The state parties and their leaders

Chapter 4 Section 1

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This below is Chapter 4 Section 1:

IV Structures of two one-party states

1. The state parties and their leaders 

No thought was further from the vanguard of the early workers’ movement than that one day socialist state parties with a leader or a small governing body at their head would completely dominate a state. At least the representatives of communal socialism like Fourier and Owen had drawn the exact opposite conclusion from the rudimentary antithesis between state and society, in that they wanted the state to be completely displaced by society, but by a society that would consist of countless communes, the phalansters, or “villages of unity and cooperation,” where people would lead lives freed from all barriers of nationality, division of labor, and religious superstition, because each of the small communities would a self-sufficient and manageable cosmos. It is striking that this idea was nothing else than a countermove to that new thing, which soon after 1800 was often called the “Industrial Revolution”: the emergence of an extraordinarily mobile and agitated system of economic relations that entailed a high degree of risk and uncertainty to everyone involved, but which also opened up unheard-of opportunities for success, which in turn were linked far more tied to organization than to what was traditionally called work—the system of the rising world market economy, which is often referred to as the competitive system and later as the capitalist mode of production. To deny this newness and the realities associated with it, such as profit and interest as well as the difference between entrepreneurs and workers, was the main characteristic of the emerging workers’ movement and not just of communal socialism. On the other hand, however, this workers’ movement, which gradually formed as journeyman craftsmen and the peasant population shifted to industrial cities, was itself a new element, and as obviously Fourier and Owen oriented themselves towards a horticultural idyll, their claim to represent a “social science” and to unreservedly approve of the technology insofar as it could be used to make work easier in the phalansters was modern. Other thinkers, however, clearly recognized the backward-looking, past-oriented aspect of communal socialism, and they replaced it with the idea of ​​a state socialism that extrapolated other characteristics of the Industrial Revolution and postulated a logical completion: in place of the “anarchy of production” was to be a planned economy, in which the state, as the only entrepreneur, would take care of the well-being of all individuals. But here, too, competition eliminated individual profits and any kind of rent-income, so that society had to divide and regulate work. Consequently, one could not dispense with concepts such as the division of labor and authority, and the existence of a governing state party was no longer inconceivable. But even state socialism took up ideas that intended the exact opposite, namely the elimination of the sources of strife between states as well as between individuals, and these sources were considered to be the private property of individuals or groups, the existence of armed and punitive formations within the antagonistic states, greed for money, subordination of individuals to material necessities that limited their happiness. In this way, state socialism, like communal socialism, made a connection with the age-old concept of the state of nature, in which, according to the teachings of ancient philosophers and also Christian Fathers of the Church, all these marks were present before they were destroyed by a fall or an intrusion of greed. But none of the state socialists, neither Louis Blanc nor Constantin Pecqueur, was able to show convincingly that the states, as the only entrepreneurs, would not have private property, and among the opponents of the socialists, indeed among the socialists themselves, the suspicion arose early on that the desired abolition of all power could lead to a hitherto unknown concentration of power. The emergence of a workers’ movement was of the highest historical necessity, since it was directly connected with the most revolutionary event in modern European history, the Industrial Revolution; but its further development did not exhibit the same degree of necessity: the workers’ movement could, within the framework of the system to which it owed its origin, seek the best possible conditions for its adherents, as the English “trade unions” did from their inception; it could make itself the champion of a completely different system, the basic outline of which was based on archaic ideas and yet partly pointed to a probable future; it could, finally, rid itself in practice or even in theory of the idea of ​​humanity, to which it was so closely attached to in its early days, and thus become a state socialism of a special kind. It was to be assumed that these tendencies would coexist and wrestle with one another, without the need for the demarcation lines to remain clearly fixed. In any case, the workers’ movement as such and in its various directions had to play an important part in further development if it took up the banner of the demand for the introduction of universal suffrage, which seemed to be the victorious slogan of the century. But weren’t new differences bound to arise within the labor movement when the different states had quite different attitudes towards universal suffrage, when absolute, semi-absolute, and democratic-liberal countries had to be distinguished?

It is not possible to show at this point to what extent Marxism wanted to be a synthesis of the reformist tendencies, aiming at patience and affirming capitalism at least for the immediate present, of the cosmopolitan-naturalist and state-socialist tendencies in the workers’ movement, and yet it continued to carry contradictions within itself. But it pointed far into the future that the most determined enemies of the state and of authority among socialists, Bakunin’s anarchists, understood Marxism from the outset as a form of authoritarian and dictatorial state socialism. But hardly any Marxists took Bakunin’s critique seriously or were troubled by ambivalence when, in 1890, the Second International—a federation of Marxist parties—proclaimed May 1 as the universal Labor Day, thereby claiming to redeem working humanity from the shackles of capitalism and imperialism in the near future.

