Pacifist Gestures¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter dissects a pivotal moment in the struggle for revolutionary internationalism during the First World War: the attempt by the Bolsheviks to use the growing anti-war sentiment, particularly among women, as a lever for revolutionary action, and their defeat by the pacifist and centrist currents that dominated the socialist movement in 1915. The narrative centres on two conferences convened in Berne: the Berne Socialist Women’s Conference in March and the International Socialist Youth Conference a few days later. The Bolsheviks, through their women’s journal Rabotnitsa, initiated the call for an international women’s conference, seeing it as an opportunity to project the ideas of revolutionary defeatism. Lenin drafted a declaration for the meeting, but it was rejected. The majority, led by a conciliatory Klara Zetkin, adopted a pacifist line confined to “supporting peace,” deliberately avoiding any condemnation of the social-chauvinist parties that had betrayed the working class by supporting their own national bourgeoisies in the imperialist slaughter. The Bolshevik delegates, including Inessa Armand and Krupskaya, were denounced as sectarians and splitters for refusing to compromise on principle.
The chapter’s core argument is that this pacifism was not a harmless error but a profoundly harmful and counter-revolutionary position. Lenin’s correspondence with Alexandra Kollontai is deployed to demonstrate his absolute refusal to countenance “unprincipled agreements” for the sake of a false unity. He explicitly rejected the slogan of “peace” as “supremely muddled, pacifist, petty-bourgeois,” arguing that it helped the warring governments climb out of their difficulties while obstructing the revolutionary struggle for civil war against the imperialist state. The text contrasts this revolutionary intransigence with the “Zetkin philistinism” that evaded the central question of condemning social-chauvinism. The youth conference produced the same result: a pacifist resolution carried 13-3, which Lenin dismissed as “marking time”—full of good intentions but avoiding the decisive break with the traitors.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical context of the Second International’s collapse in 1914, when the majority of its parties voted for war credits. It positions Lenin’s stance against the entire spectrum of opportunism, from the open social-chauvinists (Südekums) to the centrists (Kautsky, Haase, Bernstein) who, with their belated pacifist declarations like “The Demands of the Moment,” offered a “feeble reflection” of the masses’ mood while leaving the rotten party structures intact. The polemic is sharp: the chapter argues that Lenin was not out of step with reality, but ahead of it. While the ground was not yet ripe in 1915, the war’s prolongation and its attendant horrors—exploitation, profiteering, inflation—would eventually drive the masses leftwards, expressed in strike waves and the birth of movements like the British shop stewards’ movement. The pacifist gestures of the centrists are thus exposed as a distorted, emasculated reflection of the desperate yearning for peace, a position that, by refusing to break with the social-chauvinists, ultimately served to contain and misdirect the revolutionary potential of the working class.