ON August 3, People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping addressed a mass gathering marking the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression and the world anti-fascist war. The theme of Xi’s address was “Remembering history and changing the future.”

If we want to remember the history of fascism — its development, its defeat and its resurgence today — we should begin with Bulgarian Communist Party leader and general secretary of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov.

Ninety years ago, on August 2 1935, Dimitrov delivered a report to the 7th World Congress of the Communist International. This lengthy report contains within its pages the definition of fascism that communists throughout the world have held to be true and accurate since it was first elaborated. What, then, is this definition? What is fascism?

The Communist International defined fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” Dimitrov explained that fascism developed out of the sharpening of the class struggle and that it was “not a form of state power standing above both classes — the proletariat [working class] and the bourgeoisie [capitalist class].” On the contrary, “fascism is the power of finance capital itself.”

Dimitrov said that fascism becomes the favoured form of the capitalist class because “the capitalists are no longer able to maintain their dictatorship by the old methods of parliamentarism and of bourgeois democracy in general.” In fact, democracy in capitalism becomes “a hindrance in the struggle against the proletariat.”

Fascism, according to Dimitrov, is not an inevitable stage of capitalism but depends on the development of the “forces of the fighting proletariat.” Fascism, from that point of view, is an attempt to forestall the growth of the forces of revolution.

Dimitrov was also at pains to point out that there was no ideal form of fascism, no model form, but that it could come to power by various routes. It could, for example, completely dissolve all parliamentary political parties and movements or allow their continued existence in no matter how diminished a form; and that it could present itself to the working masses in any number of disguises or hide itself behind any number of masks.

In The ABC of Political Terms, published in Moscow in 1982, Dimitrov’s classic definition of fascism is reiterated, but added to it are the typical characteristics of racism, extreme nationalism, anti-communism, the destruction of democratic freedoms and “the wide practice of social demagogy.”

Not only are Nazi Germany and fascist Italy noted as the first fascist countries, but included also are Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, as well as Greece in the 1970s, Pinochet’s Chile, and the white racist apartheid regime in South Africa.

But we are in a new historical period. A question of supreme importance — not just to communist parties around the world, but to the international working class — is this: Is fascism developing now, today, in the imperialist heartland, and most especially in the US?

In the times of Dimitrov and the Communist International, fascism arose in the context of a working class that was on the march, organising itself into communist parties and arming itself for revolution. In order to maintain its hold on power, the most right-wing and reactionary elements of the capitalist class moved to a new and more vicious type of capitalist regime — fascism.

Can fascism only arise during a period of working-class revolutionary upsurge, though? Can fascism only arise during such a period of the sharpening of the class struggle that it has reached the point of open class war?

At the same time that Dimitrov was providing his analysis, Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti was in Moscow delivering a series of lectures on fascism. Basing his lectures on the foundation of Dimitrov’s analysis, Togliatti asserted that “fascism can take different forms in different countries” and that “fascism assumes different aspects at different times in the same country.”

Most profoundly, he said that all capitalist political institutions and regimes have an inherent tendency towards reaction and hence to fascism. “This tendency toward the fascist form of government is present everywhere,” Togliatti said. “But this does not mean fascism must perforce be arrived at everywhere.” Like Dimitrov, Togliatti maintained that much depended on the fighting strength of the working class.

During the century since Dimitrov delivered his report to the Communist International and Togliatti delivered his lectures, much has changed and much has been learned.

In the 1970s, Greek communist Nicos Poulantzas wrote an important and useful book, Fascism and Dictatorship. Writing under the influence of the wave of revolution that stretched from the early 1960s to the mid-’70s, Poulantzas argued that there were any number of what he referred to as “exceptional states.” That is to say, states and regimes that were “exceptions” to the classical model of capitalism. Such exceptions were fascism, Bonapartism, Caesarism, authoritarian military regimes, and various forms of police states.

From Poulantzas’s point of view, it was necessary to determine precisely what form of extreme right-wing state was in power or coming into power in order to know how to combat it. And while there is a good deal of truth to his position, ultimately what is necessary is to examine the actual and concrete situation brewing in imperialism in the present historical conjuncture.

Dimitrov, Togliatti and Poulantzas were each in their own way analysing fascism during periods when working-class revolutionary forces were relatively strong, when the fascist alternative seemed to the ruling class necessary to hold on to power, and when the inherent brutality of capitalism expressed itself in various forms of the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”

Or, as Canadian communist Dr Norman Bethune once put it: “Threaten a reduction on the profit of their money and the beast in them awakens with a snarl.”

But what we are learning today — what has, in fact, become crystal clear and obvious — is that fascism can come to power when the working class of almost every capitalist nation is very far from achieving revolution.

It is also undeniable that the vast majority of the working class has not joined the Communist Party. So, it would seem that the capitalist class of almost every nation has had no need to move beyond the classic model of what is known, falsely, as liberal democracy, in order to maintain its hold on state power.

And yet it has done so. In a good many countries of Europe, for example, extreme-right political parties are making striking electoral gains. In Hungary, the far right has taken power, as it has in El Salvador, Argentina, India and Israel. A fascist international is beginning to interweave a web.

But at the centre of imperialism, and at the purulent heart of the web of fascism, is the US. This is displayed particularly clearly in the regime of Donald Trump. In the heartland of capitalism in its imperialist stage, we see before us the slow but steady march towards fascism. It has not yet consolidated itself into a fully fledged system, but it is moving by incremental steps into a new and perhaps unique form of fascism.

Certainly, anyone paying attention can see that almost every day there is a new move in this direction. Mainstream media commentators note each new event, incident or proclamation, but fail to grasp the interconnections between each of these moments and the system which is being constructed behind the headlines. The fact that these steps are incremental only serves to seem to isolate what is, in reality, intimately connected.

There is no room here to make an exhaustive list of the events that have occurred since Trump came to power, but consider that very early in his regime, he demanded that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America.

No-one now even mentions this strange and disturbing incident, nor the threats to annex Greenland, Panama or Canada. These demagogic moves appear to have faded from public consciousness and faded into the past, because each new day contains something that eclipses the events of the day before.

The universities are being crushed. Museums are under threat. Surveillance is increasing, dissent is limited. The mass media, from newspapers to television networks, are being aggressively sued or denied access or otherwise forced to comply with Trump’s ideological agenda. Protesting against genocide is being increasingly criminalised.

The Trump regime is rife with social demagogy. Increasingly, anyone who opposes Trump is called a “communist” or a “radical Marxist extremist,” when in fact they are none of the above.

When Trump calls someone a communist, he is invoking the memory of the McCarthy period, when state propaganda turned the US people against socialism. It is intended to evoke hatred and loathing, and is a barely hidden call to violence in the same way that all fascist leaders from Hitler onward have used anti-communism.

And like every fascist or quasi-fascist leader, Trump has insisted that he will “restore law and order.” To that end, the military has appeared in the streets of the US and in the very capital itself.

A new national police force is in the offing, backed up by the fanatical forces of Trump’s Maga movement. And like every fascist dictator, from the first day of his regime, he has been governing by executive order, sidelining both Congress and the courts and any form of democratic institution.

There is only one way to defeat fascism, and Dimitrov knew what it was. All the forces and people’s movements and political parties from the centre to the left, including democratic socialists, social democrats, other left entities, and communists themselves, must put aside their differences and organise themselves into a mass united front to resist and to confront and oppose every manifestation of fascism.

This will not be an easy task. Class collaboration and opportunism are rife among the non-communist centre and centre-left, and communist parties throughout the capitalist-imperialist world are still in the slow process of rebuilding their strength and influence in a period of counter-revolution. Still, it is a task which must be done. Fascism must be destroyed.

This article appeared on People’s Voice (pvonline.ca).