Fascism! Define It to Defeat It

The Red Army plants the communist flag over Berlin’s Reichstag building in May 1945. The Soviet Union under Stalin defeated the fascists in World War II. Celebrate the power of the working class at PLP’s 50 anniversary this May Day.

Most working people have heard of Hitler and Nazi Germany, and the concentration camps like Auschwitz, which occurred under fascist rule in Germany. Workers in the United States will have definitely heard of the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror, and witnessed the police terror unleashed on Black workers in Ferguson, Missouri and in cities across the U.S. Klan and police terror, like the Nazis, reveal capitalism’s true face, with the mask of capitalist democracy removed.  “Fascism,” a word that is used often and rarely defined, is a vital concept that enables us to understand capitalist rule in its most racist, violent form.
Fascism is the open, naked rule of capitalism, a type that the capitalist ruling class turns to in times of crisis when their sham democracy no longer can serve their needs. Today fascism is increasing around the world, and the Progressive Labor Party is organizing the international working class to defeat it with communist revolution!
Imperialist Rivals Use War to Become Top Dog
Imperialist war, racism, sexism and global devastation are business-as-usual for the capitalist class. Contrary to what hypocritical politicians say, competing capitalist factions and competing imperialist powers must use military and police violence in vieing to control the world’s natural resources and position themselves to become the world’s top dog imperialist power.  
Fascism results from a type of crisis that is specific to the capitalist rulers. Each country’s capitalist class contains many factions, representing capitalists who derive their profits from different groups of banks and industries. The rivalries between different imperialist country sharpens (as for example, the current U.S. rulers’ desperate struggle to maintain control over Middle Eastern oil resources). At the same time, the internal rivalry between capitalist factions in each imperialist power also sharpen. The usual form of capitalist “democracy” breaks down. (Take for example the current government paralysis reflecting the fight between the older finance capital and Big Oil, which supported Obama and the newer upstart capitalists led by the Koch brothers who created and support Tea Party forces.)
Many severe problems plagued the ruling class of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. Following its defeat in World War I, the German economy was in shambles. Millions of workers, including war veterans, were unemployed or desperately struggling. As the volatile post-war German economy sank, work became increasingly scarce, runaway inflation made money worthless and massive strike waves rocked the country.
Bolshevik Revolution Inspired Millions
Even worse for the German ruling class was the creation of a communist-led working-class state in 1917, the Soviet Union, which inspired millions of workers in Germany. Many began looking to the Communist Party of Germany for political leadership, even to the point of staging a revolt and declaring a short-lived Soviet Republic in Bavaria in 1918.
The largest political party in Germany at the time was the liberal Social-Democratic Party (SPD), which declared itself on the side of the working class in speeches and in election campaigns to earn the loyalty and votes of the working class. Behind the scenes, the pro-capitalist SPD leadership regularly met with representatives of the German banks and industries like Deutsche Bank, steel giants Thyssen and Krupp, Volkswagen, the pharmaceutical monopoly I.G. Farben (Bayer), and other companies still around today. This dominant section of the German capitalist class became increasingly concerned throughout the 1920s that the SPD would be unable to control the working class and prepare it for another imperialist war.
Throughout this time, Adolf Hitler was busy organizing right-wing, nationalist World War I veterans, small shopkeepers and business owners to build a movement called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” or Nazis.  The Nazi movement had nothing to do with socialism, workers’ power, or the Soviet Union. Very few actual German workers belonged to the Nazi Party before the 1930s. The Nazis blamed immigrants, Jews, and the Communist Party for betraying Germany.
Hitler’s Bosses: Ditch Social Democrat, Destroy Communists
In private speeches made to the German capitalists, Hitler persuaded the biggest bosses that their strategy of using the Social Democrats to control the working class was failing. Militant strikes and the growing Communist Party’s relentless attacks on the Social Democratic Party as tools of the German ruling class increased capitalist rulers’ fear that workers in Germany would follow the example of workers in the Soviet Union. Hitler declared that Germany’s solution lay in following fascist Italy’s lead: ditching the liberal Social Democrats, violently destroying the Communist Party and all trade unions and workers’ organizations, to terrorize and discipline the working class into obedience.
Not every faction of the German ruling class went along with Hitler’s proposals, but when the liberal Social Democrat-supported Chancellor legally appointed Hitler the new Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Nazis, with the backing of Germany’s largest banks and industries, arrested the heads of those businesses that refused to cooperate. The German ruling class was brought into line first.
Then, the Nazis turned their attention to the working class by first destroying its most powerful organization, the Communist Party. The communists were the first to go into the concentration camps and the first inside the gas chambers. Once the Communist Party and its supporting organizations were smashed, the Nazis were free to round up trade unionists, Jews, homosexuals,   the handicapped, Christians, Romanis, and immigrant groups — even workers associated with the Social Democratic Party, all to be used as slave labor or, later, sent to the death camps like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau.
The Nazis eventually launched a war of annihilation against the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. Bosses in the United States and Europe armed the Nazis to the teeth and pinned their hopes on them to defeat the Soviets. However, it was millions of communist women and men organized by the Soviet Union who ultimately beat the Nazis all the way back to Berlin. The Soviet Union also led the communist resistance movement’s fight against fascism all over the world, and during that time was a beacon of hope for workers on every continent.  
U.S. Bosses Supplied Gas for Nazis’ Ovens
Communists defended the working class against fascist violence and racist terror at the same time as capitalist leaders like Henry Ford (U.S. auto boss) made under-the-table deals with Hitler to share fascist-made profits. U.S. chemical companies sold Germany the poison gas for use in genocidal gas chambers. While the failures of the old communist movement, including its fight for socialism which retained wages and inequality, eventually allowed capitalism to be restored in every socialist country, those failures do not detract from the courageous sacrifices of millions of communists and their friends in the fight to defeat fascism’s terror.
Fascism is not something unique to Germany, or any other country. It grows out of capitalism. Many capitalist countries like the U.S., members of the European Union, South Africa have a democratic facade, where some workers are allowed certain amounts of freedom. But, in truth, all workers live under a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Fascism is not different from capitalism. It is a tactic that the capitalist class uses to stay in power and maintain its class dictatorship over the working class.
Communism is the opposite of fascism. Communism means the dictatorship of the working class. After the working class has overthrown the capitalist class and abolished wages and money, the workers will run society for the good of the workers, and protect it with force to prevent the capitalists from ever regaining power. This is what Progressive Labor Party fights for.