Was Lenin a Campist?

Not even Lenin knew what his “revolutionary defeatism” should actually mean. He dropped it — and so should Marxists today.

By Alex Stout

“During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government,” said Lenin in 1915, a year after Tsarist Russia entered World War I. Clearly “defeat” referred to a military defeat by the enemy forces. 

Devoid of context and an understanding of Lenin’s political evolution, this and other passages from Lenin are approvingly quoted today to lend support to “campist” positions on the US left — positions which seek to more effectively oppose US imperialism by downplaying or ignoring the offenses of regimes opposed to it.

One influential example today would be the approach of the majority on DSA’s International Committee (IC). In January, before the invasion, DSA’s IC posted a statement which said nothing about Russia’s role in the escalation of tensions. The invasion itself is obviously indefensible, and since then their material has condemned it and called for Russian troops to withdraw, but there is still a hesitance to name or critique Russian imperialism in general.

Weeks later, Partisan Magazine published an article by Marvin G, a leader of the DSA IC, which quoted Lenin to argue for a “defeatist” practice, focusing on calls to disrupt US imperialism. However, there was no recognition that a “defeat” of the US in this proxy conflict means defeat for Ukraine, and so this approach provides no answer to the natural objections of working class people who want to stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people.

Whether it is carried out by proxy or directly, there is no progressive side in a clash between imperialist powers.

The imperialist invasion of Ukraine is condemned but that critical dimension of the conflict is not used to develop a perspective on how to assist Ukrainians or deliver peace (beyond opposition to US escalations). The conflict is primarily viewed through the single lens of opposition to US imperialism, and thus the image produced is distorted.

Campism tends to crop up wherever US imperialism comes into conflict with other governments, especially if that government claims to represent some left wing or socialist position. Instead of starting from an independent working class standpoint (for example, starting from the common interests of the US and Chinese working class struggle against the capitalist oligarchs at the helm of both the Chinese “Communist” Party and the US two-party system), campists end up shielding the camp opposed to US imperialism.

Some on the US left even argue that the Chinese and Russian states, and smaller powers aligned with them, should be supported as a bulwark against US imperialism because these capitalist authoritarian regimes maintain elements of “socialism”. Is this really the position socialists should take to fight imperialism?

In 1915, Lenin proposed that Marxists in imperialist countries at war should put forward a demand for military defeat of “their own” countries. This does seem to imply that Lenin was a campist.

What gets left out is that even in 1915, Lenin also argued that advocating for the victory of any ruling class would mean betraying working class internationalism and solidarity. His shifting positions over the years were the result of his grappling with that contradiction.

Despite some confusion in his formulations, however, Lenin’s Marxist approach was fundamentally opposed to what we might call campism today.

Lenin’s Opposition to Chauvinism

Lenin was not a mild-mannered person, politically, and certainly had no patience for chauvinism (war-mongering nationalism). He would routinely cut to the heart of an issue, identify “what is to be done” to advance the fight for socialism, and then aggressively “bend the stick” in that direction to pull the Bolsheviks, his political tendency within the workers’ movement, into the necessary position.

When World War I broke out and most of the socialist or social-democratic parties of the Second International buckled under pressure, betraying the socialist movement and falling in line behind “their own” capitalist class for the defense of their respective countries, Lenin was disgusted. This “social-chauvinism” (social-democratic in words, chauvinist in content) was a deadly disease tearing apart the movement for socialism, which could only be won on an internationalist basis, opposed to the imperialist war.

However, even Kautsky and the so-called “Marxist center” of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) were mired in passivity and bent out of shape under the pressure of the war. The dominant forces in that party had collapsed into support for their “own” capitalist class by voting for war credits. In most countries, socialist or social-democratic parties were now cheerleading the nationalist and chauvinist slogans of a “victory” of their ruling classes in this inter-imperialist war.

Well then, says Lenin, we are for the opposite position: We are for the DEFEAT of our own countries!

Revolutionary Defeatism?

This idea, later termed “revolutionary defeatism,” represented a good instinct but a bad formulation. In fact, as Hal Draper explained in 1953/54 in his article “The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Revolutionary Defeatism,” from 1914 to 1916 Lenin himself was not too sure what this meant exactly and introduced and used four different formulations interchangeably, even though each had a different meaning and was vulnerable to different criticism:

No.1: The special Russian position: defeat of Russia by Germany is the “lesser evil”.

No.2: The objective statement that “defeat facilitates revolution”.

No.3: The slogan: wish defeat in every country.

No.4: Do not halt before the risk of defeat.

These are four different political ideas. Only three of them are meaningful for the international movement. Only two of them involve any wish for defeat (1 and 3). Only one of them can actually be put forward in the form of a “slogan” (3).

Which is the meaning of Lenin’s position, even assuming that all of them have some self-consistent meaning of their own? The truth is that from this point on, Lenin juggles all four depending on polemical aim and convenience.

Lenin was reaching for a strong way to delineate the internationalist position from the social-chauvinist position, and he thought this difference must be connected in some way with the “defeat” slogan.

At root, this was an attempt to square the modern conditions of the imperialist stage of capitalism, with the old Marxist methods of the 19th century. In the 19th century, when rising capitalism was still locked in battle against powerful remnants of reactionary feudalism, Marxists could often identify the more progressive sides in wars between competing ruling classes and call on the international working class to unite with the progressive capitalists to assist the defeat of the more reactionary regime, clearing the way for expanded democratic rights that working people could use to fight for socialism. For example, in the US Civil War, Marx supported the capitalist North against the Southern slavocracy.

By World War I, however, the once-progressive features of the early capitalist class were completely played out. The world was divided up between different capitalist powers, meaning that any attempt to change access to markets, labor, and raw materials lead to conflict—including military conflict—in the form of proxy-wars and inter-imperialist wars. World War I was an expression of this new imperialist stage of capitalism, an attempt to redivide a world already fully interconnected and dominated by the big capitalist powers.

In the imperialist era, the conditions of modern capitalism are fundamentally different, and a class-based approach requires a different method. Whether it is carried out by proxy or directly, there is no progressive side in a clash between imperialist powers. There is only the devastation of war, regardless of which section of the ruling class comes out on top.

Luxemburg and Trotsky’s Position

Other Marxist internationalists, like Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, did not echo Lenin’s “revolutionary defeatism” formulations. From the start of World War I, they argued for workers and soldiers to transform the imperialist war into a revolutionary struggle of the international working class against the whole capitalist system. They agreed that “the main enemy is at home” because workers have more influence in our home countries than abroad; however, our ability to effectively oppose the capitalist class is harmed by any failure to explain things as they really are, or by any attempt to prop up the ruling class of any nation.

As Luxemburg put it, “For the class-conscious proletariat to identify its cause with either military camp is an untenable position.… The proletariat…can only strive forward and onward, for a goal that lies beyond even the most newly created conditions. In this sense alone is it possible for the proletariat to oppose, with its policy, both camps in the imperialist world war.”

She ruled out adopting a defeatist position because the working class could not advance by one imperialist camp being defeated or the other, nor could it win peace by going back to the status quo.

“A powerful movement of the proletariat is…a necessary prerequisite for the actual realization of a peace without annexations,” Trotsky agreed.  “…It is possible to overcome [the European pre-war status quo which led to the war] only by means of the proletarian revolution.” In other words, the best way to stop World War I was to turn the imperialist war into an uprising of the working class—to redivide the conflict along class lines instead of national lines.

Lenin was in the “camp” of the international working class, not in a camp with foreign ruling classes.

Instead of choosing a side in the military war between reactionary forces, Luxemburg and Trotsky argued against the false choice of “victory or defeat” and for a revolutionary struggle against the war and against all the conditions that generated the war. Failing to oppose the ruling class of another regime in addition to our own, or calling for the “defeat” of our own ruling class by the other, obfuscates the class lines of the conflict (not to mention alienates you from the broader working class at home).

As Draper carefully chronicled, Lenin moved from directly applying an outdated method and taking a fully campist (pro-Japanese) position in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese war, to trying to find some sort of non-campist yet “defeatist” position between 1914-1916 by employing several contradictory formulations of the “revolutionary defeatism” idea, to finally dropping the idea altogether in 1917.

Despite being initially convinced that it was untenable, in the end Lenin fully adopted the approach of Luxemburg and Trotsky, who had never seen the need to tie themselves to defeatist slogans in order to be principled internationalists.

Defencism From Below

Lenin discovered a new approach when sharply confronted with the masses in Russia in 1917 yearning for peace and for a defense against the threat of the victorious German army occupying significant parts of the country. The defense of the country as expressed by workers stands in contrast to all the social-chauvinists supporting the aggression of their country in an imperialist war. Instead of opposing the nationalist, chauvinist “defense” of the fatherland with “defeatism”, Lenin opposed this “defencism” from above (which hoped for gains from victory in the war), from the capitalists and their social-chauvinist supporters, with a “defencism” from below: a defencism that links the desire for peace without annexations to the socialist revolution, and organizes for both.

In his speech at the Fourth All-Russia Congress Of Soviets in March 1918, Lenin said such a worker-led defense would have been employing “tactics of the defense of the fatherland, not the fatherland of the Romanovs [the tsar and his family], Kerenskys [the leader of the pro-capitalist Russian Provisional Government between July and October 1917], or Chernovs [a leader of the right wing of the Social-Revolutionaries], a fatherland with secret treaties, a fatherland of the treacherous bourgeoisie—not that fatherland but the fatherland of the working people.”

Even in such a situation, you can still rightfully claim that “the main enemy is at home.” But that is not the same as arguing for the military defeat of any side in a reactionary war, or avoiding criticism of the opposing imperialist power. In fact, trying to shoehorn “defeatism” into an anti-war position would be an unnecessary obstacle to socialism.

Although Stalin’s counterrevolution cynically revived the old “revolutionary defeatism” idea to strengthen his bureaucratic authoritarian clique, it has always been the result of theoretical confusion and serves no good purpose today. We should drop this myth, or else run the risk of lending credibility to campist reinterpretations of Lenin’s staunchly anti-campist principles.

Lenin was in the “camp” of the international working class, not in a camp with foreign ruling classes. It’s time we learn from Lenin’s evolution on this question and discard the unhelpful dogmas that hold back true international solidarity.

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If you want to read more about how we believe these ideas apply to the war in Ukraine, which is at the same time an imperialist war of Russia against a former colony and a military conflict between imperialist power blocks – the dominant US-led NATO and its much weaker rival, Russia – you can read this article by the same author, Alex Stout:

Ukraine War: Where Is the Opposition to Washington’s Warriors? → For a class-based opposition to the Russian invasion | No to sanctions on the Russian people | No support for the NATO-Zelenskyy axis