradition of the Anti-Nazi League and Unite Against Fascism but considerably more cautious than either of them. It specialises in carefully legal marches, backed by the trade union bureaucracy with varying degrees of enthusiasm, inevitably ending in rallies listening to a selection of General Secretaries on the platform. The Together Alliance is the latest incarnation of this model, and an attempt to kick it up a gear in response to current dire circumstances.
On a local level across the country, SUTR is often a convenient banner under which anyone antiracist and vaguely on the left can gather in order to oppose the far-right. Thus the SUTR name acts as the mainstay of any kind of antiracist movement in large areas of the country, especially outside the larger cities. What SUTR looks like on the ground can vary quite considerably from place to place. Even at their best, however, and despite the dedication of many local activists turning out against the far-right on a weekly basis, their overall model can often be quite formulaic and lacking in imagination and energy, tied to a rigid and predetermined organising concept.
On the other hand, you have a diffuse crowd of autonomous antifascist groups, who have on occasion mobilised hundreds of people (or even more) under good circumstances when they have chosen to go for a mass mobilisation. More often they tend to remain as tight-knit cell-type groups, interested in preserving their security and wary of open public organising. In theory the aim of such small tight-knit groups is to enable and to protect militant action. This has historically been effective against the far-right, especially when it was composed of relatively extreme and marginal small groups. However, faced with the rapid mainstreaming and growth of the far-right, secretive networks of small groups of militants struggle to meet the challenge.
There are clear and obvious limitations of all this Actually Existing Antifascism. Even as the situation around us worsens, we often seem unable to escape these limitations. Both of these established repertoires of activism are constraining when we are faced with an unprecedented new situation. Both can be effective to an extent in their own way, but both have largely failed to capture the imagination or to generalise themselves into a force capable of out-mobilising the far-right practically or ideologically. We are no longer dealing with 20 NF members in a pub in Dover, or indeed with 500 EDL marching around Dudley, but with 150,000 on a Tommy Robinson demo, GB News, Elon Musk, with Reform aiming for government and multiple far-right demonstrations up and down the country every weekend.
We need to escape this bifurcation where one form of antifascism has the militancy without the numbers and the other has the numbers without the militancy. There’s no point to be willing to militantly confront the far-right if you don’t have the numbers. And the capacity to mobilise numbers has to be combined with imagination and a preparedness to step outside the pre-ordained script if necessary.
Ways of fighting back against fascism
Desperate times breed ingenuity and there have been some recent inspiring moves outside of these constraints. The Anti-Racist Movement (A.R.M,) launched by Black Lives Matter UK, the extensive community mobilising in Whitechapel that stopped two successive far-right demonstrations, and the formation of new community defence networks are just some of these.
Some of the key hallmarks of these initiatives that blur the boundaries between the two current traditions of actually existing antifascism are:
- Grassroots community defence led by those affected;
- Breaking down the distinction between anti-racism and anti-fascism;
- Incorporating migrant solidarity and resistance to the state border regime ;
- Opposing the interlinked racism of the state and the street;
- Autonomy and freedom of action, allowing a diversity of tactics and not seeking to prescribe forms of action;
- Allowing many groups of people to feel ‘ownership’ over the movement or action;
- Making opposition accessible and allowing ways for everyone to participate;
- The use of culture, creativity and imagination;
- Not feeling automatically constrained by the demands of the police.
We began the project of re-imagining antifascism because we think some experimental creative thinking, theoretical understanding and, ultimately, effective organising are very needed right now. This publication is an initial step in this process. In the following pages we attempt to provide an analysis of what is driving the current fascist wave, look at some of the bases of the fascist appeal as well as the current manifestations of the far rightfrom hotel protests and flaggers to Tommy Robinson’s massive demonstrations. We also focus on what we think are some inspiring recent examples of resistance to the far-right – from locals getting together to deflag their communities to militant mass community mobilisations that have stopped the far-right in their tracks in Manchester, Bristol and beyond.
Fascism is everybody’s problem and antifascism is for everyone.
Re-imagining Antifascism (RAF) Commune of Plan C
March 2026
