§ 33 The forms of civil war and its costs

The epoch of civil wars was ushered in by the Russian revolution, itself no more than the herald, the beginning, of a revolution that will be general and world-wide. The revolution began earlier in Russia than elsewhere because in Russia the de composition of capitalism set in earlier. The Russian bourgeoisie and the Russian landowning class hoped for the conquest of Constantinople and Galicia. In conjunction with their allies they participated in the cooking of the hell's broth of 1914 Through their weakness and lack of organization, they were the first to collapse, so that chaos and famine appeared in Russia earlier than elsewhere. For that reason it was especially easy for the Russian proletariat to deal with its class enemies. This is why the Russian workers were the first to gain a decisive victory, the first to establish their dictatorship.

We must not infer that the Russian communist revolution is the most thoroughgoing revolution in the world; nor must we infer that the less developed capitalism is in any country, the more 'revolutionary' will be that country and the nearer to communism. The logical consequence of such a view would be that the complete realization of socialism would first occur in China, Persia, Turkey, and other countries where practically no proletariat has as yet come into existence. Were this the case, the teaching of Marx would be completely falsified.

Anyone who reasons thus, is confusing two things: on the one hand, the beginning of the revolution; on the other hand, its character, its degree of thoroughness. The revolution began earlier in Russia owing to the immaturity and weakness of capitalist development in that country. But precisely because of that immaturity and weakness, precisely because Russia is a backward country where the proletariat is in a minority, where there is a large number of petty traders, and so on, it is difficult for us to organize an integral communist economy. In England the revolution will come later. But there the proletariat, after its victory, will organize communism more swiftly. In Britain the proletariat constitutes a very large majority of the population; the workers are accustomed to collective labour; production is highly centralized. That is why the revolution will come later in England, but why, when it comes, it will be more highly developed, more far-reaching than ours.

Many persons have supposed that the ferocious character of our civil war is due to the backwardness of our country, or to some peculiar' Asiatic' traits. The opponents of revolution in western Europe are in the habit of saying that 'Asiatic socialism' flourishes in Russia, and that in 'civilized' lands a revolutionary change will be effected without atrocities. Obviously this is all nonsense. Where capitalist development is far advanced, the resistance of the bourgeoisie will be more stubborn. The intelligentsia (the professional classes, the technicians, the managing engineers, the army officers, etc.) are more strongly solidarized with capital, and are for that reason far more hostile to communism. In such countries, therefore, the civil war will inevitably assume a more savage form than in Russia. The course of the German revolution has actually proved that the war assumes harsher forms in countries where capitalist development is farther advanced.

Those who complain of the bolshevist Terror forget that the bourgeoisie sticks at nothing for the protection of its money-bags. With reference to this matter, the resolution passed by the first congress of the Third International runs as follows:

'When the imperialist war was beginning to be transformed into civil war, and when for the governing class (the greatest criminals known to history) the danger was imminent that its merciless régime would collapse, its brutality grew greater than ever....

'Russian generals, living embodiments of the tsarist system, organized the shooting down of the workers on a large scale, and continue to do this with the direct or indirect connivance of the traitors to socialism. When the Social Revolutionary Party and the Menshevik Party were in power, the prisons were filled with thousands of workers and peasants, and the generals had entire regiments shot for disobedience. Krasnov and Denikin, with the kind cooperation of the allied governments, have slaughtered the workers by tens of thousands, hanging them, or shooting every tenth man. As a deterrent, they often leave whole rows of gibbeted corpses hanging for three days. In Ural and Transvolgia the bands of Czecho-Slovak White Guards have cut off prisoners' hands and feet, have drowned prisoners in the Volga, have buried them alive. In Siberia the generals have slaughtered communists by the thousand and have butchered innumerable workers and peasants.

'The German and Austrian bourgeois made an open display of their bestial tendencies in Ukraine, where they hanged on portable iron gallows the workers and peasants whom they had robbed, and hanged communists who were their own fellow-countrymen, our Austrian and German comrades. In Finland, one of the homes of bourgeois democracy, they helped the Finnish bourgeois to shoot from 13,000 to 14,000 proletarians and to torture more than 15,000 to death in the prisons. In Helsingfors, wishing to protect themselves from machine-gun fire, they drove women and children in front of their ranks. Thanks to their aid, the Finnish White Guards and their Swedish assistants were able to enjoy this orgy of blood when they had conquered the Finnish proletariat. In Tammerfors, they compelled women and children to dig their own graves before being slaughtered. In Viborg, they killed thousands of Russians, men, women and children.

