Spartacist (English language edition) No. 64
 International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
 2014-06

Greece 1940s: A Revolution Betrayed
Fruits of Stalinist Class Collaboration
The economic implosion of Greece in the midst of a global recession has turned that small capitalist country into a tinderbox. Greece has been plundered by the imperialist powers of the European Union (EU), while the pliant Greek bourgeoisie has inflicted massive pain and suffering on the working masses. Threatened with homelessness and hunger, the combative proletariat has taken to the streets time and again in recent years in huge demonstrations and protest strikes. At the same time, the fascist Golden Dawn, which is inspired by Hitler’s Nazis and enjoys considerable support among the police and the officer corps, has grown enormously, carrying out ever-bolder attacks on immigrants and leftists.
On both sides of the class divide, the sharp polarization of Greek society has brought to the fore bitter memories of the Civil War in the 1940s, which pitted the mass of workers and peasants under the leadership of the Communist Party (KKE) against the Greek ruling class and its imperialist patrons. Seven decades later, these events remain a living part of the consciousness of the working class.
World War II was even more horrific in the scale of its devastation and brutality than the first interimperialist world war of 1914-18. The bestiality of the imperialists was epitomized on the one hand by the mechanized machinery of murder in the Nazi death camps and on the other by the deliberate firebombing (and A-bombing) of hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians, as well as the British-engineered famine in colonial India, where wartime speculation and deliberate imperialist policy led to the deaths of well over a million people. Such imperialist brutality was visited also on the Greek populace. During the occupation of the country by the Italian and German imperialists and their Bulgarian allies, an estimated 550,000 people died, out of a population of just over seven million, largely the result of famine, but also through systematic massacres and the razing of entire villages. Tens of thousands more, especially workers and leftists, were subsequently slaughtered by the Greek bourgeoisie and its British (and, later, American) backers.
The Greek masses fought with courage and dedication. The depredations of the German occupation forces and the systematic looting of the country spurred a more or less spontaneous resistance movement in the cities as well as in the villages. The KKE placed itself at the head of this resistance. The National Liberation Front (EAM) was founded and dominated by the KKE as a coalition with small groups of social democrats, bourgeois liberals and petty-bourgeois agrarian populists. KKE cadres such as Aris Velouchiotis transformed the mountain guerrilla bands into the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), the fighting arm of the EAM. Notably, the Workers National Liberation Front (EEAM), based on the trade unions, was launched in July 1941, two months before the EAM itself. Likewise initiated and led by the KKE, the EEAM became the hegemonic organization of the Greek proletariat during the war. Under EEAM leadership, the workers’ quarters of Athens and other large cities were turned into fortresses against the invaders.
By April 1944, 90 percent of the Greek mainland was in the hands of the resistance movement. When the Nazi Third Reich began to crumble under the hammer blows of the Soviet Red Army, and the Germans were forced to withdraw from Greece, the KKE-led forces found themselves undisputed masters of the country. The EAM was supported by the vast majority of the population. Its Unified Panhellenic Youth Organization was a half-million strong. By the end of the occupation, ELAS had at least 70,000 well-armed fighters, along with a large reserve.
The working class in Athens, Piraeus, Salonika and other cities played a central and organized role in the Resistance, marked by a number of general strikes and huge protests against the depredations of the occupation forces. Working-class struggle continued after the German withdrawal, as exemplified by the Athens uprising of December 1944, the Dekemvriana, against the combined forces of the Greek capitalist state and a British expeditionary army.
The favorable situation for a seizure of power by the Communist-led workers and a settling of accounts with the capitalist oppressors was evident. Even the viciously anti-Communist Chris Woodhouse, a British agent parachuted into Greece during the occupation, conceded:
“If EAM/ELAS had been determined to seize power by violence on the liberation of Greece, the capital was waiting empty for them to do so on the day the Germans left. They could only have been evicted, if they had so decided, by a costly invasion, which Allied pressure and public opinion would have made impossible. By no conceivable calculation could a better opportunity be expected to recur.”
—Woodhouse, Apple of Discord: A Survey of Recent Greek Politics in Their International Setting (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1948)
Yet the KKE leadership refused to struggle for power. Why? Why did the Dekemvriana end in bloody defeat like the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s rather than in victory like the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917? This question continues to haunt the KKE. But it cannot be answered within the framework of the KKE’s Stalinist politics. A critical understanding of the lessons of the Greek Civil War—essential in forging an authentically communist vanguard party in Greece—can be derived only from the standpoint of Trotskyism, the continuity of V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevism.
Stalinism vs. Bolshevism
In the aftermath of the counterrevolutionary collapse of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of Central and East Europe in 1989-92, the KKE remains one of the few mass Communist parties that has not formally renounced the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Its predominant role in the Civil War and its long history of persecution and martyrdom at the hands of the state endow it with an undeserved aura of revolutionary militancy. With a base among the most combative sections of the working class and a niche as the “far left” in Greek parliamentary politics, in recent years the KKE has proclaimed its rejection of any electoral coalitions with bourgeois parties and sharply criticized its own role during the Civil War.
The KKE’s current cycle of self-criticism is clearly a work in progress. In 2011, it published the second volume of its Dokimio istorias tou KKE (Essay on the History of the KKE) (Athens: Sychroni Epohi, 2011), which includes a number of points at variance with the first volume, first published in 1995. The KKE has since announced that it intends to release a new version of the first volume. Meanwhile, the party press regularly churns out new revelations of where the KKE and the “international communist movement” went wrong. In a recent article in its newspaper, Rizospastis (Radical), titled “Pages from the Years 1941-1944,” the KKE asserts:
“The struggle of the KKE in the decade 1940-1949, with the armed struggle of EAM-ELAS in December 1944 and the Democratic Army of Greece (1946-1949), is the greatest offering of our party to the working class and the other poor popular layers as well as its greatest contribution to the activity of the international communist movement in the 20th century.
“However, it was confirmed in Greece as well as internationally that the most glorious movements are doomed to certain defeat if their vanguard cannot correctly solve the fundamental question of every political struggle—the question of power. The dilemma posed had to be, and could not be otherwise: bourgeois or workers power. However, while clearly a target of the bourgeoisie, the KKE counterposed the strategy of ‘national unity’.”
—Rizospastis, 22 December 2013 (our translation)
This statement raises more questions than it answers. Why would a self-styled Communist vanguard divert the struggle for workers power into the dead end of bourgeois “national unity”—and why did this happen not only in Greece, but also in Spain, France, Italy and elsewhere, for example South Africa? The KKE’s ideologues do not say. Nor can they, since that would compel them to trace this nationalist, class-collaborationist treachery back to its Stalinist roots.
The KKE glorifies Stalin as “one of the most eminent leaders of the proletariat of the USSR and also of the international communist movement” (“J.V. Stalin: His Enormous Contribution to the Cause of Building Socialism,” Rizospastis, 17-19 December 2010 [our translation]). In fact, Stalin was the gravedigger of revolution; Stalinism is not the continuity of the proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist program of Bolshevism but rather a throwback to the Menshevik politics of class-collaborationist coalitionism that was its mortal enemy in 1917.
The overthrow of the tsarist autocracy in the February Revolution of 1917 ushered in a period of dual power, pitting the soviets (councils) of workers and soldiers against the feeble bourgeois Provisional Government. So long as they remained the dominant force in the soviets, the Mensheviks and their petty-bourgeois, peasant-based Social Revolutionary allies sought to hand the power the workers had won back to the bourgeoisie, even joining the Provisional Government in a coalition with the bourgeois parties. Against Menshevik coalitionism—the precursor of Stalin’s “popular front”—the Bolsheviks advanced the slogan, “All Power to the Soviets!”
It took a sharp internal struggle by Lenin to win the Bolshevik Party to this revolutionary perspective. Until Lenin’s return to Russia in early April, the Bolshevik leadership under Stalin and Lev Kamenev conciliated the Mensheviks and extended conditional support to the Provisional Government, claiming this was in line with the old Bolshevik call for the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” The purpose of Lenin’s “April Theses” was to rearm the Bolshevik Party, to chart a course of struggle toward the dictatorship of the proletariat, to convince the masses “that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government” (“The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution,” April 1917). In so doing, he explicitly renounced the earlier conception that the Russian Revolution would take the form of a “democratic dictatorship.”
KKE ideologues who occasionally cite the April Theses to the contrary, Lenin’s conclusion was operationally congruent with Trotsky’s conception of permanent revolution—that the Russian proletariat could win power in advance of the Western proletariat and would be compelled to transcend the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the revolution and undertake socialist measures. Trotsky, in turn, came over to Lenin’s view on the vanguard party, allowing for a deepgoing fusion of their forces. Lenin’s struggle in April laid the basis for the Bolsheviks’ victory in October.
Even more so than in Greece, in Russia the proletariat was numerically dwarfed by the petty bourgeoisie, in the form of a downtrodden, impoverished and backward peasantry. The Bolsheviks did not conciliate the Social Revolutionaries, whose defense of the bourgeois order was in fact counterposed to the hunger for land of their peasant base. Rather, the Bolshevik-led proletariat won to its side the multimillioned peasant masses, including the peasant ranks of the decomposing Russian army, by fighting to sweep away the rule of the rapacious capitalists and landlords and to expropriate their holdings.
The Communist International (CI, or Comintern) was founded in 1919 to fight for world socialist revolution. But the postwar revolutionary wave in Europe inspired by October did not lead to the workers capturing power, largely because of the immaturity of the Communist vanguard there. By late 1923, Lenin lay dying from a stroke, and Trotsky, who had forged the Red Army and stood second only to Lenin in the eyes of the Soviet masses, was increasingly sidelined by the triumvirate of Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Gregory Zinoviev. The failure of the German Revolution in October 1923 was a particularly bitter blow. For the Soviet Union, it meant facing an indeterminate period of isolation.
In that context, a conservative bureaucratic layer in the Soviet party and state, headed by Stalin, was able to usurp political power from the proletariat. This development was manifested in the rigged delegate election to the January 1924 13th Party Conference, which allowed the loose Left Opposition around Trotsky only three delegates despite its widespread support in the party. The consolidation of this political counterrevolution, which was fought down the line by Trotsky, was marked by a series of ever more overt betrayals of the international proletariat and, by the late 1930s, the wholesale extermination of virtually all the leading cadre of the Bolshevik Party of 1917. Though the Soviet Union still rested on the nationalized economy, central planning and state monopoly of foreign trade ushered in by the Bolshevik Revolution, from 1924 on the people who ruled the Soviet Union, the way it was ruled and the purposes for which it was ruled all changed. This understanding must be the beginning of wisdom for revolutionary-minded elements in and around the KKE.
Stalin’s declaration in late 1924 that it was possible to achieve socialism in a single country gave voice to the aspirations of the conservative, Russian-centered bureaucracy, which wanted to safeguard its relatively privileged position against revolutionary “adventures.” This was flatly counterposed to the Bolshevik view that the October Revolution was only the first in a series of proletarian revolutions that would extend to the advanced capitalist countries in Europe and worldwide. In Stalin’s dogma lay the origins of the revisionism inherent in the futile quest for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism (and not, as the KKE leadership would have it, a 1956 speech by Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev). In 1926, the Soviet bureaucracy, through the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee, provided a left cover for the British Trades Union Congress misleaders as they betrayed the General Strike. In the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution, Stalin and his then-ally, Nikolai Bukharin, promoted the liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party into the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang, leading to the beheading of the Chinese proletariat by the nationalist butcher Chiang Kai-shek, whom Stalin had made an honorary member of the Comintern Executive Committee in 1926.
These bankrupt anti-revolutionary policies were codified in Stalin/Bukharin’s draft program for the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928. Until 1924, all Marxists, including Stalin, had rejected the notion that an egalitarian socialist society—which would necessarily be based on an international division of labor and a level of productivity far higher than in even the most advanced capitalist countries—could be built in a single country. In “The Draft Program of the Communist International—A Criticism of Fundamentals,” Trotsky drew out the national-reformist implications of this anti-Marxist dogma:
“The new doctrine proclaims that socialism can be built on the basis of a national state if only there is no intervention. From this there can and must follow (notwithstanding all the pompous declarations in the draft program) a collaborationist policy towards the foreign bourgeoisie with the object of averting intervention, as this will guarantee the construction of socialism, that is to say, will solve the main historical question. The task of the parties in the Comintern assumes, therefore, an auxiliary character; their mission is to protect the U.S.S.R. from intervention and not to fight for the conquest of power….
“If socialism can be realized within the national boundaries of backward Russia, then there is all the more reason to believe that it can be realized in advanced Germany. Tomorrow the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany will undertake to propound this theory. The draft program empowers them to do so. The day after tomorrow the French party will have its turn. It will be the beginning of the disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social-patriotism.”
—Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (1928)
The KKE’s social-patriotic “national unity” politics flow logically from its continued adherence to “socialism in one country.”
1935: The Comintern’s Liquidation Congress
Shortly after the Sixth Congress, Stalin proclaimed the so-called Third Period of imminent revolution everywhere. The Communist parties rejected the existing trade unions, dubbed the social democrats “social fascists” and engaged in a series of sectarian adventures, leaving these parties increasingly isolated from the mass of the organized proletariat. The culmination of this pseudo-leftist interlude was the refusal of the German Communist leadership to demand that the reformist Social Democracy join them in a workers united front against the Nazis, allowing Hitler to come to power in 1933 without having to fire a shot.
Until the Germany debacle, Trotsky and his supporters in the International Left Opposition had considered themselves an expelled faction of the CI. But when the Nazi triumph failed to provoke any internal protest, Trotsky declared that “if the Comintern remained deaf this time, it means that it is a corpse” (“It Is Impossible to Remain in the Same ‘International’ with Stalin, Manuilsky, Lozovsky and Company,” July 1933). The task now was to build the Fourth International. The Soviet bureaucracy could no longer be removed from power, concluded Trotsky, short of a proletarian political revolution—a revolution premised on unconditional defense of the Soviet workers state—led by a new Bolshevik-Leninist party.
Panicked by the Nazi victory, Stalin insisted that everything was as it should have been while reversing course toward an open alliance with the imperialist “democracies.” The new order of the day was the “people’s front against fascism,” an electoral coalition with bourgeois parties necessarily limited to a program of bourgeois reforms. The new betrayal was codified at the 1935 Seventh CI Congress, described by Trotsky as “The Comintern’s Liquidation Congress” (August 1935). Stalin’s hatchet man, Georgi Dimitrov, declared at the Congress:
“Now the working masses in a number of capitalist countries are faced with the necessity of making a definite choice, and of making it to-day, not between proletarian dictatorship and bourgeois democracy, but between bourgeois democracy and fascism.”
—Dimitrov, The United Front Against Fascism (Sydney: Current Book Distributors, 1945)
When they do mention the Seventh Congress, KKE spokesmen tread gingerly around this political minefield. While the KKE claims, for now, to reject electoral coalitions, it continually calls for “people’s power,” “people’s alliance,” etc., appealing to the petty bourgeoisie on the basis of bourgeois populism. And only a few years back, the KKE crowed: “The 7th CI Congress armed the international workers movement with a clear conception of the perspectives of the fight against fascism and war” (Essay on the History of the KKE, Vol. 1 [Athens: Sychroni Epohi, 1995]).
Thus “armed,” the Stalinists became a bulwark of the rotting bourgeois order internationally, as the social democrats had been since 1914. The popular-front policy was applied from the U.S. to Europe and more broadly. When a general strike challenged capitalist rule in France following the electoral victory of the Popular Front in 1936, Stalinist leader Maurice Thorez famously declared that one must know how to end a strike. In the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, the Stalinists became “the fighting vanguard of the bourgeois-republican counterrevolution,” as Trotsky put it (“The Class, the Party, and the Leadership,” August 1940). Intent on reassuring Stalin’s hoped-for “democratic” allies that they could count on him, the Stalinists did all they could to suppress the revolutionary proletariat of Spain, rounding up and exterminating working-class militants who defied the bourgeois Popular Front government, physically smashing the heroic Barcelona uprising of 1937 and ultimately opening the door to decades of Francoist reaction (see “Trotskyism vs. Popular Frontism in the Spanish Civil War,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 61, Spring 2009).
The popular front, wrote Trotsky, “is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism” (“The POUM and the Popular Front,” July 1936). Stalinism is warmed-over Menshevism. This is what KKE supporters seeking a road to socialist revolution must come to terms with programmatically.
Leninist Policy in World War II
The KKE’s critique of “national unity” is a hollow sham in the absence of a repudiation of its support for Stalin’s “democratic” imperialist allies in World War II. Genuine Leninists—i.e., Trotskyists—were guided by the revolutionary internationalism of the Bolsheviks in World War I. From the start of the war in August 1914, Lenin fought for a complete break with the social-patriotic class traitors of the Second International and for uncompromising opposition to their policy of “civil peace”—i.e., class collaboration in the name of “defense of the fatherland.” The Bolsheviks counterposed the call: Turn the imperialist war into a civil war!
In World War II, the Fourth International stood for revolutionary defeatism with respect to all the imperialist belligerents—the Allied as well as the Axis powers—while supporting the efforts of colonial and semicolonial peoples to free themselves from imperialist subjugation, insofar as such struggles were not decisively subordinated to one or another imperialist power. A major difference with World War I, however, was the existence of the Soviet Union, which Trotskyists defended unconditionally against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution.
As well, the widespread popular perception that the imperialist Allies in World War II were waging a progressive, democratic war against fascism, particularly Hitler’s barbaric regime in Germany, posed various tactical difficulties for the Trotskyists. Where the social democrats had been largely discredited by the end of World War I, after World War II the reformists, chiefly the Stalinists, emerged with their authority greatly enhanced by their leading role in the popular-frontist “anti-fascist resistance.” In fact, it was the Soviet Union that carried out the overwhelming brunt of the fighting against Hitler’s Germany, and it was the Red Army that defeated the Nazi scourge. On the part of the imperialists, however, this war was no less aimed at a redivision of the world than was World War I, as was evident in North Africa, South Asia and the Pacific Rim. As the postwar order demonstrated, the Western imperialists fought to make the world “safe” for neocolonial exploitation, rightist reaction and all the attendant evils inherent in capitalism, including the current resurgence of fascism.
Writing some months before the Seventh Congress, Trotsky sketched out the policies that the Bolshevik-Leninists would pursue in the coming interimperialist conflict and anticipated the perfidious role that Stalinism would play:
“The international proletariat will not decline to defend the USSR even if the latter should find itself forced into a military alliance with some imperialists against others. But in this case, even more than in any other, the international proletariat must safeguard its complete political independence from Soviet diplomacy and, thereby, also from the bureaucracy of the Third International.…
“The proletariat of a capitalist country that finds itself in an alliance with the USSR must retain fully and completely its irreconcilable hostility to the imperialist government of its own country.”
—“War and the Fourth International” (June 1934)
Frustrated by his failure in wooing the “democratic” imperialists, Stalin secured a “non-aggression” pact with Nazi Germany on the eve of Hitler’s September 1939 invasion of Poland. The Communist parties in the Western democracies went through another brief leftist phase during which their imperialists were roundly denounced (with nary a criticism of German imperialism under the Nazis). The Hitler-Stalin pact came crashing down on 22 June 1941, when German forces stormed into the Soviet Union. Having beheaded the Soviet high command in the bloody purges of the late 1930s and then repeatedly ignored warnings of the Nazis’ war plans from Soviet espionage networks in West Europe and Japan, Stalin was paralyzed following the invasion. The cost to the Red Army and the Soviet peoples of the vozhd’s (Russian for leader) touching faith in the Nazi führer was incalculable.
When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists imprisoned in the camps of Siberia demanded to be allowed to fight on the front lines in defense of the homeland of the October Revolution. Around the world, along with the advanced workers of all nations, the Fourth Internationalists hailed every victory of the Red Army against the Nazi war machine. But they did not grovel before the capitalist rulers nor wallow in the mud of bourgeois democracy. For their part, the Stalinists suddenly became the best defenders of the “democratic” imperialist ruling classes whose rapacity they had only yesterday denounced.
The war came to Greece with the Italian invasion in October 1940. After Mussolini’s troops were repulsed, in April 1941 Hitler sent in the Wehrmacht to occupy the country and shore up the Axis powers’ southern flank. Since 1936, the Greek workers and peasants had groaned under the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas. Notwithstanding the dictator’s admiration for the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy, until the Italian invasion the Metaxas regime had tried to pursue a policy of pro-British neutrality. Britain had been Greece’s great-power patron since its birth as a modern state.
During World War I, Lenin sharply rebuked those “socialists” who pointed to the plight of small countries swept up in the interimperialist war as justification for the defense of their fatherland. As he later put it in a polemic against German revisionist Karl Kautsky, “If the war is a reactionary, imperialist war, that is, if it is being waged by two world groups of the imperialist, rapacious, predatory, reactionary bourgeoisie, then every bourgeoisie (even of the smallest country) becomes a participant in the plunder, and my duty as a representative of the revolutionary proletariat is to prepare for the world proletarian revolution as the only escape from the horrors of a world slaughter” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky [1918]). Yet the outpouring of Greek “national unity” following the Italian invasion was faithfully echoed by KKE leader Nikos Zachariadis, who was then imprisoned in one of Metaxas’ camps along with many other leftists. In an open letter upheld to this day by the KKE, Zachariadis urged: “We must give all our strength, without reservation, to this war directed by the Metaxas government” (reprinted in Richard Clogg, ed., Greece 1940-1949: Occupation, Resistance, Civil War [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002]).
