V. I.

Lenin

LECTURE ON “THE PROLETARIAT AND THE WAR”. OCTOBER 1 (14), 1914 [2]

NEWSPAPER REPORT

The speaker divided his lecture into two parts:
clarifying the nature of the present war, and the attitude of
socialists to the war.

For a Marxist clarifying the nature of the war is a necessary preliminary for deciding the question of his attitude
to it. But for such a clarification it is essential, first and
foremost, to establish the objective conditions and concrete
circumstances of the war in question. It is necessary to
consider the war in the historical environment in which it
is taking place, only then can one determine one’s attitude
to it. Otherwise, the resulting interpretation will be not
materialist but eclectic.

Depending on the historical circumstances, the relationship of classes, etc., the attitude to war must be different
at different times. It is absurd once and for all to renounce
participation in war in principle. On the other hand, it
is also absurd to divide wars into defensive and aggressive.
In 1848, Marx hated Russia, because at that time democracy
in Germany could not win out and develop, or unite the country into a single national whole, so long as the
reactionary hand of backward Russia hung heavy over her.

In order to clarify one’s attitude to the present war, one must understand how it differs from previous wars,
and what its peculiar features are.

Has the bourgeoisie given such an explanation? No.
Far from having given one, it will not manage to give one
in any circumstances. Judging by what is going on among the socialists, one might think that they, too, have no idea
of the distinctive features of the present war.

Yet, the socialists have given an excellent explanation
of it, and have predicted it. More than that, there is not a single speech by a socialist deputy, not a single
article by a socialist publicist, that does not contain that
explanation. It is so simple that people somehow do not
take notice of it, and yet it provides the key to the correct attitude to the present war.

The present war is an imperialist one , and that is its basic
feature.

In order to clarify this, it is necessary to examine the
nature of previous wars, and that of the imperialist war.

Lenin dwelt in considerable detail on the characteristics
of wars at the end of the 18th and during the whole of the
19th centuries. They were all national wars , which accompanied and promoted the creation of national states.

These wars marked the destruction of feudalism, and were an expression of the struggle of the new, bourgeois
society against feudal society. The national state was a
necessary phase in the development of capitalism. The struggle for the self-determination of a nation, for its
independence, for freedom to use its language, for popular
representation, served this end—the creation of national
states, that ground necessary at a certain stage of capitalism for the development of the productive forces.

Such was the character of wars from the time of the great
French Revolution up to and including the Italian and
Prussian wars.

This task of the national wars was performed either by democracy itself or with the help of Bismarck, quite
independently of the will and the consciousness of those who
took part in them. The triumph of present-day civilisation,
the full flowering of capitalism, the drawing of the whole
people and of all nations into capitalism—that was the outcome of national wars, the wars at the beginning of
capitalism.

An imperialist war is quite a different matter. On this
point, there was no disagreement among the socialists of
all countries and all trends. At all congresses, in discussing
resolutions on the attitude to a possible war, everyone was always agreed that this war would be an imperialist one . All European countries have already reached an equal
stage in the development of capitalism, all of them have
already yielded everything that capitalism can yield.
Capitalism has already attained its highest form, and is no
longer exporting commodities, but capital. It is beginning
to find its national framework too small for it, and now
the struggle is on for the last free scraps of the earth. If
national wars in the 18th and 19th centuries marked the
beginning of capitalism, imperialist wars point to its end.

The whole end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century were filled with imperialist policy.

Imperialism is what impresses a quite specific stamp on the present war, distinguishing it from all its
predecessors.

Only by examining this war in its distinctive historical
environment, as a Marxist must do, can we clarify our attitude to it. Otherwise we shall be operating with old
conceptions and arguments, applied to a different, an old
situation. Among such obsolete conceptions are the fatherland idea and the division, mentioned earlier, of
wars into defensive and aggressive.

Of course, even now there are blotches of the old colour
in the living picture of reality. Thus, of all the warring
countries, the Serbs alone are still fighting for national
existence. In India and China, too, class-conscious proletarians could not take any other path but the national
one, because their countries have not yet been formed into
national states. If China had to carry on an offensive war
for this purpose, we could only sympathise with her, because
objectively it would be a progressive war. In exactly the
same way, Marx in 1848 could call for an offensive war against Russia.

And so the end of the 19th century and the beginning of
the 20th are characterised by imperialist policy.

Imperialism is that state of capitalism when, having done all that it could, it turns towards decline. It is a
special epoch, not in the minds of socialists, but in actual
relationships. A struggle is on for a division of the remaining portions. It is the last historical task of capitalism.
We cannot say how long this epoch will last. There may well be several such wars, but there must be a clear
understanding that these are quite different wars from those waged earlier, and that, accordingly, the tasks facing
socialists have changed.

To tackle these new tasks the proletarian party may need organisations of a very different type.

Kautsky, in his pamphlet Weg zur Macht , [1] pointed out,
in making a careful and detailed examination of economic
phenomena and drawing very cautious conclusions from them, that we were entering a phase quite unlike the old
peaceful and gradual development.

It is hard to say just now what the new form of organisation, corresponding to this phase, should be. But it is
clear that in view of the new tasks, the proletariat will
have to create new organisations or modify the old. All
the more absurd is the fear of disarray in one’s organisation, so vividly manifest among the German Social–
Democrats; all the more absurd is this legalism at all costs. We
know that the St. Petersburg Committee has issued an illegal leaflet against the war. The same has been done
by the Caucasian and certain other organisations in
Russia. There is no doubt that this could also be done abroad,
without any rupture of ties.

