LA VERITE

THE TRUTH
ISSUE N82 (NEW SERIES; NO. 688 OLD SERIES) - PART 1 - JUNE 2014
PRICE : US$6 (for Parts 1 & 2) - 5 EUROS
ISSUE No. 82
PART TWO
SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE
Another Point of View on the
War of 1914
Karl Liebknecht addresses antiwar rally in Berlin in July 1914
The politics of Communism stands only to gain from
a truthful clarification of reality. Untruth is needed for
salvaging false reputations, but not for the education of
the masses. The workers need the truth as an
instrument of revolutionary action.
Your paper bears the name Vrit (Truth). This
name, like all others, has been amply abused.
Nevertheless it is a good and honourable name. The
truth is always revolutionary. To lay bare the truth of
their position before the oppressed is to lead them to
the high road of revolution.
Leon Trotsky
LA VERITE
THE TRUTH
THEORETICAL MAGAZINE OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
LA VERITE-THE TRUTH No. 82
PART 2
CONTENTS
* The Labour Movement in France Before and at the Start of the War . . . . . . . . . . . . page 1
by Jean-Marc Schiappa
* A War for Colonies . . . Conducted with the Help of Colonies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 5
by Olivier Doriane
* April 1917: The United States of America Goes to War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 11
by Franois Forgue
* The Unfortunate Peace of Brest-Litovsk: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 17
The Dilemmas Facing the Russian Revolutionary Part
by Michel Srac
* War and Revolution: The United States of Europe (Leon Trotsky) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 26
i
The Labour Movement in France Before and
at the Start of the War
By Jean-Marc Schiappa
1) The situation of the labour
movement in 1914
In contrast with other countries, notably
Great Britain and Germany, the labour
movement in France did not function on
the trade union-political party
combination.
This is explained by the very history of
a movement which was dispersed and
divided, and which slowly reconstituted
itself after the Paris Commune, within the
social and political environment of a
country that was still rural and had small-
scale production. The bourgeois Republic
had only been able to establish itself by
making concessions to the working class
and parliamentary democracy.
From 1895 onwards, the trade unions
were organised in the General
Confederation of Labour (CGT). The CGT
managed to make completely antagonistic
political tendencies coexist more or less
harmoniously within its ranks; these
included the Guesdists (1), who called
themselves Marxists and for whom the
trade union was a transmission-belt and
played a subordinate role to the party. As
far as they were concerned, there was a
need to seize the state before trying to
take back capitalist property. There were
also presumed reformists like Auguste
Keufer, who explained: Should we
instead occupy ground that is less
theoretical, more practical for winning
everyday improvements? Are we better off
organising resistance to injustices,
barring the way to the past and marching
progressively towards our ideal?
Personally, I am a firm supporter of this
latter method, considering that Each day
has enough trouble of its own. (2)
There were also perhaps above all
the revolutionary syndicalists who, after
being in the minority in the trade union
movement, now played a leadership role
and for whom the trade union was both the
instrument for improving the workers
everyday life and the instrument for giving
birth to the future society through
revolution; for them, the preferred method
was the general strike.
The synthesis of these groups was
achieved through the Charter of Amiens
(1906), which we should always bear in
mind: Outside of all political schools,
the CGT groups together all workers
conscious of the fight to be carried out for
the disappearance of the salaried and of
employers. The Congress regards this
declaration as a recognition of the class
struggle which, on the economic plain,
sets the workers in revolt in opposition to
all forms of exploitation and oppression
material as well as moral put in place by
the capitalist class against the working
class. The congress clarifies by the
following points this theoretical
assertion. In daily protest work the union
pursues the coordination of working class
efforts, and the growth of the well-being of
workers, through the carrying out of
immediate improvements, such as the
diminution in work hours, the increase in
salaries, etc. But this task is only one side
of the work of syndicalism: it prepares
complete emancipation, which can only be
fulfilled by expropriation of the
capitalists; it advocates as a method of
action the general strike; and it considers
that the union, today a resistance group
will be, in the future, a group for
production and redistribution, the basis of
social reorganisation.
We should point out that Christian trade
unionism did not yet exist; the French
Confederation of Christian Workers
(CFTC, from which todays CFDT
emerged in 1964) only appeared in 1919
in response to the post-war revolutionary
wave.
On the other hand, in 1914 the CGT
organised around 300,000 wage-earners
out of 7 million. This was a French
tradition the trade union movement did
not compare to other countries in terms of
numbers, but it was nonetheless a
considerable force.
Politically, the socialist current had
been severely divided for a long time.
There were at least five currents;
furthermore, they were not very
structured.
The Marxists or those who considered
themselves as such were grouped around
Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde; hence the
name Guesdists. Although their
historical merit lies in the fact that they
were the first to set up a workers party
and to champion the class struggle, they
were characterised by an unparalleled
dogmatism and sectarianism. As far as
they were concerned, it was revolution or
nothing. Thus, Jules Guesde wrote in July
1897 regarding the French Revolution:
the proletariat has other things to do
than to pursue the revolution of the Third
Estate for which it has paid the price.
As if it was not the aristocracy and the
clergy who had paid the price for the
French Revolution! Regarding the Dreyfus
Affair, which saw an army officer
wrongfully convicted because he was
Jewish, when the affair pushed the country
to the brink of civil war the Guesdists
manifesto of 24 June 1898 said: The
proletarians have nothing to do with this
battle. They only have to count the blows
from the outside.
From the outside is exactly what
Guesdism was. It was for his reason that
they were to fight against the Charter of
Amiens, for example.
Another major current were the
Blanquists, so named because its members
identified with Louis Blanqui, the
revolutionary considered by Marx to be
the brains and inspiration of the
proletarian party in France (3).
Although their dedication was undeniable,
their theoretical weakness and their
1
2
constant references to a glorious but
mythologised past (the French Revolution,
especially) made them out of touch with
reality.
Much more moderate were the
Possibilists, also called Broussists
after their main leader, Paul Brousse. They
thought that everything that was possible
should be done, so long as this was in the
right direction. They were
unquestionably reformists. Shamefully,
the former Socialist Minister Vincent
Peillon identified with them, with one
difference: degree. As far as the
Possibilists were concerned, socialism was
the ultimate objective; for Peillon,
capitalism was insurmountable.
This current produced a left-wing, the
Allemanists, named after Jean
Allemane. They were more syndicalist and
more anti-clerical, but lacking any kind of
theoretical principles.
The main figure among the
Independent Socialists was Jean Jaurs.
The main Socialist leader in France was
not a Marxist; more precisely, he espoused
a highly relative Marxism, and on certain
essential points he was openly opposed to
it. It is difficult to summarise Jaurs in just
a few lines. The simplest thing, in a
review like our own, is on the one hand to
refer to the interview given to
Informations ouvrires by French
historian Gilles Candar, and on the other
to quote Trotsky.
Trotsky, who had crossed paths Jaurs
on several occasions, wrote in 1915: In
the essence of his views Jaurs had been
and remained a reformist. But he
possessed an astonishing capacity for
adaptation: and that included adaptation
towards the revolutionary tendencies in
the movement. (4)
He added in 1920: The ideologist of
democracy, Jaurs, pictured democracy as
the nations supreme tribunal rising above
the warring classes. (. . . ) An ardent
defender of the interests of the proletariat,
and profoundly devoted to socialism,
Jaurs, as the tribune of a democratic
nation, came out against imperialism. (5)
And in 1922: And we can say now,
and we can say tomorrow, that every
revolutionary party, every oppressed
people, every oppressed working class,
and above all the vanguard of the
oppressed peoples and working classes,
the Communist International, can identify
with Jaurs, with his memory, his figure,
his personality. Jaurs is our common
property, he belongs to the revolutionary
parties, to the working classes, to the
oppressed peoples. (6)
At the insistent request of the
International, all of these currents were to
unite with difficulty (it had been decided
that minutes of the congress would not be
kept) in 1905, and Jaurs gradually
assumed effective leadership.
2) Looming crisis
This was the scene presented by the
apparent situation of the French labour
movement in 1914.
The reality was much more complex.
The three big forces of the labour
movement were fraught with internal
tensions and difficulties, all linked to one
simple question: fight back or adapt.
Anarchism, which had real influence,
especially in the trade union world, had
been undergoing a serious crisis since
1911. It took the form among others of
illegalism, notably with the Bonnot
affair, which saw well-known anarchist
activists take the path of gangsterism,
which led to repression. There was an
undeniable stupor: thus Kropotkin, a
theoretician and an eminent figure in
anarchist circles, was justifying as early as
1905 the Sacred Union that was to come
(7). Activists such as Marcel Hasfeld, the
free-thinker Andr Lorulot, Victor Serge
and Amde Dunois, who joined the SFIO
(8) in 1912 before rejecting the Sacred
Union, questioned their commitment to
anarchism.
Trade unionism was also undergoing a
profound crisis. Facing attempts at
infiltration by the police and the Radical
Party (9), and subjected to provocations
and repression, it also fell prey to
scheming. One such machination resulted
in the resignation of Griffuelhes as
Secretary of the CGT in 1909. His
successor Niel proved incapable and held
on for just a few months before being
replaced by Lon Jouhaux, a revolutionary
syndicalist who hastened to declare that
the trade union needed fine tuning.
Another scheme resulted in the expulsion
of Merrheim, the combative
Metalworkers Federation official; he was
expelled from his industry union. There
was indeed a crisis in thinking among
trade union activists (10).
Strikes became routine affairs, badly
prepared, badly led and often labelled
general strike. Thus on 16 December
1912, the general strike against the war by
the CGT, conceived as a general rehearsal
for the uprising by the working class in
case of conflict, was more symbolic than
real. Almost nobody among the leadership
was worried about a false radicalism that
saw bawlers and rrrrevolutionaries
(11) acting like petty chiefs over the
working class.
The crisis within the SFIO was no less
significant. Having vilified the other
Socialist currents, the Guesdists lost all
legitimacy by unifying with them. They
lapsed into a dogmatism that barely hid a
profoundly electoralist approach. The
ultra-leftist Gustave Herv, who had
planted the tricolour flag in a dungheap
(12), had been preparing his rallying point
since 1912, and in July 1914 opposed the
general strike against war. Although Jean
Jaurs held sway over the SFIO, he did
soon the basis of his personal, intellectual
and political prestige alone, and not his
theoretical or organisational attributes.
The party which in 1905 had declared
itself a party of the working class was
increasingly becoming an electoralist party
whose candidates still could not manage
nor wanted to move away from the
Radical Party, which was the majority
party at that time. For the time being, the
figure of Jaurs, who represented the party
almost single-handedly, was over -
whelmingly charismatic and banished any
uncertainty. But after his death (13)
It was in this French context (and
international context, with the Agadir
Crisis in Morocco and the Balkan Wars)
that in 1913 the so-called Three-Year
Law was passed, extending the term of
military service to three years and thus
illustrating and accelerating the rise of
militarism. While it is an indisputable fact
that the SFIO officially pacifist and
internationalist waged a campaign
against this law, all related articles in its
newspaper LHumanit were published
under the rubric For national defence.
As part of a very French tradition,
several former revolutionaries and
socialists like Viviani, Briand and
Millerand tried to influence or appeal to
their former comrades and often
succeeded. As for Clemenceau, who had
nicknamed himself the senior cop of
France, he continued to organise the
repression of labour activity as Interior
Minister. Let us recall in passing that
Manuel Valls, Frances current socialist
Prime Minister and former Interior
Minister, recently confided that he
preferred Clemenceau to Jaurs.
Few were ravaged with concern in the
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
face of the ineffectiveness and
complacency of the official leadership of
the big labour organisations.
But within that small circle, we can
mention the grouping around La Vie
ouvrire [Working-class Life], the
recently-established trade union review
centred on Monatte, Merrheim and
Rosmer.
In fact, it was not the war that led to (or
provoked) the crisis of the labour
movement, especially in France. It was
the crisis of the labour movement that
allowed war to break out; or, to be more
exact, the official policy of the labour
movement did not allow it to stand firm
during the chauvinistic crisis. Put simply,
the war tragically revealed the
powerlessness of the labour leadership.
3) Rallying round
August 1914 was a tragedy, beyond
any shadow of a doubt. Millions of
proletarians and peasants of every country
were to massacre each other.
The assassination of Jean Jaurs, a
declared opponent of the war, on 31 July
1914 by a crank was an extreme form of
that tragedy. When brought to trial in
1919, Jaurss murderer was defended in
court by Zvas, a senior Socialist leader
who had become an Independent
Socialist. At the trial, a man testified on
behalf of the murderer, Raoul Villain.
This man was Marc Sangnier, the founder
of French Christian Democracy, with
whom several supporters of the official
left identified. He described the
murderer Villain as an upstanding,
sincere, loyal person and insisted on his
moral values (moral values consisting
of firing two bullets to the back of the
head). Villain was so well defended that
he was acquitted, and Jaurss widow was
ordered to pay the legal costs.
The last days of July 1914 saw the
CGT organise several big demonstrations
(where there were violent clashes with the
police). But the leadership waited and the
military mobilisation began amidst a
nationalist frenzy: the underground
railway station Allemagne [Germany]
was renamed Jaurs before war was
even declared (on 3 August 1914), shops
bearing Germanic names were ransacked,
and so on.
The rallying of the labour leaders
around the Sacred Union, i.e. around the
international slaughter, was explicitly
stated in a joint SFIO-CGT manifesto (an
event in itself) which as early as 28 July
criticised Austria-Hungarys historic
responsibility and sang the praises of the
French leaders who wanted peace
sincerely. Consequently, Jules Guesde
was to become a government minister,
like two other Socialist leaders.
At Jaurss funeral, CGT General
Secretary Leon Jouhaux spoke in the
name of those who will go to the front,
then remained in the rear and rallied to the
Sacred Union, later becoming a
government commissioner. Of course,
Jouhauxs biography cannot be reduced to
this moment in time (his rejection of the
Ptain-Belin Labour Charter in 1940,
which without his rejection would
have destroyed the CGT within a
corporatist set-up was extremely
important), but it should not be forgotten
either.
The anarchists played their part in this
concert with the famous Manifesto of the
Sixteen, which stated: [U]nless the
German population () finally refuses to
serve any longer as an instrument of the
projects of pan-German political
domination, there can be no question of
peace.
The Poincar government blackmailed
those named in the Carnet B (a list of
some 2,500 possible opponents of the war
who would be rounded up in case of
unrest) saying that it would not pursue
anyone who formally declared their good
intentions. At the same time it cracked
down selectively on known opponents
(the trade unionists Broutchoux was to
remain in prison for two years;
schoolteacher Julia Bertrand was also
imprisoned, among others) and no less
selectively favoured other labour officials
socially (some sought to gain a military
rank, for example, while others, more
prosaically, wanted to avoid going off
to the front, even if it meant calling on
others to fight). One weapon was very
effective against both opponents and the
half-hearted: being sent to the front.
The atmosphere against the
internationalists was oppressive: to take
just one example, the trade union leader
Merrheim, who at that time was against
the war, had to be accompanied by two
enormous dogs for his own protection
when attending meetings of the CGT
leadership, where he was regularly called
a Hun and insulted by his comrades.
The wave of chauvinism carried all
before it. Victor Serge, in one dreadful
passage from his memoirs, reports the
remarks of a friend who tries to corrupt
him: The wars business, old chap.
Youll see people are doing well out of it,
nobody wants to end it any more. ()
Jules Guesde and Marcel Sembat are in
the Government; a Socialist is defending
Jaurss murderer Maitre Zvas, you
know him. Chose, the Illegalist, has won
the Military Medal, etc. (14).
Moreover, the opponents to the war did
not complain to the leadership that it had
not prevented this wave of
chauvinism, but that it had not
distanced itself from it. We were all of us
powerless, Pierre Monatte told the
CGTs 1919 Congress.
This rallying round did not take place
in the abstract: leaders of the Socialist
Party and the CGT turned themselves into
police auxiliaries, in the literal sense of
the term, informing against their own
comrades for making internationalist
remarks.
4) Resistance
It was the small La Vie Ouvrire
group, in liaison with the Russian exiles
around Trotsky and Martov of the
newspaper Nashe Slovo, that held out.
This groups activity was marginal,
almost symbolic. A witness tells the story:
Near the corner of Grange-aux-Belles
Street and Quai de Jemmapes in Paris, a
small grey-fronted shop, a Librairie du
Travail bookshop, was still open in 1914.
There lived Pierre Monatte, editor-in-
chief of La Vie ouvrire, who shared with
Merrheim the glory of having formulated
the first protest by the French proletarian
world against the war. This shop closed
on 2 August. And yet, on certain autumn
evenings, towards 9 pm, the police were
able to note furtive signs of life, with
conspirators slipping in one after the
other, and the symposia coming to an end
after 11pm (...) We confined ourselves to
poking sadly at the cold remains of the
International; to drafting, from bitter
memory, the enormous list of those who
had failed (...). Rosmer, the poet Martinet,
Trotsky, Guilbeaux, Merrheim and two or
three others of whose names I was not
aware, we knew, sitting there in the
middle of Paris, that we were both the last
Europeans of the wonderful intelligent
Europe which the world had just lost for
ever, and the first men of a future
3
THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN FRANCE
International of which we were certain.
