The masses against the masses
JVL Introduction
Richard Seymour writes insightfully about fascism in the earlier part of the C20th and suggests parallels with developments today.
To understand fascism’s rise we need to see that its ideological groundswell had been present well before 1914, when millions were infected by volkisch, racial-nationalist ideas.
What the Nazis added to this, suggests Seymour, aside from a “socialist” rhetoric which was swiftly abandoned, was the tactic of stormtrooper terror, which had the effect of radicalising the state repressive apparatus itself
Civil society was terrorised, yes, but it was also an instrument in terror. The masses were deployed against the masses. The left was fragmented and divided.
What about today? Seymour chronicles “the several vectors of right-wing politicisation congealing at the moment, with global consequences: militias, QAnon, far-right parties in government, paramilitaries and hit squads linked to various states, anti-lockdown and anti-mask protests, anti-abortion activism, anti-trans activism, MRAs, and so on.”
It feels, he says, like counterrevolution without revolution, “as if the political rupture building over the last few years had already been hegemonised by a hardline nationalist right…”
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Thanks to the Richard Seymour for permission to repost this article.
This article was originally published by Patreon on Fri 2 Oct 2020. Read the original here.
The masses against the masses
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An excellent, and highly disturbing, piece of writing. I think we need a follow up which carefully analyses just how, and where, the various currents of the present-day far right (the anti-maskers, the anti-abortion campaigners, the preachers of ‘traditional values’) link with established right wing parties like the Tories and the Republicans, how these groups might coalesce into a politically effective force, and how they might be most effectively fought.
Remember Michael Rosen’s wonderful poem
Fascism: I sometimes fear…
I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.
Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you…
It doesn’t walk in saying,
“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”
I am deeply disappointed by this article. It is not possible to rebut it in 300 words or so. It says more about Richard Seymour than fascism. To put it at its kindest, Richard Seymour understands little or nothing about the rise of Hitler.
I was reminded of Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. He too believed that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on consent of the German masses.
Seymour himself is rapidly moving to the right and this essay is one milestone on his journey. I am surprised though that this shallow and superficial article was considered fit for publication.
I shall distribute a response since I shall assume that a right of reply will be refused.
Richard Seymour’s article is shallow and, sad to say, rather politically uninformed about the class nature of Hitler fascism and German working class’s resistance to it.
In particular, it gives no proper attention, let alone credit, to the bitter political and physical struggles carried out by the KPD/RfB, the SPD/Reichsbanner and the ADGB – in other words, the organised working class and its defence organisations – against the Nazis and the whole of the German right before 1933.
The violent conflict with the NSDAP and its allies, that raged between 1928 and 1933 in particular, claimed hundreds of lives. This is well documented in Eve Rosenhaft’s ground-breaking book “Beating the Fascists”.
It can be argued with some justice that the militant struggle against Hitler’s brown-shirted marauders was registering success as, before power was handed to Hitler in January 1933, electoral support for the NSDAP was distinctly starting to slide.
The March 1933 election was not “free” but was conducted under Nazi terror and murder. Even then, the Nazis still couldn’t get a majority at federal level or in Berlin where the KPD garnered more than 383,000 votes and the SPD over 287,000 compared with the NSDAP’s 398,000.
There was never any lack of will to fight or sacrifice on the part of the working class despite the political inadequacies, errors, failures and betrayals of its leaders. And, there is no lack of evidence of this fact either to be found in numerous books on the period.
For example, there are the works of Eve Rosenhaft, Richard Bessel, “Jan Valtin”, Oskar Hippe, “Robert Black”, lots of others like Steve Cushion and Marilyn Moos – Google them all – and, above all, the Trotsky/Ernest Mandel collection, that amply testify to the intensity and ferocity of the German working class’s resistance to the fascists.
A final note: during the ten years I lived in Germany, it was my great privilege to get to know a number of Widerstandkämpfer and Spanienkämpfer. I can well imagine their incandescent reaction had they read Richard Seymour’s article.
A sobering analysis with much to think about in the contemporary context. Richard’s piece is an important contribution, not just historically but towards understanding of what is happening right now. So, my point here is meant to clarify, meant in the most positive spirit.
He suggests that the Nazis gained up to 16.5 m votes and cites 44%, but I don’t recognise those figures. They did not do that well in electoral terms. The Nazi party peaked in July 1932 election with 13.7m votes or 37%, compared with the Communist Party’s 5.3m and the SDP’s 7.9m. Or about 36% for the left.
