Frontpaged at My Left Wing
Yes, this is meta. If you don't want to read it, that's fine, I totally understand, happily we have so many other excellent topics under discussion that I hope you can find something more to your liking.
But not all "meta" is useless or is navel gazing. The Germans and the Catalans learned this the hard way in the 1930s when what we might call today "meta" hamstrung their efforts to resist fascism.
During yesterday's discussion about Blogmark, I instead kept returning in my own mind to those two other European nations, specifically the cities of Barcelona and Berlin. To crucial moments in the 1930s when unity was needed to fend off fascism - and instead of unity, there was division in the hour of chaos.
Barcelona
We begin on the Costa Brava in 1937. It is the second year of the Spanish Civil War, of Franco's attempt to overthrow the Second Republic and replace it with a fascist regime. His forces control huge swaths of Spain, but the main cities - like Madrid - and particularly the coastal regions, like the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Valencia, remain in Republican hands.
It was this scene that drew George Orwell to Barcelona in 1937, a tale recounted in one of his great books, an overlooked classic, Homage to Catalonia. Orwell went to Barcelona to help place his body and soul on the line for the cause of freedom, socialism, democracy. He would wind up fleeing Spain in the nick of time to save his life.
It wasn't fascist forces that were out to get Orwell, however - but others among the Republican cause. You see, Barcelona in 1937 was a divided city. Although Franco's armies were poised just over the mountains in Aragon, the people of Barcelona were fighting amongst themselves. The divisions were political. Anarchists fought socialists, Trotskyists fought Stalinists, and the Valencia-based Republic eventually fought them all. In May 1937, while Franco sat in nearby Aragon, forces of the Republic attacked a group of Anarchists associated with the CNT who had taken over the telephone exchange. Soon thereafter, Orwell's Marxist group, the vaguely Trotskyist POUM, was actively "suppressed" by the Catalan Communist party (PSUC) and in order to save his life, Orwell was forced to flee to France.
Ever since, many have seen the Barcelona fighting as a perfect example of the idiocy of divisions in the hour of crisis. And yet, it has to be admitted that the divisions were real, and had legitimate causes. Anarchists and Communists in their rival trade unions really did have totally different ideas about where the Republic should be going, and had plenty of reasons to distrust the other. It was a similar situation between the various Marxist parties - the Republic distrusted those forces not loyal to it, but seen as loyal to others - like Stalin. Each group had very different ideas about what the Spanish Republic should look like, and knew that the others wanted to prevent their vision from becoming reality.
In such a situation, unity was difficult to maintain - yet that very disunity helped hurt the Republican cause, and by March 1939, Franco's armies finally descended into Barcelona, which bore the brunt of his repression.
Berlin
The sad irony is that just a few years earlier, a similar situation had played itself out in the German capital of Berlin, where divisions in the face of the Nazi threat helped Hitler seize power.
In the Reichstag in the early 1930s, the two parties on the left - the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD) together held a majority. The problem was, the two parties deeply distrusted the other.
In 1928 the KPD had announced its unwillingness to cooperate with any of the "bourgeois" parties - namely, the SPD - in politics. Stalin had believed the final collapse of capitalism was near, and that the world's Communist parties should be actively helping that happen, not trying to keep capitalism alive by cooperating with others.
In Germany there were additional reasons why the KPD was hostile to the SPD. In 1919, as the Weimar Republic was being created, many Communists had sought to push things further. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had tried to create a German Soviet Republic in Berlin, and Kurt Eisner had helped create a Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich.
The SPD, as the leading party of the new republic, decided to suppress these Communists. To do so, they turned to the military, and also to the ultra-reactionary Freikorps. The Freikorps were demobilized soldiers organized into right-wing paramilitary groups. Imagine a bunch of Timothy McVeighs, except this time they had government sanction to crush the Communists. Freikorps units killed Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Eisner, all in the early months of 1919. This deeply embittered the KPD, which understandably distrusted the SPD from then on.
The feelings were quite mutual. The SPD viewed the KPD as agents of Soviet Russia, determined to wreck a stable and independent German republic. After 1928, when the KPD again insisted on a lone-wolf strategy, the SPD felt again confirmed in their belief that the KPD was an enemy. They positioned themselves as the responsible party of government, as seen by this 1932 election poster:
(Papen is the right-wing Chancellor, Hitler you know, and Thälmann is the leader of the KPD).
At a time then when unity in the face of the fascist threat was needed, the SPD and the KPD instead remained divided, distrusting each other. It wasn't merely because they misunderstood the fascist threat - and surely Barcelona knew well the threat - but because their very real divisions could not be overcome.
Eventually in 1935 Stalin changed course and ordered his parties to participate in a Popular Front, where all non-fascist parties united to oppose fascism. This had great success in France, for example, but also in the US, where the Popular Front was responsible for a great deal of political progress, especially in states like Washington.
Blogs
Now we come to the present day. We are currently facing a fascist threat, just as Berlin did in 1932, just as Barcelona did in 1937. And yet on the blogs, we have seen a lot of division instead of common action.
I think these divisions make sense. It's important to understand that. They have legitimate bases, just as the divisions in Barcelona and Berlin did. We cannot wish them away, we cannot simply say "just shut up and get along."
Instead we must work to create trust. We must understand our differences, but not let those differences become so entrenched that we are unwilling to listen to each other.
Truth be told, comparing the blogs to Barcelona and Berlin is a bit flawed - because we are all much more on common ground then the political parties of the 1930s were. Our divisions are, in fact, not necessarily ideological in nature - they are tactical. Yet, like Barcelona, the divisions boil down to differences about what our movements should look like even in the face of the fascist threat. Is it wrong to criticize Markos, or to defend those that do? Should MLW consider itself a safe space or a free for all?
These divisions are real. We are not wrong to have different opinions on them, and we are not wrong to talk them out.
But what we need to keep in mind is that we cannot let those divisions hamstring us in the face of crisis. We need to find ways to talk them out, and especially to construct trust in each other. When I read that Maryscott and Armando have done that, even though they seemed bitterly divided yesterday, I am happy - they both understand the value of trust and mutual support even while holding different positions.
We would do well to emulate the Popular Front, to adopt that approach. A Popular Front does not at all mean we ignore our differences, whether those differences are political or personal. Instead it means we find ways to resolve them or at least reconcile them so that we may continue along with our political work.
In some ways this is especially difficult on the blogs, because for whatever reason, our interactions - all of them - are intensely personal. This may be because written communication like this is inherently more personal, who knows, but I think that's worth keeping in mind as we work on building trust with each other.
We will differ on many issues, personal and political. That's OK. So long as we find ways to talk them out, to reconcile them and continue to be politically engaged, we will be OK.
Because if we are not careful, our divisions and differences might lead us to the same fate of Barcelona and Berlin. And that, my friends, is the last thing we need.
Trust. Listening. Reconciliation. Popular Front. Let those words be our guides.