The following article is the second installment of Fascism and Revolution, excerpted from a PLP magazine article titled Rise of Fascism 1919–1934, available on our website under the “New Magazines” tab. In Part I, we examined the roots of fascism beginning in 1919, when the betrayal of social democrats and the vacillations of communist leaders led to a crushing defeat by Hungarian right-wing nationalist forces allied with the national army—setting the stage for fascism’s rise. Part I concludes with the Soviet leadership’s response to the growth of fascism and Hitler’s ascent in Nazi Germany.
By 1935, Soviet leaders were deeply alarmed by the spread of fascism in Italy and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. That year, the 7th Congress of the Comintern convened to determine a response to the fascist threat. In his main report, Georgi Dimitrov largely ignored the analysis of fascism’s roots in liberal democracy offered by R. Palme Dutt, instead charting a course for communist parties worldwide to collaborate in united fronts with liberal democrats to prevent further fascist expansion.
Part II explores the rise of fascism in the 1930s, analyzing developments in Spain, China, and North America, and tracing the progression of fascism within capitalism to the present day.
Spain, the first test
In the early 1930s, Spain resembled Italy in 1919. Though its ruling class was too weak to rule effectively, the working class lacked the bold and decisive leadership needed to seize such favorable conditions and fight for workers’ power. The Spanish Communist Party (CP) remained small and relatively isolated. It helped construct a Popular Front with the Socialist Party and liberal Republicans. (In Spain, “Republicans” were defenders of the republic and opponents of the monarchy and fascism.)
The 1936 elections marked a humiliating defeat for the right-wing forces—especially the Falange, which was still marginal at the time—and a major victory for the Popular Front, seemingly validating the communist “united front” strategy advanced by Dimitrov eight months earlier. However, the new Popular Front government refused to arm the workers and did little to alter the fundamental structures of state power.
The Falange, a fascist party, was financed by ruling-class figures and institutions. Its program was a typical mix of radical-sounding, reformist demands, anti-communism, and nationalism. The leading general of the Spanish Army, Francisco Franco, launched a fascist coup, triggering a protracted civil war.
Without a unified, aggressive central leadership, the Republicans, despite their heroism and the revolutionary energy of the working class, went from defeat to defeat. Help came from the Comintern in the form of International Brigades of anti-fascist volunteers from communist parties in 53 countries, along with military equipment and advisors from the Soviet Union.
Franco’s forces would have collapsed early in the war without aid from Germany and Italy. The fascist air force was German and Italian. Meanwhile, the British government consistently sabotaged the Republican effort. In the U.S., the Roosevelt administration never wavered in its refusal to sell arms to the Republicans.
Among its most serious errors, the Communist Party in Spain failed to engage in the fight against racism. No communist aid ever reached workers in Morocco or other colonial subjects of the Spanish ruling class. The Party was weakest in the areas with national minorities—in the Basque Country, Galicia, and Catalan. But the Party’s biggest weakness was the Popular Front and the weak political line of the Comintern that communists fought as Republicans rather than as revolutionaries. Instead of channeling all efforts toward communist revolution, the Party focused on securing its alliance with the socialists and the liberal Republicans.
The Spanish Civil War was a big defeat for the united front policy, but not for communism. Spain will never forget the help from the world communist movement and the International Brigades. These heroic volunteers helped to block the fascist advance in Spain for nearly three crucial years. The Spanish resistance, supported by the International Brigades and the Soviet Union, delayed fascist advances in Western Europe and stood as the first major battlefield of the global fight against fascism.. The resistance in Spain trained the leaders of the workers’ armies that would smash the fascist hordes in the world war to come.
China and the price paid for collaboration
The Communist Party of China (CPC) joined a united front—and even a united government—with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), which had come to power as part of a nationalist government. They were supposed to unite to fight the fascist invasion from Japan.
The CPC rebuilt its underground organization despite brutal repression: three successive Party leaders in Shanghai were executed by the KMT, yet a secure network was eventually reestablished in the cities and countryside. By the early 1930s, the Red Army controlled significant rural areas, surviving repeated campaigns by the KMT. These victories were only possible because the CPC learned from its previous errors in cooperating with the KMT.
However, the KMT’s underlying commitment to capitalist and nationalist interests remained intact. After temporary cooperation, the KMT turned decisively against the communists, slaughtering thousands in purges and campaigns like the 1927–1937 anti-communist drives. This betrayal left the door open for capitalist development and nationalist consolidation, demonstrating the limits of united fronts with bourgeois forces.
In China, as elsewhere, only a resolutely independent communist movement could challenge fascism and protect the revolutionary gains of the working class.
North America
The fascist movements in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada were less significant than those in Europe, Asia, and South America. Nonetheless, the 1930s ushered in significant rightward changes, including increased repression by police organs. Roosevelt’s New Deal concentrated more power in a growing national bureaucracy, strengthening the state’s capacity to stabilize capitalism. While it averted economic collapse, this concentration of authority also created conditions under which fascist-style authoritarianism could theoretically arise. Mexico and Canada saw similar developments.
Why didn’t full-blown fascism develop in North America in that period? First, capitalism was younger, still expanding, and more competitive than in Europe. Second, U.S. imperialism, the chief beneficiary of World War I, was still living off its imperialist loot. A final crucial reason was that the communist and left-led labor movement went on the offensive in all three countries.
The rise of fascism today
Since the end of World War II, the U.S. imperialists have dominated the world economically and militarily. But as finance capital has become the main form of U.S. capitalism, the closing of factories and the movement of production to other countries has taken a toll on the U.S. ruling class, even as their profits have skyrocketed. A string of lost wars and military debacles, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, have weakened the U.S. politically while draining its treasury. While the U.S. bosses spent billions in a failed attempt to keep control of the Middle East, their Chinese rivals constructed an industrial powerhouse and are now building a military to match.
With capitalism worldwide in a spiraling political, economic, and humanitarian catastrophe, the international working class has fallen under escalating attacks. The current political crisis is driven by inter-imperialist rivalry—by the relative decline of U.S. imperialism and the rise of Chinese state-capitalist power. The world’s deepening crisis reflects the collapse of globalism and free trade, now accentuated by overlapping catastrophes: the COVID-19 pandemic’s aftermath, wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, and severe humanitarian disasters from Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On every continent, capitalists face challenges from both internal fractures and external rivals. The old liberal world order, defined by U.S. economic and military dominance, is under pressure. China is expanding its global influence, investing vast sums to tie smaller ruling classes to its orbit, while its naval and maritime forces, now the largest in number, increasingly challenge U.S. control of the Pacific.
Meanwhile, competition over critical technologies and resources is intensifying. Control of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and rare earth elements—vital for semiconductors, data centers, and advanced electronics—has become a central axis of strategic rivalry. China dominates rare earth mining and processing, giving it leverage over the global AI supply chain, while the U.S. and allied countries scramble to secure alternative sources and production capabilities. This technological and resource struggle amplifies the geopolitical and economic tensions already destabilizing the world.
Within the U.S., an unsustainable federal debt burden, systemic economic fragility, and deepening social polarization threaten to weaken the core of U.S. power. As inter-imperialist conflicts and technological rivalries escalate, the international working class from the most super-exploited nations continue to bear the heaviest costs worldwide.
Domestic bosses exploit liberal bosses’ weaknesses
Within the U.S., deindustrialization has broken the ties between finance capital and white workers leading to a significant shift of working-class loyalties away from the main wing bosses and the Democratic Party. This alienation has been exploited by the finance capitalists’ domestic rivals, a group of bosses whose fortunes are driven by U.S. oil production and domestic industry, and who are fronted by “America First” isolationists in the Republican Party. In their weakened and internally divided state, the finance capitalists are struggling to act decisively in combatting their challengers. Their control over critical parts of the state apparatus—including the White House, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court—has either been lost or is in jeopardy. This tenuous situation cannot hold.
In periods of capitalism in crisis, war becomes the primary form of capitalist politics. In Europe, inter-imperialist rivalry has degraded into a massively destructive conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and counting. In the Pacific, open warfare between the U.S. and Chinese bosses seems imminent. If and when it erupts, it threatens to draw in a host of other countries.
Dutt’s lessons and U.S. fascism
R. Palme Dutt wrote that the roots of fascism lie in liberalism and that fascism is the inevitable form of government under modern capitalism. Today, we see all of its hallmarks in the United States: the erosion of the “rule of law,” attacks on science and rational thinking, punishment for protest, a crumbling democracy, intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry and the looming threat of world war, declining living standards for workers, the dismantling of healthcare, masked ICE terror against scapegoated immigrants, and racism more virulent than ever.
What must our response be?
Learning from the past, we in PLP know the answer is not to rely on alliances with liberals or democratic socialists. We must work within organizations to win members to our line: that the system cannot be reformed. We must avoid the mistakes of our predecessors by rejecting the strategy of a united front with liberals, social democrats, or nationalists to defeat fascism. To truly destroy fascism, we must uproot it from its source—capitalism itself.
Our ideas must be spread far and wide—through intimate conversations with friends and through CHALLENGE. We must win workers and students to understand that capitalism cannot be reformed. It must be smashed and replaced with communism, a society run by workers for the benefit of all.
