By the early days of August 1914, the world picture had changed out of all recognition. The Great Powers had unleashed the dogs of war. Kaiser Wilhelm’s armies had marched into Belgium. Britain and its allies soon followed suit, as if in some giant macabre game of chess. “The lamps are going out all over Europe”, stated Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” The Socialist International, to which the British Labour Party was now affiliated, had promised to oppose the coming imperialist war by all revolutionary means necessary. But when the test came, the International collapsed. Rosa Luxemburg went so far as to describe the International as a “stinking corpse” that had betrayed the proletariat, delivering it bound, hand and foot, to the capitalists’ military machine. Once war was declared, in a burst of jingoism, all the Labour and trade union leaders, with only a handful of courageous exceptions internationally, quickly lined up behind their respective ruling classes in what was to be the bloodiest carnage in human history, with ten million dead and millions more disabled, mutilated and poisoned.
“War is the natural condition of Europe,” wrote the anarchist Kropotkin. The First World War, however, was qualitatively different. Not only was it a world war, it was altogether on a vaster, more ghastly scale than anything previously experienced. New fiendish weapons of mass destruction were devised, including poison gas: chlorine, phosgene, and then the horrors of mustard gas, which burned away the flesh of body and lungs. Millions of men faced each other along seemingly infinite lines of trenches and fortifications known as the “Western Front”. The failed German offensive at Verdun in 1916 was to end with one million casualties (collateral damage, to use the modern dehumanised parlance). The British offensive on the Somme cost 420,000 lives, 60,000 of whom perished on the first day. The front did not shift significantly for the next two-and-a-half years. It was the most terrible and traumatic experience in living memory. Siegfried Sassoon captured the mood at the front:
Lines of grey muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!
But it would not stop for four long years. The roots of war went deep. The war itself was no mere accident or caused by the death of a Crown Prince, but resulted from the build up of imperialist contradictions and tensions prior to 1914. Britain had lost her industrial monopoly, and was being challenged in particular by American and German capitalism, which had overtaken her in terms of total production. In 1870 Britain had produced as much as one third of the world’s industrial goods; by 1913 it produced only 14 per cent. By 1913 the USA had already become the largest economy in the world, producing over one third of its industrial output – just under the combined total for Germany, Britain and France. This gave rise to continual clashes between rival imperialist powers both in Africa and the Far East, especially between Germany, Belgium, Portugal and Britain. The main powers each established their own “spheres of influence” as well as secret inter-locking alliances to safeguard their national interests. Economic protectionism now held sway in America, France and Germany as a means of keeping British exports out of their markets, while the Dominions of the British Empire, gave preferential treatment to Britain. It was a period of shifting alliances and explosive international economic, diplomatic and military rivalry.
In July 1911, in an affront to France, the German government had seized the Moroccan port of Agadir. In the coupling of military alliances, Italy declared war on Turkey, which led directly to the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and in turn to the Austro-Serbian conflict. On 28 June 1914 the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary provided the final pretext for world war. The assassination was an accident born out of necessity. Austria-Hungary then declared war on Serbia; Russia moved to support Serbia, which provoked Germany’s war with Russia and France; Germany’s refusal to respect the neutrality of “gallant little Belgium” served as the excuse for Britain to enter the war. The re-division of the world by the major imperialist powers had begun, which would culminate in the carnage of 1914-18. This convulsion signalled the impasse of world capitalism, and above all reflected, as Lenin and Trotsky explained, the rebellion of the productive forces against the straightjacket of private property and the nation state. Such contradictions provoked the frenzied struggle by the Great Powers for new markets, sources of raw materials and new fields of exploitation.
“We see, therefore, that war is not merely a political act,” stated the great military historian Clausewitz, “but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to war relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses.”[1] Stripped of all its subterfuge and cant, war was simply the continuation of imperialist rivalry (“politics”) but by “other means”. War merely carries the horrors of capitalism to their extremes.
On 24 August, the joint board of the TUC, the General Federation of Trade Unions, and Labour Party, met and passed a resolution: “That an immediate effort be made to terminate all existing disputes, whether strikes or lockouts, and wherever new points of difficulty arise during the war a serious attempt should be made by all concerned to reach an amicable settlement before resorting to strikes or lockouts.” The mighty industrial wave of the previous four years had ground to an abrupt halt. The revolutionary mood sweeping industry was completely silenced. In its place came wild patriotic enthusiasm for the war effort. A war that many believed would be over by Christmas.
The General Federation of Trade Unions, caught up in the chauvinist whirlwind, pledged whole-hearted support for the imperialist war against Germany and its allies. The TUC, through its Parliamentary Committee, unanimously fell into line. Over the first weekend in August 1914, 6,000 took the colours at army recruitment offices, and many were turned away. Such was the support for war whipped up by the government propaganda that by the end of the month, the Labour Party Executive Committee agreed to support the government’s “all-Party” recruiting drive. Mrs Pankhurst’s suffragette supporters, who had abandoned their own campaign for women’s rights, were now fierce advocates of conscription. Ramsay MacDonald, who resigned from the Labour leadership on pacifist grounds and was replaced by Henderson, nevertheless wrote to his constituency advising young men to answer the call up. Most of the other pacifist ILP leaders, including Keir Hardie, who tried to oppose the war, soon bent their heads. “The lads who have gone forth… must not be disheartened by any discordant note at home”, said the pitiful Hardie. Shortly afterwards he was to die a broken man. Even Hyndman for a short time committed the British Socialist Party to the imperialist war, before being expelled by the anti-war majority.
On the international front, the socialist parties affiliated to the Socialist International had originally set out to oppose the war, as outlined by the resolutions of the Stuttgart (1907) and Copenhagen (1910) conferences. The French socialist leader Jean Jaurés, who was later assassinated, drafted the anti-war resolutions:
If war threatens to break out it is the duty of the working class in the countries concerned and of their parliamentary representatives, with the help of the International Socialist Bureau as a means of co-ordinating their action, to use every effort to prevent war by all means which seem to them most appropriate, having regard to the sharpness of the class war and to the general political situation.
Should war nevertheless break out, their duty is to intervene to bring it promptly to an end, and with all their energies to use the political and economic crisis created by the war to rouse the populace from its slumbers, and to hasten the fall of capitalist domination.
This revolutionary attitude to war was a principled one. It recognised that the World War was a reactionary war between various imperialist powers for the re-division of the world. The working class has nothing to gain from capitalism and its policies in peacetime or war. The prime task was to unmask the class interests of the powers involved, and raise the standard of opposition and socialism.
Shamefully, instead of carrying out these decisions, the leaders of each national section rushed to support their own ruling classes. This collapse of the Socialist International constituted an historic betrayal of internationalism. While it would have been almost impossible to mobilise mass opposition at the start of the war given the patriotic fervour, if they had simply registered their opposition it would have kept the socialist banner clean and laid the basis for future large-scale resistance. But they staged an ignominious capitulation. On 3 August in the Reichstag, when the Kaiser asked for large war credits, saying, “I know only Germans”, the vote in favour was unanimous. Even the courageous Karl Liebknecht, who later went to prison for his anti-war activities, submitted to party discipline on this occasion. It must be said the betrayal came as an enormous shock to everyone. Even Lenin refused to believe the news, saying that the declaration of support for the war in the German Social Democratic Party newspaper must have been a forgery!
In the decades of upswing before the war, the leadership of the Labour movement internationally began, in effect, to accommodate itself to capitalism. The struggle for reforms became an over-riding aim, while the idea of the socialist revolution became a distant goal. “The movement is everything”, said the revisionist Eduard Bernstein, “the goal is nothing.” This outlook summed up the views of the social democratic leaders. For them, opportunist policies, the watering down of ideas and principles for illusory gains, became a way of life. As Lenin explained,
The relatively ‘peaceful’ character of the period between 1871 and 1914 served to foster opportunism first as a mood, then as a trend, until finally it formed a group or stratum among the labour bureaucracy and petty-bourgeois fellow-travellers. These elements were able to gain control of the labour movement only by paying lip-service to revolutionary aims and revolutionary tactics.
While the German socialist leaders announced a crusade against Tsarist reaction, the French and British socialist leaders launched one against German militarism. The only parties of the International to oppose the imperialist war on class lines were the Social Democracy of Russia (Mensheviks and Bolsheviks) and Serbia. In addition, the British ILP came out in opposition for pacifist reasons. The Second (Socialist) International, built on parties formally committed to revolutionary Marxism, when put to the test, simply collapsed like a house of cards.
“What then becomes of all our resolutions; all our protests of fraternisation; all our threats of general strikes; all our carefully built machinery of internationalism; all our hopes for the future?” asked James Connolly a few days into the war.[2]
Eighteen months later, Connolly led his Citizen Army, in alliance with the Irish nationalists, into an Easter Uprising against the British government. He had hoped that such an act of self-sacrifice would serve to light the flames of revolt throughout Europe against the imperialist war. However, the rising was put down in cold blood by the British government, and its leaders, including Connolly, were executed. It was the Bolshevik Party in October 1917 that carried out Connolly’s revolutionary hopes, shaking the capitalist order to its very foundations.
In Britain, there was very little organised opposition to the war, which reflected the initial enthusiasm of the population. World war was a totally new experience, and the masses were oblivious to the horror that was about to befall them. Once the Labour leadership had swung into support of the war, the rank and file were completely disorientated. The activists at local level were totally stunned and isolated, unable to offer much resistance. According to a young shop steward at the time: “Probably nothing reveals the political infancy of the revolutionary socialists and syndicalists at this time more than their utter helplessness at the outbreak of war.”[3]
Many had looked to the trade unions for a lead, but none was forthcoming. As late as 2 August 1914, a few days before the outbreak of war, demonstrations in Trafalgar Square addressed by Lansbury, Hardie, Henderson and Will Thorne, declared their total opposition to the coming conflagration. But the actual declaration of war transformed the situation. When the time for action came, nothing happened. With heads bowed, they all surrendered to the pro-war mood. They could have stood their ground and kept the flames of internationalism alive. But they were not personally up to it. It was left to a handful of courageous individuals, like John MacLean in Scotland and James Connolly in Ireland, to keep the Red Flag of international socialism flying.
Consequently, as soon as the war was declared, the railway workers withdrew their strike notices. The London building workers returned to work, and the engineers dropped their demand for a 48-hour week. The class struggle had ground to a halt. By January 1915, 12 per cent of all engineering workers nationally had already enlisted in the armed forces. This rose to 19.5 per cent before serious attempts were made to keep young people at home to service the war industries.
“What terrible attraction a war can have! Thousands went flocking to the colours in the first days, not because of any ‘love of country’, not because of any high feeling of ‘patriotism’”, recalls Willie Gallacher of the Clyde shop stewards, “but because of the new, strange and thrilling life that lay before them. Later the reality of the fearsome slaughterhouse, with all its long agony of filth and horror, turned them from buoyant youth to despair or madness.”[4]
The Labour leaders agreed to set aside all trade union conditions of labour for the duration of the war. An “industrial peace”, where strikes were suspended, was unilaterally declared by the workers’ organisations. Their capitulation was essential to the war effort. “Had labour been hostile,” Lloyd George later admitted, “the war could not have been carried on effectively.”