The American political system is showing signs of deep decay. The incident where Donald Trump circulated a post calling him “more dangerous than Hitler” is not just an isolated event but a reflection of the broader corruption affecting the entire capitalist system. The document emphasises that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are fundamental, not accidental: as David North pointed out, Trump’s movement exhibits signs of fascism, with a distinct, troubling odour. Trump operates without regard for constitutional or legal constraints. These comments are serious assessments of a political trend that is emerging from the ongoing crisis of American capitalism.[1]
The Roman Circus on the South Lawn
Nothing highlights the brutality of the current administration more clearly than the grotesque cage match on the White House lawn—fighters fighting fiercely while Trump observed like a Roman emperor. Marketed cynically as part of the “semiquincentennial” of the Declaration of Independence, this event was a deliberate rejection of democratic values. It celebrated violence, hierarchy, and dominance—precisely the social relations the ruling class aims to enforce on the working class amidst preparations for increased repression domestically and war. This isn’t just Trump’s personal issue. It exemplifies a broader political culture among the ruling class that has exhausted all democratic means of managing social conflict. The shift to outright brutality indicates an oligarchy that can no longer govern through consent.
The Liberal Establishment’s Counterfeit Anti‑Fascism
However, the primary political threat isn’t just Trump’s theatrics. It stems from how the Democratic Party and its media allies are using the “Trump is worse than Hitler’ narrative as a weapon. As the document accurately notes, this portrayal “is not a genuine anti-fascist analysis.” Instead, it’s a strategic ideological tactic aimed at directing widespread opposition to Trump into the secure confines of a capitalist party that itself undermines democratic rights.
The Democrats’ reaction to the White House spectacle—a $330 celebrity concert with Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts, and Bette Midler—exposes the class basis of their politics. It exemplifies “the politics of affluent identity, not the mobilisation of the working class.” This approach is characterised by moral posturing, symbolic actions, and commodified dissent—in stark contrast to the mass, organised, internationalist movement needed to oppose fascism.
The liberal media’s comparisons to Hitler serve two main purposes. They first diminish the unique historical nature of fascism, turning it into a moralistic stereotype instead of recognising it as a specific outcome of capitalist crises. Second, these analogies turn the struggle against authoritarianism into a branding strategy for the Democratic Party, which aims to portray itself as the final defender of “democracy” even while backing mass surveillance, militarism, and social suppression.
The Historical Lessons the Democrats Seek to Bury
Referring to Hitler’s aims to obscure rather than clarify. The text stresses that “Fascism was not halted by liberals or by voting for the ‘lesser evil.’ It was halted—where it was—by the organised force of the working class, guided by a revolutionary Marxist plan.” This crucial historical fact is what the Democratic Party and its media outlets are eager to hide.
In Germany, the Social Democratic Party disarmed the working class politically, clearing the way for Hitler’s rise. Similarly, in Italy, the liberal bourgeoisie handed power to Mussolini to suppress the workers’ movement. In Spain, the Popular Front suppressed the revolution, allowing Franco to win. In all these instances, the liberal bourgeoisie was unable to oppose fascism because it feared the working class far more than it feared the fascists.
The current situation remains similar. Democrats’ main goal is not to combat authoritarianism but to stop the rise of a working-class movement that could challenge capitalism itself.
The Real Target of the Hitler Comparisons: The Working Class
Contemporary comparisons to Hitler are used to redirect genuine anger towards backing the Democratic Party and NATO’s growing militarism. The ruling elite aim to merge anti-Trump feelings with endorsement of imperialist conflicts, portraying them as parts of a unified “defence of democracy.” This is misleading. The working class has no stake in siding with any segment of the capitalist oligarchy, whether under MAGA nationalism or liberal humanitarianism.
“The working class must have its own party, program, and independent struggle.” This is essential. Combating fascism is inherently linked to opposing capitalism. It demands the formation of a revolutionary socialist movement connected to the global working class, informed by 20th-century lessons, and unwavering in its resistance to all aspects of the ruling elite.
Conclusion: The Path Forward
The threat of authoritarianism is real, but it cannot be tackled solely through the Democratic Party, mainstream media, or superficial liberal rituals. Instead, it requires a deliberate and organised global effort by the working class to oppose the capitalist system, which fosters fascism, war, and dictatorship. The goal is not to pick between different factions of the oligarchy but to create a political force strong enough to overthrow the oligarchic system entirely. This is the only way to achieve true democracy, social equality, and human liberation.
[1] Donald Trump proudly shares a post which says he is more dangerous than Hitler-www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/donald-trump-proudly-shares-post-37314895
Katja Hoyer’s column in The Washington Post, warning that comparing Trump to Hitler is “bad politics,” is not just a neutral academic opinion. It is a deliberate political act by a main ideological tool of the American ruling class. The core message—calm down, stop panicking, trust the institutions—aims to serve a specific class interest: to lull the population into complacency during escalating political unrest and to steer mass opposition away from independent working-class political action.
The Post falsely presents itself as a strict guardian of historical accuracy. However, it is “a central organ of the Democratic Party and the intelligence agencies,” whose role is to redirect public anger into the controlled space of the Democratic Party. The true purpose of the column isn’t to correct misconceptions about history but to pacify the public. The Post is telling its readers: “calm down, things aren’t that bad, stop making hysterical comparisons.” This isn’t scholarship; it’s political soothing.
I. Liberal Historical Revisionism as a Weapon of Class Rule
A desire for historical accuracy doesn’t drive the liberal establishment’s quick rejection of Weimar comparisons. For years, these same groups frequently used Hitler and fascism as references whenever it benefited their foreign policy aims. However, when such an analogy highlights the deep problems within American capitalism—specifically, by pointing to the corruption of the American ruling class rather than a foreign dictator—it is dismissed as “hysterical,” “irresponsible,” and a poor political strategy.
The question isn’t whether crude analogies exist; they do. However, the Post’s intervention aims to hide the true lessons of Weimar: the class struggles that led to fascism and the political betrayals that facilitated it. The liberal narrative claims that fascism arises from ‘institutional failure,’ ‘fragile democracy,’ or ‘eroding norms.’ This viewpoint is a middle-class fairy tale. In reality, fascism stems from a ruling class facing an insoluble capitalist crisis, which pushes them to authoritarian measures to protect their wealth and power.
The German edition of David North’s Where Is America Going? makes this point with clarity: Trump is not an invader of a healthy democracy but “the political embodiment of a degenerated, bestial ruling class that expresses the historical crisis of the capitalist system.” This is the truth the Post cannot allow to surface.
II. The Marxist Analysis: What Is and Is Not Fascism Today
As David North pointed out in a key interview on fascism and history, Trump’s movement “smells of fascism”—it has “that particular odour, or, I might say, stink”—but it isn’t yet a widespread fascist movement in the traditional sense. The petty-bourgeois mobs of 1933 are not present in the United States in a similar form.[1]
However, the lack of a perfect analogy does not imply that the danger is imaginary. Studying Weimar aims not for an exact comparison but to grasp the patterns of capitalist crises: the ruling class’s shift toward authoritarianism, the promotion of far-right groups, the intensification of nationalism, and the buildup to war.
These trends are clearly evident. The US faces rising international conflicts, its political systems are breaking down, and the ruling class depends more on the military, intelligence, and courts to stay in power. Meanwhile, the working class is shifting left, as North observed—exactly the kind of change that historically pushes the bourgeoisie toward fascist measures. The Post’s advice—“don’t panic”—is not about avoiding fear but about cautioning against rushing into action.
III. The Lesson Liberals Fear Most: The Betrayal of the Working Class
The key lesson from Weimar, which the liberal establishment desperately tries to conceal, is not about the weakness of democratic institutions but about how the working class was betrayed by its own organisations. “Hitler gained power not due to flaws in Weimar’s constitution, but because the Social Democratic Party and the Stalinist Communist Party failed to unite against fascism.”
The SPD defended the bourgeois state, suppressed workers’ uprisings, and collaborated with the military and police. During Stalin’s harmful “Third Period” policy, the KPD labelled the SPD as “social fascists,” equating them with the Nazis and splitting the working class at a crucial time. This serves as a lesson the Post refuses to learn, as it exposes the failure of the Democratic Party’s current approach. Today, the Democrats and their pseudo-left allies—such as DSA and Jacobin—urge the working class to submit to the Democratic Party, the CIA, and the national security forces in a “popular front” against Trump. This is not a tactic to defeat fascism; it is the very strategy that enabled fascism.
