>the case. Essentially, the "lesser evil" strategy which helped to
>facilitate Hitler's rise to power became central to the reformist left.
>Of course, all of this is immaterial to non-Marxists.
>Louis Proyect
Very true. Actually, if one looks at the party politics of the pre-nazi
germany, one can easily see that social democrats, the reformist left,
were partially responsible for the rise of Hitler. Although social
democrats were fully aware of the danger of Nazism, they preferred to go
with the wind. Neumann, in _Behemoth_ goes into details of explaining the
tension between social democrats and socialists before Hitler. When
Hitler won perceivable number of seats in Reichtag, Rudolf Hilferding,
a leading theoretician of social democracy and editor of the party
gazette, wrote to the party saying that Hitler was not a big deal, and
their major concern was to fight against communists and to prevent the
spread of communism.Isn't this stupidly unstrategic when Hitler was on the
horse? Almost few months after Hilferding's bold speech, Hitler took the
power from the president.
Neumann offers a counterfactual reading of history and epxlains why his
counterfactual could not have worked under specific circumstances, looking
at both the likelihood and limitations of a certain occurance (similar to
Gramsci, but he was not a Marxist strictly speaking, of course, although
leftish).What could have happened if social democrats had gone to a united
front with communists (asuming that they would both constitute a majority
in Reichtag, and oust Hitler)? N argues that this scenario although
perceivable was still unlikely. Social democrats did not want to sacrifice
the Weimar Constitution of which they were the architects, but they
sacrificed the whole Germany and Jew people.It was a serious tactical
mistake....Maybe, communists could have been more tactical too, and
sacrificied a litle bit of Stalinism...
Mine
