“Imperialism and the National Question” (1929)

An early essay on the Italian and German Communist left

Otto Dix, The War

Dutch, Spanish, French

• Publisher’s critical notes
• Leninism or Marxism?  Imperialism and the national question

Appendices

• Zinoviev, The Marauders (1915)
• Marx on the Franco-German war of 1870

Publisher’s critical notes

Since the war in Ukraine resumed with intensity in 2022, and certainly since the war between Hamas and Israel in 2023, the question arises as to the character of these wars.

Are these national wars – also known as wars of national liberation or colonial wars? And if so, which state – or aspiring state like Hamas – is waging war to liberate itself, and liberate itself from what, and with what chance of achieving that liberation?

Or are today’s wars inter-imperialist wars, i.e. wars in which states and would-be states commit their own populations and eliminate enemy populations in a struggle for the redistribution of capitalist spheres of influence? In other words, a war that is not in the interests of the working class, and which it fights for its own class interests and, ultimately, for proletarian revolution? This is the position we defend here. Put more generally and at the same time more specifically, it is as follows:

• All wars since the beginning of the 20th century are the result of the division of the world into capitalist spheres of influence. The large and the small states and aspiring states that participate directly or indirectly (by proxy) in these wars, including the less powerful ones, are imperialist, that is, they try to make the most of the capitalist redistribution of the world that is the result of each war.
• The “defense of one’s own people” and the “right of peoples to self-determination” are merely the slogans with which imperialisms call on the workers of their countries to slaughter each other for the interests of capital.
• The working class, anywhere, has no stake in this inter-imperialist war whose price it pays in human lives, injuries, war trauma and increased exploitation and oppression. For the working class of all countries: the enemy is at home, (class) war to the (interimperialist) war, no class peace but continuation of the workers’ struggle until revolution, even if it leads to defeat of the “own” country in the war (revolutionary defeatism), transformation of the imperialist war into the proletarian world revolution.

This discussion and terminology are not new. They emerged in the period around the First World War of 1914-1918, when left-wing social democrats who opposed the participation in the war of the parties of the Second International marked the term imperialism to indicate that this war was not in the interests of the working class. After the proletarian revolution in Russia and the end of Russian participation in the First World War, left-wing social democrats who were in favor of the workers’ struggle against the war called themselves communists and came together in the Communist International. Initially, the differences between the views of the German-Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch Marxists Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek, on the one hand, and the Russian Marxists Lenin, Zinoviev, and Trotsky, on the other, remained unclear. The latter believed that national wars were still possible in the period of inter-imperialist war, and that national liberation was even in the interests of the working class. It was partly because of these differences that the partisans of Pannekoek and Gorter, who formed the KAPN and KAPD workers’ communist parties in the Netherlands and Germany, were expelled from the Communist International as “left-wing radicals” and “an infantile disease of communism” (Lenin). Amadeo Bordiga, spokesman for the communist internationalists in Italy, remained in the Communist International, criticizing the position of the Russian Bolshevists in a very “diplomatic” way.

The 1929 text that follows here, “Imperialism and the National Question”, appeared in the Paris review “L’ouvrier communiste”. Around this magazine, German immigrants, supporters of the KAPD, and Italians, supporters of the Bordiga faction (Italian Communist Left) discussed their differences. The attached article is the result. It remains interesting because it contrasts the views of the “German Communist Left” (KAPD) and those of the Bolsheviks in a way that is equally accessible to supporters of the Italian Left and even those who share the National-Bolshevik point of view. At the same time, it shows that Bordiga did in fact agree with the KAPD in 1924, but only expressed this indirectly.

The article also contains a few weaknesses. The most obvious is the characterization of the Bolshevik position as non-Marxist. This ignores the confusion of all Marxists opposed to the war over the concept of imperialism and, in particular, the unanimity over the bourgeois character of the expected revolution in Russia, a viewpoint we believe to be erroneous. The fact that in the early 20th century the world was divided into capitalist spheres of influence does not solely mean that all wars were inter-imperialist. Even earlier, with the failure of the European revolutions of 1848, the era of bourgeois revolutions was over. The adaptation to an increasingly capitalist world of countries with a predominantly pre-capitalist mode of production took place through historically obsolete regimes, such as that of Bismarck in Germany and later that of Tsarism in Russia. In order to maintain themselves militarily and in foreign trade, these countries built up a national industry that could compete with that of the older capitalist countries, particularly by applying the most modern capitalist methods of production in large-scale industrial enterprises. With this, a working class emerged in Germany and later in Russia that was no longer bound by the petty-bourgeois influences emanating from small business. Marx had the idea in 1848 that a bourgeois revolution in Germany could only be accomplished under pressure from the proletariat. This revolution in Germany could then turn, together with a proletarian revolution in France, into a proletarian world revolution. After 1848, he dropped this idea of permanent revolution, and that of associated national wars.

However, the theorists of international social democracy – from reformists to revolutionaries – mechanically insisted on the need for bourgeois revolution in “backward” Russia. In doing so, the Bolsheviks used the scheme of the Communist Manifesto and the League of Communists. In doing so, the Bolsheviki a) overlooked the fact that Marx assumed struggle of the broadest proletarian masses (Marx’s party concept of the time) while they advocated a revolutionary minority party, actually on the Blanquist model, b) that Marx proposed that the League of Communists should play the role of opposition and not of ruling party, as the Bolsheviki did. As a ruling party, the Bolsheviki became the puppets of the unchanged capitalist relations in industry and of Russia’s need for foreign policy. Under capitalist and imperialist pressure from within and without, misled by ideas of a double, bourgeois and proletarian, or permanent revolution, they thought they were leading the world revolution, while in reality they were facilitating counterrevolution at home and abroad.

The “right of peoples to national self-determination” was of little practical significance in the activities of Lenin and the Bolsheviks until Oct. 1917. But from the time they were ruling party it became an important tool in their domestic politics (Stalin was People’s Commissar of Nationalities) and their foreign policy. Henceforth, “peoples” and “nations” as the politics of the Russian state required, were labeled as “oppressed by imperialism” and thus candidates for “national liberation,” or on the contrary as “imperialist,” or “accomplices” of imperialism. Since around 1920 the Russian Communist Party had lost hope of support from a proletarian revolution in the West, it tried to protect the Eastern front through a Peasant International. The Communist International was henceforth used to make its affiliates the instruments of Russian foreign policy. Through historically outdated tactics of trade unionism, parliamentarism and formation of fronts with sections of the bourgeoisie, the Western Communist parties were to become mass organizations that exerted pressure on their governments in the interests of the Soviet Union.  When the Bolsheviks understood around 1920 that the Soviet Union could not be brought out of its isolation by a proletarian revolution in Germany, they began to seek cooperation with the German generals. Karl Radek had begun making contacts from prison in Germany during the workers’ revolt in the Ruhr against the Kapp-putsch. Probably with Moscow’s approval, the KPD joined the Bielefeld Accords, which disarmed the Red Army that workers in the Ruhr had formed. Thousands of revolutionary workers were then slaughtered by the Reichswehr and the Freikorpse, from which National Socialism would later emerge. The Bolsheviki’s initial rejection of Hamburg’s “national-bolshevism,” which advocated cooperation with the German generals and the Soviet Union in defense of Germany against France and England, gave way to its acceptance. Suddenly, the Comintern discovered that the Treaty of Versailles had made Germany a debt-ridden nation, oppressed by imperialism of France and England. The KAPD and the GIC have extensively documented this betrayal of proletarian internationalism by the Comintern and its affiliated communist parties. A summary for the case of Germany up to the Hitler-Stalin Pact in World War II can be found, among others, in Rusland en de grote nederlaag van de Duitse arbeidersklasse in 1933. (³⁹) The reorientation of Russian foreign policy toward the East since 1923, can be found in The Development of the Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union. (⁴⁰) This policy had disastrous consequences for the Communists and the revolutionary workers of China, who were massacred in 1927 by the bourgeois Kwo-Min-Tang that Moscow had imposed on them as an ally. In the above text, Part 2, see the chapters Koerswisseling naar het Oosten and De afslachting van de Chinese arbeiders-revolutie. [1]

