Some lessons from the 1930s Ethiopian and Chinese national liberation wars

Abstract

To illuminate the debates among socialists on the present Ukraine War (2022–2023), this article proposes to review the debates among Marxists in the 1930s, and in particular the debate with and in the Trotskyist tradition, to both analyze the dual nature of pre-WWII wars of national liberation and the tasks of socialists both in semi-colonial and imperialist countries. Marxists saw that two different yet intertwined political contradictions were unfolding in both the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), those of national liberation and of inter-imperialist rivalries. They thus warned against any attempt to analyze the war without acknowledging one of these two dynamics, for it would produce a one-sided and biased analysis of a complex reality. Instead, they urged fellow socialists and working people to develop a concrete and regular study of the changing relations of class forces during the wars to adjust their policies. This Marxist methodology was concretized in the reasoning and policy of revolutionary socialists in relation to government economic sanctions, to imperialist material aid packages, and to war budgets and rapid rearmament which the article reviews.