'Within their own frontiers the German bourgeois and the German Social Democrats, manifested an even greater degree of reactionary violence. Risings of the communist workers were drowned in blood; Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were brutally murdered; the Spartacist workers were massacred. The flag under which the bourgeoisie marches is the flag of the White Terror - the mass Terror and the individual Terror.

'We see the same picture in other lands. In democratic Switzerland everything is ready for the punishment of the workers should they dare to infringe capitalist law. In America it would seem that the prison, lynch law, and the electric chair, are the chosen symbols of democracy and freedom. In Hungary and Britain, in Czecho-Slovakia and Poland - everywhere it is the same. The bourgeois assassins do not shrink from the most atrocious actions. In the hope of strengthening their régime they encourage jingoism, and they organize abominable anti-Jewish pogroms, even worse than those which used to be organized by the tsarist police....When the Polish reactionaries and the "socialist" rabble murdered the representatives of the Russian Red Cross, this was but an additional drop in the ocean of crimes and atrocities perpetrated by bourgeois cannibalism in its death agony.'

As the civil war develops, it assumes new forms. When in any country the proletariat is oppressed beyond measure, it leads this war by a revolt against the State authority of the bourgeoisie. Now let us suppose that in one country or another the proletariat has been victorious and has taken the State authority into its own hands. What happens in this case? The proletariat has the organized State power at its service, it has the proletarian army, it has the entire apparatus of power. Then the proletariat has to fight with the bourgeoisie of its own land, which organizes plots and risings against the proletarian authority. Furthermore, the proletariat organized as the State has to fight with bourgeois States. Here the civil war assumes a new form, for the class war becomes war in the ordinary sense when the proletarian State is fighting against bourgeois States; the workers are now not simply fighting against the bourgeoisie, but the workers' State is engaged in formal warfare against the imperialist States of capital. This war is carried on, not for the seizure of others' goods, but for the victory of communism, for the dictatorship of the working class.

This is what has actually occurred. After the Russian revolution of November, 1917, the Soviet Government was attacked upon all sides by the capitalists; by the British, the Germans, and the French, by the Americans and the Japanese, and so on. The more the workers of other lands became infected by the example of the Russian revolution, the more firmly did international capitalism close its ranks against the revolution, the more vigorously did it attempt to establish a robber alliance of capitalists against the proletariat.

Upon the initiative of the trickster Wilson, the leader of American capitalism, an attempt to form such an alliance was made at the so-called peace conference of Versailles. The robber alliance was christened the League of Nations, this being intended to signify that it was a 'league of peoples'. In reality it is not a league of peoples, but a league of the capitalists of various countries and of their State authorities.

This league is in the nature of an attempt to form a worldwide trust of monstrous proportions which shall embrace the whole surface of the globe in a grasp of universal exploitation, and which, on the other hand, shall crush with the utmost ferocity the working class movement of revolt and revolution. It is pure fable to say that the League of Nations has been founded to promote the cause of peace. In actual fact it has a twofold aim: the ruthless exploitation of the proletariat throughout the world, of all colonies and of the colonial slaves; and the crushing of the incipient world revolution.

In the League of Nations, the USA, which became inordinately rich during the war, plays the first fiddle. All the bourgeois States of Europe are now heavily indebted to America. The United States is very powerful for the additional reason that she has vast quantities of raw materials and fuel, and is a great wheat-producing country. She wishes to use these advantages in such a way as to make all her fellow robbers dependent on her. Infallibly she will become the leader of the League of Nations.

Very interesting is the way in which the United States veils its preeminently predatory policy behind a cloud of fine phrases. When, in pursuit of plunder, she entered the war, her watchwords were ' the salvation of mankind' ' the rescue of the enslaved peoples', and so on. It suited the United States that Europe should be disintegrated, should consist of dozens of petty lands, formally 'independent' but substantially dependent upon America. This predatory interest was masked by an exalted phrase concerning ' the right of the nations to selfdetermination'. The capitalist gendarmerie, the White Guards, and the White Police, which, according to Wilson's plan, were to be ready everywhere to crush the revolution, would exist to ensure punishment for 'breaches of the peace'. In the year 1919 all the imperialists suddenly became pacifically minded, and raised a clamour to the effect that the bolsheviks were the real imperialists, the true enemies of peace. Plans for the stifling of the revolution masqueraded as zeal for peace and democracy.