After the chaos and violence of the autumn the November 1932 election saw the Nazi Party lost electoral ground, as did the left. It gained about 33% of the vote to the left’s 27%. The Weimar system enabled smaller parties, and support had grown for right wing conservative nationalists, many of whom shared much of Hitler’s anti-Semitism and anti-communism but distanced themselves from the brown-shirt ruffians. By January 1933 Hitler, in cahoots with the old aristocratic/ military establishment and big business, staged a coup. It might have been constitutional but a coup. Further elections were then subject to terrifying violent suppression by Nazi thugs.
Maybe the point for us is that elections can be a vehicle for fascism to mobilise mass support but in the end it is not the vote count they rely on but power and violence.
I entirely agree that Seymour ignores the working class resistance to the Nazis, and that this is a major weakness in his article. It’s also the case, though, that we do ourselves no favours if we insist on seeing fascism as something entirely imposed on the working class, and ignore the degree to which it was and is able to tap into beliefs and emotions which are already present, at least in a latent form, in all capitalist societies. The idea of an unsullied and ideologically uncorrupted working class is more characteristic of Left romanticism than it is of Marxist analysis.
We also need to be aware of the obvious, but frequently ignored, distinction between a working class culture and a socialist one. There will be – must be – overlaps between the two, but you don’t have to accept an entirely Leninist view that socialist ideas need to be brought to the working class from the outside, to accept that neither do they arise entirely spontaneously without political education, nor that reactionary ideas – racism, sexism and xenophobia in particular – are not also there and will have to be defeated.
It seems to me that we can both respect and celebrate the struggle of the German Left against the Nazis, and also accept, as Seymour says, that most of the population acquiesced once they were in power, and that at least a sizeable minority stayed enthusiastic to the very end. If we don’t recognise this, however unpalatable it might be, and try to analyse why it might have been so, we risk being unable to understand the appeal of far right ideas for significant numbers of people in the here and now, and to be unable to develop effective strategies to counter that appeal.
I’m not an ‘anti-lockdown activist’, but I am anti-lockdown. There may be people who are right wing who go on any demonstration about any or all government restrictions, or because they just love Donald Trump, but I think it’s a mistake to consider that most of these people raising objections to the lockdown can be grouped in with Nazis and the QAnon anti semites.
If I happen to know different scientists with different views to the ones chosen by Boris Johnson, similar to the scientists in Sweden (!), its a bit unfair to say I share anything with ultra right, well, thugs basically.
If ‘anti-trans activists’ includes people who just raise the question about the danger of non-trans men pretending to be trans in order to go into women only spaces, then I think we have a similar problem.
The left must avoid dividing against itself, and make sure these topics (like the other great divider, Brexit) can be discussed without fear.
Les Hartop. Anti lock down protestors tend to be drawn from the reactionary right wing of politics. Libertarian free marketeers, anti vaxxers, anti abortionists, the far right including fascists and neo nazis. They often embrace conspiracy theories, some of which are antisemitic and some of which are not. Many on the Tory right who are willing to contemplate a no deal Brexit are also libertarian free marketeers. For these people the pursuit of profit trumps the need for properly funded public health and social care services.For them the covid crisis is viewed as an opportunity to accumulate more wealth by the elimination of public sector bodies to deliver the services required to deal with the crisis. The left needs to challenge the neoliberal ideology which underpins their failure to surpress the virus. As socialists we should demand the privatised test and trace system is socialised, the furlough scheme is extended and those forced to self isolate are properly supported. Lock downs and restrictions placed on our human rights are the result of Tory failures I’m sure you agree with me, that they are not part of some sinister plot of Bill Gates to enslave us.
I never thought I’d find myself agreeing with Graeme Atkinson of Searchlight but I do. Richard Seymour’s article is superficial and based on a lack of knowledge. Not only did the working class not support Hitler to the end but it is also true that important parts of the countryside did not do so, as Ian Kershaw points out in Catholic Bavaria.
The KPD’s strategy was sadly wrong, given that Stalin was not unhappy about the rise to power of Hitler. The idea that the SPD were fascists thus precluding a united front was catastrophic.
But to quote uncritically from Guerin that support for Hitler ‘“surged forth from the depths of the German people. It’s because of its popular appeal that it was irresistible, that it swept everything else away; that the workers’ parties, divided among themselves, couldn’t form a front against it; that the old reactionary and feudal Germany had to reluctantly make way for it.” and to then say that ‘Somehow the masses had come to desire fascism.’ suggests that Seymour is on a short journey to the Right.
Graeme is also correct to say that the March 1933 elections were anything but fair. They were conducted under a state of terror, despite which the working class remained firm.
Seymour also knows nothing of working class resistance during the Nazi reign. E.g. in Augsburg Kershaw tells us that by 1936 the use of the Hitler salute had all but disappeared. A deeply disappointing article