1931

Some notable events, 1931

January 4: NRA offensives crush the Northwestern Clique following successful uprisings by Chinese communists and the establishment of the Shaanxi Soviet.

January 21: A mob of unemployed German workers attempt to confront Chancellor Brüning on his way to the Reichstag. The mob is dispersed by mounted police, resulting in three deaths.

February 2: Director Tod Browning pens a denunciation in the Daily Worker of the “Breen Office” that approves Hollywood films, after his film for Universal Dracula is shelved due to its content.

February 13 : The Boaventura siblings, Cristiano, João, Marcos, and Paulo; under pseudonyms translating to “The Green Devil”, “The Sword of God”, “The Righteous Knight” and “The Bull of Christ” are listed as suspects in the bombing of a Brazilian Atheist society that kills twenty six and wounds thirty seven after the Humble Knights of God post an article saying that the dead deserved worse.

February 17: William Dudley Pelley publishes his manifesto Seven Minutes in Eternity , a spiritual-political work heavily influenced by the author’s own interpretation of Adolf Hitler, Völkische , and the NSDAP.

February 21: Disputes over the Chaco region continue to heat up as Standard Oil backed Bolivia and Dutch Royal Shell backed Paraguay press their claims to a region thought to be rich in oil. However, the British Empire starts to offer itself as a mediator in the hopes that preventing a war will ensure that the oil will be produced quickly.

February 27: Albert Einstein (current a visiting research fellow at the California Institute of Technology) visits the Committee of Tektology, and discusses the role of science and technology for the socialist cause with Howard Scott and head of the biology section H.J. Mueller (currently preparing to head to the USSR as a visiting fellow).

March 2: Pearl S. Buck, an American living in China, publishes The Good Earth , detailing the life of a pre-Great War Chinese family, garnering acclaim.

March 3: President Hoover signs a bill, adopting “Hail Columbia” as the national anthem.

March 5: Mohandas Gandhi and Lord Irwin, Viceroy of India, sign a pact promising India dominion status at an uncertain date, just prior to a “Roundtable Conference” to discuss the issue.

March 11: The Ready for Labour and Defence of the USSR (GTO) programme, a physical culture training initiative, is established by the Komsomol.

March 12 : Plinio Salgado makes headlines around Brazil and to a lesser extent the world by writing an article defending the Humble Knights of God and claiming that they are only being harried by the police due to Communist bias.

March 21: Zhili Province and Beijing are liberated from warlord control. The revolutionary justice enacted by the KMT alarms foreign observers. Foreign correspondents write of another Soviet revolution in progress in China.

March 22 : Inukai Tsuyoshi resigns, and Saito Makoto becomes Prime Minister of Japan. He advocates for stronger Japanese action against the KMT.

April 3: Jin Clique warlords in the Chahar and Jehol provinces bend the knee to Japan. The IJA deploys to restore order and suppress communist uprisings.

April 13 : Gustavo Barroso meets Cristiano Boaventura for the first time, though the molysmophobic Boaventura insists on concealing his face and hands throughout the meeting. The two speak of what they believe are Brazil’s problems, and while Barroso is far more secular than the Ultracatholic Boaventura, they both express a hatred of Jews and an admiration for Salgado’s writings earlier in the year.

April 14: Following the abdication of King Alfonso XIII, the Second Spanish Republic is declared in Madrid.

April 18: To protect foreign assets from KMT/Soviet expropriation, the IJA marches on Beijing, crushing the NRA 6th Army.

April 20 : An anonymous article in Australia is published to The Daily Telegraph accusing the government of being “blind to the threat of Red Jiang” and abandoning “innocents guilty of no crime but success” to the Chinese National Revolutionary Army with their closed door policy on Asian immigration. The article sparks debate on the White Australia policy in Canberra.

April 25: German automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche founds the Porsche automobile company in Stuttgart.

April 28 : During Australasian Day celebrations, the governments of Australia and New Zealand discuss the possibility of a joint government, citing a feeling of mutual perceived threat from “the Sovietization of China” and “Japanese expansion.”

May 1: The 380 metre tall Empire State Building opens in New York City.

May 5 : The southern warlords of the Dian, Qian and Gui cliques make peace with the KMT government in a deal brokered by the Japanese government, ending the Central Plains War. The prospect of Japanese intervention hangs over China, and in the few border clashes with the IJA the NRA has performed poorly.

May 8: The Harlan County War: Coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky go on strike against layoffs and pay cuts. When mine owners’ attempts to break the strike and evict strikers from company towns with Pinkertons fails, the miners occupy the mines and towns by armed force.

May 13: Attempts to resolve the Harlan County strike fail when the National Guard called in to restore order fraternizes with the miners.

May 14 : The Communist Revolutionary Movement of the Congo is founded by a thousand left wing nationalists and Marxist revolutionaries hoping to throw off the yoke of France and Belgium.

May 15 : The Belgian Government outlaws the CRMC as soon as the demands are read and translated.

May 18: Threatened with mutiny charges, the National Guardsmen are ordered to withdraw from Harlan County and face no penalty. A core of thirty remain.

May 27: The Harlan County War ends with the assassination of Sheriff J.H. Blair. While the workers win back their homes and livelihoods, the twenty-seven surviving “Red Guardsmen” of Harlan are arrested and charged with treason against the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

May 29 : Emperor Haile Selassie invites Japanese military observers and advisers in the hopes of passing on their wisdom to one of the last remaining independent nations in Africa.

June 4: Following the collapse of the Austrian bank Creditanstalt, the German banking system is verging on insolvency

June 6: At the proposal of Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin, Jiang reluctantly agrees to let NRA officers study at the M.V. Frunze Military Academy.

June 10: Thomas Edison, “The Wizard of Menlo Park” credited with the advancing the light bulb, phonograph, and film camera, dies at age 84

June 12 : Samantha Waver, Leonid Spartak, and Samawal Hamidi publish another volume of Aeon Lullaby titled “Lord of Night ” which features notably features an only somewhat veiled stand in for Henry Ford as a nightmarish creature of dark crystal known as Adamanox who seeks to homogenize all he touches to create a cold, empty world of consumption.

June 15 : A major strike occurs in Kalgoorlie, Australia demanding the reinstatement of laid off employees and a cessation of wage cuts to the miners.

June 20: President Hoover proposes a moratorium on German reparations payments for one year, in exchange for a moratorium on repayment of Entente war debt to the United States.

June 25: The Daily Worker makes a front page apology after an issue showed a cartoon mocking the recently deceased Thomas Edison.

June 29 : The French government collaborates with a number of companies and chocolatiers to establish chocolate and sugar plantations in Madagascar, Gabon, Guiana, and Vietnam with the aid of subsidies from the French Government, eager to turn France’s large colonial empire towards greater profit.

July 1: With financing from Italy, Marcel Bucard founds the Mouvement Franciste , the most extreme contingent of the French far right, denouncing the Les Faisceau as too conciliatory towards “the Jewish-Communist menace”.

July 4: Bedlam follows in the United States House of Representatives after Speaker Bertrand Snell moves to close daily business with the house singing the new official state anthem. The gestures to national unity are ruined as Communists attempt to belt out “The Internationale”, DFLPers continue the quixotic fight to have “America the Beautiful” be the anthem, and a few members from the Deep South are heard singing “Dixie”.

July 7: Towards Soviet America , an extensive treatise on the Workers’ Party’s revolutionary aims, is published. Written with contributions by Browder, Foster, DeLeon and Sinclair, the book becomes a major non-fiction bestseller as the party begins to inch back to programmatic unity

July 10: Jiang, The Last Vagrant, an adaptation of Gerry Tan’s story The Last Vagrant, makes its debut in 勞動日報 or Labor Daily, the Chinese language version of the Daily Worker , with Tan himself as writer, to compete with the popular Buck Rogers strip (given the story was itself a response to the original Buck Rogers story).

July 13 : Sammawal Hamidi publishes The Prophet in Crimson under Haymarket Books on his reflections on life in America as a Black Muslim and outlining his beliefs as to why Islam and Socialism are not merely compatible, but that any true Muslim must also be a Socialist. The book is notably written in Arabic, translated by Sammawal himself, as well as English.

July 19 : The Indian Dominion movement convenes in Pune, ahead of the upcoming Round Table Conference in London, to discuss a plan for a singular dominion made out of the whole of the Raj that will give an equal place to the various religious and ethnic groups of India without necessarily breaking ties with Britain.

July 23 : A series of strikes in South Africa occur in protest to the downsizing of mining operations that provide for the livelihoods of both Black and White workers. The wave of firings affects everyone from miners living near Johannesburg to dock workers in Capetown and Durban.

August 6: The Red Guardsmen of Harlan are acquitted, following a hasty trial that the state Attorney-General condemns as a subject to jury pool tainting by communists.

August 12: First Secretary Longworth submits the FY1932 budget to the floor of the US House of Representatives. The rift in the coalition government breaks as DFLP backbenchers vote to quit the coalition over the severe cuts and proposed tax increases.

August 17 : Albert Nzula and Moses Kotane publish the “twenty one demands of Black Africa” document, outlining their minimum programme for a revolutionary Africa free of colonial rule and built on Marxist principles of equity and freedom. This document is also passed among Black Americans who are eager to hear of the struggle in South Africa proper.

August 19: Australian Strikers end up being divided between the White Australia supporting Labor Party partisans and the Pro-Immigrant Communist Party’s supporters, prompting the Laborites to negotiate concessions to the mining industry.

August 21: Chilean officer Marmaduke Grove convenes with many other radical leftists gathered in Argentina. With close ties to the leftist movements elsewhere in the Americas, Marmaduke expresses his hopes for a revolution in the USA that will enable him and his comrades to end the Montero regime and institute a Socialist Republic to the WCPA observer; stating that the hopes of the future of the New World rest on the success of the people of the United States.

August 29 : The Dakar shipyard, built by France as part of an ambitious West African port expansion plan meant to make a profit out of the somewhat economically marginal colonies, finally reaches completion after years of delays.

September 1: International Unemployment Day results in a mass outbreak of violence between police and demonstrators in both Germany and the United States.

September 7: John Reed, participant-observer in the Soviet revolution and author of the best-selling Ten Days that Shook the World , is called before the HISC to testify about an alleged conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. The hearings are filmed, and excerpts included in newsreels in the coming weeks.

September 15: Retired Marine general Smedley Butler publishes a damning exposé titled War is a Racket with Haymarket Books under the pseudonym Darlington Westchester.

September 19 : Prominent Cuban leftist Ramon Grau is arrested in Havana on grounds on conspiring against the government of Geraldo Machado with evidence procured via the aid of American navy intelligence.

October 1: At the DFLP emergency convention in Kansas City, Missouri, the caucus votes with a strong majority allow the longtime collaborator group, the social democratic Independent Socialist Labor Party, to merge. With the party’s national leadership recalled by the increasingly militant rank and file, the DFLP begins a sharp turn to the left.

October 12: One of the largest aircraft companies in the United States, the Detroit Aircraft Corporation, goes into receivership.

October 14: Dick Tracy, a comic strip by Chester Gould, debuts in the Detroit Mirror.

October 25 : Mussolini’s prize money is claimed by Fred C. Koch, who discovers that Libya is tremendously oil rich to the point of potentially giving Italy its long sought after ticket to becoming a first rate great power off the back of black gold. Mussolini’s government loudly announces ambitious developmental plans.

October 28: Great Britain leaves the gold standard following emergency legislation, blocking a run on the Pound sterling.

October 31: The New York City offices of The Daily Worker are raided by New York State Police for “inciting insurrection”.

