AFTERWORD

1914—The Collapse of the Second International

Based on the resolutions on war and militarism adopted repeatedly at congresses of the Second International, most class-conscious socialists and unionists were undoubtedly confident that their parties and unions would resist war moves by their governments with energetic, effective, and internationally coordinated action. But less than two years after the Basel Manifesto, that confidence would be shattered.

Following the assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, events moved inexorably toward the war that most European powers had long desired and planned for. War declarations began on July 28; within a week most major countries on the continent were swept up into the conflict.

During these weeks, most rank-and-file socialists realized that some kind of a war was imminent. Socialist parties organized large antiwar demonstrations across Europe, and party newspapers denounced militarism and secret diplomacy. Most party leaders, however, believed that their respective capitalist governments genuinely wanted peace and expected them to act to prevent a generalized conflict. The demonstrations therefore rarely took aim at the war preparations of their own rulers.

The International Socialist Bureau held an emergency session in Paris on July 29–30, 1914, attended by most major figures in the world socialist movement. But other than giving encouragement to antiwar demonstrations and holding a public meeting in the French capital to advocate peace, little more was done.

Lacking any confidence that the drive toward war could be halted, the dominant mood among the Second International’s leaders was resignation. That mood quickly turned first into reluctant acceptance, and finally into outright support for the war effort of their governments.

On August 4 the Social Democratic Party of Germany—the strongest party in the Second International, long considered the bastion of orthodox Marxism—voted unanimously for war credits (military funding) in the German Reichstag. That move was quickly repeated by Social Democratic workers’ parties in the other warring countries, apart from those in Russia and Serbia. Symbolizing this capitulation to national chauvinism, the Second International’s president, Émile Vandervelde, joined the Belgian government as minister of state.

These steps were all in direct violation of multiple resolutions adopted at Second International congresses. As such, the events of 1914 marked the death of the Second International as a revolutionary movement. Henceforth the leaderships of most Social Democratic parties tied their fate to the success of the capitalist rulers in their own countries. Thousands of Social Democrats in all countries were drafted into the army, where they were encouraged by their party leaderships to devote themselves to killing their party comrades and other workers on the opposite side of the trenches.

Reflecting this collapse, the very concept of internationalism began to be questioned by many socialists. A November 1914 article by Karl Kautsky reflected a mood of demoralization: “We deluded ourselves in expecting that the International would be able to bring about a united stance of the whole world Socialist proletariat during a world war. . . . The World War has divided socialists into different camps, for the most part into different national camps. The International cannot prevent that. In other words the International is not an effective tool in wartime.”^[1]

Left-wing, antiwar, and revolutionary socialists rejected this stance of resignation, however. Through witnessing all these bitter developments, a small but growing number of socialists concluded that the opportunist trend that had long been building within the Second International had finally reached its culmination point. One such individual was Lenin, who began to raise the need to create a new International.

An initial step in reestablishing international relations was taken by Clara Zetkin, as secretary of the International Socialist Women’s Bureau, who convened a Conference of Socialist Women in Bern, Switzerland, March 26–28, 1915. This gathering was followed a week later by an International Socialist Youth Conference in the same city.

Out of these initiatives, a conference of revolutionary and antiwar socialists took place in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in September 1915, launching what became known as the Zimmerwald movement. Subsequent conferences of this movement were held in Kienthal, Switzerland, in April 1916, and in Stockholm, Sweden, in September 1917.

One month after the Stockholm conference, the October Revolution in Russia erupted. Over the next three years, socialist parties split in two between those who identified with the Bolsheviks and supported the road Russian revolutionaries had embarked on, and those who rejected this road. Some tried for a time to straddle the two poles, but all ultimately came down on one side or the other.

Two rival international congresses were held in early 1919, codifying the split on a world level.