When “Imperialism and the National Question” relies on Zinoviev, it adopts his interpretation of Marx’s position during the Franco-German War of 1870. Marx would have considered this war to be the last national war, or one of the last national wars in Europe. For this, see Zinoviev’s “The Marauders” (1915), which we have appended, as well as the following quotations from Marx. These quotations show that in his private correspondence, Marx spoke of the Franco-German war as a national war only in a parodic sense, since it was understood as such, on both the French and German sides, by the belligerent states and the petty bourgeoisie. Finally, in his 1871 pamphlet on the Paris Commune, “Civil War in France”, Marx states unequivocally that the national war is nothing but a government swindle.

“Imperialism and the National Question” ends with the words “to be continued”. However, this sequel is not known to us. It is possible that the author wanted to draw attention to the material basis of Bolshevik views on the survival of national wars, national liberation and “anti-imperialist” struggles in colonial and semi-colonial territories. Rosa Luxemburg and, after her assassination in 1919, the KAPD had already published articles on this subject. Before 1914, Lenin believed that the Russian proletariat, or at least its party, could benefit from national movements against the central authority of the multi-people state that was Tsarist Russia. Having seized power in Russia thanks to the proletarian revolution, the Bolsheviks felt they had to fulfill their promises concerning the right of peoples to self-determination. In Finland and Ukraine, the independent national bourgeoisie immediately sided with the imperialist Entente surrounding Soviet Russia. Subsequently, the Red Army recaptured the Ukraine at the cost of many casualties. For the fatal consequences of the Communist parties’ alliance with nationalist bourgeois groups in Turkey, Persia (now Iran) and China, we refer to the article in “L’Ouvrier Communiste.” Missing, however, is the addition that the policy imposed by the Comintern of fronts with national liberation movements, or what was to pass for such, corresponded to the foreign policy interests of Soviet Russia, which in retrospect, and with more distance, we must unambiguously characterize as imperialist. For a more in-depth analysis of Lenin’s views on imperialism and national liberation, we refer here to “The inter-imperialist war in Ukraine – From Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter and Lenin to ‘Council-Communism’.”

As for Bordiga, it’s worth noting that he clung to Trotsky in his attempts to opposition within the Comintern. After Trotsky rebuffed Bordiga, the latter adopted even more intimately Trotskyist notions of permanent revolution. This led to theories of revolution in Russia as a double revolution, proletarian and bourgeois at the same time. And worse still, support for national “liberation” by the “Bordigists”, by the splits who almost all call themselves the International Communist Party. The “cycle of national liberation” is now said to have ended in the ’60s (or at other times). But the venom still regularly resurfaces in such vomit as calls for support for Palestinian proletarians while silencing Israeli workers. Incidentally, Bordiga’s article “Communism and the National Question” (1924) is not mentioned on the Bordiga archive site sinistra.net. Apparently an “infantile disorder” of Bordiga.

The many wars since the time when Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Pannekoek and Gorter pondered the new period of imperialism, have made it clear that the German and Dutch Communist Left was right. It is true that many new nations emerged in the 20th century, but their significance was no longer a struggle against pre-capitalist mode of production and for the further spread of capitalism, and thus a growth of the breeding ground of the workers’ struggle. In particular, the wars referred to by the followers of the Bolshevists as national liberation struggles, anti-colonial or anti-imperialist, in short, national wars, all turned out to be wars between capitalist, imperialist powers. During the period of the “Cold” War, these were particularly the American and Russian blocs, both capitalist and imperialist. After the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia’s place was temporarily replaced by other imperialist powers, especially regional ones. China has proven to be a new world power capable of knocking the United States off its throne. The smaller nations – like the nations of the aspirant states – have turned out to be nothing but the propagandistic illusion of the “people,” this false national unity of bourgeoisie and proletariat, which the petty bourgeoisie at the head of the so-called “liberation” struggle is using to get the proletarians and poor peasants to fight for their imperialist interests: to maximize their part in capitalist redistribution of the world through war. The ‘liberation from imperialism’ always appeared to involve the subjugation to the imperialism of another superpower. Sometimes the “liberators” revealed themselves as oppressors of other “nations,” e.g., the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. The article “Imperialism and the National Question” already mentions some examples from the 1920s, but even since then every “liberation” movement has been harsh on any form of autonomous workers’ struggle. In this respect, they sometimes show their anti-proletarian character even before their victory over foreign imperialism.

F.C. December 2023

Leninism or Marxism?
Imperialism and the national question

By L’ouvrier communiste (Paris), no. 2-3, Oct. 1929

China’s current conflict with Russia, and the threats of war which flow from this inter-imperialist incident, as indeed from all those brought to us day by day by current events, signal the imminent possibility of a new world war, and force us to pay renewed attention to the problem which the outbreak and development of the 1914 war so brutally placed before the Marxist left of the 2nd International.

On this terrain, there were major differences between the Leninist elements (reduced in this case to Lenin and Zinoviev, who alone edited the “Socialdemokrat”) and most of the Left (mainly made up of elements from Germany, Poland and Holland). It is not unimportant to note the isolation of Russian Bolshevism in its particular position on the national question in relation to other currents. It is no coincidence that Bolshevism, or Leninism, was already at odds with Western proletarian ideology on this issue.

For too long, these divergences, of fundamental importance to the development of the international revolution, have been kept under wraps by the various elements of the 3rd International. Like the majority, the so-called oppositionists, labelled Leninists, Trotskyists or Bordigists, have always pretended to ignore the antagonism of the Luxemburgist and Bolshevist tendencies. “Prometeo”, which recently published an article by Amedeo Bordiga on the “National Question” [2] , fails to point out how the content of this article seems to depart from Leninism and move closer to Luxemburgism. It should be added that Bordiga himself contributed to keeping these differences, which had existed for some fifteen years on the Marxist left, in the shadows, veiling them in the cloak of Bolshevik discipline. It was only in his 1924 lecture on Lenin that he vaguely alluded to this divergence, and in a diplomatic phrase expressed his sympathy for the anti-Leninist tendency of the Marxist left in the 2nd International.

In fact, Luxembourg’s death, and the exclusion of leftist elements such as the Dutch “Tribunists” and the German Communist-Labor Party (K.A.P.D.) from the 3rd International, enabled Leninism to dominate the Comintern’s tactics in the national question as well as in all its other issues.

