Written prior to 28 September (11 October) 1914
The European war, which the governments and the bourgeois parties of all countries have been preparing for decades, has broken out. The growth of armaments, the extreme intensification of the struggle for markets in the latest – the imperialist – stage of capitalist development in the advanced countries, and the dynastic interests of the more backward East-European monarchies were inevitably bound to bring about this war, and have done so. Seizure of territory and subjugation of other nations, the ruining of competing nations and the plunder of their wealth, distracting the attention of the working masses from the internal political crises in Russia, Germany, Britain and other countries, disuniting and nationalist stultification of the workers, and the extermination of their vanguard so as to weaken the revolutionary movement of the proletariat – these comprise the sole actual content, importance and significance of the present war.
It is primarily on Social-Democracy that the duty rests of revealing the true meaning of the war, and of ruthlessly exposing the falsehood, sophistry and ‘patriotic’ phrasemongering spread by the ruling classes, the landowners and the bourgeoisie, in defence of the war.
One group of belligerent nations is headed by the German bourgeoisie. It is hoodwinking the working class and the toiling masses by asserting that this is a war in defence of the fatherland, freedom and civilisation, for the liberation of the peoples oppressed by tsarism, and for the destruction of reactionary tsarism. In actual fact, however, this bourgeoisie, which servilely grovels to the Prussian Junkers, headed by Wilhelm II, has always been a most faithful ally of tsarism, and an enemy of the revolutionary movement of Russia’s workers and peasants. In fact, whatever the outcome of the war, this bourgeoisie will, together with the Junkers, exert every effort to support the tsarist monarchy against a revolution in Russia.
In fact, the German bourgeoisie has launched a robber campaign against Serbia, with the object of subjugating her and throttling the national revolution of the Southern Slavs, at the same time sending the bulk of its military forces against the freer countries, Belgium and France, so as to plunder richer competitors. In fact, the German bourgeoisie, which has been spreading the fable that it is waging a war of defence, chose the moment it thought most favourable for war, making use of its latest improvements in military matériel and forestalling the rearmament already planned and decided upon by Russia and France.
The other group of belligerent nations is headed by the British and the French bourgeoisie, who are hoodwinking the working class and the toiling masses by asserting that they are waging a war for the defence of their countries, for freedom and civilisation, and against German militarism and despotism. In actual fact, this bourgeoisie has long been spending thousands of millions to hire the troops of Russian tsarism, the most reactionary and barbarous monarchy in Europe, and prepare them for an attack on Germany.
In fact, the struggle of the British and the French bourgeoisie is aimed at the seizure of the German colonies, and the ruining of a rival nation, whose economic development has been more rapid. In pursuit of this noble aim, the ‘advanced’ ‘democratic’ nations are helping the savage tsarist regime to still more throttle Poland, the Ukraine, etc., and more thoroughly crush the revolution in Russia.
Neither group of belligerents is inferior to the other in spoliation, atrocities and the boundless brutality of war; however, to hoodwink the proletariat and distract its attention from the only genuine war of liberation, namely, a civil war against the bourgeoisie both of its ‘own’ and of ‘foreign’ countries – to achieve so lofty an aim – the bourgeoisie of each country is trying, with the help of false phrases about patriotism, to extol the significance of its ‘own’ national war, asserting that it is out to defeat the enemy, not for plunder and the seizure of territory, but for the ‘liberation’ of all other peoples except its own.
But the harder the governments and the bourgeoisie of all countries try to disunite the workers and pit them against one another, and the more savagely they enforce, for this lofty aim, martial law and the military censorship (measures which even now, in wartime, are applied against the ‘internal’ foe more harshly than against the external), the more pressingly is it the duty of the class-conscious proletariat to defend its class solidarity, its internationalism, and its socialist convictions against the unbridled chauvinism of the ‘patriotic’ bourgeois cliques in all countries. If class-conscious workers were to give up this aim, this would mean renunciation of their aspirations for freedom and democracy, to say nothing of their socialist aspirations.
It is with a feeling of the most bitter disappointment that we have to record that the socialist parties of the leading European countries have failed to discharge this duty, the behaviour of these parties’ leaders, particularly in Germany, bordering on downright betrayal of the cause of socialism. At this time of supreme and historic importance, most of the leaders of the present Socialist International, the Second (1889-1914), are trying to substitute nationalism for socialism. As a result of their behaviour, the workers’ parties of these countries did not oppose the governments’ criminal conduct, but called upon the working class to identify its position with that of the imperialist governments. The leaders of the International committed an act of treachery against socialism by voting for war credits, by reiterating the chauvinist (‘patriotic’) slogans of the bourgeoisie of their ‘own’ countries, by justifying and defending the war, by joining the bourgeois governments of the belligerent countries, and so on and so forth. The most influential socialist leaders and the most influential organs of the socialist press of present-day Europe hold views that are chauvinist, bourgeois and liberal, and in no way socialist. The responsibility for thus disgracing socialism falls primarily on the German Social-Democrats, who were the strongest and most influential party in the Second International. But neither can one justify the French socialists, who have accepted ministerial posts in the government of that very bourgeoisie which betrayed its country and allied itself with Bismarck so as to crush the Commune.
The German and the Austrian Social-Democrats are attempting to justify their support for the war by arguing that they are thereby fighting against Russian tsarism. We Russian Social-Democrats declare that we consider such justification sheer sophistry. In our country the revolutionary movement against tsarism has again assumed tremendous proportions during the past few years. This movement has always been headed by the working class of Russia. The political strikes of the last few years, which have involved millions of workers, have had as their slogan the overthrow of tsarism and the establishment of a democratic republic. During his visit to Nicholas II on the very eve of the war, Poincaré, President of the French Republic, could see for himself, in the streets of St. Petersburg, barricades put up by Russian workers. The Russian proletariat has not flinched from any sacrifice to rid humanity of the disgrace of the tsarist monarchy. We must, however, say that if there is anything that, under certain conditions, can delay the downfall of tsarism, anything that can help tsarism in its struggle against the whole of Russia’s democracy, then that is the present war, which has placed the purses of the British, the French and the Russian bourgeois at the disposal of tsarism, to further the latter’s reactionary aims. If there is anything that can hinder the revolutionary struggle of Russia’s working class against tsarism, then that is the behaviour of the German and the Austrian Social-Democratic leaders, which the chauvinist press of Russia is continually holding up to us as an example.
Even assuming that German Social-Democracy was so weak that it was compelled to refrain from all revolutionary action, it should not have joined the chauvinist camp, or taken steps which gave the Italian socialists reason to say that the German Social-Democratic leaders were dishonouring the banner of the proletarian International.
Our Party, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, has made, and will continue to make, great sacrifices in connection with the war. The whole of our working-class legal press has been suppressed. Most working-class associations have been disbanded, and a large number of our comrades have been arrested and exiled. Yet our parliamentary representatives – the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group in the Duma – considered it their imperative socialist duty not to vote for the war credits, and even to walk out of the Duma, so as to express their protest the more energetically; they considered it their duty to brand the European governments’ policy as imperialist. Though the tsar’s government has increased its tyranny tenfold, the Social-Democratic workers of Russia are already publishing their first illegal manifestos against the war, thus doing their duty to democracy and to the International.
While the collapse of the Second International has given rise to a sense of burning shame in revolutionary Social-Democrats – as represented by the minority of German Social-Democrats and the finest Social-Democrats in the neutral countries; while socialists in both Britain and France have been speaking up against the chauvinism of most Social-Democratic parties; while the opportunists, as represented, for instance, by the German Sozialistische Monatshefte, which have long held a national-liberal stand, are with good reason celebrating their victory over European socialism – the worst possible service is being rendered to the proletariat by those who vacillate between opportunism and revolutionary Social-Democracy (like the ‘Centre’ in the German Social-Democratic Party), by those who are trying to hush up the collapse of the Second International or to disguise it with diplomatic phrases.
On the contrary, this collapse must be frankly recognised and its causes understood, so as to make it possible to build up a new and more lasting socialist unity of the workers of all countries.
The opportunists have wrecked the decisions of the Stuttgart, Copenhagen and Basel congresses, which made it binding on socialists of all countries to combat chauvinism in all and any conditions, made it binding on socialists to reply to any war begun by the bourgeoisie and governments, with intensified propaganda of civil war and social revolution.[4] The collapse of the Second International is the collapse of opportunism, which developed from the features of a now bygone (and so-called ‘peaceful’) period of history, and in recent years has come practically to dominate the International. The opportunists have long been preparing the ground for this collapse by denying the socialist revolution and substituting bourgeois reformism in its stead; by rejecting the class struggle with its inevitable conversion at certain moments into civil war, and by preaching class collaboration; by preaching bourgeois chauvinism under the guise of patriotism and the defence of the fatherland, and ignoring or rejecting the fundamental truth of socialism, long ago set forth in The Communist Manifesto, that the workingmen have no country; by confining themselves, in the struggle against militarism, to a sentimental, philistine point of view, instead of recognising the need for a revolutionary war by the proletarians of all countries, against the bourgeoisie of all countries; by making a fetish of the necessary utilisation of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bourgeois legality, and forgetting that illegal forms of organisation and propaganda are imperative at times of crises. The natural ‘appendage’ to opportunism – one that is just as bourgeois and hostile to the proletarian, i.e. the Marxist, point of view – namely, the anarcho-syndicalist trend, has been marked by a no less shamefully smug reiteration of the slogans of chauvinism, during the present crisis.
The aims of socialism at the present time cannot be fulfilled, and real international unity of the workers cannot be achieved, without a decisive break with opportunism, and without explaining its inevitable fiasco to the masses.
It must be the primary task of Social-Democrats in every country to combat that country’s chauvinism. In Russia, this chauvinism has overcome the bourgeois liberals (the ‘Constitutional-Democrats’), and part of the Narodniks – down to the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the ‘Right’ Social-Democrats.[5] (In particular, the chauvinist utterances of E Smirnov, P Maslov and G Plekhanov, for example, should be branded; they have been taken up and widely used by the bourgeois ‘patriotic’ press.)
In the present situation, it is impossible to determine, from the standpoint of the international proletariat, the defeat of which of the two groups of belligerent nations would be the lesser evil for socialism. But to us Russian Social-Democrats there cannot be the slightest doubt that, from the standpoint of the working class and of the toiling masses of all the nations of Russia, the defeat of the tsarist monarchy, the most reactionary and barbarous of governments, which is oppressing the largest number of nations and the greatest mass of the population of Europe and Asia, would be the lesser evil.
The formation of a republican United States of Europe should be the immediate political slogan of Europe’s Social-Democrats. In contrast with the bourgeoisie, which is ready to ‘promise’ anything in order to draw the proletariat into the mainstream of chauvinism, the Social-Democrats will explain that this slogan is absolutely false and meaningless without the revolutionary overthrow of the German, the Austrian and the Russian monarchies.
Since Russia is most backward and has not yet completed its bourgeois revolution, it still remains the task of Social-Democrats in that country to achieve the three fundamental conditions for consistent democratic reform, viz. a democratic republic (with complete equality and self-determination for all nations), confiscation of the landed estates, and an eight-hour working day. But in all the advanced countries the war has placed on the order of the day the slogan of socialist revolution, a slogan that is the more urgent the more heavily the burden of war presses upon the shoulders of the proletariat, and the more active its future role must become in the re-creation of Europe, after the horrors of the present ‘patriotic’ barbarism in conditions of the tremendous technological progress of large-scale capitalism. The bourgeoisie’s use of wartime laws to gag the proletariat makes it imperative for the latter to create illegal forms of agitation and organisation. Let the opportunists ‘preserve’ the legal organisations at the price of treachery to their convictions – revolutionary Social-Democrats will utilise the organisational experience and links of the working class so as to create illegal forms of struggle for socialism, forms appropriate to a period of crisis, and to unite the workers, not with the chauvinist bourgeoisie of their respective countries, but with the workers of all countries. The proletarian International has not gone under and will not go under. Notwithstanding all obstacles, the masses of the workers will create a new International. Opportunism’s present triumph will be short-lived. The greater the sacrifices imposed by the war, the clearer will it become to the mass of the workers that the opportunists have betrayed the workers’ cause and that the weapons must be turned against the government and the bourgeoisie of each country.
The conversion of the present imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan, one that follows from the experience of the Commune, and outlined in the Basel Resolution (1912); it has been dictated by all the conditions of an imperialist war between highly developed bourgeois countries. However difficult that transformation may seem at any given moment, socialists will never relinquish systematic, persistent and undeviating preparatory work in this direction now that war has become a fact.
It is only along this path that the proletariat will be able to shake off its dependence on the chauvinist bourgeoisie, and, in one form or another and more or less rapidly, take decisive steps towards genuine freedom for the nations and towards socialism.
Long live the international fraternity of the workers against the chauvinism and patriotism of the bourgeoisie of all countries!
Long live a proletarian International, freed from opportunism!
