Communist political terms

Fascism

Capitalism’s response to a crisis of their system, when the bosses can no longer sustain the charade of liberal democracy and resort to more direct control and state terror instead. Fascism is marked by the ruling capitalists disciplining their own ranks to serve the urgent needs of the capitalist state and weather the crisis. To defend their system from internal and external threats, they use all the means available in their state apparatus, including violence. To build unity within their class and loyalty from workers, they rely on nationalist politics and calls for sacrifice. Their strategy is to mislead the working class to kill our working class sisters and brothers in the next inter-imperialist war. (Challenge, 2021, p. 6)

Big Fascists

The Big Fascists are the dominant finance capitalist faction of the U.S. ruling class. They represent the wealthiest and most powerful bosses in the U.S., including multinational banks like Chase and Citibank, multinational oil companies like ExxonMobil, the big automakers, Boeing, Amazon, and the major media companies. As the dominant grouping since World War II, the Big Fascists were the architects of the liberal world order with the U.S. bosses on top. Their dominance rests on U.S. financial and military power and its strategic control of the Middle East and the flow of oil to Europe, Asia, and Africa. To sustain this dominance, they need to rebuild a huge, multiracial military for inter-imperialist war, most likely with China. (Challenge, 2021, p. 6)

Small Fascists

The Small Fascists are a group of domestically oriented U.S. capitalists who are challenging the Big Fascists over the direction of U.S. imperialism. Since their interests are less tied to controlling the flow of oil, they are against heavy taxation to keep troops in the Middle East and in general oppose costly military bases and invasions. They’re willing to rely on a smaller, whiter army, backed by nuclear weapons and the Air Force. They have used open racism to build a political following. (Challenge, 2021, p. 6)

Revisionism

“The ideological struggle against revisionism—the ideas and practice of the class enemy within the communist movement—has taken place since the beginning of the struggle for proletarian revolution.” (Road to Revolution III, 1970)

Sectarianism

“Sectarianism can best be described as fear of the people, or lack of confidence in the people. Since we aspire to be a working class party, lack of ties, no matter in which area you work, means a lack of confidence in the working class. And, while you may verbally oppose all the middle-class notions in other groups or periodicals you essentially share their outlook.” (Base-building, 1968)

(Compare this to the incomplete definition on Reddit/Lemmy focused on individual conversations by searching the term in Lenin’s or Stalin’s writing—there’s only two results in Stalin’s Works.)