It is common to discuss fascism as if it were a set of policies or political characteristics, or a case of ‘the chicken coming home to roost.’ This is a productive line of thought, that the imperialist states unleash such violence across the world that fascist policies appear as the logical extension of them to the home front. Nazism was merely the Europeanization of colonialism. Yet this way of thinking about fascism is insufficient. While it can produce insights and help explain the psychology of the fascist butchers, it does little to illuminate the separation between the nominally democratic and fascist states in the imperial core. Fascism must be understood in a sociological sense. It is in this sense that we must understand Trump’s attack on federal workers as the spearpoint of fascism in the US. It is a serious strike at the unions, i.e. the basic organizations of the working class.

Fascists like to claim they represent the working class in some sense, and liberals continually play into this narrative by constructing a myth of a working class that is primarily white and supportive of far right politics. In truth, however, fascism is completely alien to the multiracial working class. Trotsky’s definition of fascism, arrived at by studying the fascist movements in Germany and Italy, still applies. As Trotsky wrote when describing Hitler’s rise:

While the Nazis acted as a party and not as a state power, they did not quite find an approach to the working class. On the other side, the big bourgeoisie, even those who supported Hitler with money, did not consider his party theirs. The national ‘renaissance’ leaned wholly upon the middle classes, the most backward part of the nation, the heavy ballast of history. Political art consisted in fusing the petty bourgeoisie into oneness through its common hostility to the proletariat. What must be done in order to improve things? First of all, throttle those who are underneath. Impotent before big capital, the petty bourgeoisie hopes in the future to regain its social dignity through the ruin of the workers.

Fascism is a movement of the enraged and historically obsolete petit bourgeois, the small business owners and landlords, mobilized against the working class in a desperate attempt to preserve themselves. It is a product of capitalism in decay.

As a movement of a historically obsolete class, fascism is not capable of coming to power on its own. Rather, the ruling capitalist class embraces facism to crush the organized working class at certain historical moments (often in the aftermath of failed revolutionary moments as in Germany and Italy). At these times the bourgeois sacrifices liberal democracy and direct control of the state to the petit bourgeois fascists so that facism can crush working class institutions (communist and socialist parties, labor unions, tenant associations, etc). Ultimately this means that socialism is the only hope for democracy. The capitalist class has more in common with the fascists than with the workers’ movement, and will see any semblance of democracy destroyed if it can keep control of the means of production.

This does not negate the fact that liberal democracy is the preferred method of rule of the capitalist class within the imperial core under normal circumstances, as it allows the bourgeois direct access to political power as well as economic power. In concrete terms that means the ruling class itself will use the state to contain–but never eliminate–the fascist movement until the time is ripe. Musk and his allies represent the wing of the capitalist class that has decided the time is ripe to suppress the workers’ organizations and build a Reich for themselves. Despite Trump’s election to the presidency, this wing of the capitalist class is not yet fully ascendant. It is held in check by other sections of capital that have not yet broken with bourgeois democracy and who seek capitalist stability and a return to the pre-2020 status quo. Biden was their representative. Then he committed a genocide in Palestine, doubled child poverty in the US, and spiked inflation to new heights. Trump’s reelection represents the failure of Bidenism to provide the working class with any sense of stability. As eighty million eligible voters remained at home, the Democrats' support collapsed and the Republicans gained a default victory at the polls. The critical issue is the lack of working class leadership. So long as unions and socialist organizations tailend the failed politics of the Democrats and whine pathetically about the ‘lesser evil,’ the great mass of the workers will remain at home. It is necessary to build a united front of the working class independent of the two capitalist parties to smash the fascist menace.

The fascist movement is growing and holds an increasing amount of control over the state. It is increasingly connected with law enforcement and clearly has access to the White House. The police, National Guard, ICE, and other institutions of the bourgeois state collaborate more or less openly with right wing militia groups, and Trump hobnobs with fascist ideologues. Now Trump seeks to squash federal unions by executive order. If he succeeds, this will be a major step toward a fascist regime and the suppression of all workers organizations.

Federal employee unions are currently an easier target. Their power to withhold their labor through strike actions has long been suppressed since the crushing failure of the Air Traffic Controllers’ strike in 1981. Over the past several decades, most federal employee unions have adopted an unfortunate service model approach, and their organizing muscles have all but withered away, so much so that AFGE National President Everett Kelley’s immediate response to Trump’s Executive Order was simply to send a mass email asking everyone to sign up for the “eDues” system. His next response was to call for an emergency virtual meeting to deliver a vague message to local leaders about developing plans to fight the Executive Order through the courts system. Many of the national federal employee union leaders are so far removed from the rank-and-file membership that they have forgotten the true battlefield lies outside of the courts, and that their true strength lies in the hands of those members. The current moment demands that federal employee unions quickly regrow those organizing muscles and become more militant than ever. To survive, they must. And after the fascist menace comes for the federal employees, it’s only a matter of time before the private sector unions are on the firing line.

To fight back, public sector and private sector unions must stand in solidarity as a unified front. The labor movement must strike hard and in unison to crush this attack on the working class and beat back the immediacy of the fascist menace. Then it must utterly break with the Democrats, Republicans, and all other capitalist parties. Only the labor and socialist movements can be consistently antifascist, and consistent antifascism is precisely what is needed.

Trump has called the question. What is our answer?

-Rae Stone and Freddie Forest