‘Democracy’ in Germany¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, published in Socialist Appeal in 1944, delivers a polemical assault on the hypocrisy of Allied ‘democracy’ in post-war Germany, arguing that Anglo-American imperialism is deliberately reducing the German working class to semi-colonial servitude. The core narrative thrust is that the defeat of Nazism has not liberated German workers but has instead replaced fascist oppression with capitalist exploitation under the banner of ‘democratisation’.
The chapter opens with a devastating concrete example: dockers in Hamburg, under Allied administration, are being paid four pence an hour—a rate the text claims is lower than under Hitler. This is presented not as an anomaly but as a deliberate strategy. The authors argue that British and American capital intends to use cheap German labour as a weapon against the British working class, recalling that after the First World War, British ship orders were placed with Hamburg yards specifically to intimidate British trade unions into accepting lower wages and longer hours. The historical parallel is drawn to show a consistent ruling-class tactic: pitting workers of different nations against one another.
A second piece of evidence is drawn from the Canadian forces’ daily Maple Leaf (26 May 1944), reporting that US troops fired over the heads of 6,000 German workers at an unauthorised meeting in Cologne. The meeting was to welcome survivors returning from Buchenwald; the crowd was dispersed when signs appeared criticising the Americans’ leniency toward Nazis. The chapter uses this to argue that the Allied authorities are more comfortable fraternising with Nazis and German capitalists than with the German working class. The mildness toward fascists and the brutality toward workers are presented as two sides of the same imperialist coin.
The text situates itself within the broader betrayal of working-class internationalism during the war. It condemns the capitalist press, labour leaders, trade-union officials, and Stalinists for abandoning the German workers, instead blaming them for Nazi crimes. The Trotskyist position, by contrast, is upheld as the only principled one: the German ruling class, backed by Allied imperialism, supported the Nazis; the German workers were their victims. The chapter explicitly argues against Vansittartism—the doctrine, named after British diplomat Sir Robert Vansittart, that held the entire German people collectively guilty for Nazism—which had infected the labour movement.
The conclusion is a call to action: British workers must fight chauvinism, demand the German working class’s democratic right to organise its own regime, and unite across national lines for the overthrow of capitalism. The chapter ends with the slogan of the Fourth International: ‘For a socialist Germany in a Socialist United States of Europe and the world.’