Comrades — when it came to the question of Brest-Litovsk in early 1918, it wasn't a tactical disagreement about space or a short-term calculation about men and bullets. It was the irrevocable theoretical divide for the new Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat: whether the dictatorship was to be conceived and felt as the instrument of the international class struggle — whose rationality is to carry the revolution forward and deepen it across frontiers — or whether it would become a beleaguered, nationalized regime in search of survival through accommodations between one imperialist camp and another. Proletarian Communists of 1918 asserted that revolutionary war — i.e., politically converting the imperialist war into civil war and actively linking the fate of Russia with that of Germany's, Austria-Hungary's and that of the rest of Europe's proletariat — was the only unbroken proletarian principle. The following is an argument in favor of that standpoint on theoretical, political, and practical grounds.
Marx and Engels provide the theoretical basis. The proletarian revolution, while initially possibly taking the form of a national seizure of power, is not and cannot be a strictly national phenomenon. As they explained in the Communist Manifesto: "In so far as the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle, though not in substance, yet in form," the proletariat must first settle accounts with its own bourgeoisie — but this national struggle is only the preliminary to an international process of proletarian emancipation. The Russian Revolution in October was precisely such a start: the vanguard assault to launch a process completed only by the European proletariat. To bifurcate the Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat from the dynamic experiment of international revolution is to debase the living substance of Marxism — to flip over into its opposite the very conversion of imperialist inter-state war into proletarian civil war.
Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership repeatedly before 1917 and during wartime aver that the revolutionary appeal must be to "turn the imperialist war into a civil war." As Lenin framed the task: "The conversion of the present imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan." It was not a universal call to arms but a programmatic bridge between a national revolution and world revolution: agitation, propaganda, and organization among the enemy armies and workers so that the European war would disintegrate into workers' uprisings.
But the Brest negotiations bound the new Soviet government to defining how it would incorporate the slogan into policy. The party Left — the Proletarian Communists, based in Kommunist and led by comrades such as Bukharin and Radek in polemical leadership — protested that treaty initiative by imperial Germany amounted to capitulation to one imperialist bloc and abandonment of the international revolutionary path. They were firm in their belief that retreating from predatory peace and offering guerrilla war preparation would make the October banner float until the European workers and turn the German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers into a revolutionary force by provoking and exposing the imperialist enterprise. The Left's insistence was not childish adventurism but principled recognition of the fact that the raison d'être of the October Revolution was to be an igniting spark for proletarian insurrection on the whole continent.
But Lenin preached another way. In his classic January theses and subsequent speeches contained under the titles of "Revolutionary War or German Peace," Lenin weighed the current material frailty of the Soviet Republic against the ideal of spreading revolution. Against the thesis of refusal as a way of inciting German revolution, Lenin answered that such a war of revolution today would most likely lead to the overthrow of Soviet power in Russia and thus destroy any living platform of the international movement. In Lenin's Theses, for instance, on the criticisms by realism on war on the spot, which provides grounds for fighting on the spot to place the Soviet Republic "in the position of agents of Anglo-French imperialism" and even cause actual danger of ruinous calamity at home.
The crux is this dialectical contradiction: is the Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat preserved as an end in itself (a national trophy), or is it the tool by which the proletariat internationally wages war against the bourgeois order? The Proletarian Communist line answers decisively: the dictatorship is not to be held in national possession as a trophy but employed as the living instrument of international revolutionary war. This is a principle with a direct provenance from Marxist rationality: a proletarian state isolated from the world movement will turn into a bureaucratic apparatus; an open proletarian state to class struggle from the outside reinforces the revolutionary consciousness of the masses into a liberating historical process.
Practically, the Left's case rested on a material interpretation of objective circumstances. The Austro-Hungarian and German empires in early 1918 were torn apart by mutinies, strikes, and generalized war weariness; the class composition of the armies was shifting. Radek, in April 1918 writings, emphasized that although the German high command had temporary military supremacy, the delay or deterioration of the Eastern front produced a dynamic effect on revolutionary momentum in Germany, and stiff Russian resistance could have optimized insurrectionary pressure. As Radek himself afterwards formulated it in his polemics, "We have suffered a terrible defeat, but we have not ceased to be the only home in the world to free propaganda.". … We must concentrate all our efforts on accelerating the pulse of the European Revolution and not simply wait passively with folded arms." That is a left strategic tactic that talks of defeat in military terms as something separate from the defeat of revolutionary initiative.
The leaders who advocated the peace — Lenin above all — did not deny these forces. Rather, they made a conscious choice that survival and consolidation (an opportunity to socialize, to order the Red Army, to institutionalize working-class domination) were of the immediate need. Lenin's case was simple: the Soviet Republic did not possess the organized power to engage in long-scale conventional war; to expose it to German onslaught meant most likely the physical destruction of the revolutionary hub and loss of material base to carry on the struggle. In his ratification speeches, Lenin pleaded the grim arithmetic honestly: survival sets the conditions to continue the world revolution in the future; glorious struggle now can only reduce Russia to a corpse and the revolution to a memory.
