Did European Socialists give their ultimate loyalty to national governments rather than the universal proletariat during the war?

Viewpoint: Yes. Socialist parties sustained national war efforts with recruits, votes, and propaganda.

Viewpoint: No. Socialists took advantage of the general war weariness to advance the cause of workers.

____________________________

The outbreak of war in August 1914 came as a seismic shock to a European Left that was well on its way to making terms in practice with the capitalist society it continued to challenge in principle. Anarchism and Anarcho- Syndicalism, influential for decades in Spain, Italy, and France, was in retreat before states whose intelligence and security services were proving all too capable of coping with "propaganda of the deed." Marxism had been more successful, both in organizing workers and securing representation in the parliamentary systems of the Continent.
Repressive measures such as those undertaken by the German Empire had ultimately proved too costly for states whose legitimacy depended on doing things for their citizens, not to them. Government-sponsored insurance and welfare programs provided a different sort of challenge, one involving defusing Socialist movements by diminishing the sources of envy, grievance, and resentment on which Socialism depended for recruits. One Socialist response had been "Revisionism": abandoning any belief in the inevitability and necessity of revolution in favor of building on specific gains to produce de facto socialization of political and economic systems. That view was too strong for an orthodox majority that continued to insist on revolution--but revolution as an eschatological experience rather than a political one, something that would come at an unspecified future date but for then was best neither dwelt on nor discussed. In consequence Socialism--and many Socialists--became "at ease in Capitalism," developing alternative societies in which it was possible to do everything from birth to burial in Socialist contexts, making no more concessions to "the system" than the minimum imposed by registry offices, tax collectors, and conscription officials.
The internationalism of which Socialism historically boasted was far from dead, but it was also far from being strong enough to provide a workable alternative for the tide of patriotism that moved both the leaders of the movement and its rank and file behind their respective countries in 1914. Socialist belligerence, however, was less principled than circumstantial. In all the belligerent countries, Socialists proclaimed support for a defensive war to defend threatened or violated rights. In all belligerent countries Socialists hoped as well that the conflict would bring the final victory of Socialism closer--albeit by domestically peaceful means. Even as the costs of the conflict escalated, relatively few Socialists seriously considered revolution to be an option.
That pattern began to change by 1916, as radical Russian exiles made their case for violence to Socialist leaders and intellectuals willing to take the risks of meeting in neutral countries. Events in Russia that same year brought the question of revolution to center stage. Even before the Bolsheviks seized power, the notion of a synergy between peace abroad and change at home began affecting Socialist parties in the other major belligerents. Tensions arose between advocates of increasing influence, who eventually assumed power in the dirigiste (state economic control) systems generated by the war, and supporters of drastic action to sweep away the entire system in favor of a new paradigm. The radicals triumphed in Russia; the statists won in Germany. Elsewhere the issue continued to be a source of tension and weakness in leftist ranks throughout the interwar years.



Viewpoint: Yes. Socialist parties sustained national war efforts with recruits, votes, and propaganda.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 galvanized European populations behind their governments to an unprecedented--and unexpected-- degree. The political figures, ideologues, and ordinary individuals who reflected that enthusiasm included Europeans of all political persuasions, including socialists. Rather than acting as dogmatic fanatics committed to the solidarity of the international working class, the overwhelming majority of European Socialists actively supported their national governments in the war.

The major reason for this unexpected show of socialist patriotism was that by 1914 revolutionary Marxism had been by and large discredited as a political philosophy. A rising generation of "revisionist" socialist intellectuals had come to realize that their ideals of social justice, populist democracy, and economic reform were best served by competition in a free marketplace of ideas and dedicated work through the existing institutions of government and society. Establishing a socialist government through violent revolution was thought to be a counterproductive goal, for abstract political radicalism oriented toward the future both obscured and discredited the more-immediate needs of the working class. Many socialists came to see revolutionary violence as ultimately unnecessary, believing that the main goals of their movement were more compatible with stable liberal democracy and regulated capitalist economics than they were with the turmoil of revolution and dictatorship that Karl Marx had both predicted and demanded. In European countries ruled by constitutional monarchies--even authoritarian ones such as Imperial Germany--a large number of socialists were monarchists.

