War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism
332
War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism
332eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822381563 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/12/1989 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 332 |
| Lexile: | 1620L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 701 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
War on War
Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism
By R. Craig Nation
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1989 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8156-3
CHAPTER 1
Marxism, War, and the International
Les rois nous soûlaient de fumées,
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans.
Appliquons la grève aux armées,
Crosse en I'air et rompons les rangs!
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales,
A faire de nous des héros,
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux!
(The kings intoxicate us with
gunsmoke,
Peace amongst ourselves, war on
tyrants.
Let us strike against the armies,
Fire in the air and break ranks!
If they insist, these cannibals,
In making us into heros,
They'll soon learn that our bullets
Are for our own generals!)
—Eugène Pottiers, L'lnternationale
On the eve of the First World War the European social democratic labor movement could look back with satisfaction over decades of unprecedented growth. As the political voice of organized labor, European social democracy possessed a substantial popular base, and in several of the more advanced European states socialist parties had become leading contenders for governmental responsibility. No less impressive was the movement's collective strength, embodied by the Socialist International. Since the week of 14–20 July 1889, when a motley collection of radicals met in the Salle Grenelle in Paris on the centennial of the storming of the Bastille and federated in a "New International," social democrats had demonstrated their capacity to organize internationally and pose a challenge to the dominant bourgeois order that transcended national boundaries. Despite their diversity, the International's partisans could intone with one voice the concluding refrain of their battle hymn: L'Internationale sera le genre humain! (The International shall be the human race!)
International socialism achieved institutional form in 1864, when Karl Marx himself helped to create the International Workingman's Association, a federation of labor organizations intended to give substance to the contention that socialism spoke to the common aspirations of an international working class. Thereafter, the International became absolutely fundamental to the movement's identity. The "First International" collapsed in 1876 due to rivalry within its ranks between Marx's adherents and those of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, but the precedent that it had established was soon revived. At the Paris congress in 1889 the "Second International" declared itself the successor to Marx's organization and confirmed an allegiance to its internationalist precepts. In his keynote address Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue emphasized that the delegates were not assembled beneath national flags, but rather "the red flag of the international proletariat," as "brothers with a single common enemy ... private capital, whether it be Prussian, French, or Chinese." Prior to 1914 the International never strayed from this profession of faith. Socialism would triumph as an international movement, it was widely presumed, or it would not triumph at all.
Despite its pretentions to universality, the International was hindered by a lack of effective central authority. Its first congresses in Paris, Brussels (1891), and Zürich (1893) were little more than rhetorical exercises. Not until 1896 was a first step toward a tighter bureaucratic regime taken by formulating conditions for membership that banned anarchists. A more decisive step came at the Paris congress of 1900, with the creation of an International Socialist Bureau (ISB) as a permanent executive organ. Based in Brussels, the ISB was mandated to manage the movement's affairs in the intervals between general congresses. Ultimately, its authority derived from the parties affiliated to it in what was essentially a voluntary confederation. Although these arrangements gave the International a reasonably well defined institutional identity, the ISB's prerogatives remained limited. Its effectiveness rested entirely upon the ability of affiliates to achieve and maintain a viable consensus.
As the International grew in size, consensus became ever more elusive. At the 1907 Stuttgart congress, over eight hundred delegates representing twenty-five nations were present. Participation on such a scale, with the inevitable problems of intercultural communication that it entailed, seriously inhibited dialogue. In an evaluation of the congress Karl Kautsky of the Social Democratic party of Germany (SPD) argued that in the future congresses should restrict themselves to "drawing up resolutions," with the task of arguing out a general line for the movement assigned to the party press. Such a solution was acceptable so long as an underlying coincidence of priorities could be presumed, but it left the problem of enforcing controversial decisions unresolved. The dilemma was aggravated by the movement's dogged commitment to the principle of federalism. Opposition to any concentration of authority in the hands of the ISB was typical for most national sections, which as a rule jealously guarded their autonomy. Consequently, the International's ability to act independently was quite limited. Periodic general congresses provided colorful demonstrations of solidarity, and the ISB allowed for a modicum of coordination. But the International was not in a position to discipline its affiliates nor to take initiatives without resorting to a clumsy mechanism of consultations.
