8. World War II¶
Core Argument¶
The United States entered the Second World War not to defend democracy but to protect its capitalist interests. President Roosevelt, having publicly pledged to keep America out of war, deliberately provoked Japan through an oil and steel embargo, knowing this would force an attack. US intelligence had cracked Japanese codes and knew of the planned strike on Pearl Harbor, yet the base was left unprepared. Pearl Harbor provided the necessary pretext for war. The Soviet Union’s nationalised planned economy proved decisive in defeating Germany, outproducing the Wehrmacht in artillery, tanks, and aircraft. Churchill delayed opening a second front in Europe, hoping Germany and the USSR would exhaust each other, while the US sought to halt the Red Army’s advance and weaken the British Empire. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a political warning to the USSR, not a military necessity, as Japan was already defeated. After Japan’s surrender, the Cold War began immediately, with Truman ready to confront Moscow. The USSR lost 27 million people, half of all WWII casualties, and bore the main burden of the war in Europe.
After the war, American imperialism dominated the world, possessing an intact productive base, two-thirds of global gold reserves, a huge army, and a nuclear monopoly. The Bretton Woods agreement established the dollar as the world currency. Fear of revolution compelled Washington to intervene via the Marshall Plan, assisting European capitalist recovery and creating new markets for US production. The destruction of capital during the war created a large market, while new industries opened avenues for investment, producing a sustained economic upswing that raised living standards and fostered a belief that capitalism was “delivering the goods.” This prosperity was accompanied by the McCarthy Era witch hunts. State repression, orchestrated by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, used illegal wiretaps and blackmail. The House Un-American Activities Committee targeted Hollywood, blacklisting around 250 artists and destroying careers. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for passing atomic secrets. McCarthy overreached by attacking the army and was subsequently condemned by the Senate. The post-war upswing eroded revolutionary traditions in the US labour movement, and the absence of a Marxist party with deep working-class roots meant the class could only learn through its own slow experience.
The American working class possesses strong industrial militancy and class consciousness, despite lacking a political party. From 1936 to 1955, there were 78,798 strikes involving 42,366,000 workers. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act was introduced to curb union militancy but failed to stop major strikes, including the 1959 steel strike, the largest in US history. Taft-Hartley remains in use; Reagan invoked it to fire 13,000 air traffic controllers in 1981, and George W. Bush used it against longshoremen. The state is not impartial in class conflict. The 1989 Pittston coal strike saw miners fight company violence and state troopers with dynamite, yet received minimal press coverage. Union bureaucratisation and the decline of heavy industry in the North and East have reduced membership, leaving millions of workers in new Southern and Western industries unorganised. The unions must return to the militant traditions of the CIO to organise these workers. Transforming unions into democratic, fighting organs is a precondition for socialist change in America.