In our organizing work and discussions with comrades about the struggle against fascism, we run into a variety of conflicting views on precisely what fascism is, whether it is approaching, or even whether it is already here. For many among us on the radical left today, the political emergence of Donald Trump in 2015 sent up immediate red flags about the danger of encroaching fascism as a threat to U.S. capitalist “democracy” (however undemocratic this “democracy” may be in practice). This was true particularly for inexperienced young progressives who had little or no theoretical knowledge on recognizing or combating fascism, yet snapped into action almost instinctively to resist Trump’s arrival on the political scene.
But for some of the more theoretically rigorous and academic voices on the left, Trump is little more than an especially reactionary bourgeois businessman-turned-politician, following a tradition of homegrown American white supremacy, as so many U.S. capitalist politicians have done before. These thinkers often have some abstract criteria in their definition of fascism which they argue Trump and MAGA do not fully satisfy. However, they usually agree about the seriousness with which Trump’s reactionary agenda must be fought by those of us who engage in organized struggle for social justice.
And for yet others, including some of our more experienced, and often jaded, comrades, Donald Trump is merely the new face of a fully fascist system of rule already firmly established in the U.S. These comrades fight enthusiastically with us against Trump’s increasing authoritarianism, but as far as they are concerned, U.S. capitalist “democracy” no longer has any genuinely democratic institutions or freedoms worth defending, if it ever did. “Fascism is already here,” they say. We sympathize with this view, because we wish to sow no illusions in the minds of workers about the truly antidemocratic nature of capitalist “democracy” in the United States. As the revolutionary Marxist thinker and organizer Vladimir Lenin wrote in his magnum opus State and Revolution (1918):
In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favorable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slaveowners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy,” “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.1
With this in mind, we use the term “democracy” (in the context of bourgeois liberal democracy) simply to describe that particular form of rule that is historically prevalent in developed capitalist countries, with no implication that we consider it to be genuinely democratic for workers and oppressed people. Following Marx and Lenin, we believe that genuine workers’ democracy is impossible under a system of class exploitation such as capitalism. But this does not necessarily imply that nominally democratic forms, institutions, and political freedoms are not present in a capitalist “democracy”, nor that their loss would be immaterial. Conceptual clarity is always necessary for purposes of formulating correct revolutionary Marxist strategy and tactics. Therefore, the question of whether the U.S. is already fascist requires close examination.
“Fascism Is Already Here”
The use of the word “fascism” to describe the brutally racist anti-Black and anti-worker repression in the settler colonial United States became commonplace among the U.S. organized left at least as far back as 1969. During the heroic militant struggles of the Black Panther Party to fight for Black liberation and popularize a program of multiracial, internationalist socialist revolution, the Panthers organized a “Revolutionary Conference for a United Front Against Fascism” in July 1969.2 However, it is unclear from articles from this time in their party newspaper whether by fighting “fascism” the Panthers were referring to the need to mobilize against fascist elements within a formally “democratic” capitalist system (such as against KKK-aligned police, as well as illiberal, authoritarian, racist politicians and the unmitigated terror they habitually inflict on racially oppressed populations), or if they viewed the U.S. system at that time as having become fully fascist in the sense of Italy and Germany.
The May 31, 1969, issue of The Black Panther, in which the call for the conference was initially made, notably uses the qualification “incipient American fascism”, further adding:
And what would the success of fascism in the United States entail? For the toiling masses it would, of course, entail the unrestrained strengthening of the regime of exploitation and the destruction of the working class movement.3
This would seem to suggest a recognition of the distinction between a pre-fascist system that contains seeds of a future fascist regime which must be combatted before they take root, on the one hand, and a consolidated Nazi-type fascist dictatorship on the other. However, in Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, authors Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr. add that the Panthers “began widely using the word fascism to describe the policies of the U.S. government” in the months leading up to the conference.4
The Panthers’ view of the existing U.S. system as a fascist one was most clearly and rigorously presented a few years later by George L. Jackson. Jackson was a Black radical and Marxist theorist. Sentenced to “one year to life” in 1961 for an alleged armed robbery, he remained incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison until his death ten years later. While in prison, he was welcomed as a member by the Black Panther Party with the rank of general and field marshal of the People’s Revolutionary Army, and quickly became established as a foremost theorist of the Black Panther Party, penning many theoretical articles for the party newspaper from behind bars.5
His classic Blood in My Eye, published posthumously in 1972 after he was murdered by prison guards, contains his in-depth discussion of fascism.
