Order In Berlin

Appeal to no reason: Nazis canvass a farming family

"We don't want lower bread prices. We don't want higher bread prices. We don't want   unchanged bread prices...
We want National Socialist bread prices!" 

This summer marks the centenary of the infamous Treaty of Versailles, which notionally put a formal end to the carnage of the First World War, but which a plethora of commentators, politicians and historians have long held to be in truth the trigger for the Second World War. Indeed, a few have even postulated a single world war from 1914 to 1945, punctuated by a false peace traced in Germany from 1933 by the Nazi era, but prior to this epitomised by the tumult of the Weimar Republic.

Weimar is often nostalgically remembered as the progressive interlude between the authoritarian Second Reich of the Kaiser and the genocidal Third Reich of the Fuhrer. It has been lionised as the time of Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang and Cabaret, when under the aegis of the "most liberal constitution in the world" Berlin was Cosmopolis and German culture led Europe in breaking old boundaries and forging ever freer means of expression.

That it was to lurch politically from crisis to crisis until collapsing almost eagerly into the clutches of the devious Hitler is a conundrum that has occupied historians from William Shirer's epic "Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany " through Alan Bullock, Peter Drucker and hundreds of others. And now to Benjamin Carter-Hett's 2018 offering, "The Death of Democracy", published by Windmill Books. Echoing the long held narrative, the jacket blurb dramatically poses the question of the day: "What caused the fall of the most progressive government in 20th century Europe and the rise of the most terrifying?"

Carter-Hett's book uses a combination of the episodic and thematic with a relatively loose nod to chronological narrative. Each chapter opens with a cameo to illustrate the rest of the chapter - the mysterious Reichstag fire leads to the suppression of the Communist Party; a detailed description of propaganda posters, from the Red Flags of the Communists through the muscular men of the Social Democrats and the demure, smiling women of the liberal State Party to the charcoal-grey, grim-faced unemployed workers express "Our Last Hope: Hitler". The latter opens a piece on Goebbels mastery of mass communications, his pioneering methods picked up and used by the mass media and marketing communities ever since. In a later chapter, the wife of a Communist MP searches for her arrested husband in the early weeks of Nazi rule, soon to share his fate as the main narrative picks up on the final destruction of all opposition to the Nazis.

Carter-Hett firmly places the story in the context of Germany after the First World War. While giving a nod to contemporary events, he avoids the over-tired and often facile comparisons between then and now, though still warning of the need to learn from history. No one in 1933 expected Hitler to stay in power long; no one could have anticipated the sheer scale of the horrors he would inflict on tens of millions; yet the confluence of mass protest, disillusion with democratic institutions and the blind arrogance of a self-entitled elite, and "suddenly the whole thing looks close and familiar."

Underpinning this analysis, however, is the traditional narrative: of plucky social democrats and liberals bravely taking power as the Kaiser's Empire succumbed to military defeat, desperately fending off assaults from both the extreme left and right and badly let down by the Western Allies. The latter's vengeful continuation of the wartime blockade for eight months after the Armistice, condemned hundreds of thousands of Germans to death from malnutrition and disease and coupled with the imposition of punitive reparations and substantial territorial losses at Versailles, the fate of the young liberal democracy was sealed almost from its inception.

Party representatives outside a polling station at 1932 election

Carter-Hett tracks through the ups and downs of the republic, from the wheelbarrow inflation of 1923 through the revival of the Stresseman years, from the brief attempts to advocate an early form of European economic union to the 1929 Wall Street crisis, and finally the deflation which flooded Germany with cheap food, ruining the large farming community and fostering the mass unemployment of 1931 -32. The anti-Semitism that led later to the Holocaust is also set in the context of longstanding hostility towards Jews and other racial minorities among substantial elements of German society, exacerbated but not originated by the Nazis.

