Letters

Crushing it

In his article (‘Crushing it in the egg’ October 24), Mike Macnair cites Daniel Guérin’s 1936 Fascisme et grand capital as the likely source of the following Hitler quote, referenced by generations of ‘militant anti-fascists’ who use it to reinforce the idea that fascists must be smashed while their movement is still small: “Only one thing could have stopped our movement - if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.”

This quote appears in this form on countless antifa websites, at the end of David Edgar’s 1976 play Destiny about the National Front, and in plenty of other anti-fascist agitprop. It is variously claimed that Hitler wrote or spoke these words, though no exact source is ever provided.

After some research, I eventually found the original source: Die Reden Hitlers am Reichsparteitag 1933, a 1934 publication containing complete transcripts of all speeches given by Hitler at Nuremberg the previous year. It turned out that he had indeed used a variation of the notorious formulation. Behold my translation, and marvel at the Führer’s social-Darwinist wisdom:

And so, in 1919 I established a programme and tendency that were a conscious slap in the face of the democratic-pacifist world … [We knew] it might take five, 10 or 20 years, yet gradually an authoritarian state emerged within the democratic state, and a nucleus of fanatical devotion and ruthless determination formed in a wretched world that lacked fundamental convictions.

Only one danger could have jeopardised this development - if our adversaries had understood its principle, developed a clear understanding of these ideas, and not offered any resistance. Or, alternatively, if they had annihilated the nucleus of our new movement with the utmost brutality from the very first day.

Neither was done. The times were such that our adversaries no longer had the capacity to annihilate us, nor did they have the nerve. Arguably, they also lacked the understanding to respond appropriately. Instead, they began to tyrannise our fledgling movement by bourgeois means, and in doing so, they aided the process of natural selection in our favour. From that point on, it was only a question of time until the leadership of the nation would fall to our hardened human material …

The more our adversaries believe they can obstruct our development by employing a degree of terror typical of their nature, the more they encourage it. As Nietzsche said, a blow which does not kill a strong man only makes him stronger, and his words have been confirmed a thousand times. Every blow strengthens our defiance, all persecution reinforces our single-minded determination, and any elements that do fall are merely good riddance to the movement.

It’s interesting that the antifa variation omits the first part of Hitler’s statement - specifically, the notion that the Nazi movement would have remained marginal had it been ignored by its opponents. This was the ‘tactic’ consciously employed by Austrian Social Democracy in response to early fascist assemblies and disturbances in 1919. Clearly, it did not work.

For obvious reasons, ‘physical force anti-fascists’ are fond of Hitler’s second point. However, the two must be read together and in context. Hitler’s ‘advice’ reflects his conviction that battle inspires the fittest warriors to great deeds, that the weak naturally fall by the wayside, and that thugs inevitably emerge on top. It offers no profound strategical or historical insight.

We should base our tactics on a concrete assessment of the situation at hand. Naturally, this may involve physical force - and here I don’t quite follow Jack Conrad’s SWP-like talk of the “leftist futility of squadism” in point eight of his Fifteen theses on fascism and fighting fascism, which seems at odds with his support for self-defence in point 12. Any Communist Party should have its ‘proletarian hundreds’, and even today the leaders of communist groups should encourage their members to join red gyms and learn at least the basics of self-defence. It was ‘squadism’ that contained the fascist street violence of Blood and Honour in the late 1980s to early 90s.

But at times, entirely different tactics may be necessary - whether public debates with fascists, mass demonstrations against them, or targeted propaganda aimed at their followers. What we should avoid is promoting a dogma based on a doctored Hitler quote: still less should we elevate anti-fascism above all other concerns or turn it into an ideology in its own right. As the Austrian writer and poet, Erich Fried, said, “Someone who is nothing but a fascist is a fascist. But someone who is nothing but an anti-fascist is not even an anti-fascist”.

Ultimately, fascism and similar movements will only be extinguished for good once the global system of competing predatory capitalist nation-states that serves as their breeding ground is abolished. Hitler’s was not the only radical völkisch movement in Germany at the time. Even if anti-fascists had succeeded in smashing the nucleus of the NSDAP, they would have still faced a massive cesspit forming in the ruins of a failed revolution: the Deutschnationale and their veterans’ organisation, the Stahlhelm; the Deutschvölkischer Schutz-und Trutzbund; the Thule Society; the German-Völkisch Freedom Party; the Freikorps; and many more. For all his self-assurance and considerable skill, the Führer had no idea how lucky he was to emerge as the main contender.

