ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I get articul8's point. Perhaps I don't "get" whatever it is you're trying to read into it?
Griffin and BNP strategy
- Thread starter durruti02
- Start date
I get articul8's point. Perhaps I don't "get" whatever it is you're trying to read into it?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Your point has no relevance.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
his points so seldom do
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
How well-informed are you on the minutiae of SPD/KPD contact on the subject of a united front? As Joe Reilly mentioned earlier, the main impetus behind SPD representations to the KPD was for the KPD's members to act as a "sword and shield" for the SPD, doing the street-fighting and intelligence-gathering for the putative untited front, while deriving very few political benefits.
As I've also emphasised several times, the SPD were either not interested in resistance on the streets or (in some cases) worried that they might lose political legitimacy with part of their constituency if they undertook such tactics. A united front to prevent the SPD and KPD getting "smashed off the streets" wouldn't, at least in the view of contemporary commentators such as Evelyn Anderson or later academic commentators such as Bracher, have contributed much more manpower to such resistance than the KPD raised alone. Most of the "street-fighters" who had any sympathy with the SPD had already gone over to the KPD by the late 1920s.
Because of the above, I'm not sanguine that a united front would have produced much more resistance than the KPD alone did, politically or "on the street.
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
First off, the KPD were not 'smashed off the streets'. Even though they were outnumbered they has shown themselves perfectly capable of holding their own. Nor were they always on the backfoot. Their tactics was both defensive and offensive. Something Goebbels was fretting about as late as 1932.
As for the SPD, it wasn't just that the KPD didn't like/trust them that prevented a united front. It was quite simply that in the battle for control of the streets the SDP was found wanting. The KPD for example lost as most as many street-fighters in (52) in Prussia in one year, as the SPD (54) across the whole of Germany in 8 years!
Put bluntly, though the SPD has the numbers they lacked heart. As a consequence even if the through their weight behind the united front, their contribution on the streets would have at best, been marginal.
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
well don't you allege the UAF label anybody who votes BNP fascist, and say this is tactically inept? so I am interested in whether you think the KP D labelling SDP supporters social fascist, has any similar tactical significance.
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
but that is not relevant to answering his question if not the United front, what was the alternative strategy?
"Now, if you don't believe that a united front was achievable (or desirable?) what do you suggest the KPD should have done?"
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
The two aren't comparable, but rather than have whine any more, I'll address your irrelevant point.
I call anyone (whether a political movement or an individual) who attributes the label "fascist" to a BNP voter, or to the BNP themselves, inept, because misattribution of that label weakens the word's actual meaning. I prefer to call racist nationalists "racist nationalists", unless their racist nationalism actually includes enough signifiers of fascism, at which time I'll call them fascists. Chanting about "the fascist BNP" might make you pop a boner, but it doesn't actually say much.
The label the KPD applied to the SPD, while emotive (and constructed by Moscow, not Berlin) and inaccurate, was a response to the record of the SPD in government and opposition (as well as numerous other matters). We talk nowadays about how Chamberlain "appeased" the Nazis, but conveniently forget that the SPD played such a safe game that they invariably ended up setting and supporting rightward policy that harmed the working classes, appeasing the nationalists. Like many social-democratic parties in the 20th century they were more comfortable accommodating power than supporting the worker.
Was their politics a social fascism? No. Did the label have any utility? Yes, it drew attention to the political direction of the SPD, a nominally social-democratic party which, from it's earliest parliamentary manifestation had voted with power more often than against, and did not act to stop the conspiracies toward dictatorship. The SPD were enablers, not just through the Enabling Act itself, but throughout their parliamentary existence.
As you see, in the latter case the label "fascist" has utility, in the former case none at all.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
It's entirely relevant to show that his question is constructed around his misreading/misrepresentation of history, and I did answer his question. The "alternative strategy" is what actually happened: The KPD conducted the physical resistance themselves, just as they'd have most likely (given the rich historical data) had to do if they'd formed a united front with the SPD.
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
This is yet anothe carefully cultivated Trot myth. There was no 'joint' transport strike. It was communist led - the Nazis, fearful of working class opinion, sent supporters to the picket lines in order to emphasise their socialist as against nationalist credentials.
