Re: [Marxism] Gluckstein, Abraham, the Nazis and big business

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Carlos:
> It is only in the second half of the third period, after the 1928
> election, that the NSDAP starts to draw attention of Big Industry. And it
> is only after the market crash of 1929 that Big Industry threw itself
> towards Hitler, althought this was not by any means total.

Big business did not create the fascist movement, which was middle-class
and lumpen at its core, but its support was critical in Hitler's assumption
of state power.

> In other words, the NSDAP was poised to win, or at least to present a
> serious challenge, to those two looming Red Forces, the SPD and the KPD,
> even without the support of industry.

Perhaps. But the Hitler regime, once in power, represented the interests of
big business.

> In an interesting note, Big Industry in general did indeed support the
> SPD, and continued to do so until the great depression plunged Germany
> even deeper into crisis, and the SPD's base became more radicalized in
> their economic demands. This is a bit that get lost to some of the
> advocates of the "blame the Big Industry" school of anti-fascism.

In other words, when bourgeois democracy failed, the capitalist class
switched allegiance to fascist solutions. We can all agree on this.

> I belive they are related to a counter-revolutionary material basis (the
> economic situation in Germany, the long history of german war nationalism,
> and the conservative nature of German society), coupled with an effective
> mass psychology (yes, this is a big part of it, and there is a big lesson
> to learn there for us). I am more of the Wilhem Reich school in this
> sense, however cooky he got afterwards.

Sigh. If only the American working class was 1/100th as progressive as the
German working class (and much of the middle-class) of the 1920s. An
interesting but hard to track down book is "The working class in Weimar
Germany: a psychological and sociological study" by Erich Fromm. Let me
just put it this way. The average household was far to the left of a Park
Slope WBAI-subscribing, food-coop belonging family.




Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism