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felskrivning./
What Is National Socialism?
(June 1933)
Written in exile in Turkey, June 10, 1933.
Translated from Russian and from German.
Appeared in several versions in various journals, first being The Modern Thinker, October 1933.
Last two paragraphs added as postscript November 2, 1933.
Naive minds think that the office of kingship lodges in
the king himself, in his ermine cloak and his crown, in his flesh and
bones. As a matter of fact, the office of kingship is an interrelation
between people. The king is king only because the interests and
prejudices of millions of people are refracted through his person. When
the flood of development sweeps away these interrelations, then the king
appears to be only a washed-out man with a flabby lower lip. He who was
once called Alfonso XIII could discourse upon this from fresh
impressions.
The leader by will of the people differs from the leader by will of
God in that the former is compelled to clear the road for himself or, at
any rate, to assist the conjuncture of events in discovering him.
Nevertheless, the leader is always a relation between people, the
individual supply to meet the collective demand. The controversy over
Hitler’s personality becomes the sharper the more the secret of his
success is sought in himself. In the meantime, another political figure
would be difficult to find that is in the same measure the focus of
anonymous historic forces. Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could
have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every
exasperated petty bourgeois.
The rapid growth of German capitalism prior to the First World War by
no means signified a simple destruction of the middle classes. Although
it ruined some layers of the petty bourgeoisie it created others anew:
around the factories, artisans and shopkeepers; within the factories,
technicians and executives. But while preserving themselves and even
growing numerically – the old and the new petty bourgeoisie compose a
little less than one-half of the German nation – the middle classes have
lost the last shadow of independence. They live on the periphery of
large-scale industry and the banking system, and they live off the
crumbs from the table of the monopolies and cartels, and off the
spiritual alms of their theorists and professional politicians.
The defeat in 1918 raised a wall in the path of German imperialism.
External dynamics changed to internal. The war passed over into
revolution. Social Democracy, which aided the Hohenzollerns in bringing
the war to its tragic conclusion, did not permit the proletariat to
bring the revolution to its conclusion. The Weimar democracy spent
fourteen years finding interminable excuses for its own existence. The
Communist Party called the workers to a new revolution but proved
incapable of leading it. The German proletariat passed through the rise
and collapse of war, revolution, parliamentarism, and pseudo-Bolshevism.
At the time when the old parties of the bourgeoisie had drained
themselves to the dregs, the dynamic power of the working class also
found itself sapped.
The postwar chaos hit the artisans, the peddlers, and the civil
employees no less cruelly than the workers. The economic crisis in
agriculture was ruining the peasantry. The decay of the middle strata
did not mean that they were made into proletarians, inasmuch as the
proletariat itself was casting out a gigantic army of chronically
unemployed. The pauperization of the petty bourgeoisie, barely covered
by ties and socks of artificial silk, eroded all official creeds and
first of all the doctrine of democratic parliamentarism.
The multiplicity of parties, the icy fever of elections, the
interminable changes of ministries aggravated the social crisis by
creating a kaleidoscope of barren political combinations. In the
atmosphere brought to white heat by war, defeat, reparations, inflation,
occupation of the Ruhr, crisis, need, and despair, the petty
bourgeoisie rose up against all the old parties that had bamboozled i.e.
The sharp grievances of small proprietors never out of bankruptcy, of
their university sons without posts and clients, of their daughters
without dowries and suitors, demanded order and an iron hand.
The banner of National Socialism was raised by upstarts from the
lower and middle commanding ranks of the old army. Decorated with medals
for distinguished service, commissioned and noncommissioned officers
could not believe that their heroism and sufferings for the Fatherland
had not only come to naught, but also gave them no special claims to
gratitude. Hence their hatred of the revolution and the proletariat. At
the same time, they did not want to reconcile themselves to being sent
by the bankers, industrialists, and ministers back to the modest posts
of bookkeepers, engineers, postal clerks, and schoolteachers. Hence
their “socialism.” At the Yser and under Verdun they had learned to risk
themselves and others, and to speak the language of command, which
powerfully overawed the petty bourgeois behind the lines. Thus these
people became leaders.
At the start of his political career, Hitler stood out only because
of his big temperament a voice much louder than others, and an
intellectual mediocrity much more self-assured. He did not bring into
the movement any ready-made program, if one disregards the insulted
soldier’s thirst for vengeance. Hitler began with grievances and
complaints about the Versailles terms, the high cost of living, the lack
of respect for a meritorious non-commissioned officer, and the plots of
bankers and journalists of the Mosaic persuasion. There were in the
country plenty of ruined and drowning people with scars and fresh
bruises. They all wanted to thump with their fists on the table. This
Hitler could do better than others. True, he knew not how to cure the
evil. But his harangues resounded, now like commands and now like
prayers addressed to inexorable fate. Doomed classes, like those fatally
ill, never tire of making variations on their plaints nor of listening
to consolations. Hitler’s speeches were all attuned to this pitch.
Sentimental formlessness, absence of disciplined thought ignorance along
with gaudy erudition – all these minuses turned into pluses. They
supplied him with the possibility of uniting all types of
dissatisfaction in the beggar’s bowl of National Socialism, and of
leading the mass in the direction in which it pushed him. In the mind of
the agitator was preserved, from among his early improvisations,
whatever had met with approbation. His political thoughts were the
fruits of oratorical acoustics. That is how the selection of slogans
went on. That is how the program was consolidated. That is how the
“leader” took shape out of the raw material.
Mussolini from the very beginning reacted more consciously to social
materials than Hitler, to whom the police mysticism of a Metternich [3]
is much closer than the political algebra of Machiavelli. Mussolini is
mentally bolder and more cynical. It may be said that the Roman atheist
only utilizes religion as he does the police and the courts, while his
Berlin colleague really believes in the infallibility of the Church of
Rome. During the time when the future Italian dictator considered Marx
as “our common immortal teacher,” he defended not unskillfully the
theory which sees in the life of contemporary society first of all the
reciprocal action of two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
True, Mussolini wrote in 1914, there lie between them very numerous
intermediate layers which seemingly form “a joining web of the human
collective”; but “during periods of crisis, the intermediate classes
gravitate, depending upon their interests and ideas, to one or the other
of the basic classes.” A very important generalization! Just as
scientific medicine equips one with the possibility not only of curing
the sick but of sending the healthy to meet their forefathers by the
shortest route, so the scientific analysis of class relations,
predestined by its creator for the mobilization of the proletariat,
enabled Mussolini, after he had jumped into the opposing camp, to
mobilize the middle classes against the proletariat. Hitler accomplished
the same feat in translating the methodology of fascism into the
language of German mysticism.
The bonfires which burn the impious literature of Marxism light up
brilliantly the class nature of National Socialism. While the Nazis
acted as a party and not as a state power, they did not quite find an
approach to the working class. On the other side, the big bourgeoisie,
even those who supported Hitler with money, did not consider his party
theirs. The national “renaissance” leaned wholly upon the middle
classes, the most backward part of the nation, the heavy ballast of
history. Political art consisted in fusing the petty bourgeoisie into
oneness through its common hostility to the proletariat What must be
done in order to improve things? First of all, throttle those who are
underneath. Impotent before big capital, the petty bourgeoisie hopes in
the future to regain its social dignity through the ruin of the workers.
The Nazis call their overturn by the usurped title of revolution. As a
matter of fact, in Germany as well as in Italy, fascism leaves the
social system untouched. Taken by itself, Hitler’s overturn has no right
even to the name counter-revolution. But it cannot be viewed as an
isolated event; it is the conclusion of a cycle of shocks which began in
Germany in 1918. The November Revolution, which gave the power to the
workers’ and peasants’ soviets, was proletarian in its fundamental
tendencies. But the party that stood at the head of the proletariat
returned the power to the bourgeoisie. In this sense the Social
Democracy opened the era of counter-revolution before the revolution
could bring its work to completion. However, so long as the bourgeoisie
depended upon the Social Democracy, and consequently upon the workers,
the regime retained elements of compromise. All the same, the
international and the internal situation of German capitalism left no
more room for concessions. As Social Democracy saved the bourgeoisie
from the proletarian revolution, fascism came in its turn to liberate
the bourgeoisie from the Social Democracy. Hitler’s coup is only the
final link in the chain of counterrevolutionary shifts.
The petty bourgeois is hostile to the idea of development, for
development goes immutably against him; progress has brought him nothing
except irredeemable debts. National Socialism rejects not only Marxism
but Darwinism. The Nazis curse materialism because the victories of
technology over nature have signified the triumph of large capital over
small. The leaders of the movement are liquidating “intellectualism”
because they themselves possess second- and third-rate intellects, and
above all because their historic role does not permit them to pursue a
single thought to its conclusion. The petty bourgeois needs a higher
authority, which stands above matter and above history, and which is
safeguarded from competition, inflation, crisis, and the auction block.
To evolution, materialist thought, and rationalism – of the twentieth,
nineteenth, and eighteenth centuries – is counterposed in his mind
national idealism as the source of heroic inspiration. Hitler’s nation
is the mythological shadow of the petty bourgeoisie itself, a pathetic
delirium of a thousand-year Reich.
In order to raise it above history, the nation is given the support
of the race. History is viewed as the emanation of the race. The
qualities of the race are construed without relation to changing social
conditions. Rejecting “economic thought” as base, National Socialism
descends a stage lower: from economic materialism it appeals to zoologic
materialism.
The theory of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious
self-educated individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of
life, appears particularly melancholy in the light of the history of
ideas. In order to create the religion of pure German blood, Hitler was
obliged to borrow at second hand the ideas of racism from a Frenchman,
Count Gobineau [4], a diplomat and a literary dilettante. Hitler found
the political methodology ready-made in Italy, where Mussolini had
borrowed largely from the Marxist theory of the class struggle. Marxism
itself is the fruit of union among German philosophy, French history,
and British economics. To investigate retrospectively the genealogy of
ideas, even those most reactionary and muddleheaded, is to leave not a
trace of racism standing.
The immense poverty of National Socialist philosophy did not, of
course, hinder the academic sciences from entering Hitler’s wake with
all sails unfurled, once his victory was sufficiently plain. For the
majority of the professorial rabble, the years of the Weimar regime were
periods of riot and alarm. Historians, economists, jurists, and
philosophers were lost in guesswork as to which of the contending
criteria of truth was right that is, which of the camps would turn out
in the end the master of the situation. The fascist dictatorship
eliminates the doubts of the Fausts and the vacillations of the Hamlets
of the university rostrums. Coming out of the twilight of parliamentary
relativity, knowledge once again enters into the kingdom of absolutes.
Einstein has been obliged to pitch his tent outside the boundaries of
Germany.
On the plane of politics, racism is a vapid and bombastic variety of
chauvinism in alliance with phrenology. As the ruined nobility sought
solace in the gentility of its blood, so the pauperized petty
bourgeoisie befuddles itself with fairy tales concerning the special
superiorities of its race. Worthy of attention is the fact that the
leaders of National Socialism are not native Germans but interlopers
from Austria, like Hitler himself, from the former Baltic provinces of
the Czar’s empire, like Rosenberg; and from colonial countries, like
Hess, who is Hitler’s present alternate for the party leadership. [5] A
barbarous din of nationalisms on the frontiers of civilization was
required in order to instill into its “leaders” those ideas which later
found response in the hearts of the most barbarous classes in Germany.
Personality and class – liberalism and Marxism – are evil. The nation
– is good. But at the threshold of private property this philosophy is
turned inside out. Salvation lies only in personal private property. The
idea of national property is the spawn of Bolshevism. Deifying the
nation, the petty bourgeois does not want to give it anything. On the
contrary, he expects the nation to endow him with property and to
safeguard him from the worker and the process-server. Unfortunately, the
Third Reich will bestow nothing upon the petty bourgeois except new
taxes.
In the sphere of modern economy, international in its ties and
anonymous in its methods, the principle of race seems unearthed from a
medieval graveyard. The Nazis set out with concessions beforehand; the
purity of race, which must be certified in the kingdom of the spirit by a
passport must be demonstrated in the sphere of economy chiefly by
efficiency. Under contemporary conditions this means competitive
capacity. Through the back door, racism returns to economic liberalism,
freed from political liberties.
Nationalism in economy comes down in practice to impotent though
savage outbursts of anti-Semitism. The Nazis abstract the usurious or
banking capital from the modern economic system because it is of the
spirit of evil; and, as is well known, it is precisely in this sphere
that the Jewish bourgeoisie occupies an important position. Bowing down
before capitalism as a whole, the petty bourgeois declares war against
the evil spirit of gain in the guise of the Polish Jew in a long-skirted
caftan and usually without a cent in his pocket. The pogrom becomes the
supreme evidence of racial superiority.
