Between Decisions[*]
by
Rudolf Hilferding
Written: Likely 1932
First Published: German in: „Zwischen den Entscheidungen“. Die Gesellschaft. Internationale Revue für Sozialismus und Politik, Volume 10, Part 1, January 1933
Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2205666
Translated: Klaus Hagendorf[1] and John E. King[2]
Transcription/Markup: D. Walters
Copyright: 2012, by Klaus Hagendorf & John E. King. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced here with the permission of the translators.
In the great power struggle that German Social Democracy has been leading since the onset of the world economic crisis to preserve its own credibility, to maintain or restore democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and to defeat the social, political and intellectual counter- revolution, some important preliminary, decisive events have taken place in 1932 that will have a considerable influence on the final outcome. This year witnessed the climax of German Fascism on 13 August, the day on which the President of the Republic refused to carry out the transfer of state power that Hitler demanded, and Hitler capitulated to the Commander-in-Chief of the army. It is the peripeteia in the drama – for the moment the decisive turning point in this year.[3]
The Presidential election had come first. It had not brought Hitler to power. But his success was impressive,[4] and the political decision remained open. Hitler was defeated only because the opposing candidate was Hindenburg[5] – that was not an unambiguous political decision for republicanism and democracy, not even a decision against Fascism. There was no unity in the Hindenburg camp: only the Social Democrats and the majority of the Centre Party voted on the basis of purely political considerations, while the rest, whose support was indispensable to prevent a Fascist victory, voted out of personal sentiment; they were not absolute opponents of Fascism, and to the extent that political considerations were involved, these voters did not want Hitler to rule alone but to participate in state power under their control.
The Fascist movement had not achieved a complete victory, but its rise was still unchecked, as was demonstrated by the elections for the Prussian Parliament and the first elections to the Reichstag.[6] In the event of Hitler’s election as President, the Party had evidently prepared everything to complete the so-called democratically achieved victory with sudden, violent revolutionary action, in the correct belief that the Fascist seizure of power must be followed immediately by the assertion of power through the destruction of the opposition organisations and their leaders. The ‘March on Rome’, so to speak, was to be delivered after the legal claim to power had been achieved by playing the democratic rules of the game. Owing to the strength and resistance of the German workers’ organisations, German Fascism was not able to achieve what Italian Fascism had been able to accomplish even before the conquest of state power: terrorising, weakening or complete destruction of the enemy’s organisations; it was forced to adopt the tactic of legality, which contradicts the very nature of Fascism and sets it back, again and again – as democracy in modern states does indeed offer greater stability and security of government than any other form of government. But Fascist legality – this self-contradiction – ends on the very day that power is seized. Hence the tendency for the legal victory to be completed by means of a violent coup.
The fact that, after the electoral defeat, there were only a handful of minor terrorist acts and bomb attacks, which revealed the true intentions of the Fascists while the movement still did not dare to seize state power by revolutionary means – this demonstrated to the real rulers a weakness that would be increasingly important in their subsequent decisions. The strength of the state, even against the party with the strongest and most highly developed militias, became apparent.
The heterogeneity and the internal divisions in the ‘Hindenburg camp’ of a variety of interest groups gathered together to prevent Hitler's election, and the dynamics of the Fascist movement itself in its irresistible advance, determined subsequent events. The pro-Fascist, socially and politically reactionary part of the temporary Hindenburg majority pushed for an agreement with Hitler, and the men in power, its direct exponents, who under Brüning[7] had already won an extraordinary degree of independence due to the progressive paralysis of Parliament, began to ask themselves the uncomfortable question: when would they be forced to yield power to the rising movement? Controlled Fascism, an alliance of the conservative and reactionary forces with the mass movement, uniting all the different elements that feel degraded in the Republic, seeing themselves as having been dispossessed by the economic crisis and believing themselves to be threatened by the power of the working class in the democratic ‘rule of the greatest number’ – this becomes the goal. Fascism is to share responsibility for governing at precisely the most severe point of the economic crisis, thereby restricting its growth as a mass movement. The Brüning government, the last to exist without conflict with Parliament, is overthrown[8] and a political adventure begins, the outcome of which is still uncertain.
