Reclaiming the People’s War
Though it has recently become a byword for reactionary nostalgia, the Second World War was in certain crucial ways an extension of the ‘Red Decade’ of the 1930s. A modern anti-fascist Left must reclaim this inheritance — and avoid its shortcomings.
The 'Artists Ambulance' on display at Palace Yard, London, before being sent to the civil war in Spain. (Photo by Reg Speller / Fox Photos / Getty Images)
In the crisis-ridden autumn of 1936, the communist poet and critic Edgell Rickword wrote an editorial for the magazine Left Review:
The sincerity of our protests at fascist brutalities can only be measured by the strength of our efforts to secure the right of the colonial peoples to govern themselves. And, as practical people, let us remember that the forces of ‘law and order’ kept in training on the bodies of the subject races, provide a rod in a pickle for any reactionary government to use on the backs of a militant democracy at home.
Rickword’s comments expressed a position shared by communist, anti-fascist, and anti-colonial thinkers in Britain and worldwide: that the struggles for socialism and against fascism and colonialism were inextricably linked. No victory over fascism would be complete without an end to colonial rule, and the persistence of colonial violence would always weaken the prospects for socialism in the metropole.
The kinship between European colonialism and fascism, and the hypocrisy of those states that claimed to oppose fascism while waging war on workers at home and abroad, would be repeatedly stressed by figures on the Left. One such was another Left Review contributor, the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand, who wrote that Indians ‘saw the ugly face of Fascism in our own country’ long before European intellectuals ranged themselves against it, since it was ‘British Imperialism which perfected the method of the concentration camp, torture and bombing for police purposes’ (Anand also drew parallels between repressive colonial policing and the suppression of the 1926 General Strike).
To Rickword, Anand, and similarly committed socialists and anti-imperialists, these linkages seemed logically, morally, and politically compelling. But while the crises of the 1930s proved fertile ground for leftist thought in Britain, these connections would be weakened as the ‘Red Decade’ turned into the ‘People’s War’.
Communists and Cocoa-Magnates
The time in which Rickword was writing was something of a high point for leftist intellectual culture in Britain. The growth of fascism, and the National Government’s appeasement policies, coupled with the socially corrosive effects of the Depression, had drawn many writers, artists, and thinkers into more radical circles, and especially into the orbit of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This was the era of the Popular or People’s Front, a new approach to anti-fascism endorsed by the Third International (Comintern) in 1935, which placed considerable value on cultural and intellectual work.
Ultimately a measure aimed at reducing the threat posed by fascism to the Soviet Union, the new line depended on a revised analysis of what fascism was. Communist thinking had generally understood fascism, since its emergence, as connected to capitalist development and crisis, and therefore as related to imperialism in the sense Lenin had theorised it: a phase of capitalist development characterised by inter-imperial rivalry and new forms of accumulation. In the early 1930s, Moscow interpreted fascism as a morbid symptom of capitalism’s terminal crisis, and communists were bidden to work alone — against both fascists and social democrats — to hasten its demise.
After 1933, however, with Nazism in power, fascism ascendant elsewhere, and workers’ movements weakened, predictions of capitalism’s imminent collapse were clearly overly optimistic — and the approach to fascism predicated on them was obviously out of step with reality. The Comintern recast fascism as an attack by the most reactionary capitalists on the masses and adopted a new approach, based on what Eric Hobsbawm described as a ‘set of concentric circles of unity’: the workers’ movement would form the core of a broad ‘front’ encompassing all groups who opposed fascism.
Communists were now instructed to form alliances with socialists, social democrats, and even sympathetic conservatives, and to defend existing democratic institutions. Special emphasis was placed on intellectual and cultural work as a means of unifying people around national and popular cultures that formed the battleground and common language of anti-fascism. George Orwell memorably denounced the entire enterprise as a ‘nauseous spectacle of bishops, Communists, cocoa-magnates, publishers, duchesses and Labour MPs marching arm in arm to the tune of “Rule Britannia”’.
Beneath the inclusive rhetoric, as Orwell no doubt recognised, was Soviet realpolitik. The aim was the defence of the Soviet Union, now set on entrenching ‘socialism in one country’ rather than world revolution, against the threat posed by Nazi Germany. Despite the pragmatism at its core, however, there were undoubtedly political and cultural effects in Britain, and what — at least at the time — could be considered successes, despite the small numerical size of the Communist Party.
At home, anti-fascist action focused on Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). While support for the BUF had declined by 1936, Mosley’s politics had become increasingly antisemitic, and BUF activity centred on agitation in Jewish areas of London and other major cities. The Battle of Cable Street is remembered as a victory for united action led by the Stepney-based Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism, as well as the Stepney branch of the Communist Party.
But this street-level struggle drew people from a wide range of backgrounds, including trade unions and the rank-and-file of the Labour Party, despite the Labour leadership discouraging its members from engaging in street confrontation. The anti-fascist ‘crusade’ of the Spanish Civil War, which drew in British writers, intellectuals, and artists, as well as thousands of working-class volunteers, and which saw an unprecedented number of public solidarity campaigns, is perhaps the most significant monument of the Popular Front moment.
For Culture Against Fascism
But it is in the field of culture that the outlines — and ambiguities — of the Popular Front are most visible. Writers and artists seeking ways to mobilise in opposition to fascism formed organisations such as the Artists’ International Association (which held several important anti-fascist exhibitions in the mid-1930s) and the British Section of the Writers’ International (which published Left Review as a forum for discussion of literature and politics). While Left Review was supported by the Communist Party, it attracted a range of contributors from a broader spectrum of the Left. In keeping with the populist, non-sectarian ethos of the Popular Front, its cultural output characteristically focused on ‘the people’ both as subject and audience.
