THE LENINIST MYTH OF IMPERIALISM
655
Whereas the First World War followed a period of rising prices
and expanding international trade, the second broke out ten years
after the beginning of the greatest depression in the history of cap–
italism. In most countries recovery had taken place several years be–
fore the war, and production levels were generally higher than
before the depression. But this recovery had a special character: it
had taken place within each nation. International trade, instead of
continuing to develop as in the preceding century, had not recovered
its pre-1929 volume, and the dominant economy, that of the United
States, had not overcome a condition of underemployment that
seemed chronic. One would have to be blind or fanatic to deny that
there was a relation between the slump of 1929 and the war of 1939.
One of the immediate causes of National Socialism's rise to
power was indisputably the unprecedented economic crisis, with
its
concomitant of millions of unemployed. But the exceptional acuteness
of the crisis, particularly in Germany, cannot be imputed to the
effects of the autonomous evolution of the capitalist system. A se–
quence of events, accidental in relation to world economic develop–
ments (the financial policy of Great Britain, the rate of exchange
for the pound, the use of the gold exchange standard, the pyramid–
ing of credits in the United States, the high level of world prices,
which were made dependent on American prices following the war–
time inflation, the German inflation, the accumulation of foreign
loans, etc.), had brought about the situation of 1929 and the col–
lapse that followed. Without resorting to specious arguments, it
would be possible to show that many of these accidents originated
directly or indirectly in the First World War and its aftermaths.
Nevertheless, it is a fact that the road from Versailles to the Septem–
ber aggression against Poland leads through the depression of 1929.
Assuming that this depression was in a way a consequence of the
Frrst World War, it is even more certain that it was one of the
causes of the second.
Between 1930 and 1933, the Germany of the Weimar regime,
stricken by unemployment, had a choice between three orientations.
She could adapt her domestic economy to world conditions, under–
take total planning under the leadership of the workers' party, which
was inclined to co-operate with Soviet Russia, or undertake planning
under the leadership of the "national" parties, with rearmament