November 3: James Whale’s Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff in the lead role, is a massive success, despite extensive cuts and reshoots done by Universal in the wake of the Dracula controversy (earning the ire of Whale, who saves the original cut).

November 6: The North American Labor Congress (the chief executive body of the Solidarity trade union) votes 111-45 to bail out the insolvent Credit Union Alliance.

November 9: Columbia chemistry professor Harold C. Urey demonstrates the existence of deuterium or “heavy water”, by examining hydrogen isotopes

November 14: The 1931 Imperial Conference ends with the delegates establishing a timetable for the creation of an Imperial Federation amid dire economic conditions in the Empire and the growing tide of radicalism.

November 21 : A few concept reels featuring about four minutes worth of animation are created by Samantha Waver; the first time the character who would become Amanda Aaron and Vladimir Volkov are animated in a recognisable form prior to their 1938 debut.

November 23 : Prince Chichibu comes upon Colonel Nagata Tetsuzan when assigned to the IJA 3rd Infantry Regiment. A close relationship is formed, as the two had spent much time abroad. They exchange thoughts on Japan’s current social issues, and agree that action is necessary in the near future.

December 2: Lockheed Aircraft Company, a subsidiary of Detroit Aircraft, is rescued from receivership by an association formed by its 317 workers, with additional funds acquired from the Sokal Credit Union and the founder of the company Allan Lockheed

December 10: Prominent activist, socialist ally and ILDC board member Jane Addams becomes the first American woman nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

December 31: 2451 banks have failed, totalling $1.82 billion in lost deposits. Unemployment is 17.1%, annual inflation -9.6%, Real GDP growth -8.6%.

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Excerpts from Howard Zinn,Mutual Aid in Hard Times (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1984)

A common mistaken notion is that revolutionary upsurge immediately follows a crisis period. The initial periods of any crisis are instead a struggle for the day to day existence, leaving little time or energy for a revolutionary offensive.

In 1931, workers struggled with skyrocketing unemployment, underemployment, a wave of crackdowns on tenant rights, and the collapse of public services. The recession of the previous year was now spoken of as “the depression”. Or increasingly, “the great depression.”

The rapid decline hit all classes. The ever precarious family farm was rapidly annihilated. Small shops shut their doors by the thousands. The shedding of government jobs, as the civil service and military reduced payrolls to maintain balanced budgets, sent thousands of the intelligentsia into the soup kitchen lines, rubbing shoulders with steelworkers and mendicants alike. Newspapers reported once prominent millionaires working as day-jobbers while their foreclosed mansions lay empty.

This book should not be considered an exhaustive study on the subject. Resistance, self-help and mutual aid are ultimately the stories of millions of individuals. Nonetheless, some common trends and notable examples can be identified.
[…]
Montana was geographically the third largest state during the Great Depression. The eastern expanse of the state is a marginal climate, a mixture of rolling high plains and bleak badlands. Two major rivers wind through the east, the Missouri and the Yellowstone, serving as the primary sources of irrigation water. The large reservoirs familiar on present day maps did not exist. Both were prone to periodic flooding and drought.

The western third of the state is dominated by the Rocky Mountains. Forestry and mining were the primary industries. The city of Butte was the headquarters of the Anaconda Amalgamated Copper Corporation, a trust that dominated the mining of cupric ores in the Western Hemisphere, and had interests overseas in Nippon and Poland. Its fortunes rose to meteoric highs with growing importance of electricity.

When the crash hit, extractive industries like farming, ranching, forestry and mining suffer the hardest. Prices for timber, grain and metals collapsed, and with it prosperity in the state. By year end 1932, almost half of Butte’s working population were unemployed. The once mighty Anaconda corporation was teetering on bankruptcy, with stock prices at 5 percent of the January 1930 high.

But Montana also had one of the most vibrant radical traditions, dating back to the rise of the SLP. Montanans were uniquely suited to lead the fight in resisting the iron march of the Depression.

