Revolutionaries and World War II

Imperialism and the Myth of the "Democratic" War Against Fascism

(Young Spartacus Pages)

Part One

Correction Appended

We reprint below the first part of an edited version of the presentation given by Comrade Olly Laing at a Spartacus Youth Group forum in London on October 22, which appeared in the Young Spartacus pages of Workers Hammer No. 193 (Winter 2005-2006), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain.

This year marked the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the second world war. I’m sure anyone here who observed George Bush and [British prime minister] Tony Blair’s platitudes about the fight for freedom and democracy around the VE day commemorations was sickened by the hypocrisy of these imperialist butchers of Iraq. The notion that World War II was, for the British and American imperialists, a crusade of democracy against fascism is still used by them today to portray their imperialist wars abroad and war on civil liberties at home as progressive struggles against tyranny.

After the 7 July London bombings, “the spirit of the Blitz” was invoked by politicians and the bourgeois media to declare the unity of all Londoners against “terrorism”—supposedly today’s tyrannical threat to democracy. The purpose was to rally the population around the flag of national unity, so that they would accept the racist and ever-increasing draconian “anti-terror” legislation. But national unity is a lie. Capitalist society is based on the exploitation of the working class by the bourgeois ruling class, which fosters the poison of racism and other bigotry to divide the working class in order to maintain capitalist rule. Pushed by all manner of liberal and reformist ideologues, the idea that the second world war was a “people’s war” on the part of the “democratic” capitalist powers, with all classes standing together against fascism, is also a grotesque lie.

The Nazi regime was unparalleled in its barbarity. It systematically exterminated six million Jews, millions of Slavs and other peoples and strangled all working-class organisations, turning Europe into a living hell. But this did not make the Allied imperialist “democracies” anti-fascist fighters for freedom. To understand World War II, or the history of the twentieth century for that matter, it is essential to understand the significance of the Russian Revolution. In the period following the first world war, the political consciousness of all classes in Europe was dominated by the victory of the world’s first workers revolution in Russia in 1917. For those who gained any material advantage from the status quo, those with any ideological or religious connection to the bourgeois order, fear of communism dictated pro-fascist sympathies. In this period of economic and social crisis in Europe, where the facade of parliamentary democracy could no longer deceive and contain the militant organised working class, the bourgeoisie looked desperately to fascist reaction to smash the workers organisations and the threat of socialist revolutions. That imperialist pig [former British prime minister] Winston Churchill, today still celebrated as an “anti-fascist,” enthused over Mussolini’s fascists in 1927 with the declaration: “Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism” (quoted in Robert Black, Stalinism in Britain [1970]).

It was in Germany that the Nazis placed themselves at the head of European reaction. The Russian Revolution had failed to spread to the rest of Europe and humanity was made to pay for this with Nazi terror and the Holocaust. The German proletariat had suffered the defeat of a series of insurrectionary and semi-insurrectionary movements in the period 1919-23 due to the immaturity of the Communist leadership there. The German bourgeoisie resolved to crush the organised working class once and for all. To do this it turned to the Nazi party which, in its crusade against communism, also fed off the traditional anti-Semitism of the German ruling class and targeted the whole Jewish people as racially decadent “Jew-Bolsheviks.”

It was only when German imperialism, militarised under Hitler, re-emerged as an imperialist competitor to be reckoned with that the “democracies” began to be hostile to the Nazis. For all the capitalist countries involved, the second world war was no different in character from the first world war. It was an interimperialist struggle for redividing the booty of capitalist profits. The imperialist states of both the Nazi-allied Axis powers and the Allied “democracies” all fought to defend their “right” to oppress and exploit the masses of the world. As Leon Trotsky pointed out, the “imperialist democracies are in reality the greatest aristocracies in history. England, France, Holland, Belgium rest on the enslavement of colonial peoples” (“Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War,” May 1940).

