Did Marxist determinism lead to political quietism in Nazi Germany?

 

There's not much democracy in the British workplace, but it's capitalism that unintentionally, created the modern-day worker, trade unions and socialism. Both trade unionism and socialism were a reaction against the brutal exploitative conditions of British capitalism in the early 19th century. The socialist movement grew up in the slums of Europe. 

If you press people together in factories, they will get their heads together. The workers realised that only by combining could they improve their pay and conditions of employment. We never really had revolutionary trade unionism in Britain and early English trade unionism, owes its origins more to craft sectarianism, than class consciousness. An organised working-class that can act as a social class, as immense economic power which could be used for political ends to overthrow the state and the capitalist system.

Karl Marx appeared to regard the advent of socialism as inevitable, but even if you bring the capitalist system crashing down, it doesn't necessarily follow that it will be a socialist system that replaces it; it could be fascism as we saw in both fascist Italy and Germany. Both the socialists and communist movements in Germany failed to combat the rise of fascism in Germany and seemed to see Hitler and the Nazis as an unwelcome and temporary anomaly, "the death rattle of a capitalist system on the point of extinction."

Stalin denounced the German socialists as "social fascists", and urged German Communists to view them as the main enemy of the working-class. The anarchists in Spain did at least stand up to Franco and the Falangists and tried to build a libertarian communist society in parts of Spain.

Will Angela Rayner make a bid for Starmer's job after May local elections?

 

Angela Rayner

Angela Rayner speaks with a lisp. When she was a young girl, her mother - who couldn't read or write - told her that she needed speech and language therapy. 

A Daily Mail columnist once wrote that she 'winced' when she heard Rayner demanding on the Radio 4 Today Programme, "Was you there or not at the party?" Rayner told a meeting of North West Labour members, "I'm sick of shouting from the sidelines and I bet youse lot are too." 

She's described herself as a "failing pupil" from a "failing school." By all accounts, her spelling and grammar are atrocious. One of the volunteers who worked with Rayner during her Ashton election campaign has said:

"She needed quite a bit of advice... I remember she needed help with writing statements, letters, press releases etc, because writing is definitely not her strong point. She just couldn't do it. She couldn't string two sentences together in writing, but of course she excelled verbally... Her husband really managed her campaign, in so far as anyone can manage Angela. He had the UNISON connections." 

Another former colleague has said that Rayner is good at presenting an image of competence, adding, "Quite a lot of time she was bullshitting like crazy. Someone would say something technical and complicated at a meeting, and a few minutes later, she would regurgitate it as if it were her idea."  

Like the fictional Eliza Doolittle, Rayner worked as a flower seller, cash in hand, selling roses in pubs and clubs. Angela Rayner has described herself as wild child, who from the age of thirteen, was visiting night clubs in order to spend time with older men. Rayner said her father would pick her up outside the Manchester night clubs. She's admitted herself that she likes to drink and party and is known to her children, as the "vaping dragon." But both Winston Churchill and Herbert Asquith, liked the booze. Asquith was nicknamed 'Squiffy' by some parliamentarians and I suspect that he's walked into many doors. 

I think it's preposterous to see Angela Rayner as a UK Labour Prime Minister. How would she deal on the world stage of politics with political figures like Donald Trump, Marco Rubio or the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov? I dread to think what they would make of Angela Rayner and her Star Wars shoes and her flat vowels. It's too laughable for words. Within Labour Party circles Rayner is known as the 'Diva' and there is a joke that the only test that she ever sat, was a pregnancy test.