1934: Selected Chronicle of Events

1934: Selected Chronicle of Events ​

We know we have reached a new age when the accumulated sediment of the past, too, appears to have taken on an unfamiliar hue.

Ernst Bloch, Remnants in our Times (Berlin, 1934)

We know not what strange future we are hurtling toward, only that we cannot forestall its arrival.

Erich Voegelin, On Political Religion (New York, 1934)​

January 1st: Robert Moses takes office as Mayor of New York City. The 46-year-old urban developer, whose connections run deep into the émigré circles of the city, upset the Democratic machine’s candidate in the primary before narrowly defeating his Republican opponent in the general. On inauguration day he vows to use the mayoralty to remake the physical fabric of the city and to expand its public housing, which strains under the pressure of the new European arrivals.

January 5th: The 1st All-Union Congress of Bolivian Soviets convenes in La Paz. Two proposals compete for the young republic’s constitutional architecture. The first, backed by IntRevMar and the tin miners, imagines a unitary Soviet Republic that would gradually fold the Ayllu Congresses into the new state by converting them into “rural soviets.” The second, indigenist scheme envisions a confederal order of genuine dual power: the Ayllu Congresses sovereign over most rural territory, the soviets over the cities and the mines.

January 8th: The University of Hamburg is awarded the title to the estate of the late Aby Warburg, one of the most extensive libraries and photographic collections in the world. Unlike most exiles, Warburg evinced little open hostility toward the revolution, and even visited Hamburg in 1927, the year of the Ledebour government. Since then the collection has sat mostly in storage, a fraction of it sold back at discounted prices to Warburg himself.

January 17th: The All-Union Congress of Bolivian Soviets settles on a quasi-federal compromise. In regions with indigenous majorities, the Ayllu Congresses will administer housing, welfare, education, and the other essential services, but they will also elect deputies to the All-Union Congress, which will sit in La Paz as the national government.

January 29th: Yakov Sverdlov collapses for the second time in a week during a Sovnarkom meeting. The session is again brought to a halt as doctors are called into the conference room.

February 3rd: The Kingdom of Norway permits a socialist party to contest elections for the first time since the First Revolutionary Era. The reconstituted “Free Worker’s Party of Norway,” which has distanced itself from the insurrectionary methods of its banned precursor, will take a little under a quarter of the vote in October and enter the parliamentary opposition.

February 14th: Tristan Marof is elected the first chairman of the Bolivian Workers and Peasants Republic, but military power remains in the hands of Toro and his clique, who is appointed the Commissar of Defense.

February 18th: Vienna’s population tops 2.5 million, rebounding from a post-war nadir of under 1.7 million in 1921. Over the past five years the city has added several hundred thousand to its rolls, propelled by municipal housing construction and the arrival of immigrants from Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria. As Germany’s second city, Vienna is the key link between the socialist republic and the agricultural and raw-materials production of the east, as well as the recovering industries of Bohemia. It now occupies an economic niche with more than faint echoes of its Habsburg-era function: the commercial mediator between east and west.

February 22nd: The first keels of the World-Fleet are laid down at the Brooklyn Navy Yard: the date, Washington’s Birthday, was chosen by the Navy’s publicists.

February 24th: The “Photographic Street” is completed and unveiled to a crowd of bohemians, migrants, and retired workers in the western district of Charlottenburg, Berlin. An ambitious, years-long collaboration between the photomontage artists Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, the project layers magazine pages, book plates, and propaganda images across the façades of five city blocks. It won the residents’ approval only narrowly, and several façades the artists never gained permission to touch now carry posters denouncing them. By an unintentional, almost geological process, these posters have become part of the total artwork.

February 27th: Hari Singh, the Maharaja of Kashmir, is wounded by an assassin’s bullet during a tour of the Punjabi provinces.

March 1st: The Chamber of Princes convenes an emergency session on “princely security.” Demands for expanded Resident garrisons collide with British reluctance to commit further resources to India. A Lahore worker-peasant paper prints a mock actuarial table of princely life expectancy and is promptly seized.

March 3rd: News of the Brooklyn keels reaches Tokyo. In the Diet, the Kokumin Dōmei demands an immediate naval supplement, while the Ozaki government, which traded away much of its eastern naval posture during the Bolivian Crisis for commercial concessions, holds to its line, declining to reverse course over “hulls that will not float for three years.” The opposition press is not mollified.

