18. The Beginning of the War¶
Core Argument¶
In Vienna, the outbreak of war was greeted with a ferocious nationalism that seemed to contradict the very nature of the Habsburg Empire, which negated any coherent national idea. The slogan "Alle Serben müssen sterben" appeared on hoardings and became a street cry. Trotsky, however, detected a deeper, more volatile current beneath this patriotic frenzy. For the masses, mobilisation broke into lives of monotony and hopelessness like a promise, overthrowing the familiar and making the oppressed feel equal to the rich and powerful. In the Viennese crowd, Trotsky recognised something familiar from the October 1905 days in St. Petersburg: war often becomes the mother of revolution. Unlike revolution, which attacks established power, war initially strengthens state power before undermining it. The hopes of social and national movements at the war's outset were groundless; this was only a political moratorium.
Within Austrian Social Democracy, some were openly nationalist, while others, like Victor Adler, regarded war as a catastrophe to be endured. On 3 August, Adler took Trotsky to police headquarters; warned of imminent arrest, Trotsky left for Switzerland that evening. The German Social Democracy's capitulation on 4 August shocked Trotsky profoundly. In Switzerland, he drafted an internationalist manifesto for the 'Eintracht' workers' union, probably the first such document after the war's outbreak. He wrote The War and the International, arguing the war was an uprising of productive forces against private property and state boundaries. This Zurich pamphlet on the Marxist attitude toward the war went through several editions in the Soviet Republic, serving as a textbook. It was removed from the Communist International’s ‘market’ only after 1924, when ‘Trotskyism’ was discovered. The pamphlet remains under a ban, as it was before the revolution. Trotsky observes that books have their own destiny.