Why We Are Not Pacifists

April 20, 2026

Josef Lenz¹

Translated from: LINKSKURVE
WARUM SIND WIR KEINE PAZIFISTEN Josef Lenz¹
availble on: Max Stirner Archiv, pgs 2 - 4

Revulsion towards war, the will to do everything to avoid its repetition, that was the dominant emotion among all who, with thinking and feeling, witnessed the “great time” [große Zeit²]. But the emotion is still no surety for the deed without the addition of accurate insight. “To be radical” says Marx “means to grasp a thing at its roots”. To radically eliminate war from the world, that can only be done, if you recognize its causes and eliminate these causes from the world.

First of all, that requires that war not be considered in isolation, not as an atrocity in the midst of a world which is otherwise in order. On the contrary, war must be understood as only the sharpest expression of a social order which currently determines all relations among people. The war was not monstrous because it demanded the sacrifice of millions. If it is necessary to make sacrifices for a good cause, one need not flinch. What was abhorrent in this war was the sacrifice of millions of human lives for an unworthy cause, for the enrichment of a small handful of war profiteers of all kinds. This, however, the sacrifice of human lives and human happiness to an increase in the wealth of useless layabouts, that is the prevailing law, not only in wartime, but for all time, so long as capitalism exists.

The first capitalist world war, drove thousands, who in their life circumstances did not belong to the proletariat, for whom the proletarian condition was foreign, to the side of the exploited and oppressed, because they, in the war as victims of reactionary violence, became chance comrades in suffering, what for millions of proletarians is their constant lot in life.

From this understanding, it follows that one can wage the struggle against war, only as a struggle against the social order that generates it, as a struggle against capitalism, and only in communion with the class which alone is able and willing to overthrow this social order, with the proletariat. That is why it is too little to be a pacifist and a supporter of peace in general. If you really want to remove war from the world, you must be a deadly enemy of the ruling social order, a conscious fighter to overcome it.

But this struggle cannot be waged with pacifist methods. The morality which fundamentally condemns violence, is a morality which serves the interests of the rulers who practice violence. Who fails to defy evil, renders themselves complicit in evil. Preaching non violence has the same sense as preaching “submit to the authorities”!

The last great historic attempt, to break the order of violence with the methods of non violence, the Indian independence movement under Gandhi’s leadership, has abjectly failed. The conquest of British imperialism through peaceful refusal of cooperation with them, has revealed itself as a petty bourgeois utopia, which blunted the impetus of the mass movement and so prolonged the servitude of the Indian people. The honest supporters of non violence are sectarians, who in the best case are of no use in the struggle for a better world, but if they win influence over the masses, they hamper this struggle.

The actions allowing one to overcome war and the system of capitalist imperialism which always generates war anew, is shown by the proletarian revolution in Russia in October 1917. Since the victory of the proletariat in one country, since the construction of the first socialist state, the world has been fundamentally transformed. At the same time the existence of a socialist state amid bourgeois states means a new cause for war. Alongside the wars between capitalist states, the wars for colonies and raw material rich territories, i.e. alongside imperialist wars for the preservation and growth of profit, a new kind of war appears on the agenda:

War between the imperialist states and the worker’s state. This war is from the side of the imperialists even more criminal than the war of 1914. Because it aims at the violent destruction of the only power which can lead humanity out of the “order” of violence and oppression. It is simultaneously from the side of proletarian power, the only just war, the war aimed at the destruction of the system of exploitation and oppression.

