To the Workers Who Support the Struggle Against the War and Against the Socialists Who Have Sided With Their Governments¶
Core Argument¶
In this polemical manifesto of January 1917, Lenin argues that the imperialist nature of the war has become unmistakably clear to all class-conscious workers, and that the only serious struggle against it requires a revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois rule and the establishment of socialism. Both belligerent coalitions, he contends, have revealed themselves as imperialist predators: Germany crushes small nations while cloaking its designs in hypocritical pacifist phrases, and the Entente clings just as tenaciously to its colonial seizures while claiming to fight for a ‘just’ peace. The war itself, by imposing unprecedented strains and driving mankind toward state capitalism, demonstrates in practice how planned social economy could be conducted in the interests of the masses—but only if the capitalists are expropriated under proletarian leadership.
The chapter’s central thrust is the irreconcilable split between two tendencies within the socialist movement, first demarcated at the Zimmerwald conference where Lenin acted as a separate Left wing. On one side stand those who conceal the bankruptcy of official socialism and the desertion of its representatives to the bourgeoisie; on the other, those who expose this betrayal in full and work to destroy the influence of the ‘social-patriots’ over the masses. The Zimmerwald Right, which held the majority at Zimmerwald, fought the idea of breaking with the social-patriots and founding the Third International. Since then, the split has become a definite fact: in Germany, the conference of the opposition on 7 January 1917 revealed two irreconcilably hostile labour parties, one underground and socialist with Karl Liebknecht among its leaders, the other thoroughly bourgeois and social-patriot. The same division obtains in every country.
Lenin’s polemic targets the Zimmerwald Right’s slide into social-pacifism—the very position condemned at the Kienthal conference. In Italy, Turati’s pacifist phrases have been tacitly accepted by the Socialist Party, even as identical phrases are used by both belligerent coalitions and neutral bourgeois governments to cover the fight for imperialist spoils. In Germany, Kautsky issued a meaningless pacifist manifesto that instils hope in the bourgeoisie. In France, Merrheim, Bourderon and Raffin-Dugens—participants in Zimmerwald and Kienthal—voted for false pacifist resolutions so advantageous to the imperialist bourgeoisie that even the denounced betrayers Jouhaux and Renaudel voted for them. This, Lenin insists, is no accident but a striking symbol of the imminent merger of social-patriots and social-pacifists against international socialists.
The most detailed and damning evidence concerns Switzerland, where the Socialist Party, officially affiliated to Zimmerwald, has been betrayed by Robert Grimm, chairman of both the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences and a prominent member of the Bern International Socialist Committee. At the Parteivorstand meeting of 7 January 1917, Grimm secured postponement of the party congress called to decide the fatherland defence issue and the party’s attitude toward Kienthal’s condemnation of social-pacifism. Lenin exposes Grimm’s claim that the workers were not ready as an outrageous falsehood: the Left proposed postponement until March or May, but these proposals were voted down by the ‘fatherland defenders’ led by Grimm himself. The real question, Lenin insists, is whether the Bern Committee may shield Swiss social-patriots while abusing foreign ones, or whether an honest internationalist policy will fight primarily the social-patriots at home. He demands Grimm’s removal from the International Socialist Committee and insists that the word ‘Zimmerwald’ must not serve to shield social-patriotism and bourgeois reformism.