Social fascism (also socio-fascism) was a theory that was supported by the Communist International (Comintern) and affiliated communist parties in the early 1930s, which held that social democracy was a variant of fascism because it stood in the way of a dictatorship of the proletariat, in addition to a shared corporatist economic model. At the time, leaders of the Comintern such as Joseph Stalin and Rajani Palme Dutt argued that capitalist society had entered the Third Period in which a proletarian revolution was imminent, but this could be prevented by social democrats and other "fascist" forces. The term social fascist was used pejoratively to describe social democratic parties, anti-Comintern and progressive socialist parties and dissenters within Comintern affiliates throughout the interwar period. The social fascism theory was advocated vociferously by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which was largely controlled and funded by the Soviet leadership from 1928. Overview At the 6th World Congress of the Comintern in 1928, the end of capitalist stability and the beginning of the "Third Period" was proclaimed. The end of capitalism, accompanied with a working class revolution, was expected and social democracy was identified as the main enemy of the communists. The Comintern's theory had roots in Grigory Zinoviev's argument that international social democracy is a wing of fascism. That view was accepted by Stalin, who described fascism and social democracy as "twin brothers", arguing that fascism depends on the active support of social democracy and that social democracy depends on the active support of fascism. After it was declared at the Sixth Congress, the theory of social fascism became accepted by many in the world communist movement. The new direction was closely linked to the internal politics of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). After a faction fight inside that party following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, the victorious group around Stalin shifted decisively to the left by advocating the end of the mixed economy New Economic Policy and declaring an intensification of the class struggle inside the Soviet Union. An atmosphere of revolutionary fervour was created and saw any enemy of the ruling group around Stalin denounced as "wreckers" and "traitors", an attitude that was translated on to the international stage, where both social democrats and communist dissidents were denounced as fascists. Joseph Stalin stated in a speech in 1924: Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism