"May 9, 1945 marks 80 years since the Great Anti-Fascist Victory when Nazi Germany surrendered and the peoples of the world, with the decisive role of the Red Army and the Soviet Union under the leadership of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) as the organizer and inspirer of this struggle, brought fascism to its knees across Europe.
This was not simply a military victory. It was a triumph of the working class, of communists and partisans, of ordinary people who, through organised struggle, resisted the most violent expression of capitalism.
The Soviet Union played the central and decisive role in defeating fascism. Backed by the immense sacrifices of workers, peasants, and soldiers, the Red Army shattered the fascist war machine. Over 27 million Soviet lives were lost, millions of them in direct combat. This was not a campaign of conquest but liberation through class struggle, waged against a system of organised terror supported by monopoly capital.
Fascism did not emerge by accident. It arose from a deep contradiction: the need for capitalism to maintain power amid growing working-class revolt. After the October Revolution, capitalists across Europe feared the spread of socialism. In response, they financed and empowered fascist forces globally to crush trade unions, outlaw communists, and suppress all forms of working-class resistance. Fascism was not a break from capitalism, it was capitalism stripped of its liberal mask, defending itself with brute force.
Across occupied Europe and other regions under Axis control, the working class organised underground networks, armed struggle, uprisings, and mass mobilisations. Their struggle was internationalist and anti-imperialist. Yet, the imperialist powers, many of which initially appeased or collaborated with fascism, have since tried to erase this legacy. The historical record is clear: without the Soviet Union and the international communist movement, fascism would not have been defeated.
The end of the war delivered only an illusion of peace and justice, masking ongoing violence, exploitation and inequality. While the fascist armies were defeated, the ruling capitalist class quickly regrouped. They shifted from open fascism to rebranded forms of imperialist domination. Nazis were directly integrated into NATO and intelligence services, most infamously through Operation Paperclip, which transferred Nazi scientists into U.S. military and space programs, and Gladio, NATO’s covert paramilitary network that armed and protected fascist groups across Europe to suppress communist and workers’ movements around the world. Anti-colonial movements, from Vietnam to Algeria, were met with brutal force by the very powers that claimed to stand for freedom.
This postwar imperialist offensive was not a historical accident. It revealed the ongoing class interests of capital: to restore control, suppress revolution, and maintain global dominance. And today, the same class forces continue their offensive, not only through war and exploitation, but through the falsification of history.
May 9 has been cynically renamed “Europe Day” by the EU in an attempt to sever the event from its revolutionary, working-class roots. A coordinated campaign of historical revisionism is underway, one that unhistorically equates fascism with communism, erases the Red Army, and portrays NATO and the EU as inheritors of anti-fascist values. This is not remembrance, it is ideological warfare aimed at disarming future generations.
At the same time, we see the reactionary forces with fascist roots gaining strength across Europe. This is not a spontaneous threat, but a tool of the ruling class. In times of crisis, the bourgeoisie fosters reactionary forces as a means of controlling popular resistance. Migrants are scapegoated. Anti-communist laws are passed. Solidarity with Palestine is criminalised. The same forces that once empowered fascism now carry out repression and anti-communist violence in new forms.
Eighty years on, the lesson of May 9 is not confined to the past. The contradictions that gave rise to fascism, capitalism in crisis, the suppression of revolution, imperialist war, persist today. The struggle against fascism must therefore be rooted in the struggle against the system that breeds it. Anti-fascism that does not challenge capitalism is co-opted into the system. True anti-fascism is class-based, internationalist, and struggles against capitalism, for working class power, socialism-communism.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the war in Ukraine. This is a conflict between imperialist blocs competing for dominance, the control of markets and natural resources. NATO, the EU, and the United States arm a capitalist regime in Ukraine while glorifying Neo-Nazi formations like the Azov Battalion. Meanwhile, Russia’s capitalist state appropriates and selectively uses the symbols of the Soviet Union to mask its own imperialist ambitions, while repressing anti-war demands and usurping τηε pro-Soviet sentiment that is still popular in mass consciousness in the Russian Federation and other post-Soviet republics.
Both sides instrumentalize history to justify aggression. Both represent the interests of capital. The working class gains nothing from this war. The only principled position is to oppose all imperialist camps, and to build the independent power of workers, the independent political struggle for the overthrow of the power of capital.
To truly understand May 9, we have to look at the class struggle and material conditions that shaped it. This shows us that the forces which gave rise to fascism and took part in the war are still defending the interests of the monopolies today. The anti-fascist victory of 1945 was not won through neutrality or parliamentary appeals, it was won through revolutionary struggle, forged in the trenches, factories, and partisan fronts. Today, as the EU militarizes, as reactionary migration policies tighten, and as resistance is criminalised, the same tools of class rule are being sharpened. A real anti-imperialist and anti-war movement must be built, not one based on moralist appeals, but grounded in material reality. Peace cannot exist under imperialism. Disarmament cannot come from within NATO. Justice cannot emerge from a system built on exploitation. Only a movement rooted in the needs and power of the working class, rooted in communist principles and working-class organisation, can confront the truth and fight for genuine liberation.
Fascism is not a historical exception, it is capitalism in decay, turning to terror to preserve itself. To defeat it again, we must defeat the system that nurtures it. This means building class power through the collective organisation of workers, youth, migrants, and all oppressed peoples into a united front against imperialism, war, and exploitation. It means reinforcing the Communist Parties that genuinely represent the interests of the working class and lead the fight against imperialism and exploitation.
May 9 must be reclaimed, not as a vague celebration of “peace,” but as a day of political clarity and collective memory. We must teach its truth, honour its fallen comrades, and learn from its contradictions. History is not neutral, it is shaped in class struggle. The same forces that distort the past today do so to shape the future in their interests. We must not allow that.
As imperialist powers prepare for new wars, and capital deepens its grip on every aspect of life, our task is urgent. The conditions that gave rise to fascism are reemerging, because the system that produced them was never dismantled. But the people, too, are fighting. The contradictions of capitalism are sharpening. New generations are entering the struggle. Let us commemorate through action. Let us remember by organizing. Let May 9 be not only a day of remembrance, but a call to fight, to resist, and to win."
eurcomact.org
