Facism

The second of my current projects,looking at the rise of fascism and understanding its modern ancestors, right now is in the research phase. I am reading a collection of Leon Trotsky's writing on the rise of fascism in Germany. The book titled The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany covers Trotsky's writing from 1930 to 1940. Trotsky is much easier to read than Marx or Engels but this is mainly because he does not have to define the tenets of Marxism, instead he assumes the reader to be versed in the ideas and vocabulary of Marx. His assumption is are based on the audience for his writings which would have been the Communist Party of Germany and the International more generally. Trotsky's focus is not on a critique of Fascism, which is more in line with my goals, but on criticizing the Communist Party, Stalinism and laying out a path for the Party to achieve both the destruction of Fascism and achieving the Revolution in Germany. In the readings I have done so far Trotsky has already laid out some fundamental analysis of Fascism; the economic basis of the party, which is the petite bourgeoisie that is experiencing more of the hardships of capitalism than previously, its ability to attract poor and exploited workers (mainly because of the Stalinist bureaucracy's suppression of the ideology of revolution in favor of falling to the politics of the capitalist), and its policies of demonizing communists and even socialists. In his writings before the take over of the Nazis, Trotsky can clearly see that the policies of fascism will lead to defeat of the revolutionary classes and could lead to the complete destruction of communism in Germany. Therefore Trotsky continually tries to waken the communists to the threat of fascism.

Already the opening articles that I have read lead to some interesting insights into the modern rise of fascism. Focusing, for now, on the western world countries such as Italy, Russia and The United States are experiencing extreme nationalist movements that are essentially fascist if not outright claiming fascist heritage. As historically these movements are carried by a disaffected lower middle class funded by select members of the big bourgeoisie. They appeal to lower classes by using scare tactics that feed the fear that the current power structure will take away what little these lower classes have. The fascist have also begun to perfect what their socialist enemies have already done, which is to operate under the guise of democracy to legitimize their power in the world view, the primary example of this for fascists being Italy and for socialists Venezuela. The growth of fascism is some thing that deserves more studying, because with out a strong far left there is a limited list of early warning systems to stop the rise of another fascist state.