a hope unfulfilled. communists in world war ii

for workers power from below

David Broder writes on the disappointed revolutionary aspirations ofthe WWII‐era left

The recent collapse of dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia markedinspiring victories for the mass uprisings in the Arab world. However,these revolts have again posed an age‐old question of revolutionarypolitics: is the aim to get rid of this or that leader, or to overthrow thesystem as such?

(https://thecommune.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/partisanscarrara.jpg)

This question was sharply posed in the late World War II period whenmass resistance movements besieged fascist régimes across Europe.These movements were dominated by activists who believed in thedesirability of communism.

But as such, the maintenance of capitalist order after the war was amajor defeat. Why did resistance not mean revolution? Here I shallfocus on the examples of France and Italy.

Communists for fascism

The Nazi‐Soviet pact of 23rd August 1939 was the trigger for theoutbreak of the war, giving Hitler a free hand to invade Poland. It alsoforced Communist Parties to abandon their anti‐fascist stance: if Stalinsaid Hitler was a ‘partner for peace’, then they had to present this line

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too. For the French Communist Party (PCF) this meant heaping all theblame for the war on British imperialism and advocating the westernAllies give in to Hitler’s demands. This was particularly problematicgiven the party’s traditional ‘patriotism’: tens of thousands of membersresigned in disgust.

Exploiting popular anger against the Communists, the Frenchauthorities banned the party in late September 1939. By May 1940 some5,500 of its members had been arrested, including some among theItalian Communist Party (PCI) leaders in exile. They joined thousandsof Spanish civil war veterans and foreign anti‐fascists held in prisoncamps by France’s democratic government.

One of those internees was the Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler,held in a rudimentary camp established in the Roland Garros tennisstadium in Paris. He pointed to the flimsy anti‐fascism of the Frenchauthorities, but also the apathy of the working class, both of whichaugured badly for the war effort. The ruling class knew what they werefighting for – the maintenance of the status quo – but not really what torally the population against; the working class knew they wanted tofight against Nazism, but had no idea what they were fighting for.

Indeed, the French army did nothing to combat Germany in the firsteight months of hostilities, and when the Wehrmacht turned west inMay 1940, France collapsed within just six weeks. Deputy PrimeMinister Marshal Philippe Pétain advised against resistance; at least theGermans would restore order. As Hitler’s forces overran the country,Pétain set up a new puppet régime based at Vichy in the southern ‘freezone’; the whole north and west of France was occupied by theWehrmacht.

The PCF applied to the Nazis for their paper to be made legal again:after all, following the terms of the pact, it could promote French‐Nazi‐Soviet peace. The occupying authorities refused, but the PCFmaintained an ambiguous relation to the occupation, focusing criticismon British imperialism, or else Pétain himself, and not Hitler.Nonetheless, the extent of oppression was such that many young PCF

activists took part in nationalist demonstrations on 11th November1940, and the party played a leading role in the May 1941 miners’ strikein the north.

Italy, meanwhile, rather blundered into the war: just three monthsbefore invading Poland Hitler had promised fascist leader BenitoMussolini that there would be no war until 1943. The country was not asignatory of the pact with Stalin, and did not declare war on France

until 10th June 1940, once the Germans were already rapidlyapproaching Paris. A disastrous assault on Greece in October that yearshowed that Mussolini could not be trusted to achieve anything byhimself, and Italy became something of a liability for the Axis.Moreover, the PCI denounced Mussolini’s involvement in the war,comparing it to his aggression against Ethiopia in 1935 and hisintervention on Franco’s side in the Spanish civil war.


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That said, the exiled PCI leadership had in recent years had a dubiousrelationship with the fascist régime. Although banned since 1926, theCommunists made appeals for national reconciliation, such as a 1936call for “all Italians to march together” behind Mussolini’sdemagogically anti‐capitalist manifesto of 1919. Before the pact, the PCIalso attempted to put pressure on the Italian ruling class to junkMussolini and align themselves with Britain and France as to isolateHitler, blaming the fascist dictator for selling out Italy’s interests toGerman imperialism. This was all a matter of manoeuvring in line withSoviet diplomacy: as the Italian Trotskyist Pietro Tresso explainedin1938, the PCI’s chief concern was not fascism versus anti‐fascism, stillless capitalism versus socialism, but only Moscow’s allies andMoscow’s enemies.

