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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WE CAN BREATHE!  
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Gabriel Winant
July 24, 2024
London Review of Books
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_ The fascinating history of how the antifascist movement of the
1930s created "the left" as we know it today. Joseph Fronczak shows
how socialists, liberals, communists, anarchists, and others achieved
a semblance of unity in the fight against fascism _

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In​ 1963, June Croll and Eugene Gordon took part in the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Gordon was African American, raised
in New Orleans; Croll was Jewish, born in Odessa at the beginning of
the 20th century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape
racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a
mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man
shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly
white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more
than four hundred Jews were killed. Their story, uncovered by Daniel
Candee, a former student of mine, forms an epic political anabasis.
Croll became involved in communist politics and labour agitation in
1920s New York. Gordon, fresh from Howard University, became part of
the New Negro movement and transformed the nationalist politics of
Black self-defence, learned in his childhood, into communism in the
early 1930s. Their relationship began at roughly the time the Popular
Front was founded, and the movement offered them a way to universalise
their early political commitment. They took part in workers’
struggles, but also fought for Black civil rights, women’s equality
and decolonisation. As Richard Wright wrote, ‘there was no agency in
the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon
it as the Communist Party.’

Everything Is Possible: 
Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism
by Joseph Fronczak
Yale University Press; 360 pages
January 24, 2023
Hardcover:  $35.00;  E-book:  $35.00
ISBN: 9780300251173
ISBN: 9780300268591

 
Yale University Press
After Hitler came to power it soon became clear that the Comintern
directive t0 national communist parties to adopt a sectarian
ultra-leftist strategy wasn’t working, and that some form of
co-operation with other parties was necessary to counter the fascist
threat. In July 1935 the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern
instructed national communist parties to form ‘popular fronts’
with anti-fascist forces, including factional rivals and liberal
parties. Joseph Fronczak’s _Everything Is Possible_ describes the
consequences this decision had all over the world. Black activists in
Paris, London and New York united across factional lines to challenge
white rule in the Caribbean and fascist aggression in Africa,
accompanied by all the classic acrimonies. At a 1935 meeting of the
Comintern-backed Union des Travailleurs Nègres (UTN) to organise
against Italian designs on Ethiopia, white communists who had read
about the event in _L’Humanité_ that morning outnumbered Black
attendees, and reacted indignantly to the UTN’s interpretation that
‘the French working class had allowed itself to be co-opted by
imperialism.’ At a mass demonstration for Ethiopia in Trafalgar
Square a few months later, C.L.R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Jomo
Kenyatta approached the colonialism question more subtly. ‘You have
talked of the “White Man’s Burden”,’ Ashwood Garvey observed.
‘Now we are carrying yours and standing between you and fascism.’

During the Arab revolt of 1936-39, Palestinian and Jewish
revolutionaries formed an organisation called Antifa of Palestine
which, according to Fronczak, rejected ‘the whole idea of
“national domination”, “national sovereignty”, “national
privilege”, or as Lenin called it, “the hyper-chauvinism of the
dominant”’. Trade union organisers convinced workers to down
tools, join picket lines and occupy factories. One of the most famous
is the ‘sitdown strike’ at the General Motors plant in Flint,
Michigan in 1936-37, which led to a huge growth in membership of the
United Automobile Workers – from 30,000 to 500,000 in the year
following the strike. Fronczak notes that there were waves of sit-ins
around the world, carried out by dressmakers in Paris, textile workers
in India, laundry workers in Johannesburg and crew on dredgers in the
Mekong Delta.

It was a ‘decade of heroes’, as E.P. Thompson put it. ‘There
were Guevaras in every street and in every wood.’ Popular Front
coalitions won power in France, Spain and Chile, and sympathisers with
the movement played a key part in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
administration. Communists had a critical role in campaigns against
fascist aggression. ‘In a struggle that is national in character,
the class struggle takes the form of national struggle,’ Mao Zedong
declared in 1938, elevating the practical necessity to a theoretical
maxim. Still, they would exact a price, as Orwell saw in Spain.
Everywhere, Fronczak argues, the Popular Front represented a worldwide
left-wing identity, as particular ideologies of nationalism and
sectarianism suddenly became compatible.

