Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 21 - From Marx to Mao

40
V. I. LENIN
capitalist way of life as peace is. Present-day war is a people’s
war. What follows from this truth is not that we must
swim with the “popular” current of chauvinism, but that
the class contradictions dividing the nations continue to
exist in wartime and manifest themselves in conditions of
war. Refusal to serve with the forces, anti-war strikes, etc.,
are sheer nonsense, the miserable and cowardly dream of
an unarmed struggle against the armed bourgeoisie, vain
yearning for the destruction of capitalism without a
desperate civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every
socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the
army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the
nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the
era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all
nations. Down with mawkishly sanctimonious and fatuous
appeals for “peace at any price”! Let us raise high the banner
of civil war! Imperialism sets at hazard the fate of European
culture: this war will soon be followed by others, unless
there are a series of successful revolutions. The story about
this being the “last war” is a hollow and dangerous fabrication,
a piece of philistine “mythology” (as Golos aptly puts
it). The proletarian banner of civil war will rally together,
not only hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers
but millions of semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois, now
deceived by chauvinism, but whom the horrors of war will
not only intimidate and depress, but also enlighten, teach,
arouse, organise, steel and prepare for the war against the
bourgeoisie of their “own” country and “foreign” countries.
And this will take place, if not today, then tomorrow, if
not during the war, then after it, if not in this war then in the
next one.
The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism.
Down with opportunism, and long live the Third
International, purged not only of “turncoats” (as Golos
wishes), but of opportunism as well.
The Second International did its share of useful preparatory
work in preliminarily organising the proletarian
masses during the long, “peaceful” period of the most brutal
capitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the
last third of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth centuries. To the Third International falls the task