Trotsky’s writings from 1931–33—’ For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism’ and ‘The United Front for Defence’—continue to serve as essential guides. Trotsky emphasised that workers should unite in action against fascist violence while remaining politically independent from reformist leaders. The Stalinist rejection of this approach led to disastrous consequences. Today’s refusal by the Democrats is equally perilous.
IV. The Political Function of “Don’t Panic” History
Hoyer’s column clearly plays an ideological role. It reassures readers that their concerns are exaggerated, claiming that institutions will stay stable. The Weimar comparison is dismissed as “bad politics.” It promotes trust in the courts, upcoming elections, and the Democratic Party. Most importantly, it recommends doing nothing.
This mirrors the Democrats’ real political strategy: a passive dependence on state institutions, legal tactics, and electoral processes, combined with strong opposition to any independent working-class mobilisation. The true ‘bad politics’ isn’t the historical analogy. Still, the systematic effort… to disarm the population, persuade them their eyes deceive them, and redirect legitimate fear and anger into the dead-end of the Democratic Party. The working class does not need reassurance. It needs revolutionary leadership.
V. The Real Lesson of Weimar: Independent Working‑Class Mobilisation
The United States faces a crisis not of “norms” or “institutions,” but of capitalism itself. The question posed by the title “Where is America Going? Fascism or Socialism” is genuine and not rhetorical. Its answer isn’t found within the Democratic Party, the courts, or the mythologised “guardrails” of American democracy. The sole force that can prevent the slide toward authoritarianism and conflict is the independent, international mobilisation of the working class, guided by a socialist program.
The Liberal Misuse of Weimar: A Historiographical Critique
Liberal scholarship on the Weimar Republic has long served as an ideological mirror reflecting the anxieties of the contemporary bourgeoisie. Unsurprisingly, during times of crisis, liberal historians tend to isolate Weimar not to shed light on the present but to obscure it. The latest wave of commentary—like Katja Hoyer’s column in The Washington Post—represents just the most recent phase in a longstanding historiographical effort: turning Weimar into a morality tale about “fragile democracy,” “institutional failure,” and the risks of “polarisation,” while actively ignoring the class struggles and political betrayals that paved the way for fascism.
This critique examines the dominant liberal interpretations of Weimar, their political function, and how they distort the historical record to serve the needs of the contemporary ruling class.
I. The Liberal Narrative: Weimar as a Parable of Institutional Fragility
The common liberal view of Weimar simplifies the republic’s fall to a series of institutional issues: a flawed constitution, too much presidential power, proportional representation, fragile parties, and a lack of a truly “democratic’ political culture. This explanation has been repeated so often that it has become the accepted orthodoxy. Its main points are: the Weimar Republic failed due to weak institutions; the German populace lacked a democratic spirit; and extremism from both ends contributed to its collapse. The takeaway is to protect the current liberal system at all costs.
This framework is politically convenient because it absolves the ruling class from responsibility for the capitalist crisis that led to fascism. It portrays Hitler’s rise as a technical failure rather than a result of class-driven resistance. Additionally, it enables modern liberals to see themselves as heroes defending “democracy” from irrational threats. However, this perspective is historically inaccurate.
II. The Suppression of Class: Liberal Historiography’s Foundational Evasion
The core fact of Weimar history is that fascism arose in response to a deep crisis in German capitalism. The ruling class, frightened by the revolutionary rise of the working class, used Hitler as a tool for counterrevolution. This is not just an interpretation; it is a documented fact.
Liberal scholars frequently overlook this reality. The crisis is depoliticised, viewed just as a vague “loss of faith in democracy,” a “breakdown of consensus,” or a “failure of moderation.” The class struggle is often neglected, portraying the working class as passive and the bourgeoisie as an abstract entity. Political parties such as the SPD and KPD are labelled as polarising forces rather than recognised as actors with defined class strategies.
This deliberate avoidance aligns with current political priorities. To understand Weimar’s class dynamics, one must also recognise similar class struggles in today’s capitalism and see that the crisis of liberal democracy—marked by rising inequality, militarism, and authoritarianism—is rooted in the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system, not just polarisation. Liberal historiography, however, cannot acknowledge this, which prevents it from telling the full truth about Weimar.
III. The SPD and the KPD: Liberalism’s Most Dangerous Silence
The most politically provocative lesson of Weimar history is the part played by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Stalinized Communist Party (KPD) in disarming the working class. “Hitler came to power not because Weimar’s constitution was flawed, but because the Social Democratic Party and the Stalinist Communist Party refused to unite against fascism.” This is the historical truth that liberal scholarship is most eager to conceal.
1. The SPD’s role
The SPD: defended the bourgeois state, suppressed revolutionary workers, collaborated with the military and police, and ultimately supported Hitler’s appointment. However, in liberal historiography, the SPD is portrayed as a tragic defender of democracy—an honourable but doomed force overwhelmed by irrational extremism. This portrayal is a gross misrepresentation.
2. The KPD’s role
The Stalin-era KPD’s labelling of the SPD as ‘social fascism’—equating it with the Nazis—was a harmful betrayal. Yet liberal historians rarely analyse this from a class perspective. Instead, they tend to see it as “extremism on both sides,” which maintains the misleading idea of equivalence that reinforces their broader narrative.
3. Why this silence matters
Acknowledging the SPD’s betrayal would reveal the failure of current liberal strategies, which urge the working class to submit to the Democratic Party, intelligence agencies, and the national security state in a “popular front” against the far right. Liberal historians try to prevent this comparison and, as a result, suppress the truth.
IV. The Myth of the “Strongman”: Liberalism’s Psychological Reductionism
A key feature of liberal Weimar scholarship is its focus on the psychology of authoritarian leaders. Hitler is portrayed as a charismatic demagogue who deceived a naive populace. The dictator’s personality overshadows the broader economic crisis of capitalism. This perspective has two main aims: it personalises fascism, framing it as a pathology in one individual; and it reassures liberals that authoritarianism can be overcome through “better leadership,” “civic education,” or “restoring norms.”
Contemporary liberal commentators often focus on Trump’s personality, rhetoric, and “authoritarian style,” while overlooking the social forces that support him. This psychological reductionism, similar to Weimar historiography, transforms into a political strategy: it depoliticises the crisis, personalises the threat, and sidesteps any challenge to the capitalist system.
V. The Weaponisation of Weimar: Liberalism’s Present‑Day Agenda
Liberal invocations of Weimar are not academic exercises. They serve a political function.
1. To defend the existing order
By depicting Weimar as a delicate experiment shattered by extremism, liberals portray the current capitalist system as the sole defence against authoritarianism. The underlying message is straightforward: any opposition to the system—particularly from the left—is considered a threat.
2. To delegitimise working-class struggle
Strikes, protests, and socialist movements are depicted as indicators of “polarisation” and “instability.” The working class is viewed as a threat to democracy rather than its supporter.
3. To justify alliances with the state and the right
Similarly, the SPD justified working with the military and police by claiming it was protecting democracy, while liberals now defend alliances with the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon as essential to curb the far right.
4. To suppress the real lessons of history
The core lesson of Weimar—that the working class needs to stay politically independent and struggle for socialism—is exactly what liberal historiography tries to erase.
VI. Toward a Marxist Historiography of Weimar
A Marxist analysis unveils what liberal scholarship often overlooks: the importance of class struggle, the capitalist crisis as the root of fascism, the roles of the SPD and KPD leaders in disarming workers, the need for an independent socialist movement, and the global nature of the crisis. This approach is not outdated; it is the only framework that truly comprehends the present. The working class requires revolutionary leadership, not reassurance. That is the essential lesson of Weimar. This forms the basis of a genuinely historical, political, and emancipatory understanding of the past.