The KKE launched the National Liberation Front and its ELAS fighting force only after the attack on the Soviet Union. The name ELAS—which sounds like Hellas (Greece)—underlines the nationalist character that the KKE sought to give the Resistance. The EAM’s political manifesto, which did not so much as mention the words “socialism” or “communism,” proclaimed: “The struggle will include all social classes of the people, from the worker to the bourgeois, from the poor peasant to the land owner” (“What Is the National Liberation Front and What Does It Want?”, reprinted in Greece 1940-1949). In line with the policy of the popular front, the KKE managed to bring into the EAM a handful of social democrats and bourgeois liberals, as well as the Agrarian Party. This handful represented, as Trotsky said of the small bourgeois component in the Spanish Popular Front of 1936, the shadow of the bourgeoisie; the overwhelming bulk of the Greek bourgeoisie wanted nothing to do with the Reds or the Resistance. Yet this shadow was a guarantor of the EAM’s commitment to the defense of bourgeois property relations, while simultaneously allowing the KKE tops to justify their treachery to their combative working-class base in the name of “unity.”
Some elements of the old officer corps also established resistance groups. Compared to ELAS they were militarily insignificant. The two most important—the National Republican Greek League (EDES) and the National and Social Liberation (EKKA)—were anti-Communist tools of the British high command in Cairo, for whom their main value was not in resisting the German occupation but in fighting ELAS.
Working-Class Struggle Under the Occupation
The entire interwar history of Greece dictated that the resistance struggle of the working people against the Axis occupation could not be confined to one of “national liberation” as the Stalinist schema demanded. The foreign occupation added national oppression to the sufferings of the Greek working people, but under no circumstances could the reactionary Stalinist pipe dream of “national unity” be realized. The Greek bourgeoisie was far too afraid of the proletariat for that and the class question was thrust inevitably to the fore. Moreover, British prime minister Winston Churchill, mindful of the revolutionary turmoil that swept Europe at the end of the earlier interimperialist war, was determined to extirpate any Communist influence in Greek society. Churchill was also insistent on returning the widely unpopular King George, who had installed Metaxas as dictator, to the throne.
Faced with the hostility of their hoped-for “democratic” allies, the Stalinist-led partisans—notwithstanding the KKE’s pro-imperialist politics—fought largely independently of and not under the direction and military discipline of the Allied imperialists. In an article written after the December 1944 uprising, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the most politically authoritative section of the Fourth International, noted:
“The resistance movement in Greece rose to mass proportions without—and against—the bourgeoisie. The masses were no less hostile to Churchill’s collaborationists in Cairo than to Hitler’s Quislings in Athens. The decisive force in the resistance movement was the working class.”
—“Civil War in Greece,” Fourth International, February 1945
Especially with the Red Army’s heroic February 1943 victory over the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad, the Greek working class began to assert itself through strikes and other actions and to grow in confidence. The second of two general strikes against the Nazi “civil mobilization” of forced labor, on 5 March, was accompanied by a massive demonstration in Athens. Amid clashes with the police and the occupying troops, demonstrators stormed the Ministry of Labor and succeeded in destroying the lists of workers who were slated for deportation to Germany. That evening, the German authorities announced that the civil mobilization plans had been canceled, the only country in occupied Europe where this happened.
While these actions are its best-known achievement, the EAM’s working-class auxiliary, EEAM, organized a large number of strikes, demonstrations and other actions. On 25 June 1943, following the execution of 128 Communists, more than 150,000 demonstrated against Nazi state terror. As a consequence of the protest, 50 tramway workers who were slated for execution for participating in a strike were saved. Listing the numerous strikes that took place in a typical month under the German occupation, historian Angelos Avgoustidis concludes that “EEAM’s active role in the Resistance contributed to a general appearance of continuous upheaval in the Greek cities at this time” (“EEAM: The Workers’ Resistance,” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, Fall 1984). By 1944 the Germans were under siege in the major cities. The working-class districts of Athens, the so-called “Red Belt,” were no-go areas for German troops, who could leave the cities only in guarded convoys.
The aspirations for social as well as national liberation were clearly reflected in the central role played by women in the struggle. The National Solidarity support network was dominated by female cadres, and young girls were active in the EAM’s youth movement. Greek women first got the right to vote in the 1944 election for the EAM’s “government of the mountain.” In 1946-49, women made up some 30 percent of the fighting forces and 70 percent of the medical and other support personnel in the Communist-led guerrilla army. In an article titled “Left-Wing Women Between Politics and Family,” Tassoula Vervenioti writes: “It was during the German occupation that Greek women entered the public sphere en masse for the first time”; “even today women members of EAM or the KKE feel that they acted as historical subjects and gained self-confidence, equality, and esteem through their resistance activity” (Mark Mazower, ed., After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943-1960 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000]).
At the same time, the nationalist, popular-frontist politics of the KKE/EAM embraced even the reactionary Orthodox church. Orthodox priests were welcomed into the EAM and some fought in ELAS units. The EAM manifesto reeked of anti-German and anti-Italian chauvinism combined with vile misogynist backwardness: “Whatever happened to ‘traditional Greek morals and customs’? Foreign soldiers stroll around our towns and villages arm-in-arm with our wives, our daughters, our sisters” (reprinted in Greece 1940-1949). The manifesto shrieked:
“Scourge in every way and condemn sexual relations with foreigners. Stigmatize the women who give themselves. Every woman who gives herself to foreigners is already an informer and a traitor. Use cheapening adjectives and terms for these, and make it known that after the war on both their cheeks will be carved with indelible letters a large initial P which will stand for Porni (Prostitute) and Prodotissa (Traitor).”
Under the leadership of the Stalinists, the huge social power of the working class and the heroism of its fighters, rather than being mobilized to do away with the capitalist system of exploitation, were used to pull the cart of bourgeois nationalism with attendant social backwardness.
Revolt in Cairo
In August 1943, the British invited the various guerrilla groups to Cairo, seat of the Greek bourgeois government-in-exile, to coordinate their activities. The KKE/EAM representatives begged the king not to return to Greece until after a plebiscite had been held. But Churchill dismissed this request and the negotiations were over before they began. Churchill came to the conclusion that something had to be done to clip ELAS’ wings.
Bolstered by British aid, in October 1943 EDES engaged in fighting with ELAS (ushering in what became known as the “first round” in the Civil War). The response was swift. In short order, EDES was in danger of being completely wiped out. The intervention at this time of the German army saved EDES (which collaborated with the Nazis as well as the British against ELAS). ELAS soon resumed operations and could easily have liquidated the EDES forces. But EAM/ELAS sought the unity of “all the national forces” and in February 1944 signed the British-brokered Plaka Agreement that mandated an end to hostilities among the guerrilla groups. The Plaka Agreement did not last. ELAS soon came under attack again, this time by the other British-sponsored guerrilla force, the EKKA, whose 5/42 Regiment was surrounded and liquidated by ELAS.
On 10 March 1944, EAM/ELAS announced the formation of the Political Committee of National Liberation (PEEA). The KKE/EAM leadership never intended this “government of the mountain” to be anything more than a bargaining chip for a future division of portfolios in a British-sponsored coalition government. But it was pointedly snubbed by Stalin, who feared anything that might unsettle the British just when a second front against Germany was about to become a reality. In contrast, the PEEA’s formation was greeted with excitement by the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Greek armed forces in Egypt, which was made up of some 30,000 Greek troops who had escaped following the Nazi occupation and of volunteers from among Greeks living in Egypt. They were placed under the command of the British HQ Middle East in Cairo as the Royal Hellenic Middle East Forces and saw action at El Alamein. However, the soldiers and sailors were overwhelmingly sympathetic to EAM/ELAS and became a hotbed of revolutionary agitation.
Pro-EAM officers drew up a resolution demanding the “formation of a government representing the fighting people based on the Political Committee of National Liberation” (“The Middle East Movement,” Rizospastis, 23 April 2000 [our translation]). The arrest of six of these officers triggered an angry mutiny that spread to the navy, as rebellious sailors seized the Pindus, the Averoff, the Ajax and other ships. Sailors on board the destroyer Pindus, docked in Alexandria, threw their reactionary officers into the sea. Churchill instructed his naval commander-in-chief: “You should leave the senior member of the Averoff in no doubt that his guarantee that the use of firearms will be avoided will not be reciprocated by us” (quoted in Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 5 [London: Penguin Books, 1985]). The mutiny was crushed and thousands were packed off to concentration camps in the desert. Some were sentenced to death; many others died in the intolerable conditions.
The small Egyptian Stalinist group led by Henri Curiel came to the aid of the Greek soldiers and sailors, organizing huge support demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria. Curiel provided the rebels with food and water, premises and funds, and he helped those who managed to escape after the mutiny with finding temporary sanctuary. As for the Greek Stalinist leaders, their backstabbing was captured in a message from an EAM delegation to British ambassador Reginald Leeper condemning the mutiny as the “mad action of irresponsible persons” (U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1944). The KKE now says his message was “unacceptable and inexplicable” (History, Vol. 1). Nevertheless, it was published at the time in the KKE’s Rizospastis (Athens edition, 25 May 1944).
In late May 1944, a delegation of KKE, EAM and PEEA representatives met with newly appointed prime minister Georgios Papandreou in Lebanon to sign an agreement drawn up by Leeper. Churchill saw Papandreou as the Greek politician most able to carry out a hardline policy against the KKE. The Lebanon agreement stated: “All of us agreed that the Middle East mutiny constituted a crime against our country” (reprinted in E.A.M. White Book [New York: Greek American Council, 1945]). In exchange for spitting on the bodies of their comrades, the EAM got six of 24 ministerial portfolios in a new government of “national unity” under Papandreou. In entering the Papandreou government, the Stalinists invested this hated puppet regime with a measure of popular authority.
In September came the Caserta Agreement in Italy, in which the EAM/ELAS leaders agreed to place their fighters under the discipline of British general Sir Ronald Scobie—whose purpose was to eliminate ELAS! As Woodhouse described it: “The agreement completed the work, begun at Plaka seven months earlier, of ensuring that the return of the Allies (and with them Papandhreou’s Government) should be unchallenged by EAM/ELAS” (Apple of Discord).
A month later, at a meeting in Moscow, Stalin accepted Churchill’s infamous “percentages agreement.” According to Churchill, he told Stalin: “So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety per cent. predominance in Roumania, for us to have ninety per cent. of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?” (Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 6 [London: Penguin Books, 1985]). Churchill wrote this proposal on a piece of paper, his account continues, and “I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.”
Revolt in Athens
On 12 October 1944, the German army abandoned Athens. Two days later, Scobie arrived in Greece, with the Papandreou government in his baggage. As the British convoy made its way from the port of Piraeus to the center of Athens, it was greeted by massive crowds waving KKE placards declaring: “Welcome to Our Allies.”
During this period, committees for popular administration took over food distribution and organized free medical aid and public education. Factories abandoned or shut by their owners were occupied and run by the workers. While the workers sought to exercise the power they held, the “Communist” ministers in the government of “national unity” (like the Mensheviks in Russia, the Social Democratic Party in Germany 1918-19, the Stalinists in Spain, etc.) sought to liquidate it. The EAM-controlled National Civil Guard handed over its powers to the police, who were protecting the pro-Nazi collaborators. The EAM ministers of finance and labor took responsibility for setting wages at starvation level and sacking “excess” workers in order to bring down the spiraling rate of inflation. The massive profits made by bourgeois speculators during the war were not confiscated, as demanded by the workers, but merely taxed. The KKE cautioned against strikes, but angry workers began to mobilize.
For the British imperialists and the Greek bourgeoisie, the burning question was the disarmament of the proletariat and the rural masses. In early November 1944, the British moved the Mountain Brigade from Italy to Greece, preparing for the showdown. This brigade consisted of fanatical anti-Communists who had been salvaged from the Greek armed forces in Egypt. But, feeling the hot breath of the masses on their necks, the Stalinists balked at disarming without first ensuring that the pro-Nazi collaborationist forces, as well as the rightist cutthroats of the Mountain Brigade and the Sacred Battalion, were also disarmed.
In late November, Scobie issued an ultimatum ordering ELAS units to disarm by 10 December, threatening that otherwise “the currency will not be maintained on a stable basis and the people will not be fed” (E.A.M. White Book). The six EAM ministers finally resigned from the government. In his resignation statement, the KKE’s Yiannis Zevgos called for “the demobilization of all armed forces,” including ELAS, and “for the creation of a real National Guard which will be at the service of the nation” (E.A.M. White Book). While Churchill and Scobie were preparing a bloodbath against the armed proletariat organized in ELAS, the KKE pleaded to place nation above class!
EAM called for a mass protest in Athens’ Constitution Square on 3 December and a general strike the following day in order to pressure the government. Hours before the demonstration, Papandreou suddenly withdrew permission for the protest. Under the protection of British tanks, gendarmes opened fire on the hundreds of thousands who turned out, killing at least 20 and injuring well over 100. According to an eyewitness account in the Chicago Sun:
“While the police were firing upon the unarmed demonstrators, the mass of the crowd continued to march on erectly. Women and girls with a smile on their lips shouted even after their comrades were killed ’Long Live Churchill! Long Live Roosevelt! Down with Papandreou! No King!”
—quoted in E.A.M. White Book
The day after the massacre, armed rightist gangs and the gendarmerie killed or wounded hundreds more as they were returning from the funerals of those slain on Sunday. Enraged Athens workers seized police stations throughout the capital, shouting “Death to Papandreou!” In Piraeus, dock workers paraded with clubs, knives and guns. Churchill cabled Scobie:
“You are responsible for maintaining order in Athens and for neutralising or destroying all E.A.M.-E.L.A.S. bands approaching the city.… Do not however hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.”
—The Second World War, Vol. 6
Finally, on 7 December, the Central Committee of ELAS announced: “The general battle for liberty and the complete independence of Greece has begun. We did not desire to fight; it was forced upon us” (E.A.M. White Book). Within days, workers’ detachments controlled the whole of Athens but for a small area of three square miles. On 11 December, Field Marshal Alexander, sent to Athens to assess the situation, told Leeper: “You are in a grave situation. Your seaport is cut off, your airport can only be reached by tank or armoured car, you are outnumbered, your dumps are surrounded and you have three days’ ammunition” (quoted in John O. Iatrides, Revolt in Athens [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972]).
Frightened by the revolutionary implications of the fighting, the KKE leaders tossed one concession after another at the recalcitrant British and tried to avoid engaging Scobie’s forces, even forbidding fraternization with his troops. Instead of concentrating its forces in Athens, where the struggle would be won or lost, ELAS launched a major assault against the remnants of the EDES forces in Epirus and against another reactionary guerrilla group in Macedonia. As telegrams zipped back and forth between the panicked British imperialists in Athens and London, the EAM Central Committee declared on 15 December “that it does not wish to seize power. It does not wish a coup-d’etat of any kind. It does not wish a one-sided Government of the Left” (E.A.M. White Book).
Betrayal in Varkiza
On 25 December, Churchill arrived in Athens to take personal control. Having previously rejected any substitute for the king, Churchill finally accepted Archbishop Damaskinos as regent. The KKE leaders capitulated totally. A new “national unity” government was to be formed, excluding the KKE/EAM and also Papandreou. On 30 December, as the Greek workers continued to fight for their lives, the Soviet government gave its seal of approval to their repression, announcing that it would appoint a Soviet ambassador to the puppet government in Athens.
Before Churchill’s arrival, guerrillas had managed to place a ton of dynamite in the sewers underneath the Hotel Grande Bretagne, where Churchill had intended to stay. This episode illustrates the capability and audacity of ELAS, but it was no more than a show of strength in the service of a rotten policy basically aimed at securing a couple more cabinet seats in a future capitalist government. On his return to Britain, Churchill denounced ELAS in Parliament, saying, with a nod to Stalin: “I think ‘Trotskyists’ is a better definition of these people and of certain other sects, than the normal word, and it has the advantage of being equally hated in Russia” (“War Situation and Foreign Policy,” Speech to House of Commons, Hansard, 18 January 1945). The February 1945 Fourth International article commented:
“ELAS is ‘Trotskyist’ in one sense only—in the revolutionary instincts of its indomitable fighters, in their great capacity for struggle and sacrifice. But its program and leadership has no resemblance to ‘Trotskyism.’ Churchill forgets that during the real ‘Trotskyist’ revolution, he never in his wildest dreams conceived of going to Moscow to secure the agreement of the Bolsheviks to set up the white guard Baron Wrangel as regent for the Czar while the Red Army quietly surrendered its arms.”
—“Civil War in Greece”
Dutifully aiding Churchill in his reactionary crusade against the Greek proletariat, a delegation of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) returned from Athens in early February 1945 to retail fabricated accounts of Communist atrocities. Appropriately, the delegation was headed by Sir Walter Citrine, a traitor to the 1926 General Strike. The TUC report was part of a massive propaganda campaign portraying ELAS fighters as mass murderers. The KKE’s political police, the Organization for the Protection of the People’s Struggle, certainly executed a number of collaborators and rightists. They also seized on the fighting as an opportunity to slaughter dozens of Trotskyists. But much of the “evidence” of mass executions of Greek civilians was simply manufactured.
On 11 February, KKE leader Siantos stated at a press conference:
“The Great Allies decided that it would be useful to have the British army present in Greece, and in that respect its presence is a good thing. We believe that the conflict between the British and ELAS is the result of a regrettable misunderstanding which we hope will soon be forgotten.”
—quoted in Dominique Eudes, The Kapetanios: Partisans and Civil War in Greece, 1943-1949 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972)
The following day, Siantos and his comrades signed the Varkiza Agreement. The treaty stipulated that “the armed forces of resistance shall be demobilised and in particular ELAS, both regular and reserve” while “the Sacred Squadron shall remain as at present, since it is under the immediate orders of the Allied High Command” (quoted in Apple of Discord).
The Stalinist leaders feared that the base of ELAS would revolt against a deal which left them not only disarmed but also subject to arrest without warrant under the prevailing conditions of martial law. The KKE leaders demanded an amnesty and, after some wrangling, agreed to a bogus amnesty for political crimes that allowed tens of thousands of militants to be set up for arrest and imprisonment, since their actions were deemed not political but common crimes.
Some of the rank and file of ELAS wisely refused to surrender their weapons, burying them instead. In signing the order to disarm, ELAS leader Aris Velouchiotis lent his huge authority among the ELAS ranks to this betrayal. But he then regrouped armed fighters (who included many fleeing the rightist reign of terror in the cities) in the mountains in preparation for renewed fighting. When KKE leader Nikos Zachariadis returned from Dachau concentration camp on a British military aircraft in May 1945, he denounced Velouchiotis as an adventurer. Shortly afterward, Velouchiotis and his small band of followers were trapped by government forces. Either he committed suicide or was killed; his head was severed and put on display as an anti-Communist trophy.
Zachariadis regained leadership of the party from the discredited Siantos, who would become an early scapegoat (later followed by Zachariadis himself) for the KKE leadership’s “errors” in the Athens uprising. In an article headlined “C.P. Heads Admit Treacherous Role in Greek Struggle,” the U.S. SWP commented:
“When it’s so dirty it seems impossible to cover with whitewash, call on the leadership of the Greek Stalinists. They can whitewash anything, even a bloody reign of terror for which they themselves are responsible. They’ve got it down to a fine art—making it whiter by adding a dash of the blue paint of ‘self-criticism’.”
—Militant, 7 July 1945
The Varkiza betrayal was the logical outcome of the Seventh Comintern Congress and the embrace of the imperialist “democrats.” In 1943, Stalin had dissolved the Comintern, already dead for the cause of revolution, to underscore to Roosevelt and Churchill that he was not in the business of making revolution. At war’s end, both the French and Italian Stalinists disarmed the workers and beheaded palpable opportunities for proletarian revolution—all in the service of the Stalinist fantasy of a postwar order based on “peaceful coexistence.”
The “Third Round”
The Varkiza Agreement was only a brief respite in the struggle in Greece. While large-scale fighting ceased, it could hardly be said that there was peace. The period from Varkiza until the elections of 31 March 1946 was marked by a wave of strikes and by a white terror facilitated by the Stalinists’ disarming of the workers. Nearly 1,300 leftists were murdered, some 85,000 arrested and more than 31,000 tortured. Nonetheless, the KKE stuck to the terms of the agreement and prepared for the election.
It was perfectly clear that the election would be a massive fraud. When the KKE called for the election to be postponed in view of the continuing attacks by the right, Damaskinos refused. Along with liberal opponents of the regime, the KKE ended up boycotting the election. As could be expected, it was won by the monarchist coalition. Five months later a plebiscite on the monarchy showed an improbable 68 percent of the population in favor. The newspaper of the American Trotskyists later noted that as Greece was holding the plebiscite “a 45,000 ton aircraft carrier and six other warships steamed off the Greek coast in a bristling display of military power” (Militant, 22 March 1947).
In February 1946, the KKE Central Committee had held its Second Plenum. It was later alleged—by the KKE as well as by anti-Communists—that this was the meeting at which the party resolved to launch the Civil War of 1946-49. It is doubtful that the KKE leaders ever made such a decision. This “third round” of fighting (the Athens uprising being the second round) demonstrated that despite the betrayal at Varkiza, the revolutionary energy of the working masses had not been exhausted. With more than a hint of defensiveness, KKE party historian Makis Mailis writes:
“This struggle proved that the KKE was capable of not [!] subordinating the interests of the working class and the popular layers to the strategic goals and plans of the exploiters. It proved in deeds that the KKE was not incorporated into the system despite strategically important errors such as the agreements at Lebanon, Caserta and Varkiza.”
