Reading notes on Chapter 3 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [1986]

The meaning of the Second World War

by Ernest Mandel

Verso: 1986

Chapter 3 The Social Forces

....a conjunction of action by a broad spectrum of nations, social classes, fractions of social classes, political parties and narrower cliques (financial, industrial, military and political) over the whole globe.

....from France to Bengal, from Chad to Leningrad, from the Philippines to Birmingham, from Detroit to Bosnia, from the North Manchurian plain to Egypt, from Avellaneda to Milan. Never beforehand so many people, on all continents, participated directly or indirectly in political and armed combat.

....unable to do was to whip up enthusiasm for the slaughter. In sharp contrast to August 1914, no trains or convoys of soldiers in these years went to the front bedecked with flowers and followed by cheering crowds. War-weariness was present from the beginning.

[Britain]... wide-ranging programme of social reform, which a significant section of the middle class - critical of the high conservatism of the Tory leadership in the inter-war period - could and did endorse. The British war effort, despite its dependence on the USA, commanded a degree of national unity exceptional among the Allies. Churchill, as head of a government which actively incorporated the reformist Labour party, was therefore able to get away with

inroads on British workers' standard of living which Hitler did not initially dare to impose upon the German working class.

[USA,] ....unwillingness of the US leadership to send sufficient troops to fight the Japanese in Asia - because it would have meant escalation of casualties - was crucially important in determining American war policy towards the USSR and China. Throughout the war, class tensions grew more in the USA than inBritain.4 Moreover, they were increasingly combined with racial tensions, as the influx of black people into the great industrial centres of the Mid-West and the East accelerated, and as the networkers started to react against the generally racist atmosphere prevalent throughout the industrial establishment and in the neighbourhoods. Workers in the United States were more prone to rebel against no-strike pledges than in Britain. Similarly, officers 'control over soldiers was more readily questioned in the US forces than in any other regular army. War weariness, which spread only gradually in Britain in the last two years of the war, by contrast erupted on a large scale in the US services, with soldiers' strikes and mutinies in 1945 expressing the men's desire to return home as soon as the war was over in Europe and the Far East.

[USSR] ....No amount of exhortation by the state, party or military leadership would have succeeded without this determination of the Soviet masses to fight and win the war.

[German-occupied nations] ....The ruling strata waited for the Allied armies to defeat the Nazis and restore them to power, in the meantime actively collaborating with, or showing passivity in the face of, the invading troops. But the bulk of the population of the occupied countries chose instead to fight - and thus to take an active part in the reshaping of Europe after the war.

[Germany] ....SS secret intelligence reports ....record frequent working-class protests whenever wage-cuts occurred. When Goebbels's 'total war' mobilization of 1943 led to widespread replacement of male by female labour in industry, the employers used the occasion to cut wages by twenty per cent: both men and women protested vigorously.

....between February 1933 and September 1939, 225,000 men and women were condemned by Nazi courts for political reasons. To this figure we must add those imprisoned without trial in concentration camps, who on a given day - 10 April 1939 - were estimated by a secret Gestapo report to outnumber political convicts by fifty per cent: 162,734 as against 112,432. There were further 27,369 prisoners who had been officially charged with political crimes but not yet convicted.10 So it would not seem exaggerated to estimate the number of Germans arrested as political opponents by the Nazis from the day they took power until the start of the war as between 400,000 and 600,000….

....fear of Germany going revolutionary, as much as the growing power of the Soviet Union in Europe, which stimulated the desire of the Western Allies to have their troops in France and Germany at the time of the latter's military collapse. As in the case of Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia, so also in the case of Germany, the Soviet Union's influence over the Communist Parties was seen as potential bulwark against the 'anarchy' - indeed 'Communism' -lurking behind the power of the resistance movements, which emerged in full strength in March 1943.

....Stalin too considered Western Allied occupation a weapon against 'anarchy', as emerges from Eden's report to Churchill of his conversations with him in March 1943. Stalin, Eden noted, also desired a Second Front in Europe for political reasons, since: 'If Germany collapsed, he had no desire to take full responsibility for what would happen in Germany or the rest of Europe, and he believed it was a fixed matter of Russian foreign policy to have both British and United States troops heavily in Europe when the collapse came.