For Britain, as the oldest imperialist power, the second world war was all about defending an empire whose dominance had already been encroached upon and eroded by other imperialist powers. The bloody British Empire’s prize possession was its severely oppressed Indian colony. As Trotsky remarked upon the hypocritical pretensions of the British ruling class about defending democracy:

“If the British government were really concerned about the flowering of democracy then a very simple opportunity to demonstrate this exists. Let the government give complete freedom to India. The right of national independence is one of the elementary democratic rights. But actually, the London government is ready to hand over all the democracies in the world in return for one tenth of its colonies.”

—“India Faced with
Imperialist War,” 25 July 1939

As for the United States, the society was founded on black chattel slavery whose racist legacy of black oppression was, and still is, an essential feature of American capitalism. Its interests in the war had nothing to do with the defence of “democracy” but everything to do with the defence and advancement of its imperialist sphere of influence in the world, particularly in the Pacific. From the Allied firebombings aimed specifically at the civilian populations of Dresden and Tokyo and the atomic mass murder in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to British imperialism’s deliberate starvation policies in its colonial domains like Bengal, the Anglo-American war was an imperialist crime against humanity.

For Defeat of Imperialism and Defense of the USSR

Trotskyists upheld the Leninist programme of revolutionary defeatism for all the capitalist states involved in the second interimperialist world war. Revolutionary defeatism is the position taken by Leninists in a war between rival imperialist blocs, where the working class has no side. It means hostility to all sides in a military conflict, with communists working for a revolutionary uprising of the proletariat on all sides. In a war between a colonial or semi-colonial country and an imperialist power, revolutionaries do have a side. This policy is known as revolutionary defensism, the position we of the International Communist League took in the 2003 war on semi-colonial Iraq, without giving any political support to Saddam Hussein. There was a just side to take, in defence of Iraq against U.S. and British imperialist attack. We fought for class struggle in the belly of the imperialist beasts, and for the blacking [workers refusing to handle goods] of military shipments in order to defend Iraq against the imperialist slaughter.

In an interimperialist war the defeat of an imperialist power—with the ruling class weakened, demoralised and totally discredited—opens up revolutionary possibilities. It is this situation that the programme of revolutionary defeatism strives to achieve. Revolutionary defeatism is best encapsulated by a slogan of the German revolutionary Marxist, Karl Liebknecht in World War I: “The main enemy is at home!” The aim being for the workers to focus their opposition against their “own” capitalist ruling class in order to turn the imperialist war between nations into a civil war for socialist revolution. The position was developed by Lenin in the first world war against the treachery of the reformist leadership of the so-called “socialist” parties of the Second International, who supported their “own” national bourgeoisies in the conflict. These agents of the capitalist class in the workers movement led the workers into the interimperialist slaughter, against their own class brothers, for the profits of their exploiters. The term Leninists use to describe the support of members of the workers movement for their own imperialist ruling class is “social-chauvinism.” As Lenin wrote in the midst of the first world war: “A revolutionary class cannot but wish for the defeat of its government in a reactionary war” (Socialism and War, 1915).

It was the betrayal of fundamental socialist principles by the social-chauvinist reformist leaders which necessitated the crucial split in the workers movement between the reformists, who had proven their loyalty to their national bourgeoisie, and the revolutionary internationalists who still represented the interests of the working class, socialism and therefore humanity. Lenin’s Bolsheviks broke with the Second International on the basis of the programme of revolutionary defeatism towards all the warring capitalist powers. It was this split that enabled the Bolshevik Party to uniquely lead the working class, supported by the peasantry, in a socialist revolution in 1917 against the Russian aristocracy, landlords and capitalists. The revolution pulled Russia out of the interimperialist conflict.

