COMMENT
171
the major belligerents to be done in Norway? And, greatest of all
the surprises of this surprising war, who anticipated that, after
eight months of it, there would not yet have occurred a single
bombing raid by either side on an important city or industrial
district, and that the loss of life among pedestrians run down by
automobiles in the blacked-out cities would be many times the
casualties among the opposing armies on the so-called battle front?
THE "FREE
STATE"
Some one has said that the only war the gen–
erals are ever able to prepare for is the last
war_ But in the present war, this comment on
the notorious "military mind" must be applied to all of us. The
mistake we made was to think of this war in terms of the last war.
We forgot that this war comes after two decades of further develop–
ment, or rather degeneration, of monopoly capitalism-and also
that it comes after the last war. Between 1914 and 1918, the
"classic" capitalism of the nineteenth century completed its self.
destruction. On the ruins has arisen a new structure: the "State
capitalism" of today, in which political and economic control are
centralized in the State apparatus.
In
The Third International After Lenin,
Trotsky draws a
memorable contrast between the slow, organic development of
European capitalism before the war, and the spasmodic violence
of this development since the war, with its sudden reversals, its
lightning changes, its "sharp turns ... not brought about by any
changes in the basic economic factors but by causes and impulses
of a purely superstructural character." Trotsky was writing in
1928.
Since then, the crisis-character of world capitalism has
become ever more pronounced, its contradictions, aggravated by
the depression, reaching such a pitch that the entire economic–
social structure was in danger of being racked to pieces.
It
became
a matter of life and death, for the ruling class, to bring them under
more rigid control. The bourgeoisie turned to the State, which
intervened more and more decisively in the economic process.
Inevitably, the bureaucracies in control of the State apparatus,
whether their ideological costume was the liberal reformism ')f
the New Deal or the reactionary medievalism of the Nazis, have
become increasingly independent of direct class pressure, from
