[Marxism] Socialist Policy in World War Two

[G K Milner]

It's taken me a while to respond, I know, but I think that you have perhaps 
misunderstood my meaning in the original post on 'Socialist Policy in World 
War Two'.   The conflict between 'property relations' I was talking about 
refers to the clash between imperialism in general, and Nazi German 
imperialism in particular, on the one hand, and the socialised relations of 
production at the basis of the social and political system in the USSR, on 
the other.   I took for my major source on this aspect of World War Two the 
section from Trotsky's 'In Defense of Marxism': "The USSR in War".   In this 
piece, Trotsky strongly criticised the capitulationist position of the 
Schachtman/Burnham opposition in the US Socialist Workers Party, which 
advocated abandoning the traditional perspective of the party on the defence 
in wartime of the Soviet Union as a workers' state (albeit a degenerated 
one).    For Trotsky, it is the property relations at the basis of a state 
which are decisive for a materialist analysis.   In 1940, there were no 
other post-capitalist states, and it was never my intention to state or 
imply that any colonial or semi-colonial country had, at this stage, broken 
with imperialism or capitalism.

The participation of the USSR in World War Two would by itself, in my 
opinion, require a different assessment from Marxists to the one they gave 
to the First World War.   Nevertheless, I agree with you that the war was 
caused by the accumulating contradictions of capitalism and imperialism, and 
thus was at root an inter-imperialist war.   But I believe that the 
qualifying factors - the involvement of a workers' state; the developed 
political level of the colonial independence movement (especially in Asia); 
the struggle of China against a predatory invasion, and the resistance of 
occupied peoples in Europe to their occupiers, all required a modified 
assessment from Marxists, and a recognition that there was a difference in 
kind between World War One and World War Two.

In solidarity,

Graham Milner


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "S. Artesian" <sartesian at earthlink.net>
To: <gkmilner at eftel.net.au>
Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 10:15 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Socialist Policy in World War Two


> Thanks to Shane for the information.
>
> Well, the discussion has certainly taken a twist, no?  From the attempt to
> come to grips about what really was different about  WW2, to speculations
> about...speculations.
>
>