Before Hitler consolidated his power, Germany’s left— the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD)— refused to join in an united front against the Nazis. In 1932, SPD leaders supported the right-wing nationalist Paul von Hindenberg in the presidential election who later appointed Hitler as chancellor. They stood quiet as other workers mobilized a strike against Hitler’s appointment, and even several months later rallied their members to join Hitler’s May Day. They believed they could contain fascism through cooperation with the Weimar Republic. On the other hand, the KPD believed the SPD was just as bad as the Nazis and underestimated Hitler, believing his rule would make little difference from that of his predecessors.
Leading up to the United States presidential elections this November, it’s not uncommon to find the same arguments among the left— either unconditional acceptance of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris or complete disengagement from the presidential race, citing that Harris and Trump are no different.
This history must be revisited by the American left as we stand on the brink of fascism. The failure of the German left to differentiate and analyze the relationship between bourgeois liberalism and fascism would be costly. In the months following the burning of the Reichstag in February 1933, the Nazis would use the incident to consolidate authoritarian rule, dismantle the constitution, persecute and kill labor organizers and leftist leaders, and unleash terror upon their enemies.
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In 1918, German workers and soldiers had overthrown the old state, and their workers councils spread throughout the country. But instead of taking that opportunity to destroy the old regime, break up landed estates, take over the banks, and build a workers’ army, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), instead were co opted into a coalition government with the bourgeoisie under the Weimar Republic, dragging along revolutionary workers under their reformist leadership. Instead of mobilizing its workers to take leadership, it deferred to the Weimar Republic to contain fascism, even after Hindenberg appointed Hitler as Chancellor.
Antonio Gramsci, a founder of the Italian Communist Party who was imprisoned during Mussolini’s rule, analyzed the conditions that led to the triumph of fascist power in both Italy and Germany in the 1930s: the mounting wealth inequality as the ruling class attempted to hold onto its profits and power in a prolonged period of economic decay; the breakdown and challenges to the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions; and the subsequent disillusionment and division of the working class, absent a politically independent class-conscious leadership to unite the working class. In that vacuum, grassroots fascism flourished.
In the United States, trust in the government has plummeted. More Americans reported they will sit out of this year’s election altogether or remain uncommitted, while ordinary Americans have lost faith in America’s two-party system.
Progressives who are uncritical of the Democratic Party are unable to explain why we find ourselves in a deja vu trip having to battle an ever more popular Trump. They dismiss his followers as all maniacal racists (many truly are), but they do not analyze why successive Democratic administrations have been unsuccessful at styming Trump.
Despite all the initial enthusiasm, former president Barack Obama failed to affect “Change we can believe in.” His $350 billion bank bailout, the limited reforms of the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank bill all did more to enrich Wall Street than it did to help Main Street. This left an opening for growth of the Tea Party movement, which paved the way for Trump’s win in 2016.
Glee over Biden’s 2020 triumph over Trump sank into four years of passive reforms inadequate at lifting ordinary Americans up. While Biden is touted as the “most pro-labor president since FDR,” many Americans still don’t feel like their lives have improved.
Increasingly, we find ourselves in a position where we cannot afford housing, healthcare, caregiving, and a college education. Even with a Democratic majority in both legislative branches his first two years as president, Biden failed to deliver on his promise for a public healthcare option, on child tax credits, and diminished the Build Back Better Act to the Inflation Reduction Act, turning back on promises to lessen the everyday hardship of ordinary Americans. And whatever chance there was to curb the power of an extremist Supreme Court, which is steamrolling over rights Americans won over 50 years, is being attempted at the 11th hour only a few months before his presidency will end. Better late than never, or at least before the election, perhaps.
The country has been on this slow march toward fascism for more than a decade. The Tea Party movement was sparked when immigrant rights groups in the aughts (2000s) allied with corporations to champion immigrants “who do the work no American will do” they denied the common interest of workers and fueled divisions between immigrant and US-born workers. Trump is using this familiar tactic. The lesson of Germany is that liberalism, with its “lesser evil” strategy, failed to stop fascism.
Will running on a “At least I’m not Trump” platform be enough this time? Or if it is this time around, will it be enough in another four years? In the vacuum of an independent working class leadership, this cycle between bourgeois liberalism and fascism will continue. There’s now an even bigger opening for the Trump-Vance campaign who have branded themselves as the true leaders of the American working class.
Vance’s demagogic appeal to the working class mirrors Hitler’s who in his first radio address as chancellor rallied Germans to support his Make Germany Great Again (MGGA) campaign, commiserating with, “The starving industrial proletariat who have become unemployed in their millions, while the whole middle and artisan class have been made paupers.” Like Hitler, Vance decried the liberal leadership as being “in the pocket of big business,” and “a sell out to multinational corporations.”
No matter that during his presidency, Trump opposed an increase to the federal minimum wage, defended right to work laws, and oversaw the highest rate of outsourcing by federal contractors in a decade. It’ll get worse if he’s elected. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for Trump’s presidency plans to nullify nearly every reform workers have fought in the past 100 years. It would abolish federal overtime laws, public sector unions, child labor laws, and federal minimum wage. States would be allowed to ban labor unions in the private sector. If the plan is seen through, Trump would expand presidential powers and bring the U.S. government under his authority, decimating the rights of all Americans.