The turn to resistance

The situation in the war changed dramatically on 22nd June 1941, whenHitler invaded the USSR. This ‘Operation Barbarossa’ was the largestmilitary offensive in history, involving some 3.2 million troops. Withinweeks the Wehrmacht had occupied thousands of miles of Sovietterritory: the USSR was in grave danger. For the PCF and PCI, thisurgently posed the need to build anti‐fascist resistance.

Without doubt, many Stalinists did fight heroically as partisans. Theywere at war with a German army which was far better trained, armedand supplied. Tens of thousands of them were imprisoned, torturedand died for the cause.

However, they did not advance revolutionary politics. They were tiedto Stalin’s strategy, unity with the Allies against Germany. Thisdemanded they defend the capitalist order and oppose forces ofrebellion. The Stalinists condemned the British miners’ strike of 1941because it undermined war production; they opposed demands forcolonial freedom; Pietro Tresso was murdered by PCF members in theFrench Resistance. Nor did they recognise class divisions in Germansociety: it was simply a land of naturally militaristic ‘Huns’.

Much in contrast, the Trotskyist Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste (POI) inFrance characterised the war as inter‐imperialist. They did not take partin the French resistance, both out of opposition to its anti‐Germanchauvinist and pro‐imperialist politics, and because of the threat ofStalinist assault. However, the POI defended the USSR, and what theysaw as the gains of the 1917 revolution, against both German invasionand the Stalinist bureaucracy.

The POI advocated international workers’ unity, and as such produceda newspaper for German occupation soldiers, Arbeiter und Soldat. ThePOI recognised that these troops were working‐class conscripts inuniform, many of them former Social Democrats and Communists, thefirst victims of Nazi repression. The paper argued for a resumption ofthe defeated revolutionary struggles of the end of World War I, andagainst any illusions in the intentions of the Allied imperialist powers.It demonstrated a strong belief in the potential power of German


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workers and the centrality of their revolution to the European workers’cause. Moreover the paper featured letters from both soldiers and thehome front, as did the paper Der Arbeiter, also linked to the POI butmore driven by the initiative of troops themselves.

The group also favoured fraternisation between French workers andGerman troops. This was however extremely dangerous and theorganisation was betrayed by an Austrian soldier, possibly a Nazi agent

provocateur. On 6th October 1943 the Gestapo raided a meeting in Brest:18 of the participants were executed. The next days saw a continuedcampaign to break up the organisation: in total around 50 Germansoldiers were murdered and another 50 French activists arrested, manyof them sent to concentration camps from which they would neverreturn.

Although not in thrall to the USSR like the Trotskyists, anarchists’politics did not necessarily add any clarity to the situation. Nowheredid anarchists organise independently for a specifically revolutionarymovement. Their traditional stress on militant anti‐fascism did notnecessarily imply anything more than fighting the German troops. Forexample, many Spanish exiles fought bravely in the French resistance:but this adherence to a force led by the conservative Charles de Gaulleand the Stalinists belied a separation between their means of struggleand their ultimate objectives.

Fascists against fascism

The Soviets held back the Wehrmacht onslaught at Stalingrad andbegan a counter‐offensive;, together with the USA’s entry into the warin December 1941, it was clear that fascism was doomed. However, thisalso posed the question of what kind of Europe would follow the war.

The resistance movements were heterogeneous politically, defined bywhat they opposed rather than any positive agenda. In Italy the PCIchose a cross‐class alliance with the republican Action Party, the social‐democratic PSI and the Christian Democrats rather than therevolutionary left. Rather than fighting capitalism itself they attackedMussolini for having sold out ‘the nation’ to German imperialism.

The PCF contributed enormously to the French resistance. But a moresignificant section of the élite fought against the Nazis in France than inItaly, since Vichy was so strongly associated with defeat. Indeed, theresistance’s main leader Charles de Gaulle himself approved of many ofPétain’s anti‐working class reforms “if only they were not associatedwith collaboration” with the occupation. Others in ruling circles tried toappeal to the senile Vichy leader to turn to the Allies.

Much of the ruling class did indeed change tack following the heavyAxis defeats in North Africa in November 1942. His hand forced byAllied landings in Algeria, Vichy commander Admiral Darlan switchedsides. The anti‐Semite Darlan now established a pro‐American régimein Algiers, together with Vichy Interior Minister Pierre Pucheu. Fearingtheir puppet’s imminent collapse, the Germans and Italians occupied


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the ‘free zone’ ruled by Pétain. When a young monarchist assassinatedDarlan on Christmas Eve 1942, the Allies handed power to GeneralGiraud, also a disaffected Vichyist. When de Gaulle objected, theAmericans forced the pair to work together as a two‐headed leadership.

