Is fascism an immediate threat in the US, or anywhere else? A lot of people with different kinds of politics seem to think so. As someone who looks at the leftist corners of the internet quite a bit, I can safely say I see the word “fascism” used to describe things that are happening right now dozens of times a week at least.
Depending on who you ask, the US will be a fascist state soon. Or the US is already fascist. Or the US has always been fascist. Or Israel is fascist. Or the police are fascist.
Naturally we see Donald Trump described as a fascist quite frequently. But many on the left have taken to describing the Democrats as fascists too — in particular for their role in mounting police repression and the Gaza genocide, and in general for their increasingly brazen ideological unity with the right wing.
It’s true that both major parties have moved steadily rightward over the decades and have made state violence and repression, militarized border security, and imperialist war more and more acceptable in the mainstream — no argument with that. Bad things are happening in the social and political climate of the US, and the Democrats have been instrumental in allowing that.
But do we describe this as fascism on their part? I’m going to argue that if we do describe the Democrats as fascists, the word has ceased to have any meaning at all.
Now I can imagine someone asking, what do you care? Leftists who talk about fascism are showing they take the threat seriously, even if they’re overdiagnosing it. We’re on the same side, isn’t that what matters? Aren’t you being a bit pedantic?
Well, yes it is pedantic, but for a reason. It’s not just being pedantic for its own sake. Different people mean a lot of different things when they use the word fascism (this is also true of the word socialism, of course). Most people in the mainstream use the term rather vaguely. If you look up fascism in Wikipedia, you’ll see the opening paragraph is just a generic definition of a far-right dictatorship.
If we describe the Democrats as fascists, the word has ceased to have any meaning at all.
As Marxists, we strive to be exact about our political vocabulary — including certain terms that are in general use. Just as we have a more specific or even technical definition of what the term working class means, we are also more specific in defining fascism.
More importantly, we believe that if you get these definitions wrong, it can lead to strategic mistakes in outlook, in assessing what’s happening, and in organizing. Getting it wrong can lead you astray.
Just like there is with socialism, there are contrasting and competing bad definitions of fascism. You have the bad takes on the Democrats I’ve described here, which I would describe as ultraleftist. There’s a whole history of bad ultraleftist takes on fascism (and I’ll get to that in a bit).
And then you have the liberal overuse of the term as well, which is far more common and more likely to be entertained in the mainstream. That has a different political agenda behind it, and leads to different mistakes.
Meanwhile, an actual fascist movement is on the rise, especially in Europe, but also here in the US, and in other places including Brazil and India. I think the reason these bad definitions of fascism are so widespread on the left now is that there’s a lot of concern for this rampaging far right. So it’s understandable that a lot of people have the word fascism on their lips right now.
The recent racist riots in the UK — or pogroms, as we should rightfully call them — are perhaps the most visible evidence of this resurgence. If you’re like me, those pogroms made you wonder how rapidly things are deteriorating in this world of crisis. As we’ll see fascism is a response to capitalism in crisis.
But the very reason to be precise is so we can analyze and strategize against this far-right movement — and that imperative comes out in Leon Trotsky’s writing on fascism.
Trotsky on the definition of fascism
Trotsky wrote a lot on the topic — along with Clara Zetkin, he was arguably the most important theorist of fascism during the era when it first arose in Europe. The rise of fascism was intimately tied with the disastrous end of the revolutionary period in Europe in the 1920s, and that’s why Trotsky paid such close analytical attention to it.
This is something thing Trotsky wrote in a letter to a comrade in the UK in 1931:
In order to be capable of foreseeing anything with regard to fascism, it is necessary to have a definition of that idea. What is fascism? What are its base, its form, and its characteristics? How will its development take place? It is necessary to proceed in a scientific and Marxian manner.
So Trotsky himself felt it was important to get that definition right. So here we see it’s not a new problem: people have been getting it wrong since the dawn of fascism in the 1920s. This is one focus of Trotsky’s writing.
So what is fascism? In that same letter, Trotsky wrote, “It is a plebeian movement, financed and directed by big capital. The genuine basis is the petty bourgeoisie.”
By plebeian, he means it’s a mass movement. It’s not something imposed from the top down or installed in a coup, but something that originates in the streets — though it may be financed and directed by sectors of the ruling class later. And the base of the mass movement is the petty bourgeoisie, but as Trotsky points out, some backwards layers of the proletariat may become involved too.
Trotsky himself felt it was important to get the definition of fascism right. So we see it’s not a new problem: people have been getting it wrong since the dawn of fascism in the 1920s.
