ISSUE 02

OCTOBER 2025

FASCISM BACK IN EUROPE?

Dossier on the Zetkin Forum’s International Marxist Conference in June 2025

English PDF
Deutsch PDF

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Fascism and crisis

Fascism in our time

The Right within the Class Relations of Western and Eastern Europe

Rehabilitation of Fascism through Anti-Communism

Anti-fascism instead of ruling ideology

Footnotes

Introduction

In Italy, Fratelli d’Italia, a party of open admirers of Mussolini, governs under the label of ‘post-fascist’. In almost all European countries, far-right parties are achieving seemingly unstoppable electoral success. From the Rassemblement National (France) to Reform UK (Great Britain), VOX (Spain), Alternative for Germany, the PiS party in Poland, the Hungarian government led by the Fidesz party under Viktor Orbán, and the AUR party in Romania. These electoral successes go hand in hand with anti-immigration protests[1] and racist smear campaigns, which sometimes bring tens of thousands of people onto the streets.1

Quite a few people are tempted by the coincidence of a comprehensive economic crisis and the rise of fascist parties to draw analogies with Europe from 1920 to 1940. So, is fascism back in Europe?

In many European countries, broad electoral alliances and high-profile campaigns to defend democracy are being launched by centrist parties, while the same parties, in their governmental responsibilities, mostly support the genocidal policies of the Israeli occupying power, enact racist laws, dismantle democracy, and initiate a historic rearmament. The narrative of a struggle between liberal democracy and autocracy, or illiberalism, not only determines a domestic political dividing line but also the foreign policy programme of the liberal-conservative ‘centre’ parties.

Progressive forces face a dilemma. Can they prevent the rise of far-right parties with these very same political forces? What is the difference between the ‘centre’ and the ‘right’ when they both push the same neoliberal program of class struggle and NATO’s war policy? In this historical moment, what remains of the experience of anti-fascism and the broad popular front against fascism?

In 1923, Clara Zetkin presented an insightful report to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), titled The Struggle Against Fascism”. At that time, the fascists led by Mussolini had been in power in Italy for six months. Following the victory of the October Revolution in 1917, a phase of intense class struggle had erupted worldwide. Revolutionary uprisings and mass movements on the one hand, white terror on the other. The entire system of world capitalism had entered a period of general crisis as a result of the upheaval of the First World War and the victory of the first socialist revolution, affecting all areas of life, the economy, politics, culture, and ideology. Capitalism had lost its historical initiative, according to the analysis of the Communist International. Zetkin began her report with a definition of fascism based on this overall situation of international class struggle. She said:

‘Fascism confronts the proletariat as an exceptionally dangerous and frightful enemy. Fascism is the strongest, most concentrated, and classic expression at this time of the world bourgeoisie’s general offensive’.2

Zetkin’s starting point was to understand fascism as an element of class struggle. Fascism was promoted and built up by the bourgeoisie, which could no longer maintain its class rule with its regular means of power. Zetkin recognised the essential manifestations of fascism in its pseudo-revolutionary demagogy and brutal terror. The definition of fascism and its potential for resistance was shaped by concrete experiences and an analysis of the struggles. Much distinguishes the international situation today from that of the past. Simple analogies seem nonsensical.

‘Definitions are too rigid for life, for reality. Thinking is a constant struggle against habit, against definitive, final statements. It is always work. Working on the concrete, on what´s there’.3

This is how activist Aitak Barani opened the first panel of the Zetkin Forum’s international conference in June 2025, setting the task for anti-fascism to examine political and economic conditions thoroughly. Only on this basis can we gain an understanding and a course of action in the fight against fascism and reactionary preparations for war.

Over 200 participants and 19 speakers from 14 countries presented their assessments and experiences from their concrete observations of developments in Western and Eastern Europe for discussion. This dossier guides readers through these debates, presents key arguments, aims to stimulate thought, and invites further international exchange on questions of anti-fascism. All contributions to the conference, as well as a dossier on perspectives on the rise of fascism in North and South America, Africa, and Asia, have been published online by the Zetkin Forum.

Fascism and crisis

Stagnant economic growth, protectionist tariff policies, competition for key technologies, and massive attacks on the rights and living standards of the working class – the manifestations of the economic crisis permeate the realities of Western economies and, by extension, the global economy they dominate. The 2008 crisis marked the beginning of a profound and lasting transformation in international production and trade chains and remains a central starting point for understanding the political dynamics of our time. The interpenetration of fascism and crisis, which was already apparent in analyses of the 1920s, remains crucial to the current situation. Is the rise of fascism a consequence of the economic crisis? How can the connection between neoliberal politics and fascism be understood?

Indian economist Utsa Patnaik argued at the conference that it is the suffering and frustration caused by neoliberal policies among broad sections of the population that are exploited and channelled by fascist parties – today, after decades of neoliberal policies worldwide and also in India, and similarly after 1929 in Germany by the Nazi party.

‘What the fascist parties typically do, and this is the way they rise to power, is to turn the anger of the people in the wrong direction. Instead of identifying the cause of their distress — which is the necessary of finance capital to deflate mass incomes — they instead point to minorities within society and say that these are the people who are taking away your jobs […]. In the case of Germany, as we know, it was the Jews, it was the gypsies, and later on, when the fascist party comes to power, it tries to overcome the economic crisis through violent external expansionism at the expense of the sovereignty of other countries and at the expense of crushing the labor movement in neighbouring countries as well’.4

In a sense, German fascism researcher Jürgen Lloyd picks up on this idea, identifying the inability of monopoly capital to integrate the majority of the population into its interests as a decisive factor in the establishment of fascism. At the same time, he warns against mistakenly combating the dissatisfied masses as the supposed cause of fascism. Monopoly capitalism is necessarily and fundamentally reactionary in its political content because it favours the interests of a small, shrinking group over those of the vast majority of society.

“Fascism is not distinguished from the liberal form of rule by a fundamentally different content. This content is determined by the interests to be enforced. The methods by which this content can actually be enforced – and thus the form of rule – are determined by the specific conditions. The decisive factor is the degree of ‘voluntary’ consent of the majority of the population to participate in the objectives of monopoly capital, which can be achieved within the framework of the parliamentary-liberal form of rule.”5

With reference to a memorandum by the Reich Association of German Industry (RDI) from 1929, Lloyd also argues against drawing a simplistic causal connection between fascism and economic crisis. According to Lloyd, the monopoly bourgeoisie united in the RDI was not driven to fascism by the crisis or a state of emergency, but by its own class interests, which, under the given conditions, made a change in the form of government appear necessary to assert itself. Instead, the crisis was seen as an opportunity that should not be missed.

Economics professor Clara Mattei argues that neoliberal or austerity policies were and are an integral part of capitalism and were pursued equally by both liberal and fascist states. Mattei thus contradicts the notion of a simple causality between neoliberalism and the rise of the fascist movement. Referring to her research on the economic policies of Britain and Mussolini’s Italy in the early 1920s, Mattei argues that fascism and liberalism should be seen as two forms of safeguarding the order of capital. To break the organised labour movement, comprehensive austerity policies were introduced in both countries, including cuts in social spending, capital-friendly tax policies, increased unemployment, and privatisation.

“The outbreak of the First World War politicised the economy to an unprecedented extent. […] Both countries (Great Britain and Italy, ZF) were actually experiencing an incredible amount of social turmoil through workers’ councils, peasants taking over land and running it through assemblies, the idea of nationalizing energy, such as coal in Britain, and the introduction of self-management in factories. […] In this situation of crisis of capitalism and alternatives, austerity emerges very clearly in order to defeat these alternatives and protect the capital order’.6

Fascism in our time

Unlike the fascist parties of the 1930s and 1940s, today’s right-wing actors have much more in common with neoliberal technocrats, whose profound crisis of legitimacy led to the rise of the ‘extreme right of a special kind’ in the first place, according to Vijay Prashad, director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. No Reichstag fire was necessary, no march on Rome – right-wing governments operated within the framework of liberal constitutions that placed no obstacles in the way of their rule, according to Prashad.