Maciej Zurowski
Italy

Not enough

We have followed with some interest the debate over the statement on the Ukraine war. The response of the British left to this conflict has been quite pathetic and there is indeed an urgent need to build a communist opposition to the insane course of the ruling class. We agree with the main political stance taken by the CPGB on the Ukraine war: turning the reactionary war into a civil war, opposition to Nato, and opposition to pacificism. We are interested in joint work to promote these basic positions among the left.

Although we thought the statement centred on political principles advocated by Carla Roberts was a better basis for discussion than the statement by the PCC, we think both have fundamentally the same weakness. In both cases there is not enough clarity about the specific task of communists in Britain. Of course, it is essential to have a correct position on the conflict itself. But the key task for communists here is to build an opposition in the unions and Labour Party to the pro-Ukrainian course of the leadership.

This is where the left has really failed so far. Most cheered Ukraine hawks like Sharon Graham during the strike wave. And during the election very few were ready to campaign against Nato-loving left Labourites like John McDonnell. Opposing such figures in the labour movement is where the rubber hits the road on the Ukraine war.

Beyond the specific slogans raised by Lenin during World War I, his main aim was to effect a break with the social chauvinism of the Second International, including with centrists like Karl Kautsky. We believe we are faced with the very same task today regarding Ukraine, but also Palestine.

We propose holding either a joint forum or a public debate on the war in Ukraine, although we are quite open to any other suggestions to push this issue forward.

Spartacist League Britain
email

Too much

We welcome the effort of our comrades in the CPGB (PCC) to unite the existing left in Britain and internationally against the war drive and agree with the PCC statement’s fundamental position against war (‘Establishing a principled left’ Weekly Worker October 3). However, we believe this is insufficient to establish any principled unity and will need considerable rewriting to make it a “statement with a view to cementing principled unity and furthering the struggle against war and capitalism”.

The current statement is marred by too much noise about military specifics, which is more appropriate for a ‘Notes on the war’ column than a principled political statement. We believe it is more important to draw lines of demarcation and clarify political differences on the war in Ukraine, especially against the social-imperialist camp, which is something the statement doesn’t sufficiently attempt. If we need to break away from the social-imperialists, we need to argue against their common arguments that the war is of “dual character”, a “war of independence”, a “struggle for Ukrainian self-determination” - similarly with the arguments of social-pacifists and open supporters of the Russian invasion.

We agree with the letter published on October 10 that the previous statement written with the board of the Communist Platform is much more coherent than this one. If social-imperialism is indeed a betrayal, political statements should clarify why they are wrong and what a principled anti-militarist position is. The statement’s analysis is not wrong, but it doesn’t engage with the actual arguments of campists supporting Ukraine or Russia, nor does it elaborate why “Ukraine is an American proxy” and its implications. For such a lengthy statement, it’s a glaring deficiency.

If the purpose of a political statement is to sharpen the principled left’s anti-war and anti-militarist position and distinguish it from unprincipled social-pacifists and open supporters of the Russian invasion, then it should be clear and sharp and spend more time drawing political lines of demarcation. As it currently exists, the statement isn’t effective in its intended purpose, and we cannot sign it.

We look forward to a better statement.

Editorial Board, Prometheus
email

Defeat Palestine?

Is Donald Trump a fascist and is fascism a looming danger in the US and globally? Should Marxists be revolutionary defeatists in all wars today and was Lenin (alone?) wrong to take this line in World War I?

These questions have provoked ideological and political turmoil within the CPGB and on the left in general. Jack Conrad seeks to clarify us in his ‘We need clear red lines’ article (October 24) and Rob Sewell attempts the same in his ‘Donald Trump’s populism: what does it represent?’ in The Communist (October 23). Both deny Trump is a fascist, despite Kamala Harris dubbing him as such, quoting John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, who said he was “someone who falls into the general definition of fascists”. He has often spoken approvingly of Hitler. Trump supporters have made far better preparations than in 2021 to overturn the vote if Harris wins; his intentions to rule as a despot if he is declared the winner are clear.

