Chris Burford: >Most relevantly on this particular debae, I think Lenin was wrong at >Zimmerwald, and I appreciate Louis Proyect highlighting this issue some >years ago and arguing that Lenin was correct.
Karl Marx and other socialists formed the first Socialist International in 1864. Rivalry between Marxists and anarchist supporters of the Russian Mikhail Bakunin caused it to collapse. Engels and a newer generation of Marxists founded the Second Socialist International in 1889. Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue told the assembled delegates that their flag was "the red flag of the international proletariat." Also, they were coming together as "brothers with a single common enemy...private capital, whether it be Prussian, French, or Chinese." In Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28 1914, Serb nationalists assassinated the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand. On July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia and the war became generalized within a few short months. On August 4 1914, while Russian troops prepared for an assault into East Prussia, German armies invaded Belgium and swept toward France. That day, August 4, was also the day that socialist members of the French and German parliaments voted to support emergency war appropriations. These socialists became known as 'defensists'. They wanted to postpone socialism until their own armies had successfully defended their own nation against the "barbarians" of the opposing nation. In reality, the socialist labor leaders and parliamentarians had become completely "bourgeoisified". They failed to defend the interests of the working-class against the nationalist fury whipped up by the warmakers in each nation. The capitulation to war-fever threw social democracy into a crisis. Antiwar socialists held a number of meetings in Switzerland in order to develop a strategy. Zimmerwald, a small rustic town, became the center of the antiwar opposition. The antiwar opposition split into two camps. One camp was "centrist". It opposed the war but advanced a strategy that was not revolutionary. It sought to mobilize public pressure in the various warring countries in order to force an early peace. The leader of this grouping was Robert Grimm, a Swiss socialist. Vladimir Lenin led the Zimmerwald left. It advocated a "defeatist" policy of revolution and civil war inside each warring country. Other socialists, including Trotsky, considered Lenin extreme at first, but events conspired to make Lenin look reasonable. Germany pushed into France and the armies of the two nations fought along the Meuse River over a 6-month period in 1916, while more than a million soldiers died. On July 1, the British and French launched a counteroffensive on the Somme River in Belgium. In their initial assault some 60,000 soldiers perished in a single day, a sum equivalent to all of the US deaths during the 8-year Vietnam war. While the blood-letting continued apace, Lenin sat down and wrote "Imperialism the Final Stage of Capitalism." This work is not mainly an economic dissertation. It is rather a foundation for the political line defended by the Zimmerwald left. Lenin zeroed in on the bankruptcy of social democratic reformism, the existence of an objectively revolutionary situation in the warring nations, the relationship of the World War to the crisis of imperialism, the link between struggles for national self-determination and socialism, and, finally, the need for a Third International. full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/zimmerwald.htm
