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From International Socialism (1st series), No.38/39, August/September 1969, p.1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
This issue of International Socialism is in many ways a departure from our established practice. It is the first time we have used our space to reprint sizeable chunks of the writings of any of the major Marxist thinkers, let alone devote a whole issue to this task. The reasons we do so now are partly technical: the difficulty of producing and selling a normal issue at the time of year when many of our readers are on holiday. But this also enables us to do something we have long wanted to: to make readily available a considerable portion of Trotsky’s writings on Germany between 1930 and 1934.
The importance of these writings can hardly be over-rated. Hitler’s victory in Germany was to dominate the politics of the next fifteen years as the revolution of 1917 had dominated the previous fifteen. It represented a defeat of undreamt-of magnitude, not just for revolutionary socialism but for the whole working-class movement from which event we have not fully recovered. Yet it was an avoidable defeat.
The German working-class parties had millions of supporters and hundreds of thousands of dedicated members. They had their own para-military organizations capable of driving the SA and the SS off the streets. They had a tight-knit trade-union organization on the shop floor that the Nazis could hardly penetrate.
Even after Hitler was already in power and had started a reign of terror against the working-class parties, twelve million still voted for them.
Despite, or perhaps because of this, analyses of why the defeat took place have been few and far between. For the Stalinist, the Social Democratic or liberal writer the success of Hitler raises almost insuperable problems. The liberal can hardly explain why most of those with his aspirations and ideals, far from resisting Nazism, became its whole-hearted supporters at the crucial turning point. The Social Democrat may point an accusing finger at Stalinist policies, but even so will find it difficult to justify not only a complete failure to fight, but the abject crawling and fawning before the accomplished fact of Hitler’s successes that preceded the march of Social Democratic and trade-union leaders into the concentration camps. Finally, for the Stalinist of the old sort any analysis of the policies pursued at this time by the German CP is impossible – not merely because they were so obviously wrong, but because they implicated a whole generation of Communist leaders, the Thorez, the Togliattis, the Pollitts, and the colourless hacks who have succeeded them. A genuine analysis of the. rise of Hitler must also be an exposure of the various ‘official’ ideologies that have dominated in East and West for a generation.
To do this today, with the benefit of hindsight, would perhaps be a relatively easy task. Trotsky had no such advantage. His task of analysis was made no easier by his personal situation. At the end of February 1929 he had been forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union. No state in Europe would provide him with a visa. For five years he remained trapped on Prinkipo island near Istanbul. His source of information of what was happening in Germany was through letters and newspapers that took up to seven days to arrive. His direct influence on events could only be negligible. Those in Germany willing to take his analyses of events seriously and act upon them were few, and divided into a variety of small and inevitably ineffectual groups. Leading Communists read his writings only in order to distort their meaning and vilify him.
Yet despite all this,
‘like no-one else, and much earlier than anyone, he grasped the destructive delirium with which National Socialism was to burst upon the world. His commentaries on the German situation ... stand out as a cool, clinical analysis and forecast of this stupendous phenomenon of social psychopathology ...’ [1]
In reproducing these writings we are not only coming to terms with the past. Some of the issues dealt with are no longer of relevance. At the moment, the most important task facing revolutionaries in the west is not that of fighting fascism. Some of the conceptions are likewise dated. Trotsky himself was soon to abandon the view he held at this time that the regime in the Soviet Union could be made into a genuine workers’ democracy by peaceful reform. Today when the Russian bureaucracy behaves in its trading relations with other ‘socialist’ countries like any capitalist regime, it hardly makes sense to see, as Trotsky could in 1930, economic collaboration with the Soviet Union as part of a programme for escaping from the absurd logic of the capitalist world market. But much which is dealt with here is still of relevance and will remain central to any attempt by revolutionaries trying to change the world in the future: the problem of the party and the class, of the united front, of workers’ democracy; the nature of fascism as a long-term threat.
Unfortunately space does not permit us to reproduce all of Trotsky’s writings on this period. We have been forced to make a selection. We have tried to leave out only that which is either a repetition of arguments made elsewhere, or which refers to organizations and tendencies long since dead. However, any selection must to some extent reflect the political concerns of the editors. We have however, attempted to reduce arbitrariness and distortion to a minimum by indicating what material is left out and where.
Finally, in order to get as much material in as possible we have made this issue twice the normal size and twice the normal price. This is a once-only change. The next issue (in October) will be as in the past.
1. I. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, p.129.
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Last updated on 13.2.2008