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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 25, 22 June 1940, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The swift victory of Hitler on the continent of Europe is but the beginning of fresh agonies for a tortured world. More than borders and nations are being obliterated. It is the era of “democratic” capitalism and a multi-state system that is finally being stamped into the dust forever. Had its destruction been accomplished by workers’ revolution the world to come would look different indeed.
But now out of the mad scramble of the victor and his satellites for the spoils there will emerge before long the principal features of the war world of an early tomorrow – a world divided into three vast continental blocs more or less continuously at conflict within themselves and with each other.
To a conquered Europe, Hitler will seek to bring full-blown the totalitarian machinery of organization already so developed in Germany. The working classes of Western Europe would be reduced to the helotry of the Fascist system. Capital control would pass into the hands of the ever-narrowing group of super-finance capitalists knit closely with the tops of the totalitarian regime. The Germans will doubtless dominate this group but will not be alone in it. Capitalists in Belgium, France, and before long in Britain (for Britain cannot long withstand a German attack now), will readily come forward to accept whatever degree of participation Hitler allows them in the totalitarianized exploitation of wealth and labor. With this conscripted economy – assuming it will have time to be consolidated and extended throughout the continent – the new masters can and will turn to the problem of the rest of the world’s markets, resources, and labor.
While Hitler thus brings into being this grotesquely distorted image of a United States of Europe, the United States of America will be engaged to its neck in trying to become the United States of the Americas. The American capitalist class realizes today that under the present form of organization it would be totally incapable of withstanding the economic assaults upon its markets in Latin America of a Germanized Europe and a Japanized Asia. It must – and speedily – establish no less a totalitarian control over this hemisphere.
Roosevelt’s project for an “economic union” of the Americas shows how acutely this is realized now in Washington. The June 18 New York Times bluntly says that “the plan envisages almost (!) totalitarian control over exports of surplus commodities of North and South American countries.”
This plan or something probably even more sweeping will be imposed upon all American nations, by force if necessary, if U.S. capitalism has its way. And an inevitable concomitant is the establishment of “almost” totalitarian control pf American economy itself. The sheer adaption of the American industrial and trade structure to the new situation will in itself mean a gigantic convulsion and will in itself lead swiftly to advanced stages of the totalitarian method – a method that means ruthless depression of living standards and equally ruthless repression of all working class resistance thereto.
This major crisis – immeasurably hastened by the unexpectedly swift debacle of the Allies – imposes upon U.S. imperialism a strictly hemisphere strategy for the time being. This leaves Japanese imperialism with hands free to complete, if it can, creation of the third great continental bloc.
Japan has already begun the process of moving in on the Far Eastern spoils of Hitler’s victory, giving every sign of assuming to itself the first prerogative of deciding the fate of French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies – and perhaps before long, of British Malaya, and even of India.
The Soviet Union would lie between a Germanized Europe and a Japanized Asia and without a revolutionary revival on a world scale would face the danger of being broken in two between them.
What we all face in the coming years are titanic collisions between these vast continental imperialist blocs or their breakup within through risings of the workers and the colonial peoples. The first will lead the peoples of the world deeper into the abyss. The second will lead them out to the dawning of a new, a socialist civilization.
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