In Search Of… Part Two-With Lost Loves In Mind

In Search Of… Part Two-With Lost Loves In Mind

By Bart Webber

“You know, Dad, the only good thing that came out of the break-up with Moira was that I finally cooled the fire in my head a little, finally gained a little peace. Funny it came through taking up meditation which I used to laugh at when Moira would urge me to think about doing it to relax my fevered head a bit. Used to call it just another one of those New Age things that she was always touting as the next best cure for what ailed humankind,” Dan Hawkins said to his uncomprehending father, Jethro, a man he until a few years before he had been estranged from once the old man divorced his late mother to run off with some floosy who left him flat and broken, hearted and financially. They had only reconciled after his mother’s funeral when it seemed that such mending needed doing. That incomprehension of old Jethro about what Dan had just told him was nothing but the truth as the old man was “old school,” had grown up in utter poverty in Riverdale, had done his time in “Nam and had been and was proud of his service and exhibited all the traits of those young men, white men,  who had come of age in the late 1950s and were unaffected, or claimed to be unaffected, by all the bullshit, Jethro’s term, that passed for wisdom during the counter-cultural 1960s. So his running off with some floosy, his heavy drinking (and at one point drug use), his sense of Vietnam, my country right or wrong, patriotism were all of a piece. All of piece that would make something like meditation, something he had seen the Buddhists do in Vietnam while good  American like him were taking care of the shit train that they had let their country fall into by ignoring the “commies” until it was too late. If his wife, if his girlfriends of which he had had many after that floosy slipped away with his dough and his balls, had suggested that he take up meditation for what ailed him he would have shown, had shown for lesser offenses than that, the back of his hand. (And Dan could through a miserable childhood of merciless criticism, and back hands, testify to the truth of that statement. A truth that contributed mightily to those many years of estrangement between the two men.         

“What the fuck are you talking about, Dan? How the hell was whatever that meditation bullshit that ball-buster Moira trying to lay on you going to help keep you to together when she wanted to run the show, ’’ old Jethro answered back with that unknowing grin on his face that what Dan should have done was given her his back hand, and maybe a couple of good fucks and that would have stopped that noise.

“Dad, you can’t do that with women anymore and you probably couldn’t even in your day and if you had tried to lay a hand on Ma she would have left you high and dry way before you got tangled up that floosy Susie that broke you. I don’t want to talk about that, okay. Just hear me out with a word and maybe you can learn something for once,” Dan responded plaintively. His father almost began to say something nasty but the look in Dan’s eye told him to back off.  

This is the way Dan’s old high school friend, Rich Bruce, remembered what Dan had said to his father one night when they were having dinner at Elmer’s Diner in old town Riverdale where Rich still lived and Dan needed to confide in somebody about what he was trying to do to be less distraught about Moira’s quick disappearance from his life.    

Although at first Dan and Moira were crazy in love like many twenty-somethings who were going through their first serious love affairs right from the start there had been tensions, tensions caused by Dan always being in overdrive as he was starting his career in law at a major law firm, Dale, Dale, and Rutgers where the pressure was great to perform or hit the bricks. Dan had met Moira one night at Jeff’s Grille, a local hang-out for law students at Suffolk once they got over the grind of 1L after he had taken his bar examination and needed to unwind. She was a last year student at the Museum School of Art who was there with a girlfriend and he had asked them if they wanted a drink to celebrate his “victory” since he believed he had passed the damn thing on the basis of the written questions. One thing led to another and they started dating and making plans, in the meantime moved in together.      

That’s when the heartache began, that’s when that fire in Dan’s head led to many word fights and Moira’s first threats that things were not working out and that she was leaving. In lieu of that, at least for a while once Dan explained what pressures he was under from the high-pressure law firm he was tied up with, Moira decided to start doing meditation with Don Henderson, the locally famous Buddhist convert who ran classes each week at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Moira admitted for a while that doing her “meds” she called it helped to relieve the tensions between them. 

Just for a while though as she became more distraught at Dan’s behavior, including a fear that he might strike he in a keyed-up moment. She suggested to him that he might benefit from meditation. He blew off that suggestion, laughed at her and said that if anybody he knew every found out that he was doing such a New Age thing he would be laughed out of town.    

