Proletarian internationalism
[3] After the formation of the Soviet Union, Marxist proponents of internationalism suggested that country could be used as a "homeland of communism" from which revolution could be spread around the globe.
[2] Though world revolution continued to figure prominently in Soviet rhetoric for decades, it no longer superseded domestic concerns on the government's agenda, especially after the ascension of Joseph Stalin.
[3] It played a fundamental role in the establishment of several socialist states in Eastern Europe after World War II and backed the creation of others in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
[6][7] Proletarian internationalism is summed up in the slogan coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Workers of the world, unite!
For instance, Marx and Engels supported the emergence of an independent and democratic Poland, which at the time was divided between Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary.
Rosa Luxemburg's biographer Peter Nettl writes: "In general, Marx and Engels' conception of the national-geographical rearrangement of Europe was based on four criteria: the development of progress, the creation of large-scale economic units, the weighting of approval and disapproval in accordance with revolutionary possibilities, and their specific enmity to Russia".
Shortly thereafter, the Marxist and revolutionary socialist tendencies continued the internationalist strategy of the IWA through the successor organisation of the Second International, though without the inclusion of the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements.
These wars result furthermore from the incessant race for armaments by militarism, one of the chief instruments of bourgeois class rule and of the economic and political subjugation of the working class.Wars are favored by the national prejudices which are systematically cultivated among civilized peoples in the interest of the ruling classes for the purpose of distracting the proletarian masses from their own class tasks as well as from their duties of international solidarity.Wars, therefore, are part of the very nature of capitalism; they will cease only when the capitalist system is abolished or when the enormous sacrifices in men and money required by the advance in military technique and the indignation called forth by armaments, drive the peoples to abolish this system.The resolution concluded: If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved, supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau, to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.In case war should break out anyway, it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.
It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will".
Anarcho-syndicalism was another working class political current that characterised the war as imperialist on all sides, finding organisational expression in the Industrial Workers of the World.
During the Russian Civil War, Lenin and Leon Trotsky more firmly embraced the concept of national self-determination for tactical reasons.
[15] There was a revival of interest in internationalist theory after World War II, when the extent of communist influence in Eastern Europe dramatically increased as a result of postwar military occupations by the Soviet Union.
[16] The Soviet government defined its relationship with Eastern European states it occupied such as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary as based on the principles of proletarian internationalism.
[16] Under the principles of socialist internationalism, the Warsaw Pact governments were encouraged to pursue various forms of economic or military cooperation with each other and Moscow.
In 1976, Brezhnev declared that proletarian internationalism was neither dead nor obsolete and reaffirmed the Soviet Union's commitment to its core concepts of "the solidarity of the working class, of communists of all countries in the struggle for common goals, the solidarity in the struggle of the peoples for national liberation and social progress, [and] voluntary cooperation of the fraternal parties with strict observance of the equality and independence of each".
[17] Under Brezhnev, the Soviet and Warsaw Pact governments frequently evoked proletarian internationalism to fund leftist trade unions and guerrilla insurgencies around the globe.
[5] Outside of the Warsaw Pact, Cuba embraced its own aggressive theory of proletarian internationalism, which was primarily exercised through support for leftist revolutionary movements.
[20] By the mid-1980s, it was estimated that up to a quarter of Cuba's national military was deployed overseas, fighting with communist governments or factions in various civil conflicts.
In contrast, some socialists have pointed out that social realities such as local loyalties and cultural barriers militate against proletarian internationalism.
It is a tragedy that some of the very people who had been persecuted and massacred in such bestial fashion should themselves be driven into a chauvinistic, militaristic fervour, and become the blind tool of imperialism in subjugating the Arab masses".
