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   Vol.64/No.31            August 14, 2000 
 
 
How U.S. militarization drive led to second world imperialist slaughter
Pathfinder Press reprints 'In Defense of Marxism' by Leon Trotsky
 
BY STEVE CLARK  
Pathfinder Press has just issued a new printing of Leon Trotsky's final major work, In Defense of Marxism.

In 1990, when the publishing house released the third edition of the book, the editors added the subtitle: "The Social and Political Contradictions of the Soviet Union." That edition went on sale amid the events that culminated at the end of 1991 with the collapse of the Stalinist regime in Moscow, including dissolution of the federation that since 1922 had been called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union for short.

Ten years later, many workers and young people who will be interested in Trotsky's book have lived their entire political lives during a period when the term "the Soviet Union" did not appear on any up-to-date map or globe they may have looked at.

Recognizing that political reality, Pathfinder has now expanded the subtitle to read: "The Social and Political Contradictions of the Soviet Union on the Eve of World War II."

By doing so the publisher hopes to establish a historical and political framework that makes the topic of Trotsky's work a bit more accessible and concrete, and thus of greater interest, to potential readers. With the same goal, Pathfinder in the mid-1990s added the years "1928–38" to the title of another of its standard books, The History of American Trotskyism by James P. Cannon, a founding leader of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party.  
 
Why 'on eve of World War II'?
In Defense of Marxism had been redesigned with more readable type and an attractive new cover in 1995, and those who already have it on their bookshelves will notice no substantial differences in this new printing. So the addition of seven words to the subtitle might seem of little note, especially to anyone other than a new reader.

In fact, however, the editors' choice of wording--"on the eve of World II"--raises a thought-provoking question: Why not "at the opening of World War II" instead? After all, Trotsky's articles and letters collected in the book are all written following September 3, 1939, when the imperialist governments of the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany, a few days after Berlin's invasion of Poland.

Pathfinder's editors made the right decision. For class-conscious working people, the decisive spread of the war in Europe in the fall of 1939 signaled the inevitability of what would truly transform the conflict both there and in Asia into a second world war: the entry of U.S. imperialism.

References to the opening of World War II in September 1939 are comparable in this sense to calling the Bolshevik-led workers and peasants government established in October 1917 the dictatorship of the proletariat some half a year before the toilers had expropriated most capitalist-owned means of production. In both cases, such terminology is an anticipation for practical, that is, revolutionary, purposes.

In Defense of Marxism is a collection of polemics by Trotsky written to arm the proletarian cadre of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) against a petty-bourgeois minority current in the leadership of the party that was bending to the intensifying pressures of bourgeois public opinion during Washington's militarization drive.

Trotsky was a central leader of the October 1917 revolution who, following the death of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, fought to continue advancing Lenin's communist course against the political counterrevolution eventually headed by Joseph Stalin.

Exiled by Stalin in 1929, Trotsky was living in Mexico in 1939–40 when he collaborated with Cannon and other SWP leaders in conducting this political fight, at the center of which was their intransigent defense of the Soviet workers state in face of the impending imperialist assault.  
 
Wars in Europe and Asia
Both the war in Europe and the war in Asia had begun well before the closing months of 1939.

In Asia, the Japanese government had launched its invasion and occupation of Manchuria in 1931, extending its brutal imperial control over China throughout the following seven years. (Korea had been annexed by Tokyo as far back as 1910, and remained so.)

In Europe, during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, the fascist regimes of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy provided military aid to Gen. Francisco Franco in savagely crushing the labor movement, insurgent peasants, and the rebellious colonized people of Morocco. The Italian government militarily conquered Ethiopia in 1935–36 and annexed Albania in April 1939. German imperialism occupied Austria in March 1938, the Sudetenland in October of that year, and much of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

But the declaration of war by London and Paris in September 1939 came 21 months before German imperialism's invasion of the Soviet Union--and no one at the time knew whether it would take place in 5 months, 21 months, 35 months, or when.

In fact, Stalin in August 1939 had just concluded the so-called German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact with Hitler, opening the way for Berlin to invade and occupy the western half of Poland. At the same time, Moscow invaded and occupied the eastern sector of Poland, after which Stalin's murder squads rooted out Bolshevik oppositionists and antifascist officers of the Polish armed forces.

The counterrevolutionary course of the bureaucratic caste registered by the Stalin-Hitler pact had a demoralizing and demobilizing impact on workers and farmers in the Soviet Union and worldwide, facilitating German imperialism's invasion of the workers state in June 1941. Stalin was stunned and unprepared for this assault. On its eve, he refused for days to approve defensive action by the general staff of the Red Army, because he couldn't believe what was about to happen.

But as Trotsky's polemics demonstrate, the communist workers movement had been actively readying class-conscious working people for more than half a decade to defend the Soviet workers state and take advantage of every opportunity to extend the socialist revolution.  
 
Roosevelt presses for war
In December 1941 the expanding wars both in the Pacific and in Europe were finally unified with the North American imperialist colossus, and transformed into a world war.

On December 8 of that year, Congress adopted the proposal by Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt that it "declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan [on the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor] on Sunday, December 7, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire."

Several days later, on December 11, Berlin and Rome declared war on Washington, and a grateful Roosevelt administration merely had to ask U.S. Congress to reciprocate--a vote that would have been defeated even two weeks beforehand.

A little more than two decades earlier the leading families of U.S. finance capital had emerged from World War I surpassing the United Kingdom as the dominant imperialist power financially, and were increasingly overtaking London's more-than-a-century-long economic and naval prowess as well. Successfully challenging the British Empire and the momentous advantages accruing to Westminster would take another world war.

At least since Roosevelt's October 1937 "Quarantine the Aggressor" speech, the U.S. rulers, represented by the White House, had been building up their military preparedness to extend their dominance on the battlefield.

At the same time, they began a concerted effort to combat the deep antiwar, anti-intervention attitudes among broad layers of working people in the United States, especially among many of those involved in the mass social movement that forged the industrial unions and fought for Black rights in those years.

"Under one or another pretext and slogan the United States will intervene in the tremendous clash in order to maintain its world dominion," wrote Leon Trotsky in the manifesto adopted by the May 1940 emergency conference of our world movement, the Fourth International. That manifesto--entitled "Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution"--continued:

The order and time of the struggle between American capitalism and its enemies is not yet known--perhaps even by Washington. War with Japan would be a struggle for 'living room' in the Pacific Ocean. War in the Atlantic, even if directed immediately against Germany, would be a struggle for the heritage of Great Britain....

The present titanic battles on the fields of Europe are in this sense preparatory episodes in the struggle between Germany and America. France and England are only fortified positions of American capitalism, extended beyond the Atlantic.

Seeking to direct the widespread antiwar sentiment against the imperialist rulers and their government, worker-bolsheviks in the Socialist Workers Party campaigned in the late 1930s to "Let the people vote on war!" Through their involvement in vanguard union and farmer struggles, above all in the Upper Midwest--recounted in Pathfinder's four-volume Teamsters series by SWP leader Farrell Dobbs--they took steps toward the creation of workers defense guards to combat the antilabor thuggery of fascist outfits such as the Silver Shirts, the employers' private company goon units, and others.

Recognizing the inevitability of U.S. capital's march toward war by the close of the 1930s, communist workers advanced this proletarian military policy to prepare the toilers to use the revolutionary methods--the only methods--that could both bring such a slaughter to a halt and defeat for all time the forces of fascist reaction.

"Our struggle against United States intervention into the war has nothing in common with isolationism and pacifism," said the 1940 emergency manifesto.

We tell the workers openly that the imperialist government cannot fail to drag this country into war.... The real struggle against war means the class struggle against imperialism and a merciless exposure of petty-bourgeois pacifism. Only revolution could prevent the American bourgeoisie from intervening in the second imperialist war or beginning the third imperialist war.
 
 
Struggle for a proletarian party
This proletarian internationalist course necessarily went hand in hand with the party's stepped-up effort to turn to colonizing industry and the industrial unions, to more deeply proletarianize the party, and to chart a clear, convergent working-class orientation for the youth.

The leadership of the youth, Trotsky writes in the pages of In Defense of Marxism, "have indubitable virtues and ability but, alas, they have been educated in the spirit of petty-bourgeois combinationism and if they are not wrenched out of their habitual milieu, if they are not sent without high-sounding titles into working-class districts for day-to-day dirty work among the proletariat, they can forever perish for the revolutionary movement"

This aspect of the 1939–40 political fight in the SWP is described more fully in the companion volume by James P. Cannon, entitled The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.

Simultaneous with the "Quarantine the Aggressor" speech, the Roosevelt administration took steps to prepare for war by strengthening the police apparatus of the imperialist state to wield against the vanguard of the working class.

In 1939 there was stepped-up FBI harassment of Teamsters in the Midwest--whose publications proudly opposed any support to imperialist war and championed the resistance by the colonial masses and their fight for independence, regardless of the current leadership. Among the first of these government assaults was the frame-up and indictment in 1939 of union militants in Sioux City, Iowa, who were involved in the effort to organize over-the-road truckers.  
 
Smith Act frame-up
In 1940 Roosevelt signed into law the Smith Act, a thought-control measure aimed at breaking the class-struggle vanguard of the labor movement that was leading opposition to Washington's preparations to drag workers and farmers into the slaughter. The following year, 18 leaders of Local 544-CIO in Minnesota and of the Socialist Workers Party were convicted in federal court of violating that law. As it happened, their sentencing was set for December 8, 1941.

As Farrell Dobbs recounts in Teamster Bureaucracy, at the very moment he and other Minneapolis defendants entered the courtroom to be sentenced, "Roosevelt was urging retaliation for what he termed a day of 'infamy' at Pearl Harbor. The capitalist propaganda machine was flooding the country with calls for patriotic support of the war effort, and we had just been convicted of advocating the overthrow of the government by force and violence."

These class-struggle fighters were given sentences ranging from 12 to 18 months in federal prison.  
 
Toward the second world war
The increasingly aggressive course of the Roosevelt administration against Japan (including a tightening naval blockade of oil shipments to this island nation) made a retaliatory assault by Tokyo inevitable. There is no need for conspiracy theories about Roosevelt to explain either Pearl Harbor or why Washington seized on the bombing to declare that "a state of war has existed" with Japan--this was the opportunity, long awaited by the most aggressive wing of the U.S. rulers, to counter widespread opposition to war and drum up a patriotic majority for the deployment of U.S. military might.

By the end of 1941, the interimperialist conflict between the Axis and the Allied powers in Asia, Europe, and North America; the war to defend the Soviet workers state; and the war of the colonial peoples for their liberation had come together in what the communist movement recognized as "three wars in one."

Unlike in the First World War, North America was not drawn in only during the closing 18 months of the conflict. In the second worldwide slaughter, U.S. troops saw combat for some three and a half years, and led the Allied imperialist conquest of North Africa, invasion of continental Europe, and taking of the Pacific.

The wars in Europe and Asia had been joined and the conflict had become a truly world war--one whose results and aftermath mark the relationship of class forces and the channels through which the world class struggle continues to flow today.  
 
 
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