What’s Possible for the Left?

Martin Oppenheimer

Everything Is Possible
Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism
By Joseph Fronczak
Yale University Press, 2023, 249 pages + notes and index, $35 hardcover.

EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE is a fascinating, thought-provoking if somewhat convoluted history of the “left,” as Joseph Fronczak, a Princeton history professor, defines it. It is not always easy to follow as people and events appear and reappear several times in different contexts. His prose tends on the florid side and his enthusiasms sometimes overwhelm.

For Fronczak the left is a historical phenomenon, perhaps a Zeitgeist, (not his word) evolving out of the antifascism of the early 1920s. He describes its evolution from early battles against Italian fascism to the election of Popular Front governments in the mid-1930s, to its zenith in the Spanish Civil War.

Although the traditional parties of the left play their part, the “grammar” of the left is more: it is the crowds, rallies, strikes, speeches, street battles, volunteers such as the Arditi del Popolo and the Lincoln Battalion that fascinate him. “I belong to the Left,” George Orwell said in 1945, despite his bitter experiences with segments of it in Spain (244) and so, clearly, does our author.

Fronczak’s thesis is that this left was born in anti-fascism as a worldwide response to the rise of fascism in the aftermath of World War I. Before that, he tells us, it meant little more than a location in parliamentary seating, as in the First French Republic. But then through the 1920s and early 1930s, anti­fascism as it developed internationally scaled up into idea that there was some kind of a “global collectivity called the left.” (39)

However, a good case can be made that the left, including the term, came first and fascism followed. There were mass Socialist parties (often with left wings) in many countries (including in Czarist Russia) long before the term “fascist” had been invented.

Following the First World War both fascist and “red” (socialist, anarchist and communist) formations arose in response to deep social crises (especially unemployment, inflation and parliamentary chaos). The serious possibility of leftist uprisings in several European countries including Germany, Italy and France, especially after the 1917 Russian Revolution, prompted a few sectors of the European ruling classes to support fascist elements so as to undermine this prospect.

All fascist organizations almost from their initial moments, then and now, wrapped themselves around the banners of anti-Bolshevism, anti-communism, anti-socialism and against whatever passed locally as the left (including ordinary republicanism).

Facing the Fascist Danger

As fascism grew more dangerous, the Communist, Socialist and other left groupings began to organize anti-fascist fighting organizations. In Italy socialists and fascists fought it out in the streets as early as January, 1921. (48)

Soon antifascist demonstrations cropped up in other countries, initially among Italian emigre communities as in the United States. On April 10, 1923, five months after Mussolini’s “March” on Rome, the Anti-Fascisti Alliance of North America was founded. This was hardly an impromptu gathering, since it included members of the Socialist Party, the IWW, several unions, and the underground Communist Party’s above-ground formation, the Workers Party.

“By choosing to become antifascisti,” Fronczak says, “they were taking an early step toward eventually becoming leftists.”(59) But weren’t they already leftists?

Meanwhile the German left, split following the Great War between the somewhat discredited pro-war Social-Democratic Party (SPD) and the new pro-Soviet Communist Party (KPD), confronted the rapid growth of the Nazi movement.

Fronczak gives a somewhat meandering history of the Comintern’s early struggles to understand the nature of fascism. We are introduced to Clara Zetkin, who came out of the antiwar left wing of the SPD and who, as early as 1923, called for a “united front” against the fascism that was now expanding its influence into Germany. (82)

Zetkin’s appeal was to no avail, since the Comintern’s thesis of “social fascism” soon held sway, the idea that social-democrats and others on the left were, consciously or not, enablers of fascism.

Nevertheless, in 1924 socialists and even centrist groups managed to organize a broad coalition named after the colors of the Weimar Republic (black-red-gold) to defend it. According to the German historian Richard Rohrmoser, this organization had more than 1.5 million members at the point it was outlawed by the Nazis in the Spring of 1933. It had refused collaboration with the KPD.(1)

The SPD had set up an allied fighting group, the Iron Front. The KPD had its separate group, the Red Front. Then came the now famous “Antifa,” the acronym for Antifascistische Aktion, officially founded on May 25, 1932 on orders of the KPD’s Central Committee following a physical brawl between Communists and Nazis in the Parliament a few days before.

The KPD’s intention was to use Antifa to recruit from the SPD’s rank-and-file and create a “United Front from below” to fight the Nazis. (65) This did not sit well with the SPD’s leadership, and membership in Antifa was forbidden.

