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
(This article is dedicated to the memory of Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler 1956–2025: Trotskyist and fighter for the working class)
Emil: Are your people well off?
Professor: I don’t really know. Nobody ever talks about money.
Emil: Then I expect you have plenty.
Dialogue from Emil and the Detectives
“It is sufficient to remember that the German bourgeoisie, with its incomparable technology, philosophy, science and art, allowed the power of the state to lie in the hands of a feudal bureaucratic class as late as 1918 and decided, or, more correctly, was forced to take power into its own hands only when the material foundations of German culture began to fall to pieces.”
Leon Trotsky: Proletarian Culture and Proletarian Art
The story of Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives illuminates Germany in the 1920s, before German culture began to fall to Pieces under the death blow of Fascism. Published in 1929 and in English in 1931, Kästner would have been politically aware enough to know that the book and himself were living on borrowed time. While the Nazis burned his books, he, however, did not suffer the same fate despite being interviewed by the Gestapo twice.
There are many reasons why adults return to their childhood books. For some, it is a comfort read or just the pure joy of reading. Emil and the Detectives was one of my first reads as a child. Not sure why I was drawn to it, why I chose a foreign author rather than a British one, we will never know. I borrowed it from my school library because it wasn’t on the school reading curriculum. I want to say that I was aware of its political overtones, but I was drawn to it by chance, as I was not yet politically conscious of the world around me, which would arrive when I reached sixteen. Nevertheless, the book will always evoke fond childhood memories.
Perhaps because children and adults, for that matter, face a return to the darkness that fell on Europe with the rise of fascism, that Emil and the Detectives still resonates today. It makes sense that a group of kids from 1929 would represent society’s underdogs, at risk from the forces of fascism, not only in Germany but in America, too.
The text from the 1931 translation by Margaret Goldsmith gives a flavour of the children’s class consciousness in Kastner’s book: “I don’t understand that at all,” little Tuesday declared. “How can I steal what already belongs to me? What’s mine is mine, even if it’s in a stranger’s pocket! ”These things are difficult to understand,” the professor expounded. “Morally, you might be in the right. But the law will find you guilty all the same. Even some grown-ups don’t really understand these things, but they are a fact. Or this dialogue
Emil: Are your people well off? Professor: I don’t really know. Nobody ever talks about money. Emil: Then I expect you have plenty. ”[1]
As Uma Krishnaswami correctly writes, “Emil and the Detectives positions itself squarely on the side of ordinary people and against oppression meted out by the powerful. When a suspicious-looking man, Herr Grundeis, steals the money Emil Tischbein’s mother gave him, young Emil doesn’t go to the police. Instead, he dashes off to find the thief. In the process, the boy sleuth gathers a motley band of friends, including the unforgettable Pony Hütchen and, of course, the endearing Little Tuesday, without whose faithful vigilance the plan could not unfold. Naturally, the kids are victorious in the end.”[2]
Why read Kästner Now
Emil’s story raises perennial questions: how childhood experience is shaped by class, how working-class solidarity takes root in everyday life, and how the state and the market shape civic trust. Studying such literature trains workers and students to read cultural texts as expressions of material conditions.
So Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (1929) is best read not simply as a children’s adventure but as a social document of the late Weimar Republic: a work that reflects class contrasts, urban life, and the moral questions facing youth in a capitalist society. Again, for workers and students, Kästner offers an accessible entry point into how literature can both reflect social conditions and contribute to political education. For a political framing of Kästner’s broader milieu and politics.[3]
Erich Kästner’s stories, poems and satires—written amid the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic—are rich in social observation: they identify petty‑bourgeois anxieties, the erosion of democratic habits, the everyday humiliations of children and workers, and the moral cowardice of elites. Reading Kästner in the workplace helps workers develop a literary sensibility while equipping them to connect cultural forms to concrete political tasks: building class consciousness, exposing bourgeois ideology, and preparing collective struggle.
One of Kastner’s most crucial works is Fabian or Going to the Dogs. As Bernd Reinhardt perceptively writes, “ Fabian has certain autobiographical traits and who more than once in his literary work blames ‘stupidity’ for social ills, referring to dumb Nazis, stupid Germans, and so on. The voiceover that features from time to time in the film quotes a passage from the novel where the fights between Nazis and Communists are compared to dancehall brawls. Like many other intellectuals, Kästner underestimated the danger of the Nazi movement. After the war, he admitted that they should have been fought earlier, because “threatening dictatorships can only be fought before they have taken power.”[4]
About the Author
Erich Kästner (1899–1974), a pacifist and satirist whose works were famously burned by the Nazis, though Emil and the Detectives was initially spared due to its popularity.