And yet it quickly became obvious even for the most convinced Marxists that serious distinctions had to be made in the “army of the world proletariat” when social-democratic parties from the sphere of the Russian Empire knocked on the doors of the International. The “Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania,” founded in 1894 and led by Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and Felix Dserschinsky, firmly rejected the demand for national self-determination because they considered the Russian economic area to be progressive and therefore wanted to wage its struggle only within its framework; the “Polish Socialist Party” under Josef Pilsudski, on the other hand, saw the achievement of Poland’s independence as the indispensable first phase, since national freedom was the prerequisite for social liberation. Representatives of the two competing workers’ parties, which understood such a different view of the relationship between the national and the social element and between the economic and the political factors, and which were led by descendants of the petty aristocracy or the bourgeoisie, therefore clashed with great hostility at congresses of the International. Not even the workers’ party in Russia proper was free from comparable differences, because in 1897 The Bund (aka General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia) was first founded, the union of the Jewish workers of Ruthenia and the Ukraine, who although had a strongly developed “class consciousness” at their disposal, were almost always in crafts or small industrial firms and differed from the Russian workers in that their rest from work fell on the Sabbath. It was not until a year later that the Russians follow suit with a founding congress in Minsk, which, however, was only attended by a few delegates and was by no means representative. The more striking development took place in emigration, where since the 1880s there had existed the Emancipation of Labor group, founded by Georgy Plekhanov, which in a Marxist spirit referred Russia to the normal path of capitalist development while sharply rejecting the views of Narodniki. When Lenin joined this circle, the journal Iskra came into being, which became a rallying point for Marxist tendencies and whose six editors prepared the second congress of the “Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party” in 1903, which was the actual founding party congress and immediately led to the de facto disintegration of the party into the two factions of the “Bolsheviks” and “Mensheviks” and led to the splitting off of “The Bund.” The Bolsheviks, in Lenin’s concept of the leading role of professional revolutionaries, diverged quite significantly from the Western and Central European parties of the International, to which the Mensheviks remained much closer, but on the other hand they surpassed even the German Social Democrats in Marxist orthodoxy, because Lenin did not shrink from the thesis that Marxism was all-powerful because it was correct. Thus from the beginning they were a party or party faction of a very peculiar kind. The history of the attempts at reunification and the role of the two factions in the Russian revolution of 1905 and in the parliaments that followed need not be traced here; it suffices to state in general that the Bolsheviks were above all a disciplined party, of which Lenin, although by no means the leader (führer), was nevertheless the old man who almost always prevailed in the Central Committee. So it was not too surprising that a man like Trotsky saw early on the future “dictator” in him. This contrasts strangely with the fact that the party met with a great deal of sympathy in the circles of the bourgeois and intelligentsia because it presented itself as the most determined opponent of tsarist autocracy—the names of wealthy benefactors are mentioned again and again in the literature, whose donations facilitated the survival and the work of the party. Sociologically, however, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks differed little, and both factions or parties (since 1912) also shared the fundamental difficulty of wanting to be Marxist parties, despite being in a pre-Marxist environment. Both believed, therefore, at first—that the workers’ parties in Russia would play a particularly important and active role in the bourgeois revolution that was yet to come. So, despite all the Menshevik criticism, it was not inconsistent for Lenin, after the October upheaval, to turn the paradoxical “bourgeois revolution under the leadership of the proletariat” into a genuine “socialist revolution” which, however, had to wait hour by hour, so to speak, for the world revolution, to confirm the authenticity of it Marxism.

At this point, neither the internal party disputes after the seizure of power nor the organizational developments can be followed in detail. Rather, some general characteristics of the party should be emphasized, which were repeatedly confirmed, or at least unfolded, in these processes.

The “Communist Party of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (Bolsheviks),” as it called itself from the summer of 1918, was from November 1917 the world’s first socialist party to rule alone. Since the spring, taking power alone had been Lenin’s real intention, and it was only for this reason that he allowed the armed insurrection to take place on the eve of the Second Congress of Soviets, which would undoubtedly have installed an all-party socialist government. The temporary alliance with the Left SRs was merely tactical, and by the end of the civil war Lenin’s view that the proper place for Mensheviks and SRs was in prison found little opposition within the party.

This ruling party, however, was and remained a minority party. At the most favorable of times it won barely a quarter of the votes in the Constituent Assembly elections, and when War Communism made the downside of Bolshevik rule all too evident for almost all peasants and for very many workers, even the Mensheviks won back most of the supporters they had lost in the autumn of 1917. But the ruling party had long since established unequal and open suffrage, and it could now jail or shoot its opponents at will. In the Smolensk district in 1921 there were only 10,000 party members out of a population of two million, and it was not until collectivization that observers credibly reported that the party resembled an army in an occupied country.

However, this party was by no means concerned with simply maintaining power. As the “grain” or “little heap” that it was, it remained dominated by the unconditional will for total transformation, which of course was presumably the prerequisite for maintaining power. So it was the party of social annihilation and the protracted civil war. Trotsky characterized Lenin’s ideas as “terrible, astoundingly naive, deadly thoughts,” and the minority appealed to the basic emotions of the vast majority when it directed all the bitterness and hatred that had accumulated in the masses of soldiers and workers during the war against the “Burschui” [bourgeoisie] and the officers. But the party could not stop at the destruction of what Lenin called the “flabby” bourgeoisie and the talkative intelligentsia, because there were other pre-Marxist realities in the country, and it was by no means merely Stalinist when, starting in 1928, they launched the great civil war against the peasants, talking about kulaks and meaning individual management of every kind. Not even the great purge can be attributed to Stalin alone, for since 1921 the party had undergone periodic purges, and the aim had always been to unmask “socially hostile elements” that had wormed their way into the party and acted contrary to the directives of the leadership through sabotage or criticism.