Legality, of course, is a most valuable thing, and Engels
had good reason to say: “Messrs, bourgeois, you will have
to be the first to break your legality!” [3] What is now
going on might teach the German Social-Democrats a lesson, because a government which has always boasted of
its legality is not put out by now having violated it all
along the line. In this respect, the brutal order of the
Berlin Commandant, which he forced
Vorwärts [4] to run on its front page, may prove useful. But Vorwärts itself, once
it renounced the class struggle on pain of being closed down,
and promised not to refer to it until the end of the war,
has committed suicide. It is dead, as the Paris
Golos , [5] now the best socialist paper in Europe, has rightly said.
The more frequently and the more violently I differed with
Martov before, the more definitely I must say now that that writer is now doing precisely what a Social-Democrat should do. He is criticising his own government, he is
unmasking his own bourgeoisie, he is accusing his own
Ministers. Meanwhile, those socialists who have disarmed in
relation to their own government, and devote themselves
to exposing and shaming the Ministers and ruling classes
of another country, play the part of bourgeois writers.
Südekum himself is objectively playing the part of agent of
the German Government, as others play it in relation to
the French and Russian allies.

Socialists who fail to realise that the present war is imperialist, who fail to take a historical view of it, will
understand nothing about the war. They are capable of taking
a childishly naïve view of it, in this sense, that at night
one seized the other by the throat, and the neighbours have
to save the victim of attack, or in cowardly fashion to shut
themselves away from the fight “behind locked doors” (in Plekhanov’s words).

We shall not allow ourselves to be deceived, and let the
bourgeois advisers explain the war as simply as that:
people were living at peace, then one attacked, and the
other is defending himself.

Comrade Lenin read an extract from an article by
Luzzatti, carried by an Italian newspaper. In that article,
the Italian politician rejoices that the great victor in the
war turned out to be ... the fatherland, the idea of fatherland, and repeats that we should remember the words of
Cicero who said that “civil war is the greatest evil”.

This is what the bourgeoisie have managed to achieve, this is what excites and delights them most, this is what they
have spent vast sums and efforts on. They are trying to
convince us that it is the same old, conventional, national war.

No, indeed. The era of national wars is past. This is an imperialist war, and the task of socialists is to turn
the “national” war into a civil war.

We all expected this imperialist war, and prepared for it. And if this is so, it is not at all important who attacked
first; all were preparing for the war, and the attacker was
the one who thought it most advantageous to do so at the
particular moment.

Comrade Lenin then went on to define the conception of “fatherland” from the socialist point of view.

This conception was clearly and precisely defined by the Communist Manifesto , in the brilliant pages whose
truth has been fully tested and justified by experience.
Lenin read an extract from the Communist Manifesto , where
the conception of fatherland is regarded as a historical
category, which corresponds to the development of society
at a definite stage and which later becomes unnecessary.
The proletariat cannot love what it has not got. The proletariat has no country.

What are the tasks of the socialists in the present war?

Comrade Lenin read the Stuttgart resolution, later confirmed and supplemented at Copenhagen and
Basle. [6]
This resolution clearly states the socialists’ methods of
combating the trends leading to war and their duties in
respect of a war that has broken out. These duties are defined by the examples of the Russian revolution and the
Paris Commune. The Stuttgart resolution was carefully worded, in consideration of all kinds of criminal laws,
but it indicated the task clearly. The Paris Commune is
civil war. The form, the time and the place are a different
matter, but the direction of our work is clearly defined.

From this angle, Comrade Lenin then examined the actual stand taken by socialists in the various countries.
Apart from the Serbs, the Russians have done their duty,
as the Italian Avanti! notes, and Keir Hardie is doing it
by exposing the policy of Edward Grey.

Once the war is on, it is impossible to escape it. One must go and do one’s duty as a socialist. In a war, people
think and ponder probably even more than “at home”.
One must go out and organise the proletariat there for the final aim, because it is Utopian to imagine that the
proletariat will tread a peaceful path to it. It is impossible to go over from capitalism to socialism without
breaking up the national framework, just as it was impossible
to pass from feudalism to capitalism without national ideas.

---
Notes:
[1]
The Way to Power .— Ed .

[2]
Lenin’s lecture on “The Proletariat and the War” was given
in Lausanne on October 14, 1914, two days after Plekhanov’s
social-chauvinist lecture, and was carried in the Paris Golos
Nos. 37 and 38 on October 25 and 27. The report of the lecture
was filed by a Golos correspondent (initials: I. K.) who noted that
“Lenin’s lecture was held before a great concourse of people”.

[3]
See Engels, Socialism in Germany , Section One.

[4]
On September 27, 1914, the central organ of the German
Social-Democrats, Vorwärts , carried an article, “Germany and Foreign
Countries”, which timidly suggested that the German and French
proletariat were involved in the war against their will. On this
pretext the paper was banned by the Commander of the
Brandenburg district, General von Kessel. Haase and Fischer
requested that the ban be lifted. Kessel agreed, provided Vorwärts
refrained from dealing “with the subject of class hatred and the class
struggle”. The editors accepted the condition, and the paper
reappeared on October 1, frontpaging General Kessel’s order on
the resumption of its publication.

[5]
Golos (Voice)—-a Menshevik-Trotskyist daily published in Paris
from September 1914 to January 1915, advocating a Centrist
stand.

Early in the First World War (1914–18), Golos carried Martov’s
articles against the social-chauvinists. That was when Lenin
approved of the paper’s activity. Following Martov’s turn to the
right, the paper began to defend the social-chauvinists,
preferring “unity with the social-chauvinists to drawing closer to those
who are irreconcilably hostile to social-chauvinism” (see present
edition, Vol. 21, p. 113).

From January 1915, Golos was replaced by Nashe Slovo (Our
Word).

[6]
The anti-war resolutions of the international socialist congresses
of the Second International in Stuttgart (1907), Copenhagen
(1910) and Basle (1912).