Three years ago, a joint statement by this blog and Boffy’s Blog set out the collapse of many “Marxist” organisations into social-imperialism in relation to the Ukraine-Russia War.  These organisations had abandoned the independent camp of the international proletariat and instead, lined up behind one of the contending imperialist camps of NATO/Ukraine or Russia/China.  Over the last three years their capitulation has hardened and deepened despite the imperialist nature of the war becoming more obvious.  The arguments of each side, such as they are, can only lead them to extend this support to the various imperialist camps in the future wars that are inevitable.

The contribution below was sent by a Polish reader who explains its origin.  A response by this blog will be drafted and published.

From Jan Jędrzejewski:

On May Day 2026 I published and distributed a leaflet, resulting from my first reading of Hal Draper’s The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism”, where I agreed with Draper’s conclusion to abandon the concept of revolutionary defeatism. The pdf file can be downloaded at: https://chomikuj.pl/janjedrzejewski , its name is: War-no-Socialism-yes. It would be interesting to learn the opinion of the authors of the above joint statement on my arguments against using the slogan of revolutionary defeatism. Jan Jedrzejewski, Warsaw, Poland.

Statement:

In Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Iran and else-where, capitalism bleeds with war – let’s reach for socialism! Not socialism stuck halfway, like an island in the capitalist ocean, but socialism as a world system. Such socialism will permanently ensure freedom and peace for nations. A socialized, planned economy, democratically managed through a system of workers’ councils elected at workplaces, will ensure decent jobs, adequate housing, access to adequate healthcare, education, culture, and recreation for all. The great cleanup after capitalism will begin the planned process of reclamation of devastated areas and effective protection of the Earth’s natural environment, encompassing radical changes in industry, agriculture and livestock farming. Humanity will be able to minimize social losses caused by subsequent natural disasters. Socialism is the only solution to the threat of a devastating world war in which no one will emerge victorious.

I’m speaking out about the program of a prospective revolutionary party, or rather, what shouldn’t be in it: the slogan of revolutionary defeatism. I myself used to promote defeatism in the Marxist Discussion Bulletin, which had been edited with the help of a few comrades from 2019 to 2025. I’d no longer advocate it in either Russia or Ukraine. Nor would I now present revolutionary defeatism as an alternative to the postulate of Jacobin war (see MBD no. 1, December 31, 2019).

However, I uphold Karl Liebknecht’s slogan from 1915, sometimes equated with defeatism: “The main enemy of every people is in their own country”. The bourgeoisie in Poland not only exploits the labouring masses and denies fundamental rights to the masses’ majority, such as access to housing. The rulers are currently preparing the entire country to defend itself against a supposedly inevitable attack from Russia. As the bourgeoisie claims through their spokesmen, they’re ensuring Poland’s “security”. They’re doing it by participating in a proxy war of the United States and its NATO allies against Russia, waged with Ukrainian hands on their territory, and by developing an intensive arms program. However, it’s not so much Russia as the Polish bourgeoisie itself that is pushing the labouring masses towards a war catastrophe and therefore remains our main enemy. Thus, I reiterate the call from MBD of 2024: Down with NATO! Stop rearming Ukraine! Not a man and not a penny for bourgeois militarism!

What was revolutionary defeatism? For me, defeatism was always associated with a declaration of choosing the “lesser evil”. This was the case, for example, in the definition provided by Leon Trotsky, leader of the Fourth International:

“Defeatism is the class policy of the proletariat, which even during a war sees the main enemy at home, within its particular imperialist country. Patriotism, on the other hand, is a policy that locates the main enemy outside one’s own country. The idea of defeatism signifies in reality the following: conducting an irreconcilable revolutionary struggle against one’s own bourgeoisie as the main enemy, without being deterred by the fact that this struggle may result in the defeat of one’s own government; given a revolutionary movement the defeat of one’s own government is a lesser evil” (A Step Towards Social Patriotism, July 1939, marxists.org).

What’s wrong with this definition? I think it’s impossible to be sure whether a wartime defeat or a victory of one’s “own capitalist government” would create better conditions for the success of a revolutionary intervention by the proletariat during or immediately after the war. This is especially true if it were a Pyrrhic victory, exhausting all forces. So, to paraphrase this definition, defeatism is, on the one hand, the policy of a relentless revolutionary struggle in the country during a war, against the main enemy, and, on the other hand, a kind of forecast of a less burdensome outcome of that war for the proletariat (it’s always the defeat of one’s own government). Such forecasts, however, are worthless as prophecies, and I reject this part of the above-quoted description of the policy (or tactics) of defeatism.

The impetus for me to abandon defeatism came in 2025 when I read Hal Draper’s article, The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism” (New International [USA], 1953-1954). It’s available in English at marxists.org, from which the quotes were taken.

Draper belonged to a splinter group within the Ameri-can Trotskyist movement, which, following the revelation of Hitler’s 1939 pact with Stalin regarding the partition of multinational Poland, refused to recognize the USSR as a workers’ state. Those dissidents believed that the bureaucracy in the USSR was no longer a social stratum but a new class of exploiters, and they called the country’s system bureaucratic collectivism. This contradicted Trotsky’s assertion that the USSR remained a degenerate workers’ state, requiring a proletarian political revolution.

Although I’m opposed to the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, I found Draper’s arguments for abandoning defeatism compelling. To support this thesis, he points to Rosa Luxemburg’s rejection of the victory or defeat dilemma, quoting that revolutionary’s 1915 article:

“For the European proletariat as a class, victory or defeat of either of the two war groups would be equally disastrous. For war as such, whatever its military outcome may be, is the greatest conceivable defeat of the cause of the European proletariat. The overthrow of war and the speedy forcing of peace by the international revolutionary action of the proletariat alone can bring to it the only possible victory” (The Crisis of German Social Democracy, translation used by Draper).

