As The 100th
Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Approaches ... Some Remembrances
-Lenin- The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International
The events leading up to World War I 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 to the supposedly eternal pledges by the Social-Democrats
and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the
international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the
approach of war were decisive for 20th century history. 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 almost could not be avoided in the early 20th
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 rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried
out by the norms of the last war. 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 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 and Rosa Luxemburg
in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, some anti-war anarchists like Monette
in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs,
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 as 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. 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. So imagine in
1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the
fevered masses would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one
hundred years later is not too long to honor those ardent anti-war voices as
the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war.
Over the next period as we lead up to the 100th
anniversary of the start 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 forlorn struggle during and the massive
struggles in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the
battlefields.
********
Teddy Martin had come from a long line of workers, some of
his forbears had been among the first domestic weavers in Spitalfield, had been
the first machine-tenders in Manchester and had been workers like him and his
father in the London shipbuilding trade. He knew deep in his blood there was an
“us” and “them” in the world without his party, the Labor Party, having to tell
him word one on the subject. He had even read Karl Marx in his early teens when
he was trying to figure out why his family was stuck in the faraway outer tenements
with their squalor and their human closeness (he never could get over being in
close quarters ever since then). So yes he was ready to listen to what some
left members of the party had to say if the war clouds on the horizon turned
any darker. But, and hear him true, his was like his forbears and his father
before him as loyal a man as to be found in the country. Loyal to his king
(queen too if it came to that) and his country. So he would have to think,
think carefully, about what to do if those nasty Huns and their craven allies
making loud noises of late threatened his way of life. Most of his mates to the
extent that they had any opinion were beginning to be swept up in the idea that
a little war might not be such a bad thing to settle some long smoldering
disputes. Still he, Teddy Martin, was not a man to be rushed and so he would
think, think hard, about what to do if there was a mass mobilization.
No question, thought Teddy Martin, his majesty’s government
had gotten itself into a hard situation ever since that mangy Archduke somebody
had got himself shot by a guy, a damn anarchist working with who knows who,
maybe freemasons, over in Sarajevo, over in someplace he was not quite sure he
knew where it was if somebody had asked him to point it out in a map. That
seemingly silly little act (except of course to the Archduke and his wife also
killed) apparently has exposed Britain, damn the whole British Empire that they
claim the sun never sets on, to some pretty serious entanglements because if
France were to go to war with Austria or someplace like that then the king is
duty bound to come to France’s rescue. And Teddy Martin as thinking man, as a
working man, as a member in good standing of the Labor Party ever since its
inception was still not sure what he would do. Not sure that he would follow
the war cries being shouted out by the likes of Arthur Henderson from his own
party. All he knew was that the usual talk of football or the prizefights that
filled the air at his pub, The Cock and Bull, was being supplanted by war talk,
by talk of taking a nip out of the Germans and those who spoke in that way were
gaining a hearing. All Teddy knew was that it was getting harder and harder for
him to openly express thoughts that he needed to think about the issues more.
That was not a good sign, not a good omen.
Yes, once the Germans were on the march toward Belgium and
then threatened Paris in a race to the sea if not stopped then the guys at the
Cock and Bull became more pensive, started to see that they would have to do
right by the king. One night, one July night before the blood started flowing
on the continent, one of the boys, Brewster, Teddy thought had led a toast to
the king and all including Teddy rather sheepishly. But now, now with the blood
up, no with the Empire at stake, new with even the wogs in India clamoring to
serve their king and emperor Teddy Martin could see where each must do his
duty. And so Teddy found himself less and less at the pub with the boys and
more and more at home with his wife and two young boys waiting for that minute when he would find himself
heading to the recruiting station to give his all for his country. Although he
lifted no glass to that fact.
********
The German Social-Democratic Party had given Fritz Klein
everything. Had taken him from a small furniture-making factory(less than one
hundred employees constituting in those days small) where he led the fight for
unionization (against all odds for that woefully unorganized industry and against
the then still standing laws against unionization pressed by the state as well
as well as the outlaw status of the S-D Party in those pre-legal days) and
brought him along into the burgeoning party bureaucracy (boasting of this
number of party publications, that number of members, and the pinnacle the
votes attained for the growing number of party parliamentarians in the
Reichstag). Made him a local then regional shop steward agent. Later found him
a spot in the party publications department and from there to alternate member
of the party’s national committee. As he grew older, got married, had two
lovely children the party had severely sapped the youthful idealism out of him.
