an organized armed struggle for state power between classes and social groups within a country; the most acute form of class struggle. In a class-antagonistic society civil war is “a natural and, under certain conditions, an inevitable continuation, development, and intensification of the class struggle” (V. I. Lenin. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 30. p. 133).
Civil wars develop on the basis of social crises, when state power is no longer able to “alleviate the conflicts” between hostile classes or to suppress by “legal” means the class opponents of the existing political and social system (see F. Engels, in K. Marx and F. Engels. Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 21. p. 170; Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 33. pp. 6–7). The conditions that produce civil war are determined by the disposition of class forces within a country and in the international arena. Therefore, civil wars may be combined with wars between states, a struggle against foreign intervention, or a national liberation struggle. Epochs of social revolution are characterized by civil wars in which the combatants are progressive and reactionary classes—the oppressed and the oppressors. In terms of their objective role in history, such wars are a necessary means of achieving the political goals of a revolution. These goals may be attained through uprisings by the oppressed classes, who are struggling for their social liberation. They may also be achieved through suppression of counterrevolutionary uprisings (for example, the Vendée of 1793 in France), which are aimed at restoring obsolete social relations and returning reactionary classes to power. However, in antagonistic social formations civil wars may occur in which various groupings of the ruling classes oppose each other (for example, the civil war during the decline of the Roman Republic and the Wars of the Roses in England).
The historical types and forms of civil wars are varied and include slave revolts, peasant wars, guerrilla wars, and armed struggles of the people against the government. Lenin pointed out that the epoch of the proletarian revolution is characterized by the appearance of higher and more complex forms “of a prolonged civil war embracing the whole country, that is, an armed struggle between two sections of the people” (ibid., vol. 14, p. 11). In such wars there is generally a division of a state’s territory between the combatants, each of which has its own apparatus for conducting hostilities and organizing an army and political administration. The specific features of civil wars as distinguished from wars between states are reflected in the drawing up of tactics that are subordinate to the fulfillment of the tasks of the political and class struggle.
The forcible overthrow by the people of a reactionary government is a just act. A people’s right to an armed struggle against an antipopular government was upheld in the 18th century by representatives of petit bourgeois and bourgeois democracy and by Utopian communists (for example. J. J. Rousseau, C. Helvétius. T. Jefferson, and G. Mably). This right was legally formalized in a number of documents from the age of bourgeois revolutions (for example, the American Declaration of Independence).
In the modern age the international working class and its Communist vanguard act as a consistent defender of civil war for the liberation of the working people from any oppression. At the same time, Marxism rejects the demand for civil war “under any conditions,” which is put forth by doctrinaires and dogmatists, Blanquism. and “left-wing” revisionism. The working class has a stake in overthrowing the rule of monopoly capital and crushing the resistance of counterrevolutionary forces without civil war. However, the occurrence of civil war depends on the strength of the resistance of the reactionary classes, who are usually the first to resort to civil war (see Lenin, ibid., vol. 11, p. 123). In such conditions power can be won and counterrevolutionary uprisings crushed only by an organized armed struggle of the working class and its allies. With the strengthening of the repressive military-police apparatus, the growth of militarism in capitalist countries, and the development of military technology, success in civil war depends to a decisive degree on the extent to which the popular masses are organized and on the defection of troops to the side of the revolution.
Carrying out a socialist revolution does not always involve a definite form of struggle. Certain forms of struggle become paramount in a revolution, depending on the concrete historical situation and the correlation of class forces within the country and in the world arena. In the USSR and some other countries the dictatorship of the proletariat was established as a result of civil wars. However, in a number of other socialist countries the working class established its power without civil war. In present-day conditions the working class in a number of capitalist countries has a chance to carry out a revolutionary transformation of society without civil war, through other means of class struggle and suppression of the resistance of the monopolistic bourgeoisie. This does not exclude the possibility that with a change in the concrete situation in a given country, civil war may become at a certain stage the principal form of struggle for socialism.
E. G. PANFILOV