1927

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.

-Max Weber

_One individual may die for an idea, but that idea will, after his death, incarnate itself in a thousand lives.

-_Subhas Chandra bose​

Some Key Events, 1927

January 3rd: Amid an ongoing deadlock in the German government, a measure starts to circulate around the executive committee to annul parliament until it agrees to cooperate with the appointed commissars. Although supported by the RAF’s left and entertained by the centre, the right-wing of the party is alarmed with the prospect that the measure could lead to an ongoing standoff with both the DSV and RSD, which are unlikely to endorse it.

January 7th: Influential RAF member Paul Levi meets privately with Karl Kautsky, Georg Ledebour, and Otto Wels to discuss the prospect of forming a coalition government with the DSV.

January 11th: British Prime Minister Richard Haldane flies to Jerusalem, where he meets publicly with Mohammed Amin al-Husseini and a number of other Arab notables from both Palestine and Lebanon. Shortly after the meeting, the “Haldane Declaration” is issued, promising the Palestinian and Lebanese Arabs self-rule within the space of twenty years. Although the news is greeted with approval in Palestine-Lebanon, Egyptian nationalists denounce the maneuver as an attempt to split the Muslim and Arab world.

January 14th: Prices start to fall once more in Germany as consumer confidence and the semi-public and cooperative sectors worry about the functionality of the main planning departments in the executive committee.

January 19th: Iraq’s independence is formally recognized by the United Kingdom.

January 28th: The 4th Summit of the Atlantic Union commences in the city of Los Angeles. Facing domestic pressure at home, Hoover refuses multiple British proposals to keep the pound at a fixed rate to the dollar. He also will not permit the British to consolidate or renegotiate their remaining debt.

One measure, however, secures the assent of the Atlantic Union’s varied statesmen: a proposal to introduce a new, radically simplified form of standardized English as the lingua francua of the capitalist bloc. For many years, “British American Scientific Industrial Commercial English” was nothing more than a pet project of the British polymath and linguistic psychologist Charles Kay Ogden, but lately it has attracted support from such diverse luminaries as Henry Ford, William Empson, and H.G. Wells.

The new form of English reduces the over 20,000 English words in common use to mere 850, as well as a few additional scientific terms; the entire lexicon is printable on a 7 x 10 piece of paper. Ogden’s orthographical institute, set up to propagate the language, will be folded into the Atlantic Union as the “Bureau for the Promotion of Standard English”. Of course, it will be another matter entirely to actually cajole the other states of the Atlantic Union, predominantly Spanish-speaking, to adopt the new language; cries of linguistic imperialism are already being made.

February 3rd: New German elections are held to break the government deadlock. In a surprise result, the DSV fails to gain much additional ground, and the parliamentary results are almost the same as in the previous election. Instead, it is the RSD which wins increased support in the worker’s councils, giving it a mandate to form the new government. After negotiations with Paul Levi and Eduard Bernstein, George Ledebour will announce the formation of a new ministry within the week.

February 8th: De Valois’ Fascist government rescinds the voting rights of the four communes of Senegal, which have traditionally participated in French elections and possessed a measure of self-rule.

February 18th: Prices in Germany begin to recover as the new government is sworn in. The cheap purchase of German industrial goods by Italy, Sweden, and the Netherlands has created a great deal of exchange volatility, however, disrupting economic planning in Central European nations.

February 21st: The Ledebour Ministry passes the “Provisional Re-entry and Re-admission act”. The law creates a procedure for select white emigres to apply to re-enter into Germany following an extensive screening process. After a period of residency, they will also have the opportunity to “reapply” for citizenship. Though the total number of renaturalized German citizens will not total more than 1,000 people, the temporary re-entry of several major writers and celebrities is a major propaganda coup for the government in its ongoing battle for legitimacy with emigre Germans in Switzerland, America, and Algeria.

March 4th: At an economic summit in Amsterdam, delegates from Italy, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands agree to a series of fixed currency exchange rates meant to stabilize their respective currencies. Though there is some talk of creating an international central bank with the power to finance trade deficits, in the end the socialist and social-democratic nations are wary of surrendering too much sovereignty to international institutions. Instead, each nation will be responsible for maintaining its own exchange rate, and capital flows across countries will be strictly prohibited to ease this process. Also discussed is the prospect of creating a body of “regional planning” to better allocate key industrial goods and control trade and exchange rate volatilities. This ambitious proposal is, however, tabled for the time being.

March 14th: Fritz Lang’s Siefried is released in Germany to great controversy. The movie recasts the mythological Germanic hero as a simple, noble savage, fighting against overly civilized, refined Burgundian slave-holders who are a not-so-subtle allegorical substitute for Anglo-Americans. Tying together anti-imperialist sentiment, proletarian nationalism, and the traditional German privileging of Kultur over Zivilisation, the film is a massive box office success, but also faces criticism for its “naive” nationalism, mysticism, and its celebration of violence. The new, “proletarian siegfried” predictably provokes horror in German emigre communities across the Atlantic; a representative editorial accuses the socialists of “gleefully defiling the sacred roots of the German nation”.

March 19th: The Soviet Union joins the Central European currency regime by agreeing to use its substantial gold reserves to fix the Ruble to the Mark at a set rate. Many of the smaller socialist nations in Eastern Europe will follow by fixing their currency to the Ruble.

March 23rd: Indian lawyer and peasant activist Mahatma Gandhi arrives in New York after more than a half-decade in the Soviet Union. Gandhi, who reluctantly supported the INC republican government, left for America after souring on the India Communist Party and its Soviet benefactors.

March 28th: Indian, Vietnamese, and Egyptian student organizations in London agree to join together as the “Intercolonial Federation”.

April 4th: As the socialist-syndicalist Italian coalition government prepares to pass a bill stripping significant powers from the chambers of labour, massive anarchist strikes break out across much of Central Italy. However, they are not joined by their socialist, christian-socialist, or syndicalist workers in the north or south of Italy, who largely approve of the government’s measures to accumulate increased powers and combat chronic unemployment.

April 10th: The Ledebour Ministry passes the National Healthcare Service Act, consolidating the entirety of health-related industries into a single, state-run service that will be free at the point of surface. The projected money required for its proper functioning will require a considerable re-orientation of the national economy away from the accumulation of means of production and the continued subsidy of heavy industry.

April 21st: Anarchist strikes show no signs of letting up nearly a dozen days after the passage of a bill amending Italy’s constitution. Unsurprisingly, the strikers are drawing support from their local, anarchist-controlled chambers of labour. Some right-wing members of the Italian government are beginning to urge the use of the militia to suppress the strike, but Togliatti and most of the Italian Union of Revolutionary Marxists believe this to be unconstitutional, counterproductive, counter-revolutionary, or some combination of the three.

April 25th: An American congressional committee finds “no substantial evidence” that Swiss corporations have been used as a front for IntRevMar’s procurement of sensitive technology.

May 3rd: The British Colonial Commission finalizes its plans for the administrative reorganization of the Raj.

Bengal, the most populous province, will be partitioned between two zones directly controlled by Britain: the West Bengal and East Bengal provinces. The boundaries drawn largely to adhere to religious demographics, and significant lands in western Bengal will be granted to the loyal princes of Orissa.

The sprawling Madras Presidency in southeastern India will be split into a series of smaller provinces, with the boundaries largely organized around various Dravidian languages, such as Telugu and Tamil. Here, the British promise an “Adequate measure of self-rule” as well as “government which will address the caste question”. Southeastern India has some of the most active sanskritizing movements among the lower castes.

The entirety of the central provinces will be ceded to various princes; the largest portion by far will be allocated to the Nizam of Hyperabad, who will regain not only the formerly leased territory of Berar, but also the large city of Nagpur.

The Bombay Presidency, in the West of India, will be completely partitioned. In the north, the Muslim-majority province of Sindh will be divided between loyal princes, aside from the important commercial hub of Karachi. This city, along with Bombay and its surroundings, as well as Ahmedabad, will be folded into a new, “West India Autonomous Province”. Currently, the vast majority of Indian manufacturing and advanced industry is located in this zone. What remains of the Bombay Presidency will be divided between Hyderabad, Mysore, and a new Maharashtra Province.

Around a quarter of the lands in Punjab will be ceded to princes of the Rajputana agency, as well as the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Bahadur Singh.

Finally, the capital of the British Raj will return to Delhi. Occupying a mid-point between Bengal and Punjab, the two most restive regions of India, British colonial officials believe it will play a vital strategic role in ensuring the stability of the reconstituted Raj.

All said, a little over a third of British lands will be granted to the loyal princes as a reward for their assistance in the war. Yet the particular details of the plan reveal a considerably more malicious motive: the plan is a transparent, unambiguous attempt to stoke religious, linguistic, caste, and class divisions within the Indian body politic in an effort to solidify British rule.

May 5th: Two days after news of the British administration reorganization reaches India, protests and rioting begin to rock Bengal, Punjab, and parts of the no-longer existent Madras Presidency. Hartals shake Calcutta, Amritsar, Lahore, and Burdwan.

May 6th: Sympathy strikes amongst workers commence in the western commercial cities of Ahmedabad and Bombay. Much of India is paralyzed; the British Commissioner for Bengal is killed in a raid.

May 8th: British soldiers are deployed in Calcutta and Bombay. On “Red Sunday”, over 850 civilians are killed while the soldiers suppress the strikes and riots.

May 9th: Protests continue in other Indian cities, now with an increasing number engulfing regions historically more loyal to the Raj. A new slogan has emerged: “India will not be divided.”

