Left Radical Internationalism, the Fracturing of the Second International, and Founding of the Third International, 1910-1920

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Left Radical Internationalism, the Fracturing of the Second International, and Founding of the Third International, 1910-1920

by Ali Yagiz Yildiz Sociology BA, Middle East Technical University, 2009 Comparative Studies in History and Society MA, Koc University, 2011

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

University of Pittsburgh 2023

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

This dissertation was presented by Ali Yagiz Yildiz It was defended on November 9, 2023 and approved by Dr. Jonathan Harris, Department of Political Science Dr. Diego Holstein, Department of History Dr. James Pickett, Department of History Dissertation Director: Dr. William Chase, Department of History

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Copyright © by Ali Yagiz Yildiz 2023

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Left Radical Internationalism, the Fracturing of the Second International, and Founding of the Third International, 1910-1920 Ali Yagiz Yildiz, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2023

Abstract: Between 1910 and 1920, an international faction of revolutionary Marxists organized itself first inside and against the Second International, and then outside of it, with the aim of finding a new revolutionary International. This dissertation explores the origins, development, and the dissolution of this movement, which is defined as “Left Radical Internationalism” Although the historiography has approached different national groups that were a part of this radical movement (like the Dutch Tribunists, Russian Bolsheviks, or German left-radical groups), this is the first work that analyzes the movement’s evolution as an international faction beyond the limits of narrow national settings. The dissertation reveals the international organizational structure of the Left Radical Internationalist movement, as well as the global scope, content, and shape of its intellectual development as a collective. Left Radical Internationalism formed its initial organizational center (the Zimmerwald Left Bureau) in 1915 as a radical anti-war group. The dissertation compares this structure with its political counterparts, most importantly the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) of the Second International and the Bern International Socialist Commission of the Zimmerwald Movement, to illuminate its organizational originality. In addition, it analyzes the evolution of the Left Radical Internationalist tendency’s organizational structure at various key moments, most importantly, the establishment of the Communist International and its Bureaus in 1919 and the dissolution of the original Left Radical Internationalist organizational structure immediately before the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920. Throughout, the dissertation explores the evolution of intellectual and political positions of this unique revolutionary group. One of the most important findings of the dissertation is the centrality of the “Mass Action Debate” in the evolution of left-radical positions. Starting from 1910, the mass action debate informed and determined the Left Radical Internationalist perspective and strategy on vital political and organizational questions, including war, imperialism, trade unions, parliaments, and organization. Until the founding of the Communist International, the Left Radical Internationalists’ defense of mass action tactics constituted the key impulse for their distinctive politics.

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Preface Without the help of many friends, family members and scholars, I could never have completed this work. I have so many debts of gratitude that I need to write another book just to list them all. What follows is unavoidably an incomplete account and merely the statement of my heartfelt gratitude to all the people who supported me through this period and made this dissertation possible. However, I am solely responsible for all the weaknesses and mistakes that may be present in this work. First, I must thank William Chase. As my mentor and advisor, he was always supportive and had superhuman patience with me. Throughout the years I lapsed into depression and anxietyridden personal crises several times that hindered my work. Any other advisor would lose their confidence in me, whereas Bill never did. I am tremendously privileged to have such a kind, thoughtful, patient, and supportive advisor and mentor. I was also privileged to have an excellent group of scholars on my dissertation committee, who always supported me. When I started my Ph.D., my discussions with Professor Jonathan Harris helped me shape my research question. His suggestions, comments and questions emboldened me to pursue this research. I am so grateful to him and Bill for giving me the courage to dig deep in my research. Professor Holstein's insightful comments helped me see my work from a broader perspective. I am grateful to him for his patience and illuminating reflections. Professor James Pickett helped me to realize how I can develop my work with his thoughtful and constructive remarks. I consider myself lucky to have him on my committee. The History Department community at the University of Pittsburgh was always fully supportive of me. During a critical time in my doctoral studies, Professor Niklas Frykman patiently and unwaveringly supported me. Professors Leslie Hammond, Bernard Haggerty and Scott Smith, were always kind and friendly to me. They taught me so much about teaching. I owe them all a great debt of gratitude. I was also lucky to have an amazing circle of friends. In Pittsburgh, thanks to the warm friendship of Senem Guler Biyikli and Emre Biyikli, I never felt alone. Our small discussion group which included Dante Odorisio, Jessy Oslavsky, and Jonathan Sherry provided me with an intellectual and personal sanctuary. In Turkey, my close friends Sinem Uludağ-Gök, Cem Gök, and Ekin opened their homes to me when I needed one. Without my dear friend Ender Yakaboylu’s

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constant encouragement, I would have given up. My brilliant, loyal and humane friend Semih Bilgiç was always there for me and patiently endured my constant whining. My friends' comradely wisdom and support guided me whenever I felt lost. Last but not least, I am thankful to my Family. My mother, Nurcehre Elver helped me, whenever I needed support. I turned to my father, Leven Burak Yildiz in some of my most difficult personal moments. Professor Neylan Ziyalar emboldened me when I doubted myself. I am eternally grateful to all of them.

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Table of Contents

I.

Introduction ............................................................................................................................1

II.

Insurrectionary Internationalism and the Nineteenth Century European Origins of

Communist Internationalism ............................................................................................................7 A.

Eighteenth Century Civil Society and the Emergence of Secret Societies in Europe .......9

B.

The Nineteenth Century: Transition From Conspiracy to Revolution ............................11 1.

Development of the Underground Organizational Model in the Early 19th Century ..12

2.

Blanquists, the Communist League and the First International Communist Society:

“The International Society of Revolutionary Communists” ................................................17 3. C. III.

The First International .................................................................................................21 The Formation of the Second International .....................................................................29

The Second International and Its Central Organ: The Composition, Culture and Function of

the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) 1900-1914 ......................................................................32 A.

The Organizational Evolution of the ISB ........................................................................34 1.

Functions of the ISB ....................................................................................................37

2.

The Composition and the Culture of the ISB ..............................................................38

3.

Bourgeois Pacifist Movements in the Early Twentieth Century and the ISB's Peace

Strategy .................................................................................................................................48 B. IV.

Crisis of Bourgeois Pacifism and the Collapse of the ISB ..............................................57 The Mass Strike Debate inside the Second International: Theoretical Foundations of the

Left- Radical Internationalism .......................................................................................................71 A.

The Birth of the Modern Working-Class Masses ............................................................73

B.

The Mass Action Debate in Germany .............................................................................89

C. V.

1.

The First Stage: 1904-1906 The Mass Strike Debate Begins ......................................91

2.

The Second Stage: 1910 as a Turning Point ................................................................99

3.

The Third Stage: 1910-1914 ......................................................................................105 The Mass Action Debate in the Russian Social Democratic Movement .......................120

Towards a Left-Radical Internationalist Theory ................................................................134

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A.

The Left-Radical Internationalists’ Analysis of the War ...............................................135 1.

War and Imperialism .................................................................................................135

2.

Left-Radical Internationalists on the “Collapse of the Second International” ..........147

3.

Left-Radical Internationalists for a “New Revolutionary International” ..................157

B.

The Organizational Formation of the Left-Radical Internationalist Nucleus in the

Second International before the War .......................................................................................160

VI.

1.

Towards an LRI Faction Inside the Second International (1908-1914) ....................161

2.

The Turning Point: The Radek Affair (1911-1914) ..................................................167

The First Steps towards LRI Reorganization: August 1914 to Fall 1915 ..........................175

A.

The Shock of War and the Dissolution of the ISB ........................................................176

B.

The first LRI Reactions and socialist Anti-war Meetings in Switzerland in 1915 ........180

C.

The International Peace Conferences in Bern in 1915 ..................................................184 1.

International Socialist Anti-War Women’s Conference ............................................185

2.

International Socialist Youth Conference in Bern, 1915 ...........................................189

D.

The Zimmerwald Moment .............................................................................................192

VII.

The Zimmerwald Left Fraction .....................................................................................219

A.

Formation of the Zimmerwald Left ...............................................................................219

B.

The Test of Strength for the Zimmerwald Left: Towards a Second Conference ..........234 1.

C.

The Kienthal Conference, 24-30 April 1916 .............................................................239 The Growth of the Zimmerwald Left Fraction in 1916 .................................................242

1.

The Youth International and the New Generation of Militants .................................244

2.

LRI Growth in the Neutral Countries and the Role of the Emigres Militants ...........256

3.

Some Brief Reflections on the Historical Roots of the Comintern ...........................269

VIII.

The Zimmerwald Left Fraction at an Impasse, From March 1917 to March 1919 .......276

A.

March Revolution and the Question of Socialist (re-)Unification.................................278 1.

B.

IX.

The Zimmerwald Left Between March and September 1917 ...................................291 The Seizure of Power by the Soviets in Russia and the Question of Dictatorship ........301

1.

The Question of Timing: When to Seize Power? ......................................................302

2.

The Question of Form: Soviets and Proletarian Dictatorship....................................309

The Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty and the Isolation of the Revolution in the East...............324

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A.

The International Disorganization of the Zimmerwald Left and Reorganization

Attempts, November 1917 to March 1919 ..............................................................................337 1.

East and East-Central Europe in 1918: LRI Organizational Consolidation Around the

Soviet Power.......................................................................................................................338 2.

The First Soviet Attempts to Forge Links with Western European Left Radical

Internationalists: London, Berlin, and the Swiss Soviet Diplomatic Missions in 1918 .....351 X.

The First Comintern Congress in Moscow, March 1919 ...................................................361 A.

On the Timing and Location of the Founding Congress: Why Moscow and Why March

1919 361 1.

Why March 1919? .....................................................................................................363

2.

Why Moscow? ...........................................................................................................372

B.

The Congress’ Composition ..........................................................................................375 1.

Who Was Invited and Why? ......................................................................................376

2.

Composition of the Congress ....................................................................................382

C.

The Agenda of the Congress..........................................................................................389 1.

The Assessment of the Post-War Situation ...............................................................390

2.

Soviet Dictatorship versus Parliamentary Democracy ..............................................393

3.

Founding of the International ....................................................................................395

D. XI.

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................399 The First Year of the Comintern: The Creation of the Comintern Bureaus, 1919 .............402

A.

Asynchronic Development of the Global Class Conflict and the First Stage of the

Bureau System: Summer-Spring, 1919 ...................................................................................404 1.

The Comintern’s Response to the Asynchrony .........................................................412

2.

The System of Bureaus as an Internationally Centralized Network ..........................414

B.

a)

The Southern or the Ukrainian Bureau ................................................... 416

b)

The Scandinavian Bureau ....................................................................... 419

The Reorganization of International Centers and the Formation of the Amsterdam

Bureau .....................................................................................................................................420 C.

The Amsterdam Conference and the North Atlantic LRI Scene ...................................434 1.

The Challenge of Centrist Social Democracy ...........................................................438

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2.

Parliamentarism .........................................................................................................441

3.

Trade Unions .............................................................................................................446

4.

The Question of Party Unity......................................................................................450

5.

International Action ...................................................................................................453

D.

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................456

XII.

The Splits in the Central and West European Communist Parties and the Collapse of the

Comintern Bureau System, 1919-1920 ........................................................................................458 A.

Defeat of the Global Workers’ Movement and Divisions in the LRI Movement .........461

B.

The Splintering of the KPD and Formation of the Communist Workers Party of

Germany (KAPD) ...................................................................................................................474 C.

The Fractional Struggle inside Germany turns into a Fractional Struggle inside the

Communist International: the KPD Zentrale versus the Amsterdam Bureau of the Comintern 478 D.

The ECCI Position: Moscow between Berlin and Amsterdam .....................................485 1.

Lenin's “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” ........................................491

E.

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................498

XIII.

The Second Comintern Congress (1920) and the Split in the Comintern .....................500

A.

The Tendencies Represented in the Congress ...............................................................500

B.

The Second Congress Debates.......................................................................................504 1.

C.

The Bolsheviks’ Approach ........................................................................................504 The Source of Discord: The Meridian Thesis and the Question of the Tempo of the

World Revolution ....................................................................................................................508 1.

The Parliamentary Question ......................................................................................517

2.

Trade Unions .............................................................................................................520

3.

Party and Unity ..........................................................................................................523

D.

Conclusion: The Gradual Tripartite Dissolution of the LRI Movement .......................527

XIV.

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................530

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................538

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List of Tables

Table 1 Number of participants in each ISB plenum between 1905 and 1914............................. 40 Table 2 Number of plena attended by participants. ...................................................................... 40 Table 3 Known educational & professional backgrounds of the ISB plena participants. ............ 53 Table 4 Causes and means to avoid modern wars as they were defined in the Second International Congress Resolutions. ............................................................................................. 55 Table 5 Distribution of delegates in the First Congress of the Comintern based on their organizations’ geographic composition. ..................................................................................... 388 Table 6 - Appendix A: Industrial Employment in several European Countries between 1870 and 1914 (in thousands) ..................................................................................................................... 532 Table 7 Appendix B: Groups and Parties in the Founding (2-6 March 1919) Congress of the Com-munist International ........................................................................................................... 534

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List of Figures

Figure 1 Age distribution of delegates to First Comintern Congress in March 1919 ................. 384

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I.

Introduction

“This dissertation argues that the fracturing of the Second International and birth of the Third International arose from an international revolutionary movement that this works calls Left Radical Internationalism (LRI). Left-Radical Internationalism developed inside the Second International through the merger of several left-wing political factional groups that belonged to the dominant Social Democratic parties of Europe. The most prominent among these were the Dutch, German, Polish, Latvian, and Russian LRI groups. Later, Scandinavian, Swiss, and American LRI groupings joined this core group to form the “Zimmerwald Left” fraction in 1915, inside the Zimmerwald Socialist Peace movement. From 1915 onwards, this international left-wing current evolved, endured several crises, dispersed, and reunified, compressed and expanded, hesitated, stalled and finally, in March 1919 formed the Communist International. There are multiple consequences of this new interpretation that re-centers the history of the Comintern in the context of a previously formed LRI movement. Organizationally, the Comintern represented the aspirations of a small and radical-left wing but global movement to organize itself beyond the narrow boundaries of national, “parliamentary oriented” political organizations of the traditional “Second International-type” Social Democratic movements. The LRI groups actively engaged with and intervened in the internal lives of other LRI groups, which they saw as politically necessary and correct, indeed as a precondition of internationalism. Seen in this light, the historiographical obsession with the question of which national party was dominant in the Comintern’s formation loses its meaning. Second, the founding of the Comintern, far from being a response to Russian conditions or even to the Russian Revolution taken in isolation, was an organized, international political response to two global historical phenomena, which the LRI groups defined as the emergence of “mass workers” (later also “mass actions”) and “imperialism”. The LRI groups defined the “mass workers” as distinct from other workers by their craft, occupation, gender or sex, age, nationality, locality or cultural backgrounds and as the genuine expression of the proletariat that finally universally emerged in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution of the 1880s and 1890s. A second factor was the emergence of imperialism or imperialist competition, which the LRIs perceived as a global symptom of the decline of the capitalist mode of production. These 1

two emergent historical factors led the LRIs to conclude that world was becoming overripe for a communist world revolution. The First World War only confirmed their views. Further, the LRIs viewed the emergence of mass workers as a historical subject that necessitated the abandonment of the hitherto established political and economic organizational models of the Social Democratic movement, namely trade unions, parliaments and cooperatives, all of which responded to the requirements of a previous historical era dominated by an artisanal work ethic and bourgeois challenge to a dying feudal and absolutist political order. These organizational models had to be replaced with “mass actions” and a new type of mass organization (often defined as soviets or Councils after the 1917 November Revolution). Starting from these premises, the LRI movement emerged in 1915 as a radically anti-parliamentarian movement that aimed to destroy capitalism and nation states through a global working-class revolution. Founding a new international was the logical next step for these LRIs. These theoretical conclusions were first reached in western and central Europe—not in Russia or Eastern Europe—mainly by German, Dutch and Swiss radical currents, and east European émigré revolutionaries (including the Bolsheviks) in west and central European exile. The evidence supporting this thesis is compelling. A great variety of available published documents (congress reports and proceedings, periodicals, leaflets and pamphlets, correspondence) and memoirs have been utilized to explore this thesis. In addition, archival materials related to the subject have been utilized. What is striking is that, while most of the materials related to the subject are published and long available, historiography tended to overlook the apparent connection between the LRI groups and the centrality of the LRI network in the creation of the Comintern. This points to the prevalence of a methodological preoccupation with single groups, contextualized arbitrarily in narrow national frameworks, which no LRI group identified itself with or solely operated within. This work contextualizes the LRI movement and its groupings within a Europeanwide (and global) framework so as to better analyze their evolution. That way, it is aimed to better present the evolution of the intellectual and organizational interaction of LRI groups that, over time, found its concrete expression in the founding of the Comintern. In order to fully explore the making of the Comintern, the dissertation discusses each major period of the LRI movement chronologically. The LRI movement intellectually and organizationally evolved in reaction to colossal historical events and processes. Some of the major 2

developments they witnessed were the rapid pace of industrial development after the Second Industrial revolution, the imperial colonial competition among the major European powers, the First World War, the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the German Revolution of 1919, the Civil War in Russia and the violent counter-revolutionary repression in central and east European countries following the First World War. The LRI groups attempted to jointly respond to these events and processes through an international political debate. This dissertation follows each step of these developments and analyzes the historical evolution of the LRI attempt to understand, interpret and respond to these developments in a chronological order. The first chapter focuses on the historical roots of the LRI movement in the nineteenth century and shows how certain key elements of the communist international were produced by and in direct continuity with the modern European revolutionary traditions. This broad-brush background serves to set the embryonic origins of the LRIs. The second chapter establishes a framework for the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) of the Second International, the central organ of the Second International between its congresses. The ISB itself represented both a break and a continuity with the past revolutionary Marxist tradition, an adaptation to the peaceful but short period of liberal parliamentary epoch in Europe. The third chapter turns to the mass action debate that developed inside the Second International between 1905 and 1914. It was a significant debate involving Russian, German, Dutch, Polish and other Marxists. The LRI groups first emerged during this debate. Especially during the later stages of the debate, the LRI groups began to counterpose “mass action” as a viable alternative to purely parliamentary and trade union politics, which at that point had become the established orthodoxy of the Second International. The fourth chapter delves into the debates among the LRI groups and within the Second International around the question of war and imperialism. It argues that imperialism was entangled with the debate on mass action and laid the basis for the merger of the LRI groups. The clarity reached in this debate convinced the LRI groups that, in the new imperialist period, the main tool of the working class struggle was “mass actions”. The chapter also shows how the intensification of the mass action and imperialism debates brought the LRI movement to the verge of an international split in the Second International. At the center of this split was Germany and the German LRI groupings, which was supported by the Dutch and the Russian LRIs. 3

The fifth chapter explores the first socialist reactions to the First World War. It examines how the majority socialist leaderships’ position on the war and national defense undermined the ISB, thereby creating an organizational void at the center of the international socialist movement. Two alternative approaches emerged to resolve the crisis of the socialist movement. First, “centrist-pacifist” approach aimed to restore the ISB once the war was over to preserve the coherence and the established methods of the traditional Second International. The centrist-pacifists did not see the war as an expression of epochal change in capitalism; instead, they interpreted it merely as a break in the otherwise peaceful development of capitalism. The LRI approach argued that the World War changed the conditions of the class struggle, that a return to the pre-1914 social democracy was impossible. The LRI groups argued that the World War marked the entry of capitalism into its last, decadent historical stage. Finally, they advocated for a revolutionary struggle, via mass actions, against the World War and capitalism in general. Anti-war socialists discussed both these approaches in a series of international gatherings organized in Switzerland in 1915. The culmination point of these meetings was the Zimmerwald Conference, which brought together anti-war socialists from both belligerent and neutral countries. Divided among themselves into LRI and centrist-pacifist factions, these groups still managed to organize an alternative international center, the International Socialist Commission in Bern, which played a crucial role in the socialist movement until the end of the war. The sixth chapter explores how the LRI groups in 1915 organized themselves as a leftwing tendency inside the Zimmerwald Movement. This “Zimmerwald Left” constituted the first organizational nucleus of the Third International. It brought together the Dutch, German, Russian and Polish LRI core groups. New groups also joined them. These were specifically the Scandinavian, Swiss and American LRI groups. Socialist youth organizations also leaned towards the Zimmerwald Left and constituted an important element in the LRI movement. The seventh and eighth chapters explore how in 1917 and 1918, world-historical developments tore the small LRI organization apart. Specifically, the Russian Revolution(s) in 1917 pulled the east European exile groups back into Russia and consequently, the clandestine network of the Zimmerwald Left organization in western Europe collapsed. The western and eastern LRIs were divided into two political-geographic zones of activity. While in eastern Europe the LRIs came to play a central role in the Soviets as mass organs of struggle, in the west they remained largely 4

isolated and small. The LRIs tried to overcome this division by establishing several intermediary organizations, but until the German Revolution in 1919, these attempts did not bear any tangible results. The ninth chapter focuses on a specific event: the founding congress of the Comintern in March 1919. Following the collapse of the German and Austria-Hungarian Empires, soviets (or councils) came into being in central Europe. This convinced the LRIs that it was finally the time to find a unified LRI organization. The Comintern, far from being a Bolshevik project, was the outcome of years of LRI activity that united a genuine, international movement, however small it was. The founding of the Comintern also synthesized the theoretical results of the prior mass action debates, by concretely identifying the “soviet” or “council form” as the concrete expression of proletarian mass action in the new “imperialist” historical era of capitalism, as an overcoming of the parliamentary politics of the pre-war Second International. The tenth chapter explores how the Comintern attempted to constitute itself as a truly international organization. Specifically, it explores the international bureau system, a network of bureaus spread to the centers of revolutionary activity to coordinate international communist activity. The creation of the Amsterdam Bureau of the Comintern in late 1919 constituted the climax of the Bureau system. The Dutch LRIs charged with organizing the Amsterdam Bureau, attempted to bring together the dispersed LRI groups in western Europe, Asia, Africa, and the US. However, the defeats suffered by German communists in 1919 and 1920 weakened the Comintern considerably. The eleventh and the twelfth chapters analyzed how, following the violent anti-communist repression in Germany organized by the Social Democratic government and its far-right paramilitary allies demoralized German communists leading to confusion and infighting in Germany. After the murder of the German Communist Party leadership in 1919, some prominent German Communists began to question the conclusions reached by the Comintern in March 1919 and began advocating for a return to parliamentary struggle, expecting a stabilization in capitalism. This infighting pulled the Amsterdam Bureau and the Comintern in different directions, leading to the first serious split in the LRI movement. Rather than the Bolsheviks’ heavy handedness, it was the demoralization and internal strife in western Europe that caused this split. Despite the Bolshevik attempts to amend the rift in western Europe during the Second Congress of the Comintern (1920), a common and unified strategy about how to deal with the defeat could 5

not be produced, leading to the process of gradual disintegration of the original LRI nucleus that began to form a decade earlier.

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II.

Insurrectionary Internationalism and the Nineteenth Century European Origins of Communist Internationalism

This chapter examines in broad terms the evolution of three main concepts in 18th and 19th century Europe—internationalism, revolution and political organization—in order the lay the foundation for the emergence of early 20th century left-radical internationalism and how their contents were shaped and defined. It focuses on the intersections of these concepts in specific historic moments: the formation of the first civil society organizations in the 18th Century, the formation of first communistic groups in France in the 19th century, and the formation of the First International Workers' Association. Through an analysis of how international revolutionary organizations were transformed in these separate but related moments in the history of modern European revolutionary tradition, the chapter presents a historical background to set the stage for the following chapters, which will more concretely explore the formation of the Communist International as a product of a deeply rooted culture of international revolutionary organization, which was both a continuation of and a break from those historic precedents. In addition, the chapter discusses the centrality of key concepts such as comradeship, periodical journals, and congresses as the material bodies of more abstract political ideals. The Communist International (Comintern) was not a product of Russian conditions, nor were its theories and practices responses to a political culture particular to autocratic or “eastern” regimes. Nor was it created from whole cloth. On the contrary, its origins lie in western Europe and modern civil society (or rather communists’ exclusion from it). Its insurrectionary politics and organizational culture were direct descendants of the underground political societies founded during and after the 1789 French revolution. There was no contradiction between the original "conspiratorial" roots and the Comintern’s appeal to and confidence in the transformative potential of the "masses".1 On the contrary, secrecy, or more precisely clandestine political work, was a historical condition for the birth of a public sphere where ideas and actions could be freely and openly

1

A key concept in the Communist theoretical and political mindset, which I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 3.

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discussed. Western European civil society itself was born in some measure out of secret societies and the most radical left-wing elements of this civil society provided the inspiration for the organization of a modern international revolutionary organization. This connection can be traced from a lineage established by successive generations of revolutionary radicals, whose inheritance took the form of direct experience. The founders of the Comintern were people who came to reject the politics of the Second International and its socialist parties, and of anarchist and syndicalist groups. In these late nineteenth and early twentieth century parties or groups, several generations of radicals were present: veterans of the Communist League, who fought in the barricades during the European revolutionary wave in 1848; the founders of national and legal Social Democratic parties, which began to be established after the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1870s and 1880s; and the new generation which, having rejected the politics and policies of the Second International, founded the Comintern, the Third International. Each generation met with and was tutored by the preceding one and thereby inherited from its predecessors both the principles of a new political culture (which are not necessarily written but learnt in practice) and questions about revolutionary struggle. The way that these questions were debated could and often did change in each successive generation and period. However, the questions remained more or less consistent. The primary question in the 18th century context was how, by what means, and under what conditions to overthrow the reactionary and oppressive ruling classes of the ancien regime; As we shall see, the contents of “historical conditions” or the definitions of “reactionary” and “progressive” adjectives could change for each generation. However, these were always defined and debated in relation to the question of war. Since the French Revolution, the fate of all revolutions was intermingled with the question of war. Success of a revolution in a given nation or region would immediately pose the question of invasion by other counter-revolutionary governments, as it happened in the French Revolution. Or as it happened in the Paris Commune of 1871, the revolution itself could be a reaction to an ongoing war. In the 1890s, the question of colonialism, the invasion, and conquest of non-European lands became another factor in the theoretical problematic of war and revolution. Henceforth, revolutionaries conceived of internationalism as an immediate and concrete strategic question. For revolutionaries in the modern European context, the revolution

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itself immediately posed the question of an international context, both in terms of the revolutionaries' own organization and beyond the confines of a single state. Rather than being exhaustive, this chapter highlights some of the more dramatic moments in the evolution of the emerging revolutionary international collectivities in the nineteenth century. In particular, it focuses on crucial moments in the evolution of the revolutionary organizational culture in relation to the questions of wars, insurrection, and revolution in the first three quarters of the 19th century.

A.

Eighteenth Century Civil Society and the Emergence of Secret Societies in Europe

Nineteenth century civil society was born as a clandestine movement, if not immediately as an insurrectionary one. The first “civil” spaces where individuals could gather irrespective of their social origins and discuss politics (and also, philosophy, art, sciences, commerce, in short anything interesting to them) were the Freemason lodges and similar secret societies that first emerged in the 18th century. While earlier in the 17th century masonic and artisanal lodges may have had millenarian insurrectionary aspirations, they were lost later in the century, especially in England with the establishment of a parliamentary settlement between the Whigs, Tories and the monarchy.2 From then on, Freemasonry took up moderation in debate as a principle. But apart from the content of the discussion, free discussion as a form itself was political. In the Freemason lodges, in theory, the feudal social and hierarchical distinctions of rank were temporarily set aside. The bonds between individuals were essentially ethical, or to be more precise they were based on “virtue” and the “restraining of passions.” Reason and virtue were conceived as a new basis for establishing and maintaining social relations around and among individuals. Unlike previous religious sects and orders, or medieval parliaments, voting and admittance was based on the individual and not on one’s estate or family.3 Here the precondition for participation was conviction rather than obedience to any sectarian criterion or arbitrary hierarchy.

2 3

Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford, 1991), p. 55. Ibid. p. 4

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The political implications of the Enlightenment’s defense of reason, the virtues of social harmony, and humanism were not necessarily revolutionary themselves. Indeed, many Freemason groups included aristocrats, even monarchs. Still, the basic organizational principles out of which future revolutionary radicalisms would grow bloomed first in the political culture of the political (if not social) egalitarianism, open debate and secrecy that defined the Enlightenment public culture. In these fraternities, individuals from different social classes, genders, ethnic or cultural backgrounds gathered as equals outside the family and work space for political and intellectual debate. These societies even, on occasion, included minorities traditionally excluded from the social and political life. For instance, blacks, Muslims, Jews and women, although the number of each were very few, could join certain local French Masonic lodges in the 18th Century.4 Moreover, members from these different social groups had to treat each other as equals in the “brotherhood.” As a 1753 speech given at one German lodge noted; “as soon as we gather together we all become brothers, but the rest of the world is foreign to us.... The prince and the subject, the nobleman and the burgher, the rich and the poor – each is as good as the other, nothing distinguishes one from the other, and nothing separates them. Virtue makes everyone equal.”5 Further, this was also an international fraternity, crossing political boundaries. Freemasons who were merchants used the lodges in distant cities or countries to establish commercial links in their business trips. Bourgeois ethics of commerce flourished in the universalist ethos of the fraternity6.

4

Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), p. 63. fn. 123. 5 Quoted in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840-1918 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007), p.14. As Jacob explains: “Proponents of the Enlightenment, who shunned conflicts and hostilities and valued harmony and grace, expected that sociabilité (the French concept came into being only at the beginning of the eighteenth century) would lead to a synthesis of the local and the foreign, of reason and feeling, and of morality and economy, without having to call the political order fundamentally into question.” Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, p. 16. 6 Hoffmann, The Politics of Sociability, p. 22. Hoffman further explains how this new social space had direct commercial benefits to those who could afford it: “Freemasons paid initiation fees, dues, fines for misconduct, charitable funds, and loans – only those of considerable wealth could afford the pleasures of a lodge night. The lodge certificate not only made sure a member was credit-worthy. It let Freemasons visit lodges in other cities and countries when they travelled. There they often gained access to local social circles, which in turn created commercial contacts.” Hoffmann, Civil Society, p. 18.

10

While egalitarian in theory and within the confines of its lodge, the Freemason fraternity was still not open to all social classes or groups. The brotherhood was very open by the standards of the day, but only at the top of the social hierarchy. Towards workers or artisans, it was generally consciously exclusionary. This recognition of class distinction based on property relations at the expense of corporate and feudal ranks was a modern phenomenon. This class distinction, which reflected the emerging modern class antagonisms, was modeled on British constitutionalism, where the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats could mingle (in parliament) without any disturbance or violent conflict.7 A combination of politically and socially unconventional inclusivity at the top (including a trans-national solidarity of upper classes) and exclusivity at the bottom (mainly workers, peasants and artisans) based on class distinctions made secrecy a necessity for the Freemason societies,8 which were suspicious of both the state and the laboring classes. Still, the secular and international ethics of fraternization provided the inspiration for later republican revolutionary insurrectionary societies, which, however, inverted their content. In the radical French revolutionary groups, and later the Carbonaris, secrecy, fraternity and open debate fused with the insurrectionary ethos of early 19th century European republicanism and early communism. Among these, members of the working class also had an equal and honorable right to join.

B.

The Nineteenth Century: Transition From Conspiracy to Revolution

The first modern communist organizational form was the so-called “Babeuvian Conspiracy” or the "Conspiracy of Equals" that formed after the Thermidorian coup against Robespierre during the French Revolution. The Conspiracy of Equals was not an international conspiracy. However, it is impossible to underestimate its legendary significance, if not as a model, at least as a source of inspiration, for the 19th century revolutionaries all over the world. For Marx, the

7

Jacob insists that the continental Freemasonry followed the British model that took shape after the glorious revolution in England. 8 This had nothing to do with cabbalistic rites or republican revolutionary agendas. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, pp.14-15; Hoffman, Politics of Sociability, p. 32.

11

conspiracy expressed a genuinely proletarian moment in a revolution, which he considered, was bourgeois.9 The Communist International proudly considered itself and its sections as “continuators of the heroic endeavors and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf…”.10 Nineteenth century revolutionaries were not lacking in knowledge about historical precedents to look up to, since they did not lack in sympathy for those who rebelled against suffering and tyranny in any age. From Spartacus to Müntzer and radical Anabaptists, there were several uncompromising historic rebels whom they admired and memorialized. In fact, from a Marxist perspective, all of these rebels, including Babeuf and his comrades, were expressions of heroic, albeit desperate, attempts to achieve human liberation from class exploitation. But this itself is not a great compliment for a social criticism that prioritizes material conditions at least as much as (if not more than) force of will or moral righteousness. The Conspiracy of Equals was unique, as it was the first organization founded upon a revolutionary zeal to destroy exploitation and private property in favor of communism by using clearly modern methods of struggle. The conspirators created a tradition that continued, not only as a legend but also as a living tradition and was transferred organically from generation to generation. From these veterans, the 19th century revolutionaries learned the unwritten rules and codes of revolutionary organization: publishing a central organ, constructing underground networks, thinking, and acting as a collective of comrades in a modern setting.

1.

Development of the Underground Organizational Model in the Early 19th Century

The Conspiracy of Equals was organized mainly by former French Revolutionaries, who were radicalized after the Thermidorian reaction in France in 1794. It was the most important (if not the first) attempt hitherto made by a politically organized minority to seize political power by means of a violent revolt that had as its goal ending exploitation and material inequality and

9

Karl Marx, “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution to German Cultural History Contra Karl Heinzen” in Marx and Engels: Collected Works (hereafter MECW), vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers), p. 312. 10 “Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World” (Published by the Communist International in 1919). Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci1/ch01.htm#f20.

12

establishing a communalistic social order. Its uniqueness lays in the fact that, unlike other contemporary radical intellectuals, the Conspirators did not aim to achieve their goals by charitable work, mere propaganda, or building experimental communes on the margins of the society. Jacobins themselves were not unaccustomed to the use of force in politics, but the destruction of the principle of private property was never a part of their program. For the leader of the Conspiracy, Gracchus Babeuf, and his comrades, however, the republican premise that all must have the freedom to pursue their happiness, which was a basic principle inscribed in both the American and French constitutions, was impossible while society remained divided between a class of property owners and a class of workers.11 Future revolutionary radicals underlined the affinity between themselves and the Conspiracy of Equals. While seeing the goals of the conspiracy as unattainable under the existing material conditions, Marx acknowledged that the conspiracy expressed a genuinely proletarian moment.12 What was unique in the Conspiracy of Equals for the future Marxists was not so much its theory (i.e. the questioning of the private property), nor its organizational practice (a secret society crafted to seize political power), but a combination of the two in one single organizational practice. The French Revolution and later intellectuals had already begun building the foundation of a communist doctrine. For instance, Condorcet, who committed suicide during the Terror, had already developed the first principle of a communist worldview, when he argued that unequal access to the means of wealth was the primary cause of poverty in society.13 Even though Condorcet did not go as far as proposing the abolition of private property, as did Babeuf and his comrades, he believed that through a natural process of evolution, universal material social equality would eventually be achieved.14 Condorcet was not alone in his optimistic defense of social progress. Thomas Paine also held the idea that reason demanded material equality and security for all the members

11

Samuel Bernstein, “Babeuf and Babouvism: Part 1,” Science & Society, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter, 1937), pp. 53-55. 12 Karl Marx, “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution to German Cultural History Contra Karl Heinzen” MECW, vol. 6 p. 312. Retrieved from: http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1847/10/31.htm. 13 William Smaldone, European Socialism: A Concise History with Documents (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p.17. 14 Ibid. p.16

13

of society and that this was a basic necessity for the welfare of any democratic republic. 15 However, only Babeuf and his comrades went as far as defending a revolution and class struggle between the rich and the poor as a means of achieving what they considered as rational and natural basis of a humane society.16 The Conspiracy put into practice activities that characterized revolutionary groupings in many different contexts over the succeeding decades. Faced with a fearful regime that reacted with increasing hostility towards its critics from both the left and the right, it was forced to conceal its organization from the wider public. Under these conditions, it developed the first forms of mass propaganda techniques, such as leafleting, journals, wall posters. Members established systematic personal networks of reliable contacts in the working-class neighborhoods of Paris by house-tohouse visits and they organized local cells for debate. At the center of the propagandistic activity was the publishing of an illegal central journal. Despite the Thermidorian repression, activities such as the publishing and circulation of the press, and financing such activities constituted the umbilical cord around which the organizational structure of the Conspiracy took shape.17 It is hard to over-emphasize the significance of a central organ for the Conspiracy. Militants involved in the clandestine distribution network of the paper reported on the likely individuals and groups that might support the conspiracy for an insurrection among the Paris sans culottes. They also took note of the enemies who could challenge it and hence needed to be removed. The Secret Directory receiving these reports discussed them in the context of strategic and political questions. It also acted as the editorial board.18 This structure, which combined the functions of an editorial board with the duties of political leadership remained, with variations, the core of revolutionary organizing for many decades. The skill that any revolutionary organization showed in balancing these dual public and clandestine functions remained a key test for successful organizing. Compromising either could be lethal both for the organization and its members. As Birchall has written:

15

Ian Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997) p.14; Bernstein, “Babeuf and Babouvism: Part 1”, pp. 54-55. 16 Bernstein, Babeuf and Babouvism, p.32. 17 Birchall, Spectre of Babeuf, p.157; Bernstein, “Babeuf and Babouvism: Part 2”, Science & Society, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring, 1938), p.166. 18 Birchall, Spectre of Babeuf, pp. 60-63.

14

“If the conspiracy was to escape repression, it had to be clandestine; if it was to mobilize and inspire the masses, it had to be as open as possible. The contradiction was in reality, and it was one to which there was no simple solution. The conspirators had to aim for as much clandestinely as necessary, and as much openness as possible. As the first circular to the agents pointed out, no harm could come from it being known that the secret directory existed; indeed, news of its existence might encourage the ‘unhappy majority’; but the exposure of the leading personnel would destroy the ‘combined set of ramifications leading from a single centre.”

No less of a risk was spreading demoralization among the citizens.19 As a precursor of the Comintern, the Conspirators’ strategy was clearly lacking an international (or even national) dimension. For his part, Babeuf ultimately hoped that differences between people from different states would progressively diminish. In an internal debate with one of his comrades who suggested that the French revolution should fortify itself against other nations, Babeuf opposed the idea, arguing that for a time people may “continue to be infected by prejudices and crimes by despots, and plunged into wars contrary to their interests and mortal to their liberty,” but the “circle of humanity would grow, step by step, frontiers, customs posts and bad governments would disappear... the great principle of equality or universal fraternity would become the sole religion of the peoples.”20 In its program for insurrection, the Directory also aimed to export the excess products of the republic freely to those in need beyond the borders.21 However, these statements did not go beyond professing a hopeful trajectory for human development and remained disconnected from the revolutionary strategy envisioned by the Conspiracy. There is nothing surprising in the difficulty of conceiving of the revolution as a worldwide event in 1795. Even if revolutionaries wanted to overthrow private property globally, they desperately lacked the basic means to organize themselves for such a tremendous task. First of all, there was the obvious lack of an international working class that could have nurtured feelings of international solidarity. In France, the conspiracy lacked even a national strategy and focused its efforts mainly on Paris.22 Further, during the Terror, fear of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy organized

19

Ibid, p.156. Quoted in Ibid, p. 194. 21 Bernstein, “Babeuf and Babouvism: Part 1” p. 51. 22 Ibid. This does not mean there was not sympathy towards the Conspirators. In several cities there were groups and individuals who shared the Babouvian vision. However, the insufficient means of communication forced the conspirators to rely on success first in the capital. 20

15

by foreign monarchies made revolutionaries and Paris sans culottes extremely suspicious of foreigners.23 Finally, while among certain intellectual circles outside of France there was sympathy towards the Revolution and sparks of republicanism were spreading elsewhere, the radical Conspirators’ communistic revolutionary views remained for a long time a Parisian affair. The technical means of communication for organizing an international conspiracy were simply not yet widely present. Sustaining coordinated revolutionary action across national boundaries was impossible. Hence, it was not the Conspiracy of Equals but Napoleon Bonaparte who proved to be the most dangerous threat to the old order until his defeat in 1815, and the threat he posed was a military and not a revolutionary one. Ironically, the first truly international organization concerned with the question of revolution was founded neither by republican radicals, nor socialist radicals in locally organized conspiratorial cells, but by the reactionary monarchies, which defeated Bonaparte in 1815. The heads of states who came together in Vienna in 1815, not only formally pledged to support each other against future revolutionary upheavals, but also formed a secret network of communication. In order to hide their activities from suspicious parliamentarians or constitutionalists ever watchful about reactionary assaults against political rights, the monarchies established a clandestine web of direct communication. Relying only on word of mouth and rarely using written messages, and only then through the most trusted aristocrats, the kings and princes across Europe established an emergency communication service so that they could reach out to each other in a timely fashion in case a republican or lower-class uprising threatened one of them.24

23

Bernstein, Babeuf and Babouvism, Part 2, p.185. One of the goals of the conspirators was to temporarily arrest foreigners and expel them after the success of the insurrection as a protective measure. 24 Johannes Paulmann, “Searching for a ‘Royal International’: The Mechanics of Monarchical Relations in Nineteenth Century Europe”, in (ed.s) Geyer and Paulmann, The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (London: Studies of German Historical Institute, 2001), p. 166.

16

2.

Blanquists, the Communist League and the First International Communist Society:

“The International Society of Revolutionary Communists”

Louis Auguste Blanqui and several clandestine revolutionary organizations that he founded or inspired represented a new stage in the development of European revolutionary communist tradition. Blanqui himself must have read about the history of the movement.25 He also came from a Republican background and shared some of their premises. For instance, the Society of Seasons, which he founded in the 1830s, was structured around clandestine cells, where for security reasons members of different cells did not know the members of the other cells. There was a strict chain of command. Each cell was called a “week” and consisted of seven members and each family of cells formed a “month,” which in turn formed seasons. At the apex, there were three “years.” Each group was responsible to its leader. The leaders of the three “years” formed a central organ. Members were required to find arms and be ready at any time to come out for the insurrection when called for by the central organ.26 Ultimately, the goal of the organization was to sack armories, arm the workers, mobilize sympathizing soldiers, and disarm the counter revolutionaries after an insurrection. Blanqui wrote: “Arms and organization, these are the decisive elements of progress, the serious method for putting an end to misery. Who has iron, has bread. We prostrate ourselves before the bayonets; they sweep up the disarmed crowd. France bristling with workers in arms means the advent of socialism. In the presence of armed workers obstacles, resistances, and impossibilities will all disappear.”27

Despite their clever tactics and Blanqui’s brilliant insurrectionary plans, 28 these early French communists never succeeded in organizing an insurrection in 1830s and 1840s. Blanqui spent most of his life in prison.

25

A popular history of the Conspiracy of Equals written by one of his comrades was published in late 1830s and became an immediate success. It sold thirty thousand copies immediately after its first publication following the July Revolution in France in 1830. Bernstein, “Babeuf and Babouvism: Part 2”, p.57. 26 Doug Enaa Greene, Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), pp. 89-90. 27 Ibid. p. 106. 28 His insurrection strategy basically aimed to quickly take over strategic positions in Paris with about a thousand committed revolutionists, take the government by surprise, and use to the time to distribute arms to the workers and spread the revolution to the provinces. Ibid. p78.

17

Despite the failures that he or his comrades endured, the Blanquists never advocated coups. When, after the February revolution in 1848, his comrades defended toppling the right-wing republican regime he advocated caution.29 During his trial in 1849, after the defeat of the July Uprising, he openly admitted being a communist but rejected the claim that he aspired to the organize the revolution himself. Answering the charges of conspiracy to organize a coup against the government he stated that, “The point is that handling a popular element is not like commanding a regiment that stands ready arms in hand, to which you say ‘march’ and it marches, ‘stop’ and it stops. No gentlemen, it isn’t like this at all.”30 The essential goal of the Blanquist insurrection strategy was to inspire the masses, to encourage and lead them by example.31 In the absence of the political tools to force or even criticize governments into changing their policies, communists were stuck with clandestine organization and armed insurrection, which the masses themselves resorted in 1848 all over Europe. Despite the defeats of insurrectionary attempts of communists in 1840s, they did not merely repeat the Babeuvian conspiracy in a new form. Communists attempted to form an international of sorts in order to coordinate their efforts and to react in time to counter-revolutionaries. German and French exile groups, together with the left-wing Chartists, organized an “International Society of Revolutionary Communists” in the spring of 1850 in London. The German group within this “International Society,” the Communist League was represented by Marx and Engels; the French were represented by two exiled Blanquists.32 The “organization” probably remained on paper, since there are few available documents on it and the Communist League ceased its activity soon and dissolved in 1852.

29

At the time, he defended a popular mass uprising rather than an elite coup: “Leave the men of the Hôtel de Ville to their impotence: their weakness is a sure sign of their fall. They have in their hands an ephemeral executive power; we, for our part, we have the people and the clubs, where we will organize it in a revolutionary manner, as the Jacobins once did. We must be ready to wait a few days more and the revolution will be ours! If we seize power by a bold assault, like thieves in the night, who can say how long our power might last? Beneath us, would there not be energetic and ambitious men, burning to replace us by similar means? What we need is the great mass of the people, the faubourgs rising up in revolt, a new 10 August.” Ibid. p.104. 30 Ibid. p. 119. 31 Ibid. p. 88. 32 Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Vol. III: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Monthly Review Press, 1986), p.186; Boris Nikolaevsky & Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1936), pp. 208-209.

18

However, it represented at least an aspiration to form international ties among revolutionaries. Clearly, the revolutionaries concluded that national differences had to be overcome, both among communists and also among the working class, in order to see the revolution succeed. In the “International Society’s” “statutes” (a one-page document outlining the organizational goals and principles very briefly, which is also the only document left by the organization), it was stated that: “Art.1. The aim of the association is the downfall of the privileged classes, to subject these classes to the dictatorship of the proletarians, maintaining the revolution in permanence until the realization of communism, which is or has to be the last form for constituting the human family. Art. 2.- To contribute to the realization of this aim, the association will form ties of solidarity among all sections of the revolutionary communist party, bringing about the disappearance of nationality divisions in accordance with the principle of republican fraternity.”33

Concepts like “republican fraternity,” “privileged class” (instead of bourgeoisie or capitalists), “human family,” all retained the mark of earlier Enlightenment conceptions. Despite this and its very short-lived existence, its statutes are still significant as the first statement in which the “proletarian dictatorship” was defined as the goal for an international communist revolution. The conception of the “party” in the document does not refer to a formal party, but rather a wide group of communists from different “nationalities” and groups (Chartists, Blanquists and Marxist communists). Hence, the concept refers to an international group within which there might be political and intellectual differences. Yet, it also calls for an international solidarity and even “the disappearance” of national differences as a precondition for the success or as the end result of a revolution. This internationalist spirit remained and grew into a foundation for communists in the following decades. Eventually, this "conspiratorial stage"34 ended with a total defeat for the communist radicals. This happened after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, when all over the continent revolutionary insurrections were crushed. Communist cells were dispersed; radicals found themselves in prisons or exile, isolated once again. An 1850 circular of the Communist League reported on the

33

Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. III, p.185. Engels called this early period in the history of communism as “the conspiratorial stage of communism” in an essay that he wrote on the history of the Communist League in 1885. I have borrowed the term from him. Karl Marx & Fredrick Engels, MECW Vol. 26, p.321. 34

19

situation of the various local branches cites several groups across Europe as having collapsed (with the exception of the London and Switzerland groups) and several members being imprisoned.35 This was effectively the end of the conspiratorial stage. The re-emergence of a new international organization took place only two decades later, but under new conditions and a new form of international organization. The end of conspiratorial stage did not bring the abandonment of the goal of the seizure of power. However, it signified the beginning of a transition from a conspiratorial mindset to a “revolutionary” one. This mainly reflects a transition from the earlier distrust of the “masses” emanating mainly from Enlightenment thinking, as concretized in the exclusion of the propertyless classes from the earlier civil society organizations. The Enlightenment political project aimed to restrain human passions in order achieve a rational, peaceful, and harmonious social order. Enlightenment intellectuals gave a mixed reaction to the French revolution, and the execution of the king and the Terror. On the one hand, they celebrated the destruction of the despotic ancien regime and its institutions; on the other hand, many showed a considerable suspicion about the method: Revolution. Revolution seemed to some as an unrestrained release of popular passions.36 For instance, witnessing the progress of the revolution from Germany, Schiller both attended the celebrations of the Bastille Day but also retained a reserved distance. One of his friends noted: “Schiller was no friend of the French fuss about liberty. He could see no prospect of a happier future. He held the French Revolution to be the natural consequence of the poor French government, the decadence of the court and notables, and the demoralization of the French people; it was the work of unsatisfied, ambitious, and passionate people, who exploited circumstances for their egoistic ends; but it was not the work of wisdom.”37

35

Marx and Engels reported: “The defeats of the revolutionary party last summer brought for a moment the League to the point of almost total disorganisation. The most active League members who had taken part in the various movements were scattered; contact was lost, addresses were unreliable, and this together with the danger of letters being opened made correspondence impossible for a time. So until towards the end of last year the Central Authority was condemned to complete inactivity.” Marx & Engels, MECW Vol 10, p.372. 36 The origins of the idea that revolutionaries seduce the popular passions for equality is very old. Aristotle wrote in the 4th century BC that, “The principal and general cause of an attitude of mind which disposes men towards change is the cause of which we have just spoken. There are some who stir up sedition because their minds are filled by a passion for equality, which arises from their thinking that they have the worst of the bargain in spite of being the equals of those who have got the advantage.” Aristotle, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.182. 37 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 93-94.

20

The attitude of political radicals began changing only when they witnessed first-hand the development of political and social organizations created by workers themselves. These were initially unions, strike funds, and the rising demand for more equal voting rights, like the Chartist mobilization in 1830s. Communists observed these developments and saw in the workers’ movement not only a passionate outburst of a suffering class, but a historical capacity for organized action oriented towards a rational future project: communism.38 At an international level, the creation of the First International in 1864, attended mainly by workers, laid the foundation of a merger between the workers’ movement and the radical communistic intellectuals: this new mass base gave the confidence to communists to shed their early insurrectionary politics.

3.

The First International

From the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the world (or at least the North Atlantic world) became more industrialized, more commercial, and more proletarianized. Between 1800 and 1913, the volume of world foreign trade increased by 43 times.39 This growth came from the trade of mainly industrial goods, a significant transition from the shipments of colonial goods that had been the main items of world trade in the eighteenth century. Industrial growth rate grew 30 times by the end of the nineteenth century. The new technologies that made this growth possible also made communication faster. Starting in the 1850s, and with tremendous rapidity, telegraphic connections travelled from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia. A world telegraph network connected the western and eastern hemispheres by 1870. This was a tremendous breakthrough, a harbinger of radio waves and the internet. For the first time in history, knowledge and information could be transferred faster than human speed for a relatively low price.40 Further, telegraph lines usually

38

For Engels, the Chartist movement was a spontaneous expression of such a working-class movement, which should merge with socialism. Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? In Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), p.46. 39 Sidney Pollard, “Free Trade, Protectionism, and the World Economy,” in Geyer & Paullman, The Mechanics of Internationalism, p. 27. 40 Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp.107-8.

21

followed the same routes along which the railroads were constructed. And the world railroad system, which barely existed in 1820s, covered a network of over 100,000 km by 1860s. This was mostly concentrated in Western Europe and North America, and mostly connecting industrial and urban centers. However, the sheer speed of railroad expansion was as revolutionary as the speed of the new technology itself. By 1913, the railroads covered 102 million kilometers all over the world. 41 These changes made possible a leap in the organizational form of newly emerging revolutionary internationalism. First, now there was a basic, expansive, and relatively cheap means of communication available for an internationally centralized revolutionary organization. Rapid communication, so crucial for developing reflexes to spontaneous and contingent events, was now possible. Second, with the expansion of trade and industry, the old border control and visa systems, which were established after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, were gradually liquidated; they virtually ended by 1860 in Europe. This was a significant development not only for militants of revolutionary international organizations who sought to cross borders for political ends, but also for the hundreds of thousands of workers migrating to find new work and living opportunities. Finally, as a result of all these factors, an international industrial proletariat became a factor of political life in 1860s. These economic and social changes found their echoes in politics as well. During the 1860s, the post-1848 anti-revolutionary momentum started to fall apart. In the mid-1850s, the success of the conservative order established by the Holy Alliance in Vienna in 1815 came to be challenged in Europe. Initially, those who challenged the status quo were neither socialists nor working class people. In the 1850s, Garibaldi started his long march for the unification of Italy with his thousand red shirted comrades; unification was achieved in 1859. In 1861, Alexander II abolished serfdom in Russia and the American Civil War started. Even though the aristocratic and monarchical elites did not lose their political or social power nationally, the international order established by them in 1815 was crumbling in Europe by the 1860s. The International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), also known as the First International, was a response put forth jointly by the revolutionaries and the workers' union organizers to these

41

Pollard, “Free Trade, Protectionism, and the World Economy”, p. 28.

22

new international social and political conditions. IWA was both a tool to directly intervene in world historical events (especially to the emergence, consolidation or in some cases suppression of nations or national minorities) in the name of the working class, and also a tool to be used in defense of workers in their daily struggles. What produced this merger was the meeting of strategic patterns, specifically the close proximity of both workers' and socialists' tactical aims in their contemporary struggles. Both were now struggling on the terrain of national economies. For the workers, this meant fighting against a double standard: indirect taxes and citizenship barriers for them when they sought work elsewhere, while the bosses imported sweated foreign labor as strike breakers when the workers went on strike. Convincing foreign workers not to break strikes and forming crossborder and cross-national ties of permanent solidarity became crucial for the workers during this period. In fact, this became one of the main preoccupations of the IWA’s General Council. It tirelessly produced propaganda materials and organized militants to campaign among workers from different nations, in many cases when bosses tried to use them as strike breakers. For the socialists, the national question also came to play a crucial role. Marx and Engels drew the conclusion from the fate of the 1848 revolutionary waves that defeat was (and will be in the future as well) a result of confrontation with Russia. For them and the cadres around them who were hardened in several battles during 1848, the main enemy of the forces of progress since 1789 was monarchism, the epicenter of which (in their eyes at least) was Russian absolutism. When the Crimean War started in 1853, Marx considered the defeat of Russia, even at the expense of preserving the rotten Ottoman regime, a better outcome. In the 1878 war between the Ottoman and Russian empires, he repeated his anti-Tsarist stance and again favored a Russian defeat. Meanwhile, in early 1850s, Engels was studying military science to be prepared in case the tsarist armies would once again sweep over Europe. Expecting a new confrontation, Marx wrote: “Russia is decidedly a conquering nation, and was so for a century, until the great movement of 1789 called into potent activity an antagonist of formidable nature. We mean the European Revolution, the explosive force of democratic ideas and man’s native thirst for freedom. Since that epoch there have been in reality but two powers on the continent of Europe – Russia and Absolutism, the Revolution and Democracy. For the moment, the Revolution seems to be suppressed, but it lives and is feared as deeply as ever. Witness the terror of the reaction at the news of the late rising at Milan. But let Russia get possession of Turkey, and her strength is increased nearly half, and she becomes superior to all the rest of Europe put together. Such an event would be an unspeakable calamity to the revolutionary cause. The maintenance of Turkish independence, or, in case of a possible

23

dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the arrest of the Russian scheme of annexation, is a matter of the highest moment. In this instance, the interests of the revolutionary Democracy and of England go hand in hand. Neither can permit the Tsar to make Constantinople one of his capitals, and we shall find that when driven to the wall, the one will resist him as determinedly as the other.”'42

The general strategic goal of the IWA was to do everything in its power to aid democratic and national movements in eastern Europe, to weaken the power of the Tsarist regime, and to face the next historical rendezvous with a new major revolutionary upheaval in Europe under the best possible conditions. And the key device to defeat a reactionary regime, at least if there was no strong inner contradiction to make a revolutionary transformation possible, was war. That is, even if the IWA did not propagate wars of conquest, it prepared itself for defensive wars against reactionary armies that could march on or challenge revolutionary and progressive polities. The founding of the IWA itself was partially aimed at bringing life to this strategy. The original British and French union leaders of the International were actively involved in protesting one and supporting another rebellion in two civil wars, one in Europe and the other in North America. The first was a Polish rebellion that began in 1863; British workers quickly mobilized in its support. Workers organized several demonstrations and protested Alexander II during his visits in England and France in 1864. The sympathy between the workers and the Polish insurgents was mutual. In fact, an exiled Polish aristocrat personally financed the French delegation's trip to London in 1864 for the founding congress of the IWA. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, the International adamantly opposed the southern rebels and gave all its support for their suppression. And this was not a merely moral declaration of support, since when the British government briefly contemplated intervening in favor of the Southern Confederacy, the dock workers, despite the severe conditions that they faced in the textile industry due to the northern blockade, organized strikes against intervention. The Inaugural Address of the organization gloriously celebrated the Northern cause and the first action of the International was sending a message to Abraham Lincoln congratulating him for the Northern victory.43

42

Marx, Karl. ''The Russian Menace'' New York Tribune. 12 April 1853 in (ed.s) Paul Blackstock and Bert Hoselitz, The Russian Menace to Europe (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), pp. 121-202. 43 Robin Blackburn, Marx and Lincoln: An Unfinished Revolution (New York: Verso, 2011), p. 56.

24

However, the International could not easily adopt a tactical line fitting to its general strategy in all situations. Unlike the American Civil War and the Polish national liberation struggle, the 1870 Franco-Prussian war presented a unique problem. Initially, Marx remarked, and the General Council of International concurred, that the policy should be to condemn the war as a dynastic war, while slightly favoring the idea of national defense in the face of a dynastic conquest. When, as in fact the leadership of the International had predicted, the war turned into a counter-revolutionary war following the victories of the Prussian army over first the newly established republic, and then especially against the Paris Commune, the position of the General Council became more difficult. As the minority of the Commune’s leadership was constituted by the followers of the International, the General Council of IWA had a direct stake in the event. However, in practical terms, the IWA was not yet prepared for a proletarian revolution, let alone defending it in majority peasant and monarchist France. The problem with the strategy of the International was that it did not consider the possibility of a revolutionary workers’ offensive in the west European countries imminent or even likely in the near future.44 The Paris Commune, which paradoxically was the most glorious moment in the life of the organization, the moment for which it is best remembered, constituted the most dramatic expression of this strategic blind spot. As Engels later remarked in a letter to Sorge, they “did not lift a finger”45 to organize the Commune. It came as a surprise. In fact, during the chaotic days between the defeat of Napoleon III and the explosion of the Commune, Marx repeatedly warned the French section to avoid an insurrection.46 The problem was, he argued, that the organization lacked any preparedness for such a revolution and the costs of the defeat could be colossal. He was right. A few years after the Commune’s defeat the organization ceased to exist. Despite all these problems, when the Commune finally rose, the IWA General Council stood unwaveringly behind it. It devoted all of its energy to defending the Commune against

44

In the “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association” (1864), Marx did not even mention “communism” or “socialism,” and did not even suggest anything about a future proletarian revolution. MECW Vol.20, pp.5-13. 45 Here Engels wrote that “the Commune was the intellectual child of the International, but it did not lift a finger to produce it”. “Engels’ Letter to Sorge, 17 September 1874”, MECW Vol.45, p.41. 46 Two letters Marx sent to Leo Frankel in April and May, a member of the IWMA General Council and a leader of the Commune, can be found in the MECW Vol. 44, p141 and pp.148-149.

25

slanders and to supporting its legitimacy. However, about the problems involved in the management of the Commune, the General Council was impotent. Frankel, who was a member of the IWA and a correspondent with the General Council, was elected to the Commune and was appointed to its commission for labor and industry. Throughout the brief period that he held this position, he sent several letters to Marx in London asking for his advice about day-to-day affairs of administration. Marx never responded to any of these questions, despite Frankel's insistence, and limited his responses to general political questions.47 The whole strategy of the IWA, which was designed to reap the benefits from wars aimed to carve independent nation-states from monarchical empires, faltered when Germany turned against a genuine, in fact the first ever, proletarian government in another country. In a situation when a modern bourgeois state faced a proletarian power, the historical program of the IWA caught it off guard. The contingency of the event (the Paris Commune) and revolutionaries’ expectations (a long process of bourgeois nation state formation) did not match; in fact, it never did. On the contrary, revolutionary organizations’ “plans” always included a wager, a possibility of defeat. The success of the program and its expectations were never guaranteed before the event, nor was such a guarantee sought. The so-called “conspiracy of equals” and Babeuf relied on masses to join the uprising once they started the assault on the Thermidorian government. But they were captured by the state before even they started. The clandestine Blanquist insurrectionary movement had the same fate. The IWA General Council built its whole strategy on the certainty of the capitalist development and expansion to produce national liberation wars and insurrections. They did not expect a proletarian uprising before the completion of this process, at least in Europe, and were against it. This does not mean that revolutionaries ignored facts and stuck blindly to doctrinaire projections. The problem was that their actions and programs drew their inspiration from the future. However, the shape of future events and facts always remain uncertain from the present vantage point. Hence, revolutionary organizations always had to act before the event, their theory has to be elastic, to be devised for contingencies. Blindly facing a shifting future pregnant with unpredictable events, while having to act determinately, is the reason why a culture of comradeship was and is such a central aspect of

47

Ibid.

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revolutionary organizations. It is a question of life and death for revolutionaries to establish a firm trust among themselves, to be able to act and think collectively, to take initiative when the situation demands, and to discuss all sorts of practical and theoretical questions openly without reservations. Despite this centrality of trust, it is also an extremely intangible concept. In revolutionary organizations, trust demands a consciousness of what to reveal and what to conceal. It is an extremely personal bond, but also a very abstract one, expressed through a commitment to theoretical and general formulations. Comrades trusting each other may see it as their duty and right to criticize (sometimes very harshly) each other on very personal level or on extremely fine and minute theoretical differences. As Simmel wrote: “Depending on their content, associations may be based on various kinds of presumptions of trust: on the trust in business-like efficiency or in religious conviction, in courage or love, in respectable attitude. But as soon as the society becomes a secret one, added to the trust determined by the particular purposes of the organization is a formal trust in concealment––obviously a faith in personality that has a more sociologically abstract character than any other since every possible common issue can be placed under it. It happens then, exceptions aside, that no other trust requires such an uninterrupted subjective renewal, because where it is a matter of faith in attachment or energy, in morality or intelligence, in a sense of decency or tact, the facts that establish the degree of trust once and for all and that bring the probability of disappointment to a minimum will more likely be at hand. The chance of giving away a secret, however, is dependent on the carelessness of a moment, the mellowness or the excitement of a mood, the possibly unconscious nuance of an emphasis. Maintaining secrecy is something so labile, the temptations of betrayal so varied, that in many cases such an endless course leads from secrecy to indiscretion because the unconditional trust in the former includes an incomparable preponderance of subjective factors. For this reason, secret societies––whose rudimentary forms begin with any secret shared by two and whose spread to all places and times is a rather huge, yet hardly ever also merely quantitatively valued reality—produce a most highly effective schooling in the morality of a bond among people.”48

That is why congresses and meetings (as well as polemics and journals) were exceptionally important for communist organizations. They are not merely gatherings where resolutions and manifestoes are discussed and intellectual differences are debated, but also social settings that help to foster trust. The form of debate and proceedings may differ, but open discussion forms the heart of the "trust building." Trust and conviction are produced among the comrades through a process of debate and clarification. Communist organizations abandoned all remnants of the old

48

Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, Volume:1 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 229.

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Masonic rituals pertaining to secret organizational meetings after 1840s.49 However, quite aside from eccentric ceremonies, there remained a central psychological process of comradeship. As the international basis of communist organizations widened with the participation of communists from different national, ethnic and social backgrounds, the heterogeneity of the congress itself became “ceremonial” in a concrete sense. For example, when an IWA Congress gathered in the Hague in 1872, the public and the press was shocked and amazed by the unusual mixture of these revolutionary adventurists, workers, artisans, and all sorts of eccentric personalities from several different nations. Such an unusual social asymmetry demanded nurturing a healthy culture of debate, principles and proceedings. To the outside world, these were a show of force, a ceremonial exhibition of strength, a concretization of internationalism, albeit in a small and symbolic form. In short, the 18th and 19th century communist organizations evolved to develop an international, revolutionary centralized organization. Communists embraced exploited masses of workers as agents of historical agents, and prepared for a future world historical transformation that would liberate humanity from poverty and oppression. To prepare themselves for this transformation they built underground, clandestine organizations. In order to prepare for historical contingencies and their general analysis of world historical evolution, revolutionary communists organized collective structures to debate, to clarify their positions and build trust: congresses and central publications. All these methods emerged in Europe in response to the experiences of great Revolutionary events and catastrophic counter-revolutionary intervals between them. The following chapters examine how first the Second International and then the Left Radical Internationalists organized internationally (in congresses mainly) to produce open and secret publications, to react collectively world historical events (especially wars), and ultimately to organize for a revolution.

49

Until the foundation of the First International, joining a communist organization required a ceremony of repeating a catechism as an oath of loyalty. This was definitely a Masonic ceremonial tradition continued well into late 1840s.

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C.

The Formation of the Second International

The ISB and the Second International were in many ways unusual and unprecedented entities in the history of the socialist movement. Contrary to the insurrectionary mood and the exciting clandestine atmosphere that the 1848ers lived through, the meetings of the Second International's leading cadres could be easily confused with a gathering of a noisy bourgeois crowd, despite the presence of red flags and socialist symbols adorning its congresses. The new generation of socialists who filled the ranks were full of fresh barristers and lawyers eager to follow a parliamentary political career, editors of colorful legal journals published without much harassment from the police, and established heads of trade unions and cooperatives. It was still possible to spot those from the older generation of radicals who wore real battle scars to its gatherings. In the past, these senior revolutionaries used to enter even the most bourgeois constitutional revolutions with guns in hand and had had adventurous experiences during barricade wars and civil wars from the 1848 revolutions. The new men (and they were mostly men with few notable exceptions) of the international on the other hand, were practical politicians who chose to face the “class enemy” on safer grounds. In the benches and halls of the parliaments and on the wage negotiation tables, they came to rub shoulders with the bosses. Until the founding of the Second International and its constituent parties, revolutionary socialists rarely organized permanent legal and open organizations that did not seem to constitute a direct, radical and immediate challenge to the established political and economic order. However, the Second International lacked such an immediate ambition and this led to a massive confusion about its purpose. In fact, for many participants at the Second International’s founding congress in Paris in 1889, the organization seemed to be a well-intended, but ultimately a somehow pointless form. The very organizing of the congress seemed haphazard. The delegates from different countries often did not listen to reports and discussions about other countries. In most cases, they simply could not do so because the translation work was terribly organized. Reflecting on the congress after it concluded, William Morris, a member of the British delegation wrote,

29

“…the whole time was taken up in settling various details of the constitution of the Congress, some of which excited angry feeling among the French delegates; the cause of which it was difficult, or impossible rather, for a stranger to understand.”50

Not only was the infighting among the French delegation hard to decipher and awkward for the others, but there was an uneasy feeling between some British and German delegates as well. Kitz, another British delegate, wrote after the Congress that the accuracy of Wilhelm Liebknecht’s translation was dubious. He also reported that some oppositional views, such as those of the anarchists, were suppressed without much debate and that debates on procedural details took too long.51 During the proceedings people chattered, laughed, and generally disrespected the speakers. And there was a stream of people constantly entering and leaving the debate hall. Cigarette smoke filled the room. For many, beyond expressing a genuine sentiment of internationalist solidarity, the congress achieved little. Nevertheless, beneath all this confusion and chaos, the International actually brought together two strong currents of the European socialist movement, one older and the other just emerging. The first and older tendency was what may be called the “Marx family.” In France, Britain, and Germany, Marx’s pupils and old comrades, the most prominent of whom were Friedrich Engels, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, Jules Guesde, and Paul Lafargue, were heading a visible but yet informal international caucus.52 Marx’s daughter, Elanor Evaling, was a translator in the Congress and a prominent figure in the British socialist movement. Marx’s two sons-in-law were prominent leaders in the French socialist movement. Bebel and Liebknecht, young comrades and

50

William Morris,“Impressions of the Paris Congress,” Commonweal, Vol 5, No. 185, 27 July 1889, p. 234. 51 Frank Kitz, “The Paris Congress: A delegate’s Report”. Commonweal, 10 August 1889. 52 To define this caucus Engels used the term “Germans” in some of his letters, but obviously this is a misleading expression. “The Marx family,” or to put it better “the Marx & Engels family,” had its roots in several countries and on least two continents as he himself explained in a letter to Kautsky on the composition of the “family” in the founding congress: “Close alliance with the Austrians; the Americans up till now merely a branch of the German party; the Danes, Swedes, Norwegians and Swiss as it were offshoots of the Germans; the Dutch a reliable intermediary for the West; add to that, German colonies everywhere and the non-Possibilist French almost wholly dependent on their alliance with the Germans; likewise the Slav colonies and refugees in the West, who have also been gravitating towards the Germans ever since the fiasco of the anarchists:—what a magnificent position it is!” Engels’ Letter to Kautsky, 21 May 1889, MECW, vol 48, p. 325.

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friends of Marx and Engels, were among the founders of the German party and its two deputies in the Reichstag. This “family” brought together an older generation of barricade fighters with the new generation of mass party builders and gave the Second International its ideological vocabulary. They translated the revolutionary Marxist language into a form that could be spoken by the mild-mannered social reformers of the 1890s. This fiery revolutionary rhetoric could thus be integrated into the framework of electoral politics. In fact, the Second International’s two principles of admission reflected this fusion. The first principle was clearly Marxist in spirit. It stated that “all associations which adhere to the essential principles of Socialism: socialisation of the means of production and exchange, international union and action of the workers; conquest of public powers by the proletariat, organized as a class-party” were eligible to apply to the Second International. The second principle, while still sounding Marxist in its emphasis on class struggle, was slightly new and unusually rigid in its specificity. It stated that for an organization to be admitted to the International, it had to “accept the principles of class struggle and recognize the necessity of political action (legislative and parliamentary) but do not have to participate directly in the political movement.”53 The second tendency reflected the new people of the International, who were exactly those carrying out this “legislative and parliamentary” struggle. In fact, the colorful chaos of the founding congress reflected the choir formed by idiosyncratic personalities around these charismatic public figures, orators and editors, many of whom were either parliamentarians or soon-to-be parliamentarians. Hence, Eduard Vaillant, who was elected as the president of the congress on its first day, together with Wilhelm Liebknecht, aptly described the international as “the first parliament of the international working class.”54 However, this “international workers’ parliament” did not consolidate itself in a concrete form before the main socialist parties that belonged to it had legally established themselves in their respective national countries, especially in their national parliaments. It took eleven more years for the Second International to settle the two basic principles cited above, which were not adopted until the 1900 Paris Congress.

53

The Regulations of the Congress in “Internationale Sozialisten Kongress zu Paris” (Nuremberg: 1890), p. 23. Emphasis is author’s. 54 Braunthal, History of the International. Volume I, p. 197.

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III.

The Second International and Its Central Organ: The Composition, Culture and Function of the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) 1900-1914

This chapter explores the development and activities of the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) between 1904 and 1914. Those who formed the ISB constituted a leading group of the international socialist movement. They were a tiny but extremely influential group. The ISB and those who participated in its plena were the Second International's charismatic leaders, orators, organizers of national parties, and editors of the world socialist press. They led the formation of the various national parties of Social Democracy (some of which still exist today) and defined those parties’ international strategies and tactics. Despite their disagreements or personal and temperamental differences, their names, collectively, became synonymous with socialism in the period. Hence, they were both models and exemplary figures for the left radical socialists, but eventually they became the authorities to be challenged and undermined. This group essentially formed the link between the previous generations of international revolutionary groupings and the future ones. For the Second International, the ISB’s main political function was to coordinate the organization’s effort towards world peace. A growing series of convulsions in great power politics had increased the tensions in world politics. For the Second International leadership, increasing militarization threatened the success of the growing socialist movement. A majority of the Second International’s leaders, organized around the ISB, thought that the danger of war stemmed from the pre-capitalist feudal and reactionary regimes, and they saw liberal pacifism (which had developed its own international peace movement before the war and which the Second International emulated in that regard) as allies. This was not strange since the Second International parties grew in their respective parties by supporting (while preserving their organizational independence) liberal and republican forces against various monarchical and autocratic tendencies in Europe. However, as the First World War showed, this political strategy collapsed with the establishment of national unity regimes which subdued all major bourgeois national political tendencies around the war effort, reducing internal political differences' importance. This chapter specifically focuses on the formation of the ISB, its functioning, its composition and culture, and its attempts to preserve peace by intervening in the national politics of major 32

European powers. It also discusses how and why the ISB failed in effectively mobilizing the organization’s goals. As the later Left Radical Internationalists who founded the Comintern realized, one of the main reasons for this failure was the organization's confidence in pre-war liberalism and liberal international peace organizations, which proved ineffective in the face of global great power competition.55 This confidence and assimilation of liberal politics led the next generation of Marxists to conclude that capitalist progress had reached a historic limit, that it has to be overthrown by a proletarian revolution, that the social democratic methods of international organization were inadequate for this purpose.

55

Many canonical academic works on the history of the Second International and its capitulation were written in 1960s and 1970s, during the Cold War. Some authors of these works were themselves Social Democrats. Cole's The Second International published several editions after it first appeared in 1956, Julius Braunthal's multi-volume History of the Internationals was published in 1960s), and Georges Haupt's Socialism and Great War (1972) were some of the most important works produced in this period. These interpretations were full of details and anecdotes as the authors were in some cases themselves participants of the events and organizations they recounted (Cole was a Fabian socialist and Braunthal, a member of the Austrian Social Democratic movement, was a secretary of the Second International in early 1950s). However, they did not conceal their sympathies towards their organizations and especially the right-wing social democrats of this period. Haupt himself belonged to a younger generation and was an academic historian. However, his views were also colored with similar judgements prevalent at the time. For instance, Haupt considered the German Social Democratic movement as faulty for its position on the war and tends to sympathize with the French socialists, especially Jean Jaures. Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 12-21. James Joll was similar to Haupt, who considered Marxism as rigid and its influence as "disastrous". James Joll, The Second International (New York: Praeger, 1956), p. 3. While later scholarly works presented more nuanced views on the collapse of the Second International, the historiographic focus began to shift towards social history in 1980s. Hence, more recent works show less interest about the question why the International failed to defend its international principles in 1914. An article published by Marc Mulholland even suggests that the question itself was politically loaded, since the International never renounced war in general, that its leaders always perceived wars of national defense as legitimate, and when the First World War began, the leading social democrats of Europe did not see their nationalist actions as contradictory to their internationalism. Marc Mulholland, "Marxists of Strict Observance? The Second International, National Defence, and the Question of War" The Historical Journal, 58, 2 (2015), pp.615-622. My goal here is not to present a new interpretation of the collapse of the Second International, but merely to explore the background for the discussion of how this collapse laid the grounds for the formation of the Third International and the Left-Radical Internationalist movement between 1910-1920.

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A.

The Organizational Evolution of the ISB

Until the 1900s, the Second International lacked any permanent organizations, neither a secretariat, central bodies, rules, programs, statues, nor even an official name.56 The Second International’s structure and organization took shape gradually after 1900. Specifically, the last five congresses of the Second International (1900 in Paris, 1904 in Amsterdam, 1907 in Stuttgart, 1910 in Copenhagen, and 1912 in Basel) took genuine steps towards forming effective, functioning, and responsible central organs. What triggered this process was not a sudden interest in international cooperation or spirit of solidarity. It was rather the growing tensions between colonial and industrialized world powers. In the years between 1900 and 1914, the conflicts, open or near, became like heart palpitations pulsating in an increased crescendo and each pounding corresponded to a Second International congress. The 1900 Paris Congresses was not only marked by the intense conflict in French politics over the Dreyfus affair, a warning sign of emerging nationalist militarization in the capitalist heartlands, but also the Boer Wars that began in 1899 on the periphery of the British colonial empire. It was in the Boer Wars that the British Imperialism first experimented with the concept of concentration camps that it used against the Dutch settlers. Henceforth, imperialism and colonialism became central topics of debate in the international congresses. The 1904 Amsterdam Congress showed that imperialist conflicts were not a passing phenomenon. The debates of the Congress took place under the gloomy atmosphere of the Russo-Japanese War. However, the events that really forced the leaders of the Second International to renew their commitments to anti-war internationalism with a more daring effort happened between 1904 and 1907. In those years, not only a crisis over the colonial status of Morocco brought Spain, France and Germany to the brink of war, but also Britain and Germany found themselves at loggerheads over a naval armaments race. The formation of the Austro-German Entente and French-British alliances solidified the competing military blocs that would face each other in a world war. The crisis in Balkans, triggered partially by the conflict between Italy and the Ottoman Empire, and further deepened by the conflict between the Austria-Hungarian and the Russian empires, occupied the International until 1914

56

Ibid. p. 243.