The nature of fascism, its characteristics and properties have been in dispute ever since it was first identified as a distinct phenomenon growing out of Italy’s state-supported and developed industries in 1922. Whole libraries have been written around the subject. There have been a hundred “party lines” on just exactly what fascism is. But both Marxists and non-Marxists agree on at least two of its general factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class nature. These two factors almost by themselves identify the U.S. as a fascist-corporative state.6
However, Jackson concedes that “The final definition of fascism is still open, simply because it is a developing movement.”7
“Hitler’s American Model”
Jackson’s observation of the parallels between the racially repressive structures of the post-World War II United States and those of Italian and German classical fascism is well supported by historical research. Hitler’s regime, in its project to create a racially “pure” Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) and secure Lebensraum (living space) in the east through its genocidal invasion of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, did not invent its tools of racial subjugation from scratch.
In Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, historian James Q. Whitman reveals that, particularly when it comes to the drafting of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, Nazi jurists and officials consciously studied and adapted legal and administrative mechanisms from what they saw as the birthplace of racial hierarchy: the United States.
It was American immigration, citizenship, and anti-miscegenation law that the Nazis cited over and over again. It was American Jim Crow that was highlighted by the Prussian Memorandum. It was a memorandum on American law that the Justice Ministry prepared for discussion at the planning meeting of June 5, 1934. It was American law to which the radicals at that meeting turned. It was the American criminalization of racially mixed marriage that was the forerunner of the Blood Law. It was the American conquest of the West that Nazis invoked so often while engaged in the murderous campaigns of the 1940s, just as Hitler was already invoking it in the 1920s. Nazism was certainly not a product made in America and imported into Germany, but it remains the case that when the Nazis set out to build a racist order, they turned to America first to see what sort of models they could find.8
This reality is also reflected by the writing of the Martinican poet, author, and politician Aimé Césaire. In his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Césaire famously argued that what the European bourgeoisie could not forgive Hitler for was not his shocking crimes against humanity itself, but the fact that Hitler applied to white people the horrific violence that the imperialists had previously reserved for non-white colonial subjects in the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America over which they exerted their brutal domination.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.9
For Césaire, the systematic brutality, dehumanization, and organized violence of fascism were not European aberrations but rather the boomerang effect of long-standing colonial methods, a horrifying return of violence from the colonial possession to the imperial core. “Chickens coming home to roost,” as Malcolm X described the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
This observation aligns with the analysis by the great revolutionary Marxist thinker and Black civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois. In The World and Africa, an Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (1947), Du Bois traced the origins of twentieth century warfare and fascism to the underlying global system of colonialism, white supremacy, and the never ending capitalist quest for profit through the super-exploitation of the labor of the racialized peoples of the colonized world. The Holocaust, in this view, was not an ideological novelty but the ultimate, industrialized expression of racial terror and dehumanization perfected over centuries in the slave plantations and colonial territories.
There was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood—which Christian civilization or Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.10
These facts make it impossible to deny that the ideological, racial, and methodological content of fascism is deeply embedded in the American project. However, we believe that the question of whether “fascism is already here” in the U.S. must be understood as a terminological dispute. How we answer it depends on how we define “fascism”, hinging on precise, objective criteria. In order to firmly answer the question of whether fascism is already here using the methods of scientific socialism, we must first resolve the question of what fascism is.
What Is Fascism?
