Prometheus Research Library

A Working Archive of American and In­ter­na­tion­al
Marxist History, Documentation, and Related Interests

	Printable version	HOME	February 1989
	Prometheus Research Series 2

• Introduction

• Appendix: “Proletarian Military Policy”

• Appendix: “Trotskyists in WW II,”
  by Pierre Vert

• Socialist Workers Party

• Max Shachtman’s Polemics

• Britain: Resolutions from the
  founding conference of the
  Rev­olu­tionary Com­mu­nist Party, March 1944

Editions La Brèche

Martin Widelin, founded underground anti-
Nazi newsletter addressed to German soldiers.

• France: Com­mit­tees for the
  Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al, April 1941

• Bibliography

no credit

Piet van 't Hart, leader of the Com­mit­tee of Rev­olu­tionary Marxists, who fought clandestinely during the German oc­cu­pa­tion of Holland, 1940-1945.

published by Spartacist Publishing Co.

Introduction

“Trotskyist Policies on the Second Imperialist War--Then and In Hindsight” (continued)

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Continued from left column

that the Red Army would not stand in the way of a capitalist postwar Europe, they also believed it unlikely that Soviet soldiers could be made to turn their guns on an insurgent German proletariat. Thus they thought that the chances of a successful German revolution would be better if the Red Army entered Germany before the Allies.⁷⁷

The Shape of the Postwar World

The British and American imperialists were able to enter Europe as “liberators” because they had not been forced to resort to much overt and felt military dictatorship during the war. They never had to deal with a recalcitrant domestic population; the morale of their armies remained high, and this played no small role in their victory. The internment of the Japanese Americans, the brutal British repression of the “Quit India” movement, the even more destructive Bengal famine which the British created following the repression—these acts paled beside the genocidal horror of the Holocaust, revealed to the world first as the Red Army advanced into Poland, and especially as the Allied armies advanced into Germany. When the Allied imperialists landed in Italy, the American atom-bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still two years away. Yet even this atrocity, while it represented a giant leap in the murderous art of killing large populations, is on a qualitatively different plane from the Holocaust—the selective killing of a predesignated people organized on a factory basis.

But if the British and American bourgeoisies had succeeded in hiding their imperialist war aims behind a “dem­ocrat­ic” and “anti-fascist” lie, this was also thanks to Stalin. Political support of the Com­mu­nist Parties for the Allied imperialist war effort after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 had helped the imperialists maintain their lies. And if the war remained overwhelmingly popular in the metropolitan centers on the Allied side, it is also necessary to note that the sordid nationalist banner under which the Stalinist-led Partisans conducted the Resistance struggle did nothing to further revolt among the population of the Axis powers. There was no organized mass opposition in Germany, and the Japanese masses seemed to remain loyal to the state to the end.

Nonetheless, it was the Soviet Red Army which broke the back of Hitler’s war machine, though the British and American ruling classes now try to pretend otherwise. Churchill and Roosevelt had to share the world with Stalin, and the military relationship of forces was codified in the agreements made at Yalta and Potsdam. The Russians had lost 20 million dead and probably a quarter of their industrial capacity, while the North American continent remained unscathed by the war. As the founding conference of the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al had foreseen, the United States emerged as the predominant power, economically and militarily. The U.S. bourgeoisie was able to dole out the rations it chose to the bourgeoisies of Europe, while granting the British the “special relationship” of junior partner.

Much has been made of the supposed “ca­tas­tro­phism” of Trotsky’s prognosis that a revo­lu­tion­ary wave would follow the end of WWII. But as Trotsky himself noted:

Every historical prognosis is always con­di­tion­al, and the more concrete the prognosis, the more conditional it is. A prognosis is not a promissory note which can be cashed on a given date. Prognosis outlines only the definite trends of the development. But along with these trends a different order of forces and tendencies operate, which at a certain moment begin to predominate.⁷⁸

Revolution is ever a desperate solution to a desperate situation, and should the situation diminish, the possibility of a rev­olu­tion­ary solution vanishes. If proletarian revolutions failed to materialize at the end of the war it was because of the extreme weakness of the Trotskyist forces, the class treason of the Stalinists, and the fact that the imperialist bourgeoisies had also learned some lessons from WWI: the victorious imperialist governments did not leave their defeated class “brothers” with weak and ineffectual governments. The Allied oc­cu­pa­tions of Germany and Japan, and furthermore the partition of Germany, were designed to prevent the outbreak of any social struggle threatening bourgeois rule. When a massive wave of strikes and factory oc­cu­pa­tions broke out in Japan in 1946, it was crushed by the combined forces of the Japanese government and the Allied Supreme Command. In early 1947 there were massive demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of workers in the Ruhr, the industrial heartland of Germany. The workers demanded the expropriation without compensation of the mining, steel and chemical industries and popular control over food distribution, which was in the hands of the Allied oc­cu­pa­tion forces. When the Ruhr strikes spread, the French, British and American commands outlawed all strikes and protests, under threat of the death penalty.⁷⁹

In Italy and France the bourgeoisie succeeded in restabilizing its class rule only with the aid of the Stalinists who entered the postwar governments, literally disarming the war-weary and rev­olu­tion­ary-minded masses. In Greece the British army smashed an incipient social revolution.

In South Asia in the early years of the war the armies of the French, British, Americans and Dutch had been shattered by the Japanese. The Asian subjects of the European colonial powers had generally welcomed the Japanese victories (Sukarno collaborated with the Japanese in Indonesia, while Bose’s Indian National Army actually fought alongside the Japanese), but oc­cu­pa­tion generally put an end to any illusions about the beneficence of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In the British and French colonies of the Middle East the hatred of the masses for their imperialist exploiters was such that there was massive and demonstrative pro-Axis sentiment—the Allies maintained a hold over their possessions only with bloody repression. As the war ended, national independence struggles spread throughout the colonial world.

At this juncture the Anglo-American imperialists were denied the opportunity to fully implement their victory over the Axis powers by repossessing their colonies: a massive “troops home” movement swept their armies at the end of the war. The Trotskyists, few as they were, participated in this movement. When the troops impatiently demanded an early and rapid demobilization, the imperialists were unable to justify continued militarization on “anti-fascist” grounds—they had to give way to the desire of the troops to go home. American troops withdrew from China in 1947, with the civil war still raging there. The British were forced to give way to demands for Indian independence, and also had to withdraw their armies from the Near East. The Dutch attempt to reconquer Indonesia failed, and they were forced to recognize an independent republic in 1949.

The leadership of the Soviet degenerated workers state did not inspire the struggles of the oppressed masses against colonial rule at the end of the Second World War. Stalin feared the colonial uprisings almost as much as the imperialists did—he saw no reason to upset the postwar division of the world agreed to at Yalta. The imperialist Allies were welcomed back to Vietnam by the Stalinists. The Viet Minh worked hand in hand with the British and French to suppress the Trotskyist-led Saigon uprising in August 1945, and it was the Viet Minh who were responsible for arresting and executing the Trotskyist leaders. (Little more than a year later the Viet Minh found themselves under attack by the French imperialists, who bombed Haiphong in November 1946, thus initiating a campaign of escalating provocation which led directly to a relentless thirty years of war.) French CP leader Maurice Thorez was a vice president in the postwar De Gaulle cabinet which savagely suppressed a nationalist uprising in Algeria in 1945, bombing villages and killing tens of thousands. But Stalin’s attempt to conciliate the Allies by betraying other peoples’ revolutions did not prevent the imperialists from turning on him. The capitalists had never given up their desire to reconquer the one-sixth of the globe ripped away from the capitalist world market by the October Revolution. And they could not fail to see in the military and industrial might of the USSR the ultimate source of all threats to their class rule.

Churchill, ousted from the British government by the massive Labour victory in the June 1945 election, had inaugurated the Cold War with his famous “iron curtain” speech in March 1946. But public opinion could not be changed, nor weaponry and renewed armies created, overnight. Meanwhile the imperialists made much of Stalin’s refusal to integrate the economy of the Soviet occupied zone with that of the rest of Germany. In 1947 the United States both inaugurated the Marshall Plan and sent military aid and advisers to Greece and Turkey under the “Truman Doctrine.” There was a not-so-implicit military threat behind these moves (the Red Army still stood on the borders of both countries) and this was concretized by the coming together of the NATO alliance. So Stalin decided to liquidate capitalism in most of Eastern Europe, creating a cordon sanitaire between the USSR and the imperialist armies and establishing a series of states qualitatively similar to that of the Soviet Union. The “Free World’s” loss of East Europe sent the imperialists into a frenzy. Then, in 1949, the Chinese Kuomintang collapsed in front of Mao Tse-tung’s peasant-based army. The Americans had fought and defeated Japan for the right to exploit China—now they found themselves unable to intervene to stop the Chinese Revolution. This determined Washington on a course of military confrontation and by 1950 it was possible to fight over Korea.

Military conflicts since WWII have largely been expressions of American im­pe­ri­al­ism’s overriding hostility to the Soviet degenerated workers state, and especially of im­pe­ri­al­ism’s hostility toward new overturns of capitalist property relations. The imperialist-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs failed to throw back the Cuban Revolution, and since 1961 massive Soviet economic and military assistance has helped the Cuban deformed workers state maintain itself, 90 miles offshore, a constant thorn in the side of the U.S. imperialist colossus. But above all it is the thirty-year war of imperialist aggression against the Vietnamese Revolution, protracted by Stalinist capitulation at the Geneva negotiating table in 1954, which epitomizes im­pe­ri­al­ism’s desperate attempts to maintain its bloody grip on the world. The world proletariat owes a debt of gratitude to the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants who inflicted a humiliating defeat upon the United States, a blow from which U.S. im­pe­ri­al­ism has yet to recover. The “Vietnam syndrome” prevented the U.S. from unleashing the full force of its military machine against the Sandinista insurrection in 1979, though the U.S. has since kept up a relentless and devastating campaign of military and economic pressure on the unstable petty-bourgeois government of Nicaragua.

Most of the struggles against colonial rule in the postwar period have been led by petty-bourgeois nationalist forces who have sought to maintain capitalist property relations, cutting a deal with the imperialists (the Algerian FLN, the liberation movements in the former Portuguese African colonies). Marxists have militarily supported the independence forces in these struggles, while fighting for rev­olu­tion­ary proletarian organization and leadership. Since Marxists have been defensist on the side of the anti-imperialist forces, no one claiming the mantle of Trotskyism has seriously suggested the application of the “Proletarian Military Policy” on the imperialist side.

Confronting WWIII

Today the threat of world war brings with it the spectre of thermonuclear holocaust. The best scientific minds can only speculate as to what might result if even only a small fraction—several hundred to a thousand—of the nuclear warheads in current arsenals were detonated over urban areas. The destruction wrought by two small fission bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would pale in comparison to that caused by several modern higher-yield fusion weapons.

Those humans who might survive the immediate blast and its aftermath would be faced with lethal levels of radioactivity spreading far beyond the targeted cities. In addition to the fallout spread globally by prevailing winds, firestorms would throw great clouds of dust and ash into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and leading to a “nuclear winter.” A similar climatic catastrophe caused by meteor impact is thought to have led to mass extinctions 65 million years ago. The effects could conceivably range from the partial destruction of human civilization, to the total reduction of humanity to a qualitatively lower level of social organization, up to the extinction of higher mam­ma­li­an life on the planet. What is clear is that some truly awful catastrophe is impending. Given the increasing probability that the outbreak of a major war would mean uncontrolled, vastly ex­panding nuclear exchanges, one ought to look grimly at the greater causes and greater consequences. But even the least is a catastrophe.

However, that doesn’t mean they won’t push the button. World im­pe­ri­al­ism has already brought human civilization to the brink of the abyss with two world wars. A rational human being would not consciously embark on a course leading to nuclear world war. But capitalism long ago created economic forces which strain against the boundaries of the nation-states in which they are fettered: world im­pe­ri­al­ism isn’t rational, and neither are the men who rule over us in its interest. As Trotsky wrote in “War and the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al”:

The fear of the consequences of a new war is the only factor that fetters the will of im­pe­ri­al­ism. But the efficacy of this brake is limited....All governments fear war. But none of the governments has any freedom of choice. Without a proletarian revolution, a new world war is inevitable.

While the irreconcilable hostility of U.S. im­pe­ri­al­ism to the Soviet Union is the main factor now posing the threat of WWIII before humanity, one cannot ignore interimperialist contradictions. The strength of Japanese industry and world trade cannot be suppressed peacefully. And there is evidence that German im­pe­ri­al­ism is ready for renewed imperialist adventure.

The threat of nuclear war is real and immediate. We don’t have a lot of time left before an imperialist government (or one of its desperate and embattled junior partners) triggers a world cataclysm.

The world bourgeoisie has at its disposal enormous political experience and economic reserves. If the history of the 20th century proves anything it is this: within the social context there is no situation in which the bourgeoisie cannot prevail, if there does not exist a rev­olu­tion­ary party capable of wresting power from its hands. Rev­olu­tion­ary proletarian parties are not built overnight: it took two generations of ferment in the Russian intelligentsia, the dress rehearsal of 1905, and years of patient underground work among the proletarians of the tsarist empire to produce Lenin’s Bolsheviks. But if the small forces which adhere today to the rev­olu­tion­ary program of Lenin and Trotsky do not succeed in forging themselves into parties with the experience, will and authority among the masses to lead a successful proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries, there will be no future for humanity.

A rev­olu­tion­ary in­ter­na­tion­alist leadership of the USSR would greatly facilitate working-class revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. But it will take a political revolution, in which the working masses of the Soviet Union oust the bureaucratic caste which usurped power in 1924 and take power back into their hands, to return the Kremlin to the road of Lenin and Trotsky. A successful political revolution in the Soviet Union also requires the forging of a new Bolshevik party, based on the program of the early Com­mu­nist In­ter­na­tion­al.

The Soviet bureaucrats do not believe in the possibility of proletarian revolution against im­pe­ri­al­ism, and they view those who fight for it as virtual provocateurs intent on destroying “peaceful coexistence.” The current Gorbachev policy of abject capitulation to imperialist military pressure in Afghanistan, Indochina and Angola can only embolden the capitalists who seek to “roll back” Communism all the way to the homeland of the October Revolution. Gorbachev and his predecessors have always been able to exploit the deeply felt fear of war and desire for peace of the Soviet population. But Gorbachev’s “new thinking” ignores the fact that American military planners continue to dream up scenarios for WWIII—from total annihilation by ICBMs to “limited” nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union in the Central European plain. Only the eradication of capitalist im­pe­ri­al­ism from the globe will eliminate the threat of nuclear holocaust for good.

The U.S. imperialist state has in its cross hairs the industrial and military powerhouse of the Soviet degenerated workers state. According to the Brookings Institution, the U.S. threatened in earnest to use nuclear weapons 19 times between 1949 and 1975. It was, after all, the U.S. imperialists who first developed and used nuclear weapons on the hapless civilian population of an already defeated Japan. Since WWII, the American government has always pursued a first-strike strategy, from “quick reaction” bombers in the 1950s, to later silo- and submarine-based ICBMs. A single nuclear sub carries enough weaponry to destroy every large and medium-sized Soviet city; half of the fleet with thousands of warheads is at sea at all times. Not content with this, the imperialists are pushing for space-based weapons. Reagan’s “Star Wars” project is but the latest U.S. attempt to gain a technological edge over the Soviet Union—one with no realistic defensive use, but a system of potential value in conjunction with a first strike.

Faced with the incessant U.S. escalation in the nuclear arms race, the Soviets have been forced to keep pace. American bourgeois rationalists such as George F. Kennan and Theodore Draper have observed that this nuclear numbers game has long since become pointless: a modest force (e.g., several hundred warheads) would be sufficient to destroy the USSR as a functioning society and the thousands of bombs currently in place offer no additional deterrence.⁸⁰ True, but it is utopian for Draper and Kennan to address their advice to an irrational ruling class whose avowed policy is to “prevail” in protracted nuclear war. A variant of the rationalists’ ideas, however, could serve as a policy model for a rational Soviet government: (1) no first strike; and (2) a matching response to any nuclear attack, kiloton for kiloton, at least as long as Soviet command and control remained in existence to do so. This policy would apply equally against the so-called “independent” British and French forces (both of which will have 500 submarine-based warheads by the mid-1990s) and doubtless against Israel or any other co-participant in an American nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.

Such a Soviet defensive missile posture (coupled with sufficient upgrading of the weaponry) would have enough teeth to give the imperialists reason to pause before an all-out attack—it means defense not capitulation. This kind of rational policy might just stimulate some dissension even within the U.S. military establishment against Washington’s head­long rush to Armageddon, not to mention gen­er­ating dissent among the population at large.

In the absence of a successful proletarian revolution, it is certain that Washington will, at some point in the future, prepare to launch its nuclear missiles, no doubt claiming as pretext some supposedly deadly Soviet provocation. If faced with domestic social struggle, the American ruling class could attempt to deflect discontent toward an external Soviet “enemy.” This could well backfire: during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, imminent nuclear war was met not with flag-waving patriotism, but with profound despair. Masses of Americans rightly questioned the sanity of their rulers, but in the absence of a workers party to focus the fear and anger into a fight against the bourgeoisie, the result was inchoate individualized apathy and defeat.

After the subsequent 25 years of dirty wars and government deceit, a direct step now toward nuclear war could also engender massive domestic opposition. Obviously, revolutionaries cannot project a sudden spontaneous “general strike against the war” (the slogan of some wishful pacifist thinkers in the Second In­ter­na­tion­al before WWI). As Trotsky wrote in 1935, “a general strike can be put on the agenda as a method of struggle against mobilization and war only in the event that the entire preceding developments in the country have placed revolution and armed insurrection on the agenda.”⁸¹ The mass-based rev­olu­tion­ary party necessary to bring the latter situation about has yet to be built. But revolutionaries should prepare for a conjuncture in which ruling-class war preparations are met by massive class struggle.

At the first serious moves toward war, pacifist demagogues will switch to “national defense.” On the eve of WWII Trotsky stated, “In peacetime, the imperialist ‘pacifists’ are not sparing of magnanimous phrases; but in the event of a conflict, they will take their stand on the side of their government....”⁸² While the “nuclear freeze” crowd comes “in from the cold,” war preparations will undoubtedly engender genuine pacifistic sentiments among the broader masses. In 1915, Lenin noted that “the temper of the masses in favour of peace often expresses the beginning of protest, anger and a realisation of the reactionary nature of the war.”⁸³ Com­mu­nists have to participate in resulting movements and demonstrations, not to deceive the people with abstract pacifist twaddle, but to orient popular opposition toward the overthrow of bourgeois class rule.

If, despite our efforts, the bourgeoisie clings to power and confronts us with a situation of incipient WWIII, proletarian revolutionaries can have only one policy—defeatism toward their own capitalist governments. Massive and immediate opposition to the war would inevitably spread from the civilian population into the armed forces. If the ruling class believed that a significant portion of military personnel might refuse to launch, the bourgeois state would be compelled to hesitate and turn to massive repression in an attempt to ensure the reliability of its military machine. Civil war would ensue. In this conjuncture, revolutionaries would fight to bring about the scenario outlined by Trotsky:

If a large-scale rev­olu­tion­ary movement is developing in a country, if at its head is a rev­olu­tion­ary party possessing the confidence of the masses and capable of going through to the end; if the government, losing its head, despite the rev­olu­tion­ary crisis, or just because of such a crisis, plunges headlong into a war adventure—then the mobilization can act as a mighty impetus for the masses, lead to a general strike of railwaymen, fraternization between the mobilized and the workers, seizure of important key centers, clashes between insurrectionists and the police and the re­ac­tion­ary sections of the army, the es­tab­lish­ment of local workers’ and soldiers’ councils, and finally the complete overthrow of the government, and consequently, to stopping the war.⁸⁴

Such a rev­olu­tion­ary struggle, based on intransigent proletarian in­ter­na­tion­alism, would give a powerful impetus to, and in turn be aided by, a political revolution to throw out the nationalist bureaucrats in the Kremlin.

