As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Approaches Today With The Anniversary Of The Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand... Some Remembrances -Lenin-Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism-HOW THE INTERNATIONAL CAN BE RESTORED (1914)
The events leading up to World War I from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges by the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20th century history. The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine.
The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas. The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.
A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs, were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space. Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war.
Over the next period as we lead up to the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.
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Teddy Martin had come from a long line of workers, some of his forbears had been among the first domestic weavers in Spitalfield, had been the first machine-tenders in Manchester and had been workers like him and his father in the London shipbuilding trade. He knew deep in his blood there was an “us” and “them” in the world without his party, the Labor Party, having to tell him word one on the subject. He had even read Karl Marx in his early teens when he was trying to figure out why his family was stuck in the faraway outer tenements with their squalor and their human closeness (he never could get over being in close quarters ever since then). So yes he was ready to listen to what some left members of the party had to say if the war clouds on the horizon turned any darker. But, and hear him true, his was like his forbears and his father before him as loyal a man as to be found in the country. Loyal to his king (queen too if it came to that) and his country. So he would have to think, think carefully, about what to do if those nasty Huns and their craven allies making loud noises of late threatened his way of life. Most of his mates to the extent that they had any opinion were beginning to be swept up in the idea that a little war might not be such a bad thing to settle some long smoldering disputes. Still he, Teddy Martin, was not a man to be rushed and so he would think, think hard, about what to do if there was a mass mobilization.
No question, thought Teddy Martin, his majesty’s government had gotten itself into a hard situation ever since that mangy Archduke somebody had got himself shot by a guy, a damn anarchist working with who knows who, maybe freemasons, over in Sarajevo, over in someplace he was not quite sure he knew where it was if somebody had asked him to point it out in a map. That seemingly silly little act (except of course to the Archduke and his wife also killed) apparently has exposed Britain, damn the whole British Empire that they claim the sun never sets on, to some pretty serious entanglements because if France were to go to war with Austria or someplace like that then the king is duty bound to come to France’s rescue. And Teddy Martin as thinking man, as a working man, as a member in good standing of the Labor Party ever since its inception was still not sure what he would do. Not sure that he would follow the war cries being shouted out by the likes of Arthur Henderson from his own party. All he knew was that the usual talk of football or the prizefights that filled the air at his pub, The Cock and Bull, was being supplanted by war talk, by talk of taking a nip out of the Germans and those who spoke in that way were gaining a hearing. All Teddy knew was that it was getting harder and harder for him to openly express thoughts that he needed to think about the issues more. That was not a good sign, not a good omen.
Yes, once the Germans were on the march toward Belgium and then threatened Paris in a race to the sea if not stopped then the guys at the Cock and Bull became more pensive, started to see that they would have to do right by the king. One night, one July night before the blood started flowing on the continent, one of the boys, Brewster, Teddy thought had led a toast to the king and all including Teddy rather sheepishly. But now, now with the blood up, no with the Empire at stake, new with even the wogs in India clamoring to serve their king and emperor Teddy Martin could see where each must do his duty. And so Teddy found himself less and less at the pub with the boys and more and more at home with his wife and two young boys waiting for that minute when he would find himself heading to the recruiting station to give his all for his country. Although he lifted no glass to that fact.
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The German Social-Democratic Party had given Fritz Klein everything. Had taken him from a small furniture-making factory(less than one hundred employees constituting in those days small) where he led the fight for unionization (against all odds for that woefully unorganized industry and against the then still standing laws against unionization pressed by the state as well as well as the outlaw status of the S-D Party in those pre-legal days) and brought him along into the burgeoning party bureaucracy (boasting of this number of party publications, that number of members, and the pinnacle the votes attained for the growing number of party parliamentarians in the Reichstag). Made him a local then regional shop steward agent. Later found him a spot in the party publications department and from there to alternate member of the party’s national committee. As he grew older, got married, had two lovely children the party had severely sapped the youthful idealism out of him. Still he was stirred whenever Karl Liebknecht, old Wilhelm’s son, the father whom he knew from the old days, delivered one of his intellectual and rational attacks against the war aims of the Kaiser and his cabal. Still too though he worried, worried to perdition, that the British and, especially the French were deliberately stepping on German toes. Although tired, endlessly tired, he hoped that he would be able to stick to the Second International’s pledge made at Basle in 1912 to do everything to stop war in case it came, as was now likely. He just didn’t know how he would react, didn’t know at all.
