The Second World War

A Marxist History

Chris Bambery

• Editorial: Pluto Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781849649230
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: 20th Century History

The Second World War casts a long shadow, portrayed as a necessary and paradigmatic war that defeated fascism. During recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, US presidents and British prime ministers have tried to claim they were following in the footsteps of Winston Churchill by standing up to dictators. In The Second World War Chris Bambery tests this position in a thorough account of the war and demonstrates why it continues to dominate TV history channels and school history books. Arguing that the conflict was as much about a division of the world between the great powers as it was as a rising of ordinary people against fascism, he offers a nuanced and radical analysis that sets the book apart from conventional histories of the war.

CHAPTER ONE

Competing Empires at a Time of Economic Crisis

The Great Depression Fuels Great Power Rivalries

The Second World War might well have happened without Adolf Hitler coming to power. But it would have been a much more limited conflict, and a more conventional one.

In 1929 a sudden and sharp collapse on the New York stock exchange marked the start of the greatest economic crisis in the history of capitalism thus far. The Great Depression bred economic collapse, social polarisation and political instability including war. All within short order. It also heralded a retreat from the old economic liberalism, associated in particular with the British policy of free trade. Politicians moved to protectionism across the globe, which led to a collapse in world trade but also heightened competition over the control of markets and raw materials, competition which quickly took a military shape.

The First World War had ended with a re-partitioning of the world in which Britain and France gained most territory. While the British Empire was bigger than ever, the British ruling class was painfully aware that it had been ousted as the world’s financial power by the US. At its height in the mid nineteenth century, Britain had adopted a policy of free trade because that benefited its exports when it was the pre-eminent industrial power. Its rivals, the US and Germany, did not follow suit. Rather, they employed protective measures to defend their domestic markets and emerging industries. Other states would follow their lead.

After 1918 Britain had attempted to maintain sterling as the chief international trading currency by valuing it against gold. But it could maintain neither the gold standard nor free trade as the general rule across the capitalist system. Following the immediate post-war recession at the beginning of the 1920s, the second half of the decade did see a relative stabilisation, before Europe was thrust into depression in 1929. The recovery of the mid 1920s was based on countries importing US goods and borrowing US money. The US had tariffs to prevent those countries to which it sold goods balancing their account by exporting goods to America. Instead they were forced to take out US loans to cover the shortfall. The victors in the First World War had taken out American loans to cover the debts they had incurred, while the losers had taken them to help pay off reparations imposed on them by the post-war treaties agreed at Versailles. The Wall Street Crash in 1929 ended this financial roundabout and the banking crisis spread to Europe heralding an economic slump.

Between 1929 and 1932 the volume of world trade fell by one quarter. Five years later, the 1929 peak had still not been recovered.¹ Much of the decline stemmed from the collapse of incomes, but a substantial portion was a consequence of the rush to trade protection. When the British government defaulted on loan repayments to America, Washington retaliated by enforcing trade restrictions on British imports.

Meanwhile the expansion of US agriculture had led to over-production and a high level of indebtedness from farmers who had borrowed to expand. Pressure had been building from US agriculture for import restrictions even prior to the Wall Street Crash. Herbert Hoover, the Republican candidate, won the 1928 presidential election promising agricultural protection. Subsequently in June 1930, the US erected tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods. Over the next three years, average US tariffs would rise to 54 per cent, compared with 39 per cent in 1928. In short order Britain, France and then Germany introduced similar tariffs over the next two years.

Having erected a complex barrier of import controls to protect its home market, Washington now demanded that the UK and other European countries repay their debts in dollars (which could only be earned by exporting to the US). In October 1932 Britain, Canada, Australia and other dominions created a system whereby British tariffs were lowered for all those trading in pounds. The new Sterling Bloc accounted for a third of world trade. By attempting to stop foreign imports into the new bloc, London was throwing down a gauntlet to its rivals. If they wanted a greater market share they would have to re-order the world.

The US and France followed Britain in attempting to create their own protected trade areas, together with a degree of state direction of the economy. Germany, Japan and Italy did not control overseas territories and looked to military expansion to secure markets and raw materials. For the German economy this global shift to protectionism was a catastrophe. Britain, France, the US and the USSR all had ample supplies of raw materials within their economic zones. Germany did not. Nearly half of Britain’s trade was with its dominions and colonies and a third of French exports went to its colonies; Germany had none.

