Socialism and Education

The opposition in Germany to the rise of National Socialism came from almost every section of society, including communists, socialists, conservatives and liberals, and took a number of different forms, ranging from passive resistance to open hostility to the regime. It is clear, however, that this opposition did not have the desired effect as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (the Nazi Party) and its dictator Adolf Hitler came to power and created a totalitarian state with little difficulty and disastrous consequences. The failure of the resistance to Nazism can be attributed to a number of factors, such as isolation, inability to withstand Nazi repression and the unwillingness of different sections of the resistance to work together. It was most certainly the weakness of the opposition to National Socialism that ensured its success.

Leon Trotsky relates that in its ninth plenum in February 1928, the Executive Committee of the Third Communist International ‘gave the signal for an intensified, extraordinary, irreconcilable struggle against ’social fascism.’ The German Communist Party certainly did have the potential to organise such an opposition to National Socialism, however the struggle that eventuated certainly did not fit that description. After the German Communist Party was banned and their deputies expelled from the Reichstag in March of 1933, Communist opposition most often took the form of illegal publications published either within or outside of Germany and distributed widely. Members of the Communist resistance organised themselves into underground networks. Michael Thomsett recounts that ‘cells of the underground contained only three people, trained to work together with absolute efficiency, with limited contact outside of the group itself.’ This was known as the troika system. J. P. Stern speaks of Communist resistance in the form of ‘industrial sabotage… [and] contact with foreign workers or prisoners of war,’ and he puts their numbers in ‘the ten thousands.’

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From 1870, European governments were becoming increasingly anxious at what they perceived as the growing threat of socialism and working class movements. Reasons for this fear derived from the myth and example of the 1871 Paris Commune, the growth in International Working Men’s Associations, universal suffrage and the growth of an industrial workforce. The urban working class had begin organising themselves in an attempt to achieve better conditions.

There were two methods by which they organised themselves. Firstly, parliamentary seats were sought and won and reforms were achieved in the political arena. Secondly, improvements were sought by strikes or revolution. Many people become confused by the concepts of communism and socialism. Both political philosophies aim to create a classless society where the means of production, distribution and exchange are owned by the community. They differ in that socialists maintain that they can achieve such an objective through democracy while communists insist that this is impossible. In Marxist terminology the terms have a further difference where socialism is regarded as a transitional phase between capitalism and communism when society is governed by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

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