right of national self-determination seriously, should have used it as a lever against the imperialistic war.
The most elementary demand of national defense is that the nation take its defense into its own hands. The first step in this direction is the militia; not only the immediate armament of the entire adult male populace, but above all, popular decision in all questions of peace and war. It must demand, furthermore, the immediate removal of every form of political oppression, since the greatest political freedom is the best basis for national defense. To proclaim these fundamental measures of national defense, to demand their realization, that was the first duty of the Social-Democracy.
For forty years we have tried to prove to the ruling classes as well as to the masses of the people that only the militia is really able to defend the fatherland and to make it invincible. And yet, when the first test came, we turned over the defense of our country, as a matter of course, into the hands of a standing army, to be the cannon fodder under the club of the ruling classes. Our parliamentarians apparently did not even notice that the fervent wishes with which they sped these defenders of the fatherland to the front were, to all intents and purposes, an open admission that the imperial Prussian standing army is the real defender of the fatherland. They evidently did not realize that by this admission they sacrificed the fulcrum of our political program, that they gave up the militia and dissolved the practical significance of forty years' of agitation against the standing army into thin air. By the act of the Social-Democratic group our military program became a utopian doctrine, a doctrinaire obsession, that none could possibly take seriously.
The masters of the international proletariat saw the idea of fatherland defense in a different light. When the proletariat of Paris, surrounded by Prussians in 1871, took the reins of the government into its own hands, Marx wrote enthusiastically:
