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
“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
“I don’t believe lies are something to stand on. I believe lies are something to build on.”
― Philip Roth, Our Gang
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
― John Adams
“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humour the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
In his introduction to this book Joseph Kishore makes the following point 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.”
He continues “Trump’s rise and return to power is 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.”
Why is this analysis made by the World Socialist Website so important. Because the analysis, published by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) following Trump’s second election, not only traces the emergence of Trump, but the political forces also that enabled him, they provide an essential strategy for opposing his government.
While there is a violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States a similar process taking place in the working class. The working class will need to realign its politics to meet head on the new challenge. Part of that process is a systematic study of the articles contained in this book.
Leon Trotsky was fond of saying that the motive force of history is truth and not lies. The correct and truthful analysis made by the World Socialist website has been met by a number of Pseudo Left organisations with hostility at the temerity of calling Trump a Fascist.
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 political tendency. 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.[1]
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 standing 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.”[2]
The World Socialist Website opposed Woods 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 own class interests. Others, like Jeff Bezos, have proclaimed their support for Trump after the election.” [3] The article went on to reiterate its position that Trump and his allies were fascists.
The writer Sinclair Lewis was well aware of people like Woods who downplayed the fascist danger writing “The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessup’s, who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”[4]
While the development of an American fascist oligarchy is a new development the fear of an American oligarchy is not. In his book John Adams and the Fear of an American Oligarchy Luke Mayville shows that Adams who was the second American president spent most of his adult life warning about the development of an American Oligarchy. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson dated 2 September 1813 he writes. Now, my Friend, who are the aristoi.? Philosophy may Answer “The Wise and Good.” But the World, Mankind, have by their practice always answered, “the rich the beautiful and well born.” And Philosophers themselves in marrying their Children prefer the rich the handsome and the well descended to the wise and good.”[5]
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,” warned:
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 recognize the dangerous implications and real consequences of last Tuesday’s election. At the very least, it is necessary to take Trump at his word.[6]
Not all are inclined to take Trump at his word. In a recent collection of essays entitled Did it Happen Here, Perspectives on Fascism and America the British historian Richard Evan took Umbridge that Trump is a fascist, and his gang constituted an albeit small fascist movement.
He writes “The temptation to draw parallels between Trump and the fascist leaders of the 20th century is understandable. How better to express the fear, loathing and contempt that Trump arouses in liberals than by comparing him to the ultimate political evil? But few who have described Trump as a fascist can be called real experts in the field, not even Snyder. The majority of genuine specialists, including the historians Roger Griffin, Matthew Feldman, Stanley Payne and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, agree that whatever else he is, Trump is not a fascist.”[7]
It is perhaps a little surprising that a historian of Evans calibre should be so complacent and wrong. His solution to the crisis of American democracy is also wrong and sows’ dangerous illusions. He writes “Whether the US and its citizens succeed in preserving democracy and its institutions depends largely on whether they succeed in identifying what the real threats are and developing appropriate means to defeat them. Imagining that they are experiencing a rerun of the fascist seizure of power isn’t going to help them very much in this task. You can’t win the political battles of the present if you’re always stuck in the past.
It is recommended that those workers and youth who recognize that Trump is threatening dictatorship, and is a fascist should carry out a thorough a study of the analysis made on the World Socialist Web Site and especially the articles contained in this book and prepare themselves for the coming momentous battles.
[1] Trump victory: a kick in the teeth for the establishment-https://marxist.com/trump-victory-2024.htm
[2] Trump victory: a kick in the teeth for the establishment-https://marxist.com/trump-victory-2024.htm
[3] Alan Woods, leader of pseudo-left RCI, hails election of Trump as “kick in the teeth” to US ruling class.wsws.org
A Trumpet of Sedition 