What is Fascism?

Fascism is a version of far-right politics, and knowing your enemy is essential to defence. But defining it is not straightforward. Firstly, these extremists try to dissociate themselves from their tainted past. Ironically, in doing so they follow Hitler by hiding behind ‘the grossly impudent lie’ which ‘always leaves traces behind it even after it has been nailed down’. Consider Austria’s FPÖ. Its founder, Anton Reinthaller, SS Brigadeführer, and jailed Nazi Reichstag member, called it the Freedom Party. Britain’s Tommy Robinson has fronted numerous misnamed organisations like ‘the Football Lads Alliance’ or ‘Democratic Football Lads Alliance’. What did the arson attacks on refugees in August 2024 in Rotherham have in common with soccer?

An additional complication is that well-intentioned opponents may label any authoritarian or bullying behaviour as fascist. When campaigning against Reform UK in a recent by-election someone came up and said, ‘Farage is a fascist’ but immediately added, ‘And the Tories are fascists too!’ Whatever one thinks of Tories we were not living in a fascist Britain from 2010 to 2024 when the Conservatives were in power. The current Labour government of Keir Starmer uses heavy police tactics against Palestine and climate protesters, but appalling as that is, he is not a fascist either. Applying the term too widely blunts it as a tool for combating the genuine article.

Conventional analyses of the contemporary far right are hardly more useful. One takes claims of respectability at face value and concludes that what we see today has no meaningful connection to the pre-war dictatorships. Approaching the question in this narrow way ignores the dynamic and dangerous nature of current political trends and the deepening parallels with the past.

Another view centres on the idea we are witnessing a defensive cultural backlash against immigration or ‘woke’ policies. The flaw here is that there is no correlation in Britain or anywhere else, between support for the far right and levels of immigration or ethnic minority presence. Indeed, there is often an inverse relationship. Take the 2024 general election in Britain. London has around three times the national average of ethnic community people living there, yet Reform UK got half the vote share it received in England overall. Scapegoats are not to blame for their own oppression.

Social Roots

The answer lies elsewhere. Fascism is best understood as the product of class relations generated during periods of social crisis. In 1932, the year before Hitler became German chancellor, the Russian socialist Leon Trotsky noted the central role played by the petty bourgeoisie: ‘When the social crisis takes on an intolerable acuteness, a particular party appears on the scene with the direct aim of agitating the petty bourgeoisie to a white heat and of directing its hatred and its despair against the working class’.

What was true in the 1930s remains true of the far right’s social composition today. A recent report by a large scale and widely respected European Social Survey says:

This section is not to be confused with other so-called ‘middle class’ people who, in fact, are white-collar wage earners. The petty bourgeois person aspires to become a big bourgeois, but sits between them and the working class.

Autocratic rule and the persecution of ethnic minorities is not new, but fascism is a distinctly recent development. It first arose in the early twentieth century in places where there was a parliamentary-style democracy and capitalist economy. Here the petty bourgeoisie split away from mainstream politics and mobilised as a semi-independent and deadly force.

But how could this group, usually the bastion of conventional social respectability, turn towards extreme reaction? To understand that we need to look at the ideas which social classes hold in their heads. We are socialised into a capitalist society that consistently displays several key features. Firstly, it is a system of competition between firms and states. Secondly, it depends on exploitation by a narrow group. Hierarchical authority is exerted top-down from bosses to workers. Living in such a society makes the rivalry and inequality of nations or people (or ‘races’ as they used to be called) seem natural and common sense. This pervasive ideology is the breeding ground for discrimination and oppression. Everyone is affected and while no class is ever homogenous, class location generally influences how this ideology is interpreted in practice.

Big business takes a pragmatic approach. While happily exploiting labour wherever it can, at home its representatives stress ‘national interest’ as a convenient cover for its selfish goals. This is supplemented by weaponising competition and hierarchy to divide and rule the population. Scapegoats are routinely identified to divert discontent.

Like the big bourgeois, the petty bourgeois strives to succeed within the capitalist framework, but it lacks the means. Feeling it has a stake in the system ruling idea is generally accepted without qualification. Capitalism is taken to be a system of unbreachable ‘economic laws’, which means every group must struggle over a limited pot of resources, and so on. Nationalism has a particular attraction for a group which operates chiefly within the local economy. Because it is also a disparate grouping in which individuals often compete one against the other, they find in ‘the nation’ a sense of collective identity seeing themselves as its very embodiment.

Working-class attitudes are tempered by the reality of the daily grind which contradicts such thinking. Pressure from the boss at work, poverty, and gross inequality, cut across the idea of an undifferentiated national community where ‘we are all in it together’. For this reason, the working class has a history of fending off capitalism’s worst excesses by forging a culture of solidarity based on concepts of equality, free speech, and the right to vote and form unions. Consciousness of the capitalist/worker antagonism pushes back against discrimination and prejudice. Nonetheless, there are some workers who come to share the petty bourgeois mentality; they suffer like others but think they are more entitled than others who are seen as rivals for limited resources.

Classical Fascism

In the triangular class interplay of capitalists, the petty bourgeoisie, and workers parliamentary democracy – and accompanying liberal freedoms – reflects a certain configuration of relations. These reforms were established by the struggle of ordinary people from below. Though an advance on past practices, they were always a compromise between the wealthy elite and the mass of the population. By conceding things such as the franchise, profit-making could continue undisturbed. Democratic ‘rule’ always stopped short of granting significant economic rights to workers, or undermining the state’s function of safeguarding capitalist interests home or abroad. Nonetheless, the concession was real.

In the early twentieth century this system of elections and ‘middle ground’ politics had taken root as the ‘normality’ in parts of Western Europe and beyond. Here the petty bourgeoisie, hoping to become big bourgeoisie someday, supported the latter’s political representatives and backed centre or right-wing parties like the Conservatives and Liberals. However, the capitalist crisis up-ended everything. This was when fascism first appeared.

In 1914, economic competition turned into military conflict between rival imperial blocs. The trauma of the First World War was ended by leftwing revolutions beginning in Russia in 1917 and spreading to Germany and Austro-Hungary a year later. This alarmed big business and its representatives on political grounds. Then the capitalist world economy collapsed in spectacular fashion in 1929. The Wall Street Crash reduced world trade by two thirds. The elite was now determined that the rest of society must bear the economic brunt. Living standards plummeted everywhere. In many countries the ruling classes concluded that earlier compromises such as parliaments were no longer tolerable. In some places they took matters directly into their own hands. Of the twenty-four European countries which enjoyed some form of democracy in the interwar period only eleven remained by the later 1930s. The rest were under authoritarian regimes.

It is significant that fascist dictatorships were only set up in Italy and Germany. Studying these countries tells us what conditions led to this happening and helps predict where the risks lie today. Unlike the other European countries which fell to non-fascist authoritarianism, Germany and Italy were industrialised and had a significant working-class presence. Class compromise was long-standing and the concessions made not easily withdrawn. In the midst of crisis, the Italian and German ruling classes would eventually find an unexpected saviour in petty bourgeois fascism, but that lay ahead along a twisted path.

Early on it was not the fascists but radical workers who made the running. In 1918, mass uprisings ended the First World War and forced the German Kaiser to abdicate. Italy experienced the biennio rosso (two red years) which culminated in the Occupation of the Factories. However, these moves towards the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism stopped half-way. Capitalism was allowed to survive and the Italian and German ruling classes resolved to avoid a repetition. Yet their own numbers were miniscule, and they lacked reliable means of defence. Germany’s military forces had mutinied and what remained were reduced in number by the Versailles peace treaty. Italy’s army was demoralised, and its officers were unsure whether the rank and file would shoot their own people to protect elite property.

Enter the fascists. Mussolini founded Italy’s fasci di combattimiento (fighting bands) in 1919, giving fascism its title. The National Fascist Party (PNF) followed. Hitler set up the German Nazi party (NSDAP) a year later. These movements were neither puppets nor initiated by the ruling class itself. Led by political adventurers like Hitler and Mussolini they had their own agenda. Indeed, these ruling classes were so thoroughly discredited due to disastrous war and then the Wall Street Crash, that only movements standing outside their ranks stood a chance of marshalling significant support.

Fascism marked an organisational severance of the petty bourgeoisie from conventional politics. Both Hitler and Mussolini posed as antiestablishment. This sounded radical, but they did not reject its ideology. Far from it. What they called for was full and unrestrained implementation of its dogma. Their criticism was not directed against capitalist society but at its political set-up which was judged not reactionary enough. As a sign of petty bourgeois desperation fascism demanded counter-revolution against parliament and democratic freedoms.

Symbolic of this were the forces Mussolini and Hitler initially mobilised: an extreme right-wing ex-army rabble thrown on to the streets by the ending of war. Dressed in paramilitary uniforms – black shirts (Italy) and brown shirts (Germany) – they used physical violence against any group they disapproved of. They would get help and finance from some hard-line members of the elite, but as yet these rag-tag formations were far too weak to carry through a programme of totalitarian rule. A mass political movement was necessary.

That was delivered by systemic crisis. The traditional allegiance of the petty bourgeoisie was to its ‘superiors’, but its world was turned upside down by the very people and system it admired. Furious but feeling privileged over those ‘below’, it channelled its anger downwards. Classical fascism was a movement that combined the initial street gangs born of wartime bloodshed with an ‘anti-party’ mass party backed by many petty bourgeois voters.

The rulers of Italy and Germany did not immediately warm to outsiders like Mussolini or Hitler. Their squads might be useful for cracking the skulls of class enemies, and their votes offset those of left parties, but neither regime wanted to cede its own state positions. They were also suspicious of the way the demagogues publicly denounced the establishment to attract followers. However, a moment came when intractable crisis meant feelings of distaste were outweighed by a realisation that things would be even worse if fascists were not given political authority.

In Italy, fascists began with attacks against organised labour in the countryside at the behest of landowners. This gave the blackshirt leader enough confidence to demand state power for himself, using the threat of still more violence to gain it. To maintain his radical credentials Mussolini would claim he conquered the government, but the truth was more prosaic:

Despite Mussolini’s hollow threat the King made him Prime Minister. To have trounced fascism at that point would have emboldened the workingclass movement which was the greater enemy.

Hitler attempted to emulate the March on Rome, but his Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 ended in failure and arrest. Germany’s weakened army High Command dared not take the risk of enabling open counter-revolution so soon after the Kaiser’s downfall. Hitler realised that:

Under the post-war Weimar Republic this strategy also failed dismally. It was only when the 1929 Crash shattered stability that Hitler’s made headway. When mainstream political parties lost all trust the Nazi party gained millions of votes, particularly from the petty bourgeoisie. But the industrialists and military leaders still hoped to hold on. They sidelined the Reichstag parliament to rule directly with Field Marshal Hindenburg, the President, as figurehead. It was they, not Hitler, who effectively ended democratic rule. Hitler was refused the chancellorship in July 1932 when he got his highest vote (37 percent) in a free election.

A new election, in November 1932, saw the NSDAP haemorrhaging support. Paradoxically that was the very moment the establishment decided to put Hitler in power. The elite had relied on balancing the farright masses against the working class. But when it looked like his movement might disintegrate, fear of the left outweighed any reservations they had. This conversation between the sitting Chancellor and head of the army says it all:

Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933 with only one third of the electorate behind him.

The first priority of fascism was to smash working-class organisations, both unions and parties, and it had a weapon unlike anything possessed by conventional state forces. At the time of his accession to power Mussolini had some 200,000–300,000 squadristi while Hitler’s stormtroopers numbered some 400,000. Their totalitarian counter-revolution penetrated every corner. It then became clear that fascism in government differed from when it was a rising movement. Now the leaders of the petty bourgeoisie had fulfilled that grouping’s dream of personally becoming members the ruling class, they wielded an unlimited domination over all of society, the petty bourgeoisie included.

