Around the world, capitalist governments are elevating fascist and extreme-right parties while promoting nationalism, anti-immigrant chauvinism and militarism.
In the United States, former president Donald Trump, with the support of significant sections of the Republican Party, is seeking to build a fascistic movement. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer, openly hails the blood-soaked military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. And in Germany, of all places, the political establishment has elevated the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the official opposition, while leading German academics with state support attempt to relativise and whitewash the crimes of the Nazis.
As Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, explained in the course of his struggle against the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany, fascism is a movement of the ruined petty-bourgeoisie, mobilized by the corporate elite against the working class to stave off revolution from below. The resurgence of fascist forces today is the outcome of a conspiracy of the ruling classes, aware that their agenda of austerity, social inequality, and war has no mass base of support.
The International Committee of the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Party are fighting back against the rise of fascism and alerting the working class of the danger of a descent to all the horrors of the 1930s. Our struggle is based upon the independent political mobilization of the working class, united internationally on the basis of its common class interests, against capitalism and for socialism.
This essay is based on the transcript of the remarks made by David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), in opening an online discussion held January 17 on the significance of the fascist assault on the Capitol in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021.
The White House is the center of a fascistic conspiracy to overturn the Constitution and establish a presidential dictatorship.
The World Socialist Web Site first published this statement on October 14, 2019. It warned that “Trump is utilizing the power of the presidency to create an unconstitutional and illegal dictatorship.” In light of the recent nationwide military/police crackdown, the WSWS is republishing this crucial document.
The lawsuit against historian Fernando Mikelarena for his research into fascist repression during the Spanish Civil War marks a new assault on historical truth.
The hacked contents of the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo’s servers have revealed that police officers and public officials donated money to fascist and right-wing campaigns, such as the fundraiser for the teenage Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse.
In her new book The Self-Righteous Ones, Left Party politician Sahra Wagenknecht explicitly adopts the anti-immigrant and nationalist line of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and emerges as a vociferous proponent of a policy of mass infection.
At its party conference, leading representatives of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) fomented racism and demanded the ending of all protective measures against the coronavirus pandemic, as well as a massive rearmament programme.
Someone from the SEP or World Socialist Web Site will contact you promptly.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party), the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, is leading the fight against the efforts of the German ruling class to rehabilitate fascism.
While the AfD has been elevated to the official opposition of the German parliament and systematically provided with media time to promote its fascistic propaganda, an effort is underway among German academics to create a new historical narrative based on ferocious anti-Marxism, the trivialization of Nazi crimes, and the rehabilitation of Hitler.
This has been led by the university administration at Humboldt University, in Berlin, which has provided unstinging support for its right-wing extremist professor of history, Jörg Baberowski, who is notorious for his lying claims that “Hitler was not vicious” and that the Führer did not want to know anything about Auschwitz and the mass extermination of the Jews.
Why Are They Back? analyzes the interaction of high-level political conspirators, media propagandists and right-wing academics at Berlin’s Humboldt University in the present-day resurgence of Nazism and German militarism.
Between 1931 and 1933, Trotsky sought to arouse the most politically conscious sections of the German working class and the socialist intelligentsia to the immense danger posed by fascism and the urgent necessity for a unified struggle of the proletariat to prevent a Nazi victory. Trotsky’s writings on German fascism rank among the greatest works of political literature in the twentieth century. No one else wrote with such prescience, precision and passion on the German events and their world historic implications.
The victory of Hitler’s Nazi Party in January 1933 was the result of the betrayals of Social Democracy and Stalinism. The Social Democrats placed their confidence in the bourgeois Weimar Republic and tied the working class to the capitalist state. The Stalinist policy of “social fascism”—which claimed that the SPD and Hitler’s party were “twins”—opposed all forms of collaboration between the Communist Party and the Social Democracy, even for defensive purposes.
The lessons of Trotsky's struggle are of acute political relevance today amidst a universal turn toward fascism and authoritarianism by capitalist governments around the world.
In these essays Trotsky examines the political and social origins of fascism and elaborates the strategical and tactical methods for the defense of the working class against this deadly menace.
A little more than a half-century has passed since the collapse of Hitler's Third Reich, and mankind is still struggling to come to grips with its legacy of horror and bestiality.
The Germany Communist Party had a perspective and a political line which completely misjudged the political situation, disoriented and paralyzed the working class, and finally allowed Hitler to take power without meeting any organized working class resistance.
Under conditions of an international resurgence of fascist forces, the series, which had an enormous impact in West Germany in 1979, has lost none of its relevance.
The following is an addendum to the lecture “Imperialism and the political economy of the Holocaust,” delivered by Nick Beams at San Diego State University on April 29.
This lecture was delivered at San Diego State University on April 29. It was the eighth in a series entitled "Killing for a higher cause: Political violence in a world in crisis" sponsored by the Institute on World Affairs within the Political Science Department of the San Diego State University.
At least 1.47 million Jews, more than a quarter of all victims of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, were murdered within 92 days from mid-August to early November 1942.
Sabisky’s resignation is meaningless and all the questions now being raised in the media about “vetting processes” are irrelevant.
Innumerable posts on social media have drawn the connection between the reactionary ideology of eugenics and the British government’s criminally delayed and negligent response to the pandemic.
Eugenicist Carl has raised over $100,000 to begin a legal appeal against the St. Edmund’s College decision to rescind his appointment, on the grounds of wrongful dismissal.
Carl’s dismissal is a victory over a global campaign to revive far-right ideology on university campuses.
