How to Save the World from a Fascist Takeover [KKF longread]

Guest essay from Egor Kotkin. Support Egor’s work on Substack and Patreon. Follow him on Twitter and YouTube.

The current global rise of fascism was anything but unexpected. Originally, fascism emerged in the 1920s in very specific historical circumstances, shaped by 1) the conditions of late-stage capitalism with its runaway inequality and rapidly increasing poverty, which was making the conditions of the working poor ever closer to the conditions of the unemployed poor, on the one hand, and 2) the successful October Socialist Revolution in Russia in 1917, followed by the Bolshevik’s victory in the Civil War and the establishment of the first worker state, the USSR, in 1922, on the other.

In other words, the power of economic coercion under capitalism was weakening, as late capitalism no longer left the working masses any hope of material improvement in the future, at the same time as an alternative to the entire capitalist system just emerged, for all the workers of the world to see in the form of the USSR.

And the clock was set on repeat almost 50 years ago, in the 1970s in the US, when the American big business utilized Lewis Powell’s memo and Milton Friedman’s new wrapper for capitalism—that became known as neoliberalism—for the purpose of undoing whatever moderate progress was achieved by the social democratic reforms in Western Europe and the New Deal in the US in taming capitalism after 1929. The rollback of regulations introduced after the Great Depression did the only thing it could do: it returned the conditions of capitalism to the very state that led to the rise of fascism and the Great Depression in the 1920s. The fact that this time America itself is playing the role of not only the main economic instigator, but also the main villain, became obvious during Trump’s first term, and turned into a question that has haunted me ever since: how will a world without the USSR be able to defeat fascism this time? And it only became more acute when Trump’s victory in 2024 did just that, completing the transition from the US Weimar Republic to the US Third Reich.

The West’s failed attempt to unite the world directly, by replicating itself globally through colonizing the entire planet, has simultaneously created the conditions for the awakening of global humanity indirectly—through its denial by the rest of the world.

At the