By Manuel Velasco

In 1945, the defeat of the Axis, first in Europe and then in Japan, freed forces for the peoples of the world to rise up against the bourgeois governments in the immediate postwar period. But U.S. imperialism together with the Soviet bureaucracy managed to impose a world order that later broke down after the fall of the Berlin Wall and today is again shaken by the weakening of U.S. hegemony, reviving in the present some debates already raised 80 years ago.

Capitalist barbarism showed its worst face with the clashes unleashed in World War II. The destructive levels of the “Great War” (as the First World War was called) were overshadowed. Capitalism made clear the leap in its destructive capacity, abandoning definitively the promise of “progress” in the eyes of the European peoples and the world. Diplomacy proved insufficient to settle the disputes of the countries in conflict, which led to a crisis of international organizations. In 1933 Nazi Germany withdrew from the United Nations and at the end of 1937 Mussolini’s Italy did the same.

The apocalyptic situation unleashed in the world was a consequence of the inter-imperialist disputes unresolved in the First War, but on this occasion with one of the sides occupied by Nazi-fascism which proposed to liquidate the revolutionary experience in Soviet Russia and eliminate the democratic freedoms conquered by the European working class. Trotsky in “The Struggle against Fascism: The Proletariat and the Revolution” (1933) already warned about the military objectives of Nazism assuring that “if Hitler seizes power a war against the Soviet Union”.

The definitive defeat of the Axis meant the beginning of a reconstruction of the world order that had broken down at the beginning of the century. However, tensions between powers remained with new protagonisms. On the one hand, the hegemony of the United Kingdom was finally displaced by the United States in the capitalist world. The American power demonstrated its technical and military superiority with the atomic bombs that caused Japan to surrender, but its economic dominance was also categorical: its GDP represented 50% of the world total, it possessed 80% of the world’s gold reserves, produced half of the world’s manufactured goods and its currency became the central pillar of the international monetary and commercial system after Bretton Woods.

On the other hand, the Soviet Union increased its prestige by defeating Nazism and from there it would try a new division of the world as it had once tried with Nazi Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but now sharing control with the United States and Europe in the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, an agreement that aimed mainly at stopping the rise in mobilization that was shaking the post-war world.

Between wars and revolutions

The end of the war in 1945 marked the beginning of the most revolutionary stage in history. Just as World War I was the stage for the development of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the postwar period prompted the various workers’ and peasants’ movements around the world to take up arms, this time against their own governments.

While the European elites were questioned for their collaborationism with Nazism, the socialist perspective gained more popularity because of the leading role of the left in the resistance. However, the influence of Stalinism worked against revolutionary radicalization. Instead, the Communist Parties opted for liberal democracy as a way out.

Similarly, in the “third world” the process of decolonization put an end to the old colonial empires, resisting new occupations. Despite the great absence of the proletariat at the head of many of these revolutions, the mobilization of the masses imposed on the various bureaucracies a socialist agenda, achieving expropriations and a whole series of historic conquests for the peoples. Once again, the lack of a revolutionary leadership that integrates and strengthens the different experiences ended up stagnating the development of the world revolution, allowing capitalism to gain air in the following decades.

A present that repeats the past?

Today, 80 years after the war, the post-war order is showing clear signs of exhaustion. Tensions in the European Union, the rise of China and the sharpening of military conflicts are clear symptoms of a model in decline. In the same vein, Trump’s first geopolitical maneuvers demonstrate the will of a sector of the Western bourgeoisie to displace Europe and point all guns against China.

Another central point that connects our times with those of World War II is that the ultra-right once again succeeds in influencing the masses and, supported by its popularity, conquers positions of power in central countries. The technological bourgeoisie now also bets on the new right and gives them not only economic but also political backing, although not without internal tensions.

The war machine of capitalism presents an activity only comparable to that of 1945. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine we saw wars again in Europe, in the Middle East Israel deepens its role as gendarme reinforcing its genocidal military apparatus and the most recent conflict between India and Pakistan revives the fear of a nuclear war that has haunted the world since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, today increased by the development and control of nuclear weapons in more countries than at that time.

The great absence in our times is that of Stalinism and its counterrevolutionary apparatus. The new processes of social mobilization are no longer guarded by the international gendarme into which the USSR degenerated, but the various reformist bureaucracies, political, trade union and religious, continue to act in all countries.

Socialism or barbarism

World War II ended, but capitalist chaos remains. Although the decades have passed, it is clear that the recurrent crises of capitalism lead us to renewed scenarios of catastrophe, where a few are saved (and profit) while the majorities agonize in wars and misery. Phenomena such as Nazi-fascism resonate today because xenophobia, machismo and anti-communism have found a new synthesis represented by the ultra-right, already spread across all continents. The violence of their discourse has not yet been translated into the armed mobilization of their bases (not in a generalized manner) but in all cases they have made different attempts. Although they already govern different countries, the advantage in the streets is held by the movements of workers and youth who take to the streets for our rights, in defense of Palestine and against fascism.

All the nostalgic variants of the welfare state are powerless to resolve the crossroads at which we find ourselves, because of their limited vision of reformist compromise with a sector of the supposedly “progressive” bourgeoisie to save liberal democracy from its deep crisis. Only with a transitional program of rupture with the interests of the bourgeoisies and independence from all imperialism can we put a brake on the new arms race.

To stop the advance of the ultra-right, to defend democratic freedoms and the rights we have won, we must raise the banner of socialism with a political alternative that brings together the millions of activists who fight against capitalism in the world.