Fighting Fascism: from the Past to the Future

by Karyn Pomerantz, 4-24-2023

This blog article offers a definition and description of the signs of fascism, how it developed in several countries in the 1930s and 1940s, the ways people fought back, and the lessons they teach us. We will explore the Popular Front and anarchist responses compared to a revolutionary strategy.

What is Fascism? Is the US a Fascist State?

Fascism is a stage of capitalism run by the same class of people as under “democratic” (liberal) capitalism. It is not a new or different system. It develops when the ruling class cannot govern as “usual” and requires brute force to control workers to accomplish its goals (https://multiracialunity.org/2020/08/17/updating-fascism-usa/).

People often believe that fascism requires politicians like Trump or DeSantis who spread a vicious discourse on racism and inspire white nationalists. Fears that either may gain the presidency have pushed liberal voters into the Democratic Party camp or into total despair and inaction.

However, fascism serves the interests of the same political and economic ruling class as under liberal democrats. It is easier for this class to keep its power peacefully by convincing workers to accept oppression rather than resorting to a more violent, disruptive fascist agenda.

Liberal democrats like Biden and former Democratic Party administrations give lip service to democracy in many countries. When US corporations need to steal resources, markets, and cheap labor overseas, the government will install fascist regimes, such as in Chile, Argentina, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

While their practices have elements of fascism, such as breaking strikes and deporting people, they do not signify that we have a fascist form of capitalism. If a liberal government can rule and milk the working class without sparking massive disruption, there is no need to use extreme force and repression to govern.

The US Economy Now and Then

Today, the US economy struggles to compete against China’s and has less flexibility to satisfy the working class. The social safety net, never adequate, has more holes than net; it is harder for all workers to secure the necessities for life like jobs while workers of color suffer from unemployment rates twice as high as others. With the end of the Covid Public Health Emergency, workers will lose expanded health care, telehealth, food stamps, eviction protections, and free Covid medicines, vaccines, masks, and tests. Forecasters warn that fifteen million people could lose Medicaid coverage, and many more will default on mortgages and rents.

In the 1930s, communists organized militant unions, and waged campaigns against unemployment and evictions, threatening capitalism. In response, President Roosevelt established the New Deal to “preserve capitalism;” it offered millions of jobs and established Social Security but excluded black domestic workers and Mexican farm workers. The economy today does not have the money to pay for large social programs due to reduced taxes on the rich and lower productivity compared to China. In fact, the government has cut food stamp allocations to $23 per month and made Medicaid eligibility more difficult to secure. Nonetheless, there are abundant funds for the war in Ukraine to control resources, markets, and superpower status. Both imperialist sides decimate Ukrainian and Russian workers to achieve their goals (https://multiracialunity.org/2022/03/02/war-in-ukraine-the-only-good-imperialist-is-a-dead-imperialist/).

What Are the Characteristics of Fascism?

These characteristics of fascism enable capitalism to survive:

Racism keeps workers divided and weakened to keep a small group of owners in power. Planters and businessmen in the shipbuilding, textile, banking, and insurance industries used the most egregious racism to profit from slavery. It continues today in different forms. Black people have been living under terrifying conditions ever since. They have been jailed, scapegoated, and killed by disease and police. Indigenous people experienced genocide from the days of the European colonialists and still suffer marginalization, rape, murder, and escalating poverty. Migrants face horrific conditions as Homeland Security detains thousands, separates families, and returns asylum seekers to their native countries where they often face impoverishment, death, rape, and violence. The US rulers rely on racist ideology to turn white US citizens, also suffering, against migrants and workers of color by framing them as criminals, competitors for jobs, and drug dealers. Under fascism, attacks on the “other” intensify with mass displacement and imprisonment.

Eugenics is a particular form of racism that the US developed, and Hitler adopted. Elders and people with mental illness and physical disabilities were labeled “useless eaters” and murdered before others were sent to concentration camps. Sound familiar? The elimination of the Covid emergency benefits also sacrifices “disposable” people. This especially affects Long Covid patients (4 million unable to work), undocumented immigrants, poor families, and communities of color who require these benefits due to illness, unemployment, or non-living wages.

Nationalism and patriotism prepare workers to side with their governments in wars rather than uniting with class brothers and sisters around the world. It conditions people to accept the lie that the US fights wars for humanitarian reasons.

