INTRODUCTION
The subject of this volume is Marx and Engels’ views on the relation between war and revolution. Its thesis is that, over the course of decades, their views on this question changed—evolved is a better word—although, in this case as in others, they wrote no definitive statement of their views. Instead, we have a considerable corpus of ad hoc responses to the events of the hour, many of them politically explosive, from which we have to reconstruct, not a line, but an approach. To complicate things further, many of these crises, while they were the news of the day at the time, have since faded from memory.
1. The “Revolution” of August 14, 1914
On August 4, 1914, the Reichstag delegation of the German Social-Democratic Party joined the bourgeois parties and supported the government request for emergency war credits. It wrote a political as well as a financial blank check made out to German militarism. This political earthquake destroyed the Second International and the after shocks are still being felt.
Like most earthquakes this one was unexpected, although it had been preceded by the usual tremors. Everyone had expected the socialists to follow the example of Liebknecht and Bebel in 1870 and at least abstain on the vote. The socialists expected that themselves. Almost up to the day of the vote the Party press had continued to expose the provocative, bellicose, maneuvers of the Austrian and Prussian diplomats. And it was the German Party that had dominated the prewar conferences of the International where the movement had almost unanimously denounced the war preparations of the governments and the slavish support the bourgeois parties gave those governments as they rushed towards Armageddon.
The causes and consequences of this unexpected betrayal have been the topic of thousands of books, articles and doctoral theses. I am concerned with a narrower question. In order to cover themselves politically, the pro-war socialists looked for precedents in Marx and Engels. And they found more than enough for their purposes. They found evidence “proving” Marx and Engels to be rabid Russophobes who welcomed a war against Tsarist Russia by practically anybody.
Everyone, of course, was aware that hostility to Tsarism had been a prominent part of Marx and Engels’ politics. But no one had previously claimed that this hostility led to a support for the war policy of Tsarism’s great power rivals. Yet, after the swing of the German party majority into the prowar camp, even socialist opponents of the war, people like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, accepted this rewrite of history. These antiwar socialists could only argue that the policy Marx and Engels had pursued was outdated. What else could they have done under the circumstances? As we shall see, Marx and Engels wrote no systematic study of “the war question.” Their views were expressed in specific discussions of specific crises whose historical circumstances were, by 1914, often obscure if not completely forgotten. And Marx and Engels’ views evolved over decades as the state structure of Europe altered in response to war, national revolutions and the economic triumph of capitalism. The pressure to avoid a detailed historical account—and the lengthy research involved in constructing such an account—was overwhelming. Both Luxemburg and Lenin, not to mention lesser figures, simply decided to accept the main charge against Marx and Engels and move on. In doing so for obvious and compelling reasons they, nevertheless, put their imprimatur on the fabricated history of the prowar socialists.
Luxemburg, in the deservedly famous antiwar Junius Pamphlet, contrasted the Tsarist Russia of 1848 with the revolutionary post–1906 Russia, thus implying that Engels had died without changing his views on the Russian threat.1 But, as we will see, Engels had long abandoned the 1848 position and done so publicly in pamphlets and articles once well known not only to German socialists but to the international movement.
But it was Lenin’s antiwar polemics that were most responsible for leading practically all future historians astray.
2. Lenin, Potresov and Kautsky
In 1915, Lenin drafted an article titled “Under a False Flag” which was not published until 1917.2 In it he outlined his own position which he claimed was also that of Marx and Engels. He was to repeat this argument in several articles and resolutions which were published during the war but this draft presented his schema in greater detail.
Lenin’s article was provoked by the anti-Kautsky polemic of the prowar socialist, Alexander N. Potresov, writing in the magazine Nashe Dyelo. Potresov attacked Kautsky for not choosing sides in the war.
One recent biographer describes Kautsky’s dilemma in 1914.3 At the start of the war he had hoped to persuade the SPD delegation in the Reichstag to follow the example of Bebel and Liebknecht during the Franco-Prussian war and abstain in the vote for war credits. When it became clear that this would not be possible, he tried to get the party delegation to denounce the imperialist ambitions of all sides which had brought on the war and limit support to the government to what was required solely by the need to defend the country from attack. When this maneuver also failed, Kautsky was faced with the choice between concealing his antiwar sentiments and splitting the party in the midst of war.4 He rejected the second alternative and confined his public pronouncements to justifying “defensive wars” by citing the record of Marx and Engels while rejecting the annexionist plans of all the belligerents.5
For Potresov that was not good enough. It was no good arguing that Marx and Engels were for the right of each nation to self defense. That was just a device for avoiding any stand on the war. That was not what Marx and Engels had done. Their writings provided, he claimed, precedents for his prowar politics.
Potresov chose for his main precedent Louis Bonaparte’s Italian campaign of 1859. It was a particularly useful precedent because all sides were repugnant not only to socialists but to many halfway decent liberals. In this incident, which was pretty obscure even by 1915, Bonaparte, in secret alliance with the Russians, attacked Austria’s Italian possessions. The announced aim of the campaign was to liberate Italy. And Garibaldi’s troops were involved in the fighting—basically as auxiliaries of the French. The real aim was to cement a Franco-Russian alliance against Austria and keep the German states in turmoil. And, in the end, the Italian revolutionaries were swindled by Bonaparte.
In this crisis, Potresov claimed that Marx and Engels, when forced to decide “which Power in the Concert of Europe was the main evil: the reactionary Danubian monarchy or other outstanding representatives of this Concert,” refused “to step aside and say that the two are equally bad.”6 Marx and Engels, in Potresov’s version of history, urged intervention by Prussia in defense of Austria and in the name of Germany’s national interest. Lassalle, the other “great teacher” of the movement, used the same “lesser evil” methodology. Only he came to the opposite conclusion and supported Bonaparte. No matter. The important thing is the “Marxist” method not the conclusion. And Potresov wanted to use this “Marxist” method to decide which of two very reactionary sides in World War I was the main evil. Presumably, in 1915, Potresov was more concerned with coming to the correct (that is, pro-Entente) conclusion.
Lenin accepted Potresov’s argument while rejecting the conclusion. He agreed that Marx and Engels threw their support to one side or another “notwithstanding the highly reactionary character of the governments of both belligerent sides.”7 Lenin, in fact, went further than Potresov or Kautsky. He insisted that “no other question could have been posed at the time.”8 He corrected Potresov’s phrasing of the question “the success of which side is more desirable” to “the success of which bourgeoisie was more desirable.”9 Both men claimed to be quoting, or at least paraphrasing, Marx but neither bothered to point to a reference. Everybody agreed, without need of evidence, that Marx was prowar in 1859, and so were Engels and Lassalle.
3. Three Epochs
Lenin, apparently, felt all