Revolutionary Anti-militarism (1)
(«communist program»; Nr. 11; April 2026)
“Militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe. But this militarism also bears within itself the seed of its own destruction. Competition among the individual states forces them, on the one hand, to spend more money each year on the army and navy, artillery, etc., thus more and more hastening their financial collapse; and, on the other hand, to resort to universal compulsory military service more and more extensively, thus in the long run making the whole people familiar with the use of arms, and therefore enabling them at a given moment to make their will prevail against the warlords in command. And this moment will arrive as soon as the mass of the people—town and country workers and peasants—will have a will. At this point the armies of the princes become transformed into armies of the people; the machine refuses to work and militarism collapses by the dialectics of its own evolution… And this will mean the bursting asunder from within of militarism and with it of all standing armies” (1).
From 1878, when Engels wrote the crystal-clear pages of Anti-Dühring, down to the present day, the imperialist bourgeoisie has increased its military expenditure a hundredfold, so that it now reaches unbelievable proportions, and the plague of militarism, which at the end of the last century was confined solely to Europe, has by now seized the entire world. Lenin wrote that imperialism by its very nature tends to militarise the whole of society; and in periods of the sharpest economic and social crisis this phenomenon reaches its peak. Today, as the world once again finds itself on the brink of a global conflict – the only real “solution” that allows the bourgeoisie to emerge from the crisis and revive that infernal cycle of the production and reproduction of capital, which is, after all, the sole raison d’être of the existing mode of production – militarism grows more acute by the day and rapidly asserts its dominance over the entire economic and social structure of all countries.
Thus once again the alternative is placed before the world proletariat: either war or revolution – which once more confirms what communism has always maintained: that capitalism, both in its young revolutionary phase and in its ageing imperialist phase, necessarily leads to war, and that the inter-war periods – that is, periods of imperialist “peace”, to be clear, dotted with dozens of local wars affecting millions of proletarians – are nothing other than periods of preparation for ever more colossal clashes (2).
But imperialism will explode only from within – this is the lesson handed down to us by Marx, Engels and the glorious October Revolution: it is the very machinery of imperialism that must grind to a halt under the action of proletarians rising up against the intolerable effects of militarism, who refuse to kill one another merely because they wear different uniforms. And it is the task of the party of the world revolution to incite and lead the struggle to stop the imperialist war in the only way it can be stopped – that is, by transforming it into a civil war.
For the party to fulfil this task, it is necessary that it wages an unremitting struggle against all forms of opportunism, old and new, “right” and “left”, which inevitably strive to place or keep the proletariat in the service of the bourgeoisie, the nation, the state, the fatherland, democracy, and thus scrupulously avoid calling on it to fight for its own interests, for its final aim: the socialist revolution. In short, the party must “arm the proletariat with the desire to arm itself”. And it is in this perspective that one must view this work devoted to revolutionary anti-militarism, to the propaganda and agitation that the revolutionary party, relying on its theory and on the lessons of more than a century, must conduct within the bourgeois army, that is, within the anti-proletarian organisation par excellence.
1848–1871
In June 1848 the Parisian proletarians made their first attempt to “storm the heavens”; the bourgeoisie’s response was immediate: however hesitantly and cowardly it had waged the struggle against the remnants of the old world, the bourgeoisie proved all the more determined and merciless in suppressing the proletariat. Engels, analysing the final battle, notes that the clash could have had a different outcome had it been possible to carry out revolutionary activity within the bourgeois army. “For four days 40,000 of them opposed forces four times their strength, and were within a hairbreadth of victory. They almost succeeded in gaining a footing in the centre of Paris, taking the Hôtel de Ville, forming a Provisional Government and doubling their number not only by people from the captured parts of the city joining them but also from the ranks of the mobile guard, who at that time needed but a slight impetus to make them go over to their side” (3). Engels would repeat this same idea on several other occasions, especially in his so-called military writings.
In the years following the European revolution of 1848, Marx and Engels repeatedly returned to the question of armies and their reorganisation. On the one hand, it was a matter of exposing the futility of the sermons about disarmament, about peace and about the possibility of imposing it on the bourgeois states, since wars are a direct consequence of the capitalist mode of production, and therefore, as long as capitalism exists, war will not be eliminated; on the other hand, of showing how the proletariat can and must, for its revolution – against all the designs of the bourgeoisie – make use of the objective fact that the type of army based on universal conscription continually increases the number of workers trained in the handling of weapons and thus, from a military standpoint, technically prepared to confront the enemy class, and that such an army, composed in its overwhelming majority of proletarians, is in any case a double-edged sword, extremely dangerous for the ruling class at least in a pre-revolutionary period – especially if, in earlier phases, a skilful and intense work of infiltration and subversive propaganda has been carried out within its ranks.
“In considering the struggle for existence and Dühring’s declamations against struggle and arms it should be emphasised that a revolutionary party must know also how to struggle… Hence the universal conscription is in our interest and should be taken advantage of by all to learn how to fight, but particularly by those whose education entitles them to acquire the training of an officer in one year’s voluntary service” (4).
The introduction of conscription too forms part of the contradictory, dialectical and by no means linear development of the capitalist mode of production. Let us take the example of the French army. In 1818, France, which for more than twenty years had had a conscription-based army, created by the Gouvion–Saint-Cyr law a classic professional army (5). Only after the war with Prussia and the subsequent establishment and defeat of the Commune was a system of armed forces based on compulsory military service adopted. Logically speaking, on the basis of the experience of the Commune, it is not clear what immediate interest the French bourgeoisie could have had in reorganising its army: to call all citizens to arms, and therefore above all the proletarians of town and countryside, for a longer or shorter period, means making permeable to the demands, needs and doctrine of the proletariat precisely that organism which above all others must maintain the status quo – that is, directly defend the interests of the bourgeoisie.
But it was precisely the Franco-Prussian War that closed one cycle and opened another: wars between states were replaced by wars between nations; wars between professional armies, which had touched the population of a particular nation only marginally, became definitively wars involving practically the whole population, and thus required mass conscription. Hence the bourgeoisie, which is theoretically interested in keeping the proletariat as far away from arms as possible for reasons of internal order, is compelled by its needs of external expansion to incorporate it definitively into the army, to teach it the use of the very weapons which will one day be turned against it and seal its death – which is only a further confirmation that the capitalist mode of production, like every other mode of production, through its own development generates the forces that determine its downfall.
THE CURRENT FALSE ALTERNATIVE : A PROFESSIONAL ARMY OR A CONSCRIPTION-BASED ARMY?
There is no shortage of those today who claim that the entire theoretical conception of Marxism concerning the army and war — and the resulting struggle which the communists waged against the army and within it — is no longer valid at all. The supposed reason is that professional armies would today, as a general tendency, be preferred by the warlords over armies based on conscription.
However, this is a false alternative. In reality, it is utterly inconceivable today that a world war could be fought by professional armies alone: this would mean a return to feudal wars, in which two armies confronted one another — literally — face to face in a very limited corner of the world, and the army that first showed its back to the enemy lost. Feudal war aimed essentially at defending the still extremely limited development of the productive forces. Imperialist war, on the contrary, owing to the enormous development of the productive forces, aims at the conquest of ever new markets for its commodities — which is also a means of resolving the problems of overproduction typical of senile capitalism through the massive destruction of dead and living labour. To suppose, therefore, that modern wars can be waged solely with limited professional armies is to believe that imperialism can reduce its contradictions, that the various imperialisms can soften, if not indeed resolve, their mutual rivalry without having to resort to armed conflict and without making use of the military superiority afforded by the participation of the whole population in the direct clash. In other words, it means a return to Kautsky’s positions on super-imperialism, which have been decisively refuted by the dialectical development of the present mode of production.
Something quite different is the creation, on the part of the bourgeoisie, of special units composed exclusively of mercenaries, which do not serve only in the event of an inter-imperialist conflict but above all for the maintenance of order and for counter-revolutionary repression within the individual countries. It is no accident that in periods when the thermometer of the class struggle is rising – and today we are seeing its first indications – there is a marked proliferation of precisely these special units. It is evident that the proletariat will find it very difficult to break up these formations from within, and will therefore have to confront them on a purely military level: at least in the most advanced capitalist countries, the revolution and the definitive establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat will certainly be preceded by a long and bloody civil war, and this will set against one another, on one side, the armed ranks of the proletariat led by its own party and – on the opposite side of the front – among the other instruments of bourgeois preservation, various infamous Freikorps, mobilised to suppress it.
With the year 1871, the cycle of the bourgeoisie’s progressive wars comes definitively to a close for Europe, and revolutionary Marxism finds itself on the terrain of exclusively proletarian struggles against the bourgeoisie. “That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternize for the common massacre of the proletariat—this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society upheaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war. Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national Governments are one as against the proletariate!” (6).
After the phase of wars for national consolidation there follows a long period which, for the sake of simplicity, we have called the “idyllic interlude of the capitalist world”, and which lasts until 1914, that is, until the outbreak of the first world massacre. This period is characterised by the penetration of the capitalist mode of production throughout the globe and, on the military level, by the so-called Pax Britannica, a synonym for armed peace among the metropolises of capitalism and for continuous war against the coloured peoples. And it is precisely in this period that militarism becomes the supporting axis of the economic and social life of capitalism and increasingly performs – in addition to its external work of conquest – an internal activity, no less important, namely the struggle against the proletariat, which, now freed from all obligations towards the bourgeois revolution, emerges as a completely autonomous class, with its own party and its own programme to be carried out: the destruction of the capitalist mode of production and the establishment of the dictatorship of class, the necessary path towards communism.
Militarism, now more than aware that its historical task is to defend and enforce the fundamental law of capitalism, namely profit, intervenes with increasing frequency and growing force against every attempt, however small, by the proletariat to defend its own interests.
The army, which is today everywhere based on conscription, is thus used to sabotage strikes and to suppress proletarian demonstrations. It is enough to recall the repression against the unemployed in January 1874 in New York, the suppression of the railway workers’ strikes in July 1877 in Maryland, the massive deployment of the army against the general strike of Dutch railway workers in January 1903 and against that of Hungarian railway workers in 1904, and furthermore the massacre at Fourmies on 1 May 1891, at Chalon-sur-Saône in 1899 (in France), and in Trieste in 1902 — and the list could go on indefinitely.
A special mention must be made of the young Italian bourgeoisie, which particularly distinguished itself by liberally scattering “the king’s bullets” at the proletariat. Here is a summary of the major massacres that took place in Italy between June 1901 and May 1906: Berra, 27 June 1901, 2 dead, 10 wounded; Patrignano, 4 May 1902, 1 dead, 7 wounded; Cassano, 5 August 1902, 1 dead, 3 wounded; Candela, 8 September 1902, 5 dead, 11 wounded; Giarratana, 13 October 1902, 2 dead, 12 wounded; Galatina, 20 April 1903, 2 dead, 1 wounded; Piere, 21 May 1903, 3 dead, 1 wounded; Torre Annunziata, 31 August 1903, 7 dead, 10 wounded; Cerignola, 17 May 1904, 5 dead, 40 wounded; Bruggera, 4 September 1904, 3 dead, 10 wounded; Castelluzzo, 11 September 1904, 1 dead, 12 wounded; Sestri Ponente, 15 September 1904, 2 dead, 2 wounded; Foggia, 18 April 1905, 7 dead, 20 wounded; S. Elpidio, 15 May 1905, 4 dead, 2 wounded; Grammichele, 16 August 1905, 18 dead, 20 wounded; Scarano, 21 March 1906, 1 dead, 9 wounded; Muro, 23 March 1906, 2 dead, 4 wounded; Turin, 4 April 1906, 1 dead, 6 wounded; Calmiera, 30 April 1906, 2 dead, 3 wounded; Cagliari, 12 May 1906, 2 dead, 7 wounded; Nebida, 21 May 1906, 1 dead, 1 wounded; Sonnezza, 21 May 1906, 6 dead, 6 wounded; Benventare, 24 May 1906, 2 dead, 2 wounded (7).
