The Economy & Class Structure of German Fascism: Chapter 10

The Dialectic of Fascism

At this stage, I feel it might be useful to an English readership to outline in great brevity the events which actually led to the first Nazi Government, and for this purpose I cannot do better than to quote from Professor Roy Pascal’s book ‘The Growth of Modem Germany’.¹

‘There was a dense cloud of propaganda issuing from Nazi quarters, largely of a radical, pseudo-socialist colour, and it was difficult to penetrate through this fog to the meaning of the alliance with the land-owning and industrial interests represented in the Cabinet. This deliberate confusion, laming opposition within and without the Nazi party, contributed considerably to the success of the Nazis. But Hitler and his associates had no intention of resting content with a mere internal reorganisation of German society. The “autarchism” of certain groups of intellectuals, who advocated the restoration of [the] German economy through the sealing-off of Germany from the world, was soon condemned as pettifogging and parochial. To one part of the Nazi programme Hitler had remained consistently loyal, the Points which call for a greater Germany embracing all Germans, and land for colonisation. Thus, although the official slogan of the Nazi party in 1933-34 was the ‘creation of work’, all the measures adopted were such as promoted the military power of Germany — the expansion of the army, the great extension of the paramilitary organisations of the Nazi party, the development of the Labour Service. Industry and agriculture were thoroughly reconstructed and re-equipped for the same purpose....

The pogroms against the Jews which Hitler unleashed immedi­ately on taking power, and which culminated in the systematic slaughter of millions of Jews during the war, served many purposes. For the Storm Troopers they were a stimulus for vicious passion and an outlet for brutal bullying; in the masses of the people they induced a terror of the Nazi power. The first outbreak in February 1933 was the overture to the destruction of the Communist organisations, which led immediately to the establishment of Hitler’s dictatorship.

In January Hitler solemnly asserted his determination to abide by the Constitution, and his preparations for the suppression of the communists were made in defence of ‘law and order’. When the Reichstag building was found to be on fire (on February 27), the Communist party was outlawed, and the police, now stiffened with Storm Troopers, was given free play to kill communists or to throw them into concentration camps, where thousands lost their lives after torture. The other parties acquiesced in the fate of the communists, partly out of fear, partly in malicious satisfaction, partly in the hope that the Nazi rage would expend itself on Jews and Bolsheviks.

On March 5 new elections to the Reichstag were held. Even in the prevailing terror, the Communist party won 81 seats, but because its representatives were not allowed to take their seats, the Nazis, who had won 43.9% of the votes cast, had a clear majority....On May 2 the trade unions were dissolved....the Steel Helmets, the Nationalist ex-servicemen’s organisation, was absorbed in the S.A., and on July 14 the Nationalist party itself broke up; its more pliant leaders, like Papen and the foreign Minister, Neurath, were admitted to membership of the Nazi party.

The Cabinet itself was enlarged bit by bit through the admittance of Nazis like Goebbels and Hess. Hugenberg, the Nationalist leader, was forced to resign, and by June the Nazis had a majority in the Cabinet.’

With that brief but comprehensive outline I return to my own narrative. Hugenberg had been appointed as Minister of Economics in the original version of the Hitler Government, and in this capacity he carried the dual responsibility for both industry and agriculture. Not since Caprivi, the successor to Bismark in 1890, had the offices of industry and agriculture been united in the person of one Minister. It was a union intended to guarantee industry’s control over the cartelisation of agriculture, and thus to carry out the policy of the MWT. Hugenberg was an exceedingly ponderous and thorough man who insisted on sifting through and wording every ordinance and regulation himself instead of delegating to the ministerial bureaucracy intended for the purpose.

One of my colleagues on the editorial board of the ‘Deutsche Führerbriefe’, regularly passing his office, saw the lights on night after night sometimes as late as 2.00 a.m. and even after the Reichstag fire. Before his enforced resignation on June 26, 1933 he had succeeded in putting the Finishing touches to the German-Dutch Trade Pact. This was an agreement that was to be a model of the new trade policy based on agrarian cartelisation offering favourable terms for industrial exports against variable quantities and fixed price quotas of agricultural imports. His work on the first decrees on edible fats, on the Farm Inheritance Law, and his preparation towards the debt clearances of the peasant farmers, all these carefully thought-out and intricate examples of his legislation were ready to be taken over by his far less competent but more politically acceptable successor.

There were several reasons why the choice of this successor fell upon a completely unknown man named Darré.² In the First place he was a Nazi. Secondly he was specially recommended by old Reusch, the boss of the Gute Hoffnungshütte, one of the main iron and steel works of Germany, who for personal reasons felt confident in vouchsafing for his suitability. For, when a young man in his First post, on the Königsberg Agricultural Board, Darré had indulged in some underhand deals in Polish rye and had consequently been sacked. But Reusch had been fascinated with Darré’s bizarre ideas about the ‘New Nobility of Blood and Earth’ and so had saved him and had him installed as his protegé in the Nassau Agricultural Chamber, and from there to the Ministerial post in Berlin. Reusch had, however, in his wisdom, preserved the incriminating documents on Darré’s malpractices in his own personal safe and thus felt able to guarantee the future behaviour of his young charge. The third reason for his instatement was that among the industrialists who knew him Darré had enjoyed the reputation of vast ignorance of industrial affairs, equalled only by spectacular stupidity in general. One could safely expect that, without so much as noticing it, he would make himself the compliant tool of industry. ‘The man’s so stupid that he’ll carry out our policies and not even know what he’s doing’ — were Max Hahn’s actual words to me at the time. In short, Darré was the ideal of a Nazi. In consequence industry leapt with him out of the frying pan into the Fire.

It was not merely that the fascist dictatorship was particularly indebted to this kind of stupidity and ignorance. This mere psychological fart hides a far deeper motive. The switch to the terroristic control of absolute surplus value production by the state meant that the bourgeois elite had to smash not only the proletarian political organisations but also the mass basis appropriate to their own previous control through relative surplus value production, mainly the unions and social-democracy; these they had to replace with a different mass basis: that of National Socialism. However, the relationship of the bourgeoisie to this new mass basis is fundamentally different from the earlier one. Social-democracy and the leading elite groups of finance capital belonged together as opposite poles within the same economic regime, that of advancing relative surplus value production. In a fascist dictatorship, the proletariat is excluded as a class from all share in power, but this means that the bourgeoisie stands in a constant polemic with its own unavoidable situation, the objective, blind power embodied in the party dictatorship of its fascist class vanguard. This vanguard is by no means exclusively the bourgeoisie’s obedient tool for the political disarming of the proletariat. The fascists perform this function only if they can ride roughshod over the bourgeoisie too, forcing it to go the way they want.³

Strangely enough, this is not because the Nazis possessed superior instruments of power, up to June 30, 1934 in the S.A. and from then on in the Gestapo and the S.S., in the party bureaucracy and in the administrative hierarchy. They certainly did not control the lords of the bourgeoisie as the janissaries did their Sultant. The regular army that the capitalists had at their potential disposal could at any time have put a bloodless end to the Nazi tyranny. What made the rule of the Party so invincible compared with the power potential of the bourgeoisie was precisely the bourgeoisie’s entanglement in the contradictions of its own position.

The fascist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie creates as its unflinching shadow the opposition of the bourgeoisie to its dictatorship; only the sides for and against in their different sections successively change roles, indeed these opposing sides are simultaneously represented in the various columns of the same balance-sheet. And this opposition to fascist class rule is indeed no more than a shadow. Viewed as an independent force, it immediately reveals its political impotence. Every real action undertaken against the agencies of dictatorship, an army insurgency for example, cancels out the very class and profit interest which gave rise to the opposition in the first place. For what would be the point of a bourgeois opposition which, by winning, came to power? The only possible sense it could have would be a restoration of the genuine profitability and profit-making suspended by fascism, — in other words, a return to the rules of economic competition and the methods of relative surplus value production. It would amount to a suicidal attempt to restore conditions whose previous unreali­zability had already caused the plunge into fascism, conditions which had now become all the more unrealizable, for fascism had massively multiplied the disproportions existing at the outset. With every successful opposition action, the bourgeoisie would run into increasingly total economic helplessness and when pushed to the extreme brink of its class rule would have of necessity to create just such a dictatorship as its opposition had had the misfortune to overthrow.⁴

The dictatorial power of the Nazis was the blind power of the unchangeability and the inner contradictions of the fascist path which they pursued. It could be threatened by the bourgeoisie only in the purely theoretical event that from outside the country (from heaven perhaps!), the entire financial and economic deficit of German capitalism were wiped out, the contradictions removed and the position of the German bourgeoisie re-normalized. For then the fascist party would not only be dispensable, it would actually have to be removed speedily for the renormalization to succeed. We can thus see that the party derives its power not from its own strength or from any original political concept or line of its own but solely by virtue of the unavoidable predicament of the bourgeoisie, trapped between the profit and the loss calculations of its own class interest; as this predicament intensifies, so does the power of the Nazis. And the Nazis can hardly do better in their own interests than to employ the maximum possible ignorance and stupidity. The more bourgeois china is broken, the better fares the Party, the more inextricably is the bourgeoisie tied to its protection racketeers and the more noiselessly it has to abdicate lever after lever of its economic power to the Party. The black of the fascist cloth is the black of the ink into which the bourgeoisie has fallen. The dialectic of fascism is uncontrollable.

1. Published in 1946 by Cobbett Press in ‘Past and Present Series’

2. Richard Walther Darré, one of the more prominent exponents of Nazi “blood and soil” ideology. At the peak of his political career, he was the seventh most senior officer in the Schutzstaffel (SS). Despite rising to such high ranks within Nazi Germany, Darré’s incompetence was so great even by Nazi standards that he ended up being reassigned to lower posts before the beginning of World War II. The fact that Darré’s political influence waned before the Nazi regime committed its most notorious crimes probably explains why Darré received light sentences in the Nuremberg Trials, and did not even complete his prison sentence. Darré lived the last three years of his life as a free man and died of cancer in a Munich hospital in 1953. — Bluebird

3. The original footnote Sohn-Rethel included here simply instructed the reader to reference Chapter 13 of his book for an explanation of relative and absolute surplus value. But since we have serialized this edition, and because Sohn-Rethel explains the concepts very concisely, we will simply include the passage in this footnote: “A Marxist analysis will help us to understand the system more fully. We know that capitalist profits are reaped from the amount of work which labourers perform over and above that necessary to produce the value of their wages. This unpaid labour represents the ‘surplus value’ which can be ‘absolute’ or ‘relative’. It is called relative when its extraction is associated with increased labour productivity because it can be enlarged without an extension of the labour time. This implies a general technological advance of society and marks a progressive stage of the capitalist mode of production. In the early epochs of capitalism the measure of the surplus value simply depended on the absolute length of the working day and, when this met with outer limits, it depended on the speeding of labour. This Marx calls ‘absolute surplus value’ because the technical and the social conditions of labour then are tantamount to a fixed, absolute magnitude. Judged from the angle of these Marxian categories the essence of the fascist economic system is recognisable as a reversion of the capitalist mode of production from the relative to the absolute surplus value extraction. The rate of accumulation is raised by depressing the rate of consumption, and the surplus product cannot be of a consumable and marketable kind.”

4. Sohn-Rethel captures the essence of the Nazi dictatorship so perfectly in this paragraph. Having been lifted into power at every opportunity by the Bourgeoisie, in the hope of resolving economic contradictions which the Bourgeoisie proved incapable of resolving through its own class rule, the Nazis assume the image of impartiality by suspension of Bourgeois Democracy. But the formal suspension of Bourgeois Democracy does not resolve the contradictions that exist among the Bourgeoisie, as competition in the domestic and international markets, as the inherent contradictions of commodity production and exchange, brings the Bourgeoisie into a constant polemic with itself. The constant attempts by the Fascist dictatorship to manage these contradictions may alienate small segments and individuals from the Bourgeoisie at some points, but even in opposition, these members of the Bourgeoisie are too dependent on the Fascist dictatorship to displace it and reinstall Bourgeois Democracy. The result is that there is a constantly revolving door between the factions of the Bourgeoisie who support the Fascist dictatorship and those who oppose it; on opposite sides and on the same side simultaneously. — Bluebird