V. I.   Lenin

Proposed Amendments to the Resolution on the War Issue^[1]

Published: First published in 1931 in Lenin Miscellany XVII. Written between January 27 and 29 (February 9 and 11), 1917. Translated from the German. Published according to a typewritten copy.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 23, page 282.
Translated: M. S. Levin, The Late Joe Fineberg and and Others
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
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1. Party parliamentary deputies shall be under obligation to reject, stating their principled grounds, all war demands and credits and insist on demobilisation.

2. No civil peace; intensification of principled struggle against all bourgeois parties, also against nationalist-Grütli ideas in the labour movement and the party.

3. Systematic revolutionary propaganda in the army.

4. Support of all revolutionary movements and of the struggle against the war and against one’s own government in every warring country.

5. Assistance to every revolutionary mass action in Switzerland—strikes, demonstrations—and their development into open armed struggle.

6. The party shall proclaim the socialist transformation of Switzerland to be the aim of the revolutionary mass struggle decided upon at the 1915 Party Congress at Aarau. This revolution is the only, and really effective, way of liberating the working class from the horror of high prices and hunger, and is essential for the complete elimination of militarism and war.

Notes

[1] These amendments were proposed by the Swiss Lefts at the Zurich cantonal party congress in Töss, February 11–12, 1917.

The congress had before it two draft resolutions: (1) a social-chauvinist draft submitted by minority members of the commission on the war issue, and (2) a Centrist draft from the commission majority. The latter was adopted with the amendments formulated by Lenin by 93 votes to 65. The Lefts voted for the resolution in order to prevent adoption of the social-chauvinist draft. The typewritten copy of the amendments has this note by Lenin on the results of the voting:

“For the Right-wing Klöti and Co. resolution —65 —82

The amendments were published in No.{\thinspace}1 of the leaflet “Gegen die Lüge der Vaterlandsverteidigung” (“Against the Fatherland Defence Lie”) issued by the Swiss Left in February 1917 in close cooperation with Lenin.

Lenin discusses the struggle within the Swiss Social-Democratic Party in his article “The Story of One Short Period in the Life of One Socialist Party” (see pp. 283–86 of this volume).