I
Emile Vendervelde, president of the Socialist International founded in 1889, itself successor to the International Workingmen's Association founded in 1864, reflected on the International's collapse one year into the Great War:
By a tragic coincidence just as delegates were preparing to attend the Congress of the International in Vienna, to celebrate its twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniversary, it was precisely in Vienna that arose the great catastrophe that divides the our peoples into two hostile camps…The greatest pain in my life has been to see the European workers divided against themselves. My greatest hope is to one day to see them reconciled.Footnote 1
The International was never reconciled in its old form, and the war crisis of 1914, when all constituent national parties excepting the Serbian and much of the Russian backed their own governments, has been taken as its representative epitaph ever since.
The ‘collapse’ was all the more striking because the International had so strongly projected a starkly anti-war message. As has been pointed out by Kevin Callahan, Paul Miller, and Douglas Newton, the Second International in effect caricatured its own public position in the hope that by so doing it would give the strongest possible signal to the Great Powers that foreign policy adventurism risked mass social upheaval.Footnote 2 Socialist propaganda also tended towards a prophylactic rhetoric of anti-nationalism to ‘keep the masses away from any imperialist ideology’, as Otto Bauer put it.Footnote 3
The famous ‘Resolution against War and Militarism’, passed at the 1907 Stuttgart Congress of the International, declared that it was the duty of socialist parties ‘to coordinate and increase to the utmost the efforts of the working class against war’. Only with careful circumspection did it state that socialists opposed wars ‘of aggression’ (Angriffskrieg) specifically. The corollary, that defensive wars were legitimate, was left entirely unstated. The resolution's rousing conclusion forcefully stated that the socialist duty in the event of war was ‘to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule’.Footnote 4 In 1912, with international tensions ratcheted up by turmoil in the Balkans, a declamatory resolution passed by an Extraordinary Congress of the International condemned war without evident qualification and issued threats of revolution supported by socialists if war did break out.Footnote 5 This was a straightforward message designed to maximize public mobilization. In 1912, there were labour movement protests against war in Bohemia, Hungary, Italy, England, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. About 100,000 marched in Paris, while meetings in forty-three German cities brought together 300,000.Footnote 6 Given the scale of this agitation, it is little wonder that socialist support for war in 1914 looked like an abandonment of principle. But the agitational language of the International was instrumental, deliberately one-dimensional, and calculated to inhibit a slide to war. It designedly played down the socialists' real commitment to national self-defence.
For the fifty years after the war, explanations for the collapse of the Second International oscillated between condemnations of its ‘helplessness’ and ‘betrayal’.Footnote 7 Georges Haupt complicated this picture in the 1970s by pointing out the unpreparedness of the International in 1914, but the historiographical binary remains tenacious.Footnote 8 Madeleine Rébérioux sees in the Second International's failure to stop the war an ‘utter helplessness’ in the face of a nationalist ‘perversion’ of proletarian class consciousness.Footnote 9 Jean-Jacques Becker finds the ‘the inability of the International to take concrete action’ to be a ‘ridiculous’ spectacle.Footnote 10 For Mural and Cursat Cinar, ‘organization dysfunction’ arising from a collision of domestic and internationalist concerns prevented effective action.Footnote 11
To be sure, careful studies have long acknowledged the hard realities confronting socialists and the complexities of their attitudes to wars of defence that contributed to the collapse.Footnote 12 Since Haupt, the ‘betrayal’ account has tended to give way somewhat in favour of a ‘genetic account’ in which the collapse of the Second International is ascribed to the rigidities of its prevalent culture of orthodox Marxism.Footnote 13 Still, the broad picture is familiar in the recent general histories. For Donald Sassoon, patriotism may not have been the socialists' ‘first reflex, but it emerged when their pacifism failed’.Footnote 14 Geoff Eley writes that it was the ‘powerlessness’ of the International that led socialists into active support of the war.Footnote 15
The ‘helplessness account’ is true but largely trivial. The Second International failed to prevent the First World War, but so too did the chancelleries of Europe. Socialists internationally believed that they had sufficient influence to weigh in the balance against a Great Power risking a general conflagration. They had some justification for so thinking.Footnote 16 They certainly hoped that protests against limited wars might prevent them escalating.Footnote 17 But once a general war was certain, the International well understood that there was nothing they could do to stop it. Ilya Rubanovich, a Russian representative, told the International Socialist Bureau on the eve of the Great War that ‘we shall not prevent [general war] once it is there. In this respect we have never entered into an obligation vis-à-vis the proletariat.’Footnote 18
The ‘betrayal narrative’ is insecure. The notion that socialists were harried into national chauvinism against their better instincts by working-class war-mania in July 1914 has been decisively countered: no such popular war-mania existed.Footnote 19 Socialists were not swept away from their principles. Emile Vendervelde pointed out in May 1917 that ‘it was Marxists of strict observance…who were among socialists the first to bring a remorseless condemnation against the pacifism of non-resistance’ to foreign attack.Footnote 20 Of course, it can be argued that Vandervelde's Marxists were renegades abandoning the traditions of the Second International – and this certainly turned out to be the case for some of them – but at the time they did believe that they were loyal to the traditions of Marx, as indeed did the most of the pro-war socialists of the Central Powers understandably left out of account by Vendervelde.Footnote 21 On the other side, there were not a few future Communists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti in Italy, Bohumír Šmeral in the Czech lands of Austria-Hungary, and Henri Barbusse and Marcel Cachin in France, who began their war-time experience as pro-belligerents. The point is, socialists did not generally see themselves as betraying ideals when they rallied to the nation's defence, as they saw it, in 1914. Should we simply say that they were deluding themselves?