Although the transformation of European socialism into an essentially democratic force was neither fully understood nor widely trusted in the years leading up to World War I, it became astonishingly clear in August 1914. As the series of war declarations crisscrossed the Continent, armies mobilized in good order in the absence of socialist antiwar agitation and with no palpable resistance from trained soldiers who supported socialism in civilian life. In France more than 98 percent of the reservists called up in August 1914 responded promptly, and this punctuality was only typical among the combatant powers. The 2,500 French socialists and other radicals whom the Ministry of the Interior had identified as potential subversives to be arrested in the event of war made no trouble, and four-fifths of them eventually served in uniform. In Britain, where the Labour Party (founded only in 1900) remained a marginal political force until after the war, many socialist volunteers, such as the fighter ace Edward Mannock, became war heroes. Others were entrusted with significant responsibility.

The attitudes and actions of socialist political leaders across Europe confirmed the truth about the new moderation of socialism. In France the socialist movement had been thrown into initial disarray by the assassination of its de facto leader, Jean Jaurès, by a right-wing fanatic a few days before war was declared. Although Jaurès and most of his supporters had long advocated peaceful solutions to international problems and had worked against efforts to increase military spending and prolong obligatory peacetime military service, French socialists closed ranks behind the government when conflict could no longer be avoided. The socialist leader of the largest French labor union, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), proclaimed his support for the government in a setting no less dramatic than Jaurès's funeral. The socialist delegations in both the National Assembly and Senate voted in overwhelming numbers for war appropriations. In late August Prime Minister René Viviani, himself an independent socialist and a pragmatic politician, expanded his government to include all shades of political opinion represented in Parliament, and two leading Socialist Party deputies accepted ministerial portfolios. A former socialist, Alexandre Millerand, also became minister of war at that time, and in December 1916 Viviani's successor, Aristide Briand, appointed the Socialist deputy Albert Thomas as minister of armaments. It was quite clear that the French Socialist Party had abandoned its rhetorical emphasis on proletarian internationalism in favor of national solidarity with other social classes and national interests. This stand, truly, was a union sacrée, or "sacred union," as the wartime system of political relationships in France came to be called.

In addition to the revisionist influences on their ideology, the French socialists had additional justifications for their actions. Since Germany had declared war and stood poised to invade French territory, socialists argued that their patriotism represented the defense not only of their homeland but also of the "cradle of the liberty" for which the French Republic stood. Rather than sourly weakening France from within and taking on the burden of an unpopular antiwar position, they positioned themselves as conscientious republicans fighting for their homeland against an authoritarian empire.

Dissent from the official line of the French Socialist Party remained quite minor. A small number of party members and CGT officials attended antiwar socialist conferences in the Swiss resorts of Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916), but they were marginal figures whose views never had a serious impact on either the trade union or the party. Although intraparty dissent became more pronounced as the war dragged on, and when Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau rocked the boat by breaking strikes and cracking down on the free expression of dissent, the Socialist Party remained cohesive until a small, radical minority broke off to form the French Communist Party in December 1920.

The German socialist movement had more problems preserving its unity, but its mainstream nevertheless remained committed to the war. As conflict became imminent in late July 1914, only fourteen members of the parliamentary delegation of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which held the largest plurality in the Reichstag (German Parliament), declared their opposition to the war in the party caucus. Yet, all of them accepted and publicly supported the party line. When the Reichstag voted on the first appropriation of German war credits on 4 August 1914, the measure was approved unanimously. The catch phrase for the Social Democrats became "in the hour of peril we shall not leave the Fatherland in the lurch."

Like the French socialists, a small minority of German Social Democrats soon became disillusioned with the war and the heavy-handed government administration. Even as early as December 1914 the radical SPD Reichstag delegate Karl Liebknecht voted against a second appropriation of war credits, and a small faction of other SPD members supported him. Yet, Liebknecht's action was and remained decisively out of step with the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of German socialists. Although the Social Democrats lost their outward unanimity early on, most socialists realized--as their French counterparts had--that their growing respectability in the German political landscape would be endangered if they were thought to be sabotaging the war effort supported by the rest of the country. One strand of socialist thought actually tried to justify the war in Marxist terms, arguing that since backward and autocratic Russia was a major national enemy, a military victory would lead to its political liberation. When Russia unexpectedly invaded Germany in August 1914, rallying to the defense of Marx's homeland and the arguable birthplace of socialism was a compelling battle cry.

Thus, the Social Democratic Party entered into a German version of union sacrée, the so-called fortress peace, or Burgfriede. On the basis of a series of informal understandings with the Imperial government, German Socialists agreed to support the war in exchange for guarantees that the war situation would not be used as a pretext to mistreat labor unions or reverse democratic gains in the Empire. The Imperial government to a large degree kept up its end of the bargain. When a war economy was organized, many government officials included trade-union representatives and socialist politicians in their decision-making processes. Union rights were generally respected. Socialists who supported the war remained free and politically active. Only Liebknecht, his associate Rosa Luxemburg, and a few other socialists were briefly jailed for radical political agitation.

At the same time, the socialists were willing to tolerate many aspects of wartime civil administration that contradicted their ideals. Under laws passed in Prussia in the 1850s and 1860s, the Imperial government was empowered to declare a national state of siege in wartime and place broad powers in the hands of district military commanders. In law as well as in practice, these generals came to exercise virtually unchecked authority over freedom of speech and political assembly. In some cases they applied political labels to unions in order to curtail their activities. At other times they closed socialist newspapers with a zeal that a growing number, yet still a decided minority, of socialists found alarming. In December 1916 General Erich Ludendorff was given, among his other responsibilities, the authority to organize the national economy along military lines, and he implemented a compulsory labor draft. Although his original intention of drafting all adult men and women under the age of sixty was abandoned, and many of the other onerous provisions of his plan were dropped or softened, Ludendorff's policies were a direct provocation to the ideals of German socialists who, out of respect for national defense, largely did nothing.

German political opposition to the war did develop, but it was never officially sanctioned by the SPD. When a grouping of pacifist party members formed a working group to agitate for a "democratic peace," that is, one without territorial acquisitions or financial indemnities, the Social Democratic leadership expelled them from the party. The new political party that these dissidents formed in April 1917, the Independent Social Democrats (USPD), commanded little popular support, had no major electoral impact, and split when a dissident faction formed the German Communist Party (KPD) in late December 1918. The most serious peace initiatives, moreover, came not from the leadership of any socialist party but from a faction of the moderate Catholic Center Party led by Matthias Erzberger, which energetically criticized the government's handling of the war and called for its end. Socialist politicians supported Erzberger's peace resolution in July 1917, but this stance only betrayed their desire for a reasonable peace, not a philosophical unwillingness to support their country.

Ultimately, the late-hour political reforms and formal request for an armistice by the Imperial government came not from back-stabbing socialists who had seized the reins of power but from an army High Command that could foresee nothing but total defeat, a society that was incapable of enduring more sacrifices for the war, a broad domestic political consensus that could no longer support the kaiser, and an international community that would not enter into negotiations with an authoritarian Germany. Rather than lead the agitation or drive the political reforms, the Social Democrats were thrust into power by default. The liberal constitutional monarchy envisioned by the reforms of October 1918 required democratic, parliamentary rule, and hence a transfer of power to the plurality holding SPD. Its leader, Friedrich Ebert, a monarchist who had lost two sons in the war, became a republican only after William II abdicated and Ebert unexpectedly found himself chancellor of a democratic Germany.

The majority of socialists in Austria-Hungary were also supportive of the war, though their attention was divided by the multiethnic dilemma of the Empire. The most prominent leaders of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party, Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, actually incorporated the nationalities issue into their support for the war effort by calling for the transformation of the Habsburg Empire into a federation of national territories. In their view this policy would, at least early in the war, have satisfied minority grievances and included the further democratization of political life. The projected reform also had Marxist cachet because if such a state were under socialist leadership, Renner and Bauer maintained, it would pay homage to Marx's ideal of an international socialist polity. Leaving that bizarre theoretical construction aside, the Socialists' projected reform was not unlike the liberalized federal structure elaborated by Emperor Karl I in October 1918. Although the reform was too little and too late, both the Socialists and the emperor believed it would create an Austro- Hungarian state for which all of its people would fight. Despite the best of intentions, however, the spirit of nationalism became too strong and was too heavily backed by the Allies for any amount of imperial loyalty to tame.

