Along with being among its most strident internal critics, Lenin was also a leading figure of the Second International, delegate to its congresses and a member of its executive International Socialist Bureau from 1907 until 1912. In this November, 1914 article, Lenin surveys the organizational and political wreckage of the International’s as its opportunism met the First World War.

‘Position and Tasks of the Socialist International’ (1914) by V.I. Lenin from Selected Workers, Vol. 18. International Publishers, New York. 1930.

WHAT is most depressing in the present crisis is the triumph of bourgeois nationalism and chauvinism over a majority of the official representatives of European Socialism. It is not in vain that the bourgeois papers of all countries either mock at them or laud them condescendingly. There is no task more important for those who wish to remain Socialists than to make clear the causes of the Socialist crisis and to analyse the tasks of the International. There are people who are afraid to recognise the truth that the crisis, or more correctly the collapse of the Second International, is the collapse of opportunism.

Reference is made, for instance, to the unanimity of the French Socialists; to the fact that the old factions of Socialism changed their positions in relation to the war. But all these references are incorrect.

Defence of class collaboration; renunciation of the idea of a Socialist revolution and of all revolutionary methods of struggle; adaptation to bourgeois nationalism; forgetfulness of the fact that the frontiers of nationality and fatherland are changing in history; making a fetish of bourgeois legalism; abolition of the class point of view and the class struggle out of fear of repelling the “broad masses of the population” (read: petty bourgeoisie)–those are undoubtedly the ideological foundations of opportunism. It is on this soil that the present chauvinist-patriotic mood of the majority of the leaders of the Second International has grown. That the opportunists prevailed among those leaders was long noted from various angles by various observers. In consequence of the war, the real dimensions of this prevalence were disclosed most rapidly and in striking manner. That the unusual acuteness of the crisis has made the old factions change places here and there, should surprise nobody. On the whole, however, these changes affected only individuals. The currents inside of Socialism have remained the same.

There is no full unanimity among the French Socialists. Even Vaillant, who pursues a chauvinist line together with Guesde, Plekhanov, Hervé and others, is compelled to recognise that he is receiving a series of letters from protesting French Socialists who point out that the war is an imperialist one and that the French bourgeoisie is guilty of it no less than the others. One must not forget that such voices are stifled not only by triumphant opportunism but also by military censorship. In England, Hyndman’s group (the English Social-Democrats, the British Socialist Party) has completely sunk into chauvinism, as is the case with the majority of the semi-liberal leaders of the trade unions. Resistance to chauvinism is offered by MacDonald and Keir Hardie of the opportunist Independent Labour Party. This is really an exception to the rule, but some revolutionary Social-Democrats who had long fought against Hyndman have now left the ranks of the British Socialist Party. Among the Germans the picture is clear: The opportunists are victorious, they are jubilant, they are in their own element. The “centre” headed by Kautsky has sunk into opportunism, which it defends by unusually hypocritical, vulgar and self-satisfied sophisms. In the ranks of the revolutionary Social-Democrats, protests are being heard from Mehring, Pannekoek, K. Liebknecht, and from a series of nameless voices in Germany and in German Switzerland. In Italy, the groupings are also clear: The extreme opportunists, Bissolati and Co. are for the “fatherland,” for Guesde Vaillant-Plekhanov-Hervé. The revolutionary Social-Democrats (the Socialist Party) with the Avanti at its head, is fighting against chauvinism and exposing the selfish bourgeois character of the appeals for war, enjoying the support of a large majority of the advanced workers. In Russia, the extreme opportunists of the Liquidators’ camp have already raised their voices in defence of chauvinism in lectures and in the press. P. Maslov and E. Smirnov are defending tsarism under the pretext of “defence of the fatherland” (Germany, don’t you see, threatens to force upon “us” commercial treaties at the point of the sword, whereas tsarism, it seems, did not and does not throttle the economic, political and national life of nine-tenths of the population of Russia by the power of the sword, the knout and the scaffold!), and they are defending the entry of Socialists into bourgeois reactionary cabinets and voting for military appropriations to-day, for new armaments to-morrow!! Plekhanov has sunk into nationalism, hiding his Russian chauvinism under Francophilism; so has Alexinsky. Martov, judging by the Paris Golos, behaves more decently than the rest of this company, offering, as he does, resistance to both German and French chauvinism, rising both against the Vorwärts, against Mr. Hyndman, and against Maslov, but afraid to declare a decisive war against international opportunism and its most “influential” defender, the “centre” of the German Social-Democracy. The attempt to paint war-volunteering as a realisation of Socialist tasks (see the declaration of a group of Russian volunteers in Paris, consisting of Social-Democrats and Socialists-Revolutionists, also Polish Social-Democrats, Leder and others) was defended only by Plekhanov. The majority of the Paris section of our party has condemned these attempts. The position of the Central Committee of our party is clear to the readers from the editorial in the present issue. In the history of the way in which the views of our party were formulated we must, to avoid misunderstandings, establish the following facts: A group of members of our party, overcoming the tremendous difficulties of re-establishing organisational connections disrupted by the war, first worked out the “theses,” and on September 6-8, had them circulated among the comrades. Then it conveyed them through the Swiss Social-Democrats to two members of the Italo-Swiss Conference at Lugano (September 27). Only by the middle of October did it become possible to re-establish connections and to formulate the standpoint of the Central Committee of the party. The “thesis,” as finally edited, is the editorial of this issue.