Probably Dan’s response set something off in Moira, he wasn’t sure if that was the moment when he had time to reflect on what had happened after she packed her bags and left but it didn’t help. She got moodier the more he got in that same condition, they made love less often and not as tenderly as before, a sure sign that things were going downhill fast. She would speak wistfully of having to find herself, having to see what she was all about in this wicked old world (Dan’s term, not hers) and the kicker, that she thought Dan’s frenzies were affecting her already delicate health. That last part, the affecting her health part got Dan’s attention and that was when he suggested the trip to Paris. She agreed.        

The trip to Paris had been great, they saw the museums, ate well, made love better than they had in a while and came back refreshed. Or so Dan thought. A week later, perhaps seeing how great things could be away the pressure-cooker of their lives together Moira lowered the boomthe first time. Said she wanted out. Dan begged her not to go and the only way he could placate her then was to succumb to her request that they go into couples counselling. Dan had hated even the idea of that kind of thing (and when he told his father about what she had asked him to do the old man gave a look like wasn’t he just pussy-whipped). So they went to a counsellor in Cambridge that Moira had heard of through New Age network and while Dan had held his nose at first once he got into the sessions he told Moira that he was in all the way, one hundred percent.      

Those weekly sessions went on for the better part of a year until he and Moira decided to take a week’s vacation to Maine. That week was another great time for fun at the beach, eating out and doing a few goofy things like playing miniature golf, going bowling, and going to an old-fashioned outdoor drive-in theater. A week later Moira lowered the final boom, packed her bags and left (that threatening to leave and leaving after a great vacation had Dan thinking about Moira’s own psychological problems but not much). Her argument was that like before she had to find herself, see what she was about and still thought Dan was aggravating her medical problems. She also told him in uncertain terms that he had better take stock of himself, seek some help, maybe see Don about doing meditation or he would become a human wreak.           

Well Dan moped around for a while, several weeks, thinking about where he had let the thing fall apart. Knew that he had been responsible for a lot of what had gone wrong, had been an ass about stuff. Then one day on the bulletin board at the law firm he saw a notice that several institutions in Boston, including Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) were putting on a Hubweek, a week of social, physical, and medical therapy workshops and lectures to let people calm down essentially. He noticed that one workshop was being held at MGH with a Doctor Herbert Benson, a name he knew from a book he had read that Moira had left around the apartment one thing when she was looking for yet another New Age idea. This Doctor Benson had proof, had done research, that practicing meditation would help your health or as Dan put it put out the fire in his head, let him be at peace a little. So he went to the workshop and the rest is history. He started doing that previously scorned meditation. And he felt better, calmer.  Old man Jethro Hawkins’ reaction:WTF. Some things never change.           

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

Pacifism As The Servant of Imperialism

Transcribed for the Trotsky Internet Archive, now a sub-section of the Marxists’ Internet Archive, by J.J. Plant and HTML markup by David Walters in August of 1996. Transcribed from Communist International, English Edition, No.5 New Series. No translator is credited. No date is provided although it clearly dates from the period of the Provisional Government of mid-1917.

There were never so many pacifists in the world as now, when in all countries men are killing one another. Every historical epoch has not only its own technique and its own political form, but also a hypocrisy peculiar to itself. Once peoples destroyed each other in the name of the Christian teaching of love of humanity. Now only backward governments call upon Christ. Progressive nations cut each others’ throats in the name of pacifism. Wilson drags America into the war in the name of the League of Nations, and perpetual peace. Kerensky and Tseretelli call for an offensive for the sake of an early peace.