To illustrate, Trotsky makes a distinction between the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain from 1920 to 1932, and the dictatorship of the original fascist, Mussolini, in Italy. Primo De Rivera was an aristocrat and he had the support of the establishment including the military. This makes it a much more standard (if no less appalling) state of affairs.
By contrast, the original fascist movement in Italy was made up of the frustrated petty bourgeoisie. It was a street movement, and that makes a difference. Trotsky points out that Mussolini had difficulty bringing the traditional military establishment into his project, which was at first driven by street militias and paramilitaries and other thugs. This was true of the Nazis too.
So Trotsky reminds us that there are other kinds of dictatorship besides fascist ones, historically speaking. France under Napoleon is another classic example. Part of the problem in defining our terms is that since World War II, the image of fascism has overtaken the concepts of dictatorship and authoritarianism — understandably so because Hitler and the Nazis were so historically awful.
About the definition of petty bourgeoisie: When we Marxists use that term (another one we’re very specific about!) it means small business owners, middle managers, bureaucrats, doctors, lawyers, priests, and others who don’t depend on wage work for a living. They’re not the big bourgeoisie — the investor class who runs society, and they’re not workers who are dependent on a wage from the investor class. They’re people who either own their own businesses, or they do contract work, or are executives paid a high salary to manage other workers.
The petty bourgeoisie tend to feel like they create their own wealth through their own hard work and virtue. They tend to be more individualistic, if not outright more conservative on average than workers, and they avoid mass politics during ordinary times. For example they want nothing to do with unions.
The petty bourgeoisie roughly correlates to “middle class” — that’s not an exact definition, because you can earn a higher wage, live in a middle-class neighborhood, and still be of the proletariat, but we do use that term as a loose synonym at times.
When the petty bourgeoisie or the middle classes experience crisis and suffer, and fear being displaced or pushed into the ranks of the working classes or the poor — that’s when they often panic, or get angry, or lash out at others, whether immigrants or Jews or LGBTQ+ people. At such times they may set aside their aversions to organized politics and start to cohere into reactionary movements. There might be significant numbers of ex-soldiers in their ranks — this was true in Germany, where ex-soldiers who had been through World War I felt abandoned by society — and that can give the movement a militaristic tendency.
Trotsky refers to ordinary bourgeois democracy as a “dictatorship” — the dictatorship of capital over workers and other classes. That’s what we live in, and what capitalism has been for centuries. This is exactly why labeling capitalism’s more violent or repressive traits as fascism is an error.
In the formation of a fascist state, there’s another step involved, which is that during a crisis — such as the crises of Europe between the wars, such as the crisis in Chile in 1973 — the capitalist class identifies this process happening, and uses these angry petty bourgeoisie to their advantage, financing and arming them in paramilitaries to do their dirty work in repressing the proletariat. At these times there’s revolutionary potential in the workers’ movement — as there was in Germany during the revolutions in 1918 and 1919, and in Italy during the revolution of 1920, and in Chile in 1973. At this point big capital fears for its survival. The decision is made that they can no longer rely on ordinary bourgeois democracy.
What follows is a state of things in which capital is still in charge but there is no more workers’ movement and no more democracy.
As Trotsky puts it in his 1932 essay “What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat”:
At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium — the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat — all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.
The way Trotsky describes this happening in Italy in November of 1920 is the reference case of a fascist upsurge and takeover.
One thing to note here is that Trotsky refers to ordinary bourgeois democracy as a “dictatorship” — the dictatorship of capital over workers and other classes. That’s what we live in, and what capitalism has been for centuries. This is why Marx, Engels, and Lenin called for a dictatorship of the proletariat, the only thing that can bring an end to the dictatorship of capital. This is exactly why labeling capitalism’s more violent or repressive traits as fascism is an error.
In the same essay, Trotsky identifies three key traits of a fascist state. In his words, fascism means:
- Workers’ organizations are annihilated;
- The proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state;
- A system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.
By “system of administration,” he means extensive police repression, such as the Gestapo — but also an expanded bureaucracy. Hiring thousands of new bureaucrats is one way the Nazis dealt with unemployment.
Four things to distinguish when discussing fascism
Returning to the present day, I want to make a few distinctions here, pull out a few strands, because there are overlapping meanings when we use the word fascism:
1. A fascist state
We’ve already discussed what a fascist state is, but one thing to emphasize is that there are currently no fascist states in the world today, if we stick to Trotsky’s more strict definition. There are of course plenty that are authoritarian to a greater or lesser degree.