—“The Strategy of the KKE with Nikos Zachariadis as General Secretary of the CC (1931-1956),” Kommounistiki Epitheorisi (Communist Review), November-December 2013 (our translation)
The KKE had not changed its reformist stripes. The reality was that “the system” refused to incorporate the KKE. It was the unrelenting violence of the Greek reaction that drove the working masses into an armed struggle for self-preservation and the KKE leadership was again obliged to place itself at the head. Within three months of its founding in October 1946, the Stalinist-led Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) controlled extensive parts of northern Greece. The government’s conscript army included large numbers of supporters of the Stalinists’ EPON youth organization and others sympathetic to the guerrillas. But instead of fighting for victory, the Stalinists scrambled for compromise, making repeated peace offers.
By this time, the U.S.-led Cold War against the Soviet Union was well under way. Churchill’s March 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, was followed one year later by Washington’s proclamation of the anti-Soviet Truman Doctrine. By April 1947, with the sun setting on the bankrupt British Empire, the anti-Communist Labour government of Clement Attlee (who succeeded Churchill) finally pulled its forces out of Greece, to be replaced by a much more powerful U.S. imperialism. The U.S. began sending massive amounts of military aid to the right-wing Athens regime in order to prevent the “spread of Communism.”
As Stalin was forced to respond to the increasingly bellicose threats of U.S. imperialism, Bulgaria and most other Central and East European countries occupied by Soviet forces were transformed into bureaucratically deformed workers states. In Yugoslavia, the victory of Josip Broz Tito’s Communist-led Partisans over the Nazis and their local allies had also resulted in the creation of a deformed workers state. Thus, the DSE fighters were able to find refuge across Greece’s northern borders.
But instead of offering the DSE the military aid it needed to win, Stalin and Tito kept the Greek fighters on a drip feed. In 1948, Stalin summoned Bulgarian and Yugoslav CP leaders to the Kremlin and told them, according to Milovan Djilas, then Tito’s vice president: “The uprising in Greece has to fold up” (quoted in Djilas, Conversations with Stalin [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962]).
The developing split between Tito’s Yugoslavia and the Kremlin was beginning to exert a decisive influence on events. In July 1949, hoping to get U.S. aid after being cut off by the Kremlin, Tito announced that he was closing the border to the Greek fighters. This was the final blow to the DSE. In August, the DSE fighters made their last stand on the mountainous border with Albania and Yugoslavia, massively outnumbered by Greek government forces and bombed by U.S. planes dropping napalm. The defeat of the guerrilla war, in which some 40,000 Communist-led militants lost their lives, highlighted the perfidy inherent in the dogma of “socialism in one country,” as nationalist rivalry between the Stalinist bureaucracies in Moscow and Belgrade acted to strangle the last round of the Greek revolution.
Macedonia: Litmus Test for Greek Revolutionaries
The main theater of the guerrilla war was Macedonia and large numbers of Macedonians fought in the DSE, making up an estimated 25 percent of the Communist forces in April 1947, and more as time passed. The KKE had by this time buried its earlier demand for the right of self-determination for Macedonia in favor of a call for national equality within the borders of Greece. But unlike the bourgeois parties, the KKE at least acknowledged the national existence of the Slavic Macedonian people.
Partitioned among Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War of 1913, Macedonia was a cockpit of rivalries and intrigues among these three regional powers. Greece annexed the largest portion of this region and went on to expel or forcibly Hellenize much of the Slavic-speaking population, denying any national rights to those who remained. Even to acknowledge the existence of this national minority, much less its right to secede, was anathema to the advocates of a “Greater Greece.” Thus for revolutionaries in Greece, support for the right of self-determination for the Slav-Macedonian minority in northern Greece has long been a litmus test of their commitment to internationalist struggle against the Greek bourgeoisie.
Trotsky addressed the Macedonian question in a 1932 discussion with the early Greek Trotskyists, the Archeiomarxists. The Archeiomarxists opposed independence for the Macedonian minority. Responding to their argument that Aegean Macedonia was “90 percent Greeks,” Trotsky replied: “Our first task is to take an attitude of total skepticism toward these [government] figures.” On the question of independence, Trotsky said:
“I’m not certain whether it is correct to reject this slogan. We cannot say we are opposed to it because the population will be against it. The population must be asked for its opinion on this. The ‘Bulgarians’ represent an oppressed layer.…
“It’s not our task to organize nationalist uprisings. We merely say that if the Macedonians want it, we will then side with them, that they should be allowed to decide, and we will also support their decision.”
—“A Discussion on Greece” (Spring 1932)
Trotsky went on to point to the crux of the matter for Marxists in Greece:
“What disturbs me is not so much the question of the Macedonian peasants, but rather whether there isn’t a touch of chauvinist poison in Greek workers. That is very dangerous. For us, who are for a Balkan federation of soviet states, it is all the same if Macedonia belongs to this federation as an autonomous whole or part of another state.”
The oppression of the Macedonian minority under the Greek jackboot was such that many Macedonians initially welcomed the Bulgarian occupation in World War II. It was necessary to oppose the chauvinism not only of the Bulgarian ruling class but also of the Greek bourgeoisie over Macedonia. But this was not the Stalinists’ approach: for example, in July 1943 the EEAM organized a massive demonstration in Athens against the Bulgarian annexation of “Greek” Macedonia.
The brutality of the Axis occupiers soon repelled many Macedonians. By the time of the 1946-49 war, the main factor in winning support among the Slavic minority for the DSE’s struggle was the social revolution taking place across the border in Yugoslavia. There, the Macedonian partisans had formed their own HQ, were led by Macedonian officers and used the Macedonian language and flag. The creation of an autonomous Macedonian republic within the Yugoslav federation was to exert a powerful attraction for the Slavs in Greece. The Yugoslavs’ agitation for a united Macedonia met with hostility from the KKE.
But as the split with Tito deepened, the KKE made an effort to conciliate the Macedonians in order to undermine support for Tito, declaring in January 1949 that with “the victory of the DSE and of the people’s revolution, the Macedonian people will find their full national restoration as they themselves wish” (Resolution of the Fifth Plenum of the CC of the KKE, 30-31 January 1949, www.rizospastis.gr [our translation]). Only a few months later, following the defeat in the Civil War, the KKE again repudiated the right of self-determination. Intoning that “Stalin teaches us,” leading KKE spokesman Vasilis Bartziotas announced in October 1949: “Today the situation has changed.… We have to return to the slogan for national equality which was put forth by the [1935] Sixth Congress of the KKE” (quoted in Andrew Rossos, “Incompatible Allies: Greek Communism and Macedonian Nationalism in the Civil War in Greece, 1943-1949,” Journal of Modern History, March 1997).
More than 40 years later, when the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia declared its independence in 1991 amid the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Yugoslav deformed workers state, posters across Greece declared, “Macedonia Is Greek!” KKE spokesman Aleka Papariga was witchhunted at the time for merely stating that there were Slavic speakers in Greece. Nevertheless, the KKE now echoes the Greek bourgeoisie in railing against “a conscious effort to promote Turkish national consciousness in the Muslim minority and a so-called ‘Macedonian’ national consciousness among a section of the Slavic-speakers.” The KKE declares:
“The attempts to gain recognition of a ‘Macedonian national minority’ as well as a ‘Turkish minority’ as pursued by the U.S. and the EU, with all that that entails, would constitute another step toward contesting the borders (e.g., the Treaty of Lausanne) and territorial status in the region, something moreover that is not hidden in nationalist circles in Turkey and FYROM [Macedonia].”
—Rizospastis, 27 April 2014 (our translation)
This grotesque appeal to a 90-year-old imperialist treaty in order to defend the territorial integrity of capitalist Greece speaks volumes about the revolutionary pretensions of the KKE. Contrast this with Lenin, who wrote: “A member of an oppressor nation must be ‘indifferent’ to whether small nations belong to his state or to a neighbouring state, or to themselves.… To be an internationalist Social-Democrat one must not think only of one’s own nation, but place above it the interests of all nations, their common liberty and equality” (“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” July 1916).
It is a task of Leninists to combat national chauvinism among the workers and to educate them in the spirit of internationalism. Without breaking the proletarian vanguard from loyalty to its “own” capitalist state and winning it to the understanding that workers of all countries share a common interest in overthrowing capitalism and constructing a global communist society, it will not be possible to forge a party capable of leading a revolution. This is particularly true in the Balkans, where nationalist territorial conflicts have long served to poison the consciousness of the working class. In the statement announcing the founding of the Trotskyist Group of Greece in 2004, we noted:
“The Balkan peninsula is a region with myriad interpenetrated peoples and oppressed minorities. An equitable resolution of the national question in the Balkans requires a socialist federation. The ICL recognizes that the question of Macedonia is a test of the authenticity of any group claiming to be internationalist in Greece. The TGG defends the national rights of the Macedonian minority in Greece, including their right to set up their own state or unite with the existing state of Macedonia. For full democratic rights for national minorities in Greece! For a Balkan socialist federation!”
—Spartacist (English edition) No. 59, Spring 2006
Trotskyists in the Greek Civil War
The Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin was a contradictory phenomenon resulting from and in turn reinforcing the isolation and relative economic weakness of the Soviet Union. While pursuing a generally reactionary policy motivated by defense of its bureaucratic privileges, at times—and through its own methods—it was compelled to defend the historically progressive collectivized economy on which that privileged position was dependent. In the capitalist countries, the Stalinist parties served two masters: the Kremlin bureaucracy and the local bourgeoisie. But in cloaking themselves in the mantle of the Russian Revolution, these parties also had to maintain the loyalty of the subjectively revolutionary masses drawn to their banner. In their article on the Greek Civil War, the American Trotskyists captured well this contradictory situation:
“The Greek masses were burning with revolutionary determination and wished to prepare the overthrow of all their oppressors—Nazi and Greek. Instead of providing the mass movement with a revolutionary program, similar to the Bolshevik program of 1917, and preparing the masses for the seizure of power, the Stalinists steered the movement into the blind alley of People’s Frontism. The Stalinists, who enjoyed virtual hegemony of the mass movement, joined with a lot of petty bourgeois politicians, lawyers, professors, who had neither mass following nor influence, and artificially worked to limit the struggle to the fight for capitalist democracy.…
“The very threat of effecting such a program [for a democratic republic] by EAM lead to civil war and British intervention. Frightened by the inexorable logic of the struggle—which could only triumph with the dictatorship of the proletariat—the Stalinists and petty bourgeois leaders sought an agreement with the reactionary bourgeois government in exile and through them with British imperialism.…
“A great gulf separates the insurgent masses from their treacherous Stalinist leaders. Yet so long as the Stalinists remain at the helm they cannot escape the revolutionary pressure of the workers and peasants who hate the king and will never peacefully countenance his return, who are determined to purge Greece not only of the German collaborationists but of all the satraps of the Metaxas dictatorship, and who instinctively are striving towards a socialist solution.”
—“Civil War in Greece”
Unfortunately, the Trotskyist militants on the ground in Greece did not share this dialectical approach. They not only opposed the Stalinist misleaders but also rejected the Stalinist-led mass movement.
Trotskyism in Greece had its origins with the Archeiomarxist group that had been expelled from the Greek Communist Party in 1924. After several years of educational work, including the publication of key Marxist texts in Greek, the Archeiomarxists embarked on work in the trade unions, winning the leadership of a number of unions. In 1930, they adhered to the International Left Opposition (ILO), becoming its largest section, with a membership comparable to that of the KKE. Four years later, the bulk of the Archeiomarxists split with Trotsky over his call for a new International. Those who stayed with Trotsky included veteran cadre George Vitsoris. After Vitsoris was forced to go into exile, the group came under the leadership of Agis Stinas.
Meanwhile, Pantelis Pouliopoulos, who had been general secretary of the KKE from 1924 until a year before his expulsion in 1927, formed the Spartakos group. Pouliopoulos professed support for the Left Opposition but refused to unite with the official ILO section, the Archeiomarxists. He, too, initially opposed the call for the Fourth International, but started moving closer to Trotsky in 1935. Thus by the late 1930s, there were two main groups in Greece claiming adherence to Trotskyism. Over the years, various other groupings (notably that of Loukas Karliaftis) shifted back and forth between the two or set up ephemeral independent operations.
When World War II broke out, the best of the Trotskyist cadre in Europe sought to uphold the program of revolutionary internationalism, in contrast to the gross chauvinism of the Stalinist-led resistance movements, encapsulated in the headline of the French Communist Party’s newspaper L’Humanité: “A chacun son boche” (Everyone Get a Kraut). In particular, the Trotskyists sought to fraternize with the German and Italian occupation troops, recognizing that many of them were working-class youth from a Communist or socialist background who could serve as a bridgehead for socialist revolution throughout Europe. Exemplary in this regard were the French Trotskyists, who built a cell in the German armed forces at Brest and distributed the newspaper Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier), and also the Dutch Committee of Revolutionary Marxists. (For more on this, see “Documents on the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’,” Prometheus Research Series No. 2, February 1989.)
In Greece, Pouliopoulos became a symbol of proletarian internationalism when he confronted an Italian firing squad in 1943, appealing to the soldiers as class brothers in Italian. They refused to fire, and it was left to a fascist officer to execute Pouliopoulos.
The Struggle for Program
The Fourth Internationalists had to apply their program in unimaginably difficult circumstances. Few in number, the Trotskyists in Greece were isolated by the war from the Fourth International and subjected to persecution by fascists, “democratic” imperialists and Stalinists alike. At the time of the Italian invasion in 1940, the majority of the Greek Trotskyists, in common with many KKE militants, found themselves in the prison camps of Metaxas. But the Greek Trotskyists were also hamstrung by serious political problems, notably on the Russian question and the national question. (A detailed treatment of Trotskyism in Greece is presented in two unpublished dissertations by Alexis Hen: “Les trotskystes grecs et le Parti communiste de Grèce pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale” [Greek Trotskyists and the Communist Party of Greece during the Second World War], INALCO, December 2006, and “Les trotskystes entre deux phases de la guerre civile en Grèce 1945-1946” [The Trotskyists Between Two Phases of the Civil War in Greece 1945-1946], INALCO, November 2011.)
Unlike World War I, the Second World War was marked by prolonged occupations of a number of European countries by the German (and, to a lesser extent, Italian) military. Many European Trotskyists were thrown into disarray by these occupations, developing symmetrical deviations on the national question. In France, the group around Marcel Hic espoused an explicitly nationalist and popular-frontist line—which was opposed by other French Trotskyists—declaring that the Trotskyists “stretch out [their] hands to the ‘French’ faction of the bourgeoisie” (quoted in “Documents on the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’”). Both of the Greek Trotskyist groups were guilty of the opposite error, failing to recognize any aspect of national oppression under the Nazi occupation. Karliaftis defended this abstentionist position throughout his life:
“Occupations during the imperialist war are nothing but a phase, an incident of a smaller or greater significance of the prolonged war.… It neither raises a national question and a question of National Liberation, nor, finally, does it change the basic duties of the proletariat, i.e. the transformation of the war into a civil war.”
—quoted in “Documents on the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’”
While Trotsky opposed those “semi-internationalists” who argued for supporting the Allied imperialists after France was occupied by the Nazis, he did not, as Karliaftis did, turn a blind eye to the renewed significance of the national question. Rather, he asserted, national oppression could act as an auxiliary motor force for proletarian revolution:
“In the defeated countries the position of the masses will immediately become worsened in the extreme. Added to social oppression is national oppression, the main burden of which is likewise borne by the workers. Of all the forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable.…
“One can expect with assurance the rapid transformation of all the conquered countries into powder magazines.…
“The new war map of Europe does not invalidate the principles of revolutionary class struggle.”
—“We Do Not Change Our Course” (June 1940)
In the case of the Russian question, the two Greek Trotskyist groups were at odds. The Pouliopoulos group called for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union. Stinas opposed this call and became even more virulently anti-Soviet when Stalin entered the war in a bloc with the Allied imperialists. Similar disputes over the Russian question erupted in other sections of the Fourth International, most notably in the American SWP, where a petty-bourgeois opposition led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham and Martin Abern split away following the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact to form the Workers Party, which openly renounced unconditional military defense of the USSR.
Both Greek groups opposed the popular-frontist politics of the Stalinists and denounced support for the Anglo-American Allies. They did not join the KKE in enthusing over Metaxas’ war with Italy, recognizing that this was subordinated to the interimperialist conflict. However, both of the Greek Trotskyist groups went further, generally refusing to defend ELAS against the German occupation army and, later, against the British/Greek reactionary forces in 1944-45. With this abstentionist line, the Trotskyists abandoned the struggling masses to the chauvinist demagogy of the Stalinists.
The severe disorientation of the Greek Trotskyists during the war was a result of their failure over the years to recognize the primacy of the struggle for programmatic clarity. Such internal struggle is critical to the cohering of a politically homogenous cadre organization. Instead, ostensible Trotskyism in Greece spawned a confused and heterogeneous multiplicity of groups that would come together and then fall apart without any advance in clarity.
Sectarianism and Stalinophobia
Once contact with the International was re-established in 1945, the Greek organizations’ sectarianism toward the Resistance was subjected to the criticism of their comrades in other countries. But some of the counsel against sectarianism tended in the direction of opportunism toward the Stalinists. This opportunist thrust was already evident in a resolution adopted at a February 1944 clandestine conference in Paris. Among the participants were two Greek exiles—George Vitsoris and Michalis Raptis (Michel Pablo), who after the war became the principal leader of the International and the architect of a revisionist policy that led to its destruction. This resolution called on the Fourth Internationalists to:
“Organize themselves within the ranks of the military organizations controlled by the National Unity of the anti-German bourgeoisie and the Stalinists as secret fractions, with their own discipline, and firmly oriented toward breaking with these organizations at the most advantageous or the most necessary moment.”
—“Theses on Liquidation of World War II and the Revolutionary Upsurge,” Fourth International, March 1945
Trotskyists do not oppose partisan struggle on principle. It can be a useful auxiliary in the proletariat’s fight to overthrow capitalist rule. But as we noted in the introduction to our Prometheus Research Series bulletin:
“Although the Partisan movements in France, Italy and Greece followed very different trajectories, where the leadership was not simply bourgeois nationalist it was Stalinist and the Stalinists had subordinated their forces to the military and political alliance with the ‘democratic’ imperialists. Participation by the small Trotskyist nuclei in nationalist bourgeois or Stalinist military formations in a subordinated or assimilated role would have meant abandoning a class position, crossing the line to class collaborationism. Moreover, it would have tended to cut across the necessary strategy of subverting the Axis armies through revolutionary fraternization.”
—“Documents on the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’”
Those Greek Trotskyists who attempted to join the Stalinist-led Resistance were often rewarded with a Stalinist assassin’s bullet. What was necessary was to remain with the proletariat in the cities and to prepare for the moment when the proletariat rose in struggle as a class. This was demonstrated in Vietnam in 1945, for example, with the defeat of the Japanese occupation forces. Though they were ultimately defeated, with many of their cadre rounded up and executed, the Trotskyists were able to intervene into the accompanying social turmoil to lead a proletarian insurrection in Saigon against a popular-front government dominated by Ho Chi Minh’s Stalinists and allied with the British and French imperialist forces. (See Spartacist pamphlet, Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam [1976].)
Greece was not Vietnam. The overwhelming mass of the working class was firmly under the control of the Stalinists, who hunted down and murdered dozens of Trotskyists during the December 1944 uprising. But, at bottom, what the Trotskyists lacked was a program for intervention into the Stalinist-led mass movement. Instead of supporting the workers uprising while politically opposing the Stalinist misleaders and exposing their compromisist policies, the Trotskyists took an abstentionist line.
In a statement on the Dekemvriana published in February 1945, the group founded by the late Pouliopoulos asserted that it had been objectively impossible to intervene given the murderous anti-Trotskyist role of the KKE. While acknowledging that the struggle “between the Right and the KKE-EAM took on the character of a conflict between capital and the oppressed layers of society,” the statement avoided any hint of military defense of the EAM forces (quoted in “Greek Trotskyists and the Communist Party of Greece During the Second World War”). Two months later, in a conference resolution published in its paper, Ergatika Nea (Workers News), the group (now fused with Karliaftis) openly equated the EAM with the British/Greek bourgeois forces:
“The two groups that fought one another must be judged from the point of view of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution; the oppressed masses can and must judge them from this historical perspective alone, and they must condemn them both mercilessly with regard to their political line as well as the relationship of forces that they relied on and the means and methods that they used.…
“The conflict that arose in the December movement was not a conflict between opposing social forces, neither between capital and the proletariat, nor between capital and the oppressed layers of the population.”
—quoted in “The Trotskyists Between Two Phases of the Civil War in Greece 1945-1946”
With this sneering, plague-on-both-your-houses line, how could the Trotskyists have had any chance of winning over any of the many thousands of workers who felt betrayed by the KKE leadership’s capitulation?
From the beginning of 1945, oppositional elements within the Pouliopoulos group had started to criticize their abstentionist line in the uprising. The internal discussion was aired in the group’s paper, and more nuanced views on the role of the Stalinists and the contradictions of the Resistance were expressed. At a July 1946 conference attended by Pablo, the Stinas and Pouliopoulos groups (as well as another small group from Salonika) fused to become the Communist Internationalist Party of Greece (Fourth International), the KDKE. Though supported by only a minority of the fused group, Pablo managed to impose his line condemning the Trotskyists’ sectarianism toward the Resistance and the Dekemvriana. During the guerrilla war of 1946-49, the Trotskyists adopted a clear position of military support to the Communist-led forces.