Sewell goes to great lengths to prove that Trump’s anti-establishment populism has been enhanced by the Democrats’ use of the courts against him in an unjustified way, it seems. He says, “Trump is not a fascist, aiming to destroy the American trade union movement or establish a ruthless dictatorship”. Really? A few paragraphs later he seems to contradict himself, “the situation in America has never been so polarised, you would have to go back to the Civil War of the 1860s for any real comparison. That fact that 45 percent of Republicans supported the storming of the Capitol in January 2021 is a reflection of this”.

The World Socialist Web Site/Socialist Equality Party frequently make the opposite point - that the Democrats and the courts have been back-peddling over the attempt to overturn the election by force in the storming of Capitol Hill and other matters like the blatant request by Trump to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find me 11,780 votes”; he had lost by 11,779 votes. Surely the latter at least was an immediate arrestable offence meriting jail and banning from public office? The WSWS are right on this, and Sewell and Conrad are wrong: Trump is a fascist; and fascism and civil war is a looming threat in the US.

Revolutionary defeatism is in a muddle in the CPGB: there is Jack Conrad, Carla Roberts and the statement, ‘Danger of World War III: the communist response’, by Ian Spencer, Bob Paul, Andy Hannah, Paul Cooper, Carla Roberts, Anne McShane. Marxists are dual defeatists in wars between imperialist powers, we are defeatist in the imperialist country in wars between imperialism and a colonial or semi-colonial country and for the victory of the latter, regardless of the political character of the government of that oppressed nation.

The CPGB correctly does not recognise Russia as an imperialist power, so Marxists should not be dual defeatist here, but they are. And it seems the confusion extends to both the wars in Ukraine and Gaza/Lebanon, “In the current situation, communists in the belligerent imperialist and proto-imperialist countries need to take a position of revolutionary defeatism: the main enemy is at home,” says the above group. We are defeatists on the Palestinian/Hezbollah side? And Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a defensive move against US/Nato encirclement, which puts him in a popularity bracket of the high 80s at home.

And the source of the confusion is their reliance on that third campist Hal Draper’s Lenin and the myth of revolutionary defeatism.

We have to thank Mike Macnair for clarifying this question, despite his nonsense about what modern imperialism and proto-imperialism are. Carla Roberts clarifies: “Macnair, like Conrad, quotes Hal Draper’s seminal book The myth of Lenin’s ‘revolutionary defeatism’ - but disagrees with Draper’s assessment that ‘the defeat slogan was simply wrong and always implies that you must positively wish for the victory of the other side’. Macnair explains: “What is missing in Draper’s account is that Bolshevik anti-war agitation and organisation among the soldiers did not disappear after April. But the disappearance of the defeat slogan, and the mass defencism, were real. Mass defencism reflected the fact that, as the war had evolved, it had become mainly a war fought on Russian soil, which Russia was losing. The masses could see perfectly well that the liberty they had won in February would not survive German occupation.”

The defeat of the global hegemonic power and all its proxies - the US and its finance houses and transnational corporations, who dominate the planet via the International Monetary Fund and World Bank - is always the most progressive outcome of all wars. Remember Vietnam?

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Sly evasion

Your ongoing discussion over a statement on the danger of World War III does anything but set out “principled” positions; in fact on all sides it is nothing but sophistry and flannel, designed to cover up the key issue; should there be a call for the defeat of imperialism or not?

That emerges most clearly in the discussion about Ukraine, as set out in the “alternative statement” from Carla Roberts (‘Different times, different slogans’, October 24), but which in all key points reflects the same dishonest and devious points made on all sides.

It begins with misanalysis: there is not a “danger of” World War III; it is an inevitable product of capitalist crisis, we are in it already and it is unstoppable until the fight to overturn capitalism is carried through. But, that aside, your line bends the Leninist understanding of the inter-imperialist predatory nature of World War I and the call made by the Bolsheviks for defeat for each major power, warning against and hostile to the chauvinist and ‘patriotic’ stampeding of workers behind the ruling class. Defeat of each ruling class would thereby open up the possibility for revolutionary war against it - civil war in fact, embodied in the slogan, ‘Turn your guns against the ruling class’, as then happened in 1917.

