The Militia System and Revolutionary Warfare

The Militia System And Revolutionary Warfare

An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves”. (Lenin, The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution, Selected Works, Volume 1, page 743).

“War attains complete development before peace …. “ (Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, 4).

The arming of the workers is one of the key demands in the struggle against world imperialism and national oppression. A militia is based on the universal conscription of the workers of a military age. This militia exercises a civil and military role. During the First Imperialist World War of 1914-1918, the first workers’ state broke free from the shackles of the rival imperialist powers. The example of the Red Army inspires revolutionary socialists throughout the world. Between 1918 and 1921,the Red Army drove back the tiny whiteguard armies and expelled the fourteen imperialist armies from Russia. In total, the Red Army comprised ten to twelve millions led by workers and the military specialists.

Von Clausewitz established the doctrine that war is “politics by other means” (Zu Kriege).

The French Revolution led to the triumph of the middle class over the monarchy, the aristocracy and the clergy. Between 1792 and 1798, the middle class established the unfettered reign of their class in France by uniting with the workers of Paris and abolishing feudal relations. The Prussians, English, Russians and Austrian Empires united in a war to crush the revolution with the professional, mercenary armies of the old Europe. At Valmy in 1792, French armies defeated the Prussian Army and consolidated the system of universal conscription (the levies). The French Revolution decayed in opposition to England’s industrial supremacy and domination of the seas.

A counter-revolution established Napoleon as Emperor. France embarked on wars of aggression against Italy, Spain, Ausrtia and Prussia and France was ‘bled white’(Marx).

In opposition to the French Empire, Prussia established the Landwehr in the 1807 Landwehrgesetz . The Landwehr was based on universal military conscription and short-terms of service. In 1813, Prussia also recruited a Landsturm. These guerrillas harried the retreating French in the rear. In 1814, the coalition of Prussian, Austrian, Russian, English, Swedish and the Spanish troops defeated the French army. Austria-Hungary and other reactionary powers retained permanent armies for a long time. Prussia operated the conscript system (Engels, The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party [1865] MECW Volume 20 page 37-80). The example of the ‘armed people’ endured.

Social Democracy developed during the revolutionary situation in Germany in the 1870’s. In 1863, the Union of German Workers Association met in Frankfurt and under Bebel’s leadership – Marx and Engels were under threat of arrest if they entered Prussia – decided to call for the abolition of the standing army and the establishment of trade unions. (In 1869, the UGWA became the Social Democratic Workers Party of Germany after its Nuremburg conference).

The International Working Mens’ Association was established by Marx and the English and German trade unionists in 1864 in London. In 1866, Marx, as Secretary of the I.W.M.A. drew up instructions for the Delegates of The Provisional General Council on the different questions (MECW, Volume 20, pages 185 – 294). Marx outlined the need for mutual benefit societies (trade unions), the need for international co-operation against strikebreaking, the need for political agitation to limit the working day, the need to prohibit juvenile and children’s labour by law, the need for co-operative labour, the need for the abolition of indirect taxation and the levying of a progressive income (or direct) tax, the need for the emancipation and unification of Poland and for a socialist policy on armies.

 Regarding armies (op. cit pages 193–194), Marx, endorsed middle class opposition to “the deleterious influence of large standing armies”. He proposed “the general armament of the people and their general instruction in the use of arms”.

 He went on,

“We accept as a transitory necessity small  standing armies to form schools for the officers of the militia, every male citizen to serve for a very limited time in those armies”. (page 194,op. cit.)

The Paris Commune of 1871 abolished the standing army and the police as its first measure .Public representatives, educational and legal officials were made subject to election and the right of recall. They were paid the wages of the competent workman. In its place, the communes were to unite with Paris.

The standing army had been caught unawares by the Prussians a few months before the establishment of the Commune from the elected representatives of the Civil Guard – but with the help of the blind eye of the occupying Prussian Army – it crushed the Commune and 30,000 Communards were killed in revenge. Galliflets’ slaughter of the workers inspired loathing (and enlightenment) as had Cavaignac’s massacre of 3000 workers in the 1848 revolution.

 Marx wrote his famous Civil War in France as An Address to the international Working Men’s Association in 1871. Today, it is a permanent testimony to the reckless valour of the French workers.

In 1905, the Russian workers rose in revolt and established the Soviets (or Workers Councils) as the first form of workers’ power in that country. In February 1917, Russian workers rose in revolt again and established the Soviets. These were dominated by the democratic middle class and the opportunists for eight months. A Provisional Government of these social-patriots and social-chauvinists along with the monarchist liberals existed alongside the Soviets.

 The Bolsheviks grew within the Soviets under the slogan of “All Power To The Soviets . All land to the Peasants”. In the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government with the help of the armed workers, soldiers and sailors (The Red Guards). The Red Guards entered history as a loose organisation of  revolutionary soldiers and sailors and armed workers.

In Spring 1918, Lenin and the Bolsheviks faced the revolt of the Tsarist officers in the South. On the basis of the alliance of the workers and peasants under the leadership of the workers, a workers’ state was established. The threat from Kornilov impelled the Bolsheviks to enlist the services of former monarchist officers as military specialists to bring order to the Red Army while it healed its wounds.

 In April 1918, Trotsky outlined the plans for an armed militia to The Central Executive Committee of Soviets. The militia was to be headed at regional, provincial, uyzed and volost levels by a collegium of two political commissars and a military specialist. The direction of the military matters was to be the sole responsibility of the military specialist. The political formation of the workers and peasants was the task of the two commissars. (The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky, Volume 1, pages 126-157).

All males between the ages of 18 and 40 years were subject to military conscription for twelve hours per week for a total of eight weeks. Military training was unpaid. The educational authorities were responsible for the military training of 16-18 year olds. Women could receive military training on request.

As Lenin had foreseen in Military Programme of The Proletarian Revolution (Selected Works, Volume 1, pages 740-749) world capital and trade had drawn even small nations into “the vortex of the world economy”. He put forward the  demand for universal conscription against the reformists. He called those who called for universal disarmament “crackpots”.Lenin said that the imperialist slaughter and maiming of tens of millions was the real background and that the demand for disarmament represented “extreme opportunism”.

 In the April Theses of 1918, Lenin outlined his doctrine that the quickest way to end  civil war is to involve the masses (Lenin, Selected Works, Volume 2, page 542) and the preparation of an army in the rear as the workers’ state and the proletarian party “crawled in the mud”. There was no alternative. The soldiers were exhausted and the economy worn out. This was “the respite theory”. The fact was that the soldiers at the front had sold millions of roubles worth of howitzers and shells to the Germans.

The vision of a class “for itself” as distinct from a class “of itself” had found a military expression in the Irish Citizen Army which along with the Irish Volunteers had taken part in the “premature” (Lenin) Rising of April 1916 in Dublin. This was another attempt to turn the imperialists’ war into a civil war in an oppressed nation.

 In  November 1918, the German Soldiers and Workers Councils (Arbeiter- und Soldatenrate) mobilised tens of thousands of soldiers and armed workers to take Germany out of the war and throw out the Emperor. In Germany, a republic was established, the Weimar Republic.  The Weimar Republic soon fell under the spell of Noske, Scheidemann and the opportunists who had voted for the war loans in August 1914. The exception was Karl Liebknecht.

Can a workers’ state – and such a state is no longer a state in the proper sense since it is transitional between capitalism and socialism- be established peacefully? In 1872, Marx spoke to the Amsterdam Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association that Britain and America might make a peaceful transition to socialism by “buying out” the capitalists given that neither country had a “military-bureaucratic caste”.

 Lenin wrote in Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism that, by 1916, the First Imperialist World War had shown that a new phase had been reached by capitalism. The British Boer War of 1898 – 1902 and the Spanish-American War 1898 had introduced  the division of the world and monopoly capital. Neither Britain nor the United States was without a military-bureaucratic caste and this caste was connected by “a thousand threads” to the finance monopolies and the industrial trusts. There was no alternative to revolutionary warfare.

 In 1921, the Council for Labour and  Defence led the transformation from military conscription to labour conscription as the Civil War drew to a close. Shattered industry was producing at an eighth of its 1913 level and cities were empty and starving.

Internationally, the revolutionary tide had begun to ebb and the decisive force in ending Russia’s isolation, the German proletariat, was unorganised at home and the directed towards an ill-prepared putsch in 1923 by Zinoviev and the Communist International. The best organised and most civilised European country was not destined to come to Russia’s aid by giving it credits and sending it machinery in return for grain and raw materials.

 In March 1918, Lenin had said,

“At all events, under all conceivable conditions, if the German revolution does not come, we are doomed.” (Extraordinary Seventh Congress of R.C.P. (B), Lenin, Selected Works, Volume 2, page 535).

In  Ireland, the philistines had established themselves after the Great Famine of 1846 – 50 and preached partition of the agricultural south from the industrial north after the Truce of 1921. A ruinous Treaty reshaped English power in Ireland and kept the whole country under the heel of the London Stock Exchange and the City Banks. Only in the 1920’s was Britain outstripped by the United States as the pre-eminent imperialist power. Tariffs allowed Irish industry to grow in the 1930’s and the agricultural revolution suggested by Marx was consolidated with the abolition of the land annuities. A trade war between England and Ireland raged between 1932 and 1935.

In the world’s first workers’ state the revolution was overthrown from within and a military-bureaucratic caste pursued its own “power, prestige and revenues”. In 1924, Stalin proclaimed that “socialism in one country” was possible. A standing army replaced the militia and, by 1938, the military-industrial complex was consuming 98% of the tool-making machinery. (In 1937, the officer caste – and with it gold braid, decorations and ranks – was restored). This “stability” was bought at the cost of enormous inefficiency and waste in the economy and a bloody purge of the army, bureaucracy, peasantry and Left Opposition.

(In 1937, the leader of this campaign of murder before that year, Yezhov, was himself executed).

The example of Russia and the wars of imperialism teaches the need for the disbandment of the standing army (and police). The First International and, after it, the first independent parties of the working class called for the uprooting of this poisonous weed.

 Writing about the Paris Commune, Marx decried the state as a “parasitic excrescence” which cannot be laid hands on ready-made by the working class and the democratic lower middle class.Nevertheless,it is the immediate means for the overthrow of the standing army and guards workers’ democracy afterwards.

 In Ireland, the training of every last man in arms requires an adequate corps of instructors.

In an age when the United States annual military spending is $400 US billions and human rights are being curtailed and refugees and migrants imprisoned, there is no alternative for civilisation other than to put the guns in the hands of the people. Since 1999, the United States and Britain have launched wars against Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and have prepared a slaughter in Iraq.

 This is an age of increased imperialist aggression.

© Joseph Paul Mc Carroll 2002,2017