The oppression of women and the indoctrination of children build the ranks of fascists. The Nazis glorified Aryan women as mothers and rewarded them for producing as many children as possible. The Nazi Party organized the Hitler Youth for boys and the League of German Girls to instill fascist ideology and military discipline. Young girls and boys attended mandatory summer camps where hundreds of girls returned home pregnant. Many US school districts also mandate military training for teens in ROTC.

Anti-communism prevents the growth of socialist and communist movements and justifies killing radicals. Anti-communist propaganda portrays radical workers as untrustworthy, dictatorial, and controlled by other countries (mainly Russia and China). All the major capitalist countries were terrified that workers, inspired by the Russian Revolution, would follow their lead. Communists were the first Nazi political targets, and tens of thousands were murdered in Germany and occupied countries. Eliminating the Soviet Union was the primary objective of Nazi Germany and the Allies during WWII.

Severe repression eliminates strikes, unions, and any opposition by leftists, academics, artists, and liberals. It involves mass roundups, torture, imprisonment, and executions.

Censored education attacks access to history, ideas, and authors that teach about capitalism and its oppressions. It includes book bans, controlled curriculum, criminalization of critical race theory, drag story hours, and exclusion of anti-racist and labor history as well as other types of rebellion. It spreads disinformation and unscientific information to confuse and misdirect people.

Fighting Fascism

WWI and the Depression of the 1930s devastated the world’s working class, increasing poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and hunger. The Allies spent a fortune on the war with money and lives. Workers in the US and Europe rebelled with large strikes and demonstrations. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union did not experience a depression and offered hope that another social system could serve the working class. Governments in countries like Spain, Italy, and Germany instituted fascist measures to control its workers who rebelled against post-war austerity.

However, except for the Soviet Union, the communists were not able to stop fascism or seize power due to the politics of the popular front and anarchism. Popular front politics called for forming coalitions with anti-communist groups and suspending the fight for socialism. Anarchism called for forming collectives, worker-controlled factories and farms, but without a state to maintain governance. We’ll see how this affected antifascist outcomes in several countries. These ideas are hotly debated today.

This section discusses the strengths and weaknesses of antifascist strategies and offers examples from several selected countries.

Major Antifascist Politics and Practices

Communists, socialists, and anarchists were the major political leaders of the fight against fascism before and during WWII. They all envisioned a society where workers lived in a more equitable society. However, there were deep differences in their approaches. The communist parties directed by the Soviet Union fought for a revolution that would replace capitalism with socialism. Socialists favored an electoral approach to taking power while anarchists urged workers to establish worker run co-ops without any state structure.

The line of fighting directly for socialism changed in 1935 when the 7^th World Congress of the Comintern (communist parties around the world led by the Soviet Union) met. It adopted the policy of the United Front which directed the world’s communist parties to join coalitions with unions, liberal governments (the social democrats) to beat back the rising fascist movements. At the same time, the communist parties were expected to suppress their revolutionary goals until fascism ended. Its proponents argued that there was insufficient power to win a revolution and the fight against fascism was the priority. After the war, communists who were active in the resistance movements in the cities, sewers, and forests of France, Eastern Europe, and Italy joined the Popular Front’s new social democratic governments, agreed to disarm, and participate in elections. They were allowed to exist as electoral parties in Europe, even large ones, but lost the ability to fight for revolutionary change. totally co-opted by the capitalists. The US ruling class kicked out left-wing union leaders in many industrial unions, convened the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) under Senator Joseph McCarthy to blackball and jail alleged communists, denied GI benefits to black veterans who returned to a life of extreme discrimination, and turned appreciation of the Soviet Union’s destruction of the Nazis into virulent anti-communism and patriotism.

Today, few communist parties reject the Popular Front. It is still a complex issue facing leftists today. They unite with authoritarian neo-colonial rulers against the major imperialists, sell-out union leaders, democratic socialists who believe in elections for social change, and organizations that fight to reform capitalism instead of destroying it. This does not mean that revolutionaries should not join unions, the Democratic Socialists of America, anti-racist and similar movements. We need to join them to attract members to defeat capitalism with multiracial class consciousness and to promote class war. As one poster proclaimed: the only good war is class war!”

Anarchism

Today, many young activists have embraced anarchism. They reject the idea of joining an organized communist party and rely on forming fragmented affinity groups, such as seen in the Occupy movement. They don’t recognize the need to build an organization capable of overthrowing the capitalist state or to protect the newly developing society from its enemies.

They attack communists as being authoritarian, a perspective supported by anti-communist propaganda and the reversal of socialism in the USSR and China. This devolution resulted from many errors made during the first attempts to build socialism, including the practice of the popular front that allowed business groups to join the government. Other failings included nationalism and the two-stage theory of revolution, which meant keeping many aspects of capitalism, such as material incentives, wage differences, and privileges, that did not melt away as expected.

Pacifism

Violence plays a pivotal role in creating and resisting fascism. Yet many people who oppose fascism use non-violent pacifist strategies. Many liberals believe that ignoring the fascists will weaken them or that any type of violence is immoral. On the other hand, we see that violence was essential in many struggles. Andreas Malm, an environmental activist, writes in How to Blow Up a Pipeline that major movements hid behind a rhetoric of non-violence while employing violent tactics to win. These included the struggles for women’s suffrage, US civil rights, the abolition of slavery and apartheid, and the defeat of Nazi Germany.

EXAMPLES OF ANTIFASCIST MOVEMENTS

England and the Fight Against the British Union of Fascism (BUF)

Three million English workers had no jobs during the 1930s. To quell socialist and labor revolts and prevent a communist revolution, the fascists in England, led by the aristocratic Oswald Moseley, organized the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932.

The BUF grew out of the Conservative Party. Many industrialists, newspaper owners, and aristocrats promoted the BUF; some also funded it. The British government and the police protected the BUF, refusing to prohibit their gatherings, racist speech, or physical assaults. Many English newspapers published opinions supporting the German Nazis.

The BUF appealed to disenfranchised English workers by blaming economic problems on Jews and immigrants, and promising decent housing and jobs, promises never delivered. They attacked Jewish residents in London’s East End with vicious taunts, destruction of property, fire bombings, and physical beatings. They rallied around the country to recruit members, spreading terror.

Anti-fascists

Many liberal organizations relied on the politicians to control the violence. They collected over 1,000,000 petition signatures for the Home Secretary to ban a BUF demonstration. The Home Secretary refused.

However, communist, socialist, and labor organizations refused to tolerate the rise of fascism; they did not rely on elections, lobbying, and petitions. Instead, they launched huge community organizing efforts for housing, jobs, and other urgently needed necessities. This lessened the appeal of fascists who played on the insecurities of British workers while doing nothing to improve living conditions.

They also engaged the BUF in hand-to-hand combat. In the battle of Cable Street, over 7,000 fascists gathered in the East End, protected by 10,000 police. The anti-fascists from labor unions, and socialist and communist parties prepared to stop the rally. And they did. Over 300,000 anti-fascists blocked the march, hit Moseley with a rock, and fought his supporters. With all roads blocked to escape, Moseley called off the demonstration.

Following this huge street fight, the BUF eventually retreated and disbanded. England did not have a fifth column of traitors within it as World War II began.

“It is vital therefore that we remember the lessons of Cable Street. Only the organized working class, armed with an understanding of fascism and a dedication to resolute struggle against it, will be capable of destroying its menace once again. In the final analysis, however, it is only the complete destruction of capitalism itself, which needs and breeds fascism with all its attendant horrors, and its replacement with a system that allows the majority control over their own lives for the first time in history, which will guarantee the final defeat of fascism (The Battle of Cable Street, 1936, www.marxist.com, Ghosts of Cable Street, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv9i76Aj8oM).

The anti-fascist fight did not lead to a movement for socialism. As presented above, the Popular Front policy encouraged the communist parties to unite with labor and other organizations to fight Nazism, leading to the left abandoning their revolutionary positions.

Spain and the International Brigades

In 1936, General Franco and his Nationalist Party began a war to depose Spain’s Republican government. They launched vicious attacks on labor and revolutionary organizations. Nazi Germany and Italy sent munitions, planes, and financial aid. The Spanish working class rose up in armed rebellion, and left-wing workers from around the world rushed to join their comrades. Known as the International Brigades, approximately 30,000 fought, including 3,000 black and white members of the US Abraham Lincoln Brigade, mostly members of the Communist Party. The casualty rates were very high; many died, including over 750 Lincoln Brigade members.

