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Issue No. 135 | 10 May 2002 |
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The Costs of War
Interview: Squaring Off Industrial: Heroes Betrayed History: At The Coalface International: Wobblies With Chinese Characters? Politics: Dancing with Trotsky Economics: You Are What You Eat Poetry: Alexander's Bragtime Band Satire: Stott Despoja Celebrates Engagement With Minor Party Review: Painting Paradise
The Soapbox The Locker Room Postcard Bosswatch Week in Review Tool Shed
 Heaps and Heaps of Hate MailNo ChoiceWho Rules Australia?No Wrap for Song Comp Abbott's Contempt
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Politics Dancing with Trotsky
***************** My whole political life has been a dance with Leon Trotsky.
Often I have stumbled. Sometimes I have slipped. But always I have returned to Trotsky's embrace.
I find constant inspiration from the example and the writings of the man who led the Russian revolution and who was murdered because he fought to keep alive the ideas of genuine socialism.
And so it is that with the rise of the extreme right in Europe I have found myself re-reading some of Trotsky's most outstanding political documents - his articles on fascism in Germany.
"Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front" is a collection of Trotsky's writings between 1930 and 1932 about the threat Hitler posed and the way the working class could unite to defeat him.
The power of Trotsky's analysis is so overwhelming that I have to remind myself that he is describing Nazism before Hitler comes to power, not after.
Trotsky understood that there were three main classes in advanced capitalist societies - the big bourgeoisie, the middle class and the working class. Because it is a small minority in society the bourgeoisie cannot rule on its own. So it rules through the middle classes or what the Left often describes as the petty bourgeoisie.
This class is made up of disparate groups like small artisans and shopkeepers, other small businesses, petty officials, technical personnel, senior journalists, the intelligentsia and the peasantry. It is caught between big business and organized labour. It is the class of fear - the fear of capital driving it into the working class.
It is the class of fascism.
The bourgeoisie unleashes their Nazis in times of economic or political crisis to crush the working class and its political organisations. To do that fascism must have an army.
The military wing of fascism is drawn from demoralized workers and the unemployed, the down and out and small time criminals.
This means fascism has two faces - the respectable middleclass who are its political wing, and the underclass who make up its fighting wing.
In normal times the bourgeoisie rules through the social democratic wing of the middle class - the labor parties and trade union bureaucracy which lead millions of workers in support of the capitalist system. This is not a question of who wins power in parliamentary elections. Social democracy, even in opposition, is the rock in normal times on which the bourgeoisie rules precisely because it poses no challenge to the capitalist system and takes millions down this dead end of history.
Trotsky understood that fascism and social democracy are politically antagonistic. This is because the role of fascism is to solve the crisis of capitalism by destroying the independent organisations of the working class, irrespective of whether they are led by radical communists or conservative labor party types. It is those working class organisations which stand in the way of the implementation of the measures necessary in the eyes of the bourgeoisie to restore profit rates.
For this reason, and despite the fact that fascism and social democracy are both agents of the bourgeoisie, Trotsky recognized the real danger fascism posed to the working class. He railed against the complacency and stupidity of the Stalinists and their description of the Labor Party in Germany as "social fascism".
Trotsky argued that an understanding of the role of fascism as the destroyer of all workers' organisations at the behest of the German bourgeoisie meant that the major working class organisations - social democrat and communist - had to form a united front to defend themselves against the fascists.
Apart from providing a real defence against the barbarity of fascism a united front would also expose to the mass of workers the pro-capitalist nature of the social democratic leadership and strengthen the communists' claims to leadership of the working class. This was a prerequisite to revolution - in the end the only bulwark against fascism.
By 1932 in Germany there were 8 million unemployed and one in three people in the cities depended on the dole. Real wages were one-third lower than in 1928.
Agricultural prices fell and the peasantry faced ruin. Hopelessness spread through the middle classes and sections of the working class and the Nazi Party vote exploded.
Hopelessness alone does not explain fascism's growth in times of crisis. As Trotsky makes clear the Nazis can only arise as a mass movement when there is no party regarded by ordinary workers as their revolutionary leader.
In Germany there were two mass working class parties - the Social Democrats (the Labor Party) and the Communist Party.
The German Communist Party was thoroughly stalinised. It followed whatever absurd political line emanated from Moscow at the time. And the most absurd of all was the view that the Social Democrats were social fascists. Although the Communists won millions of votes in 1930 and 1932 the Party, because of its historically criminal tactics, did not win the confidence of the vast majority of workers, who remained with the Social Democrats.
Trotsky criticised time and again the tactics of the Moscow leadership and their hangers on in Germany. The danger to workers was great. The Communists, he argued, must openly propose a united front of all workers' organisations - communist and social democratic - against the fascists.
The Stalinists rejected his analysis. Instead of unity against the enemy, the Communists created criminal divisions among German workers and by doing so helped Hitler come to power.
The Social Democrats did nothing. In the face of the Nazi threat they clung to absurd notions of constitutionality as the way to beat Hitler.
Trotsky's united front strategy was the only way for the German working class to defeat the Nazis before they assumed power. But his was a lone voice. The Stalinists, the fascists and the social democrats vilified him.
The economic crisis in Germany meant that by 1932 many of the German bourgeoisie saw Hitler as the only man who could drive wages down and restore profit rates. They supported him.
Hitler played the democratic game for anti-democratic but pro-profit purposes. In January 1933 he came to power constitutionally. Within days his paramilitary forces became part of the armed forces of the state. They began their attack on working class organisations.
Within months the Social Democratic Party and Communist Party were banned, their presses closed down and the trade unions abolished.
Hitler's first concentration camps filled with the cream of the German working class.
By 1936 German wages were half the level of 1933. German profit rates rose. However unlike other major capitalist countries German capitalism had no room for expansion through colonies or new markets. As Trotsky foresaw war in Europe was inevitable.
Trotskys' predictions in "Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front" about the Nazis were horrifyingly vindicated.
Humanity has paid the price ever since for the Left's failure to understand fascism and mobilise the working class against it.
As fascism in Europe implants itself once again in society, playing at democracy and biding its time, we on the Left must learn the lessons of history.
Leon Trotsky "Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front" Bookmarks 1989
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