[Asia]

....uncontrollable and unpredictable social forces increasingly came to upset imperialist calculations for the region.

....Chiang and his cohorts viewed the mushrooming strength of this Communist-led alliance with growing concern. The Japanese, by comparison, were seen as a secondary problem, which would in any case be solved by an American military victory.

....The US policy in China thus stumbled over the same basic contradiction faced by the British in the Balkans, brought about by an increased intertwining of national-liberation and class wars. The more the masses organized, the more the pressure for revolutionary change grew and the less, in consequence, was the ruling class prepared to fight the invaders. The Kuomintang forces were instead kept in reserve for the final test of strength with the People's Liberation Army. On the other hand, the less Chiang fought the Japanese, the more the PLA became the centre of the national liberation struggle and the more the tide turned in favour of revolution

....Indochinese resistance movement fought obstinately against all the various post-war projects of colonial 'normalization' attempted, in combination with the native ruling class, by British, Chinese Nationalist, French and, much later, American forces. For the Indochinese people, the war did not end in 1945 but continued until the middle of the 1970s: their struggle, lasting nearly thirty-five years, conducted against Japan, France and the United States in succession, is without parallel in contemporary history. Given its relative isolation, the tremendous sacrifices it imposed on the population and the material and human destruction it entailed, the outcome of their heroic fight has been more painful for these courageous people (calamitous in Kampuchea)than one had expected or wished for.

[India]  ....resistance by the masses to the British colonial presence persisted throughout the war, despite all the blandishments of 'anti-fascist* ideology eagerly employed against the autonomous mass struggles by the British Labour Party and the Communist Party of India (a party notable, unlike that of China or Vietnam, for its slavish obedience to Moscow).

....The French Communist Party, fully engaged in its class collaborationist honeymoon, with Maurice Thorez serving as vice-president in De Gaulle's cabinet, behaved scandalously, going to the lengths of covering up for the repression by calling the Algerian nationalist leadership Nazis!

....Imperialist bourgeoisies; bourgeoisies in independent, colonial and semi-colonial countries; professional classes and the intelligentsia; urban and rural petty bourgeoisies; the working class; the landowning class; poor and dispossessed peasantry - all these major and minor classes and fractions of classes, organized by states and armies, parties, professional organizations and movements, entered voluntarily or under compulsion into the cataclysm of a war that began as an inter-imperialist struggle for world power.

....overall character of the Second World War must be grasped as a combination of five different conflicts:

1. An inter-imperialist war fought for world hegemony and won by the United States (though its rule would be territorially truncated by the extension of the non-capitalist sector in Europe and Asia).

2. A just war of self-defence by the Soviet Union against an imperialist attempt to colonize the country and destroy the achievements of the 1917 Revolution.

3. A just war of the Chinese people against imperialism which would develop into a socialist revolution.

4. A just war of Asian colonial peoples against the various military powers and for national liberation and sovereignty, which in some cases (e.g. Indochina) spilled over into socialist revolution.

5. A just war of national liberation fought by populations of the occupied countries of Europe, which would grow into socialist revolution (Yugoslavia and Albania) or open civil war (Greece, North Italy). In the European East, the old order collapsed under the dual, uneven pressure of popular aspirations and Soviet military-bureaucratic action, whereas in the West and South bourgeois order was restored - often against the wishes of the masses -by Western Allied troops.

....The politics of 'anti-fascist alliance', whatever the semantic meaning of the words involved, amounts in reality to systematic class collaboration: the political parties, and especially the Communist parties which maintained that the Western imperialist states were waging a just war against Nazism, ended by forming coalition governments after1945 wherein they actively participated in the reconstruction of the bourgeois state and the capitalist economy. In addition, this incorrect understanding of the character of Western states' intervention in the war led to a systematic betrayal of the colonial populations' anti-imperialist struggles, not to speak of the counterrevolution in Greece.