We can breathe!
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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
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?