The German freedom movement prior to Hitler was inspired by Karl Marx's economic and social theory. Hence, an understanding of German fascism must proceed from an understanding of Marxism.
In the months following National Socialism's seizure of power in Germany, even those individuals whose revolutionary firmness and readiness to be of service had been proven again and again, expressed doubts about the correctness of Marx's basic conception of social processes. These doubts were generated by a fact that, though irrefutable, was at first incomprehensible: Fascism, the most extreme representative of political and economic reaction in both its goals and its nature, had become an international reality and in many countries had visibly and undeniably outstripped the socialist revolutionary movement.
That this reality found its strongest expression in the highly industrialized countries only heightened the problem. The rise of nationalism in all parts of the world offset the failure of the workers' movement in a phase of modern history in which, as the Marxists contended, 'the capitalist mode of production had become economically ripe for explosion'. Added to this was the deeply ingrained remembrance of the failure of the Workers' International at the outbreak of the First World War and of the crushing of the revolutionary uprisings outside of Russia between 1918 and 1923
They were doubts, in short, which were generated by grave facts; if they were justified, then the basic Marxist conception was false and the workers' movement was in need of a decisive reorientation, provided one still wanted to achieve its goals. If, however, the doubts were not justified, and Marx's basic conception of sociology was correct, then not only was a thorough and extensive analysis of the reasons for the continual failure of the workers' movement called for, but also - and this above all - a complete elucidation of the unprecedented mass movement of fascism was also needed. Only from this could a new revolutionary practice result.
A change in the situation was out of the question unless it could be proven that either the one or the other was the case. It was clear that neither an appeal to the 'revolutionary class consciousness' of the working class nor the practice a la Coue - the camouflaging of defeats and the covering of important facts with illusions - a practice that was in vogue at that time, could lead to the goal. One could not content oneself with the fact that the workers' movement was also 'progressing', that here and there resistance was being offered and strikes were being called. What is decisive is not that progress is being made, but at what tempo, in relation to the international strengthening and advance of political reaction.
The young work-democratic, sex-economic movement is interested in a thorough clarification of this question not only because it is a part of the social liberation fight in general but chiefly because the achievement of its goals is inextricably related to the achievement of the political and economic goals of natural work-democracy. For this reason we want to try to explain how the specific sex-economic questions are interlaced with the general social questions, seen from the perspective of the worker's movement.
In some of the German meetings around 1930 there were intelligent, straightforward, though nationalistically and mystically oriented, revolutionaries - such as Otto Strasser, for example - who were wont to confront the Marxists as follows: 'You Marxists like to quote Marx's theories in your defence. Marx taught that theory is verified by practice only, but your Marxism has proved to be a failure. You always come around with explanations for the defeat of the Workers' International. The “defection of the Social Democrats” was your explanation for the defeat of 1914; you point to their 'treacherous politics” and their illusions to account for the defeat of 1918. And again you have ready “explanations” to account for the fact that in the present world crisis the masses are turning to the Right instead of to the Left.
But your explanations do not blot out the fact of your defeats! Eighty years have passed, and where is the concrete confirmation of the theory of social revolution? Your basic error is that you reject or ridicule soul and mind and that you don't comprehend that which moves everything.' Such were their arguments, and exponents of Marxism had no answer. It became more and more clear that their political mass propaganda, dealing as it did solely with the discussion of objective socio-economic processes at a time of crisis (capitalist modes of production, economic anarchy, etc.), did not appeal to anyone other than the minority already enrolled in the Left front.
The playing up of material needs and of hunger was not enough, for every political party did that much, even the church; so that in the end it was the mysticism of the National Socialists that triumphed over the economic theory of socialism, and at a time when the economic crisis and misery were at their worst. Hence, one had to admit that there was a glaring omission in the propaganda and in the overall conception of socialism and that, moreover, this omission was the source of its 'political errors'. It was an error in the Marxian comprehension of political reality, and yet all the prerequisites for its correction were contained in the methods of dialectical materialism. They had simply never been turned to use. In their political practice, to state it briefly at the outset, the Marxists bad failed to take into account the character structure of the masses and the social effect of mysticism.
Those who followed, and were practically involved in the revolutionary Left's application of Marxism between 1917 and 1933, had to notice that it was restricted to the sphere of objective economic processes and governmental policies, but that it neither kept a close eye on nor comprehended the development and contradictions of the so-called 'subjective factor' of history, i.e., the ideology of the masses. The revolutionary Left failed, above all, to make fresh use of its own method of dialectical materialism, to keep it alive, to comprehend every new social reality from a new perspective with this method.
The use of dialectical materialism to comprehend new historical realities was not cultivated, and fascism was a reality that neither Marx nor Engels was familiar with, and was caught sight of by Lenin only in its beginnings. The reactionary conception of reality shuts its eyes to fascism's contradictions and actual conditions. Reactionary politics automatically makes use of those social forces that oppose progress; it can do this successfully only as long as science neglects to unearth those revolutionary forces that must of necessity overpower the reactionary forces.
As we shall see later, not only regressive but also very energetic progressive social forces emerged in the rebelliousness of the lower middle classes, which later constituted the mass basis of fascism. This contradiction was overlooked; indeed, the role of the lower middle classes was altogether in eclipse until shortly before Hitler's seizure of power.
Revolutionary activity in every area of human existence will come about by itself when the contradictions in every new process are comprehended; it will consist of identification with those forces that are moving in the direction of genuine progress. To be radical, according to Karl Marx, means' getting to the root of things'. If one gets to the root of things, if one grasps their contradictory operations, then the overcoming of political reaction is assured. If one does not get to the root of things, one ends, whether one wants to or not, in mechanism, in economism or even in metaphysics, and inevitably loses one's footing.
Hence, a critique can only be significant and have a practical value if it can show where the contradictions of social reality were overlooked. What was revolutionary about Marx was not that he wrote this or that proclamation or pointed out revolutionary goals; his major revolutionary contribution is that he recognized the industrial productive forces as the progressive force of society and that he depicted the contradictions of capitalist economy as they relate to real life. The failure of the workers' movement must mean that our knowledge of those forces that retard social progress is very limited, indeed, that some major factors are still altogether unknown.
As so many works of great thinkers, Marxism also degenerated to hollow formulas and lost its scientific revolutionary potency in the hands of Marxist politicians. They were so entangled in everyday political struggles that they failed to develop the principles of a vital philosophy of life handed down by Marx and Engels. To confirm this, one need merely compare Sauerland's book on 'Dialectical Materialism' or any of Salkind's or Pieck's books with Marx's Das Kapital or Engels' The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science.
Flexible methods were reduced to formulas; scientific empiricism to rigid orthodoxy. In the meantime the 'proletariat' of Marx's time had developed into an enormous class of industrial workers, and the middle-class shopkeepers had become a colossus of industrial and public employees. Scientific Marxism degenerated to 'vulgar Marxism'. This is the name many outstanding Marxist politicians have given to the economism that restricts all of human existence to the problem of unemployment and pay rates.
It was this very vulgar Marxism that maintained that the economic crisis of 1929-33 was of such a magnitude that it would of necessity lead to an ideological Leftist orientation among the stricken masses. While there was still talk of a 'revolutionary revival' in Germany, even after the defeat of January 1933, the reality of the situation showed that the economic crisis, which, according to expectations, was supposed to entail a development to the Left in the ideology of the masses, had led to an extreme development to the Right in the ideology of the proletarian strata of the population.
The result was a cleavage between the economic basis, which developed to the Left, and the ideology of broad layers of society, which developed to the Right. This cleavage was overlooked; consequently, no one gave a thought to asking how broad masses living in utter poverty could become nationalistic. Explanations such as 'chauvinism', 'psychosis', 'the consequences of Versailles', are not of much use, for they do not enable us to cope with the tendency of a distressed middle class to become radical Rightist; such explanations do not really comprehend the processes at work in this tendency. In fact, it was not only the middle class that turned to the Right, but broad and not always the worst elements of the proletariat.
One failed to see that the middle classes, put on their guard by the success of the Russian Revolution, resorted to new and seemingly strange preventative measures (such as Roosevelt's 'New Deal'), which were not understood at that time and which the workers' movement neglected to analyse. One also failed to see that, at the outset and during the initial stages of its development to a mass movement, fascism was directed against the upper middle class and hence could not be disposed of 'merely as a bulwark of big finance', if only because it was a mass movement. Where was the problem?
The basic Marxist conception grasped the facts that labour was exploited as a commodity, that capital was concentrated in the hands of the few and that the latter entailed the progressive pauperization of the majority of working humanity. It was from this process that Marx arrived at the necessity of 'expropriating the expropriators'.
According to this conception, the forces of production of capitalist society transcend the limits of the modes of production. The contradiction between social production and private appropriation of the products by capital can only be cleared up by the balancing of the modes of production with the level of the forces of production. Social production must be complemented by the social appropriation of the products. The first act of this assimilation is social revolution; this is the basic economic principle of Marxism. This assimilation can take place, it is said, only if the pauperized majority establishes the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as the dictatorship of the working majority over the minority of the now expropriated owners of the means of production.
According to Marx's theory the economic preconditions for a social revolution were given: capital was concentrated in the hands of the few, the growth of national economy to a world economy was completely at variance with the custom and tariff system of the national states; capitalist economy had achieved hardly half of its production capacity, and there could no longer be any doubt about its basic anarchy.
The majority of the population of the highly industrialized countries was living in misery; some fifty million people were unemployed in Europe; hundreds of millions of workers scraped along on next to nothing. But the expropriation of the expropriators failed to take place and, contrary to expectations, at the crossroads between 'socialism and barbarism', it was in the direction of barbarism that society first preceded.
For the international strengthening of fascism and the lagging behind of the workers' movement was nothing other than that. Those who still hoped for a revolution to result from the anticipated Second World War, which in the meantime had become a reality - those, in other words, who counted on the masses to turn the weapons thrust into their hands against the inner enemy -had not followed the development of the new techniques of war. One could not simply reject the reasoning to the effect that the arming of the broad masses would be highly unlikely in the next war.
According to this conception, the fighting would be directed against the unarmed masses of the large industrial centres and would be carried out by very reliable and selected war-technicians. Hence, a reorientation of one's thinking and one's evaluations was the precondition of a new revolutionary practice. The Second World War was a confirmation of these expectations.