There is no doubt that the term fascism is totally distorted, it is used without rigor to designate any repressive act or reactionary policy, and this obviously generates confusion. This happens between political forces of different traces, and also in the international communist movement.
Let's look at some examples. In the 2016 elections in the United States, the Democratic Party nominated Hillary Clinton, and the Republicans nominated Trump. There was talk of the danger of fascism and of concentrating forces in favor of Clinton, including the Communist Party of the USA, to which was added the voice of progressive intellectuals from other countries and so-called leftist parties; the same alarm was raised in the 2020 elections, where Trump was the Republican candidate and Biden for the Democrats alike; and the same now in the 2024 elections between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, although in this case not only the Republican candidate was branded a fascist, but there were also those who described the Democratic candidate as a fascist. Neither Trump's triumphs meant the advent of fascism, nor did his defeats a popular triumph, what is clear is that the common imperialist policy, despite the nuances, of the Democrats and Republicans remained unchanged; that the imperialist party of the Democrats was whitewashed, and that Biden's triumph meant a period of greater intensification of policies against migrants, the beginning of the imperialist war, and complicity with the genocide in Palestine; and that at the pace of this "anti-fascist" line in this decade the positions of the labor and popular movement in the United States were weakened and the crisis of the communist movement in that important country worsened. Of course, the Trump administration, like that of Biden before, or before Obama, that is, the alternation that occurs between the Democrats and Republicans, is imperialist and harmful to the peoples and workers, and we clash with it, we unveil it, and we also mobilize against the consequences suffered by the peoples, with our positions in conflict with the strategy of capital, we fight to put an end to it.
The same happens in Brazil where social democracy and also communist parties expressed that the triumph of Bolsonaro was the triumph of fascism. And this is also how the coups in Bolivia and Peru have been characterized.
Something similar is also happening in Mexican politics, where opportunist forces have always spoken of the risk of fascism should lead us to close ranks with social democracy, 50 years ago around the PRI and today around MORENA. In the 1970s, when the PRI governed through Luis Echeverría, after the coup in Chile in 1973, and the military coups in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, in the context of antagonisms that arose within the Mexican bourgeois parties, a sector of the progressive intelligentsia and the opportunistic Popular Socialist Party launched the slogan "Echeverría or fascism". in favor of a President who attacked the unions, responsible for the student repressions of 1968 and 1971, and who launched the "dirty war", a large-scale counterinsurgency operation against peasant populations, which kidnapped, murdered and disappeared thousands of workers, young people and students who were organizing to fight; among those who were not killed by the state counterinsurgency group called the White Brigade and were presented alive to be imprisoned, the possession of Marxist literature was exposed as dangerous evidence against them. The same happened between 2018 and 2024, when the social democrat López Obrador was President, and a bloc of bourgeois parties opposed to some of his measures was formed, although they supported other essential ones such as the creation of the National Guard and the ratification of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Such a bloc of parties, one of them part of the Socialist International (PRI), the other of a Christian Democratic definition (PAN), and the other, of Obrador's former colleagues, also social democrats (PRD), there is no way to characterize it, neither by their objectives, nor by their political course of fascist forces, although they are clearly bourgeois forces in a range that goes from liberal to conservative. For the opportunists, wielding the risk of fascism is a good justification for placing themselves behind social democracy, avoiding Marxist-Leninist analysis in order to understand events and intervene in them. In this case it was an inter-bourgeois struggle, a dispute over the way to manage capitalism in Mexico.
On another level, for some decades now, in social democratic spaces such as the Sao Paulo Forum, it has been argued that the neoliberal management of capitalism is a fascist or neo-fascist management, and that in order to confront it, it is necessary to make maximum efforts at unity where communists, social democrats and non-neoliberal capitalist expressions are grouped.
There is also a line of argument that maintains that the United States as an imperialist country is a fascist country, [1] and everything that opposes it would go on to form the anti-fascist front. It is an anti-scientific approach and a dangerous trend, especially in the conditions in which with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, imperialist war broke out, imperialist war on both sides. It does not escape a dose of pathos that those who chose to support Biden inside the US, and also abroad, as an option against the fascism that Trump would represent, later promoted an anti-fascist front against his determination to back Zelensky and start the war.
For communists, for Marxist-Leninist theory, the abuse of concepts such as fascism or their inappropriate use is inadmissible; the crimes and barbarity of imperialism are not minimized or attenuated so as not to call it fascism inaccurately; nor can we admit that it is used as a political-ideological element to wash the face of one of the blocs of capitalist countries that are confronting each other today to demand an improvement in their position within the imperialist system.
We are referring to the clash that occurs on the one hand between the US, the EU, and their allies (for example the USMCA countries) and on the other the so-called emerging economies where capitalist China, Russia, and their allies are located. It is not the antagonism between two worlds, but contradictions within the same rotten world of capitalism, a dispute between blocs of countries that are based on the exploitation of the working class, a dispute over the interests of the monopolies.
These antagonisms are no longer contained in diplomatic frameworks or economic and commercial confrontation, but as we know since February 24, 2022, the imperialist war broke out, initially with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. From the outset, the Russian state has wanted to present the military aggression as an anti-fascist act, and they develop a line of propaganda in that objective, they also seek to align forces with that flag.
Since the overthrow of socialist construction in the USSR in 1991, the counterrevolution imposed capitalist relations in Russia, which is today among the top 20 economies in the world, several of its monopolies predominate in various branches, such as energy, and the objectives of the so-called Special Military Operation announced by President Vladimir Putin, they are nothing else than the defense of the interests of their monopolies, of the routes, markets and their profits. Capitalist Russia is undoubtedly an important country well positioned in the imperialist system. That is why communists do not hesitate to characterize the war between Russia and Ukraine as an imperialist war, but corroded by opportunism, several communist parties, instead of seeing what is obvious, that is, a war that is imperialist on both sides, admitting that Russia is a capitalist country, deny that it is their interests that lead it into the conflict, they raise the discourse of it is a war against fascism, thus supporting one side of capitalist countries against another and abandoning the lessons that Lenin and the Bolsheviks have given us. The point is that since then, "anti-fascist" forums have increased, such as the one held in Minsk in April 2023, or the one held this April 2025, organized by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, to which we were summoned, an invitation that the PCM decided to reject thinking that it aims to whitewash the role of capitalist Russia and support for imperialist war.
In the same direction, under the auspices of the Government of Venezuela, something called the "Antifascist International" was formed a short time ago, to which the Sao Paulo Forum and the Party of the European Left concur, and like the "Fifth International" that Hugo Chávez proposed in his day, it is nothing more than an organic structure to hold a series of events in support of Maduro after a questionable electoral process that violated its own regulations and that among other aggravating factors was the ominous illegalization of the Communist Party of Venezuela, which was stripped of its electoral registration, then handed over to a small group of mercenaries.
It can be said that today when we speak of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist fronts, we are actually talking about an ideological cover to support one of the blocs of capitalist countries – the one that calls itself multipolarity – in the course of contemporary inter-imperialist antagonisms, and to force us to close ranks with the progressive or neo-Keynesian management of capitalism.
This does not mean that we underestimate fascism. We take this into account, we study the developments of the class struggle. The twentieth century, and the action of the Communist International, and each of its Sections provides us with elements that enrich our perception.
We are aware that fascism is a form of management of the power of the monopolies and of the management of capitalism, it arises from its bosom, and its definitive liquidation is linked to the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production.
The barbarity and crimes of fascism in the 1930s and during World War II should not be forgotten. The communists were then, have been and will be on the front line fighting fascism and any other management of capitalism. Part of our daily struggle is the historical memory of the great contribution of the Soviet Union and the communists to the defeat of fascism and the liberation of the peoples it subjugated. We reject the historical distortion that denies the fundamental contribution of the USSR, the Red Army, the partisans and the resistance – with a leading role of the communists – in Europe and Asia. We are making efforts to dismantle the perverse decision of the European Union to equate fascism with communism, which is the one that defeated it and paid a high price of sacrifice with millions of workers and communists who watered the battlefields, the concentration camps, the dungeons, the firing squads with their blood. On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the defeat of fascism we reaffirm our commitment to our comrades in the USSR, Germany, Italy, France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Holland, Belgium, Romania, nourished by historical optimism and paying a high price of sacrifice, did everything for Victory Day.
And although the anti-Comintern Axis has been defeated, fascism remains as a possible management in the framework of capitalism's crisis, of destabilization, as a counterrevolutionary force.
But there is another problem that we would like to at least outline, understanding that addressing it requires a deeper, more detailed and documented study, and that is the question of when we talk about the struggle against fascism, in an almost mechanical way we think of the Popular Front, that is, the front with social democracy, with non-fascist bourgeois forces and non-fascist capitalist countries.
