"Fascism is the political punishment meted out to the
working class for the squandering of opportunities to overthrow the capitalist
system”
Leon Trotsky
“If, against all expectations, Germany finds itself in a
difficult situation, then she can be sure that the Soviet people will come to
Germany's aid and will not allow Germany to be strangled. The Soviet Union
wants to see a strong Germany, and we will not allow Germany to be thrown to
the ground.”
Joseph Stalin
“All these things are still apparent today. You Americans
can see for yourselves how impossible it is to feed the German people from the
German soil itself. From the viewpoint of a historian's perspective, one could
say that Hitler would never have arisen if the Allies had not treated Germany
so poorly. Justice Jackson said so himself. Today, things are more impossible
than ever. The East has been taken away from Germany - in other words, hunger
created Hitler, and paradoxically, Hitler created still greater hunger.”
Hans Frank
“Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the
Jews, but it may also be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of
genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis.
Still, there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel as
they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic
distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was
forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of it created an
atmosphere in which the policy turned to genocide.”
Howard Zinn
It is a little surprising that a book of this significance has
been so little reviewed. In fact, I would go as far as to say it has been
completely ignored by the capitalist media. This is not surprising given that
it purports to be a Marxist analysis of the rise of fascism in Germany and examines
the struggles of the working class.
Gluckstein’s The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class is well-written
and researched. It addresses a vital question for those interested in what
social forces produced Nazism, and how the global working class should respond.
This is not merely an academic debate. The answers determine whether workers
adopt an independent socialist strategy or are diverted into alliances that
preserve capitalism and open the road to mass fascism and barbarism. Gluckstein’s
book is a significant attempt to understand the rise of fascism from the
standpoint of the materialist conception of history. The reader needs to locate
fascism in the development of capitalist class relations, not as an aberrant
moral failing or solely a product of culture.
Gluckstein is not an economic historian, but his book does
show that structural economic crisis and the disintegration of ruling-class
authority created the conditions for the rise of the fascists. Marxist analysis
explains Nazism as a political instrument forged out of definite class needs
and crisis tendencies within German and world capitalism. Adam Tooze’s economic
study, The Wages of Destruction, demonstrates how the Nazi project was shaped
by the drive of German capital to overcome its relative decline and secure raw
materials, markets and strategic position—in short, the connection of
militarism, imperialism and genocide to economic aims.
In the introduction to his book, which is well worth
reading, Tooze puts forward his basic thesis: “The originality of National
Socialism was that rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a
global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries,
Hitler sought to mobilise the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount
an epic challenge to this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the
globe over the previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its own
imperial hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East, it would create
the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform
necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United
States.... The aggression of Hitler’s regime can thus be rationalised as an
intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of
global capitalism, tensions that are of course still with us today.”
As Tooze points out, the German ruling class, fragmented and terrified by mass
working-class struggles, turned to the far right as a means of defending
property, reimposing discipline and preparing for future imperialist war aims.
Gluckstein’s work tends to emphasise aspects of this
history; however, not being a classical Marxist is a handicap. A Marxist critique would dig deeper. It needs
to be explained how capitalist reorganisation, imperial rivalries and the
political sclerosis of working-class leadership created the objective basis for
Nazism—and why only a revolutionary alternative rooted in working-class
independence could have prevented it.
The political defeat of the German working class was not a
result of workers’ “backwardness” alone but of the collapse and betrayal of
their organisations: Social Democracy’s subordination to bourgeois
parliamentary politics and Stalinism’s bureaucratic compromises and purges left
workers without revolutionary leadership. The trade-union bureaucracy and
social-democratic leaderships, by integrating into the state apparatus and
policing class discipline, blocked independent mass action. As Trotsky warned,
the bureaucratized unions tend to “grow together” with state power and
capital—creating a political vacuum that fascist movements exploit.
Nazism fused older anti-Jewish prejudices with virulent
anti-Bolshevism to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie and small sections of the
working class against organised labour and socialism. It should be noted that
the genocidal culmination—the Holocaust—cannot be divorced from the
imperial-colonial aims of the Nazi regime and its need to smash the labour
movement and seize “Lebensraum” in the East (Imperialism and the political
economy of the Holocaust). Ideology mattered—but ideology itself was shaped and
harnessed to class strategy.