Even the most radical national grouping of socialists, those of the Russian Empire, were supportive of the war effort in their country. Of the myriad of socialist circles and political parties that had sprouted in late Imperial Russia, only the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, led by the ideologue Vladimir Lenin, dismissed the war as an imperialist struggle that the workers of the world should refuse to fight. In 1914, however, Lenin's call was a small, insignificant voice, for the members of his party were scattered abroad, sitting in jail or Siberian exile or living precariously on the edge of the law in Russia. By virtue of the Bolsheviks' own criteria for party membership, which had formed the basis of their split from the Menshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party in 1903, their party was restricted to an elite of professional revolutionaries. Opposition to the war marginalized the Bolsheviks even further because many of their prominent members and activists in Russia were promptly arrested for amateurish antiwar agitation.

The overwhelming majority of Russian Socialists--the Mensheviks, the populist Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party, and a few other minor parties and independents--immediately ignored Lenin's views and advocated "defensism." Like their peers throughout continental Europe, these socialists believed first and foremost in the patriotic defense of their homeland and in the pursuit of broad political transformation later. Fighting on the side of the French Republic and a democratizing Britain against the authoritarian empires of Central Europe had a definite ideological appeal and raised hopes for the future of Russia. When the proto-parliamentary Duma institution voted to support the war, only the tiny Bolshevik delegation and a small number of disaffected Mensheviks and SRs voiced opposition. Even most Russian socialists who were obliged to live in foreign exile for political reasons came out in support of the war. Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov, the grand old man of Russian Marxism, who lived in Parisian exile, worked to enlist Russian volunteers in the French army in 1914. The antiwar Bolsheviks were treated as virtual outcasts in the socialist movement at large.

As the war continued, socialist support for the Russian war effort remained solid. Assassinations of Tsarist officials by revolutionary terrorists, common before the war, virtually ceased after 1914, and the most spectacular wartime murder, that of the Siberian mystic and Imperial family intimate Grigory Rasputin in December 1916, was carried out by conservative monarchists who objected to his suspicious influence and activities. Labor unions and other workers' associations ignored Bolshevik admonitions and compliantly elected representatives to the "special councils" and War Industries Committee that Tsar Nicholas II had agreed to introduce to organize the Russian war economy in 1915. When many other problems in Russia eventuated the collapse of the monarchy in February 1917, socialist agitation was not a factor. Most socialists believed that the inevitable revolution was still far in the future and were surprised that the popular demonstrations that swept Petrograd toppled Nicholas II so easily. Ultimately, the tsar's downfall came from the growing unreliability of the military and his own de facto abdication of political leadership, not from socialist disloyalty.

After the fall of the tsar, all Russian socialist parties except the Bolsheviks (after some initial confusion) supported both the Provisional Government that took power as a temporary executive and the continuation of the war. Appealing to strict Marxist theory, they argued that the new government represented the "bourgeois- democratic phase" of human development and would have to exist for a long period of time before a socialist revolution could occur. The attitude of most socialists, therefore, was to engage the Provisional Government in cooperation while seeking a supervisory role over its rather undemocratic executive authority. As part of this strategy, socialists were even willing to enter the government. Only one, the nominal Socialist Revolutionary Aleksandr Kerensky (simultaneously a vice chairman of the Petrograd Soviet), entered its first cabinet as minister of justice, but more opportunities for socialists became available as the political situation changed.

When the imperialist ambitions of the Provisional Government were accidentally discovered in April 1917, socialist politicians led the uproar, but their objections were to the long-term strategic ambitions of the government rather than the war in principle. On the contrary, many socialists presciently argued that an immediate peace would put Germany in a commanding position that would both endanger the achievements of the February Revolution and enable Berlin to establish long-term hegemony over all Europe. When Petrograd was rumored to be threatened by German advances or "counterrevolutionary" activity by Russian armies, the socialists were the first to call out reliable military units and workers' militias to meet them. Like the radicals of the French Revolution, Russian socialists discovered a militant patriotism when their political gains were threatened.

Socialist resolve also applied to high politics. After the liberal ministers of war and foreign affairs resigned over the war-aims crisis, Kerensky took over the War Ministry, and four additional Socialists were brought into the cabinet. As the authority of the government waned amid military reversal and civil strife in the summer, political discord led to the departure of more-liberal ministers and their replacement by still more socialists who hoped their presence could stabilize the situation. By late July they controlled a majority of the cabinet, with Kerensky as premier.

Ultimately, however, the Provisional Government failed, no matter what the moderate socialists did. Although Kerensky tried his best to rally the army, it became increasingly disaffected by political instability and declining military fortunes, and it melted away. In urban areas radical workers and garrison soldiers began to favor extreme solutions and were disappointed with the moderate Socialists' timidity and willingness to shore up the hated Provisional Government. During one demonstration in July 1917 a worker seized a socialist minister by his collar and screamed, "take power, you son of a bitch, when it's given to you!" When Lenin's Bolsheviks, untainted by cooperation with the discredited regime and posing as defenders of the democratic revolution, managed to seize power and to establish their dictatorship in October 1917, it was largely at the price of the moderate socialists' involvement in the decaying internal stability and war effort of Russia.

The cases of France, Germany, Austria- Hungary, and Russia--the countries with the strongest socialist movements in Europe--indicate how far European Socialists had departed from the founding principles of international solidarity and revolutionary violence. Mainstream socialist parties not only failed to work against the war, they supported it outright by voting war credits, entering cabinets, and accepting government policies that betrayed their most fundamental ideals, and sacrificing the lives of their supporters and, in the case of Ebert and many others, their own sons. The Austrian Socialists actually twisted Marxist internationalism in a vain attempt to create a workable multiethnic state that could remain effective in the war. Renegade Marxists such as the German Independent Social Democrats, the French internationalists, and the Russian Bolsheviks were fringe groups whose members would later break decisively with the majority socialist movement, label it "social fascism," and in many cases fight violently against it. Although the Bolsheviks eventually supplanted the moderate socialists in their country, they only did so through the incompetence of their opponents, years of desperate armed struggle, and ruthless terror. The overwhelming majority of socialists backed their governments and supported their efforts in World War I.

-- Paul Du Quenoy, Georgetown University


Viewpoint: No. Socialists took advantage of the general war weariness to advance the cause of workers.

In the half century before the outbreak of the Great War, European Socialists had demonstrated consistent hostility to the idea of war. In Germany the Social Democratic Party mounted a drumfire of propaganda against the military system and the state that underwrote it; voted consistently against military budgets; and encouraged Socialist conscripts to do their duty but took no abuse from superiors. French Socialists voted against the introduction of a third year of obligatory service in 1913. In other states the pattern was similar--and now to a point where most armies included arresting Socialist leaders and activists in their mobilization plans. The founding of the Second International in 1889 offered an alternative to both militarism and nationalism, emphasizing the cooperation of the working class of Europe in moving forward the inevitable triumph of socialism by economic and political means.

In that context one of the major surprises of August 1914 was the quietism of European Marxists. Instead of standing for the brotherhood of the workers and the commonwealth of mankind, Socialist parties affirmed declarations of war, and Socialist party members fell into line at regimental depots throughout Europe. Far from the International becoming the human race, it seemed that the workers had fatherlands after all. Generals pigeonholed orders for mass incarcerations, congratulating themselves on the rightness of their assumption that it would take no more than a little whiff of gunpowder to return the deluded followers of Karl Marx to their patriotic duty.

It all seemed simple in August, but as the war endured and evolved into one of production, the worker, specifically the stereotypical proletarian, the industrial worker, became at least as important as the soldier. A conflict evolving into a war of machinery borrowed more and more of its tropes and images from mines and factories. Chronic labor shortages, especially in jobs requiring physical strength and endurance, gave corresponding leverage to laborers and their representatives--leverage that increased as public opinion turned against high profits crossing the line into profiteering. War economies began shifting from free-enterprise models to an emphasis on management and direction that to Socialist intellectuals prefigured at least the initial stages of a Socialist order. The capitalists themselves were putting the machinery of a new world in place; it would only be necessary to change the hands on the crank. Socialists, moreover, were laying down their lives like everyone else, paying in full the blood price of citizenship. While strikers might be unpopular among front-line soldiers, they could also emerge as home- front heroes to those workers lacking the organization, or the nerve, to put their own jobs on the line to protest shortages and declining real wages. In short, from being considered borderline members of their respective societies before 1914, Socialists were rapidly becoming social archetypes.

As more and more people of all classes and conditions began questioning the need to fight the war to a finish at whatever the cost, Socialists benefited from their prewar standing as an organized opposition. That process varied by country. In Britain and France, where legitimacies in the prewar regime were broad and wartime dislocations relatively limited, Socialist opposition was muted, expressed through the system and focused on specific issues rather than general principles. In Germany, wartime hardships merged with prewar disaffection to split the Socialists in April 1917, with a new Independent Social Democratic Party challenging the continuation of the war. In Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia--all states whose infrastructure suffered heavily under the strains of war--Socialist parties moved further along the path of opposition toward overt resistance to the war effort. Protest rallies, strikes, and military mutinies testified alike to growing war weariness and possible opportunities for parties or movements willing to seize them.

International interaction by the organized Left began as early as 1915, when neutrals from Holland, the Scandinavian countries, and still-uncommitted Italy organized meetings and acted as clearinghouses for the belligerents. Dissident Socialists from France and Germany joined exiles from tsarist Russia to pass resolutions denouncing the war at Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916). These were not major industrial centers throbbing with proletarian ressentiment. They were Swiss villages--but the demand for peace echoed no less powerfully for that.

Radicals such as Lenin argued the only way to end militarism was to end capitalism, and the only way to end capitalism was by revolution. Socialism in the decades prior to 1914, however, had acquired something like a Jeffersonian aspect, presenting the good life as being a quiet one, where a man--or a couple--could go to work, put in a fair day, and enjoy the full fruits of their labor. Socialism was about bicycle riding and pigeon racing, about chess clubs and gymnastic societies--about bringing men home safely to the women and children who waited for them. As the chaos of war threatened to engulf civilization, Socialists all over Europe yearned not for revolution but for stability.

The Russian Revolution of March 1917, if anything, served to strengthen that mind-set. For the first months the forces of popular protest emphasized ending the fighting rather than reconstructing society. It was that demand for a negotiated peace, with no annexations and no reparations, that engaged Socialists throughout Europe--and led to an increased scale of popular protest, outside the existing institutional channels. Even in Britain, socialist opposition groups called for Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets on the Russian model.

Proposals for an international Socialist conference at Stockholm in September foundered on a growing split between "defense Socialists," who more or less accepted the legitimacy of their respective national causes and hoped to construct Socialism on a framework of wartime institutions and experiences, and were advocates of outright revolution. It was these men and women who dominated the rump meeting actually held at Stockholm, which insisted on the inseparability of peace and revolution. When in October 1917 the Bolsheviks unseated the Provisional Government, they legitimated their unilateral seizure of power by translating the principle into action, removing Russia from the war and simultaneously proceeding to establish the foundations of a revolutionary social order.

French and British Socialists denounced the Bolsheviks for leaving them in the lurch before the Germans. German Socialists criticized the Bolshevik belief that a Socialist economy could be created by a political revolution. Socialist "establishments" everywhere were attracted by President Woodrow Wilson's ideas of liberal internationalism as means for securing the kind of peace that would--eventually--make Socialism possible. Increasing numbers of the respective rank and file, however, turned in desperation to the only approach that seemed to offer an end to the years of destruction. This division would continue to burden the European Left in the postwar years. Its existence is final proof that Socialism was anything but passive in face of the challenge of war.