March 12th: The 4th Congress of the International Union of Revolutionary Marxists opens in Rome. It is Italy’s first time hosting the Internationale, after Amsterdam, Moscow, and Berlin. Scheduled every four years, the Congress was postponed by two years over amidst the Bolivian Crisis; it now falls to the delegates to determine the fate of the substantial infrastructure built up during the period of international emergency. Optimism still runs high after the victories of 1933; one socialist delegate is heard to remark that “here, in the ruins of the slave-world, we will continue building a new socialist civilization which outlasts it.” Long tours of the Roman ruins have set the delegates’ minds on questions of culture, historical inheritance, and civilizational change, questions that will color the debates of the following fortnight.

March 14th: Conversation at the Internationale turns to the future of the Anti-Transit and Blockade Committee. It is folded into the existing anti-colonial apparatus, now renamed the Anti-Colonial Bureau in recognition of its size and importance, the “committee” reduced to a supervisory body at its apex. Over the following week, concerns mount about the regulation of this Bureau and about the criteria for IntRevMar support: the Anti-Transit Committee’s communiqués, though suggestive, never laid out what constitutes a “proletarian” movement.

March 19th: After five days of nearly continuous debate, one clear winner has emerged from the Internationale’s argument over the anti-colonial apparatus: Antonio Gramsci. It is the former Italian premier’s works — most of them published during his years as a private citizen — that furnish the vocabulary in which every proposal is now phrased. The Luxemburgist center demands that, to be eligible for IntRevMar assistance, the proletarian class must exercise “hegemony” over the party itself; the Kautskyans ask only that the Marxist party hold “broad civil hegemony over the remainder of the anti-colonial coalition,” permitting aid to non-Marxist parties within such a grouping; the Soviets, always the most flexible in these matters, require merely that non-Marxist parties accept “permanent and collegial co-hegemony” with socialist ones — the clear reference being to Bulgaria and Serbia, where popular peasant parties govern alongside socialist partners. Gramsci himself vacillates between the Kautskyan and Soviet positions, looking to thread the needle. A position close to the Soviet one was adopted in 1920, but after the debacle of the Indian Revolution, a more stringent line had typically prevailed despite no change in its formal position. Now, in 1934, IntRevMar finally has the opportunity to clarify its true intentions in a form it is accustomed to: an official statement of doctrine.

March 23rd: A formulation is settled upon. The wave of anti-colonial enthusiasm that has swept Europe since the Bolivian Crisis has weakened the stricter councilist positions, and the Rome Formula adopts, in substantial measure the Kautskyan one, attending to the doctrinal content of the party and its position in the political field rather than to its social composition. One rider is attached: far stricter supervision of any funds flowing to non-socialist parties. The restriction has a long future and its first consequences will arrive before the year is out.

March 28th: The 4th Congress closes. Besides settling doctrine, it approves a four-year expansion of the Anti-Colonial Bureau funded by sharply increased contributions from the member states. Wide-ranging programs are endorsed to gather knowledge of the colonized world, to fortify relations with existing parties, to entrench and extend the covert networks, and to train the coming generation of revolutionary cadres. Altogether, they will require a doubling of personnel, many of whom will need to be trained over the next few years. The demand for social scientists and marxist theoreticians will itself be sufficient to drive up enrollment in graduate programs across the bloc.

March 30th: The Central Executive Committee accepts Sverdlov’s resignation. Trotsky retains the chairmanship of the CEC and adds several committee chairmanships, Bukharin becomes chairman of Sovnarkom, and Kollontai consolidates her control over the Party. Atlantic correspondents, primed for a succession struggle, file increasingly baffled dispatches as the committee simply adjourns without naming a leader.

April 1st–10th: A decade of social-democratic reform culminates in Sweden and Denmark with the passage of bills partially “socializing” the remaining large private corporations. Under the new system, engineered in part on the advice of J. M. Keynes and a coterie of American and German expatriates, each government will gradually acquire a stake of roughly forty percent in the large firms, to be distributed into the accounts of private citizens. Citizens may trade these shares with one another on designated exchanges at prices the market sets, but the shares cannot be alienated to firms, funds, or foreigners, aggregated into controlling blocs, or pledged as collateral: every citizen holds a perpetual, personal claim on the dividends of capitalist growth. The American press predictably laments that Scandinavia has now well and truly gone Bolshevist, while the socialists retort that the act makes a mockery of true socialization. Less remarked upon is the simple, stunning fact that a coalition of the middle class and the workers has forced through a bill which decimates the power of capital while retaining every trapping of a private market, an institutional arrangement without historical precedent.

