Capital & Class. - 1979. - Issue 7

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE DIVISION OF

THE WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT :

WORKERS AND POLITICAL PARTIES IN

THE FRANKFURT AREA 1929/1930

James Wickham

How could the working class movement split when confronted by the

obvious menace of Nazism? This paper argues that this split, represented

by the 'social fascism' line of the European communist parties in the late

1920s, cannot be adequately assessed by a political critique of the workers

parties or by a sociological analysis of the composition of the working

class . Instead it develops an historical analysis of the formal and informal

institutions of the German working class movement which breaks down

the artificial dichotomy between 'organisation' and 'spontaneity' . This

analysis reveals how the decline of informal class organisations in the

mid-1920s created a situation in which the 'social fascism' line could

become a self-fulfilling prophecy .

Increasingly British socialists are claiming that it is possible to learn

from the rise of Nazism over forty years ago how to fight the growing

threat of the National Front in England today . Obviously there are simi-

larities between the two situations : historically high unemployment,

capital re-structuring, political crisis within the bourgeoisie itself . However,

not the least of the differences is the fact that in Germany before 1933

there existed two mass parties which claimed to represent the German

working class-the KPD (Communists) and the SPD (Social Democrats) -

two parties which both refused to undertake any joint action against the

Nazis. This paper attempts to explain how this mutual antagonism came

about and how it could be sustained in the face of apparently obvious

evidence of its fatal consequences. This will involve taking as the object of

enquiry not the political parties as such, but the working class movement

itself.

Here we are immediately on uncharted territory, for while socialists

continually talk of 'the working class movement', it is by no means clear

2

CAPITAL & CLASS

what this actually is. Working class political history is usually written

either as a history of political institutions (parties, trade unions etc .), or as

the 'social history' of the bases of these formal institutions . Accordingly,

after a brief historical outline of the main developments of working class

politics during the Weimar Republic[1 ] which suggests the relevance of this

focus, the second part of the paper attempts to 'theorise' the concept of

the working class movement : subsequent sections examine political organi-

sation in one local area of Germany primarily in the period 1929/1930 .

The local focus is important, because it is only at this level that it is

possible to answer the questions which the stress on the working class

movement raises-namely the nature of the 'rank-and-file' situation in

which political organisation occurs .

1 . THE WORKERS, THE PARTIES AND THE MOVEMENT

The victory of Nazism was at the same time the defeat of both the

largest communist party and the largest social democratic party in Europe .

The SPD, founded in 1875, had been the largest party of pre-War social

democracy within the Second International, with more than 1 m . members

by 1914 and polling 34.7% of the vote in the 1912 elections to the largely

powerless Reichstag (parliament) (Hunt, 1970, p . 2) . Like most of the

other parties in the Second International, in August 1914 the SPD rallied

to the support of 'its' nation, but by 1917 a minority had split off to form

the USPD (Independent Social Democrats) on a platform of opposition to

the War; within the USPD the Spartakusbund, led by Rosa Luxemburg and

Karl Liebknecht, formed an explicitly revolutionary left-wing which in

December 1918 declared itself the German communist party and became

one of the founding sections of the Third International . Despite these

divisions, the period from November 1918 to October 1923 in Germany

can be characterised as one of 'working class offensive'-a period of mass

movements which repeatedly frontally challenged the power of the

bourgeois state and a period in which the strike rate reached never-to-be-

repeated levels .

The November Revolution which ended the War took the form of

Rate (councils or soviets) that were set up in almost every town . The

council's members were drawn from all three working class political parties

and they controlled the administration and supervised, even if they did not

replace, the authorities . The final suppression of the councils during 1919

was followed in 1920 by a right-wing military putsch, defeated by a uni-

versal general strike supported by all three parties-a strike which in the

Ruhr area culminated in an armed workers' rising . In 1921 there was

another workers' armed insurrection in Central Germany ; in mid-1923

another general strike forced the resignation of the right wing government

of Chancellor Cuno, at a time when arguably the KPD had the support of

the majority of German workers (Rosenberg, 1970, p . 137). Although the

autumn of the same year saw the first openly fascist attempt to seize state

power (Hitler's 'beer hall putsch' in Munich,)[2] at the same time the army

(with the toleration of the SPD leadership) forcibly deposed the state

governments of Saxony and Thuringia where a coalition between the KPD

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

3

and the local left-wing SPD was openly forming workers' militias .

The KPD's attempt to launch a 'German October' in autumn 1923

had been a complete fiasco,[3] but after a brief and equally disastrous

'ultra-left' period under the leadership of Ruth Fischer and Ernst Maslow

the party consolidated its strength . again, membership for example rising

from 95,000 in 1924 to 130,000 in 1928 and the share of the vote rising

from 9% in December 1924 to 10 .6% in 1928, both members and voters

being overwhelmingly working class . For its part the SPD, which since

1922 included the right wing of the now defunct USPD, was in govern-

ment from 1928 and had in the same year a total membership of over

0.8m. and a popular vote of 29 .8%. Although both members and voters

clearly included a large petty bourgeois element, it is clear that the

majority of them were also drawn from the working class . Purely in terms

of votes and members then, both KPD and SPD) remained major political

forces during the years of relative political and economic stability between

1924 and 1929 . However, the subsequent period was to bring not a re-

vitalised working class offensive, building on this apparently existing

strength, but working class defeat .

In the renewed political crisis which roughly coincided with the

world-wide Great Depression from 1929 onwards, the Nazi party

developed for the first time into a mass movement, its votes rising from

2 .6% in 1928 to a peak of 33 .9% in July 1932 (Lipset, 1963, p . 141), a

growth which was at minimum facilitated by the conflict between the SPD

and the KPD. The SPD, ejected from government in 1930, clung des-

perately to its policy of 'the lesser evil', tolerating increasingly reactionary

governments because of its fear of admitting the Nazis into the state and

essentially treated the Nazis and the Communists as equally dangerous ex-

tremists. Conversely the KPD, following the Comintern theory of 'social

fascism', declared that fighting the SPD was at least as important as

fighting the Nazis, and, just like the SPD, refused to countenance any

attempts by its members to co-operate with the rival party against the

fascist threat .

This brief chronological account highlights two important differences

between the period of working class offensive and the two subsequent

periods . Firstly, the period of working class offensive was one in which the

mass movements were always larger than the political parties involved in

them: the movements dominated the parties, and not vice versa. Secondly,

solely in the first period did what can only be called successful political

innovation occur-only in the period of mass movements was it also

possible for new organisations to form which subsequently became mass

parties . This rather obvious linkage suggests however a perhaps less obvious

conclusion : in order to explain in any situation the policies which parties

adopt and their members actually follow, it is necessary to examine not

the parties as such, nor their social basis, but the wider movement within

which the parties are located . This movement can after all be thought of

existing not just as the 'mass movements' of strikes and demonstrations,

but as that whole informal and usually uncharted political world within

which socialists talk, agitate and organise . Since this political world under-

goes changes just as important as either the policies of the parties . or the

4CAPITAL & CLASS

economic and social situation of their supporters, it is to specifying what

such an understanding of 'the working class movement' involves that we

now turn .

2 . THE WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT[4]

Any account of the final defeat of the German working class move-

ment by Nazism has to be able to explain the 'ultra-left' policy of the

KPD. This is not to place all the blame for Nazism's success on the com-

munists, as contemporary social democratic accounts tend to do, nor is it

to claim that the SPD leadership itself was particularly willing to co-oper-

ate with the KPD, even if only in a defensive alliance against the Nazis .

The analysis of the conjuncture of 1929/1930 starts with the problem of

the KPD simply because this party claimed to be able to lead both the

fight against fascism and the fight for socialism : any assessment of KPD

policy has to explain how, given the anti-communism of the SPD, the KPD

came to adopt a policy which in retrospect made achievement of its aims

impossible. As will become clear, formulating such an explanation raises

general problems of the analysis of working class politics which are hardly

confined to the problem of the KPD in the Weimar Republic ; at the same

time, if such an explanation involves recourse to concepts more familiar in

sociological than strictly marxist discourse, this is because one remarkable

weakness of conventional marxist theory is precisely its inability to

analyse the forms of working class politics in specific conjunctures .

