SOCIALIST APPEAL JUNE 29, 1940 Only the Workers Can Restore Peace to a Warring World Promises Of Both Capitalist Gangs Are Nothing But a Pack of Lies; Neither the Nazis nor the Western Democracies Can Create a World System Capable of Assuring Security to All army in the world against their own former fatherland.
In order to save their capital, the Spanish bourgeoisie turned to Mussolini and Hitler for military aid against their own people. The Norwegian bourgeoisie aided Hitler invasion of Norway. Thus it always was and always will be.
Official patriotism is a mask for the exploiting interests.
Class conscious workers throw this mask contemptuously aside. They do not defend the bourgeois fatherland, but the interests of the toilers and the oppressed of their own country and of the entire world. The theses of the Fourth International state. Against the reactionary slogan of national defense it is necessary to advance the slogan of the revolutionary destruction of the national state. To the madhouse of capitalist Europe it is necessary to counterpose the program of the Socialist United States of Europe as a stage on the road to the Socialist United States of the World.
THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY IS LIE No less a lie is the slogan of a war for democracy against Fascism. As if the workers have forgotten that the British government helped Hitler and his hangman crew gain power! The imperialist democracies are in reality the greatest aristocracies in history. England, France, Holland, Belgium rest on the enslavement of colonial peoples.
The democracy of the United States rests upon the seizure of the vast wealth of an entire continent. All the efforts of these democracies are directed toward the preservation of their privileged position. considerable portion of the war burden is unloaded by imperialist democracies onto their colonies. The slaves are obliged to furnish blood and gold in order to insure the possibility of their masters remaining slaveholders. The small capitalist democracies without colonies are satellites of the great empires and glean a portion of their colonial profits. The ruling classes of these states are ready to renounce democracy at any moment in order to preserve their privileges.
In the case of tiny Norway the inner mechanics of decáying democracy have once again been revealed before the whole world. The Norwegian bourgeoisie made simultaneous use of the social democratic government and the Fascist policemen, judges and officers. At the first serious impact, the democratic heads were swept away and the Fascist bureaucracy, which immediately found a common language with Hitler, became master of the house. With different national variations this same experiment was previously performed in Italy, Germany, Austria, Poland, Czecho Slovakia, and a number of other states. In a moment of danger the bourgeoisie has always been able to free from democratic trappings the real apparatus of its rule as the direct instrument of finance capital. Only the hopelessly blind are capable of believing that the British and French generals and admirals are waging a war against Fascism!
The war has not halted the process of the transformation of democracies into reactionary dictatorships but on the contrary is carrying this process to its conclusion before our very eyes.
Within every country as well as on the world arena, the war strengthened immediately the most reactionary groups and institutions. The general staffs, those nests of Bonapartist conspiracy, the malignant dens of the police, the gangs of hired patriots, the churches of all creeds are immediately pushed to the forefront. The Papal Court, the focal point of obscurantism and hatred among men, is being wooed from all sides, especially by the Protestant President Roosevelt. Material and spiritual decline always brings in its wake police oppression and an increased demand for the opium of religion.
Seeking to gain the advantages of a totalitarian regime, the imperialist democracies launch their own defense with a redoubled drive against the working class and the persecution of revolutionary organizations. The war danger and now the war itself is utilized by them first and foremost to crush internal enemies. The bourgeoisie invariably and unswervingly follows the rule: The main enemy is in one own country.
As is always the case, the weakest ones suffer the most.
The weakest ones in the present slaughter of the peoples are the countless refugees from all countries, among them power in the world. Along with her, Italy at best mightnot for very long seize control of the Mediterranean basin. But being the first power does not mean being the only power. The struggle for living room would only enter a new stage.
The new order which Japan is preparing to establish, basing herself on German victory, has as its perspective the extension of Japanese rule over the greater part of the Asiatic continent. The Soviet Union would find itseli hemmed in between a Germanized Europe and Japanized Asia. All three Americas, as well as Australia and New Zealand would fall to the United States. If we take into account the provincial Italian empire in addition, the world would be temporarily divided into five living rooms. But imperialism by its very nature abhors any division of power.
