Issue 224 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published November 1998 Copyright © Socialist Review

The armistice signed by the great powers in November 1918 brought the most destructive war yet known to humanity to an end. Some 10 million had been killed in battle. Another 3 million were missing, presumed dead. This was butchery on a truly colossal scale. The attempt by Germany to break through French lines at Verdun between February and June 1916 involved 2 million in battle--1 million of these were casualties. The British offensive on the Somme, designed to blunt the Verdun attack, killed 420,000 British soldiers- with 60,000 mown down on the first day.

Of the great powers, Germany, with war on two fronts, suffered the greatest losses--about 1.8 million. But in proportion to its population it was France which suffered more. It mobilised 168 per 1,000 inhabitants, with 34 of those lost; for Germany the figures were 30 out of 154 per 1,000 mobilised. Russia, with its huge army of 15.5 million, might well have come off worst among the belligerents, except that its troops increasingly refused to fight and the Bolshevik revolution brought the war to an end a year earlier.

An estimated 13 million civilians also died. Not only war carried them off, but shortages of food and fuel. People's resistance to disease weakened. Typhus, especially on the eastern fronts, took a heavy toll. Russia recorded some 9 million cases, with 1.5 million dead by 1920. The Spanish flu epidemic which swept Europe in 1918 was a mass killer.

Many more men than women died in the course of the war. The effect was to distort the gender balance, particularly in Germany and France. France's population dropped by 3 million between 1913 and 1920. It lost nearly one fifth of men of military age. The war created other distortions. The physical damage was enormous, as was the dislocation to people's lives. In those areas of northern France conquered by Germany, over half the population fled and 800,000 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. Much of the countryside became sterile.

These raw statistics give some sense of why the First World War so scarred the imagination of Europe. There had been no major war since 1871. The Franco-Prussian conflict of that year had been decisive and swift, involving few casualties. Few could imagine a state of existence in which peace would give way to prolonged and bloody conflict. The general feeling when war was declared in August 1914 was that this would be a short war, over before Christmas. One side or the other, it was thought, would make a quick breakthrough.

Nobody had anticipated that the rival armies would get bogged down in trench warfare. Yet this became a war in which thousands of soldiers died in offensives to gain a few yards of stinking, muddy soil--a distance which was just as frequently lost a few days later. Nor did anyone imagine that the outcome of the war would change Europe so deeply and witness the collapse of empires, the birth of new countries--or revolution.

Voices of protest, which had been deafened by jingoism at the start of the war, began to gain a hearing as the senseless slaughter continued. Why had the war turned out this way? Why did it appear impossible to stop?

One element was certainly the blind and arrogant stupidity of the military high commands, winch persisted in mass sacrifice whatever the cost. The assessment of the relationship between British soldiers and their generals--lions led by donkeys--applied just as much to other armies. Yet the belief that the war was the last throw of an aristocratic, backward looking officer caste is insufficient as an explanation.

It is true that military elites dominated empires like Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, but central in the run up to hostilities was the way in which all the major powers found themselves locked into an arms race. As the imperialist scramble for territory and resources between the leading European nations intensified in the closing years of the 19th century, each needed to ensure that it would not fall behind in military might. So Germany rapidly expanded its navy in order to rival that of Britain, the biggest in the world.

This build up in the means of death was only possible as a consequence of the growth of large scale capitalist industry. Frederick Engels had already observed in 1892 how warfare had become a branch of industry and how the development of large scale industry had become a political necessity. Nowhere was this clearer than in Germany, where Krupp, the king of cannons, built his steel empire from a firm employing 16,000 in 1873 to one employing nearly 70,000 in 1912.

The arms manufacturers, driven by the need to maximise profit, were unscrupulous in using government fears to place orders in the run up to the war. Krupp used its monopoly position to ensure that the German army would buy the artillery it wished to sell--which was not the most modern. Meantime, it was free to export more than half its output to foreigners, some of whom could be deemed enemies.

Yet it is a mistake to see the war as the consequence of a conspiracy by arms manufacturers with enough economic clout to make governments and armies dance to their tune. This is to suppose that capitalism as a whole had no interest in war. Such was the conclusion reached by the German socialist theoretician Karl Kautsky in 1914. He saw imperialism as no more than a struggle to subjugate 'agrarian regions'. So although this led to an arms race and to war, imperialism, he argued, was not necessary for the continuation of capitalism itself. On the contrary, he claimed, 'it is the capitalist economy which is extremely threatened by the conflicts between its states. Every farsighted capitalist today must call to his comrades: capitalists of the world, unite!'

The war, then, was a colossal 'mistake', in which the most 'progressive' sections of capital had no stake. But imperialism was a lot more than a struggle for territory. It represented the newest phase of capitalist development, with capital becoming both more internationalised and more closely fused with the national state. This was argued by the Russian Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin. In the age of imperialism, capital can no longer remain within national boundaries if it is to compete effectively with its rivals. It forms giant cartels which unite whole branches of industry to dwarf national markets. At the same time it requires close integration with the state if it is to protect its position in relation to rival capitals. So military competition is not a 'backward' step. It is central to the very survival of capitalism itself.

War is the inevitable product of competitiveness in an era where capital is fighting for global resources through access to raw materials and fresh outlets of capital. Capital calls on the power of the state to settle matters of economic rivalry. The antagonism which pits different companies against one another in the form of peaceful competition breaks out in antagonism between national rivals in the form of military competition.

That is why the First World War took the form it did. Capitalists may not have wanted a war, but they were tied to a system which made war the final arbiter of rival sections of capital. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 might in earlier times have produced no more than a limited war, resolved by diplomacy. But the nature of the capitalist system as a whole dictated that war would now be fought on an enormously expanded scale. It would also drag the major powers into a struggle to redivide the world in the interests of the economically strongest--even if that meant, a struggle to the point of economic collapse and social dislocation.

All the socialist parties of Europe, with few exceptions, had capitulated at the beginning of the war and refused to oppose the ruling classes of their own countries. The German Social Democratic Party, to whose left wing Kautsky belonged, was no exception. Kautsky could justify this on the grounds that, since the war was not primarily a consequence of capitalist development, now was not the time to fight capitalism.

The Russian Bolsheviks, almost uniquely among socialist parties, drew the opposite conclusion. The conflict between nations that flowed from the nature of capitalism and resulted in mass slaughter of workers by each other had be stopped, not by appeals to capitalists' better instincts, but by resuming class struggle on an international scale. War could only be answered by revolution.

Up until the third year of the war, that seemed a utopian dream. With the collapse of the socialist parties in 1914 into patriotism and the co-option of labour and trade union leaders into government institutions, there seemed little prospect of any kind of challenge to the social and political order, let alone the prospect of revolutionary transformation. Yet beneath the surface things were beginning to change. The early euphoria evaporated as the endless slaughter went on. War weariness set in, followed by resentment.

This change began to pose a threat to Europe's leaders. War had knocked prewar social relations out of their accustomed groove. Sustained military conflict required an enormous expansion of the economy to provide material for the war effort. By 1916, Britain, France and Germany all faced the problem of insufficient labour power to feed both the war machine and the industrial machine. Not even mobilising women to work in the place of the men who had gone off to war could resolve the problem. In addition, millions of peasants and agricultural workers were sucked out of the countryside into the cities. Agriculture declined in many parts of Europe. To the housing crisis in the swollen cities was added the burden of food shortage, even starvation. This was particularly true of Gemany.

Not even the top of society remained immune, cushioned though they were by wealth. Few upper class homes escaped the horror of death at first hand. A quarter of Oxford and Cambridge students under the age of 25 perished. No wonder that some of the finest anti-war poetry came from officers like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, whose first hand experience of the reality of trench life cut across the official cant about the glory of war.

Public debt massively increased and with it came inflation. War fever also saw fortunes made out of profiteering and the black market. Newly rich individuals flaunted wealth in the midst of suffering and failing living standards. It made a mockery of the supposedly noble aims of war and fuelled even greater resentment. The net effect was to put the social and political structure of each belligerent country under increasing strain--particularly those of the most backward and weakened powers: semi-feudal Russia and the unmodernised empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Of course, the main cost of the war fell on the working class. At the same time, each nation's dependence on keeping war production at maximum capacity strengthened the position of the working class. This was true whether the working class was numerically small in relation to the rest of the population (such as in Russia) or numerically dominant (as in Germany). Either way, it held the fate of the nation in its hands.

It took time for the political numbness induced in the early stages of the war to wear off, and the influx of raw elements from the countryside and of women into the factories complicated the task of union organisation. But as confidence in their ability to struggle returned, workers began to become conscious of their power. As they did so, the transformation of society by war did not take long to push political questions to the fore--including the future of capitalist society itself.