Confronting World War III, rev­olu­tion­ary de­feat­ism and the military defense of the Soviet Union remain the policy of the in­ter­na­tion­al pro­le­tar­iat.

In­ter­na­tion­al Executive Committee of the international Spartacist tendency

February 1989

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⁴² See “A Step Towards Capitulation,” 21 March 1941, Internal Bulletin of the WIL. Back

⁴³ Bornstein and Richardson, op. cit., 15. Back

⁴⁴ Cited in Bornstein and Richardson, op. cit., 89. Back

⁴⁵ Jean Rabaut, Tout est possible! Les “gauchistes” français 1929-1944 (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1974), 344. See also Jean-Pierre Cassard, Les trotskystes en France pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale (1939-1944) (La Vérité, n.d.), 65-66, and Yvan Craipeau, Contre vents et marées (Paris: Editions Savelli, 1977), 70-77. Rous took a few others with him, including Fred Zeller, who had been a leader of the Socialist Party youth recruited during the entry. Back

⁴⁶ “Three Theses on the European Situation and the Political Tasks” by German Comrades, dated 19 October 1941, but not printed until September 1942 in In­ter­na­tion­al Bulletin, vol. II, no. 3, 6. Back

⁴⁷ “We Do Not Change Our Course,” op. cit., 296-297. Back

⁴⁸ See “Resolution on the French Section,” Docu­ments of the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al, 364. Back

⁴⁹ Rodolphe Prager, ed., L’In­ter­na­tion­ale dans la guerre 1940-46, volume 2 of Les congrès de la Quatrième In­ter­na­tion­ale (Paris: Editions La Brèche, 1981), 98 (our translation). Back

⁵⁰ Cassard, op. cit., 65, and Craipeau, op. cit., 76-82. Back

⁵¹ Cassard, op. cit., 65. Back

⁵² See Fritz Keller, “Le Trotskysme en Autriche, 1934 à 1945,” Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 5 (January-March 1980), 127. This is a translation of large sections of Keller’s book, Gegen den Strom: Fraktionskämpfe in der KPÖ—Trotzkisten und andere Gruppen, 1919-1945 (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1978). Back

⁵³ See “The War Question and Pabloites Revisionism” (1966) in Documents of the “Workers Vanguard” Greece (1979), 189-190. Back

⁵⁴ See Craipeau, op. cit., 80. Back

⁵⁵ Cassard, op. cit., 63-64, 69-72. Back

⁵⁶ Ibid., 113-114. See also André Calvès, Sans bottes ni médailles (Montreuil: Editions La Brèche, 1984), 56. Back

⁵⁷ See Wim Bot, “Generals Without Troops: Dutch Trotskyism during the Occupation,” published in Rev­olu­tion­ary History, vol. I, no. 4, 1-21 Back

⁵⁸ “Letter from a Worker in the German Under­ground,” Militant, 18 July 1942, and “A Worker’s Message from Poland and the Ghetto,” Militant, 1 August 1942. Soon after these letters appeared, the Militant gave prominent coverage to the first reports of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Back

⁵⁹ Calvès, op. cit., 69, 72-78, 84. Back

⁶⁰ Roughly translated, “Everybody get a Kraut”: infamous headline of the French Stalinist paper, l’Humanité. Back

⁶¹ See Pierre Vert, “Trotskyists in World War Two.” Back

⁶² Prager, op. cit., 459-473. Back

⁶³ See Cannon’s report on the trip in Socialist Workers Party Internal Bulletin, no. 10 (June 1939), 12-24. Back

⁶⁴ See “Proletarian Military Policy.” Back

⁶⁵ Militant, 14 February 1942. Back

⁶⁶ This polemic, titled “Britain at the Crossroads” (Permanent Revolution, January-March 1944), is cited in Part 1 of Charles Wesley Ervin, “A History of Trotskyism in India,” manuscript submitted for pub­li­ca­tion to Rev­olu­tion­ary History. Back

⁶⁷ Bulletin du Secrétariat Européen de la IVe In­ter­na­tion­ale, no. 5: “Discussion sur la politique militaire du prolétariat” (April 1945). This bulletin includes some of Trotsky’s last writings on the subject, excerpts from Cannon’s September 1940 plenum speech, and a 1916 article by Lenin, “The ‘Disarmament’ Slogan.” Lenin’s article raises the demand for “voluntary military-training associations, with free election of instructors paid by the state.” Whatever one thinks of this demand, it is hardly relevant to the “Proletarian Military Policy” since the workers militia envisioned by Lenin was clearly not an auxiliary to the bourgeois army, but counterposed to it. Back

⁶⁸ Prager, op. cit., 14. For the vote at the Second World Congress, held 2-21 April 1948, see the minutes in Rodolphe Prager, ed., Bouleversements et crises de l’après-guerre (1946-1950), volume 3 of Les congrès de la IVe In­ter­na­tion­ale (Paris: Editions La Brèche, 1988), 44. Privas’ motion failed by a vote of 13 to 16, with three abstentions. Back

⁶⁹ See “Genesis of Pabloism,” Spartacist, no. 21 (Fall 1972), 1-13. Back

⁷⁰ “Discussions with Trotsky,” op. cit. Back

⁷¹ See the preface and postscript in Daniel Guérin, ed., Léon Trotsky sur la deuxième guerre mondiale (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 7-17 and 212-217. Back

⁷² “The U.S. Will Participate in the War,” Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40), 94-97. Back

⁷³ Broué, op. cit., 56 (our translation). Back

⁷⁴ Cited in Bot, op. cit. Back

⁷⁵ Ibid. Back

⁷⁶ Ibid. Back

⁷⁷ Ibid. Back

⁷⁸ “Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events,” In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942), 175. Back

⁷⁹ Ute Schmidt and Tilman Fichter, Der erzwungene Kapitalismus: Klassenkämpfe in den Westzonen 1945-1948 (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1971), 23-30. Back

⁸⁰ See, for example, George F. Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), and Theodore Draper, “Nuclear Temptations,” New York Review of Books, 19 January 1984, 42-50. Back

⁸¹ “The ILP and the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al,” 18 September 1935, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1935-36), 2nd ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), 140. Back

⁸² “The Congress Against War and Fascism,” Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), 430. Back

⁸³ V.I. Lenin, “Socialism and War,” Collected Works, vol. 21, 315. Back

⁸⁴ “The ILP and the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al,” op. cit., 140. Back

