The following article is the second installment of Fascism and Revolution, excerpted from a PLP magazine article titled Rise of Fascism 1919–1934, available on our website under the “New Magazines” tab. In Part I, we examined the roots of fascism beginning in 1919, when the betrayal of social democrats and the vacillations of communist leaders led to a crushing defeat by Hungarian right-wing nationalist forces allied with the national army—setting the stage for fascism’s rise. Part I concludes with the Soviet leadership’s response to the growth of fascism and Hitler’s ascent in Nazi Germany.

By 1935, Soviet leaders were deeply alarmed by the spread of fascism in Italy and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. That year, the 7th Congress of the Comintern convened to determine a response to the fascist threat. In his main report, Georgi Dimitrov largely ignored the analysis of fascism’s roots in liberal democracy offered by R. Palme Dutt, instead charting a course for communist parties worldwide to collaborate in united fronts with liberal democrats to prevent further fascist expansion.

Part II explores the rise of fascism in the 1930s, analyzing developments in Spain, China, and North America, and tracing the progression of fascism within capitalism to the present day.

Spain, the first test

In the early 1930s, Spain resembled Italy in 1919. Though its ruling class was too weak to rule effectively, the working class lacked the bold and decisive leadership needed to seize such favorable conditions and fight for workers’ power. The Spanish Communist Party (CP) remained small and relatively isolated. It helped construct a Popular Front with the Socialist Party and liberal Republicans. (In Spain, “Republicans” were defenders of the republic and opponents of the monarchy and fascism.)

The 1936 elections marked a humiliating defeat for the right-wing forces—especially the Falange, which was still marginal at the time—and a major victory for the Popular Front, seemingly validating the communist “united front” strategy advanced by Dimitrov eight months earlier. However, the new Popular Front government refused to arm the workers and did little to alter the fundamental structures of state power.

The Falange, a fascist party, was financed by ruling-class figures and institutions. Its program was a typical mix of radical-sounding, reformist demands, anti-communism, and nationalism. The leading general of the Spanish Army, Francisco Franco, launched a fascist coup, triggering a protracted civil war.

Without a unified, aggressive central leadership, the Republicans, despite their heroism and the revolutionary energy of the working class, went from defeat to defeat. Help came from the Comintern in the form of International Brigades of anti-fascist volunteers from communist parties in 53 countries, along with military equipment and advisors from the Soviet Union.

Franco’s forces would have collapsed early in the war without aid from Germany and Italy. The fascist air force was  German and Italian. Meanwhile, the British government consistently sabotaged the Republican effort. In the U.S., the Roosevelt administration never wavered in its refusal to sell arms to the Republicans.

Among its most serious errors, the Communist Party in Spain failed to engage in the fight against racism. No communist aid ever reached workers in Morocco or other colonial subjects of the Spanish ruling class. The Party was weakest in the areas with national minorities—in the Basque Country, Galicia, and Catalan. But the Party’s biggest weakness was the Popular Front and the weak political line of the Comintern that communists fought as Republicans rather than as revolutionaries. Instead of channeling all efforts toward communist revolution, the Party focused on securing its alliance with the socialists and the liberal Republicans.

The Spanish Civil War was a big defeat for the united front policy, but not for communism. Spain will never forget the help from the world communist movement and the International  Brigades. These heroic volunteers helped to block the fascist advance in Spain for nearly three crucial years. The Spanish resistance, supported by the International Brigades and the Soviet Union, delayed fascist advances in Western Europe and stood as the first major battlefield of the global fight against fascism.. The resistance in Spain trained the leaders of the workers’ armies that would smash the fascist hordes in the world war to come.

China and the price paid for collaboration

The Communist Party of China (CPC) joined a united front—and even a united government—with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), which had come to power as part of a nationalist government. They were supposed to unite to fight the fascist invasion from Japan.

The CPC rebuilt its underground organization despite brutal repression: three successive Party leaders in Shanghai were executed by the KMT, yet a secure network was eventually reestablished in the cities and countryside. By the early 1930s, the Red Army controlled significant rural areas, surviving repeated campaigns by the KMT. These victories were only possible because the CPC learned from its previous errors in cooperating with the KMT.

However, the KMT’s underlying commitment to capitalist and nationalist interests remained intact. After temporary cooperation, the KMT turned decisively against the communists, slaughtering thousands in purges and campaigns like the 1927–1937 anti-communist drives. This betrayal left the door open for capitalist development and nationalist consolidation, demonstrating the limits of united fronts with bourgeois forces.
In China, as elsewhere, only a resolutely independent communist movement could challenge fascism and protect the revolutionary gains of the working class.

North America 

The fascist movements in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada were less significant than those in Europe, Asia, and South America. Nonetheless, the 1930s ushered in significant rightward changes, including increased repression by police organs. Roosevelt’s New Deal concentrated more power in a growing national bureaucracy, strengthening the state’s capacity to stabilize capitalism. While it averted economic collapse, this concentration of authority also created conditions under which fascist-style authoritarianism could theoretically arise. Mexico and Canada saw similar developments.

Why didn’t full-blown fascism develop in North America in that period? First, capitalism was younger, still expanding, and more competitive than in Europe. Second, U.S. imperialism, the chief beneficiary of World War I, was still living off its imperialist loot. A final crucial reason was that the communist and left-led labor movement  went on the offensive in all three countries.

The rise of fascism today

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. imperialists have dominated the world economically and militarily. But as finance capital has become the main form of U.S. capitalism, the closing of factories and the movement of production to other countries has taken a toll on the U.S. ruling class, even as their profits have skyrocketed. A string of lost wars and military debacles, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, have weakened the U.S. politically while draining its treasury. While the U.S. bosses spent billions in a failed attempt to keep control of the Middle East, their Chinese rivals constructed an industrial powerhouse and are now building a military to match.

With capitalism worldwide in a spiraling political, economic, and humanitarian catastrophe, the international working class has fallen under escalating attacks. The current political crisis is driven by inter-imperialist rivalry—by the relative decline of U.S. imperialism and the rise of Chinese state-capitalist power. The world’s deepening crisis reflects the collapse of globalism and free trade, now accentuated by overlapping catastrophes: the COVID-19 pandemic’s aftermath, wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, and severe humanitarian disasters from Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On every continent, capitalists face challenges from both internal fractures and external rivals. The old liberal world order, defined by U.S. economic and military dominance, is under pressure. China is expanding its global influence, investing vast sums to tie smaller ruling classes to its orbit, while its naval and maritime forces, now the largest in number, increasingly challenge U.S. control of the Pacific.

Meanwhile, competition over critical technologies and resources is intensifying. Control of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and rare earth elements—vital for semiconductors, data centers, and advanced electronics—has become a central axis of strategic rivalry. China dominates rare earth mining and processing, giving it leverage over the global AI supply chain, while the U.S. and allied countries scramble to secure alternative sources and production capabilities. This technological and resource struggle amplifies the geopolitical and economic tensions already destabilizing the world.

Within the U.S., an unsustainable federal debt burden, systemic economic fragility, and deepening social polarization threaten to weaken the core of U.S. power. As inter-imperialist conflicts and technological rivalries escalate, the international working class from the most super-exploited nations continue to bear the heaviest costs worldwide.

Domestic bosses exploit liberal bosses’ weaknesses 

Within the U.S., deindustrialization has broken the ties between finance capital and white workers leading to a significant shift of working-class loyalties away from the main wing bosses and the Democratic Party. This alienation has been exploited by the finance capitalists’ domestic rivals, a group of bosses whose fortunes are driven by U.S. oil production and domestic industry, and who are fronted by “America First” isolationists in the Republican Party. In their weakened and internally divided state, the finance capitalists are struggling to act decisively in combatting their challengers. Their control over critical parts of the state apparatus—including the White House, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court—has either been lost or is in jeopardy. This tenuous situation cannot hold.

In periods of capitalism in crisis, war becomes the primary form of capitalist politics. In Europe, inter-imperialist rivalry has degraded into a massively destructive conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and counting. In the Pacific, open warfare between the U.S. and Chinese bosses seems imminent. If and when it erupts, it threatens to draw in a host of other countries.

Dutt’s lessons and U.S. fascism

R. Palme Dutt wrote that the roots of fascism lie in liberalism and that fascism is the inevitable form of government under modern capitalism. Today, we see all of its hallmarks in the United States: the erosion of the “rule of law,” attacks on science and rational thinking, punishment for protest, a crumbling democracy, intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry and the looming threat of world war, declining living standards for workers, the dismantling of healthcare, masked ICE terror against scapegoated immigrants, and racism more virulent than ever.

