Franz Mehring: May Day and Militarism

[My own translation of the text in “Die Neue Zeit”, 22nd year 1903/04, Second Volume, pp. 97-100. Reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4, pp. 431-434. Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome]

The fifteenth May Day of the international proletariat falls on a Sunday, and so the force with which the working class demands rest from work for its holiday slackens of itself. This year, the significance of May Day as a rally against war and for international peace is all the more striking. For the first time since the proletarian world holiday has existed, it coincides with a great war which can claim world-historical significance and can become a general world conflagration.

One would be mistaken if one were to assume, with certain benevolent workers' friends of the bourgeois world, that the anti-militarist significance of the May Day has been welded, so to speak, externally to its anti-capitalist significance. It is wrong to say to the workers: make your peace with militarism and it will grant you the social reforms you need. Such talk is not a hair's breadth wiser than the assurance of the bourgeois peace enthusiasts: throw off the militarist yoke and the capitalist yoke will be gentle and sweet to you. In this contradiction even the more unprejudiced heads of the bourgeois world view stagger hopelessly about, and when they try to overcome its agony by marching shoulder to shoulder, as the militarist social reformers à la Naumann and the capitalist peace enthusiasts à la Barth have recently been trying to do, the confusion becomes all the greater.

Proletarian class consciousness, on the other hand, has settled this contradiction from deep within itself by coming to the realisation that class domination within human society and the bloody wars between nations are only two sides of the same thing. Abolish class rule and the wars will be eradicated by the root; carry on the wars and you will always have class rule again. From the standpoint of capitalist society, however, war is a "cultural ideal", as bourgeois professors have taught us, it is an "element in God's order", as Moltke put it in his way; the view on which Buckle proceeded in drafting his great work of history, namely, that the "insignificant stories of battles and sieges" were without all interest for the bourgeois cultural world, was nothing but a great illusion.

Buckle was right backwards, but not forwards. His conception of history was a great advance against the courtly falsifyers od history who told pompously of the pompous war campaigns of great-powered war lords, but it stopped short of the fairy tale of the millenial empire of freedom and peace among nations that free trade was supposed to have opened. It was a barrier that only socialism could overcome and has gradually overcome. [Wilhelm] Liebknecht, in his otherwise perfectly justified admiration for Buckle, still somewhat overlooked it, and likewise Lassalle once speaks contemptuously of wars that were waged for the sake of some mistress's whim. Engels, on the other hand, devoted scarcely less detailed study to the history of war than to economic history, and in fact the two go parallel, illuminate and explain each other, show the same characteristic types.

Among the many foolish slogans of the bourgeois press, there are few that would be more foolish than the qualmish expression of the "battle thinkers", of whom, of course, the German army is supposed to teem in the first place. One could just as well speak of "stock market thinkers". For the same qualities make the happy general and the happy stock market speculator: a certain amount of mother wit, not too little, but still rather too little than too much, and especially a large measure of "gambler's audacity", as Clausewitz, the most ingenious theoretician of war, expresses it. Clausewitz is himself the classic example of the fact that the ability to think logically and, in general, an outstanding intelligence are a great misfortune for the commander. He proved himself only very mediocre in war, and that, as is unanimously reported by his fellow combatants, because he always "looked at the black side". In other words, because he had too bright a mind to blunder blindly, in accordance with the precept of his teacher Scharnhorst that in war it was less important what happened than that anything happened at all. It is the same phenomenon that Lassalle once explained with the words: "Hence comes that remark which has so often been made by experienced merchants, that in mercantile careers it is so preferentially often the more intelligent speculators who suffer shipwreck, and it is the more stupid who seem to have the more favourable chances. The sum of circumstances that cannot be known infinitely outweighs the sum of circumstances that can be known at any time." It is the same in war as in capitalist speculation. The more correct the estimate of the knowable circumstances, the greater, therefore, the intellect of the general or the speculator, the greater the probability that the infinitely predominant sum of the non-knowable circumstances will change the result, which then naturally has a paralysing effect on the energy of those who can think logically enough to make this consideration. As this explains why a Clausewitz, who had a masterly command of the theory of war, had no practical successes in war, so it also explains why the princely class, if no other champions of humanity, has produced a disproportionately large number of "glorious" commanders. For if its members are protected from an excessive development of their intellect by the nature of their education and spiritual formation, their "gambler's audacity" is all the more excellently developed, since they have nothing to fear in the event of failure but that the nations will have to pay the bill, to whom they can then, like Old Fritz to his retreating grenadiers at Kolin, make the morally devastating reproach: You rascals, do you want to live forever?

But just as in the wild dice game of capitalist speculation only the immanent laws of historical development prevail, so also in the wild dice game of war. Under the condition of class rule, war has been, all in all, a lever of historical progress, just like the capitalist mode of production, in the wake of which militarism has won its unprecedented expansion. Without the wars of the Napoleonic age, Germany would have degenerated into the mire of feudalism, as Poland did before it, and the guns of the war of 1870 blew open the door of the world market to it. The blindness to this historical significance of the wars, always under the condition of class rule, was Buckle's mistake and is today the mistake of the bourgeois peace enthusiasts, against whom Moloch's worshippers have a very easy game. On the other hand, by recognising the historical significance of wars, we are far from recognising them as a lever of human progress. In this, too, socialism stands to militarism just as it stands by its twin brother, capitalism: it does not turn its back on it by muttering a few annoying and banal phrases, like the capitalist peace pipe smokers, but studies its strengths and weaknesses in order to overcome it all the more surely. For, as in all others, the struggle which the proletariat wages against the ruling classes differs from the struggles which the ruling classes wage among themselves, whether on the market or in battle, in that in it it is not the sum of ignorable but of knowable circumstances which decides, and that the victory of the working class is all the more certain the more accurately and correctly it is able to recognise these circumstances.

From all this it follows that if all the vital interests of the proletariat point to fighting militarism to the death just as much as capitalism, it must not be indifferent to the way in which the wars of capitalist society take place. The other day in the Reichstag, the Reich Chancellor accused the German Social Democracy of an inner contradiction, because it demands strict neutrality in the Russo-Japanese war, but nevertheless wages a fierce war against Russia – more correctly, against Tsarist despotism. However, the idea of this alleged contradiction can really only arise in the mind of a man who has only a very dim idea of historical connections and no idea at all of the proletarian class struggle. If the working class cannot be enthusiastic about it, but can only shrug its shoulders in contempt at the fact that capitalist society, for all its throbbing and flaunting of its culture, knows no other way of balancing its clashes of interests than by the barbarous and crude means by which animals fight over their feeding places, so it need by no means be indifferent to the way in which the decision is reached in the individual case. For as long as class rule exists, wars are among the levers of historical development, and the working class has a keen interest in seeing this development take place at the most rapid pace until the complete bankruptcy of class rule. Therefore, while we are not interested in the victory of the Japanese, we are interested in the defeat of the tsarist system, with which to mourn we leave to the bearers of class rule.

It does not behove the working class to take sides in the bloody dealings of its oppressors, but it is its duty to keep a watchful eye on how it can promote its liberation struggle in the midst of the catastrophes that are beginning to befall the world of capitalism. This is how we celebrate May Day this year.