Fascism

What It Is and How to Fight It

Presented here is the Marxist explanation of fascism, one of the most horrible forms of capitalist rule. In the 1920s and 1930s, exiled Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky analysed German fascism as it developed. Through these prescient writings he tried to alert the workers’ movement to the mortal danger threatening and to arm it for the struggle.

For Trotsky, fascism was a response of the capitalist ruling class to a severe crisis of its system. Through fascism, capitalism attempts to create a mass movement of the desperate middle class to use as a weapon to smash all forms of working-class organisation.

Thus fascism did not die with Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker, but is inherent in the capitalist system. If that system is once more threatened by economic crisis and working-class revolt, the bosses may again turn to the fascist option.

The threat of fascism with all its horrors can only be ended by the working class organising to get rid of capitalism and establish a socialist society.