Trotskyists have always been Wonky on War

When being very left means aiding fascism

When it comes to assessment of international conflicts, the putative left does not always have a great record. While Trotskyism is not alone when it comes to folly in this department, it is certainly up there with the best. I'm very much a newbie when it comes to forensic work in this area, but what I have exhumed so far leaves me highly unamused.

I’ve been looking at the position the Trots took during World War II. They were decidedly "anti-imperialist" and refused to support the US and Britain during the 1939-45 war against fascism. They said it was just an inter-imperialist war. It is a bit like the way various present-day Trot groups and others characterize Russia's plans to totally destroy Ukraine as an inter-imperialist proxy war with the West.

It is true that they supported China as a semi-colonial country resisting Japanese imperialist aggression and the Soviet Union as a “deformed workers state" resisting German aggression. But the verbal "support" of a few hundred Trots counted for nothing, and less than nothing when you take into account the fact that they opposed those who could really help doing so.

Their position was very much at odds with that taken by the Soviet Union which was keen to see the western powers go to war with Germany. The aim of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (with its subsequent invasion of Poland) was to avert a war with Germany that would have seen Britain and France sitting on the sidelines, and to open up the prospect of those countries removing the German threat to the Soviet Union or at least being its allies in any future conflict. And of course, they were delighted when the US joined the war and provided them with substantial aid.

And by the way, the Russians did not consider a favorable view of their political system as the grounds for supporting them. They pointed out that the war was essentially a case of rampaging mad dog German nationalists trying to kill, enslave, expel and replace the Slavic population of eastern Europe. They had already consumed Poland as an appetizer.

The Trots had the view that the US and Britain were just as much rampaging imperialists as the the fascists. Both sides were "equally predatory" according to their 1943 resolution. marxist.org The US occupation of Europe would be much like the Nazi one. And their bourgeois democracy and liberalism were more and more a facade and on the way out. So it did not matter much who won the war.

On the Marxist left, the attitude of the Trotskyist movement in particular towards democracy has frequently been an ambiguous one. While democratic rights , for example for the trade unions, for national minorities, etc., are vigorously defended, democratic institutions are equally vigorously denounced. This outlook is possible since in the ‘epoch of capitalist decline’, Trotsky argued, the very material basis of bourgeois democracy has been eroded. "Naturally there exists a difference between the political regimes in bourgeois society just as there is a difference in comfort between various cars in a railway carriage. But when the whole train is plunging into an abyss the distinction between decaying democracy and murderous fascism disappears in the face of the collapse of the entire capitalist system.” marxists.org

Trotsky then went on to say that it did not matter who won:

The victory of the imperialists of Great Britain and France would be not less frightful for the ultimate fate of mankind than that of Hitler and Mussolini. Bourgeois democracy cannot be saved. By helping their bourgeoisie against foreign fascism, the workers would only accelerate the victory of fascism in their own country. The task posed by history is not to support one part of the imperialist system against another but to make an end of the system as a whole. marxists.org

Max Schachtman in January 1938 proclaiming that in the event of America being pulled into the coming war, their party, The Socialist Workers Party (US), would

... utilize the crisis of capitalist rule engendered by the war to prosecute the class struggle with the utmost intransigence, to strengthen the independent labor and revolutionary movements, and to bring the war to a close by the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of proletarian rule in the form of the workers state. Wikipedia

The war did not cause a crisis of capitalist rule and nobody was overthrowing anybody. All this fellow was doing was giving weight to the view that Trotskyists were agents of fascism.

With the victory against fascism, we saw the return of bourgeois democracy in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe the replacement of reactionary prewar autocracies by "people's democracies". At the same time we saw that capitalism still had a heck of a lot of economic and social progress left in it. It did not sink into economic and social crisis. The colonial and former colonial countries certainly suffered during the subsequent Cold War and beyond, but what they have endured does not come close to what victorious German and Japanese fascists would have inflicted. Indeed they have made a certain wobbly progress. So, the victory against fascism really mattered. This is so obvious, you really shouldn't have to say it!