Our epoch lacks the indignant satire of a Juvenal. In any case, even the most potential satirical weapons are in danger of being proved powerless and illusory in comparison with triumphant infamy and grovelling stupidity; which two elements were unfettered by the war.
Pacifism is of the same historical lineage as democracy. The bourgeoisie made a great historical attempt to order all human relations in accordance with reason, to supplant blind and dumb tradition by the institutions of critical thought. The guilds with their restriction of production, political institutions with their privileges, monarchistic absolutism – all these were traditional relics of the middle ages. Bourgeois democracy demanded legal equality for free competition, and for parliamentarism as the means of governing public affairs. It sought also to regulate national relations in the same manner. But here it came up against war, that is against a method of solving all problems which is a complete denial of “reason”. So it began to advise the people in poetry, in philosophy, in ethics, and in business methods, that it is far more useful for them to introduce perpetual peace. These are the logical arguments for pacifism.
The inherited failing of pacifism, however, was the fundamental evil which characterises bourgeois democracy. Its criticism touches only the surface of social phenomena, it has not the courage to cut deeper into the underlying economic facts. Capitalist realism, however, handles the idea of perpetual peace based on the harmony of reason, perhaps more pitilessly than the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity. Capitalism, which developed technique on a rational basis, failed to regulate conditions rationally. It prepared weapons for mutual extermination which would never have occurred to the dreams of the “barbarians”of medieval times.
The rapid intensification of international conditions, and the unremitting growth of militarism, knocked away the ground from under the feet of pacifism. But at the same time, these same forces were giving pacifism a new life before our very eyes, a life as different from the old one as a blood-red sunset is from a rosy dawn.
The ten years which preceded the war were the period of what has been called “armed peace”. The whole time was in reality nothing but an uninterrupted war, a war waged in colonial lands.
This war was fought out upon the territories of backward and weak peoples; it led to the participation of Africa, Polynesia and Asia, and prepared the way for the present war. But, as there had been no European war since 1871, although there had been quite a number of small but sharp conflicts, common opinion among the petty- bourgeois had been systematically encouraged to look upon an ever-growing army as a guarantee of peace, which would gradually bear its fruits in a new organisation of popular international law. As for the capitalistic governments and big business, they naturally saw nothing to object to in this “pacifist”interpretation of militarism. Meanwhile world conflicts were in preparation and the world catastrophe was there.
Theoretically and politically, pacifism has just the same basis as the doctrine of social harmony between different class interests.
The opposition between capitalistic national states has just the same economic basis as the class struggle. If we are ready to assume the possibility of a gradual toning down of the class struggle, then we must also assume the gradual toning down and regulation of nationalistic conflicts.
The guardian of democratic ideology, with all its traditions and illusions, was the petty bourgeoisie. During the second half of the nineteenth century, it had become completely transformed inwardly, but it had not yet disappeared from the scene. At the very time when the development of capitalistic technique was permanently undermining the economic role of the petty bourgeoisie, universal franchise and compulsory military service were giving it, thanks to its numerical strength, the appearance of a political factor. Where the small capitalist had not been crushed out of existence altogether by big business, he was completely subjugated by the credit system. It only remained to the representatives of big business to subjugate the petty bourgeoisie also in the political field, by taking all its theories and prejudices and lending them a fictitious value. This is the explanation of the phenomena which were to be observed in the last ten years before the war, when reactionary imperialism was growing to such a terrific height, while at the same time the illusive blossoming of a bourgeois democracy, with all its reformism and pacifism took place. Big business subjugated the petty bourgeoisie to its imperialistic ends by means of its own prejudices.
France was the classic example of this two sided process. France is a country of finance-capital supported upon the basis of a numerous and generally conservative petty bourgeois. Thanks to foreign loans, to the colonies, and to the alliance with Russia and England, the upper strata of the population were dragged into all the interests and all the conflicts of world capitalism. Meanwhile, the French petty bourgeoisie remained a provincial to his very marrow. He has an instinctive dread of geography, and all his life long he has had the greatest horror of war, mainly because he usually has only one son, to whom he will leave his business and his furniture. This petty bourgeois sends a bourgeois radical to represent him in parliament, for that gentleman promises him that he will preserve peace for him by means of the League of Nations on the one hand and of Russian Cossacks, who will chop off the Kaiser’s head for him, on the other. The radical deputy arrives in Paris from his circle of provincial lawyers, not only full of the will to peace, but also with only the vaguest of notions as to the position of the Persian Gulf, and without any clear idea of why or for whom the Baghdad Railway is necessary. These “radical pacifist” deputies provided from their midst a Radical Ministry, which immediately found itself entangled up to the ears in the meshes of all the previous diplomatic and military obligations undertaken by all the various financial interests of the French Bourse in Russia, Africa and Asia. The Ministry and Parliament never ceased intoning their pacifist phraseology, but at the same time they were automatically carrying out a foreign policy which finally brought France into the war.
English and American pacifism, despite all the variety of social conditions and ideology (despite also the lack of any ideology as in America) carry out essentially the same work : they provide an outlet for the petty bourgeoisie citizens’ fear of world-shaking events, which after all can only deprive him of the remnants of his independence; they lull to sleep his watchfulness by useless notions of disarmament, international law, and arbitration tribunals. Then, at a given moment, they hand him over body and soul to capitalistic imperialism which has already mobilised every means necessary for its end: i.e., technical knowledge, art, religion, bourgeois pacifism and patriotic “Socialism.”
“We were against the war, our deputies, our Ministers, were all against the war,”cry the French petty bourgeois: “Therefore, it follows, that we have the war forced upon us, and in order to realise our pacific ideals we must pursue the war to a victorious end.”And the representative of French pacifism, Baron d’Estournel de Constant, consecrates this pacifist philosophy with a solemn “jusqu’au bout!” – war to the end!