Still, Antifa was able to organize strikes in November, 1932 and a march of some 80,000-100,000 in Berlin as late as January 25, 1933, just days before Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. But the rifts between the two mass workers’ parties were too deep, in the end, for Antifa to create a broad united front against Nazism.

Missing from Fronczak’s narrative is any mention of the chief advocate for a united front of German workers’ parties, Leon Trotsky. He had been expelled from the Soviet Communist Party in 1927, but he and his anti-Stalin followers still considered themselves members of its “left-opposition.”

Trotsky viewed the KPD as the only party capable of stopping the Nazis and pressed it to adopt a united front “from above” with the SPD leadership. He penned a whirlwind of articles from 1930 to 1933 pleading for the Communists to change course from their disastrous “third period” policy.(2) Again, tragically, to no avail.

Popular Fronts and Labor Strikes

Stalin’s strategy was only reversed after Hitler’s triumph. It came following Georgi Dimitrov’s famous speech at the Seventh Comintern Congress in 1935. Suddenly the Communists embraced antifascist solidarity in the form of Popular Fronts (note: not United Fronts of workers’ organizations) even with yesterday’s “social fascists.” (154) But by then it was too late for Germany.

It was not until the middle of the Great Depression, the years that led up to the Spanish Civil War, that “the left as we know it today” coalesced, Fronczak contends. A major contribution in that direction was the “Hands Off Ethiopia” movement, a response to Mussolini’s program to make Italy great again through expanding Italy’s colonial empire in 1935.

There were mass protest meetings in many countries as Mussolini prepared for the war. “To support Ethiopia is to fight fascism” became the slogan of the day. (164) Fronczak points to the “interconnectivity” of the Hands Off Movement with antifascism and the fight against “Jim Crow” in Chicago and elsewhere.

On October 3, 1935 Italian troops invaded from its colonies in Eritrea and Somalia. Their modern weaponry prevailed and Ethiopia became an Italian colony in February, 1937.

Hands Off Ethiopia was one of many “transnational” protest movements going back many years. One of the best known had grown up in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian-American anarchists framed for murder and executed in 1927. Each movement “stirred together some initial elements of the global left to come.” (153)

The links among labor actions, strikes, sit-downs and antifascism are clear when it comes to France, Spain and many other countries. Fronczak describes the leadup to the 1936 General Strikes that convulsed the British Mandate in Palestine and French Mandates in Syria and Lebanon.

A bi-national working-class Antifa group in Palestine had called for a strike uniting Arab and Jewish workers, but the wider Arab Nationalist Uprising then “spun the situation away” from them. (200) The politics of a “shared future made by a shared struggle” was over.

During the 1936-37 GM autoworkers’ sit-downs in Flint, Michigan the workers held up antifascist signs including “They Shall Not Pass” and “raised their fists in antifascist salutes.” (197)

Yet it was the economic crisis that led to global waves of protest, not least in the United States. The Veterans’ Bonus March, strikes among farmworkers, general strikes in Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis, the Harlan County Coal War, the formation of the Unemployed Councils, are only a few examples.

There is little evidence that anti-fascism as such played more than a minor role in the struggles in U.S. fields and factories during the Depression. But there is a lot of evidence that members of the Communist and Socialist Parties and other left formations were deeply involved in helping labor organizing, leading strikes, and trolling for members during organizing campaigns. Some of these would soon be heading to Spain.

In 1936 “the antifascist moment hit its peak” and “the political world was rearranged…”. (178-9) A wave of strikes and factory seizures in France was followed by victory for a Popular Front ticket in France. The creation of other Popular Fronts followed:  “combining all parties of the left…even beyond that…by incorporating the people themselves without any distinction of ideologies.” (184)

“Tout es possible,” wrote Leon Blum, the French socialist prime minister — until it wasn’t. Blum’s Popular Front government was undone by multiple crises: The Depression, the fanatics on the Right, the threat posed by Hitler, the Spanish civil war that deeply split French opinion, internal disputes, all contributed to the dissolution of his government in the Fall of 1938.

Fronczak spends much of Chapter 5 enthusing about the development of Popular Fronts. It was antifascism that “fueled” them, he says, with the Depression a secondary factor, at least in France.

Although the Comintern now supported such formations, he thinks the idea had grown beyond its control. The problem was that Popular Fronts downplayed class issues in order to include “bourgeois” parties, thereby potentially alienating the more radical sectors of the working class and poor peasants.

Defeat in Spain

The book’s centerpiece is the Spanish Civil War, where again a Popular Front coalition confronted reactionary forces, this time on the battlefield. A Popular Front including republican parties, Socialists, Communists and even anarcho-syndicalists upset expectations and was elected in February, 1936.

Although the government was following a fairly safe, non-revolutionary program, conspiracies to overthrow the Republic commenced at once. An uprising led by a group of generals began in July. A month later Germany decided that General Francisco Franco would be their man and sent aircraft to assist his troops.

“Manifesto of Antifascist Action,” German Communist Party, July 1932.

It is impossible in this book review to detail the catastrophic circumstances that ultimately led to the defeat of the Republic after three years of fighting. Fronczak presents us with a cast of characters worthy of ten Shakespeare productions. They run from the famous (Simone Weil, Sylvia Pankhurst, Orwell, Dolores Ibarruri of “No Pasaran!”) to a long list of rank-and-file volunteers such as Oliver Law, a Black American Communist volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, killed in action July 9, 1937.

The “Lincolns” were part of the 15th International Brigade, mainly recruited by the U.S. Communist Party.

The author is not shy in condemning the role of the Comintern in suppressing, indeed engineering the murder, of elements of the left not in sync with its policies in Spain. The Spanish Communist and Socialist Parties acted to assure the government’s bourgeois allies, as well as the West (which failed anyway to come to its help), that no real revolution would stem from the Popular Front’s government.

Fronczak understands that “the politics of unity that had pressed together so many incongruent parts into ‘the left’ had always been a fragile project…” These contradictions burst forth in the events of April, 1937 in Catalonia. His brief description misses that much of Catalonia was in control of workers’ and peasants’ unions and their militias.

The red and black flag of the Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo (CNT) flew over Barcelona’s telephone exchange. On May 3 the CNT and its anarchist allies, the Federacion Anarchista Iberica (FAI), plus the Partit Obrera d’Unificacio Marxista (POUM) called for a seizure of power throughout Catalonia, in short, a complete social revolution.(3)

After some debate among the revolutionary forces in the face of military attacks by Loyalist forces, the CNT backed down and entered negotiations with the Central Government, to the dismay of Trotsky and his followers. “After the May Days, the Spanish Republic’s efforts to consolidate control of the war effort led to an intensified political repression” of the anarchist and POUM militias. (227)

Meanwhile the war between Franco’s forces and the Loyalist Army including the International Brigades ground on.

Although the war did not end formally until April 1, 1939, the International Brigades were withdrawn from fighting on September 1, 1938. On November 1 they staged a farewell parade to the cheers of some 250,000, in Barcelona. The book contains several photos of this event by the famous Robert Capa.

Fronczak sees the “paradox.” Thousands had come, “their sacrifices amounted to one of the great shows of human solidarity in world history,” but the effects of the war undermined the cause of antifascism. (228)

The left was fractured and many were disillusioned. Some would turn their disillusionment into pro-Western anti-communism.

As he closes his book, the author adopts a valedictory mode: “The left has given the modern political world a never-ending lesson on the meaning of struggle. That alone is a worthy gift.”

Fronczak tries to make the case for an all-encompassing left, including revolutionary wars “that were at times liberatory and at times murderous disasters.” (247)

This sidesteps a lot. Is the common denominator of antifascism sufficient to define the left as he seems to think?

Historically the left has always been torn between movements committed to democratic structures versus those committed to elitist processes. Do these belong under the same rubric? Is there a historical moment when they cease being part of the left?

The left has suffered many defeats since Spain. Fronczak cites Allende’s Chile among other “heroic” defeats that “paradoxically instilled leftists with more confidence of their eventual glory.” (247)

But “everything” is not really possible, despite the book’s title. We are limited by historical circumstance in how we struggle, as has become clearer than ever since Trump’s victory. Fortunately the book was in press prior to that sad event.

Notes

1. Richard Rohrmoser, Antifa, Portraet einer linksradikalen Bewegung, Verlag Beck, 2024, 44-45.
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2. Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Intro. by Ernest Mandel, Pathfinder Press, 1971.
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3. Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain, Pathfinder Press, 1938 and 1974, ch. 10.
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May-June 2025, ATC 236