Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's article by Leon Trotsky, written in the aftermath of the unchallenged takeover by Hitler in 1933, titled "The Tragedy Of The German Proletariat".
BOOK REVIEW
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST FASCISM IN GERMANY, LEON TROTSKY, MERIT PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK, 1971
Periodically throughout my long political life it has been a fashion for someone to call every abhorrent political opponent from a right wing bourgeois politician like George Bush to the jihadis in the Middle East to various state interventions into private life some form of fascist or fascism. If merely descriptive, such terms might be rendered harmless. If, however, those words represent a thought out political expression then there are problems. For a profound understanding of what the original phenomena of fascism was, its differences from other types of political expression and, most importantly, how to fight it one can do no better than to read this book by Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky, moreover, remains one of the few who understood what it was all about when it was happening. Through the pamphlets and articles contained in this collection he analyzed and kept analyzing despite the bleakness of the situation,asking Why Germany? No only was that the place where the menace of fascism was greatest but it also represented the place where the Communist Party was fairly strongly rooted (although generally poorly led after the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht) and had at least a semblance of a history of revolutionary resistance behind it. That, in the end, he was a voice in the wilderness after his political defeat in the internal Russian Communist Party fights of the 1920’s and that he was fighting against the erroneous ‘third period’ conception of fascism promulgated by the Communist International and an economic ‘left turn’ in Russia itself does not take away from the grandeur of his efforts and the quality of his analysis.
Starting from a life long commitment to a Marxist approach to social and political phenomena, Trotsky describes the rise of fascism not as some supra-historical development or merely an unfortunate abnormal blip on the road to human progress but as a result of the decay of capitalism as a system in the post World War I period. He charts its effects on various classes and its appeal to the defeated, abused and passed over in the economic and political development of capitalism, mainly the urban and rural petty bourgeoisies and the lower end of the working class that finds its way into the lumpemproletariat. He also does a superb job of distinguishing that trend from the semi-bonapartist and bonapartist governmental trends just before the Nazi takeover in Germany. That those classes or parts of classes , at least some of them, in other circumstances could be won to a pro-socialist perspective, given strong and decisive leadership by the Communist parties of the times underlies the whole analysis. In fact his analysis makes no sense if one does not assume, as Trotsky did, that it had to be played out in the political arena, arms in hand.
A word on the theoretical battle that Trotsky waged against other factions, centrally the Stalinists, in the Communist International (his group saw itself as an bureaucratically expelled external faction in this period). That is the famous fight against the excesses of the ‘third period’. By sleight of hand Stalin, and his agent toadies in the International, had proclaimed that capitalism was dead. No just dead in the figurative sense of no longer being progressive but in need of immediate burial – the so-called ‘final crisis’- the 'third period'.
Thus, according to that scenario, the battle lines were starkly drawn between communists and capitalists. Every other social force was either on the sidelines or an agent of that capitalism. That included the huge European social democracy that although lost as a revolutionary catalyst for change still had authority among the working masses, particularly in Germany. Thus that social democracy was cast not as a potential ally, even if temporary and unreliable, in the struggle against the rapidly rising fascist menace but as an asset to the capitalist side, the twin of fascism. Trotsky’s fervent and desperate calls for workers united fronts thus fell on deaf communist ears. And frankly, until too late, social democratic ears, as well. Nobody said it would be easy in the early 1930’s (unlike say in 1923-24) but such a strategy could have beaten back the fascist advance or at least held it in check. One does not want to get too much in speculation about how that might have changed world history but the early defeat of fascism- in the egg- would certainly have changed it. Read on.
BOOK REVIEW
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST FASCISM IN GERMANY, LEON TROTSKY, MERIT PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK, 1971
Periodically throughout my long political life it has been a fashion for someone to call every abhorrent political opponent from a right wing bourgeois politician like George Bush to the jihadis in the Middle East to various state interventions into private life some form of fascist or fascism. If merely descriptive, such terms might be rendered harmless. If, however, those words represent a thought out political expression then there are problems. For a profound understanding of what the original phenomena of fascism was, its differences from other types of political expression and, most importantly, how to fight it one can do no better than to read this book by Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky, moreover, remains one of the few who understood what it was all about when it was happening. Through the pamphlets and articles contained in this collection he analyzed and kept analyzing despite the bleakness of the situation,asking Why Germany? No only was that the place where the menace of fascism was greatest but it also represented the place where the Communist Party was fairly strongly rooted (although generally poorly led after the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht) and had at least a semblance of a history of revolutionary resistance behind it. That, in the end, he was a voice in the wilderness after his political defeat in the internal Russian Communist Party fights of the 1920’s and that he was fighting against the erroneous ‘third period’ conception of fascism promulgated by the Communist International and an economic ‘left turn’ in Russia itself does not take away from the grandeur of his efforts and the quality of his analysis.
Starting from a life long commitment to a Marxist approach to social and political phenomena, Trotsky describes the rise of fascism not as some supra-historical development or merely an unfortunate abnormal blip on the road to human progress but as a result of the decay of capitalism as a system in the post World War I period. He charts its effects on various classes and its appeal to the defeated, abused and passed over in the economic and political development of capitalism, mainly the urban and rural petty bourgeoisies and the lower end of the working class that finds its way into the lumpemproletariat. He also does a superb job of distinguishing that trend from the semi-bonapartist and bonapartist governmental trends just before the Nazi takeover in Germany. That those classes or parts of classes , at least some of them, in other circumstances could be won to a pro-socialist perspective, given strong and decisive leadership by the Communist parties of the times underlies the whole analysis. In fact his analysis makes no sense if one does not assume, as Trotsky did, that it had to be played out in the political arena, arms in hand.
A word on the theoretical battle that Trotsky waged against other factions, centrally the Stalinists, in the Communist International (his group saw itself as an bureaucratically expelled external faction in this period). That is the famous fight against the excesses of the ‘third period’. By sleight of hand Stalin, and his agent toadies in the International, had proclaimed that capitalism was dead. No just dead in the figurative sense of no longer being progressive but in need of immediate burial – the so-called ‘final crisis’- the 'third period'.
Thus, according to that scenario, the battle lines were starkly drawn between communists and capitalists. Every other social force was either on the sidelines or an agent of that capitalism. That included the huge European social democracy that although lost as a revolutionary catalyst for change still had authority among the working masses, particularly in Germany. Thus that social democracy was cast not as a potential ally, even if temporary and unreliable, in the struggle against the rapidly rising fascist menace but as an asset to the capitalist side, the twin of fascism. Trotsky’s fervent and desperate calls for workers united fronts thus fell on deaf communist ears. And frankly, until too late, social democratic ears, as well. Nobody said it would be easy in the early 1930’s (unlike say in 1923-24) but such a strategy could have beaten back the fascist advance or at least held it in check. One does not want to get too much in speculation about how that might have changed world history but the early defeat of fascism- in the egg- would certainly have changed it. Read on.