Germany’s economic revival had been based on exports, but now they were excluded from key markets, and key raw materials had to be bought with dollars, sterling or francs. In terms of foreign trade Germany had been in third place behind the US and UK in 1928, when its foreign trade was worth $58 billion. By 1935 it was worth $20.8 billion. Financially it was in a weak position holding just 1 per cent of the global gold and financial reserves in 1938, compared to the US holding of 54 per cent and the British and French holdings of 11 per cent each.² German governments before Hitler came to power had already resorted to export subsidies and trading via barter or using German Marks, which could only be redeemed in Germany. Before Hitler took power, sections of Germany’s ruling circles began to argue that its export problems and lack of raw materials could only be solved by domination of Eastern and South Eastern Europe. They found ready allies in the military command.

Hjalmar Schacht had resigned as president of the Reichsbank in protest at Germany continuing to pay war reparations as determined by the Treaty of Versailles. He went further, arguing that a German trade zone could encompass not just Central and Eastern Europe, but the Middle East, Latin America and the Far East. Although he never joined the Nazi Party, Schacht made the acquaintance of Hitler and facilitated contacts for him amongst bankers in 1932. On 28 November that year, Time magazine reported a dinner at the steel tycoon Fritz Thyssen’s house:

At Herr Thyssen’s residence … Leader Hitler and Oberst Göring ate dinner … Germans soon noticed the surprising fact that several news agencies of Biggest Business, such as ‘Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung’ and ‘Rheinisch-Westfalische’ had abruptly switched from hostility to support of Adolf Hitler.

Noting that these newspapers were closely connected to big business circles, Time added: ‘For the first time in his blatant, meteoric career Adolf Hitler was “getting warm”. Stocks on the Berlin exchange, which eased when the von Papen Cabinet resigned, firmed again and began to rise.’³

By January 1933 when Hitler took power, there were 6 million unemployed in Germany. Hitler’s initial economic programme was similar to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which was being implemented at around the same time. Public spending on the motorways and railways (both of military importance) increased, subsidies were given to housing, firms were forced into cartels, industry was offered cheap loans and tax exemption while wages were pegged at the same level as at the bottom of the slump. Industrial production rose from 53.8 per cent of the 1929 figure to 79.8 per cent in 1934.⁴ Yet unemployment remained at three times the 1929 figure and inflation began to mount.

The major capitalist corporations remained largely intact but they were increasingly subordinated to an arms drive, something they themselves supported. Hitler had at first, in 1933–34, introduced relatively mild measures, some inherited from his predecessors, aimed at creating work. From 1935 onwards these gave way to an arms economy, the ‘preparedness economy’. By 1936 Germany’s economic output equalled the 1929 figure. Three years later it had grown by a further 30 per cent. Such expansion rested on the cuts in labour costs imposed even before Hitler took power.

In 1938–39 the German economy fell into a grave economic crisis. A huge budgetary deficit existed – public expenditure was 55 million Reichsmarks in 1938–39, but tax and custom receipts were only 18 million. Much of the Third Reich’s economic policy was based on ‘autarky’ – economic self-sufficiency. The Nazis limited exports in order to curb earlier trade deficits. But there was a limit to how far they could go down that road. Rearmament fuelled the need to import raw materials, but the only way Germany could find the necessary materials in a world dominated by protectionism was by physically expanding the borders of the Third Reich. As the British Marxist historian, Tim Mason, argues: ‘The only “solution” open to this regime of structural tensions and crises produced by dictatorship and rearmament was more dictatorship and more rearmament, then expansion, then war and terror, then plunder and enslavement.’⁵

Similar pressures were affecting Britain, the United States and Japan. All were locked into a system of trade protection in which the only solution to their economic problems was a re-partition of the world. Russia was a partial exception given its vast territory and raw materials, but even Stalin could not disengage the Russian economy from the competition between states.

State control reached its zenith in the one country that had experienced a successful working-class revolution – Russia. The old ruling class had been destroyed, but amid an economic blockade, foreign invasion and civil war, workers’ democracy had been eroded because the working class had been decimated. Instead the state bureaucrats took charge of the economy. They associated with Stalin, the general secretary of the Communist Party, which they joined to benefit their career. Stalin’s focus was not on international revolution but on industrialisation. Having removed his opponents from the leadership of both the state and the Communist Party in 1928–29, he presided over a brutal policy of ‘top-down’, state-led industrialisation at the expense of the working class and peasantry.

In Japan one faction of the ruling class, associated with the army command, regarded China as its natural market and supplier of materials. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash they embarked on the attempted colonisation of Manchuria. But that brought them into conflict with Washington, which was determined to create an ‘open door’ to China for US goods. A minority faction in the Japanese elite, including the naval command, wanted to expand southwards to gain control of oil (the US controlled Japanese supplies), rubber and other materials from the colonial powers (Britain, France and Holland), and to take the Philippines, which were effectively under US control.

The US looked not just to the Pacific region. It had major investments in Europe and already eyed control of Middle Eastern oil. Germany and Japan would, in the course of the late 1930s, be perceived by Washington as the immediate dangers, but the dismantling of the British sterling bloc and Empire were also key strategic goals.

The Great Depression would only end with the war, as the great powers put the need to arm before the need to make profits in the short term. Both political and corporate leaders understood, increasingly, that there was a battle for survival going on which centred on the ability of each state to control a slice of the global economy, to guarantee the supply of raw materials and to weaken the ability of rival powers to do the same.

In this light, we can see the Second World War as a conflict between rival imperialisms; a conflict as much between the Allies as between them and the Axis. The exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky understood this when in 1934 he wrote:

US capitalism is up against the same problems that pushed Germany in 1914 on the path of war. The world is divided? It must be re-divided. For Germany it was a question of ‘organising Europe’. The United States must ‘organise’ the world. History is bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism.⁶

The conflict would see America finally eclipse Britain as the major imperial power and would lay the basis for the economic and political arrangements that dominated the following half century. Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s secretary of state, explained in a public address in July 1942 that:

Leadership toward a new system of international relationships in trade and other economic affairs will devolve very largely upon the United States because of our great economic strength. We should assume this leadership, and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of pure national self-interest.⁷

Why the Second World War Was Different

The Second World War was a product of an economic recession which bred heightened imperialist tensions. But Hitler’s advent to power ensured it was a war quite different from its predecessor two decades before – it became a racial, genocidal war, which threatened the rights and liberties of the working classes and much of the peasantry.

The two decades between 11 November 1918 and the declaration of war on Germany by Britain and France on 3 September 1939 are often described as a breathing space. In relation to Europe a better description might be a period of civil war, while in Asia and Africa it was a time of nationalist rebellion and a renewed imperialist drive.

The First World War had dribbled away into a series of vicious border wars. Unofficial German forces fought Poland and the Baltic states; clashes erupted between irregular Italian forces and the new state of Yugoslavia; Greece was encouraged by the Lloyd George government in London (which wanted to control the Dardanelles) into a disastrous invasion of Turkey which would end with Turkish victory and the withdrawal of British forces from Istanbul, as well as the mass expulsion of Greeks from Turkey and Turks from Greece. France and Britain urged Poland into attacking Russia (the counter-attack carried the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw before it was contained). Fascism triumphed in Italy in 1922 and Central and Eastern Europe was littered with nationalist and anti-Semitic dictatorships. Shortly after the October Revolution in Russia the attempt by the working class to seize power in neighbouring Finland was defeated, and followed by terrible massacres.

The 1930s began with fascism winning control in Germany. In 1934 a right-wing government defeated the working class of Vienna. It seemed that fascism was set to win in France at the beginning of the same year. A fascist assault on the National Assembly was defeated by a general strike, and the French fascist movement floundered. The election of a Popular Front government two years later, with an accompanying wave of factory occupations, meant that a key section of the ruling class began to see German occupation as a price worth paying if it delivered them from the apparent threat of Communist revolution.

The year 1936 also saw a military uprising in Spain against a freshly elected Popular Front government. Workers’ uprisings defeated the rebels in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and other cities. A three-year civil war followed, with German and Italian military intervention on the side of General Franco, the rebel military leader, and Stalin providing arms and expertise to the republican government. The Spanish Civil War pitted left against right and haunted the years in the immediate build up to the Second World War, with politicians in European capitals fearing the war might escalate beyond their control. Franco’s eventual victory emboldened the fascist powers and their supporters elsewhere.

As the great powers moved towards a world war aimed at re-structuring the global order, millions of people wanted to resist fascism by whatever means. The victory of Hitler in Germany – a country which was home to both the largest Social Democratic party and the largest trade union movement in the world, together with the largest Communist Party outside Russia – was a huge shock to the working-class movement globally. There was a widespread feeling that this could not be allowed to happen again. In 1934 wo...