Peter Schwarz, wsws.org

Eighty years ago, on January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed the leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler, as German chancellor. In the ensuing twelve years, the Hitler regime committed crimes never previously witnessed by mankind. It smashed the organized labor movement, subjected the country to a totalitarian dictatorship, destroyed Europe in an unprovoked war of aggression, and murdered millions of Jews, Roma and other minorities.

January 30, 1933 was a historic turning point. Before then, barbarism and anti-Semitism had been considered traits of economic and cultural backwardness. In 1933, however, the elite of a country that was highly developed both economically and culturally handed over power to a barbaric anti-Semite whose party relied on the dregs of society.

The source of this development lay in the irresolvable contradictions of German and international capitalism. The consequences of World War I and the onset of the global economic crisis in 1929 had ruined broad layers of the working class and middle class. German society was deeply divided; democracy existed only in name. The Weimar Republic survived on the basis of emergency decrees and presidential cabinets as it headed towards a social explosion.

Under these conditions, Hindenburg decided to entrust Hitler with the reins of government. The Nazis were needed to crush the workers’ movement. They had mass support among desperate layers of the petty-bourgeoisie and the lumpen proletariat, which they mobilized against the organized labor movement. The destruction of the labor movement was the prerequisite for the preparation of the war of conquest that German business so urgently demanded.

Hindenburg’s decision was supported by the heads of the army, by big business and by the bourgeois parties. Hitler did not have to conquer power; it was handed to him by the ruling elite. The claim, however, that the majority of Germans supported Hitler is patently false.

In the last election before the handover of power, held in November of 1932, the two major workers’ parties, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD), received half a million more votes than Hitler’s NSDAP. The workers hated the Nazis. Not only did they vote against Hitler, they wanted to fight him. But their leaders proved incapable of conducting such a struggle.

The SPD, which had crushed the proletarian revolution of 1918-19, had no intention of mobilizing the workers. The party took refuge behind the state, which it claimed would tame the Nazis. It encouraged illusions in the police and in the army and Hindenburg, whom the SPD backed in the Reichstag election of 1932. Nine months later, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor.

The social democratic-dominated unions went even further. The General Federation of German Trade Unions (ADGB) professed its loyalty to the new regime and demonstrated on May 1, 1933 under the swastika. All to no avail. On May 2, the Nazis stormed the union headquarters.

The key to stopping Hitler rested in the hands of the Communist Party, which had been founded in 1919 in response to the rightward turn of the SPD. Under the influence of Stalin, however, the KPD pursued a disastrous policy. It refused to make any distinction between National Socialists and Social Democrats, designating the latter as “social fascists.” The KPD leadership strictly refused to conclude a defensive alliance with the SPD against the Nazis.

Leon Trotsky and his followers fought tirelessly for such a united front, and were bitterly persecuted by the Stalinists. The Stalinist policy assumed an ultra-left form, but in fact it concealed the refusal of the Communist Party to undertake any struggle to expose the SPD leadership, win over social democratic workers and mount a serious struggle to oppose Hitler.
“No policy of the Communist Party could, of course, have transformed the Social Democracy into a party of the revolution,” Trotsky wrote in May 1933. “But neither was that the aim. It was necessary to exploit to the limit the contradiction between reformism and fascism—in order to weaken fascism, at the same time weakening reformism by exposing to the workers the incapacity of the Social Democratic leadership. These two tasks fused naturally into one. The policy of the Comintern bureaucracy led to the opposite result: the capitulation of the reformists served the interests of fascism and not of Communism; the Social Democratic workers remained with their leaders; the Communist workers lost faith in themselves and in the leadership.”

Trotsky drew far-reaching conclusions from the disastrous defeat of the German working class. Up until that point, the Left Opposition led by Trotsky fought for a political reorientation of the Communist parties and the Communist International. But following the refusal of the Communist International to draw any lessons from the German catastrophe and its prohibition of any discussion amongst its members of the disastrous policies of the KPD, such an orientation was no longer possible.

“An organization which was not roused by the thunder of fascism” Trotsky declared, “demonstrates thereby that it is dead and that nothing can ever revive it. To say this openly and publicly is our direct duty toward the proletariat and its future.” The task was no longer to reform the Comintern, but to build new communist parties and a new International.

Trotsky met with fierce resistance from centrist groups, which shared some of his criticisms of Stalinism but declared that the establishment of a new International was premature. Such a step, they argued, was possible only on the basis of a fresh upsurge of the revolutionary movement.

Trotsky decisively rejected such arguments. “Marxists, however, are not fatalists,” he wrote. “They do not unload upon the historical process those very tasks which the historical process has posed before them… Without a fused and steeled revolutionary party, a socialist revolution is inconceivable.”

These words once again take on burning and immediate significance. The international crisis of capitalism, which has worsened dramatically since the financial crisis of 2008, places explosive class struggles on the agenda. In Egypt, Greece, Portugal and Spain workers are rebelling on a daily basis against the brutal austerity measures and political attacks being carried out by their governments. The governments resort in response to authoritarian methods and encourage the growth of fascist organizations, such as Golden Dawn in Greece, the National Front in France, and Jobbik in Hungary.

A host of pseudo-leftist organizations together with the trade unions are doing everything in their power to lead the struggles of workers into a dead end and defend bourgeois rule. The most urgent task today is to build a new revolutionary leadership that unites workers internationally and mobilizes them in the struggle for workers’ power and the construction of a socialist society.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Schwarz writes for the World Socialist Web Site, an offshoot of the SEP (Socialist Equality Party), which he naturally endorses as a solution to the crises outlined in the essay.

By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org

Wednesday’s bombing of a Syrian military site by Israeli warplanes has ratcheted up the danger that the Western-backed civil war in Syria will spill over into a broader regional conflagration.

Unnamed US officials cited by the New York Times claimed that the target of Wednesday’s dawn air strike was a military convoy carrying arms that were supposedly destined for Hezbollah, the Shia political movement and militia in Lebanon.
The Syrian government, however, said that air strikes were directed against a military research center in Jamraya, in the Qasioun mountain range about three miles west of Damascus. It said that two workers at the center were killed in the bombing and five others were wounded.

“Israeli warplanes violated our airspace at dawn today and directly struck one of the scientific research centers responsible for elevating the resistance and self-defense capabilities in the area of Jamraya in the Damascus countryside,” Syria’s military said in a statement published by the official Sana news agency.

The Syrian regime charged that the air strikes had been facilitated by coordinated attacks on the part of the US-and Western-backed “rebels” against the country’s radar networks and air defense systems.
“Late Wednesday, a US official said the accounts of two targets—a convoy of weapons and a military site—weren’t mutually exclusive,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The official suggested that the convoy was attacked inside the military facility. How Israel determined that it was carrying weapons bound for Hezbollah across the border in Lebanon has not been clarified.

For its part, the Israeli regime has maintained a complete silence on its act of aggression against Syria. The New York Times late Thursday described this silence as “part of a longstanding strategy to give targeted countries face-saving opportunities to avoid conflict escalation.”

According to this perverse reasoning, Syria’s public statement on the attack—rather than the attack itself—was responsible for “increasing the likelihood of a cycle of retaliation.”

The air strike was reportedly carried out by four Israeli warplanes that flew low over Syrian territory before firing as many as a dozen missiles into the complex.

The Lebanese Daily Star quoted residents of the Jamraya area who said that they were woken by blasts at the military site. “We were sleeping. Then we started hearing rockets hitting the complex and the ground started shaking and we ran into the basement,” a woman who lives next to the complex told the Lebanese newspaper.

Another Syrian, who has a relative working inside the military site, told Reuters: “It appears that there were about a dozen rockets that appeared to hit one building in the complex. The facility is closed today.”

The extreme right-wing government of Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that it fears the nearly two-year-old civil war in Syria will lead to advanced weapons falling into the hands of Hezbollah or the Western-backed Islamist militias. In reality, as it begins its third term in office, the Netanyahu government is exploiting the crisis in Syria to carry out military strikes aimed at weakening its potential adversaries and paving the way for a new eruption of open warfare.

According to US officials, the alleged convoy headed to Lebanon was not carrying chemical weapons or any other offensive arms, but rather Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles, which would be capable of hitting Israeli fighter-bombers, helicopters and drones.

As NBC News put it, “They would remove Israel’s critical freedom of flight over Lebanon.” The Israeli regime has exercised this “freedom” repeatedly in the last several days. On Wednesday, the Lebanese army reported that Israeli warplanes had carried out two sorties over Lebanese territory, circling for hours on Tuesday and returning before dawn on Wednesday.

More importantly, this unchallenged control over Lebanon’s airspace is critical for Israel if it is preparing yet another war against the country to its north, which it last invaded in 2006, destroying much of its infrastructure with air and sea bombardments and killing over 1,100 people.

This eventuality was strongly suggested by a top Israeli military commander. On the eve of the air strike on Syria, Major-General Amir Eshel, the chief of Israel’s air force, declared that Israel was now engaged in a “war between wars” and that “this campaign is 24/7, 365 days a year. We are taking action to reduce the immediate threats, to create better conditions in which we will be able to win the wars, when they happen.”

Eshel said that Tel Aviv was trying “to keep [our] efforts beneath the level at which war breaks out,” but added, “… if there is no alternative—maybe it will.”

The Israeli attack was carried out after prior consultation with the Obama administration in Washington, which, like Tel Aviv, has maintained a guilty silence over the air strikes. Indeed, the only official US response came in the form of a statement by the White House deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, who issued a warning to Syria that it should not “further destabilize the region by transferring weaponry to Hezbollah.”

Israel’s carrying out a so-called “preventive” military action, i.e., unprovoked aggression, against a sovereign territory was clearly not seen by the US administration as “destabilizing.” This was just the latest in a long line of such criminal actions, carried out by Washington’s ally, including last October’s attack on an alleged weapons factory in Sudan and endless violence against the Palestinian populations in the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The Israeli air strikes were condemned by the Russian government, which called them “unprovoked attacks on targets on the territory of a sovereign country, which blatantly violates the UN Charter and is unacceptable, no matter the motives to justify it.”

Iran, Syria’s closest regional ally, warned that the “Zionist regime’s attack on the outskirts of Damascus will have grave consequences for Tel Aviv.” Previously Tehran had warned that it would treat an attack on Syria as an act of aggression against its own territory.

In Lebanon, President Michel Suleiman denounced the Israeli attack as “flagrant aggression” and accused Israel of “exploiting the developments in Syria to carry out its aggressive policies, indifferent to all the humanitarian and international treaties.”

Debka.com, an Israeli military intelligence web site with close ties to the Israeli secret services, reported that the strike on Syria had “touched off high military alerts across the region,” including on the part of a Russian fleet of 18 warships in the eastern Mediterranean, the Lebanese and Jordanian armies and US forces based at the Incerlik air base in Turkey, as well as US special operations troops deployed in Jordan.

The US-backed Israeli attack on Syria is only the beginning of what threatens to explode into a far wider war, including against Iran, dragging the entire region into a bloodbath and endangering the lives of millions.

BILL VAN AUKEN is a leading political analyst with the SEP (Socialist Equality Party).