Normal accounts of social fascism, like most accounts of any other

specific form of working class politics, usually rely on a varying mixture of

two in fact opposed arguments . On the one hand there is what might be

called an economistic approach, as for instance in studies in the 'mass

society' tradition (cf . Barbu, 1956 ; Kornhauser, 1960) . The mass un-

employment of the Great Depression is seen as dividing the working class

into two opposed camps of employed and unemployed workers, organised

politically in the SPD and the KPD respectively : politics are explained in

terms of an assumed economic situation, from which political action is

simply derived . In fact, a more accurate description of this argument is

that it is sociological, since it assumed that the employed and unemployed

formed two distinct social groups which different parties merely reflected .

The empirical problems with such an argument are clear : it is easy to

find counter-examples outside of Germany in the Depression where mass

unemployment led to political apathy rather than revolutionary politics, [5]

just as it is clear that within Germany the membership, let alone the elec-

torate, of the SPD and KPD were not simply identical with employed and

unemployed workers . "At a theoretical level, the sociological argument

assumes that 'the unemployed' can be treated as a given social group, and

further, as one which is automatically radical without the actual politics

of this radicalism having to be further examined . By contrast, what will be

called the 'political' argument operates the other way round, explaining

the politics of the KPD purely in terms of the decisions of the leadership

and treating the social basis of the party as unimportant (cf . Weber, 1969 ;

Bahne, 1976) . Consequently, it becomes impossible to ask why a particular

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

5

policy should actually have been accepted by the party membership, since

these are seen as carrying out whatever orders they receive from on high .

In practice most accounts use a mixture of these arguments, yet if

both arguments are theoretically untenable, one because it reduces politics

to the mere expression of social situation, the other because policies are

unrelated to the situation of their adherents, then merely adding the two

together will not help-it is necessary to change the very terms of the dis-

cussion within which the two positions are the opposing poles. Before out-

lining how this can be done, it will be useful to consider two influential

recent marxist works, each of which expresses with particular clarity one

of the two arguments-firstly Poulantzas' Fascism and Dictatorship, and

secondly Roth's Die andere'Arbeiterbewegung .

Poulantzas sees the policy of the KPD as one position within the

general line of the Comintern, a line which is for him characterised in its

entirety as an 'economistic deviation', that is to say, the assumption that

the advance of the productive forces ensures the ultimate victory of social-

ism, and closely linked to this, that capitalism can be reduced to a simple

contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat . Within this overall

perspective, the apparent opposites of the strategies of 'Popular Front' and

'Class Against Class' were simply right and left wing variants of a common

theme, the choice between which was in the last resort determined by the

situation of the class struggle in Russia itself.

Poulantzas' discussion of Comintern theory is important, because it

suggests how in many ways the conventional Trotskyist critique rests on

similar assumptions to the position it criticises . However, the restriction of

the analysis to the explicit pronouncements of the Comintern entails

certain problems. Firstly, Poulantzas assumes that the Comintern leaders'

actual policies were the same as what they were announced to be . Yet this

is untenable. For example, there is considerable (and long available)

evidence that the leaders of the Comintern, unlike perhaps the average

KPD militant, did not in fact consider revolution in Germany to be a

realistic possibility at the end of the Weimar Republic . Further, the

Russian determinants of KPD policy can hardly be reduced to a deviation

within Comintern theory . However much the KPD and the Comintern

might inveigh in public against the 'reactionary monopoly capitalists', in

fact for the foreign policy of the Russian state the main aim was the pre-

vention of a Franco-German alliance . Accordingly, these same reactionary

monopolists were potential if temporary allies since they were revanchist

and Francophobe, while the SPD was necessarily the chief enemy because

of its commitment to 'fulfilment' of the conditions of the Versailles

Treaty (cf. Weingartner, 1970, esp . p . 21 f, pp . 77ff.)

More seriously, since Poulantzas locates the origins of social fascism

in Russia, he, like conventional histories of the KPD, is unable to explain

why such a policy could have been supported, or at least passively

tolerated, by more than a quarter of a million KPD members : the 'Bolshev-

isation' of the KPD legitimates treating the party in isolation from the

working class of which it claimed to be a part . This weakness cannot be

overcome merely by stressing the effects of the SPD's participation in the

Great Coalition government of 1928-1930 and the linked increased

6

CAPITAL & CLASS

repression of communist opposition within the trade unions-both factors

which are claimed by Lehndorff to have pushed the KPD towards the

social fascism theory . Just because the social democratic and trade union

leaderships shifted rightwards, this does not by itself mean that KPD

members automatically had no realistic option but to treat these organis-

ations as inherently reactionary . It was after all an SPD minister who used

the army to smash the councils in 1919, it was an SPD minister who was

largely responsible for defeating the Ruhr rising in 1920, but none of this

made KPD members refuse to co-operate with members of the SPD at

local level, or refuse to work within the trade unions, yet by 1929 many

KPD members were prepared to do both .

Clearly, this problem cannot be tackled by arguments which concen-

trate solely on policies without considering the class to which such policies

were intended to appeal . It is this that makes, relevant the contribution of

recent German socialist historians who have examined the internal

structure of the working class.[6] Thus, in a pathbreaking and extremely

influential re-analysis of the course of German working . class history, Roth

has argued that the history of the class is the history of its continual

division by capital through the creation of a privileged, skilled and

reformist section-that section of the working class upon which all the

official organisations are based . By contrast, it is in the 'massed working

class', the unskilled and semi-skilled workers exposed to the direct

command of capital, workers who are often foreigners, always culturally

and politically unintegrated, despised by the conventional political or-

ganisations and neglected by traditional socialist history, that the real

revolutionary force of capitalism lies .

Roth's 'history from below' has certainly rescued from the contempt

and even ignorance of conventional historians the mass of unorganised,

unskilled and even apparently 'unpolitical' workers . However, as it stands,

the argument is in fact the mirror image of that of Poulantzas, for Roth

treats questions of political theory and strategy as the direct expression

of a particular social group-the division between reformist and revo-

lutionary politics merely reflects the division between privileged and un-

privileged workers .[7] Because Roth argues in this way, and because in his

rather cursory discussion of the final years of the Weimar Republic, he

treats the unemployed and the unskilled 'massified' workers as socially

identical, it would seem legitimate to take Roth as presenting a marxist

version of the automatic radicalism of the unemployed argument criti-

cised above .

The first problem with Roth's approach is that he assumes that only

the actions of the 'other working class movement' really matter.[8] Thus,

in a surprising convergence with the official Comintern analyses of the

final period of the Weimar Republic situation, Roth sees this as a time of

renewed mass offensive in which the mass of unskilled and unemployed

workers again move onto the attack . Yet this not only completely exagger-

ates the importance of the strikes and unemployed demonstrations which

did occur, but more importantly, it fails to notice their key feature,

namely their isolation from the bulk of the class .

Secondly, Roth has an inadequate theory of organisation .[9] A

SOC/AL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

7

revolutionary struggle, so it appears, is one which directly challenges the

power of capital, and in turn is defined as any struggle which takes place

outside the official organisations of the working class. Strikes which occur

outside the official trade unions are seen as automatically challenging the

division between economic and political conflict which such organisations

institutionalise-'wild' or 'unofficial' strikes are de facto 'revolutionary' .

This fetishism of 'spontaneity' operates to prevent any investigation of the

actual organisational form of these struggles-it is simply assumed that

because there were no paid bureaucracies and written records, such

struggles were spontaneous . While amongst German socialist historians,

Roth has been the first to pose the question of the political significance of

divisions within the working class, he does this by counterposing the elite

workers to the mass of workers, and, like an old-fashioned conservative

historian, he sees the masses as precisely a mass-unorganised, leaderless,

impulsive, elemental -the categories are the same, merely the moral evalu-

ation is reversed .

