This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Monday, August 04, 2014
As
The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End
All Wars) Starts ... Some Remembrances-August 4, 1914 German Social-Democrats Support The Kaiser's War Budget -
The Collapse of the Socialist International in the First World War
“To forget is counter-revolutionary.”*
“If our resolution does not foresee any specific method of action for the vast diversity of eventualities,” said Jean Jaurès in urging the adoption of the famous anti-war resolution of the Second International at its special conference in Basel on November 24, 1912, “neither does it exclude any. It serves notice upon the governments, and it draws their attention clearly to the fact that [by war] they would easily create a revolutionary situation, yes, the most revolutionary situation imaginable.”
So the resolution did. The unanimous vote cast for the memorable document of Basel marked the highest point ever reached by the Second International. It was a solemn warning, not one syllable of which nurtured the illusion of “national defense”, that the allied socialist parties of the entire world would reply to an imperialist war as did the Parisian masses in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian war and the Russian workers in 1906 after the Russo-Japanese war.
The great betrayal of socialism in 1914 by the Second International consisted in trampling in trench-mud the Basel anti-war resolution and the whole of revolutionary socialist tradition. The main parties of the International had become so closely interwoven with the fate and interests of the capitalist fatherland that the declaration of 1912 was little more than a heroic echo of a revolutionary past. The vast institutions they had built up, the trade unions they had expanded, the steady growth of their parliamentary strength – all these conjured up in the minds of the socialist parties an idyllic picture of the cooperative commonwealth gradually emerging out of capitalist society without serious disturbances or convulsions.
That a war would actually break out, seemed a remote prospect. How to combat it if it actually supervened, was a problem about which few cudgelled their brains. When the International made its last impotent gesture by, a special Bureau session at Brussels hastily convened after the Austrian ultimatum to Servia, “it is remarkable,” wrote Kautsky six later years, “that the thought! never occurred to anyone of us who was there to bring up the question of what to do if the war breaks out before then [before the special congress which was called for August 9] ? What position would the socialist parties have to adopt in this war?”
The fact is, as the Austrian chauvinist Karl Seitz pointed out, “The world war caught us unprepared.” Unprepared to act like revolutionists against the imperialist war, but thoroughly prepared to support it with jingo enthusiasm. Nor was the bourgeoisie unaware of the inclinations of its respective social democracies. Quite the contrary. And these inclinations were part of the calculations of the warmongers who were driving towards action at a terrific speed in those crucial days.
“I never had any doubts about the patriotic sentiments of the social democracy in the event of war,” read the memoirs of Victor Naumann, the intimate of the later Chancellor, Hertling, “and never understood the Berlin policy which constantly brought up the fearful question: will not the conduct of the social democracy, at the outbreak of a great war, produce severe conflicts in the interior which would be disastrous for the conduct of the struggle?”
In Berlin, six days after the ringing manifesto of the party leadership had proclaimed its opposition to the war which was clearly impending, the undeceived “war ministry released at 8 o’clock, July 31, with the following communication to the General Command: According to reliable information, the Social Democratic party has the firm intention of conducting itself in a manner becoming to every German under the present conditions.” (See the memoirs of General Wrisberg.)
The assurance of the War Ministry was better than well-founded. The dominant group in the party leadership and in the Reichstag fraction had already determined to support the fatherland in the war – to support it regardless of whether this view was supported by the majority or not. Hermann Mueller had been dispatched to Paris to feel out the French socialists. The Austrians and Russians had already announced their mobilization orders. Mueller proposed not to vote for war credits in the Reichstag if the Frenchmen would act similarly. “That we shall vote for the war credits, I consider out of the question.” Renaudel and his confrères were agreeable – unless “France is attacked”; then the party would vote like a man for credits. Mueller returned empty-handed.
The Reichstag fraction met with the party executive; Kautsky, among others, was invited to attend. The chauvinists prevailed. Kautsky could not summon enough courage to advocate a vote against the war credits; he proposed abstention. Neither the Left wing nor the Right would listen – so he proposed to vote for the credits with a “demand” upon the government for certain assurances! Out of several score votes cast, Liebknecht and his friends rallied a bare 14. By fraction discipline they were forbidden to vote against the credits in the Reichstag.
On August 4 the horrible tragedy occurred. Three days before the Kaiser had already pardoned his former opponents: “I know no more parties – I know only Germans.” In his throne speech he addressed himself to his minions: “Looking upon you today, honorable gentlemen, is the whole German people, rallied around its princes and leaders. Arrive at your decisions unanimously and speedily – that is my innermost wish.”
Amid applause from the Junker reaction such as had never before been vouchsafed it, the German social democracy replied to a man. Hugo Haase rose in the afternoon session of the Reichstag on August 4, the only speaker on the list, and read off the statement of the fraction which had previously been submitted for approbation to Chancellor Bethmann-Holweg! “Now we are making good what we have always stressed: in the hour of danger we do not leave the fatherland in the lurch.” The hall rang with tumultuous Bravos. For the first time in German history, the social democracy joined in the frenzied Hoch der Kaiser!
The Austrian social democracy, already up to its ears in the chauvinist swamp, cheered effusively. Austerlitz wrote Der Tag der deutschen Nation, his infamous editorial in the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung of August 5:
“Man by man the German social democrats voted for the loan. Like the entire international social democracy, our Reichs-German party, that jewel of the organization of the class conscious proletariat, is also the most vigorous opponent of war, the most passionate supporter of concord and solidarity of the people ... Never did a party act more grandly and loftily than this German social democracy which proved its worth at this extremely serious moment.”
For others it was harder to believe that the classic party of the Second International had committed so heinous a crime. Even Lenin, whose illusions were few enough about the German social democracy, could not bring himself to believe the report. “It cannot be, it must be a forged number,” he told Zinoviev when the first copy of the BerlinVorwärts arrived in his Galician exile. “Those scoundrels, the German bourgeoisie, have especially published such a number of the Vorwärts in order also to compel us to go against the International.”
In Bucharest, the organ of the Rumanian social democracy, Rominia Muncitoare, condemned the report that Haase had approved war credits in the Reichstag as a “monstrous lie”, and to substantiate its view, proudly reprinted the anti-war speech which “Bebel’s successor” had delivered in Brussels only the week before. As late as August 13, it still wrote: “As to the Arbeiterzeitung, if it still exists, it must have passed into the camp of the Austrian officialdom in order to disseminate the government’s lies about the socialists.” Only at the end of the month did it accept as truth what was truth; it reprinted Haase’s declaration with a bewildered, stupefied comment.
“The war burst asunder the International, it was its first great victim,” wrote Friedrich Adler dejectedly. “The Second International is dead, the Third must be built,” said Lenin; and at that moment there were only two others to hear him, Zinoviev and Krupskaia. The International was dead – not just the German social democracy.
On July 29, 1914, the peerless Jaurès was still saying at Brussels : “As for us French socialists, our duty is simple; we have no need of imposing a policy of peace upon our government. It is practising one ... I have the right to say that at the present hour the French government wants peace and is working for its preservation.” Jaurès – Jaurès who had been second to none in laying bare the base diplomatic intrigues between France and Russia, but who could not elevate himself to an understanding of the motive forces of imperialist politics! As the words fell from his eloquent lips, the Russian ambassador at Paris, Izvolsky, was sending a telegram in code to Sazonov in St. Petersburg to inform the Czar that Viviani had given renewed assurances of the determination of France to act in full harmony with the Russians. Everything was ready for the European war, and Jaurès was in the toils of illusion. Three days later he was murdered by the assassin Raoul Villain as he sat with his friends in a restaurant.
On August 4, the French Chamber of Deputies also rang with an unprecedented unity. The whole socialist fraction joined in the vote for all the government measures, for war credits, for proclaiming a state of siege, for the suppression of free press and free assemblage. “It is a matter today of the future of the nation, of the life of France. The party has not hesitated,” exclaimed the manifesto of the party. “Spontaneously, without waiting for any other manifestation of the popular will, he [the head of the government] has appealed to our party. Our party has replied: Here!”
“On July 14,” read the cynical memoirs of L.-O. Frossard, patriot in 1914, Socialist party secretary in 1920, Communist party secretary in 1921, and patriot all over again now, in 1934, “we voted the resolution of Vaillant:Rather the insurrection than war! On July 31, we grabbed a rifle and ran to the frontiers crying: Vive la France!”
On August 27, Marcel Sembat entered the cabinet of the Sacred Union as minister of public works, and Jules Guesde – Guesde the Master! the orthodox Marxist! – as minister without portfolio. Later Albert Thomas became under-secretary of state of munitions. Marcel Cachin took the place of Jaurès at the head of l’Humanité, and like the German chauvinist Suedekum who represented the Kaiser in flying trips to Italy, Rumania and Sweden, he was sent to persuade the Italian socialists to help the Entente; they gave him a cold reception, but he boasted on his return that the King of Italy had helped him on with his overcoat.
Vaillant, the old Blanquist whose articles in l’Humanité became so violently jingoist that even the editors felt constrained to eliminate them little by little, until he was completely silenced by death in 1915, wrote when the war began: “In face of the aggression, the socialists will fulfill their whole duty for the fatherland, for the republic and for the revolution.” “More than that,” answered the satisfied editor of Le Temps on August 4, “we do not ask of M. Edouard Vaillant and his friends.”
Each social patriot sought to outdo his fellow, and the bourgeoisie itself. “Come generals! We are giving you men, give us victories!” cried Compère-Morel. “We promise to fulfill our duty completely, as Frenchmen and as socialists faithful to the International,” came the pledge made at Jaurès’ grave by Marcel Cachin, who later fulfilled his duty just as completely under Stalin. “When seven French departments are invaded, when cities in the army zone, like those from which I write these lines, live under the constant menace of German cannon, it is impossible to say, be it only seemingly, to those who are fighting: we refuse you the means of defending yourselves,” wrote Frossard.
“Cruel as the sacrifices for it are, the war must and will be pursued to its liberating finish. The finest, the most heroic army that France has ever had, seconded and supported by the firm resolve of the nation, will give her the victory that will be her salvation, the salvation of Europe, the salvation of the peoples, the salvation of democracy and socialism in the entire world,” were the prophetic words of Vaillant. “Who then is fighting against the work of national defense? (Who then is disinterested in the fate of the country? Is there then any incompatibility between the International and the fatherland ?” asked the same Paul Faure who in 1934 pledges himself so glibly to lead the French proletariat in the struggle against war.
And Hervé who clamored at the Limoges congress in 1906 for a resolution declaring the need of replying to every declaration of war with a military strike and an insurrection, who exclaimed “We detest our fatherlands, we are anti-patriots!”, wrote a demagogic plea to the Minister of War on August 2, 1914, begging as a special favor to be sent to the front with the first infantry regiment “in spite of my myopia and my forty-three years”; in 1915 he changed his La Guerre Sociale into the chauvinist La Victoire.
The Belgian socialists took the same road. With the blessing of the party, Emile Vandervelde joined the reactionary clerical cabinet of his most august majesty, Albert, king of the Belgians and butcher of the Congo. Louis de Brouckère, who had served a term of six months in his youth for an anti-militarist article, quit the editorship of Le Peuple to join the aviation corps. Into the same nationalist wave plunged the young “radical”, Henri de Man, who enlisted in the army with the same enthusiasm with which he now seeks to enlist the radical Belgian proletariat for his equally treacherous “plan”.
In England, the Labour party was enthusiastically bellicose. Arthur Henderson, John Hodge, Brace and Roberts joined the government of National Defense. The Independent Labour party adopted a pacifist position, but its members in the Parliament never voted against the war budget. Ramsay MacDonald, who gained a reputation for opposition to the war, nevertheless wrote the mayor of his constituency, Leicester, endorsing the recruiting drive and spoke at the ILP conference in 1916 against expelling the chauvinists Clynes and Parker because he “was not going to say that men who had participated in the recruiting campaign should be turned out of socialist organizations”!
H.M. Hyndman, who had advocated preparedness, together with Robert Blatchford, long before! the war, turned bitter-end patriot and wrote: “Everybody must eagerly desire the final defeat of Germany.” His party split in two, one wing forming the internationalist British Socialist party. H.G. Wells left his Utopias to swim lustily in the jingo pool and kept shouting for Germany to be put to the sword. Bernard Shaw cut a pitiful figure throughout: “We shall punch Prussia’s head all the more gloriously if we do it for honor and not for malice. Then, when we have knocked all the militarism out of her and taught her to respect us, we can let her up again.”
In Bulgaria, the leaders of the Right wing “Broad” socialists, Sakasoff, Pastukoff and Dsidroff concluded a civil peace with their bourgeoisie and entered the cabinet, first of Malinoff and then of Theodoroff.
In Poland, the split in the ranks of the International was more favorable to the Left wing than in many other countries. After having denounced the reactionary Polish Club of the Austrian chamber as the “Shlakhzizenklubs”, the leader of the Polish Social Democracy in Austro-Hungary, Daszinsky, together with the other Austro-Polish social democrats, joined it in a burst of national enthusiasm. Together with the reactionary Polish Socialist party, they made open and common cause with the Hapsburg monarchy, established the Supreme National Committee of patriots, formed the Polish Legion with Josef Pilsudski at its head and fought for Polonia Irredenta.
The Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania (the party of Rosa Luxemburg and Jogisches), joined with the Left wing of the PPS and the Bund in an anti-war position and proclaimed: “The proletariat declares war upon its governments, its oppressors!”
In Holland, all the Right wing socialists voted for military credits “for the protection of neutrality” – while the group of Gorter, Pannekoek, Roland-Holst and Wijnkoop (the Tribunists) took a militant internationalist stand.
In equally neutral Sweden, the social democrats, allies of the tools of French imperialism, sent Hjalmar Branting and three other party leaders into the Eden cabinet; Branting later became president of the council. In Denmark, the social democrats, here the allies of the tools of German imperialism, permitted Stauning to accept a ministerial post in the bourgeois cabinet.
Treachery, opportunism, conservatism, chauvinism – these were the victors of the day. And not even the revolutionary traditions of the Russian movement rendered it immune from them.
Plekhanov, the scintillating Marxist, the godfather of the whole Russian party, the man with whom others broke but never ceased to admire, sank to the level of drummer-boy to czarist imperialism. “The marauders are at the borders of my country and are ready to rob and murder.” “Make your; reservations,” he urged the Duma deputy Burianov, “ – this is absolutely necessary – but vote for the credits. The rejection of the credits would be a betrayal [of the people] and abstention would be cowardice, vote for the credits!” The old man was for the imperialist war, for saving the French bourgeoisie in the name of the revolution of 1789, against the barbarism of the German Junkers
Together with such Bolsheviks-turned-patriot as Alexinsky and Liubimov, he joined hands at Lausanne in 1915 with turncoat Social Revolutionists like Avksentiev, Bunakov, Voronov and Argunov to launch the chauvinist paper Priziv.
The Mensheviks, those abroad in particular, under Martov’s leadership, took up an internationalist position, but they never strayed far from the Centrist camp of Kautsky. Trotsky, with a group of Bolsheviks and Left wing Mensheviks, took over the Parisian Nashe Slovo, fought for a revolutionary internationalist position until deported to Spain, but did not reconcile himself with the Bolsheviks until after the March revolution. Lenin and Zinoviev, speaking for the Bolshevik Central Committee abroad, in Switzerland, were like a voice crying in a mad, war-devastated wilderness for their far advanced, consistent revolutionary position.
Names which once commanded nothing but respect in the Russian movement were now associated with service in the camp of czarist imperialism. Parvus, as an exception, joined the service of German imperialism. Plekhanov, Alexinsky who later passed openly into the camp of czarism, Potressov, Mazlov, Cherevanin, Vera Sassulich, Ida Axelrod, to say nothing of the prince-regent of the anarchists, Kropotkin, all became social patriots. In Russia especially, the Mensheviks took an ambiguous Centrist position, or else became semi-pacifist, semi-collaborationists in the war.
Outside of Russia, nobody could be found to support the drastic thesis of Lenin in favor of revolutionary defeatism, for a thoroughgoing break with the Centrists of all shadings – nobody. And even in the Bolshevik party itself, very few, certainly in the first period of the war, were those who stood by the Swiss exiles.
Hundreds of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks enlisted in the French army, fearing that a German victory would mean the end of European civilization. Another Bolshevik group, centered around Lunacharsky, published Vperiod in Switzerland, confining its program to the demands for peace without annexations or indemnities, general disarmament, and a United States of Europe. In the leading circles in Russia, matters were still worse. There the distinction between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was often difficult to discern – at times for cause.
In the August 8, 1914 session of the Duma, convened by the Czar to demonstrate the national unity of the Russians, the Menshevik Khaustov read a joint declaration of the deputies from both social democratic fractions, which declared their refusal to vote war credits. But, it added, in order to show that their refusal did not breathe the spirit of support for the Central powers, they would abstain on the vote – a position which instead breathed the spirit of support for Kautsky’s position. (The socialist deputy Manikov, who did vote for war credits and “civil peace”, was immediately expelled from the Menshevik fraction.)
In November 1914, the Bolshevik deputies, Badayev, Petrovsky, Samoilov, Shagov and Muranov, together with the representative of the Central Committee, Kamenev, were arrested at a secret meeting where Lenin’s startling theses on the war were just being considered. At the trial of the six, they declared that the theses were a draft, from abroad, but that they themselves were not in agreement with it. In their appeal against the verdict, all the defendants declared themselves expressly against points 6 and 7 in Lenin’s theses because they “contradicted the declaration which was read in the name of the two fractions on August 8” and moreover “were not shared either by social democratic deputies or by the central instances of the party”.
Point 6 dealt with revolutionary defeatism as the lesser evil for the proletariat; point 7 dealt with the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war against the bourgeoisie! Yaroslavky’s history euphemistically dismisses the whole affair with the judgment: “It is true that not all the accused adopted an equally worthy attitude.”
In the United States, the party also divided into two main camps. With the war in its third year, the American Socialist party called an emergency convention in St. Louis at which the famous majority resolution was adopted, taking a militant attitude against the impending war. Except for Debs, Coldwell and a few dozen others, none of the leaders of the party outside of the militant Left wing, organized but tiny, ever allowed the majority resolution to leave the paper it was written on. The semi-patriotic, semi-pacifist minority resolution, signed among others by John Spargo, George H. Goebel, Cameron! H. King, Charles Edward Russell and the present party chairman, Leo Krzycki, really represented the course pursued by the authoritative party leaders in action – the legend of the St. Louis resolution to the contrary notwithstanding.
The extreme Right wing split off from the party, and with Phelps Stokes, Henry Slobodin, William English Walling, Charles Edward Russell, A.M. Simons, Alexander Howat, Louis Kopelin, John Spargo and several other patriots – many if not most of whom had but yesterday been the most insubmersible phrase-revolutionists – they formed the Social Democratic League and, together with the AF of L bureaucracy, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy. Upton Sinclair, Haldemann-Julius, Leroy Scott and Robert Rives La Monte, who bemoaned the fact that he was too old to shoulder a musket, turned proper jingo.
The official party promptly forgot the St. Louis resolution. Meyer London, its lone Congressman, conducted himself disgracefully, never used the floor to attack the war, and confined his antiwar activity to voting in favor of or not voting against practically all the war measures and appropriations. The socialist aldermen in New York City voted for Liberty Bonds and a Victory Arch. The ousted New York state assemblymen protested their patriotism with a piteous earnestness that would have wrung tears from rock.
Hillquit announced in 1917: “I do not advocate an immediate separate peace, a withdrawal by America. Nothing that I have ever said or written could justify such a sweeping assertion ... I want America to act, not to withdraw.” The National Executive Committee issued a manifesto in the same year saying: “We are not discouraging enlistments. We are not obstructing the conduct of the war.” And while Debs went to prison, the party’s struggle against war was entirely submerged and dissolved into then pacifist People’s Council – the League against War and Fascism of its day.
It seemed that the whole International had turned delirious with war fever. All the hidden jingoism of the socialist leaders came to the surface as the flames of war burned off the thin veneer of their Marxian phraseology.
The French, and Belgians and English became the most inflamed “jusqu’au boutistes” – bitter-enders. In Austria, Pernerstorfer took care to explain that the tiny anti-war minority was composed riot merely of academicians, but of Jews. Austerlitz wrote bloodcurdling leaders – “On to Paris” – in the Arbeiterzeitung. The Reichenberger Vorwärts under Joseph Strasser, the only paper in the dual monarchy to take a revolutionary position, was suppressed by the government and its place taken by a Right wing organ which outdid its Viennese model.
In Germany, social democrats went from patriotism to open imperialism. Heilmann, who demanded the conquest of the Baltic, shouted: “Let the eternally vacillating figures suddenly desire to play the strains of the International – as for me, I go to Hindenburg!” Meerfeld claimed that the rejection of annexations was un-Marxian. Landsberg explained that the annexation of Poland up to the Narev line was still far from a wild annexationist policy.
Not only the old opportunists, but many who had but yesterday distinguished themselves by a fiery oratorical or literary revolutionism overnight became just as fiery patriots – a somersault which was psychologically explained by Freidrich Adler, and not so wrongly as “Kriegsbegeisterung als Überkompensation der Insurrektionsgelüste” – war frenzy as an over-compensation of lust for insurrection. Heinrich Cunow, who signed the original antiwar protest of the Vorwärts editors, quickly leaped to the right, was later rewarded with Kautsky’s post as editor of Die Neue Zeit, and propagated the theory that imperialism was an inevitable and progressive stage of capitalism against which nothing could be done.
Paul Lensch, another of the radicals who voted against war credits on August 3 in the fraction, soon occupied himself with proving by Marxism that the fraction could not have acted otherwise than it did. Konrad Haenisch, another of yesterday’s wordy radicals, described his own transformation in a rapturous paean which should never be forgotten:
“Not for everything in the world would I live again through those days of inner struggle! That impulsive ardent yearning to fling yourself into the vast stream of the general national flood-tide, and from the other side, the terrible fear of the soul to follow this yearning relentlessly, to surrender entirely to the mood which roared and raged all around you and which, did you but peer into your heart, had already long ago taken possession of your very insides! That fear: shall you not become a scoundrel to yourself and your cause – should you too feel the way your heart commands? Until at last – I shall not forget the day and hour – the terrific tension suddenly snaps, and you dare to be what you really were; until – despite all petrified principles and wooden theories – for the first time (the first time for almost a quarter of a century!) with swelling heart, with clear conscience, and without any fear of thereby becoming a traitor, you join in the tempestuous storm-song: Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles!”