Those duped into being foot-soldiers of counter-revolution had served their purpose and were now cast aside. This exposed an intrinsic contradiction contained in the fascist project. It is organisationally independent of the ruling class but ideologically enslaved to it. Unlike the embattled workers whose role in production makes them indispensable, the independent social weight of the petty bourgeoisie is negligible. In 1923, Mussolini dissolved the fascist squads. In the infamous ‘night of the long knives’ of 1934, Hitler massacred the leadership of the brownshirts to discipline the Nazi base. All power was concentrated at the top through Italy’s corporatist state and Germany’s massive conglomerates. Beneath these small businesses were swallowed up or collapsed.

There was also a sinister policy dynamic that came into play. Mussolini and Hitler saw their duty as curing the capitalist crisis. This was to be at the expense of the petty bourgeoisie along with all others, but they still wanted to retain popularity over a mass base for use as a bargaining chip in power struggles at the top. Smashing workers’ organisations and persecuting target groups might temporarily satisfy the craving of the supporters, but it did nothing to actually improve their lives. To resolve the dilemma fascist leaders turned to ever more aggressive policies at home and abroad. This led to a spiral of what historians call ‘cumulative radicalisation’ at the end of which lay Auschwitz.

There were national differences. It took Mussolini four years of manoeuvring before he could proclaim himself dictator or dissolve all rival parties to the PNF. Hitler did that in five months. Mussolini allowed employers’ organisations like Confindustria to take the economic reins more-or-less directly. Hitler wanted his gang to be the dominant element in the ruling class partnership. In both cases collaboration between the fascist state and big business was extensive. With that came an imperialist agenda that ultimately led to the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the destruction of both regimes.

One important contrast between classical fascism and the situation today concerns racism. Unsurprisingly, mainstream histories of classical fascism play down how its primary role was to establish pro-capitalist dictatorship through crushing the working class. Instead, what is noted, and unavoidably so, is that Nazi racism targeted Jews. Other victims – Roma, leftists, gays, and so on – are commonly overlooked.

Yet racism was a side consideration in comparison with counterrevolution. Despite Jews being Europe’s most significant target of ethnic persecution, in fascist Italy they were welcomed into the PNF as members of ‘the nation’. Their presence in that party was three times higher than their share in the population. It was only in the late 1930s, at the insistence of Hitler, now an ally in the Rome-Berlin Axis, that anti-Jewish measures were enacted. In Germany, 95 percent of Nazi public propaganda was devoted to petty bourgeois fears of socialism and communism, and rejection of the parliamentary status quo.

The class character of the fascist phenomenon is therefore key to understanding it. Nonetheless, a fabricated conspiracy with Jews at the helm played an internal role for the NSDAP and continues to this day as a perverted way the far right understands the world. Antisemitic politics began in the 1880s when the Kaiser’s private chaplain founded the first anti-Jewish party to divide and rule the socialists. Like the rest of establishment ideology, the Nazis took this over, inventing a JewishBolshevik plot to control everything. That served to bind and motivate the inner core of ‘true believers’. When Germany declared war on Russia this delusion led to genocide.

Fascism Today

Fascists did not disappear after 1945, but the landscape had changed. Mass wartime resistance movements led by the left had torn out their roots and they were associated with concentration camps, Axis invasions, and the Holocaust. During the sustained economic boom which lasted until the mid1970s, they were consigned to the dustbin of history and ‘normality’ reigned.

However, the fundamental conditions that gave birth to classical fascism have returned. Despite differences there is important continuity with the past. Firstly, capitalism has been experiencing declining profit rates and intermittent crises ever since the 1970s. This has been accompanied by business concentration at the top, neoliberalism, globalisation, and austerity, all of which render the position of the petty bourgeoisie increasingly precarious. Like its forbears it is turning away from the discredited centre parties. While its accepts the basic tenets of capitalism and vents its fury downwards, for the moment the main target is ethnic minorities.

That is not how mainstream commentators see it. They suggest the entire population is in the grip of reactionary ideas (hence their use of the loaded term ‘populism’), and that all politicians must therefore respond to the demands of far-right leaders ‘legitimate concerns’. This is a distorted approach that puts cause and effect the wrong way round.