Still he was stirred whenever Karl Liebknecht, old Wilhelm’s son, the father whom
he knew from the old days, delivered one of his intellectual and rational
attacks against the war aims of the Kaiser and his cabal. Still too though he
worried, worried to perdition, that the British and, especially the French were
deliberately stepping on German toes. Although tired, endlessly tired, he hoped
that he would be able to stick to the Second International’s pledge made at
Basle in 1912 to do everything to stop war in case it came, as was now likely.
He just didn’t know how he would react, didn’t know at all.
Fritz was furious, furious at two things. First that those
damn whatever they were anarchists, nationalists, or whatever had assassinated
the Archduke Ferdinand. Had threatened the peace of Europe, his peace, with
their screwy theory of picking off various state officials thinking that would,
unlike victory in the mass class struggles, change the world. Christ, they
could have at least read Marx or somebody. Make no mistake Fritz had no truck
with monarchy, certainly not the moribund Austro-Hungarian monarchy, despised
the Kaiser himself right here in the German homeland (although on the quiet
since the Kaiser was not above using his courts for the simple pleasure of
skewering a man for lese majeste and had
done so to political opponents and the idle wild-talkers alike). Still his
blood boiled that some desperados would pick at a fellow Germanic target. Fritz
was not at all sure that maybe the French, or the English, the bloody English
were behind the activities. Hugo Heine thought so, his immediate regional director,
so there could be some truth to the assertion.
Secondly, that same Hugo Heine had begun, at the behest of
the national committee of the party, to clamp down on those who were trying to
make the party live up to its promises and try to make a stand against any
German, any Kaiser moves toward war over the incident at Sarajevo. The way
Heine put it was that if war was to come and he hoped that it would not the
Social-Democracy must not be thrown into the underground again like in the old
days under Bismarck. Hugo had spent two years in the Kaiser’s jail back then
for simply trying to organize his shop and get them to vote for the party then
outlawed. The radical stuffing had come out of Hugo though and all he wanted
was not to go back to jail now for any reason. Fritz cursed those damn
anarchists again, cursed them more bitterly since they were surely going to
disturb his peace.
Fritz Klein was beside himself when he heard the news, the
Social-Democratic parliamentary caucus on August 4th had overwhelming
to support the Kaiser’s war budget (and because overwhelming each member was
duty-bound to vote en bloc the way the majority vote went and did so despite
the pleas of Karl Liebknecht), to give him the guns, ammunition and whatever he
needed to pursue the war aims that were just beginning to unfold. Fritz had not
expected the party to be able to stop the war preparations, or once the war
clouds got too ominous, to stop the mobilizations, but he did expect that the
parliamentary delegation (which was under its own discipline and not the
party’s) would not cravenly grant the Kaiser’s every war supply. All those
brave peacetime proclamations about the brotherhood of man and international
working-class solidarity were now so much paper in the wind. He sat for a
moment in disgust and disbelief that now Europe would be in flames for who knew
how long before he knew he would have to explain to the party stalwarts the
whys and wherefores of the budgetary decision. And have to explain why he and
his comrades would soon be loading rifles instead of bags of flour somewhere
near the Atlantic Ocean. For a flash he hoped for a short war but in his gut he
knew the fates were fickle and that the blood of the European working-class
youth would be spilled without question and without end.
********
Jacques Rous (and yes he traced his family roots back to the
revolution, back to the “red” priest who he was named after who had led some of
the plebeian struggles back then that were defeated by those damn moderate cutthroats
Robespierre and Saint Just) had long been a leader the anarchist delegation in
his Parisian district, had been in a few fights in his time with the damn city
bourgeoisie, and had a long, very long memory of what the Germans had, and had not
done, in Paris in ’71,in the time of the bloodedly suppressed Commune. Also Jacques
had long memories of his long past forbears who had come from Alsace-Lorraine
now in German hands. And it galled him, galled him that there were war clouds
gathering daily over his head, over his district and over his beloved
Paris.
But that was not what
was troubling Jacques Rous in the spring of 1914. He knew, knew deep in his
bones like a lot of his fellow anarchists, like a lot of the guys in the small
pottery factory he had worked in for the past several years after being laid
off from the big textile factory across the river that if war came they would
know what to do. Quatrain from the CGT (the large trade union organization to
which he and others in the factory belonged to) had clued them in, had told
them enough to know some surprises were headed the government’s way if they
decided to use the youth of the neighborhoods as cannon fodder. What bothered
Jacques was not his conduct but that of his son, Jacques too named in honor of
that same ancient red priest who was the lifeblood of the family. Young Jacques
something of a dandy like many youth in those days, something of a lady’s man
(he had reportedly a married mistress and somebody else on the side), had told
one and all (although not his father directly) who would listen one night that
he planned to enlist in the Grenadiers just as soon as it looked like trouble
was coming. Old Jacques wondered if other fathers were standing in fear of such
rash actions by their sons just then.
Old Jacques could see the writing on the wall, remembered
what it was like when the German
threatened to come back in ’70 and then came the last time. Came and left the
Parisian poor to eat rats or worse when they besieged the city, old Thiers fled
to Versailles, and Paris starved half-aided by those Germans and he expected
the same if not worse this time because that country was now unified, was now
filled with strange powerful Krupp cannon and in a mood to use it now that one
of the members of their alliance had had one of its own killed in Sarajevo and
all Europe was waiting for the other shoe to drop. He believed that the
anarchists of Paris to a man would resist the call to arms issued by the
government. Quatrain, the great leader ever since Commune days, almost
guaranteed a general strike if they tried to mobilize the Parisian youth for
the slaughter. Yeah Quatrain would stand tall. Jacques though had personal
worries somebody had seen his son, also Jacques, heading with some of his “gilded”
friends toward the 12th Grenadier recruiting office in the Hotel de
Ville ready to fight for bloody bourgeois France, for the memory of Napoleon,
for the glory of battle. And he old Jacques knowing from some skimpily- held
barricades back in ’71 just how “glorious” war was fretted in the night against
his blood.
Damn, the Germans were on the march again, yesterday it was
Belgium and old Jacques knew in his heart where the bloody Kaiser was heading
next. Hell knew it since those bloody May weeks in ’71 when the Germans acted as
“honor guard” for the damn Thiers reaction once they broke out of Versailles so
he was prepared to defeat his section to the death if it came to that, came to
shedding an old man’s blood. What worried Jacques, had
worried him all spring was young Jacques cavalier attitude toward the impeding
slaughter, his disregard for any of the principles that the old man had tried
to instill in him from his youth. Had in
May joined the 47th Grenadiers who were now stationed in a forward
position in the border area between France and Belgium. Sure young Jacques
looked the gallant like all the Rouses but that last look, that unknowing look
that old Jacques detected in his young son before he saw him off told plenty
about the fears to come. The fear that no matter how far apart they had drifted,
father and son, they were kindred, they were French at this dismal hour.
*******
George Jenkins dreamed the dream of many young men out in
the heartland, out in the wheat fields of Kansas a dream that America, his
America would keep the hell out of what looked like war clouds coming from
Europe in the spring of 1914 (although dreams and dreamers were located not
just on the farms since George was not a Kansas farm boy but a rising young
clerk in Doc Dell’s Drugstore located in the college town of Lawrence). George
was keenly interested in such matters and would, while on break or when things
were slow, glance through the day later copy of the New York Times or Washington
Post that Doc provided for his more worldly customers via the passing
trains. What really kept George informed though was William White’s home-grown Emporia Gazette which kept a close eye
on the situation in Europe for the folks.
And with all of that information here is what George
Jenkins, American citizen, concluded: America had its own problems best tended
to by keeping out of foreign entanglements except when America’s direct
interests were threatened. So George naturally cast skeptical eyes on
Washington, on President Wilson, despite his protestations that European
affairs were not our business. George had small town ideas about people minding
their own business. See too also George had voted for Eugene V. Debs himself,
the Socialist party candidate for President, and while he was somewhat
skeptical about some of the Socialist Party leaders back East he truly believed
that Brother Debs would help keep us out of war.