The program with which National Socialism came to power reminds one
very much – alas – of a Jewish department store in an obscure province.
What won’t you find here – cheap in price and in quality still lower!
Recollections of the “happy” days of free competition, and hazy
evocations of the stability of class society; hopes for the regeneration
of the colonial empire, and dreams of a shut-in economy; phrases about a
return from Roman law back to the Germanic, and pleas for an American
moratorium; an envious hostility to inequality in the person of a
proprietor in an automobile, and animal fear of equality in the person
of a worker in a cap and without a collar; the frenzy of nationalism,
and the fear of world creditors ... all the refuse of international
political thought has gone to fill up the spiritual treasury of the new
Germanic Messianism.
Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. 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.
German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the
backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram
against the organizations of the working class and the institutions of
democracy. But fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty
bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of
monopoly capital. Mussolini is right: the middle classes are incapable
of independent policies. During periods of great crisis they are called
upon to reduce to absurdity the policies of one of the two basic
classes. Fascism succeeded in putting them at the service of capital
Such slogans as state control of trusts and the elimination of unearned
income were thrown overboard immediately upon the assumption of power.
Instead, the particularism of German “lands” leaning upon the
peculiarities of the petty bourgeoisie gave way to capitalist-police
centralism. Every success of the internal and foreign policies of
National Socialism will inevitably mean the further crushing of small
capital by large.
The program of petty-bourgeois illusions is not discarded; it is
simply torn away from reality, and dissolved in ritualistic acts. The
unification of all classes reduces itself to semisymbolic compulsory
labor and to the confiscation of the labor holiday of May Day for the
“benefit of the people.” The preservation of the Gothic script as
opposed to the Latin is a symbolic revenge for the yoke of the world
market The dependence upon the international bankers, Jews among their
number, is not eased an iota, wherefore it is forbidden to slaughter
animals according to the Talmudic ritual. If the road to hell is paved
with good intentions, then the avenues of the Third Reich are paved
with symbols.
Reducing the program of petty-bourgeois illusions to a naked
bureaucratic masquerade, National Socialism raises itself over the
nation as the worst form of imperialism. Absolutely vain are hopes that
Hitler’s government will fail today or tomorrow, a victim of its
internal inconsistency. The Nazis required the program in order to
assume power; but power serves Hitler not at all for the purpose of
fuming the program. His tasks are assigned him by monopoly capital. The
compulsory concentration of all forces and resources of the people in
the interests of imperialism – the true historic mission of the fascist
dictatorship – means preparation for war; and this task, in its turn,
brooks no internal resistance and leads to a further mechanical
concentration of power. Fascism cannot be reformed or retired from
service. It can only be overthrown. The political orbit of the regime
leans upon the alternative, war or revolution.
Postscript
P.S.: The first anniversary of the Nazi
dictatorship is approaching. All the tendencies of the regime have had
time to take on a clear and distinct character. The “socialist”
revolution pictured by the petty-bourgeois masses as a necessary
supplement to the national revolution is officially liquidated and
condemned. The brotherhood of classes found its culmination in the fact
that on a day especially appointed by the government the haves renounced
the hors d’oeuvre and dessert in favor of the have-nots. The
struggle against unemployment is reduced to the cutting of
semi-starvation doles in two. The rest is the task of uniformed
statistics. “Planned” autarky is simply a new stage of economic
disintegration.
The more impotent the police regime of the Nazi is in the field of
national economy, the more it is forced to transfer its efforts to the
field of foreign policy. This corresponds fully to the inner dynamics of
German capitalism, aggressive through and through. The sudden turn of
the Nazi leaders to peaceful declarations could deceive only utter
simpletons. What other method remains at Hitler’s disposal to transfer
the responsibility for internal distresses to external enemies and to
accumulate under the press of the dictatorship the explosive force of
nationalism? This part of the program, outlined openly even prior to the
Nazis” assumption of power, is now being fulfilled with iron logic
before the eyes of the world. The date of the new European catastrophe
will be determined by the time necessary for the arming of Germany. It
is not a question of months, but neither is it a question of decades. It
will be but a few years before Europe is again plunged into a war,
unless Hitler is forestalled in time by the inner forces of Germany.
November 2, 1933
Leo Trotskij talar i Danmark 1932.
