Around the world, capitalist governments are elevating fascist and extreme-right parties while promoting nationalism, anti-immigrant chauvinism and militarism.
In the United States, former president Donald Trump, with the support of significant sections of the Republican Party, is seeking to build a fascistic movement. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer, openly hails the blood-soaked military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. And in Germany, of all places, the political establishment has elevated the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the official opposition, while leading German academics with state support attempt to relativise and whitewash the crimes of the Nazis.
As Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, explained in the course of his struggle against the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany, fascism is a movement of the ruined petty-bourgeoisie, mobilized by the corporate elite against the working class to stave off revolution from below. The resurgence of fascist forces today is the outcome of a conspiracy of the ruling classes, aware that their agenda of austerity, social inequality, and war has no mass base of support.
The International Committee of the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Party are fighting back against the rise of fascism and alerting the working class of the danger of a descent to all the horrors of the 1930s. Our struggle is based upon the independent political mobilization of the working class, united internationally on the basis of its common class interests, against capitalism and for socialism.
Christoph Vandreier, the deputy chairman of the Socialist Equality Party, defended the right to advocate for the socialist transformation of society in a speech at the Berlin Administrative Court on November 18.
This essay is based on the transcript of the remarks made by David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), in opening an online discussion held January 17 on the significance of the fascist assault on the Capitol in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021.
The White House is the center of a fascistic conspiracy to overturn the Constitution and establish a presidential dictatorship.
The World Socialist Web Site first published this statement on October 14, 2019. It warned that “Trump is utilizing the power of the presidency to create an unconstitutional and illegal dictatorship.” In light of the recent nationwide military/police crackdown, the WSWS is republishing this crucial document.
The alliance of Israel’s political elite with the world’s most reactionary forces demonstrates that Zionism is no less a bitter enemy of Jewish workers and youth than it is of the Palestinians.
The European Court’s findings confirm the WSWS’s assessment of the massacre 10 years ago and underscore the anti-democratic nature of the Kiev regime.
Together with The German People, the documentaries The Moelln Letters and The Lie were met with great interest at this year’s Berlin film festival.
Australian and New Zealand leaders have hypocritically condemned Islamophobia, even as they embrace the fascist Trump and back the Gaza genocide.
Someone from the SEP or World Socialist Web Site will contact you promptly.
The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party), the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, is leading the fight against the efforts of the German ruling class to rehabilitate fascism.
While the AfD has been elevated to the official opposition of the German parliament and systematically provided with media time to promote its fascistic propaganda, an effort is underway among German academics to create a new historical narrative based on ferocious anti-Marxism, the trivialization of Nazi crimes, and the rehabilitation of Hitler.
This has been led by the university administration at Humboldt University, in Berlin, which has provided unstinging support for its right-wing extremist professor of history, Jörg Baberowski, who is notorious for his lying claims that “Hitler was not vicious” and that the Führer did not want to know anything about Auschwitz and the mass extermination of the Jews.
Why Are They Back? analyzes the interaction of high-level political conspirators, media propagandists and right-wing academics at Berlin’s Humboldt University in the present-day resurgence of Nazism and German militarism.
Between 1931 and 1933, Trotsky sought to arouse the most politically conscious sections of the German working class and the socialist intelligentsia to the immense danger posed by fascism and the urgent necessity for a unified struggle of the proletariat to prevent a Nazi victory. Trotsky’s writings on German fascism rank among the greatest works of political literature in the twentieth century. No one else wrote with such prescience, precision and passion on the German events and their world historic implications.
The victory of Hitler’s Nazi Party in January 1933 was the result of the betrayals of Social Democracy and Stalinism. The Social Democrats placed their confidence in the bourgeois Weimar Republic and tied the working class to the capitalist state. The Stalinist policy of “social fascism”—which claimed that the SPD and Hitler’s party were “twins”—opposed all forms of collaboration between the Communist Party and the Social Democracy, even for defensive purposes.
The lessons of Trotsky's struggle are of acute political relevance today amidst a universal turn toward fascism and authoritarianism by capitalist governments around the world.
In these essays Trotsky examines the political and social origins of fascism and elaborates the strategical and tactical methods for the defense of the working class against this deadly menace.
A little more than a half-century has passed since the collapse of Hitler's Third Reich, and mankind is still struggling to come to grips with its legacy of horror and bestiality.
The Germany Communist Party had a perspective and a political line which completely misjudged the political situation, disoriented and paralyzed the working class, and finally allowed Hitler to take power without meeting any organized working class resistance.
Rossoliński-Liebe’s biography of Bandera provides irrefutable evidence for the horrific crimes and fascist outlook of Stepan Bandera, who is now widely glorified as a “hero” by the Ukrainian regime.
The role that Snyder is playing in justifying the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the alliance of US imperialism with the Ukrainian far right make it imperative to investigate his book more closely.
