Rising Fascism: Lessons From the 1930s

As the far right movement grows in most places across Europe, including Ireland, what lessons can we learn from the writings of those who witnessed the first fascist movements grow? The Russian socialist Leon Trotsky analysed the birth of Hitler’s movement and gave warnings to the left that went unheeded – leading to the mass murder of workers and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Many historians try to explain the rise of fascism in Germany through the personal qualities of Adolf Hitler. Trotsky rejected this approach looking at the classes that lay behind each political personality:

“Naive minds think that the office of kingship lodges in the king himself, in his ermine cloak and his crown, in his flesh and bones. As a matter of fact, the office of kingship is an interrelation between people. The king is king only because the interests and prejudices of millions of people are refracted through his person.”

Hitler, he wrote:  “stood out only because of his big temperament a voice much louder than others, and an intellectual mediocrity much more self-assured. He did not bring into the movement any ready-made program, if one disregards the insulted soldier’s thirst for vengeance. Hitler began with grievances and complaints about the Versailles terms, the high cost of living, the lack of respect for a meritorious non-commissioned officer, and the plots of bankers and journalists of the Mosaic persuasion. There were in the country plenty of ruined and drowning people with scars and fresh bruises. They all wanted to thump with their fists on the table. This Hitler could do better than others.”

Hitler didn’t have a mass audience in the 1920s, he was seen as a crank. But after the 1929 stock market crash the suffering of the masses increased and Hitler was able to appeal to millions of drowning and desperate people. His main audience wasn’t the working class. 

Hitler appealed mostly to the class socialists call the “petty bourgeoisie”. In modern times the term “middle class” is usually applied to white collar workers – but they are part of the working class. There is another class that lies between the bosses and the workers – this is the petty bourgeois class, the real middle class. 

“Mussolini wrote in 1914, there lie between them (bosses and workers) very numerous intermediate layers which seemingly form “a joining web of the human collective”; but “during periods of crisis, the intermediate classes gravitate, depending upon their interests and ideas, to one or the other of the basic classes.””

Who makes up this middle class “human web?” Small businesses that feel crushed by large corporations, lawyers, judges, artists, academics and all those who do not have to work for a wage or earn their wage for managing others. It also includes farmers. They resent those above them in the boss class but they often fear being pushed down into the working class below them. 

This middle class layer penetrates into the working class. There are workers who lose their jobs and after a long stint unemployed turn to wheeling and dealing. Drug dealers are small businessmen, ruthlessly chasing after profit. They are part of this middle class but can have working class accents and be tied by family into the working class.

This layer includes union bureaucrats and functionaries who mediate between workers and bosses, managers of NGOs and charities. The petty bourgeoisie has a left and a right wing – just like the ruling class. They echo the ruling class and help transmit ruling class ideas into the working class. The local pub owner influences the working class regulars. The manager of an NGO argues with their workers.

“The petty bourgeoisie is characterised by the extreme heterogeneity of its social nature. At the bottom it fuses with the proletariat and extends into the lumpen proletariat; on top it passes over into the capitalist bourgeoisie.” By lumpen proletariat he meant the small minority who fall out of the working class and into criminality. 

The ruling class could not rule without this middle class holding the workers down: “The big bourgeoisie, making up a negligible part of the nation, cannot hold power without the support of the petty bourgeoisie in the town and the village” 

Trotsky wrote: “German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organisations of the working class and the institutions of democracy. But fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital.”

The reward given to middle class people and workers for following Hitler was the night of the long knives. Once the Hitler movement came to power the middle class was no longer needed, its energy was used up and the fascists combined with the capitalist state. Hitler murdered the leaders of the SA and anyone in his movement that had an expectation of change. 

“After the conquest of power fascism will easily find its soldiers. With the aid of the state apparatus, an army of the pet sons of the bourgeoisie, of intellectuals, counter-clerks, demoralised workers, lumpen proletarians, etc, is easily created.” 

“After fascism is victorious, finance capital gathers into its hands, as in a vice of steel, directly and immediately, all the institutions of sovereignty, the executive, administrative, and educational powers of state.” 

