Around the world, capitalist governments are elevating fascist and extreme-right parties while promoting nationalism, anti-immigrant chauvinism and militarism.

In the United States, the President Donald Trump is seeking to build support for a fascist 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 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.

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.