As the Black Lives Matter protest movement petered out in 2020 and attention shifted to the US election campaign, President Donald Trump issued a bugle call to his white supremacists shock troops: “Proud Boys. Stand down and stand by.” The culmination of this was the paramilitary group’s organising and leadership role in the January 6 insurrection attempt.
There has been a lot of discussion over whether or not Trump and his movement is fascist. We may only be able to say definitely in hindsight. The answer might come down to whether Trump uses regular troops to suppress, disappear and murder working class leaders and succeeds in his aim to overturn the constitution to make a third presidential run.
Too much focus on this question however, obscures the important fact that Trump’s authoritarian policies and global trade ware are already badly impacting the US working class and a fight-back is necessary and underway.
Nonetheless, it is vital to understand what fascism is and the conditions in which it arose.
The revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote extensively in the 1930s about how to fight fascism. His Fascism: What it is and how to fight it provides a Marxist analysis of fascism, its origins, class character and a working class strategy to defeat it.
Trotsky described how the fascist movement in Italy comprised “new leaders from the rank and file”. He argued that fascism is not simply a reactionary military dictatorship, but a mass movement based primarily on small business owners, shopkeepers, professionals and the most backward sections of the working class.
“It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses.”
He said the fascist movement in Germany was “analogous” to the Italian one. “It is a mass movement, with its leaders employing a great deal of socialist demagogy. This is necessary for the creation of the mass movement.”
In moments of a severe financial crisis, such as the 1930s Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany were the ruling class’ brutal response to decaying capitalism.
Fascism in power is an expression of monopoly capital in decay. To stay in power it needs to destroy all democratic institutions, as well as to annihilate the working-class movement and its organisations. The petty-bourgeois masses, that put it in power, do not gain control; they become its victims and tools.
Two sides of crisis
Capitalism’s internal contradictions create a series of crises the working class suffer, including in housing, employment, cost-of-living and the climate. These issues are used by the far right to mobile its base around reactionary racist solutions, which seek to blame minorities for the problems that stem from the capitalist system.
The primary economic crisis of capitalism is its ever declining rate of profit, stagnant growth, massive debt and static markets, particularly since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. The capitalists can boost their profits by going to war, deregulating the economy to remove production costs and cutting social programs and safety nets, coupled with privatisation, and this is the context for the rise of the far right today.
Trump’s movement shares many of the features Trotsky described in the 1920s. Trump’s reactionary base has attracted small capitalists and it clearly has the financial backing of the billionaire class. He has also attracted a working class base by claiming he would lower the cost of living and bring down inflation.
But there are also differences.
The German working class in the 1930s was strong and militant and the capitalist class sought to use the fascists to break that power. The US working class today, while not smashed, faces many anti-union laws: only 9.4% of workers are members of unions, down from 20% in 1983.
Trump is using racism to divide the working class.
His push to use the national guard in Democratic-led cities with Black Mayors and ICE’s kidnapping of people, including US citizens, and deportations to prisons in El Salvador, shows he is testing the waters for martial control.
The DOGE’s axing of 300,000 jobs, Trump’s executive orders attacking medicine and science, including gender affirming treatments, ending USAID funding and his “Big Beautiful Bill” are all aimed at taking rights away and weakening organised labour.
His tariff rules have already severely harmed US agriculture and tourism and are driving up inflation, making life even harder for American workers.
Support for Trump is running at about 40% with a 55% disapproval rate.
But while Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement is working to get itself better organised during this term of his presidency, so too is working class resistance against it. While the US does not have a workers’ party or movement of labour independents, recently some Democratic governors and mayors have started to resist Trump’s agenda and street demonstrations against ICE kidnappings such as those in LA recently show the depth of that disapproval.
British far right
A far right protest in Britain on September 13, dubbed “Unite the Kingdom”, placed the openly fascist Tommy Robinson at the helm of the march. It was billed as a “demonstration for free speech, British heritage and culture”. This is now the far right’s new, respectable rallying code. However this rally’s main demand and other like it is to end “mass immigration” on the spurious rationale that it threatens British identity. Its emphasis on “free speech” is a dog whistle to get behind the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
Reflecting on the state of British politics after this demonstration, the September 25 Guardian suggested much of Britain was politically disengaged, saying election turnouts are lower, politicians are seen as more similar to each other and “political cynicism and avoidance reign”.
That is almost universally the case in the West, as capitalist governments rotate between brand A and B, offering similar if not the same policies on climate, wages, migration and war.
