The Collapse of the Second International¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: The Collapse of the Second International
The outbreak of the First World War exposed the Second International as a hollow shell, its constituent parties abandoning every prior anti-war commitment to rally behind their respective national bourgeoisies. The chapter’s central argument is that this betrayal was not a sudden aberration but the logical culmination of the reformist and centrist politics that had long infected the International. The German SPD, the most prestigious section with a million members, voted for war credits on 4 August 1914, its press renouncing “class discord and class hatred”. Crucially, the so-called Lefts within the party, who had spoken against war credits in the fraction meeting, nonetheless voted for them on grounds of group discipline. This is presented as definitive proof that left reformism and centrism, for all their radical phrase-mongering, are bound to the right wing and serve only as a left cover for outright betrayal.
The pattern repeated across all belligerent states: French socialists entered the union sacrée government, British Labour’s Arthur Henderson joined Lloyd George’s coalition, and Belgian, Dutch, and Scandinavian leaders aligned according to their bourgeoisie’s imperial dependencies. The chapter launches a sharp polemic against the anarcho-syndicalist slogan of a general strike against war, which had been demagogically advocated before 1914. Drawing on Trotsky’s analysis, it argues that a general strike can only succeed as part of a revolutionary situation, not as a special method to prevent mobilisation. War governments feel strongest at the moment of mobilisation; patriotic intoxication and war terror make such a strike hopeless, turning it into a putsch that crushes the vanguard. The anarcho-syndicalist leaders themselves proved this when, the day after war was declared, they dropped the strike slogan and meekly accepted ministerial portfolios.
The chapter draws on Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means: the right wing’s pro-bourgeois peacetime collaboration naturally extends into wartime support for “their” imperialist gang. The masses, confused by patriotic intoxication and the argument that Tsarist victory would destroy German workers’ organisations, could plead ignorance; the leaders could not. The imperialist character of the war was evident from the contending powers’ war aims—markets, colonies, spheres of influence, the Straits—and had been discussed for a decade. The Stuttgart (1907) and Basel (1912) congresses had solemnly pledged to utilise the war crisis to hasten capitalist downfall. Every party except the Russian and Serbian betrayed that pledge. The Italian party’s halfway position of “neither collaboration nor sabotage” is dismissed as inadequate. The chapter’s polemical target is therefore twofold: the open social-patriots and, more insidiously, the centrists and left reformists whose radical posturing masked their essential function as apologists for the right.