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“Our Eighth Army”

The bourgeois state desperately fears giving arms to the working class. Historically, the proletariat seizes arms when faced with a felt threat (e.g., the Spanish workers faced with Franco’s coup). The use of the slogan “arm the workers” gave a semi-defensist tilt to the WIL’s propaganda. Jock Haston, Sam Levy and Millie Lee opposed this tilt, particularly when it cropped up as softness to the bourgeois defense forces of the Home Guard. But Haston would not argue against the P.M.P. itself, since Cannon and Trotsky were its proponents. This led Haston into the dishonest methodology of denying that Cannon and Trotsky meant what they wrote—ludicrously he claimed that the P.M.P. was simply a program for work in the armed forces (as if Leninists had not always opposed individual draft resistance!).⁴² It was apparently Haston’s in­ter­ven­tion that pulled the WIL back from an early approach to social-patriotism. A subsequent WIL resolution on the military policy drops the demand “arm the workers” and also demands the dissolution of the Home Guard.⁴³

Yet a current conciliatory of defensism continued to run through the WIL’s propaganda. We have appended to this bulletin a flyer for a 1942 WIL meeting. This flyer presents workers control of production as the answer to the “chaos” of British war production, and it contains not one word of opposition to the war. In a speech to the 1943 WIL conference, Ted Grant went so far as to proclaim:

We have a victorious army in North Africa and Italy, and I say, yes, Long Live the Eighth Army, because that is our army. One of our comrades has spoken to a number of people who have had letters from the Eighth Army soldiers showing their complete dissatisfaction. We know of incidents in the army, navy and other forces that have never been reported, and it is impossible for us to report. It is OUR Eighth Army that is being hammered and tested and being organised for the purpose of changing the face of the world. This applies equally to all the forces.⁴⁴

Trotskyists Under the Nazi Occupation

Especially after the Nazi oc­cu­pa­tion of France in June 1940, the pressure on the Trotskyists in occupied Europe was enormous. Added to this was the pervasive cliquism which had riddled the European groups ever since their formation in the early 1930s. So it is not surprising that, cut off from senior cadre in­ter­na­tion­ally, and with the death of Trotsky, most individuals and virtually all the groups showed major disorientation, ranging from partial revision of some crucial aspect of Leninism to the total abandonment of Marxism. Jean Rous, who had supported Trotsky’s positions in many of the faction fights in the French section from 1934 to 1939, defected to found the “Mouvement National Révolutionnaire” under the slogan “Neither Vichy nor London, neither Berlin nor Moscow.” The MNR took the position that Hitler’s Germany, like Stalin’s Russia, represented a new, higher stage of capitalism. They flirted briefly with Déat’s French fascist party, calling on the French state to defend itself against “Judaism, Masonry and Jesuitism.”⁴⁵ Most MNR members eventually joined the Gaullist Resistance.

The German section, the In­ter­na­tion­al Com­mu­nists (IKD), which existed during the war only in exile, broke with Leninism toward Menshevism when it claimed that “the transition from fascism to socialism remains a utopia without a stopping place, which is by its contents equivalent to a dem­ocrat­ic revolution.” They espoused a movement for “na­tion­al freedom” by “all classes and strata.”⁴⁶

But even among those who maintained a rev­o­lu­tionary perspective, the reaction to Nazi oc­cu­pa­tion generated symmetrical deviations on the national question that broke sharply, if episodically, with the tradition of Trotskyism and Leninism. When the P.M.P. did become a subject of debate, it was in the context of this broader debate on the national question.

Colony-starved German im­pe­ri­al­ism sought, first of all, to subject all of Europe to a savagely brutal imperialist domination. The more agrarian and backward Eastern Europe had long been the object of German imperialist ambitions. But the German oc­cu­pa­tion of industrially advanced West Europe also raised the issue of national op­pres­sion, though not in a way that is simply analogous to the struggle for national liberation in a traditional colonial situation, where the agrarian revolution is a central driving force. After the fall of France, Trotsky himself had noted that “France is being transformed into an oppressed nation....Added to social op­pres­sion is national op­pres­sion, the main burden of which is likewise borne by the workers. Of all the forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable.”⁴⁷

On the eve of the war the French Trotskyists were in political and or­gan­iza­tion­al disarray. The official French section, the In­ter­na­tion­alist Workers Party (POI), had fractured in February 1939 over the question of entry into Marceau Pivert’s PSOP. The PSOP had recently emerged from the French Social Democracy in opposition to support for the bourgeoisie’s war preparations (for much of the preceding period the head of the French Socialists, Léon Blum, had been leader of the governing Popular Front coalition). Entry into the PSOP represented an opportunity to intersect thousands of leftward-moving workers and petty bourgeois. While the minority of the POI, headed by Yvan Craipeau, did enter the PSOP, the majority initially refused to do so, leading to a break with the In­ter­na­tion­al Secretariat in June. The Pivert organization disintegrated after the war began.

Craipeau’s followers regrouped to form the “French Committees for the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al,” which was considered to be the official French section of the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al at the Emergency Conference held in New York in May 1940.⁴⁸ In August, this organization fused with Marcel Hic’s wing of the ex-POI which had opposed entry into the PSOP. Documents written by Marcel Hic provided the basis for the fusion, though the new organization kept the name “French Committees for the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al.” Hic espoused an explicitly nationalist and popular-frontist line, declaring that the Trotskyists “stretch out [their] hands to the ‘French’ faction of the bourgeoisie.”⁴⁹ Hic also called on English workers to abandon rev­olu­tion­ary defeatism and support the military struggle of British im­pe­ri­al­ism.⁵⁰ However, Hic’s positions faced strong opposition from within the fused group, especially from Marcel Gibelin.⁵¹ A period of intense internal debate followed, which resulted in the French Committees abandoning the more extreme class collaboration and social-patriotism expressed in the early documents.

Other groups broke with the Trotskyist program in an opposite direction, by denying that any aspect of the national question existed in Nazi-occupied Europe. This was the position of the “Rev­olu­tion­ary Com­mu­nist” group composed of Austrians, Germans and Czechs who had fled to France in 1938.⁵² It was also the position of some of the Greek Trotskyists, represented by L. Kastritis of the Workers Vanguard group, who continue to maintain that “oc­cu­pa­tions during the imperialist war are nothing but a phase, an incident of a smaller or greater significance of the prolonged war....It neither raises a national question and a question of National Liberation, nor, finally, does it change the basic duties of the proletariat, i.e. the transformation of the war into a civil war.”⁵³ This general approach was shared by the French Barta group,⁵⁴ precursor of Lutte Ouvrière, which with­drew early on into the same kind of sterile economism it maintains today, and by the followers of Amadeo Bordiga, some of whom briefly fused with the Trotskyists in Italy in 1944.

