I
want to go into the question of the resistance movement in
Europe between 1940 and 1944 in detail. I want to do so
especially because some comrades for whom I have respect, and
whom I hope to see back in the Fourth International, the
comrades of the Lutte Ouvrière group in France, have made it
their special point of honour to raise this question against the
Fourth International.
From
the foundation of the Communist International, communists were
educated in a principled rejection of the idea of "national
defence" or "defence of the fatherland" in the
imperialist countries. This meant a total refusal to have
anything to do with imperialist wars. The Trotskyist movement
was educated in the same spirit. This was all the more necessary
with the right-wing turn of the Comintern and the Stalin-Laval
pact in 1935, which turned the Stalinists in the West European
countries, and in some colonial countries, into the worst
advocates of pro-imperialist chauvinism.
In
India, for instance, this led to the disastrous betrayal by the
Stalinists of the national uprising in 1942. When the uprising
took place, the British colonialists opened the jails for the
leaders of the Indian Communist Party in order to transform them
into agitators against the uprising and for the imperialist war.
This tremendous betrayal laid the basis for the continuous mass
influence of the bourgeois nationalist Congress Party in the
following decades.
Our
movement was inoculated against nationalism in imperialist
countries, against the idea of supporting imperialist war
efforts in any form whatsoever. That was a good education, and I
do not propose to revise that tradition. But what it left out of
account were elements of the much more complex Leninist position
in the First World War. It is simply not true that Lenin's
position then can be reduced to the formula: "This is a
reactionary imperialist war. We have nothing to do with
it." Lenin's position was much more sophisticated. He said:
"There are at least two wars, and we want to introduce a
third one." (The third one was the proletarian civil war
against the bourgeoisie which in actual fact came out of the war
in Russia.)
Lenin
fought a determined struggle against sectarian currents inside
the internationalist tendency who did not recognise the
distinction between these two wars. He pointed out: "There
is an inter-imperialist war. With that war we have nothing to
do. But there are also wars of national uprising by oppressed
nationalities. The Irish uprising is 100 per cent justified.
Even if German imperialism tries to profit from it, even if
leaders of the national movement link up with German submarines,
this does not change the just nature of the Irish war of
independence against British imperialism. The same thing is true
for the national movement in the colonies and the semi-colonies,
the Indian movement, the Turkish movement, the Persian
movement." And he added: "The same thing is true for
the oppressed nationalities in Russia and Austro-Hungary. The
Polish national movement is a just movement, the Czech national
movement is a just movement. A movement by any oppressed
nationality against the imperialist oppressor is a just
movement. And the fact that the leadership of these movements
could betray by linking these movements politically and
organizationally to imperialism is a reason to denounce these
leaders, not a reason to condemn these movements."
Now
if we look at the problem of World War II from that more
dialectical, more correct Leninist point of view, we have to say
that it was a very complicated business indeed. I would say, at
the risk of putting it a bit too strongly, that the Second World
War was in reality a combination of five different wars. That
may seem an outrageous proposition at first sight, but I think
closer examination will bear it out.
First,
there was an inter-imperialist war, a war between the Nazi,
Italian, and Japanese imperialists on the one hand, and the
Anglo-American-French imperialists on the other hand. That was a
reactionary war, a war between different groups of imperialist
powers. We had nothing to do with that war, we were totally
against it.
Second,
there was a just war of self-defence by the people of China, an
oppressed semi-colonial country, against Japanese imperialism.
At no moment was Chiang Kai-shek's alliance with American
imperialism a justification for any revolutionary to change
their judgement on the nature of the Chinese war. It was a war
of national liberation against a robber gang, the Japanese
imperialists, who wanted to enslave the Chinese people. Trotsky
was absolutely clear and unambiguous on this. That war of
independence started before the Second World War, in 1937; in a
certain sense, it started in 1931 with the Japanese Manchurian
adventure. It became intertwined with the Second World War, but
it remained a separate and autonomous ingredient of it.
Third,
there was a just war of national defence of the Soviet Union, a
workers state, against an imperialist power. The fact that the
Soviet leadership allied itself not only in a military way -
which was absolutely justified - but also politically with the
Western imperialists in no way changed the just nature of that
war. The war of the Soviet workers and peasants, of the Soviet
peoples and the Soviet state, to defend the Soviet Union against
German imperialism was a just war from any Marxist-Leninist
point of view. In that war we were 100 per cent for the victory
of one camp, without any reservations or question marks. We were
for absolute victory of the Soviet people against the murderous
robbers of German imperialism.
Fourth,
there was a just war of national liberation of the oppressed
colonial peoples of Africa and Asia (in Latin America there was
no such war), launched by the masses against British and French
imperialism, sometimes against Japanese imperialism, and
sometimes against both in succession, one after the other.
Again, these were absolutely justified wars of national
liberation, regardless of the particular character of the
imperialist power. We were just as much for the victory of the
Indian people's uprising against British imperialism, and the
small beginnings of the uprising in Ceylon, as we were in favour
of the victory of the Burmese, Indochinese, and Indonesian
guerrillas against Japanese, French, and Dutch imperialism
successively. In the Philippines the situation was even more
complex. I do not want to go into all the details, but the basic
point is that all these wars of national liberation were just
wars, regardless of the nature of their political leadership.
You do not have to place any political confidence in or give any
political support to the leaders of a particular struggle in
order to recognise the justness of that struggle. When a strike
is led by treacherous trade union bureaucrats you do not put any
trust in them - but nor do you stop supporting the strike.
Now
I come to the fifth war, which is the most complex. I would not
say that it was going on in the whole of Europe occupied by Nazi
imperialism, but more especially in two countries, Yugoslavia
and Greece, to a great extent in Poland, and incipiently in
France and Italy. That was a war of liberation by the oppressed
workers, peasants, and urban petty bourgeoisie against the
German Nazi imperialists and their stooges. To deny the
autonomous nature of that war means saying in reality that the
workers and peasants of Western Europe had no right to fight
against those who were enslaving them at that moment unless
their minds were set clearly against bringing in other enslavers
in place of the existing ones. That is an unacceptable position.
It
is true that if the leadership of that mass resistance remained
in the hands of bourgeois nationalists, of Stalinists or social
democrats, it could eventually be sold out to the Western
imperialists. It was the duty of the revolutionaries to prevent
this from happening by trying to oust these fakers from the
leadership of the movement. But it was impossible to prevent
such a betrayal by abstaining from participating in that
movement.
What
lay behind that fifth war? It was the inhuman conditions which
existed in the occupied countries. How can anyone doubt that?
How can anyone tell us that the real reason for the uprising was
some ideological framework - such as the chauvinism of the
French people or of the CP leadership? Such an explanation is
nonsense. People did not fight because they were chauvinists.
People were fighting because they were hungry, because they were
over-exploited, because there were mass deportations of slave
labour to Germany, because there was mass slaughter, because
there were concentration camps, because there was no right to
strike, because unions were banned, because communists,
socialists and trade unionists were being put in prison.
That's
why people were rising, and not because they were chauvinists.
They were often chauvinists too, but that was not the main
reason. The main reason was their inhuman material living
conditions, their social, political, and national oppression,
which was so intolerable that it pushed millions onto the road
of struggle. And you have to answer the question: was it a just
struggle, or was it wrong to rise against this over-exploitation
and oppression? Who can seriously argue that the working class
of Western or Eastern Europe should have abstained or remained
passive towards the horrors of Nazi oppression and Nazi
occupation? That position is indefensible.
So
the only correct position was to say that there was a fifth war
which was also an autonomous aspect of what was going on between
1939 and 1945. The correct revolutionary Marxist position (I say
this with a certain apologetic tendency, because it was the one
defended from the beginning by the Belgian Trotskyists against
what I would call both the right wing and the ultra-left wing of
the European Trotskyist movement at that time) should have been
as follows: to support fully all mass struggles and uprisings,
whether armed or unarmed, against Nazi imperialism in occupied
Europe, in order to fight to transform them into a victorious
socialist revolution - that is, to fight to oust from the
leadership of the struggles those who were linking them up with
the Western imperialists, and who wanted in reality to maintain
capitalism at the end of the war, as in fact happened.
We
have to understand that what started in Europe in 1941 was a
genuine new variant of a process of permanent revolution, which
could transform that resistance movement into a socialist
revolution. I say, "could", but in at least one
example that was what actually happened. It happened in
Yugoslavia. That's exactly what the Yugoslav Communists did.
Whatever
our criticisms of the bureaucratic way in which they did it, the
crimes they committed in the course of it, or the political and
ideological deviations which accompanied that process,
fundamentally that is what they did. We have no intention of
being apologists for Tito, but we have to understand what he
did. It was an amazing thing. At the start of the uprising in
1941 the Yugoslav CP had a mere 5,000 active participants. Yet
in 1945 they took power at the head of an army of half a million
workers and peasants. That was no small feat. They saw the
possibility and the opportunity. They behaved as revolutionaries
- bureaucratic-centrist revolutionaries of Stalinist origin, if
you like, but you cannot call that counter-revolutionary. They
destroyed capitalism. It was not the Soviet army, it was not
Stalin, as a result of the "cold war", who destroyed
capitalism in Yugoslavia. It was the Yugoslav CP which led this
struggle, accompanied by a big fight against Stalin.
A1l
the proofs are there - all the letters sent by the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union to the Yugoslavs, saying: "Do not
attack private property. Do not push the Americans into
hostility to the Soviet Union by attacking private
property." And Tito and the leaders of the Communist Party
did not give a damn about what Stalin told them to do or not to
do. They led a genuine process of permanent revolution in the
historical sense of the word, transformed a mass uprising
against foreign imperialist occupation - an uprising which
started on an inter-class basis, but under a bureaucratic
proletarian leadership - into a genuine socialist revolution.
At
the end of 1945, Yugoslavia became a workers state. There was a
tremendous mass uprising in 1944-45, the workers took over the
factories, the land was taken over by the peasants (and later by
the state, in an exaggerated and over-centralised manner).
Private property was largely destroyed. Nobody can really deny
that the Yugoslav Communist Party destroyed capitalism, even if
it was through its own bureaucratic methods, repressing workers
democracy, even shooting some people whom it accused of being
Trotskyists (which was not true - there was no Trotskyist
section in Yugoslavia then or at any time previously). And it
did not destroy capitalism through some bureaucratic moves with
a foreign army, as in Eastern Europe, but through a genuine
popular revolution, a huge mass mobilisation, one of the hugest
ever seen in Europe. You should study the history of what
happened in Yugoslavia - how, as bourgeois writers say, in every
single village there was a civil war. That's the truth of it.
The only comparison you can make is with Vietnam.
So
I think that revolutionaries should basically have tried to do
in the other occupied countries what the Yugoslav Communists did
in Yugoslavia - of course with better methods and better
results, leading to workers democracy and workers power directly
exercised by workers councils, and not by a bureaucratised
workers party and a privileged bureaucracy.
That
is not to say at all that it was our fault if the proletarian
revolution failed in Europe in 1945, because we did not apply
the correct line in the resistance movement. That would be
ridiculous. Even with the best of lines, the relationship of
forces was such that we would not have succeeded. The
relationship of forces between the Communist parties and us, the
prestige of the CPs, the links of the CPs with the Soviet Union,
the low level of working class consciousness as a result of a
long period of defeats - all that made it impossible for the
Trotskyists really to compete with the Stalinists for the
leadership of the mass movement. So the mistakes which were
made, both in a right-wing sense and in an ultra-left sense,
actually had very little effect on history. They are simply
lessons from which we have to draw a political conclusion in
order not to repeat these mistakes in future. We cannot say that
we failed to influence history as a result of these mistakes.
These
lessons were of a dual nature. The leading comrades of one of
the two French Trotskyist organizations, the POI (which was the
official section), made right-wing mistakes in 1940-41. There is
no doubt about that. They started from a correct line
essentially, the one I have just outlined, but they took it one
step too far. In the implementation of that line they included
temporary blocs with what they called the "national
bourgeoisie".
I
should add they were able to use one sentence by Trotsky in
support of their position. Remember that before arriving too
hastily at a judgement on these questions. This sentence came at
the beginning of one of Trotsky's last articles: "France is
being transformed into an oppressed nation." In an
oppressed nation there is no principled reason to reject
temporary, tactical agreements with the "national
bourgeoisie" against imperialism. There are conditions: we
do not make a political bloc with the bourgeoisie. But purely
tactical agreements with the national bourgeoisie are
acceptable. We should, for instance, have made such an agreement
in the 1942 uprising in India. It is a question of tactics, not
of principle.