Hitler is striving for exclusive possession of power; the Brüning ministry is the first obstacle that has to be overcome. Its successor will be a transitional government. New elections are to establish the Party's power as decisive along the legal road to power, the repeal of the ban on the Fascist militias is to restore its revolutionary means of power, the unification of the Prussian police and state bureaucracy with the forces of the Reich is to be the most important precondition for the working of the totalitarian state.[9] On these terms Hitler agrees. He offers his support, and only in this way can the Papen government operate.[10] The purely reactionary wing of the counter-revolutionary camp has seized state power for itself. Herr Hitler has left it to them – so that he can organise an electoral victory and strengthen his militias in a completely legal way.
La légalité le tue – legality is fatal to him.[11]
Hitler controls the strongest party in the Reichstag, with more than a third of the deputies. More than this – the Reichstag has become unworkable because of the three dictatorial parties, the National Socialists, the Nationalists and the Communists, the ‘system’ has been destroyed, the constitution cannot operate, and Herr von Papen simply proclaims the facts of the matter: the new authoritarian state leadership is waiting for its Fascist partner.
On 13 August Hitler stood before Hindenburg, as ten years ago Mussolini had stood before the King. The German was looking for the same thing as the Italian: the surrender of state power to the Fascists. The Italian tragedy becomes a German farce. Hitler goes back down the palace steps – it is the fall of Fascism.
Hitler himself had helped to keep Papen in power, his movement creating a platform from which the old forces of reaction could rise again. Were they to capitulate to him? Were the Prussian Junkers, accustomed to rule, the top bureaucrats and the generals to surrender the field unconditionally without being forced to by the plebeian mass movement? Mussolini, after the destruction of the opposing organisations, after the March on Rome, had his audience with the King. And the King gave in to him because the Italian generals had demanded it. But German state power was unshaken, not least because of Hitler’s own tactics. To demand the fruits of the revolution without having the revolution – this political construction could only come about in the head of a German politician.
The defeated Hitler is looking to start again, trying to save himself through legality. But now legality is the struggle against authoritarianism, against dictatorship, against Nationalism – it is the struggle against Fascist ideology in support of democratic ideology. La légalité le tue. Legality is fatal to him. In the second elections for the Reichstag Hitler lost two million votes;[12] the aura of invincibility has been destroyed, the decline has begun.
The Papen government is the government of restoration. It has been so from the start, and its conflict with the National Socialists is now intensifying this character. It is completely isolated in the Reichstag, but its position in society is stronger than its political stance. It is the voice of the agricultural interests, and it brings a large part of the bourgeoisie behind it through tax relief, the reduction of social welfare benefits and unemployment relief and the undermining of wage agreements. The upper echelons of the bureaucracy support a government that promises to restore their threatened monopoly over the administration by fighting the ‘Party hacks in office’, and the army leadership is using it to defend its own position as the decisive and dominant factor in an unsettled political world. Its policy on foreign and military affairs is securing it the support of those who, up to now, approved only of the National Socialist stance. But the policy of restoration is rapidly and fundamentally destroying the very foundations of the social order that it had brought about, even before it can develop into a political order. The agrarian dictatorship under which it operates aggravates the commercial antagonism between agriculture and industry to an unbearable degree; its attacks on the labour movement are giving rise to a rapidly growing anger and bitterness, on a dangerous scale; its power politics aims to turn constitutional reform into an East-Elbian centralism never before accepted in Germany, and this is provoking the resistance of the provincial governments; its financial policy, in particular the recklessness with which it has allowed the progressive shattering of local government finances, is causing more and more concern; its risky foreign policy is a very bad preparation for a solution to Germany’s economic problems, which cannot be solved without international cooperation. And with all this the internal political crisis has intensified, and the attempt to elevate the ‘worthy, national, constructive elements’ has ended in an open rebellion that has temporarily brought them over to the side of the Communists. ‘The economy needs calm’, but with his mindless dilettantism Herr von Papen has poured oil on the flames. The second Reichstag election, the full political significance of which has only become apparent subsequently, has revealed the complete isolation of the government of restoration. It is on the verge of collapse.
