The webinar opened with a powerful account of the academic persecution faced by David Abraham in the early 1980s after he published The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, a Marxist analysis showing how conflicts within German capitalism made democracy unsustainable and opened the door to Hitler. Conservative historians launched a vicious campaign to destroy his career. As Abraham explained, the attack stemmed from "ideological animus" during the Reagan-Thatcher era, when any serious analysis linking capitalism to fascism was politically intolerable.
Jacques Pauwels demolished the myth that Hitler's rise was accidental or that the Nazis improved workers' lives. "Hitler's so-called capture of power was merely a transfer or surrender of power," he stated. "Without the financial and other support of industry and finance, in other words, big business... Hitler could never have risen to supremacy." Pauwels documented how German workers' real wages fell dramatically under Nazi rule while corporate profits soared, and how work accidents and illnesses more than doubled between 1933 and 1939. The first concentration camp at Dachau, he noted, was built not primarily for Jews but because "regular prisons were full of political prisoners, mostly social democrats and communists."
Mario Keßler emphasized a point he has taught for 40 years: "Before Hitler and the German fascists could annihilate the Jews, they had to destroy the German and European labor movement." The Nazis never won a majority in any Weimar election and never made significant inroads into the working class. Their function was to mobilize middle-class resentment while preventing left-wing radicalization.
The discussion then turned to today. North drew explicit parallels between Weimar's collapse and the present crisis of American capitalism, pointing to gold's rise from $35 per ounce in 1971 to over $4,000 today as evidence of the deepening capitalist crisis. Abraham described the emerging alliance between fossil fuel oligarchs and Silicon Valley "anarcho-libertarians" like Peter Thiel, who has invoked Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt while identifying workers, leftists, minorities, and environmentalists as civilization's "blockage."
Christoph Vandreier, chairman of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei in Germany, addressed the rehabilitation of Nazism in German academia, where historian Jörg Baberowski has declared that "Hitler was not cruel" and received support from "almost the entire academia in Germany." This historical falsification coincides with Germany's trillion-euro rearmament program.
North concluded with a critical question: Is fascism inevitable? He argued that the same contradictions driving reaction also create revolutionary potential, just as World War I produced both catastrophe and the October Revolution. "We are not only talking about the past, but we're really discussing the present," he emphasized, predicting "an explosive turn by the working class and the most advanced sections of young people and workers toward Marxism."
This discussion provides essential historical and political education for anyone seeking to understand—and fight—the resurgence of fascism. We urge you to watch the full recording, share it widely with coworkers, friends, students, and fellow workers, and use it as a basis for serious discussion about the tasks ahead.
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