‘The most crucial finding from our research is that these forms of the right have not abandoned the framework of austerity and war but are merely new political brands that will pursue the same policies as the neoliberal technocratic parties but with a more muscular and acerbic form of nationalism to attract mass support that might have otherwise drifted leftward’.7

Professor of political science, Mònica Clua Losada, invited by the Catalan “Popular Unity Candidacy” (CUP), points out that this form of authoritarian neo-liberalism is by no means new, but has a long tradition in Chile and also in Catalonia. Building on these experiences, since the 2008 crisis and in response to a progressive emancipation movement in Catalonia, the Spanish state has reacted with systematic measures to discipline society and restrict democratic spaces and parliamentary rights.

‘This violence often takes place without fanfare and reinforces traditional structures of power (along axes of patriarchy and of nativism, for instance). The far right’s source of power lies in these “cultures of cruelty”, which occasionally lead to spectacular acts of violence against social minorities’.8

While ‘classical fascism’ emerged as a counter-revolutionary force against the rise of the workers’ and peasants’ movements in Europe in the context of the October Revolution and was an expression of the imperial ambitions of Germany and Italy as latecomers to colonial land grabbing, the ‘extreme right of a special type’ is emerging at a time when there is no mass movement of the working class and peasants against capitalism, according to Prashad. In contrast, the extreme right is fully supported by a bourgeoisie that fears losing its economic dominance to China. The Global North must deepen its own regime of exploitation and prepare for war.

‘On the table before the bourgeoisie in the West, therefore, is the question of how to reinvigorate their economies, the only answer being to increase militarism and threaten China, in particular, so as to get it and other Asian countries to slow down their own development to favour the Atlantic world. The New Cold War imposed by the West on China, in particular, is a key element in the emergence of the far right of a special type’.9

Although this new right wing is breaking with the language of globalisation and the Atlantic consensus in some respects, these forces do not have withdrawal from NATO in mind.

Greek philosophy professor Dimitrios Patelis also emphasises the intertwining of contemporary fascism with neoliberalism.

‘Fascism today is even more deeply linked to the ideology and practices of extreme neoliberalism, to the cannibalistic individualism of social Darwinism, and to the poisonous whims of ‘desire’ of ‘post-modern’ irrationalism’.10

He further argues that, with the emergence of transnational monopolies and the deep integration of the countries of the so-called West under the leadership of the US, fascism no longer arises within the core countries of imperialism, but as an instrument for their proxy wars. Already after the Second World War, fascist regimes were put in place by the core countries of imperialism against the socialist camp.

‘With the emergence of the camp of the early socialist countries and the countries emerging from the victorious anti-imperialist movements, fascism, fascist-type “movements”, and dictatorial regimes of various forms were promoted and imposed by the imperialist countries in collaboration with (or significant sections of) the local subservient ruling classes in the dependent, semi-independent, and peripheral countries of the imperialist metropolitan centers’.11

Historically, fascist regimes in South Korea, South Vietnam, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan and other dictatorships in countries of the Global South are examples of this. After 1990, similar actions were taken in Yugoslavia, the Baltic countries and, in particular, today in Ukraine and Israel. Entire countries and peoples were placed under brutal and open foreign administration and turned into expendable ‘private military companies’ of the aggressive Euro-Atlantic axis, according to Patelis.

Meloni, Trump, Le Pen, Weidel, et al. are considered figureheads of the modern right in the West. The theses put forward suggest that they should be understood as far-right forces that have emerged alongside the neoliberal policies of the economically integrated transatlantic system. They differ from the regimes of open terror that represented fascism in the first half of the 20th century. The country-specific contributions on the right in Western and Eastern Europe, which formed the focus of the conference, support this assessment.

The right wing within the class relations of Western and Eastern Europe

Both Salvatore Prinzi of the Italian party ‘Potere al Popolo’ and Gyula Thürmer of the Hungarian Workers’ Party clearly contradicted the characterisation of the Meloni and Orban governments as fascist. Many liberal analysts would come to such a conclusion if their view were limited to individual superficial characteristics of the state superstructure.