In order to free his hands against America, Hitler would have to settle bloody accounts with his friends of yesterday Stalin and Mussolini. Japan and the United States would not remain disinterested observers of the new struggle. The third imperialist war would be waged not by national states and not by empires of the old type but by whole continents. Hitler victory in the present war would thus signify not a thousand years of German Peace but bloody chaos for many decades if not centuries.
But neither would an Allied triumph result in any more radiant consequences. Victorious France could re establish her position as a great power only by dismembering Germany, restoring the Hapsburgs, Balkanizing Europe. Great Britain could again play a leading role in European affairs only by refurbishing the game of playing on the contradictions between Germany and France on the one side, Europe and America on the other. This would signify a new and ten times worse edition of the peace of Versailles with infinitely more malignant effects upon the weakened organism of Europe. To this it must be added that an Allied victory without American aid is improbable, while the United States this time would demand a much higher price for its assistance than in the last war. The debased and exhausted Europe the object of Herbert Hoover philanthropywould become the bankrupt debtor of its trans Atlantic savior Finally, if we suppose the least probable variant, namely the conclusion of peace by the exhausted adversaries in accordance with the pacifist formula: No victors, no vanquished, this would signify restoration of the international chaos which existed prior to the war, but this time based on bloody ruins, on exhaustion, on embitterment. In a short period of time all the old antagonisms would cut through to the surface with explosive violence and break out in new international convulsions.
The promise of the Allies to create a democratic European federation this time is the crudest of all pacifist lies.
The state is not an abstraction but the instrument of monopoly capitalism. So long as trusts and banks are not expropriated for the benefit of the people the struggle between states is just as inevitable as the struggle between the trusts themselves. Voluntary renunciation by the most powerful state of the advantage given by its strength is as ridiculous a Utopia as voluntary division of capital funds among the trusts. So long as capitalist property is preserved, a democratic federation would be nothing but a worse repetition of the League of Nations, containing all its vices minus only its illusions.
In vain do the imperialist masters of destiny attempt to revive a program of salvation which was completely discredited by the experience of the past decades. In vain do their petty bourgeois Aunkies warm up pacifist panaceas which long ago changed into their own caricature. The advanced workers will not be duped. Peace will not be concluded by those forces now waging war. The workers and soldiers will dictate their own program of peace!
itself first of all in the brutal treatment of defenseless THE PRESENT WAR AND DEFENSE OF THE USSR foreigners. Before the concentration camps for war prisoners were built, all the democracies constructed concentration camps for the revolutionary exiles. The governments of the entire world, particularly the government of the USSR, have written the blackest chapter in our epoch through their treatment of the refugees, the exiles, the homeless. We send our warmest greetings to our imprisoned and persecuted brothers and tell them not to lose heart. From the capitalist prisons and concentration camps will come most of the leaders of tomorrow Europe and the world!
WHAT THE NAZI WAR SLOGANS REALLY MEAN Hitler official slogans in general do not warrant examination. The struggle for national unification has long since been shown a lie, for Hitler is converting the national state into a state of many nations, trampling under foot the liberty and unity of other peoples. The struggle for living room is nothing but camouflage for imperialist expansion, that is, the policy of annexation and plunder. The racial justification for this expansion is a lie; National Socialism changes its racial sympathies and antipathies in accordance with strategic considerations. somewhat more stable element in fascist propaganda is, perhaps, anti semitism, which Hitler has given a zoological form, discovering the true language of race and blood in the dog bark and the pig grunt. Not for nothing did Frederick Engels label anti semitism the socialism of idiots. The sole feature of fascism which is not counterfeit is its will to power, subjugation, and plunder, Fascism is a chemically pure distillation of the culture of imperialism The democratic governments, who in their day hailed Hitler as a crusader against Bolshevism, now make him out to be some kind of Satan unexpectedly loosed from the depths of Hell, who violates the sanctity of treaties, boundary lines, rules and regulations. If it were not for Hitler the capitalist world would blossom like a garden. What a miserable lie! This German epileptic with a calculating machine in his skull and unlimited power in his hands did not fall from the sky or come up out of Hell: he is nothing but the personification of all the destructive forces of imperialism. Just as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane appeared to the weaker pastoral peoples as destroying scourges of God, whereas in reality they did nothing but express the need of all the pastoral tribes for more pasture land and the plunder of settled areas, so Hitler, rocking the old colonial powers to their foundations, does nothing but give a more finished expression to the imperialist will to power.
Through Hitler, world capitalism, driven to desperation by its own impasse, has begun to press a razor sharp dagger into its own bowels.
The butchers of the second imperialist war will not succeed in transforming Hitler into a scapegoat for their own sins.
Before the judgment bar of the proletariat all the present rulers will answer. Hitler will do no more than occupy first place among the criminals in the dock.
Stalin alliance with Hitler, which raised the curtain on Extremely eloquent in its unanimity and fury was the the World War and led directly to the enslavement of the campaign which the world bourgeoisie launched over the Polish people, resulted from the weakness of the USSR Soviet Finnish war. Neither the perfidy nor the violence of and the Kremlin panic in face of Germany. Responsibility the Kremlin prior to this had aroused the indignation of for this weakness rests with no one but this same Kremlin; the bourgeoisie, for the entire history of world politics is its internal policy which opened an abyss between the written in perfidy and violence. Their fear and indignation ruling caste and the people; its foreign policy which sacri arose over the prospect of a social overturn in Finland ficed the interests of the world revolution to the interests upon the pattern of the one engendered by the Red Army in of the Stalinist clique.
Eastern Poland. What was involved was a fresh threat to The seizure of Eastern Poland a pledge of the alliance capitalist property. The anti Soviet campaign, which had a with Hitler and a guarantee against Hitler was accom class character through and through, disclosed once again panied by the nationalization of semi felidal and capitalist that the USSR by virtue of the social foundations laid property in Western Ukraine and Western White Russia. down by the October revolution, upon which the existence Without this the Kremlin could not have incorporated the of the bureaucracy itself is dependent in the last analysis, occupied territory into the USSR. The strangled and still remains a workers state, terrifying to the bourgeoisie desecrated October revolution served notice that it was of the whole world. Episodic agreements between the bourstill alive.
geoisie and the USSR do not alter the fact that taken on In Finland the Kremlin did not succeed in accomplishing the historic scale the contradiction between world imperiala similar social overturn. The imperialist mobilization of ism and the Soviet Union is infinitely more profound than world public opinion in defense of Finland. the threat the antagonisms which set the individual capitalist counof direct intervention by England and France; the impa tries in opposition to each other. War and the Fourth tience of Hitler, who had to seize Denmark and Norway International. before French and British troops appeared on Scandinavian Many petty bourgeois radicals, who only yesterday were soil all this compelled the Kemlin to renounce sovietiza still ready to consider the Soviet Union as an axis for tion of Finland and to limit itself to the seizure of the grouping the democratic forces against Fascism, have indispensable strategic positions.
suddenly discovered, now that their own fatherlands have The invasion of Finland unquestionably aroused on the been threatened by Hitler, that Moscow, which did not part of the Soviet populace profound condemnation. How come to their aid, follows an imperialist policy, and that ever, the advanced workers understood that the crimes of there is no difference between the USSR and the Fascist the Kremlin oligarchy do not strike off the agenda the countries.
question of the existence of the USSR. Its defeat in the Lie! will respond every class conscious worker there is world war would signify not merely the overthrow of the a difference. The bourgeoisie appraise this social difference totalitarian bureaucracy but the liquidation of the new better and more profoundly than do the radical windbags.
forms of property, the collapse of the first experiment in To be sure, the nationalization of the means of production planned economy and the transformation of the entire in one country, and a backward one at that, still does not country into a colony, that is, the handing over to im insure the building of socialism. But it is capable of furperialism of colossal natural resources which would give it thering the primary prerequisite of socialism, namely, the a respite until the third world war. Neither the peoples of planned development of the productive forces. To turn the USSR nor the world working class as a whole care for one back on the nationalization of the means of producsuch an outcome.
tion on the ground that in and of itself it does not create Finland resistance to the USSR was, with all its hero the well being of the masses is tantamount to sentencing a ism, no more an act of independent national defense, than granite foundation to destruction on the ground that it is Norway subsequent resistance to Germany. The Helsinki impossible to live without walls and a roof. The class government itself understood this when it chose to capitu conscious worker knows that a successful struggle for comlate to the USSR rather than transform Finland into a plete emancipation is unthinkable without the defense of military base for England and France. Our whole hearted conquests already gained, however modest these may be.