April 11th: The visit of the French foreign minister Marcel Bucard draws protests from Jewish communities across the United States. The antisemitic policies of the French government, which include special tax schedules, university quotas, and the recall of professional licenses, have driven the emigration of most of France’s remaining Jews. Though mostly Jewish, the protests are joined by a smattering of Irish and German Americans, a coalition reminiscent of the turbulent politics of the Bryan years. Robert Moses, who declines to endorse the street demonstrations, nonetheless lets them go forward in New York, and wonders publicly “if Valois could not be made to improve his behavior, given how well-provisioned he appears to be with American dollars.”

April 14th: The Federal Communications Board is created by act of Congress, consolidating licensing authority over the American airwaves; its first commissioners are immediately besieged by petitions against the “radio demagogues” of the drought states.

April 25th: The Oxford Union debates the motion “That this Government has harmed the credibility and position of the Empire during the Bolivian Crisis.” Speaking for the motion is Oswald Mosley. It carries by three votes, creating a national scandal.

May 2nd: The Psychoanalysis Panic begins. In the Viennese pages of Vorwärts, Karl Wedemeyer*, a former soldier of the Austro-Hungarian Army, recounts his half-decade in the psychoanalytic clinics of Sigmund Freud and other leading practitioners, alleging abuse and “psychic domineering.” The newspaper feuilletons open their assault on psychoanalysis as a “bourgeois science”; its beleaguered defenders, a mixture of heterodox leftists, bourgeois remnants, and English expatriates, muster in their magazines and cafés.

May 5th: The first great urban project of the Moses mayoralty begins: a massive highway jutting out from First Avenue and cutting diagonally across the Lower East Side, a fist of concrete aimed at the ethnic masses and the opening move in a planned refashioning of the proletarian quarter. Hygienic modern blocks are to replace the ramshackle tenements of the last century. Demolition starts on the 5th, and the displaced begin to stream across the river into Brooklyn.

May 9th: An unforgettable scene unfolds on the Vienna Ringstrasse, where several thousand workers have converged for the “March against Psychoanalytic Chauvinism.” They are addressed by none other than Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher and logician associated with the materialist critique of psychoanalysis. Carnap, staid, restrained, script in one hand and microphone in the other, struggles to address a crowd at all, bellowing out a theoretical and abstruse indictment which faults the doctrine for its “lack of conformity to the canons of the empirical sciences,” and suggests, at its most heated, that “its lack of theoretical precision provides the breathing room necessary for the entry of social prejudices.”

May 14th: Hearings begin. RSD politicians known to have undergone psychoanalytic treatment are called before the Vienna municipal council to testify. Was “psychic domineering” - the use of analytical technique to establish power over the patient - broadly practiced? The frequently bewildered witnesses deliver no single verdict. Some defend their analysts; others cannot help recalling a certain discomfort at the extension of the psychoanalytic gaze into the most private corners of their lives.

May 17th: Returning from a journey through rural Hungary, Croatia, and Bulgaria, Ernst Bloch publishes Remnants in our Times, a scathing attack at once on peasant backwardness and on the failure of the socialist societies to confront the agrarian question squarely.

May 23rd: The period of Centralist Reform in Italy ends when camera del lavoro elections in Tuscany and Liguria refuse Togliatti’s government a mandate, returning instead a dizzying array of Gramscians, left-Catholics, anarchists, and Bordigist internationalists. The localist-federative system has made party discipline nearly impossible to impose, and the anarchists, grown deeply skeptical of the experiment in socialism, now refuse to join any national coalition or even to attend most sessions of the All-Union Congress, making a governing majority harder still to assemble. The press in both Russia and Germany savages the “desiccated” and “archaic” Italian system; several periodicals charge that the camera del lavoro have bred patronage networks through which “non-proletarian” forces have entrenched themselves in Italian politics.

May 28th: The psychoanalytic panic concludes with the formation of a new supervisory body tasked with inspecting the conditions in psychoanalytic clinics and interviewing patients to ensure that psychoanalysis is practiced in a “collegial and egalitarian spirit”. They are given the power to revoke licenses, a decision which infuriates the psychoanalytic leadership, who complain of political interference; Freud himself will emigrate later that year.

