At 31/07/02 08:50 -0400, Louis Proyect quoted from his article on Zimmerwald in response to my comment:
>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. <snip re 1914> >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 Obviously these are very big and important questions. I am sure neither Louis Proyect nor I mention them because we think we are just about to convert the other. But if it helps to indicate the lines of difference rather than to be polemical, (as I have to tidy things up for a while) the reasons for my statement are It is almost ahistorical to say that Lenin was "wrong" in that the war happened, Zimmerwald happened, Lenin happened and the Russian Revolution happened. Nevertheless I think what Lenin quotes of Robert Grimm, the Swiss Marxist, sounds to me a serious position. Now maybe Lenin did not want to demolish it with the ferocity he directed towards Kautsky for tactical reasons, but also it may be that Grimm was not wrong. And in ignoring those arguments, Lenin was. Broadly I think the Second and a Half International, with people like the Swiss and the Danes, typically in the smaller powers of Europe, provided a principled basis for marxists winning a hearing as soon as the consequences of the imperialist war started to bite. IMO once the Third International realised that revolution was not going to break out all over Europe after the first world war it and its successor parties evolved an international policy that prioritised peace in a way that could be communicated to the masses of the population, yes with some difficulty, but it did not require marxists to take a stand that would automatically deprive them of a hearing by getting them put in prison. It is also an exercise in counterfactuals. Had Lenin not been so single minded it is hard to believe that the Bolshevik Revolution would have followed the February Revolution. I am persuaded that one of the major factors compelling Lenin was to get Russia out of the war. But this set history on a path which confirmed the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and set the young embattled Soviet State in a direction which IMO was not all caused by one person, Stalin. Struggling for peace is a long term major goal of internationalism, but it is a process, and needs to be about uniting, temporarily, with people who, in Lenin's terms, are opportunists, if that helps to get a hearing from the mass of working people. Chris Burford London