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
ahhh, I was struggling to remember this incident. And you say it was a myth. Oh well, I don't know the fact of the matter one way or the other. So what happened, they kicked them off the picket line?
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
ahhhhh, ok. So you are saying there is no different strategy that the KPD could have employed beyond the one they did. that there was an inevitability to the rise of fascism in Germany? There is no lessons for anybody reformist or revolutionary?
You see, I'm quite prepared to bow to your reading of history, compared to other people's reading of history which contradicts you, for arguments sake. That a united front in Germany was impossible. BUT, what are the lessons for today? Do we unite reformist and revolutionary and smash them while they are still small, as Hitler suggested should have been done? You see I think the reformists in Britain, and revolutionary parties such as the SWP [but not sorely] have moved on, they have learned the lesson that if they do not unite and fight, they both surely perish in the face of a fascist government, who will use the state to physically destroy them both.
For whilst I can see need for street fighting the fascist, is that the only tactic open? Without control of the state, the fascist in Germany could never have smashed the KPD and the SDP. Whilst I absolutely agree revolutionaries cannot merely occupy control of the state, like a driver in a car, and drive the state in any direction it wants, throwing up any road blocks you could to Hitler gaining control the state in Germany, would have meant he didn't have the resources to destroy the SDP and the KPD.no?
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
hmmmm, don't take this question the wrong way. Though a stupid man, I've seen lots of evidence that suggests Griffin was clever enough to realise he couldn't openly be fascist, and get elected. For this reason alone he concealed his fascism, but remained one. What do you believe? He never was a fascist? Or he had moved on?
I don't think it's really something I would forget. [I quite liked http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Revolution-Germany-1918-1923/dp/1898876223 ]
I don't think so at all. As you say, the label was as a result of strategy by Moscow, not Berlin. The same control was held over the British Communist Party. The late 20s and early 30s saw the British Communist Party playing a key role in building rank-and-file organisation and resistance.the late 30s saw the British Communist Party switch to popular frontism. Why? Because the tactics of both the German and British communist parties with dictated by the needs of Russian imperialism, not the best interests of the working class.
I do understand now a lot more where you are coming from. But I still disagree with you. I think it comes from a different attitude to how ideas change. To tactical differences. But thanks anyway for explaining your ideas clearly.
for me, I don't believe that the working classes views about reformists/etc change because revolutionaries construct the correct labels. I think, as does the SWP, ideas change in struggle. That in every single thing you do, you try to bring a maximum number of people you can into self activity of trying to take control of their own destiny. In this activity/struggle they cannot help but learn for themselves who is on their side, and who isn't. The emancipation of the working class, has to be the act of the working class, and all that. This is not just that they have to take control, but they have to learn their own lessons. They cannot learn these, if they are not fighting. Any barrier to bringing the maximum number into self activity is wrong imo. Labelling the rank-and-file of the SDP social fascist, and the kpd isolating them selves in glorious revolutionary purity was wrong FMPOV. Whether a United struggle against the fascists was achievable in Germany is another argument. But it remains in my opinion, the lesson of Germany.
PS.in fairness to you, I do accept that my position comes from a far greater amount of ignorance of the facts, than you have. You have clearly studied the topic very hard, and are very knowledgeable. However, my understanding of the topic has come from people who have studied the topic equally as hard as you, and are equally knowledgeable. It has also come from studying the topic at University for my dissertation, and so sources that they were not SWP. Who is right and who is wrong I don't know categorically. But no surprise, I do not find your arguments as convincing as the ones my worldview has succumbed to. We will just have to agree to disagree. and that is not a bad thing.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
And unfortunately while some of the Nazis were run off by KPD members, not all of them were, which (as you say) gave the Nazis traction.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Some KPD members reacted as one usually does when faced with such scum, and did indeed kick them off of the picket line. Others (a minority, but nonetheless enough so that the "cooperation" myth is still peddled) played "wait and see", asking party bosses what they should do, and giving the Nazis enough breathing space to be able to posture.
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
don't remember you pointing this out, butI already knew this, an this is one of my points. The kpd should not have refused to enter a coalition government with the SDP. If they had done they could have applied a break to fascism, and that may have been all that was necessary.