Such is, in brief, the state of affairs in European and Russian Social-Democracy. The collapse of the International is apparent. This is definitely proven by the controversy between the French and German Socialists. Not only the “Left” Social-Democrats (Mehring and the Bremer Bürger-Zeitung [Bremen Citizen’s Gazette]) but even the moderate Swiss organs (Volksrecht [People’s Right]) have recognised this. Kautsky’s attempt to gloss over this collapse is a cowardly evasion. The collapse of the Second International is clearly the collapse of opportunism which found itself in bourgeois captivity.

The position of the bourgeoisie is clear. It is equally clear that the opportunists only repeat bourgeois arguments without criticism. To what is said in the editorial we may only add perhaps that the Neue Zeit derisively points out that internationalism consists in the workers of one country firing upon the workers of another country in the name of defence of the fatherland!

The fatherland question, we say to the opportunists, cannot be raised in the abstract without an analysis of the concrete historical character of the present war. This war is an imperialist war, i.e., a war of the period of a most developed capitalism, a period of the end of capitalism. It is necessary that the working class first “constitute itself as the nation,” says the Communist Manifesto, thereby indicating the limits and conditions for our recognition of nation and fatherland as necessary forms of the bourgeois order and, consequently, also of the bourgeois fatherland. The opportunists distort this truth when they apply to the final stage of capitalism that which was true in relation to budding capitalism. Of this final stage of capitalism, and of the tasks of the proletariat in its struggle to destroy, not feudalism, but capitalism, Karl Marx says clearly and definitely: “The workers have no fatherland.” It is obvious why the opportunists are afraid to recognise this truth of Socialism, why, in most cases, they are even afraid openly to debate it. The Socialist movement cannot be victorious within the old framework of the fatherland. It creates new, higher forms of human life under which the best demands and progressive tendencies of the labouring masses of all nationalities will be fully satisfied in an international unity while the present national partitions are destroyed. The attempts of the present-day bourgeoisie to disunite and split the workers by means of hypocritical references to the “defence of the fatherland” will meet with ever new attempts of the workers to establish the unity of the workers of the various nations in the struggle for the overthrow of the rule of the bourgeoisie of all nations.

The bourgeoisie is fooling the masses by spreading the cloak of the old ideology of “national war” over the imperialist plunder. The proletariat exposes this swindle in that it raises the slogan of transforming the imperialist war into civil war. This very slogan was suggested by the Stuttgart and Basle resolutions, which had in mind not war in general but precisely the present war, and which spoke not of the “defence of the fatherland” but of “hastening the collapse of capitalism,” of utilising for this aim the crisis created by the war, and of the example of the Commune. The Commune was a transformation of war between peoples into civil war.

Such a transformation, of course, is not easy, and cannot be accomplished by the individual parties at will. Such a transformation, however, is inherent in the objective conditions of capitalism in general, in the epoch of the final stage of capitalism in particular. In this, and only in this direction, must the Socialists conduct their work. To refrain from voting for military appropriations, to refrain from aiding and abetting the chauvinism of “our” country (and its allied nations), to fight, in the first place, against the chauvinism of “our” bourgeoisie without being confined to the legal forms of struggle when the crisis has set in and the bourgeoisie itself has done away with the legality created by it–this is the line of work that leads to civil war, and that will bring it about at this or that moment of the all-European conflagration.

The war is not an accident, not a “sin,” as is the idea of the Christian ministers (who preach patriotism, humanitarianism and peace no less eloquently than the opportunists); it is an inevitable stage of capitalism, it is a form of capitalist life as natural as peace. The war of our days is a people’s war. It does not follow from this truth that one must swim with the “popular” current of chauvinism; on the contrary, even in war times, in the war itself the same class antagonisms that rend the peoples will continue to exist and will manifest themselves in a military way. The idea of refusing to serve in the army, of strikes against the war, etc., is mere foolishness, it is the miserable and cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against an armed bourgeoisie, it is a weak yearning for the abolition of capitalism without a desperate civil war or a series of wars. Propaganda of class struggle even in the midst of war is the duty of a Socialist; work directed toward transforming the war of the peoples into a civil war is the only Socialist work in the epoch of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations. Down with the sentimental and foolish preacher’s yearnings for a “peace at any price!” Let us raise the banner of civil war! Imperialism has put the fate of European civilisation at stake: this war, if there does not follow a series of successful revolutions, will soon be followed by other wars; the fable of the “last war” is an empty, harmful fable, a philistine “myth” (to use the correct expression of the Golos). If not to-day, then certainly to-morrow; if not during the present war, then after it; if not in this war, then in the following one, the proletarian banner of civil war will rally not only hundreds of thousands of enlightened workers, but also millions of  semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois who are now being fooled by chauvinism and who, besides being frightened and benumbed by the horrors of the war, will also be enlightened, taught, aroused, organised, hardened and prepared for a war against the bourgeoisie both of “their own” and of the “foreign” countries.

Overwhelmed by opportunism, the Second International has died. Down with opportunism, and long live the Third International, purged not only of “deserters” (as the Golos would wish it) but also of opportunism!

The Second International did its full share of useful preparatory work in the preliminary organisation of the proletarian masses during the long “peaceful” epoch of most cruel capitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the last third of the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth century. The Third International is confronted with the task of organising the forces of the proletariat for a revolutionary onslaught on the capitalist governments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all countries, for political power, for the victory of Socialism.

Sotsial-Demokrat, No. 33, November 1, 1914.

International Publishers was formed in 1923 for the purpose of translating and disseminating international Marxist texts and headed by Alexander Trachtenberg. It quickly outgrew that mission to be the main book publisher, while Workers Library continued to be the pamphlet publisher of the Communist Party.

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