The arguments of both Roth and Poulantzas turn out then to operate

within the same conceptual space : the polarities of leaders and led, organi-

sation and spontaneity . Instead of adopting the conventional solution, the

eclectic combination of the two positions, it is necessary to break down

these dichotomies, and to focus on the organisation of the working class

movement itself. The organisation of the working class movement because,

against Roth, however elemental class struggle may appear, it always in-

volves organisation and at the same time is never the movement of all

members of a specified social category. The organisation of the working

class movement because, against Poulantzas, class struggle is never the

private property of specific institutions, not even of revolutionary parties .

Such an approach takes as its starting point neither policies nor social

bases, but the everyday activity of militants . Immediately, this makes clear

that organisation can hardly be treated as restricted to the activities of

institutions such as unions or political parties, for these are only the

formalised pinnacle of a potentially much wider network of activity .

Accordingly, the term working class movement must be taken as referring

to all resistance to capitalist domination and exploitation which is both

collective and explicit .

To make clear that what is involved is a social movement, it is useful

to distinguish between institutions and quasi-institutions . Institutions refer

to formal organisations with a codified organisational structure, a defined

membership and often paid officials . The institutions of the working class

movement are centrally then the political parties and the trade unions,

together with their ancillary organisations . Further, in Weimar Germany

these institutions also included the massive workers' sporting and singing

clubs, for these too were formal organisations (complete with their own

full-time officials) which were explicitly linked to working class political

positions . Quasi-institutions by contrast are less formalised and range from

shop stewards' committees and tenants' associations (some of which

become institutions in the full sense of the word), through organisations

such as factory delegate meetings to friendship networks and other

'informal' contacts. All of these involve political organisation -they are all

8

CAPITAL & CLASS

ways in which people come together to resist together .

Defining the working class movement in this way is important for two

reasons. Firstly, it overcomes many of the problems associated with the

notion of 'class consciousness' . Not only does it analyse locatable practices

rather than imputed ideas, it also overcomes the perennial problem that

'working class' political action never actually involves all members of 'the

working class', but nearly always also involves non-workers as well (cf .

Hindess, 1977) . Taking the working class movement, and not the working

class as such, as the object of analysis dispenses with the problematic

notion of class subjects . Secondly, this approach allows us to break down

the whole dichotomy between spontaneity and organisation, which is

largely the dubious legacy of leninism within marxist political theory . It

allows us to grasp the full political importance of Gramsci's claim that

spontaneity as such does not exist, and restore to their rightful place

everyday organisational activities without falling into theoretical

spontaneism . [10]

However, just as it is important to treat the working class movement

as wider than official institutions, it is equally important to delimit it . The

working class movement does not include forms of resistance which are

either individual, or more importantly, subcultural, nor is it the same as

the concept of 'proletarian public' developed by Negt and Kluge . Not only

do these authors essentially treat 'public' as an extension of 'conscious-

ness', but the concept is continually treated as including questions of life

style, so that the domain of the political is dramatically over-extended .

Forms of adaptation and resistance to capitalism such as either the tradi-

tional extended working class family or contemporary forms of youth

culture may well be actually more of an impediment to the smooth accu-

mulation of capital than a well integrated trade union movement (cf . Hall

and Jefferson, 1976), but this 'resistance' is largely 'unconscious' . It does

not have the distinguishing feature of a social movement, that of an or-

ganised practice orientated towards the achievement of a (however

limitedly) different state of affairs .

The working class movement, in contrast then to working class culture,

involves explicit resistance . As such, despite the rhetoric of its members, it

is not the class itself : the world of the working class movement is the

world of the rank and file militant attempting to mobilise support for

economic, political and ideological change . This stratum of militants is

variable in a number of ways . The crucial questions for a materialist

analysis of the origins and effects of social fascism concern not just the

number and social location of these militants, although this is obviously

important, but above all the organisational form of the working class

movement which they made up .

Firstly, it is necessary to examine the degree to which a unified

working class movement existed before the advent of the social fascism

line. This is not, it cannot be stressed enough, a question merely of the

degree of co-operation between the SPD and KPD at a party level, but of

the extent to which it was possible for party militants to co-operate with

each other across party boundaries . To the extent that this did occur, what

forms did this co-operation take and what was its quasi-institutional basis?

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

9

To what extent, in other words, were there quasi-institutions which

enabled such co-operation independent of the parties themselves? Further,

in order to gauge the effects of social fascism, it is necessary to know what

the policy of social fascism meant for these quasi-institutional links : the

division of the working class movement for which the policy of social

fascism is often blamed can only be said to have occurred if in fact it made

such 'informal' co-operation impossible .

Secondly, to what extent was the working class movement indepen-

dent of the political parties as such? To the extent that militants could

operate within a quasi-institutional area which was outside of the control

of any one political party, they would have had a power basis to which the

leadership would have had to respond . For example, if KPD oppositional-

ists had no other area of activity open to them apart from the KPD itself,

then if they were expelled they would be faced with the alternative of in-

activity or joining the SPD, for forming a new and competing n political

party would be an unrealistic possibility . In other words, to the extent

that the working class movement in its entirety was actually co-extensive

with the political parties, then opposition within them could be relatively

easily over-ridden by the party leaderships .

Thirdly, what was the relationship between the working class move-

ment and the different sections of the working class itself? Did above all

quasi-institutions exist which spanned the different economic divisions

within the class, such as between unskilled and skilled, between employed

and unemployed, even between men and women? To the extent that this

was the case, then revolutionary politics would have a realistic chance of

reaching wide areas of the class, but to the extent that this was not the

case, then such social divisions could also become political divisions and

revolutionary politics could be encapsulated in the ghetto of one particular

section of the class .

Obviously, to begin to tackle such questions in historical research in-

volves methodological as well as theoretical problems . After all, one reason

why the history of the working class is written so often as a history of in-

stitutions and of formal ideologies is that this is so much easier, even if the

unfortunate result is inevitably that official definitions of politics and or-

ganisation are thus accepted . Such problems are particularly acute in the

case of Weimar Germany, where the very strength of the working class

movement involved massively organised institutions, continually churning

out documentation of their own existence . As a result, the existence of the

movement itself, apart from its institutional pinnacles, is not nearly so

clear as in the British case, where the working class movement, because

weaker, was also less institutionalised, and so its existence was and is

paradoxically clearer .

Nonetheless, the conventional sources of local political history-above

all newspapers and police reports-can be used to reconstruct the form of

the working class movementin Weimar Germany . This will allow an

analysis of social fascism which goes beyond both the 'political' critique of

the KPD's explicit theory and the 'sociological' analysis of the party's

social basis . Assessing the strategy of social fascism within this perspective

involves gauging the strategy's effects not on 'working class consciousness',

10

CAPITAL & CLASS

but on the organisation of the working class movement itself . The KPD's

effectiveness against fascism then was the extent to which the party could

unify and extend the movement and in so doing overcome the divisions

which rationalisation and subsequent mass unemployment tended to

create; the KPD's effectiveness as a party of socialist transformation was

the extent to which it enabled political practices that aimed at the achieve-

ment of socialism to be hegemonic within the working class movement

itself .

As we shall now see, the KPD completely failed to achieve such ends .

Instead, it systematically exacerbated existing pressures towards the divi-

sion of the movement and hence towards the isolation of the party, even

though it was these same pressures-in interaction with the policies of

both the SPD and the KPD itself-on the organisation of the movement

which also explains the undoubted attractiveness and 'rationality' of social

fascism to many of the KPD's own adherents .

3. THE KPD AND THE PRE-CONDITIONS FOR DEFEAT

The essential pre-conditions of the KPD's policy of social fascism, and

hence of the party's ultimate defeat in 1933, were the changes that had

occurred within the working class movement before the onset of renewed

political and economic crisis . As this first section of the local study of the

Frankfurt area will now attempt to demonstrate,(11 ] between 1923 and

1929 theree were major alterations on the forms of organisation of the

movement itself, in the relationship between the movement as such and

the KPD and the SPD, and finally in the relationship between the move-

ment and the working class . That is to say, the first stage of an explanation

of social fascism lies not just in the evolution of the KPD's own strategy,

nor merely in economic changes as such, but in how these interacted to

produce changes within the working class movement itself .

Recent work on the KPD in the Weimar Republic, and in particular

the important study of unemployment and rationalisation by Eva-Cornelia

Schock, has tended to argue that the KPD was already both socially and

politically isolated by 1929 . This argument however has to be heavily

qualified. Thus it is clear for example that during this period the party

was by no means merely a party of unemployed workers : by 1927 not

only were a majority of members employed, but 62% were also trade

union members; in the party's Hessen-Frankfurt regional area indeed this

proportion stood above the average at 70% .(12] Like elsewhere in

Germany, during the period of relative stability in the Frankfurt area the

party had made considerable gains, in particular outside the city itself .

Thus both in adjacent Offenbach, a town based on small scale production

in the leather and metal industries, and in nearby Hanau, an entirely indus-

trial town centred around predominantly small-scale metal-working, the

KPD played an important role in local town politics and above all in local

trade union affairs, in Hanau controlling the local branch of the DMV (the

metalworkers' union), in Offenbach that of the leatherworkers' union .

In Frankfurt itself the KPD was much less influential than this in

trade union affairs, but this did not mean to say that it was politically

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

11

isolated . After the defeat of the mass movements of 1923, the KPD was

still able to initiate such popular mass campaigns as the solidarity move-

ment with the British General Strike in 1926 (a campaign which culmina-

ted in a meeting of 20,000 in the city's largest hall), the campaign for the

release of Sacco and Vanzetti, and above all the referendum movement for

the expropriation of the property of the old princely families . By 1928 the

SPD fraction in the city parliament was increasingly distancing itself from

the mayor's policy of liberal and progressivist municipal expansion, and it

was possible for the fraction chairman, Karl Kirchner, to be seriously con-

sidering the policy advocated by the left wing of his party-a local alliance

with the KPD.[13]

Furthermore, and not to be underestimated, although the SPD con-

trolled the 'cultural' organisations such as the workers' sporting clubs and

the workers' singing clubs, and indeed ensured that they received muni-

cipal subsidies, these were open to KPD members and definitely provided

an arena which could be regarded as the common meeting ground of the

mass demonstrations and the everyday club life of workers' recreational

associations then ensured that the 1,300 members which the Frankfurt

city KPD claimed in 1929 were hardly isolated in terms of their political

contacts .

However, this list of activities also indicates the potential weakness of

the KPD, and here Schock's thesis of the importance of changes in unem-

ployment after 1923 is borne out, even though it needs to be complemen-

ted somewhat . All these activities occur in organised arenas which are com-

pletely separated from immediate production : organised political commu-

nication between KPD and SPD members was located increasingly outside

the factories, while both within the factories and within the trade unions

the KPD was powerless . From 1918 through to 1923 the central arena of

Frankfurt working class politics had been the Betriebsrateversammlungen

factory delegate meetings)' where representatives from all the factories

joined significantly by representatives of the unemployed) had met in

public. These meetings had been the quasi-institutional basis of the series

of revolutionary and semi-revolutionary upsurges of the period forming,

for example, the core of the general strike called by the KPD in support of

the socialist governments of Saxony and Thuringia .

How this movement was defeated is important for later developments :

the SPD got the strike called off by mobilising the official shop stewards

of the metalworkers' union against the unofficial factory delegate meeting .

[14] After this, such meetings never recurred . The organisational change

that occured in the period of stabilisation was the 'officialisation' of

factory organisation : after the defeat of 1923, organised communication

between factories occured solely through the trade unions, and in parallel

to this, the locus of wage negotiations moved 'upwards' into the hands of

full-time trade union officials .

One crucial precondition for this process was the changed economic

situation in the metal industry, the key industry in the city . Up until 1923

the industry had been in export led boom-gaining easy foreign orders,

employers continually expanded production on a largely quantitative basis,

and faced with the extreme shortage of skilled labour, tolerated a high

12

CAPITAL & CLASS

degree of informal shop floor control over immediate production and

granted wage demands relatively easily . The boom in the metal industry

also affected other industries : with a general labour shortage, the wages

policy (or lack of it) in the metal industry was a source of continual ten-

sion within the employers' organisations as the metalworkers became wage

leaders in the area and individual metal firms granted wage demands rather

than face loss of orders.

Further, the boom meant not only low unemployment and a contin-

ual demand for skilled workers, it also enabled a high degree of mobility,

in particular of skilled workers, between the factories of the area . Young

workers who had just finished their apprenticeship could move from one

factory to another to gain greater experience in their trade and better

wages, political militants dismissed from one factory could be sure of

getting another job elsewhere almost immediately . In other words, on the

basis of their non-factory specific skills and the full employment, the

metalworkers of Frankfurt were independent of any one particular em-

ployer, and this was the pre-condition for the strong factory-based or-

ganisation of that period .[15]

From late 1923 onwards the situation changed dramatically. Employ-

ment collapsed at the end of the year, revived slightly in 1924/1925 and

after another major relapse, revived more strongly for a brief period for

most of 1928 . Although in both periods of revival there was full time

working (i .e . a 54 hour week), and in 1928 even some over-time was being

worked, the situation remained qualitatively different to that of the pre-

vious period . Firstly, and easiest to document, there is the very extent of

unemployment which, as Schock rightly argues, now clearly became a

threat for all workers in the industry . According to the local office of the

metalworkers' union (the DMV), in December 1925 over 7,000 metal-

workers were dismissed, a further 2,000 laid off temporarily ; in 1926 there

were 10,000 workers less employed in the local metal industry, which

would have meant that employment in the industry had effectively been

halved! Although as the table below shows, these claims were slightly

exaggerated, employment did clearly fluctuate dramatically . Even more

important, both the fluctuation and the overall decline in jobs were largest

in the two sectors where both wage militancy and trade union organisation

had previously been strongest, namely machine-building and cars .

Secondly, as the result of increased competition and concentration

within the industry, there was the closure of a series of smaller factories,

such as the Veisawerke, closed in March 1927 after the firm had been

taken over by Siemens and production moved to Berlin . Thirdly, there is

of course rationalisation within production itself . Although it is impossible

to make any definite overall generalisation about the extent and effects of

rationalisation within so variegated a metal industry as that of Frankfurt

at this period, the DMV at least complained that women were now re-

placing men on many jobs (prima facie evidence of 'deskilling') and that

many factories were now employing women for the first time .

Before however the consequences of these economic changes can be

seen, it is necessary to examine also the role of the political parties, in

particular the USPD and KPD . The situation of full employment combined

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

13

Employment in the Frankfurt Metal Industry 1925-1932

Source: calculated from Industr-und Handelskammer

Frankfurt a.m ., Jahresberichte (relevant years) . In

brackets : absolute figures for 1925 .

with the continuing political crisis and (towards 1923) accelerating in-

flation provided the basis for important political effects of the strong

factory organisation within the metal industry . Behind the delegate

meetings of the factory workers stood the factory work-forces as an or-

ganised political force . Thus it is striking that up to 1923 (but not after-

wards) the mass demonstrations always took the form of the workers

leaving their factories early and marching en bloc to a central meeting

place. Workers who were employed in the metal industry at the time still

today stress (perhaps with some exaggeration) the unity and the resulting

political power of the work-forces : employers for example did not dare to

take any reprisals for political strikes .

Although this rank-and-file strength was a constant of the period from

the end of the War until October 1923, it was accompanied by decisive

shifts in political allegiances . From about 1917 onwards the UPSD was

clearly the leading political force amongst the shop stewards of the indus-

try : it was on the basis of contacts between them for example that the

party organised the initital seizure of local political power in November

1918 (cf. Sender, 1940, pp . 99ff, Lucas, 1969, pp . 16ff). Some measure of

the importance of the metalworkers for the USPD is indicated by the fact

that in the local elections of March 1919 fully 35 of the party's 95 can-

didates were metalworkers, a proportion never reached subsequently by

the KPD, let alone the SPD . During 1919 the local USPD consolidated its

hold in the DMV when its candidates won all posts in local union elections,

despite a vicious campaign by the SPD complete with allegations of ballot-

rigging . However, when the USPD split in 1921, all the leading local DMV

functionaries rejoined the SPD, and the KPD was never able to subsequently

seriously challenge the SPD's control of the union apparatus . While in the

period of inflation this made effectively no difference to the power of the

factory workforces who were able to force the union into continual mili-

tant wage bargaining, this shift did provide the basis for the defeat of 1923 .

