A few thoughts inspired by the Edelweiss Pirates article in the last issue and discussions that followed it on why the working class were subdued in Germany in the 1930s.

I think part of the problem in trying to find worthy moments of working class resistance to Hitler and the Nazis after 1933 might lie in a neglect of a proper understanding of events in Germany from the Revolution of 1918/19 until that date (ie, not going back far enough).

The Weimar Republic existed because of the revolutionary insurrection of the German working class at the close of the war. It was, of course, a symbol of the defeat of a revolution, but it was the best that the capitalist class could get away with at the time. If the Weimar Republic had not been created then Germany probably would have faced an extended civil war, which may have resulted in the complete occupation of the country by foreign powers. Both a civil war and an occupation by foreign powers would have been bad for German business.

But, of course, the Weimar Republic was not a confident beast, and it lurched about all over the place. And indeed, during the ’20s a minor civil war took place anyway, and there were even attempted communist/socialist insurrections by sections of the working class. The Freikorps (the Republic’s boot boys who were formed from disgruntled reactionary elements in the German army and who were to give the Nazis a good leg up) and others waged a war of assassination against the enemies, as they saw it, of capitalism that reached quite huge proportions.

The Weimar Republic was not only a symbol of the defeat of a revolution, it was also an expression of the fear that German capitalists had of the class that had given them such a shock at the end of the war. The Republic was a kind of buying off of the liberals (ie the SPD): they got political power, but in return they knew they had to regain control of the working class and create a situation where the economy could get on its feet again.

Indeed, the economy did start to get on its feet for a while, partly due to some crafty accounting by those in the Republic responsible for paying war reparations (I think). But it wasn’t enough (especially with the Wall Street Crash) and the very existence of the Weimar Republic itself started to become a liability. Things needed to be speeded up, and revenge had to be exacted. The capitalists had waited for over a decade to get their own back and to finally take charge again of the labouring classes. Political events in the early ’30s allowed them to do it. The working class had been effectively defeated many years previously. In the case of targeting militant workers, Hitler and his Party were merely carrying out mopping up operations for the boss class.

By the time Hitler became the democratically elected Chancellor there was little hope of working class resistance and as he tightened his grip there was even less chance. We could compare the situation to Northern Ireland in recent years, where due to the good policing of the working class by the IRA and the British government, there has been virtually no possibility of working class resistance. An unarmed working class will usually find itself at a loss in the face of an aggressive (armed) State (in the case of NI the working class was/is subject to the repressive arms of both the IRA and the UK government).

Of course, there were actions against the Nazis while they were in power, but they were small and isolated and no one would presume that there could have been a toppling of the Nazis by a suddenly rejuvenated working class, who had found some guns and a bag of fertiliser in a lock-up just outside Hamburg. BUT this doesn’t mean that reports of resistance to tyranny aren’t inspiring, as the Edelweiss Pirates article shows. The problem with trying to put a ‘working class’ perspective on acts of resistance such as this is that in periods like this the ‘conscious working class’ element may not be very strong. In human history there are just as many stories of heroic resistance to anti-human things as there are stories of complicity in misery-making and atrocity.

Sometimes the working class in general just doesn’t do anything very interesting, but the reason that periods like this exist is always because the working class has done very interesting things in the recent past. So, for example, the state of defeat that the working class in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s found itself in was a direct consequence of the attempts by the ruling class to regain control of the economy and the working class after the revolution of 1918 and 1919. Similarly, the state of defeat that the industrial working class has been enduring since the early 1980s in Britain is a direct result of attempts by the ruling class to regain control after the years of trouble in the 1960s and 1970s.

PROLETARIAN GOB

Organise! reply

We find little to disagree with in your analysis of Weimar Germany, the defeat of the German working class or in the role of the Nazis and Hitler.

Having said that, there is every point in making available the history of youngsters like the Edelweiss Pirates. One interesting thing about them is that they had no connection to the older movement. They arose quite independently of it and arose amongst young people who had been brought up under the thumbs of Nazi ideologists. Although they did not develop a political view which we could identify as libertarian communist, their existence did show that even under a dictatorship as brutal as the Nazis, young workers were prepared to rebel.

We take the view that the liberation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself and that the working class will develop political consciousness as a result of its own struggle. It surely follows for us that the Edwelweiss Pirates’ existence and their struggles are in themselves put ‘a working class perspective’ on what happened in that era. They prove that sections of the working class were not simple dupes and were not impossibly cowed by terror and defeat. The ruling class would like us to believe that this was true. They could not celebrate the actions of thousands of young ‘thugs’ because they showed up the complicity of the bourgoisie in Hitler’s reign.

As the saying goes, from small acorns...

Louis Robertson