1945 – Victory in Europe: When ‘liberation’ meant socialism


COMMEMORATIONS MARKING the 60th anniversary ‘victory in Europe’ (VE)
day have concentrated on the sacrifices made by the service men and
women in liberating Europe from the clutches of fascism.
The horrors of war, the concentration camps and ‘ethnic cleansing’,
have also been highlighted. However, the mainstream media has ignored
the role played by the working class in occupied Europe in driving out
the Nazis in the final stages of the war.
As Dave Carr explains, this resurgent workers’ movement in Europe
between 1945-47 could also have carried through a socialist revolution.

VE had come at an enormous cost. 40 million soldiers and civilians
had been killed. 27.5 million in the Soviet Union alone. The ruling
classes’ gamble with fascism had resulted in much of eastern Europe
coming under the influence of the USSR, and capitalism and landlordism
being swept away there.

In the West, capitalist industry was on its knees – crippled by the
burden and destruction of the war. Throughout Europe the mass migrations
of demobbed soldiers, workers and refugees was creating political
instability. Everywhere there were food shortages, unemployment,
homelessness and poverty.

But as the Allies advanced into Germany they frequently found
factories and mines taken over by committees of workers and trade unions
who had driven out SS saboteurs. The first act of the Allies was to ban
these anti-fascist organisations! Nonetheless, the power of the workers’
committees meant that the demand for nationalisation of the mines of
Krupps and other war industries became widespread.

For example, in 1946 in Hesse, Germany, 71% approved of the
socialisation of industry in a referendum. A shocked US commander Clay
vetoed it.

However, the resurrected German Communists (KPD) and social-democrat
(SPD) parties, while responding to the workers’ demands by calling for
partial nationalisation of industries, both called for the restoration
of capitalism. In this they were less radical than the Christian
Democrats who demanded widespread nationalisation with a section calling
for the abolition of capitalism to prevent the resurgence of fascism.

In 1947 a strike wave took place in the industrialised Ruhr area of
Germany which included demands for nationalisation of industry.

At its height 350,000 workers were on strike. The US occupiers in
response threatened to cut food rations and to impose martial law. The
Allies’ situation was saved by the trade union leaders and KPD leaders
who restrained the workers from taking action. Improved food supplies,
an end to the dismantling of industry, and the establishment by the
occupying authorities of ‘works councils’ to deal with workers’ wages
and conditions, gradually eased the conflict.

Workers’ resistance

In France and Italy the dying days of the war saw massive strike
waves by a working class growing in confidence of its power. This was to
be a major problem for the Allied occupation. In late 1943, after
Mussolini’s removal, the Italian workers in the industrialised north,
still under the control of the German army, organised strikes and a
15,000-strong armed resistance movement. After a general strike,
Badoglio’s fascist government was forced to recognise workers’ factory
councils.

In March 1944 one million workers struck in the occupied north. In
Milan the bosses were forced to pay the workers for the days on strike!
Liberation in 1945 left communist and socialist workers dictating to the
capitalists the terms and conditions of employment. Perhaps as many as
two million workers joined the Communist Party.

Likewise in France, 50,000 Parisians – arms in hands – drove out the
German occupiers forcing the Allies to rush General Charles de Gaulle
into the liberated city to head off a new Paris commune.

The Resistance movement published a charter demanding nationalisation
of the capitalist monopolies. In many regions this demand was
implemented with many companies being run by workers’ committees. In the
first elections in France in October 1945 the Communists won 26.1% of
the vote and the socialists 24.8% – a majority. Moreover, for the first
time a majority of workers were organised in trade unions.

The capitalists’ fears following the collapse of the Nazi regimes was
summed up by the Economist (1 December 1945):

"The collapse of that New Order imparted a great revolutionary
momentum to Europe. It stimulated all the vague and confused but
nevertheless radical and socialist impulses of the masses. Significantly
every programme with which the various Resistance groups throughout
Europe emerged from the underground contained demands for
nationalisation of the banks and large-scale industries; and these
programmes bore the signatures of Christian Democrats as well as of
Socialists and Communists." (Quoted in Capitalism since World War II by
Andrew Glyn et al)

In the victorious countries of Britain and the US the working class
demanded its reward for defeating fascism. Above all, there was a
widespread mood that there should be no return to the poverty and
unemployment that characterised capitalism between the two wars.

In the US the trade unions embarked on a massive strike wave for
better wages and conditions in 1946.

In Britain, the Attlee Labour government was swept into office and
established a welfare state and carried through the nationalisation of
basic industries such as coal, energy production, railways, steel, etc.
But, generally, it was only the investment-starved, near bankrupt
companies that were taken over.