The thing which above all others the English Stock Exchange required for the successful conduct of the war, was pacifist like the liberal Asquith, and the radical demagogue Lloyd George. “If these men are running the war,” said the English people, “then we must have right on our side.”
And so pacifism had its allotted part to play in the mechanism of the war, like poison gas, and the ever-rising pile of war loans.
In the USA the pacifism of the petty-bourgeoisie showed itself in its true role, as the servant of imperialism, in an even less disguised manner. There, as elsewhere, it was the banks and the trusts which really managed politics. Even before the war, owing to the extraordinary development of industry, and of the export trade, the USA had been steadily moving in the direction of world interests and of imperialism. But the European war drove on this imperialistic development at a feverish pace. At the very moment when many pious people (even Kautsky) were hoping that the horrors of the butchery in Europe would fill the American bourgeoisie with horror of militarism, the real influence of the events in Europe was proceeding, not on psychological, but on materialistic lines, and was leading to the very opposite results. The exports of the USA, which in 1913 had totalled 2,466 millions of dollars, rose in 1916 to the crazy height of 5,481 milliards of dollars. Naturally the lion’s share of this export trade was allotted to the munitions industry. Then came the sudden threat of a cessation in he export trade to the Entente countries, when unrestricted submarine warfare began. In 1915 the Entente had imported American goods up to thirty-five milliards, while Germany and Austria-Hungary had barely imported as much as fifteen millions. Thus, not only a diminution of the gigantic profits was indicated, but the whole of American industry, which had its basis in war industry, was now threatened with a severe crisis. It is to these figures that we must look for the key to the division of “sympathies”in America. And so the capitalists appealed to the State: “It is you who started this development of war-industry under the banner of pacifism, it is now up to you to find us a new market.” If the State was not in a position to promise the “freedom of the seas” (in other words, freedom to squeeze capital out of human blood) then it must open a new market for the threatened war industries – in America itself. And so the requirements of the European slaughter produced a sudden, a catastrophic militarisation of the USA.
This business was bound to arouse the opposition of the great masses of the people. To conquer this undefined discontent, and transform it into patriotic co-operation was the most important task in the domestic politics of the USA. And it was by a strange irony of fate that the official pacifism of Wilson, like the “opposition” pacifism of Bryan, provided the most powerful weapons for the performance of this task, i.e., the taming of the masses by militaristic methods.
Bryan hastened to give loud expression to the natural dislike of the farmers, and of all the petty-bourgeoisie to imperialism, militarism and increase in taxation. But at the very time when he was sending off wagon-loads of petitions and deputations to his pacifist colleagues, who occupied the highest places in the government, Bryan was also using every effort to break away from the revolutionary lead of this movement.
“If it comes to war,” thus for instance Bryan telegraphed to an anti-war meeting held in Chicago in February, “then, of course, we shall support the government, but up to that moment it is our most sacred duty to do everything that lies in our power to save the people from the horrors of war.” In these few words we have the whole programme of petty bourgeois pacifism. “Everything that is in our power to prevent war,” means to provide an outlet for the opposition of the masses in the shape of harmless manifestos, in which the government is given a guarantee that if war comes, no hindrance will be put in its way by the pacifist opposition.
That indeed, was all that was required by the Official pacifism personified by Wilson, who had already given plenty of proofs to the capitalists who were making the war, of his “readiness to fight.” And even Mr Bryan himself found it enough to have made this declaration, after which he was content to put aside his noisy opposition to the war; simply for one purpose – that of declaring war. Like Mr Wilson, Mr Bryan hastened over to the other side of the government. And not only the petty-bourgeoisie, but also the great mass of the people, said to themselves: “If our government, headed by a pacifist of such world-wide reputation as Wilson, can declare war, and Bryan himself can support the government on the question of war, then surely this must be a righteous and necessary war.” This explains why the pious, Quakerish kind of pacifism, indulged in by the demagogues who led the government, was so highly valued by the Stock Exchange and the leaders of war industry.
Our own Menshevik, social-revolutionary pacifism, despite the difference in outward conditions, played in its own way exactly the same part. The resolution on war, which was adopted by a majority of the All-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, is founded not only on the common pacifist prejudices concerning war, but also on the characteristics of an imperialistic war. The Congress declared that the “first and most important task of revolutionary democracy” was the speedy ending of war. But all these assumptions are only directed towards a single end: so long as the international efforts of democracy have failed to make an end of war, so long must Russian revolutionary democracy demand with all its strength that the Red Army shall be prepared to fight whether defensive or offensive.
The revision of the old international treaties makes the Russian Congress dependent upon voluntary understandings with the diplomacy of the Entente, and it is not in the nature of these diplomats to liquidate the imperialistic character of war, even if they could. The “international efforts of democracy” leaves the congress and its leaders dependent upon the will of the Social-Democratic patriots, who are tied and bound to their imperialistic governments. And this same majority of the congress, having first of all led itself into a blind alley with this business of the “quickest possible ending to war,” has now landed itself, where practical politics are concerned, in a definite conclusion: the offensive. A “pacifism” which rallies the petty-bourgeoisie and brings us to the support of the offensive will naturally be most warmly welcomed, not only by Russians but also by Entente imperialism.
Miliukov, for instance, says: “In the name of our loyalty to the allies and to our old (imperialistic) treaties, the offensive must inevitably be entered upon.”
Kerensky and Tseretelli say: “Although our old treaties have not yet been revised, the offensive is inevitable.”
The arguments vary, but the policy is the same. And it could not be otherwise, since Kerensky and Tseretelli are inextricably bound up in the government with Miliukov’s party.
The Social-Democratic, patriotic pacifism of Dan, like the Quaker pacifism of Bryan, are, when we come to actual facts, equally in the service of the imperialists.
It is for this reason that the most important task of Russian diplomacy does not consist in persuading the Entente diplomacy to revise something or other, or to abrogate something else, but in convincing them that the Russian revolution is absolutely reliable, and can safely be trusted.
The Russian ambassador, Bachmatiev, in his speech to the Congress of the USA on June 10th, also characterised the activity of the Provisional Government from this point of view :