May 12th: In London, the intercolonial union holds a vigil for the protestors killed in Punjab, Bengal, and Bombay. The new German Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Eduard Bernstein, cancels a planned visit with Prime Minister Haldane, explaining to the press that the “German Socialist Republic will await negotiations with Britain until the nation deigns to elect a man who is not involved in the butchery of innocents”.

May 15th: A chapter of the People’s Front Against Imperialism is formed in London: it includes a broad array of trade unionists, left-wing radicals, and suffragettes. Its first president is Nancy Cunard, a British aristocrat and feminist.

May 21st: Amid continued police suppression, Indian strike and protest action start to subside.

May 29th: In a move which surprises much of the Atlantic Union, the Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Ozaki introduces legislation to have “Standard English” taught in elementary schools. This is part of Ozaki’s effort to make Japan into a favorable investment destination for American capital, as well as a testament to the internationalism of Japanese political culture in the interregnum era.

June 8th: After months of strikes, most of the anarchist militants have finally returned home, defeated not by armed force but by the growing contempt they face from the rest of Italy’s working classes, as well as the declining capacity of the Chambers of Labour to support them. The anarchist leadership, however, is furious, and they announce that they will be sitting out the next chamber of labour elections in protest. Some start to talk of breaking outright with IntRevMar.

June 15th: George Orwell publishes “1962”, a short, satirical novel in which English has been reduced to merely fifty words, the rest of which are proscribed by the state.

June 20th: The Kinsey Cooperative Institute for the Study of Gender, Sexuality, and Sexual Politics is founded as an affiliate of the University of Berlin.

June 24th: The Death of Dr. Caligari is released in German Theatres. The film depicts the strange career of an abusive German war psychiatrist who is eventually killed by one of his shell-shocked patients.

June 2: Time and the Foreclosure of Being is published by Martin Heidegger, a German white emigre and philosophy professor at the University of Chicago.

June 6th: Thomas Mann becomes one of the first white emigres to return to the Socialist Republic of Germany. He will be welcomed into the country by his brother, Heinrich Mann, who serves in a junior, advisory position in the Commissariat of Culture. In a public appearance, he will meet with the Commissar of Culture Lion Feuchtwanger, who will thank Mann for his “magnificent novel depicting the death-throes of the old, bourgeois world.”

June 11th: Joseph Stalin, a formerly prominent Bolshevik politician who has been sidelined by the rise of Sverdlov, publishes “Nationality and Revolution”. Expounding an “ultra-leninist” view of nationality, Stalin argues that the “nation-state form” is a “historically necessary and indubitably progressive” stage on the way to communism, and urges the creation of a world of “free, equal” nation-states as the “instrumental condition for the transition to global communism”. Roundly criticized even in Russia, it nonetheless gains some traction in certain anti-colonial circles.

June 16th: The Worker and Peasant’s Party of India is created in the Punjab as a communist front organization. Over a dozen prominent activists, overwhelmingly Sikh, will take the long and perilous trek over the Karokaram mountains; four are apprehended by British authorities before they reach Punjab.

June 22nd: Walter Benjamin travels to Rome, where he joins the reformed order of Jesuits and begins his studies to become a priest.

June 29th: Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Persia, is feted at a state dinner in Washington D.C. Shortly after his meeting with Hoover, the Royal Persian Army receives several dozen American landships and hundreds of artillery pieces at a heavily discounted rate.

July 12th: Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Ozaki announces that Japan will aim to replace military-occupied Manchuria with a system of Chinese-led civilian rule.

July 18th: Valois orders the banning of the Accion Francaise and other rival far-right militia groups.

July 24th: Time and the Foreclosure of Being arrives in Germany. While the “reactionary nostalgia” of the text is duly condemned, its phenomenological method and challenge to post-enlightenment epistemology interests many heterodox thinkers and intellectuals, including Lukacs, Adorno, and even Bloch.

July 28th: The German art and film critic Siegried Krakeur is the first to make use of the word “Hypermodernism” in a feuilleton. The phrase will gain traction as a descriptor for the radical aesthetic break inaugurated by the Great War.

August 3rd: The Dhoot affair: Indian revolutionary Naina Singh Dhoot dies under mysterious circumstances while preparing to board an ocean liner from Seattle to Vladivostok.

August 6th: Seattle newspapers report on the death of several police officers, murdered while attempting to apprehend an English national suspected of being involved in the killing of Naina Singh Dhoot. Senator Ole Hanson alleges that Britain is running an “assassination ring” on the West Coast.

August 8th: The national press starts reporting on the sensational “Dhoot Affair”.

August 13th: Britain apprehends Sohan Singh Josh, the leader of the Worker and Peasant’s Party of Punjab.

August 16th: Shortly after touching down outside London on a Trans-atlantic flight, world-famous aviator Lindberg asks a British journalist if there was any more news on the Dhoot Affair; the brief incident will make its way into American papers, a reflection of the hold that the matter now exercises on America’s public consciousness.

August 19th: Speaking publicly about the matter for the first time, Herbert Hoover assures a team of reporters that every effort is being made to apprehend the killers of Naina Singh Dhoot. When journalists inquire about whether any of the suspects have connections to British intelligence services, Hoover remarks that he has no reason to believe Britain would carry out murders on American soil, but insists that Britain’s involvement will make no “material difference” to American investigations.

August 22nd: With the rise in anti-colonial sentiment, Bernstein persuades the parliamentary delegation of his People’s Socialist Party to abandon their commitment to military cuts.

August 26th: Amid swelling anti-imperialist feelings in China, the trial against Chiang Kai-shek is quietly dropped, and left-wing Kuomintang members such as Wang Jingwei are allowed back into the party.

September 3rd: Chinese anarchists form the first “Peasant’s University” in the province of Shaanxi, meant to train rural agriculturalists in the virtues and habits of the coming anarchist society.

September 8th: After weeks of subsiding press coverage, the investigation into the Dhoot killing is quietly wrapped up.

September 14th: Galicia, now a little over a third Jewish, terminates its program to resettle refugee Jews. Around the same time, the first Polish ministers are invited into the upper levels of government.

September 21st: J.M. Keynes visits Stockholm, briefly meeting with the Prime Minister and several American emigres. His observations while in the country will contribute to his later economic work.

September 29th: The German Electrical, Air, Motor, and Motor-parts Collective forms the “Rubber and Synthetic Materials Research Collective” as a state-sponsored affiliate; it will be tasked with investigating whether it is possible to create synthetic forms of rubber and other militarily vital materials. Britain currently controls over 90% of the world’s rubber supply, and similar efforts are underway in the United States.

October 5th: The National Employment Act passes through the Italian legislature, creating a source of funds that will be provided directly to Chambers of Labour in the regions most affected with unemployment. Considerably less sweeping than the initial plan, which would have created a series of public corporations mostly untethered from Chamber of Labour control, it is a fig leaf of sorts to the restive Italian anarchists.

October 12th: Max Weber, the President of the University of Chicago, passes away peacefully in his sleep. Weber has become a towering figure in the German emigre community, but was also a comparatively liberal figure, who often, according to one eulogy, “restrained its most atavistic instincts”.

October 18th: Kemal Ataturk, the long-time President of Turkey, meets with Herbert Hoover in Washington D.C. Hoping to maintain steady relations with Britain despite the recent Dhoot affair, Hoover promises Ataturk American loans but refuses to sell him military equipment.

October 28th: Oil is discovered in Kirkuk, on the southern border of the democratic republic of Kurdistan. The Soviet Union and its client states are already the largest provider of oil to IntRevMar, and the exploitation of the Kirkuk wells will permit the Soviet bloc to solidify its dominance of the oil market.

November 5th: The German People’s Assembly and Executive Committee begins debating a bill to introduce a third “Chamber of National Minorities” to ensure Austro-Marxist representation of Poles, Czechs, Frenchmen, and Jews. After the recent government deadlock, there is skepticism about adding an additional layer to a German political system that is already viewed as overly byzantine by many representatives.

November 11th: Paul Levi breaks from his coalition partners, announcing that he and his pragmatist wing of the RAF will not support the Chamber of National Minorities.

November 16th: Under the guidance of the Kautskyist wing of the RSD, the proposed chamber is gradually watered down into a purely advisory, consultative body. Levi indicates that he will now support the bill.

November 21st: The British colonial commission takes up the controversial matter of the Dutch East Indies, Anglo-Italian Libya, and Anglo-French Indochina and Central Africa. The position of these colonies in the British system has been confused by an ongoing conflict with America, which insists that Britain does not have the right to extend its protective trade and customs measures to these possessions.

December 2nd: Despite Levi’s support, the Minority Emancipation Act narrowly fails to clear the required threshold in the Executive Committee. In lieu of Austro-Marxist representation, the committee now begins working on language rights reform.

December 8th: Henry Ford opens his first factory in China, to manufacture parts for shipment to Detroit. It will be located in the bustling Chinese section of Shanghai.

December 14th: Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia agree to introduce Standard English at the tertiary level of education.

December 21st: Conservative historian Friedrich Meinecke becomes the new president of the University of Chicago; by now, the college has become one of the most vital institutions of the German emigre community. At his inauguration speech, Meinecke details a series of curricular reforms aimed at making the university into a center of “Euro-American culture”. These include a series of mandatory “great books” courses, in which students will become acquainted with the “most profound works of pre-bolshevik European culture and civilization, so that their spirit and teachings may be preserved here, in America”.