It was the existence and participation of the state that resulted from this revolution—the Soviet Union—that made one important difference in the strategy of revolutionaries in World War II. While being for the defeat of all capitalist states, Marxists were for the unconditional military defence of the Soviet Union. This was because the USSR was a workers state that had overthrown capitalist and landlord exploitation, as well as tsarist tyranny. It was based on a collectivised, planned economy where production was not determined by the capitalist profit motive. The revolutionary economic and social gains that produced full employment, free universal healthcare, education and affordable housing remained despite Stalinist degeneration. The revolutionary leadership under Lenin and Trotsky fought for world socialist revolution, but the conservative bureaucracy led by Stalin abandoned this programme when it usurped political power from the working class in 1924.

The rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy came about in the context of the abortion of the German revolution in 1923, which produced a wave of disillusionment amongst the people of the Soviet Union and a conservative cynicism about the prospects for the international extension of the revolution. The majority of the revolutionary Bolshevik workers who had led the Russian Revolution had either been killed in the civil war or co-opted into the bureaucracy. Lenin had been incapacitated by a stroke during Stalin’s rise to power, and died in January 1924. Motivated by maintaining their privileged position against the working people, the Stalinist bureaucracy had given up on world revolution in favour of peaceful coexistence with world imperialism under the utopian-reactionary dogma of “socialism in one country.” To consolidate this political counterrevolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy exiled, executed or imprisoned the best remaining proletarian revolutionary elements led by Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition.

USSR Liberated Europe
from Nazism Despite Stalin

The Stalinist misleadership seriously endangered the Soviet Union during World War II. Soviet Russia was Hitler’s main target and the Nazis almost succeeded in destroying it due to the sabotage of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Stalin’s regime had been consolidated by bloody purges in the 1930s in which many of the Red Army’s best officers were murdered, including Marshal Tukhachevsky, one of the most brilliant generals in the civil war of 1918-21. Stalin trusted the paper promises of his 1939 pact with Hitler. He ignored all warnings from Soviet spies of the coming Nazi invasion and even when it was clearly imminent he ordered the Soviet armed forces not to actively prepare for defence. But it was the Soviet Union, despite Stalin, that took on the vast majority of the Nazi war machine, smashed it and liberated Europe from fascist enslavement.

Up until the last year of the war in Europe, nearly 95 per cent of all German troops were engaged against the Soviet forces. By the time the Allied imperialists launched D-Day, the guts of the German army had already been destroyed, especially in the decisive battles of Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943. A truly remarkable example of the Soviet peoples’ endurance and heroism was the 900-day siege of Leningrad, where the city’s population was mobilised in a fight to the death to defend the city from the Nazis. Over 800,000 citizens died. For example, when a giant armaments factory was attacked by German artillery, the workers formed a battalion and went to the front.

In fact the D-Day “second front” was not motivated by finishing Hitler off, but by saving European capitalism from the Soviet Union. The policy of the imperialist “democracies” was to let the USSR, the real arch-enemy of the imperialists, go it alone against German imperialism so they would destroy each other. Only when it was clear that the Soviets were going to win the war did the Western Allies launch D-Day in fear of Europe succumbing to Soviet dominance. Around 28 million Soviet citizens sacrificed their lives in defending the world’s first workers state and liberating Europe from Nazism. It was testimony to the superiority of a collectivised, planned economy and the fact that the Soviet working peoples saw they had revolutionary gains to defend that the USSR had the resources and the will to defeat the powerful and barbaric Nazi war machine.

The Trotskyists of the Fourth International were the only force in World War II who had the revolutionary Leninist perspective of defeat for all of the imperialist powers and defence of the Soviet workers state. The policy of the Stalinised Communist parties internationally was determined by Stalin’s diplomatic manoeuvres with the imperialist powers, burying the interests of the international working class. For the first couple of months of war, when Stalin was in a pact with Hitler, the Stalinist parties declared it an interimperialist war. But even then their strategy was not Leninist revolutionary defeatism. Instead of fighting for civil war against the bourgeoisie, the Stalinists called for imperialist peace. In fact its “neutral” stance tilted towards Nazi Germany, with the Communist parties giving backhanded support to Hitler’s “peace initiatives.”