The fall of North Africa was also bad news for Mussolini. With Tunisiajust a stone’s throw from Sicily, the south of Italy now faced the threatof Allied landings. His situation was all the more critical due to a newdomestic crisis.

The first twenty years of fascism had suffocated the working class. Forall the miseries of the régime, most Italian workers thought it best tokeep their heads down, to ‘get by’. But fascism was unable even to feedthe population. Even if the authorities did supply the promised rations,these offered each citizen only 895 calories a day, less than half thenecessary amount. Food protests by women in Milan in summer 1942were followed by strikes at the Alfa Romeo and Tedeschi factories.Given the fumbled concessions of a disoriented régime, each actioninspired confidence in others that fascism was not all‐powerful, andcould be challenged.

After a winter of gradual building, March 1943 saw an eruption ofstruggle in northern Italy. Following a stoppage at Turin’s Rasetti

factory on Friday 5th, the giant FIAT Mirafiori works walked out,encouraging similar actions at a dozen other workplaces after theweekend. As news of the rebellion spread by word of mouth and theunderground press, other workers were encouraged to add their voicesto the chorus of dissent. By the end of the month there were also majorstrikes in Milan – perhaps 100,000 workers participated in total.

These were not the kind of strikes which could bring the economy to itsknees. Many of the actions were just a few hours long. They were moreimportant as a political act. For two decades workers had consideredany and all acts of disobedience as a potential death sentence. Now thatkeeping their heads down was no longer an option, they confronted therégime responsible for their despair. Hundreds of workers weredeported and arrested in March: but this was not enough to stop themovement. Hitler raged that Italy’s fascists had not taken a hardenough line.

The disintegration of the home front posed a major challenge to theItalian régime: if they did not get a grip on the situation then the statewould be besieged both from within Italy and by Allied forces. TheKing and fascist ministers decided that removing Mussolini could save

the system. At 2am on the night of 24th‐25th July 1943, a meeting of theFascist Grand Council voted to depose Mussolini. He was bundled intoan ambulance and taken to prison.

On the 25th Italians took to the streets, joyously celebrating the fall ofthe hated dictator. This was a victory for the pressure they had exerted.So long the oppressor of the Italian workers, the self‐proclaimed heir tothe Roman Emperors was now humiliated.


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And it was the ruling class, not Mussolini’s victims, who set the termsof the new order. In his place came Marshal Pietro Badoglio, fascistapparatchik and leader of the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Hepromised change: but quickly moved to assert his authority over the

nascent workers’ movement. On the 27th troops opened fire on a peacedemonstration in Reggio, killing nine workers. The following day amarch through Bari to salute political prisoners was broken up bygunshots: 23 more deaths. The army also broke up demonstrations inMilan, Turin, Florence, La Spezia, and Sesto Fiorentino; the next monthwould see 38,500 political arrests.

The war continued: the Allies had begun landings in Sicily on the 10th.However, the King and Badoglio quickly moved to negotiate peace.Having stressed their loyalty to the Axis, they signed an armistice on

3rd September: when this was revealed a week later, the Wehrmachtinvaded Italy. Badoglio did nothing to organise resistance and fledRome, while the Germans quickly took over almost the whole country.They freed Mussolini from prison and made him declare a newgovernment; meanwhile, the Allied‐occupied areas were ruled byBadoglio. Long‐time fascists such as the Agnellis, who owned FIAT,started hedging their bets, producing for Germany yet also funding theanti‐fascist parties.

Thus by September 1943 the Allies had won over leading fascists inboth France and Italy. The Axis was clearly beginning to fracture. Butthese were no democrats. They supported fascism when it was on therise and were proud of their role in building Hitler’s empire. Theirmotivation was purely to defend the stability of the existing social orderfrom more profound change, by sacrificing individual leaders.

Communists against communism

One of the thousands of activists arrested by the French authorities inOctober 1939 was Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian CommunistParty. Fortunately for Togliatti, they did not recognise him and he wasreleased in May 1940, allowing him to flee to the USSR before theGerman occupation. Having worked for the Communist Internationalin the 1930s, he was adept at implementing Stalin’s orders: for instance,playing a leading role in the struggle against anarchists and the POUMduring the Spanish civil war.

