SEAN TARJOTO PROF. S. McMEEKIN
2/18/02 - Week 3 REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
The German "Internationale" Group submitted several theses to the Zimmerwald Conference detailing that the aim of all parties claiming to be Socialist to strive primarily for peace as well as war. Peace needed to be secured as an final goal, but "war against war", against the ruling classes of the Great Powers and its policy of expansion of capital through colonization and nationalism, would be the necessary step toward this peace. The Group also declared the Second International was ruined. Its inability to create a set of common tactics which would be an "effective dam" against the disintegrative qualities of nationalism, and proposed that a new Worker's International would need to carry on the class struggle. This struggle, and its solidarity would "consolidate the masses" by "bearing in mind the importance of teaching political activity", and bringing the "resolute initiative to the broad masses" against its own nationalism.
The next to last principle which the Group delivered to the delegates was that "[t]he next task of socialism is the spiritual liberation of the proletariat from the guardianship of the bourgeosie." The bourgeosie, and its own spiritual and economic values, must be separated from the proletariat's. The new international would have to drive a wedge into the imperialist ideology of the war "which manifests itself in the influence of nationalist ideology" (73). A friend of mine interprets that with the bourgeosie disposed, it could no longer had the power to "guard" the property of the ruling classes.
For the Group, class antagonisms, which exist within the historical process of Imperialism, were reaching their final phase. "Capitalism has the destiny of strengthening the force of its worst enemy to the extent that it unfolds itself (71)." For the group, the growing gap between the middle and working classes only increases the numbers, and antagonism of the proletariat. World peace would be possible only with the revolutionary will generated by proletarian political activity, it would be this liberating force that bring an end to the war on both ideologically and tactically.
Could the language of the theses place the delegates of the Zimmerwald conference as the guardians? The last words are, "The Socialist International is the fatherland of the proletarians, to the defense of which everything should be subordinated." All tactics, programmes and allegiances would be toward a revolution to secure peace for the International. But this contradicts with the "spiritual liberation" of the proletariat, which could appear at the same time it resolved its revolutionary will, by political activity. In defending the fatherland of the Socialist ideology, it could free itself from the "guardianship of the bourgeoisie" that sat both at the conference and the seats of power within the Reichstag and the Duma.
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