According to [[Georgi Dimitrov]], fascism is, "the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,"<ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote="Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital."}}</ref> taking vengeance against the [[Proletariat|working class]] and the revolutionary section of the [[peasantry]] and [[intelligentsia]].<ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote="Fascism is not a form of state power "standing above both classes -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie," as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not "the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state," as the British Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia."}}</ref> Both the development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries, according to historical, social and economic conditions the national peculiarities, and the international position of the given country.<ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote="The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries, according to historical, social and economic conditions and to the national peculiarities, and the international position of the given country. In certain countries, principally those in which fascism has no broad mass basis and in which the struggle of the various groups within the camp of the fascist bourgeoisie itself is rather acute, fascism does not immediately venture to abolish parliament, but allows the other bourgeois parties, as well as the Social-Democratic Parties, to retain a modicum of legality. In other countries, where the ruling bourgeoisie fears an early outbreak of revolution, fascism establishes its unrestricted political monopoly, either immediately or by intensifying its reign of terror against and persecution of all rival parties and groups. This does not prevent fascism, when its position becomes particularly acute, from trying to extend its basis and, without altering its class nature, trying to combine open terrorist dictatorship with a crude sham of parliamentarism."}}</ref>In foreign policy, fascism incites violent hatred of other nations, acting in the interests of the extreme imperialists, yet it presents itself to the masses in the guise of a champion of an ill-treated nation, and appeals to outraged national sentiments.<ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote="In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations."}}</ref> Within a country or nation, fascists are not the patriots they boast to be, as they engage in [[historical revisionism]] of cultures, a form of ethnocide, to promote their fascist ideology. Communists must urgently expose the way fascists in practice do not care about the proletariat's native cultures, and combat this revisionism, outshining fascists with a more genuine nationalism, adapting Marxism-Leninism to their own national conditions, and practice [[proletarian internationalism]]. The proletariat of colonized nations will not shy from national sentiments and struggle against the imperialism oppressing their native cultures, and the proletariat of imperialist nations will struggle against their own bourgeoisie's oppressor policies. Communists from oppressor nations must valorize the more noble, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, non-chauvinist aspects of their cultures.<ref>{{Citation|author=Vladimir Lenin|year=1914|title=ON THE NATIONAL PRIDE OF THE GREAT RUSSIANS|title-url=http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/NPGR14.html|quote=Are we class-conscious Great-Russian proletarians impervious to the feeling of national pride? Certainly not. We love our language and our motherland; we, more than any other group, are working to raise its laboring masses (i.e., nine-tenths of its population) to the level of intelligent democrats and socialists. We, more than anybody are grieved to see and feel to what violence, oppression and mockery our beautiful motherland is being subjected by the tsarist hangmen, the nobles and the capitalists. We are proud of the fact that those acts of violence met with resistance in our midst, in the midst of the Great Russians; that this midst brought forth Radischev, the Decembrists, the intellectual revolutionaries of the seventies; that in 1905 the Great-Russian working class created a powerful revolutionary party of the masses.We are filled with national pride because of the knowledge that the Great-Russian nation, too, has created a revolutionary class, that it, too, has proved capable of giving humanity great examples of struggle for freedom and for socialism; that its contribution is not confined solely to great pogroms, numerous scaffolds, torture chambers, severe famines and abject servility before the priests, the tsars, the landowners and the capitalists.
