On 20 June a conference in London adopted a statement under a slogan that reads like settled wisdom: ‘No to militarisation and conscription. Welfare not warfare.’ Stop the War now asks its supporters to carry a model resolution built on it into their union branches, and a petition is going round that warns the government’s new military ‘gap year’ pilot is the thin end of the wedge, the precursor to bringing back the draft. The branch secretary photocopying it for the September meeting is not a campist ideologue. She is doing what the labour movement has always done with conscription, which is to refuse it.And she is half right, which is the difficulty. The slogan answers a question, and the question it answers is not the one being asked in Kyiv.Strip the issue to its bones. Can the working class be conscripted by a bourgeois state, even in self-defence, even with the bombs already falling on its own cities? Put that way it sounds like a matter of principle with an obvious socialist answer. It is not. The tradition the model resolution claims, the tradition of Engels and Jaurès and Debs, gives a different and more uncomfortable answer, and the cleanest statement of it was set down in a private letter six weeks before its author was murdered.
The letter behind the slogan
Almost nobody who quotes the formula has read the paragraph around it. On 9 July 1940, weeks before his assassination, Leon Trotsky wrote to Albert Goldman, a leader of the American Socialist Workers Party who was drafting articles on conscription for the party press. Goldman sent a draft formulation. Trotsky sent it back corrected, and the correction is the whole document.
Goldman had written that once conscription is made law the party ceases to struggle against it and turns instead to fighting for military training under workers’ control. Trotsky struck the concession out. He would not let it stand on the record that the movement had ever opposed conscription as such. He declared himself unequivocally in favour of compulsory military training and of conscription, and then set down the line that survives him.
“We are absolutely in favor of compulsory military training and in the same way for conscription. Conscription? Yes. By the bourgeois state? No.”
Read what the ‘No’ attaches to. It fastens to the state, not to the conscription. We cannot entrust this work, Trotsky wrote, to the state of the exploiters, any more than we hand them our schools; military training is a part of education, and we no more boycott the one than the other. His instruction to Goldman was exact: do not record us as fighting conscription, record us as fighting, without let-up, the capitalist state that commands the army and bends it to the advantage of the owning class. The enemy was the officer caste and the people behind it. Never the call-up itself. And in the same breath he slammed the pacifist exit shut, insisting that opposition to the war keeps its revolutionary content only by denouncing pacifism without mercy: we are against this war, and we will have it anyway, until we are strong enough to overthrow the class that makes it.
So the activist who lifts ‘By the bourgeois state? No’ and waves it as a refusal to defend has turned the man inside out. Trotsky was settling how revolutionaries fight inside a conscript army they fully expect to enter. He was not asking permission to stay out of it.
The argument was older than Trotsky, and larger
The Trotskyists inherited this question. They did not invent it. For two generations before that letter the conscription argument ran through the whole of the socialist movement, and not once did it turn on conscription in the abstract. It turned on two things. Whose war. Whose army.
The dominant answer, before 1914, was the armed nation. Friedrich Engels wrote Can Europe Disarm? for the German party in March 1893, in the thick of the Reichstag’s debate on the Military Bill, and argued that the staged reduction of service terms by treaty was the road that led from the standing army to a militia, to the people in arms. He was nobody’s pacifist. He backed universal conscription and was ready, when the moment demanded it, to argue for revolutionary war on the Napoleonic model. The demand reached back further still, to 1848, to the fourth of the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany: the universal arming of the people, armies that would be workers’ armies in the same instant. Jean Jaurès gave the idea its fullest expression in L’Armée nouvelle in 1910. Against the long-service professional barracks, against the caste, he set a short-service citizen militia on the Swiss pattern, the reservist with his rifle at home, a force built for defence and clumsy for aggression. He said the thing his opponents could not believe a socialist would say, that the workers’ movement should not seek to undermine the army but to democratise it, to make soldiers of the citizens and citizens of the soldiers.
Not everyone swallowed it. Rosa Luxemburg turned on Jaurès directly, named his politics chauvinist and petty-bourgeois, and charged that by arming the eastern departments against Germany he had stripped the armed nation of its democratic content and aimed it across the Rhine. The fault line was already cut, years before the guns. The armed nation could be a school of the people or it could be an instrument of the fatherland, and in August 1914 the German Social Democracy chose: it voted the war credits, and ‘national defence’ became the alibi for an imperialist slaughter that fed a generation into the mud.
The refusal, and what it was refusing
Against that capitulation stood the socialists who would not touch the bourgeois army at all. They are the model resolution’s true ancestors, and they are worth meeting properly. In the United States the Socialist Party met at St Louis in 1917 and bound itself against the war and against conscription in the same resolution. Eugene Debs climbed the bandstand at Nimisilla Park in Canton, Ohio, on a sweltering Sunday in June 1918 and told the crowd what he thought of a war declared by the masters and died in by the men: if war is right, let it be declared by the people. Federal agents were working the audience for draft cards as he spoke. He went down for it under the Espionage Act, ten years, and ran for president from a prison cell in 1920, polling the better part of a million votes. In Britain the refusal wore Independent Labour Party colours. Fenner Brockway and Clifford Allen, both ILP men, built the No-Conscription Fellowship and threw it against the 1916 Military Service Act, won the conscience clause, and then watched the founders march off to Pentonville and Walton. Some sixteen thousand men refused to serve. Their convention filled a Friends’ Meeting House, which is the kind of room this argument has always been had in.