In short, over the course of five years the Italian royal army carried out a total of 23 massacres of proletarians, in which it caused the death of 78 people and injured 199. The bourgeoisie of all advanced capitalist countries, for their part, routinely make use of militarism in order to keep the working class “quiet”: “Modern armies, when not engaged in colonial plunder, serve exclusively to defend capitalist property” (8).
The struggle against the internal enemy is just as important for the bourgeoisie as the struggle against the external one. The army, composed in its overwhelming majority of conscripts, of workers and poor peasants in uniform, serves precisely this purpose. And the young proletarian, who for a shorter or longer period serves the “fatherland”, is prepared for this task by the incredible barracks life, through the most aberrant methods, ranging from isolation to absolute discipline and obedience. The reaction of the international workers’ movement is immediate. At the Paris Congress (1891), as at the subsequent congresses, the International emphasises the features of militarism as a necessary consequence of capitalism, the indissoluble link between capitalism and war, and once again reaffirms the necessity of the conquest of power by the proletariat and the establishment of socialism as the only guarantee of peace.
It is only at the Paris Congress of 1900 that anti-militarism becomes part of the programme and is recognised as a form of class struggle. “Socialist parties must everywhere undertake to educate and organise the youth for the purpose of the struggle against militarism, and must carry out this task with the greatest energy.”
Anti-militarism is thus recognised as indispensable with the same weight as the daily defence of workers’ demands: it constitutes a fundamental component of proletarian self-defence against the bourgeois state. In all the Western countries newspapers, journals and leaflets that advocate anti-militarism arise. Alongside the youth federations of the social-democratic parties, the trade unions also operate in this direction, carrying out extensive agitation, as do the anarchist movements, which have made it rather their banner.
REVOLUTIONARY ANTI-MILITARISM AND ANARCHIST ANTI-MILITARISM
We have noted that the anarchists made a banner of the anti-militarist struggle, and it must be added that they succeeded in gaining no insignificant number of followers, often even more than the Marxist parties. Anarchist anti-militarism, however, is entirely different from the Marxist one. Anarchism regards militarism as a wholly autonomous phenomenon, conceives it essentially as an “evil” in itself, and sees the struggle against it as a series of individual acts determined by separate conscious wills. It is therefore ready to support and theorise any individual action regardless of the real relation of forces and the objective possibilities of the proletariat, and thus ultimately reduces all its anti-militarist activity to empty pacifist appeals against any war, instead of to concrete actions directed towards the organisation of the proletariat in an anti-capitalist sense.
Lenin, polemicising with Hervé, one of the principal representatives of anarchistically tinged anti-militarism within the socialist movement, wrote in 1907: “The notorious Hervé, who has made such a noise in France and Europe, advocated a semi-anarchist view by naïvely suggesting that every war be ‘answered’ by a strike and an uprising. He did not understand, on the one hand, that war is a necessary product of capitalism, and that the proletariat cannot renounce participation in revolutionary wars, for such wars are possible, and have indeed occurred in capitalist societies. He did not understand, on the other hand, that the possibility of ‘answering’ a war depends on the nature of the crisis created by that war. The choice of the means of struggle depends on these conditions; moreover, the struggle must consist (and here we have the third misconception, or shallow thinking of Hervéism) not simply in replacing war by peace, but in replacing capitalism by socialism. The essential thing is not merely to prevent war, but to utilise the crisis created by war in order to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. However, underlying all these semi-anarchist absurdities of Hervéism there was one sound and practical purpose: to spur the socialist movement so that it will not be restricted to parliamentary methods of struggle alone, so that the masses will realise the need for revolutionary action in connection with the crises which war inevitably involves, so that, lastly, a more lively understanding of international labour solidarity and of the falsity of bourgeois patriotism will be spread among the masses” (9).