Belgian Marxist economist, activist, anti-fascist resistance fighter, and Holocaust survivor Ernest Mandel wrote that “The history of fascism is at the same time the history of the theoretical analysis of fascism.”11 Fascism first took power in Italy in 1922 following Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome12, comprised of a mass movement of “black-shirted ex-army officers and sundry toughs who . . . spent their time attacking trade unionists, socialists, communists, and farm cooperatives”,13 in the words of Michael Parenti. It did not come into existence according to a pre-determined blueprint. When it arrived, it defined itself in mythic and mystical terms incompatible with a Marxist dialectical materialist analysis. As with the emergence of any strange new social phenomenon of world-shaking historical consequences, the ability of great revolutionary thinkers to understand what fascism was—and draw correct tactical conclusions about how to fight it—lagged sorely behind its sudden and unexpected appearance in the phenomenal plane. As Mandel explained:
Theoreticians tried to grasp the essence of fascism not only because they loved sociology or scientific knowledge in general, but also because they acted on the understandable and perfectly reasonable assumption that the better they were to understand the nature of fascism, the more successfully would they be able to fight it.14
The best and brightest minds of the Communist International (Comintern) went right to work, using the scientific socialist methodology of revolutionary Marxism to attempt to understand the fascist phenomenon objectively. In June 1923, Clara Zetkin and Karl Radek presented their findings to the Third Enlarged Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) in Moscow. While reactionary authoritarian dictatorships were nothing new, Zetkin and Radek argued that, unlike such regimes of the past, fascism was not merely rule by a small terroristic elite.
At first, the prevailing view was that fascism was nothing more than violent bourgeois terror, and its character and effects were thought to be similar to those of the Horthy regime in Hungary. Yet even though fascism and the Horthy regime employ the same bloody, terrorist methods, which bear down on the proletariat in the same way, the historical essence of the two phenomena is entirely different.15
On the contrary, Zetkin correctly observed that the striking difference between fascism and the authoritarian regimes that preceded was its mass character. Unlike these previous top-down regimes, fascism took the form of a grassroots mass movement rooted in the petty bourgeoisie (small farmers, shopkeepers, veterans), economically ruined by the profound crises of the capitalist system and its imperialist wars. “We can combat fascism only if we grasp that it rouses and sweeps along broad social masses who have lost the earlier security of their existence and with it, often, their belief in social order.” She continued:
Masses in their thousands streamed to fascism. It became an asylum for all the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned. And what they no longer hoped for from the revolutionary proletarian class and from socialism, they now hoped would be achieved by the most able, strong, determined, and bold elements of every social class.16
However, Zetkin and Radek recognized that despite the mass character of the fascist movement, the fascist political leaders were financed and promoted by agrarian capital and petty financial capital. Observing that the fascist squads’ main targets were the labor chambers, union halls, and socialist party offices, Zetkin and Radek correctly concluded that fascism was a terroristic movement financed by capital to break the power of the revolutionary proletariat. “The bourgeoisie was quick to recruit fascism to service and use in its struggle to beat down and permanently enslave the proletariat.”17
In 1924, August Thalheimer, the main theorist of the German Right Opposition of the German Communist Party (KPD), argued that fascism arose from the colossal failure of liberal capitalist democracy to manage the post-war economic crisis and suppress the revolutionary working class. When capitalism goes into a serious once-in-a-lifetime crisis like the Great Depression, inevitably it drives workers from all walks of life to join each other in the streets to defend their basic physical survival needs. In order to preserve its own wealth and power, the capitalist class must suppress the possibility of a workers’ revolution. The capitalists found that their traditional method of maintaining power—parliamentary rule and reliance on reformist Social Democracy—was no longer capable of preserving capitalist rule and suppressing the threat of socialist revolution. Thalheimer explained that a fascist regime takes hold when the capitalist class, exhausted and threatened by the organized proletariat, chooses to willingly give up the direct political control of the state that it normally wields through parliamentarism, handing dictatorial power to the executive, to protect its wealth and status by crushing the threat of revolution.18
“Social Fascism”?
At its Sixth World Congress in 1928, the Communist International (Comintern) declared the “Third Period” of revolutionary struggle. The congress passed a resolution affirming the majority view that the previous period of capitalist stability had ended, and a new “Third Period” had opened, necessitating a change in tactics for all Comintern-affiliated parties in their struggle to build and lead a socialist revolution in their respective countries. This meant abandoning the “United Front” strategy of the previous period. The United Front strategy, established in 1922, had required all Comintern-affiliated communist parties in various countries to engage in joint strikes and street demonstrations with reformist Social Democrats wherever possible, with an eye to winning the Social Democratic workers away from their reformist misleaders.
