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From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 46, 7 October 1933, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The “historic Anti-War Congress” has adjourned, and as was to be and was foreseen, it has left absolutely no positive residue, save a bitter taste in the mouth of every revolutionist, and illusions in the minds of those workers duped by the macabre masquerade of the Stalinists.
More than once in these columns we have submitted the whole Stalin-Barbusse (in the United States: Browder-Sinclair-Dreiser) movement to a thorough criticism which laid it bare as a burlesque of a genuine united front movement against Fascism and the clanger of imperialist war, as a pernicious pacifist delusion calculated to cover up the impotence of the international Stalin apparatus. The just concluded New York congress merely remained true to smudgy tradition of the Amsterdam assembly last August and the Paris gathering that followed it. It represented nothing but the Stalinist organizations plus a few handfuls of pacifists and confusionists serving as a “respectable front”. Like its predecessors – the Anglo-Russian Committee, the Kuo Min Tang alliance, the “World League Against Imperialism” – it is part of the Great Illusion of Stalinism.
The official Stalinist theory of national socialism leads directly to the conception that the struggle against imperialist war and for the defense of the Soviet Union, requires, or permits, policies and practices from those pursued in the general strategy of the proletarian vanguard. A revolutionary policy must be followed “in general” in the struggle of the British working class against the bourgeoisie and its labor lieutenants. But in the struggle against the war danger, the British Communists must subordinate themselves to the Purcells and Cooks. The proletariat in the colonial and semi-colonial countries must conduct an independent struggle against its ruling class. But in the alleged interests of the defense of the Soviet Union, it must be tied to the chariot of Arabian princes, reactionary Hindu mystics, Balkan “peasant” leaders or demagogic office seekers from Catalonia to Cathay.
In essence, this course resulted in the blowing up of the Second International when the crucial test confronted it. The International is an instrument of peace, and not of war, was the Kautskyan explanation in 1914. If there is any difference between that and the conduct of the Stalinists, it is that the latter half conceal themselves behind the thin mask of Messrs. Muenzenberg, Barbusse and their similars. Nevertheless, this does not eliminate the fact that at bottom we are dealing here with a semi-pacifist, semi-social patriotic conception, which has led to the August Fourth of both internationals.
The New York congress affords us the opportunity of making a most striking comparison between it and a similar movement in this country in 1917 – the “People’s Council of America for Democracy and Terms of Peace”. If a few names and terms are changed as they have to be for the period of time that has elapsed, it will be difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Or, if there is a distinction, it lies only in the fact that the Barbusse movement and its proponents have been deteriorating and collapsing at a speedier rate.
The “People’s Council” was as much a cover organization for the Socialist party as the Barbusse movement is for the Stalinists. It too had as its aim the struggle against war and the preservation of peace. It too proclaimed itself a “friend of the Russian revolution” and demanded that the peace terms of the “Russian democracy” be universally accepted. It too held its “historic conventions”, represented itself as the 1917 equivalent of the “real united front”, and at its constituent assembly in Chicago in September 1917 declared itself to be “representing in all over two million members” (American Labor Yearbook, 1920).
Among its founders and spokesmen could be found almost exactly the same organizations, the same individuals – at all events, the same types – as those that composed the New York congress a few days ago. If the Barbusse movement has Mrs. Annie E. Gray of the Women’s Peace Society, the 1917 movement had the equally well-intentioned Harriet Park Thomas, of the Women’s Peace Party. For the Barbusse actress, Mlle. Alia Nazimova, the People’s Council had the actress Miss Lola LaFollette. Mr. Leopold Stokowski’s place was occupied in 1917 by the sculptor Frank Stephens. Rabbi Israel Goldstein had his counterpart sixteen years ago in Rabbi Judah L. Magnes, just as the present secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Mr. J.B. Matthews was at that time represented by its then secretary, Mr. Edmund C. Evans. The People’s Council had its J.B. Salutsky then, and the Barbusse Committee has him now. Both movements had more than their quota of ministers, pastors, priests and other gentlemen of the gospel. The official party representatives in 1917 were Hillquit, Lee, Panken and Berger; today they are Browder, Minor, Hathaway and Bedacht.
The “Peoples Council” was, as is quite well known today, a miscarriage. It organized no real movement against the war, nor could it. It even proclaimed that “We are not discouraging enlistments. We are not obstructing the conduct of the war”. Its belly caved in completely and there was no backbone to hold it up. The pacifists, as before 1917 and ever since, proved to be against war until ... it broke out.
Ah, but you forget that it was the social patriotic Socialist party that inspired and maneuvered the People’s Council; whereas now it is the revolutionary Communist party that is behind the Barbusse movement – The objection is based upon a superficial distinction in this case, for the difference is less real than apparent.
The Communist party does, it is true, adopt revolutionary theses on how to fight the war danger; it speaks and writes incessantly of the transformation of imperialist war into civil war, of the struggle against pacifism, and more of the same.
But – and this is the nub of the question – the Socialist party of 1917, in its own conventions and press, also paid formal homage to the revolutionary phrase. At its St. Louis emergency convention in 1917, it declared (majority resolution on war):
“We particularly warn the workers against the snare and delusion of defensive warfare. As against the false doctrine of national patriotism we uphold the ideal of international working class solidarity ... The acute situation created by war calls for an even more vigorous prosecution of the class struggle, and we recommend to the workers and pledge ourselves to the following course of action: 1. Continuous, active and public opposition to the war, through demonstrations, mass petitions and all other means within our power.”
Radical enough, wasn’t it? Among its signatories were not only the revolutionist Ruthenberg, but also the Centrist Hillquit and the social imperialist Berger. So much for their words. In action however, the St. Louis resolution did not prevent Hillquit and Berger from dissolving the Socialist party and its anti-war work in the wishy-washy pacifist morass of the People’s Council, which served American imperialism so well, in its own way, while the war was actually on.
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