However, those people subscribing to far-right or neofascist “solutions” and marching at their rallies are far from disengaged. Many are actively racist, having been drip fed racist policies for decades from mainstream parties.
In Britain, the toxic debate over Brexit was led by racist and anti-immigration voices, including Nigel Farage’s UK Independent Party which served to legitimate today’s open racism.
Today, British Labour enjoys just 20% support. A September 26 YouGov poll said “A Reform UK government [is] a near-certainty if an election were held tomorrow”. They could win 311 seats out of 650, leaving them just 15 short of an outright majority and enough to almost certainly form a minority government and take power.
The “Stand up to Racism” counter protest only drew 5000 people in London despite having some trade union support. However local anti-racist protests after the summer 2024 race riots consistently outnumbered the far right in larger towns including Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Brighton and Walthamstow.
The British left may coalesce around the new “Your Party”, scheduled to be founded in November, however if it has a purely parliamentary focus it may end up losing activists looking for a more grassroots approach.
March for Australia
The “March for Australia” rallies on August 31 which demanded immigration be stopped drew between 40,000-50,000 people. In Victoria, the rally was led by Nazi spokesperson Thomas Sewell, who later led an attack on Camp Sovereignty by a group of between 30 and 50 black-clad NSN neo-Nazis.
This march was the first attempt in recent years by the far right to organise its support base, showing they can coordinate nationally. The protest tried to sell their demands, One Nation’s policies, as a legitimate response to housing shortages and cost of living rises. But the National Socialist Network’s organising role and its placement of Sewell at the podium in Naarm/Melbourne, along with MPs in other city’s rallies including Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts and the grand-son of a Lebanese immigrant family, Bob Katter, represented a new bid to bring its racist politics out of the shadows.
Australia’s colonialisation relied on the genocide of First Nations and the theft of their land. Racism was endemic to the colony and the White Australia Policy began immediately after Federation in 1901. First Nations people were not even recognised as being human until the successful 1967 referendum t0 change the constitution.
The two main capitalist parties continue to rely on racism to instill fear about migration, “boat people” and Islamophobia, especially to buy votes at election time. One Nation, once decried by the major parties as extremist, has been helping them set their reactionary immigration agenda since 1997.
Hanson claimed Australia was being “swamped by Asians” in the 1990s. Coalition PM John Howard said refugees had thrown their children overboard, to push his anti-asylum seeker policies in the early 2000s. Later Tony Abbot continued these tropes, with the addition of how the Islamic State terrorist cells would come to Australia if he didn’t “stop the boats”.
The Reclaim Australia marches which organised opposition to Islam in 2015 were small, but significant. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 lock-downs, particularly in Victoria, that the far right began organising again, a lowlight being with its attack on the CFMEU offices in Naarm after the union declared its support for the government’s lockdown restrictions on construction sites.
Confronting the far right
We can learn lessons from history about how to defeat the far right.
While Hitler was being appeased by bourgeois governments, the Stalinist Communist International decided on tactics which not only confused and demoralised the workers movements, it allowed Nazism to win.
Stalin’s categorisation that even capitalist parties were fascist and his assertion that fascism and social democracy were twins made the formation of any united fronts against the rise of fascism impossible.
When the Comintern labelled the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the largest workers party to be “fascist”, it precluded any possibility of forming a united front with workers to confront the threat of fascism. This allowed Nazism to come to power in Germany without a united resistance.
Fighting fascism requires a mass movement of labour and progressive forces to stand against their reactionary politics. That includes socialists, social democrats, greens and liberals.
The anti-racist “Sovereignty never ceded” protest on September 13 in Naarm drew about 7000 people, outnumbering the far right’s 1000 at Parliament House that same day. This was an example of the united front, drawing in many groups, horrified by the “March for Australia” protests two weeks earlier.
Counter protests are important because they help expand our organising capacity which can demoralise and isolate the far right. Our strongest show of solidarity and anti-racism more recently, was the 300,000 strong march for Palestine across Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The military defeat of Italian and German fascism in World War II led most people to conclude that fascism was finished once and for all.
However, the far right and neo-fascist groups will continue to seize their opportunity to push forward their reactionary agenda because capitalism is a system in permanent crisis and they will seize every opportunity to promote their racist and authoritarian solutions.
Whether a significant enough section of the ruling class decide to back them will depend on the organisation of the working class and their allies. This is why socialists must continue to oppose parties and movements that blame oppressed minorities, rather than the unjust capitalist system itself, and build politically independent militant and democratic trade unions.
[Marcus Greville is a member of the Socialist Alliance.]