Fritz was furious, furious at two things. First that those damn whatever they were anarchists, nationalists, or whatever had assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand. Had threatened the peace of Europe, his peace, with their screwy theory of picking off various state officials thinking that would, unlike victory in the mass class struggles, change the world. Christ, they could have at least read Marx or somebody. Make no mistake Fritz had no truck with monarchy, certainly not the moribund Austro-Hungarian monarchy, despised the Kaiser himself right here in the German homeland (although on the quiet since the Kaiser was not above using his courts for the simple pleasure of skewering a man for lese majeste and had done so to political opponents and the idle wild-talkers alike). Still his blood boiled that some desperados would pick at a fellow Germanic target. Fritz was not at all sure that maybe the French, or the English, the bloody English were behind the activities. Hugo Heine thought so, his immediate regional director, so there could be some truth to the assertion.
Secondly, that same Hugo Heine had begun, at the behest of the national committee of the party, to clamp down on those who were trying to make the party live up to its promises and try to make a stand against any German, any Kaiser moves toward war over the incident at Sarajevo. The way Heine put it was that if war was to come and he hoped that it would not the Social-Democracy must not be thrown into the underground again like in the old days under Bismarck. Hugo had spent two years in the Kaiser’s jail back then for simply trying to organize his shop and get them to vote for the party then outlawed. The radical stuffing had come out of Hugo though and all he wanted was not to go back to jail now for any reason. Fritz cursed those damn anarchists again, cursed them more bitterly since they were surely going to disturb his peace.
Fritz Klein was beside himself when he heard the news, the Social-Democratic parliamentary caucus on August 4th had overwhelming to support the Kaiser’s war budget (and because overwhelming each member was duty-bound to vote en bloc the way the majority vote went and did so despite the pleas of Karl Liebknecht), to give him the guns, ammunition and whatever he needed to pursue the war aims that were just beginning to unfold. Fritz had not expected the party to be able to stop the war preparations, or once the war clouds got too ominous, to stop the mobilizations, but he did expect that the parliamentary delegation (which was under its own discipline and not the party’s) would not cravenly grant the Kaiser’s every war supply. All those brave peacetime proclamations about the brotherhood of man and international working-class solidarity were now so much paper in the wind. He sat for a moment in disgust and disbelief that now Europe would be in flames for who knew how long before he knew he would have to explain to the party stalwarts the whys and wherefores of the budgetary decision. And have to explain why he and his comrades would soon be loading rifles instead of bags of flour somewhere near the Atlantic Ocean. For a flash he hoped for a short war but in his gut he knew the fates were fickle and that the blood of the European working-class youth would be spilled without question and without end.
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Jacques Rous (and yes he traced his family roots back to the revolution, back to the “red” priest who he was named after who had led some of the plebeian struggles back then that were defeated by those damn moderate cutthroats Robespierre and Saint Just) had long been a leader the anarchist delegation in his Parisian district, had been in a few fights in his time with the damn city bourgeoisie, and had a long, very long memory of what the Germans had, and had not done, in Paris in ’71,in the time of the bloodedly suppressed Commune. Also Jacques had long memories of his long past forbears who had come from Alsace-Lorraine now in German hands. And it galled him, galled him that there were war clouds gathering daily over his head, over his district and over his beloved Paris.
But that was not what was troubling Jacques Rous in the spring of 1914. He knew, knew deep in his bones like a lot of his fellow anarchists, like a lot of the guys in the small pottery factory he had worked in for the past several years after being laid off from the big textile factory across the river that if war came they would know what to do. Quatrain from the CGT (the large trade union organization to which he and others in the factory belonged to) had clued them in, had told them enough to know some surprises were headed the government’s way if they decided to use the youth of the neighborhoods as cannon fodder. What bothered Jacques was not his conduct but that of his son, Jacques too named in honor of that same ancient red priest who was the lifeblood of the family. Young Jacques something of a dandy like many youth in those days, something of a lady’s man (he had reportedly a married mistress and somebody else on the side), had told one and all (although not his father directly) who would listen one night that he planned to enlist in the Grenadiers just as soon as it looked like trouble was coming. Old Jacques wondered if other fathers were standing in fear of such rash actions by their sons just then.