First of all, we need to highlight the Marxist position on this particular problem, as it emerges unmistakably from the quotations claimed by Zinoviev and Lenin themselves. In Zinoviev and Lenin’s “Against the Current” (Tome 1, page 18 of the French translation), they refer to Marx’s view in “The Communist Manifesto”: “Workers have no fatherland”. Let’s reproduce in its entirety the passage from the manifesto where Marx and Engels set out their thinking on the question of the fatherland in relation to the working class (see the Librairie de l’Humanité edition, p. 37):

“Workers have no fatherland. You can’t take from them what they don’t have. As the proletariat of each country must first conquer political power, set itself up as a nationally ruling class, and become the nation itself, it is still national, but not in the bourgeois sense of the word.”

“Already, national demarcations and antagonisms between peoples are disappearing more and more with the development of the bourgeoisie, the freedom of trade, the world market, the uniformity of industrial production and the corresponding conditions of existence. The proletariat in power will make them disappear even more. Its joint action, in civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions of its emancipation.”

Lenin here (l. c.) gives an exact interpretation of Marx’s text, recognizing that the socialist revolution cannot win within the limits of the old fatherland, that it cannot preserve itself within national borders, and that its common action, as Marx rightly says, in civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions of emancipation. Clearly, Karl Marx implies that advanced proletarians have a strong sense of internationalism even before revolutionary victory, and that he sees this as a basis for the development of revolution. The expression “nation”, applied to the social whole dominated by the proletariat and gradually identified with itself, is formalized as the meaningless residue left by the bourgeoisie in its downfall. It in no way allows us to assert that Karl Marx thought of the distinct existence of a “socialist homeland” of any kind.

It is clear from the above that national boundaries are already losing their economic and political significance under bourgeois rule and are destined to be completely abolished by the development of proletarian power.

The subsequent development of the capitalist economy has thoroughly demonstrated the accuracy of this thesis, by achieving the universal unity of the market for raw materials, outlets, and capital. The last war unmasked nationalism as an ultra-reactionary survival that no longer expresses the interests of an autonomous social formation but serves as an ideological disguise for imperialist realities.

The petty bourgeois of all stripes and the labor aristocracy of the monopolies are vehicles of patriotism only to the extent of their subjection to big business, which makes them its puppets, alternating the comedy of national defense with that of Wilsonism,[3] of Locarnism[4] etc… Workers have no reason to be attached to national demarcations, which is demonstrated by workers’ internationalism; it is obvious that the historical basis of its struggles and revolutionary experiences will lead the proletariat to abolish borders as soon as it has achieved the seizure of power in more than one country. The ethnic character of nationalities is losing all value, the fusion of the most disparate ethnic elements has long since become commonplace, and “natural” frontiers no more than ethnic frontiers resist the currents of civilization.

Thus, the internationalist thesis of Marxism lends itself to no misunderstanding; the expression that sums it up: “workers have no fatherland”, is irrevocably clear, marking the real division between bourgeois nationalism and proletarian internationalism, as subsequent historical development has unmasked the distinctly bourgeois character of patriotic and national ideology. And yet Lenin did not completely erase from his “Marxist” conception the influence of this patriotic ideology, which the Marxist elements of the West entirely rejected.

It’s interesting to note that when Lenin polemicizes with the reformists, he assumes ultra-leftist attitudes[5] while when he polemicizes with the ultra-leftists, he assumes reformist attitudes. This eclectic stance is generalized across all issues. The oscillations of his centrism are very well characterized in works such as “Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” on the one hand, and ” ‘Left-wing’ Communism — an Infantile Disorder” on the other. In the passage quoted from “Against the Current” (page 18 of the first volume), Lenin polemizes against the reformists and social traitors. He becomes purely internationalist, recalling the unequivocal Marxist expression: “Workers have no fatherland”.

On page 213, polemizing against the Dutchman Nieuwenhuis and comparing him to Gustave Hervé, he asserts that the latter was talking nonsense “when he drew this conclusion from the axiom: ‘Every fatherland is nothing but a cash cow for capitalists'”:

“The German monarchy or the French republic, it’s all one and the same, as far as socialists are concerned.”

“When, in the resolution he presents to the congress, Hervé declares that for the proletariat it is absolutely indifferent” whether the country is under the domination of this or that national bourgeoisie, he is formulating and defending an absurdity worse than that of Nieuwenhuis. It is not at all indifferent to the proletariat to be able, for example, to speak its mother tongue freely, or to suffer national oppression in addition to class exploitation. Instead of drawing this deduction from the premises that herald socialism, that the proletariat is the only class that will fight to the end, certainly, against all national oppression, for the complete equality of rights of nations, for the right of nations to self-determination, Hervé instead declares that the proletariat has no business dealing with national oppression, that it ignores the national question in general.”

Naturally, Lenin adopts his favorite method of analogy in this instance, to be able to reject a theory because of the betrayal by a man. But this is of little importance to us. What is more important, is the content of this passage, which sums up Lenin’s theory of the national question. And it claims to derive this particular conception of his and the Bolsheviks’, from the premises that herald socialism!

However, he has already admitted with Marx that “the workers have no fatherland” and that the national question can have no interest for the working class. Marx clearly states that you can’t take from them (the proletarians) what they don’t have. And yet it’s clear from Lenin’s passage that the fatherland can be taken from the workers, that it’s not just a privilege of the ruling classes, but also an advantage of the exploited classes. The contradiction between Marxist and Leninist thought is clear here. For Lenin, the proletariat must take an interest in the national question; it must be against all national oppression, i.e., against all oppression of the fatherland, which, according to Marx, it does not have and cannot take away. For Lenin, the proletariat is even the paladin of national defense, as it represents the only class that will fight to the bitter end, especially against all national oppression.

These are undoubtedly the sources of National-Bolshevism. And once we have reflected on the meaning of Lenin’s thought, it’s not surprising that Bukharin said in 1923:

“The 1923 conflict between France and Germany was not simply a repetition of the 1914 conflict. Rather, it has a national character. Consequently, the Communist Party of Germany will have to make it clear to the working class that it alone can defend the German nation against the bourgeoisie, which is selling out the national interests of its country.”

Indeed, in the spirit of Leninian thought, wasn’t Germany an oppressed country? There’s no doubt about it. German regions were oppressed by French occupation, and it was the “duty” of German workers to fight to the bitter end for their liberation! For the liberation of Germany from the oppression of the Entente. Everyone is familiar with the results of the application of Lenin’s tactics in Germany in 1923.[6]

It is clear from this disastrous experience that when the proletariat sets out to defend “its fatherland” “the oppressed nation” it achieves only one result, namely, to strengthen its own bourgeoisie. But it will be necessary to point out one more obvious contradiction, which exists in the articles of “Against the Current” to realize the equivocal nature of National Bolshevism. In Zinoviev’s article “The Marauders” (page 71 of the first vol.)[7] it is stated that:

“Marx regarded the war of 1870-1871 as one of the last – or the last – great national war of Europe. Every socialist obviously agrees that the war of 1870-71 actually closed the era of national consolidation of the great European states.”

Needless to say, Zinoviev was polemizing against the reformists. It is clear from Marx and Zinoviev’s opinion that the era of national wars is completely closed. The Marxist view finds a tremendous contribution in the subsequent development of capitalism and capitalist imperialism, of a purely economic nature. In “Imperialism, the Last Stage of Capitalism”, Lenin highlighted the character of the latter, differentiating it completely from classical imperialism. This modern imperialism, the product of capitalism’s economic antagonisms, completely dominates all international struggles and disputes. There is consequently no place for accessory elements such as the national in the great modern conflicts of capitalism. National issues can only serve as a pretext for the development of international conflicts and can even be artificially provoked to unleash a war. Nothing can escape the power of the imperialist spiral, the relentless struggle between rival imperialisms. The reality of this question is very clear in Rosa Luxembourg’s thinking (Junius brochure).

