Antifascism Against Machismo

An intergenerational dialogue on the meaning of feminist antifascism.

Anti-Fascism Against Machismo collects & continues a conversation begun by Tammy Kovich (as "Petronella Lee") in 2019. Four feminist, antifascist revolutionaries jump off from each other's reflections & bring the particularities of their varied contexts to bear on one central problem: What has & will a women's war against fascism look like?

Kovich kicks things off with a probing look at the central importance of gender to fascism, & its particular formulations in today's far right. She continues by examining the historic role of women as partisans in three antifascist wars of the 1930s & 40s-Ethiopia, Spain, & Yugoslavia-contrasting this with the restrictive image of "antifa" as a young, Euro man of a particular subcultural aesthetic & antifascist activity as not much broader than street fights. Finally, she builds on this to propose what an antifascism that takes a fight against patriarchal domination-on the right & the left-seriously.

Butch Lee, a white woman who worked in support of Black revolutionary movements & who sought to elaborate a vision of what a women's revolutionary movement must be, responded to Kovich's zine a few months later. The 80-year-old Amazon theorist brings her life of experience & study to bolster Kovich's main points, while asking questions about some limits she sees in the work. From 1950s white, small town New Jersey to the civil rights struggle in Southside Chicago, refugees from Tsarist pogroms to the fighters of the Black Liberation Army, Lee's most autobiographical public writing-the last before her death in 2021-questions Kovich's framing of antifascism as a limited struggle that must expand to meet the needs of a properly revolutionary politics.

While Kovich's work focuses on the position of revolutionary women, stuck between misogynist fascists & macho antifascism, Butch Lee reframes the discussion around the position of white women: the reproducers of the "white race," colonized for the role, yet so often participants, willing collaborators in the extension & preservation of white supremacy. Lee asks what it means to see today's fascists as transcending their previous role as fringe cosplayers, now becoming something more intractable & more deeply rooted in the changes occurring in global patriarchal capitalism.

Veronica L. then offered her own contribution, advancing the conversation by seeing the ways in which the analyses of fascism offered by Lee & Kovich each illuminated different aspects of what they all see as profoundly inter-related phenomena. She also applies the earlier works to her own experiences as a white woman organizing without cis men & to the new context made by the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic & the mass antiracist & anticolonial reverberations of #ShutDownCanada & the George Floyd rebellion, which had each reshaped the political context since Kovich & Lee's 2019 writings.

The book also features a new introduction by El Jones, which continues & frames the discussion through her own experiences as a Black antifascist, antiracist, abolitionist organizer & educator on occupied Mi'kmaq land on Canada's east coast.

In these times of rising instability, fracturing identities, & a resultant rise in challenges to & defences of white supremacist patriarchy, Antifascism Against Machismo makes a powerful contribution to the understanding needed for a revolutionary resistance at the same time as it offers a model for political discussion. Women building revolutionary theory together, between different contexts, across borders & generations, & beyond the stale fences of political sects.