Opposition to the war as waged by the governments rarely extended to indifference to the question of defence. It is significant that in Rosa Luxemburg's anti-war Junius Pamphlet of 1915 it was admitted that wars of national defence were legitimate. Luxemburg's argument was that only destruction of the ‘imperialistic milieu’ by class struggle could release the revolutionary-democratic energies necessary for ‘the best defence against a foreign enemy’. When war threatened, Luxemburg wrote, German Social Democracy should have insisted that the people alone could legitimately decide on questions of war and peace, and national defence should have been committed to a people's militia rather than the standing army.Footnote 22 In this fashion, almost all anti-war socialists accepted the legitimacy of national defence.
The ‘genetic account’ seeks to explain the collapse of 1914 as an explosion under pressure of emergency of pre-existing tensions between ‘reformist’ and ‘revolutionary’ within the International. Leninist polemics naturally looked for evidence of degeneration from strict class-struggle principles in the pre-1914 socialist movement to explain the ‘betrayal’ of 1914,Footnote 23 and this hunt for evidence of incipient deviation was widely taken up even by scholars not inclined to accept Communist value judgements. The ‘genetic account’ is also problematic.Footnote 24 The divisions between radicals and reformists, Marxists and revisionists, ‘dogmatists’ and ‘Social Democrats’ simply do not map with any fidelity onto the divisions that opened in 1914. Of the three leading ‘anti-militarists’ of the pre-war International, Gustave Hervé (France) and Hendrik de Man (Belgium) became extreme national defencists in 1914, while Karl Liebknecht (Germany) was the first SPD representative to vote against war credits in the Reichstag.Footnote 25 In June 1915, Hugo Haase and Eduard Bernstein of the ‘revisionist’ wing of German Social Democracy joined with the orthodox Marxist Karl Kautsky in publishing a manifesto, ‘Das Gebot der Stunde’, attacking German annexation plans and the SPD leadership. The same year, firebrands of the pre-1914 SPD left, including Parvus, Heinrich Cunow, Konrad Haenisch, and Paul Lensch, joined with arch-revisionists to propagandize for a German victory through the newspaper, Die Glocke.Footnote 26 On the radical anti-war left, Rosa Luxemburg had always been on the Marxist left, but both Karl Liebknecht and especially Kurt Eisner were associated with the pre-war reformists and revisionists. In France, Léon Jouhaux, leader of the radical and syndicalist Confédération générale du travail famously committed himself to France's military defence over the grave of his recently assassinated reformist rival, Jean Jaurès; but Alphone Merrheim and Alfred Rosmer, also of the semi-syndicalist tradition, opposed the war. The inheritors of Jean Jaurès's reformism, in turn, would be strongly inclined toward pacifism in the interwar period.Footnote 27 Ramsay MacDonald, by the standards of the International an ultra-moderate leader of the British Labour party, opposed the war; the veteran British Marxist, Balford Bax, supported it along with, as he put it, ‘almost…all the surviving “old guard” of the pioneer Socialist body of this country’.Footnote 28
Of course, it is perfectly true that revolutionary and reformist tendencies co-existed in the Second International, and the war – or more precisely, the question of war-time collaboration with bourgeois governments – drastically polarized these divisions. But to explain the 1914 split by reference to tensions within the Second International, which after all was an avowedly broad church, risks confusing cause and effect.
In fact, we can much better understand socialist attitudes to the war not by tracing them to some pre-war original sin, but by noting the degree to which they felt that their country was imperilled and in need of emergency defence. Unsurprisingly, pro-war sentiment was overwhelming amongst Belgian socialists, whose country was largely occupied by the German military, and powerful amongst French socialists, though some feared for the country being bled to death without a compromise peace. German socialists were increasingly divided: the consequences of defeat struck terror but the Kaiser's army was evidently unwelcome on foreign territory. From the outset, German violation of Belgian neutrality put great strain on the unity of the German Social Democracy.Footnote 29 Socialists wavered in Great Britain, which was not in imminent peril. In Ireland, many socialists saw this as a British war and some may have preferred on balance a German victory.Footnote 30 War-commitment was decidedly patchy in Italy, which in 1915 joined the war as a matter of choice. In Austria-Hungary, German socialists largely supported defence of the fatherland, the Hungarians were somewhat less enthusiastic, the Southern Slavs sympathized with Serbia and had hopes for a Russian victory, the Czechs looked to Britain and France as patrons of their future state, while the Poles much preferred an Austrian to a Russian victory.Footnote 31 The idea that the war was more or less predatory on both sides was unsurprisingly most common amongst socialists in the neutral countries.Footnote 32 In the Tsarist Empire, nationalities in the Polish war-zone calculated on the prospects for liberation if Germany was victorious. In Russia proper, that the enemy appeared sufficiently distant geographically during the first years of the war meant that a gamble on ‘revolutionary defeatism’ to bring down the domestic regime had widespread credibility.Footnote 33 But once the Germans drew closer to the Russian heartland, and particularly to the city of Petrograd, even Lenin's Bolsheviks were emphatically opposed to any separate peace with the foreign enemy.Footnote 34 By September 1917, Lenin was actually urging his party to seize power immediately to forestall the provisional government surrendering Petrograd to the Germans.Footnote 35 The refusal in 1914 of the two solitary socialist deputies in the Serbian parliament to support their country's war is perhaps the only clear-cut example of socialist scruples trumping geopolitical calculation.
The ‘genetic account’, which seeks to explain the division of the International in 1914 by dint of careful exegesis of immanent divisions over dogma in the decades preceding, has a clear Leninist provenance, but it is of dubious validity. It is the proposition of this article that the position of national defence taken up by most socialists was congruent with the tradition of the Second International.
