May Day: Bedlam Let Loose. (1940)

From the May 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

Exactly one year ago the Socialist Standard's annual May-Day Message emphasised the imminent danger of war: to-day this war has been in progress for eight months. Poland, Russia, Finland, and now the Scandinavian lands, have been drawn into its destructive vortex.

The League of Nations, “Collective Security,” the “Peace Front”—all have vanished, and in their place has come the line-up of allies in war, as it has always, down throughout the history of capitalism.

“Armed strength means peace!” “Alliances prevent war!” Does anyone now believe those discarded catch-cries ?

Yet right up to the outbreak of hostilities millions pinned their faith to such spurious arguments. Even now we can hear in some quarters regrets: “If only the Western Powers could have made a pact with Russia … !”

The cause of war to-day is capitalism; the line-up in war is forced on the countries concerned by their interests as capitalist competitors for wealth and trade. The factors that cause wars determine also how the warring governments shall group themselves, these factors are indivisible.

The Berlin-Moscow pact, hailed by the Communists in this country as a “Victory for Peace and Socialism,” gave the signal for the outbreak of war. It left the governors of Britain’s wealth under no further illusions, if illusions they held. Hitler had secured Germany in the East; his next move would be either South-East into the Balkans and ultimately Turkey, or else he would strike directly at the West. In either case it would be a challenge to the Empires of Britain and France. And move Hitler must, the German dictatorship cannot stand still. Its only purpose is to establish Germany as a world Power.

For the present his sleeping partner in Moscow has adopted the role of “belligerent neutral.” The Finnish adventure has tested the Russian military machine, and found it, at least for the time, in some respects wanting; further moves from Moscow have had to be postponed, if not entirely shelved. So the Führer turns to his former ally, Mussolini, hoping to tempt him into a more active role.

In the meantime the battle has already begun in earnest—on the soil of a country, Norway, which has not known the horrors of war for over a century. Towns are bombed, villages entirely destroyed, the civil populations, the aged and the sick, have to drag themselves from their homesteads and flee from the combatants in frantic endeavour to save their lives.

This terror cannot be imagined, it can only be experienced.

What will come next ?

Will total war spread to Sweden—to the low countries—or will a million human bodies be hurled against the walls of steel and concrete on the Western Front ? The decision rests with the class into whose keeping the workers have foolishly given their destiny. Whichever side makes the next move we are certain of one fact: that it will not be decided in the interests of the workers. In the opinion of our rulers, we were born to work and to suffer. It is an opinion which only a growing movement for Socialism can change.

Already the signs of working-class discontent are in evidence. There is not unanimous enthusiasm for war. Even the promise of Hitler’s removal has failed to awaken any jingoism comparable with that in the last war, in this country or in France. We may be sure that millions of Germans are in the same mood, although they have little chance of showing it as yet.

Their time will also come, with or without defeat in war Hitler is doomed.

Hitler claims to be the apostle of a new era— he is wrong. He is the backwash of an old one, the German bourgeois revolution of 1848. His gangster rule can only be a passing phase of German history. The tragic pity is the slaughter that may accompany his downfall.

Hitler and his ideas will not be destroyed by war, rather are they given a temporary new lease of life. Not only in Germany, but in France and Britain, too, forces of suppression are coming to the fore as always in war.

Real progress can only be assured through the growing understanding of working-class people in all lands, an understanding of the world and the social forces that make it what it is to-day.

Socialist propaganda plays a most important part in that mental awakening.

History calls upon the working class to take vhe initiative. We of the Socialist Party of Great Britain accept our share of that responsibility.

Our work will go on. Our ideas are invincible. Neither Hitler’s Germany nor Stalin’s Russia, nor the British Empire, will be able to withstand the march of Socialism.

Sid Rubin