[1] Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner E. Hall (Translator) Puffin Paperback – 21 Sept. 1959
[2] Why You Should Read (or Reread) Emil and the Detectives-www.umakrishnaswami.com/blog/why-you-should-read-or-reread-emil-and-the-detectives
[3] See the WSWS discussion of Kästner’s Fabian work and its relation to the Weimar social crisis, on Fabian and the dangers of the 1930s.
[4] German Film Award in Silver for Dominik Graf’s Fabian: Going to the Dogs-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/13/fabi-n13.html
“The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.”
Leon Trotsky, in ” Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, “
“It would be so much easier for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares”. Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and point our finger at any of its new instances – every day, in every part of the world.”
― Umberto Eco, Il fascismo Eterno
“ but we know. and have always said, that the bourgeoisie is attached to fascism. The bourgeois and fascism stand in the same relation to each other as do the workers and peasants to the Russian Communist Party.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings: 1921-1926
“Abraham Lincoln, said, just before his assassination: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
― Jack London, The Iron Heel
How to Spot a Fascist is a collection of three distinct yet profoundly thought-provoking essays on freedom and fascism. ‘Ur-Fascism’ examines fourteen essential characteristics of fascism. Like the great German author Gunter Grass, Eco was briefly a young fascist. Unlike Grass[1] Eco was not vilified for it. When Mussolini was at the height of his power, Eco was a young child lacking the knowledge and capacity to grasp the criminal character of the organisation he was associated with. He Writes in “Ur-Fascism:
“In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists — that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.”
Umberto Eco was undoubtedly one of the greatest writers and historians of the 20th Century. If he were still alive during this modern period of history, he would not have hesitated in calling the latest incumbent in the White House a fascist. Donald Trump fits most of the criteria cited by Eco in his 1995 essay.
Eco writes “If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. Suppose Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism. In that case, I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and indeed a right-wing party, has now minimal connection to the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.”[2]
While Eco has several brilliant insights into Italian fascism, his work also has significant weaknesses. One of which was his blindness towards the betrayals of Italian Social Democracy. As Leon Trotsky points out, “ Italian fascism was the immediate outgrowth of the betrayal by the reformists of the Italian proletariat’s uprising. From the time the First World War ended, there was an upward trend in the revolutionary movement in Italy, and in September 1920, it resulted in the seizure of factories and industries by the workers. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a real fact; all that was lacking was to organise it and draw from it all the necessary conclusions. The social democracy took fright and sprang back. After its bold and heroic exertions, the proletariat was left facing the void. The disruption of the revolutionary movement became the most critical factor in the growth of fascism. In September, the revolutionary advance came to a standstill, and November already witnessed the first significant demonstration of the fascists (the seizure of Bologna)[3]
Leon Trotsky was one of the first Marxists to not only define what exactly Italian fascism was, but also to warn of the danger it represented to the Italian and world working class. One of his earliest attempts to define fascism was in November 1931 when he wrote a letter to a friend titled “What is Fascism”. He wrote,
“The Fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders emerging from the ranks. It is a plebeian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat and even to a certain extent, from the proletarian masses. Mussolini, a former socialist, is a “self-made” man arising from this movement. The movement in Germany is primarily analogous to the Italian movement. It is a mass movement, with its leaders employing a great deal of socialist demagogy. This is necessary for the creation of the mass movement.
The genuine basis is the petty bourgeoisie. In Italy, it is a significant base, comprising the petty bourgeoisie of towns and cities, as well as the peasantry. In Germany, likewise, there is a large base for Fascism. In England, there is less of that base because the proletariat is the overwhelming majority of the population; the peasant or farming stratum is only a relatively insignificant section. It may be said, and this is true to a certain extent, that the new middle class, the functionaries of the state, the private administrators, etc., etc., can constitute such a base. However, this raises a new question that needs to be analysed. This is a supposition. It is necessary to explore just what it will be. It is essential to foresee the Fascist movement growing from this or that element. But this is only a perspective which is controlled by events. I am not affirming that it is impossible for a Fascist movement to develop in England or for a Mosley or someone else to become a dictator. This is a question for the future. It is a far-fetched possibility. To speak of it now as an imminent danger is not a prognosis but a mere prophecy. To be capable of foreseeing anything in the direction of Fascism, it is necessary to have a definition of that idea. What is Fascism? What is its base, its form and its characteristics? How will its development take place?”
This short volume, ‘How to Spot a Fascist,’ was republished in 2019 and is an essential contribution to understanding today’s fascist movement, led by Donald Trump. Eco was an insightful and compassionate writer, but he did not live to see the fascists come back. In the same year as Eco’s collection of essays, Christoph Vandrier’s book Why Are They Back was published by Mehring Books. As Vandrier’s recounts in the book after 81 years after the fall of the Third Reich, the neo-Nazi right has become a major political force in Germany. The book provides a valuable lesson in how to fight today’s fascists by learning the lessons of the past.
[1] Günter Grass and the Waffen SS-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/05/gras-m04.html
[2] Ur-Fascism Umberto Eco: June 22, 1995 The New York Review of Books theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
[3] How Mussolini triumphed-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/fascism-what-it-is-how-to-fight-it-leon-trotsky/02.html
‘Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,’
Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
“A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not help with all its might and all the means at its disposal- if it does not help women, twofold and threefold enslaved in the past, to get on the road of individual and social progress. A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not take the greatest possible care of the children … for whose benefit it has been made. But how can one create … a new life based on mutual consideration, on self-respect, on the real equality of women . . . on the efficient care for children-in an atmosphere poisoned with the roaring, rolling, ringing, and resounding swearing of enslavers and enslaved people, that swearing which spares no one and stops at nothing? The struggle against ‘foul language’ is an essential condition of mental hygiene just as the fight against filth and vermin is a condition of physical hygiene.”
― Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life & Other Writings on Culture & Science
“The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”
Rosa Luxemburg
Lost Boys by James Bloodworth is a journalist’s examination of the reactionary movement that has been somewhat lightly termed the Manosphere. The Manosphere quaintly refers to a motley collection of websites, blogs and online forums promoting misogyny, masculinity and opposition to feminism. It promotes racism, antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, climate change denial, homophobia and transphobia. This movement has become a recruitment centre and training ground for what can only be termed trainee fascists.
It is not surprising that Bloodworth did not want to research and write this book. He replied to his editor, saying, “Why would I want to do that?”. He writes, “Today I feel a bit like a funeral director in the aftermath of a mass casualty event. I would have preferred things to have turned out differently, but considering they haven’t, I intend to put my knowledge to some practical use. Having spent so much time researching the manosphere – including interviewing and interacting with hundreds of men and spending months at a time embedded on a course which purportedly taught men how to become ‘high status alpha males’ – I feel as if I have something worthwhile to contribute.”[1]
Indeed, why should anyone want to associate and talk to a bunch of Nazi like scumbags who give two thousand pounds to learn how to hunt down woman and on some occasions rape them and then brag about their behaviour of social media.
The origins of this so-called pickup movement can be traced back to Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestseller, The Game. His book turned the art of seduction into a woman hunt, which sees women as nothing more than prey and being treated as such. The men within this movement have no comprehension of history but their attitude towards women would not look out of place in the Nazi Party of German fascism.
To his credit, Bloodworth exposes these trainee fascists. He reveals the close links between the manosphere and the far Right, including fascists like Donald Trump. Trump’s fascist partners in the While House who dismiss their enemies as “beta”. His vice-president, JD Vance, describes himself as “red-pilled”. As Bloodworth points out, the rise of the Anti-feminist backlash coincided with the growth of fascist forces worldwide, and it reminded him of Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which enjoyed a resurgence during the first Trump presidency. As Sinclair wrote, ” Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.’ However, his political understanding of how and why these members of the lumpen proletariat and deranged petty bourgeois are cannon fodder for a fascist movement is limited.
Bloodworth’s new book was inspired by his watching of the Netflix series Adolescence. He writes, “It is a striking film that is masterfully shot and powerfully acted. It has also generated a worthwhile public conversation. Much of this conversation has been constructive; however, some of it has been animated by a desire to change the subject – to talk about anything but misogyny and the radicalisation of young men on the internet. I found Adolescence surreal to watch at times.”[2]
As Thomas Scripps writes in his review of the Netflix series, “The reality, as we have been shown, is that the problems are well beyond an individual family’s ability to resolve. Perhaps the most common expression throughout the series is “I don’t know”, or some variant, from kids and adults alike; they are buffeted and bewildered by forces beyond their grasp.
The role of smartphones, the Internet, and social media, in particular, is well-contextualised in this broader social landscape. It would be foolish to deny the role they play in creating an unprecedented level of exposure to peer pressures and corporate advertising, declared and undeclared, and in streamlining the passage of individuals damaged by these influences into darker waters. But the real problem is the poison spilling out of a rotting social system—from misogynist ideologies to the glorification of violence, wealth and selfishness—for which these technologies are a conduit, and the conditions of social neglect which make young people emotionally susceptible: the most vulnerable dangerously so. Conditions which also hinder the social dialogue necessary to help children learn how to interact healthily with new technologies and form genuine relationships.”[3]
So far, the opposition to the rise of the “Manosphere has not come from working-class women, but has taken the form of the middle-class movement centred around the #MeToo movement, which is already eight years old. As the Marxist writer David Walsh wrote, “The ostensible aim of this ongoing movement is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign’s “progressive” claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other significant social and political issues of the day.”[4]
One of the more outspoken and articulate critiques of the “Manosphere has come from the pen of the writer Amia Srinivasan. Her book The Right To sex,[5] while containing so worthwhile observations, it essentially promotes the #MeToo movement’s right to unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process.
Srinivasan is the darling of all the radical groups, who fall over themselves in promoting her idea of social justice. Her brand of modern-day feminism is dominated mainly by selfish, upper-middle-class champions of “women’s rights”. Srinivasan writes, “It’s essential in any radical political tradition. It’s no surprise that utopian writing always has these wacky ideas. I mean, think about More’s Utopia, full of these strange possibilities, because the same political imagination that leads to the disclosure of new possible social arrangements also sometimes generates some crazy shit. The broadening of the sense of what’s possible, as well as what’s delightful about human life, has to be central to a radical politics.
As Kate Randall points out, “ The fight for women’s rights is a social question that must be resolved in the arena of class struggle, not in the rarified atmosphere of the corporate boardroom and Hollywood. As Rosa Luxemburg once explained: “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”
Notes
James Bloodworth is a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in numerous British newspapers, as well as in many US publications. His book Hired: Undercover in Low Wage Britain was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2019 and was selected as The Times Best Current Affairs and Big Ideas Book of the Year in 2018. He has produced and presented documentaries for Channel 4 television and has appeared on many podcasts. He has a new book, Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, scheduled for release on June 5, 2025, the result of a five-year investigation into the subculture.
[1] Adolescence’ and the Marketisation of Childhood, by James Bloodworth – 4 April 2025-https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/bloodworth-adolescence/
[2] ‘Adolescence’ and the Marketisation of Childhood, by James Bloodworth – 4 April 2025-https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/bloodworth-adolescence/
[3] Adolescence: Gripping realism explores social pressures behind young male violence-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/03/24/fbxd-m24.html
[4] One year of the #MeToo movement-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/19/year-o19.html
[5] The Right to Sex: Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2022 Hardcover – 19 Aug. 2021-Bloomsbury
“Disaster nationalism is not fascist. These movements do not seek to overthrow electoral democracy. Except the RSS in India – the grass-roots cadre organisation supporting Modi’s BJP – they do not command far-right, paramilitary mass movements.”
Richard Seymour
“Fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”
Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
“In the meantime, the first characteristic of a revolutionary party is- to be able to look reality in the face.”
Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
“If we place events in this more historically comprehensive context, it is clear that January 6 marks a new stage in a protracted process of democratic breakdown. We have witnessed in recent days efforts by historians and journalists to claim that really nothing of great importance happened on January 6, and that everything will more or less return to normal. This dangerous underestimation of the danger is based not merely on an incorrect evaluation of American conditions.”
David North.
While it is usually not possible to tell a book by its cover, you can usually gauge a book by its first page. Probably the greatest example of this is Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which is arguably the most stunning introduction to a book in modern literature. The same cannot be said about Richard Seymour’s first page.
The quote from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is perhaps fitting, given that Seymour is not a Marxist but a pseudo-leftist, and both Adorno and Horkheimer were anti-Marxists.
As Peter Schwarz says, “The first thing that comes to mind when reading ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ is the complete absence of any reference to concrete historical, economic or political events, social classes, political parties or questions of perspective. Neither the policies of the Social Democrats nor those of the Communist Party are examined. Not even Hitler is mentioned. Instead, everything is treated at the level of pure thought, which is presented as an independent subject, completely detached from thinking individuals, social consciousness, the struggle of classes and the struggle of ideas. Horkheimer and Adorno describe this as “thought … reflecting on its own guilt.”[1]
Seymour does examine in a limited manner concrete historical, economic and political events, which is not the problem; however, he does so not from the perspective of a Marxist but from that of a radical leftist. In Richard Seymour’s book, Trump is not a fascist but another far-right leader who is peddling a non-Marxist term called “Disaster Nationalism”.
There are many sides to a Marxist, and one of those sides is clarity of thought and action. Arguably, the greatest Marxist thinker of the 20th century, apart from Vladimir Lenin and the modern-day Trotskyist David North, was Leon Trotsky. You would have thought that if someone was looking to understand modern fascism and be given a book contract to do so, you would consult the most brilliant authority on the subject, and that is Trotsky. Yet in Seymour’s book, Trotsky warrants one tiny mention with no quotes from his major works on German and Italian fascism.
This is Trotsky’s approach: “What is fascism? The name originated in Italy. Were all the forms of counter-revolutionary dictatorship fascist or not (That is to say, before the advent of fascism in Italy)? The former dictatorship in Spain of Primo de Rivera, 1923–30, is called a fascist dictatorship by the Comintern. Is this correct or not? We believe that it is incorrect. The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a “self-made” man arising from this movement.
Primo de Rivera was an aristocrat. He occupied a high military and bureaucratic post and was chief governor of Catalonia. he accomplished his overthrow with the aid of state and military forces. The dictatorships of Spain and Italy are two different forms of dictatorship. It is necessary to distinguish between them. Mussolini had difficulty in reconciling many old military institutions with the fascist militia.
This problem did not exist for Primo de Rivera. The movement in Germany is analogous mostly to the Italian. It is a mass movement, with its leaders employing a great deal of socialist demagogy. This is necessary for the creation of the mass movement. The genuine basis (for fascism) is the petty bourgeoisie. In Italy, it has a very large base – the petty bourgeoisie of the towns and cities, and the peasantry. In Germany, likewise, there is a large base for fascism. It may be said, and this is true to a certain extent, that the new middle class, the functionaries of the state, the private administrators, etc., can constitute such a base. But this is a new question that must be analysed. To be capable of foreseeing anything about fascism, it is necessary to have a definition of that idea. What is fascism? What are its base, its form, and its characteristics? How will its development take place? It is necessary to proceed in a scientific and Marxian manner.”[2]
Seymour does not proceed in a scientific or Marxist manner. If he did, he would behave like any decent historian or writer and examine the only orthodox or classical Marxist movement on the planet, which is represented by the Marxists who write for the World Socialist Website. They have written extensively on the rise of modern fascism. It suffices to say that Seymour did not contact them or quote their analysis.
Their analysis of the rise of Trump and his brand of American fascism cuts across Seymour’s pseudo-left perspective, which is to downplay the rise of world fascism. Marxist writer Joseph Kishore believes that the return of Donald Trump to power represents “the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States. Trump’s rise and return to power are not an aberration but the product of deep-rooted crises in American and world capitalism. His administration is carrying out a historic restructuring of the state, tearing apart the remaining democratic constraints on oligarchic rule, and preparing for global war.”
While it is one thing to describe Trump and his gang as fascists, it is another to set his dictatorship in the same context as the rise of Hitlerite fascism in 1933. David North, the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), in his introductory remarks to the post-election online webinar “The Election Debacle and the Fight Against Dictatorship,” cautions:
“ Now, it is not the position of the SEP and the WSWS that the accession of Trump to the presidency is the equivalent of Hitler’s 1933 victory. The United States is not Weimar Germany, and the transformation of the United States into a police state dictatorship backed by a mass fascist movement will not, whatever Trump’s intentions, be achieved overnight. But it would be politically irresponsible, and contribute to the success of Trump’s aims, not to recognise the dangerous implications and real consequences of last Tuesday’s election. At the very least, it is necessary to take Trump at his word.[3]
Which Seymour does not. He is not alone in underplaying the dangers of the rise of fascism in America. Alan Woods, leader of the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI), the successor to the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), published an article that starkly illustrates the complacent and anti-Marxist orientation of his and other political tendencies. Revealingly titled “Trump victory: a kick in the teeth for the establishment,” the article echoes Trump’s fraudulent claims of being an anti-establishment figure while downplaying the immense dangers posed by a Trump presidency to the working class.