Old Jacques could see the writing on the wall, remembered what it was like when the German threatened to come back in ’70 and then came the last time. Came and left the Parisian poor to eat rats or worse when they besieged the city, old Thiers fled to Versailles, and Paris starved half-aided by those Germans and he expected the same if not worse this time because that country was now unified, was now filled with strange powerful Krupp cannon and in a mood to use it now that one of the members of their alliance had had one of its own killed in Sarajevo and all Europe was waiting for the other shoe to drop. He believed that the anarchists of Paris to a man would resist the call to arms issued by the government. Quatrain, the great leader ever since Commune days, almost guaranteed a general strike if they tried to mobilize the Parisian youth for the slaughter. Yeah Quatrain would stand tall. Jacques though had personal worries somebody had seen his son, also Jacques, heading with some of his “gilded” friends toward the 12th Grenadier recruiting office in the Hotel de Ville ready to fight for bloody bourgeois France, for the memory of Napoleon, for the glory of battle. And he old Jacques knowing from some skimpily- held barricades back in ’71 just how “glorious” war was fretted in the night against his blood.
Damn, the Germans were on the march again, yesterday it was Belgium and old Jacques knew in his heart where the bloody Kaiser was heading next. Hell knew it since those bloody May weeks in ’71 when the Germans acted as “honor guard” for the damn Thiers reaction once they broke out of Versailles so he was prepared to defeat his section to the death if it came to that, came to shedding an old man’s blood. What worried Jacques, had worried him all spring was young Jacques cavalier attitude toward the impeding slaughter, his disregard for any of the principles that the old man had tried to instill in him from his youth. Had in May joined the 47th Grenadiers who were now stationed in a forward position in the border area between France and Belgium. Sure young Jacques looked the gallant like all the Rouses but that last look, that unknowing look that old Jacques detected in his young son before he saw him off told plenty about the fears to come. The fear that no matter how far apart they had drifted, father and son, they were kindred, they were French at this dismal hour.
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George Jenkins dreamed the dream of many young men out in the heartland, out in the wheat fields of Kansas a dream that America, his America would keep the hell out of what looked like war clouds coming from Europe in the spring of 1914 (although dreams and dreamers were located not just on the farms since George was not a Kansas farm boy but a rising young clerk in Doc Dell’s Drugstore located in the college town of Lawrence). George was keenly interested in such matters and would, while on break or when things were slow, glance through the day later copy of the New York Times or Washington Post that Doc provided for his more worldly customers via the passing trains. What really kept George informed though was William White’s home-grown Emporia Gazette which kept a close eye on the situation in Europe for the folks.
And with all of that information here is what George Jenkins, American citizen, concluded: America had its own problems best tended to by keeping out of foreign entanglements except when America’s direct interests were threatened. So George naturally cast skeptical eyes on Washington, on President Wilson, despite his protestations that European affairs were not our business. George had small town ideas about people minding their own business. See too also George had voted for Eugene V. Debs himself, the Socialist party candidate for President, and while he was somewhat skeptical about some of the Socialist Party leaders back East he truly believed that Brother Debs would help keep us out of war.
Jesus, those damn Europeans have begun to make a mess for themselves now that some archduke, Jesus, an archduke in this day and age (and George Jenkins thanked some forgotten forebear for getting his clan out of Europe whenever he did so and avoided that nonsense about going to the aid of somebody over a damn archduke). Make no mistake George Jenkins had no sympathy for anarchists and was half-glad a couple of years ago when the Socialist Party booted the IWW, the damn Wobbies, out if that is what they did and the beggars didn’t just walk out. Although he had an admiration for Big Bill Hayward and his trade union fights that is all it was-admiration and policy could not be made on that basis. So no he had no truck with anarchists but to go to war over an archduke-damn. Still George was no Pollyanna and kept abreast of what was going on and it bothered him more than somewhat that guys like Senator Lodge from Massachusetts and others from the Northeast were beating the war drums to get the United States mired in a damn European war. No way, no way good solid Midwesterners would fall for that line. And so George watched and waited. Watched too to see what old Debs had to say about matters. George figured that if the war drums got loud enough then Brother Debs would organize and speak up to keep things right. That was his way.