In fact, there are ardent supporters of Mussolini in Meloni’s government. According to Prinzi, she is continuing the neoliberal policies of her predecessors without the need for a fascist form of government. Italy’s numerically large petty bourgeoisie is being integrated with individual concessions, while the deepening dependence on the market is increasingly disorganising the working class. Meloni represents the interests of the transatlantically integrated big bourgeoisie. Marlène Rosato came to the same conclusion regarding France. The transatlantically oriented bourgeoisie, which the EU also represents as a whole, is increasingly turning to extreme right-wing parties, such as the Rassemblement National (RN), in the face of rivalry with China and the formation of a left-wing alternative in individual countries, such as France.

The contributions painted a somewhat different picture of Eastern Europe. According to Thürmer, Orbán’s Fidesz party was able to achieve political majorities primarily through a state-capitalist course that limited the influence of foreign capital in individual sectors. However, there were no signs of an actual shift away from the EU and the West. Political scientist Vladimir Bortun analysed the situation in Romania in a similar way. The far-right Alliance for the Unification of Romanians (abbreviated to “AUR” in Romanian and currently the strongest opposition party) entered the elections with a programme that combined neoliberal elements with those promoting the national economy, without questioning the narrow framework of Western alliance orientation.

‘The domestic bourgeoisie felt squeezed out by foreign capital, which has become dominant in most key sectors of the economy since the accession to the European Union and the integration of Romania into global markets. The right-wing turn is the reaction of this national bourgeoisie that wants to capture state power against the domination of foreign capital’.12

The national bourgeoisie typically occupies economic sectors such as real estate, construction, food, and hospitality, and profits, in particular, from the struggles of small self-employed individuals who are unable to withstand the economic pressure of foreign capital. In terms of foreign policy, however, contrary to some claims, right-wing parties such as AUR are clearly aligned with NATO and particularly supportive of the Trump administration, according to Bortun.

‘It is very much a pro-capitalist party, that combines elements of neoliberalism with elements of economic nationalism or state capitalism’.13

While right-wing parties in both Western and Eastern Europe employ the rhetoric of national sovereignty – their respective variations on ‘America First’ – to build a voter base, none of these forces are actually breaking with the Western alliance, nor are they abandoning NATO or the EU. According to Mònica Clua Losada, this Western alliance is maintained by networks such as the Atlas Network, which uses large sums of money to organise the collection and orientation of new right-wing institutions worldwide, thereby building bridges between fascist forces, representatives of authoritarian neoliberalism, and anarcho-capitalist circles.

The far-right parties of Western Europe are turning out to be instruments and representatives of the interests of Europe’s transatlantic oriented bourgeoisie. The boundaries between liberal and conservative forces are becoming blurred. In Eastern Europe, it is liberal forces that most consistently support a policy of open markets in the interests of the largest monopoly groups from Western Europe and the USA. Right-wing parties that strengthen the interests of their national bourgeoisie to a limited extent often provoke opposition from the economically dominant countries of the EU, as illustrated by the example of the Orban government in Hungary. Regarding Poland, the Polish philosopher and humanities scholar Florian Nowicki emphasised that it is precisely the liberal parties that have played the role of chauvinistic whip-crackers and normalised fascist language, especially against Russia.

It is clear that the specific face of right-wing and fascist parties in Western and Eastern Europe is largely shaped by the country’s position in the international division of labour and its specific historical development. The legacy and experience of socialism remain ever-present in the crises and conflicts in Eastern European countries, as do the experience of neoliberal shock therapy and neocolonial integration into the Western-dominated division of labour after 1990. Thürmer emphasised that moments of political and economic crisis offer both the opportunity to reorganise socialist forces and the path to the establishment of fascism.

‘The Hungarian people have spent four decades in socialism, and they have gotten a lot from it. If capitalism cannot solve its crisis, people will remember socialism. […] The future of right-wing movements depends on the further development of Hungary and, naturally, Europe. If stability in Hungary collapses, we will face a period of political and even legal instability. We cannot even exclude the danger of civil war’.14

The core programme of ‘classical fascism’ was the war against the Soviet Union and against the revolutionary movements in Europe and worldwide, which were influenced by the October Revolution. Militarily, it was the Red Army that decisively defeated German fascism. The demonisation and delegitimisation of socialism after 1945, but especially after 1990, when the socialist camp was defeated, necessarily went hand in hand with a rehabilitation of fascism in the politics of memory and a distortion of the history of the Second World War. Several contributions to the conference explicitly addressed the close connection between anti-communism and the current rise of right-wing and fascist forces.

