I wrote this before the 2024 US election. I hoped for another result, but did not hide from the alternative. I think it’s still relevant to the world in which we find ourselves now.

Dear Friends, Tragedy, yes, but will it be farce next time?

One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as an historical norm.

Walter Benjamin

A bit more than ninety years ago one of the two or three worst catastrophes of the twentieth century – the terrible century that is still for many of us ours – occurred. At the moment it didn’t seem so catastrophic, just another couple of inconclusive elections in a nation still torn between its all too real absolutist past and the possibility for a “democratic” future. That moment quickly passed. Oddly enough, though, the cause has been neglected, even by reactionary historians whom you might have thought would have delighted in rubbing our noses in it. So it’s left to people like me to make sure that everyone understands what happened. And what happened was that the two main working class parties – our parties, for people like me, that is – caused the catastrophe. 

The two elections of July and November 1932, prepared the way for the Nazi accession to power in Germany, culminating in Hindenburg’s recognition of Hitler as Chancellor, 30 January 1933.

The Nazis never won a majority, and received fewer votes in November than in July. What handed them victory was the refusal of the two working class parties, the Social Democrats (SDP) and the Communists (KPD), to unite in opposition to them. Let’s be clear here: in July, SPD + KPD votes were a couple of percentage points below the votes for the Nazis; in November they were several points above. Had the SPD and the KPD campaigned together, their vote counts would have been a great deal higher in both elections. Animosity between Social Democrats and Communists did terrible damage to working class solidarity.

It's easy to put most of the blame on the KPD, subject as it was to the dictates of the Third International, and to Stalin’s disastrous rejection of the United Front strategy in 1928: henceforth, the Social Democrats became Social Fascists. But the SPD also has a lot to answer for, going back to its use, as governing party, of the reactionary paramilitary Freikorps, to suppress the Communist uprising of 1919 – including the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Forget all that. The Social Democrats and the Communists had it in their power, easily in their power, to defeat the Nazis in 1932. They chose not to. Anyone today who still aspires to Marxism, Socialism, Communism, must deal with this, just as they must accept completely and without reservation, the fact of the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union, China, and other countries – some of the most terrible atrocities of a terrible century, our century, for some of us still.

We must remember these things, however painful it is to remember them: the Communists and the Socialists had it in their power to defeat the Nazis. The coming to power of the Nazis was a catastrophe for all. For those of us who still think that the only possible future for humanity that is not horror and barbarism is something for which the best words are socialism, communism … we must take responsibility for the actions of our comrades, those who came before us. We cannot judge, we cannot know what we would have done in their situation. But we must recognize the result of their decision. And it must be in our thoughts today, always, all the time, and it must guide us now in an unprecedented crisis, a crisis of bourgeois democracy, not at all the same as the crisis of the Weimar Republic in 1932, in the US 2024.    

And why is it so necessary to think of this now? Because so much effort is going into analyzing Trump’s speeches, their references to Hitler, etc. But very little effort into how to combat them. So here’s a grand claim: Yes, Trump’s words do invoke Hitler (whether he knows it or not), but the only thing that matters now is to form a movement against him and his allies that is as all-encompassing as possible. So let’s go back there, to the time of resistance to fascism not only from outside but from within: the Popular Front.

We need a new and global Popular Front. In the US, right now, that means figuring out the specifics of our situation, so, to finding both similarities and differences between ours and others. And it is certainly true that Marxists tend to go too far in universalizing situations (and I am not exempting myself from this though I do try). 

There are situations, conjunctures, as some of us used to say, that recur at least in part, and it’s a good idea to pay attention so as to recognize these if we can, always separating what is in common from what is not. So:

Yes, USA 2024 and Germany 1932 are not entirely dissimilar, though the similarities may be fewer than much media talk suggests. So, let’s start not from comparisons, but with what is actually happening in the USA now, today.

The US today is in an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly dangerous situation. One of its two major parties has become what? … dishonest? dishonorable? shameful? utterly contemptible? rogue? criminal? traitorous? pathetic? groveling? can you imagine yourself debasing yourself so-ing?

Well, yes, all of the above and more. All of them, in Congress at least. It is now completely impossible to engage with the Republican members of both Houses on any subject whatever. But the Republicans today do have one great quality for which all Americans, and, indeed, all people, should thank them from the bottom of our hearts: they are almost unbelievably bad at governing, and the more control they have over the instruments of power, the worse they become.

I’m not joking, this truly is their gift to the Republic. Will it see us through? Well that’s the question. And the dangers may be less at the federal level than that of the states.

What do they actually want, the Republicans? It’s very hard to say: all of the reclaiming the US from hard-left something or rather makes no sense at all. Yes, many of them do seem to want to take the US back to the good old days, but it’s unclear just which old days those are. The religious element is truly scary. Members of Congress having lengthy conversations with God about their campaign strategies – Yo God, should I stick with this congressional district, the polls are looking pretty bad … maybe I should switch to another, whad’ya think? – is far from the worst of it.

What do they actually want? Well it certainly does not have anything to do with actually doing anything constructive towards the social good – they have themselves irrefutably demonstrated this. So we’re left with the paltriest of all goals, money, and then maybe, attached to the money, notoriety, and then, some power to get the money and the notoriety.

Not exactly glorious aims. But they are astonishingly willing to acknowledge and even celebrate them! Over and over again they preen themselves on useless legislation that does nothing other than to lay bare their own lies.

And then there’s Trump, the definition of nonentity, who nonetheless only has to speak and all those members of Congress jump. So the question – among many others – is just what is the danger when a nonentity controls a party with absolutely no other aim than the personal interest of each one of them? What can this weird mass of clamoring voices, divided against each other as much as against the “enemy”, “led” by the empty shell of a person actually do?

Maybe a way to think about this is to contrast US 2024 with Germany 1933. 

In 1933 the Sturmabteilung (SA), the original Nazi “storm-troops” numbered over 3 million; the Schutzstaffel (SS), originally a security detail for Hitler and other Nazi leaders, numbered over 300,000. Both were already heavily armed, and organized with military discipline. Many of their members were veterans of the Freikorps, recruited by reactionary officers from troops demobilized after 1918: that is, they had not only undergone military training, and the uniquely brutalizing conditions of trench warfare, they were also primed to believe the myth of the “stab in the back”, the betrayal of the German Army, Germany, by bourgeois – so Jewish – politicians. And the Nazis did have clearly defined aims, and plans to realize them. They knew what they wanted.

American reactionaries do own lots and lots of guns, including many that can easily be turned from “civilian” into “military” weapons, though even these, overwhelmingly, would only be light infantry weapons. It would be good to know just what the number and kind of arms owned by American reactionaries is as compared to the guns in the control of the SA and the SS. Has anyone measured that? Unfortunately that’s out of my line. Equally, we could consider just how many American reactionaries there are as a percentage of the population, in comparison to SA and SS membership in comparison to the Germany population.

The obvious contrast, even from just those two calculations, is that the SA and the SS were highly organized, highly armed and under a central command. The American armed reactionaries are … well what are they? For all their talk of civil war, etc., they are at least not that. And for that, we should all, including all of them, all of us, be enormously, even exuberantly grateful.

The American reactionaries, ordinary civilians, elected Republicans and the media who are their puppet masters, are also wonderfully at odds with one another. I hope that I am not making a terrible mistake, but I don’t see here the kind of organized armed movement necessary for an actual coup d’état.

But we are faced with a terrible threat. What is it? I think that we need to focus less – though certainly never forget it – on the danger of armed violence, and think more about the damage that has been done to the entirety of the political order and civil society by the transformation of the Republican Party into a bottomless pit of corruption … and the way in which that terrible damage is confounded by the fact that the perpetrators of this corruption are still treated as legitimate figures in government.

This is not Germany, 1933. It is what we are faced with in the US of A, 2024.

Love and Solidarity,

Bobby