Revolutionary strategy

Trotsky’s peace programme

An introduction to Trotsky's 1915–16 'Programme for Peace', on defeatism and the United States of Europe slogan, plus the full text.

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We publish here an English translation of Leon Trotsky’s article ‘The Programme for Peace’, written during 1915–16. This is the first time that the article has been published in English for forty years.

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There are a number of reasons why Trotsky’s Peace Programme should be reprinted and why it deserves to be studied by militants today. The programme is a landmark in the development of Trotsky’s political method. The First World War demonstrated starkly that capitalism had outplayed its historically progressive role. ‘Permanent war or permanent revolution’ were the choices that Trotsky saw as facing humanity.

The major tasks that had been inscribed on the banner of the bourgeois revolutions—national independence, the breaking up of the big estates, equality under the law—remained unfulfilled for the great majority of mankind and unfulfillable on the basis of capitalist property relations in the new imperialist epoch.

In their turn, capitalist property relations and the political forms of bourgeois rule were themselves becoming ever-greater impediments to the development of the productive forces. The national state, for example, served as a fetter on the rational international organisation of production required by the level of development of the productive forces.

It was Trotsky, more than any other Marxist, who most sharply understood the major programmatic consequences of imperialism’s crisis and decay. For him it necessarily fell to the proletariat to take up as its own the unfulfilled democratic struggles of the oppressed and exploited, as part of its permanent revolution against capitalism. Only the proletariat was capable of giving effective leadership in those struggles: their realisation could only take the form of a proletarian revolution, no longer of partial struggles for a minimum democratic programme within capitalism.

Only the international proletariat could sweep aside the nation states and mechanisms of exploitation that threatened mankind’s productive forces with stagnation and decay. The only answer to imperialism’s war and crisis, the only answer to the exploitation, oppression and misery of the masses, lay in the international proletarian revolution. In this way, as we shall further see, the Peace Programme projects onto an international scale the programme of permanent revolution that Trotsky had first systematically elaborated for Russia in his book Results and Prospects in 1906.

Although cramped in style because of its publication under the stern eye of the censor, Trotsky’s Peace Programme is the most codified and developed version of his attempts to develop a programme of proletarian struggle against the First World War. As such it must be discussed in comparison with the abject surrender in 1914 of the majority of the leaders of European socialism to their ‘own’ national bourgeoisies, and also with the programme advanced by Lenin, Zinoviev and the Bolsheviks. In this respect, the article shows the development of Trotsky’s political method and the difficulties associated with some of his positions—and those of the Bolsheviks—in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Scientific approach

At the time that the Peace Programme was written, Trotsky was not a member of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. He did not finally join until July 1917. During the early years of the war, his writings were the subject of much hostile debate with the Bolsheviks. Their disputes, and the problems specifically associated with this article—most notably those around the slogans of ‘The United States of Europe’ and ‘Defeatism’—can make clear to us the struggle waged by both revolutionary tendencies to elaborate a new programme for the new epoch, and to build a new International. The disputes also show the kind of rigorous and scientific approach that we need to employ today in the struggle to re-elaborate the communist programme and to build a new revolutionary international.

The collapse of the Second International

The major parties of the Second (Socialist) International backed their respective bourgeoisies at the declaration of hostilities in August 1914. In the name of ‘national defence’, the massive French and German socialist parties became recruiting sergeants for the carnage created by their ‘own’ bosses. The International was in tatters. Its leading sections were calling on their members to slaughter fellow workers in the name of the ‘national interest’.

Only a minority of European socialists stood against this stream of chauvinism and capitulation. A small left wing in the German party around Liebknecht and Luxemburg stood out against the war, as did others in Bulgaria and Russia.

Russian social democracy had experienced its division into revolutionary (Bolshevik) and opportunist (Menshevik) parties prior to the war. Trotsky adopted an ambiguous centrist stance with regard to that division. He sought to unify the two parties through the intervention of the Second International. Trotsky’s initial response to the war was to reflect his stance towards the divisions in Russian social democracy.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks responded to the war in the theses ‘The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War’ (September 1914). After denouncing the imperialist war and the social democratic traitors, the theses called for ‘all-embracing propaganda, involving the army and the theatre of hostilities as well, for the socialist revolution and the need to use weapons, not against their brothers, the wage slaves in other countries, but against the reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all countries’.1

They raised ‘as an immediate slogan’ the call for republics in Germany, Poland and Russia, and ‘the transforming of all the separate states of Europe into a republican United States of Europe’.2

Defeatism

By early 1915, Lenin had elaborated the consequences of this call for soldiers to turn their arms on the bourgeoisie, to turn the imperialist war into a civil war. In theses prepared for a conference of Russian social democratic groups abroad, Lenin advanced the following position: ‘In each country, the struggle against a government that is waging an imperialist war should not falter at the possibility of that country’s defeat as a result of revolutionary propaganda. The defeat of the government’s army weakens the government, promotes the liberation of the nationalities it oppresses, and facilitates the civil war against the ruling class. This holds particularly true in respect of Russia. A victory for Russia will bring in its train a strengthening of reaction, both throughout the world and within the country, and will be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the peoples living in areas already seized. In view of this, we consider the defeat of Russia the lesser evil in all conditions’.3

For Lenin, the call for civil war against the ruling class necessarily meant that a defeat for the government and its army due to proletarian struggle was a ‘lesser evil’ than an abstention from that struggle in the name of ‘defence’ of the ‘nation’.

Bolshevism also stood unequivocally for the need for a definitive break, not only with the Second International, not only with the outright traitors in its ranks, but also with the opportunism which had marked its life prior to the great betrayal of 1914. ‘The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism. Down with opportunism and long live the Third International purged not only of “turncoats”…but of opportunism as well’.4

If Bolshevism stood firm on a programme of international civil war, Menshevism splintered and divided under the impact of the war. Plekhanov, ‘the father of Russian Marxism’, enthusiastically embraced the Romanov war effort. Inside Russia, the Mensheviks advocated and organised workers’ participation in industrial war committees set up to increase productivity in war industries.

In exile in Paris, however, Menshevism’s historic leader—Martov—edited the anti-war newspaper Golos (‘Voice’). It was in Golos that Trotsky first published his articles against the war.

War and the International

At the outbreak of war, Trotsky fled from exile in Vienna, where he was under immediate threat of internment, to neutral Switzerland—at that time also the home of Lenin, Zinoviev and their closest co-thinkers. In September and October 1914, during his stay in Zurich, Trotsky wrote a series of articles which were first published in Golos and shortly thereafter collected into a pamphlet—War and the International.

The articles contain the analysis of the roots of the war which was later to inform the Peace Programme: ‘The forces of production which capitalism has evolved have outgrown the limits of nation and state. The national state, the present political form, is too narrow for the exploitation of these productive forces…The present war is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit’.5

This understanding, whilst inferior to the theory of Imperialism which Lenin was to develop over the next years, nevertheless clearly shows that of a revolutionary struggling to come to terms with the new epoch of wars and revolutions, to provide a scientific analysis which could guide the world working class to victory.

It was this view of the contradiction between the internationalisation of the capitalist economy and the maintenance and reinforcement of national state structures—a global application of the perspective of permanent revolution which he and Parvus had developed during and after the 1905 revolution—which was to eventually lead Trotsky to heavily emphasise the slogan of ‘The United States of Europe’.

Trotsky’s programme

Both the analysis and the programme of War and the International contrasted sharply with that advanced by Lenin. Trotsky argued: ‘”Immediate cessation of the war” is the watchword under which the social democracy can reassemble its scattered ranks, both within the national parties, and the whole International’.6

The struggle for peace was not, at this time, posed as an explicit call to struggle for proletarian revolution and class war against the imperialist bourgeoisie. It is posed as a means of re-assembling the International’s ‘scattered ranks’ and ‘a fight to preserve the revolutionary energy of the proletariat’7 around the slogans:

  • ‘No reparations
  • The right of every nation to self-determination.
  • The united states of Europe—without monarchies, without standing armies, without feudal ruling castes, without secret diplomacy’.8

Despite Trotsky’s denunciation of imperialism and the social democratic traitors, this programme lacks the explicitly proletarian revolutionary character of the call issued by the Bolsheviks, and also did not raise the call for the building of a new international. (It should be noted, however, that by the 100th issue of Golos—8 January 1915—Trotsky was raising the call to ‘gather the forces of the Third International’9).

As the war proceeded, Martov and the ‘Menshevik-Internationalists’—as they called themselves—were increasingly cramped and restrained by their co-existence with the opportunist majority of Menshevism’s leaders, and their consequent inability to fight opportunism. The hopes expressed by many, including Lenin, that the old divisions within Russian social democracy would be overcome and that the possibility existed for a re-alignment of the Russian internationalist left were repeatedly dashed by Martov’s refusal to break with the opportunists.

However, in February 1915, Trotsky for the first time publicly broke with the Mensheviks. But he still refused to apply the logic of his position, and sought to occupy a point midway between the two camps. His developing position on the war needs to be understood in this context.

Nashe Slovo

The articles that make up the Peace Programme were published in the Paris-based Russian paper Nashe Slovo (‘Our Word’), which began publication after Golos closed down under the harassment of the censor, in January 1915.

Nashe Slovo was published in editions of between 2 and 4 pages, and was heavily subject to the censor’s pencil, with white spaces where an article was disapproved of. Amongst its contributors were many who, like Trotsky, were not yet Bolsheviks, but who in the years to come were to play major roles in the Russian Revolution as members of that party. There were Menshevik-Internationalists such as Antonov-Ovseenko and pro-Bolsheviks like Lunacharsky and Manuilsky. Other contributors included Riazanov, to be a leading historian of the Bolshevik Party, Sokolnikov, future Commissar of Finance, and Karl Radek, Angelica Balabanov and Christian Rakovsky who were all leading members of the Communist International in the early 1920s.

Despite this wealth of talent, Nashe Slovo could not adopt a consistent and principled attitude towards the programme being advanced by the Bolsheviks. Enormous strains developed within this group as Martov continued to refuse to break with Menshevik opportunism, and as Bolshevism exerted ever-stronger pressure by virtue of the clarity and intransigence of its stance. Throughout 1915—within international left circles and within the Russian émigrés—Trotsky continued to attempt to act as broker between the two camps.

Zimmerwald

This was made amply evident during the Zimmerwald conference. On 5 September 1915, thirty-eight delegates met in the Swiss mountain village of Zimmerwald in an attempt to organise the international forces of anti-war socialism. On the right were the German delegates such as Haase who refused to countenance issuing a declaration that denounced the social chauvinists as traitors. They refused to even issue an unequivocal call for voting against war credits. The Bolsheviks constituted a left minority at the conference, and presented their anti-war policy in the form of a call for no restriction of the fight against the war ‘from considerations of the defeat of their own country’, for turning ‘the imperialist war between the peoples into a civil war of the oppressed classes against their oppressors, a war for the expropriation of the class of capitalists, for the conquest of political power by the proletariat and the realisation of socialism’.10 They also argued for a remorseless struggle against social chauvinism and the ‘centre’ that would not fight it.

At Zimmerwald, Trotsky demonstrated that he had still not broken with his centrist waverings between Bolshevism and opportunism. His draft manifesto—which was eventually accepted—attacked the social democratic leaders but did not call for a break with them. It denounced the war in strident tones but in the name of ‘socialism’, advanced the ‘fight for peace—for a peace without annexations or war indemnities’. Against Lenin’s call for civil war and defeat as a ‘lesser evil’, Trotsky remained an advocate of a peace ‘without victors or vanquished’.11

Peace without annexations

Trotsky’s calls were far more evasive and ambiguous than those of the Bolsheviks at this time. ‘Peace without annexations’ is, in essence, not a position that is clearly counterposed to those social democrats who, like Kautsky, supported ‘national defence’ and the war waged by their own bourgeoisie, as long as it was a defensive war with no annexations.

Much of the dispute between Trotsky and the Bolsheviks at this time centred on the question of ‘defeatism’. We have already seen the early application by Lenin of the ‘defeat is a lesser evil’ slogan. Throughout 1915–16, Trotsky stood firmly opposed to the slogan. Yet his arguments against it suggest that he did not really grasp the nature of Lenin’s position.

Contradictions

In 1915, Trotsky argued against Lenin in the following manner in the pages of Nashe Slovo: ‘To the same extent that defeat, all other things being equal, shatters a given state structure, so does the victory of the other side which is implied by this defeat strengthen the state organisation of that other side. And we do not know of any European social and state organism which it is in the interest of the European proletariat to strengthen, nor do we assign to Russia the role of the state chosen to have its interests subordinated to those of the development of other European peoples…

But war is too contradictory, too double-edged a factor of historical development for a revolutionary party which feels firm class ground beneath its feet, and is sure of its future, to see in the road of defeat the road of political success. Defeat disorganises and demoralises the ruling reaction, but at the same time war disorganises the whole of social life, and above all, the working class…

Finally, a revolution which grows out of a defeat inherits an economy disordered to the utmost by war, exhausted state finances, and extremely strained international relations’.12

Trotsky plainly fails to grasp that Lenin was not advocating Russia’s defeat at the hands of the German army, but rather at the hands of the Russian proletariat. Further, to hold back working-class struggle for fear of the possible consequences of defeat, in the way that Trotsky outlines here, would be to necessarily encourage a ‘greater evil’—the consolidation of the power of the imperialists against the world working class, and the respective national bourgeoisies against their national working classes. The question of ‘defeatism’ remained a central point of difference between Lenin and Trotsky at this time, and Trotsky was not able to resolve this problem in the Peace Programme.

The basic analysis of the war put forward in the Peace Programme represents that developed in War and the International. Just as small and medium sized enterprises are systematically annihilated in capitalism’s domestic markets, so too the independence of the small and medium size states was undermined by the workings of international capitalism: ‘The fact remains that there can no longer be a return to independence for the small states. Whether Germany or England wins—in either case the question is to be determined is who will be the direct master over the small nations’.

The development of capitalism itself rendered the re-creation of the pre-war world (status quo ante bellum) impossible. In this way Trotsky continues to show a profound grasp of the international nature of the imperialist economy, and the internationalist programme needed to combat it.

A step in the right direction?

For Trotsky it follows that the ‘peace without annexations’ which he, and others, had advocated, could only be secured at the hands of the proletariat. Here, in the second section of the Peace Programme, he openly addresses the fact that only a proletarian offensive—a revolutionary force—can achieve that objective: ‘In order to wrest annexations from the hands of the victorious party, which is armed to the teeth, the proletariat would naturally, regardless of its desires, be in need of a revolutionary force, which it will have to be ready to use openly’.

This marks a definite step in the direction of Bolshevism’s call for civil war and one which becomes clearer as the article proceeds.

Two burning tasks immediately confronted humanity in the midst of the war, according to Trotsky. On the one hand, the old nation states and tariff barriers had to be destroyed if the productive forces were to be freed from their fetters. On the other hand, there remained the task of safeguarding ‘to the national community its freedom of development (or dissolution) in the interests of material and spiritual culture.’ Imperialism is capable of achieving neither. Peace, the international organisation of production and the defence of the rights of national communities are only achievable as a result of proletarian revolution. ‘It is possible to overcome this regime only by means of a proletarian revolution. Thus, the centre of gravity lies in the union of the peace programme of the proletariat with that of the social revolution‘.

By this point, Trotsky was posing the struggle against imperialist war—its roots and its consequences—within the perspective of permanent revolution. He is explicitly combining the struggle against war and for key democratic slogans with the programme of social revolution in a manner which had not been apparent in War and the International or in the Zimmerwald draft.

Presuming that the international proletarian revolution must have as its object the international reorganisation of production so as to revolutionise the productive forces, it followed for Trotsky that the programme of social revolution must itself advance the necessary slogans to achieve that goal.

It is because of this desire that in the Peace Programme, pride of place is given to the slogan of The United States of Europe, as ‘the most integral part of the proletarian peace programme’.

Kautsky and Ledebour’s use of the slogan

The slogan first seems to have been raised within German social democracy in the face of the mounting war threat. Ledebour, for example, had argued: ‘We put…to capitalist society…the demand…that they (the statesmen) prepare to unite Europe in a United States of Europe in the interests of Europe’s capitalist development, in order that later on Europe shall not be completely ruined in world competition’.13

Kautsky had also advanced the slogan, in 1911 in his own particular way: ‘Nevertheless the effort to peacefully unite the European states in a federative community is by no means hopeless. Its prospects are bound up with those of the revolution’.14

Kautsky, with his theory of ‘ultra-imperialism’, was later to argue that this form of rationalisation of European capital was perfectly possible in the ‘post-imperialist’ phase of capitalist development. He thus advocated it as a pacifist slogan for a non-imperialist capitalism.

As we have seen, at the outbreak of war, both Lenin and Trotsky raised the slogan, despite this murky pre-history. In ‘War and Russian Social Democracy’ (October 1914), Lenin was to repeat the call: ‘The formation of a republican United States of Europe should be the immediate slogan of Europe’s Social Democrats’.15 Lenin wanted to raise the slogan as part of a democratic programme which would be false and meaningless, without the revolutionary overthrow of the German, the Austrian and the Russian monarchies.16

United States of Europe

But Lenin soon dropped the slogan and polemicised against it at the time that Trotsky was placing increasing emphasis on it in his Nashe Slovo articles. Trotsky however stuck to his position. In December 1917, for example, in the first English language preface to The Peace Programme, Trotsky explained: ‘Into the peace-programme we include also the “United States of Europe”. This motto does not belong to the official programme of the government of workmens’ and soldiers’ councils, nor has it as yet received recognition from our party. Nevertheless we believe that the programme of democratic peace leads to a republican World Federation beyond a European one (and a considerable part of the pamphlet is devoted to the statement of this opinion). This question is practically put to the European proletariat by the further development of the revolution’.17

Lenin’s antagonism towards the slogan seems to have been prompted firstly by a fear of the economic consequences of the slogan, and also by a hostility to the political practice of those—including Trotsky—who placed such emphasis on the slogan. At heart, however, his dissatisfaction reflects the very real problems that Lenin himself was having in developing his own ‘stageist’ view of watertight divisions between democratic demands and struggles and the proletarian socialist programme.

Until he had completed his work on imperialism, this view led Lenin to still see the coming Russian revolution as having an essentially national radical-democratic character. Only his realisation of the ripeness of the world imperialist system for overthrow at the hands of the world proletariat broke him finally from that conception, although in a manner that, at least initially, led him to misunderstand the potential dynamic of some key democratic demands in the programme of proletarian revolution.

In rejecting the slogan of The United States of Europe, Lenin made a number of criticisms which, if they are aimed at Trotsky, do not stick. Lenin’s quarrel is not with the politics of the slogan. In August 1915, Lenin wrote that it remained ‘quite invulnerable as a political slogan’18 but Lenin presumed the demand was posed as a demand within capitalism, therefore while it was ‘invulnerable’ as a democratic political demand, its weaknesses lay in its economic consequences. He feared that its only outcome could be to create a cartel of European imperialisms in order to more efficiently exploit the colonial and semi-colonial world, and protect themselves against other imperialisms: ‘Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states. In this sense, a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists…but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America’.19

However, this argument does not offer us the basis for rejecting the slogan or Trotsky’s argumentation. In the Peace Programme, Trotsky unambiguously posed the slogan as the slogan of international proletarian revolution, not as a democratic demand within capitalism, as Lenin thought. In his criticism of this slogan, Lenin showed that he had not yet fully grasped the fact that in the imperialist epoch, residual and unfulfilled democratic slogans take their place in the arsenal of the proletarian programme, possessing their own revolutionary dynamic, to the extent that they are fought for in a struggle led by a vanguard workers’ party.

That is the sense in which Trotsky raised the slogan, that is the sense in which we can say that it represented an internationalist development, a deepening of the programmatic method of permanent revolution which was to bring Lenin and Trotsky together in 1917.

Stalinist critique

Lenin’s last argument against the slogan has been grist to the mill of every Stalinist critique of Trotskyism to this day. Even conceding that the United States of Europe could be advanced as a programme of proletarian revolution Lenin remained alarmed that it could consequently be interpreted as a demand for a simultaneous proletarian revolution throughout Europe…or none at all. As Lenin put it: ‘it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others’.20

Is this an argument for ‘socialism in one country’, as the Stalinists would have us believe? Firstly, Lenin doubtless meant by ‘victory of socialism’ a successful proletarian seizure of power, and not the final consolidation of socialism as the Stalinists have always claimed. No other reading would be consistent with Lenin’s politics. More importantly, there is no evidence from a reading of the Peace Programme that Trotsky used the slogan in that sense—witness Trotsky’s own words: ‘It is profitable and necessary to reiterate the elementary thought that no single country in its struggle has to “wait” for the others, lest the idea of parallel international action be supplanted by the idea of procrastinating international action’.

Lenin does not give adequate grounds for dismissing Trotsky’s use of the slogan ‘For a United States of Europe’. In the way it is used here, it is a form ‘of the dictatorship of the European proletariat’, not a part of a programme of rationalised ultra-imperialism.

Comintern adopts the slogan

It is in this manner which Trotsky successfully argued for the slogan to be adopted by the Communist International in June 1923: ‘The slogan of “the united states of Europe” has its place on the same historical plane with the slogan “A workers’ and peasants’ government”; it is a transitional slogan, indicating a way out, a prospect of salvation, and furnishing at the same time a revolutionary impulse for the toiling masses…

Is the realisation of a “workers’ government” possible without the dictatorship of the proletariat? Only a conditional reply can be given to this question. In any case, we regard the “workers’ government” as a stage toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. Therein lies the great value of the slogan for us. But the slogan “the united states of Europe” has an exactly similar and parallel significance. Without this supplementary slogan the fundamental problems of Europe must remain suspended in mid-air’.21

In order to make the slogan more precise, the revolutionary aspect of the slogan was made explicit (in the manner put forward by Trotsky in his 1922 post-script) and the ‘Soviet United States of Europe’ became part of the Comintern’s programmatic armoury.

Trotsky himself was later to dramatically relegate the importance of the demand. After 1928 it was never raised by Trotsky in any of his major programmatic documents. He used the ‘Soviet United States’ slogan again in a discussion on Greece in 1932.22 In the only other recorded use of the slogan, in a discussion on Czechoslovakia in June 1938, he used the formulation ‘the United Socialist States of Europe’.23

We have examined some of the strengths of Trotsky’s position. However, the truth is that Trotsky’s view that the United States of Europe demand was the most important component of the programme and the key slogan of the hour was profoundly mistaken. While the slogan had excellent propaganda value in the midst of the imperialist war, it did not have the organising role, mobilising power or tactical leverage that Trotsky seemed to invest it with.

In all these spheres it was Lenin’s slogans and tactics—and the party he built to fight for them—that proved indisputably more effective in developing organised proletarian struggle against the imperialist war.

On the question of defeatism, Trotsky was definitely wrong. Much has been made by socialist writers of this division between the two men, generally in an attempt to suggest that there was merely a difference ‘of propagandist emphasis’.24 However, Trotsky’s later consistent use of Lenin’s formulation makes it clear that he felt that there was a significant difference between the two positions. In his major theses on the coming war, ‘War and the Fourth International’ (June 1934), Trotsky explicitly embraces Lenin’s formulation, and in his famous ‘Transitional Programme’ (April 1938), he quotes it verbatim: ‘the defeat of your own (imperialist) government is the lesser evil’.25

There are other important differences between Lenin and Trotsky in this period, expressed in the Peace Programme, which deserve our attention, for they point to the rapid curve of development which Trotsky’s thought was undergoing during these years.

Trotsky’s desire to act as a ‘middle man’ between Bolshevism and Menshevism stemmed from his failure to understand the kind of party the working class needs, and the kind of programme that party needs to be armed with.

Lack of precision

However, his view of the epoch was also seriously flawed in a manner which led to his errors over the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and his attitude towards tactical questions at this time.

The pre-1917 Trotsky tended to see the permanent revolution as an objective process, driven onward by the motor of history separate from, and regardless of, the intervention of organised forces to shape and mould that process.

Hence his advancement of an analysis of the causes of the war as being primarily ‘a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit’.26

This view of a bursting asunder of national boundaries in the face of the needs of the productive forces is focused at a different level of analysis from that of Lenin’s more precise and scientific explanation of the imperialist role of the major powers in exploiting and carving up the world.

Both are correct to imply that imperialism was not ‘a policy’, but a new and decisive internal development of capitalism—its ‘highest stage’ as Lenin had it. But Lenin’s approach led to a whole series of programmatic positions which Trotsky’s more abstract approach could only hint at. For example, in the early sections of the Peace Programme, Trotsky deals with Belgium—a minor imperialist power—in the same manner as Serbia, Persia, Rumania, Greece and other imperialised countries. Belgian imperialism was an early loser in the inter-imperialist clash of 1914–18. The imperialised countries were always the victims of imperialist domination, and as such a different set of tactics needed to be advanced towards them.

A similar lack of precision is shown in the section on the right of nations to self-determination. Because of his understanding of the epoch, he correctly understood that the national question and the permanent revolution were intimately inter-related, but he failed to emphasise that the national question could be the beginning, the dynamic lead into the revolution, as had Lenin. Instead, the national question is completely bound up with the political union of Europe—the socialist revolution. No independent role for the national question is envisaged. It is one thing to recognise that a revolution will be necessary to achieve national liberation. It is quite another to always bind the two together.

At the root of these problems with Trotsky’s approach at this time lies a certain ‘objectivism’, a reliance upon the ‘laws’ of permanent revolution and ‘history’. For this reason, before 1917, he tended to eschew ideological struggle with opportunism and the fight for defeatism in the ranks of the working class, and instead based his programme on ineluctable laws that would spontaneously propel the working class towards the international revolution.

This reliance upon a ‘process’ is a one-sided, under-developed element in Trotsky’s evolving politics at this time which has tragically come to represent ‘Trotskyism’ for thousands of militants all over the world. The ‘objectivism’ of pre-1917 Trotsky has come to be characteristic of post-war ‘Trotskyism’.

The search for the epicentre of ‘the world revolution’ has led these epigones to trail their coats behind every radical movement that has developed—from students, through petit-bourgeois nationalism, to Stalinism. Their approach is a caricature of Trotsky’s early method. They see the overall development of the ‘revolutionary process’ and cheer from the sidelines whatever struggle is going on, dissolving themselves into the movement wherever possible.

At his worst, Trotsky was far superior to these characters: he was moving towards communist politics; they are moving away.27

A higher synthesis

The arguments between Lenin and Trotsky, and the development of their respective positions, were of profound importance in the construction of the party and programme that were to lead the Russian proletariat to power in 1917. Lenin was breaking with the radical stageist programme that informed Bolshevism before 1914. Trotsky was applying on the international terrain the programmatic method that he had developed out of the 1905 experience. The enormous strengths and continuing weaknesses of the traditions they represented are still in evidence in the period examined here. It was only in 1917 itself that Bolshevism was able to transcend the two traditions, creating a higher synthesis that broke Trotsky from ‘objectivism’ and centrism, and won in practice to the programme of permanent revolution.

The Peace Programme is not a perfect, finished document. It is one frame from the film of Trotsky’s political development at a key point in the struggle waged by Trotsky, Lenin and many other revolutionaries for a new communist programme and a new communist international. It is in that context that the article should be read and studied today.

The Peace Programme has had a chequered history, rarely being published in the same form over the past seventy years. Trotsky wrote the articles for Nashe Slovo in 1915–16, and then edited them into a pamphlet. In May 1917, Trotsky revised the articles, and wrote a new Introduction. This was published as a Bolshevik pamphlet in June of that year. In 1918 an English translation of the pamphlet was published in Petrograd.

The first English translation abroad was an abridged version edited by the veteran US socialist Louis C. Fraina, which appeared in 1919 in the collection The Proletarian Revolution in Russia, by Lenin and Trotsky.

In 1942, the American SWP published a revised translation of Fraina’s edition, taking the final Soviet edition of Trotsky’s writings as their reference point. (It was for this edition of his collected works that the 1922 post-script was written.)

In September 1944, the SWP published a new translation, taken direct from Trotsky’s collected works, and including the sections which Fraina had omitted.

Having consulted the Russian version in the Collected Works, and the 1918 Petrograd translation, we decided that John G. Wright’s 1942 translation was in many respects better than that of 1944, especially in the early sections. We have therefore reproduced the 1942 translation directly from the SWP’s Fourth International of May 1942 (hence the American spellings). To enable the reader to judge the differences between the 1942 and 1944 versions, we have included all the substantive differences between the two, in the form of footnotes, together with explanatory notes for today’s reader. Abridged passages are denoted in square brackets.

We have been unable to check any of the post-1917 versions with the original articles from Nashe Slovo; it is not known how much Trotsky edited the articles prior to their publication as a pamphlet. The version we present here, however, is the best and most complete translation currently available.

Notes

  1. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 18. ↩︎
  2. Ibid. ↩︎
  3. Ibid., p. 163. ↩︎
  4. Ibid., p. 40. ↩︎
  5. Leon Trotsky, War and the International (Colombo, 1971), p. vii. This 1915 pamphlet has only been reprinted once in English since 1918; the 1971 Sri Lankan edition can still be found in some bookshops. ↩︎
  6. Ibid., p. 74. ↩︎
  7. Ibid. ↩︎
  8. Ibid. ↩︎
  9. I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (Oxford, 1970), p. 217. ↩︎
  10. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, pp. 347–8. ↩︎
  11. Trotsky, op. cit., pp. 86–89. ↩︎
  12. Labour Review (London), September 1980, p. 246. ↩︎
  13. Quoted in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 39, p. 383. ↩︎
  14. Ibid., p. 385 (original emphasis). ↩︎
  15. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 33. ↩︎
  16. Ibid. ↩︎
  17. Trotsky, What is a Peace Programme? (Petrograd, 1918). ↩︎
  18. Lenin, op. cit., p. 340. ↩︎
  19. Ibid., p. 341. ↩︎
  20. Ibid., p. 342. ↩︎
  21. Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2 (London, 1953), p. 345. ↩︎
  22. Trotsky, Writings Supplement 1929–33 (New York, 1979), p. 130. ↩︎
  23. Trotsky, Writings 1937–8 (New York, 1976), p. 357. Trotsky never made clear his reason for this change of phrase, but it may reflect his coming to grips with the corruption of much of the experience and slogans of the Russian revolution under Stalin’s rule. For millions of workers, the term ‘soviet’ increasingly did not imply the mass activity of the working class organised into workers’ councils, but the jackboots of Stalin’s secret police crushing workers’ democracy and instituting savage purges. As the chief revolutionary opponent to Stalin’s regime of terror, Trotsky may have sought to reappropriate the legacy of the Russian revolution in its prime, whilst not identifying with its symbolic title of ‘soviet’ when it had degenerated into political counter-revolution. This could therefore have led him to formulating the slogan as ‘the united socialist states’. ↩︎
  24. Deutscher, op. cit., p. 236. See also, for example, Workers Action (London), No. 108, 24 June 1978, p. 6. ↩︎
  25. Trotsky, The Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution (New York, 1977), p. 131. ↩︎
  26. Trotsky, War and the International, p. vii. ↩︎
  27. For a more detailed critique of the degeneration of the Fourth International, see our book, published jointly with the Irish Workers Group, The Death Agony of the Fourth International (London and Dublin, 1983). ↩︎

The Programme of Peace

by Leon Trotsky

The text below is the 1944 Fourth International translation by John G. Wright, sourced from the Marxists Internet Archive. Permanent Revolution no.2 in 1984 actually printed the earlier 1942 translation with the 1944 differences footnoted.

I. What is a programme of peace?

What is a programme of peace? From the viewpoint of the ruling classes or of the parties subservient to them, it is the totality of those demands, the realization of which must be ensured by the power of militarism. Hence, for the realization of Miliukov’s ‘peace programme’ Constantinople must be conquered by force of arms. Vandervelde’s ‘peace programme’ requires the expulsion of the Germans from Belgium as an antecedent condition. From this standpoint the peace clauses merely draw the balance sheet of what has been achieved by force of arms. In other words, the peace programme is the war programme. But that is how matters stood prior to the intervention of the third power, the Socialist International. For the revolutionary proletariat, the peace programme does not mean the demands which national militarism must fulfil, but those demands which the international proletariat intends to impose by its revolutionary struggle against militarism of all countries. The more the world revolutionary movement unfolds, the less do the peace questions depend on the purely military position of the belligerents, the less becomes the danger that peace conditions may be understood by the masses as war aims.

This is rendered most clear to us by the question of the fate of small nations and weak states.

The war began with a devastating invasion of Belgium and Luxembourg by the German armies. In the echo created by the violation of the small country, beside the false and egotistic anger of the ruling classes of the enemy, there reverberated also the genuine indignation of the popular masses whose sympathy was attracted by the fate of a small people, crushed only because they happened to lie between two warring giants.

At that first stage of the war the fate of Belgium attracted attention and sympathy, owing to its extraordinary tragic nature. But thirty-four months of military operations have proved that the Belgian episode constituted only the first step towards the solution of the fundamental problem of the imperialist war, namely, the subjection of the weak by the strong.

Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in ‘regulating’ the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers. The more developed the technique of capitalism, the greater the role played by finance capital, and the higher the demands of militarism, all the more grows the dependency of the small states on the great powers. This process, forming as it does an integral element of imperialist mechanics, flourishes undisturbed also in times of peace by means of state loans, railway and other concessions, military-diplomatic agreements, etc. The war uncovered and accelerated this process by introducing the factor of open violence. The war destroys the last shreds of the ‘independence’ of small states, quite apart from the military outcome of the conflict between the two basic enemy camps.

Belgium still groans under the yoke of German militarism. This, however, is but the visible sanguinary and dramatic expression of the collapse of her independence. The ‘liberation’ of Belgium does not at all confront the Allied governments as an independent task. Both in the further progress of the war and after its conclusion, Belgium will become but a pawn in the great game of the capitalist giants. Failing the intervention of the third power—the revolution—Belgium may as a result of the war remain in German bondage, or fall under the yoke of Great Britain, or be divided between the powerful robbers of the two coalitions.

The same applies to Serbia, whose national energy served as a weight in the imperialist world scales whose fluctuations to one side or the other are least of all influenced by the independent interests of the Serbian people.

The Central Powers drew Turkey and Bulgaria into the whirlpool of the war. Whether both these countries will remain as the southeastern organ of the Austro-German imperialist bloc (‘Central Europe’) or will serve as small change when the balance sheet is drawn up, the fact remains that the war is writing a final chapter of the history of their independence.

Before the outbreak of the Russian revolution, the independence of Persia, which had been terminated in principle by the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907, was most obviously liquidated.

Rumania and Greece furnish us with a sufficiently clear example of how limited a ‘freedom of choice’ is given to small-state firms by the struggle of the imperialist trust companies. Rumania preferred the gesture of an apparently free choice, when she sacrificed her neutrality. Greece tried by means of passive opposition to ‘remain at home.’ As if to show most tangibly the futility of the whole ‘neutralist’ struggle for self-preservation, the whole European war, represented by the armies of Bulgaria, Turkey, France, England, Russia and Italy, shifted on to Greek territory. Freedom of choice comes down at best to a form of self-elimination. In the end, both Rumania and Greece will share the same fate: they will be the stakes in the hands of the great gamblers.

At the other end of Europe, little Portugal deemed it necessary to enter the war on the side of the Allies. Her decision might seem inexplicable if, in the question of participation in the dog fight, Portugal, which is under English protection, had had greater freedom than the government of Tver province or Ireland.

The capitalist summits of Holland and of the three Scandinavian countries are accumulating mountains of gold, thanks to the war. However, these four neutral states of northwestern Europe are the most aware of the illusory character of their ‘sovereignty,’ which, even if it survives the war, will nevertheless be subject to the settlement of the bills advanced by the peace conditions of the Great Powers.

‘Independent’ Poland will be able, in the midst of imperialist Europe, to keep hanging her shingle of independence only by submitting to a slavish financial and military dependence on one of the great groups of the ruling powers.

The extent of the independence of Switzerland clearly appeared in the compulsory and restrictive measures adopted regulating her imports and exports. The representatives of this small federative republic who, cap in hand, go begging at the entrances of the two warring camps, can well understand the limited measure of independence and neutrality possible for a nation which cannot muster several millions of bayonets.

If the war, in consequence of the ever increasing number of combatants and of fronts, has become an equation with many unknowns thus, rendering it impossible for the different governments to formulate the so-called ‘war aims,’ then the small states still have the doubtful advantage that their historical fate may be reckoned as predetermined. No matter which side proves victorious, and however far-reaching the influence of such a victory may be, the fact remains that there can no longer be a return to independence for the small states. Whether Germany or England wins—in either case the question to be determined is who will be the direct master over the small nations. Only charlatans or hopeless simpletons are capable of linking up the question of the freedom of the small peoples with the victory of one side or the other.

Exactly the same result would follow the third and most likely outcome of the war, that is, its ending in a draw. The absence of pronounced preponderance of one of the warring camps over the other will serve only to disclose all the more clearly the preponderance of the strong over the weak within each of the camps, and the preponderance of both over the ‘neutral’ victims of imperialism. The termination of the war without conquerors or conquered is by itself no guarantee for anybody: all small and weak states will none the less be conquered, and the same applies to those who were bled white on the battlefields as to those who tried to escape that fate by hiding in the shadows of neutrality.

The independence of the Belgians, Serbians, Poles, Armenians and others is regarded by us not as part of the Allied war programme (as treated by Guesde, Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Henderson and others), but belongs to the programme of the international proletarian struggle against imperialism.

II. Status quo ante bellum

But the question is: can the proletariat under the present circumstances advance an independent ‘peace programme,’ that is, its own solutions of the problems which caused the current war or which have been disclosed in the course of this war?

We have been told that the proletariat does not now command sufficient forces to bring about the realization of such a programme. Utopian is the hope that the proletariat could realize its own peace programme as a consequence of the present war. Something else again is the struggle for the cessation of the war and for a peace without annexation, i.e. a return to the status quo ante bellum, to the state of affairs prior to the war. This, we are told, is by far the more realistic programme. Such were, for example, the arguments of Martov, Martynov and the Menshevik-Internationalists generally, who hold on this question as on all others not a revolutionary but a conservative position (not a social revolution, but the restoration of the class struggle; not the Third International, but the reestablishment of the Second International; not the revolutionary peace programme, but a return to status quo ante bellum; not the conquest of power by the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, but proffering the power to bourgeois parties…). In what sense, however, may the term realistic be applied to a fight for ending the war and for peace without annexations? That the war must end sooner or later is incontestable. In this anticipatory sense the slogan of ending the war is unquestionably very ‘realistic,’ for it banks on a certainty. But what is it in the revolutionary sense? It may be objected: isn’t it utopian to hope that the European proletariat, with its present forces, will succeed in halting military operations against the will of the ruling classes? Furthermore, we ask: under what circumstances can the end of the war be brought about? Theoretically, three typical possibilities may here be considered:

  1. a decisive victory of one of the belligerent sides;
  2. a general exhaustion of the opponents without a decisive preponderance of one over the other;
  3. the intervention of the revolutionary proletariat, which interrupts the ‘normal’ development of military events.

It is quite obvious that in the first case, if the war is ended by a decisive victory of one side, it would be naive to dream of a peace without annexations. If the Scheidemanns and Landsbergs, the staunch supporters of the work of their militarism, make speeches in parliament in favor of an ‘annexationless’ peace, it is only with the firmest conviction that such protests can hinder no ‘useful’ annexations. On the other hand, one of our former Czarist commanders-in-chief, General Alexeiev, who dubbed the annexationless peace as ‘a utopian phrase,’ concluded quite correctly that the offensive is the chief thing, and that in case of successful war operations everything else would come of itself. In order to wrest annexations from the hands of the victorious side, which is armed to the teeth, the proletariat would naturally require, in addition to its good intentions, a revolutionary force, which it will have to be ready to use openly. In any case, it possesses no ‘economic’ means whatever to compel the victorious side to renounce the advantage of the victory gained.

The second possible outcome of the war, on which those who seek to promote the narrow programme ‘annexationless peace and nothing more’ principally depend, presupposes that the war, exhausting as it does all the resources of the warring nations will, without the revolutionary intervention of the third power, end in general exhaustion—without conquerors or conquered. To this very situation, where militarism is too weak for effecting conquests, and the proletariat for making a revolution, the passive internationalists have adapted their lame programme of ‘annexationless peace,’ which they frequently denote as a return to the status quo ante bellum, i.e., the order of things prior to the war. Here, however, this pseudo-realism lays bare its Achilles heel, for actually a military stalemate, as already shown, does not at all exclude annexations, but on the contrary presupposes them. That neither of the two powerful groups wins does not mean that Serbia, Greece, Belgium, Poland, Persia, Syria, Armenia and others would be left intact. On the contrary, it is precisely at the expense of these third and weakest parties that annexations will in this case be carried out. In order to prevent these reciprocal ‘compensations’ the international proletariat must needs set afoot a direct revolutionary uprising against the ruling classes. Newspaper articles, convention resolutions, parliamentary protests and even public demonstrations have never prevented the rulers from acquiring territories or from oppressing the weak peoples either by way of victory or by means of diplomatic agreements.

As regards the third possible outcome of the war, it seems to be the clearest. It presupposes that while the war is still on, the international proletariat rises with a force sufficient to paralyze and finally to stop the war from below. Obviously, in this most favorable case, the proletariat, having been powerful enough to stop the war, would be least likely to be able or willing to limit itself to that purely conservative programme which goes no further than the renunciation of annexations.

A powerful movement of the proletariat is thus in each case a necessary prerequisite of the actual realization of an annexationless peace. But again, if we assume such a movement, the foregoing programme remains quite miserly in that it acquiesces in the restoration of the order which prevailed prior to the war and which gave birth to the war. The European status quo ante bellum, the product of wars, robberies, violations, legitimism, diplomatic stupidity and impotence of peoples, remains as the only positive content of the slogan ‘without annexations.’

In its struggle against imperialism, the proletariat cannot set up as its political aim the return to the map of old Europe; it must advance its own programme of state and national relations, corresponding to the fundamental tendencies of economic development, corresponding to the revolutionary character of the epoch and the socialist interests of the proletariat.

The isolated slogan ‘without annexations’ gives, first of all, no criterion for a political orientation in the various problems posed by the course of the war. Assuming that France later on occupies Alsace-Lorraine, is the German Social Democracy together with Scheidemann bound to demand the return of these provinces to Germany? Shall we demand the restitution of the kingdom of Poland to Russia? Shall we insist upon Japan’s giving Chio-Chau back to Germany? Or that Italy yield back to its owners that part of Trentino now occupied by her? That would be nonsense! We should be fanatics of legitimacy, i.e., defenders of dynastic and ‘historic’ rights in the spirit of the most reactionary diplomacy. Besides, this ‘programme’ likewise demands a revolution for its fulfilment. In all these enumerated and in other similar cases we, confronted with the concrete reality, shall naturally advance only one principle, namely, consultation of the peoples concerned. This is certainly no absolute criterion. The French ‘socialists’ of the majority reduce the consultation of the population of Alsace-Lorraine to a shameful comedy: first occupying (that is, acquisition by force of arms) and then asking the population’s consent to be annexed. It is quite clear that a real consultation presupposes revolutionary conditions wherein the population can give their reply without being threatened by a revolver, be it German or French.

The only acceptable content of the slogan ‘without annexations’ is thus a protest against new violent acquisitions, which amounts to giving a negative expression to the right of nations to self-determination. But we have seen that this democratically unquestionable ‘right’ is being and will necessarily be transformed into the right of strong nations to make acquisitions and impose oppression, whereas for the weak nations it will mean an impotent wish or a ‘scrap of paper.’ Such will be the case as long as the political map of Europe forces nations and their fractions within the framework of states separated by tariff barriers and continually brought into conflict by the imperialist struggle.

It is possible to overcome this regime only through the proletarian revolution. Thus, the centre of gravity of the question lies in combining the peace programme of the proletariat with that of the social revolution.

III. The right of nations to self-determination

We saw above that Social Democracy, in the solution of concrete questions in the field of the regrouping and new formations of national state groups, can make no step without the principle of national self-determination, which latter in its last instance appears as the recognition of the right of every national group to decide its state fate, hence as the right of peoples to sever themselves from a given state (as for instance from Russia or Austria). The only democratic way of getting to know the ‘will’ of a nation is the referendum. This democratic obligatory reply will, however, in the manner described, remain purely formal. It does not enlighten us with regard to the real possibilities, ways and means of national self-determination under the modern conditions of capitalist economy; and yet the crux of the matter lies precisely in this.

For many, if not for the majority of the oppressed nations, national groups and sections, the meaning of self-determination is the cancellation of the existing borders and the dismemberment of present states. In particular, this democratic principle leads to the emancipation of the colonies. Yet the whole policy of imperialism, regardless of the national principle, aims at the extension of state borders, at the compulsory incorporation of weak states within the customs border, and the acquisition of new colonies. Imperialism is by its very nature both expansive and aggressive and it is this quality that characterizes imperialism, and not the changeable manoeuvres of diplomacy.

From which flows the perennial conflict between the principle of national self-determination, which in many cases leads to state and economic decentralization (dismemberment, separation), and the powerful centralist tendencies of imperialism which has at its disposal the state organization and the military power. True, a national-separatist movement frequently finds support in the imperialist intrigues of a neighboring state. This support, however, can become decisive only through the application of military force. And as soon as matters reach an armed conflict between two imperialist organizations, the new state boundaries will not be decided on the basis of the national principle, but on the basis of the reciprocal relation of military forces. To compel a victorious state to refrain from annexing newly conquered lands is as difficult as to force it to grant the freedom of self-determination to previously acquired provinces. Finally, even if by a miracle Europe were divided by force of arms into fixed national states and small states, the national question would not thereby be in the least decided and, the very next day after the ‘just’ national redistributions, capitalist expansion would resume its work. Conflicts would arise, wars and new acquisitions, in complete violation of the national principle in all cases where its preservation cannot be maintained by a sufficient number of bayonets. It would all give the impression of inveterate gamblers being forced to divide the gold ‘justly’ among themselves in the middle of the game, in order to start the same game all over again with redoubled frenzy.

From the might of the centralist tendencies of imperialism, it does not at all follow that we are obliged passively to submit to it. A national community is the living hearth of culture, as the national language is its living organ, and these will still retain their significance through indefinitely long historical periods. Social Democracy is desirous of safeguarding and is obliged to safeguard to the national community its freedom of development (or dissolution) in the interests of material and spiritual culture. It is in this sense that it has taken over from the revolutionary bourgeoisie the democratic principle of national self-determination as a political obligation.

The right of national self-determination cannot be excluded from the proletarian peace programme; but it cannot claim absolute importance. On the contrary, it is delimited for us by the converging, profoundly progressive tendencies of historical development. If this ‘right’ must be—through revolutionary force—counterposed to the imperialist methods of centralization which enslave weak and backward peoples and crush the hearths of national culture, then on the other hand the proletariat cannot allow the ‘national principle’ to get in the way of the irresistible and deeply progressive tendency of modern economic life towards a planned organization throughout our continent, and further, all over the globe. Imperialism is the capitalist-thievish expression of this tendency of modern economy to tear itself completely away from the idiocy of national narrowness, as it did previously with regard to local and provincial confinement. While fighting against the imperialist form of economic centralization, socialism does not at all take a stand against the particular tendency as such but, on the contrary, makes the tendency its own guiding principle.

From the standpoint of historical development as well as from the point of view of the tasks of Social Democracy, the tendency of modern economy is fundamental, and it must be guaranteed the fullest opportunity of executing its truly liberationist historical mission: to construct the united world economy, independent of national frames, state and tariff barriers, subject only to the peculiarities of the soil and natural resources, to climate and the requirements of division of labor. Poles, Alsatians, Dalmatians, Belgians, Serbians and other small weak European nations not yet annexed, may be reinstated or set up for the first time in the national configurations towards which they gravitate, and, above all, will be able to remain within these configurations and freely develop their cultural existence only to the extent to which as national groupings they will cease to be economic groupings, will not be bound by state borders, will not be separated from or opposed to one another economically. In other words, in order that Poles, Serbians, Rumanians and others will be able actually to form untrammeled national unifications, it is necessary that the state boundaries now splitting them up into parts be cancelled, that the framework of the state be enlarged as an economic but not as a national organization, until it envelops the whole of capitalist Europe, which is now cut asunder by tariffs and borders and torn by war. The state unification of Europe is clearly a prerequisite of self-determination of great and small nations of Europe. A national-cultural existence, free of national economic antagonisms and based on real self-determination, is possible only under the roof of a democratically united Europe freed from state and tariff barriers.

This direct and immediate dependence of national self-determination of weak peoples upon the collective European regime excludes the possibility of the proletariat’s placing questions like the independence of Poland or the uniting of all Serbs outside the European revolution. But, on the other hand, this signifies that the right of self-determination, as a part of the proletarian peace programme, possesses not a ‘utopian’ but a revolutionary character. This consideration is directed to two addresses: against the German Davids and Landsbergs who from the heights of their imperialist ‘realism’ traduce the principle of national independence as reactionary romanticism; and against the simplifiers in our revolutionary camp who proclaim this principle to be realizable only under socialism and who thereby rid themselves of the necessity of giving a principled answer to the national questions which have been posed point-blank by the war.

Between our present social condition and socialism there still lies an extended epoch of social revolution, that is, the epoch of the open proletarian struggle for power, the conquest and application of this power with the aim of the complete democratization of social relations, and the systematic transformation of capitalist society into the socialist society. This is the epoch not of pacification and tranquility but, on the contrary, of the highest intensification of the class struggle, the epoch of popular uprisings, wars, expanding experiments of the proletarian regime, and socialist reforms. This epoch demands of the proletariat that it give a practical, that is, an immediately applicable answer to the question of the further existence of nationalities and their reciprocal relations with the state and the economy.

IV. The United States of Europe

We tried to prove in the foregoing that the economic and political unification of Europe is the necessary prerequisite for the very possibility of national self-determination. Just as the slogan of national independence of Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks and others remains an empty abstraction without the supplementary slogan Federative Balkan Republic, which played such an important role in the whole policy of the Balkan Social Democracy; so on the all-European scale the principle of the ‘right’ to self-determination can be invested with flesh and blood only under the conditions of a European Federative Republic.

But if on the Balkan peninsula the slogan of a democratic federation has become purely proletarian, then this applies all the more to Europe with her incomparably deeper capitalist antagonisms.

To bourgeois politics the destruction of ‘internal’ European customs houses is an insurmountable difficulty; but without this the inter-state courts of arbitration and international law codes will have no firmer duration than, for instance, Belgian neutrality. The urge toward unifying the European market which, like the effort towards the acquisition of non-European backward lands, is caused by the development of capitalism, runs up against the powerful opposition of the landed and capitalist classes, in whose hands the tariff apparatus joined with that of militarism (without which the former means nothing) constitutes an indispensable weapon for exploitation and enrichment.

The Hungarian financial and industrial bourgeoisie is hostile to economic unification with capitalistically more developed Austria. The Austro-Hungarian bourgeoisie is hostile to the idea of a tariff union with more powerful Germany. On the other hand, the German landowners will never willingly consent to the cancellation of grain duties. Furthermore, the economic interests of the propertied classes of the Central Empires cannot be so easily made to coincide with the interests of the English, French, Russian capitalists and landed gentry. The present war speaks eloquently enough on this score. Lastly, the disharmony and irreconcilability of capitalist interests between the Allies themselves is still more visible than in the Central States. Under these circumstances, a halfway complete and consistent economic unification of Europe coming from the top by means of an agreement of the capitalist governments is sheer utopia. Here, the matter can go no further than partial compromises and half-measures. Hence it is that the economic unification of Europe, which offers colossal advantages to producer and consumer alike, and in general to the whole cultural development, becomes the revolutionary task of the European proletariat in its struggle against imperialist protectionism and its instrument—militarism.

The United States of Europe—without monarchies, standing armies and secret diplomacy—is therefore the most important integral part of the proletarian peace programme.

The ideologists and politicians of German imperialism frequently came forward, especially at the beginning of the war, with their programme of a European or at least a Central European ‘United States’ (without France and England on the one side and Russia on the other). The programme of a violent unification of Europe is just as characteristic of the tendencies of German imperialism as is the tendency of French imperialism whose programme is the forcible dismemberment of Germany.

If the German armies achieved the decisive victory reckoned upon in Germany during the first phase of the war, German imperialism would have doubtless made the gigantic attempt of realizing a compulsory military-tariff union of European states, which would be constructed completely of exemptions, compromises, etc., which would reduce to a minimum the progressive meaning of the unification of the European market. Needless to say, under such circumstances no talk would be possible of an autonomy of the nations, thus forcibly joined together as the caricature of the European United States. Certain opponents of the programme of the United States of Europe have used precisely this perspective as an argument that this idea can, under certain conditions, acquire a ‘reactionary’ monarchist-imperialist content. Yet it is precisely this perspective that provides the most graphic testimony in favor of the revolutionary viability of the slogan of the United States of Europe. Let us for a moment grant that German militarism succeeds in actually carrying out the compulsory half-union of Europe, just as Prussian militarism once achieved the half-union of Germany—what would then be the central slogan of the European proletariat? Would it be the dissolution of the forced European coalition and the return of all peoples under the roof of isolated national states? Or the restoration of ‘autonomous’ tariffs, ‘national’ currencies, ‘national’ social legislation, and so forth? Certainly not. The programme of the European revolutionary movement would then be: the destruction of the compulsory anti-democratic form of the coalition, with the preservation and furtherance of its foundations, in the form of complete annihilation of tariff barriers, the unification of legislation, above all of labor laws, etc. In other words, the slogan of the United States of Europe—without monarchies and standing armies—would under the indicated circumstances become the unifying and guiding slogan of the European revolution.

Let us assume the second possibility, namely, an ‘undecided’ issue of the war. At the very beginning of the war, the well-known professor Liszt, an advocate of ‘United Europe,’ argued that should the Germans fail to conquer their opponents, the European unification would nevertheless be accomplished, and in Liszt’s opinion it would be even more complete than in the case of a German victory. By the ever growing need of expansion, the European states, hostile to one another but unable to cope with one another, would continue to hinder each other in the execution of their ‘mission’ in the Near East, Africa and Asia, and they would everywhere be forced back by the United States of North America and by Japan. Precisely in case of a stalemate in the war, in Liszt’s opinion, the indispensability of an economic and military agreement among the European great powers would come to the fore against weak and backward peoples, but above all, of course, against their own working masses. We pointed out above the colossal obstacles that lie in the way of realizing this programme. Even a partial overcoming of these obstacles would mean the establishment of an imperialist trust of European states, a predatory share-holding association. And this perspective is on occasion adduced unjustifiably as proof of the ‘danger’ of the slogan of the United States of Europe, whereas in reality this is the most graphic proof of its realistic and revolutionary significance. If the capitalist states of Europe succeeded in merging into an imperialist trust, this would be a step forward as compared with the existing situation, for it would first of all create a unified, all-European material base for the working class movement. The proletariat would in this case have to fight not for the return to ‘autonomous’ national states, but for the conversion of the imperialist state trust into a European Republican Federation.

However, the further the war progresses and reveals the absolute incapacity of militarism to cope with the questions brought forward by the war, the less is spoken about these great plans for the uniting of Europe at the top. The plan of the imperialist ‘United States of Europe’ has given way to the plans, on the one side, of an economic union of Austria-Germany and on the other side of the quadruple alliance with its war tariffs and duties supplemented with militarism directed against one another. After the foregoing it is needless to enlarge on the great importance which, in the execution of these plans, the policy of the proletariat of both state ‘trusts’ will assume in fighting against the established tariff and military-diplomatic fortifications and for the economic union of Europe.

Now after the so very promising beginning of the Russian revolution, we have every reason to hope that during the course of this present war a powerful revolutionary movement will be launched all over Europe. It is clear that such a movement can succeed and develop and gain victory only as a general European one. Isolated within national borders, it would be doomed to disaster. Our social-patriots point to the danger which threatens the Russian revolution from the side of German militarism. This danger is indubitable, but it is not the only one. English, French, Italian militarism is no less a dreadful enemy of the Russian revolution than the Hohenzollern war machine. The salvation of the Russian revolution lies in its propagation all over Europe. Should the revolutionary movement unfold in Germany, the German proletariat would look for and find a revolutionary echo in the ‘hostile’ countries of the west, and if in one of the European countries the proletariat should snatch the power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie, it would be bound, be it only to retain the power, to place it at once at the service of the revolutionary movement in other countries. In other words, the founding of a stable regime of proletarian dictatorship would be conceivable only if it extended throughout Europe, and consequently in the form of a European Republican Federation. The state-unification of Europe, to be achieved neither by force of arms nor by industrial and diplomatic agreements, would in such a case become the unpostponable task of the triumphant revolutionary proletariat.

The United States of Europe is the slogan of the revolutionary epoch into which we have entered. Whatever turn the war operations may take later on, whatever balance-sheet diplomacy may draw out of the present war, and at whatever tempo the revolutionary movement will progress in the near future, the slogan of the United States of Europe will in all cases retain a colossal meaning as the political formula of the struggle of the European proletariat for power. In this programme is expressed the fact that the national state has outlived itself—as a framework for the development of the productive forces, as a basis for the class struggle, and thereby also as a state form of proletarian dictatorship. Our denial of ‘national defense’, as an outlived political programme for the proletariat, ceases to be a purely negative act of ideological-political self-defense, and acquires all its revolutionary content only in the event that over against the conservative defense of the antiquated national fatherland we place the progressive task, namely the creation of a new, higher ‘fatherland’ of the revolution, of republican Europe, whence the proletariat alone will be enabled to revolutionize and to reorganize the whole world.

Herein, incidentally, lies the answer to those who ask dogmatically: ‘Why the unification of Europe and not of the whole world?’ Europe is not only a geographic term, but a certain economic and cultural-historic community. The European revolution does not have to wait for the revolutions in Asia and Africa nor even in Australia and America. And yet a completely victorious revolution in Russia or England is unthinkable without a revolution in Germany, and vice versa. The present war is called a world war, but even after the intervention of the United States, it is Europe that is the arena of war. And the revolutionary problems confront first of all the European proletariat.

Of course, the United States of Europe will be only one of the two axes of the world organization of economy. The United States of America will constitute the other.

The only concrete historical consideration against the slogan of the United States of Europe was formulated by the Swiss Social Democrat as follows: ‘The unevenness of economic and political development is the unconditional law of capitalism.’ From this the Social Democrat draws the conclusion that the victory of socialism is possible in one country and that it is needless therefore to make the dictatorship of the proletariat in each isolated state conditional upon the creation of the United States of Europe. That the capitalist development of various countries is uneven is quite incontestable. But this unevenness is itself extremely uneven. The capitalist levels of England, Austria, Germany or France are not the same. But as compared with Africa and Asia all these countries represent capitalist ‘Europe,’ which has matured for the socialist revolution. It is profitable and necessary to reiterate the elementary thought that no single country in its struggle has to ‘wait’ for the others, lest the idea of parallel international action be supplanted by the idea of procrastinating international inaction. Without waiting for the others we begin and we continue the struggle on our own national soil in complete certainty that our initiative will provide the impulse for the struggle in other countries; and if this were not so, then it would be hopeless to think—as is borne out both by historical experience and theoretical considerations—that revolutionary Russia, for example, would be able to maintain herself in the face of conservative Europe, or that Socialist Germany could remain isolated in a capitalist world.

To view the perspectives of the social revolution within a national framework is to succumb to the same national narrowness that forms the content of social-patriotism. Vaillant, until the close of his life, regarded France as the chosen country of the social revolution, and precisely in this sense he insisted upon its defense to the end. Lentsch and others, some hypocritically, others sincerely, believed that the defeat of Germany means above all the destruction of the very foundation of the social revolution. Lastly, our Tseretellis and Chernovs who, in our national conditions, have repeated that sorry experiment of French ministerialism, swear that their policy serves the cause of the revolution and therefore has nothing in common with the policy of Guesde and Sembat. Generally speaking, it must not be forgotten that in social-patriotism there is active, in addition to the most vulgar reformism, a national revolutionary messianism, which regards its national state as chosen for introducing to humanity ‘socialism’ or ‘democracy,’ be it on the ground of its industrial development or of its democratic form and revolutionary conquests. (If a completely triumphant revolution were actually conceivable within the limits of a single, better prepared nation, this messianism, bound up with the programme of national defense, would have its relative historical justification. But in reality, it does not have it.) Defending the national basis of the revolution which such methods as undermine the international connections of the proletariat, really amounts to undermining the revolution, which cannot begin otherwise than on the national basis, but which cannot be completed on that basis in view of the present economic and military-political interdependence of the European states, which has never been so forcefully revealed as in this war. The slogan, the United States of Europe, gives expression to this interdependence, which will directly and immediately set the conditions for the concerted action of the European proletariat in the revolution.

Social-patriotism which is in principle, if not always in fact, the execution of social-reformism to the utmost extent and its adaptation to the imperialist epoch, proposes to us in the present world catastrophe to direct the policy of the proletariat along the lines of the ‘lesser evil’ by joining one of the warring groups. We reject this method. We say that the European war, prepared by the entire preceding course of development, has placed point-blank the fundamental problems of modern capitalist development as a whole; furthermore, that the line of direction to be followed by the international proletariat and its national detachments must not be determined by secondary political and national features nor by problematical advantages of military preponderance of either side (whereby these problematical advantages must be paid for in advance with absolute renunciation of the independent policy of the proletariat), but by the fundamental antagonism existing between the international proletariat and the capitalist regime as a whole.

This is the only principled formulation of the question and, by its very essence, it is socialist-revolutionary in character. It alone provides a theoretical and historical justification for the tactic of revolutionary internationalism.

Denying support to the state—not in the name of a propaganda circle but in the name of the most important class in society—in the period of the greatest catastrophe, internationalism does not simply eschew ‘sin’ passively but affirms that the fate of world development is no longer linked for us with the fate of the national state; more than this, that the latter has become a vise for development and must be overcome, that is, replaced by a higher economic-cultural organization on a broader foundation. If the problem of socialism were compatible with the framework of the national state, then it would thereby become compatible with national defense. But the problem of socialism confronts us on the imperialist foundation, that is under conditions in which capitalism itself is forced violently to destroy the national-state frameworks it has itself established.

The imperialist half-unification of Europe might be achieved, as we tried to show, as a result of a decisive victory of one group of the great powers as well as a consequence of an inconclusive outcome of the war. In either instance, the unification of Europe would signify the complete trampling underfoot of the principle of self-determination with respect to all weak nations and the preservation and centralization of all the forces and weapons of European reaction: monarchies, standing armies and secret diplomacy.

The democratic republican unification of Europe, a union really capable of guaranteeing the freedom of national development, is possible only on the road of a revolutionary struggle against militarist, imperialist, dynastic centralism, by means of uprisings in individual countries, with the subsequent merger of these upheavals into a general European revolution. The victorious European revolution, however, no matter how its course in isolated countries may be fashioned can, in consequence of the absence of other revolutionary classes, transfer the power only to the proletariat. Consequently the United States of Europe represents the form—the only conceivable form—of the dictatorship of the European proletariat.

A postscript (1922)

The assertion, repeated several times in the Programme of Peace, to the effect that the proletarian revolution cannot be victoriously consummated within a national framework may perhaps seem to some readers to have been refuted by the five years’ experience of our Soviet Republic. But such a conclusion would be unfounded. The fact that the workers’ state has maintained itself against the entire world in a single and, moreover, backward country testifies to the colossal power of the proletariat, a power which in other more advanced, more civilized countries, will truly be able to achieve miracles. But having defended ourselves as a state in the political and military sense, we have not arrived at, nor even approached socialist society. The struggle for revolutionary-state self-defense resulted in this interval in an extreme decline of productive forces, whereas socialism is conceivable only on the basis of their growth and blossoming. Trade negotiations with bourgeois states, concessions, the Geneva Conference and so on are far too graphic evidence of the impossibility of isolated socialist construction within a national-state framework. So long as the bourgeoisie remains in power in other European states we are compelled, in the struggle against economic isolation, to seek agreements with the capitalist world; at the same time it can be stated with certainty that these agreements, in the best case, will help us heal this or that economic wound, make this or that step forward, but the genuine rise of socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the most important countries of Europe.

That Europe represents not only a geographic but also an economic and political term is graphically evidenced by the events in recent years: the decline of Europe, the growth of the power of the United States, the attempt of Lloyd George to ‘save’ Europe by means of combined imperialist and pacifist methods.

Today the European labor movement is in a period of defensive actions, of gathering forces and making preparations. A new period of open revolutionary battles for power will inexorably push to the fore the question of the state interrelationships among the peoples of revolutionary Europe. To the extent that the experience in Russia has projected the Soviet state as the most natural form of the proletarian dictatorship, and to the extent that the proletarian vanguard of other countries has adopted in principle this state form, we may assume that with the resurgence of the direct struggle for power, the European proletariat will advance the programme of the Federated European Soviet Republic. The experience of Russia in this connection is very instructive. It testifies to the complete compatibility under the proletarian regime of the broadest national and cultural autonomy and economic centralism. In this sense, the slogan of the United States of Europe, translated into the language of the Soviet state, not only preserves all its meaning but still promises to reveal its colossal significance during the impending epoch of the social revolution.

Revolutionary strategy | Imperialism & war | Marxist theory | Theory and debate | First World War | permanent revolution | Trotsky | Zimmerwald

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