Reflecting the political threat posed by Trotskyism, in the fall of 1946 the KKE agreed to a series of three debates with the KDKE in Athens. The Stalinists were on the defensive in the face of bourgeois persecution and restlessness within their ranks following the betrayal at Varkiza. A central issue in the debates was the question of British troops. Although the Trotskyists had correctly warned—against the KKE—that the Allied imperialists would impose a new dictatorship on the masses, the Trotskyist speakers would not state explicitly that they were for the withdrawal of the British troops on the grounds that this would be a concession to Greek nationalism. The fact that those chosen to speak for the KDKE included the anti-Soviet Stinas and Karliaftis, who still defended his earlier refusal to side with ELAS against the Wehrmacht, spoke to the Greek Trotskyists’ continuing refusal to reach out to the Stalinists’ working-class base.
Nearly 70 years later, the groups that falsely claim some identity with Trotskyism in Greece constitute a social-democratic, anti-Communist mélange that avoids the KKE like the plague and has nothing but contempt for its working-class base. In contrast, the Trotskyist Group of Greece is the only organization with a perspective aimed at winning the workers, including those who look to the KKE, to a revolutionary program and the struggle for an authentically Leninist vanguard party.
Greek Stalinism—Then and Now
Drawing the lessons from the Resistance and the Civil War begins with the understanding that defeat did not result primarily from the military superiority of the enemy, nor from the mistakes of individuals, but from the Stalinist politics of the leadership. The social liberation for which the masses yearned and fought could only be achieved through a workers revolution to sweep away the capitalist exploiters. This is what thousands upon thousands of Communist militants, not just in Greece but in France, Italy and elsewhere, expected and desired after the defeat of the fascist scourge. But the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union feared workers revolution, which it knew would threaten its own parasitic rule, and the KKE leaders, who followed Stalin, allowed the bourgeoisie to regain power. Those who apologize for or whitewash the betrayals of the past are preparing new ones.
This is palpable in Greece today. As life grows ever more unbearable for the masses, especially youth, the KKE vaunts the protest actions organized by its PAME trade-union front while arguing that the proletariat must await the day when some “objectively revolutionary situation” drops from the sky like a deus ex machina. Meanwhile, the strutting, stiff-arm-saluting fascists of Golden Dawn grow by leaps and bounds because they offer a “radical” answer now. What is urgently necessary is a fighting workers united front drawing in the main sections of the trade unions to defend the workers movement, immigrants, gays and all the oppressed against the fascists. Instead the KKE talks of “isolating” the “criminal, inhuman theories” of the fascists through educational programs in the schools or defeating them at the ballot box (KKE Political Bureau statement, 27 September 2013, www.902.gr [our translation]).
The fascists are not a debating society nor a right-wing ideological circle but a violent paramilitary gang dedicated to ethnic “purification” and the pulverization of the workers movement. In the absence of a proletarian challenge to its rule, the Greek bourgeoisie has not yet thrown its weight behind the fascists in the way that key sectors of the German bourgeoisie did in the early 1930s. But Trotsky’s warning to the German workers speaks equally to the KKE ranks today:
“Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle.”
—Trotsky, “For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism” (December 1931)
The KKE covers for its criminal passivity with the perfectly correct statement that socialist revolution is ultimately the only answer to fascism. But the KKE’s program is not socialist revolution but reformist reliance on the bourgeois state. The KKE complains, “The bourgeois state has the legal framework to deal with the criminal actions of GD [Golden Dawn]. That this has not been done so far is the responsibility of governments up to now” (KKE Political Bureau statement, 27 September 2013 [our translation]). The bourgeoisie holds the fascists in reserve as a force to be unleashed against the proletariat when and as necessary. And even when the state, for its own purposes, does slap them on the wrist, this serves the bourgeoisie as a precedent to unleash repression against “extremists” on the left. As is evident in Greece today, it also allows the fascist killers to paint themselves as martyrs for the “little people.”
In line with its cringing legalism, the KKE seeks to curry favor with the fascist-infested cops, supporting their “strikes” and welcoming these hired thugs of the capitalist state into the labor movement. In a 27 February 2013 letter to the president of the European Confederation of Police, the KKE’s Aleka Papariga stated forthrightly, “We support the right of union action and the struggles of those in uniform for a decent life, like all the rest of the working people” (Rizospastis, 8 March 2013 [our translation]).
The Trotskyist Group of Greece fights to cohere from among those militants who seek to learn from the lessons of history a Bolshevik cadre committed to building a Greek section of a reforged Fourth International. In fighting for a party to lead a new revolutionary upsurge to victory, we note the following passage from a 1961 document of the British Socialist Labour League, one of the founding documents of our tendency:
“The history of the last 40 years has driven home the lesson so often repeated by Lenin and Trotsky, that there are no impossible situations for the bourgeoisie. It survived the challenge of revolution and economic depression between the wars by resort to fascism. It survived the Second World War with the complicity of the Stalinist and Social Democratic leaderships—which ensured that the working class would not make a bid for power—and used the breathing space to elaborate new methods of rule and strengthen the economy. Even the most desperate situations can be overcome if only the active intervention of the workers as a class for themselves, with a party and leadership with a perspective of overthrowing capitalism, is not prepared in time.”
—“The World Prospect for Socialism”
The KKE’s self-criticisms are a sham devised to disguise the essential continuity of its current politics with the class-collaborationist politics that led the workers of Greece into a death trap in the 1940s. A party capable of leading the struggle for workers power will be forged only by telling the truth and by instilling in the proletariat the understanding that its class interests are irreconcilably opposed to those of all wings of the bourgeoisie and its state.
Clara Zetkin and the Struggle for the Third International
(Women and Revolution pages)
The outbreak of the first interimperialist war in August 1914 marked a watershed in the international socialist workers movement, as the social-democratic Second International collapsed into social-chauvinism. Saluting the “defense of the fatherland,” the social-chauvinist leaders rallied behind their own ruling classes, helping to lead the proletariat into the carnage of the war and suppress class struggle in the name of “civil peace.” The most spectacular example was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), widely seen as the leading party in the International. On 4 August 1914, the SPD fraction in the German Reichstag (parliament) voted in favor of granting the imperial government war credits, thereby approving Kaiser Wilhelm II’s imperialist war aims.
Prepared by their years-long struggle and decisive split with the Russian opportunists—the Mensheviks—V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party emerged as the leadership of an international movement to recapture the banner of revolutionary Marxism. As early as the Stuttgart International Socialist Congress in 1907, Lenin had attempted to bring together a left-wing core against the opportunists in the International. Led by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, the left won unanimous approval of a resolution that embodied Lenin’s key point: “The essential thing is not merely to prevent war, but to utilise the crisis created by war in order to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie” (Lenin, “The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart,” August-September 1907). But when war broke out, among the social-democratic parties in the combatant countries only the Bolsheviks, some Mensheviks and the Bulgarian and Serbian parties opposed war funding for their governments.
The Second International’s ignominious collapse meant, for Lenin, the irrevocable need to break decisively with the opportunists and their centrist apologists and to fight for a new, Third International. In 1919, after years of struggle and the triumphant conquest of power by the proletariat in the October 1917 Russian Revolution, the Third (Communist) International (Comintern, or CI) was founded in Moscow. Its first four Congresses (1919-22) proclaimed a revolutionary program of action, seeking to win over the best of the left-wing socialists throughout the world and begin the process of building mass Communist parties.
Forging new, Leninist vanguard parties required a series of political fights to break the revolutionary elements from social-democratic practice and program and to purge the centrist waverers. As Lenin wrote, “The Third International has gathered the fruits of the work of the Second International, discarded its opportunist, social-chauvinist, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois dross, and has begun to implement the dictatorship of the proletariat” (“The Third International and Its Place in History,” April 1919).
Among the fruits of the Second International was the trailblazing work among women before 1914 that was initiated and carried out mainly by women cadre of the SPD, led by Clara Zetkin. A prominent left-winger associated with Rosa Luxemburg, Zetkin fought for and organized special efforts to bring women under the banner of the party and encouraged the extension of these efforts internationally. For 25 years, she served as the editor of Die Gleichheit (Equality), a high-level, polemical journal that organized and educated SPD women cadre. Zetkin’s pioneering work among women was later to serve as a stepping stone for the Bolsheviks as they sought to implement their revolutionary program for women’s emancipation. A writer, speaker, organizer and translator, Zetkin was one of the best and certainly best-known leaders in the Second International. Already over 60 years old at the time of the Russian Revolution, she was a rare participant in the 1889 founding of the Second International who made it over to the Communist International. Lenin’s hard political struggles with her played a huge part in the positive outcome.
In her path from left-wing social democrat to communist, Zetkin carried a heavy load of political baggage from the Second International. The wrenching process of Zetkin’s journey speaks to the vast gulf between social democracy and communism, even for left-wing social democrats who embraced the Bolshevik Revolution. Her understanding of the necessary, hard, programmatic fight for a Leninist vanguard party was partial; she struggled to break from the social-democratic conception of the “party of the whole class” (one class, one party), which meant conciliation of opportunism. For several years, she straddled social democracy and Leninism before coming over decisively to communism.
Today a large swath of the left avidly promotes the social-democratic illusions in gradual reform and parliamentary tactics that dominated the Second International. In “The Neo-Kautskyites: Recycling the Second International” (Spartacist [English edition] No. 63, Winter 2012-13), we addressed the resurgent popularity of Social Democracy’s main theoretician, Karl Kautsky, among an array of reformist left groups, notably those associated with the journal Historical Materialism and its various conferences and book projects.
In this milieu are supporters of the U.S.-based International Socialist Organization (ISO), the United Secretariat and the British Socialist Workers Party, who distort the lessons of revolutionary history to camouflage their own open rejection of the prospect of international proletarian revolution. In embracing the bourgeois lie of the “death of communism,” the reformists have ever more overtly renounced and denounced even their erstwhile formal pretensions to Leninism. Kautsky and his ilk sought to subordinate the workers to their class enemy through politically muddled “unity” in a “party of the whole class.” Today’s reformists follow in his footsteps.
A parallel revival of interest in Clara Zetkin has taken place among these same reformists and leftist academics. A prime example is John Riddell, a leftist historian and editor of a valuable book series that collects the documents of the early CI under the title The Communist International in Lenin’s Time. Riddell’s writings, frequently published in the ISO’s International Socialist Review and other reformist journals, tout Zetkin precisely because of her differences with the Bolsheviks over the war and party organization. At the same time, he disagrees with and thus seeks to bury the steps Zetkin made toward a Bolshevik perspective. The reformists cannot stand the fact that the veteran socialist Zetkin championed the Bolshevik Revolution and, with great difficulty, came to realize the necessity of the qualitative break with social democracy that Lenin’s party represented.
The Party Question from the Second to the Third International
The official doctrine of international social democracy posited a sharp division between the maximum program (socialism at some point in the future) and a minimum program of political and socio-economic reforms considered achievable within the capitalist system. Crucially, the SPD’s understanding of the state—that it could be transformed in the interest of the working class through parliamentary means—reflected a creeping revisionist gradualism that came to supplant the party’s stated revolutionary socialist perspective. For the main SPD leaders, socialism would be reached through increasing their representation in the Reichstag and the slow accretion of the party’s forces in the working class. This last dangerous illusion was deeply ingrained in Zetkin’s politics.
The “party of the whole class,” as popularized by Kautsky, represented all tendencies claiming to speak for the interests of the working class—from the most opportunist and pro-capitalist to the most class-conscious and revolutionary. The revisionist wing led by Eduard Bernstein rejected the central tenets of Marxism and argued explicitly that capitalism could be gradually reformed in the direction of socialism. While the SPD formally rejected Bernstein’s revisionism in 1903, his program became the de facto practice of the increasingly conservative party executive and the SPD trade-union leadership in the years before the outbreak of the war. Social Democratic party “democracy” meant that the reformist parliamentarians and trade-union officials spoke for the party while the working-class base effectively had no voice.
In sharp contrast, Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party meant a cadre organization of professional revolutionaries cohered around a revolutionary program, including the most advanced layers of the class-conscious proletariat as well as pro-socialist intellectuals. The task of the party was to bring revolutionary consciousness and the program of socialism to the working class. The democratic-centralist party spoke and acted with one voice while allowing the widest internal democracy to argue over party program and priorities.
Until 1914, Lenin saw these organizational methods as applicable only to the particular conditions of tsarist Russia. With the onset of a full-scale interimperialist war and the collapse of the Second International, Lenin transcended the theoretical and doctrinal underpinnings of social democracy and generalized his understanding of the party question to all countries. Whereas in his struggle against the Mensheviks Lenin had seen opportunism as a petty-bourgeois trend external to the workers movement, he now came to understand that there was a material basis within the workers movement itself for the top layer to serve as political agents for the capitalist order. Analyzing the material basis for opportunism and social-chauvinism in the imperialist countries, Lenin wrote:
“Certain strata of the working class (the bureaucracy of the labour movement and the labour aristocracy, who get a fraction of the profits from the exploitation of the colonies and from the privileged position of their ‘fatherlands’ in the world market), as well as petty-bourgeois sympathisers within the socialist parties, have proved the social mainstay of these tendencies, and channels of bourgeois influence over the proletariat.”
—“The Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. Groups Abroad” (February 1915)
Between 1914 and 1917, Lenin developed and fought around three main slogans. One, socialists in the belligerent countries must stand for the defeat, above all, of their “own” bourgeois state. Two, the war demonstrated that capitalism had entered decisively into the imperialist epoch, its highest stage, and that the time for socialist revolution had ripened. Socialists must work to transform the imperialist war into civil war, opposing class collaborationism and “civil peace” in a fight for proletarian revolution. And three, the Second International had been destroyed by social-chauvinism. A new, revolutionary International must be built through a sharp split with the opportunists in the social-democratic movement. Lenin wrote: “To the Third International falls the task of organising the proletarian forces for a revolutionary onslaught against the capitalist governments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all countries for the capture of political power, for the triumph of socialism!” (“The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International,” November 1914).
Lenin’s 1915 classic Socialism and War, written jointly with his closest collaborator at the time, Gregory Zinoviev, denounced the social-chauvinism of the SPD majority (led by Philipp Scheidemann, Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske): “Opportunism has ‘matured,’ and is now playing to the full its role as emissary of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement.” He called for a total organizational and political break with the majority:
“Unity with the opportunists actually means subordinating the working class to their ‘own’ national bourgeoisie, and an alliance with the latter for the purpose of oppressing other nations and of fighting for dominant-nation privileges; it means splitting the revolutionary proletariat of all countries.”
Lenin singled out the centrist role of Karl Kautsky, who provided cover for the outright reformists of the SPD in arguing that the party was a “peacetime instrument” and that a unified International could be re-established when the war ended. (See “Bolshevik Policy in World War I,” page 5.) Unlike the SPD majority leaders, Kautsky was not an open recruiting sergeant for the imperialist military, but his call for “peace” obscured the inevitability of war in the imperialist epoch and provided a road back to the overt social-chauvinists. His theory of “ultra-imperialism” claimed that imperialist rivalry and war could be eliminated by some sort of peaceful alliance of all imperialist powers. Lenin termed this “a most reactionary method of consoling the masses with hopes of permanent peace being possible under capitalism” (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism [1916]). Such social-pacifism, Lenin argued, “is doing more harm to Marxism than avowed social-chauvinism,” which at least set forth its treacherous course openly (Socialism and War).
The great strength of the Bolshevik Party was that due to its early split with the Menshevik opportunists, it developed as a politically homogenous organization through a series of struggles such as the 1905 Revolution, the work in the Duma (Russian parliament) and many internal political fights. The training and selection of experienced cadre took time, and the party as a revolutionary instrument had to be consciously built to intervene into and guide the struggles of the proletariat. Thus, for the Third International, the first task of revolutionary socialists had to be to defeat and replace the reformists as the leadership of the mass workers movement, the precondition to leading that movement to victory over capitalism and laying the basis for a socialist society.
Opportunism vs. Bolshevism at Berne
Lenin’s struggle for a revolutionary response to the war faced resistance from veteran left-wing social democrats—especially at the September 1915 Zimmerwald and 1916 Kienthal conferences of antiwar socialists—who sought, in various ways, to maintain the “unity” of the old, politically bankrupt International. Zetkin was not present at either of these historic conferences (during Zimmerwald she was in jail for her antiwar activities), but she was the convenor of the March 1915 International Conference of Socialist Women at Berne, where she played a conciliatory role in seeking unity between opposing political forces.
In November 1914, Bolshevik leader Inessa Armand, in the name of the editorial board of the party’s women’s journal, Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker), wrote Zetkin to urge her to call a conference of left-wing socialist women against the war. The meeting was intended “to draw the working women into the struggle against every kind of civil peace and in favor of a war against war, a war closely connected with civil war and social revolution” (quoted in Olga H. Gankin and H.H. Fisher, eds., The Bolsheviks and the World War: The Origin of the Third International [Stanford University Press, 1940]). Lenin, who hoped that the conference would be a first step toward the founding of the Third International, commented before it began in a letter to Alexandra Kollontai, who was soon to join the Bolsheviks and would become a leader of the CI’s work among women:
“Apparently you do not entirely agree with the civil war slogan, which you relegate, so to speak, to a minor (I should even say to a conditional) place behind the slogan of peace. And you underline that ‘what we must put forward is a slogan that would unite us all.’
“Frankly, what I fear most of all at the present time is just this kind of indiscriminate unity, which, in my opinion, is most dangerous and harmful to the proletariat.”
—quoted in N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1970)
Zetkin agreed to organize the conference, but sought to attract women from all wings of the “antiwar” spectrum, including social-pacifist activists who publicly refused to criticize the treacherous politics of the official party leaderships. This fostered precisely the “indiscriminate unity” Lenin feared. The proceedings were marked by a confrontation over counterposed resolutions: one supported by Zetkin and almost all the other delegates, the other put forward by the Bolshevik delegation. Motivating the Bolshevik resolution, Armand argued:
“We Social Democrats who adhere to the Central Committee consider that the slogan of civil war must be advanced now and that the labor movement is now entering upon a new phase in the course of which socialism will be attained in the more advanced countries.… The working women should be told directly that peace can be attained through revolution and that real salvation from war lies in socialism.”
—quoted in Olga Ravich, “Unofficial Account of the International Conference of Socialist Women at Berne, 26-28 March 1915,” published in The Bolsheviks and the World War
Zetkin supported the argument that criticisms of the social-chauvinists should wait for national and international social-democratic conferences and that the appeal for revolution should be postponed until after the war. Against the call for civil war, Zetkin and the other opponents of the Bolsheviks insisted on the peace slogan as the rallying cry of the antiwar socialists. Some harbored the illusion that the imperialists could embrace pacifism, while others claimed that this slogan could unite the broadest layers of the working class against the war.
The manifesto issuing from the Berne conference contained no criticism whatsoever of the betrayal by the leaders of the social-democratic parties to which most of the delegates belonged. Instead, the manifesto declaimed: “As the will of the socialist women is united across the battlefields, so you in all countries must close your ranks in order to sound the call: peace, peace!” Nadezhda Krupskaya, who along with Armand headed the Bolshevik delegation, derisively commented that the majority resolutions reflected the “goody-goody pacifism of the English and the Dutch” whom Zetkin accommodated.
Zetkin continued to urge campaigns for peace, a reflection of her inability to understand the necessity for a split with the social traitors of the SPD. She argued:
“Many resolutions by male comrades calling on the Party Executive to finally undertake an energetic peace campaign have come about at the initiative of women comrades. Undoubtedly this movement, as well as that of the opposition generally, has pushed the PV [Party Executive] forward a bit.”
—quoted in Richard J. Evans, Sozialdemokratie und Frauenemanzipation im deutschen Kaiserreich (Social Democracy and Women’s Emancipation in Imperial Germany) (Bonn: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz, 1979) (our translation)
In his critique of the Conference resolution, Lenin debunked this illusion:
“An absolutely erroneous and harmful idea is being inculcated upon the working masses, the idea that the present-day Social-Democratic parties, with their present Executives, are capable of changing their course from an erroneous to a correct one.…
“The Women’s Conference should not have aided Scheidemann, Haase, Kautsky, Vandervelde, Hyndman, Guesde, Sembat, Plekhanov and others to blunt the vigilance of the working masses. On the contrary, it should have tried to rouse them and declared a decisive war against opportunism.”
—“On the Struggle Against Social-Chauvinism” (June 1915)
In September 1915 at Zimmerwald, Lenin won over a small core of left-socialists to this view. When the Bolshevik manifesto was defeated, these Zimmerwald Leftists, as they came to be known, critically endorsed the majority statement because, as Lenin stated, it “signifies a step towards an ideological and practical break with opportunism and social-chauvinism” (“The First Step,” October 1915). Lenin continued: “At the same time, the manifesto, as any analysis will show, contains inconsistencies, and does not say everything that should be said.” The organized Zimmerwald Left fought as the embryo of the Third International; thus, the CI at its founding congress declared the Zimmerwald movement disbanded.