I think it was in Trotsky's fascism and Stalinism and the United front Trotsky quotes Goebbels saying, all is lost, the cadre is going over to the kpd en masse.
there was nothing inevitable about Hitler taking power. It was on a knife edge. And putting the interests of the working class before the interests of Russian imperialism, could possibly have made a difference.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
In my considered opinion, as I've stated previously, even if Hitlerist Nazism could have been avoided, a right-nationalist politics which contained most of the main constituents of fascism as proposed by Griffiths would have come about, not merely as a result of Versailles and Weimar, but because of historical and political currents going back to the mid-19th century. Bear in mind that you're talking about a polity where a significant minority of the electorate supported the idea of an extra-parliamentary dictatorship right up until they got one, and who left a hole in their constitution - a hole the SPD never bothered to close - that virtually validated such a takeover.
In my opinion conditions aren't such that a united front is required, and if one were, due to a hard swerve to the right, I'm sanguine that one would take place.
What I don't see happening is people coming together in anything but loose association (a la Barking and Dagenham, which was a "triumph" of people coming together with a specific aim, not a UAF victory) when the threat doesn't warrant it. It doesn't make tactical sense to use your limited armoury and ammunition except as needed, and one-off cooperation is harder for the opposition to nail down. Bear in mind that in this equation "we" are insurgent, so using insurgent tactics, rather than massing our divisions on "their" border, makes sense.
You seem to be forgetting the political structure of the German state and the lande. Hitler had a legal and legitimate (insofar as any similar group was) power base in several of the lande even before he was imprisoned. It was never a question of merely putting roadblocks in his way, it would have required the wholesale overwhelming of right-nationalist sentiment throughout the lande in order to remove the various nationalist groupings that the Nazis were interlinked with too. As it was, various elements of the left were proscribed by the individual lande prior to Hitler's emergence from Landsberg. The historic and social currents in the middle and upper classes - guiding the hands of those with power and influence - made some form of right-wing dictatorship nigh on inevitable in Germany, regardless of physical and/or political resistance from the left.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I believe that by the mid-nineties, he'd realised that neo-Nazism was a busted flush, and that fascism per se, as opposed to a politics that contained elements of fascism, but was based on democracy, wouldn't work. In this he'd been preceded by most of the right in Europe, so he had plenty of examples through which to illustrate his ideas to his followers.
Was he ever a fascist or a neo-Nazi? Of course he was, but many of those members of the BNP who you could have legitimately called "fascists" pissed off when Griffin began to atempt to turn the BNP into an electable political party.
You might not forget the multiple instances, but people tend to forget the contexts, and the threads that link all those instances together.
The (rather naive) assumption was made by the British, german and many other nations' communists that Moscow represented the interests of all of the international proletariat, not merely the interests of a group of Bolshevik beards in the Kremlin.
It wasn't the rank and file of the SPD who were labelled "social fascist". It was the hierarchy and it's policies.[/quote][/quote]
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I disagree that coalition would have made a difference. In fact given the nature of most coalitions we cannot be sure that a KPD-SPD coalition wouldn't have hastened fascism, given the nature of the political opposition and their links to the apparatus of state power.
As for Hitler, I agree that Hitler himself wasn't inevitable, but a fascist or near-fascist dictatorship? That was almost inevitable for Germany. What wasn't inevitable was what came with the dictatorship.
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
but the attractiveness of the Nazi party to the German ruling class was it's paramilitary wing could be used to smash working-class organisation. If Goebbels is to be believed, this was falling between their fingers as they seem to offer nothing different to what had gone before.
someone else wrote about how the paramilitary prowess of the Nazi party was massively exaggerated. Much of their displays of power where pageantry, marching in and out of places, for show, rather than direct opposition. And that it was only as they came to power, that they had the resources.
if as you suggested earlier the SDP was not as prone to streetfighting because of its middle-class constituents, why were the overwhelmingly middle-class constituents of the Nazi party prone to streetfighting? Surely they weren't, it was the working-class cadre that that Goebbels was talking about who will street fighters. Supposedly leaving to join the communist.
if you look at Germany in the 1920s, there is massive strike waves, that attracted the middle classes into 'revolutionary' influence. there was a massive growth of middle-class occupations unionisation. There was no saying this couldn't be done again. What was needed was belief in the viability of such a movement. what was needed was adequate "poll of attraction". Because, unfortunately, imbued with the muck of ages the working-class demands leadership. It's all its ever been used to. Naïvely yes, because the leadership in Russia had gone through a fundamental change, but as you point out Russia still held much weight as a beacon for something different. So much so that Communist parties would have followed its lead almost blindly.
