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LA VERITE
THE TRUTH
ISSUE N 82 (NEW SERIES; NO. 688 OLD SERIES) - PART 1 - JUNE 2014PRICE : US$6 (for Parts 1 & 2) - 5 EUROS
ISSUE No. 82
PART TWO
SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE
Another Point of View on theWar of 1914
Karl Liebknecht addresses antiwar rally in Berlin in July 1914
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The politics of Communism stands only to gain from
a truthful clarification of reality. Untruth is needed for
salvaging false reputations, but not for the education of
the masses. The workers need the truth as an
instrument of revolutionary action.
Your paper bears the name Vrit (Truth). This
name, like all others, has been amply abused.
Nevertheless it is a good and honourable name. The
truth is always revolutionary. To lay bare the truth of
their position before the oppressed is to lead them to
the high road of revolution.
Leon Trotsky
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constant references to a glorious but
mythologised past (the French Revolution,
especially) made them out of touch with
reality.
Much more moderate were the
Possibilists, also called Broussists
after their main leader, Paul Brousse. They
thought that everything that was possible
should be done, so long as this was in theright direction. They were
unquestionably reformists. Shamefully,
the former Socialist Minister Vincent
Peillon identified with them, with one
difference: degree. As far as the
Possibilists were concerned, socialism was
the ultimate objective; for Peillon,
capitalism was insurmountable.
This current produced a left-wing, the
Allemanists, named after Jean
Allemane. They were more syndicalist and
more anti-clerical, but lacking any kind of
theoretical principles.The main figure among the
Independent Socialists was Jean Jaurs.
The main Socialist leader in France was
not a Marxist; more precisely, he espoused
a highly relative Marxism, and on certain
essential points he was openly opposed to
it. It is difficult to summarise Jaurs in just
a few lines. The simplest thing, in a
review like our own, is on the one hand to
refer to the interview given to
In fo rm at io ns ouv ri re s by Fre nc h
historian Gilles Candar, and on the other
to quote Trotsky.Trotsky, who had crossed paths Jaurs
on several occasions, wrote in 1915: In
the essence of his views Jaurs had been
and remained a reformist. But he
possessed an astonish ing capaci ty for
adaptation: and that included adaptation
towards the revolutionary tendencies in
the movement. (4)
He added in 1920: The ideologist of
democracy, Jaurs, pictured democracy as
the nations supreme tribunal rising above
the warring classes. (.. .) An ardent
defender of the interests of the proletariat,
and profoundly devoted to socialism,
Jaurs, as the tribune of a democratic
nation, came out against imperialism. (5)
And in 1922: And we can say now,
and we can say tomorrow, that every
revolutionary party, every oppressed
people, every oppressed working class,
and above all the vanguard of the
oppressed peoples and working classes,
the Communist International, can identify
with Jaurs, with his memory, his figure,
his personality. Jaurs is our common
property, he belongs to the revolutionary
parties, to the working classes, to the
oppressed peoples. (6)
At the insistent request of the
International, all of these currents were to
unite with difficulty (it had been decided
that minutes of the congress would not be
kept) in 1905, and Jaurs gradually
assumed effective leadership.
2) Looming crisis
This was the scene presented by the
apparent situation of the French labour
movement in 1914.
The reality was much more complex.
The three big forces of the labour
movement were fraught with internal
tensions and difficulties, all linked to one
simple question: fight back or adapt.
Anarchism, which had real influence,
especially in the trade union world, had
been undergo ing a serious crisis since1911. It took the form among others of
illegalism, notably with the Bonnot
affair, which saw well-known anarchist
activists take the path of gangsterism,
which led to repression. There was an
undeniable stupor: thus Kropotkin, a
theoretician and an eminent figure in
anarchist circles, was justifying as early as
1905 the Sacred Union that was to come
(7). Activists such as Marcel Hasfeld, the
free-thinker Andr Lorulot, Victor Serge
and Amde Dunois, who joined the SFIO
(8) in 1912 before rejecting the SacredUnion, questioned their commitment to
anarchism.
Trade unionism was also undergoing a
pr ofo un d cri si s. Fa ci ng at te mp ts at
infiltration by the police and the Radical
Party (9), and subjected to provocations
and repression, it also fell prey to
scheming. One such machination resulted
in the resignation of Griffuelhes as
Secretary of the CGT in 1909. His
successor Niel proved incapable and held
on for just a few months before being
replaced by Lon Jouhaux, a revolutionary
syndicalist who hastened to declare that
the trade union needed fine tuning.
Another scheme resulted in the expulsion
of Merrheim, the combative
Metalworkers Federation official; he was
expelled from his industry union. There
was indeed a crisis in thinking among
trade union activists (10).
Strikes became routine affairs, badly
prepared, badly led and often labelled
general strike. Thus on 16 December
1912, the general strike against the war by
the CGT, conceived as a general rehearsal
for the uprising by the working class in
case of conflict, was more symbolic than
real. Almost nobody among the leadership
was worried about a false radicalism that
saw bawlers and rrrrevolutionaries
(11) acting like petty chiefs over the
working class.
The crisis within the SFIO was no less
significant. Having vilified the otherSocialist currents, the Guesdists lost all
legitimacy by unifying with them. They
lapsed into a dogmatism that barely hid a
profoundly elec toralist approach . The
ultra-leftist Gustave Herv, who had
planted the tricolour flag in a dungheap
(12), had been preparing his rallying point
since 1912, and in July 1914 opposed the
general strike against war. Although Jean
Jaurs held sway over the SFIO, he did
soon the basis of his personal, intellectual
and political prestige alone, and not his
theoretical or organisational attributesThe party which in 1905 had declared
itself a party of the working class was
increasingly becoming an electoralist party
whose candidates still could not manage
nor wanted to move away from the
Radical Party, which was the majority
party at that time. For the time being, the
figure of Jaurs, who represented the party
almost single-handedly, was over-
whelmingly charismatic and banished any
uncertainty. But after his death (13)
It was in this French context (and
international context, with the AgadirCrisis in Morocco and the Balkan Wars)
that in 1913 the so-called Three-Year
Law was passed, extending the term of
military service to three years and thus
illustrating and accelerating the rise of
militarism. While it is an indisputable fact
that the SFIO officially pacifist and
internationalist waged a campaign
against this law, all related articles in its
newspaper LHumani t were published
under the rubric For national defence.
As part of a very French tradition
several former revolutionaries and
socialists like Viviani, Briand and
Millerand tried to influence or appeal to
their former comrades and often
succeeded. As for Clemenceau, who had
nicknamed himself the senior cop of
France, he continued to organise the
repression of labour activity as Interior
Minister. Let us recall in passing that
Manuel Valls, Frances current socialist
Prime Minister and former Interior
Minister, recently confided that he
preferred Clemenceau to Jaurs.
Few were ravaged with concern in the
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face of the ineffectiveness and
complacency of the official leadership of
the big labour organisations.
But within that small circle, we can
mention the grouping around La Vie
ouvrire [Working-class Life], th e
recently-established trade union review
centred on Monatte, Merrheim andRosmer.
In fact, it was not the war that led to (or
pr ov oke d) th e cr is is of th e la bou r
movement, especially in France. It was
the crisis of the labour movement that
allowed war to break out; or, to be more
exact, the official policy of the labour
movement did not allow it to stand firm
during the chauvinistic crisis. Put simply,
the war tragically revealed the
powerlessness of the labour leadership.
3) Rallying round
August 1914 was a tragedy, beyond
any shadow of a doubt. Millions of
proletarians and peasants of every country
were to massacre each other.
The assassination of Jean Jaurs, a
declared opponent of the war, on 31 July
1914 by a crank was an extreme form of
that tragedy. When brought to trial in
1919, Jaurss murderer was defended in
court by Zvas, a senior Socialist leader
who had become an Independent
Socialist. At the trial, a man testified on
behal f of the murderer , Raoul Vil lain.This man was Marc Sangnier, the founder
of French Christian Democracy, with
whom several supporters of the official
left identified. He described the
murderer Villain as an upstanding,
sincere, loyal person and insisted on his
moral values (moral values consisting
of firing two bullets to the back of the
head). Villain was so well defended that
he was acquitted, and Jaurss widow was
ordered to pay the legal costs.
The last days of July 1914 saw the
CGT organise several big demonstrations(where there were violent clashes with the
police). But the leadership waited and the
military mobilisation began amidst a
nationalist frenzy: the underground
railway station Allemagne [Germany]
was renamed Jaurs before war was
even declared (on 3 August 1914), shops
bearing Germanic names were ransacked,
and so on.
The rallying of the labour leaders
around the Sacred Union, i.e. around the
international slaughter, was explicitly
stated in a joint SFIO-CGT manifesto (an
event in itself) which as early as 28 July
criticised Austria-Hungarys historic
responsibility and sang the praises of the
French leaders who wanted pe ace
sincerely. Consequently, Jules Guesde
was to become a government minister,
like two other Socialist leaders.At Jaurss funeral, CGT General
Secretary Leon Jouhaux spoke in the
name of those who will go to the front,
then remained in the rear and rallied to the
Sacred Union, later becoming a
government commissioner. Of course,
Jouhauxs biography cannot be reduced to
this moment in time (his rejection of the
Ptain-Belin Labour Charter in 1940,
which without his rejection would
have destroyed the CGT within a
corporatist set-up was extremely
important), but it should not be forgotten
either.
The anarchists played their part in this
concert with the famous Manifesto of the
Sixteen, which stated: [U]nless the
German population () finally refuses to
serve any longer as an instrument of the
pr oj ec ts of pan -Ge rm an po li ti ca l
domination, there can be no question of
peace.
The Poincar government blackmailed
those named in the Carnet B (a list of
some 2,500 possible opponents of the war
who would be rounded up in case of
unrest) saying that it would not pursueanyone who formally declared their good
intentions. At the same time it cracked
down selectively on known opponents
(the trade unionists Broutchoux was to
remain in prison for two years;
schoolteacher Julia Bertrand was also
imprisoned, among others) and no less
selectively favoured other labour officials
socially (some sought to gain a military
rank, for example, while others, more
prosaically, wanted to avoid going off
to the front, even if it meant calling on
others to fight). One weapon was veryeffective against both opponents and the
half-hearted: being sent to the front.
The atmosphere against the
internationalists was oppressive: to take
just one example, the trade union leader
Merrheim, who at that time was against
the war, had to be accompanied by two
enormous dogs for his own protection
when attending meetings of the CGT
leadership, where he was regularly called
a Hun and insulted by his comrades.
The wave of chauvinism carried all
before it. Victor Serge, in one dreadful
passage from his memoirs, reports the
remarks of a friend who tries to corrupt
him: The wars business, old chap.
Youll see people are doing well out of it,
nobody wants to end it any more. ()
Jules Guesde and Marcel Sembat are in
the Government; a Socialist is defendingJaurss murderer Maitre Zvas, you
know him. Chose, the Illegalist, has won
the Military Medal, etc. (14).
Moreover, the opponents to the war did
not complain to the leadership that it had
not prevented this wave of
chauvinism, but that it had not
distanced itself from it. We were all of us
po we rle ss , Pierre Monatte told the
CGTs 1919 Congress.
This rallying round did not take place
in the abstract: leaders of the Socialist
Party and the CGT turned themselves into
police auxiliaries, in the literal sense of
the term, informing against their own
comrades for making internationalist
remarks.
4) Resistance
It was the small La Vi e Ou vri r e
group, in liaison with the Russian exiles
around Trotsky and Martov of the
newspaperNashe Slovo, that held out.
This groups activity was marginal,
almost symbolic. A witness tells the story:
Near the corner of Grange-aux-BellesStreet and Quai de Jemmapes in Paris, a
small grey-fronted shop, a Librairie du
Travail bookshop, was still open in 1914.
There lived Pierre Monatte, editor-in-
chief of La Vie ouvrire, who shared with
Merrheim the glory of having formulated
the first protest by the French proletarian
world against the war. This shop closed
on 2 August. And yet, on certain autumn
evenings, towards 9 pm, the police were
able to note furtive signs of life, with
conspirators slipping in one after the
other, and the symposia coming to an endafter 11pm (...) We confined ourselves to
poking sadly at the cold remains of the
International; to draf ting, from bitte r
memory, the enormous list of those who
had failed (...). Rosmer, the poet Martinet,
Trotsky, Guilbeaux, Merrheim and two or
three others of whose names I was not
aware, we knew, sitting there in the
middle of Paris, that we were both the last
Europeans of the wonderful intell igent
Europe which the world had just lost for
ever, and the first men of a future
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THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN FRANCE
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International of which we were certain.
We formed the chain linking one century
to the next... (15)
Pierre Monatte, after carrying out (and
before continuing to carry out) a policy of
opposition which earned him the anger of
the government and the trade union
leaders, gave a virulent and public boost
to that opposition within the CGT: on 3
January 1915, he resigned from the
CGTs National Confederal Committee,
in protest against the orientation of the
confederal leadership which notably had
agreed to hold a propaganda tour on
behalf of the government.
His Open Letter was widely distributed
un de rg ro un d. Le t us not e th at hi s
resignation was assessed in various ways
by opponents to the war. For Merrheim, it
was a mistake; for Trotsky, it was a
necessary and healthy act of splitting.
Monatte was quickly despatched to thefront by the government.
On 1 November that same year,
Rosmer, another conspicuous trade union
activist, sent aLetter to the Subscribers of
La Vie Ouvrire: In France, socialism
and syndicalism have abandoned the
working class at the most serious, the
most painful time. The disarray has been
greater than in any other country and,
before such a betrayal, we are willingly
letting ourselves become discouraged and
sceptical. But it is not true that we cannot
do anything.Despite the repression and censorship,
other trade union publications succeeded
in defending labour internationalism; this
was the case with Lunion des mtaux
[Metalworkers Unity], organ of the
CGT-affiliated Federation, which
published the manifesto of the German
workers against the war, and the primary
schoolteachers union. Teaching trade
unionists grouped around the review
LEcole mancipe [The Emancipated
School], which was banned in 1914 and
replaced by LEcole de la fdration ,
were also active.
And it was not, could not, be an
accident that from the inmost depths of
the labour organisations, even those most
mistreated by their official leaders, the
will to say no seeped and then surged
up. The objector Raymond Lefebvre
joined the SFIO in 1916 on his return
from the front where he had been
wounded where he joined the handful of
cadres who rejected the Sacred Union.
Monatte wrote from the frontline in
February 1917: The war will not last for
ever. We will return to you from the
trenches. On our return, the proletariat
will still be the proletariat.
It was this certainty, this confidence
that drove the militant activists on.
These initial regroupments, informal to
begin with, became the Committee for the
Resumption of International Relations
and the Trade Union Defence Committee.
All together in this Committee, despite
the easily explicable friction and old
pre judices, socia lis ts, syndicalis ts and
libertarians were to take action against the
war, against capitalism, and then for the
defence of the Russian Revolution.
This resulted in the attendance of
Albert Bourderon (syndicalist member of
the CGT-affiliated Coopers Federation
and delegate of the Federation of the
Bourses du Travail) (16) and Merrheim in
the International Socialist Conference
held in Zimmerwald from 3 to 8September 1915. The organised threads of
labour internationalism had been re-tied.
Works consulted:
The most important of these are Alfred
Rosmer, Le Mouvement ouvrir pendant
la guerre: De lUnion sacre
Zimmerwald [The Labour Movement
During the War: From the Sacred Union
to Zimmerwald], published in two
volumes in 1936 and 1959; and the
classic work Edouard Dollans, Histoiredu mouvement ouvrier [History of the
Labour Movement], Vol.2 (1871-1920),
published before Rosmers history (thus
allowing him to make some corrections).
Also, Pierre Monatte, La Lu tt e
syndica le [The Trade Union Struggle]
(edited by Colette Chambelland, Paris,
1976); and J Vidal, Le Mo uv em en t
ouvrier franais de la Commune la
guerre mondiale [The French Labour
Movement from the Commune to the
World War], published in 1934. J Vidal
was the pseudonym of the great Soviet
historian Vladimir Dalin, who was a
signatory of a letter of support for Trotsky
in 1924 and who was then deported to the
Gulag, where he spent 20 years.
(1) See the article by Lucien Gauthierentitled The root causes of the collapseof the Second International in this issueofLa Vrit-The Truth for a detailedexamination of Jules Guesdes conceptionof the party and the trade union.
(2) A quote from St.Matthews Gospel,
Chapter 6.(3) Letter to Louis Watteau in
Brussels, 10 November 1861.(4) FromJean Jaurs, a political
profile by Trotsky published in the liberalnewspaperKievskaya Mysl, No.196, 17July 1915.
(5) Thoughts on the Progress of the
Proletarian Revolution, The First FiveYears of the Communist International,Vol.1.
(6)Report to the Fourth WorldCongress of the Communist International,1 December 1922.
(7) Jean Maitron,Histoire dumouvement anarchiste en France, Vol.1,
p.377 onwards. The union sacre orSacred Union was a political truce inFrance during the First World War, inwhich a significant part of the socialistmovement agreed not to oppose thegovernment or call any strike, in the name
of patriotism.(8) The French Section of the
Workers International (French acronym:SFIO) was formed in 1905 as a merger
between the French Socialist Party andthe Socialist Party of France. Althoughwidely known as the Socialist Party, itadopted the name officially only in 1969.
(9) The traditionally centrist RadicalParty (full name: the Radical Republicanand Radical-Socialist Party) was officiallyfounded in 1901 but traced its roots to the1870s and the reformist wing of the
French Republican Party, known as theRadicals, led by Georges Clemenceau.(10) Pierre Monatte, La Vie Ouvriere
(1909-1914) in Colette Chambelland(ed.),La Lutte syndicale (Paris, 1976).
(11) The first characterisation was byMonatte, the second by Lenin.
(12) Herv gained notoriety in 1901 bywriting an article in the socialist presswhich included the image of the Frenchtricolour planted in a pile of manure.
(13) Jaures was murdered in a Pariscaf on 31 July 1914 by nationalistfanatic Raoul Villain.
(14) Victor Serge,Memoirs of aRevolutionary, Chapter 2.
(15) From the Preface toLEponge devinaigre [The Sponge of Vinegar] by thesocialist writer Raymond Lefebvre,quoted in Alfred Rosmer,Le mouvementouvrier pendant la guerre.
(16)Bourses du Travailwere working-class organisations that encouragedmutual aid, education, and self-organisation amongst their members.They were one type of CGT-affiliatedorganisation, together with regionalunions and national federations.
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At first glance, the First World War
may not appear to merit that name. In the
strict sense of military operations, it was a
war that was mainly concentrated on
European soil. However, in the full sense
of the term, it was indeed a world war.
Other articles in this issue of our review
establish the fact that it took place to
allow a new partition of the world
between the capitalist powers. It alsoestablishes how right Lenin was, at the
start of the 20th century, in defining
imperialism, the highest stage of
capitalism, as reaction all down the line,
the maker of wars and revolutions.
It was a world war because it was
caused by the competing international
interests of the colonial powers that
shared the world between them and the
emerging imperialist states that found
themselves deprived of colonies.
A world war, because the peoples ofthe world were thrown onto the European
battlefield.
A world war in terms of its
consequences, which turned the whole
planet upside down.
The First Congress of the Communist
International, held in Moscow in March
1919, explained in its Manifesto of the
Communist International to the Workers
of the World that: The last war, which
was by and large a war for colonies, was
at the same time a war conducted with the
help of colonies. The colonial populations
were drawn into the European war on an
unprecedented scale. Indians, Negroes
(1), Arabs and Madagascans fought on
the territories of Europe for the sake of
what? For the sake of their right to
continue to remain the slaves of England
and France. Never before has the infamy
of capitalist rule in the colonies been
delineated so clearly; never before has
the problem of colonial slavery been
posed so sharply as it is today.
Thus, at a time when the civil war
waged by the forces of White reaction
was encircling Russia, the First Congress
of the Communist International firmly
highlighted the degree unknown up to
that point to which the peoples had been
dragged into the war. It was a mass
deportation. Millions of workers and
pe as ant s we re sn atc he d fo rm th ei r
countries by the colonial powers andthrown into the bloody fray.
A new slave trade
We know that French imperialism
carried out an out-and-out devastation
of its colonial possessions in Africa. It
was not alone in doing so. British
imperialism did the same.
In May 1915, the Black American
militant activist W E B Du Bois explained
in an article entitled The African Roots ofWar: Yet in a very real sense, Africa is
a prime cause for this terrible overturning
of civilisation which we have lived to
see.
According to Du Bois, Africa was the
Land of the Twentieth Century due to the
gold and diamonds of South Africa, the
cocoa of Angola and Nigeria, the rubber
and ivory of the Congo and the palm-oil
of the West Coast.
And although the forms taken by the
outbreak of the First World War did not in
the first instance involve the African
peoples, the rule of the European warring
powers over the continent would soon
drag them into the fray.
By the time the war ende d, ev ery
country in Africa, with the exception of
the small Spanish territories which
remained neutral had been formally
committed to one side or the other. (2)
Their commitment was first and
foremost via the demands of the war
effort that were placed on them (providing
troops and porters, foodstuffs, etc.).
Africa would also suffer economic crisis
induced by the war and the resulting
shortage of manpower. There was also
limited fighting on its soil during the
invasion of the German colonies.
A war needs combatants. The colonial
po we rs qui ck ly re al is ed th at th ei r
African possessions offered them an
advantage. The French General Mangin,promoter of an armed body named the
Black Force and author of a book of the
same name, wrote: Our African forces
would constitute an almost indefinite
reserve, the source of which is beyond the
reach of the adversary. (3)
All of the belligerent powers present in
Africa recruited soldiers there for the
battlefi elds of Europe and Africa , and
po rt er s fo r the ca mpai gn s in Af ri ca .
Several methods were used in carrying
out that recruitment. The promise ofcitizen status not generally enjoyed by
the colonised led some Africans of the
elite to join up voluntarily (we will
return later to all of the false promises
made to the colonised peoples and
examine the consequences of those acts of
deception). But above all, it was the
obligation placed on the traditional chiefs
to deliver a contingent of men, the
number of which was set by the colonial
administrators, together with the
conscription laws (French decree of 1912,
British decree of 1915) that introduced
military service for Africans, which
allowed this mass conscription to occur.
Several historians have described this as
a new slave trade.
But () the recruitment campaign
provok ed widesp read re vo lts and the
insurgent areas were impossible to recruit
in. () At a time when the Allied colonial
regimes in Africa could least afford
trouble in their own backyards, their
authority still only tenuously established
5
A War for Colonies Conducted with the
Help of Colonies
By Olivier Doriane
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in places like southern Ivory Coast, much
of Libya or Karamoja in Uganda was
widely challenged by armed risings and
other forms of protest by their subjects.
()
Large areas of Haut-Sngal-Niger
and Dahomey remained out of French
control for as much as a year (). Insom e ca ses wh at we re de sc ri be d as
revolts were, in effect, as in Libya, just
the continuation of primary resistance to
European occupation. () There can be
no doubt that the visual evidence of the
apparent weakening of European
authority as represented by the exodus of
Eu rop ean s [to fight in Europe]
encouraged those contemplating revolt
(). But not all protests were violent in
character. ()
To avoid recruitment teams,inhabitants of whole villages fled to the
bush. () In Zanzibar, too, men hid all
day and slept in trees at night to avoid
being impressed as porters. (4)
In total, more than a million African
soldiers were involved in these campaigns
[on African soil] or campaigns in Europe.
Even more men, as well as women and
children, were recruited, often forcibly, as
po rt er s to su pp or t armies ( ). Ov er
150,000 soldiers and porters lost theirlives during the war. Many more were
wounded and disabled. () Further,
North Africans were recruited to work at
factory benches vacated by Frenchmen
conscripted into the army. () All in all
over 2.5 million Africans, or well over 1
percent of the population of the continent,
were involved in war work of some kind.
(5)
In Asia too
These veritable slave raids also
affected Asia. The bloodletting on the
fields of battle set the pace for the
requisition of human beings in the
colonies.
Thus in 1916, there were terrible losses
in the Battle of the Somme. On 1 July, in
a single day, there were 60,000 British
casualties, including 19,240 dead. In total
the July battles put 400,000 British troops
out of action, half of them dead ormissing. British imperialism had already
begun mass conscription in India: over
750,000 men were drafted (36,000 died)
That was not enough. Following the
Battles of the Somme, the British colonial
authorities set up the Chinese Labour
Corps, which recruited 100,000 Chinese
workers.
We should in fact remember that at the
start of the war, the European
imperialisms were present in China,occupying foreign concessions. These
were 25 in number and were shared
between France, Great Britain, German,
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LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
At another level, the fate of Black
Americans was also revealing. Some
200,000 Black workers were thrown onto
the European battlefields, in a muchhigher proportion to the actual ratio with
the population of the US. The Trinidadian
Black Trotskyist C L R James explained:
The war was a war for democracy,
but the Negroes were segregated. There
was not a single regiment consisting of
white and Negro soldiers mixed.
American democracy did not want to
have even American coloured officers,
and it took a hard fight to have a few
hundred. When they did agree, they
trained Negroes as officers in a specialNe gro cam p. An d th es e me n we re
informed by the State Department that
when they visited the South, they should
not wear their uniforms. Democracy
was sending the Negro to fight for
democracy, but could not bear the
sight of him in the officers uniform of
democracy. () When they went to
France, the discrimination continued.
American democracy forced most of
the black soldiers to be common
labourers. () Far from practicing any
sort of democracy to Negroes, the
American commanders did their best tomake the French maltreat the Negroes.
() But when the American officers saw
this and the friendly way in which Negro
soldiers were being welcomed both by
French men and women, they issued a
military order, Order No.40, instructing
Negroes not even to speak to French
women. For this offense against
democracy, many Negroes were
arrested, though the French people, men
and women, had made no complaint. The
Am er ic an of fi ce rs, in th is wa r fo rdemocracy, wrote a special document
to the French commanding staff, telling
them that Negroes were a low and
degenerate race, that they could not be
trusted in the company of white people,
that although some Negroes were
officers, the French officers should have
nothing to do with them, except in matters
relating strictly to fighting. The French,
said this American order, should not eat
with Negroes, nor even shake hands.
The author went on: as soon as the
war was over, there was such a desperate
series of race riots in America as had notbeen seen for many years. In Washington,
in Chicago, white mobs inspired and
encouraged by American employers and
American capitalis t pol ice , shot down
Ne gr oes , ma ny of wh om ha d lo st
relations in the great war for
democracy. The Southern whites were
so anxious to put the Negro back in his
place that they lynched Negroes who
dared to wear the uniform of a private.
The great war for democracy and the
bravery and the sacrifices fordemocracy of the Negro people ended
with thousands of them having to fight
desperately, not for democracy, but for
their lives in democratic America.
CLR James (under the name J R
Johnson), Why Negroes Should Oppose
the War, published by the American SWP
as a pamphlet in 1939.
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bu t al so th e Un it ed St at es . Al th ou gh
Chinese historians refer to the war as the
European War, the presence of troops
from the various belligerent countries on
the same territory, in addition to the fact
that the majority of Chinese cities subject
to the Unequal Treaties were also
accessible by sea, meant that the Chinesesoil itself faced the threat of armed
confrontation. On 6 August 1914, the
Chinese government declared its str ict
neutrality in the European war and
accompanied this declaration with a
statement of the neutrality regulations of
the Republic of China. China asked the
warring states to respect its neutrality.
Some conflict resulted from the Anglo-
Japanese alliance of 1902, which pushed
Japan into declaring war on Germany and
to seize the German territory of Qingdaoin November 1914. But it was in 1915,
with the sending of Chinese workers en
masse to Russia and then to the battlefields
of France in 1916, that China really entered
the war.
In total, 200,000 Chinese workers left
for Russia between 1915 and 1917, and
140,000 for France between 1916 and
1918, transported to Europe in atrocious
conditions. Some 27,000 would never
return. In neighbouring Vietnam also,
90,000 Annamites (6) were conscripted.
The deception of the promises by the
imperialist powers
This involvement in the war would have
pr of ou nd con seq uen ce s in te rm s of
relations between the peoples of the
colonies and the colonial authorities.
Everywhere, national questions arose
forcefully.
The Second Congress of the Communist
International, held in 1920, rightly insisted:
The imperialist war of 1914-18 has veryclearly revealed to all nations and to the
oppressed classes of the whole world the
falseness of bourgeois-democratic phrases,
by practically demonstrating that the
Treaty of Versailles of the celebrated
Western democracies is an even more
brutal and foul act of violence against
weak nations than was the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk of the German Junkers and the
Kaiser. (7)
This policy of aggression, the document
stressed, was hastening the collapse of the
petty-bourgeois nationalist illusions that
nations can live together in peace and
equality under capitalism.
Because colonial powers everywhere
had hardly been reticent in terms of
promises of future recompense. Now, far
from marking a relaxation of the colonialorder or of the racism that was prevalent in
the United States, the post-war period
would be marked by a reinforcement of the
mechanisms of repression.
In India, promises of reform had been
made in return for a commitment to the
side of the democrats against barbarous
militarism. (8)
The reality? In March 1919, the
Imperial Legislative Council passed the
Rowland Act, which extended indefinitely
the wartime state of emergency, thusallowing the colonial authorities to
imprison those suspected of terrorism for
two years and to strictly control the press.
Anyone found guilty of assisting enemies
of His Majesty could be sentenced to
death.
A non-violent protest demonstration
organised in Amritsar (in the Punjab) on 13
April 1919 was bloodily put down,
resulting in well over 1,000 deaths (the
official figure was 370 dead and 1200
wounded). A new stage in the struggle for
national liberation was opening. It had to
wait 28 years before ending in
independence.
British imperialism had previously
applied this repressive policy with ferocity
in its oldest colony: Ireland. When Ireland
was dragged into the war, voices were
raised within the Irish labour movement,
calling for rejection of a war being waged
by the colonial power. The revolutionary
socialist James Connolly was one of the
main leaders of the Irish labour movement,
and in particular of the Irish Transport andGeneral Workers Union. A banner hung in
the unions headquarters, Liberty Hall in
Dublin, which declared: We serve neither
king nor Kaiser, but Ireland.
As Connolly put it: The power which
holds in subjection more of the worlds
population than any other power on the
globe, and holds them in subjection as
slaves without any guarantee of freedom or
power of self-government, this power that
sets Catholic against Protestant, the Hindu
against the Mohammedan, the yellow man
against the brown, and keeps them
quarrelling with each other whilst she robs
and murders them all this power appeals
to Ireland to send her sons to fight under
Englands banner for the cause of the
oppressed. () The cause of labour is the
cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is thecause of labour. They cannot be
dissevered. (9).
At that time Liberty Hall was under the
protection of armed members of the Irish
Citizen Army (ICA), the workers self-
defence organisation set up during the
famous Dublin general strike (the Lockout
of 1913). The ICA was the spearhead of
the insurrection against British rule
launched on 24 April 1916. The Easter
Rising was put down and repressed
mercilessly.But in the aftermath of the First World
War, the Irish people identified with the
republican cause. A war of independence
began in 1918. It would continue until
1921, forcing the British government into
negotiations.
The link with the labour movement in
Europe
Even though colonial oppression
endured throughout the world and even
though repression hit hard, social relations
within the dominated countries were
modified as a consequence of the war. As
noted by S K Koza, author of a series of
articles on Africa published in
Informations Ouvrires [Labour News], the
organ of the Independent Workers Party
(POI) in France:
The forced recruitment of Africa into
the war was to have considerable
consequences. There is no doubt that the
war opened up new horizons for very many
Africans, especial ly to members of theeducated elite. The new image of the white
man whom they had been urged to kill
during the war, whilst up to the war the
white man had belonged to a clan whose
members were regarded as sacrosanct due
to the colour of their skin together with
the failure to keep the promise of reforms,
convinced many Africans not only that an
improvement in their condition could only
come from regaining their sovereignty, but
that henceforth victory was possible.
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rivals upon whom they still depended for
so much . () It al so me ant that the
solution of Chinas revolutionary tasks
passed into the hands of the newest and
youngest class, the urban proletariat,
organizing and drawing behind it the
millions of toilers and artisans in the
towns and on the fields. ().For China the lessons of the Russian
revolutions bore a peculiar cogency. In
Russia, the proletariat of a backward
country had taken over the tasks a
bankrupt bourgeoisie proved unable to
shoulde r. The October revolution had
sh ow n ho w th e co mb in at io n of a
proletarian insurrection the culmination
of the new class antagonisms and a
peasant war the carry-over of the old
offered the only way out for a backward
country in the modern world of
imperialism. (15)
Soviet Russia also played an active
role: in 1919 and 1920 it declared it
would rescind all the Unequal Treaties
which the tsarist government had imposed
on China, giving further impetus to the
national question.
The shining phrases of Woodrow
Wilson, his promises of self-determination
and social justice for all peoples had bred
the hope that in the general readjustment
China too would come into her own.
When at Versailles these illusions werecynically spiked by the imperialist horse-
traders, the new youth rose in fury against
the treachery of the corrupt Japanophile
Peking Government. On May 4, 1919,
there were huge student demonstrations in
Peking. The homes of traitorous Ministers
were attacked and wrecked. The
movement spread across the country. In it
a new note sounded. Workers in factories
struck in support of the student demands.
The growth of industry had brought a
modern proletarian class on to the scene.At the end of 1916 there were already
nearly one million industrial workers and
their number nearly doubled by 1922. To
the Western front in Europe went an army
of nearly 200,000 Chinese labourers, who
learned there to read and write a little
and, what was more important still, came
into contact with European workers and
the higher European standard of living.
They returned with new ideas of how men
struggle for better lives. They had seen
the great nations locked in conflict and
they came back determined to free their
own. Many on their way back from
Europe refused to land at Japanese ports
during the furore over Shantung. (16) ()
The eyes of the new youth turned from
Versailles to Russia, where the October
revolution offered them an example andan inspiration infinitely more compelling
in its reality. (17)
The government in Moscow had
already indicated that it was prepared to
treat the issue of Sino-Soviet relations on
a radically new basis. On 4 July 1918, the
then Peoples Commissar for Foreign
Affairs Chicherin had stated that
Bolshevik Russia was renouncing all the
tsarist Unequal Treaties had signed with
China, as well as all the arrangements
previous ly made with Japan and other
countries regarding China.
This policy was once again declared in
a manifesto dated 25 July 1919 (known as
the Karakhan Manifesto). The
declarations by the Soviet government in
1919 and 1920 had made a new wind
bl ow th rough th e cor ri do rs of
international diplomacy, which irritated
the western powers.
The appeal to struggle to liberate
the East from the European tyrants
This was of value throughout the
world. The Declaration of the Rights of
the People of Russia (15 November 1917)
had made a huge impression wherever it
became known: it declared the equality
and sovereignty of all the peoples of
Russia, and their right to self-
determination, including the right to
secede and form an independent state.
In the Maghreb region of North Africa,
leaflets that were passed from hand to
hand reproduced in Arabic the Appeal ofthe Council of Peoples Commissars to
the Muslims of Russia and the East (3
December 1917). This document declared
that the beliefs and customs of Muslims
were free and inviolable. Appeals such
as Build your nat ional life freely and
without hindrance and We look to you
for sympathy and support were well-
received.
It was significant that three years after
the October Revolution, the Syrian-based
Patriotic Committee of Arab Unity
declared: The Arabs regard the
government of Lenin and his friends, and
the Great Revolution they have launched
to liberate the East from the European
tyrants as a great force capable of
ensuring their well-being and happiness.
The dismantling of the Ottoman
Empire
The dismantling of the Ottoman
Empire in fact resulted in the national
question being posed in strong terms
throughout the Maghreb and the Middle
East. Different imperialisms had torn into
the region during the war itself. In 1914,
Egypt became a British protectorate. In
1917, they occupied Mesopotamia. With
the Balfour Declaration that same year,
Great Britain foresaw and prepared its
takeover of Palestine. The Treaty of
Sevres, signed on 10 August 1920,
formalised the dismemberment of the
Ottoman Empire. France and Britain then
launched into a complicated struggle for
influence in the former Ottoman
possessions of Lebanon, Palestine, Syria,
Iraq and Arabia.
France occupied Syria in 1920. And in
1926, Iraq was placed under British
mandate. This Balkanisation of the Near
and Middle East was said to have beenprepar ed by sec re t An gl o- Fr en ch
agreements in 1916 known as the
Sykes-Picot negotiations in liaison
with tsarist Russia.
But the end of the war also meant the
revolt in Turkey led by Mustafa Kemal,
who was to abolish the Empire and found
the Republic of Turkey.
There were also numerous revolts
throughout the Middle East. After 1919,
the repression was extremely brutal in
every territory placed under mandate.Between 1920 and 1926, French Generals
Gouraud, Weygand and Sarrail practically
operated a military dictatorship in Syria,
and used bloody repression against the
Arab masses who rose up several times.
In Iraq in late 1919, a genuine revolt
developed against the British. Following
bloody repress ion, the Brit ish installed
Faisal as King of Iraq.
In Palestine, riots occurred against the
British mandate and Zionism in 1920,
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1921 and 1929. On each occasion, they
were brutally put down by British troops.
The two poles
Thus, immediately following the war,
the situation seemed to be clearly defined:
on one side the victorious RussianRevolution which called for national
liberation, for the mobilisation of the
broadest masses for the right to a nation
and for the expropriation of the exploiters.
On the other side, the powers which,
having won the war, were sharing out the
world between themselves while
increasing the oppression of nations.
But everything had been turned upside
down. The Manifesto of the Second
Congress of the Communist International
po in ted ou t: The bourgeoisie of the
whole world is looking back wistfully
upon the days just past. All the
foundations of international and internal
relations have been overthrown or
shaken. Threatening clouds darken the
future of the capitali st world . The old
system of alliances and mutual insurance
which formed the foundations of
international equilibrium and of armed
peace has been utterly destroyed by the
Imperialist War. The Versai lles Treaty
has failed to establish any other
adjustment in its stead.
Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany
in succession have fallen out of the world
race. Some of the powerful empires which
had themselves previously played a
prominent par t in the wor lds plunder
have now become the objects of plunder
and dismemberment. ()
But there are defeated parties even in
the camp of the conquerors. Stupefied by
the fumes of a chauvinistic victory which
it had won for the benefit of others the
French bourgeoisie fancies that it hasbecome the ruler of Europe. But in reality
France has never been in such slavish
dependence upon the more powerful
governments of England and America
than she is today. ()
Japan, torn within her feudal shell by
capitalist contradictions, stands on the
verge of a great revolutionary crisis
which is already paralysing her
imperialist aspirations, in spite of the
favourable international situation.
Thus only two great powers remain:
Great Britain and the United States. ()
At the same time the national str ife
within the bounds of the victorious
countries has reached its climax. The
English bourgeoisie which pretends to be
the guardian of the nations of the world is
incapable of solving the Irish question athome.
Still more threatening is the national
question in the colonies. Egypt, India,
Persia are shaken by internal upheavals.
(18)
The First World War thus put an end to
any possibility of stabilising the
imperialist order; instead, as Trotsky
pointed out, it opened the epoch of wars
and revolutions and the epoch of
counter-revolution.
And in this new epoch, the flag of the
struggle for national independence, for
pu tt in g an end to co lo nia l ru le , ha d
definitively passed into the hands of the
working class engaged in the long and
difficult struggle for socialism.
EDOTES
(1) The term Negroes, which was
used in every publication at that time, did
not have the pejorative content it has
today. This also applies to documentsproduced in the 1930s.
(2) General History of Africa, Vol.VII:
Africa under Colonial Domination 1880-
1935 , Chapter 12, (UNESCO Press,
1990).
(3)Ibid.
(4)Ibid.
(5)Ibid.
(6) Annam (Vietnamese: An Nam) was
a French protectorate encompassing the
central region of Vietnam. Vietnamese
were subsequently referred to as
Annamites.(7) V I Lenin, Pr eli mi nar y Dr af t
Theses on National and Colonial
Questions, 5 June 1920.
(8) The huge impact of the Russian
Revolution of 1917 was no doubt a factor
in the strong necessity felt by imperialism
to announce reforms. Presenting the
Report on Indian Constitutional
Reforms to Parliament in April 1918,
Lord Chelmsford, Viceroy of India,
explicitly referred to the Russian
Revolution in his justification: Th e
Russian Revolution in its beginning was
regarded in India as a triumph over
despotism; and notwithstanding the fact
that it has since involved that unhappy
country in anarchy and dismemberment, it
has given impetus to Indian political
aspirations. One will appreciate thishomage of vice to virtue.
(9) James Connolly, The Irish Flag
published in Workers Republic, 8 April
1916.
(10) The French Section of the
Workers International (French acronym
SFIO, widely known as the Socialist
Party) was formed in 1905 as a merger
between the French Socialist Party and
the Socialist Party of France. At its 18th
National Congress , he ld in Tours in
December 1920, a three-quarters majority
of delegates, who had opposed the FirstWorld War and who now supported the
newly-created Communist International
voted to split away to form the Section
Fr an ai se de l Int er nat io na le
Communiste (SFIC). The majority of the
SFIOs elected officials chose to remain
in the SFIO and the Second International
The SFIC was formally renamed the
Communist Party of France in 1943.
(11) From the first two Supplementary
Theses on National and Colonial
Questions, submitted as an amendment to
Lenins Theses of 5 June 1920 on this
subject. The Supplementary Theses were
adopted during the fourth session on 25
July 1920.
(12) This refers to the general strike of
1919, which mobilised 150,000 workers.
(13) Ma ni fe st o of th e Co mm un is t
International to the Workers of the World
adopted unanimously at the First World
Congress on 6 March 1919. See Leon
Trotsky, The First Five Years of the
Communist International, Vol.1.
(14) Harold R Isaacs, The Tragedy of
the Chinese Revolution, Chapter 1.
(15) Isaacs, op. cit., Chapter 2.
(16) The Shantung (or Shandong)
pe ni ns ul a, pr ev ious ly unde r Ge rm an
control, was occupied by Japan following
its allocation under the Treaty of
Versailles.
(17) Isaacs, op. cit., Chapter 3.
(18) The Capitalist World and the
Communist International, August 1920.
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economic and also the political literature
of the two hemispheres has more and
more often adopted the term
imperialism in order to describe the
present era. (3) As the 19th century drew
to a close, US capitalism and the US state
were already draping themselves in the
need to bring democracy in order toinstall their rule using the worst forms of
violence. It was in Cuba that Pershing
who in 1914 was to command the US
forces in France first came to fame. The
carving-up by force of the colonial
pos ses si on s of th e bi g po we rs , th at
characteristic trait of imperialism which
was to be the root-cause of the First
World War, was the motivation for US
policy 15 years earlier, with regard to
Spain. The emergence of the United
States as a world power was a constituentelement of imperialism at the world level.
In the United States itself, the period
that followed the Civil War was a period
of frenzied development in every sector of
the economy. Between 1860 and 1884,
coal-extraction rose from 14 million to
100 million tons; between 1880 and 1910
steel production increased 25-fold. This
period also saw the spread of the railways.
There were already 330,000 kilometres of
railtrack in 1890; in 1911 this had risen to
540,000 km. We will not review here thebloody epic of the building of a modern
economy across the country-continent, the
reign of the robber barons. In order to
carry out this titanic task, the number of
loans had to increase tenfold. The banks
brough t th e dev el op in g bra nc he s of
industry under their control and
guaranteed them in order better to control
their concentration; during the 1890s, the
majority of the rail companies merged
into six networks, four of which were
completely controlled by the Morganbank. The banks themselves underwent
the same process of concentration, as
pointed out by Bukharin: In the United
States there are only two banks of such
importance: The National City Bank (the
Rockefeller firm) and the National Bank
of Commerce (the Morgan firm). (4)
Lenin pointed to the United States as a
country where concentration was
increasing: Al mo st ha lf th e to ta l
production of all the enterprises of the
country was carried on by one-hundredth
part of these enterprises! These 3,000
giant enterprises embrace 258 branches
of industry. From this it can be seen that
at a certain stage of its development
concentration itself, as it were, leads
straight to monopoly. (5)
It was in reference to US firms Standard Oil, the United States Steel
Corporation as well as German
examples that Lenin specified his
definition of the concentration of the
monopolies: The concentration of
pr od uct io n; th e mo no po li es ari si ng
therefrom; the merging or coalescence of
the banks with industry such is the
history of the rise of finance capital and
such is the content of that concept. (6)
This epoch of tempestuous
developments was also a period of violentclass struggles.
If one of the conditions of capitalism
booming in the United States had been the
destruction of the slavery system through
war, one of the necessities for the stability
of the system of capitalist exploitation had
been the crushing of the revolutionary
movement of the Blacks in the South,
who for the first time in the history of the
United States were in the majority in
some state assemblies and were posing
the question of radical land reform. It wasthis process that was to form the basis of
widespread racial segregation.
It was at the moment when this
veritable counter-revolution was
completed in 1877 that the state placed its
means for repression at the service of the
railway magnates to crush a strike-wave
which had been started by the railworkers
bu t which was ac tive ly suppor ted by
broad sectors of the population.
It was again the railworkers who
entered into struggle in 1884. In 1885-6,there was the huge movement for the 8-
hour day which culminated in Chicago on
1 May 1886 and was smashed through
bloody repression, notably accompanied
by th e con vi ct io n of six of th e
movements main organisers following a
provocation involving a bombing. The
latter decades of the 19th century and the
first decades of the 20th were marked by
intense class conflicts, especially in the
mines. It was during this period that the
labour organisations that succeeded the
Knights of Labor, which were to play a
predominant role in the class struggle,
were formed: the American Federation of
Labor (AFL) set up in 1886 and the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
founded in 1905 (7).
The particular characteristic of thedevelopment of capitalism in the United
States during the second half of the 19th
century and the early part of the 20th was
that its expansion in the course of which
some of the characteristics of imperialism
emerged occurred mainly within
national borders as they had been defined
at the time, including through previous
conquests (e.g. the Mexican War, 1846-
8). In order to consolidate its empire, US
capitalism needed to expand, hence the
war in Cuba and the Philippines, and theincursions into Central America and
Mexico. But these imperialist thrusts had
a secondary impact on the economy: the
domestic market remained the
determining factor.
At the turn of the century, the United
States became the most powerful
industrial power in the world. In absolute
figures, its coal production, for example,
was higher than in all other capitalist
countries, and the same was true for steel
production. Although American capitalwas exported in large quantities to
Mexico and Latin America, the United
States remained above all a country where
foreign capital was invested. British
capital in particular realised large profits
from its financing of the building of the
railways.
Although a big industrial power the
worlds leading power in certain sectors
the United States did not yet challenge the
domination of the world market exercised
by the old capitalist powers, notably GreatBritain. But everything about its
development headed towards challenging
the basis on which the world market was
constituted. War would provide the
occasion and the form through which
these imperialist tendencies would impose
themselves.
The master of the capitalist world
The main outcome of the First World
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War which had clearly turned into a
civil war was the victory of the
October Revolution under the direction of
the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky
and the establishment of the first workers
state.
On 28 July 1924, ten years after the
start of the war, Leon Trotsky delivered aspeech on the Perspectives of World
Development. (8) He spoke of the United
States at that time as the central figure in
the modern history of mankind and
emphasised that whoever wishes or tries
today to discuss the destiny of Europe or
of the world proletariat without taking the
power and signif icance of the USA into
account, is in a certain sense drawing up
a balance-sheet without consulting the
master. For the master of the capitalist
world and let us firmly understand this! is New York, with Washington as its
state department. We observe this today
even if only in the plan drawn up by the
experts. We observe that Europe, which
only yesterday was so powerful and so
proud of her culture and her historical
past we observe that in order to get out
from under, in order to crawl out on all
fours from those fearful contradictions
and misfortunes into which Europe has
driven herself, she is compelled to invite
from across the Atlantic a general by thename of Dawes () [to draw up] a
pr ec is e pre scr ip ti on co nce rni ng th e
regulations and dates of Europes
restoration. (9)
It was during this speech that Trotsky
defined the wishes of US capitalism with
regard to the European imperialisms using
his famous and often-quoted formulation:
under the hegemony of American
capitalism, Europe will be permitted to
rise again, but within limits set in
advance, with certain restricted sectionsof the world market allotted to it. (). If
we wish to give a clear and precise
answer to the question of what American
imperialism wants, we must say: It wants
to put capitalist Europe on rations.
This had nothing to do with a
pr og ra mm e ai me d at es ta bl is hi ng a
peaceful balance, a harmonious division.
This American pacifist programme of
universal bondage is by no means a
pe ac efu l one . On th e co ntr ar y, it is
preg na nt wi th wa rs an d th e grea te st
revolutionary paroxysms. () The
indicated era of pacifist Americanism is
laying the groundwork for new wars on
an unprecedented scale and of
unimaginable monstrousness, Trotsky
added.
These lines first appeared in 1924. Itwould be misleading to yield to
temptation and see them by analogy as a
key which on its own would allow us to
understand todays developments, almost
a century later, just as it would be
pointless to indulge in academic exercises
aimed at evaluating, after the event, the
validity of this or that forecast.
The onward march of the international
class struggle had already changed many
of the facts ten years further on: the crisis
of the whole capitalist system, certainlyadding to the decline of Europe but also
hitting the leading capitalist power itself
with unparalleled force; the rise of
fascism in the face of the threat of social
revolution; the degeneration of the state
that resulted from the Russian Revolution;
the political counter-revolution waged by
Stalinism, etc.
The Second World War, its
consequences, the revolutionary
upheavals it generated, the situation
created by the survival of an imperialistsystem in decay, the collapse of the USSR
whose foundations had been undermined
by the bureaucracy, all constituted a new
situation in which the United States
nevertheless remained the leading
imperialist power.
What is striking above all is the degree
to which the issues raised by Trotsky have
in no way been resolved and have retained
all of their importance. The world
capitalist system has only been able to
survive by preserving and enhancing themajor role played by the United States.
There has not been any new factor,
redistribution of roles or change in the
hierarchy within the capitalist system:
This Babylonian tower of American
economic might must find its expression
in everything, and it is already expressing
itself, but not yet fully by far, Trotsky
said in 1924. Is this not exactly what was
imposed via the catastrophes that have
punctuated the history of the preservation
of the capitalist system? And are not the
obstacles facing US capital rooted in the
generalised crisis of the capitalist system
itself?
The amazing expansion of American
capitalism, its manifest power acquired in
the very first years of the 20th century, the
degree of concentration that was achievedin the US, the role of the monopolies and
the role of finance capitalism, all required
that in order for the United States to
become ful ly- formed as an imperiali st
power, its combative diplomacy and its
recourse to military aggression should no
longer be exercised first and foremost at
the regional or continental level. In order
to become the leading imperialist power
in the full sense of the term realising the
potential offered by the development that
had brought it thus far the Americanimperialist state had to assert its rights
through war.
When President Wilson who on
several occasions had repeated that the
United States would remain neutral
asked Congress for its approval for
entering the First World War (which
Congress granted by a large majority) he
justified it by defending the right of US
citizens to sail on merchant ships in the
war zone. In fact, this was an affirmation
of free trade in a sophisticated form.Once again, the main issue is stated in
Europe and America. After detailing the
stages on the path of imperialism to which
the United States had deliberately
committed (the Spanish-American War of
1898, the detaching of the province of
Panama from Colombia and the
construction of the Panama Canal),
Trotsky wrote:
The decisive signpost along this road
was the war. As you will recall, the US
intervened in the war toward the very end.For three years the US did no fighting.
Mo re th an th at , tw o mo nt hs be fo re
intervening in the war, Wilson announced
that there could be no talk of American
pa rt ic ip at io n in th e bl oo dy do gf ig ht
among the madmen of Europe. Up to a
certain moment the US remained content
with rationally coining into dollars the
blood of European madmen. But in that
hour when fear arose lest the war
conclude with victory for Germany, the
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most dangerous future rival, the United
States intervened actively. This decided
the outcome of the struggle. () America
avariciously fed the war with her industry
and avariciously intervened in order to
help crush a likely and dangerous
competitor.
War is the health of the state
War is the health of the state. This is
the title given by American historian
Howard Zinn to a chapter in his book A
Peoples History of the United States. It
was the title of a book by an American
writer, Randolph Bourne, published
during the First World War.
On the eve of the war in 1914, Zinn
points out, the United States was suffering
a serious recession. During his 1912presidentia l campaign, Wilson stated:
Our domestic markets no longer suffice,
we need foreign markets.
The outbreak of the war in Europe
constituted a drive-wheel that benefited
the whole of the US economy. US
industries became the main suppliers of
war materials to the Allies: the massacre
that was underway offered an endlessly
renewable outlet for the means of
destruction supplied by the Americans. In
April 1917, the United States had soldmore than US$2 billions worth of goods
to the Allies. To appreciate the
significance of this amount, we should
bear in mind that during the same period,
private investment in the United States
amounted to US$3.5 billion. Howard Zinn
notes: With World War I, England
became more and more a market for
American goods and for loans at interest.
J P Morgan and Company acted as agents
for the Allies, and when, in 1915, Wilson
lifted the ban on private bank loans to theAllies, Morgan could now begin lending
money in such great amounts as to both
make great profit and tie American
finance closely to the interest of a British
victory in the war against Germany. (10)
More generally, it was in the crucible
of war that US imperialism re-invented
itself, undergoing the transformation that
would see it become the worlds principal
factory, its principal depot for
commodities and its central banker, as
Trotsky explained in Eu rop e an d
America.
Immediately, there was prosperity,
accumulation of profits linked to the war
and good health for the exploiters,
which also meant good health for their
state.
The war would of course be good forthe state in yet another sense. We referred
in the first part of this article to the
intensity of the class struggle in the
United States. The years leading up to the
outbreak of the First World War were
marked by an upsurge in the activity of
the working class in all fields, an upsurge
in struggles for demands which
sometimes resulted in clashes with the
state apparatus and which in every case
signalled a broadening and deepening of
trade union activity. This was the caseover the course of several months,
including after the United States entry
into the war.
The revolutionary trade union
organisation Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW) was to play a decisive role
in these conflicts. It was the IWW that led
the big strike by textile workers in
Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 a
strike that could not be broken through
attempts to divide or recourse to police
repression (the town of Lawrence wasplaced under siege and the trade union
leaders were jailed). The IWW turned the
strike, which involved nearly 30,000
workers, into a national issue. Another
strike began in early 1913, in the silk
industry in Paterson, New Jersey. There
again, police repression and solidarity
demonstrations turned it into a national
event.
Other strikes did not succeed in having
the demands met. But they were
significant, not only because theyevidenced the workers combativity and
wish to organise, but also because they
marked the IWWs entry into the most
crucial of industrys sectors, sometimes
also drawing AFL trade unions into
joining the strikes. This was the case in
Akron, Ohio, following a spontaneous
movement that began in the big tyre-
pressing factories, and with the strike at
auto-manufacturer Studebaker in Detroit.
We could also include in the list of
significant conflicts the strike the by iron
ore miners of the Messabi Range in
Minnesota, which involved 6,000 workers
in 1916. There, the powerful United
States Steel Corporation had to give way,
and was forced to agree to an 8-hour
working day and a wage-rise across the
board of around 10 percent.The trade union leader Eugene Debs,
who was the moving spirit of the big
Pullman Strike in 1894, has become one
of the main representatives of the
Socialist Party. Under his leadership, the
party developed widely, and in the 1912
pres idential el ec tion Debs stood as a
candidate and received nearly one million
votes, doubling the result he obtained in
1908.
The capitalists and their political
representation, their state, demonstratedtheir concern in the face of this surge of
the socialist labour movement. Just before
Wilson became President, a strike broke
out in the mines in Colorado run by the
Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation,
owned by the Rockefeller family. Very
quickly, the bosses turned to violence;
strike-breakers were brought into the
mines under the protection of armed men
who attacked the strikers, killing several
of them. In April 1914, after eight months
of strike, Rockefeller called out theNational Guard, who attacked the strikers
encampment, killing 26 people. Many
miners then took up arms in turn. Finally,
federal troops had to be called in, and a
conciliation commission was set up
What appeared at the time as a messy
moment was to become the norm. the
United States entry into the war gave the
State the opportunity to engage in a
violent and bloody offensive against the
labour movement, amounting to a
preventive civil war.In June 1917, Congress passed the
Espionage Act. In the name of taking
action against espionage, this repressive
law in fact put into question the most
fundamental of democratic rights enjoyed
by US citizens, including thei r right to
have an opinion and to express it at least
as far as the war was concerned.
The new law had a clause that
provided penalties up to twenty years in
prison for Whoever, when the United
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States is at war, shall wilfully cause or
attempt to cause insubordination,
disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in
the military or naval forces of the United
States, or shall wilfully obstruct the
recruiting or enlistment service of the
US. (11)
As one can gather, an article or a
speech explaining the causes of the war,
even if it did not involve any slogan,
could fall under the Act. Randolph
Bourne, the author of the book War Is the
He alt h of th e Sta te , was obliged to
undergo its rigours.
Howard Zinn quotes one example of
the application of this law which
demonstrates all of its arbitrariness but
which also displays unintended humour.
The maker of a film entitled The Spirit of
76 was sentenced to 10 years in prison
under this law because, the judge said, the
film tended to question the good faith of
our ally, Great Britain. The film was
based on the American Revolution of
1776 and depicted atrocities committed by
the British colonial troops! (12)
But where the Espionage Act was used
most liberally was against the labour
movement, combined with activities by
extra-legal militias that involved
attacks, kidnapping and lynching.
Although Samuel Gompers and mostof the AFL leadership agreed to
pa rt ic ip at e in th e wa r eff or t, th e
government was not able to enlist the
support of the Socialist Party or the IWW.
Just after the declaration of war, the
Socialist Party held an emergency
conference in St. Louis which described
the declaration of war as a crime against
the people of the United States. Without
giving slogans opposing recruitment and
then conscription, the IWW condemned
the United States entry into the war.Initially, the government was counting
on attracting volunteers, but after six
weeks only 73,000 volunteers had
enlisted. It needed to pass a law bringing
in conscription.
Throughout the United States,
thousands of socialist activists, trade
unionists and pacifists were arrested.
More than 900 people were convicted
under the Espionage Act. There were
hundreds of incidents where groups of
outraged patriots broke up meetings,
trashed offices and injured or killed
labour activists.
In the case of the IWW, a real manhunt
was unleashed across the country. Daniel
Gurin summarised the situation as
follows, in O va le peuple amricain?
[Where Are the American People Going?]
(Paris: Julliard, 1950-1): The entry of the
United States into the war unleashed
fierce repression against the. All of the
combined forces of capitalism, the public
authorities and veterans used as fascist
militias were employed in crushing them
(). Thousands of IWW members were
arrested and given long prison
sentences.
The American Trotskyist leader James
P. Cannon, who before being one of the
founders of the Communist Party of
America had been a IWW organiser,
shared this view. He even thought that the
disorganisation produced by the
repression and the need to concentrate
every effort on solidarity between
prisoners had hindered the discussion on
the Russian Revolution which would have
allowed the majority of the IWW to move
towards the Communist International.The same policy of repression was
unleashed on the Socialist Party.
Thus, its most popular leader, Eugene
Debs, was convicted for having delivered
a speech against war in Canton, Ohio, on
16 June 1918, recalling that Wars
throughout history have been waged for
conquest and plunder (see the excerpts
from this speech featured separately in
this article). He was charged under the
Espionage Act on the basis that his words
could incite his audience to resist thedraft. He was sentenced to 10 years in
prison. He appealed, and his appeal was
heard by the Supreme Court in 1919. The
war had ended. Nevertheless, the sentence
was upheld. That 66-year-old man then
spent three years in a federal penitentiary
under strict conditions, before being freed
by presidential order. (13)
Physically worn-out, Debs died in
1926. During the final phase of his life, he
did not play the role he could have. In the
name of unity between all socialists, he
came out in favour of a utopian
reconstitution of the Socialist Party on the
same basis as just before the war he
refused to go further down the path of the
Bolshevism he had begun to draw on in
his Canton, Ohio Speech. His evolution
cannot be separated from the
consequences for the whole of the
American labour movement of the wave
of reaction generated by the war. All the
restrictions on the right to organise and
the right of expression decreed in the
name of the state of war were
maintained for years afterwards. They
provided the legal basis for a reign of
terror directed against Communist,
anarchist and trade union activists, against
Blacks and against immigrant workers
during the 1920s, as means of
discouraging a new upsurge by the
working class in the world and in the
United States itself, expressed most
notably in the Seattle General Strike of
January 1919.
Through its participation in the first
global conflict, US imperialism created
the conditions for the global role it was to
play. In direct terms, the United Statesgoing to war met counter-revolutionary
objectives, forming part of the
conversion of the imperialist war into
civil war (14), but in the camp of the
counter-revolution. Occurring in 1917,
after the Russian Revolution had begun to
erupt and at the time when the first
mutinies were occurring at the Front and
strikes were breaking out in Britain,
Germany and France, it was a counter-
revolutionary operation.
At the same time as US imperialismwas using war to begin to impose itself as
the leading imperialism, it was led to play
the role of main guarantor of the world
order against the revolution. In order to
play that role, it first had to carry it out in
the United States itself, against the
American working class.
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Excerpts from
the anti-war
speech given by
Eugene Debs on16 June 1918
(The Canton,
Ohio Speech)
Wars throughout history have been
waged for conquest and plunder. (...)
And here let me emphasize the fact
and it cannot be repeated too often that
the working class who fight all the battles,
the working class who make the supreme
sacrifices, the working class who freely
shed their blood and furnish the corpses,
have never yet had a voice in either
declaring war or making peace. It is the
ruling class that invariably does both.
They alone declare war and they alone
make peace. ()
Yes, my comrades, my heart is attuned
to yours. Aye, all our hearts now throb as
one great heart responsive to the battle
cry of the social revolution. Here, in this
alert and inspiring assemblage our hearts
are with the Bolsheviki of Russia. Those
heroic men and women, those
unconquerable comrades have by their
incomparable valour and sacrifice added
fr esh lu str e to th e fa me of th e
international movement. Those Russian
comrades of ours have made greater
sacrifices, have suffered more, and have
shed more heroic blood than any like
number of men and women anywhere on
earth; they have laid the foundation of the
first real democracy that ever drew the
breath of life in this world. And the very
fi rst ac t of th e tr iu mp han t Ru ss ia n
revolution was to proclaim a state of
peace with all mankind ().
He re we ha ve th e ve ry br ea th of
democracy, the quintessence of the
dawning freedom. The Russian revolution
proclaime d its glorious triumph in its
ringing and inspiring appeal to the
peoples of all the earth. ()
EDOTES
(1) Introduction to Nikolai Bukharins
Imperialism and World Economy.
(2) Imperialism, the Highest Stage ofCapitalism, Chapter VII: Imperialism as
a Special Stage of Capitalism.
(3) Preface to the French and German
editions, July 1920.
(4) Imperialism and World Economy,
Chapter IV.
(5) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism, Chapter I: Concentration of
production and monopolies.
(6) Op. cit., Chapter III: Finance
Capital and the Financial Oligarchy.
(7) The Knights of Labor was one ofthe first national organisations of a trade
union nature formed just after the
American Civil War. It retained the
character of a society whose members
were initiates, but addressed all workers.
It was to play an important role after
1876. The AFL organised the workers on
the basis of craft unions. For decades it
was to be the main trade union
organisation in the United States. By
refusing to organise unskilled workers or
those in insecure jobs the mass of
immigrant workers and by rejecting
Black workers, in practice it limited its
activity to the labour aristocracy. Its main
leader, Samuel Gompers, would give his
name to what was referred to as business
unionism: Gomperism.
The Industrial Worke
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