World War, Verso 1986, E6.95: this is also the source of the following extract)
Trotskyists and the War
The legacy of destruction left by World War Two is staggering. Eighty million people were killed, if one includes those who died of starvation and illness as a direct result of the war - eight times as many as during World War One. Dozens of cities were virtually totally destroyed, especially in Japan and Germany. Material resources capable of foeding. clothing, housing, equipping all the poor of this world were wasted for purely destructive purposes. Forests were tom down and agricultural land converted into wasteland on a scale not wilnessed since the Thirty Years War or the Mongol invasion of the Islamic Empire.
(..)
Was all the destruction pointless? Has intemational capitalism emerged from World War Two with all the fundamental contradictions which led to the conflict unresolved not only structurally, but even conjuncturally? Many observers would have categorically denied such a statement ten years ago, when it seemed that in contrast to the inter-war period, the intemational capitalist economy had experienced Iwo decades (in the Anglo-Saxon countries, nearly three of unprecedented growth, interrupted only hy minor recessions: and long historical period of high levels of and impressive material standard of living of the toiling mas ses in the imperialist countries.
Today it Is obvious that the twenty to twenty live years of the postwar boom were only an interlude, a "long expansive wave" of the capitalist conomy following the long depression' of the inter-war period, which will itself be followed hy • 'long depression" of even longer duration than the 1913-1939 period. At the start of the war, political adherents of Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International, who insisted on continuing the class struggle and opposing the class collaboration of the 'war effort in the Allied imperialist countries, were a small, persecuted minority.
Their rejection "democratic' credentials of the imperialists, and their insistence that only a mobilised working class could, through revolutionary action, establish genuine peace and democracy in Europe, clashed head on with the reformism of the social democratic parties and Stalin's total opposition to revolutionary struggle in
FEATURES
The legacy of World
War Two
To be sure, that interlude witnessed a new leap forward of the productive forces - the third technological revolution - and a great increase in the material wealth and average skill and knowledge of the international working class, not to mention a big expansion in the number of wage-carers. Even if the material and intellectual progress was very unevenly divided as between the more and less developed capitalist countries, it enlarged the base from which world socialism can be built. The material proconditions for a socialist world of plenty and a global withering away of the social division of labour berweca 'bosses" and 'bossed' were much more considerable in 1970 than in 1939, let alonc 1914. They are even more so in 1985.
same time, however, the price humankind must pay for the delay of world for the survival of decaying for the capitalism, becomes more and more frightening. The tendency for the productive forces to be transformed into forces of destruction not only usserts itself periodically in crises of over-production and world wars. More and more il asserts itself unrelentingly in the fields of production, consumption, social relations, health (including mental health) and above all in the uninterrupted succession of local' wars. This global price in human suffering, death and threats to the very physical survival of humankind is agan staggenng. It outsenps anything seen during the First or Second World Wars.
"The perversion of human consumption and human wants through profit-oriented standardised mass production is imposing a growing burden of illness and death upon humankind... And the threat which poisoned Europe which, if successful, could swiftly destabilise his own bureaucratic grip on the Soviet working class. Stalin was also at pains to demonstrate his 'respectability" to his imperialist allies: as a gesture in this direction. and as a symptom of his hostility to the spread of revolutionary struggle, he dissolved the Third International (Cominter) in 1943.
As the war progressed, however, the imposition of draconian altacks on trade unions and other democratic rights, and the reemergence of class struggle - in battles over wages and conditions - soon vindicated Trotskyist analysis. And, ar German imperialism hegan to suffer military defeats across Europe, and capitalist state power
Was all the destruction pointless? air, seas, water and forests pose to the very physical survival of humanity is similar to the threal of nuclear world war.
In that sense, the Second World War indeed solved nothing. Le. remoted none of the hanic causes of the intensifying crisis of survival of human civilisation and humankind itself. Hitler has disappeared, but the tide of destructiveness and barbarism keeps rising, albeit in more variegated forms and a less conway (if World War III can bo
For the underlying cause of that destructiveness remains. It is the dynamic of competition, capital accumulation and impenalism incrcasingly turned against itself, ie. boomeranging from the "periphery"
'centre", with all the destructive potential this expansion and self-assertion harbours in the face of growing resistance and defiance from millions, if not hundreds of milLions, of human beings.
Ernest Mandel weakened its grip, the instinctive response of the working class was to reorganise independently and take local power into its own hands - only to be fiercely opposed by the Stalinist and social democratic parties.
The class line of the