Communists and their sympathisers gained a new popularity by laying
claim to local symbols and patriotic traditions. But the Popular Front
also blurred distinctions that had an important political value.
Authorising party members to work with progressive causes of all kinds
– including those independent of party direction – and to join in
coalitions with larger and more powerful liberal and socialist rivals
threatened communism’s distinctiveness, its oppositional
consciousness and organisational world. In many cases, this was a
right turn, undermining years of effort under repressive conditions
building disciplined and durable organisations. Black communists in
the American South, for example, found that the party’s new
orientation in the 1930s implied collaboration with Jim Crow Democrats
and abandonment of the anti-racist working-class militancy that had
begun to cohere early in the decade. Trotsky (not an advocate of a
‘popular front’ strategy but of the more rigorous ‘united
front’, excluding liberal groupings) was scornful, writing in
December 1937 that the Frente Popular in Spain was a ‘political
alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests
on basic questions in the present epoch diverge at an angle of 180
degrees’.

In the ‘Third Period’ that preceded the Popular Front, communists
refused to collaborate politically or organisationally with socialist,
social democratic, anarchist or liberal forces. The first two periods
in this chronology were the revolutionary turbulence that began in
1917 and the capitalist retrenchment and restabilisation of the
mid-1920s. During these years, debates had raged on the left about the
nature of the emerging fascist threat: was it old wine in a new
bottle, as the Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga insisted, or ‘an
exceptionally dangerous and frightful enemy’, as the German Marxist
Clara Zetkin believed? The answers to these questions had practical
consequences. Should communists support street confrontations with
fascists, a tactic Bordiga opposed, despite his rival Antonio Gramsci
taking a different view? Should they form a ‘united front’ against
the threat – as Zetkin argued, and the German communist Willi
Münzenberg attempted in the form of the Comintern-backed Action
Committee against War Danger and Fascism?

For Fronczak, the debates in Moscow and Communist Party headquarters
across Europe are important chiefly as the distant echo of active
anti-fascism – an emerging political identity in cities around the
world. ‘They came,’ as Vivian Gornick put it in her classic book
on American communism, ‘from everywhere.’ This was more true than
Gornick realised, as _Everything Is Possible_ shows. ‘The
mid-Depression years,’ Fronczak writes, ‘were when the basic idea
of the left as some great aggregate of people who find common cause
with each other the world over finally took form.’ When the
Comintern abandoned its Third Period view that liberals and even
socialists were accomplices of fascism, it was following rather than
leading a force that had already emerged. Wherever they appeared,
the _fascisti_ had been met by organised opponents. As Fronczak
writes, the Arditi del Popolo in Italy anticipated the Popular Front.
They were the vanguard not of the workers, but of ‘the people’:
bruisers who went onto the streets to punch and shoot back. ‘Mass
ecstasy’ was the way Eric Hobsbawm, then a teenager in Berlin,
described street confrontations with the Nazis in the early 1930s.

The political concepts of left and right originate in the seating plan
at the National Assembly of the French Revolution, but the rise of
international socialist and communist movements at the end of the
19th century made it possible to identify groups in different
countries that were like 0ne another in some abstract way – the
British left, the Russian left and so on. Yet the term was more often
used to describe a position within a workers’ organisation than in
relation to society as a whole – as in Lenin’s diatribe against
‘left-wing communism’. A coherent global left appeared only with
the arrival of the fascist threat. It did not take long, as Fronczak
emphasises, for fascism to provide a way for right-wing elements to
identify themselves and their goals. In addition to German, Italian,
Romanian, Spanish and Japanese far-right groups, there were
blackshirts in Buenos Aires and Detroit, blueshirts in Paris and
Peking, greyshirts in Beirut and Johannesburg, greenshirts in São
Paulo and Cairo, silvershirts in Minneapolis, goldshirts in Mexico, as
well as Falangist formations in South and Central America: comrades of
Franco’s clerical-military fascism, but with an extra emphasis on
the racial unity of white Hispanic-Americans, or _la raza_, a group
they thought had conceded far too much ground to Indigenous peoples
and to democracy.