This argument is not valid from our Proletarian Communist point of view because it is based on an artificial dichotomy between the "national base" and the international process. To sign an imposed peace is to give material and political legitimacy to the German imperial command; it frees German troops for use elsewhere and sends a message to German workers that the Russian revolution has accepted a national compromise rather than international class solidarity. Luxemburg, under arrest, analyzed the problem in clear-cut terms: "The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was in fact nothing but the surrender of the revolutionary Russian proletariat to German militarism." Her is not moral melodrama but a biting political analysis: surrender converts the October precedent into an instrument of imperialist stabilization and not into the spark of continental revolution.
Trotsky's famous bargaining tactic — "neither war nor peace" — aimed to walk the middle line: delay and demobilize and wait for the German revolution to burst; refuse to sign the annexation terms but refuse to resume hostilities straight away. Trotsky's approach was reckoning both with objective ferment in Germany and exposed position in Russia. But the eventual signing (March 3, 1918) broke that delicate equilibrium and, for the left, ratified the debilitating political lesson: revolutionary diplomacy substituted for revolutionary war.
Why, in theory, was revolutionary war the correct course? Three related reasons.
First, theoretical coherence. The proletariat's emancipation is not a goal within the reach of a shut national regime; the very expression dictatorship of the proletariat presupposes international struggle. To support peace with an imperialist bloc is to nationalize the dictatorship and to rebuild it as a national form of administration. Marx and Engels repeatedly asserted that the struggle of the workers will be international in character and that the victories must be extended; the Left's insistence at Brest was only the logic of that internationalism applied to the stage of imperialist war.
Second, solidarity as practice. Revolutionary war is not only a military position; it is the concentrated political linking of the Russian proletariat's fate to the soldiers and workers of the other countries. That link — by uncovering the predatory designs of imperialism and by calling to the soldiers to fraternize and to revolt — was the only certain way of making local victory universal triumph. To trade away that link in a separate peace was to reverse the initiative in the hands of imperialist diplomacy. Radek, Bukharin and Kommunist's pages argued in these very political terms: the fight has to be translated into an international agitation which disintegrates enemy fronts by politicizing them from inside.
Third, the preservation of the revolutionary character of the dictatorship itself. An administrative state that organizes itself primarily to remain in existence administratively will, with the passage of time, forfeit its living connection with the masses and become a managerial machine. Revolutionary war preserves the dictatorship as a school and instrument of class struggle; peace risks transforming it into a custodian of national order. The actual result was appropriate to justify the Left's anxiety: Brest's tough concessions were supplemented by intervention, displacement, and domestic tensions which had to be endured by the Soviet power in other forms — finally, and in a disastrous manner, with the stiffening of coercive actions which the Left dreaded.
This is not to preclude the monumental difficulties encountered by the Left. The Russian proletariat was exhausted; the army disintegrated; the peasantry class situation precluded mobilization; a war of revolution would have entailed unimaginable suffering. But principle matters: the question was not whether or not Russia could at once defeat Germany, but whether the October Revolution was staying true to the objective of transforming imperialist war into proletarian civil war. To refuse on that grounds risks to make proletarian power an historical anomaly rather than into a lever for an upset world.
In summary: the revolutionary-war option in the Brest issue was the right Marxist and proletarian principle. It preserved the worldwide mission of the Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat, it sought to convert the imperialist war into transnational proletarian civil wars, and it preserved the living, militant essence of proletarian power. Lenin's mathematics of provisional consolidation rested on hard realism; but realism that legitimates breaking with international revolutionary solidarity risks institutionalizing the revolution as a national state and sacrificing the character of proletarian dictatorship. The Proletarian Communists' call to revolutionary war was thus anything but sentimentalism but the coherent elaboration of proletarian internationalism in the epoch of imperialism. We hold that stance now — theoretically correct, politically firm, and in commitment to the principle that the Revolution is not for the protection of an apparatus but for the freedom of the working class everywhere.
Lenin, “The conversion of the present imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan.” See Lenin, Socialism and War and related 1915-1916 resolutions. Online text: Marxists Internet Archive, “Turn Imperialist War Into Civil War.”
Lenin, Revolutionary War or German Peace (January 1918 theses / speeches). See collection and translation at Soviet history resources and Marxists Internet Archive.
Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Ch.1: “In so far as the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle, though not in substance, yet in form…”
Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Tragedy (September 1918): “The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was in reality nothing but the capitulation of the revolutionary Russian proletariat to German militarism.”
Karl Radek, The International Situation and related April 1918 polemics (see Marxists.org and translations collecting Radek’s April 1918 essays). Example phrase used: “We have suffered a terrible defeat, but we have not ceased to be the only home in the world to free propaganda…”
Trotsky on the Brest negotiations and the “neither war nor peace” policy: Trotsky’s speeches and his History of the Russian Revolution / My Life chapters on Brest.
Documents, speeches and minutes collected on Marxists.org and in Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 27 — works Feb–July 1918), plus Six Theses on the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (April 1918) relevant to post-Brest debates.
Left-press materials (first issues of Kommunist, 1918) containing Bukharin, Radek and Ossinsky articles arguing the Proletarian Communist position. See translations and scans (libcom.org translations and archival pages).
Comments