Clara Zetkin: Let's arm ourselves!

[My own translation of the text in "Die Gleichheit. Zeitschrift für die Interessen der Arbeiterinnen", 21st volume No. 15, 24 April 1911, p. 225 f. Reprinted in Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften, Vol. I, pp. 521-528. Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome]

Struggle to the death against capitalism as the order which sucks its existence and its flowering from the strangulation of creative forces, that is the oath which the proletariat of the whole world takes on May Day. Therefore, in addition to the demand for effective social reform legislation, the slogan comes to the fore: War on war! Forward against militarism, marinism and colonial policy!

What else is social reform legislation, in particular a thoroughgoing legal protection of workers, whose mainstay must be the eight-hour day, but the admission that the exploiting classes, in their blind desire for profit, are squeezing the labour force to the point of destruction? They callously trample underfoot all consideration of the fact that the commodity of labour power is different from the rest of the commodity rabble because living humanity is inextricably attached to it and is degraded and trampled underfoot with it by wage slavery. The 9,000 dead and more than half a million wounded who fall on the battlefield of labour year in, year out; the hundreds of thousands who fall victim to consumption and an army of occupational diseases; the countless children who, as offspring of exploited parents, are condemned to die and perish even before birth - they announce to the have-nots with terrible forcefulness that it is blood, their own blood, which makes the glistening stream of gold of capitalist surplus value swell and drives it forward. And is it bodily life alone, then, that the proletarian sells for a miserable wage into slavery and death? The multitude of pyschic forces crushed in the treadmill of capitalist profit-making, deprived by the society of bourgeois property of nourishing soil, warming sun and refreshing dew, defies even an approximate estimate. They are as innumerable as the seeds of plants that spring up in prodigal abundance to fade and decay without having germinated, without having sprouted roots and leaves.

The three-headed monster of militarism, marinism and colonial policy, born from the womb of the capitalist order, reveals in another guise the waste and desolation of fertile life which are among the most salient features of that very order.

The capitalist countries are staring in the face of arms, the peoples who have been drawn into the spell of capitalist culture are threatening to collapse under the inexorably growing burden of armaments. The German Reich alone, which in 1872 spent 347 million marks on the army, navy, military pensions and interest on its debt, will have to spend 1453 million marks on these purposes in the current year. According to the Austrian professor Kobatsch, the armament expenditure of all countries together devours 10 billion Marks annually, that of the European states alone 7 billion. This sum - fabulous according to its amount, a crime according to its origin, for the robbery of the food and culture by the usurer of customs and taxes on the poor and poorest brings it together in the main - by no means exhausts the waste of means. To the 7 billion must be added 6 billion in annual interest for the propertied classes, who lended to father state in the individual countries so that it could carry out the armaments which were in their interest: furthermore, billions in loss of work for the active soldiers. Millions of young men in the prime of their strength and efficiency are deprived of creative, nourishing work; their days pass in the barracks and on the armoured ships of the war fleet in the drill that paralyses the spirit, breaks the character, in short, kills the human being, to leave us the skilful and docile living murdering tool of an alien commanding will. In Germany alone there are about 700,000 of them every year - the overwhelming majority of them proletarians - who, instead of increasing the wealth of society, unproductively consume it. Ingenious researchers and inventors rack their brains to discover forces, to devise weapons, machines, methods, which on land and sea, which descending from the skies, mow down people and what human hands have created in an instant and in mass. Fantastic vast sums of human and material productive forces are alienated by the "armed peace" of the capitalist order of material and cultural work, which it captivates up and dissipates, while the hunger and educational longing of millions and millions raise their voices in vain.

However, in these times of triumphant imperialism, of the exploitative and adventurous world power policy of the possessing classes, may we really correctly speak of an "armed peace"? What streams of blood has this policy shed only since the turn of the century, and how many hundreds, thousands of millions shamefully wasted in carrying murder, destruction, servitude, plunder across the globe? Shortly before the twentieth century began, there was a bloody struggle between the United States and Spain over Cuba; the Boer War breaks out, and the poisoned dumdum bullets, the murderous concentration camps cause the faith in the love of freedom and peace, in the humanity of Bible-believing bourgeois England, to flutter like cobwebs. This is quickly followed by the German Hun campaign to China, to which Pastor Naumann, as the herald of Protestant Christianity and democratic sentiment, shouts out the slogan in the pose of the aesthetic superhuman: "No quarter will be given!" Long before the bones of the fallen have rotted away, the battle between Russia and Japan, with its horrors, tops the genocidal horror of the past. In between, and right up to our own day, blood-soaked expeditions into colonial countries - like those of the Germans against the Hereros - to snatch the last shred of land from the natives, to rob them of the remnants of their livestock and to make them, as dispossessed people, liable to pay interest and tribute to the interests of capitalist cliques by the most unscrupulous, barbaric methods.

All this in its entirety gives an idea of the infernal work of destruction of a world war, which in the sky of the capitalist order is like a thundercloud that can only be swept away by the storm wind of the social revolution. In its everyday course, the capitalist order destroys infinitely more cultural values, people and things in refined hypocritical forms within a short span of time than marauding Vandals and Normans, than the Huns, Tartars and Turks together, who flooded Europe, did in their shroudless barbarism.

In its infancy, capitalism longed to burst all social bonds that resisted the incorporation of untold multitudes into the new mode of production. In England, the peasantry of the feudal lords was not enough to satisfy its need for exploitation and expansion. It filled its factories by creating the blood laws, by taking away the inmates of the poorhouses and orphanages as its wage slaves. Everyone who did not serve it - from the child to the old man - appeared to it as a prodigal, a robber of that capitalist property and surplus value which bourgeois science, both brazenly and mendaciously, calls "national wealth". Mature capitalism, on the other hand, does not have enough of the industrial reserve army - this concentration camp of unused forces - which has to be unemployed and starve because its use does not seem profitable to the exploiters at a given moment and which, thanks to its misery, counteracts the struggles of the drudging proletariat for better working conditions. Through the militarist sibling, it allows millions of the most efficient to be torn from the gears of its economy, forcing the exploited to maintain them as unproductive consumers. At the gateway of capitalist development, the sermon of the strictest thrift as a stage of ascent to wealth and prestige, resounds also for the possessing classes, yes, especially for them, which today is only the addition to the starvation wages of the disinherited. At the height of its development of power, capitalism is practising the most madhouse-like wastefulness known to history in the form of unproductive arms expenditure. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t."¹ The method of an exploitative, enslaving social order, which is cracking at the seams under the influence of immanent disruptive forces and which is to be preserved by its beneficiaries at all costs. In fact, the militaristic extravagance of the capitalist world today is not only explained by the lavish profits that fall into the laps of certain capitalist coteries thanks to armaments, wars and colonial campaigns, by the "good and safe investment of capital" - as Freiherr von Stumm once blurted out -, which, in connection with militarism and imperialism, offer growing giant government loans, by the view of the "rifled cannons" as the last means of the reason of state against the "naughty" masses of the "enemy within".

The driving force of these circumstances is far surpassed by the compelling force of another fact. At the present stage of its development, capitalist society is no longer able to master the enormous productive forces that have grown up within its bosom. The creative play of these forces can no longer be harnessed to capitalist surplus value; rather, it must explode the social order which generates it and gives it legal force. As is periodically the case in crises, militarism, marinism and colonial policy are constantly putting human and material productive forces out of action, paralysing them, destroying them, which the exploiting and ruling classes are no longer able to subdue. Armament madness and imperialism are proofs that the forces of production are rebelling against the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeois form of property. What appears to the exploited masses as a mad, culture-killing fever of waste is, from the point of view of those very classes, a means of prolonging the life of the capitalist order. It is from this context of things that the flatly negative no must be appreciated, which the Chancellor of the German Reich, on the eve of the proletarian world rally for peace, opposed to the motion of the Social-Democratic fraction for the restriction of armaments. It was international capitalism itself which answered through the mouth of the scrawny bureaucrat, and so his declaration was greeted with jubilant, ecstatic approval by the decisive ruling strata in all the great capitalist countries. The capitalist states will no more renounce their armament madness than a life-hungry man, dreading death, will hammer in the nail on which a laughing heir kindly invites him to hang himself.

Thus the revolutionary proletariat gathers around the maypole of international socialism without self-deception about the fact that in bourgeois society it is the only determined and powerful fighter against armament madness and war atrocities - against the horror without end and the end with horror. Its struggle against militarism, marinism and colonial policy grows new joy from the realisation that the armament and war fever which shakes the capitalist states, like the accumulation of capital in fewer and fewer hands, heralds the hour of world history in which capitalism must be replaced by socialism, the order of the forces bringing about mass destruction be replaced by the order of the free development of life. Imbued with the consciousness of its power and of the brotherhood of the exploited of all countries, of the commonality of their aim and struggle, the proletariat everywhere is preparing for the May Day celebration as a dress rehearsal of its determination to stamp its broad breast against the armament and conquest madness of the ruling classes. It is closing its ranks and testing its weapons. There is only one means of forcing the mortal enemy to disarm: the clear, defiant armament for irreconcilable class struggle. Let us arm ourselves!