Stalin had burned his fingers badly in his attempts to lean on the capitalist elements in China and to conciliate the trade union bureaucracy in Britain. Now he turned the Comintern sharply in the opposite direction. In violation of its statutes, the International had not held a conference for four years. A new Congress was called in 1928 which introduced officially the programme of socialism in one country into the programme of the Communist International. It also proclaimed the end of capitalist stability and the beginning of what was termed the ‘Third Period’. In contrast to the period of revolutionary upheavals following 1917 (the First Period), and the period of relative capitalist stability after 1923 (the Second Period), this so-called Third Period was supposed to usher in the final collapse of world capitalism. At the same time, Social Democracy, according to the once famous (but now buried) theory of Stalin, was supposed to have transformed itself into ‘Social Fascism’. No agreement was now possible between the Communists and the ‘social fascists’ who constituted the main danger confronting the working class.
It was just at this period that the unprecedented slump of 1929-33 affected the capitalist world. In particular, it hit Germany especially hard. Living standards collapsed. The German workers faced degradation and misery, while the middle classes were also ruined. Germany’s figures of unemployment rose steadily. At the peak, it reached six million. The middle class, having failed to receive anything from the revolution of 1918, and disappointed with the failure of the Communists in 1923 to take power, now in anguish and despair began to look for a solution to their problems in a different direction. Subsidised and financed by the capitalists, the Nazis began to secure a mass basis in Germany. In the elections of September 1930, they secured nearly six and a half million votes. The policies of Stalin had a disastrous effect in the Communist International. The lurch to the left in the USSR, expressed in the policy of forced collectivisation and the madness of ‘Five-Year Plans in four years’, found its reflection internationally in the ultra-left theory of the ‘Third Period’ and ‘Social Fascism’. This had the most terrible consequences in Germany, where it was directly responsible for splitting the working class and allowing Hitler to come to power without a fight.
The German working class was one of the strongest in the world, with powerful labour organisations and hundreds of thousands of workers organised in communist and socialist militias. The German Communist Party, together with the Social Democracy constituted the mightiest force in Germany. At the time of Hitler’s first big electoral advance in 1930, when the Nazis got six and a half million votes, the Communist Party had won four and a half million, and the Social Democracy eight and a half million – taken together, more than twice the Nazi’s. The combined strength of the Communist and Social-Democratic forces was more than sufficient to defeat the fascists, had they been united around a serious programme of struggle. Yet in 1933 Hitler could boast that he had come to power “without breaking a window pane”.
The reason for this monstrous state of affairs was the paralysis of the German proletariat as a result of the policies of both the Social-Democratic and Stalinist leaderships. In 1931, the Stalinists went so far as to form an unofficial united front with the Nazis to bring down the Social-Democratic government in Prussia (the so-called Red Referendum). At one point, they issued the slogan “Beat the little Scheidemanns in the school yard” – an invitation to the children of Communists to beat up those of the Social Democrats. Jan Valtin, at that time a Communist Party activist in Germany, recalled his experience of this policy:
It was a weird alliance, never officially proclaimed or recognised by either the Red or the Brown bureaucracy, but a grim fact all the same. Many of the simple Party members resisted stubbornly; too disciplined to denounce openly the Central Committee, they embarked on a silent campaign of passive resistance, if not sabotage. However, the most active and loyal communist elements – I among them – went ahead energetically to translate this latest Parteibefehl [Party order] into action. A temporary truce and a combining of forces were agreed on by the followers of Stalin and Hitler whenever they saw an opportunity to raid and break up meetings and demonstrations of the democratic front. During 1931 alone, I participated in dozens of such terroristic enterprises in concert with the rowdiest Nazi elements. I and my comrades simply followed Party orders. I shall describe a few of such enterprises to characterise this Dimitrov-Hitler alliance and to illustrate what was going on all over Germany at that time.
In the spring of 1931, the socialist Transport Workers’ Union had called a conference of ship and dock delegates of all the main ports of western Germany. The conference took place in the House of Labour in Bremen. It was public and the workers were invited to listen to the proceedings. The Communist Party sent a courier to the headquarters of the Nazi Party, with a request for co-operation in the blasting of the trade union conference. The Hitlerites agreed, as they always did in such cases. When the conference opened, the galleries were packed with two to three hundred Communists and Nazis. I was in charge of operations for the Communist Party and a storm troop leader named Walter Tidow – for the Nazis. In less than two minutes, we had agreed on a plan of action. As soon as the conference of the Social Democrats was well under way, I got up and launched a harangue from the gallery. In another part of the hall Tidow did the same. The trade union delegates were at first speechless. Then the chairman gave the order to eject the two troublemakers, me and Tidow, from the building. We sat quietly, derisively watching two squads of husky trade unionists advance toward us with the intention of throwing us out. We refused to budge. As soon as the first trade union delegate touched one of us, our followers rose and bedlam started. The furniture was smashed, the participants beaten and the hall turned into a shambles. We gained the street and scattered before ambulances and the Rollkommandos of the police arrived. The next day, both the Nazi and our own Party press brought out front page accounts of how ‘socialist’ workers, incensed over the ‘treachery’ of their own corrupt leaders had given them a thorough ‘proletarian rub-down’. (J. Valtin, Out of the Night, pp. 252-3.)
By these means, the mighty German working class was handed over, bound hand and foot, to the Nazis. The workers’ organisations were destroyed. Communists and Social Democrats alike ended up in Hitler’s concentration camps. And the USSR was placed in terrible danger. This was the balance sheet of the policy of ‘Social Fascism’.
Despite their expulsion from the Communist International, Trotsky and his followers still considered themselves as part of it, and insistently demanded that they be allowed to return to the ranks. At the same time, they subjected the suicidal theory which had now been adopted by the Comintern to sharp criticism. In place of it they demanded a return to the realistic Leninist policy of the United Front as a means of winning the masses in action and through their own experience, to communism. With the victory of Hitler at the polls Trotsky sounded the alarm. In a pamphlet entitled The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany, he issued a signal for a campaign, which was carried on for three years by the International Left Opposition of the Comintern, as the Trotskyists looked on themselves. In Germany, France, USA, Britain, in faraway South Africa, and in all countries where they had groups, the Trotskyists conducted a campaign demanding that the German Communist Party set into motion a campaign for a united front with the Social Democrats to prevent Hitler from coming to power.