27.06.2012
Lenin and the United States of Europe
Jack Conrad takes issue with Robert Griffiths and the attempt to recruit Lenin to the No2EU camp
Supporters of the red-brown ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’ often tried to give themselves a Marxist disguise in an attempt to escape from the barrage of criticism they faced from the internationalist left. During the campaign leading up to June 4 European Union elections, various half-digested ‘theoretical’ snippets and catchphrases were regurgitated to justify No2EU’s programme for withdrawal from the EU and the creation of a Fortress Britain.
Hence on the eve of the election we read Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain and No2EU’s lead candidate in Wales, citing Lenin. He is fielded in order to protect No2EU from those who are committed to using the EU as a “staging post” on the road to a social Europe or a United Socialist States of Europe.1
Of course, Lenin did write a forthright article in August 1915 on the United States of Europe, declaring it either “impossible” or “tantamount to an agreement on the partition of colonies”. Temporary agreements were possible, admitted Lenin, but “only for the purposes of suppressing socialism in Europe”.2 Equipped with this quote, comrade Griffiths feels fully justified in characterising the EU as “an absolute barrier to the struggle for socialism at home”. Because his socialism is implaccably national one can easily appreciate why any steps towards a United States of Europe are regarded with unalloyed horror. And, needless to say, that is exactly how he and others in No2EU regard proposals such as the still unratified Lisbon treaty.
It would, of course, be easy to brush aside such attempts to recruit Lenin’s shade into the No2EU camp - perhaps dismissing what Lenin said in 1915, in the midst of World War I, as having little or no relevance to the situation in Britain nearly a century later. But that would be wrong. We consciously inhabit and draw strength from our movement’s history and achievements in theory.
Even if we think Lenin displayed a one-sidedness, or was simply wrong in 1915, those of us who consider correct theory vital for the success of the workers’ self-liberation movement, especially those who call themselves Marxists, are obliged to approach a thinker and revolutionary politician of Lenin’s stature with the utmost seriousness. Objections and disagreements must be put forward after much thought and in a fully considered manner.
Bolsheviks
Before dealing with Lenin’s 1915 article, ‘On the slogan for a United States of Europe’, it will help if some background is provided. The Stalinite editors of Lenin’s Collected works say that the slogan for a United States of Europe “gained wide currency” during World War I and was promoted by bourgeois politicians and the “Kautskyites, Trotskyites and other opportunists”.3 This is indeed true. By the same measure it is also true that the slogan had a prior life - moreover, the Bolsheviks, under Lenin’s leadership, deployed the slogan as part of their first collective response to the outbreak of inter-imperialist war.
After he managed to get from Krakow in Poland to Berne, and the safety of neutral Switzerland, during August 1914, Lenin drafted a set of theses which were approved by the ad hoc Bolshevik leadership gathered there - Zinoviev, Bukharin, Shilovsky, etc. ‘The tasks of revolutionary social democracy in the European war’ included the demand for the “United States of Europe”.4 This very same formulation was carried over into the manifesto of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party central committee - again drafted by Lenin.
In this manifesto, as before, it was stressed that the slogan for a United States of Europe did not imply the coming together of the existing, monarchical, Europe. The Bolsheviks presented a revolutionary democratic way out of the carnage. Without the “revolutionary overthrow of the German, the Austrian and Russian monarchies” the slogan of a United States of Europe is “absolutely false” and “meaningless”, Lenin explained a short while later.5
The Hohenzollern and Hapsburg monarchies in Germany and Austria were, of course, only half-democratic. Behind the facade of parliament lay autocracy. As to Russia, the tsar’s duma was nothing more than a pathetic fig leaf - Bolshevik deputies who expressed militant opposition to the war found themselves clapped in jail. Exile in Siberia awaited.
Hence the Bolshevik demand: “propaganda for republics in Germany, Poland, Russia, and other countries”; and “transforming of all the separate states of Europe into a republican United States of Europe”.6 Naturally such a “republican United States of Europe” went hand in hand with other key elements in the minimum programme, such as self-determination for Europe’s colonies in Asia and Africa and the oppressed nations languishing in the internal Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.
The Bolshevik slogan for a “republican United State of Europe” did not spring out of thin air. The slogan was part of the common culture of the pre-World War I Second International. A loose parallel might be drawn with the pan-Africanism of the Organisation of African Unity. Before the “winds of change” in the 1960s actually reproduced a series of petty states - and therefore vested bureaucratic interests - within the arbitrarily drawn old French, Belgian and British colonial boundaries, the likes of Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré envisaged a petty bourgeois African socialism stretching from the Cape to Cairo.
Kautsky
I am not sure exactly who originally coined the “republican United States of Europe” slogan. Suffice to say, within the Second International differences over continental unity reflected broad factional alignments and philosophical inclinations. Hence in his The national question and social democracy (1907) the Austro-Marxist, Otto Bauer, writes of “a United States of Europe” in essentially evolutionary terms. It is “not an empty dream”, but the “inevitable end of the road on which the nations set foot long ago”.7
Rosa Luxemburg, Alexander Parvus and others on the far left of the Second International could be cited too. But it seems clear to me that the moving spirit behind the “republican United States of Europe” slogan was Karl Kautsky who was the leading thinker of the Second International’s orthodox Marxist majority (a very wide and porous bloc which included Lenin and all the other editors of Iskra). Eg, in his April 1911 article ‘War and peace’ Kautsky argues in favour of linking anti-militarist propaganda to a United States of Europe. The United States of Europe is thought of as an alliance “with a common trade policy”, a single parliament, a single army, etc.
Not that Kautsky preached pacifism or social reformism. On the contrary, the Kautsky of 1911 is convinced that “a European war is bound by, natural necessity, to end in social revolution”. That is why the most far-sighted sections of the ruling class strive to “preserve peace” and seek measures of “disarmament”. They dread war because it will bring revolution. “War”, considers Kautsky, “is followed by revolution with inevitable certainty”. This is not the result of some devious “social democratic plan”, but “the iron logic of things”.
Industrial capital has given way to finance capital and brought to a halt all progressive measures of general social reform. Capitalism was entering its period of decline. Nevertheless, despite the difficulties of realising the United States of Europe, “efforts to peacefully unite the European states in a federative community” are by no means hopeless. “Its prospects are bound up with those of the revolution,” maintained Kautsky.
Whether revolution arises from “competition in armaments” or from “war” itself - there will in any case be an “international revolution.” Even if revolution “does not arise from reaction against the burden of armaments” or “against the horrors of war” but from other causes, and even if at the outset it is not international, but restricted to a single state, it “cannot remain so for long under present conditions”. The revolution is “bound to spread to other states”. As it does, Kautsky believes that the “United States of Europe” and eventually the “United States of the civilised world” progressively comes into being.8
Switch
Obviously having been content to repeat the “republican United States of Europe” slogan in 1914, Lenin began to rethink. His first objections, in 1915, appear secondary, or nitpickingly technical. He expressed himself keen at the RSDLP’s conference of groups abroad, held in Berne, to put the slogan on hold, “pending a discussion, in the press, of the economic aspect of the matter”. So far, the discussion had been “purely political” - the economic aspect had, by implication, been neglected.9
However, a blistering criticism soon followed. Social Democrat No44 - the Bolshevik central organ - carried Lenin’s article ‘On the slogan for a United States of Europe’. What was Lenin’s argument?
Propaganda backing the republican United States of Europe “expressly emphasised” that the slogan was meaningless “without the revolutionary overthrow of the German, Austrian and Russia monarchies”. Lenin said he did not quarrel with such a presentation of the question “within the limits of a political appraisal”. In other words, Lenin rejected the charge that the republican United States of Europe slogan “obscures or weakens” the “slogan of a socialist revolution”.
To counterpose democracy and socialism is to fall head-first into economism - still dominant on the left in today’s Britain. “Political changes of a truly democratic nature”, especially a political revolution, “can under no circumstances whatsoever either obscure or weaken the slogan of a socialist revolution”. Quite the reverse. In Lenin’s opinion, they always bring it closer, extend its basis and draw in petty bourgeois and semi-proletarian masses into the struggle for socialism.
The “republican United States of Europe” slogan - if accompanied by demands for the revolutionary overthrow of the most reactionary monarchies - is “quite invulnerable as a political slogan”. However, there still remains, argued Lenin, the “highly important question of its economic content and significance.” From the angle of the economic conditions of imperialism - the export of capital and the division of the world by the leading powers - a United States of Europe “is either impossible or reactionary.”
Britain, France, Russia and Germany controlled vast tracts of the planet either directly in the form of colonies and dominions or indirectly in the form of semi-colonies. These powers (bar Russia) also exported capital in huge sums so as to exploit the world and extract super-profits - from which elite state officials, high clergymen and “other leeches” gain their fat sinecures.
That system of plundering the majority of the world’s population by a handful of great powers represented the highest stage of capitalism. Britain, Germany, France and Russia could no more renounce their colonies and spheres of influence than they could the export of capital, argued Lenin.
Following this line of reasoning, Lenin insisted that a United States of Europe under capitalism must be tantamount to an “agreement on the partition of colonies”. Furthermore such an agreement between the great powers is itself impossible except by way of a trial of strength. And that in plain language means war. Germany was growing economically four times faster than Britain and France. As to Japan, its economic growth was 10 times more rapid than Russia’s. Hence the redivisionist inter-imperialist contest and its attendant slaughter.
So temporary arrangements were possible, conceded Lenin. In that sense a United States of Europe is possible “as an agreement between the European capitalists”. But to what end? Only for the purpose of “suppressing socialism in Europe” and jointly “protecting colonial booty” against Japan and the United States: ie, denying their ‘fair’ share of colonies.
Compared to the USA, the United States of Europe “denotes economic stagnation” and signifies the organisation of reaction. Under capitalism a United States of Europe would retard the more rapid economic development of the USA. Lenin also wanted to strike a blow against the Eurocentric prejudices that frequently passed for common sense in the Second International: “The times when the cause of democracy and socialism was associated only with Europe have gone for ever,” he announced. Lenin concluded on the basis of the above arguments that the slogan for a United States of Europe “is an erroneous one”.10
Lenin elaborated upon the economic argument against the United States of Europe in his Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism. Much of the raw material for this pamphlet came from Imperialism (1902), a weighty socio-political study written by the British liberal anti-imperialist, John Atkinson Hobson.
Hence we find Hobson approvingly quoted by Lenin when he warns that imperialism - the conquest of colonies and the export of capital on a huge scale - carried the risk that western Europe would end up like the south east of England, the Riviera or the “tourist-ridden” or residential parts of Italy and Switzerland - “little clusters of wealthy aristocrats drawing dividends and pensions from the far east”, surrounded by professional retainers and tradesmen, personal servants and workers in the transport trade with all the real work done in Asia and Africa.
Hobson specifically held out the danger of an “alliance of western states, a European federation of great powers which, far from advancing the cause of world civilisation, might introduce the gigantic peril of a western parasitism”. Hobson admitted that the “situation is far too complex, the play of world forces far too incalculable, to render this or any other single interpretation of the future very probable”. But the influences which govern the imperialism of western Europe today are “moving in this direction” and, unless “counteracted or diverted”, point towards some such “consummation”.
Lenin enthusiastically concurs. “The author is quite right: if the forces of imperialism had not been counteracted they would have led precisely to what he has described. The significance of a ‘United States of Europe’ in the present imperialist situation is correctly appraised”.11
So what is Lenin’s own political perspective? Essentially it lay in making revolution in one’s own country. Not in some messianic, nationalistic fashion, but as the beginning of a process that can only be completed on a global scale.
Not surprisingly Lenin argued against the United States of the World as an immediate demand. Such a state form belongs in the maximum programme. So it would be wrong for two reasons. Firstly, it merges with socialism. Secondly, it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the “victory of socialism in a single country is impossible”. Clearly a contradictory argument.
This second point, however, was squarely directed against Leon Trotsky, who as his sympathetic biographer, Isaac Deutscher, says, had “seemed to imply that revolution could break out in Russia only simultaneously with a European upheaval”.12 Trotsky, as I showed in my little book Remaking Europe, vehemently denied the charge and defended the slogan of a United States of Europe throughout World War I ... and beyond.
Lenin feared that if erected into a rigid, self-fulfilling prophesy such an insistence on a simultaneous European revolution could excuse revolutionary fatalism and breed passivity. “Uneven development,” states Lenin, “is an absolute law of capitalism.” Hence the “victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone.”
After expropriating the capitalists and organising its own socialist production the victorious proletariat of that country would “rise against the rest of the world” and attract to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries. The use of revolutionary war in the manner of France 1792-1802 in order to spread the flame of liberation is not ruled out. “A free union of nations in socialism is impossible without a more or less prolonged and stubborn struggle of the socialist republics against the backward states.” Finally, Lenin once again stresses, the “democratic republic” will be the “political form” of the dictatorship (rule) of the proletariat and the oppressed classes.
Socialism in one country
This argument on the possibility of a victory in one country is, of course, now famous - infamous. Having discovered it nearly 10 years later, Stalin went on, in 1924, to use the very passage quoted above in order to justify his theory of socialism in one country against what he dubbed Trotsky’s “theory of the simultaneous victory of socialism in the principal countries of Europe”.13
It has to be admitted that Lenin’s formulation is open to such a nationalist interpretation - if one shamelessly ignores the corpus of his writings, which take for granted the necessity of socialism being international. Evidently on that basis what Lenin meant - and here Trotsky agreed - was that in all probability the proletariat of one country would seize state power ahead of others and might have to survive in isolation for a short period of time before revolutions arose elsewhere. No country should wait for others. Revolutionary initiatives in one country take forward the struggle in others. But in the face of a counterrevolutionary Europe revolutionary Russia could only but succumb or turn into its opposite.
Nevertheless in ‘On the slogan for a United States of Europe’ Lenin is hardly at his best. Leave aside the sloppiness around the “victory” of socialism in one county, Lenin rests the whole weight of his case against the republican United States of Europe on a rigid conceptual separation between the political and the economic. Politically he says it is a good slogan. Economically bad. True, capitalism has put in place such a structural separation between the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ spheres. It is though, argues the academic Marxist Ellen Meiksins Wood, “the most effective defence mechanism available to capital”.14
Previous modes of production - such as feudalism and Asiatic despotism - are completely bound up with political force. State unit and economic unit are often indistinguishable. The position of exploiter is typically inseparable from their political (military) power and consequent place in the hierarchy. Surplus is extracted from the direct producer either by custom, backed by might, or simply obtained through employing naked military force. The exploiter has nothing or very little to do with production itself or even supervising production.
It is capitalism which creates a separate sphere of economics by discarding the former extra-economic means of exploitation - conventional labour duties, tithes, royal tribute. Social obligations and functions are repudiated too. The business of the capitalist is business.
The extraction of surplus value can in principle be achieved through purely ‘economic’ mechanisms. Private property becomes absolute. Having been ‘freed’ from the means of production, workers must sell their ability to labour to the capitalist - who now monopolises the means of production. So, although the coercive force of the political sphere is still necessary in order to stand guard over property and the general conditions of production and reproduction, the inescapable need to gain a living provides, in normal circumstances, all that is required to persuade the worker to make themselves available for exploitation. Marx called it ‘commodity fetishism’.
That is precisely why the capitalist market is a political as well as an economic space. By taking up the struggle for democracy and giving it a definite social content, the working class thereby begins to challenge not only the state, but the conditions of its own exploitation. As a rule Lenin experienced no problem whatsoever in recognising this elementary Marxist proposition. Hence for him the task of Marxist educators was to lay bare the economics in politics and the politics in economics.
Self-determination
In that light Lenin’s numerous writings on the right of nations to self-determination oddly contrast with his rejection of the republican United States of Europe as either being “impossible” or “reactionary”. Leftist critics - eg, Luxemburg, Bukharin and Pyatakov - maintained almost exactly the same thing. The “self-determination” of small nations under conditions of imperialist capitalism was either a “reactionary utopia” or “impossible”. “So long as capitalist states exist,” writes Luxemburg in her Junius pamphlet, “there can be no ‘national self-determination’ either in war or in peace.”15
On the contrary, Lenin replied, the demand was perfectly feasible. He used Norway’s separation from Sweden in 1905 as proof. Furthermore, he insisted, if they were to achieve anything serious, not least socialism, Marxists must champion the rights of oppressed nations, especially against the great powers. Not to do so is to abandon the fight for socialism.
Self-determination is a demand for the equality of rights between nations. No serious Marxist imagines that the right to self-determination is limited to oppressed nations alone. There is no need, for example, to get into a complete tangle about whether or not, say, Scotland is, or is not, an oppressed nation. The right to self-determination is nowadays exercised by all advanced capitalist powers, certainly to the degree real measures of democracy have been won from below. Marxists merely demand that that same right be extended to all nations. The bottom line must be the right to secede. Those who do not stand by this right are condemned by Lenin as chauvinists. However self-determination does not mean that Marxists are obliged to advocate the nation-state let alone endless breakaways and the establishment of a multitude of dwarf states. Lenin touches upon this in ‘Socialism and war’ - the pamphlet he and Zinoviev jointly wrote in 1915:
“The championing of this right”, the right to self-determination, “far from encouraging the formation of petty states, leads on the contrary, to freer, fearless and therefore wider and more universal formation of large states and the federation of states”. The authors insist that such states “are an advantage” to the masses and that workers, in the oppressed nation, must “unfailingly” fight for the “complete” unity of the workers of the oppressed and oppressor nationalities, “including organisational unity”16 - Alan McCombes, Tommy Sheridan, Colin Fox and other comrades in Scotland might care to take note.
