War and
revolutionary strategy
Mike Macnair
– part 5
I began this series assessing how the debate in the French
Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire around some new form of left unity, and
possible alternatives, posed questions of revolutionary strategy. The second
article looked at the sense in which ‘Marxism’ is a strategy, the strategy of
the working class emancipating itself through organising to fight politically
for socialism; and the third and fourth articles have explored the strategic
debate in the German SPD and Second International about how to carry
this struggle forward.
The right wing’s policy of winning reforms through coalition
governments has led us to where we are now (Blairism, etc). The left’s mass
strike strategy posed but did not solve the question of government and has
repeatedly led nowhere. The centre’s strategy of patience created mass workers’
parties and movements. However, the centre’s ambiguities on the state and
nationalism led it, when it was faced by war and revolution with sharp choices
on state and nation, to collapse into the policy of the right wing of the
movement.
I wrote in the second article that the strategic debates of
the Second International are more relevant to the modern workers’ movement than
those of the Third International, in the first place because our times are
closer to theirs than they are to the “short 20th century” (Hobsbawn), and
secondly because at least some of the strategic concepts of the Comintern are
not simply rendered obsolete by the fall of the USSR, but are proved by the
fate of the ‘socialist countries’ to be a strategic blind alley.
Nonetheless, we cannot simply splice the film of history to
skip a century. Nor can we simply argue, as Antoine Artous, the editor of Critique
Communiste, does, that “the current period is characterised by the end of
the historical cycle which began with October 1917” (Weekly Worker
February 16).
We live after the great schism in the socialist
movement which resulted from the 1914-18 war. Most of the organised left and a
good many ‘independents’ still identify with traditional ideas derived from the
first four congresses of the Comintern (usually in a diluted and confused
form).
Moreover, the Comintern re-posed the problems of the state
and internationalism, party organisation, unity and government coalitions. Any
judgment on possible socialist strategies for the 21st century must take the
Comintern’s ideas into account, even if in the end it proves necessary to
reject some or all of them.
There are three core elements of strategy proposed by the
Comintern and its leadership. The first and the essence of the split was
Lenin’s response to World War I - the idea of a defeatist policy.
The second was the idea of the split itself. This started
with the notion that organisational separation from the right, and the creation
of a new type of International and a new type of party, would immunise the
workers’ movement against repeating the right’s betrayals. In 1921-22 it became
apparent to the Comintern’s leadership that the right and centre could not be
so easily disposed of, and the strategic problem of workers’ unity (and the
question of government) re-posed itself in the form of the united front policy.
But this policy stood in contradiction to the concept of the party established
in 1920-21 and proved short-lived.
The third was the problem of what form of authority could
pose an alternative to the capitalist political order. Beginning with ‘All
power to the soviets’, the Comintern leadership had shifted by 1920 to the idea
that the dictatorship of the proletariat was necessarily the dictatorship of
the workers’ vanguard party. The united front turn of 1921-22 entailed a shift
here as well, to the ideas of a workers’ or workers’ and farmers’ government as
the immediate alternative to capitalist rule.
In this article I will discuss the question of war and
revolutionary defeatism. This question comes first. Hal Draper has argued that
Lenin was wrong on defeatism. If the strategic judgment expressed in
‘defeatism’ was wrong, Lenin was also wrong to argue for a split with the
anti-war centrists.
In August 1914 the parliamentary representatives of the
German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the majority of the larger parties of
the Second International in the belligerent countries voted for war credits for
their national governments. In doing so, they betrayed commitments which had
been made at the 1907 Stuttgart and 1912 Basel congresses of the International.
If the war had appeared, as Engels imagined it in 1891, as a
revanchist attack by France on Germany with Russian support, and had been
fought on German soil, the policy of the SPD might have been vindicated.
However, the partial success of the Schlieffen plan to outflank the French
armies by attacking through Belgium, and the weakness of the tsarist army,
meant that the war was not fought on German soil. Moreover, both the long
background of rising inter-imperialist tensions, and the immediate diplomatic
context (German support of an Austrian ultimatum against Serbia for
‘supporting’ what would now be called ‘terrorism’), made German policy appear
aggressive, not defensive.
On the other hand, had the Schlieffen plan succeeded in
rapidly knocking France out of the war, the war would indeed have been - as
many military leaders imagined it would be in 1914 - a short one, and the error
of the socialist leaderships would have been marginalised by the political
consequences in the defeated belligerent countries (France and Russia).
But the Schlieffen plan did not work as intended. Invading
France through neutral Belgium provided an excuse for British intervention on
the French side; and the German forces outran their rail-based logistics and
became overextended, enabling the French army to regroup forces and at the
first battle of the Marne (September 1914) to strike at a weakness in the German
line. The result was that France was not knocked out of the war, Britain became
fully engaged in it, and there developed the stabilised trench lines of the
various fronts, factories of murder which were to run for another four years.
The socialist leaderships had ended up accepting responsibility for an enormous
crime against the working class and humanity in general.
Lenin argued from the outbreak of the conflict for a clear
assessment that it was a predatory imperialist war for the redivision of the
world, an understanding shared by Luxemburg, Trotsky and others. On this basis
it was to be regarded as reactionary on all sides. This, in turn, led Lenin to
support the policy that came to be called ‘defeatism’ and for the slogan ‘Turn
the imperialist war into a civil war’. With equal determination he argued for a
decisive break with the right wing, and, indeed, from all those socialists who
supported their own governments in the war.1
A section of the left and centre endeavoured in vain to
restore the honour of the socialist movement by convening the Zimmerwald
(1915), Kienthal (1916) and Stockholm (1917) conferences of socialists to
promote a peace policy. As the true nature of the war became clear, elements of
the centre who had initially gone along with the right turned to an anti-war
policy; but they still clung to the idea of re-establishing the unity of the
International. Lenin now argued for a decisive break with the anti-war centre
as well as the right, on the basis that the centre’s pacifist line merely
covered for the right.
A left wing at the Zimmerwald conference argued for a policy
of pursuing the class struggle against the war; the Bolsheviks participated.
But even among the Zimmerwald left the instinct for unity of the movement was
strong, and Lenin argued even for a break with those elements of the left who
were unwilling to split from the centre. There could be no real
internationalism, he insisted in this context, without a willingness to carry
on a practical struggle against one’s own state’s war policy: that is,
defeatist propaganda in the armed forces.
Until the October Revolution, it is fairly clear that Lenin
could not carry the full rigour of his line within the Bolshevik leadership.
The public statements of the Bolshevik Party in Russia were anti-war and
characterised the war as imperialist and predatory, but did not go to the full
lengths of defeatism. The Bolsheviks were equally unwilling to break decisively
with the limited unity expressed in the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences and
call openly for a new International, or - the other aspect of Lenin’s
insistence on a clear split - to rename the RSDLP (Bolshevik) the Communist
Party.2
Lenin’s line was given strong apparent justification by the
course of events. On the one hand, the October Revolution, plus the new
regime’s ability to hold power into 1918, seemed to confirm the claims of
defeatism positively. On the other, the responses of the Russian, German and
international right and centre to the February and October revolutions and the
1918-19 revolution in Germany seemed to negatively confirm the need for a
rigorous split. A large enough minority of the parties of the Second
International (including majorities in France and Italy) was willing to split
from the right, to support the proclamation of the Third International in 1919.
Even so, the concerns for the broad unity characteristic of
the Second International persisted within some of the parties affiliated to the
Third. The Russian leadership resolved to force a cleaner break with the centre
tendency and did so with the 1920 adoption by the Third Congress of the Twenty-one
conditions for affiliation to the Comintern.3 The defeatist position was not
adopted in explicit terms, but the political essence of the content Lenin had
intended by it was.
Condition six provided that “It is the duty of any party
wishing to belong to the Third International to expose, not only avowed
social-patriotism, but also the falsehood and hypocrisy of social-pacifism...”
Condition four required that “Persistent and systematic
propaganda and agitation must be conducted in the armed forces, and communist
cells formed in every military unit. In the main communists will have to do
this work illegally; failure to engage in it would be tantamount to a betrayal
of their revolutionary duty and incompatible with membership in the Third
International.”
And condition eight required that “Any party wishing to join
the Third International must ruthlessly expose the colonial machinations of the
imperialists of its ‘own’ country, must support - in deed, not merely in word -
every colonial liberation movement, demand the expulsion of its compatriot
imperialists from the colonies, ... and conduct systematic agitation among
the armed forces against all oppression of the colonial peoples” (emphasis
added).
