HISTORICAL ANTIFASCISM AND THE GLOBAL LEFT

Abstract

Joseph Fronczak's Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism presents antifascism in the 1920s and 1930s as a universal cause that united people across social and ideological divides, creating the discursive framework for the global Left we know today. It revises standard accounts according to which the Left originated either with the Atlantic revolutions circa 1800 or with the international workers’ movement that took shape in the late nineteenth century. This article accepts the weak form of the book's argument that the antifascist era was remarkably creative and essential for understanding the development of today's Left. However, it rejects the strong form of the argument that dissociates the Left from any prior history in the revolutionary tradition or the workers’ movement. To complement the book's discursive analysis of languages of the Left, this article outlines a structural analysis of antisystemic opposition in the contexts of global capitalism, imperialism, and mass politics. What results is a long-term concept of the Left that, among other things, highlights the promise and pitfalls of antifascist populism. The core problem of defining the Left is accounting for the historical disjuncture between unity of antisystemic consciousness and unity of organized action.