A tactic that is the only possible internationalist response to any war or conflict between two bourgeois or bureaucratic factions in the decadence of capitalism. It consists of the denunciation of both sides ("the enemy is in your own country") and the corresponding call to turn the war into revolutionary civil war, that is, into class war ("war on war").
Imperialist war, decadence and revolutionary defeatism
The outbreak of the first imperialist war fought on a world battlefield, in August 1914, marked a point of no return in the development of imperialism. Capitalism showed that it had reached a limit to its geographical expansion beyond which any enlargement of the scope of national markets would necessarily turn into conflict between states.
On the other hand, the conditions of economic growth during the war and in the reconstruction, on top of piles of corpses and ruined cities, and by states structurally marked by militarism, ever more totalitarian, showed clearly that the dissociation between development and economic growth was already a worldwide reality. Capitalism no longer allowed a free development of the productive forces. It had entered its phase of decadence.
In decadence all wars between two bourgeois factions are reactionary, since what is historically on the agenda is the overcoming of capitalism. There can be no progressive capitalism, no rising capitalism in a single country... because the global, systemic conditions make it impossible. In fact, every conflict between states is necessarily imperialist, whoever the formal "aggressor" may be, because in reality every national capital is stifled in its possibility of expanding, of reaching new markets with their corresponding opportunities for sales and investment.
National capital is constrained within the borders it created in its day in order to develop; a permanent tendency to crisis appears, together with a hunger for markets which, since it cannot be satisfied, transforms the organization of national capital and its relationship to the state.
Imperialism has completely buried the old bourgeois-democratic program; expansion beyond national borders (whatever the national conditions of the annexed countries) became the platform of the bourgeoisie of all countries. If the term "national" remained, its real content and function have turned into their opposite; it serves only as a miserable cover for imperialist aspirations and as a battle cry of their rivalries, as the one and last ideological means of winning the adherence of the popular masses so that they play their role as cannon fodder in the imperialist wars.
Rosa Luxemburg. The Crisis of Social Democracy, 1916
One after another, the European states send their own workers to die and to kill other workers en masse in a war of extermination that expresses the point that over-accumulation had reached and the extent to which the markets, both national and colonial, were becoming insufficient, at an accelerating pace, for each and every national capital. The war is a world war because capitalism no longer "fits" in the national market, because capital has entered into acute contradiction with the national state.
Therefore, there is no possible progressive way out of any war or conflict that does not pass through the defeat of the bourgeoisie and capitalism as a whole. There is no possible progressive side in a war. Revolutionary defeatism is the only option for workers in any conflict between two bourgeois factions.
The first slogan of revolutionary defeatism: "The enemy is at home"
The war precipitates the break between the left and opportunism within the International. On one pretext or another -for France the war would be purely defensive, for Germany the aim would be to put an end to the feudal tsarist regime, etc.- practically all the big socialist parties close ranks around the war effort of their bourgeoisies.
The SPD parliamentary group votes en bloc to approve the war credits. Only Karl Liebknecht votes against, and he is prevented from reading out his reasons, from having them entered into the record of the session and from publishing them in any newspaper. Nevertheless, revolutionary defeatism had found its first voice.
My vote against today's War Credits Bill is based on the following considerations: This war, wanted by none of the peoples involved, has not broken out to further the welfare of the German people or of any other. It is an imperialist war, a war for the division of important territories of exploitation for capitalists and financiers.
From the point of view of the arms race, it is a war provoked jointly by the German and Austrian war parties, in the darkness of semi-feudalism and secret diplomacy, in order to gain advantages over their opponents. At the same time the war is a Bonapartist effort to disorganize and split the growing working-class movement.
Karl Liebknecht. Vote against the war credits, 1914
When Lenin, in Zurich, reads the Vorwärts, the official newspaper of German social democracy, supporting the war and the credits, he thinks that the copy he holds in his hands is a forgery produced by German military intelligence. The collapse of the International is total, and it is time to declare it dead. He is clear that what must be developed, the only possible option, is revolutionary defeatism.