Thus, in contrast to the individual rejection of the use of arms, to pacifism at all times and in all places, and to the exaltation of the individual gesture characteristic of anarchism, the socialists counterpose the scientific conception of the capitalist mode of production and of its phenomenon, militarism, which can be eradicated only together with capitalism, that is, with the final social order founded upon class division. They direct their propaganda above all towards those classes which are by their very nature hostile to militarism, namely the industrial and agricultural proletariat, without, however, neglecting propaganda addressed to the small peasants and, in general, to the petty bourgeoisie; they regard the anti-militarist struggle not as an individual struggle but as a class struggle, and therefore recognise that individual acts of revolt—although they are not to be condemned a priori, since they are symptoms of social instability or courageous acts of refusal—cannot, nevertheless, be theoretically elevated to the status of means for abolishing militarism. The instrument with which the Marxists wage their struggle against capitalism in all its forms is the revolutionary party, the long revolutionary preparation: even such slogans as the general strike against war or the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war carry full weight only if, on the one hand, real situations of the disintegration of militarism exist, and, on the other, there stands behind them a revolutionary party capable of leading the proletariat against the bourgeois state.
In his attacks on anarchism, Lenin spares not even that parliamentary, legalist and reformist socialism which holds that “the vast economic and political organisations of the working class permeate and conquer the institutions by legal means, preparing a gradual transformation of the entire economic mechanism”, and which was to lead the parties of the Second International to the great betrayal of 1914.
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST REFORMIST ANTI-MILITARISM
The struggle which the Marxist left wages against the opportunists is thus no less vehement than that which it wages against the anarchists. For the International, in its majority, is steadily sliding towards reformist and pacifist positions. The necessity of conquering power by violent means is gradually denied, and with it the very notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the political form of power proper to the working class is abandoned. Concepts which had seemed to have nothing more to do with the proletariat are fished out again and appropriated by the parties of the Second International. Thus the concept of the fatherland, definitively dead for the revolutionaries of 1848, is revived, and the powerful war-cry of Marx and Engels, “The workers have no fatherland”, is transformed by Jaurès into a mere theatrical bon mot: “The proletariat does not stand outside the fatherland. When the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels in 1847 formulated the famous sentence, so often repeated and interpreted in every sense: ‘The workers have no fatherland’, it was nothing but a theatrical bon mot, a wholly paradoxical and moreover unhappy [sic!] rejoinder to the polemic of the bourgeois patriots who denounced communism as the destroyer of the fatherland […] The Manifesto’s formula signifies the substitution of a series of abstract and artificial revolutions for that profound revolutionary evolution which Marx himself so often defined with such force.” And further: “A little internationalism takes one away from the fatherland; much internationalism brings one back to it. A little patriotism takes one away from the International; much patriotism leads one back to it” (10).
From these positions it is then but a short step to asserting that the proletariat has the duty to defend the “fatherland” against any “aggression”. “An army thus constituted has as its sole objective the defence, against any aggression, of the independence and the territory of the country. Every war is criminal unless it is manifestly and certainly defensive, unless the government of the country offers to the government of the foreign state with which it is in conflict to settle the conflict itself by arbitration” (11).
And it is Rosa Luxemburg who replies to these positions in an effort to restore the integral doctrine of Marxism against opportunist deviations: “It is needless to point out that this excessive zeal in fulfilling the patriotic duty would impose an immense burden on the fighting organisations of the proletariat and would force upon them aims and tasks that are entirely and fundamentally alien to them, and which must therefore be categorically rejected in the interests of the class struggle.” She then continues her discussion of the distinction between defensive and offensive war: “Here we find, as the basis of this whole political orientation, that famous distinction between offensive and defensive war which has hitherto played a great role in the foreign policy of the socialist parties, but which — in the light of the experience of the last decades — ought to be simply and straightforwardly banned… To surrender to the illusion that juridical formulas can prevail over the interests and the power of capitalism is the most harmful policy the proletariat can pursue” (12).
Not long before, Lenin had sharply attacked those German Social Democrats such as Vollmar and Noske, according to whom no specific anti-militarist activity was necessary, since wars are “a necessary concomitant of capitalist development”, and therefore the proletarians are obliged to take up arms just as the bourgeois do — in view of this development. “(…) the attitude of Vollmar, Noske and those who think like them on the ‘Right wing’ is opportunist cowardice.
Since militarism is the offspring of capitalism, and will fall with it— they argued at Stuttgart and still more at Essen—no special anti-militarist agitation is needed: it should not exist. But a radical solution of the labour question and the women’s question, for example—was the reply given them at Stuttgart—is also impossible while the capitalist system exists; in spite of that, we fight for labour legislation, for extending the civil rights of women, etc. Special anti-militarist propaganda must be carried on all the more energetically because cases of interference in the struggle between labour and capital on the part of the military forces are becoming more frequent; and because the importance of militarism not only in the present struggle of the proletariat, but also in the future, at the time of the social revolution, is becoming more and more obvious” (13).