Rehabilitation of fascism through anti-communism

During the Second World War, in Yugoslavia, as in other countries in Eastern Europe and East Asia, the struggle for liberation from fascist occupation merged with the struggle for socialism. The Yugoslav partisans were the only consistently anti-fascist faction in the liberation struggle, according to their own self-image, and became the central actors in the people’s war of liberation. Serbian historian Jelena Đureinović traces the stages of historical revisionism, which she identifies as being rooted in anti-communism and supported by a broad consensus of liberal, conservative, and fascist forces from the 1980s to the present day. Gradually, the Serbian Chetniks, as supposed opponents of both the fascists and the communists, became the central point of reference in the politics of memory, despite their actual collaboration with the fascist German occupation.

‘The discourses from the 1980s and 1990s turned into dominant narratives: references to socialist Yugoslavia disappeared from the public sphere, the narrative of victimhood under communist terror became prominent and fascist collaborators replaced the Partisans as positive references from the Second World War. As the source of legitimacy of Yugoslav state socialism, the Second World War became the most important object of revision’.15

According to Đureinović, the core issue here is the delegitimisation of any left-wing alternative to capitalism. The EU is acting as the central driver of this historical revisionism.

‘The EU also provides funding for projects, publications, and events and stirs history writing and educational initiatives through the Platform for Memory and Conscience in Europe towards the lens of the communist terror, and away from any other perspectives that would depict the lived experiences or achievements of state socialism as anything but negative’.16

Serbian political scientist and media scholar Aleksandar Đenić highlights the role of the EU by examining various historical and political resolutions that equate the history of fascism with socialism under the banner of totalitarianism. As a result, since 1990, monuments to the anti-fascist war have been dismantled in numerous Eastern European countries and laws have been passed in Romania, the Baltic states, Poland, and Bulgaria criminalising communist symbols and organisations. Nazis who were expropriated or punished by socialist governments are receiving restitution claims or being rehabilitated. Totalitarianism theory posits the liberal-democratic society as the norm and contrasts it with supposedly illiberal or autocratic states.

‘These decisions are dominated by an anti-communist narrative that dehumanizes communists and constructs an anti-totalitarian discourse, while simultaneously tacitly rehabilitating anti-communist movements in post-socialist societies, regardless of their fascist and/or collaborationist nature’.17

In Germany, the rewriting of the history of fascism had to take a slightly different course. Despite numerous continuities with important elites of the Hitler regime, the West German Federal Republic had to define itself in opposition to German fascism. German journalist Susann Witt-Stahl traces the central stages of historical revisionism in Germany, which gradually reached new heights in line with the Federal Republic’s war policy. The bombing of Yugoslavia, Germany’s first war of aggression after 1945, was legitimised by the then Green Foreign Minister on the grounds that a new Auschwitz must be prevented.

‘The functional elites of German imperialism had thus accomplished the feat of ideologically exploiting their own old crimes to legitimize new ones’.18

Witt-Stahl recognises an important feature of the reaction under the guise of the currently advancing reactionary-militaristic restructuring of the state and society, presented in a left-liberal and anti-fascist guise. In foreign policy, too, supposed anti-fascism serves as an instrument for asserting Western power interests. This goes hand in hand with the Nazification of the enemy, which, according to Witt-Stahl, is currently being pursued in particular in German policy towards Russia. Support for Ukraine and a clean bill of health for Ukrainian fascists are becoming the decisive focal point and catalyst for the rehabilitation of German fascism.