The ruling class used Hitler to destroy the left and then once he was gifted power he turned on his own movement and purged those who expected any moves against the rich. 

“Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy.” The ruling class was using the middle class as a “battering ram” to smash the workers and retain its rule through a vicious police state and murder camps. 

“Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of declassed and demoralised lumpen proletariat; all the countless human beings that finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.” 

The middle class relied on legends, myths and conspiracy theories to build their movement. They couldn’t see themselves as pathetic middle class puppets of the big bourgeois and so convinced themselves of the sanctity of their “race”. They mobilised every already existing prejudice and superstition to turn degraded and broken people on the leaders of the working class. 

“Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.”

The soil that fascism grows out of is our capitalist class system and its polluted culture. In modern times we have billionaires like Rupert Murdoch pumping out filth in rag newspapers and through news outlets like Fox News. Fascism condenses and pukes up all this “undigested barbarism”. 

What about the position of the other classes? Fascism as a movement of the middle class, it has never been able to take power without the help of the ruling class. Furthermore the working class has to be demoralised and demobilised to give the fascists an opening. Trotsky was clear that the left was to blame for giving the fascists the chance to grow. 

Every victory for fascism represented a failure of the left to focus working class anger against the system. When the working class appeared strong the middle class would follow in its wake. When the working class failed to mobilise the middle class went back to serving the ruling class. 

There had been an unsuccessful workers revolution in Germany from 1918 to 1923 and the capitalists had feared a repeat of the Russian Revolution. One faction of the ruling class thought using “Social Democracy” (how Trotsky described the combined forces of the SPD – a cowardly establishment party like our Labour Party but much more powerful – and the trade union leaders, who are part of the middle layers between workers and bosses)

While one faction of the ruling class sought to use the SPD and unions to control workers another faction of the ruling class thought they could use Hitler to smash the workers, destroy the unions and all opposition to their rule once and for all. The ruling class went back and forth between both strategies before finally throwing in its lot with Hitler. 

“There are periods during which the bourgeoisie leans upon both Social Democracy and fascism, that is, during which it simultaneously manipulates its electoral and terrorist agencies.” 

The Communist Party in Germany was led by fools who stood on the sidelines of the class struggle shouting loudly that the Social Democrats were the “main enemy” of workers. They correctly understood that the union leaders and their political party, the SPD, were agents of capitalism in the working class, as Trotsky noted:

“In the person of social democracy the petty bourgeoisie, which follows finance capital, leads behind it millions of workers.” 

But the Communists failed to understand that there was a difference between agents of the ruling class that ran mass worker organisations and had an interest in defending those bodies from attack and the authoritarian wing of the ruling class that wanted to unleash Hitlers middle class bands of fascists on the unions and completely destroy them.

The Communist newspapers wrote articles that conflated the middle class fascists and the middle class reformists: “Fascism is the military organisation of the bourgeoisie which leans upon the Social Democracy” they wrote.  

Trotsky agreed that the reformists were used by the establishment to control workers through reformist parties and trade union bureaucracies but he also understood the dialectic of identity and difference. The two wings of the middle class were united, had identity, in one sense: the middle class reformists disorganised and demoralised the workers, they tied the workers shoelaces together and when the workers fell over Hitler would kick them in the face.

But the reformists did this unconsciously. The reformists also led organisations, the unions, that were valuable to our class despite these bureaucratic leaders. Trotsky asked the simple question: should we let Hitler destroy those organisations? No. This would weaken rank and file workers and prepare the way for fascist rule. Instead revolutionary workers needed to win over those under the influence of the union leaders through united front class struggle. 

“Fascism has as its basic task the razing to their foundations of all institutions of proletarian democracy. Has this any “class meaning” for the proletariat or hasn’t it?” he reasoned. 

At one point the ruling class, trying to hold back both the left and Hitler’s movement, established a police dictatorship under Bruning. The Stalinists declared that facism had already won and so there was no need to worry about Hitler! But trade unions were still legal and the German state was balancing between far left and far right – a situation that wouldn’t last as more and more of the ruling class desired Hitler in power to finally eliminate the left. 