The majority of the International, however, remained on Jaurèsian positions, that is, it sought only to “prevent” the outbreak of a general war, despite the positions of the left, which fought to make the war the starting spark of revolution. And the unrelenting effort of the left to reaffirm and defend Marxist orthodoxy against every right-wing deviation and against centrism was not without results. At the Stuttgart Congress of 1907, Lenin and Luxemburg succeeded in having inserted into the Resolution on Militarism and the Conflicts between Nations an amendment of the utmost importance: “in the event that war should break out, they [the socialists] have the duty to intervene so as to bring it to an end as quickly as possible, and to use with all their strength the economic and political crisis created by the war to agitate the broadest layers of the people and to hasten the fall of capitalist rule.” In the subsequent Basel Manifesto (1912) it was recalled that the proletarians would consider as criminal any participation in the imperialist war; that the war would inevitably bring about an enormous economic, political and social crisis; and that it was the duty of the socialist parties to use this crisis to overthrow capitalist domination.
However, despite the efforts of the Marxist left, the majority of the national sections — now entirely caught in the coils of centrism and opportunism — based their practical politics and daily activity increasingly on reformism.
THE RUSSIAN EXPERIENCE : 1905 – INSURRECTION AS AN ART
The great lesson of the Russian Revolution of 1905 lay in the fact that it fully demonstrated how the revolutionary party must prepare an insurrection both practically and politically: “[The] insurrection is an art and that the principal rule of this art is the waging of a desperately bold and irrevocably determined offensive” (14).
After this experience, the Bolshevik party constantly prepared itself – even in the years of the most ruthless Tsarist repression – “with a view to a general armed insurrection”, by establishing its own internal military organisation and by organising proletarians in uniform through antimilitarist propaganda and agitation. Prior to 1905, the antimilitarist activity of the RSDLP had not gone much beyond appeals addressed to the army “not to fire on the workers” during proletarian demonstrations such as those on May Day.
In 1905, however, after the defeat of the army and navy in the war against Japan and their subsequent disintegration, the party began intervening massively within their ranks and succeeded in creating an embryonic organisation there. Naturally, this work could unfold most fully in those branches, such as the artillery and the navy, composed predominantly of proletarians. Under the pressure of events — the disintegration of the army on the one hand and the advance of the revolution on the other — the Bolshevik party was thus able to produce more than one example of a real, even if in many respects insufficient, union between the proletarian masses and the troops, representing the first step toward the creation of the revolutionary army.
In the summer of 1905 an event of great importance took place: the uprising aboard the battleship Potemkin – in which the Bolsheviks played a leading role – in close connection with the contemporary uprising in Odessa. “The armed uprising of the people is maturing and is organising itself before our very eyes under the impact of the spontaneous course of events. It was not so very long ago that the only manifestation of the people’s struggle against the autocracy was revolts—unconscious, unorganised, spontaneous, sometimes wild outbreaks. But the labour movement, as the movement of the most advanced class, the proletariat, rapidly outgrew this initial stage. The goal-conscious propaganda and agitation carried on by the Social-Democrats had their effect. (…) The struggle grew into an insurrection. Even the tsar’s troops gradually began to see that they were being made to play the shameful role of executioners of freedom, of henchmen of the police. And the army began to waver. At first isolated cases of insubordination, outbreaks among reservists, protests from officers, propaganda among the soldiers, refusal of some companies and regiments to shoot at their own brothers, the workers. Then—the siding of part of the army with the uprising. The tremendous significance of the recent events in Odessa lies precisely in the fact that, for the first time, an important unit of the armed force of tsarism—a battleship—has openly gone over to the side of the revolution” (15).
