German workers and the German workers in shooting the French workers.
If we examine the premises from which Kautsky draws his conclusions, we find the belief, whose absurdity Clausewitz demonstrated eighty years ago, that at the beginning of a war all the historical relations between nations and classes are obliterated and that an entirely new order of things is ushered in. There are people who were attacked and who are defending themselves, who are "simply" repelling the "enemies of their country." The oppression of a large number of nations, of over one-half of the population of the globe, by the imperialists of the great powers, the competition between the bourgeoisies of those nations for the division of profits, the endeavor of capitalists to break up and crush out the labor movements, all of those things on which Plekhanov and Kautsky wrote extensively for ten years preceding the war, seem to have disappeared entirely from their field of vision.
The two leaders of the social-patriots insult Marx by invoking him as their authority in this connection. Plekhanov points to the national wars waged by Prussia in 1813, by Germany in 1870, and Kautsky shows that Marx settled the question as to the nation, that is the bourgeoisie, whose victory was not to be wished for in the wars of 1854–5, 1859, 1870–71, and that the Marxists did the same in the wars of 1876–7 and 1897. Sophists of all times have always resorted to the same tricks: they use examples which do not apply to the case in point. The previous wars of which they speak were the continuation of a policy of many years standing, a movement of the bourgeoisie against foreign domination and against Turkish and Russian absolutism. No question could be raised then except as to the desirability of the victory of one bourgeoisie or another. In these wars, Marxists could call upon the nations to act, inflame national hatred, as Marx did in 1848, and later in the war with Russia, as Engels did in 1859 when he excited the Germans' national hatred against their oppressors, Napoleon III and the Russian Czar.[1]
- ↑ G. Gardenin, writing in Zishn, charges Marx with revolutionary chauvinism for favoring in 1848 a war against nations which he had proved to be counter-revolutionary, the Slav and Russian nations. Such a charge shows opportunism or superficiality or both. We Marxists have always favored war against counter-revolutionary nations. For instance, if Socialism should triumph in the United States or in Europe in, let us say, 1920, and if Japan and China should then mobilize against them their Bismarcks, even only on the diplomatic field, we should join hands with the Socialistic counitries in a revolutionary war. Does that seem strange to you, Mr. Gardenin?