Donny Gluckstein comes from a political milieu associated
with the Lambertist tradition; historically, this current has tended toward
nationalist and economistic deviations from the Trotskyist method. The
Lambertist milieu and the POID‑derived formations trace their
politics to Pierre Lambert’s
line. Historically, Lambertism emerged as a response to the crisis of the post‑war
left: a stress on trade‑union work, factory embedding, and
the construction of broad “workers’ parties.” But as documented in the
history of the French PCI/OCI, Lambert’s
priorities—rooted in
unions and seeking broad alliances—produced
persistent tendencies toward centrism, accommodation to union bureaucracies, and
political compromises that diluted a Leninist program.
Many on the pseudo left tend to treat Nazism primarily as a
quasi-irrational cultural or psychological phenomenon, divorced from capitalist
interests. These risks mystify its social roots and underestimating the
conscious role played by industrialists, financiers and the military
bureaucracy in bringing Hitler to power.
Gluckstein’s book came under sustained attack primarily from
his fellow pseudo-lefts, and two are worth mentioning. Tom Cord’s article in
Fighting Talk, issue 23, addresses fascism as a political phenomenon that the
left must confront. His piece raises useful questions about the social roots of
far‑right
movements and the failures of centrist parties. However, Cord’s article, aside
from being a right-wing attack on Gluckstein, suffers from theoretical limits
that require correction. The starting point of a genuinely revolutionary
analysis must be the materialist method: ideas and movements are rooted in
social relations and the class interests that those relations express. Any
assessment of Nazism that abstracts from the objective interests and political
role of German capitalism will be incomplete and in danger of demagogy, which
is precisely the tone and content of Ford’s review of Gluckstein’s book.
I am unable to find any reply by Gluckstein regarding Cord’s attack on his
book.
The "debate" between German Marxist Horst Haenisch
and Donny Gluckstein was a far more substantial matter than Cord’s somewhat simplistic
riposte. The debate took place through a series of written exchanges in the
journal International Socialism between 2018 and 2019. The debate over whether
the Holocaust is a particular specificity to Nazism or a universal manifestation
of broader modern imperialism) was at the heart of this discussion. The answer
to this conundrum can be found in the realm of dialectics. Particular forms
emerge out of universal tendencies: the Holocaust must be understood as both an
extreme, historically specific manifestation and as rooted in broader
processes. On the universal level, capitalist imperialism, racial ideologies
developed in colonialism, and the social crises of a decaying capitalism create
conditions in which genocidal solutions become thinkable and implementable. The
reader should note that the racialist ideology of the Nazis was the most
extreme expression of a wider European and global tradition of colonial, racial
pseudo-science and political violence.
Who are the actors?
Donny Gluckstein is a historian associated with the British
SWP milieu whose work addresses fascism, class struggle and working‑class
resistance. His writings often emphasise political and cultural factors
alongside social causes. The British SWP evolved from the revolutionary left
and developed into a large extra‑parliamentary organisation; over
decades, critics on the Marxist left have charged it with political adaptation
to trade‑union and extra‑parliamentary alliances,
opportunist united‑front practices, and failures to break decisively with
reformist perspectives.
Horst Haenisch is a contemporary German author and scholar
associated with German Marxist historiography. He is best known for his 2017
book "Fascism and the Holocaust: Attempt at an Explanation".
Haenisch’s critique — insofar as it targeted excessive
intellectualism, opportunism or sectarianism — has a legitimate core if you believe
that Haenisch insists the party must be in organic relation to workers’
struggles. But when such critiques abandon dialectical analysis or slide into
petty‑bourgeois
rejection of theory, they become politically harmful. The famous debate between
Trotsky and James Burnham is relevant to this situation. Trotsky warned that
anti‑dialectical
tendencies among intellectuals often lead them to inconsistent politics, saying,
"The 'petty-bourgeois opposition' is fleeing from the hard reality of the
world struggle into the ivory tower of abstract 'reason'. James Burnham’s famous rejection of
dialectics in the 1939 debate became a vehicle for abandoning working‑class
analysis and led to opportunist conclusions. Burnham ended his days as a right-wing
mouthpiece for capitalism.
To summarise Haenisch's position, he believed the Holocaust was
a unique event that was not simply the fault of the ruling class. He claims it
is the only Nazi project that falls into the category of the "primacy of
politics" over economics.
According to Google’s artificial intelligence, he uses the
concept of Bonapartism to describe the Nazi state’s relative autonomy,
suggesting the Nazi party acted like a "Praetorian Guard" that could
pursue its own racist fantasies independently of immediate capitalist needs. He
distinguishes Nazi antisemitism from general racism, characterising it as a
deadly "antisemitism of reason" driven by middle-class competition
for professional positions.