To swim against this stream – no, not a stream, a torrent! – how many were there? Internationalism was submerged, and true internationalists could be found only with the greatest difficulty. Only those with the stoutest hearts, only those inspired with the most deep-rooted conviction, believed that the International – the new International – could and would be rebuilt, that the) social revolution would rise triumphant from the blood-soaked trenches. And they were completely isolated!
Whatever opposition to the war manifested itself in the first period was for the most part pacifist, vacillatory, cowardly – in a word, Kautskyan. And even this tendency made little headway until it became clear that the prevalent optimism – “The war will last only three months!” – rested on self-deception.
The Independent Labour party was overwhelmingly pacifist in its policy; the Communist movement finally emerged out of such tiny revolutionary anti-war groups as the British Socialist party, the Socialist Labour party, the Shop Stewards’ movement. In France, the predominant anti-war tendency was for a long time; that led by Longuet and his friends, for whom Woodrow Wilson was the new Messiah.
Even the French Zimmerwaldians did not all stay with the revolution to the end. Of that little group which was so heavily influenced by Trotsky, few remained with the revolutionary movement. Merrheim, the most popular of the Zimmerwaldians, turned Wilsonian, and then became a violent enemy of Communism and the Soviets; Bourderon soon returned to the bosom of the social democracy; Brizon, who also became a Wilsonian, returned from Kienthal with the report that he had had “to defend France inch by inch against Lenin” and his thesis on defeatism; Monatte returned to syndicalism, and Loriot died as a Communist who withdrew to the position of syndicalism; Rosmer outlasted most of them, and then retired from active political life.
In Germany, the brave internationalists assembled around immortal Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht constituted only a handful, and even here it required all the persuasiveness at Rosa’s command to convince Liebknecht of the imperative need of breaking openly the discipline of the social patriots. The main stream of proletarian anti-war sentiment flowed in the channels of Centrism, and was vitiated by Kautsky and Bernstein. “We too wanted to bring about the speedy termination of the war,” wrote the former, “but not by means of a revolutionary rising, which seemed to us improbable ...”
In Italy, where the Socialist party took a militant anti-war position, where the patriots like Bissolati, Cabrini and, Bonomi, had already been expelled in 1912 for supporting the Tripolitan war adventure (expelled on the motion of Benito Mussolini!), the most authoritative leaders were unable, for years, to bring themselves to a separation from the Right wing and Centrist elements which would have permitted the speedy – the timely! – growth of a strong revolutionary party.
Only in a few parties did the revolutionary Marxists find support: among the Russian Bolsheviks, the courageous Servian socialists, the Rumanians, the Bulgarians, some of the Swiss and Scandinavians, the Hollanders, and very few others.
As for the rest, the imposing idea of transforming the imperialist war into the war for the social revolution, took their very breath away. The thesis of revolutionary defeatism as the lesser evil for the proletariat, far from meeting with a favorable response, encountered savage attack. And most fantastic of all appeared the idea in which was concentrated the most urgent need of the revolutionary proletariat of that period: the irrevocable break with the Second International and the founding of the Third International. Even those who; would acknowledge that the former had failed, would not agree that it was bankrupt and had to be discarded. For the first years of the war, Lenin and the consistent Marxists were practically alone, and few, very few.
Twenty of history’s most amazing years have passed since the colossal tragedy of August 4, 1914. The working class is at the conjunction of three crucial processes: the Second International has succeeded in regaining if not its lost progressive character then at least the grudging support of millions of workers; the Third International has lost both its progressive character and the support of the masses who flocked to it in the early years after the war; the world is plunging with terrifying speed into the abyss of a new world war.
And because war is not merely inevitable under capitalism, but is actually impending as this is written. Because the Stalinist International is even less capable of leading the struggle against the new imperialist carnage than it was of leading the struggle against Hitlerism. Because the Second International remains true to itself and to its past, true to its bourgeois fatherlands, because tomorrow it will enter the service with the war-cry of “Democracy versus Fascism!” as it did twenty years ago with the war-cry of “Democracy versus Kaiserism!” or “Kultur versus Czarism!” – we in turn have raised the war-cry of “For the proletarian revolution to end imperialist war!” “For the Fourth International to lead the proletarian revolution!”
What the slogan of the Third International was in the last war, the watchword of the Fourth International shall be in the next: the rallying banner of all that is alive and vigorous in the proletarian movement, the avenger of the exploited and oppressed and martyred, the executor of the testament of our death, the intrepid challenger and deadly enemy of the ruling class and all class rule. And; it will have among its mottoes the stirring inscription on Schiller’s symbolic clock:
Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango.
I summon the living, I mourn the dead, I shatter the thunderbolts!
* OSKAR KANEHL.
Max SHACHTMAN
New International, August 1934
Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night- The Songs of Tom Waits-Take Four
From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin-
A YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night
If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of the bourgeois-driven push (okay, okay maybe going back further to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys)to get ahead in this wicked old world leaving you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city where youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, landed on your ass more than a few time but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done. Yeah so if you are wondering then what, have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed you off your sainted wheels, and got you into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, not faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half, sisters and brothers), and need some solace, need to reach back to roots, reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter (oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay).
If the norms of don’t rock the boat, the norms of keep your head down, keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual, and excuse, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, speaking some unknown language maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.
If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run,recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side, sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, gotten it taken away like some maiden virginity, those who never had anything but lost, not those who never had a way to be lost), dopesters inhaling, in solidarity hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor stiff out of his room rent for kicks, out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote if that earth angel connection comes through, creating vision of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get“connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night), hipsters (all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving), fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japans ), the driftless (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them”too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.
If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore –mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup trestle, some Hoboken broken down pier, the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world, then Tom Waits is your stop.
Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record (CD okay) and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living, looking for busted black-hearted angels (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless gin mill), for girls with Monroe hips (swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and flaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells (descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys, get real, and left for dead with cigar wrapping rings, for the desperate out in forsaken woods who need to hold to something, and for all the misbegotten.
Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Dove Linkhorns of the world, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores, having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, the wretched of the earth and their kin, far from it, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear and occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Finally, if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.
*************
Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Defenders Of The International Working Class-From Our Forebears The Diggers Of The English Revolution-“The World Turned Upside Down”
A YouTube film clip of Billy Bragg (Known In This Space As Narrator Of Woody Guthrie And His Guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists )performing The World Turned Upside Down.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around.Organize the unorganized-Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran!Hands Off Syria! U.S. Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Quality Free Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
*********
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
**********
Markin comment:
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
THE FOLLOWING IS A SONG BASED ON THE DIGGER EXPERIENCE IN 1650
If John Milton was the literary muse of the English Revolution then the Diggers and their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, were the political muses.
The World Turned Upside Down
We will not worship the God they serve, a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve.
In 1649 to St. George's Hill
A ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people's
will
They defied the landlords, they defied the laws
They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.
We come in peace, they said, to dig and sow
We come to work the lands in common and make the waste
ground grow
This earth divided we will make whole
So it may be a common treasury for all "**
The sin of property we do disdain
No man has any right to buy or sell the earth for private gain
By theft and murder they took the land
Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command
They make the laws to chain us well
The clergy dazzle us with heaven, or they damn us into hell
We will not worship the God they serve,
a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve
We work and eat together, we need no swords
We will not bow to masters, nor pay rent to the lords
Still we are free, though we are poor
Ye Diggers all, stand up for glory, stand up now!
From the men of property the orders came
They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers'
claim
Tear down their cottages, destroy their corn
They were dispersed - only the vision lingers on
Ye poor take courage, ye rich take care
This earth was made a common treasury for everyone to share
All things in common, all people one
They came in peace - the order came to cut them down
WORDS AND MUSIC BY LEON ROSSELSON, 1981
Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel
From The Archives Of Women And Revolution
Markin comment:
The following is a set of archival issues of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting articles from the back issues ofWomen and Revolution during Women's History Month in March and periodically throughout the year.
Markin comment on founding member James P. Cannon and the early American Communist Party taken from a book review, James P. Cannon and the Early American Communist Party, on the “American Left History” blog:
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past mistakes of our history and want to know some of the problems that confronted the early American Communist Party and some of the key personalities, including James Cannon, who formed that party this book is for you.
At the beginning of the 21st century after the demise of the Soviet Union and the apparent ‘death of communism’ it may seem fantastic and utopian to today’s militants that early in the 20th century many anarchist, socialist, syndicalist and other working class militants of this country coalesced to form an American Communist Party. For the most part, these militants honestly did so in order to organize an American socialist revolution patterned on and influenced by the Russian October Revolution of 1917. James P. Cannon represents one of the important individuals and faction leaders in that effort and was in the thick of the battle as a central leader of the Party in this period. Whatever his political mistakes at the time, or later, one could certainly use such a militant leader today. His mistakes were the mistakes of a man looking for a revolutionary path.
For those not familiar with this period a helpful introduction by the editors gives an analysis of the important fights which occurred inside the party. That overview highlights some of the now more obscure personalities (a helpful biographical glossary is provided), where they stood on the issues and insights into the significance of the crucial early fights in the party.
These include questions which are still relevant today; a legal vs. an underground party; the proper attitude toward parliamentary politics; support to third- party bourgeois candidates;trade union policy; class-war prisoner defense as well as how to rein in the intense internal struggle of the various factions for organizational control of the party. This makes it somewhat easier for those not well-versed in the intricacies of the political disputes which wracked the early American party to understand how these questions tended to pull it in on itself. In many ways, given the undisputed rise of American imperialism in the immediate aftermath of World War I, this is a story of the ‘dog days’ of the party. Unfortunately, that rise combined with the international ramifications of the internal disputes in the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International shipwrecked the party as a revolutionary party toward the end of this period.
In the introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? I would argue that the period under study represented Cannon’s apprenticeship. Although the hothouse politics of the early party clarified some of the issues of revolutionary strategy for him I believe that it was not until he linked up with Trotsky in the late 1920’s that he became the kind of leader who could lead a revolution. Of course, since Cannon never got a serious opportunity to lead revolutionary struggles in America this is mainly reduced to speculation on my part. Later books written by him make the case better. One thing is sure- in his prime he had the instincts to want to lead a revolution.
As an addition to the historical record of this period this book is a very good companion to the two-volume set by Theodore Draper - The Roots of American Communism and Soviet Russia and American Communism- the definitive study on the early history of the American Communist Party. It is also a useful companion to Cannon’s own The First Ten Years of American Communism. I would add that this is something of a labor of love on the part of the editors. This book was published at a time when the demise of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was in full swing and anything related to Communist studies was deeply discounted. Nevertheless, for better or worse, the American Communist Party (and its offshoots) needs to be studied as an ultimately flawed example of a party that failed in its mission to create a radical version of society in America. Now is the time to study this history.
The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left
Click below to link to The Rag Blog
http://www.theragblog.com/
Peter Paul Markin comment:
When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers from what I now call the “Generation Of ‘68”, we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics. Those scorned old leftists, mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us young stalwart in-your-face- rebels who were going to re-invent the world, re-invent it without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human progress.
Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads. Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists. Problem is that unlike our 1960s generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be. That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.
So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left-wing militants.