“The wiseacres who boast they do not recognize any difference between Bruning and Hitler are saying in reality: it makes no difference whether our organisations exist or whether they are destroyed.” But the ruling class was still unsure about the fascist path and the cost of offering power to Hitler. Mass struggle could still scare them away from that path. 

“The big German bourgeoisie is vacillating at present; it is split between up. Its disagreements are exhausted by the question: which of the two methods of cure for the social crisis shall be applied at present?”

In our time this division between the big capitalists is typified by two billionaires: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. The first embraces woke politics – while attacking Amazon workers for unionising. The other embraces anti-woke politics while also attacking his workers. From the point of view of class they’re both at war with our class. But the “culture war” represents a real division in the ruling class about what method is best to control us. 

The German Communists refused to face reality. While their vote increased from 3.3 million to 4.6 million in the 1928 elections the fascist vote increased more – from 800,000 to 6.4 million. The reformists in the SPD maintained their vote while many workers went over to voting for Hitler. The growth of fascism was partly the responsibility of the Communists – they failed to give workers hope. 

“The gigantic growth of National Socialism is an expression of two factors: a deep social crisis, throwing the petty bourgeois masses off balance, and the lack of a revolutionary party… if the Communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter revolutionary despair.” 

Trotsky blamed both wings of the left for the growth of the fascists: While the reformists suffocated struggle the far left shouted from the sidelines. The result was a shift to the right in German politics. The German Communists focused on the threat Hitler represented but they didn’t mobilise workers against capitalism. 

“The programmatic declaration of the German Communist Party before the election was completely and exclusively devoted to fascism, as the main enemy. Nevertheless fascism came out the victor, gathering not only millions of semi-proletarian elements, but also many hundreds of thousands of industrial workers.” 

They offered the working class no call to action – except to offer support to isolated strikes. They just condemned the fascists. Trotsky described this moralism as trying to “grab the workers by the throat”.  Trotsky offered a solution to the Communists. There was a way to work with and against the union leaders and SPD at the same time. This was the theory of the “united front”. He wrote:

“The radicalisation of the masses will affect the Social Democratic workers long before they cease to be Social Democrats.” The key was to find ways to bring those workers into common action alongside the Communists. To prove in practice the Communists were the real deal. What kind of issues did he suggest campaigns on? 

They had to be issues with broad appeal that won respect for the Communists with workers who might be in the Social Democratic camp or even those who could be attracted to voting for Hitler: 

“The problem of unemployment is one of the most important elements of the political crisis. The struggle against capitalist rationalisation and for the seven hour day remains entirely on the order of the day.” He also connected these economic struggles to the demand for “economic cooperation” with the workers of Russia. 

“The impatience of the unemployed will inevitably react against the Communist Party” if they didn’t organise campaigns for support for the unemployed. “The proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie interpenetrate, especially under the present conditions, when the reserve army of workers cannot but produce petty traders and hawkers, etc… At present, these elements have gone or are going over to the National Socialists… No class can long exist without prospects and hopes.” 

The most oppressed sections of the working class, facing poverty and unemployment and forced to fight over scraps were attracted by the fascists: 

“Without a widespread campaign against the high cost of living, for a shorter working week, against wage cuts; without drawing the unemployed into this struggle hand in hand with the employed; without a successful application of the policy of the united front” the left would fail. 

They needed mass struggle, Trotsky wrote, to “fight for lower prices. Fight for higher wages.” 

“The mood of the working class is deeply troubled. They are tormented by unemployment and need. But they are goaded even more by the confusion of their leadership and the general mess.” The longer the left went without mobilising workers in mass campaigns against their suffering the more the workers were left demoralised and confused. 

“The perplexity in the ranks of the workers raises the spirits of the fascists.” The lack of mass struggle gave an opening to the fascists. Whereas the “daily struggle of the proletariat sharpens the instability of bourgeois society.” It was by fighting for the workers basic needs that morale could be restored to the class. It was demoralisation that fed the fascists. 

