Socialists have always condemned wars between peoples as a barbarous and bestial affair. But our attitude towards war is fundamentally different from that of bourgeois pacifists (advocates and preachers of peace) and anarchists. We differ from the former in that we understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within a country, we understand the impossibility of eliminating wars without eliminating classes and creating socialism, and also in that we fully recognize the legitimacy, progressiveness, and necessity of civil wars—that is, wars of the oppressed class against the oppressing class, of slaves against slaveholders, of serf peasants against landowners, of wage workers against the bourgeoisie. Both from pacifists and from anarchists, we Marxists differ in that we recognize the necessity of a historical study (from the standpoint of Marx's dialectical materialism) of each war individually. In history, there have been repeatedly wars which, despite all the horrors, brutalities, calamities, and sufferings inevitably connected with every war, were progressive—that is, they were beneficial to the development of humanity, helping to destroy especially harmful and reactionary institutions (for example, autocracy or serfdom), the most barbarous despotisms in Europe (Turkish and Russian). Therefore, one must examine the historical peculiarities of precisely the present war.