Lil Joe Replies to Amiri Baraka On the Wiemar Republic


Hello Marvin,

I am presently doing research and analysis of the so-called International
Court as an agency of U.S./EU imperialism, along with G6 and the UN
Security Council in attacking Sudan. I will however present a few thoughts
pn the subject raised concerning the traditional historical comparison of
Germany in the 1900s and early 30s to the U.S. today.

For the moment, I will say this, that both the German Social-Democratic Party
and the Communist Party of Germany were created by the working class and
based on trade unions. Thus, I will show the Social-Democratic Party in
Germany in contrast to the U.S. Democratic Party, that has always been
a capitalist class party.

The Democratic Party was originated by slave owners, capitalists
has never been in the Democratic Party the equivalents of the Social -
Democratic Labor Party, the Independent Socialist Party, or the
Communist Party of Germany. Predicated upon their respective class
and national basis, there were never members and leaders in the
Democratic Party comparable to Social Democrat and Communist
party's leaders and authors such as August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht,
Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemberg,
Clara Zetkin, Paul Levy, Karl Korsch ...

According to German workers and socialists of the time, the problem
wasn't that the German Social-Democrats leadership refused to
form a united front with the Communist Party &0r its Trotskyist,
in a working class common front against the bourgeois class, and
its political representative Bruning government of the bourgeois State.
The problem was that the Social-Democrats instead campaigned
for Hindenburg as the lesser evil vis-a-vis the Nazis and Hitler:

"In those years (1930-32) the German Socialists, and the trade
unions that they controlled, were addicted to the disastrous policy
of the 'lesser evil'. Instead of mobilising the working class against
the growing threat of Fascist dictatorship, they tried to keep Hitler
out of office by supporting the reactionary Brüning administration,
and by conniving at the anti-democratic measures of that government.
In the presidential elections of March 1932 they helped to bring about
the re-election of Hindenburg, who less than a year later sold out to
Hitler." http://marxists. anu.edu.au/ history/etol/ revhist/backiss/
vol3/no1/kisexp. html

The Democratic Party has never been the working class party
-On the contrary, the Democratic Party was founded by the capitalist James
Madison and the slave owner Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was the principle
author of the Declaration of Independence, based on Locke's political
philosophy of right of rebellion, but Madison was the principle author of the
Constitution of the United States, which reversed the revolutionary sounding
rhetoric of the Declaration of independence and became the legal document
of dominance of American politics by bourgeois and slave holders class
property formations.

Of course you know the Constitution, based on Montesquieu's political
arguments for the myth of "separation of powers" that gave the masses a
semblance of political power by sending people to the House of Representatives
by affordable campaigns, which the Senate and Office of the Presidency could
only be won by the rich and their political representatives, and the Judiciary
comes from these same classes of wealth and power, with the Senate having
Constitutional authority to cancel House legislation. And the President has
Constitutional authority to veto. To guarantee that the American republic
never become a democracy - mob-rule - the Judiciary hierarchy is established
to "defend the rights of the minority" [read: the property rights of the top 1-20%
that today own 84% of the nations wealth, leaving 16% spread among the
bottom 80%]. To prevent the "tyranny of the majority", the founders of the
Democratic Party set up this political system of subordination of authority,
and by the writing of their Constitution, set up the judiciary generally and the
Supreme Court in particular to knock down any threat as "unconstitutional".

It was the Democratic Party of Thomas Jefferson which came up with the
"principle of states rights. The next major Democrat was the slave owner
and Indian killer Andrew Jackson. Prior to the American Civil War, Stephen
A. Douglas, of Illinois represented the slave power in the Senate, and opposed
After the Civil War the Democrats were the Dixiecrats, and at the same time
were reactionary racists in the North. In 1924, of the years Baraka mentioned
concerning the civil war in Germany in which political parties had armed
detachments fighting in the streets, the American Democratic Party convention
could not even pass a resolution denouncing the Ku Klux Klan!

The German Social-Democratic Party and German Communist Party were
both socialist parties with the same historical and theoretical basis in
the International Working-Men's Association and Marxist socialism, which
was the basis of their ideological and political splits in the 1920s-30s. It
was on this basis that the United Front between them in opposition to
the NAZI party was even possible. They were two working class parties
fighting the capitalist state. The differences between the Social-Democrats,
the Communists and the Trotskyists was how to correctly fight the
economic disintegration ( (depression, inflation) and the capitalist class
and their bureaucratic- military state machine.

That was the bureaucratic military state taken over by the Nazis. The "fall"
of the Germany's Wiemar Republic only meant that the already existing
bourgeois bureaucratic- military state was given to the Nazi Party to
govern/ manage on behalf of these capitalists, officially when Germany'
President, Paul von Hindenburg handed the authority to govern that
state by the Nazis, in 1933 by making Adolph Hitler the government
Chancellor. The same members of the bureaucratic- military state in
existence being governed by the Wiemar Republican government was
the one governed by the Nazis - the same state bureaucries and military
hierarchal chain of command.

The most powerful, economically dominate class is the most powerful,
politically dominate class. The bureaucratic- military machine is the
state. Whether the government formation is monarchy or so-called
dictatorship, aristocracy or oligarchy, timocracy or democracy, is
determined by the nature of State, depending upon the needs of the
economically dominate class. In other words the class content of
which a society is composed determine the political form of the state's
forms government.



In Germany the working class left cadres formed the Communist Party,
The Social-Democratic Party was base on the trade union bureaucracy,
though to the right of the Communist Party, it was a party with working
class legitimacy, and that was the basis for a united front with Communists .

The debates among workers at the taverns polemics in the various worker's
socialist and communist press was how the proletariat should respond to the
depression engendered mass unemployment and market inflation, that
was making life hell for the working classes and panic in the bourgeois
classes - the industrial bourgeoisie, the owners of natural resources and
mines that fed those industries with raw materials, and the masses of the
petty-bourgeoisie were all in a fit of fear of the working classes, even more
so than the losses in production and distribution resulting from depression and
inflation.

At the more superficial levels the issue was alternatives to the German political
crisis, it was superficial in that it leveled in the superstructure seperate and
apart from the natural, industrial and finance capital - the economic base.

The Democratic Party in the United States cannot be
compared to Socialist and Communist workers parties in
Germany. Rather, based both upon its origin and history,
and the capitalists who finance it against workers class parties,
the Democratic Party is more comparable to the German Nazi Party,
in that they are both Capitalist class parties. In 1924, the Democratic
Party national Convention was as racist and anti-Semitic as the
German Nazi Party, in that they couldn't even successfully
pass a resolution denouncing the Ku Klux Klan.
http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Klanbake

Yet, even if were were to play along with the Democratic Party is needed
to defend communist and socialist workers and minorities from the
Republican "fascists", still, Baraka could no more defend the American
workers from the Republican Party than Hindenburg "defended" the Wiemar
Republic. Rather, like Hindenburg Baraka will do what is in the interest
of the capitalist class to do - including turning the reins of government over
to a "fascist dictator".

This in brief this is my response, Marvin.
Take care.

Lil Joe