We formed the chain linking one century
to the next... (15)
Pierre Monatte, after carrying out (and
before continuing to carry out) a policy of
opposition which earned him the anger of
the government and the trade union
leaders, gave a virulent and public boost
to that opposition within the CGT: on 3
January 1915, he resigned from the
CGTs National Confederal Committee,
in protest against the orientation of the
confederal leadership which notably had
agreed to hold a propaganda tour on
behalf of the government.
His Open Letter was widely distributed
underground. Let us note that his
resignation was assessed in various ways
by opponents to the war. For Merrheim, it
was a mistake; for Trotsky, it was a
necessary and healthy act of splitting.
Monatte was quickly despatched to the
front by the government.
On 1 November that same year,
Rosmer, another conspicuous trade union
activist, sent a Letter to the Subscribers of
La Vie Ouvrire: In France, socialism
and syndicalism have abandoned the
working class at the most serious, the
most painful time. The disarray has been
greater than in any other country and,
before such a betrayal, we are willingly
letting ourselves become discouraged and
sceptical. But it is not true that we cannot
do anything.
Despite the repression and censorship,
other trade union publications succeeded
in defending labour internationalism; this
was the case with Lunion des mtaux
[Metalworkers Unity], organ of the
CGT-affiliated Federation, which
published the manifesto of the German
workers against the war, and the primary
schoolteachers union. Teaching trade
unionists grouped around the review
LEcole mancipe [The Emancipated
School], which was banned in 1914 and
replaced by LEcole de la fdration,
were also active.
And it was not, could not, be an
accident that from the inmost depths of
the labour organisations, even those most
mistreated by their official leaders, the
will to say no seeped and then surged
up. The objector Raymond Lefebvre
joined the SFIO in 1916 on his return
from the front where he had been
wounded where he joined the handful of
cadres who rejected the Sacred Union.
Monatte wrote from the frontline in
February 1917: The war will not last for
ever. We will return to you from the
trenches. On our return, the proletariat
will still be the proletariat.
It was this certainty, this confidence
that drove the militant activists on.
These initial regroupments, informal to
begin with, became the Committee for the
Resumption of International Relations
and the Trade Union Defence Committee.
All together in this Committee, despite
the easily explicable friction and old
prejudices, socialists, syndicalists and
libertarians were to take action against the
war, against capitalism, and then for the
defence of the Russian Revolution.
This resulted in the attendance of
Albert Bourderon (syndicalist member of
the CGT-affiliated Coopers Federation
and delegate of the Federation of the
Bourses du Travail) (16) and Merrheim in
the International Socialist Conference
held in Zimmerwald from 3 to 8
September 1915. The organised threads of
labour internationalism had been re-tied.
Works consulted:
The most important of these are Alfred
Rosmer, Le Mouvement ouvrir pendant
la guerre: De lUnion sacre
Zimmerwald [The Labour Movement
During the War: From the Sacred Union
to Zimmerwald], published in two
volumes in 1936 and 1959; and the
classic work Edouard Dollans, Histoire
du mouvement ouvrier [History of the
Labour Movement], Vol.2 (1871-1920),
published before Rosmers history (thus
allowing him to make some corrections).
Also, Pierre Monatte, La Lutte
syndicale [The Trade Union Struggle]
(edited by Colette Chambelland, Paris,
1976); and J Vidal, Le Mouvement
ouvrier franais de la Commune la
guerre mondiale [The French Labour
Movement from the Commune to the
World War], published in 1934. J Vidal
was the pseudonym of the great Soviet
historian Vladimir Dalin, who was a
signatory of a letter of support for Trotsky
in 1924 and who was then deported to the
Gulag, where he spent 20 years.
(1) See the article by Lucien Gauthier
entitled The root causes of the collapse
of the Second International in this issue
of La Vrit-The Truth for a detailed
examination of Jules Guesdes conception
of the party and the trade union.
(2) A quote from St.Matthews Gospel,
Chapter 6.
(3) Letter to Louis Watteau in
Brussels, 10 November 1861.
(4) From Jean Jaurs, a political
profile by Trotsky published in the liberal
newspaper Kievskaya Mysl, No.196, 17
July 1915.
(5) Thoughts on the Progress of the
Proletarian Revolution, The First Five
Years of the Communist International,
Vol.1.
(6) Report to the Fourth World
Congress of the Communist International,
1 December 1922.
(7) Jean Maitron, Histoire du
mouvement anarchiste en France, Vol.1,
p.377 onwards. The union sacre or
Sacred Union was a political truce in
France during the First World War, in
which a significant part of the socialist
movement agreed not to oppose the
government or call any strike, in the name
of patriotism.
(8) The French Section of the
Workers International (French acronym:
SFIO) was formed in 1905 as a merger
between the French Socialist Party and
the Socialist Party of France. Although
widely known as the Socialist Party, it
adopted the name officially only in 1969.
(9) The traditionally centrist Radical
Party (full name: the Radical Republican
and Radical-Socialist Party) was officially
founded in 1901 but traced its roots to the
1870s and the reformist wing of the
French Republican Party, known as the
Radicals, led by Georges Clemenceau.
(10) Pierre Monatte, La Vie Ouvriere
(1909-1914) in Colette Chambelland
(ed.), La Lutte syndicale (Paris, 1976).
(11) The first characterisation was by
Monatte, the second by Lenin.
(12) Herv gained notoriety in 1901 by
writing an article in the socialist press
which included the image of the French
tricolour planted in a pile of manure.
(13) Jaures was murdered in a Paris
caf on 31 July 1914 by nationalist
fanatic Raoul Villain.
(14) Victor Serge, Memoirs of a
Revolutionary, Chapter 2.
(15) From the Preface to LEponge de
vinaigre [The Sponge of Vinegar] by the
socialist writer Raymond Lefebvre,
quoted in Alfred Rosmer, Le mouvement
ouvrier pendant la guerre.
(16) Bourses du Travail were working-
class organisations that encouraged
mutual aid, education, and self-
organisation amongst their members.
They were one type of CGT-affiliated
organisation, together with regional
unions and national federations.
4
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
At first glance, the First World War
may not appear to merit that name. In the
strict sense of military operations, it was a
war that was mainly concentrated on
European soil. However, in the full sense
of the term, it was indeed a world war.
Other articles in this issue of our review
establish the fact that it took place to
allow a new partition of the world
between the capitalist powers. It also
establishes how right Lenin was, at the
start of the 20th century, in defining
imperialism, the highest stage of
capitalism, as reaction all down the line,
the maker of wars and revolutions.
It was a world war because it was
caused by the competing international
interests of the colonial powers that
shared the world between them and the
emerging imperialist states that found
themselves deprived of colonies.
A world war, because the peoples of
the world were thrown onto the European
battlefield.
A world war in terms of its
consequences, which turned the whole
planet upside down.
The First Congress of the Communist
International, held in Moscow in March
1919, explained in its Manifesto of the
Communist International to the Workers
of the World that: The last war, which
was by and large a war for colonies, was
at the same time a war conducted with the
help of colonies. The colonial populations
were drawn into the European war on an
unprecedented scale. Indians, Negroes
(1), Arabs and Madagascans fought on
the territories of Europe for the sake of
what? For the sake of their right to
continue to remain the slaves of England
and France. Never before has the infamy
of capitalist rule in the colonies been
delineated so clearly; never before has
the problem of colonial slavery been
posed so sharply as it is today.
Thus, at a time when the civil war
waged by the forces of White reaction
was encircling Russia, the First Congress
of the Communist International firmly
highlighted the degree unknown up to
that point to which the peoples had been
dragged into the war. It was a mass
deportation. Millions of workers and
peasants were snatched form their
countries by the colonial powers and
thrown into the bloody fray.
A new slave trade
We know that French imperialism
carried out an out-and-out devastation
of its colonial possessions in Africa. It
was not alone in doing so. British
imperialism did the same.
In May 1915, the Black American
militant activist W E B Du Bois explained
in an article entitled The African Roots of
War: Yet in a very real sense, Africa is
a prime cause for this terrible overturning
of civilisation which we have lived to
see.
According to Du Bois, Africa was the
Land of the Twentieth Century due to the
gold and diamonds of South Africa, the
cocoa of Angola and Nigeria, the rubber
and ivory of the Congo and the palm-oil
of the West Coast.
And although the forms taken by the
outbreak of the First World War did not in
the first instance involve the African
peoples, the rule of the European warring
powers over the continent would soon
drag them into the fray.
By the time the war ended, every
country in Africa, with the exception of
the small Spanish territories which
remained neutral had been formally
committed to one side or the other. (2)
Their commitment was first and
foremost via the demands of the war
effort that were placed on them (providing
troops and porters, foodstuffs, etc.).
Africa would also suffer economic crisis
induced by the war and the resulting
shortage of manpower. There was also
limited fighting on its soil during the
invasion of the German colonies.
A war needs combatants. The colonial
powers quickly realised that their
African possessions offered them an
advantage. The French General Mangin,
promoter of an armed body named the
Black Force and author of a book of the
same name, wrote: Our African forces
would constitute an almost indefinite
reserve, the source of which is beyond the
reach of the adversary. (3)
All of the belligerent powers present in
Africa recruited soldiers there for the
battlefields of Europe and Africa, and
porters for the campaigns in Africa.
Several methods were used in carrying
out that recruitment. The promise of
citizen status not generally enjoyed by
the colonised led some Africans of the
elite to join up voluntarily (we will
return later to all of the false promises
made to the colonised peoples and
examine the consequences of those acts of
deception). But above all, it was the
obligation placed on the traditional chiefs
to deliver a contingent of men, the
number of which was set by the colonial
administrators, together with the
conscription laws (French decree of 1912,
British decree of 1915) that introduced
military service for Africans, which
allowed this mass conscription to occur.
Several historians have described this as
a new slave trade.
But () the recruitment campaign
provoked widespread revolts and the
insurgent areas were impossible to recruit
in. () At a time when the Allied colonial
regimes in Africa could least afford
trouble in their own backyards, their
authority still only tenuously established
5
A War for Colonies Conducted with the
Help of Colonies
By Olivier Doriane
in places like southern Ivory Coast, much
of Libya or Karamoja in Uganda was
widely challenged by armed risings and
other forms of protest by their subjects.
()
Large areas of Haut-Sngal-Niger
and Dahomey remained out of French
control for as much as a year (). In
some cases what were described as
revolts were, in effect, as in Libya, just
the continuation of primary resistance to
European occupation. () There can be
no doubt that the visual evidence of the
apparent weakening of European
authority as represented by the exodus of
Europeans [to fight in Europe]
encouraged those contemplating revolt
(). But not all protests were violent in
character. ()
To avoid recruitment teams,
inhabitants of whole villages fled to the
bush. () In Zanzibar, too, men hid all
day and slept in trees at night to avoid
being impressed as porters. (4)
In total, more than a million African
soldiers were involved in these campaigns
[on African soil] or campaigns in Europe.
Even more men, as well as women and
children, were recruited, often forcibly, as
porters to support armies (). Over
150,000 soldiers and porters lost their
lives during the war. Many more were
wounded and disabled. () Further,
North Africans were recruited to work at
factory benches vacated by Frenchmen
conscripted into the army. () All in all
over 2.5 million Africans, or well over 1
percent of the population of the continent,
were involved in war work of some kind.
(5)
In Asia too
These veritable slave raids also
affected Asia. The bloodletting on the
fields of battle set the pace for the
requisition of human beings in the
colonies.
Thus in 1916, there were terrible losses
in the Battle of the Somme. On 1 July, in
a single day, there were 60,000 British
casualties, including 19,240 dead. In total,
the July battles put 400,000 British troops
out of action, half of them dead or
missing. British imperialism had already
begun mass conscription in India: over
750,000 men were drafted (36,000 died).
That was not enough. Following the
Battles of the Somme, the British colonial
authorities set up the Chinese Labour
Corps, which recruited 100,000 Chinese
workers.
We should in fact remember that at the
start of the war, the European
imperialisms were present in China,
occupying foreign concessions. These
were 25 in number and were shared
between France, Great Britain, German,
6
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
At another level, the fate of Black
Americans was also revealing. Some
200,000 Black workers were thrown onto
the European battlefields, in a much
higher proportion to the actual ratio with
the population of the US. The Trinidadian
Black Trotskyist C L R James explained:
The war was a war for democracy,
but the Negroes were segregated. There
was not a single regiment consisting of
white and Negro soldiers mixed.
American democracy did not want to
have even American coloured officers,
and it took a hard fight to have a few
hundred. When they did agree, they
trained Negroes as officers in a special
Negro camp. And these men were
informed by the State Department that
when they visited the South, they should
not wear their uniforms. Democracy
was sending the Negro to fight for
democracy, but could not bear the
sight of him in the officers uniform of
democracy. () When they went to
France, the discrimination continued.
American democracy forced most of
the black soldiers to be common
labourers. () Far from practicing any
sort of democracy to Negroes, the
American commanders did their best to
make the French maltreat the Negroes.
() But when the American officers saw
this and the friendly way in which Negro
soldiers were being welcomed both by
French men and women, they issued a
military order, Order No.40, instructing
Negroes not even to speak to French
women. For this offense against
democracy, many Negroes were
arrested, though the French people, men
and women, had made no complaint. The
American officers, in this war for
democracy, wrote a special document
to the French commanding staff, telling
them that Negroes were a low and
degenerate race, that they could not be
trusted in the company of white people,
that although some Negroes were
officers, the French officers should have
nothing to do with them, except in matters
relating strictly to fighting. The French,
said this American order, should not eat
with Negroes, nor even shake hands.
The author went on: as soon as the
war was over, there was such a desperate
series of race riots in America as had not
been seen for many years. In Washington,
in Chicago, white mobs inspired and
encouraged by American employers and
American capitalist police, shot down
Negroes, many of whom had lost
relations in the great war for
democracy. The Southern whites were
so anxious to put the Negro back in his
place that they lynched Negroes who
dared to wear the uniform of a private.
The great war for democracy and the
bravery and the sacrifices for
democracy of the Negro people ended
with thousands of them having to fight
desperately, not for democracy, but for
their lives in democratic America.
CLR James (under the name J R
Johnson), Why Negroes Should Oppose
the War, published by the American SWP
as a pamphlet in 1939.
The Role of Blacks in the US Army
7
but also the United States. Although
Chinese historians refer to the war as the
European War, the presence of troops
from the various belligerent countries on
the same territory, in addition to the fact
that the majority of Chinese cities subject
to the Unequal Treaties were also
accessible by sea, meant that the Chinese
soil itself faced the threat of armed
confrontation. On 6 August 1914, the
Chinese government declared its strict
neutrality in the European war and
accompanied this declaration with a
statement of the neutrality regulations of
the Republic of China. China asked the
warring states to respect its neutrality.
Some conflict resulted from the Anglo-
Japanese alliance of 1902, which pushed
Japan into declaring war on Germany and
to seize the German territory of Qingdao
in November 1914. But it was in 1915,
with the sending of Chinese workers en
masse to Russia and then to the battlefields
of France in 1916, that China really entered
the war.
In total, 200,000 Chinese workers left
for Russia between 1915 and 1917, and
140,000 for France between 1916 and
1918, transported to Europe in atrocious
conditions. Some 27,000 would never
return. In neighbouring Vietnam also,
90,000 Annamites (6) were conscripted.
The deception of the promises by the
imperialist powers
This involvement in the war would have
profound consequences in terms of
relations between the peoples of the
colonies and the colonial authorities.
Everywhere, national questions arose
forcefully.
The Second Congress of the Communist
International, held in 1920, rightly insisted:
The imperialist war of 1914-18 has very
clearly revealed to all nations and to the
oppressed classes of the whole world the
falseness of bourgeois-democratic phrases,
by practically demonstrating that the
Treaty of Versailles of the celebrated
Western democracies is an even more
brutal and foul act of violence against
weak nations than was the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk of the German Junkers and the
Kaiser. (7)
This policy of aggression, the document
stressed, was hastening the collapse of the
petty-bourgeois nationalist illusions that
nations can live together in peace and
equality under capitalism.
Because colonial powers everywhere
had hardly been reticent in terms of
promises of future recompense. Now, far
from marking a relaxation of the colonial
order or of the racism that was prevalent in
the United States, the post-war period
would be marked by a reinforcement of the
mechanisms of repression.
In India, promises of reform had been
made in return for a commitment to the
side of the democrats against barbarous
militarism. (8)
The reality? In March 1919, the
Imperial Legislative Council passed the
Rowland Act, which extended indefinitely
the wartime state of emergency, thus
allowing the colonial authorities to
imprison those suspected of terrorism for
two years and to strictly control the press.
Anyone found guilty of assisting enemies
of His Majesty could be sentenced to
death.
A non-violent protest demonstration
organised in Amritsar (in the Punjab) on 13
April 1919 was bloodily put down,
resulting in well over 1,000 deaths (the
official figure was 370 dead and 1200
wounded). A new stage in the struggle for
national liberation was opening. It had to
wait 28 years before ending in
independence.
