I saw the other parenti post from a while back. And I’ve been meaning to ask about some stuff that I see come up on different places.
One of them being about parenti’s book blackshirts and reds. So I’ve run into specific people who have claimed and bought up that parenti is lying about : how social democrats in germany gave fascists a path and its actually fault of soviets.
To paraphrase them
Soviets gave kpd direction to be hostile and also it wasn’t just “socdems will ally with nazis”. It was cause soviets gave advice to be hostile to the spd.
To boil it down, they say that parenti is wrong about rise of fascism and he whitewashed soviet mistakes.
The other one that’s bought up is the bombing of germany and american industrial ties. I see it brought up that parenti is just lying about bombing in cologne of ford factory. And its actually all lies and say the charlie higham “trading with the enemy” reference is bullshit. They go on to say that american industrialist involvement with german industry is not that deep. And that parenti (and other communists) lie about this to make a grand narrative of american involvement. They bring up nazi economy book by tooze and this site as a debunking lies material.
Now my post isn’t so much about parenti, I wanna broadly discuss about the whole notion that soviets or german communists were the reason nazis came to power and that socdems were really not at fault.
And also to discuss that american industrialists involved with germany is some bullshit conspiracy. Which it isn’t, given the lengths across the board they spread collaborating after and before the war. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on dulles, hw, and nazis spread across into different places for american interests. So I don’t think american involvement is some fake conspiracy.
What are your thoughts? (Sorry if this post is too long)
To paraphrase them
Soviets gave kpd direction to be hostile and also it wasn’t just “socdems will ally with nazis”. It was cause soviets gave advice to be hostile to the spd.
The other one that’s bought up is the bombing of germany and american industrial ties. I see it brought up that parenti is just lying about bombing in cologne of ford factory. And its actually all lies and say the charlie higham “trading with the enemy” reference is bullshit.
David Swanson cites Weixelbaum’s response in his excellent book Leaving World War II Behind, chapter 7, so I believe that Parenti was indeed mistaken (but not ‘dishonest’) when he speculated that the failure to bomb a factory in Cologne was intentional. As Swanson noted, Parenti and others at least had reasonable grounds for their suspicions!
They go on to say that american industrialist involvement with german industry is not that deep.
What are your thoughts?
It’s typical victim blaming: the classic tale about how the Communist ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and let Fascism into the world. The Fascists came to power in Italy and Germany due to capitalism’s deficiencies, not because of us, nor even because of ordinary social democrats (as annoying as they may be). People did not simply shake their heads at us and promote the far right as a form of collective punishment. The ruling class instituted the far right in order to prevent capitalism from collapsing.
Thank you very much for all these great linked threads.
I did look at the weixelbaum article and what I gleaned as much about the bombing. I guess my contention with the article is with the way they talk of books about american capital in europe or gladio are conspiracy drivel. I read more on weixelbaum writing about higham saying his book is more for conspiracy feeders. I think weixelbaum doesn’t see capital and monopolies relations to western policy especially regarding dulles brothers. I disagree with weixelbaum there about that this stuff is all baseless conspiracy until some sealed records say otherwise. But that is another topic. I guess I can see why parenti made that inference.
As for fascists, yeah they are put to task by the ruling class as reaction to salvage collapse rather than let communists take reigns.
I’m not sure how true any of what they’re claiming is, but it sounds like typical anti-communist propaganda to blame the Nazis on the Soviets, although there probably is some ironic truth to the idea that Nazism came as a result of a reaction against the Bolshevik Soviets. And it seems that Lenin respected the party for a while until bourgeois elements of proto-Nazism in the SPD were causes of the split and presumably ground for a later collaboration between the SPD and the Nazis, according to The German Revolution by Pierre Broue:
Social Democracy Before 1914
The split between Social Democrats and Communists, the basis for which had existed since August 1914, when almost every socialist party supported its government on the outbreak of the First World War, and which was realised in 1919 with the establishment of the Communist International, has projected a distorting light on the history of the International. Many writers, politicians and historians who have attempted to discover the roots of this significant split treat it as a phenomenon which could have been foreseen. Although the tensions and debates within the International prior to 1914 were implicit pointers to a split, few if any socialists desired a schism. The Russian Bolshevik faction, the nucleus of the future world Communist movement, regarded itself as no more than a Russian faction constructing a workers’ social-democratic party – which in the language of those times meant ‘revolutionary Marxist’ – in the given historical conditions of the empire of the Tsars. When Lenin was polemicising in 1905 against Peter Struve, he angrily denied that he wanted to split the Party:
When and where did I call the ‘revolutionism of Bebel and Kautsky’ opportunism? When and where did I ever claim to have created any sort of special trend in international social democracy not identical with the trend of Bebel and Kautsky? When and where have there been brought to light differences between me, on the one hand, and Bebel and Kautsky, on the other – differences even slightly approximating in gravity the differences between Bebel and Kautsky, for instance, on the agrarian question in Breslau? The indignation of the Bolshevik leader in 1905 was legitimate. Despite many discussions and differences, he maintained this attitude until 1914, and let slip no occasion to pay homage to German Social Democracy, the model of that ‘revolutionary social democracy’ which he wished to construct in Russia, in opposition to those he regarded as the opportunists, whom he wished to exclude from the Party only because they denied the necessity for its existence and wished to ‘liquidate’ it.
