MIA: History: ETOL: Documents: International Communist League/Spartacists—PRS 2
“On National Defence”
submitted by the Militant Group of the Revolutionary Socialist League
Written: 1944
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York. Published in Prometheus Research Series 2, 1989.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: David Walters, John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
The text of this resolution is taken from a bulletin entitled “Resolutions submitted by the Militant Group (R.S.L.) to the R.S.L.-W.I.L. Fusion Conference,” dated March 1944.
1). This Conference declares that there must be no room for ambiguity in our organisation with regard to our attitude in the event of the invasion of imperialist Britain by the forces of a rival imperialist power. Our attitude is determined by our estimation of the war as an imperialist one. In such a war, “national defence” means defence of colonial booty and imperialist exploitation. Furthermore, defeats of British Imperialism, by weakening it, facilitate its overthrow at the hands of the revolutionary proletariat.
2). As Lenin put it, “We will not become partisans of national defence until after the seizure of power by the proletariat, until after the offer of peace....Until the moment of the seizure of power by the proletariat, we are for the proletarian revolution, we are against the war, we are against the ‘defencists’.” (August, 1917)
3). Consequently, we must reject, on grounds of revolutionary principle, all policies stating or implying that the British proletariat should resist a foreign imperialist invasion before it, the British proletariat, has obtained state power. We reject such policies, regardless of whether they advocate class-collaboration in an open form, e.g., working-class support for the bourgeois state against invasion, or in a concealed form, e.g., “independent” working-class military struggle against invasion within the bourgeois state, that is, before the proletariat has seized power.