Hal Draper has argued in his Lenin and the myth of
revolutionary defeatism that Lenin’s use of ‘defeat’ slogans in 1914-16
reflected his general tendency to ‘bend the stick’: “He makes perfectly clear
what he means, but that is how he seeks to underline, with heavy, thick
strokes, the task of the day, by exaggerating in every way that side of
the problem which points in the direction it is necessary to move now.”
In Draper’s view, the resulting slogan was incoherent and mistaken, and Lenin,
when he was required to formulate slogans for practical purposes, did not use
it. He argues that it ceased to be employed altogether in 1917 and through the
early years of the Comintern, and was only revived by Zinoviev in 1924 as a
stick with which to beat Trotsky.
Draper is usually an exceptionally careful scholar, and his
work on Marx and Engels’s ideas in Karl Marx’s theory of revolution
brilliantly draws out the political context of specific writings and arguments
in order to make the underlying ideas clear. In Lenin and the myth of
revolutionary defeatism, however, Homer has nodded. Missing from Draper’s
argument about defeatism are two crucial elements.
The first is that the primary political context is Lenin’s
argument for a clear split in the International - with the right, and with
anyone who wanted to maintain unity with the right, in particular with the
centre. This is the precise context of, for example, Lenin’s polemic
against Trotsky on the defeatism formula. And it is retained in condition six
of the Twenty-one conditions (a document whose whole purpose is to
finalise the split with the Kautskyian centre).
The second is the concrete conclusion which follows from
defeatism. That is, that the socialists should, so far as they are able, carry
on an anti-war agitation in the ranks of the armed forces. In November 1914
Lenin wrote: “Refusal to serve with the forces, anti-war strikes, etc, are
sheer nonsense, the miserable and cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against
the armed bourgeoisie, vain yearning for the destruction of capitalism without
a desperate civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every socialist
to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work
directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only
socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the
bourgeoisie of all nations.”4
In July 1915, in arguing, against Trotsky, for “practical
actions leading toward such defeat”, Lenin comments as an aside: “For the
‘penetrating reader’: This does not at all mean to ‘blow up bridges’, organise
unsuccessful military strikes, and, in general, to help the government to
defeat the revolutionaries.”5
But neither here nor anywhere else does Lenin repudiate
carrying on anti-war agitation in the ranks of the armed forces, and, on the
contrary, this is the principal concrete conclusion which follows from
defeatism. And this, too, is retained in the Twenty-one conditions, in
conditions four (a general obligation to organise and agitate in the armed
forces) and eight (specifically on the colonial question).
To carry on an effective agitation against the war in the
ranks of the armed forces is, unavoidably, to undermine their discipline and
willingness to fight. This was apparent in 1917 itself. It is confirmed by
subsequent history. One of the few effective anti-war movements in recent
history was the movement in the US against the Vietnam war. If we ask why
this movement was successful, the answer is clear: it did not merely carry on
political opposition to the war (demonstrations, etc) but also disrupted
recruitment to the US armed forces and organised opposition to the war within
the armed forces. The result - together with the armed resistance of the
Vietnamese - was a US defeat.
It is clear enough that these judgments were intended to be strategic.
The Zimmerwald left proposed a resolution condemning the imperialist character
of the war and arguing (in a slightly less emphatic way than Lenin’s version)
for class struggle against it. An opponent, Serrati, argued that this
resolution would be rendered moot by the end of the war (still anticipated in
1915 to be not far off). Lenin responded that “I do not agree with Serrati that
the resolution will appear either too early or too late. After this war,
other, mainly colonial, wars will be waged. Unless the proletariat turns
off the social-imperialist way, proletarian solidarity will be completely
destroyed; that is why we must determine common tactics. If we adopt only a
manifesto, Vandervelde, L’Humanité and others will once again start
deceiving the masses; they will keep saying that they, too, oppose war and want
peace. The old vagueness will remain” (emphasis added).6
Right or wrong, then, Lenin’s defeatism was arguing for two
fundamental changes in the strategy of international socialism. The first was
for a clear split: the abandonment of the historic policy of unity of the
movement at all costs which had flowed from the success of the Gotha
unification, the SPD and the unifications which it had promoted.
The second was a new strategic policy in relation to war,
or, more exactly, in relation to imperialist wars. This policy called for an
open proclamation along the lines that ‘the main enemy is at home’, to ‘turn
the imperialist war into a civil war’ and, complementing this, practical efforts
to undermine military discipline by anti-war agitation and organising in the
armed forces.
Draper’s view is that the defeat slogan is simply
wrong - meaningless unless you positively wish for the victory of the other
side. It must follow that unless you support such a scenario, you would not go
beyond a slogan along the lines of ‘Carry on the class struggle in spite of the
war’. That is, you would not arrive at Lenin’s argument that the
principal way to carry on the class struggle in such a war is to argue
that civil war is better than this war and to undermine military discipline by
anti-war agitation and organisation in the armed forces.
The flip side of this argument is that Draper only partially
addresses the internal limits of Lenin’s argument. Lenin argues for
generalising a defeat position to all the 1914-18 belligerents on the basis
that 1914-18 is a war among the imperialist robbers for division of the
spoils of the world. He - and the Comintern - further generalise this
position to ‘colonial wars’: that is, the wars of the imperialist states to
acquire and retain colonies and semi-colonies.
They do not argue that communists in the colonies and
semi-colonies should be defeatist in relation to these countries’ wars for
independence/against the imperialists. On the contrary, in this context the
third and fourth congresses of Comintern urged the policy of the
anti-imperialist front. I argued in my 2004 series on imperialism that the
course of events since 1921 has proved that the policy of the ‘anti-imperialist
front’ is not a road to workers’ power and socialism.7 That does not alter the point here
that the defeatist policy is specific.
Pretty clearly, it is, in fact, more specific than Lenin
realised; but it also contains underlying elements of general strategic
principle, which need to be teased out of the specificity.
Draper makes the point that when Lenin returned to Russia he
found that it was necessary to address mass defencism among workers and
soldiers, and the defeat slogan disappeared as a slogan after April
1917. What is missing in Draper’s account is that Bolshevik anti-war agitation
and organisation among the soldiers did not disappear after April. But the
turn, and the mass defencism, were real. Mass defencism reflected the fact that
as the war had evolved, it had become mainly a war fought on Russian soil,
which Russia was losing. The masses could see perfectly well that the liberty
they had won in February would not survive German occupation.
The same issue was posed a great deal more sharply in
1939-45. World War II was indeed a second inter-imperialist war for the
redivision of the world. But overlaid on this war was a class war against the
proletariat and its organisations, begun with Hitler’s 1933 coup, continued with
German intervention in the Spanish civil war and with the defeatism of much of
the French bourgeoisie and officer class in 1940, Quisling and so on.
The result was that the defeatist position adopted in 1938
by the founding congress of the Trotskyist Fourth International lacked
political purchase. Mass support, to the extent that it moved to the left
against the bourgeois governments, moved to the communists who - after 1941 -
unequivocally favoured the defeat of the Axis. It did not move in the direction
of the defeatist, or at best equivocal, Trotskyists. The Trotskyists were split
by the war - at least in Britain, France, China and Indochina, and probably
elsewhere - between defeatists and advocates of the ‘proletarian military
policy’, who argued that the working class needed to take over the conduct of
the war in order to defend its own interests.
In fact, if we look back on 1914-18 itself, it should be
apparent from what I said in discussing the outbreak of the war (above) that it
was the specific military-political conditions of 1914-18 which allowed
Lenin’s thesis to obtain the sort of political purchase it did. If the war had
been fought on German soil, as Engels anticipated in 1891, a German
revolutionary-defencist policy would have been vindicated. If it had been a
short war, the issue would have been brushed aside. It was the enormity of
1914-18, and in particular the stalemated fronts, which powered both the
defeatist thesis and willingness to split the International.
In other words, the judgment that defeatism is the right
approach to inter-imperialist wars is a concrete judgment about the
particular war. But there are strategic principles which lie behind it.
Half the justification for defeatism was Lenin’s belief that
imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism and hence that 1914-18 showed
that revolution was immediately on the agenda. This would mean that the
strategy of patience was wholly superseded. This idea was expressed in several
documents of the first three congresses of the Comintern, which assert that the
major capitalist countries are on the verge of civil war.
This judgment of the international situation is, in
fact, the hidden secret of the defeatist line for the world inter-imperialist
war. In such a war, it is an almost impracticable line for the workers’ party
of any single belligerent country. But if the workers’ parties of all
the belligerent countries agitate and organise against the war in the ranks of
the armed forces, the possibility exists of fraternisation between the
ranks of the contending armies, leading to the soldiers turning their arms
first on their officers and then on their political-economic masters.
This is the meaning of Lenin’s argument in his polemic
against Trotsky that it is essential to his policy “that co-ordination and
mutual aid are possible between revolutionary movements in all the
belligerent countries”.8
Such a line assumes that the mass workers’ International exists and that its
national sections can be made to follow a common defeatist line.
The idea that the class struggle was moving internationally
into civil war did not only support the position of ‘turning the imperialist
war into the civil war’. It underpinned Lenin’s and his Russian co-thinkers’
willingness to gamble on the seizure of power by a workers’ party in a
peasant-majority country. It justified the extremely sharp split line in
relation to the right and centre tendencies in the international socialist
movement. And it also supported the explicit conception of a more or less
militarised workers’ party adopted in 1920-21.
I argued in my 2004 series on imperialism that this idea
mistook the crisis of British world hegemony for a terminal-phase crisis
of capitalism. The Comintern was, in fact, already retreating from its full
implications by mid-1921. But the Comintern leaders clung to it - and Trotsky
clung to it to his death. They did so because, for the Russians, it was their
only hope of salvation. If the revolution in western Europe, or that of the
‘peoples of the east’ against colonialism, did not come to their aid, they had
betrayed the hope of the socialist revolution as thoroughly as the right wing
of the socialists by their actions in 1918-21 (Cheka, suppression of political
opposition, suspension of soviet elections, strike-breaking, Kronstadt and
their theorisation of one-party rule of the militarised party as a necessary
aspect of the dictatorship of the proletariat).
To say this, however, is still not to imply that the
defeatist strategic line was wrong. It was (at least partially) right because
it made a true judgment about the state.
It is not the capitalist class which is the central
obstacle to the emancipation of the working class, but the capitalist state
and international state system.
We have already seen this point in the second article in
this series (Marx and Engels’s critiques of Gotha emphasised the Lassalleans’
illusions in the German empire), the third (the policy of government coalitions
requires the socialists to manage the state as a competing firm in the world
market, and therefore to attack the working class; the mass strike or
revolutionary crisis immediately poses the question of government and the form
of authority) and the fourth (the Kautskyian centre downgraded the question of
state form and ended by bringing state-bureaucratism and nationalism into the
workers’ movement).
A state is, at the end of the day, an organised armed
force. The states of particular classes are tied to those classes by the forms
in which they are organised. For the working class to take power, therefore,
the existing capitalist (or pre-capitalist) state has to be ‘smashed up’. And
at the end of the day, this means that the coherence of the existing armed
forces has to be destroyed.
Lenin’s judgment, expressed in defeatism, was that the war, because
it was unjust and predatory, and because it showed imperialist
capitalism coming up against its historical limits, offered the workers’ party
both the need and the possibility to destroy the coherence of the existing
armed forces through anti-war agitation - and thereby to take power.
The need was there because the war in itself involved
the mass blood-sacrifice of workers. It was also there because any war in which
serious forces are engaged and in which the international standing of the
belligerent state is at issue reshapes politics around itself. The class
struggle therefore necessarily takes the form of the struggle against the war.
(This is not true of all wars: minor colonial counterinsurgency operations,
etc, may reshape the politics of the colonial country but do not reshape those
of the imperialist country.)
The possibility was there because the war was unjust
and predatory in character, and therefore tended to lose political legitimacy
as it went on.
Underlying the defeatist line, then, is a strategic
understanding that in order to take power the working class needs to overthrow
the ruling class’s state: that is, to break up the coherence of this state as
an organisation of armed force. This strategic understanding is in no sense
dependent on the “actuality of the revolution” (Lukács).
The war immediately posed the question of state power
and the coherence of the armed forces, as (in a different way) an internally
driven revolutionary crisis or mass strike wave does. But the advocates of the
‘strategy of patience’ could have prepared the workers’ movement and the
society as a whole for the fact that this question would in future be posed.
They chose not to.
In his 1891 critique of the Erfurt programme, Engels wrote
that “If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can
only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the
specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French
Revolution has already shown.”
A democratic republican military policy implies fighting for
universal military training, a popular militia and the right to keep and bear
arms. It also implies that within any standing military force which may be
necessary, the ranks should have freedom of political speech and the right to
organise in political parties and trade unions.
It further implies taking seriously the expression ‘defence’
which appears in ideological form in the ‘ministry of defence’. This means
consistent opposition in principle to colonial wars and overseas interventions,
including ‘peacekeeping’ activities, which are invariably founded on lies and
serve concealed imperialist interests.
If we take every opportunity to spread the ideas of a
democratic republican military policy, by doing so we arm the working class
movement for the conditions in which defeatism becomes a real necessity. To the
extent that we win individual reforms in this direction, we will in practice
undermine the ability of the armed forces to be used in defence of the
capitalist class, both against the colonies and semicolonies, and also against
a proletarian majority.
These ideas are neither an innovation from Marxist
principles, nor a ‘republican shibboleth’. They are a version of the policy
Engels urged on the SPD in 1892-9 in his series of articles Can Europe
disarm?9 Their absence from the political
arsenal of the British left is the product of a timid pacifism which is covered
by super-revolutionary phrases about rejecting ‘reforming the bourgeois state.’
The Trotskyists have made of defeatism something different:
not a practical strategic choice for the working class’s struggle for power,
but a purity test. Every war becomes, like 1914-18, a test of the revolutionary
moral fibre of organisations; positions considered false on international
conflicts are ‘proof’ of succumbing to the pressure of the bourgeoisie.
It has to be said that this Trotskyist use of war policy as
a purity test does originate in the Comintern and Lenin’s policy of defeatism.
But it originates not in defeatism itself, but in the arguments for the split
from the right and centre.
The Spartacist League and sub-Sparts might be said to have
reduced this idea to absurdity when they argued that Afghan communists should
join with the Taliban (who would immediately shoot them) to fight US
imperialism. But the crown must surely belong to the Socialist Workers Party
comrades, who claim their revolutionary credentials by calling for “victory to
the Iraqi resistance”.
This same SWP has for the last 20 years resolutely opposed
in the name of ‘broad unity’ any political agitation either for a democratic
republican military policy, or for organised workers’ self-defence. Today its
‘revolutionary defeatist’, supposedly anti-imperialist alliance with political
islam involves sacrificing fundamentals of democratic, let alone socialist,
policy.
1. Early examples in ‘The war and Russian Social-Democracy’,
VI Lenin CW Vol 21, p35, and ‘The position and tasks of the Socialist
International’, VI Lenin CW Vol 41, p349, both published November 1
1914
2 . Defeatism: Draper Lenin and the myth of revolutionary
defeatism www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1953/defeat/index.htm,
at id., /chap3.htm, § 2; Zimmerwald: Lenin Tasks of the proletariat in our
revolution www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/tasks/post.htm;
and the name, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf/29i.htm
(issue referred to a future for lack of time; but if it had been agreed by a
clear majority, this would hardly have happened).
3. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x01.htm
4. ‘The position and tasks of the Socialist International’,
VI Lenin CW Vol 21, p35.
5. ‘The defeat of one’s own government in the imperialist
war’, VI Lenin CW Vol 21, p275.
6. The objection is reported in ‘Revolutionary Marxists at
the International Socialist Conference’, www.marxists.org.uk/archive/lenin/works/1915/sep/05.htm;
Lenin’s response is in one of his speeches at the conference: www.marxists.
org.uk/archive/lenin/works/1915/aug/26.htm, text at note 12.
7. Weekly Worker July 29, August 5 and August 12
2004, accessible with other materials on the issue at www.cpgb.org.uk/theory/imperialism.htm.
8. ‘The defeat of one’s own government...’
9. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 27, p367ff, discussed
in more depth in Draper and Haberkern, Karl Marx’s theory of revolution V,
war and revolution, ch 7.
First published in Weekly Worker – April 2006