Tim Mason
“In the meantime, the first characteristic of a really
revolutionary party is to be able to look reality in the face.”
― Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
"Fascism, as I recall from many discussions in Berlin
in the 1960s, was not just an epoch which ended in 1945, but was also something
which the Christian Democrats and the right wing of the Social Democrats were
then trying to reinstate in a less barbaric form,"
Tim Mason.
Donald Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night was not so
much a speech from a president but the rantings of an aspiring Führer, though
with somewhat less decorum than an address by Hitler before the German
Reichstag. It was vicious, violent and depraved, plumbing the depths of
cultural and political degradation in the United States.
Joseph Kishore
The opening quote from Tim Mason could be very easily
applied to the current fascist regime in the White House. David North’s article
Trump, the Epstein files and the putrefaction of the American oligarchy led me
to Tim Mason.[1]
I want to say that I discovered Mason’s work through years
of study, but that would be a lie. As is usually the case, I found Mason’s work
through the Marxist writer David North. North’s antennae for excellent
historians is second to none. So when North calls Mason a “Brilliant
historian”, I felt the need to examine his work, which led me to this book.
Tim Mason is one of the most important Marxist historians of
German fascism. His work situates the rise of Nazism not in the realm of
individual pathology or cultural uniqueness, as is common in modern-day
historiography, but as a historically specific response by sections of the
ruling class to the interaction between an acute capitalist crisis and a
powerful, independent working‑class movement. Mason did his best
to apply the classical materialist conception of history. He believed that political
forms and ideologies were rooted in concrete class relations.
The main importance of this book is that fascism in Germany
emerged from a conjuncture in which capitalist elites faced an existential
threat. The economic dislocation of the late Weimar years (the Great
Depression, mass unemployment), combined with the extraordinary militancy and
organisation of the working class, created a situation in which portions of the
bourgeoisie concluded that ordinary parliamentary rule and social‑democratic
collaboration could not guarantee the defence of their property and privileges.
In this context, reactionary, extra‑parliamentary means—mobilising mass petty‑bourgeois
resentment, paramilitaries and nationalist ideology—were adopted to smash the labour movement and restore
capitalist rule.
In the introduction to this book, Jane Caplan explains that
academics and writers have argued that Mason underplays the role of ideology,
culture and contingency; others say he gives too much causal weight to the
working class as a stimulus for fascism, suggesting a more active role of
conservative elites and mass petty‑bourgeois currents. These debates
are not abstractions: they affect how readers orient tactually. If fascism is
seen primarily as a crisis response to working‑class strength, the strategic
implication is the urgency of political leadership and unity in the labour
movement to preclude the ruling class’s resort to authoritarian rule.
Again, Mason’s examination of the rise of Nazi Germany would
not look out of place with today's fascist regime in America. He writes, “The
only 'solution' open to this regime of the structural tensions and crises
produced by dictatorship and rearmament was more dictatorship and more
rearmament, then expansion, then war and terror, then plunder and enslavement.
The stark, ever-present alternative was collapse and chaos, and so all
solutions were temporary, hectic, hand-to-mouth affairs, increasingly barbaric
improvisations around a brutal theme. … A war for the plunder of manpower and
materials lay square in the dreadful logic of German economic development under
National Socialist rule. [Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class (Cambridge,
1995), p.51]
Tim Mason and
Daniel Goldhagen: two poles in the historiography of Nazism
One of Mason’s admirable characteristics was his ability not
to back down in an academic fight. One of the tragedies of his way-too-short
life was that he was unable to take on Daniel Goldhagen and his right-wing
historiography of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”. The debate between the
interpretations advanced by Tim Mason and Daniel Goldhagen would not simply
have been an academic quarrel about sources and method. They would have
reflected deeper theoretical and political divergences over how to explain the
rise of fascism, the social roots of mass political crimes, and the
relationship between ideology and material interests.
