Acting like "social fascists," the party "excommunicated" its reformers, he said.

The phrase social fascists was used by communists against social democrats before 1933, and is still used in some communist circles to refer to modern social democracy movements.

The distance between these two, at least at the ideological level, became so great that the communists often referred to the social democrats as "the social fascists".

During the nineteen-twenties and thirties the Comintern and its franchisees took the line that social democrats and the like were "social fascists."

Adopted in 1928 by the Profintern, the party line branded the social democrats as "social fascists".

This, and the repressive legislation against the communists that followed, served as further evidence to communists that social democrats were indeed "social fascists".

Social Democrats were targeted by Communist polemics, in which they were dubbed "social fascists."

In particular, the Comintern described all moderate left-wing parties as "social fascists", and urged the Communists devote their energies to the destruction of the moderate left.

This contradicted the then official Communist line, which saw the social democrats, or "social fascists", as the greatest enemies of the Communist Party.

The social-democrats saw the communists as insignificant while the communists taunted the social-democrats by calling them "servants to capitalism" and "social fascists".