What must our response be?

Learning from the past, we in PLP know the answer is not to rely on alliances with liberals or democratic socialists. We must work within organizations to win members to our line: that the system cannot be reformed. We must avoid the mistakes of our predecessors by rejecting the strategy of a united front with liberals, social democrats, or nationalists to defeat fascism. To truly destroy fascism, we must uproot it from its source—capitalism itself.

Our ideas must be spread far and wide—through intimate conversations with friends and through CHALLENGE. We must win workers and students to understand that capitalism cannot be reformed. It must be smashed and replaced with communism, a society run by workers for the benefit of all.

Kentucky—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) cadre in Owensboro expanded upon their first food drive last month by hosting a “lunch and learn” on the 25th at a local park in one of our members’ communities. This community is primarily made of Black and Latin workers, and hosts several local homeless shelters. As soon as the first couple comrades arrived on scene to set up,  we were immediately approached by several workers in the area, who heard about the event through the flyers put around locally. They immediately left to go and tell everyone at the local shelter, and anyone else they came across on the way. We began passing out CHALLENGE and engaging with the workers. Many were receptive to the reality: we need communism to free our class from this capitalist hell!

Feeding and educating 

The event’s goal was to host a public educational forum while simultaneously addressing racist local food insecurity in the community. The idea of holding public education came from how receptive the community was to our ideas at the previous food drive. In our goals of agitating the local community we were wildly successful. After about an hour or so the people started coming in waves. This culminated in a small crowd of around 15-20 at about 2 pm. Several, at least half, holding the newest issue of CHALLENGE, listened to a comrade speak about the disparity between the capitalist ruling class and the working class. Words of affirmation came from the crowd while another PLer kept the grill going and ensured that everyone received a helping, and a second helping if they wanted it! 

Fighting for workers…even Trump supporters

One interaction stuck with us: A man came up and began speaking to us. He told us at first that he was a Donald Trump voter, to which we replied, “We don’t care. You’re a working class man. You deserve dignity, a home, healthcare, and education.” To which he replied, “You’re damn right I do!” He then began saying that he strongly agreed with what we were doing but “that word” (communism) made him think twice. We told him that was natural. Then, later on he asked: what do you guys want to achieve? We told him we want working people to own and control the means of production. He said, “I find that hard to believe! That’s what everyone in this country wants!” We then asked, “Well, do you remember when you said that word makes you recoil? That’s the point. They don’t want you to embrace your own liberation!”

Reenergized for the battles ahead!

All in all we fed a maximum of 70 or so people. We made contacts and friends, along with the numerous issues of CHALLENGE distributed. The workers also took extra to hand out to their friends, many of whom said they’d never even considered much of what we were talking about, that we had their heads spinning with all these new perspectives. The comrades in the local club feel vindicated, energized, and excited to continue going out to the community and engaging with the masses. More on our antiracist, antisexist, working class fightback to come!

What is unfolding today in Pakistan-administered Kashmir (Azad Jammu and Kashmir, or AJK) is not a passing protest—it is an historic uprising of the working class against decades of exploitation, deprivation, and betrayal. The working class in Kashmir, long silenced by colonial dependence and capitalist greed, are breaking their chains and stepping into history as conscious agents of change. Their revolt challenges not only the despotic local bosses, but the entire capitalist-imperialist system that sustains it.

The Jammu Kashmir Awami Action Committee (JAAC) did not emerge overnight. It grew out of years of organizing by progressive and communist students, workers, and activists who united beyond sectarian and nationalist divisions. When the state unleashed brutal violence during the strike on September 29, 2025—killing more than a dozen and injuring hundreds—it hoped to crush dissent. Instead, the blood of martyrs ignited a broader rebellion. The state’s machinery faltered before the united strength of the working people, forcing the rulers to concede.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) stresses that temporary reforms cannot end permanent exploitation. The next task is to channel mass anger into revolutionary organization—linking every struggle for bread, electricity, and basic needs to the fight for communist power.

Roots of the JAAC Movement

JAAC’s roots trace back to the 2017–18 mobilizations against unfair electricity bills, wage theft, and privatization. Local traders, transport workers, teachers, and government employees built networks of solidarity that coordinated strikes and protests across AJK (PoK). By 2020–21, these struggles had evolved into a united front against systemic exploitation.

The May 2023 general strike marked a turning point. Markets shut down, transport halted, and tens of thousands demanded relief from unbearable tariffs and inflation. The government’s partial concessions proved that mass struggle—not parliamentary politics—is the true engine of change. That victory laid the groundwork for the revolutionary upsurge of 2024–25, when the movement’s class character became unmistakable.Exploitation and inequality

AJK generates more than 3,000 megawatts of electricity, yet its own people face blackouts and unaffordable tariffs. The Mangla Dam, built in the 1960s, displaced over 100,000 workers in Kashmir—many of whom remain uncompensated. While local communities bear the cost, Pakistan’s capitalist elite and corporate allies reap the profits.

Over 40 percent of AJK’s population suffers from food insecurity. Unemployment exceeds 30 percent, and public services have collapsed under austerity. The region’s hydropower, forests, and minerals are plundered in the name of “development.” This is not mismanagement—it is the logic of a semi-colonial capitalist system that treats AJK (PoK) as an internal colony of Pakistan, itself subordinate to global imperialism.

Political domination and “refugee seats”

One of the clearest instruments of this domination is the system of “refugee seats” in the AJK Legislative Assembly. Twelve seats are reserved for people who claim to be refugees from Jammu and Kashmir but have lived in Pakistan since 1947. They neither reside in AJK nor share its material conditions—yet they rule over it.

These individuals already enjoy full political rights in Pakistan, participating in its provincial and national assemblies. The Pakistani ruling class uses them as proxies to dominate AJK’s politics, install puppet governments, and suppress local self-rule. The JAAC’s demand to abolish these twelve seats is therefore not a minor reform—it is a major challenge to a colonial political structure that denies AJK’s people sovereignty over their land and labor.

Radical organization threatens bosses

Through determined struggle, the JAAC has won partial rollbacks of anti-people tariffs, restored flour subsidies, united workers, peasants, traders, teachers, and students under one banner, and created local coordination committees—the first seeds of direct workers’ power. These efforts have exposed the capitalist nature of the Pakistani state and its local collaborators.

Yet contradictions remain. Elements within JAAC’s leadership—petty-bourgeois, reformist, and nationalist—seek compromise rather than revolution. As Marx and Lenin taught, without a revolutionary communist party, spontaneous struggle remains confined within capitalist limits. The movement must advance from reform to revolution.

The massacres in Mirpur, Bagh, and Muzaffarabad were not accidents but deliberate acts of class war. The state defends profit through bullets and prisons. What it fears most is not protest but organization—workers and peasants developing class consciousness and preparing to seize power.

Communist internationalism is key

The oppression of AJK (PoK) cannot be separated from global capitalism. The same system that enforces IMF austerity in Pakistan funds Zionist genocide in Palestine, fuels wars in Sudan and Congo, and exploits workers from Dhaka to Detroit. The enemy is international—so our struggle must be internationalist.

As the Progressive Labor Party teaches: “The fight for reforms can only serve the revolution when it exposes the class nature of capitalism and helps workers organize for power.”

Class-conscious workers in the JAAC must now take concrete steps to build communist-led workers’ committees in every district—to control resources, administration, and production. Unite workers, peasants, students, and youth across religious and regional lines. Reject NGO politics, electoral illusions, and nationalist distractions that divide the working class. Link AJK’s fight with broader anti-imperialist movements—from India to Palestine, from Cuba to Sudan.

Toward a new communist dawn

The blood spilled in AJK has not been in vain—it has watered the seeds of a new dawn, a dawn of revolution. The people demand bread, but they are learning to fight for power. They demand relief, but they are beginning to build communism. They mourn their martyrs, but they also organize in their name.

The uprising in AJK (PoK) reveals a universal truth: the oppressed cannot rely on parliaments or promises—only organized working-class power can end exploitation. Reform was the spark; revolution is the fire. The battlefield is global, and the working class is its vanguard.

The International Communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) strives to provide leadership and raise class consciousness among workers and students, uniting them under the red flag for an international communist revolution.
Long live PLP.

Brooklyn, NY—“No ICE on campus, that’s right!” is by far the most common student response and sums up the attitude of hundreds of students in response to leaflets calling for student-worker unity in the face of immigration raids. “Come for four, come for us all!” sums up the attitude of most faculty and staff we’ve spoken to who are outraged at City of New York’s (CUNY) recent termination of the “Fired Four” adjuncts for supporting pro-Palestinian students on campus. While these sharpening attacks may seem unrelated, they reflect rising fascism and a lashing out of declining U.S. imperialism against any threats – external and internal – to their sagging but lethal empire.

