Fascism In Perspective: It Was Never As Popular With the Working Class as Our Ruling Class Wants You to Believe

Here are facts our rulers never report to the general public; for example, Hitler never won an election

Since the mass media are currently making the U.S. presidential election all about (supposedly) fascist Trump versus anti-fascist Harris, and are trying to make pro-Harris voters fear that the great unwashed are a gigantic fascist movement in the making, I offer some historical perspective on fascism.

William Shirer’s book has a lot of important information in it, information that most Americans never learn from our schools and mass media. Here are some key facts about fascism, presented below as extracts from my free and searchable online (PDF) book about World War II that has all the indicated footnote sources, many of which are citations from Shirer’s book and other books by very reputable historians.

It is a myth that the German working class was pro-Nazi.

Workers Versus Nazis In The Weimar Republic

Page 15

The [German] working class militia organizations defended against attacks from government controlled anti-working class forces such as the Free Corps3 (Freikorps) as well as the Nazi's private SA militia. On May Day 1929 the Communist Party challenged a ban declared on demonstrations in the streets of Berlin by the Berlin police chief (who was a member of.the Social Democratic Party.) The Communists announced that, “We do not accept the ban. We shall demonstrate in the streets, and if the police try to attack we shall call a general strike for the next day.” The police made a deliberate attack and violence broke out. The Communists called for a general strike and were pressured by many militant workers to distribute weapons, which they did not do. But workers set up barricades in the quarters of Neukolln and Wedding and the police had to lay siege to the areas for three days before they wece able to restore capitalist “order.” Thirty demonstrators died in the fighting and 200 were wounded; 1,200 people were arrested. The Prussian Minister of the Interior used the event as an excuse to ban the mass organizations of the Communist Party.4

In the large May Day struggle and in numerous smaller fights the working class asserted its control over entire local areas. The Communist Party was a paramilitary organization and it had mass organizations that were also paramilitary and focused on self-defense ofworking class neighborhoods. One such organization was the Kampfbund gegen den Faschismus, which at the end of 1931 had 100,000 members, 7,000 in Berlin. Communist party membership itself rose from 135,000 in 1929 to 381,000 in 1931.5 In addition, 400,000 workers in the building trades, textiles, and later engineering and mining, belonged to another radical and militant organization—the anarcho-syndicalist Freie Arbeiter Union.6

In the German province of Prussia alone, between June 1 and June 20, 1932, there were 461 pitched street battles between workers and Nazis, in which eighty-two people died and four hundred were wounded.7 In his classic account, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, William Allen gives a detailed account of events from 1930 to 1935 in a small German rural town with a population of 10,000 mainly middle-class Lutherans. Allen describes a typical incident. Three weeks before the July 31, 1932 Reichstag elections, twenty-five men in the Reichsbanner (a Social Democratic Party militia organization) got into a fight with sixty Nazi SA (militia) men while crossing a bridge in opposite directions. Homeless people in a nearby Army compound rushed to help the Reichsbanner, and when police arrived there was a surging crowd of about eighty persons pelting the Nazis with stones.8

In the years of the Great Depression (1929-33) when unemployment rose to 30 percent, fighting broke out daily between the unemployed and government officials. The welfare system was designed to humiliate the unemployed and make them submissive. Unemployed people had to report sometimes daily and at least monthly to the authorities and beg. Welfare recipients went from being submissive, however, to being aggressive, and were backed up by the Communist Party. It was an everyday occurrence for welfare claimants to get into “episodes of assaults, clashes and threats to benefits officers, and the police repeatedly being called.”9

In addition to the police, the Nazis (not yet in control of the government) made a concerted attempt to subjugate workers in the working class neighborhoods. Nazi gangs threatened the owners of taverns where unemployed workers gathered, demanding that the taverns cater to Nazis and not the workers.10 Nazi SA men would walk into tenement houses and urinate in the hallways and wave their pistols at children and threaten to shoot into people’s windows.11 Against such criminality, the people in the poorest quarters preferred to organize vigilante squads rather than ask the equally hated police to intervene. And similarly, people organized groups to physically defend people being evicted.