British imperialism had previously
applied this repressive policy with ferocity
in its oldest colony: Ireland. When Ireland
was dragged into the war, voices were
raised within the Irish labour movement,
calling for rejection of a war being waged
by the colonial power. The revolutionary
socialist James Connolly was one of the
main leaders of the Irish labour movement,
and in particular of the Irish Transport and
General Workers Union. A banner hung in
the unions headquarters, Liberty Hall in
Dublin, which declared: We serve neither
king nor Kaiser, but Ireland.
As Connolly put it: The power which
holds in subjection more of the worlds
population than any other power on the
globe, and holds them in subjection as
slaves without any guarantee of freedom or
power of self-government, this power that
sets Catholic against Protestant, the Hindu
against the Mohammedan, the yellow man
against the brown, and keeps them
quarrelling with each other whilst she robs
and murders them all this power appeals
to Ireland to send her sons to fight under
Englands banner for the cause of the
oppressed. () The cause of labour is the
cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the
cause of labour. They cannot be
dissevered. (9).
At that time Liberty Hall was under the
protection of armed members of the Irish
Citizen Army (ICA), the workers self-
defence organisation set up during the
famous Dublin general strike (the Lockout
of 1913). The ICA was the spearhead of
the insurrection against British rule
launched on 24 April 1916. The Easter
Rising was put down and repressed
mercilessly.
But in the aftermath of the First World
War, the Irish people identified with the
republican cause. A war of independence
began in 1918. It would continue until
1921, forcing the British government into
negotiations.
The link with the labour movement in
Europe
Even though colonial oppression
endured throughout the world and even
though repression hit hard, social relations
within the dominated countries were
modified as a consequence of the war. As
noted by S K Koza, author of a series of
articles on Africa published in
Informations Ouvrires [Labour News], the
organ of the Independent Workers Party
(POI) in France:
The forced recruitment of Africa into
the war was to have considerable
consequences. There is no doubt that the
war opened up new horizons for very many
Africans, especially to members of the
educated elite. The new image of the white
man whom they had been urged to kill
during the war, whilst up to the war the
white man had belonged to a clan whose
members were regarded as sacrosanct due
to the colour of their skin together with
the failure to keep the promise of reforms,
convinced many Africans not only that an
improvement in their condition could only
come from regaining their sovereignty, but
that henceforth victory was possible.
A WAR FOR COLONIES
Mixing between the millions of men
who had been moved to Europe also
allowed a link to be partially made with
the labour movement of the imperialist
countries, albeit under the most terrible of
conditions. This was the case with
relations between the nascent Algerian
national movement and the French labour
movement. During the war, 173,000
Algerians were conscripted (25,000 were
killed). During the same period, 75,000
Algerians replaced French workers who
had left for the front.
This resulted in the discovery of the
factory and the class struggles of the
French working class. The Algerian
workers began to organise within the
French labour movement. Although the
war had snatched tens of thousands of
Algerians from their homes, only to throw
them onto the fields of battle, at the same
time it had opened up new horizons for
broad masses.
These types of contact were a world
phenomenon.
In the United States in August 1914, a
group of 60 Indian activists of the
nationalist Ghadar Party left San
Francisco by sea. They recruited 150
Indians in Shanghai. Their objective: to
set up a network of Ghadar activists in
India. Their first attempt failed. Other
ships arrived successfully.
Several young activists who set up the
Chinese Communist Party had previously
gone to France and worked in factories.
Ho Chi Minh, the future leader of the
Vietnamese Communist Party, joined the
SFIO in France and then joined the
French CP when the Tours Congress
happened. (10)
In Tunisia, the movement that gave
birth in 1920 to the Destour, or
Constitution Party, was undoubtedly
driven mostly by repatriated soldiers and
workers who were dissatisfied with the
condition of inferiority they were forced
to endure in their own country.
The world unity of the class struggle
is affirmed
These were just some of the organised
expressions of a much more far-reaching
process: the world unity of the class
struggle was being affirmed forcefully in
relation to the fact that, with the world
market having been created, imperialism
was tearing the planet apart in order to
carve up that market.
The Second Congress of the
Communist International emphasised:
The great European war and its
consequences have shown clearly that the
masses of people in the oppressed non-
European countries have, as a result of
the centralisation of world capitalism,
been indissolubly bound up with the
proletarian movement in Europe. It also
insisted: European capitalism draws its
strength in the main not so much from the
industrial countries of Europe as from its
colonial possessions. (11)
The Manifesto of the Communist
International had previously highlighted
the importance of the overlap of the
mobilisation against the colonial yoke and
mobilisations in the imperialist countries.
The Manifesto explained: A number of
open insurrections and the revolutionary
ferment in all the colonies have hence
arisen. In Europe itself, Ireland keeps
signalling through sanguinary street
battles that she still remains and still feels
herself to be an enslaved country. In
Madagascar, Annam and elsewhere the
troops of the bourgeois republic have
more than once quelled the uprisings of
colonial slaves during the war. In India
the revolutionary movement has not
subsided for a single day and has recently
led to the greatest labour strikes in Asia,
which the English government has met by
ordering its armoured cars into action in
Bombay (12). The colonial question has
been thus posed in its fullest measure not
only on the maps at the diplomatic
congress in Paris but also within the
colonies themselves. (13)
Mobilisations by peoples subjected to
colonial humiliation would indeed
develop during this whole period. Several
factors came into play: the destabilisation
of all inter-imperialist relations; the rise in
activity by broad masses having directly
experienced imperialist barbarism; and of
course, the appeal of the October
Revolution.
In fact, although this war to carve up
the world had established a certain
balance, from imperialisms point of view
it had not resolved all the outstanding
questions quite the opposite. It was a
war that carried new confrontations within
it.
Though victorious, in reality France
and Great Britain saw their positions as
imperialisms weakened at the world level.
US imperialism was emerging, and the
global upheavals that resulted from the
war were leading to the mobilisation of
the peoples of the colonies.
The impact of the Russian
Revolution
But above all, it was impossible to
separate that wave of mobilisations from
one of the consequences of the war: the
victory of the proletarian revolution in
Russia under the leadership of the
Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky,
and the enormous hope this inspired
among all the peoples of the world.
The struggle for national liberation, for
national sovereignty, would combine with
perspectives of expropriating capital that
were opened up by the Russian
Revolution. From this point of view, in
the stage of imperialism, this was the
resounding confirmation of the whole
theory of the permanent revolution.
Writing in 1938, Harold R Isaacs
explained how this was expressed in
China: [S]wift and sudden changes
began to occur as a direct result of the
Great War. () Far more spectacular
was the spurt of industrial growth made
possible by the breathing space of the
War. ()
This rise of productive forces brought
aspiring Chinese capital automatically
into collision with entrenched foreign
interests and the existing structure of
foreign economic and political privilege.
It also brought the new class of workers
into conflict with their employers, foreign
and Chinese alike. (14)
Isaacs went on: While aspiring
Chinese industrialists and bankers,
envisaging an independent capitalist
development of their own, would naturally
want to loosen the imperialist grip, they
were confronted with the fact that the gulf
that separated them from the exploited
masses in the country was far more
profound and unbridgeable than the
antagonism between them and the foreign
8
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
rivals upon whom they still depended for
so much. () It also meant that the
solution of Chinas revolutionary tasks
passed into the hands of the newest and
youngest class, the urban proletariat,
organizing and drawing behind it the
millions of toilers and artisans in the
towns and on the fields. ().
For China the lessons of the Russian
revolutions bore a peculiar cogency. In
Russia, the proletariat of a backward
country had taken over the tasks a
bankrupt bourgeoisie proved unable to
shoulder. The October revolution had
shown how the combination of a
proletarian insurrection the culmination
of the new class antagonisms and a
peasant war the carry-over of the old
offered the only way out for a backward
country in the modern world of
imperialism. (15)
Soviet Russia also played an active
role: in 1919 and 1920 it declared it
would rescind all the Unequal Treaties
which the tsarist government had imposed
on China, giving further impetus to the
national question.
The shining phrases of Woodrow
Wilson, his promises of self-determination
and social justice for all peoples had bred
the hope that in the general readjustment
China too would come into her own.
When at Versailles these illusions were
cynically spiked by the imperialist horse-
traders, the new youth rose in fury against
the treachery of the corrupt Japanophile
Peking Government. On May 4, 1919,
there were huge student demonstrations in
Peking. The homes of traitorous Ministers
were attacked and wrecked. The
movement spread across the country. In it
a new note sounded. Workers in factories
struck in support of the student demands.
The growth of industry had brought a
modern proletarian class on to the scene.
At the end of 1916 there were already
nearly one million industrial workers and
their number nearly doubled by 1922. To
the Western front in Europe went an army
of nearly 200,000 Chinese labourers, who
learned there to read and write a little
and, what was more important still, came
into contact with European workers and
the higher European standard of living.
They returned with new ideas of how men
struggle for better lives. They had seen
the great nations locked in conflict and
they came back determined to free their
own. Many on their way back from
Europe refused to land at Japanese ports
during the furore over Shantung. (16) ()
The eyes of the new youth turned from
Versailles to Russia, where the October
revolution offered them an example and
an inspiration infinitely more compelling
in its reality. (17)
The government in Moscow had
already indicated that it was prepared to
treat the issue of Sino-Soviet relations on
a radically new basis. On 4 July 1918, the
then Peoples Commissar for Foreign
Affairs Chicherin had stated that
Bolshevik Russia was renouncing all the
tsarist Unequal Treaties had signed with
China, as well as all the arrangements
previously made with Japan and other
countries regarding China.
This policy was once again declared in
a manifesto dated 25 July 1919 (known as
the Karakhan Manifesto). The
declarations by the Soviet government in
1919 and 1920 had made a new wind
blow through the corridors of
international diplomacy, which irritated
the western powers.
The appeal to struggle to liberate
the East from the European tyrants
This was of value throughout the
world. The Declaration of the Rights of
the People of Russia (15 November 1917)
had made a huge impression wherever it
became known: it declared the equality
and sovereignty of all the peoples of
Russia, and their right to self-
determination, including the right to
secede and form an independent state.
In the Maghreb region of North Africa,
leaflets that were passed from hand to
hand reproduced in Arabic the Appeal of
the Council of Peoples Commissars to
the Muslims of Russia and the East (3
December 1917). This document declared
that the beliefs and customs of Muslims
were free and inviolable. Appeals such
as Build your national life freely and
without hindrance and We look to you
for sympathy and support were well-
received.
It was significant that three years after
the October Revolution, the Syrian-based
Patriotic Committee of Arab Unity
declared: The Arabs regard the
government of Lenin and his friends, and
the Great Revolution they have launched
to liberate the East from the European
tyrants as a great force capable of
ensuring their well-being and happiness.
The dismantling of the Ottoman
Empire
The dismantling of the Ottoman
Empire in fact resulted in the national
question being posed in strong terms
throughout the Maghreb and the Middle
East. Different imperialisms had torn into
the region during the war itself. In 1914,
Egypt became a British protectorate. In
1917, they occupied Mesopotamia. With
the Balfour Declaration that same year,
Great Britain foresaw and prepared its
takeover of Palestine. The Treaty of
Sevres, signed on 10 August 1920,
formalised the dismemberment of the
Ottoman Empire. France and Britain then
launched into a complicated struggle for
influence in the former Ottoman
possessions of Lebanon, Palestine, Syria,
Iraq and Arabia.
France occupied Syria in 1920. And in
1926, Iraq was placed under British
mandate. This Balkanisation of the Near
and Middle East was said to have been
prepared by secret Anglo-French
agreements in 1916 known as the
Sykes-Picot negotiations in liaison
with tsarist Russia.
But the end of the war also meant the
revolt in Turkey led by Mustafa Kemal,
who was to abolish the Empire and found
the Republic of Turkey.
There were also numerous revolts
throughout the Middle East. After 1919,
the repression was extremely brutal in
every territory placed under mandate.
Between 1920 and 1926, French Generals
Gouraud, Weygand and Sarrail practically
operated a military dictatorship in Syria,
and used bloody repression against the
Arab masses who rose up several times.
In Iraq in late 1919, a genuine revolt
developed against the British. Following
bloody repression, the British installed
Faisal as King of Iraq.
In Palestine, riots occurred against the
British mandate and Zionism in 1920,
9
A WAR FOR COLONIES
1921 and 1929. On each occasion, they
were brutally put down by British troops.
The two poles
Thus, immediately following the war,
the situation seemed to be clearly defined:
on one side the victorious Russian
Revolution which called for national
liberation, for the mobilisation of the
broadest masses for the right to a nation
and for the expropriation of the exploiters.
On the other side, the powers which,
having won the war, were sharing out the
world between themselves while
increasing the oppression of nations.
But everything had been turned upside
down. The Manifesto of the Second
Congress of the Communist International
pointed out: The bourgeoisie of the
whole world is looking back wistfully
upon the days just past. All the
foundations of international and internal
relations have been overthrown or
shaken. Threatening clouds darken the
future of the capitalist world. The old
system of alliances and mutual insurance
which formed the foundations of
international equilibrium and of armed
peace has been utterly destroyed by the
Imperialist War. The Versailles Treaty
has failed to establish any other
adjustment in its stead.
Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany
in succession have fallen out of the world
race. Some of the powerful empires which
had themselves previously played a
prominent part in the worlds plunder
have now become the objects of plunder
and dismemberment. ()
But there are defeated parties even in
the camp of the conquerors. Stupefied by
the fumes of a chauvinistic victory which
it had won for the benefit of others the
French bourgeoisie fancies that it has
become the ruler of Europe. But in reality
France has never been in such slavish
dependence upon the more powerful
governments of England and America
than she is today. ()
Japan, torn within her feudal shell by
capitalist contradictions, stands on the
verge of a great revolutionary crisis
which is already paralysing her
imperialist aspirations, in spite of the
favourable international situation.
Thus only two great powers remain:
Great Britain and the United States. ()
At the same time the national strife
within the bounds of the victorious
countries has reached its climax. The
English bourgeoisie which pretends to be
the guardian of the nations of the world is
incapable of solving the Irish question at
home.
Still more threatening is the national
question in the colonies. Egypt, India,
Persia are shaken by internal upheavals.
(18)
The First World War thus put an end to
any possibility of stabilising the
imperialist order; instead, as Trotsky
pointed out, it opened the epoch of wars
and revolutions and the epoch of
counter-revolution.
And in this new epoch, the flag of the
struggle for national independence, for
putting an end to colonial rule, had
definitively passed into the hands of the
working class engaged in the long and
difficult struggle for socialism.
ENDNOTES
(1) The term Negroes, which was
used in every publication at that time, did
not have the pejorative content it has
today. This also applies to documents
produced in the 1930s.
(2) General History of Africa, Vol.VII:
Africa under Colonial Domination 1880-
1935, Chapter 12, (UNESCO Press,
1990).
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Annam (Vietnamese: An Nam) was
a French protectorate encompassing the
central region of Vietnam. Vietnamese
were subsequently referred to as
Annamites.
(7) V I Lenin, Preliminary Draft
Theses on National and Colonial
Questions, 5 June 1920.
(8) The huge impact of the Russian
Revolution of 1917 was no doubt a factor
in the strong necessity felt by imperialism
to announce reforms. Presenting the
Report on Indian Constitutional
Reforms to Parliament in April 1918,
Lord Chelmsford, Viceroy of India,
explicitly referred to the Russian
Revolution in his justification: The
Russian Revolution in its beginning was
regarded in India as a triumph over
despotism; and notwithstanding the fact
that it has since involved that unhappy
country in anarchy and dismemberment, it
has given impetus to Indian political
aspirations. One will appreciate this
homage of vice to virtue.
(9) James Connolly, The Irish Flag,
published in Workers Republic, 8 April
1916.
(10) The French Section of the
Workers International (French acronym:
SFIO, widely known as the Socialist
Party) was formed in 1905 as a merger
between the French Socialist Party and
the Socialist Party of France. At its 18th
National Congress, held in Tours in
December 1920, a three-quarters majority
of delegates, who had opposed the First
World War and who now supported the
newly-created Communist International,
voted to split away to form the Section
Franaise de lInternationale
Communiste (SFIC). The majority of the
SFIOs elected officials chose to remain
in the SFIO and the Second International.
The SFIC was formally renamed the
Communist Party of France in 1943.
(11) From the first two Supplementary
Theses on National and Colonial
Questions, submitted as an amendment to
Lenins Theses of 5 June 1920 on this
subject. The Supplementary Theses were
adopted during the fourth session on 25
July 1920.
(12) This refers to the general strike of
1919, which mobilised 150,000 workers.
(13) Manifesto of the Communist
International to the Workers of the World,
adopted unanimously at the First World
Congress on 6 March 1919. See Leon
Trotsky, The First Five Years of the
Communist International, Vol.1.
(14) Harold R Isaacs, The Tragedy of
the Chinese Revolution, Chapter 1.
(15) Isaacs, op. cit., Chapter 2.
(16) The Shantung (or Shandong)
peninsula, previously under German
control, was occupied by Japan following
its allocation under the Treaty of
Versailles.
(17) Isaacs, op. cit., Chapter 3.
(18) The Capitalist World and the
Communist International, August 1920.
