Democracy, Bonapartism and Fascism: PRE-ORDER NOW!

Wellred Books’ latest title Democracy, Bonapartism & Fascism: Class Struggle in the 1930s is available to pre-order now! This collection features crucial writings that can arm communists not only with a deeper understanding of Bonapartism and fascism, but with a method for analysing turbulent times, such as those we live in today.

“Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet. Fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.”

This was how Trotsky described National Socialism in 1933. He highlights the contradiction of the most advanced societies producing this most barbarous and backwards of regimes. In his writings of this period, Trotsky takes on the task of explaining the rise of Hitler, and how exactly capitalism ‘puked up’ this regime. What was it about capitalism in crisis that enabled this particular development? 

He deals with the consequences of the failure of the German revolution, with the impoverishment of the petty bourgeois layers in society, and with how the capitalist class sought to roll back the gains of the past. He deals with the succession of Bonapartist regimes leading up to Hitler being handed power. Crucially, he points to the decisive factor in the rise of the fascists: the failure of the leadership of the working class.

He doesn’t just explain why Hitler arose, but also the alternative course that history could have taken. The 1930s were a period of existential crisis for the capitalist system, which had profound implications for the class struggle. In country after country, the possibility existed for the seizure of power by the working class. As the articles in this collection masterfully explain, the working class were prevented from stopping the rise of fascism by the inability of the Communist International – after the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy – to prepare them for the seizure of power. 

This book has not been produced for mere historical interest. It contains important lessons for today. In the present period of political polarisation and economic turmoil, we have seen the rise of figures like Trump, Le Pen and Farage. Many fear that this is the start of the same process. 

Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have declared: “We are on the eve of an authoritarian administration. This is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like”. But, as she tacitly admits, Trump is no Hitler or Mussolini. In fact, anyone who seriously studies fascism must draw the conclusion that Trump is not a fascist. 

Still, Ocasio-Cortez is asking us to support the Democrats as the ‘lesser evil’, when it is precisely the policies of the Democrats who prepared the way for the rise of Trump in the first place! Much like the Social Democrats of Germany in the early 1930s, what she’s asking us to do is to defend the status quo, when that status quo has become repugnant to the mass of people.

It is in this context that this collection offers communists the tools required to navigate such a tumultuous period. Each article has been carefully selected to do just that, focusing on Trotsky’s writings on Germany and how it was that the Nazis came to power. This is followed by selections of Trotsky’s articles on France that deal with Bonapartist regimes from Doumergue onwards, and the failures of the Popular Front government’s class-collaborationism, which served to prepare the ground for the French bourgeoisie’s capitulation to Hitler in 1940.

Finally, the book contains two articles by Ted Grant: ‘Democracy or Bonapartism in Europe: A reply to Pierre Frank’ and ‘The Menace of Fascism’. With these texts, Ted Grant took up a struggle against the empiricist leadership of the Fourth International, and defended the need to concretely analyse the conditions of the period and their implications for the class struggle, rather than merely repeating the slogans of the past.

In times of great turbulence, it is vital for communists to have a clear understanding of the period in which we live and the nature and role of the manifold figures that arise. This text aims to arm readers with not only an analysis of the past, but with a method to understand the world today. Get your copy now!