From my understanding, the premise of revolutionary defeatism involves supporting the defeat of your own bourgeois government. I am an American. I am perfectly fine with that when it comes to things like US military actions in the Middle East. However, there has been one enemy the United States has had that is definitely quite different, Nazi Germany. It’s pretty much universally believed among the left that Nazi Germany was bad and should never be supported (and that’s for a GOOD reason).
But how does revolutionary defeatism square in with something like that?
Anti-fascist partisan struggle in occupied countries, Poland, France, Balkans etc
I would even add Korea in there because while they were anti-colonial, people like Kim Il-Sung led a guerilla resistance movement that very much resembled the European partisan struggles.
Stalin shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin.
Revolutionary defeatism is not scripture, it’s not to be followed at all times. Lenin did not create holy sacraments to be venerated, he was a man who forged strategies for the time he lived. During WWI revolutionary defeatism was the “correct” stance. During WWII it probably wouldn’t have been. Just like how communists supported the Union in the American Civil War because it was destroying slavery, even though the Union was a capitalist settler colony nation-state, we have to be flexible and respond to the present conditions we’re in.
Yeah US communists did support the USA in helping the soviets against the germans. My go to example would be Woody Guthrie.
I need to read more to talk authoritatively on the issue, but I’m pretty sure this is the exact kind of thing Mao was getting into when he spoke about primary and secondary contradictions. Even though the ultimate goal is to dismantle capitalism, driving out Imperial Japan was a higher priority in the short term than defeating China’s domestic bourgeoisie. So yeah, there are counterexamples to Lenin’s line during the Bolshevik revolution.
One point all these theorists hammer on is the need for practice to reflect the conditions. We can’t just reenact 1917 like a cargo cult.
In the case of fascism, communists should form a popular front with liberals to destroy the fascists.
The communists and KMT allied with each other - perhaps forcefully - to defeat the Japanese because otherwise there would be no China to fight over.
Resistance against Nazis throughout Europe did find strange coalitions of communists, liberals, and even conservatives. But as you can see, after WWII liberals never sided with the communists during liberation movements. Usually they were working with the west to undermine everything at home and fascism was usually the result
