The Early Disputes of the Second International

A New International and Its Unfinished Business

The Second International was born divided. In July 1889 two international socialist congresses met separately in Paris. The Possibilists led by Paul Brousse gathered in the Rue de Lancry, while the Marxist congress, led by Jules Guesde and backed by Wilhelm Liebknecht and the German Social Democrats, opened on 14 July, the centenary of the storming of the Bastille, in the Salle Petrelle. The latter is counted as the founding congress of the Second International. Liebknecht declared that the old International had "passed into the mighty working-class movement." 1

The founding congress set up neither a standing body nor membership rules. The question of who could enter the congresses was a question of what the movement was, and the answer revived the conflict between Marx and Bakunin that had broken the First International. The organisers of the Brussels congress of 1891 invited only parties that recognised "the necessity of political action", formally excluding the anarchists. At the same congress the Dutch socialist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis proposed that any declaration of war be met with a general strike by conscripts, but the congress overwhelmingly preferred a resolution by Vaillant and Liebknecht that relied on parliamentary and electoral tactics. 1 2

Domela Nieuwenhuis had been a Lutheran preacher who lost his faith and took up the political fight for workers; he founded the Social Democratic League and in 1888 became the first socialist member of parliament in Dutch history. After his term ended in 1891, however, he grew sceptical of parliamentary work and drifted towards anarchism. His anti-war general strike proposal at Brussels foreshadowed the two questions that would collide again in 1893 and 1896: parliamentary politics or direct action, and how far the congress should open its doors. 2

Two Roads for Polish Socialism

At the same time Polish socialism was splitting in two. Polish socialist émigrés who met in Paris in November 1892 founded the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and adopted the Paris programme, which set the goal of an independent democratic republic alongside the proletariat's conquest of power. One of the main authors of that first programme was Stanisław Mendelson, who in the 1870s and 1880s had published the first Polish socialist magazines, Równość and Przedświt. The PPS bound socialism to the dream of independence that had ruled the Polish political imagination since the rising of 1863. 3 4

Those who rejected the independence line broke away in 1893. Veterans of the Union of Polish Workers and the Second Proletariat founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), whose intellectual centre was the monthly Sprawa Robotnicza (The Workers' Cause), launched that year by Rosa Luxemburg, then a twenty-two-year-old student in Switzerland, with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchlewski. The party described itself as the workers' party of a territory rather than of a nation, and refused to back the demand for Polish independence. In Austrian Galicia, meanwhile, the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia, co-founded in October 1892 by Ignacy Daszyński among others, stood on the same independence line as the PPS. 5 6

The PPS had powerful authority on its side. In his preface to the Polish edition of the Communist Manifesto, written in London on 10 February 1892, Engels wrote that "the restoration of an independent and strong Poland is a matter which concerns not only the Poles but all of us", and that "the workers of all the rest of Europe need the independence of Poland just as much as the Polish workers themselves." That independence, he added, "can be gained only by the young Polish proletariat." Marx and Engels had backed Polish independence since 1848 on the reckoning that it would weaken tsarist Russia, the bulwark of European reaction. Luxemburg would come to argue that this very tradition had been overtaken by changed times. 7 8

Zurich 1893: The Political Action Clause and the Expulsion of the Anarchists

The third congress of the Second International opened in Zurich on 6 August 1893 with 439 delegates from twenty countries. An official delegation of the British trade unions attended for the first time, lending the congress greater international authority. Right after the opening, before deliberations had even begun, the congress voted on the conditions of admission. The resolution, carried on the motion of the German Social Democratic leader August Bebel, admitted all trade unions, and those socialist parties that "recognize the necessity of the organization of the workers and of political action". Political action was defined as using political rights and the legislative machinery to advance the interests of the proletariat and to conquer political power. 9 10

Since anarchists rejected political action itself, the clause in effect threw them out. After angry debate, German anarchists and dissident Social Democrats, Gustav Landauer among them, were removed by force, the expelled delegates shouting "We protest!" At a separate anarchist meeting Landauer answered by calling the general strike the "introduction of the revolution." The Zurich resolution became the rule that guarded the door of the Second International from then on. 10 1 11

The same line was drawn on war. A resolution first proposed by the German delegation and presented for the commission by Georgy Plekhanov declared that "the fall of capitalism means universal peace" and called on socialist deputies to reject all military credits. The Dutch delegation again proposed an international general strike against war, as at Brussels, and was voted down. The congress called the eight-hour day "the most important available measure" to improve workers' conditions of life, and adopted by acclamation a resolution on the protection of women workers presented by Louise Kautsky. 9