(1925 = 100)

Electro-

Technical

Machine

Building

Autos, Type-

writers

Metal

Products Total

100 100 100 100100

1925 (6,784) (7,717) (7,754)(6,134) (28,389)

1926 83.9 62.9 72.3 61.6 70.4

1927 84.4 74 .2 74.0 81 .276.2

1928 90.5 90.4 80.0 83.486.1

1929 100.0 74 .6 78 .1 121 .2 91 .8

1930 96 .0 77.2 56.2 97.2 80.9

1931 78.1 41 .1 40.9 75.963.0

1932 60 .6 26 .8 53.4 68 .051 .0

14

CAPITAL & CLASS

As we have seen, the immediate isolation of the KPD in October 1923

occurred through the SPD pitting the official trade union organisation

against the directly elected factory delegates, a move which immediately

underlined the division between employed and unemployed since, while

the latter were able to participate in the central factory delegate meetings,

they had of course no formal or informal influence on the shop stewards

themselves . After the defeat, many party members in Frankfurt, as else-

where in Germany, responded to this immediate political isolation by

moving to positions which were close to those of five years later . Many left

the unions in disgust, some of them now(!) began secretly to gather

weapons, and in general it is clear that the new `left-wing' leadership of

Ruth Fischer and Ernst Maslow had the support of many at least of the

party's members (cf . Abendroth, 1976, pp . 61ff) . Indeed, it took the inter-

vention of the Comintern and its effective deposition of the 'ultra-left'

leadership to change the party's policies (Flechtheim, 1968, pp . 228ff) .

In one way this episode shows that the Comintern by itself can hardly

be held solely responsible for every ultra-left position within the KPD, for

clearly the policy was this time adopted against the Comintern's wishes.

However, unlike after 1929, there was no way in which the left-turn could

be construed as successful by either local militants or party leaders-mem-

bership and votes slumped disastrously ; the party's involvement in mass

actions of any sort became non-existent . Quite probably this setback by

itself would have ultimately brought about a change within the KPD even

without the intervention of the Comintern .

It is equally clear that this brief left-turn exacerbated the weakness of

the KPD which had shown itself in 1923 : its vulnerability to counter-

attack by the official union organisation within the factories themselves,

resulting from the party's lack of influence within the unions at least at

local level . The situation in 1924 however was particularly disastrous, for

now the rejection of the union by many KPD members went with an eco-

nomic slump which by itself meant a decline in trade union membership .

Significantly, decline in trade union membership was most pronounced

within the union of the metalworkers : in Frankfurt DMV membership had

reached an all-time peak of over 29,000 in 1922, falling by the end of

1923 to 14,600 and by the end of 1924 to a low of 10,600 : while in 1922

over 40% of all Frankfurt trade unionists had been in the DMV, by 1924

this proportion had fallen to nearly 18% .

These economic and political processes together destroyed the metal

industry as a basis for the KPD . The new instability of employment plus

the SPD control over the union machinery together ensured that quasi-

institutions such as the factory delegate meetings could no longer exist,

and meetings of shop stewards now took place entirely on the instigation

of the union leadership . While this much is clear, it also appears that move-

ment of workers between the factories, in particular movement of young

skilled wokers, also declined, and this, so oral evidence suggests, meant

that politically based contacts between the factories through the circu-

lation of individual militants also diminished . As far as the sphere of im-

mediate production was concerned then, militants could now operate

within the union or within the factory based organisations of their party

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

15

(e.g . the factory cells of the KPD), but nowhere else . Further, should

militants be dismissed, they now were unlikely to be 'replaced' by other

militants .

Take for example the situation in the Adlerwerke, the largest metal

factory in the city with a militant tradition dating back at least to the

major metal strike of 1912 . In 1921 the factory had been 'purged' of com-

munist cadres after the very strength of the party within the factory had

enabled the party to call a partial strike in solidarity with the 'March up-

rising' ; while these workers could not return to Adler, they were to some

extent replaced by other communists. When however in August 1924 the

firm announced plans to lay off 1,500 workers a communist meeting

within the factory was attended by only 100 and the dismissals proceeded

without any opposition and indeed with the explicit agreement of the

unions and the official Betriebsrat (factory council) members . Although in

1929 the factory was, at least in its car production section, the best trade

union organised car plant in Germany with 97 .3% of the car workforce

trade union members, there is no evidence of any effective KPD activity in

the factory after 1924. The example of Adler illustrates a tendency notice-

able within the KPD in the whole of Germany, and suggested in the Hessen-

Frankfurt region by the relative importance of Offenbach and Hanau for

the party's trade union work : even though the party regained ground

amongst employed workers, its basis now shifted to the smaller factories .

These changes also affected the nature of trade union organisation . In

the metal industry as a whole during the period of stability there were in

the Frankfurt area only a few minor strikes in smaller factories . Certainly

in 1929 There was a general increase in trade union activity, and not just

in the metal industry-an official strike of the municipal workers, militant

wage movements in the railways and in the chemical industry . However,

these all occurred within the framework of the official trade union

organisation : thus although the DMV regional committee faced consider-

able opposition to its acceptance of a final arbitration offer in 1929 (the

offer being itself an improvement on the employers' original proposals),

this opposition was enacted solely within DMV meetings . The trade union,

in other words, became the only basis for 'economic' conflict .

During the period of stabilisation then, the decisive changes within the

working class movement were not in the number of militants as such, but

in the form of the movement . Firstly, its organisational basis shifted-

away from the unofficial quasi-institutions, based largely on the factory

workforces of the metal industry, and into the official institutions, the

trade unions, the political parties and the sporting and singing clubs .

Within this new context KPD and SPD members were still united in the

trade unions and the cultural associations, but links between them at a

quasi-institutional level could only remain at the most informal level of all,

namely friendship and family connections . This meant, secondly, changes

in the relationship between the movement and the political parties, for

now political activity was focussed on the parties, on whose policies the

unity of the movement now depended . Since the 'Bolshevisation' of the

KPD meant that party theory increasingly saw the force for revolutionary

change as solely the party, this was a change which the party was utterly

16

CAPITAL & CLASS

unable to theorise, for the question of mass influence was now posed in

terms of the party on the one hand, the class on the other . Thirdly, the

officialisation of the movement meant that now almost the only linkage

between it and the unskilled, 'lower' sections of the class itself was again

solely through the parties, since both the trade unions and the cultural

organisations were predominantly organisations of skilled workers .

These three factors together were the essential preconditions of the

social fascism line, for they made it both an extremely credible and an

extremely disastrous response to certain actions of the SPD . As the SPD

leadership moved increasingly to the right after its entry into government

in 1928 (Lehndorff, 1975, pp . 90ff), the results would be very different to

similar moves before 1923, for now for the KPD member the only area

which was not controlled by the reformists could well appear to be the

KPD itself. At the end of the period of stabilisation, and unlike earlier,

what appeared as openly reactionary measures of the SPD leadership

could be interpreted as proving the completely reactionary nature of re-

formism as a whole . The consequence was clear: complete break with the

reformists, whether in their party, their cultural organisations, their trade

unions . Yet given the nonexistence of quasi-institutions which spanned

most of the class, the social fascism line would be disastrous for the KPD,

for this interpretation involved a flight back into the party which now

could only divide the working class movement and ghettoise the party

amongst the unemployed .

4. SOCIAL FASCISM-THE SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

The previous section has shown how by 1929 the quasi-institutional

elements of the working class movement had largely disappeared . The con-

sequence of this organisational shift would be decisive in the changed con-

juncture of 1929 : once the unity of the movement had become a unity

only of institutions, then this unity depended solely on the policies of the

existing party leaderships . In other words, the pre-conditions of the social

fascism line do not by themselves explain the actions of the KPD or the

situation after 1929, but merely set the stage-a different policy by the

KPD would certainly have had very different consequences . However, once

the KPD had declared its main enemy to be the SPD itself, then in 1929

this necessarily destroyed the unity of the movement, since there was now

no quasi-institutional arena where militants could co-operate .