The passage of the army – or at least of a part of it – to the side of the revolution is an extremely important fact, but still not sufficient. Lenin, in the same article, states that it is necessary to create an army of the revolution, for only with its own army can the revolution defeat the counter-revolutionary forces. “The units of the revolutionary army are springing up out of the army itself. The task of these units is to proclaim the insurrection, to give the masses military leadership, as essential in civil war as in any other war; to create strong points for the open mass struggle; to spread the uprising to neighbouring districts; to establish complete political freedom, if only at first in a small part of the country; to embark on the revolutionary transformation of the decayed absolutist system; and to give full scope to the revolutionary creative activity of the masses, who participate but little in this activity in time of peace, but who come to the forefront in revolutionary epochs. Only by clearly understanding these new tasks, only by posing them boldly and broadly, can the units of the revolutionary army win complete victory and become the strong points of a revolutionary government. And a revolutionary government is as vitally essential at the present stage of the popular uprising as a revolutionary army. The revolutionary army is needed for military struggle and for military leadership of the masses against the remnants of the military forces of the autocracy. The revolutionary army is needed because great historical issues can be resolved only by force, and, in modern struggle, the organisation of force means military organisation” (16).
Lenin therefore poses the question of insurrection as an immediate problem, to which the revolutionary party must provide an equally immediate answer. This task is by no means an easy one – not only because of the objective situation, but also owing to the activity of the opportunists, specifically the Mensheviks, who seek to lead the entire revolutionary movement back into the framework of conciliation with the bourgeoisie, not infrequently adopting extremist postures and asserting that it is necessary to “provide” new pretexts capable of provoking further uprisings. Lenin replies: “What is lacking is not ‘new incentives’, my most esteemed Manilovs, but a military force, the military force of the revolutionary people (and not the people in general), consisting of 1) the armed proletariat and peasantry, 2) organised advance detachments of representatives of these classes, and 3) sections of the army that are prepared to come over to the side of the people. It is all this taken together that constitutes a revolutionary army. To talk of an uprising, of its force, of a natural transition to it, and to say nothing of a revolutionary army is folly and muddle-headedness—and the greater the degree of the counter-revolutionary army’s mobilisation, the more that is so (…) The slogan of insurrection is a slogan for deciding the issue by material force, which in present-day European civilisation can only be military force. This slogan should not be put forward until the general prerequisites for revolution have matured, until the masses have definitely shown that they have been roused and are ready to act, until the external circumstances have led to an open crisis. But once such a slogan has been issued, it would be an arrant disgrace to retreat from it, back to moral force again, to one of the conditions that prepare the ground for an uprising, to a ‘possible transition’, etc., etc. No, once the die is cast, all subterfuges must be done with; it must be explained directly and openly to the masses what the practical conditions for a successful revolution are at the present time” (17).
Thus, a rejection of any putschist attitude, but at the same time a rejection of any action that tends to dampen the strength and the revolutionary impetus, and to arrive at a compromise with the class that holds power. And this reasoning – as Lenin himself emphasises – applies not only to Russia, where the democratic revolution has yet to triumph, but also to the rest of the European countries, now fully imperialist.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 reached its climax in December. The insurrection at that time swept through all the major cities, hundreds of thousands of workers joined it, and it also drew over to the side of the insurgents no small part of the army. And it was on this day that the fate of the revolution was decided: it was crushed because the forces of autocracy were able to rely on an army which, despite the revolutionary work carried out within its ranks, was still sufficiently strong and organised.