A complication I would not edit away, because it is the honest part. Not all of that refusal rested on the character of the war. The absolutists in the Fellowship, many of them Quakers rather than socialists, would not bear arms for any state in any war whatever, and the British movement never did cleanly separate the political objector from the religious one. The anarchists carried the refusal furthest, and then met the test the others were spared. In Spain the columns of the CNT began as voluntary workers’ militias and were ground, under the weight of a war they could not afford to lose, into the conscripted discipline of a regular Popular Army with its ranks and its saluting restored. Where that leaves the principle is something the tradition has argued over for ninety years and has never honestly closed, and I am not going to pretend a single article closes it now.
The hinge Lenin supplied
What separates Debs in 1918 from the Ukrainian socialist in 2026 is not courage and not principle. It is the war. And the man who insisted on that distinction, against every temptation to collapse all wars into one grey imperialist mass, was Lenin.
In the polemic against the Junius pamphlet in 1916 he refused Luxemburg’s implication that the epoch of imperialism had abolished national wars. National wars by oppressed and colonial nations were not only possible in that epoch, he wrote, they were inevitable, and only a sophist would erase the difference between an imperialist war and a national one on the pretext that the one can pass over into the other. In Socialism and War the year before he had drawn the line plainly: a just war is one that defends a people from enslavement, or frees it from a yoke. The category that mattered was never the mechanism of mobilisation. It was the class and national content of the war the mobilisation served.
Set the two wars side by side and the slogan on the London leaflet falls apart in the hand. Debs faced an inter-imperialist bloodletting in which the American worker had no stake but his own death; refusal there was revolutionary, and ‘the main enemy is at home’ was the whole of wisdom. The Ukrainian worker faces an imperial army of conquest whose victory means, concretely, the liquidation of every union, every feminist circle, every socialist paper in the occupied zone. These are not two intensities of one situation; they are opposite situations. A politics that cannot tell them apart has stopped being internationalism. It is a category error with a banner.
Rayner Lysaght and the example of Ireland
An objection that needs meeting directly is the one raised in one of the exchanges that prompted this article. Connolly himself, the argument runs, warned against subordinating the class struggle to the nationalist project; 1916 proved him right by ending with a theocratic bourgeoisie running Ireland in the interests of British capital; therefore the Irish parallel cuts the other way. D. Rayner O’Connor Lysaght’s The Republic of Ireland, the most rigorous account the Irish FI tradition produced, does not support this reading. Connolly’s decision to fight was made from his class analysis, not against it. With the Second International collapsed, Irish labour stood — in Lysaght’s account — as potentially the only organised force prepared to attack the war in a way that might open a socialist Europe; the Rising was chosen even without the expected German arms specifically to isolate the right in a revolutionary situation. That is the reasoning of a man who sees a class opening, not of a man abandoning class politics for the green flag.
What destroyed the socialist content of the Irish revolution was not 1916. It was what came after: Connolly’s successors in the ITGWU withdrew labour from the national struggle and severed the republican movement from existing socialist thought. The Free State gave the bourgeoisie the colonial bureaucracy it wanted because the working-class movement abandoned the field — not because Connolly entered it. A strategy of revolutionary abstention from national liberation struggles does not protect the left from bourgeois capture. It simply performs the surrender earlier, more cleanly, and with a clearer conscience. Connolly was executed by the British state not because he made a nationalist error. He was executed because he was a class enemy of British imperialism, and the state knew the difference even if some of his inheritors do not.
The question that is actually being asked
Here is where the collective-choice instinct has to be handled with care, because it is half of an answer and the dangerous half. It is tempting to say that conscription in self-defence is a matter for the workers of each country to decide for themselves, democratically, as a collective act. Tempting, and wrong in the way 1914 was wrong. If the justice of a war were settled by the vote of the workers caught inside it, the German Social Democracy could have pleaded that its members chose the fatherland, and the plea would have to be honoured. The character of a war is an objective matter. It is fixed by who is doing what to whom, before any ballot is counted, and no show of hands in Berlin in 1914 or anywhere since can turn a war of conquest into a war of defence.
What the working class does decide, what is genuinely and only its to decide, is the form the defence takes and the hands that control it. That is the whole of the terrain, and it is enormous. Who is called up, and who pays to stay home. Whether a soldier is rotated out or left in the line until he breaks, and whether martial law becomes the cover for gutting the right to organise. This is precisely the ground the Ukrainian left fights on, and it is not asking the question the model resolution answers. Sotsialnyi Rukh does not demand an end to mobilisation. It demands that the oligarch’s son be called as readily as the labourer’s, that the worker in uniform keep the rights of a worker, that the burden of a just war stop falling on the people least able to refuse it. ‘No to conscription’ is no answer to that. It is not even in the same conversation.
September, and the difficulty the leaflet papers over
Which returns us to the branch meeting, and to the genuine difficulty the leaflet papers over. Britain is not Ukraine. There is no army at the Channel. A fight against British militarisation, against a Treasury pouring billions into rearmament while welfare is cut, against a recruitment drive dressed up as a youth opportunity, is a fight inside an imperialist power against its own ruling class, and on that ground ‘welfare not warfare’ is a perfectly good revolutionary slogan. The trouble begins the moment the same four words are asked to cover Kyiv as well as London, the moment a resolution written against the British state’s war drive is made to read as a verdict on whether an invaded people may defend itself. The word ‘conscription’ does different work in the two mouths, and the model resolution runs them together as though the distinction were a quibble. That is no quibble. It is the only thing that has ever mattered in this argument, from the Reichstag in 1893 to the Ukrainian trench. Whether the British left can hold that distinction, or whether it will keep mailing the aggressor’s comfort to the victim under the frank of solidarity, is not a question a genealogy can settle. It is a question of whose war, and whose army, and the movement has answered it both ways before.