How this division occurred is shown in this section by an examin-

ation of the KPD's attempts to organise the unemployed in Berlin and

above all in Frankfurt itself . The importance of existing organisations is

then indicated by the contrast with nearby Offenbach, where a rather

different (and in national terms, rather unusual) local situation enabled the

opposition within the KPD to take over the existing party apparatus and

to organise locally on the basis of policies which strengthened rather than

weakened the overall movement . Conversely, the destruction 'of quasi-

institutions in Frankfurt itself explains the defeat of the unusually strong

left within the city's SPD, for within the SPD too, opposition now could

only have an institutional (and not a quasi-institutional) basis. In other

~ bCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

17

words, in 1929 the situation was such that the policies of the existing

parties were crucial : writers such as Poulantzas are correct to analyse these

in detail, but what they fail to see is why from 1929 onwards these

policies should be so unusually decisive .

The actual strategy of 'class against class' and the accompanying

theory of social fascism was finally adopted by the KPD at its 12th

Congress in June 1929, although the origins of the new line can be traced

back to Comintern meetings in 1928 .[16] The Congress declared the exis-

tence of a period of revolutionary upswing in which all non-revolutionary

forces formed a solid front of reaction, externally against the Soviet Union,

internally against the working class . Social democracy was accordingly de-

fined as 'social fascist', as in no way progressive, as merely an organ re

presenting solely the interests of the bourgeoisie against the increasingly

revolutionary working class.[ 171

For the KPD this new left turn was intended to make the party

doubly independent of reformism : organisationally independent, in that

now new 'rank-and-file' organisations were to allow the party to take the

initiative outside the official reformist institutions, and socially indepen-

dent in that these organisations were to be based on layers of the working

class-the unorganised and above all the unemployed-which the refor-

mists had ignored. It is clear that such a strategy was given much credi-

bility by the actions of the SPD itself: entering the Grand Coalition in late

June 1928, the SPD became part of a government which then introduced

the very measures of naval rearmament the party had campaigned against

in the previous election (cf. Caspar, 1959, pp . 78ff) . The SPD's acceptance

of responsibility for the Weimar State, and in particular its involvement in

government at national and local level, meant that it was forced to justify

measures which were widely unpopular with many of its own membership .

The politics of the KPD in this period therefore cannot be written off

as mere mindless agitation, as the conventional historiography of the

Weimar Republic usually does, for its slogans had considerable popular

resonance . The problem however was that the theory and strategy of social

fascism meant that the party organised in such a way as to make 'social

fascism' into a self-fulfilling prophecy-the SPD was driven further to the

right but at the same time the KPD became condemned to a radicalism

that was ineffectual and isolated, above all because in the situation of

1929 a frontal onslaught on the SPD meant a division of the working class

movement, and not merely a conflict between political parties .

These processes first became clear in the May riots in Berlin in 1929.

The KPD attempted to set up rank-and-file committees as the basis of 're-

volutionary' demonstrations which would be carried out separately from

those of the SPD and the trade unions and if necessary in defiance of any

police bans . When Zorgiebel, the SPD police president of Berlin, did ban

the KPD May Day demonstrations,[18] this must have confirmed for

many the correctness of the theory of social fascism-the SPD could

hardly have chosen a better way of showing how far it had come from the

days before 1914 when it had campaigned for the right to strike and

demonstrate on May Day (cf. Anderson, 1948, pp . 184ff) .

On May 1, 1929 there was street fighting between communists and

18

CAPITAL & CLASS

the police in Berlin : it was not until May 4 that the police were again in

full control of Neukoln and Wedding, the two most working class areas of

the city . The extent of popular support for the KPD is further suggested

by the form of the demonstrations-street barricades and actions such as

the extinguishing of the street lights required at least the passive support

of much of the local population . Nor were the activists mere young

'rowdies' as the SPD press tried to claim : of the 1,228(!) arrests made by

the police, 320 were under 20, but 599 between 20 and 30 and 147 over

60 .

The problem the KPD faced was not so much lack of immediate

support as the inability to organise this support . On the one hand the

party was unable to co-ordinate the demonstrations, for the illegal organi-

sation of the party did not function at all and the courier service between

the areas collapsed ; on the other hand, sections of the party acted as if

they were in an immediately revolutionary situation, and were only

brought under control again by the Berlin leadership with considerable

difficulty . Further, the extent to which the KPD's new factory organisa-

tions were ineffective is shown by the complete failure of the general

strike on May Day itself, and by the mere 14,000 who followed the call

for solidarity strikes on the next day . The nature of this combination of

popular support and political ineffectivity becomes clearer when we

examine the unemployed riots in Frankfurt 6 months later .

In Frankfurt, as elsewhere in Germany, unemployment was rising

rapidly towards the end of 1929. Indeed, unemployment in the city was

above the national average, in particular because of the weakness of the

metal industry . During November dismissals continued in the chemical and

in the car factories, one metal factory closed completely, so that by the

new year, of the total population of the city, roughly every 12th person

was unemployed. Particularly important was the rising number of unem-

ployed who, having exhausted their insurance payments, depended solely

on city welfare : within the city itself this rose from only 2,000 in Septem-

ber to over 9,000 in January 1930 .

It was in this situation that the KPD increased its attempt to organise

the unemployed. In the local elections in November 1929 both the KPD

and the NSDAP had gained seats, while the SPD had lost .[19] In the first

meeting of the new city parliament the KPD put forward an emergency

motion calling for a Winterbeihilfe-an extra welfare payment-of 50RM

for all unemployed, the costs to be covered by extra taxes on high income

groups . Although such motions can easily be dismissed as purely agitation-

al,[201 all speakers in the city parliament accepted the need for some

form of special help for the unemployed ; further, not only did the existing

city budget include funds for such extra welfare payments, but in the pre-

vious year a Winterbeihilfe of 50RM had in fact been paid to the

unemployed .

Within the city parliament the KPD motion was passed on December

10 with the votes of the KPD, the SPD and the NSDAP fractions . Outside

the building several thousand communist supporters demonstrated,

shouting 'we want work and bread, or we'll beat you dead' . For the KPD

it was the demonstration which had forced the issue, and in Berlin Die

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

19

Rote Fahne reported jubilantly, `communists force winter aid'. However

the town council, with whom the decision to actually make the payments

rested, was not so easily persuaded . Facing an increasing and unplanned

budget deficit in the city's finances, it rejected the KPD's proposals and

suggested that Winterbeihilfe should be limited to only 10RM for each un-

employed. The result was a direct confrontation with the KPD, which was

now campaigning in other towns for increased welfare in the same way

that it was in Frankfurt .

On Tuesday December 17 the city parliament met to discuss the issue

again and the KPD now stepped up its campaign . The local KPD news-

paper, Die Arbeiterzeitung, accused the SPD police president Steinberg of

attempting to provoke 'a bloodbath' and KPD leaflets announced 'the

street belongs to us, we won't give way till our demands are met' . In the

afternoon the KPD led a march of several thousand through the streets and

until late into the evening the police were continually in action as groups

of demonstrators tried to force their way into the Romerberg (the main

square in front of the town hall), others pushed in windows in the Zeil

(the main shopping street of the city) and police cars were bombarded

with stones and several times fired on . During the Christmas week the

Frankfurt police repeatedly dispersed crowds which appeared to be pre-

paring to break the complete ban imposed on all KPD open-air meetings.

As far as parliamentary politics are concerned, the conflict ended with

the SPD accepting that some extra benefits would be paid out at the cost

of further reductions in expenditures, such as on a new swimming pool,

for which the party had earlier campaigned and which would have pri-

marily benefitted the working class population . That is to say, the KPD

was unable to bring even sections of the SPD away from their policy of

government responsibility at all costs. As far as the politics of the street

are concerned, the KPD again proved unable to mobilise and organise more

than a small section of the unemployed . Although the increase in unem-

ployment in Frankfurt in the autumn of 1929 came in particular from the

chemical and above all the metal industry, not a single metal or chemical

worker was amongst those arrested during the demonstrations .

