By Paul Moorhouse, PRMI Scotland. 6 May 2025
As the anniversary of the end of World War Two is celebrated, the world’s leaders are again recruiting soldiers and arming them with horrific new weapons in preparation for new conflicts, and possibly yet another, even more brutal world war.
This article examines how Trotskyists worldwide responded to these compulsions during the second world war. They struggled, ‘despite all hazards’, to build the slender forces of the Fourth International (FI). It was intended to assist the working class to overthrow capitalism, and the bureaucratic, Stalinist elite in the USSR. They would be replaced by genuinely democratic, international socialism that could lay the basis for an end to poverty and war for ever.
Opposition to imperialist war
On 31st December 1943, 18 leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the US surrendered to imprisonment in Minneapolis for “subversive activity” intended to “undermine or overthrow” the US state.
Saying farewell to SWP members before 14 months in prison, SWP National Secretary James Cannon explained that like anti-slavery insurrectionist John Brown (‘the grandest figure in the whole history of America’) they:
“saw the abomination of the imperialist war and we were under compulsion to tell the people the truth about it. We saw the vision of a socialist society and were under compulsion to fight for it at all costs and despite all hazards.”
Whilst the ‘Minneapolis 18’ were imprisoned, leaders of Britain’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) were jailed for, and their release won through mass campaigning. The Paris Gestapo murdered German Trotskyist Martin Monath and the 23-year-old Belgian Abraham Leon perished in the Auschwitz gas chambers.
In Vietnam, Tạ Thu Thâu , leader of the FI’s largest section, imprisoned for five years in 1939 by colonial authorities on the orders of France’s ‘democratic’ Third Republic was released by the same authorities, now acting in the name of the (already deposed!) Vichy collaborators with the Nazis.
Tạ, subject to a ten-year banning order without civil rights, joined the underground resistance, but was executed within a year by the new ‘Communist’ led Viet Minh government. President Ho Chi Minh explained Tạ ‘was a great patriot and we mourn him … but those who do not follow the line we have laid down will be broken’.
What ideas inspired such sacrifices? What threat did the FI pose, convincing German Nazism, its allies and ‘democratic’ opponents, as well as Stalinists like Ho, that it should be ‘broken’?
The Death Agony of Capitalism
The answer lies in the FI’s analysis of the imperialist nature of the world war. In 1938, at its Founding Congress, it passed a programme entitled “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International” known as the “Transitional Programme“. It explained:
“Imperialist war [continues] the predatory politics of the bourgeoisie. The struggle of the proletariat against war is the continuation and sharpening of its class struggle…war alters the.. struggle between the classes, but not the aim and basic course. The imperialist bourgeoisie dominates the world… the approaching war will therefore be an imperialist war. The fundamental content of the politics of the international proletariat will consequently be… against imperialism and its war. In this struggle the basic principle is: “the chief enemy is in your own country” or “the defeat of your own (imperialist) government is the lesser evil.”
“But not all countries of the world are imperialist countries…colonial or semi colonial countries will undoubtedly attempt to utilize the war in order to cast off the yoke of slavery. Their war will be not imperialist but liberating. It will be the duty of the international proletariat to aid the oppressed countries in their war against oppressors. The same duty applies in regard to aiding the USSR…The defeat of every imperialist government in the struggle with the workers’ state or with a colonial country is the lesser evil.“
The Programme applied the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks during the first world war to the new conflict. In drafting it, following the 1934 Theses on War and the Fourth International, and then the 1940 Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, Leon Trotsky founder and (until his 1940 assassination) leader of the Fourth International consistently refused to make any concession to class-collaborationist ‘national defence’: ‘the defeat of our own government is the lesser evil’ (to abandoning the class struggle).
Updating Lenin’s Revolutionary Defeatism
However, the FI could not simply parrot the slogan Lenin advanced against the betrayals of the leaders of the Socialist International in 1914: ‘Revolutionary Defeatism’. Their slogans needed meaningful contemporary content.
As Trotsky’s last article (incomplete on his desk when Stalin’s assassin cleaved his skull with an ice-axe) explained, Lenin addressed a ‘small revolutionary minority.., this purely negative answer served as the basis… for training the cadres… it could not win the masses who did not want a foreign conqueror’.
In 1917 ‘the Bolsheviks in the space of eight months conquered the overwhelming majority of the workers… decisive… in this… was not… refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland but… the slogan: “All Power to the Soviets!” The FI needed slogans which spoke to mass consciousness 25 years later. Some Trotskyists, avoiding this demanding task, clung to Lenin’s slogan, reducing it to parody.
In Britain the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), the official section of the FI at the outbreak of the war, even attacked the Workers International League (WIL – fore-runners of the RCP) for demanding adequate air raid shelter for workers (eg by occupying London’s underground railway stations) as ‘defencist class-collaboration’. The WIL replied:
‘If all that was required of revolutionaries was to repeat ad nauseam, phrases and slogans taken from the great teachers of Marxism… the revolution would be simple indeed…every sectarian would be a master strategist.’
Boldly intervening in the air raid campaign, and other workers’ struggles, the WIL grew from nine activists in West London in 1937 to become a national organisation of hundreds forming the core of the FI’s new British section the RCP in 1944.
Defence of the Soviet Union
As the war progressed, Trotskyists world-wide, debated two dimensions of the conflict which had not confronted the Bolsheviks 25 years before. The defence of the Soviet Union and what became known as the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’.
The war was a predatory conflict over colonies and world markets between imperialist powers (essentially ‘WWI round two’), but was also viewed, both by the fascist ‘Axis’ powers and British and American imperialism as an opportunity to dispose of 1918’s other ‘unfinished business’: overthrowing the workers’ state in the USSR, reversing the gains of the 1917 revolution.
The bureaucratic dictatorship in Moscow, fearing the international working class, could not effectively defend, let alone spread, revolution. Genuine revolutionaries needed to defend the USSR, despite its oppressive political regime of show-trials and labour camps, even as Stalin flip-flopped between alliances with the rival imperialist blocs; at the start of the war entering into a pact with Hitler to conquer and divide Poland.
Trotsky devoted much of his final year to opposing a minority within the SWP, led by Max Shachtman, who interpreted Stalinist betrayals and the Soviet invasion of Finland to mean that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers’ state. Trotsky’s contributions to this debate, published as In Defence of Marxism remain a classic of Marxist theory.
It is particularly valuable to compare this to Jim Cannon’s companion volume The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. An outstanding party-builder and agitator, Cannon always prioritised the organisational and opportune over theoretical fundamentals.
Proletarian Military Policy
During the 1940 split, Trotsky filled this gap, strengthening the party in the long term. Without Trotsky’s restraint, Cannon was less successful. His anxiety in 1938 to force organisational ‘unity’ on the disparate Trotskyists groups in Britain meant that, for much of the war the RSL’s (the FI’s official section) propaganda was an eclectic mixture of the ultra-left ‘defeatism’ over deep air-raid shelters and pacifist ‘anti-militarism’, light years removed from the strategy at the centre of the second debate within the International, dubbed the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’ (PMP).
It was left to the WIL, unrecognised and unsupported by the International, to apply this policy, developing a strong base for Trotskyism in workplaces and armed forces, whilst the ‘united’ RSL’s squabbling factions disintegrated. Whilst this mistake did not prove fatal, Cannon’s refusal to reevaluate perspectives for the post-war period, instead abstractly repeating formulas torn from the text of the Transitional Programme without context, destroyed the FI as a vehicle for revolutionary struggle.
What was the Proletarian Military Policy, how did it arise? In May 1940 Germany invaded France, within weeks the Third Republic’s capitalist politicians sued for peace with Hitler, many joining the collaborationist Vichy regime policing southern France for Nazism.
In July WIL’s Youth for Socialism explained how French bosses, remembering the 1870 Paris Commune, refused to arm the workers: ‘France was betrayed. The real Fifth Column was the capitulation government of financiers, manufacturers, millionaires and generals… Rather than lose all their profits by a victory of the French masses, these ‘patriots’ preferred to assure themselves of scraps… from the tables of the Nazis.’
This revealed the inability of capitalist nation states to reliably deliver what workers needed: protection from invasion and occupation, and overthrowing fascist repression. The capitalists feared arms in the hands of the working class, in the remaining ‘democracies’ Britain and USA (already preparing to join the war) revolutionaries should expose this, arguing to arm workers as a class.
From the dock of the Minneapolis sedition Trial in November 1941 (before US entered the war) Cannon explained:
“We.. favour… universal military training.. not the method…used by the present capitalist government… workers should get military training…under the direction of the trade unions [removing] one of the greatest defects… in the present military apparatus… the social gulf between the worker-soldier, and the officer… That is the heart of… our military policy.”
“The war was not one of democracy against fascism: Hitler wants to dominate the world, but… American capitalists [have] the same idea…the Sixty Families who own America…are the greatest enemies of democracy here at home.. they would…use the… war to eliminate civil liberties at home, to get the best imitation of fascism they can.“
“A workers’ state, would wage a revolutionary war against Nazism promising not to impose another Versailles peace…to cripple the German people.. take away their milk cows… starving German babies. We would [propose] to them: “a reorganisation of the world on a fair socialist basis.” We would also say to them, “…we are going to build the biggest army.. in the world, to put at your disposal, to help smash Hitler by force of arms on one front, while you revolt against him on the home front.”
Opposing both imperialist war and pacifism the FI resisted pressure for a truce in the class struggle for the duration of the war. In Britain, Trotskyists supported strikes in the mines and other industries establishing a Militant Workers Federation, to link rank and file resistance. When engineering apprentices on Tyneside struck against conscription into the coal mines, they turned to the newly formed RCP and the MWF for support and were victorious. Right-wing miners leaders complained to the government: ‘if the [apprentices] are allowed to walk out… you can hardly blame our lads for doing the same, it is time the situation was handled firmly.’
Labour did Tory’s dirty work
Two Labour members of the coalition cabinet, Home Secretary Herbert Morrison and labour minister Ernest Bevin, spearheaded the imprisonment of four RCP members using anti-union laws passed by the Tory government following the defeat of the 1926 General Strike. RCP General Secretary Jock Haston, and MWF secretary Roy Tearse received 12 month sentences. A widespread campaign secured their acquittal on appeal.
As well as workplaces up and down the country, support came from soldiers in North Africa. A petition published in the Eighth Army News declared ‘The right to strike is part of the freedom we are fighting for… the real culprit… is the government… leaving industry in the hands of exploiters… intensifying exploitation by drafting unwilling apprentices down the pits’.
The arrests were also debated in the Cairo Forces Parliament, reflecting the growing success that the WIL/RCP had in applying the PMP. By February 1944, 600 soldiers attended a session of the Parliament passing a resolution moved by RCP members for nationalisation of the banks, land, mines and transport to build 4 million new council homes.
Enthusiastic support for this repression came from the Communist Party of Great Britain. Indeed, the CPGB Stalinists wanted more! Communist MP, DN Pritt demanded that Morrison close down the RCP paper Socialist Appeal. When the coalition had banned the CP’s Daily Worker in January 1941, WIL had opposed this as an attack on democracy and the workers movement.
Communist head over heels
In 1941 the CP had attacked the war as ‘imperialist’, defending Stalin’s pact with Hitler.
On June 22, 1941 Hitler invaded the USSR and Stalin performed a 180 degree turn to enter an alliance with Britain and, after Pearl Harbour, US imperialism. In August Socialist Appeal wrote
Because Hitler…leaves them no alternative… The bureaucracy are forced to defend the Soviet Union. [But] in a distorted bureaucratic manner…, devour[ing] four-fifths of the goods produced for consumption…, this is what they are fighting for. Stalin desires the defeat of Hitler [but] he does not wish for a proletarian revolution in Germany… the seizure of power by the German proletariat would sweep Stalinism aside!
The CPGB turned in lockstep with their Moscow masters, Socialist Appeal explained:
‘The prostituted Comintern, from being sold… to placate Hitler, is now bartered for… machine tools and Spitfires.’
In May 1943, Stalin further capitulated to imperialism, disbanding Lenin’s International.
At the Yalta conference in February 1945 he conceded yet more: dividing Europe into ‘spheres of influence’. East European states occupied by the Red Army were to be Russia’s fiefdom.
In turn imperialism ruled supreme in France, Italy and Greece, where Stalin acquiesced to the disarming, imprisonment and torture of Communist-led partisans by fascist collaborators under the supervision of Britain. On December 3rd 1944, British soldiers killed 28 unarmed demonstrators in Athens, carrying Greek, American, British and Soviet flags, and chanting: ‘Viva Churchill, Viva Roosevelt, Viva Stalin’.
Imperialism resented the bureaucracy’s dominance east of what became the ‘Iron Curtain’, capitalist frustration at losing the power to plunder and exploit much of Europe fuelled the Cold War, however, the WIL explained in early 1944:
“The strength of the Soviet Union [compels] imperialists to arrive at an agreement… war weariness and bitterness of the masses throughout the world brings in its train revolutionary explosion… occupied Europe looks towards the Soviet Union for a way out. And in Britain, and America too, the working class looks towards the Soviet Union with sympathy.,.. The imperialists are compelled to… compromise with the Kremlin bureaucracy. They can do so because Stalin fears the Socialist Revolution in Europe as much as they do themselves… The Stalinist bureaucracy is the only force… which can assist them in smashing the… masses in Europe.“
Victory at Stalingrad led eventually to one in three of people worldwide living under planned economies for the next half-century. This was not Stalin’s victory, it was the posthumous victory of Lenin, Trotsky and of the countless other Bolsheviks imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by him, achieved despite the bureaucracy’s repressive mismanagement.
Russian workers endured the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad and a generation of youth died fighting to defend their state. These sacrifices to defend the planned economy answered the defeatist cynicism of Shachtman and the 1940 SWP opposition with arguments written in blood.
Moreover, this was despite the bureaucracy’s insistence that this was not a revolutionary war of the working class but a ‘Great Patriotic War’, replacing the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky with chauvinism and anti-German racism.
The same approach reigned in occupied Europe: Communist militants formed the backbone of the resistance movements but raised no criticism of capitalist leaders. Opportunities were wasted to appeal to German soldiers on a class basis as the Red Army did in 1918-21: the only ‘good German’ was a ‘dead German’ the Stalinists said. In contrast Martin Monath was targeted by the Gestapo for his role producing Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier) circulated amongst German Soldiers and workers by French Trotskyists.
Wartime support for imperialist governments similarly led Stalinists to abandon anti-imperialism in the colonial world, at the very time these struggles grew (as the Transitional Programme anticipated).
In India the Communist Party put independence ‘on ice’ handing the leadership of the national liberation struggle to the middle class nationalists of Congress. In France the Trotskyists were able to recruit amongst interned Indo-Chinese workers because, unlike the Stalinists, they supported their liberation.
End of war opened a new period
‘Socialist’ victories in the East however, and Stalinist assistance to derail struggles in the West, along with the relative isolation of the genuine revolutionaries enabled capitalism to consolidate its grip on Western Europe, using the increased economic dominance of US imperialism to underwrite the reconstruction of war-devastated economies, conceding reforms to avoid revolution.
The leaders of the RCP, who characterised this process as ‘counter-revolution in a democratic form’, and a minority in the SWP (led by Felix Morrow and Albert Goldman, one of the Minneapolis 18 and head of their legal team) argued that to build in this new situation the FI needed to reassess the perspectives outlined in the Transitional Programme.
Instead of debating these questions politically, as Trotsky had with Shachtman, and the WIL had when there was initial questioning of the PMP within its ranks, Cannon and the majority of the FI leadership used organisational methods to isolate this opposition. In the process they destroyed the RCP and fatally damaged the whole FI.
We stand in the traditions of the RCP and in a new period of global conflict and crisis needs once again to use their methods of democratic political debate along with firm organisation of militant struggle to rebuild the workers movement.