It is one thing to oppose a United States of Europe brought about by emporers, imperial bureaucrats, conservative ministers, high commands and military conquests. But there is no need to conflate that with the republican United States of Europe won through revolution and completed by the voluntary agreement of the peoples. If there is a general right to freely merge into larger and larger state units and federations, surely that applies as much to Europe - which its overripe for working class rule and has long established mutual economic and cultural ties - as it does with every other corner of the world.
Motives
So why did Lenin perform an 180-degree about-turn between 1914 and 1915 on the “republican United States of Europe” slogan? Undoubtedly there were numerous reasons, including, I suspect, psychological factors, besides those of economic analysis, political programme and factional calculation.
But let us begin with the obvious. There existed many out-and-out reactionary advocates of a United States of Europe. Germany was not untypical. Here such people ranged from ambitious university professors and influential figures in the imperial high command to social chauvinist intellectuals. A modern-day version of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire appealed to those beguiled by romantic national history or in thrall to Prussian state worship. Bayonets, artillery bombardments, poison gas and brutal invasion were, though, the methods they excused, or directly oversaw, in order to achieve their chosen ends. Unity brought about in such a way could only but multiply existing social oppression and national grievances many times over. Their Europe was to be born swaddled in chains.
German military strategy, in the words of Friedrich von Bernhardi, a junker general, writing in his 1912 bestseller, had a national mission to finally settle scores with France in the west and expand territorially deep into tsarist Russia in the east. After the crushing victory continental power would be consolidated through a “Central European Federation” - with at its core a Greater Germany, incorporating Austria, Holland, South Prussia, etc.17 From this Fortress Europe Germany proudly steps forth - fulfilling its god-given destiny - as the world’s leader. The narrow-mindedly commercial Anglo-Saxon powers, Great Britain and the US, are henceforth reduced to a more fitting place in the global pecking-order.
In good measure the German ruling classes turned to imperialism in an attempt to put off socialism. The Social Democratic Party achieved remarkable electoral successes after Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws were lifted. The 1912 election in particular “frightened all the forces of the establishment”, notes US historian Paul Kennedy. The results, which were a “stunning victory” for the SDP, provoked pan-German calls from big industrial capital, the great landowners and Lutheran newspaper-owners for a “coup d’etat from above”. Plans to curb the Reichstag’s already severely limited powers were certainly given a more than sympathetic hearing “in court and army circles”.18
However, German socialism was far from united and far from single-mindedly revolutionary. Imperial plans for German world domination were complemented and given succour by rightwing social democrats such as Gerhard Hildebrand. This socialist empire-builder had, even before the outbreak of war in August 1914, vigorously promoted the idea of a “United States of Western Europe” (he excluded Russia); it would be fronted, of course, by Germany. His united Europe would fend off the “great Islamic movement” rising in Asia and teach the “African negroes” the virtues of hard work and industry. The “African people require guidance and care”, he tenderly argued, “for an indefinite time to come”.19
The August Babel-Karl Kautsky leadership quite rightly expelled him from the party. Yet with the declaration of war Hildebrandism - to use a phrase - almost instantly infected the majority of the SPD’s parliamentary fraction. Rosa Luxemburg, half in mourning and half in defiance, described the SPD as a “stinking corpse”.
Other equally disgusting personifications of the social chauvinist contagion can be cited from Russia, France and Britain: Charles Longuet, Jules Guesde, Edouard-Marie Vaillant, Victor Chernov, Georgi Plekhanov, Henry Hyndman, Philip Snowden, etc. Meanwhile Lenin sifted through a vast mass of books, journals and papers in the meticulously ordered libraries of Switzerland to find the political ammunition he needed in order not only to expose the predatory war aims of the belligerent powers, but to polemically demolish rightwing social democracy. Suffice to say, the views of Hildebrand, and his ilk, on their united Europe were useful for “understanding the tendencies of opportunism and imperialism within social democracy!”20
Besides the united Europe advocated by the emporers, ministers, generals and the social chauvinists, there were, however, other plans for a united Europe - crucially those still emanating from former comrades who Lenin now scornfully referred to as the Kautskyites. Lenin was determined to draw a clear line of demarcation that would completely separate off the Bolsheviks and the principled internationalist left from the Kautskyite renegades.
To avoid a split, Kautsky, for example, refused to condemn the SPD majority when under its rightwing leadership the entire Reichstag fraction voted to finance the war. Though not an MP he attended the meetings of its parliamentary fraction (Kautsky thought the war would soon be over and unsuccessfully urged an abstention). Only in June 1915 did he, Eduard Bernstein and Hugo Hasse issue an appeal which condemned the pro-war majority and the annexationist plans of imperial Germany. However, this went hand in hand with pleas for social peace in Germany while the war lasted.
Nevertheless, Kautsky alibied the right by holding out the prospect of re-cementing party unity with them once the war finally finished. Indeed in 1920, along with the minority faction of the Independent Social Democratic Party, he did rejoin the SDP. From now on he was prisoner of the right. His influence in Germany and internationally rapidly diminished.
Obviously, in doing all of this Kautsky betrayed himself and, of course, the great cause of socialism. What made him a particularly dangerous, though, was not only his past reputation as an outstanding Marxist theoretician. It was the fact that throughout World War I he continued to be regarded as an authoritative Marxist.
His centrist stance was not isolated to Germany. Far from it. Every country had its equivalent and, whether they stood on the right of that spectrum or on the extreme left, what marked them out for Lenin was their unwillingness to countenance an irrevocable political and organisational schism with the social chauvinists and those who defended them. In Russia this amorphous, unstable and ever-shifting centrist swamp included Jules Martov - the Menshevik Internationalist leader who would, in 1918, gain an overall majority in the Menshevik Party - and so-called independents, most notably Trotsky.
Demarcation
Here, I think, we must bring into our account psychological as well as factional considerations. The relationship between Kautsky and Lenin before 1914 might be described as that of star pupil to learned teacher. Lenin expressed his disagreement with Kautsky on this or that episodic issue. However, he considered Kautsky the worthy intellectual leader of the Second International and sought whereever possible to secure such invaluable support in the inner-party struggle against the Mensheviks. Kautsky often wrote about Russian affairs and in general sided with the Bolsheviks - eg, over the worker-peasant nature of the Russian Revolution, election tactics and combining insurrection with general strike in 1905.
Kautsky’s miserable collapse in 1914 hit Lenin like a bolt from the blue. He could hardly believe the news when it came. Undoubtedly he felt emotionally betrayed, personally deserted and was full of hurt. Nevertheless he quickly fought back, hurling invective against Kautsky for all he was worth. The strategic goal, in Lenin’s mind, was though, a complete and absolute rupture with such centrists, as well as the social chauvinists. The Bolsheviks intransigently raised the call for a Third International and turning the inter-imperialist war into a civil war of social liberation. To begin with, they made little headway. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, writes amusingly of the situation of the left when anti-war socialists gathered at the sleepy Swiss village of Zimmerwald in September 1915. Out of the 38 delegates its ‘revolutionary civil war’ left, she writes, consisted of the “Dutch left plus ourselves, plus the German left, plus nought”.21
The general mood internationally - as revealed by the anti-war socialist conferences in London, Berne and Zimmerwald - was for arriving at a broad consensus around inoffensive slogans such as “peace” and harmless resolutions pointing out the errors of social chauvinism.
It was in this context of murderous world war and continued conciliation with centrist and rightwing traitors that Lenin turned against the “republican United States of Europe” slogan. Lenin decided to associate the slogan with Kautsky and those who refused to break with the right. It became intertwined with Lenin’s undeniably correct campaign to draw the clearest lines of demarcation.
Surely, however, he overcompensated and drew a line that was far too narrow and defensive on this occasion. In so doing he gave away a highly serviceable political weapon. Post-1914 Kautsky might have come to give the slogan a “pacifist reading”. But, if the slogan was supplemented with the call for revolutionary civil war throughout Europe and other key planks in the minimum programme, such as self-determination for the colonies and oppressed nations, then, yes, even in the darkest days of World War I, it carries a powerful message.
Workers in Europe share a common democratic and Marxist heritage, are a clear majority, highly organised and, if united together, will surely make a key contribution towards the world revolution.