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Happy Memorial Day!
It's already that time of year again America! That great day where you eat a ton of disgusting cholesterol-filled food and shop at your favorite store's Memorial Day sale in order to honour those decieved into fighting and dying for capitalist imperialism under the guise of freedom (WW2 exception). Great... yep.
Why is WWII an exception? If anything it was the most blatant show of imperialism in recent history.
"Socialist ideas become significant only to the extent that they become rooted in the working class."
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. . .Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
SocialistWorker.org
International Socialist Review
Marxists Internet Archive
Hey! I LIKE my cholesterol-filled hot dogs and hamburgers! :P
Don't forget the beer.
Believe me comrade, I haven't.1
Well at least in WWII a purpose was served, regardless of what followed.
"True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing"
-Socrates
The fight against Hitler was neccessary, so I view it differently from say the Vietnam war.
In a wars between imperialist powers(like WWII was, between US, Nazi Germany and the USSR, which by then were all imperialist countries) the working class should take no side supporting a bourgeoisie government, regardless of its political character(ie bourgeoisie "democracy" or bourgeoisie fascism) and hope for the defeat of one's country, and a transformation of the war into a class war and social revolution. The only way to stop the war, is by means of revolution. The only way to defeat fascism in Nazi Germany was by working class revolution, not US invasion(btw US companies sponsored much of Hitler's elections campaign). Thinking that the US was "lesser evil" is a classic counter-revolutionary argument. They were all imperialist capitalist countries, just with different political form(bureaucracy,"democracy",fascism).
google: isl position on wars
World War II and the Rise of Fascism
On the eve of World War II, the USSR was no longer a workers' state and would not have received any revolutionary support from true Marxists. Our position is that turning the country back into a workers' state would have required a new civil war between the working class and its bureaucratic ruling class of exploiters – a social, rather than political, revolution. (This is contrary to the position held by Trotsky until his death in 1940.)
However, World War II was marked by the rise of a new enemy to the working class, a political enemy whose main target is the working class. By the use of brute force, it would try to deny it its most basic democratic rights, attempting to seal off any possibility of a working-class revolution. This enemy, so fierce it would strike fear even in the hearts of the bourgeois ruling class, would receive the notorious name ‘fascism’, after the Italian Fascist movement – the first of its kind to rise to power.
Naturally, fascism has terrified the workers throughout the world; millions of them were willing to take arms in hands and smash the fascist serpent. The bourgeoisie, in turn, would naturally pounce on this opportunity, when the eyes of the workers are focused elsewhere, and cynically demand "civil peace" from the working class - which in actuality means far-reaching capitulations - while accusing those who refuse to make them of refusing to contribute to the war effort, or even worse, of collaborating with the fascist enemy.
With regards to defeatism, the transformation of imperialist war into civil war was not as relatively easy in the second world war as it was during the first, since in the former it was easier for the bourgeoisie to sell to the workers the lie that this war was not just another imperialist war designed to further their own interests in weakening and eliminating imperialist competition, but was nothing less than a "war to save democracy!"
Marxist revolutionaries know that fascism is nothing but the uglier side of the same capitalist face, and that its rise to power is just a symptom of a bourgeois ruling class so intimidated by the strong working class and its impending revolution that it is willing to give the keys to its country to right-wing militants rather than give its place away to a more advanced mode of production of which it will no longer be the master.
Once again, as in any other imperialist war, regardless of the political character of the rulers of the different imperialist countries, our position would be both defeatism and the transformation of imperialist war into civil war. If anyone should make capitulations to save its skin from the fascists, it should be the bourgeoisie and not the working class. After all, it was they who gave it control under the cover of democratic slogans. Overall, the imperialist characteristic of a country is overwhelmingly more significant to us than its political character.
Trotsky writes aptly about the possibility of an inter-imperialist war and the correct proletarian attitude towards it:
"If the proletariat should find it beyond its power to prevent war by means of revolution – and this is the only means of preventing war – the workers, together with the whole people, will be forced to participate in the army and in war. Individualistic and anarchistic slogans of refusal to undergo military service, passive resistance, desertion, sabotage are in basic contradiction to the methods of the proletarian revolution. But just as in the factory the advanced worker feels himself a slave of capital, preparing for his liberation, so in the capitalist army too he feels himself a slave of imperialism. Compelled today to give his muscles and even his life, he does not surrender his revolutionary consciousness. He remains a fighter, learns how to use arms, explains even in the trenches the class meaning of war, groups around himself the discontented, connects them into cells, transmits the ideas and slogans of the party, watches closely the changes in the mood of the masses, the subsiding of the patriotic wave, the growth of indignation, and summons the soldiers to the aid of the workers at the critical moment."
For a working class which lives in a country plagued by fascism, here's a summary of the correct tactics to counter fascism without forfeiting the class struggle:
1. The working class can trust no one to defend it from its political or class enemies. Therefore, in case of an armed onslaught upon it, revolutionaries would call the workers to arm themselves for the purpose of self-defense against the fascists.
2. A workers' revolutionary party must send an infiltration force of propagandists into the army in order to win the support of as many soldiers as possible (most of them come from the ranks of the poor peasantry and the crisis-battered petty bourgeois) to the proletarian revolution.
3. A united front of action, temporary and tactical only, should be formed with all anti-fascist elements. The working class should strive to rise to the leadership of this united front, win as many anti-fascists to its side in the class war, and steer this movement towards the socialist revolution. Under no circumstances should the working class make any capitulations of its class interests to alien class elements, nor fall under their control. Keeping the working class an independent, self-emancipating fighting force is key to eliminating both the fascist threat and the capitalist ruling class responsible for its very emergence.
The Lessons of the Spanish Revolution
An example of a civil war involving fascism is the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939. In this war a fascist army backed by Nazi Germany attempted to take over Spain. Unlike in Germany, the working class in Spain was not yet weakened by its traitorous leadership to the point where it had lost all will to fight fascism. A "popular front" consisting of many different and contradictory political and class elements was formed to fight fascism.
Trotsky wrote on this "popular front":
"A bloc of divergent political groups of the working class is sometimes completely indispensable for the solution of common practical problems. In certain historical circumstances, such a bloc is capable of attracting the oppressed petty-bourgeois masses whose interests are close to the interests of the proletariat. The joint force of such a bloc can prove far stronger than the sum of the forces of each of its component parts. On the contrary, the political alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests on basic questions in the present epoch diverge at an angle of 180 degrees, as a general rule is capable only of paralyzing the revolutionary force of the proletariat.
"Civil war, in which the force of naked coercion is hardly effective, demands of its participants the spirit of supreme self-abnegation. The workers and peasants can assure victory only if they wage a struggle for their own emancipation. Under these conditions, to subordinate the proletariat to the leadership of the bourgeoisie means beforehand to assure defeat in the civil war."
Trotsky was right, and the popular front tactic proved to be disastrous to the working class and its revolution. Understanding that bourgeois "democracy" and totalitarian fascism stem from the same class interest in prolonging the death agony of capitalism helps Marxist revolutionaries to see right through all sorts of class enemy propaganda, be it bourgeois-liberal, reformist or centrist, and exposes its role in blocking the revolutionary power of the working class. The only way to win an anti-fascist campaign is to free the proletariat from the leadership of the bourgeoisie.
Remember, they died fighting for our freedom! Without them, we'd have nothing!
Hey, at least I get to eat multiple hamburgers without feeling bad.
Let's also commemorate the civilians that died in Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.
Socialism resides entirely in the revolutionary negation of the capitalist ENTERPRISE, not in granting the enterprise to the factory workers.
- Bordiga
I feel such pity for the ignorant masses of sheeple and their pathetic consumerism! tsk tsk!
"Win, lose or draw...long as you squabble and you get down, that's gangsta."
"Germany lost the Second World War. Fascism won it." - George Carlin
"I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will." - Antonio Gramsci
"If he did advocate revolutionary change, such advocacy could not, of course, receive constitutional protection, since it would be by definition anti-constitutional."
- J.A. MacGuigan in Roach v. Canada, 1994
Just another day...
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
-James Baldwin
"We change ideas like neckties."
- E.M. Cioran
i'm kind of over being an iconoclast. like i am against us imperialism, etc etc of course but this weekend i went with my parents to put flowers on my grandparents grave because my grandfather was a veteran and did some shopping too. no grillouts and beers but i wouldn't have minded. and hey i got paid double at work, so i definitely appreciate that.
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
Man, you're lucky. My work decided to not do double pay this year for memorial day (which sucks double because it was a 'bonus' day and thus like triple the work of a normal Monday.) Most of my friend's workplaces didn't do double pay either. I think companies are starting to phase out double pay for holidays, at least around here.
"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." -Wilde
"Beaucoup de clopes! Beaucoup de vin! Beaucoup de rhum! Viva la révolution!"- Bilan
"The Sun shines. To hell with everything else!" -Stephen Fry
How so?
The Croatian Independence Day is soon. Or maybe it was Statehood Day. I swear, we have two or three of those things and they're all fucking interchangeable. I would organise a mass retch-along, but my chief partner in crime is in another district, vae mihi.
Anyway, unlike my comrades in the ISL, I think that the Soviet Union remained a workers' state throughout the Second World War, and that the defense of the Soviet Union was an important task of the worldwide communist movement. But the contribution of the so-called "Western Allies" to that defense is debatable; certainly, without a second front the struggle against Hitlerism would last longer, but the Allied intervention was a case of "too little, too late". And this shows how misguided relying on bourgeois governments to fight fascism is.
I don't know if the soldiers deserve to be glorified, in toto. Certainly they happened to be on the correct side of the conflict, for once. And I am not suggesting that anyone should get teary over Wehrmacht or SS members being killed. But most of these people, if given the orders, would have participated in the bloody butchery of civilians and revolutionaries, and indeed many did, both before the Second World War and after. Soldiers are instruments of their government, in the end.
damn that sucks, fuck that
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
I didn't even know it was memorial day til I was at the airport and was lookin at the tv like "da fuck is with all these soldiers? We at war again?" I felt dumb cuz even though I dont give 2 shits about memorial day I feel like I probably should have known that, especially considering I feel like I have to have heard it dozens of times that weekend but it never clicked with me.
Freedom before Peace
yeah but without our military in ww2 we could have got invaded by the nazis
“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