“As long as capitalist states exist, i.e. as long as imperialist world politics dominates the internal and external life of states, the right of nations to self-determination is of no importance, neither in peace nor in war. What’s more: in the present imperialist milieu, there is no room for a war of national defense, and any social policy that disregards this historical milieu and seeks to orient itself from the isolated base of a single country, is from the outset built on sand.”

As we have just seen, imperialism has eliminated any possibility of a national war in the Marxist sense of the word, and Karl Marx’s opinion of 1871 has found a solid basis in the subsequent development of capitalist imperialism. Now, in the passage quoted above, it would seem that Lenin’s general line is closer to this opinion. But this is not the case. In his polemic against the Polish social democrats (page 129 of the 2nd vol. of “Against the Current”), Lenin develops his thought in contrast to them:

“Obviously, Polish authors pose the question of ‘defense of the fatherland’ quite differently from our party. We reject the defense of the fatherland in the imperialist war… Obviously, the authors of the Polish theses reject the defense of the fatherland in a general way, i.e. even for a national war, perhaps believing that national wars in the imperialist era are impossible.”

It’s clear that in this passage Lenin asserts that, for him, national wars are not yet over, and that he accepts the defense of the fatherland in a national war. Here, Lenin’s ideology clearly contradicts both Marxism and himself. For Lenin, reality oscillates between two poles that negate each other. On the one hand, he recognizes the terrible reality of the imperialist war, which apparently originated in a national conflict; on the other, he is desperately striving to revive an outdated nationalism. And it is for this very reason that he looks for examples in national insurrections, which have successively unmasked their reactionary character and brought no advantage to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, Lenin asserts (page 139 of the 2nd vol. of “Against the Current” this:

“Socialists want to use for their revolution all the national movements unleashed against imperialism. The clearer the struggle of the proletariat against the common front of imperialism becomes, the more essential becomes the internationalist principle that says: a people that oppresses other peoples cannot be free itself.”

In the polemic with the Junius brochure (“On a brochure by Junius” Contre le Courant II page 154), Lenin’s thinking on this question became increasingly clear. For Lenin, there is a clear dividing line between national and imperialist wars.

“Only a sophist (p. 158) could try to erase the difference between an imperialist war and a national war…”

And further down he even asserts the possibility of a great national war:

“If imperialism outside ‘Europe were to continue for another twenty years or so, leaving no room for socialism, for example because of an American-Japanese war, then a great national war in Europe would be possible.”

As a consistent Marxist, Junius (Luxemburg) maintains that there can be no more national wars, and Lenin cries out that it would be wrong “to extend the appreciation of the present war to all possible wars under imperialism, to forget the national movements that can arise against imperialism”. And he adds that even a great national war is possible! Here the contradiction between his thinking and Marxist thinking becomes ever more acute, for Zinoviev himself the war of 1870-71 closed the era of great national wars in Europe.

In vain, on pages 122-23 of the same book, Lenin tries to extricate himself from his polemic against the Polish social democrats, resorting to Engels’ thought in “The Po and the Rhine”. His contradiction with Marxism is no less obvious. Engels believes that the borders of the great European nations were determined in the course of history, which saw the absorption of several small, unviable nations, increasingly integrated into one large one by language and the sympathies of the populations. This Engelsian thesis is already very weak from a historical point of view. But above all, Lenin is obliged to note that reactionary, imperialist capitalism is increasingly breaking down these democratically-defined borders. It should be noted, however, that Engels’ view of capitalism’s influence on the upheaval of old frontiers as “natural” does not at all correspond to the main idea of Marxism as expressed in the above-mentioned passage of the Communist Manifesto:

“Already the demarcations and antagonisms between peoples are disappearing more and more with the development of the bourgeoisie, free trade, the world market, the uniformity of industrial production and the corresponding conditions of existence.”

Marx does not regard this process of the disappearance of national demarcations as a reactionary phenomenon, as Lenin claims. Lenin considers the whole process, and the Polish social-democrats’ approach to it, as “imperialist economism”:

“The old “economists” [8] , leaving only a caricature of Marxism, taught workers that “what’s economics” matters only to Marxists. Do the new “economists” think that the democratic state of victorious socialism will exist without borders (in the sense of a sensation complex without matter?). Do they think that borders will be determined solely by production needs? In reality, these borders will be determined democratically, i.e. in accordance with the will and sympathies of the population. Capitalism uses violence to influence “these sympathies” and thereby adds new difficulties to the work of bringing nations closer together.”

There is a clear contrast between Leninian and Marxist thinking. For Marx, the bourgeoisie and the economic organization of capitalism make borders disappear, eliminating national difficulties; for Lenin, capitalism increases these difficulties. It may be noted that the bourgeoisie was progressive in 1848 and reactionary in the imperialist phase. This would be a distinction of little use, as the rise of the world economy has not ceased since then, even through formidable crises, to determine an ever-closer rapprochement between national populations, and sometimes the fusion of national elements.

Leninian thinking also fails to recognize the artificiality of the so-called national sentiments expressly fostered by the bourgeoisie. It doesn’t realize that in some strata of the population, chauvinist feelings are a simple result of their economic conditions. That today, love of country is relegated to these strata, which we have already mentioned.

Here, Lenin’s thinking appears to be a historical anachronism, a step backwards. He wants to achieve the unity of peoples by going back to a historical basis, which Marxism already considered in 1848 to be in danger of disappearing. Leninian thinking in this field, which is largely ignored by Western communist militants, can be defined as downright reactionary.

Instead of fighting national sentiments, which the bourgeoisie has every interest in keeping alive, it encourages and legitimizes them, making them a moral basis for the development of socialism.

No one will doubt for a moment, when reading Lenin’s polemic against Junius, that sophistry is on his side. Indeed, what is the only argument he can add against Luxembourg? The subtle pretext that dialectics can slip into sophistry. And to do this, he appeals to the dialectic of the Greeks, which has nothing to do with materialist dialectics, which is not a method outside reality, but a method within reality itself. For this national war (little Serbia revolting against big Austria) had turned into the imperialist war, not in abstraction but in reality. It clearly proved that sophistry was on Lenin’s side when it came to national wars and questions.

But before reviewing the historical events that have confirmed this judgment, it won’t hurt to clarify Lenin’s thinking with a quotation whose content is beyond dispute. In the article against the Junius pamphlet (page 158, vol. II of “Against the Current”, Lenin clearly affirms his belief in national wars and extends his theory to the colonial question:

“National wars – he says – are not only probable, but they’re also inevitable in an age of imperialism, on the side of colonies and semi-colonies (China, Turkey, Persia) there are populations totaling up to a billion men, i.e. more than half the population of the globe. National emancipatory movements in these areas are either already very strong or growing and maturing. The continuation of national emancipatory policies in the colonies will inevitably involve national wars against imperialism. Wars of this kind may bring about a war of the great imperialist powers today; but they may also bring about nothing, that will depend on many circumstances.”

So far, we’ve noted the contradictions between Marxism and Leninism on the national question. We have pointed out the sharp contrast between Lenin’s National-Bolshevik thesis and the Marxist internationalism of the German, Polish and Dutch leftists. Those who have read or will read Bordiga’s article “Communism and the National Question” published in “Prometeo” on September 15, 1929[9] will notice that this contrast (while hidden) also existed between Italian leftist thought and Leninist thought.

This was no pure coincidence. Anti-Marxist Leninism concealed a profound difference in objective conditions between Russia and other European countries on the national question. The objective bases of the forthcoming Russian revolution were not purely socialist, and Lenin’s thinking produced that strange contamination of proletarian and bourgeois elements, which clashed with the clearly working-class thinking of the West. The Russian objective conditions were already reflected in their contrast in the thinking of the future leader of the October Revolution.

These considerations, which have their theoretical basis in the conception of historical materialism, and which contain the judgment of the national conception of Leninism, would not be sufficient if they were not supported by the historical bankruptcy of National-Bolshevism. Many communist militants have hitherto believed that the tactics applied by Leninism, Bukharism and Stalinism had nothing to do with Lenin’s thought; they thought that these tactical lines of the Communist International were a degeneration of the pure line of Bolshevism. This was also due to the diplomatic attitude of some leftist opponents, who, as we pointed out at the beginning of this article, hid serious differences with Lenin by appealing to the degeneration of Bolshevism. Zinovievist, Bukharinist, Stalinist and even Trotskyist nuances are in no way detached from genuine Leninist National-Bolshevism.

That’s why we’ve had to resort to numerous quotations from Lenin, so that non-fanaticized communist workers who read and think can understand that National-Bolshevism has a single source, which is Leninism.

But let’s move on to the analysis of the historical process after the theoretical foundation of National-Leninism, to note its anti-proletarian nature and its definitive bankruptcy.

We have already seen that Lenin, in contrast to the Marxist thesis of 1871, envisaged the possibility of a great national war in Europe; we have seen that Lenin considered it the duty of the proletariat to defend the oppressed nation. For the Leninists in 1923, in the period of the Ruhr occupation and economic war, Germany was waging a national war. They argued that, following the Treaty of Versailles, Germany had become an oppressed nation. That’s why Bukharin, in the above-mentioned quotation, felt that the German proletariat had to defend the nation. In the “Rote Fahne” of June 17, 1923, Zinoviev asserted that Communists are the true defenders of the country, the people, and the nation. Bukharin and Zinoviev were Leninists, pure Bolsheviks. In “Against the Current”, hadn’t Lenin foreseen the “great national war”? Of course, Zinoviev had forgotten his article on the Marauders, but hadn’t Lenin in 1916 forgotten his 1914 considerations against the reformists? Radek, exalting Schlageter and polemicizing amicably on the “Rote Fahne” with the fascist Réventlow, was also a consistent Leninist, for he thought of defending oppressed Germany against Entente imperialism and the treacherous German bourgeoisie. Admittedly, Ruth Fischer went a little beyond the bounds of Leninism when she justified fascist anti-Semitism to racist students to save the oppressed homeland, but this was no more than a temperamental lapse. There was nothing Leninist about Paul Froelich when he wrote in the “Rote Fahne” of August 3, 1923:

“It is not true that we Communists were anti-nationals during the war. We were against the war, not because we were anti-German, but because the war only served the interests of capitalism… by this very fact we do not deny national defense where it is put on the agenda!”

Lenin said he rejected the defense of the fatherland in an imperialist war, but not in a general way? We see clearly that neither Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek nor Froelich betrayed Leninism in their 1923 strategy. It was Leninism alone that was killing the German revolution; it was National-Bolshevism which, in claiming to save the nation from the German bourgeoisie, was saving the bourgeoisie from the German proletariat. This distracted the proletariat’s attention from its main objective: the struggle against international capitalism, and thus detached the German fatherlandless from the fatherlandless of other nations, while chattering about national oppression, national betrayal by the German bourgeoisie and other petty-bourgeois songs. What were the results of the consistent application of Leninian national tactics in the German 23? That the proletariat was defeated, that the German bourgeoisie was strengthened to such an extent that Bukharin at the VI Congress of the Communist International was forced to point out the resurrection of German imperialism!…

This is how Lenin’s national ideology, at least as far as the “great European national war” is concerned, found its grave in the German 1923. And behind this tomb appears the bloody image of the author of the Junius brochure, who cries out: “There can be no more national wars under capitalist imperialism”.

But if the great European national war found its grave in the German 23, the small national wars of the colonies and semi-colonies (Turkey, Persia, and China) also died in the swamp of imperialist reaction. They too were unable to escape the influence of the capitalist-dominated historical milieu. The history of Turkey’s and China’s national wars is the well-known story of Kemal Pasha and Chang-Kai-Shek. These are two bloody tragedies in which the proletariat and the communists of Turkey and China played the role of victim. The Russia of Lenin, of Bolshevism, of socialist construction, gave the weapons for these national wars to Chang-Kai-Chek and Kemal Pasha; the latter, immediately drawn into the circle of imperialist policy, formed a united front with the imperialists against the proletariat, and turned the weapons Russia had provided them with against the proletariat and the communists. And yet, in these circumstances, pure Leninist tactics were applied, whatever Trotsky and his followers may say. The Chinese and Turkish proletariat were told to defend their homeland, oppressed by the imperialists and their agents; the crusade of oppressed nations against imperialism was proclaimed. Didn’t Lenin himself advocate the use of a united front of oppressed nations against imperialism? Surely it cannot be argued that the struggle in defense of the oppressed nation could be reconciled with the revolutionary interests of the workers, for the struggle of the proletariat against capitalism and international imperialism is the struggle against its own bourgeoisie, not in the name of its own nation, but in the name of the international proletariat. What mattered most in China for the Chinese and international proletariat was the entry of the Chinese working class into the revolutionary proletarian struggle, and not into the national struggle, which was reactionary in its essence, and could not lead in any case to China’s national emancipation, but in any case, to the Chinese bourgeoisie’s link-up with imperialism. Can we today call national wars conflicts that cannot escape the historical milieu of imperialism? Of course not. So, the ideology of national wars, of the non-capitalist, non-imperialist homeland, has failed utterly in terrible defeats and a sea of proletarian blood. And the holy crusade of oppressed nations against oppressive imperialism has been transformed into a liaison between the indigenous bourgeoisies and imperialism, against the indigenous proletariat and against the world proletariat.

If in China and Turkey the legend of the national war ended in tragedy, in Afghanistan and Persia it died under the mockery of history in the farce of Amanoullah.[10]

The colonies themselves, Egypt, India, these countries which encompass millions of humans and which Lenin hoped to unleash in their national fire against the imperialism of the capitalist colossus, do not allow us a national war. For in the Swaraj,[11] the Wafd,[12] etc., the indigenous bourgeoisie has already lost its national aggressiveness, and is seeking compromise, a submissive alliance with the imperialist colossus. And yet the staunch Leninists are still preparing new nationalist crusades, i.e. new massacres of colonial proletarians, instead of preparing the socialist revolution by developing the consciousness of the proletariat in the same countries.

What conclusions can be drawn from this analysis of thoughts and facts on the national question?