Yet at the core of the book is the view that the Weimar Republic was indeed a democracy, ruined by the ill-intentions of army leaders like Ludendorff through the myth of the "stab in the back" of November 1918 and the political immaturity of its people. He notably recounts the views of Berlin Social Democrats who, viewing the rise of the Nazis, decried the proletariat as not being ready for democracy. Germans longed for a Father-Emperor, it seemed.

Yet there is another narrative; one largely excised from mainstream history and given only a passing reference in Carter-Hett's tome. Its most recent publication can be found in another 2018 book, "A People's History of the German Revolution" by the late William A. Pelz under the Pluto Press imprint.

This takes a very different starting point: the Social Democrats who assumed power in 1918-19 were not the democratic revolutionaries that both history and their right-wing contemporaries portrayed them as being. In fact, quite the opposite - in truth, they prevented rather than led revolution and willingly agreed a Faustian pact with the military specifically to head off the momentum of their more radical rivals - the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Spartacist League (transformed on New Years' Eve 1918 into the Communist Party of Germany, the KPD).

The Imperial bureaucracy, judiciary and military were left in place and ownership of industry and land was to be reviewed rather than nationalised or redistributed. SPD leader and first Republican President Friedrich Ebert vocally abhorred the idea of revolution, while more sanguine colleagues argued that the time had not yet come for such massive change. In exchange for a parliamentary republican constitution being supported by the High Command, the Social Democrats undertook to bring the revolutionary components of the revolution to heel.

German social democracy had its roots in revolution - in particular the unsuccessful revolts of 1848, which Karl Marx himself participated in,  and during which the bourgeoisie failed to make significant inroads against the feudal hangovers that existed in the then-disparate German states. Although social democrats organised and grew, it was only much later in the century, after the wars of unification and industrialisation under the Second Reich founded in 1871, that it flourished. Political reform under the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, granted a very limited parliamentary system under which the Social Democratic party (SPD) soon grew to be the largest socialist party in the world.

Indeed, as both Pelz and Carter-Hett explore, its membership expanded into so many forms of activity - political, cultural, educational, artistic, community self-help - that it developed into a virtual state-within-a-state. As other parties representing different groups developed similar infrastructure under the Weimar system, German politics became increasingly confessional in their nature, almost tribal, with limited interaction and switching between their fixed points - to leave the party was to leave behind personal affiliations and even a way of life.

Yet Pelz postulates that, while the growth of the SPD greatly enhanced working class organisation and political awareness, it developed its own bureaucracy and hierarchies, and even a leadership class whose rise to prominence was parallelled in a fall in its radical temperament. Its parliamentary success was its revolutionary downfall, culminating in the decision by the party's MPs to defy the previously agreed line of the Second International that socialist parties would oppose war and work instead for international revolution to end conflicts. Instead, like socialists in most other countries (the Russian Bolsheviks being one of the few exceptions), the SPD voted in favour of the war credits requested by the Imperial Government to fight the war.

This dichotomy between continuing revolutionary rhetoric and revisionist reality was to lead to schism in the party in 1916 with a minority led by Hugo Hasse, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg leaving to establish an independent party (the USPD). This was to fracture further with Liebknecht and Luxemburg moving into the Spartacist League, which transformed itself into the Communist Party (KPD) at New Year. Meanwhile, the USPD initially collaborated closely with their original comrades in the crucial weeks of October and early November 1918 and joined the provisional government under SPD leader Ebert following the Kaiser's abdication.

Pelz charts how the war came to an end not through the machinations of either politicians or generals, but through a war weary soldiery making common cause with a revolutionary civilian populace. Starting at the naval base at Kiel, where sailors refused a final supposedly glorious "death run" by the Imperial Fleet (one Admiral lamented that had the fleet been destroyed, at least its' officers and men would be "lying in immortal flame at the bottom of the sea" rather than being preserved in cowardice and disgrace), military mutineers were quickly aided by masses of revolutionary civilians. In many cases the insurrection was started or even led by women, who had been prominent in illegal anti-war protests from 1914 onwards. The revolutionary crowds quickly established a string of Soldiers and Workers Councils (or to use the Russian word, Soviets) to threaten the exhausted Imperial regime.

