Second International

What kind of organisation was it?

Thirteen years after the First International dissolved, an international of socialist parties was refounded in Paris in 1889, the centenary of the French Revolution. Unlike its predecessor, the Second International was a federation of mass parties: organisations with hundreds of thousands of members and seats in parliament actually existed, with the German Social Democratic Party at the centre. Its one standing body, the International Socialist Bureau in Brussels created in 1900, had little power; real unity came from a shared theory, Marxism, whose recognised interpreter was Kautsky. From 1890 it organised May Day demonstrations internationally, and the Copenhagen congress of 1910 created International Women's Day. After the London congress of 1896 confirmed the exclusion of the anarchists, only parties accepting parliamentary politics remained.

What did it fight over?

Two great debates ran through the flourishing organisation. One was the revisionism debate: when Bernstein questioned the theory of capitalist collapse and proposed gradual transition through accumulated reforms, Kautsky and Luxemburg answered him in the name of orthodoxy. Congress resolutions rejected revisionism every time, yet the daily practice of the parties already revolved around parliament and the trade unions. The other was the mass strike debate, over whether the political mass strike shown by the Russian revolution of 1905 could be used in Germany, which divided the party leadership, the unions and the left. In both debates the gap between official position and actual conduct kept widening.

Why did it collapse in 1914?

On the question of war the gap exploded. The Stuttgart congress of 1907 and the emergency Basel congress of 1912 resolved that the workers of every country would act to prevent war, and if it came, would use it to bring down capitalism. But on 4 August 1914 the German Social Democratic deputies voted for the war budget, and the French and Austrian parties followed. The calculation of protecting decades of organisation and seats, the pressure of national opinion, and the governments' logic of defensive war overrode the internationalist resolutions. The anti-war minority regrouped in the Zimmerwald movement, and the International ceased to function. Lenin called the collapse a betrayal by the leaders and demanded a new International, which came in 1919 as the Comintern. The social democratic lineage continued through the Labour and Socialist International of 1923 to the Socialist International of 1951. The collapse of 1914 is generally taken as the point where social democracy and communism became separate movements.