Social fascism was a theory supported by the Communist International (Comintern) and affiliated communist parties in the early 1930s that 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, which was largely controlled and funded by the Soviet leadership from 1928.^[