Editor’s note: The Second International is often seen as a high point of Marxist organization, judged by its size, influence, and breadth. As much of the Left today debates how to achieve greater size and influence in the face of a rising tide of fascism, war, and reaction, it is worth considering how such organization was fatally undermined by its bankruptcy of thought. Below is an excerpt from chapter 9, “The Second International, 1889-1914,” of Raya Dunayevskaya’s book Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 until Today. Rather than being included in one of the book’s Parts, it is the only chapter in “Organizational Interlude,” reflecting the view that the Second International was a detour in the development of revolutionary Marxism: that it was Marxist organizationally but not philosophically. Marxism and Freedom is now available as an ebook as well as in paperback.
“Kant’s results are made the immediate beginning of these philosophies, so that the preceding exposition, from which these results are derived, and which is philosophic cognition, is cut away beforehand. Thus the Kantian philosophy becomes a pillow for intellectual sloth, which soothes itself with the idea that everything has already been proved and done with.”
—Hegel1
“From the Depths,” by William Balfour-Ker.
The death of the First International2 came soon after the defeat of the Paris Commune. The years of the “Great Depression” that set in seemed to spell the doom of all working-class organizations. In America, for instance, the severe 1875 crisis signified the collapse of the Eight-Hour Leagues. In the 1880’s, however, the working class in Europe and America began to act in an organized manner on both the economic and political fronts. At its St. Louis Congress in December, 1888, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) decided to launch a campaign for simultaneous strikes to take place all over the country on May 1, 1890. The plan was to strike a single industry, with workers in all other industries giving it financial aid until the struggle was won. Each industry would have its turn until the eight-hour day was won for all. Delegations went abroad to see what could be done to make this an international struggle.
Those American beginnings of the formation of the Second International3 have been forgotten4 not only because the AFL later became the advocate of “business unionism” rather than international class struggle. When, in 1905, the very militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was organized it hardly got any more attention from the Second International. This happened not alone to America, where there was no established Marxist party. The Russian Social Democracy, which adhered fully to the International’s program, played a completely insignificant role. It was small. When the great 1905 Revolution broke out and involved hundreds of thousands, it was not on the agenda as a separate point. It had happened between Congresses. In a word, the Second International was from the beginning to the end a West European organization. It was headed by the German Social Democracy, which was the largest political mass organization of workers in the world. Bigness counted.
The Second International was established on July 14, 1889, on the occasion of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the fall of the Bastille which had opened the great French Revolution. For a quarter of a century the Second International was to experience unprecedented growth, be respected as a powerful organization and stand for established Marxism. Suddenly, and against the basis of its very existence as an opponent of capitalism, it collapsed in the face of Western Civilization’s plunge into the chaos of the First World War.
Its voting of war credits certainly was a total change of front from its previous anti-militarist and anti-war manifestoes. Yet the breakup of the Second International came as the logical conclusion to strong objective forces.
With hindsight, and much systematic study of the new stage of capitalistic development, V.I. Lenin traced the double transformation into opposites: (1) of competition into monopoly; and (2) of a stratum of the working-class into the aristocrats of labor who gained by the super-profits of imperialism.5 We will deal with this in Part IV, “The Great Divide in Marxism.” The point here is that the slow poisoning of Marxism, long before the collapse, is to this day overlooked by people claiming to be Marxists. Karl Kautsky’s works, written when he was a “good revolutionary theoretician,” are used as textbooks by so-called revolutionary theoreticians as well as by reformists to this day. The methodology of presenting the results of Marx’s studies as if they were something to be learned by rote, and disregarding the process, the relationship of theory to history, past and present, in the development of Marxism, still permeates what is left of the Marxist movement.6 Yet without the relationship of theory to actuality Marxism is meaningless. Learning by rote becomes, to use a Hegelian expression, “a pillow for intellectual sloth.” Nowhere is that intellectual sloth more deep than among self-avowed Marxist theoreticians. The truth is that what has happened to the Second International was only the first link in a continuous chain that is by no means limited to reformists and betrayers….
Engels was still alive when the Second International was founded, and at its birth, predicted its end. “You (Karl Kautsky) put abstract political questions in the foreground and hide thereby the most immediate concrete questions, the questions which the first great events, the first political crisis itself places on the order of the day.”7 This was true not only politically of the Erfurt Program but theoretically. In his correspondence with Kautsky on his books, the Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx, and on the Erfurt Program, Engels put his finger on the Achilles’ heel. He wrote in his criticism of Kautsky’s identification of planlessness with capitalism: “When we go over to trusts which monopolize and rule over whole branches of industry, then not only private production but also planlessness ceases.” There, in a nutshell, was the theory that dominated the Second International, revolutionary and reformist alike, throughout the span of its life. Engels could do no more than criticize and wait for events to bear out his criticism. Meanwhile, what was on the order of the day was the organization of the working-class—trade union organization and political organization. In this, the German Social Democracy could show enough gains to impress Engels in his last days.
1. Achievements of the Second International: Trade Union and Political Organization of the Proletariat
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Karl Kautsky. Public domain.
The German Social Democracy was the greatest party of the Second International, both numerically and in theoretical stature. It was the first modern mass organization in the world. It was founded in 1875, led by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel in a merger between the Lassalleans and the Marxists8. Karl Kautsky became its outstanding theoretician. In 1887, two years before the formation of the Second International, Kautsky published the Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx, which became the standard popularization of Marxism. If the reduction of Marx’s “economic principles” to a catechism was done without any of the underlying philosophic concepts, it made up for this lack with sufficient lip service to “the dialectic.” The Second International became the titular heirs of the Marx-Engels writings. They never published Marx’s Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts. But Kautsky’s heavy standardization of Marxism became the foundation for all sorts of “concrete studies” on slums, juvenile delinquency, and other “crimes of capitalism.” In 1892, Kautsky wrote the Erfurt Program, and this also became the model for all Social Democratic Parties on the political, programmatic front.
The key word, in theory as well as in practice, was: Organization, organization, organization. It lived entirely in the realm of the difference between immediate demands and the ultimate goals of socialism. The ultimate goals of socialism could wait. Meanwhile, there was the “practical” struggle and in that they could show phenomenal gains.
During twelve years of their existence, the German Social Democracy had to work under the handicap of Bismarck’s AntiSocialist Laws. Their meetings and publications were prohibited. Their leaders were harried and often thrown into jail. The publications were published abroad and smuggled into Germany. Bismarck tried to win the workers away from socialism by some welfare-state features such as old-age and sickness insurance. The workers, on the other hand, were determined to build up their own organizations with their own aims and methods. They struggled for a shorter workday and better wages; for popular education and freedom for the press. They kept growing despite the persecutions. By 1890, when the Anti-Socialist Laws expired, it was the Iron Chancellor who had to resign. In the very first free election, the German Social Democracy received 1,427,000 votes, or fully twenty per cent of the vote. By 1903, twenty-five per cent of the German population voted Socialist and sent eighty-one Social-Democratic deputies to the Reichstag (Parliament). By 1914 the Party had a million members and another three million trade union members were under its control.
This was indeed the most elaborately organized socialist movement the world had ever seen, not alone in its mass political party and trade union organizations, but in cooperatives, among the youth, among women. They published an impressive array of newspapers, journals, books, and pamphlets. They were a world unto themselves, even having “socialist” rituals for births, weddings, funerals, as well as sponsoring organized sport, travel, recreation. They began to believe that their organized strength, in and of itself, would make capitalistic war impossible, and would assure Social-Democratic power. When capitalism “inevitably” and “automatically” fell, they fully expected their ruling cadre to be ready to replace the capitalist managers who were “mismanaging” the productive forces and embarking upon colonialism and burdening the population with military expenditures.
This belief in organizational strength, which would “automatically” insure the world against war, became characteristic not alone of the German Social Democracy, but of the whole International. Keir Hardie, for example, the founder of the Independent Labor Party of Britain, and a left winger at all the sessions discussing militarism, stated: “A strike of British coal miners would suffice by itself to bring warlike activities to a stand.” The Austrian, Adler, spoke of how the “crime of war” would “automatically” bring the downfall of capitalism. No words were more popular in the Second International’s lexicon than “inevitable” and “automatic.” All this was possible because of organization, organization, organization.
No word was used with greater contempt than “unorganized.” As one German study9 put it, “the unorganized worker became a low species of human.”
Monopoly was “organized capitalism” and looked upon as “the necessary stage to socialism.” They had contempt not alone for small scale enterprisers but for the great mass of peasantry, and not only for the artisans but for the great mass of unorganized workers. Even “colonialism,” which was fought officially, was not looked upon with such revulsion as anything or anybody that was “unorganized.” The conception seemed to be: the trade unions would organize the proletariat on the economic field; the Party would organize it on the political field; and the youth would be organized on an anti-militaristic basis.10 Then, when they had won sufficient votes, the world could be theirs.
At the highest point of the International’s development, in 1907, the Congress voted for the anti-war amendment of Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. Yet it is at this high point that we can discern the beginning of the end of the International. This Congress of 1907 was the first to take place after the 1905 Russian Revolution. That great event, however, was not on its agenda, much less did it make a point of departure for theory.11
Leon Trotsky. Public domain
The left revolutionaries (Lenin, Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky) who did make this event a new departure for their theory did not ask the Congress to do the same. None challenged the West European character of the international gathering at a time when the Russian working-class had “stormed the heavens.” None asked that the point be put on the agenda. None challenged the dominance of the German leadership in theory as well as in practice. Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky12 differed quite fundamentally among themselves. Their failure to draw a sharp line between themselves and other political tendencies was, however, not due to their differences. They were all more conscious of the similarity of views with those of the International than of the dissimilarity.
The spirit of 1905 entered the Congress only insofar as it was an outgrowth of the Russo-Japanese war. Luxemburg and Lenin moved an amendment to the anti-war resolution to the following effect: (1) that they were duty-bound to do everything to prevent war by all means; and (2) in case of war “to intervene in order to bring it promptly to an end, and with all their strength to make use of the economic and political crisis created by the war to stir up the deepest strata of the people and precipitate the fall of capitalist domination.” That was general enough to gain unanimous acceptance.
There is no such thing as Marxist theory that does not link the specific stage of workers’ revolt to the specific stage of capitalist development. The 1905 Revolution gave birth to an unheard-of new form of workers’ organization called the Soviet (Council). If such a new phenomenon was not even put on the agenda it could mean only one thing—the theoreticians were not receiving the impulses from these deepest layers of the revolutionary proletariat. The whole concept of theory as Marx lived it flowed from the proletariat as its source. The concrete struggles of the workers in his day produced the break in Marx’s concept of theory. It isn’t that intellectuals must work out “ideas.” But, as we saw, the actions of the workers created the conditions for Marx to work out theory. No such thing happened as a result of the 1905 Revolution. 1905 did not do for the theoreticians of the Second International what 1861-71 did for Marx’s theory. In that could be seen the fact that the Second International as an organization was beginning to go off the Marxist rails. Despite their adherence to Marxist “language,” there was no organization of Marxist thought.
[For reasons of space, we omit section 2, “The Beginning of the End of the Second International: New Form of Workers’ Organization: the Soviet” —Editor]
3. The End of the Second International: New Stage of Capitalist Production and Stratification of the Proletariat
Raya Dunayevskaya
The twentieth century opened with the first billion dollar trust (United States Steel). The age of steel followed the age of steam. Heavy industry preponderated over light industry. Large-scale production began to take on new forms: cartels and trusts. Free competition was being transformed into its opposite, monopoly. With cartels and trusts came imperialism; and with imperialist super-profits a stratification took place in the working class itself, between the aristocrats of labor (the craftsmen) and the great mass of poorly paid and unorganized workers.
Once the Second International cut itself off from the new impulses arising from the year 1905—not alone the Russian Revolution but the IWW, not alone the “advanced” countries but backward Africa and the Zulu Rebellion—whose impulses could they attune to but those of the aristocrats of labor?
No one was in the least mistaken about the rapid transformation of the AFL from a militant fighting organization to undiluted “business unionism.” Everyone, including Lenin, was led astray when the same happened to the German unions “under Socialist influence” because the manifestoes and pronunciamentos kept coming in full force and in “traditional” language. In truth, it was not the German Social Democracy that “set the line” which permeated them through and through, but the labor aristocracy. It could not have been otherwise since only the latter had an objective base. The upper stratum of the working class began to have a stake in the super-profits of German imperialism.
Where Marx spoke about the “bourgeoisification” of part of the British proletariat and the need to go to “lower and deeper” layers of the working class, the leaders of the Second International said: “Since” there is only one proletariat, “therefore” there must be only one Social Democracy in each country. Where Marx wrote, “the proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing,” Bernstein wrote that to him “the movement” (that is to say, the Socialist Party) was everything, “socialism nothing.”
That was a harsh statement, and “revisionist.” Nevertheless it characterized not only the Revisionists, who were a minority, but “the orthodox” Marxists who were in the majority. Indeed, the German Social Democracy was never able to make as sharp a line against the right as against the ultra-left. Anarchists were expelled in 1896; not only were the Revisionists not expelled, but the “censure” of them meant nothing since they were allowed to remain as authoritative leaders. They corrupted the whole Party.13 When Bernstein criticized and revised Marx’s analysis of the law of motion of capitalist society, he was only the open example of what was corrupting the inner core of the German Social Democracy in its adaptation to the capitalist milieu.
Not only Bernstein, but the orthodox theoreticians—from Kautsky, who wrote “pure” theory, to Hilferding, who made the concrete study, Finance Capital—gave expression precisely to this new stratification in the working class. This passed for “Marxist theory.” Yet Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital is hardly distinguishable from the liberal study of Imperialism by Hobson. They are equally pedantic and filled with statistics. Hobson’s book is a pioneer work in its field. It was written in 1902. Hilferding’s, written in 1910, is a follow-up, with “Socialist conclusions” tacked on. Hilferding is “for” the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the proletariat in both studies is just an inert mass. Indeed, Hilferding’s book describes monopolistic control as if it overcame anarchy instead of deepening the contradictions of both “control” and “anarchy of the market.” His theoretical conceptions are of a smooth, well-oiled mechanism of events. Contradiction has been eliminated. As monopoly capitalism brought “order” into the national market, he argues, so the workers will “take over” and bring order out of the anarchy of the international market.
All, in fact, would be organized. The unions would manage industry while the political party would take over the State apparatus. There is no longer any sense of breaking the chains of the ubiquitous capitalist machine, nor is there the faintest glimmer of the idea that “the dictatorship of the proletariat” or “the workers organized as the ruling class” means the total reorganization of the relations of men at the point of production by the men themselves. The underlying assumption seems to be that a ruling cadre—the labor organizers—would replace the financial oligarchy and do on an international scale what the bourgeoisie did only on the national level.
Missing from their picture of organized capitalism and no “great wars” was the dialectic of the minor “incidents,” from the imperialistic carving up of Africa to the Balkan cauldron. They were blind to the inner necessity and drive toward imperialist expansion, and the irreconcilable breakdown of Western Civilization.
It could not have been otherwise for what was missing from the “trustified” concept of “socialization of production” was the fragmentation of the worker to a cog in a machine, the actuality of capitalist progress as dehumanization. The German Social Democracy had become part of the very organism of “progressive capitalism” and was bound to fall with it.
1 Hegel’s Science of Logic, Vol. I (Macmillan, 1951), p. 73, footnote.
2 The International Working Men’s Association was the first international association of working-class groups aiming for emancipation of workers. —Editor
3 The Socialist International, or Second International, was an international federation of socialist parties, many of which regarded themselves as Marxist. —Editor
4 See G. D. H. Cole: “. . . the earlier International Congresses which helped to prepare the way for the Second International have been largely forgotten, and with them the close connection of the entire movement in its early stages with the struggle for the eight hours’ day and with the American initiative in this respect. . . . The actual resolution adopted . . . was as follows: . . . ‘In view of the fact that a similar manifestation has already been decided on for May 1st, 1890, by the American Federation of Labor at its Congress held at St. Louis in December 1888, this date is adopted for the international manifestation.’ ” (The Second International, p. 9).
5 See especially the pamphlet, “Imperialism; a Popular Outline,” and the article, “The Split in the International,” included in Lenin’s Selected Works, Vols. V and XI, respectively.
6 I am, of course, not referring to Communists who have perverted Marxism into its opposite, but to Trotskyists and similar radical groupings.
7 Not only was Engels’ critique, written in 1891, not published until 1901 (Neue Zeit, Jahrg. 2, Vol. I, 1901), but it made no impression on the living revolutionaries even then. It took the actual collapse of the Second International before Lenin “discovered” this criticism.
8 Marx was most critical of the program which served as the basis for the unity. In fact, he was going to disassociate himself publicly from the new organization. Meanwhile, he satisfied himself with a fundamental theoretical attack known as the Critique of the Gotha Programme. This was not made public until 1891, as the German Social Democracy prepared for the Erfurt Congress, when Engels insisted on its publication. (Included in Marx-Engels Selected Works, Vol. II.)
9 See Ruth Fisher, Stalin and German Communism.
10 The last principle was greatly tampered with. As soon as Karl Liebknecht, the leader of the youth, wrote his pamphlet Militarism and Anti-Militarism, which earned him an eighteen month jail sentence, the pamphlet was promptly repudiated by the Party. Liebknecht was replaced by another leader, and the youth was placed under the strict discipline of the Party. That was 1907. As we shall show when we take up the 1905 Revolution, the degeneration had already set in.
11 Dunayevskaya developed more on the 1907 Congress in Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, chapter 1, and in the Afterword to chapter 11. —Editor
12 Trotsky was in jail, but his theory of permanent revolution and his writings on the history of the Soviet had been published.
13 That the Party was corruptible to begin with could be seen even from the corridor gossip which had it that one of the leaders of “the revolutionary wing” said to Bernstein, “But such things you speak about should be done, not said.” Those who insist on seeking the “roots” of Stalinism in Leninism would, if they were truly objective, find a whole forest of “roots” for the One-Party State concept in the Second International’s ukase that only one Social Democracy exist in each country.
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by Raya Dunayevskaya
with a preface by Herbert Marcuse
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