And once again it is Lenin who summarises the lessons that the revolutionary party must draw from 1905 concerning its influence on the army and military preparation: “Another lesson concerns the character of the uprising, the methods by which it is conducted, and the conditions which lead to the troops coming over to the side of the people. An extremely biased view on this latter point prevails in the Right wing of our Party. It is alleged that there is no possibility of fighting modern troops; the troops must become revolutionary. Of course, unless the revolution assumes a mass character and affects the troops, there can be no question of serious struggle. That we must work among the troops goes without saying. But we must not imagine that they will come over to our side at one stroke, as a result of persuasion or their own convictions. The Moscow uprising clearly demonstrated how stereotyped and lifeless this view is. As a matter of fact, the wavering of the troops, which is inevitable in every truly popular movement, leads to a real fight for the troops whenever the revolutionary struggle becomes acute. The Moscow uprising was precisely an example of the desperate, frantic struggle for the troops that takes place between the reaction and the revolution. Dubasov himself declared that of the fifteen thousand men of the Moscow garrison, only five thousand were reliable. The government restrained the waverers by the most diverse and desperate measures: they appealed to them, flattered them, bribed them, presented them with watches, money, etc.; they doped them with vodka, they lied to them, threatened them, confined them to barracks and disarmed them, and those who were suspected of being least reliable were removed by treachery and violence. And we must have the courage to confess, openly and unreservedly, that in this respect we lagged behind the government. We failed to utilise the forces at our disposal for such an active, bold, resourceful and aggressive fight for the wavering troops as that which the government waged and won. We have carried on work in the army and we will redouble our efforts in the future ideologically to ‘win over’ the troops. But we shall prove to be miserable pedants if we forget that at a time of uprising there must also be a physical struggle for the troops” (18).
And it was precisely on the basis of these lessons that, after the February Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik Party was able to revive its military organisation and carry out that revolutionary work within the army which made October possible, along with the subsequent victory over the White armies.
(to be conitnued)
(1) Engels Friedrich, Anti-Dühring (Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science), in Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25, Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 158.
(2) It should be recalled that what the communists have always denied, in principle, is not the possibility of preventing the imperialist war as such, but the possibility of preventing it by the peaceful means propagated by the bourgeoisie itself and by the reformists. In 1956 we wrote in Dialogue with the Dead (Dialogato coi Morti): “We answer the thesis of the 20th Congress on the present avoidability of war not by claiming that war itself is absolutely inevitable, but by stating that it cannot be prevented by a vaguely ideological movement of proletarians and poor middle layers, a movement incapable of offering serious resistance and which a war would crush like a bulldozer. General war is therefore historically avoidable, but only on condition that it is opposed by a movement of the pure wage-earning class, and that this movement does not await its outbreak in order to substitute for it peace, but in order to overthrow, together with the war in its infancy, the old, infamous capitalism.”
(3) Engels Friedrich, The June Revolution, The Course of the Paris Uprising, 1848, in Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 7, Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 164.
(4) Engels Friedrich, From Engels’Preparatory Writings for Anti-Dühring, Part Two, Ch. III, The Party and Military Training, in Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25, Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 609.
(5) Despite having a professional army, France was forced – since voluntary enlistment did not supply the required number of recruits – to introduce a limited form of compulsory conscription, which concerned about 40,000 men selected from the annual class subject to the call-up.
(6) Marx Karl, The Civil War in France, 1871, in MECW, Vol. 22, Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 353–354. For a more detailed analysis of the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent Commune, we refer to a series of articles on the Military Question published in Il programma comunista in the 1960s, in particular nos. 3, 4, 11, 12, 13 – 1966.
(7) Le mouvement socialiste, May–June and August–September 1906. (Own translation).
(8) Lafargue Paul, in L’Humanité, October 9, 1906. (Own translation).
(9) Lenin V. I. , The International Socialist Congress in Stutgart, 1907, in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 13, Progress Publishers, 1978, Moscow, p. 79–80.
(10) Jaurès Jean, L’Armée nouvelle, 1911. (Own translation).
(11) Jaurès Jean, ibid.
(12) Luxemburg Rosa, Review of Jaurès’s L’Armée nouvelle, in Leipziger Volkszeitung, June 9, 1911. (Own translation).
(13) Lenin V. I., Bellicose militarism and the anti-militarist tactics of social-democracy, 1908, in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 15, Progress Publishers, 1977, p. 196-197.
14) Lenin V. I., Lessons of the Moscow uprising, 1906, in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 11, Progress Publishers, 1972, p. 176.
(15) Lenin V.I., Revolutionary army and revolutionary government, 1905, in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 8, Progress Publishers, 1977, p. 560–561.
(16) Lenin, ibid., pp. 562–‘ 563.
(17) Lenin V.I. , The latest in Iskra tactics, 1905, in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 9, Progress Publishers, 1977, p. 366–367, 369.
(18) Lenin V.I. , Lessons of the Moscow uprising, 1906, in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 11, Progress Publishers, 1972, p. 174–175.
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