Lenin on World War I:
WOLFE, BERTRAM D.
Lenin on World War I By Bertram D. Wolfe THE VERY HEART of totalitarianism is that it aspires to be total, that it wants the world. It thinks compromise shameful, not natural or reasonable. To it,...
...We have always considered it absurd for the revolutionary proletariat to disavow revolutionary wars that may prove necessary in the interests of socialism...
...Wolfe on the Communist approach to "peaceful coexistence...
...that History, with a capital H, has given it a mandate to wage war until it has conquered the world...
...In an article in a Zurich paper and a "Farewell Letter to the Swiss Workers," he spoke of the "peace" terms he would offer if he managed to seize power in Russia...
...With the stubborn insistence that characterized him, he reasserted it again and again, before the First World War, during it, and after it...
...Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly to Lenin and his party, the Tsar fell...
...Lenin continued to worry now about "an imperialist peace which will bring the people the greatest deception in the form of half-reforms, half-concessions": "It is precisely now, when the ruling bourgeoisie is preparing peacefully to disarm millions of proletarians and to transfer them safely from the filthy, stinking, fetid trenches to the penal servitude of the capitalist factories it is precisely at this time that our slogan, 'turn the imperialist war into civil war for socialism,' acquires greater significance than it had at the outset of the war...
...Moreover, Lenin was dedicated to stirring up a war of his own...
...Propaganda for peace at the present time, unless it is accompanied by a call for revolutionary mass actions, is only capable of spreading illusion, demoralizing the proletariat...
...Such men were not merely intellectually wrong in their estimate of the social possibilities—they were morally wrong, perverse, despicable deceivers, to be fought, exposed, discredited, destroyed...
...Obviously, it is not the defensive or aggressive character of a war, but the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat, or rather the interests of its international movement, that represent the only possible point of view from which the question of the attitude of Social Democracy toward any particular phenomenon of international relations can be examined or solved...
...In the spring of 1916, Lenin was writing once more on a "Program of Peace...
...and so forth...
...We do not deceive ourselves for a single moment: we know that such conditions would be unacceptable not only to Germany but also to the capitalist governments of England and France...
...Vol...
...He hated with all his heart those who thought that the party could admit part-time revolutionaries, or those who deprecated violence, who used the term "class struggle" somewhat more figuratively than he, who nourished the "philis-tine," "traitorous" belief that a better world could be built gradually, by compromise or consensus or peaceful conversion of the majority...
...For instance at the time of the Wars of Liberation, when a man was really worth something even without 'business...
...And he believed that another war, a big war, would give him his opportunity...
...Vol...
...XXIII, pp...
...Long before the First World War, his writings contained significant attacks on "pacifist illusions...
...I looked upon this period of 'quiet and order' as an undeserved and mean trick of fate...
...it calls upon the workers of the world to overthrow their governments...
...Yet, with these frank and revealing words open to them to ponder, the statesmen of Europe and America preferred to accept Hitler's later assurances that all he desired was peace...
...attack on banks...
...The third was a cessation of military operations...
...attack on gendarmes...
...One need only read the directives he prepared in 1905, under the heading: Our Own Revolutionary Patrols...
...killing of horses of Cossacks...
...XXIII, p. 183...
...Lenin was never a pacifist, and he took every opportunity to say so...
...After this, Lenin began to turn anxiously to the question of "peace terms...
...No, we must utilize the feeling for peace to explain to the masses that the benefits they expect from peace cannot be obtained without a series of revolutions...
...But neither attitude bespeaks a special love of peace...
...Vol...
...Yet, he could not close his eyes to the fact that ordinary folk, the soldiers in the blood and mud of the trenches, humble men and women facing overwork and deprivation in the cities, yearned with all their hearts for peace...
...We would be forced to carry on a revolutionary war against the German—and not only the German—bourgeoisie...
...What interests us most is points 4 and 5 and Lenin's own interpretation of his "peace" offer: "4...
...XXI, p. 264—Lenin's italics...
...V, 1926, pp...
...Thus, in 1908, in an article on "The Anti-Militarist Tactics of Social Democracy," he wrote: "The Social Democrats may even find themselves in the position of having to demand aggressive wars...
...Bourgeois pacifists and their 'socialist' imitators or echoers," he wrote, "picture peace as being something in principle distinct from war, for the pacifists of both shades have never understood that "war is the continuation of the politics of peace and peace is the continuation of the politics of war.' Neither bourgeois pacifists nor socialist pacifists see that, if the bourgeois governments are not overthrown by revolution, peace now can only be an imperialist peace, a continuation of the imperialist war...
...He decided to "utilize" this to extend "their" war into "his" war?to transform the imperialist war into a civil war...
...For him, the word "war" was not figurative but literal...
...Whoever promises the people a 'democratic' peace, without advocating at the same time a socialist revolution, is deceiving the proletariat...
...Vol...
...attack on prisons...
...Vol...
...From this view of the necessity of aggressive wars once the Socialists took power anywhere, Lenin never departed...
...351 and 360-361...
...that History has given it guarantees that in that war it must win...
...But how shall it be utilized...
...But the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 had brought in its train the Revolution of 1905...
...455-6, and, somewhat expanded by Lenin, in Volume IX of his Collected Works, pp...
...Such were Lenin's "peace terms...
...fires, rope or rope ladders, shovels for the building of barricades, dynamite cartridges, barbed wire, nails—to use against the cavalry—etc...
...For such peace conditions we would be willing to carry on a revolutionary war...
...Vol...
...Not disarmament, but the arming of the proletariat and the disarming of the bourgeoisie, was the only slogan worthy of socialists who wanted to continue their war until complete victory...
...Adolf Hitler, thanks to his special temperament and the background from which he sprang, loved war for its own sake even before he dreamed of waging war to win power...
...XXIII, pp...
...To a Communist, then, peace is only another form of war...
...he mused in his youth, according to Mein Kampf...
...Why could one not have been born a hundred years earlier...
...He was convinced that the "class war" which he was trying to bring to a climax was destined to be armed, violent, international in scope...
...Every effort must be made," he wrote after the war had been going on for a year, "to utilize the feeling of the masses for peace...
...Detachments of 3 to 5 men...
...When gentler souls find Lenin using the term "class war," they translate it in their own minds into support of strikers, political demonstrations, labor parties, taking the side of the poor...
...The first and second involved the repudiation and publication of secret treaties...
...It would become "realistic and constructive," sobered by the responsibilities of power, and would abandon its mad dream of "tomorrow the world...
...How the facts of power "sobered" his language and complicated his tactical approach will be the subject of future articles...
...To accept the peace slogan, to recognize the slogan of peace and repeat it, would be to encourage the self-important posturings of the powerless (or generally, even worse, hypocritical) phrasemongers...
...Socialists cannot, without ceasing to be socialists, be opposed to all war neither revolutionary wars, nor a war against the bourgeoisie, nor a war of liberation...
...The New Germany would become a model of peaceful coexistence, wanting nothing more than to grow great within its own borders and exhibit the superiority of its own system...
...Vol...
...257, 263...
...XV, p. 176...
...There is nothing more harmful than this deception, nothing which more falsely beautifies capitalist slavery...
...With the Balkan Wars, the first gust of wind swept over Europe...
...Between considering war beautiful and considering it "useful" there is quite a difference...
...As 1916 drew to a close and the weary world staggered into its third year of war, a fear that "the imperialist war might give way to an imperialist peace" began to clutch at Lenin's heart...
...XXII, p. 156...
...This war we would wage...
...Once he had "got what he wanted" and united all Germans, he would be too busy with the construction of the "New Germany" to covet any more lands...
...We are not pacifists...
...On the contrary, it presupposes such war...
...These notes were written near the end of October 1905, when the Tsar was just granting a constitution under the pressure of a wave of strikes and demonstrations...
...The original notes are in Leninskii Sbornik, Vol...
...He believed that the war would continue until capitalism was in ruins, and he hoped and worked to convert the war between nations into a civil war...
...Especially profoundly wrong is the idea that a so-called democratic peace is possible without a series of revolutions...
...Increasingly, Lenin trained his fire not on those responsible for the outbreak of war, or on those who supported "war to the victorious end," but on those who withheld such support, like his former teacher and master, Karl Kautsky, and on those who thought that the masses might be mobilized around a struggle for an early peace, like Lenin's future associate, Trotsky...
...83-84...
...The liberation of all the colonies and oppressed nations...
...These same thoughts, in more or less the same words but ever more sharply, Lenin repeated a thousand times during the war...
...In 1914, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven out of my overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune of being allowed to live in these times...
...It believes that war, its war, is inevitable, necessary and glorious...
...XXIII, p. 117...
...Vol...
...WIII, pp...
...But when Lenin said "class war...
...He concluded that the primary need of a "peace program" was exposure of "the hypocrisy" of all those who were urging peace, from bourgeois advocates to Kautskyans...