Jesus, those damn Europeans have begun to make a mess for
themselves now that some archduke, Jesus, an archduke in this day and age (and
George Jenkins thanked some forgotten forebear for getting his clan out of
Europe whenever he did so and avoided that nonsense about going to the aid of
somebody over a damn archduke). Make no mistake George Jenkins had no sympathy
for anarchists and was half-glad a couple of years ago when the Socialist Party
booted the IWW, the damn Wobbies, out if that is what they did and the beggars
didn’t just walk out. Although he had an admiration for Big Bill Hayward and
his trade union fights that is all it was-admiration and policy could not be made
on that basis. So no he had no truck with anarchists but to go to war over an
archduke-damn. Still George was no Pollyanna and kept abreast of what was going
on and it bothered him more than somewhat that guy slike Senator Lodge from
Massachusetts and others from the Northeast were beating the war drums to get
the United States mired in a damn European war. No way, no way good solid
Midwesterners would fall for that line. And so George watched and waited.
Watched too to see what old Debs had to say about matters. George figured that
if the war drums got loud enough then Brother Debs would organize and speak up
to keep things right. That was his way.
********
Ivan Smirnov was no kid, had been around the block a few
times in this war business. Had been in the Russian fleet that got its ass
kicked by the Japanese in 1904 (he never called them “Nips” like lots of his
crewmates did not after that beating they took that did not have to happen if
the damn Czar’s naval officers had been anything but lackeys and anything but
overconfident that they could beat the Johnny-come-lately Japanese in the naval
war game). More importantly he had been in the Baltic fleet when the revolution
of 1905 came thundering over their heads and each man, each sailor, each
officer had to choice sides. He had gone with rebels and while he did not face
the fate of his comrades on the Potemkin
his naval career was over.
Just as well Ivan had thought many times since he was then able
to come ashore and get work on the docks through some connections, and think.
And what he was thinking in the spring of 1914 with some ominous war clouds in
the air that that unfinished task from 1905 was going to come to a head. Ivan
knew enough about the state of the navy, and more importantly, the army to know
that without some quick decisive military action the monarchy was finished and
good riddance. The hard part, the extremely hard part, was to get those future
peasant conscripts who would provide cannon fodder for the Czar’s ill-thought
out land adventures to listen up for a minute rather than go unknowingly
head-long into the Czar’s arm (the father’s arms for many of them). So there
was plenty of work to do. Ivan just that moment was glad that he was not a
kid.
As the war clouds thickened after the killing of the
archduke in bloody damn Sarajevo in early summer 1914 Ivan Smirnov knew in his
bones that the peasant soldier cannon fodder as always would come flocking to
the Czar like lemmings to the sea the minute war was declared. Any way the deal
was cut the likely line-up of the Czar with the “democracies” of the West,
Britain and France and less likely the United States would immediately give the
Czar cover against the villainies of the Huns, of the Germans who just the
other day were propping up the Czar’s treasury. It could not end well. All Ivan
hoped for was that his party, the real Social-Democrats, locally known as the
Mensheviks from the great split in 1903 with the Bolsheviks and who had definitely
separated from that organization for good in 1912, would not get war fever just
because the damn Czar was lined up with the very democracies that the party
wished to emulate in Russia.
He knew too that the talk among the leadership of the Bolsheviks
(almost all of them in exile and thus far from knowing what was happening down
in the base of society at home) about opposing the Czar to the bitter end, about
fighting in the streets again some said to keep the young workers and the
peasants drifting into the urban areas from the dead-ass farms from becoming
cannon-fodder for a lost cause was crazy, was irresponsible. Fortunately some
of the local Bolshevik committee men in Russia and among their Duma delegation
had cooler heads. Yea this was not time to be a kid, with kid’s tunnel vision,
with great events working in the world.
********
The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International
The gravest feature of the present crisis is that the majority of official representatives of European socialism have succumbed to bourgeois nationalism, to chauvinism. It is with good reason that the bourgeois press of all countries writes of them now with derision, now with condescending praise. To anyone who wants to remain a socialist there can be no more important duty than to reveal the causes of this crisis in socialism and analyse the tasks of the International.
There are such that are afraid to admit that the crisis or, to put it more accurately, the collapse of the Second International is the collapse of opportunism.
Reference is made to the unanimity, for instance, among French socialists, and to the fact that the old groups in socialism have supposedly changed their stands in the question of the war. Such references, however, are groundless.