The way in which the crisis began contains the conditions for its resolution. There seem to be three possibilities. One is a return to parliamentary government. The President calls on Hitler, as prospective Chancellor, to form a majority government. This will not be seriously attempted. It will fail, not because of the constitutionally inadmissible stipulations of the President but due to the very nature of a Fascist party. Fascism consists of a coalition of disparate social, economic and ideological elements that have come together to conquer state power. In opposition, Fascism can promise all these diverse groups that it will meet their contradictory demands. Once in power it will have to choose between these conflicting interests. The social diversity must destroy the unity of this party of coalition if, after seizing power, the particular groups are allowed to defend their political interests effectively. This is why Fascism, once in power, can retain power only in the form of a total dictatorship. Thus, as a Fascist, Hitler is quite right to demand the complete and unqualified transfer of power. But the power of German Fascism in relation to the power of the state has undergone yet another decline since 13 August. The game that was played on 13 August is being repeated, and Hitler is again the loser. He is called back to ‘legality’ once again, under much less favourable circumstances. Now he has to play the role of a parliamentary opposition leader once more. This is forcing him to side with the Communists. But cooperation with the Communists, using a parliamentary majority to defeat the authoritarian Presidential government – that is fatal to the Fascist party. In alliance with the Communists, it can keep Parliament unworkable,[13] but by so doing it also maintains the need for Presidential rule, which it is too weak to get rid of by non-parliamentary means. But if it does decide to make Parliament workable again it will have to cooperate with a parliamentary majority – openly or in disguise – and will have to take responsibility for a policy of toleration or coalition, with the certain prospect that the conflicts within its own ranks will blow it apart. This is the dilemma that finds its expression in the conflict between Gregor Strasser and Hitler,[14] and which has a surprisingly strong impact in every election.
The second possibility was to keep supporting the Papen government. This would have meant an attempt to drive the restoration government along a path leading inexorably to a breach of the constitution, to the popular masses coming together in a rebellious revolutionary mass movement, taking the crisis of the state to an altogether higher level. Those who held state power, the generals and the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, were horrified at this prospect and they finally got their way against the figurehead of state power, the President, who, misunderstanding the situation, had supported Herr von Papen to the end. And so the crisis was resolved through the formation of the Schleicher government.[15]
Papen’s downfall is a victory for the popular movement that opposed him. It is not a victory for democracy in the sense that the political parties that supported the constitution were strong enough to defeat the government. But it is a victory for democracy all the same, because the government was defeated by the resistance of the broad masses, by its complete lack of mass support. It is a victory of the people over absolutism. This victory cannot be followed through because of the contradictions within the forces that came together only briefly in the struggle against this government.
None the less: the downfall of Papen has proved that a restoration regime is no longer possible in Germany; his disappearance, at the same time, has ruined the policies of Hugenburg,[16] who already believed himself to be the winner. It has shown, above all, that even the independent power of the state cannot make politics against the people, and in this sense Papen’s downfall was indeed a victory for the democratic forces.
This also reveals the behaviour of the Schleicher government. It is trying to liquidate the real policy of restoration.[17] Abandonment of constitutional reform and the worst social cuts, abolition of the special courts, an amnesty: all this is being done in part by the very same people who were responsible for the policy of restoration, which makes the changes even more obvious and shows that they are based on the same objective circumstances that have led to the downfall of Papen.
There is a certain analogy between the position of the Schleicher government in the Reichstag and that of the authoritarian governments of Imperial times. The decisions of the Reichstag do not determine the fate of the government. In the event of conflict the Reichstag is the weaker party, against which the government forces will seek to prevail. The Social Democrats stand opposed to this authoritarian government. Any notion of parliamentary toleration of the government is clearly absurd, since all the preconditions for it are lacking. It is the Communists and the National Socialists who have a majority at their disposal for votes of no confidence and the repeal of emergency decrees. Toleration or cooperation is not something for the Social Democrats to consider, but rather for the National Socialists.
But the political problem involves more than opposition to Presidential government. The solution is not as simple as it was in the era when the liberal bourgeoisie fought against absolutism and in favour of the parliamentary system. Presidential governments are only possible in Germany because Parliament has been made unworkable by the dictatorial parties: the National Socialists, the Nationalists and the Communists. Thus the struggle against the Presidential regime must be linked to a struggle for a functioning Parliament and that demands a struggle against the dictatorial parties. The Presidential regime is a secondary problem; the primary problem is the paralysis of Parliament.
For the Social Democrats, it is a question of a fundamental confrontation with the Communists. Thus the slogans of the Popular Front are now misplaced. They may have made sense in the immediate post-war years, in a period when the Social Democrats were dominant and the authority of the trade unions was undisputed, but today they can only lead to confusion. The Communists are seeking the unity of the workers’ movement on a directly revolutionary basis for the immediate seizure of power through revolutionary action. For this they need the subordination of the workers to the leadership of the revolutionary avant- garde, the Communist leadership. Unity presupposes the subjugation of the masses under their leadership and the destruction of Social Democracy, of its essence and its organisational independence. When the Social Democrats speak of unity, we are thinking of the unity of a working class that is fighting for its own goals, established by the working class itself through its own democratic self-determination. The same words have a totally different content. In the present situation, however, to take part in pseudo-revolutionary action would mean helping Fascism win a certain victory in alliance with the power of the state – a game that we must repudiate from the outset, for it will end not in the revolution but in counter-revolution.
The task is not an easy one. It is repugnant to the worker to engage in a struggle against his own class comrades, and this in the face of the Fascist danger, which demands nothing more urgently than the unity of proletarian action. But it is an unavoidable task, because the tactics of the Communist leadership are crippling the power of the working class to act, inside and outside Parliament. The repeated attempts to use the ‘Popular Front’ to expose the Social Democratic leadership and to divide it from the Social Democratic masses, to contrast the ‘pure revolutionary conduct’ of the Communists with the ‘betrayal of the Social Democrats’, will by their very nature transform any extra-parliamentary action into an adventurist putsch. For this reason the fundamental struggle against the Communist leadership, the struggle for the allegiance of the Communist workers, is only the other side of the struggle against the Presidential regime, the other side of the struggle for the reconquest of democracy, which, newly reclaimed and secured, is actually the only terrain on which the working class can achieve its goals.
Meanwhile the political situation remains fluid and uncertain. The economic crisis is posing problems for the Schleicher government, and its attempts to solve them may well undermine it, just like its predecessors. The temptation to seek salvation by giving up power to the Fascists, which already existed with the Papen government, may again become a real danger. It is characteristic of our time that there is a sort of race between the economic crisis and the rebellious opposition that it has produced in the political sphere, and it remains uncertain whether the crisis will come to an end before this rebellion has run its course.
And so we stand between decisions. In Germany the Fascist movement has been kept from power, to which it came so very close, thanks to the tactics of Social Democracy, which through its policy of toleration avoided the consolidation of the bourgeoisie into a single reactionary mass under Fascist leadership and prevented the entry of the Fascists into government during their upswing phase. The same tactics have held the Centre firm in its opposition to the restoration government, thereby depriving it of the only bourgeois party that was still holding out. But the National Socialists are spellbound by legality, which now leaves them only the choice between taking a subordinate position in the bourgeois bloc and thereby speeding up their own incipient decline, or even more so by going into opposition and disappointing their followers, who are waiting impatiently for a recovery. It is this initial decline that has reduced the danger of a compromise between Hitler and Schleicher, since a declining party has much less prospect of seizing exclusive power at the expense of its partner in government than a rising party.
This is how the decisions against Fascism and restoration have worked out up to now. But the final outcome of the political development will depend above all on the consequences of economic events.
In Place of a Comment
“I cannot help seeing the terror of the bourgeois world in the face of the word ‘Communism’, this terror on which Fascism has lived for so long, as rather superstitious and childish: it is the greatest folly of our epoch.”[18]
Thomas Mann
Endnotes
* First published in German in: „Zwischen den Entscheidungen“. Die Gesellschaft. Internationale Revue für Sozialismus und Politik, Volume 10, Part 1, January 1933, pp. 1–9. See: http://archive.org/details/ZwischenDenEntscheidungen.
1. Contact: [email protected]; Paris, France. Internet: http://eurodos.free.fr/mime.
2. Contact: [email protected]; School of Economics and Finance, La Trobe University, Victoria 3086, Australia.
3. On 13 August 1932, following the Nazi success in the Reichstag elections on 31 July, Adolf Hitler met President Hindenburg to demand that he be appointed Reich Chancellor in place of Franz von Papen. Hindenburg refused, instead offering him the position of Deputy Chancellor. Hitler declined the offer and left empty-handed.
4. In the first round of the Presidential election, on 13 March, the incumbent Hindenburg (who had the support of the Social Democrats) won 49.6% of the vote, with Hitler in second place with 30.1%%. The second round took place on 2 April, and saw Hindenburg re-elected with 53% to Hitler’s 36.8% and the Communist Ernst Thälmann’s 10.2%.
5. Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) was a career soldier who, with his fellow-general Erich von Ludendorff, established a ‘silent dictatorship’ over Germany in the final two years of the First World War (Evans 2004, p. 55). After the German defeat he promoted the myth of the ‘stab in the back’. Hindenburg was elected President of the republic in 1925 as a non-party conservative and was re- elected in 1932. He was complicit in the marginalisation of Parliament after 1930 by the Brüning government and its successors, and was responsible for appointing Hitler as chancellor on 30 January 1933. After Hindenburg’s death in August 1934 Hitler himself assumed the role of President and Supreme Commander of the armed forces.
6. In the four provincial elections on 29 April 1932 the Nazis increased their vote in Prussia, Bavaria, Württemburg and Anhalt, becoming the largest party in all but Bavaria; the Social Democrats lost their majority in Prussia. National elections for the Reichstag were held on 31 July; the Nazis were again the largest party, with 37.4% of the votes, compared to the Social Democrats’ 21.6%.
7. Heinrich Brüning (1885-1970) was a Catholic politician who ran the Christian Democratic trade union federation in the 1920s and represented the Centre Party in the Reichstag between 1924 and 1933. When the coalition government of Herman Müller collapsed in March 1930, Brüning become Chancellor. His minority government was tolerated by the Social Democrats, whose fear of the Nazis overcame their opposition to his deflationary economic programme. Brüning resigned as Chancellor in May 1932 and fled to the United States two years later. He was Professor of Political Science at Harvard from 1937 to 1951, when he returned to Germany.
8. The minority Brüning government held office from March 1930 until May 1932. Brüning incurred the hostility of the Junkers because of his policy of promoting peasant settlements in East Prussia, and was replaced as Chancellor by Papen, who had the support of the big landlords.
9. The ban on the wearing of uniforms by the SA and SS was imposed by Brüning in December 1931 and lifted by Papen in June 1932. In the ‘Prussian coup’ of 20 July 1932, emergency legislation was invoked to proclaim ‘exceptional circumstances’, to dismiss the province’s coalition government led by the Social Democrat Otto Braun and to appoint Papen as ‘Reichskomissar’. There was no resistance by the Social Democrats or the trade unions. Papen’s coup ‘dealt a mortal blow to the Weimar Republic’ (Evans 2004, p. 287).
10. Franz von Papen (1879-1969) replaced Brüning as Chancellor on 31 May. He led what was known as the ‘Barons’ Cabinet’, with seven out of eleven ministers being big landlords. Papen was a career soldier and diplomat, who represented the Centre Party in the Prussian legislature. He was part of the right-wing, monarchist wing of the party, and had supported Hitler against its preferred candidate, Wilhelm Marx, in the 1925 Presidential election. Papen’s government was initially tolerated by the Nazis after he lifted the ban on the SA and SS, but after the November election in he was able to muster very little support in the Reichstag and resigned as Chancellor (in favour of Schleicher) on 3 December. Papen was briefly Hitler’s Deputy Chancellor and subsequently served as German ambassador to Turkey; after the war he served three years of an eight-year sentence imposed by a de-Nazification court.
11. The French expression ‘La légalité le tue’ seems to have been derived from a statement by Bonaparte’s prime minister Odilon Barrot in January 1849, shortly after the monarchist coup: ‘La légalité nous tue’. Hilferding will probably have remembered it from Engels’s citation in his 1895 introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, where he celebrated the advance of European socialism in the 1890s: ‘The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité nous tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like life eternal’ (Engels 1895, p. 136).
12. In the Reichstag elections of 6 November the Nazi vote fell to 33.1% from the 37.4% that the party had achieved in July, and on 4 December it fell sharply again in provincial elections in Thuringia; the Nazis seemed to be ‘staring failure in the face’ (Burleigh 2000, p. 144). Hilferding was not the only one to exaggerate the downward trend: Burleigh cites the liberal Vössische Zeitung as predicting a continued Nazi decline, with the English socialist academic Harold Laski imagining an elderly Hitler in a Bavarian beer garden, reminiscing about how he had nearly ruled the Reich (ibid., p. 145).
13. The last government to enjoy a clear majority in the Reichstag was the coalition led by the Social Democrat Hermann Müller, which collapsed in March 1930. Just how unworkable the German Parliament had become was demonstrated on 12 September 1932, when (on a motion of the Communist Party) Chancellor Papen’s economic programme was rejected by 512 of the 554 deputies.
14. Gregor Strasser (1892-1934) became a Nazi in 1921 but soon fell out with Hitler, initially over his attempt to free the northern German section of the party from domination by the Bavarian leadership and then because of his left-wing stance. Strasser took an anti-capitalist and pro-Russian position that alienated him from Hitler and other Nazi leaders. By the 1930s, however, there was little difference in the ideological positions of Strasser and Hitler (Evans 2004, p. 303). After he failed in the autumn of 1932 to form an all-party ‘social’ government in alliance with conservative trade unions, as proposed by Schleicher, Strasser retired from political life. This did not prevent him from being shot on 30 June 1934, the ‘night of the long knives’.
15. General Kurt von Schleicher (1882-1934) was appointed Chancellor on 3 December 1932, following the resignation of Papen. He was a career soldier who had served as War Minister in Papen’s government. After the failure of Schleicher’s attempt to construct a mass basis for his government by bringing together conservative trade unionists and left-wing Nazis like Gregor Strasser, he resigned as Chancellor on 28 January 1933, recommending Hitler as his successor. On 30 June 1934 Schleicher and his wife were killed by the SS on the ‘night of the long knives’.
16. Alfred Hugenberg (1865-1951) built up a large media empire, which he used to promote right-wing politics in the Weimar republic. He represented the anti-Weimar German People’s Party in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933, leading its right wing and in 1931 supporting an alliance with the Nazis against the Brüning government. Although his relations with Hitler soon cooled, Hugenberg was briefly Minister of Economics, Agriculture and Food in the first Nazi government before his dismissal, and the dissolution of his Party, in June 1933. He remained in the Reichstag as a ‘guest’ of the Nazis until 1945, but without any political influence. After the war he was imprisoned by the British for five years.
17. ‘Some of Schleicher’s economic schemes, which included a possible nationalization of the steel industry and his repeal, carried out in December, of Papen’s wage and benefit cuts imposed the previous September, also caused concern among elements in the business world whose interests Papen, Hindenburg and Hugenberg took seriously’ (Evans 2004, p. 305).
18.In the original: “Ich kann nicht umhin, in dem Schrecken der bürgerlichen Welt vor dem Wort Kommunismus, diesem Schrecken, von dem der Faschismus so lange gelebt hat, etwas Abergläubisches und Kindisches zu sehen, die Grundtorheit unserer Epoche.”[18] (Thomas Mann in 1944).
Bibliography
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Copyright © 2012 Klaus Hagendorf & John E. King. All Rights Reserved!