George, despite his membership in the American Socialist Party and devotion to its presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1912 when he travelled all over Kansas on weekends trying to drum up votes among the small hard-pressed farmers and small town people whom he was kindred with, had somewhat neglected what was happening among his fellow European socialists in the big-tent Second International. All he knew was that at least since the turn of the century when so many countries were getting industrialized and were to prove they counted making war cloud noises that the International was committed to stopping the madness of war anyway they could. He could not say though he was shocked, naïve shocked anyway, when all of Europe mobilized for war and the German Social-Democrats had led the way and voted the Kaiser’s war budget without a murmur (as far as he knew). Hadn’t this country gone crazy with war hysteria when the Maine went down and Teddy and the boys gave old hombre Spain a bloody nose in return. And received heros’ welcomes and glad tidings when they returned. Thankfully the war clouds in America were not fierce yet, but he knew once they came, as he feared they would those small farmers and small town people would not receive him with open arms like in 1912.
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Ivan Smirnov was no kid, had been around the block a few times in this war business. Had been in the Russian fleet that got its ass kicked by the Japanese in 1904 (he never called them “Nips” like lots of his crewmates did not after that beating they took that did not have to happen if the damn Czar’s naval officers had been anything but lackeys and anything but overconfident that they could beat the Johnny-come-lately Japanese in the naval war game). More importantly he had been in the Baltic fleet when the revolution of 1905 came thundering over their heads and each man, each sailor, each officer had to choice sides. He had gone with rebels and while he did not face the fate of his comrades on the Potemkin his naval career was over.
Just as well Ivan had thought many times since he was then able to come ashore and get work on the docks through some connections, and think. And what he was thinking in the spring of 1914 with some ominous war clouds in the air that that unfinished task from 1905 was going to come to a head. Ivan knew enough about the state of the navy, and more importantly, the army to know that without some quick decisive military action the monarchy was finished and good riddance. The hard part, the extremely hard part, was to get those future peasant conscripts who would provide cannon fodder for the Czar’s ill-thought out land adventures to listen up for a minute rather than go unknowingly head-long into the Czar’s arm (the father’s arms for many of them). So there was plenty of work to do. Ivan just that moment was glad that he was not a kid.
As the war clouds thickened after the killing of the archduke in bloody damn Sarajevo in early summer 1914 Ivan Smirnov knew in his bones that the peasant soldier cannon fodder as always would come flocking to the Czar like lemmings to the sea the minute war was declared. Any way the deal was cut the likely line-up of the Czar with the “democracies” of the West, Britain and France and less likely the United States would immediately give the Czar cover against the villainies of the Huns, of the Germans who just the other day were propping up the Czar’s treasury. It could not end well. All Ivan hoped for was that his party, the real Social-Democrats, locally known as the Mensheviks from the great split in 1903 with the Bolsheviks and who had definitely separated from that organization for good in 1912, would not get war fever just because the damn Czar was lined up with the very democracies that the party wished to emulate in Russia.
He knew too that the talk among the leadership of the Bolsheviks (almost all of them in exile and thus far from knowing what was happening down in the base of society at home) about opposing the Czar to the bitter end, about fighting in the streets again some said to keep the young workers and the peasants drifting into the urban areas from the dead-ass farms from becoming cannon-fodder for a lost cause was crazy, was irresponsible. Fortunately some of the local Bolshevik committee men in Russia and among their Duma delegation had cooler heads. Yea this was not time to be a kid, with kid’s tunnel vision, with great events working in the world.