Strike action, which had been limited up until 1915, began to increase. Initially strikes were a response to economic hardship, not a challenge to the war. More strikes occurred in Britain during the war than in any other country at war, with the exception of Russia. Skilled workers in the vast armaments industry were at the heart of this militancy. The shop stewards movement, and its equivalent in Germany, was the radical driving force.

Yet even if in form these strikes were not political, their effect was. Governments feared their ability to wage war. It did not take much, therefore, for economic demands to take on a political colouring. The leaders of the strikes were often dissident socialists who filled the vacuum left by the official union leaders. A similar process of radicalisation was taking place in the armies of Europe. The discipline which held them together was cracking, and class rather than national allegiance was beginning to get the upper hand. There were major mutinies, severely repressed, in the French army, German navy and even among British soldiers.

By 1917 the anger among the masses was so deep that state structures began to totter. In Germany widespread and mostly spontaneous strike action (involving 300,000 workers in Berlin alone) against reduced bread rations shook the regime to the core. The Kaiser survived for another year, but his opposite number in Russia was less fortunate. Demonstrations, also over bread in the spring of 1917, led to the Tsar's abdication.

Revolution now swept over Europe. Russia was the weak link in the imperialist chain. Fighting a modern war on the same terms of industrial development as its more advanced rivals had fatally undermined its archaic social structure. The army was disintegrating and peasants seized the land. But the crisis did not disappear with the abdication of the Tsar and the installation of a provisional government. The war went on, the land question was unresolved and the bosses still ran the factories.

Only the working class could resolve this continuing crisis. For that a new form of political power was needed, one which allowed it to exercise direct democratic control over society. The creation of a system of workers' councils answered that need. Within six months a social revolution had taken place.

What had appeared utopian at the start of the war was now a reality. In 1918 the collapse of the spring offensive and the prospect of further loss of life led to the collapse of the German army. In November a naval mutiny at the northern German port of Kiel triggered an insurrectionary movement, uniting some 40,000 sailors, soldiers and workers. All this came in the wake of a highly politicised strike of 400,000 workers in Berlin, in which demands over food supplies were secondary to demands for mass strikes to force the world's rulers to accept a peace without annexations.

A system of workers' councils emerged as it had in Russia. Yet they never realised their potential to impose a new form of rule on society. The revolution stalled. Power remained with the bourgeois politicians and the councils withered. The process of political clarification, which had occurred in Russia as the result of a bitter ideological struggle by an organised revolutionary party, never occurred. There were too few such revolutionaries in Germany, too poorly organised and too lacking in roots. The old socialist leaders, having moved to the left to recapture credibility, now used that credibility to save the social order. Instead of a workers' republic, which could have changed the course of European history, the weak and sickly Weimar Republic was born from the collapse of the empire.

War also ended the Austro-Hungarian empire and brought about the short lived Hungarian revolution. Italy, whose participation in the war had proved disastrous, underwent enormous working class radicalisation. By 1919 it was on the verge of revolution. The biennio rosso (two red years) which followed saw bitter struggles--strikes, factory occupations and the emergence of factory councils. But as in Germany the chance for revolution was squandered and similarly the blame must be laid on the inadequacy of the Socialist Party, which was big on words but cowardly in deeds.

Italy also gave a foretaste of what the failure of revolution could mean. As working class militancy fell back, Mussolini's fascist movement grew. The war not only radicalised the working class, it embittered the middle layers of society who were powerless to protect themselves against the ravages of war--unlike the working class who could organise themselves collectively. Over half the rank and file of Mussolini's fascists were ex-military men. Germany was to repeat this pattern with the rise of a much nastier fascist movement. This too was dominated by ex-servicemen nursing a sense of national betrayal and middle class elements determined to wreak revenge on the working class movement.

The postwar settlement, with its creation of new national states out of the rubble of the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, was supposedly a guarantee to the exhausted peoples of Europe that never again would there be war. The League of Nations was meant to settle disputes before they led to generalised conflict. Both the prospect of peace and power to ensure it proved illusory. Nothing had been resolved. The victorious allies inflicted retribution on a prostrate Germany. It lost territory, was partially occupied and demilitarised, and forced to pay massive reparations it could ill afford.

The inter-imperialist rivalry which had driven the world to war in 1914 had not disappeared. Its contradictions were to explode in an even greater and more terrible world war only 21 years later. In the absence of successful revolution, barbarism beckoned. As we approach the end of the century of war, the same choice faces humanity.