The 2024 elections and the danger of fascism: The working class must no longer remain at the mercy of its enemies

By Larry Holmes
September 27, 2024

The writer is First Secretary of Workers World Party.

The presidential election this year is a watershed moment for the working-class movement and for the anti-imperialist forces within it. It is time to do what has yet to be done in the post-World War II era and that is the rebuilding of a workers’ movement with its own political organization independent of the bourgeoisie. Ultimately, this organization would be a mass workers’ party. We will return to this idea, but first we’ll give an abbreviated assessment of the situation we face.

Some time ago, capitalism entered its end stage, protracted as that stage may be. This is the historical framework in which to view the desperate measures that the capitalist class took almost a half a century ago under the Margaret Thatcher regime in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States to save the capitalist system. Those drastic measures are commonly referred to as neoliberalism. Recent developments indicate that capitalism’s end stage has progressed from a trot to a gallop and is on the verge of becoming a free fall.

Some of the recent developments that evidence the acceleration of capitalism’s terminal disease include the near collapse of the capitalist financial system in 2008 and the extreme measures that the capitalists had to take in order to stop the collapse (measures that have exhausted their utility). The evidence also includes endless wars, the unraveling of the U.S. imperialist empire, the collapse of the three-quarters of a century world capitalist order constructed and presided over by the U.S. ruling class, the rise of Donald Trump and the danger of fascism.

The prospect of another catastrophic capitalist economic crisis and the potential for World War III are also explosive symptoms of the mass destruction engendered by capitalism’s downward spiral.

This makes the 2024 U.S. elections unlike any previous ones. As in the past, they have nothing to do with democracy, but are rather a fig leaf over the capitalist class’s complete domination over everything through the duopoly of the two capitalist parties.

However, this time there is a feeling that whatever the outcome of the elections, there is little to nothing that the capitalist class can do to manage or stop the multiplying crises from merging into a storm that threatens their system. Of course they will try to maintain their control either by war, fascism, another massive attack on the workers –  and especially the most oppressed or some combination of these horrors.

Fear of Trump?

There are many people in the U.S. who are enthusiastic about the first woman of color becoming president. Many are also deeply worried about the prospect of Trump winning the election. While these feelings are understandable, they do nothing to alter the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris is a servant of U.S. imperialism — and she’s gone out of her way to avow her loyalty.

Harris is fully prepared to go to war for empire, order or condone more and greater police repression against protests in support of Palestinians or anything else progressive except reproductive rights. She appears ready and willing to continue the neoliberal assault on the working class.

It’s important to recall that the rise of ultraright, white-supremacist, neofascist forces is in large part because the Democratic Party leadership, along with the main social democratic political parties in Europe and elsewhere in the world, abandoned even the pretense of defending the working class from the neoliberal assault on wages and social services. While not surprising, it is telling that at a time when the overwhelming majority of the working class is one paycheck away from ruin, the Democratic political leaders say nothing meaningful about wages, health care and housing.

More than anything else, this election hinges on the genocide in Gaza. Many who sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians blame President Joe Biden and Harris for backing and arming Israel and say they want the Democrats and Harris to pay a price that they will never forget for enabling genocide — even if they also condemn Donald Trump.

Gaza is not an isolated event. The genocide in Gaza comes at a time when Washington, fearful that U.S. imperialism is losing its hegemony, is willing to go to war against Iran, Lebanon, Russia and ultimately China. Gaza reveals the extent to which U.S. imperialism and its Israeli client will go to defend its besieged empire.

Unlike in the past, the U.S government is unable to hide from the world what it is willing to do to people who rise up against imperialism. Even this exposure fails to deter them. This is a turning point. This is the world situation. The U.S. ruling class and both of its political parties are ready to go to war with the rest of the world in order to maintain the U.S. imperialist empire.

Democratic party is biggest obstacle

The Democratic Party is not only the graveyard of mass movements; up until now it has been the biggest obstacle to the development of an independent working-class movement. Democratic Party leaders are using the Kamala Harris campaign to revitalize the party. From a class point of view, that is a problem.

There are many reasons for workers and oppressed people to fear Trump. He hopes to rally his MAGA base to election victory with the most openly racist campaign against migrant workers of color in modern history. That he has so much support, including from a significant number of workers, mostly white, is troubling, to say the least. It’s important to point out that Trump also has strong backing from sections of the capitalist ruling class.

A big part of the MAGA base is motivated by the fear of losing white supremacy to the changing demography of the United States. A significant minority of Trump’s MAGA movement is openly white supremacist and even fascist. In part, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 reflects a wish list that the ultraright has been trying to enact since the Reagan presidency. It should not be taken lightly.

If Trump should win, will that mean the victory of fascism? No it will not. However, it would be a mistake to minimize the danger of fascism that Trump and the MAGA movement reflects even if Trump loses.

As in the past, the danger of fascism is a by-product of a severe economic crisis of the capitalist system. As we know, since the 1980s, vast changes to the way that capitalism is organized have created unprecedented inequality, widespread economic insecurity, fatalism and anger. If this anger is not deliberately and effectively channeled into the workers’ class struggle against the capitalist system, it can foster the conditions for the rise of fascism.

