Chapter 4: War and revolutionary strategy

  1. Q
    Q
    Discuss:

    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]4 [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]War and revolutionary strategy[/FONT]




    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]I wrote in chapter one that the strategic debates of the late 19th century workers’ movement are more relevant to the modern workers’ movement than those of the Third International, in the first place because our times are closer to theirs than they are to the “short 20th century” (Hobsbawm), and secondly because at least some of the strategic concepts of the Comintern are not simply rendered obsolete by the fall of the USSR, but are proved by the fate of the ‘socialist countries’ to be a strategic blind alley.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Nonetheless, we cannot splice the film of history to skip a century. Nor can we simply argue, as Antoine Artous did in the 2006 LCR debate, that “the current period is characterised by the end of the historical cycle which began with October 1917”.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]We live after the great schism in the socialist movement which resulted from the 1914-18 war. Most of the organised left and a good many ‘independents’ still identify with traditional ideas derived from the first four congresses of the Comintern (usually in a diluted and confused form).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Moreover, the Comintern re-posed the problems of the state and internationalism, party organisation, unity and government coalitions. Any judgment on possible socialist strategies for the 21st century must take the Comintern’s ideas into account, even if in the end it proves necessary to reject some or all of them.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Strategic alternatives[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]There are three core elements of strategy proposed by the Comintern and its leadership. The first, and the essence of the split, was Lenin’s response to World War I - the idea of a defeatist policy.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The second was the idea of the split itself. This started with the notion that organisational separation from the right, and the creation of a new type of International and a new type of party, would immunise the workers’ movement against repeating the right’s betrayals. In 1921-22 it became apparent to the Comintern’s leadership that the right and centre could not be so easily disposed of, and the strategic problem of workers’ unity (and the question of government) re-posed itself in the form of the united front policy. But this policy stood in contradiction to the concept of the party established in 1920-21 and proved short-lived.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The third was the problem of what form of authority could pose an alternative to the capitalist political order. Beginning with ‘All power to the soviets’, the Comintern leadership had shifted by 1920 to the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat was necessarily the dictatorship of the workers’ vanguard party. The united front turn of 1921-22 entailed a shift here as well, to the ideas of a workers’ or workers’ and farmers’ government as the immediate alternative to capitalist rule.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]In this chapter I will discuss the question of war and revolutionary defeatism. This question comes first. Hal Draper has argued that Lenin was wrong on defeatism. If the strategic judgment expressed in ‘defeatism’ was wrong, Lenin was also wrong to argue for a split with the anti-war centrists.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]War and betrayal[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]In August 1914 the parliamentary representatives of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the majority of the larger parties of the Second International in the belligerent countries voted for war credits for their national governments. In doing so, they betrayed commitments which had been made at the 1907 Stuttgart and 1912 Basel congresses of the International.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]If the war had appeared, as Engels imagined it in 1891, as a revanchist attack by France on Germany with Russian support, and had been fought on German soil, the defencist policy of the SPD might have been vindicated. However, the partial success of the Schlieffen plan to outflank the French armies by attacking through Belgium, and the weakness of the tsarist army, meant that the war was not fought on German soil. Moreover, both the long background of rising inter-imperialist tensions, and the immediate diplomatic context (German support of an Austrian ultimatum against Serbia for ‘supporting’ what would now be called ‘terrorism’), made German policy appear aggressive, not defensive.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]On the other hand, had the Schlieffen plan succeeded in rapidly knocking France out of the war, the war would indeed have been - as many military leaders imagined it would be in 1914 - a short one, and the error of the socialist leaderships would have been marginalised by the political consequences in the defeated belligerent countries (France and Russia).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]But the Schlieffen plan did not work as intended. Invading France through neutral Belgium provided an excuse for British intervention on the French side; and the German forces outran their rail-based logistics and became overextended, enabling the French army to regroup forces and at the first battle of the Marne (September 1914) to strike at a weakness in the German line. The result was that France was not knocked out of the war, Britain became fully engaged in it, and there developed the stabilised trench lines of the various fronts, factories of murder which were to run for another four years. The socialist leaderships had ended up accepting responsibility for an enormous crime against the working class and humanity in general.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Peace and unity or civil war and split?