What we would now call the right-wing politics of the 19th and early
20th centuries had been pulled in different directions: back to
feudal and religious authority, forward into industrialisation and
liberalism. Between the two was the ever present discourse of racial
hierarchy. Fascism, which proposed to pursue traditional right-wing
goals – racial-national aggrandisement, commercial and territorial
expansion – by revolutionary means, promised to modernise
reactionary politics for the 20th century, and to resolve its
incoherent counter-tendencies through the purification of popular
violence.

As the sociologist Dylan Riley says, fascism was in this sense a form
of democratic authoritarianism, suitable for a new political age. It
appeared first in Italy, hazily before the country entered the First
World War and then taking coherent form in the chaotic aftermath of
the armistice, as Italy was gripped by strikes and recriminations. The
fascists gloried in ‘beatings in the street, brawls in the square,
buildings burned in daylight, public humiliations and beards ripped
out, victims dragged by rope, bullwhippings, purgations and public
executions, some of them mock and some actual’. Fronczak emphasises
that the violence seemed to feed a ‘spiritual need’, marking an
‘expedition into the interior of one’s self’.

Where fascism should be located on the political spectrum has been a
source of vexation for decades, one exploited by later right-wing
forces that have claimed socialist influence on fascist ideas. But
fascists knew where they belonged. ‘I am not at all displeased,
honourable colleagues, to begin my discourse from these benches on the
extreme right,’ Mussolini declared in his maiden parliamentary
speech. ‘Left and right aren’t where one begins,’ Fronczak
writes. ‘Rather they are first encountered as a choice to be made:
where will one go to make one’s politics?’

There was a fascist riot in Paris on 6 February 1934, resembling
Washington’s on 6 January 2021 in its awkward gesturing towards a
coup d’état it could not enact. Another riot, triggered by
counter-demonstrating communists, followed on 9 February. ‘The
drawback of the Ninth, from the perspective of the wide political
community about to take form and become known as “the left”,’
Fronczak writes, ‘was that it muddied the rationale for why the
Sixth had been such a terrible and intolerable thing in the first
place. It fed into the trope of fascism and communism as similar and
equivalent forms of “extremism”.’ Another attempt was made,
after another three-day interval: the largest demonstration yet, but
calm and disciplined. ‘Young and old; women, men and
children ... socialists, communists ... Trotskyists, all
fraternally united ... and anarchists, republicans and liberals too;
French-born and Algerian-born; members of rival labour organisations
and non-union workers as well: they all undivided themselves among the
crowd.’ ‘Everyone finds their place,’ one demonstrator said,
‘because the place of everyone is everywhere.’ Cries of
‘Unity!’ swept through the gathering.