“All these events,”he said, “show us that the power and significance of the Provisional Government are growing every day, and the more they grow the more capable will the government be of throwing out all disintegrating elements, whether these come from the reaction or from the agitation of the extreme left. The Provisional Government has just decided to take all possible means to achieve this end, even if it has to resort to force, although it does not cease to strive for a peaceful solution of its problems.”

One need not doubt for a moment that the “national honour” of our Social-Democratic patriots remained undisturbed while he ambassador of the “revolutionary democracy” eagerly proved to the American plutocracy that the Russian government was ready to pour out the blood of the Russian proletariat in the name of law and order. The most important element of law and order being its loyal support of Entente capitalism.

And at the very moment when Herr Bachmatief was standing hat in hand, humbly addressing himself to the hyaenas of the American Stock Exchange, Messieurs Tseretelli and Kerensky were setting the “revolutionary democracy” by the ears, in assuring then that it was impossible to combat the “anarchy of the left” without using force, and were threatening to disarm the workers of Petrograd and the regiment which supported them. We can see now that these threats were delivered at just the right moment: they were the best possible guarantee for the Russian loan from America.
“You see, now,” Herr Bachmatiev might have said to Mr. Wilson, “our revolutionary pacifism does not differ by a hair’s breadth from the pacifism of your Stock Exchange. And if they can believe Mr. Bryan, why should they not believe Herr Tseretelli?”

---

     

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.   

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

THE STRUGGLE FOR STATE POWER

---

Democracy, Pacifism and Imperialism

(June 30, 1917)

There have never been so many pacifists as at this moment, when people are slaying each other on all the great highways of our planet. Each epoch has not only its own technology and political forms, but also its own style of hypocrisy. Time was when the nations destroyed each other for the glory of Christ’s teachings and the love of one’s neighbour. Now Christ is invoked only by backward governments. The advanced nations cut each other’s throats under the banners of pacifism a league of nations and a durable peace. Kerensky and Tseretelli shout for an offensive, in the name of an “early conclusion of peace.”

There is no Juvenal for this epoch, to depict it with biting satire. Yet we are forced to admit that even the most powerful satire would appear weak and insignificant in the presence of blatant baseness and cringing stupidity, two of the elements which have been released by the present war.
Pacifism springs from the same historical roots as democracy. The bourgeoisie made a gigantic effort to rationalize human relations, that is, to supplant a blind and stupid tradition by a system of critical reason. The guild restrictions on industry, class privileges, monarchic autocracy these were the traditional heritage of the middle ages. Bourgeois democracy demanded legal equality, free competition and parliamentary methods in the conduct of public affairs. Naturally, its rationalistic criteria were applied also in the field of international relations. Here it hit upon war, which appeared to it as a method of solving questions that was a complete denial of all “reason”. So bourgeois democracy began to point out to the nations – with the tongues of poesy, moral philosophy and certified accounting that they would profit more by the establishment of a condition of eternal peace. Such were the logical roots of bourgeois pacifism.
From the time of its birth pacifism was afflicted, however, with fundamental defect, one which is characteristic of bourgeois democracy; its pointed criticisms addressed themselves to the surface of political phenomena, not daring to penetrate to their economic causes. At the hands of capitalist reality the idea of eternal peace, on the basis of a “reasonable” agreement, has fared even more badly then the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity. For Capitalism, when it rationalized industrial conditions, did not rationalize the social organization of ownership, and thus prepared instruments of destruction such as even the “barbarous” Middle Ages never dreamed of.
The constant embitterment of international relations and the ceaseless growth of militarism completely undermined the basis of reality under the feet of pacifism. Yet it was from these very things that pacifism took a new lease of life, a life which differed from its earlier phase as the blood and purple sunset differs from the rosy-fingered dawn.
The decades preceding the present war have been well designated as a period of armed peace. During this whole period campaigns were in uninterrupted progress and battles were being fought, but they were in the colonies alone.
Proceeding, as they did, in the territories of backward and powerless peoples, these wars led to a division of Africa, Polynesia and Asia, and prepared the way for the present world war. As, however, there were no wars in Europe after 1871 – in spite of a long series of sharp conflicts – the general opinion in petty bourgeois circles began gradually to behold in the growth of armies a guarantee of peace, which was destined ultimately to be established by international law with every institutional sanction. Capitalist governments and munition kings naturally had no objections to this “pacifist” interpretation of militarism. But the causes of world conflicts were accumulating and the present cataclysm was getting under way.
Theoretically and politically, pacifism stands on the same foundation as does the theory of the harmony of social interests. The antagonisms between capitalist nations have the same economic roots as the antagonisms between the classes. And if we admit the possibility of a progressive blunting of the edge of the class struggle, it requires but a single step further to accept a gradual softening and regulating of international relations.
The source of the ideology of democracy, with all its traditions and illusions, is the petty bourgeoisie. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it suffered a complete internal transformation, but was by no means eliminated from political life. At the very moment that the development of capitalist technology was inexorably undermining its economic function, the general suffrage right and universal military service were still giving to the petty bourgeoisie, thanks to its numerical strength, an appearance of political importance. Big capital, in so far as it did not wipe out this class, subordinated it to its own ends by means of the applications of the credit system. All that remained for the political representatives of big capital to do was to subjugate the petty bourgeoisie, in the political arena, for their purposes, by opening fictitious credit to the declared theories and prejudices of this class. It is for this reason that, in the decade preceding the war, we witnessed, side by side with the gigantic efforts of a reactionary-imperialist policy, a deceptive flowering of bourgeois democracy with its accompanying reformism and pacifism. Capital was making use of the petty bourgeoisie for the prosecution of capital’s imperialist purposes by exploiting the ideologic prejudices of the petty bourgeoisie.
