Social Fascism

Origins and doctrinal foundations

In November 1923 Comintern chairman Grigori Zinoviev concluded that von Seeckt on one side and Ebert and Noske on the other represented different varieties of fascism. The basic propositions of the thesis were formulated at a presidium meeting of the Comintern Executive Committee in January 1924, and in September 1924 Stalin wrote in 'Concerning the International Situation' that fascism was the bourgeoisie's fighting organisation relying on the active support of Social Democracy, that social democracy was 'objectively the moderate wing of fascism', and that the two were 'not antipodes, they are twins'. The argument was that as long as social-democratic parties defended bourgeois democracy and accepted class collaboration with capital, they did not differ from fascism. Otto Wille Kuusinen is identified as having supplied central components of the thesis.

The Third Period and formal adoption

At its Sixth World Congress, held in Moscow from 17 July to 1 September 1928, the Comintern proclaimed the end of capitalist stabilisation and the beginning of the 'Third Period' of world crisis and decisive battles for the proletarian dictatorship, and identified social democracy as the main enemy. The thesis defining social democracy as 'social fascism' was generally supported by the congress, with only a small minority opposed, notably the Italian delegation; it was not included in the programme adopted by the congress. In the USSR the same years brought collectivisation and dekulakisation, and the clearing away of 'right' opposition domestically was projected internationally through the Comintern as its transmission belt, so that social democrats and communist dissidents were denounced as fascists.

In 1929 the 10th Plenum of the ECCI formally confirmed the thesis, making social democracy a mere variant of fascism and any united front of communist with social-democratic parties impermissible. The Communist Party of Germany had already adopted it at its 12th Party Congress in June 1929, and Hermann Weber regards the 'Stalinisation of the KPD' as completed by that congress. Between 1929 and 1934 the concept was the ideological constant of the KPD.

Application and consequences

Relations between the SPD and the KPD in Germany were marked by mutual hostility. Under Chancellor Hermann Müller the SPD agreed with anti-communist parties in treating the Stalinists as fascists, and in 1929 Berlin police under an SPD government shot down Communist workers demonstrating on May Day, the Blutmai; that and the repressive legislation that followed served the Communists as evidence that social democrats really were 'social fascists'. In 1929 the KPD's Roter Frontkämpferbund was banned by the governing Social Democrats, and a KPD resolution described the 'social fascists' as the 'main pillar of the dictatorship of Capital'. KPD leader Ernst Thälmann presented Blutmai as striking proof of 'the transformation of social democracy into social fascism', and from mid-1929 he claimed the same transformation in the British Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald.

The priority of fighting the SPD before the Nazis showed itself in the 1931 referendum on dissolving the Prussian Landtag, when, with the approval of the Political Secretariat of the ECCI, the Communists joined a plebiscite initiated by the Nazis aiming at the resignation of Otto Braun's Social Democratic state government. In France the social fascism charge was raised by the PCF against the SFIO until 6 February 1934, when the far-right riot on the Place de la Concorde was read by the left as a fascist coup attempt; that reading opened cooperation between the two parties, and after the May 1936 elections the PCF tolerated the Popular Front government of the socialist Léon Blum.

Abandonment and the turn

After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 both the KPD and the SPD were outlawed and thousands of members of both were arrested, including KPD leader Ernst Thälmann, while most SPD leaders fled into exile. That experience forced the Comintern's turn, and at the Seventh Congress in August 1935 Georgi Dimitrov defined fascism as 'the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of finance capital' and made the Popular Front the official line. The opening of peaceful cooperation led to Popular Front governments in France and Spain in 1936 and in Chile in 1937.

The turn was not immediate. As late as May 1933 the KPD declared that the elimination of the 'social fascists' from the state apparatus and the suppression of their organisations and press changed nothing in the fact that they remained 'the main social support of the dictatorship of capital', and at the end of 1933 the KPD politician Fritz Heckert demanded that the struggle against the 'fascist bourgeoisie' be waged 'not together with the Social Democratic Party, but against it'.

Criticism and debate

Leon Trotsky argued against the accusations of 'social fascism'. In a letter of 8 December 1931 to a German communist worker he advocated a tactical union of communists and social democrats against fascism, warning that should fascism come to power it would ride over their skulls and spines 'like a terrific tank' and that only a fighting approach to the social-democratic workers could bring victory. Thälmann called the idea of a communist-social-democratic union the worst, most dangerous and most criminal theory devised by Trotsky.

Opposition existed inside the USSR as well: in June 1929 People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin spoke out against the theory. In post-war West German historiography Arthur Rosenberg concluded that the KPD leadership did not want revolution at all but only convenient propaganda against the SPD and left socialists, while Hermann Weber held that the two workers' parties dogmatically held to their respective templates so that no common action occurred, with a rethink coming only with the destruction of both parties in 1933. It has also been argued that the theory and the practice based on it were among the chief factors contributing to the victory of German fascism in January 1933.

Distinction: the later 'Trotskyist variety of fascism' label

Distinct from the original social fascism thesis, Trotskyism was assessed in the 1930s as a variety of social fascism, and after the First Moscow trial the concept of a 'Trotskyist-Zinovievite variety of fascism' was introduced. After the Comintern and the CPSU changed their attitude to social democrats and dropped the term, Trotskyists ceased to be called 'social fascists', but Trotskyism continued to be called a variety of fascism, with the fabricated Moscow trials presented as 'proving' the charge that Trotsky worked for Nazi Germany.