Revolutionary defeatism is a concept made most prominent byVladimir Lenin inWorld War I. It is based on theMarxist idea ofclass struggle. Arguing that theproletariat could not win or gain when fighting a war undercapitalism, Lenin declared its true enemy is the imperialist leaders who sent their lower classes into battle. Workers would gain more from their own nations' defeats, he argued, if the war could be turned into civil war and then international revolution.[1]
Initially rejected by all but the more radical at thesocialistZimmerwald Conference in 1915,[2] the concept gained from more and more socialists, especially inRussia in 1917 after it was forcefully reaffirmed in Lenin's "April Theses" asRussia's war losses continued, even after theFebruary Revolution as theProvisional Government kept them in the conflict.[citation needed]
DuringWorld War I in the United Kingdom, theBritish socialist movement included a small minority of revolutionary defeatists such asJohn Maclean.[3] Similarly, the Polish revolutionaryRosa Luxemburg and her German comradeKarl Liebknecht argued for revolutionary defeatism against theSocial Democratic Party of Germany's pro-war stance. A notable opponent of this thought during WWI wasPyotr Kropotkin, a Russian anarcho-communist who claimed that theEntente were the lesser evil of the conflict and that Bolshevik Russia should have continued to support them against theCentral Powers.
Revolutionary defeatism was also a policy of theInternational Communist Party underAmadeo Bordiga, which sawWorld War II as a reactionary war between two opposing empires, in contrast to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union andChinese Communist Party who were then allied with Great Britain and the United States in a continuation of Dmitrov's Comintern Popular Front anti-fascist politics, which, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, changed their stance from neutrality and discouraging participation, to treating the war as a progressive fight for freedom and liberation from theNazi regime.[citation needed]
