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Weekly Worker 610 Thursday February 2 2006
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Learn military art
Good news, bad news
Now the bad news. Our campaign to up the number of standing orders to our paper seems to have ground to a halt, with not a single new pledge received over the last seven days. While our January success is most pleasing, what we urgently need is a commitment from our readers and supporters to guarantee regular income - as we have found to our cost, one month’s victory can be replaced by disappointment the next, leaving us unable to do more than keep up with our running costs rather than plan for expansion and improvement in a controlled way. Another let-down over the last seven days has been the absence of a single donation received via our website. Quite remarkable really. Last week we had 13,138 online readers, yet not one of them thought to leave their calling card - or rather their credit card - to show their appreciation with a gift using our PayPal facility. Next week I hope to be able to report good news all round - a healthy start to February’s fund, some web donations and, most of all, a spurt in our standing order appeal. Robbie Rix
|
First
the good news. We have well and truly exceeded our £600 fighting
fund target for January with some very welcome donations in the
last few days of the month - thanks to KT and SB (£20), PL, VJ and
FT (£10 each). Our final total was £700 exactly.
From VI Lenin, ‘The military programme of the proletarian revolution’ (1916 - www.marxists.org)
An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. We cannot, unless we have become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, forget that we are living in a class society from which there is no way out, nor can there be, save through the class struggle.
In every class society - whether based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, wage-labour - the oppressor class is always armed. Not only the modern standing army, but even the modern militia - and even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, Switzerland, for instance - represent the bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat. That is such an elementary truth that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it. Suffice it to point to the use of troops against strikers in all capitalist countries.
A bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat is one of the biggest fundamental and cardinal facts of modern capitalist society. And in face of this fact, revolutionary social democrats [communists] are urged to ‘demand’ ‘disarmament’! That is tantamount to complete abandonment of the class-struggle point of view, to renunciation of all thought of revolution. Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from, and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap ….
Today the imperialist bourgeoisie militarises the youth as well as the adults; tomorrow, it may begin militarising the women. Our attitude should be: all the better! Full speed ahead! For, the faster we move, the nearer shall we be to the armed uprising against capitalism. How can [communists] give way to fear of the militarisation of the youth, etc, if they have not forgotten the example of the Paris Commune? This is not a ‘lifeless theory’ or a dream. It is a fact. And it would be a sorry state of affairs indeed if, all the economic and political facts notwithstanding, [communists] began to doubt that the imperialist era and imperialist wars must inevitably bring about a repetition of such facts.
A certain bourgeois observer of the Paris Commune, writing to an English newspaper in May 1871, said: “If the French nation consisted entirely of women, what a terrible nation it would be!” Woman and teenage children fought in the Paris Commune side by side with the men. It will be no different in the coming battles for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie ….
The whole of social life is now being militarised. Imperialism is a fierce struggle of the great powers for the division and redivision of the world. It is therefore bound to lead to further militarisation in all countries, even in neutral and small ones. How will proletarian women oppose this? Only by cursing all war and everything military, only be demanding disarmament?
The women of an oppressed and really revolutionary class will never accept that shameful role. They will say to their sons, ‘You will soon be grown up. You will be given a gun. Take it and learn the military art properly. The proletarians need this knowledge not to shoot your brothers, the workers of other countries, as is being done in the present war, and as the traitors to socialism are telling you to do. They need it to fight the bourgeoisie of their own country, to put an end to exploitation, poverty and war, and not by pious wishes, but by defeating and disarming the bourgeoisie’.
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