T. Derbent: Lenin and the War (1)

Introduction: Lenin and Clausewitz

Three months before the October Revolution, following insurrectionary demonstrations in Petrograd, Kerensky’s Provisional Government issued a warrant for Lenin’s arrest. In response, Lenin left the capital and clandestinely made his way across the Finnish border, only taking with him a small bag and two books: Karl Marx’s Civil War in France and Clausewitz’s On War. Clausewitz’s influence on Marxism-Leninism began with Engels, was deepened by Mehring, and became decisive through Lenin’s study.
At first glance, it could seem as if there was a great divide between the Prussian soldier, patriot, and monarchist, and the Russian professional revolutionary. But a deep intellectual affinity united the two: dialectical, methodical, caustic, creative thinking, founded on a solid philosophical culture. Lenin was quick to perceive the originality and richness of Clausewitz’s thought, which had been misunderstood, distorted, and impoverished by a military caste which—both in France and Germany—brought the art of warfare to its lowest ebb in the First World War. As important as Clausewitz was for Lenin, so Lenin was for Clausewitz, in that the Russian revolutionary was the first statesman to apply his thinking in the realm of political action.
In his field, Clausewitz’s thought is the equivalent of Hegel’s in philosophy, or Adam Smith’s in economics: one of the foundational sources of Marxism-Leninism. It wasn’t until the military writings of Mao Zedong, himself a great reader of Clausewitz,¹ that a revolutionary military policy was fully and coherently theorized; neither Marx, Engels, Lenin, nor Stalin had produced a work that surpassed On War, just as Capital surpassed The Wealth of Nations.
Whether it was Mehring’s writings that prompted Lenin to read Clausewitz is still an open question.² What is certain is that Lenin read the passages in which Mehring praised Clausewitz’s thought, before undertaking the reading of On War in the Bern library, during his second exile³ between autumn 1914 and spring 1915. In his notebook, he copied substantial excerpts (in German) accompanied by a few remarks in Russian. Extracts which, tellingly, grew in number and scope as he read on.

Part I: Theory of War

1.1. War as a Political Instrument

The first thesis of Clausewitz of which Lenin took note was his famous formula describing war as “the continuation of politics by other means.” Clausewitz first mentioned it in his Note of July 10, 1827 [on the state of the manuscript],⁴ before copying paragraph 24 of Chapter 1 of Book 1 in its entirety.⁵ Later, when Clausewitz addressed the question again in chapter 6 B of Book VIII, Lenin reproduced extensive passages, noting in the margin: “most important chapter.”¹It is in this chapter that we find the famous passage: “It is, of course, well-known that the only source of war is politics­—the intercourse of governments and peoples; but it is apt to be assumed that war suspends that intercourse and replaces it by a wholly different condition, ruled by no law but its own. We maintain, on the contrary, that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means.” Clausewitz, On War, 605; Derbent, “Notes de Lénine Sur Clausewitz” (“Lenin’s Notes on Clausewitz,”) 158.
But of what politics is war the continuation? Firstly, of object-politics, i.e., the set of historical, social, economic, technical, cultural, and ideological factors that constitute the social conditions of war, making it a socio-historical product.⁶ Secondly, of subject-politics, or policy, that is, political action, the “conduct of public affairs” inspired by a set of motives and guided by a specific aim. In this sense, the Clausewitzian concept of “continuation” is to be understood as follows:

1. The specificity of war, namely the use of armed force, which creates a particular situation governed by specific laws;
2. The inclusion of war in the broader totality of politics. War is only one of the means of doing politics;⁷
3. A complex relationship between the aims within a war (its Ziel—i.e., the destruction of the enemy army, the capture of its capital or one of its provinces) and the larger purpose of the war (its Zweck—i.e., the new situation created as a result of the war: the conquest of a province, the establishment of a new political regime, the annexation of the enemy country).

Clausewitz points out that if we separate war from politics, war would be no more than the expression of hatred between two peoples. But warfare cannot be reduced to mere animosity, to a struggle to the death pitting two peoples blindly against each other. As Lenin summarizes in a sidenote, war is part of a whole, and that whole is politics. It is by establishing this relationship that Clausewitz makes war a theoretical object.⁸ In this light, all wars become phenomena of the same nature.

