Problem posed by the victories of the allies

Wellred

Core Argument

Here the author confronts the central contradiction produced by the impending victory of Anglo-American imperialism: the national liberation of Europe from Nazi rule will not lead to genuine freedom but to a new, more insidious form of subjugation. The chapter opens with a polemic against the ultra-lefts, who deny the reality of national oppression in Europe. The author insists that the French, Czechs, and Poles were oppressed not only as workers but as members of subject races, and that Marxism must fight against all forms of national domination. However, the bourgeoisie of the liberated nations will become the oppressors of the defeated Germans tomorrow, while all remain satellites of Anglo-American capital. Thus the Fourth International cannot separate the struggle for national self-determination from the struggle for social emancipation; the only real solution is the destruction of imperialism and the creation of a federation of socialist soviet republics.

The core of the argument turns on the unique position of Germany in the coming European revolution. The allied bourgeoisie and the Stalinist bureaucracy understand this clearly, as shown by their plans for the military occupation and dismemberment of Germany. The dissolution of the Nazi regime will create a political vacuum, and proletarian uprisings will pose the socialist revolution on the order of the day. The German bourgeoisie, having no independent base, will become collaborators and quislings of Anglo-American imperialism. Consequently, the liberation of Germany from Allied domination will assume an anti-capitalist as well as an anti-Allied form. The foreign workers in Germany will serve as a crucial link between the European and German working classes, but they can only be approached from the angle of united class resistance to all oppressors.

The chapter draws heavily on the experience of the 1918 German revolution and the Spanish revolution of 1931-1936 as models for the coming period. The bourgeoisie, unable to establish military dictatorships across all Europe due to the radicalisation of the masses and the weakness of its own domestic base, will resort to pseudo-democratic forms—bourgeois democracy, popular frontism, and class collaboration—as a counter-revolutionary tactic. The Stalinists and Social Democrats will attempt to guide the mass movement into these harmless channels. The task of the Bolshevik-Leninists is to expose them in action through transitional demands, including the call for a government free from all representatives of capitalism, while simultaneously agitating for workers' committees, arming the workers, and the setting up of soviets. The revolution will pass through ebbs and flows, inevitably culminating in civil war, but the European masses, uprooted by war and crisis, are instinctively striving towards a socialist solution.