Woods writes, “The ruling class of America – firmly supported by the governments of Europe – was determined to keep him [Trump] out of office, by fair means or foul. After Trump was ousted in the 2020 election, everything was done to prevent him from running again… All the numerous attacks against him rebounded and turned against those who were seen, correctly, as being involved in a conspiracy to prevent him from re-entering the White House.[4]
The World Socialist Website opposed Wood’s complacency, writing, “This portrayal is false. The ruling class was not ‘determined to keep [Trump] out of office.” Significant sections of the financial and corporate elite, including billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, actively supported Trump, viewing his authoritarian and pro-business agenda as a means of furthering their class interests. Others, like Jeff Bezos, have proclaimed their support for Trump after the election.” The article went on to reiterate its position that Trump and his allies were not fascists.
Seymour, like many of his pseudo-left fellow travellers, downplayed the 2006 coup attempt by Trump and his supporters in his latest book. In his article “Myths about the January 6th Capitol Building Events,” written by Roger D. Harris, a member of California’s Peace and Freedom Party, joins Seymour in his criminal underplaying of the coup attempt. Harris writes, “The riot was no attempted coup; it was just a sitting president unprecedentedly calling a march on the Capitol… signifying a breakdown of bourgeois political norms. What did happen is that a sitting president unprecedentedly called for a march on the Capitol to contest an election, signifying a breakdown of bourgeois political norms. Quite unlike Al Gore, who took a hit for elite political stability rather than contest the 2000 presidential election, Trump flagrantly broke the rules of orderly succession.”[5]
There is a degree of confusion, complacency, and even a hint of deception in Seymour’s analysis; when he writes, “ Disaster nationalism is not fascist. These movements do not seek to overthrow electoral democracy. Except for the RSS in India – the grass-roots cadre organisation supporting Modi’s BJP – they do not command far-right, paramilitary mass movements. The fascism that is being prepared through this sequence will not resemble classical fascism. The world that made fascism — colonialism, class civil war, revolution, and intense industrial modernisation-has passed. The new world is one in which the big questions will be those raised by the climate crisis: who gets what and who does without, who lives and who dies. Neonate fascism, whether green or brown, is preparing the terrain for a war on what it sees as mutant or out-of-place biology: the migratory or criminal.”[6]
Analogies with the past are fraught with danger, especially when examining the rise of fascism. Yet, the past can serve as a guide for today. Crucial to understanding the rise of fascism today is a systematic study of the past, especially the work of Leon Trotsky. As Trotsky writes: “German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organisations of the working class and the institutions of democracy. But fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital. Mussolini is right: the middle classes are incapable of independent policies. During periods of great crisis, they are called upon to reduce to absurdity the policies of one of the two basic classes. Fascism succeeded in putting them at the service of capital.
“Trotsky’s understanding of fascism can be used to understand today’s fascism. Seymour’s reluctance to study or utilise Trotsky’s work on fascism stems from his political views, which are a mishmash of liberal, Stalinist, and reformist traditions. Seymour joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1998 and fully immersed himself in their anti-Trotskyism. Pseudo-leftists Mike Kidron and Chris Harman, for economics; Alex Callinicos, for political philosophy; and Tony Cliff, for the weltanschauung, were his heroes. A second layer of influence was the ‘political Marxists,’ including Ellen Wood and Robert Brenner, and thirdly, Althusser, Gramsci, Poulantzas, Stuart Hall, and the Birmingham School. Is it any wonder Seymour is completely vague and indelicate regarding the rise of fascism in America
As the Marxist George Lavan Weissman wrote: “An indiscriminate use of the term (fascism)reflects vagueness about its meaning.” Asked to define fascism, the liberal replies in such terms as dictatorship, mass neurosis, anti-Semitism, the power of unscrupulous propaganda, the hypnotic effect of a mad-genius orator on the masses, etc. Impressionism and confusion among liberals are not surprising. However, Marxism’s superiority lies in its ability to analyse and differentiate among social and political phenomena. That so many of those calling themselves Marxists cannot define fascism any more adequately than the liberals is not wholly their fault. Whether they are aware of it or not, much of their intellectual heritage comes from the social-democratic (reformist socialist) and Stalinist movements, which dominated the left in the 1930s when fascism was scoring victory after victory. These movements not only permitted Nazism to come to power in Germany without a shot being fired against it, but they failed abysmally in understanding the nature and dynamics of fascism and the way to fight it. After fascism’s triumphs, they had much to hide and therefore refrained from making a Marxist analysis, which would, at the very least, have educated subsequent generations.[7]
This book lacks merit and should not have been allowed past the editorial stage by Verso. The fact that the Pabloites at Verso share Seymour’s politics should not come as a surprise. If the Scribes at Verso wanted to understand the rise of global fascism, they could have at least reprinted some of Leon Trotsky’s works. We wait with bated breath for this to happen.