The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women
The October Revolution took Marxism out of the realm of theory and gave it flesh and blood. From the day Lenin proclaimed to the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order,” the hopes of the masses of oppressed and exploited people around the world were directed toward the first workers republic. Zetkin hailed the revolution and followed and reported on the events as closely as possible. In the Leipziger Volkszeitung, a newspaper under the control of the left wing of the Independent Social Democrats, she conveyed her view of the revolution:
“The Bolsheviks have reached their goal in a bold assault which has no parallel in history. Governmental power is in the hands of the Soviets. What has transpired is the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat or more correctly: The dictatorship of the working population because, around the industrial proletariat of the great modern economic centers of Russia (the axis of crystallization for the revolutionary forces) are grouped the peasants and petit-bourgeois citizens in their work garments and military uniforms.”
—“The Battle for Power and Peace in Russia,” 30 November 1917, translated in Philip S. Foner, ed., Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1984)
The Russian Revolution illuminated once and for all the vital interrelationship between the emancipation of women and workers revolution. The fundamental question—reform or revolution—is decisive for the liberation of women as it is for all the exploited and oppressed in class society. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat in Soviet Russia, the working people began to build the infrastructure of collectivized institutions to replace housework and childcare shouldered by women in the family, aiming to liberate women from the drudgery and isolation that for ages had prevented them from full participation in the economy and public life. Soviet legislation at that time granted women in Russia a level of equality and freedom that has yet to be attained by the most economically advanced “democratic” capitalist countries. (For an extensive account of Bolshevik work and the effect on women of the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution, see “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 59, Spring 2006.)
However, the Bolsheviks recognized that without qualitative economic development, the very survival of the revolution was at stake. Soviet Russia had inherited the social and economic backwardness of tsarist Russia, further compounded by the devastation of World War I. In the bloody Civil War (1918-20), the new workers state had to fight against the armies of domestic counterrevolution and their imperialist supporters. The imperialists also instituted an economic blockade, isolating the Soviet workers state from the world economy and world division of labor. The country’s economy was thrown back by decades. Leon Trotsky, who with Lenin was a leader of the 1917 Revolution, explained that from the beginning, the Bolsheviks recognized that:
“The real resources of the state did not correspond to the plans and intentions of the Communist Party. You cannot ‘abolish’ the family; you have to replace it. The actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis of ‘generalized want.’ Experience soon proved this austere truth which Marx had formulated eighty years before.”
—The Revolution Betrayed (1936)
The Bolsheviks sought above all to break the isolation of the young Soviet state. All eyes turned to Germany, with its advanced industry and restive proletariat, to extend the revolution to West Europe. However, the years of seeking indiscriminate “unity” with opportunists at the expense of forging a programmatically hard vanguard party meant that when the revolutionary moment was at hand, there was no party prepared to lead the working class in a fight for power.
Against Centrist Conciliationism
Instead of forming a new, communist party as Lenin advocated, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and other left-wing leaders lingered in the SPD, where they were gagged by the pro-war tops and by stringent government censorship and vigorous repression. The principal leader of the SPD left wing, Luxemburg, had a “spontaneist” view of the role of the party, believing that the process of the class struggle itself would bring the working class to revolutionary consciousness:
“The Social Democracy is nothing but the embodiment of the class struggle of the modern proletariat, resting on its consciousness of the historical consequences of this struggle. Its [the Social Democracy’s] actual leader is in reality the masses themselves, namely as dialectically conceived in their process of development.”
—“Der politische Führer der deutschen Arbeiterklasse” (The Political Leader of the German Working Class) (1910) (our translation)
Thus Luxemburg, who had denounced the SPD after August 1914 as a “stinking corpse,” nonetheless believed that the unity of all wings of the party must be maintained at all costs. When the split finally occurred in January 1917, it was instigated by the SPD leadership itself when it expelled virtually all of its critics—bourgeois defeatists, pacifists, centrists and the revolutionary leftists grouped around Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Franz Mehring and Leo Jogiches.
In April 1917, the expelled members founded the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). The USPD had a politically heterogeneous membership replicating that of the mother party, minus only the social-chauvinist right wing. At the far left was the Spartacist group of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Both the revisionist Bernstein and the centrist Kautsky were USPD leaders. Longing to be reunited with the SPD, they and their adherents determined the dominant politics of the new party. The deft use of Marxist phraseology from the pen of Kautsky and his followers served as a left cover for the USPD’s thorough reformism in deeds. Thus the USPD functioned as a barrier between the Spartacists and the more advanced workers who rejected the outright reformism of the SPD.
In August 1918, Kautsky wrote The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, an attack on the very conception of the class dictatorship, first advanced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and now embodied in the Soviet workers state. Lenin, who had broken off work on The State and Revolution to lead the Russian proletariat to power, used the leftover material in his 1918 reply, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. But in Germany itself, Kautsky’s attacks on the October Revolution went unanswered. Lenin wrote to the Soviet envoys in West Europe:
“Kautsky’s disgraceful rubbish, childish babble and shallowest opportunism impel me to ask: why do we do nothing to fight the theoretical vulgarisation of Marxism by Kautsky?
“Can we tolerate that even such people as Mehring and Zetkin keep away from Kautsky more ‘morally’ (if one may put it so) than theoretically.”
—“Letter to Y.A. Berzin, V.V. Vorovsky and A.A. Joffe” (September 1918)
Lenin urged the envoys to “have a detailed talk with the Left (Spartacists and others), stimulating them to make a statement of principle, of theory, in the press, that on the question of dictatorship Kautsky is producing philistine Bernsteinism, not Marxism.” The German Marxists never produced such a statement.
In November 1918, the outbreak of mass class struggle and mutinies within the defeated German armed forces resulted in the deposing of the Kaiser. The SPD followed the logic of its earlier betrayal and, with the USPD, formed a government pledged to preserve the capitalist order. In the midst of this revolutionary crisis, the Spartacists and others such as the Revolutionary Shop Stewards were loosely organized, autonomous groupings surrounded by an enormous, volatile periphery. In December 1918, the Spartacists finally split with the USPD and founded the KPD(S) (Communist Party of Germany [Spartakus]). But it was too late for the revolutionary-minded militants to forge a party capable of leading the proletariat to fight for power in the 1918-19 upsurge. In January 1919, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by the Freikorps, reactionary troops unleashed by the SPD government. In March, Jogiches was also murdered. The young KPD was beheaded, its leadership cut down.
Laying out the decisive difference between the Russian and German revolutions, leftist historian Evelyn Anderson wrote:
“In Russia, a political party emerged, the Bolsheviks, whose leaders knew what the mass of the people wanted and what they wanted themselves, who had the keenest sense of power and the courage to act boldly. In Germany such a political party was totally lacking.”
—Hammer or Anvil: The Story of the German Working-Class Movement (New York: Oriole Editions, 1973)
Zetkin and others lacked the political understanding to draw the balance sheet of the fatal delay of the necessary split. As late as 1921, Zetkin persisted in characterizing the December 1918 founding of the KPD as a “mistake.” She insisted:
“Incidentally, Leo Tyszka [Jogiches] continued to share this opinion with me from the beginning until his death, and the development of the party has proved us correct.”
—Briefe Deutscher an Lenin 1917–1923 (Letters to Lenin by Germans 1917-1923) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1990) (our translation)
This dead-wrong conclusion is echoed by Lars T. Lih and Ben Lewis, the latter a supporter of the Communist Party of Great Britain, in Martov and Zinoviev: Head to Head in Halle (London: November Publications, Ltd., 2011). Documenting the debate at the 1920 Halle conference, where the majority of the USPD agreed to join the CI, Lewis writes of the split and formation of the KPD that “in the words of a later KPD(S) leader Paul Levi, the split had ‘scarcely any influence’ on the disaffected ranks of the USPD. Clearly, a premature move.” We will hear more from Levi later.
In agreeing with Zetkin and Levi, Lewis and his fellow reformists are denying that there was even a possibility of a German October in 1918-19, turning their backs on the actual historical events. The masses of workers were setting up workers and soldiers councils in an attempt to follow in the path of the Russian proletariat. Lenin wrote:
“When the crisis broke out, however, the German workers lacked a genuine revolutionary party, owing to the fact that the split was brought about too late, and owing to the burden of the accursed tradition of ‘unity’ with capital’s corrupt (the Scheidemanns, Legiens, Davids and Co.) and spineless (the Kautskys, Hilferdings and Co.) gang of lackeys.”
—“A Letter to the German Communists” (August 1921)
After the devastating defeat in January 1919, and in line with earlier consultations with Jogiches and Luxemburg, Zetkin remained in the USPD through its Extraordinary Party Conference in March 1919, where she launched a blistering attack on the USPD leaders for joining the government of Ebert and Scheidemann. This, she argued, was “incompatible with the principles of revolutionary class struggle”:
“We are now confronted with the question: Can these opposing views be reconciled? I don’t hesitate to answer: No! They are irreconcilable because they are fundamentally counterposed conceptions as to historical development and its preconditions. Such contradictions cannot be united by even the most beautiful resolutions.”
—“Speech at USPD Extraordinary Party Conference” (4 March 1919) (our translation)
This was her resignation from the USPD. But though Zetkin joined the KPD soon after, she failed to confront the USPD left wing with a clear demand to split and join the KPD. And she persisted in her efforts to revive the “socialist women’s movement,” maintaining friendly, collaborative relations with the USPD women. In a 13 March 1920 letter to Rosa Bloch, a Swiss comrade, Zetkin asked her to send a “statement of solidarity” with the USPD women and even suggested another “international socialist [i.e., social-democratic] women’s conference.” This call for a unified socialist women’s movement was supported by the USPD women and was starkly counterposed to the CI’s perspective of a complete political break with opportunism. The conference never materialized. Zetkin’s efforts to promote unity continued until the USPD left wing finally split in October 1920 and fused with the KPD in December.
Work Among Women from the Second to the Third International
In his 1921 letter to the German Communists, Lenin noted that the “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” adopted by the CI’s July 1921 Third Congress “mark a great step forward.” The “Theses on Methods and Forms of Work of the Communist Parties Among Women,” adopted at the same Congress, sought to guide Communist work among women, just as the Organizational Theses did for the work as a whole.
In 2011 we published a new translation of the CI’s Theses (Spartacist [English edition] No. 62, Spring 2011). In our research, we found that the Theses were the product of a yearlong controversy between the Soviet cadre and others. These differences were not known to us when we published “Foundations of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy” in Women and Revolution Nos. 8 and 9 (Spring and Summer 1975), covering the period from the founding of the SPD in 1875 to January 1917. Although this article has for the most part stood the test of time, we now recognize some flaws as a result of our research on the Comintern’s work among women and in light of a wealth of academic studies that have appeared since 1975.
In 1975, Werner Thönnessen’s The Emancipation of Women: The Rise and Decline of the Women’s Movement in German Social Democracy 1863-1933 (published in German in 1969 and in English in 1973) was virtually the only available study on the work among women of the prewar German Social Democracy. We have come to evaluate it as a politically skewed presentation. Thönnessen’s anti-communist account does not deal with the founding of the Third International and omits altogether that Zetkin went over to the Leninist Comintern. The book has also been criticized academically, centrally by British historian Richard J. Evans, who has published extensively on the history of the SPD and the woman question in both English and German.
In the Spartacist introduction to the Theses we noted:
“In the past…Women and Revolution incorrectly presented the history of the ‘proletarian women’s movement’ as if there were a direct continuity from the work among women of the Second to the Third International. For example, in ‘The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,’ we wrote, ‘Before World War I the Social Democrats in Germany pioneered in building a women’s “transitional organization”—a special body, linked to the party through its most conscious cadre.’ In fact, the idea of a special party apparatus to conduct work among women was pioneered by the Bolsheviks in their endeavor to draw the masses of toiling women to the side of the vanguard party and can be undertaken only by a programmatically hard Leninist party.”
In the Communist parties, the apparatus for leading the work was to be carefully built as an integral part of all leading bodies—from the women’s department of the central committee to the leading body of party local committees.
The SPD’s pioneering work on the woman question can be best characterized as an important first step in the development of the model of communist work among women. Zetkin rightly insisted that the emancipation of women was a question of class rule. She drew on Engels’ classic The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) and identified the institution of the family as the primary source of the special oppression of women. With organized religion and the state, the family is also a key prop of the capitalist system, a vehicle for the inheritance of private property for the ruling class and the means for the reproduction of labor to be exploited, the source of capitalist profits.
Thus Zetkin understood correctly that the liberation of women required the destruction of the capitalist order and the building of a new socialist society to enable the socialization of housework and childcare, transforming them into collective institutions. This perspective underpinned her well-known hostility to bourgeois feminism, which was pushed by the various European feminist groups and had ideological influence within the SPD as well. As Zetkin put it, “In the atmosphere of the materialist concept of history, the ‘love drivel’ about a ‘sisterhood’ which supposedly wraps a unifying ribbon around bourgeois ladies and female proletarians, burst like so many scintillating soap bubbles” (“What the Women Owe to Karl Marx,” March 1903, translated in Foner, ed., Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings).
Zetkin knew that because of the material conditions of women’s lives—their social isolation in the family, relative political backwardness, and the working woman’s double burden as housewife and wage slave—special methods of party work were necessary to recruit women to socialism. She fought for this perspective at party congresses and in the pages of Die Gleichheit. But by the time of the outbreak of the war in 1914, the SPD leadership viewed women’s subordinate status in society as normal, just as they promoted the parliamentary illusions of a peaceful road to socialism. As stated in the German-language CI journal edited by Zetkin, Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale (The Communist Women’s International), work among women was widely viewed in the SPD as “an unavoidable secondary task.”
Developing the Theses on Work Among Women
After the First CI Congress, the leading women cadre began work on a guiding document on work among women for submission to the Comintern Executive (ECCI). More than a year later, the First International Conference of Communist Women took place from 30 July to 2 August 1920 in Moscow, at the time of the CI Second Congress. When we examined the record of the 1920 conference, we found that two document drafts were submitted: one by Russian comrades and one by West and Central European delegates.
Writing a report on the conference was greatly hampered by Inessa Armand’s tragic death in September 1920. Particularly impressive was the report’s published summary of Armand’s presentation on the draft Russian theses. Containing the basic components of the final Theses as adopted by the Third Congress, it provided a political blueprint for that document. Armand emphasized that all Communist parties should “immediately begin to engage in the broadest, most intensive work among the masses of proletarian women” (Otchet o Pervoi mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii kommunistok [Report on the First International Conference of Communist Women] [Moscow: Gosizdat, 1921] [our translation]).
Armand placed great emphasis on establishing in all countries the two highly effective methods of work among women developed in Soviet Russia: delegate assemblies and non-party women’s conferences. These methods, implemented under the close watch of the party leadership, were established to educate the masses of women workers and peasants who remained outside the orbit of the party. In the delegate system, elections would be held in a factory for women workers to choose one of their ranks as delegate to the Zhenotdel—a special department of the Russian Communist Party Central Committee for work among women—for a period of three to six months. The delegatka, wearing a red scarf as her badge of office, served as an observer-apprentice in various branches of public activity such as the factory, soviet, trade union, school, hospital or communal dining center.
Differences over the applicability outside Soviet Russia of these methods of work among women was one source of lively and extensive debate. West and Central European comrades argued that these methods could not be used outside of a workers state and would amount to social work. But in fact, non-party women’s conferences were a key part of the Bolsheviks’ organizing efforts among working women leading up to the insurrection in October 1917. Rabotnitsa was a central tool to draw women into active work under the direction of the party (see “History of the Journal Rabotnitsa: How the Bolsheviks Organized Working Women,” Women and Revolution No. 4, Fall 1973). Special efforts to reach working women in Petrograd culminated in the First All-City Conference of Petrograd Working Women in October 1917, which was attended by 500 delegates representing 80,000 working women.
Objections were also raised in various meetings to the Russians’ explicit indictment of the Second International as a “brake on the revolutionary proletarian movement” and “an opponent of the liberation of all toiling women,” shamefully betraying proletarian women’s struggle for the most elementary democratic demands. Rosi Wolfstein from Germany and the Austrian Anna Ströhmer objected to the critical assessment of the Second International’s work among women because it omitted Zetkin’s work. Against that view, a number of Soviet delegates argued that although Zetkin played a leading role and joined the fight of the left wing, it was the opportunist majority that determined the political policies of the Second International and its member parties.
The overall character of the Theses was also at issue, revealing differences on party centralization. In Ströhmer’s opinion, the section on the Second International should not be polemical and the Theses should not be agitational but historical in character. The Danish and Hungarian delegates objected to the detailed organizational forms and methods as “instructions” to the parties. These political differences could not be resolved, and the women’s conference failed to complete a document for submission to the Second CI Congress. When the Congress took place from 19 July to 7 August 1920, the questions of women and youth were referred to the ECCI.
In September 1920, Zetkin arrived in Soviet Russia, where she witnessed the historic gains for women that the October Revolution made possible. She observed in practice the Soviet women’s methods of work under the Zhenotdel. Zetkin recalled in her Reminiscences of Lenin (dated January 1925) that he solicited her help in the development of the Theses.
The political framework for the Theses is laid out in this discussion. Lenin emphasized the “inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman, and private property in the means of production.” Only communism, not feminism or social democracy, could lay the basis for the emancipation of women. But just as true, the party had to win over the millions of working women in town and country in order to make the revolution and to construct a new, communist society. Therefore the party must build special organs “whose particular duty it is to arouse the masses of women workers, to bring them into contact with the Party, and to keep them under its influence” (quoted in Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin [New York: International Publishers, 1934]).
In December 1920, a document was published in Die Kommunistische Internationale No. 15, the German edition of the CI theoretical journal, under the title “Guidelines for the Communist Women’s Movement” and with a note at the end: “Edited by Clara Zetkin.” An early contribution by Zetkin in the discussion, this document appears under the title “Theses for the Communist Women’s Movement” in the documentary collection edited by John Riddell, Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991). The “Guidelines” represent an important intermediate stage in the discussion, but to title this document as the “Theses,” without any explanation, only promotes confusion between it and the final CI Theses. In fact, the two documents reflect political differences. The Guidelines express the tendency of the German comrades to extol the SPD’s work among women while minimizing the historic betrayal by the Social Democracy. The Theses, honed through months of debate, were tightly focused on “placing before the Communist Parties of the West and the East the immediate task of strengthening the work of the party among the female proletariat.” The work among women is placed firmly in the framework of the tasks of the Communist International.
Another important difference between the documents is Zetkin’s uncritical reference to the 1915 Berne Women’s Conference in the Guidelines:
“These women called for international revolutionary mass action to compel the imperialist regimes to make peace and to free up the historic terrain for the workers’ international struggle to achieve political power and vanquish imperialism and capitalism.”
Thus she continued to uphold the outcome of the Berne Conference and to dodge the necessity of a hard break with the opportunists as well as her own role in conciliating the waverers. To our knowledge, Zetkin never repudiated her role at Berne.
On 21 May 1921, a joint plenum of the Zhenotdel and the Orgburo of the Russian Communist Party Central Committee was held to prepare for the Second International Conference of Communist Women. This plenum appointed an “editorial commission, consisting of cdes. Kollontai, Menzhinskaya, Krupskaya, Itkina, Vinogradskaya” and directed that “all theses are preliminarily submitted for review to the editorial commission” (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History [RGASPI] f. 17, op. 10, d. 54, l. 81-83). There is little doubt that this was the body, consisting of the Zhenotdel’s top editors and writers, that worked through the considerable volume of documents, drafts and amendments, and prepared the final Theses as they were adopted by the Third CI Congress. While much remains unknown, it is certain that the original language of the document was Russian.
The Second Women’s Conference was held in Moscow from 9 to 15 June 1921, before the Third CI Congress. Reflecting continuing controversy over methods of work, one Soviet delegate, Janson, criticized Zetkin for placing too much emphasis on work among housewives. Housewives were the majority of women in Germany; only one-fifth of women there were workers. Janson argued that in Russia only one-tenth of women worked, but when the Bolsheviks’ forces were small it was necessary to concentrate on the proletariat.
This lack of concentration on workers at the point of production, reaching out to petty-bourgeois layers of women as equally important, reflected the fact that in the prewar period the socialist women’s movement in Germany consisted primarily of housewives, generally the wives of SPD members. Seeking to put the exploited and oppressed in power to construct a new socialist order, the Comintern’s pointedly revolutionary conception was to mobilize the “most backward, most forgotten and oppressed, most humiliated layers of the working class and the toiling poor,” as stated in the summary of Armand’s 1920 presentation cited above. These were precisely the masses of proletarian women, concentrated in the lower strata of the working class, whom the SPD did not succeed in recruiting. In the end, the editorial commission reached agreement on the Theses, and they were adopted by the Third CI Congress.
Struggle Around the 21 Conditions
Under pressure from their leftward-moving members, a number of mass social-democratic parties—such as the USPD, with 800,000 members—had been forced by the tremendous authority and popularity of the Russian Revolution to turn to Moscow. But the CI had to keep out the tagalong reformists and centrists who were simply following their ranks with the full intention of diverting them back to a reformist course. (See the Spartacist publication, “The First Four Congresses of the Communist International,” Marxist Studies No. 9, August 2003.) This task required codifying the CI’s strategy and tactics. In summer 1920, the Second Congress adopted the “Conditions of Admission Into the Communist International” (the “21 Conditions”), an organizational and political weapon with which to separate the revolutionaries from the reformists and centrists and to establish democratic-centralism as the organizational basis for the Comintern.
For the next year, a heated battle raged within various parties in Europe over the 21 Conditions and adherence—or not—to the Third International. The seventh condition stated that the CI “cannot reconcile itself to the fact that such avowed reformists” as Kautsky, Hilferding and others should be part of the International and that “this split be brought about with the least delay” (published in Helmut Gruber, ed., International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967]).