We are filled with national pride, and therefore we particularly hate our slavish past... and our slavish present, in which the same landowners, aided by the capitalists, lead us into war to stifle Poland and the Ukraine, to throttle the democratic movement in Persia and in China, to strengthen the gang of Romanovs, Bobrinskis, Puriskeviches that cover with shame our Great-Russian national dignity.|city=Moscow|publisher=Progress Publishers|trans-title=Sotsial-Demokrat No. 35|trans-lang=Russian}}</ref><ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote="The fascists are rummaging through the entire history of every nation so as to be able to pose as the heirs and continuators of all that was exalted and heroic in its past, while all that was degrading or offensive to the national sentiments of the people they make use of as weapons against the enemies of fascism. Hundreds of books are being published in Germany with only one aim -- to falsify the history of the German people and give it a fascist complexion."}}</ref> The socialist revolution will be the "salvation" of nations, cultures and the people. Both the proletariat's international and diverse national interests will be defended. The cultures will be liberated from monopoly capitalism.<ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote="Communists who suppose that all this has nothing to do with the cause of the working class, who do nothing to enlighten the masses on the past of their people in a historically correct fashion, in a genuinely Marxist-Leninist spirit, who do nothing to link up the present struggle with the people's revolutionary traditions and past -- voluntarily hand over to the fascist falsifiers all that is valuable in the historical past of the nation, so that the fascists may fool the masses. No, Comrades, we are concerned with every important question, not only of the present and the future, but also of the past of our own peoples. ...to sneer at all the national sentiments of the broad masses of working people is far from being a genuine Bolshevik, and has understood nothing of the teaching of Lenin on the national question.Comrades, proletarian internationalism must, so to speak, "acclimatize itself" in each country in order to strike deep roots in its native land. National forms of the proletarian class struggle and of the labor movement in the individual countries are in no contradiction to proletarian internationalism; on the contrary, it is precisely in these forms that the international interests of the proletariat can be successfully defended.
...the socialist revolution will signify the salvation of the nation and will open up to it the road to loftier heights. By the very fact of building at the present time its class organizations and consolidating its positions, by the very fact of defending democratic rights and liberties against fascism, by the very fact of fighting for the overthrow of capitalism, the working class is fighting for the future of the nation. The revolutionary proletariat is fighting to save the culture of the people, to liberate it from the shackles of decaying monopoly capitalism, from barbarous fascism, which is laying violent hands on it. Only the proletarian revolution can avert the destruction of culture and raise it to its highest flowering as a truly national culture -- national in form and socialist in content
Only by struggling hand in hand with the proletariat of the imperialist countries can the colonial peoples and oppressed national minorities achieve their freedom. The sole road to victory for the proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries lies through the revolutionary alliance of the working class of the imperialist countries with the national-liberation movement in the colonies and dependent countries, because, as Marx taught us, "no nation can be free if it oppresses other nations."
Communists belonging to an oppressed, dependent nation cannot combat chauvinism successfully among the people of their own nation if they do not at the same time show in practice, in the mass movement, that they actually struggle for the liberation of their nation from the alien yoke. And again, on the other hand, the Communists of an oppressing nation cannot do what is necessary to educate the working masses of their nation in the spirit of internationalism without waging a resolute struggle against the oppressor policy of their "own" bourgeoisie, for the right of complete self-determination for the nations kept in bondage by it. If they do not do this, they likewise do not make it easier for the working people of the oppressed nation to overcome their nationalist prejudices.}}</ref>
Fascists gain their following from the petty bourgeoisie and certain sections of the proletariat through disingenuous appeals to their needs and demands, inflaming prejudices and playing on their sense of justice and even on their revolutionary traditions, their faith in revolution, their resentments, hatred of corruption, and the urge towards socialism.<ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote=What is the source of the influence of fascism over the masses? Fascism is able to attract the masses because it demagogically appeals to their most urgent needs and demands. Fascism not only inflames prejudices that are deeply ingrained in the masses, but also plays on the better sentiments of the masses, on their sense of justice and sometimes even on their revolutionary traditions.}}</ref> Fascism promised many things: to fight corruption, "a fair wage," a great future for the youth; for the landless and indebted peasants, an end to debt bondage and rent, expropriation of the landed estates from usurers without compensation.<ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote=This, the true character of fascism, must be particularly stressed because in a number of countries, under cover of social demagogy, fascism has managed to gain the following of the mass of the petty bourgeoisie that has been dislocated by the crisis, and even of certain sections of the most backward strata of the proletariat.}}</ref><ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote="WHAT DOES FASCIST VICTORY BRING TO THE MASSES? Fascism promised the workers "a fair wage," but actually it has brought them an even lower, a pauper, standard of living. It promised work for the unemployed, but actually it has brought them even more painful torments of starvation and forced servile labor. In practice it converts the workers and unemployed into pariahs of capitalist society stripped of rights; destroys their trade unions; deprives them of the right to strike and to have their working-class press, forces them into fascist organizations, plunders their social insurance funds and transforms the mills and factories into barracks where the unbridled arbitrary rule of the capitalist reigns. Fascism promised the working youth a broad highway to a brilliant future. But actually it has brought wholesale dismissals of young workers, labor camps and incessant military drilling for a war of conquest. Fascism promised to guarantee office workers, petty officials and intellectuals security of existence, to destroy the omnipotence of the trusts and wipe out profiteering by bank capital. But actually it has brought them an ever greater degree of despair and uncertainty as to the morrow; it is subjecting them to a new bureaucracy made up of the most submissive of its followers, it is setting up an intolerable dictatorship of the trusts and spreading corruption and degeneration to an unprecedented extent. Fascism promised the ruined and impoverished peasants to put an end to debt bondage, to abolish rent and even to expropriate the landed estates without compensation, in the interests of the landless and ruined peasants. But actually it is placing the laboring peasants in a state of unprecedented servitude to the trusts and the fascist state apparatus, and pushes to the utmost limit the exploitation of the great mass of the peasantry by the big landowners, the banks and the usurers."}}</ref>But actually, it brings them an even lower standard of living: destroys their trade unions, deprives them of the right to strike and to have their working-class press, forces the revolutionary movement underground, pressures them into fascist organizations, plunders their social insurance funds and transforms the mills and factories into prisons, where the unbridled arbitrary rule of the capitalist reigns. Fascism causes wholesale dismissals of young workers, labor camps and incessant military drilling for a war of conquest, places the peasants in unprecedented servitude to the usurers, landlords, and the fascist state apparatus. It supresses the democratic liberties of the working people, falsifies, curtails and intensifies the law. It commits unspeakable crimes against humanity in concentration camps and torture chambers, and through police brutality, sterilization and countless murders.<ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote="I have before me a statistical summary drawn up by the International Red Aid [international organization of that time for aid to revolutionary fighters] regarding the number of killed, wounded, arrested, maimed and tortured to death in Germany, Poland, Italy, Austria, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In Germany alone, since the National-Socialists came to power, over 4,200 anti-fascist workers, peasants, employees, intellectuals -- Communists, Social Democrats and members of opposition Christian organizations -- have been murdered, 317,800 arrested, 218,600 injured and subjected to torture. In Austria, since the battles of February last year the "Christian" fascist government has murdered 1,900 revolutionary workers, maimed and injured 10,000 and arrested 40,000. And this summary, comrades is far from complete."}}</ref>From the point of view of the colonized, fascism is very familiar. Fascism in the colonizing states is the exact violence that these colonialist-imperialist nations (e.g. Europe) unleashed upon the world turned inward.<ref>{{Citation|author=Aimé Césaire|year=1950|publisher=Monthly Review Press|title=Discourse on colonialism|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Discourse_on_Colonialism|chapter=|chapter-url=|section=|page=36|quote=[W]e must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact…each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France and they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery (13).People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind-it’s Nazism, it will, pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack (14).|pdf=https://libcom.org/files/zz_aime_cesaire_robin_d.g._kelley_discourse_on_colbook4me.org_.pdf|city=France|publisher=Réclame|isbn=1583670254|doi=|lg=|mia=|trans-title=Discours sur le colonialisme|trans-lang=}}</ref><ref>{{Citation|author=Frantz Fanon|year=1961|title=Wretched of the earth|chapter=|section=|page=90|quote="what is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country?"