It is a myth that Hitler was voted into power

Hitler Was Never Elected

Hitler, contrary to today’s popular misconception, was never elected; he was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg on January 30, 1933. (The germ of truth in the misconception is that Hitler did in fact become Chancellor constitutionally, since the constitution permitted the President to appoint the Chancellor.) The only times Germans had an opportunity to vote for Hitler, the Nazi leader failed to capture even a plurality: In the Presidential election March 13, 1932 there were four candidates including the incumbent Hindenburg, and Hitler received only 30.1% of the vote versus Hindenburg’s 49.6%. In the runoff election April 10 between Hindenburg, Hitler and a third candidate, Hindenburg received 53% versus Hitler’s 36.8% of the votes.12

In the November 6, 1932 Reichstag (Parliament) election, the last one before President Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor, the Nazis won 196 deputies, while the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party—both Marxist, both rooted in the working class, and both explicitly opposed to anti-Semitism13—won between them 25 more seats than the Nazis for a total of 221 seats.14 After this election the Nazis were in steep decline. The party was literally bankrupt and unable to make the payroll of its functionaries or pay its printers. In provincial elections in Thuringia on December 3, the Nazi’s vote dropped by 40 percent. Gregor Strasser, a top Nazi who had led the party during Hitler’s time in prison, concluded that the Nazis would never obtain office through the ballot.15 In his diary the last week of December, Hitler’s right-hand man, Joseph Goebbels, wrote: “(T]he future looks dark and gloomy; all prospects and hope have quite disappeared."16 This was only two months before Hindenburg, in response to pressure from industrialists, bankers, large landowners and military leaders,17 would appoint Hitler Chancellor.

Germany’s rulers feared not only working class votes, but a general strike that could lead to civil war. On December 2, General Kurt von Schleicher told the current Chancellor, Franz von Papen, “The police and armed services could not guarantee to maintain transport and supply services in the event of a general strike, nor would they be able to ensure law and order in the event of a civil war."18 Hindenburg subsequently dismissed Papen and appointed Schleicher as Chancellor, telling Papen: “I am too old and have been through too much to accept the responsibility for a civil war. Our only hope is to let Schleicher try his luck.”19

Schleicher, responding to the same Great Depression and the same kind f working class militancy that forced FDR to offer Americans a New Deal, tried to pacify the German working class with similar promises, but workers did not trust him. Afterjust fifty-seven days in office the elite decided that only Hitler could do what had to be done. Twenty-six days before Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, Baron Kurt von Schroeder, a Cologne banker, had a private meeting with Hitler, three other Nazi leaders, and Papen. During this meeting Papen and Hitler agreed that Social Democrats, Communists, and Jews had to be eliminated from leading positions in Germany, and Schroeder promised that German business interests would take over the debts of the Nazi Party. Twelve days later, Goebbels reported that the financial position of the (previously bankrupt) Nazi party had “fundamentally improved overnight.”20

When members of Germany’s elite prevailed upon Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as ChancellorJanuary 30, 1933, the reason was because they were convinced that only Hitler would do whatever was necessary decisively to defeat workers’ power.

Chancellor Hitler Fails To Tame His Workers

Within two months of being appointed Chancellor, Hitler arrested four thousand leaders of the Communist Party along with others in the Social Democratic and liberal parties, including members of the Reichstag, and carted them off to be tortured and beaten. Hitler got away with this because of a suspiciously convenient fire that burned down the Reichstag building February 27, 1933. (Although the trial of the suspected arsonist came too late to affect events, historian William Shirer writes that “the trial, despite the subserviency of the court to the Nazi authorities, cast a great deal of suspicion on Goering and the Nazis.”) Hitler used the fire as an excuse to gag and arrest his opponents. The Nazis accused a communist of starting the fire, and did everything they could to create panic and fear ofCommunists. The day after the fire Hitler got President Hindenburg to sign a decree “For the Protection of the People and the State.” Shirer notes the act was described as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state.” It imposed restrictions on personal liberty, free expression of opinion including freedom of the press, rights of assembly and association; and violations on the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communication. Also it declared that warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations and restrictions on property were permissible beyond the pre-existing legal limits. And it imposed the death sentence for new categories of crime including “serious disturbances of the peace" by armed persons.