…
The Party bureaucracy
The analyses of sociologists such as Max Weber and Robert Michels,24 and the furious attacks by French Socialists such as Charles Andler, have contributed to painting a somewhat schematic picture of German Social Democracy. They tried to explain the victory of revisionism in its ranks by depicting the SPD as a sclerotic, bureaucratised organisation, fundamentally conservative, tightly subjected to an apparatus of politically-limited functionaries, and consequently integrated into the society which it originally claimed to be struggling against and transforming.
There is a real basis for these accusations. The Executive, which had been strengthened at the demand of the radicals in the period of the struggle against revisionism, was dominated by full-timers who in practice were not subject to control. The Executive appointed and paid the local and regional secretaries who made up the hierarchy which contained all the activity of the organisations in a fine-meshed net. Discipline was strict, and the elected members or the representatives in the mass organisations were subject to tight control in the Party fractions which the full-time members of the leadership controlled. The Executive also nominated the candidates in elections, made the careers of the full-timers, transferred functionaries, technicians, instructors and journalists, and conducted the electoral campaigns, which were their main business, like military operations.
Michels explained this complete centralisation of the apparatus and the reign of strict discipline as the result of the victory of conservatism in the ideology of the Party from 1906 onwards. However, these same characteristics led Lenin to regard the German Party as the model of revolutionary social democracy. In his opinion, Bebel and the activists of his generation had realised the aim, which the Bolsheviks proclaimed but had not yet attained, of a disciplined, centralised mass party which would constitute the framework for a workers’ army firmly led by a professional general staff. From this point of view, German Social Democracy was the object of the somewhat envious admiration of the few Russian émigrés who had the good fortune to familiarise themselves with its functioning.
The contradiction existed only in appearance. Carl Schorske remarks in his discussion of the sociologists and of Michels in particular: ‘The purposes for which – and the circumstances under which – the bureaucracy was constructed were far stronger forces for conservatism than the mere fact that the functionaries were salaried.’25 The professional revolutionaries who had built the Bolshevik faction in order to bring revolutionary consciousness and socialdemocratic organisation to the Russian working class did so in conditions of illegality and repression which hardly gave them the possibility or even the temptation to adapt themselves to, or to integrate themselves into, Tsarist society. They had maintained their revolutionary objective, which might have seemed even more remote than in Germany, in the forefront of their general propaganda, whilst they strongly centralised their organisation – yet no conservatism found its way into their daily practice. On the contrary, the apparatus of German Social Democracy, which did not reject in principle its long-term revolutionary objective any more than the Russian Bolsheviks, was constructed entirely between 1906 and 1909. In this period, it was seeking electoral effectiveness, to increase the number of votes won and candidates elected, during a period of relative social calm and reflux of the working class, and it was preoccupied with ensuring that internal conflicts did not weaken its electoral impact, and that the revolutionary phraseology of its radical wing or the demands of the least-favoured workers did not scare off potential voters amongst the democratic petty bourgeoisie and the most conservative strata of the workers. The revisionism of Bernstein and the reformism of the leaders of the trade unions had taken root in an economic conjuncture which encouraged optimistic beliefs in continued, peaceful progress.
This was what Zinoviev was to do his best to demonstrate by means of a study of the statistics which were published by the organisation in Greater Berlin in 1907. He was trying, after the event, to explain the change in the nature of the Party and the ‘treachery’ of its leaders in 1914, and emphasised that, at that date, the percentage of members who were definitely not wageearners – ‘self-employed workers’ including proprietors of inns and taverns, barbers, artisans, traders and even small-scale manufacturers – could be estimated at 9.8 per cent. The specific political weight of these elements was all the greater because the Party was orienting its electoral effort and adapting its language in order to win this clientèle. The counterweight was insubstantial; only 14.9 per cent of the members of the Party figure in the statistics under the simple label of ‘workers’, or to be more precise, unskilled workers, who, in fact, made up the mass of the working class.26
The core of the Party’s supporters was composed of skilled workers who had a trade, whom Zinoviev called ‘the labour aristocracy’.27 It was from their ranks that the Party’s full-time staff was recruited, an apparatus of some thousands of privileged functionaries,28 who often held more than one job and salary, and controlled promotions in the Party’s apparatus – its press, treasury and mass organisations – in brief, what Zinoviev called ‘the labour bureaucracy’. He defined this as a caste which tried to hide the fact that it existed, but which had its own clearly defined interests. Its aim was ‘order and peace’, the social status quo, which gave an increasingly conservative character to the Party’s policies. He drew the conclusion that the members of this caste were, in reality, emissaries of the bourgeoisie within the ranks of the proletariat.29
Carl Schorske arrived at a very similar analysis and conclusions, though he formulated them differently, in his study of the manner in which conservatism seeped into the party:
What the party functionary wanted above all else was peace and unity in the organisation. In the riven condition of the party, this made him a natural opponent of both criticism and change. And as the pressure for change came increasingly from the left, the functionary identified himself increasingly with the right.30
Still quoting Pierre Broue’s The German Revolution.
