The third installment in a series exploring Second International (1889-1914) radicals.
The war in Ukraine has commanded the attention of almost everyone during the past few weeks and will probably continue to do so. But there is very little attempt at making sense of the issue. It’s not quite as clear-cut as Right, Left, or Center would make it out to be. To see why, let us examine the anti-war Marxism of an old Dutch priest turned radical socialist, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. His call to make “war on war” marked him out as an early revolutionary defeatist of the 2nd International (1889-1914), even if his anti-party views would ultimately cast him into obscurity once World War I arrived.1 Comparing his position with that of various influential Leftists in today’s Ukraine debate is striking and will hopefully reveal the urgent need to dig deeper into the past to recover our collective ability to dream of and fight for a better future.
Nieuwenhuis’ Revolutionary Defeatism
Long before the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s anti-war position (the only thing that temporarily could reunite Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), Eugene Debs’ imprisonment for publicly refusing to fight in WWI, or even Rosa Luxemburg’s courageous but ultimately unsuccessful Spartacist uprising, Ferdinand Nieuwenhuis consistently called for the Left to actively thwart the possibility of a world war. He would bring it up in every international socialist conference, much to the annoyance of several other members and delegations. But Nieuwenhuis’ anti-war sentiments were no paltry Christian pacifism. Rather, they burned bright with the fire of revolutionary defeatism, a specifically Marxist orientation toward war.
Such an orientation had two strategic goals designed to turn the opportunity of a large-scale war among the world’s largest capitalists and corporations into the first assault of the global dictatorship of the proletariat. On one hand, this vision called for a general strike in wartime. No more munitions, supplies, food, or anything else destined for the battlefield would be produced by the workers back home. This would severely undermine each belligerent’s ability to carry on the fighting. On the other hand, it also realized that a citizens’ militia would not be sufficient for an uprising against modern Bonapartist states with their large standing armies equipped with efficient killing technology. So, a significant part of the armed forces would have to be enticed to rebel against the officers and join their civilian siblings in seizing the moment for a true proletarian uprising.
This vision proceeded from a firm understanding of what it would take to actually achieve the goals that the 2nd International professed. Nieuwenhuis knew the Left couldn’t just sit on the sidelines of any impending war and watch with fancy slogans and high-minded morals while its own supporters were drafted or enlisted to fight other proletarians of other nationalities. Rather, he thought, before any outbreak of war, the Left ought to agitate among the workers preparing them for all the machinations their governments would employ to entice them to fight. If that wasn’t enough, then the Left should prepare itself to engage in counter-warfare and channel the population’s war-weariness into an all-out popular mobilization for socialism.
Let’s see some examples from one of Nieuwenhuis’ more famous speeches, “What Does the Refusal of Military Service Mean?”. For one thing, he expresses no illusions about what kind of struggle is needed to inaugurate the dictatorship of the proletariat:
The intent is that people finally stop producing phrases and nice statements about aversion to war because that doesn’t help anyone. One does not stop cannonballs with paper protests and if one does not use force, it only makes the rulers smile.
In discussing the possibility and necessity of workers staying at home and refusing to comply with conscription orders, Nieuwenhuis reveals the classic Marxist take on the class struggle: that its highest form will be that of a civil war in which the last artificial bonds of national fraternity are ripped asunder and the proletariat will finally confront its most dangerous enemy, its ‘own’ bourgeoisie, who has been posing as its caretaker and benefactor this whole time:
The goal is, as such, to prevent mobilization on both sides. What will they do with these refusers? Will they arrest and imprison them? But who would do that? Would the local police take charge of that? But they are entirely powerless. So few men couldn’t do anything to ten refusers. Where would they lock them up? In prison? But those are already chock-full, to such an extent even that 2200 people can’t serve their sentences because there is no room for them in prison. They will take a few and, to make a horrifying example, shoot them. They wouldn’t dare to commit such atrocities because that would mean civil war. And behold that is exactly must be done. Each country will be so busy with their own soldiers that war can’t be conceived of.
He expounds further on this vision:
Civil war, that is the war of the proletariat against their true enemy, capitalism. And the war between nations [is] the murder of fellow workers for the entertainment of the rulers. Thus the last would be stupid, very stupid [for the ruling class].
And still:
The true oppressors of the people are those in power and thus a victory over them is a liberation from oppressors. Who is the enemy of the Dutch worker? Certainly not the German, Belgian, French or English worker? No, the workers are one another’s friends because their interests don’t conflict. The Dutch capitalist is as much the enemy of the Dutch workers as the German capitalist is the enemy of the German worker. On the other hand the workers of all countries are one another’s friends. Therefore one must prefer civil war over war between countries.
Nieuwenhuis knew what was at stake in any such world war. He knew that the socialist parties throughout Europe, as the darlings of bourgeois democratic electoral politics, would be either shamelessly courted or mercilessly coerced into supporting a European war. In the event that socialists actively voted for war or even simply marched into battle with a little reluctance (both of which ended up happening), then the real casualty of the war would be socialism itself. That is, without an active policy to make war on war, the Left’s reputation and vision for the future would be tarnished, perhaps irrevocably so:
Suppose that, on both sides, the people answer the call to arms. Suppose that they do it, though protesting, and though they claim that all responsibility for history and humanity lays with the villainous rulers, who started the war, what would happen then? Those suspected of socialism are placed in the front line — and they know very well who those are — on both sides, the result will be that socialists kill each other as a crude trick to administer a bloodletting to the socialists.
In the end, Nieuwenhuis would be eerily prescient. The socialist parties of Europe eagerly voted to go to war with each other. The end result was that Hitler could with some justification claim that socialism was actually to blame for WWI. Socialism has never quite been the same since World War I, but it is hard to tell if this owes itself primarily or just tangentially to the Marxist capitulation to war. Had Nieuwenhuis been heeded, would things have been different? Who knows? That is hardly a useful question for us now. Instead, let us compare Nieuwenhuis’ confident, politically viable program with today’s Left’s opposition to war. The differences should be startling.
Please, No More War!
The Left today certainly has its heart in the right place by opposing war. But without being able to explain war in terms of larger trends within contemporary capitalism, the Left’s opposition falls flat. First, it reveals its impotence to actually meaningfully intervene to stop the war. And second, perhaps in recognition of its impotence, it tries to shoe-horn this (and every other) conflict into the outmoded categories of decades past. We see both trends on display with respect to Ukraine.
As an example of the former, consider Caitlin Johnstone, whose social media posts and Substack articles of late have been laced with extra urgency, vitriol, and explicit moral posturing. The now third most popular article on her Substack is entitled “It's Not Okay For Grown Adults To Think This Way About Ukraine.” That title says it all. Far from a political calculation of the possibilities of actually doing something productive with war, this manifesto is a moral condemnation of her opponents that relies on that most authoritarian of epistemologies: common sense.
What can one even say of ‘strategy’ in such a piece? Is it one of hoping to inspire or embarrass enough minds to change, which will somehow float its way to the top decision-makers, who will realize their moral failings and make a noble about-face? Or does Johnstone believe that large-scale change à la Occupy or BLM is still possible, and that all it needs is a succinct manifesto to serve as its spark? Regardless, the very ambiguity highlights Johnstone’s impotence in the face of a war which she can neither explain nor understand. The best she can do is articulate a theoretical begging at the feet of the politicians and war-profiteers for them to change their minds.
But it’s not really all Johnstone’s fault. Taking a look at the statements of various communist and workers’ parties throughout the world demonstrates as such. These would probably reject the suggestion that the contemporary Left is as impotent as I claim. As a result, they reveal just how much their worldviews are stuck in the past, a past that they can’t even reactivate despite all their trying. These parties often use words like fascism or imperialism to describe the conflict in Ukraine. Their own anti-Americanism, which they mistake for anti-imperialism, leads them to conclude that the real antagonists in this conflict are NATO, the US, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Thus, Russia is seen as waging a defensive war or acting in the interests of the oppressed eastern populations of Ukraine.
But it’s not immediately clear if the orientation of such parties makes sense anymore. What could fascism mean without a Weimar Republic? What could imperialism mean without a militant international socialist movement? These aren’t transhistorical terms that can just be applied to new situations that remotely seem similar to an image that Lenin cooked up in a 100-year-old pamphlet. That’s not how the Marxist method used to work. Because of the Left’s impotence, it grasps at older historical straws in a desperate bid to remain relevant. But by doing so, it reveals itself to be the prime motor of its own impotence. And the cycle continues.
Conclusion
An exercise such as this may tempt one into thinking that we can somehow side with the past over the present or that contemporary problems owe themselves to poor leadership. While easy, such a conclusion remains deeply flawed. The past deserves not our nostalgia but rather our pity. We are supposed to have moved on from the days of Nieuwenhuis’ relevance. Yet we find ourselves in a situation in which an old Dutch Marxist articulated a better anti-war position than our contemporaries. This is a problem! And it is a problem that cannot be solved simply by choosing sides or changing leadership. It is a problem that is firmly rooted in the history that has passed between the two bookends I arbitrarily selected.
If we look to the past now, it must be in full recognition of this problem of historical regression. Capitalism has moved on, yet the Marxism of the 2nd International remains the highest articulation of the problems and possibilities of socialism. What would it take to bring into being the future society that Nieuwenhuis thought possible, necessary even? The past can help us clarify our questions, but it can no longer provide answers. Traversing this distance may be necessary if we are to recover our broken dreams of emancipation. Or it may all be the useless, privileged exercise of a burnt-out-organizer-turned-armchair-philosopher. Will this essay contribute anything to stopping the fighting in Ukraine? Unlikely. But is that even the goal?