Lacking strong institutional bonds, the International's importance came to rest primarily upon its status as a living symbol of socialist internationalism. Yet even here no consensus was manifest. Internationalism was the most ambitious, but also the most abstract, of all social democratic causes, constantly invoked but seldom probingly examined. A resolution proposed by the British Independent Labour party (ILP) to the International's 1910 Copenhagen congress gave the slogan some positive content by raising the call for a European federation, but this was a minimal demand that did not come close to satisfying more visionary aspirations. For European social democrats in the age of the Second International, internationalism remained a highly romanticized notion, an important source of emotional reinforcement and legitimization, but difficult to relate to the daily struggle for political influence.
So long as the problem remained in the realm of theory, a degree of ambiguity could be tolerated. After the turn of the century, however, an increasingly unstable international situation made it imperative to define internationalism's practical as well as theoretical implications. Between 1900 and 1914 the International engaged in a wide-ranging debate concerning international policy and antiwar strategy. The debate could never be definitively resolved, and as a result the movement confronted the "July Crisis" of 1914, which heralded the outbreak of World War One, without clear guidelines for collective action. When the war arrived, rather than rallying around a common program, the leading social democratic parties opted independently to support their respective governments. In his diary entry for 3–4 August 1914, the French writer Romain Rolland spoke for all those who had placed their trust in the International by describing its effacement as "the greatest catastrophe in history ... the ruin of our most sacred hopes for human fraternity"
How could so shocking an abandonment of commitments have occurred? The most obvious explanation focuses upon the International's structural weaknesses. At the moment of truth it revealed itself to be little more than a weak federation of autonomous parties that perceived their tasks and terrain essentially in national terms. The lack of central direction could nonetheless have been overcome had the organization as a whole rested upon a more solid consensus concerning ends and means. Marx's theoretical legacy provided a point of departure for all social democrats, but it was a disputed legacy which did not lead to evident conclusions. The social democratic debacle of August 1914 in large measure reflected a failure to come to terms with the movement's real political goals and to rally around an alternative vision of world order corresponding to its highest ideals and aspirations. Much of the debate carried on within the socialist community during the long years of war that followed would be concerned with an attempt to set the failure right.
"The Workers Have No Fatherland"
European socialist thought prior to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment contained a powerful strain of universalist ethical pacifism, perhaps most eloquently expounded in the English language by the seventeenth-century "Digger" Gerrard Winstanley. For Winstanley the roots of war lay in the institution of private property, the artificial division of the earth, God's "common treasury," into tracts capable of serving as objects of power in the quest for worldly dominion. The "buying and selling" engendered by private ownership of the land "did bring in, and still doth bring in, discontents and wars, which have plagued mankind sufficiently for so doing. And the nations of the world will never learn to beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, and leave off warring, until this cheating devise of buying and selling be cast out among the rubbish of kingly power." Though his vision was millenarian, Winstanley acknowledged the futility of Utopian expectations in an imperfect world. His outline of an ideal commonwealth recognized the legitimacy of defensive war, "to withstand the invasion ... of a foreign enemy," and of revolutionary civil war, "to restore the land again and set it free." Winstanley's contention that war was the product of social injustice, his attempt to define alternative institutions capable of reducing the extent of conflicts, and his Utopian quest for community presaged many of the preoccupations of modern socialism concerning the problems of war and peace.
The immediate sources for the nineteenth-century socialist tradition were the secular thought of the Enlightenment and the inspiration of the French revolution, with their contradictory mélange of cosmopolitanism, patriotism, and militarism. The "Conspiracy of the Equals" led by François Noël Babeuf in 1795, often counted as the first "proto-socialist" movement of the contemporary era, claimed a primary allegiance to "the grand society of humanity," and insisted that "as peace represents the first of all blessings after that of liberty, it is neither desirable nor just to take recourse to arms except when liberty is menaced." Simultaneously, it announced that "the defense of the Motherland against an ever-possible aggression from abroad is an essential part of the wisdom of the law" and defined rigorous measures to ensure national defense. Pre-Marxian socialist thought was dominated by French theorists and impregnated with the mythos of Valmy and la patrie. Whether expressed in the cosmopolitan Europeanism of Henri de Saint-Simon, the idiosyncratic blend of insurrectionary antimilitarism and Jacobin patriotism of Auguste Blanqui, or the nationalistic bellicism of Victor Considerent, it never succeeded in resolving the contradictory appeals of revolutionary nationalism and internationalism nor the dilemma of distinguishing between just and unjust wars. Like Winstanley before them, the "Utopian" socialists were inspired by a vision of community where the sources of war had disappeared, but shared a pragmatic assessment of the need for organized coercive force to defend and preserve existing political institutions.
Marx's apparent ability to reconcile internationalism with the real-life demands of political action was a significant source of his appeal. Already in The Communist Manifesto of 1848, answering the charge that communists sought "to abolish countries and nationality," Marx and Engels argued in a famous passage that acceptance of the nation-state as an arena for struggle did not conflict with the goals of socialist internationalism, but rather reinforced them. "The workers have no Fatherland" they proclaimed. "One cannot take from them what they do not possess. In that the proletariat must first achieve political hegemony, must lift itself to the level of a national class, must constitute itself as the nation, it is itself still national in character, though not in the bourgeois sense of the term." These brief remarks were something less than transparent. Marx and Engels repeatedly made the point that the state in class society was not a defender of the "common weal" (as in liberal or social contract theory), but the expression of specific forms of class rule. The modern nation-state was an agent of bourgeois class hegemony, the "executive committee" of the propertied. It remained true nonetheless that it was within the confines of the nation-state that the proletarian labor movement would grow to maturity The working class must "constitute itself as the nation" as a first step toward emancipation: "The struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is at first, in form though not in content, national in character. The proletariat must first settle accounts with its own bourgeoisie." The premises of internationalism would be realized as a function of the gradual elimination of class division and social injustice. In the meantime the nation-state was neither an impartial arbiter nor the mystical distillation of Blut und Boden (blood and soil), but a relatively autonomous political institution that the proletariat must win over and use for its own ends.
The ambivalence of these formulations was also present in discussions of the problem of war and militarism. For Marx and Engels the coercive authority of the state, and its ability to resort to disciplined military force, were essential to its role as the guarantor of class privilege. "Dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and filth," Marx wrote in the first volume of Capital, capital accumulation proceeded historically on a foundation of violent usurpations, culminating in "the commercial wars of the European nations, with the globe for a theater." Coercive, competitive, and anarchic, the international system of developed capitalism represented an inexhaustible font of violent conflict. War was nonetheless not considered fatalistically inevitable; in any given set of circumstances a resort to arms could be avoided by conscious political action. Marx urged revolutionary socialists to "master themselves the mysteries of international politics," to seek to counteract diplomatic folly by purposeful protest actions, and to develop an alternative image of international society inspired by "the simple laws of morality and justice."
Marx's optimism rested upon what he identified as underlying trends working to erode the foundations of the capitalist world order and prepare the way for socialism. In the process of overcoming feudal fragmentation capitalism had forged the centralized nation-state "as a weapon of the rising social order in its struggle for emancipation." Industrial capitalism, with its insatiable appetite for markets and raw materials, was now bursting the bonds of the nation-state itself. The growth of the capitalist world market challenged the premises of nationalism by diluting national peculiarities and creating a "universal interdependence of nations." It likewise gave rise to the proletariat as a social class defined within an international division of labor, a process which "alike in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped the proletariat of any and all national character." Proletarian internationalism would be the very essence of the new international society toward which the socialist movement aspired, and the effort to realize the unity of the working class was therefore of fundamental importance. To the extent that workers continued to define their social identity in terms of national allegiance, they were victims of false consciousness. Nationalism, like religious affiliation, was an opiate of the peoples.
The nation-state had all the same not yet exhausted its potential. In his polemics with Bakunin Marx poured scorn upon the anarchists' demand for the unconditional "abolition of the state" precisely because they ignored its historically conditioned character. What was in question for the anarchists, Marx charged, was "not the overthrow of the Bonapartist, Prussian, or Russian state, but the abstract state, a state that exists nowhere." The socialist revolution would not abolish the state "as such," but replace the mechanisms of the bourgeois state with institutions reflecting the class hegemony of the proletariat, a wrenching transformation that Marx described unrepentently as "necessarily an authoritarian act." Only after a relatively lengthy transition phase, during which proletarian hegemony would be extended over the leading sectors of the world economy, would a rational organization of production and distribution on a global scale become possible, and only then would the abolition of the state in the anarchist sense begin. Engels summarized the process during 1880 in his classic Socialism: Utopian and Scientific with a phrase that has become a kind of synopsis of the Marxist image of internationalism: "In proportion as the anarchy of social production vanishes, the political authority of the state withers away. Humanity, at last master of its own form of social organization, becomes at the same time master over nature and its own master—that is, free."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from War on War by R. Craig Nation. Copyright © 1989 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1 Marxism, War, and the International
2 Against the Current
3 The Zimmerwald Movement
4 The Zimmerwald Left
5 Zimmerwald Left and Zimmerwald Center
6 Petrograd and Stockholm
7 The Origins of Communist Internationalism
Postscript. Communism and Social Democracy: The Enduring Challenge
Notes
Bibliography
Index