The following is an excerpt from The Bolsheviks and War (1985) by U.S. Marxist-Leninist thinker and organizer Sam Marcy, founder of Workers World Party in 1959. From Chapter 5: “Class struggle in the nuclear age”:
The second event we must analyze took place on a now historic date, June 12, 1982, when the city of New York was the scene of the largest anti-war demonstration in the history of the United States. The specifics of the program of the demonstration were directed against the threat of nuclear war and for a freeze on nuclear weapons. More immediately, it was to stop the deployment in Europe of Pershing II and cruise missiles and the development of the most threatening of all U.S. weapons, the MX first-strike missile.
The demonstration was widely heralded as the most successful ever. Almost all the capitalist newspapers said that perhaps as many as 500,000–800,000 attended. The more progressive papers and those in the working-class movement gave it almost a million.
But there was an extraordinary aspect to this demonstration that seemed to escape the attention of the organizers and, in particular, the scores of speakers who delivered short messages and greetings during the day-long demonstration. There were perhaps as many as a hundred speakers, and most of them were well aware of what was going on in the world. Yet they omitted to mention (or if they did so it was in such a perfunctory way as to be completely overlooked in all accounts of the event, the war of devastating proportions going on in Lebanon at that very moment.
On that very day there was already in progress one of the cruelest, most barbarous, if not genocidal wars of U.S. imperialism. The fact that the actual fighting was being carried out by its surrogate Israel should have fooled no one. The war was being conducted against one of the most oppressed and persecuted peoples of the century—the Palestinians. No one could avoid seeing it on television, hearing about it on the radio, or reading the banner headlines in the world or U.S. press.
The first wave of the terrible invasion by the Israelis began on June 5 and continued, with merciless destruction, all the way to June 15–16. An eight-column banner headline in the New York Times of June 7 read, “Big Israeli force invades south Lebanon, sharp fighting with guerrillas reported.” Two days later a similar dramatic headline said that now the Israelis were only 15 miles outside Beirut and were using tanks and infantry in an evident attempt to trap and destroy the Palestinians. It was substantially the same on June 12, 13, and 14.
It would have been utterly impossible for any speaker to have denied knowledge of what was going on. The newspapers and the media were full of it worldwide. Yet the speakers, with the possible exception of one or two, all hewed to the bourgeois-pacifist line. They spoke only about the threat of nuclear war and completely closed their eyes to the war that was literally in front of them. It was as though the imperialist architects of this war were not inseparably bound up with the very same imperialist forces that are promoting nuclear war.
All that was really needed was a clear and simple resolution denouncing the U.S.–Israeli war being waged against the Palestinians and the Lebanese. No one would have demanded that the U.S.–Israeli war against the Palestinians and Lebanese be the focus of the demonstration. But a clear denunciation of the war in the form of a resolution could hardly have escaped the attention of the world press, even if the U.S. press tried to hide it. . . .
It was to Lenin’s great credit that he led his party in an opposite direction, in the direction of urging the masses not only to oppose the war but to call it by its right name. The other leaders of the Second International failed to do this, as do their counterparts today.
Why did the Second International end up in ruins?
Certainly among the most important reasons is the fact that, notwithstanding that they stood at least in words on the platform of working-class struggle, they failed to see that the only antidote to an imperialist war is the development of a class war, and that a class war in the midst of an imperialist war inevitably means defeating the armies of the ruling class by overturning its rule. This the leaders of the Second International had agreed to in words, as late as two years before the First World War broke out.
Where Lenin’s more profound understanding of the class struggle and of imperialism in general proved itself superior was where he went beyond both the pacifism of bourgeois liberals as well as the pacifism of the various socialist parties on the European continent. In his view, the imperialist war was just a continuation of imperialist politics by other (violent) means. While not for a moment abandoning any type of peaceful demonstrations against the war, he resolutely and with determination pushed his own formula for a solution to the imperialist war: “A revolutionary class in a reactionary war cannot but desire the defeat of its own (capitalist) government. The defeat of one’s own government in an imperialist war is the lesser evil.” Only in that way can there be a real fraternization collectively of the workers in the imperialist countries against the war.
Just as energetically, however, Lenin relentlessly agitated for and defended the correctness of a revolutionary war of the oppressed people and urged revolutionary defeatism by the workers in the oppressing imperialist countries. He urged upon the workers in the oppressing imperialist countries fraternal support and anti-imperialist solidarity, up to and including revolutionary measures that would facilitate the defeat of the imperialist government.
A century of imperialist struggle has not invalidated but really confirmed the correctness of the principled, revolutionary Marxist-Leninist tactics and strategical approach. Local conditions and temporary lulls in the class struggle may necessitate a diversity of different tactical approaches. They must, however, be in harmony with the principled revolutionary working-class position of anti-imperialist struggle.
What is the social content of imperialist aggression? It is for super-profits at home and abroad. It is the congenital drive of the bourgeoisie for super-exploitation which is the source of the super-profits. . . .
These giant multi-national monopolies are more powerful than any ancient empire ever was. There are even few modern imperialist states that can rival the power of one of the dynastic finance capitalist groupings which bankroll the various weapons systems. They relentlessly milk the U.S. Treasury which in turn passes on its losses to the masses of the working class and oppressed.
If the struggle against imperialist war is to become serious, it must take on a working-class character. That doesn’t mean to narrow the appeal, as capitalist politicians maintain. On the contrary, it means to broaden it, for it is the working class and the oppressed people together with the lower middle class that constitute the majority in any case.
Taking on a working-class character means that the fundamental aim of the anti-war struggle is not merely against the military–industrial complex, but also the defense contractors and the big banks, as well as the giant oil corporations. In a word, the struggle against imperialist war must be conducted as an all-around classwide struggle against the bourgeoisie. Only a real class war can stop an imperialist war and has the material basis for winning the allegiance of all the oppressed and exploited masses.