Power Politics and the Atomic Bomb¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, published in Socialist Appeal, mounts a polemical Marxist critique of the immediate post-Hiroshima geopolitical situation, arguing that the atomic bomb has not altered the fundamental drivers of war. The core argument is that war or peace is determined not by the existence of any weapon, however terrible, but by the “insoluble contradictions of capitalist imperialism” — the economic and political relations of the great powers. The text dismisses as “wishful thinking” the initial belief that the bomb would make war too terrible to contemplate.
The chapter dissects the power politics of the three major Allied powers through their recent public statements. Truman’s “Twelve Points” are characterised as American big-business ‘idealism’ in the tradition of Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter, a cloak for US imperialism’s drive to “maintain world domination.” The clause on non-recognition of “Governments imposed by force” is identified as a direct attack on Russia’s position in Eastern Europe, while the text notes the pointed silence on its application to India and Java. Molotov’s speech is read as a mirror-image power play: denouncing US ambitions and the bomb monopoly, but offering no revolutionary internationalist appeal to workers and peasants. Instead, the chapter argues, the Stalinist bureaucracy, foreseeing an inevitable clash with American imperialism, pursues a purely nationalist policy, signalled by a “sinister recounting” of strategic territories and bases acquired during the war.
The analysis of British politics reveals only a “purely tactical difference” between Labour and Tories. Churchill urges subordination to the US in an anti-Soviet bloc; Bevin, while directing fire at Russia, reflects the agonising position of British imperialism as a “second-rate power” caught between class antagonism to the USSR, imperialist rivalry with the USA, and an insufficient economic basis for an independent role. This makes British policy a major factor of “uncertainty.”
The chapter polemicises against the utopianism of liberal and scientific figures. Professor Einstein’s proposal to place the bomb under the United Nations Organisation is dismissed as useless, given that the UN’s members are the likely protagonists in a new war. The threatened publication of bomb secrets by concerned scientists is labelled a “useless gesture,” as the secret will not last long anyway, and premature publication would merely accelerate the arms race. The text reserves its sharpest fire for the “labour and Stalinist leaders,” who are condemned as “tools of the decaying capitalist system” with no alternative to offer. The only solution posited is the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class, led by the Fourth International, to destroy the system of antagonistic national states and imperialist markets, thereby harnessing atomic energy for humanity’s benefit.