Lenin’s Position¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s position during the First World War is the most misunderstood aspect of his work, argues this chapter, because it is read without grasping his method or the concrete conditions in which he wrote. The collapse of the Second International in August 1914, when the SPD’s Reichstag faction voted for war credits, was a shattering, unprecedented blow. Lenin initially refused to believe the report in Vorwärts, attributing it to a German general staff provocation; Trotsky and Axelrod shared this disbelief. The betrayal disoriented the entire workers’ vanguard. Lenin concluded that a radical break was necessary, not only with open chauvinists but also with the so-called lefts—Kautsky, Haase, and Lebedour—who argued the International could be revived after peace. Lenin reserved his sharpest polemics for Kautsky, recalling Rosa Luxemburg’s earlier charge that Kautsky had the “subservience of a theoretician” to the party majority. The chapter insists that Lenin’s slogans—“turn the imperialist war into a civil war” and “the defeat of Russia is a lesser evil”—were never intended for the masses. He was completely isolated from them, writing instead for the cadres, to re-educate them in an uncompromising spirit against social-chauvinism. The sharpness and polemical exaggeration were deliberate: to shock people into grasping his point of view and to leave no chink through which the old leaders could crawl back after the war. Evidence of the need for this approach is given: Shlyapnikov reports that Lenin’s theses on the war were greeted with “perplexity” in Petersburg, and the Moscow Okhrana noted that the Leninists “could not agree on their attitude towards the war” for a long time. Even Trotsky, whose position was consistently internationalist and fundamentally the same as Lenin’s, criticised the “civil war” slogan as unable to provide a basis for broad mass agitation. Lenin wrongly described Trotsky’s position as “centrism” and “Kautskyism”. The chapter argues that Trotsky, through his Paris daily Nashe Slovo, could command a broader audience and therefore placed his emphasis differently. Further confusion arose from Lenin’s own supporters: Zinoviev crudely presented the defeatist slogan as “Yes, we are for the defeat of ‘Russia’”, which the chapter calls a caricature that would have been suicidal for mass work and played into the later accusation that the Bolsheviks were German agents. The core of the chapter is a defence of Lenin’s method: that his apparent ultra-leftism was a necessary pedagogical weapon for a tiny, isolated revolutionary wing facing the greatest betrayal in working-class history.