Probably there is no other country in which this double process was so unmistakably accomplishing itself as in France. France is the classic land of finance capital, which leans for its support on the petty bourgeoisie of the cities and the towns, the most conservative class of the kind in the world, and numerically very strong. Thanks to foreign loans, to the colonies, to the alliance of France with Russia and England, the financial upper crust of the Third Republic found itself involved in all the interests and conflicts of world politics. And yet, the French petty bourgeois is an out-and-out provincial. He has always shown an instinctive aversion to geography and all his life has feared war as the very devil – if only for the reason that he has, in most cases, but one son, who is to inherit his business, together with his chattels. This petty bourgeois sends to Parliament a radical who has promised him to preserve peace – on the one hand, by means of a league of nations and compulsory international arbitration, and on the other, with the cooperation of the Russian Cossacks, who are to hold the German Kaiser in check. This radical depute, drawn from the provincial lawyer class, goes to Paris not only with the best intentions, but also without the slightest conception of the location of the Persian Gulf, and of the use, and to whom, of the Baghdad Railway. This radical-“pacifist” bloc of deputies gives birth to a radical ministry, which at once finds itself bound hand and foot by all the diplomatic and military obligations and financial interests of the French bourse in Russia, Africa and Asia. Never ceasing to pronounce the proper pacifist sentences, the ministry and the parliament automatically continue to carry on a world policy which involves France in war.
English and American pacifism, in spite of the differences in social and ideological forms (or in the absence of such, as in America), is carrying on, at bottom, the same task; it offers to the petty and the middle bourgeoisie an expression for their fears of world cataclysms in which they may lose their last remnants of independence; their pacifism chloroforms their consciences – by means of impotent ideas of disarmament, international law and world courts – only to deliver them up body and soul, at the decisive moment, to imperialism, which now mobilizes everything for its own purposes: industry, the church, art, bourgeois pacifism and patriotic “Socialism.”
“We have always been opposed to war: our representatives, our ministry have been opposed to war”, says the French citoyen, “therefore the war must have been forced upon us, and in the name of our pacifist ideals we must fight it to the finish.” And the leader of the French pacifists, Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, endorses this pacifist philosophy of an imperialist war with a pompous jusq’au bout. [To the end – Ed.]
The English Stock Exchange, in its prosecution of the war, has need first of all of pacifists of the Asquith (Liberal) and Lloyd George (radical demagogue) type. “If these people go in for war,” say the English masses, “right must be on our side.” Thus a responsible function is allotted to pacifism in the economy of warfare, by the side of suffocating gases and inflated government loans.
More evident still is the subordinate role played by petty bourgeois pacifism with regard to Imperialism in the United States. The actual policy is there more prominently dictated by banks and trusts than anywhere else. Even before the war the United States, owing to the gigantic development of its industry and its foreign commerce, was being systematically driven in the direction of world interests and world policies. The European war imparted to this imperialistic development a speed that was positively feverish. At a time when many well-meaning persons were hoping that the horrors of the European slaughter might inspire the American bourgeoisie with a hatred of militarism, the actual influence of European events was bearing on American policy not in psychological channels, but in material ones, and was having precisely the opposite effect. The exports of the United States, which in 1913 amounted to 2,466 million dollars, rose in 1916 to 5,481 millions! Of course, the lion’s share of this export fell to the lot of the war industries. The sudden breaking off of exports to the Allied nations after the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare meant not only the stoppage of a flow of monstrous profits, but threatened with an unprecedented crisis the whole of American industry, which had been organized on a war footing.
It was impossible for this thing to go on without some resistance from the masses of the people. To overcome their unorganized dissatisfaction and to turn it into channels of patriotic cooperation with the government was therefore the first great task of the internal diplomacy of the United States during the first quarter of the war.
And it is the irony of history that orncial “pacifism”, as well as “oppositional pacifism”, should be the chief instruments for the accomplishment of this task: the education of the masses to military ideals.
Bryan rashly and noisily expressed the natural aversion of the farmers and of the “small man”generally to all such things as world-policy, military service and higher taxes. Yet, at the same time that he was sending wagonloads of petitions, as well as deputations, to his pacifist colleagues at the head of the government, Bryan did everything in his power to break the revolutionary edge of the whole movement. “If war should come,” Bryan telegraphed on the occasion of an anti-war meeting in Chicago last February, “we will all support the goverment of course; yet at this moment it is our sacred duty to do all in our power to preserve the nation from the horrors of war.”These few words contain the entire programme of petty bourgeois pacifism: “to do everything in our power against the war” means to afford the voice of popular indignation an outlet in the form of harmless demonstration, after having previously given the government a guarantee that it will meet with no serious opposition, in the case of war, from the pacifist faction.
