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

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>

> 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.

I agree and disagree. I agree in that Big Business was key to Hitler's
assumption to power, but I disagree on the social base of the NSDAP.

Except for rural peasants, who were a politically significant force in very
few states in germany, the NSDAP shared its political based with the KPD.
Including the lumpen. This myth of the NSDAP being a middle-class/lumpen
alliance against the worker-only KPD has no basis in historical reality.

The KPD even actively recruited from this base:

In the 1920s, the KPD's youth papers routinely appealled to "Degenerate
youth! Guttersnipes! Pimps! Bums! Thieves! Plunderers!" to join the Party.

A seminal article in this respect, which I have posted many times in many
lists:

ORGANISING THE 'LUMPENPROLETARIAT': CLIQUES AND COMMUNISTS IN BERLIN DURING
THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC by Eve Rosenhaft
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2379/evans1.htm

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

As all fascism, yes. Which points in a correct dichotomy that is not made,
and continues to have grave practical consequences in many places, which is
that one thing is fascism in power and another fascism trying to get power.
For example, the NBP in Russia, the FN in France, or the BNP in the UK, none
of which have the support of Big Industry, but are powerful fascist
organizations capable of playing the same role the NSDAP did, and who
recruit from the same social base.

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

Yes, because regardless of differences, we agree on the objective factors
behind fascism; we wouldn't be marxists if it were any other way.

What we might disagree is on historical perspective (the lessons to be
learned) and on the subjective factors, which in the case of fascism are
very important, because the diference between fascism and other forms of
capitalism lie exactlly in the subjective.

> 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.

I have read it, not so hard to track. There are 12 for sale at Amazon of the
Harvard press edition, and 2 of the Berg, which is more expensive.

> 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.

Yet all those supposedly "progressive" people evidently switched their
alligeance to the NSDAP or catrastophically failed to rise up in resistance.
That there was no active german resistance to speak of during WWII tells a
lot about the mass psychology that developed under German fascism.

This is were this optimistic view of the German working-class many have
falls. That there was a huge, important communist party in Germany, that the
most progresive section of the German working-class at thge time was more
concious that the most progressive section of the USA working-class of today
is not in doubt.

What history has shown is that they were not enough. That is the hard fact
we have to swallow and answer effectively unless fascism comes and eats us
alive again.

sks


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