Jesus, thought Ivan once the Czar declared his allegiance to the Entente, once he had gotten the Duma to rubber-stamp his war budget, he could not believe that Plekhanov, the great Plekhanov, had declared for the Czar for the duration and half of his bloody own party had capitulated (the other half, the leadership half had been in exile anyway, or out of the country for some reason) this was going to be hell. There would be no short war here, no quick victory over the land hungry Huns, nothing but the stench of death filling the air overcoming all those mobilization parades and the thrown flowers, the kissed girls, the shot of vodka to fortify for the run to the front. Most of the peasant boys marching to the front these days would never see Mother Russia again, never get to smell the good Russian earth and if he had anything to say about it their own piece of good Russian earth unlike their fathers who toiled on the land for Mister’s benefit for nothing. He thought too about the noises, and they were only noises just then, exile noises that the Bolsheviks had a point in opposing the war budget in the Duma, those who had not deserted the party for the Czar in the patriotic build-up, now being sent to Siberia for their opposition. They were still the wild boys and he argued with their committeemen to keep their anti-war positions quiet for now while the hysteria was still building but he was getting to see where maybe they were right-this war would be the mother of invention for the next revolutionary phase.
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V. I. Lenin
Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism-HOW THE INTERNATIONAL CAN BE RESTORED
For decades, German Social-Democracy was a model to the Social-Democrats of Russia, even somewhat more than to the Social-Democrats of the whole world. It is therefore clear that there can be no intelligent, i.e., critical, attitude towards the now prevalent social-patriotism or “socialist” chauvinism, without a most precise definition of one’s attitude towards German Social-Democracy, What was it in the past? What is it today? What will it be in the future?
A reply to the first of these questions may be found in Der Weg zur Macht, a pamphlet written by K. Kautsky in 1909 and translated into many European languages. Containing a most complete exposition of the tasks of our times, it was most advantageous to the German Social-Democrats (in the sense of the promise they held out), and moreover came from the pen of the most eminent writer of the Second International. We shall recall the pamphlet in some detail; this will be the more useful now since those forgotten ideals are so often barefacedly cast aside.
Social-Democracy is a “revolutionary party” (as stated in the opening sentence of the pamphlet), not only in the sense that a steam engine is revolutionary, but “also in another sense”. It wants conquest of political power by the proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Heaping ridicule on “doubters of the revolution”, Kautsky writes: “In any important movement and uprising we must, of course, reckon with the possibility of defeat. Prior to the struggle, only a fool can consider himself quite certain of victory.” However, to refuse to consider the possibility of victory would he “a direct betrayal of our cause”. A revolution in connection with a war, he says, is possible both during and after a war. It is impossible to determine at which particular moment the sharpening of class antagonisms will lead to revolution, but, the author continues, “I can quite definitely assert that a revolution that war brings in its wake, will break out either during or immediately after the war”; nothing is more vulgar, we read further, than the theory of “the peaceful growing into socialism”. “Nothing is more erroneous,” he continues, “than the opinion that a cognition of economic necessity means a weakening of the will ... . The will, as a desire for struggle,” he says, “is determined, first, by the price of the struggle, secondly, by a sense of power, and thirdly, by actual power.” When an attempt was made, incidentally by Vorwärts, to interpret Engels’s famous preface to The Class Struggles in France in the meaning of opportunism, Engels became indignant, and called shameful any assumption that he was a “peaceful worshipper of legality at any price”.[1] “We have every reason to believe,” Kautsky goes on to say, “that we are entering upon a period of struggle for state power.” That struggle may last for decades; that is something we do not know, but “it will in all probability bring about, in the near future, a considerable strengthening of the proletariat, if not its dictatorship, in Western Europe”. The revolutionary elements are growing, Kautsky declares: out of ten million voters in Germany in 1895, there were six million proletarians and three and a half million people interested in private property; in 1907 the latter grew by 0.03 million, and the former by 1.6 million! “The rate of the advance becomes very rapid as soon as a time of revolutionary ferment comes.” Class antagonisms are not blunted but, on the contrary, grow acute; prices rise, and imperialist rivalry and militarism are rampant. “A new era of revolution” is drawing near. The monstrous growth of taxes would “long ago have led to war as the only alternative to revolution ... had not that very alternative of revolution stood closer after a war than after a period of armed peace...”. “A world war Is ominously imminent,” Kautsky continues, “and war means also revolution.” In 1891 Engels had reason to fear a premature revolution in Germany; since then, however, “the situation has greatly changed”. The proletariat “can no longer speak of a premature revolution” (Kautsky’s italics). The petty bourgeoisie is downright unreliable and is ever more hostile to the proletariat, but in a time of crisis it is “capable of coming over to our side in masses”. The main thing is that Social-Democracy “should remain unshakable, consistent, and irreconcilable”. We have undoubtedly entered a revolutionary period.
This is how Kautsky wrote in times long, long past, fully five years ago. This is what German Social-Democracy was, or, more correctly, what it promised to be. This was the kind of Social-Democracy that could and had to be respected.
See what the selfsame Kautsky writes today. Here are the most important statements in his article “Social-Democracy in Wartime” (Die Neue Zeit No. 1, October 2, 1914): “Our Party has far more rarely discussed the question of how to behave in wartime than how to prevent war .... Never is government so strong, never are parties so weak, as at the outbreak of war .... Wartime is least of all favourable to peaceful discussion .... Today the practical question is: victory or defeat for one’s own country.” Can there be an understanding among the parties of the belligerent countries regarding anti-war action? “That kind of thing has never been tested in practice. We have always disputed that possibility ....” The difference between the French and German socialists is “not one of principle” (as both defend their fatherlands) .... “Social-Democrats of all countries have an equal right or an equal obligation to take part in the defence of the fatherland: no nation should blame the other for doing so ....” “Has the International turned bankrupt?” “Has the Party rejected direct defence of its party principles in wartime?” (Mehring’s questions in the same issue.) “That is an erroneous conception .... There are no grounds at all for such pessimism .... The differences are not fundamental .... Unity of principles remains .... To disobey wartime laws would simply lead to suppression of our press.” Obedience to these laws “implies rejection of defence of party principles just as little as similar behaviour of our party press under that sword of Damocles—the Anti-Socialist Law.”
We have purposely quoted from the original because it is hard to believe that such things could have been written. It is hard to find in literature (except in that coming from downright renegades) such smug vulgarity, such shameful departure from the truth, such unsavoury subterfuge to cover up the most patent renunciation both of socialism in general and of precise international decisions unanimously adopted (as, for instance, in Stuttgart and particularly in Basic) precisely in view of the possibility of a European war just like the present! It would be disrespectful towards the reader were we to treat Kautsky’s arguments in earnest and try to analyse them: if the European war differs in many respects from a simple “little” anti-Jewish pogrom, the “socialist” arguments in favour of participation in such a war fully resimhle the “democratic” arguments in favour of participation in an anti-Jewish pogrom. One does not analyse arguments in favour of a pogrom; one only points them out so as to put their authors to shame in the sight of all class-conscious workers.
But how could it have come to pass, the reader will ask, that the leading authority in the Second International, a writer who once defended the views quoted at the beginning of this article, has sunk to something that is worse than being a renegade? That will not be understood, we answer, only by those who, perhaps unconsciously, consider that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and that it is not difficult to “forgive and forget”, etc., i.e., by those who regard the matter from the renegade’s point of view. Those, however, who have earnestly and sincerely professed socialist convictions and have held the views set forth in the beginning of this article will not be surprised to learn that “Vorwdrts is dead” (Martov’s expression in the Paris Gobs) and that Kautsky is “dead”. The political bankruptcy of individuals is not a rarity at turning points in history. Despite the tremendous services he has rendered, Kautsky has never been among those who, at great crises, immediately take a militant Marxist stand (recall his vacillations on the issue of Millerandism[2]).
It is such times that we are passing through. “You shoot first, Messieurs the Bourgeoisie!”[3] Engels wrote in 1891, advocating, most correctly, the use of bourgeois legality by us, revolutionaries, in the period of so-called peaceful constitutional development. Engels’s idea was crystal clear: we class-conscious workers, he said, will be the next to shoot; it is to our advantage to exchange ballots for bullets (to go over to civil war) at the moment the bourgeoisie itself has broken the legal foundation it has laid down. In 1909 Kautsky voiced the undisputed opinion held by all revolutionary Social-Democrats when he said that revolution in Europe cannot now be premature and that war means revolution.