[1] An interview with David North on fascism, Trump and the lessons of history-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/17/ttml-a17.html
Brian Reade’s comparison of the 2026 World Cup to Hitler’s 1936 Olympics has triggered the usual hand-wringing in liberal circles. Despite its rhetorical flair, Reade’s argument—like all moralistic complaints from the declining Labour-aligned press—falls apart due to political evasions. The comparison with 1936 is not incorrect; what is flawed is the conclusion he draws from it.[1]
The United States, hosting the 2026 World Cup, is not just “controversial”; it embodies global imperialism through its illegal war against Iran, supporting the Gaza genocide, and conducting mass arrests and deportations of immigrant workers, unprecedented in recent American history. As has been reported, ICE agents will be present at every stadium. The Iranian team has been denied visas and faced what can only be seen as a veiled death threat from Trump. Meanwhile, the Congolese team has been targeted with a racist quarantine order that reflects the imperial disdain typical of the US-NATO war efforts.
Comparing these events to 1936 is more than an exaggeration; it’s an understatement. The Nazi regime used the Berlin Olympics to project an image of a peaceful, cultured Germany while secretly preparing for genocide. Likewise, the Trump administration exploits the World Cup to spread a message of “unity,” even as ICE functions as an anti-immigrant force similar to the Gestapo, and the Pentagon conducts widespread destruction in the Middle East. Yet, beyond these parallels, the comparison quickly falls apart—and it exposes the political shortcomings of Reade’s framework.
The Liberal Myth of 1936
Reade, like all liberal moralists, references 1936 as a moral story: Jesse Owens humbling Hitler, representing individual bravery overcoming bigotry, and suggesting that sport can “shame” authoritarian regimes. This narrative serves as the mythology of a ruling class eager to hide its own complicity.
The stark truth is that by 1936, the German working class was crushed. The Communist Party and Social Democrats had betrayed the proletariat, paving the way for Hitler’s rise. Western democracies, especially Britain and the United States, did not boycott Berlin; instead, they collaborated. The American Olympic Committee, led by fascist-sympathizer Avery Brundage, fiercely resisted any boycott efforts. Meanwhile, US companies like IBM and Ford gained significant profits through their association with the Nazi regime.
The lesson from 1936 is not that sport can be corrupted by bad governments, but that the capitalist elites worldwide will cooperate with fascism when it benefits their interests. Only the unified effort of the global working class could have prevented Hitler’s rise, and only such collective action can now prevent our slide into war and dictatorship.
The Liberal Illusion of Boycotts and Moral Appeals
Reade’s strategies—such as boycotts, moral condemnations, and appeals to FIFA or the “international community”—are typical of a political tendency that has detached itself from the working class. These approaches rely on the false belief that the capitalist state and its institutions can be coerced into ethical actions.
However, FIFA is not an impartial judge corrupted by Trump; rather, it functions as a tool of global capitalism. Its president, Gianni Infantino, awarded Trump the bizarre “FIFA Peace Prize.” The tournament’s design—opening match in Mexico City with the later rounds held in the United States—reflects the geography of imperial power.
What about the governments Reade suggests might “take a stand”? Starmer’s Labour largely supports US imperialist wars as a loyal junior partner. The Democratic Party managed the same deportation system and imperialist machinery before Trump came back into office. Appealing to these forces means aligning with those responsible for the disaster.
Sport as a Weapon of the Capitalist State
Reade’s framework embraces the nationalist idea that the key issue in modern sport is determining which nation is “fit” to host. However, every capitalist country employs sport as a means of nationalist mobilization. The 2012 London Olympics, the 2014 Sochi Games, and the 2018 World Cup in Russia—each was used to cloak social inequality and imperial ambitions with patriotic symbolism.
However, the nationalist story is beginning to weaken. During the Milan Winter Olympics, thousands demonstrated against Trump and ICE, booing Vice President Vance. US athletes openly expressed their disapproval of the regime. Freestyle skier Chris Lillis said he was “heartbroken” over ICE’s actions and emphasized that athletes represent a different America than the one involved in mass repression.
Even in the United States, the nationalist event is faltering. While 75% of Americans are aware that the US is hosting the World Cup, almost a third intend to support a different country. This significant statistic highlights the immigrant heritage and globalist sentiments of millions—sentiments that the ruling elite cannot eliminate.
The Working Class and the Real Lesson of 2026
Modern football was built by the working class, shaping its culture, passion, and worldwide popularity— all rooted in working-class life. Instead of a moral boycott by liberal columnists, the solution to the nationalist spectacle of the 2026 World Cup is promoting awareness among the political class. The 1936 Olympics happened after the German working class was politically defeated and betrayed by Stalinism and social democracy. Similarly, the 2026 World Cup unfolds at a time when the international working class has yet to develop the revolutionary leadership needed to stop the progression toward war and dictatorship.
The lesson is not that sport should be considered ‘pure” or “apolitical.” Throughout history, sport has always had political implications. The real lesson is that combating fascism, war, and authoritarianism cannot be delegated to FIFA, bourgeois governments, or the conscience of the ruling class. Instead, it must be done by the international working class.
Antonio Scurati’s M: Il figlio del secolo (2018) has been celebrated by Italy’s cultural elite as a major achievement: winning the Premio Strega, becoming a publishing sensation, and inspiring a lavish Sky TV adaptation. Its success is closely linked to the political context of its release. The novel appeared in 2018, a year when the Five Star–Lega coalition brought far-right politics into government, and just four years before Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia—descendants of Mussolini’s movement—came to power.
The celebration of Scurati’s Mussolini novel isn’t just a cultural event; it reflects a broader ideological trend. It contributes to normalising, trivialising, and aesthetically sanitising fascism within bourgeois society. As Peter Schwarz noted during the centenary of the March on Rome, the anniversary was “not only of historical interest but of urgent political relevance. Just a week prior, his political successors had taken control of the Italian government.” The support for M by the Italian intellectuals should be understood within this framework.
The Novel’s Method: Biography as Historical Obfuscation
Scurati’s main idea—that Mussolini is the “son of the century’ and embodies the spirit of his time—exposes a key ideological flaw in the novel. The text rightly points out that this is a methodological mistake: “Fascism is explained not as a product of the crisis of capitalism… but rather as the expression of a historical Zeitgeist incarnated in a single personality.” This is more than just an artistic decision; it constitutes a political misrepresentation.
By focusing on Mussolini’s psychology, charisma, sexual appetites, and opportunism, Scurati echoes typical bourgeois historical narratives. The underlying issues, such as the crisis of Italian capitalism, betrayals by the PSI reformist leadership, the trade-union bureaucracy’s cowardice, and Stalinist sabotage of revolutionary potential, are overshadowed by the novelist’s obsession with the dictator’s personality.
Trotsky’s analysis, referenced in the document, begins with a different assumption: “When the ‘normal’ police and military forces of the bourgeois dictatorship… fail to uphold social stability, the fascist regime seizes power.” Fascism is not a result of a “century spirit,’ but a tool of the ruling class created by finance capital to oppose the revolutionary working class. Scurati’s biographical approach consistently conceals this reality.
The Disappearance of the Working Class
M’s most revealing aspect is how it systematically removes the working class’s presence. The Biennio Rosso—the period marked by factory occupations, workers’ councils, and a near-revolutionary upheaval in 1919–1920—acts only as a faint backdrop to Mussolini’s actions. As the document states: “The true tragedy of Italian fascism is not Mussolini’s charisma or monstrosity; it is that a significant revolutionary working-class movement was crushed for lack of a truly Marxist leadership.”
This is the history Scurati cannot disclose. His narrative, focused on the dictator as the central figure, makes it impossible. The working class appears as a faceless crowd, serving only as a backdrop for Mussolini’s actions. The revolutionary potential of the Italian proletariat—once a source of concern for the bourgeoisie and an inspiration for workers across Europe—is now reduced to mere atmospheric detail. This issue goes beyond literature and has political implications. Omitting the working class from the history of fascism becomes a necessary step toward its political rehabilitation.
Aestheticisation and the Seductions of Reaction
The novel’s use of documentary elements—such as archival excerpts, letters, and newspaper clippings—has been widely recognised as a mark of seriousness. However, this approach does not prevent fascism from being aestheticised; in fact, it sometimes promotes it. The document itself warns that “the line between critical representation and aesthetic complicity is thin,” and Scurati often crosses this boundary. By centring Mussolini in a sweeping narrative, the novel makes him inherently compelling. Readers are encouraged to view things from his perspective, follow his rise, and see the consolidation of fascist power as a compelling story arc. This reflects the long-standing danger in bourgeois portrayals of fascism: the tendency to turn political tragedy into a visual or artistic spectacle.
