Fighting on all Fronts (4 page)

In many cases (such as Greece, Italy, Vietnam and Yugoslavia) Communist Parties (CPs) were the most influential. Their predominance had been earned before the war when they had opposed the establishment and proposed radical change, often at very high personal risk. Through deep working class roots that could articulate the popular mood, a strong sense of discipline, organisation, cohesive ideology and personal commitment, the CPs possessed invaluable tools for developing the underground activities of wartime resistance.

The CPs’ Achilles’ heel, however, was their devotion to Stalin’s Russia. In the mistaken belief that this regime represented “actually existing socialism”, CP leaders acted as tools of Russian foreign policy at the very same time as at the domestic level their members were championing grassroots resistance. This contradiction could remain unresolved while the fighting continued. When the war ended the situation became
untenable. Either CPs accepted the spheres of influence drawn up in “crude and even callous” arrangements such as the percentages agreement or they broke with Russia.

A particularly sharp example of the problem was seen in Italy when CP leader Togliatti executed the so-called “Salerno turn” in April 1944. He insisted that the Italian CP “must abandon the position of opposition and criticism which it occupied in the past
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and enter a southern Italian cabinet led by a prominent fascist and the same king who had appointed Mussolini. Both were seeking left cover in an attempt to remain in power after ditching the discredited Duce. Since Stalin assigned Italy to Western imperialism its CP must assist in this quest. The Greek CP had the strength to see off Churchill’s challenge but under Russian pressure it made fatal concessions which doomed it to defeat in a civil war. In France de Gaulle was able to dissolve the resistance almost overnight due to CP quiescence there. There were exceptions to this pattern where various circumstances, such as individuals exhibiting greater autonomy from Russia or balanced spheres of influence (such as for Yugoslavia where Stalin and Churchill went “fifty-fifty”) helped resistance movement goals to find greater expression. China, Vietnam and Yugoslavia were examples of this.

Despite these obstacles the very existence of mass popular resistance meant the outcome of the war was not the one planned by the imperialists. The masses made their demands felt in a number of ways. India, Indonesia and Vietnam all achieved independence as a result of processes unleashed by the war.

In Europe the people were determined that they had not suffered and fought just to benefit one imperialist camp over another. They remembered the misery of the Depression that had followed the First World War. The ruling class were also very aware that the 1914-1918 war had sparked an unprecedented wave of revolutions that came close to destroying capitalism altogether. As one British MP famously put it in 1943: “If we don’t give them reform, they will give us revolution”.
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In Western Europe the ideas of social justice and social solidarity encouraged state provision of welfare, nationalisation of some industry and economic policies designed to avoid unemployment and so on. So the eventual outcome of the Second World War was deeply ambiguous. While the contours of imperialism were redrawn in favour of two new superpowers (the US and the Soviet Union), the break-up of traditional empires and an apparent “social democratic consensus” set a new pattern in many Western countries.

If the first casualty of war is truth, the second is critical analysis. The conventional view of the Second World War subordinates everything to a struggle between nations with fascists on one side and democrats on the other. That is both the starting point and the end point, and the meaning of terms like “war”, “fascism”, “democracy” or “nation” is treated as self-evident. However, a proper understanding of the 1939-1945 period requires this scenario to be stood on its head. The fighting, the states involved, their ideologies and political institutions need to be rooted in their social context—the system of capitalism.

Capitalism is a system torn by two central antagonisms. One is between capitalists themselves who compete to survive and accumulate. From this vantage point the formation of hostile blocs and the outbreak of the Second World War emerge as a clash between ruling classes advancing their own interests. However, this was also a total war which drew entire populations into its gaping maw. The masses were not passive tools and their relations with the rulers, both Axis and Allied, were shaped by the second key contradiction of capitalism—between exploiters and exploited.

The key institution mediating these twin contradictions was the state. It is through the state that capitalists collectively enforce their internal and external goals. Exploitation within a state’s territory is maintained by the carrot or the stick, democracy being an example of the former and fascism an example of the latter. It was therefore secondary that some of the leading Allied powers were parliamentary democracies while their opponents were fascist. Thus Stalinist Russia and Greece, both dictatorships, fought with the Allies while Finland, a member of the Axis coalition, remained a parliamentary democracy throughout the war.

When capitalist states use their power to further capitalist interests externally, to gain control of resources and people beyond their borders for the purpose of exploitation, this constitutes imperialism. During 1939-1945 the Axis powers found that in a world where there was virtually no “free” territory left achieving this goal involved the elimination of rival capitalist entities. So the Second World War was initiated by the most powerful capitalist state machines which fought each other. As such, it was not a battle of nations (if that term is used in the sense of the people in general) but of imperialist blocs.

What of the smaller states that fell victim to Axis expansion? They claimed a common “national” interest linking government, capitalists
and the people. However, in practice more often than not the needs of exploitation took precedence over any hostility that these ruling classes felt towards imperialism. Therefore rather than consistently throw their lot in with the people and maintain independence from imperialist influence, the capitalists relied on one or other of the imperialist camps.

For ordinary people the continuation of capitalist drives from the top opened a gap between official propaganda and the lived reality of wartime conditions. Consequently the masses developed a host of activities from below through which they strove for their own interests in opposition to the top of society. Imperialism and exploitation engendered anti-imperialism and radical resistance. The concept of national interest was tested to destruction by mass struggles for justice, democracy and equality.

Unlike their enemies, the major Allied powers such as Britain, France and the Soviet Union had a long history of imperialist activity. Before 1939 Britain, France and the Soviet Union controlled more than half of the globe’s land mass: the British Empire encompassed a quarter of the world, France’s possessions gave it almost a tenth and Stalin controlled a sixth. Up to that point the US state relied less on external state action, the focus having been internal expansion across the North American continent and exploitation of an imported labour force, many being slaves.