II
The famous line in the Communist Manifesto – that ‘the workers have no country’ – was, as E. H. Carr has noted, ambiguous: it was ‘neither a boast nor a programme’,Footnote 36 but rather a complaint that workers were in practice deprived of their patrimony by bourgeois society. Later socialists agreed that in a real sense workers were excluded from the fatherland, but as Jules Guesde put it in 1906 ‘If you tell him [the worker] he has no homeland, it is still lying to him, he has one.’Footnote 37 At any rate, socialists did not feel bound by old formulations taken at face-value. The German socialist leader August Bebel bluntly stated that the parties of the Second International ‘no longer shared the opinions of the Manifesto’ when it came to its assertion that the workers have no country.Footnote 38
Socialists of Marx's generation, in fact, had no difficulty in supporting the patriotism of workers, at any rate in the right cause. Though they never espoused a principled right of self-determination for nationalities, Marx and Engels were enthusiastic for Polish and Irish national liberation, partly for the instrumental reasons that their success would weaken the inertial power of the Russian and British empires.Footnote 39 In his 1876 socialist history of the Paris Commune, approved of by Karl Marx and translated by Eleanor Marx, Lissagaray celebrated the stand of ‘patriotic Paris’ during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, whose revolutionaries ‘delayed the capitulation [to Germany] for months and revenged it with their blood’.Footnote 40 Wilhelm Liebknecht, who with Bebel abstained on voting war credits in 1870 for Bismarck's war with France, similarly praised the defenders of Paris: ‘The bourgeoisie, who so love to mouth the word “patriotism”, have at no time and in no place proven themselves to be patriotic, while the proletariat, whom they self-righteously accuse of being unpatriotic, have always sacrificed their blood in solidarity with their threatened homeland.’Footnote 41
Socialists of the Second International generally looked to the nation as the necessary framework for socialist construction. Jean Jaurès considered socialism analogous with patriotism, for ‘social rights, national rights, are only the geometric locus of the rights of all individuals’.Footnote 42 British and Irish socialists, each in their own way, constructed national tales that made the working class the most genuine inheritors of national culture.Footnote 43 In Ireland, James Connolly looked forward to the ‘fervent patriot’ coming to realize that ‘his hopes of an Ireland re-born to National life is better stated, and can be better and more completely realized, in the Labour movement’.Footnote 44 In Austria, Otto Bauer explicitly repudiated Marx's suggestion (shared in common with most mid-Victorian liberals) that smaller nationalities would disappear with the march of progress. On the contrary, socialism would democratize and thus accentuate national identities: ‘Socialism makes the nation autonomous, so that its practical way of life shapes its culture, and this will cause increasing differentiation of nations in socialist society, their natures being more sharply defined and their characters more sharply divorced from one another.’Footnote 45 Only in Russia, perhaps, was national identity consistently deprecated as chauvinism. But against this, revolutionaries supported minority national movements within the empire as dynamite built into the foundations of Tsarist despotism.Footnote 46 Rosa Luxemburg, it is true, rejected Polish nationalism as inherently reactionary in an age of transnationalism, but she scandalized the opinion of the International in doing so.Footnote 47
It is certainly true that many socialists believed that the modern proletariat, in contrast to the traditional artisanal apprentice, was ‘torn loose from the soil’ and thus ‘a citizen of the world’, as Karl Kautsky, the leading interpreter of Marxist orthodoxy, put it in his canonical discussion of the socialist programme.Footnote 48 Ramsay MacDonald in 1911, perhaps a little disapprovingly, wrote that ‘Internationalism is as much a mode of Socialist action, as it is of Catholic organisation.’Footnote 49 But the reigning idea was one of co-operation between nations rather than effacement of nationality. Proletarian patriotism, Kautsky wrote in 1907, was intimately linked to internationalism. ‘The patriotism of the proletariat in itself closely bound with the idea of international solidarity, the idea that wealth and culture of their own nation prospers only if they go hand in hand with the prosperity and culture of other nations.’Footnote 50 Kevin J. Callahan has aptly coined the hyphenated word ‘inter-nationalism’ to describe the combination of patriotism and international solidarity that characterized Second International ideals.Footnote 51 Second International socialists believed in nations that required defence.
III
The inaugural International Socialist Congress of 1889, in Paris, had called ‘peace the first and indispensable precondition for worker-emancipation’.Footnote 52 Generic opposition to war, and the system that gave to rise to it, was central to international socialist perorations up to 1914. However, it was equally assumed that ‘justice’ should regulate relations between ‘communities, peoples, nations, as well as between citizens’.Footnote 53 A human right to autonomy and self-defence was assumed. Socialists were opposed to pacifism. Marx spurned overtures to the First International from the ‘cowardly’ League of Peace and Freedom because its pacifism would weaken France and Britain against Tsarist Russia.Footnote 54 For Engels, writing in 1891, German socialists had a responsibility to defend their fatherland even against republican France in the event of a two-front war: ‘If the French republic placed itself at the service of His Majesty the Czar and Autocrat of all the Russians, the German socialists would fight them with regrets – but fight them they would.’Footnote 55
Marx's and Engels's hostility to Russian power was echoed in the German SPD. August Bebel told the Erfurt Party Congress in 1891 that ‘German soil, the German fatherland belongs to us, the masses.’ He made clear that in a war with Russia – ‘the bastion of cruelty and barbarism’ – the Social Democrats would stand with the ruling powers in Germany, ‘not to save them and their political and social order, but to save Germany [and] ourselves’.Footnote 56 Even Russians agreed that the autocracy presented a special case. At the Zurich Congress of the International in 1893, Georgi Plekhanov, reporting for the commission on militarism, opposed the Dutch idea of a general strike against war because it would only ‘disarm the civilized nations and leave western Europe at the mercy of the Cossacks'. Socialists, Plekhanov declared, must combine the interests of ‘freedom, civilization and of the revolutionary proletariat’.Footnote 57