But the party of social destruction saw itself as the party of progress, and in certain areas not even its most determined enemies could dispute that claim. It taught the illiterate to read and write, it campaigned against filth, “culturelessness” and alcoholism; it did not shrink from “washing, cleaning, ruffling and kneading” the proletarians and ordinary party members, to quote Lenin’s words; it propagated the “scientific spirit” against superstition, and it noted with deep satisfaction that even in Lubavitchi, a center of the “darkest” Hasidic spirit, some craftsmen no longer kept the Sabbath. So it was not surprising that Bukharin and Pyatakov refused to give up their faith in the party even after they had been the victims of the worst slanders and faced death: whoever left the party, left the best part of his own life, slipping out of the streak of history into the brackish waters of an indifferent private existence.

But no determination, no enthusiasm and no progressiveness would have preserved the party’s power and thus the possibility of action if it had not remained the party of the organization Lenin had made it into. The chain of command extended from the Politburo and the Central Committee and its secretariat via the party committees of the regions (oblast) and districts (rayony) to the committees of the towns and villages, where a “first secretary” played the most important role everywhere, if only because he administered the nomenklatura, which contained the positions and names up for election to the subordinate bodies. No matter how the composition of the Politburo changed, the decisive directives emanated from it, and no matter how many members of the party were expelled in the purges, “party cells” were nevertheless to be found in every major school, in all factories, in all universities: in all regiments of the Red Army and in all subdivisions of the GPU, reporting to and receiving instructions from the higher leadership. In the army, commissars were assigned to officers, who were politically subordinate to a main department in the army command; in every machine-tractor station there was a “Political Department,” which included a special representative of the GPU. So the party had its eyes and ears everywhere, and all these eyes and ears checked and rechecked each other and were checked by other and relatively independent bodies such as the GPU. Unlike all the other parties in the world, this party not only wielded political power but directed—and in a sense owned—the entire economic life of the country. It therefore had to be omnipotent, and it called this omnipotence socialism, which of course had not yet fulfilled its final task, namely to abolish all power of men over men and all obstacles to the development of each. For the time being, the strongest of all states, the party-economy state, remained the prerequisite for future statelessness, but opponents were not the only ones who might ask themselves whether this most right-wing of all left-wing parties from the outset had remained left-wing in its dreams and mythologies, but in reality had created the most efficient of all state power structures that could ever be found on earth. Thus this party looked Janus-faced with keen eyes in the direction of present realities and took the place in a state-socialist developmental dictatorship which, within a much more relaxed structure, was filled by the economic bourgeoisie of the liberal system; but it also looked into the distant future with a dreamy look and continued to be the party of militant universalism, which believed that it could sweep away all barriers and bigotries simply by the storm its arguments.

But whether it actually united the extremes or merely made one a pretext for the other, it did not necessarily had to have a führer but could be directed by a central body whose members remained anonymous. But when in 1937 Stalin compared the party to an army and equated the approximately 3,000 higher party leaders with the general staff, the 40,000 middle ranks with the officer corps and the 150,000 simple party employees with the non-commissioned officers, it was obviously self-evident for him that he was the generalissimo of this army. Certainly Lenin understood the “leader organization” to mean a collective, but from the very beginning he was the first in this collective, and one might ask, like Trotsky, even in the earliest period, whether he was really the first among equals. As early as 1918, newspaper articles and assembly speeches called him “the leader” [führer] (“Vozhdj”) of the Russian proletariat and the world proletariat as a matter of course, and as in the feudal system, his closest followers were also given the title “leader” (führer) with a regional limitation; so Zinoviev was called the “Leader of the Northern Commune.” The party rallies gave ovations to “Führer Ilyich,” which, of course, always meant “Comrade Lenin.” In fact, throughout his life Lenin could not make any essential decision alone, but always had to secure majorities in the Politburo and at party congresses, often with hard struggles and arguments. But very soon after his death, Trotsky was hailing him as “the greatest man of our revolutionary epoch,” and the same man touched on one of the most peculiar problems of Marxism when he claimed that Lenin was the only genius besides Marx to stand out among the leaders of the working class; to be sure even without these geniuses the class would do justice to its world-historical tasks, “but more slowly.” If another statement of Trotsky’s is held next to it, namely that the Bolsheviks would never have seized power without Lenin’s urging, since the bourgeoisie would then soon have made peace and changed the situation substantially, one might arrive at the conclusion that both the new state as well as the Russian working class were created by this one genius. It is therefore permissible to assert that the Communist Party of Soviet Russia was also a “leader’s party” [Führerpartei] in a narrower sense from its early days, indeed that it developed a true leader cult [Führerkult] which, in view of the Lenin mausoleum, was often called a by sympathetic observers “the cult of relics” and compared to religious phenomena. But after the death of the “genius leader” could the party now be collectively run by average people? Lev Kamenev found very little favor when he spoke out against the notion of “one-man leadership” and against the “creation of a leader” at the 14th congress. Stalin, in his position as Party Secretary-General, the only one to be a member of the four main upper bodies at the same time—the Politburo, the Central Committee, the Secretariat, and the Org(anization)bureau—had effectively succeeded Lenin and as early as 1926 his statues could be found in many places in the Soviet Union. It soon became customary to speak of “the party and its leader Stalin,” and public speeches no longer lacked references to the greatness of Stalin’s leadership that were much applauded. Trotsky ingeniously reversed the accusation that had once been leveled at himself and accused Stalinism as a Bonapartist regime, but he ignored the fact that Martov had leveled the same accusation against Lenin before the war. It was part of the nature of the party that a single man should be at its head, wielding an unusual degree of power. Nonetheless, both Lenin and Stalin were always seen only as personifications of the party, even formally of the class, no matter how curious the second provision seemed in view of the origins and precedents of both. That the party finally extended its elementary intention of annihilation to itself, i.e. those members who rebelled against the leader were probably decided in the concept of this party, however accidental the extent of the great purge might be. The situation is different, however, with the fact that Stalin finally—probably from 1937 onward—needed the approval of no body for his decisions except formally, and towards the end of his life he often no longer even considered the mere convening of the Politburo to be necessary. This violated the spirit of the party, which always remained collectivist even when submitting to the will of a leader. But the thinking of the National Socialist Party was also collectivist, although it was based on a completely different tradition and was undoubtedly a Führerpartei in a different sense.

The workers’ movement, in its largest and most influential part, had placed itself in the tradition that counted the French Revolution and especially its Jacobin phase among its origins. The opposite tradition was that of the Right, which saw the French Revolution as above all dissolution, disintegration and chaos. It was easy to see in Abbé Barrel’s conspiracy theory, in Edmund Burke’s defense of organic development, in Joseph de Maistre’s labeling of the Revolution as “satanic” and in Adam Müller’s attacks on the Roman legal concept of private property and private religion nothing more than a defense of feudalism and thus the interests of the nobility against modernity. But if the Industrial Revolution, though not rootless, was primarily new, the French Revolution was something old and new, and as early as 1793 former liberals used to label it terms that had previously applied to quite different opponents, such as “despotic synod,” “missionaries,” and “inquisition courts.” In their eyes, therefore, that which presented itself as progressive was regressive, and conversely the conservative writers soon learned to use pamphlets and demagogic attacks. The historical reality of Europe did not know pure progress, which would have been embodied by concrete persons, and pure reaction, which could be described by specific names, but was determined by overshooting, polyvalences, mixed forms, appropriations and rethinking, and it therefore showed, including the French Revolution, only incomplete revolutions and incomplete reaction periods. Who in the 19th century could have accomplished more objectively progressive deeds than the subjective reactionaries Robert Peel, Louis Bonaparte, Otto von Bismarck and Benjamin Disraeli? Thus, the anti-Semitism of the Wilhelmine period was a modernization of the traditional conspiracy theory, and the Social Darwinist ideas of the turn of the century were not exclusively an instrument of defense of the national-liberal bourgeoisie, but they found support in new scientific findings such as Francis Galton’s theory of the heritability of characteristics. But just as the Left, in all its transformations and guises, remained recognizable by an affinity to the doctrine of the liberation of individuals into unstructured pure humanity, so the Right was always shaped by the fear of possible social chaos as well as the despotism that would eventually result. This fear was the complement of the conviction that tradition-bound order and thus institutionalized hierarchies were the most elementary basis of human coexistence. Therefore, from early on, the Right also tended towards the concept of annihilation, the concept of eliminating the “conspirators” or the originators of the decomposition, and in a man like Eugen Dühring it appeared openly around 1900 in the turn against the Jews as a vermin race. But Dühring in particular came from the Left, and the older the Right became, the more originally leftist traits it absorbed. However, it remained identical to herself in all changes as long as order took precedence over liberation. Of course, order could never be a concept of humanity in the same sense as liberation to peace and informality, because the term was by no means so supra-temporal and always had to be based on an existing order, but it nevertheless became virulent in all periods of history when the shaking of the existing situation seemed unbearable to a large number of people and the fear of the dissolution of society spread. It was to be assumed that this concept could only become effective on a mass scale in the 20th century if it was combined with the concept of liberation.

