Spark
Prescriptions for Strategy
The Great War achieved many things. The capitalists created the greatest barbarity known to humanity, offering up their workers in chains by the millions while our brave Red Army soldiers fought, tears in their eyes, through them to get at their masters. They succeeded in the end, as the forces of progress must always do when faced by reaction, and out of their struggle emerged the liberation of millions more people in France, Russia, and South America. But politically, the Great War finally laid bare the essential contradiction between capitalism and communism. Prior to the War one could pretend with credibility, as did Bernstein in our Republic as well as the British and American social democrats, that there could be rapprochement between capitalist and communist powers, that two antagonistic social systems could exist side by side in peace. Goldman claims just this today, and is laughed off the street whenever she ventures outside her faction’s strongholds. Such was the political change wrought by the War.
The capitalists in Britain and the United States understand this just as well as the Marxists. They understood that, despite their social democrats’ pacifism, they would be forced to choose between defending the capitalist states in which they resided, or advancing international socialism. They feared that the progressive influence of Cologne would overcome the social democrats’ instincts, inculcated in them by the bourgeoisie, to defend their fatherlands. Thus they unleashed bloody repression on anything and anybody that smacked of socialism. Now there are four socialist parties in Britain and America: two, socialist only in name, in bed with the capitalist elites, and two alternately in prison or in hiding. For the purposes of the international revolution, Labour and the American Socialist Party offer no perspectives for the future. It is the tasks of American and British communists to build new organizations that can withstand enforced clandestinity and still influence and lead the mass workers’ movements in their respective countries. It is the Communist International’s task to aid in the reconstruction of American and British socialism. For now, however, we must reluctantly cede America and Britain to the capitalists.
Discouraged readers will want to know if there is any fertile ground for revolution left in the world. We would like to reassure them that there is, but only if the Communist International does its utmost to nurture its development. In China, for instance, there is a strong Communist party. However, it has begun down the road of opportunism by joining the national-liberal Koumintang, lending socialist legitimacy to a fundamentally bourgeois party and befuddling the workers away from itself and into the lap of Dr. Sun. Unfortunately, this situation will take much work to remedy, and due to the influence of the Soviet Union on developments in China, it will take time for our Republic to make its voice heard. For the time being we must push for the greatest possible autonomy of the Communist Party within the Koumintang. For it to maintain its membership in that party the Communists must be able to organize as a bloc within it, to publish their own propaganda, and to maintain their own armed wing. Anything less amounts to liquidation of the Communist party and the guillotining of the Chinese proletariat. Direct VSVR intervention in China is impractical for now, but we should work with Plekhanov to station Red Army forces on Soviet soil so that the Red and Soviet Armies can strike at China in unison with a Chinese uprising, in accordance with Plekhanovist thought on revolution. In all our dealings in this matter we must be comradely, but firm. We have sixty years of revolutionary experience behind us: let that fact take the place of bluster and bombast.
While in China the Troika allowed the Soviet Union to monopolize the development of the International’s policy, the movement in northern Latin America is much younger and hitherto unguided by the International. Zapata looks to our Republic for aid, and we must answer. Let us remember that the liberation of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Argentina, and Chile was achieved in cooperation between the peoples of those countries and our Republic. It was Luxemburg who gave the Chileans the money and arms needed to make their revolution. It was Trotsky who, by distracting the capitalist powers in the Great War, allowed the people of Brazil to overthrow their tyrant Emperor. Let us now complete what they began by sponsoring the liberation of Mexico, Central America, Colombia, and Venezuela from capitalism.
For a red Latin America in five years. For a red China in ten. For a red world in twenty, vote Marxist, Ballot Line 4.
-Comrade Zimmerwald