Hitler had scheduled elections to the Reichstag for the following week, March 5, and tried to use the fire to frighten Germans into believing that they had to vote for Nazis to prevent the Communists from taking over and completely destroying the nation. “Truckloads of storm troopers roared through the streets all over Germany, breaking into homes, rounding up victims and carting them off to S.A. barracks, where they were tortured and beaten. The Communist press and political meetings were suppressed; the Social Democrat newspapers and many liberal journals were suspended and the meetings of the democratic parties either banned or broken up. Only the Nazis and their Nationalist allies were permitted to campaign unmolested.” Hitler naturally expected the Nazis to win handily.

But in a show of resistance to the Nazis that is almost always overlooked by standard 21st century accounts, Germans under these extraordinary circumstances gave the Nazi Party only 44% of the total vote.21 The Nazis could not obtain a majority even with Hitler installed as Chancellor and their opponents in prison!

Read pages 19 to 26 in my book to learn about the enormous subsequent opposition—including labor strikes—against the Nazis by the German working class.

Page 164:

Although the Nazi Party never achieved an electoral majority in Germany and had power given to it by the German elite in 1933, it did initially attractsupport from peasants and the middle class (each of these groups made up about one third of the population), based on promises to them that it didn’t keep. As for German industrial workers (the remaining third of the population), the Nazis made only half-hearted efforts to win their support because the Nazis realized that workers understood the Party’s true anti-working class aims very clearly. By the time Germany was at war, however, even peasants and the middle class were bitter that the Nazi regime had given them the opposite of what it had promised. The peasants felt more exploited than ever and were furious at Nazi actions they saw as purely immoral, and the middle class felt betrayed because they were treated with greater contempt by the Nazis than by the old rulers in the preceding Weimar Republic.

Read details about this in pages 164 to 179, including this observation:

Because of wrong-headed Marxist leadership,¹ German blue-collar workers failed to unite with peasants and make a democratic revolution in Germany when that was the only alternative to Nazi rule. Working class leaders allowed the Nazis to disarm workers (who had militias and weapons), and then when the leaders were hauled off to concentration camps the workers were left to deal with the Nazis as best they could.

The following glimpse of life in a German coal mine, as reported by a complaining Gestapo agent, shows how some German workers fought the Nazis even without weapons or organization. One can only hope that FDR was not successful in killing the coal miner, Lapschiess, who is described below.

October 13, 1943 We wish to inform you herewith of an incident which occurred underground here on 9.10 in Franz Otto Colliery, Duisburg Neuenkamp. At the end of a shift the foreman S[...], Karl, b. 24.10.03 in Duisburg, who is in charge of coal-extraction from the faces of one district of the pit, ordered one of the Russian prisoners of war employed there to stay on longer and help extract a wedge of coal that had remained in the rock. Since the Russian refused, despite repeated requests, to comply with this instruction, S[...] attempted forcibly to compel him to perform this task. In the course of the altercation the apprentice face-worker, Lapschiess, Max, b. 23.4.03 in Gelsenkirchen, resident here at Essenbergerstr, 127, turned on the foreman and defended the POW in a manner such as to encourage the latter to strike the foreman on the head with his lamp. S[...] received a gaping wound on the face which has required stitches, and he has since been on sick leave. He is a diligent man and a member of the colliery Political Action Squad. We should be grateful if you could make it clear to Lapschiess, who has already been in a concentration camp (1935-39), that his interference with instructions issued to the Russian prisoners of war constitutes a disturbance of the colliery’s operation and that he may under no circumstances take the part of a POW. This morning Lapschiess declared in impudent fashion to my face that he would continue to intervene if Russian prisoners of war were assaulted.100

Antisemitism

Please also read pages 164-9 in my online book, in the section titled “The Anti-Semitism Question” about the role of antisemitism in Nazi organizing. You may be surprised to learn the truth about it.

JAPANESE FASCISM—NOT AT ALL POPULAR!

Starting on page 26 of my online book, it shows that the fascist Japanese government was a response to an anti-fascist working class that the rulers feared might make a revolution.

