END OF GERMAN CAPITALISM
201
capable of controlling production on a national scale, arises. In
Germany, where for various wellknown historical reasons, the
problems both of economic crisis and of war economy facing mod–
em capitalism presented themselves in a far more intense form
than in any other advanced capitalist nation, in Germany the solu–
tion has taken on a correspondingly acute form. But in all capi–
talist nations, the bourgeoisie face the same dilemma faced by the
German bourgeoisie: they cannot survive without war, but in order
to make war, they must allow the State the destroy the basic forms
of capitalism. There is only one historical alternative to this devel–
opment: socialism. The fate of our civilization depends on
whether the workingclass is able to turn history into this channel
in
the next period.
This process is going on in all advanced capitalist nations, and
it will continue throughout the next historical period, until and
unless socialist revolution intervenes. This is not a matter of 'just
a war economy' or of a 'long-term investment by the bour–
geoisie'-what a ridiculous shopkeeper's mentality to think in such
terms in a period when the very bases of post-1800 society are
dissolving before our eyes! For the great fact of the epoch we are
now entering on is that war is no longer an interruption of the
'normal' peacetime development of capitalism, but has become, as
Trotsky came to recognize in the last months of his life,
the normal
mode of existence of our society.
As he wrote in his last article:
"We should understand that the life of this society, politics, every–
thing will be based upon war.... In this epoch, every great ques–
tion, national or international, will be resolved with arms." The
new 'military program' he proposed, in taking the army as well as
the factory, as a
normal
arena of class struggle henceforth, recog–
nizes pragmatically-however reluctant Trotsky was to make any
explicit revisions of basic theory-that the old concepts of class
struggle must be reshaped.
We should read again, with the Nazi economy in mind, Marx's
description of the death agony of capitalism: "The monopoly of
capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has
sprung up and flourished along with it and under it. Centralization
of the means of production and socialisation of labor at last reach
a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integu–
ment.
The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist