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with only brief intervals of relief. Hence, the 1907 Stuttgart and the 1910 Copenhagen Congresses decisions strengthened the organizational statues of the International to pursue an international peace policy. The 1912 Basel Congress that faced dangerous diplomatic and military situation on three fronts (in the Balkans, Western Europe, and Africa) was, more than a congress, in effect a spectacular demonstration, a global anti-war demonstration of 555 delegates representing numerous mass parties and trade unions. In the light of these growing geopolitical tensions, the International could not simply remain an organization that convened world congress once every three years. The Second International leadership aimed to coordinate its efforts in a more centralized and focused manner towards peace. For that purpose, it organized an Executive Bureau, the ISB, with definitive powers, that could coordinate the national parties and react to sudden external events the resolution of which could not wait until the next congress. Organizationally, the Second International defined itself as an international umbrella of national political parties. This was significantly different from the IWA, which had an international leadership root and branch, with little interest in forming national organizations prioritizing national agendas and adapting itself to local conditions. In contrast to the IWA, the Second International thrived first as an amalgamation of different national parties which grew in prominence, primarily as products of national conditions and peculiarities. These can be differentiated into three main categories based on their national political system: colonial empires with republican or constitutional monarchic regimes (Britain, France); small European countries (which, as in the case of Belgium or Netherlands, themselves had considerable colonial possessions); or autocratic or authoritarian constitutional regimes like Germany or the Russian Empire. In most cases, socialists from the colonies could not find a representation in the International (with the notable exception of white settler colonies, such as South Africa, which was represented by mainly white only or white majority socialist parties). Given the strength of the European socialists in the International, the limited political reach the ISB did not make its coordination efforts any easier. Different political and historical particularities limited the political tools available to the ISB. In Britain and France, the socialists lacked a unified national party. In France, the SFIO was only formed in 1905 and Britain was represented by the Labour Party, which was an amalgamation of trade union federations and which did not 35

even officially endorsed socialism. The Belgian party was formed essentially by the consumer cooperative movement. The German Social Democratic Party (SDP) was a model party in east and central Europe, as it was a rapidly growing political party and had well-established ties with the trade union movement. However, it was excluded from the national executive power by the powerful Junker landlords, the German monarchy, and most of the bourgeois class. The Austria-Hungarian socialist movement was chronically disunited and itself resembled a little international formed by several national Social Democratic parties constituted by minority socialists. The Russian party itself operated in the underground and was politically divided. Under these conditions the ISB took it upon itself to organize the congresses, coordinate various different sections' activities pertaining to international conflicts, and attempted to unify disparate the national sections.57 During the congresses, the most important debates concerning the agenda of the congresses took place in sub-commissions composed of a smaller number of delegates, which, if they could come to a unanimous decision, presented their resolutions to the whole body of the congress for a final vote. In most cases, the resolutions of these sub-commissions carried the congresses. The ISB carefully selected the members of these sub-commissions from among prominent socialist delegates to represent the main tendencies in the International. However, in certain exceptional cases, a minority could challenge the resolution. In those cases, the congress adopted amendments to the resolutions. Between the congresses, the international socialist leadership met (at least once a year) in the ISB Plena (in most cases these meetings took place in Brussels). Over time, these meetings and the correspondence network established by the ISB took over significant executive functions in the International. Whenever urgent international events that required the attention of the International arose, such as major general strikes or riots, wars or threats of war, uprisings or state persecutions, the ISB mobilized and organized meetings. Usually after those meetings, or in some cases without even a meeting, the Secretariat of the ISB

57

Georges Haupt considers the ISB merely as “coordinating institution without any power to take decisions or means to finance action... The ISB was a moral authority. It confirmed the institutionalization of the international leaders and leading groups in so far as they were institutionalized in their national strongholds, but not to the extent that one could call it an international leading group... Its distinction was due rather to the presence in it of prestigious names such as Bebel, Jaures, Vaillant, K. Hardie, V. Adler”. Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism, p. 87. In his analysis, Haupt tends to emphasize the positions and differences of various national parties rather than their commonalities.

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itself issued manifestos and called the national parties to organize protest or solidarity demonstrations.

1.

Functions of the ISB

The ISB was the heart and soul of the Second International. Its role was beyond being merely functional. From the establishment of the Second International in 1889 until the founding of the ISB in 1900, the International could not find a concrete international expression beyond its spectacular congresses.58 The ISB was formed at the 1900 Paris Congress, which also established a permanent secretariat in Brussels. Austrian medical doctor and the leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SDP), Victor Adler, who according to Julius Braunthal was partly responsible for the decision to find the ISB, wrote that, with the formation of the ISB, “International social democracy has developed from a stage of casual contact and mutual sympathy to one of solid organizations.”59 Concretely, the ISB had three main organs: an International Committee composed of two delegates coming from each section or national party; an Inter-parliamentary Commission; and the permanent Secretariat. The first two met at least once a year, but the most prominent and active executive organ was the Secretariat. Until Camille Huysmans replaced Victor Serwy as the Secretary of the International, it held six plenary meetings between 1900 and 1905. But it was under the secretariat of Huysmans that the Bureau and its Secretariat gained real official and practical powers over the whole international socialist movement. The turning point for the Second International and the ISB was the 1907 Stuttgart Congress. That Congress gave the Bureau and its Secretariat the responsibility to organize the congresses, decide on the agenda, and determine the number of votes that the sections would have in the congresses.60 National sections had to submit any resolutions that they wanted the congresses to discuss to the ISB and the ISB would decide which ones would be on the agenda. The regularity of

58

Gerhart Niemeyer, “The Second International” in M.M. Drachkovitch, ed., The Revolutionary Internationals, p.116. The only practical action of the Second International before the establishment of the ISB was the adoption of May Day as an International working-class day of action. However, it was to be organized by national parties as each party saw fit. 59 Braunthal. History of the International. Volume I, p. 244. 60 “The Regulations of the Congresses and of the ISB,” pp. 23-27.

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the organization was not only a formal success, it also had practical results. For the first time since its inception, the reports could be properly translated into the three official languages (German, English and French), and the question of representation was more or less resolved. This meant “the definitive consolidation of the Second International and the transformation of congresses into assemblies wielding a profound influence,”61 or to put it more concisely, it marked the emergence of the International “from a period of chaos,” as Jean Jaures noted. The ISB’s emergence as a central organ with real executive powers turned the Second International into a genuine international force. The 1910 Copenhagen Congress further enhanced the ISB’s authority.62 In this period when the world was under a constant threat of war, the ISB increasingly recognized itself as not only the leading organ of the socialist International, but also as “the only party of peace.”63 However, in this capacity, the ISB did not act as it pleased under circumstances that it chose, but under the already existing conditions created by the European political and international traditions and contemporary practices. To explain those traditions that weighed on socialists, let us explore the composition and collective characteristics of the ISB as an international socialist organization.

2.

The Composition and the Culture of the ISB64

In the face of the growing threat of war, ISB’s perspective, decisions, and structure between 1900 and 1914 mimicked the period’s liberal pacifist movements. There is nothing strange in that

61

Lenin, Sochinenie, Volume.26, pp.79-80. “Regulations of the Congresses and of the ISB”. 63 “1891 Second International Brussels Congress Resolution against war,” ISB Bulletin. No. 9 Supplement. p. 4. 64 In the following analysis, I used the biographical information of the ISB members who participated at least two or more of the ISB’s plena as official representatives of their national sections. My main sources were collections of documents edited by Georges Haupt in La Deuxième Internationale. 1889-1914. Etude critique des sources. Essai bibliographique, (Paris, La Haye, Mouton et Co, 1965) and Second International ISB Bulletins. I focused on the period between 1905 and 1914, when Huysmans was the secretary of the ISB. Many socialists who played significant roles in their respective national parties or even in the international movement at earlier or later periods were not always among those listed. Americans who could not easily travel to Europe, leaders of the factional oppositions that were not recognized by the International also fell out of the group. Hence, this analysis only shows the character of the ISB as a primarily European collective representing only the officially recognized political parties. 62

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since most of the ISB members were coming from bourgeois backgrounds, were working in a liberal political environment, and in turn created a similar political-organizational culture.65 This section examines certain cultural and demographic characteristics of the participants in ISB Plena in the period between 1905-191466 in order to explore how and why this collective international body refrained from a revolutionary confrontation in the face of the war, as some expected it to do. In the ISB, delegates from (mostly, but not only) European Social Democratic parties discussed and made crucial decisions concerning the actions to be taken by the International as it became more effective in organizing demonstrations and reaching collective decisions in a quicker manner. For the first time, during this period, the ISB as a collective leadership actively intervened in the life of the national parties. These interventions mostly centered around bringing about party unity in order to secure better results in parliamentary elections. The ISB helped bring about the unity of the French party (in 1905), tried to unify the Russian Party, and organized a special plenum to achieve the same end in Britain (in 1913). It also punished harshly those factions that divided national parties: in 1909, when the left-wing Marxist Dutch Social-Democratic Party broke from a revisionist right-wing national party, the ISB sided with the mainstream tendency and expelled the dissenters. In addition to this political and moral role over socialist parties, it also planned the Second International congresses, their agendas, and decided on each country’s mandates. It was among the members of these plena that crucial questions about war and imperialism were first deliberated, and the international line of the socialists was drawn. A total of 111 Social Democrats participated in at least one of these plena (see table 1). On an average, 29 members participated in each plenum. However, not all members participated on “equal” terms. For example, the Belgium delegation (Vandervelde, Anselee, Huysmans in the

65

The “leading group” concept was first used by Haupt. Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism, p. 87. However, he did not consider the Bureau as a proper leading group since the ISB lacked political coherence and an international authority. Here I claim the contrary: the ISB had political authority, but not so much one entrusted with formal powers. Its authority laid in the cultural and ideological weight the collection of individuals who composed it had over the International, as I explain below. 66 The ISB held ten plena in this period, all under Secretary Camille Huysmans. Unlike the earlier plena held under the leadership of the first secretary of the ISB, Victor Serwy, the plena held after the 1904 Amsterdam Congress were better organized. In this period, the ISB had more executive authority, which was formalized by the Second International in 1907 Stuttgart Congress.

39

capacity of secretary, and Bertrand or Furnemont interchangeably) had almost always been overrepresented. Not even the British or German delegation had such consistent overrepresentation. Only Eduard Vaillant, as a representative of the French section, together with the Belgium delegation, participated in all these plena. Table 2 shows the breakdown of delegate participation. Table 1 Number of participants in each ISB plenum between 1905 and 1914. March

Nov

June

Oct

Nov

1910,

Sept

Oct

Dec

July

1906,

1906,

1907,

1908,

1909,

Copen-

1911,

1912,

1913,

1914,

Brussels

Brussels

Brussels

Brussels

Brussels

hagen

Zurich

Brussels

London

Brussels

21

22

24

30

30

39

25

36

34

32

Table 2 Number of plena attended by participants.67 1

2 Plena

3 Plena

4 Plena

5 Plena

6 Plena

7 Plena

8 Plena

9 Plena

10 Plena

21

8

5

8

4

4

3

1

3

Plenum 54

The first general characteristic of the group is its gender composition: most of them were men. Throughout its existence only three women (Angelica Balabanova, Rosa Luxemburg, Angele Roussel) participated in its activities in an official capacity. When the First World War started, the average age of the participants was 46. Further, for those about whom I could find reliable biographical information, a significant majority of the members were either skilled workers, artisans, or had university (or equivalent level) educations. Unskilled and young workers were not represented in the ISB, even though, unskilled, young and female workers constituted the great majority

67

Only a small group of Social Democrats regularly attended each plenum. Only 57 attended more than one plenum and only 36 attended more than two. In my discussion, I will mainly rely on an analysis of ISB delegates who attended at least two plena of the Bureau. There is a great discrepancy in the literature about biographical information. On some of these socialists, there are volumes of biographies, yet there are others whose birthplaces are unknown. That practical problem forced me to limit myself to this top group of 57 socialists. And even in this group I could not find any information on some people except their names and the parties that they represented. Hence, as a result, this study is somewhat limited, and it focuses on the most primary available biographical information (nationality, gender, occupation, education and broad outlines of political career).

40

of the European working class, as well as its most politicized, militant sections. Further, the unskilled industrial workers and female workers played very important roles in the 1905 Russian revolution, the establishment of the IWW in the US, and the revolutionary syndicalist organizations in France, Spain, Britain, and other countries. Female workers and intellectuals were at the forefront not only of radical socialist movements (both before, during and after the war), but they also waged radical suffrage battles all over the world. In order to address this enormous omission, at the 1907 Stuttgart Congress, the Socialist International created two international organizations: the International Union of the Socialist Youth and the Socialist International Women’s organization. However, these two organizations had an awkward relationship with the ISB. They were neither officially represented in the ISB (or in its enlarged plenum meetings), nor did they have any influence over the Congress’ decisions and proceedings. Hence, they merely constituted as artificial addenda (with a mainly propagandistic capacity) to the official executive organs of the international socialist movement. Even though both organizations actively and militantly engaged in anti-militarist campaigns before the war and played extremely important roles in the establishment of the radical anti-war Zimmerwald Left movement during the war and the Communist International after the war, historians have tended to overlook them. I will consider the role played by these movements in the anti-war revolutionary struggles in more detail in the following chapters. It is sufficient to note here that working-class women, youth, and the unskilled proletarians constituted the most militant, rapidly growing, and radical sections of the European proletariat, yet they did not have any representatives in the ISB to raise their voice. Hence, it is fair to picture the International Socialist leadership as a patriarchal, relatively elite group, if not in terms of its ideological orientation, at least in its social composition. The international socialist leadership, as represented in the ISB, was also an organization of parliamentarians.68 Thirty-one of the 51 (61% of the total) who attended at least two ISB plena, held a seat in their respective national parliaments at least once before 1914. An important reason

68

There were nine delegates who could not be parliamentarians: women (who were legally excluded from European parliaments) or members from certain eastern European countries, where there were either no democratically elected parliaments or the Social Democratic candidates were not legally allowed to run in the parliamentary elections.

41

for this rise of parliamentarians in the socialist movement was the decline of the trade union movements. Two factors contributed to this decline: the relative rise in workers’ living conditions and the changing composition of the working class. Food prices in the last two decades of the nineteenth century steadily decreased thereby raising the real wages of the workers almost everywhere in Europe.69 The rise in the living conditions was not brought about by the union struggles but happened in part as an indirect result of capitalism’s own transformation. Technical improvements in transportation and the weakening of the custom barriers made life easier for the workers. With the development of new productive technologies that enabled unskilled or semi-skilled workers to find work opportunities abroad, especially in the US, millions of eastern and central European peasants joined the working class. These newcomers did not share the same artisanal conception of work or pride of work or a similar attachment to traditional trade union culture, as did the artisans of previous generations.70 As a result, for these new workers, political action became more convenient than trade union action.71

69

For instance, in Britain, between the mid-1870s and mid-1890s, real wages rose as prices fell and the wages share of the national income rose from 52% to 62% and wage levels increased by 26% between 1886 and 1896. After 1896, real wages stagnated, and from 1908 actually declined, as prices rose by 10% to 1913. This has been identified as a major cause of the labor unrest in the years before the WWI. Richard Price, “England” in Marcel van der Linden & Jürgen Rojahn, eds., The Formation of Labour Movements, 1870-1914: An International Perspective Vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), p. 12. 70 Trade unions resisted incorporating this new unskilled worker stratum. For example, in Germany: “Particularly the unskilled workers had a hard time with the union movement just as the union movement had a hard time with them. The unskilled usually had an extensive history of migration experience behind them and thus had severe problems adapting to the ways and rhythms of industrial work and to the conditions of urban life. If they did manage to become organized, they still ran up against the disdain of the qualified workers organized in trade unions. It was not the unskilled, but a type of qualified male, settled, skilled worker who carried the growing momentum of the union movement until 1912. This skilled worker was between 20 and 35 years old and lived in a proletarian quarter of one of the industrially diversified big cities. Artisan traditions were still important to him”. Klaus Tenfeldep “Germany”, in The Formation of Labour Movements, p. 261. 71 Cole, The Second International, p. 130. An example of relative “peace” between the trade unions and bosses can be observed in the development of collective bargaining in 1880s and 1890s. As Price notes: “Increasing representation of worker-employer relation through the collective bargaining systems … spread from 1890s [onwards]. These systems were not usually established in the face of employer hostility, but at their initiative and insistence. Indeed, with the exception of railways … most such systems, emerged from a context of defeated strikes or union weakness. the purpose of such systems was not to concede to labor, but to bring order and discipline to social relations. … Since these systems depended upon collective organization for their effective functioning, they directly encouraged union growth which now became less a statement of solidarity … and more a functional necessity. Some employers were even willing to deducts membership fees from pay packets.” Price, “England”, Ibid. pp. 15-16.

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The heavy parliamentarian presence in the ISB expresses the general endorsement of the political parliamentary struggle in the international workers’ movement. The Second International not only metaphorically, but almost literally became a “parliament of the European working class,” a European caucus of Social Democratic parliamentarians. Those socialists who were schooled in parliamentary politics interacted with and acquired a uniquely new culture of politics and debate thanks to their regular, often daily, engagements with other bourgeois or aristocratic deputies from liberal and conservative parties. Daniel Orth, a sympathetic American journalist who travelled Europe to observe the progress of the social democratic movement firsthand, noted with fascination that “the best school for Socialism has been the school of parliamentary activity. Here the hotblooded protesters become sober artisans of statecraft... Neither the soft humanities of the utopists nor the blood and thunder of revolution overturned the existing state. But when the workingmen appeared in parliaments, then things began to change.”72 However, it would be absurd to reduce the causes of social democratic involvement in parliamentary activity to timidity or a spirit of compromise on the part of the Social Democratic leadership. Parliamentarism reflected the zeitgeist of the era, a break with radical antagonism of the previous generation’s sense of historical mission, which was akin to a secular revolutionary millenarianism. Parliaments and legislative assemblies were considered, not only by socialists but also by liberals and every other opposition group (except anarchists), as a “limiting factor upon the State, rather than as its supreme organ of power.”73 The rapid urbanization and industrialization of Europe also necessitated a constant revision of legal codes. Archaic rules and regulations had to be discarded in favor of new modern ones. In a sense, the significance of legislative assemblies for all classes and interest groups increased from 1880s onwards.74 Many Marxists of this period developed a distinctive political strategy to fit into this new era of parliamentarism that began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Different social democrats offered different reasons for their electoral and parliamentary strategy, but for many, the leading theoretician of the method was Karl Kautsky. It is important to remember that Kautsky did not see parliamentarism as a direct path leading to socialism. His argument was more nuanced.

72

Samuel Orth, Social Democracy in Europe (London: Williams & Norgate, 1913), p. 251. Cole, History of Socialist Thought. Vol. 3 Part.1, p. 12. 74 Richard Evans. Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 (London: Penguin Books, 2017), p. 321. 73

43

He argued that parliaments could effectively be used to thwart reactionary attacks on the workers’ political and economic rights. For him, there was a difference between government, as the executive branch of the state held by the aristocracies and monarchies, and parliament, as a check on the state itself. Through a careful and temporary alliance to stop the reactionary classes maneuvers, liberals and socialists could work against the state inside it, inside the parliament. 75 Eventually, this struggle could possibly lead to a peaceful revolution. Kautsky envisioned a long-drawn struggle between parliaments and the states. Once the state and aristocracy allied with it began an open and violent attack against legal institutions like parliaments, they could lose their legitimacy. That could, in turn, legitimize a transition of power to the socialists through legal means. They could then liquidate the anti-democratic and anti-popular character of state institutions. Kautksy argued that European aristocracies and monarchies only inadvertently granted parliamentary rights to the masses of people, and that they were always on guard for the day when the socialists would start gaining majorities. This “war of attrition” carried out relatively peacefully inside the civil society could have led to a kind of revolution, which was totally different from how previous generations had conceptualized it.76 This was how the Marxist wing of the Second International, or at least

75

He wrote in 1898: “one of the most important tasks of the working class in its struggle for the achievement of political power is not to eliminate the representative system, but to break the power of government vis-à-vis the parliament.” Quoted in, Eric Blanc, “The Roots of 1917: Kautsky, the State, and Revolution in Imperial Russia,” John Riddell: Marxist Essays and Commentary, October 2016, https://johnriddell.com/2016/10/13/the-roots-of-1917-kautsky-the-state-and-revolution-in-imperial-russia/. Kautsky perceived liberals and the bourgeoisie as a non-ruling ruling class. For him, it was too busy in business to rule politically. Hence it relegated executive functions to a caste of bureaucrats and administrators. He wrote in his famous “Social Revolution” pamphlet (1902): “The capitalists have therefore neither time nor leisure, nor the previous culture necessary for artistic and scientific activity. They lack even the necessary qualifications for regular participation in governmental activities. Not only in art and science but also in the government of the State the ruling class is forced to take no part. They must leave that to wageworkers and bureaucratic employees. The capitalist class reigns but does not govern. It is satisfied, however, to rule the government.” Karl Kautsky, The Social Revolution (Chicago: Charles & Kerr Company, 1902), pp. 29-30. This generalization may have explained the situation in central Europe and especially Imperial Germany, it surely did not do so for the rest of the world. However, the most interesting aspect of this formulation is that Kautsky abstracted the bourgeoisie as a class from the state, conceiving it as alien to the state. Hence, for him, bourgeois institutions and especially national parliaments become less significant organs of class rule, especially in comparison to the military and bureaucracy. 76 Braunthal, History of the International Vol.1, p.270. Kautsky wrote this in 1904. Matters were more complicated in practice and in different countries, the balance of forces between different social classes and groups changed the situation and role of national parliaments greatly. For example, Belgium, “the most bourgeois country of Europe” according to Engels, had a huge Social Democratic party-union-

44

most of it, officially conceived of the relationship between their historical goal (socialism via revolution) and their current political practice (parliamentary struggle). This new perception of an orderly, parliamentary "revolution" in contrast to the dramatic events of 1848 and 1871, had its reflection in the daily lives of the ISB leadership. The leaders of the new international did not expect to live the life of homeless immigrants and exiles as did their nineteenth century ancestors. Far from it. When Victor Adler (one of the most prominent figures of the ISB and also the leader of the German Austrian Social Democratic Party) was criticized by his party comrades for his concerns about earning a comfortable living, Kautsky defended him: "We may not carry on in conformity with anarchist-nihilistic methods of propaganda which contend that the revolution comes very soon and which of necessity crumbles if the revolution does not come at the expected time. Our agitation must be calculated on a long duration, we must prepare ourselves so that we able to conduct our struggle for decades; but for that it is necessary that pioneers have an ordered domestic life."77

This was not an isolated case. Several prominent leaders of International Social Democracy who gathered in ISB plenum belonged to a bourgeois social background. For instance, Vandervelde, the leader of the ISB and a prominent figure in the Second International, himself wrote that "one would have to search far and wide to find a Brussels family that was more thoroughly bourgeois than mine."78 As his biographer noted, Vandervelde's socialism derived not from his social position or his theoretical inquiries: "Rather than sharing their suffering, he inquired into it and reported on it... he remained within the middle-class world in which he had been nurtured and educated."79 As I will explore in more detail in the next chapter, the parliamentary route to power came to be questioned by more radical wings of the Marxist movement and workers towards the end of the 1910s. The last decade before the First World War saw an intensification and radicalization of workers’ struggles. The rising cost of living after 1910 started to erode the gains of the previous

cooperation structure. But here almost all of the other political parties and especially the strong liberals, opposed universal suffrage. However, in the ethnically complex and politically conservative Austria-Hungarian Empire, the central state bureaucracy granted universal suffrage in 1906 to divide the parliamentary opposition into bickering national groups. Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, (London: Bell & Sons Ltd., 1939), pp. 322-325. 77 Kautksy as quoted in Gary Steenson, Karl Kautsky: Marxism in the Classical Years (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1978), p. 155. 78 Janet Polasky, The Democratic Socialism of Emile Vandervelde: Between Reform and Revolution (Oxford: Berg, 1995), p.10 79 Ibid. p.13.

45

decades and parliamentary tactics could not ameliorate this economic trend. Workers turned increasingly to more radical tactics of struggle like sabotage, slowdowns, or wildcat strikes. This trend gave birth to a powerful revolutionary syndicalism (especially in Latin- and English-speaking countries), which ultimately rejected the parliamentary struggle, a rejection that reflected the disillusionment about change by electoral means of certain sections of workers. The disillusionment with the established social democratic parliamentarism arose from the suspicion of many left-wing intellectuals about the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism via parliamentary means. Robert Michels, a pupil of Max Weber, whose sociological studies and eventually his disillusionment with German Social Democracy led him to syndicalism, developed one of the most damning critiques of social democratic parliamentarism. According to Michels, social democratic parliamentarians in Europe were becoming detached from their parties’ working-class constituencies and instead seeking to secure positions in their parties’ leading organs. The leaderships had a tendency to degenerate into an exclusive club more in touch with bourgeois politicians in their daily lives than the working class.80 For many social democratic leaders, however, the rising cost of living that was drawing a wedge between the party leaderships and the radicalizing masses was primarily a result of aristocratic reaction against parliamentary and democratic gains of the last decades and not their failure of parliamentary methods. Otto Bauer’s report on the “high cost of living” prepared at the request of the ISB for the last Second International congress81 is one of the most exemplary documents reflecting this perspective. Here Bauer argued that the agricultural sector, primarily in Eastern Europe, was lagging the development of industry and that the archaic forms of property relations was the reason for that. Governments were imposing taxes to defend the landowning aristocrats or monopolies against competition, which resulted in raising food prices. The immediate solution that

80

Robert Michels, Political Parties (New York: Hearts International Library Co., 1915), pp. 153-157. While Michels was not alone in his criticism of the degeneration of the social democratic party leaderships, his was one of the most interesting. Some of the other prominent critics of the rise of bourgeois intellectuals into leadership positions in socialist parties (mainly through parliamentarism) included Jan Machajski in Russia, Edouard Berth, Hubert Lagardelle and Georges Sorel in France, and Arturo Labriola in Italy. David Beetham, "Reformism and 'Bourgeoisification' of the Labour Movement" in Carl Levy, ed., Socialism and the Intelligentsia: 1880-1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan and Paul, 1987), pp. 109116. 81 The 1914 Vienna Congress could not take place because of the war.

46

Bauer proposed was the reduction and elimination of tariffs and barriers on (initially) food staples and ultimately all goods.82 Bauer clearly saw the aristocracy (as a landowning and military caste) and not capitalism or the liberal bourgeoisie as the cause of the problem. Militarism and the aristocratic castes entrenched in the military bureaucracy were perceived as a literal barrier against the expansion of the world market. Militarism was a burden on industry and trade (and hence the bourgeoisie) and through rising taxes and tariffs, it was also a cause of rising prices.83 In another brochure prepared also for the same congress, Kautsky summed up the role of the Second International, as opposed to the First, in relation to the political aspects of the aristocratic and dynastic reaction. According to him, while the First International’s policy was to defend the progressive gains and the proletariat against the reaction from the East, from Tsarism (perceived then as the leading reactionary force in Europe) in particular, the Second International’s policy was uniform everywhere: It was to carry out a general anti-war propaganda and that political goal was also strengthened by the development of industry and commerce, which

82

Otto Bauer, “The High Cost of Living”, August 1914. Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/bauer/1914/08/costliving.html#f10 It is interesting to note here that Otto Bauer later radically revised his position. In a pamphlet that he wrote towards the end of the First World War, in September 1917, he described the situation between 1911 and 1914 thus: "The increasing cost of living and the development of employers' associations had considerably reinforced class antagonism. The growth of German social democracy, the monstrous wave of strikes in England, the awakening of the Russian proletariat announced gigantic class struggles. Everywhere, the reformists' illusions appeared to have been left behind: in France, 'ministerialism' seemed to be abolished; in Italy the working class had expelled the reformists from the party; in Austria, the majority at the Vienna Congress in 1913 had risen with seeming resoluteness against the reformists’ illusions which had proliferated as a result of the electoral victory. Everywhere, the working class seemed to be determined to follow in Marx’s steps. The mighty development of cartels and trusts, the rapid process of subordination of world economics to financial capital, the renewed antagonism between the great imperialist powers foreshadowed the era of the decisive clash between Capital and Labour." Otto Bauer as quoted in Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, p. 246. 83 In his pamphlet, “The High Cost of Living” first published in 1913, Kautsky wrote: To all... causes of the raising of prices a new impetus is given by the emulation in armament of the great powers, through world politics, which tends to an increase in the military forces both on land and sea. The latter proceeds less by means of the increase in the number of combatants than by reason of the development and growth of the technical apparatus, which knows no limits and proceeds more rapidly than increase in the forces, and thereby the waste of productive forces is increased, since they are literally thrown into the sea, and the burdens of the people are much heavier, as appears today in the form of a steady increase in indirect taxation, and increasing the cost of the means of consumption of the masses.” Karl Kautsky, The High Cost of Living: Changes in Gold Production and The Rise in Prices (Chicago: Charles & H. Kerr Company, 1914), p. 94.

47

according to Kautsky, strengthened peace.84 Hence, in a world becoming increasingly chaotic and violent on its colonial edges, the Social Democrats perceived the relative peace and quiet of the European metropolis as representative of the future, in which they constituted the autonomous left flank of a progressive liberal democratic free market.

3.

Bourgeois Pacifist Movements in the Early Twentieth Century and the ISB's Peace

Strategy

The practical means by which the ISB leadership advocated for the preservation of peace and the struggle against militarism were varied, and they changed over time. However, two elements stood out and, especially in the last few years of the Bureau's existence, were continuously emphasized. The first was the idea of a political European union to negate national conflicts; the second focused on international diplomatic and legal agreements between states as the basis of peaceful relations. The idea that a political European integration could be the cure for war was very old. The First International’s 1867 Lausanne conference resolution on war stated that “the formation of a confederation of free states in the whole of Europe”85 could be a remedy for wars. However, at the time, it remained a somehow vague project relegated to a distant future. Beginning in the 1890s, the idea of a united Europe started to be seen as more realistic and achievable to many, an idea that appealed not only to socialists but also to other radicals and liberals. In fact, international integration started to look like a fact of daily life. New technologies created an international network of rapid cross-border communication, and, in turn, these technologies produced their own

84

Karl Kautsky – Report for the 1914 Vienna Congress. It is interesting how so many brilliant Marxists did not see the affinity between their definition of militarism and the liberal definition of the concept. As Albert Hirschman explained, the duality between a war-like aristocratic class and peaceful commercial or bourgeois class emerged in the liberal thinking gradually in the 17th and 18h Centuries. For these thinkers, aristocratic passions, such as glory or pride, was at the foundation of destructive wars. Whereas self-seeking passions like avarice, were peaceful since, by following these, the bourgeoisie was also contributing the society through commerce and capitalist production. Albert Hirschman, Passions and Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 139142. 85 Bulletin of the International Socialist Bureau, No. 9 Supplement (Brussels: 12 Octobrer1911), p. 1.

48

institutional basis. The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of regulatory international institutions with “persistent and connected sets of rules, often affiliated with organizations that operate across international boundaries.”86 Conceptions of space and time began stretching beyond the horizons of a nationally defined imagination. The telephone made the instant transmission of voices over long distances a reality and trains rapidly shrank spatial distances. Discoveries of the hitherto unexplored (at least by the Europeans) edges of the world marked this period and its changing sense of space. The expansion of known space led many to question sentimental attachments to limited geographical localities. Spangler, a witness of these dramatic changes, concluded that Europeans had in fact a unique, “Faustian soul” aspiring to live in a limitless space, always desiring to overcome borders.87 Ortega y Gasset even argued that war itself “was brought about by a narrow-mindedness among nations that failed to see the larger context of their actions. People must react against this ‘exclusivism’ and develop a broad outlook that embraces a multitude of perspectives.”88 Norman Angell even went as far as to claim that wars were a thing of past, an illusion as the future belonged to a unified world.89 While the Second International or the ISB did not officially propose any plan for European unity, many of its supporters believed that the unification of Europe was the predominant historical trend, driven by the advances of capitalism itself. For example, Jaures thought that unity of European nations was inevitable, whether it would be achieved by workers, democratically, or by some form of Ceaserism, tyrannically.90 Kautsky wrote that “... uniting the states of European

86

Emily Rosenberg, in A World Connecting. p. 824. Rosenberg argues that before the Great War, a wide variety of associations blossomed under the sunny optimism that international political institutions might keep pace with the globalization occurring in the economic and technological realms. International networks were generally elite affairs, and many Euro-American leaders assumed that nationalistic warfare had become a relic of a less enlightened past and that imperialism and internationalism would eventually uplift the globe into an era of shared “civilization” and progress. Ibid. p. 825. 87 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), p.139. 88 Ibid. p.151. 89 Norman Angell, Quoted in James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, (London: Longman, 1992). p.161. 90 Jaures wrote in 1898 that, “We know that, in the present state of the world and Europe, distinct and autonomous nations are a precondition for human freedom and human progress. As long as the international proletariat is not sufficiently organized to bring Europe into a state of unity, it could only be unified by a kind of monstrous Caesarism, a holy capitalist empire which would crush all national pride and all proletarian demands.” Jean Jaures quoted in Christine Collette, “The Second International and Its Bureau,

49

civilization into a federation with a common commercial policy, a federal parliament, a federal government and a federal army – the formation of the United States of Europe” was the only guarantee of a lasting peace.91 In this spirit, the ISB saw the formation of detente between France, Germany and England as a guarantor of peace.92 For those who saw a tendency towards a united states of Europe, the most solid signs of its emergence were to be found in international legal agreements, which both the ISB and many of its national parties supported. In fact, European international politics during the last quarter of the nineteenth century could be defined as “the era of the legal internationalists.”93 From the 1860s onwards, legal theorists started developing the notion that relations between states, just like relations between sovereign individuals, should and could be governed by laws. Overcoming the natural state of conflict by standardized regulations and laws seemed to these thinkers to be a civilized necessity. Raymond Bridgman, author of the “First Book of World Law” in 1911, which discussed the expansion of international standardization in several aspects of life, claimed that a “world law” was already spontaneously in formation and that the unity of all mankind under a single political unit was unavoidable.94 The original impetus for this liberal internationalism had its first concrete example in the so-called “humanitarian” partitioning of Africa among European powers. In the eyes of liberal legal theorists, belonging to European civilization became a legitimate reason to claim a right to “empty lands” for the purpose of civilizing those lands. Legal agreements were a civil means to

1900-1905” ARAB (Arbetarrorelsens Archiv, Swedish Labour Movement’s Archives and Library), 2002, p. 2. 91 Quoted in Richard Day & Daniel Gaido (ed), Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 453. Rosa Luxemburg, who totally opposed the idea of a United States of Europe, participated in four ISB plenums. However, I think her stance on this question, as in many others, in the ISB was unique and isolated. 92 This was in fact the general policy the ISB consistently pursued especially in a concentrated zeal in 1913. As Haupt notes: "Month after month Vaillant returned to the point and in every letter he asked the ISB to put pressure on the Labour Party. As late as January 1914 he wrote to Huysmans: 'Always remember to insist on a British-German-French rapprochement with our friends in the British section.’" Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, p.121. 93 Arthur Eyffinger. The Hague: International Centre of Justice and Peace (Jongbloed Law Booksellers: The Hague, 2003), p. 42. 94 Emily Rosenberg, “Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World” in Akira Iriye and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., A World Connecting: 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,2012), p. 834.

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realize this goal, as an alternative to war.95 Implicit in this argument was that civilization, like law, essentially belonged to the Europeans. Hence, for the liberal internationalist legal theorists, civilized European nations had to avoid war, especially among themselves, because it was considered a primitive way of resolving conflicts.96 Just like liberals of the time who viewed parliaments as their main political weapons against the arbitrary rule in national politics, many Social Democrats, especially those who served in a parliament also saw it as a tool to avoid wars.97 The legal-liberal pacifists were essentially proposing a system of inter-state agreements supported by permanent independent international institutions to consolidate peace in Europe and in the wider North Atlantic. The goal was to reduce armaments and settle inter-state disputes via courts of arbitration and multilateral agreements. The first initiative in the direction of limiting the arms race came from an unlikely place. In 1898, Russian Foreign Minister, Count M. N. Muravyov, issued a manifesto against the armaments race and called for an international conference in the name of Tsar Nikolai II. As a gesture to him, The Hague Convention opened on 18 May 1899, Nikolai’s birthday, and took the first steps to lay the legal groundwork for the acceptance of arbitration as an alternative to war in settling disputes between nations. In 1900, a permanent court of arbitration was established in Hague.98 Even before its establishment, pacifists and legal scholars could count dozens successful arbitration cases. Between 1890 and 1900, amidst rising military tensions, sixty-three successful arbitration decisions were reached.99 To support the case of international arbitration, an Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) was established in 1889.100 By 1910,

95

Jorg Fisch offers the General Act of the Berlin Africa Conference in 1844-5 as the most important example of these agreements, which also laid the foundation for the “peaceful” colonization of Africa. Jorg Fisch, “Internationalizing Civilization by Dissolving International Society: “The Status of Non-European Territories in Nineteenth-Century International Law” in (ed.s) Geyer and Paulmann, The Mechanics of Internationalism, p. 251. 96 Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870– 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 83-4. 97 Koskenniemi writes, “in a way, international legal history became a story of individual lawyers acting like so many chivalrous knights, defending the oppressed against the oppressors, peace against war, carrying the torch of civilization (from Greece and Rome) through dark ages to the present. It was not kings or diplomats but writers and scientists who finally woke up “das schlummerende Rechtsbewusstsein der civilisierten Welt [the slumbering sense of justice in the civilized world].” Ibid. p. 78. 98 Eyffinger, The Hague, p.41 and p.44. 99 Sandi Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War In Europe, 1815-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 91. 100 Frederik Sterzel, The Inter-Parliamentary Union (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1968), pp. 9-11.

51

twenty parliamentary groups with nearly about twenty-nine hundred members all over Europe and north America, supported the IUP.101 At the end of 1890s, it could count among its members ministers, diplomats, and professors of international law,102 and it held yearly conferences in different parliaments of Europe every year. Together with the IPU, The Hague Court of Arbitration, and several other international peace organizations, liberal-pacifist movement constituted a growing and, at least at the time it seemed, successful elite movement. Such was the political culture in which many social democrats, especially those who studied law or served in parliaments, lived. Social democrats and liberals were similar both in their deep commitment to the power of law and also their practical engagement with law as a practice. The international socialist leadership itself engaged with, and to some extent even grew out of, this liberal legal milieu.103 Among those Social Democrats who participated in the ISB Plena whose educational or professional backgrounds I could identify, a staggering 30% were either educated in law, or were both educated in and practiced law. There was even a high court judge among them, the Swiss Social Democratic Party leader, Fritz Studer. Those who had studied law constituted the largest single group among those who completed a university education. The occupations or disciplines of others were more or less evenly distributed across professions such as medicine, philosophy, economy or astronomy. Further, except for Studer, Lenin, and Fabra Ribas, 104 all of those who studied law were also parliamentarians. Unlike other professions, a law degree gave these Social Democrats an opportunity to both practice their professions while also actively engaging in politics.105 Yet, few of those who studied law came from the so-called lower classes: among the core ISB group, only six of whom came

101

Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism, p. 86. Ibid. p. 85 103 See Table 3. 104 These last two could not run for elections in their own countries or their countries did not have a stable national parliament in this period. 105 It is important to stress here the growing importance of law as a profession in Europe in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Growing urbanization caused a boom in demand for doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and others. Further, in this period, legal codes were repeatedly rewritten to adjust the changing needs of the time. This brought a standardization of legal education, which was previously poorly organized. In Italy in 1877, 40 per cent of university students and in Germany between 1830 and 1860 nearly about 30 per cent of the university students were enrolled in law faculties. Evans, The Pursuit of Power, pp. 320-321. 102

52

from an artisanal or working-class background were parliamentarians. The notable exceptions were August Bebel from Germany, Keir Hardie from Britain, Anton Nemec from Bohemia, and Thorvald Stauning from Denmark. Although each of those came from artisanal or working-class backgrounds, they were longtime parliamentarians. Apart from these famous examples, most other skilled workers or artisans who participated in the ISB leadership had careers in trade union, cooperative or party bureaucracies and, if they became parliamentarians at all, it was later in their career (Friedrich Ebert is the most well-known example). The fact that women, youth and unskilled workers (who also lacked basic political rights, most importantly the right to vote) were, by and large, excluded from the International’s leadership meant that the ISB and the member parties of the Second International resembled very much to any other liberal party in terms of its social composition, educational level, and class background. Table 3 conveys this succinctly. Table 3 Known educational & professional backgrounds of the ISB plena participants. Education/Profes-

Law (practiced

Other university ed-

Did not complete a for-

Artisans or Skilled

sion

as jurists, law-

ucation

mal education for politi-

Workers

yers and/or stud-

cal or other reasons and

ied law)

worked as editors or writers

Number

11

10

6

10

Percentage

30%

27%

16%

27%

Given its educational and class background, it is not surprising that the international Social Democratic leadership joined and imitated the liberal-pacifist movement. But more notable for this study is that they adjusted the structure of the International to align with the pacifist-liberal movement. The Socialist International’s 1904 Amsterdam Congress established an Inter-parliamentary Commission (IC) modeled on lines very similar to the IPU. The IC served as a union of Social Democratic parliamentarians across Europe. It was to meet yearly and the ISB secretary was to act as the IC’s secretary. Its main role was to “facilitate unity of action on the great international and

53

political questions.”106 In this vein, the ISB encouraged French, English and German socialists to participate in the IPU congresses. From 1908, the French socialist leaders were advocating a French, German, English entente cordiale (with the addition of Russia) as the guarantor of the world peace. A regular ISB plenum participant, Vaillant, wrote to the ISB secretary Huysmans in 1913 after the rise of the tensions in Balkans: "As regards the general crisis of armaments, militarism, and war, that causes such cruel ravages in France and Germany, the only remedy — as the International has recognized— lies in a Franco-German rapprochement leading to an alliance between Britain, France, and Germany. Britain which has been drawing closer to Germany and has struck up a friendship with France, can if she so desires achieve the Franco-German rapprochement that must of necessity precede the triple union for peace and civilization between France, Britain, and Germany."107

For this purpose, the ISB organized a joint meeting between the IC and the IPU, which took place in Basel on 9 April 1913 with the participation of mainly French and German liberal, radical, and socialist MPs. The ISB endorsed the pacifist meeting and declared its "fullest support" to all "bourgeois groups and parties directed against the chauvinistic provocation of the nations, against the policy of conquest and increase in armaments."108 Moreover, the international socialist leadership also took up the political and legal goals of liberal pacifist movement. Table 4 provides a summary of the concepts used both to define the contemporary causes of wars and the immediate practical means that the Second International proposed to avert wars in the International Socialist Congress resolutions. As the table shows, the definition of the causes of wars were left ambiguous and congresses deliberately avoided condemning all contemporary wars. However, the international congresses were much clearer on the means to prevent wars. The first concrete political tool that the Second International proposed was an old slogan of workers movement, conversion of standing armies to citizens militia. Especially from 1907 onwards, more specific and practical measures began to replace the slogan of citizens militia. These included parliamentary opposition to military and naval expenditures, replacing secret diplomacy (which was considered as an aristocratic and arbitrary means to evade

106

Statutes of the Inter-parliamentary Commission, passed at the Stuttgart, by the I.C. and ratified by the International Socialist Congress. 107 Quoted in Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, p. 119. 108 Ibid. pp. 117-8.

54

Standing armies (as expressions of monarchic, oligarchic,

Citizens militia for national defense (democratic, republican)

109

55

Report by Hugo Haase to the International Socialist Congress of Vienna, August 1914. Table 4 presents, in brief, the decisions of the various Second International’s Congresses that relate to military conflict. competition for world market. Spirit of militarism. Dynastic ambitions, capitalist desire for profit and secret diplomatic treaties

in all international disputes. Disarmament. Abolition of secret diplomacy. Guarantee of the independence all nations. Limitation to armsofrace, courts of arbitration. Conversion of the standing army in all countries into an army efficient for the purpose of defense.

Armaments race. Capitalist

states. National prejudices.

maments. Courts of arbitration. International arbitration be made compulsory

tary opposition against military and naval ar-

budgets in standing parliaments. Uniform anti-militaReplacing armies with democratic rist propaganda. organization of national defense. Parliamen-

against militarism. Vote against military

imperial governments. Educating youth

Competition between capitalist

ing armies, secret treaties.

bitration.

Oppose the alliance between bourgeoisie and

Economic antagonisms, stand-

“Militarism”

class struggle)

“Militarism” (as a product of

Citizens militia, international tribunes of ar-

tional associations for universal peace

assemblies, disarmament, supporting interna-

Rejection of military budgets in legislative

Agitation against all desires for war.

of contemporary cars

wars

or capitalist classes’ interests)

Definition of the causes

Means proposed to avoid or stop modern

1912

1910 Basle

hagen

Copen-

1907

Stuttgart

1900

Paris

1896

London

1893

Zurich

1891

Brussels

1889

Paris

Congress

parliamentary oversight on the part of kings and courts) with international courts of arbitration,

and finally disarmament. All of these were also the goals of liberal, legal-pacifist movement. If

the last Vienna Congress of the Second International had taken place in 1914 (which was averted

by the First World War), the draft resolution prepared on the question of imperialism and arbitra-

tion courts drafted by Hugo Haase would probably have been adopted, given that it also proposed

the use of courts of arbitration as an alternative to imperial colonization and militarism.109

Table 4 Causes and means to avoid modern wars as they were defined in the Second Interna-

tional Congress Resolutions.

In this period, it was commonly assumed that a revolution would likely follow a world war and hence the leading socialists did not believe that major capitalist powers would risk such a likelihood over what they perceived as economically backward colonial possessions. The Second International’s anti-war declarations underlined this possibility as well. The 1871 Paris Commune followed the French defeat at Sedan and the 1905 Revolution in Russia could not be thought separately from the start of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904. Hence, the reasoning went, the advanced western democracies would not be so irrational as to solve their problems by an archaic means as a destructive world war. While in its resolutions, the Second International made it clear that “once the war broke out” the national parties, independent of the International, had to do “whatever they could” to bring the war to a speedy end. In other words, once a general European war began, the International as an organization recognized that it was powerless, but it did not even believe in such a likelihood.110 The 1907 Stuttgart resolution called on the national sections to “do everything they could” to rouse the masses to hasten the downfall of the capitalist classes.111 Yet, as an organization, the Second International did not take upon itself any official responsibility to act or force its constituent national parties to act against a world war between advanced capitalist nations. This in practice could only mean forcing those parties to act against their own governments, which was counter to the organizational logic and structure of the Second International and the ISB. In fact, the leaders of the International made abundantly clear several times that the International was a peace time organization. Once the war broke out all the national sections were clearly on their own.112 While

110

Haupt succinctly summarizes both the German and the French socialist leaders' inability to comprehend the likelihood of a world war sparked by a confrontation between their countries: "In the theory of imperialism, as formulated by Kautsky and Bauer, there was no longer a place for revolution— though, of course, as part of the propaganda arsenal and as a permanent threat to governments, there was the warning expressed by Jaurès: 'War will be the starting point of the international revolution.' Intoxicated by words, the socialist leaders remained vague about the concept and form of this 'revolution' to which, at the height of the crisis, public reference was made at the Cirque Royal rally in Brussels on 39 July 1914 by both Jaurès and Haase. 'Let our enemies beware. It may well be that, angered by so much misery and oppression, the people will awaken at last and make socialist society a reality.'" Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, p. 221. 111 1907 Stuttgart Resolution. ISB Periodic Bulletin no.9. Supplement, p.7. 112 I cannot explain the historiographical neglect on this question. Possibly the historians of the International may have found this confidence in liberal-legal pacifist means to avert war to be obvious. However, these socialists were not naive. It is necessary to understand that the confidence that the socialists as well

56

the ISB and the Second International structure were very well adapted to the period’s political views on a variety of issues, their conception of revolution excluded violent confrontation and deemed state repression as archaic. They apparently could not conceive of abandonment of civil liberties or wars between advanced capitalist nations.

B.

Crisis of Bourgeois Pacifism and the Collapse of the ISB

The blind spot of the ISB peace strategy was its confidence in liberalism and its almost religious belief in the perpetual continuation of a European peace that the liberal peace movement promised. Especially absent among the majority of the ISB leaders' vision was the contradictory relationship between colonial exploitation and the apparent peace and prosperity prevalent in Europe. In that sense, most Socialist leaders shared a similar weakness with liberal and pacifist peace movements in Europe. Both the ISB leadership and the European pacifists saw the source of great power competition as a European problem and not essentially a world problem. The progressive movements of the small European countries, like the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries, were wary of the growing armament competition between major European powers, but in most cases these countries themselves were colonial powers.113 Further, these movements did not see an inherently militaristic or reactionary aspect in colonialism per se. Until the "backward" people of Asia and Africa developed as much as Europe had, colonial rule was seen by many social democrats as acceptable, as long as it remained within some humane boundaries.

as other liberal intellectuals, placed in European civilization as the vanguard of humanity was extremely strong. Few intellectuals dared to question the self-confidence of European civilization. And among the Social Democrats only the extreme leftists, especially Rosa Luxemburg, found the courage to question the established principles of the socialist theory. For that, the radical leftists were ridiculed and isolated. I will discuss this in more detail in the following chapters. 113 Arthur Rosenberg also makes a similar point: "From 1889 to 1914 not even a consistent attempt was made... to drive the ruling imperialists and the feudal or semi-feudal groups from power by means of an alliance between the workers and the middle classes... All this meant that liberal democracy was unable to defeat imperialism anywhere. It found a favorable soil only in smaller countries that had no acquaintance with power politics and for whom national questions did not exist" Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, p. 326.

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Until then, the social democrats believed, their role was merely to limit the competition for colonial possessions and keep it within peaceful boundaries. The belief that imperialist competition could be contained may retrospectively seem naive, but as the relative success of the arbitration courts and the IPU until 1914 shows, it seemed that the advanced European countries could carve out the rest of the world among themselves without much friction. Further, in the early 1900s, theories about a harmonious and peaceful development of capitalism and even peaceful transition into socialism found a following among "orthodox” Marxists. One of the most significant examples of this tendency was Rudolf Hilferding and his work Finance Capital. In this work, Hilferding argued that capitalism was evolving into a more organized, more peaceful, and less competitive form in the twentieth century, with the likely result that a gradual and orderly transition out of capitalism was becoming possible.114 Similar "Neo-Harmonist" theories within Marxism abounded in this period. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a strong

114

Hilferding's work was even celebrated by Lenin himself. However as Henryk Grossman's later review shows, it opened the way for radically different conclusions from Marx and the classical Marxist theory of decadence or capitalist decline. For Hilferding, capitalism's peaceful evolution itself made the proletarian revolution and also systemic crises (and by implication wars between capitalist powers) a redundant prospect. Grossman wrote: "... Hilferding presents the course of historical development quite differently from Marx. The latter depicted the limits of capitalist accumulation that, in a dialectical shift at a definite stage of development, ultimately leads to the 'expropriation of the expropriators'. Hilferding wants to demonstrate the peaceful and gradual growth of capitalism into a regulated economy. The cartelisation of industry, in order to raise prices and profits, lowers the rate of profit in the non-cartelised industries, intensifies competition in them and thus the tendency towards concentration. This leads to further cartelisation in these industries too. So, a tendency towards the continuous extension of cartelisation emerges. The result of this concertation movement, its ideal, theoretical endpoint, will be the complete cartelisation of all branches of industry not only in the national but also in the world economy, a universal or 'general cartel' which consciously regulates the entirety of capitalist production in all its spheres, sets prices and also undertakes the distribution of products. With the advance of the concentration movement in industry, production is increasingly planned ('organised capitalism') and finally reaches its highest expression in the general cartel. The anarchy of production disappears, crises are eliminated and replaced by production 'regulated' by the general cartel, even if still on the basis of wage labour. 'The tendencies towards the establishment of a general cartel and towards the formation of a central bank are converging', hence a peaceful and painless transition from capitalism to socialism becomes possible. 'The socialising function of finance capital facilitates enormously the task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most important branches of production under its control, it is enough for society, through its conscious executive organ - the state conquered by the working class - to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate control of these branches of production.' 'Even today, taking possession of six large Berlin banks would mean taking possession of the most important spheres of large-scale industry.'" Henry Grossman, "Fifty Years of Struggle Over Marxism, 1883-1932" in Rick Kuhn, ed., Capitalism's Contradictions: studies in Economic Theory Before and After Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), p. 106.

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Russian legal Marxist current developed. As opposed to the Russian populist movement, which saw it impossible for capitalism to develop peacefully in Russia without squeezing the peasantry and destroying its social basis since it required extra-capitalist markets in order to realize profits, legal Marxists denied the necessity of such extra-capitalist markets for the further development of capitalism and by implication they also denied the necessity of a destructive path for capitalist development.115 For these "legal Marxist" theorists, such as Peter Struve or Mikhail Tugan-

115

Rosa Luxemburg's summary of the origins of the Populist movement in Russia gives both a fair summary of this movement's origins and a Marxist evaluation of its weaknesses. She basically saw the origins of the "legal Marxism" as a "neo-harmonist" reaction to the doubts about the prospects of peaceful capitalist development as it emerged in 1860s and remained prevalent until 1890s among the populist section of the Russian intelligentsia: “The action this time takes place from the beginning of the 1880s to the middle of the 1890s, and the setting is Russia. Capitalist development had already reached maturity in western Europe. The previous, rosy conception of the classical economists, Smith and Ricardo, which was formed while bourgeois society was burgeoning, had long since faded. The self-interested optimism of the vulgar Manchester doctrine of harmony had also been silenced by the devastating impact of the world crash of the 1870s and under the heavy blows of the intense class struggle that had broken out in all capitalist countries since the 1860s. Even the widespread social reformist attempts to shore up economic harmony in Germany in the early 1880s had ended in a hangover: the twelve-year trial period of the Emergency Law against Social Democracy had had a brutally sobering effect and ultimately tore away all the veils of harmony, revealing jarring capitalist antagonisms in all their naked reality. Since then, optimism was only possible in the camp of the rising working class and the theorists acting as its spokespersons... The situation was certainly different in Russia at the time. Here, the 1870s and 1880s were a transitional period, a phase of internal crisis with all its attendant distress. Large-scale industry was in fact just enjoying its penetration into Russia under the impact of the period of heavy protective tariffs. A particular cornerstone of the absolutist regime’s policy of proactively boosting capitalism was the introduction of a tariff on gold on the western frontier in 1877. The “primitive accumulation” of capital thrived wonderfully in Russia from its promotion by all manner of state subsidies, guarantees, premiums, and orders placed by the government, and reaped profits that would have seemed the stuff of legend in the West at the time. As a result, internal conditions in Russia offered nothing less than an attractive and promising picture at the time. In the countryside, the decline and disintegration of the peasant economy under the pressures of heavy taxation and the monetary economy yielded terrible conditions, periodic famines, and peasant unrest. On the other hand, the factory proletariat in the cities had not yet consolidated itself, either socially or intellectually, into a modern working class... During the 1880s and into the 1890s, the intellectual life of the Russian intelligentsia, especially the socialist intelligentsia with its orientation toward opposition, was dominated by a bizarre concoction incorporating “indigenous” residues of Populism alongside various elements of Marxian theory; the most salient feature of this theoretical mishmash was a skepticism in relation to the possibilities of the development of capitalism in Russia. The Russian intelligentsia had been preoccupied from an early date by the question as to whether Russia should undergo capitalist development following the example of Western Europe. Russian intellectuals had primarily observed only the dark side of capitalism, its devastating effect on traditional, patriarchal forms of production and on the prosperity and livelihood of broad masses of the population. On the other hand, Russian peasant communal land ownership—the famous obshchina—appeared as a possible starting point for a higher social development in Russia, which would bypass the capitalist stage with all its attendant misery, taking a

59

Baranovski, there was no relation between the expansion of capitalism and its need for external markets. Such theories paved the way among both the so-called "orthodox" Marxists (such as Hilferding and, after 1910, Kautsky) or the right-wing social democrats to the belief that there was no inherent reason for capitalist powers to pursue colonial possession. Capitalism could perfectly live without colonial pillage. Hence, for several leading social democrats in 1900s and 1910s, an ethical and even progressive colonial policy was possible under capitalism. This new perspective on the colonial question became an important point in the agenda of the Second International congresses, especially after 1900. Colonial conflicts such as the Boer Wars and the suppression of the Chinese Boxer rebellion by the European powers, transformed the budding theoretical debate on the colonial question into an urgent political matter. In the 1900 Paris Congress, and especially in the 1904 Amsterdam and 1907 Stuttgart Congresses, the question became one of the most heated subjects of debate. The climax of the debate was reached in the 1907 Congress. The 1907 Stuttgart Congress was important for several other reasons as well. The ISB as an organizational center reached the zenith of its power in this Congress. This was the first Congress at which the ISB became more firmly established as a leading organ, thanks to the efforts of Huysmans, who became the secretary of the organization ISB in 1905. Further, both the organization and its main parties were at the height of their powers in their respective national contexts. For the first time the French delegation represented a unified party—the SFIO (the French Section of the Labor International)—at this Congress and the International also adopted a new voting

shorter and less painful route than the Western European countries to the promised land of socialism. Would it be right to forfeit such a fortunate and exceptional situation, such a unique historical opportunity, by destroying peasant forms of ownership and production through the forcible transplantation of capitalist production to Russia with the help of the state, thus opening the floodgates to the proletarianization, impoverishment, and precarization of the working masses? Only one aspect of these broad fields of “Populist literature,” with all their ramifications, is of interest here: the battle of opinions over the prospects for capitalist development in Russia—and even then, only in so far as the debate rests upon general considerations of the way in which the capitalist mode of production is socially conditioned. Such considerations were to play a large role in the literature of the Russian debates of the 1880s and 1890s. The point of contention was at first Russian capitalism and its prospects, whereas the resulting debate naturally extended itself to the general problem of the development of capitalism, in which the example and experiences of the West played a singular role as a source of evidence.” Rosa Luxemburg, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II, Economic Writings 2. (New York: Verso books, 2016), E-book, chapter 17.

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system for the Congresses, giving a privileged position to the bigger, well-established parties (the German, English and French) over the rest. While the previous system granted equal votes for the delegations of each country's socialist movement, the new weighted system assigned votes according to the strength and prominence of each national party, on a scale ranging from twenty to two.116 However, these concrete steps, which were designed to overcome the previous organizational chaos, awarded the biggest parties and gave credibility to the Congress. But it faced with a new political division. In a sense, the organizational divisions and bickering among different national factions and parties were replaced with an international political factionalism over two major questions: the colonial question and the question of war. During the 1907 Congress, the ISB assigned the Dutch Henri Hubertus van Kol to present a draft statement on the colonial question to be deliberated in a special committee. Van Kol was an early member of the First International and a regular attendee of the ISB plenum117 as a representative of the Dutch Party. What was less known at the time was that van Kol himself owned coffee plantations in the Dutch colony of Java (Indonesia).118 Consistent with his bourgeois background, van Kol was an ardent supporter of what he called a "socialist colonial policy," or a benevolent type of colonial policy that treated the colonial "natives" "humanely". In the 1904 Congress of the Second International, he defended the position that the even the victory of socialism would make the continuation of colonialism necessary. In one of his speeches to a previous congress, he asked rhetorically "can we abandon half of the globe to the caprice of people still in their infancy, who leave the enormous wealth of the subsoil undeveloped and the most fertile parts of

116

The Russians were assigned 20 votes, as were the English, French and German Social Democratic parties, probably due to the newly acquired prestige of the Russian socialist movement after the 1905 Revolution. Italian, Belgian, and American parties followed with 15 votes each. The Austria-Hungarian socialist parties (which was aptly called the "little international") shared twenty-six votes between them (which included Austrian, Bohemian, Hungarian and others). Among the small countries, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and Norway had ten to twelve votes, more than the Australian, Japanese, Argentine or South African parties, which had between two to four votes each. 117 H. van Kol attended eleven out of sixteen ISB plenum. 118 Margreet Schrevel and Emile Schwidder, “A Socialist in the Dutch East Indies,” Archive, International Institute of Social History, 2016, https://iisg.nl/collections/vankol/intro.php.

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our planet uncultivated?"119 In the 1907 Congress, the resolution that he proposed on the colonial question further exposed this logic: “Socialism strives to develop the productive forces of the entire globe and to lead all peoples to the highest form of civilization. The congress therefore does not reject in principle every colonial policy. Under a Socialist regime, colonization could be a force of civilization... [The Congress] rejects once again the current methods of colonization, which are fundamentally capitalist in nature and serve no purpose other than conquering and subjugating alien peoples in order to relentlessly exploit them for the benefit of an insignificant minority. At the same time the proletariat in the capitalist countries must bear increasing burdens... Finally, the congress declares that Socialist parliamentary deputies have the obligation to use the parliaments to fight against the merciless exploitation and bondage that prevails in all existing colonies. To this end the deputies must advocate reforms in order to improve the lot of the native peoples. They must combat all infringements on the rights of the native peoples, including their exploitation and enslavement. They must work with all available means for the education of these peoples for independence. The deputies of the Socialist parties should propose to their governments that they conclude a treaty and create a colonial law that would protect the rights of the native peoples and be guaranteed by all the treaty signatories.”120

Such a “humane” defense of colonialism as a sort of benevolent “white men's burden” was not alien to the ISB leadership. Henry Hyndman, one of the founders and senior leaders of the British Socialist Party and another regular participant of the ISB meetings, had similar views on the colonial question. He was an inheritor of sizable wealth that he inherited from his grandfather who made his fortune in slave trading.121 While lamenting the atrocities committed by the British against the Dutch settlers during the Boer wars, Hyndman still boasted in a letter to Huysmans in 1901 that “we English are essentially practical and adventurous as we have been for centuries... We dominate at this moment one-fifth of the whole habitable sphere of the earth and control nearly one-fifth of its population.”122 Similarly, the prominent and charismatic French MP, Jean Jaures,

119

H. H. van Kol quoted in John Riddell, ed., Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, Documents: 1907-1916 Preparatory Years (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1986), p. 5. 120 "Majority Resolution on Colonialism" in Riddell (ed), Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, pp. 7-8. 121 Braunthal, History of the International Vol.1, p. 201. 122 Hydman's letter to Camille Huysman Archive, Archief en Museum voor Het Vlaamse Culturleven, Antwerp, Hyndman to Serwy, 23 May 1901, I 100/13a. Quoted in Christine Colette, “The Second International and its Bureau”. p. 3. Hyndman was not alone in the British socialist movement. Fabians who constituted the right-wing of the British Labour Party held similar views. Bernard Shaw who wrote a pamphlet, "Fabianism and Empire" in 1900 echoed Hyndman's sentiments claimed that the "British

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was a defender of colonialism as long as it was “restrained” and did not led to military confrontation between “civilized Europeans”. Despite his halfhearted acknowledgement of the capitalist impetus behind the colonial expansion, Jaures also argued consistently for colonialism. He claimed that “all peoples have a colonial policy, and it is not our formulae of the future that will make them retrace their steps. The law of expansion and conquest to which all peoples yield seems as irresistible as a natural law, and even though we denounce eloquently all the villainies, all the corruptions, all the cruelties of the colonial movement, we shall not stop it...”123 In fact, Jaures did not even defend the freedom of a single French colony, but merely defended “humane” treatment of colonial peoples.124 Instead of seeing an infringement of the internationalist socialist principles, Jaures actually criticized the British colonialism for essentially obstructing the France's “rights” to “exploit” and have “influence” in Africa.125 Similarly, Emile Vandervelde, the prominent and respected leader of the ISB and the Belgian party, a lawyer and a Social Democratic MP in the Belgian parliament, when confronted with the atrocities committed by the Belgian state in its crown colony Congo, was terribly offended. In her letter to the British liberal journalist E.D. Morel, who uncovered the barbaric treatment of Africans by the Belgium colonizers, Vandervelde's wife Lalla Vandervelde wrote: “My Husband who, in spite of being an internationalist, has a warm love in his heart for his country, will not admit that the Belgian people should be rendered responsible for what has happened and is happening in the Congo … [she added that her] “husband was very angry when he thinks that people in England are agitating for the Congo to be taken away from Belgium.”126

Empire could not be contained on fixed-frontier ideas." Shaw wrote at the same time as the joint European armies and navies were entering China to suppress the Boxers. Day & Gaido wrote: "Shaw added that ‘if the Chinese themselves cannot establish order in our sense, the Powers must establish it for them’. Shaw’s one worry was that ‘if we meddle with China, and our interference does not relieve the poverty that produces emigration, we shall find ourselves in a Yellow Muddle that may bring the Chinese War into our own streets'." Day & Gaido (ed), Discovering Imperialism, p. 22. 123 Harold Weinstein, Jean Jaures: A Study of Patriotism in the French Socialist Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 143. 124 Ibid. p. 144. 125 Ibid. pp. 145-6. 126 Quoted in Daniel Laqua, The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880-1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige (Manchester University Press, 2015), p. 63.

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Despite the Second International leaders' concealed defense of their countries' colonialism, van Kol’s resolution faced a torrent of attack, especially from the young generation of socialists in the 1907 Stuttgart Congress.127 Spearheading this left-wing internationalist criticism were figures who would later form the Communist International and the wartime LRI movement: mainly, the Dutch radical leftists and east-European socialists. They challenged the assumption that the socalled “backward” regions of the world and colonies had to go through capitalist development first, in order to reach socialism.128 Polish Marxist Karski-Marchlewski in 1907 opposed the idea that the Asian and African peoples had to pass through a process of capitalist development to reach socialism. He argued that: "What Marx said was that countries that had already begun capitalist development would have to continue the process through to completion. But he never said that this was an absolute precondition for all nations... We socialists understand that there are other civilisations besides simply that of capitalist Europe. We have absolutely no grounds to be conceited about our so-called civilisation or to impose it on the Asiatic peoples with their ancient civilisation."129

127

It must be noted here that figures like Kautksy and Ledebour representing the German SDP also protested van Kol's resolution on colonialism. However, Kautsky's position was moderate and ambiguous towards colonialism. He made a distinction between settler colonialism or "work colonies," where European migrants of and colonial migrated out of Europe and "exploitation colonialism" where native populations were exploited by European merchants and civil servants. While he attributed a progressive role to the former, he considered the latter as reactionary. Besides the meaningfulness of such a distinction, Kautsky's position was actually close to van Kol's in the sense that it did not conclude from this to any denunciation of colonialism as a matter of internationalist principle. Day & Gaido (ed.), Discovering Imperialism, p. 17. In fact, in an essay on the construction of railroads in China which he wrote in 1886, comparing the east Asian workers to the armies of "Xerxes or Genghiz Khan," he wrote, "the army of those who, as a consequence of the construction of the Chinese railroads, will threaten our civilisation. A new Mongol invasion threatens us! And it is we ourselves who are forcing the Chinese to fall upon us, who are building the road for them." Ibid. p. 18. 128 Already in the 1904 Amsterdam Congress of the Second International, this question was debated in the Dutch caucus. At the time, against van Kol, these left-wing Dutch critics argued that van Kol's linear progressivism was "too dogmatic and fatalistic". Instead, they argued that "colonial areas need not pass through an inevitable stage or phase of capitalist political economy... A socialist victory in Europe which would allow colonial territories to bypass the capitalist stage" was possible. Hence, "It is not, in anticipation, impossible that through the triumph of socialism in the old world, areas in other sectors of the globe, which are still in the precapitalist era, can be saved from the misery of capitalism, and allowed to share in the technical advantages of modern production." This position was raised by a Dutch Marxist called Mandels but were also endorsed by Herman Gorter. Erik Hansen "Marxists and Imperialism: The Indonesian Policy of the Dutch Social Democratic Workers Party, 1894-1914" Indonesia No. 16 (Oct., 1973), p. 91. 129 Karski-Marchlewski quoted in Day & Gaido (ed), Discovering Imperialism, p. 26.

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Despite the fierce criticisms from the left-radicals, major European Social Democratic parties constituted a united front on the colonial question. The strongest Social Democratic parties with massive parliamentary presence and huge influence in the International voted almost en masse for the van Kol resolution in 1907 Stuttgart Congress; the delegations from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, South Africa, England, and France (the last two with minor desertions) voted in favor. Except for Japan and USA, all the Social Democratic delegations from countries that have overseas colonies endorsed van Kol's pro-colonialist resolution. Only with the utmost effort of east European Marxists, who managed to gather around themselves the votes of socialists from smaller countries or countries where socialists did not have meaningful parliamentary presence, could the van Kol resolution be defeated.130 Lenin in his report on the Congress clearly stated this maturing separation between the "opportunist and revolutionary wings of the International Social Democracy": "The Congress defeated the Commission’s motion by 128 votes to 108 with ten abstentions (Switzerland). It should be noted that at Stuttgart, for the first time, each nation was allotted a definite number of votes, varying from twenty (for the big nations, Russia included) to two (Luxembourg). The combined vote of the small nations, which either do not pursue a colonial policy, or which suffer from it, outweighed, the vote of nations where even the proletariat has been somewhat infected with the lust of conquest."131

130

For an excellent detailed discussion of this debate see: Thomas R. Fedyszyn, European socialism and the colonial question (1848-1918) (Unpublished Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1975). I especially used the table Fedyszyn presented for the analysis of the voting in the Stuttgart Congress on the colonial question for the above summary. Ibid. p. 60. 131 Following this comment, Lenin also took the first step towards his conception of "labor aristocracy" which was to play a major role in his analysis in the following years: “This vote on the colonial question is of very great importance. First, it strikingly showed up socialist opportunism, which succumbs to bourgeois blandishments. Secondly, it revealed a negative feature in the European labour movement, one that can do no little harm to the proletarian cause, and for that reason should receive serious attention. Marx frequently quoted a very significant saying of Sismondi. The proletarians of the ancient world, this saying runs, lived at the expense of society; modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians... The nonpropertied, but non-working, class is incapable of overthrowing the exploiters. Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, can bring about the social revolution. However, as a result of the extensive colonial policy, the European proletarian partly finds himself in a position when it is not his labour, but the labour of the practically enslaved natives in the colonies, that maintains the whole of society. The British bourgeoisie, for example, derives more profit from the many millions of the population of India and other colonies than from the British workers. In certain countries this provides the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism. Of course, this may be only a temporary phenomenon, but the evil must nonetheless be clearly realised and its causes understood in order to be able to rally the proletariat of all countries for the struggle against such opportunism. This struggle is bound to be victorious, since the “privileged” nations are a diminishing faction of the capitalist nations."

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Ironically, while an openly pro-colonialist resolution lost by a hairsbreadth, the same congress also produced one of the most outspoken anti-war resolutions of the Second International. In fact, the 1907 Stuttgart Resolution on War is usually remembered as a historic document, a testament of European Social Democrats’ fidelity to peace. The resolution's famous addendum proposed by Lenin and Luxemburg stated that: "If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved, supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau, to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation... In case war should break out anyway, it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule."132

Yet the boldness of the resolution lay more in its capacity to hide the discord over questions (such as imperialism and colonialism) rather than being a statement of a genuine and confident anti-war position. The resolution in general denounced wars between European powers, which did not challenge the pacifist mindset, but did challenge that of the emergent right-wing colonialist majority of the Congress. The last two congresses of the Second International (1910 Copenhagen and 1912 Basel emergency congresses133) did not see a dramatic change in the direction and the

V. I. Lenin, "The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart (September 1907)" in Lenin Collected Works, Volume 13 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 75-81. 132 "Stuttgart Resolution on War and Militarism", in Riddell (ed), Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p.35. 133 Gankin & Fisher noted that the Basel Congress "was the last general session of the Second international before the World War, and it is significant that, in contrast to the previous resolutions of the International on militarism and international conflicts, this Congress declared for the first time that national wars in Europe had ceased and that a period of imperialist wars had begun." Olga Hess Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War: The Origins of the Third International (California: Stanford University Press, 1940), p.79. This is indeed an important difference, however with some qualifications: first of all, this congress retained the old tri-partite analytical framework that the ISB leaders used to interpret the world politics. It assigned a special role to Germany, France and England and continued to see these countries as the bearers of peace. The implication here was that the advanced capitalist countries, unlike Austria-Hungary or Russia for instance, did not have anything to gain from aristocratic or monarchical military competition. After reviewing the tensions in the Balkan and east European countries and various classes' reactions to those, the resolution stated: "But the most important task in the International's activities devolves upon the working class of Germany, France and England. At this moment it is the task of the workers of these countries to demand that their respective governments withhold all support to both Austria-Hungary and Russia, that they abstain from any intervention in the Balkan troubles and maintain absolute neutrality. A war between the three great leading civilized peoples because of the Serbo-Austrian

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perspective of the ISB leadership. The German, Belgian, French and English parties' leaderships basically continued pursuing their general peace policy centered around seeking diplomatic solutions via special courts of arbitration for colonial and other international disputes between major European powers, and parliamentary pressure via the Inter-parliamentary Socialist Group and in tandem with the liberal IPU. As the diplomatic efforts ended in successfully averting a war between Russia and Austria-Hungary over the Balkans and between Germany and France over African colonies in 1913 (prominent socialist leaders were also involved in the diplomatic deliberations), the ISB leadership sank into a self-congratulatory and self-satisfactory inertia.134 Its overall strategy that a detente between civilized countries (mainly between Britain, France and Germany) as an assurance for world peace and its general confidence in the peaceful development of capitalism seemed, at least very briefly, ratified by the events. Hence, when the World War came, the shock was all the more brutal and disorienting. In its last tragic last plenum that took place in 29-30 July 1914 in Brussels immediately after the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war against Serbia, the leaders of European Social Democracy publicly reiterated their belief and commitment in peace. However, the confidential proceedings of the plenum reveals a sense of awe, disbelief, and desperation. In this last tragic meeting, when the twenty-five-year-old International was on the brink of collapse, the leaders of the sister parties who had socialized with each other intimately for decades were puzzled about how to act together. Victor Adler gloomily denied the possibility of any militant action against war. He said: "Is it not dangerous to encourage Serbia from inside our own country? Are we not taking on a great responsibility in trying to lead the Serbs to think that Austria is threatened by revolution? We must protect the proletariat against such a virus. We must protect our institutions. Ideas of a strike and so forth, are mere fantasies. It is a very serious question, and our only hope is that we will be the only victims and that the war will not spread. Even if remains localized, the party will be in dismal straits. Our enemies will be strengthened and encouraged by their success... We hope that bureau believes us when we say that we

dispute over a port would be criminal madness. The workers of Germany and France cannot concede that any obligation whatever to intervene in the Balkan conflict exists because of secret treaties." "Manifesto of the Extraordinary International Socialist Congress Basel, November 24-25, 1912" in Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War, p.83. 134 Haupt explains: "The leaders of European socialism were unanimously of the opinion, expressed a year previously by Victor Adler, that for the moment it was in the interests of peace to let time do its work and to be extremely cautious and reserved about initiatives that would involve socialism in foreign policy." Haupt, Socialism and the Great War, p.124.

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could not have acted differently. We want to save the party. What the bureau and we can do together is to condemn those responsible and try to contain the conflict."135

Both the German SDP leader Hugo Haase and the French SFIO leader Jaures protested against Adler’s resignation. Both were confident that France, Germany or Britain would not be dragged to a war and that even if the governments were, the socialists would resist the tide. Haase stated, "we know the Austrians well enough to understand their attitude... They are too close to the situation to view it in perspective. Their attitude of passivity and resignation is wrong, first because this passivity does not help Social Democracy, and second because it does nothing to solve the present crisis. If they oppose the war now, they will have public opinion on their side after the war."136 He also assured his comrades that Germany would not be dragged into war and even claimed that, except for a minority pro-Austrian group among the liberals, the German "ruling class and the great industrialists are opposed to the war."137 A few days later he voted for the approval of the war credits when Germany declared war against Russia. Similarly, Jaures was confident that the French government was opposed to war.138 The same day he gave this assurance, Jaures was assassinated by a French nationalist and saved from seeing that both his party and government turn out to be completely committed to war. In contrast to the leadership of the Second International around the ISB, the radical leftists who opposed the van Kol resolution in 1907, remained firmly internationalist in 1914.139 The division over the colonial question in the International in 1907 almost prefigured in embryonic form the division of European socialism into the proto-Communists, pacifist center, and the nationalist right-wings that happened after 1914. Many future figures of Left Radical Internationalism were already opponents of the ISB strategy and followed intensely the debates of the congresses. And when the war started with the full support of the major European socialist parties, which lined up behind their own governments (contrary to their own promises), Herman Gorter, one of the

135

Riddell (ed), Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 113. Ibid. p. 114. 137 Ibid. p. 115. 138 Ibid. 139 Rosa Luxemburg was also a participant of the last plena of the ISB and one of the few internationalists in the gathering that remained staunchly committed to the socialist anti-war position. 136

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prominent leaders of the LRI movement whose name will regularly appear in the following chapters, was not surprised: "In almost every country, then, the opposite of a struggle against the bourgeoisie, there was only cooperation with the bourgeoisie... Someone who was well-acquainted with international social democracy, however, could have foreseen all of this a long time ago. The Stuttgart Congress was the last Congress to seriously take a position against imperialism. This attitude began to go into retreat at Copenhagen and was routed at Basel [Congresses]. It was clear that social democracy became more fearful as imperialism became stronger, as the threat of war became more urgent and the war approached. In Basel, the Congress was still celebrated with pomp and ceremony; but in the empty phrases of Jaurès, in the hollow threats of Keir Hardie, in the abject whining of Victor Adler about the destruction of culture, in the pusillanimous and insignificant words of Haase, in the vain boasts of the Congress, one could already perceive the impotence of the Congress and its repugnance and aversion to any action. Worse yet: even then, the intention of marching alongside the bourgeoisie was proclaimed."140

Given Gorter's prognosis that the Second International was already leading towards collapse in 1907, 1910 or 1912, the left-wing tendencies' reluctance to organize as an international faction against the Social Democratic leadership around the ISB is all the more puzzling. Before 1914, the LRIs refrained from turning their criticism into a systematic, international and organizational-fractional opposition. In this period, a root-and-branch reevaluation of the Second International and the proposition of a radical alternative to it was still beyond the left-wing's horizons. The LRIs only formed themselves into an international fraction in 1915 (which is the subject of the next two chapters). Before the war, they confined themselves more to developing a theoretical criticism of the mainstream Social Democracy and the Second International. Anton Pannekoek's "Tactical Differences within the Workers' Movement" (1909) and Rosa Luxemburg's "Accumulation of Capital" (1913) were two notable examples of this theoretical effort. The latter in particular was a consummate and brilliant theoretical warning about disregarding the deep interrelation between the social and political development in the capitalist heartlands and the imperialist colonial competition. However, this warning came too late to organize the LRIs as an international political entity. Only the shock of war could do that. Only then did the LRIs begin drawing the radical political and organizational conclusions that led them to believe that a new international was necessary. As

140

Herman Gorter, Imperialism, the World War and Social Democracy (1914). Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1914/imperialism.htm.

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we shall see, the Left-Radical Internationalists, a new generation of socialists from different social backgrounds than those of the ISB and Second International’s leading members, viewed socialism’s purpose, means, and goals very differently. But given the liberal-pacifist polices of the ISB and Second International, and their inattention to radical solutions to the era’s mounting problems, Left-Radical Internationalists had to find their own way in the new terrain defined by world war and revolutionary unrest. The issues were not simply political but also organizational, as they had to develop new means of organization to face the challenge. Contrary to the ISB model, the LRI developed an underground form of organization. In opposition to the ISB, its members were not “public” figures (e.g., parliamentarians, union leaders). Finally, they forged an internationally centralized group as opposed to the ISB which was a loose federation of national parties. Chapter 3 will explore in more detail the biographical backgrounds of this group; chapter 4 will discuss the organizational structure of this new LRI group.

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IV.

The Mass Strike Debate inside the Second International: Theoretical Foundations of the Left- Radical Internationalism

The theoretical core of Left Radical Internationalism and later the Comintern began to take shape during the debate over the mass strike (or mass action) that took place within the socialist movement between 1910 and 1914. Throughout this debate, the left-radicals gradually came to the conclusion that given the historical period, the mass strike was the most effective instrument to oppose imperialism and war because the legal parliamentary parties and their electoral strategies were useless against these new threats to the working class. This chapter examines how the confrontation between the left-radicals and the centrist leadership inside the social democratic movement gradually led to this radical conclusion between 1910 and 1914. It was already commonplace, especially among European intellectuals, to denigrate the proletarian masses as impulsive and irrational. The left-radicals were a markedly radical exception to that assumption. Thus, it would be hard to explain the LRI vision of turning the war into a worldwide class war against capitalism and imperialism without acknowledging the LRI’s deep confidence in the proletarian masses. On the surface, this may appear to be a contradiction since the proletariat itself, passively or not, let itself be led to war and used as cannon fodder in a war between the capitalist world powers in 1914. However, the Left Radicals’ confidence in what they defined as the proletarian masses was born in the first decade of the twentieth century when a new form of social struggle, the mass strike, mass action, was born. These internationalists had witnessed the birth of the “masses” in action on a scale and depth hitherto unseen, and their members adapted their political views to this new reality. Masses, mass action, proletarian masses, and mass strike are concepts that acted as theoretical pivots for LRI theory at least until 1920. In all its key texts, the Zimmerwald Left used mass action, mass struggle, and mass strike (interrelatedly and interchangeably) and emphasized the crucial role of the “masses” in stopping the war. In its first manifesto, the Zimmerwald Left declared the “mass struggle” as a new form of struggle, one beyond the traditional social democratic

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methods (parliamentarism and trade unionism) was already emergent.141 Even in the midst of the war, the LRIs held to this view. In its first collective central organ, the Vorbote (published in 1916), the Zimmerwald Left again clearly emphasized that, “The Social Democraticparties cannot command the proletariat to halt. In a large majority of cases, they have devoted themselves to imperialism. The conscious active or passive support of the war policy by representatives of parties and of trade unions has left a mark too deep to permit an easy return to the old pre-war situation.”142 When the Zimmerwald Left finally took over the Zimmerwald movement’s central organ and following the Third Zimmerwald Conference in September 1917, the International Socialist Commission, it more forcefully declared: “…international socialism can recover from its present collapse only by means of a vigorous mass action of the laboring class in belligerent countries in favor of terminating the war. Only in a revolutionary struggle for peace can socialism again become a factor of public life and transform the end of the imperialist orgy into a powerful advance along the road toward the realization of ultimate socialist aims.”143

In the “Platform of the Communist International” jointly drafted by the Spartacist Hugo Eberlein and Nikolai Bukharin, the revolution was envisioned as a “mass struggle … which led logically to direct confrontation and open battle with the bourgeois state machine.”144 This time, however, there was an added clarification that the organs of this new struggle were defined as “soviets” or “workers’ councils” in contradistinction to the parliamentary parties and trade unions. There is a clear line of continuity in the LRI position about “mass action” at the heart of the revolutionary struggle from its earliest stages, from even before its formation as an organized international faction until its constitution as the Communist International in 1919. Mass action or mass strikes emerged as the core tactical principle of the International Left after almost a full decade of intense intellectual and political struggle. Before the war, this struggle over the nature and role of mass action was fought in three main rounds, each representing a further step towards embracing the mass action. The first round opened in 1904, just prior to the 1905 Russian

141

"Die Zimmerwalder Linke uber die Aufgaben der Arbeiterklasse," Internationale Flugblatter, No.1 (Bern: November 1915). 142 "Zur Einfuhrung", Vorbote no.1, (Zurich: January 1916), pp. 1-4. 143 Angelica Balabanoff, "Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung" in Carl Grunberg, Archiv fur die Geschichte des Sozialismus der Arbeiterbewegung no. XII (Leipzig: Verlag von C.L. Hirschfeld, 1926), pp. 398-400. 144 John Riddell, ed., Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress: March 1919. (New York: Pathfinder: 1987), pp. 241-9.

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Revolution. In this round, which one might call a gestation period, the LRIs were not yet formed as an international faction. However, many future LRIs, especially in the west, sensed mass action as a new form of struggle and embraced it. In the second round, starting in 1910, the LRI split with the center of the social democratic movement over the use of mass action as a means of advancing working class political rights, especially universal suffrage, which the working class still lacked even in most “democratic” regimes. Opposing this, the centrist social democrats grew increasingly hostile to the idea of mass action. The LRIs considered this as proof of the older generation’s attachment to the calcified methods which were increasingly proving useless. The last round and the most “violent” round (emotionally, psychologically but also theoretically for the LRIs), unfolded over the years between 1911 and the Great War. Had the war not intervened, a massive split in the social democratic movement was very likely as a result of this debate. Building upon the second round, the LRIs began questioning each and all of the tactics, theories, and organizational principles of the Social Democratic leadership in the Second International. They elaborated a theory of epochal shift arguing that the old social democracy was incapable of acknowledging the mass action because it was ossified or, even worse, that it had been bought off by imperialism and constituted itself as a form of workers bureaucracy. Hence, former legal methods of struggle were unreliable as were the massive, legal organizations (such as parliamentary parties, trade unions and cooperatives) built upon peaceful methods of struggle. For the LRIs, the conclusion was obvious: Mass action was the only revolutionary means to fight war, capitalism, the state, and ultimately bring about a socialist revolution. Mass action required masses in sufficient number to challenge and topple the existing world order. In the decades before World War I, the working masses increased in size at a rate never before seen. To appreciate why the LRIs believed that mass action was so critical, one must first appreciate the dramatic transformations in the size and composition of the working class.

A.

The Birth of the Modern Working-Class Masses

The proletarian masses emerged as a material political force in the modern world at the turn of the 20th century. They formed the living, laboring, suffering, and rebellious core of the 73

modern capitalist world and wage relations. In late 19th century, they were to a large extent excluded from civil political life, not only in central and eastern Europe where monarchical and aristocratic power had a firm grip over the executive branch, but also from liberal parliaments and legislativebodies in almost all Europe and North America. The emergent modern proletarian was distinct form the early nineteenth century workers, mostly journeymen or artisans who were being increasingly detached from the ownership of their production tools by the encroachment of new technology and capital, yet still possessed their skills and pride. Unlike the skilled workers of old, the modern masses were not educated in the historic arts and crafts that were a part of urban European culture. In general, they tended to be either first or second generation peasant immigrants. Being "unskilled" made them a cheap source of labor power and hence easily "replaceable" for the employers. The psychological and existential world of the modern proletarian masses was ironically captured by the otherwise conservative Heidegger as one of "being thrown intothe world". The proletarian could work anywhere in the world, in any modern industrial plant,construction site, or service j o b in any country (especially in the former two, in case aminimum language is required for work). Hence, they were at home everywhere, but also paradoxically,without truly belonging anywhere. The modern masses were the product of the second, global wave (though it was mainly a European and North American process) of industrialization that took off in the second half of the nineteenth century and continued a t a rapid pace until 1914.145 Theexpansion of industrialization followed a complex pattern and it did not constitute a uniform or homogenous geographic progress in Europe. Especially in the regions and countries that were peripheral to western capitalism, the spread of the modern industry was markedly imbalanced. Even in Germany, while the previously industrial regions of Saxony and Silesia (especially dominated by the textile industry) lagged behind, the Ruhr region became the prime mover ofindustrialization. In Germany, the new heavy industry relied on the rich coal fields of the Ruhr. Similarly, in the Austria-Hungarian Empire, the Austrian and Bohemian regions rapidly industrialized on par with the rapid industrialization in Germany, yet the rest of the empire, especially Hungary, retained

145

Sidney Pollard explained that it is impossible to put an exact date on this second wave of industrialization, however he starts it broadly in 1870s. Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1760-1970, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 219.

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the status of an internal colonial market for the Austrian industrial economy In Russia, a highly modern industrial sector developed around the central Moscow industrial region and the coal rich Donets basin. The traditional Ural regions lagged and a scattered development of specialized industries spreading to the western, especially Polish and Baltic regions completed the picture. In coal- poor Italy, the industrialization process rapidlyemerged but was concentrated in the northern Genoa-Milan-Turin triangle. The advances in hydroelectric power compensated for the lack of coal in these regions. Most of Italyretained the character of a mainly peasant country, especially in the South. Scandinavia was also a latecomer region, while most of the Balkan and Iberian peninsulas remained primarily peasant economies.146 The industrialization in Europe was heavily concentrated in an arc stretching from northern Italy in the south moving northward through Switzerland, the Rhine valley reaching Belgium and England in the north. Moving away from this arc in any direction, the density of industrialization grew sparser. In this period, except for Britain, much of the European population remainedmainly rural. However, the general trend was clear towards more urbanization. The new industrial centers were connected by a growing web of railroads and ports connecting the Europeanindustrial space. From a modest 108,000 kilometers in 1860, the European railroad network grew to 102 million kilometers in 1913 (concentrated mostly in western Europe).147 The revolution in transportation also cheapened basic consumption commodities, which in turn further enabled the formation of the mass working class. In fact, railroads and the cheapening of food prices made chronic seasonal hunger in the countryside a thing of the past, at least in much of western Europe. But in the Russian Empire, hunger was still a serious social problem.148 The lowering of transportation costs enabled not only the shipping of commodities but also labor. The years preceding World War One saw a continuous rise in overseas migration. Early in the nineteenth century overseas migration from Europe counted in the tens of thousands per year; by the early twentieth century, it rose to about a million a year. Further, among the overseas migrants, unskilled industrial laborers replaced the

146

Ibid. pp. 219-242. Sidney Pollard, "Free Trade, Protectionism and World Economy," in Geyer & Paulmann, Mechanics of Internationalism, p. 28. A similar growth also happened in the shipping industry. The shipping tonnage in world trade grew from four million tons in 1800 to forty-seven million tons in 1913 ninety-two percent of which belonged steam ships. Ibid. p.92 148 Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power. eBook: Chapter 2. 147

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primarily skilled and trained laborers or farmers.149 Compared to the rapid urbanization and the simultaneous decline in agricultural population process that began after the Second World War throughout the world, the urbanization of Europe during the Second Industrial Revolution was relatively slower, but still unprecedented and dramatic. From 1850 to 1900, economically active agricultural population declined from 52% to 42% in France, 75% to 62% in Italy, 60% to 35% in Germany and 22% to 9% in Britain.150 A general qualitative change and evolution in the industrial production processes during the Second Industrial Revolution conditioned the numerical increase of the industrial, mass worker population. The most important change in the character of work was the socialization of the work process through its capitalist organization. In the Capital, Karl Marx conceptualized this as a transition from the formal domination of capital over labor to a real domination. Accordingly, the formal domination of capital over labor merely implies the hiring ofthe individual worker by the capitalist without altering or intervening in the work process itself. In this first stage, the capitalist did not intervene in the work of the craftsmen or the artisan. In this relationship, which owed its existence to the separation of the worker from the ownership of the means of production, the amount of profit depended on the amount of time the worker worked, or the amount produced. The capitalist did not own the skill of the worker in a literal sense, hence capital depended on the skill, initiative, ability and temperament of the workers. Moreover, capitalists could not increase the production beyond a certain limit determined by the workers' physical and psychological limitations, especially if the skill required for the production belongs only to a scarcelabor pool and the solidarity among the workers are strong. According to Marx, the transition to the real domination of capital over labor transformed this relationship. In this new phase, which started with the advance of mechanized manufacturing, each instance of the work process was separated into different tasks and distributed to different workers specialized solely on a particular aspect of the work process. Thus,the capitalist collectivized the work process, which was hitherto carried out by the individual craftsmen, in turn enabling the capitalist to impose a discipline formally and more actively on the workers and take away the

149 150

Pollard, "Free Trade, Protectionism and World Economy", pp. 37-8. Evans, The Pursuit of Power. ebook: Chapter 5.

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individual initiative in the labor process. Marx described the worker who works in the same workshop based on such a division of labor imposed by a capitalist through real domination on labor as "the collective worker".151 While at this stage, assuming that advanced machinery was not yet introduced, the workers' skills do not wholly lose their importance. But they were separated into special tasks in their particular applications. Hence, the capitalist still manages, homogenizes and equally distributes the time spent for the production of a specific commodity in the work process.152 For Marx, the real domination of capital over labor was realized first in the organization of work and the distribution of the tasks involved in work to specialized, collective workers. For Marx, while the “combination of individual specialized workers” or work carried out by “the collective workers” homogenizes the time spent in work and thereby socializes it, the separate acts of work remain “specialized,” different aspects of work, requiring specific talents if not skills. Thus, “in one operation he [the worker] must exert more strength, in another more skill,in another more attention.”153 The work is collectivized by merely distributing various aspect of the same specific tasks carried out by a single craft worker into a group of “collective workers.” In this phase, which Marx defined as the manufacturing phase, the work imposes a hierarchy on the workers depending on the skills andqualities of the work they perform. 154 However, with the introduction of machinery, even this specialization tended to become superfluous. The capitalist transformation of work and the domination of capital over workers became complete. Marx identifies this as the "factory system" and separates it from the manufacture: ""Along with the tool, the skill of the worker in handling it passes over to the machine. The capabilities of the tool are emancipated from the restraints inseparable from human labourpower. This destroys the technical foundation on which the division of labour in manufacture was based... There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here

151

"The collective worker, who constitutes the living mechanism of manufacture, is made up of solely such one-sidedly specialized workers... in comparison with the independent handicraft, more is produced in less time, or in other words the productivity of labour is increased. Moreover, once this partial labour is established as the exclusive function of one person, the methods it employs become perfected. The worker's continued repetition of the same narrowly defined art and the concentration of his attention on it teach him by experience how to attain the desired effect the minimum of exertion. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1 (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 458. 152 Ibid. pp. 464-465. 153 Ibid. p. 468. 154 Ibid. p. 469.

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it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages."155

The advancement of industrialization, machine technology and its implementation in different economic sectors, Marx argues, created the condition for the replacement of skilled artisans, a limited and more expensive source of variable capital, with a comparatively vast pool of less skilled and less expensive labor, including even recent migrants from the countryside, women or children. As the industrialized work came to rely less on the ability of the worker, as it demanded less and less incentive during work, more and more workers, who did not have any particular previous knowledge about any specific branch of industrial production, became available to do any work at a lower cost.156 Having written several drafts of the Capital in 1850s and 1860s, Marx naturally could only lay out his analysis as a prediction, which he thought would soon be generalized over the world. He took his concrete empirical examples from the history of the English textile industry or the exceptionally few continental industries that became manufacture industries, such as the Swiss watch production. The mechanization in production only spread to Europe and North America at a massive scale with the Second Industrial Revolution and the effects of this process became increasingly visible from the 1890s. The early theories for how best to manage the burgeoning transformation of the industrial work during the Second Industrial Revolution were Taylorism and Fordism.157 Both appeared and were first implemented in the US. The former corresponded more to the emergence of collective worker under the manufacture system, while the latter gave a concrete expression to the machine factory system described by Marx in the Capital. Taylor himself was from an upper-class background, but being a rebel of sorts, he chose to pursue the career of an artisan lathe machine operator rather than studying law at a university level, as expected from someone from his class. However, rising from the ranks, he implemented the results of his experience and began publishing his

155

Ibid. p. 545 & p. 548. Ibid. p. 788. 157 Following David Montgomery, I discuss Taylorism and Fordism not as the prime movers of the mechanization and mass production but only as particular instances of these tendencies in the industrial production. David Montgomery "Strikes of the Machinists in the US" in Leopold Haimson & Charles Tilly, eds., Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an International Perspective: Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.278. 156

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conclusions in in1890s. Taylor's theories gained popularity not only in the US and Britain, but also in France and Germany. He soon became known as the founding father of "scientific management" or "rationalization" (as it was called in Germany).158 As Braverman explains, Taylor was not primarily concerned with the implementation of new technological advancements in the workplace, but with the workplace organization itself. The first principle of Taylor's "rational management" was to clearly separate the worker from the design of the specific work in which he or she was involved and transfer any task involving the intellectual aspects of the work to the management: "The managers assume" Taylor claimed, "the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing thisknowledge to rules, laws and formulae. All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department."159 By undermining the autonomy of the craftsman and subjecting her to management through the reorganization of the work process, Taylorism essentially realized what Marx described in manufacturing and created a "collective worker" or the mass worker.160 Fordism carried this process one step further by implementing machinery in the workplace in a Taylorist manner on assembly lines. In the early 1900s automobile production still heavily relied on craftsmen. Mechanics assembled every part of the automobile and the work process relied on their initiative and skills. Gradually, the assembly line technique was implemented, which was itself perfected into the form of an endless chain conveyor in 1914. As the work process was divided into several specific tasks, the varied tasks carried out by skilled mechanics were reduced to their simplest parts and divided into numerous "unskilled" workers. The management could finally impose the work tempo on the workers. The chain conveyor implemented in the Ford's Highland

158

Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), p. 63. 159 Taylor quoted in Braverman. Ibid. pp.77-8. 160 To what degree Taylorist techniques were implemented in the industrial production remains a disputed subject. As Braverman's critics point out, workshops organized strictly and decidedly following the Taylorist model to the detail were few and mostly in small scale precision production sectors. However, it is generally accepted that early twentieth century witnessed a general transformation of the working condition and division between manual and mental labor in the workshop represented a general trend globally. David Stark "Class Struggle and the Transformation of The Labour Process" Theory and Society, 9 (January 1980), p. 119.

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Park plant for the first time in 1914, reduced the time required to produce a single "Model T" automobile to one-tenth of the time that it formerly required.161 It is difficult to measure the demographic characteristics of the population that fell into the category of “mass worker” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Marx's description of the "collective worker" is elusive enough to fit into any rigidly sociological and statistical categorization. The individual “mass worker” could be periodically between work. Unemployment was a constant threat that all workers faced in this period. At times, the waves of internal and international migration led bosses to replace workers. However, general estimations provide a glimpse of the growing demographic importance of the mass workers in the late nineteenth century world. In the Americas, the spectacular growth of the industrial population in this period can be more clearly conveyed. The U.S., while having a proportionally meager industrial population of 350,000 in 1820 (out of a total population of 9.6 million), had an industrial population (working in extractive, manufacturing and construction sectors and excluding service and finances) of 2,930,000 in 1870 (out of a total population of 39.8 million), 6,670,000 in1890 (out of a total population of 62.9 million), 8,700,000 in 1900 and 11,580,000 in 1910 (out of total populations of 75.9 and 91.9 million respectively).162 Added to that, the USA had a fluctuating unemployed population between 1900 and 1914, ranging from 574,000 in 1906 to 3,120,000 in 1914 when the World War began.163 By comparison, Mexico followed the USA with a more stable population of workers whose number remained consistentlybetween 500,000 and 600,000 between 1900 and 1921.164 In the European heartland of the Second Industrial Revolution, specifically in the U.K., Belgium, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, the figures and the historic trends were similar to those in the USA between 1870s and 1914. Appendix A presents a general overview of the

161

Ibid. p.101. Initially, the skilled workers deserted Ford's plant in protest, but Ford reacted by increasing the pay rate to a flat $5 a day for all workers (which was previously scaled and was at around half that amount): a small concession considering the enormous tenfold increase in the production rate. Ford later wrote, "the payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made". Quoted in Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, pp. 102-3. 162 B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: The Americas, 1570-1988 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), p.4 and p. 103. 163 Ibid. p.108. 164 Ibid. p.101.

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increase (both in absolute and relative terms) of the industrial population in different European countries.165 This general statistical summary presented above conveys the general dimensions of the working class. The increasing number of workers in industrial employment included the fairly important category of the artisans and skilled artisanal workers in industry, who tended to differ significantly from the proletarian mass (or "collective laborer" as Marx called it) in terms of their social status, wage level, and their control over the work process. Further, the above summary (and the table in Appendix A) excludes a major portion of mass workers employed in transportation, service sector and office work, which were enormously important and integral to the Second Industrial Revolution. For example, women's participation in the office work and education in late 19th century, which generally termed as unskilled, as were low-wage workers, service workers in restaurants, bars, pubs and other similar services, transportation workers in several modern sectors (especiallythe maritime transportation and railroads) constituted a major portion of the new mass working class. The summary also excludes the agricultural wage laborers that worked in plantations, latifundias or similar agricultural enterprises producing commodities for the industrial market. They too contributed and were integral to the industrial production process. Finally, the unemployed, who fluctuated in and out of work, are also excluded. However, the Appendix provides an indication of the growth of the mass worker population.166

165

In the peripheries of the Second Industrial Revolution, the proletarian masses were a small minority in a mainly peasant world. Employment statistics for Africa and Asia is scant until 1940s and 1950s. However, even in these continents, a growing number of people were employed in manufacturing and industry in certain regions. For instance, in Egypt the population employed in manufacture and industry grew from 350,000 in 1907 to 422,000 1917. A similar pattern can also be observed in other sectors, such as commerce, finance, transport and services. B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia & Oceania, 1750-1993 (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 91. Similarly, in India, industrialand manufacturing employment rose from 13 million in 1901 to about 16 million in 1911 (one third of which was female). The statistics however, does not clarify concretely to what degree this population was separated from the artisanal production. Ibid. p.95. 166 Considering the limited and contradictory character of the available data and variations in the records in different countries for the period some labor historians attempt to reach out to an estimate based on the workplace or factory size. For instance Jurgen Kocka estimates that in Germany in 1907 there were about 6.2 million industrial workers working in factories that employed more than 11 workers. Jurgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society 1914-1918 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 11-12.

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How did the other social classes respond to the emergence of mass workers? Though it is impossible to cover this reaction exhaustively, certain mainstream tendencies have to be discussed here as they informed the socialists’ perspective on the question. Even though the proletarian masses were a new phenomenon in late nineteenth century Europe, urban and rural lower classes had formed crowds organized for political or economic action for centuries. Rulers of Europe were accustomed to peasant crowds and rural rebellions, and until the 19th century they considered a degree of tumultuousness normal or even healthy. From eighteenth century until at least the 1848 Revolution in France, bourgeoisie and insurrectionary"crowds" had a tense but still cordial relation in the face of the absolutist challenge. The crowd or "mob" actions were defined as moral and just, or immoral and mad, depending on the ruling class fractions' own positions vis-a-vis the state. However, as George Rudé demonstrated in his work on crowd actions in revolutionary France, while the crowds of the 18th and early 19th centuries were extremely heterogeneous, they were not irresponsible, mindless or pointlessly destructive. 167 In fact, these “mobs” sometimes acted in accord with the law or moved against what they considered to be its infringements.168 Even the early bourgeois thinkers of the 18th century acknowledged the moral role of the “mobs” and their revolts as a guarantor against tyrannical tendencies of the state or aristocracy. The first defenders of the free market saw the liberation of feudal bonds restricting the movement of the masses as a positive sign. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, like Smith and Ferguson embraced the new masses as a brake on unrestricted absolutism. Accordingly, the urban masses created by capitalism could serve as a balancing force against the excesses of rulers. However, the appearance of the modern proletarian masses generated an intellectual "antimass" reaction. Suspicion and distrust towards masses began to emerge mainly in the 19th century. The 1848 Revolution in Paris saw the same crowds that had acted in unison with the bourgeoisie in 1789, on opposite sides of the barricades.169 The demonization of the urban masses

167

George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp.132-136. Dieter Groh, “The Dilemma of Unwanted Leadership in Social Movements,” in (ed.s) Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici, Changing Conceptions of Leadership, Springer Series in Social Psychology (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986), p. 146. 169 For instance, Tocqueville drew from this the conclusion that the majority rule could also be tyrannical, and that the bourgeoisie could also be the victim a working class mob. Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution, p. 235. 168

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accompanied the rise of industrialization. Thomas Malthus in his “Essay on Population” complained about how the industrial development created a crowded urban space full of “hungry, sickly and dangerous poor classes,” i.e. the proto-proletarians.170 In Malthus’ condescending vision, narrow, dirty and tight urban space bred crowds, in contrast to which stood idyllic and selfsustaining rural communities. Modern industry, urban crowdedness, corruption, and masses in general were almost synonymous in the Malthusian worldview. Georg Simmel, a contemporary to the emergence of the proletarian masses, saw in the masses a new form of personhood. For Simmel, the cultural intensity of the modern metropolis pushed the individual into a “blasé” attitude: The individual was diffused in masses, she was banal, reduced in intellectual capacities, did not have a great deal of focus or disciplined concentration required for intense intellectual activity. 171 Simmel was not alone in his skepticism towards the intellectual capacity of the masses. In fact, by the early twentieth century, a widely held conservative and liberal consensus was that the crowds, mobs or “rabble” were composed of a “lumpen” mass of individuals on the “fringe” of society, who some deemed insane, hysterical or at least lacking clear thought and, as a consequence, they tended towards were criminal and destructive actions.172 Criminology and "mass psychology" gave a scientific coloring to this bourgeois suspicion of the emerging masses. Led by Le Bon and Freud, these “scientific” approaches were influenced by then fashionable theories of magnetism. The masses, these theories suggested, were intellectually weak and open to “suggestion” for they acted hysterically almost as if they are in a “hypnotic” state.173 Le Bon elaborated on this claiming that the masses were formed by“primitive” and childish people blinded by the tyranny of their passions. They were almost in a state of trance. Emotions rather than reason drove them. 174 Ironically, the early “mass psychologists” claimed

170

Thomas Malthus, An Essay On The Principle Of Population, 1998, (Oxford University Press, 1993), Ebook. 171 George Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 329-330. 172 Serge Moscovici, "The Discovery oft he Masses", in Carl R Graumann and Serge Moscovici, eds., Changing Conceptions of Crowd Mind and Behavior (New York: Springer Verlag, 1985), pp. 7-8. 173 Erika Apfelbaum & Gregory R. McGuire, "Models of Suggestive Influence and the Disqualification of the Social Crowd" in Graumann and Moscovici, eds., Changing Conceptions of Crowd Mind and Behavior, p. 44. 174 Moscovici, "The Discovery of the Masses," pp. 14-15.

