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.’
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, came out in 2021.]