For me responsibility doesn't really lye with the KPD. It lies with Moscow. If ifs and ands were pots and pans, I'd be a tinker. But, if Lenin and Trotsky were still there, if Moscow had put the interests of the international working class before its own, there could have been a completely different outcome. They would have maintained the Communist parties building of the rank-and-file working-class organisation, like they were in the late 20s and early 30s in the UK.they would have maintained the influence of revolution from below, rather than revolution from above as Stalin offered.
Now I know you consider the revolutionary party bureaucracy, to be like the trade union bureaucracy, as a bureaucracy they become more concerned with the interests of themselves, and their party structures, rather than the interests of the working class. But I think this is structuralism. It denies agency. There's a world of difference between the ideology of the trade union bureaucrat whose reason for existence is to manage the contradiction between capital and labour, and the ideology of someone who believes that only a classless society is the way forward for humanity.. Lenin and Trotsky fell into that category, Stalin didn't. I is with Stalin that responsibility lies for Nazi Germany. IMO
anyway this is all moot. We are never going to agree.
" You might not forget the multiple instances, but people tend to forget the contexts, and the threads that link all those instances together."
I am aware of many of the threads of thought, the influence of the Junka's, the long history of anti-Semitism, the argument that Hitler was some kind of proto-German etc etc. but there was another thread, that the lost revolution show's. And whilst you're prepared to accept context the Germany, what about the context from Russia. The annihilation of the Russian working-class in the Civil War, the invasions, the failure to spread the revolution from a backwards country, all these contributed to the strangulation of Bolshevism. It wasn't just some kind of structuralist inevitability.
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
anyway before all turns sour as usual, I do actually have a lot of respect for the reservations of anarchist about revolutionary parties based upon Leninism, Trotsky etc, and their preferred methodology. I'd genuinely, genuinely would love to see the anarchists prove me wrong, because I have nothing to lose but my chains.
malatesta32
Not Serb. No, Really!
you got a source for that panda? the 2 refs i got were from 'academic' books and its`difficult to cross reference. also this looks` pretty neat!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Political-V...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320927735&sr=1-1
anyone know about it?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Only partially-accurate. Another part of the attractiveness was rearmament and everything (incl. militarisation) that went with it.
If Hitler is to be believed (and that's a stretch, I grant you!), he'd always intended to "cleanse" the NSDAP of "socialist" elements, and his actions from '28 onward do bear that out, so while No-Balls might have gotten hysterical, I'm sure Hitler was perfectly satisfied with the newer cadre members (bearing in mind he'd by then harnessed some of the most reactionary young people in Germany - the students).
Arguably Hitler's publishing interests, and the funds from them, meant that the Nazis had "ready money", and the high-volume backing that the likes of Schacht helped Hitler put into play also meant that from the mid-'20s, they also had a cushion of resources. Add to that their infiltration of state and federal bureaucracy and the power that having done so gave them, and resource-wise they were able to out-perform every single other nationalist political party in Germany years before they took power.
As for paramilitary prowess, it was a numbers game. The Nazis had greater numbers of bodies.
It's not black and white. We know that the Brownshirts were an agglomeration of people from different classes who stepped onto the Nazi traain at different times. There were a hard-core of former enlisted men who'd come to the NSDAP through the Freikorps movement, plus a significant "spine" of junior and middle-rank officers. There were those (mostly early recruits) who actually believed that Hitler would deliver socialism, there were the mostly rural peasant class of what we might call "yeoman" rank, who owned their own land and believed Hitler on the subject of land reform as well as lebensraum.
Although you can eventually grade all this in terms of class membership, you need to bear in mind that Hitler preached to different audiences at different times, and delivered different sermons. The SA had a cross-class membership at least partly because of this.
BTW, didn't suggest that the SPD weren't "prone to street-fighting", both Joe and I said that the SPD hierarchy forbade their members participation in street-fighting (perish the thought that they engage is "squaddism", eh?
).And also, massively, into reactionary nationalist influence.
True.
