A petty bourgeois pacifist tendency¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter delivers a sustained polemic against the leadership of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), accusing it of harbouring a deeply embedded petty-bourgeois pacifist tendency that constitutes a fundamental break with Leninism and the programme of the Fourth International. The core argument is that the RSL’s fixation on the slogan of “peace” is not an incidental error but the logical culmination of a series of opportunist mistakes on war and militarism, stretching back to the imposition of conscription in Britain in 1939. The author traces this lineage to demonstrate a qualitative degeneration: the accumulation of errors has produced a new quality of political deviation.
The chapter’s key claims are substantiated by a forensic examination of the RSL’s record. At the outbreak of war, the RSL is charged with aligning with the Peace Pledge Union and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in advocating refusal to register for conscription—a utopian directive that its own members ignored. The author counterposes this with a lengthy quotation from Lenin’s The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution, in which Lenin instructs proletarian women to tell their sons to take up arms, not against foreign workers, but to fight the bourgeoisie at home. The RSL’s subsequent entry into an unprincipled “Socialist anti-war front” with pacifists and its adoption of the slogan “Stop the war” (later dropped without explanation) are presented as further evidence of a semi-pacifist slide. The most serious charge concerns the RSL’s explicit repudiation of the 1940 Fourth International Manifesto’s demand that workers learn the military arts, which the RSL’s Executive Committee dismissed as “defencist and patriotic” and inapplicable to Britain. This, the author argues, flowed directly from their earlier conscription policy.
The theoretical context is drawn from classical Leninism and Trotsky’s writings. The chapter mobilises Lenin’s insistence that war cannot be ended by “sticking the bayonet into the ground” and that the slogan “Down with the war!” is correct but insufficient without addressing the concrete consciousness of the masses. Trotsky’s 1940 criticism of Shachtman is cited to argue that the revolutionary programme must be based on war, not on wishful thinking for peace. The polemic is directed squarely against the RSL leadership, but also implicitly against centrist currents like the ILP and Stalinists, who are shown to have vacillated similarly. The author argues that the RSL’s approach is scholastic: it demands an exact replica of the Russian Revolution, whereas history proceeds algebraically. The chapter concludes by arguing that the task is not to scorn the “chauvinist” masses but to learn from them, offering a programme that confronts the defeat of reaction both at home and abroad.