Draper also quotes Trotsky, who at the same time rejected Lenin’s lesser-evil orientation, writing:

“…under no conditions can I agree with your opinion, which is emphasized by a resolution, that Russia’s defeat would be a »lesser evil«. This opinion represents a fundamental concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, a concession for which there is no reason or justification, and which substitutes an orientation (extremely arbitrary under present conditions) along the lines of a »lesser evil« for the revolutionary struggle against war and the conditions which generate this war” (Nashe Slovo, June 4, 1915, translation used by Draper).

Draper writes that Trotsky pointed to the “social-patriotic potential which resides in” the defeat-slogan regarding one’s own government. I don’t intend to enquire into this methodology of social-patriotism or social-patriotic potential. As I wrote above, I reject defeatism for lack of foundation of declaring in advance which outcome of the war represents the lesser evil.

Moreover, Draper’s history of defeatism provides arguments for its rejection. First, Draper emphasizes that the tactics of defeatism, inherited by Lenin, applicable only in Russia, valid in pre-imperialist times, during the 1914 inter-imperialist war was opposed by revolutionary social democratic activists in exile (Luxemburg, Trotsky, Radek) and at home (e.g., Bukharin, Pyatakov, but not Zinoviev). Second, Draper alleges that Lenin abandoned defeatist tactics forever upon his return to the country after the February Revolution of 1917, without explaining by Lenin, why. This occurred after being confronted with the “social-patriotism of the masses” (Draper’s formulation).

According to Draper, the main reason for Lenin and the Bolshevik Party abandoning defeatism was the orientation of the masses towards defence of the country, understood by them as defence of the gains of revolution that over-threw czarism. Draper explains that Lenin abandoned defeatism when he realized “that the defeat-slogan [regarding one’s own government] broke all links between the sentiments and interests of the masses and the program of the consistent revolutionaries”.

As for the titular myth of Lenin’s “revolutionary defeatism”, it refers to the political counterrevolution in the USSR. Draper writes that after years of oblivion, “Defeatism was revived as a »principle of Leninisim« in the beginnings of the Stalinist counter-revolution, most specifically by Stalin’s partner in the »troika« which succeeded to Lenin’s leadership – Zinoviev”. It should be summoned up here that the political counterrevolution in the USSR took place after Lenin’s death in 1924, under Stalin’s slogan of building “socialism in one country”, or as Trotsky later explained, the recognition that “the revolution is wholly completed; social contradictions will steadily soften; the kulak will gradually grow into socialism; the development as a whole, regardless of events in the external world, will preserve a peaceful and planned character” (The Revolution Betrayed 1936, marxists.org).

However, the history of defeatism is even more complicated. Draper points to Trotsky’s later adoption of the slogan of defeatism, even “revolutionary defeatism”, despite his 1915 critique of defeatism, quoted above. Draper notes that Trotsky didn’t justify this decision. He writes that Trotsky “has fallen precisely into the methodological error of putting the question in the form of a choice between military outcomes on the government plane – the error which he saw so clearly in Lenin before he started to find »orthodox« formulations”. However, as Draper writes, Trotsky “never did accept it [the term defeatism] in the sense given to it by Lenin or anyone else. What happened is that he sought to reinterpret it in a peculiar fashion which not only deprived it of Lenin’s content but sometimes of any content whatsoever”. All of it together speaks for abandoning defeatism as an unjustifiably tolerated baggage from the past.

As we’ve seen, Draper believed that the slogan of defeatism had social-patriotic potential. Therefore, in his article, he argues that the Palestinian Trotskyists’ 1939 concept of advising defeatism to workers in fascist states, but not in the “democratic camp”, was “the first case we know of where serious thinking about Lenin’s concept of defeatism led a group in an objectively social-patriotic direction; where, so to speak, the social-patriotic potential in it was acted out in politics”. In turn, Trotsky, in the above-quoted (after Draper) letter from 1939 to these Palestinians, already in the title states that their concept is “A Step Towards Social Patriotism”.

In short, social-patriotic potential, which “resides” in the slogan of defeatism (Draper), emerged along with rejection of this slogan for some countries, as a step to-wards social-patriotism (Trotsky). I’d propose another explanation: this “step” of the Palestinian Trotskyists probably resulted from the mood of the masses, from the fact that the Jewish workers in Palestine saw their main enemy in European fascism, and not in the British bourgeoisie. I wouldn’t call it social-patriotism, a term I’d re-serve for the revisionist policy of “political truce” with the bourgeoisie by a workers’ party in the name of “defence of the fatherland”, such as that adopted by the German SPD and many workers’ parties in other countries after the World War One broke out.

To sum up, I advocate proletariat’s revolutionary struggle “against war and the conditions which generate this war” (Trotsky, 1915); I believe that “The overthrow of war and the speedy forcing of peace by the international revolutionary action of the proletariat alone can bring to it the only possible victory” (Luxemburg, 1915); I believe that what’s necessary is “conducting an irreconcilable revolutionary struggle against one’s own bourgeoisie as the main enemy” (Trotsky, 1939). The effects of this struggle should be assessed not in terms of drawing close to a wartime defeat of one’s own government, but in terms of drawing close to an overthrow of capitalism, as the social system that generates predatory and increasingly destructive wars. On May Day, let’s call together: War – no! Socialism – yes! Socialism – where? All over the world!

File to download: chomikuj.pl/janjedrzejewski Contactwith the author: (e-mail) mbd-warszawa@wp.pl