...Secondly, civil wars are also wars the inevitable continuation, development and sharpening of the class struggle...
...Many socialists were arguing that the war should end with some agreement on the scaling down of armaments...
...Thirdly, the victory of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all war...
...In 1913, during the Balkan Wars, he wrote to Gorki that, if the current conflict brought about a bigger war between Austria and Russia, this "would be a very useful thing for the revolution...
...They consisted of six points...
...Therefore, Lenin urged that, far from fighting for the "deception" of disarmament, proletarians should be entering the armies, learning how to use arms, welcoming the ever swifter and more "inevitable" militarization of women and youth as well as men...
...attack on police precincts...
...When Lenin managed to call a conference of his Bolshevik faction in Berne, Switzerland, at the end of February 1915, he proposed a resolution denouncing those who longed for an early peace and an end to the seemingly endless slaughter: "Some of the means employed to fool the working class are pacifism and the abstract preaching of peace...
...he meant tear...
...They arm themselves as best they can (guns, revolvers, bombs, knives, brass knuckles, rags soaked in kerosene to set This is the second of a series of articles by Mr...
...He was terribly afraid that his fellow Social Democrats (he did not use the word "Communist" until 1917) were becoming too strongly anti-war...
...Only after we have overthrown, finally conquered and expropriated the bourgeoisie of the whole world, and not only of one country, will wars become impossible...
...His idea of the "party" he was trying to build was that it should consist of "professional revolutionaries," men who dedicated to his war not just their spare time but the whole of their lives...
...Lenin's wartime writings make up seven and a half volumes in the Fourth Russian Edition, and in a thousand ways they make explicit Bolshevism's real attitude toward war and peace for the benefit of contemporary statesmen...
...Socialistic' parsons and opportunists are always ready to dream about the peaceful socialism of the future, but the very thing that distinguishes them from revolutionary Social Democrats is that they refuse to think about the fierce class struggles and class wars that are necessary for the achievement of that beautiful future...
...It [the Soviet of Workers' Deputies] declares that it has no confidence in any of the bourgeois governments...
...burning of barracks, etc...
...When the great mass movements of 1905 were over, the "class war" in ebb, and Lenin's party legally participating in the elections which the new constitution permitted, he still organized the famous bank robberies of 1907 with such armed detachments as he retained or made contact with...
...XXI, p. 141...
...attack on censorship and other institutions...
...Beginning of military operations: murder of policemen...
...Lenin was quite a different type from Hitler...
...Under capitalism, particularly in its imperialist stage, wars are inevitable...
...To Lenin, this was once more the hateful heresy: "This main argument is precisely the main error...
...Hope was kindled in Lenin's breast that he might return to Russia and there start yet another revolution which would turn into a world revolution...
...The sixth was the payment of war loans exclusively by the capitalists...
...It would be deceiving the people with the illusion that the present governments, the present ruling classes, are capable of a peace in any way satisfying to democracy and to the working class, without the ruling classes' first being overthrown by a series of revolutions...
...his notes began...
...This war was his full-time "profession" —he had no other...
...Once the great war had begun, his chief scorn and hatred was reserved not for those who had started it, nor for those of his old comrades who supported their governments, but for those who urged a speedy peace or a democratic peace...
...In the autumn of 1916, a year to the day before Lenin was to seize power, we find him writing: "A 'socialist' who delivers speeches about a 'decent' peace resembles a clergyman who, seeing before him the madam who runs a brothel and the police official who is in league with her, preaches' to them and to the people of love toward one another and the observance of the Christian commandments...
...A demand for general disarmament seemed a useful slogan in the struggle against militarism and war...
...Such a peace must be fought for not in the reactionary Utopia of a non-imperialist capitalism, nor in a league of nations under capitalism, but in a socialist revolution...
...Lenin's closing words were: "Finally our "peace program' must make clear that the imperialist powers and the imperialist bourgeoisie cannot grant a democratic peace...
...If our statesmen keep this elementary point in mind, they will be less likely to go astray in their "peace" negotiations with Communists...
...To it, all agreements are temporary, tactical expedients on its inexorable march to total power...
...Nor can Social Democrats overlook the positive significance of revolutionary wars or of wars the purpose of which would be to defend the conquests of the proletariat...
...He was not one to fall down on his knees when war broke out...
...389-393...
...Now we know why he always took the trouble to put quotes around the word "peace"-before he took power...
...Even as a boy, I was not a pacifist...
...The Boer War appeared to me like summer lightning...
...Fourth Russian Edition, Vol...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 11