Instead of an orientation towards the masses the Communists took radical workers out of the big unions and into pure “red unions” – further divorcing the revolutionary influence from the masses: “The 200,000 to 300,000 workers who are now organised in independent RGO (Communist) unions could serve as a priceless leaven within the reformist brotherhoods.” 

The tens of thousands of Communists were organising separately to the millions in the main unions. This guaranteed continued reformist dominance of the main unions. It wasn’t a radical strategy because it handed the working class over to the big reformist unions and refused to fight for influence over workers who didn’t yet agree with the socialists. 

The German Communists ignored Trotsky’s advice, declaring in subsequent elections that Hitler’s movement “had peaked”. This was madness. They were hiding from reality. Trotsky reminded them that it was the responsibility of the party to cut off the rise of Hitler: 

“Fascism would fall to pieces if the Communist Party was able to unite the workers.” The lack of a united front strategy from the Communists meant that the union leaders were able to maintain control over most workers. They needed to understand the grave danger the working class faced from the fascists:

“The coming to power of the German “National Socialists” would mean above all the extermination of the flower of the German proletariat.” At the beginning of the 1930s it still wasn’t too late because “influential layers of the bourgeoisie fear the fascist experiment” and Hitler couldn’t come to power without the approval of the establishment. 

Big class struggles would prove that the fascists were “human rubbish” – “on the scales of revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials.” 

There was another Communist Party in Germany, the Socialist Workers Party, that tried to bridge the gap between reform and revolution inside one organisation instead of in united front movements. This was another mistaken strategy. 

Trotsky understood they offered no real leadership to the working class and they justified their programmatic looseness with talk of the class being “above” the party. If the party was supposed to be the organic leaders of class struggles, why would you tell those leading workers to bow to more backward layers? Trotsky wrote: 

“The class, taken by itself, is only material for exploitation. The proletariat assumes an independent role only at that moment when from a social class in itself it becomes a political class for itself. This cannot take place otherwise than through the medium of a party. The party is that historical organ by means of which the class becomes conscious. To say that the “class stands higher than the party” is to assert that the class in the raw stands higher than the class which is on the road to class consciousness. Not only is it incorrect; it is reactionary.” 

“The class is not homogenous. Its different sections arrive at class consciousness by different paths and at different times… The problem of the united front… originates therein.” The point of the united front was common action with reformist organisations to prove to the workers that supported them that the politics of the revolutionaries was better. Unity in struggle and political separation were both necessities. 

Trotksy was scathing in his writings against the attempt by the Socialist Workers Party (SAP) to introduce the contradictions of the united front into a party:

“The policy of the united front cannot serve as a programme for a revolutionary party. And in the meantime the entire activity of the SAP is based on it. As a result, the policy of the united front is carried over into the party itself, that is, it serves to smear over the contradictions between various tendencies. And that is precisely the fundamental function of centrism.” 

By centrism he meant vacillating between reform and revolution. “The daily paper of the SAP is steeped in the spirit of going 50/50.”  But the “very need for a party originates in the plain fact that the proletariat is not born with an innate understanding of its historical interests. The task of the party consists in learning, from experience derived from the struggle, how to demonstrate to the proletariat its right to leadership. Stalinist bureaucracy, on the contrary, holds the opinion that it can demand outright obedience from the proletariat.” 

“Instead of submitting such a one sided ultimatum, which irritates and insults the workers, the party should submit a definite program for joint action” Trotsky wrote. In our day the left is infected with a new form of ultimatum politics – the workers must be “cancelled” for showing any influence of ruling class ideas. If the conditions put to workers to join a united action are too high – for example that they are all already free of racist prejudices – then that isn’t a united front!

The purpose of the united front is to pull workers who do not yet agree with us into common action and to then demonstrate that socialists know how to organise and have the right ideas. Trotsky quoted Lenin, who always argued against both reformism and against moralism from the sidelines: 

“For the task of the Communists consists in being able to convince the backward; to know how to work among them and not fence ourselves off from them by a barrier of fictitious and puerile “left” slogans.” Trotsky added: “This holds all the more for the Communist Parties of the West which represent only a tiny minority of the working class.” 