That there is no national question for the proletariat, that the workers can derive no advantage from the existence of a homeland for themselves, and that they have no business dealing with national oppressions, with the right of nations to self-determination. The proletariat develops its movement, makes its revolution as a class, not as a nation. As soon as the proletariat achieves victory in several nations, borders can only disappear. The Leninist thesis of the national autonomy of socialist states is nonsense. Lenin asserts that as long as the state exists, the nation remains a necessity. But the nation is only a product of the bourgeois state, not of the proletarian state. Proletarian states can only tend to unite and abolish borders. Better still, socialism as an economic and social order can only be achieved based on the total disappearance of borders. The abolition of national economic differences cannot be achieved without the abolition of national boundaries, which are, moreover, artificial, and conventional. The proletarian dictatorship, the workers’ state, which is not the bourgeois state, can only be universal and not national, democratically unitary, and not federative. Marxist communists have no desire to build a United States of Europe or the world; their goal is a universal republic of workers’ councils.

Marxist communists must therefore propagate among the broad working masses hatred of the fatherland, which is a means for capitalism to sow division between proletarians in different countries. They must advocate among the broad working masses the need for fraternization, for the international union of all proletarians in all countries. They must fiercely combat not only all the chauvinist, fascist or social-democratic tendencies that poison even working-class circles, but also all the masked tendencies that try to give any basis whatsoever to the national ideal. They must fight against the legend of national wars, the legend of popular anti-imperialist crusades. Using historical experience, they must instill in the proletarian masses faith in the victory of socialism, on purely classist, purely internationalist bases.

We must therefore focus all our efforts on reviving true Marxist internationalism, which has been confused by the social-reformists and national-Bolshevists.

We understand our propaganda alone cannot bring about this effort to bring internationalism back to the masses and develop it to a hitherto unknown degree. We know that our propaganda, while necessary, would not have the slightest influence, if subsequent developments in the historical process did not confirm it. But we also know that these developments can only push the proletariat towards the positions that true internationalists have never betrayed, and that Rosa Luxembourg maintained until the day she died.

(to be continued) [13]

Source

“Léninisme ou Marxisme? L’impérialisme et la question nationale“. L’ouvrier communiste (Paris), no. 2-3, Oct. 1929. Transcription and translation by F.C.

Appendices

Zinoviev, The Marauders (1915)

These are not the marauders who, when the cannonade has ceased, prowl the battlefields, and strip the dead soldier of his boots. We’re talking about a different breed of marauders: those who make their living in literature.

Lately, a few literary bandits have been appearing, intent on demonstrating that the current crash of German socialist opportunism is in fact that of Marx and Engels, that of scientific socialism. To this end, they set out to “prove” that Marx and Engels were chauvinists.

This is how Peter Struve “proves”, in the Messager de la Bourse de Pétrograd, the organ of Russian national liberalism, that Marx was always the enemy of the Slavs and that the present Sudekum are merely complying with his last wishes. This is how the little journal of the revolutionary socialists of Paris, La Pensée (Mysl), has fallen to the rank of a stock exchange sheet, publishing various articles by a M. I. Gardénine, who is an unscrupulously cardsharper – unscrupulously and, moreover, without much skill – seeking to “prove” the same thing to us.

Nothing could be more agreeable to the German social-chauvinists who, to deceive the workers, explain that they are following Marx’s teachings. And even the foretellers of the European mainstream press (see Frankfurter Zeitung) see no harm to spread the same version to the public: Marx and Engels thus provide Sudekum and Scheidemann with reinforcement.

It is therefore not inappropriate to examine the arguments of these literary marauders. To consider the Russian variety of the species, let’s look at the articles by M. I. Gardénine (La Pensée, numbers 13, 16 and 50).

It discusses the attitude of Marx and Engels during the 1870-1871 war. In six points, Mr. Gardénine formulates his indictment of the founders of scientific socialism. These six points are as follows 1° they (Marx and Engels) considered, in spite of the facts, that France was responsible for the war and played the role of aggressor in it; 2° they wished Germany victory; 3° they readily justified this wish with theoretical arguments, from the point of view of the proletariat; 4° in the course of subsequent events, they showed little interest in the French Republic, which they did not take seriously and which they treated as a “scoundrel”; 5° their opposition to the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was largely platonic and quiet, and never fierce; 6° finally, their attitude to the plans to proclaim a Commune in Paris, i.e., to the methods of revolutionary action, was entirely negative, – as long as these plans remained unfulfilled. M. Gardénine concludes: “The original sin does not lie with them (the Sudekums), but with their intellectual ancestors (Marx and Engels)”.

Marx regarded the war of 1870-1871 as one of the last – or the last – great national war in Europe.[14] This war, he wrote to Engels on August 8, 1870, “finally brings about the realization of the ‘national’ objectives of 1848”.[15] Was Marx’s opinion right or wrong?

Of course, every socialist agrees that Marx was right, that the war of 1870-1871 effectively closed the era of national consolidation of the great European states, that it unified Germany, thus fulfilling a great historical mission and achieving progress. The war of 1870-1871 is thus essentially different from the typically imperialist war of 1914. The 1870-1871 war marked the end of the first stage of capitalist development in Europe. The war of 1914 begins the completion of its final stage. 1870-1871 was the end of the beginning. 1914 is the beginning of the end. For imperialism, in its present proportions, is the last stage of capitalism, which, cramped within national frameworks, is making supreme efforts to adapt to a development of production leading ineluctably to socialist revolution.

Such is the “minimal” difference between the wars of 1870 and 1914. The attitude of socialists towards these two wars cannot, of course, be identical. Socialists are only obliged to remain socialists now, as they did 44 years ago.

Marx and Engels, examining the situation from the point of view of the international proletariat, said: the defeat of France in the Franco-German war of 1870-1871 would be in the interests of the proletariat of all countries. Why? 1° Because it would lead to the fall of Louis-Napoléon, whose regime was stifling France and providing a bulwark for European reaction; 2° Because, even if a revolution did not occur in Germany and did not unify Germany from below, the unification of Germany would then be achieved from above, if only, as Bismarck wanted, by creating a new, broad base for the German workers’ movement and thereby giving a new impetus to the growth of socialism in all countries.

Were Marx and Engels right?
Yes.

We could then argue with them about the very substance of the question; we could find their whole assessment of the grouping of powers to be wrong. One could judge the situation quite differently. But could they be reproached for being chauvinistic because they wanted France to be defeated? Certainly not. During the Russo-Japanese war, the entire International wished for Russia’s defeat, believing it to be in the interests of the world proletariat. Were socialists everywhere guilty of Japanese chauvinism?

Marx and Engels “regarded France as the aggressor”. In saying this, Mr. Gardénine reveals the depths of his personal stupidity.

What does he reproach Marx and Engels for? For failing to see during the events themselves that, from the point of view of diplomatic history, Prussia was the aggressor, even though we know that Bonaparte was no less provocative than Bismarck? It’s true that Bismarck, along with all the bourgeois politicians, succeeded in deceiving the socialists, and even Bebel and Liebknecht to some extent. Marx and Engels considered Bonaparte the aggressor at the time. But is Mr. Gardénine interested in the diplomatic question, or in something more important? Thirty years after the Franco-Prussian war, Jaurès was writing its history and hesitated to say which of the belligerents was more guilty, which had been more provocative at the last moment. After Prussia’s victory over Austria (1866), when Napoleon III saw Bismarck forget his promises of compensation to the French Empire, Bonapartism was bound to seek revenge for Sadowa. After the Luxembourg conflict, in which Napoleon received nothing either, his bellicose tendencies were to increase. Napoleon III could only hold on in France through foreign policy successes. In 1868-1869, his failure in this area led to the beginning of the dissolution of Bonapartism itself. Bonapartism had to play for all it was worth. The ground shifted beneath its feet, it became nervous and fell into Bismarck’s trap. He pushed to the limit a fortuitous conflict over the vacancy of the Spanish throne and was the first to declare war on Prussia.

