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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Episode 10.55: Whatever Happened to the International?
Over the past few episodes, we have talked about the chain of events that led to World War I from the perspective of those shuffling around the halls of power: foreign ministers, prime ministers, presidents, kings, and emperors. The type of people who hang maps on the wall and treat the world like a giant game of Risk or Diplomacy or whatever other tabletop game of world domination you happen to enjoy. As they treated the world like a great big competition, all of them were fundamentally guided by this thing called the national interest. When they sat around in fancy rooms, trying to figure out what to do next, their calculations, tactics, and strategies were driven by a desire to advance the national interest of whatever sovereign political unit they happened to be working for. Not that it was always clear what that was, nor what the best strategy would be to achieve it. There were always competing and mutually exclusive options available. Was it in Germany’s national interests to ally with Britain, or opposed Britain? Was it in Russia’s national interest to ally with France, or ally with Germany? But the point is, wherever you went and whoever you were talking about, their fundamental preoccupation was: the national interest.
But there was a different point of view out there, an alternate framework for seeing the world. People who were trying to erode, undermine, and ultimately destroy national interest as a kind of thinking. To stop seeing the world from such a parochial, chauvinistic, and tribal viewpoint. And this connects us all the way back to episode 10.1 of this series, which was called what? That’s right, The International Working Men’s Association. One of the founding pillars of socialism of all stripes, traditions, and disciplines was the belief that national identity and national interests were a barrier to understanding how the world actually works. One of the core objectives of socialism as a political, economic, and social project was to tear down this false consciousness and reveal the truth about the world: that a French worker had more in common with a German worker than they did with a French banker; that a Russian miner and an Austrian miner were on the same side, against a ruling class that oppressed them both in the same ways, for the same reasons, and using the same tools. That for all their dynastic rivalries, the ruling classes of Europe were fundamentally aligned with each other in the much larger project of mass exploitation; that the material and economic conditions — what in Marxist terminology we call relations to the means of production — were far more important than mere regional differences like whether you typically ate sausages or cheese plates or whether you drank beer or wine. Socialists believed that a huge part of their project was destroying these parochial blinders, and allowing the workers of the world to recognize reality. The reality was that class relations, not national relations, were the true relations. Then, and only then, would they be able to throw off their collective shackles, the shackles of imperialism and capitalism and barberism. Workers of the world unite! That had been the slogan going back to the Communist Manifesto 1848. And what we are here to talk about today is why, after all this effort, all the books and the pamphlets, the speeches, the declarations, the study groups, the meetings, the manifestos, the workers of the world did not unite in the summer of 1914, and instead joined their respective national war efforts and went off to murder each other in the millions.
Now we spent a bit of time talking about the first attempt by the first generation of revolutionary socialists to achieve the dream of international workers solidarity in the International Working Men’s Association, which broke down due to ideological and personality conflicts between Marxists and anarchists in the mid 1870s. But what I have not yet talked about at all is that about 15 years later, they gave it another shot. In the mid 1880s, a new generation of socialist leaders concluded that the work they were doing in their own respective homelands ultimately necessitated international coordination and cooperation. And so, after much correspondence and many preliminary meetings between leaders of various social parties in the several European powers, delegates representing twenty different nations came together in Paris on July the 14th, 1889 — the hundredth anniversary of the fall of the Bastile — to found a new international coalition of socialist parties. What thereafter becomes known as the Second International.
Now, socialists being socialists, the founding of the Second International was mildly complicated by the fact that divisions inside the ranks of the French socialists led to rival and competing assemblies on that July 14th, 1889, but let’s not worry about that too much, because the Second International does ultimately reconcile itself into a functional unified body that then lives on for the next 25 years. Mostly the Second International was a European affair, with delegates from Britain and Germany and France and Greece and Hungary, but right from the beginning, it did include delegates beyond the confines of Europe. There were a handful of delegates from the United States, as well as at least one guy from Argentina. Over the next 25 years, the number of nationalities represented in the Second International grew to include delegates from literally all over the world — from north America, south America, India, and Asia. At the first meeting of the Second International, the Russian delegation included both Grigori Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism and Piotr Lavrov, the most eminent Narodist theorist out there. So, both the Russian Social-Democrats and the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries sent delegates to the Second International, and both were welcome.
But though multiple socialist tendencies could exist side-by-side in the Second International, it was decided pretty quickly that the anarchists were going to be excluded. Irreconcilable tensions between socialists and anarchists, the Red and the Black, had sunk the First International. So the red socialists concluded, not without controversy and argument in their own ranks, to exclude the Black anarchist groups from the Second International. They did this by including among the set of requirements a group must meet before they could affiliate with the International, agreement with the principle that political work was an essential component of the social struggle this was a point the anarchist groups rejected, believing that any political activity granted unacceptable measures of legitimacy to the existing social and political system they were trying to destroy. So, the Second International became an all Red affair. After excluding the anarchists, though, the leaders of the Second International did their best to create a broad umbrella they could all fit under, and they worked hard to ensure general unity and cohesion. So, for example, many of the parties affiliated with the Second International were explicitly Marxist, but you didn’t have to be a Marxist at all. As I already mentioned, both the Russian Social-Democrats, who were Marxist, and the SRs, who were coming out of a completely different Narodist tradition, found a home inside the Second International. French socialist groups, meanwhile, drew from their own wellsprings that did not require them to appeal to the philosophy or the authority of a German theorist writing from the archives of the British Library. They might mix in Marxist thinking, or they might straight up reject Marxist thinking, without finding themselves at irreconcilable odds with the declarations coming from the various congresses of the Second International, which were held at intervals every few years. Now all these guys argued with each other and mutually denounced each other, but they still did their best to hang together under the same red banner.
The most important constituent part of the Second International was the German Social Democratic Party, the SPD. The leaders of the SPD were among the most important leaders of the Second International, and their party was the biggest, strongest, and most successful socialist party of the era by quite a bit. In 1890, Germany repealed a law that had been on the books since 1878 that made writing about, talking about, or advocating socialism a crime. So, now allowed to operate out in the open, leaders of the heretofor underground socialist movement in Germany proved just how barely below the surface them and their ideas had been. In the next election to the Reichstag, they won a million and a half votes and secured more than 30 seats. They then proceeded to form close ties with German labor unions and successfully ran candidates for the legislature. Their resources, standing, and influence made the German SPD the central pillar of the Second International, and the leading light of the whole socialist movement in Europe. And for example, when we talked about how Pavel Axelrod and Julius Martov were eager to make the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party a mass movement party, out there organizing legally in the open and contesting and winning elections, they were specifically pointing to the German SPD as the ideal model. Axelrod in particular was close personal friends with most of the leaders of the German SPD, and Lenin and the Bolsheviks would chide him for advocating policies that might make sense in the German political context, but not the Russian political context.
The very success of the German SPD working inside a semi-liberal political context with a parliament, and political rights, and legal labor unions spawned the great controversy that defined the internal conflicts and debates of the Second International, and that is revisionism. Now we talked about the arrival of revisionist Marxism in episodes, 10.27, 10.28, and 10.29. But just to refresh your memories: in the late 1890s, a leading German socialist named Edward Bernstein started arguing that Marxism needed to be revised and updated for the new world they were now operating in. And Bernstein was no outsider — he was an inner circle leader of the German SPD going back to the days in the underground in the 1880s, and he was close to the aging Friedrich Engels; so much so, that Bernstein was named the literary executor of the papers of Marx and Engels. But as they approached the turn of the 20th century, Bernstein started publishing works revising key Marxist concepts, especially about the means by which socialism would be achieved. Bernstein argued that socialism could be achieved without recourse to violent and cataclysmic revolution. He argued that capitalism was not in fact in its death throes, and just needed to be pushed over, and he argued that liberal bourgeois democracy was not an inherent obstacle to socialism. It was more realistic and frankly more plausible that a socialist society would be achieved by socialist parties organizing and mobilizing the working classes to produce electoral majority that could then legislate all the socialist wishlist items into existence.
More than anything, revisionism stood for a renunciation of the need or even the desirability of revolution. Reform, reform, reform, one step after another; that was the true and achievable path to victory. Bernstein’s revisionism set off a cascading series of debates and arguments and mutual denunciations. Because Bernstein isn’t just giving Marxism a new haircut here, he’s rooting around and doing brain surgery. His own comrades in the SPD officially condemned his arguments, but in the interest of unity, they did not kick him or his supporters out of the party, nor were they expelled from the ranks of the Second International. And for all the rhetorical thunder and fury triggered in response to revisionism, the reality was that many socialist parties started behaving in revisionist ways, even if they were not explicitly revisionist in their doctrine. French socialist parties and the British Labor Party achieved real measurable advances running candidates for elections, using the electoral power of unions to then legislate economic and social reforms for their working class constituents.
Now there was of course, a vocal left-wing of the Second International, embodied by people like the famous Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who believed that this was all fatally compromising the movement. That by embracing bourgeois, parliamentary politics and viewing workplace regulations or wage increases as achievements to be proud of, all they were doing is making the shackles of capitalism so soft that workers stopped thinking they were shackled at all.
The left wing argued that capitalism could not be reformed step-by-step until it became socialism. Capitalism had to be destroyed, root and branch. Socialism could not grow out of capitalism; it had to replace capitalism. They warned their comrades that they were all in grave danger of losing sight of this fundamental fact.
Now, as I said, we covered a lot of this ground in episodes 10.27 and 10.28 and 10.29, because the battles between revisionist Marxists and orthodox Marxists that consumed international socialism at the dawn of the 20th century of course spread over into Russia. Roundabout 1902 and 1903, the newly minted Russian Social Democratic Labor Party fought internally between orthodox and revisionist wings. The newspaper Iskra was specifically established to combat the heretical scourge of revisionism and economism and reformism, and maintain the true orthodox revolutionary faith. These were the years when the future leaders of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks like Plekhanov and Lenin and Martov and Axelrod were all on the same side as defenders of Marxist orthodoxy, if for no other reason than arguing in favor of the parliamentary road to legislating reforms until socialism was achieved seemed to be lunacy in the context of tsarist Russia. There was no freedom of speech or freedom of the press or freedom of assembly. There were no elections to win. There was no parliament to legislate from.
But then along came the revolution of 1905 and the October Manifesto, which seemed to promise exactly the kind of semi free parliamentary system that made the revisionist path possible. The creation of the Duma led to renewed soul searching about how to achieve the end goal of socialism and Russia. Both the Bolsheviks and Menshevik factions ultimately boycotted elections to the first Duma, and then backtracked and aggressively ran candidates for the second Duma. As the years went on, one of the key differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was how close did they think their party was from becoming a mass open party of the working classes? Basically, how close is the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party to becoming the German SPD? The Bolsheviks said, it’s still a long ways off Mensheviks thought they were actually pretty close and needed to start taking practical steps now to make the transition. In fact, the further right you go inside the ranks of the Mensheviks, you run into a new group called Liquidationists, who believed that the time had finally come to leave underground revolutionary activity behind for good; that terrorism, criminality, bank robberies, expropriations were just counterproductive banditry, and instead they should focus on legally organizing for reform legislation.`
Now a similar debate was also happening inside the ranks of the SRs, and in our episodes about the first couple of Dumas, we talk about how the SRs were also divided on the issue of whether to engage in parliamentary politics or not. Those who were implacably opposed, who wanted to boycott everything and recommit to revolutionary terrorism, splintered off and became known as the SR maximalists. Meanwhile, on their right wing, a chunk of SRs split towards legal parliamentary work. They reformed themselves as a new group called the Popular Socialists, more or less renouncing the underground and focusing exclusively on achieving agrarian socialism through legal parliamentary means. In 1909, even as unimpeachably a revolutionary as Catherine Breshkovsky, the babushka of revolution, helped found a new faction of the SRs called New Path, renouncing the efficacy or the need for revolution.
Now through the whole period between the Revolution of 1905, and the arrival of the first World War about a decade later, there was something of a broad realignment happening within the larger spectrum of Russian socialism. Lenin, and the Bolsheviks on the left, were openly willing to make tactical alliances with left SRs and maximalists, who they had a lot in common with despite their doctrinal disagreements. Certainly Bolshevik policy was tactical alliances with the SRs is cool, tactical alliances with the liberals is not cool. Mensheviks, meanwhile, were often very ready to work with liberals to craft a larger left liberal block to combat the tsar and conservatives and the Black Hundreds. And on this side, the Popular Socialists and right SRs and right Mensheviks and Liquidationists tended to align with one another.
Now, I don’t want to oversell this, and there were still major differences between the Social-Democrats and the SRs, and sometimes everybody just worked together for a shared project, but you see a new dynamic playing out inside of Russian socialism that is going to inform a lot of how they all respond to World War I. Because I have sort of just drawn the line between the Defensivists and the Defeatists.
The great controversy surrounding revisionism, and the debates over how socialism ought to respond to a world which allowed them to operate in the open, thus potentially negating the need for illegal revolution, was the great controversy inside socialism during the 25 years of what one might call the age of the Second International. And the reason I dwelled a bit on it here today is that it directly informs the great controversy that ultimately destroyed the Second International. Because we need to explain why, after 25 years of declaring the necessity, the fundamental importance of advancing international solidarity of the working classes against the false consciousness of chauvinistic nationalism, why, when the brewing clouds of war finally clapped with thunder and rained in torrents in the summer of 1914, the socialist parties of Europe each joined their respective national war efforts, and betrayed their international principles.
Throughout their various congresses, and there were nine of them in all between 1889 and 1914, the members of the Second International could not have been more clear: great power wars were imperialist, nationalist, and capitalist, and no socialists could support them in any shape or form. Now some allowances could be made if the war was purely defensive in nature, warding off a foreign invasion, or if it was a war of national liberation against a foreign oppressor. But mostly, great power wars are bad, and socialists cannot support or participate in them. They simply could not allow the workers of the world to be turned into cannon fodder for wars that benefited only the ruling class. Now, some left-wing leaders were not a hundred percent on board with preventing great power war, as they saw those wars as the perfect opportunity to rise up and overthrow their respective governments — as Lenin would put it, to turn a foreign war into a civil war. But in the main, the consistent policy of the Second International was to oppose war. This became very important after the Bosnian Crisis, as war seemed to be increasingly inevitable in Europe. In 1912, the Second International convened for an emergency congress at the beginning of the Balkan Wars to reassert their anti-war position, and they resolved that if a great power war broke out, that it was the duty of every socialist party in every nation to do everything in their power to stop it, up to and including declaring a national general strike.
So then, the final test finally came in July 1914. They had spent a generation preaching international solidarity, rejecting chauvinistic nationalism and imperialism, and committing themselves to doing everything in their power to stop a European war. And then what happened?
They all flinched.
As diplomacy broke down, mobilization for war began, and political parties of every type in every country now had to decide how to respond. The socialist parties of Europe almost uniformly supported their national war efforts. Socialist legislators voted in favor of war bonds to fund the war. Union leaders and socialist parties vowed not to call strikes for the duration of the war. They declared as loudly and clearly as they could that they were patriotic supporters and committed to national victory. The German socialists, the French socialists, the British socialists, and Austrian socialists, and every other kind of socialist, all of them members of the Second International, all of them leaders of the Second International, turned their back on a generation’s worth of talk about international solidarity, and effectively admitted that before they were socialists, they were French and German and British and Austrian. Though the organization sputtered on as a shell-shocked zombie for a few more years, the Second International died in August, 1914. It was among the very first casualties of World War I.
So what the heck happened?
For starters, let’s be very clear. This is not as simple as saying national tribal identity trumped their international socialist principles, that like in France, they tore down the red flag as soon as they saw the tri-color go up. But for a variety of reasons, some good and some bad, they all wound up lashing themselves to their respective national projects. And so that is what we’re going to spend the rest of today’s episode talking about: why that happened. Now the post-mortem on the Second International usually starts with the idea that it was the victim of the success of its constituent national parties. To take Germany as the clearest and most important example, the leaders of the SPD and the German labor unions formed a tight and productive alliance with each other. Union leaders, almost all of them members of the SPD, turned out votes for socialist candidates who would in turn push for pro-labor legislation once they were elected. This was the model parliamentary labor group. Their success led the party apparatus and the union apparatus to grow larger and more professional, creating a cadre of leaders who are naturally protective of the gains they were making, and didn’t want to rock the boat too much. The unions in particular were the most small C conservative wing of the SPD, and since they were the ones who could turn out voters in elections, their views had to be taken into account. And it’s not like this strategy wasn’t working: the measurable results of the revisionist reform project were obvious for all to see. And in the 1912 election, the SPD won the single largest block of seats in the Reichstag. They weren’t a majority, but they were no longer just a handful of crank sitting in the back. Why would you do anything crazy and radical to risk that position? They were only getting bigger and stronger year over year. And this was true of most of the legal socialist parties across Europe. Their very success made them cautious. It’s easy to be a revolutionary when you have nothing to lose, and now they had something to lose.
