In the sphere of military tasks and military work, the situation in the Soviet Republic has developed under the dictatorship of the proletariat as follows.

The imperialist war, as our Party foresaw long ago, could not end not only in a just peace, but indeed in any simply concluded stable peace by bourgeois governments. This petty-bourgeois illusion of democrats, socialists, and social-democrats has been completely refuted by the course of events. On the contrary, the imperialist war with necessity was transforming and is transforming before our eyes into a civil war of the exploited laboring masses, with the proletariat at their head, against the exploiters, against the bourgeoisie.

Both the resistance of the exploiters, growing as the proletariat's pressure grows and especially intensified by the proletariat's victory in individual countries, and the international solidarity and international organization of the bourgeoisie—all of this with necessity leads to a combination of civil war within individual countries with revolutionary wars between proletarian countries and bourgeois countries defending the dominion of capital. In view of the class character of such wars, the distinction between defensive and offensive wars loses any meaning whatsoever.

On the whole, this process of the development of international civil war unfolding before our eyes, particularly rapidly since the end of 1918, is a lawful product of class struggle under capitalism and a lawful stage toward the victory of the international proletarian revolution.

Therefore, the RCP resolutely rejects, as reactionary petty-bourgeois illusions of petty-bourgeois democrats, even those calling themselves socialists and social-democrats, all hopes for disarmament under capitalism, and counterpoises to all such slogans, which in fact merely play into the hands of the bourgeoisie, the slogan of the arming of the proletariat and the disarming of the bourgeoisie, the slogan of the complete and merciless suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, the slogan of the struggle to victory over the bourgeoisie of the whole world in both internal civil wars and in international revolutionary wars.

The practical experience of more than a year of military work and the creation of a proletarian revolutionary army, after the immeasurable exhaustion and war-weariness of all the laboring masses, has led the RCP to the following fundamental conclusions: