Against pessimism "The overall picture of the ideology prevalent during World War Il is sombre indeed. Internationalist or even simply humanist consciousness were at a historical low-point much so that many thought that an irreversible slide towards barbarism had already set in. Orwell's 1984 was the prototype of such premoni-
Such profound pessimism was premature. In the last analysis, the radical decline in globally rational marked WWII was a reflection of the great defeats suffered by the international working class prior to, and during, the first years of the war. But after Stalingrad and Mussolini's downfall, a new and tumultuous rise of international working-class militancy occurred.
The disappearance of the fascist dictatorships in Europe, and the victory of the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions, were the clearest expressions of this modification in the global balance of class forces.
So were the upsurge of the French and Italian labour movement in 1944-48; the landslide victory of the British Labour Party in 1945; the insurgency of national liberation movements throughout Asia which seriously weakened imperialism in the 1945-5 period.
Such upheavals ultimately made possible a limited and contradictory revival of working-class consciousness and genuine internationalism too, even if they had to start from a very low level.
Certain social forces and individuals saved humanity's and the international proletariat's honour during the Second World War.
The Amsterdam workers launched a magnificent strike in February 1941 against the first anti-Semitic measures of the Nazi occupation.
The Yugoslav Communists built a proletarian brigade much to the fury of Stalin - which succeeded in recruiting several thousand Italian,
Hungarian and German soldiers and volunteers into its
The Danish resistance saved nearly all the Danish Jews from the Holocaust by transporting them overnight to Sweden. Small groups of Japanese leftists aided the Chinese guerrillas in Manchuria.
An ex-militant of the Left Opposition, Lev Kopelev, succeeded in organising anti-fascist propaganda in the German language so efficiently that the German citadel of Grandenz surrendered without a fight to the Red Army. Having thus saved the lives of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers, he was promptly arrested and imprisoned by Stalin's NKVD for the hideous crime of "cosmopolitanism".
A tiny group of European Communists under the leadership of Leopold Trepper set up an information network in occupied France and Belgium which was worth several divisions for the Red Army, according to expert opinion. After the liberation of France, Trepper travelled to Poland where he was promptly arrested by the NKVD and kept in jail for several years.
Small groups of internationalist Communists, generally of Trotskyist conviction, combined anti-fascist resistance activity with a steadfast defence of working-class interests and a staunch internationalist their stance.
These were small exceptions. But they demonstrated that under the ashes heaped upon the workers class consciousness by Noske, Hitler and Stalin, a spark remained. From that spark, new flames would arise.
What these proletarian internationalists embodied was the conviction that the war could end otherwise than by the restoration of ruling-class power or the emergence of new bourgeois states; that it could end otherwise than by the total victory of either of the two coalitions; that it could lead to the spread of victorious popular socialist revolutions.
Such conviction was neither utopian nor did it discount the strength of the armies of the potential victors. It expressed an understanding of the instinctive wishes and spontaneous trends of tens of millions of workers and poor peasants over three continents.
For it to be realised, sufficient organisational strength - including armed strength - and political capacity were required. But purpose and initiative could make all the
It was not the relative strength of their opponents which made the Yugoslav Revolution victorious and led the Greek to defeat, which saw a victory of social revolution in China and its defeat in Indonesia. Differences in the resolve and determination of the Communist Parties in these four countries were the
What was possible in Yugoslavia and China would also have been possible in some other European and Asian countries. [EM] * Extracted from Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War, London: Verso, 1986
International Viewpoint #309 March 1999 31