Everywhere socialists struggled to find some understanding of what had happened. An event of such earth-shattering significance could not be explained in terms of individual failings alone – although personal qualities undoubtedly played a role, as we see in the courageous stand taken by Karl Liebknecht in Germany. Lenin and Trotsky found the explanation in the long period of capitalist upswing that preceded the First World War. The mass parties of the Second International had taken shape under conditions of full employment and rising living standards which formed the basis of the politics of ‘class peace’. A similar situation existed in the developed capitalist countries between 1948 and 1974. In both cases the results were similar. Marx long ago explained that “social being determines consciousness”. In such conditions, the labour leaders tended to separate themselves from the working class. In the hothouse atmosphere of parliament or shut away in trade union offices, and enjoying a privileged standard of living, they gradually succumbed to the pressure of alien classes.
The theoretical expression of this pressure was the rise of revisionism – the assertion that the ideas of Marx and Engels were out of date and had to be revised. In place of revolutionary politics, they advocated peaceful parliamentary reform and gradualism. ‘Today better than yesterday; tomorrow better than today’ was their watchword. Slowly, peacefully, gradually, they would reform the capitalist system until it would imperceptibly grow over into socialism. What a beautiful idea! How practical! How economical! No sane person would prefer the road of hard struggle and revolution to such an alluring vision of the future. But unfortunately, all theories sooner or later must face the test of practice. The dreams of the reformists were weighed in the balance of the events of August 1914 and found wanting. All the beautiful illusions of peaceful parliamentarism and gradual change ended up in the muck and blood and poison gas of the trenches.
Cutting through the fog of chauvinist demagogy and sentimental pacifism, Lenin explained the socioeconomic roots of social chauvinism, its class basis in the labour aristocracy. The mass parties and trade unions of the Second International had taken shape in a long period of capitalist upswing and full employment in which reforms and concessions could be made to the working class and particularly its upper layers. Under such conditions, a thick crust of bureaucracy formed at the top of the labour organisations, composed of a large number of members of parliament, trade union officials, journalists, and the like, among whom were a host of careerists and jacks-in-office, separated from the class by their incomes, life styles, and psychology and imbued with bourgeois ideas derived both from their living standards and the social milieu in which they moved. Decades of slow, peaceful development in boom conditions, the absence of class struggle for long periods (Russia was the exception here) meant that the mass organisations, and especially their leading layer, came increasingly under the pressure of alien classes. While they still professed loyalty to the class struggle and socialism before the Party faithful, in practice their conduct was entirely circumscribed by the limits of what was permitted by bourgeois legality and ‘public opinion’. They had fallen victim to that fatal disease which Marx called ‘parliamentary cretinism’. In his article ‘The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx’, Lenin characterises this period thus:
The second period (1872-1904) was distinguished from the first by its ‘peaceful’ character, by the absence of revolutions. The West had finished with bourgeois revolutions. The East had not yet risen to them. The West entered a phase of ‘peaceful’ preparations for the changes to come. Socialist parties, basically proletarian, were formed everywhere, and learned to use bourgeois parliamentarism and to found their own daily press, their educational institutions, their trade unions, and their cooperative societies. Marx’s doctrine gained a complete victory and began to spread. The selection and mustering of the forces of the proletariat and its preparation for the coming battles made slow but steady progress.
The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism. They interpreted the period of preparing the forces for great battles as renunciation of these battles. Improvement of the conditions of the slaves to fight against wage slavery they took to mean the sale by the slaves of their right to liberty for a few pence. They cravenly preached ‘social peace’ (i.e., peace with the slave-owners), renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials of the working-class movement, and the ‘sympathising’ intelligentsia. (Reproduced in Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 101.)
The right-wing leaders were not the only trend in the international Social Democracy. There were also centrist tendencies – Karl Kautsky, Rudolph Hilferding, and Hugo Haase in Germany; Jean Longuet and Alphonse Merrheim in France; Ramsey MacDonald in Britain; Victor Adler in Austria, and others. The usual line of these people was to hide behind pacifism, but to avoid a real struggle against the right-wing social chauvinists. Lenin directed his most severe attacks against this trend as the main obstacle, preventing the workers from taking the revolutionary road. They were, he said, ‘left in words, right in deeds’, a comment that is applicable to left reformists at every period.
Only slowly did the revolutionary wing begin to recover from the deadly blow inflicted in August 1914. But gradually, a regroupment took place everywhere. The forces of revolutionary internationalism in almost every case emerged from an inner differentiation and splits in the old mass organisations – the Social Democracy and the unions. The international left included Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Klara Zetkin in Germany; Dimitar Blagoev and Vasil Kolarov in Bulgaria; John MacLean in Scotland; and James Connolly in Ireland, as well as the Serbian Social Democrats whose two MPs voted against the war credits. The Bulgarian ‘tesnyaki’ (‘Narrow socialists’) issued an anti-war manifesto and voted against the militarisation of the country. That was the plus side. But on the other hand, some ex-lefts like Parvus in Germany and Plekhanov in Russia went right over to the camp of social-chauvinism. In the German SPD the left international tendency had the strongest base after Russia, Serbia, and Bulgaria.
On 2 December, 1914, Karl Liebknecht voted against war credits in the Reichstag. This courageous act was a turning point which gave heart to the left-wing workers not only in the German SPD, but in all the belligerent countries. On 4 December, a meeting of party activists in Halle voted to support Liebknecht’s stand. The Bolsheviks tried to contact the German Lefts, but found this materially impossible either through Switzerland or Scandinavia. Because of the traditional role of the German party in the International, this was particularly important. Revolutionary internationalists like Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring took a courageous stand against the war. In Austria likewise the left began to organise. In Britain, especially in Scotland, there were anti-war meetings and later strikes (the Glasgow rent strike, the shop stewards movement.) By posing fundamental questions in a very sharp way, the war provoked a series of crises and splits in the ‘left’ parties in Britain – the Socialist Party and Socialist Labour Party (SLP) and also in the Independent Labour Party (ILP), out of which the forces of the future Communist Party were formed.
There was also a growing left opposition within the French Socialist Party and trade unions. The revolutionary syndicalist current led by Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte led the opposition to the ex-Syndicalist right-reformist leaders. As the war dragged on, the support for the chauvinists began to melt away. The circulation of the right-chauvinist paper L’Humanité went down by about a third. In Italy, the revolutionary socialist trend was represented by Avanti, edited by Giacinto Serrati, while the leader of the right wing of the Socialist Party was the future fascist dictator Mussolini. The Romanian Social Democrats also adopted a revolutionary anti-war position. The Dutch ‘Lefts’ organised around the paper Tribune, but their leader, Anton Pannekoek, like several others, suffered from the kind of extreme ultra-left tendencies that were prevalent at the time, as a reaction against the policies of the leadership. In general, the left was composed of rather weak, mainly young forces whose lack of experience expressed itself in a swing towards ultra-left, semi-anarcho-syndicalist positions.