Lenin CW-Vol. 23.pdf - From Marx to Mao

THE “DISARMAMENT” SLOGAN101escape from sad reality in a nebulous “disarmament”fantasy. “Disarmament” means simply running away fromunpleasant reality, not fighting it.Incidentally, certain Lefts fail to give a sufficientlyconcrete answer on the defence of the fatherland issue, andthat is a major defect of their attitude. Theoretically,it is much more correct, and in practice immeasurably moreimportant, to say that in the present imperialist war defenceof the fatherland is a bourgeois-reactionary deception,than to take a “general” stand against defence of the fatherlandunder “all” circumstances. That is wrong and, besides,does not “strike” at the opportunists, those direct enemiesof the workers in the labour parties.In working out a concrete and practically necessary answeron the question of a militia we should say: We are notin favour of a bourgeois militia; we are in favour only ofa proletarian militia. Therefore, “not a penny, not a man”,not only for a standing army, but even for a bourgeois militia,even in countries like the United States, or Switzerland,Norway, etc. The more so that in the freest republicancountries (e.g., Switzerland) we see that the militia isbeing increasingly Prussianised, and prostituted by beingused against strikers. We can demand popular election ofofficers, abolition of all military law, equal rights for foreignand native-born workers (a point particularly importantfor those imperialist states which, like Switzerland,are more and more blatantly exploiting larger numbersof foreign workers, while denying them all rights). Further,we can demand the right of every hundred, say, inhabitantsof a given country to form voluntary militarytrainingassociations, with free election of instructorspaid by the state, etc. Only under these conditions couldthe proletariat acquire military training for itself andnot for its slave-owners; and the need for such training isimperatively dictated by the interests of the proletariat.The Russian revolution showed that every success ofthe revolutionary movement, even a partial success likethe seizure of a certain city, a certain factory town, orwinning over a certain section of the army, inevitablycompels the victorious proletariat to carry out just sucha programme.