Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES, 1912-16


“SOCIAL-IMPERIALISM AND LEFT RADICALISM”

Bremer Bürger-Zeitung, 1915, No. 291 (December 13).

Leading article: “Social-Imperialism and Left Radicalism”.... “It [Left radicalism] was the trend in German radicalism which took shape during the campaign for the suffrage in Prussia and in the 1910-13 debates on disarmament”....

N.B.  ...“He (Kautsky) sought to depict imperialism
as a form of capitalist expansion which could give
way to another, peaceful form”....

Among these Lefts were “Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Radek, Thalheimer, Zetkin and others”....

...“The Left radicals waged a sharp struggle against the survivals of the British Manchesterism ideology in foreign policy” (Ledebour and K. Kautsky, also Eckstein)....

 

The Left radicals and social-imperialists find common ground in that “the world has entered the imperialist era”....

 ...“For the Left radicals, even the militia is not a means
for abolishing the expansionist tendencies of imperial-
ism—they favour it only in the hope that it will bring
to maturity the anti-imperialist tendencies of the masses.
The social-imperialists, on the other hand, use every
approach to a militia presented by this war, but which
can be achieved only in opposition to the policy upheld
by the war, as a bait for militarising Social-Democracy”.

PAPERS OF THE SOCIETY FOR SOCIAL POLICY | “E. RAPPARD, TOWARDS NATIONAL AGREEMENT

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