The Social Democrats, by this stage in negotiations with the Imperial Chancellor Prince Max of Baden, actually sent one of their leaders, Gustav Noske, to try to head off the radical movement, but his success was fleeting as the Council movement spread across Germany and to the capital, Berlin, itself. Ebert and the SPD leadership responded by making its deal with the military - and while the Kaiser abdicated and retired into Dutch exile, the events that followed were in effect the Establishment absorbing the revolutionary wave until its impact was blunted and softened into meaninglessness.

When the USPD, alarmed by the violent suppression of protesters in early December, left the provisional coalition government, their personnel were removed by the SPD from key posts, leading to further popular discontent. When the USPD Berlin police chief was dismissed by Noske, who now held the position of Minister of the Interior, huge crowds took to the streets in early January and an initially hesitant Luxemburg joined them. For several days, a full socialist revolution appeared in the making and the SPD leaders fled the city.

Freikorps paramilitaries -"the advance guard of Nazism"

However, the revolutionary leaders debated ceaselessly over whether or not to seize power until the initiative was lost. Noske, who declared himself the SPD's bloodhound, enlisted the Freikorps - hard right-wing armed paramilitary units composed of former soldiers - to suppress the civilian demonstrators by all means necessary.

Over several days, hundreds of Berliners were slaughtered, among them Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Pelz charts the utterly vicious and vengeful nature of the repression and in particular the misogynistic repercussions that were rained down on female socialists, a number of whom were tortured, sexually assaulted and humiliated by both paramilitaries and regular police. The Far Right's hostility to female activism and its emphasis of "traditional" roles for women runs deep, and Hitler was to amplify it many times in the years ahead, but it was centrist social democrats who drew first blood.

The SPD leaders returned and proceeded with a constitutional convention that obligingly adopted a thoroughly liberal constitution and kicked the issue of industrial ownership far out of sight. While revolutionary uprisings persisted in a few places, these were all bloodily suppressed, the last one in Munich in March 1919, where an idealistic commune of artists and philosophers briefly held a form of power before the more organised KPD established a three week defence of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Among the elected members of their Workers and Soldiers' Council sat one Adolf Hitler, who clung briefly to socialism's promise of a better world when questioned after his arrest - before being employed by the police to spy initially on his former comrades and then, with devastating consequences, to infiltrate the predecessor organisation of the Nazi Party.

Pelz and Carter-Hett exemplify the sharply different narratives that define interwar Germany.

The latter, liberal view regrets the bloodshed by the Freikorps, but essentially lionises the Weimar Republic as a noble but tragic experiment in democracy, one which was flawed from a combination of ill-will among leading politicians and generals on the right; hobbled by (largely unpaid and ultimately cancelled ) war reparations to the Allies; and undermined by provisions in the constitution which granted emergency powers that bypassed the Reichstag. Secondary considerations he explores are the division between cosmopolitan Berlin and the rural hinterland where the large farming community was hostile to the immorality of the capital, alarmed by the arrival of large numbers of refugees from Soviet Russia and devastated by the deflation of 1929.

Socialists murdered by social democrats - Liebknecht and Luxemburg

Pelz by contrast sees Weimar not as a product of revolution, but as a block or perhaps more correctly a devious sop to mass revolutionary fervour. The self-interest of the SPD leadership won out over the demands of the radical crowds and turned on its former comrades with a ferocity markedly more severe than anything meted out against subsequent right-wing putsches.

While Hitler's Beer Cellar uprising led to his jailing in a comfortable prison suite for just long enough for him to complete his Mein Kampf testimony, Luxemburg was done to death by sadists who dumped her corpse into a canal where it rotted for some months before its recovery.

