Lenin’s Thoughts Concerning the Relationship Among War, Peace and Revolution

Lenin’s theoretical analysis on the relationship between war, peace and revolution in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution.

War and peace are different means of resolving political contradictions in class society, while war is politics with bloodshed, peace is politics without bloodshed. Class struggle inevitably leads to social revolution and turns into revolutionary war at a certain time, and the peaceful seizure of power is an exception of “once-in-a-lifetime”. For social phenomena such as war, peace and revolution which exist alternately and transform into each other, Marxists shouldn’t oppose everything or affirm everything in general, but first find out by which historical conditions they are caused, by which classes it they carried out and for what purposes, so as to distinguish their specific attributes and adopt different positions against them.

Lenin clearly proposed that there are two types of war, just and unjust. The World War I was an unjust and it was an imperialist predatory war between two major imperialist blocs for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital. The Social Democrats of the Second International betrayed the proletariat and helped the bourgeoisie to incite the workers and peasants of the belligerent countries to butcher each other under the guise of defending the motherland. Most of the left socialist-revolutionaries became pacifists who only lamented peace and limited themselves to propaganda for peace, and the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in Russia put forward the slogan of supporting “domestic peace” during the World War I. Later, on the pretext that the February Revolution in Russia had overthrown the Tsar, they implemented the policy of “revolutionary defensism”, that is, the policy of defending the bourgeois motherland, regardless of the fact that the landlord capitalists still controlled the state power, and the bourgeois provisional government was still engaged in the dirty and bloody war.

Lenin emphasized that bourgeois nationalism and proletarian internationalism were two opposing worldviews and policies. He held high the banner of proletarian internationalism, and as early as in “The War and Russian Social-Democracy” he exposed the imperialist nature of the war and the lies of the bourgeoisie that it was a war to “liberate” the peoples of other countries (for example, Tsarist Russia), stating that for proletariat the only genuine war of liberation, could be a civil war against the bourgeoisie both of its “own” and of the “foreign” aggressor countries. Only by “turning the present imperialist war into a civil war” and “defeating the ‘own’ government in the imperialist war” can we get rid of the unjust war, win a just peace, and move towards the real freedom of all peoples and move towards socialism. Lenin then asserted that uneven development was the absolute law of capitalism, that imperialist wars accelerated the maturation of revolutionary conditions, and that socialism cannot win “simultaneously victories” in all countries where capitalism is highly developed and where the proletariat was the majority of the population, as the Second International advocated, but would first be victorious in several or even in one capitalist country alone. A victory of socialism in one country would still not be able to put an end to all wars in general at on stroke. Domestically, there must be a class war at home to suppress the resistance of the bourgeoise and must be the patriotic war against the foreign bourgeoisie that attempts to eliminate socialism. On the other hand, internationally, there are revolutionary national rebellions and national wars, and proletarian rebellions and wars against the bourgeoisie and wars among the imperialists and so forth.

“Marxists have never forgotten that violence must inevitably be accompanied by the collapse of capitalism in its entirety and the birth of a socialist society.” With the salvoes of the October Revolution, Lenin’s prophecy became a reality. The first decree of the first socialist state was the Decree on Peace, which declared that all belligerents immediately cease hostilities and conduct peace negotiations. However, this call was responded by the joint attack of the Allied imperialists and the domestic counter-revolutionary forces that wanted to strangle the Soviet power in its cradle. After bidding farewell to the Soviet people, who were “workers without a homeland” and preserving their socialist homeland through the Patriotic War, Lenin proposed that Soviet Russia “wants to live in peace with all peoples” for domestic construction. Imperialism, however, intended to turn the peaceful economic construction of the Soviet Union into an opportunity for the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet regime. Lenin once said that previously we never imagined that peace would come after the war, and that the socialist calf and the capitalist jackal would embrace each other. He argued that peaceful coexistence and cooperation between countries with different systems was well possible after establishing a degree of parity of power, but for Lenin a long-term peaceful coexistence was unthinkable and would end in either a victory for one or another. He initiated the creation of the Communist International to replace the bankrupt Second International. In his later years he pinned his hopes on the Eastern revolutions that would promote the world revolution.

After Lenin’s death, the international bourgeoisie used the counter-revolutionary policy of two fists namely both war and peaceful means alternately to stifle the revolutionary struggles of peoples and national liberation movements, especially in order to destroy the socialist countries it used both the cold war method and the strategy of peaceful evolution, all these coupled with the endless violence and terror acts in the Western world, have led the people to a deeper understanding of Lenin’s statement in 1916: “Capitalist society is and has always been horror without end.” The victory of socialist revolutions throughout the world is the only way to eliminate classes and class struggles, to eradicate the causes of war and to establish permanent peace and sustainable development in the world; this is the materialist dialectics of war, peace and revolution.