David Walsh’s critique of The March on Rome is relevant here too: the work “includes much intriguing imagery… but is confused and, in the end, quite wrong-headed.” Scurati compiles a comprehensive documentary record, but the framework—Mussolini as the “son of the century”—fails to create an accurate portrayal of fascism.
The Political Function of M: Fascism as Cultural Spectacle
The widespread popularity of M serves a clear ideological purpose in modern Italy. As was said before, the novel enables middle-class readers to explore fascism as a historical event, while those connected to fascism strengthen their political influence today. The core of the novel’s political significance lies in its transformation of fascism from a present threat into a literary relic. It allows intellectuals to feel morally superior without confronting the rise of the far right today. It aestheticises the bourgeoisie’s historical crimes, making them seem safe for consumption. Additionally, it conceals the class forces that gave rise to fascism and are behind its recent revival. This is no coincidence; it reflects the cultural shift parallel to the political reintegration of the far right.
Conclusion: What the Working Class Requires
The working class does not require another grand novel about Mussolini. Instead, it needs a scientific Marxist analysis of fascism as a particular form of bourgeois dominance, rooted in the capitalist crisis and only preventable through the autonomous political mobilisation of the working class. The document ends with justified sternness: “On that score, Scurati’s novel offers nothing.” This is the core judgment. M: Il figlio del secolo is not a valuable contribution to understanding fascism. Rather, it stands as a monument to the ideological evasions of today’s bourgeois intellectuals—a literary expression of the very crisis that is once again elevating the far right to power.
The scene on Rutland Gate—a homeless man sleeping outside a £210 million empty mansion—is not just eccentric London lore. It represents the entire social system: a society in which the wealth of the global elite is fiercely guarded. At the same time, the basic needs of millions of people are viewed as an unacceptable burden on the “market.”
The Guardian’s report on 2–8A Rutland Gate unintentionally reveals what the ruling class and its media often try to hide: the housing crisis is not simply a technical issue or the result of a lack of construction. Instead, it is a consequence of capitalism turning housing into a speculative asset for the world’s wealthiest.[1]
The article highlights the stark contrast: “a homeless man with no money sleeping on the doorstep of a £200m house with 45 rooms that has been empty for years.” This is not an anomaly; it reflects the system’s inherent logic.
The Mansion as Financial Instrument: London’s Role in the Global Oligarchy
Rutland Gate is more than just a residence; it’s a vault, a safety deposit box, and a tradable asset within the portfolios of billionaires whose wealth stems from corruption, exploitation, and financial speculation. The ownership lineage—comprising Saudi royalty, Lebanese oligarchs, and Chinese property magnates—resembles a who’s who of global capitalist misconduct. The mansion’s acquisition was carried out via shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, a common method for laundering money and avoiding scrutiny. As noted, “Often, companies in tax or secrecy havens are used as the vehicle for these investments.”
London is the epicentre of this global network, known as the Alpha City, attracting the ultra-wealthy who regard it as both a playground and a refuge. Every British government, whether Tory or Labour, actively courts their presence. Yet the city’s housing stock is not primarily for residents; instead, it serves mainly as a speculative asset for international elites.
The numbers are striking: 47,000 homes owned by foreigners in London, over 300,000 long-term empty homes across England, and 268,000 second homes taken out of residential use. In Kensington & Chelsea, one in nine homes is unoccupied. This isn’t a mistake but the deliberate result of a system in which societal needs are subordinated to the pursuit of profit.
The Human Being on the Porch: A Life Made Precarious by Capitalist Disintegration
The story of Anders Fernstedt, the man living on the porch, serves not just as a personal misfortune but also as a reflection of the systemic dismantling of social supports, the erosion of the welfare state, and the harshening of the working class.
Fernstedt’s experience—marked by unstable jobs, no-fault evictions, unsafe temporary housing, and rough sleeping—mirrors that of hundreds of thousands. His homelessness isn’t due to addiction or mental health problems; he insists he is “healthy… physically and mentally, with no addictions.”
His descent into homelessness was driven by the collapse of stable employment, the commodification of housing, the reduction of social services, and the violence and insecurity of Britain’s privatised rental market. His presence on the porch isn’t just symbolic—it’s diagnostic, exposing a society where the working class is pushed to the edge while the oligarchy enjoys luxury in empty mansions.
The Political Economy of Emptiness
The Guardian quotes a housing expert calling the situation “bizarre and perverse.” However, nothing about it is truly strange. It reflects a logical consequence of a system in which: housing is treated as a commodity rather than a right; the government prioritises capital over society; the wealthy are protected from scrutiny and taxes; local authorities lack sufficient funds and powers; and the market determines who has a home and who ends up homeless.
The article points out that “the places building the most housing have mysteriously managed to produce the highest level of vacancy.” This is not puzzling—developers tend to build what is profitable, not what is needed. Luxury towers are constructed because they serve as channels for global capital flows, not because Londoners need penthouses.
The ruling class claims that taxing or regulating the super-rich would “scare them away.” This argument has been repeatedly used to justify every form of social vandalism since the 1980s. It reflects an ideological stance of a political system entirely dominated by finance capital.
The State’s Role: Enabler, Not Regulator
The British government is not a neutral mediator; instead, it actively facilitates the accumulation of oligarchic wealth. It offers a legal system that maintains secrecy jurisdictions, a deregulated property market, police protection for elite enclaves, austerity measures that erode social housing, and political rhetoric that blames the poor for their poverty. The Levelling Up Act’s “empty homes premiums” are superficial solutions, as councils lack both the authority and funds to seize vacant properties. Meanwhile, billions of dollars’ worth of public land have been sold to private developers, who construct luxury flats that remain unoccupied. Overall, the government’s priorities are evident: safeguarding capital and penalizing low-income individuals.
A Social Order in Decay
The image of Rutland Gate is not just obscene; it is historically provocative. It brings to mind the final phases of collapsing social systems: aristocrats of the ancien régime, robber barons of the Gilded Age, and oligarchs of late Tsarist Russia. In each scenario, the ruling classes isolated themselves from the people’s hardships, retreating into luxury while society fell apart. This process led not to stability but to revolution.
The Socialist Perspective: Housing as a Social Right
The housing crisis cannot be addressed within a capitalist framework. Essential actions involve expropriating luxury properties left empty, abolishing offshore ownership arrangements, making substantial public investments in high-quality social housing, ensuring democratic control of urban planning by the working class, and reorganizing the economy along socialist lines focused on human needs.
Rutland Gate should not be a palace for billionaires. It should serve as a public asset, transformed into housing, community spaces, or social infrastructure. The resources are available, but what is missing is the political strength of the working class, organized independently from capitalist parties and advocating for a socialist agenda.
Conclusion: A System That Cannot Be Reformed
The Guardian article states the mansion will never become social housing, which is accurate—under capitalism. However, the stark inequality it illustrates is the key reason to challenge and overthrow the system that creates such disparities. The man on the porch and the mansion in the background are interconnected; they represent different facets of the same social structure. Addressing one without resolving the other is impossible.
[1] It was Britain’s most expensive house. Why is its only resident a homeless man who lives on the porch? Sam Wollaston-www theguardian.com
Pip: The Weimar Republic: a republic so thoroughly betrayed by its own defenders that historians are still arguing about whose fault it was — which is, in a way, the whole point.
Mara: That tension is exactly what freerein61 puts at the center of this episode — a close reading of Katja Hoyer's new Weimar history, and what its methodological choices reveal about how we understand fascism, class, and the limits of liberal historiography.
Pip: Let's start with the history itself, and the argument about who the "ordinary Germans" really were.
Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe — Who Were the Ordinary Germans?
Pip: The central question here is methodological: when historians write about "ordinary Germans" under Weimar and Nazism, what does that category actually contain — and what does it quietly erase?
Mara: The post opens with Trotsky's 1933 analysis as its spine. Here is the line: "The pauperisation of the petty bourgeoisie, barely concealed by their ties and socks of artificial silk, eroded all official creeds and, above all, the doctrine of democratic parliamentarism."
Pip: So Trotsky is not describing a nation with a shared psychology. He is describing a specific class fragment — the petty bourgeoisie — under specific material pressure, and asking who benefits from their desperation.
Mara: That contrast is what drives the critique of Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 Hitler's Willing Executioners, where the Holocaust is explained by a centuries-old "eliminationist antisemitism" unique to German culture. David North's 1997 response, The Myth of "Ordinary Germans," identifies the structural flaw: the category is, as North puts it, "a vacuous generalisation from which all internal social antagonisms and conflicts have been extracted."
Pip: And the tell is the omission. In six hundred and twenty-two pages about Germans and the Holocaust, Goldhagen does not mention Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, or the Social Democratic Party — which by 1912 was the largest party in the Reichstag, drawing its support overwhelmingly from German workers.
Mara: That omission is described here as structurally necessary: acknowledging a mass socialist workers' movement directly contradicts the claim that all Germans shared a uniform antisemitic worldview.
Mara: Götz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries offers a more materialist frame — Germans supported Hitler because they materially benefited from expropriated Jewish property — but the post argues it still treats the working class as passive recipients and still flattens class differences in who actually gained from the Nazi economy.
Pip: The third position is the one most relevant to Hoyer: the Volksgemeinschaft school, associated with scholars like Michael Wildt and Frank Bajohr. The focus shifts to how the Nazi national community was actively built, consented to, and experienced — participation, social belonging, integration of the Mittelstand.
Mara: Hoyer's Weimar book explicitly challenges what she calls the "Weimar syndrome" — reading the republic purely as a prelude to catastrophe. The post grants that vulgar retrospective determinism is genuinely bad history. But it argues her correction overshoots, and in a specific direction.
Pip: When you dissolve class into "ordinary people experiencing the republic," the German working class — which nearly took power in November 1918, consistently backed the SPD and KPD throughout Weimar, and maintained underground resistance networks in Berlin, Hamburg, and the Ruhr after Hitler's rise — disappears into the general population.
Mara: The archival evidence is concrete. Hans-Rainer Sandvoss's research using Gestapo files opened after 1989 showed sustained working-class resistance. A Gestapo report from March 1936 recorded that in Berlin one could go days without hearing the Hitler salute, except from officials, uniformed personnel, or out-of-town visitors.
Pip: That detail does a lot of work. It is not romanticization — it is a data point that the dominant historiography structurally cannot accommodate.
Mara: The post connects this to the post-Soviet intellectual climate. Since the 1990s, abandoning class as the primary analytical lens has been framed as a neutral methodological update. The argument here is that it is not neutral — it is a politically motivated choice that obscures how fascism actually functioned: as the capitalist ruling class's response to the revolutionary threat of an organised working class.
Pip: Hoyer's earlier book Beyond the Wall, on the GDR, gets a brief but pointed mention — the same move, the post argues: foregrounding ordinary experience to soften and contextualise a regime defined by bureaucratic dictatorship over the working class.
Mara: The collapse of Weimar is traced here not to democratic fragility or mass irrationality, but to two specific betrayals: the SPD's violent suppression of the 1918 revolution and its subsequent tolerance of emergency rule under Brüning and von Papen, and the Comintern's "social fascism" theory, which barred any united working-class front against Hitler. Trotsky's writings — What Next? and The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany — are described as essential, offering analysis that forecast the catastrophe while there was still time to prevent it.
Pip: And the contemporary parallel is drawn directly: the AfD's rise, and pseudo-left groups like Marx 21, the SAV, and RIO channelling working-class opposition into parliamentary and trade-union frameworks that have already accommodated the very policies they claim to oppose.
Mara: The closing argument is that Hoyer's rehabilitation of Weimar as democratic achievement is ultimately a liberal ideological exercise — extracting lessons about defending liberal democracy against populism, rather than the historical lesson that without revolutionary Marxist leadership, capitalism's crises produce fascism. Trotsky's framework, the post insists, remains the one that actually fits the evidence.
Pip: The question underneath all of this is what history is actually for — whether it explains outcomes or explains them away.
Mara: And that question does not stay in the archive. The same methodological choices that erase the German working class from Weimar reappear every time a contemporary crisis gets framed as a problem of culture or psychology rather than class.
“The pauperisation of the petty bourgeoisie, barely concealed by their ties and socks of artificial silk, eroded all official creeds and, above all, the doctrine of democratic parliamentarism… In the highly fevered atmosphere brought about by war, defeat, reparations, inflation, occupation of the Ruhr, crisis, need, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie rose against all the old parties that had cheated it.”
Leon Trotsky- What is National Socialism? (1933)
“The class struggle is a law of social development. For ages, that struggle has been between the poor and the rich, the exploited and the exploiters.”
Jack London: The Iron Heel
“The ‘ordinary German’ who populates Daniel Goldhagen’s book is a vacuous generalisation from which all internal social antagonisms and conflicts have been extracted.”
David North
“They can only maintain their position while they honestly believe that civilisation depends on themselves alone…”
Jack London On Oligarchy
To understand Katja Hoyer’s contributions to recent historiography, we need to consider the broader academic landscape in which they fit. The ‘Ordinary Germans’ historiography is central to her latest book’s introduction. Since the postwar era, this field has been shaped by ongoing tensions between Marxist class analysis and various idealist, culturalist, and nationalist perspectives. The question of ‘ordinary Germans’ extends beyond mere academic debate; it is key to understanding fascism and influences the working class’s readiness or inability to oppose it. Since the 1990s, discussions about ‘ordinary Germans’ have been dominated by three main positions, none of which fully align with a Marxist view. Hoyer’s work synthesises and, in some respects, integrates elements from all three.
The primary perspective linked to Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 bestseller, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, is that the Holocaust was carried out by “ordinary Germans” driven by deeply rooted, centuries-old “eliminationist antisemitism” unique to German culture. Goldhagen argued this belief was so ingrained that it could be activated without coercion or specific circumstances; Germans killed Jews simply because they were Germans. David North’s 1997 critique, The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”, points out a key methodological flaw: the idea of “ordinary Germans” is an overly broad, abstract category with no internal differentiation, which makes it scientifically meaningless.
As North observes, questioning whether “ordinary Germans” refers to a factory worker, shopkeeper, lumpenproletarian, Junker landowner, or industrialist reveals that this category ignores class differences within German society, unintentionally reinforcing the Nazi myth of a unified Volk in a distorted way. Goldhagen’s notion of ewige Deutsche (eternal Germans) as enemies of Jews parallels the Nazi ewige Jude (eternal Jew) as enemies of Germans. Both are racial-nationalist abstractions that erase nuanced history and social class distinctions.
Furthermore, as North emphasises, the Goldhagen thesis relies on making the German socialist movement essentially invisible. In a 622-page book about Germans and the Holocaust, there’s not a single mention of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, or the Social Democratic Party, which by 1912 was the largest party in the Reichstag, drawing most of its support from the German working class. This omission is intentional; it’s structurally necessary because recognising a large socialist workers’ movement with millions of Germans directly contradicts the idea that all Germans shared a uniform antisemitic worldview.
The second perspective is offered by Götz Aly’s ‘Hitler’s Beneficiaries’ (2005), which suggests that ordinary Germans mainly supported Hitler for economic reasons they gained from the confiscation of Jewish property, a Nazi welfare system funded through expropriation and war spoils. While this outlook is somewhat more materialist than Goldhagen’s, it remains problematic: it portrays the working class as passive recipients of stolen wealth, dismisses acts of resistance, and continues to use the broad category of “Germans” as beneficiaries, oversimplifying the significant class differences in who benefited from the Nazi economy.
The third major perspective most pertinent to Hoyer is the Volksgemeinschaft historiography. Since around the 2000s, this view has been dominant in German academic history and is linked with scholars like Michael Wildt, Frank Bajohr, and the broader ‘Nazi society’ social history movement. This approach examines how the Nazi idea of the national community was actively built, enacted, and accepted by significant segments of German society, rather than merely being imposed from above. It highlights the roles of participation, consent, social pleasures of belonging, and the integration of the Mittelstand (middle classes) and parts of the working class into a racially defined national identity.
Hoyer and the Volksgemeinschaft Turn
Hoyer’s ‘Weimar intentionally challenges the so-called “Weimar syndrome’ the common tendency to interpret the republic solely as a precursor to Nazism. She aims to analyse the republic on its own terms and emphasise the daily lives of ordinary people who did not anticipate the impending catastrophe. She highlights Weimar’s cultural vitality, genuine social reforms, the expansion of women’s rights and sexual freedoms, and the democratic activism of the working class through unions and political parties. A crucial point underlying this is that vulgar retrospective determinism, which views fascism as the inevitable outcome of all developments in Weimar, is indeed poor history. However, Hoyer’s correction veers too far in the opposite direction, a mistake tied directly to the Volksgemeinschaft historiography.