Advocacy of class collaboration; abandonment of the idea of socialist revolution and revolutionary methods of struggle; adaptation to bourgeois nationalism; losing sight of the fact that the borderlines of nationality and country are historically transient; making a fetish of bourgeois legality; renunciation of the class viewpoint and the class struggle, for fear of repelling the “broad masses of the population”(meaning the petty bourgeoisie)—such, doubtlessly, are the ideological foundations of opportunism. And it is from such soil that the present chauvinist and patriotic frame of mind of most Second International leaders has developed. Observers representing the most various points of view have long noted that the opportunists are in fact prevalent in the Second International’s leadership. The war has merely brought out, rapidly and saliently, the true measure of this prevalence. There is nothing surprising in the extraordinary acuteness of the crisis having led to a series of reshufflings within the old groups. On the whole, however, such changes have affected only individuals. The trends within socialism have remained the same.
Complete unanimity does not exist among French socialists. Even Vaillant, who, with Guesde, Plekhanov, Hervé and others, is following a chauvinist line, has had to admit that he has received a number of letters of protest from French socialists, who say that the war is imperialist in character and that the French bourgeoisie is to blame for its outbreak no less than the bourgeoisie of any other country. Nor should it be overlooked that these voices of protest are being smothered, not only by triumphant opportunism, but also by the military censorship. With the British, the Hyndman group (the British Social-Democrats—the British Socialist Party [2]) has completely sunk into chauvinism, as have also most of the semi-liberal leaders of the trade unions. Resistance to chauvinism has come from MacDonald and Keir Hardie of the opportunist Independent Labour Party.[3] This, of course, is an exception to the rule. However, certain revolutionary Social-Democrats who have long been in opposition to Hyndman have now left the British Socialist Party. With the Germans the situation is clear: the opportunists have won; they are jubilant, and feel quite in their element. Headed by Kautsky, the “Centre” has succumbed to opportunism and is defending it with the most hypocritical, vulgar and smug sophistry. Protests have come from the revolutionary Social-Democrats—Mehring, Pannekoek, Karl Liebknecht, and a number of unidentified voices in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland. In Italy, the line-up is clear too: the extreme opportunists, Bissolati and Co. stand for “fatherland”, for Guesde-Vaillant-Plekhanov-Hervé. The revolutionary Social-Democrats (the Socialist Party), with Avanti! at their head, are combating chauvinism and are exposing the bourgeois and selfish nature of the calls for war. They have the support of the vast majority of progressive workers.[4] In Russia, the extreme opportunists of the liquidators’ camp[5] have already raised their voices, in public lectures and the press, in defence of chauvinism. P. Maslov and Y. Smirnov are defending tsarism on the pretext that the fatherland must be defended. (Germany, you see, is threatening to impose trade agreements on “us” at swordpoint, whereas tsarism, we are expected to believe, has not been using the sword, the knout and the gallows to stifle the economic, political and national life of nine-tenths of Russia’s population!) They justify socialists participating in reactionary bourgeois governments, and their approval of war credits today and more armaments tomorrow! Plekhanov has slid into nationalism, and is endeavouring to mask his Russian chauvinism with a Francophile attitude, and so has Alexinsky. To judge from the Paris Golos,[6] Martov is behaving with more decency than the rest of this crowd, and has come out in opposition to both German and French chauvinism, to Vorwärts, Mr. Hyndman and Maslov, but is afraid to come out resolutely against international opportunism as a whole, and against the German Social-Democratic Centrist group, its most “influential” champion. The attempts to present volunteer service in the army as performance of a socialist duty (see the Paris declaration of a group of Russian volunteers consisting of Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and also a declaration by Polish Social-Democrats, Leder, and others) have had the backing of Plekhanov alone. These attempts have been condemned by the majority of our Paris Party group.[7] The leading article in this issue[1] will inform readers of our Party Central Committee’s stand. To preclude any misunderstanding, the following facts relating to the history of our Party’s views and their formulation must be stated here. After overcoming tremendous difficulties in re-establishing organisational contacts broken by the war, a group of Party members first drew up “theses” and on September 6-8 (New Style) had them circulated among the comrades. Then they were sent to two delegates to the Italo-Swiss Conference in Lugano (September 27), through Swiss Social-Democrats. It was only in mid-October that it became possible to re-establish contacts and formulate the viewpoint of the Party’s Central Committee. The leading article in this issue represents the final wording of the “theses”.
