The Fight against Fascism and the Far Right. 2025, Feminist Education Association, paperback, 251 pages.
Few of Leon Trotsky’s observations were more insightful, prescient and useful than his writings on fascism. As early as September 1930, the Russian revolutionary-in-exile was warning that “fascism in Germany has become a real danger,” devoting much time over the next decade to demystifying and diagnosing the ascendant reactionary turn. That counter-revolutionary movement, though better understood, is no less a danger today.
It is in this firm anti-fascist tradition that the Freedom Socialist Party’s Melbourne branch has collated a new book, The Fight against Fascism and the Far Right. The book brings together more than 30 years of reports, addresses, and actions, offering an essential and instructive history of the FSP’s anti-fascist organizing. These are not simply observations from a single campaign. They are a collection of reporting, from the front lines which spans multiple crises, tracing the ebb and flow of ultra-right influence while exploring the responses that have stymied its growth.
One of the book’s great strengths — and there are many — is the way it casts a wide net, incorporating invaluable historical precedents, detailing contemporaneous campaigns against fascist groups, and placing these lessons within an internationalist perspective. Included are trenchant insights from comrades such as FSP founder Clara Fraser, international secretary Guerry Hoddersen, and Melbourne branch organizer Alison Thorne, along with a host of FSP members and friends.
A key takeaway from Trotsky’s analyses of fascism is the importance of the united front, described by FSP leader Gloria Martin, quoting Trotsky, as “a conglomerate of workers’ organizations ‘marching separately and striking jointly’ in a combined thrust against capitalist reaction.” That same takeaway permeates The Fight against Fascism and the Far Right: the role of this democratic collaboration, and the FSP’s longstanding involvement in its building, is explored in depth. In Australia as in the U.S., in the 1990s as now, the contours of united front organizing are laid out in sharp, rousing articles.
Thirty years of activism on this front are summed up by Ella Schulze-Willey in a November 2023 piece: “Whether you are an immigrant, part of the LGBTQIA+ community, a woman, a worker, a Muslim, a Jew, we all have a common enemy that needs smashing.” Through this smashing, wrote Alison Thorne and Peter Murray in 1994, we can “strengthen workers’ resolve to find real solutions to the poverty, misery and despair which are the sustenance of fascism.”
There is no anti-fascist theory as deep, abiding and revelatory as that of Trotsky, and this ample new entry from the Melbourne branch adds practical, ground-level dispatches to that illustrious study. Theory without practice is inert, lifeless; in this collection, you will find not only analysis and discussion, but tales of action, organization and grit, indispensable in the fight ahead.
To order The Fight against Fascism and the Far Right in the U.S. or Australia, click here. For other countries contact freedom.socialist.party.australia@gmail.com.