2. People who identify or organize as fascists
Next is fascism as a movement, as opposed to a state. This means the small but growing minority of people who openly support fascist politics. They may organize with greater or lesser success depending on conditions on the ground. Conditions have been more favorable for them in the last decade. And in this category there are two subcategories.
a. Fascist street movements
The first of these is the street movement — Rick Kuhn here in Australia calls them the “boot boys.” These are familiar to us: in the US we have the III%ers and the Proud Boys and others. Some groups, including the Proud Boys, avoid use of the term “fascism” and avoid Nazi imagery, and this is one way they appeal to a lot of frustrated and confused young men. They are better at marketing than the outright neonazis who embrace all that.
The neonazis often seem like clowns with their swastikas and cosplay, but it’s frightening when they feel safe enough to mobilize, as they did at a drag-queen story hour in Ohio last year that was defended by our comrades in Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists. These creeps brought guns to an event for children and carried banners with slogans like “Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions.” This references the Nazi view that the Weimar Republic of the 1920s was corrupt and degenerate, and ties that in with gay and trans visibility in our society.
b. Openly fascist politicians
The second subcategory of open fascists are the ones who work in the political sphere, wear suits and ties, and are a bit more palatable in the mainstream, but who are very much fascists themselves.
A prime example of this is the AfD or Alternative for Germany, whose rapid growth and popularity is very unsettling. Through their campaigns against immigrants, and preying on the downwardly mobile middle class’s fears about austerity, immigrants, and the “Great Replacement,” the AfD has legitimized the same kinds of politics that were practiced by the Nazis, and have gained a significant share of parliamentary seats in certain states in just ten years since their formation. Earlier this year, they won a majority in the state assembly election in the state of Thuringia, a first for the far right since the downfall of the Nazis (though it’s unlikely they’ll be able to form a government because the other parties have ruled out working with them). They’re part of a far-right coalition that has a number of seats in the European parliament too.
An important point is that the AfD has strong connections to the street movement, the boot boys, and in some towns in Germany immigrants face intimidation even when going about day-to-day business such as grocery shopping. The AfD are also good at exploiting social media including TikTok to appeal to a younger audience.
Without being alarmist, it’s fair to point out that this combination of political power plus a street movement is how fascism happens. It’s very serious stuff and there’s nothing happening on this kind of scale in the US. Trumpism as it is today really can’t compare. This would be like if the Proud Boys had a political party that was dominant in several state legislatures around the country, and had a much bigger street movement at the same time.
However, it’s worth noting that the AfD has documented connections with the far-right in the US. This is an international movement, so we have to be very wary and not dismissive of fascist potential in the US.
Looking beyond Germany, there are even more mainstream politicians like Marine Le Pen, the far-right opposition leader in France, and Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, who are considered by many sober observers to be fascists, but who themselves reject that notion.
3. Reactionary politicians who are supported by fascists
The third thing to differentiate is right-wing politicians who are not fascists, but are supported by them; and who may themselves coddle fascists, or lend them tacit support. Donald Trump is right now the most significant example of this.
I’m just going to state this plainly: Trump is not a fascist. This might be a controversial statement for some liberals and even some on the left. But when you compare Trump to real organized fascists such as the AfD, you see he’s just an opportunistic grifter who’s built a reactionary following because it’s convenient for him.
He certainly has uncomfortable proximity to the far right, perhaps most damningly in his role in the riot in Washington on January 6, 2021. It’s easy to picture someone like Trump approving of and benefiting from a hypothetical fascist takeover of the US government if that were to take place. But for now it’s incorrect to label Trump himself a fascist for specific reasons.
In an article at Tempest earlier this year, Dan Davison and Sacha Marten lay out some of these arguments. They quote historian Richard Evans, who wrote that January 6 “bears no comparison to the hundreds of thousands of armed and uniformed stormtroopers and Squadristi that the Nazi and fascist leaders deployed on to the streets daily in the 1920s and early 1930s to intimidate, beat up, arrest, imprison and often kill political opponents.”
January 6 was a relatively disorganized and ideologically incoherent riot, nothing close to a fascist uprising. What forces did momentarily cohere on that day have since been badly scattered and hounded by the law.
So, Trump has no real paramilitary movement, and also no real support from the elements of the capitalist class or the military that he would need for a fascist takeover. As Kit Wainer and Charlie Post put it:
Trump’s attempts to retain office despite losing the election failed for a simple reason: the complete absence of any interest among leading capitalists or state bureaucrats to eradicate or even weaken the Constitutional order in order to extend Trump’s presidency… None of the players Trump needed to play central roles in his efforts to hold on to power had any incentive to cooperate. Quite the contrary, their futures were bound up with the stability of the capitalist state, a state whose limits can not easily be stretched by a single politician.
Davison and Marten also point out that Trump doesn’t seem to have very many allies among the big bourgeoisie — for example he’s had no rich benefactors to help him with his many legal and financial woes, and instead he depends on selling “cheap junk” to his true believers. He’s really quite a pathetic figure. “While it’s far from impossible,” they write, “it would certainly be odd for the bourgeoisie to see fit to make a dictator out of the man they don’t trust enough to lend money to.”
This is a key point. As we’ve seen, fascism is a cudgel wielded by the ruling classes when they are desperate. But we’re nowhere near that stage yet in the US. In recent years, the capitalist class has much preferred the Democrats — the oldest, most powerful, and most stable capitalist party in history — to run their state affairs. The Republicans under Trump are more unstable, but not enough to shake the foundations of bourgeois democracy.
Certainly this is all dangerous enough in and of itself. You don’t have to think Trump is a fascist to view him as a noxious, corrosive, dangerous figure, especially because of the movement that backs him. Trump’s movement is arguably more dangerous than he is.
I’m also not arguing that a future instance of American fascism would resemble German or Italian fascism in a one-to-one comparison — we don’t want to be that wooden in our thinking. But we have to be clear in assessing the social forces at work and not give in to panic.
4. General conditions of reaction in society
This brings us to the fourth thing to distinguish when discussing fascism, which is the general conditions that signal a dangerous turn to the right in society — the widespread embrace of far-right ideas, and the emergence of an angry, paranoid, sometimes violent petty bourgeoisie. This is true of the mass movement that supports Trump. In recent years we’ve seen more concentrated instances of it in the right-wing protests against mask mandates, vaccines and lockdowns in the US, Canada, and Australia.
I don’t think it’s incorrect to say that this is the human material of fascism. They aren’t as sharply defined as the Proud Boys, but these are the ordinary people who are ready for a broader fascist movement if and when it does coalesce anytime.
If you look at the values of the people who enabled and embraced fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and the values of these people today, they’re very comparable. They’re extreme nationalists, they’re anti-immigrant, and they’re racist of course. The whole concept of the nation and their national identity is tied into their racism. They have a really toxic conception of masculinity and gender roles. They’re ableist. They’re homophobic, they’re rabidly anti-trans — and they have grotesque ideas of “purity,” whether it’s racial purity or gender purity, and a fear of things like “contagion” and “weakness.” This is why trans folks have been sounding the alarm about how the current rhetoric echoes the rhetoric about Jewish, disabled, and LGBTQ+ people in Europe a hundred years ago.
They’re also superstitious — they may or may not be religious extremists, though they usually are in the US — and they’re anti-intellectual, anti-science, and conspiracy-minded.
Reading Trotsky on the culture of fascism in 1933, we get a sense of these similarities between past and present fascists — similar conspiracy theories and superstitions (think QAnon), a similar fixation on misunderstood or distorted history (especially medieval chivalry and ancient Rome). “What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!,” Trotsky writes. “Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism.”
Capitalist repression is not fascism
A separate thing to distinguish, and something that is often mislabeled fascism, is what’s bad and has always been bad under capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Police repression has always existed under capitalism: as Lenin pointed out in State and Revolution, it’s a feature of the system, not a bug. Racism has always existed under capitalism — again, a feature required by the system, especially since slavery was definitive for the first few centuries of capitalism. Imperialist war has always existed under capitalism.
When you compare Trump to real organized fascists such as the AfD, you see he’s just an opportunistic grifter who’s built a reactionary following because it’s convenient for him.
When you get fuzzy with the definition and start applying it to any instance of violence and repression, then the word loses meaning. Is structural racism fascist? Then all of US history is fascist. What’s the point of identifying a change in conditions or the threat of the far right if that’s the case?
Let’s look at a case study: the recently published The Black Antifascist Tradition, by Jeannelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen, which we reviewed earlier this year. The definition of fascism being stretched to such a degree in a serious scholarly work is a prime reason we need to push back against these narratives.
Hope and Mullen argue that all forms of Black anti-racist struggle in US history have been a form of anti-fascism. In particular they argue that Jim Crow segregation in the South was a fascist system, but they also argue that white supremacy in general has fascist characteristics. As they write, “Anti-Black Fascism is enshrined within American law… unlike European Fascism, there is no need for a singular Fascist regime or dictator to ensure its existence.”