Many of the most famous rhetorical moments of the Popular Front years
are similar to this one. When the Spanish communist Dolores Ibárruri,
known as ‘La Pasionaria’ and the populariser of the slogan ‘¡No
pasarán!’, hailed the departing soldiers of the International
Brigades in 1938, she made the same point about unity: ‘communists,
socialists, anarchists, republicans – men of different colours,
differing ideology, antagonistic religions – yet all profoundly
loving liberty and justice, they came and offered themselves to us
unconditionally. They gave us everything – their youth or their
maturity; their science or their experience; their blood and their
lives; their hopes and aspirations – and they asked us for
nothing.’ The African American communist Harry Haywood said that the
effort to organise help for Ethiopia after the Italian invasion of
1935 ‘inevitably became a fight against the growth of fascism right
in Chicago against every petty persecution, Jim Crow degradation,
misery and discrimination’. Fronczak writes that Chicago’s South
Side ‘became a hotbed of Ethiopian solidarity’, manifest in mass
meetings and demonstrations, which likened fascism in Europe to
segregation. And not only Chicago: ‘The Tokyo newspaper _Yomiuri
Shimbun_ reported a local blacksmith’s “astonishment” at how
slow business had become “because of the news from overseas in the
morning and evening papers, as well as the radio broadcasts –
everyone’s mind was on that faraway African country.”’ During
the Battle of Cable Street in the Jewish East End of London on 4
October 1936, the protesters who beat back Oswald Mosley’s British
Union of Fascists shouted ‘¡No pasarán!’ A trace of this
worldwide mood can be seen in _Casablanca_: the screenplay was
written by three communists or sympathisers, and its hero, Rick
Blaine, has fought in Spain and run guns to Ethiopia (in fact, the
white leadership of the global left failed to rally to Ethiopia’s
cause).

As McCarthyists later discovered to their horror, party members and
sympathisers were scattered across the bureaucracies enforcing the New
Deal. Leon Keyserling, an economist who helped to draft some important
pieces of New Deal legislation, including the Social Security Act and
the National Labour Relations Act, though never a party member, wrote
in private that ‘there is no chance for lasting gains to either
farmer or labourer save by revolution.’ Chile’s Frente Popular,
which took power in 1938 after an attempted coup by the National
Socialist Movement of Chile, attempted to replace imports with
domestic production – though its best-known global legacy was a
politician, Salvador Allende, its minister of health. In France, Léon
Blum’s Popular Front government, which held power between June 1936
and June 1937, carried out a furious programme of legislative reform,
bringing in the right to strike, collective bargaining, a forty-hour
week and two weeks’ paid holiday in the face of massive strikes at
home and across the empire. ‘Finally, we can breathe!’ Simone Weil
exulted. But the coalition collapsed at the end of 1937 (it took power
again very briefly in 1938). In Spain, the Frente Popular
administration shattered under the violence of the fascist assault
that followed the left’s victory in the 1936 election. Republicans
and communists joined to suppress rival left-wing factions whose
indiscipline, they argued, aided the enemy – deliberately so,
Ibárruri claimed in her attack on ‘anarchotrotskyist fascists’.

For​ thousands of communists around the world, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet
Pact represented their ‘Kronstadt’ – the moment of disillusion
with the Bolshevik adventure. Unfortunately, Fronczak’s narrative
reaches this moment only in its final pages. Opponents of exploitation
and racism had mingled freely across sectarian and partisan boundaries
– people such as Keyserling and J. Robert Oppenheimer, along with
millions of others. With the onset of the Cold War, this space emptied
out. In the US, radical influence was purged from mainstream unions
and centre-left parties, and the figure of the working-class or
socialist militant was largely banished from popular culture. Social
democratic policies were rolled back and interracial working-class
opposition to segregation and discrimination was stigmatised.
Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance
and _Casablanca_’s screenwriters named before the House Un-American
Activities Committee. Keyserling and his wife, Mary, faced questions
regarding their loyalty. In Europe, the welfare state held up better,
but soon passed into the hands of Christian Democrats or
conservatives. The prestige the left had accrued across Europe by its
sacrifice during the defeat of fascism waned quickly, particularly
after the outrages of Stalinism became evident. In a well-known 1945
poll, 57 per cent of French respondents gave the Soviet Union the
greatest credit for Germany’s defeat, compared with 20 per cent who
chose the US; in a 2004 poll, these figures were reversed.