The US government under the liberal FDR Administration made it difficult for these fighters to leave and return. They criminalized their participation, invalidated their citizenship, and arrested many after the war. They ignored all pleas for weapons and planes in the false guise of neutrality. In fact, Texaco, Shell, and US Standard Oil Company provided fuel, and GM and Ford sent vehicles to fascists in Spain and Germany.

France also created obstacles to entering Spain by shutting its border, forcing the volunteers to climb the icy, steep Pyrenees mountains to enter Spain; 200 died trying to cross.

The men and women volunteers arrived without adequate clothing, weapons, and training. They experienced horrible conditions enduring infestations of lice, bad food, and little sanitation. Some bathed twice a year. Joining these fighters were famous writers like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell who popularized the war.

Britain, ruled by yhe Conservative Party and France, wanted to defeat the militant labor and revolutionary movements, and eventually destroy Soviet communism so they did not fund the anti-fascists.

The Soviet Union was the only country other than Mexico to send arms, military advisors, trainers, planes, and fighters. There would have been no anti-fascist opposition without this aid.

The Spanish Civil War was the first major attack on growing European fascism. It exposed the betrayal of social democratic politicians, built internationalism, and clarified political conflicts among left-wing parties. While the Republicans scored significant victories like saving Madrid from the Nationalists and a few other battles, they eventually lost in 1939 as Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.

Weaknesses of the Antifascist Movement

Although the International Brigades and the Republican Army fought heroically, the anti-fascists had many weaknesses. Materially, they were outgunned. They had old-fashioned, inoperable weapons, little training, inedible food, inadequate clothing and protective gear, and terrible medical care despite the many nurses and doctors who operated under exhausting conditions.

Politically, the antifascists belonged to different antagonistic parties, the anarchists in the POUM and communists loyal to the Soviet Union’s line. Although the anarchists seized power in Barcelona in 1936 and started to create a more equal and moneyless society, they thought it was against their principles to be administrators themselves. Thus, they allied with liberals and were ousted by 1937 (Lessons of People’s War in Spain 1936-1939, Progressive Labor Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 5 (Oct. 1974), 106-116).

France

Although the Germans invaded and defeated France in June 1940, no real resistance emerged until the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. In fact, many in France passively accepted the German Nazis who relied on many informers to arrest their opposition, while the French police actively rounded up Jews and others for their conquerors. The Communist Party had been directed by Moscow to restrain itself before the invasion, but then it became the most prominent arm of resistance. The Communists had the most experience of how to operate secretly and had the only group of fighters with military expertise, including veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Many women, Jews, natives and immigrants; religious groups; students and academics; refugees from Eastern Europe; and French nationalists became involved in the resistance. When the Germans tried to force masses of Frenchmen to work for them, many fled to the countryside and formed rural Maquis(resistance) groups.

From 1942, de Gaulle and his British sponsors attempted to unify all the resistance groups. The communists cooperated in this effort, under advice from the USSR, but maintained much of their autonomy. At the end of the war, they controlled large areas and had 100,000 men and women under arms. Some wanted to use this power and their wide esteem to make revolution, but the Comintern urged them to participate in de Gaulle’s government as an electoral party.

German Nazis

Germany also suffered from the Great Depression after WWI. In addition to this, the Allies had bombed many cities and demanded and received large reparation payments ($33 billion), plunging Germany into an inflationary economic disaster as its currency lost its value. The war left people on the verge of starvation after the government sent their food and money to the troops.

Rebellions broke out during the post-war years, overthrowing the Kaiser and threatening revolution. During this time, the revolutionary communist Spartacist Party developed, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who were assassinated by the government. The communist party of Germany (KPD) joined the Spartacists. It also joined Parliament to challenge the German liberals electorally, rejecting the principle of class against class. Instead, they attacked the social democrats as the major enemy over the fascists. They rejected social democratic politics because they believed capitalism could be improved, built illusions about voting, and attacked communist politics.

Meanwhile, the KPD grew from 20,000 members in 1920 to 140,000 in 1927. Their large size and experience allowed them to move underground and oppose the Nazis throughout their rule. Their mistakes of attacking the Social Democratic Party (SPD) over the Nazi Party weakened them. When the KPD asked the social democrats to unite with them, the SPD refused.