June 2nd: A storm of dust blackens the sky over the Dakotas, and tens of thousands of farmers find their fields barren. The Dust Bowl has begun.

June 8th: The Moscow Workers’ Channel broadcasts a two-hour valedictory interview with the retired chairman. Sverdlov, unscripted and audibly tired, ranges over fifteen years of decisions; pressed on the improvisations of the revolution’s first winter, he offers the sentence that will be quoted for fifty years: “We did not know what we were doing.”

June 12th: A minority government is formed by the Italian Union of Revolutionary Marxists, resting informally on supply-and-confidence from the left wing of the Catholic Popular People’s Party. With Togliatti discredited, Gramsci and Bordiga both mount bids for the party leadership, and both fail; the former, bitterly disappointed by his party’s rejection, forswears public life and commits himself to proving his critics wrong in the abodes of theory. His supporters retain sway enough to deny Bordiga any real chance, and the leadership passes at last to the elusive Umberto Terracini, whose winning qualification is his studied distance from every existing fraction.

June 17th: Georges André Malraux publishes Man’s Fate (La Condition Humaine), an 800-page epic of the French Civil War. The book is swiftly banned in both Frances’, in one for its “defeatist pacifism,” in the other for its “bourgeois quietism.” In an irony lost on no one, it circulates quietly in eastern, socialist France under Italian imprints, an arrangement reminiscent of nothing so much as the Ancien Régime’s treatment of Enlightenment tracts.

July 16th: In commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Great War, a delegation of British veterans led by Robert Graves arrives in Strasbourg to meet German, French, and Italian veterans of the war, before traveling west to the memorial field where the Great Mutiny began fifteen years ago. The event receives muted, ambivalent treatment in the German and British press alike. The choice of the war’s anniversary rather than the mutiny’s is not lost on the German papers, though the Italians and the French socialists prove more sanguine about this “display of soldierly solidarity.”

July 21st: The German synthetics industry suffers a serious blow when chemists at the American firm DuPont beat it to the invention of nylon by roughly three months.

August 3rd: Citing Italian developments, the Revolutionary Worker’s Front (RAF) opens a formal inquiry into “Anarchist Entryism” within the party’s ultra-left caucus.

August 8th: On the strength of a substantial grant co-sponsored by the Anti-Colonial Bureau and the German government, the University of Hamburg founds the Institut für dialektische Kulturwissenschaft (Institute for the Dialectical Study of Culture), housed in what was once the Warburg Library. In a surprise appointment, the Soviet anthropologist David Zolotarev is named the institute’s first director; Ernst Cassirer, with his decades of experience in the library, is made secretary and archivist rather than granted a leadership position, owing largely to lingering questions about his political loyalties. The institute’s mission is “the comparative study of cultural form, with an eye to liberating the emancipatory potential intrinsic in each people’s culture.”

August 22nd: As the ten-thousandth “Dust Bowl refugee” reaches the West Coast, the Republican-dominated Congress narrowly rejects an agricultural relief bill opposed by President Vandenberg.

August 29th: The RAF inquiry is stonewalled by the workers of Stuttgart and Munich. The councilist left closes ranks and denounces the return of “the party discipline of the Ebert days.” Kurt Schumacher, an executive-committee “backbencher” and rising RSD politician, urges the RAF to expel its “un-proletarian and un-Marxist elements, just as we have refused collaboration with Bernstein’s revisionists since the shameful 1927 compromises.”

September 14th: Jan Appel, leader of the RAF’s councilist left, addresses the executive committee with a warning: the investigation of the anarchists has already begun to extend to loyal, committed communists. His speech causes uproar within the RAF, and the activist base begins to turn against the inquiry.

September 21st: Amid rising international tensions, plans for a 1935 World’s Fair in London are placed on indefinite hold, but the first Olympic Games since the Great War remain set to open in New York in 1936, with the socialist nations at work on devising an international Spartakoid in response.

September 28th: The attempt to expel the anarchists collapses spectacularly as several regional party executives publicly refuse orders from the center. The inquiry is quietly dropped.

October 4th: Ground is broken at Flushing Meadows, Queens, for the stadium of the 1936 Games. Mayor Moses, who lobbied ferociously for the site, has annexed the Olympics to his building program, which includes parkways, pools, and arenas rising out of ash dumps.

