Antisemitic anti-Zionism in the German Communist movement before 1933

Cross-posted from Anti-National Translation:

To add to the German article, “Class-Strugglers against their own Will: The German Communist Party and the Antisemitism in Weimar Republic“, by Olaf Kistenmacher that I already linked to, here are two more texts, this time in English, by Olaf, from the Engage journal:

From ‘Judas’ to ‘Jewish Capital’: Antisemitic Forms of Thought in the German Communist Party (KPD) in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933 [May 2006]

From ‘Jewish Capital’ to the ‘Jewish-Fascist Legion in Jerusalem’: The Development of Antizionism in the German Communist Party (KPD) in the Weimar Republic, 1925-1933 [September 2006]

The argument, essentially, is that a trajectory towards a malignant form of anti-Zionism in the post-1945 anti-imperialist left was already present in the 1920s. “It did not need to be invented after 1945 in order to identify ‘Zionism’ with imperialism and capitalism, and the socialist and communist left after 1945 were not the first to advocate the hatred of ‘Zionism’. This has already been done in the 1920s. It is also important that the conversion of anti-imperialism into anti-Zionism marked a considerable shift in the worldview of the left: Throughout the Weimar Republic, the KPD drew a fetishistic picture of capitalism, as if the German working class possessed its ‘working power’ as a quasi-natural property that could create ‘values’ independent of the historical circumstances.” Although pre-1933 anti-Zionism cannot be equated to its post-Shoah forms, the intellectual basis was already deeply rooted.

Related articles

• Class-Strugglers against their own Will: The German Communist Party and the Antisemitism in Weimar Republic (antigerman.wordpress.com)

Histories

From the blogs:

• From Shiraz Socialist: The King’s Speech – a right royal falsification; Remembering Dorothy Thompson.
• Timothy Snyder: Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?
• From BobFromBrockley: “Progressive London”: A Popular Front for reactionaries.
• Peter Berger: Revolutionaries with American passports.

From Lawrence and Wishart, the ex-Stalinist publishing company:

• Kevin Morgan on John Saville’s life (from  John Saville: Commitment and history)
• Andrew Thorpe on the origins of Lib-Lab division (from Renewal 18.3/4)
• Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Terry Hopton on Tolstoy (from Anarchist Studies)
• Sylvain Boulouque on French communism from the First World War to the Cold War (from Twentieth Century Communism)
• Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja on the history of democracy in DR Congo (from Soundings 34, 2006)

From the archive of struggle:

Features:

• Joseph J. Cohen: “The Right to Self-Determination” (1951) This is a fascinating text from The World Scene From The Libertarian Point of View. For information on Cohen, see Notes in the margins.
• “The movement must fight back as one”. News Line (April 9, 1983); “May Day in Libya” News Line (May 1976). Bitter irony as the people of Libya rise up heroically against the dictator Gadafi.
• Joseph A. Labadie: “Is Tyranny a Necessity?” in Liberty X.21, Whole No. 307 (February 23, 1895). 7.
• “Sunday Schools That Teach Children Anarchy,” from the New York Times (May 8, 1910)
• Simone Weil: “Le sang coule en Tunisie” (1937)

Also:

• Harry Rogoff: Di diaur fun prolearia (1900)
• Jan Wacław Machajski: State socialism (1900)
• William Charles Owen: Stray Thoughts (1911)
• Alexander Schapiro: The crisis of power (1917)
• Leo Trotzki: What is a revolutionary situation? (1931)
• Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM): Révolution espagnole, 24. November 1936; Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM): Révolution espagnole, 17. September 1936
• Friedrich Adler: The Witchcraft Trial in Moscow (1936)
• Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM): Réponse du POUM à l’article de la Pravda et de l’Humanité (1937)
• Andreu Nin: Majdagarna i Barcelona (1937)
• Leo Trotzki: Upproret i Barcelona (några preliminära kommentarer) (1937)
• Pierre Broué: ”Majdagarna” i Barcelona 1937 (1988)
• George Padmore: Chris Jones: Fighter for the Oppressed (1944)
• Claude Lefort: The Contradiction of Trotsky (1948)
• Natalia Sedowa Trotzki: Bruch mit der 4. Internationale (1951)
• C.L.R. James/Raya Dunayewskaya: State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950/1986)
• Raya Dunayewskaya: The Revolt In The Slave Labor Camps In Vorkuta (1955)
• La Révolution prolétarienne: Czar Staline est mort (1953, Artikel von Robert Louzon, Alfred Rosmer, V. Cardey und Pierre Monatte)
• Ignacio Iglesias: Conversación con Silone (1955)
• Helmut Rüdiger: Aus Rudolf Rockers Briefen (1958)
• Social Revolution: NUS: What Now? (1976) /  Where We’re At (1976)
• Ian Pirie: School Report (1976)
• World Revolution: The SPGB: Parliamentary Cretins (1976, wo die IKS Recht hat, da hat sie Recht)
• Agis Stinas: In the transfer section of Piraeus (1977)
• Boris Souvarine: Stalin: Why and How (1978)
• Sam Dolgoff: The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective (19??)
• Adam Buick/John Crump: La dynamique capitaliste des économies étatisées (1985)
• Marcel van der Linden: Second thoughts on revolutionary syndicalism (1988)
• Nikolai Bucharin/Luigi Fabbri/Albert Meltzer: The Poverty of Statism, Anarchism vs. Marxism (19??)
• Wayne Thorpe: Anarchosyndicalism in Inter-War France: The Vision of Pierre Besnard (?)
• Carl Levy: Currents of Italian syndicalism before 1926 (2000)
• Philippe Bourrinet: The workers’ councils in the theory of the Dutch-German communist left (?)
• Philippe Bourrinet: Victor Serge: Totalitarianism and State Capitalism (Socialist Deconstruction and Collectivist Humanism) (2002)

