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From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 42, 9 September 1933, p. 3.
Another translation available in the Lenin Internet Archive.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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This article was published by comrade Lenin in October 1916, in the Social-Democrat, the Bolshevik publication issued in Geneva, Switzerland during the war. It is of especial importance now, when preparations are being made for an Anti-War Congress with the participation of Barbusse and other pacifists. It clearly states the revolutionary line in the struggle against war, and distinguishes it from petty-bourgeois pacifism. To read this document now enables one to measure the distance which separates the line of Lenin and that of Stalin, the “greatest disciple of Lenin”. – Ed. |
The adherents of disarmament are opposed to the point in the program on the “arming of the people” for this reason among others, that the latter demand is supposed to lead more easily to concessions to opportunism. We have already examined the most important part: the relation of disarmament to the class struggle and to the social revolution. Now let us examine the question of the relation of the demand for disarmament to opportunism. One of the most important reasons why it is unacceptable is precisely the fact that it, and the illusions created by it, inevitably weaken and take all force from our struggle against opportunism.
There is no doubt whatever about the fact that this struggle is the most important question on the agenda of the International. A struggle against imperialism, which is not indissolubly connected with the struggle against opportunism, is nothing but an empty phrase or a swindle. One of the main deficiencies of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, one of the main reasons for a possible fiasco (failure, or collapse) of these germs of the Third International, lies precisely in the fact that the question of struggle against opportunism was not even openly posed, not to speak of a decision on this question in the sense of the necessity of a break with the opportunists. Within the European movement opportunism has conquered – for the time being. In all the larger countries two shades of opportunism have been formed: first, an honest, cynical and therefore less dangerous social-imperialism, that of Messrs. Plekhanov, Scheidemann, Legien, Albert Thomas, Sembat, Vandervelde, Hyndman, etc.; and second a concealed form, of the Kautskyan type: Kautsky-Haase and the “Social-Democratic Co-operative Group” in Germany; Longuet, Pressemane, Mayeras, etc. in France, Ramsay MacDonald and other leaders of the “Independent Labor Party” in England, Martov, Tscheidse, etc. in Russia, Treves and other so-called “Left reformists” in Italy.
The sincere form of opportunism is frankly and openly opposed to the resolution, and to the beginning revolutionary movements and outbreaks, it is in open alliance with its government, no matter what different forms this alliance may take, ranking from participation in the ministry up to participation in the war committees of industry. The concealed opportunists, the Kautskyans, are more harmful and dangerous to the labor movement, because they hide the defense of their pacts with the government behind fine-sounding and also “Marxist” phrases and pacifist slogans. The struggle against both these forms of the prevailing opportunism must be carried out in all fields of proletarian policy: parliamentary trade union, strikes, the army, etc. But in what does the most important peculiarity consist, which distinguishes both forms of the prevailing opportunism?
It consists in the fact that the concrete question of the connection of the present war with the revolution and other concrete questions of the revolution are passed over in silence, are veiled over or are treated with reservations as to police prohibitions. And this is done – irrespective of the fact that, before the war, unofficially on innumerable occasions and officially in the Basle Manifesto the connection of precisely this coming war with the proletarian revolution was pointed out.
The main defect of the demand for disarmament consists precisely in the fact that in it all the concrete questions of the revolution are evaded. Or are the adherents of disarmament in favor of an entirely new kind of unarmed revolution?
We go on. We are in no way opposed to the struggle for reforms. We do not want to ignore that dismal possibility, that if the worst comes to the worst, mankind will live through yet another imperialist war, if, irrespective of the numerous outbreaks of the ferment among the masses and their discontent and irrespective of our efforts, the revolution fails to develop out of this war. We are in favor of a program of reforms, which is directed against the opportunists too. The opportunists would be only too happy if we were to leave to them alone the struggle for reforms, and betake ourselves to the misty distances of some “disarmament” in order to save ourselves by flight from the sad reality. “Disarmament” is just that, a flight from ugly reality, but absolutely not a struggle against it.
A propos: one of the main deficiencies in the posing of the question, for example of the defense of the fatherland, among certain Left wingers, lies in the fact that the answer is not concrete enough. It is theoretically far more correct, and practically far more important, to say that in the given imperialist war the defense of the fatherland is a bourgeois-reactionary swindle instead of setting up “general” theses against “every” defense of the fatherland. This is not correct, and also does not “hit” the immediate enemies of the workers within the workers’ parties, the opportunists.
In the question of the militia, in working out a concrete and practically necessary answer, we should have said, “We are not for a bourgeois, but only for a proletarian militia”. And therefore “Not a penny and not a man”, not only for the standing army but also for the bourgeois militia, even in such countries as the United States or Switzerland Norway, etc. And all the more so, because even in the freest republican countries (for instance in Switzerland) we see the Prussianization of the militia, the prostitution of the militia for the purpose of mobilization against strikers. We can demand: selection of officers by the people, abolition of all military law, equal rights for foreign workers with the native-born (this is an especially important point in such imperialist countries as Switzerland which exploit foreign workers more and more shamelessly and leave them without rights) and moreover: the right, let us say, for each hundred inhabitants of a given country to create free associations for the study of the art and science of war, with free selection of instructors and payment of the work of the instructors out of State funds, etc. Only under such conditions could the proletariat acquire the knowledge of war for itself and not for its slaveholders, and the interests of the proletariat unquestionably demand such knowledge. The Russian revolution has shown that every success, even if it is only a partial success, of the revolutionary movement, as for instance the conquest of a certain city, of a certain factory district, a certain part of the army, will inevitably force the victorious proletariat to realize just such a program.
