Studying Fascism in the Second Trump Term: Reading R. Palme Dutt’s ‘Fascism and Social Revolution’

The question of how to understand the rise of fascism in the aftermath of the first World War has been a question asked by socialists the world over for almost a century. Fascism has sought to eradicate the left and the working-class movement wherever we have resisted it – thus, understanding both the roots of fascism and how to defeat it are pressing concerns. The importance of those two questions has weighed more heavily on us than ever as a caucus as we faced the beginning of the second Trump administration. Liberal media commentators and political figures have been invoking comparisons between Trump and Hitler since the former’s 2016 presidential run. The figure of Trump as authoritarian (and thus fascist) strongman grew to a fever pitch as his longshot campaign gained steam, and defined the Resistance under his first administration. Now, in the grip of a far crueler, even more brutal Trump regime, these questions take on a near existential, panicked urgency, under a staccato of executive orders from the Trump administration and a seeming coup by Elon Musk of the federal government.

The invocation of fascism as it pertains to Trump and the political project that surrounds him begs a number of other questions. Is Donald Trump himself a fascist? Is the Republican party fascist? Was January 6th a fascist uprising? Has the United States always been fascist? These (and more) were the fodder of countless pundits and commentators. It is amid these questions that Red Star chose to look deeper into history to find better questions, and answers that guide us toward political strategy. We read R. Palme Dutt’s Fascism and Social Revolution, a classic text by a Communist who was observing the contemporaneous rise of fascism across Europe in the interwar period. We share our conclusions, and the relevance of Dutt’s revolutionary Marxist-Leninist perspective on his tasks and ours, as well as our experience building the caucus through shared education, and finally the value and necessity of collective study for DSA as a whole.

While Fascism and Social Revolution is a text that many Red Star members had read before – introduced to the text via Vijay Prashad’s Red Star over the Third World – in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election we opted to reread Dutt as a whole group, as current events gave the prescience of the text a new urgency. This deep, contemporaneous reading helped us to come to a sharper collective understanding of the political problems we face in the present by asking questions of the text and each other along the way, and deepened our social and political cohesion at a fractious political moment. In addition to this synopsis, Red Star also intends to produce a study guide for the text in order to share our learning in greater depth and to make more accessible this resource that we drew so much from. Dutt’s laborious yet eminently graspable argument weaves together a number of threads that we can trace right through our present political crisis: the dialectical nature of reformist exhaustion and fascist advance, the contradictions of fascist ideologies advancing in practice as a movement of monopoly capital against the working class, and a pseudo-’isolationism’ that masks a march toward total war, internally and externally. For this reason it is a valuable tool for socialists here and now.

Social Fascism as a Text

What is Fascism and Social Revolution? Discarded, we think, in the line struggles following the second World War and the division of Western socialism against Stalinism, it is the masterwork of R. Palme Dutt (of the Communist Party of Great Britain). A shockingly prescient analysis, published in 1935, Dutt describes in detail what later scholars of fascism such as Alberto Togliatti would explicate in their lectures after World War II of the dynamics of fascism.

Dutt lays out a materialist analysis of fascism beginning, in a very Marxian mode, from the question of production and its relationship to class struggle. Dutt builds on the thesis Lenin lays out in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, charting a future clash of monopolistic titans. Dutt contrasts with other theorists of fascism: he is not concerned with psychoanalyzing the subjective person’s experience of fascism or how it has become melded into a mass, as Theodor Adorno emphasized in his work; nor with the cultural forms of fascism as Umberto Eco’s oft-cited essay on fascism is. Rather, fascism is not an ideological form that emerges as an authoritarian impulse but is the clearest realization of capitalist ideology. From a materialist and scientific socialist perspective, out of failed class struggle comes fascism, as Dutt points at the failed socialist revolutionary attempts and parties, and their subsequent allegiance towards their respective nation-states. Through his analysis of the fascist takeovers in Italy, Austria, and Germany, Dutt articulates fascism as an ideology serving a particular purpose for capitalists: that its destruction and focus on the Other – something that theorists of “authoritarianism” overindex on – functions as necrotic “resolutions” of the class struggle. Where a liberal political scientist might attribute fascism’s rise to a defect in character – racism, a susceptibility to populist rhetoric, a politician’s machismo, the list goes on – Dutt looks at the material circumstances; where that same liberal outlook might see the suppression of free speech and parliamentary democracy as expressions of dictatorial orientations towards a population, Dutt looks to the suppression also of the working class organizations.

Fascism, Dutt says, is contradictory: it promises security through constant struggle; a spiritual quest, as Mussolini describes it; the rejuvenation of the race through the nation, per Hitler. These are obscurations, Dutt charges, for the real character of fascism: a movement powered by the bourgeoisie to maintain their dictatorship and control over society. Fascists have ex post facto made their justification for their ideological form without coherence – what matters was an expression of power, and required a bit of “trial and error”, as Dutt puts it, when fascist movements are trying to coalesce. What is most important though, he reminds us, is that this is powered by the bourgeoisie – the ruling class – itself. Fascism is not something that emerges out of nowhere, it is linked to the development of capitalism itself and the specific struggles as monopoly capital dominates all other forms.

Dutt saves his criticism most pointedly for the Social Democrats, though, with whom he charges helping the fascists rise to power. Their commitment to capitalism and their struggle against revolutionary politics is the reason that fascism had the space to maneuver and ascend to power. In each of his three case studies, Social Democratic parties pursued programs of reform which placated the working class, primarily through parliamentary strategies which bound them to the bourgeois state. The intransigence of party leadership on questions of war, imperialism, and upholding capitalism in the face of severe economic crisis destroyed their working-class base, and the months and years spent pursuing these programs gave the bourgeoisie time and space to maneuver against the working class movement that threatened.

The Applicability of Dutt Today

Red Star has discussed Dutt’s Fascism and Social Revolution before, during a “Red Start” political education event in 2023. Vijay Prashad’s mention of Dutt – a brief aside in Red Star over the Third World, one of Red Star’s oft-recommended texts – prompted a member’s curiosity, and two others joined him in reading it. They were struck by Dutt’s prescience: Dutt published it in 1934, well over a year before the Nuremberg Laws were published and long before World War II more formally began, but his evocative descriptions of a capitalist system in decay and crisis, of an incoherent and contradictory fascistic politics, and of a class struggle thwarted captured their attention. They found his descriptions of Austria, Germany and Italy in the rising tide of fascism to bear more than a small resemblance to the United States and its nascent revanchism that found expression in the first Trump presidency and its aftermath. We fashioned a two-part Red Start out of several excerpts from the text, which was modestly attended by our previous standards. But everyone, again, walked away from it struck by how Dutt seemed to be describing the current conditions we were experiencing in the United States: an anemic social democratic strain that earnestly defended the rising reactionary tide mixed with a cultural melange of contradictory revanchist elements: Dutt may not have had the charlatans of social media selling testosterone replacement theory and misogyny and “tradwife” and all these recovered elements of Naziism; instead he named them in advance of us “re-discovering” them in our current age.

As Trump’s re-election bid gained steam last year, fascism once again became the go-to description of the political moment. Just as Dutt described, we observed pressure building from across what is generally considered the American “left” – a smorgasbord of competing tendencies claiming the mantle of an anemic progressivism – to support the Harris campaign in the hopes of suppressing this force via legal means, utilizing democratic institutions. Some elements of the “left” prematurely declared victory when Biden was removed in a palace coup, mistaking the calculated decision of a political elite for an ingenious political maneuver which won them a seat at the table. But this was no prize: the Democratic party had put a new face on essentially the same political program, as the Harris campaign proudly proclaimed its intent to uphold our border regime, to adhere to the rule of law as determined by a coterie of constitutionalist zealots, and to expand our military might so that all may fear us. Who, we asked, were the fascists we were beating, by supporting Kamala Harris? As a caucus, we again asked, what about Dutt?

“It is useless,” Dutt says, “ to discuss abstractly as in a school classroom the abstract forms of ‘Fascism’, ‘Democracy’, ‘Dictatorship’, etc, without regard to the actual situation and general line of capitalism in the present period.” How do we understand our present period, then? It is bracing to revisit the words of Hitler and Mussolini today in the context of the world Dutt was describing; it is even more difficult to walk away from this study without feeling like Dutt was describing the very world we wake up to every day. A dizzying rollback of democratic norms and rights, horrifying reports of mass detentions, deportations, and vigilante terror, and the liquidation of productive capacities. At the same time, the pursuit of an ‘America-first’ pseudo-isolationism that at the same time asserts overtly expansionist aims and ingratiates itself to an emerging international neoliberal-fascist axis. At the same time, our world is not Dutt’s: There is no Comintern fomenting the spread of communism – certainly not one with a working-class base in the capitalist countries waiting for the signal to revolt. The conditions Dutt claimed to be ‘rotten-ripe’ for proletarian revolution have festered in the neoliberal era.

