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Review

Ernest Mandel did not write The Meaning of the Second World War to comfort anyone. The book opens with a dedication to Trotskyist martyrs — “above all to the heroic unknown editors of Czerwony Sztandar who published their Trotskyist underground paper in the Warsaw Ghetto until the last days of the uprising” — and never lets the reader forget that it is an instrument of political argument, not a detached historical survey. Against the then-prevalent and still recurring image of a “good war” fought to crush fascism, Mandel delivers a densely argued, statistically armored brief that the conflict was, at its root, an inter-imperialist struggle for world hegemony waged within the brutal logic of monopoly capitalism. It was also, simultaneously, a just war of Soviet self-defense, a Chinese and Asian anti-colonial liberation, and European national resistance — but he insists that the “anti-fascist” unity that subsumed all these into a single moral narrative amounted to little more than class collaboration designed to contain the revolutionary potential the war itself unleashed.

The book’s central contention is that the war resulted from the irreconcilable contradiction between the internationalization of productive forces and their organization within competing nation-states. The pre-war chain of working-class defeats — Shanghai in 1927, the rise of fascism, the Spanish republic’s collapse, the French Popular Front’s self-liquidation — was not just context but precondition: counter-revolution cleared the ground for a renewed imperialist bloodletting. The United States emerged as the hegemon, its economic and military power so overwhelming that the war’s outcome was foreordained by industrial capacity long before the first shots were fired. Mandel thereby positions himself squarely in the Marxist materialist tradition, drawing on Lenin’s theory of monopoly capitalism, Trotsky’s law of uneven and combined development, and an extension of Clausewitz via Franz Mehring that treats war as the continuation of class politics by other means.

Mandel’s most analytically distinctive move is his taxonomy of five overlapping wars, a polemic against the simplifying piety of “the anti-fascist war” that gives him leverage to distinguish the character of each theater:

the Second World War must be grasped as a combination of five different conflicts: 1. An inter-imperialist war fought for world hegemony and won by the United States … 2. A just war of self-defence by the Soviet Union against an imperialist attempt to colonize the country … 3. A just war of the Chinese people against imperialism which would develop into a socialist revolution. 4. A just war of Asian colonial peoples … for national liberation and sovereignty, which in some cases (e.g. Indochina) spilled over into socialist revolution. 5. A just war of national liberation fought by populations of the occupied countries of Europe, which would grow into socialist revolution (Yugoslavia and Albania) or open civil war (Greece, North Italy).

This is not mere labeling; it is the book’s analytical spine. The Soviet Union’s self-defense is recognized as just, even as Stalin’s regime is condemned for its cynical realpolitik — the secret protocol of 1939, the purge of Tukhachevsky that crippled the Red Army, the deliberate starvation of the Warsaw uprising in 1944. The Chinese revolution and anti-colonial uprisings across Asia are treated as legitimate wars of national and social emancipation, but Mandel is equally careful to underline Japanese imperialism’s own racist violence toward Koreans, Chinese, and other Asians, faulting those who would romanticize Tokyo’s anti-Western rhetoric. The European resistance movements, especially those in Yugoslavia, Greece, and northern Italy, had already begun to transform into civil wars or socialist revolutions by 1943 — a development that the Allied command and the Kremlin alike worked furiously to contain.

The book’s middle chapters marshal an imposing volume of quantitative evidence to demonstrate that the Axis could not win. Drawing on the industrial-output statistics of Hillman, Petzina, Milward, and Kaldor, Mandel shows that American arms production alone dwarfed the combined capacities of Germany and Japan: by 1942 the United States was turning out some $37.5 billion in weaponry against Germany’s $13.8 billion, and the gap only widened. He treats this not as a contingent fact but as a consequence of the “iron rules of reproduction” — no guns without butter, wage goods as indirect means of production — and he credits the Soviet planned economy with a remarkable recovery after the 1941 collapse, relocating entire factory complexes to the Urals and surpassing German output in key categories by 1943. For Mandel, the Second World War is the first fully motorized conflict, a “conveyor-belt war” of militarized Fordism in which mass-produced tanks, trucks, aircraft, and munitions made logistics the decisive operational factor. The Axis, he argues, lost the supply war before it lost the shooting war.

This materialist dissection extends to the character of Nazi rule itself. Mandel rejects any interpretation of the Third Reich as a classless racial tyranny or a pre-capitalist aberration. He cites corporate profit data relentlessly: German corporate gross profits rose from 3 billion Reichsmarks in 1933 to 14 billion in 1942–43; the electrical industry’s net profits climbed from 100 million to 645 million. The SS’s own enterprises — the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke, the exploitation of camp labor at five to thirteen pfennigs an hour — integrated extermination with accumulation. The “extermination through labour” apparatus was not incidental atrocity but integral to the war economy. Generalplan Ost, with its projection of five million Germanic settlers on depopulated Russian soil, fused racial utopianism with continental looting. Mandel’s analysis of atrocity is thus inseparable from his analysis of profit, and his insistence on the capitalist character of the Nazi state aligns the book with a tradition of Marxist historiography that treats fascism as a specific form of capitalist dictatorship rather than a pathology outside historical materialism.

Nowhere is Mandel’s polemical ambition sharper than in his account of the Holocaust. He rejects the comfortable notion that the gas chambers were simply the monstrous endpoint of European antisemitism. “The seeds of the gas chambers,” he writes, “resided in the mass enslavement and killing of Blacks via the slave trade, in the wholesale extermination of the Central and South American Indians by the conquistadors.” The line runs from Aristotle’s rationalization of natural slavery, through colonial conquest, to the industrial rationality of the SS bureaucracy, with traditional petty-bourgeois Jew-hatred supplying only “fertile ground” — knives to the atom bomb. Mandel further insists that the racial exterminationism was not exclusively German. Admiral Halsey’s public statement about “burning the bestial apes” in the Pacific, and General McNair’s call to “hate with every fibre of our being,” are offered as evidence that the Allied war effort, too, was saturated with a dehumanizing racism traceable to the same colonial-imperialist roots. He deploys Christopher Thorne’s argument that the Pacific war was, in a vital aspect, “a racial war” viewed over “a hundred years or more,” and he reads Hiroshima and Nagasaki not as aberrations but as expressions of a contempt for human life “not far removed from extreme racism.” This is a bracing, deliberately unsettling case that will strike many readers as overstretched — it flattens distinctions between different regimes of racial violence — but it is central to the book’s thesis that imperialism is the matrix of modern barbarism.

Mandel’s chapter on science and weapons mounts a parallel attack on technological determinism. The atomic bomb, the computer, radar and the proximity fuse are treated as fruits of a war that detonated the “third technological revolution,” but he refuses to grant these technologies any autonomous momentum. “The atomic bomb or the computer have no ‘will’ of their own,” he insists. “The people who control them and are ready to use them have wills; and these wills are determined by powerful social interests. Their power over machines and weapons is a function of their power over other people.” He cites the Manhattan Project’s exclusion of popular, congressional, and even scientific deliberation from the decision to use the bomb, and he ridicules Vannevar Bush’s thesis that only free societies can produce advanced weapons by pointing to Vichy’s secret grenade-launcher and the Nazi jet program. The gulf between bourgeois democracies and dictatorships “largely disappears in war conditions,” Mandel argues; both Churchill and Roosevelt imposed centralized military-scientific authority as readily as Hitler or Stalin.

The atomic bomb, in Mandel’s rendering, was never a military necessity. He cites the US Strategic Bombing Survey’s own conclusion that Japan would have surrendered without it, the peace overtures sent through Moscow in June 1945, and the testimony of the men who made the decision. Truman saw the bomb as “something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians,” and Churchill told Alanbrooke it would “completely alter the diplomatic equilibrium” after Germany’s defeat. Mandel presents the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a political demonstration aimed primarily at the Soviet Union — an opening move of the Cold War rather than a closing act of the hot one — and he argues that a demonstration on an uninhabited island would have served any genuine military purpose. The case is contested but methodically made, weaving archival documents, memoir excerpts, and the internal logic of his materialist framework into a unified indictment.

Having established the war’s character as imperialist, anti-colonial, and revolutionary all at once, Mandel turns to the diplomatic conferences that conventional histories credit with shaping the postwar order. His argument is blunt: Yalta and Potsdam ratified what armies had already won. The German bourgeoisie’s refusal to capitulate in the summer of 1944 handed Eastern Europe to the Red Army; the Ardennes offensive delayed the Western allies’ advance; the Soviet breakthrough on the Pruth at Yassy-Kishinev sealed Romania’s fate. Mandel quotes Stalin’s notorious remark to Tito and Djilas in April 1945: “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army has power to do so.” It is a stark admission and, for Mandel, the key to the entire settlement — one that Trotsky had anticipated as early as 1939, predicting that wherever the Red Army marched, it would carry statification on its bayonets. The Italian armistice, which excluded the Soviet Union from Western Europe, rehearsed the same principle in reverse, and Mandel treats the Cold War as the formalization of these battlefield facts: first through the consolidation of Soviet control in the east, then through the Marshall Plan’s systematic reintegration of Western Europe under American economic hegemony. Even Communist authors, he notes with satisfaction, now concede the Marshall Plan was “of crucial importance in relaunching the capitalist economy.”

This analysis is, by design, relentless in its subordination of ideas to material forces, and that relentlessness is both the book’s greatest strength and its most obvious liability. Mandel’s Marxist-Trotskyist commitment leads him to interpret nearly every Allied policy — the postponement of the second front, the institution of military-civilian fusion, the saturation of the airwaves with “anti-fascist” propaganda — as machinery for containing the working class. The French and Italian Communist parties, under Stalin’s direction, are portrayed as the loyal shock troops of this containment: Maurice Thorez steering the French resistance into de Gaulle’s coalition, Palmiro Togliatti returning to Italy specifically to brake the radical wing and enter the Badoglio government. The Greek EAM-ELAS becomes a tragedy of betrayed revolution. Even the Soviet Union’s herculean defense at Stalingrad and Kursk cannot fully redeem, in Mandel’s eyes, a regime whose leader deliberately denied aid to the Warsaw uprising and whose NKVD commissars terrorized Red Army field commanders while deporting whole Caucasian nationalities. Isaac Deutscher’s observation that Stalin’s scheme to dismantle German heavy industry would have dispersed “the main, if not the only, social force to which communism could have appealed” — the German working class — is cited to underline the deep distrust of workers that Mandel sees as the hallmark of Stalinism.

The book’s scholarly apparatus — over nine hundred endnotes, tables of comparative industrial output, verbatim quotations from captured German documents and Allied correspondence — is formidable, but it is marshaled to serve a closed system. Mandel systematically refutes A.J.P. Taylor’s portrait of Hitler as an unplanning opportunist by mustering the Schmundt notes, the pre-planned Gleiwitz provocation, and war-aim directives that stretched to Australia and West Africa. Schumpeter’s claim that militarism is a pre-capitalist atavism is countered with the postwar American military-industrial complex. Popper and Hayek are dismissed as “inferior bourgeois scholarship.” The tone is that of a prosecutor, and Mandel never seriously entertains the possibility that the “anti-fascist war” might have functioned as something more than a mystification, or that the millions who believed they were fighting fascism might, in their subjective understanding, have altered the struggle’s character in ways a purely class analysis cannot capture. Source quality flags what any sober reader will sense: evidence is rigorously selected, but it foregrounds racial hatred among Allied commanders as much as Nazi atrocity, and it treats Stalin’s machinations with the same prosecutorial intensity it reserves for Hitler’s. Harry Truman’s cynical 1941 formula — “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way kill as many as possible” — is waved like a smoking gun, yet the subsequent American decision to supply the Soviet Union with enormous quantities of material is treated largely as a calculation of imperial self-interest.

For all its polemical heat, the book is not without prescience. In its closing chapter, Mandel warns that capitalism’s “profit-oriented standardised mass production” is generating “poisoned air, seas, water and forests” on a scale that threatens humanity’s physical survival “similar to the threat of nuclear world war.” Writing years before climate collapse entered mainstream discourse, he identifies ecological destruction as an intrinsic expression of the same logic that produces permanent war economies, an unbroken succession of “local wars,” and the continuing drain of value from the global South. His predictions about a long depression — a downturn commencing in the late 1960s and exceeding the 1913–39 interwar slump in duration — were partly borne out by the erosion of the postwar boom, though history has not delivered the timetable he imagined. And his conviction that only a democratic socialist world federation can abolish the class and national conflicts that generate destruction is presented less as a policy proposal than as a logical terminus of the whole historical demonstration: if monopoly capitalism produced this war, and if capitalism has survived only by institutionalizing its militarism and ecological plunder, then the alternative is revolution or catastrophe. The book ends exactly where Mandel’s dedication began: with the martyrs of the revolutionary left and a refusal to accept any lesser horizon.

The Meaning of the Second World War is, in the end, a work of monumental conviction that demands to be read as a corrective, not a consensus. For readers willing to enter its analytical universe, it offers the most comprehensive Marxist account of the war available in English — one that insists on the primacy of class, treats racial genocide as a colonial inheritance, and refuses to separate the military narrative from the balance sheet of monopoly profit. For readers who cannot share its premises, it will read as a brilliantly informed but intransigently sectarian text, one that flattens the moral complexity of a war in which the Allied cause, for all its imperial crimes, did halt a regime of unequaled industrial extermination. Mandel would answer that halting fascism without dismantling the system that breeds it is no victory at all, and that the eighty million dead demand a deeper accounting than any liberal “never again” can provide. The book’s most honest reader, whatever their politics, is the one who can hold both of those positions in their mind at once — and recognize that Mandel’s case, however partial, cannot be dismissed simply because it refuses to flatter the victors.