Stalinism responsible¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter excoriates the Stalinist bureaucracy as the primary agent responsible for the catastrophe engulfing post-war Europe. Its core argument is that Stalin’s control over Poland and Czechoslovakia, exercised through puppet regimes, has been used to pursue a policy of national oppression rather than international socialist solidarity. The text contends that an offer of work, bread, and fraternal co-operation would have won the enthusiastic support of the German working class and the peoples of the region. Instead, the Stalinist leadership has chosen the path of nationalist vengeance, expelling 25 million Germans from Eastern Europe and Eastern Germany, and carving away more than a third of Germany’s territory, leaving a ruined and starving rump state. This, the chapter warns, sows the seeds for new national and fratricidal hatreds, inevitably giving rise to reactionary movements and another war.
The chapter’s polemic is directed squarely at apologists for Stalinism within the so-called ‘Communist’ Party, personified by Ivor Montagu. Writing in the Daily Worker on 10 October, Montagu justifies the expulsions by arguing that Poles, having suffered terribly, cannot be expected to spare or share food with German refugees, even those whose families had lived in the area for centuries. The chapter quotes Montagu’s sneering dismissal of appeals for pity and brotherly love as fit only for “Sunday Schools,” and his counter-argument that the winter prospects of Holland, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Western USSR are grimmer than Germany’s. The text denounces this as the “language of reaction,” utterly devoid of the ideals of communism and internationalism.
Drawing on classical Marxist theory, the chapter counterposes that the oppression of one nation by another cannot solve the problems of the masses in any country. It reiterates the fundamental Marxist teaching that there is plenty in the world to provide for the entire human race; it is the fetters of private ownership of the means of production that cause starvation and privation. Stalinism, having long abandoned revolutionary Marxist policy, now resorts to the worst forms of national oppression and chauvinism. The only solution, the chapter concludes, is a break with nationalism and the co-operation of all peoples for a socialist United States of Europe, which alone can end the suffering and decay and open a new era of peace and plenty.