A Markin disclaimer:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Sometimes I will comment on my disagreements and sometimes I will just let the author/writer shoot him or herself in the foot without note. Off hand, as I have mentioned before in other contexts, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in the entries on this website. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. Read on.
It is a grave error to attack Jews anywhere based on the actions of the Israeli government.
Protest in Lyon, France, July 16, 2014, against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Demonstrations in Europe, especially in France, are becoming increasingly anti-Semitic. Photo by AFT.
By David McReynolds | The Rag Blog | July 20, 2014
In recent days there has been a flurry of anti-Semitic outbursts in France and elsewhere, clearly triggered by Israel’s military actions against the Palestinians in Gaza. I’m depressed enough about the whole situation that I have not yet written my own views on the tragedy of Gaza, but it is crucial that no one, anywhere in the world, should take out on a local Jewish community center or synagogue their justified anger against the Israeli regime.
Many Jews outside of Israel do support the Israeli actions, and many have openly opposed those actions. Indeed, some of the leading and sharpest critics of Israel have come from the Jewish community. Continue reading →
You can also call (Comments”202-456-1111), write The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, e-mail-(http://www.whitehouse.gov’contact/submitquestions-and comments) to demand that President Obama use his constitutional power under Article II, Section II to pardon Private Manning now.
*Start a stand -out, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, in your town square to publicize the pardon and clemency campaigns. Contact the Private Manning SupportNetwork for help with materials and organizing tips http://www.bradleymanning.org/
*Contribute to the Private Manning Defense Fund- now that the trial has finished funds are urgently needed for pardon campaign and for future military and civilian court appeals. The hard fact of the American legal system, military of civilian, is the more funds available the better the defense, especially in political prisoner cases like Private Manning’s. The government had unlimited financial and personnel resources to prosecute Private Manning at trial. And used them as it will on any future legal proceedings. So help out with whatever you can spare. For link go to http://www.bradleymanning.org/
*Write letters of solidarity to Private Manning while she is serving her sentence. She wishes to be addressed as Chelsea and have feminine pronouns used when referring to her. Private Manning’s mailing address: Bradley E. Manning, 89289, 1300 N. Warehouse Road, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-2304. You must use Bradley on the address envelope.
Private Manning cannot receive stamps or money in any form. Photos must be on copy paper. Along with “contraband,” “inflammatory material” is not allowed. Six page maximum.
*Call: (913) 758-3600-Write to:Col. Sioban Ledwith, Commander U.S. Detention Barracks 1301 N Warehouse Rd Ft. Leavenworth KS 66027-Tell them: “Transgender rights are human rights! Respect Private Manning’s identity by acknowledging the name ‘Chelsea Manning’ whenever possible, including in mail addressed to her, and by allowing her access to appropriate medical treatment for gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy (HRT).” (for more details-http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/2013/11/respecting-chelseas-identity-is-this.html#!/2013/11/respecting-chelseas-identity-is-this.html *******
As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Starts ... Some Remembrances-August 4, 1914 German Social-Democrats Support The Kaiser's War Budget -The Great Working- Class Betrayal
Markin comment on the meaning of August 4th for
the revolutionary socialist movement:
As we take note of, or better and more
useful, etch into our political calculations the great betrayal of the German
Social-Democracy in voting for the Kaiser’s war budget on this day we should
after 100 years have no illusions about the nature of the leadership of that
great working-class organization. Those who were close to the scene, those in
the left-wing of the party and who had been most vocal about opposition with the
war clouds looming all through the early part of the 20th century, the
likes of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, had been waging a rear-guard
action for years against the tendency of the party leadership to fudge on the
German war issue.
Whether Liebknecht and Luxemburg, like
Lenin, Trotsky and many other international socialists who looked to the German
party, Marx and Engels’ own party, were shocked into disbelief by the
leadership’s action is hard to know at this remove but what should be clear to
left-wing militants today is that they stayed in the official party far too
long once the ramifications of August 4th became clear and as the
war dragged on. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were, no question, personally heroic
when they formed the anti-war opposition within the party as the official leadership
continued to press for support of the never-ending war budget requests. What they
did not do and a matter which has been the subject of some debate over the
years was break off from the official party soon enough and subsequently the
Independent Socialists to which they adhered when working within the official party
became a moot question.
As the palpable anti-war resistance
grew among important segments of the German working-class (those not dragooned
into the army for the trenches on the various fronts) those militants, even if
originally a small independent group they could have posed a clear pole of attraction
for those militants looking for a way to oppose the war and prepare for the social
revolution. Sometimes, as the Bolshevik experiences during that same period
show, you have to fight against the stream. Fight hard. Enough said.
*********
From Leon Trotsky's War and the International
CHAPTER VII
THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTERNATIONAL
AT their Convention in Paris two weeks before the outbreak of the catastrophe, the French Socialists insisted on pledging all branches of the International to revolutionary action in case of a mobilization. They were ihinking chiefly of the German Social Democracy. The radicalism of the French Socialists in matters of foreign policy was rooted not so much in international as national interests. The events of the War have now definitely confirmed what was clear o many then. What the French Socialist Party desired from the sister party in Germany was a certain guarantee for the inviolability of France. They believed that only by thus insuring themselves with the German proletanat could they finally free their own hands for a decisive conilict with national militarism.
The German Social Democracy, for their part, flatly refused to make any such pledge. Bebel showed that if the Socialist parties signed the French resolution, that would not necessarily enable them to keep their pledge when the decisive moment came. Now there is little room for doubt that Bebel was right. As events have repeatedly proved, a period of mobilization almost completely cripples the Socialist Party, or at least precludes the possibility of decisive moves. Once mobilization is declared, the Social Democracy finds itself face to face with the concentrated power of the government, which is supported by a powerful military apparatus that is ready to crush all obstacles in its path and has the unqualified cooperation of all bourgeois parties and institutions.
And of no less importance is the fact that mobilization wakes up and brings to their feet those elements of the people whose social significance is slight and who play little or no political part in tirnes of peace. Hundreds of thousands, nay millions of petty hand-workers, of hobo-proletarians (the riff-raff of the workers), of small farmers and agricultural labourers are drawn into the ranks of the army and put into a uniform, in which each one of these men stands for just as much as the class-conscious workingman. They and their families are forcibly torn from their dull unthinking indifference and given an interest in the fate of their country. Mobilization and the declaration of war awaken fresh expectations in these circles whom our agitation practically does not reach and whom, under ordinary circumstances, it will never enlist. Confused hopes of a change in present conditions, of a change for the better, fill the hearts of these masses dragged out of the apathy of misery and servitude. The same thing happens as at the beginning of a revolution, but with one all-important difference. A revolution links these newly aroused elements with the revolutionary class, but war links them – with the government and the army! In the one case all the unsatisfied needs, all the accumulated suffering, all the hopes and longings find their expression in revolutionary enthusiasm; in the other case these same social emotions temporarily take the form of patriotic intoxication. Wide circles of the working class, even among those touched with Socialism, are carried along in the same current.
The advance guard of the Social Democracy feels it is in the minority; its organizations, in order to complete the organization of the army, are wrecked. Under such conditions there can be no thought of a revolutionary move on the part of the Party. And all this is quite independent of whether the people look upon a particularly war with favour or disfavour. In spite of the colonial character of the Russo-Japanese war and its unpopularity in Russia, the first half year of it nearly smothered the revolutionary movement. Consequently it is quite clear that, with the best intentions in the world, the Socialist parties cannot pledge themselves to obstructionist action at the time of mobilization, at a time, that is, when Socialism is more than ever politically isolated.
And therefore there is nothing particularly unexpected or discouraging in the fact that the working-class parties did not oppose military mobilization with their own revolutionary mobilization. Had the Socialists limited themselves to expressing condemnation of the present War, had they declined all responsibility for it and refused the vote of confidence in their governments as well as the vote for the war credits, they would have done their duty at the time. They would have taken up a position of waiting, the oppositional character of which would have been perfectly clear to the government as well as to the people. Further action would have been determined by the march of events and by those changes which the events of a war must produce on the people’s consciousness. The ties binding the International together would have been preserved, the banner of Socialism would have been unstained. Although weakened for the moment, the Social Democracy would have preserved a free hand for a decisive interference in affairs as soon as the change in the feelings of the working masses came about. And it is safe to assert that whatever influence the Social Democracy might have lost by such an attitude at the begnining of the War, it would have regained several times over once the inevitable turn in public sentiment had come about.
But if this did not happen, if the signal for war mobilization was also the signal for the fall of the International, if the national labour parties fell in line with their governments and the armies without a single protest, then there must be deep causes for it common to the entire International. It would be futile to seek these causes in the mistakes of individuals, in the narrowness of leaders and party committees. They must be sought in the conditions of the epoch in which the Socialist International first came into being and developed. Not that the unreliability of the leaders or the bewildered incompetence of the Executive Committee should ever be justified. By no means. But these are not fundamental factors. These must be sought in the historical conditions of an entire epoch. For it is not a question and we must be very straightforward with ourselves about this – of any particular mistake, not of any opportunist steps, not of any awkward statements in the various parliaments, not of the vote for the budget cast by the Social Democrats of the Grand Duchy of Baden [35], not of individual experiments of French ministerialism, not of the making or unmaking of this or that Socialist career. It is nothing less than the complete failure of the International in the most responsible historical epoch, for which all the previous achievements of Socialism can be considered merely as a preparation.
A review of historical events will reveal a number of facts and symptoms that should have aroused disquiet as to the depth and solidarity of Internationalism in the labour movement.
I am not referring to the Austrian Social Democracy. In vain did the Russian and Serbian Socialists look for clippings from articles on world politics in the Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung that they could use for Russian and Serbian workingmen without having to blush for the International. One of the most striking tendencies of this journal always was the defence of Austro-German imperialism not only against the outside enemy but also against the internal enemy – and the Vorwaerts was one of the internal enemies. There is no irony in saying that in the present crisis of the International the Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung remained truest to its past.
French Socialism reveals two extremes – an ardent patriotism, on the one hand, not free from enmity of Germany; on the other hand, the most vivid anti-patriotism of the Hervé type, which, as experience teaches, readily turns into the very opposite.
As for England, Hyndman’s Tory-tinged patriotism, supplementing his sectarian radicalism, has often caused the International political difficulties.
It was in far less degree that nationalistic symptoms could be detected in the German Social Democracy. To be sure, the opportunism of the South Germans grew up out of the soil of particularism, which was German nationalism in octavo form. But the South Germans were rightly considered the politically unimportant rear-guard of the party. Bebel’s promise to shoulder his gun in case of danger did not meet with a single-hearted reception. And when Noske repeated Bebel’s expression, he was sharply attacked in the party press. On the whole the German Social Democracy adhered more stricly to the line of internationalism than any other of the old Socialist Parties. But for that very reason it made the sharpest break with its past. To judge by the formal announcemnets of the party and the articles in the Socialist press, there is no connection between the Yesterday and Today of German Socialism.
But it is clear that such a catastrophe could not have occurred had not the conditions for it been prepared in previous times. The fact that two young parties, the Russian and ther Servbian, remained true to their international duties is by no means a confirmation of the Philistine philosophy, according to which loyalty to principle is a natural expression of immaturity. Yet this fact leads us to seek the causes of the collapse of the Second International in the very conditions of its development that least influenced its younger members.