-- Dennis Showalter, Colorado College


ZIMMERWALD DRAFT (1915)

This document was written in August 1915 by Socialists meeting in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, as Europe faced the calamity of World War I:

The present war has been engendered by imperialism. Capitalism has already achieved that highest stage. Society's productive forces and the magnitudes of capital have outgrown the narrow limits of the individual national states. Hence the striving on the part of the Great Powers to enslave other nations and to seize colonies as sources of raw material and spheres of investment of capital. The whole world is merging into a single economic organism; it has been carved up among a handful of Great Powers. The objective conditions for socialism have fully matured, and the present war is a war of the capitalists for privileges and monopolies that might delay the downfall of capitalism.

The socialists, who seek to liberate labour from the yoke of capital and who defend the world-wide solidarity of the workers, are struggling against any kind of oppression and inequality of nations. When the bourgeoisie was a progressive class, and the overthrow of feudalism, absolutism and oppression by other nations stood on the historical order of the day, the socialists, as invariably the most consistent and most resolute of democrats, recognised "defence of the fatherland" in the meaning implied by those aims, and in that meaning alone. Today too, should a war of the oppressed nations against the oppressor Great Powers break out in the east of Europe or in the colonies, the socialists' sympathy would be wholly with the oppressed.

The war of today, however, has been engendered by an entirely different historical period, in which the bourgeoisie, from a progressive class, has turned reactionary. With both groups of belligerents, this war is a war of slaveholders, and is designed to preserve and extend slavery; it is a war for the repartitioning of colonies, for the "right" to oppress other nations, for privileges and monopolies for Great-Power capital, and for the perpetuation of wage slavery by splitting up the workers of the different countries and crushing them through reaction. That is why, on the part of both warring groups, all talk about "defence of the fatherland" is deception of the people by the bourgeoisie. Neither the victory of any one group nor a return to the status quo can do anything either to protect the freedom of most countries in the world from imperialist oppression by a handful of Great Powers, or to ensure that the working class keep even its present modest cultural gains. The period of a relatively peaceful capitalism has passed, never to return. Imperialism has brought the working class unparalleled intensification of the class struggle, want, and unemployment, a higher cost of living, and the strengthening of oppression by the trusts, of militarism, and the political reactionaries, who are raising their heads in all countries, even the freest.

In reality, the "defence of the fatherland" slogan in the present war is tantamount to a defence of the "right" of one's "own" national bourgeoisie to oppress other nations; it is in fact a national liberal-labour policy, an alliance between a negligible section of the workers and their "own" national bourgeoisie, against the mass of the proletarians and the exploited. Socialists who pursue such a policy are in fact chauvinists, social-chauvinists. The policy of voting for war credits, of joining governments, of Burgfrieden, and the like, is a betrayal of socialism. Nurtured by the conditions of the "peaceful", period which has now come to an end, opportunism has now matured to a degree that calls for a break with socialism; it has become an open enemy to the proletariat's movement for liberation. The working class cannot achieve its historic aims without waging a most resolute struggle against both forthright opportunism and social-chauvinism. . . .

The imperialist war is ushering in the era of the social revolution. All the objective conditions of recent times have put the proletariat's revolutionary mass struggle on the order of the day. It is the duty of socialists, while making use of every means of the working class's legal struggle, to subordinate each and every of those means to this immediate and most important task, develop the workers' revolutionary consciousness, rally them in the international revolutionary struggle, promote and encourage any revolutionary action, and do everything possible to turn the imperialist war between the peoples into a civil war of the oppressed classes against their oppressors, a war for the expropriation of the class of capitalists, for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, and the realisation of socialism.

Source: "The Draft Resolution Proposed by the Left Wing at Zimmerwald," in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, volume 21, fourth edition, edited by Julius Katzer (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 345-348.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic: 1879-1992, translated by Antonia Nevill (Oxford, U.K. & Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993).

Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (London: Cresset, 1964; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1964).

Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Imperial Germany, 1914-1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London: Cape, 1996).

Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, volume 3, 1840-1945 (New York: Knopf, 1969).

Lonnie R. Johnson, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

John Keegan, The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998).

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution(New York: Knopf, 1990).

Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Eric D. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protest to Socialist State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present, fifth edition (New York: Norton, 1995).