What
was wrong in the position of the POI leadership was to make an
extrapolation from a temporary, conjuncture situation. If France
had permanently become a semi-colonial country, that would have
been another story. But it was a temporary situation, just an
episode in the war. France remained an imperialist power, with
imperialist structures, which continued through the Gaullist
operation to exploit many colonial peoples and maintain its
empire in Africa intact. To change one's attitude towards the
bourgeoisie simply in the light of what happened over a couple
of years on the territory of France was a premature move which
contained within it the seed of major political mistakes.
In
fact it did not lead to anything in practice. Those who say that
the French Trotskyists "betrayed" by making a bloc
with the bourgeoisie in 1940-41 do not understand the difference
between the beginning of a theoretical mistake and an actual
treacherous intervention in the class struggle. There was never
any agreement with the bourgeoisie, never any support for them
when it came to the point. Whenever strikes took place the
French Trotskyists were 100 per cent on the side of the workers.
Whether it was a strike against French capitalists, German
capitalists, or a combination of both, they were on the side of
the workers every time. So where was the betrayal? It just
confuses a possible political mistake and an actual theoretical
one - which eventually could perhaps have had grave
consequences, but in actual fact never did. That it was a
mistake I naturally do not deny. But I think the comrades of the
POI minority who fought against it did a good job, and by 1942
it was reversed and did not come up again.
The
sectarian mistake, however, was in my opinion much graver. Here
the ultra-left wing of the Trotskyist movement denied any
progressive ingredient in the resistance movement and refused to
make any distinction between the mass resistance, the armed mass
struggle, and the manoeuvres and plans of the bourgeois
nationalist. social democratic or Stalinist misleaders of the
masses. That mistake was much worse because it led to abstention
on what were important living struggles of the masses. Those
comrades (such as the Lutte Ouvrière group) who persist even
today in identifying the mass movements in the occupied
countries with imperialism - saying that the war in Yugoslavia
was an imperialist war because it was conducted by nationalists
- are completely revising the Marxist method. Instead of
defining the class nature of a mass movement by its objective
roots and significance, they try to do so on the basis of its
ideology. This is an unacceptable backward step towards
historical idealism. When workers rise against exploitation and
oppression with nationalist slogans, you say: "The rising
is correct; please change the slogans." You do not say:
"The rising is bad because the slogans are bad." It
does not become bourgeois because the slogans are bourgeois -
that is a wrong and absolutely unmaterialist approach.
Trotsky
warned the Trotskyist movement against precisely such mistakes
in his last basic document, the Manifesto of the 1940 emergency
conference. He pointed out that they should be careful not to
judge workers in the same way as the bourgeoisie even when they
talked about national defence. It was necessary to distinguish
between what they said and what they meant - to judge the
objective historical nature of their intervention rather than
the words they used. And the fact that sectarian sections of the
Trotskyist movement did not understand that, and took an
abstentionist position on big clashes involving hundreds of
thousands or even millions of people, was very dangerous for the
future of the Fourth International.
To
abstain from such clashes on ideological grounds would have been
absolutely suicidal for a living revolutionary movement. But we
had no section in Yugoslavia. And had we had one, it would
happily not have been sectarian. Otherwise we could not address
the Yugoslav Communists and workers with the authority which we
have today. Our first intervention in Yugoslavia was only in
1948; it was a good one, and so now we can speak with an
unblemished banner and considerable moral authority in
Yugoslavia. But if the Lutte Ouvrière line had been applied in
practice between 1941 and 1944 in Yugoslavia, and if Yugoslav
Trotskyists had been neutral in that civil war, we would not be
very proud today and we would certainly not be in a strong
position to defend the programme of the Fourth International. As
it is, some of the Yugoslav Communists who later became
Trotskyists were heroes in the civil war, which gives them a
certain standing and moral authority. It makes it easier for
them and for us to discuss Trotskyism in Yugoslavia today. If we
had to carry the moral blemish of passivity and abstention in a
huge civil war, we would, to say the least, be in a very bad
position today.
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