Such, briefly, is the present state of affairs in the European and the Russian Social-Democratic movement. The collapse of the International is a fact. It has been proved conclusively by the polemic, in the press, between the French and German socialists, and acknowledged, not only by the Left Social-Democrats (Mehring and Bremer Bürger Zeitung ), but by moderate Swiss papers (Volksrecht ). Kautsky’s attempts to cover up this collapse are a cowardly subterfuge. The collapse of the International is clearly the collapse of opportunism, which is now captive to the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie’s stand is clear. It is no less clear that the opportunists are simply echoing bourgeois arguments. In addition to what has been said in the leading article, we need only mention the insulting statements in Die Neue Zeit, suggesting that internationalism consists in the workers of one country shooting down the workers of another country, allegedly in defence of the fatherland!
The question of the fatherland—we shall reply to the opportunists—cannot be posed without due consideration of the concrete historical nature of the present war. This is an imperialist war, i.e., it is being waged at a time of the highest development of capitalism, a time of its approaching end. The working class must first “constitute itself within the nation”, the Communist Manifesto declares, emphasising the limits and conditions of our recognition of nationality and fatherland as essential forms of the bourgeois system, and, consequently, of the bourgeois fatherland. The opportunists distort that truth by extending to the period of the end of capitalism that which was true of the period of its rise. With reference to the former period and to the tasks of the proletariat in its struggle to destroy, not feudalism but capitalism, the Communist Manifesto gives a clear and precise formula: “The workingmen have no country.” One can well understand why the opportunists are so afraid to accept this socialist proposition, afraid even, in most cases, openly to reckon with it. The socialist movement cannot triumph within the old framework of the fatherland. It creates new and superior forms of human society, in which the legitimate needs and progressive aspirations of the working masses of each nationality will, for the first time, be met through international unity, provided existing national partitions are removed. To the present-day bourgeoisie’s attempts to divide and disunite them by means of hypocritical appeals for the “defence of the fatherland” the class-conscious workers will reply with ever new and persevering efforts to unite the workers of various nations in the struggle to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie of all nations.
The bourgeoisie is duping the masses by disguising imperialist rapine with the old ideology of a “national war”. This deceit is being shown up by the proletariat, which has brought forward its slogan of turning the imperialist war into a civil war. This was the slogan of the Stuttgart and Basle resolutions, which had in mind, not war in general, but precisely the present war and spoke, not of “defence of the fatherland”, but of “hastening the downfall of capitalism”, of utilising the war-created crisis for this purpose, and of the example provided by the Paris Commune. The latter was an instance of a war of nations being turned into a civil war.
Of course, such a conversion is no easy matter and cannot be accomplished at the whim of one party or another. That conversion, however, is inherent in the objective conditions of capitalism in general, and of the period of the end of capitalism in particular. It is in that direction, and that direction alone, that socialists must conduct their activities. It is not their business to vote for war credits or to encourage chauvinism in their “own” country (and allied countries), but primarily to strive against the chauvinism of their “own” bourgeoisie, without confining themselves to legal forms of struggle when the crisis has matured and the bourgeoisie has itself taken away the legality it has created. Such is the line of action that leads to civil war, and will bring about civil war at one moment or another of the European conflagration.
War is no chance happening, no “sin” as is thought by Christian priests (who are no whit behind the opportunists in preaching patriotism, humanity and peace), but an inevitable stage of capitalism, just as legitimate a form of the capitalist way of life as peace is. Present-day war is a people’s war. What follows from this truth is not that we must swim with the “popular” current of chauvinism, but that the class contradictions dividing the nations continue to exist in wartime and manifest themselves in conditions of war. Refusal to serve with the forces, anti-war strikes, etc., are sheer nonsense, the miserable and cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against the armed bourgeoisie, vain yearning for the destruction of capitalism without a desperate civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations. Down with mawkishly sanctimonious and fatuous appeals for “peace at any price"! Let us raise high the banner of civil war! Imperialism sets at hazard the fate of European culture: this war will soon be followed by others, unless there are a series of successful revolutions. The story about this being the “last war” is a hollow and dangerous fabrication, a piece of philistine “mythology”(as Golos aptly puts it). The proletarian banner of civil war will rally together, not only hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers but millions of semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois, now deceived by chauvinism, but whom the horrors of war will not only intimidate and depress, but also enlighten, teach, arouse, organise, steel and prepare for the war against the bourgeoisie of their “own” country and “foreign” countries. And this will take place, if not today, then tomorrow, if not during the war, then after it, if not in this war then in the next one.
