Here we look at Ernest Mandel’s analysis of imperialism as a primary cause for the outbreak of the Second World War. These notes are based on his book The Meaning of the Second World War, which was originally published in 1986. The overview below is based on the 2011 Verso publication.
The First World War and Revolution
The First World War was an event that affected the societies of the whole world, and thus, in a general way, the conditions for The Second World War unsurprisingly stemmed from that.
This is not to say that WW2 was an inevitable result of the conditions of the time. Following the First World War, there remained on one hand, “the growing contradiction between economy and politics within the capitalist world”, and on the other hand, the war “had opened the door for a new arrival: socialist revolution”.
The unresolved and “growing contradiction between economy and politics” mentioned above would express itself again as conflict between competing imperial states, and is discussed further below.
The other consequence Mandel mentioned was the arrival of socialist revolution. Had socialist revolution been successful, especially in Germany, and had it successfully spread throughout Europe before the terrible conditions of the Russian Civil War brought about grotesque Stalinism, the conditions that caused the Second World War would not have been the same. But the capitalist classes were determined not to allow revolution to spread1.
Mandel writes that, “From the outset the new arrangement between victors and vanquished was overshadowed by the desire of the ruling classes to prevent the spread of revolution, especially to Germany” [my emphasis ]. The contradiction of the Treaty of Versailles following World War “was that the victors wanted to weaken German capitalism without really disarming it and while keeping its industrial power intact. This made its military comeback inevitable.”
Thus, on the one hand, the anti-war forces embodied in the revolutionary working classes were crushed, and on the other hand, German capitalist industry was maintained. It was the heavy-industry capitalists, in particular, who bolstered Nazism and militarisation. (This is a topic which will not be discussed further here, but Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business is essential further reading on the subject).
German Humiliation?
Before moving on to what the Second World War was fundamentally caused by, let us briefly look at what Mandel says it was not fundamentally caused by.
It is often claimed that The Second World War was a result of the harsh reparations the French bourgeoisie demanded of Germany following the First World War. In other words, the war was a consequence of the humiliation Germany suffered after World War 1. This reasoning is not sufficient for Mandel. He argues that although the “foolish policies” of the French bourgeoisie “exacerbated” issues, “they did not create these problems”.
To prove this point, Mandel looks to the “relationship developing between China, Japan and the USA, which would eventually lead to the Pacific War”. Japan and the USA were collaborators “in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China” and in 1905, following its humiliation of Tsarist Russia, Japan signed a treaty with Russia “under US auspices”. During The First World War, Japan entered the war as an ally of the USA, Britain and France. Japan “was not badly treated” in the treaties that followed. The point is, Japan was not humiliated by the outcome of World War 1 as Germany was, but nevertheless she “embarked upon a course of violent aggression” as Germany did. So German humiliation, on its own, is not satisfactory reasoning as a cause for The Second World War.
Imperialism and Global Hegemony
Following its imperial successes, Japan looked voraciously towards China. The USA, also growing as a world power with its own bourgeois interests, “was resolved at all costs to prevent the transformation of China into a Japanese colony or dependency”. The war, in this sense, was an imperialist war. The conflict between the USA and Japan was “fuelled by the grave economic crisis of 1929-32 in both countries. It flowed from the perception that a long-term solution involved a decisive break with economic isolationism… and hence the need to achieve for oneself (or deny others) strategic insertion in the world market via hegemony over a substantial part of the world, as a necessary step to world dominance”.
According to Mandel, “International hegemony” was at stake in the lead-up to the breakout of World War 2. The primary powers—Germany, the USA, Britain, and Japan—all had this common drive to be the globally dominant force and to have as wide a “sphere of influence” as possible (to use a common bourgeois euphemism). In this sense, the war was a result of plain old capitalist imperialism.
“The motor of the Second World War“, writes Mandel, “was the major capitalist states’ need to dominate the economy of whole continents through capital investment, preferential trade agreements, currency regulations and political hegemony. The aim of the war“, as far as the ruling classes of the imperialist states were concerned, “was the subordination not only of the less developed world, but also of other industrial states, whether enemies or allies, to one hegemonic power’s priorities of capital accumulation“.
“For the United States the war was to be the lever which would open the whole of the world market and world resources to American exploitation … World hegemony” would be “exercised only through a combination of military strength and economic superiority.” 2
The USA was the main victor of the Second World War from an imperialist persepective. The working classes, conversely, saw the war as an ideological one against the insanity and monstrousness of fascism. However, the ruling classes of Britain, Germany, Japan and the USA saw it in terms of imperialist possibilities – they had no greater priority. For example, in 1942, the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull said, “‘Leadership towards a new system of international relationships in trade and other economic affairs will devolve largely upon the United States because of our great economic strength. We should assume this leadership… primarily for reasons of pure national self-interest.’”
Clearly the United States has enjoyed global dominance since 1945. However, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Japan was a growing force and coveted the role the US was to ultimately occupy as leader of the world. The “conquest of China was” to be “a stepping-stone to the conquest of world hegemony…” Even “Japan’s alliance with Germany could be only temporary, and remained fragile and ineffectual throughout the war, for it was seen as a provisional truce with a future enemy”. In other words, capitalist imperialism ensured that even Japan and Germany understood they would soon come into conflict over essentially the same issues they were to fight the USA and Britain on.
Germany, too, wanted what the United States was to finally have, “the dominant position in the world”.
Hitler stated “‘The struggle for hegemony in the world will be decided for Europe by possession of the Russian space. Any idea of world politics is ridiculous (for Germany) as long as it does not dominate the continent … If we are masters of Europe, then we shall have the dominant position in the world. If the (British) Empire were to collapse today through our arms, we would not be its heirs, since Russia would take India, Japan East Asia and America Canada’” (Mandel, p. 16).
Even a weakened and declining British Empire still held hopes of keeping the global hegemony that it was to definitively lose through the Second World War. He described it as a bourgeois “dream… where the disproportion between end and means became increasingly pathetic”. In the end, Mandel suggests Britain wasn’t much more than a proxy for US imperialism as “Roosevelt was convinced” that “‘if Britain fell, a disastrous war for the United States would be inevitable” as Germany would likely attack via Latin America and “Japan would go on the rampage in the Pacific” (Mandel described later how British interests in Japan and its former empire in the Far-East would be virtually disregarded by the US following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The idea that Germany could invade the American continent was not far-fetched; had Germany won the productive forces of Europe, its naval capacity – together with Japan’s – could have overwhelmed the US navy.
The Causes of Imperialism
A vital element to grasp in understanding Mandel’s interpretation of the Second World War is that the war was not solely as a result of “the particularly abhorrent role played by Hitler and German Nazism”3. Mandel’s assertion is that the fundamental conditions for the war are caused by “imperialism, as a specific form of capitalism generated by the … contradiction between the internationalisation and socialisation of the productive process, on the one hand, and [the productive process’s] continued organisation by private and national interests, on the other” [my emphasis].
It’s easy to read the above passage without fully absorbing its significance and meaning. Let’s break down what Mandel is saying.
According to Mandel’s analysis, It was imperialism, a symptom of capitalism, that was the fundamental reason for the war. Imperialism is “generated” through the contradictory process of capitalist production being an international process (i.e. that commodities are produced using raw materials from all around the world and by people from all around the world), but for “national” reasons in the sense that production is conducted for the benefit of the capitalist classes of individual capitalist nations competing with one another. It is a social process in that the products of labour are completed through a division of labour and there is a dependency on people with various skills and expertise as well as the requirement of organisations to purchase commodities produced by other organisations to be used for further production. But capitalist production is conducted for private reasons in the sense that what is socially produced by workers is not owned by them but privately owned and controlled by their employers who direct production within their organisation for the purpose of their own private wealth and interests. Imperialism therefore stems from the tensions formed by capitalist production being both social & private, national & international.
Which parties happened to be in power, whether they were Nazi, Conservative or Democrat, though not unimportant, was nevertheless a relatively superficial factor in the outbreak of World War 2. The fundamental thing to note is that it is “the structurally barbaric nature of imperialism as a system, not limited to any particular political form of the bourgeois state or any particular national ruling class” that brings about such things as World Wars [author’s emphasis].
The”Fate of the Soviet Union” and the Working Class
The “context of the imperialist drive for world domination” was just one condition that brought about the Second World War. Another fundamental condition was “the specific relationship with wage labour” – one based on exploitation of the working class and their relative submission to such exploitation. The ability of each state to “mobilize all necessary resources, human as well as material, for victory” depended on such a relationship between capital and labour. It required “a subordination of the working class to capital… The attitude of the working class to imperialist wars was therefore of importance not only to the ruling classes, but also to the future of the working class itself”.
The working class of the early twentieth century was quite a revolutionary class, as events in Germany, Russia, and elsewhere show. In Mandel’s view, World War 2 could only be unleashed by removing such proletarian resistance to capitalist imperialism. He writes:
“Labour’s resistance to the hegemonic drive of the bourgeoisie, and the young Soviet republic, which survived despite the concentrated efforts of the imperialist powers to destroy it, constituted formidable obstacles to the pursuit of imperialist designs… Both had to be… neutralized before any imperialist power could seriously contemplate starting another international war. The history of the preparation and unleashing of WWII is, therefore, not just the history of an increasingly explosive differentiation of sectional (national) interests of the world bourgeoisie, but also of its sustained and more or less successful efforts to remove these obstacles. In other words, it is also a history of counter-revolution” [my emphasis].
In this regard, “The fate and evolution of the Soviet Union was particularly crucial”. The Russian Revolution eradicated capitalism and established a workers democracy in the new Soviet state. It was strong enough, given all its difficulties, “to prevent the restoration of capitalism”, but its difficulties had nevertheless “gravely weakened the Soviet working class: the Soviet republic had survived, but in a greatly distorted form”. This was one factor among others that “contributed to the impotence of the European working class in the inter-war period”. The “downturn of revolution” allowed for a counter revolutionary bourgeois “onslaught” against an exhausted, confused and disappointed proletariat.
Such “stepping stones” in this direction, i.e. in the direction of undermining the proletariat so that imperialist war could be waged, included “Chiang Kai-Shek’s massacre of Communist and other labour militants in Shanghai in 1927; the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s; the defeat of the Spanish republic; the collapse of the Popular Front in France. The failure of the British General Strike and the stranglehold imposed by the CIO bureaucracy upon the rising militancy of the American working class likewise played far from marginal roles in preparing the new conflict”.
Please subscribe!
Footnotes:
- The treachery of the supposed working class politicians in Germany in 1914 was also instrumental in undermining the revolutionary momentum and potential of the working class. Indeed, Mandel goes so far as to state that “the historic turning-point was 1914 [i.e. the outbreak of the First World War]. The abdication of large parts of the labour movement’s leading strata, and of key sectors of the liberal intelligentsia, in the face of colonialism, imperialism and war signified an acceptance of violence, mass slaughter, nationalism and racism, as well as the restriction of civil and working-class rights (i.e. an acceptance of the impermanence of the civilizational gains of many generations) for reasons of Realpolitik dictated by national bourgeoisies”. ↩︎
- Today, we can clearly see that the United States has achieved and enjoys such superiority and likes to think – or at least say – that it exercises its role honourably as the global policeman. The term means nothing except to say that the US capitalist class, as the dominant ruling class of the world, exercises its power over both its “sphere of influence” and those outside that sphere for its own selfish interests. Today, the Biden administration’s contempt for the International Criminal Court (ICC), because of the USA’s naked involvement in the genocide of Palestine, is surely proof that if the US is a policeman, it is one who regards himself as above the law. Thus, all bourgeois law is ultimately subordinate to the “law” of US imperialism and the interests of the American capitalist class. At the outset of the Second World War, all the primary states aimed to win the privileged position of international lawlessness and unaccountability that the US now enjoys virtually without restraint from other capitalist states. Such is the “moral superiority” of the US. The USA does not enjoy its hegemony because of its “American values” or its “Americanism”, but because of the economic and social conditions that existed globally during the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries that were advantageous to American capitalism. It should also be noted here that Soviet Russia endured the worst possible conditions for socialism to develop during the 20th century, suffering war and invasion, civil war, massive industrial and agricultural destruction, and a despotic Stalinism, and yet, despite all these terrible hardships and disadvantages, their non-capitalist economy still accelerated and grew at a much faster rate than even the USA, to become the second power in the World, only just behind the Americans. To have those with the worst possible conditions outperform those with the best is proof enough of capitalism’s inefficiencies. The latter part of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first century have been dominated by US ruling class interests, culture, and destructive military adventures around the world. The centre of gravity since 1945 has been with the USA because of its economic and military forces. We do not look to the USA for its moral or philosophical superiority, no matter what the sycophants say. In a global capitalist economy, compulsion is, ultimately, a more powerful force than moral influence. ↩︎
- Mandel himself experienced Nazi abhorrence as a prisoner of their concentration camps. ↩︎
Discover more from Proletarian Perspective
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Proletarian Perspective 
Leave a comment