Hitler’s Victory

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

The old view about the backwardness of countries seized by dictatorship can no longer be maintained. Though it was possible with some exaggeration to apply it to Italy, it cannot possibly be applied to Germany, which is a highly developed capitalist country in the very heart of Europe.

There is one common reason for the collapse of democracy: capitalist society has outlived its strength. The national and international antagonisms that break out in it destroy the democratic structure just as world antagonisms are destroying the democratic structure of the League of Nations. Where the progressive class shows itself unable to take power in order to reconstruct society on the basis of socialism, capitalism in its agony can only preserve its existence by using the most brutal and anti-cultural methods, the extreme expression of which is fascism. That historic fact appears in Hitler's victory. In February 1929, I wrote as follows in an American journal:

"In an analogy with electricity, democracy may be defined as a system of safety switches and fuses to guard against the violent shocks generated by national or social struggles. No other epoch in the history of man has been so filled with antagonisms as our own. The overloading of the current shows itself more and more at various points in the European system. Under the too-high tension of class and international antagonisms, the safety switches of democracy fuse or break. This is the essence of the short circuit of dictatorship."

My opponents relied on the fact that the process had only laid hold of the fringe of the civilized world. But I replied: "Internal and world antagonisms, however, are not declining but growing. … Gout begins with the big toe, but, once it has begun, it reaches the heart."

For many the choice between Bolshevism and fascism is rather like a choice between Satan and Beelzebub. I find it difficult to say anything comforting about this. It is clear that the twentieth century is the most disturbed century within the memory of humanity. Any contemporary of ours who wants peace and comfort above all has chosen a bad time to be born.

Hitler's movement has been lifted to victory by 17 million desperate people; it proves that capitalist Germany has lost faith in decaying Europe, which was converted by the Treaty of Versailles into a madhouse without being provided with straitjackets. The victory of the party of despair was possible only because socialism, the party of hope, was unable to take power. The German working class is both numerous and civilized enough to achieve this, but the party leaders have shown themselves incompetent.

The Social Democrats with their peculiar conservative limitations hoped, along with the other parliamentary parties, to "educate" fascism gradually. They gave the position of chief drill sergeant to Hindenburg, the field marshal of the Hohenzollerns; they voted for him. The workers had the right instincts and wanted to fight But the Social Democrats held them back, promising to give the signal when Hitler should have finally abandoned legal methods. Thus the Social Democracy not only summoned the fascists to power through Hindenburg but allowed them to carry out the governmental revolution by stages.

The policy of the Communist Party has been thoroughly wrong. Its leaders started from the absurd axiom that the Social Democrats and National Socialists represented "two varieties of fascism," that they were, in Stalin's formula, "not opposite poles but twins." It is undoubtedly true that the Social Democracy, like fascism, stands to defend the bourgeois regime against the proletarian revolution. But the methods of the two parties are entirely different. The Social Democracy is unthinkable without parliamentary government and mass organizations of the worker^ in trade unions. The mission of fascism, however, is to destroy both. A defensive union of Communists and the Social Democrats should have been based on this antagonism. But blind leaders refused to take this approach. The workers were left divided, defenseless, without plans or prospects before the attacking enemy. This position demoralized the proletariat and strengthened the self-confidence of fascism.

Two and a half years ago, in September 1930, I wrote as follows:

"Fascism in Germany has become a real danger, as an acute expression of the helpless position of the bourgeois regime, the conservative role of the Social Democracy in this regime, and the accumulated powerlessness of the Communist Party to abolish it Whoever denies this is either blind or a braggart." ["The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany," reprinted in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p. 60]

I expressed this idea in a series of pamphlets which have appeared during the last two years in Germany. Thus in November 1931, I wrote:

"The coming to power of the National Socialists would mean first of all the extermination of the flower of the German proletariat, the destruction of its organizations, the eradication of its belief in itself and in its future. Considering the far greater maturity and acuteness of the social contradictions in Germany, the hellish work of Italian fascism would probably appear as a pale and almost humane experiment in comparison with the work of the German National Socialists." ["Germany, the Key to the International Situation," ibid., p. 125]

The Stalinist faction said that this was panic-mongering. Out of the vast political literature devoted to this question I shall only refer to a speech made by the official leader of the German Communist Party, Thälmann, before the Executive Committee of the Communist International in April 1931, when he exposed so-called pessimists — i.e., people who were capable of foresight — in the following words:

"We have not allowed panic-mongering to divert us from our path. … We are convinced that September 14, 1930 (when the Nazis won 107 seats in the Reichstag), was Hitler's best day, and that now he cannot expect to do better, only worse. Our estimate of the development of that party has been confirmed by events. … Today the fascists have no reason to be pleased."

That quotation is enough!

Thus, while bourgeois democracy was collapsing, fascism was assisted to power by the united efforts of the leaders of both workers' parties.

Hitler's government has lost no time in setting a fast pace. It announces that it will educate the Communists in concentration camps. Hitler promises to exterminate the Social Democrats, that is, to achieve, in much harder conditions, the task which was beyond the strength of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. Hitler's political army is made up of officials, clerks, shopkeepers, tradesmen, peasants, all the intermediate and doubtful classes. In point of social consciousness, they are human dust.

It is a paradox that Hitler, for all his anti-parliamentarism, is much stronger on the parliamentary than the social plane. The fascist dust remains dust after each new counting of heads. On the other hand, the workers are united by the process of production. The productive forces of the nation are strongly concentrated in their hands. Hitler's struggle for control is only beginning. His main difficulties are before him. Changes in trade and industry are altering the relation of forces, not in Hitler's favor, but in favor of the proletariat The mere fact of the reduction of unemployment will increase the self-consciousness of the workers. The spring which has been too tightly compressed must ease itself. After the extraordinary decline of the workers' standard of living during the years of crisis, a period of widespread economic struggles can be confidently expected.

Hitler's principal difficulties are before him, like his principal struggles. In the international arena, further gestures and phrases cannot be expected from Hitler in the immediate future. He has too long and sanguinary a war to fight out inside Germany for him to think seriously of war against France. On the other hand, he will try with all his strength to prove to France and the other capitalist states the necessity of supporting him in his providential mission of fighting Bolshevism. Allowing for every diversion, the foreign policy of fascist Germany is essentially directed against the Soviet Union.