The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism. Down with opportunism, and long live the Third International, purged not only of “turncoats”(as Golos wishes), but of opportunism as well.
The Second International did its share of useful preparatory work in preliminarily organising the proletarian masses during the long, “peaceful” period of the most brutal capitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the last third of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. To the Third International falls the task of organising the proletarian forces for a revolutionary onslaught against the capitalist governments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all countries for the capture of political power, for the triumph of socialism!
Notes
[1] See pp. 25–34 of this volume.—
Ed.
[2] The British Socialist Party was founded in 1911, in Manchester, as a result of the Social-Democratic Federation merging with other socialist groups. The B.S.P. carried on its propaganda in the Marxist spirit, was “not opportunist, and . . . was
really independent of the Liberals” (see present edition, Vol. 19, p. 273 Its small membership, however, and its isolation from the masses gave it a somewhat sectarian character.
During the First World War, a sharp struggle flared up in the party between the internationalist trend (William Gallacher, Albert Inkpin, John Maclean, Thomas Rothstein and others) and the social-chauvinist trend led by Hyndman. On a number of questions a section of the internationalists held Centrist views. In February 1916 a group of party members founded the newspaper
The Call, which was instrumental in uniting the internationalist elements. When, at its Salford conference in April 1916, the Party denounced the social-chauvinist stand held by Hyndman and his followers, the latter broke away from the Party.
The British Socialist Party acclaimed the October Socialist Revolution in Russia, its members playing a prominent role in the British working people’s movement in support of Soviet Russia, and against the foreign intervention. In 1919 the majority of the local Party branches (98 against 4) declared for affiliation to the Communist International.
The British Socialist Party and the Communist unity group played the leading part in founding the Communist Party of Great Britain. At the first Unity Congress of 1920 the overwhelming majority of the B.S.P. branches merged in the newly founded Communist Party.
[3] The Independent Labour Partya reformist party founded by the leaders of “new trade unions” in 1893, when the strike struggle revived and there was a mounting drive for a labour movement independent of the bourgeois parties. The Party included members of the “new trade unions” and a number of the old trade unions, representatives of the professions and the petty bourgeoisie, who were under Fabian influence. The Party’s leader was James Keir Hardie.
From its early days the Independent Labour Party held a bourgeois-reformist stand, concentrating on the parliamentary forms of struggle and parliamentary deals with the Liberals. Characterising this party, Lenin wrote that it was “actually an opportunist party that has always been dependent on the bourgeoisie” (V. I. Lenin,
On Britain, Moscow, p. 401).
When the First World War broke out, the Party issued an anti-war manifesto, but shortly afterwards took a social-chauvinist stand.
[4] See Note 20 in
Position and Tasks of the Socialist International.
[6] Golos (
The Voice )—a daily Menshevik paper, published in Paris from September 1914 to January 1915, which followed a Centrist line.
In the early days of the war of 1914-18
Golos published several of Martov’s articles directed against social-chauvinists. After Martov’s swing to the Right, the newspaper came out in defence of the social-chauvinists, preferring “unity with the social-chauvinists to drawing closer to those who are irreconcilably hostile to social chauvinism” (p. 113 in this volume)
In January 1915
Golos ceased publication and was replaced by
Nashe Slovo (
Our Word ).
[7] The Paris group or group for aid the R.S.D.L.P. was formed on November 5 (18), 1908. It separated from the common Menshevik and Bolshevik Paris group, to unite Bolsheviks alone. It was later joined by pro-Party Mensheviks and
Vperyod supporters.
During the war the group consisted of N. A. Semashko, M. F. Vladimirsky, I. F. Armand, S. I. Gopner, L. N. Stal, V. K. Taratula, A. S. Shapovalov and others. Led by Lenin, the group took an internationalist stand and waged a vigorous struggle against the imperialist war and the opportunists.
