Gordon Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 21, 1 April 1933, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
In the last issue of Die Weltbuehne (the radical bourgeois Berlin periodical) to reach here, Hellmuth von Gerlach, the well-known pacifist, who has since been reported under arrest and subject to the tortures of the Fascist police, quotes the following conversation between a Nazi leader and a prominent French journalist:
Nazi: “We know quite well that Germany needs fifteen years to come to power again economically and fifteen more in order to be in shape as a military power.”
Frenchman: “But the corridor?”
Nazi: “The question of the corridor can be solved of itself, without war. It wont take long before Russia cracks. Then we leave the Poles the Ukraine as far as Odessa and we in turn, get the Corridor and Danzig.” (Weltbuehne, February 28)
This solution of the Nazi chieftain is, of course, rather over-simplified. In their calculations, the German reactionaries, intoxicated with their recent and rather easy successes, are counting without their host – the international working class. The latter on the other hand has not as yet, by far, said its last word. But it is necessary to face the situation clearly, to look eye to eye with the facts. And the facts point to a shifting of the specific gravity of the world political situation from Germany where world reaction has been able to put a feather into its cap, to Soviet Russia, which is from all indications, the next butt of its attack. The defense of the Soviet Union as the fortress of the world revolution stands first on the order of the day for the international proletarian movement. A genuine defense of the world revolution and its Soviet fortress requires a recounting and an evaluation of the set-back already suffered in Germany.
When the International Left Opposition first sounded the alarm over the Hitler danger and raised the implications it had for the USSR and the progress of the world revolution, the Stalinists accused us of a counter-revolutionary design to draw the attentions of the workers away from the threat of Japanese invasion in the East. In doing this, the shining lights of bureaucratic Centrism only exposed their own lack of foresight, their own poverty of fundamental international perspective and orientation. Blinded by their “practicality”, by their empiricism, these pretenders to Communist leadership only see a danger when they come up square against it. So it has been with the Hitler danger, to which they are only now, two years after the Bolshevik-Leninists warned against it, waking up.
The Left Opposition foresaw the danger in its time thanks to its internationalist orientation, the guiding line for which is furnished by the Marxist conception of the permanent revolution. Only that conception, viewing the class struggle as an international phenomenon and its revolutionary solution as a solution to be realized decisively only on a world scale, provides the foresight that is necessary in coping with the problems posed for the Communists in the present epoch. The Stalinist conception of “socialism in one country’’, repudiating, as it does, the fundamental ideas of Marxism, of necessity leads to blind groping, to the bungling of the strategical problems posed, to the perpetration of crimes against the revolution, to the heaping up of defeats for the proletariat.
The breath-taking events of the last few weeks and months in Germany are a case in point. The Fascist reaction is almost without obstruction consolidating its power and preparing for its next steps in the East. These blows are struck in the face not of an unorganized proletariat, but of the best organized working class in the whole capitalist world. Germany possesses not only the strongest social democracy in the world, but the strongest Communist party – outside of the USSR – as well. In accounting for the events that have transpired, in analyzing the set-back that has been suffered, it is therefore indispensable and of the greatest import to probe the basic policies of these two tremendous! forces, the policies which failed to stand the test and the leaderships that failed to stand the test. The basic policies of the social democracy have long been those of treachery to the working class and the betrayal they achieved in helping Hitler to power was ail the less surprising because it merely complemented their treacheries of 1914 and 1918. The key to a successful resistance of the Fascist danger naturally rested with the Communists and their ability to win the majority of the working class from the social democrats and for revolutionary struggle. That involved, above all, the highly important and concrete question of the application of the Leninist united front tactic. But in evaluating the events, it is once more necessary to give a complete characterization of the social democracy, especially insofar as it has a bearing also upon an understanding of the Stalinist role in the situation.
The German social democracy started out on its road of working class betrayal by substituting for the Marxian perspective of the permanent revolution, the perspective of national socialist reformism.
“The conception of the permanent revolution was set up by the great Communists of the middle of the XIX century, by Marx and his adherents, in opposition to that democratic ideology which, as is known, presumed that all questions should be settled peacefully, in a reformist or evolutionary way, by the erection of the ‘rational’ or democratic state. Marx regarded the bourgeois revolution of ‘48 as the direct introduction to the proletarian revolution. Marx ‘erred’ Yet his error has a factual and not a methodological character. The revolution of 1848 did not turn into the socialist revolution. But that is just why it also did not achieve democracy. As to the German revolution of 1918: it is a proletarian revolution decapitated by the social democracy; more correctly, it is the bourgeois counter-revolution, which is compelled to preserve pseudo-democratic forms after the victory of the proletariat.” – (Trotsky)
The petty bourgeois character of the social democratic bureaucracy that grew up before the war, turning aside from the revolutionary outlook of the great founders, directed the movement into the quagmire of “realistic” and “practical” reforms. The course of the petty bourgeois leadership led to the capitulation to the monarchy in August 1914. The fulfillment of the petty bourgeois ideal, after the collapse of the monarchy in 1918, involved the decapitation of the proletarian revolution, the counter-revolutionary obstruction of the permanent course of the revolution and was crowned by the setting up of the “democratic” Weimar republic. That only the proletarian dictatorship can complete the democratic revolution, that the Weimar type of republic can only head off this course, that it is impotent in preventing the re-entrenchment of the reaction – all this has been amply proved by the development of events culminating in the coming to power of the Fascists. The treacherous role of the social democracy, beginning with the capitulation to the Hohenzollerns in 1914, proceeding through the betrayal of the revolution of 1918 and degenerating into the lowest depths with the policy ofl the ‘’lesser evil” paved the road for the Fascist victory in 1933. That is an established fact. The rejection of the concept of the permanent revolution, the petty bourgeois ideal of national socialist reformism, has worked, in the last analysis, as a trap for the social democracy itself and has served to aid the growth and the seizure of power by the Fascists, whose purpose it is to liquidate the working class movement of Germany built up in the course of more than half a century.
The responsibility of the Stalinists, for years undisputed in the leadership of the Bolshevik party and the Communist International which arose in the struggle against the social democracy and its treachery, assumes thereby all the greater significance. The whole past of the social democracy anticipated their role in the Hitler disaster. But why did not the Communist party, the German section of the Bolshevik International prove equal to the task? This is the paramount question that is posed by the German events. This is the question upon the answer to which depends the successful preparation for the tasks that face us at present. Without the correct answer to this question it will be impossible to make up for lost time, to repair the losses already suffered and to arm for future action.
(Another article on this question will follow in the next issue.)
Gordon Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 4 September 2015