As Steve Leigh wrote in our review:
This analysis turns “fascism” into an amorphous influence on everything, rather than a specific structure and set of policies decided on by the ruling class in extreme circumstances. This is wrong for two reasons. It is not dialectical — it draws conclusions by comparing surface features of racism in the US with surface features of fascism, rather than looking at their essence. And it is ahistorical and anachronistic.
As Steve points out, segregation in the US was most certainly a direct influence on the Nazis — this historical reality is one thing that fuels these arguments. That doesn’t make it fascism, however. The two systems had very different goals, especially as regards the working class. As Steve says:
The goal of Jim Crow was to divide the poor people of the South, workers and sharecroppers, on race lines. It was to break up the unity between Black and white people that had developed during Reconstruction and the Populist period… The goal was not the extermination of the Black race. The goal was not the destruction of working-class unions and other institutions or the atomization of the working class, as it was under fascism.
The problem with this approach is that you therefore let bourgeois democracy off the hook. As Marxists, we argue that bourgeois democracy is inherently repressive; that’s why we want to overthrow it and bring about socialism.
Two common errors in defining fascism
We can break down the theoretical errors around the definition of fascism into two broad tendencies, with different bad outcomes.
There’s the liberal tendency to label Republicans as fascists, mainly for the purpose of electioneering — the familiar tactic of lesser-evilism. Hal Draper called this out in his classic 1967 essay, “Who’s going to be the lesser-evil in 1968?” Draper describes a colleague who was panicking over Ronald Reagan’s election as governor of California, saying, “This is how Hitler got started!” The Republicans have to be portrayed impressionistically as dangerous monsters in order to justify voting for the Democrats, who then end up doing all the same things (such as defoliating Vietnam, as Lyndon Johnson did in the example cited by Draper).
And while Trump is more of a loose cannon than Reagan, it’s still the same phenomenon at work. When Democrats call Trump a fascist — for example in all the fearmongering over Project 2025 — they aren’t being sober in their assessment of the threat, and they aren’t calling for anti-fascist organizing at the grassroots level. They’re just calling for votes.
When you vote for the Democrats, you vote for union busting and genocide, and then you become disillusioned when they inevitably betray you. You’ve been told the way to fight fascism is by voting, but you see everything getting worse, and you become confused or want to give up.
One way you can tell this is that they’re not worried about Project 2024 — the threats to our democracy that are happening right now. They’re not worried about the severe repression of student protest for Palestine on university campuses, where free speech and the right to assemble are being seriously challenged, in many cases under Democratic mayors and governors. They aren’t worried about the current repression of political activists, such as the Biden administration’s outrageous classification of the Samidoun charity as a terrorist organization.
Even worse than Democrats doing this is when socialists who know better do it — who give up their principles of opposing capitalist parties in order to justify voting for Democrats to beat Trump.
To name one example, our nemesis Dan La Botz argues for this very thing in a recent article in Against the Current: “Most of us on the left in the broad sense fear that should he win, we would enter a period of authoritarianism, the anteroom to fascism. That is why many of us believe we must vote for Kamala Harris.”
This is a very unserious argument in a socialist, and it has the effect of diluting understanding of the real dangers on the ground. The outcome is that you vote for the Democrats, you vote for union busting and genocide, and then you become disillusioned when they inevitably betray you. You’ve been told the way to fight fascism is by voting, but you see everything getting worse, and you become confused or want to give up.
The second bad tendency is ultraleftism, which leads to the conclusion that fascism is already happening now — the US is fascist or always has been. That is not only objectively wrong, as discussed, but it has a really detrimental impact on strategy. It can lead to excessive security culture. It can lead to going underground prematurely, which is disastrous because mass organizing is the only way to effectively resist the state and the rise of the far right. In more extreme cases it can lead to individual terrorism, which is a foolish and useless strategy for combating the capitalist state.
But more often, in ordinary people who encounter these kinds of attitudes when they’re radicalizing, ultraleftism just leads to despair, nihilism, and, again, giving up. If you think everything is already stacked against you in a fascist state, you’re not going to cultivate much hope of organizing for change.
The Stalinist roots of bad takes on fascism
As with many bad ideas on the left, what at first seems to be the product of vague thinking or a lack of analysis can in fact be traced to… you guessed it, Stalinism!
This is what George Lavan Weissman wrote in 1969 about the Stalinist history of the misuse of the term:
That so many of those calling themselves Marxists cannot define fascism any more adequately than the liberals is not wholly their fault. Whether they are aware of it or not, much of their intellectual heritage comes from the social-democratic and Stalinist movements, which dominated the left in the 1930s when fascism was scoring victory after victory…
To the Stalinists, every capitalist party was automatically “fascist.” Even more catastrophic than this disorienting of the workers was Stalin’s famous dictum that, rather than being opposites, fascism and social democracy were “twins.” The socialists were thereupon dubbed “social fascists” and regarded as the main enemy. Of course, there could be no united front with social-fascist organizations, and those who, like Trotsky, urged such united fronts, were also labeled social fascists and treated accordingly.
How divorced from reality the Stalinist line was may be illustrated by recalling its translation into American terms. In the 1932 elections, American Stalinists denounced Franklin Roosevelt as the fascist candidate and Norman Thomas as the social-fascist candidate. What was ludicrous as applied to US politics was tragic in Germany and Austria.
Returning to Trotsky: in 1931 he wrote about the Communist Party of Italy and its fatal errors with regards to the fascist threat.
In its eyes, fascism appeared to be only “capitalist reaction.” The particular traits of fascism which spring from the mobilization of the petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat, the Communist Party was unable to discern.
This article is about overdiagnosing fascism, but as Trotsky shows, underdiagnosing it is very much a problem too. Note how incisive he is about why we have to get this right when he moves on to the German Communist Party’s similar errors, which were unfolding in real time as he wrote in 1933:
The leadership of the German Communist Party today reproduces almost literally the position from which the Italian Communists took their point of departure; fascism is nothing else but capitalist reaction; from the point of view of the proletariat, the difference between diverse types of capitalist reaction are meaningless…
To insist that fascism is already here, or to deny the very possibility of its coming to power, amounts politically to one and the same thing. By ignoring the specific nature of fascism, the will to fight against it inevitably becomes paralyzed.
As Trotsky says in the same essay, “The first characteristic of a really revolutionary party is — to be able to look reality in the face.”
One conclusion we can draw from Trotsky is that the best way to fight fascism is to build a revolutionary movement. As he says:
The gigantic growth of National Socialism is an expression of two factors: a deep social crisis, throwing the petty-bourgeois masses off balance, and the lack of a revolutionary party that would be regarded by the masses of the people as an acknowledged revolutionary leader.
If the communist party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair.
Conclusion
The states aren’t as high for us as they were then. But the fascist movement is growing, and so the stakes might become high at some point in the future. This can’t be stated often enough: the only effective way to combat fascism is with a mass movement of workers, the oppressed, socialists, and other anti-fascists in a united front.
And in order to effectively organize we need to be clear in our theory and communications. We need to convince people who are just now radicalizing, and to convince the ordinary people who might join us in an anti-fascist coalition, that we know what we’re talking about. And perhaps most importantly, we also need to convince them that there’s hope of victory.
When you describe a Democrat like Kamala Harris as a fascist, it’s impactful, it appeals to the emotions, it has enough of a kernel of truth in it to seem right — but it doesn’t stand up to analysis, and therefore it’s misleading. It’s just an emotive buzzword. It’s crying wolf.
This can’t be stated often enough: the only effective way to combat fascism is with a mass movement of workers, the oppressed, socialists, and other anti-fascists in a united front.
These principles are illustrated by recent events in the UK. In the days after the terrifying pogroms mentioned above, there were huge and inspiring mobilizations by leftist and workers’ organizations against the far right, who were completely outnumbered. The lesson is that the majority of ordinary people will oppose violence against Muslims or immigrants when it comes down to it, and they’ll stand up for them. The mistake these far-right thugs often make is in thinking they represent the majority — because a lot of people resent the general conditions of the economy, or because a lot of people are casually racist. They think they represent the will of the people when they burn a mosque, when in fact they don’t.
Such counterprotests are so important because they help isolate and demoralize the fascists. We saw similar mobilizations after Charlottesville in the US in 2017. That’s how you defeat them. The more they’re outnumbered in the streets, the less chance they have of building momentum. Thus, organizing against them before they have a chance to build is a crucial task of the left.
But also, and I hope this is a bit obvious, but you couldn’t do this under fascism — you couldn’t assemble a mass of people to stand up to fascist thugs in a fascist state. In a fascist state, all organizing has to be done underground. And this is why it’s key to organize out in the open while we still have the chance.
So this example of effective anti-fascist organizing is also proof that we don’t live under fascism today in the West, at least for the time being.
