Showing posts with label The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

V.I. Lenin- The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War

Vladimir I. Lenin - The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War.
Published in Sotsial-Demorkrat No. 43, July 26, 1915.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1974], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 275-280
Republished from Marxists Internet Archives.

During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.

This is axiomatic, and disputed only by conscious partisans or helpless satellites of the social-chauvinists. Among the former, for instance, is Semkovsky of the Organising Committee (No. 2 of its Izvestia), and among the latter, Trotsky and Bukvoyed,[2] and Kautsky in Germany. To desire Russia’s defeat, Trotsky writes, is “an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation—highly arbitrary in the present conditions—towards the lesser evil” (Nashe Slovo No. 105).