Social Chauvinism
사회배외주의
Lenin's critical term for the position of socialists who supported their own country's war in the First World War as "defence of the fatherland". Meaning "socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds", it covered voting war credits, suspending the class struggle in wartime (the civil truce) and entering bourgeois cabinets. Lenin saw it as "consummated opportunism" and found its economic basis in a labour aristocracy sharing the crumbs of imperialist super-profits. "Social patriotism" was used in the same sense.
In depth
Lenin's definition
In August 1914 most socialist parties of the belligerent countries, above all the German Social Democratic Party and the French Socialist Party, supported their own governments' war. The resolutions of the Stuttgart (1907), Copenhagen (1910) and Basel (1912) congresses to resist war went unheeded and the Second International collapsed. Lenin called the socialists who had changed sides "social-chauvinists", a word he first used in 1914 in "Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism".
The definition in Socialism and War (1915) runs: social-chauvinism is advocacy of the idea of "defence of the fatherland" in the present war, an idea that logically leads to abandoning the class struggle in wartime and to voting war credits. The social-chauvinists, it argued, were defending not the fatherland against foreign oppression but the "right" of great powers to plunder colonies and oppress other nations. Lenin placed in this category not only those who championed one belligerent government but also those who, like Kautsky, held that the socialists of all belligerent countries had an equal right to "defend the fatherland".
Opportunism and the labour aristocracy
Lenin called social-chauvinism "consummated opportunism": the war had transformed opportunism into social-chauvinism and the secret alliance between the opportunists and the bourgeoisie into an open one. Both had the same economic basis, the interests of a thin stratum of privileged workers and of the petty bourgeoisie who received crumbs of the profits their own bourgeoisie drew from robbing other nations. They had the same ideological content too: class collaboration instead of class struggle, renunciation of revolutionary methods, and helping one's own government in its difficulties instead of using them for revolution.
The typical social-chauvinists Lenin named were Plekhanov in Russia, Lensch and David in Germany, Guesde in France, Hyndman in Britain and Vandervelde in Belgium. At the Zimmerwald conference of 1915, too, the majority of the leaders of German, French and Austrian Social Democracy, and Hyndman, the Fabians and Plekhanov among others, were singled out as "social patriots".
Social patriotism and later use
"Social patriotism" served as another name for the same thing. Lenin himself used the two words interchangeably, and point 6 of the Twenty-one Conditions adopted by the Second Comintern Congress in 1920 required parties wishing to join to expose "not only overt social patriotism" but also the hypocrisy of social pacifism. Against social-chauvinism Lenin set the line of breaking with it and turning the war into civil war, which led to revolutionary defeatism and the founding of the Third International. Soviet political literature later applied the term to Western left movements that supported colonialism and armament, and at the end of the 1920s went as far as calling social democracy "social fascism".