The core issue goes beyond mere emphasis and highlights what is fundamentally missing. When Hoyer and other Volksgemeinschaft historians analyse the daily lives of “ordinary people” during the Weimar Republic or Nazism, they often blur the distinctions among class, the nation, and the people. The German working class, which nearly achieved socialist power during the November Revolution of 1918, consistently supported the SPD and KPD throughout Weimar and maintained underground resistance networks in Berlin, Hamburg, and the Ruhr well after Hitler’s ascent to power.
These workers are frequently portrayed as simply part of the indistinct mass of “Germans” experiencing the republic, depression, and Nazi rise in largely uniform ways. Hoyer’s historiographical approach, though it varies in details from Goldhagen’s, reaches a similar conclusion through a different method: it minimises “the relationship between capitalism and fascism” and depicts “all workers, the petty bourgeoisie, industrialists, and bankers as ‘the Germans.'”
The evidence opposing the dominant narrative is strong but often overlooked in this historiography. Hans-Rainer Sandvoss’s detailed archival research into Berlin workers’ resistance to the Nazi regime, utilising Gestapo files that only became accessible after 1989, revealed that the working class in Berlin and other labour hubs largely remained resistant to Nazi propaganda for several years following Hitler’s rise to power.
A Gestapo report from March 1936 noted that in Berlin one could go days without hearing the Führer salute, except from officials, uniformed personnel, or provincial visitors. The Nazi party regularly encountered challenges in industrial areas such as mining regions, Hamburg’s docks, and factory zones. This is not romanticisation but a reflection of the historical record. Yet, this resistance vanishes completely in a historiography that depicts all Germans as uniformly “ordinary.”
Why does this historiography remain so influential? Its foundation lies in the political and intellectual climate established after the fall of the Soviet Union and the so-called “triumph of capitalism.” Since the 1990s, numerous historians have justified abandoning honest and objective analysis by pointing to the collapse of the Soviet Union and East Germany, as well as the apparent victory of capitalism. In doing so, they have replaced genuine scientific methods with subjective, postmodern ideologies.
Abandoning class as the primary analytical focus is a politically motivated choice, not a neutral one. As David North notes in his critique of Goldhagen, during the postwar period, framing fascism’s class aspects through psychological, cultural, or national-identity lenses was linked to the Cold War objective of undermining Marxism. This also served to hide that fascism was essentially the capitalist ruling class’s response to revolutionary threats from the organised working class. Goldhagen attributes this entirely to German national psychology, while Volksgemeinschaft historians approach it more subtly by highlighting consent, participation, and everyday social integration. This indicates that “the Germans” collectively created fascism, instead of acknowledging that a particular class imposed it on a divided society—one in which millions were coerced, terrorised, and ultimately wiped out.
Focusing on Hoyer, there’s an additional point to consider. Her earlier book, Beyond the Wall (2023), depicts the GDR as a society with significant social achievements and broad support. This mirrors the strategy used for Stalinism: emphasising the daily lives of “ordinary people” to soften, contextualise, and ultimately justify a regime largely defined by bureaucratic dictatorship over the working class. In both Weimar/Nazi Germany and East Germany, highlighting “ordinary experience” aims to diminish political and class divisions and foster sociological empathy.
Leon Trotsky examined Weimar Germany and German fascism not from the standpoint of current social historians, but through his own contemporaneous writings, which remain unmatched in their analytical insight. He saw fascism not as stemming from German national character or broad social trends, but as a tactic used by the capitalist elite to unite the impoverished petty bourgeoisie—including shopkeepers, artisans, clerks, and disillusioned farmers—against the organised working class, especially when bourgeois democracy proved unable to resolve the social crisis.
This perspective is elaborated in his 1933 book, ‘What is National Socialism?’. He describes how the impoverishment of the petty bourgeoisie, barely hidden by their artificial silk ties and socks, undermined all official beliefs, especially democratic parliamentary doctrine. Amid the tense environment created by war, defeat, reparations, inflation, the Ruhr occupation, crisis, need, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie turned against all the old parties that had deceived them.
This analysis focused not on the cultural attitudes of “ordinary Germans” but on the class struggles within a society facing a severe capitalist crisis. Central to the discussion was the question of revolutionary leadership: whether the organised working class would seize power or whether the petty bourgeoisie, with no viable working-class alternative, would be pushed into the arms of a movement supported and financed by large capital interests. The outcome depended on the betrayals by the SPD and the Comintern, rather than on any intrinsic psychological traits of a uniform “German people.”
This framework is consistently rejected by “ordinary Germans’ historiography, from Goldhagen to Götz Aly, the Volksgemeinschaft school, and Katja Hoyer. This rejection is deliberate, as it precisely identifies the actual determinants of the outcome: class struggle, the crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the counterrevolutionary roles of Social Democracy and Stalinism. These lessons remain highly relevant today, with the rise of the AfD in Germany and the pseudo-left channelling working-class opposition into bourgeois safe havens. Rediscovering these truths requires not a softer or more empathetic history.
Katja Hoyer is a historian of German and British background, author of “Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire” (2021) and, more recently, “Weimar Germany: Democracy on the Brink” (2024). She also wrote “Beyond the Wall” (2023), an alternative perspective on the GDR. Her Weimar book seeks to portray the republic not just as a precursor to Nazi disaster, a “Weimar syndrome” she explicitly aims to go beyond, but as a lively, authentic democratic experiment with notable achievements in culture, social policy, and politics. From a Marxist standpoint, there are serious methodological and political problems with this kind of liberal rehabilitation project.
Like many liberal histories, Hoyer emphasises Weimar’s lively cultural scene—covering the Bauhaus, Expressionism, Brecht, Grosz, cabaret, and sexual liberalism. Although these are important and genuine, highlighting them as the city’s main achievement shifts focus away from the crucial relationship between culture and politics. The innovative cultural output of Weimar arose from a revolutionary crisis in a drastically changed world. Many key figures, including Brecht, understood that this culture was closely linked to the revolutionary struggle. To focus too much on aesthetics risks neglecting Weimar’s political significance.
The Weimar Republic emerged from the German Revolution of November 1918 but was quickly thwarted by Social Democracy. Led by Ebert and Noske, the SPD violently suppressed the revolutionary movement, killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and kept the capitalist institutions and the Junker military hierarchy unchanged. Any explanation of Weimar that ignores this foundational betrayal—the counterrevolutionary actions of Social Democracy—fails to truly account for subsequent events.
The so-called cultural boom of Weimar’s Goldene Zwanziger era was funded through repeated betrayals of the working class. Under pressure from the Comintern, the KPD called off a planned insurrection at a critical moment—an action that led to a catastrophic failure, enabling German capitalism to stabilise temporarily. These “golden” Weimar years were merely a brief, circumstantial pause rather than a genuine democratic achievement.
The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not mainly caused by weak democracy or mass irrationality. Instead, it resulted directly from the Stalinist “social fascism” theory, which falsely labelled the SPD as equivalent to the Nazis and prevented a united working-class front against Hitler. This was compounded by the SPD’s own policies of supporting Hindenburg and collaborating with emergency measures under Brüning and von Papen. Trotsky’s writings from that era, such as What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat and The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany are essential resources, offering profound analysis that forecasted the catastrophe. Nevertheless, there was still time to avert it.
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) stepped in not to lead the revolution, but to suppress and then drown it in blood. Led by Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske, the SPD allied with the old imperial military officers to crush the revolutionary movement. They organised the Freikorps, early fascist-style paramilitary groups, to eliminate the revolution’s key leaders. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), were pursued and killed in January 1919 under the orders of the SPD government. The traditional Junker military aristocracy, judiciary, civil service, major banks, and industrialists — all reactionary forces — remained untouched behind a newly formed democratic facade. This was the original sin. As the Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Germany) states plainly: “In 1918, the SPD had strangled the proletarian revolution to save the bourgeois order. The result was the Weimar Republic, in which the old forces of reaction continued to live behind a democratic facade.”
