Miguel Ángel | Unión Proletariá (Spain)
Article for the Session 1: World War II and the victory of the global anti-fascist struggle
To understand and confront a war, Lenin said that the most important thing is to elucidate its class character, its causes, the classes that sustain it, and the historical and historical-economic conditions that generated it.
The two world wars of the 20th century and the one now maturing are imperialist wars. When monopoly capitalism can no longer resolve its economic crisis peacefully, each of its states must resort to plundering wars against the proletariat, the oppressed peoples, and other imperialist nations.
The First World War of 1914-1918 did not sufficiently end the overaccumulation of capital by any single power: imperialism as a whole lost one-seventh of the planet’s continental landmass with the victory of socialism in the Soviet Union; France and England defeated Germany, and despite the enslaving conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, it regained its footing, becoming the world’s second industrial power; most of the labor movement remained under the control of the bourgeoisie through social democracy, but the communist faction of the proletariat held out long enough to unleash a powerful class struggle beginning with the crisis of 1929.
Most of the world’s capitalists then encouraged Nazi-fascism to crush the militant workers’ movement and launch fascist-influenced Europe against the USSR. But the Soviet government skillfully maneuvered to delay this goal and pit the Berlin-Rome Axis against Western parliamentary regimes. Thus, between 1939 and 1941, the Second World War was an unjust war between two equally imperialist contenders. But, beginning in 1941, when the European fascist powers invaded the Soviet Union, the liberal imperialist side was forced to enter into an alliance with the country of socialism, and the war became a just war, a war for the liberation of the working class and the peoples of the world.
Despite this “grand alliance,” the war effort will be predominantly Soviet, and the majority of the victims of the atrocities in Germany, Italy, and Japan will be Soviet and Chinese.
The aim of German fascism was to destroy the Soviets, annihilate socialism, and obliterate the Soviet way of life. They were waging not just a war of usurpation or even enslavement, but a war of extermination, of genocide. An official call from the Nazi command at the beginning of the invasion, read to every Hitlerite unit, read: “Discard compassion and pity, kill every Russian and Soviet. Do not hold back before an old man, a woman, a girl, or a boy; kill. This will save you from death, ensure the future of your family, and cover you with eternal glory.” This is comparable only to what Israel is doing today to the Palestinian people: a planned racist genocide.
Between 20 and 30 million Soviets lost their lives, two-thirds of whom were civilians (the proportion was even higher among the Chinese population), which gives an idea of the fascists’ exterminating and reactionary purpose. In contrast, the number of victims in the Axis countries was less than a third of that recorded in the Allied countries; and the ratio of military to civilian casualties in the Axis countries was reversed, demonstrating the liberating and progressive purpose of the Allies, especially the USSR (even according to Wikipedia).
It was during the Great Patriotic War in the USSR that the fascist hordes were destroyed: 607 Axis Divisions, or 75% of the Nazi Army. The evidence, despite imperialist propaganda, is irrefutable. In total, the fascists lost 13,600,000 men in the war, killed, captured, and wounded, of whom around 10,000,000 fell to the Red Army.
From the beginning of the Nazi aggression in 1941 until the turning point marked by the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, the imperialist allies remained on the sidelines, offering very little support to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union demanded the opening of a second front in Western Europe, but this had to wait until 1944.
Despite Western ideologues, the Red Army’s victory was not due to a numerical superiority in troops or climatic factors such as sub-zero temperatures. In both cases, until mid-1943, the Axis forces outnumbered those of the Red Army, and during the winter of 1941, temperatures only dropped below minus 10 degrees Celsius on very few days. The Blitzkrieg—which allowed the Nazis to conquer Denmark in one day, the Netherlands in five days, Belgium in 19 days, Poland in 35 days, France in 44 days, and Norway in 63 days—failed in the USSR. And the Soviet combatants’ courage and skill were numerous proofs of their bravery.
The Soviet resistance and subsequent victory were due to the fact that it was a people’s war, based on the people’s identity with the socialism that had improved their lives and gave them confidence in a better future for humanity. The population of the USSR enlisted en masse in the Red Army and the organized anti-fascist guerrilla movement, and worked hard in the rearguard and building fortifications.
The difficult conditions in which the Soviet divisions found themselves at the beginning of the war (inexperience in motorized units, inferior quality of weapons, numerical superiority of the enemy, etc.) were quickly compensated for by the impetus and the certainty that they could not retreat, that they had to destroy as many enemy units as possible.
It was the Communist Party, created by V.I. Lenin, that led the Soviet people and their fighters to the great victory over the aggressors. In the preceding decades, this party had brought workers to power and managed to heal the wounds of the First World War and the Civil War, aggravated by the counterrevolutionary intervention of 14 capitalist countries. It had turned the country into the second industrial power, nationalizing factories, collectivizing and mechanizing agriculture, and organizing a planned economy. In 1931, Stalin warned that “We are fifty to one hundred years behind the most advanced countries. We must close this gap in ten years. Either we do it, or they will finish us off.” And he succeeded.
The current Russian rulers extol Tsarist Russia and distort the significance of the policy of patriotic unity pursued during the war against Hitler’s Germany. They assign decisive value to the concessions the Bolshevik government made to the country’s backward forces (Orthodox clergy, nationalist military, imperial traditions, etc.) and curse the struggle the revolutionary proletariat waged to transform them, a struggle that was, however, essential for them to play a positive role in the resistance against the Nazi invasion. They also avoid recalling the evidence provided by Stalin that the country’s situation “on the eve of the Second World War, in 1940, was several times better than before the First World War, in 1913” (Speech delivered at the meeting of electors of the Stalin constituency in Moscow, February 9, 1946). And even less do they want to recognize that, as Stalin explained, what gave the people and the army “great and invincible strength” was “the socialist system born of the October Revolution” (27th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, November 6, 1944).
During the years of the conflagration, the Party intervened as an organizer and inspirer of talent, directing all efforts from the front and rear to defeat the enemy. The reorganization of the entire country according to wartime demands, the formation of new units and groups, their equipment, the accelerated development of the war industry, the training of military cadres, the leadership of mass fronts and the guerrilla movement, ideological work among the masses, and foreign policy were at the center of attention of the Party, its Central Committee, and the State Defense Committee.
In the confrontation with the fascist aggressors, 3.3 million communists perished, while 5 million soldiers, sailors, sergeants, officers, and generals joined the ranks of the Party. “I want to go into battle as a communist,” they wrote, knowing that joining the Party would grant them a unique privilege: to be the first to launch a crucial defense or a daring attack, to meet a burst of enemy fire and accomplish the most difficult and mortally dangerous missions. This is the greatest testimony to the immense prestige the Communist Party enjoyed among the masses of the Soviet people.
Of course, the peoples of Asia and Western Europe also contributed to the victory over fascism, with their communist parties playing a prominent role. But the decisive force was the USSR, its Bolshevik Party, and its Red Army.
At the present time, imperialism does not need a fascist battering ram identical to that of the past against the socialist countries and the labor movement, due to the weakening of the communist movement caused by (objective) social stability and (subjective) revisionist betrayal in the dominant countries. We are, however, witnessing a rise of more or less fascist ideas and forces, while bourgeois “democracies” are becoming increasingly restrictive and authoritarian. Although collusion still prevails between imperialist states and between the two parties into which the capitalist class in each country is beginning to break up, the importance of fighting against fascistic policies and the shock forces they distill is growing. However, it is not opportune for communists to propose an alliance with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democracy while it supports the “civilizing” militarism of its governments with more or less enthusiasm.
Currently, the most appropriate course of action is for communists to focus on winning over the vanguard of the working class in the fight against imperialism and its two parties, and to support the anti-imperialist camp as a whole. This isn’t about ruling out specific agreements and consensus, but it is a priority to denounce the demagoguery of both the New Right and the collaborationist Left.
This denunciation is necessary not only for communists in oppressor countries, but also for those in countries opposed to them. To understand the importance of the role of the revolutionary proletariat in the anti-imperialist resistance, it is enough to compare the Second World War and the Russian Federation’s Special Military Operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. Ukraine fell into the clutches of fascism, as Italy and Germany did in the last century. But the Russian Federation’s war effort is incomparably smaller than what the Soviet Union had to endure: hundreds of thousands of combatants and victims, compared to tens of millions with weapons far less destructive than those of today (to think that imperialism would fear using them is deceptive and illusory, since it requires war).
Will Russia be able to defeat future direct NATO aggression? Will it succeed under its current political regime, which is subservient to capital and idealizes the country’s most rancid past? It will probably only succeed if the Russian working class regains political power to carry out the most urgent socialist transformations. And it will hardly be able to do so alone: it will need the proletariat of each country to fulfill its revolutionary and internationalist obligations.