Notionally you say you are for civil war, but do not really make clear how that is supposed to happen other than it should “be turned” into one led by workers - spontaneously? What then is the purpose of the revolutionary party?

You declare over Ukraine that all sides in this war - Russia and Nato (standing behind the Kievites) are imperialist powers, and therefore you do not support any of them. You use that as a reason effectively to wash your hands of taking a position; revolutionary defeatism means “our fight is at home”, you declare.

But that is just a sly evasion of the main question. Firstly, the Bolsheviks never said that the fight was only domestic; they very strongly called for defeat of tsarism, which in the circumstances was only possible at the hands of the German imperialists. For this they were vigorously attacked by all parties, including much of the Menshevik ‘left’ and the Trotskyists (headed obviously by Trotsky), based around the undialectical notion that the Bolsheviks were ‘supporting the Germans’ - an accusation most extremely expressed in the yellow press lies of them taking ‘German gold’.

It was a nonsense; the revolutionaries’ only interest was to see imperialism - ‘their’ tsarism - defeated. In that sense it did not matter that the Germans were imperialists, any more than it now matters whether the Russians in Ukraine are called imperialists: what counts for the working class in Britain is that some way or other its own side, Nato, is defeated.

The ‘Our fight is at home’ slogan just avoids the question, suggesting that the class struggle against the government here is disconnected from imperialism’s rampaging in Ukraine, usefully avoiding the need to call too sharply for Nato, the Kiev stooge and British forces to come a cropper. Instead it implies that ‘this is not our war’. But your position is not really even-handed anyway: instead you join the Stop the War pacifists to condemn Russia’s “invasion”, which is tantamount to siding with western imperialism, and its fingering of Moscow as the ‘culprit’.

That undermines your point that the whole war is the result of a “clear provocation” by the west through its skulduggery and its culmination in the fascist Maidan coup of 2014, instigated and carried through with $5 billion of subversion and lying propaganda for ‘democracy’. If the war is Moscow’s fault, then how can you convince workers that their interest is to see their ‘own’ side defeated, which is the Marxist understanding?

Just to further avoid the issue, you add in an additional point that somehow Britain is not directly involved anyway. Total garbage; obviously the UK is a major contributor to Nato (and in fact was a lead instigator of the anti-communist alliance during the post-war ‘left’ (ha!) Clement Attlee Labour government) as well as a constant agitator among other members for increased funding. Obviously Nato is heavily involved.

Furthermore Britain has been a significant ‘military advisor’ and trainer for the Ukraine reactionaries - not just from 2022, but since the Maidan (with Boris Johnson even hosting the outright Nazi Azov brigade in parliament to ‘honour’ them), as well as covertly supplying intelligence, equipment like ‘sea drones’, strategic guidance (albeit disastrously, as in the failed Kursk offensive) and almost certainly special forces boots on the ground.

But your characterisation of Russia and the west as competing imperialists is wrong anyway and misses the complexities and contradictions of real world developments. Certainly, Russia is not a non-imperialist power, as the confused “Kremlin supporters” you take snide pot shots at want to say (using their own mechanical, one-sided application of Marxist definitions to get round their difficulties). But Russia is also in no way comparable to the enormous concentration of monopoly financial and military power in the west, which, a century after Lenin’s Imperialism analysis, is at least an order of magnitude greater than anyone else and constantly intensifying even more.

Of course, Putin is not a communist, and does not serve the interests of the working class. His Greater Russian nationalism is appalling and his Orthodox church worship risible. But in present conditions Russia has been thrown against the great monopoly capitalist domination of Washington and its nasty sidekicks, prime among them Great Britain, which is desperate to find a way to survive in the rapidly intensifying cut-throat trade war conditions of the greatest world economic collapse in history, and ready to do anything to stay onside with the US.

Don Hoskins
EPSR

Mainstay Lih

I believe you would be interested in how people see the Weekly Worker. For the record please register my opinion.

The paper has inspired me to learn about the work of Karl Kautsky, which I knew nothing about. I am interested if or when you cover this topic. I have the complete intention not to be biased - that means I will look at all points of view (left, right, centre, Trotskyist, anarchist, etc), including and especially Kautsky’s own words. And I will try to have a ‘Leninesque’ perspective, which is an uncompromising rejection of Kautsky’s centrism and opportunism, but an objective view at the same time. (At a quick glance, I’m partial to Mike Taber’s article about Kautsky in Cosmonaut in 2019.)

When it comes to Lars Lih, I’m not very charitable. I hope there’s the same Leninesque attitude by the Weekly Worker of principled objectivity with no political obsequiousness, but unfortunately there is no such uncompromising rejection of Lih’s positions: for example, how he turns Lenin into a Kautskyite caricature with little left that’s distinctively ‘Leninist’. Lenin has limited originality in Lih’s scheme of things: Lenin is the receptacle and definition of Kautskyite ‘Erfurtianism’. (I’m referring to a lot of Lih’s writings that’s post-Lenin rediscovered, published in June 2008) And extraordinarily, Lih is a Weekly Worker mainstay in a sense. I know this isn’t new, but for me it’s new, since I just ‘drove up’. The Weekly Worker had joined the Lars Lih bandwagon, and for what political ends? That’s yet to be determined.

When someone is a traitor to socialism it’s hard to get past that reality. Both Kautsky and Lih can’t be seen as very exemplary or relevant for modern times in my view, despite the important contributions they made before they both ended up as anti-Marxist mouthpieces in support of reformism, directly or indirectly.

This is where I draw the line. If we can’t be principled in our politics, it’s an empty world indeed. No-one probably wants to revisit the Kautsky/Lih/Eric Blanc controversy. But it was necessary for the Weekly Worker to dispense with everything in a better way - specifically to refrain from taking Lih under your ideological wing. Publishing him is worthy, but a clear disclaimer is required, so the Weekly Worker isn’t his representative.

The new book by Doug Greene should shed light on the subject. Whether he’s a Trotskyist or Stalinist or whatever is not my concern except to be aware of his political positions. I can appreciate a good-faith and deep scholarly investigation, wherever it comes from; my enemy is sectarianism.

Your decisions and actions regarding Daniel Lazare were belated, but nevertheless appreciated and wise. I see you can be flexible when the political winds of truth beckon change.

I will look forward to supporting the Weekly Worker; I can tolerate a lot until I can’t. The primary doctrine that guides me is Marxist materialism. At the same time, naturally, I come to my own conclusions.

GG
USA

Remember Tom

Like many I was saddened to hear of Tom May’s passing, but also perhaps pleased to learn he lived to a good age.

I remember first meeting him some time in the early 1990s, I had been disillusioned by a spell in the Socialist Workers Party and had come across the Weekly Worker somewhere along the line. There was an attempt to put a cell together in the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire area.

He stood for the council in the Dallow Ward of Luton in, I think, 1995. I and some other local comrades took to the leafleting on seemingly endless streets of houses, and standing outside a polling station getting sunburnt, as handfuls of voters came and went. I remember going to his house in Luton, where over cheese sandwiches he handed me a shirt many times too large for the skinny kid I was, but perfect for keeping the sun off my burning arms.

At the election count that night I remember being quite impressed that we had secured something like 50 votes! I also recall telling a Labour activist in the gents that Tony Blair would last a while, but Labour would move left in future - which in hindsight I shall claim to be a prediction of the Corbyn leadership!

Whilst shuttling between god knows where to somewhere or other, I received that day in return for my campaigning a short course in communist politics, his attempts to calculate what a minimum wage should be and the discovery that he and my grandfather had been colleagues at the Luton College.

Other memories are of getting lifts in one of the several Skodas he had, and his almost always insightful input at party seminars in London - pipe in hand and in his element. There was also occasional sparring with his son, James, who was of a similar age to myself and then a prominent member of the Class War anarchist group, who would assert that I was a “middle class student type” (but then his dad was the one who had a bidet!).

Tom was instrumental in convincing me to get a higher education. I still remember him saying something like “Your cleverer than most of the idiots in the universities”, which still resonates in my mind.

I drifted away from politics in general for a number of years, but returned to attend Communist University one year, and was delighted to see that old Tom was still there repeating a point he had made consistently when I knew him before - the need for trained party cadre. Apart from the pipe being replaced with nicotine gum that day, he was still the same paternalistic teacher.

I wish his family well, and will make a donation in his name on payday.

John Masters
Bedfordshire