From my understanding, the premise of revolutionary defeatism involves supporting the defeat of your own bourgeois government. I am an American. I am perfectly fine with that when it comes to things like US military actions in the Middle East. However, there has been one enemy the United States has had that is definitely quite different, Nazi Germany. It's pretty much universally believed among the left that Nazi Germany was bad and should never be supported (and that's for a GOOD reason).
But how does revolutionary defeatism square in with something like that?
Revolutionary defeatism is not scripture, it's not to be followed at all times. Lenin did not create holy sacraments to be venerated, he was a man who forged strategies for the time he lived. During WWI revolutionary defeatism was the "correct" stance. During WWII it probably wouldn't have been. Just like how communists supported the Union in the American Civil War because it was destroying slavery, even though the Union was a capitalist settler colony nation-state, we have to be flexible and respond to the present conditions we're in.
Yeah US communists did support the USA in helping the soviets against the germans. My go to example would be Woody Guthrie.
I need to read more to talk authoritatively on the issue, but I'm pretty sure this is the exact kind of thing Mao was getting into when he spoke about primary and secondary contradictions. Even though the ultimate goal is to dismantle capitalism, driving out Imperial Japan was a higher priority in the short term than defeating China's domestic bourgeoisie. So yeah, there are counterexamples to Lenin's line during the Bolshevik revolution.
One point all these theorists hammer on is the need for practice to reflect the conditions. We can't just reenact 1917 like a cargo cult.
It’s about hierarchy of needs and planning.
Defeatism is only a good idea if the winner would push things forward towards goals.
facts. Marxism is a method of analysis and planning first and a doctrine second.
Anti-fascist partisan struggle in occupied countries, Poland, France, Balkans etc
I would even add Korea in there because while they were anti-colonial, people like Kim Il-Sung led a guerilla resistance movement that very much resembled the European partisan struggles.
In the case of fascism, communists should form a popular front with liberals to destroy the fascists.
The communists and KMT allied with each other - perhaps forcefully - to defeat the Japanese because otherwise there would be no China to fight over.
Resistance against Nazis throughout Europe did find strange coalitions of communists, liberals, and even conservatives. But as you can see, after WWII liberals never sided with the communists during liberation movements. Usually they were working with the west to undermine everything at home and fascism was usually the result
It seems like it has succeeded in the modern US as well. Though I’ve seen some theories that we need to reindustrialize the country for any meaningful organizing to takes place
If we stsayed out of it the soviets would have taken Germany when it ran out of meth. And probably London.
Our subsequent creation of nato, and colonization of Japan did far more harm than any good we did in europe
yea this is the key point really. arguably if the USA had been plagued by rampant saboteurs and work stoppages at home, the Soviets take Europe and accept Japan's surrender and the partitions of Korea and Vietnam don't happen
EDIT: thinking about it more I wanted to acknowledge that you have to consider that nobody really knew that the nazis would lose at the time, and that's a very consequential thing to misjudge even if it looks like they are losing.
in support of this I am going to include this pasta about the pacific theater
As much as the erasure of the Soviet involvement in WW2, and more importantly, them being the primary reason the fascists were defeated is terrible, China's equivalent is so much worse. The primary reason Japan was able to be defeated when they were, and possibly at all, and the primary driving force of their defeat, was absolutely China.
"75-80% of Japan's military was trapped in China for most of the war. Nationalist Chinese resistance to these Japanese advances was ineffective, primarily because the Nationalist leadership was still more interested in holding their forces in reserve for a future struggle with the Communists than in repelling the Japanese. By contrast, the Communists, from their base in north-central China, began an increasingly effective guerrilla war against the Japanese troops in Manchuria and North China. The Japanese needed large numbers of troops to maintain their hold on the immense Chinese territories and populations they controlled. Of the 51 infantry divisions making up the Japanese Army in 1941, 38 of them, comprising about 750,000 men, were stationed in China (including Manchuria). Including the strong Japanese Kwantung Army stationed in Northeast China, were pinned down. Thus Japan was able to employ only 10 or 11 divisions in the Pacific theatre, with the other five divisions stationed on Japanese islands." (Britannica)
"The scale of China's resistance destroyed Japan's strategy. At the time of Pearl Harbour 80% of Japan's troops were in China. They could never be released to form the Pacific perimeter against the US due to China's resistance. Japan launched repeated attacks in China including in 1944 using 500,000 troops in the Ichi-Go offensive. This was almost twenty five times the 21,000 Japanese troops that fought the US at Iwo-Jima or more than six times the 76,000 regular Japanese troops that defended Okinawa. Given appalling US casualties in both battles if Japan had been able to release hundreds of thousands of troops from China to defend its Pacific perimeter the total Allied victory in Asia's war at worst might not have been achieved, and at best would have involved far greater US causalities.
Unlike Hollywood China is not seeking any pre-eminent position. It states every country that participated in the greatest military conflict in human history, the World War to defeat Japanese aggression and Nazism, played a vital role. The sole reason the present generation enjoys relative peace and prosperity, and are not called upon to show the same courage as the generation of 1931-45, is because of that gigantic earlier sacrifice. But regarding such immense events there are two great truths. Individually the courage of combatants of every country participating in the great defeat of aggression and fascism was equal, and that in that struggle no country played a greater role than China." (China daily)
Japan sustained losses and casualties totalling 1.5 million in China and at the end of the war, China accepted the surrender of 1.28 million Japanese soldiers.
By comparison, the allied American, British, and Canadian forces killed, wounded and captured a total of 1.25 million of the Japanese forces. Which would mean 70% of Japanese forces were killed and captured by China. While the other allies combined only eliminated 30%. (WW2 database) (China daily) (Wikipedia)
The Soviets were the sword that decapitated the Nazis, (and to an extent the Japanese) while the China was the shield that held back/trapped the Japanese. 35,000,000+ Chinese and Soviets died holding back/crushing the fascist hordes. We owe everything to their sacrifices.
The second Sino-Japanese War is probably one of the fronts it seems like most Westerners don't know about. While we erase the actual Soviet Involvement in the war, we still seem to know about battle such as Stalingrad and the fact they took Berlin. Most westerners don't even know about the Chinese theater and battles such as Shanghai.
They call it the Pacific theater to ignore the land war, in American classrooms it’s “island-hopping, nukes, and we won!”
and the nazi machine would have killed a lot more Jews and other groups they hated in the extra time they had
yeah that has to be factored in as well. the Wannsee Conference wasn't until 1942, but even a delay of a few months is a staggering human toll
It's 50-50. Yes, but look at how many lives have been lost because we created the Atlantic power block. I dunno if one can be longtermist about this kinda thing. There is no way to do a counterfactual. We simply wouldn't be looking at unchecked species endings global warming if the US wasn't there to claim sole super power status after the war.
the US didn't have to create nato or do containment doctrine, etc and while you could surely anticipate the capitalists doing some cold war shit i don't think it's reasonable to expect any specifics or the full extent of the terror, especially before Truman.
