With the launch of war against Iraq , activists around the world have been trying to come to grips with reasons behind the United States and Britain ‘s aggression against a country debilitated by a decade of sanctions. This search for real reasons behind the attack on Iraq is not academic. Activists have been looking for the most effective ways of campaigning against the war. Understanding the sources of the conflict is one important step in the struggle against warmongers.
In this edition’s Socialist Theory column, Numsa Bulletin has extracts from a pamphlet written by V.I. Lenin in July 1915. Lenin’s Socialism and war was written after the outbreak of the 1914-1918 World War I (WW I). The pamphlet took issue with socialists who saw the actions of their governments as “defensive wars” and took sides with their governments.
Reprinting extracts from Lenin’s pamphlet, in no ways means that his WW I analysis could be transplanted onto the ongoing conflict. By including the extracts in the following pages, we hope to demonstrate the power of the Marxist method; that of studying each incident concretely. Unlike other socialists who retreated to known slogans and formulae, Lenin examined the war concretely. He characterised it as an imperialist war that demanded from socialists, the transformation of the conflict into a civil war against the bourgeoisie.
Consistent with the method of looking at issues concretely, Numsa Bulletin is also publishing Jeffrey Ndumo’s article that looks at the reason behind the US-Britain’s war drive.
Lenin on War : Extracts from Socialism and War, July 1915 Attitude of socialists towards wars
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). That is why the features historically specific to the present war must come up for examination.
The historical types of wars in modern times
The Great French Revolution ushered in a new epoch in the history of mankind. From that time down to the Paris Commune, i.e. between 1789 and 1871, one type of war was of a bourgeois-progressive character, waged for national liberation. In other words, the overthrow of absolutism and feudalism, the undermining of these institutions, and the overthrow of alien oppression, formed the chief content and historical significance of such wars. These were therefore progressive wars. During such wars, all honest and revolutionary democrats, as well as all socialists, always wished success to that country (i.e. that bourgeoisie) which had helped to overthrow or undermine the most baneful foundations of feudalism, absolutism and the oppression of other nations. For example, the revolutionary wars waged by France contained an element of plunder and the conquest of foreign territory by the French, but this does not in the least alter the fundamental historical significance of those wars, which destroyed and shattered feudalism and absolutism in the whole of the old, serf-owning Europe .
In the Franco-Prussian war, Germany plundered France but this does not alter the fundamental historical significance of that war, which liberated tens of millions of German people from feudal disunity and from the oppression of two despots, the Russian Tsar and Napoleon III.
The difference between wars of aggression and of defence
The period of 1789-1871 left behind it deep marks and revolutionary memories. There could be no development of the proletarian struggle for socialism prior to the overthrow of feudalism, absolutism and alien oppression. When, in speaking of the wars of such periods, socialists stressed the legitimacy of “defensive” wars, they always had these aims in mind, namely revolution against medievalism and serfdom. By a “defensive” war socialists have always understood a “just” war in this particular sense (Wilhelm Liebknecht once expressed himself precisely in this way). It is only in this sense that socialists have always regarded wars “for the defence of the fatherland”, or “defensive” wars, as legitimate, progressive and just. 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 slave-holders with the purpose of consolidating slavery.
The war today is an imperialist war
It is almost universally admitted that this war is an imperialist war. In most cases, however, this term is distorted, or applied to one side, or else a loophole is left for the assertion that this war may, after all, be bourgeois-progressive, and of significance to the national-liberation movement. Imperialism is the highest stage in the development of capitalism, reached only in the twentieth century. Capitalism now finds that the old national states, without whose formation it could not have overthrown feudalism, are too cramped for it. Capitalism has developed concentration to such a degree that entire branches of industry are controlled by syndicates, trusts and associations of capitalist multi-millionaires and almost the entire globe has been divided up among the “lords of capital” either in the form of colonies, or by entangling other countries in thousands of threads of financial exploitation.