[1] The rise of fascism in Germany and the collapse of the Communist Internationaw.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/10/le9-all.html
[2] Extracts from a letter to an English comrade, November 15, 1931;
printed in The Militant, January 16, 1932-www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm#p1
“Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois”.
Leon Trotsky
“For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody. Here lies the utterly compelling paradox.
Richard Evans
“Because I knew better, I was disturbed from the start by the one-sided delegation of blame on German industry, banks, etc.”
Gotz Aly
Although the figure of Adolf Hitler looms large over Richard Evans’ new book, it is first and foremost a biographical study of Hitler’s inner circle. It offers a new way to understand the rise of Fascism in Germany without conceding too much ground to other historians, such as the right-wing Daniel Goldhagen, who blamed “ordinary Germans” for the rise of Nazi Germany.[1]
Never one to shy away from controversy, Evans, in his introduction, makes the bold claim that without Hitler, there would have been no attempt at a “Thousand Year Reich”, and the Holocaust would have never happened. I am at a loss the see how Evans would have come to that conclusion. I am pretty sure that the German bourgeoisie would have found a willing executioner somewhere amongst its Petty Bourgeoisie.
But if we are going to indulge in counterfactuals, a better one would be the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once said, “ Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place – on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring – of this, I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders … But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin, the October Revolution would have been victorious anyway”.[2]
Evans draws upon previous writers, such as Joachim Fest’s bestseller The Face of the Third Reich, published well over half a century ago. The book is meticulously researched and uses large secondary literature as well as recently published primary sources. As Mary Fulbrook correctly states, Evans “ stands on the shoulders of giants,” acknowledging his debt to Ian Kershaw, whose two-volume biography of Hitler has so far not been surpassed.
However not wanting to be too negative Mary Fulbrook’s’ Bystander society, Laurence Rees The Nazi Mind and Gotz Aly Hitler’s beneficiaries is now joined by Richards Evans in promoting a view point that not only Nazis but large swathes of the German population were responsible for war and the subsequent Holocaust. Indeed, Evans does not go quite so far as Daniel Goldhagen so in her review Fulbrook, is critical of Evans’s attack on historians like Daniel Goldhagen, who shift the blame for the holocaust away from the Nazis and blame “ordinary Germans”. She writes, “ Antisemitism of varying hues is, of course, a refrain throughout, but oddly, the Holocaust remains slightly out of focus, with only cursory and slightly misleading summaries of key controversies, as between Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen. Evans rattles rapidly over several approaches, ending up – surely unintentionally? – by implying that recent scholarly consensus around “interpretations that stress the specificities of the German situation” necessarily entails support for Goldhagen’s ahistorical reification of a supposed German mentality of “eliminationist antisemitism”.
In noting the impact of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of April 7, 1933, on “individuals of ‘non-Aryan descent’ or in other words, Jews”, Evans, in effect, compounds Nazi assumptions by omitting to point out that “non- Aryans” covered even individuals with only a single Jewish grandparent, some previously unaware of any Jewish ancestry or not considering themselves Jewish by religion, let alone “race”. The intricacies of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 are similarly skated over too briefly, inadvertently buttressing the notion of clear distinctions between “Jews” and non-Jewish Germans. The complexities arising from historical assimilation and high rates of conversion and intermarriage in Germany could have been explored in more detail in the chapter on Luise Solmitz.”[3]
That Evans approaches the problem of German Fascism through “the potted biographies of 18 men and five women” can only take one so far. Although Evans does not subscribe that all Hitler’s henchmen were made up of madmen or psychopaths, his grasp of how these men and women were not only able to pursue a genocidal war and murder 6 million Jews in the Holocaust is tenuous at best. The first step of any historian studying this subject is to comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. Unless this is undertaken first, then Historical science and political theory will be seen to be helpless in the presence of such unfathomable evil.
In his review of Evan’s book historian Richard Overy makes this startlingly inaccurate point “Those who gravitated to the Nazi movement and gained power and status as a result made a conscious decision. Evans is at pains to emphasise that Germans did have a choice in whether to reject the regime, or what it asked them to do, and he cites at the end the story of a German woman from Hamburg who fled to Denmark in protest when her Jewish employer was arrested. At the same time, he rightly reminds us that this was a regime rooted, ultimately, in the exercise of terror. Under such circumstances, the room for choice is limited. Outright rejection of the regime meant a couple of SA thugs on the doorstep dragging you off for a beating, or worse; choosing to oppose risked the guillotine or the camp. The number of brave people who did reject was small. For most people, choice was circumscribed.”[4]
Overy leaves out one minor detail: the defeat of the German workers’ movement. When fascism came to power, the working class ceased to exist as an organised political and social force. Neither Evans nor Overy examines the role of Stalinism and Social |democracy that led to the rise of Fascism and the smashing of the workers’ movement.
In Evans’ book, the socialist movement is all but invisible. Not a single reference is to be found, in the course of his book, to Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel or Wilhelm Liebknecht. He does not mention the anti-socialist laws of 1878–90 implemented by the regime of Bismarck. The Social Democratic Party, the first mass party in history, which by 1912 held the largest number of seats in the German Reichstag, is not mentioned. There is no reference to the 1918 revolution or the uprising of the Spartacus League. These omissions cannot be explained as an oversight. Evans cannot deal with the German socialist movement because its historical existence represents a refutation of the theoretical premise of his book. There was a socialist opposition to German Fascism. The German working class were betrayed by Stalinism and Social democracy.
As the Marxist writer David North points out, “ the victory of fascism was not the direct and inevitable product of anti-Semitism, but the outcome of a political process shaped by the class struggle. In that process, the critical factor was the crisis of the German socialist movement, which was, it must be pointed out, part of a broader political crisis of international socialism. Hitler’s rise was not irresistible, and his victory was not inevitable. The Nazis were able to come to power only after the mass socialist and communist parties had shown themselves, in the course of the entire postwar period, to be politically bankrupt and utterly incapable of providing the distraught masses with a way out of the disaster created by capitalism. Yet without an examination of the emergence of the German socialist workers’ movement, it is impossible to understand the nature and significance of modern anti-Semitism.[5]
Although Evans is coming to the end of an illustrious career, he still maintains his indifference to orthodox Marxism. Not only does he ignore the writings of the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky on the rise of German Fascism, but a simple study of his other major works including the superb The Class, the Party and the Leadership pamphlet would have yielded an infinitely better understanding of the rise of German Fascism than countless academic studies that he has no doubt studied.
Trotsky writes, “There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in the same direction: from despotism – to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people” but are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc., arise.
The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class or the product of its free creativeness. Leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the different layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably rises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions. Precisely for this reason, the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot immediately improvise a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilising the collapse of the old leading party. The Marxist, i.e. dialectic and not scholastic interpretation of the inter-relationship between a class and its leadership does not leave a single stone unturned of our author’s legalistic sophistry.[6]
Richard Overy, at the end of his review, poses the question Could it happen again? The simple answer to that question is that it already has. Trump in America is the first fascist in the White House. In the English-language edition of Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy and the Return of Fascism in Germany Christian Vandreier makes this point “In Germany, for the first time since the end of the Nazi regime a far-right party [Alternative for Germany—AfD] has 90 deputies in the federal parliament. “Why Are They Back? is about how this shift to the right was politically and ideologically prepared. “The fascists are not a mass movement but are a hated minority. However, the ruling elite is once again promoting fascism and right-wing ideology to suppress opposition to its militarism and worsening social inequality… That is why an independent movement of the working class is the only way to fight this danger.”
Notes
Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971),
F.L. Carsten, The German Workers and the Nazis
Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy and the Return of Fascism in Germany, Christian Vandreier
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
The Rise of Trump and the Crisis of American Democracy- Mehring Books 2025
Chance and necessity in history: E.H. Carr and Leon Trotsky compared
January 200 Ann Talbot
[1] Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Paperback – 3 Mar. 1997
[2] Trotsky, Diary in Exile (London 1958), pages 53-54. www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1989/trotsky1/00-preface.html#n2
[4] Hitler’s People by Richard Evans review-https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/hitlers-people-richard-evans-review
[5] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
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A Trumpet of Sedition 