“Peaceful” decades, however, have not passed without leaving their mark. They have of necessity given rise to opportunism in all countries, and made it prevalent among parliamentarian, trade union, journalistic and other “leaders”. There is no country in Europe where, in one form or another, a long and stubborn struggle has not been conducted against opportunism, the latter being supported in a host of ways by the entire bourgeoisie, which is striving to corrupt and weaken the revolutionary proletariat. Fifteen years ago, at the outset of the Bernstein controversy, the selfsame Kautsky wrote that should opportunism turn from a sentiment into a trend, a split would be imminent. In Russia, the old Iskra,[4] which created the Social-Democratic Party of the working class, declared, in an article which appeared in its second issue early in 1901, under the title of “On the Threshold of the Twentieth Century”, that the revolutionary class of the twentieth century, like the revolutionary class of the eighteenth century—the bourgeoisie, had its own Gironde and its own Mountain.[5]
The European war is a tremendous historical crisis, the beginning of a new epoch. Like any crisis, the war has aggravated deep-seated antagonisms and brought them to the surface, tearing asunder all veils of hypocrisy, rejecting all conventions and deflating all corrupt or rotting authorities. (This, incidentally, is the salutary and progressive effect of all crises, which only the dull-witted adherents of “peaceful evolution” fail to realise.) The Second International, which in its twenty-five or forty-five years of existence (according to whether the reckoning is from 1870 or 1889) was able to perform the highly important and useful work of expanding the influence of socialism and giving the socialist forces preparatory, initial and elementary organisation, has played its historical role and has passed away, overcome, not so much by the von Kiucks as by opportunism. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the empty-headed busy-bodies (if not the intriguing lackeys of the chauvinists and the opportunists) labour at the task of bringing together Vandervelde and Sembat with Kautsky and Haase, as though we had another Ivan Ivanovich, who has called Ivan Nikiforovich a “gander”, and has to he urged by his friends to make it up with his enemy.[6] An International does not mean sitting at the same table and having hypocritical and pettifogging resolutions written by people who think that genuine internationalism consists in German socialists justifying the German bourgeoisie’s call to shoot down French workers, and in French socialists justifying the French bourgeoisie’ call to shoot down German workers in the name of the “defence of the fatherland”! The International consists in the coming together (first ideologically, then in due time organisationally as well) of people who, in these grave days, are capable of defending socialist internationalism in deed, i.e., of mustering their forces and “being the next to shoot” at the governments and the ruling classes of their own respective “fatherlands”. This is no easy task; it calls for much preparation and great sacrifices and will be accompanied by reverses. However, for the very reason that it, is no easy task, it must be accomplished only together with those who wish to perform it and are not afraid of a complete break with the chauvinists and with the defenders of social-chauvinism.
Such people as Pannekoek are doing more than anyone else for the sincere, not hypocritical restoration of a socialist, not a chauvinist, International. In an article entitled “The Collapse of the International”, Pannekoek said: “If the leaders get together in an attempt to patch up their differences, that will be of no significance at all.”
Let us frankly state the facts; in any case the war will compel us to do so, if not tomorrow, then the day after. Three currents exist in international socialism: (1) the chauvinists, who are consistently pursuing a policy of opportunism; (2) the consistent opponents of opportunism, who in all countries have already begun to make themselves heard (the opportunists have routed most of them, but “defeated armies learn fast”), and are capable of conducting revolutionary work directed towards civil war; (3) confused and vacillating people, who at present are following in the wake of the opportunists and are causing the proletariat most harm by their hypocritical attempts to justify opportunism, something that they do almost scientifically and using the Marxist (sic!) method. Some of those who are engulfed in the latter current can be saved and restored to socialism, but only through a policy of a most decisive break and split with the former current, with all those who are capable of justifying the war credits vote, “the defence of the fatherland”, “submission to wartime laws”, a willingness to be satisfied with legal means only, and the rejection of civil war. Only those who pursue a policy like this are really building up a socialist International. For our part, we, who have established links with the Russian Collegium of the Central Committee and with the leading elements of the working-class movement in St. Petersburg, have exchanged opinions with them and become convinced that we are agreed on the main points, are in a position, as editors of the Central Organ, to declare in the name of our Party that only work conducted in this direction is Party work and Social-Democratic work.
The idea of a split in the German Social-Democratic movement may seem alarming to many in its “unusualness”. The objective situation, however, goes to show that either the unusual will come to pass (after all, Adler and Kautsky did declare, at the last session of the International Socialist Bureau[7] in July 1914, that they did not believe in miracles, and therefore did not believe in a European war!) or we shall witness the painful decomposition of what was once German Social-Democracy. In conclusion, we would like to remind those who are too prone to “trust” the (former) German Social-Democrats that people who have been our opponents on a number of issues have arrived at the idea of such a split. Thus Martov has written in Gobs: “Vorwarts is dead .... A Social-Democracy which publicly renounces the class struggle would do better to recognise the facts as they are, temporarily disband its organisation, and close down its organs.” Thus Plekhanov is quoted by Gobs as having saidin a report: “I am very much against splits, but if principles are sacrificed for the integrity of the organisation, then better a split than false unity.” Plekhanov was referring to the German radicals: he sees a mote in the eye of the Germans, but not the beam in his own eye. This is an individual feature in him; over the past ten years we have all grown quite used to Plekhanov’s radicalism in theory and opportunism in practice. However, if even persons with such “oddities” begin to talk of a split among the Germans, it is a sign of the times.
Notes
[1] In its issue of March 30, 1895, Vorwärts published a summary and several extracts from Engels’s preface to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, omitting very important propositions on the revolutionary role of the proletariat, which evoked a vehement protest from Engels. In his letter to Kautsky of April 1, 1895, he wrote: “To my astonishment I see in the Vorwärts today an extract from my ‘Introduction’, printed without my prior knowledge and trimmed in such a fashion that 1 appear as a peaceful worshipper of legality at any price” (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 568).
Engels insisted on the “Introduction” being published in full. In 1895 it was published in the journal Die Neue Zeit, but with considerable deletions, these at the instance of the German Social-Democratic Party leadership. Seeking to justify their reformist tactics, the leaders of German Social-Democracy subsequently began to interpret their version of the “Introduction” as Engels’s renunciation of revolution, armed uprisings and barricade fighting. The original text of the “Introduction” was first published in the Soviet Union in 1955 (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1962,Vol. I, pp. 118-38).
[2] Millerandtsm—an opportunist trend named after the French "socialist" Millerand, who in 1899 joined the reactionary bourgeois government of France and helped the bourgeoisie in conducting its policy.
The admissibility of socialists’ participation in bourgeois governments was discussed at the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900. The Congress adopted Kautsky’s conciliatory resolution condemning socialists’ participation in bourgeois governments but permitting it in certain “exceptional” cases. The French socialists used this proviso to justify their joining the bourgeois government at the beginning of the First World War.
[3] See F. Engels, Socialism in Germany, Section I.
[4] Iskra (The Spark)-the first all-Russian illegal Marxist newspaper, founded by Lenin in 1900. It played a decisive part in the establishmeat of the revolutionary Marxist party of the working class. The first issue appeared in Leipzig in December 1900; it was subsequently published in Munich, in London (from July 1902) and in Geneva (from the spring of 1903). On Lenin’s initiative and with his direct participation,the fskra editorial hoard drew up the Party programme, which was published in Iskra No. 21, and prepared the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. which marked the beginning of a revolutionary Marxist party in Russia. Soon after the Congress, the Mensheviks, helped by Plekhanov, gained control of Iskra, so that, beginning with issue No. 52, Iskra ceased being an organ of revolutionary Marxism.
[5] The Mountain (Montagne) and the Gironde-the two political groups of the bourgeoisie during the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. The Montagnards, or Jacobins, was the name given to the more resolute representatives of the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary class of the time, who stood for the abolition of absolutism and the feudal system. Unlike the Jacobins, the Girondists vacillated between revolution and counter-revolution, and sought agreement with the monarchy.
Lenin called the opportunist trend in Social-Democracy the “socialist Gironde” , and the revolutionary Social-Democrats the “proletarian Jacobins” , “the Mountain”. After the R.S.D.L.P. split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin frequently stressed that the Mensheviks epresented the Girondist trend in the working-class movement.
[6] Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich-characters in Gogol’s Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Iran Nikiforovich. The quarrel between these two provincial landowners, whose names have become proverbial, started on a most insignificant pretext, and dragged on endlessly.
[7] The International Socialist Bureau-the executive body of the Second International, established by decision of the ParisCongressof 1900. From 1905 Lenin was member of the LS.B. as representative of the R.S.D.L.P.
