On the European continent at the beginning of the twentieth century, two forces were locked in a frantic struggle. One side consisted of the extreme nationalist parties represented by the Italian Blackshirts; the other was the World Labor Party represented by the Soviet Union.
Although these two political forces were utterly different, they shared one common trait: both sought the support of the lower classes. The special nature of the Labor Party lay in its global character.
In other words, the former drew boundaries along ethnicity and nationhood. Take the Italian Blackshirts, for example: in their political doctrine, the interests of the Italian nation stood above all else, while the unspoken meaning was, "The Italian nation is the greatest nation in the world."
The latter, however, had carried a global nature from the moment of its birth. In the eyes of Labor Party members with pure ideals, every person in their own country, or even Black slaves in colonies across West Africa, were equal "human beings."
The reason why both extreme nationalist parties and the Labor Parties of various European nations had risen like a strange army in the early twentieth century was actually very simple.
The living conditions of European commoners at the beginning of the twentieth century were far from ideal. Under the capitalists' meticulous calculations, the wages of workers at the bottom could only guarantee their bare survival—and that survival depended on laboring tediously in factories for more than ten consecutive hours.
Thus, in some industrial nations, workers' quality of life might even have been worse than that of serfs. It was like the feudal era, when tenant farmers at the bottom might have lived worse lives than primitive people in Africa.
Whenever an economic crisis struck, the survival prospects of Europe's lower classes only became more