Reading notes on Chapter 9 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [Verso: 1986]
The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel Verso: 1986 Chapter 9 Ideology ....British imperialism and its allies in the minor European imperialist countries, the main ideological weapon was antifascism. By playing upon the British and European masses' justified hatred of Hitler's and other fascist regimes' suppression of the labour movement encroachments upon vital workers' rights and freedoms and crimes against humanity such propaganda by and large succeeded in subordinating basic class antagonisms between capital and wage labour to the priority of defeating the N... more »
Reading notes on Chapter 8 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [Verso: 1986]
The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel Verso: 1986 Chapter 8 Science and Administration ....No more than contemporary science should contemporary weapons be reified. They possess no independent social momentum blindly imposing its 'will' on people. The atomic bomb or the computer have no 'will' of their own. 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. That is the message to be drawn from the Thi... more »
Reading notes on Chapter 7 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [Verso: 1986
The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel Verso: 1986 Chapter 7 Logistics ....America's top strategist, General Marshall, was to call the Second World War the automobile war. The use of Paris taxis during the battle of the Marne notwithstanding, World War One had largely been a railway war. ....only the American and British armed forces became thoroughly motorized from 1942 onwards, to such an extent that the landing of one million soldiers in Normandy was accompanied by no less than 140,000 motorized vehicles (100,000 in the first eleven days alone). Ja... more »
Reading notes on Part Two of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [Verso: 1986]
The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel Verso: 1986 Part Two: Events and Results Chapter 10: The Opening Gambit In Europe ....During the interlude of the drole-de-guerre, Hitler feverishly prepared the offensive against France, based upon the brilliant strategic plan by von Manstein and Guderian. Instead of trying to encircle the French armies in Eastern France (as was done success fully in 1870 and tried unsuccessfully with the Schlieffen plan in 1914), the Wehrmacht would attempt to encircle them in the centre of the front by a bold breakthrough at Sedan a... more »
Reading notes for Chapter 6 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [Verso: 1986]
The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel Verso: 1986 Chapter 6 Weapons ....Germany and Japan were overwhelmed by the sheer superiority of America's industrial capacity. The Wehrmacht had used 2,700 tanks on the Western front in May 1940, 3,350 in its invasion of the USSR in June 1941. The US government decided to produce 45,000 tanks in 1942 and 75,000 in 1943. Germany's annual airplane production amounted to around 11.000 in 1940 and 1941. The US government decided to build 43.000 airplanes in 1942 and 100,000 in 1942. Its output of merchant ships rose from 1 mi... more »
Reading notes on Chapter 5 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [1986]
The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel Verso: 1986 Chapter 5 Strategy ....war is a continuation of politics by other means. The point lies in the term continuation. ....decisive determinants and constraints governing the choice of priorities and, with it, the use of available resources: the class nature of the state which wages the war and hence the class interests which ultimately shape military and geopolitical considerations. The freedom of choice of a given national ruling class is decisively limited by the social and material correlation of forces. [Fr... more »
Reading notes on Chapter 4 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [1986]
The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel Verso: 1986 Chapter 4 Resources World wars ....result from the operation of the law of uneven development, that is, from the contradiction between the tendency of the industrial-financial balance of imperialist forces to undergo periodic modification (through the upsurge of specific bourgeois classes previously retarded in their development) and the tendency for the division of the world into spheres of influence to remain frozen for a longer period. This last division is reflected in military naval build-up, in internatio... more »
Reading notes on Chapter 3 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [1986]
The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel Verso: 1986 Chapter 3 The Social Forces ....a conjunction of action by a broad spectrum of nations, social classes, fractions of social classes, political parties and narrower cliques (financial, industrial, military and political) over the whole globe. ....from France to Bengal, from Chad to Leningrad, from the Philippines to Birmingham, from Detroit to Bosnia, from the North Manchurian plain to Egypt, from Avellaneda to Milan. Never beforehand so many people, on all continents, participated directly or indirectly in... more »
Reading notes on Chapters 1 and 2 of The meaning of the Second World War By Ernest Mandel [1986]
The meaning of the Second World War By Ernest Mandel Verso: 1986 Chapter 1 The Stakes 1876 and 1914 ....creation of colonial empires following the international thrust of capital proved to be only a temporary answer to the problem of the growing disproportion between development of the productive forces and the political form within which this development had taken place: the nation-state.1 Given the poverty and low growth rates of the colonies, their demand for manufactured goods was inherently limited; they were hardly a substitute for the lucrative markets to be foun... more »
Mandel's book looks pretty interesting, as do the other titles displayed on the Marxist Update page.
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