Joseph Fronczak – författare

The fascinating history of how the antifascist movement of the 1930s created “the left” as we know it today  In the middle years of the Great Depression, the antifascist movement became a global political force, powerfully uniting people from across divisions of ideology, geography, race, language, and nationality. Joseph Fronczak shows how socialists, liberals, communists, anarchists, and others achieved a semblance of unity in the fight against fascism. Depression-era antifascists were populist, militant, and internationalist. They understood fascism in global terms, and they were determined to fight it on local terms. In the United States, antifascists fought against fascism on the streets of cities such as Chicago and New York, and they connected their own fights to the ones raging in Germany, Italy, and Spain.  As he traces the global trajectory of the antifascist movement, Fronczak argues that its most significant legacy is its creation of “the left” as we know it today: an international conglomeration of people committed to a shared politics of solidarity.

A global history of antifascism from its inception to our own times. Its inspiration, and subject of critique, though, is a work of fascist history, Robert O. Paxton's classic essay The Five Stages of Fascism. Paxton influentially studied fascism by comparing national case studies and proposing a cycle of five developmental stages through which each national fascism might progress. In this Element, the historian Joseph Fronczak counters Paxton's method of stages with one of ages: instead of organizing antifascism into national case studies going through stages, he organizes antifascism's global history into five ages, stressing the transnational causes and solidarities that pushed global antifascism to take form and shift shape over time. A further aim of this Element is to pose this history of antifascism as a counterhistory of fascism, a sort of epistemological experiment for rethinking fascism's history through a formulation of antifascism's history.