In an unfinished work, Violence and Economy (Neue Zeit, 1895-96), Engels, describing these events, acknowledges that Bismarck had succeeded in setting a trap for Bonaparte and that, from the point of view of diplomatic history, the error concerning direct aggression was thus explained. He explains it further by showing that the whole situation also obliged Napoleon to want war. In particular, because he was hoping for the support of Austria, eager to take revenge for the war of 1866; of Denmark, revenge for Schleswig-Holstein; and even of Italy!

But for Marx and Engels, as for materialist socialists, the diplomatic conflict preceding the war was far from being the most important.

The long historical process, begun in the early 19th century, of Germany’s emancipation from the medieval fragmentation, oppression and stagnation imposed by French kings and emperors up to Napoleon III, was what mattered to Marx and Engels. But all this hardly exists for the Jean Benêts of “socialist-revolutionary” sociology.

Instead of considering the war objectively, as a consequence of the bourgeois-democratic, progressive national movement of the German people, these Jean Benêts stick to the subjective argument: Which of the adversaries was the cleverest, which one beat the other?

For a long time, Napoleon III oppressed not only France, but the whole of Europe, and prevented the unification of Germany. Putting an end to this oppression, even by war, was important, necessary and a step forward in history. Don’t you understand, Mr. Gardénine? Do you think, like all petty bourgeois, that any war is bad, harmful, reactionary, that, for example, an offensive war by India or China against Russia or England would not constitute historical progress, would not mean defending the national independence of 700,000,000 humans against the exploitative banditry of Nicholas II and George V?

In 1870, Marx and Engels couldn’t have known how cleverly Bismarck was tricking foolish diplomats. But we can be sure that, had they known, their view of the war of 1870-1871 would not have been altered, and they would have continued to wish for France’s defeat.

For, let us repeat, it was not the question of aggression at the last moment and defense that was decisive for them; it was another, infinitely more serious question… Marx and Engels rightly considered the war of 1870-1871 to be a national war. But did they draw chauvinistic conclusions? By no means.

On July 23, 1870, immediately after the declaration of war, the first manifesto of the General Council of the International appeared, drafted by Marx. Marx scourges Prussian despotism. Marx urges German workers to show fraternal solidarity with French proletarians.

September 9, 1870, immediately after Sedan, the International’s second manifesto, also drafted by Marx, devoted to passionate agitation against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, propaganda for solidarity with the French Republic, merciless criticism of the Prussian monarchy, and an appeal to workers everywhere to act in an internationalist spirit.

At the time, there were social-chauvinists in Germany, Schweizer and his group, who initially voted for the war credits, etc. Did Marx and Engels show solidarity with them? No.

In his letter of July 28, 1870, Marx writes to Engels:

“Fortunately, the whole (patriotic) demonstration is middle-class. The working class, with the exception of Schweizer’s followers, takes no part. Fortunately, the class struggle in both countries, France and Germany, is so strongly developed that no present war can force history to turn back the clock.”

Is that the language of Sudekum, Mr. Gardénine?

When the English oligarchy began its agitation for English intervention on behalf of Prussia, Marx, in his letter of August 1, railed against the idea and threatened the English bourgeoisie with a popular uprising. Is this how today’s Sudekum behaves?

Marx and Engels rightly saw the 1870-1871 war as a national war. Did they advise German socialists to support Bismarck and vote for war credits, for example? Not in the least. They approved of Bebel and Liebknecht, who had refused to vote for these credits from day one. They ask the militants of the Brunswick Committee, yesterday’s Lassalians, now hesitant, to do the same. “Marx has sided with us,” writes Bebel in a letter from 1870 (see the account of the German Socialists’ high treason trial, page 244). “Marx’s letter convinced me”, admitted Bracke, one of the most prominent Brunswickers (idem, p. 406).

Marx and especially Engels opposed G. Liebknecht who, in his agitation, sometimes fell into the error of wanting to make anti-Bismarckism an exclusive tactic. They were absolutely right. Liebknecht’s mistake was to ignore the fact that the war of 1866 had settled the question against Austria, while, in his opposition to Bismarck, he still fell into Austrophilia and sentimental sympathy for the small German states. It’s true that, during the war of 1870-1871, Liebknecht fell much less into this trap than in previous years. And it’s not without reason that Marx sometimes defended him against Engels. In any case, the debate had nothing to do with nationalism or internationalism.

Marx and Engels only protested the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine “platonically”! An impudent lie. In their private letters of 1870, Marx and Engels regarded this annexation as “the greatest misfortune for the whole of Europe, and especially for Germany”. Marx foresaw, from day one, that this annexation would bring France closer to Russia and provoke incalculable calamities. In both Manifestos of the International, annexation is scorned in merciless terms. In all his subsequent articles, Engels found no expression strong enough to express his indignation at this act of violence (1888-90-91).

Would Marx and Engels have had a negative attitude towards the plans for the proclamation of the Commune, i.e. revolutionary action by French workers? M. Gardénine didn’t think about what he was writing. Sudekum and even, most probably, General von Klück, would now be pleased to see French workers acting alone in a revolutionary way. After the fall of the Empire (September 4, 1870), it was Marx’s duty to warn French workers against reckless action. It was, we would say, Marx’s duty to do so, especially after the unsuccessful attempt of October 1870, which had led to the arrest of Blanqui, Flourens and other militants. Marx, as is clear from his correspondence and the International’s second appeal, did so only out of fear that premature action would help Prussian absolutism crush the French republic. In other words, he was driven by motives quite contrary to chauvinism.

And when the Commune erupted, Marx’s work on the French Civil War wrote this name in gold letters in the history of the international proletarian movement.

The attitude of Marx and Engels during the 1870-71 war, nobly courageous and profoundly in line with the principles of internationalism, is engraved in the minds of all French socialists. Vaillant himself, despite the patriotic frenzy that has taken hold of him, recently spoke out in L’Humanité – of December 14, 1914 – in his capacity as a militant of 1870-71, against the slander that makes chauvinists of Marx and Engels. They acted as internationalists, he declared, without ever expressing the slightest hostility towards France. Vaillant hates Germans and everything German. He has retained a fondness for only two “Germans”: Marx and Engels.

“Similar statements,” wrote Mr. Gardénine in his first article The Unexpected Revelation, “will, I know, at first appear quite implausible. I wouldn’t even be surprised if they were seen as an abominable slander against the founders of scientific socialism.” Mr. Gardénine saw clearly. But did he have to be a prophet to know that he would be called by name and that the slanderer would be called a slanderer?

Carry on, you narodniki (populists). Take advantage of the confusion to carry out your literary raids and to slander Marxism, as one slanders the dead. But spare us, at least, your Tartufe rhetoric and your sweet calls for union! And don’t think you’re being original, at least in your slander of Engels and Marx. Long before Mr. Struve and Mr. Gardénine, at the time of the First International, anarchists with very few ideas demonstrated, with just as much brilliance, that Marx was in reality a masked Bismarckian and that he wanted to subordinate the entire International to Prussian interests. Struve and Gardénine are weaving the laurels that could once have been claimed by men who were the scum of anarchy.