Consequently, after the great catalyst of the First World War, unexpected opportunities were bound to open up for a left-right party in those countries where the existing order was not as widely discredited as the autocracy in Russia, and where it was not as solid and untouched as that of the victorious Western powers. First to assert itself was a new type of party in Italy, which lamented a “mutilated victory”: a party supported by large sections of the middle classes, backed by the upper classes and founded by former Marxists and leftists, Fascism. German National Socialism already indicated the left-wing tendency in its name, and in its program it demanded the “abolition of laborless and effortless income,” it adopted the former radical leftist demand for the homogeneity of the people and nevertheless represented the position of extreme liberalism with the idea of free play of forces. But the stronger and more credible was the basic right-wing pattern: belief in the stab in the back of enemies and conspirators, hatred of the agitators of the Marxist left, orientation towards past greatness, the characterization of the French Revolution as a “terrible volcanic eruption,” and resolute clinging to one’s own. Thus the National Socialist party was of a fascist type and more precisely a radical fascist party. But it would probably have remained a group torn apart by factional struggles among other groups, if it had not been headed by a man, who in discussions with his closest confidante, stretched Bolshevism “from Moses to Lenin” and who rejected all compromises, including those with the “völkish wandering scholars” no less decisively than Lenin had done toward the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries. He created the ideology of his party just as little as Lenin created that of his own, but he too set the decisive accents and formulated the most authoritative sentences. Above all, however, in this party of former war veterans who identified with their past and wanted to liberate Germany by destroying the enemies of the people he won a different position than Lenin could and wanted to hold in his party of émigrés and war-weary soldiers.

Adolf Hitler was born two notches below Lenin in the social hierarchy and never attended university or college; in terms of origin and educational background he showed similarities with Stalin, if one disregards his artistic inclinations and abilities. But the German Workers' Party, which he joined in 1919, was far removed from the conspiratorial nature of the Bolshevik Party and offered greater opportunities for a popular orator from the outset, since it arose in a comparatively free and liberal society. On the other hand, however, it was characterized by its proximity to the Freikorps, and their principle was not merely military, but far more archaic as the personal and direct attachment of relatively few men to their respective leader. Thus, the democratic principle of decision-making through general meetings and the command principle initially existed side by side, and the story of Hitler, who in the beginning was merely the seventh member of the executive committee as a “head of propaganda,” is a story of the expansion of the leadership power, similar to that of Mussolini.

But even after the transfer of “dictatorial powers” from 1921 onwards, Hitler, in stark contrast to Lenin, was not involved in any kind of central committee; the command principle triumphed very early on over the democratic principle of election and discussion. At first, however, he still had mentors and fellow fighters of equal standing, but the putsch of November 1923 was entirely his own work, which was not decided or even confirmed by any party committee. After the party’s re-establishment, Hitler had to overcome numerous difficulties vis-à-vis the North German wing, but he also won over the protagonist of the Führer cult, Joseph Goebbels, from the ranks of these leftists. Until 1930, the “Supreme SA Leader” Franz Pfeffer von Salomon still held a relatively independent position, but then Hitler personally took over the leadership of what was by far the most important branch of the party. More than any other German party, far more than the Bolsheviks before they seized power, the NSDAP already had the character of a state within a state around 1930, and the cult of the leader (Führerkult) was the most important integrating factor of the party, in which very different tendencies had come together. But Hitler’s objective superiority repeatedly emerged, to whom men like Hess, Himmler and Goebbels were extremely devoted, while the public still regarded him as a “pale replica” of Mussolini.

Thus Hitler, who was not a member of the Reichstag, was appointed to the state office of Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, as the leader of the National Socialist movement. Therefore, from the very beginning, despite his oath to the constitution, he was not only one factor among several factors, but he had a decisive advantage because he was the undisputed leader of the National Socialist popular movement and thus led its state-shielded revolution, which saw itself primarily as as a counter-revolution. From August 1934 at the latest, the will of the Führer was the supreme law, and thus the decision on war and peace, for which a Reich law was required according to the Weimar Constitution, fell solely within the competence of Adolf Hitler. Lenin was far from possessing such absolute power, and since 1937 Stalin had, at most, de facto. Therefore, in 1939, there could not be the slightest doubt that Hitler alone was responsible for the war against Poland, and only around his forehead was woven the laurels of victory.

The characterization of the Führer’s power by the National Socialist jurists was to a good extent quasi-theological and mystical. The leader, they said, is an embodiment of the actual will of the people and thus the advocate of the “objective idea of ​​the nation against the subjective arbitrariness of a misguided popular mood.” His office is indivisible, his power is “not restricted by safeguards and controls, by autonomous areas of protection and well-acquired individual rights, but it is free and independent, exclusive and unrestricted.” It is not arbitrary, but tied to the fate and task of the people. But the fate and task of the people is determined by the leader alone, he directs the “deployment of the people’s collective political power for the common great goals.” The referendums do not determine his decisions, but have the function of confirmation, of trusting commitment to the decisions of the leader.

Even before the war began, the principle of the Führerstaat (leader-state) was so fully realized that Goering could say that he himself and all other state and party leaders had no more decision-making authority on the big questions than the stones on which they stood. It has been known since the earliest post-war period from the memoirs of those involved that below this level there were numerous conflicts of authority among the subordinates, but this fact was precisely a prerequisite for the independence of Hitler’s decisions in the area of ​​world politics. The National Socialist jurists were therefore right when they rejected the equation of the Führerstaat with a dictatorship or even an absolute monarchy. In fact, no dictator or absolute monarch had ever had as much power as Hitler. Even the will of the military emperor Napoleon I was not directly identical with the will of the state. It is a completely unfounded assumption that something of the sort would have been necessary if the goal had consisted merely in regaining the status of a great power or even in the founding of a Greater Germany. It was probably the only “constitution” under which a defeated state could grasp for “world domination” against all odds and against the concerns of all experts: the archaic simplicity of the formation of will in warlike tribes was combined with the modern efficiency of a state system based on the division of labor. But it was also the only form of government in which a single person could drag an entire nation into total defeat and even physical ruin. From a philosophical perspective, it was the most extreme form of perverted theology: the Führer was considered a god, or at least as a semi-divine savior, and historically speaking, this was the stark opposite of German and European tradition.

