In fact, Antifa, being putatively an organization of far-left socialists, has more in common with fascism than most of its progressive supporters are willing to admit. Indeed, far-left socialism, or communism, has always had something of an ideological kinship with fascism even though there's a great deal of sibling rivalry and even hostility between the two.
Both are totalitarian and oppressive, both are based on socialist economies, both use anarchy and chaos to acquire power, and both promote, and are typified by, hatred.
The differences between them are fairly insignificant. Fascists generally tend to be more nationalistic and focus their hatreds on those of different ethnicities from themselves. Communists tend to be more internationalist and direct their hatreds toward those in the upper socio-economic classes and adherents to theistic religions. In other words, they both practice identity politics.
Because both are forms of socialism it's misleading to call the fascists "far-right." They are, in fact, leftists, and their antipathy toward communist socialists is the hatred spawned between ideological brothers who disagree on relatively minor matters regarding their inheritance.
I discuss all this in more detail here, but the important point to be made in the present post is that the distinctions between Antifa and the Nazi-style white supremacists they despise are minor. They're two faces of the same evil, and no decent person should associate with, or defend, either of them.
An interesting piece by Tyler Stone at The Federalist explains some of the history between the Nazi fascists and the Soviet communists. Were it not for Hitler's betrayal of Stalin, Germany and the Soviet Union might well today share global hegemony.
After recounting the sordid history of cooperation between the communists and the fascists in the late 30s and early 40s Stone concludes with this:
The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany desired the same goals: to defeat democracies, independent Republics, and individual freedom throughout Europe (and the world). Communism and Nazism are just different sides to the same totalitarian coin....It's an interesting historical fact that progressives and communists in the United States, prior to Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, were very supportive of Hitler and his demands. As long as the fascists and communists were allies the left in the U.S. insisted that the United States remain neutral in the conflict unfolding in Europe, but once Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. American communists and their progressive acolytes did a complete turn-about and beat the drums for war against Germany.
Communism stood side by side with Nazism, and marched with it across Europe. As Friedrich Hayek in his book, “Road to Serfdom,” states: “[T]o both [Nazis and Communists], the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type [i.e. conservatives].”
If the left wants to remove offensive objects from history, then perhaps they should start by acknowledging that the hammer and sickle is just as hateful and oppressive as the swastika.
One lesson in this, I suppose, is that we should be very careful about being seduced by what groups like Antifa proclaim as their goal. Their agenda is, in fact, the erection of a totalitarian state and the abolition of individual freedom, and they'll do and say whatever it takes to achieve that end. Indeed, one of their heroes, Vladimir Lenin, said this in a speech in 1920:
We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas....Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order...Thus began a movement which, before the end of the twentieth century, had murdered approximately 100 million people. Antifa and groups like it are the ideological heirs of both Lenin and Hitler, and we should put as much distance between them and ourselves as we do between ourselves and the neo-Nazis.