As I recall, the two main Civil Service unions, as well as the professional associations that represented lawyers, were rightist, though.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
From memory, Evelyn Anderson's "Hammer or Anvil - The Story of the German Working Class Movement". Goes into the fact that because the original union strike vote fell just short of the legal trigger point for strike (75%), the strike was unofficial and therefore gave wriggle room for the political opportunism of the Nazis, although (as I said) this wasn't tolerated by all the strikers, and toleration wore progressively thinner as the strike stretched over its' 5 day course.
Here's an old RA article that seems pertinent to the discussion:
For more than fifty years the ‘United Front’ has been a talisman of the Left. Leading SWP member and journalist, Paul Foot, recently explained why. Astonishingly as Joe Reilly discovers, the whole rationale is based entirely on a series of lies.
Maybe it’s something to do with the Millennium but revisionism is everywhere. You can hardly open a paper without some widely accepted historical truth being traduced as ‘myth’. From the comment of American academic Norman Finkelstien that the Imperial War Museum view of the Holocaust read ‘like a Harry Potter story’; to the Mel Gibson reworking of the American War of Independence, to the refighting of ‘The Battle of Britain’ along class lines.
Yet in the midst all the dissembling, a single paragraph by Paul Foot, on where the blame for the rise of Hitler should lie, is, by some distance, the most treacherous and despicable of the crop. Where The Mirror columnist Charlie Catchpole rushes to the defence of the well cultivated myth of ‘The Few’ as “dashing young pilots with upper class accents” (when as C4’s Secret History shows they were overwhelmingly working class recruits, buttressed, by more than a fair smattering of generally, better trained, Poles) Foot invents a series of myths to malign ‘the few’ in another not unrelated conflict. Catchpole does not attempt to deny the facts explored in Secret History, but was insistent nonetheless that it was “nasty and mean-spirited” of the makers of the programme to bring it up.
‘Nasty and mean-spirited’ were some of the more restrained criticisms that greeted Norman Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry. Unlike Mel Gibson’s, The Patriot, which was accused of inventing atrocities in order to depict the British as Nazis, the central charge against Finkelstien is that he is intent on denying the ‘uniqueness’ of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews. For Jewish leaders like Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Weisel, the Nazi attempted extermination of the Jews was ‘a unique event - and uniquely irrational’. Weisel for example is insistent the Holocaust remains “a religious mystery, unknowable and inexplicable.” (Evening Standard)
As is all too evident, the quarrel generally is not over the hard facts of the past, but more hegemony over the future. For many the past is not history. Indeed in all too often cases as with fascism, the past is not even past.
It is against this backdrop that Foot’s own contribution has emerged. It is a falsification of history at least as politically loaded as the accusations laid against Finkelstien. Because as a mere glance at the map of Europe 2000 shows, the far-right are winning arguments and making substantial political gains hand over fist, without any evidence of a cogent counter-strategy.
Central to this inertia is that notion that fascism was an ‘inexplicable aberration’, and could, had tactics differed a fraction, been entirely avoided, Hitler could have been stopped by entirely legal and, most importantly, non-violent methods. By constitutional means, by democratic elections, by, in a word -pacifism.
Writing in The Guardian on June 3 Foot, by seeking to explain the theoretical underpinning, went out of his way to endorse this line of thinking. “Though their combined vote and their influence in the country was substantially greater than those of the Nazis, both sides - especially the communists - rigidly refused to form a united front against the fascists. The communists, who at one stage were getting 6million votes, renamed the social democrats ‘social fascists’. So great was the sectarian divide in those crucial months before the deluge that the communists preferred even to link up and stage strikes with the fascists rather than campaign in the country and the factories for a unified force against fascism. ‘After Hitler, our turn’ was the boast of communist leader Ernest Thalmann. After Hitler as it happened communists and social democrats were at last united - in the concentration camps.”
Paul Foot is a highly respected and indeed influential journalist, so his thesis deserves to be accorded some respect. I will therefore address the main points chronologically.
Before we begin it is only fair to say that as a simple statement of fact it is in almost every respect false. Worse it is knowingly false. Paul Foot, not to put too fine a point on it, is a liar - and given the level of research on the subject - a brazen one to boot.