In Latin America, as the historian Kirsten Weld writes, ‘the Spanish
Civil War served as a living metaphor for those who disagreed,
passionately, about how to organise their societies, and the energy
that they poured into the cause did not dissipate with the
Republic’s defeat.’ The Ubico dictatorship in Guatemala was the
first foreign state to recognise the Franco regime, and the
anti-fascist intellectual and diplomat Luis Cardoza y Aragón would
locate the inspiration for the country’s temporarily successful
democracy movement of the 1940s and 1950s in ‘Republican Spain, the
eternal Spain that all of us carry in our hearts’. When a ship
chartered by Pablo Neruda brought thousands of Spanish Republican
exiles to Valparaíso in 1939, Allende, still Chile’s minister of
health, was there to welcome them. Four decades later, Augusto
Pinochet, having dispatched Allende, told Henry Kissinger that his
country had destroyed communism once before, and knew how to do it
again. ‘It is a long-term struggle we are a part of. It is a further
stage of the same conflict which erupted into the Spanish Civil
War.’

The Cold War’s chief political accomplishment may well have been the
end of the international solidarity formed in the fight against
fascism. National and even regional lefts persisted, but in isolation
proved vulnerable to what Vincent Bevins has called ‘the Jakarta
method’, in reference to the purge of hundreds of thousands of
Indonesian communists and sympathisers in 1965-66. Indeed, the
escalating threat to the Allende government in Chile was made plain in
the warnings stencilled in public places: ‘Jakarta is coming.’ Cut
off from each other, descendant movements met as strangers, perhaps
distant cousins. The struggles for Vietnamese independence and African
American civil rights, for instance, both emerged from the Popular
Front. Both Ho Chi Minh and Martin Luther King Jr could trace lines of
influence back to interwar anti-fascism. Ho Chi Minh had visited the
centres of the international left – working and reading in Paris,
London, Harlem, Moscow and Canton. King had a more distant connection:
among his advisers was the communist Jack O’Dell, and the leadership
of the civil rights movement was full of veterans of the Popular
Front, such as A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin. King
attended the Highlander Folk School, one of the most important
institutional survivals of 1930s American radicalism. When he
delivered his 1967 speech opposing the US war in Vietnam, he said
that the Vietnamese ‘quoted the American Declaration of Independence
in their own document of freedom’, but ‘we refused to recognise
them.’ The grounding of the Vietnamese struggle in the tradition of
American liberty seemed to justify King’s dissent while also voiding
communism of its specific content – the paradox of the Popular Front
all over again. In 1969, the Black Panthers called not for a popular
front, but as Zetkin and Trotsky had once done, for a ‘united front
against fascism’.

Over time and due to Cold War repression, the decisive contribution of
socialists and communists to the defeat of fascism was gradually
obscured. ‘Once I was young and impulsive, I wore every conceivable
pin,’ Phil Ochs’s 1960s song ‘Love Me, I’m a Liberal’ goes.
‘Even went to the socialist meetings, learned all the old union
hymns/But I’ve grown older and wiser, and that’s why I’m turning
you in.’ The left is in danger of being cut out of its own story –
dismissed today as ‘tankies’, Russian stooges or fanatics.

In France this summer, left-wing parties unexpectedly managed to agree
an alliance to fight the July parliamentary elections forced by
President Macron, and called it the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP).
When they unexpectedly gained the most seats, consigning Marine Le
Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National to third place, thousands
filled the Place de la République, chanting – what else? –
‘¡No pasarán!’ Macron’s Renaissance party had seemed keener in
the first round of voting to oppose the left as antisemitic on account
of its Palestinian sympathies than to address the racism and
xenophobia of the genuinely antisemitic right. In the run-off,
Renaissance failed to extend its electoral collaboration pact to the
largest left-wing party in the NFP, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France
Insoumise, which was seen as beyond the pale, like the ever growing
far right. Not for the first time, the left was expected to give more
than it received in the name of anti-fascist unity.

_[GABRIEL WINANT is Assistant Professor of History at the University
of Chicago. His writing about work, inequality, and capitalism in
modern America has appeared in The Nation, the New Republic, Dissent,
and n+1. His first book, The Next Shift
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in 2021.]_

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