The SPD justified the suppression of democratic protest on the grounds that it was done to defend democracy - it was all for the greater good of a new Germany. Like centrists and revisionists throughout history, their emphasis was on defeating radicalism, not assaulting conservatism. It warped the incredible revolutionary optimism of the war-weary masses in 1919 that out of the dreadful slaughter a new, better and peaceful world could be born. It squeezed out any hope of significant social change through years of economic crises and austerity which, like more recent troubles, somehow always favoured the big landlords and capitalists. And ultimately it gave rise through the collapse of any faith in liberal democracy to the abandonment of realism and the wild fantasy of "National Socialist bread prices!"

Nazis come to power with Centrist support, 1933 Enabling Act

In the end, as observed by Professor Mario Kessler in his introduction to Pelz's tome, "The unfinished Revolution of 1918-19 resulted only in a precarious democracy, which was usurped by full-fledged counter-revolution in 1933 when the Nazis took power."

The ultimate irony, recounted in some detail by Carter-Hett, was that in 1933, the Enabling Act that legally empowered Hitler's dictatorship only passed the required threshold with the crucial votes of Zentrum - the Centre Party.

And perhaps it is this betrayal, even more than the obscenity that was Nazism, that should be the lesson of then for now. For through such historical prisms, the Great Lie of the Centre is exposed - by the very nature of its fettering of socialist change, centrism shifts rightward and becomes of the Right; it is not that the centre cannot hold - it is that it does not actually exist, and never did. As Pelz himself reflects, "...had the German Revolution been radical and purged the old state apparatus, there would most likely have been no Nazi seizure of power, no Third Reich, no World War II, no Holocaust. Unhappily, that opportunity to sweep away the pests of the past was squandered... Moderation won out, albeit after a mountain of corpses and rivers of blood, and it proved ultimately wanting."

On 14 January 1919, as the bloody social democrat-instigated repression of socialists and Spartacists was picking up momentum, and just hours before her murder, Rosa Luxemburg penned her final polemic, mocking the SPD for announcing that "order" was being restored through the killing of Germany's own citizens. Yet even in that darkest moment, she looked to a better future, one which she would never see, but which she summonsed up with her last known words, words which echo still today.

"Order prevails in Berlin!"
You foolish lackeys! Your "order" is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will "rise up again, clashing its weapons" and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing:

                                                              I was, I am, I shall be!

Spartacist League flag, 1917

Weimar Britain

Deployed to Glasgow - British Army tanks at the Gallowgate cattle market, 1919

"Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?"
The Watchman said, "The morning cometh, and also the night."

These words, from Isiah Chapter 21 were quoted by the German sociologist, Max Weber, in a bookstore lecture on the chaos surrounding him in the interwar German Republic. This is known to history as the Weimar Republic after the town where its "most democratic constitution in history" was drawn up by the constitutionalist parties in 1919, after the fall of the Kaiser's autocratic regime in the final days of the First World War.

We do well to recall that not even a century separates us from these turbulent times, nor were the uncertainties about the democratic settlement confined to Germany or even the nascent states arising from the collapsed Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires. Britain after the Great War saw a string of strikes, violent repression by the army (tanks and ten thousand armed troops were deployed in Glasgow in the conveniently forgotten battle of George Square to suppress protests about working conditions), and concerns about a Soviet-style takeover among the Establishment that led, among other things, to a fearful King George V refusing refuge to his cousin, the deposed Czar Nicholas of Russia. The forged Zinoviev letter  linking the rising Labour Party to Soviet Russia saw off the first minority socialist government in 1924 (its dissemination carried out courtesy of the Daily Mail then as now happily peddling a few myths to buttress the status quo). Democracy was skin-deep and the forces of reaction ranged against progressives remained as ruthless as ever.