Article continues here: http://www.redaction.org/anti-fascism/the_few.html
Reproduced from RA Volume 4, Issue 8, September/October '00
For more than fifty years the ‘United Front’ has been a talisman of the Left. Leading SWP member and journalist, Paul Foot, recently explained why. Astonishingly as Joe Reilly discovers, the whole rationale is based entirely on a series of lies.
Maybe it’s something to do with the Millennium but revisionism is everywhere. You can hardly open a paper without some widely accepted historical truth being traduced as ‘myth’. From the comment of American academic Norman Finkelstien that the Imperial War Museum view of the Holocaust read ‘like a Harry Potter story’; to the Mel Gibson reworking of the American War of Independence, to the refighting of ‘The Battle of Britain’ along class lines.
Yet in the midst all the dissembling, a single paragraph by Paul Foot, on where the blame for the rise of Hitler should lie, is, by some distance, the most treacherous and despicable of the crop. Where The Mirror columnist Charlie Catchpole rushes to the defence of the well cultivated myth of ‘The Few’ as “dashing young pilots with upper class accents” (when as C4’s Secret History shows they were overwhelmingly working class recruits, buttressed, by more than a fair smattering of generally, better trained, Poles) Foot invents a series of myths to malign ‘the few’ in another not unrelated conflict. Catchpole does not attempt to deny the facts explored in Secret History, but was insistent nonetheless that it was “nasty and mean-spirited” of the makers of the programme to bring it up.
‘Nasty and mean-spirited’ were some of the more restrained criticisms that greeted Norman Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry. Unlike Mel Gibson’s, The Patriot, which was accused of inventing atrocities in order to depict the British as Nazis, the central charge against Finkelstien is that he is intent on denying the ‘uniqueness’ of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews. For Jewish leaders like Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Weisel, the Nazi attempted extermination of the Jews was ‘a unique event - and uniquely irrational’. Weisel for example is insistent the Holocaust remains “a religious mystery, unknowable and inexplicable.” (Evening Standard)
As is all too evident, the quarrel generally is not over the hard facts of the past, but more hegemony over the future. For many the past is not history. Indeed in all too often cases as with fascism, the past is not even past.
It is against this backdrop that Foot’s own contribution has emerged. It is a falsification of history at least as politically loaded as the accusations laid against Finkelstien. Because as a mere glance at the map of Europe 2000 shows, the far-right are winning arguments and making substantial political gains hand over fist, without any evidence of a cogent counter-strategy.
Central to this inertia is that notion that fascism was an ‘inexplicable aberration’, and could, had tactics differed a fraction, been entirely avoided, Hitler could have been stopped by entirely legal and, most importantly, non-violent methods. By constitutional means, by democratic elections, by, in a word -pacifism.
Writing in The Guardian on June 3 Foot, by seeking to explain the theoretical underpinning, went out of his way to endorse this line of thinking. “Though their combined vote and their influence in the country was substantially greater than those of the Nazis, both sides - especially the communists - rigidly refused to form a united front against the fascists. The communists, who at one stage were getting 6million votes, renamed the social democrats ‘social fascists’. So great was the sectarian divide in those crucial months before the deluge that the communists preferred even to link up and stage strikes with the fascists rather than campaign in the country and the factories for a unified force against fascism. ‘After Hitler, our turn’ was the boast of communist leader Ernest Thalmann. After Hitler as it happened communists and social democrats were at last united - in the concentration camps.”
Paul Foot is a highly respected and indeed influential journalist, so his thesis deserves to be accorded some respect. I will therefore address the main points chronologically.
Before we begin it is only fair to say that as a simple statement of fact it is in almost every respect false. Worse it is knowingly false. Paul Foot, not to put too fine a point on it, is a liar - and given the level of research on the subject - a brazen one to boot.
Article continues here: http://www.redaction.org/anti-fascism/the_few.html
Reproduced from RA Volume 4, Issue 8, September/October '00
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
good article! However, I would redress the balance by saying, the criticism of the KPD is a criticism of comrades. It is not a matter of SDP good, KPD bad.in fact quite the reverse.