Enslavement and settler colonialism

Before going any further into the discussion of what fascism is, it’s necessary to note that Black radical organizations and activists tend to get frustrated when the discussion of fascism is limited to its development in Europe. Slavery and Jim Crow may predate the rise of fascism in Europe, but not by much.

Whatever one’s definition of fascism, it is no less serious than the fascism that attacked the revolutionary struggle of freed slaves to build power and self-determination, known as Reconstruction, which followed the Union’s victory over the Confederacy in the 1861-65 Civil War. Reconstruction was violently crushed by the mass mobilization of armed white supremacists with the help of the Northern capitalist ruling class. Crushing Reconstruction laid the basis for organized Ku Klux Klan terror against Black people for the purpose of imposing legalized white supremacy in the South and elsewhere.

When you talk about fascism in the U.S., you must also include the genocidal holocaust perpetrated by settlers and the U.S. army against Indigenous people in the war to steal Native land. This is why the demand for “Land Back!” is so important.

Nevertheless, Marxists have learned important lessons from studying how fascism came to power in the 1920s in Italy and 1930s in Germany.

Fascism is not just the implementation of reactionary policies. Fascism is the coming to power of a grouping that aims to replace bourgeois democracy, one form of capitalist rule, with another form of capitalist government, a dictatorship.

However, in the case of fascism in Italy and Germany, the dictatorships did not come into power through a military coup for example, though parts of the military might have participated, but through a mass reactionary movement supported by a decisive faction in the bourgeoisie. This fascist movement was highly organized, armed and able to violently crush and/or replace the organizations of the working class and the oppressed. Only a working-class movement whose level of organization and militancy was superior could have stopped the fascists.

The ranks of a fascist mass movement came from sections of the petty bourgeoisie (including small farmers) who were pushed down from their social position and turned into impoverished workers as a consequence of a severe capitalist crisis. Parts of the working class, even some in unions, were drawn into the fascist movement. In this way the leaders of the fascist movement came to power, and once in power used the state apparatus — the army and the police — to outlaw and repress opposition to those in power, especially the working-class organizations, including communist and socialist parties.

The leaders of the fascist movement overturned bourgeois democracy by convincing a large section of the capitalist ruling class that this was the only way to save the capitalist system in the midst of a crisis that threatened the system. The principal threat to the capitalists was that if something desperate was not done, the working class under the leadership of revolutionaries would overturn the capitalist class and their system.

Big capitalists backed fascists

This means that another important point in understanding fascism is that it was used to defeat the working-class movement and crush the class struggle of the workers against capitalism. If we don’t understand how fascism is very deliberately used to alter the balance of the class struggle in favor of the capitalist class, then we miss the essence of fascism.

Understanding the relationship of fascism to the class struggle and the ruling class’s fear of the working class sets us on the course that leads to the correct conclusions. Elements in the capitalist ruling class may not agree with fascism.  Indeed, some may even oppose it. While the ruling class can avoid supporting fascists, they cannot control the conditions that give rise to fascism.

The lessons from the first struggles against fascism show that there can only be and therefore must be an escalation — political, ideological, organizational — of the defensive and offensive struggle initiated by the working class. In order to prevail, the working-class movement must outorganize and outnumber the fascist movement and have the resolve to crush it. The capacity of the working class to do this is one of the things that paves the road to revolution.

If you take the working class and the class struggle out of the equation, then the individual workers are left at the mercy of the political machinations of their enemy. If the working class does not advance in every way that is necessary in order to meet the requirements of the class struggle, then it is left at the mercy of the capitalist class in the face of war, depression and all other crises. It is only the mobilization of the working class that can stop fascism. There is no more important lesson that can be taken away by the 2024 presidential elections.

Develop new working-class movement

The elections will come and go, but no matter who wins, the danger of fascism and fascist activity remains, because its potential is tied to the crisis of the capitalist system. Whatever happens in November, the need to address what is necessary for the development of a new working-class movement will remain.

If Trump loses the election, it is likely that he will refuse to concede, claim that the election was stolen and call on his supporters to rise up. We can only speculate on what that might mean. What we do know is that within the MAGA movement there are forces prepared to mobilize, to use violence and to target the most oppressed sections of the working class. It may even target political opponents.

There exists in the United States an armed neofascist infrastructure with the covert and overt involvement of considerable segments of the police. While this is not on the level of the KKK in its heyday or the brownshirts (storm troopers) in Germany in the 1930s or the blackshirts in Italy in the 1920s, it should not be dismissed.

If a struggle breaks out after the elections that threatens the workers and oppressed, the working-class movement must be prepared to respond. This would have to include the readiness to organize workers’ anti-fascist defense committees. There are already calls for a united front against fascism. Depending on events, it’s possible that such a united front could be a stepping stone towards a mass workers’ formation.

All who are serious about breaking the political dictatorship of the capitalists must revisit and seriously reassess the relevance of the class question to the situation we face today. There is no way of getting around this. Moreover, this reassessment for those who are ready must be theoretical.

