Introduction¶
Core Argument¶
The Marxist analysis of war underwent a profound transformation as capitalism entered its imperialist stage, a shift that Marx and Engels could not have fully anticipated during capitalism's progressive era. The Second International, at its congresses in Stuttgart (1907), Copenhagen (1910), and Basel (1912), formally opposed imperialist war, with Lenin and Luxemburg successfully amending the Stuttgart resolution to emphasise using war crises to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Yet in 1914, this International betrayed its own resolutions, with social-democratic parties voting for war credits and entering national unity governments. Lenin identified the social roots of this betrayal in the labour aristocracy, a stratum of workers bought off by imperialist super-profits, and fought for a clean break with social-chauvinists and centrists like Kautsky.
At Zimmerwald in 1915, Lenin's pamphlet Socialism and War articulated the Marxist position: Marxists are not pacifists but analyse each war's class character, opposing imperialist wars while supporting progressive wars of national liberation and class war. The Zimmerwald Left, though a minority, pushed for revolutionary opposition, and by Kienthal in 1916 had gained ground, securing explicit criticism of social-patriotic leaders and a call for deputies to vote against war credits. Lenin's slogan of revolutionary defeatism—that the defeat of tsarism was the lesser evil for Russian workers—was a polemical formulation for cadres, not used in Bolshevik agitation inside Russia, which focused on revolutionary struggle against the government as the only way to end the war.
After the February Revolution of 1917, Lenin abandoned the "lesser evil" defeatist slogan, now addressing masses in a revolutionary context. He distinguished between the "honest defencism" of workers and peasants who had made the revolution and the reactionary defencism of the ruling class. Revolutionaries, Lenin argued, must patiently explain that only workers' power could end the war, not simply oppose it. The Bolsheviks rejected slanders that they favoured a separate peace with Germany or army disorganisation, and before October warned soldiers against being provoked into riots. As the ruling class sought military defeat to crush the revolution, Lenin argued that nationalised banks and peasant land committees would produce superior defence. At Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, he stated: "We were defeatists at the time of the tsar, but at the time of Tsereteli and Chernov we were not defeatists." Lenin explained in 1921 that the Bolsheviks changed their position upon returning to Russia because they saw that ordinary workers and peasants stood for defence of the homeland, and could not be called traitors. His method was first to wage an implacable principled struggle to win the vanguard, then to explain the same ideas in ways that connected with the masses' experience and consciousness.