Credits: Entdinglichung (1, 2, 3)

Related Articles [auto-generated]

From the archive of struggle no.37

In previous issues, I have featured the Labadie Collection, the Holt Labor Library, and other American archives. Today, we turn to Ireland.

The MultiText Project in History is an innovative educational project, brought to you by the History Department, University College Cork. It is the largest and most ambitious project undertaken by any university to provide resources for students of Modern Irish History at all levels: University students, the general reader, and second-level students. The project aims to publish a minimum of 12 books, each dealing with a separate period of Irish history. Each book contains accounts of key personalities, concepts, and detailed elucidations of some case studies in the period.

Among the project’s galleries are one on James Connolly and one on James Larkin, and a case study of the 1913 strike and lockout in Dublin . Here are some of the features:

Farewell dinner for Connolly, New York, 1910.

Farewell dinner on the occasion of Connolly’s departure from New York to return to Dublin, 14 July 1910.

Election leaflet in Yiddish.

Election leaflet in Yiddish in support of James Connolly in his campaign for election to Dublin Corporation for the Wood Quay Ward in 1902.

Larkin in Moscow as representative of the Workers’ Union of Ireland at the Fifth Congress of the Comintern.

Larkin was sentenced to five to ten years in Sing Sing Prison, New York State for ‘criminal anarchy’ in 1920.

Larkin addressing a crowd c. 1923.

The rest below the fold.

Marxist theory 2

From The Commune:

• State capitalism and communism-from-below in latin america
• The spirit of utopia today
• On Marxism Today

From Workers Liberty:

• The mistakes of Mandel and Cliff on the Russian question
• Julius Jacobson on Shachtman on Leninism, the Comintern and putschism
• The two souls of eco-socialism
• Trotsky on why Stalin invaded Poland
• Third camp politics: America, Iran and our solidarity
• George Lansbury and Poplarism
• United Fronts and Popular Fronts

Sketchy Thoughts:

• (Introduction to Hamerquist)
• Don Hamerquist: Lenin, Leninism, and some leftovers
• (A response from Dave Renney)
• (A reply by Tom Wetzel)
• (A response by What in the hell…)

• Noel Ignatiev: C.L.R. James on the Marxist Organization

Notes and Commentaries:

• EH Carr on history and revolution

Links:

• Gramsci and hegemony

Marxist Theory 1 here.

European histories: 1934, 1959, etc

From The Commune:

The last week has seen much media coverage of the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, largely devoted to nostalgia and a hefty chunk of British (and Polish) nationalism. What is rarely commented on is the dynamics of political struggle within the countries participating in the bloodbath, and less still the activity of the workers’ movement, which did not in fact purely and simply support the Allies, and had to resist authoritarian measures imposed to varying degrees by each state enforcing wartime control measures.

While some of the struggles that took place had an immediate and significant effect on the outcome of the war, others which totally failed are equally worth remembering. While popular culture venerates Nazis-turned-good, as in the 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie which depicts the 20th July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler by aristocratic militarists who had lost faith in their Führer, less well-known are the stories of those who fought Nazism from start to finish, from a position of far less power, severe privations and heavy repression. How many people know that the first action in defiance of the Holocaust was nothing to do with the Allies (who infamously refused to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz and did little to stop it), but a two-day general strike started by communist dockworkers and tramdrivers in response to raids of Jewish homes in Amsterdam in February 1941? [READ THE REST]

From Eurozine:

The Hungarian Quarterly 195 (2009)

Two books dealing with the state security apparatus in communist Hungary emphasize the extent to which its members, from informants and their handlers up to high-ranking politicians in the Ministry of the Interior, were subordinate to the Communist Party hierarchy, writes historian and journalist Sándor Révész. This radically calls into question the common treatment of “informants” as scapegoats and shifts the focus to Party officials, many of whom became respected politicians after 1989.

“The sources show clearly that a much wider circle of people than the network of agents were responsible for the disadvantages, and even vilification, suffered by thousands of people”, writes Révész. “This makes it hardly surprising that researchers pushing for freedom of information on state surveillance find little support. The response to publications that do find their way to a wider readership is jittery, with researchers generally being accused of the very thing that is least true of them, i.e. that they are only interested in unmasking and pillorying those who were recruited into the informer network.”

After 1956, writes Révész, the covertly totalitarian Kádár regime strove for omniscience as opposed to omnipotence, which in turn entailed a new form of policing. “If a legitimate, constitutional opposition is not allowed to exist, then every activity, person and group represents a threat to national security should it carry the seeds of dissidence.” The lesson to be learned “is that no general conclusions can be drawn about the possibility of refusing to cooperate with the state security services”.

Also:

Slavenka Drakulic on Tito. Timothy Snyder on totalitarianism’s Baltic killing fields. Ben Peck on the Hitler-Stalin pact. Nada Prlja on the red bourgeoisie in Yugoslavia and the coming black communism. 

In other news: Lyndon LaRouche’s creeps peddle softcore Holocaust denialism – an Armenian Holocaust survivor is arrested for stopping them.

Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service talk Trotsky

From National Review Online’s Uncommon Knowledge TV show. Each episode is around 6 minutes. Pretty good from the superficial listen I’ve had.

• Trotsky with Hitchens and Service 1: Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service introduce Leon Trotsky, “one of the half-dozen outstanding Marxist revolutionaries.”(Background stuff. Skip it if you are among the initiated.)

• Trotsky with Hitchens and Service 2: the defeat and exile of Leon Trotsky.

• Trotsky with Hitchens and Service 3: What if Trotsky, rather than Stalin, attained control of the Soviet Union?

• Trotsky with Hitchens and Service 4: Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service talk about Trotsky’s “moral moments.” (On anti-fascism and the 1930s)

• Trotsky with Hitchens and Service 5: Trotsky today – scrutinizing the modern romantic view of Leon Trotsky.

(Twitter version: The Hitchens/Service series: 1: http://ow.ly/jygc, 2: http://ow.ly/jygo, 3: http://ow.ly/jyhv, 4: http://ow.ly/jyhO, 5: http://ow.ly/jyhW. “Christopher Hitchens is a journalist and author. His most recent book is God Is Not Great. Robert Service is a historian who has published major biographies of Lenin and Stalin. His most recent book, Comrades!, is study of communism as a worldwide movement. His upcoming work, Trotsky, will be published in November 2009.”)

ADDED: Lesley Chamberlain “Twilight in Mexico” in WSJ on Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary by Bertrand M. Patenaude (published in the UK as Stalin’s Nemesis, which I blogged about here, when it was Radio 4′s Book of the Week. More from Bookhugger, Ardmayle, The Tablet. More later today about the current Book of the Week, which also has a Trotskyist theme. ).

John Cornford

The Marxist Internet Archive, as I noted here, are undertaking the wonderful task of adding Brian Pearce’s regular column, Constant Reader, from the 1950s, to their great collection. A couple of items caught my eye. This is from March 1959:

John Cornford’s warning

A useful book on this subject is ‘John Cornford: A Memoir’, edited by Pat Sloan (1938). It consists of selections from the writings of the young man to whom the socialist movement in the universities in that period owed more than to anybody else, together with contributions by people who knew him.

Cornford was killed in action in December 1936, fighting with the International Brigade in Spain. His writings while in Spain suggest that, had he lived, his Marxist approach would have brought him into conflict with Stalinism.

For Cornford the struggle in Spain was ‘a revolutionary war’.

‘In Catalonia at least the overwhelming majority of the big employers went over to the fascists. Thus the question of socialism was placed on the order of the day.’

The Communist Party should ‘force recognition from the government of the social gains of the revolution’.

Cornford feared that the party was ‘a little too mechanical in its application of People’s Front tactics. It is still concentrating too much on trying to neutralize the petty bourgeoisie – when by far the most urgent task is to win the socialist workers…’

And this is from the following week:

Cornford and the anarchists

An error crept into one of my quotations from Cornford last week – an error which it is particularly worth correcting, as it weakens the point of the passage quoted.

It was not the ‘socialist’ but the ‘anarchist workers’ that Cornford thought the Spanish communists should concentrate on winning.

Though he had no time for anarchism, Cornford saw that the main body of militant workers in the principal industrial region of Spain, around Barcelona, were anarchists, and, being a sincere communist, that meant for him that the party’s task was first and foremost to get among those workers, establish close ties with them, and win them for Marxism.

The line actually taken by the Stalinists was first to stick a label on the anarchist workers (‘uncontrollables’, the 1937 equivalent of ‘Left adventurists’), then to work up a pogrom spirit against them among the followers of the Communist Party, and finally to attack and decimate them, using an armed force recruited among former policemen and the middle class.

Very relevant to what we were talking about here.

Anti-Stalinism/Hitchery/Bloggery

Anti-Stalinism

Anne Applebaum on the KGB in America. Enty on John Saville. The secret life of Victor Serge.

The Hitch

Christopher Hitchens on Abraham Lincoln’s centenary. Hitchens on Hemingway’s libido. Hitchens on Edward Upward. Hitchens on Karl Marx.

Bloggery

This blog – The Fatal Paradox – is new to me. I found it via Phil and will be visiting again! (Phil: “one of those blogs that defy easy categorisation. Hailing from New Zealand, it offers commentary on history, art and theory with a slight Spanish tinge to proceedings. Well worth checking out.”) We have Moriscos, Un chien andalou, Juan Goytisolo on Genet, Pablo Neruda: what more could one want?

Another blog new to me is Workers Self Management, an blog. Includes a bit of english history to be proud of, and a link to a WSA article on solidarity unionism that talks about the landless movement in Brazil and Spain in the 1930s.

Archive special

From the archive of struggle, no.19. Non-anoraks, skip this post, and go to this one, on Obama’s taste in reading and an alternative to the Richard and Judy book club, or this one,  on early jazz and recent fado, or this one, on how blogging has re-invigorated radical history.

Steve Cohen

First of all, ArchivesHub last month highlighted the Greater Manchester Collection of Steve Cohen, lawyer and anti deportation campaigner, 1975-1996. Go here for the website, which includes links to selected websites and some excellent suggested reading.. For background on Steve Cohen, check Engage/Bob.

The rest

Marxist Internet Archive:

• Added to the J. T. Murphy Archive: The Communist Party of Great Britain (1943) and The Last Great Split in World Communism (1948) [Poumista: Latter is particularly recommended. Murphy played a part in the 1926 expulsion of Trotsky from the Communist International, was expelled himself in 1932 for challenging its disasterous ultra-left Third Period politics, and reflects here on these two expulsions and on Tito's. By the way,  Murphy's wikipedia page badly needs editing!]
• Added to the Rudolf Hilferding Archive: State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy 1940 [Poumista: This piece is also important, as a key intervention in the debate about the character of the Soviet Union. Hilferding wrote it as the Nazis boot was stamping on the face of France, not long before he was handed by the Vichy French to the Gestapo, who would murder him and take his wife Rose to Auschwitz, where she perished. His characterisation of the Stalinist system as totalitarian has considerable force.]
• Added to the Brian Pearce Archive: Rank-and-file Movements of the Thirties, 15 November 1958 (Constant Reader) [Poumista: Pearce is another important, neglected character. Like EP Thompson, he was part of the Communist Party Historians Group, but re-thought Stalinism in the wake of Russia's counter-revolution crushing of the Hungarian revolution 1956, getting himself expelled in 1957. A close associate of Peter Fryer, he passed with him through the orbit of Gerry Healey. This piece, I think, dates from his time with Healey's Club, and is an important contribution to the 1950s' revisioning of Anglo-Stalinist and labour history.]

[Beneath the fold: Spanish anarchist histories, and more besides]

Radical history web 2.0

[From the archive of struggle, no.17]

Via Tendance Coatesy, we find a blog for the Country Standard, the Communist Party of Great Britain’s rural paper. A bit Stalinist, of course, for my liking, but some fascinating historical stuff. In particular, quite a bit about the early history of the Indendent Labour Party in rural areas, especially in the Northwest, and of the Clarion movement.

Across the Atlantic, The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History is a wonderful project. Of particular interest among recent(ish) stuff is Don Hamerquist in the 1970s articulating a careful anti-Stalinist Leninism in polemics against a then-nameless grouping from Boston, which eventually became the core of the Proletarian Unity League, which in turn was one of the founding elements of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization in the mid-1980s.

The STO, incidentally, have been discussed in the Big Flame blog I already linked to. The use of blogging for grassroots history projects, as in these three examples is one of the great features of Web 2.0, of what Bob calls “citizen scholarship“.