One of our goals in our study of Dutt was to approach these historical parallels with caution and be wary of the desire to make one-to-one comparisons between what Dutt describes in nascent fascism, still working to achieve its ultimate genocidal form, and the contemporary moment. We talked deeply about crisis: we know that capitalism is beset by crisis, but of what kind? What form does “the crisis” take today? Dutt was able to point ably to those factors and conditions in the lead-up to World War II, replete with citations of productive capacity in the vein of the most rigorous Marxist scholarship. Our shared reading prompted new questions about our ability to analyze our historical circumstances and directed where our future study should go.

Because we are scientific socialists, Dutt resonated with Red Star specifically for his emphasis on class struggle, articulating a thesis for fascism as a relationship to both social democracy and capitalism. It is difficult to dispute Dutt’s characterization of social democrats as the handmaidens to fascism’s rise when we look today at the leadership provided by America’s ostensible “left” political party and its ardent commitment to preserving capitalism and the American order regardless of the ostensible damage to national jurisprudence. And Dutt deftly describes the character of a fascist society and its logical endpoint – one that is in a state of permanent civil war with itself, repressing and liquidating various enemies within while preparing itself for cataclysmic, total war with any and all enemies without.

When we try to define whether or not Trump or Trumpism is fascist, we can point to other competing readings: Dutt is closest, perhaps, to the Black Panther George Jackson, who described fascism as already here. It is a poignant reminder as the Trump administration leaps over every legalistic or bureaucratic roadblock to its governance by writ: Dutt says clearly, at the end of chapter 12, that legalism will be no barrier to fascism, but only a working class movement. Defense of the entire working class and its institutions, steadfast opposition to war and chauvinism, and rejection of reforms and political compromises that divide and demobilize the working class: this is the revolutionary program that can defeat fascism, drive it out not on a technicality but with its death-knell. Building that working class movement is the American left’s most urgent task, and thus DSA’s, as small as we are right now.

One Way Out

If you asked a Red Star member, “Is the United States fascist today?” you likely wouldn’t get a simple yes or no. We might ask instead: was the fascist “turn” decades ago, as George Jackson would point to, or is it on the nascent horizon? How does neoliberalism relate to fascism, particularly internationally? Did fascism actually disappear after World War II, or was it transfigured and resurrected elsewhere? Did fascism win when the USSR collapsed? One could also point to a number of manifestly fascist elements of our society: the military arsenals that the average police force is equipped with and the overbuilt prison-industrial complex; the compromised democratic rights that are continually being shaved away in the pursuit of national security; the lawlessness and ungovernability of the right-wing militia movement which increasingly targets the left directly; the political-economic nexus of demagoguery and new product markets. At bottom, however, assessing whether or not fascism is “here” (and whether any one politician, party, or movement represents it) is beside the point. We are guided by the Marxist prompt and materialist analysis that Dutt posed: understanding and defeating fascism is about class struggle. Fascism, whatever other political form it takes, is an expansion of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and only the revolutionary working-class movement can end it.

In the current historical moment we are in, it is easy to get swept up in transposing the struggles against fascism that were part of our shared socialist history onto today. These comparisons often don’t serve any meaningful course to our political action except to stand frantically against Trump and Trump supporters. It is, often, incoherent: we are told to look to the Democrats to save us, that they are the better against the fascist enemy, even as they do nothing to stop it but punch the left, repeatedly. This counterposing isn’t a new phenomenon; it is, as Dutt elucidated, a handmaid’s position for fascism. What Dutt centered for us, though, was the revolutionary horizon: fascism will not be defeated except through the struggle for communism. While the Axis powers might have been defeated, we are now in a world where fascist ideology reigns across the Western world. Our task, daunting as it may be, is the same as it ever was: to assemble the class forces necessary to struggle and win, and to build DSA into an organization that the working class would wield in that struggle.

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