Czech Antifascism after the 1989 and Anarchist Direct Action: Clashes and Matches between Class, Community, and Civic Oriented Variants of Anarchism

Abstract

Czech Antifascism after the 1989 and Anarchist Direct Action: Clashes and Matches between Class, Community, and Civic Oriented Variants of Anarchism

The paper looks at post-1989 history of Czech antifascism and distinguishes three variants of anarchism that developed alongside with it. In the first part, it refines and expands the widely used schema that pits autonomists against anarchists (or liberal lifestyle anarchists against social anarchists). Whereas autonomists, according to this schema, are individualistic hedonists who are resigned to broader social change and enjoy their privileges in order to create "islands of freedom" in which to live their own alternative. Anarchists, then, are those who participate in the class struggle and seek a social revolution that collectivises the means of production. The problem with this scheme is mainly the simplification of the first position, as it does not recognise any other type of collectivism than class collectivism. It thus presents all other types of collectivism as individualistic. However, purely individualist anarchism has never been the dominant current among anarchists who do not subscribe to the class struggle. In our scheme we will instead work with different types of collectivism and distinguish between community-oriented, civic-oriented and class-oriented types of anarchism.

In order not to stay only with concepts and ideological schemes, which are rather useless without concrete examples of action in certain contexts, we will apply them, in the second part, to the interpretation of the basic milestones of Czech antifascism after 1989. There, we outline for periods and focus on shifts in understandigs of direct action influenced by shifting coallitions between class, community, and civic oriented anarchists.