Free trade and competition have been superseded by a striving towards monopolies, the seizure of territory for the investment of capital and as sources of raw materials, and so on. From the liberator of nations, which it was in the struggle against feudalism, capitalism in its imperialist stage has turned into the greatest oppressor of nations. Formerly progressive, capitalism has become reactionary. It has developed the forces of production to such a degree that mankind is faced with the alternative of adopting socialism or of experiencing years and even decades of armed struggle between the “Great” Powers for the artificial preservation of capitalism by means of colonies, monopolies, privileges and national oppression of every kind.
A war between the biggest slave-holders for the maintenance and consolidation of slavery
Since 1876, most of the nations which were foremost fighters for freedom in 1789-1871, have, on the basis of a highly developed and “over-mature” capitalism, become oppressors and enslavers of most of the population and the nations of the globe. From 1876 to 1914, six “Great” Powers grabbed 25 million square kilometres, i.e. an area two and a half times that of Europe , Six Powers have enslaved 523 million people in the colonies.
For every four inhabitants in the “Great” Powers there are five in “their” colonies. It is common knowledge that colonies are conquered with fire and sword, that the population of the colonies are brutally treated, and that they are exploited in a thousand ways (by exporting capital, through concessions, etc., cheating in the sale of goods, submission to the authorities of the “ruling” nation, and so on and so forth).
The Anglo-French bourgeoisie are deceiving the people when they say that they are waging a war for the freedom of nations and of Belgium ; in fact they are waging a war for the purpose of retaining the colonies they have grabbed and robbed. The German imperialists would free Belgium , etc., at once if the British and French would agree to “fairly” share their colonies with them. A feature of the situation is that in this war the fate of the colonies is being decided by a war on the Continent. From the standpoint of bourgeois justice and national freedom (or the right of nations to existence), Germany might be considered absolutely in the right as against Britain and France, for she has been “done out” of colonies, her enemies are oppressing an immeasurably far larger number of nations than she is, and the Slavs that are being oppressed by her ally, Austria, undoubtedly enjoy far more freedom than those of tsarist Russia, that veritable “prison of nations”.
Germany , however, is fighting, not for the liberation of nations, but for their oppression. It is not the business of socialists to help the younger and stronger robber ( Germany ) to plunder the older and overgorged robbers. Socialists must take advantage of the struggle between the robbers to overthrow all of them.
To be able to do this, socialists must first of all tell the people the truth, namely, that this war is, in three respects, a war between slave-holders with the aim of consolidating slavery. This is a war, firstly, to increase the enslavement of the colonies by means of a “more equitable” distribution and subsequent more concerted exploitation of them; secondly, to increase the oppression of other nations within the “Great” Powers, since both Austria and Russia (Russia in greater degree and with results far worse than Austria) maintain their rule only by such oppression, intensifying it by means of war; and thirdly, to increase and prolong wage slavery, since the proletariat is split up and suppressed, while the capitalists are the gainers, making fortunes out of the war fanning national prejudices and intensifying reaction, which has raised its head in all countries, even in the freest and most republican.
War is the continuation of politics by other (i.e: violent) means
This famous dictum was uttered by Clausewitz, one of the profoundest writers on the problems of war. Marxists have always rightly regarded this thesis as the theoretical basis of views on the significance of any war. It was from this viewpoint that Marx and Engels always regarded the various wars.
Apply this view to the present war. You will see that for decades, for almost half a century, the governments and the ruling classes of Britain and France , Germany and Italy , Austria and Russia have pursued a policy of plundering colonies, oppressing other nations, and suppressing the working-class movement. It is this, and only this, policy that is being continued in the present war. In particular, the policy of both Austria and Russia , in peacetime as well as in wartime, is a policy of enslaving nations, not of liberating them. In China , Persia , India and other dependent countries, on the contrary, we have seen during the past decades a policy of rousing tens and hundreds of millions of people to a national life, of their liberation from the reactionary “Great” Powers’ oppression.
A war waged on such a historical basis can even today be a bourgeois-progressive war of national liberation. If the present war is regarded as a continuation of the politics of the “Great” Powers and of the principal classes within them, a glance will immediately reveal the glaring anti-historicity, falseness and hypocrisy of the view that the ”defence-of-the-fatherland” idea can be justified in the present war.