But the legal explanations about the constitutional position of the unrestricted leader of the people could not be taken from the fact that this god or demigod was at the same time the pioneer of a “world view” that wanted to appeal to far more people than just the Germans: at least the Germanic peoples and maybe even all Aryans. And reality was far from consistent with the concepts and postulates. The German people was not a manageable clan that looked up trustingly to their patriarch, but a modern, very complex and historically diverse society. The Führer therefore needed an organ that was not identical with the people, and his world view had to be as much rooted in this organ as it in turn permeated it. If the NSDAP was Hitler’s first and foremost creation, he was in a way its offspring. The Third Reich was therefore just as much a party state as a Führerstaat, and the Law for Securing the Unity of Party and State of of December 1, 1933 also formally fixed this fact by defining the party as “the leading and moving force of the National Socialist state.” If the Führer’s character may be interpreted as the unrestriction of traditional monarchical power, the party character of the state was something historically quite new that could be derived even less from the traditions of the right than from the traditions of socialism. But Soviet Russia was ahead of Germany by 15 years.

From the outset, the NSDAP was not a party of dignitaries, but a well-organized mass party, of the kind that had previously only been the Social Democratic Party in Germany and, from 1920, the Communist Party of Germany as well. But not only was the leader’s power much more pronounced, but the membership movement was more powerful than it had been in the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Communist Party of Soviet Union. At the time of the seizure of power, the NSDAP had over 700,000 members, while the Bolshevik party had numbered little more than 200,000 in the autumn of 1917; in 1935, membership was 2.5 million, about the same as that of the Communist Party of Soviet Union, including candidates. The NSDAP was thus far less of an elite party than the Communist Party of Soviet Union, and extensive party purges were never carried out. Hitler never compared his party to the status of the samurai or to a “sword-bearing order” as Trotsky and Stalin, respectively, did with regard to the Communist Party of Soviet Union. But unlike the Communist Party of Soviet Union, the NSDAP was already organized like a state before the seizure of power, and the Munich Reich leadership had resembled a government since 1930. The SA party army, with its staffs and army-like hierarchy, was far greater in number than the “Red Guard” had been in Petrograd in 1917. However, this party and its army did not have to assert themselves in a genuine civil war, and they destroyed the other parties, but by no means entire social classes, and with regard to the “main enemy,” Jewry, the intention of expelling them was realized only very gradually. Thus the SA did not become the army of the state, as the Red Guard did in a certain way, and the party, while exercising great influence, always remained a state within a state and for many years could not remotely think of subjugating and outright appropriating the economy, as the Communist Party had done in Soviet Russia. Unlike Russia in 1917 and even more so in 1920, Germany had a declining economy that was nevertheless very efficient and well-functioning, which was integrated to the world market in many ways and was to a large extent dependent on it. An attempt to expropriate and reorganize it without the express and overwhelming consent of the electorate would have provoked the chaos and decline that had followed war and civil war in Russia. Precisely because of this, the power of the party was much more limited and social pluralism, in contrast to political pluralism, was largely preserved. At least some leaders of party organizations, such as Joseph Goebbels, managed to get into the relevant state offices, but Alfred Rosenberg was no more successful in taking over the Foreign Office as Ernst Röhm was in taking over the Reich Ministry of the Armed Forces. Although later on there were more and more personal unions between party and state offices, in principle state and party remained separate. The de facto situation consisted in a bitter competition between the various party and branch leaders for shares in state power, and this also resulted in a confusing juxtaposition of claims and competences, which one may call neofeudalism, but which was by no means a polycracy, since there was never the the slightest doubt as to who had to make the big decisions. A certain confusion was even explicitly promoted by Hitler, just as Stalin and Lenin had promoted the competing coexistence of organs. In Germany, of course, far more stronger remnants of the traditional individualism and greater opportunities for one’s own initiative remained, while in the Soviet Union the multiplicity of authorities served far more pronouncedly the alternating control and thus the rule of the top extending to the smallest detail. The basic difference between the NSDAP and the Communist Party of Soviet Union was that the latter had to create an industrial and warlike society through extreme activity after the devastation of war and civil war, while the former only had the easier task of getting a highly industrialized society out of a peace crisis to prepare for war or at least for the possibility of credible threats of war. Thus the NSDAP shared most of the formal features of the Communist Party of Soviet Union, e.g. activism and the will to exterminate, but only in a much less pronounced form until the outbreak of war.

