The Mood of the Working Class¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the chapter mounts a sophisticated defence of Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism against its caricature by “empty-headed ultra-lefts.” The core argument is that Lenin’s slogan was never a literal demand for military defeat, but a polemical weapon against chauvinism and the ‘Burgfrieden’ (civil peace) policy of the social-chauvinists. The essence was that socialists bear no responsibility for an imperialist war, and that even the defeat of Russia was a “lesser evil” compared to supporting the bourgeoisie. However, the chapter insists Lenin was too much of a realist to confuse this revolutionary programme with the actual consciousness of the masses. The art of building a party lies in connecting a finished scientific programme to the “confused and contradictory consciousness” of the workers.
The chapter’s key evidence for this tactical flexibility is Lenin’s return to Petrograd in spring 1917, where he modified his position by acknowledging an “honest defencism” among the masses, distinct from the betrayal of the social-chauvinists. This was not an abandonment of revolutionary defeatism, but a recognition that propaganda must be pitched to the actual level of consciousness to avoid sectarianism. The chapter contrasts Lenin’s wartime intransigence with his conciliatory speech to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, where he told honest worker-defencists that the Bolsheviks were not pacifists and would fight German imperialism—but only after the Mensheviks and SRs broke with the bourgeoisie and took power. This, the chapter asserts, was the real essence of Lenin’s revolutionary military policy.
Drawing on the work of Robert McKean and the Bolshevik eyewitness Alexander Shlyapnikov, the chapter provides a granular account of the working-class mood at the outbreak of war. Initially stunned and despondent, with women weeping at recruiting offices and 40 per cent of workers mobilised, the mood soon turned to anger. Anti-war protests erupted: 27,000 demonstrated on 31 July, and disturbances occurred in 17 provinces, with 505 draftees and 106 officials killed in the first two weeks. The tsarist police themselves noted that internationalist positions secured the widest acceptance among workers. Yet this spontaneous protest was crushed by the unfavourable class balance of forces. The chapter cites Badayev’s account of how “philistines” and “idle loafers” on Nevsky Prospect, stirred up by patriotic shouts, fell upon demonstrating workers and helped the police arrest them. The regime rode out the storm because mobilisation drowned the thin layer of advanced Bolshevik workers in a sea of politically untutored peasant soldiers. Until events changed the outlook of the muzhiks in uniform, the worker-Bolsheviks in the trenches were impotent. The chapter thus argues that the initial opposition was real but overwhelmed by a hostile class environment, not by any deep-seated working-class patriotism.