‘The revising and ideological obscuring of the history of Ukrainian collaborators with Hitler and the suppression of facts about their political heirs has long corresponded with a practice of systematic concealment, silence, denial, and contestation with ignorance of the increasing activities of Ukrainian pro-Ukrainian fascists in Germany, German Nazis in Ukraine, and the cooperation of the German armed forces and German politicians with fascist military personnel in Ukraine — in effect, a creeping integration into the “fortified democracy” is taking place’.19

Even though the form, content, and speed of fascism’s rehabilitation depend heavily on the history and conditions of the respective country, the distortion of history is a widespread phenomenon with significant commonalities. While anti-communism is the central connecting element between liberals, conservatives and fascists, the doctrine of totalitarianism acts as the ideological narrative of the entire bourgeois spectrum. It is clear that those who rewrite the role of the Soviet Union, the anti-fascist popular front and partisan movements are also rewriting the role and history of fascism and its collaborators. In the context of the current confrontation between European countries and Russia, organisations and ideologies that were already anti-Russian and anti-Bolshevik during the Second World War are being rehabilitated.

Liberals and fascists converge in their war aims. On the left-liberal side, ‘[…] rigid moralism as an antidote to “authoritarian evil” (Witt-Stahl) forms the shell of reactionary realpolitik. The exploitation of anti-fascism as a guise for imperial war policy poses enormous challenges for anti-fascists.

Anti-fascism instead of ruling ideology

The starting point and focus of the conference was the question of how to orient our actions. How can reactionary developments and fascist forces be effectively combated? Drawing on the practical experience of the Italian grassroots trade union Unione Sindicale di Base (USB), Cinzia Della Porta argues that pushing back the fascists currently means organising struggles for the social and economic interests of the working class, against arms deliveries, and for solidarity with Palestine. A neoliberal war against the working class that has been going on for 30 years is now being intensified by the comprehensive orientation towards external war, which is becoming the only way out of the systemic crisis for the capitalists. The reactionary turn reflects this development, which has been driven forward by governments of both ostensibly left-wing and right-wing persuasions. Only a sharply articulated, class-conscious resistance to further precariousness, the dismantling of democracy, and preparations for war can undermine the growth of right-wing forces.

Nasrin Düll from the student group ‘Studis gegen rechte Hetze’ (Students Against Right-Wing Agitation) in Frankfurt am Main showed how anti-fascism, which was still defended by the labour movement in the Federal Republic after 1945, was gradually replaced by a pro-Zionist position supporting the state with the help of ideological narratives from above, thus effectively exonerating and glorifying fascism.

‘The denazification of Germany was transferred to Palestine and is thus the continuation of colonial traditions – philo-Semitism is a masked anti-Semitism that would rather ship the European Jews out of Europe to a racist settler colony instead of really combating Europe’s own anti-Semitism at its roots’.20

Flanked by supposedly left-wing academic discourse and state integration programmes, the basic structures of anti-fascism in Germany were undermined on a broad front on this ideological basis, according to Düll. These would have to be rebuilt independently and in many cases from scratch, as she describes in concrete terms regarding her experience of anti-fascist work at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

‘Particularly in the area of anti-fascism/anti-racism, you are dealing with very specific enemies, both ideologically and very directly physically. Anti-fascism, therefore, always has the character of self-defense, which must take concrete forms: education, gathering information, organizing, and helping each other. […] The turning away of anti-fascism from practical (self-)organization is a further condition for the elitist (and thus statist) turn of anti-fascism’.21

The anti-fascist activist Andrea Toussaint from Paris puts forward the thesis that the limitations of a ‘moral anti-fascism’ that focuses exclusively on right-wing organisations have been conclusively proven, not only in France, by the genocide in Gaza. On the one hand, it has become clear that a definitive anti-colonial position must be an essential component of anti-fascism. On the other hand, it has become apparent that a tactical orientation towards a broad republican bloc against the extreme right undermines one’s own political credibility in the long term. Toussaint argues for a more comprehensive understanding of the dialectical relationship between the liberal-conservative centre and the extreme right to avoid playing into the hands of the division of labour between these forces.

‘Although cast as a monstrous outsider, completely alien to the acceptable political field, the far right in reality plays a dual role: as a supplier of fascist ideas, but also as a justification for the implementation of racist and authoritarian policies.

