The Outbreak of War¶
Core Argument¶
The Outbreak of War
The outbreak of the Second World War represents the inevitable convulsion of a decaying imperialist order, rooted in the irreconcilable rivalry between the old colonial empires of Britain and France and the latecomer plunderers of Germany and Italy. Britain’s nineteenth-century hegemony has collapsed: she has lost naval supremacy, faced colonial revolts, and been overtaken economically by the United States and Germany. France’s European dominance, a temporary product of Versailles, has reduced her to little more than Britain’s latest dominion. Germany’s regeneration was always inevitable, aided by British support against the USSR, but Munich was merely Chamberlain’s attempt to buy peace at others’ expense. Hitler could extract nothing more from London without striking at Britain’s own lifelines. The war is thus a struggle for a new division of the world.
The United States, holding two-thirds of the world’s gold, is automatically displacing Britain and preparing for world dominion. British and French industry has stagnated, poisoned by colonial super-profits and the privileges secured by social-patriotic ‘defence of democracy’. The Fourth International’s 1934 theses predicted this collapse. The Spanish Civil War exposed the real faces of the ‘great democracies’: they backed Franco from the start, preferring dictatorships for controlling colonies. Blum and Chamberlain used ‘non-intervention’ to conceal British capital’s plan to dictate terms to the victor. Stalin’s Moscow, groping toward Berlin, stands ready to betray all democracies.
The Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August, which Trotsky predicted, was sealed because British and French Tories refused to negotiate an anti-German pact with Stalin unless Soviet troops could move westward—which they would not permit. This pact demoralised those who had followed Stalinist Popular Front policies. The Daily Herald’s call for resumed negotiations with Stalin represented an attempt by radical and social-democratic circles to return to that earlier situation, seeking to use Trotsky as an ally against communism and the Soviet workers’ state. The Versailles Treaty, which ended the First World War, imposed crushing sanctions on Germany. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ and ‘Good Neighbour’ policy aimed to impose US control throughout the Americas less through direct intervention and more through economic penetration. The war is inevitable and will crush both empires.