Daniel Goldhagen’s bestseller argued that a uniquely German,
popular “eliminationist” anti‑Semitism made ordinary Germans
willing perpetrators of the Holocaust. Goldhagen’s thesis reduces complex historical processes to an
abstract identity — “the German” — stripping out class antagonisms, the decisive role of
political institutions, and the contingency of mass politics. From a Marxist
standpoint, this is an example of vulgar abstraction: it substitutes a quasi‑cultural
essentialism for a scientific inquiry into social forces and interests.
As North writes, “The works that attract the greatest
attention are precisely those which leave unchallenged, or actually reinforce,
the basest prejudices and misconceptions. Daniel Goldhagen’s immensely
successful and thoroughly deplorable Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust falls within this category. The principal theme of
Goldhagen’s book is easily summarised. The cause of the Holocaust is to be
found in the mindset and beliefs of the Germans. A vast national collective,
the German people, motivated by a uniquely German anti-Semitic ideology,
carried out a Germanic enterprise, the Holocaust. The systematic killing of
Jews became a national pastime, in which all Germans who were given the
opportunity gladly and enthusiastically participated.”[2]
Mason places the rise of Nazism firmly in the context of the
global economic collapse after 1929. The Great Depression produced mass
unemployment, wage cuts, and sharp volatility in employment and social
standards. For millions of workers, this was not an abstract crisis but a
concrete experience of dispossession: sudden loss of work, decline in living
standards, and acute fear for the future.
As the Marxist economist Nick Beams writes, “The Nazi
movement was handed the reins of power by the German ruling elites because
there was no other party capable of carrying through the destruction of the
organised working class and socialist movement. They certainly hoped that they might
be able to curb some of the Nazi “excesses”. But at every stage, the costs were
too high. There was always the danger that any conflict with the Nazis would
ignite a movement from below, so that in the end the “excesses” were an
acceptable price to pay. Within the thinking of the Nazi leadership, racism and
the drive to exterminate the Jews may have taken priority over all other
issues. But that does not settle the question. By pointing to the primacy of
economics, Marxism does not, in the final analysis, maintain that behind every
political leader's decisions there is an economic motivation that ideology is
used to conceal. It means that economic interests—the material interests of the
ruling classes—determine the broad sweep of politics. And there is no question
that the destruction of the socialist and workers’ movement, a necessary precondition
for the Holocaust, and the war aimed at the conquest and colonisation of the
Soviet Union, out of which it arose, were both determined by the “class
interests of big German capital.”[3]
Mason, like Beams, emphasises that the German working class
was not monolithic. He explains why the Nazis seduced some sections of the
working class. The Nazi party included "socialism" in its name as a
strategic, populist tactic to attract working-class support by redefining the
term to mean national and racial unity rather than class struggle. According to
historical analysis, this "socialism" was a deliberate deception, as
Hitler rejected Marxist ideology, purged the party's anti-capitalist wing, and
quickly dismantled worker organisations upon seizing power.
Deindustrialisation in some sectors, the growth of
precarious employment, the displacement of skilled artisans, and the erosion of
stable trade‑union frameworks produced a fragmented class with
differing material interests and levels of political organisation. This social
differentiation made it easier for reactionary appeals—national renewal, order, and protection against “foreign” competition or communist
upheaval—to resonate
with particular strata (skilled workers facing downward mobility, the unemployed
mass of casual labourers, and workers in small towns reliant on conservative
employers).
Mason highlights the role of employers, the state and
conservative elites in channelling working‑class discontent toward fascism.
Sections of big business and the conservative state apparatus actively sought a
political force capable of smashing independent labour organisations and
breaking left‑wing resistance. By presenting Nazism as a bulwark
against Bolshevism and economic chaos, the ruling class offered a political
instrument that promised restoration of order and protection for property—even if at the price of
authoritarianism.
A decisive political factor in Mason’s account is the
bankruptcy of the Social Democratic and Communist parties. The SPD had become
integrated into the bourgeois democratic apparatus and was unable or unwilling
to generalise working‑class struggles into a political challenge to
capitalist rule. The KPD, following Comintern directives, pursued an “ultra‑left” line that labelled social
democrats as “social‑fascists,” refusing a united front
against the Nazi threat. Mason shows how this dual failure—reformist accommodation on
the one hand, sectarian isolation on the other—left the working class without a
coherent mass leadership to resist fascist encroachment. This echoes Trotsky’s
warning that fascism triumphs where revolutionary organisations fail
politically.
Mason does not ignore ideology: nationalist myths, anti‑parliamentary
resentments, fear of social breakdown, and conservative cultural values
mediated workers' interpretation of their material distress. But for Mason,
these subjective factors do not arise from the “spontaneity”
of mind; they derive from real material insecurities and the absence of an
alternative political program. The petty‑bourgeois layers and strata within
the working class, pushed by crisis into reactionary horizons, were
particularly vulnerable to promises of national revival and social ordering.
In Mason’s dialectical account, fascist support among
workers results from the interaction of objective capitalist crisis, social
differentiation within the working class, active intervention by capitalist
elites, and fatal political errors by the mass parties. The result was a shift
of parts of the working class into alignment—tactical, sometimes coerced—with a
movement whose program was unmistakably counter‑working‑class.
Shortly before his death, Mason became acutely aware of the
growth of postmodern tendencies in academic historiography. He was enough of a
Marxist to understand that this was a grave threat to Marxist historiography.
Mason argued that Marxism rests on philosophical materialism and the
dialectical method: thought reflects an objective world whose development can
be studied and whose laws (including class relations and the dynamics of
capitalism) can be grasped and acted upon. Against this, postmodernism declares
an “incredulity toward metanarratives” and relativises truth, undermining the
possibility of a coherent, class‑based theory of social change.
In a paper at the end of this book, Mason writes, "I
was bemused and depressed by the scholasticism of much methodological left-wing
writing," he explained in one exemplary passage; "...militancy
congests into clamorous categories, producing works which might be the
offspring of a proud union between a prayer wheel and a sausage-machine"
(207-8).
A final word in this review should be a brief examination of
the History Workshop movement, in which Mason played a central part. The
movement revitalised social history by centring subaltern experience, oral
history and labour culture. Its recuperation of working-class traditions
corrected elite-centred historiography and helped politicise a generation of
researchers and activists. The movement’s democratic ethos—valorising
rank-and-file memory and grassroots initiative—is an important corrective to
bureaucratic or sectarian historiography.
Yet the History Workshop often veered toward empiricism and
culturalism, sometimes treating political outcomes as emergent properties of
cultural forms rather than outcomes of class struggle mediated by
organisational and programmatic relations. From a Marxist-Leninist and
Trotskyist standpoint, culture must be read as an expression of class
relations, and cultural analysis must be subordinated to—indeed, dialectically
united with—analysis of the economic base, party politics, and international
dynamics. Plekhanov’s insistence that theory must be the instrument for
developing proletarian self-consciousness remains a guide: historical research
must illuminate the pathways by which objective material processes generate
class-political possibilities, and how conscious organisation can raise class
forces to realise them (Plekhanov on dialectical materialism).
To summarise, Mason’s contribution to an understanding of
Fascism is important because it rejects simplistic monocausal accounts and
insists on analysing real social layers and interests rather than treating “the
working class” as a single, undifferentiated actor. This is a genuinely
historical-materialist starting point: social consciousness is rooted in
concrete material conditions and the class.
Studying Mason and the History Workshop is not an academic
pastime divorced from politics. In the present era of capitalism’s intensified
crisis, mass poverty and the decay of reformist leaderships, recovering the
social history of working-class organisation provides tactical lessons. One
thing is clear: Mason would have had a field day examining the rise of fascism
in the United States. His contribution to a Marxist understanding of Fascism is
sorely missed.
[1]
www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/11/xobm-f11.html
[2]
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
[3]
Marxism and the Holocaust-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/adde-m15.html
