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

BOURGEOIS PACIFISM AND SOCIALIST PACIFISM187the notorious Jouhaux, the anarchist Broutchoux and ...the “Zimmerwaldist” Merrheim all voted for it:“This Conference of National Corporative Federations,trade unions and labour exchanges, having taken cognisanceof the Note of the President of the United States which‘invites all nations now at war with each other to publiclyexpound their views as to the terms upon which the war mightbe brought to an end’—“requests the French Government to agree to this proposal;“invites the government to take the initiative in makinga similar proposal to its allies in order to speed the hourof peace;“declares that the federation of nations, which is oneof the guarantees of a final peace, can be secured only giventhe independence, territorial inviolability and politicaland economic liberty of all nations, big and small.“The organisations represented at this conference pledgethemselves to support and spread this idea among the massesof the workers in order to put an end to the present indefiniteand ambiguous situation, which can only benefit secretdiplomacy, against which the working class has alwaysprotested.”There you have a sample of “pure” pacifism, entirely inthe spirit of Kautsky, a pacifism approved by an officiallabour organisation which has nothing in common with Marxismand is composed chiefly of chauvinists. We have beforeus an outstanding document, deserving the most seriousattention, of the political unity of the chauvinists and the“Kautskyites” on a platform of hollow pacifist phrases. In thepreceding article we tried to explain the theoretical basisof the unity of ideas of the chauvinists and the pacifists,of the bourgeois and the socialist reformists. Now we see thisunity achieved in practice in another imperialist country.At the Zimmerwald Conference, September 5-8, 1915,Merrheim declared: “Le parti, les Jouhaux, le gouvernement,ce ne sont que trois têtes sous un bonnet” (“The party, theJouhaux and the government are three heads under onebonnet”, i.e., they are all one). At the C.G.T. Conference,on December 26, 1916, Merrheim voted together with Jouhauxfor a pacifist resolution. On December 23, 1916, oneof the frankest and most extreme organs of the German social-