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It is becoming increasingly clear that a major turning point has been reached in the second World War—not in the sense of any alteration of the grand strategy of the principal imperialist contenders, nor a definitive change in their relative positions, but in the much more portentous sense that large masses of the workers in a number of important countries are taking the first steps along the road of conscious opposition to the imperialists and their war after years of more or less passive acquiescence. We are witnessing today the first mass upsurges of the tortured peoples, the first movement toward a revolutionary solution of those fundamental social problems which the war has accentuated to a point where even mere survival has ceased to be compatible with the present order of things for millions of the earth’s inhabitants. The masses, regarded as just so much cannon fodder by the “democrats” and fascists alike, have begun to intervene actively and independently.
The overthrow of Mussolini by the Italian people, with the proletariat in the van of the movement, proved to be the starting point of the upsurge. The war-weary masses of Italy wanted peace and an end to the gangster capitalist regime which had brought them so much woe. But the ouster of Mussolini’s government has proved to be but a single step along the road to peace. Italy has been truncated and torn apart by the rival imperialist camps and converted into a major battlefield. In the North, the workers struggle with the highest courage and determination against the Nazi oppressors. Those in the South find themselves in opposition to the “democrats,” who are bent on fostering the hated rule of Badoglio and his King, in which the masses rightly see a continuation of the old intolerable order thinly disguised by a slight shift at the top.
Events themselves are posing for the Italian workers the urgent question of the next step. The overthrow of Mussolini, although an event of the greatest progressive significance, has solved none of the burning problems confronting the workers and peasants of Italy. There is no peace and very little bread. While the workers in the North give battle to the military juggernaut of the Nazi imperialists, those in the South have already learnt that neither peace nor bread can be secured through attachment to London and Washington. In both North and South the invading armies are advertised as “liberators.” Yet both are in league with the Italian bourgeoisie, intent upon stifling the popular will and preventing any fundamental social change. Realization of this important fact will hasten the formation of a revolutionary party which, at the head of the aroused masses, will project Italy along the path of the struggle for socialism.
HARBINGERS OF THE APPROACHING STORM
Throughout Europe the rumblings of the coming revolutionary storm can be heard—above all in France, where the clouds of civil war have long been gathering. Little is needed now to explode the rotted structure of bourgeois rule. Foremost among the worries of the “democracies” is the fear, amounting almost to certainty, that their invasion of the Continent will touch off an explosion in France and elsewhere and that they may be unable to quench the resulting revolutionary conflagration.
Nor are things going so well for the ruling class within the “democracies” themselves. In Britain last month more than 100,000 coal miners went out on strike and succeeded in winning concessions from their employers. The fact that they tied up a large section of a vital industry in determined disregard of government warnings that such a strike might have disastrous effects on maturing plans for the invasion of Europe, is of the highest significance. It means that at least a very large section of the British working class is no 1ongr subject to the hypnosis of war propaganda and is prepared resolutely to fight for labor’s rights in the very course of the war. The misleaders of British labor, the hardened and cynical labor lieutenants of the capitalist class, remain united in coalition with the Tories, but the rank-and-file of the workers are breaking away and taking to the road of independent struggle.
The same phenomenon is to be observed in Australia, where thousands of coal miners struck in defiance of the conservative union leaders and the government. Even when the government attempted grand intimidation by drafting some 500 miners into the armed forces, the strikers held firm until they had gained most of their demands.
DEVELOPMENTS IN CANADA AND USA
In Canada, large masses of workers and farmers who previously have followed the capitalist political parties are streaming into the Canadian Commonwealth Federation at a remarkable rate. The CCF is led by a reformist, wishy-washy, middle-of-the-road coterie not one whit more advanced than the conservative leadership of the British and Australian labor parties. But the mass movement in its direction is nonetheless very significant. It means that the Canadian masses are breaking definitively with the avowed capitalist parties and embarking on the road of independent working class political action. The extent of the movement may be gauged by the fact that as early as last August, in the Ontario elections, the CCF secured 34 of the 85 seats in the provincial legislature. It was the first time in the history of eastern Canada that the workers turned so sharply against the capitalist parties. At the same time, the Canadian Congress of Labor (CIO) has increased its membership from 55,000 in 1940 to more than 250,000 at the present time.
In this country the launching of a labor party in Michigan, heart of the industrial Midwest, under the auspices of CIO unions representing 225,000 workers, holds the promise for the commencement of a general breakaway by American labor from capitalist politics.
STRIKES, HUNGER RIOTS IN JAPAN
Even in imperialist Japan the monolithic war structure is beginning at last to crack. Reports by Japanese prisoners of war in Chungking tell of strikes by workers and hunger riots by peasants in the very shadow of the imperial palace in Tokyo. The strike movement got under way even before the extension of the war to the Pacific area, but the workers, without benefit of organization, were driven back to work literally at the point of the bayonet. That was early in 1941, Toward the end of 1942 there were more strikes, including walkouts from armament plants in the Tokyo district. And now, only recently, the strike movement has risen to a new high. For this information we are indebted to Japanese newspapers which somehow got out from behind the wall of the Japanese censorship. Among other things, they tell of a big demonstration in Tokyo’s Ueno Park attended by some 40,000 people. Police and gendarmes fired on the demonstrators, who were demanding increased food rations, wounding 37, of whom eight later died. A fact of the greatest significance is that this demonstration—according to the Japanese press—was organized by the “Workers Party.” Thus, in the teeth of the military dictatorship and in defiance of a government ban on all political parties, the Japanese workers have once more created a party of their own. Also, the same sources reveal, the Japanese Farmers’ Union, long emasculated by government control, has been revived as a fighting organization of the peasants and has figured in recent food riots in Kagoshima and. other districts of Japan.
These developments in far-separated parts of the globe, occurring simultaneously, are symptomatic of the growing war-weariness of the masses, of a desire to find a way out of the bloody morass. The further piling up of horrors and tragedies, acceleration of the mass murder of the peoples, the increasing devastation, deepening privation and misery—all inevitable as long as capitalism is permitted to live—will serve to translate what is now largely a mass mood of discontent into the positive coin of conscious mass opposition to the capitalist warmakers and their criminal plans. As has happened so often in history, war and revolution will become intertwined in the not far distant future.
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