Fascism developed speedily and strongly in Germany during the 1930s. The National Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazi Party, organized in the 1920s to place Hitler in power and to spread anti-Marxist, anti-Semitic propaganda. In the Beer Haus Putsch of 1923, Hitler led a group of Nazis to kill the elected rulers of Bavaria and claim power. However, he was arrested and imprisoned for 11 months where he wrote his political manifesto, Mein Kampf. Turning away from a strategy of seizing power with physical violence, the Nazi Party embarked on an electoral campaign for chancellorship.

Hitler promised economic growth and political power for Germany. President Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor with little opposition in 1933. In subsequent elections, Nazi politicians won most seats in the German Reichstag, its parliament, and passed laws giving the Party control over the police, excluding any socialist and communist party members in the government, killing 4,000 communist party members, and sending political opponents to the Dachau concentration camp. It smashed the unions and banned and burnt 20,000 books written by Jewish and liberal authors. Meanwhile, newspapers in England and the US applauded these anti-communist actions.

The Nazi Party built a massive movement of working-class Germans. Relying on its racist eugenics movement, it labeled its whiter, blonder non-Jewish Germans the Aryan race. They served the Party with extreme loyalty. Meanwhile, the Nazi Party attacked anyone who resisted with violence, murder, and terror.

The Nazis destroyed labor, socialist, and communist threats to businesses. The ruling rich built and supported the Nazis for their successful destruction of labor and unions. With the left parties destroyed, the Nazi Party headed east to destroy the Soviet Union, occupying countries along the way. The remaining communists went underground to spread educational materials to encourage resistance. The Nazis killed 30,000 KPD members and sent 150,000 to the camps.

The Nazis also imprisoned millions of soldiers and civilians in slave labor and concentration camps; millions of prisoners died producing materials and armaments for Germany and the Allies, including the US. Nonetheless, they could not defeat the Soviet people.

The United States Fascist Movements and Collusion with Germany

The US government entered WWII to stop the Nazis from capturing Europe. However, it also wanted to destroy communism in the USSR. It built fascist organizations allied with Germany. Henry Ford financed, disseminated, and supported racist propaganda against Jews and immigrants. Father Charles Coughlan, a precursor to Fox News, spread virulent racism over the airways. Eugenicists supported them with phony scientific claims of white supremacy, resulting in over 60,000 forced sterilizations by the 1970s.

German citizens and emigres formed the fascist German American Bund. They drove out labor activists, progressives, communists, and socialists from their jobs and unions. Thousands of anti-fascists were imprisoned under severe conditions. Another Klan like organization, the Black Legions, funded by DuPont, spread terror and murder (The Black Legions, It Can Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis).

Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle, published The Flivver King about Henry Ford who:

“… pledged to put down the Reds and preserve the property interests of the country; to oust the Bolshevik [Roosevelt] from the White House and all his pink professors from the government services … [and] to make it a shooting offense to talk communism or to call a strike (https://countercurrents.org/2023/04/wwii-holocaust-could-never-have-happened-without-american-corporations-investing-joint-venturing-with-hitlers-poor-nazi-germany-)

While opposing Germany on the battlefield, US companies partnered with German industries during and after the war, making up to $14 million in 1938. Major corporations like IBM, I.G. Farben, DuPont, Ford, Texaco, and GM contracted with Germany to provide vehicles, oil, munitions, and data systems, often using German slave labor prisoners to manufacture their products. Banks like Chase Manhattan processed the money from these ventures.

The US ambassador to Germany in 1936 revealed that:

“A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. …. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy.”

(More on blog post, 5-1-2023)

US Left Responds to War

As during the build-up to WWI, communists opposed US entry into WWII because it represented a rivalry between imperialist powers cloaked by a veneer of anti-racism. The treatment of black workers and soldiers contrasted with meaningless pledges to fight racism abroad just like all the performative diversity pledges today. Meaningless talk. This isolationist stance drew sharp attacks against the socialist and communist parties. The Communist Party changed its line to follow the policy of the Comintern and joined with others in the Popular Front to support the war. The Popular Front consisted of all groups that opposed Hitler, even if they were anti-communist. It meant that building a revolutionary movement that could eliminate the causes of war would have to wait.

