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

A CARICATURE OF MARXISM37to backward countries. To brush aside these concrete questionsby resorting to general phrases about the “era”, asKievsky does, is to abuse the very concept “era”. And toprove that, we shall cite one example out of many. Butfirst it should be noted that one group of Lefts, namely, theGerman Internationale group, 24 has advanced this manifestlyerroneous proposition in §5 of its theses, publishedin No. 3 of the Bulletin of the Berne Executive Committee(February 29, 1916): “National wars are no longer possiblein the era of this unbridled imperialism.” We analysedthat statement* in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata. 25 Here weneed merely note that though everyone who has followed theinternationalist movement is long acquainted with thistheoretical proposition (we opposed it way back in the springof 1916 at the extended meeting of the Berne ExecutiveCommittee), not a single group has repeated or acceptedit. And there is not a single word in the spirit of this or anysimilar proposition in Kievsky’s article, written inAugust 1916.That should be noted, and for the following reason: ifthis or a similar theoretical proposition were advanced, thenwe could speak of theoretical divergencies. But since nosuch proposition has been advanced, we are constrained tosay: what we have is not a different interpretation of theconcept “era”, not a theoretical divergency, but merelya carelessly uttered phrase, merely abuse of the word “era”.Here is an example. Kievsky starts his article by asking:“Is not this (self-determination) the same as the right toreceive free of charge 10,000 acres of land on Mars? The questioncan be answered only in the most concrete manner, onlyin context with the nature of the present era. The right ofnations to self-determination is one thing in the era of theformation of national states, as the best form of developingthe productive forces at their then existing level, but it isquite another thing now that this form, the national state,fetters the development of the productive forces. A vast distanceseparates the era of the establishment of capitalismand the national state from the era of the collapse of thenational state and the eve of the collapse of capitalism itself.* See present edition, Vol. 22, pp. 308-13.—Ed.