Stalinism and Western Marxism Socialism in One Country

Stalinism and Western Marxism Socialism in One Country

FROM BOLSHEVIZATION TO THIRD PERIOD, 19231928

The Third Internationals dependency on the USSR was meant to be tem- porary, but its thinking inevitably prioritized the Soviet states foreign pol- icy needs. This soon produced tensions for both Soviet policy-makers and the Left elsewherebetween sponsoring revolution on a world scale and coexisting in a capitalist global economy or between supporting Commu- nist parties against foreign governments and normalizing Soviet relations with the same states. It was no accident that the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agree- ment ofMarch 1921, the first real breach in the new states isolation, ac- companied the introduction ofthe New Economic Policy (NEP), which modified the radicalism ofdomestic socialist advance.³ By Cominterns Fourth Congress in 1922, the main principle ofinternational solidarity for Communists had shifted from independent revolutionism to supporting the Soviet Union. The European stabilization of192324 only strengthened this trend.⁴

If the Bolsheviks immense prestige made it hard for foreign Commu- nists to argue against them in the 1920s, this was exacerbated by the po- larized 1930s, with most CPs illegal and the Soviet Union seemingly alone against fascism. The smaller, the more embattled, the more persecuted the CP, moreover, the more vital a psychological resource Bolshevik success became. From exile or the darkness of a fascist jail, identifying with the Soviet Union became the indispensable lifeline. Genuine internationalism was certainly involved: many Communists had frequent misgivings, but honoring Soviet primacy expressed an internationalist discipline the Second International had failed to deliver.

International Communism in the 1920s was volatile and confused, as revolutionaries adjusted to the nonrevolutionary circumstances after 1923. From the Third Comintern Congress in 1921, which acknowledged a pe- riod ofnonrevolutionary stabilization, to the Sixth Congress in 1928, bat- tles for control in individual CPs brought violent oscillations, as right and left fought over Soviet favor. Such swings meant frequent changes of leadership, with the German party offering an extreme case. In 1920, the KPD retained a right leadership under the surviving Spartacist Paul Levi; and after the 1921 March Action and a brief ascendancy of the left brought Levis expulsion, a renewed right leadership under Ernst Meyer and Heinrich Brandler resumed control. In 1922, the United Front strategy was seriously pursued, followed in 1923 by a delicate balance of right leadership under Brandler and left minority. By 1924, in reaction to the

botched Hamburg insurrection and the old leaderships insufficient Bolshe- vism, a new left faction under Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow was installed but was soon followed by another purge and a fresh controlling group around Ernst Thalmann and Ernst Meyer.⁵

But these twists and turns reflected structural facts, including massive turnovers ofmembership, rather than just Moscow control via dictatorial or capricious meddling in a foreign partys affairs. From almost 300,000 members on the eve ofthe Hamburg uprising, the KPD plummeted to

120,000 in spring 1924, where membership stayed until the renewed growth after 1930. With rapidly changing rank-and-file support, sudden and frequent reversals of political fortunes, and a general dashing of rev- olutionary hopes, KPD behavior could hardly be anything but erratic.

This made sense ofthe Bolshevization drivethe instructions issued by the Fifth Comintern Congress in 1924 for reshaping CPs in the Bolshevik image. It was meant precisely to fortify the infant Communist parties against changes ofline and leadership. Bolshevization meant strict cen- tralism oforganization; disciplined respect for Comintern directives; and

Leninist theory. Again, this wasnt simply imposed by Moscow. The CPs were ripe for such regularizing. The Russian Revolutions overpowering prestige for the mainly small and struggling fellow parties and the felt need for international solidarity if the Revolution was to be defended were very persuasive. But discipline was urgently needed for organizational effective- ness in the foreign CPs, where such disparate mixtures of exsocial dem- ocrats, syndicalists, anarchists, left sectarians, feminists, trade union mili- tants, and the previously unorganized all gathered.

On the one hand, the Bolsheviks took an increasingly Moscow-centric view ofthe International, reducing its autonomy, solidifying Soviet control ofthe Executive (ECCI), and imposing conformity with Soviet needs. Where Soviet foreign policy dictates diverged from the needs of revolution- ary strategy in the West, as in the secret pacts with the German government in the 1920s for military aid or the German trade deals during the first Five Year Plan after 192829, Soviet leaders disregarded Western revolution. Instead, the setting of a uniform line through the Comintern rigidified after

1928, regardless ofnational circumstances. The Soviet-dominated ECCI suppressed debate and imposed its own clients on individual CPs. On the other hand, the CPs had a desperate need oftheir own for stability, and the discipline demanded by Comintern became seductively functional for institutional consolidation in that sense.

When the Third International had its Sixth Congress after a four-year hiatus in 1928, these issues came to a head. The so-called Left Turn now stressed the opening ofa new, Third Period in capitalisms history since

1917. Ifthe First Period marked revolutionary crisis (till 1923) and the Second relative stabilization (192428), the Third supposedly resumed the crisis, intensifying Western economic difficulties, with renewed openings for revolution. This required ironclad discipline from national CPs and strict

separation from reformists. It demanded that Communist parties become the sole anticapitalist rallying points, destroy reformist illusions in the working class, and oppose all cooperation with social democrats, who be- came the main enemy. This last instruction, denouncing social democrats through the infamous formula of Social Fascism, repudiated coalition building in the working class. Rather than repairing the 191723 splits, Communists now deepened them. Reformists were vilified as fascisms trail- blazers. Communism degenerated toward sectarian isolation.

This sectarianism had its precedents, but the 1928 Turns uniform ap- plication began a lasting pattern for the future. It became the instrument oforthodoxy, disciplining the CPs often turbulent independence. The Sixth Congress suppressed debateas in the final reckoning with Brandler and neutralizing ofMeyer in the KPD or the humbling ofJules Humbert-Droz, the Cominterns independently minded Latin European expert. It also in- stalled long-term loyalist leaderships inside national parties.⁶ The crudity of the process contrasted with the febrile, if frequently embittered, openness ofinner-party debates earlier on, but most CPs produced no dearth of supporters for the 1928 line. The ultraleft proclivities of the KPDa party never happier than when assailing the SPDs criminal reformismmade it the most zealous advocate ofthe Soviet proposals. Newer militants in the Young Communist Leagues (YCLs), molded by the new culture ofantag- onism to social democracy, supplied much ofthe indigenous sectarian mo- mentum. Given this support in the membership, and most CPs weakness

(some were already illegal), the Soviet leaderships immense authority pre- cluded opposition.

British Communists, for example, had definite misgivings. But if Tom Bell attacked the Cominterns use ofbad second-rank specialists in the business ofdetecting deviations and Tommy Jackson lamented the pro- cess ofInprecorization as the death ofcritical thought, in the end dis- cipline got the better ofconviction, and the CPGB swung round.⁷ Italys PCI put up the hardest fight. At the Sixth Congress, Angelo Tasca and Palmiro Togliatti stuck by their principles and resisted the now familiar browbeating from ECCIs Soviet contingent, even leaving the hall in protest at Togliattis treatment.⁸ But while Tasca left the PCI, decrying Stalins role and the Cominterns degeneration, Togliatti made his peace: Ifwe dont give in, Moscow wont hesitate to fix up a left leadership with some kid out ofthe Lenin School; or, in Stalins version: Either complete capitu- lation or we could leave.⁹

Thus the Left Turn remade Communist leaderships and rigidified inner- party life. The quality of Comintern debate declined. The gap between Congresses lengthened: there were annual meetings during 191924 and then four years before the Sixth and seven before the Seventh (and last) Congress. Comintern functionaries changed from facilitators of national revolutionary initiative, roving consultants to the world revolution, into

loyal Soviet servants. There was always an unreality earlier, as ill-informed emissaries parachuted fleetingly into unfamiliar national situations. But that system also produced formidable individuals, like the Swiss Communist Jules Humbert-Droz, whose Comintern responsibilities embraced southern Europe, with a decisive role in the PCF in 192428; or the German Willi Mu nzenberg, who orchestrated a remarkable range ofhumanitarian, polit- ical, economic, and cultural activities through the International Workers Aid (IAH) in Berlin.¹⁰

In Moscows relations with foreign Communist parties, therefore, the Third Internationals Sixth Congress was the watershed. Soviet leaders brought the international movement uniformly behind the Third Periods new strategy, enforcing new standards of uncritical obedience to their de- cisions. In the nonrevolutionary circumstances after 1923, the CPs might have developed broader coalitions, given encouragement by a friendly Comintern leadership. The 1928 Left Turn countermanded such national integration, severing earlier links to the non-Communist Left.

SHAPING A COMMUNIST TRADITION

Communist parties were stamped by two early experiencesanger at the Lefts older social democratic traditions and ambivalence toward the pop- ular insurgencies of191721. The workers councils have often been claimed as a possible third way between a hopelessly compromised social democracy beholden to the forces of order and an alien Bolshevism plying a misguided extraneous model. But in the 1920s the councils inspired less by their alternative revolutionary example than by their ineffectuality and failure. Like the 1871 Paris Commune, they were a glimpse of how so- cialism might be organized. But otherwise, the turbulence of191921 re- vealed the fragmentation of the revolutionary movement into violently adventurist localisms, sometimes avowedly syndicalist but driven by blan- ket antipathies against remote political machines. The Lefts problem was how to unify this militancy for political ends and how to organize the frustrated revolutionary hopes for a period of prosaic recuperation. This was the problematic ofBolshevization. It was also at the center ofGramscis and other leading Communists thinking in 192328.

Given Bolshevisms bedrock assumptions, articulated by Lenin between the Zimmerwald movement and the October Revolution, the CPs needed to demarcate themselves as sharply as possible from their Second Interna- tional predecessors. For Lenin, this was how the amorphous left-socialisms of191819 could be converted into durable party alternatives, and so something like the Twenty-One Conditions became unavoidable. As the European revolutionism contracted during 192123, Comintern Con- gresses tracked foreign Communist faithfulness to Bolshevik methods, par-

ticularly after the German October of 1923, whose failure was attributed to inadequate Bolshevization. The injunction to foreign CPs to make this deficit good was the key outcome ofthe Fifth Congress in JuneJuly 1924. Yet this was not the only option in the mid-1920s. In theory, the Com- interns 1922 framework of United Front made reintegration with left social democracy an equally logical course. But Bolshevization sharpened distinc- tions between Communist and non-Communist affiliations. It required de- finitive transformation of the new CPs from parties rooted in their national labor movements into wholly new formations. This was the process that was brought to a climax in 1928. The CPs not only emerged with new leaders, often trained in Moscow, especially if the party was underground; they also began recruiting new sections ofworkers with no previous labor movement backgrounds. Communists now stressed their apartness from the

rest ofsociety, including the rest ofthe working class.

The Czechoslovak CP (KSC) was an extreme case. Formed in 1920 un- der Bohumir Smeral, an exSocial Democrat schooled in the Austro- Marxist tradition, it seemed well adapted to the stabilized 1920s. Instead, the Comintern severed these existing working-class roots. In 1928, the KSC massively purged itself, reducing membership from 150,000 to only 25,000 by 1930. Most party members and Red trade unionists returned to Social Democracy. The party Bolshevized itselfat the cost oflosing its roots in the mainstream ofthe Czechoslovak working class and migrating from the center ofthe working class to the periphery. ¹¹ Its collective self- differentiation created a rare form of disciplined corporate elan, and in the conditions ofthe Third Period this took a specifically Stalinist form, with bureaucratic decision-making, reduction ofinner-party democracy, uncrit- ical conformity to the party line, and obedience to Moscow. Many excesses wouldnt easily be forgotten. Given Klement Gottwalds maiden speech to the Czechoslovak Parliament in 1929, his later protestations ofdemocratic affinities after 1935 hardly inspired instant belief: We are the party of the Czech proletariat and our headquarters are in Moscow. We go to Moscow to learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to twist your throats. And as you know, the Russian Bolsheviks are masters at that.¹²