Scholars of Japanese history before World War II have investigated the reasons why Japanese rulers chose war and aggression. Andrew Gordon, Assistant Professor of History at Duke University, in Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan writes:

I believe the relationship between labor and social problems and the ‘big story’ of the ascendance of the military and fascism in the 1930s has been insufficiently studied and its significance under appreciated. The existence ofsuch a ‘relationship,’ for example between the repudiation of party rule in 1932 and the social turmoil of the previous three years, is difficult to prove. No radical push from below, either of the left or the right, directly ousted the parties; Admiral Saito did not proclaim that the nation was turning to military rulers because radical unions were too powerful. Yet a range of evidence examined below, from diaries and memoirs to newspaper and magazine articles, suggests that a relationship did exist. We shall see, first, that the newly ascendant military men and bureaucrats, among many others, truly feared that domestic social order might collapse during and after the depression, and second, that this fear informed, and at rimes propelled, a wide range of new domestic and foreign policies.51

Based on the diary of one ofJapan’s key army leaders, Lieutenant General Suzuki Teiichi, Gordon writes: Suzuki’s diary from 1933 to 1934 notes numerous lengthy discussions on the subject with Army Minister Araki, as well as with the ministers offinance, foreign affairs, and agriculture, and also reports on the deliberations at several cabinet meetings. It records a consistent military chorus at such meetings, echoed by reform-oriented bureaucrats in the Home Ministry such as Goto Fumio: “domestic unrest" was a great problem, impeding national defense...Suzuki repeatedly told his associates that “a great war would fundamentally strengthen the people and their nationalism.”52

The background to this evidence thatJapan’s rulers viewed war as a means of preventing working class revolution, or “collapse of domestic social order,” is the intense class struggle that existed in Japan for decades prior to World War II, which we review here. [Read about this in detail in my book starting at page 27]

Page 157:

Hardly "One Hundred Million Hearts BeatingAs One"

The Fascist Japanese government and military leaders tried to instill in ordinary Japanese people a willingness to die for the Emperor and sacrifice themselves in battle for the glory of Japan. They saturated the newspapers and other media with evocations of the ideals ofloyalty and self-sacrifice to the “Yamato" race, ideals that came from an ancient but tiny Samurai warrior elite who themselves did not often honor these ideals in practice.13 The propaganda aboutJapan being “One hundred million hearts beating as one” was meant not only to stifle dissent in Japan but also to inspire fear in Allied armies.

Japanese soldiers were ordered to sacrifice themselves and die with honor or else be branded a coward and a traitor. Some soldiers, especially those from the small and elite Samurai warrior caste, fought and died with fanatical loyalty to the Emperor. But most soldiers obeyed because of fear and coercion. John Dower, in Embracing Defeat, recounts how in May 1946 a veteran wrote a letter to Asahi, a leading newspaper in Japan, recalling the “ ‘hell of starvation’ he and his fellow soldiers had endured on a Pacific island and the abuse they suffered at the hands of their officers.” The veteran described how enlisted men “had died of starvation at a far greater rate than officers” and said they “had been killed by the tyranny of their own leaders.” Referring to an old Samurai saying in which killing an enemy at the time of one’s own death is described as “taking a souvenir to hell,” the veteran said, “Most of his comrades died wishing to take not an enemy but one of their officers with them as their souvenir.”14 Dower also reports that, “Several months later, a report in the Asahi about an abusive officer ‘lynched’ by his men after surrender triggered eighteen reader responses, all but two of which supported the murder and offered their own accounts of brutality and corruption among the officer corps. One veteran confessed that he frequently had felt like attacking his officers, but restrained himself because he feared adverse consequences for his family back home.”15

The government’s “Die for the Emperor and the Yamato race" propaganda in Japan during the war was not terribly successful, even based on accounts from before the surrender. As early as 1942 Japanese police records show there was a growing contempt for the authorities, even for the Emperor himself. The following letter was addressed to police in Osaka in 1942:

It is only the privileged classes and military who live extravagantly, leaving the sacrifices to the common people alone. Abolish aristocratic government. If you truly wish to speak of one hundred million hearts beating as one, then practice communism thoroughly and treat everyone equally. Don’t mouth such utter nonsense as the “Yamato movement." The people’s hearts are turning more and more against the government.16

In 1943 at several local meetings in rural Kochi at which the government’s agrarian policy was being discussed, a forty-nine year old farmer declared:

I feel no gratitude for having been born in Japan. Being born in Japan is regrettable, I think, and I loathe the emperor. Soldiers are killers. Students who get orders are embryo killers. They say soldiers die on the battlefield saying Tenno Heika Banzai [Long live the emperor], but it isn't so. Invariably they die filled with loathing.17

A sixty-eight year old woman in a small rural community concluded in August, 1943

If the United States or the like faced this sort ofsituation, they’d immediately turn the gun on their emperor, and it would be good if Japan did 18 so too.