Still his followers are steadfast. Trump and Vance, and the right-wing elite who prop them up, have been able to deceive and mislead a faction of America’s working class by promoting reactionary nationalism, clothed in Christianity.
As economic crises become more frequent and intense, class inequality more stark, imperialist wars more deadly and violent, the facade of bourgeois democracy and liberalism is exposed, and our faith in its institutions dissipate. Capitalism can no longer rationally defend itself. Deepening social inequities cannot be justified. So to save its own power and wealth, the ruling class devolves into culture war.
In the American South, that revolt is underway. The likes of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council have been successful in pushing laws in many U.S. states aimed at silencing college students and professors, banning books, and injecting Biblical teachings in K-12 schools. This school year, Louisiana will be the first state to require the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school in the state.
Even without Trump in the White House, religious extremist groups rejecting science and fighting “the holy war” in U.S. politics have grown in the past four years. The main target of their crusade now? The border. Leading up to this presidential election, militias, far-right white supremacist groups, and armed vigilantes have converged at the border, stoking fears about the “replacement” of white people. Project 2025 aims to have Trump carry out the “largest deportation effort in the history of this country.”
While these folks can be dismissed as crazy racists, there is a real fear, even within liberal bastions, that immigrants are taking away the jobs of Americans. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has been impotent in addressing those fears. Even while unemployment is rising, Democrats cite a labor shortage and the need for cheap immigrant labor to do “the work no American wants to do.” But Americans aren’t buying it. They’re seeing good jobs turn bad as more industries seek out this highly exploitative cheap labor. Resentment intensifies as hard times reach more and more U.S.-born workers who see bosses preferring “hard-working” immigrant workers to the “lazy” citizen.
Workers regurgitate these racist tropes to justify why the other is the problem instead of pointing their fingers at the ruling class, who profit from the division of the working class at large. But the root of this division lies in the fact that workers who wish to organize are paralyzed by the lack of rights to do so among undocumented workers.
Liberals further divide the working class by only reacting to the reactionary identity politics of the right with their own identity politics. They are not interested in having a strong and united working class, which can chip away at their profits. So, they hand out crumbs and concessions for the few among Black Americans, women, LGBTQ, and immigrants and detract them with promises to move into the echelons of the elite while the majority still suffer.
In reality, both parties, since Ronald Reagan passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, have endorsed a provision in the law that criminalizes undocumented workers. With no right to work and organize, they are condemned to the most exploitative and miserable jobs. Instead of protecting American workers, the law divided the working class in the U.S. and deteriorated conditions for all workers. The leadership of both parties refuse to change this. This way, one party can denounce immigrants and the other praise them, while the ruling class still continue to profit off this division and super exploitation.
Both parties also agreed on continued support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. America’s engagement in imperialist wars have long interfered in nations democratic processes, provoked unjust wars, destroyed the livelihoods and homes of people in those countries, and drove their exodus to other countries, fueling the cycle of intervention and exploitation, and the resentment from native workers that follows. Trump’s claims to being an isolationist, anti-imperialist president is just as dishonest as everything else he says. During his presidency, Trump ordered the assassination of Iran’s top general, attacked Syria’s government, and increased airstrikes in the Arab World. In 2018, Trump threatened to invade Venezuela to topple leftist dictator Nicolás Maduro, a year later inflicted sanctions on the country, fueling a mass exodus of Venezuelans to the U.S.
While the left must see that both parties, beholden to the interests of the ruling elite, will never be able to truly represent the interests of working people, it is a mistake to conflate Trump’s fascism with the Democratic leadership’s bourgeois neoliberalism.
Throughout the decade before Germany’s communist party KPD was utterly annihilated by the Nazis in 1933, its leadership, under Ernst Thälmann, adhered to Stalin’s theory of “social fascism,” that the social democratic SPD who kowtowed to liberal reformism was just as bad as the fascist Nazis. Under the slogan “After Hitler, Our Turn,” the KPD argued that there would be a communist struggle against both fascism and social democracy, and that a Hitler reign would accelerate communist victory. No matter that by 1933 when Hitler was appointed chancellor, the KPD was a shell of what it used to be; it failed to organize the masses, and could not pull off a successful general strike against Hitler.
Similar arguments prevail among the other faction of the left who equate Harris with Trump and argue that both of their presidencies will “be the same shit.” Some leftists even believe that Trump will help them to accelerate the deterioration of conditions so that the working class will one day wake up, realize how rotten everything is, and then revolt against the ruling class. They forget that without struggle to connect to the masses of ordinary working people, without struggle to unite them under their common interests, and without struggle to build an independent working class organization, they could as easily march towards open arms of fascists, like Trump.
Organizing working people to address their immediate needs gives rise to political demands that can unite the working class. Such demands should inform the platform of the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris if she wants to win the support of working people. She rides on her identity as a Black woman while having no clear platform. Uniting people around demands that reflect common needs of people, citizens and immigrants alike, is a process of challenging the limitations of the two-party system, opening up people’s eyes to the real culprit of their hardships, and paving the way for a new politics led by the working class. This is the only way forward to fight fascism.
Five months after Hitler took power, the SPD was banned, its members sent to and some killed in concentration camps. Like other communists, KPD leader Ernst Thälmann was thrown in jail by the Nazis in 1933, spent eleven years in solitary confinement, and then shot dead under Hitler’s personal order in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944. None of this did these leftists leaders imagine in 1933.
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