In the USPD, the fight was intense. The virulently anti-Bolshevik Luise Zietz, a leading USPD cadre, had headed the SPD women’s work since 1908, when Zetkin was pushed aside by the party bureaucrats. That year, legal restrictions on women joining political organizations were lifted. Under Zietz’s effective organizing and right-wing political influence, thousands of women were recruited to the SPD. After the Second CI Congress, Zietz traveled around Germany, aggressively campaigning against the 21 Conditions as a “diktat” from Moscow that only those with the “souls of slaves” could accept.
In September 1920, Zetkin published a pamphlet arguing for adherence to the Comintern, “Der Weg nach Moskau” (The Road to Moscow). In October, her two-part article under the same title appeared in the KPD’s Rote Fahne (Red Flag). These pieces were published to coincide with, and intervene into, the crucial October 1920 Halle conference, where the USPD was to take up the question of adherence to the Third International. But while Zetkin fervently advocated adherence to the CI, her reluctance to pursue political polarization and splits undermined the hard work necessary to build it. Regarding the 21 Conditions, she wrote:
“It is regrettable that the World Congress did not formulate its demands to the individual national parties more skillfully. What they require and stipulate is wholly justified in terms of the essence of the matter. It is a summary of the organizational measures that are absolutely necessary to create a powerful, homogeneous, cohesive Communist International.… However, in the Conditions, their formal organizational aspect is emphasized at length and insistently instead of their essence, their political-historical content.… This fact gives the rightist USPD leaders a convenient pretext for shifting the field of battle over affiliation to the Communist International and for replacing productive, clarifying debates about the great questions of principles and tactics with heated, nasty squabbling over organizational forms and formulas.”
—Rote Fahne, 3 October 1920 (our translation)
While acknowledging in the abstract the necessity of the 21 Conditions, Zetkin balked at their implementation. She had not drawn the lessons of the consequences of maintaining “unity” with the social-chauvinists and their apologists in the German party. As Gregory Zinoviev said at the Halle conference, if the USPD fails to join the CI, “it will be because you do not agree with us on the question of world revolution, of democracy and of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (USPD, Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des außerordentlichen Parteitages in Halle vom 12. bis 17. Oktober 1920 [Minutes of the Deliberations of the Extraordinary Party Conference in Halle from 12 to 17 October 1920] [Berlin: Verlagsgenossenschaft “Freiheit”] [our translation]). The majority of the USPD was won over, voted to affiliate to the CI and fused with the KPD, creating the United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD) with some 350,000 members. After the Third CI Congress, the party reverted to the name KPD.
France, Italy: Zetkin Flinches Some More
Zetkin’s failure to understand the role of splits and fusions in building a revolutionary combat party was also seen in her response to conferences in France and Italy where Socialists debated affiliating with the CI. At the December 1920 Tours congress of the French Socialist Party, Zetkin called on the delegates to “come out clearly, unreservedly and openly for the Third International, meaning not just for its principles and tactics but also for its Conditions” (“Speech at the 18th Party Congress of the French Socialist Party in Tours,” 27 December 1920 [our translation]). The Socialist Party ratified the Comintern conditions in a two-to-one vote.
But in her letter to Lenin of 25 January 1921—the same letter in which she criticized the 1918 founding of the KPD—Zetkin asked him to use his influence to soften the ECCI’s interventions, which “sometimes have the character of a brutal, imperious intervention lacking the proper knowledge of the actual condition under consideration” (Letters to Lenin by Germans). She objected to a scathing, wide-ranging and detailed ECCI critique of the French Socialist Party’s work that had polarized the party. The Socialist Party, which had not split during the war, had “assumed complete responsibility for the imperialist carnage,” wrote the ECCI, and maintained in its ranks the same leaders who had aided and abetted the French bourgeoisie (“Letter to the French Socialist Party from the Presiding Committee,” 29 July 1920, published in Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!).
The ECCI letter argued effectively for a hard split with the social-patriots. In her letter to Lenin, Zetkin wrote that the ECCI letter “came within a hair’s breadth of putting in question and destroying the success of the gathering.” Thus she balked at the brutally honest political criticism and debate that were necessary to separate the centrists from the revolutionaries.
Zetkin’s same letter also complained to Lenin about the ECCI’s intervention in Italy. In this period, Italy was in vast upheaval in the countryside, where peasants were seizing estates, and in the cities, where the metal workers occupied factories. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) had come over to the CI without a split, encompassing a spectrum of political tendencies from reformism to syndicalism and ultraleftism. The party leadership had consciously sabotaged the factory occupations, in collaboration with the trade-union bureaucracy, rather than struggle to seize power. As Trotsky put it at the Third CI Congress in June 1921:
“For three years following the war, each and every comrade who arrived from Italy would tell us: ‘We have everything ready for the revolution.’ The whole world knew that Italy was on the eve of the revolution. When the revolution broke out, the party proved bankrupt.”
—“Speech on the Italian Question at the Third Congress of the Communist International” (29 June 1921)
This, he continued, was the direct result of the earlier failure to purge the PSI of the reformists grouped around longtime leader Filippo Turati: “Turati and his friends are in this sense honest, because they declare daily, openly and repeatedly that they do not want the revolution. They do not want it and yet they remain members of the Socialist Party, even its prominent members.”
At the PSI’s Livorno conference in mid-January 1921, the centrists under Giacinto Serrati still refused to break with the reformists, with whom they formed a majority. The minority left-wing delegates around Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci walked out of the conference and founded the Communist Party of Italy. Six months later, in his report on the activities of the ECCI at the Third World Congress, Zinoviev stated of the split:
“Even if we lose a great mass of Italian workers for a time, so be it; we will win them back. But not one step, not one single step backward, because otherwise the Communist International is lost. At stake was the clarity of the Communist International; at stake were the principles of communism.”
—Protokoll des III. Kongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale (Minutes of the Third Congress of the Communist International) (Hamburg: Verlag der Kommunistischen Internationale, 1921) (our translation)
Serrati’s failure to split with Turati when it counted was a central factor in the defeat of the revolutionary opening. That failure in turn led to the rapid demoralization of the proletariat and the triumph of Mussolini and his fascists.
The Levi Affair
Zetkin’s 25 January 1921 letter to Lenin called the PSI’s split “a grave defeat,” arguing for a “most rapid reunification of the two factions” as it was “an objectively unjustifiable error for the communists to constitute their own faction.” In this she agreed with Paul Levi, her close colleague and a protégé of Luxemburg, who had inherited the leadership of the KPD. This was the beginning of the Levi affair, which brought Zetkin to the brink of a break with the CI. In this struggle she finally, after a sharp fight, threw over her remaining social-democratic conceptions and became fully a communist.
After Levi’s return to Germany from the PSI conference, he, Zetkin and several other members of the VKPD Central Committee (Zentrale) resigned in protest against the leadership’s refusal to endorse their opposition to the split in the Italian Socialist Party. This left the VKPD with a weakened leadership at a time of great political tumult and confusion—the disastrous 1921 March Action, which began in connection with a wave of workers’ struggles in central Germany provoked by police actions in the mines. The VKPD called for armed resistance and a general strike but did nothing to prepare them. When their calls went unanswered in much of Germany, isolated sectors of the working class were plunged into a futile military action. The well-prepared German bourgeoisie reacted with murderous repression. Despite mass casualties and thousands of arrests of the most militant workers, the VKPD leadership maintained that this grave defeat was actually a victory and vowed to remain on its disastrous course.
The March Action, inspired by the “theory of the offensive,” was associated with Comintern representative Béla Kun. The leader of the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1919, Kun held that the consciousness of its own political interests and historical destiny was insufficient to motivate the working class to revolution; instead, revolutionaries must electrify the proletariat through acts of great audacity. The German leadership was deeply split, with Zetkin and Levi opposed to the bogus “theory” and to the March Action. Accusations flew back and forth between them and the German lefts, led by Ruth Fischer, Arkady Maslow and Ernst Reuter. The party leadership of Ernst Meyer, Heinrich Brandler, August Thalheimer and Paul Frölich supported the left.
On 16 April, Lenin wrote a letter to Zetkin and Levi conceding that “I readily believe that the representative of the Executive Committee [of the CI] defended the silly tactics.” He added that “this representative [Béla Kun] is very often too Left.” Lenin continued:
“I consider your tactics in respect of Serrati erroneous. Any defence or even semi-defence of Serrati was a mistake. But to withdraw from the Central Committee!!?? That, in any case, was the biggest mistake! If we tolerate the practice of responsible members of the Central Committee withdrawing from it when they are left in a minority, the Communist Parties will never develop normally or become strong. Instead of withdrawing, it would have been better to discuss the controversial question several times jointly with the Executive Committee. Now, Comrade Levi wants to write a pamphlet, i.e., to deepen the contradiction! What is the use of all this?? I am convinced that it is a big mistake.
“Why not wait? The congress opens here on June 1. Why not have a private discussion here, before the congress? Without public polemics, without withdrawals, without pamphlets on differences.”
—“To Clara Zetkin and Paul Levi” (April 1921)
Levi published his inflammatory and slanderous pamphlet, Our Road: Against Putschism, on 3 April 1921. While Lenin himself characterized Levi’s criticisms of the March Action as essentially correct, Levi revealed himself as an egocentric, petty-bourgeois dilettante by publicly attacking the party when it was under fire from the class enemy. To Levi, the VKPD leadership consisted of “new Ludendorffs,” an invocation of Hitler’s crony, the right-wing nationalist general who led Germany’s armed forces into the massive bloodbath of World War I. With some 150 workers killed and 3,500 imprisoned, with the VKPD hemorrhaging workers by the thousands, Levi’s public denunciation served to divide the working class, stifle discussion in the party and provide ammunition for state prosecution of the party. For this public breach of party discipline, and not his political criticisms of the March Action, Levi was rightly expelled from the party and later from the International.
Levi was his own worst enemy, said Lenin (Zetkin, Reminiscences). In his August 1921 “Letter to the German Communists,” Lenin characterized Levi’s anti-party action:
“While urging others to pursue a cautious and well-considered strategy, Levi himself committed worse blunders than a schoolboy, by rushing into battle so prematurely, so unprepared, so absurdly and wildly that he was certain to lose any ‘battle’ (spoiling or hampering his work for many years), although the ‘battle’ could and should have been won. Levi behaved like an ‘anarchist intellectual’.”
Going into the Third Congress of the Comintern, the VKPD was at a breaking point, riven by bitter acrimony about the March Action. In a 6 May letter to Lenin, Paul Frölich wrote that without the intervention of the ECCI, Zetkin would have faced expulsion herself for her indiscipline. His letter revealed a party seething with factional venom:
“Let me say a few words about comrade Clara. Although my opinion has been from the outset that in her basic views comrade Clara is not a Communist, I always looked up to her with the greatest trust. But I must say that in the long run, it is impossible to get along with her in the party. She has stated repeatedly, not only now, but also in the past—and comrade Karl [Radek] can cite incidents for this—that her position in the workers movement and now in the Communist International is so important that she cannot submit to party decisions if, in her opinion, these decisions are political stupidities. You will understand that with such a view, party work is made totally impossible. Based on this view and incited by Levi, in the current situation she has challenged the party in the most horrendous way and publicly exposed the party. Objectively the situation was already such that we would have had to expel Zetkin and her acolytes if the express will of the Executive had not held us back. You can believe that we, too, are conscious of what Clara Zetkin’s expulsion from the party would mean for the whole International, and we have left no means untried to restrain her from her exaltations.”
—Letters to Lenin by Germans
Third Comintern Congress
This was the situation when the Third World Congress met in Moscow from 22 June to 12 July 1921. The revolutionary wave that swept Europe after World War I, propelled by the Russian Revolution, was receding. The Congress was dominated by the fight over the “revolutionary offensive” that had brought the International to the verge of a split. Kun and the German leadership were backed by Bolshevik leaders Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and initially Karl Radek against Trotsky and Lenin, who placed themselves demonstratively in the right wing of the Congress.
Lenin and Trotsky, at first in the minority in the dispute, led the fight against the ultralefts. They saw this as a fight for the very life of the International. Their position that the Communist parties desperately needed time to gain experience and root themselves in the working class was informed by the disaster of the German events. Trotsky said:
“It is our duty to say clearly and precisely to the German workers that we consider this philosophy of the offensive to be the greatest danger. And in its practical application to be the greatest political crime.”
—“Speech on Comrade Radek’s Report on ‘Tactics of the Comintern’ at the Third Congress” (2 July 1921)
As he had done many times before, Lenin struggled—successfully this time—to win Zetkin over on the eve of the Third Congress (see Zetkin’s Reminiscences). She had persisted in her objections to Levi’s expulsion from the party. Zinoviev noted in his introductory remarks at the Congress on the German party:
“Already at the founding of the VKPD, we feared that centrist currents would emerge in this party. And unfortunately we must say that our fear became a reality all too rapidly.… [The Italian question] is an international question; it is also linked to the German question. The Executive drew up a resolution and disciplined leading German comrades, at whose head stands our esteemed comrade Zetkin.”
—Minutes of the Third CI Congress (our translation)
This Congress represented a turning point for Zetkin. As a result of intense arguments with the Bolshevik leaders on the eve of the Congress, Zetkin began to understand that the threat to the International required her to side with Lenin and Trotsky in a disciplined struggle against the ultralefts and the likes of Levi. She finally broke with Levi and threw herself into battle against him.
In winter 1921-22, Levi again proved himself to be an enemy of the Comintern when he published Rosa Luxemburg’s criticisms of the Russian Revolution, knowing full well that Luxemburg herself had not wanted these writings made public. Written while Luxemburg was isolated in prison, these fragmentary pieces, while praising the revolution and its basic principles, criticized some Bolshevik defense measures as “suppression of democracy.” Zetkin, who had personal knowledge of Luxemburg’s change of opinion, defended her in a savage polemic against the SPD and USPD leaders. She wrote that Levi’s publication had provided grist for the Social Democracy’s anti-Bolshevik mill:
“Just think of it! The people of the self-same Vorwärts [SPD paper], who the day before Rosa Luxemburg’s murder had as good as incited such an infamous deed.… All of them suddenly discovered a soft spot for the ‘intellectually superior woman,’ for the ‘sharpness of her intellect,’ the ‘scientific nature’ of her historical thought, and they paid homage to ‘the legacy’ she had left to the proletariat.…
“But what is most bitter is that the initial impetus and veneer of justice for [Vorwärts editor] Stampfer’s and Hilferding’s ignominious game were provided by a man who in the decisive last years of her life was one of Rosa Luxemburg’s close comrades-in-arms.”
—Um Rosa Luxemburgs Stellung zur russischen Revolution (On Rosa Luxemburg’s Position on the Russian Revolution) (1922) (our translation)
The SPD’s purpose in exploiting Luxemburg’s essay through lies and distortions, Zetkin wrote, was to make the workers draw back from the fight for their own interests under the Communist banner:
“The press of the majority and Independent Social Democrats pounced on this critical appraisal of Bolshevik tactics with the greed of hungry curs. What they sought in this critique, invoking the name of Luxemburg, was justification of their parties’ great sins of commission and omission against the revolution.”
Zetkin noted: “No one will contest Paul Levi’s right to develop backward. But in doing this he does not have the right to invoke Rosa Luxemburg.” In 1922, most of the rump USPD returned to the SPD. That year, Paul Levi also rejoined the party of Scheidemann, Ebert and Noske—the party that had unleashed the Freikorps against Luxemburg and Liebknecht and crushed the workers uprising in January 1919.
After the March Action, the German KPD leadership drew back. As we detailed in an earlier article: “Having burned their fingers, yesterday’s enthusiasts for the ‘permanent offensive’ like Brandler, Thalheimer and Meyer now genuflected before bourgeois legalism and respectability” (“A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 56, Spring 2001). But in January 1923, the French occupation of the Ruhr provoked a political and economic crisis in which the potential for proletarian revolution was manifest. This opportunity was again lost through the failure of the German party leadership, which was abetted and encouraged in its passivity by Zinoviev and J.V. Stalin in Moscow.
Our opponents, however, take the view that a German October in 1923 was impossible. At bottom, they call into question the validity of the October Revolution and the attempt of the Bolsheviks to extend that revolution internationally. Brandler’s line was always one of “Russian exceptionalism,” i.e., maybe Lenin’s program worked in Russia but it did not apply in Germany with an ostensibly more “cultured” working class that was allegedly wedded to the framework of parliamentary democracy. Since the destruction of the Soviet Union, revisionists have “discovered” that Lenin’s program didn’t work in Russia either, that the Soviet workers state was a “failed experiment.”
Many reformists and left-leaning academics today are sympathetic to Brandler. Brandler posited that it was the working class itself that had failed. According to him, “the decisive cause” was “the still too strongly hindering influence of social democracy.… In other words, the majority of the working class was not yet won for communism” (A. Thalheimer and H. Brandler, “Theses on the October Defeat and on the Present Situation,” January 1924, published in International Communism in the Era of Lenin). To deny that there were real opportunities for revolutionary victory in Germany leads inexorably to the conclusion that Hitler’s rise and the triumph of fascism were inevitable.
Zetkin’s Revisionist Apologists: The Neo-Kautskyites
We stand on the international working-class perspective of Marxism as developed in theory and practice by Lenin and Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International. Our critical evaluation of Clara Zetkin is in this context. We seek to reclaim her best work from the social democrats, Stalinists and feminists who distort both her positive contributions and her mistakes for their own ends, and from the distortions and falsehoods of the neo-Kautskyites, of whom John Riddell is a leading example.
At the core of these distortions is an accommodation to capitalist rule, and hostility, in deed and increasingly in word, to the Bolshevik Revolution and its world-historic significance as the model for socialist revolution. The contemporary neo-Kautskyites dismiss this legacy in order to embrace the opportunist practices of the German Social Democracy. To this end, they seek to deny the vast gulf that separated the Third International from the Second. To this end, they suck the revolutionary core from Zetkin and substitute for it their own spineless reformist worldview.
Riddell’s attempt to remake Zetkin in his own image has forced him to twist her politics into some pretty strange shapes. Finding it impossible to ignore her innumerable statements attacking bourgeois feminism, Riddell performs a magic trick and redefines the word:
“Feminism is the struggle for women’s liberation and against sexism. And if the word is understood in that sense, the Communist Women’s Movement was indeed a large and effective international component of feminism, until it was sidelined by the rise of Stalinism.”
—“Clara Zetkin in the Lion’s Den,” johnriddell.wordpress.com, 12 January 2014
Feminists seek to change society, and thus the position of women, by changing social relations within the existing capitalist society. We understand that to liberate the exploited and oppressed, you have to change the class relationships to the means of production, that is, abolish private property altogether. As Zetkin knew, this is the difference between reform and revolution. This understanding motivated her best work.
Because our opponents reject the aim of proletarian revolution altogether, the question of the institution of the family as the main source of the oppression of women rarely appears in their writings. In practice, the would-be left rejects the centrality of the family in capitalist society. If it is addressed at all, it is with an empty homage to Engels and a mention of “gender roles” and domestic violence. Only the seizure of power by the proletariat in Russia in 1917 made it possible to get a glimpse of the profound transformation needed to uproot and replace the family. Replacing it by collective means for the nurturing and socialization of children is—in a broad historic sense—the most radical and transformative aspect of the Marxist program for a future society.
Riddell must airbrush Zetkin’s hostility to feminism out of the political picture because it flies in the face of his main preoccupation: unity at all costs, regardless of political program, and certainly across class lines. As a member of the Comintern, according to Riddell, Zetkin sought unity between women of different classes because:
“She favoured a broad and non-partisan approach, aiming for unity with non-revolutionary currents; action in the interests of the working class as a whole; and efforts to win social layers outside the industrial working class.… She opposed a focus on the concerns of the revolutionary vanguard.”
—“Clara Zetkin’s Struggle for the United Front,” johnriddell.wordpress.com, 3 May 2011
Riddell puts this forward as an example of the “united front,” a concept that he attributes mainly to Zetkin. It’s a challenge to count the ways in which this is dead wrong. First, Zetkin’s opposition to bourgeois feminism never let up in the least. Second, Riddell misrepresents altogether the united-front tactic as developed by the CI: It was a tool for the party to fight for political hegemony over the proletarian masses by uniting in action with the reformists and centrists who still held authority in the workers movement. This meant sharp political combat in the course of a unified action. As Trotsky wrote:
“We broke with the reformists and centrists in order to obtain complete freedom in criticizing perfidy, betrayal, indecision and the half-way spirit in the labor movement. For this reason any sort of organizational agreement which restricts our freedom of criticism and agitation is absolutely unacceptable to us. We participate in a united front but do not for a single moment become dissolved in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment.”
—“On the United Front” (March 1922)
For example, a united front to carry out a common action around specific concrete demands—e.g., in defense of abortion rights—could certainly include bourgeois feminists, whose politics of reliance on the capitalist state would be ruthlessly exposed by the Leninist party.
But Riddell employs classless rhetoric of “unity” to subordinate the interests of the proletariat to those of the petty bourgeoisie or bourgeoisie—this he calls the “united front.” Actually he is arguing for nothing less than the born-again Kautskyite “party of the whole class,” a complete reversion to social democracy as against revolutionary Leninism. Riddell openly favors ostensibly socialist parties supporting and forming bourgeois parliamentary governments, which he misterms “workers governments.” To the contrary, a parliamentary regime headed by a social-democratic party is a capitalist government, not a “workers government” or a “reformist government.” By 1923, the call for a parliamentary “workers government” with the Social Democrats was intrinsic to the KPD leadership’s rightist interpretation of the united front and was a factor in the defeat of the revolutionary upsurge in Germany. Like Lenin, we Spartacists have always insisted that a workers government can be nothing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat.