The militant mineworkers did not go down without a fight. The city of Butte became a prelude to the revolution to come, as mineworkers occupied the mines and company offices to demand an equal sacrifice from the managerial hierarchy and the shareholders. The union protected its members by distributing work equally. To keep their comrades from losing their jobs, each worker took fewer shifts.

As rents went into arrears, landlords attempted to evict tenants with hopes of putting these properties on the market again. But at every turn, their usual political clout had evaporated. Attempts to evict families were met with rent strikes by other tenants. Communists had taken many of the city and county elected positions, including the Sheriff’s office, in the 1930 election. The Workers’ Party had, predictably, refused to use state powers to assist the landlords.

The war with the landlords came to a head when the city’s landlords formed an association to pool expenses to bring in Silver Legion goons, and to lobby the state government to revoke the city’s charter and place it under direct rule from Helena. The attempt to place an Anaconda company lawyer as the head of the emergency management of Silver Bow County was met with a statewide outbreak of strikes and demonstrations.

With the state government gridlocked by a negative majority in the legislature, and fearing that a WCP/DFLP coalition might be able to put the votes together for impeachment, Governor Frank Hazelbaker opted instead to use posse comitatus to deputize members of the Silver Legion into the state police in secret.

The street fighting began in Butte on 24 October 1931, with winter fast approaching. Tipped off by railway workers, the Silver Legionists were mobbed at the Northern Pacific Station. Miners and other workers from the city overwhelmed the column and forced their retreat.

Silver Bow Sheriff Raymond Verne* used the violations of the state’s criminal syndicalism act to seize the property of known conspirators as criminal enterprises, and ordered their arrest for conspiracy and murder (for the deaths of several sheriff’s deputies in the street fighting). The complicated legal questions surrounding their trials were still unresolved by the outbreak of the revolution. Similarly, the reorganization of Silver Bow County and the City of Butte into a combined Butte Soviet was less than enthusiastically received at the state capital.
[…]
Farmers in North America had gone through several waves of radicalisation. At the end of the United States, rural producers had banded together to form the People’s Party, and led a briefly successful entryist campaign into the old Democratic Party. After the collapse of the Populists, rural farmers turned to the rising Socialist Labor Party’s promises of producer co-operatives, state banks, and railroads to buttress their interests against greedy rentiers.

When the Socialist Labor Party went all-in on revolutionary socialism, many small farmers stuck with the alliance with urban workers, while others joined the nascent Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. While the DFLP in this period made no mention of socialism, socialist organizational strategies and literature continued to circulate.

The growing demand for urban labor and declining agricultural prices drew millions into American cities. Accustomed to the self-directed rhythms of yeoman farming, they quickly radicalised. These young workers sent socialist literature to their rural relatives, mainly in the form of organizing strategies.

The anarchist movement had long had a revolving door relationship with the WCP, sometimes one that was genuinely cordial, sometimes one that was strained at best. While anarchists overall consistently supported the WCP during elections, they would often clash over both theory and praxis, with the Anarchists aligning themselves with the WCP’s leftmost faction and critiquing the WCP’s electoral strategy during the Second Period, but overall, the two would begin to find common ground to firmly unite around as the Thirties progressed, as rural mutual aid groups such as the Grange began to translate and circulate pamphlets, essays and short novels of anarchist literature written by Russian peasants both before and during the Civil War, alongside newer works by American farmers and members of the growing co-operative movement.

One such piece that was of particular note at this time was the completed Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists. The Platform was the work of 27 Russian and Ukrainian anarchists in exile in France, most notably Nestor “Bat’ko” Makhno, the figurehead “leader” and military commander of the anarchist Free Territory and Black Army located in Southern Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, before it’s betrayal and suppression by the Bolshevik state. The Platform sought to address why anarchism had both failed to launch both the initial socialist revolution in Russia, nor launch the desired “Third Russian Revolution” that would rescue the Russian working class from a state that it claimed to represent, but continually repressed, and why it had been defeated in Ukraine.