Soviet Union Stops the Nazis

The Soviet Union stopped the Nazis during World War II through long and grueling battles and courageous resistance. Pro-Soviet partisans fought Nazi soldiers behind enemy lines in the forests and cities. To protect manufacturing, Soviet workers carried industrial plants to safer territory. They had been won to left principles and were willing to make enormous sacrifices rather than collaborate with the Nazis. Unlike in other countries, they was no fifth column of traitors once the war began.

The Soviets had strong generals to direct the fighting, but it was the political commitment from millions of Soviet workers of all ages, backgrounds, and genders who won the war. They fought door to door in Leningrad and Stalingrad and turned the Nazis around with extreme bravery. However, much of this loyalty was for the “motherland” rather than for socialism.

This commitment of millions of residents made the difference in stopping the Nazis; people were willing to sacrifice their lives to defeat them. The Nazi defeat in the USSR, in which over 27 million civilians and soldiers died, was the turning point of the war. Fearing that the USSR would take over more territory, the US stepped up its European Front operations. By 1945, the Nazis were defeated.

Questions to Ask and Lessons to Learn

Who Enables Fascism?

Back to our earlier question: who will enable fascism to develop today? Liberal anti-racists? Working class violent white nationalists? Anarchists? On the one hand, people with liberal or progressive ideas believe that capitalism can be reformed; all we need to do is hold candlelight vigils against fascist demonstrations.

This response occurred many times when the Klan and Nazis rallied during the 1980s around the US. The International Committee Against Racism, the Communist Workers Party, and Progressive Labor Party, and others organized workers and students to go out to the rallies and stop them. The Grand Wizard of the Klan remarked on a radio interview that these counter attacks limited their recruitment because people did not want to join an organization that was beaten.

The Democrats, democratic socialists, and conservatives currently support the neo-fascist government of Ukraine while pretending or being misled to believe it is a fight to protect democracy. The liberal FDR who wanted to preserve capitalism refused to send any aid to the anti-fascists fighting Franco in Spain. Roosevelt cancelled the citizenship of the Lincoln Brigade volunteers and blocked their entrance to Spain. The liberal French government closed its borders with Spain to stop them from crossing into Spain.

Today, the liberal US government continues to support the fascist government of Israel; US police continue to kill 1000 unarmed persons a year, and the liberal government in Atlanta, Georgia has killed one person and jailed Forest Defender activists who oppose Cop City with domestic terrorism charges, keeping many in jail without any bail. Cop City will destroy the forests to make way for a huge police training facility and movie sets.

Is this any different than the Trump Administration’s attack on the Water Defenders? Hundreds of native and non-indigenous Water Defender activists courageously occupied Standing Rock for months to prevent a pipeline from destroying the land and water. US cops shot and arrested many protesters.

In a nutshell, to stop fascism, we need:

Commitment to a revolutionary movement aiming for a new egalitarian society rather than reforming capitalism.
Internationalism – an injury to one is an injury to all.
Long-term organizing and fighting for workers’ needs, like housing and jobs.
To build workers’ leadership, increase awareness of how capitalism works, and strengthen commitment to establishing a workers’ run society.
A massive, coordinated party to discuss, plan, and implement actions rather than anarchistic affinity groups operating independently and spontaneously.
Mass violence against fascist movements to limit their power or defeat them in war.
To increase the militancy within the labor movement and oppose reliance on liberal politicians.
To reject racist ideas and practices that target people who are Jewish, Asian, brown, black, and immigrant.
Anti-sexism that burden women with unpaid labor, restrict reproductive health services, justifies sexual abuse, and robs the movement of women’s political skills.
Multiracial international solidarity can ensure that no worker is stereotyped, stigmatized, ostracized, and killed. It strengthens our movements by increasing our numbers and commitment to one another.
To recognize that liberals as well as openly racist politicians like Trump can turn to fascism to control rebellion.

The US ruling class will stop at nothing under any administration, Democrat or Republican, to hold on to its wealth and power. Once fascists are in power, they cannot be voted away.

However, the working class of all countries outnumbers our oppressors. Our racist divisions, faith in capitalist run electoral processes, and pacifism restrain us from building a strong anti-fascist movement. Learning from history can help us develop strategies that will strengthen our movements today. Whether we live under fascism today or not, our response is the same: building tight knit bonds among workers everywhere to develop anti-capitalist programs and strategies to eliminate capitalism and its inevitable wars and repression.