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Socialist Paths in a Capitalist Conundrum: Reconsidering the German Catastrophe of 1933
WILLIAM SMALDONE
Willamette University
| For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) stood at the center of the world's democratic socialist movement. Socialists around the globe respected and envied its more than one million dues-paying members, powerful trade-union allies, and ability to win the support of one third of the German electorate. Even after 1917, when the advent of communism sharply divided the world labor movement, democratic socialists continued to place the German party at center stage. During the Weimar Republic, the SPD was the largest single party in Parliament until the Nazi electoral breakthrough of 1930–1932. As the Republic's most important political "bulwark," the SPD was the hope of many who sought to pave a democratic path to socialism while fending off extremists of the right and left. |
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Legions of historians have put forward a wide array of explanations for the Social Democratic collapse in 1933. These explications include SPD and trade union unwillingness to pursue more radical changes in Germany during the revolution of 1918–1919, the party's hesitation to govern at the national level during much of the Republic's existence, its rigid adherence to parliamentary norms even as the latter disintegrated, and its inability to respond effectively to the challenge of the Great Depression. While some historians hold the "structural" social, economic, and political problems that beset the republic as primarily responsible for its demise, others focus on its "crisis of modernity" or stress the allegedly "mediocre" leadership of the parliamentary parties, especially the SPD, in the struggle for power.1 |
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Rather than revisit old ghosts, this essay aims to shift the debate's focus away from the national or European contexts of the Weimar period to a broader framework that explores how the German Social Democratic experience in 1933 relates to the global experience of democratic socialism in the twentieth century. To that end, after surveying the background of German Social Democracy's failure in 1933, I examine three other major moments in the global history of twentieth-century democratic socialism: the defeat of Chilean socialism in 1973, the reversal of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1990, and the aftermath of the African National Congress's electoral victory in 1994. |
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I have selected these cases, in part, because they provide clear examples of the widely varying circumstances under which strong democratic socialist movements have struggled to achieve their aims, but also because in each setting they were operating amidst civil war or extreme social tensions.2 Such conditions set them apart from cases in which democratic socialist forces operated under relatively peaceful conditions, such as in Scandinavia between the wars or in Western Europe in the post-1945 era. |
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For me, the term "democratic socialist" denotes those forces that aim to establish a social and political order in which, via solidarity, democratic practices, and the use of resources to meet the needs of people rather than profits, all people share equal freedoms in all spheres of life. In my view, these goals must be embodied in the specific details of any particular movement's program and practice. While not rejecting violence as a weapon in the struggle against tyranny, democratic socialists adhere to Engels's dictum that "the working class can only come to power under the form of the democratic republic."3 Hence, they eschew dictatorial methods once the latter is established. |
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