1.2 War and Antagonism

One of the truisms of counterrevolutionary discourse, whether on the left or the right, consists of reducing those who use violence to the use of such violence alone. A more nuanced form of this is the claim that Lenin’s politics is a mere continuation of war. This accusation has been leveled at Lenin, Marxism, and the USSR as a state. A particularly bold formulation of this claim can be found in J. F. C. Fuller, sometimes referred to as “the greatest military thinker of the 20th century,” who wrote (in 1961!) that

Soviet political relations, both internal and external, are analogous with those within and between primitive tribes. . . . To both the tribesman and the revolutionary “to destroy or be destroyed” is the governing slogan, and as in the animal world, there is no distinction between war and peace.⁹

There are many versions of this evaluation, one of the least libelous being by Jean Vincent Holeindre:

[Lenin’s] politics are thought out from the point of view of class struggle, which necessarily has a violent character, and from the perspective that peace will be established as a result of the realization of the communist idea. This is where Clausewitz’s Formula is overturned: in Lenin’s eyes, violence precedes and institutes politics. In Lenin’s theory, violence must be conceived and implemented by the vanguard party. The vocation of politics is not to tame violence, but to organize it in the revolutionary moment with the aim of putting an end to it once and for all, as soon as the objectives of the revolution have been achieved.¹⁰

Considering the vocation of politics to be the domestication of violence is a Hobbesian, liberal view, alien not only to Lenin but to Clausewitz, Machiavelli, and many others, for whom war does not represent the negation of politics but one of its manifestations.
The Marxist-Leninist conception of history is founded on the notion of contradiction, which can take the form of social antagonism—as illustrated by the opening line of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.¹¹

In French, we have long been confronted with a recurring translation error which reveals the relative complexity of the question. The standard French translation of the word “Kampf” is “guerre” (Krieg), rather than “lutte” (struggle) or “combat” (fight). This error seriously misrepresents the concept’s meaning, since antagonism is not necessarily belligerence, especially since class struggle is “sometimes open, sometimes concealed.” This is an essential clarification, as it suggests that historical agents, even though they may not be concealing their intentions, may nevertheless be blind to the antagonism between them.
Moreover, for Marxism-Leninism, the scope of politics is broader than that of the struggle between antagonistic classes. If societies are divided by the class contradictions that determine historical upheavals, they are also marked by innumerable conflicts of interest between peoples, nations, classes, particular social strata, class factions, and so on. Not all these conflicts of interest imply a logic of open warfare, firstly because they may be offset by a community of higher interests, and secondly because war is costly and its outcome uncertain: the game of war may not seem worth the effort. In the historic struggle between the English bourgeoisie and aristocracy, the period of Cromwellian warfare in the 17th century was rather short lived compared to the process of the conversion of a large part of the English aristocracy to the delights of capitalism. Today, the US and China are experiencing numerous conflicts of interest, leading to increasingly hostile practices of various kinds (espionage, disinformation, taxation or limitation of imports, etc.); yet the US and China are fundamentally at peace. In politics, peace is not the exception. Peace does not presuppose the absence of contradictions; it is the state in which armed violence is not considered to be the appropriate means of resolving conflicts of interest.
In the case of contradictions between antagonistic classes, a certain warlike relationship persists, however tenuously, in times of peace. First, because the more violent episodes of the past are still present during times of peace (for example, the legacy of the Paris Commune). Second, because certain class-conscious political forces, having no illusions about cooperation between classes with antagonistic interests and convinced of the inevitability of confrontation, carry out acts of war during times of peace as a preparation/anticipation of future periods of open war.¹²
The idea of a period of peace between antagonistic classes leads us to reflect on the way in which the Manifesto spoke of a struggle that is sometimes concealed, sometimes open. When the power of a class is well secured, its devices of coercion are used only exceptionally. Its ideological omnipotence succeeds—if not in preventing any expression of the specific interests of the dominated class, then at least in keeping said expression at a low level of antagonism. At this stage, most of the dominated class does not see itself as such, but dilutes or splits its identity along other lines (national, ethnic, religious). In such periods, in the absence of a clear enemy and deluded by its own ideological categories, the ruling class itself often perceives its own identity as a mere part of a national or religious community. This is not a situation of war in disguise, but one of peace between classes, which lasts until the historical agents—both objective (war, economic crisis) and subjective (political action)—transform the class in itself into a class for itself.
For Lenin, pacifist strategies are pacifist illusions. Only revolution can cut the knot of social contradictions. The class struggle is destined to transform itself into a class war by the transition from a period marked by an accumulation of quantitative changes (more class consciousness, more organization, more revolutionary theory and practice) to a phase in which qualitative change takes place (the passage from peaceful to armed struggle):

A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war, i.e., into an armed struggle between two sections of the people.¹³

The proletariat constitutes itself as a class in its own right through partial struggles, through an effort to organize and raise political consciousness—but this does not yet make it a partisan of open warfare. Consciousness of the fundamental contradiction between class interests does not necessarily imply belief in the need for war. The idea that parliament or the state float above social classes, or that they can at least be used to transform society, is likely to result in a pacifist outlook. War is costly and risky and clashes with long-held moral values: it is inevitable that nonviolent strategies will be favored as long as they seem likely to succeed. What’s more, the process leading from the class in itself to the class for itself, and subsequently from class struggle to class war, is far from linear. It involves both rapid advances and equally abrupt setbacks. This is why Lenin criticized the armed actions of the Narodniks, as in his view, proletarian politics called for the work of consciousness raising and organization, which included an antagonistic dimension (strikes, etc.) but did not yet require armed violence.

1.3. War As an Object of History

Lenin reproduces the sections of chapter 3 B of Book VIII of On War dealing with the transformation of warfare in the light of historical changes, particularly those brought about by the French Revolution. According to Clausewitz, it is not in the new ideas and new processes that the French Revolution introduced into the art of war that one should look for the causes of its armies’ accomplishments, but in the new state of society and its national character.
Only a government freed of all the special rights, privileges, internal barriers, monopolies, and particularisms that characterized the Ancien Régime could launch a genuine national mobilization and set up a war economy. All of France’s resources were mobilized in the service of war, and the military might that resulted far surpassed the combined strength of the opposing dynastic armies. Unlike the princes’ armed forces, made up of mercenary vagabonds trained by the drill and led by the rod, the French army was a national army of citizens, whose recruitment and promotion was based on merit, not birth.
With the armies of the Revolution (which Napoleon inherited), warfare underwent major changes and took on a new form—not because the French government had emancipated itself from the constraints of politics, but because the Revolution had changed the foundations of politics itself, thus awakening new forces and revealing new means of increasing and directing the dynamics of war. These changes in military art were the outcome of those in politics.
In the chapter entitled “Scale of the Military Objective and of the Effort to Be Made,” Clausewitz looks back at the historical changes brought about in the character of warfare (from the Tatar hordes and the small republics of antiquity, to ancient Rome, the vassals of the Middle Ages and the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries):

The Tartar people and army had been one; in the republics of antiquity and during the Middle Ages the people (if we confine the concept to those who had the rights of citizens) had still played a prominent part; but in the circumstances of the eighteenth century the people’s part had been extinguished. The only influence the people continued to exert on war was an indirect one—through its general virtues or shortcomings. . . . This was the state of affairs at the outbreak of the French Revolution. . . . [T]he full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance. . . . Since Bonaparte, then, war, first among the French and subsequently among their enemies, again became the concern of the people as a whole, took on an entirely different character, or rather closely approached its true character, its absolute perfection. There seemed no end to the resources mobilized; all limits disappeared in the vigor and enthusiasm shown by governments and their subjects. . . . War, untrammeled by any conventional restraints, had broken loose in all its elemental fury. This was due to the peoples’ new share in these great affairs of state; and their participation, in turn, resulted partly from the impact that the Revolution had on the internal conditions of every state and partly from the danger that France posed to everyone. Will this always be the case in future? From now on will every war in Europe be waged with the full resources of the state, and therefore have to be fought only over major issues that affect the people? Or shall we again see a gradual separation taking place between government and people? Such questions are difficult to answer, and we are the last to dare to do so. . . . [Our objective:] show how every age had its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions. Each period, therefore, would have held to its own theory of war, even if the urge had always and universally existed to work things out on scientific principles. It follows that the events of every age must be judged in the light of its own peculiarities. One cannot, therefore, understand and appreciate the commanders of the past until one has placed oneself in the situation of their times, not so much by a painstaking study of all its details as by an accurate appreciation of its major determining features.¹⁴

Lenin recopied this excerpt, described it as important, and summed it up in the following way: “Each era, its wars.” And so it proved to be for revolutionary wars as well.

1.4. The Rise Toward the Extremes and the Clausewitzian Trinity

Lenin also showed a keen interest in analyzing the political causes of the rise of extreme forms of war and of the process of de-escalation, as weak motives and tensions take war away from its “ideal,” “abstract” model: absolute war, the unrestrained outbreak of violence aimed at crushing the enemy to the bone.
When considering the differences in the nature of war, Clausewitz develops a remarkably dialectical line of thought, which Lenin would carefully reiterate:

The more powerful and inspiring the motives for war, the more they affect the belligerent nations and the fiercer the tensions that precede the outbreak, the closer will war approach its abstract concept, the more important will be the destruction of the enemy, the more closely will the military aims and the political objects of war coincide, and the more military and less political will war appear to be. On the other hand, the less intense the motives, the less will the military element’s natural tendency to violence coincide with political directives. As a result, war will be driven further from its natural course, the political object will be more and more at variance with the aim of ideal war, and the conflict will seem increasingly political in character.¹⁵

Thus, even when war appears to be absurd and senseless, drawing from within its own fabric the reasons for its escalation to new extremes and pitting different nations against each other, politics remains the determining factor in war. In fact, in such instances, it is even more decisive than ever. Only when war is tempered by the influence of political power does it betray the weakness of its own political objectives and motivations. As Lenin summarized: “appearance is still not actuality. The more war seems ‘military,’ the more profoundly it is political; the more ‘political’ war appears to be, the less profoundly political it actually is.”¹⁶
During the repression of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Lenin was able to assess the value of Marx’s lessons on the Paris Commune. These lessons, set out in The Civil War in France, can be summed up as follows: the necessity of centralism, of decisiveness, and of the use of force. And yet, it was only gradually, as the situation grew more perilous, that the Bolsheviks acquired the means to wage civil war: they created the Cheka¹⁷ on the spur of the moment, and it only came to play a real role after the assassination of Bolshevik leader Volodarsky. The death penalty itself, a terrorist measure par excellence, was not introduced until the spring of 1918. But despite these hesitations and improvisations, the Bolsheviks were able to carry out the “rise towards the extremes” of violence and save the revolution from the dangers that struck it down in Finland, Poland, Hungary, and Germany.¹⁸
According to Clausewitz (whom Lenin also quoted in his following train of thought), wars are as different as the motives behind them and the political relations that precede them. War is a true shape-shifter not only because of such differences, but also because of the combinations of factors, tendencies, and phenomena that are peculiar to it, and which Clausewitz presents in the form of a trinity: the feeling of hatred and hostility (which drives the people), the set of objective and subjective factors at play (which the general staff has to sort out), and the rational objectives (which the government has to judge).

1.5. Lenin and Other Aspects of Clausewitzian Thought

When reading and commenting on Clausewitz, Lenin also dwelt on the role played in war by the people;¹⁹ on the role of the general staff;²⁰ on the critique of the doctrine of key positions (the key position in enemy territory, says Clausewitz, is its army—to which Lenin adds in the margin: “witty and clever!”); on the conduct and character of a regular army; on the concept of the “decisive battle”; on the advantages of the defensive; on the narrowness of the general staffs’ vision, etc.
He goes on to discuss the question of courage (that of the soldier in the face of physical danger, and that of the warlord confronted with his responsibilities), as well as Clausewitz’s digressions on the legitimacy of theoretical activity, and the dialectic between the particular and the general that should characterize it.
Lenin’s notes on Clausewitz reveal a particular interest in the theses relating to “military virtue,” namely those qualities that are peculiar to a regular army hardened by victory and defeat. In fact, Clausewitz theorized about the “military virtue” of regular troops in order to distinguish it from the military qualities of the people in arms, in order to examine their respective merits, the situations in which both are best employed, and so on.
Given that the modalities of confrontation can never be freely chosen, certain conditions demand that the forces of revolution provide themselves with the means required to develop said “military virtue,” since the inherent qualities of a people in arms (enthusiasm, fighting spirit, creativity) are unable to resolve all problems. It was Lenin who first understood, in the field of proletarian military thought, that the armament of the masses could, under certain conditions, be insufficient, and that the revolution might have to equip itself with a standing army. This went against many prejudices stemming from the anti-militarist tradition of the workers’ movement and anticipated the difficulties of a people’s government confronted with the onset and conduct of a conventional war (Russia 1918–21, Spain 1936, etc.).

Part 2: Imperialist War, War of Liberation

2.1. The Class Character of War

Clausewitz, referring to the new character of warfare brought about by the French revolution, writes that “[t]he people became a participant in war, instead of governments and armies as heretofore, [and as such] the full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance.”²¹ According to Lenin, who introduces a class analysis into the subject, this was in fact the war “of the French bourgeoisie and perhaps of the entire bourgeoisie”—even if the revolutionary wars and the wars waged by Napoleon’s French Empire may have had a certain “national” character, insofar as they also expressed the struggle of the popular masses against absolutism, national oppression, and feudalism.
In the same chapter, Clausewitz explains that while

[i]t is, of course, well known that the only source of war is politics—the intercourse of governments and peoples; but it is apt to be assumed that war suspends that intercourse and replaces it by a wholly different condition, ruled by no law but its own.²²

Far from disappearing with the onset of war, political life and struggle continue and, in fact, shape the course of war itself. It was on this basis that Lenin was able to attack Kautsky and Plekhanov, who denounced their government’s imperialist aims in peacetime but joined the side of the bourgeoisie in wartime. As early as May–June 1915, in his pamphlet directed against the leading figures of social-chauvinism, Lenin drew on his most recent reading of Clausewitz:

to be able to assess the concrete situation, [Plekhanov] says, we must first of all find out who started it and punish him; all other problems will have to wait until another situation arises.  [. . .] Plekhanov has plucked out a quotation from the German Social-Democratic press: the Germans themselves, before the war, admitted that Austria and Germany had “started it,” he says, and there you are. He does not mention the fact that the Russian socialists repeatedly exposed the czarist plans of conquest of Galicia, Armenia, etc. He does not make the slightest attempt to study the economic and diplomatic history of at least the past three decades, which history proves conclusively that the conquest of colonies, the looting of foreign countries, the ousting and ruining of the more successful rivals have been the backbone of the politics of both groups of the now belligerent powers.
With reference to wars, the main thesis of dialectics, which has been so shamelessly distorted by Plekhanov to please the bourgeoisie, is that “war is simply the continuation of politics by other [i.e., violent] means.” Such is the formula of Clausewitz, one of the greatest writers on the history of war, whose thinking was stimulated by Hegel. And it was always the standpoint of Marx and Engels, who regarded any war as the continuation of the politics of the powers concerned—and the various classes within these countries—in a definite period.
Plekhanov’s crude chauvinism is based on exactly the same theoretical stand as the more subtle and saccharo-conciliatory chauvinism of Kautsky, who uses the following arguments when he gives his blessing to the desertion of the socialists of all countries to the side of their “own” capitalists: “It is the right and duty of everyone to defend his fatherland; true internationalism consists in this right being recognized for the socialists of all nations, including those who are at war with my nation. . . .” (See Die Neue Zeit, October 2, 1914, and other works by the same author.)²³

Indeed, there had been debate in the Second International as to whether the multiplication of wars (the Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War) was a mere coincidence or the expression of a historical trend. Lenin’s analysis of world war as “imperialist” in nature, accompanied his work on imperialism in general.²⁴ The term does not simply denounce the annexationist aims of the belligerent powers; it expresses the historical content of a war that occurs when the capitalist mode of production has spread to the whole world, when there are no longer any “virgin” territories to colonize, and when the expansion of one power can only take place at the expense of another.
Lenin’s inclusion of the class character broadens the horizon of Clausewitz’s theory. Lenin argued that a policy (and the war it determines) serves the interests of one class and undermines the interests of another. This vision opposed that of the Second International’s ideologues, who were quick to emphasize the “national” character of war. If war seems to have a national character because part of the masses enthusiastically supports it, the real character of war is to be found in its political cause, and in this case in the imperialist aims of the belligerent powers. Imperialist policies are the cause of war, they give it meaning and determine not only its nature, but also its revolutionary potential. As Lukács points out:

War is, as Clausewitz defined it, only the continuation of politics; but it is so in all respects. In other words, it is not only in foreign affairs that war is merely the ultimate and most active culmination of a policy which a country has hitherto followed “peacefully.” For the internal class relations of a country as well (and of the whole world), it only marks the intensification and ultimate climax of those tendencies which were already at work within society in “peacetime.”²⁵

The question of popular enthusiasm for war, that of the “instigator of war” (i.e., which of the powers “provoked” the inter-imperialist war), or that of the motives invoked by each of the powers involved (the fight for freedom, for civilization, etc.), obscure rather than illuminate the real character of war.

2.2. The Political Subject of War

For Clausewitz, the political subject is the state, and war is war between nations. He conceives of particular interests, whether individual or collective, but for him politics

is nothing in itself; it is simply the trustee for all these interests [the rational interests of the state and its citizens] against other states. That it can err, subserve the ambitions, private interests, and vanity of those in power, is neither here nor there. In no sense can the art of war ever be regarded as the preceptor of policy, and here we can only treat policy as representative of all interests of the community.²⁶

In short, in one way or another, the state “represents” the nation it governs. It can lead this nation to war, and is therefore the ultimate political agent. In his account of the conflicts that followed one another from Antiquity to the Napoleonic empire, Clausewitz does not list the Peasants’ War in Germany, the Wars of Religion in France and England, nor any civil wars. His On War shows a clear unease with these phenomena.
According to Lenin, this section (which he painstakingly re-transcribed) marks a rapprochement with Marxism. But a rapprochement only. For Marxism, politics is the complex set of manifestations of class interests; it is the more or less coherent and organized action of classes (and class fractions) to realize their interests, and at a higher stage, the action of the institutions they establish (party, state, soviet, trade union, army, etc.). Lenin himself takes the point of view of a non-state politico-military force: the Russian workers’ movement organized by the Bolsheviks. From this new, broader, and deeper conception of the political subject, Lenin adopts the Clausewitzian analysis point by point: war (just like negotiations) follows the logic of politics, but has its own “language” (in the same way that diplomacy possesses its “language”). Analyzing war reveals specific laws, including its tendency to develop into extreme forms (and the fact that this tendency is tempered by the political stakes involved), or its threefold nature: political logic, the art of war, and the sense of hostility.
The question of whether Clausewitz’s theses should be applied to non-state subjects remains open to debate. According to Martin Van Creveld, the Israeli military essayist who wrote a seminal work on the substitution of “asymmetric” warfare for conventional warfare,²⁷

strictly speaking, the dictum that war is the continuation of politics means nothing more or less than that it represents an instrument in the hands of the state, insofar as the state employs violence for political ends. It does not mean that war serves any kind of interest in any kind of community; or, if it does mean that, then it is little more than a meaningless cliché.²⁸

For Van Creveld, not only does the asymmetric type of warfare emerge very late in history, it is in fact already on its way out, and Clausewitz’s lessons with it.
One current of US military thought has reacted to this alleged “discovery” of asymmetry. For this school of thought, the essence of strategy consists precisely of exploiting one’s advantages and one’s opponent’s weaknesses.²⁹ This lead Conrad Crane to distinguish two ways of waging war: “the asymmetric one and the stupid one.”³⁰ If we consider that asymmetrical warfare takes on a specific character, not as warfare between the weak and the strong (which is simply “dissymmetric” warfare), but in terms of strategy (targeting the population and the civil administration rather than the armed forces, and/or considering the population as the battleground and the object of the war), we can see that there’s nothing very innovative here either.
All the more so as the non-state entities involved in so-called “asymmetrical” wars (Maoist guerrillas in the Philippines, PKK in Kurdistan, Hezbollah in Lebanon, etc.) operate according to a political rationale equal to, and sometimes even superior to, that of the states they are fighting. Wars between states, revolutionary wars, and wars of national liberation are all part of the same political logic. Van Creveld is wrong in restricting the capacity to use war as a tool of political logic only to the state.³¹ Although some armed groups operate on the basis of an extra-political rationale (mafias, religious sects, racist gangs, street gangs), only in exceptional cases do they position themselves as active belligerents, a fact that may be overshadowed by the importance of the jihadist phenomenon.³²

2.3 Just Wars, Unjust Wars

From Clausewitz’s formula linking war to politics, we only retained the primacy of political authority over military power. By adding to this an analysis of the political nature of a particular war—fundamentally, its class character—Lenin was able to identify its historical and moral character, and thus distinguish between just and unjust wars:

To recognize defense of the fatherland means recognizing the legitimacy and justice of war. Legitimacy and justice from what point of view? Only from the point of view of the socialist, proletariat and its struggle for its emancipation. We do not recognize any other point of view. If war is waged by the exploiting class with the object of strengthening its rule as a class, such a war is a criminal war, and “defensism” in such a war is a base betrayal of socialism. If war is waged by the proletariat after it has conquered the bourgeoisie in its own country, and is waged with the object of strengthening and developing socialism, such a war is legitimate and “holy.”³³

This is a notable expansion on Clausewitz’s thematic approach, since Clausewitz, apart from the moral advantages he attributes to the attacked nation, emphasizes only moral factors that are extraneous to the character of warfare itself, which are therefore likely to benefit both belligerents (e.g., the “military virtue” of the troops). The military impact of the Marxist-Leninist approach lies in the fundamental adherence of the popular masses to the just war, and thus a higher degree of mobilization, endurance, and fighting spirit.
It was Mehring who opened this path by rejecting the concept of “defensive war” in favor of the concept of “just war.” Indeed, the concept of “defensive war” can mask the imperialist character of a war. It was in the name of self-defense that Germany mobilized against Russia and France against Germany in 1914; it was on the same basis that the German and French social-chauvinists rallied their bourgeoisie. The concept of just war—revolutionary war and war of national liberation, in which peoples fight for their true interests is quite different.

[I]t is not the defensive or offensive character of the war, but the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat, or—to put it better—the interests of the international movement of the proletariat—that represent the sole criterion for considering and deciding the attitude of the Social-Democrats to any particular event in international relations.³⁴

Lenin’s thoughts date back to 1908, but the problem resurfaced with force in 1914, when the leaders of the Second International aligned themselves with their respective bourgeoisie by asserting that the enemy nation had declared the war.

2.4 Wars of National Liberation

In respect to wars of national liberation, Lenin was a true “purifier” of Marxism. And a lot had to be done! Back in 1848, political, social, and national issues seemed intertwined to all parties involved; both the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletarian vanguard were in favor of “national liberation” (which in this context took the form of German unification—as opposed to the dusty reactionary principalities), while reactionaries identified and fought the proponents of German unity and those of democracy as if they were a single enemy.
This explains why the democratic movement was so enthusiastic at the outbreak of the Second Schleswig War against Denmark (which resulted in the annexation of Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia)³⁵ and, above all, why Marx and Engels were so hostile towards the Czech national cause.³⁶ At the time, Marx and Engels’ position was imbued with a “Great German” outlook—even if its criterion was determined by the revolutionary cause’s best interests—as the main reason for their hostility was that Slavic nationalist movements (particularly Panslavism) favored the policies of the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire, the main reactionary force of the time, had intervened militarily not only within its own borders (in Poland) but also beyond (in Hungary), in order to resist any challenge to the balance of power established by the Holy Alliance at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
Marx and Engels would refine their positions, but it was Lenin who, while justifying/contextualizing Marx’s and Engels’ positions on the subject of the Southern Slavs, would strip the national question of its pre-Marxist cloak.
Here, Raymond Aron nevertheless thought he discovered a contradiction in Lenin’s reasoning:

In defining the nature of war, Lenin swept aside national passions indifferently and continued to follow the Marxist interpretation of the society of states. But in defining annexation he referred to the will of the people. He condemned the patriotic fervor of 1914 and approved in advance the desire of Finland, Poland and even the Ukraine to be independent.³⁷

In short, he claimed that Lenin deemed the national feelings of the masses relevant when it came to obtaining independence for Poland, and negligible (a product of bourgeois propaganda) when it came to “liberating” Alsace-Lorraine.
To this point, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up is a remarkable text, because it defines the Leninist position against the chauvinist Right, but also against the Zimmerwaldian³⁸ Marxist Left which asserted “that socialism will abolish all national oppression, since it abolishes the class interests that lead to this oppression.”

What has this argument [objects Lenin,] about the economic prerequisites for the abolition of national oppression, which are very well known and undisputed, to do with a discussion of one of the forms of political oppression, namely, the forcible retention of one nation within the state frontiers of another? This is nothing but an attempt to evade political questions!³⁹
It is impossible to abolish national (or any other political) oppression under capitalism, since this requires the abolition of classes, i.e., the introduction of socialism. But while being based on economics, socialism cannot be reduced to economics alone. A foundation—socialist production—is essential for the abolition of national oppression, but this foundation must also carry a democratically organized state, a democratic army, etc. By transforming capitalism into socialism the proletariat creates the possibility of abolishing national oppression; the possibility becomes reality “only”—“only”!—with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres, including the delineation of state frontiers in accordance with the “sympathies” of the population, including complete freedom to secede. And this, in turn, will serve as a basis for developing the practical elimination of even the slightest national friction and the least national mistrust, for an accelerated drawing together and fusion of nations that will be completed when the state withers away. This is the Marxist theory.⁴⁰

What about the class character of national liberation struggles? Lenin is clear: we must support the right to self-determination (up to and including armed insurrection) of national minorities and oppressed nations, even if they are not progressive in character, except when they become instruments of international reaction. For example, as this article was written in 1916, Marxists should support a possible insurrection by the Belgians against Germany, the Armenians against Russia, the Galicians against Austria, even if these movements were led by the national bourgeoisie. Marxists cannot be accomplices, even passive ones, in a violation of peoples’ right to self-determination. The only exception being:

[if] it is . . . the revolt of a reactionary class⁴¹[:]
The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete casts, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected. It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement, but it would be ridiculous to delete the demand for a republic from the program of international Social-Democracy on these grounds.⁴²

