It is known as the Great War, First War or even as “the war that came to end all wars.” The World War I It marked the lives of entire generations around the world because the men and women who lived through this war had no facts or antecedents with which to compare it, they had never experienced anything like it.
To have an idea of the magnitude of what happened, it was thought that the war would last a few days but it ended for four years, 1914 a 1918. More than 30 countries intervened and there was fighting in Europe, Asia and Africa. It affected more than 80 million people, of whom at least 10 million died on the battlefield and many millions more as a result of the Spanish flu epidemic unleashed at the end of the war. Violence and patriotism made even children join as soldiers; the youngest combatant was barely 8 years old and was Serbian.
This war (like all wars) not only affected society and the economy but also generated a new way of fighting. Before, armies faced each other hand-to-hand in open terrain for a short time and then each side could advance or retreat, and then the soldiers returned to their camps. Even the first clashes of the war had this perspective when the Germans attacked through Belgium into France to advance quickly as they tried to do in the Battle of the Marne but the plan failed and they failed to reach Paris. From 1915 onwards the situation changed and everything stagnated. It barely moved forward or backward by miles.
Faced with the advance of artillery, cannons and automatic machine guns; the possibility of annihilation from a distance was much more certain. This made the soldiers will dig ditches to hide and protect yourself from the enemy’s sights. As Leon Trotsky said ironically, in the century of aviation men had to bury themselves.
These ditches full of mud are the trenches, where millions of soldiers lived: overcrowded, cold, dirty, and hungry showed the dehumanizing face of capitalism. And they also expressed a new type of conflict. The “war of movement” was replaced by the “war of positions” or also called “trench warfare“. It served to preserve and control a territory permanently (that’s why trenches were dug) and little by little advance on the enemy. A faithful reflection of this image can be seen in the German film No news on the front.
Life in the ditches would affect the psyche of the soldiers who would no longer be the same, but it would also cause serious consequences for the entire society at wareven if they were not fighting. A tight economy, changes in labor relations, threats of invasion, seeing your family and friends leave for the front; many do not return.
How did the conflict start?
It is often said that everything happened when on June 28, 1914, a Serbian nationalist murdered the Archduke Franz Ferdinandheir to the Austro-Hungarian empire. But this was nothing more than the provocation that led to the outbreak because the true causes are much deeper.
In the 30 years before the war, the main imperialist powers had been competing with each other to control more territories. Even In 1884 Africa was divided as if it were a cake. This competition was to obtain more raw materials and resources to enhance their industry and win new markets.
An enormous international tension was generated. The years before the war are often known as “Pax armada” because countries were arming themselves and militarism was advancing but without reaching a global military confrontation. However, it was far from being a time of peace.
Since the beginning of the 20th century there have been war conflicts: the war between Russia and Japan in 1905, the Balkan war, which was two, in 1912 against the Turkish Empire and the second in 1913 between the Balkan countries themselves. Also there were colonial wars. There we can see direct antecedents of the First War because the imperialist powers created and tested new weapons such as the use of gas. And because the attacks were against the civilian population.
The truth is that the powers were preparing to go to a large-scale war and at the same time they were forming defensive military alliances in which: if they attacked one, the rest had to defend it.
On one side was the Entente alliance Made up of France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia and Great Britain, the empire was the most powerful and largest in the world. On the other side the Austro-Hungarian and German empires. We must pay attention to the latter because he wanted to displace the English from the podium of the powers. In addition to industrial power, it even had a naval fleet that could challenge it for power.
These two sides had interests in the Balkan region, where there were also nationalist movements fighting for the independence of their lands, which is why it became the area of greatest global geopolitical tension.
In the middle of this situation he only needed an excuse to end up unleashing the war and that fact was the attack on the prince. With his murder this system of alliances was activated and they began to declare war against each other.
The labor movement in the war
In addition to these two sides, there was a third key factor and it was the labor movement. By 1914, workers were a very powerful force thanks to the industrial drive of the previous decades. They participated massively in the social democratic parties that in their beginnings – very far from the current ones – brought together Marxists from all over the world and formed the Second International whose motto was: workers of the world unite.
They had representatives in factories and parliaments. And they were divided between those who said that socialism would be achieved through reforms and those who said that it would be through a revolution.
Since the early years of the 20th century, Social Democracy had been denouncing that countries were heading towards a world conflict, but when the war finally broke out, its main leaders – especially the reformists – in countries with large representation such as Germany or France ended up supporting it instead of putting all their forces to oppose it.
It was legitimized for German workers to consider their French or English counterparts as their enemies and vice versa, while their exploiting compatriots would be their true “allies”: all for national unity.
An important fact is that while millions of workers/soldiers were sent to their deaths, women massively joined the labor market producing food and weapons.
The left or revolutionary wing within the Marxism refused to accept support for the war and accused the pro-war Social Democrats of being traitors. There were Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht among others. The latter became the symbol of the fight against war when in 1915 he wrote a manifesto that said: “The main enemy is in one’s own country” and generated an enormous stir.
They called to transform that war that only generated destruction, hunger and misery into civil war and overcome the capitalist system that had engendered it. They said that war was a midwife of revolutions.
And they were right. In the middle of this world war, a revolution occurred in Russia that triumphed in 1917, but it was not the only one because there were revolutionary processes in other countries throughout the following period.
Decisive moments
The war was stagnant. The two sides had reserves and weapons to continue destroying each other but the course of the war did not change. What managed to tip the balance were a series of events:
First the United States entry in 1917. It entered as an ally of the Entente and brought numerous men, weapons and new forces. This positioned him as a world power, also becoming Europe’s banker because he gave it credits, weapons and food.
This factor was key to the development of the war and so was, as Leon Trotsky says, the creative use of science as tank introduction that could knock down the trenches making a difference or the use of ranged artillery to destroy the wire construction.
Although the war ended in 1918 and peace was signed in the famous Treaty of Versaillesnothing was ever resolved. Germany was humiliatedhad to surrender when an enormous revolution broke out in its own territory that it had to face and in the middle of the war it could not do so. New states were also created from defeated empires such as: Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
This combined with the world crisis of 1929 and the subsequent rise of fascism was what created the conditions for a second world war, ten times bloodier and more destructive.
Up to this point we can reach two conclusions.
First of all this war was not between soldierseven at Christmas 1914 French, Belgians and Germans fraternized and sang together; something that their governments later prohibited. The war was between imperialist powers for world domination.
Second. It’s not just that inaugurated an era of wars and crises, but also of revolutions that over the years were breaking out in different parts of the planet. Returning to the idea of war as a midwife of revolutions, if in the First War there were great revolutionary processes; Before and during the Second War, the most widespread revolutionary cycle of the entire 20th century occurred. A fact that is usually left aside in the analyzes of these two enormous processes.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