Germany embarked on a course that was to see its constitutional democracy lurch from crisis to crisis, with only a brief respite in the mid-1920s, before it collapsed into the eager arms of the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. 1919 had seen an initial rush of support for the new political system, when a range of Social Democrats, Liberals and conservative Christian Democrats combined to draft a political constitution with the intention of using it to argue out their different ideological views of society and the economics that underpinned it. However, the economic instability of the times, as well as the continuing nationalist narrative of betrayal by democrats and humiliation by foreign powers at the Treaty of Versailles, meant that Weimar Germany was on the defensive from nearly the very start. The liberal democratic parties were challenged by growing electoral forces on both the left - with the USPD (independent social democrats) and later the KPD (Communists) rising rapidly  - and on the right, where a variety of nationalists, conservatives and extremists eventually coalesced under the Nazi swastika.

The constitutionalists were typically unimaginative and unresponsive to the public need, and complacent to boot. Rather than provide genuinely different paths to voters to choose within a democratic context, they drew together, blurring their differences and putting defence of the constitution ahead of anything else - there was to be no land reform, no tackling of the excesses of the rich, no change to the autocratic running of factories and no genuine change to the lot of the ordinary person. With hyperinflation creating real hunger, scapegoats such as the Jews were created by nationalists and the myth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a forgery created several decades earlier by the Czarist police in Russia to justify anti-Jewish pogroms) became a deep-rooted belief among Germans of all classes as an explanation for their troubles. Arrogantly believing there to be no viable alternative, the "Weimar parties" increasingly acted as a single block trying to exclude the more ideologically focussed parties of the left and right. It was to be a vain strategy.

At the ballot box, the process of democratic disintegration was evident - the main constitutionalist parties polled over 70% of the vote in the elections of 1919; but by 1929 this had fallen to barely 51% and in the final election of 1933, just 33%. The Nazis had eclipsed the conservatives, polling 52% of the vote (along with an allied party), while the Communists still polled nearly double the vote they had taken in 1919 in spite of a violent campaign of repression by the authorities - Communist deputies were barred from taking their seats in the final Reichstag, where with the brave exception of the remaining Social Democrats, Hitler bullied and bribed enough deputies to vote through the Enabling Act that gave him total power. As the historian William Shirer was to comment, the Nazis came to power by means of one of the most democratic constitutions ever written.

Funeral oration for a democracy: Hitler speaks on the Enabling Act 1933

As we face a New Year, what are the lessons of history for us today?  Can we write off these days as events distant in time and place, or are the parallels with today, in Britain and elsewhere, sufficiently striking to provide more than a passing interest?

The British political class is as isolated and irrelevant to most of the public as were these Weimar liberals, and many other liberals of their day. For example, take the inaction of the liberals in the 1917 Provisional Government in Russia, whose near-religious belief in the apparently magical powers of a constantly delayed constitutional settlement meant no action at all on bringing the hated war to an end or reforming the ownership of land which condemned millions to starvation. In this way, quite justifiably, the Bolshevik promise of land, bread and freedom easily undermined the support the liberals had previously enjoyed after the overthrow of the Czar.

What are we witnessing now but a re-run of history? Since before the banking crisis of 2008 and the ongoing recessions, politics have been in open crisis, but a crisis of complacency rather than one of action. The boom of the the late 1990s and early 2000s, was sustained on the personal debt of tens of millions of ordinary people while market-oriented government of all supposedly different political hues adopted strikingly similar political strategies. The State has been reduced in scope; market economics and PFI deals proliferate in public services; bloated capitalists control ever bigger swathes of the economy - much of their "venture capitalism" and "social entrepreneurship"  funded and underwritten by a desperately misled public.

And, now that it has all gone sour, what true difference is there between the main parties, the managerialist politicians of Weimar Britain? Barely a jot. They squabble over the tiniest shifts in spending priorities as if these would make a huge, transformational difference to society and life, their fury and froth masking the truth - that these people are all part of the same establishment, the same tiny elite of political servants of big business and international corporations. In such a context "liberal democracy" as it is expressed and portrayed in Britain is not democracy at all - but quite the opposite. It is the semblance of democracy; a form devoid of content, existing to create the illusion of choice while in effect denying genuine choice. Governments come and go, but the Establishment remains, and ordinary people remain as powerless as ever.

