Revolutionary Defeatism

[Apsken at aol.com]

Revolutionary defeatism is a phrase from Lenin referring to the duty of
Marxists in imperialist countries to oppose the war efforts of their own
governments (and thus in effect to encourage the defeat of their countries'
armies by their imperialist opponents, although the actual slogans of the
Soviet of Workers and Soldiers were "Turn the guns around!" and "Turn the
imperialist war into civil war!"; Lenin used the term defiantly and
provocatively, to stiffen his comrades' resolve in the face of the Second
International's collapse into national patriotism). Naturally revolutionary
defeatists also hope for the rest of what Doug wrote, but those points are
beyond the usual meaning of the term. Hal Draper as a Shachtmanite leader once
wrote an article titled "The Myth of Lenin's 'Revolutionary Defeatism'," which
was a tortured argument that Lenin didn't really mean it, that it would have
been contradictory for German workers to advocate the defeat of Germany;
British, the defeat of Britain; Russians, the defeat of Russia, and so forth,
as though those outcomes were mutually exclusive of one another and of the
revolutionary project. Hal's real problem was his anti-Stalinist discomfort in
calling for the defeat of the U.S. in a hypothetical war with the USSR; his
article was a fundamental text for the Third Camp, shortly before the main
Third Camp leaders abandoned their pretense and declared themselves in support
of U.S. military conquests. As a consequence of Hal's tutelage, many otherwise
radical Third Campers had great difficulty in taking a positive view of a
Vietnamese victory over U.S. forces, because they regarded both Ho Chi Minh
and the NLF as surrogates of Soviet "imperialism," against which they were
holding out their Third Camp alternative.

Ken Lawrence