The Second International and War: a correction

The latest issue of Socialist Worker (25 August) carries an article on the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International which took place a hundred years ago. According to the author, John Riddell, the Congress “took a bold stand in the struggle against capitalist war”.

No, it didn’t.

The big set piece debate was on militarism and anti-militarism. Some of the French delegates wanted the Congress, in the words of a motion proposed by Gustave Hervé, “to answer any declaration of war, from whatever side it may come, by military strike and insurrection” (an anticipation of Lenin’s “turn war into a civil war”, though Lenin didn‘t vote for it). This was opposed by August Bebel on behalf of the German party. There were good grounds for opposing it, in particular because if not enough workers were socialist-minded and the representatives of capital still controlled the State it was likely to lead to a bloodbath. But it was not on this ground that Bebel opposed it. Basically, he didn’t want to rule out the possibility of Social Democrats supporting a so-called “defensive” war. Nor was he against a country having armed forces; he just wanted them to be organised democratically as a “citizens army”. So, he wasn’t an “anti-militarist” even in theory.

In his reply, Hervé declared that he “could not believe that people who call out everywhere our beautiful motto of the International: ‘Proletarians of all Countries unite!’ would go on interpreting it in practice by ‘Proletarians of all Countries, massacre one another!’”

Most of the other delegates supported Bebel, and the composite resolution that was finally adopted committed the Social Democratic MPs merely to using “the means which appear to them the most efficacious” to prevent a war breaking out and that, if it did, “to intervene for its being brought to a speedy end”. Far from being “a bold stand in the struggle against capitalist war”, it was a blank cheque for what happened when the First World War broke out in August 1914 and the Social Democratic MPs of the warring countries lined up behind their government in support of the war.

The SPGB had already seen through Bebel in an article in the June 1907 Socialist Standard entitled “Bebel and Hervé. German Party Leader as a Jingo“. While not endorsing Hervé’s slogan of “Rather Insurrection than War”, the article commented favourably on his general analysis that:

"All Socialists call themselves internationalists, and this, to every Socialist, means to be in favour of the international union of the workers.
"But there are two very different ways of understanding this international union; there is the patriotic way, and the anti-patriotic way.
"The patriotic internationalists say: 'Present day countries, such as history has made them, are moral entities whose existence is useful to human progress. However imperfect they may be, however inhuman even they may be for proletarians, the latter have in each country the duty of defending them when attacked. We are internationalists, but if the country in which we chanced to be born is attacked we will defend it to the death'.
"This in plain language means simply; 'Workers of the world unite; but if your rulers order you to massacre your comrades, do so!'
( . . . )
"The workers are disinherited and illtreated in every existing country.
"All nations are equal, or nearly so, in this respect, particularly now that the capitalist regime renders more and more uniform the material, intellectual, and political conditions of life for the labouring class in all countries; and now that the introduction of the capitalist system in Russia will compel even Tsarism to accord to the Russian workers the essentials of political liberty.
"No country at the present day, is so superior to the others that the workers of that country should get themselves killed in its defence.”

It only remains to add that when the First World War broke out, the SPGB stuck to this position and opposed the war. Hervé, sadly, turned coat and became a super-patriot joining in the chorus of ‘Proletarians of all Countries, massacre one another!”.

ALB