And yet, under this liberal form of regime, there is ultimately, as with all regimes, a need for some sort of social contract, however transactionally Hobbesian it may be. As with even the most brutal dictatorship, some sort of equilibrium is required to sustain a regime in power, and there are plenty of signs that this equilibrium is breaking down faster and in a more sustained way than in any previous crisis in the west, such as the riots of 1968 or the industrial disputes of the 1970s. The Occupy Movement has transformed political action around the capitalist world, the first major insurrection of the internet age: what started as one day marches and "flash mob" demonstrations has morphed into a truly international, sustained movement against not just the political establishment and the odd tax dodging financier; but rather against the entire capitalist system and the lies on which it is based. And so too against the politicians who cravenly defend it and grease the palms of its elite owners.

But how the future will go remains the same conundrum raised by Weber in his bookstore lecture back in Weimar Germany - the morning cometh, and also the night. Occupy, Ukuncut, the trade unions, the green movement and others on the left argue, as yet not entirely coherently, for a new, fairer society with transformed financial relations, and with social ownership, co-operative and smaller scale economics as a response to the crisis of capitalism. There is a gradual coalescing behind broad concepts of collectivism, egalitarianism and more direct democratic forms of politics. But, perhaps reflecting the truly democratic and participatory nature of the movement, there is as yet no all-encompassing idea, and perhaps there never will be. Yet some unified and coherent platform is urgently required because, elsewhere, other more malicious forces are gathering, and Capital, with all its vested interests and incumbent power, will not go down without a fight, the likes of which we have not seen.

For the narrative that is put out repeatedly in the media, in Government legislation and the official zeitgeist, is that the problems of society are caused by scapegoats - by too much welfare, by slack workers, by red tape on health and safety and hiring and firing or by migrants either taking too many jobs or not taking enough jobs. The true causes of grief are not the tiny, tiny number of people who own the vast majority of wealth on the planet, but the disabled person who needs support accessing a shop, or the illegal migrant who, according to complete myth, is given luxury accommodation, free cars and phones (as opposed to the grim reality of working long hours for little pay in often dangerous conditions at the hands of violent gangmasters). Muslim plots to take over the world are raised up, viciously echoing the Zionist Protocols of Czar Nicholas, to sow further divisions, some of them so fantastical that they invite equally fantastical responses from conspiracy theorists (- themselves an echo of some of the thousands of messianic wandering prophets of interwar Europe).

In this direction lies the path being bulldozed by the likes of Golden Dawn in Greece, the MSI in Italy, FN in France and various currently disparate right wing parties in Britain, targeting groups of vulnerable people and minorities to divert attention from the true inequities of the wealth gap and the economic and political grip of the elite. It is a road that starts with shocking tales of individuals who fiddle social security or fake disability, or groups who look a bit different and have strange traditions, and ends up at the doors of gas chambers and on the edges of execution pits. It is an unconscionably brutal path which we pretend is distant at our peril. There is in every society a desire to find easy solutions; to conform to the norms that are drilled into us about ownership and supposed opportunity from the school desk to the retirement party; and all too often, even in the most democratic society, a willingness to find some sort of salvation in the form of a "strong" person or party. In the context of a society without genuine political choice but one with increasing economic hardship and personal insecurity, this desire grows even deeper.