But after the USSR was invaded by the Nazis, the Stalinists transformed the nature of the imperialist “democracies” from being exploiters and oppressors of the world to lovers of “freedom” and “democracy.” The Stalinists were now for the defence of the British and American imperialist fatherlands and supported the war effort. Siding with their “own” ruling class in the war meant class-collaboration for the Communist parties of the Allied countries. The American Communist Party supported the racist internment of American citizens of Japanese origin and expelled those from its own ranks. The British Communist Party opposed independence for India for the duration of the war.

The size of the Trotskyist forces was small but their intervention was significant and heroic. British and American Trotskyists were persecuted and jailed for their anti-imperialist propaganda and support for working-class struggles during wartime. In Britain greedy bosses used the war as an excuse to drive down wages, particularly in the coal mines. The miners reacted with strikes which the British Trotskyists threw their forces behind, calling for the organisation of strike committees and all-out support for the miners, demanding nationalisation of the mines without compensation to the coalowners and under workers control. This was in stark contrast to the British Stalinists, who acted as strikebreakers. They insisted that the miners should go back to work as they were criminally damaging the British war effort and joined the capitalist government’s witch hunt against the Trotskyists, becoming the most enthusiastic in slandering the Trotskyists as Nazi agents.

While fighting for class struggle against the imperialist war, British and American Trotskyists were actively fighting for the defence of the Soviet Union. Members of the American then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP)—which is in no way a relation of the British Socialist Workers Party—volunteered as merchant seamen for the deadly Murmansk supply run to Russia, risking their lives in U-boat-infested waters doing their internationalist proletarian duty to aid the USSR. On these supply runs Trotskyists also carried revolutionary internationalist propaganda to inspire the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy that was undermining the defence of the Soviet workers state. As for the hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries in Stalin’s prison camps—among whom numbered many individual Trotskyists who survived the executions of 1937-38—they requested to be sent to the front to fight to the death against fascism. When Stalin refused to allow them to do so, they did what they could for the Soviet war effort by agreeing to the extension of the working day to twelve hours. In 1941 Stalin ordered a further wave of executions of political prisoners. Among 157 murdered on 11 September were Olga Kameneva, Trotsky’s sister, and Christian Rakovsky, formerly a leading member of Trotsky’s Left Opposition.

Fraternisation with the soldiers of the occupying armies is an essential wartime activity for revolutionaries in order to undercut national chauvinism. In Nazi-occupied Europe, French Trotskyists fraternised with working-class conscripts of the German army in a bid to get them to turn their guns the other way against the Nazi rulers. Courageously, they distributed an underground revolutionary newspaper in German, Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier) and built a cell within the German armed forces at Brest. For example, 65 heroic French and German Trotskyists were shot by the Nazis in 1943 when they were discovered. Rather than trying to evade forced labour in Germany, some French and Dutch Trotskyists went to work there in order to aid the hoped-for German workers revolution against the Third Reich. Such proletarian internationalist mobilisation of the German workers—in or out of uniform—against the Nazis was anathema to the Stalinist-led resistance in Europe. In alliance with the much smaller nationalist bourgeois resistance, they carried out the chauvinist and anti-working-class policy that the “only good German is a dead German.”

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Correction

The article "Revolutionaries in World War II" (WV No. 865, 3 March), reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 193 (Winter 2005-2006), incorrectly referred to Red Army commander Mikhail Tukhachevsky as a general. The Red Army was built on the principle of abolishing the rank of general, along with all other ranks of the tsarist officer caste. Officers' ranks were only restored to the Red Army in 1935 as part of the Stalinist bureaucracy's consolidation of political power (see "On the Abolition of Ranks in the Red Army," Workers Hammer No. 196, Autumn 2006). (From WV No. 881, 24 November.)