But with the change in policy, the Comintern argued that the Social Democratic parties were the main enemies of the working class and essentially the same as the Nazis. “Everyone to the right of the communists was, in one form or other denounced as ‘fascist’. We therefore had ‘social fascists’, ‘liberal fascists’, ‘radical fascists’ and ‘Trotsky fascists’, as well as the real fascists.”19
Although it had been clear to the communist movement since Lenin broke with the reformist Second International that Social Democracy’s betrayal of proletarian revolution ultimately serves the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie, the logic of the resolution failed to recognize that fascism represented an immediate physical threat to both revolutionary communists and reformist social democrats as it sought to obliterate everything that stood in its path to absolute power. In this light, the Comintern’s Third Period policy of “social fascism” was a colossal political and theoretical blunder that prevented the German communist workers from standing with the social democratic workers in the streets to physically confront the rising Nazi movement and defend the workers’ movement from being drowned in blood.20 “They failed to grasp that Social Democracy was not compatible with fascism,” writes Marxist historian and organizer Rob Sewell in his monumental Germany 1918–1933: Socialism or Barbarism, “That the fascists, if they came to power, would destroy the Social Democrats along with all other working-class organizations.”21
For a United Front!
But there were many leaders in the communist movement who recognized the deadly error. August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler, leaders of the Right Opposition of the Comintern-affiliated German Communist Party (KPD), were expelled from the party for opposing the Comintern’s “social fascism” policy and calling for a United Front, a limited tactical alliance with the social democrats for the physical defense of the organized workers’ movement. Although they were bitter organizational rivals, the international Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky agreed with Thalheimer and Brandler on the urgent need for a United Front.
Thalheimer had contributed greatly to the revolutionary Marxist analysis of fascism. He had introduced the idea that a fascist dictatorship occurs when the threat of socialist revolution during a severe capitalist crisis compels the bourgeoisie to surrender its ability to directly influence politics into the hands of the leader of a movement of crazed and economically ruined petty bourgeois fanatics. The bourgeoisie entrusts the fascist leader with the task of suppressing the incipient socialist revolution.22
Building on Thalheimer’s work, Trotsky provided an important clarification. The task to which the bourgeoisie had entrusted the fascist leader was not mere suppression of the workers’ movement, but its absolute, physical annihilation. Its purpose was to smash into atoms every independent organization of the working class: trade unions, socialist and communist political parties (whether reformist or revolutionary), and all grassroots progressive organizations, to reduce the proletariat to an “amorphous state.” For Trotsky, the theoretical imprecision was a political disaster. He argued that it failed to correctly warn the German working class of the unique and mortal danger fascism posed, thereby undermining the necessary fight for the immediate, militant United Front.
Trotsky warned that the German Communist Party’s failure to form a tactical alliance with the Social Democrats to fight back the fascist bands in the streets would lead to catastrophe—a prediction tragically validated by the consolidation of Hitler’s dictatorship in 1933, when all the prominent leaders and intellectuals of the Communist and Social Democratic parties were murdered, thrown in concentration camps, exiled, or otherwise silenced, and all their activity outlawed. All agitation in favor of socialist revolution became an illegal underground activity, conducted at great bodily risk to the agitator. Needless to say, a workers’ revolution led by conscious Marxists had become a practical impossibility for a generation or more.
Following Hitler’s consolidation of power (1933) and the subsequent extermination of the German communist movement, the Comintern was forced to face the failure of the Third Period “social fascist” policy, which had forbidden the communist parties from engaging in physical defense of each other’s meetings and demonstrations against fascist vigilante violence. In August 1935, Georgi Dimitrov was elected General Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Speaking at the Comintern’s Seventh World Congress defined fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”
While an incomplete definition, Dimitrov’s identification of fascism as a terrorist dictatorship helped to clarify the need for the workers’ movement to physically fortify against fascist attacks through United Front coalition work between left tendencies that included the formation of armed workers’ defense committees. Unfortunately, Dimitrov’s prescription for combating the rise of fascism at that desperate hour also included the formation of electoral blocs between communists and anti-fascist liberal bourgeois parties. While this has led to much confusion in the revolutionary Marxist movement over whether it is appropriate for revolutionary workers to ally with “progressive” bourgeois forces when the threat of fascism is perceived to be near, the change in policy for joint defense of the workers’ organization between all left tendencies was a much-needed affirmation of the earlier United Front policy that had been in place since Lenin’s time.
So, Is America Fascist?
Based on the observations of these giants of Marxist thought, we can define a fascist movement as a mass movement of frenzied and economically ruined petty bourgeoisie and alienated workers, financed by sections of big business. When extreme economic crisis drives the workers toward socialist revolution in defense of their basic survival needs, the capitalists determine that pluralistic liberal “democracy”, with its basic political freedoms, is no longer capable of preserving their wealth and power. So they surrender their ability to directly determine political policy into the hands of the fascist leader, empowering him to utilize his fanatical worshipers as a battering ram to physically smash the organized workers’ movement to pieces and outlaw its activities.
In this light, we cannot consider the U.S. system to be currently fascist. As Matthew N. Lyons writes in Insurgent Supremacists, the U.S. political system “has always been a shifting mix of pluralistic openness and repression, where real political space has been won for some people and some ideas that would not be permitted in a wholly authoritarian system, including opportunities to organize, debate, participate in electoral politics, and criticize those in power.”23
On this same theme, Manning Marable wrote in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America(1983):
U.S. bourgeois “democracy” is oppressive and under Reagan is even moving toward unambiguous authoritarianism, yet is not specifically fascist in the classical sense. Progressives can have a direct impact upon public policies and the behavior of the state in certain respects, via electoral participation, lobbying, civil disobedience, mass demonstrations, etc. The state bureaucracy under a bourgeois “democracy” often accommodates the demands of the left into its own public policies.24
However, this by no means should be taken as a cause for celebration. The freedom for independent grassroots civilian organizations, socialist and communist parties, and trade unions is not guaranteed. With the return of Donald Trump to power and his alarming moves to target all anti-fascist speech with the help of his loyal army of masked worshipers, this freedom is facing immediate threat of physical annihilation!
In a future article in this series, we will explain in detail why we consider the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement led by the current U.S. President Donald J. Trump to be a fully fascist movement. We will present our view of what steps the U.S. has already taken along the road to a neo-Nazi police state dictatorship, and what steps remain before such a dictatorship could be consolidated.
For now, suffice it to say that this future is not inevitable. Time is of the essence for the multiracial and multinational independent grassroots progressive left of the United States to galvanize itself with the skills it will need to not only lead, but physically defend, a revolutionary upswell of millions in opposition to Trump’s policies. But this upswell is not guaranteed to happen if the workers are deprived of a clear understanding of the danger. If revolutionary Marxists fail to correctly identify and warn the workers of the true nature and urgency of the physical threat they are facing, we will be to blame for their enslavement.
- V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 124–5. ↩︎
- Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 299–300. ↩︎
- “The Black Panther Party comes forth/ We must develop a united front against fascism,” The Black Panther, May 31, 1969, Vol. 3, no. 6. ↩︎
- Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 300. ↩︎
- Curry Malott, Randall Scott, and Elgin Bailey, “George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye: A critical appraisal,” Liberation School, August 13, 2025, https://www.liberationschool.org/george-jackson-blood-in-my-eye/. ↩︎
- George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990), 134. ↩︎
- Ibid., 135. ↩︎
- James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 139–40. ↩︎
- Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 36. ↩︎
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa and Color and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. ↩︎
- Ernest Mandel, “Introduction,” in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, by Leon Trotsky (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 9. ↩︎
- Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 87–91. ↩︎
- Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), 2. ↩︎
- Mandel, “Introduction,” 11. ↩︎
- Clara Zetkin, “The Struggle Against Fascism” (Report to the Third Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, June 20, 1923), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed November 8, 2025, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/06/struggle-against-fascism.html. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Clara Zetkin, “Resolution on Fascism” (Resolution adopted by the Third Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, June 23, 1923), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed November 8, 2025, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/06/fascism-report-comintern.htm. ↩︎
- August Thalheimer, “On Fascism,” originally published in Gegen den Strom (1930), reprinted in Marxists Internet Archive, accessed November 8, 2025, https://www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/fascism.htm. ↩︎
- Rob Sewell, Germany 1918–1933: Socialism or Barbarism (London: Wellred Books, 2018), 322. ↩︎
- Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (Montreal: Kersplebedeb and Oakland: PM Press, 2018), 231. ↩︎
- Sewell, 347. ↩︎
- Thalheimer, “On Fascism.” ↩︎
- Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists, iii. ↩︎
- Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 1999), 257. ↩︎