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Nazi Whip
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 28, 27 May 1933, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
(Continued from the last issue)
The factory councils are now compelled to beat a hasty retreat, in many places already passing into oblivion set aside by the Fascists; nothing else could be expected when the Reformists are left in practically undisputed control. Here again they admonished the workers to remain neutral politically and not to fight. “Do not let yourselves be irritated, your rights and your duties are guarded by the constitution and by the factory council law,” so said the Hamburg trade union leaders. And this at the very moment when the councils are bruskly dissolved or reorganized, by the method of the worker elected representatives being jailed and tortured and replaced by Fascists. No, those who sat safely so far behind were not irritated, only frightened and paralysed. But even the reorganizations are only temporary measures. Not even Nazi councils, so close to the rank and file workers, where class ideology may again penetrate, can be tolerated. That the Fascist dictatorship is in deadly earnest about their attempt to destroy all working class organizations one need not doubt for a moment.
The Fascist and the workers organizations are the two opposite poles, mutually exclusive. Within the latter the trade unions form the great reserve. Even these the Fascists cannot tolerate as they will always offer a basis for struggle against capitalism, including the mere struggle for reform demands. Capitalist society has reached its decay stage and is under ever greater difficulties in granting any reform concessions. At this moment this is the most marked in Germany. Hence, Fascism is called upon to perform its mission.
In its approach to the trade unions it is also completing the counter-revolution by stages, encountering no obstacles whatever from the miserable functionaries who are now the lackeys [1] of Hitler as they once upon a time were to the Hohenzollerns. In this respect, the lead was given by the president of the German trade union federation, Leipart. The day after Hitler had arrived in power he said:
“The present government may carry through a period of no agreements perhaps even further reduction of wages; they may even bring out reactionary plans from the storage room of antiquated ideas and make arrangements which oppose the rights and liberties of the German working class. But the German workers know that after a long period of social ascent can also sometimes follow reverses, yes even temporary conscious retreats.”
In other words, the German workers have had their good times, now they should submit and accept the bad times.
But even such lackey service is not sufficient. Today the Fascists exact a much heavier tribute than did once the Hohenzollern. The methods of suppression, first applied to the Communists, the social democrats and then the auxiliary organizations, each in their turn, has also commenced against the trade unions. The rank and file membership, also in this instance showing their alarm at the Nazi advance and showing their readiness to fight, respond and gather in masses at their headquarters at each attack. That does not at all suit these frightened lackeys who are much more alarmed about the rank and file action than by the Nazi attacks and prefer to sell-out to the latter.
Their answer is leaflets, in which they plead with the workers to stay at home and not to resist. “Congregating at the headquarters,” said the Berlin leadership, “will be taken advantage by the Communists. What do they seek at our headquarters?” And the sad truth is that to the bulk of the membership the Communists have appeared as the disorganizers of the movement.
Thus the road is cleared for the Nazis. They pursue their destruction so far unhampered. Perhaps the clearest indication of how they proceed by stages to destroy the present union basis and to transfer the unions into pure organs of the Fascist state is given by the Bavarian government appointed by police commissioner von Epp. Its first act was the trade union decree in which the unions are ordered to “resume their functions,” but on the following conditions:
They are to make no direct or indirect attempts toward contact with the prohibited political organizations, their late leaden or their members.
Their headquarters will remain occupied by the police whenever the authorities find such necessary.
All political activities are prohibited, the unions are not to hold any public meetings and regular membership meetings to be held only upon notification given to the police.
At any time the actions or decisions of the unions, including their finances, are subject to inspection by the Nazi established shop nuclei.
In this work of destruction, the Nazis are proceeding quite unhampered as far as the militant minority is concerned. It is practically entirely outside of the trade unions, not merely by persecution or default but by deliberate and – particularly now proven – false policy.
That is the Stalinist policy of independent “revolutionary” unions. As in the United States the T.U.U.L., so in Germany the RGO, only in the latter case it proved much more fatally and much more criminally wrong, due to the more advanced political conditions and due to the larger scale of the splits and of the isolation of the party from the masses. Otherwise the characteristics are common to both of these products of the “third period” era.
Trade unions to be effective must embrace all workers of the industries or at least a sufficiently decisive section. That will include workers of varying political opinions. The R.G.O., a rival union, based upon withdrawal of the revolutionary minority and based upon acceptance in advance of party policies and leadership, remained a paper organization playing no serious role at all in the class struggle. Its membership was composed only of Communists and only a very small section of the Communists at that. The R.G.O. could, therefore, not at all serve to connect the party with the masses, but on the contrary detached it and created a wall of separation.
The basic aim of the revolutionary party is to gain influence upon the working masses and particularly those organized in the trade unions. The R.G.O. became precisely the most formidable obstacle to this basic aim. Numerically feeble, it could of course not at all substitute for the mass unions. It was unable to even influence them because it was distinctly a rival organization.
The R.G.O. could naturally not remain immune from the typical Stalinist bureaucratic methods either. One party member relates how in the early part of this year the whole Berlin R.G.O. leadership was removed and a new one appointed in its place without the slightest explanation made to the membership.
A fatal injury to the movement is the record of this R.G.O. policy. Its consequence contributed heavily to the party’s impotence in face of the Nazi advance, to its being wiped out without a struggle and to the defeat of the working class as a whole. Long ago the Left Opposition demanded a change in this course and as, the only correct one, for the R.G.O., to immediately return to the trade unions in order to take up the Left wing activities within them.
That is still, despite all the positions lost, an imperative necessity. It does not diminish with the transformation of the trade unions into organs of the Fascist state. On the contrary. It increases in importance. So long as they represent a form of organization gathering workers within their ranks, they constitute a field for revolutionists to work in and to learn how to be able to do the work, skillfully, carefully – well planned and courageously executed. To fight every inch for the existence and functioning of the trade unions, to fight for existence and functioning of the factory councils, helping to give expression within them to the working class needs and connecting up therewith the democratic remands which inevitably must arise – that is the job at present. Now that Fascism in in power, it is an especial necessity to utilize every means available for flank attacks until the proletariat can again gather its forces. That the workers will respond heroically, has already been shown even in these difficult days by local strikes and demonstrations against arrests and against attacks upon the factory councils.
But the Stalinist party and Comintern leaders have not changed their course in regard to the R.G.O. It was commissioned to initiate the anti-Fascist congress scheduled to be held in Prague but prohibited by the Czecho-Slovakian government. Naturally, it is to be assumed that efforts will be made to hold the congress in some other country. But no matter where it will be, when initiated by the R.G.O. it cannot even mark a serious attempt to really rally a mass response to this gathering, not to speak of initiating subsequent actions. As far as a genuinely united working class action against Fascism is concerned, this congress called by the R.G.O. is condemned in advance to sterility and Impotence.
1. Since the writing of this article, the lackeys have as is only natural, and was to be expected from the past developments, been given the boot. – Ed.
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