File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-11.141, message 65


Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 00:39:45 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Were the Nazis "Revolutionary"?


        
The press of work,  family and politics has precluded my answering Louis P's
provocative post ["Nazi Proletarians" 1/8/97] before now.   Lou raises a
number of important points germane to our discussions on the revolutionary
potential of the working class,  not least of which is the vexing question
of the character of the early Nazi movment.

Lou jibs at my use of the term "revolutionary" to describe the Nazi party
and reminds us of the seemingly cotnradictory fact that the Nazis -- acting
as they did in the interests of German capital-- sought to "preserve" the
existing order,  rather than overthrow it.      Yet for years the Nazi
movement contained many elements of an anti-bourgeois revolution,  targeting
as it did the satiated,  the soft,  the corrupt,  the careerist within
German society.    Nazi populism was directed above all against the educated
professional,  literary,  commercial and financial bourgeoisie -- social
groups whose "basic worthlessness" was set in its starkest relief in the
Nazi image of  "the Jew".    Nazism rose to power on the systematic
denigration of bourgeois German institutions,  from the legal and teaching
professions to the persecution of independent intellectuals and of
"degenerate" cultural forms. 
The Nazis aimed to make a revolution in German society and mores.    That
such a revolution was calculated to serve the interests of the big German
bourgeoisie,  or whether the evolution of German fascism itself produced
that ultimate effect,  does not disguise this salient feature of a movement
that counted hundreds of thousands of industrial proletarians in its front
ranks (Tim Mason,  "National Socialism and the German Working Class,  1925 -
May 1933,"  *New German Critique*,  11 [Spring, 1977],  pp. 49-93;  see
also,  his *Nazism,  Fascism and the Working Class* [Cambridge, 1995:
Cambridge University Press]).    The German Nazi party,  too, contained
twenty-five to thirty times the number of industrial workers,
proportionately,  than Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia (See Max H. Kele,
*Nazis and Workers: National Socialist Appeals to German Labor,  1919-1933*
[Chapel Hill,  NC,  1972: Duke University Press]).   

 Also,   Lou should note that I am not using the term "revolutionary" in the
sense that it is used by various "intentionalist" historians like Karl
Dietrich Bracher,  who declared the Nazi regime to be "revolutionary, unique
and totalitarian"  on the account of the "absolute pre-eminence" which it
gave to "biological politics" (Bracher and Leo Valiani,  *Fascism and
National Socialism* [Toronto,   1992: Black Star Books].    Mine is a more
functionalist approach;  there is in my view much that early fascism had in
common with Marxism in its antipathy to a decadent bourgeois order.   Its
attempts to drive a wedge between labor movement functionaries and the
rank-and-file employed means similar to certain motifs in the Communist
onslaught upon "social fascism" made famous after the "Left turn" of the
Comintern after 1928.   And it is worth recalling that the KPD leader
Thalmann attempted between 1930 and 1933 to invest himself with the aura of
a Fuhrer.    

All this is important,  not as an effort to "prove" that workers are more
susceptible to blandishments of an evil ideology than others similarly
situated,  but to locate the sympathies of the industrial toilers in regards
to the institutions that complement and uphold a self-consciously tenuous
bourgeois order.

Louis Godena



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