The Allied programme for Europe¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the Allied programme for post-war Europe is more catastrophic than the Versailles Treaty, driven not by a desire for liberation but by the competing imperatives of American, British, and Soviet imperialism. Where the Nazis sought a unified concentration camp, the Allies aim to atomise and Balkanise the continent, repeating the errors that led to catastrophe after the last war. Europe is to be carved into spheres: Western Europe subordinated to Anglo-American finance capital, Eastern Europe dominated by the Kremlin through bourgeois puppets. The core claim is that a genuinely united Europe, even under capitalism, would threaten both American and British imperialism as a rival, and the Soviet bureaucracy, which fears any capitalist federation as a future base for war against the USSR. Hence Stalin, Truman, and Churchill are united in their commitment to the dismemberment of Germany and the fragmentation of the continent.
American imperialism, driven by the insoluble contradictions of its own market, seeks to usurp Europe’s historic dominance and establish the dollar’s hegemony over European currencies and industry. Using loans, food, and equipment as weapons, Washington aims to put Europe on rations while simultaneously blackmailing and buying off revolutions. The savagery of Anglo-American policy toward Germany is dictated not only by exploitation but by fear of the German proletarian revolution. The German masses, having experienced every variant of bourgeois rule within decades, will inevitably turn toward socialism. The occupying troops—Tommies and Doughboys—will soon demand demobilisation, and the German proletariat’s struggle against national humiliation and dismemberment will prepare a tremendous resistance under the very heel of the occupation.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical experience of Spain after 1931 as an object lesson in the rapidity of revolutionary turns: mass upsurge, reformist betrayal, a brief lull as reaction prepares, then insurrection. This pattern, the text argues, will repeat across Europe. The Stalinists and classical reformists, by supporting world imperialism, may temporarily stabilise bourgeois democratic regimes, offering limited concessions—trade unions, a relatively free press—as a necessary “democratic interlude” before reaction. But such regimes lack a mass social basis and cannot endure once Anglo-American troops withdraw. Military dictatorships without social support would face crises and convulsions.
The chapter polemicises sharply against Stalinism and reformism as props for imperialism, and against the entire Allied programme as a recipe for national decay, cultural decline, and intensified cycles of war, revolution, and counter-revolution. The only alternative is the central strategic slogan of the Fourth International: the Socialist United States of Europe, made possible by the objective conditions of continental crisis and the subjective basis of mass radicalisation against Allied domination, nationalist intoxication, and chauvinism.