80 years since the end of Nazism: The barbarity of the Second World War is that of capitalism!

On the 80th anniversary of the end of World War 2, we are republishing below two articles from L'Etincelle, the newspaper of the French Fraction of the Communist Left. In 1945, amid nationalist hysteria, when Europe was being ‘liberated’ from Nazism by the Allied forces, a handful of revolutionary militants kept the flame of proletarian internationalism alive by denouncing the imperialist war and all the sides in conflict: the barbarism of Nazism was not a product of ‘human folly’ but of decadent capitalism; the Allies, with their massive bombings and nuclear bombs, were no less barbaric than their adversaries; militarism remained, as it does today, the way of life of decadent capitalism.

Risking their lives, the comrades put up posters, threw leaflets onto trains leaving for the front, and issued appeals to all soldiers and workers, calling on them to show their class solidarity across frontiers, to cease fire and lay down their arms, and to unite against global capitalism.

The Manifesto distributed by the French Fraction of the Communist Left in January 1945 follows on from an extract from a report on the international situation written by the French Fraction’s successor, the Gauche Communiste de France . We first published these texts in our International Review no. 59.

50 years ago: The real causes of the Second World War

The other article by L'Etincelle, dated June 1945, was first published in English in World Revolution 281

Buchenwald, Maidaneck: Macabre demagoguery

We are also republishing an article from our International Review (number 66) which focuses on the many crimes of the democratic allies during the course of this war.

Let Us Remember: The massacres and crimes of the 'Great Democracies'