The Communists wanted to give orders to the working class to jump when they were told to – “shrieking alone will not convince them (the workers)” as Trotsky put it – while the Socialist Workers Party tailed the working class and refused to show any leadership. They were both wrong. The key was to win authority by leading mass class struggles and simultaneously use that authority to argue for socialism. Then you could avoid both mistaken strategies. 

There was a way out of these dead ends: 

“By correlating the struggle for power with the struggle for reforms; by maintaining complete independence of the party while preserving the unity of the trade unions; by fighting against the bourgeois regime while at the same time utilising its institutions by relentlessly criticising parliamentarianism – from the parliamentary tribunal; by waging war mercilessly against reforms, and at the same time making practical agreements with the reformists in partial struggles.” 

The tactic of the united front was worked out by Trotsky between the third and fourth congresses of the Communist International. He reminded his readers in the 1930s just what the international movement had agreed back then: 

“The class life of the proletariat is not suspended in this period preparatory to the revolution… the working masses sense the need for unity in action.” The working class suffers every day under capitalism. Socialists have to work with others on the left to fight for the basic needs of the class or face being discredited in workers eyes: “For those who do not understand that task the party is only a propaganda society.” 

The united front had to include the reformist leaders. They had the workers. Without them it wasn’t a united front and wouldn’t serve to win workers over to revolutionary ideas. Socialists needed to be: “dragging the reformists from their asylums and placing them alongside ourselves in front of the eyes of the struggling masses”.  

Those who thought this was being “soft” on the reformists were like the “journalist who believes that he rids himself of reformism by ritualistically criticising it without ever leaving his editorial office.” Calling a front for struggle under slogans that were so radical the masses didn’t respond was actually cowardice and found “no response in the masses”. In fact those who claimed to want a revolution but failed to see the necessity of truly mass work were fools according to Trotsky because:

“The soviet is the highest form of united front” The mass assemblies of workers that had occupied workplaces and taken power in Russia were organisations that included the whole fighting section of the working class, revolutionary and reformist, and all the parties representing workers. During the Russian revolution there was a fight inside the soviet assemblies between these revolutionary and reformist workers. 

How did the ultra lefts expect to get soviets, which were mass united fronts, if they wouldn’t even engage in preparatory mass work now, before a revolution? Rejecting the united front in the present meant rejecting the united fronts, the soviet assemblies, of the future – in fact rejecting revolution. Ultra left posturing on the sidelines is verbal radicalism and actual cowardice. 

The reformist Social Democrats, instead of relying on class struggle, appealed to the German state to defend them from Hitler. But that state was preparing to coalesce with the fascists if the crisis continued. “Social Democracy” he wrote “wants the working class to be a lackey” but “no one will follow a lackey!” Trotsky pointed out the foolishness of relying on the state or the police to defend the working class movement: 

“The fact that the police was originally recruited in large numbers from among Social Democratic workers is absolutely meaningless. Consciousness is determined by environment even in this instance. The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker. Of late years these policemen have had to do much more fighting with revolutionary workers than with Nazi students.” 

Trotsky understood that the machinery of the German state would work with the fascists to destroy the left and that ultimately Hitler couldn’t come to power without the help of the ruling class. This informed Trotsky’s approach to the suggestion of a left President to block Hitler’s rise. He pulled no punches when it came to describing the politicians of the soft left:

“The politicians of reformism, these dextrous wirepullers, artful intriguers and careerists, expert parliamentary and ministerial manoeuverists are no sooner thrown out of their habitual sphere by the course of events, no sooner placed face to face with momentous contingencies, than they reveal themselves to be — there is no milder expression for it — utter and complete fools.”

“To rely on a President is to rely on “the state!”… these Marxists… yelp for the night watchman to come to their aid. They say to the state “Help! Intervene!”  Which means “Bruning don’t force us to defend ourselves with the might of workers’ organisations, for this will only arouse the entire proletariat and then the movement will rise above the bald plates of our party leadership.”

“The idea of nominating a candidate for president on the part of the united workers’ front is at root a false one. A candidate can only be nominated on the grounds of a definite programme. The party has no right to sacrifice during elections the mobilisation of its supporters and a test of its strength.”

