Fifty per cent vote for workers’ parties¶
Core Argument¶
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the German working class delivered a decisive electoral verdict that confounded the pessimism of the era. The Berlin Municipal Council election of 1946 saw the Social Democrats secure 49 per cent of the vote, nearly one million ballots, dwarfing the Christian Democrats’ 454,000 and the Socialist Unity Party’s 406,000. This result is presented as irrefutable evidence of the German proletariat’s enduring vitality and its tenacious hold on socialist traditions, despite the catastrophic disillusionment of the preceding fifteen years.
The chapter’s core argument is that this vote represents a profound repudiation of Stalinism, not a retreat from socialism. The author contends that the German workers want genuine workers’ democracy, not the bureaucratic caricature imposed in the East. The striking fact that the combined vote for Marxist parties—nearly 50 per cent across Germany and 70 per cent in Berlin—exceeds the 40 per cent achieved before Hitler’s rise is marshalled as proof that the masses have not abandoned their class ideals. The Social Democrats’ gains at the expense of the Communist Party are explained not as an endorsement of reformism but as a revulsion against the totalitarian Stalinist regime, witnessed at close quarters by those who lived under it. In Berlin, where the Stalinists were pre-Hitler the strongest party, their overwhelming defeat despite vastly superior resources and propaganda apparatus is held up as a devastating indictment.
The chapter draws on the historical context of the Nazi period, noting the capitulation of both the Social Democratic and Communist parties to Hitler, their craven and sycophantic attitude toward the occupation authorities, and the abandonment of internationalism by labour and Stalinist parties abroad. The polemical target is twofold: against the Stalinist regime, whose “caricature of socialism” holds no attraction, and against the reformist leadership of Schumacher, whose victory proclamation of “peace, freedom, democracy and socialism” is treated as hollow rhetoric masking the absence of a genuine revolutionary alternative. The vote for the Christian Democrats is analysed as the capitalists’ successful organisation of a despairing middle class around a religious banner, a counterweight made possible only by the workers’ parties’ failure to adopt a bold revolutionary policy that could rally these layers.