In Togliattis PCI a similar process came to inspire self-confidence in the partys indigenous tradition. In 1926, Togliatti adjusted cannily to Stalins incipient ascendancy, while Gramsci stayed heterodox on workers coun- cils, party education, and appeals to nonproletarian strata. Yet Gramsci had still supported Bolshevization, which empowered the internal fight against Amadeo Bordiga and helped demarcate a Communist as against a social democratic identity. Ifthat identity became colored by Stalinism after

1928, the process of self-demarcation had already conferred important strengths. The Lyon Thesessteered through the PCIs Third Congress in January 1926, just before Gramsci was arrested and Togliatti called to Comintern work in Moscowwere a foretaste of the Popular Fronts dis- cussions after 193435. Neither Gramsci, removed from the Left Turns

vicissitudes by imprisonment, nor the shrewdly circumspect Togliatti ever abandoned this thread. For the PCI, the 1928 Turn disastrously interrupted a national strategy moving toward what we might term left Popular Fron- tism. By contrast with the KPD, which was always happiest denouncing Social Democrats, the PCIs instincts stressed the broadest cooperation against the Fascists.

So the Third Periods meanings for the Communist political tradition were complex. The Communist parties were new political formations, un- fixed in character, and its easy to forget their often chaotic fluidity in the

1920s, when the Communist political tradition was still being shaped. That degree ofinternal volatility hardly favored stable policies, and the post-

1928 regularities consequently came as a relief. Communism as a distinctive and unitary traditionlasting a quarter-century up to 1956was certainly shaped decisively by the Third Period. Unfortunately, this simultaneously expressed the Stalinist ascendancy inside the Soviet Union, which now fully coopted the Comintern into its orbit.

NATIONAL COMMUNISMS?

Third International Communism was something qualitatively new in Eu- ropean labor movements.¹³ It demanded a special loyalty, expanding into all parts ofan activists life, especially where parties remained small cadre organizations. Joining the CP required full-time daily commitment, mark- ing Communists off from other workers. Passionate identification with the Soviet Union and the discipline ofinternational solidarity were vital to Communisms positive appeal. A key part ofthis political culture was Sta- linism, whose main manifestations were the demonizing of Trotsky; silenc- ing ofinner-party and wider public dissent; purges and show trials; and uncritical ex post facto endorsement of Soviet events like the Nazi-Soviet Pact, via the dependency instated so crudely by Cominterns Sixth Congress in 1928. This sad abjectionbelying so many Communists courageous independence on home ground and deforming their internationalisms un- derlying generosityrequired socializing the members into the history and practices ofthe movement.

In 1938, the famous Short Course on the History of the Communist Party (Bolshevik)of the Soviet Union was published, and its massive world- wide dissemination had no parallel in the international labor movement until Mao Zedongs little Red Book in the 1960s and 1970s. This manual invented diamat (dialectical materialism) and the axiomatic simplifica- tion ofMarxism. It privileged Bolshevism as the exemplary experience. It kept a deafening silence over the history of the International, let alone other parties. It was the sacramentalization ofparty history.¹⁴ There was a world of difference between the drafting of the Short Course in the later

1930s and the revolutionary years after 1917, when Gramsci reflected so

creatively on Communist political education. The new stale conformities reduced Marxisms intellectual vitality and the breadth ofCommunisms popular appeal. Yet there were also times when Cominterns iron discipline became relaxed and individual CPs might protect certain areas ofauton- omy.

In Little Moscowslocal Communist strongholdsa CP could in- tegrate creatively into the rhythms oflocal community life. In Mardy in South Wales, Lumphinnans in Fife, and the Vale of Leven in western Scotland, Communists subsisted on local solidarities, which they strength- ened and transformed. These were compact, homogeneous working-class communities, dominated by single staple industries like coal and textiles experiencing a crisis ofcontraction after 1918, with no alternative sources ofemployment, and with an unbalanced and incomplete class structure (no resident capitalist or rentier class), allowing the working class to dominate the local political scene. Ifstruggles were defensive ones over unemployment, basic union rights, and evictions, they presup- posed a broadly based oppositional culture enabling the whole commu- nity to be mobilized rather than manual workers alone. Communists rooted themselves in all the organized structures ofeveryday life. CP members werent particularly numerous. But the partys legitimacy and leadershipits local hegemonygrew from organizing defense of the communitys way oflife. Yet this was not solely a story oflocalized po- litical culture. Militants drew essential inspiration from the larger inter- national movement they tried to represent.¹⁵

The specifically Communist part ofLittle Moscows oppositional culture included the USSRs popularity as an idealized workers state, diffused through the Friends ofthe Soviet Union. Cominterns official culture also reshaped British Marxism, with an older socialist autodidacticism disap- pearing into the official Marxism-Leninism, stressing the need for practical involvement in the labor movement and working-class community life. Yet by 1930, party theory had rigidified into orthodox rehearsals ofgiven po- sitions, with Moscows authority substituting for indigenous understand- ing and debate. Theorists increasingly were university-trained intellec- tuals conversant with Soviet Marxism rather than self-taught proletarian philosophers from a Marxist theoretical culture within the working class. This was another aspect ofthe specifically Communist affiliations ofthe CP.¹⁶

Paradoxically, Third Period sectarianism produced much creativity in cultural politics, because withdrawing from cooperation with other parties threw the CPs back on their own resources. An array ofinnovations re- sulted in theater, film, the rest ofthe arts, activities for youth and children, sports, the organization ofleisure, and the general cultural sphere, which recaptured some ofthe verve of191723.¹⁷ This was especially true of sexual politics and womens rights, given socialisms poor existing record ofchallenging established notions ofsex, gender, motherhood, and

womens place. In Germany during the Third Period, Communists came closer to breaking this particular barrier.¹⁸

With its aggressively proletarian identity contrasting starkly with its actual members, who gathered on street corners rather than factory floors

(80 percent being unemployed after 1930), the KPD found itself willy-nilly the voice ofbroader-based nonclass mobilizations around women, youth, tenants, welfare claimants, and others during its period of growth in 193032.¹⁹ Sex reform agitations over abortion and contraception were part ofthis, with surprising cooperation among Communist, Social Dem- ocratic, liberal, and nonaligned left-wing doctors, social workers, and other activists. The KPDor individual Communists and their professional or- ganizations and the coalitions and forums the party sponsoredenergized the 1931 campaign for abortion reform and the remarkable sex counseling clinics that flourished before 1933.²⁰

Even as the Cominterns Left Turn committed the KPD to a disastrously sectarian national strategy, in other words, its behavior at the base became more flexible. While its public ideology relentlessly reiterated its credentials as the archetypically proletarian party, it was joined by people who were the very opposite ofthe classically proletarian. The KPDs tragedy during the early 1930s was not just that it lost the working-class partys traditional workshop and factory base via unemployment, the victimizing of militants, and the SPDs control oflabors old institutional world, because this forced it into creative alternatives. The real tragedy was that the party stumbled on solutions that its own self-understanding disallowed. Such a politics focused on women and youth as well as employed and unemployed work- ing men, on the private as well as the public sphere, and on broad democratic values as against the misplaced triumphalism ofthe impending proletarian revolutionoffered a chance to transcend the labor movements narrower class-based vision. Indeed, this politics expanded the boundaries ofthe political itself, bringing the intimate domains ofsexuality and do- mesticity into politics and questioning the traditional boundaries ofprivate and public life.

There were many reasons why this possibilityan oblique Popular Frontism, from below and avant la lettrenever took off. But one was certainly the subordination ofthe KPDs official thinking to the Cominterns

1928 line. This cant be said too strongly. Recent histories ofindividual CPs have placed them carefully in the social and political history of their own societies rather than seeing them as the ciphers ofinterests and policies originating elsewhere, in the apparatus ofComintern and the power centers ofMoscow.²¹ But the Third International remained the authority that Com- munist parties all acknowledged. The new histories have shown the poten- tials for creative national-popular politics an imaginative Communist party could release. But such possibilities were only ever fitfully realized. The Stalinist culture ofthe Third International was crucial to how they were stifled.²²

WESTERN MARXISM

While Western CPs rigidified in the wake ofStalinism, creative forms of Marxist thought survived. Before 1914, Marxism was almost entirely co- terminous with the socialist political tradition. Marxist thought was absent from universities, academies, and other contexts of formal intellectual life. Declaring oneselfa Marxist meant taking a place within the socialist move- ments themselves, making a living from journalism, lecturing, and socialist educational work. While Second International theoreticians (Labriola, Mehring, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Bauer) came from middle-class or gentry backgrounds, few others brought an academic education. Pre-1914 socialist culture was mainly fashioned by self-educated labor activists, typified by the SPDs twin founders, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel. There were exceptionsthe PSI recruited more success- fully from university graduates and academics before 1914but the main relationship of Marxism and mainstream intellectual life before the First World War was mutual isolation.

This changed after 1918. The radicalizing of intellectuals through war and revolution brought a younger generation ofwriters, artists, and the academically educated into the Left, often without organized party affilia- tion. After 1918, for the first time one could be a Marxist and hope for an academic or professional career. Conversely, one could teach in a univer- sity, work for a newspaper or publisher, manage a theater or gallery, or build a career in the educational, welfare, health and housing bureaucracies and take Marxist ideas seriously without losing ones post. This was true ofGermany, Austria, Scandinavia, Czechoslovakia, France, the Low Coun- tries, and Britain. Intellectual radicalisms never achieved more than grudg- ing toleration from the dominant culture and reckoned with harassment, bordering on outright suppression. Nonetheless, socialist ideas developed a presence beyond the organized tradition itself, with certain shifts in Marxist theory as a result. IfMarxist thinkers focused originally on politics and economics, expounding the laws ofdevelopment ofcapitalism and the the- ory ofthe class struggle in the direct service oftheir parties, after 1918 they turned to philosophy and aesthetics.²³

Exponents ofthis Western Marxism worked in relative isolation, both from the practical activism of labor movements and from each other, with- out the translation, circulation, and exchange ofMarxist ideas common before 1914. Three major figures of the 1920s exemplified this trend: Karl Korsch, Georg Lukacs, and Antonio Gramsci. Each thought within a spe- cific idiom, defining Marxisms originality against dominant pre-Marxist philosophical traditionsHegel and his legacies in particular, or in Gram- scis case the massive influence in early twentieth-century Italy ofBenedetto Croce. Their early worksKorschs Marxism and Philosophy (1923), Lu- kacs History and Class Consciousness (also 1923), Gramscis writings in

LOrdine nuovo during 191920belonged quintessentially to the postwar revolutionary moment. They stressed the subjective elements in Marx and the room for creative revolutionary agency (Gramscis revolution against Capital) against the Second Internationals orthodox determinism, already reviving via the economistic rigidities ofMarxism-Leninism and Stalinized Third International thought. With the removal oftheir authorsKorsch was expelled from the KPD in 1926, Lukacs recanted his dissent from the

1928 Turn and withdrew into literary work, and Gramsci was impris- onedthese early texts ofWestern Marxism became forgotten.²⁴

A further site of Western Marxist innovation, the Institute for Social

Research in Frankfurt, founded in 1923 and transplanted to New York in

1934, severed the links to politics even more completely. Some collabora- tors had Communist links, including Karl Wittfogel, Henryk Grossmann, and Walter Benjamin; others supported the SPD, like Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer. Most, like Herbert Marcuse, were radicalized in 1917

18. The Institutes presiding patriarchs, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, made a virtue ofindependence. The Frankfurt Schools theoretical concernsthe contradictory meanings ofthe Enlightenment, emancipation, and the critical theory ofsociety, the rise ofmass culture, the dialectic of reason and domination, and the impact ofpsychoanalysistook them ex- clusively to philosophical aspects ofMarxism, in an esoteric mode discon- nected from the labor movement, with no interest in influencing working- class militants. This was a conscious stance. The Frankfurt Schools leading voices (Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno) despaired ofworking-class political agency, a pessimism doubly induced by the logics ofquiescence they de- tected in the workers relationship to mass culture and by the labor move- ments disastrous defeats under fascism. Exile played a big part too, for in the United States the Institute was divorced entirely from a labor movement with socialist or Marxist traditions.²⁵

Marxist thought between the warsand over the longer term to 1968 displayed a striking paradox. Rigid and formulaic in the officially sanc- tioned discourse ofthe CPs, it developed impressive creativity in specific areas like philosophy and aesthetics, sometimes in a tolerated space inside the parties, sometimes in the universities or the public sphere ofletters and the arts, where Marxism for the first time achieved limited acceptance, at least in societies with stable democratic polities and legally secured free- doms ofexpression. Thus Western Marxisms distinctive features contrasted with the period before 1914. Classical Marxiststhe Second International theorists, coming after Marx and Engels themselveswere usually full-time revolutionaries, who united theory and practice, cut their teeth on Marxist economics, and devoted their writing to current political problems, sup- ported by their parties rather than by positions in universities and other academic institutions. Western Marxists after 1918 were invariably isolated from direct political involvementeither because they avoided party mem- bership, pursued purely theoretical studies, or lived in a Fascist prison. They

wrote mainly about philosophy, culture, and aesthetics rather than eco- nomics and politics. They were mostly professional academics.

This was a Marxism of defeat. It came from pessimism, political dis- connectedness, and sometimes despair. But this disempowerment had a double source. On one side, the revolutionary movement had contracted in the West, certainly by 1923, leaving Marxists with profoundly different circumstances from the unbounded opportunities beckoning so excitingly in 191721. Then, in the world economic crisis after 1929, the working- class movements suffered disastrous setbacks, when their proudest, largest, and most self-confident exemplarsin Germany and Austriawent down, crushingly, to defeat.

Yet on the other side, the surviving space ofrevolutionary optimism, the Soviet Union and its organizationally impressive Third International, was cramped and unsympathetic for intellectuals, bluntly and aggressively intolerant ofcritical theoretical work. Worse, it was increasingly undemo- cratic. The Stalinization of the CPs after 1928 was a political defeat for committed, creative, and generous-minded socialist intellectuals almost as depressing as the crisis ofEuropean democracy, especially during the purges in the Soviet Union after 1934. Through Stalinism, Marxism lost much of its public creativity as a theoretical tradition. Independent thinkers were forced to the margins of the Communist movement or out of it altogether. Western Marxists suffered beneath this complex burden, a triangulated sense of defeat. They retreated before the failed revolution in the West, the victory offascism, and Soviet Stalinization.

by 1930 the lefts prospects were bleak. Despite apocalyptic wagers on the world crash, out-and-out revolutionaries re- mained minorities in their national move- ments, even, as in the KPD, where they en- joyed mass support. Socialist parties were further from power than ever, while even the scaled-down hopes authorized by the post-

1918 settlements wore thin. Democratic fran- chise, civil freedoms, welfare legislation, and an expanded public sphere characterized those settlements, rather than socialist mea- sures per se, and even these gains were moot. On Europes peripherythe Baltic, Balkans, and Iberiademocracy lost to authoritarian- ism. In first Hungary (191920) and then Italy

(192022), virulent counterrevolutions were unleashed. Only in Scandinavia was democ- racy secured. In France, government scandals energized the extraparliamentary Right during

1933, and in Britain the debacle of the 1929

31 Labour government split the party and slashed its parliamentary strength, paralyzing it indefinitely.

This made democracys fate in central Eu- rope all the more vital. And it was here that democratic breakdown was far advancedon

15 July 1927 Austria entered incipient civil war after a confrontation of government and Socialists, while in March 1930 parliamentary government was suspended for rule by Presi- dential Decree in Germany.¹ These conflicts interacted with the Wall Street crash of Oc- tober 1929 in crises of enormous proportions. By 1933, industrial unemployment ran from

36.2 percent in Germany and 33.4 percent in Norway to 28.8 percent in Denmark, 26.9 percent in the Netherlands, 19.9 percent in

Britain, and 14.1 percent in France.² As Nazi electoral support rocketed from a tiny 2.6 percent in 1928 to 37.4 percent in 1932, things were clearly coming to a head. Once the Nazis entered government, not only labors hard-won corporative gains of 1918 but also the larger democratic foun- dations would fall.

The Nazi seizure of power (30 January 1933) was a democratic catas- trophe whose effects reverberated across Europe. By spring, the SPD and KPD, Europes most prestigious Social Democratic and Communist parties, had gone; terror was unleashed against the regimes opponents; and German democracy was dead.³ The impact elsewhere was immense. While the term fascism already existed, its overpowering valency was newas the future that had to be stopped. It named the main threat, internationally in the Third Reichs foreign aggressions, nationally in ones own societya danger to the rights of labor and socialism, to the Soviet Union, to de- mocracy, to peace, to cultural freedom, to decent and civilized values, to individual liberties, to progress. As Communist militants, rank-and-file so- cialists, and Left intellectuals contemplated possible futures, the rise of fas- cism reshaped their rhetoric. Stopping the fascists dominated discussion. In the later 1920s, Italian Fascism graduated into a full-blown postde- mocratic regime. Spain, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, Albania, and Yugo- slavia all buried parliamentary democracy in the same decade, while Hun- garian authoritarianism radicalized under Gyula Go mbo s in 1932. In 1933, social democracys central European heartland also fellAustria via the clerico-authoritarianism of Engelbert Dollfuss and Germany via the Nazi assumption of power, leaving only Czechoslovakia among 1918s demo- cratic republics. In 1934, the Rights inexorable advance continued in Bul- garia, Latvia, and Estonia, with Greece falling in 1936. Facing these dis- asters, three dramas stamped Left perceptions: the Austrian Schutzbunds desperate attempt to resist further police repression by an armed rising in Linz on 12 February 1934; the nationwide Socialist and Communist general strike against the growing violence of the French Right, also on 12 February

1934; and the Spanish Socialist uprising of October 1934, including the

14-day insurrection of Asturian miners.⁴

Two of these initiativesthe Austrian and Spanishwere bloody fail- ures. The Linz Schutzbund failed to galvanize SPO leaders, and the belated Vienna uprising experienced terrible defeat. Yet the very decision to resist in contrast to SPD passivityhad huge resonance and inspired the Asturian fighters, emblazoning their actions with the slogan Better Vienna Than Berlin.⁵ The Spanish rising, also suppressed, proved vital for later radi- calization. Only the French events spelled success. After a crescendo of right-wing violence against the Republic, stopping short of a coup but par- alyzing the moderate Left and returning the Right to government, demonstrations and streetfighting pervaded the week, until CGT and So- cialists called a general strike on 12 February and Communists and their unions followed suit. Separate marches converged unpredictably on the