Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/163

 argument, however, is also incorrect. It may be so, but it need not always be so. Different colonial wars in the period between 1900 and 1914 did not have this result; and it would be ridiculous to consider it possible, if this war ends in a general exhaustion of the warring countries, that there should not be a national revolutionary war, perhaps by China together with India, Persia, Siam, etc., against the existing world powers.

The negation of all possible national wars under Imperialism is theoretically and historically incorrect, and in practice promotes European chauvinism: we, belonging to nations that suppress hundreds of millions of people in Europe, Africa and Asia, we declare to these oppressed people that their war against "our" nation is impossible!

Civil wars are also wars. Those who accept the class struggle must accept civil wars, which, under certain circumstances, are a natural and inevitable continuance, development and accentuation of the class struggle in every society based on class divisions. All great revolutions prove this. To deny or to overlook civil wars would mean becoming a victim of the most hopeless opportunism and abandoning the Social Revolution.

The victory of Socialism in one country does not all of a sudden exclude all wars in general. On the contrary, this situation implies wars. The development of Capitalism proceeds differently in different countries: this is inevitable in a society based on the production of commodities. The result is: Socialism cannot be victorious in all countries at the same time. Socialism will be victorious first in one or in some countries, other countries continuing for a certain length of time on a bourgeois or pre-bourgeois basis. This will not only result in antagonisms, but will develop the direct tendency of the bourgeoisie in the other countries to crush the victorious proletariat of the Socialist country. In such cases our war would be justifiable and right, it would be a war for Socialism, for liberation of other peoples from their bourgeoisie. Engels was right when he recognized clearly, in his letter to Kautsky, September 12, 1882, the possibility of wars of defense of Socialism, meaning the defense of the victorious proletariat against the bourgeoisie of other countries.

Only after we have completely forced down and expropriated the bourgeoisie of the whole world and not of one country alone, will wars become impossible. And it is scientifically incorrect and not at all revolutionary to overlook or confuse the most important,