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

MILITARY PROGRAMME OF PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION87monopolistic position as profitable and as tranquil aspossible.The genuine Swiss Social-Democrats are striving to useSwitzerland’s relative freedom and her “international” positionto help the victory of the close alliance of the revolutionaryelements in the European workers’ parties. Switzerland,thank God, does not have “a separate language of herown”, but uses three world languages, the three languagesspoken in the adjacent belligerent countries.If twenty thousand Swiss party members were to pay aweekly levy of two centimes as a sort of “extra war tax”,we would have twenty thousand francs per annum, asum more than sufficient periodically to publish in threelanguages and distribute among the workers and soldiers ofthe belligerent countries—in spite of the bans imposed bythe general staffs—all the truthful evidence about theincipient revolt of the workers, their fraternising in thetrenches, their hope that the weapons will be used for revolutionarystruggle against the imperialist bourgeoisie of their“own” countries, etc.That is not new. It is being done by the best papers, likeLa Sentinelle, Volksrecht and the Berner Tagwacht, 40 although,unfortunately, on an inadequate scale. Only throughsuch activity can the splendid decision of the Aarau PartyCongress 41 become something more than merely a splendiddecision.The question that interests us now is: Does the disarmamentdemand correspond to this revolutionary trend amongthe Swiss Social-Democrats? It obviously does not. Objectively,disarmament is an extremely national, a specificallynational programme of small states. It is certainly not theinternational programme of international revolutionarySocial-Democracy.Written in September 1916First published in the magazineJugend-Internationale Nos. 9,and 10, September and October 1917Signed: N. LeninFirst published in Russian in 1929in the second and third editionsof Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. XIXPublished according tothe magazine textTranslated from the German