Revolutionaries and World War II

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

Part Two

(Young Spartacus pages)

We reprint below the second and concluding part of an edited version of the presentation given by Comrade Olly Laing at a Spartacus Youth Group forum in London on 22 October, which appeared in the Young Spartacus pages of Workers Hammer No. 193 (Winter 2005-2006), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain. The first part of this presentation appeared in WV No. 865, 3 March.

Though the Leninist position of revolutionary defeatism of all the capitalist powers was the main thrust of Trotskyist policy during World War II, there was a political deviation from this perspective. Based on their hatred of fascism, the British and American working classes were overwhelmingly supportive of the conscription drive and war effort against Nazi Germany. By 1940 the Nazis had occupied most of Western Europe in a matter of months and stood across the Channel—less than 30 miles from Britain. There was enormous pressure on the American and particularly the British Trotskyists to accommodate to the misguided consciousness amongst the workers—pushed by the reformists such as the Labour Party in Britain—that they must support their so-called “democratic” bourgeoisie in a war against the fascist powers. The “Proletarian Military Policy” (PMP), first adopted by the American SWP in September 1940, was a partial capitulation to this consciousness.

It’s a fact that Trotsky authored the first expression of what became the PMP. However, he was murdered by a Stalinist assassin shortly before its formal adoption and didn’t have the chance to defend or reconsider the PMP in the debate raging within the Fourth International. Observing the rapid advance of the Nazi armies in Europe, Trotsky saw how the European bourgeoisies had given up the fight and accommodated the Nazis very easily. This was particularly so in France whose bourgeoisie was, if anything, even more anti-Semitic than the German ruling class and wanted to smash the organised working class just as much. Generalising this experience, Trotsky predicted that the remaining “democracies” would soon appease Hitler or turn into military dictatorships, ripping off their democratic mask. This would quickly expose their reactionary character to the working class which, armed and with military training from the capitalist state itself, would direct its anti-fascist and democratic sentiment against its “own” imperialist rulers. But this underestimated the extent to which the British and American imperialists would use the facade of a democratic crusade against fascism to further their own war aims: a facade which the PMP complemented. We of the ICL are unique today in opposing the PMP. And now I’ll tell you why.

The central demand of the PMP was to call for trade-union control of the compulsory military training being carried out by the imperialist state, with “federal funds for the military training of workers and worker-officers.” The implication that working-class organisations could control a function of the bourgeois army was wildly utopian. It went against the Leninist understanding of the state. The military is part of the “special bodies of armed men” that make up the state. The police, prisons and army in a capitalist state are there to defend capitalist property relations and the rule of the bourgeoisie against any threat to its order, including the working class—the ultimate potential threat. These oppressive institutions cannot be reformed to act in the interests of the workers. They must be smashed and replaced by organs of working-class rule through a socialist revolution. Revolutionaries fight for democratic rights for the soldiers within the bourgeois military, and for the forming of soldiers soviets, or councils, to further a split within the army, with the rank-and-file soldiers coming over to the side of the workers in a socialist revolution against the bourgeoisie. And if the working class is conscripted, revolutionaries will go into the military with the rest of their generation in order to further this split. But this does not mean revolutionaries support the imperialists’ conscription drive and war effort.

Calling for the funding of military training, even if under the control of the trade unions, the PMP was in brazen opposition to the slogan of revolutionaries in the first world war: “Not a man and not a penny” for the imperialist military. It went against the elementary Leninist revolutionary defeatism during interimperialist war that the main enemy was the working class’s “own” imperialist bourgeoisie. Ultimately the PMP could only be for the trade unions to control and to make more efficient the American and British imperialist war effort.

Trotsky was wrong in his support for the PMP in 1940—in fact his and the Fourth International’s positions in the build-up to and early months of World War II are the most effective polemics against the PMP. In his 1934 polemic “War and the Fourth International” Trotsky tears apart the bleatings of reformists about the need to support the bourgeoisies of the democratic countries in order to fight fascism. He wrote:

“The sham of national defense is covered up wherever possible by the additional sham of the defense of democracy. If even now, in the imperialist epoch, Marxists do not identify democracy with fascism and are ready at any moment to repel fascism’s encroachment upon democracy, must not the proletariat in case of war support the democratic governments against the fascist governments?

“Flagrant sophism! We defend democracy against fascism by means of the organizations and methods of the proletariat. Contrary to the Social Democracy, we do not entrust this defense to the bourgeois state.... And if we remain in irreconcilable opposition to the most ‘democratic’ government in time of peace, how can we take upon ourselves even a shadow of responsibility for it in time of war when all the infamies and crimes of capitalism take on a most brutal and bloody form?”

The PMP went against the entire nature of Trotsky and the Fourth International’s otherwise heroic and revolutionary defeatist intervention into the war. In the “democratic” imperialists’ colonies the Trotskyists went nowhere near the PMP. Within a few weeks of Britain’s announcement that India was at war with the Axis powers, 90,000 workers were on strike against the war in Bombay, with strikes and mass meetings in Calcutta and elsewhere. If the Trotskyists had demanded, during this strike wave, that the British imperialists fund military training under trade-union control so that the Indian masses could “fight fascism” and defend British “democracy,” it would have meant their virtual dissolution into the British administration. This most starkly demonstrates the absurdity and the anti-internationalist parochialism of the PMP. It only had application for the Anglo-American imperialist centres, not their enslaved colonies or, of course, the fascist and military dictatorships of the Axis powers.

In 1942 a gigantic movement for independence known as the “Quit India” movement swept the subcontinent. Inspired by Japanese military victories in Britain’s Far East colonies, barricades went up in the streets of Bombay and strikes erupted with millions shouting “Long Live the Revolution!” The British retaliated by killing thousands, bombing villages and interning tens of thousands in concentration camps. The Trotskyists of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India intervened heroically calling for “Down with imperialism! Down with the imperialist war!”

If British imperialism’s war effort had been damaged by colonial uprisings abroad and working-class struggle at home, it would have been a good thing for revolutionaries and the masses of the world—including the British working class. As our comrades pointed out in “Documents on the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’” [Prometheus Research Series No. 2, February 1989]: “far better that intense proletarian class struggle and colonial uprisings paralyze the British and American war effort, perhaps leading to transient German victories, than that the proletariat implicitly support the Allied armies by demanding better trained and equipped soldiers!” The pamphlet goes on to explain:

“If mass popular opposition to the war had disrupted the British war effort, leading Hitler to attempt a Channel crossing (as it was, he never mounted a serious effort), the German conquerors would have inherited the problems of the British bourgeoisie, compounded by national resentment at the foreign invader. The colonial slaves of the British Empire would doubtless have taken advantage of a humiliating British defeat to declare their independence. It is not hard to imagine the revolutionary world scenario which would have ensued, infecting even the soldiers of the Wehrmacht [the German army], many of whom were sons of Social Democratic and Communist workers.”

For anyone who thinks winning the worker-soldiers of the German army over to the overthrow of Nazism is just wishful thinking, I should point out that 80,000 German soldiers were shot or hanged by Nazi authorities for insubordination or desertion during the war. As well as the Trotskyist cells I have already mentioned, there are other instances of proletarian resistance and solidarity within the German army that we know about. One example was reported by the American SWP’s newspaper, the Militant. It printed two letters in 1942 from a socialist worker drafted into the German army. He had spent three weeks in Warsaw at the end of 1941 where he had made contact with Jewish Bundists and Polish socialists, for whom he raised 500 marks from his underground resistance group upon returning to Berlin.

Many may think that the Trotskyist position of turning the imperialists’ second world war into a series of socialist revolutions against all the capitalist powers, even if courageous and principled, never had any chance of happening. But there were pre-revolutionary situations around the world during and because of World War II. Proving the policy of revolutionary defeatism correct, the military defeat of the fascist Italian bourgeoisie in 1943 led to the Italian working class rising up and taking their revenge against Mussolini and his ilk. They seized arms and formed workers councils, creating a pre-revolutionary situation against the capitalist order. Similar revolutionary opportunities occurred with the defeat of the Nazi-collaborator regime in occupied France. But it was the betrayals of Stalinism which strangled these revolutionary opportunities. Desperate not to see the overthrow of capitalism by workers revolution in the West, the Stalinist bureaucracy ordered the re-emerging Communist parties in Italy and France to instruct the workers to disarm and join the governments of the supposedly progressive “democratic” bourgeoisie.