‘By rolling out the red carpet while constantly disassociating from it, the moral antifascism of the ruling capitalist bloc helps advance far-right ideas — while giving them a subversive gloss. The electoral successes that inevitably follow then provide the perfect excuse for successive governments to implement major portions of the far-right programme’.22

According to Toussaint, anti-fascism must form a broad, offensive popular bloc that does not take the narrow, officially respected boundaries of discourse as its basis, but rather positions itself consciously broadly and openly and does not constantly define itself in opposition to more radical forms of protest and positions.

Della Porta, Düll, and Toussaint agreed that the task at hand is to free anti-fascism from its hypocritical appropriation and state-supporting emptying by forces of the neoliberal bourgeois centre and to redefine it on the basis of international solidarity and sharp opposition to NATO’s war policy.

This rehabilitation of anti-fascism goes hand in hand – as the contributions from Eastern Europe in particular have made clear – with the reappropriation and rehabilitation of the history of socialism, which is historically closely intertwined with the struggle against fascism. On the other hand, this overlap between anti-fascism and socialism does not simply mean that they are identical. Self-defence against fascist attacks, the formation of a progressive counterculture against a widespread culture of brutalisation, and the defence of democratic rights remain a broad point of reference for progressive forces. Reclaiming this social field goes hand in hand with pushing back the bourgeois deceivers of an anti-fascism emptied of content.

Footnotes

  1. See also the dossier “Import – Deport, European Migration Regimes in Times of Crises” from the Zetkin Forum: https://zetkin.forum/publications/import-deport-european-migration/ ↩︎
  2. Clara Zetkin, The Struggle Against Fascism (1923). Online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/06/struggle-against-fascism.html ↩︎
  3. Aitak Barani, On the Problem of a Definitive Definition of Fascism, p. 2. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/250722_Aitak_final.pdf ↩︎
  4. Utsa Patnaik, Neoliberalism lays the groundwork for the Rise of Neofascism., p. 3. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/250725_Utsa_Final.pdf ↩︎
  5. Jürgen Lloyd, “Rise or decline?” – How does fascism relate to the economic crisis?, p. 4. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/250804_JurgenLloyd_Final.pdf ↩︎
  6. Clara Mattei, The capital order – fascism and austerity, p. 3. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/250722_Clara_Final.pdf ↩︎
  7. Vijay Prashad, The Ugly Character of the Far Right of a Special Type., p. 1. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/250725_Vijay_final.pdf ↩︎
  8. Ibid., p. 2. ↩︎
  9. Ibid., p. 4. ↩︎
  10. Dimitrios Patelis, On the relationship between imperialism and fascism during WWIII, p. 6. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/250724_Patelis_Final.pdf ↩︎
  11. Ibid., p. 4. ↩︎
  12. Vladimir Bortun, The Class Relations of the Extreme Right in Romania, p. 1. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/20250722_vladimir_DE.pdf ↩︎
  13. Ibid., p. 5. ↩︎
  14. Gyula Thürmer, Crisis of Capitalism – Development of Right-Wing Policy in Contemporary Hungary, p. 5. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/250724_Gyula_final.pdf ↩︎
  15. Jelena Đureinović, Rehabilitation of WW2 Collaborators and Demonisation of Antifascism in Serbia and the Post-Yugoslav Space, p. 5. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/J250811_Jelena_final.pdf ↩︎
  16. Ibid., p. 3. ↩︎
  17. Aleksandar Đenić, Legal and Ideological Rehabilitation of Fascist Collaborators in the Context of Serbia’s EU Accession, p. 13. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/250722_Aleksandar-Djenic_final.pdf ↩︎
  18. Susann Witt-Stahl, “Never again (Russia)!” On the rehabilitation of fascism in Germany, p. 5. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/250804_Susann_final-1.pdf ↩︎
  19. Ibid., p. 8. ↩︎
  20. Nasrin Düll, German Great Power Politics with the Help of Anti-Fascism?, p. 3. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/250804_Nasrin_Final.pdf ↩︎
  21. Ibid., p. 11. ↩︎
  22. Andrea Toussaint, Against moral anti-fascism. Reflection on the popular front model and its limits., p. 4. Online: https://zetkin.forum/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/250811_Final.pdf ↩︎