of self-government and independence of all countries whose people desire and are capable of sustaining an independent existence.

During the past ten and more years 600 million men and women in nearly a score of lands have, with our support and assistance, attained nationhood. Many millions more are being helped surely and steadily toward self-government. Thus, the reality and effectiveness of what we have done is a proof of our sincerity.

[3]

Further, we know that political independence cannot alone assure men and nations full opportunity to pursue happiness and to fulfill their highest destiny. There is likewise need for economic sustenance and growth. This, too, we have helped to provide. We seek to develop with others a large volume of mutually beneficial trade.

Likewise we seek, through technical assistance, the Colombo Plan and other programs we support, to help economic progress in the less developed countries and to raise the living standards of their peoples. In these programs we have not sought nor desired extension of either economic or political power. The purpose is not to dilute, but to enrich and secure their freedom.

During this period of notable cooperative progress in the free world, those who assert the supremacy of the state and deny the inherent rights of man have also been active. Millions of people of different blood, religions and traditions have been forcibly incorporated within the Soviet Union, and many millions more have in fact, although not always in form, been absorbed into the Soviet Communist bloc.

In Europe alone, some 100 million people, in what were once ten independent nations, are compelled, against their will, to work for the glorification and aggrandizement of the Soviet Communist state.

The Communist rulers have expressed, in numerous documents and manifestos, their purpose to extend the practice of communism, by every possible means, until it encompasses the world. To this end they have used military and political force in the past. They continue to seek the same goals, and they have now added economic inducements to their other methods of penetration.

It would be illusory to hope that in their foreign policies, political and economic, the Soviet rulers would reflect a concern for the rights of other peoples which they do not show toward the men and women they already rule.

Any free nation that may be persuaded by whatever threat, promise or enticement to embrace communism will lose its independence, and its people will forfeit their rights and liberties. These contrasting records of recent years reflect the essence of the struggle between free countries and the Communist rulers.

[5]

In the face of the Communist challenge, almost fifty nations which cherish freedom have drawn together in voluntary associations for their collective security. These associations uphold for all their members the right to independent existence, the right to free expression and the right to differ. The purpose of their union is to preserve those national rights, just as within a state people join together to preserve their individual rights.

[6]

We reject any thought that the cleavage we have described should be resolved by force. We shall never initiate violence. Moreover, we shall use our full influence to assure that Soviet efforts to inflame old antagonisms will not succeed in breaking the peace. The United Nations provides appropriate machinery to assist countries desiring peacefully to bridge their differences and to settle disputes.

Many nations of the free world are ever anxious to proffer their good offices to promote the same end. Our two countries stand constantly ready to aid in negotiation and conciliation with others directly concerned, so as to achieve just settlements of the concrete issues that now trouble the world.

[7]

We shall persevere in seeking a just and lasting peace and a universal and effectively controlled disarmament which will relieve mankind of the burden and terror of modern weapons.

Meanwhile, the society of free nations must return the power needed to deter aggression. We recognize that such power should never serve as a means of national aggrandizement but only as an essential shield for every member of the community of nations.

We are determined to make the conquest of the atom a pathway to peaceful progress, not a road to doom.

[8]

We will not be deflected from the policies and purposes we have herein stated. On the contrary, we will maintain and, where necessary, strengthen and extend them. Thus, we shall help ourselves and others to peace, freedom and social progress, maintaining human rights where they are already secure, defending them when they are in peril and peacefully restoring them where they have temporarily been lost.

While resolutely pursuing these aims, which are the products of our faith in God and in the peoples of the earth, we shall eagerly grasp any genuine opportunity to free mankind of the pall of fear and insecurity which now obscures what can and should be a glorious. future.

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER.
ANTHONY EDEN.

Soviet Policies

42. THE WAR PROGRAM OF THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION: V. I. LENIN SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER 19171 (EXCERPT)

I

The main argument is that the demand for disarmament is the clearest, most decisive, most consistent expression of the struggle against all militarism and against all war.

But this main argument is precisely the principal error of the advocates of disarmament. Socialists cannot, without ceasing to be Socialists, be opposed to all war.

Essentials of Lenin, London, Lawrence and Wishart 1947, pp. 741-746.

In the first place, Socialists have never been, nor can they be, opposed to revolutionary wars. The bourgeoisie of the imperialist "Great" Powers has become thoroughly reactionary, and we regard the war which this bourgeoise is now waging as a reactionary, slaveowners' and criminal war. But what about a war against this bourgeoisie? For example, a war for liberation waged by people who are oppressed by and dependent upon this bourgeoisie, or by colonial peoples, for their independence? In the theses of the Internationale group, in § 5, we read: "In the era of this unbridled imperialism there can be no more national wars of any kind." This is obviously wrong. The history of the Twentieth Century, this century of "unbridled imperialism," is replete with colonial wars. But what we Europeans, the imperialist oppressors of the majority of the peoples of the world, with our habitual, despicable European chauvinism, call "colonial wars" are often national wars, or national rebellions of those oppressed peoples. One of the main features of imperialism is that it accelerates the development of capitalism in the most backward countries, and thereby extends and intensifies the struggle against national oppression. This is a fact. It inevitably follows from this that imperialism must often give rise to national wars. Junius, who in her pamphlet defends the above-quoted "theses," says that in the imperialist epoch every national war against one of the imperialist Great Powers leads to the intervention of another competing imperialist Great Power and thus. every national war is converted into an imperialist war. But this argument is also wrong. This may happen, but it does not always happen. Many colonial wars in the period between 1900 and 1914 did not follow this road. And it would be simply ridiculous if we declared, for instance, that after the present war, if it ends in the extreme exhaustion of all the belligerents, "there can be no" national, progressive, revolutionary wars "whatever," waged, say, by China in alliance with India, Persia, Siam, etc., against the Great Powers.

