May Day will be celebrated this year under special circumstances, amid the tumult of war.† This year, the character of the May Day demonstrations will naturally be marked by the struggle for world peace. But not only that. Rather, this time of war requires more than a pacifist and proletarian demonstration; it must also promote an understanding that universal peace can be attained only in connection with our fight for the final goal of socialism.
If the Russo-Japanese War has shown anything, it is the vanity with which some socialist “lovers of humanity” speculate about being able to create world peace on the basis of preserving a balance of power between the Dual Alliance and the Triple Alliance.‡ These eulogists for the two major military alliances cannot express enough their absolute satisfaction with the “lasting peace” that has been maintained in the center of Europe for thirty years.§ The existence of this system of competing alliances allows them to predict “a coming peace” and “all of humanity at peace” as the most natural thing in the world. The thunder of cannons coming from Port Arthur, which has made the stock exchanges of Europe shudder convulsively, is a powerful reminder for these socialist ideologue-apologists for capitalist society that in their fantasizing about a European peace they have forgotten one factor—modern-day colonial policy, which has left the stage of local European conflicts far behind, because it has extended itself to the other side of enormous oceans.¶ The Russo-Japanese War ought to have finally made it clear by now to the last unbeliever that the fateful question of war and peace in Europe cannot any longer be decided within the “four walls” that contain the European concert of powers. Rather, this question must be resolved “out there” in the gigantic maelstrom, the whirlpool of world politics and colonial policy.**
For Social Democracy, what the actual significance of this current war amounts to—aside from its short-term effects contributing toward the collapse of Russian absolutism—is what I have just stated above. This war directs the gaze of the proletariat in an international direction, toward the great political and economic interconnections that exist in this world, and it exerts strong pressure within our ranks against any kind of national egoism or narrow-minded pettiness of perspective, against the kind of thinking that always arises in periods of political tranquility.
The war rips apart all the veils of illusion with which the capitalist world surrounds us—this world of economic, political, and social fetishism.
The war destroys all illusory suggestions about peaceful social development, about the omnipotence and unchallengeable nature of bourgeois legality, about national sectionalism or regionalism, about the stability of political conditions, about “responsible” leadership in politics and the so-called conscientiousness of “trusted” statesmen or parties, about the power that supposedly exists in European parliaments, which are supposedly capable of shaking up and straightening out this world of strife, [about] parliamentarism as the presumed center of social existence.
War unleashes—simultaneously with the reactionary forces of the capitalist world—the forces of social revolution that are fermenting in the depths of society.*
Today, on this May Day, we will celebrate to the acrid smell of gunpowder while world events unfold at full tilt.