It was reactionary politics from the mainstream that preceded far right electoral success. Tariq Ali has called this development the emergence of an ‘extreme centre’. With nothing to offer their populations in the midst of capitalist crisis, centre politicians and the media have been competing with each other to distract attention by attacking immigrants, Muslims, and others, while they support the super-rich. The far right saw an opportunity to escape the ghetto and jumped on this bandwagon, making it their main selling point. They outbid the mainstream by insisting it does not go far enough. And then the mainstream politicians are surprised that they are losing votes. This justifies a further move by the ‘centre’ towards the right to appease the reactionary forces they themselves have conjured up. What we are witnessing is a creeping form of cumulative radicalisation without fascist governments necessarily being in charge.

Another difference concerns fascist strategy. In the interwar period, the sequence began with organised violence preceding the building of a mass petty bourgeois base. Counter-revolution was to the fore. Nowadays the order is reversed. The far right, whether direct descendants of fascism or not, typically avoids the stigma of the past and its street armies. It shuns uniforms, dresses smartly, and tries to sound respectable (albeit not too much) to woo electors but deliver the dog whistle messages of reaction. It remains to be seen whether, if the far right attains government, the authoritarian tendency inherent of the enraged petty bourgeoisie will indeed be satisfied by the use of conventional state coercion. But a potential recourse to extra-judicial violence to bully their political competitors or smash their opponents, is not excluded. Examples are the Tommy Robinson pogrom in UK (2024), fire-bombing of Roma in Italy (2011), and PEGIDA actions in Germany (2014–17). We saw how Trump was prepared to countenance violence by the Proud Boys and suchlike in the assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 but now uses state agencies like ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to terrorise opponents.

There is also a difference in pace. The period we live in has been described as the 1930s in slow motion. Today traditional left parties are weaker than at that time and therefore not seen as needing to be immediately eliminated. This does not make the danger of fascism any less, but it explains why far-right politics has not crystallised in such a sharp, concentrated way. Political scientists like to talk of a broad spectrum of far-right parties ranging from ‘populist right’, to ‘radical right’, and ‘neofascist’. By contrast, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and Wall Street Crash gave an urgency to the counter-revolutionary programme of the angry petty bourgeoisie that is lacking today. Classical fascism was therefore overt, extreme, and explicit in both word and deed.

It took Mussolini three years from founding his movement to being appointed ‘Il Duce’ or dictator. Hitler’s NSDAP was the sole party in Germany just thirteen years after its foundation. Post-war France and Italy are examples of the modern fascist trajectory. Jean-Marie Le Pen set up the Front National in 1972 and its first electoral breakthrough was in 1988. Today, though making headway it is still seeking power. The Italian fascist movement was re-founded in 1946, but it was not until 2022 that Georgia Meloni became prime minister. Austria’s FPÖ was established in 1956 and has had three bouts in office as part of coalition governments. The country’s parliamentary institutions, diverse political parties, and trade unions have survived till now.

The situation is dynamic and unstable. Ultimately, despite differences of pace, the unfolding logic of petty bourgeois reaction is highly dangerous. Refugees trying to save their lives by crossing the Channel in small boats may be the primary target of petty bourgeois outrage today. But if far-right ideas take hold the danger of a full-blown fascist-style dictatorship or something akin to it is very real and extends far beyond the scapegoats of today. Above all, the working class could be dramatically weakened once again. Its powers of resistance curtailed, society as a whole would be forced to pay the full price of an accelerating capitalist crisis.

The Working Class

A sense of urgency on our side is essential despite the longer timescale and more diffuse far right movement. Luckily, we are forewarned by history, anti-fascist resistance is not yet facing the repression of the inter-war period, and there is much that we can do.

A class analysis of fascism reveals both its strengths but also its weaknesses. The reactionary petty bourgeoisie is important but is a diminishing section of society. As producers the working-class majority has greater social weight, and diametrically opposed interests. So, an understanding of where workers stand is the starting point for defence. The situation is not simple. The electoral scores achieved by the far right could not be achieved without some working-class voters. Analysis of election patterns shows these supporters tend to be white, male, and manual with a low level of educational achievement.

Since the beginnings of the crisis in the mid-1970s this segment, like the rest of the working class, has seen its living standards and quality of life slashed. The problem has been aggravated by a shift of manufacturing to countries in the Global South. The political conclusion drawn from this situation could have gone either way. There might have been a decision to fight back by joining with the rest of the working class, adopting a genuinely critical posture toward capitalism, and voting left. This did not happen because mainstream left party leaders have betrayed this group along with the entire class. These leaders see their role, especially during crises, as nurturing big business in the hope that one day some crumbs will be shared from the table. That is why Rachel Reeves, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer talks endlessly of growth – by which is meant profits. Such people are barely distinguishable from traditional representatives of the right and have paid a heavy electoral price.

Consequently, a minority of workers falls into the far-right camp. They are seduced by an ideology that whispers that being white and male makes them superior. Others believe they are protesting against the system, rather than bolstering it and worsening their fate. Voting this way does nothing to end the vicious cycle of poverty leading to low educational achievement. It merely perpetuates the disadvantage they feel compared to those in better paid, skilled, more knowledge-based jobs.

But we should not be mesmerised by this lapse in judgement. Many white, male, manual workers do not vote far right, and in any case this category is a declining element of the working class overall. Taken in the round working class consciousness is expanding to encompass areas such as education, health, services, ‘white collar’, and ‘professional’ spheres that once were regarded as middle class in status and mentality. The contemporary working class is broad, multigender, and multi-ethnic.

Furthermore, while far-right electoral advances cannot be overlooked, voting itself is only one part of a much larger picture. Disillusionment with the failure of the current political system extends well beyond election times. For decades parliament has not reflected or acted on major public priorities such as social services and living standards. OECD surveys show almost half the population have little or no trust in politicians, and many don’t vote at all. Abstainers tend to come from the very group of low paid, educationally poorly qualified people that the far-right hopes to win. But it is only gathering part of this group to its reactionary message. Since abstention took off in the 1970s, those who stay home outnumber far-right voters by a ratio of two to one in Britain and are equal to them in France and Germany. In Italy the largest party among workers is neither on the left nor on the right, but non-voters.

This means there is a huge reserve of working-class people for antifascists and anti-racists to appeal to. And this is not just a theoretical claim. Despite the noise about all-conquering ‘populism’ which requires its constant presence on our screens, we never hear about a far more popular counter-trend in public opinion. In 2002, the Europe-wide Social Survey put three countries in the category of being most favourable to immigration. That number was eight a decade later. As Marine Le Pen’s party challenges for the presidency, French polls suggest ‘there is no sign of a long-term move to the right. Rather it is the inverse that is seen.’ A 2024 British Social Attitudes report on immigration finds that in 2014, 30 percent thought that immigration had a positive impact on the economy; by 2021, this figure had increased to 59 percent. As one writer summarises it, ‘despite a rise in populism on the continent, Europeans seem to be getting more liberal’.

The key issue, therefore, is how to mobilise this force. One powerful factor is the distaste felt by most ordinary people for fascism and its record. That even includes some who cast their ballot for the far right in the mistaken belief that is a way to protest. The effectiveness of calling out fascism and racism has been seen in recent mobilisations, both electoral and on the streets in France and Germany. Classic examples from earlier history are the Anti-Nazi League and Unite Against Fascism in the UK at the end of the 1970s (which destroyed the National Front and British National Party), and KEERFA which broke Golden Dawn in Greece.

As class analysis also shows, it is a mistake to restrict our strategy to opposing the far right alone. Lying behind its growth is economic crisis, mainstream political decay, the precarious situation of the petty bourgeoisie and workers, and divide and rule tactics driven from the top. Therefore, as well as combating fascism it is necessary to challenge the source of the contagion – capitalism. There are many fronts to this: antiimperialism, Palestine solidarity, strikes, social justice campaigns, fighting oppression of women, LGBTQ, and more. All these should be seen as part of the common fight. Offering a left alternative to social despair is a necessary antidote to fascism.

There is no room for passivity or complacency. Arch-reaction is on the move, but so are its opponents. There are many people who can and should be mobilised on our side, and let’s face it – this must be done if humanity is to have a viable future.