Chapter Thirty-Eight 'Militia and Disarmament' (August 1912) Paul
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Chapter Thirty-Eight ‘Militia and Disarmament’ (August 1912) Paul Lensch In 1912 the author of this article, Paul Lensch (1873– 1926), was one of the main anti-revisionist spokes- men of the Left, whose positions he had defended at party conferences in Essen (1907), Jena (1911) and Chemnitz (1912). From 1908 to 1913, Lensch served as chief editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, and in 1912 he was elected to the German Reichstag for the SPD. He opposed war-credits in October 1914 but later changed his view. In 1915, the Lensch- Cunow-Haenisch group was formed with the pur- pose of endorsing German imperialism on Marxist grounds, especially through their organ Die Glocke (‘The Bell’), edited by Parvus. As an Anglophobe, Lensch regarded Germany as the ‘revolutionary’ side in the conflict, with England as the ‘counter- revolutionary’. When the SPD split in October 1917, Lensch became one of the journalistic spokesmen of the SPD-majority grouped around Friedrich Ebert. In November 1918, he played an important role as a contact-man between the Council of People’s Repre- sentatives and the military leadership. Lensch then withdrew from party politics and, in 1919, received a professorship of economics at the University of Berlin through his friend, the Prussian Minister of 562 • Paul Lensch Culture Konrad Haenisch. He also worked as a foreign-policy correspondent for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a journal belonging to the concern of Hugo Stinnes. In 1922, Lensch left the SPD and became increasingly associated with conservative opponents of Social Democracy until his death in 1926.1 The article translated here dates from Lensch’s radical early years, when he challenged Karl Kautsky for proposing disarmament agreements as the appropriate tactical response to imperialism. On 29 March 1909, the SPD Reichstag fraction submitted a resolution calling for an international agree- ment to limit naval armaments. The resolution was a response to Germany’s rejection of informal disarmament initiatives by the British government. It referred to decisions of the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907, which had been approved by the German government, and called upon Germany to take the necessary steps ‘in order to bring about an international understanding of the great powers for the mutual limitation of naval armaments’.2 Almost two years later, on 30 March 1911, the Reichstag fraction widened that demand into a proposal for a general limitation of armaments.3 Both resolutions were rejected by the bourgeois majority in the Reichstag. By this time, Karl Kautsky, who, as early as 1898, had called for the standing army to be replaced by a people’s militia – he then ridiculed disarmament as nothing more than ‘reduction of the standing army to dimensions that will still enable [governments] to hold down their own people’– revised his own posi- tion and sought to justify the course taken by SPD Reichstag deputies.4 In the dispute that followed, Kautsky’s main opponents were Lensch, as chief editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, together with Anton Pannekoek and Karl Radek, both representatives of the Bremen left wing grouped around the Bremer Bürger-Zeitung. Lensch opened the quarrel with an article describing the disarmament motion as a utopia that was unrealisable within the framework of capitalism.5 This was the first in a long series of articles by Lensch, Radek and Pannekoek.6 Rosa Luxemburg also became involved in 1911 with her 1. Ascher 1961, Sigel 1976, Lensch 1918. 2. Reichstag 1909, XII. Legislatursperiode, I. Session, Bd. 236 (29 March 1909), p. 7822A (for Ledebour’s speech see pp. 7818A–7825C). See also Ledebour 1909. 3. Reichstag 1911, XII. Legislatursperiode, II. Session, Bd. 266 (30 March 1911), p. 5982B (for Scheidemann’s speech see pp. 5978C–5983D). 4. Kautsky 1898c, p. 743. 5. Lensch 1911. See also Radek 1911a. 6. Radek 1911a, Pannekoek 1911, Radek 1911b, and Radek 1911c..