Had the workers made their revolution, under the kind of leadership the Trotskyists were fighting to build, there was every chance that the working-class conscripts of the American and British armies in Italy and France would have refused to crush them and indeed supported them. A revolutionary appeal to these soldiers, particularly the black GIs who faced vicious racist discrimination in the forces and at home, could have split the base of the armies from the officers, winning it over to the cause of socialist revolution. Stalin also allowed the British imperialists to crush the Greek Communist Party-led uprising at the end of the war. After the defeat of the Japanese imperialists, the Vietnamese Trotskyists—with a mass following amongst the workers—led the 1945 Saigon insurrection against the reinvading French colonialists who were supported by British forces. The uprising was put down and the Trotskyist forces massacred, not only by the French and British imperialists but above all by the Vietnamese Stalinists.

Even though the PMP was adopted in theory in America by the SWP, in practice—because it was utopian and because the American Trotskyists did focus on opposing the American imperialist war effort—it never came to anything.

There were two Trotskyist groups in Britain at the start of the war: the Revolutionary Socialist League and the Workers International League. The Revolutionary Socialist League opposed the PMP, correctly arguing that it was a concession to social-patriotism. The Workers International League, however, embraced it—though there was opposition to it within the party. The Workers International League remained revolutionary defeatist towards British imperialism in its activities. It highlighted British atrocities in its colonies during the war and called for their immediate unconditional independence. It actively supported strikes and made clear in a headline from its newspaper Socialist Appeal: “Capitalist Second Front will crush European Revolution.” But its support for the PMP did blunt its revolutionary propaganda and provided for a current that was conciliatory to social-chauvinist defensism of British imperialism. There is a flyer from the time for a meeting of the Workers International League. It says workers control of production is the answer to the chaos of the war effort. It doesn’t mention any opposition to the imperialist war. At a 1943 Workers International League conference, one of its leading members, Ted Grant, went so far as to voice his support for an army of British imperialism. He declared: “We have a victorious army in North Africa and Italy, and I say, yes. Long Live the Eighth Army, because that is our army” (quoted in Sam Bornstein/Al Richardson, War and the International [1986]). Grant was talking at a time when there was working-class dissent in the Eighth Army. But it was still very much an army of British imperialism. Grant’s statement is an example of the seeds of social-chauvinist and reformist perspectives that were to grow and contribute to producing the many Labourite outfits sometimes referring to themselves as Trotskyists in the decades since the war.

The Socialist Party: Parodying the PMP

Ted Grant went on to lead a reformist outfit called Militant, which was characterised by being deeply buried inside the Labour Party until it was thrown out in the early 1990s. The [British] Socialist Party of today has its origins in the Militant group and still holds to Militant’s reformist social-chauvinist tradition. In a Socialist Party meeting a week after the 7 July [London] terrorist bombings, Socialist Party speakers, including its leader Peter Taaffe, participated in an orgy of social-patriotic ravings about the need for the working class to unite against terrorism and war. They said what was needed was for the trade unions to help in organising a campaign for this unity. This sentiment was repeated in its newspaper for the next four weeks in a row, with the front page spelling out such slogans as: “No to terrorism, no to war” and “Workers’ unity against war and terrorism.” We Marxists of the International Communist League of course condemn all terrorist attacks against innocent civilians. But this condemnation does not mean echoing the British ruling class’s own campaign for mobilising national unity “against terrorism,” which is aimed at maintaining class peace and arming the state to the teeth with reactionary racist “anti-terror” legislation. The Socialist Party’s demands for demonstrations to be built by trade unions and working-class organisations under the slogans “United against terror” and “United against war” conceal the fact that the biggest threat to the working class and oppressed at this moment in time is not terrorism but the “anti-terror” laws.

In providing a thin proletarian veneer for the ruling class’s own aims of national unity in the “war against terrorism,” it is as though the Socialist Party are acting out their own bizarre parody of the PMP. Instead of trade-union control of the war “against fascism,” today they are practically calling for trade-union control of the “war on terror.” The difference being, of course, that the PMP was a result of tremendous pressures on Trotskyists resulting from the Nazi victories and a desire of the working class to fight fascism. The Socialist Party’s unity campaign against “terrorism and war” is the result of its standard reformist practice of shamelessly adapting to the most backward moods and fears within the working class which are conditioned by bourgeois scaremongering.

In contrast we communists of the Spartacus Youth Group and International Communist League base ourselves on the principles laid out by Trotsky at the founding conference of the Fourth International:

“To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s programme on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour of action arrives—these are the rules of the Fourth International.”

This is our tradition and this is why we honour those Trotskyists in World War II who swam against the stream in the fight against imperialism—fascist and “democratic”—and the struggle for socialist revolution, the only road for the liberation of humanity. A struggle which today we fight to carry forward.