Debate – Are we heading for a new 1933?

Debate – Are we heading for a new 1933?

‘Fascism’ is the wrong term for current developments

Daniel Kreutz responds to Helmut Dahmer's editorial in SoZ 4/25

[This article posted on 6/1/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.sozonline.de/2025/06/debatte-vor-einem-neuen-1933/.]

Trump, Milei, and Meloni are ultra-right—but back then, class relations were different: there was a strong labor movement and young revolutions. “Fascism” is the wrong term for today's developments. Daniel Kreutz responds to Helmut Dahmer's editorial in SoZ 4/25

During the long years of my political socialization as a Trotskyist cadre in the 1970s and 1980s, it was part of our DNA, so to speak, to criticize the indiscriminate labeling of repressive-authoritarian regimes (such as the military dictatorships in Greece, Chile, and Turkey) as “fascist,” which was widespread in the radical left at the time, in favor of more precise, differentiated analyses. We were inspired by the class-based political works of Trotsky, who recognized the catastrophe looming with the Nazi party earlier and more sharply than most other minds of his time.

Since then, fascism has not been merely a party with an ultra-right ideology for me, but above all an organized violent mass movement of middle classes threatened with declassification and socially desperate, uprooted people who direct extralegal terror primarily against the labor movement. The bourgeoisie can use this “mob movement,” which is alien to its class, as a last resort to save capitalism from a crisis that it is unable to overcome by other means due to the relative strength of the wage-dependent class.

Fascist rule begins with a period of “institutionalized civil war” aimed not only at smashing the labor movement and other forces of democratic opposition and physically destroying their vanguard forces, but also at completely atomizing the wage-dependent class, thus depriving it of any capacity for collective articulation for a long time to come. Despite all the concrete differences, this captures the common features of Italian, German, and Spanish fascism.

Trump, Milei, Meloni, Orban, Modi, and Bolsonaro (who has been voted out of office), as well as their political formations, represent ultra-right-wing views, and their governments attack democratic, social, and human rights more harshly than those of the liberal center. But nowhere are there scenarios that are even remotely comparable to those of “my” concept of fascism. The term does not fit at all. And there is no known theoretical or analytical development that would make it equally applicable to today's hard right as it was to Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. This also seems hardly possible because the underlying class political power relations are radically different today than they were in the 1920s and 1930s.

At that time, in a period marked by the Russian October Revolution and the German November Revolution, the bourgeoisie, faced with powerful trade unions and workers' parties, no longer found the strength to control its systemic crisis by “democratic” means and even had to fear socialist upheavals. The fascists offered not only the complete elimination of the labor movement but also the prospect of military expansion (“living space in the East,” colonies in Africa).

Today, in the wake of the victory of capitalism over post-capitalist but bureaucratic-dictatorial nominal socialism in the Soviet Union and China, as well as the neoliberal “revolution from above” against the welfare state, in which even significant former “workers' parties” played a decisive role, a political (socialist) class movement of wage earners is practically non-existent, and trade union class consciousness is at an all-time low. Given the current balance of power, it is not apparent that capitalist “solutions” to the multiple systemic crisis could fail in the face of determined resistance “from the left.”

No solidarity with the liberal center!

The term “Bonapartism”—another form of authoritarian class rule first analyzed by Marx—also seems inappropriate to me for the regimes of the new hard right. This form of rule responds to a relative equilibrium between the conflicting classes, which blocks parliamentary-democratic solutions to the crisis in the interests of one or the other. The Bonapartist regime can then seemingly rise above the classes and play them off against each other. Incidentally, in 1933, the Nazis did not replace “democracy,” but rather the Bonapartism of Papen/Schleicher.

It is quite obvious that the rise of the new hard right is a product of the regime of the neoliberal “extreme center.” This has marginalized the political representation of social issues, or rather, of socio-ecological issues, while the dismantling of the welfare state for which it is responsible has increased social inequality. This was and is the dismantling of democracy.

At the core of the “democratic” form of capitalist rule is the negotiation of political class compromises in order to integrate powerful (reformist) movements of wage earners. Without such a countervailing power, new spaces open up on the right and “democracy” inevitably drifts to the right itself.

If the social (socio-ecological) needs and interests of wage earners are no longer an issue, political “culture wars” (such as those over migration, sexual orientation, everyday consumption, etc.) trigger divisions in the everyday consciousness of the class: The center has been dismantling asylum law since 1993, created the mass grave in the Mediterranean, and is now testing the limits of what it can get away with in harassing refugees. It is also the center that has been waging or fueling wars for decades and is now openly embracing militarism.

The new hard right is the repulsive symptom of a disease whose source lies in the center.

Some analysts see the electoral successes of the hard right as a “rebellion” by the losers of globalization, which in this country is also reflected in disproportionately high AfD election results among union members. Trump's re-election was, as we know, the result of widespread rejection of the “democratic” alternative. When nothing else works, the liberal elites can at least still scare themselves by voting for the hard right.

Bourgeois “democracy” is politically flexible. Depending on the social and political balance of power, it can present itself as a “progressive new beginning” (Willy Brandt's “dare more democracy”; although there were also professional bans for leftists and an entry ban for Ernest Mandel) or, with strong authoritarian traits, become “illiberal democracy”—a term that, despite its vagueness, is far more appropriate than “fascism.”

If the necessary fight against the far right to prevent a “new 1933” is exaggerated, this suits the red-green center wing, which, despite its active involvement in human rights abuses, authoritarianism, and preparations for war, presents itself to the moralized mass consciousness as “the good guys” standing against “evil.”

Under the prevailing narrative that Weimar failed because of the “disunity of the democrats,” “Never again is now!” suggests that there is nothing more urgent than closing ranks with liberal “democracy.” Yet the continuation of the centrist regime is the basis for the further strengthening of the hard right. In fact, the struggle against the far right should rather be about opening up perspectives for a new class struggle for socio-ecological and grassroots democratic ways out of the multiple systemic crisis. In the absence of sufficiently powerful forces, however, the outlook remains bleak.

Daniel Kreutz

*A good summary can be found in: Georg Jungclas: Die Formen des kapitalistischen Staates (The Forms of the Capitalist State). Hamburg 1972.