19th December 2000
Below is the text of a letter emailed to Weekly Worker but not printed.
‘You Bastards’
Responding to criticism of the Socialist Party, Kiern Edwards in a letter entitled ‘You Bastards’ (Weekly Worker Nov 9) describes the CPGB as ‘a Stalinist rump’ and went on; “Hitler came to power because of you bastards and you would have probably denounced us for fighting him.” The implication being that Trotskyists, Social Democrats [SPD] and liberals all fought the Nazis, while the ‘Stalinist German Communist Party’ (KPD), when not openly collaborating with the fascists stood idly by. This is a grotesque Trotskyist falsification of fifty years standing, and it is time it was put to bed.
Writing in The Guardian on June 3 Paul Foot, makes the not dissimilar claim that Hitler could have been easily defeated were it not for the obstinate sectarianism/collusion of the KPD.
"Though their combined vote [SPD/KPD] 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 6 million 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, but as a simple statement of fact, it is in almost every respect false. Worse it is false not through ignorance, but through concerted effort.
Paul Foot, not to put too fine a point on it, is a liar - and given the level of research available on the subject - a brazen one to boot.
Let's deal first with his claim that support for the Communist and Social Democrats "combined had substantially greater influence in the country generally than the Nazis". The facts differ starkly. In November 1932 the Nazis took 33.1% of the vote. In this election the Communists were big gainers with 16.9%. This put them little more than 3% behind the Social Democrats on 20.4%. In all, a combined Left total produced 37.3%, a mere 4.2% more than the Nazis. Substantially greater? And this was in a reduced poll. Only three months earlier, in July, the Nazis themselves had received 37.4%! So comparing the results over the two elections reveals the differential to be - 0.1% - and that in favour of the fascists! So Foot's inference that by merely casting aside `sectarian differences'. Hitler could have been stopped, is exposed as nonsense.
As well, in making it clear whose sectarianism was at fault, it is evident whom, in the name of `unity', Foot believes should have eaten crow. Again this skates over, the striking fact that from 1928 onward, SPD support in working class areas was in free fall. In 1928, the SPD took 29.8% of the national vote, while the Communists took just 10.6%, a differential of just under 20%. Four years later it had been whittled down to just over 3%. Even the banning of their Communist rivals couldn't stop the SPD meltdown, which dropped a further 2% to 18.3% in 1933. Had the KPD not been banned, it is not inconceivable that it would have become the larger party electorally. But according to Foot it is nevertheless the failing reformists to whom the KPD should have politically capitulated? Not withstanding the fact is the KPD vote and recruitment was directly at the expense of the SDP, if judged by nothing more than voting trends, it would have been strategically insane to do so.
Next like Edwards, (and SWP Central Committee member Chris Bambery on another occasion) Foot draws on the SWP canard of routine communist fraternisation, or as he puts it, the "communist preference" for creating alliances with the Nazis rather than the social democrats. Foot alleges that the communists preferred "to stage strikes and link up with the Nazis rather than argue for a united front in the country and the factories against the fascists". Once again this too is almost 100% fabrication.
On the one notable occasion the Nazis joined a Communist picket line it was in support of the Berlin Transport Workers Strike in 1932. The Nazis, who at the time, for entirely tactical reasons were emphasising the `socialist' over the `national' in their strap line, felt they had no option but to support the strike. Otherwise their support from among the German working class (something else the SWP deny incidentally) would have been seriously shaken. "We are in by no means an envious position,” Goebbells wrote at the time. "Many bourgeois circles are frightened off by our participation in the strike.” As Goebbels makes plain, it was the Nazis who were forced with gritted teeth, to temporarily adapt to a communist-led class war agenda, not as Foot alleges, the other way round.