The VII Congress of the Communist International in 1935 marked a turning point in relation to the revolutionary strategy elaborated not only since 1919, when the Third International was founded, but also with the positions that were formed in opposition to the opportunism and revisionism of the decomposing Second International. The fact that a new Congress was not held, due to the erroneous decision to dissolve the Comintern in 1943, led to such a strategic shift being absolutized and considered unquestionable within the international communist movement, which historically evaluated is the basis of an opportunist deviation, and one of the foundations of the current crisis of the communist parties.
From the IV Congress of the III International, the discussion on the characterization of fascism began within it. It can be seen in the materials of its Congresses, Plenums and other materials that the definition is being enriched, not only on the so-called classical, Italian fascism, but also on the German and other forms that it acquires in different countries. Ercoli's speech at the XII Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in September 1932 is illustrative, [2] as well as the theses adopted on the basis of Kusinen's report, which states that already in the governments preceding Hitler, with Brüning and Papen, and with the collaboration of social democracy, fascism was already installed for the crushing of the mass movement. the reduction of the revolutionary movement and the reduction of the standard of living of the workers. It is therefore inaccurate to consider as a single elaboration the one presented at the VII Congress of 1935 by Georgi Dimitrov, which also focused on the German variant of fascism, which has been elevated to a universal definition. For example, R. Palme Dutt, a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, and an important leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, wrote Fascism and Social Revolution, an important book in which in 1934 he defined fascism as a form of power and domination of the bourgeoisie, that is, of finance capital as a whole, of the monopolies, and not as the form preferred by the most reactionary part of finance capital, which is the thesis presented by Dimitrov.
Over the years, the Communist International has been outlining fascism as an instrument that would allow the ruling class to break the revolutionary upsurge of the working class and carry out the consistent and firm implementation of the policy of capital to overcome the destabilization of the system caused by the Great October Socialist Revolution, the revolutionary wave that followed and the great crisis of 1929.
But if the inaccuracy in the characterization of fascism can constitute a mistake, the underlying problem arises with the strategic line that was adopted at the last Congress of the Comintern to confront fascism, which is the line of the popular front or anti-fascist front, an inter-class alliance, with social democracy, which is already at that time a political force integrated into the system, at the party or governmental level, and non-fascist bourgeois parties could participate in these governments.
In the face of fascism, it is then said that we must defend bourgeois democracy. In fact, several parties that with their heroic struggle had the conditions for the seizure of power decided to stop at the re-establishment of bourgeois democracy with certain extensions. The door was opened to the opportunistic strategy of the intermediate stages. It was not possible to establish that the objective of the defeat of fascism, that is, of a form of capitalist management, would have to be linked to the conquest of power and the Socialist Revolution. The comrades of the Communist Party of Greece, through their experience in the Second World War, as organizers and leaders of the successful resistance against the Nazi-fascist occupation have presented conclusions, not only for a correct history of the KKE, but also for present and future struggles.
Another great problem that opened up was the devaluation of the role of the Communist Party with the thesis presented there of the single party of the proletariat, as fusions of the communists with the social democrats, what happened in Spain at the youth level with the JSU, and in the post-war period in parties such as the Hungarian, the Polish, history showed that in such parties resulting from these fusions, Social democratic currents were maintained that in the 90s would be part of the counterrevolutionary forces that fought for the triumph of the counterrevolution.
Seen in this way, the Browderism that did so much damage was not a deviation but a consequence of that line, which anticipated the Svolta di Salerno, Titoism, and which has its roots in Eurocommunism and other opportunist manifestations.
Therefore, the correct definition is important for the elaboration of revolutionary policy against fascism. If fascism constitutes a form of management of the dictatorship of capital, then it cannot be confronted in alliance with the parties that support bourgeois parliamentary democracy, the other form of the dictatorship of capital. Likewise, the two forms (parliamentary democracy and fascism) are not separated by "Chinese Walls". We have had and continue to have bans on Communist Parties and trade union action also in many bourgeois democracies in Europe.
The line of popular fronts led the revolutionary workers' movement to defeat and formed the conditions for the mutation of some Communist Parties towards Eurocommunism in Europe (Italy, France, Spain).
The foundations were then laid for a line that is programmatically trapped in the strategy of the intermediate stages, which is predisposed to merge (dissolve) with other organizations, and even if it is not against fascism to promote fronts with the bourgeoisie.
A heritage that must be renounced in order to lay the foundations of revolutionary strategy. The real struggle against fascism consists only in the struggle against the strategy of capital, the rallying of forces for the victory of the socialist revolution.