The Militant - November 19, 2001 -- Bolshevik leaders on connection between wars and class struggle

Vol.65/No.44 November 19, 2001

Bolshevik leaders on connection between wars and class struggle

Below is an excerpt from Socialism and War, a pamphlet which summed up the position on World War I of the Bolshevik Party in Russia. It was published in German for circulation to the delegates at the September 1915 International Socialist Conference at Zimmerwald, Switzerland. The article can be found in Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, copyright © 1984 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

BY V.I. LENIN AND GREGORY ZINOVIEV
Socialists have always condemned wars between nations as barbarous and brutal. Our attitude towards war, however, is fundamentally different from that of the bourgeois pacifists (supporters and advocates of peace) and of the anarchists. We differ from the former in that we understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within a country; we understand that wars cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and socialism is created; we also differ in that we regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by an oppressed class against the oppressor class, by slaves against slaveholders, by serfs against landowners, and by wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as fully legitimate, progressive and necessary.

We Marxists differ from both pacifists and anarchists in that we deem it necessary to study each war historically (from the standpoint of Marx's dialectical materialism) and separately. There have been in the past numerous wars which, despite all the horrors, atrocities, distress and suffering that inevitably accompany all wars, were progressive, i.e., benefited the development of mankind by helping to destroy most harmful and reactionary institutions (e.g., an autocracy or serfdom) and the most barbarous despotisms in Europe (the Turkish and the Russian)....

For example, if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia, and so on, these would be "just,' and "defensive" wars, irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slaveholding and predatory "Great" Powers. But imagine a slave-holder who owns 100 slaves warring against another who owns 200 slaves, for a more "just" redistribution of slaves. The use of the term of a "defensive" war, or a war "for the defence of the fatherland," would clearly be historically false in such a case and would in practice be sheer deception of the common people, philistines, and the ignorant, by the astute slave-holders. It is in this way that the peoples are being deceived with "national" ideology and the term of "defence of the fatherland," by the present-day imperialist bourgeoisie, in the war now being waged between slaveholders with the purpose of consolidating slavery.

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