In August 1940 Henri Molinier, central leader of the In­ter­na­tion­al Com­mu­nist Committee (CCI, the Molinier-Frank group), wrote a document entitled “What Is To Be Done?” which equated the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany as new, “progressive” forms of “state capitalism.” Molinier (for whom Trotsky had always expressed a great deal of esteem, unlike for his brother Raymond) called for work in all mass organizations, including fascist ones.⁵⁵ As might be expected, this document gave rise to an intense faction fight which lasted until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 eliminated the basis for this eclectic and impressionistic state capitalism.

A little over a year later, the CCI sent to Germany some of its members who had been requisitioned by the Nazis for forced labor (the STO—Obligatory Labor Service).⁵⁶ Some members of the Dutch Committee of Rev­olu­tion­ary Marxists (CRM) also went to work in Germany. The CRM had emerged in 1942 from the remnants of Henk Sneevliet’s organization and declared for the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al a year later, though it remained out of contact until the end of the war.⁵⁷ There was mass evasion of STO in most of occupied Europe, but it was either brute force or raw hunger which impelled most of those who participated—and some rev­olu­tion­aries were forced to go through this experience with the rest of the European proletariat. Working in Germany was anathema to the bourgeois nationalist Resistance movements and their Stalinist collaborators, but another consideration entered into the equation for the Trotskyists: the strategic importance of the German revolution, in which STO workers could be expected to play an important role. The CCI formed a cell near Berlin and attempted to propagandize among French and German workers, while a member of the CRM participated in a strike in Bremerhaven.

Were the Trotskyists such wishful thinkers to expect (and work for) a proletarian revolution to arise from the ashes of a defeated Germany? Only worshippers of the accomplished fact can think so. The Nazi authorities were forced to shoot or hang some 80,000 German soldiers for insubordination or desertion during the war. In 1942 the Militant published two letters which had been smuggled to an American friend by a socialist worker who had been drafted into the Wehrmacht.⁵⁸ This German soldier, a member of the League of Rev­olu­tion­ary Socialists, spent three weeks in Warsaw at the end of 1941. He records with horror the starvation, despair and utter hopelessness of the Ghetto masses. Managing despite all odds to make contact with some Jewish Bundists and Polish Socialists, when he returned to Berlin this young worker raised 500 marks from among those in his underground resistance group. The money was sent to the Polish Socialist Party, and to the Trotskyists and Bundists active in the Warsaw Ghetto.

The memoirs of André Calvès, one of the Trotskyists who helped build the cell in the German armed forces at Brest, are full of instances of German soldiers’ sympathy and material aid for acts of proletarian resistance. What of the German soldier at the Porte d’Orléans who handed over his pistol on demand with an “auf Wiedersehen Genossen” [see you later comrades]? What of the German soldiers and sailors in Brest, shot for their work with the Trotskyists in distributing Arbeiter im Westen?⁵⁹ The putrid and venal nationalism of the mass bourgeois and Stalinist Resistance forces—“A chacun son boche”⁶⁰ —made both fraternization and the task of organizing inchoate opposition within the German armed forces much more difficult than they had to be.

In the face of the overwhelming repressive forces unleashed against the proletariat (and these included the national bourgeois forces of “law and order” and the Stalinists as well as the invading imperialist armies), the Trotskyist cadre, for all their youth, inexperience and episodic disorientation, continued to be animated by the spirit and program of rev­olu­tion­ary in­ter­na­tion­alism. The re­con­sti­tution of a European Secretariat in early 1942 was a tremendous accomplishment. The 1945 Saigon uprising led by the Vietnamese Trotskyists; the publication of Arbeiter und Soldat; the cell built in the German armed forces at Brest; the publication of the Trotskyist newspaper Czorwony Sztandard in the Warsaw Ghetto; the work of the CRM and CCI in Germany; the participation of the Indian Trotskyists in the “Quit India” movement; the American Trotskyists who sailed on the Murmansk run; the involvement of Trotskyists (including British and American soldiers) in the rev­olu­tion­ary wave which swept Italy in 1943; and the participation of both the WIL and the SWP in strikes and other trade-union struggles which objectively cut across the imperialist war effort: all of these are ample testimony to the courage and even audacity of the small Fourth In­ter­na­tion­alist forces in the face of almost incalculable odds.⁶¹

During the war and its immediate aftermath the ranks of the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al were decimated by savage imperialist repression—and Stalinist assassination. Many of the sections were virtually decapitated; some, like the Vietnamese, destroyed altogether. It is almost impossible in hindsight to appreciate the magnitude of the losses. Rodolphe Prager lists names of those known to have fallen—over one hundred—and there were many more.⁶² Of these, almost half were murdered in Greece, especially by the Stalinists in the civil war of 1945. But it wasn’t only Greece. The Nazis eliminated the leadership of the French and Belgian parties. They also executed almost the entire Central Committee of Henk Sneevliet’s Dutch Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front. Of those Trotskyists who did survive the war, many returned from the hell of Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, Auschwitz. The years preceding the war had seen the leadership of the In­ter­na­tion­al thinned by a wave of Stalinist assassination (Leon Sedov, Erwin Wolf, Rudolf Klement, Trotsky himself). By 1945 few of the leaders of 1939 survived. Abram Leon, Léon Lesoil, Marcel Hic, Ta Thu Tau, Chen Chi-chang, Walter Held, Pietro Tresso (Blasco)—all were gone.

The losses in Europe and Asia underline a critical failure on the part of the SWP leadership—they were unable to take on the leading role in the In­ter­na­tion­al, a responsibility that was posed for the SWP after Trotsky’s death. The SWP was the one section which had been founded by cadre who came over as part of a faction from the Com­mu­nist In­ter­na­tion­al; the section which had been strengthened most by close collaboration with Trotsky; the section which, because it was situated on the North American continent, had the most material resources, a large maritime fraction and thus some limited ability to move around the globe during the war. Yet they did not see themselves as responsible and barely kept up the pretense of maintaining a functioning In­ter­na­tion­al Secretariat in New York. They did not even attempt to set up an outpost in a neutral European country. No doubt the utter disaster of Cannon’s 1939 trip to France, made at Trotsky’s urging in an attempt to resolve the fracturing of the French section around the question of entry into the PSOP, played a role here.⁶³ In addition, the defection of the Shachtman and Abern faction was keenly felt in the SWP. But they should have tried.

Opponents of the “Proletarian Military Policy”

The British and American Trotskyists emerged from the war relatively intact. The Stalinists had relentlessly condemned the Trotskyists for their defeatism, while both the British and American bourgeoisies had prosecuted Trotskyists for their opposition to the war. Yet the experience with the P.M.P. hardly steeled the SWP and RCP for what lay ahead—its sole redeeming quality was that it didn’t work. Its utopian character meant that it was not likely to be implemented, and in any case it had ceased to be the centerpiece of propaganda on the war by the end of 1943. The British and American Trotskyists continued to pursue the class struggle, and to view themselves as antiwar and anti-imperialist.

The documents presented to the March 1944 founding conference of the Rev­olu­tion­ary Com­mu­nist Party (RCP), reprinted in this bulletin, reflect the lack of applicability of the P.M.P. in the political climate created by certain German defeat. The resolution presented jointly by the WIL and the Trotskyist Opposition of the RSL, which was adopted as the position of the RCP, presents a very mild version of the P.M.P. Point 7 of this resolution, which attempts to detail the “progressive motives” of the defensism of the masses, does, however, reveal the central problem with the policy. The resolution of the Militant Group of the former RSL is correct as far as it goes, but perfunctory and formal.

The resolution of the RSL’s Left Faction gives the issue the attention it deserves, making some very cogent arguments for rev­olu­tion­ary defeatism. But the Left Faction errs in equating defeatism with a “neutral” attitude toward the “enemy” imperialist camp in war. Revolutionaries are defeatists toward all the imperialist combatants. Moreover, the Left Faction reveals a fatuous ultraleftism in opposing dem­ocrat­ic demands during wartime (including the demand for air-raid shelters!). Demands to extend to the masses the provisioning and protection privileges enjoyed by army officers can be quite powerful in wartime. Moreover, if won, these measures represent a serious drain on the imperialist war effort. The February Revolution in Russia began as a strike by women textile workers in Petrograd demanding bread.

Max Shachtman’s polemics against the P.M.P., also reprinted here, do not suffer from the excesses of those of the Left Faction. Shachtman had recoiled in horror at the Hitler-Stalin pact, which precipitated WWII, and his Workers Party remained highly attuned to the views and moods of the large Depression-bred intellectual milieu typified by the Partisan Review. Shachtman seized on the patent revisionism of the P.M.P. to score some correct points against his bitter factional opponent Cannon, whom he attempted to portray as some kind of simpleton in “theoretical” matters. It was extremely convenient for Shachtman to brush aside Trotsky’s role in the elaboration of the P.M.P.: Cannon was a far more useful foil than the newly martyred Trotsky. It should be noted, however, that at the time Shachtman had available to him almost all of Trotsky’s writings on the subject—they had been published in the October 1940 Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al. By 1950 Shachtman had developed his own, anti-Soviet, version of a “proletarian military policy.”⁶⁴

The document of Comrade C. adds a new dimension to the discussion of the P.M.P.—he observes that “trade-union control of national defense” under bourgeois rule could only be instituted in a fascist or corporatist sense. The acuity of Comrade C.’s observation (no doubt the result of first-hand experience of the Nazi jackboot) is borne out by the fact that the only trade-union federation which adopted the program of the P.M.P. during the war was the Confederation of Mexican Workers—the corporatist creature of the ruling party of the Mexican bourgeoisie (today’s Institutional Rev­olu­tion­ary Party).⁶⁵ Aside from the too acrimonious debate on the question of whether the SWP’s resolution should have been printed, both Comrade C.’s letter and the reply of the leading committee are admirable statements, especially given the context in which they were written.

There were other opponents of the “Proletarian Military Policy.” The Indian BLPI evidently pub­lished a polemic on the question in 1944.⁶⁶ And according to Rodolphe Prager the Belgian section, initially at least, refused to include the passage containing the demand for “trade-union control of military training” when they published Trotsky’s May 1940 Manifesto. Unfortunately, many of the issues in dispute during the war, including the “Proletarian Military Policy,” were never fought out to a real conclusion. While the European Secretariat published an informational bulletin on the P.M.P. in April 1945 and invited discussion on the subject, this never materialized.⁶⁷ Jacques Privas attempted to reopen the question at the Second World Congress in 1948 but both the British and American sections evidently opposed this, and Privas’ motion referring the question to the incoming In­ter­na­tion­al Executive Committee narrowly failed. We can only agree with Prager when he regrets that the issue was never resolved.⁶⁸ In hindsight it is clear that the uncorrected departure from Leninist principle over the P.M.P. facilitated the acceptance of the revisionist campaign of the In­ter­na­tion­al Secretariat leadership around Michel Pablo a few years later. Pablo deprecated the role of rev­olu­tion­ary Marxist program and organization, initially in the light of the consolidation of the Russian seizure of Eastern Europe, and he advocated the entry of the small Trotskyist nuclei into the Stalinist parties. This led to a split in the Trotskyist forces, the destruction of the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al, and the subsequent shift of most of the elements involved onto the political terrain previously inhabited by the pre-war London Bureau.⁶⁹

Trotsky vs. the SWP

That Trotsky’s motivations in putting forward the P.M.P. did not fully coincide with those of the SWP in adopting it, is clear from the series of discussions he held with SWP leaders in June 1940.⁷⁰ In these discussions Trotsky advocated that the SWP give critical support to the presidential campaign of American Com­mu­nist Party (CP) leader Earl Browder. Trotsky raised this proposal because the CP, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact, had temporarily dropped its popular-frontism in favor of exposing the imperialist war aims of the American bourgeoisie. The SWP refused to critically support Browder, and in the discussions Trotsky put his finger on the reason why: the SWP feared to break its bloc with the virulently anti-Com­mu­nist pro-Roosevelt forces in the American trade unions. This observation by Trotsky lends weight to the view that the SWP’s fulsome adoption of the P.M.P. stemmed in part from opportunist appetites. One can see a similar opportunist thread in the workerist trade unionism of the WIL. In all fairness to Trotsky, it must be pointed out that he was murdered before the P.M.P. was fully elaborated by the SWP.

Daniel Guérin has suggested that Trotsky’s intransigent Soviet defensism played a role in the genesis of the “Proletarian Military Policy.”⁷¹ Certainly no one reading Trotsky’s writings over his last year can doubt that he saw catastrophe approaching as the disastrous effects of Stalin’s beheading of the Red Army became apparent in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Guérin certainly writes well on the startling prescience of Trotsky’s predictions as to the course of the war. But Guérin is wrong to posit the existence of “two” Trotskys, one a proletarian revolutionist and the other a Soviet official. Trotsky had since 1917 maintained both elements as integral to his rev­olu­tion­ary proletarian worldview. Yet Guérin is not completely wrong. In a letter to the New York Times on 1 October 1939, Trotsky, arguing that only U.S. entry into the war on the Allied side would break Stalin from his pact with Hitler, did implicitly suggest this course to the U.S. bourgeoisie.⁷² While Trotsky’s letter was in no way a programmatic statement of the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al, it indicates that the extreme danger posed by the war to the homeland of the October Revolution loomed very large in his mind. This must have played a role as Trotsky elaborated the P.M.P.