“By mid 1944, before the air raids began,”an official of the Home Ministry’s “Special Higher Police”—the notorious “Thought Police”—privately described the social situation as “like a stack of hay, ready to burst into flame at the touch of a match.”19

The Thought Police recorded graffiti found on the “walls of public and private places between December 1941 and early 1944.” The following is a small sample.20

December 1941:

Kill the emperor. Why does our fatherland dare to commit aggression? Ask the leaders why they're waging aggressive war against China. Look at the pitiful figures of the undernourished people. Overthrow the government. Shoot former Prime Minister Konoe, the traitor. January 1942: Absolute opposition to the imperialist war. Soon we won’t be able to eat. Those who feel good being called soldiers of industry are big fools.

March 1942:

End the war. In the end we’ll lose and the people will suffer. Her Majesty the Empress is a lecher. Sumitomo Metal is a cheating company that tarings the sweat and blood out of us workers for a pittance. Kill those guys who decide on salaries. June 1942: No rice. End the war. End the war. Give us freedom. Destroy the aristocracy—those consuming parasites.

August 1942:

Overthrow the government. Raise wages. November 1942: Stop the war. February 1943: Kill the dumb emperor Kill Tojo March 1943: Ridiculous to be a soldier—35 sen a day.

June 1943:

2,000 yen to whoever lops off the emperor’s head. 2,000 yen.. .for the empress.

July 1943:

Kill the rich. For what purpose have you all been fighting for seven years?

Not exactly one hundred million hearts beating as one.

In September 1943 a twelve-year-old boy addressed a postcard reading “stupid emperor” to the imperial residence. The next month a mother, whose two sons had been killed in the war, cursed the emperor as “heartless” and trampled his likeness underfoot before burning it. The same month a nineteen year old student wrote a letter to his mother saying,

“What’s all this about being the Emperor’s children! If that were so the Emperor would take care of his poor unfortunate children, but he doesn’t...It would be good if the Emperor and all just died off.”21

These kinds of out bursts of emotion revealed to the police that even people who had no formal connection to subversive organizations were, under the surface, seething with anger at the authorities. A secret Home Ministry survey “on the eve of Japan’s surrender reported:

As we survey recent occurrences of statements, letters, and wall writings that are disrespectful, antiwar, anti-military, or in other ways inflammatory, from April 1942 to March 1943... the total number of incidents was 308, an average of slightly less than 25 incidents a month. From April 1943 to March 1944...the total number was 406, an average of 34 incidents a month. Compared to this, from April 1944 to March 1945...the total was 607, an average of slightly less than 51 incidents a month, thus showing a rapid increase.22

After the surrender, a Kyoto journalist reported that “his paper received two hundred letters per day during the war,” and that “the great majority became critical as the war progressed and included ‘much denouncing of officials and the military for their alleged failure to share the people’s hardships.’ ”23 (The letters were not published.) The Japanese government was so frightened oflosing support for the war that they began arresting people for expressing even the slightest deviation from ultra-patriotism. A parent was arrested after being overheard saying, “I learned my child was killed in Singapore. However much one may speak of the country, can a parent help but weep?” One of the most common types of comment investigated by the police was that “it made little difference at all to the common person whether or notJapan was victorious.” One company employee was recorded as saying: “No matter what country’s control we come under, it’s all the same.” Likewise, a farmer was arrested for saying that “farmers would not be adversely affected by Japan’s impending defeat, only officials and politicians would be in trouble."24 Some people welcomed defeat with slogans such as “Win, America, Win.” One anonymous letter to military officials read, “Japan is the enemy.”25 One unsigned letter addressed to Prime Minister Tojo in March 1943 read:

I am the child of someone killed in the war in North China. It is the army and navy ministers, starting withTojo, who cruelly killed my precious father and elder brother on the battlefield. Fools! What do you mean by holy war and peace? Look at how miserable my family is. My father died in the desolate fields of North China. My brother is unemployed. My grandmother can barely swallow the wretched rice she is forced to eat. Our baby is skinny as a praying mantis and cries piteously.26

Police dossiers included many letters that explicitly denounced the Emperor. A typical one read:

The war is a cruel thing where many people and talented people are killed and injured, so we shouldn't wage war. Why are we waging war and who is doing it? The emperor is doing it. If there were no emperor the war wouldn’t be necessary.27

Fighting Fascism On The Job

Opposition in Japan to the authorities was not only of an individual nature. Between January 1943 and November 1944 there were 740 industrial labor disputes and another 612 potential disputes that were thwarted in an overt police state that made any open protest extremely dangerous.28 The most prevalent form of protest took the form of mass absenteeism from work, even before the bombing of urban areas commenced in late 1944. Between October 1943 and September 1944 absenteeism in Japan’s undamaged plants was 20 percent.29

The “Thought Police" came to believe as defeat drew closer that Japan faced a revolutionary upheaval. In February 1945 Prince Konoye Fumimaro, who had been Prime Minister from 1937 to 1941, “personally urged the Emperor to effect a surrender quickly in order to save Japan ‘from a communist revolution’” and explained exactly why he believed that “Japan seemed ripe for revolutionary transformation."30 Two months later the Thought Police reported on the rural population, warning that “the germination of an impending class struggle is a real matter for anxiety.”31

Contrary to people like Admiral William “Bull” Halsey of the Pacific Fleet, who was fond ofsaying that “The only good Jap is a Jap who’s been dead six months”32 there were many good Japanese people living in the cities that were firebombed by the U.S. government. Many of the victims of American bombs were as anti-Fascist as any American. In fact, many of the Japanese bombing victims were more anti-Fascist than the Allied commander in the Pacific, General MacArthur, because they wanted to do away with the Emperor whereas MacArthur kept the emperor on the throne. The Japanese government used the powers of a police state to control the population; but the fact that there was so much expressed opposition to the government in the face of harsh repression and unrelenting propaganda indicates that most of the ordinary Japanese people killed by the firebombing would be more accurately described as anti-Fascist than pro-Fascist. Furthermore, this was no secret to U.S. intelligence, especially in the Foreign Morale Analysis Branch of the U.S. Office of War Information, who knew very well that one hundred million hearts were not beating as one; in 1945 they specifically concluded that “the country was beset by serious internal tensions.”33

Could the American and British leaders have allied with the anti-Fascists inside of Japan instead of adopting a strategy of killing as many of them as possible? We will take this question up after next looking at what ordinary Germans were thinking during the war years.

JUST SAYING :)

By the way, regarding fascism, Marxists—along with most intellectuals in the past and today—have an extremely wrong and negative view of ordinary people, as fascists or proto-fascists. Here, for example, are the words of a trained Marxist (Thomas S.) sent to me recently:

“[S]ocial psychological studies conducted by the Frankfurt School, in 1929 under the direction of Erich Fromm, and in 1949 under the director of the Authoritarian Personality study, Theodor Adorno, both indicated that while an egalitarian sentiment might be widespread among the lower classes, what is equally apparent from these studies is a social psychology which is either fascist, or susceptible to fascism. This was corroborated by other studies conducted by the Frankfurt School under the aegis of the American Jewish Committee, such as Ackerman and Jahoda's Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder.”

Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to remove the rich from power.

1. Nazism could only have been defeated by a popular armed revolution, and there was no democratic model of revolution appealing to the majority of Germans and no revolutionary leadership committed to such a model. The Social Democratic Party had long since abandoned the goal ofrevolution and committed its considerable power to protecting the Weimar republic against Communist revolution. The German Communist Party offered only an anti-democratic idea of revolution which had already proved itself a disaster in the Soviet Union. The problem was not that the Nazis reflected the real values and goals of most Germans. The problem was that the Marxist leaders of the working class parties, the Social Democratic and Communist parties, failed to champion the revolutionary aspirations of the majority ofGermans. If the Marxists had provided leadership for ordinary people’s revolutionary goals, history might have been very different. The Social Democratic Party (SDP), however, which controlled the major trade unions, acted like a special interest group and only bargained for trade-union concessions, rather than mobilizing the working class for social transformation. In these years (that is, 1929-33) the German Communist Party did espouse workers' revolution (this changed in 1935), but the anti-democratic model of Soviet-style revolution could hardly have been expected to gain majority support. In the USSR at the time, having crushed the Workers' Opposition within the Communist Party, the Stalin leadership was consolidating its power, destroying any lingering illusions that the Bolshevik Revolution could lead to a promising new world.