As pointed out by Georgi Dimitrov, the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International defined fascism to be "the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital". Yet, so many fascists claim that fascism and their movements are there to stop finance capital.
One instance I would point out here is that Michael Hudson has done a lot of writing on finance capital. When these discussions come about, you can see fascists by the dozen coming to agreement with someone who almost talks like a Marxist. It goes without saying that Michael Hudson has been hosted, on Geopolitical Economy Report, with Pepe Escobar, a journalist who has made mention to philosophical discussions with people like Alexander Dugin. Interestingly enough, Pepe Escobar has specifically mentioned, in an interview relating to geopolitics (of the current Israeli situation), that he would suggest reading a text about Jewish people. This book was anti-semitic in ways I have never seen before. Relating back to Dugin, I'm at a point where I see "geopolitics" or "multipolar" and assume some relation to the man, so I was already highly suspicious anyway.
So the question is: why do so many reactionaries and fascists try to claim the fight against finance capital is their fight? I haven't seen any evidence that fascists actually do anything to stop finance. It all gets blamed on immigrants or Jewish people or something else.
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Additionally, what is the deal with all the attemps to form some type of red-brown alliance of sorts? Everything left-wing in nature always seems to hold mention, directly or indirectly, to something that comes out of the LaRouche or Dugin playbooks. These people aren't even Communists, they're just fascists.
The worst part is that we know American fascism actually claims to be uniquely American and thus not fascist at all because American fascism just isn't European. Franklin D. Roosevelt was almost like a competent Mussolini, yet purely electoral and allowed Communists to exist (but under scrutiny and surveillance), and even had a real plot against him by real fascists. On the opposition, it looks like we even have people reading Marx and Engels and Lenin at length, but still co-opting the messaging to do some PatSoc/NazBol/Duginist/Strasserist/etc. adjacent work.
If you sit in pro-China spaces too long, you find a bunch of fascists. If you sit in anti-China spaces too long, still fascists everywhere. If you speak up for Korea, same thing, attacked by anti-Communists on one end and your message is co-opted by neo-fascists claiming Korea is an ethnostate or a PatSoc state, and worthy of praise, on the other. These are the same tactics NazBols would use for recruiting back when Stalin was running the USSR, claiming Stalin as one of their own.
Now we have more anarchists and other leftists attacking Communist spaces for holding a bunch of "tankies" and people like us are getting lumped in with Jackson Hinkle and Haz.
If reading all the theory doesn't solidify our principles, if our organizations are still infiltrated heavily, if our message is dilluted by opportunists, and if we have people engaging in real-life praxis still falling victim to cult-like behavior and taking on fascist-adjacent viewpoints, then what do we have?
and I won't ignore people trying to minimize this either. If you look at any left-wing organizations in the "West" (yet another euphemism I hate since it just sounds like right-wing garbage pitting East against West, or Atlanticist fascist against Eurasian fascist), we notice that there are no serious organizations like there used to be. Definitely nothing like the Black Panther Party is alive today.
Then look at how quickly the fascists switch up and adhere to their new lines, like it was a script. From pro-Ukraine to pro-Russia; from pro-Israel to pro-Palestine; from anti-China to pro-China or vice versa. People who were screaming about Communists and (((globalists))) taking over the WEF and the global institutions are now celebrating Javier Milei's election in Argentina. When leftists bring up international orgs ran by the US? Well, the fascists already had their anti-WTO, anti-World Bank, anti-NED, anti-IMF lines ready to go, getting their voice out and their opinions boosted while the legitimate opposition was censored or removed.
Sorry for the rant. I just need someone to make some sense out of all this. It feels like the internet has been stuck in psyop mode for so many years that every form of opposition left, right, and center, has been infiltrated to the point of never challenging anything. Weird times lie ahead.
Fascism is the ideology that the status quo is good by nature, but that there is something corrupting it - something preventing the state from being great again. Some form of parasitic force, be it foreigners, women, the jews, bankers, international enemies, communists, even other fascists.
Proletarians on the far-right often share many of the same complaints people who would also be open to having communist beliefs have. Fascism allows these complaints to form incoherent complaints, contradictory ones, etc. It is easy to be a fascist, especially considering class and elements leading to over-exploitation, like not being a cishet man, being foreign, etc. If only the people responsible for this misery would get off their asses and do stuff, everything would be fine. Of course, the policies fascists support are often against the proletarians' interests. You also have people who know the implications of fascist rule (just as democratic rule) and they want the state to start throwing its military, economic, etc. power around the world to incite conflict and get loot.
The bourgeois on the other hand, use fascism as a weapon when it seems that the current form of capitalist rule (usually some kind of democracy) is not "working" well enough for them - that they are outperformed by foreign capital, that strikes are ongoing, that a reformist government that might or might not be popular is lowering their profits, that the current government policy is making the country unstable and risk their profits, etc. You saw this in Germany of the 1930s with Hitler's pacts with industrialists, and you see it now in Germany when there was a secret meeting of AfD-fascists, hardline neo-nazis and some wealthy people, discussing donations to the party and how to do "re-migration".
Ah, but is the reading done? And what is read? This is not provable and can't be answered, but for example Capital has the reputation of being this extremely difficult book people get bored of very fast.
What do we have? Nothing to lose but our chains. It seems like we are taking L after L after L for the last (many) years, but we also have nothing else to do but keep getting our message across, and fight for a better world, a classless and stateless society. Giving up or watering down what we want for the sake of harm reduction/doing stuff faster is a tactic that leads to nowhere, unfortunately. Taking peasant rebellions as an example, there were many many many throughout history, and the vast majority failed. But not all. There were times where it did get better. And if it can't? Then I'd keep trying out of spite.