Shameful resolution passed at conference¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, from the July 1943 issue of Socialist Appeal, launches a blistering polemic against the Labour Party conference’s adoption of a resolution that attributes the crimes of the Hitler regime to the German people as a whole. The core argument is that this resolution represents a complete betrayal of international socialist principles and a capitulation to chauvinism, specifically the reactionary current of “Vansittartism,” which held the entire German nation collectively guilty for Nazism. The text’s narrative thrust is to expose the hypocrisy and cowardice of the Labour and trade union leadership, who are shown to be parroting the slanders of the capitalist class against the German workers.
The key claim of the resolution, which the chapter excoriates, is that the “overwhelming mass of the German people” supported the Nazi regime, that anti-Nazi Germans are a “very small minority,” and that Germany must be “re-educated” and disarmed. The chapter counters this by calling it a “deliberate travesty of history.” As evidence of the resolution’s reactionary character, the author points to the enthusiastic endorsement it received from the formerly pro-fascist capitalist press, including the Daily Mail and the Sunday Dispatch. This alignment is used to demonstrate that the Labour leadership’s position objectively serves the interests of the British ruling class.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical context of the interwar period and the Second World War. It reminds readers that British capitalists “aided, armed and financed Hitler” to create a “bulwark against Bolshevism,” and that Churchill openly praised Mussolini and Franco before the war. The polemic is sharpened by a devastating comparison: if German workers are to be blamed for their masters’ crimes, then the British Labour leaders are far more culpable, as they support a government representing the very monopoly capitalists who backed Hitler, while remaining silent about British imperialism’s own ongoing crimes in India. The text argues that the Labour leaders, unlike the German opposition, face no risk of firing squads or concentration camps, yet they choose complicity. The chapter’s polemical targets are thus threefold: the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy (especially Charles Dukes, who slandered German trade unionists), the British capitalist class, and the chauvinist ideology of collective national guilt.