At the final session on 12 August the seventy-two-year-old Friedrich Engels was elected honorary president and gave the closing speech, the only time Engels addressed a congress of the Second International. He stressed the need to stay separate from the anarchists, while urging that "we must continue to work on common ground." He died two years later, in August 1895. 11 9

Zurich 1893: The Dispute over Luxemburg's Mandate

Poland sent eleven delegates to Zurich, among them Mendelson and Daszyński. Sprawa Robotnicza sent Luxemburg, and the Social Democratic workers of Łódź and Warsaw sent Marchlewski. The all-Polish delegation led by Daszyński opposed seating them. It was the first time the internal split in Polish socialism reached the international stage. 11 5

The congress first rejected the mandate of Sprawa Robotnicza on the ground that it was anonymous. When the paper's editor, Leo Jogiches, sent the congress bureau a telegram giving his full name and address and demanding that the mandate be accepted, the matter seemed settled. But when the bureau took it up, the Polish delegation had already submitted a written statement in reply to the telegram, portraying the editor as a "suspicious individual" unworthy to mandate a delegate. Luxemburg asked for the floor to refute it and was refused, and the bureau moved to the next item after five minutes. In the end her mandate was rejected. 12 11

On 11 August Luxemburg and Marchlewski issued a statement explaining what had happened, signed with the pseudonyms "Kruszyńska" and "Karski". Sprawa Robotnicza's report to the congress, which was never officially delivered, was largely Luxemburg's work. It argued that with the Polish bourgeoisie dependent on the Russian market and the three partitioned regions grown apart in their interests, "the endeavour to call into being a capitalist Polish state lacks any real basis", and it named the attempt to fuse independence with socialism "social patriotism". In its place it set, for Russian Poland, the overthrow of absolutism and the task "to wrest a democratic constitution from the Tsarist regime", together with universal suffrage and the rights of assembly, association and language. 12 13

The "Social Patriotism" Debate Before London

Pushed out at Zurich, Luxemburg carried the dispute into Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of German Social Democracy. In 1896 she published "New Tendencies in the Polish Socialist Movement" and "Social Patriotism in Poland" there in turn. Her target was the resolution prepared for the London congress by the Union of Polish Socialists Abroad, the PPS's organisation in exile. It would have declared that the subjugation of one nation by another serves only capitalists and despots, that the Russian tsardom in particular was a permanent threat to the international labour movement, and that "the independence of Poland represents an imperative political demand both for the Polish proletariat and for the international labor movement as a whole." 14 8

In an article published in July 1896 simultaneously in Sprawa Robotnicza no. 25 and, in Italian, in Critica Sociale, Luxemburg attacked the draft on two counts. First, "the Russian tsardom derives neither its inner strength nor its external significance from the subjugation of Poland"; tsarism rested on Russia's own social structure and on the interests of its nobility and bourgeoisie. Second, the general principle that national subjugation profits only capitalists and despots was "one of those great truths" that "can lead to no practical conclusions whatsoever", and the resolution "maintains a deep silence" on how Poland could be freed. A demand without action was "a pious wish". Adopting it, she warned, would encourage nationalist organisation in Poland and elsewhere, and she asked why not, then, the liberation of the Czechs, Ireland and Alsace-Lorraine. 14

Luxemburg's articles angered not only the Polish socialists but also the Austrian Social Democratic leader Victor Adler. Karl Kautsky, editor of Die Neue Zeit, published a reply the same year. As Lenin summed it up, Kautsky held that the International could not at that time make Polish independence a point of its programme, but that Polish socialists were fully entitled to put forward such a demand, and he criticised Luxemburg's materialism as extremely "one-sided". So three positions had formed before the London congress met: the PPS, which wanted Polish independence in the International's programme; Luxemburg, for whom Polish socialists should not demand independence at all; and Kautsky in between. 8

London 1896: The Final Exclusion of the Anarchists

The International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress that opened in London on 27 July 1896 brought together some 770 delegates from twenty-two countries, the largest congress of the Second International up to that time. It was the first since Engels's death, and Paul Singer of Germany said in his opening address that his spirit and his work "remain". Émile Vandervelde of Belgium later called it "the most agitated, the most tumultuous, and the most chaotic of all the congresses of the Second International." It was also the last congress disrupted by anarchist delegates. 15

On the eve of the congress the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta wrote that anarchists should be admitted, and led a common front of the anti-parliamentary forces. Some French and Italian anarchists got around the Zurich clause by having trade unions appoint them as delegates, while Landauer and Malatesta, denied delegate status, contested the proceedings from the public galleries. When Paul Delesalle, who had come as a French trade-union delegate, tried to mount the rostrum, he was thrown violently down the steps and injured. 16 1 17

The opening session reaffirmed the Zurich resolution by a vote of national delegations: seventeen in favour, two against, with Italy abstaining. The two against were France (57 to 56) and the Netherlands (9 to 5), while the British delegation voted 223 to 104 in favour. Keir Hardie and Tom Mann of the British Independent Labour Party took the anarchists' side on admission. In his Labour Leader editorial just after the congress Hardie wrote that the real question was not whether to admit anarchists but whether to admit socialists who put trade-union and co-operative action before parliamentary action, and that if the German reading, which through Vorwärts branded the Free Communists as anarchists, had prevailed, most of the Dutch and French delegations would have been excluded. He also criticised voting by nationality. 15 18

The congress fixed the rules for inviting the next one: only organisations seeking socialist property and production that accepted legislative and parliamentary action, and purely trade-union bodies that accepted the necessity of legislative action, would be invited, and "consequently anarchists are excluded." Domela Nieuwenhuis was expelled from the International the same year and soon broke with the socialist movement altogether. After London the congresses of the Second International were congresses of socialist parties that went into parliament, and of trade unions. 15 2

London 1896: The Polish Resolution and "Self-Determination"

The Polish question set off a long debate in London. Józef Piłsudski, there for the PPS, pressed the independence resolution, and Luxemburg opposed him. But the PPS motion was never put to the vote. Instead the congress unanimously adopted a general resolution: "This Congress declares that it stands for the full right of all nations to self-determination and expresses its sympathy for the workers of every country now suffering under the yoke of military, national or other absolutism." It called on the workers of those countries to join the ranks of the class-conscious workers of the whole world, to fight together for the defeat of international capitalism and for the aims of international Social Democracy. 8 19 5

Each side believed it had won. In the foreword to an anthology of her writings in 1905 Luxemburg wrote that the PPS had sought recognition of Poland's restoration as an absolute necessity for the international labour movement, but that "the London congress ruled precisely to the contrary": it set Poland on a level with all other oppressed peoples and simply reaffirmed, in general terms, socialists' sympathy for them and their right to self-determination. The PPS, for its part, found vindication in the congress's formal declaration of the self-determination of nations. 19

Eighteen years later Lenin devoted a chapter of The Right of Nations to Self-Determination to the London resolution. He saw the PPS proposal as an attempt "to establish for all time the point of view Marx had held in a different epoch", "an attempt to use the letter of Marxism against the spirit of Marxism." Yet Luxemburg's view that Polish socialists should not demand independence "entirely precluded the proclamation of the right of nations to self-determination", and "in essence was defeated in the International!" What the London resolution reproduced, Lenin wrote, was Kautsky's view, which combined recognition of self-determination with an appeal for the international unity of the workers. 8

Assessment

The two congresses of 1893–1896 drew the boundaries of the Second International. With the Zurich resolution making "political action" the condition of entry, and its reaffirmation in London, socialism and anarchism parted completely as organisations. The excluded shifted their weight to direct action through the trade unions, to revolutionary syndicalism. As Keir Hardie pointed out, the boundary pushed out not only anarchists but also socialists who put action outside parliament first, and the centre of the congresses was taken by mass parties such as the German Social Democrats, whose seats were growing. The tension between parliamentarism and revolution that remained inside broke out again a few years later in the revisionism controversy. 1 18

The Polish dispute was not a one-off quarrel but a line that divided the Polish left for half a century. The conflict between the PPS, with independence first, and the internationalist SDKP, which merged with the Lithuanian Social Democrats in 1899 to become the SDKPiL, continued in the streets of 1905; after the PPS split in 1906 its left wing joined the SDKPiL in 1918 to found the Communist Workers' Party of Poland. Piłsudski, who argued for independence in London in 1896, became Chief of State of independent Poland in 1918, and Daszyński, who had kept Luxemburg out at Zurich in 1893, became prime minister of the Provisional People's Government in Lublin in November that year. 5 6

The London formula of the "right of nations to self-determination" took on a long life of its own. When the right to self-determination entered the programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, the SDKPiL objected, and the argument between Luxemburg and Lenin ran on until 1914, when Lenin used the London resolution against her. Historians have read the conflict both ways: as Luxemburg overrating the economic tendencies of capitalist development and missing the political force of the national question, and as her early foresight of the danger that nationalism would eat into the labour movement. Like Landauer, who led the revolution in the Bavarian Council Republic in 1919 and was beaten to death by soldiers, those who parted ways at these congresses met the revolutions of the twentieth century by different roads. 8 10