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.