Should revolutionaries put forward the slogan of ‘revolutionary defeatism’?

Submitted by ICConline on

Printer-friendly version

Faced with the gravity of the international situation and the escalation of the barbarity of war, it is the responsibility of revolutionaries to stimulate the working class to become conscious of the historic stakes at play, to grasp the dynamics of the balance of forces between the classes and the consequences for its struggle, and to develop reflections on the goals of its struggle. With the perspective of defending the principles of the Communist Left, the question therefore arises as to what analyses and orientations the various groups within the proletarian political milieu are putting forward to orientate workers’ struggle.

The importance of proletarian debate

Public meetings, such as those organised by the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) on 7 March and by the ICC on 21 March, in Paris and other cities around the world, provide forums for proletarian debate where the analyses and arguments of different revolutionary groups can be compared. We therefore agree with the following emphasis in the ICT’s assessment: “We consider these spaces for discussion, reflection and debate to be essential in a period fraught with dangers for the working class, not only to compare the viewpoints and opinions of militants and sympathisers of the Communist Left, but also to offer a political opening to those newly interested in the proposals of  revolutionary internationalist minorities”.[1] Indeed, the debate was conducted in a fraternal spirit not only amongst proletarian groups, but also with the other participants,[2] notably young people interested in the positions of the Communist Left, particularly on the central question of war and how revolutionaries and the working class must respond, for, as the ICT emphasised, “a consensus quickly emerged regarding the catastrophic and barbaric prospect towards which capitalism is leading us”.[3]

During the debate, significant differences emerged regarding the method of analysis and its implications for the proletariat’s struggle. On the assessment of the dynamics of war, the majority of the groups present asserted that the world was heading “towards a third world war”, whilst the ICC, going against the current, maintained that: “we are heading towards a proliferation and generalisation of conflicts across the world, against a backdrop of growing chaos, ultimately threatening to destroy humanity”. The debate centred on the appropriateness today of the slogan of ‘revolutionary defeatism’, that is, the desire of the proletariat in each country to see its own bourgeoisie defeated in order to facilitate the struggle for its overthrow. In reality, the promotion of this slogan reveals not only ambiguities regarding genuine internationalism, but above all erroneous views concerning the implications of the current dynamics of capitalism and the present balance of forces between the classes.

An ambiguous slogan from the start…

The slogan of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ was certainly put forward by Lenin during the First World War. However, he was then seeking to “respond to the sophistries of the 'centrists', who while being 'in principle' against any participation in imperialist war, advised that you should wait until the workers in the 'enemy' countries were ready to enter into struggle against the war before calling on workers in 'your' country to do the same. In support of this position, they put forward the argument that if the workers of one country rose up before those in the opposing countries, they would facilitate the imperialist victory of the latter. Against this conditional 'internationalism', Lenin replied very correctly that the working class of any given country had no common interest with 'its' bourgeoisie. In particular, he pointed out that the latter's defeat could only facilitate the workers' struggle, as had been the case with the Paris Commune (following France's defeat by Prussia) and the 1905 revolution in Russia (which was beaten in the war with Japan). From this observation he concluded that each proletariat should 'wish for' the defeat of 'its' bourgeoisie. This last position was already wrong at the time, since it led the revolutionaries of each country to demand for 'their' proletariat the most favourable conditions for the proletarian revolution, whereas the revolution had to take place on a world-wide level, and above all in the big advanced countries, which were all involved in the war.” [4]

Rosa Luxemburg was already criticising Lenin’s erroneous position in this respect, even though she, too, sometimes succumbed to the logic of this sort of ‘reverse patriotism’. It is, however, no coincidence that in her Junius Pamphlet she concludes with the far clearer slogan from the Communist Manifesto of 1848: “Workers of the world, unite!” and not with the slogan of “revolutionary defeatism”. Moreover, “with Lenin, the weakness of this position never put his intran­sigent internationalism in question (we can even say it was precisely his intransigence which led to the error). In particular, Lenin never had the idea of supporting the bourgeoisie of an 'enemy' country - even if this might be the logical conclusion of his 'wishes'.”[5]

On the other hand, the nationalist vision of the revolution contained in the slogan of “revolutionary defeatism” was subsequently exploited on numerous occasions “by bourgeois parties draped in 'communist' colours, in order to justify their participation in imperialist war. Thus, for example, after the signing of the Russo-German pact in 1939, the French Stalinists suddenly discovered the virtues of 'proletarian internationalism' and 'revolutionary defeatism', virtues they had long ago forgotten and which they repudiated no less rapidly as soon as Germany launched its attack on the USSR in 1941. The Italian Stalinists also used the term 'revolutionary defeatism' after 1941 to justify their policy of heading the Resistance against Mussolini.”[6] A lesson must be drawn from this: “any slogan addressed to this or that sector of the proletariat, attributing it with tasks that are distinct or different from those of other sectors, is ambiguous and can easily be turned against the working class”.[7]

Lenin would hardly ever put forward this slogan again after February 1917, favouring instead that of “transforming the imperialist war into a civil war”. Moreover, the slogan of “revolutionary defeatism” contains yet another major drawback, highlighted after the First World War, which underscores how much it tends to turn its back on true internationalism: “The old schema of revolutionary defeatism, which held that the defeat of one’s own government is favourable to the development of the revolution, as well as containing an inherent ambiguity about the need to oppose all governments in a situation of war, has been demonstrably refuted by the fact that the division between victorious and defeated nations creates deep divisions in the world proletariat, as was most clearly seen in the wake of the 1914-18 war.” [8]

… an aberration today

The current dynamics of global capitalism bear no resemblance whatsoever to those within which the slogan of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ was first raised. Today, it does not in any way tend towards the formation of blocs with a view to a third world war, or even the mobilisation of tens of millions of proletarians at the front, but on the contrary towards the explosion of imperialist ‘each against all’ and the proliferation of chaotic and barbaric wars, within the framework of a capitalist society in decay. Nor are we in a situation of profound physical and ideological defeat for the working class, but in a context where workers are attempting, albeit not without difficulties, through their economic struggles, to develop their autonomy and class consciousness.

The proletariat is returning to the path of struggle and is indeed emerging from its torpor, particularly since the movements that erupted in Britain in 2022 during the ‘Summer of Discontent’, under the slogan ‘Enough is enough!’. The momentum set in motion, which continued in 2023 in France, the United States and across the globe, marks a ‘rupture’[9] with the relative passivity of the past thirty years, signifying a tendency to once again express a fighting spirit and a conscious effort enabling the gradual reclaiming of a lost class identity. This slow, bumpy, difficult process is certainly marked by obstacles, but, to paraphrase Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution, it indicates “a molecular process”, that is to say, a tendency still in the making, leading towards a necessary politicisation and the affirmation of a long-term perspective of revolutionary struggle. And in this respect, resistance in response to the economic attacks linked to the crisis of overproduction, against the war economy, but also against the ideological campaigns demanding sacrifices, is indeed a real step forward, even if still fragile. In short, the stakes of the current dynamic and the challenges they pose to the working class are considerable, but they are not those of a world war to which the slogan of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ claimed to respond.

In reality, this framework of analysis defended by the ICC is neither strange nor original. It refers to the ‘classical’ analysis as developed by Marx and Engels in their time (and partly by Rosa Luxemburg), which held that the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle would arise from the economic collapse of capitalism and not from war between capitalist states: “No, war does not create the most favourable conditions for the generalisation of the revolution. Contrary to the thesis on war which implies the view of an extremely rapid progression which surprises the bourgeoisie (on the Russian model), the revolution emerges, as Luxemburg said at the founding congress of the German CP, as a long and painful process, full of false starts, advances and retreats in the struggle. It is in this process that the conditions mature for generalisation, the raising of consciousness and the capacity for self-organisation. Revolutionaries must cease making their impatience a point of reference and learn to work in the long term, as reality dictates. […].  The conditions for generalisation can be found in the crisis itself. The inevitable submersion of capitalism in a deeper and deeper crisis creates the inexorable march towards the generalisation of the struggle, the condition for the opening of the revolution on a global level and for its final victory”.[10]

From such a perspective, ‘revolutionary defeatism’ is no longer merely a mistaken slogan, completely beside the point; it immediately opens the door to leftist positions. In fact, this slogan allows, the bourgeoisie and its leftists to embody imperialist aims, sometimes coupled with another slogan, that of ‘national liberation struggles’, a fig leaf for imperialist enterprises and the massacres of populations, as during the Cold War and the first Gulf War in 1990, when this slogan enabled the Trotskyists to defend Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against ‘US oppression’. Similarly, it remains one of the slogans used to justify nationalist support for ‘oppressed Palestine’ in the conflict pitting the Palestinian bourgeoisie against that of Israel.

The ICT, moreover, uses a similar lexicon, albeit ambiguously, though it does so to defend a necessary ‘fraternisation among the oppressed’.[11] While the ICT and the PCI do not support one bourgeois camp against another, advocating “revolutionary defeatism” on the erroneous basis of differences in national situations between countries obscures any clear distinction from the deceptions of the leftists and their tainted “internationalism”. For these organisations, the erroneous use of the slogan of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ illustrates the danger of a mechanical and blind application of old formulas from the past. The ICT and PCI are incapable of taking into account in their analytical framework today’s historical situation, the balance of forces between the classes that it entails, and the actual material situation of the working class, particularly in the central capitalist countries, which the comrades consider to be “still heavily marked by the weight of the counter-revolution”[12]

While war and militarism are indeed at the heart of the current situation and the defence of proletarian internationalism remains unquestionably a principle to be upheld, unlike in the past, the development of the next revolutionary wave will not arise from a world war, nor in any case from fraternisation across the fronts as advocated in a recent PCI article.[13] The revolution has its origins in the deepening economic crisis: “the bourgeoisie’s demand for sacrifice in the name of boosting the machinery of war will certainly encounter serious resistance from an undefeated working class. The class movements that characterise the rupture re-affirm the centrality of the economic crisis as the main stimulant of the class struggle. But at the same time, the proliferation of war and the increasing cost of the war economy, above all in the main countries of Europe, will be an important factor in the future politicisation of the struggle, in which the working class will be able to make a clear link between the sacrifices demanded by the war economy and the growing attacks on its living standards, and eventually to integrate all the other threats coming from decomposition into a struggle against the system as a whole.”[14]. And in this sense, the most consistent slogan remains that of Marx’s Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world, unite!”

WH, 4 April.

 

[1]  “Bilan of the 7 March 2026 public meeting”, published in French on Leftcom.org.

[2]  Communist Left groups present: ICT, PCI-Le Prolétaire and PCI-Cahiers Internationalistes, the ICC. Plus one militant from the CNT-SO.

[3]   “Bilan of the 7 March 2026 public meeting”, op cit

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8]  Report on the class struggle for 26th ICC Congress International Review 174 (May 2025)

[9] See our article Why does the ICC talk of a "rupture" in the class struggle? World Revolution 397 (July 2023)

[11] “Bilan of the 7 March 2026 public meeting”                                       

[12] ICT Introductory remarks to public meeting

[13] PCI, War in Ukraine. The “Clear Tendency” in the murky quagmire of national defence and realpolitik

[14] Resolution on the international situation International Review 174 (November 2025)

Rubric: 

Public meetings