It’s no surprise that John Riddell defends Paul Levi as a victim of factional politics in the German party and the Comintern. Levi, writes Riddell, was “a voice of caution” who “pressed Communists to take initiatives that were inclusive, aimed at restoring unity in action by the working class as a whole” (“Why Did Paul Levi Lose Out in the German Communist Leadership?”, johnriddell.wordpress.com, 5 July 2013). Riddell argues that the German party’s working-class base itself was “ultraleft” and the source of the problem, declaring that “only a united and authoritative leadership in Germany could have persuaded that vanguard to struggle for unity with more conservative working-class forces.” He blames “[t]he partisan intervention of Comintern leaders in the German dispute,” which “made it impossible for the German leadership to restore its unity through the lessons of own [sic] experience in Germany. Moscow’s involvement tended to freeze the German alignments.”
In his eagerness to embrace “unity, unity” irrespective of political program, Riddell mixes up the entire dispute over both the “theory of the offensive” and the earlier CI struggle with the Left Communists. Lenin wrote his pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920) specifically to address the disease of ultraleftism. At that time, ultraleftism had a certain mass base in the working class; many of the “lefts” were syndicalist or anarchist workers who in response to social-democratic treachery had rejected parliamentary activity, work in reformist-run trade unions and even the idea of a working-class party. In 1919, Paul Levi actually threw these workers out of the KPD in his own pursuit of “unity” with the USPD.
Lenin sought to regroup to the CI not only the best elements of the Socialist parties but also these subjectively revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist workers. Emphasizing that the vanguard party had to be carefully and consciously built through internal political struggle and external combat with reformist and centrist forces, Lenin wrote, “Would it not be better if the salutations addressed to the Soviets and the Bolsheviks were more frequently accompanied by a profound analysis of the reasons why the Bolsheviks have been able to build up the discipline needed by the revolutionary proletariat?”
Riddell also wants to diminish Lenin’s role in the CI’s struggle against the “theory of the offensive.” He casts Zetkin as the hero of the debate with his claim that “Zetkin’s discussion with Lenin helped win the leading Russian Communists to support her critique of the disastrous ‘March Action’” (“Clara Zetkin in the Lion’s Den”). In fact, Lenin saved Zetkin’s membership with his relentless arguments over her continuing opposition to Levi’s expulsion. At the same time, he made it clear that he would welcome Levi back into the party if Levi recognized the destructiveness of his breach of discipline. In recounting some of these arguments, Zetkin’s Reminiscences shows the comradeship between Zetkin and Lenin, in which sharp political differences were no obstacle to warm personal relations. It must stick in Riddell’s craw to see such friendship between Zetkin and the man he falsely accuses of the “belittlement of women” (“Clara Zetkin in the Lion’s Den”).
For a Revolutionary Internationalist Party!
In a series of writings beginning a few months after the October 1923 debacle in Germany, Trotsky undertook a critical evaluation of the political problems of the German events, leading to his 1924 work, The Lessons of October. Trotsky contrasted the German events with the Russian October, noting that a section of the Bolshevik Party leadership, centered around Lev Kamenev and Zinoviev, had balked at organizing the seizure of power in 1917. Trotsky detailed the series of fights Lenin waged after the outbreak of revolution in February 1917 in order to rearm the party. These fights made the victory in October possible. The fundamental issue in dispute was “whether or not we should struggle for power.” Trotsky asserted:
“If by Bolshevism—and we are stressing here its essential aspect—we understand such training, tempering, and organization of the proletarian vanguard as enables the latter to seize power, arms in hand; and if by social democracy we are to understand the acceptance of reformist oppositional activity within the framework of bourgeois society and an adaptation to its legality—i.e., the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state; then, indeed, it is absolutely clear that even within the Communist Party itself, which does not emerge full-fledged from the crucible of history, the struggle between social democratic tendencies and Bolshevism is bound to reveal itself in its most clear, open, and uncamouflaged form during the immediate revolutionary period when the question of power is posed point-blank.”
Here Trotsky underscored that the struggle for clarity in a Leninist party is never “finished” and is not the province of any one individual. Leninist parties depend upon a collective of comrades, with their strengths and weaknesses, to develop and carry out the revolutionary line that has been determined through democratic-centralist debate and decision in the party as a whole. As part of a collective with Luxemburg, Liebknecht and other talented comrades, Paul Levi was a useful propagandist for the Communist cause. But after the effective decapitation of the German party, instead of fighting to set it back on course, in spring 1921 he reverted to his social-democratic proclivities. Zetkin chose to join a different collective, that of the Bolsheviks and the Third International, in which she fought alongside Lenin to forge a new weapon of worldwide revolution. Sadly, after the Stalinization of the CI began in 1924, she fell into line, nearly 70 years old and suffering from a lifetime of chronic illness.
Today we in the International Communist League seek to uphold and extend the revolutionary lessons of Lenin’s Communist International. As Trotsky stressed in The Lessons of October, “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.”
Against Reformist Apologists for Ukrainian Fascism
ICL Letter to Revolutionary History, 1991
The letter reprinted below originally appeared in the press of the British section of the International Communist League, the Spartacist League/Britain, under the headline “ICL Withdraws from Revolutionary History Editorial Board” (Workers Hammer No. 122, April 1991). The Editorial Board of the British-based “non-party” Revolutionary History (RH) journal now consists of a variety of Labourite and Stalinophobic elements. When RH was launched in 1988, an ICL representative was part of the founding Editorial Board. Our purpose was to collaborate in Marxist archival research, a task that the Prometheus Research Library, archives of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League/U.S., continues to pursue to this day. As our letter documents, our revisionist partners sought incessantly to transform the journal into an unprincipled propaganda bloc promoting anti-Soviet and pro-imperialist politics, ultimately forcing us to resign from the Editorial Board in March 1991.
One of the precipitants of our break with Revolutionary History was the revisionists’ enthusing, driven by their hatred for the Soviet degenerated workers state, over the World War II-era Ukrainian fascists of Stepan Bandera. Emboldened by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, the Banderaites resurfaced in a now capitalist Ukraine and grew to such an extent that they became the shock troops of the anti-Russian, pro-NATO, pro-European Union (EU) “Euro-Maidan” protests of late 2013 and early 2014. We warned from the outset against the ominous presence of these fascists, organised in Svoboda and the Right Sector, and opposed the U.S./EU-sponsored coup they spearheaded in February 2014.
We have defended the language and other national rights of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking populations concentrated in Crimea and in the more ethnically mixed areas of southern and eastern Ukraine. On this basis, we supported the Russian military presence that allowed Crimea the right to vote to rejoin Russia. (For more on this question, see, for example, “Fascist-Infested, Imperialist-Backed Ukraine Coup: Crimea Is Russian” and “Reformist Left: Shills for NATO Imperialists Over Ukraine,” Workers Hammer Nos. 226 and 227, Spring and Summer 2014.) We likewise support national independence for Chechnya in opposition to the Great Russian chauvinist regimes, first of Boris Yeltsin and now of Vladimir Putin.
Having done their bit to promote nationalist bloodletting as a battering ram for capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union and the East and Central European deformed workers states more than two decades ago, the reformists today line up behind the efforts of the U.S./NATO imperialists to encircle, isolate and demonise a now capitalist Russia. The one constant in all this is the opportunists’ acquiescence to the interests of their “own” capitalist ruling classes.
—————
London
22 March 1991
To the Revolutionary History Editorial Board:
This is to inform you of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)’s decision to withdraw from the Revolutionary History Editorial Board. The political divergence between ourselves and other members of the Editorial Board, who have been unable to resist using the magazine as a vehicle for current politics, has now come to preclude any legitimate editorial participation on our part. We do not wish to act as a sort of revolutionary “conscience” for those whose ostensible Trotskyism is but a thin veneer covering a capitulationist, social-democratic core shaped by decades of demoralisation.
The immediate catalyst for our decision is the proposed, draft general editorial for the upcoming issue (Volume 3, No. 4). A pathetic and fatuous attempt to link the proposed contents (on the Trotskyists in WWII) to the recent U.S. oil grab and war in the Persian Gulf, the article doesn’t even mention the word imperialist, let alone make any distinction between an inter-imperialist conflict and an imperialist war of depredation against a neo-colony. Meanwhile it ludicrously defines “technological innovation” since Trotsky’s time as...”the missile and the fighter plane”!
You are also deeply disoriented. Any thinking person (let alone Marxist) who seriously worries about the future of our species on this planet thinks about nuclear weapons and ecological disaster, given, e.g., an American imperialist ruling class made socially psychotic by the nation’s underlying economic decline, the Zionist madmen who run Israel, and the looming threat of capitalist dismemberment of the USSR, with its many thousands of nuclear missiles. The editorial’s series of disingenuous questions smacks of a desire to alibi the dirty war against Iraq; its complaints about “flat pacifism” and “blanket condemnation from the sidelines” reflect loss of revolutionary will, despair and demoralisation in the face of very real threats to humanity’s future. And of course you end by inveighing against Stalinism as the “agency of the system inside the movement,” failing to even mention the main pro-capitalist agent inside the British working-class movement—the Labour Party, in whose wake the British Stalinists have eddied, with only brief interruptions, since 1935.
It is the continued disintegration and collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe which condition the increasingly all-sided political divergence between ourselves and the rest of the Editorial Board. The grossly anti-Communist sketch of Stalin leering over Eastern Europe which appeared on the cover of Revolutionary History Volume 3, No. 1 (which we refused to distribute publicly), the desire on the part of a good part of the Editorial Board to publish patently fascistic Ukrainian nationalist material in that same issue, the attempt of the editor to whitewash the record of the highly dubious Hungarian “anti-Stalinist” Michel Varga, also in that issue (cf. our “ICL Statement” on Varga, RH Volume 3, No. 1, pp. 27-8): these are the acts of those who currently howl along with the imperialist wolves, cheering the anti-democratic nationalist movements which openly threaten counterrevolution in the Baltic states. Such “anti-Stalinism” has nothing in common with Trotskyism, which seeks to mobilise the East European and Soviet working classes in defence of collectivised property forms and for their international extension.
As we noted in our letter of 10 July 1990 (edited without our consent and printed without date in RH Volume 3, No. 3), the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (URDP) material proposed for publication in RH was clearly fascistic on the basis of internal evidence. Disorientation is too mild a word for those so blinded by Stalinophobia that they fail to see that the sentence which ended “Bolshevist Bonapartism” by A. Babenko [Ivan Majstrenko] (“Will Europe find in herself the strength and wisdom to defend her right of primogeniture and her priority against semi-Asiatic Moscow?”) displays a classic western fascist mindset. But we find it incredible that such a screed could be defended by reference to the writings of Marx and Engels, as Chris Ford does in his letter in Revolutionary History Volume 3, No. 3 (Spring 1991). The Russia Marx and Engels wrote of had been ruled for centuries by tsarism; a few years later it became clear, at least to Lenin, that Russia had been thrust onto the road of capitalist development and clear to Trotsky that this would mean capitalist enterprise in its most advanced form. Out of the contradiction between a backward and autocratic Russia and a developing new economy and social classes arose the February and October Revolutions of 1917. Most of the editorial board seems content to let Chris Ford have the last word on this subject; we do not want to be part of an editorial board where this has to be a subject of debate.
From 1949-1953 the American Workers Party (WP) of Max Shachtman and (for a brief period in 1950-51) the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of James Cannon acted as publicity agents for the URDP, to their shame and later embarrassment. The most one can say about the Workers Party in this regard is that its publication of articles which hailed the murder of Soviet General Vatutin in the midst of WWII (one of which was proposed for publication in Revolutionary History) was at least consistent with their failure to defend the USSR from Hitler. Moreover, the Shachtmanites’ support to the Ukrainian nationalists presaged their 1958 liquidation into the Cold War Socialist Party. In any case neither the WP nor the SWP made the distinction between the URDP and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) which Chris Ford insists on. Both portrayed the UPA as a sort of underground wing of the URDP and both uncritically hailed the UPA’s guerrilla struggle against the Stalinist regime. The WP’s Labor Action carried regular reports of UPA activity; the 6 November 1950 issue, for example, mourned the death of UPA General Taras Chuprinka (Roman Shukhevich).
The UPA was founded in 1940 in the newly Soviet-occupied western Ukraine, in collaboration with the Wehrmacht and explicitly to fight against the Red Army. It is well known that all wings of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism collaborated with Hitler when he invaded the Ukraine in 1941. The Nazis quickly revealed they had very little regard for Slavic “untermenschen” and even less for Ukrainian independence; nationalist sentiment quickly turned against them. Nonetheless the UPA spent more time fighting the red anti-fascist Soviet partisans than it did the Germans, even according to the slavish apology for the nationalists written by John Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism (Columbia University Press, 1963). Armstrong says that the Stefan Bandera wing of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (the OUN-B) dominated the UPA by the Fall of 1942; we assume that the Bandera forces are the supposed “left” wing of Ukrainian nationalism which Chris Ford refers to. Before the Banderaites won control of the UPA it had been collaborating with the remnants of S. Petliura’s Ukrainian government in exile.
Armstrong never mentions the fact that anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic pogroms were synonymous with Petliura’s Ukrainian-nationalist White forces who massacred tens of thousands of Jews during the Russian Civil War. Petliura has been the hero of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism ever since, and Armstrong can’t help but use a quote which reveals much about Ukrainian nationalism after 1941:
“Regardless of the negative attitude toward the Jews as a weapon of Moscovite-Bolshevik imperialism, we regard it as inexpedient at the present stage of the international situation to take part in anti-Jewish actions, in order not to become a blind tool in foreign hands and not to divert the attention of the masses from the principal enemies.”
— Conference of OUN-B, 1942
The Ukrainian nationalists also found it inexpedient to mention capitalist restoration after the Ukrainian masses had experienced the mass murder and looting of the Nazi occupation. After 1942 most Ukrainian nationalist organisations (with the possible exception of the Monarchists) changed their tune in order to avoid losing all credibility; the UPA started talking about socialised property and even “classless society.” Chris Ford provides all the quotes.
But the fascist social character of the Bandera forces never changed. Mikhail Baitalsky, a Jewish Ukrainian Trotskyist imprisoned in Vorkuta with some of Bandera’s forces in the early 1950s, describes their all-pervasive anti-Semitism in the installment of his memoirs just published in the March issue of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism. He also writes what he learned of activities of the Banderaite “partisans”:
“In the months when we were located near Kovel, I learned of the fate of several little nearby places and settlements. I will not speak of the fate of the local Jews; you can imagine what happened to them. But Poles also lived there. The Bandera forces butchered, one after another, all the Polish families who had not managed to go into hiding. They slaughtered them not with guns but with sabers. They derived pleasure from hacking up other peoples’ children with their bare hands and massacring women. Ukrainian women who lived in these villages told me about this.”
Up until the end of the war the UPA collaborated with the Germans and one can only shudder when imagining the probable nature of their anti-Soviet guerrilla activity after the war. Armstrong reports that they made the chairmen of the new collective farms special targets. Needless to say they had little popular support. Most UPA units had escaped into the waiting arms of western intelligence forces by 1947. By 1950 they had little in the way of operational forces in the Ukraine. Kim Philby reports (My Silent War) that continued support for Bandera was a bone of contention between MI6 and the CIA in the early ’50s; luckily Philby was in a position to spike both the CIA and MI6’s attempts to give Bandera’s bands concrete assistance.
As for Ivan Majstrenko, he was part of the Borot’bist current of left Ukrainian nationalism which was won to the Bolshevik Party in the early 1920s and he may genuinely have been a communist once. But after he joined forces with the UPA he was only an insignificant publicity agent and left tail on Banderaite fascism. In 1948 his URDP joined the Ukrainian General Council (Rada) formed in Munich, home base for anti-Soviet Western intelligence agencies and all their captive-nations hangers-on. The Marxist ideological veneer of the URDP didn’t fool much of anybody—except some erstwhile Trotskyists, blinded by their own Stalinophobia.
Mikhail Baitalsky didn’t hail the Banderaites as fellow fighters in the struggle against Stalin; we can’t be part of an editorial board which allies with their virtual equivalents in the Soviet Union today.
Naturally, however, our members internationally will want to read such interesting archival material as you produce, which was the reason for our original involvement on the Editorial Board of Revolutionary History.
Fraternally,
Alastair Green
for the International Communist League
Bolshevik Policy in World War I
From the Archives of Marxism
One hundred years ago Europe was engulfed in World War I, a bloody interimperialist conflagration that saw the slaughter of more than 16 million people. The betrayal by the dominant parties of the Second International, who supported the war efforts of their “own” bourgeoisies, ultimately led to a decisive split between opportunists and revolutionaries within the international workers movement, and paved the way for the first successful proletarian seizure of power, the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, and to the formation in 1919 of the Third (Communist) International.
Spartacist is pleased to present to our readers the first English translation of an important article by Gregory Zinoviev on the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary internationalist opposition to the war. Written in August 1915, Zinoviev’s “Pacifism or Marxism (The Misadventures of a Slogan)” was one of several major works written in close collaboration with V.I. Lenin during the first two and a half years of war, when both were in exile in Switzerland. Lenin had a division of labor with Zinoviev, then his most senior collaborator, both in writing propaganda and in organizing Bolshevik interventions into the socialist antiwar conferences at Zimmerwald and Kienthal in 1915 and 1916. Zinoviev’s article was written on the eve of the Zimmerwald conference and was first published in the Bolshevik paper Sotsial-Demokrat on 23 August 1915. That month, Lenin and Zinoviev also finished their famous joint work, Socialism and War.
As Zinoviev explains, the core of the Bolsheviks’ perspective was the need to turn the imperialist war into a civil war pitting the proletariat against the capitalists. The 4 August 1914 vote in the Reichstag (parliament) by the German Social Democrats (SPD) to fund the war effort of their own ruling class was replicated by “socialist” leaders in almost all the other combatant countries, Serbia and Russia (and later Bulgaria) being the most notable exceptions. The Bolsheviks fought to break authentic Marxists away from these social-chauvinists and regroup the Marxists in a new, revolutionary Third International.
Countless volumes by bourgeois historians have been published over the past century purporting to explain how the First World War was an accident—the result of age-old Balkan intrigues and diplomatic blunders and misunderstandings by imperialist politicians. Marxists reject such philistine claptrap, recognizing that the world war was the inevitable outcome of the emergence of imperialism, the final stage of capitalism in its decay. This was marked by the concentration of bank and industrial capital—merged as finance capital—in monopolist combines. As Lenin briefly summarized it, “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed” (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism [1916]).
World War I showed conclusively that the drive to war is inherent in imperialism, with military force used to “settle” the inevitable economic rivalries. As Lenin and Zinoviev demonstrated in their writings, the superprofits derived from colonial exploitation made it possible for the imperialist bourgeoisies to bribe the top layers of the working class, i.e., the labor aristocracy and labor bureaucracy, whose loyalty to their capitalist masters was amply proved from the outset of the war. Thus the struggle for socialist revolution—the only alternative to deepening capitalist barbarism—required first and foremost a political struggle to expose and isolate the social-chauvinist lackeys of imperialism, as well as their social-pacifist allies.
Zinoviev’s wartime articles, others of which analyzed in depth the reasons for the social-patriotic decay of the SPD, were an essential part of the Bolsheviks’ propaganda arsenal. Reading only Lenin’s writings of this period, powerful as they are, provides an incomplete picture of the Bolsheviks’ fight. That is why the key war articles of both Lenin and Zinoviev, including the one below, were compiled in a volume titled Against the Stream, first published in Russian in 1918 by the Petrograd Soviet and then produced in a German edition by the Communist International in 1921. In 1927, Victor Serge and Maurice Parijanine produced a French edition. Most of Zinoviev’s articles in this authoritative volume of Bolshevik propaganda have never appeared in English.
The present article shows how social-pacifist reformists such as French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, known as the tribune of France, who was assassinated by a pro-war nationalist on the eve of the war, in fact served as props for the bourgeois order. But it is particularly valuable for its polemics against the centrist elements who called for “peace,” and were seen by Lenin as the main obstacle to revolutionary clarity. These centrists ranged from SPD leaders Karl Kautsky and Hugo Haase to the British Independent Labour Party and many Russian Mensheviks.
Zinoviev pays particular attention to Nashe Slovo (Our Word), a Paris-based exile journal coedited by Leon Trotsky and Menshevik leader Julius Martov. While seeking to rally opposition to the war, the “non-factional” Nashe Slovo regularly polemicized against the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary perspective. The Mensheviks called for “Neither victory nor defeat” and “Peace without annexations,” while Trotsky criticized the Bolsheviks for refusing to raise the slogan of a “struggle for peace.” The differences over slogans were linked to organizational perspectives; Lenin and Zinoviev attacked Trotsky for giving a left cover to social-pacifist forces and refusing to call for a break with the opportunists.
As Trotsky later acknowledged, the core criticisms raised by Sotsial-Demokrat were “undoubtedly correct and helped the left-wing of the editorial board to oust Martov, in this way giving the newspaper, after the Zimmerwald Conference, a more defined and irreconcilable character” (quoted in Ian D. Thatcher, Leon Trotsky and World War One [Basingstoke, England: Palgrave, 2000]). When revolution broke out in Russia in early 1917, Trotsky broke decisively with social-pacifism and conciliation of the Mensheviks and soon became a central leader of the Bolshevik Party.
