Leon Trotsky's “What Next?” stands as one of the most prescient and urgent warnings in political literature, written in January 1932 as Hitler’s rise to power was imminent. This essential essay demonstrates how the German Communist Party could have prevented the victory of fascism through a correct revolutionary policy.

Trotsky’s masterwork provides a devastating critique of the Stalinist theory of “social fascism,” which equated Social Democracy with fascism and prevented the unity of the working class necessary to stop Hitler. He explains that fascism represents a particular governmental system that mobilizes the desperate masses of the ruined petty bourgeoisie. “[I]t organizes and militarizes them at the expense of finance capital, under the cover of the official government, and it directs them to the extirpation of proletarian organizations, from the most revolutionary to the most conservative.”

The essay’s central strategic insight concerns the united front tactic. Rather than the KPD’s ultimatistic demand that Social Democratic workers break with their leaders before any joint action, Trotsky advocated that the Communist Party propose concrete agreements to the SPD leadership for common struggle against fascism. This approach would have exposed the Social Democratic leaders’ unwillingness to fight while uniting the German working class and drawing sections of the petty bourgeoisie away from the Nazis.

Trotsky warned that Hitler’s victory was not inevitable, but that the KPD’s policies were clearing the path for this disaster by preventing the mobilization of the working class. This analysis proved tragically prophetic when Hitler assumed power in January 1933, confirming Trotsky’s urgent warning about the consequences of the Stalinist policy in the face of mortal danger to the world proletariat.