The most profitable parts of industry remained in private hands. Yet
the weakened capitalist class would not have been able to seriously
resist widespread public ownership measures but the Labour and trade
union leaders had no intention of challenging capitalism.

Stalinism

WITH WAR-weary US, British and Commonwealth troops desperate to
return home, a determined revolutionary workers’ movement could have
successfully overthrown capitalism at this time. However, Stalin, who
controlled the Communist movement, had agreed during 1944-45 with
Churchill and Roosevelt to co-exist with imperialism and to divide
conquered Europe into Western and Soviet ‘spheres of influence’.

This counter-revolutionary arrangement was to last until the fall of
Stalinism in the USSR and eastern Europe between 1989-91.

In France, despite the weakness of the capitalist class and the
enormous strength of the Communist Party (PCF), no revolution took
place. Instead, the PCF participated in a ‘government of national unity’
which ruthlessly pursued an imperialist policy in Vietnam (Indo-China),
Algeria, Madagascar and elsewhere. Having held back strikes and workers’
movements, the PCF was dumped from government by the capitalists in
1947.

Only in Greece did the Communists (KKE) make a bid for power when the
British ignited a civil war when they tried to disarm the KKE-controlled
National Liberation Army (ELAS). The revolution was brutally crushed by
the British firstly and then decisively by US troops. Stalin ‘helpfully’
closed Greece’s eastern borders preventing workers from escaping the
counter-revolution.

Marshall aid

In 1947, US imperialism, now a capitalist superpower, (British
imperialism was bankrupt and faced colonial revolutions in its decaying
empire) sought to undermine revolution in Western Europe by imposing
stability through the Marshall aid recovery programme. $13 billions in
grants and loans were pumped into Europe’s ravaged industries over four
years.

Many of the capitalist institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT, forerunner of the World Trade Organisation – WTO) were
established in the immediate post-war period to impose US imperialism’s
power on the world economy and prevent restrictions to ‘free trade’
which had dogged the world economy before the war.

The right-wing leaders of the British and US labour movement were
also mobilised in defence of capitalism in Europe. The British TUC
persuaded the German trade union leaders to take measures to prevent
communist influence. Future SPD leaders like Willie Brandt were taken to
America to be schooled in pro-Western capitalist ideology.

Eventually, the revolutionary wave in Europe exhausted itself blocked
by the political leadership of the workers’ organisations who acted as
transmission belts for the policies of either imperialism or Stalinism.

In Western Europe, where the establishment of new military regimes
was impossible following the collapse of the Nazi regimes, the
counter-revolution assumed a ‘democratic form’, ie the formation of
liberal capitalist democracies backed by the workers’ parties leaders
and underpinned by Marshall aid.


Eastern Europe – Stalin establishes his satellite states

IN 1944-45 the Red Army rolled across eastern Europe, ushering the
collapse of the Nazis and their quisling regimes. This gave rise to
revolutionary movements of workers and peasants. However, the Stalinists
had no intention of allowing a socialist revolution to reach its
conclusion, as a democratic socialist society would end the rule of the
privileged bureaucracy.

In 1944, as the workers of Warsaw in Poland rose up against the Nazi
occupiers, Stalin halted the Red Army on the city’s outskirts until the
insurrection was crushed.

In East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, etc, anti-fascist
committees, workers’ factory committees and soviets were snuffed out by
Soviet officials. Governments in these occupied countries were
established with officials drawn from social-democratic and capitalist
parties. But the key ministries – police and army – were controlled by
the Communists who rested on the only real power, the Red Army.

Eventually these ‘popular front’ governments were swept aside and
‘unification’ of the social-democratic parties and Communist Parties
took place. The new regimes became mirror images of Stalinist Russia.
Industry (much already having been looted as ‘war reparations’ – £15
billion from East Germany alone) was nationalised as the new Stalinist
regimes leaned on the working class to deal a blow to the capitalists.

However, not a hint of workers’ democracy was allowed. Many genuine
revolutionaries wound up in prison followed by social democrats, now
that the new regimes had no further use for them. Sometimes the jailers
would be former Nazis (see …And Red is the Colour of our Flag by Oscar
Hippe). From the outset these countries were ‘deformed workers’ states’
ie nationalised economies but bureaucratically planned and run by
totalitarian regimes.


World revolution abandoned

AS PREDICTED by Trotsky, Stalin’s anti-revolutionary strategy of
‘socialism in one country’ would lead to the political degeneration of
the Communist movement along national and reformist lines.

Defence of the USSR, ie the privileged bureaucracy, and a foreign
policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’ with imperialism meant a jettisoning
of the world socialist revolution.

Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm concurs that Stalin’s position
during and after WWII was to derail revolutionary movements.