Leaving aside Russia, there was a presumption in favour of the right to national self-defence. This was the position adopted by the International Workingmen's Association, and by Marx and Engels, during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The first address of General Council, penned by Marx, insisted that ‘on the German side, the war is a war of defence’.Footnote 58 But when Bismarck pressed his advantage over a prostrate France, the General Council flipped its position. Now it called on French workers to ‘perform their duties as citizens’ and warned against ‘any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis’ as a ‘desperate folly’ when ‘the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris’.Footnote 59
There were sceptical voices on the left. Domela Nieuwenhuis, leader of the Dutch party and a revolutionary pacifist, tried to turn the argument from defence on its head:
When governments declare war, it is a revolutionary act, and we have the right, even the duty to meet it with revolution. When attacked, we have the right to defend ourselves. Well! War is an attack on our lives, our well-being, our freedom, our humanity; and in our own defence, in the name of civilization, humanity sets itself against the cannons and guns of our oppressors.Footnote 60
At the 1891 Congress of the International, Nieuwenhuis argued that socialists ‘must reject all chauvinism and any distinction between offensive and defensive wars’. Any skilled diplomat, he pointed out, could present his country's military action as ultimately defensive. This would become an important point for German socialists in 1914, but in his response in 1891 Wilhelm Liebknecht avoided the point, simply condemning the Dutch resolution as ‘unacceptable and absurd’.Footnote 61
The right of national defence was most clearly voiced by national parties. In 1893, at the national congress of the orthodox Marxist Parti ouvrier française, delegates adopted a resolution, written by party leader Jules Geusde, which concluded that the demands of international solidarity did not ‘exclude or limit the right and duty of a nation to defend itself against any government whatever which betrays the peace of Europe. France, if attacked, would have no more zealous defenders than the Socialists of the Workers’ Party.’Footnote 62 Shortly after the unification of the French socialist factions, the united party passed a resolution at their 1906 Limoges congress,
To remind the working class of all countries that government cannot threaten the independence of a foreign nation without thereby violating the rights of the working class of that nation and internationally; and that the nation and its threatened working class have the imperious duty to safeguard their independence and autonomy against these attacks, and the right to rely on the support of the working class of all countries.Footnote 63
The Limoges resolution was brought to the 1907 Stuttgart Congress of the International by a majority of the French delegation led by Jean Jaurès. Here, August Bebel, leader of the German party, spoke against, but his objection was not to the vindication of national self-defence cited above, but the resolution's conclusion requiring all socialist parties to prepare ‘necessary institutions’ to take ‘suitable action’ if war loomed. Bebel thought he recognized in this gnomic formulation the provocative anti-militarism of Gustave Hervé, Nieuwenhuis's successor on the radical anti-war left.
Hervé had gained notoriety – and some following amongst the syndicalist French trade unionists – by vociferously arguing that a socialist insurrection would have best chance of success when the army was engaged by a foreign enemy at the frontier. Once the insurrection was successful, however, ‘we will fight…to defend when we have managed to establish’.Footnote 64 This was recognizable as a radicalized version of the French republican faith in 1870: defeatism when it came to Napoleon III's war against Prussia followed immediately by a revolutionary war to defend the French Republic. This did not save Hervé's anti-patriotism from being overwhelmingly repudiated at Stuttgart. Such was the mood against Hervé that he was improperly deprived by the chair of his right to reply.Footnote 65 The Second International always vindicated the right to armed national defence. The 1910 Copenhagen Congress of the International continued to call for ‘self-determination of all peoples and their defence against armed attacks and violent repression’.Footnote 66
IV
In the decades before 1914, the nature of national armies changed profoundly. The victory of Prussian arms in 1864, 1866, and 1870 had set the seal on a new form of military organization based upon a mass reserve of trained civilians available to be called into service in event of war, industrially supplied munitions, rapidity of troop movements by railway, and an efficient General Staff and officer corps. At least on the continent, technology had made obsolete the old reliance on field armies of highly drilled career soldiers. The Austrians adopted Prussian-style universal military service in 1868, France did so in 1872, Russia in 1874, and Italy in 1875. By 1900, of the Great Powers only Britain and the United States, both protected by the sea, relied upon volunteer professional armies.
Marx had characterized the old-style professional standing army as the ‘true prop of…kingly power’, being ‘separated from the mass, opposed to it, distinguished by certain badges, trained to passive obedience, drilled into a mere instrument of the dynasty which owns it as its property and uses it according to its caprice’.Footnote 67 This had long been the view of radical Liberals, who feared the standing army as an instrument of despotism at home and aggression abroad. Liberals had long preferred a general militia of citizen-soldiers, an ‘armed nation…invincible in defence…in attack quite the contrary’, as Charles-James Fox put it in 1794.Footnote 68 Marx and Engels were inclined to see the Prussian revolution in military organization as a good thing, therefore, as it involved much broader masses in the armed forces.
Engels assumed that the Prussian-style army was progressive in that it developed the sinews of industrial capitalism.Footnote 69 The modern army, being based upon advanced technology, factory-like discipline, and mass-enlistment, was in his panglossian view peculiarly open to socialist subversion. It was through the army, Engels confidently averred in the 1890s, that the socialists would force the door to power.Footnote 70 Engels thought it particularly important for the socialist movement to win support from rural districts, from whence most recruits were drafted. ‘If we get the rural districts of the six eastern provinces of Prussia’, he wrote to Laura Marx in 1891, ‘the German army is ours.’Footnote 71
The Dreyfus Affair in France, during which the army perilously subverted the institutions of the republic around the turn of the century, dispelled much of this optimism. ‘They have inflicted a supreme humiliation on the democracy which relied on them’, an anonymous French socialist wrote in 1900, ‘but their betrayal will be a salutary lesson.’Footnote 72 Socialists in general became much less sanguine that mass conscription would simply democratize the army. The fear was that it would instead militarize society and even sections of the proletariat.
Karl Liebknecht of the German SPD implicitly disputed Engels's optimistic prognosis that the army must inevitably go ‘red’.Footnote 73 Liebknecht was worried that
[The] military spirit means generally a perversion and confusion of the proletarian class-consciousness, and that militarism serves capitalism by contaminating with this spirit our whole public life in every direction simultaneously, apart from the purely militarist contamination wrought by it. Militarism does this, for instance, by producing and furthering the spirit of servility in the proletarian who thus submits more readily to economic, social and political exploitation.Footnote 74
Militarism, Liebknecht argued, was
a system projected beyond the army which penetrates the whole society by a network of militarist and semi-militarist institutions (the system of control, courts of honour, prohibition to engage in writing, the class of officers of the reserve,…militarisation of the bureaucratic apparatus…, young men's defence clubs, military clubs, and so on). Further, militarism makes an appearance as a system which saturates the whole public and private life of our people with the militarist spirit…Militarism along with the Catholic Church is the worst Machiavellianism in the world's history and the most Machiavellian of all the Machiavellianisms of Capitalism.Footnote 75
Liebknecht warned that, for all its glittering ‘Prunk und Putz’ (pomp and finery), ‘militarism is the destroying angel of culture’.Footnote 76 Liebknecht's regime-baiting anti-militarism worried the SPD leadership, who feared a government crackdown (and Liebknecht was, in fact, imprisoned). But they fully agreed that the army needed democratizing, with recruits serving less time with the colours and being protected from reactionary indoctrination. Their aim was to transform the army into a ‘militia’.
Engels in the 1860s had by no means been opposed to a professional army establishment in Prussia.
As long as we have the French army on the one side, the Russian on the other and the possibility of a combined attack by both at the same time, we need troops who will not have to learn the fundamentals of the art of war when they first face the enemy. We therefore totally discount the fantastic notion of a militia army with as it were no term of service at all.Footnote 77
By the 1890s, however, Engels was much exercised by the thought that general war would now devastate Europe, and in 1893 in the German socialist newspaper Vorwärts he proposed a move to a citizen militia system as a ‘disarmament’ that could be achieved under capitalism. This is often seen as a markedly pacifist proposal, denuding any army so transformed of offensive capability.Footnote 78 But Engels meant for the militia-army to be operationally effective. He was careful to state that he was simply proposing the existing Prussian military model amended only by shortening the length of time conscripts would serve with the colours – and even this only multilaterally and by international agreement.Footnote 79
The Second International took a similar view in its demand for a people's militia. Bebel insisted that Social Democrats must recognize that ‘we cannot get along entirely without military armament as long as the relations of the various countries to one another have not undergone a change from the ground up’. Until then, socialists supported military armaments ‘for defence, and upon the broadest democratic principles which prevent a misuse of military force’.Footnote 80 In 1898, Bebel published a booklet, Nicht stehendes Heer!, in which he called for a militia (Volksheer), made up of armed citizens (Staatsbürger in Waffen). This force would be larger but cheaper than the standing army, eschewing reactionary indoctrination of recruits, organized only for strategic defence, and reliant on the ‘fundamental strength of the people’ rather than elaborate military art.Footnote 81 In proposing the famous 1907 Stuttgart Resolution on War, Emile Vendervelde (the Belgian leader) was applauded when he glossed the resolution's demand for a popular militia to replace the standing army as expressing the ‘inalienable right of every nation to defend its independence from external attack’.Footnote 82
Socialists knew that militia plans had to be militarily viable.Footnote 83 They rejected any suggestion that the militia-army should only be capable of defensive tactics.Footnote 84 This meant, of course, that a war crisis would present socialists with a terrible dilemma: if international action could not prevent war, the question of an offensive military art was unavoidable.Footnote 85 Jean Jaurès's encounters with German socialists at the 1904 Amsterdam Congress of the International convinced him that the SPD would fall in behind the German war effort in the event of war with France. From this point, he turned his mind to how a democratic citizen army might be organized to wage effective war in modern conditions. The result would be his 1910 Armée nouvelle proposals.Footnote 86 Here, Jaurès asked two questions: ‘How can we best secure the chance of peace for France and for the uncertain world which surrounds her? And if, in spite of her efforts and her desire for peace, she is attacked, how can we equip for the best chance of salvation, the means of Victory?’Footnote 87 His scheme envisaged military training for schoolboys, followed by compulsory service with the colours for six months, and refresher training up to age thirty-four. This, he reckoned, would produce an ‘immense national strength’ for a ‘broad and flexible strategy’ in which the ‘method of total defence’ prepares the way for an ‘irresistible offensive’ to defeat the enemy.Footnote 88 Essentially, this meant a screen army to hold the frontiers while a mass offensive force was built behind the lines; a strategy that might well have met the actual exigencies of the coming war.
The German socialists were just as concerned to have a ‘militia’ army with modern capabilities. In a 1912 polemic against the left-socialist Anton Pannekeok, Kautsky made clear that an efficient militia system would not be possible without ‘officials to care for its armament, without a general staff, without instructors for privates and officers’. This was, Kautsky emphasized, entirely applicable even to the capitalist state: ‘I repeat, to avoid any misunderstanding: the question here is not the design of the future state by victorious Social Democrats, but of that of the present state reformed through our opposition.’Footnote 89 The Second International took its commitment to willing the means for national defence seriously.
V
Strategically, socialists believed it to be their duty to avoid entanglement in bourgeois government, and this meant denying governments military credits. At the Congress of the International in 1900 it was agreed that ‘Socialist deputies in all countries undertake to vote against any military spending and expenses for the fleet and colonial military expeditions.’Footnote 90 It was made tolerably clear, however, that socialists might join bourgeois governments in time of war emergency. A resolution written by Karl Kautsky and passed at the Paris Congress of the International in 1900 supported the principle of socialist participation in a bourgeois government if it was called for as a ‘forced expedient both temporary and exceptional’, so long as such participation was authorized by the responsible socialist party.Footnote 91 The commission gave an illustration:
Suppose that in a country where the roads are dangerous, three men with clearly opposed political and philosophical convictions are met and attacked simultaneously. Then they forget their differences to defend against the common enemy. In short, we believe that coalitions are bad because they tend to weaken the consciousness of the proletariat. But they are sometimes the least bad option, when it is necessary to choose between two evils.Footnote 92
Even Rosa Luxemburg, on the Marxist left, agreed that situations might arise when socialists should join a coalition government to defend ‘the country's freedom’.Footnote 93
These were no doubt deliberately ambiguous formulations: the threat to a country's freedom could be domestic. But commenting on the resolution in the October 1900 issue of his Marxist periodical, Die Neue Zeit, Kautsky speculated that if German armies suffered a defeat at the hands of Russia, and if Europe thereby faced domination by the ‘Cossack army’, ‘then German Social Democracy would hardly hesitate for a moment before nominating representatives to a coalition government of Liberal, Left, even the [Catholic] Centre party, tasked with organizing a people's war’.Footnote 94 At the 1904 Amsterdam Congress, Kautsky clarified that socialists could join a bourgeois government (so long as it was not outright reactionary) ‘in purely exceptional cases, for example in the event of war or invasion’.Footnote 95 Jaurès welcomed Kautsky's admission that socialist participation in a bourgeois government was admissible ‘to push an invading enemy back across the borders’.Footnote 96 Emergency participation in war-time coalition governments was definitely countenanced by the Second International.
VI
It is not the case that socialists of the Second International were blithely unaware that general war was a real possibility.Footnote 97 In the late nineteenth century, most socialists had adopted the radical liberal line that unjust wars were the product of dynastic agressors plying standing armies as their tools. But as early as 1885, the British socialist Belfort Bax, commenting on rising ‘colonial fever’, remarked that ‘the jealousy between the courts of Europe, once the sole and until recently the main cause of national enmity and war, has in our day been superseded by the jealousy between the great capitalists of its various nationalities'.Footnote 98
It took some time for the ‘new imperialism’ to become an issue more generally in socialist circles. But by the twentieth century, with the accumulation of flashpoints on the imperial periphery of Europe, socialists were increasingly concerned that a colonial collision of no intrinsic importance might detonate general war. A resolution passed by the Congress of the French Socialist party in 1912, on the occasion of the Moroccan war-scare, condemned the prospect of an armed conflict not ‘for their independence, nor for vital reasons, but because of the most foolish aberration’.Footnote 99 Socialists were mostly indifferent to colonialism as such, but they certainly feared it as a possible occasion for war.
There was also a presentiment that capitalism was becoming politically regressive as it grew more militaristic. In polemicizing against the optimistic revisionism of Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg set the structural trends of capitalism against his blithe predictions:
As a result of the development of the world economy and the aggravation and generalisation of competition on the world market, militarism and marinism as instruments of world politics have become a decisive factor in the internal as well as in the external life of the great states. If it is true that world politics and militarism represent a rising tendency in the present phase of capitalism, then bourgeois democracy must logically move in a descending line.Footnote 100
Militarism and imperialism, it seemed to many socialists, was destroying the old basis of relatively progressive bourgeois liberalism. In his 1909 brochure, The road to power, Karl Kautsky argued that the development of finance-capital and imperialism meant that now only the proletariat were uncorrupted. All other classes, said Kautsky, had become nothing but a ‘reactionary mass’.Footnote 101 This formulation was all the more striking given Kautsky's reputation as an orthodox Marxist. He was deliberately echoing the Lassallean characterization of all non-proletarian strata as ‘one reactionary mass’, attacked by Marx in his canonical Critique of the Gotha Programme.Footnote 102
Kautsky reflected on Engels's warning that the turmoil of a war might pitch the workers to power before they were ready to exercise it.Footnote 103 Now, however,
the proletariat has now grown so strong that it can contemplate a war with more confidence. We can no longer speak of a premature revolution, for it has already drawn so great strength from the present legal basis as to expect that a transformation of this basis would create the conditions for its further upward progress. The proletariat hates war with all its strength. It would sacrifice everything rather than raise a cry for war. But if war should break out in spite of it, the proletariat is the only class that could confidently await its outcome.Footnote 104
We can perhaps see this leftist turn in Kautsky – from which he would recede – as an extreme theorization of the International's revolutionary bluster designed to discourage the Great Powers from war adventurism.
High theory at length caught up with the socialists' instinct that capitalism was becoming ever more aggressively militarist. The Austro-German Marxist, Rudolf Hilferding, published Finance capital in 1910 as an updated version of Capital. What had changed since Marx's masterpiece, Hilferding argued, was that from around 1870 state-capitalism had displaced competitive capitalism. Marx had identified the process of concentration of capital, but this had reached a new level with massive cartels and trusts that suffocated truly free competition. Banks now organized and effectively led industrial capital. This ‘finance capital’ lent money to the state, which was increasingly at its beck and call.Footnote 105 The classically liberal, free-trading bourgeoisie had been absorbed into an oligarchic ‘possessing class’ determined to have full freedom to invest abroad, and to have these investments protected by the imperialist projection of state power.