The republic experienced continual crises during its short fourteen-year span. In 1923, it faced two major setbacks: the French occupation of the Ruhr and a severe hyperinflation that destroyed the savings of the middle and working classes, causing widespread despair. That year, the KPD, guided by the Comintern, planned a revolutionary uprising but cancelled it at the last moment, which Trotsky later called “a classic demonstration of how it is possible to miss a perfectly exceptional revolutionary situation of world-historic importance.” German capitalism temporarily stabilised thanks to American loans under the Dawes Plan, and the mid-1920s are often seen as the “golden years” of Weimar—brilliant in culture, fragile politically, and economically reliant on foreign capital.
Then came 1929. The Wall Street Crash cut off American credit, the German economy collapsed, and unemployment exploded to over six million, roughly a third of the workforce. The social crisis was catastrophic. The middle classes — small shopkeepers, artisans, farmers, white-collar employees — who had already been ruined by inflation and were now devastated by the depression, were thrown into a desperate search for a way out. Into this vacuum stepped Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), offering an intoxicating brew of nationalist demagogy, antisemitism, and violent scapegoating aimed at the most desperate and disoriented petty-bourgeois layers.
As the crisis deepened, the SPD’s response was to retreat, capitulate, and appeal to the very institutions of the bourgeois state to save it. In 1930, when President Hindenburg appointed the Catholic conservative Heinrich Brüning as chancellor and began governing by emergency decree, bypassing parliament altogether, the SPD tolerated this, refusing to bring down the government. It feared revolution from below more than dictatorship from above. In 1932, the SPD supported the re-election of the arch-reactionary field marshal Paul von Hindenburg as president. This man would eventually appoint Hitler as the supposed “lesser evil” against the Nazis. When von Papen illegally deposed the SPD-led government of Prussia in a July 1932 coup, the SPD lodged a complaint with the Supreme Court rather than mobilising its millions of members to fight back. As the SGP historical document summarises, drawing directly on Trotsky’s analysis, the SPD’s attitude was that the fate of Germany depended “not on the fighting strength of the German proletariat… but on whether the pure spirit of the Weimar Constitution… shall be installed in the presidential palace.”
Even more grotesque was the behaviour of the trade unions. The ADGB (the main trade union federation) actually dissociated itself from the SPD three and a half months before Hitler seized power, hoping to demonstrate its “reliability” to the new order. They marched under the swastika on May 1, 1933. The Nazis rewarded this servility on May 2 by storming union offices, arresting and murdering union leaders, and dissolving the ADGB entirely.
The Communist Party of Germany was founded in direct response to the SPD’s betrayal. It had millions of members and supporters, its own armed Red Front defence organisations, and a working class willing to fight. But under Stalin’s domination of the Communist International, the KPD pursued a line of suicidal ultra-leftism, the theory of “social fascism.” This theory held that Social Democracy and fascism were not opposites but “twins” — that the SPD was itself “social fascist,” and that the main enemy was not Hitler but the SPD. On this basis, the KPD refused any united action with SPD workers against the Nazis. It even made common cause with the Nazis on occasion, supporting a Nazi-initiated referendum in 1931 to bring down the SPD-led Prussian state government. All the while, it consoled its demoralised members with the slogan: “Nach Hitler, kommen wir” “After Hitler, it’s our turn” the grotesque fantasy that Hitler’s regime would quickly collapse and the Communist revolution would follow.
The Weimar Republic and the pseudo-lefts: Then and Now
To understand the pseudo-left’s stance towards the Weimar Republic, we first need to identify what truly led to its downfall. The Weimar Republic didn’t perish due to internal contradictions or the overwhelming rise of fascism. Instead, it was dismantled by the organised workers’ movement, specifically by its leadership. This is the key lesson that the pseudo-left today tries hard to conceal.
The SPD, representing the German working class, showed its true colours with its betrayal in November 1918. Instead of leading the revolutionary effort—which aimed to seize state power and expropriate capital—it chose to defend the existing bourgeois order. The party was responsible for the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, suppressed workers’ councils, and upheld the Junker officer caste and state structure that, fifteen years later, helped facilitate Hitler’s rise. As noted, “the Social Democratic Party… sided with the bourgeois order in 1914 and became the main supporter of the bourgeois state in the Weimar Republic.” In the final years of the Weimar Republic, the SPD backed Brüning’s emergency decrees, which gradually dismantled democratic rights and undermined the working class, thereby paving the way for Hitler rather than resisting him.
The devastating role of Stalinism followed. The KPD, controlled by Stalin through the Comintern, dismissed Trotsky’s urgent plea for a united front of Communist and Social Democratic workers against the Nazis. Instead, it adopted the destructive “social fascism” thesis, claiming that the SPD was equivalent to fascism and that there was no real difference between bourgeois democracy and fascist dictatorship. This was not just a tactical error but a politically damaging disorientation that froze the German working class, separated Communist workers from Social Democratic workers, and at times even led the KPD to collaborate with the Nazis against the SPD, such as in the 1931 Prussian referendum. Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 occurred without organised resistance from the German working class, despite the SPD and KPD each having millions of members and their own armed units. This catastrophe proved Trotsky’s view that the Communist International was no longer a revolutionary force and that the Fourth International needed to be established.
The Frankfurt School
This reveals the connection to the modern pseudo-left. The Frankfurt School—comprising Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin—originated directly from the confusion following Germany’s defeat. Notably, “Horkheimer and Adorno do not mention [the role of Social Democracy and Stalinism] once and avoid discussing Stalinism in all their other works.” This silence was intentional. The Frankfurt School crafted a comprehensive theoretical framework—covering Critical Theory, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and the theory of the “authoritarian personality”—which attributed fascism to mass psychology, the irrationality of the masses, and the failures of the “Enlightenment,” largely ignoring the political betrayals by the SPD and the Comintern.
Why is this important? By framing the crisis of revolutionary leadership as the main explanation, the Frankfurt School adopted a different political stance: moving away from building a revolutionary Marxist party rooted in the working class, and instead emphasising cultural criticism, identity politics, and pressure on bourgeois institutions. This shift lies at the heart of the modern pseudo-left, as David North details in ‘The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism, and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left.’ The Frankfurt School’s move away from viewing the working class as the revolutionary agent—to focusing on the “critical intellectual” and later prioritising racial, gender, and cultural issues—set the stage for all that now claims to be ‘left,’ but fails to challenge capitalism.
The Contemporary Pseudo-Left
The contrast between the 1930s and today is more than superficial; it’s structural. With the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) now Germany’s second-largest party, pseudo-left groups like Marx 21, the SAV, and RIO are, in a modified form, repeating the political crimes that facilitated Hitler’s rise. Marx 21, influenced by Tony Cliff’s International Socialist Tendency, cynically invokes Trotsky’s “revolver-poison” analogy to justify demanding that the bourgeois state ban the AfD, directly contradicting Trotsky’s actual stance. Trotsky opposed the SPD’s reliance on the Weimar state and police to fight fascism, understanding that the state was not neutral but filled with reactionary elements. History confirmed this: it was Hindenburg, the Reichswehr, big business, and the judiciary—all institutions the SPD appealed to for protection—that implemented Hitler’s appointment. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (the Office for the Protection of the Constitution) was, until recently, led by fascist Hans-Georg Maassen, who secretly met with AfD representatives. Calling on this agency to defend democracy from fascism is the twenty-first-century equivalent of the SPD crying “Help! Intervene!” to the Weimar state.
The SAV, descended from the British Militant Tendency, tends to praise the trade union bureaucracy as a defender against the right and envisions a Left Party–SPD–Green coalition as a “democratic alternative” to the AfD. Yet, as Germany’s ruling coalition, the SPD and Greens have carried out the AfD’s refugee deportation policies, approved the largest war budget since WWII, and frequently collaborated with the AfD to normalise its presence in parliament. At the same time, trade unions have agreed to austerity measures with the government and corporations. The SAV’s approach isn’t aimed at “pushing them left” but at aligning working-class frustration with the very forces responsible for it.
RIO, associated with the Morenoite Trotskyist Fraction-Fourth International, claims to support a “united front” and “anti-capitalism from below.” In reality, it partners with the SPD, Greens, trade unions, and Fridays for Future. This strategy conflicts with Trotsky’s original concept of the united front, which was meant to awaken workers from Social Democratic stagnation and rally them around a revolutionary program. Conversely, RIO’s “front” seems designed to align workers with bourgeois parties, often employing radical rhetoric.