10
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
April 1917: The United States of
America goes to war against Germany
and the powers linked with it. With the
direct entry into the conflict of the most
powerful state outside of continental
Europe, the war indeed became a World
War not only in terms of its stakes but
through its participants.
Viewed strictly in terms of military
operations, on the eve of the US
intervention the Western Front remained
in deadlock: nether camp appeared
capable of bringing about a decisive
breakthrough. To the East, the revolution
that had begun in Russia had straightaway
overthrown tsarism; the new government
was giving assurances that it would
continue with the war on the side of the
Allies, but would it be able to?
The first detachments of the American
Expeditionary Forces arrived in France as
early as May. The US war industry, which
was operating at full capacity, no longer
had the European conflict simply as an
outlet: it was now a direct component part
of the conflict. However, several months
were needed before the US forces became
operational, to use the accepted phrase.
But in the spring and then the autumn of
1918, American troops played an
important role in defeating the last of
Germanys big offensives. The US
contribution tipped the scales in the
military situation.
The USs military engagement cost the
lives of 116,000 young Americans as
with all of the belligerent countries, most
of them were blue- and white-collar
workers, farmers and students. This figure
may appear low when compared to the
losses suffered by Germany (1,800,000),
France (1,600,000) and Great Britain
(800,000), but it underlines the fact that
trench warfare resulted in terrible carnage;
the American contingent had taken up
position in just a limited part of the front,
and that for only a few months
If we were to limit this brief and
necessary factual report to the figures, we
would be missing the main point.
Why did the United States intervene?
What is the historic significance of that
intervention?
US imperialism and the
establishment of imperialism at the
world level
The French statesman Raymond
Poincar referred to 1917 as the terrible
year. The Russian Revolution had begun
with the overthrow of the imperial regime
an uprising by the workers and peasants
against the war, poverty and autocracy. In
the army as all over the country, it was
embodied in a network of committees of
workers, peasants and soldiers (the
soviets); in October 1917, it was to result
in the establishment of the first workers
government.
Activity by the masses against the war
and the system that had caused it
developed everywhere: mutinies on the
Western Front and the Italian Front, and
strikes in Germany, France and Great
Britain.
The US military intervention was
straightaway a directly counter-
revolutionary intervention against the
peoples and workers of every country.
The intervention confirmed the
reactionary and imperialist character of
the conflict that was underway. The two
opposing camps were fighting for the
same goals of pillage and exploitation.
But more precisely, what was the
significance of this intervention for young
US imperialism itself, and what changes
would it bring about for the world
imperialist system?
Lenin wrote in December 1915:
Needless to say that there can be no
concrete historical analysis of the present
war, if that analysis does not have for its
basis a full understanding of the nature of
imperialism, both from its economic and
political aspects. (1)
How did Lenin summarise his
conception of imperialism? He wrote:
Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of
development at which the dominance of
monopolies and finance capital is
established; in which the export of capital
has acquired pronounced importance; in
which the division of the world among the
international trusts has begun, in which
the division of all territories of the globe
among the biggest capitalist powers has
been completed. (2)
Just before giving this concise
definition, Lenin pointed out:
Imperialism emerged as the development
and direct continuation of the
fundamental characteristics of capitalism
in general. But capitalism only became
capitalist imperialism at a definite and
very high stage of its development, when
certain of its fundamental characteristics
began to change into their opposites
().
The way in which the capitalist mode
of production developed in the United
States was a component part of that
worldwide process. Every study that
addressed the question of imperialism at
the time it was constituted the empirical
descriptions of the changes that were
underway, like the attempts to address the
question in Marxist terms, i.e. in relation
to the class struggle and the perspective of
the proletarian revolution referred to
what was happening in the United States.
In the very first pages of Imperialism,
the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin
noted that During the last fifteen to
twenty years, especially since the
Spanish-American War (1898) and the
Anglo-Boer War (18991902), the
11
April 1917:
The United States of America Goes to War
By Franois Forgue
economic and also the political literature
of the two hemispheres has more and
more often adopted the term
imperialism in order to describe the
present era. (3) As the 19th century drew
to a close, US capitalism and the US state
were already draping themselves in the
need to bring democracy in order to
install their rule using the worst forms of
violence. It was in Cuba that Pershing
who in 1914 was to command the US
forces in France first came to fame. The
carving-up by force of the colonial
possessions of the big powers, that
characteristic trait of imperialism which
was to be the root-cause of the First
World War, was the motivation for US
policy 15 years earlier, with regard to
Spain. The emergence of the United
States as a world power was a constituent
element of imperialism at the world level.
In the United States itself, the period
that followed the Civil War was a period
of frenzied development in every sector of
the economy. Between 1860 and 1884,
coal-extraction rose from 14 million to
100 million tons; between 1880 and 1910
steel production increased 25-fold. This
period also saw the spread of the railways.
There were already 330,000 kilometres of
railtrack in 1890; in 1911 this had risen to
540,000 km. We will not review here the
bloody epic of the building of a modern
economy across the country-continent, the
reign of the robber barons. In order to
carry out this titanic task, the number of
loans had to increase tenfold. The banks
brought the developing branches of
industry under their control and
guaranteed them in order better to control
their concentration; during the 1890s, the
majority of the rail companies merged
into six networks, four of which were
completely controlled by the Morgan
bank. The banks themselves underwent
the same process of concentration, as
pointed out by Bukharin: In the United
States there are only two banks of such
importance: The National City Bank (the
Rockefeller firm) and the National Bank
of Commerce (the Morgan firm). (4)
Lenin pointed to the United States as a
country where concentration was
increasing: Almost half the total
production of all the enterprises of the
country was carried on by one-hundredth
part of these enterprises! These 3,000
giant enterprises embrace 258 branches
of industry. From this it can be seen that
at a certain stage of its development
concentration itself, as it were, leads
straight to monopoly. (5)
It was in reference to US firms
Standard Oil, the United States Steel
Corporation as well as German
examples that Lenin specified his
definition of the concentration of the
monopolies: The concentration of
production; the monopolies arising
therefrom; the merging or coalescence of
the banks with industry such is the
history of the rise of finance capital and
such is the content of that concept. (6)
This epoch of tempestuous
developments was also a period of violent
class struggles.
If one of the conditions of capitalism
booming in the United States had been the
destruction of the slavery system through
war, one of the necessities for the stability
of the system of capitalist exploitation had
been the crushing of the revolutionary
movement of the Blacks in the South,
who for the first time in the history of the
United States were in the majority in
some state assemblies and were posing
the question of radical land reform. It was
this process that was to form the basis of
widespread racial segregation.
It was at the moment when this
veritable counter-revolution was
completed in 1877 that the state placed its
means for repression at the service of the
railway magnates to crush a strike-wave
which had been started by the railworkers
but which was actively supported by
broad sectors of the population.
It was again the railworkers who
entered into struggle in 1884. In 1885-6,
there was the huge movement for the 8-
hour day which culminated in Chicago on
1 May 1886 and was smashed through
bloody repression, notably accompanied
by the conviction of six of the
movements main organisers following a
provocation involving a bombing. The
latter decades of the 19th century and the
first decades of the 20th were marked by
intense class conflicts, especially in the
mines. It was during this period that the
labour organisations that succeeded the
Knights of Labor, which were to play a
predominant role in the class struggle,
were formed: the American Federation of
Labor (AFL) set up in 1886 and the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
founded in 1905 (7).
The particular characteristic of the
development of capitalism in the United
States during the second half of the 19th
century and the early part of the 20
th
was
that its expansion in the course of which
some of the characteristics of imperialism
emerged occurred mainly within
national borders as they had been defined
at the time, including through previous
conquests (e.g. the Mexican War, 1846-
8). In order to consolidate its empire, US
capitalism needed to expand, hence the
war in Cuba and the Philippines, and the
incursions into Central America and
Mexico. But these imperialist thrusts had
a secondary impact on the economy: the
domestic market remained the
determining factor.
At the turn of the century, the United
States became the most powerful
industrial power in the world. In absolute
figures, its coal production, for example,
was higher than in all other capitalist
countries, and the same was true for steel
production. Although American capital
was exported in large quantities to
Mexico and Latin America, the United
States remained above all a country where
foreign capital was invested. British
capital in particular realised large profits
from its financing of the building of the
railways.
Although a big industrial power the
worlds leading power in certain sectors
the United States did not yet challenge the
domination of the world market exercised
by the old capitalist powers, notably Great
Britain. But everything about its
development headed towards challenging
the basis on which the world market was
constituted. War would provide the
occasion and the form through which
these imperialist tendencies would impose
themselves.
The master of the capitalist world
The main outcome of the First World
12
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
War which had clearly turned into a
civil war was the victory of the
October Revolution under the direction of
the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky
and the establishment of the first workers
state.
On 28 July 1924, ten years after the
start of the war, Leon Trotsky delivered a
speech on the Perspectives of World
Development. (8) He spoke of the United
States at that time as the central figure in
the modern history of mankind and
emphasised that whoever wishes or tries
today to discuss the destiny of Europe or
of the world proletariat without taking the
power and significance of the USA into
account, is in a certain sense drawing up
a balance-sheet without consulting the
master. For the master of the capitalist
world and let us firmly understand this!
is New York, with Washington as its
state department. We observe this today
even if only in the plan drawn up by the
experts. We observe that Europe, which
only yesterday was so powerful and so
proud of her culture and her historical
past we observe that in order to get out
from under, in order to crawl out on all
fours from those fearful contradictions
and misfortunes into which Europe has
driven herself, she is compelled to invite
from across the Atlantic a general by the
name of Dawes () [to draw up] a
precise prescription concerning the
regulations and dates of Europes
restoration. (9)
It was during this speech that Trotsky
defined the wishes of US capitalism with
regard to the European imperialisms using
his famous and often-quoted formulation:
under the hegemony of American
capitalism, Europe will be permitted to
rise again, but within limits set in
advance, with certain restricted sections
of the world market allotted to it. (). If
we wish to give a clear and precise
answer to the question of what American
imperialism wants, we must say: It wants
to put capitalist Europe on rations.
This had nothing to do with a
programme aimed at establishing a
peaceful balance, a harmonious division.
This American pacifist programme of
universal bondage is by no means a
peaceful one. On the contrary, it is
pregnant with wars and the greatest
revolutionary paroxysms. () The
indicated era of pacifist Americanism is
laying the groundwork for new wars on
an unprecedented scale and of
unimaginable monstrousness, Trotsky
added.
These lines first appeared in 1924. It
would be misleading to yield to
temptation and see them by analogy as a
key which on its own would allow us to
understand todays developments, almost
a century later, just as it would be
pointless to indulge in academic exercises
aimed at evaluating, after the event, the
validity of this or that forecast.
The onward march of the international
class struggle had already changed many
of the facts ten years further on: the crisis
of the whole capitalist system, certainly
adding to the decline of Europe but also
hitting the leading capitalist power itself
with unparalleled force; the rise of
fascism in the face of the threat of social
revolution; the degeneration of the state
that resulted from the Russian Revolution;
the political counter-revolution waged by
Stalinism, etc.
The Second World War, its
consequences, the revolutionary
upheavals it generated, the situation
created by the survival of an imperialist
system in decay, the collapse of the USSR
whose foundations had been undermined
by the bureaucracy, all constituted a new
situation in which the United States
nevertheless remained the leading
imperialist power.
What is striking above all is the degree
to which the issues raised by Trotsky have
in no way been resolved and have retained
all of their importance. The world
capitalist system has only been able to
survive by preserving and enhancing the
major role played by the United States.
There has not been any new factor,
redistribution of roles or change in the
hierarchy within the capitalist system:
This Babylonian tower of American
economic might must find its expression
in everything, and it is already expressing
itself, but not yet fully by far, Trotsky
said in 1924. Is this not exactly what was
imposed via the catastrophes that have
punctuated the history of the preservation
of the capitalist system? And are not the
obstacles facing US capital rooted in the
generalised crisis of the capitalist system
itself?
The amazing expansion of American
capitalism, its manifest power acquired in
the very first years of the 20th century, the
degree of concentration that was achieved
in the US, the role of the monopolies and
the role of finance capitalism, all required
that in order for the United States to
become fully-formed as an imperialist
power, its combative diplomacy and its
recourse to military aggression should no
longer be exercised first and foremost at
the regional or continental level. In order
to become the leading imperialist power
in the full sense of the term realising the
potential offered by the development that
had brought it thus far the American
imperialist state had to assert its rights
through war.
When President Wilson who on
several occasions had repeated that the
United States would remain neutral
asked Congress for its approval for
entering the First World War (which
Congress granted by a large majority) he
justified it by defending the right of US
citizens to sail on merchant ships in the
war zone. In fact, this was an affirmation
of free trade in a sophisticated form.
Once again, the main issue is stated in
Europe and America. After detailing the
stages on the path of imperialism to which
the United States had deliberately
committed (the Spanish-American War of
1898, the detaching of the province of
Panama from Colombia and the
construction of the Panama Canal),
Trotsky wrote:
The decisive signpost along this road
was the war. As you will recall, the US
intervened in the war toward the very end.
For three years the US did no fighting.
More than that, two months before
intervening in the war, Wilson announced
that there could be no talk of American
participation in the bloody dogfight
among the madmen of Europe. Up to a
certain moment the US remained content
with rationally coining into dollars the
blood of European madmen. But in that
hour when fear arose lest the war
conclude with victory for Germany, the
13
APRIL 1917: USA GOES TO WAR
most dangerous future rival, the United
States intervened actively. This decided
the outcome of the struggle. () America
avariciously fed the war with her industry
and avariciously intervened in order to
help crush a likely and dangerous
competitor.
War is the health of the state
War is the health of the state. This is
the title given by American historian
Howard Zinn to a chapter in his book A
Peoples History of the United States. It
was the title of a book by an American
writer, Randolph Bourne, published
during the First World War.
On the eve of the war in 1914, Zinn
points out, the United States was suffering
a serious recession. During his 1912
presidential campaign, Wilson stated:
Our domestic markets no longer suffice,
we need foreign markets.
The outbreak of the war in Europe
constituted a drive-wheel that benefited
the whole of the US economy. US
industries became the main suppliers of
war materials to the Allies: the massacre
that was underway offered an endlessly
renewable outlet for the means of
destruction supplied by the Americans. In
April 1917, the United States had sold
more than US$2 billions worth of goods
to the Allies. To appreciate the
significance of this amount, we should
bear in mind that during the same period,
private investment in the United States
amounted to US$3.5 billion. Howard Zinn
notes: With World War I, England
became more and more a market for
American goods and for loans at interest.
J P Morgan and Company acted as agents
for the Allies, and when, in 1915, Wilson
lifted the ban on private bank loans to the
Allies, Morgan could now begin lending
money in such great amounts as to both
make great profit and tie American
finance closely to the interest of a British
victory in the war against Germany. (10)
More generally, it was in the crucible
of war that US imperialism re-invented
itself, undergoing the transformation that
would see it become the worlds principal
factory, its principal depot for
commodities and its central banker, as
Trotsky explained in Europe and
America.
Immediately, there was prosperity,
accumulation of profits linked to the war
and good health for the exploiters,
which also meant good health for their
state.
The war would of course be good for
the state in yet another sense. We referred
in the first part of this article to the
intensity of the class struggle in the
United States. The years leading up to the
outbreak of the First World War were
marked by an upsurge in the activity of
the working class in all fields, an upsurge
in struggles for demands which
sometimes resulted in clashes with the
state apparatus and which in every case
signalled a broadening and deepening of
trade union activity. This was the case
over the course of several months,
including after the United States entry
into the war.
The revolutionary trade union
organisation Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW) was to play a decisive role
in these conflicts. It was the IWW that led
the big strike by textile workers in
Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 a
strike that could not be broken through
attempts to divide or recourse to police
repression (the town of Lawrence was
placed under siege and the trade union
leaders were jailed). The IWW turned the
strike, which involved nearly 30,000
workers, into a national issue. Another
strike began in early 1913, in the silk
industry in Paterson, New Jersey. There
again, police repression and solidarity
demonstrations turned it into a national
event.
Other strikes did not succeed in having
the demands met. But they were
significant, not only because they
evidenced the workers combativity and
wish to organise, but also because they
marked the IWWs entry into the most
crucial of industrys sectors, sometimes
also drawing AFL trade unions into
joining the strikes. This was the case in
Akron, Ohio, following a spontaneous
movement that began in the big tyre-
pressing factories, and with the strike at
auto-manufacturer Studebaker in Detroit.
We could also include in the list of
significant conflicts the strike the by iron
ore miners of the Messabi Range in
Minnesota, which involved 6,000 workers
in 1916. There, the powerful United
States Steel Corporation had to give way,
and was forced to agree to an 8-hour
working day and a wage-rise across the
board of around 10 percent.
The trade union leader Eugene Debs,
who was the moving spirit of the big
Pullman Strike in 1894, has become one
of the main representatives of the
Socialist Party. Under his leadership, the
party developed widely, and in the 1912
presidential election Debs stood as a
candidate and received nearly one million
votes, doubling the result he obtained in
1908.
