ResoluteReader: August 2026

Sunday, August 02, 2026

Leon Trotsky - Fascism, Stalinism & the United Front

In the early 1930s, as fascism in Germany grew from strength to strength, the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote a series of pamphlets and articles to explain the nature of fascism and to argue for a working class strategy that could defeat it. These articles, several of the most important of which are collected here, remain some of the best studies of German fascism and Hitler's rise to power. They remain crucial reads today for those trying to understand contemporary fascism - not because the situation is identical, but because Trotsky's method is to place the far-right into the political and economic context.

That said, the essays collected here, contain a great deal of insight, strategy and tactics, that can help us understand how to defeat the far-right and fascism today. Key to this, as Trotsky understood in the 1930s, was mobilising the largest number of workers in militant and mass opposition to the fascists. This required the use of the United Front tactic, a strategy developed in the revolutionary circumstances of 1917 by the Bolsheviks, and adopted by the early Communist International. It required the revolutionary left to build a strategic alliance with forces and workers' organisations to the right of them in order to shape a mass movement. The potential, as Trotsky repeatedly notes, was there but the principle barrier to such unity was the ultra-left position of the German Communist Party (KPD). The KPD argued, following the lead of the now Stalinised Comintern, that the Social Democrats were no better than the fascists. Indeed, at times they made it clear they thought that the Social Democrats and the millions of German workers' who supported and voted for them were worse than the Nazis.

This positioning was tragic. It cut the revolutionary left off from wider workers' forces. This fundamentally weakened the anti-fascist movement and it also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the revolutionary left. Throughout these essays there is a growing sense of urgency from Trotsky as he desperately argues for a different course.

In 1930 he writes:

If the Communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie.

But the opposite is also true. Trotsky continues:

The election revealed... counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat.

Later he points out that:

those workers who remain with Social Democracy, as well as those who voted this time for the National Socialists, did do not out of simple ignorance, not because they awakened only yesterday, not because they have as yet had no chance to know what the Communist Party is, but because they have no faith, on the basis of their own experience in the recent years.

The mistakes of the KPD in the revolutionary era of the early 1920s were one thing, but a bigger problem was the wrong-headed approach to the Social Democrats. One problem of course, was the failure to build unity also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the sort of struggles that could have undermined some of the political and economic base of the Nazi's support.

The belief that the SPD were as bad as the fascists meant that the KPD wasn't able to launch the sort of industrial strategy that could have raised the confidence of the working class and transformed the situation. In his 1932 article, The Only Road, Trotsky points out that it is precisely the chaos of capitalism itself that is leading the capitalists towards seeing fascism as a solution. That requires a clearer revolutionary strategy from the KPD, one that was sorely lacking:

If the economic evils of our epoch, in the last analysis, result from the fact that the productive forces of humanity are incompatible with private ownership of the means of production as well as with national boundaries, German capitalism is goring through the severest convulsions just because it is the most modern, most advanced, and most dynamic capitalism on the continent of Europe.

He continues a few pages later:

The petty bourgeoisie must acquire faith in the ability of the proletariat to lead society onto a new road. The proletariat can inspire this faith only by its strength, by the firmness of its actions, by a skilful offensive against the enemy, by the success of its revolutionary policy.

The barrier to this was, in the first instance, the fact that the Soviet Union's isolation meant that country was no longer led by revolutionaries, but by a "national-opportunistic bureaucracy, which does not believe in world revolution". This is the "misfortune" for the whole proletariat.

Many of these essays are available elsewhere, and some of them have been collected in different collections. One thing that stands out from this edition from Bookmarks in Britain is a very useful framing essay by Steve Wright, and contextual introductions to each year by Chris Harman. This new edition of Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front also benefits from an excellent essay by British socialist and anti-fascist organiser Samira Ali, who brings Trotsky's analysis of fascism up to date. As she says, these articles "endure because of their theoretical clarity and their strategic questions remain profoundly contemporary".

In Britain we live in the most dangerous times since Trotsky was writing. If the specifics of fascist organisations today are different, as Samira Ali says, we "return to Trotsky['s writings]... not because they offer a ready-made template for understanding fascism today, but because they provide something more important than historical analogy. They provide a method: analyse fascism concretely, identify the forces that can stop it, and argue for forms of working class unity before the decisive moment has passed."

As such this book is one for our dangerous times.

George Clare - Berlin Days: 1946-1947

In 1938 George Clare, then aged 17 and an Austrian Jew, fled Vienna where he had grown up to escape the Nazi annexation of the country. Clare's parents would eventually die in the Holocaust, but in those pre-war years they initially ended up in Berlin where they expected to get passes to travel to France. Somewhat surprisingly, given the political situation, Clare fell in love with Berlin. Though he eventually made it to England and spent the war there, when he eventually was called up after the war he made it back to Berlin where he began playing a key diplomatic and legal role in the denazification process that the Allies imposed on the population of defeated Germany.

Berlin Days is the second part of Clare's autobiography. The first covers his youth in Austria and the fate of his family. This is a book that covers Clare's time in Berlin, a short period but one that was foundational for European geopolitics and Clare himself. While the book looks at the denazification process and the problems that the Allied authorities faced, it is also Clare's coming to terms with what Nazism meant and how the people of Germany came to follow Hitler. In no small part it is also Clare's reckoning with the deaths of his parents in Nazi concentration camps.

Some of the most interesting, and poignant, parts of the book occur when Clare follows up on people who his family knew from before the war, or does similar on behalf of friends back home. His own family members, being Jews, have simply vanished. Clare's friends fiancee have survived, clearly having suffered through the war, and seek his support to navigate labyrinthine military beauracracy in order to get permission to work. On his arrival there's a certain naivete to Clare as he tends to see the good in people. Later he becomes more cynical as he experiences various former Nazis trying to escape the net or hide their backgrounds.

Alongside other military officers Clare eventually gets to discuss the fates of hundreds of Germans. Those wanting to take on particular jobs, in particular jounralists or actors, have to demonstrate that they hadn't been a member of the Nazi party. This is made more complicated by the different regulations for the Soviet, French, British and American sectors. The division of Berlin adds confusion when, as in the case of the famous condutor Furtwangler, one or other side (in this case the Soviets) want to use them for their own ends. On occasion Clare and his colleagues expose someone who has hidden an appalling past. They, after all, have all the Nazi documents that have escaped destruction.

Unfortunately Clare's rather plodding style doesn't suit the material and the anecdotes are often lost in the material. It's hard to get a wider picture of Berlin in these crucial period, as Clare's focus is so narrow on the immediate bureacracy he experienced. That's not to say there's nothing of interest. For instance Clare meets (in 1946 and again towards the end of her lifetime), Else Bongers the wife oif the Bauhaus architect and socialist, Richard Paulick. Bongers helps get Paulick out of Germany immediately after the Nazis take power, saving his life. But she remains. But this interesting story is all too brief. The real problem perhaps is that too many actual Nazis were helped out by the various administrations when they had knowledge and skills that were needed.

In his attempts to understand the Nazis and the Germans, Clare is similarly disappointing. He tends to see Hitler as having a unique ability at a time of great Nationalism, to sway millions. There is no doubt truth in this, but Clare fails to grasp why fascism was so effective at destroying political opposition. That said Clare, who was a leftist at the time, does understand that the failure of unity between the Communists and Socialists was crucial to Hitler's breakthrough. He does not, however, not the systematic violence that was used to stop any opposition.

With its over focus on the bureacracy this book will probably interest specialists more than the casual reader.