Revolutionary Opposition to World War I

quote of the issue

The carnage of World War I was a watershed, provoking a profound realignment in the workers movement internationally. When war broke out on 4 August 1914, the German Social Democratic Party voted to fund the war effort of its “own” ruling class. This historic betrayal of the proletariat by the largest party of the Second International was repeated by “socialists” in almost all other combatant countries. In response, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin launched a fight to break revolutionaries away from the social chauvinists of the Second International and regroup them around a proletarian internationalist program.

Alongside a small minority of European parties, the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) took a principled stance in opposition to the war. Opposing militarism and war fever, the SPC issued the short manifesto printed below two days after the war began, laying out a perspective of class struggle against the Canadian capitalist exploiters. The SPC rightly declared that the working people had no side in this war between the imperialist powers. It is important to add, however, that in wars between a colonial or semicolonial country and an imperialist power, the workers do have a side—in defense of the subjugated country. This point was underlined by Lenin and the Bolsheviks as part of their struggle to rally the working masses to oppose their “own” bloody imperialist ruling classes.

Amid a barrage of anti-German war hysteria, the SPC, centred in Western Canada, also waged an important internal struggle, forcing the resignation of the editor of their newspaper, the Western Clarion, for taking a chauvinist, pro-war position. For their opposition to the war, members of the SPC across the country were arrested—some repeatedly—and jailed for sedition.

By 1916, the SPC had endorsed the Socialist Party of Britain’s call to form the Third International. In response to the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the party began to discuss changing its name to Communist Party of Canada. However, it took a series of fights for a core of the SPC to unify with the forces based in Eastern Canada who formed the Communist Party in 1921. At the heart of these debates was a struggle over the kind of party needed for proletarian struggle. Those who saw their purpose as “organizing the working class for the capture of political power,” in the words of SPC leader Jack Kavanaugh, joined the Communists.

The SPC’s “Manifesto to the Workers of Canada” was issued by the party’s Dominion Executive Committee in Vancouver on 6 August 1914. We reprint it from Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada (1981) by Ian Angus.

In view of the European situation, and the efforts of the capitalist press and politicians to stir up a war fever in Canada, to the end that Canadian workingmen will be induced to take up arms in defense of the interests of their masters, the Socialist Party of Canada, instead of passing futile resolutions of protest, would call your attention to the following facts:

1. Inasmuch as all modern wars have their origin in the disputes of the international capitalist class for markets in which to dispose of the stolen products of labor, or to protect themselves in the possession of the markets they already have, the motive of the anticipated struggle in Europe is of no real interest to the international working class.

2. Further, as the struggle, if materialized, will claim as its victims countless thousands of the members of our class in a quarrel that is not theirs, it behoves the workers not to be carried away by the frenzied clamorings of the interested advocates of war, the vaporings of capitalist “statesmen,” or the blare of martial music. In no conceivable manner, shape or form could the interests of the workers of any of the nationalities involved be furthered or protected by their participation in the conflict.

3. Since the international working class produces all the wealth of the world, and still possesses nothing, receiving in the shape of wages but sufficient to maintain a slavish existence: and since the international capitalist class occupies the position of a social parasite, producing nothing and possessing everything, which position it is able to maintain by virtue of its control of the state—the only struggle that can be of vital interest to the working class of all nations is that which has for its object the wresting of this power from the hands of the master class, and using it to remove all forms of exploitation and servitude. To this struggle the Socialist Party of Canada calls you. The only barrier standing in our way is ignorance in the ranks of our own class.

As an International Working Class, we have but one enemy—the International Capitalist Class.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS: YOU HAVE A WORLD TO GAIN.

—Western Clarion, 15 August 1914