Chris Harman book 1919-1923, Germany's Lost Revolution, makes quite clear the despicable role the SDP played in German politics. Especially its counterrevolutionary actions. And so the criticism of the KPD is based upon, what should revolutionaries have done to defend the interests of the working class, themselves, and promote revolution.
massive mistakes were made by stallin.and the KPD, like the British Communist Party, were filled with many good revolutionary socialist who were mistaken in being puppets of stalin's imperialist interests.this is what is being criticised in my opinion, rather than the revolutionary commitment of some of the most heroic and finest revolutionaries.
the criticism of the KPD is based upon the analogy made by Trotsky. Trotsky talks of a workplace, where the fascist on one side, and a revolutionary on the other side, and the vast majority of the working class and middle. The fascist tries to influence the workplace towards fascism, and the revolutionary socialist oppositely. This is the lens through which the role of the KPD is analysed. It is being criticised for ultra-leftism, when maximum unity of the WORKING-CLASS was needed, to defend what you've got so you can push on for something better.the article is absolutely right, that the analysis is as much about today, as it is about the past. It is as much about self-criticism, as it is about criticism of the KPD. It is about learning the lessons of history.
Chris Harman book 1919-1923, Germany's Lost Revolution, makes quite clear the despicable role the SDP played in German politics. Especially its counterrevolutionary actions. And so the criticism of the KPD is based upon, what should revolutionaries have done to defend the interests of the working class, themselves, and promote revolution.
http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/3701
massive mistakes were made by stallin.and the KPD, like the British Communist Party, were filled with many good revolutionary socialist who were mistaken in being puppets of stalin's imperialist interests.this is what is being criticised in my opinion, rather than the revolutionary commitment of some of the most heroic and finest revolutionaries.
the criticism of the KPD is based upon the analogy made by Trotsky. Trotsky talks of a workplace, where the fascist on one side, and a revolutionary on the other side, and the vast majority of the working class and middle. The fascist tries to influence the workplace towards fascism, and the revolutionary socialist oppositely. This is the lens through which the role of the KPD is analysed. It is being criticised for ultra-leftism, when maximum unity of the WORKING-CLASS was needed, to defend what you've got so you can push on for something better.the article is absolutely right, that the analysis is as much about today, as it is about the past. It is as much about self-criticism, as it is about criticism of the KPD. It is about learning the lessons of history.
Casually Red
tomorrow belongs to me
Had not the SPD once urged the likes of the Freikorp to restore order on the streets ? And green lighted the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht ? I doubt theyd have been much use , and if anything contributed greatly to the rise of fascism .
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Yep.
Doubtless indirectly, but, as they say, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".[/quote]
Casually Red
tomorrow belongs to me
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
SPD bad. KPD good? Really does anyone believe this but yourself? As a line of argument it would be a lot more convincing had Chris Bambery not accused the KPD fighters of enjoying a 'laddish lifestyle' (Is there any doubt who his contemporary targets were in the mid-1990's?) socially 'fraternising' with Nazis in taverns, 'joint picket lines', a cross over in paramiltary membership and so on.
Just in case anyone is curious about the fraternisation allegation, the one example provided by Bambery is taken from Beating the Fascists? by Eve Rosenhaft, where she recounts how a group of passing brown-shirts were invited to join some communists in a Christmas drink.
Bambery leaves the reader to ponder that scene and goes on to extrapolate about the inherent dangers of political violence per se.
Tellingly he omitted to mention the viscious brawl that followed, with one SA member dying of stab wounds a month later.
Oddly enough sharing pubs with the NF was also the 'comradely' accusation laid against the squadists in the early 80's, at the same time as a nascent RA were clearing the NF out of Chapel Market in Islington, the official SWP line recomended activists abandon sales pitches to the NF, where the fascists wouldn't share them.[/quote]
Just in case anyone is curious about the fraternisation allegation, the one example provided by Bambery is taken from Beating the Fascists? by Eve Rosenhaft, where she recounts how a group of passing brown-shirts were invited to join some communists in a Christmas drink.
Bambery leaves the reader to ponder that scene and goes on to extrapolate about the inherent dangers of political violence per se.
Tellingly he omitted to mention the viscious brawl that followed, with one SA member dying of stab wounds a month later.
Oddly enough sharing pubs with the NF was also the 'comradely' accusation laid against the squadists in the early 80's, at the same time as a nascent RA were clearing the NF out of Chapel Market in Islington, the official SWP line recomended activists abandon sales pitches to the NF, where the fascists wouldn't share them.[/quote]
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