Appendix III. 1923: An Opportunity Missed?¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter appendix, “1923: An Opportunity Missed?”, constitutes a sustained polemical defence of the thesis that a revolutionary situation existed in Germany in October 1923, which was squandered due to the prevarication and cowardice of the Communist Party leadership, both in Germany and the Communist International. The core argument directly refutes the claim, advanced by Mick Jones in a letter to the Militant International Review, that the notion of a missed revolution in 1923 is a “myth” propagated by “would-be Trotskyist circles”.
The narrative thrust is to establish that all four of Lenin’s conditions for a revolutionary situation were present: a split in the ruling class, the pauperisation of the middle class, a militant mood among the proletariat, and the existence of a mass revolutionary party, the KPD, which by December 1920 had absorbed 500,000 members from the USPD. The chapter draws heavily on the economic catastrophe of hyperinflation to substantiate its case. It cites the price of a loaf of bread rising from 1.5 million marks in September to 201 billion marks in November 1923, and the official exchange rate of one pound sterling soaring from 47 million marks on 31 August to 80,000 million marks on 19 October. This data is used to demolish Jones’s contention that the formation of the Stresemann government in mid-August began “a process of stabilisation”. The chapter counters that the currency was only stabilised, via the Dawes Plan and foreign loans, at the end of 1924, well after the revolutionary opportunity had passed.
The polemic is directed squarely at Mick Jones, but through him at the historical apologists for the Brandler-Walcher leadership of the KPD. The chapter accuses Jones of relying on the “thin” testimony of Jakob Walcher, a leader who had a “vested interest in attempting to cover up their mistakes”. It deploys Trotsky’s 1935 characterisation of Walcher as a “centrist” who “collected all the arguments for turning a revolutionary situation into a non-revolutionary situation”. The real culprit, the chapter insists, was not the objective situation but the subjective factor: the “prevarication of the Zinoviev/Stalin leadership of the Communist International”. It quotes Stalin’s letter urging restraint, in which he argued the German Communists would “fall with a crash” if they seized power, lacking the reserves of peace and land that the Bolsheviks had in 1917. The chapter concludes that this defeat, born of dithering and a lack of revolutionary nerve, laid the political basis for the relative stabilisation of German capitalism between 1924-28 and, ultimately, the triumph of fascism in 1933.