As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Continues -The Anti-War Resistance Builds –The Russian Revolution Breaks The Logjam

As The 100^th Anniversary Of World War I Continues -The Anti-War Resistance Builds –The Russian Revolution Breaks The Logjam    

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European and in some cases colonial youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts (as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various “small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19^th century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other less lethal forms of  industrial production).

Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own capitalist-imperialist  nation-state against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists, Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.

Other than isolated groups and individuals, mostly like Lenin and Trotsky in exile or jail, and mostly in the weaker lesser capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood. (When the first international conference of anti-war socialists occurred in Switzerland in 1915, the famous Zimmerwald conference, one wag pointed out that they could all fit in one tram [bus].) Almost all parties assuming that the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everyone could go back to the eternal expressions of international working-class solidarity after the smoke had settled (and the simple white-crossed graves dug in the vast bone-crushed cemeteries that marked the nearby battle fields too numerous to mention). You see, and the logic is beautiful on this one, that big mail-drop of a Socialist International, was built for peace-time but once the cannons roared then the “big tent” needed to be folded for the duration. Jesus.  

Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long because “Long Live The Communist International,”  a new revolutionary international, would become the slogan and later order of the day in the not distant future), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century (including forbears Marx and Engels), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turned to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.  

Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace “scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has suffered from that lack of resolve ever since.)

Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already churning away in the first year as a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries and not just them), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America “Big Bill” Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the madness got caught in the bogus information madness and supported Bush’s “paper war” although not paper for the benighted Iraqi masses ever since (and plenty of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with him).

At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. “Be ready to fight” the operative words.

So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                  

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.   

Leon Trotsky

Peace Negotiations and the Revolution

(February 1918)

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Originally written: circa February 1918
First Printing: 1920; by Louis Fraina
Source:Leon Trotsky: What Is A Peace Programme?, Lanka Samasamaja Publications, Colombo, Ceylon, June 1956, pp.28-31.
Translation: Louis C. Fraina.
Transcription/Mark-up for TIA: A. Lehrer/David Walters.

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Publisher’s Note

In Louis C. Fraina’s edition of The Programme of Peace, the following article was included as Chapter 1. However, as is evident from the article itself, it was written after peace negotiations had begun, probably in February 1918, and therefore does not properly belong to the series written in Nashe Slovo in 1915-16. Our text follows pp.328-330 of The Proletarian Revolution in Russia, Louis C. Fraina (ed.), 1919.

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Our adversaries accuse us, who stand on revolutionary internationalist ground, of having considered it possible to enter into peace negotiations with the monarchist and capitalist representatives of Germany, Austria and their allies. If this be a contradiction, it is brought about not by the inconsistency of our tactics but by the objective state of affairs in Europe. In Russia, the proletariat placed itself at the head of the state, whereas in the other warring countries the power of the state still remains in the hands of the capitalist classes, other bureaucracies and their monarchies. The negotiations of workers with capitalists during a strike do not at all contradict the principles of the class struggle. The same may be said of negotiations of a proletarian government with that of the bourgeoisie, as long as the people of Europe put up with such governments.

It is usually the same people who reproach us with “betraying” our allies and of “concluding peace” with the Central Powers. This reproach is founded on a quite different estimate both of the allied and of the enemy governments. The fact, however, is that we recognize, in principle, no difference in this respect. An understanding with the government of the German Kaiser weights as much in the scales of the policy of the international proletariat as the understanding with the governments of the King of Great Britain or of the Mikado. The national differences of state form and of diplomatic usage are completely moved to the background by the uniformity of the imperialist aims and the methods of the present world policies of the great powers. As to the small states, they play a purely passive role, compelled as they are to dangle in the trail of the great imperialist states and their groupings.
We must open negotiations with those governments which at present exist. However, we are conducting these negotiations in a way affording the public the fullest possibility of controlling the crimes of their governments, and so as to accelerate the rising of the working masses against the imperialist cliques. We are ready to support this uprising with all the forces at our command. The official and semi-official French patriots, who a few months ago supported Romanov against us, are now indignant at our negotiations with the Hohenzollerns. They very often summon against us the help of the spirits of their ancestors, the Jacobins, who conducted no negotiations with the “tyrants” but declared ruthless war against them.
This opposition, which aims at the glorifying of the petty bourgeois democracy of the 18th century at the expense of the proletarian democracy of the 20th century, is in every respect irrelevant.
Our revolution was directly generated by the war. In France, on the contrary, at the close of the 18th century the war was generated by the Revolution.
After the French masses, principally the peasantry, had achieved the greatest revolutionary conquests, the stress of feudal Europe forced them to defend these conquests by force of arms against the foreign enemy. The enthusiasm of the revolution passed immediately into the zeal of war, which only meant the conveyance of the revolution across its national borders.
Our people bled in the course of the last three years in the imperialist murder campaign, and the revolution became first of all a means of freeing them from the horrors and sufferings of the war. The Jacobin Revolution of 1792 had a feudal Europe against it. The proletarian revolution of 1917 faces an imperialist Europe, divided into two hostile camps. If to the “sanscullotte” the war was the direct continuation of the liberating revolution, then to the Russian soldier who has not yet left the trenches occupied by him for three years, the revolutionary war on an extensive scale would seem nothing else but a continuation of the preceding murder.
This by no means implies that we renounce the revolutionary war. On the contrary, we consider it the duty of the revolutionary classes to defend the cause of Socialism against the inner as well as the foreign class-enemies. Doubtless our revolutionary war can become popular provided there is an open revolutionary fight of the proletariat at last in one of the European countries. The powerful impulse which Europe has received from the Russian Revolution must now come back from Europe, thus materializing the thought of an international revolution in the consciousness of the working class of Russia, and supplying the stimulus to rouse them for a revolutionary war. We do not doubt for a moment that in a consequence of the present war, the workers of Europe will repeat the fight of the Russian proletariat, a month sooner or later, on more powerful, economic foundations and in a more perfect political form. If, in awaiting the imminent revolutionary flood in Europe, Russia should be forced to conclude peace with the present-day governments of the Central Powers, it would be a provisional, temporary, transitory peace with the revision which the European Revolution will have to concern itself in the first place.
Our whole policy is built on the calculation upon this revolution. The peace-programme, as submitted by us, can be fully accomplished only by overthrowing the capitalist governments. By realization of the democratic peace-programme, the present-day governments are all the more surely preparing their catastrophic collapse. Through our peace-negotiations we are trying to give them every possible support in this respect.
Into the peace programme we include also the “United States of Europe”. This slogan does not belong to the official programme of the Government of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets, nor has it yet received recognition from our party. Nevertheless, we believe that the programme of democratic peace leads to a republican World Federation beyond a European one (and a considerable part of the pamphlet is devoted to the statement of this opinion). The question is practically posed before the European proletariat by the further development of the Revolution.

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