recognition of the right of every nation self determina All the more obligatory therefore is the defense of so tion does not alter the fact that in the course of the present colossal a conquest as planned economy against the restora; war this right does not have much more weight than tion of capitalist relations. Those who cannot defend old thistle down. We must determine the basic line of our positions will never conquer new ones.
policy in accordance with basic and not teņth fate faetors. The Fourth International can defend the USSR only The theses of the Fourth International state. The idea of by the methods of revolutionary class struggle. To teach national defense especially if it coincides with the idea of the workers correctly to understand the class character of the defense of democracy can most readily be utilized to the state imperialist, colonial, workers and the reciprodupe the workers of small and neutral countries (Switzer cal relations between them as well as the inner contradictions land, to a certain extent Belgium, the Scandinavian coun in each of them enables the workers to draw correct practries.
Only petty bourgeois blockheads (like tical conclusions in every given situation. While waging a Robert Grimm) from a God forsaken Swiss village could tireless struggle against the Moscow oligarchy, the Fourth seriously believe that the World War into which he will be International decisively rejects any policy which would aid drawn is a means for defending the independence of Switz imperialism against the USSR.
erland. These words today acquire a special meaning. In The defense of the USSR coincides in principle with no way superior to the Swiss social patriot Robert Grimm the preparation of the world proletarian revolution. We are those pseudo revolutionary petty bourgeois who believe fatly reject the theory of socialism in one country, that that it is possible to determine proletarian strategy in rela brain child of ignorant and reactionary Stalinism. Only tion to the defense of the USSR through reliance upon the world revolution can save the USSR for socialism. But such tactical episodes as the Red Army invasion of the world revolution carries with it the inescapable blotting Finland.
out of the Kremlin oligarchy.
THE PREPONDERANCE OF GERMANY IN THE CONFLICT Whatever may be the war outcome, the preponderance of Germany has already been clearly shown. Unquestionably Hitler fails to possess any secret new weapon. But the perfection of all the different existing weapons and the well coordinated combination of these weapons on the basis of a more highly rationalized industry lends German militarism enormous weight. Military dynamics is closely bound up with the peculiar features of a totalitarian regime: unity of will, concentrated initiative, secrecy of preparation, suddenness of execution. The peace of Versailles, moreover, has done the Allies a poor service. After fifteen years of German disarmament Hitler was compelled to start building an army from nothing, and thanks to this the army is free of routine and does not have to drag along obsolete technique and equipment. The tactical training oi troops is inspired by new ideas based on the latest word in technology. Apparently only the United States is destined to surpass the German murder machine.
The weakness of France and Great Britain was not unexpected. The theses of the Fourth International (1934)
state: The collap of the League of Nations is indissolubly bound up with the beginning of the collapse of French hegemony on the European continent. This programmatic document declares further that England rulers are increasingly less capable of carrying out their plans, that the British bourgeoisie is alarmed by the disintegration of its empire, the revolutionary movement in India, the instability of its positions in China. The power of the Fourth International lies in this, that its program is capable of withstanding the test of great events.
The industry of England and France, thanks to the assured flow of colonial super profits, has long lagged both in technology and organization. In addition, the so called defense of democracy by the socialist parties and trade unions created an extremely privileged political situation for the British and French bourgeoisie. Privileges always foster sluggishness and stagnation. If Germany today reveals so colossal a preponderance over France and England, then the lion share of the responsibility rests with the social patriotic defenders of democracy who prevented the proletariat from tearing England and France out of atrophy through a timely socialist revolution. The Program of Peace In return for the enslavement of the peoples Hitler promises to establish a German Peace in Europe for a period of centuries. An empty mirage! The British Peace after the victory over Napoleon could endure a century pot a thousand years. solely because Britain was the pioneer of a new technology and a progressive stem of production Notwithstanding the strength of her industry, present day Germany, like her enemies, is the standard bearer of a doomed social system. Hitler victory would in reality not mean peace but the beginning of a new series of bloody clashes on a world scale. By overthrowing the British empire, reducing France to the status of Bohemia and Moravia, basing herself on the European continent and its colonies, Germany undoubtedly would become the first