Following the Soviet dictator, he now promoted the unity of all forcesagainst the Axis. Indeed, now that he was with the Allies, Badogliorequested help from the pro‐resistance parties in order to give himmore popular legitimacy: the logic of the Stalinist position was thus tooblige. Togliatti, returning to Italy in March 1944, announced that thePCI would unconditionally accept the offer to join a cross‐partygovernment, even under the King.

The PCF had also entered negotiations to join the provisionalgovernment in Algeria as early as August 1943. De Gaulle also neededdemocratic legitimacy – the existing régime was, after all, unelected and


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based in a colony. Two PCF members joined his administration in April1944.

These cross‐class coalitions set the tone of the resistance movementsand therefore the resultant post‐war establishment. Both France andItaly had multi‐party governments based on these coalitions untilspring 1947, when they were exploded by Cold War tensions.

Some Communists were more aggressive in asserting their power. In1944 the Limousin resistance movement, led by a dissident PCF branch,established something like their own government. As in Yugoslavia,where Stalinism was insurrectionary in its tactics, it created notworkers’ power, but a bureaucratic and hierarchical state apparatus.

The PCF reined in workers’ struggles wherever they were not merelyan adjunct of the national resistance. The nascent factory committeeswere quickly hollowed out in favour of mere workers’ participation inmanagement bodies. National unity and state power were constantlypromoted over grassroots initiative. In January 1945 PCF leaderMaurice Thorez demanded “one army, one police, one administration”.

Trotskyist critiques often portray Stalinism as revolutionary in wordsbut reformist in deeds. But the problem with Stalinist reformism wasnot just that it sought gradual change in stages. Rather, in occupyingthe structures of state‐level manoeuvre, its strategy and vision ofsocialism reproduced the characteristics of representation undercapitalism. All the initiative had to come from the central stateapparatus, while the mass of workers passively awaited changedelivered on their behalf, unable to define its terms for themselves.

Workers for communism?

France’s POI were isolated but also hopeful as to the prospects for thepost‐war world. They could draw inspiration from the example ofWorld War I, which concluded with a revolutionary wave across theRussian Empire, Germany, Hungary and northern Italy, led by groupswho had been small at the outbreak of hostilities. But if the Wehrmachtwas driven out of France and Italy only thanks to the Allies, anAmerican‐British occupation would surely not provide much of anopportunity to overthrow capitalism. The very existence of the Badoglioand de Gaulle provisional governments was intended to preclude anysuch political vacuum.

However, it was far from only the Trotskyists who had ambitions of arevolutionary outcome to the war. The rank‐and‐file Communist Partymembers who dominated the partisan forces saw cross‐class alliancesas just a tactical episode, later to be followed by revolution. But therewas little perspective of exactly what change was necessary and how itshould come about.

Both countries had a high pitch of labour militancy, with strikes againstdeportations in France and a series of strike waves in Genoa, Milan andTurin. Class exploitation was a centrally important motivation forresisting the repressive occupation régimes. However, as the


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Communist Parties’ hegemony developed, many strikes simply had theintention of disrupting Axis supplies and communications to help theAllies, rather than building workers’ organisation as such.

The Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué stressed the importance of thePCF’s pre‐1939 hegemony to its support in the latter part of World WarII. Given its strong roots in the class, even now operating on theunderground the party could make significant political turns and retainthe trust of millions of passive supporters. Although the Hitler‐Stalinpact had threatened these ties, the PCF adapted to Moscow’s line inrelatively good order. Broué counterposed this to the PCI, whichMussolini had crushed in 1926, relatively early in the history of theCommunist International. Since the party leadership was exiled andhad no effective organisation in Italy, it was unable to impose Stalinistpolitics on the working class. As such, when the workers’ movementarose from the ashes, it would have the politics of the earlyCommunists, not those of Palmiro Togliatti.

However, Broué’s analysis is limited to analysing Stalinist betrayal. IfCommunist Parties dominated resistance movements and thesestruggles did not lead to revolution, it makes sense to ask what theseparties’ failings were; however, we must also ask why they were notsimply bypassed. If the French Trotskyists could take pride in theirprinciples but did not have the numbers to put them into practice: whydidn’t their numbers grow? And if Togliatti stood at odds with thestill‐deep rooted traditions of Italian communism, then why was hisparty not marginalised?

Since Trotskyism came from a split in an already well‐developed Sovietbureaucracy, it places undue responsibility on leaders to change events.It blames the Communist Parties for not being forthright enough to takepower on behalf of the working class. The problem with such anargument is that it portrays workers as passive victims of their leaders’betrayals, rather than active subjects able to cast leaders aside and acton their own behalf.