The most distinctive aspect of Popular Front culture in Britain are the various creative experiments in radical historiography and the practice of ‘history from below’, exemplified in A. L. Morton’s A People’s History of England (1938), which aimed to narrate a history both of and for the people. Large-scale pageants of British (or, more often, English) history aimed to construct a sense of popular national history as a radical tradition leading towards the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s, and ultimately beyond that towards a horizon of (English) communism. The writer Ralph Fox — one of the highest-profile British communists to die fighting for the Spanish Republic — described such projects as an attempt to forge ‘a spiritual community with the dead’ of past radical struggles.
But these narratives tended to gloss over questions of class and empire. To put it another way, their immediate target was fascism understood in a fairly narrow way as a threat to national culture — and both fascism and culture were disentangled from their connections to global influences of empire and capitalist transformation. The people, as an idea, was necessarily both expansive and limited.
This limitation was echoed in international contexts. The Second Congress of the International Association of Writers in Defence of Culture held in Spain in the summer of 1937 featured a high-profile cast of delegates in the midst of the Civil War. But its rallying slogan ‘For Culture Against Fascism’ also reflected a defensive emphasis on ‘culture’ — understood as the bourgeois culture of European nations — and on notions of progress and democracy that supposedly inhered in that culture. Rickword was among the delegates, but the linkages between fascism, capitalism, and imperialism that he had insisted on in Left Review now seemed, at best, inconvenient, as attention turned to defending what was deemed valuable within capitalist societies.
Despite the Comintern’s claim that fascism was a class strategy, Popular Front culture in practice often subsumed class into ‘people’ and people into ‘nation state’. The willingness to defend national cultures and political traditions in the capitalist countries, and the sidelining of more radical analyses and demands, alienated anti-colonial thinkers and some communists. In 1938 George Padmore, for instance, decried the intellectual contortions necessary to accept the Comintern’s demand that communists defend the ‘good peace-loving’ imperial powers (Britain, France, the USA) against the bad ones (Germany, Italy, Japan).
Dad’s Red Army
In the summer of 1939, with war now an inevitability, British communists hoped that the war would be a war on two fronts, against both fascism abroad and the ruling class at home: a war for social revolution and not merely for the defence of imperial power. This possible line was closed off by Moscow, when it announced that it regarded the war as imperialist on both sides and signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, before another about-turn prompted by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 recast the war as a people’s war against fascism.
To an extent, the Second World War provided a context in which some of the ambitions of the Popular Front might be realised. The progressive, relatively egalitarian popular culture of wartime, ‘a kind of zenith of mass society’, as Raphael Samuel called it, owed something to Popular Front anti-fascism. Indeed, the idea of a ‘people’s war’, so central to much popular memory, emerged directly from the experience of 1930s anti-fascism.
The term originated with Tom Wintringham, an ex-communist and former Left Review editor, who had commanded the British battalion of the International Brigades in Spain. Wintringham is best known for his central role in the establishment of the Home Guard, but he imagined the war as a conflict through which the entire country could transform and remake itself along socialist lines through armed struggle. His immediate model for such a ‘people’s army’ was the International Brigades, but he also insisted that ‘arming the people’ was both revolutionary and ‘completely part of the tradition of the British’.
Recalling Popular Front historical narratives and their evocation of a ‘spiritual community of the dead’, Wintringham linked his vision of the people’s army to historical precedents, particularly the Leveller movement within Cromwell’s New Model Army, and what Wintringham took to be its emphasis on debate and democracy. Such an army of active commitment, he thought, would be inherently anti-fascist.
Many communists, ex-communists, and other leftists participated in education initiatives within the armed forces, which aimed to develop an understanding of the purpose of the war and the kind of society that was being fought for — often in ways that drew consternation and disapproval from the army establishment. There were even bold attempts at democratising the army. Such initiatives, which sound a little like attempts to foster the ‘militant democracy’ Rickword envisaged, are often credited with helping to shape the emergent social democratic consensus and to deliver the Labour landslide at the 1945 election.
Imperialism Deferred
But as in the 1930s, more far-reaching questions of fascism’s relationship to capitalism and imperial rule were deferred in the interests of securing victory — and then closed off as the Cold War took hold. In his 1942 Letters on India, written as a series of letters to a fictional British worker to emphasise their shared stakes in the anti-fascist struggle, Anand wrote:
If the present war is being fought to create a new world order based on democracy and freedom, if the Allies aim to liberate the 90 million peoples of Poland and Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, etc., at present writhing under the oppression of Hitler, then let them begin, as a token of their earnestness, by liberating the 400 million of India held under British rule.
At a moment when the British government had refused to promise India independence in exchange for support in the war, Anand asked a crucial question: for which people is the war being fought?
In a sense, this is a question that haunts all attempts to root anti-fascism in the terrain of national cultures. Looking back, we can see in the British Popular Front an effort to find a popular and national language that would draw a variety of people into the struggle against fascism — and a concept of people’s war as a war for social revolution.
But we can also see how focusing on fascism as an immediate threat to European nations and their cultures allowed for questions of its relationship to capitalism and imperialism to go unanswered (and indeed largely unasked). Today, new and revived variants of fascism inevitably recall its twentieth-century manifestations. In responding to them, we might consider some of the roads not travelled by the 1930s left.