THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL
The International Workingmen’s Association—the famous First International—was founded in London on 28th of September 1864. After the massacre of French workers in 1848 and the collapse of the Chartist movement in England in the forties, the international working class movement had entered a period of ebb. Since these defeats the workers had concentrated mainly on the economic struggle for reforms. But after 1857 there re-opened a period of political activity on the part of the European working class. The political reawakening of the workers soon revived the idea of internationalism and led to the formation of the First International.
Marx was the soul of this organisation, and drafted its inaugural appeal, which stated that the emancipation of the working class must be the task of the workers themselves; that their emancipation could be achieved only by the abolition of class rule altogether; that the economic subjugation of the workers to the capitalist owners of the means of production was the cause of servitude in all its forms; and that the cause of emancipation of the pro-letariat was an international one demanding the interna-tional solidarity of the working class. Under Marx’s leadership the International proceeded to unite the labour movements of the various countries as well as to fight against various unscientific Socialist theories and trends.
As a result of the economic crisis of 1866 a wave of strikes swept over the advanced capitalist countries. In supporting and guiding these strikers and in mobilizing the international solidarity of the proletariat in their favour the International proved itself to be a very valuable weapon in the hands of the workers. Despite the opposition of the bourgeoisie and police prosecution the Inter-national grew in strength and became the recognized international organization of the working class.
In 1871 occurred the historic Paris Commune, in which the Paris workers seized power. In the famous address issued by the International Workingmen’s Association in September 1870, Marx had warned the French proletariat against an untimely uprising. But when in 1871 the armed uprising actually took place the International. Workingmen’s Association supported it, and its Parisian members were among the most capable and gallant fighters on behalf of the Commune.
But following on the defeat of the Paris Commune, the European proletariat entered on a period of reaction and retreat. The support of the International in England, France and Germany as well as in the smaller countries of Europe swiftly declined. United repression by the several governments of Europe and the split caused by the anarchist Bakuninists hastened the decline. In 1872 Marx carried through the transfer of the headquarters of the General Council of the International to New York. The International was formally dissolved in 1876.
However, the first International had played its historic role in guiding the International Workers’ movement for a decade and permeating the workers’ movement with the ideas of revolutionary socialism. There now followed a period of formation and growth of mass Socialist labour parties in separate countries on a scale hitherto unknown. In 1878 Marx wrote in an English publication attacking the contention that the International had been a failure. “In reality the Social-Democratic Workers’ parties in Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Holland and North America, organized more or less within national frontiers, represent just as many international groups, no longer isolated sections sparsely distributed over various countries and held together by a General Council on the periphery, but rather the working class it-self in constant, active and direct connection … Thus, far from dying out the International has developed from one stage into another and higher one, in which many of its original tendencies have already been fulfilled.” (See Mehring—Karl Marx , page 483). The period of the First International, we should note, was one in which the Euro-pean mass parties had not yet arisen. The backbone of the First International had been the English trade unions which at that time took an interest in working class poli-tics. Although it included several small parties and groups in Europe and America the only genuine mass labour party it contained had been the party in Germany.
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL,
During the eighties, Marxist parties arose in most of the European countries, and in 1889 combined in the Second International. During this era the Socialist parties succeeded in winning the allegiance of a majority of the industrial workers in Germany, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Scan-dinavia and Russia. In England however, where the trade unions were now confining their activities purely to the economic field, a Socialist mass party, failed to develop. In America too, the Socialist Party formed in 1901 did not gain a mass backing.
The largest and best organized of the parties of the Second International was the Social-Democratic Party of Germany which by 1914 had secured nearly one-third of the total number of seats in the Reichstag. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Russia, too, held an im-portant position in the International on account of the revolutionary character of the movement in that country and the theoretical ability of its leaders, particularly Plekhanov. The outstanding Marxist theoreticians of the Second International were Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky, while the political leader was Bebel.