"The communist revolutions actually made (Yugoslavia, Albania, later
China) were made against Stalin’s advice…. Few remember that Stalin
urged the Yugoslav communists to keep the monarchy or that in 1945
British communists were opposed to the break-up of the Churchill wartime
coalition."

"For practical purposes, as dissident revolutionaries recognised, it
was a permanent goodbye to world revolution. Socialism would be confined
to the USSR and the area assigned by diplomatic negotiation as its zone
of influence, ie basically that occupied by the Red Army at the end of
the war." (The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm, pp168-169).

As a gesture to imperialism Stalin dissolved the Comintern (Communist
International) in 1943 and the US Communist Party in 1944.


Planned economy decisive

WHILE ALLIED bombing restricted Germany’s war economy and US
lend-lease supplies to the USSR were important, it was Soviet manpower
and above all the strength of the planned economy (albeit distorted by
bureaucratic rule), which out-produced the German economy and was
therefore decisive in defeating the German army.

That German forces suffered an estimated 93% of their casualties on
the Soviet front, shows the Soviet contribution to the war was decisive.


Fascism – a product of capitalist reaction

A PERNICIOUS myth is that the German people were ‘collectively
guilty’ for Hitler coming to power in 1933 and the subsequent world war.

Fascism was never embraced by a majority of the German working class.
In July 1932 the Nazis got 13,745,800 votes (37.4%), while the combined
SPD/KPD vote was 13,242,300 (36.2%). In November 1932, the last ‘free’
election in the Weimer republic, the Nazi vote slumped by two million to
11,737,000 (33.1%), easily surpassed by the SPD/KPD vote of 13,228,000
(37.3%).

The Nazis initially moulded a social movement of the small
shopkeepers, sections of the middle classes, the peasantry and
criminalised elements of the working class (the ‘lumpenproletariat’),
Financed by the big capitalists, Nazism was used as a battering ram
against the workers’ movement. It was a desperate last gamble by the
capitalist class faced with a growing crisis in their system and the
threat of a socialist revolution.

Once in power all vestiges of democracy were snuffed out by the
Nazis. Political parties and trade unions were banned. The middle
classes and peasantry who formed the Nazis social base were utterly
betrayed and the regime assumed the character of a military-police
dictatorship.

The German working class were the victims of Hitlerite fascism. Many
socialist and communist militants perished in the concentration camps.
The backers of the Nazis were the giant industrial and financial
corporations such as Thyssen, Krupp, and IG Farben, etc, whose fear of
socialist revolution saw them use their power to enable an effective
fascist coup.

Only in July 1944 when the German Reich’s war was lost did a section
attempt to remove Hitler. Yet these reactionary generals and politicians
are remembered in official history as the German ‘resistance’ rather
than the brave socialist and communists militants who continued their
resistance in the concentration camps and in the underground.

In fact when the Reich collapsed both the Western Allied powers and
the Russian Stalinists, instead of ‘de-Nazifying’ society, incorporated
many former Nazis and leaders of other nationalist parties that had
backed Hitler in 1933 into the running of East Germany and West Germany.

United front

THE NAZIS could have been prevented from taking power by the mighty
German working class. Its principal parties – the Social Democrats (SPD)
and the Communist Party (KPD) – attracted millions of votes, had many
deputies in parliament, extensive party branches and mass trade union
support. They even organised their own workers’ militia which defended
the workers districts against the fascist brownshirts.

Yet Hitler boasted that he came to power without a single rifle shot
being fired. This was only possible, as the Trotskyist opposition warned
before 1933, because the leaders of the KPD and SPD instead of uniting
the working class had divided it.

The KPD had pursued, in line with the Stalinist Communist
International, an ultra-left policy of the so-called ‘third period’, in
which they claimed that the SPD were ‘social fascists’. And while the
SPD leaders were in fact wedded to capitalism, the working-class ranks
of the SPD were not.

But instead of pursuing a workers’ united front ‘from below’ to
defeat the Nazis, the KPD attacked the ‘main enemy’, the SPD. They even
went as far as saying that after Hitler it will be the Communists turn
to rule!

Equally, the SPD leaders lulled the workers into complacency by
saying that Germany wasn’t Italy (where Mussolini ruled) and that German
culture was too robust to allow fascist barbarism.

Rather than preparing the masses for a decisive showdown with
capitalism and its fascist bands, they put their faith in the capitalist
state and parliament to defend democracy. But when the Nazi vote fell
sharply in November 1932 the capitalist parties backed Hitler to become
Chancellor.

In January 1933 the Nazis and right wing parties engineered a
parliamentary coup. Hitler was installed but even at this late hour a
workers’ uprising using its militias could have succeeded but no call
came from the SPD or KPD leaders and the workers’ movement was
demolished like a sledgehammer smashing an ants’ nest.