[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Lenin argued from the outbreak of hostilities for a clear assessment that this was a predatory imperialist war for the redivision of the world, an understanding shared by Luxemburg, Trotsky and others.59 On this basis it was to be regarded as reactionary on all sides. This, in turn, led Lenin to support the policy that came to be called ‘defeatism’ and for the slogan ‘Turn the imperialist war into a civil war’. With equal determination he argued for a decisive break with the right wing, and, indeed, from all those socialists who supported their own governments in the war.60[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]A section of the left and centre endeavoured in vain to restore the honour of the socialist movement by convening the Zimmerwald (1915), Kienthal (1916) and Stockholm (1917) conferences of socialists to promote a peace policy. As the true nature of the war became clear, elements of the centre who had initially gone along with the right turned to an anti-war policy; but they still clung to the idea of re-establishing the unity of the International. Lenin now argued for a decisive break with the anti-war centre as well as the right, on the basis that the centre’s pacifist line merely covered for the right.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]A left wing at the Zimmerwald conference argued for a policy of pursuing the class struggle against the war; the Bolsheviks participated. But even among the Zimmerwald left the instinct for unity of the movement was strong, and Lenin argued even for a break with those elements of the left who were unwilling to split from the centre. There could be no real internationalism, he insisted in this context, without a willingness to carry on a practical struggle against one’s own state’s war policy: that is, defeatist propaganda in the armed forces.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Until the October Revolution, it is fairly clear that Lenin could not carry the full rigour of his line within the Bolshevik leadership. The public statements of the Bolshevik Party in Russia were anti-war and characterised the war as imperialist and predatory, but did not go to the full lengths of defeatism. The Bolsheviks were equally unwilling to break decisively with the limited unity expressed in the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences and call openly for a new International, or - the other aspect of Lenin’s insistence on a clear split - to rename the RSDLP (Bolshevik) the Communist Party.61[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Lenin’s line was given strong apparent justification by the course of events. On the one hand, the October Revolution, plus the new regime’s ability to hold power into 1918, seemed to confirm the claims of defeatism positively. On the other, the responses of the Russian, German and international right and centre to the February and October revolutions and the 1918-19 revolution in Germany seemed to negatively confirm the need for a rigorous split. A large enough minority of the parties of the Second International (including majorities in France and Italy) was willing to split from the right, to support the proclamation of the Third International in 1919.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The 21 conditions[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Even so, the concerns for the broad unity characteristic of the Second International persisted within some of the parties affiliated to the Third. The Russian leadership resolved to force a cleaner break with the centre tendency and did so with the 1920 adoption by the Second Congress of the Twenty-one conditions for affiliation to the Comintern.62 The defeatist position was not adopted in explicit terms, but the political essence of the content Lenin had intended by it was.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Condition six provided that “It is the duty of any party wishing to belong to the Third International to expose, not only avowed social-patriotism, but also the falsehood and hypocrisy of social-pacifism...”[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Condition four required that “Persistent and systematic propaganda and agitation must be conducted in the armed forces, and communist cells formed in every military unit. In the main communists will have to do this work illegally; failure to engage in it would be tantamount to a betrayal of their revolutionary duty and incompatible with membership in the Third International.”[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]And condition eight required that “Any party wishing to join the Third International must ruthlessly expose the colonial machinations of the imperialists of its ‘own’ country, must support - in deed, not merely in word - every colonial liberation movement, demand the expulsion of its compatriot imperialists from the colonies, ... and conduct systematic agitation among the armed forces against all oppression of the colonial peoples” (emphasis added).[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Hal Draper[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Hal Draper has argued in his Lenin and the myth of revolutionary defeatism that Lenin’s use of ‘defeat’ slogans in 1914-16 reflected his general tendency to ‘bend the stick’: “He makes perfectly clear what he means, but that is how he seeks to underline, with heavy, thick strokes, the task of the day, by exaggerating in every way that side of the problem which points in the direction it is necessary to move now.” In Draper’s view, the resulting slogan was incoherent and mistaken, and Lenin, when he was required to formulate slogans for practical purposes, did not use it. He argues that it ceased to be employed altogether in 1917 and through the early years of the Comintern, and was only revived by Zinoviev in 1924 as a club with which to beat Trotsky.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Draper is usually an exceptionally careful scholar, and his work on Marx and Engels’ ideas in Karl Marx’s theory of revolution brilliantly draws out the political context of specific writings and arguments in order to make the underlying ideas clear. In Lenin and the myth of revolutionary defeatism, however, Homer has nodded. Missing from Draper’s argument about defeatism are two crucial elements.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The first is that the primary political context is Lenin’s argument for a clear split in the International - with the right, and with anyone who wanted to maintain unity with the right, in particular with the centre. This is the precise context of, for example, Lenin’s polemic against Trotsky on the defeatism formula. And it is retained in condition six of the Twenty-one conditions (a document whose whole purpose is to finalise the split with the Kautskyite centre).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The second is the concrete conclusion which follows from defeatism. That is, that the socialists should, so far as they are able, carry on an anti-war agitation in the ranks of the armed forces. In November 1914 Lenin wrote: “Refusal to serve with the forces, anti-war strikes, etc, are sheer nonsense, the miserable and cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against the armed bourgeoisie, vain yearning for the destruction of capitalism without a desperate civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations.”63[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]In July 1915, in arguing, against Trotsky, for “practical actions leading toward such defeat”, Lenin comments as an aside: “For the ‘penetrating reader’: This does not at all mean to ‘blow up bridges’, organise unsuccessful military strikes, and, in general, to help the government to defeat the revolutionaries.”64[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]But neither here nor anywhere else does Lenin repudiate carrying on anti-war agitation in the ranks of the armed forces, and, on the contrary, this is the principal concrete conclusion which follows from defeatism. And this, too, is retained in the Twenty-one conditions, in conditions four (a general obligation to organise and agitate in the armed forces) and eight (specifically on the colonial question).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]To carry on an effective agitation against the war in the ranks of the armed forces is, unavoidably, to undermine their discipline and willingness to fight. This was apparent in 1917 itself. It is confirmed by subsequent history. One of the few effective anti-war movements in recent history was the movement in the US against the Vietnam war. If we ask why this movement was successful, the answer is clear: it did not merely carry on political opposition to the war (demonstrations, etc) but also disrupted recruitment to the US armed forces and organised opposition to the war within the armed forces. The result - together with the armed resistance of the Vietnamese - was a US defeat.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] It is clear enough that these judgments were intended to be strategic. The Zimmerwald left proposed a resolution condemning the imperialist character of the war and arguing (in a slightly less emphatic way than Lenin’s version) for class struggle against it. An opponent, Serrati, argued that this resolution would be rendered moot by the end of the war (still anticipated in 1915 to be not far off). Lenin responded that “I do not agree with Serrati that the resolution will appear either too early or too late. After this war, other, mainly colonial, wars will be waged. Unless the proletariat turns off the social-imperialist way, proletarian solidarity will be completely destroyed; that is why we must determine common tactics. If we adopt only a manifesto, Vandervelde, L’Humanité and others will once again start deceiving the masses; they will keep saying that they, too, oppose war and want peace. The old vagueness will remain” (emphasis added).65[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] Right or wrong, then, Lenin’s defeatism was arguing for two fundamental changes in the strategy of international socialism. The first was for a clear split: the abandonment of the historic policy of unity of the movement at all costs which had flowed from the success of the Gotha unification, the SPD and the unifications which it had promoted.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] The second was a new strategic policy in relation to war, or, more exactly, in relation to imperialist wars. This policy called for an open proclamation along the lines that ‘the main enemy is at home’, to ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war’ and, complementing this, practical efforts to undermine military discipline by anti-war agitation and organising in the armed forces.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Limits of defeatism[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Draper’s view is that the defeat slogan is simply wrong - meaningless unless you positively wish for the victory of the other side. It must follow that unless you support such a scenario, you would not go beyond a slogan along the lines of ‘Carry on the class struggle in spite of the war’. That is, you would not arrive at Lenin’s argument that the principal way to carry on the class struggle in such a war is to argue that civil war is better than this war and to undermine military discipline by anti-war agitation and organisation in the armed forces.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The flip side of this argument is that Draper only partially addresses the internal limits of Lenin’s argument. Lenin argued for generalising a defeat position to all the 1914-18 belligerents on the basis that 1914-18 was a war among the imperialist robbers for division of the spoils of the world. He - and the Comintern - further generalised this position to ‘colonial wars’: that is, the wars of the imperialist states to acquire and retain colonies and semi-colonies.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]They did not argue that communists in the colonies and semi-colonies should be defeatist in relation to these countries’ wars for independence/against the imperialists. On the contrary, in this context the third and fourth congresses of Comintern urged the policy of the anti-imperialist front. I argued in my 2004 series on imperialism that the course of events since 1921 has proved that the policy of the ‘anti-imperialist front’ is not a road to workers’ power and socialism.66 That does not alter the point here that the dual-defeatist policy is specifically designed for particular political conditions, those of inter-imperialist war. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Pretty clearly, it is, in fact, more specific than Lenin realised; but it also contains underlying elements of general strategic principle, which need to be teased out of the specificity.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Draper makes the point that when Lenin returned to Russia he found that it was necessary to address mass defencism among workers and soldiers, and the defeat slogan disappeared as a slogan from Lenin’s writings after April 1917. What is missing in Draper’s account is that Bolshevik anti-war agitation and organisation among the soldiers did not disappear after April. But the disappearance of the defeat slogan, and the mass defencism, were real. Mass defencism reflected the fact that as the war had evolved, it had become mainly a war fought on Russian soil, which Russia was losing. The masses could see perfectly well that the liberty they had won in February would not survive German occupation.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The same issue was posed a great deal more sharply in 1939-45. World War II was indeed a second inter-imperialist war for the redivision of the world. But overlaid on this war was a class war against the proletariat and its organisations, begun with Hitler’s 1933 coup, continued with German intervention in the Spanish civil war and with the defeatism of much of the French bourgeoisie and officer class in 1940, Quisling in Norway, and so on.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] The result was that the defeatist position adopted in 1938 by the founding congress of the Trotskyist Fourth International lacked political purchase. Mass support, to the extent that it moved to the left against the bourgeois governments, moved to the communists who - after 1941 - unequivocally favoured the defeat of the Axis. It did not move in the direction of the defeatist, or at best equivocal, Trotskyists. The Trotskyists were split by the war - at least in Britain, France, and China, and probably elsewhere - between defeatists and advocates of the ‘proletarian military policy’, who argued that the working class needed to take over the conduct of the war in order to defend its own interests.67[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] In fact, if we look back on 1914-18 itself, it should be apparent from what I said in discussing the outbreak of the war (above) that it was the specific military-political conditions of 1914-18 which allowed Lenin’s thesis to obtain the sort of political purchase it did. If the war had been fought on German soil, as Engels anticipated in 1891, a German revolutionary-defencist policy would have been vindicated. If it had been a short war, the issue would have been brushed aside. It was the enormity of 1914-18, and in particular the stalemated fronts, which powered both the defeatist thesis and willingness to split the International.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] In other words, the judgment that defeatism is the right approach to inter-imperialist wars is a concrete judgment about the particular war. But there are strategic principles which lie behind it.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Terminal phase [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Half the justification for defeatism was Lenin’s belief that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism and hence that 1914-18 showed that revolution was immediately on the agenda. This would mean that the strategy of patience was wholly superseded. This idea was expressed in several documents of the first three congresses of the Comintern, which assert that the major capitalist countries are on the verge of civil war.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]This judgment of the international situation is, in fact, the hidden secret of the defeatist line for the world inter-imperialist war. In such a war, it is an almost impracticable line for the workers’ party of any single belligerent country. But if the workers’ parties of all the belligerent countries agitate and organise against the war in the ranks of the armed forces, the possibility exists of fraternisation between the ranks of the contending armies, leading to the soldiers turning their arms first on their officers and then on their political-economic masters. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]This is the meaning of Lenin’s argument in his polemic against Trotsky that it is essential to his policy “that co-ordination and mutual aid are possible between revolutionary movements in all the belligerent countries”.68 Such a line assumes that the mass workers’ International exists and that its national sections can be made to follow a common defeatist line.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The idea that the class struggle was moving internationally into civil war not only supported the position of ‘turning the imperialist war into the civil war’. It also underpinned Lenin’s and his Russian co-thinkers’ willingness to gamble on the seizure of power by a workers’ party in a peasant-majority country. It justified the extremely sharp split line in relation to the right and centre tendencies in the international socialist movement. And it supported the explicit conception of a more or less militarised workers’ party adopted in 1920-21.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]I argued in my 2004 series on imperialism that this idea mistook the crisis of British world hegemony for a terminal-phase crisis of capitalism. The Comintern was, in fact, already retreating from its full implications by mid-1921. But the Comintern leaders clung to it - and Trotsky clung to it to his death. They did so because, for the Russian leaders, it was their only hope of salvation. If the revolution in western Europe, or that of the ‘peoples of the east’ against colonialism, did not come to their aid, they had betrayed the hope of the socialist revolution as thoroughly as the right wing of the socialists by their actions in 1918-21. (Cheka, suppression of political opposition, suspension of soviet elections, strike-breaking, Kronstadt and their theorisation of one-party rule of the militarised party as a necessary aspect of the dictatorship of the proletariat).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]To say this, however, is still not to imply that the defeatist strategic line was wrong. It was (at least partially) right because it made a true judgment about the state.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]State, war and revolution[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]It is not the capitalist class which is the central obstacle to the emancipation of the working class, but the capitalist state and international state system.