Our translation of Zinoviev’s article is taken from the 1927 French edition, published under the title Contre le Courant. It has been checked against the earlier Russian and German publications, with minor changes made to correspond to the Russian. Bracketed material has been inserted by Spartacist. Ellipses in the text are Zinoviev’s own.
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Pacifism or Marxism (The Misadventures of a Slogan)
by Gregory Zinoviev, 23 August 1915
For revolutionary Marxists, the peace “slogan” is a much more important question than is sometimes believed. In reality, the dispute comes down to combating bourgeois influence in the workers movement, within the framework of socialism.
The “slogan” of peace is defended in socialist literature from two different points of view. Some, while not accepting pacifism on principle, choose to view this slogan as most appropriate for the present, merely as a code word that is supposed to immediately arouse the masses, as a call that would only play a role in the final months of the war. Others see something more in this slogan: they turn it into a whole system of foreign policy for socialism, to be maintained after the war, in other words, the policy of so-called socialist pacifism.
In fact, the advocates of the former bolster the latter. And this cannot be otherwise.
The latter tendency is the more serious of the two because it has a history, its own theory, and an intellectual foundation. The philosophy of this second tendency is the following: up until now, socialism has not been sufficiently pacifist, it has not sufficiently preached the idea of peace, it has not focused its efforts toward the goal of leading the entire world proletariat to adopt pacifism as the International’s general system of foreign policy. Hence the impotence of the socialist proletariat in the current war, hence the weakness of the International in the face of the erupting horror of the war.
This point of view is strongly emphasized in Max Adler’s recent pamphlet: Prinzip oder Romantik (Principle or Romanticism, Nuremberg, 1915). Max Adler (in words, of course) is an opponent of purely bourgeois pacifism, which he most forcefully rejects. He’s not even the sort of pacifist we find in England in the Independent Labour Party. He is a “Center Marxist,” a Kautskyist. And here is the kind of platform he puts forward under the guise of lessons to be drawn from the 1914-1915 war:
“The foreign policy of socialism can only be pacifist, not in the sense of a bourgeois movement for peace…or in the sense that socialists have hitherto recognized the idea of peace…in other words, as an idea that until now had been considered a secondary goal in the proletariat’s struggle for emancipation… Now is the time to raise the following warning: Unless the Social Democracy makes the idea of peace the central point of its program of foreign and domestic policy, all its internationalism must and will remain utopian… After the war, socialism will either become organized international pacifism or it will no longer exist.”
—pamphlet cited above, pages 61-62 (emphasis in original)
That’s certainly a whole program. But it is not the program of Marxism; it is the program of petty-bourgeois opportunism. This “international pacifism” is but one step away from international social-chauvinism. The logic of this development is very simple: we are pacifists, the idea of peace is the central point of our program; but until pacifism is more deeply rooted among the masses, as long as the idea of peace is still weak, what else can one do but defend one’s own fatherland?! Of course, this can only be a temporary decision, made with “a heavy heart.” Of course after the war, we will have to adopt the idea of peace as the “central point” in our propaganda. But for the time being, we must defend the fatherland. There is no other way out.
And for socialists who cannot conceive of any other perspective—a revolutionary perspective of turning imperialist wars into a civil war—there really isn’t any other way out. From pacifism to social-chauvinism, and from social-chauvinism to new pacifist sermons—this is the vicious circle in which the ideas of opportunists and “Center” Marxists are hopelessly trapped.
“Die Friedensidee zum Mittelpunkt”—“The idea of peace at the heart of our slogans”! Now they say that—after the first pan-European imperialist war has broken out! This is what you have learned from events!
“Nicht Friedensidee, sondern Bürgerkriegsidee”—not the idea of peace, but the idea of civil war—this is what we are tempted to shout at these great utopians who promise such a meager utopia. Not the idea of peace, but the idea of civil war, citizen Adler! This will be the central point of our program.
The problem is not that we failed to sufficiently preach the idea of peace before the war; it is that we did not preach the idea of class struggle, of civil war, enough or seriously enough. Because in wartime, the recognition of class struggle without a recognition of civil war is empty verbiage; it is hypocrisy; it is deceiving the workers.
German Social Democracy first sought ways to fight against imperialist wars in 1900 at the Mainz Social Democratic conference, when Kiautschou [Jiaozhou Bay in China, first seized by Germany in 1897] was occupied. Rosa Luxemburg put it powerfully:
“In times of peace, we thunder daily against the government’s foreign policy; we curse militarism in times of peace. But as soon as there’s a real war, we forget to draw the practical conclusions from it and to show that our years-long agitation has not borne any fruit.”
—Minutes, 165
The problem is not that in times of peace we did not preach peace very much. It is that when war came we found ourselves prisoners of the opportunists, of those who want peace with the bourgeoisie in times of peace and especially in times of war. The problem is that faced with an enemy as powerful as international imperialism, we have been unable to protect the proletariat from bourgeois renegades who emerged from our own ranks; we have been unable to defend it from the opportunism that is now degenerating into social-chauvinism.
You say that socialism will become organized international pacifism or it will totally cease to exist? We reply: you have to understand that by preaching pacifism you are not taking a single step forward; what you are telling us amounts to six of one and a half-dozen of the other; you are moving from social-pacifism to social-chauvinism and from social-chauvinism to social-pacifism. We say to you: either socialism will become organized international civil war or it will not exist…
Max Adler is not alone. We chose him precisely because he is a typical spokesman for an entire current of political thought. Hasn’t the entire Jaurèsist movement, and Jaurès himself, defended this very same social-pacifism within the International? And can anyone doubt that the tribune of France would today be a member of the cabinet of ministers and would be advocating social-chauvinism, along with the entire French party, had he not been sent to his grave by an assassin’s bullet? And, while remaining true to himself, would Jaurès have envisioned any other perspective for the future than “organized international pacifism”?
This is the problem of the Second International; herein lies the reason for its impotence, which has always existed at its core—and prevailed!—a tendency which inscribed on its banner not militant socialism, not the tactic of civil war, but international pacifism, which inevitably leads to the tactic of civil peace.
Today we all applaud the Independent Labour Party because, far from prostrating itself at the feet of the English government, this party had sufficient honesty and courage to refuse to enlist in the imperialist camp, and not to sell out to social-chauvinism. But we must not have any illusions. The Independent Labour Party has been, is, and will be a supporter not of militant Marxism, but of “organized international pacifism.” The Independent Labour Party is temporarily our fellow traveler, but it is not a solid ally for us. While it is honest and courageous, it lacks a consistent socialist program. Let us not forget that it already endorsed the notorious resolutions of the London Conference, at which the unabashed social-chauvinists ran the show.
There are three tendencies in the English workers movement: 1) Social-chauvinism, espoused by the Labour Party, the majority of the Trade Unions, half of the British Socialist Party (Hyndman), the petty-bourgeois Fabian League, etc.; 2) the social-pacifist tendency, which is represented by the Independent Labour Party; and 3) the revolutionary Marxist tendency, which is represented by a very substantial minority (almost half) of the British Socialist Party.
Mutatis mutandis, after all, we find the same division in German Social Democracy. The infamous Kautskyist “Center” today also resolutely calls for peace. By advocating disarmament and arbitration courts, by pleading with the imperialists to refrain from extremes and practice a kind of peaceful imperialism, Kautsky has been drawing closer to the social-pacifists for a long time. And like them, he in fact reveals himself to be, in all serious matters, the ally of opportunists in times of peace, the ally of social-chauvinists in times of war.
In words, social-pacifism rejects the “humanitarian” pacifism of the petty bourgeoisie. But in reality the two are brothers under the skin. And the other side is perfectly aware of this. As the international journal of the pacifists, Die Menschheit (Mankind), correctly stated fairly recently:
“The decisions of the Easter conference of the English Independent Labour Party are worth noting. One might think they were taken word for word from our writings (that is, pacifist literature)…Kautsky has published a pamphlet titled The National State, the Imperialist State and the Alliance of States. The title alone is enough to show the extent to which Kautsky shares the framework of pacifist ideas.”
A prominent representative of petty-bourgeois humanitarian pacifism, Professor A. Forel, clearly states that he has been a “socialist” for decades. And when we read his proposal for organizing a “supranational Areopagus” [High Court in classical Athens] (see his curious pamphlet The United States of the World, 1915, pages 99-196 and elsewhere) to resolve international conflicts, when we see him exhorting the imperialists to conduct a “cultured” colonial policy, we are continually reminded of this thought: after all, and in their entire outlook, in all their skepticism concerning the revolutionary struggle of the masses, our social-pacifists are much closer to the good little petty bourgeois than to revolutionary proletarians.
[The Russian monarchist and Slavophile] Mr. Struve recently wrote that “principled pacifism has always been alien to Social Democracy, to the extent that the latter is based on orthodox Marxism.” He thus blames the Marxists and congratulates the French social-chauvinists (and Plekhanov along with them) for upholding the tradition of the “great pacifist orator Jean Jaurès” through their present conduct. Struve is right. Yes, the principle of pacifism has always been alien to orthodox Marxism. In 1848-1849, Marx openly called on revolutionary Germany, after its victory over absolutism in that country, to join with revolutionary Poland in waging a revolutionary offensive war against tsarism, against that international gendarme, against that pillar of international reaction. For Marx, this conduct obviously had nothing in common with principled pacifism. In 1885, Jules Guesde rejoiced at the threat of war between Russia and England in the hope that a social revolution would emerge from such a catastrophe. When Guesde acted in this way, when he called on the proletariat to make use of the war between two giant powers to hasten the unleashing of the proletarian revolution, he was much more of a Marxist than at present when, along with Sembat, he carries on the tradition of the “great pacifist orator Jean Jaurès.” In 1882, Friedrich Engels (see his 12 September 1882 letter to Kautsky on the fight against colonial policies in Kautsky’s pamphlet Socialism and Colonial Policy, page 79 of the German edition) wrote: “A victorious proletariat cannot forcibly confer any boon whatever on another country without undermining its own victory in the process. Which does not, of course, in any way preclude defensive wars of various kinds” (that is, wars by one or another proletariat victorious in its own country against countries that are fighting to maintain capitalism). With these words, Engels came out as an opponent of the principle of pacifism and spoke as a revolutionary Marxist.
Yes, we are by no means principled pacifists; we are absolutely not opposed to all wars. We are against their wars, we are against wars of the oppressors, against imperialist wars, against wars whose goal is to reduce countless millions of workers to slavery. However “Social Democrats cannot deny the positive significance of revolutionary wars, that is, non-imperialist wars and, for example, those that were waged between 1789 and 1871 to overthrow foreign oppression and create capitalist national states out of fragmented feudal lands or wars that may be waged to safeguard conquests won by the proletariat in its struggle against the bourgeoisie” (see our resolution on pacifism in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 40).
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But does this have any relevance to our Russian disputes, to the disagreements over the question of the slogan of peace, for example between ourselves and the paper of the Russian “Center,” Nashe Slovo?
This is definitely relevant. It is true: we won’t find in Nashe Slovo a consistent defense of the principle of pacifism in the spirit of Adler. But this journal wholeheartedly defends the theory of “democratic peace” and rejects the way that we pose the question when we assert that “anyone who believes in the possibility of a democratic peace without a series of revolutions is profoundly mistaken” (see our resolution in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 40). And this journal certainly does not establish a clearly defined difference between the two worldviews, the two tactics of organized international pacifism and the organized international preparation for civil war…
First of all, we would like to dispense with one supposed point of dispute. If you believe Nashe Slovo, Sotsial-Demokrat is committing “a serious political mistake” by ignoring the mass movement that is taking place around the slogan of peace, for example the demonstration of German socialist women in front of the Reichstag, etc. (Nashe Slovo No. 100). This of course is false. This demonstration was an extremely important event, which we welcome. It became a political event because it did not restrict itself to raising the slogan of peace: the demonstrators clearly protested against social-chauvinism by booing Scheidemann. And from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint, we wonder why the slogan for this demonstration had to be limited to “peace.” Why not “Bread and Jobs”? Why not “Down with the Kaiser”? Why not “For a Republic in Germany”? Why not “Long Live the Commune in Berlin, Paris and London”?
People may tell us: The slogan of peace is easier for the masses to comprehend. The huge sacrifice of blood oppresses them, the deprivations caused by the war are boundless, the chalice of suffering is overflowing: enough blood! Bring our sons and husbands back home! It is this simple slogan that the masses will understand most easily. True enough! But since when does revolutionary social democracy adopt slogans because they are the “easiest to understand”?
Social democracy should certainly not ignore the emerging movement to end the war. To enlighten the masses, it should make use of the growing disgust with the imperialist slaughter of 1914-1915; it should itself arouse this disgust which must be turned into hatred for those responsible for the massacres. But does this mean that its slogan, the political conclusion to be drawn from these grandiose bloody lessons of 1914-1915, the message on its banner, would purely and simply be “peace”?
No, a thousand times no! Social democrats will also participate in demonstrations for peace. But in so doing, they will raise their slogan, and starting from the simple desire for peace, they will call for revolutionary struggle. They will expose the pacifism of the petty bourgeoisie—those in the camp of the bourgeoisie as well as those in the camp of the fake socialists—who lull the masses with promises of a “democratic” peace without revolutionary action.
The “slogan” of peace has no revolutionary content in and of itself. It only takes on a revolutionary character when it is combined with our arguments for a tactic of revolutionary struggle, when it is accompanied by a call for revolution, by revolutionary protests against the government of one’s own country, against the imperialists of one’s “own” fatherland. Trotsky criticizes us for ceding this “slogan” of peace “to the exclusive use of sentimental pacifists and priests” (Nashe Slovo No. 100). What does that mean? We have limited ourselves to stating the most obvious, least disputed fact: those who stand merely for peace without giving this “slogan” any other meaning are the priests (see, for example, the many encyclicals of the Pope) and the sentimental pacifists. This in no way means that we were speaking out “against peace.” The slaughter must be ended as soon as possible; this goal must play and does play a role in our agitation. But this means that our own slogan is revolutionary struggle, that agitation for peace becomes social-democratic only when it is accompanied by revolutionary protests.
Ask yourself this simple factual question: Precisely who, right now, puts forward the notion that peace as a “slogan” is enough in and of itself? Let us try to list impartially the social and political groups that want peace. These are: the English bourgeois social-pacifists; Kautsky, Haase and Bernstein; the German Parteivorstand (party leadership) (see its recent appeal); various bourgeois Leagues for Peace, including in Holland; the head of the Catholic church; a section of the English bourgeoisie (see the revelations made some time ago about English initiatives for peace); and again, in Russia, an “advanced” section of the merchant class, a whole party of courtiers, etc. Naturally, each of these groups, each of these parties is driven by motives which are not those of the others, and each raises the question in its own fashion. And that is precisely what demonstrates that the “slogan” of peace, on its own, cannot be that of the revolutionary social democracy at this time.
Another thing about which there can also be no doubt: the various general staffs and governments play a game around the “slogan” of peace, according to their strategic and political considerations. This has been the case not only during the war, but in times of peace as well. The leader of the German opportunists, Mr. Eduard David, recently made the following significant revelation in his bible of social-chauvinism: it turns out that the Berne peace conference in 1913 included the participation of…the German government.
“We later found out,” David writes, “that the inter-parliamentary attempts at an agreement between France and Germany had been supported by [German Chancellor] Bethmann Hollweg. As [Reichstag] deputy Gothein stated, the participation of representatives of bourgeois parties in the Basel Conference in 1914 had been expressly recommended by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin.”
—Die Sozialdemokratie im Weltkrieg (Social Democracy in the World War), page 81
This is how bourgeois governments act in pursuit of their diplomatic games. They cynically exploit peace efforts by the socialists, whom they maneuver like puppets. Who could say, for example, who played the greater role in the appearance on this godly earth of the recent appeal for peace of the German Parteivorstand? Was there pressure by the workers and the Social Democratic opposition? Or was there a certain “inspiration” coming from “circles” close to Bethmann-Hollweg? This would by no means be in contradiction with the repression against Social Democratic journals which published the appeal. After all, the entire “game” of the likes of Bethmann-Hollweg consists of saying: we are committed as much as ever to war to the bitter end, even after the Lemberg affair [when Lemberg (Lvov) was retaken from Russia by the German army in 1915]; we have plenty of reserves, but “the people” have already had enough victories and are now demanding “an honorable peace.”
It is noteworthy that the official defenders of the “slogan” of peace often don’t even conceal that they take account of the strategic situation of their “fatherland.” By publishing the appeal for peace of the Parteivorstand, the official organs of the German party tell us: “We are authorized to state that, effective 7 May, the leadership unanimously adopted this appeal… But its publication was delayed due to Italy’s entry into the war. After the great military successes (of Germany) in Galicia, the leadership decided to proceed with its publication” (Hamburger Echo No. 147). Those same official organs of German Social Democracy reprinted, without a single word of criticism, the commentary by the semi-official government paper (the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung) on the Parteivorstand’s appeal. “The Social Democratic party leadership,” this government paper wrote, “published its manifesto, like other organizations, based on our complete certainty of victory…“
Such is the simple logic of social-chauvinism. Our [German commanders] Hindenburg or our Mackensen have won victory on the battlefield; that is why we are proponents of the “slogan” of peace. But since “our” [French commander] Joffre or our [British War Secretary] Kitchener have not won any victories, for our part we are therefore in favor of war to the bitter end…
On the other hand, a major defeat may also prompt those responsible for these matters to wink at the “socialists”: go ahead now, fellows, raise the “slogan” of peace. That was the case during the Vienna conference, when the tsar’s troops crossed the Carpathians and Krakow was threatened.
That alone should be enough to prevent revolutionary internationalists from adopting the “slogan” of peace without supplementing it…
There have been many misadventures with this “slogan”—just think, for example, about what happened to it in Nashe Slovo. At first this journal defended it from a purely pacifist standpoint: it argued for peace with certain “conditions,” i.e., a democratic peace. Now it just calls for peace without any conditions, since it has become all too clear that “disarmament,” “arbitration courts,” and so forth, do not suit those who seek to raise the question within a revolutionary framework. But this simple “slogan” of peace is already completely meaningless from the standpoint of Social Democracy. [Russian Tsar] Nicholas II and [German Kaiser] Wilhelm II are also proponents of peace “in general”: they certainly don’t need war for its own sake…
Kautsky has defended the “slogan” of peace ever since the beginning of the war (Kampf für den Frieden, Klassenkampf im Frieden [Struggle for Peace, Class Struggle in Times of Peace]). Vandervelde like Victor Adler, Sembat like Scheidemann, claim to be internationalists and pacifists, and the same is true of all the social-chauvinists. As the end of the war draws closer, diplomatic swindles by bourgeois cliques will become a greater factor behind the scenes and the simple “slogan” of peace will become ever less acceptable for socialist internationalists.
It is wrong and particularly dangerous to think that internationalists should be guided by considerations of who is for the “slogan” of peace and who is against it. If you want to make it impossible for the internationalists of different countries to agree, to close ranks under a definite programmatic banner; if you want to erase any dividing line between ourselves and the “Center,” then the “slogan” of peace must be adopted.
The Italian Social Democrats have made known through their press their intention of convening a conference or congress of internationalists. This undertaking should be warmly supported. But it would lose nine-tenths of its significance if its efforts were restricted to what the international conference of women [Berne, March 1915] and the international youth conference [Berne, April 1915] already did. Indeed, the point is not to draft a “unanimous” resolution together with social-pacifists, which includes the “slogan” of peace, and to slap each other on the back for adopting a so-called “action program” unanimously. In fact, this would be a program of inaction. Instead, faced with the current terrible crisis of socialism, what’s posed is to get our bearings; to regroup what remains of the army of Marxists; to break with the self-declared traitors and the vacillating elements who, in practice, come to their aid; to project a course of struggle for our socialist generation in the imperialist epoch; and to create a Marxist international nucleus.
There are now countless enthusiasts for the “slogan” of peace. And the number will continue to increase. The task of revolutionary internationalists is an entirely different one. We cannot salvage the banner of socialism, we cannot regroup the broad mass of working people under this banner, we cannot lay the cornerstone of the future, truly socialist, International except by proclaiming from this day forward the full Marxist program, by providing a clear and precise answer of our own as to how the socialist proletariat must fight in the epoch of imperialism. The question for us is much broader than the months remaining until the end of the first imperialist world war. The question for us is one of an entire epoch of imperialist wars.
Not with the idea of international pacifism, but with the idea of international civil war—in this sign thou shalt conquer!
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Correction
We introduced an error in our translation of Gregory Zinoviev’s August 1915 article “Pacifism or Marxism (The Misadventures of a Slogan)” in Spartacist (English edition) No. 64 (Summer 2014). The article included a quote from Rosa Luxemburg at the German Social Democracy’s 1900 Mainz conference. We translated one sentence of the quote as: “But as soon as there’s a real war, we forget to draw the practical conclusions from it and to show that our years-long agitation has not borne any fruit.” In fact, there is no negative in the sentence, which should read: “But as soon as there’s a real war, we forget to draw the practical conclusions from it and to show that our years-long agitation has borne fruit.”
Correction (map of the Baltic Sea)
The map of the Baltic Sea region adapted from Holt, Rinehart and Winston and printed on p. 48 in Spartacist (English edition) No. 63 (Winter 2012-13) mistakenly identified the Scandinavian peninsula west of the Gulf of Bothnia as Finland. Finland is situated east of the Gulf of Bothnia.