The Movimento Comunista d’Italia

This question is particularly pertinent to Italy, since the PCI was not theonly major communist organisation in the country. A number of groupsarose in 1942‐43 thanks to local initiatives by communists raising theirheads after years of repression. Many of the important leaders of suchparties had been members of the Communist Party in the 1920s, butexpelled or forced to leave due to fascist repression.

Indeed, in the period following the armistice, the PCI was not even thelargest communist party in the capital. That honour lay with theMovimento Comunista d’Italia (MCd’I), sometimes known after itsnewspaper Bandiera Rossa. In November 1943 it boasted some 2,500members in Rome, whereas the PCI had around 1,700.

The Italian left was strongly marked by differing levels of experience.Any activists under 30 would have been too young to rememberanything other than fascist totalitarianism; older comrades had lived


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through the early years of the PCd’I. This period had involved a degreeof struggle between still‐revolutionary forces and bureaucraticelements, but it was curtailed prematurely by the crushing of the partyby fascism: the exile press and its debates did not reach Italy at all.

Therefore activists rekindling the struggle had an ambiguous traditionto look back to. When the MCd’I formed in late August 1943 it broughtlibertarians together with not only a vanguardist Bordigist tendency,but even outright Stalinists. Some ex‐PCI members literally could notbelieve that Stalin wanted Italian Communists to support Badoglio andthe monarchy, and condemned Togliatti for betraying the Soviet leader!However, differences ran deeper than the resistance strategy: the MCd’Icondemned bureaucracy and technocratic visions of communism.

But apart from its democratic culture, what distinguished the MCd’Ifrom the PCI most was its rejection of the politics of national unity orsupport for the Allies. Instead it highlighted the need to “transform thewar against Nazism into a war against all capitalism”.

Indeed, much unlike the other groups to the left of the PCI, the MCd’Iwas heavily devoted to partisan activity. Its raids on German prisons,weapons depots and troop trains were the envy of Rome, and it playeda major role in galvanising a spirit of resistance in the city. However, itrefused to participate in the National Liberation Committees, calling onthe PCI to break ties with the pro‐capitalist parties and instead join itsown Red Army.

At the same time, the MCd’I had strong cells in certain workplaces.With over seventy firefighters, its activists set a German traintransporting fuel alight, then arranged for crews to hose water onto thepetrol such that it burned all the more fiercely. Its telephone exchangeworkers put dozens of lines out of use; its post and telegram branchmisdirected and sabotaged German mail. Its members at the statestatistics agency ISTAT sabotaged the census, such that it reported 90%of the population were women, disrupting the conscription of men forthe army and labour service. They also produced over a hundredthousand fake ID cards and work permits for political refugees andJews.

The group took bold initiatives: for instance, disrupting a massexecution by shooting all the SS officers and freeing the prisoners;giving out 10,000 leaflets in one fell swoop by co‐ordinating gangs ofthree people to go to each of 120 cinemas at the same time; breakinginto a prison camp and freeing the Soviet POWs. However, this alsovisited heavy repression on the group. Two‐thirds of the MCd’Ileadership had been arrested in December 1942, and when Badoglioreleased political prisoners after the armistice, they were the last to befreed. 186 MCd’I members were killed during the nine‐monthoccupation, over a third of the anti‐fascist total in Rome.

External pressures

So the PCI did not outpace other groups simply because of the prestigeof the USSR or the kudos it had earned fighting the German occupation,


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although certainly it benefited from both these factors. The argumentpresented in its press – whereby the Communists stood for effectiveaction and its leftist rivals were just armchair revolutionaries – was farfrom the reality. Indeed, the PCI parted ways with many of its mostcommitted activists, replaced by weakly politicised new recruits. Twothousand members broke away in Turin to form Stella Rossa; the Naplesfederation also split. The dissident Salerno federation’s newspaper wasbanned by the Allied authorities, and the editor imprisoned: at itsconference in April 1944, with even main PCI leaders present, the‘national unity’ line was forced through by only one vote. Theadvocates of this policy not only relied on such gerrymandering butalso on the promise that this was just a tactical episode, and thatrevolution would soon be back on the agenda.

Many were not prepared to wait until the war was over to start the fightfor workers’ power. But workers and the dispossessed in Romestruggled to build an alternative. The MCd’I’s strongest popular basewas in the borgate, suburbs around Rome where some 80% of residentslived below the poverty line. Populated by southern migrants and slumdwellers forced out of the centre by demolitions, these areas wereseparated from the city by several miles of barren countryside. Largeareas lacked running water or sewage systems. This situation wasworsened further by the war and collapse of the régime’s food supplies,such that by 1944 survival itself became citizens’ most pressing concern.As Silverio Corvisieri wrote: “It is true that hunger pushes the wolffrom its lair, and that a lack of food represents an incentive to rebellion,but this does not deny the fact that there is a limit to what a humanbeing can bear.”

This kind of situation did not augur well for establishing organs ofcounter‐power, encouraging a narrow short‐term focus: ‘get Italy freefrom the Nazis, get the economy going again, and then we can discusssocialism’. While the resurgent working‐class movement did displayimaginative tactics – the Turin tram drivers who went on ‘strike’ byrefusing to take any fares, or the countless examples of raids onstate‐run or Wehrmacht food stores – this did not necessarily build anylasting organisation. Moreover, the Nazis adopted an effective carrot‐and‐stick strategy, which terrorised the masses with hostage‐taking andreprisals for anti‐fascist attacks, at the same time as granting limitedconcessions over rations.

The Allies also exerted pressure on the workers’ movement from theoutside. In Naples, answering Communist Party requests, the Americanmilitary government revoked the licence of the radical trade unionfederation’s newspaper, until its editor was replaced with a PCImember. At Villa Borghese in May 1944 a British Army emissaryarrogantly ordered the MCd’I’s Antonino Poce that there must be nopopular insurrection against the Nazis in Rome; Poce angrily objectedthat a British major had no right to tell communists what to do, butsince this order also meant the PCI would not participate, the BandieraRossa’s forces had no choice but to knuckle under. That same month,when workers in France’s second city Marseille revolted against thefascist authorities over a cut in the bread ration, their general strike,


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gripping the whole city, was crushed by American bombers. 1,752people were killed.

Allied intervention was no idle threat: the western imperialist powerswere determined to set the terms of liberation and the new Europe. InGreece the Allies took sides with the far‐right monarchy andsuppressed the Communist Party‐led resistance movement. On asmaller scale, after the Allied occupation of Rome and thereconstitution of the local state, the police mounted a massive offensiveagainst the borgate. There were a series of armed assaults, rounding upthousands of partisans: in the Quarticciolo district alone there weresome 700 arrests, with residents lined up against the wall at gunpointand revolutionaries forced to identify themselves.

But the MCd’I’s own strategy also imposed limits on its growth.Despite its anti‐capitalist politics, it threw all of its organisational effortsinto fighting the Germans: it even stopped publishing its popularnewspaper in order to focus on military resistance. Moreover, therevolutionary left had no national organisation whereas the PCI waswell‐drilled and effective in propagandising for its line. While the PCImembership in Rome soared – from 300 in July 1943 to 1,700 inNovember 1943 and 39,000 in December 1944 – over this period theMCd’I only grew from 2,500 to 6,000.

Conclusions

1945 was not a repeat of the revolutionary conclusion of World War I,but only a faint echo. The ruling class was far better‐prepared to imposea new order, making concessions to the working class in order to avertrevolution. Stalinism was an active agent of this process. However, it isalso important to understand why those with truly revolutionaryambitions failed to make more of an impression on events.

Here I have just briefly sketched some of the forces involved in theanti‐fascist resistance movements and the communists who rivalledthem from the left. Of course this does not fully explain all theparticular episodes of the war, but rather the reasons why differenttendencies behaved as they did. I feel that these experiences are rich inimportant lessons which transcend the specific dynamics of the period.

One is that there is not much use in having a correct political line if youeither do nothing to put it into action, or else get stuck into activism andleave the political vision by the wayside. Those who rejected Stalinistpolitics of national unity, but themselves supported anti‐Nazi resistancemovements, often fell into this contradiction.

Coalitions have a strong tendency to advance the power of those whoalready stand closest to the hegemonic institutions, since capitalism canaccept these new leaders into its midst while pacifying the resistancemovements from which they emerge.

The greater lesson, however, it that it is no good fighting a particularrégime without at the same time building some form of counter‐powerwith which to replace it: fighting an authoritarian régime in unity with


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bourgeois democrats will simply bring the latter to power. The meansof struggle are replicated in the ends achieved.

Date : March 11, 2011Tags: french resistance, italian partisans, stalinism, the commune,world war IICategories : imperialism, the commune, workersʹ action against war

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a hope unfulfilled. communists in world war ii

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