How are Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members in our CUNY club connecting the struggle over the escalating attacks on immigrant workers, the Fired Four, and increasing worldwide U.S. imperialist violence? By organizing a student-worker alliance at Brooklyn College, Kingsborough Community College and beyond through basebuilding among students, staff, workers and faculty. Throughout the semester we’ve struggled to ensure regular leafleting and building CHALLENGE readership, while sharpening our club’s internal struggle to follow up with contacts, arrange home visits and social outings. Here is our midterm progress report.

Contest the spaces, rule the schools!

At Kingsborough, our club’s first step this semester was reclaiming the campus hallways. Beginning last year, campus police informed students and faculty leafleting  to meet antiracist students and faculty that all leafleting must be approved by the administration. Many workers still hold the bosses’ illusions about so-called freedom of speech. However, as the bosses  try to normalize and force workers to accept rising fascism, reality is exposing this contradiction.

This year, student and faculty PL’ers included our friends and coworkers, especially in the faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress and custodian’s union, DC 37, in our plans to mass distribute leaflets against ICE and in support of the Fired Four in the same hallways we were banned from. Printing out the PSC’s own resolutions and flyers and encouraging students and staff to sign PSC petitions has grown our circle of new friends, and   exposed for them and us both the emptiness of “freedom of speech” and the necessity of breaking the bosses’ bans on antiracist organizing.

This has also led to a few confrontations with campus police. At first, they kept their distance, and then got bolder by once again telling us all literature distribution must be approved, and that we cannot use the tables in the hallway without a “reservation” from Student Life. Last week, the chief of public safety himself approached us, grabbed a leaflet from a student’s hands and warned them “you shouldn’t have this!” To us, the chief stated that “this flyer hasn’t been approved by Student Life.” We gave another leaflet to the student and when we asked what Student Life has to do with our union, the PSC, the chief mumbled something in reply and walked away. After that we continued leafleting for the remainder of our planned time, making new contacts. After discussion, we plan on bringing our own table and playing video of the NYPD’s attack on Brooklyn College students last May.

Basebuilding and boldness disrupt fascist business as usual

KCC’s students, who are majority immigrant, Muslim, Black and Latin youth from Brooklyn, have a sharp understanding of rising fascism and have already made the connection between the Fired Four and fascist ICE raids. One young Black student who stopped to get more information asked, “Why aren’t more people protesting? Are we?” Excellent question. We need organization and leadership to confront  fascism, whether from Donald Trump’s fascist ICE shock troops or the Big Fascist CUNY administrators, both servants of the same imperialist U.S. capitalist state.

Declining U.S. imperialism can only offer the working class fascism in two flavors. Trump-flavored fascists are the most open about their Nazi goals, hoping to divide worker-led fightback with racist terror and promote traditionally sexist cultural norms. Meanwhile, Democrat-flavored fascists co-opt worker-led fightback into elections, hoping to divide worker-led fightback with identity politics and “hope” that the capitalist state can serve the working class. These Big Fascists are the biggest danger, and we cannot underestimate the dangers ahead. However, both are no match for a united working class under communist leadership, and our recent struggles prove it.

Dare to struggle, dare to win

A year ago, KCC’s administration probably thought they’d won. They saw the potential power of students and workers when more than 50 KCC students protested against the Gaza genocide almost seven hours outside the campus gates (see CHALLENGE, 6/5/24). So, the following fall, tightening rules regarding student clubs were in place.

On May 8, 2025, when Brooklyn College’s president probably thought they’d won, they called the fascist Strategic Response Group kkkops against a peaceful student protest and fired and investigated faculty, following ruling class orders.

In the same way, despite the defeats of past revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, capitalists around the world probably think they’ve won. As communists and CHALLENGE readers know, fascist attacks in both “blue states” and “red states” do not surprise us, and with basebuilding, they can be defeated. It’s not just about Trump, or about electing a new Democrat savior like Zohran Mamdani, whose spokesperson recently confirmed NYPD commissioner Tisch “acted appropriately” when ordering the NYPD to stand by when ICE conducted an immigration raid on Canal Street (PIX11, 11/7). WE are the leadership we’re looking for- JOIN US!