A congress in Bern, Switzerland, in early February 1919, officially reconstituted the Second International. But the new body bore little resemblance to the one that Frederick Engels helped form in 1889. Instead of a revolutionary opponent of capitalism, it had now become in practice a defender of that system, with a few reforms. At the Bern Congress, a bland assessment of the 1914 collapse was offered in the opening address by Karl Hjalmar Branting of Sweden, who was careful to avoid any blame:

Already since the Stuttgart Congress of 1907 the struggle against war and militarism has been our foremost concern. We all perceived, through our common intuition, the forces which must endanger the peace of the world in a society which not only gave free scope to the capitalistic policy of exploitation, but which, besides, maintained in the greater parts of the world a concentration of power in the hands of feudal castes, which was altogether out of touch with the real thought of the peoples and divested of responsibility. The International could still raise its voice at Basle in 1912 against the already threatening universal war. In 1914, however, when the contest had already become more openly acute and when, moreover, criminal hopes for a war which should speedily bring the domination of the world within the grasp of one strong nation, set at naught all attempts towards a peaceful compromise on the part of the western democracies, the International itself fell a first victim to the world-catastrophe.^[2]

No discussion on the reasons for this catastrophic collapse occurred at the Bern Congress. A competing congress was held the following month in Moscow, on March 2–6, 1919, founding a Third International—the Communist International. The balance sheet drawn by this gathering on the efforts to create an international revolutionary working-class movement was sharply different:

Conscious of the world-historic character of their tasks, advanced workers have striven for an international association since their first steps to organize the socialist movement. The cornerstone was laid in 1864 in London with the founding of the First International. The Franco-Prussian War, out of which Hohenzollern Germany emerged, cut the ground from under the First International while at the same time giving impetus to the development of national workers’ parties. Already in 1889, these parties came together at the Paris congress and created the organization of the Second International. But in that period, the center of gravity of the workers’ movement remained entirely on national soil, within the framework of the national state, based on national industry, and working within national parliamentarism. Decades of organizational and reform work created a generation of leaders who in their majority verbally acknowledged the program of social revolution, but renounced it in reality and became mired in reformism and in adaptation to the bourgeois state.

The opportunist character of the Second International’s leading parties was completely exposed and caused the greatest debacle in world history at the moment when the course of events called for revolutionary methods of struggle by the workers’ parties. If the war of 1870 dealt a blow to the First International by revealing that the power of united masses did not stand behind its revolutionary socialist program, so too the war of 1914 killed the Second International by revealing that above the solidly welded masses stood parties that had become servile organs of the bourgeois state.^[3]

These two contrasting assessments highlight the fact that despite its ignominious collapse, the Second International of 1889–1914 nevertheless remained an essential part of the continuity of all major currents in the workers’ movement, as well as a point of reference that had to be addressed in one way or another. They also go to the heart of the ongoing battle over the Second International’s legacy.

* * *

Reviving and popularizing the concept of international working-class unity in action was perhaps the primary accomplishment of the Second International during the quarter century when its resolutions were guided by revolutionary Marxism. By winning broad masses to socialism, it helped provide a seedbed for revolutionary movements that began to germinate during the great working-class upsurge that followed the end of World War I—even though many of these movements developed in polar opposition to what most parties of the Second International had become by that point.

The founding congress of the Second International in 1889 took an important step in promoting international solidarity with the establishment of May Day as an occasion for international working-class action. The very next year, Frederick Engels took part in a May 1890 demonstration in London of two hundred thousand working people, which was part of the internationally coordinated actions. Giving his assessment of this historic manifestation of proletarian unity, Engels wrote what can be considered an accurate summation of the Second International’s accomplishments and the most positive aspects of its legacy:

“Working men of all countries, unite!” But few voices responded when we proclaimed these words to the world forty-two years ago, on the eve of the first Paris revolution [of 1848] in which the proletariat came out with demands of its own. On September 28, 1864, however, the proletarians of most of the Western European countries joined hands in the International Working Men’s Association of glorious memory. True, the International itself lived only nine years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilised for the first time, mobilised as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866 and again by the Paris Workers’ Congress in 1889. And today’s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the working men of all countries are united indeed.

If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!^[4]

Footnotes

Kautsky, “Internationalism and the War,” in Riddell, ed. Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, chapter 4, pp. 147–48 (original pagination). ↑
Branting’s speech can be found in De Kay, The Spirit of the International at Berne, p. 17. ↑
From “Manifesto of the Communist International to the Proletariat of the Entire World,” in John Riddell, ed., Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress: March 1919 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987), pp. 230–31 (original pagination). ↑
“Preface to the Fourth German Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 27, p. 60. ↑