Historical Events of the Revolutionary World Movement

World War I 1914-1918

Either sacrifice all civilisation and perish

or

throw off the capitalist yoke in the revolutionary way, do away with the rule of the bourgeoisie and win socialism and durable peace !

MESSAGE OF THE COMINTERN (SH)
ON OCCASION OF THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY
OF WORLD WAR I

JULY 28, 1914 – JULY 28, 2014

100 years have passed since the beginning of World War I (1914-1918). For us, Stalinist-Hoxhaists, and for all the world proletarians, workers and exploited and oppressed classes, the events of a hundred years ago and the world undoubtedly deserve to remain a central topic of study and learning. We must unmask the bourgeois-revisionist media which spread the ideology of pacifism on occasion of this historical event. Pacifism paves the way towards ideological preparation of new imperialist wars. It is the same still ruling class which instigated WWI and which wages new imperialist wars today - the world bourgeoisie. It is necessary to explain the class-character of imperialist war and thus the necessity of the world proletarian war as the utter means of global proletarian class-struggle.

The World War I was initially known only by the designation of the Great War - until 25 years later world imperialism-capitalism unleashed a second major military conflict of even larger proportions. The Great War was an imperialist war, it was a reflection of the inter-imperialist rivalries and contradictions between the great powers of its time. Comrade Stalin noted that:

“You remember how the First World War arose. It arose out of the desire to re-divide the world. (…) There are capitalist states which consider that they were cheated in the previous redistribution of spheres of influence, territories, sources of raw materials, markets, etc., and which would want another redivision that would be in their favour. Capitalism, in its imperialist phase, is a system which considers war to be a legitimate instrument for settling international disputes, a legal method in fact, if not in law.” (Stalin, Interview Between J. Stalin and
Roy Howard, 1936, edition in English)

The WWI was fought mostly in the European continent and profoundly altered the political map, leading to the collapse of four of the major reactionary empires that had marked the world for decades or even centuries: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tsarist Russia, the German Empire, created after the unification of Germany in 1871, and the Ottoman Empire. But if World War I marked the end of a determined epoch of capitalist-imperialist world, there would also be an event occurring during it that changed forever the history of mankind: the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia, led by the Bolshevist Party of comrades Lenin and Stalin, and which gave birth to the first socialist state of proletarian dictatorship in the world and to the first big step towards the global elimination of societies based on class domination, violence, oppression and exploitation.

World War I was an huge slaughter that lasted for more than four years. Although estimates differ, the total number of deaths, military and civilian, must have been about 20 million (!!). The imperialist powers in confrontation were almost all European, the so-called “civilized Western nations” like England, France, Tsarist Russia and later the U.S., on one side; and Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, on the other side. The decades leading up to the war were marked by a great development of capitalism and mostly by its advancement towards its imperialist and monopolist stage. Of course, because imperialism necessarily means War, all this also meant that the weaponry also knew enormous advances, had become more devastating, with more deadly consequences for the working peoples.

Imperialism confirmed the full power of its first modern war machine. But the description of the horror that affected the proletariat, workers and other exploited and oppressed classes of Europe in the early twentieth century would become frighteningly common in the following decades, until the present day and always in the future while world capitalist-imperialist system dominated by the global bourgeois class exists.