No stable counter-revolutionary capitalist armies in Europe¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter advances a singular, polemical thesis: the military foundation of European bourgeois rule has been shattered by the Second World War, leaving no reliable counter-revolutionary army on the continent. The author argues that this fact, ignored by the working-class press, is of decisive strategic importance. The French army is said to have vanished, the Italian and Low Countries’ armies dissolved, and the Polish émigré force dismissed as pitiful and inadequate. The Balkan armies of Greece and Yugoslavia are smashed; those of Romania and Bulgaria, though formally intact, are already shaky. Even the British army, if counted as European, is composed predominantly of workers so imbued with anti-capitalist and socialist consciousness that it could not be used for protracted repression. Once Hitler is gone, the author contends, the rationale for these soldiers’ presence in Europe evaporates.
The only remaining bourgeois force is the extra-European American army, which the chapter identifies as politically backward but ideologically incoherent. American soldiers are indifferent to imperialist war aims, uniformly desire to go home, and direct any reactionary animosity toward Japan, not Germany. The author predicts that after Hitler’s defeat, in an atmosphere of universal hostility, the American army would rapidly demoralise if used against European workers, with the desire to return home transforming into political opposition to the ruling class.
The chapter then turns to the Red Army, arguing that its Stalinist bureaucracy is more terrified than any imperialist command at the prospect of fraternisation between Soviet soldiers and German workers and peasants. The bureaucracy has erected a wall of hatred, but the author insists that once the German masses move toward uprising and reprisals against Nazis and the German ruling class, this will rekindle the flame of October 1917 among Red Army soldiers. Thus the Red Army is judged even more unstable than any imperialist force as a base for capitalist counter-revolution.
The chapter draws on the historical experience of the October Revolution and the subsequent degeneration of the Soviet state, implicitly counterposing the revolutionary potential of the rank-and-file soldier to the conservative designs of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Its polemic is directed against “revolutionary pessimists” who fail to grasp the unprecedented weakness of the bourgeois state apparatus, and against the Stalinist leadership’s policy of suppressing revolution in the name of a popular front or spheres-of-influence diplomacy. The argument is that Europe stands on the eve of revolutionary convulsions, and that no army—bourgeois or Stalinist—can be relied upon to suppress them.