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]We have already seen this point in chapter one (Marx and Engels’ critiques of Gotha emphasised the Lassalleans’ illusions in the German empire), chapter two (the policy of government coalitions requires the socialists to manage the state as a competing firm in the world market, and therefore to attack the working class; the mass strike or revolutionary crisis immediately poses the question of government and the form of authority) and chapter three (the Kautskyian centre downgraded the question of state form and ended by bringing state-bureaucratism and nationalism into the workers’ movement).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]A state is, at the end of the day, an organised armed force. The states of particular classes are tied to those classes by the forms in which they are organised. For the working class to take power, therefore, the existing capitalist (or pre-capitalist) state has to be ‘smashed up’. And at the end of the day, this means that the coherence of the existing armed forces has to be destroyed.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Lenin’s judgment, expressed in defeatism, was that the war, because it was unjust and predatory, and because it showed imperialist capitalism coming up against its historical limits, offered the workers’ party both the need and the possibility to destroy the coherence of the existing armed forces through anti-war agitation - and thereby to take power.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The need was there because the war in itself involved the mass blood-sacrifice of workers. It was also there because any war in which serious forces are engaged and in which the international standing of the belligerent state is at issue reshapes politics around itself. The class struggle therefore necessarily takes the form of the struggle against the war (this is not true of all wars: colonial counterinsurgency operations, etc, reshape the politics of the colonial country but do not necessarily reshape those of the imperialist country).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The possibility was there because the war was unjust and predatory in character, and therefore tended to lose political legitimacy as it went on.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Underlying the defeatist line, then, is a strategic understanding that in order to take power the working class needs to overthrow the ruling class’s state: that is, to break up the coherence of this state as an organisation of armed force. This strategic understanding is in no sense dependent on the “actuality of the revolution” (Lukács).[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Preparing for defeatism[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The war immediately posed the question of state power and the coherence of the armed forces, as (in a different way) an internally driven revolutionary crisis or mass strike wave does. But the advocates of the ‘strategy of patience’ could have prepared the workers’ movement and the society as a whole for the fact that this question would in future be posed. They chose not to.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]In his 1891 critique of the Erfurt programme, Engels wrote that “If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.”69[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]A democratic republican military policy implies fighting for universal military training, a popular militia and the right to keep and bear arms. It also implies that within any standing military force which may be necessary, the ranks should have freedom of political speech and the right to organise in political parties and trade unions.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]It further implies taking seriously the expression ‘defence’ which appears in ideological form in the ‘ministry of defence’. This means consistent opposition in principle to colonial wars and overseas interventions, including ‘peacekeeping’ activities, which are invariably founded on lies and serve concealed imperialist interests.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]If we take every opportunity to spread the ideas of a democratic republican military policy, by doing so we arm the working class movement for the conditions in which defeatism becomes a real necessity. To the extent that we win individual reforms in this direction, we will in practice undermine the ability of the armed forces to be used in defence of the capitalist class, both against the colonies and semicolonies, and also against a proletarian majority.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]These ideas are neither an innovation from Marxist principles, nor a ‘republican shibboleth’. They are a version of the policy Engels urged on the SPD in 1892-9 in his series of articles Can Europe disarm?70 Their absence from the political arsenal of the British left is the product of a timid pacifism which is covered by super-revolutionary phrases about rejecting ‘reforming the bourgeois state.’[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Defeatism and the Trotskyists[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The Trotskyists have made of defeatism something different: not a practical strategic choice for the working class’s struggle for power, but a purity test. Every war becomes, like 1914-18, a test of the revolutionary moral fibre of organisations; positions considered false on international conflicts are ‘proof’ of succumbing to the pressure of the bourgeoisie.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]It has to be said that this Trotskyist use of war policy as a purity test does originate in the Comintern and Lenin’s policy of defeatism. But it originates not in defeatism itself, but in a combination of revolutionary-defencism with the arguments in 1914-18 and immediately after for the split from the right and centre (to be discussed in the next chapter).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Trotsky argued that the workers’ movement should favour the victory of the Ethiopians led by the emperor Haile Selassie.71 In the Japanese invasion of China, Trotsky argued in 1937 for the Chinese workers’ organisations to pursue a defencist policy: “the duty of all the workers’ organisations of China was to participate actively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan ....”72 In 1938 Trotsky argued that in the (highly unlikely) event of a military conflict between Britain and the Vargas dictatorship in Brazil, the working class should “be on the side of ‘fascist’ Brazil against “democratic” Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If Britain should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship.”73[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] The defencist argument, it should be clear from both the Chinese case and the hypothesis of a Britain-Brazil war, is an argument about the road of the working class to power in a colonial or semi-colonial country under attack from an imperialist power. It is a variant of the line of the ‘anti-imperialist front’. I have argued against this line in my 2004 series on imperialism.74 [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] The false character of Trotsky’s 1937 line for China is a particularly clear instance. The Kuomintang regime was a government in form, which in practice presided over warlordism: it was not an effective coherent state. In this context, in order to defeat the Japanese invasion, what was needed was to create a state, alternative to the KMT pseudo-state: the policy followed by the Maoists, who fought on two fronts both against the Japanese and against the KMT, and as a result in 1948 were able to take power. To “participate actively and in the front lines” of the war, as Trotsky argued, would not open the road to the masses but merely identify the communists (in this case, the Trotskyists) with the failing KMT regime. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] In some cases it is clear that revolutionary defencism would be the appropriate stance of communists in the colonial country. In others - like in China in the 1930s and Iraq today - the right approach of communists would be to create a ‘third military camp’. In yet others - like the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands/ Malvinas in 1982 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 - the right response is a kind of revolutionary defeatism, ie, to denounce the irresponsible adventurism of the invasion.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] In his 1940 proposals of the “proletarian military policy” in the wake of the fall of France, Trotsky was to return to revolutionarydefencism: “the capitalists and their state will sell you out to the Nazis, you need to arm yourselves” (and, by implication, soldiers need to take action against defeatist officers, and so on).75 This is in substance the same as Engels’ ‘defencist’ line of 1891. But this was not Trotsky’s line for the colonial countries in the passages quoted above. On the contrary, these passages show a merely moralising defencism which demanded that the working class ‘supported’ the weaker side. This is perhaps understandable in the Ethiopian case, given the marginality of the proletariat in Ethiopia in 1935. For China it was Stalin’s line, which Mao and his cothinkers refused to follow. It would have been complete nonsense in the unlikely event of a British attack on Brazil. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] Leaving these defects aside, a critical point is that defencism in the colonial countries is a policy for communists in the colonial countries. Before 1935 Ethiopia was a semi-colony in the British sphere of influence. Ethiopian-defencism by communists in Britain would therefore have amounted merely to demanding a more aggressive defence of British imperial interests against Italy - just as Serbian-defencism in 1914 amounted to defence of British and French imperial interests. Brazilian-defencism by communists in the United States in the highly implausible circumstance of a British attack on Brazil in 1938 would similarly have amounted to defence of US imperial interests. ‘Iraqi-defencism’ in Germany and France in 2002-03 would similarly amount to defence of German and French commercial interests in their companies’ contracts with the Ba’athist regime. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] Defeatism in the imperial countries, on the other hand, no more needs to imply defencism of the other side than, for example, defeatism for Russian workers in 1914-18 meant victory to the Kaiser (for the reasons given above). Communists in the imperialist country or countries involved should be defeatist, that is, fight against the war, including by agitation as far as possible in the armed forces: that is, in the same way that Lenin urged defeatism in relation to the 1914-18 war. In relation to what should happen on the ‘other side’, their primary approach should be one of solidarity with the workers’ movement and communists in the ‘target’ country.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] Trotsky’s moralising version of colonial-country defencism was then overlaid by ‘purifying split’ arguments, in Trotsky’s last political legacy to the Trotskyists. This was the 1939-40 split in the US Socialist Workers’ Party on the question whether socialists should favour the victory of the USSR in its invasions of Finland, Poland and the Baltic states in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact.76 In his polemics in the lead-up to this split, Trotsky combined substantive arguments for Soviet-defencism (siding with the USSR in war whatever the merits of the Soviet regime’s particular actions) with arguments for a ‘purifying’ split of the type used by Lenin and Zinoviev in 1914-16 and in the Comintern leadership’s arguments for a split with the Kautskyites. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] Now, if it were true - as Trotsky claimed - that the USSR was a kind of workers’ organisation, a ‘trade union that had seized power’, and a strategic gain for the working class in spite of the bad leadership of the Stalinists, then defencism would be broadly justified and it would be equally justified to call its opponents scabs. Soviet-defencism would also clearly be a task of the working class in every country, whether imperialist or colonial and whether at war with the USSR or not.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] Even so it would not be completely justified. For example, I do not think that any Trotskyist group supported the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council general strike against the Sunningdale agreement. Nor, on a smaller scale, have Marxist socialists ever given support to strikes which demand the exclusion of ethnic or religious minorities from the workplace (which have occasionally happened). In the case of capitalist attacks on the USSR, like the intervention in 1918-21 or like 1941, Soviet-defencism would be plainly justified. Where the Stalinist regime used military force against a workers’ revolutionary movement, as in NKVD operations in Spain, Soviet-defencism would be obviously wrong. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] The Soviet invasions of Finland, Poland and the Baltic states did not fall obviously into either case, so it would be necessary to ask whether in the concrete Soviet victory would strengthen or weaken the position of the working class as a global class. The Soviet invasions of Finland, Poland and the Baltic states, in alliance with the Nazi regime, would probably not qualify. It is perfectly clear that the Hitler-Stalin Pact enabled the imposition of fascism (through German conquest) in western continental Europe and the Balkans: a large price for the international workers’ movement to be expected to pay for a small glacis west of the USSR (and one which proved in 1941 to be illusory). The nearest analogy in trade union affairs would be an event of a type which has from time to time happened: one craft union makes a deal with the employer which includes de-recognition of other unions and thus allows one section of the workforce to make gains at the expense of other sections. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] In reality (as I argued in the introduction) Trotsky’s assessment was wrong: given that there was no prospect of the working class taking power back from the bureaucracy, the Stalinist Soviet regime could not be considered as a strategic gain for the working class, or in the same light as a trade union. Other things apart,77 this assessment would imply that the USSR under Stalin should be approached as a nationalist-bonapartist regime based on the petty proprietors, ie like the Brazilian Vargas regime or, in modern times, the Iraqi Ba’athist regime, but with rhetoric much further left. This would imply a revolutionary-defencist policy in some circumstances (like the 1941 German invasion). It would not imply such a policy in the case of an agreement with a neighbouring imperialist power (Germany) to carve up the small states in the locality (Finland, Poland and the Baltic states). [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] Trotsky’s position in 1939-40 was thus substantially wrong irrespective of the arguments about the class character of the Soviet state. On top of this error came the argument that the opposition represented a ‘petty-bourgeois opposition’ and one which was caving in to the pressure of US imperialism. The result was a hard organisational split aimed to ‘purify’ the SWP of this ‘petty-bourgeois influence’ and accompanied by a conference resolution giving formal purging powers to the SWP party apparatus. But the brevity of the faction-fight meant that the split took place on the basis of extremely muddled positions. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] As we will see in the next chapter, ‘purifying’ splits do not achieve their object (to protect the pure revolutionaries from contamination). The 1940 split in the SWP and Fourth International is a textbook example. After the fall of France, Trotsky radically diluted his ‘principle’ of dual-defeatism in the inter-imperialist war in favour of the ‘proletarian military policy’. By 1948 the ‘orthodox’ majoritywere demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Europe, the exact opposite of Trotsky’s line in 1939.78 [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] The muddle of 1937-40 has become a part of Trotskyist orthodoxy. That is, Trotskyists in the imperialist countries must be ‘defeatist’ in colonial wars in the peculiar sense of being ‘defencist’ in relation to the colonial country or movement. Trotskyists in the colonial countries must be ‘defencist’ in the same sense. To do otherwise is said to be to be ‘pro-imperialist’ or ‘social-chauvinist’, thus justifying a hard split to purify the party. The ‘left’ Trotskyist groups, especially those influenced by the US Spartacist League, have been most systematic in pursuing this policy. But it has remained part of the polemical arsenal of the ‘softer’ Trotskyist groups whenever differences arise on war questions. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] The Spartacist League and sub-Sparts might be said to have reduced this idea to absurdity when they argued that Afghan communists should join with the Taliban (who would immediately shoot them) to fight US imperialism: a policy of ‘revolutionary suicide’ which might have been borrowed from Monty Python’s ‘Judean People’s Front crack suicide squad’. [/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] But the absurdity crown must surely belong to the British SWP comrades, who claim their revolutionary credentials by calling for “victory to the Iraqi resistance”. This same SWP has for the last 20 years resolutely opposed in the name of ‘broad unity’ any political agitation either for a democratic republican military policy, or for organised workers’ self-defence. Today its ‘revolutionary defeatist’, supposedly anti-imperialist, alliance with political islam involves sacrificing fundamentals of democratic, let alone socialist, policy.[/FONT]
  2. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    How succesful is this defencist tactic? I remember Engels who wrote:
    We both see the danger of war, and the hunger crisis in Russia, which you have underestimated, can make the rulers lose their support (der Zügel entgleiten), and for this case we must be prepared. [...] The people (die Leute) [the French] need to understand that a war against Germany through a coalition with Russia is also for most a war against the strongest and most combative (schlagfertigste) socialist party in Europe, and that there is nothing left for us but to strike back (loszuschlagen ist) against every attacker who's helping Russia. Either we will be subjected (Denn entweder unterliegen wir), and then the socialist movement will be destroyed for 20 years; or we ourselves take power (wir kommen selbst ans Ruder), and then it counts for the French as well as for the Marseillaise: "Quoi, ces cohortes étrangères feraient la loi dans nos foyers?" [what! Foreign cohorts would rule our homes?] In any case, the current [political] system in Germany wont survive the war; in addition its defence needs enormous means (gewaltige Anstrengungen), revolutionary means.
    W. Blumenberg, August Bebel: Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Engels, Amsterdam, IISG, 1965, p. 439 [l. 164]