The demand for an expansionist policy revolutionizes the whole world view of the bourgeoisie, which ceases to be peace-loving and humanitarian. The old free traders believed in free trade not only as the best economic policy but also as the beginning of an era of peace. Finance capital abandoned this belief long ago. It has no faith in the harmony of capitalist interests, and knows well that competition is becoming increasingly a political power struggle. The ideal of peace has lost its lustre, and in place of the idea of humanity there emerges a glorification of the greatness and power of the state. The modern state arose as a realization of the aspiration of nations for unity. The national idea, which found a natural limit in the constitution of a state based upon the nation, because it recognized the right of all nations to independent existence as states, and hence regarded the frontiers of the state as being determined by the natural boundaries of the nation, is now transformed into the notion of elevating one's own nation above all others.Footnote 106
Hilferding was generally a moderate within the SPD, but he was deeply concerned at the expansionary aggression of the new-fangled finance-capital state. In 1907, he had sided with the radicals in lambasting any concession to colonialism and militarism.Footnote 107
Kautsky grew worried that automatic association of capitalism with imperialism and war invited fatalism. If aggressive militarism was an ineradicable feature of finance-capitalism, then socialists might be tempted to accept war as inevitable and seek to seize power amidst its ruins, or alternatively to support their own country's imperialism as the most advanced and thus objectively progressive model available. When war loomed in 1911 over the Moroccan crisis, therefore, Kautsky emphasized the divisions within the bourgeois regarding militarism and imperialism, and insisted that Great Power belligerence was contingent and that pacific capitalism remained structurally possible. Socialists, he argued, could and should find allies amongst the liberal bourgeoisie in the struggle for peace. Rosa Luxemburg was confounded: ‘He takes great pains to make international politics appear senseless, meaningless from the point of view of capitalist society.’Footnote 108 Marxists had a hard time in seeing war as an extrinsic shock to the system.
VII
With the July crisis of 1914, however, the shock came. As is well known, most socialists rallied to their country's defence. In Belgium, France, and Great Britain, they joined the government. Jules Guesde's statement on taking up a cabinet post on 28 August was carefully worded to make it clear that he was acting in the spirit and letter of the International's known positions:
I have gone into the cabinet as an envoy of my party, not to govern, but to fight…France has been attacked, and she will have no more ardent defenders than the workmen's party. The solidarity of workmen does not shut out the right to defend themselves against traitor workmen. Nor does international solidarity exclude the right of one nation to defend itself against a nation which is traitor to the peace of Europe.Footnote 109
The echoes of the Limoges resolution on war, and the London and Amsterdam resolutions on emergency participation in government (including the principle that it must be authorized by the party), were clear and deliberate.
For German socialists, the dilemma in July was sharper, for the Reich was delivering aggressive ultimatums to Belgium and France backed by the threat – soon to be realized – of military attack. As both Engels and Domela Nieuwenhuis had pointed out, however, the state of military art, which required geo-strategic manoeuvre with huge armies across very wide fronts, meant that strategic aggression and defence were hard to distinguish. On the eve of war, Hermann Müller of the SPD explained to a French socialist that the ‘distinction which some socialists still try to make between the attacking power and the attacked’ was virtually obsolete.Footnote 110 August Bebel had died before the war crisis. But in one of his last statements reiterating socialist commitment to national self-defence, he had stated that any general conflict ‘will be a world war which will set our fatherland before the question of “to be or not to be”’.Footnote 111 His point was that Germany's encirclement, exposed as it was to simultaneous attack from both the west and the east, meant that even if Germany instigated hostilities socialists would still be faced with the problem of whether to rally to its defence. The German party was painfully aware of ‘Germany's and Austria's position on the map’ exposing the Central Powers to ‘a concentric attack’. This meant, the SPD argued, that ‘Germany and Austria cannot inflict so crushing a defeat on their enemies as their enemies can inflict on Germany, if the foe can march forward from all sides in the flush of victory.’Footnote 112 For German socialists, defence required aggressive activity on all fronts to stave off the threat. It was with these considerations in mind that they voted their government war credits.
Vandervelde, who had been elected president of the Second International in 1900, had a well-merited reputation for his ability to bridge between polarizing positions.Footnote 113 In a remarkable interview conducted with an American socialist in 1915, he acknowledged the German socialist position:
with our whole hearts we render this testimony to our German comrades, that in their efforts for the maintenance of peace they did their duty, their whole duty, and more than their duty…
What gives our situation a particular tragic character, is the fact that on both sides the socialists appear equally convinced that it is a question of a war of defence. Similarly with the French and Belgian socialists, who are firmly fixed on the idea that it is a case of legitimate defence, the German Social Democrats have voted the credits for war.
We will naturally be careful not to address any reproaches to them in this matter. We take cognizance of the difficulties of the situation. If they had refused to vote credits for the war they would have given over their country to Cossack invasion. In voting for them they have furnished the Kaiser arms against republican France, and against the democracies of Western Europe.
Between the two evils they chose the one they considered the lesser. Again, I repeat, we do not blame them. But we, who are defending our independence, are inflexibly resolved to defend it to the end.Footnote 114
Even as his country suffered brutal occupation, Vandervelde could see the socialist point of view on the other side of the trenches.
The Second International was confronted by the logic of an inter-state military configuration that demanded massive response in the event of general war. As the enemy took the offensive, almost any country caught up could reasonably claim to be defending national integrity. For Kautsky, because each power-bloc was imperialist, it was now impossible to choose between them as either progressive or reactionary from the proletarian point of view. This meant that national defence was the only operative principle. In October 1914, he wrote that ‘every people, and the proletariat of every people, has a pressing interest in keeping the enemy from crossing the frontier’. With each belligerent seeking to wage war on foreign territory all that was left was for each nation to ‘save its skin as best it can’.Footnote 115 This situation triggered well-established norms widely accepted by all parties of the Second International in support of national self-defence and emergency class-collaboration. That it was too much to stomach for many socialists is of no surprise, but it was consistent with generally accepted socialist ideas.
VIII
The socialist split over the war is rightly seen as crucial in explaining the emergence of international Communism. The Leninist position was that its stance of intransigent opposition to the war and support for ‘revolutionary defeatism’ derived from the genuine principles of the pre-war Marxist ‘centre’. This has generally been accepted by scholars. Neil Harding argues that Lenin ‘remained true to the fundamentalist Marxism he had always espoused’.Footnote 116 Robert Service includes Lenin in the ‘minority of Europe's socialists’ who in opposing the war ‘sustained the line of the International’.Footnote 117 Moira Donald says that there was ‘nothing new’ in Lenin's anti-war arguments. They were merely a ‘reiteration’ of the line long argued by Karl Kautsky, the veteran theorist of Marxist orthodoxy.Footnote 118 Lenin may have turned on the ‘renegade’ Kautsky after 1914, but historians have largely concurred that he remained true to the revolutionary Marxism he imbibed from Kautsky's pre-war writings. ‘Lenin hated Kautsky because he loved Kautsky's books’, as Lars T. Lih has put it.Footnote 119 But even orthodox books are written and read from particular points of view, and from 1914 Kautsky and Lenin violently disagreed about the true meaning of the pre-war Marxist ‘centre’.
With the outbreak of the war, Lenin condemned the Second International outright. Ever the soi-disant Marx disciple, he insisted that he was loyal to the traditions of revolutionary socialism, and that the International was apostate. But it is important to recognize that Lenin himself argued that a new era in capitalist history had been inaugurated by the war which rendered the entire political methodology of the International out of date.
Both the First and the Second International had supported ‘bourgeois liberalism’ in so far as it really advanced civil and political liberty. Their belief in a class-party of the proletariat seeking to advance electorally had demarcated them from anarchists and syndicalists on the left and social liberals on the right. Lenin had approved this ‘use of bourgeois legality’ by socialists ‘in the period of so-called peaceful constitutional development’, but he believed it to be ‘to our advantage to exchange ballots for bullets (to go over to civil war) at the moment the bourgeoisie itself has broken the legal foundation it has laid down’.Footnote 120 For Lenin, the outbreak of the Great War marked this moment on a world-historical scale.
Lenin did not entirely innovate. He built upon a periodization of capitalism introduced by Kautsky in his 1909 Road to power and developed by Hilferding amongst others.Footnote 121 But while Kautsky had concluded that the proletariat could no longer prefer a victory for one power-bloc on the basis that its bourgeoisie was more progressive than its enemy, he did not thereby conclude that the proletariat had no interest in defending civil and democratic liberties from foreign conquerors. But for Lenin, the new epoch of imperialist meant that bourgeois liberalism itself was in a state of collapse. As he wrote, ‘the imperialist war erases all differences between a monarchy and a republic’.Footnote 122
With all great powers equally predatory, insisted Lenin, socialist tactics in war could no longer ‘depend on who fires the first shot. That is ridiculous.’Footnote 123 In effect, Lenin agreed with the analysis of the German socialists that in modern war no belligerent was ‘innocent’. Lenin, however, could not tolerate an internationalism that simply vindicated the ‘social chauvinism of all nations’.Footnote 124 In the period between 1789 and 1871, he wrote, the slogan ‘“defence of the fatherland” was permissible’. In the imperialist epoch, however, ‘it would be absurd to apply it to a war between the imperialist Great Powers, a war to decide who gets the biggest piece of the Balkan countries, Asia Minor, etc.’.Footnote 125 If no imperialist power was innocent, all were guilty.
This had profound consequences going far beyond questions of war and peace. Marx, Lenin admitted, had conceived of the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism in tolerably democratic countries such as Britain and the US. But with the advent of the Great War,
this restriction made by Marx is no longer valid. Both Britain and America, the biggest and the last representatives – in the whole world – of Anglo-Saxon ‘liberty’, in the sense that they had no militarist cliques and bureaucracy, have completely sunk into the all-European filthy, bloody morass of bureaucratic-military institutions which subordinate everything to themselves, and suppress everything.Footnote 126
This new stage of capitalism by virtue of the ‘fundamental economic traits’ of ‘monopoly capitalism’ was in all advanced counties ‘distinguished by a minimum fondness for peace and freedom, and by a maximum and universal development of militarism’.Footnote 127 The resort to arms in 1914 had opened an entire epoch in which wars would be repeated and liberal constitutionalism destroyed.
For Lenin, the war marked the point when the bourgeoisie became entirely reactionary and civil and political liberties entered their death agonies. The future left only two choices: capitalism characterized by militarism and war, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. The imperialist war could only be displaced by the civil war between classes. By this Manichean view, not merely its solidarity but the very world of the Internationals had collapsed.
IX
Socialists of the Second International, excepting Jaurès, showed little signs of understanding the military rationale behind the Great Powers' strategy of forward defence. The ‘Prussian model’ of mass armies implied a hair-trigger on mobilization. Huge armies had to be ready to storm into precipitous attack as soon as general war became likely. This was seen to be the only hope of preventing the enemy consolidating a defensive line, and the contest degenerating into an attritional slugging match. All the continental Great Powers, therefore, calculated on getting their blow in first, most famously Germany with the Schlieffen Plan and France with Plan XVII.
The Marxists of the Second International, never happy with a purely strategic logic, preferred to ascribe militarism and the ‘offensive spirit’ to the socio-economic dynamics of capitalism in the imperialist age. The immediate dilemma presented was the same, however. It was an internationalist principle that national self-defence was both a right and a duty. Enemy invasion, either actual or imminent, convinced many socialists that they were obliged to support the waging of war and to rally behind their government.
For Lenin, the imperialist stage of endless conflict to repartition the globe between the great powers marked a new epoch. Capitalism had become incompatible with durable civil and political liberty. Lenin insisted upon a fundamental break with Second International socialism which had always been committed to defending electoral constitutionalism and co-operating with bourgeois liberal opposition to authoritarianism. In the advanced countries, Lenin concluded, the era of bourgeois liberty had come to an end, for militarism and capitalism had become indistinguishable. This left only one brutal decision: to choose capitalist dictatorship and endless imperialist war, or to take the path of dictatorship of the proletariat. Such was the apparent choice as understood by early Communists.