So in the summer of 1914, when they were confronted with the question of supporting the war or not, socialist party leaders across Europe believed they faced two great threats. First, the consequences of losing the war, and second, the consequences of opposing the war. Germans and Austrians and other parties inside the various national minorities among the central powers were terrified by the thought of Russian victory. The tsar was the most reactionary autocrat in Europe. If tsarist Russia won a great power war, socialism would be outlawed and they would all be hunted as criminals. So, to take the leaders of the SPD again, they looked at their available options and said, we have to do everything in our power to fight the tsar. There was simply no hope for socialism, local, national, or international, if the tsar’s armies conquer central Europe a victorious Tsar was by far the most evil outcome on the table, and so they chose what they believe to be the lesser of two evils: supporting the German national war effort against Russia.
And the funny thing is, if you head west, you find French socialists leaders making all these same calculations and arguments, except replacing the Russians tsar with the German kaiser. Another conquest of France by Imperial Germany would almost certainly be the end of socialism in France and probably in Europe. So they believed it was the duty of French socialists to help defeat Germany — not in the name of France, but in the name of socialism. And I should mention too, that the socialists had always drawn a distinction between aggressive imperial wars and defensive wars to protect a country from foreign invasion. And it should not surprise you to learn that every one of the great powers framed World War I as a war of national defense, and so too did the leaders of the various socialist parties.
There was also, though, the more immediate concern about what would happen if they opposed the war. And what they realized is that they probably would not have to wait for a victorious tsar or victorious kaiser to find themselves outlawed and hunted as criminals. Their own governments would happily do it. If they voted against funding for the war, or called for strikes, or agitated against the war effort in any way, that would all but guarantee wartime governments would declare them traitors and pass anti-socialist laws. Conservatives in every country in Europe had been itching to outlaw socialism for years, and they would not hesitate to use socialist opposition to the war as the excuse they needed.
Socialist parties would be committing political suicide and throwing everything they had built over the last 25 years for basically nothing. French socialists got a taste right away for what might happen as their most prominent anti-war voice, a guy named Jean Jaurès, was trying to organize opposition to the war in July 1914, and for his trouble was shot dead by a nationalist fanatic in a cafe on July 31st, 1914.
So because of these fears, the fear of losing what they had achieved domestically, the threat of conquest by a vast reactionary power, be it the tsar or the kaiser, the near certainty of domestic repression if they opposed the war, the socialist parties set out to prove their unflinching patriotism. The first big task for all of them was when their legislatures considered the question of war credits — that is war bonds, which would fund the war. After heated debate inside the ranks of the German SPD, their very large block inside the Reichstag voted unanimously in favor of war credits. As they were the most prominent socialist party, and the leaders of the Second International, this repudiation of the very recent pledge to oppose war at all costs sent shockwaves through the socialist ranks. It was also the signal for other socialist parties in other countries to do the same, and in the summer of 1914, wherever there are government asking their legislatures to approve war credits, we find socialists voting in favor of them. French socialists signed up for a thing called the sacred union, pledging not to call strikes or even criticize the government in time of war. This was the opposite of what they had just been pledging in the Second International, because as international war broke out, international solidarity died.
But this is not the whole story. Because while the votes were unanimous, there was a whole left wing of the Second International still committed to opposing the war and pursuing revolution instead of calling for wartime truces. And this sentiment was very strong inside the ranks of the Russian revolutionaries. Lenin, for example, was absolutely shocked by the German SPD vote for war credits, and he spent at least several days believing it was phony propaganda cooked up by the kaiser. When the reality hit home that all these socialist parties were breaking hard for their respective national war efforts, people like Lenin on the left wing of the Second International felt utterly betrayed. But it does have an interesting effect that will become very important to the position of the Russian revolutionaries going forward. For 50 years, they had been a peripheral appendage to the cause of European and international socialism, considered by their western comrades to be kind of overly quarrelsome, and whose only significant contribution to the cause of international socialism would be taking out the tsar. But after 1914, everything was scrambled up and realigned by World War I. And as the lights were being snuffed out across Europe, Lenin and his Russian comrades, more than any other national group kept the revolutionary faith.
And from here on out, they would no longer consider themselves junior associates following in the wake of the Germans and the French, but the leaders of the international socialist revolution.