On the day the war in Europe ended in 1945, the centre of London became jammed by an enormous crowd. After six years of suffering, that mass of people might have been expected to be looking angrily for the leaders who had deceived them that the mess of cynicism, destruction and slaughter had been necessary, even constructive. But when the crowd called for Churchill it was not in any spirit of revenge; his appearance was greeted with For He's a Jolly Good Fellow and when the royal family came onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace the dense-packed sufferers broke out into the national anthem. It was clear, then, that the war had changed nothing of any lasting significance. Capitalism was to continue. The suffering and deprivation would go on, loyally and musically absorbed by the people.
It was indeed an exceptionally eventful year. As it became apparent that the German and Japanese war machines were about to collapse, the Allied leaders had begun earnest discussions about how the post-war world was to be arranged. These conferences were not about the future safeguarding of democracy, nor about securing a happy and prosperous life for the people who had been on the receiving end of the war. They were not even exclusively concerned with the destruction of Germany and Japan as economic and military rivals. The biggest item on the agenda was how the victorious Allies would carve up the world, which was actually quite appropriate since that was partly what the war had been about.
Behind their wartime unity, the Allied powers remained competing capitalist states and some of the history of the war can be explained only on that basis. Before Germany surrendered, the American government were engaged in delicately manoeuvring their forces so as to balance the competing needs of keeping the alliance with Russia against that of restricting the Russian grip on the Europe of the future. They were not always successful. At the Yalta conference, in February 1945. Stalin agreed to join the war against Japan only in return for valuable concessions. At Potsdam. later in the year, there was agreement to split Germany into zones; the provision to treat the country as an economic whole was then quietly forgotten, which effectively set up the separate states of East and West Germany and so enlarged the Russian sphere of control in Europe.
As the flames of war and the fluttering of "peace" treaties died away it was clear that Russian capitalism was now the great power in Europe, with an empire which ran from the Baltic almost to the Mediterranean. The American capitalist class, whatever they had agreed at the conferences, recognised the threat to their interests and responded by erecting their own power bloc in NATO. In the Far East, where Russia and the rising capitalist power of China competed to fill the space left by the defeat of Japan, there was SEATO. The result of all this was predictable, to all except those who had absorbed the propaganda about the war being fought for peace in freedom: the map was redrawn so that new frontiers existed to be fought over in place of the old. The rivalry of interests remained and the division of Berlin, Korea, Vietnam and other places set out the battle lines of the future. Since those statesmen — Roosevelt, Truman, Stalin, Churchill, Attlee redrew the map millions of workers have been killed in wars across the frontiers, to assert the minority class interests entrenched on either side.
Although they were represented at the conferences, the British capitalist class exerted only a minor influence, for the 1939/45 war had given a mighty impetus to the decline of British power in the world. The war in the Far East had made it plain that British resources could no longer sustain a chain of colonies, markets and bases in the area. America took over as the power which could impose stability on the Far East as a field of supply and trade for the industry and commerce of the capitalists of the west. For some time after 1945 British politics was fashioned by the readiness with which this new reality was accepted. From childhood the workers had been schooled into the belief that the British Empire was the most civilising experience in history. To deny that called for much cunning — the sort applied by Harold Macmillan, who was adept at carrying one policy while professing to stand for another. The impending death of British imperialism was held off in a series of military scuffles in places like Cyprus, Borneo, Suez and Central Africa but in the end it had to be faced.
On VE Day, Churchill assured the non-vengeful crowd in Whitehall that they were celebrating the defeat of a tyranny. There was a popular assumption that the complacency of the pre-war world would never happen again; in particular there would be no compromise with dictatorships (the war was widely, and mistakenly, believed to have been provoked by attempts at appeasing Germany's insatiable demands; the Potsdam conference, in July and August 1945, agreed to destroy Nazism). To support these promises, the wartime propagandists had to perform the astounding feat of ignoring the character of Russian capitalism. They had to blot out the history of the purges, the labour camps, the show trials, the political executions and the mass exterminations and instead pretend that Stalin's Russia was a land peopled by stolidly contented peasantry and industrial workers cared for by a benign man with a reassuringly avuncular moustache. Of course they were equal to this task. If they had not been, they would have had to admit that on "our", side there was one of the world's most ruthless dictatorships and that the war could not. therefore, be a defence of democracy.
The Russian ruling class committed their people to the war against Japan just in time to claim for themselves some of the spoils from that country's defeat, an event notable for opening the new age of instant nuclear annihilation — as a fitting end to a war for a safer world. To compound the horror, the V2 rockets which had flown down onto London in a last, defiant spasm from Germany, spawned the delivery systems which now ensure the weapons arrive on target and on time. It is now possible that the first stages of a future nuclear war will be concerned with which power is able to dominate space itself, much as fighter aircraft would be sent out to clear the bombers' way in the 1939/ 45 war. In these times of "peace" vast resources are expended in refining and intensifying these means of destruction, while each year millions die through lack of food. There is no more poignant illustration of capitalism's inhumane priorities.
But of course none of this was emphasised during those headstrong days in 1945. For a brief time, hope flourished like flowers in the summer sun. Soon, there was a new government in Britain — for the first time the Labour Party ruled with the sort of majority to ensure them a full term of power. Their years in the wilderness had given them plenty of time to work out their plans; now they could implement the explicit promises in their manifesto Let Us Face The Future and satisfy the implicit hopes of their patient followers. Many people decided that it was the dawn of a new age. a time to trample over stuffy, outmoded traditions; Labour MPs offended against parliamentary order by singing (although many of them knew neither the words nor the tune) The Red Flag in the House of Commons.
Some of those MPs. like much of the party membership, were inspired by the conviction that Labour was a socialist party. Its aims, such as the nationalisation of industry and the establishment of a state medical service, were represented as socialism. It is difficult to describe this attitude as other than plain ignorance, for socialism means nothing if not a fundamental change in social relationships, based on the dispossession of the capitalist class — which was simply not represented in Labour Party thinking let alone in their election manifestoes. Subsequent revelations in Cabinet papers and political memoirs, of how the personalities of that government thought and of how they did their job as ministers, confirm that none of them were anywhere near being socialists. They were interested — and this was what the working class had voted for — in a different method of administering capitalism.
So any dreams that Clement Attlee and his ministers would, after the constitutional assent of the king, instal the working class into communal ownership of the means of production and distribution were misguided. The Labour government quickly got down to the job of restoring the war-battered fortunes of British capitalism, by launching a drive for cheaper and more efficient production and more competitive marketing — which was another name for the more intensive exploitation of the workers. A significant part of the government's life was spent in a persistent effort to hold down wages and generally blight workers' lives with a continuance of wartime austerity measures. The war, they said, had not after all solved all problems; the working class must still suffer in the interests of the ruling class. That those interests were well protected by that Labour government was evidenced through their concern for the upkeep of a British military presence. They sent British workers to die in places like Korea, they struggled to protect British investments in the rubber and tin of the Far East and the oil of the Persian Gulf. This "peacetime" government might have been expected to abolish conscription — the forcible recruitment of people into the military machine — but instead they increased the period of service from 18 months to two years. Perhaps their crowning achievement in this field was to set up the programme to manufacture a British nuclear bomb.
It is common now for Labour supporters, wandering in the seemingly endless desert of Thatcher Britain, to recall the Attlee government with pride and affection, as proof that they are capable of great things. But the desert is a place of mirages. The truth is that that government was riven with bitter dissent as its rival factions squabbled over the most effective way of running British capitalism. In the end this wore them out and they went down to an exhausted defeat, witnessed by workers in a kind of blank despair; was this all there was to show for the hopes for a new society?
So 1945 was not a typical year. Forty years on, there is no happier tale to tell. The world remains in the same disfigured, crazy, inhumane mess. The cause of this goes deeper than any state of peace or war, or of any state or any party, to the roots of society. If the workers who fought and celebrated and who were deceived were to pay attention to that fact, it would be the most fruitful commemoration of that troublous year when the war finished and the world settled back into the menacing tumult which they persist in calling peace.
Ivan
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