International Congresses were held in Amsterdam in 1904, Stuttgart in 1907, Copenhagen in 1910 and Basle in 1912. At the last named conference a resolution against the approaching war was passed, incorporating and developing the decisions of the previous congresses on this subject. In the event of the outbreak of war the decision was “to intervene in favour of its speedy termination and … to utilise the economic and political crises created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.” This Manifesto of the Basle Congress of November 1912 was signed by all the Socialist parties of the world.
And yet, despite this resolution, on the outbreak of the first Imperialist World War in August 1914, a majority of the parties of the Second International openly supported the war, voting war credits and in certain cases even taking office in the government. Only the Socialist parties of Russia and Serbia opposed the war. (Later, when Italy entered the war, the Italian Socialist party also opposed the war, but taking a pacifist altitude). The ‘social-patriotism’ of the parties of the Second International seems all the more surprising when one considers the fact that the leaders of all these parties considered themselves to be Marxists, or at least freely used the name and ideology of Marx.
But it would be a mistake to imagine that the capitula-tion of the leaders of the Second International to the bourgeoisie of their respective countries in 1914 was a sudden lapse for which the basis had not been laid well in advance. Viewed historically, the betrayal of 1914 appears not as a sudden deviation from the policies that had in-creasingly been gaining acceptance among the leaders of the Second International parties in the preceding years, but as the logical culmination of them. The growth of opportunism in the parties of the Second International had for several years prior to 1914 been an open secret in European Social-Democratic circles. Lenin defined the ingredients of opportunism as being the replacement of revolutionary by reformist aims; the rejection of the class struggle and the adoption of class collaboration; the neg-lect of illegal organisation and activities in times of crisis; and in war time, the denial of the internationalism of the working class combined with the preaching of bourgeois patriotism. There were, to be sure, in most of the parties left wing elements untainted by the opportunist politics of the leaders. But the only groups of any magnitude were the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Rosa Luxembourg group in Germany. The opportunist leadership of the majority of the Second International parties, following a policy of limiting their activities to trade unionism and parliamen-tarism in peace time, found no difficulty in accommodating themselves to the “defence of the fatherland” slogan in time of war.
By attributing the betrayal of 1914 to the growth of opportunism in the parties of the Second International, however, we by no means exhaust the problem. Oppor-tunism is a political trend and no political trend grows in a vacuum. It remains to trace the roots, that is, to un-cover the social basis of the opportunism of the Second International.
The beginning of the European working class movement of the 19th century had been stormy. The Chartist movement in England in the forties, the struggle of the French workers in 1848 and still more their heroism in the Commune of 1871, the militant struggles of the German workers in 1848 and even after 1878 against the anti-Labour Laws of Bismarck were characteristic of the universally militant nature and revolutionary temper of the early European working class movement. The course of capitalist development in these years did not permit the rise of reformist illusions in the working class move-ment. That is how it came to pass that both Marx and Engels, quite correctly on the basis of the objective condi-tions of the time, though proved incorrect by the subsequent course of historical development, visualised the proletarian revolution not as a distant event to be measured even in decades, but as an imminent practical problem of their time.
But with its entry into the stage of Monopoly and Imperialism in the last quarter of the 19th Century, Capitalism obtained a new lease of life. Capitalism, already decrepit and torn asunder by its internal contra-dictions was able to enter on another period of expansion of trade and industry through the ruthless exploitation of colonies under imperialism. In all the great European countries, and particularly in Britain, the growth of im-perialism and the accumulation of super-profits enabled the bourgeoisie of these countries to grant concessions and win over a small and privileged upper stratum of workers as well as to gain the support of sections of the petty bour-geoisie benefiting from imperialism. (These sections had no interest in revolution, but only in defending their right to a share of the spoils of imperialist exploitation). This was the social basis of the opportunism of the Second International. Resting for their main support on these layers, the opportunist leaders were able, through the trade union bureaucracy, to permeate the working class movement with reformist and class-collaborationist ideas in peace time and to lead the workers into the camp of the bourgeois patriots on the outbreak of the imperialist war.