The capitalists and their political
representation, their state, demonstrated
their concern in the face of this surge of
the socialist labour movement. Just before
Wilson became President, a strike broke
out in the mines in Colorado run by the
Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation,
owned by the Rockefeller family. Very
quickly, the bosses turned to violence;
strike-breakers were brought into the
mines under the protection of armed men
who attacked the strikers, killing several
of them. In April 1914, after eight months
of strike, Rockefeller called out the
National Guard, who attacked the strikers
encampment, killing 26 people. Many
miners then took up arms in turn. Finally,
federal troops had to be called in, and a
conciliation commission was set up
What appeared at the time as a messy
moment was to become the norm. the
United States entry into the war gave the
State the opportunity to engage in a
violent and bloody offensive against the
labour movement, amounting to a
preventive civil war.
In June 1917, Congress passed the
Espionage Act. In the name of taking
action against espionage, this repressive
law in fact put into question the most
fundamental of democratic rights enjoyed
by US citizens, including their right to
have an opinion and to express it at least
as far as the war was concerned.
The new law had a clause that
provided penalties up to twenty years in
prison for Whoever, when the United
14
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
States is at war, shall wilfully cause or
attempt to cause insubordination,
disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in
the military or naval forces of the United
States, or shall wilfully obstruct the
recruiting or enlistment service of the
US. (11)
As one can gather, an article or a
speech explaining the causes of the war,
even if it did not involve any slogan,
could fall under the Act. Randolph
Bourne, the author of the book War Is the
Health of the State, was obliged to
undergo its rigours.
Howard Zinn quotes one example of
the application of this law which
demonstrates all of its arbitrariness but
which also displays unintended humour.
The maker of a film entitled The Spirit of
76 was sentenced to 10 years in prison
under this law because, the judge said, the
film tended to question the good faith of
our ally, Great Britain. The film was
based on the American Revolution of
1776 and depicted atrocities committed by
the British colonial troops! (12)
But where the Espionage Act was used
most liberally was against the labour
movement, combined with activities by
extra-legal militias that involved
attacks, kidnapping and lynching.
Although Samuel Gompers and most
of the AFL leadership agreed to
participate in the war effort, the
government was not able to enlist the
support of the Socialist Party or the IWW.
Just after the declaration of war, the
Socialist Party held an emergency
conference in St. Louis which described
the declaration of war as a crime against
the people of the United States. Without
giving slogans opposing recruitment and
then conscription, the IWW condemned
the United States entry into the war.
Initially, the government was counting
on attracting volunteers, but after six
weeks only 73, 000 volunteers had
enlisted. It needed to pass a law bringing
in conscription.
Throughout the United States,
thousands of socialist activists, trade
unionists and pacifists were arrested.
More than 900 people were convicted
under the Espionage Act. There were
hundreds of incidents where groups of
outraged patriots broke up meetings,
trashed offices and injured or killed
labour activists.
In the case of the IWW, a real manhunt
was unleashed across the country. Daniel
Gurin summarised the situation as
follows, in O va le peuple amricain?
[Where Are the American People Going?]
(Paris: Julliard, 1950-1): The entry of the
United States into the war unleashed
fierce repression against the. All of the
combined forces of capitalism, the public
authorities and veterans used as fascist
militias were employed in crushing them
(). Thousands of IWW members were
arrested and given long prison
sentences.
The American Trotskyist leader James
P. Cannon, who before being one of the
founders of the Communist Party of
America had been a IWW organiser,
shared this view. He even thought that the
disorganisation produced by the
repression and the need to concentrate
every effort on solidarity between
prisoners had hindered the discussion on
the Russian Revolution which would have
allowed the majority of the IWW to move
towards the Communist International.
The same policy of repression was
unleashed on the Socialist Party.
Thus, its most popular leader, Eugene
Debs, was convicted for having delivered
a speech against war in Canton, Ohio, on
16 June 1918, recalling that Wars
throughout history have been waged for
conquest and plunder (see the excerpts
from this speech featured separately in
this article). He was charged under the
Espionage Act on the basis that his words
could incite his audience to resist the
draft. He was sentenced to 10 years in
prison. He appealed, and his appeal was
heard by the Supreme Court in 1919. The
war had ended. Nevertheless, the sentence
was upheld. That 66-year-old man then
spent three years in a federal penitentiary
under strict conditions, before being freed
by presidential order. (13)
Physically worn-out, Debs died in
1926. During the final phase of his life, he
did not play the role he could have. In the
name of unity between all socialists, he
came out in favour of a utopian
reconstitution of the Socialist Party on the
same basis as just before the war he
refused to go further down the path of the
Bolshevism he had begun to draw on in
his Canton, Ohio Speech. His evolution
cannot be separated from the
consequences for the whole of the
American labour movement of the wave
of reaction generated by the war. All the
restrictions on the right to organise and
the right of expression decreed in the
name of the state of war were
maintained for years afterwards. They
provided the legal basis for a reign of
terror directed against Communist,
anarchist and trade union activists, against
Blacks and against immigrant workers
during the 1920s, as means of
discouraging a new upsurge by the
working class in the world and in the
United States itself, expressed most
notably in the Seattle General Strike of
January 1919.
Through its participation in the first
global conflict, US imperialism created
the conditions for the global role it was to
play. In direct terms, the United States
going to war met counter-revolutionary
objectives, forming part of the
conversion of the imperialist war into
civil war (14), but in the camp of the
counter-revolution. Occurring in 1917,
after the Russian Revolution had begun to
erupt and at the time when the first
mutinies were occurring at the Front and
strikes were breaking out in Britain,
Germany and France, it was a counter-
revolutionary operation.
At the same time as US imperialism
was using war to begin to impose itself as
the leading imperialism, it was led to play
the role of main guarantor of the world
order against the revolution. In order to
play that role, it first had to carry it out in
the United States itself, against the
American working class.
15
APRIL 1917: USA GOES TO WAR
Excerpts from
the anti-war
speech given by
Eugene Debs on
16 June 1918
(The Canton,
Ohio Speech)
Wars throughout history have been
waged for conquest and plunder. (...)
And here let me emphasize the fact
and it cannot be repeated too often that
the working class who fight all the battles,
the working class who make the supreme
sacrifices, the working class who freely
shed their blood and furnish the corpses,
have never yet had a voice in either
declaring war or making peace. It is the
ruling class that invariably does both.
They alone declare war and they alone
make peace. ()
Yes, my comrades, my heart is attuned
to yours. Aye, all our hearts now throb as
one great heart responsive to the battle
cry of the social revolution. Here, in this
alert and inspiring assemblage our hearts
are with the Bolsheviki of Russia. Those
heroic men and women, those
unconquerable comrades have by their
incomparable valour and sacrifice added
fresh lustre to the fame of the
international movement. Those Russian
comrades of ours have made greater
sacrifices, have suffered more, and have
shed more heroic blood than any like
number of men and women anywhere on
earth; they have laid the foundation of the
first real democracy that ever drew the
breath of life in this world. And the very
first act of the triumphant Russian
revolution was to proclaim a state of
peace with all mankind ().
Here we have the very breath of
democracy, the quintessence of the
dawning freedom. The Russian revolution
proclaimed its glorious triumph in its
ringing and inspiring appeal to the
peoples of all the earth. ()
ENDNOTES
(1) Introduction to Nikolai Bukharins
Imperialism and World Economy.
(2) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism, Chapter VII: Imperialism as
a Special Stage of Capitalism.
(3) Preface to the French and German
editions, July 1920.
(4) Imperialism and World Economy,
Chapter IV.
(5) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism, Chapter I: Concentration of
production and monopolies.
(6) Op. cit., Chapter III: Finance
Capital and the Financial Oligarchy.
(7) The Knights of Labor was one of
the first national organisations of a trade
union nature formed just after the
American Civil War. It retained the
character of a society whose members
were initiates, but addressed all workers.
It was to play an important role after
1876. The AFL organised the workers on
the basis of craft unions. For decades it
was to be the main trade union
organisation in the United States. By
refusing to organise unskilled workers or
those in insecure jobs the mass of
immigrant workers and by rejecting
Black workers, in practice it limited its
activity to the labour aristocracy. Its main
leader, Samuel Gompers, would give his
name to what was referred to as business
unionism: Gomperism.
The Industrial Workers of the World,
which stood for revolutionary trade
unionism, called for the setting-up of trade
union organisations based on the branches
of industry. They would be in the
vanguard of organising millions of
immigrant workers, and through their
activity they prefigured what was to
become the Congress of Industrial
Organisations (CIO).
(8) The speech was published the
following month as The Premises for the
Proletarian Revolution. This and a second
speech were published together in
February 1926 as the pamphlet Europe
and America.
(9) Charles Dawes had been appointed
by the US government as head of a
committee of experts with the job of
overseeing the economic reorganisation of
Europe following the end of the First
World War.
(10) A Peoples History of the United
States, Chapter 14.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Ibid. Zinn points out a further
irony: The case was officially listed as
U.S. v. Spirit of 76.
(13) President Harding commuted
Debs sentence to time served.
(14) See V I Lenin, Socialism and War,
Chapter 1.
16
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
Preamble
At 9.00pm on 26 October 1917, the
Second All-Russia Congress of the soviets
(councils) of workers and soldiers opened
its session in Petrograd. The Kerensky
government, which had tried to relaunch
the war offensive (tsarist Russia was the
ally of Britain and France), had been
overthrown, its ministers arrested. The
congress of the new regime had three
major questions on its agenda: la peace,
land and the formation of a new
government.
Because it was important for the
revolution first of all to keep its promise
to have done with the imperialist war,
which on average was killing 1, 459
Russian soldiers every day. This demand
was at the heart of the uprising that had
swept the tsarist regime from power. It
had also been the continuation of the war
in defiance of popular aspirations that had
dug the trench that separated the masses
and the Provisional Government.
As rapporteur on peace at the 26
October session, Lenin proposed the
following decree: The workers and
peasants government, created by the
Revolution of October 24-25 and basing
itself on the Soviet of Workers, Soldiers
and Peasants Deputies, calls upon all the
belligerent peoples and their government
to start immediate negotiations for a just,
democratic peace. (1)
The terms used were carefully
calculated: they were directed
simultaneously at the warmongering
governments in power and the peoples
who were suffering terrible carnage. In
effect, it was necessary to avoid giving
any pretext whatsoever to the
governments to postpone or refuse to hold
talks. The conditions proposed were even
more precise: immediate peace, without
annexations or contributions to
reparations.
In view of the diplomatic traditions of
lies and hypocrisy, and of the thousand
and one pretexts used by imperialism to
subjugate nations and colonise them, a
long paragraph specified the exact
meaning of the word annexation:
In accordance with the sense of
justice of democrats in general, and of the
working class in particular, the
government conceives the annexation of
seizure of foreign lands to mean every
incorporation of a small or weak nation
into large or powerful state without the
precisely, clearly, and voluntarily
expressed consent and wish of that nation,
irrespective of the time when such forcible
incorporation took place, irrespective
also of the degree of development or
backwardness of the nation forcibly
annexed to the given state, or forcibly
retained within its borders, and
irrespective, finally, of whether this nation
is in Europe or in distant, overseas
countries.
Then, the same decree provided the
workers of the whole world with the
famous proof of the rigour and good faith
of the first workers and peasants
government in world history: The
government abolishes secret diplomacy
(). It will proceed immediately with the
full publication of the secret treaties
endorsed or concluded by the government
of land-owners and capitalists from
February to 25 October 1917.
It addressed the class-conscious
workers of the three most advanced
nations of mankind and the largest states
participating in the present war, namely,
Great Britain, France, and Germany.
This address to the peoples and
governments for immediate peace was
adopted unanimously and enthusiastically.
The Bolsheviks, who were in the
majority, had been joined by other parties:
the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (S-Rs),
the Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian Social-
Democrats, etc.
To describe the moment, let us refer to
Leon Trotsky, soon to be appointed
Peoples Commissar for Foreign Affairs
with responsibility for the peace-talks,
who quoted the activist-observer and
writer John Reed:
Listen, nations! The revolution offers
you peace. It will be accused of violating
treaties. But of this it is proud. To break
up the leagues of bloody predation is the
greatest historic service. The Bolsheviks
have dared to do it. They alone have
dared. Pride surges up of its own accord.
Eyes shine. All are on their feet. No one is
smoking now. It seems as though no one
breathes. The presidium, the delegates,
the guests, the sentries, join in a hymn of
insurrection and brotherhood.
Suddenly, by common impulse,
the story will soon be told by John Reed,
observer and participant, chronicler and
poet of the insurrection we found
ourselves on our feet, mumbling together
into the smooth lifting unison of the
Internationale. A grizzled old soldier was
sobbing like a child. Alexandra Kollontai
rapidly winked the tears back. The
immense sound rolled through the hall,
17
The Unfortunate Peace of Brest-Litovsk
The Dilemmas Facing the Russian
Revolutionary Party
By Michel Srac
burst windows and doors and soared into
the quiet sky.
Did it go altogether into the sky? Did it
not go also to the autumn trenches, that
hatch-work upon unhappy, crucified
Europe, to her devastated cities and
villages, to her mothers and wives in
mourning? Arise ye prisoners of
starvation! Arise ye wretched of the
earth! The words of the song were freed
of all qualifications. They fused with the
decree of the government, and hence
resounded with the force of a direct act.
Everyone felt greater and more important
in that hour. The heart of the revolution
enlarged to the width of the whole world.
(2)
As early as 7 November, this peace
proposal was cabled to every government
engaged in the war, and simultaneously
transmitted to the peoples of the
belligerent nations.
In all the general enthusiasm, a single
slightly discordant voice could be heard.
The Bolshevik Eremeyev asked for the
peace conditions to be formulated towards
the governments as an ultimatum. Lenin
was opposed: this verbal intransigence
would be used by the imperialist
governments to avoid the issue. Reporting
on this exchange as a historian, Trotsky
observed: The future disagreements over
Brest-Litovsk gleam out for a moment
already in this episode. (3)
Three months later, faced with the
terrible peace conditions dictated by the
Central Powers to a weakened Soviet
Russia, the Bolshevik Party and the
Congress of Soviets were to tear each
other apart. Lenin, in the minority for a
long time, would have no other solution
than to use the threat of his resignation
from both the partys Central Committee
and the soviet government. The revolution
was on the brink of the abyss.
I. Truce: the situation becomes
complex
A three-week truce was signed on 22
November at Brest-Litovsk, then on 2
December the armistice came into force
on all fronts, from the Baltic Sea to the
Carpathian Mountains (Austria-Hungary).
It was a territorial status quo; the armies
remained camped on their positions. The
truce was renewed in late December.
Negotiations were opened on 9
December. Trotsky, who from 27
December represented the soviet
government, put an end to the informality
which the skilful Austro-Hungarian and
German diplomats had tried to establish
with the Russian delegation. He proposed
to them that the views of the imprisoned
internationalists Karl Liebknecht and
Rosa Luxemburg should be made known
to the German troops.
We should remember that at that time,
the Bolshevik Party which wanted to lay
the foundations of the Third International
had for several years been completely
united on the internationalist positions of
Marxism. Everybody was fully aware that
the Russian Revolution, which had
occurred in an economically backward
country, depended on the progress and
rhythms of the revolution in Europe, and
especially on the German revolution.
The Tsars allies, the governments of
France and Britain, had not deigned to
reply to the peace proposals. Instead they
immediately started up the patriotic
propaganda machine (the familiar
brainwashing), spreading the slander of
an alliance between the Russian
revolutionaries and the German enemy,
the Kaiser.
No other uprising occurred in Europe
in the autumn of 1917. It was therefore
necessary to define a tactic that would
allow the demand of the masses
immediate peace to be satisfied and at
the same time would win some time,
safeguarding the first proletarian position
that had been won until other revolutions
followed.
Moreover, all along that vast military
front stretching for thousands of
kilometres, the Russian army was
exhausted and starving, and many soldiers
were throwing down their weapons and
going home.
The proposal for a just and democratic
peace without annexations was met with
the shameless response by the Central
Powers that they would respect this
formula and the self-determination of
nations. But the imperialist diplomats and
generals present in Brest-Litovsk did not
take long in clarifying the meaning they
gave to that respect: Khlmann, for
instance, was anxious to show that the
German seizure of Poland, Lithuania, the
Baltic provinces and Finland was nothing
more than a form of self-determination
on the part of each of these countries,
since their will was being expressed
through national organs created by the
German authorities of occupation. (4)
On 5 January 1918, the imperial
representatives laid out their territorial
demands at the negotiating table. They
intended actually to annex Poland,
Lithuania and Latvia, which they were
then occupying.
The tensions and disagreements that
had been troubling the Bolshevik Party
for weeks suddenly reached new heights
in the face of the need to respond to this
diktat.
II. Internal clashes: peace with
annexations or revolutionary war?
In the preceding crises that had shaken
the Bolshevik Party since February after
Lenins April Theses demanding a break
with the Provisional Government, then at
the time of the insurrection itself the
positions being expressed could be
grouped along classic left-right lines.
Lenin and Trotsky, who solidly supported
the slogan All power to the soviets and
then the insurrection, represented the left
of the party in each instance.
Up to Lenins return in April 1917, the
partys policy had swung sharply to the
right under the influence of Kamenev
and Stalin (5). Stalin had adopted the
viewpoint of a division of tasks between
the soviets and the Provisional
Government, which amounted to giving
the latter unconditional support. Turning
his back on the policy espoused
constantly by Lenin since 1914 which
was scathing towards the criminal
betrayal of the social-patriots and the
social-chauvinists of the Second
International Kamenev used the
18
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
columns of Pravda to condemn the slogan
Down with war, to the great satisfaction
of the petty-bourgeois parties that
followed Kerensky in his national defence
policy, which was a continuation of the
tsars. Under this opportunist leadership,
the Bolsheviks were tending to become
the left flank of Menshevism;
furthermore, in the countryside the two
parties often came together in joint
organisations.
The protest began with the workers
mass meetings and soviets, which rose up
against the patriotic line being voiced in
Pravda. Then: In the broad party mass a
quick differentiation took place leftward
and leftward toward the theses of
Lenin. (6)
The second internal clash was even
clearer. On the eve of the agreed
insurrection, Kamenev and Zinoviev
publicly took a position that condemned
it. They kept up this political behaviour
even after the insurrection, seeking an
agreement with all the socialists within
the soviet government, with those same
socialist conciliators whom the revolution
had defeated. When, during talks opened
on Kamenevs initiative, those so-called
socialists proposed to him a government
in which the Bolsheviks would hold 5
posts out of 18, to the exclusion of Lenin
and Trotsky, Kamenev replied: There is
no cause for a break (7).
In the winter of 1917-18, things
appeared very different. Together with the
majority of the partys Central Committee
around Bukharin, Pyatakov and others,
who were presenting themselves as Left
Communists, a mass of militant activists
oriented towards the slogan of a
revolutionary war, rejecting peace talks;
to their eyes, this position was the only
one that was compatible with
internationalism and helping towards the
European revolution.
Lenin, initially in the extreme minority
(this point was similar to the period of the
April Theses), used a deliberately blunt
formulation to argue that they should
accept this peace with annexations now.
(8)
Trotsky shared Lenins opposition to a
revolutionary war, which he also thought
was impossible, but disagreed with him
over signing the peace treaty. This
disagreement became more pronounced
when Trotsky left the peace talks at Brest-
Litovsk on 30 January without signing. In
a sense, one could say that his position
was located in the centre of a division
within which Lenin would be classified as
being the right More precisely, he
was to describe his position as a bridge
between the two camps that had formed,
allowing the partys majority to move
towards Lenins position. Because, he
said, at that time Lenins point could
have been carried out by means of a split
in the party and a coup dtat but not
otherwise. (9)
At that moment in January-February
1918 the situation regarding the fate of
the revolution was perilous.
Let us take a look at the unfolding of
events and the formation of political
currents between October 1917 and
February 1918, in order to draw all the
possible lessons. We will then see what
we should make of the divisions between
them.
A. The left in favour of
revolutionary war
The opening of peace talks, two
months after the seizure of power, was
met with hostility by Bukharins left-wing
current. This position was expressed in a
cartoonish way inside the partys
organisations in Moscow. The partys
Moscow leadership called for the
breaking-off of diplomatic relations with
all imperialisms and all-out war against
the bourgeoisie of the whole world! (10)
In January, Lenins position signing a
peace agreement with annexations
presented in a meeting of 400 militant
activists was defeated by 387 votes to 13.
The slogan of revolutionary war was also
carried in Petrograd, in the Ural region
and Siberia, together with the demand for
a congress that would rule against signing
a peace treaty.
Let us repeat: all of the Bolsheviks
were convinced that the survival of the
revolution was linked to the fate of the
German revolution. The left, carried
away by the relative ease of the
victories over the Tsar and then Kerensky,
as Lenin put it, was gambling merely on
the chance that the German revolution
may begin in the immediate future, within
a matter of weeks. (11)
It would be a mistake to view this as
the result of simple overexcitement.
Having entered its fourth year, the
imperialist slaughter provoked sizeable
revolts in late 1917. In December, strikes
spread across Austria-Hungary. In Vienna
(Austria), strike action affected every
factory, supported by demonstrations of
women protesting against famine. The
industrial regions of Upper Austria, Styria
and Hungary were affected. The first
workers councils made their appearance
in the workers mass rallies. In January
1918, the movement spread to Warsaw,
which was occupied by the German army.
In Berlin itself, factories were on strike,
accompanied by the election of secret
delegates. On 17 January, 5,000 sailors on
14 warships raised the red flag in
Dalmatia. Rejection of the war, mutinies:
the awakening of the masses as they
shook off the yoke of the patriotic terror
could be felt throughout Europe. These
stirrings were seized upon by the left of
the Bolshevik Party which held the
majority as justifying the refusal to sign
a peace agreement and the commitment to
a revolutionary war, reinforcing the
revolution in Europe. It was these hopes
that were added to indignation when the
imperialist predators put forward their
demands for annexations. Signing a peace
agreement was presented at the time as
weakening the European revolution, on
which the young Russian Revolution
depended.
B. Positions common to Lenin and
Trotsky
Both revolutionary leaders made the
same observation: the Russian army,
which had risen up against the
continuation of the war, was exhausted
and disorganised; worn-out soldiers were
leaving the front. On his way to Brest-
Litovsk for the first time, Trotsky
observed: the trenches were almost
deserted. (12) Addressing his left-wing
adversaries, Lenin tirelessly invited them
to visit the front to observe the state of the
19
THE UNFORTUNATE PEACE OF BREST-LITOVSK
army to which they wanted to give the job
of waging a revolutionary war. They
refrained from doing so.
Secondly, both revolutionaries who
had returned to Russia after long years
abroad had since 1914 fought against
and assessed the most terrible betrayal in
history: the crossing-over of the leaders of
the Second International to the camp of
the imperialist war, depriving the working
class of its political parties and pushing it
into the patriotic slaughter, while the
socialist traitors became servile
Ministers to the bourgeoisie. The Third
International would appear in 1919. In
Vienna and Warsaw, the social-chauvinist
leaders acted in the interests of their
bourgeoisie, breaking the strikes on the
pretext of minor concessions. The sailors
revolt in Dalmatia was brutally
suppressed.
If they were convinced that the future
of the revolution depended on Europe,
both Lenin and Trotsky were no less
convinced that the option of revolutionary
war was unrealistic and fanciful. Because
at that time, as Lenin drummed home, the
old Russian army was disorganised and
the new governments revolutionary army
had not yet been formed.
What was to be done in this tricky
situation? The truce and armistice were
deliberately extended through the tactics
employed by Trotsky delaying tactics,
reopening of discussions that had already
been resolved and this procrastination
did not go unnoticed by the cunning
German diplomats. In short, they played
for time for as long as possible during the
months of December and January. The
partys three currents were in agreement
on this temporary tactic, each one
maintaining its strategic positions.
On 21 January, just as Lenins Twenty-
One Theses of 7 January, in favour of a
separate peace with annexations, were
being published within the party, Lenin
added the following last-minute 22nd
thesis: The mass strikes in Austria and
Germany, and, subsequently, the
formation of the Soviets of Workers
Deputies in Berlin and Vienna, and,
lastly, beginning from 18-20 January,
armed clashes and street fighting in
Berlin all this should be regarded as
evidence of the fact that the revolution in
Germany has begun. This fact offers us
the opportunity, for the time being, of
further delaying and dragging out the
peace negotiations.
c. Disagreements between Lenin and
Trotsky
Here is how Trotsky, writing in My
Life in 1930, summarises his reasoning
and choices at that time: It was obvious
that going on with the war was
impossible. On this point, there was not
even a shadow of disagreement between
Lenin and me. We were both equally
bewildered at Bukharin and the other
apostles of a revolutionary war. But
there was another question, quite as
important. How far could the
Hohenzollern government go in their
struggle against us? In a letter to one of
his friends, Czernin wrote that if they had
been strong enough, they would have sent
their troops against Petrograd to
establish order there, instead of
negotiating with the Bolsheviks. There
was certainly no lack of ill-will. But was
there strength enough? Could
Hohenzollern send his troops against
revolutionaries who wanted peace? How
had the February revolution, and, later
on, the October revolution, affected the
German army? How soon would any
effect show itself? To these questions, no
answer could as yet be given. We had to
try to find it in the course of the
negotiations. Accordingly we had to delay
the negotiations as long as we could. It
was necessary to give the European
workers time to absorb properly the very
fact of the Soviet revolution, including its
policy of peace. And this was all the more
important since the press of the Entente,
like the Russian conciliatory and
bourgeois press, was portraying the peace
negotiations in advance as a comedy with
the roles ingeniously distributed.
Even in Germany, among the Social
Democratic opposition of that period,
which was apt to see its own weaknesses
reflected in us, people were talking about
the Bolsheviks working hand in hand with
the German government. And this version
must have been even more credible in
France and in England. It was obvious
that if the bourgeoisie of the Entente and
the Social Democracy succeeded in
spreading the wrong idea about us among
the masses of workers, the future military
intervention of the Allies would be made
all the simpler. So I insisted that before
signing a separate peace if that proved
absolutely unavoidable we must at all
costs give the workers of Europe a
striking and incontestable proof of the
deadly enmity existing between us and the
German ruling classes. It was these
considerations that gave me the idea of a
political demonstration at Brest-Litovsk
expressing the slogan: We end war, we
demobilize the army, but we do not sign
peace. If German imperialism finds itself
unable to send troops against us I
reasoned it will mean that we have
achieved a tremendous victory of far-
reaching consequences. But if it were still
possible for the Hohenzollerns to strike
against us we should always be able to
capitulate early enough. (13)
As we can see, Trotskys orientation
was guided by the fate of the European
revolution, including the need to protect
the fragile Russian Revolution against
future foreign military interventions
interventions which in fact were to occur
very shortly. But we can also see that this
position rests on uncertain assumptions:
the ability or not of the Central Powers to
launch the decisive offensive on the
Russian front. This uncertainty formulated
by Trotsky was often translated among
the left into the certainty that such an
offensive was impossible. As for Lenin,
he categorically refused to base his policy
on this most uncertain of forecasts.
We now turn to the major document,
one that deserves the readers full
attention: Lenins Twenty-One Theses of
7 January 1918. With the same firmness
he displayed in April, when he was
scathing regarding the opportunism of the
party leadership, he now took up the fight
against the adventurism of the
revolutionary war. He was still swimming
against the stream. In a party meeting
with 60 or so participants held on 8
January, he got 15 votes. Trotsky got 16.
With 32 votes, the Left Communists held
an absolute majority.
20
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
Let us remember that at that moment,
the class enemy had shown its hand,
revealing its intentions on 5 January. As
far as Lenin was concerned, the real
choice to be made was: sign a shameful
peace agreement now in order to save the
revolution, or be condemned to an even
more terrible peace, with the revolution in
mortal danger. On reading these lines
today (see feature box in this issue), with
the benefit of hindsight it is difficult to
deny their remarkable perspicacity.
Finally, Lenin refuted one last
argument: that signing a separate peace
agreement with annexations would deliver
a major blow to the national rights of the
countries annexed by the imperialist
victors. But the first socialist revolution
had its back to the wall, and the interests
of socialism are higher than the interests
of the right of nations to self-
determination (14). Once the peace
treaty had been signed, the soviet
government would secretly help the
Finnish Revolution; similarly, measures to
help the German Revolution banned by
the peace treaty would remain secret
until 1919. Although the revolution
revealed to the masses the truth regarding
the imperialists diplomatic conspiracies,
it knew how to be smart with the enemy
in order to help the peoples shake off the
imperialist yoke.
On reading the Twenty-One Theses,
which were written just over a month
before the disaster in February caused by
the resumption of the German offensive,
we can correct our initial political
classification of the positions that were
current at that time. The Left Communists
led by Bukharin did not represent the
marching wing of the revolution; they had
a dangerously unrealistic and adventurist
policy. Only their phraseology was
revolutionary; ultra-revolutionary,
according to Lenin. It was Lenin, who
took all factors of the situation into
account beginning with the fragility and
insecurity of the Revolution in the face of
the imperialist juggernauts, which
dominated both militarily and
economically who was the true left of
the party, although in the minority. There
was no longer any Russian army. There
was not yet any Red Army capable of
standing up to the enemy; the peasantry
and peasant-soldiers wanted first and
foremost that the promise of peace be
kept; the German Revolution, awaited by
everyone, remained precisely a
hypothesis. Above all, Lenin predicted
the worst, which was to become a reality:
by refusing to sign that shameful peace
treaty, the party was condemning itself to
an even more disadvantageous separate
peace (15) which happened on 3
March.
Between these two positions those of
revolutionary realism and revolutionary
phraseology, the latter of which answers
the human yearning for the beautiful,
dramatic and striking, but totally
disregards the objective balance of class
forces (16) was the position of
Trotsky, whose voice was to become
decisive in the Central Committee.
Although Lenin had formed a bloc with
him in favour of the tactic of
procrastination at Brest-Litovsk, he now
thought that the delaying tactics were
becoming unworkable and dangerous,
unlike Trotsky. The latter continued to
oppose the formal act of signature, out of
consideration for what he regarded as the
interest of the European revolution:
thwarting the imperialist manoeuvres
consisting of slandering the Russian
Revolution, which was being presented as
the instrument of the Central Powers. He
stuck to his intention, which was to
demobilise the army without signing the
peace treaty. But this position postulated
that the enemy would accept the fait
accompli, and that the soviet government
would gain the necessary respite without
signing the peace treaty. The facts were to
cruelly disprove this hypothesis.
III. Resumption of the German
offensive, sharp political crisis:
The revolution saved at the last
minute
In his memoirs, Trotsky reports his
conversation with Lenin in early January.
Let us note that, writing during a period
when the air was full of Stalinist slanders
against Trotskyism, Trotsky faithfully
recounts a conversation which
undoubtedly showed that Lenin was right
regarding the course that history was
about to take.
To Trotskys estimation that the
Germans were incapable of resuming the
offensive, Lenin responded: One could
want nothing better, if it turns out that
Hoffmann is not strong enough to send
troops against us. But there is little hope
of that. He will find specially selected
regiments of rich Bavarian farmers for it.
And then, how many of them does he
need? You say yourself that the trenches
are empty. What if the Germans resume
fighting?
Then we will be compelled to sign the
peace, but everyone will realise that we
had no choice. By this act alone, we will
deal a decisive blow at the story of our
secret connection with the Hohenzollerns.
Of course, there are certain
advantages in that. But it is too risky.
(17)
The Central Committee adopted
Trotskys position on 22 January: drag
things out, declare that the war has ended,
refuse to sign the peace treaty, then act
according to circumstances. Trotsky,
who occupied a crucial position between
the partys two wings, had assured Lenin
that he would not rally to the adventurist
position of revolutionary war in any
case whatsoever. But one important
disagreement remained: to sign or not?
Lenin and Trotsky reached a
confidential agreement one which
would give rise to different interpretations
subsequently.
Lenins interpretation, given in a
speech in March 1918: it was agreed
between us that we would hold out until
the Germans presented an ultimatum, and
then we would give way. () I proposed
quite definitely that peace be concluded.
We could not have got anything better
than the Brest peace. (18)
The interpretation of the agreement
given by Trotsky in My Life: Lenin
reminded me of our agreement. I
answered that by an ultimatum I had not
meant simply a verbal statement, but an
actual German offensive that would leave
no doubt as to the real relations between
the countries. (19)
Events escalated in late January. On
21
THE UNFORTUNATE PEACE OF BREST-LITOVSK
the 28th, General Hoffmann called for the
treaty to be signed, while restating the
demands for annexations. Trotsky replied:
We are removing our armies and our
people from the war. () We cannot
place the signature of the Russian
Revolution under these conditions which
bring with them oppression, misery and
hate to millions of human beings. (20)
While the imperialist diplomats and
generals angrily promised a resumption of
the war, the soviet delegation withdrew.
Krylenko, the soviet military commander-
in-chief, published the order to demobilise
the army. As far as Lenin was concerned
whose forecast, as we have seen, was
that the Germans would attack the
decision to lay off the army was yet
another error. Also, on 30 January, he
twice tried to cancel the order by Trotsky
and Krylenko. In vain: the order only
served to intensify the spontaneous
movement of disintegration.
Four days later, on 16 February (21),
the German General Staff announced that
it would attack at midday on 18 February.
In the Bolshevik Party leadership, there
was great consternation. Lenin, said
Trotsky, was terribly excited; never
before had I seen him like that, nor did I
again. (22) The risk that had been
envisaged of being forced into war
under the worst of conditions, with what
remained of the army being demobilised
was henceforth confirmed. It would
therefore be necessary to sign and even
more shameful peace agreement which
the Central Committee could still not
make up its mind to do. One crisis
meeting followed the other:
Evening of 17 February, on the eve
of the German offensive: immediately
propose new talks to Germany with a view
to signing a peace agreement. This
resolution by Lenin was defeated by 6
votes (including Trotsky) to 5. Trotskys
position was adopted: Wait for the
offensive to be sufficiently evident, as well
as its influence on the labour movement,
before resuming the talks.
Morning of 18 February, a new
meeting as German troops advanced
rapidly without meeting any resistance.
Proposal by Lenin and Zinoviev:
immediately send a proposal on the
resumption of peace talks. Defeated by 7
votes (including Trotsky and Bukharin) to
6.
Evening of 18: By playing with war,
we are making a present of the revolution
to the Germans (Lenin). The proposal to
conclude peace was adopted by 7 votes
(Lenin and Trotsky) to 6, with one
abstention. Another vote stipulated that
worsening conditions would not lead to a
refusal.
The response of the victors on 22
February (the imperialist General Staff
had given itself enough time to occupy
even greater expanses of territory), was to
set crushing conditions, both financially
and territorially, with the obligation to
evacuate Ukraine and Finland, Livonia
and Estonia. Russia lost 26 percent of its
population, 27 percent of its arable land,
26 percent of its railway network and 75
percent of its capacity to produce steel
and iron.
This announcement provoked a sudden
revival of the crisis within the party.
Lenin, conscious that any new
procrastination would bring about the loss
of the revolution, let fly against
revolutionary phraseology (23), which he
called a disease. He listed the
arguments of those who let themselves
be carried away by illusions, dreading the
iron logic of the facts. He recalled their
mistaken forecast (Germany cannot
attack, her growing revolution will not
allow it). He published his Twenty-One
Theses, which were fully confirmed
thereafter. He showed that the Left
Communists had fallen into the trap of the
Anglo-French imperialists, who achieved
a double benefit: keeping their German
enemy occupied on the Eastern Front and
eliminating the power of the soviets.
However, Lenin was only able to avoid
doing something that could not be undone
by threatening to resign from both the
Central Committee and the government.
Agreeing to such a capitulation is the
duty of any revolutionary worthy of the
name.
During the night of 23 February,
Trotsky came round to the idea of signing
the peace treaty, although he was very
sceptical about the possibility of securing
peace even at the price of complete
capitulation. (24) But he did not want to
disturb the unity of the party at a time
when it would be necessary, in his view,
to use force to defend the revolution. He
abstained, thus giving Lenin a majority
vote.
Between 3.00am and 6.00am that same
night, Lenin and Trotsky eventually
convinced the S-Rs, the majority of whom
were hostile to signing, that a government
dispatch should be sent to the Germans
accepting their conditions.
On 3 March in Brest-Litovsk,
Sokolnikov signed the treaty-diktat
without reading it. Tensions remained
high. On 6 March, the partys Seventh
Congress ratified the document by just 30
votes to 12 against, with 4 abstentions. In
the conferences, a narrow majority of 53
out of 96 declared themselves in favour of
signing. The majority was overturned in
Moscow.
On the All-Russian Central Executive
Committee of the soviets, where the
signing was denounced as shameful by
the S-Rs (they were to assassinate the
German Ambassador in an attempt to
restart the war), the vote was even closer:
116 to 84 with 26 abstentions. On 12
March, the S-Rs left the government.
The after effects of this crisis would be
long-lasting. Bukharin, who was close to
a split, published a political organ
separately from the party. He would only
acknowledge his error seven months later:
I must frankly and openly admit that we
() were wrong, that Lenin was right,
because the breathing spell gave us the
opportunity to concentrate forces, to
organise a powerful Red Army.
Lenin wasted no time in drawing the
balance-sheet of a painful but necessary
lesson.
IV. Crawling in the mud
It was one of Lenins adversaries who
provided the best formulation of his
historic position on Brest-Litovsk: as he
told the Central Committee on 8 March,
Ryazanov chanced to say a serious
word. He said that Lenin was
surrendering space to gain time. (25)
Once the short respite was obtained
22
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
that would allow the Revolution to build
its army under Trotskys leadership,
Lenin utilised the cruel and bitter defeat
as a means to steel the party for the tasks
that awaited it. Abandoning the boasting
and sabre-rattling of the revolutionary
phraseology, party members would have
to consciously face up to the real situation
facing Russia on the chessboard of world
politics. History has taught you a lesson
and dispelled your illusions, he told them.
Those who had allowed themselves to be
carried away by the initial triumphal
march of the revolution were now
becoming aware of the enormous
difficulty in resisting the wish of the
imperialists of the whole world to destroy
the young Soviet Revolution. They would
have to experience cruel defeats, and
perhaps, if the German Revolution did not
come, would have to withdraw not just
to Petrograd or Moscow, but to
Vladivostok! The Revolution had
benefited for a few months from a
European situation in which the two
groups of [imperialist] predators had
clashed. (26)
Brest-Litovsk thus prepared the ground
for the next trials, during which the
imperialists would combine their counter-
revolutionary offensives: If the European
revolution is late in coming, gravest
defeats await us because we have no
army, because we lack organisation,
because, at the moment, these are two
problems we cannot solve. If you are
unable to adapt yourself, if you are not
inclined to crawl on your belly in the mud,
you are not a revolutionary but a
chatterbox. (27)
This political rearmament, which
began from a bitter defeat and was only
possible with a party like the Bolsheviks,
reunited the revolutionary forces for the
next terrible stage of the civil war.
Theses on the
Question of the
Immediate
Conclusion of a
Separate and
Annexationist
Peace
1. The position of the Russian
revolution at the present moment is such
that nearly all the workers and the vast
majority of the peasants undoubtedly
side with Soviet power and the socialist
revolution which it has started. To that
extent the socialist revolution in Russia
is assured.
2. At the same time, the civil war,
provoked by the frantic resistance of the
wealthy classes, who realise full well
that they are faced with the last and
decisive fight for the preservation of
private ownership of the land and means
of production, has not yet reached its
climax. The victory of Soviet power in
this war is assured, but some time must
inevitably elapse, no little exertion of
effort will inevitably be required, a
certain period of acute economic
dislocation and chaos, which accompany
all wars, and civil war in particular, is
inevitable, before the resistance of the
bourgeoisie is crushed. ()
5. All these circumstances taken
together are such as to make it perfectly
clear that for the success of socialism in
Russia a certain amount of time, several
months at least, will be necessary,
during which the hands of the socialist
government must be absolutely free to
achieve victory over the bourgeoisie first
in our own country and to launch far-
reaching mass organisational work on a
wide scale.
6. The position of the socialist
revolution in Russia must form the basis
of any definition of the international
tasks of our Soviet power, for the
international situation in the fourth year
of the war is such that it is quite
impossible to predict the probable
moment of outbreak of revolution and
overthrow of any of the European
imperialist governments (including the
German). That the socialist revolution in
Europe must come, and will come, is
beyond doubt. All our hopes for the final
victory of socialism are founded on this
certainty and on this scientific prognosis.
Our propaganda activities in general,
and the organisation of fraternisation in
particular, must be intensified and
extended. It would be a mistake,
however, to base the tactics of the
Russian socialist government on
attempts to determine whether or not the
European, and especially the German,
socialist revolution will take place in the
next six months (or some such brief
period). Inasmuch as it is quite
impossible to determine this, all such
attempts, objectively speaking, would be
nothing but a blind gamble.
7. The peace negotiations in Brest-
Litovsk have by now 7 January 1918
made it perfectly clear that the war party
has undoubtedly gained the upper hand
in the German Government (which has
the other governments of the Quadruple
Alliance at its beck and call) and has
virtually already presented Russia with
an ultimatum (and it is to be expected,
most certainly to be expected, that any
day now it will be presented formally).
The ultimatum is as follows: either the
continuation of the war, or a peace with
annexations, i.e., peace on condition that
we surrender all the territory we have
occupied, while the Germans retain all
the territory they have occupied and
impose upon us an indemnity (outwardly
disguised as payment for the
maintenance of prisoners) an
indemnity of about three thousand
million roubles, payable over a number
of years.
8. The socialist government of Russia
is faced with the question a question
whose solution brooks no delay of
whether to accept this peace with
annexations now, or to immediately
23
THE UNFORTUNATE PEACE OF BREST-LITOVSK
wage a revolutionary war. In fact, no
middle course is possible. No further
postponement can now be achieved, for
we have already done everything
possible and impossible to deliberately
protract the negotiations.
9. On examining the arguments in
favour of an immediate revolutionary
war, the first argument we encounter is
that a separate peace at this juncture
would, objectively speaking, be an
agreement with the German imperialists,
an imperialistic deal, and so forth,
and that, consequently, such a peace
would mean a complete break with the
fundamental principles of proletarian
internationalism.
This argument, however, is obviously
incorrect. Workers who lose a strike and
sign terms for the resumption of work
which are unfavourable to them and
favourable to the capitalists, do not
betray socialism. The only people who
betray socialism are those who secure
advantages for a section of the workers
in exchange for profit to the capitalists;
only such agreements are impermissible
in principle. ()
10. Another argument in favour of
immediate war is that, by concluding
peace, we objectively become agents of
German imperialism, for we afford it the
opportunity to release troops from our
front, we surrender to it millions of
prisoners of war, and so on. But this
argument too is manifestly incorrect, for
a revolutionary war at the present
juncture would, objectively speaking,
make us agents of Anglo-French
imperialism, by providing it with forces
which would promote its aims. The
British bluntly offered our Commander-
in-Chief, Krylenko, one hundred roubles
per month for every one of our soldiers
provided we continued the war. Even if
we did not take a single kopek from the
Anglo-French, we nevertheless would be
helping them, objectively speaking, by
diverting part of the German army. ()
12. () Unquestionably, even at this
juncture we must prepare for a
revolutionary war. We are carrying out
this promise, as we have, in general,
carried out all our promises that could
be carried out at once: we annulled the
secret treaties, offered all peoples a fair
peace, and several times did our best to
drag out peace negotiations so as to give
other peoples a chance to join us.
But the question whether it is possible
to carry on a revolutionary war now,
immediately, must be decided exclusively
from the point of view of whether
material conditions permit it, and of the
interests of the socialist revolution which
has already begun.
13. Summing up the arguments in
favour of an immediate revolutionary
war, we have to conclude that such a
policy might perhaps answer the human
yearning for the beautiful, dramatic and
striking, but that it would totally
disregard the objective balance of class
forces and material factors at the present
stage of the socialist revolution now
under way. ()
15. Further, there is not the slightest
doubt that the peasant majority of our
army would at the present juncture
unreservedly declare in favour of a
peace with annexations and not in favour
of an immediate revolutionary war; the
socialist reorganisation of the army, the
merging of the Red Guard detachments
with it, and so on, have only just begun.
With the army completely
democratised, to carry on war in
defiance of the wishes of the majority of
the soldiers would be a reckless gamble,
while to create a really staunch and
ideologically stable socialist workers
and peasants army will, at the very
least, require months and months.
16. The poor peasants in Russia are
capable of supporting the socialist
revolution led by the working class, but
they are not capable of agreeing to fight
a serious revolutionary war immediately,
at the present juncture. To ignore the
objective balance of class forces on this
issue would be a fatal error.
17. Consequently, the situation at
present with regard to a revolutionary
war is as follows:
If the German revolution were to
break out and triumph in the coming
three or four months, the tactics of an
immediate revolutionary war might
perhaps not ruin our socialist revolution.
If, however, the German revolution
does not occur in the next few months,
the course of events, if the war is
continued, will inevitably be such that
grave defeats will compel Russia to
conclude an even more disadvantageous
separate peace, a peace, moreover,
which would be concluded, not by a
socialist government, but by some other
(for example, a bloc of the bourgeois
Rada and Chernovs followers, or
something similar). For the peasant
army, which is exhausted to the limit by
the war, will after the very first defeats
and very likely within a-matter of weeks,
and not of months overthrow the
socialist workers government.
18. This being the state of affairs, it
would be absolutely impermissible
tactics to stake the fate of the socialist
revolution, which has already begun in
Russia, merely on the chance that the
German revolution may begin in the
immediate future, within a matter of
weeks. Such tactics would be a reckless
gamble. We have no right to take such
risks.
19. The German revolution will by no
means be made more difficult of
accomplishment as far as its objective
premises are concerned, if we conclude a
separate peace. Probably chauvinist
intoxication will weaken it for a time, but
Germanys position will remain
extremely grave, the war with Britain
and America will be a protracted one,
and aggressive imperialism will be fully
and completely exposed on both sides. A
socialist Soviet Republic in Russia will
stand as a living example to the peoples
of all countries, and the propaganda and
revolutionising effect of this example will
be immense. ()
V I Lenin, On The History Of The
Question Of The Unfortunate Peace, in
Collected Works, Vol.26.
Works consulted
24
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
Jean-Jacques Marie: Lnine: la
rvolution permanente, Paris: Payot,
2011; Trotsky: rvolutionnaire sans
frontires [Trotsky: Revolutionary
without borders], Paris: Payot, 2006.
Pierre Brou: Le Parti bolchevique,
Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963.
Leon Trotsky: History of the Russian
Revolution; My Life.
V I Lenin: Complete Works, Vols. 26
and 27.
ENDNOTES
(1) V I Lenin, Report on Peace to the
Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of
Workers and Soldiers Deputies, 26
October (8 November) 1917.
(2) Leon Trotsky, History of the
Russian Revolution, Chapter 47.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Leon Trotsky, My Life, Chapter 31.
(5) History of the Russian Revolution,
Chapter 12.
(6) History of the Russian Revolution,
Chapter 16.
(7) Cited in Jean-Jacques Marie,
Lnine, Paris: Payot, 2011.
(8) See no.8 of Theses On The
Question Of The Immediate Conclusion
Of A Separate And Annexationist Peace, 7
January 1918, published in full as On The
History Of The Question Of The
Unfortunate Peace in Collected Works,
Vol.26. Although they finally numbered
22, these are still commonly referred to as
the Twenty-One Theses.
(9) My Life, Chapter 32.
(10) Cited in Jean-Jacques Marie,
Staline, Paris: Fayard, 2001.
(11) No.18 of the Twenty-One Theses.
(12) My Life, Chapter 32.
(13) Ibid.
(14) No.21 of the Twenty-One Theses.
(15) No.17 of the Twenty-One Theses.
(16) No.13 of the Twenty-One Theses.
(17) My Life, Chapter 32.
(18) V I Lenin, Reply to the Debate
on the Political Report of the Central
Committee, 8 March, Extraordinary
Seventh Congress of the RCP(B), first
published in full in 1923.
(19) My Life, Chapter 32.
(20) Adolph Joffe (ed.), Mirnye
peregovory v Brest-Litovske, 1920,
pp.207-8, cited in Tony Cliff, Trotsky:
The Sword of the Revolution 1917-1923,
Chapter 2.
(21) Under the new calendar. During
the period examined here, Russia replaced
the Julian calendar (old style) with the
Gregorian calendar (new style), losing
13 days in the process. Therefore, the day
after 31 January 1918 was 14 February.
(22) My Life, Chapter 32.
(23) See V I Lenin, The Revolutionary
Phrase, 21 February 1918.
(24) My Life, Chapter 32.
(25) Reply to the Debate on the
Political Report of the Central Committee,
8 March, op.cit.
(26) V I Lenin, Political Report of the
Central Committee, 7 March,
Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the
RCP(B).
(27) Ibid.
25
THE UNFORTUNATE PEACE OF BREST-LITOVSK
In May 1917, the war had been going
on for almost three years, the tsarist
regime had just collapsed under the
blows of the February Revolution, and
the imperialist regimes that had thrown
millions of men onto the field of battle
knew that their strength was reaching its
limits.
Imperialist peace programmes were
springing up on all sides. The spectre of
the Russian Revolution haunted every
government. Secret contacts between
chancelleries increased. They hurriedly
sought to redraw the borders by carving
up peoples and nations, exacerbating as
never before the question of national
sovereignty on a devastated continent,
with the exclusive aim of guaranteeing
the system of private ownership of the
means of production that was directly
under threat.
Pacifists throughout Europe were
seized by the subject, invoking the moral
principles that should allow for the
signing of a peace treaty that would
avoid annexations and respect the
peoples right to self-determination.
In May 1917, Leon Trotsky entered
into talks with Lenin to allow him to join
the Bolshevik Party together with his
Inter-District organisation (1). He
brought to the table a major contribution
to the fight against the peace
programme in the name of which the
Provisional Government was trying to
push the Revolution into a dead-end.
On this occasion he put together in a
revised form the articles which he
himself had written in Nashe Slovo [Our
Word] in 1915-16 against the attempts to
counterpose the struggle for peace to the
socialist revolution.
In this revised article, which dealt
with the peace programme, the right to
self-determination and the United States
of Europe, he drew the line under the
polemic which had seen him and Lenin
on opposing sides over the latter
question in 1915.
Lenin, worried by the possibility that
the slogan of the United States of Europe
might allow the pressure from
opportunists in each country to divert the
struggle of the working class against its
own bourgeoisie for the seizure of
power, had been opposed to it:
But while the slogan of a republican
United States of Europe if
accompanied by the revolutionary
overthrow of the three most reactionary
monarchies in Europe, headed by the
Russian is quite invulnerable as a
political slogan, there still remains the
highly important question of its
economic content and significance. From
the standpoint of the economic
conditions of imperialism i.e., the
export of capital arid the division of the
world by the advanced and
civilised colonial powers a United
States of Europe, under capitalism, is
either impossible or reactionary.
Capital has become international and
monopolist. The world has been carved
up by a handful of Great Powers, i.e.,
powers successful in the great plunder
and oppression of nations. ()
That is how the plunder of about a
thousand million of the earths
population by a handful of Great Powers
is organised in the epoch of the highest
development of capitalism. No other
organisation is possible under
capitalism. Renounce colonies, spheres
of influence, and the export of capital?
To think that it is possible means coming
down to the level of some snivelling
parson who every Sunday preaches to
the rich on the lofty principles of
Christianity and advises them to give the
poor, well, if not millions, at least
several hundred roubles yearly.
A United States of Europe under
capitalism is tantamount to an
agreement on the partition of colonies.
Under capitalism, however, no other
basis and no other principle of division
are possible except force. () It is for
these reasons and after repeated
discussions at the conference of RSDLP
groups abroad, and following that
conference, that the Central Organs
editors have come to the conclusion that
the slogan for a United States of Europe
is an erroneous one. (2)
In May 1917, Leon Trotsky
summarised the common position
developed during those war years by the
genuine internationalists who were
engaged in the battle to bring down the
warmongering system of imperialism.
The ideas he expressed at that time
which he took up again in 1922 and 1924
as part of his struggle for the Socialist
United States of Europe, after the
proletariat had seized power in the
Soviet Union are especially relevant
today, one hundred years after they were
written.
The editorial team
(1) The Mezhrayontsy, based in
Petrograd.
(2) V I Lenin, On the Slogan for a
United States of Europe, published in
Sotsial-Demokrat No. 44, 23 August
1915.
The United States of Europe (1)
Between our present social condition
and socialism there still lies an extended
26
War and Revolution
The United States of Europe
(Leon Trotsky)
THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE -- LEON TROTSKY
epoch of social revolution, that is, the
epoch of the open proletarian struggle for
power, the conquest and application of
this power with the aim of the complete
democratization of social relations, and
the systematic transformation of capitalist
society into the socialist society. This is
the epoch not of pacification and
tranquillity but, on the contrary, of the
highest intensification of the class
struggle, the epoch of popular uprisings,
wars, expanding experiments of the
proletarian regime, and socialist reforms.
This epoch demands of the proletariat that
it give a practical, that is, an immediately
applicable answer to the question of the
further existence of nationalities and their
reciprocal relations with the state and the
economy.
We tried to prove in the foregoing that
the economic and political unification of
Europe is the necessary prerequisite for
the very possibility of national self-
determination. Just as the slogan of
national independence of Serbs,
Bulgarians, Greeks and others remains an
empty abstraction without the
supplementary slogan Federative Balkan
Republic, which played such an important
role in the whole policy of the Balkan
Social Democracy; so on the all-
European scale the principle of the
right to self-determination can be
invested with flesh and blood only under
the conditions of a European Federative
Republic.
But if on the Balkan peninsula the
slogan of a democratic federation has
become purely proletarian, then this
applies all the more to Europe with her
incomparably deeper capitalist
antagonisms.
To bourgeois politics the destruction of
internal European customs houses is an
insurmountable difficulty; but without
this the inter-state courts of arbitration
and international law codes will have no
firmer duration than, for instance, Belgian
neutrality. The urge toward unifying the
European market which, like the effort
towards the acquisition of non-European
backward lands, is caused by the
development of capitalism, runs up
against the powerful opposition of the
landed and capitalist classes, in whose
hands the tariff apparatus joined with that
of militarism (without which the former
means nothing) constitutes an
indispensable weapon for exploitation
and enrichment.
The Hungarian financial and industrial
bourgeoisie is hostile to economic
unification with capitalistically more
developed Austria. The Austro-Hungarian
bourgeoisie is hostile to the idea of a
tariff union with more powerful
Germany. On the other hand, the German
landowners will never willingly consent
to the cancellation of grain duties.
Furthermore, the economic interests of
the propertied classes of the Central
Empires cannot be so easily made to
coincide with the interests of the English,
French, Russian capitalists and landed
gentry. The present war speaks eloquently
enough on this score. Lastly, the
disharmony and irreconcilability of
capitalist interests between the Allies
themselves is still more visible than in the
Central States. Under these
circumstances, a halfway complete and
consistent economic unification of
Europe coming from the top by means of
an agreement of the capitalist
governments is sheer Utopia. Here, the
matter can go no further than partial
compromises and half-measures. Hence it
is that the economic unification of
Europe, which offers colossal advantages
to producer and consumer alike, and in
general to the whole cultural
development, becomes the revolutionary
task of the European proletariat in its
struggle against imperialist protectionism
and its instrument militarism.
The United States of Europe without
monarchies, standing armies and secret
diplomacy is therefore the most
important integral part of the proletarian
peace program.
The ideologists and politicians of
German imperialism frequently came
forward, especially at the beginning of
the war, with their program of a European
or at least a Central European United
States (without France and England on
the one side and Russia on the other). The
programme of a violent unification of
Europe is just as characteristic of the
tendencies of German imperialism as is
the tendency of French imperialism
whose program is the forcible
dismemberment of Germany.
If the German armies achieved the
decisive victory reckoned upon in
Germany during the first phase of the
war, the German imperialism would have
doubtless made the gigantic attempt of
realising a compulsory military-tariff
union of European states, which would be
constructed completely of exemptions,
compromises, etc., which would reduce to
a minimum the progressive meaning of
the unification of the European market.
Needless to say, under such
circumstances no talk would be possible
of autonomy of the nations thus forcibly
joined together as the caricature of the
European United States. Certain
opponents of the programme of the
United States of Europe have used
precisely this perspective as an argument
that this idea can, under certain
conditions, acquire a reactionary
monarchist-imperialist content. Yet it is
precisely this perspective that provides
the most graphic testimony in favour of
the revolutionary viability of the slogan
of the United States of Europe. Let us for
a moment grant that German militarism
succeeds in actually carrying out the
compulsory half-union of Europe, just as
Prussian militarism once achieved the
half-union of Germany, what would then
be the central slogan of the European
proletariat? Would it be the dissolution of
the forced European coalition and the
return of all peoples under the roof of
isolated national states? Or the restoration
of autonomous tariffs, national
currencies, national social legislation,
and so forth?
Certainly not. The programme of the
European revolutionary movement would
then be: The destruction of the
compulsory anti-democratic form of the
coalition, with the preservation and
furtherance of its foundations, in the form
of complete annihilation of tariff barriers,
27
the unification of legislation, above all of
labour laws, etc. In other words, the
slogan of the United States of Europe
without monarchies and standing armies
would under the indicated
circumstances become the unifying and
guiding slogan of the European
revolution.
Let us assume the second possibility,
namely, an undecided issue of the war.
At the very beginning of the war, the
well-known professor Liszt, an advocate
of United Europe, argued that should
the Germans fail to conquer their
opponents, the European unification
would nevertheless be accomplished, and
in Liszts opinion it would be even more
complete than in the case of a German
victory. By the ever growing need of
expansion, the European states, hostile to
one another but unable to cope with one
another, would continue to hinder each
other in the execution of their mission
in the Near East, Africa and Asia, and
they would everywhere be forced back by
the United States of North America and
by Japan. Precisely in case of a stalemate
in the war, in Liszts opinion, the
indispensability of an economic and
military agreement among the European
great powers would come to the fore
against weak and backward peoples, but
above all, of course, against their own
working masses. We pointed out above
the colossal obstacles that lie in the way
of realising this programme.
Even a partial overcoming of these
obstacles would mean the establishment
of an imperialist trust of European States,
a predatory share-holding association.
And this perspective is on occasion
adduced unjustifiably as proof of the
danger of the slogan of The United
States of Europe, whereas in reality this is
the most graphic proof of its realistic and
revolutionary significance. If the
capitalist states of Europe succeeded in
merging into an imperialist trust, this
would be a step forward as compared
with the existing situation, for it would
first of all create a unified, all-European
material base for the working class
movement. The proletariat would in this
case have to fight not for the return to
autonomous national states, but for the
conversion of the imperialist state trust
into a European Republican Federation.
However, the further the war
progresses and reveals the absolute
incapacity of militarism to cope with the
questions brought forward by the war, the
less is spoken about these great plans for
the uniting of Europe at the top. The plan
of the imperialist United States of
Europe has given way to the plans, on
the one side, of an economic union of
Austria-Germany and on the other side of
the quadruple alliance with its war tariffs
and duties supplemented with militarism
directed against one another. After the
foregoing it is needless to enlarge on the
great importance which, in the execution
of these plans, the policy of the proletariat
of both state trusts will assume in
fighting against the established tariff and
military-diplomatic fortifications and for
the economic union of Europe.
Now after the so very promising
beginning of the Russian revolution, we
have every reason to hope that during the
course of this present war a powerful
revolutionary movement will be launched
all over Europe. It is clear that such a
movement can succeed and develop and
gain victory only as a general European
one. Isolated within national borders, it
would be doomed to disaster. Our social-
patriots point to the danger which
threatens the Russian revolution from the
side of German militarism. This danger is
indubitable, but it is not the only one.
English, French, Italian militarism is no
less a dreadful enemy of the Russian
revolution than the Hohenzollern war
machine. The salvation of the Russian
revolution lies in its propagation all over
Europe. Should the revolutionary
movement unfold in Germany, the
German proletariat would look for and
find a revolutionary echo in the hostile
countries of the west, and if in one of the
European countries the proletariat should
snatch the power out of the hands of the
bourgeoisie, it would be bound, be it only
to retain the power, to place it at once at
the service of the revolutionary
movement in other countries. In other
words, the founding of a stable regime of
proletarian dictatorship would be
conceivable only if it extended
throughout Europe, and consequently in
the form of a European Republican
Federation. The state-unification of
Europe, to be achieved neither by force of
arms nor by industrial and diplomatic
agreements, would in such a case become
the unpostponable task of the triumphant
revolutionary proletariat.
The United States of Europe is the
slogan of the revolutionary epoch into
which we have entered. Whatever turn
the war operations may take later on,
whatever balance-sheet diplomacy may
draw out of the present war, and at
whatever tempo the revolutionary
movement will progress in the near
future, the slogan of the United States of
Europe will in all cases retain a colossal
meaning as the political formula of the
struggle of the European proletariat for
power. In this programme is expressed
the fact that the national state has outlived
itself as a framework for the
development of the productive forces, as
a basis for the class struggle, and thereby
also as a state form of proletarian
dictatorship. Our denial of national
defence, as an outlived political program
for the proletariat, ceases to be a purely
negative act of ideological-political self-
defence, and acquires all its revolutionary
content only in the event that over against
the conservative defence of the antiquated
national fatherland we place the
progressive task, namely the creation of a
new, higher fatherland of the
revolution, of republican Europe, whence
the proletariat alone will be enabled to
revolutionise and to reorganise the whole
world.
Herein, incidentally, lies the answer to
those who ask dogmatically: Why the
unification of Europe and not of the
whole world? Europe is not only a
geographic term, but a certain economic
and cultural-historic community. The
European revolution does not have to
wait for the revelations in Asia and Africa
nor even in Australia and America. And
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
28
THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE -- LEON TROTSKY
yet a completely victorious revolution in
Russia or England is unthinkable without
a revolution in Germany, and vice versa.
The present war is called a world war, but
even after the intervention of the United
States, it is Europe that is the arena of
war. And the revolutionary problems
confront first of all the European
proletariat.
Of course, the United States of Europe
will be only one of the two axes of the
world organization of economy. The
United States of America will constitute
the other.
The only concrete historical
consideration against the slogan of the
United States of Europe was formulated
by the Swiss Social Democrat as follows:
The unevenness of economic and
political development is the unconditional
law of capitalism. From this the Social
Democrat draws the conclusion that the
victory of socialism is possible in one
country and that it is needless therefore to
make the dictatorship of the proletariat in
each isolated State conditional upon the
creation of the United States of Europe.
That the capitalist development of various
countries is uneven is quite incontestable.
But this unevenness is itself extremely
uneven. The capitalist levels of England,
Austria, Germany or France are not the
same. But as compared with Africa and
Asia all these countries represent
capitalist Europe, which has matured
for the socialist revolution. It is profitable
and necessary to reiterate the elementary
thought that no single country in its
struggle has to wait for the others, lest
the idea of parallel international action be
supplanted by the idea of procrastinating
international inaction. Without waiting
for the others we begin and we continue
the struggle on our own national soil in
complete certainty that our initiative will
provide the impulse for the struggle in
other countries; and if this were not so,
then it would be hopeless to think as is
borne out both by historical experience
and theoretical considerations that
revolutionary Russia, for example, would
be able to maintain herself in the face of
conservative Europe, or that Socialist
Germany could remain isolated in a
capitalist world.
To view the perspectives of the social
revolution within a national framework is
to succumb to the same national
narrowness that forms the content of
social-patriotism. Vaillant, until the close
of his life, regarded France as the chosen
country of the social revolution, and
precisely in this sense he insisted upon its
defence to the end. Lentsch and others,
some hypocritically, others sincerely,
believed that the defeat of Germany
means above all the destruction of the
very foundation of the social revolution.
Lastly, our Tseretellis and Chernovs who,
in our national conditions, have repeated
that sorry experiment of French
ministerialism, swear that their policy
serves the cause of the revolution and
therefore has nothing in common with the
policy of Guesde and Sembat. Generally
speaking, it must not be forgotten that in
social-patriotism there is active, in
addition to the most vulgar reformism, a
national revolutionary messianism, which
regards its national state as chosen for
introducing to humanity socialism or
democracy, be it on the ground of its
industrial development or of its
democratic form and revolutionary
conquests. (If a completely triumphant
revolution were actually conceivable
within the limits of a single, better
prepared nation, this messianism, bound
up with the programme of national
defence, would have its relative historical
justification. But in reality, it does not
have it.) Defending the national basis of
the revolution which such methods as
undermine the international connections
of the proletariat, really amounts to
undermining the revolution, which cannot
begin otherwise than on the national
basis, but which cannot be completed on
that basis in view of the present economic
and military-political interdependence of
the European states, which has never
been so forcefully revealed as in this war.
The slogan, the United States of Europe,
gives expression to this interdependence,
which will directly and immediately set
the conditions for the concerted action of
the European proletariat in the revolution.
Social-patriotism which is in principle,
if not always in fact, the execution of
social-reformism to the utmost extent and
its adaptation to the imperialist epoch,
proposes to us in the present world
catastrophe to direct the policy of the
proletariat along the lines of the lesser
evil by joining one of the warring
groups. We reject this method. We say
that the European war, prepared by the
entire preceding course of development,
has placed point-blank the fundamental
problems of modern capitalist
development as a whole; furthermore,
that the line of direction to be followed by
the international proletariat and its
national detachments must not be
determined by secondary political and
national features nor by problematical
advantages of military preponderance of
either side (whereby these problematical
advantages must be paid for in advance
with absolute renunciation of the
independent policy of the proletariat), but
by the fundamental antagonism existing
between the international proletariat and
the capitalist regime as a whole.
This is the only principled formulation
of the question and, by its very essence, it
is socialist-revolutionary in character. It
alone provides a theoretical and historical
justification for the tactic of revolutionary
internationalism.
Denying support to the state not in
the name of a propaganda circle but in the
name of the most important class in
society in the period of the greatest
catastrophe, internationalism does not
simply eschew sin passively but affirms
that the fate of world development is no
longer linked for us with the fate of the
national state; more than this, that the
latter has become a vice for development
and must be overcome, that is, replaced
by a higher economic-cultural
organisation on a broader foundation. If
the problem of socialism were compatible
with the framework of the national state,
then it would thereby become compatible
with national defence. But the problem of
socialism confronts us on the imperialist
foundation, that is under conditions in
29
which capitalism itself is forced violently
to destroy the national-state frameworks
it has itself established.
The imperialist half-unification of
Europe might be achieved, as we tried to
show, as a result of a decisive victory of
one group of the great powers as well as a
consequence of an inconclusive outcome
of the war. In either instance, the
unification of Europe would signify the
complete trampling underfoot of the
principle of self-determination with
respect to all weak nations and the
preservation and centralisation of all the
forces and weapons of European reaction:
monarchies, standing armies and secret
diplomacy.
The democratic republican unification
of Europe, a union really capable of
guaranteeing the freedom of national
development, is possible only on the road
of a revolutionary struggle against
militarist, imperialist, dynastic centralism,
by means of uprisings in individual
countries, with the subsequent merger of
these upheavals into a general European
revolution. The victorious European
revolution, however, no matter how its
course in isolated countries may be
fashioned can, in consequence of the
absence of other revolutionary classes,
transfer the power only to the proletariat.
Consequently the United States of Europe
represents the form the only
conceivable form of the dictatorship of
the European proletariat.
ENDNOTE
(1) This text forms Section 4 (preceded
by the final paragraph of Section 3) of
The Programme of Peace, originally
written as a series of articles by Leon
Trotsky in 1915-6 in the internationalist
newspaper Nashe Slovo, which he edited
in Paris. Trotsky revised these articles in
May 1917 and reprinted them in form of a
programmatic pamphlet in the Bolshevik
press in Russia in June 1917. This
translation by John G. Wright (from the
1923 Moscow edition of Trotskys
Collected Works, Vol. II, pp.462-482)
was first published in the September 1944
issue of Fourth International, the review
of the American SWP.
LA VERITE/THE TRUTH
30
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