Yesterday’s socialism in the face of today’s war Pt.3

III.

The previous considerations are of a very general nature, it will be said, and events would have affected them. Let us see how and why. Those socialists who are for Italy’s intervention in favour of the Triple Entente say that it represents democracy against absolutism and militarism (?) and that its victory will ensure the resolution of the famous national problems. Faced with such a decisive moment in history, the Italian Socialist Party should leave abstract dissertations behind and advocate armed intervention by the Italian State.

The case of the defensive war is therefore not there, since it is proposed to intervene, i.e. to attack. The other two motivations remain: war of nationality and war of democracy.

According to this current assessment, Germany, still a semi‑feudal State, dominated by militarist cliques and an emperor who dreams of world hegemony, would have attacked France and Russia with a long‑prepared plan, dragging Austria along with it and finding the pretext in the Sarajevo bombing to spark off the Slav‑German quarrel. England is said to have intervened, moved by the violation of Belgian neutrality, and the current aim of the Triple Entente powers is said to be to weaken Germanic arrogance in order to solve nationality problems, ensure the triumph of democracy over militarism, and – according to a certain subversive committee in Rome – even to provide the peoples with an advance on socialism in the form of a system of labour and social justice (?!). Now this exposition of the present moment, which should make us advocates of war, and would like to be the ultimate expression of the most enlightened objectivity, is as partial as ever; it is the derivation of an infinity of prejudices and sentimentalisms, it strains reality within a conventional framework, while pretending to mock the position of those socialists who do not waver under the flood of rhetoric, accusing them of wanting to close the immense rhythm of history in a few preconceived formulas…

One should at least, before passing judgment, hear the other bell. According to the Germans, and according to the common opinion of the neutrals who sympathise with them, this is purely reversed. Modern, industrial Germany, rich in the forces of commercial expansion second to none in the fields of science and culture, reacts against the danger of Russian absolutism, which wants to suffocate it under the pressure of the Slavic masses, incited under hand by England, which sees a new rival growing on the seas. Germany defends itself and makes a barrier against the spread of tsarism… Heresies? Yes, heresies one as much as the other, as each State is totally uninterested in democracy spreading and socialism hastening… But every State has an interest and needs, in order to ward off internal turmoil, to deceive the people by presenting war as the only way to save the fatherland from danger, and by claiming to be drawn into it.

On the causes of the war we shall not discuss at length. Everyone had been preparing for it for decades. Emperor Wilhelm’s ravings were matched by the monstrous Franco-Russian alliance, the warmongering toasts of Mr Poincaré, and the struggle of the French bourgeoisie to obtain the three‑year truce.

England’s philanthropic policy was accused of hypocrisy by Keir Hardie in the middle of the House of Commons after the outbreak of war. Russian socialists abandoned the Duma in protest against the Tsar’s warmongering declarations. The Germans, Austrians and French were unanimous for war. Everyone is convinced that they are fighting for a cause of justice. All are victims of national colour-blindness.

To say that today’s Germany is feudal is a huge exaggeration. If certain political forms have not evolved, this does not entitle one to discredit the astonishing social-economic development of Germany in the last generation.

There is, around the emperor, an agrarian aristocracy. There are courtly forms, remnants of other times. There is the high prestige of the army. But then, pray tell, what of the English agrarian aristocracy that surrounds its king, making the Middle Ages survive in the whirlwind of modern English life? What about French fanaticism for the armée?

And how to erase from the rose‑tinted picture the great black stain of Russian despotism?

In Prussia there is restricted suffrage: but the multiple vote in Belgium does not detract from the fact that today it is ranked at the pinnacle of democracy just because it has been invaded. But, by silly convention, if one speaks of Germany, one alludes to the Germany of the Kaiser; if of France, one says “The France of ’89 and the Commune”; if of Russia, “Revolutionary Russia of 1905”. Eh off, that’s a bit much! Do they not, by any chance, remember the Germany of reform and Marxism, autocratic and libertarian Russia, plutocratic England and France whose coffers dripped with human blood…?

But apart from this labyrinth of observations and reminiscences accessible to every grammar school pupil, the undeniable fact remains, from the socialist point of view, that there is no antithesis between militarism and democracy, and that Germany’s military preparedness is in relation to its modern industrial development and not to traditions of other times. Militarism is international.

On the other hand, only the naive can believe that the Triple Entente States fight for the… “United States of Europe” and to re‑establish nationalities within their borders. Already the upper classes of France and England dream of the partition of Germany – let alone Austria! – and, just as the Kaiser yearned for the march on Paris, so the Tsar is eager to pour his exterminated army into Berlin. There is no place but for violence and no desire other than the annihilation of the enemy. The peoples are the instrument of this like the powder or lead of bullets. Cabinets and staffs study the offence without sparing human material. But fleet units are spared, which cost millions and would not be rebuilt until years and years later… In the margin of the monstrous tragedy, the Sudekums and the Hervés reconcile the bestial State egoism of monarchies and republics with the supreme principles of democracy and the International. They are merely prisoners of situations stronger than themselves. Speech is to the cannon and authority is to the sword; the law of the people appears in the pages of the Social War or the Arbeiterzeitung, more or less bad faith accomplices of proletarian deception, but on the battlefields the law without canons, the law of the strongest, holds sway; there is no holds barred.

Is it, as some say, the old race rivalry that survives and returns to force us to rectify the plans and ways of the International? Does history demolish the old Marxian Manifesto? No. Those pages dictated in 1848, when ethnic and national claims were raging, are even truer today. Where are the races and nationalities? In many armies they always fight under the same final unity of State militarisms. Few socialists have refused to fight. True. But how many men belonging to oppressed races and nationalities have refused the rifle that was supposed to defend the oppressor? What irredeemed land rose up?

Every conscience and every sense of freedom and human pride have had to bend under the yoke of this most modern tyranny. There is nothing left but soldiers. Soldiers do not know why they fight: they must fight. They will know, later, the infamous futility of sacrifice. The conditions of the immense conflict are little changed today. But no advantage can compensate for the enormous waste of human life and wealth. We ourselves, convinced revolutionaries, could not wish for a proletarian redemption that would cost the lives of half of the oppressed insurgents in arms. Life is the supreme good. And yet, many revolutionaries who are today for war arm themselves with pacifism!

And many are today for the war, reformists and democrats, who denied to the holy cause of socialism the lives of a few proletarians who fell in the field of class struggle and would today like to sacrifice thousands in an action that, even if it would lead us to greater freedom, would always be the most strangely indirect way to achieve it.

From war, however, we only await the exaltation of militarism. After such an example, democrats, republicans, reformists will cross the Rubicon and be the allies of the war preparations of nations. The great military State units will hardly be broken up and we will have to reactivate the most difficult – but perhaps most bitter and decisive – class struggle.

Intervention?

But let us come to the socialist proponents of Italian intervention. Their thesis of the need to ensure the victory of the Triple Entente has nothing to do with socialism. The possible lesser evil that would result from such a solution to the conflict is no match with the socialist advantage of standing up to the warmongering tide, at least in a large State, and even if profiting from special circumstances. And, granted this incurable Francophilie, granted their strange conception of war (just asking these socialists which war they will oppose if they are in favour of an Italian intervention without necessity and without provocation) let us look a little at the extent of their insane warmongering propaganda. That volunteers are leaving we understand; as well as people who are still convinced that the destinies of the world are decided by slaughtering workers under the uniform of the Ulan.

But, after all, they put their skins at stake. And they must be respected despite the clearly established practical futility of their gesture. However, we observe how difficult it is to obtain for direct socialist action a sacrifice even far less than that of one’s own life, and we wonder if instead of cases of conscious heroism we do not witness the intoxicating hypnotism of blood. However, we have no words against the criminal advocates of State intervention. To wish that those who will or will not be dragged to the frontier and exposed to machine‑gun fire, that the Austrophobic or Austrophile youth, and perhaps indifferent because they are too busy with the daily torment of their homeland’s misery, should go to the slaughter without question, that is insane, anti‑socialist and inhuman. To unleash the vile values of State militarism, to renounce party or class autonomy in order to entrust every directive to that military authority that we have always dreamed of flattening and destroying, from free pioneers of the Revolution to become His Majesty’s praetorians, ah no, even if just and holy were the cause for which Italy would go to war; which it is not.

Pacifism? No. We are advocates of violence. We are admirers of the conscious violence of those who rise up against the oppression of the strongest, or the anonymous violence of the masses who revolt for freedom. We want the effort that breaks the chains. But the legal, official, disciplined violence at the whim of an authority, the unreasonable collective murder that the ranks of soldiers carry out automatically at the echo of a brief command, when from the opposite side no less automatically come the other masses of victims and murderers dressed in another tunic, this violence that wolves and hyenas do not have, disgusts and repulses us. The application of this military violence to the masses of millions of men removed from the remotest corners of the States, in the tremendous alternatives of this war, can have no other effect than to bruise and suffocate that spirit of sacrifice and heroism to which we may tomorrow call the champions of proletarian insurrection – and which is quite different from the bestial tendency to destroy, to kill as long as possible, with eyes veiled in smoke and blood.

We pacifists? We know that in times of peace the victims of the current unjust regime do not cease to fall. We know that workers’ children are mowed down by death for lack of bread and light, that work has its share of violent deaths like battle, and that misery makes, like war, its massacres.

And in the face of this, it is not the supine Christian resignation that we propose, but the response with open violence to that hypocritical and concealed violence that is the foundation of today’s society. But the sacred violence of rebellion, if it is not to be a guilty sacrifice, must strike just and hit the real target. Well dead were the thousands of communards who fell under the lead of the Versaillaises. But to send a million men to the slaughter in the name of revolution, handing them over to today’s rulers to be engaged in an enterprise of uncertain success, which finds its reasons in a questionable and bolshy unconscious and contradictory rhetoric, is not justified by claiming to be immune to pacifist tenderness, no, by golly, it is the insane work of mad butchers.

And against it we stand our ground, for socialism, anti‑militarists tomorrow as yesterday and as today, because we wish for the sacrifice of our lives, when necessary, a very different DIRECTION.