The period of the late twenties and the early thirties held many challenges for the World Communist Movement. With the dislocation of the economic depression and the rise of fascism, the Communist Movement was in a position to actively engage in broader and more intensified struggles than had hitherto been the case. But the analysis of this conjuncture, the role of the party and its relation to other parties, the trade unions and mass organizations, were sharply sectarian. This led to a weakening of those forces whose cohesion was necessary in resisting fascism. This sectarianism was greatly influenced by economist and dogmatist errors which conditioned the political line of the Communist Movement.
The historical results of this sectarianism contributed to the triumph of fascism in Germany and a calamitous world war.
This period of communist history is significant in more than a detached, historical sense. Many sectarian, ultra-left tendencies in our own movement draw their marginal legitimation from the theses of this period. Our critique of the past is, in many ways, a critique of our present.
1. How did the German Communist Party struggle against Nazism? Why did they fail?
2. How Was the Comintern economist? Include discussion of the following points:
a) the relation of economism to the lack of a mass-line
b) linear economic views of development
c) tendencies of economic development and their overdetermination by class struggle
d) the primacy given forces of production over relations of production
e) uneven development
f) economist catastrophism.
3. What were some of the political results of this economism? In line with this economism, what was the relation of Communists to other parties and the trade unions? How was reformism perceived within this problematic?
4. Discuss the importance of analyzing the concrete conjuncture of the class struggle and the relative balance of forces spoken of by Lenin. How does Lovestone’s critique fit into this? How are aspects of this problematic reproduced in our movement
Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, pp. 36-52. (Poulantzas is Greek, born in 1936. He studied under Althusser and is the author of several important books on politics and class analysis; including the important Political Power and Social Classes, The Crisis of the Dictatorship, and Classes in Contemporary Capitalism.)
Theodore Draper, “The Ghost of Social Fascism,” Commentary, pp. 29-42. (Draper is an American bourgeois historian noted for his history of the CPUSA written from an anti-communist perspective.)
Jay Lovestone, “Crisis in the C. P., U.S.A.,” Revolutionary Age, pp. 13-19.