[Marxism] Trotsky on the Nazi Threat to the German Labour Movement

["Graham M." <gkmilner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear B.,
            I think I might have mentioned to you in my last email that I
have been reading Ian Kershaw's biography of Adolf Hitler.   I have reached
the period of the German Revolution of 1918-19 and the Bavarian 'Soviet
Republic'.   As you might know, Hitler was in Munich during that time.   An
anarchist friend pointed out, when I mentioned these events in a card to
him, that there were libertarian socialists, such as Gustav Landauer,
involved in the rising in Bavaria.   I replied that communist activists had
been executed after the rising as well as anarchists - it was in fact in the
bloody atmosphere of reaction in the wake of the Bavarian rising's
suppression that the Nazi movement was born.

I have been looking into an organisation known as the Thule Society, which
existed in Munich at the time of the 1919 events.   I've come across a
number of references to it in general literature on Hitler and Nazism.   I
mentioned it to my anarchist friend and he suggested checking the Google
search engine for websites.   I did that, and some useful information came
up, as well as a fair amount of cranky material.   The Thulists did have a
link with occultism, as I suggested to my anarchist friend, but more with
the occultism of 'nordic race mythology' than your old-fashioned,
semitic-style devil-worship.   I believe that some Nazi leaders, like
Himmler, were heavily involved in the former kind of occultism.

I believe it is possible to make sense of Nazi ideology, and I think that
Marxism offers a good approach when it is used creatively and
undogmatically.   When I studied a UWA course on European Fascism back in
1997, I was disappointed that, while a number of Marxist writers and
theorists were considered in the course such as Palme Dutt and Erich Fromm,
the writings of Trotsky were not.   The course controller did not like
Trotsky much, but I believe that anyone who has studied the selection of
Trotsky's writings on the German situation c.1930-33, published by Penguin
Books in the 1970s under the title 'The Struggle Against Fascism in
Germany', must recognise the importance of this material.   Perry Anderson,
the editor of the 'New Left Review', in his book 'Considerations on Western
Marxism' described Trotsky's writings on German fascism as among the most
important of the 20th century (dealing as they do with the context of an
advanced capitalist state).   Even Nicos  Poulantzas, no friend of
Trotskyism, in his book 'Fascism and Dictatorship' observed that the
importance of Trotsky's writings on fascism is unquestionable.

Trotsky prescribed for the German labour movement the absolute necessity of
forging a united front of workers' parties (primarily the SPD and the KPD)
to stem the growth in support for the Nazi party, and thence to take the
initiative in the class struggle, and push forward towards the conquest of
power.   The German Communist Party's insane, ultra-left line, the result of
the Stalinist 'Third period' policies of the Comintern leadership, made such
a united front impossible.   The stakes in this conflict were as high as any
in the history of international socialism, and the triumph of the Nazi party
was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, catastrophe in the history of
world labour - an avoidable catastrophe, as Ernest Mandel emphasises in his
introduction to Trotsky's book.

Best regards,

Graham

(Graham Milner)


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