They have a partial rationality: the costs of such labour can be reduced to almost nothing, a miserable pittance which rapidly reduces the labourer's weight and health till he dies from Against pess "The overall picture of the ideology prevalent during World War II is sombre indeed. Internationalist or even simply humanist consciousness were at a historical low-point — so much so that many thought that an irreversible slide towards barbarism had already set in. Orwell's 1984 was the prototype of such premonition.
Such profound pessimism was premature. In the last analysis, the radical decline in globally rational behaviour which indubitably marked WWII was a reflection of the great defeats suffered by the international working class prior to, and during, the first years of the war. But after Stalingrad and Mussolini's downfall, a new and tumultuous rise of international working-class militancy occurred.
The disappearance of the fascist dictatorships in Europe, and the victory of the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions, were the clearest expressions of this modification in the global balance of class forces.
So were the upsurge of the French and Italian labour movement in 1944-48; the landslide victory of the British Labour Party in 1945; the insurgency of national liberation movements throughout Asia which seriously weakened imperialism in the 1945-5 period.
Such upheavals ultimately made possible a limited and contradictory revival of working-class consciousness and genuine internationalism too, even if they had to start from a very low level.
Certain social forces and individuals saved humanity's and the international proletariat's honour during the Second World War.
starvation and deprivation. There is no longer any question of the need for medium-term reproduction of individual labour power.
It is true that the average productivity of such labour is abysmally low. But as long as the supply of slaves is abundant, an operation of this order has a rationality of sorts.
Ancient Roman senators and contemporary SS gangsters - not to mention 18th and early 19th century Southern plantation owners in the USA — made "exact" calculations to discover where the precise limit of that "rationality" lay.
While the SS gangsters were certainly the most criminal of all, they imism
The Amsterdam workers launched a magnificent strike in February 1941 against the first anti-Semitic measures of the Nazi occupation.
The Yugoslav Communists built a proletarian brigade - much to the fury of Stalin - which succeeded in recruiting several thousand Italian, Austrian, Hungarian and German soldiers and volunteers into its ranks.
The Danish resistance saved nearly all the Danish Jews from the Holocaust by transporting them overnight to Sweden. Small groups of Japanese leftists aided the Chinese guerrillas in Manchuria.
An ex-militant of the Left Opposition, Lev Kopelev, succeeded in organising anti-fascist propaganda in the German language so efficiently that the German citadel of Grandenz surrendered without a fight to the Red Army. Having thus saved the lives of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers, he was promptly arrested and imprisoned by Stalin's NKVD for the hideous crime of "cosmopolitanism"
A tiny group of European Communists under the leadership of Leopold Trepper set up an information network in occupied France and Belgium which was worth several divisions for the Red Army, according to expert opinion. After the liberation of France, Trepper travelled to Poland where he was promptly arrested by the NKVD and kept in jail for several years.
Small groups of internationalist Communists, generally of Trotskyist conviction, combined anti-fascist resistance activity with a steadfast defence of working-class interests and a staunch internationalist were by no means the least calculating.
Like the Roman slave-owners of certain periods, they forced their slaves to work themselves to death. Those who could work were not killed outright. That was the precise function of the notorious "selections" on arrival in the extermination camps.
More generally, the rationale of the extermination programme was drastically to reduce the population of Poland and the Ukraine - the German colonisation space — and to allow only those to survive who would become obedient slaves. The Jews were considered unfit for that role — something of a racist compliment. * attitude towards the individual German soldier and worker. Many of them paid with their lives for their stance.
These were small exceptions. But they demonstrated that under the ashes heaped upon the workers" class consciousness by Noske, Hitler and Stalin, a spark remained. From that spark, new flames would arise.
What these proletarian internationalists embodied was the conviction that the war could end otherwise than by the restoration of ruling-class power or the emergence of new bourgeois states; that it could end otherwise than by the total victory of either of the two coalitions; that it could lead to the spread of victorious popular socialist revolutions.
Such conviction was neither utopian nor did it discount the strength of the armies of the potential victors. It expressed an understanding of the instinctive wishes and spontaneous trends of tens of millions of workers and poor peasants over three continents.
For it to be realised, sufficient organisational strength - including armed strength - and political capacity were required. But purpose and initiative could make all the difference.
It was not the relative strength of their opponents which made the Yugoslav Revolution victorious and led the Greek to defeat, which saw a victory of social revolution in China and its defeat in Indonesia. Differences in the resolve and determination of the Communist Parties in these four countries were the decisive factors.
What was possible in Yugoslavia and China would also have been possible in some other European and Asian countries. [EM] * Extracted from Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War, London: Verso, 1986
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