The Allies claimed to be acting in self-defence during the Second World War and this seemed plausible as their rivals could only build empires of their own by seizing land from the established plunderers. Moreover Allied governments could don the mantle of democracy. Their gradual accretion of colonies and the fact that it often involved overcoming economically weak areas meant that domestic populations did not have to be directly harnessed to achieve external expansion. There could thus be a relative separation between politics at home (which might take parliamentary form) and imperialist foreign policy dressed up in benign clothing such as a civilising Christian mission or in the case of Russia “actually existing socialism”. When MPs at Westminster accused Churchill of endangering Britain’s colonies by signing up to the democratic principles of the Atlantic Charter he replied that it did “not qualify in any way…the British Empire” and only applied to “the states and nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke”.
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By contrast the chief Axis powers were late starters in the imperial race. Japan’s Meiji Restoration took place in 1867 while Italy and Germany
only unified in 1870 and 1871 respectively. The first two gained nothing from their efforts in the First World War while Germany lost what little it had grabbed. This humiliation was compounded by internal crises during the inter-war years ranging from Japan’s 1918 rice riots, to Italy’s “Two Red Years” (1919-1921) and the German Revolution (1918-1923). Social upheaval threatened the ruling classes who turned to counter-revolutionary forces such as militarism, Italian fascism and Nazism to resolve both internal and external difficulties.

Their extreme right ideology wiped out domestic opposition (trade unions and political parties) and liquidated democratic rights. With the working class largely silenced, Axis governments aimed to make the respective populations obedient instruments of totalitarian, racist and aggressive imperialist expansion. Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
, with chapters on “The Struggle against the Red Front” at home and “The Eastern Orientation” of conquest, encapsulated this strategy perfectly. Though the underlying process was the same, what had taken the Allies decades even centuries to achieve, the Axis felt they needed to consolidate in months, years at the most, and this lent a peculiarly sharp edge to their policies.

Nor was the turn to authoritarianism unique to the leading Axis powers. In 1920 most European countries had some form of parliamentary democracy. But the threat posed by communist revolution in the early 1920s and the impact of the 1929 Wall Street Crash meant that by 1939 this had disappeared everywhere except for the Western fringe of the Continent. The cancer was systemic.

While the rhetoric employed by Axis and Allies differed, the underlying substance of their imperialisms did not. For the ruling classes of Europe there was no principled distinction drawn between democracy and fascism since these were merely varieties of domination. For example, during the Spanish Civil War, Italy and Germany actively contributed to Franco’s smashing of the Republic. Although Britain and France feigned neutrality, they ensured the Republic received no assistance. Meanwhile the US turned a profit supplying oil to both sides. The British and French establishments had no qualms about appeasing Hitler, Mussolini or Hirohito in the 1930s and only turned to war when Axis expansion became a clear threat to their hegemony. Russia had opposed appeasement but in 1939 Stalin concluded a pact with Hitler that included the seizure of the Baltic states and the partitioning of Poland with Germany. This was the green light the Führer needed to unleash the war which began two weeks later.

When appeasement failed and it came to blows these were on lines set out in 1932 by Stanley Baldwin: “you have to kill more women and
children more quickly than the enemy…when the next war comes”.
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True to this strategy, the RAF conducted “area bombing” which killed 600,000 German civilians culminating in the Dresden firestorm in February 1945 which cost some 40,000 lives.

For their part the Nazis foresaw a
Grossraumwirtschaft
(macroeconomic space) in Eastern Europe. Planners deemed “a third of the [Polish] population…surplus to requirements” and “a barrier to capital formation”.
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Millions were to be slaughtered. In the Far East, Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere meant shocking exploitation and violence across a vast swathe of territory.

Capitalist ruling classes that fell victim to the Axis responded on a strictly profit and loss basis. The French establishment concluded after brief resistance that it would be better to collaborate and accept occupation of the majority of the country than risk revolution by arming its workers. Some ruling classes enthusiastically sided with the Axis such as in Austria; some split between the two camps (as was the case initially in Yugoslavia); while yet others formed governments-in-exile and waited for Allied armies to restore their property and rights. Where temporary marriages of convenience between Allied governments and resistance movements had been arranged, they were repudiated as soon as the defeat of the Axis made divorce decently possible.

The war ended with Washington deploying nuclear weapons. Previously on the US western seaboard the entire population of Japanese ethnic origin (including US citizens) was thrown into concentration camps because “the Occidental eye cannot readily distinguish one Japanese resident from another” and some could be spies. In Japan itself the US sought to kill “the enemy wherever he or she is in the greatest possible numbers in the shortest possible time. For us there are no civilians in Japan”.
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By 1945 Tokyo was suing for peace behind the scenes. Nonetheless atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were deliberately selected as areas to experiment with the new weapon because they were “closely surrounded by workers’ houses”.
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For the capitalists the Second World War was about imperialist rivalry through and through.

So far we have focused on the motivations of the tiny capitalist minority. To grasp the role of the vast majority it is useful to compare the Second
World War with the 1914-1918 war. Between 1914 and 1918 fighting was more geographically restricted, relatively static and often bogged down in trench warfare. There was little change to the status quo in terms of who exploited resources and people within national borders. With little success to show on either side, one aspect of imperialism—the merciless battle between capitalist rivals—became salient. Luxemburg exposed this clearly when she wrote:

The cannon fodder loaded onto trains in August and September is moldering in the killing fields of Belgium, the Vosges, and Masurian Lakes where the profits are springing up like weeds. Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth—there stands bourgeois society…the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form.
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