1. Zhang Yuan-Lin, Mao Zedong Und Carl von Clausewitz: Theorien Des Krieges, Beziehung, Darstellung Und Vergleich (Mannheim University Press, 1995).
2. Schössler suggests the existence of this influence as early as Mehring’s 1904 articles on the Russo-Japanese War. Dietmar Schössler, Clausewitz–Engels–Mahan: Grundriss Einer Ideengeschichte Militärischen Denkens (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2009), 388; 393.
3. His exile was the result of a wave of repression following the defeat of the 1905 Revolution. Lenin had gone to Galicia, which was Austrian at the time, but had to leave in 1914 following the declaration of war
4. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 69–70; T. Derbent, “Notes de Lénine Sur Clausewitz” (“Lenin’s Notes on Clausewitz”), in Clausewitz et La Guerre Populaire (“Lenin and the People’s War”) (Brussels: Aden, 2004), 132.
5. Clausewitz, On War, 79; Derbent, “Notes de Lénine Sur Clausewitz” (“Lenin’s Notes on Clausewitz,”) 132–133.
6. “The origin and the form taken by a war are not the result of any ultimate resolution of the vast array of circumstances involved, but only of those features that happen to be dominant” Clausewitz, On War, 580.
7. “The concept that war is only a branch of political activity; that it is in no sense autonomous” Clausewitz, 605.
8. Later, war would become a theoretical object through the intercession of other relationships: Bouthoul and Feund, for instance, based their polemology on a certain type of anthropology.
9. John Frederick Charles Fuller, The Conduct of War, 1789-1961: A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and Russian Revolutions on War and Its Conduct (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961), 202.
10. Jean-Vincent Holeindre, “Violence, Guerre et Politique – Études Sur Le Retournement de La ‘Formule’ de Clausewitz” (“Violence, War and Politics—Studies on the Reversal of Clausewitz’s “Formula”), Res Militaris 1, no. 3 (Summer 2011).
11. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party & Principles of Communism (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 33.
12. In Italy, for example, during the intense class struggle of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the Red Brigades carried out armed propaganda with the aim of leading the masses to armed revolution, while the P2 Masonic lodge (“Propaganda Due”), on the other side, provoked assassination attempts to bring about martial law.
13. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 11 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962).
14. Clausewitz, On War, 589–593.
15. Clausewitz, 87–88.
16. V. I. Lenin, “Lenin’s Notebook on Clausewitz,” Soviet Armed Forces Review Annual, ed. Donald E. Davis, trans. Walter S. G. Kohn, vol. 1 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1977), 196.
17. The Cheka was the Bolshevik governments’ security agency during the early days of the founding of the Soviet Union, focused on suppressing counterrevolutionaries and safeguarding the socialist state according to Marxist-Leninist principles.—Ed.
18. In 1918, Finland went through a civil war between White and Red forces, resulting in the defeat of the revolutionaries of the Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic and the declaration of the Kingdom of Finland under German control. In Poland, the Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee, controlled only the regions of Podlasie and parts of Mazovia. Following the triumph of the regular Polish armies over the Soviets, the committee was soon dissolved. The Hungarian Soviet Republic, led by Béla Kun in 1919, emerged after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and attempted to establish a communist state in Hungary. Kun’s government implemented sweeping reforms and land redistribution, but faced internal opposition and external intervention, leading to its downfall after a few months. In Germany, the 1918 revolution saw the emergence of workers’ councils modeled on the Russian soviets. Under the command of Social Democratic traitors, the reactionary Freikorps troops suppressed the workers’ uprisings of January 1919.—Ed.
19. “Although one single inhabitant of a theater of operations has as a rule no more noticeable influence on the war than a drop of water on a river, the collective influence of the country’s inhabitants is far from negligible, even when we are not dealing with popular insurrection. At home, everything works more smoothly—assuming the public is not wholly disaffected.” Clausewitz, On War, 373.
20. Lenin also dwells on Clausewitz’s observation in Chapter 30 of Book VI that the general staff tends to overestimate issues that are directly under its control (such as the topography of the theater of war) and that, since military history is written by the general staff, it is these aspects that are generally emphasized at the expense of others no less important.
21. Clausewitz, On War, 592.
22. Clausewitz, 605.
23. V. I. Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International,” Collected Works, vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966).
24. In 1916, Lenin completed Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
25. Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (New York: Verso, 2009), 51.
26. Clausewitz, On War, 606–607.
27. Symmetric warfare is war between states with more or less equal strength, dissymmetric warfare is war between a strong state and a weak state; asymmetric war is between a state and a non-state entity or between two or more non-state entities.
28. Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991).
29. Part of what Clausewitz calls the “principle of polarity.”
30. Conrad Crane teaches at the US Army War College and Lukas Milevski at the National Defense University. See Lukas Milevski, “Asymmetry Is Strategy, Strategy Is Asymmetry,” Joint Force Quarterly 75 4th Quarter (September 30, 2014), https://ndupress.ndu.edu/JFQ/Joint-Force-Quarterly-75/Article/577565/asymmetry-is-strategy-strategy-is-asymmetry/ and Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 140.
31. His analysis of the Algerian war is so far-fetched that it can only stem from his Zionist stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
32. Part of the jihadist movement’s wars (and in varying proportions) involve a form of political rationality, part of what Creveld calls “the continuity of religion by other means.”
33. V. I. Lenin, “‘Left-Wing’ Childishness,” Collected Works, vol. 27 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965).
34. V. I. Lenin, “Bellicose Militarism and the Anti-Militarist Tactics of Social-Democracy,” Collected Works, vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963).
35. The Democratic Party was steeped in nationalism and, while hostile to Bismarck and the reactionary Prussian state, also made Schleswig-Holstein a German national issue.
36. Simon Petermann, Marx, Engels et Les Conflits Nationaux (“Marx, Engels and National Conflicts”) (Brussels: Émile Van Ballberghe, 1987).
37. Raymond Aron, Clausewitz, Philosopher of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 276.
38. The Zimmerwald Conference was a 1915 meeting of anti-war socialists during World War I. Differences emerged between those advocating for a pacifist approach to end the war (the Zimmerwaldians) and Lenin, who argued for turning the war into a revolutionary civil war against capitalism.
39. V. I. Lenin, “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” Collected Works, vol. 22 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964).
40. “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up.”
41. “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up.”
42. “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up.”