And so we can see our current political class - still smugly asserting itself, wringing its hands about the deficit, blatantly lying about everyone being in it together, rewriting their manifestos and changing their offer as frequently and easily as a used car salesman reviews his prices. Personally and professionally isolated from the people they supposedly represent more than ever before - with huge numbers having never worked outside politics and many having no ideological belief whatsoever - the careerists at the heart of our system do know something is not quite right, something is wrong. But they don't get what; indeed, they can't. Isolated in their self-created bubble, they are not programmed that way. Rather, they turn to suppression of civil liberties, increasing surveillance and the all-embracing "war on terror" as a means of demonising all their opponents and entrenching their hold on power - yet, in doing so, rather than create a solid base for their own survival, they may in fact be simply paving the way for even more authoritarian elements to rise.

The turnout in elections is dripping away, lower and lower. From 84% in 1950, it decline to just 59% in 2001, rising slightly to 64% at the 2010 election, even although people were choosing a government in the midst of an economic crisis. There is a proliferation of support for the non-mainstream: UKIP, a right wing force described by some as "fascists in suits", has emerged recently as the third party in national polls and performed well in recent by-elections. It is not a Nazi party, but it is riding on a tide of xenophobia and scapegoating (while quietly proposing tax cuts and other benefits for the very richest members of society). And it is accompanied by a multitude of other parties - the BNP, the EDs, BFP, NF and other groups.

At the Rotherham by-election a few weeks ago, although UKIP stole the limelight with their showing of 21.7% of the vote, other far right candidates took a further 12% of the vote. This meant one in three voters chose hard right parties, while the left parties Respect and TUSC took nearly 10% of the vote combined. With the Tories in fifth place and the Lib Dems in eighth place, the Government parties were out polled by the non-mainstream parties of left and right by 43% to 7.5%. Even the Labour Party managed only a 46% vote share in what was once its heartlands.

Rotherham is not an isolated case - two other by-elections showed similar patterns on the same night, while Respect pulled off a stunning and largely unexpected victory in Bradford West earlier in the year. National opinion polls show the "Others" constantly polling around one in five votes and the support for the three so-called main parties is increasingly soft; identification and party loyalty is at a historic low; and no wonder, given the utter contempt of the electorate demonstrated by the main parties. It will take little to force a major change to the party political paradigm - one fear must be that a UKIP win at the 2014 European elections may mark the moment. Our complacent political class may want to reflect that the Nazis polled a meagre 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 national elections - just five years later, the length of a British Parliament, they assumed total power.

And so the question that remains is not are we in Weimar Britain, sitting precariously on the edge of momentous, potentially transformational change. The answer to that is given: we are undoubtedly in the last days of traditional politics; only the bashed, discredited system keeps what remains together. The real question is what will come next, and from what direction and in what form. In this country, as in the world, we stand at a crossroads as not since the turmoil of 1919 that rent Europe apart. One way marks the route to a fairer society where resources are shared more equally, but with the requirement that we break down big corporations, regulate our economies as never before, reintroduce some of the protective measures that were once common and change our views completely on ownership of socio-economic resources, common and collective rather than exclusive and individualist.

The other route marks a far more brutal and authoritarian course - isolated from the world, distrusting of many of our fellow citizens, targeting people in new forms of pogroms, blaming rather than sharing, controlling rather than caring for one another.

We can choose: and events will force the choice probably sooner rather than later - day or night, left or right; or, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, socialism or barbarism. Capitalism and liberal democracy are in terminal decay, their failure hastened by the gathering environmental and resource crises. The German Republic passed into history when Hitler himself screamed down the incredibly brave Social Democrat leader, Otto Wels, as he voiced the very last words of legal opposition to the Nazis, his speech in effect the funeral oration of the young democracy. If Weimar Britain is to similarly pass, it falls to those of us on the Left to ensure it passes to a better place than the gates of a new Auschwitz.

"At this historic hour, we German Social Democrats pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and Socialism. No Enabling Law can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible ...."

- Otto Wels, addressed to Adolf Hitler at the debate on the Enabling Act,  at the Reichstag meeting in the  Kroll Opera  House, Berlin, 23 March, 1933.

Otto Wels - Hitler's final opponent in the Reichstag, 1933