Central Committee of the
Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party
How the International Can Be Restored
12 December 1914
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 be “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’ 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 “peace-loving advocate for adherence to law no matter what”.[6] “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 10 million voters in Germany in 1895, there were 6 million proletarians and 3.5 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, 2 October 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 Basel) 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 resemble 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 “Vorwärts is dead” (Martov’s expression in the Paris Golos) 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).[7]
It is such times that we are passing through. “You shoot first, Messieurs the Bourgeoisie!”, Engels wrote in 1891, advocating, most correctly, the use of bourgeois legality by us, revolutionaries, in the period of so-called peaceful constitutional development.[8] Engels’ 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,[9] 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.[10]
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 Klucks as by opportunism.[11] 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 be urged by his friends to make it up with his enemy.[12] 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’s 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:
- The chauvinists, who are consistently pursuing a policy of opportunism;
- 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;
- 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[13] 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 Golos:
Vorwärts 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 Golos as having said in 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.
Endnotes
[1] The issue of Proletary (No. 17) which published this article also contained the resolution of the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart.
[2] See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, in Marx and Engels Collected Works (henceforth referred to as MECW), Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, p. 591, footnote.
[3] Pseudonym of Anatoly Lunacharsky.
[4] The Copenhagen Congress of the Second International was held between 28 August and 3 September 1910, the RSDLP being represented by Lenin, Plekhanov, Lunacharsky, Kollontai, Pokrovsky and others. The Congress appointed several committees for preliminary discussion and drafting of resolutions on the agenda items. Lenin worked on the cooperative committee.
The Congress’ resolution ‘The Struggle Against Militarism and War’ confirmed the Stuttgart Congress’ resolution on ‘Militarism and International Conflicts’ and listed the demands to be advanced by the socialist parliamentary deputies: (a) all conflicts between states to be unfailingly submitted for settlement by international courts of arbitration; (b) general disarmament; (c) abolition of secret diplomacy; (d) autonomy for all nations and their protection against military attacks and oppression.
The Basel Congress of the Second International was held on 24-25 November 1912. It was the extraordinary congress called in connection with the Balkan War and the imminent European war. The Congress adopted a manifesto emphasising the imperialist nature of the approaching world war, and called on the socialists of all countries to wage a vigorous struggle against war.
[5] Socialist-Revolutionaries – a peasant-based party in Russia, founded at the end of 1901 and the beginning of 1902 as a result of the union of various Narodnik groups and circles. The Socialist-Revolutionaries did not recognise the class differences between the proletariat and the petty proprietors, glossed over the class contradictions within the peasantry, and rejected the proletariat’s leading role in the revolution. The Socialist-Revolutionaries’ views were an eclectic mixture of the ideas of Narodism and revisionism.
In the period of reaction between 1907 and 1910, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party suffered a complete ideological and organisational breakdown. During the First World War most of its members took a social-chauvinist position.
[6] In its issue of 30 March 1895, Vorwärts published a summary and several extracts from Friedrich Engels’ introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, omitting very important propositions on the revolutionary role of the proletariat, which evoked vehement opposition from Engels. In his letter to Kautsky of 1 April 1895, he protested that he was being presented as a “peace-loving advocate for adherence to law no matter what”.
Engels insisted on the introduction being published in full. In 1895 it was published in the journal Die Neue Zeit, but with considerable deletions at the insistence 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’ renunciation of revolution, armed uprisings and barricade fighting.
The original text was first published in 1955, and is reproduced in full in the Wellred Books edition of The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, published in 2021.
[7] Millerandism (or ‘ministerial socialism’, or else Ministerialism) refers to the opportunist tactic of socialists’ participation in reactionary bourgeois governments. The term appeared when, in 1899, the French socialist Alexandre Millerand joined the bourgeois government of Waldeck-Rousseau.
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.
[8] See Friedrich Engels, ‘Socialism in Germany’, in MECW, Vol. 27, p. 241.
[9] Iskra (The Spark) – the first all-Russian illegal Marxist newspaper, founded by Lenin in 1900. It played a decisive part in the establishment of the revolutionary Marxist party of the working class. Soon after the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, the Mensheviks, helped by Plekhanov, gained control of Iskra from issue No. 52 onwards.
[10] 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 RSDLP split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin frequently stressed that the Mensheviks represented the Girondist trend in the working-class movement.
[11] Alexander von Kluck – German general during the First World War.
[12] Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich – characters in Nikolai Gogol’s The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, also known as The Squabble. The quarrel between these two provincial landowners, whose names have become proverbial, started on a most insignificant pretext, and dragged on endlessly.
[13] The International Socialist Bureau (ISB) – the executive body of the Second International, established by decision of the Paris Congress of 1900. Lenin was the RSDLP representative on the ISB from 1905 until June 1914, after which MM Litvinov represented the RSDLP, on Lenin’s proposal. When the First World War broke out, the ISB became a pliable tool in the hands of the social-chauvinists.