Broué Picks Up the Gun

In his Cahiers Léon Trotsky article, Pierre Broué guts the P.M.P. of its programmatic content, and he is willfully blind to its Anglo-American bias. For Broué Trotsky’s last writings on universal imperialist militarism are simply a sort of call to “pick up the gun,” and he argues that the Trotskyists should have entered “a mass movement based on national and social resistance” to fascism—that is, the various Partisan movements in Europe.⁷³ He sees the failure of the Trotskyists to enter such formations as central, implying that this determined their lack of success in leading a proletarian revolution in any country at the end of the war.

But Broué avoids a crucial question—the class independence of the proletarian fighting forces. Although the Partisan movements in France, Italy and Greece followed very different trajectories, where the leadership was not simply bourgeois nationalist it was Stalinist, and the Stalinists had subordinated their forces to the military and political alliance with the “dem­ocrat­ic” imperialists. Par­tici­pa­tion by the small Trotskyist nuclei in nationalist bourgeois or Stalinist military formations in a subordinated or assimilated role would have meant abandoning a class position, crossing the line to class collaborationism. Moreover, it would have tended to cut across the necessary strategy of subverting the Axis armies through rev­olu­tion­ary fraternization.

Without securing sufficient weight for the class-conscious fraction as would allow the right of veto over the activities of the Partisan group or withdrawal from it, such involvement could only be, and was, a noose around the necks of the rev­olu­tion­ary workers, to be drawn tight sooner rather than later. Many of the Trotskyists who did enter or attempt to work in such formations were simply slaughtered by the Stalinists. This was true particularly in Greece, which Broué upholds as his main example. Only in Yugoslavia did a Partisan struggle against the German oc­cu­pa­tion forces end in a successful overturn of capitalist property relations, the first of a series of postwar social overturns led by peasant-based guerrilla formations. But what resulted was a workers state deformed from its inception by a bureaucratic regime qualitatively similar to that in the Soviet Union. In West Europe the Partisan forces were made to hand the reins of power back to the bourgeoisie, while in most of Eastern Europe the Soviet Red Army filled the vacuum of state power left when the Nazis retreated.

The question that Trotskyist strategy had to address was: who would prevail upon the collapse of the Axis oc­cu­pa­tion—the forces of the rev­olu­tion­ary proletariat, or those of the Allied imperialists? The Stalinist forces were still perceived by the masses as the proletarian vanguard formation (the exceptions being Vietnam, Ceylon and Bolivia, countries where the proletariat came to class consciousness after the Comintern adopted an explicit policy of col­labo­ra­tion with the “dem­ocrat­ic” colonial powers). The prestige of the Com­mu­nist Parties had only been enhanced by the military victories of the Soviet army, and the Stalinists used this prestige to tie the masses to the forces of bourgeois nationalist “law and order,” building illusions in “liberation” by the Allied armies.

There was a great disproportion between the end and the means: concluding the war through victorious proletarian revolution versus the scattered scores and hundreds that were the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al. During the war the Trotskyist forces were for the most part too small to have anything but a propagandistic orientation to the layers of advanced workers, most of whom followed Stalinist leadership. In hindsight and from afar, we cannot presume to determine exactly what else they might have done, but the policy of the tiny Dutch CRM seems admirable. The CRM opposed political assassination and other individual acts of terror against the Nazi occupying authorities—these acts had no military impact and simply brought down increased German repression on the general population (dealing with proven informers for the Germans was of course another matter). The CRM advocated economic sabotage in the form of working slowly, and strikes and other forms of mass proletarian action where feasible. Defense of the Soviet Union was an important part of their calculations:

Since 90 per cent of the German army has been thrown against the Soviet army, the workers (German and foreign) have the duty deliberately to weaken German war pro­duc­tion, by means of so-called “economic sabo­tage” in the weapons and munitions factories and in the transports to the Russian front.⁷⁴

The CRM produced some 44 issues of De Rode October from their formation in 1942 until the end of the war. They also produced an internal discussion bulletin. While the CRM had a very small membership—between 50 and 75 by 1945—the biweekly De Rode October had a circulation of some 2,500 in 1943, and at the end of the oc­cu­pa­tion their cadre emerged virtually intact.⁷⁵

The small Trotskyist forces had to await the opportunities provided by mass proletarian struggle. Such struggle did occur, even under Nazi oc­cu­pa­tion. A massive strike wave greeted the attempt to impose the forced labor program in Greece in December 1942, and the Nazis had to give way to it. The insurrectionary state of mind of the Greek masses was also reflected in the April 1944 mutiny against the Metaxas-supporting officers of the Greek armed forces in Egypt. In Italy there was an uprising against the German occupying forces in Naples in 1944, and insurrections in several cities in the north after the Allied landing. In Genoa the Germans actually surrendered to the Partisan forces. In the Netherlands there were three major strikes against the German oc­cu­pa­tion forces: in 1941 a strike in Amsterdam and other northern towns protested the first arrests and deportations of Jews; a two-day general strike in April 1943 protested the sending of Dutch prisoners of war to Germany for forced labor; and in September 1944 there was a national railway strike, called by the bourgeois Resistance in support of the Allied invasion.

The CRM expected that rev­olu­tion­ary resistance would erupt first in the Balkans and Italy—the weakest links in the Axis empire. They were right in their projection, but, as they had also noted, a rev­olu­tion­ary breakthrough in southeastern Europe would probably “bleed to death” unless the German proletariat came to its assistance. As early as February 1943 De Rode October put its finger on the main factor working against such a rev­olu­tion­ary upsurge in Europe—the projected Allied invasion.⁷⁶ The much-heralded Allied “second front” would only be established when the Soviet Red Army had militarily weakened the Wehrmacht, i.e., at the point when a rev­olu­tion­ary development within Germany was most likely. De Rode October warned that it was a race against the clock between a German revolution and Allied-led coun­ter­revo­lu­tion. If revolution had broken out in Europe, including Germany, prior to the Allied landings, the imperialist armies would have been subject to the disintegrating effects of a major political upheaval, while at the same time the High Command would have made every effort to smash the revolution. As it was, however, the Allied imperialists invaded first. Events after the July 1943 landing in Italy confirmed the CRM in its prognosis—the Allied armies provided the indispensable military might under cover of which the Italian bourgeoisie, with the aid of the Com­mu­nist Party, was able to disarm the insurrectionary proletariat.

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