Potsdam¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter “Potsdam” from Socialist Appeal (Vol. 7, No. 11) launches a polemical assault on the secrecy enveloping the Potsdam Conference, attributing its anti-democratic character directly to Stalin’s initiative. The core argument is that the conference is not a forum for a just peace but a sordid carve-up of continents between imperialist powers and the Stalinist bureaucracy, conducted behind a veil of police and military censorship that mocks even the most elementary democratic norms. The text notes with bitter irony that Stalin’s hirelings in the British Communist Party have attempted to justify this secrecy, yet dare not cite Lenin in their defence, for nowhere in the writings of the socialist teachers can a single line be found to sanction such a procedure. Lenin and Trotsky, by contrast, conducted diplomacy as publicly as possible, understanding that the active intervention of the masses strengthened the working class and the Soviet Union alike.
The chapter draws on the recent historical precedent of earlier Big Three conferences, where Greece was cynically handed over to British imperialism for a brutal assault before the Nazis were even expelled, while the Balkans were ceded as a sphere of influence to the Stalinist bureaucracy. These real decisions were never published; they leaked out only through the march of events. The same outcome is predicted for Potsdam: the real bargains will remain secret, confined to the tops. The text contends that whatever patchwork emerges from the chaos of capitalism in Europe and Asia, it will be more savage, vicious, and repressive than the Treaty of Versailles, a reactionary settlement that did not endure two decades. The sole unifying principle among the three Allies is their shared fear of socialist revolution. Concessions to the Stalinist bureaucracy are made in the hope of staving off the complete collapse of imperialism, but this is dismissed as an illusion.
The polemic is directed simultaneously against the imperialist gangsters of Britain and America, the Stalinist bureaucracy, and the cynical apologists in the Western Communist parties. The chapter concludes with a revolutionary counter-vision: not a new and worse Versailles perpetuating national divisions and racial hatred, but a Socialist United States of Europe and a federation of Socialist Soviet Republics of Asia, to be created by the coming upsurge of the masses, which will revise all decisions made in secret.