|pdf=|city=|publisher=Grove Press|isbn=9780802150837|doi=|lg=http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D2A7D155578D59565375286BA995A79D|mia=|title-url=|chapter-url=|trans-title=|trans-lang=}}</ref> Fascism in the settler colonial countries translates to the acceleration of colonialist violence upon indigenous and marginalized groups, perpetrated largely by a collaboration between the settler population, the settler-colonial state, and indigenous compradors. Along with that, all the indignities of accelerated capitalism may be thrust upon not only the native, but also the settler population. With diminishing returns of [[primitive accumulation|primary capital accumulation]] as the colonialist project progresses, the bourgeoisie may enact increased demands and pressure on the settler proletariat. The effects of fascist [[propaganda]] results in its followers being inspired to violent [[terrorist]] actions against the blamed populations, and these terrorists are quietly or even loudly supported by fascist politicians.<ref>{{Citation|author=Mnar Adley|year=2023|publisher=Mint Press News|title=Manifestos of Hate: What White Terrorists Have in Common|title-url=https://www.mintpressnews.com/manifestos-of-hate-what-white-terrorists-have-in-common/261344/}}</ref> The murder of [[working class]] Muslims and Latin Americans, and the shooting and bombing of Mosques and Synagogues to fight "globalists" or "replacement" anxieties of the white man are examples of this.<ref>{{Citation|author=Weiyi Cai, Simone Landon|year=2019|title=Attacks by White Extremists Are Growing. So Are Their Connections.|publisher=The New York Times|title-url=}}https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/world/white-extremist-terrorism-christchurch.html</ref><ref>{{Citation|author=Natasha Lennard|year=2019|title=The El Paso Shooter Embraced Eco-Fascism. We Can’t Let the Far Right Co-Opt the Environmental Struggle.|publisher=The Intercept|title-url=https://theintercept.com/2019/08/05/el-paso-shooting-eco-fascism-migration/}}</ref>In the preliminary stages, bourgeois governments adopt reactionary measures that facilitate the fascist acquisition of power. This is the time when fascism should be fought, or it will be too late. Fascism was able to come to power primarily because the working class succumbed to class collaboration with the bourgeoisie, and was divided and disarmed in face of the onslaught of the bourgeoisie. The Communist Parties failed to form a united anti-fascist proletarian front with the Social-Democratic leaders, to struggle against fascism's poisonous ideology and its historical and cultural revisionism, this failure cleared the path to power for fascism. In order to defeat fascism, there needs to be an agreement to form a united anti-fascist proletarian front with the progressive non-Communists.<ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote="All this, however, does not make less important the fact that, before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory."}}</ref><ref>{{Citation|author=Vladimir Lenin|year=1952|title=Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder|publisher=Foreign Languages Publishing House|city=Moscow|section=2,part 2|page=81-82|url=http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/LWC20.html|quote="If we establish a united front with the Communists, the petty bourgeoisie will take fright at the 'Red danger' and will desert to the fascists," we hear it said quite frequently. But does the united front represent a threat to the peasants, small traders, artisans, working intellectuals? No, the united front is a threat to the big bourgeoisie, the financial magnates, the junkers and other exploiters, whose regime brings complete ruin to all these strata.}}</ref> Humanity will inevitably take the next step towards progress. Fascism and the bourgeoisie are doomed to fail, and communism will succeed.<ref>{{Citation|author=Vladimir Lenin|year=1952|title=Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder|publisher=Foreign Languages Publishing House|city=Moscow|section=2,part 2|page=81-82|url=http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/LWC20.html|quote=Acting thus, the bourgeoisie acts as all classes doomed by history have acted. Communists should know that the future, at any rate, belongs to them; therefore we can and must combine the most intense passion in the great revolutionary struggle with the coolest and most sober evaluation of the mad ravings of the bourgeoisie.}}</ref>Take note however that this does not mean Communists and progressives must or will have complete political unity. In order to more formally unite under one big party, without ceasing to be revolutionary, these 5 conditions must be met:
# Complete independence from the bourgeoisie and dissolution of the alliance between progressives and the bourgeoisie;
# Preliminary unity of action;
# Recognition of the revolutionary overthrow of the rule of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat;
# Refusal to support one's own bourgeoisie in an imperialist war;
# Building up the Party on the basis of democratic centralism.<ref>{{Citation|author=Georgi Dimitrov|year=1972|publisher=Sofia Press|title=The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm|quote="First, complete independence from the bourgeoisie and dissolution of the bloc of Social-Democracy with the bourgeoisie;Second, preliminary unity of action;
Third, recognition of the revolutionary overthrow of the rule of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of soviets a sine qua non;
Fourth, refusal to support one's own bourgeoisie in an imperialist war;
Fifth, building up the Party on the basis of democratic centralism, which ensures unity of purpose and action, and which has been tested by the experience of the Russian Bolsheviks."}}</ref>