Borrowing heavily from the platform of the German KAPD, it came to the conclusion that the lack of existence of a strongly organized anarchist movement to promote and nourish anarchist tendencies among the wider proletariat and peasantry alike, and that the formation of tightly organized, explicitly anarcho-communist (rejecting the so-called “synthesist” model, which aimed to create a “big tent” of multiple anarchist tendencies, and as such tended to have larger numbers, but were too loosely organized to accomplish much of anything) groups, amongst the lines of Marxist political parties was ultimately necessary for the proper introduction and encouragement of anarchist ideas amongst the working class at large, while still maintaining the anarchist principles of federalism, autonomy, collective responsibility and direct action over electoralism and participating within the limits drawn by the bourgeois state, and rejecting the model of the “vanguard party” core to Leninist doctrine. The Platform used various quotes from Bakunin and Kropotkin on that “the formation of an anarchist organization in Russia, far from being prejudicial to the common revolutionary task, on the contrary, it is desirable and useful to the very greatest degree” as justification for their actions, maintaining that this was not a revision of anarchist principles, merely a restatement of what had already been proposed.

While controversial with the wider anarchist movement as a whole, being rejected by the synthesists, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman for it’s apparent “forsaking” of anarchist principles, and attempting to model “Leninism without Lenin”, and supported by Errico Malatesta for “behind the linguistic differences lie identical positions” after seeing a Platformist group in action and additional dialogue with Makhno, the 1930 publication of an English translation of the Platform (published as the Organisational Platform of Libertarian Communism within the United States), alongside addendums written by American anarchists, captured the attention of the national zeitgeist perfectly, speaking to many about the crushing exploitation that was occurring in the rural areas of the United States.

With countless farms deep in arrears, many banks that were teetering on the edge of insolvency use the police power of their local and state governments to foreclose on over one million family farms during the depths of the Depression. Such a crisis demanded collective direct action in response. While the single, nationwide General Union of Anarchists that the Platform desired never came to pass before the Revolution, many farmers formed localized or statewide affinity groups based on the Platformist program, with partial, albeit limited success in national organization and coordination. These groups, while often theoretically confused, espousing both a mixture of American historical chauvinism about the right to bear arms and the Declaration of Independence and anarchist slogans about “everything for everyone and nothing for no one” and class warfare, grew not because of their muddled theory, but because of their effective praxis. Using a mixture of intimidation through organized militias and fundraising/pooling together resources in solidarity, these affinity groups would buy back foreclosed farms at bankruptcy auctions, frustrating the efforts of rentiers. Reclaimed farms would be slowly reintegrated into a collective system, run by the affinity groups and local farmers, sharing both the costs of operation and the benefits of doing so.

Sharing planters, tractors and other machinery improved efficiency greatly on these communal farms, and the surplus labor freed in the process allowed many in the collectives to initiate cottage scale production. As the general revolutionary zeitgeist spread coast to coast, the rural anarchists began to strengthen their alliance with the urban working class. The largest of these affinity groups, the rapidly growing, multi-state Libertarian Bund was allowed to join as an affiliate group of the WCP, despite the protests of those who desired to adhere to Moscow’s party line. Unsold grain from these farms was stockpiled and furnished directly to the American branch of International Red Aid, which took an increasingly large role in the provision of emergency relief to the unemployed.
[…]
Emergency relief had traditionally been the domain of Christian philanthropic groups in Europe and the Americas. They had a long history of bad blood with politically conscious workers, who saw them as more concerned with the souls of the poor than the health of their bodies. The largest and most infamous, the Salvation Army, had forced extensive rituals of obeisance and praying from supplicants before any meal. In spite of extolling the virtues of self-reliance and work, the nature of aid given by the “Starvation Army” made the unemployed choose between being able to eat for the day or having the time to look for work.

Following the first International Unemployed Day, immediate relief came to the fore of working-class politics. The intolerability of traditional relief systems, and with no end in sight to the current crisis, local cells of the Workers’ Party turned their efforts to relief-as-praxis. In New York City, the party convinced the local unions to dip into the strike fund to set up a network of volxküchen(1).

The volxküchen utilised volunteer labor, often provided by Pioneers or the college-age YCL, often in permanent community spaces. They provided a variety of general American and ethnic dishes, prepared with ingredients that had been obtained through bulk purchase, donation, or from soviet gardens. Food quality was initially quite mixed, but improved as the institutions put down roots and attracted the patronage of local restaurants that chose to tie their future to the co-operative movement rather than reaction.

In the volxküchen, men and women of all social strata mingled both in front of and behind the counter. Gourmet chefs taught orphans how to cook, while a former banker shared the bench with a laundress.
[…]
As the unemployment rate rose, workers turned an increasingly blind eye towards thefts. Unsold produce, bread and meat very often disappeared on its way to disposal, only to miraculously wind up at a volxküche. In spite of the attempts of owners to push for the police to investigate, the increasingly mutinous urban police continued to fail to find any suspects or evidence.

Stockpiles of coal for industrial use that lay unused as factories idled were routinely pilfered during the winter. The thefts, often undertaken by the workers themselves, seldom wound up on the black market. Instead, they were given to tenant unions to keep the poor and indigent warm in the cold Northern winters.

The paradox of abundance and poverty had never been so acute. Food rotted in warehouses while millions went hungry. Common household necessities were carted to landfills while the workers who had built them went without, and could only watch with bitter tears in their eyes as the fruit of their toils was sunk.

The embers of anti-capitalist discontent were stoked into a raging inferno. Even many in the once reactionary middle classes took part in the looting, and traded dogeared copies of Capital and Toward Soviet America in well off neighborhoods.

From our privileged position in the present, we should not mistake these as peaceful acts. Even these victimless crimes were in themselves a violent insurrection against the logic of capital. And resistance was not often so peaceful. Desperate wermen and women seldom are.

The highest expression of class conflict is civil war, and in truth that civil war was already under way by 1931. In thousands of small engagements, workers clashed with capitalists for survival. Armed mobs often formed to violently expropriate shops of necessities, especially food.

And while the more showy street battles between the Spartacus League and Silver Legion dominate historic memory, there were a dozen other reactionary groups that filled their ranks with the young and desperate. More regular still were the clashes between tenants and the law over evictions.

The social war was at its most desperate every winter, especially in the North. Landlords, themselves hounded by creditors, tried to violently evict delinquent tenants. Tenant associations fought back, sometimes by boycott, other times with direct violence. Murders of tenant leaders and landlords spiked.

Others fell into the proletariat themselves, with their rental properties foreclosed by the banks, and would have to turn to the very tenants they had been locked in struggle with for protection.

The fights over housing and food were complimented with fights over available work. The existing working class had long been instilled with institutions and consciousness of collective solidarity, and would not cross a picket line. The newly immiserated petit-bourgeoisie, yeomanry and intelligentsia were not accustomed to the norms of proletarian solidarity.

They made very useful scabs, at least for a time. And as unemployment rates climbed, it became easier to tempt men to violate the sacred oaths of proletarian solidarity. Battles at picket lines grew in frequency. Ethnic lines in the unions became more fraught. Fights often broke out among desperate men and women in the same union. The questions of tactics were not theory, but a potentially life and death struggle.

And not every battle was successful. While the urban police departments bled out in the ongoing struggle against the organised workers, hundreds of thousands would be rendered homeless. Pushed to the extremes of poverty, with very little access to work, they congregated into shantytowns in garbage dumps, vacant lots, and under bridges. These “Hoovervilles” presented the final indictment of the richest, most industrious country in the world.

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1. “People’s kitchens”; Volx is a North American German corruption of Volk , to de-emphasise the nationalistic connotations brought on by the rise of Völkische. It is a common loan word in TTL’s American English and needs no definition even among monoglots.