To deny all possibility of national wars under imperialism is wrong in theory, obviously mistaken historically, and in practice is tanamount to European chauvinism: we who belong to nations that oppress hundreds of millions of people in Europe, Africa, Asia, etc., must tell the oppressed peoples that it is "impossible" for them to wage war against "our" nations!

Secondly, civil wars are also wars. Anyone who recognizes the class struggle cannot fail to recognize civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions, inevitable continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle. All the great revolutions prove this. To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, would mean sinking into extreme opportunism and renouncing the Socialist revolution.

Thirdly, the victory of Socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all war in general. On the contrary, it presupposes such wars. The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in the various countries. It cannot be otherwise under the commodity production system. From this it follows irrefutably that Socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries.

It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois for some time. This must not only create friction, but a direct striving on the part of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the victorious proletariat of the Socialist country. In such cases a war on our part would be a legitimate and just war. It would be a war for Socialism, for the liberation of other nations from the bourgeoisie. Engels was perfectly right when, in his letter to Kautsky, September 12, 1882, he openly admitted that it was possible for already victorious Socialism to wage "defensive wars." What he had in mind was defence of the victorious proletariat against the bourgeoisie of other countries.

Only after we have overthrown, finally vanquished, and expropriated the bourgeoisie of the whole world, and not only of one country, will wars become impossible. And from a scientific point of view it would be utterly wrong and utterly unrevolutionary for us to evade or gloss over the most important thing, namely, that the most difficult task, the one demanding the greatest amount of fighting in the transition to Socialism, is to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie. "Social" parsons and opportunists are always ready to dream about the future peaceful Socialism; but the very thing that distinguishes them from revolutionary Social-Democrats is that they refuse to think about and reflect on the fierce class struggle and class wars that are necessary for the achievement of this beautiful future.

We must not allow ourselves to be led astray by words. The term "defence of the fatherland," for instance, is hateful to many, because the avowed opportunists and the Kautskyites use it to cover up and gloss over the lies of the bourgeoisie in the present predatory war. This is a fact. It does not follow from this, however, that we must forget to ponder over the meaning of political slogans. Recognizing "defence of the fatherland" in the present war is nothing more nor less than recognizing it as a "just" war, a war in the interests of the proletariat; nothing more nor less, because invasions may occur in any war. It would be simply foolish to repudiate "defence of the fatherland" on the part of the oppressed nations in their wars against the imperialist Great Powers, or on the part of a victorious proletariat in its war against some Galliffet of a bourgeois state.

Theoretically, it would be quite wrong to forget that every war is but the continuation of politics by other means: the present imperialist war is the continuation of the imperialist politics of two groups of Great Powers, and these politics were engendered and fostered by the sum total of the relationships of the imperialist epoch. But this very epoch must also necessarily engender and foster the politics of struggle against national oppression and the politics of the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie, and therefore, also the possibility and the inevitability, first, of revolutionary national rebellions and wars; second, of proletarian wars and rebellions against the bourgeoisie; and, third, of a combination of both kinds of revolutionary war, etc.

II

To this must be added the following general considerations.

An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, deserves to be treated like slaves. We cannot forget, unless we become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, that we are living

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in a class society, that there is no way out of this society, and there can be none, except by means of the class struggle. In every class society, whether it is based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, on wage labour, the oppressing class is armed. The modern standing army, and even the modern militia-even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, Switzerland, for example-represent the bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat. This is such an elementary truth that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it. It is sufficient to recall the use of troops against strikers in all capitalist countries.

The fact that the bourgeoisie is armed against the proletariat is one of the biggest, most fundamental, and most important facts in modern capitalist society. And in face of this fact, revolutionary SocialDemocrats are urged to "demand" "disarmament." This is tantamount to the complete abandonment of the point of view of the class struggle, the renunciation of all thought of revolution. Our slogan must be: The arming of the proletariat for the purpose of vanquishing. expropriating and disarming the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics a revolutionary class can adopt, tactics which follow logically from the whole objective development of capitalist militarism, and dictated by that development. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world historical mission, to throw all armaments on the scrap-heap; the proletariat will undoubtedly do this, but only when this condition has been fulfilled, certainly not before.

If the present war rouses among the reactionary Christian Socialists, among the whimpering petty bourgeoisie, only horror and fright, only aversion to all use of arms, to bloodshed, death, etc., then we must say: Capitalist society has always been an endless horror. And if this most reactionary of all wars is now preparing a horrible end for that society, we have no reason to drop into despair. At a time when, as every one can see, the bourgeoisie itself is paving the way for the only legitimate and revolutionary war, namely, civil war against the imperialist bourgeoisie, the objective significance of the "demand" for disarmament, or more correctly, the dream of disarmament, is nothing but an expression of despair.

We should like to remind those who say that this is a theory divorced from life, of two world-historical facts: the role of trusts and the employment of women in industry, on the one hand; and the Paris Commune of 1871 and the December uprising of 1905 in Russia, on the other.

The business of the bourgeoisie is to promote trusts, to drive women and children into the factories, to torture them there, to corrupt them, to condemn them to extreme poverty. We do not "demand" such a development. We do not "support" it; we fight it. But how do we fight? We know that trusts and the employment of women in industry are progressive. We do not want to go back to the handicraft system, to premonopolistic capitalism, to domestic drudgery for women. Forward through the trusts, etc., and beyond them to Socialism!

This argument, is, mutatis mutandis, applicable also to the present militarization of the people. Today the imperialist bourgeoisie militarizes not only the adults, but also the youth. To-morrow, it may proceed to militarize the women. To this we must say: All the better! The quicker it does this the nearer shall we be to the armed