The Second World War

In the Introduction to the previous section, on the APCF and THE CIVIL WAR IN SPAIN, we saw how the APCF, perhaps because of its anarchist orientation at that time, fell into the trap of supporting one faction of the ruling class - the democratic capitalists of the Republican Government - against another - the fascist capitalists who sought to overthrow the government. Although for the bourgeoisie the civil war in Spain was a success as a forerunner to the much greater conflict which soon followed it, the APCF itself, as the articles in this section show, managed not to be taken in be the mystification of anti-fascism a second time around.

In Resist War!, the first article in this section, the APCF set out the position which it adhered to throughout 1939-45: the cause of war is capitalism, therefore the only way war can be ended for good is by the overthrow of the capitalist system; this must be a world-wide revolution, since all the capitalist states are aggressors from the working class's point of view, and the workers can gain nothing from identifying their own interests with those of their own or any other ruling class.

The APCF's revolutionary defeatist stance - stated succinctly again in the short article on India - marked it out as virtually unique among the political groupings of the time in Britain, and was another one of the many aspects of its politics which clearly separated it from the so-called socialists of the Communist Party and the Trotskyist sects.

The Communist Party's first instinct, in September 1939, had been to support the war as anti-fascist, but within a month, on orders from the Communist International in Russia, they had overturned this position and now opposed the war as imperialist. Later still, in June 1941, after Russia itself had entered the war, the CP reversed its position again and once more took to supporting the war as anti-fascist. The CP's line from June 1941 onwards, and its role in helping the war effort, are described and criticised in this section in The Second Front and Freedom Of The Press.

As for the Trotskyists, they simply tail-ended every twist and turn of CP policy; whatever disagreements they may have had with the ruling Stalinist gang, in the final analysis they regarded Russia as a "workers state" worth defending, and were therefore bound to the interests of Russian state capitalism every bit as much as the CP was.

The APCF's analysis of Russia is worth mentioning briefly at this point. In 1935 the APCF had published a pamphlet called The Bourgeois Role Of Bolshevism, which was a translation of the Theses on Bolshevism written by the Group of International Communists (GIC) in Holland. In this text the GIC argued that the 1917 Russian revolution had been a capitalist revolution in which the Bolshevik party had played the "bourgeois role" which the indigenous Russian bourgeoisie had been too weak to fulfil itself. However, despite publishing the Dutch group's Theses, the APCF did not share the GIC's views on this issue. The APCF's own position on 1917 was the same as that set out by James Kennedy in the article, Dictatorship, reprinted in the first section. In contrast to the GIC, which had proceeded from a localist, country-by-country point of view, Kennedy analysed the failure of the Russian revolution from a world-historical perspective. The revolution in Russia, Kennedy argued, had been a proletarian revolution, but, against the expectations of the Bolsheviks, it had not spread beyond Russia. It was the isolation of the revolutionary workers in Russia which within a few years led to the establishment of capitalism there, under state control.

Whatever its precise origins, anyway, from around 1925 onwards the APCF had begun to argue that it was state capitalism which existed in Russia, and not any form of communism or "workers' state", so in 1939 the APCF was able to see clearly that from the point of view of the working class the Russian system was essentially no different from Britain, the USA, Germany, Japan, or wherever.

The APCF's opposition to all existing capitalist states therefore included not supporting Russia in any way.

In the APCF's view, the existing nation-states were not only all equally capitalist, but also all equally totalitarian, or at least tending to become so, in the sense that the state was now bringing under its control ever-wider aspects of economic, social and political life.

This view was in part a rejection of bourgeois propaganda which portrayed the Second World War as a struggle between democracy and fascism. The APCF argued that the war was a struggle between 'democratic' and 'fascist' capitalists, and that democracy and fascism were nothing more than forms of domination which the ruling class could adopt or discard according to the needs of capital at any given time.

However, the APCF was also making a wider observation: that totalitarian state control was the political form which capitalism was universally tending to adopt, and that the war was speeding up this process. This is essentially the point of view on which Icarus's article on Events and Trends is based.

The APCF's view was linked to a theory of capitalist 'decadence', some aspects and implications of which are discussed elsewhere in this pamphlet in the sections on PRINCIPLES AND TACTICS and PARTY AND CLASS. The political features of decadence are touched on in the first section, in the articles To Anti-parliamentarians and The People's Convention. Briefly, it is argued i~ these articles that democracy was the political form appropriate to capitalism in its ascendant era of free competition, while totalitarian state control was the political form appropriate to the decadent era of monopoly capitalism.

Indeed, believing that parliamentary democracy was increasingly obsolescent, and that the issue of parliamentary activity was therefore of rapidly decreasing importance, the APCF proceeded to argue that to continue to call itself 'anti-parliamentarian' was now anachronistic. Consequently, in October 1941 the APCF changed its old name and called itself instead the Workers' Revolutionary League.

If the inevitable tendency towards state capitalism was developing as a general response to the needs of capital in its period of 'decadence' and permanent crisis, it was also being greatly accelerated by the specific needs of capital during wartime; as the articles War and Fascism and FA Ridley's The Historic Consequences of the War argue, 'democratic' capitalism could only fight 'fascist' capitalism by becoming 'fascist' itself.

The APCF was certainly not short of evidence to sustain this argument, since a whole battery of legislation was passed in Britain during the war designed to give the state control over practically every aspect of economic, social and political life.

Military conscription was introduced immediately, with all men aged between 18 and 41 liable to be called-up under the National Service (Armed Forces) Act. One of the APCF's members, Willie McDougall, was for a while during the war chairman of the Glasgow and West of Scotland branch of the No-Conscription League, an organisation which arranged legal advice and mock tribunals for war-resisters preparing to appear before the Conscientious Objectors Tribunals. Many revolutionaries were imprisoned, some repeatedly, for refusing to comply with the conscription acts.

Also in May 1940, the Emergency Powers Act (EPA) was extended to empower the Minister of Labour to direct workers and set wages, hours and conditions of work in "key" establishments. Around the same time, the Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order (known as Order 13O5~) was introduced, which made strikes illegal unless a dispute had first exhausted, without reaching any settlement, a stipulated procedure of negotiation involving the Ministry of Labour and a National Arbitration Tribunal.

The Essential Works Order (EWO), 1941, introduced further state control over labour power. Under this legislation a worker was obliged to give 7 days' notice of resignation to his or her boss and to the National Service Officer, whose permission had to be obtained before the worker involved could leave his or her job. So rarely was this permission granted that virtually the only way workers could leave workplaces controlled by the EWO was through getting the sack. The EWO also legislated for the prosecution of workers for absenteeism and for failure to carry out any reasonable order issued by the boss.

By the late summer of 1941 the reserve army of unemployed had been virtually completely reintegrated into production (or military service). Consequently, in December 1941 measures were introduced allowing for the conscription of women aged 20-30: mobile women (e.g. those without family ties or responsibilities) could be directed to any area of the country where there was a labour shortage, while immobile women were directed to employment nearer home. Women entered the labour force in increasing numbers from this point on, when the possibilities of increasing output through sheer weight of numbers had begun to be exhausted, thus necessitating changes in the actual techniques and organisation of production (e.g. dilution of skilled work).

One effect of legislation of the sort outlined here was that by the end of August 1943, 14072 men and 3067 women in England and Wales had been prosecuted for of fences which would not have been punishable before the war; of these totals, 1255 men and 199 women had been imprisoned.

At the beginning of 1944 the Bevin Boys scheme was announced, involving the conscription of one in ten young men into coalmining rather than into the armed forces. This provoked the apprentices strikes of March-April 1944, which were in turn followed by the introduction of yet tougher legislation in the form of Regulation 1AA, allowing for sentences of 5 years penal servitude and/or a £500 fine to be imposed on "any person who declared, instigated, made anyone take part in, or otherwise acted in furtherance of a strike amongst workers engaged in essential services".

Oppressive measures such as these, and their consequences for the working conditions of the working class in Britain during the war, are mentioned in several of the articles in this section, particularly War and Fascism. The striking similarity between the position of workers in 'democratic' Britain and fascist Germany can be seen by comparing the legislation described above with the measures applying in Germany which Icarus mentions in Axis Workers Show Way. All things considered, it becomes immediately apparent why the APCF should have thought the following remark about war made by James Connolly in October 1915 so pertinent as to reprint it in Solidarity 27 years later: "In the name of freedom from militarism it establishes military rule; battling for progress it abolishes trial by jury; and waging war for enlightened rule it tramples the freedom of the press under the heel of a military despot". (Solidarity June-July 1942).

Despite all this, workers in Britain were not completely cowed by the onslaught of bourgeois coercion and propaganda, as the following figures illustrate:

YEAR NUMBER OF STOPPAGES NUMBER OF WORKERS INVOLVED

1939 940 337 000

1940 922 299 000

1941 1251 360 000

1942 1303 456 000

1943 1785 557 000

1944 2194 821 000

1945 2293 531 000

However it is important that these figures are interpreted realistically. Most workers in Britain did support the war, in the belief that they were fighting fascism. What many of them were not prepared to tolerate was the resort to fascist methods at home in order to prosecute the war. Workers would readily resist their bosses and the state in order to protect their rights, wages and conditions -but they did so within an overall political framework bounded by the bourgeois mystification of antifascism.

All the same, even this economistic struggle had certain aspects which revolutionaries found encouraging, since workers who were prepared to defend their basic working and living conditions found their struggles opposed not only by the bosses and the state, but also by organisations widely considered to be on the side of the workers, such as the Labour and Communist Parties and the trade unions. The lesson of this, that workers had to organise their own struggles themselves, outside and against capitalist party and trade union organisations, is elaborated by Icarus in The Turning Tide.