Right at the heart of the revisionism, is an unchallenged assumption in the ability of a talismanic `united front' to `stop Hitler' by itself. Numbers alone, (regardless of tactics, which are deliberately never mentioned) would, Foot implies, have been sufficient. We have already identified more than one gaping hole in that theory. But there's more. Of those, who, to quote Pastor Niemoller, "stood up" to the Nazis, it was according to Foot, the "rigid refusal" of working class Communist street-fighters to bond with the Social Democrats, which more than any other factor was responsible for handing the Nazis victory on a plate.
Yet even when leaving aside (for another time) the pivotal political question of `unity on whose terms', (revolution v reform etc), the very best in the circumstances SPD/KPD unity as proposed by Foot could possibly have provided, was - electoral unity only! Yet "a united front" on such a limited basis, Trotsky was absolutely adamant, "decides nothing", particularly when the real `battle was for control of the streets'. Accordingly for Trotsky the real "value of the united front", was "when Communist detachments come to the help of Socialist detachments and vice a versa".
And as a cursory reading of history bears out, controlling the streets was strategically pivotal, a reality the official record of injuries and fatalities bears out. In 1932, the year before Hitler took power, the authorities reported that between January and September of that year, seventy Nazis, fifty-four Communists, ten Social Democrats and twenty `others' were killed in clashes - in Prussia alone. As guns were used only rarely, the level of the fatalities are a testimony to the ferocity of the hand-to-hand clashes, and also signify that the level and nature of the struggle was both persistent and intense. A low level form of civil war in fact. Other statistics give a sense of the scale of the conflict. Red Aid a communist support organisation committed to looking after victims, prisoners and dependents, reported that, between 1930 and 1931, no fewer than 18,000 communist volunteers were wounded in such skirmishing.
Not only does the level of struggle give a lie to the Foot prognosis that this could have all been sorted constitutionally and possibly even more ridiculously by implication - on the result of that one election - it also exposes the Trotskyist myth of the united front on an electoral basis providing any form of remedy. Indeed as Trotsky himself repeatedly emphasised, the primary value of the united front, was not some poxy electoral alliance, but was almost exclusively a - paramilitary one!
A yet more devastating truth is hidden within the dry statistics. Though a mere detail, it nevertheless explodes the myth of communist intransigence, and emphatically reverses the finger of blame. What the official records show, is that far from communists being `especially sectarian', or having a `preference for linking up with Nazis' the commitment of the far smaller organisation to the fight against fascism, dwarfed and shamed, (though not in Foot or Edward's eyes) the strikingly larger Social Democrat Party. Staggeringly, the Communists had more of their fighters (54) killed in Prussia in the first nine months of 1932, than the 52 the SPD lost across - the whole of Germany - in the previous eight years! Figures all the more extraordinary, when you consider that in 1928 the Communists had a membership of only 130,000 while around the same time, the SPD boasted a membership 30,000 - short of a million!
Had the strikingly larger SPD even matched the KPD kill record; ‘corrected the papa's son's patriots in their own way’ as Trotsky put it, not just in the "crucial few months before the deluge" that Foot typically refers to, but in the eight years from 1925 onwards when battle was joined, neither party, whether `united' or otherwise would have ended up in the camps.
Cold statistics such as this utterly demolish the Foot argument that it was the communists who were guilty of not pulling their weight. On the contrary it is the “flabby pacifism” of the SPD that emboldened the Nazis. And whatever else Stalin and the Comintern might have wanted Communists in Germany fought hard, and more to the point, fought almost alone.
To sum up, a compound of the 'Jews first' 'hardmen responsible' revisionism favoured by liberals and Trotskyists alike, produces a unitary view of events, that is both grotesque and Orwellian. Working class communists are written out of history on the one hand, at the same time as being held to account for it's darkest chapter on the other.
To then use this 'false memory' "to arm us against any repetition of similar horrors in the future", to recommend as Foot does, that it be employed as the template for current anti- racist/fascist strategies, is lunatic, criminal, and almost certainly suicidal.
‘You bastards?’ Indeed.
Joe Reilly
Red Action
Losing the Battle of the Streets