It was already characteristic that the party, in addition to its branches—the SA, the SS, the NSKK (national socialist motor corps), the Hitler Youth, the NSDStB (National Socialist German students’ league) and the NS-Frauenschaft (national socialist women’s league)—also had affiliated organizations such as the Medical Association, the Association of National Socialist German Lawyers, the Association of Teachers and the Reich Association of German Officials, which clearly showed the continued existence of social pluralism.

The top organization of the party took place through the distribution of functions in the Reich leadership, which retained its seat in Munich as the “capital of the movement.” But Rudolf Hess, who could be compared to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Union, actually had far fewer opportunities to intervene in the state sphere, although he had considerable rights to participate in legislation and in the appointment of all officials. During his stay in Berlin on November 13 and 14, 1940, Molotov also paid a visit to Hess, and questions of the organization of both parties are said to have been discussed. If the news is correct, it would be the only “top-level” meeting that ever took place between the Communist Party of Soviet Union and the NSDAP. Whether Martin Bormann had “top-level talks” of a completely different kind, who after Hess’ mysterious flight to England became one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich as “Head of the Party Chancellery,” is an open question.

Under Hess and Bormann, the “Reich leaders,” including Robert Ley, head of the “German Labor Front,” but also the leaders of large organizations such as Heinrich Himmler and Baldur von Schirach, were ministers of a kind. There was no “instruction:” of entire state areas by party departments—like by the departments of the Central Committee in the Soviet Union—but the affiliated organizations were each assigned to a specific office in the Reich leadership. The organization of the party extended downwards through the Gau, district, local group and cell lines down to the lowest unit, the block, which comprised 40-60 households. All party officials wore uniforms and insignia, which, unlike the uniforms and insignia of the SA and SS, never became well known, let alone popular.

The block leaders had the task of collecting dues at the grass roots, but also of advising, monitoring and, and propagandizing from mouth to mouth, towards the pure “Volksgenossen”. In every apartment building there was a “NSDAP notice board”: “Here speaks the NSDAP. Comrades: If you need advice and help, turn to the NSDAP.” Then followed the name of the block manager and the address of the office. The party’s announcements were pinned in the lower half.

Even before the civil war broke out in 1918 in Petrograd, Moscow and other large Russian cities, the ruling party had already been present among the social base. There “house committees” had been formed, which usually consisted of the household staff or the poorest residents and which very quickly made it their task to evict hostile families, to redistribute living space and at least to exercise extremely strict surveillance of all “Burschui” [bourgeois]. For many years there was no analogy to this in National Socialist Germany, not even towards the Jewish residents, no matter how unpleasant the checks and often enough the harassment by the lowest party functionaries might be. The German system was far more a system of control than of change, a capillary system capable of suppressing any spontaneous impulse, but which was also an activating and democratizing institution. Many block leaders, a number of district leaders and a few Gau leaders were workers or former workers or came from very humble backgrounds, and a wide field was open to the urge for titles and distinctions. But however uncomfortable the wholesaler and the government councilor might be under the suspicious eyes of the block leader, who might still have been a humble clerk, they remained what they were, wholesaler and government councilor, and against any encroachment they could appeal to the courts, provided that as active members of dissolved parties they did not have to fear denunciation to the Gestapo. In Moscow and Petrograd, on the other hand, the house committees almost sovereignly governed and changed their small areas and more serious defiance was often punished on the spot.

Here, far below the level of the party leaders and even the leaders, the innermost core of the difference between the two parties seems to become tangible: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a party of the proletarians, which aimed at the annihilation of all class differences, and the NSDAP was a party of the petty bourgeois who, despite all its political activism, was concerned precisely with the preservation social conditions.

This simple thesis is questionable, however, because at the time when it seized power, the NSDAP was more than five times as strong as the Bolshevik party in relation to the total population. Accurate and reliable information is not available for the early period of the later Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but it has been calculated that in August 1917 at most 5% of the industrial workers were members of the party. Of the 171 delegates to the 6th Party Congress who filled out the questionnaires, 92 were Russians and 29 were Jews. 94 had higher education, 72 were workers and soldiers. The average age was 29 years. So it was a party of intellectuals and workers and peasants in soldiers’ coats. It is not possible to determine how many of the workers worked in handicraft workshops or in small industry and therefore showed petty-bourgeois traits; in Petrograd the proportion of workers from the large-scale Putilov works was undoubtedly large. But what was particularly remarkable was of course the high proportion of “foreign nationals,” not only Jews but also Latvians, and generally the low average age in the party. At the second party congress in London, half the delegates were Jewish and far more than 50% were intellectuals. Here the origin of the talk of “Jewish Bolshevism” is clearly recognizable. A basic feature of the Russian Revolution consisted in the fact that it was not, in the end, an uprising of the oppressed “foreigners” but simultaneously after all, it was: the Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Finns, Georgians and many others. Moreover, a good portion of that half of the delegates belonged to the “Bund” and the Mensheviks, and to a similar question any of the Jewish Bolsheviks would have given the same answer that the People’s Commissar Mechlis later gave to an anti-Semitic remark by Stalin, he is not a Jew, he is a communist. A high degree of probability can be attributed to the thesis that the Jews in Russia’s western provinces—still a clearly recognizable “people” and yet already in the process of detaching themselves from the beliefs that seemed to constitute that people—represented the strongest reservoir of energy and talent, which was ever concentrated in such a small space and suddenly acquired almost unlimited potential for action. This explains why the Jewish share in the top leadership positions was initially extraordinarily high, but this in no way proves that Bolshevism as such was Jewish; it merely makes it particularly clear how little the Bolshevik party, on the eve of its seizure of power corresponded to Marxian scheme of the vast majority of proletarians and the tiny minority of capital magnates. No sociological calculation of percentages can change the result to which the historical view leads: in 1917 the Bolshevik party was still a very undeveloped and relatively small party made up of intellectuals, workers and “foreign nationals” who, in the situation of the still uncompleted military defeat, placed itself at the head of the mass desire of almost all soldiers for peace and almost all peasants for land. However, since it had declared itself Marxist from the beginning, after taking over sole power it could not stop at the mere conclusion of peace and the division of the land of the landowners demanded by the Social Revolutionaries, but it also had to expropriate industry and socially destroy the bourgeoisie of the private owners as well as the old intelligentsia. It was thus the party of a major social upheaval, and if any kind of substantial change may be called a revolution and is at the same time progressive and historically justified, then it was indeed a revolutionary and progressive party in line with historical development. But it was not the party that corresponded to Marx’s basic concept.

Sociological data for the years after the seizure of power and the civil war are of little use, since the party was now able to manipulate social reality and its own composition by temporarily only allowing workers and poor peasants to join, while many white-collar workers and relatives of the old intelligence were purged out. But since, with a few exceptions, all important leading positions in the huge state had to be filled by party members, the party, although almost 90% of its members had elementary school education or were illiterate in 1919, became almost identical to the leading elite, and the number of workers or peasants who actually did manual labor amounted to little more than a 10%. The question of whether profound differentiations and the formation of a new class or even caste took place under the cover of the vague concept of white-collar workers or the new intelligentsia could not be reliably decided in view of the lack of a science of sociology.

On the other hand, there is a wealth of material relating to the NSDAP, which, after all, before it seized power, had been developing for 14 years in the bosom of a society that differed from other European societies in no fundamental social characteristic. All of these societies can be characterized as petty-bourgeois societies, i.e. they do not consist in the great majority of peasants and workers, but they have a comparatively very broad middle class, which dedicates itself to mediating and organizing activity. Together with the old classes of the educated bourgeoisie and the petty nobility, below the grand burghers and aristocracy, it constitutes not much less than half the population and forms not so much a class as an all-pervading atmosphere, the filtration basin, as it were, of the nation and of society that never takes a unified political position and is just as closely linked to the upper class of the working class as it is to the “working” part of the upper bourgeoisie. Because of this diversity, the middle class has never developed a heroic image of itself, but rather constantly criticized itself and, in so doing, brought an emotion into society that is as alien to a warlike aristocratic society as it is to a state as small farmers in 1870, and still in 1920 it was a question of whether this basic element of all Western societies was on the decline or on the advance, and Karl Marx not only put forward one thesis, but also the other. One could even claim with a grain of salt that the concept of the revolutionary proletariat, like socialism in general, was an invention of the petty bourgeoisie, because it arose from the aversion of people of petty-bourgeois origin to certain and indeed often obsolete features of their youthful world. In any case, one says nothing of substance when one describes the NSDAP as a petty-bourgeois movement and repeatedly confirms or slightly modifies statements that can already be found in the official “party statistics” from 1935 and which show that the workers in the party at 32 % are underrepresented compared to the 47% share in the population and that this share has fallen to 8% among the district leaders. Comparable facts, namely deviations from an imagined or postulated equality of representation, can be found in all states and parties where the concept of representation has something to say, and what is characteristic of National Socialism is exclusively the comparatively very high proportion of workers within a middle-class movement. The thesis of the “declassed,” which to a certain extent applies to every radical party, is equally unfounded. Incidentally, in such cases “declassification” is more often the consequence than the cause of activity for a party, and this was also the case with the NSDAP. The relative number of party members in individual regions depended much less on social composition than on extra-sociological factors such as proximity to the border, denomination, and voluntary participation in the war. Last but not least, the NSDAP, like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was a youth party. Far more enlightening than statistical accounts of shares in yet-to-be-defined classes or strata is an early statement by Clara Zetkin in 1923 that fascist parties tended to consist of the strongest and most determined (and, it must be added, most excitable) “elements of all classes.” It might be said with just as much justice that the Bolshevik Party in 1917 consisted of the most energetic and active elements of the Russian and non-Russian intelligentsia and workers. The decisive question, however, as to why these elements formed a party in Russia or in Germany, cannot be explained by sociology, but only by history. It is true that the differences between the two parties can be made somewhat understandable from sociological and historical circumstances, but their development and especially the seizure of power resulted from very specific situations and events.

But even if these seizures of power were by no means mere coups or can be traced back to intrigues or trivial coincidences, the new state parties still found so much resistance in all strata of society that they could not do without organs to enforce and secure their rule. Next to the parties, these organs were the most important structural element of that form of government for which the term totalitarian was already in use before 1933.