October 11th: The Anti-Colonial Bureau, invoking the Rome Formula’s supervision rider for the first time, suspends disbursements to the Punjab Defense Committee pending a full audit of its non-socialist affiliates and a study of the “prospects for socialist hegemony in Punjab”. The committee’s Marxist partners protest that the audit punishes precisely the coalition-building the Formula was written to permit. The suspension is technical, provisional, and quietly understood on all sides to be a precedent: from now on, the auditors will help set the tempo of coalition politics.

October 15th: Norwegian elections. The Free Worker’s Party takes just under a quarter of the vote, as forecast, and enters opposition in good order; Mowinckel retains his government with agrarian support. London reads the result as vindication of managed re-legalization. Berlin’s press, more quietly, notes that the Norwegian question has been reopened rather than closed.

October 23rd: Kollontai concludes a three-week tour of the Ukrainian countryside, her first sustained undertaking as chair of the Party.

November 1st–6th: The fifteenth anniversary of the Great Mutiny of 1919. The Berlin Radio Syndicate broadcasts The Guns For Our Generals, an hour-long montage of veterans’ voices recounting the crucial first days of November 1919. The program is heard in listening halls across the bloc and attendance figures are published the following week.

November 6th: The “Prairie Break” elections. Falling agricultural prices, the Dust Bowl disaster, and perceived Republican indifference to the common farmer combine to vault the neo-Bryanite People’s Party into power across the Great Plains. Its congressional delegation climbs from a little under twenty to over sixty-five, while Republican redoubts in the upper South hold only narrowly, saved by vote-splitting between Democrats and the People’s Party. Yet for all its victories in the agrarian midwest, the party fails to breach the Republican cities: it remains a party of the farmer rather than the worker.

November 9th: A new bill is introduced in Congress offering relief to Dust Bowl victims and subsidies to struggling smallholders. Vandenberg declines to say whether he will support it.

November 13th: Facing the prospect of a prolonged period of militarization, the Norwegian prime minister Johan Mowinckel and his Swedish counterpart Ivar Vennerström meet in Gothenburg to discuss defense cooperation. Both governments face critics who charge them with subordinating foreign policy to the dictates of greater powers. In Norway, the middle classes are nearly unanimous in wishing to avoid the expense of a military state; in Sweden, workers and the government’s rural allies alike recoil from the prospect of the long Norwegian border becoming a militarized flashpoint.

November 21st: After a week of negotiation, Mowinckel and Vennerström reach an agreement. The 1,600-kilometre frontier will be demilitarized: soldiers, fortifications, and military installations, whether domestic or foreign, are banned from a strip forty kilometres deep on either side, with a joint Swedish–Norwegian commission empowered to perform compliance inspections. The accord, which also caps army expansion and aircraft procurement, does not meaningfully disturb either country’s place within its bloc: Norway will continue to base British destroyers on its southern coast, essential to the Atlantic Union’s watch against a naval breakout, and Sweden retains its technological, commercial, and naval agreements with the socialists. But it is enough to allay public fears, and Mowinckel and Vennerström return home to thunderous approbation.

Decades later, diplomatic historians will discover that the basic shape of the agreement was agreed upon within the first day of negotiations, but that each nation purposely drew it out in an attempt to dissuade their bloc partners from concluding that they were rushing into detente.

December 14th: Private memos are circulated in several Swiss banking circles, showing that inter-bloc trade has increased considerably since its nadir eleven years ago, with fifty-two percent of it moving through Swiss transshipment. This has been the sixth consecutive year of expansion, which continued even amidst the Bolivian crisis. Economists will later mark this as a plateau: this is the last year of the growth that began in 1928, and the decline which sets in thereafter is the clearest commercial sign of the fraying foundations of the international order.

December 18th: In New York, the publishing arm of the Jewish Bund votes to commission a guidebook to the great cities of socialist Europe, for release the following year. The prospectus is pointed: a guide to the cities where the worker’s quarter is being built up rather than torn down. Across the river, Moses’s crews continue clearing the Lower East Side.

December 20th: Hungarian and Croatian trade delegations in Berlin lodge a joint complaint: Soviet collectivized grain, now arriving in quantity under the new procurement stability, is crowding their exports out of German markets. The Trade Commissariat promises a study.

December 25th: The first royal Christmas broadcast. George V’s voice is carried over the new Empire shortwave chain to Ottawa, Delhi, Nairobi, and Sydney, the Crown’s answer, the Times notes approvingly, to “the demonstrated reach of seditious broadcasting from the continent.”