The collapse of the Second International

The pledge against war: from Stuttgart to Basel

After the Russian Revolution of 1905 the Second International’s congresses argued over how to stop a war. At Stuttgart in 1907 four positions clashed: Hervé’s strikes and insurrection in the army; Guesde’s view that class struggle would abolish war without special action; Bebel’s parliamentary pressure; and Jaurès’s readiness to use the mass strike. The compromise resolution ended with an amendment drafted by Luxemburg and Lenin: if war broke out, socialists were to use the crisis to “hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule”. 1 2

At the Copenhagen congress of 1910 Keir Hardie and Vaillant proposed naming a general strike in the arms industries as the means to prevent war, but the decision was put off to a Vienna congress in 1914. In November 1912, as the Balkan Wars threatened to become a European war, an extraordinary congress met in Basel. Delegates marched to the cathedral, and the congress unanimously adopted a manifesto reaffirming the Stuttgart resolution. Jaurès declared the International “strong enough to speak in this tone of command to those in power”. 1 3 4

The July crisis of 1914

When the Balkan Wars did not become a general war, optimism spread through the International in 1913. Kautsky and others argued that the great powers’ economic interdependence made war irrational — the theory of “ultra-imperialism”. Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July 1914 caught them off guard. The SPD appealed for peace on the 25th but offered no concrete plan of action. 1

On 29 July the International Socialist Bureau met in emergency session in Brussels: Jaurès, Victor Adler of Austria, Hugo Haase of Germany and Hardie of Britain. Adler confessed that “the war is already with us” and that his party could do nothing; Haase was confident that German workers could be mobilised. The Bureau’s only decision was to move the Vienna congress forward to Paris on 9 August. That evening Jaurès gave his last speech for peace at a rally in the Cirque Royal. 1 5 6

The murder of Jaurès and 4 August

On the night of 31 July Jaurès was shot dead in the Café du Croissant in Paris by Raoul Villain, a 29-year-old nationalist. The International lost its most powerful anti-war leader. On 1 August Germany declared war on Russia and France and Germany mobilised. Hermann Müller, sent by the SPD to Paris, found the French socialists, bereaved of Jaurès and facing German invasion, unwilling even to consider voting against war credits. Villain was acquitted after the war. 7 1

On 4 August in Berlin the SPD deputies voted unanimously for war credits. The internal vote had been 78 to 14, and Haase, who had opposed them, read the party’s declaration proclaiming the Burgfrieden, the civil truce. The same day the socialists in Paris voted for the credits and joined the Union sacrée. Socialists in Austria, Belgium and Britain rallied to their governments; Jules Guesde and Marcel Sembat entered the French government and Émile Vandervelde the Belgian. Only in Serbia and Russia did socialist deputies vote against the war. 1 8 9 10 11

Social patriots and dissenters

When the British Labour Party backed the government’s request for £100 million in war credits, Ramsay MacDonald resigned the party chairmanship and Arthur Henderson took over. Hardie, Labour’s founder, held to his opposition to the war until his death in 1915. The Italian Socialist Party stayed neutral, but Benito Mussolini, editor of Avanti!, was expelled for advocating intervention and founded Il Popolo d’Italia. In Russia Plekhanov backed national defence. In the United States the Socialist leader Eugene Debs opposed the war and was jailed in 1918. 12 13 14 15 16

Responses to the defeat diverged. Luxemburg said that “everything is lost, all that remains is our honour”; Trotsky called the Second International a “rigid shell” from which socialism must be freed. Lenin denounced it as a “stinking corpse” and from autumn 1914 called for turning the imperialist war into a civil war and founding a new, Third International. 15 17 18

The split in German Social Democracy

On 2 December 1914 Karl Liebknecht cast the only vote in the Reichstag against the second war credits, declaring that this was not a defensive but an imperialist war. Arrested while leading an anti-war demonstration in Berlin on 1 May 1916, he was sentenced to four years and one month. In the Junius Pamphlet, written in prison, Luxemburg quoted Engels: bourgeois society stood at the crossroads of “transition to socialism or regression into barbarism”. 19 20 21

Opposition widened. Bernstein, who had voted for the credits on 4 August out of party discipline, turned against them in 1915 with Haase and Kautsky. When the SPD leadership began expelling the opponents in 1916, they formed the Social Democratic Working Group and in April 1917 founded the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) at Gotha, with the Spartacus League inside it. The majority under Ebert and Scheidemann kept supporting the war. 22 23

Zimmerwald and Kienthal

The Bureau moved to the neutral Netherlands and convened neutral parties in Copenhagen in January 1915 without result; the Allied parties met separately in London in February and those of the Central Powers in Vienna in April. Clara Zetkin organised an international socialist women’s conference against the war in 1915. Robert Grimm of Switzerland prepared an independent anti-war conference with the Italian Socialist Party, and from 5 to 8 September 1915 thirty-eight delegates met in the village of Zimmerwald near Bern. They joked that half a century after the First International all Europe’s internationalists could still fit into four coaches. 1 24 15 25

Lenin and Zinoviev for the Bolsheviks, Martov and Axelrod for the Mensheviks, Trotsky for Nashe Slovo, Rakovsky of Romania, Kolarov of Bulgaria and German opposition deputies such as Ledebour attended. The manifesto blamed the war on reactionary capitalist governments and called for peace without annexations or indemnities, but left out Lenin’s demands — voting against war credits, a new International. Lenin, Radek and Zinoviev formed the “Zimmerwald Left”, and the Kienthal conference of April 1916 deepened the split. 15 26 27 28

1917 and the road to a new International

In The Collapse of the Second International (1915) Lenin located the cause not in individual leaders’ treachery but in opportunism — a labour aristocracy and bureaucracy bribed from imperialist superprofits — and theorised it in Imperialism (1916). After the February Revolution neutral socialists and the Petrograd Soviet tried to gather every socialist party in Stockholm in 1917 to broker peace, but the Allied governments refused passports and the conference collapsed. Grimm, chairman of the Zimmerwald movement, had to step down that year over the Grimm–Hoffmann affair. 29 30 1 25

The first post-war conference met in Bern in February 1919, but the Belgians refused to sit with the Germans and the French, Italian and Swiss parties that had backed the Zimmerwald Left stayed away. The conference condemned the Bolshevik dictatorship and endorsed parliamentary democracy. A month later, in March, the Communist International was founded in Moscow on a total rejection of the Second International’s “social patriotism”. The remaining parties passed through the “Two-and-a-half International” of 1921 and merged in 1923 into the Labour and Socialist International. 1

Explaining the collapse

Against Lenin’s thesis of betrayal, historians such as Georges Haupt saw the collapse as the outcome of the International’s long-standing contradictions. Its anti-war strategy was built for prevention and useless once war was declared; a federation of autonomous parties had no means of enforcing joint action; and its leaders underestimated how far mass patriotism could outweigh class loyalty and how fast mobilisation would move. Even so, the International left the traditions of mass social democracy — May Day, International Women’s Day, “The Internationale”. 1 29

The collapse separated two currents that had long coexisted in the International. Reformists saw the existing democratic state as a neutral instrument the majority could capture and use; revolutionaries saw it as an organ of class rule to be overthrown. Among the revolutionaries, too, the SPD mainstream expecting revolution after long preparation parted from the left of Lenin and Luxemburg, who expected capitalism’s imminent breakdown through war or crisis. 1914 exposed these differences in a single choice — the vote on war credits — and that line became the post-war boundary between social democracy and communism. 1