Further, instead of the mass marches of the factory workforces which

had characterised the period up to 1923, or the organised popular demon-

strations of the period of stability, the demonstrations themselves were a

series of isolated clashes with the police, even if they culminated in a semi-

insurrectionary situation in the Altstadt, the picturesque slum area in the

centre of the city. The Altstadt itself was no solidly proletarian area, but

included both a substantial criminalised population and a large proportion

of traditional petty bourgeois (small shopkeepers, traders and self-em-

ployed craftsmen), so that the demonstrations were thus physically iso-

lated from the core working class housing areas in the industrial parts of

the city .[21 ] Unlike the demonstrations of the two previous periods then,

the riots of 1929/1930 were at most the temporary organisation of one

isolated section of the working class .

It is of course easy to argue that all this was the inevitable conse-

quence of mass unemployment, but such an argument not only makes

politics the automatic result of a given 'social situation' in the manner

20

CAPITAL & CLASS

criticised earlier, it can conveniently be challenged by examining the case

of nearby Offenbach . Under the leadership of Heinrich Galm, the Offen-

bach KPD had been one of the key bases of the right-wing opposition

within the party which had opposed the party's new ultra left line,[221

and Offenbach was one of the few areas where the new 'right wing' KPO

was able to win over the existing local KPD party organisation . One reason

for this is clear : until 1928 the strength of the KPD in Offenbach, in com-

plete contrast to the situation in Frankfurt, had been its detailed work in

local trade union and communal affairs, and it is clear that Galm and his

supporters were not prepared to see this jeopardized .[231

Significantly, the KPO's campaign for the local elections of 1929

stressed its local commitment and competence : local issues, such as an

ongoing controversy with the city of Frankfurt over the gas supply, were

an integral part of its propaganda, and Galm's good humoured speeches,

replete with local jokes, indicated his stature as a successful local poli-

tician . At the same time, the KPO attempted to utilise and expand the exis-

ting institutions of the working class movement, organising successful

election meetings for members of the leather workers' union and for the

local unemployed . The election results confirmed the value of this

approach: while the KPD lost three seats, the KPO gained five, and now

had an 11 strong fraction in the Offenbach city parliament .

Work amongst the unemployed was one of the main activities of the

KPO in 1929/1930 . However, its agitation was utterly different in style

to that of the KPD, a typical KPO unemployed meeting being attended

largely by older workers with their wives and children . Like the KPD, the

KPO campaigned for Winterbeihilfe in December 1929, calling meetings

attended by up to 1,000 people . Certainly, these demonstrations them-

selves do suggest how the different unemployed agitation of the KPD

could also become successful. For example, on December 12, 1929 the

KPO held an unemployed demonstration attended by about 800 despite

pouring rain . After singing the "Internationale", the demonstrators

marched through the city-as they passed the town hall they shouted the

KPD slogan "give us work and bread or we'll beat you dead" and the

trade union office was greeted with boos and groans .

However, and this is decisive, at the same time as the demonstration

Galm was negotiating directly with the mayor on behalf of the unem-

ployed. The aim of the KPO unemployed organisation was both to force

real concessions and on this basis precisely to organise the unemployed .

Thus, while the KPD agitation merely stressed what the unemployed

already knew-the bleakness of their situation-the KPO attempted to

show that through organisation real if limited gains could be achieved .[241

Further, the KPO utilised its strong local position to put pressure on

the SPD. Although immediately after May 1 1929 the KPO in Offenbach

had called protest meetings against what it too called 'Zorgeibel's blood-

bath' in Berlin, it never rejected negotiations with the SPD . Thus after the

November elections the KPO attempted to persuade the SPD that the two

parties should form a 'red majority' in the city parliament . On January 15

a public meeting of over 1,200 was called by the KPO on this slogan .

Although the SPD at the last minute refused to send a speaker, Galm con-

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

21

tinued to argue that only a local alliance with the SPD could safeguard the

city's financial autonomy and so prevent cuts in social welfare .

The KPO's strategy in Offenbach stands then in complete contrast to

that of the KPD in Frankfurt . While the KPD isolated its own supporters

and would not organise them effectively even in this isolation, the KPO

was continually concerned to strengthen and move leftwards the working

class movement as a whole . This is shown not only in its attempt to com-

pel the SPD to resist (instead of passively accepting) the cuts in social

welfare, but more importantly, in its attempts both to utilise existing

working class institutions and to create new ones-institutions which

could form the basis of a proletarian public. Within one local area then, a

different politics to those of the KPD were able to some extent to prevent

unemployment from dividing the working class movement . However, in

Frankfurt itself, the left within the SPD was unable to make a similar

breakthrough, despite apparent favourable conditions.

As elsewhere in Germany, in Frankfurt the decisive issue for the left

in the SPD was the extent to which the party should form coalitions with

bourgeois parties. In preparation for the party's congress in Magdeburg

which debated the issue in May 1929 (cf . Hunt, 1970, pp. 228ff; Drechsler,

1965, pp. 40ff), the Frankfurt local organisation had passed a motion

critical of the coalition policy and two of its three delegates were opposed

to coalition . Significantly, while the bulk of the SPD Frankfurt leadership

were full-time trade union or party officials, these delegates-Karl Beul

and Andreas Portune-were shop stewards in the DMV and had a

personal history which went back to activity in the USPD and the factory

committees of the Revolution of 1918 .[25] However, unlike ten years

earlier, these same leaders were now unable to develop any real mass basis .

For people such as Portune and Beul, the SPD's election losses in 1929

were the deserved result of coalition with bourgeois parties in government,

and they proceeded to call a series of party membership meetings to make

their point. The extent of discontent within the party in early 1930 is

shown by the fact that Portune's motion that the SPD immediately leave

the coalition was finally only defeated by 112 to 136 votes . Indeed, the

subsequent attempt of the Bezirk (regional) party organisation to counter

the growing strength of the Frankfurt left at first misfired, cementing the

emerging alliance between the marxist left and other elements within the

local party leadership critical of party policy .

Determined to break the left's editorial control of the local party

newspaper, without any warning the regional press commission dismissed

Hans Marckwald, a left-wing member of the editorial committee. This was

clearly perceived by nearly all the Frankfurt SPD as an unwarranted step,

and their opposition was made particularly vehement by the fact that

under the shock of his dismissal, Marckwald and his wife attempted joint

suicide. It was Kirchner himself who now led the attack on the regional

secretary, Paul Rohle, whom he accused of engineering Marckwald's dis-

missal . When Rohle appeared at a membership meeting of the Frankfurt

party he was hardly able to make himself heard, Kirchner demanded his

resignation, and a motion along these lines proposed by Portune was

passed by an overwhelming majority .

22

CAPITAL & CLASS

Nonetheless, although the call for Rohle's dismissal was confirmed at

the quarterly delegate meeting of the Frankfurt party in June 1930, Rohle

was able to ignore the storm in the local organisation and Marckwald re-

mained dismissed. Indeed, these events marked the peak of the left's in-

fluence within the Frankfurt party. When the left finally broke with the

SPD to form the new Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD), in-

dividuals such as Marckwald and Portune, despite their undoubted popu-

larity within the local organisation, were joined by less than 400 of the

party's Frankfurt members and were completely unable to even begin to

attract to their new organisation important moderate critics of the party's

policy such as Kirchner . By the end of 1931 in the Hessen-Nassau region as

a whole, less than 400 SPD members had resigned to join the SAPD, and

the new party was politically and organisationally isolated . It was a

dramatic contrast to the founding of the USPD twelve years earlier .

What is decisive about the defeat of the SPD left is the arena within

which it occurred, namely solely within the SPD itself . Indeed, the case of

Portune is almost exemplary . Portune always stressed that he would

remain, in his terms, a member of the working class, and this meant that

even when elected to the Reichstag on the SPD list in 1930 he attempted

to continue in his occupation of metalworker . And this demonstrative

commitment to his origins was undoubtedly popular-it was indeed one

of the reasons for his drawing power as the SPD's most popular local

speaker in the election campaign of 1930 . However, Portune was com-

pletely unable to utilise this support in any organised fashion, just as he

was unable to use his position within the local DMV to develop an inde-

pendent power base . Once the working class movement had become iden-

tical with the official institutions with which it is usually identified, the

chances for political innovation were slim indeed .

