/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

the socialist movement by that time had liquidated itself via subordination to the ussr and the ussr did not want to fight the nazis until they were forced to

>>2807342
This is not the full story. The USSR ordered Communist movements in places like the UK to actively HARM THE WAR EFFORT. What the fuck could possibly be the justification for this. That's another thing, why is it that even though the USSR knew war with Nazi Germany was inevitable they still ordered other Communist movements to weaken the allies? The early French resistance movement was largely made up of CONSERVATIVES because Socialists weren't interested in fighting. How the fuck does this not bother anybody else?

>>2807344
they perceived the allies as a bigger threat, and didn't think the nazis would attack them any time soon

>>2807346
Yeah, this is what I'm talking about. This would be considered an absolutely unacceptable position to hold in the modern day. If I started a thread titled "The Allies were a bigger threat than the Axis" I'd get fucking banned. This was just the common ideology of Socialists from 1939 to 1941. This is what I'm trying to address, this abject failure to take the right side until the USSR basically ordered them to.

>you know what's the problem with the USSR in WW2? It didn't ally with western imperialism hard enough
No pretty sure the problem was allying with Nazis then western imperialism afterwards and abolishing the Comintern to appease them

>liberalism and fascism as antithetical
Read the Great Alibi

you are renegade kautsky, you worship FDR, you hate communist program, you destroy proletarian party and replace it with socdem party
>>2807355
>>2807388
this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Commercial_Agreement_(1940)

Between January 1940 and date of the German invasion, the USSR exported goods of a total estimated value of 597.9 million Reichsmarks to Germany. German deliveries amounted to 437.1 million Reichsmarks. The agreements continued German–Soviet economic relations and resulted in the delivery of large amounts of raw materials to Germany, including over 820,000 metric tons (900,000 short tons; 810,000 long tons) of oil, 1,500,000 metric tons (1,700,000 short tons; 1,500,000 long tons) of grain and 130,000 metric tons (140,000 short tons; 130,000 long tons) of manganese ore.

Raw materials that Germany had obtained from the Soviets through the 1940 agreement supported the German war effort against the Soviet Union from 1941. In particular, the German stocks of rubber and grain would not have sufficed to support the invasion of the USSR if the Soviets had not already exported these products to Germany.

>>2807455
MLibs shy away from this but avthentic ultras realize this was historically progressive

>>2807459
You're being dogmatic and undialectical. Sending millions of tons of raw materials to people who have been openly vowing to exterminate you for decades is just smart geopolitics.

>>2807469
>Sending millions of tons of raw materials to people who have been openly vowing to exterminate you for decades
<they fail anyways
kek common soviet W

>It is the constant aching pain in Socialist anti-interventionist "NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR" advocacy. "You said the same thing in 1939!" is the inevitable response from Liberals whenever we oppose the latest imperialist war.
Tbh I don't really hear this argument too often from libs when it comes to opposing current wars. It's not as if liberal states didn't have their own appeasement phase in the 1930s, during which time communists were leading the charge against Fascism in Germany, Spain, and elsewhere. I'd say that most people are more likely to invoke Chamberlain as the face of appeasement rather than Molotov-Ribbentrop, but that's just my experience. Molotov-Ribbentrop is more commonly invoked by liberals to prove the supposed ideological affinity between communism and fascism, not so much to attack communists as appeasers.
>So, I ask you: why did we fuck that up?

1. Prior to Operation Barbarossa, WW2 (at least in Europe and arguably even the Pacific) was legitimately an inter-imperialist war, and without any knowledge of the full scope of Nazi imperial ambitions or genocidal intent, it would have been pretty easy to argue that they were no greater threat to socialism or the worker's movement than the Western Allies. This would have especially been the case after Molotov-Ribbentrop was signed and it looked like the Nazis were shelving their anti-communist crusade to focus on rival imperialist powers. These views were clearly mistaken, but I think it's easy to see how reasonable people in that context could have held them, especially since the clearest parallel was WW1 where communists rightly did not take a side.
   
   
2. The Comintern was pretty clearly an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. While there is an obvious logic to this (the loss of the USSR at that time would have been a far bigger disaster for socialism than any downsides that came from subordination of the International to Moscow), it still led to some pretty obvious mistakes. Communist parties abroad flip flopped in ways that made it clear they were more concerned with Soviet geopolitical interests than class struggle in their own countries, which hurt their legitimacy. This led to some completely ridiculous orders coming out of Moscow, like telling communists in 1939-1940 not to resist German occupation in countries like Belgium or Yugoslavia because the Soviets didn't want to damage relations with Germany. I think this was a far bigger mistake than underestimating the German threat and not taking a side initially, since it wasn't based on a reasonable assessment of the available information but pure opportunism on the part of the Soviets. The essentially told communists in occupied countries to give up their neighbours to the gas chambers, sacrifice their national self-determination, and accept the extermination of the worker's movement in their countries to serve Soviet interests.
   

>Is the cause of that fuck-up perhaps still around and waiting to push the Left into neutrality on yet another extremely cut and dry war coming in the future?
I don't think I've seen anything like that in some time, apart from maybe some fringe ultra positions on conflicts like Iran or Palestine which are rare among self-described socialists. If anything I think the opposite problem is far more prevalent, with supposed socialists supporting their governments in wars where they ought to be supporting the other side, or at least remain neutral and practice revolutionary defeatism (e.g. Ukraine). When you look at the whole of socialist history from the Second International to the present, this problem is far more common than remaining neutral in conflicts where we really ought to pick a side.

>>2807667
>without any knowledge of the full scope of Nazi imperial ambitions or genocidal intent
<Hey guys it's me, Adolf Hitler. I'm going to rape and kill everybody and commit genocide and stuff. Listen closely, because this quote will be very famous: "If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!". Probably going to put that quote on posters and stuff, just to make sure everybody knows what my intentions are. I got the idea from while I was on LeftyPol. Everybody who agrees, reach for my LeftyPol T-shirt and say "Sieg Heil!"
<Awesome, very nice. Don't forget to subscribe and smash that mf like button!
It could not have possibly been that difficult to know what he was going to do, right?

History doesn’t exist, only the present exists, stop being prisoner to stories you have no way to verify

>>2807698
>It could not have possibly been that difficult to know what he was going to do, right?
Prior to Hitler both Germany and most other capitalist powers had committed similar atrocities, on similar scales, using similar means. This is after the Namibian genocide, the Belgian Congo, Manifest Destiny, multiple famines in British India, and centuries of conquest, slaughter, and theft by the very powers which were now opposing Germany and posturing as defenders of humanity and civilization. Belgium alone killed around 10 million people in the Congo, which is comparable to the number the Nazis killed in the camps. The concentration camp, eugenics, and racial hygiene laws had all already been implemented in America, the British Empire, and elsewhere. Brutal white terrors aiming at the eradication of socialism had already been unleashed in numerous countries, often with the support or participation of those same Western powers. The Nazis weren't really all that special when it came to this. The only two things that really set them apart were systematization of the killing (i.e. it was far more meticulously organized, planned, executed, and documented than what preceded it), as well as the fact that Europeans rather than colonized people were the primary victims. In fact were it not for the invasion of the USSR, you could potentially argue that the Nazis were no more reactionary than Britain, France, and America.

>why is it that even though the USSR knew war with Nazi Germany was inevitable they still ordered other Communist movements to weaken the allies?

If it makes you feel better the USSR had been helping the germans violate the treaty of Versailles since like 1925.