The alliance between Canadian imperialism and Ukrainian fascism is most strikingly embodied in the person of Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. The granddaughter of a prominent Ukrainian Nazi collaborator who was provided refuge in Canada following the Third Reich’s downfall, she is the leading anti-Russia war-hawk in the Trudeau Liberal government.
The collaboration of Germany and the US with Ukrainian fascists has historical precedents reaching back 100 years.
Workers, who are today confronted with the unfolding maelstrom of a new imperialist redivision of the world, the buildup of fascist forces, social counterrevolution and an ongoing pandemic and climate catastrophe, have a tremendous amount to learn from the heroic but also tragic experience of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Holocaust.
Under conditions of an international resurgence of fascist forces, the series, which had an enormous impact in West Germany in 1979, has lost none of its relevance.
The following is an addendum to the lecture “Imperialism and the political economy of the Holocaust,” delivered by Nick Beams at San Diego State University on April 29.
This lecture was delivered at San Diego State University on April 29. It was the eighth in a series entitled "Killing for a higher cause: Political violence in a world in crisis" sponsored by the Institute on World Affairs within the Political Science Department of the San Diego State University.
Sabisky’s resignation is meaningless and all the questions now being raised in the media about “vetting processes” are irrelevant.
Innumerable posts on social media have drawn the connection between the reactionary ideology of eugenics and the British government’s criminally delayed and negligent response to the pandemic.
Eugenicist Carl has raised over $100,000 to begin a legal appeal against the St. Edmund’s College decision to rescind his appointment, on the grounds of wrongful dismissal.
Carl’s dismissal is a victory over a global campaign to revive far-right ideology on university campuses.
The alliance of Israel’s political elite with the world’s most reactionary forces demonstrates that Zionism is no less a bitter enemy of Jewish workers and youth than it is of the Palestinians.
The European Court’s findings confirm the WSWS’s assessment of the massacre 10 years ago and underscore the anti-democratic nature of the Kiev regime.
Together with The German People, the documentaries The Moelln Letters and The Lie were met with great interest at this year’s Berlin film festival.
Australian and New Zealand leaders have hypocritically condemned Islamophobia, even as they embrace the fascist Trump and back the Gaza genocide.
Coalition negotiations between the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats to form a new federal government began Thursday. The earlier exploratory talks already left no doubt that this will be the most right-wing German government since the fall of the Third Reich.
Young workers and students who want to fight against fascism, militarism and social cuts need a clear understanding of the Left Party, which plays a key role in implementing social cuts and the deportation of refugees, and also fundamentally agrees with government policy on the question of war.
Even though the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) will not be part of the administration, the new government programme clearly bears its hallmark.
In the following video, the chairman of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP), Christoph Vandreier, talks about the result of the 2025 federal election and explains “how the fight against fascism and war must be waged.”
There are striking images and certain convincing performances, but on the whole the filmmakers seem very much out of their depth. The work is starved of genuine historical and social insight.
We workers must take up the principle that "an injury to one is an injury to all," regardless of race, nationality, citizenship or legal status. We will fight to defend our immigrant neighbors and the rights of the working class.
“There used to be skinheads in bomber jackets and combat boots. Today, however, the neo-Nazis are sitting in parliament wearing ties and suits!”
The result of Germany’s federal election on February 23 is the product of a deep political and social crisis that will lead to explosive class conflicts.
Germany’s 2025 Federal Election has exacerbated the political crisis in Germany and Europe. The result confronts workers and young people who want to fight against fascism, militarism and social cuts with fundamental political questions and tasks.
These parties have reacted with glee to Donald Trump’s election as US president, recognising that they now have an extremely powerful ally across the Atlantic with whom they can press a reactionary agenda already substantially adopted by European governments.
For the first time since the fall of the Third Reich 80 years ago, there is a real possibility that a party with direct ideological continuity with the Nazis will enter government.
In the past few days, tens of thousands in over 100 cities have protested and paid tribute to the nine young people with a migrant background, who were shot dead by the German racist Tobias Rathjen five years ago, on 19 February 2020.
Constant incitement against refugees and migrants, far-right conspiracy theories about “left-wing elites” or the denial of pandemics—in Germany, all of this has been rendered socially acceptable in recent years, promoted by media and government representatives.
Regardless of which parties form a government or whether there will be new elections, social cuts, anti-refugee agitation and increasing rearmament spending will be at the centre of the next government’s agenda.
The entire campaign for this month’s federal election is a repulsive spectacle. All the parties in the Bundestag (parliament) and their candidates to be the next chancellor are competing with each other in inciting anti-refugee hatred, calling for more German and European rearmament spending and currying favour with the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The SGP is running in the early federal elections on February 23 to oppose the all-party coalition for war and social cuts, and to build an international movement against war and capitalism.
