Communists in the Face of Fascists

Abstract

This study necessarily focuses on interwar Germany as a key social formation for the entire history of the ‘short twentieth century’, because it was there that the Marxist prediction of a continuation of the European revolutionary tradition seemed to have its best chance of fulfilment. Russia returns here in a new guise — the Soviet Union, base for the Comintern, the supposed ‘general staff’ for communist parties in fostering world revolution. In the previous chapter we looked at the ideological and class realities of the Nazi formation of a German social terrain. Here we will consider the actual Communist attempts to build its own terrain — in terms of revolution up to late 1923, and formally thereafter.