…
Historically, the Social-Democratic bureaucracy was personified by Fritz Ebert,34 who became Secretary in 1906 at the age of 36, and Chairman of the Party in 1913 after Bebel died. This former saddler, who joined the Party when very young, had a noteworthy talent for organisation. At first, he was a manual worker in the shipyards in Bremen, and then manager of a Party canteen which was a centre of Social-Democratic propaganda. In 1900, he was a full-timer, a member of the Party secretariat in Bremen responsible for labour problems, where he won the reputation of being an efficient official. When elected General Secretary, he made himself the champion of modern methods of organisation, introduced telephones, stenographers and typists into the dusty offices, multiplying reports and questionnaires, card-indexes and circulars. Schorske writes of him: ‘Colourless, cool, determined, industrious and intensely practical, Ebert had all those characteristics which were to make of him, mutatis mutandis, the Stalin of social democracy.’35
It was Ebert who constructed the apparatus, and in whom the revisionists finally placed their confidence. In 1911, he had the support of Legien and the trade-union leaders against Haase – whom Bebel supported – for the succession to the chairmanship vacated by the veteran radical Singer.36 He was defeated on this occasion,37 but was to succeed Bebel himself two years later, this time without difficulty. His lieutenants, the other bosses of the apparatus, seem at first sight to be less dull. Otto Braun, of working-class origin, had belonged in his youth to the left-wing opposition group which opposed the Erfurt Programme. Later a journalist in Königsberg, he subsequently kept his distance from the great theoretical disputes in the Party. The former compositor Philip Scheidemann had become a journalist in Hesse; he was a talented agitator, and passed for a radical until he was elected to the Executive, but he too had stood back from the great debates, and did not speak at any of the three congresses to which he was delegated between 1906 and 1911. In the Reichstag, he became the Party fraction’s expert on stock-rearing.38
At first, one may feel surprised at the importance of the role which such insipid personalities played in a movement as broad and as important as Social Democracy. The fact is that Ebert, Braun, Scheidemann and the others found themselves placed in what was in a certain sense a privileged position, between opposed class forces. The economic transformation of Germany and the relative social peace in Europe, interrupted only by the revolution in the Russian Empire in 1905, the advances in social legislation, which were won by Social Democracy and the trade unions, together with the prospects of social advancement and individual success which the workers’ organisations and their closed world offered to capable members of the working class, all nourished the revisionist tendencies.
These tendencies were fundamentally opposed to Marxism, in particular the tendency which favoured a ‘national-socialist’ movement, in which the standard of living of the German workers was considered to be linked to the prosperity of ‘its’ capitalists and the expansion of German imperialism.
Such perspectives were developed in the wake of Bernstein’s revisionism, but much more crudely and cynically, and without the idealism and the moral preoccupations which inspired him.39 These people were ‘socialists’ for whom the working classes were in league with capitalism, with its colonial and military policies, defensive in principle, but offensive where necessary. If the German Empire were drawn into a war, whether it be offensive or defensive, the German workers could under no circumstances desire its defeat.
Noske, a former woodcutter who had become a Party functionary and then a deputy, expressed more clearly than anyone else this repudiation of the very foundations of proletarian internationalism, when he declared in the Reichstag that the socialists were not ‘vagabonds without a fatherland’, and called on the deputies of the bourgeois parties to give the German workers sound reasons for being soldiers of Germany.40 The forces at work behind Noske were not disguising themselves.
The junker and Prussian Minister for War, von Einem, grasped the opportunity which this speech offered, and called upon Bebel to repudiate the anti-militarist writings of his comrade, Karl Liebknecht.41 Indeed, it was through Noske and the Prussian minister as intermediaries that the SPD was to be brought to engage in the debate on the national question and, in particular, the problem of national defence. The Imperial High Court was to pronounce when it sentenced Karl Liebknecht to eighteen months in prison.42
Shortest leftist discourse