    Does this presuppose a revolutionary situation?
  3. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    I also recall my remarks which further fanned the flames in the CC:

    http://www.revleft.com/vb/revolution...090/index.html
    http://www.revleft.com/vb/republican...465/index.html

    Comrade Paul Cockshott will most likely have a better appreciation of the second link as it tries to explain things by using the coordinate system (approximated by a mathematical table).

    To apply things to an ever-complicated real-life context, though: if China (clearly now an imperialist power) tries to take Taiwan and the US responds militarily (akin to Austria-Hungary of old declaring war on Serbia and forcing Germany's and the Triple Entente's hands by treaty - WWI), does "revolutionary defeatism" apply even if there is no revolutionary period? Or is there actually a case for siding with China, since there is a more militant labour movement there (in spite of tough party control)?

    [Per the second link, the coordinates are (1,1) for the US and (3,2) for China.]
  4. Paul Cockshott
    Paul Cockshott
    How succesful is this defencist tactic? I remember Engels who wrote:
    W. Blumenberg, August Bebel: Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Engels, Amsterdam, IISG, 1965, p. 439 [l. 164]

    Does this presuppose a revolutionary situation?
    Engels was being unrealistic here. The German general staff had already settled on a policy of offensive in the event of war (The war plans of the great powers, 1880-1914
    PM Kennedy - 1985 - Unwin Hyman) so Engels was laying the foundation for the policy of social patriotism eventually followed by the SPD. Had war occured 10 years earlier, the outcome would not have been much different - unless British neutrality at that point allowed a swift German victory. But that would not have weakened the imperialist German state, but would have strenghtened it.
  5. Paul Cockshott
    Paul Cockshott

    To apply things to an ever-complicated real-life context, though: if China (clearly now an imperialist power) tried to take Taiwan and the US responds militarily (akin to Austria-Hungary of old declaring war on Serbia and forcing Germany's and the Triple Entente's hands by treaty - WWI), does "revolutionary defeatism" apply even if there is no revolutionary period? Is there actually a case for siding with China, since there is a more militant labour movement there (in spite of tough party control)?

    [Per the second link, the coordinates are (1,1) for the US and (3,2) for China.]
    Support the Chinese. Claim to Taiwan legitimate, not imperialist agression.
    Even failing this Chinese victory would be progressive, just as Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 or Britain in 1942 was.
  6. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Thanks!

    I suppose this chapter was the least interesting of the book's chapters, then?
  7. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The Trotskyists have made of defeatism something different: not a practical strategic choice for the working class’s struggle for power, but a purity test. Every war becomes, like 1914-18, a test of the revolutionary moral fibre of organisations; positions considered false on international conflicts are ‘proof’ of succumbing to the pressure of the bourgeoisie.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]It has to be said that this Trotskyist use of war policy as a purity test does originate in the Comintern and Lenin’s policy of defeatism. But it originates not in defeatism itself, but in a combination of revolutionary-defencism with the arguments in 1914-18 and immediately after for the split from the right and centre (to be discussed in the next chapter).[/FONT]
    In this case "Trotskyism" doesn't exist. Even Macnair admits that there are many "Trotskyists" positions on war. What's "a purity test"? This concept depend on the relationship between various competing parties, not theory.
  8. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    So recently I was able to read some pages of the 'Vooruit', official paper of the Workers' party of Ghent (1893). And there was a small article explaining the reason why on the international Zürich congress the resolution demanding a general strike to end a possible European war was defeated. Apparantly the socialists were against such a strike because it would only help reactionary Russia defeat Germany - as the working class in Russia wasn't an organized power strong enough to boycot Russian war plans.
  9. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    In this case "Trotskyism" doesn't exist. Even Macnair admits that there are many "Trotskyists" positions on war. What's "a purity test"? This concept depend on the relationship between various competing parties, not theory.
    "Purity test" means that someone taking the "wrong" position within a sect would be expelled. It's not just between "holier than thou" competing sects. Just look at the "star chamber" soap opera in the Alliance for Workers Liberty around Sean Matgamna's "scummy, scabby article" (Macnair in his RS video).

    Look at me and my spat with Yehuda and especially KC: if I even mentioned revolutionary defencism in some Trotskyist organization, I'd be expelled.

    As for the Zurich congress resolution, I only wish they revisited the question in 1905. The Russian military was so incompetent on so many counts.
  10. Paul Cockshott
    Paul Cockshott

    As for the Zurich congress resolution, I only wish they revisited the question in 1905. The Russian military was so incompetent on so many counts.

    ?? What do you mean
  11. Paul Cockshott
    Paul Cockshott
    I am having difficulty persuading some people on the thread about the Naxalites that the question of war and revolution are closely linked. How anyone can imagine a 1917 type of revolution without a war beats me.
  12. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    Yes. You can't really imagine the success of Lenin's strategical choices without the failure of war; and it's hard to imagine the success of the transitional method without the consequences of that war: the fact that social democracy was unable to provide for the immediate needs of most of the working class, while on the other hand social democracy was desperate to save capitalism from its downfall (prol. revolution).
  13. Paul Cockshott
    Paul Cockshott
    Why do you say social democracy was desperate to save capitalism?
    Surely you mean something else. I can think of no interpretation of the RSDLP's actions that makes this plausible.
  14. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    Surely you mean something else.
    I meant European social democracy (SPD, BWP, ISP, ..)
  15. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    ?? What do you mean
    Per Rakunin's post above, there should have been a continent-wide general strike to either avert European war or defeat it, in accordance with the Basel Manifesto (even when taking into account Lars Lih's warning about the "centrist" wording of that manifesto). The Russian military was in no position for making land grabs, with its incompetent personnel, tactics, and especially logistics.