The Marxist thesis on the centrality of the class struggle and the role of the working class in the revolutionary process has been under attack since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. In the wake of setbacks to the working- class movement, especially in the epoch of neoliberalism, more than a few have abandoned Marxism or dulled its sharpness and abandoned its revolutionary objectives in order to make it more compatible with the view that capitalism is going to last for a long time, maybe even forever.

This belief has only served to suppress the centrality of the class struggle and the development of the working-class movement. It has created the false, paralyzing and prevailing conclusion that organizing the working class is the exclusive domain of the traditional union movement, with all of its limitations.

The union movement and its current leaders have tied themselves to the Democratic Party and the policy of business unionism over mass organization and militancy. They have, by and large, succumbed to the fragmentation of the working class and the backwardness of some sections of the working class. This leadership has embraced the orders given to it by bosses that their unions are supposed to be fighting, orders that they must support U.S. imperialism and keep radical and revolutionary politics out of the labor movement.

Particularly since the 1980s, they have resigned themselves to representing a shrinking base of unionized workers instead of organizing and militantly fighting for the entire multinational working class.

Radicals and militants were purged en masse from the labor movement during the height of the anti-communist witch hunt in the 1950s and in many ways the once decisive influence of radicals during the historic working-class struggles of the 1930s has never recovered. But nothing in existence remains constant, and the labor movement is changing from the bottom up.

Rebirth of workers’ movement

Young radical workers from Starbucks to Amazon, graduate student teachers to workers in every sector of the economy, including migrant workers and in every part of the country, including the South are creating the basis for a fundamental rebirth of the working-class movement. This new energy is also reflected in some of the older labor unions that have been more ready and willing to go on strike.

The latest development that has become an enormous part of change from below is the emergence of labor solidarity with Palestine. It is nothing less than the seeds of a new anti-imperialist consciousness in the working-class movement.

Trade unionists who have organized “Labor for Palestine” have been organizing protests and fighting to get union resolutions passed at every level of the labor movement and in every union, calling for an immediate ceasefire and ending shipments of weapons to Israel.

The New York Times published a front-page article Aug. 30 on the struggle over Gaza inside the labor movement. The article is instructive, because it shows that the bourgeoisie is monitoring this development and what it thinks of it. The Times article asserts the left-wing workers who have come into the labor movement through the recent organizing drives are fighting with the leadership and demanding more solidarity with Gaza.

The article quotes Charmaine Chua, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who says, “Many people are being freshly brought into union-movement work as a result of their solidarity with Palestine.”

The article also quotes Larry Cohen, a former president of the Communications Workers of America, who said the Gaza issue “was a reminder that the goals of union members and the interests of the Democratic Party were not always the same, even if labor leaders sometimes lost sight of the difference.”

Cohen also said that “calls to limit shipments of offensive weapons to Israel until there is a ceasefire might put labor at odds with the Biden administration. But these calls would most likely create enthusiasm within the labor movement, motivating existing members and helping to attract new ones.”

The young militants who have recently entered the labor movement and the union activists who are organizing for Gaza are part of the new forces that have the potential of remaking a new workers’ movement that could transcend the labor movement and its limitations and develop into a mass workers’ party.

A mass workers’ party is not a revolutionary cadre party which serves a related but critically necessary purpose. Moreover, such a party need not be and should not be entirely based in the organized labor movement, though it would be important to have radical trade unionists at the center of it. Why? Because if such a party was really independent of the capitalist political parties, the leadership of the traditional labor movement would do all that it could to stop such a development.

Anti-imperialism needed

Another source of energy and political direction for such a party could be the mass movement in support of Palestine, especially the students. This would serve to draw student activists who are also workers into the workers’ movement. Also, this would help to ensure that a new mass workers’ organization is anti-imperialist.

There will be opportunities to attract these students. Even now, the students who are trying to re-establish the encampments this semester are facing widespread repression, and they need support from the rest of the movement urgently.

The world is rising up against imperialism, especially U.S. imperialism. A workers’ party that is on the wrong side of this struggle cannot be helpful to the development of a new working-class movement.

Anti-imperialism is a pillar of proletarian or working-class internationalism. Internationalism is the solidarity in theory and in practice of the workers and oppressed peoples of the world. Fascism is based on reactionary imperialist nationalism. Its purpose is to have the workers fighting each other instead of capitalism.

Internationalism on the other hand is the exact opposite of fascism and the enemy of fascism. U.S. imperialism may be diminished, but it remains the leader of the capitalist world, and this reality requires that the working-class movement in the U.S. have the strongest internationalist orientation, especially in practice. A new workers’ movement in the U.S. that is not strong on internationalism would remain chained to imperialism.

The organizational form that a new workers’ movement takes is not something that can be prematurely proclaimed. It must be based in the day-to-day struggles of the working class. The challenge for the best fighters for the working class, regardless of their generation, will be to put aside reservations, any pessimism, any concerns that such a perspective is impossible or impractical.

This has to be a long-term project that is subject to the inevitability of passing through stages. The most important thing is understanding its urgency and having the serious commitment to its coming into being no matter how long or hard that might be.

This is not something that is contingent on who wins the election. The elections will come and go, but the need to address what is necessary for the development of a new working-class movement will remain.