The betrayal of socialism committed by the majority of the leaders of the Second International (1889-1914) signifies the political and ideological bankruptcy of this International. The main cause of this bankruptcy lies in the actual predominance within it of petty-bourgeois opportunism, whose bourgeois character and whose danger the best representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of all countries have long been pointing out.
The opportunists had long been preparing the bankruptcy of the Second International,
by denying the socialist revolution and substituting bourgeois reformism for it;
by denying the class struggle and its indispensable transformation, at certain moments, into civil war, and
by advocating class collaboration; by preaching bourgeois chauvinism under the names of patriotism and defense of the fatherland, and by ignoring or denying the fundamental truth of socialism, already set forth in the Communist Manifesto, that the workers have no fatherland;
by confining themselves, in the struggle against militarism, to a sentimental petty-bourgeois point of view instead of recognizing the need for a war of the proletarians of all countries against the bourgeoisie of all countries;
by turning the unavoidable use of bourgeois parliamentarism and bourgeois legality into a fetishism of that legality, forgetting that in times of crisis illegal forms of organization and agitation are imperative.
Lenin. The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War, 1914
Revolutionary social democracy, the left of the Second International, sets to work under a level of general repression unknown until then. They are few, very few; they fight against an atmosphere of war hysteria relentlessly promoted by the media and shielded by the strictest censorship. Advocating revolutionary defeatism has become a crime of treason.
The absurd slogan "hold out" has hit rock bottom. It only drags us ever deeper into the vortex of genocide. The class struggle of the international proletariat against international imperialist genocide is the socialist command of the hour.
The main enemy of every people is in its own country!
The main enemy of the German people is in Germany: German imperialism, the German war party, German secret diplomacy. This enemy at home must be fought by the German people in a political struggle, cooperating with the proletariat of the other countries, whose struggle is against their own imperialists.
Karl Liebknecht, The Main Enemy Is at Home, 1915
Turn the weapons against the real enemy, transform the war into revolution. When Lenin launches the first slogans characteristic of revolutionary defeatism, they sound unreal amid the oppressive atmosphere of patriotic hooliganism.
Wide propaganda, extended both to the troops and to the theater of military operations, for the socialist revolution and for the need to turn the weapons not against our brothers, the wage slaves of other countries, but against the reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all countries. The obligatory organization of clandestine cells and groups among the troops of all nations to carry out this propaganda in all languages.
A relentless struggle against the chauvinism and "patriotism" of the petty bourgeois and bourgeois of all countries without exception. Against the leaders of the present International, who have betrayed socialism, an obligatory appeal to the revolutionary consciousness of the working masses, who bear the whole burden of the war on their shoulders and who, in most cases, are hostile to opportunism and chauvinism.
Lenin. The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War, 1914
There is no internationalism without revolutionary defeatism
From the first imperialist world war onwards, it is impossible to uphold internationalism without putting revolutionary defeatism into practice.
[The] revolutionary meaning [of internationalism is the] solidarity of the world proletariat as a unit against international capitalism. Solidarity in ideas as well as in deeds, directed against the nation and patriotism first and foremost, colonial countries included.
There can be no interest higher than that of the world proletariat, not even that of a country where the revolution had triumphed.
The internationalists fight with equal ferocity both contending sides in local imperialist wars (Vietnam) as well as in wars of a world character, and brand the respective partisans and propagandists as traffickers in human flesh.
They propose and strive to organize the action of the exploited, at the front and in the rear, against their respective governments and military commands.
All national defense -even at the level of resistance- conceals exploitation and oppression. The immediate enemy, for each proletariat, is in its own country; harassing it to the utmost is the condition for unleashing the struggle of the proletariat in other countries and undertaking, united, the destruction of capitalism throughout the world.
Consequently, the internationalists reject as reactionary the slogan: "Non-interference in the internal affairs of another country". It is designed to prevent the solidarity and collective action of the proletariat in the various countries, while it fosters the constant economic interference of the great powers in the affairs of the small ones and often brings about their military intervention: local wars, the invasion of Tibet, of Santo Domingo, of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, of Cuba, plus the gigantic arms trade. The proletariat of any country has not just the right but the obligation to intervene in the struggles of the proletariat of any other country.
"Lexicon of contemporary political trickery, compared with the revolutionary lexicon". G. Munis, 1970