5. THE KPD AND THE RGO STRATEGY : THE ISOLATION OF

RADICALISM

So far we have seen that the crucial feature of the conjuncture of

1929/1930 was that the politics of the KPD and the SPD operated to-

gether to divide the working class movement. This was possible because in

the previous period the movement had already become a movement of

institutions without any developed quasi-institutional sub-structure . It

was this combination of a specific set of policies of the parties and a

specific organisational form of the movement that ensured the ineffective-

ness both of the KPD's agitation amongst the unemployed and of the

attempts of the SPD left to challenge the coalition policy of their own

party .

However, the official institutions of the working class movement in-

cluded not simply the political parties, but also of course the trade unions

to which until 1929 most employed communists belonged. It is here that

the new strategy of the KPD was most disastrous, because the new line of

the RGO (Revolutionare Gewerkschaftsopposition) operated to confirm

the SPD's definition of the communists as dividers and wreckers. As such

the RGO strategy is a vital part of the defeat of the left within the SPD it-

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

23

self : while the SPD left called for a working class mobilisation against the

government, and this implied at least limited co-operation with the KPD,

the RGO strategy made such co-operation effectively impossible (quite

apart from the fact that the theory of social fascism defined the SPD left

wingers as the most dangerous social fascists of all) (Lehndorff, 1975, pp .

86f) .

Central to the KPD's analysis of the role of the official trade unions

was the assumption that, just like the SPD, the German trade union

bureaucracy had now become merely an instrument of repression . Accor-

dingly, instead of (as previously) attempting to compel the trade union

leadership to support rank-and-file demands, the new strategy aimed at

creating new mass organisations based primarily on workers who were un-

skilled and not trade union members .[26] Given what was seen as the

complete integration of the trade unions into capitalism, it followed that

the RGO would have to organise economic struggles independently of the

trade unions ; such struggles would automatically become political struggles,

and the form of struggle would be the political mass strike. Hence the

necessity of opposing revolutionary candidates to the official trade union

candidates in the works council elections, hence too the necessity of or-

ganising struggles under elected strike leaderships and of ignoring the

official trade union institutions . [271 As we shall now see, this strategy

meant that the KPD now lost much of its traditional support in the skilled

and trade union organised sections of the working class, while it could

only appeal to the unorganised and to the least privileged amongst

employed workers at the cost of completely isolating them from the rest

of the working class movement .

Within the Frankfurt area there was one factory where if anywhere

the RGO strategy should have been successful, namely the works of the

firm of Adam Opel in the town of Russelsheim to the West of the city . In

complete contrast to the small-scale factories and the skilled workers of

Offenbach and Hanau to the East, and to the variegated metal industry of

Frankfurt itself, Opel had almost from its beginning in 1862 been based on

mass production techniques . Always producing mass consumption goods,

first sewing machines, then bicycles, during the 1920s Opel became the

largest car factory in Germany.[28]

During the Weimar period Opel's strategy was in sharp distinction to

the rest of the German car industry . While during the inflation period the

other car firms simply expanded production on the basis of existing ma-

chinery, and then campaigned vehemently for tariff protection, Opel

orientated towards the new possibilities of mass production through a

policy of continual investment and innovation. In 1923 one of the first

assembly lines in Europe was installed,[29] enabling the introduction of

the 'Laubfrosch', the first German mass produced car . A smaller, random

example of innovation : in 1928 new railway bays were built so that cars

could be loaded direct from the assembly line and test track onto the rail-

way wagons, cutting the number of workers involved from 56 to 25 and

the time per car from 20 minutes to 4 (Seherr-Thoss 1974, p . 152) .

By 1928, Opel employed nearly 10% of all workers in the German car

industry and was producing 42,000 cars a year.[30] Precisely because

24

CAPITAL & CLASS

Russelsheim was the most advanced car factory in Germany, perhaps in

Europe, in 1928/1929 Opel was bought by General Motors (Sloan, 1964,

pp . 197, 332-327) . More than European manufacturers, more even than

Opel itself, American firms were able to finance and market the new mass

consumption goods on the hitherto unprecedented scale towards which

they were moving the industry : in 1929 General Motors' Vice-President,

Alfred P . Sloan, told an incredulous gathering of RUsselsheim works coun-

cillors that in the next five years production would rise from 40,000 cars

per year to 200,000 .[31 ]

Such a form and scale of production should have meant that in Opel,

if anywhere in the Frankfurt area, there existed a 'massified' working class,

according to Roth, the basis for' the `other' working class movement . But

closer examination shows that such a categorisation is questionable.

Although Opel had certainly the most advanced form of mass car produc-

tion in Germany at the time, this does not mean to say that the workers

were predominantly semi-skilled . according to the DMV in 1929 66% of

the 4,800 metal workers employed in car production in Opel were skilled

('Gelernte') workers, against an average of 56 .6% for the industry as a

whole, and interestingly, against 57 .4% for Adler in Frankfurt, where

production methods were much less aavanced .[321 It is of course possible

that these skilled workers actually carried out basically semi-skilled tasks,

but on this the evidence is contradictory .

Further, although Opel was renowned for the uncertainty of its em-

ployment (not only did production in the auto industry in general fluc-

tuate according to the season, but in Opel itself it was common for the

factory to be shut down for several weeks at a time while production was

reorganised or work on new models prepared), at the same time the firm

was well known locally for its relatively high wages .[33] Crucially, with

88% of all car workers unionised, Opel was the third best organised car

factory in Germany and was way above the (itself high) industry average

of 70.6%. Any revolutionary strategy which ignored this would clearly

face enormous difficulties .

After the take-over of Opel by GM the KPD increased its agitational

work in the factory .[34] However, up until mid-1929 the party appears

to have attempted to overcome the divisions within the work-force

through strengthening and radicalising the trade unions-the party

members, in line with the party's general trade union strategy, presented

themselves as more effective trade unionists than the SPD and the refor-

mists. Thus the first number of the KPD's factory newspaper in Opel,

Der Opel Prolet, urged all Opel workers to join the DMV. In the factory

council election campaign in spring 1929 the paper pointed out that, while

the SPD accused the communists of putting forward a candidate list of un-

organised workers, all the KPD candidates were in fact trade union

members; later in the year, defending themselves against the charge of

splitting the trade unions, the communists could still argue that the limi-

tation of the reformist trade union strategy was that it actually weakened

the unions by being concerned only with those workers who were already

trade union members, instead of trying to involve all workers in the union .

The situation in 1929 was in fact extremely favourable for such a

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS25

militant trade union based offensive within Opel . American ownership

meant that now as total sales began to fall,[35] rationalisation and speed-

up continued and intensified, however with American trained supervisors

and increased use of time-and-motion studies, in 1929 the work-force was

cut from 10,500 to around 6,000, and it was alleged that the firm was now

only interested in employing young workers . Indeed, the Frankfurt SPD

newspaper repeated an argument common in the KPD's factory agitation

when it commented that the factory combined American standards of high

productivity with European standards of low wages and bad working

conditions .

Instead of defending its membership against such rationalisation, the

DMV officially encouraged it . Throughout the 1920s the union had cam-

paigned for greater concentration and rationalisation in the industry,

claiming that the resulting increase in productivity would enable firms to

afford higher wages . Not only was nationalisation never demanded and

issues of working conditions never raised, but the American industry was

explicitly held up as an example for Germany to emulate : not surprisingly

therefore, the DMV never mentioned the low trade union organisation and

the bad working conditions in the American car plants .

The union leadership's commitment to such a position opened up new

possibilities for successful opposition . Firstly, to the extent that rational-

isation was an attack on the position of the more skilled workers, those

more conservative union functionaries who were nonetheless actually

based within the factories were now under pressure .[36] Secondly, and

more obviously, support for rationalisation and concentration, because of

its long term benefits of higher pay, could well have been credible for

trade union members in the modest expansion of the 1920s. In the current

depression however, even Opel was dismissing workers : the costs of the