United fronts for struggle weakened the reformists and strengthened the revolutionaries. United political fronts did the opposite. The reformists were after all “the hangers on of the bourgeoisie… doomed to wretched ideological parasitism.” They’d do anything to avoid being dragged into mass protests and strikes and tried to distort united fronts back into political compromises. 

“Election agreements, parliamentary compromises concluded between the revolutionary party and the Social Democracy serve, as a rule, to the advantage of the Social Democracy. Practical agreements for mass action, for purposes of struggle, are always useful to the revolutionary party…. No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together!”

The reformists exaggerated the strength of Hitler’s movement and played down the strength of the working class, parliament, he wrote, “is a trick mirror. In parliamentary representation the strength of an oppressed class is way below its actual strength and contrariwise: the representation of the bourgeoisie even the day before its downfall will still be a masquerade.” Only mass class struggle “tears away all the covers from the actual relation of forces.” 

The threat of fascism was used to justify an opportunist unity of the left and the call to run the state. In 1932 the Social Democrats lurched left in the face of the growing threat from Hitler. They called for a left government to stop the fascists. Trotsky responded with tactical clarity: 

“The Communist Party must say to the working class (the right wing government) is not to be overthrown by any parliamentary game… the Communists obligate themselves in advance to use no violent methods against a Social Democratic government that bases itself upon the majority of the working class and insofar as it guarantees the Communists freedom of agitation and organisation.” 

This was the traditional socialist position of external support for a left government. Why external? Because those who ran the capitalist state could coalesce with Hitler and crush the working class. A parliamentary majority of reformist politicians didn’t change the nature of the machine. Communists would get a hearing from workers by offering to critically support a left government but only if they maintained their freedom to organise and agitate against that government.

The main thing was struggle. Not to get trapped in parliamentary games: “This makes the general strike an indispensable fighting weapon. It must be prepared. A special strike plan must be worked out.” If the power of the working class wasn’t unleashed the victory of Hitler meant death for all factions of the left:

“Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!”

In Greek myth Cassandra was given the power to see the future but she was cursed so that no one would ever believe her true predictions. Without organisation knowledge is useless. Trotsky had no organisation in Germany – an organisation that could  lead struggle and argue in every workplace, in working class communities, in unions and on every street corner. 

In Ireland the fascist movement is only beginning. Their power is inversely proportional to the confidence of the working class to fight. When the working class mobilises in large numbers the fascists are revealed to be “human garbage” – isolated individuals with no real economic power. One national strike by a big workforce and they’d be irrelevant. 

But our class is held back by the likes of ICTU, who refuse to fight, and by left moralism, that refuses to prioritise mass struggle on workers’ basic needs. Such mass struggles never automatically undermine racism but they fertilise the soil for socialist ideas to gain purchase. Without mass struggle you have no authority within our class. The left is made up of many activists who are not working class. They will have an instinctive urge to stay in a left bubble. 

As Labour type parties have shifted right on economics, defending austerity in power, they’ve left behind the blue collar working class and moved to courting middle class voters on social issues. Moralism on social issues can cover retreat from class politics because you can shout down those who appeal for class politics as not being anti-racist enough. 

Ultra left moralism and the move to the right on the question of government and the state go hand in hand. We have to reject both. The price we pay for not pursuing the strategies and mass class struggle tactics outlined by Trotsky is far too high – it’s hope and socialism, or despair and barbarism. We can’t just summon up big struggles but we need to be seen to be at the forefront of fighting for them. 

“The fascists find their human material mainly in the petty bourgeoisie. The latter has been entirely ruined by big capital. There is no way out for it in the present social order, but it knows of no other. Its dissatisfaction, indignation, and despair are diverted by the fascists away from big capital and against the workers. It may be said that fascism is the act of placing the petty bourgeoisie at the disposal of its most bitter enemies. In this way, big capital ruins the middle classes and then, with the help of hired fascist demagogues, incites the despairing petty bourgeoisie against the worker. The bourgeois regime can be preserved only by such murderous means as these. For how long? Until it is overthrown by proletarian revolution.”