Finally, it is a self-understood that one must not fight against opportunism with programs alone, but by inflexibly seeing to it that they are carried out. The greatest and most fatal error of the now bankrupt Second International lay in the fact that its deeds did not correspond to its words, that the habit of the conscienceless revolutionary phrase was cultivated (see the present relation of Kautsky and his partners to the Basle Manifesto). If we approach the demand for disarmament from this point of view, we must first of all raise the question of its objective meaning.
Disarmament as a social idea – that is, as one whose origin is due to a certain social situation and which can have an influence on a certain social milieu, and which does not merely remain the caprice of an individual or of a circle – has evidently arisen from the special, unusually “calm” conditions of existence of a few small states, which have stood aside from the bloody road of the war for a fairly long time, and hope to continue to remain on the side. In order to be convinced of this, it is sufficient to visualize the line of reasoning of the Norwegian adherents of disarmament: “We are a small country, we have a small army, we can do nothing against the great powers (and therefore they are powerless to resist being forcibly drawn into an imperialist alliance with one group or another of the great powers!), we want to continue in peace in our little corner and carry on our little corner politics and demand disarmament, compulsory courts of arbitration, eternal neutrality, and the rest” (“eternal” neutrality – like that of Belgium, evidently?)
The petty effort of the small states to remain on the side – the petty-bourgeois wish to remain at all costs far from the great battles of world history – and to use their relatively monopolistic position to remain in an ossified passivity – this is objectively the situation which can obtain a certain success and a certain circulation for the idea of disarmament in a few small states. It is self-understood that this effort is reactionary and rests on illusions alone, since imperialism is drawing the small states after all, in one way or another, into the whirlpool of world economy and world politics.
We can illustrate this by the example of Switzerland. The imperialist situation prescribes for it, objectively speaking, two directions for the labor movement. The opportunists are trying to make an alliance with the bourgeoisie, to make Switzerland a republican-democratic monopoly federation, to make money out of the tourists of the imperialistic bourgeoisie, and to be able to use this “peaceful” monopoly position all the more profitably and all the more quietly. In practice, this policy of the alliance of a small privileged layer of workers in a small country, itself in a privileged position, with the bourgeoisie of its own country, is opposed to the masses of the proletariat. The genuine social-democrats of Switzerland are trying to use the relative freedom of Switzerland, its “international” position (as neighbor to the countries of the highest civilization), as well as the circumstance that Switzerland, thank God, does not speak its. “own independent” language but three world languages for the broadening, consolidation and strengthening of the revolutionary alliance of the revolutionary elements of the proletariat of all Europe. “Let us help our bourgeoisie to remain in the monopoly position of dealing in the quietest manner possible in beauties of the Alps, for a long time to come; perhaps then a few pennies will fall off for us” – this is, objectively speaking, the content of the policy of the Swiss opportunists. “Let us help the alliance of the revolutionary proletariat among the French, the Germans and the Italians to overthrow the bourgeoisie” – that is the object-content of the policy of the Swiss revolutionary social-democrats. Unfortunately this policy is still only inadequately carried through by the “Lefts” in Switzerland, and the excellent and the excellent decision of its party congress in Aarau in 1915 (recognition of the revolutionary mass struggle) for the time being still remains on paper. But that is not the question now.
The question which interests us can be posed in this way: Does the demand for disarmament correspond to the revolutionary direction among the Swiss social-democrats, or not? Obviously this is not the case. Objectively speaking, the “demand” for disarmament corresponds to the opportunistic, narrowly-national, line of the labor movement, limited by the horizon of a small state. Objectively speaking, “disarmament” is the most national, the specifically national, program of the small states, and in no way an international program of international social-democracy.
P.S. In the last issue of the English magazine, The Socialist Review (September 1916), the organ of the opportunistic “Independent Labour Party”, we find on page 287 the resolution of the Newcastle Conference of this party – “refusal of support to any conceivable war of any conceivable government”, even if this war should “nominally” be a defensive war. And on page 205 we find in the editorial the following statement, “We do not approve the insurrection of the Sinn-Feiners (the insurrection Ireland in 1916). We do not approve of any armed insurrection altogether, just as we do not approve of militarism and war no matter what kind of form it may take”.
Is it still necessary to prove that these “anti-militarists”, that such adherents of disarmament, not in small state, but in a great power, are the worst kind of opportunists? And yet they are perfectly right in theory, when they regard the armed insurrection as being also “one of the forms” of militarism and of war.
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