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War and Revolution: Lenin and the Myth of Revolutionary Defeatism, by Hal Draper. Edited by E. Haberkern. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996. Paper, $15.95. Pp. ix, 159.
Lenin's position during the First World War was distinguished by his "revolutionary defeatism," that is, by the claim that consistent opposition to the imperialist war entailed a preference for the defeat of one's own government. This position was urged, not only against those, "social-patriots" or 'defensists," who would subordinate the revolutionary struggle for socialism to an imperative for national defense, but also against those, "centrists," who would subordinate their opposition to "defensism" to, or even temper it with, a concern for peace or for socialist unity.
Draper's work is a slightly edited reissue of a piece that first appeared in The New International in 1953-1954. Its aim is to dispel a "myth" fabricated in 1924 by Zinoviev to the effect that Lenin, relying upon a tradition of revolutionary defeatism that goes back to Marx, alone held to an uncompromising opposition to the war and that revolutionary defeatism, as the only consistent alternative to social-patriotism, was essential to Lenin's antiwar position (3). Draper argues on the contrary that the persuasiveness of Lenin's revolutionary defeatism was dependent upon a series of implicitly contradictory formulations and hence upon an essential ambiguity. If the significance of defeatism was expressed in the call to "turn the imperialist war into a civil war," it did not differ in substance from the views of people like Luxemburg or Trotsky, who opposed support for either side in the war ("neither victory nor defeat") and advocated instead the revolutionary intervention of the proletariat. In this case Lenin's insistence upon a...