What unites these trends, both historically and socially, is their class origin. The Frankfurt School consisted of segments of the bourgeois intelligentsia that had forsaken the working class. Currently, the pseudo-left champions privileged middle-class groups—such as academics, NGO workers, and trade union bureaucrats—who benefit from the current system enough to be wary of a genuine socialist revolution. Their emphasis on identity politics, state intervention, and parliamentary tactics reflects their social standing. Just as the KPD’s “social fascism” idea was driven more by the needs of Moscow’s bureaucracy than the interests of German workers, today’s pseudo-left ideology mirrors the interests of a social class with a very different relationship to capital than that of the working class.
Why Does a Marxist historiography Matter Today
The fall of the Weimar Republic was not due to democracy being fragile, mass irrationality, or fascism being an inevitable historical force. Instead, it collapsed because the organised workers’ movement was led by parties — one reformist, one Stalinist — that, for their own class-based reasons, refused to unite the working class in a revolutionary fight against capitalism. The key takeaway is not “defend liberal democracy” or “vote for the lesser evil,” but that capitalism’s crises lead to fascism.
Only revolutionary working-class mobilisation under genuine Marxist leadership can prevent this. This is the core task of the Fourth International — both then and now. In short, Hoyer’s attempt to portray Weimar as a democratic success is ultimately a liberal ideological exercise. It aims to extract lessons about defending “liberal democracy” against modern populism, rather than the true historical lesson that, without a revolutionary Marxist party leading the working class to power, capitalism’s crises breed fascism. Trotsky’s lesson remains highly relevant today.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.”[4] 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.[5]
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.[6] 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.[7]
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
“ A regime whose leadership was increasingly entrapped in economic and political contradictions largely of its own making and that sought escape or resolution or maintenance of its distinctive identity through a series of sudden lurches in policy and ever more explosive risk-taking.”
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 solely missed.
[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
The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone is a useful if limited account of how and why the Nazi’s perpetrated the murder of six million jews. Reading Stone’s book while a genocide takes place in Gaza and Trump’s fascist government carries out state-sponsored murders is a brutal reminder that fascism is on the rise again and did not end with the Nazi’s Holocaust.
Stone is the director of the Royal Holloway’s Holocaust Research Institute in London. He is the author of over 20 books, including Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and The Liberation of the Camps. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023), Concentration Camps: A Short History (2017), and Histories of the Holocaust (2010).
Stone’s book has a subtitle called ‘The Unfinished History,’ which probably alludes to the number of books on or about the Holocaust, which is approaching 40,000. But as the Marxist writer David North says:
“Here we encounter a terrible problem: For all that has been said and written about the Holocaust, it remains a strangely obscure event. A vast amount of empirical data about the Holocaust has indeed been collected. We possess detailed information about how the Nazis organised and executed their “Final Solution,” the murder of six million European Jews. And yet the issues that are central to an understanding of the Holocaust—its historical origins, political causes and, finally, its place in the history of the twentieth century—have, with very few exceptions, been dealt with poorly. This is, really, an intolerable state of affairs. The one basic question raised by the Holocaust, “Why did it happen?” is precisely that to which it is most difficult to obtain an answer.”[1]
It must be said that Stone gives a good go at answering North’s question. Stone’s book provides a “brisk, compelling and scholarly” account that seeks to supplement the vast historiography already in place. Stone argues against the historiography that the Holocaust was exclusively a German project, highlighting the extensive collaboration and independent murders from other European nations like Romania and France.
While accepting the idea that the Holocaust was an “industrial genocide” taking place at the main concentration camps, Stone supplements this analysis with other shocking facts that millions were killed elsewhere and by different methods, too. The “Holocaust by bullets” was responsible for 1.5 million Jewish deaths between late 1941 and the spring of 1942. In late 1944, as the Russian army advanced westwards towards Germany, the Nazis evacuated the camps. They forced the 750,000 or so surviving Jewish inmates onto “death marches”, sometimes over vast distances in the winter. This claimed another 250,000 victims, often shot by SS guards when they collapsed and could no longer walk.
Ideology
Stone’s examination of Nazi ideology is to be welcomed. He argues that for too long, Nazi ideology has been downplayed. Stone is critical of the post-war tendency to deny any political coherence to the Nazis’ ideas. He believes that Nazi ideology represented a radicalisation of ruling class ideas of nationalism, imperialism and race.
He says that the Nazis didn’t have a developed programme for genocide worked out in advance. But he says we need to take seriously their ideological motivation, which always harboured a genocidal potential capable of being unleashed under certain circumstances.
While Stone does not accept the right-wing theory that the Holocaust is such a terrible event that it defies a rational explanation, he pays little attention to the historian’s ability to comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. In other words, Stone tends to downplay Marxist historians’ attempt to use historical science and political theory to understand the Holocaust.
Although Stone uses a large number of historians to examine Nazi ideology, he mostly ignores any Marxist-based historiography. A simple reading of the writings of Leon Trotsky or Abraham Leon, to name just two Marxists, would give a historian a far deeper insight into the rise of fascism and of Nazi Ideology.[2]
Stone’s use of Ernst Bloch is problematic to say the least. Bloch was not a classical Marxist. Bloch (1885–1977) occupies a complex position in Marxist thought. He is best known for his attempt to retrieve utopian hope as an element of Marxist theory—most famously in The Principle of Hope—insisting that human longing and anticipatory consciousness matter for politics. From the standpoint of classical Marxism and the continuity of the Fourth International, Bloch’s contribution must be assessed dialectically: what in his work advances the materialist understanding of history, and what tendencies lead away from the independent revolutionary politics of the working class?
Bloch insisted that utopian impulses—aspirations, anticipations, images of a better world—are not mere illusions but social phenomena rooted in objective contradictions. He sought to recuperate the emotional and imaginative dimensions of social life that orthodox economic or “vulgar” readings of Marxism can marginalise. This emphasis corresponds to Marxism’s insistence that human consciousness is shaped by social being; yet classical Marxism places primary explanatory weight on the development of the productive forces and class relations as the motive forces of history. Bloch’s insistence on hope supplements but must not displace the materialist analysis of how objective conditions—production, class struggle, political institutions—generate revolutionary possibilities. To say that Bloch was “unusually” the only Marxist to take fascism seriously is not only wrong but is a political lie.
Another writer missing from Stone’s work is Konrad Heiden.[3] Heiden’s biography of Hitler is worth reading. Heiden’s insight into Hitler’s anti-Semitism is worth an extensive examination.
According to Heiden, “Hitler hated the whole great sphere of human existence which is devoted to the regular transference of energy into product, and he hated the men who had let themselves be caught and crushed in this process of production. All his life, the workers were for him a picture of horror, a dismal, gruesome mass … everything which he later said from the speaker’s platform to flatter the manual worker was pure lies.
Heiden explains Hitler’s demonic obsession with the Jews. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained how his conversion to anti-Semitism flowed from his encounters with the labour movement. It was among the workers that Hitler first came into contact with Jews. He then discovered, to his amazement, that many Jews played prominent roles in the labour movement. “The great light dawned on him,” wrote Heiden. “Suddenly, the ‘Jewish question’ became clear. … The labour movement did not repel him because Jews led it[4]The Jews repelled him because they led the labour movement. Heiden concluded, “It was not Rothschild, the capitalist, but Karl Marx, the Socialist, who kindled Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism. ”Stone has profited intellectually from a careful study of Heiden’s biography of Hitler.
Given that Stone has conducted extensive historiographical work, he has written 20 books on or about the Holocaust; his conclusions on how to fight modern-day genocide and the rise of fascism are troubling, to say the least. He writes, “The fact is that Holocaust education goes out of the window if people feel their life chances are narrowing; nothing in the end can stop people from supporting these dark forces in times of crisis.”
This is extraordinarily fatalistic. The goal is not merely to “know” the Holocaust as an isolated tragedy, but to understand its roots in class, imperialism and political defeat—and to transform that understanding into organised political action to build the international socialist movement that can prevent future barbarism. From a Marxist standpoint, Stone’s empirical and historiographical contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Marxism begins with the materialist method: social phenomena, including ideologies and mass crimes, are rooted in concrete material relations—class structures, property relations, state formation and the competitive dynamics of imperialism. The destruction of mass working-class political organisations left the proletariat unable to interpose itself as an independent social force; this political vacuum was decisive.
[1] 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
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A Trumpet of Sedition 