On the Defence of the Homeland Issue

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of On the Defence of the Homeland Issue has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published in the Collected Works of Lenin, Fourth English Edition, Volume 23, Progress Publishers, 1964.

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This in an article written by Comrade Lenin in Zurich, Switzerland in December 1916. It was first published in Pravda, No. 174, 1st of August, 1929.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#ON THE DEFENCE OF THE HOMELAND ISSUE

#Nikolaj Lenin

#December 1916

#★

#1

The bourgeoisie and its supporters in the labour movement, the Grütlians, usually pose the question thus:

Either we recognize in principle our duty to defend the homeland, or we leave our country defenceless.

That presentation is fundamentally wrong.

This is how the question stands in reality:

Either we allow ourselves to be killed in the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie, or we systematically prepare the majority of the exploited, and ourselves, for seizure — at the price of less sacrifice — of the banks and expropriation of the bourgeoisie in order to put an end to the high cost of living and war.

#2

The first presentation of the question is thoroughly bourgeois, not Socialist. It disregards the fact that we are living in the imperialist era, that the present war is an imperialist war, that in this war Switzerland will under no circumstances be ranged against imperialism, but on the side of one or the other imperialist coalition, that is, will in fact become an accomplice of one or another group of the big robber powers, that the Swiss bourgeoisie has long been tied to imperialist interests by thousands of threads. It is of no concern whether this is implemented by a system of interrelations and «mutual participation» of the big banks through export of capital, or through the tourist trade, which thrives on the patronage of foreign millionaires, or through unscrupulous exploitation of disfranchised foreign workers, and so on.

In short, all the fundamental tenets of Socialism, all the Socialist ideas, have been forgotten. The predatory nature of the imperialist war is being embellished. One's «own» bourgeoisie is being depicted as an innocent lamb and the case-hardened bank directors of present-day Switzerland as heroic Wilhelm Tells, and, furthermore, the secret agreements between Swiss and foreign banks and between Swiss and foreign diplomats are overlooked. And this incredible hotchpotch of bourgeois lies is covered up by a fine-sounding and «popular» phrase meant to deceive the people: «defence of the homeland»!