How the struggles developed in Europe

Wellred

Core Argument

This chapter argues that the Second World War did not suspend class struggle but rather intensified it, fusing the national question with the social question. The central thesis is that the bourgeoisie, even under occupation, proved incapable of leading a genuine democratic revolution, leaving the proletariat as the only force capable of fighting simultaneously for national liberation and social emancipation. The evidence is drawn from the Balkans and Eastern Europe, where, even under the Nazi heel, bitter civil war raged between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie alongside the resistance against the Germans. In Yugoslavia, Greece, and Poland, the struggle for national freedom was inseparable from the struggle for bread and land.

The chapter then turns to Western Europe, arguing that the advance of Anglo-American armies immediately revealed the “national” question as a social one. The release of occupation pressure did not lead to bourgeois restoration but to the beginnings of proletarian uprisings. In France and Belgium, workers and the petty bourgeoisie armed themselves, and in France they began seizing factories and mines, marking a new stage of the proletarian French revolution. So sharp was the leftward swing that even de Gaulle, a Bonapartist figure, resorted to social demagogy, pretending to stand for nationalisation and the punishment of big capitalists. This demonstrates the depth of the petty bourgeoisie’s radicalisation.

The chapter then engages in a polemic against the hypothetical objection that a Nazi victory would have produced a different outcome. It insists that even complete German victory would have been ephemeral. Hitler’s empire would have been built on sand, unable to hold down London, Moscow, Paris, or Brussels for even a decade. The inevitable revolts would have awakened the class solidarity of German workers and soldiers, threatening Berlin itself. The argument draws on Trotsky’s earlier analysis of China, where he predicted that the bourgeoisie would collaborate with Japanese invaders. The chapter extends this logic to France, Belgium, Norway, and Greece, asserting that collaboration would have exposed the bourgeoisie as utterly alien to the masses’ interests. The theoretical context is the Marxist understanding that the bourgeoisie, having long since ceased to be a revolutionary class, cannot lead democratic or national liberation struggles, leaving the proletariat as the sole consistent force for both.