Revolutionary Defeatism
혁명적 패전주의
A wartime tactic advanced by Lenin in the First World War: in a reactionary imperialist war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its own government; revolutionary action against one's own government in wartime necessarily facilitates that defeat; and the government's military defeats make it easier to turn the imperialist war into civil war. Lenin attacked the slogan "neither victory nor defeat" as a paraphrase of defence of the fatherland, while other internationalists such as Trotsky opposed the defeat slogan as a concession to the methodology of social patriotism.
In depth
1914: the defeat of tsarism as the "lesser evil"
"The War and Russian Social-Democracy", written by Lenin in September 1914 and issued in November as a manifesto of the RSDLP Central Committee, defined the collapse of the Second International as the collapse of opportunism and declared the conversion of the present imperialist war into a civil war the only correct proletarian slogan. From the standpoint of the international proletariat, it said, it was impossible to determine the defeat of which group of belligerents would be the lesser evil for socialism, but for the working class and toiling masses of all the nations of Russia there could be no doubt that the defeat of the tsarist monarchy, the most reactionary and barbarous of governments, would be the lesser evil.
1915: "the defeat of one's own government" in every country
In the resolution of the Berne conference of February–March 1915 and the article "The Defeat of One's Own Government in the Imperialist War" (July 1915) Lenin broadened the argument. In a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government; this is axiomatic. A revolution in wartime means civil war; converting a war between governments into a civil war is facilitated by the governments' military reverses, and one cannot actually strive for such a conversion without facilitating defeat. Lenin added that this did not mean "blowing up bridges" or organising unsuccessful strikes in the war industries.
Lenin made the slogan the touchstone separating revolutionaries from social-chauvinism. Socialism and War (1915) stated that the advocates of victory for their governments and the advocates of "neither victory nor defeat" equally took the standpoint of social-chauvinism. "Neither victory nor defeat", he argued, was only a paraphrase of the "defence of the fatherland" slogan and amounted to a class truce, the renunciation of the class struggle.
Debate among internationalists
The slogan was not accepted even by many who followed Lenin. Trotsky wrote in Nashe Slovo that to desire Russia's defeat was "an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism", and Lenin replied that this was high-flown phraseology justifying opportunism. At the Zimmerwald conference of 1915 the concept was rejected by all but the most radical, and the conference manifesto contained no defeat slogan. In the April Theses of 1917 Lenin forcefully reaffirmed his rejection of revolutionary defencism, and as Russia's war losses continued more socialists came round to the idea.
Divergent interpretations
In The Myth of Lenin's "Revolutionary Defeatism" (1953–54) the historian Hal Draper argued that Lenin's defeat slogan went through four different formulations in 1914–1916, was abandoned in 1917, and was revived in the Comintern by Zinoviev in 1924, after which the Trotskyist movement inherited it. Amadeo Bordiga's International Communist Party adopted revolutionary defeatism as its policy in the Second World War, which it regarded as a reactionary war between two empires.