The League of Nations has already shown itself to be an international policeman and executioner. Its executive officers overthrew the Soviet Republics in Hungary and Bavaria. They have continually endeavoured to crush the Russian proletariat; in the north and in the south, in the west and in the east of Russia, the British, the American, the Japanese, the French, and other armies have made common cause with the Russian enemies of the working class. The League of Nations used black troops against the Russian and Hungarian workers (in Odessa and in Budapest). The depth of baseness to which the League of Nations can descend is shown by the fact that these 'civilized' brigands entered into a Butchers' League in partnership with General Yudenich, who was chief of the socalled North-Western Administration. The League of Nations incites Finland, Poland, etc., to attack Soviet Russia; with the aid of the consuls of the foreign Powers it organizes conspiracies; its agents blow up bridges, throw bombs at the communists, and so on. There is no atrocity of which the League of Nations is not capable.

The more vigorous the proletarian onslaught, the more firmly do the capitalists close their ranks. In the Communist Manifesto, penned in the year 1847, Marx and Engels wrote: 'A spectre haunts Europe, the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have united in a holy alliance to lay this spectre - the pope and the tsar, Metternich and Guizot, the French radicals and the German police.' Many years have passed since then. The spectre of communism has begun to clothe itself in flesh and blood. In the campaign against it are arrayed, not only old Europe', but the entire capitalist world. Nevertheless the League of Nations will be unable to fulfil its two aims, which are the organization of the world economy into a single trust and the universal suppression of the revolution. There is not sufficient unity even among the Great Powers. The United States is hostile to Japan, and both these Powers are arming for the fight. It is hardly credible that there can be much friendly feeling between defeated Germany and the disinterested' robber Entente. Here is certainly a rift in the lute. The lesser States are fighting one with another. Still more important is the occurrence of a number of colonial risings and wars - in India, Egypt, Ireland, etc. Enslaved countries are beginning to fight against their civilized' European slave- drivers. To the civil war, the class war waged by the proletariat against the imperialist bourgeoisie, there are superadded colonial risings which help to undermine and destroy the dominion of world-wide imperialism. Thus the imperialist system is being broken up by two different groups of influences. On the one hand, we have the upward movement of the proletariat, the wars waged by the proletarian republics, and the revolts and the wars carried on by the nations enslaved to the imperialists. On the other hand, we have the oppositions and disharmonies among the great capitalist Powers. Instead of lasting peace', there is complete chaos; instead of universal repression of the proletariat, there is fierce civil war. In this civil war the strength of the proletariat waxes while the strength of the bourgeoisie wanes. The inevitable issue of the struggle will be the victory of the proletariat.

Certainly the victory of the proletarian dictatorship will not be achieved on easy terms. The civil war, like any other war, demands the sacrifice of persons and the sacrifice of material values. Every revolution involves such costs. A natural consequence is that in the opening phases of this civil war the devastation due to the imperialist war is in various places considerably increased. It is obvious that when the best workmen, instead of working or organizing production, go to the front rifle in hand to defend themselves against the landlords and the military caste, the life of the factories must suffer. Plainly, the disorganization that results from the civil war is harmful. Manifestly, the loss of comrades that ensues is a costly sacrifice. But this is inevitable in every revolution. During the bourgeois revolution in France, in the years 1789-93, when the bourgeoisie was breaking the yoke of the landlords, the civil war brought much disorganization in its train. When, however, the caste of landlords and aristocrats had been conquered, the development of France was rapid and extensive.

No one can fail to understand that in so gigantic a revolution as the universal revolution of the proletariat, which effects the overthrow of a system of oppression that required centuries to upbuild, the cost must be exceedingly great. We have seen that the civil war is now conducted upon a world-wide scale. In part it takes the form of a war waged by bourgeois States against proletarian States. The proletarian States which are defending themselves against the imperialist robbers, are waging the class war, which is in actual fact a holy war. But this war demands the sacrifice of blood. The wider the extent of the war, the larger will be the number of victims, and the more extensive will be the disorganization.

But because revolution is costly, we must not for that reason set our faces against revolution. The capitalist system, the growth of centuries, culminated in the monstrous imperialist war, in which rivers of blood were shed. What civil war can compare in its destructive effects with the brutal disorganization and devastation, with the loss of the accumulated wealth of mankind, that resulted from the imperialist war? MANIFESTLY IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT HUMANITY SHALL MAKE AN END OF CAPITALISM ONCE AND FOR ALL. WITH THIS GOAL IN VIEW, WE CAN ENDURE THE PERIOD OF CIVIL WARS, AND CAN PAVE THE WAY FOR COMMUNISM, WHICH WILL HEAL ALL OUR WOUNDS, AND WILL QUICKLY LEAD TO THE FULL DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES OF HUMAN SOCIETY.