Readers should ask themselves the relevant methodological
question: do arguments rest on a concrete, historically grounded analysis of
class relations and state form — a materialist-dialectical determination — or
on impressions, eclecticism or petty‑bourgeois moralising that detach
ideas from class reality? When theory becomes a matter of rhetorical flourishes
or pragmatism, it ceases to serve proletarian politics and becomes a barrier to
building working‑class independence.
Intentionalism versus structuralism
The debate between Gluckstein and Haenisch, to put it simplistically,
was over two contending historiographical schools of thought which currently dominate
historiography regarding the rise of fascism and the Holocaust.
The intentionalist school emphasises decisions and
individuals—most prominently Hitler and top Nazi leaders—as the causal centre.
Structuralist/functionalist accounts emphasise impersonal social structures,
administrative routines and systemic pressures that produced genocidal outcomes
without requiring a single master plan. To put it simply, one is relatively
close to a Marxist historiography, the other is not.
Do agency and leadership matter: Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler
and the Nazi leadership were decisive agents who gave ideological content,
legitimacy and directives that escalated persecution to extermination. This
move towards extermination appeared at The Wannsee Conference (Berlin, January
20, 1942). It was a high‑level administrative meeting of
senior Nazi officials that consolidated and coordinated the implementation of
the regime’s policy of
mass murder of Jews—what
came to be called the “Final
Solution.” Far from a
sudden, isolated act of criminality, Wannsee formalised a process already
rooted in the racist, expansionist and economic policies of the Nazi state that
flowed from the contradictions of imperialist capitalism and Germany’s drive for living space in
the East.
Structural conditions enabled and shaped those decisions:
the bureaucratic-capitalist state, the logic of war and colonisation, the
collaboration of local administrations, and the preexisting racism of European
imperialism created the technical and social capacity to carry out mass murder.
As Nick Beams argues, if one considers the question very
narrowly, as we have noted, then it is easy to show that the mass murder of the
Jews ran counter to the immediate economic and military interests of German
imperialism. But that is the problem—the narrow perspective through which the
issue is viewed. If we widen the horizon, then the underlying interests come
into view. The Holocaust arose out of the war against the Soviet Union and the
plans of German imperialism for the domination of Europe. The German capital
had handed over the reins of power to the Nazis to carry out these tasks. To be
sure, as occurred before the war, some of their actions conflicted with the
immediate short-term interests of German business—although there is no record
of opposition from within the German ruling elites to the mass murder of the
Jews—but there was a direct coincidence between the drive of the Nazis for
Lebensraum in the East and the interests and needs of German imperialism.
Thus, the explanation is neither “Hitler did it alone” nor
“structural forces made individuals irrelevant.” Rather, structural pressures
channel and constrain agency; individuals choose within those constraints, and
those choices can be decisive. The dialectical relationship between structure
and agency is central.
To finish one question the reader should ask is whether this
is just a historical debate or whether it helps us understand contemporary
politics. Reducing the Holocaust to a metaphysical “evil” or to merely
psychological explanations dissolves political responsibility and obscures the
social origins of mass barbarism. Conversely, purely structural reductionism
that denies conscious decision-making can excuse perpetrators as mere cogs.
Both tendencies are politically dangerous and historically inadequate.
Understanding the Holocaust as an outcome of capitalist
crisis, imperial rivalry and the betrayal and destruction of workers’ movements
reveals the crucial lesson emphasised by Trotsky: the absence of an
independent, politically conscious revolutionary leadership permits the rise of
barbaric counterrevolutions. Stalinism’s betrayal and the defeats of the
workers’ movement in the interwar period were decisive in opening the road to
Nazism.
As the global economy careens into a new period of crisis,
far-right and explicitly fascist parties are gaining ground across Europe. The
urgency of preventing a resurgence of fascism in the twenty-first century makes
it more necessary than ever to understand the political and social context of
the Nazis’ ascent to power in Germany.
I don’t usually end a review with an advert, but readers of
this article would be advised to read two books. The first being Why Are They
Back?: Historical falsification, political conspiracy and the return of fascism
in Germany by Christoph Vandreier and
secondly, Where is America Going -David North
Notes
German Marxism and the Holocaust-(Summer 2018) www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/gluckstein/2018/xx/holocaust.html
Imperialism and the political economy of the Holocaust-Nick
Beams-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/holo-m12.html
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