Official pacifism could have desired nothing better. It could now give satisfactory assurance of imperialist “preparedness”. After Bryan’s own declaration, only one thing was necessary to dispose of his noisy opposition to war, and that was, simply, to declare war. And Bryan rolled right over into the government camp. And not only the petty bourgeoisie, but also the broad masses of the workers, said to themselves: “If our government, with such an out-spoken pacifist as Wilson at the head, declares war, and if even Bryan supports the government in the war, it must be an unavoidable and righteous war ...” It is now evident why the sanctimonious, Quaker-like pacifism of the bourgeois demagogues is in such high favour in financial and war industry circles.
Our Menshevik and Social-Revolutionist pacifism, in spite of apparent differences, is in reality, playing the same part as American pacifism. The resolution on war passed by the majority of the All Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants, condemns the war not only from a pacifist stand-point, but also because of the imperialist character of the war. The Congress declares the struggle for an early conclusion of the war to be “the most important task of revolutionary democracy”. But all these premises are merely mobilized so that they may lead to the conclusion: “until such time as the war may be ended by the international forces of democracy, the Russian revolutionary democracy will be obliged in every possible way to cooperate in strengthening the fighting power of our army and rendering it efficient for both offensive and defensive action.”
The revision of the old international treaties, the Congress, like the Provisional Government, would make dependent on a voluntary agreement of Allied diplomacy, which in its very nature, neither desires nor is able to relinquish the imperialist aims of the war. The Congress, following its leaders, makes the “international forces of democracy” depend on the will of the social-patriots, who are bound by iron chains to their imperialist governments. Voluntarily restricitng themselves in the question of “an early end of the war to this charmed circle, the majority of the Congress naturally arrives at a very definite conclusion in the domain of practical politics: an offensive on the military front. This “pacifism”, which solidifies and disciplines the petty bourgeois democracy and induces it to support an offensive, ought manifestly to be on most friendly terms not only with the Russian imperialists, but also with those of the Allied nations.
Miliukov says: “In the name of our fidelity to our Allies and to the old (diplomatic) treaties, we must have an offensive.”
Kerensky and Tseretelli say: “Although the old (diplomatic) treaties have not yet been revised, we must have an offensive.”
The argument may differ; the policy is the same. Nor could it be otherwise, since Kerensky and Tseretelli are indissolubly bound up in the government with the party of Miliukov. As a matter of fact, the social-patriotic pacifism of the Dans, as well as the Quaker pacifism of the Bryans, are both operating in the service of Imperialism.
In view of this state of affairs, the chief task of Russian diplomacy is not to make Allied diplomacy refrain from this act or that or to revise this thing or that, but to make Allied diplomacy believe that the Russian Revolution is safe and sound and solvent. The Russian Ambassador, Bakhmetiev, in his speech before the Congress of the United States, delivered on June 10, characterized the Provisional Government chiefly from this point of view.
“All these circumstances,” said the Ambassador, “point to the fact that the power and significance of the Provisional Government are growing day by day, that with each passing moment the Provisional Government is becoming better able to cope with all those elements that mean disaster, whether they take the form of reactionary propaganda or that of an agitation by the members of the extreme left. At the present time the Provisional Government is determined to take the most drastic steps in this direction, resorting to force, if need be, in spite of its constant ndeavours for a peaceful solution of all questions.”
There is no doubt that the “national honour” of our “defenders” remains absolutely unruffled while the Ambassador of “revolutionary democracy” fervently persuades the parliament of the American plutocracy of the readiness of the Russian government to pour out the blood of the Russian proletariat in the name of “order”, the chief ingredient of which is its fidelity to Allied Capitalism.
And at the very moment when Bakhmetiev stood hat in hand, a humiliating speech passing over his lips, in the presence of the representives of Capitalism, Tseretelli and Kerensky were explaining to the “revolutionary democracy” how impossible it was to dispense with armed force in its fight with “the anarchy of the left”, and threatening to disarm the workers of Petrograd and the regiment which made common cause with them. We know that these threats came just in the nick of time; they served as a strong argument in favour of the Russian Loan in Wall Street. You see, Mr. Bakhmetiev was in a position to say: “our revolutionary pacifism differs in no respect from your own brand of pacifism, and if you put your faith in Bryan, there is no reason why you should distrust Tseretelli.”
There remains to us only the necessity of putting one question: How much Russian flesh and Russian blood will it take, on theexternal front as well as in the interior, in order to secure the Russian Loan, which, in its turn, is to guarantee our continued fidelity to the Allies?

June 30, 1917