Social Fascism and the Division of the Working Class Movement: Workers and Political Parties in the Frankfurt Area 1929/1930

How could the working class movement split when confronted by the obvious menace of Nazism? This paper argues that this split, represented by the 'social fascism ' line of the European communist parties in the late 1920s, cannot be adequately assessed by a political critique of the workers parties or by a sociological analysis of the composition of the working class. Instead it develops an historical analysis of the formal and informal institutions of the German working class movement which breaks down the artificial dichotomy between 'organisation ' and 'spontaneity '. This analysis reveals how the decline of informal class organisations in the mid-1920s created a situation in which the 'social fascism ' line could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Increasingly British socialists are claiming that it is possible to learn from the rise of Nazism over forty years ago how to fight the growing threat of the National Front in England today. Obviously there are simi-larities between the two situations: historically high unemployment,