23 September 1941
When I said that the belief in international working class solidarity doesn’t exist any longer, I was not thinking of what may or may not be said at the ‘parties’ which Mr. [Nicholas] Moore supposes I frequent. I was thinking of the history of Europe during the past ten years and the utter failure of the European working class to stand together in the face of Fascist aggression. The Spanish civil war went on for two and a half years, and during that time there was not one country in which the workers staged even a single strike in aid of their Spanish comrades. So far as I can get at the figures the British working class subscribed to various ‘aid Spain’ funds about one per cent of what they spent during the same period in betting on football and horse-races. Anyone who actually talked to working men at the time knows that it was virtually impossible to get them to see that what happened in Spain concerned them in any way. Ditto with Austria, Manchuria, etc. During the past three months Germany has been at war with Russia and at the time of writing the Germans have overrun the greater part of the Russian industrial areas. If even the shadow of international working class solidarity existed, Stalin would only have to call on the German workers in the name of the Socialist Fatherland for the German war-effort to be sabotaged. Not only does nothing of the kind happen, but the Russians do not even issue any such appeal. They know it is useless. Until Hitler is defeated in the field he can count on the loyalty of his own working class and can even drag Hungarians, Rumanians and what-not after him. At present the world is atomised and no form of internationalism has any power or even much appeal. This may be painful to literary circles in Cambridge, but it is the fact.