Thus official bourgeois and government pacifism has currently taken on a different meaning from the one it originally possessed. Already in the first imperialist world war, the slogan of peace served to preach the continuation of the war. The “fatherland” on every side of the trenches must prevail, in order to ensure peace. From the war was born the League of Nations, as an alliance of the great powers to protect the division of the world which was implemented after the victory of the Allies. The League of Nations is completely incapable of resolving a serious conflict between the great powers. But it is certainly able, if the common interest of all the imperialists demands it, to organize a sanctions based war [Sanktionskrieg], against the only force of peace, against the Soviet Union. The pacifist propaganda for the League of Nations, for the preservation of peace through its authority, through arbitration, through agreements like the Kellogg Pact, through disarmament etc. This propaganda, which is first of all carried out by the social democratic parties, serves more than anything else for the preparation of reactionary wars against the proletarian state. “Pacifists” like Gerlach, Coudenhove, Stresemann, Briand, Breitscheid, Crispien, Macdonald and Henderson consciously use pacifist phraseology to prepare the most reactionary of all wars, the world war of capitalist “civilization” against Bolshevism.

The whole “peace activity” of the League of Nations is premised on the assumption, that this sanctions war of the League powers should be applied against every state, whether a member of the League of Nations or not, which does not subordinate itself to the arbitration of this imperialist league. The International of the social democratic Parties has bound its supporters to take a position against every war, with the exception of those wars sanctioned by the League of Nations. Because the proletarian state cannot be subject to the arbitration of its deadly enemies, it is clear that all these regulations and threats are directed against the workers state.

The real enemies of the imperialist murder system must first of all wage the struggle against this pacifist mass deception. They cannot come together with those who consciously or unconsciously support the preparation of war for the preservation of the system of war with “peace” propaganda.

There is however, a small group of “revolutionary pacifists” around Kurt Hiller who want to unite the struggle against war with the struggle for socialism and recognize the necessity of violence in defense against reactionary attacks and for the defense of the socialist state against bourgeois states³. Out of this tendency, some will probably fight on the side of the revolutionary proletariat in critical moments, but as a tendency it essentially works to divert opponents of war from the effective methods of struggle against war.

The advocacy of refusing military service, promotes the illusion that the individual without the conscious organized revolutionary struggle of the masses, can withdraw themselves from the barbaric compulsion to kill or be killed in the service of profit. The struggle of the masses requires a cohesive, disciplined, centralized, international revolutionary party organization, as was created in the Communist International under the leadership of Lenin on the base of the experiences of the First World War. Who wants to wage the struggle against imperialist war with other methods, without this organization, will probably be found in the other camp when the going gets tough. Because the power of bourgeois public opinion is immense, whoever cannot set against it a firm, clear proletarian revolutionary outlook, will also in practice not take the path of serious struggle.

The recognition of revolutionary violence by the revolutionary pacifists is not unconditional but conditional and backhanded. They think only of defensive violence—similar to a portion of the “left” Social Democrats. But this is the wrong way to pose the question. The difference between attack and defense is determined in the deeper sense by the social situation and decisive interests of the combatant parties. Whoever fights for the cause of the exploited and oppressed always wages a just struggle, regardless of whether the methods of struggle, considered externally, are offensive or defensive. To bind oneself tactically to the defensive use of force, while admitting the unavoidability of civil wars and of revolutionary wars of socialist states against bourgeois states, this means: to forego the conscious, planned audacious preparation of these unavoidable struggles, leaving to the enemy the choice of the moment in time for the decision.

We already see in the development of the conflict in Manchuria, that the imperialists understand how to create a situation in which the socialist state appears as the aggressor⁴. Who puts the preservation of the current situation of “peace”—a peace that is nothing other than a sometimes open, sometimes hidden civil war against the exploited masses and the systematic preparation of imperialist war—over the cause of struggle for an authentic peace, one which can only be reached through the overthrow of capitalism in all countries, who is not in unreserved solidarity with the fighting international proletariat and the proletarian state, who sees in the revolutionary workers movement only the welcome alliance partner of a peace movement which seeks to unite people of “good will” over all class interests, has in the war that now stands on the agenda, fallen unavoidably into the service of the war makers, who under the slogans of peace, defend a social order which is permanent war.

Linkskurve Number 1, August 1929. 3-7.⁵