March 3, 1915. G. Zinoviev.

Source

Zinoviev, “Les Marauders”, in Contre le Courant Volume I. 1914-1915 / N. Lenin, G. Zinoviev ; translated from Russian by V. Serge and Parijanin. Transcription and translation by F.C.

Marx on the Franco-German war of 1870

Marx to Laura and Paul Lafargue, July 28, 1870:

“He (Napoleon) saw clear signs of the national character of the war in Germany and was surprised by the unanimous, rapid and immediate commitment of southern Germany to Prussia. (…) In Germany, the war is considered a national war because it is a defensive war. The middle classes (not to mention the ‘Junkers’ in Prussia) vied with each other in declarations of allegiance. We think we’re back in the days of 1812 sqq. ‘for God, King and Country’ (…). But it is comforting to note that workers are protesting in Germany as well as in France. Fortunately, class warfare is so well developed in both countries that no war of states will be able to turn back the wheel of history for long. On the contrary, I believe that the present war will lead to experiences which the “officials” on both sides do not expect at all.”

(MEW vol. 33, p. 124)

Marx to Engels, July 28, 1870:

After examples of events and statements in both France and Germany that would be appropriate in the case of a national war: “Who would have thought it possible that 22 years after 1848, a national appeal in Germany would possess such theoretical expression!”

(MEW vol. 33, p. 11)

Marx to Engels, August 8, 1870:

“The Empire is done”, i.e. the German Empire. By hook and crook, neither in the way planned nor in the way imagined, it seems that all the maneuvers since the Second Empire have finally led to the realization of the ‘national’ objectives of 1848 – Hungary, Italy, Germany! It seems to me that this kind of movement will only be completed when the Prussians and Russians start fighting (…)”

(MEW, vol. 33, p. 31)

However, Russia did not take part in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Marx in Civil war in France, April-May 1871:

“That after the most formidable war of modern times, the victorious and vanquished armies should join forces to slaughter the proletariat together – such an unheard-of event proves, not as Bismarck believes, the final crushing of the new society that is rising, but the complete crumbling of the old bourgeois society. The greatest heroic upsurge of which the old society was still capable is the national war, and this is now revealed to be a pure government swindle which has no other purpose than to postpone the class struggle, and which flies out the window as soon as the class struggle flares up into civil war. Class domination is no longer able to hide under a national uniform; national governments are united in the face of the proletariat!”

(MEW vol. 17 p. 360/1)

All fragments translated from the East German edition Marx Engels Werke (MEW)

---

[1] F.C., The inter-imperialist war in Ukraine. From Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter and Lenin to “Council-Communism”,chapter The domestic and foreign policies of the Soviet Union and the “oppressed nations”. Find there the sources (also in German) mentioned in notes 39 and 40

[2] Amadeo Bordiga, Communism and the National Question (1924): https://www.international-communist-party.org/English/Document/24CoNatQ.htm

[3] See Wikipedia, Wilsonianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilsonianism

[4] See Wikipedia, Locarno Treaties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locarno_Treaties

[5] By ultra-left, the Leninists mean the position of the uncompromising Marxists. (Author’s note)

[6] The occupation of the Ruhr by the French army in January 1923, the acceleration of the economic disaster and hyperinflation created a situation of chaos, which might seem “pre-revolutionary”, with the development of a works council movement akin to that of the revolutionary “confidence men” of 1918. The success of this movement, and the creation of party “workers’ militias” (proletarian centenaries) to fight the police and the Corps Francs in the Ruhr, restored confidence among the CP rank and file. But, as Pierre Broué notes, 1923 was above all marked by “the rise of the far-right nationalists” – who appealed to the “millions of downtrodden petty-bourgeois”, to workers sensitive to nationalist and anti-Semitic propaganda – and developed their armed militias (S.A. of the Nazi party), thanks to subsidies from the Ruhr’s major industrialists, and with the complicity of the Reichswehr.

The KPD’s populist demagoguery appealed to these ruined petty-bourgeois strata, pandering to their exacerbated nationalist sentiments and even their anti-Semitism. Karl Radek, the former Linksradikale of Bremen, was able to hold a speech – before the executive of the Comintern – in memory of the Nazi Leo Schlageter, shot by the occupying French army in June 1923:

Only if the German Cause is that of the German people, only if the German Cause consists of a struggle for the rights of the German people, will it recruit the active friends of the German people. By making the people’s Cause the Nation’s Cause, make the Nation the people’s Cause. This is what the Communist Party of Germany must affirm, and this is what the Comintern must affirm at Schlageter’s tomb.

This appeal to nationalist sentiment could perfectly well coexist with an “anti-fascist” mobilization, such as the “anti-fascist day” of July 29, which was a significant failure. The KPD then attempted a Popular Front policy avant la lettre. On October 10, the Saxon Social Democratic government included several Communist ministers, including Fritz Heckert (future Stalinist leader, still buried in a Kremlin wall), and above all Brandler, who became head of the State Chancellery. The same thing happened on October 13 in the Thuringian government, where three “Communist ministers” were appointed, including Karl Korsch as Minister of Justice.

These apparent “successes” paved the way for defeat. Workers’ governments were dissolved by the Reichswehr without resistance. And without resistance, the entire movement capitulated. The Hamburg uprising of October 23, in a single district, was a fiasco: “only a part of the Communists fought, and they fought alone, the great masses remaining, if not indifferent, at least passive”.

It was another October, that of 1929, which consummated the defeat of the German workers. After a so-called “class versus class” (or “third period”) turnaround, in which social democracy was branded “social fascism”, the KPD returned to its policy of exalting the German “proletarian nation”. In August 1930, its Central Committee, wishing to compete with Nazism on its own turf, issued an address “For the National and Social Liberation of the German People”. In November 1932, the KPD established a united front at grassroots level with Nazi workers during the Berlin transport strike.

The counter-revolution came to power on November 9, 1919, “killing” the workers’ councils, then imposing the law of the Weimar Constituent Assembly by fire and iron. It was a veritable bloodletting of the German proletariat, carried out under the direct responsibility of social democracy. By 1923, at the end of the German revolution, the number of working-class victims was already comparable to that of the Paris Commune.

Defeat paved the way for Hitler in January 1933. The dream of global workers’ emancipation – in which Germany would play a key role – was transformed into the bloody nightmare of “national and social liberation for the German people”.

It was the royal road to world war.

Ph. Bourrinet, Workers’ Councils in Germany 1918-23.

[7] See Appendix for full article.

[8] The “economists” formed a tendency in Russian social democracy that attached absolute importance to the struggle for partial economic demands. Note by the author.

[9] Amadeo Bordiga, Communism and the National Question (1924)

[10] Probably Amanullah Khan, see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanullah_Khan

[11] See Wikipedia for the Swaraj concept by Gandhi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaraj

[12] See Wikipedia for the Egyptian Wafd party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafd_Party

[13] Continuation not known.

[14] Source not indicated.

[15] MEW Bd. 33, p. 31. See further in this Appendix for the full quotation. In this, it is not so much a historical necessity assumed by Zinoviev in Marx, but rather Marx’s irony regarding the bourgeois manipulations on both sides of the front.