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that masses were both gullible, but also hysterical, prone to destructive and revolts. This hostility towards the masses had a clear class bias. The suggestion was that the workers were incapable of organizing themselves for systematic, cool-headed, constructive, intelligent, long-term action, let alone leading society in general. Underlying this class prejudice that became increasingly pronounced in late nineteenth century was the fear of intellectuals like Le Bon that the ascendancy of the proletarian masses with a clear socialist spirit, also meant that the decline of the traditional elites.175 Some argue that the negative reaction of many European intellectuals to the birth of the proletarian masses in the late nineteenth century can be attributed to a fear of loss of status with the advance of mass media and the increase in the literacy rate among the proletarian population.176 A literate proletariat may contradict at first sight the superficial implication massive "deskilling" at work that the industrialization implied. However, homogenization of the labor processes relied on the workers’ capacity to quickly learn how to operate machines and adapt themselves to the changing structure of the work processes.177 According to Carey, compulsory education coupled with increasing availability of literary material to a wider public that found it

175

Gustave Le Bon approvingly quoted from Paul Bourget the following lines: "That which constitutes the novelty of modern society is the substitution of the organised mass for personal initiative, the advent of crowds, and the disappearance, or at least the diminution, of the power of the superior class." Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1989), p. 284. 176 John Carey, The Intellectuals and The Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939, (London: Faber&Faber, 2012), p. 6. 177 Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders: Europe, 1800-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 302. For the American case, David Gordon wrote, "The initial creation of a wage-labor force proved to be an inadequate foundation for capital accumulation in the late-nineteenth-century US economy. While employers could count on a fairly continuous supply of labor power, as we have seen in the previous chapter, they could not necessarily count on a steady and adequate flow of labor activity in production. The rapid growth during the 1850s and 1860s had partially masked this problem. As the crisis of the 1870s and 1880s deepened, however, the insufficiency of the prevailing wage labor system grew more evident. Employers began to search for more effective systems to extract labor from their workers. These late-nineteenth-century explorations led eventually to the dominance of a new stage in the organization of the labor process and the structure of labor markets in the United States: the homogenization of labor, a spreading tendency toward the reduction of jobs in the economy to a common, semiskilled denominator." Gordon David, Richard Edwards & Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 100.

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easier to digest and engage with (especially in the form of journals, daily papers, cheap pamphlets among others) irritated the intellectuals.178 Like intellectuals, there emerged a growing tendency of resentment and fear among the skilled workers and artisans against mass production and the emergence of the mass worker. In fact, the trade union movement itself was a reaction of the skilled, artisanal workers against the encroachment of deskilling. A contemporary observer in England in 1870s wrote: "The artisan creed with regard to labourers is, that the latter are an inferior class, and that they should be made to know and kept in their places. In the eyes of unionist and nonunionist mechanics, any clever or ambitious labourer who shows a desire to get out of his place, by attempting to pick up or creep into "the trade" to which he is attached as an unskilled assistant, is guilty of deadly sin... In the same way artisans' wives hold the wives of labourers to be of a lower social grade, and very often will either not "neighbor" with them at all, or else only in a patronising way." 179

This attitude reflected the general organizational patterns of the artisanal workers in this period. The skilled laborers in industry remained a major section of the working class and they remained a distinct social group within that class,180 who felt increasingly encroached upon by new workers and industrialization. The first concrete expression of the organized skill workers’ reaction against this encroachment was the formation of labor unions. Unions were bastions of the resistance to mass production and scientific management, which threatened to undermine skilled work. In most European countries and the US, the traditional craft unions staunchly opposed both

178

Carey, The Intellectuals and The Masses, pp. 16-22. Corey even suggests that the modernist art was a reaction against the masses' increasing involvement with the literary and artistic spheres of activity that were traditionally reserved for a small group of intellectuals. Walter Benjamin wrote: “With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis … Art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to … ‘pure’ art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter.” Quoted in Carey, The Intellectuals, p.85. 179 Thomas Wright quoted in Marc Linder, European Labor Aristocracies: Trade Unionism, The Hierarchy of Skill and the Stratification of the Manual Working Class Before the First World War (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1985), p.102. 180 For instance, in Germany the skilled laborers in coal industry earned on average two to three more hourly wage compared to an unskilled worker in the same industry. Wage differences, though less dramatic, also existed in other sectors. For instance, in textile most unskilled workers were women and earned considerably less than the male skilled workers in the same industry. Stefan Berger, "Germany", in Stefan Berger & David Broughton, eds., The Force of Labour: The Western European Labour Movement and the Working Class in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1996), p. 73.

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the recruitment of the unskilled mass worker into their organizations and the introduction of the de-skilling posed by management techniques and machinery. What complicated the trade-union situation and caused one of the major variations between unions in different countries was their attitude to politics. Most trade unions between 1870 and 1914 were anti-socialist or generally remained neutral in politics. However, as in the case of the German Free Trade Unions (Freie Gewerkschaften), some unions developed directly out of the social democratic movement. As distinct from the Christian and business unions, these social democratic unions were nominally in alliance with the SPD, while enjoying a great deal of autonomy.181 But there were variations. The American Federation of Labor in the US, was initially organized as a strictly apolitical trade union and the skilled or artisanal workers turned towards socialist politics only gradually, towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the courts and police showed an open hostility against the unions and "the open assault of scientific managers" on all the skilled workers "notions of ethical work relations".182 It is sometimes assumed that the increasing rate of unionization among the workers of Europe and North America corresponded to a declining trend in strike activity and the creation of more peaceful relations between labor and capital between 1870s and 1914. However, comparative studies on labor relations show that this simplistic picture was wrong. First, as discussed above, trade unions remained for the most part of this period the organizations of theskilled and artisanal laborers.183 Second, the mass workers resorted to wildcat strike actions and mass strike

181

In countries which the socialist movements modeled themselves on the SPD, a similar pattern of union and party pairing also developed. For instance, in Sweden, the hegemonic trade union movement belonged to the socialist party. James Fulcher, "Sweden" in Berger & Broughton, eds., The Force of Labour, p. 8. 182 David Montgomery "Strikes of the Machinists in the US" in Haimson & Tilly, Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions, p. 280. 183 Dick Geary, European Labour Protest (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 98-104. The exception to this general tendency was the industrial unionism and revolutionary syndicalism. However, even the industrial unions and the "new type of unions" that developed in Britain during 1890s, remained relatively marginal to the traditional mainstream unionism. Further, even the militant anarcho-syndicalism of the Spanish CNT or the syndicalist French CGT remained essentially the organizations of the workers in traditional industries or the skilled. For instance, one of the most important unions tied to the French CGT was the French National Federation of Printers, an industry which during this period remained one of the least affected by the new wave of industrialization and a sector whose workers were among the most conservative. Ibid.

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actions at an increasing rate after 1900. Third, mass workers went on strike sometimes outside of and sometimes even against the trade unions. Clearly, the “wildcat strike” phenomenon reflected the growing discord between the traditional unions and mass workers. The socialist movement’s reaction to the emergence of the mass worker was more complex. On the surface, the numerical and proportional growth of the working class could have, and did to a certain extent, benefit the socialist organizations. Arguably, no revolutionary party or movement enjoyed a more fortunate period in modern history than the Social Democrats had during the period between 1880s and 1914. Rapidly growing legal mass Social Democratic parties made their presence felt in legislative assemblies for the first time in history. The formation of the socialist parties all over Europe in 1880s, their growing success in the electoral arena and their increasing influence on the trade union movement boosted socialists' confidence. For the founders of the social democratic movement, the success of the movement was confirmation of their theories in practice. In Kautsky's pen, this optimism found its boldest formulation, which became the official line of the Second International and its confidence in the imminent success of socialism. Kautsky formulated the theory of the socialist growth during this period in the Erfurt Program (1891) and a series of texts that he produced in the next few years: The Class Struggle (1892) and Parliamentarismus und Demokratie (“Parliamentarism and Democracy”, 1893). Kautsky co-authored the Erfurt program with Eduard Bernstein for the SPD in its first Congress after the end of the "anti-socialist laws" period in Germany in 1890, which allowed the party to finally surface from the underground with full legal rights. Kautsky's theory was basically an adaptation of the Marxist theory about the inevitability of communism.184 What was new in Kautsky's formulation was his suggestion that the parliamentary struggle could be the best method of mobilizing the growing population of proletariat towards the seizure of political power. In this scenario, the revolution, especially one similar to the 1848 revolution, defined with barricade fights and violent civil

184

In a letter to Weydemeyer, Marx wrote about his theory that "... I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with the certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society." Marx's Letter to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1952, MECW (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), pp. 62-3.

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wars, was relegated to the class struggle of the previous era. The new era, with expanding suffrage rights and growing legal parties in parliaments presented the proletariat with the option to conquer political power by more peaceful means or at least, if the ruling classes resisted, through a much more orderly and legitimate kind of civil war, as a last resort.185 However, Kautsky's formulation had one overarching problem that only became clear in retrospect: it failed to grasp the full implications of the growing “mass worker” phenomenon. From this followed two key problems. First, the growth of the socialist movement (especially in terms of socialist party membership and trade unions in German) was restricted mainly to the artisanal and skilled workers. The trade unions were essentially formed by skilled workers and remained conservative. But even the socialist parties formed by this group increasingly became a minority given the mass of growing unskilled or semi-skilled workers who remained outside of these organizations for much of the period until 1914. What was worse for his formula was the tendency and willingness of the mass of the unskilled or semi-skilled workers to participate in mass actions rather than lend their initiatives to purely parliamentary struggles.186 It is beside the point if Kautsky's projections really reflected the theoretical convictions or the actual orientation of the Social Democratic parties in Europe and north America. The novelty

185

For a more detailed discussion of Kautsky's vision of a parliamentary road to power see: Jukka Gronow, On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 182-4. 186 Kautsky was aware of the fact that the majority, especially the unskilled and semi-skilled workers, remained organizationally outside of the Socialist parties and unions, but he was nevertheless hopeful that the growth of the socialist movement would eventually break the barrier between the skilled and the unskilled sections of the classes. He wrote in the "Class Struggle": "From skilled and unskilled proletarians there gradually forms the stratum of the worker class that finds itself in movement - the worker movement. This is the part of the proletariat that fights for the common interests of its class, its ecclasia militants (fighting church). This stratum grows at the expense of the arrogant worker 'aristocrats' sunk in their egoism as well as the dull 'rabble', the lower strata of the wage proletariat that vegetates in hopelessness and powerlessness. We have seen that the worker proletariat is constantly increasing; we know further that it becomes ever more decisive for the other working classes, whose living conditions and whose way of feeling and thinking is ever more influenced by it. Now we see that in this ever-growing mass the fighting section grows not absolutely but proportionately. No matter how fast the proletariat grows, the fighting section grows even faster. But the fighting proletariat is by far the most important and productive recruiting ground for Social Democracy. Social Democracy is nothing other than the part of the fighting proletariat that is aware of its goal. [In turn,] the fighting proletariat has a tendency to become more and more synonymous with Social Democracy; in Germany and Austria the two have in actuality become one." Kautsky as quoted in Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), p. 76.

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of Kautsky's argument rested on its interpretation of the contemporary situation of the labor movement. In his vision, the growth of socialism neatly overlapped with the growth of the bourgeois democratic institutions. This optimism of the Erfurtian program and its seeming success (at least in terms of the electoral successes of the social democratic movement in Germany and Europe in general) turned it for many socialists into a model to be emulated.187 However, the emergence of mass workers and mass workers’ actions triggered a lively debate inside the socialist movement in 1900s. A small but distinct minority came to challenge Kautsky's Erfurtian vision and gradually formulated a theory of mass action and revolutionary civil war as an alternative strategy to Erfurt’s program’s peaceful vision, taking into account of other world-historical developments, especially the rise of capitalist militarism, colonialism and threat of a World War.

B.

The Mass Action Debate in Germany

The debate inside the Second International on mass action began in Germany and hence was conducted in German. This was not surprising since even until the Second World War, the linguafranca of Marxism was German. However, the mass strike developed first in adjacent countries (Belgium, Russia, Italy, Sweden among others), and the radical left (both in Germany and abroad) that embraced the concept felt compelled to debate with the apathetic leaderships of the SPD and trade unions. Those leaderships were increasingly bent on emphasizing the unique conditions in Germany in their effort to dismiss minimize the importance of the mass action. No less

187

Especially in eastern Europe, the Kautskyian-Erfurtian vision of socialism was extremely influential. According to Georges Haupt, the SPD was already a "mentor party" for the budding socialist parties in east and south-east Europe in 1890s. One can argue the same for the Scandinavian and Dutch parties as well. The French, Belgian and English socialist movements on the other hand, had already developed, sui generis traditions at this point. However, the Erfurt Program and Kautsky's writing on it were influential and debated in the whole Second International organizations. The Erfurt Program was translated into Bulgarian, English, Finnish, French, Greek, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Yiddish, Lettish, Norwegian, Polish, Rumanian, Russian, Swedish, Serbian-Croatian, Spanish, Czech in several editions. Werner Blumenberg, Karl Kautskys Literarisches Werk: Eine Bibliographisce Ubersicht (The Hague: Mouton&Co, 1960), pp. 47-8.

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paradoxical was that all the major theoreticians involved, whether for or against the new tactic, were born outside the German Empire: Kautsky was born in Austria-Hungarian empire, Pannekoek and Roland Holst were Dutch, Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish Jew. The radical-left in the debate was represented essentially by the Dutch, Polish, Russian, and east European Marxists. The opponents of the mass strike in Germany, on the other hand, took their inspiration from outside Germany, from countries that practiced certain traditional social democratic tactics much more successfully (e.g., parliamentarism in France, the cooperative movement in Belgium, and the trade-union movement in England), which were slow to mature in Germany, despite the great strength of the SPD. Hence, at its heart, the debate reflected a world historical crisis of the socialist movement and a search for direction in the face of increasing working-class militancy that unfolded as the prospect of war grew. Due to its great strength, the SPD in the years immediately prior to the WWI represented both the greatest hopes of the world socialist movement in the face of these challenges but was also the most indecisive socialist organization due to its inability to clarify an effective strategy (radical or reformist) in German politics. The Mass Action debate in Germany developed in three stages and at each stage, the debate revolved around three main different questions: 1. In this initial stage (until 1906), the debate focused on how to define the "mass strike" or the mass action as a distinct form of political action. It was mainly concerned with explaining to what extent and why the mass strike should be considered as a distinct concept from the syndicalist conception of general strike. 2. In the second stage (1910) the focus of the debate shifted to the question if the mass action was suitable for advanced, western countries. While Kautsky and his orthodoxy proposed the defense of the mass action as a weapon of last resort, as a defensive method, the radicalleft (now beginning to define itself as a distinct tendency from the orthodox) proposed its use for ultimately attainment of socialist goals. 3. In the final, third stage (1910-1914), the debate began to widen and became entangled with other political and theoretical questions that concerned the socialist movement. In the final phase, the debate over mass action and imperialism merged. At this point the left-radicals began to define the mass action concept as a means of struggle going beyond the traditional boundaries 90

of the social democratic duality (parliament versus trade unions). Left radicals defined the mass action as the only means of struggle in the imperialist phase and last phase of capitalism.

1.

The First Stage: 1904-1906 The Mass Strike Debate Begins

Many have assumed that Rosa Luxemburg was the first person to elaborate theoretically on the question of mass action from a new Marxist perspective. However, until the 1905 revolution in Russia, she did not pay much attention to the concepts of "mass action" or "mass strike". While impressed by the Belgian mass strike of 1903, she thought the mass strike was only applicable to small countries with geographically condensed industrial zones and populations that could relatively easily be mobilized. In countries like Germany, let alone Russia, where industrial regions were widely dispersed and the labor force was too big to organize centrally, she initially thought mass strike was a “difficult undertaking.”188 It was not Luxemburg, but rather the Dutch radical Marxists, especially Henriette Roland-Holst, who were the first to develop a new theory of mass action. For the Dutch radicals, “mass action” was a discovery more than an intellectual invention. The Dutch Social Democratic party was not one of the strongest in the socialist world when a general strike suddenly began on the Amsterdam docks in 1902. The strike began when the dock owners brought in non-unionized workers to break the resistance of the unions and where the Social Democratic unions had a strong grasp. In reaction, a group of non-unionized and mostly anarchist-leaning train workers showed solidarity by rejecting their bosses’directives to transport the wares and stopping work. Suddenly, the conflict turned into a general strike. The whole affair

188

Schorske, Germany Social Democracy, 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp.33-4. This evaluation of mass strike may have originated from Engels. In a letter Engels wrote to Kautsky in 1893, he discussed at length about the 1893 Belgian general strike for suffrage and came to the conclusion that if general political strike suffered defeat in Belgium, in a "primarily industrial country with a thoroughly shaky and ill-disciplined militia-style army" was a difficult and risky undertaking, than it had even less chance "in Austria where the peasant predominates, industry is sparse and relatively weak, the big towns are few and far between, the nationalities have been set at odds with one another and the socialists make up less than ten per cent of the total population... So for heaven's sake let us avoid taking any step that might tempt the working men, who are in any case impatient and thirsting for action, to stake their all on one card - and, what's more, at a time when the government wants this and could use provocation to bring it about." Engels to Kautsky in Stuttgart, 3 November 1893 in MECW Vol. 50 (New York: Lawrance&Wishart, 2010), p. 226.

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developed without any organized union or party intervention; it was solely organized by workers’ own initiative out of a feeling of class solidarity. Herman Gorter, a leading Dutch socialist explained his surprise on the development of the strike action: “We thought we were far behind in the International labor movement. The “great industry” has very slowly developed in Holland. The domination of the small businesses, anarchist propaganda, the power of religious ideas, the dull indifference of the mass — all these operated to hinder the development of the labor movement. One year ago the situation appeared almost hopeless. But the proletariat is an unknown quantity. All the powers of the future slumber in it and it is as impossible for one to determine the exact moment in which water will turn into ice, or lightning to strike from the clouds, as to determine beforehand the moment of the outbreak of the accumulated revolutionary energy of the proletariat...The experience of the last year has greatly changed the view of the Social Democracy in regard to the general strike. To be sure we had already given up the original position of absolutely rejecting the general strike, but the indifference and even the half conviction of the justification of this powerful means of class struggle has grown in just the degree that the idea of this weapon has entered into Social Democracy. Even if we consider the general strike of all laborers as sought after by the Anarchists, Utopian, and if we reject the idea that the general strike is the only weapon, the panacea of the proletariat (for whither shall come the necessary organization, training and discipline for the general strike without the experience gained in the daily political and economic struggle?), we have, nevertheless, learned to recognize it as a powerful weapon whose application we must learn to study and which will be more and more favourably looked upon by all Socialists.”189

T h e 1 9 0 2 mass actions prompted the Dutch radicals to engage in a more in-depth inquiry. Roland-Holst’s pamphlet, “The General Strike and Social Democracy” (Algemeene Werkstaking en Sociaaldemokratie) was the product of this process.190 For Roland-Holst, the massstrike

189

Herman Gorter, “The Great Strike on the Railroads of Holland,” International Socialist Review, (April 1903). The question of a general strike for political aims was discussed in the Second International at least since 1890s, but until 1900 it was not taken as a reliable tool of struggle. It was considered as a substitute or addendum to the parliamentary and electoral struggle. Schurer, "The Russian Revolution," p. 462. Also see: Braunthal, History of the International, Vol.1, pp. 285-295. The first use "political mass strike" concept in the International can be dated to 1904. Groh, "The Dilemma of Unwanted Leadership in Social Movements: The German Example Before 1914", p. 39. 190 Roland-Holst worked on the pamphlet throughout 1904. Written originally in German and translated into Dutch, it was a hotly debated instant success when it was first published in 1905. Later it was overshadowed by the better-known pamphlet on the subject written by Rosa Luxemburg, “Mass Strike” and published in 1906. All references here are to the second 1906 German edition of Roland-Holst’s pamphlet. Kautsky later wrote that it was upon his suggestion that Roland-Holst penned her pamphlet. He recounted in 1913 that due to an increasing interest on the subject in the German party, he was offered to write on the "mass strike" question, but since he was busy editing Marx's "Theories of Surplus Value" he recomended Roland-Holst instead, since she herself experienced a mass strike and read all literauter on the subject. Karl Kautsky, "Die Schrift der Genossin Roland-Holst", in Der politische Massenstreik: Ein

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was a modern phenomenon that did not in any way resemble the early 19th century anarcho-syndicalist conception of the “general strike.” In the 1880s and 1890s, Marxists considered the general strike, which they conceived of as an instantaneous strike action started simultaneously bythe entire working class against the bourgeoisie, as an impossible fantasy.191 In a historical situation when the capitalist economy was rapidly advancing and was improving both the numbers and the living conditions of the working class, this looked utopian.192 Early in the 20th century, mass strikes where economic and political demands merged and spread to a wider population emerged as a new phenomenon. Roland-Holst observed that, while between 1893 and 1901 there was only one mass strike, between 1902 and 1905 there were no less than five worldwide. In all these cases, mass strike was a prolonged struggle, possibly lasting for months or even longer in one industrial sector, region or city, and sporadically spreading to the next with its own tempo.193 All these pointed out to a new form of struggle. Further, in these new mass strikes or mass actions, political and economic goals were mixed and the form of action itself

Beitrag zur Geschichte der Massenstreikdiskussionen innerhalb der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, (Berlin: Vorwarts, 1914), Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1914/genstreik/index.html. 191 Engels wrote: “In the Bakuninist programme a general STRIKE is the lever employed by which the social revolution is started. One fine morning all the workers in all the industries of a country, or even of the whole world, stop work, thus forcing the propertied classes either humbly to submit within four weeks at the most, or to attack the workers, who would then have the right to defend themselves and use this opportunity to pull down the entire old society… it was universally admitted that this required a wellformed organisation of the working class and plentiful funds. And there's the rub. On the one hand the governments, especially if encouraged by political abstention, will never allow the organisation or the funds of the workers to reach such a level; on the other hand, political events and oppressive acts by the ruling classes will lead to the liberation of the workers long before the proletariat is able to set up such an ideal organisation and this colossal reserve fund. But if it had them, there would be no need to use the roundabout way of a general STRIKE to achieve its goal." K. Marx, F. Engels, “Revolution in Spain”, in MECW Vol. 23 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), pp. 584-5. 192 Beginning from 1860s, major advanced capitalist economies grew rapidly more than usual. Russia and Italy were outliers, where the growth lagged behind the US, Britain, France and Germany. This trend actually continued until the 1929 crisis. Haimson & Tilly, Strikes, Wars and Revolutions, p. 5-6. As Dick Geary notes, this growth also corresponded to a relative increase in the working class living standards generally until 1914. Dick Geary, European Labour Politics from 1900 to the Depression (London: Macmillan, 1991), p.16. "Between the mid-1870s and mid-1890s real wages share of the national income rose from 52% to 62% and wage levels increased by 26% between 1886 and 1896. After 1896 real wages stagnated and from 1908 actually declines as prices rose by 10% to 1913 and has been identified as a major cause of the labour unrest in the years before the WWI. Price, "Britain" in The formation of the Labor Movements, p. 12. 193 Henriette Roland-Holst, Generalstreik und Sozialdemokratie, Zweite Auflage (Dresden: 1906), p. 43.

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defied the strict and rigid separation between the economic and political struggles. In that sense, they overcame the division of labor between trade unionists, who focused exclusively on economics, as opposed to the parliamentarians and editors who focused on politics and law.194 Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet on the Mass Strike appeared soon after. This was a monumental work and retrospectively, it marked the beginning of the Communist split in the world working class movement.195 Published in September 1906, Luxemburg incorporated into the debate her conclusions from the experience of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg lucidly described this seemingly spontaneous and complex aspect in her exploration of the latest and most spectacular example of the mass strike: The mass strike, as the Russian Revolution shows it to us, is such a changeable phenomenon that it reflects all the phases of the political and economic struggle, all stages and factors of the revolution. Its adaptability, its efficiency, the factors of its origin are constantly changing. It suddenly opens new and wide perspectives of the revolution when it appears to have already arrived in a narrow pass and where it is impossible for anyone to reckon upon it with any degree of certainty. It flows now like a broad billow over the

194

It is necessary to note here that Roland-Holst did not counterpose mass action as a new alternative tactic overcoming the old social democratic parliamentary and trade union tactics. Instead, she thought these were complementary. Philippe Bourrinet, The Dutch and the German Communist Left (London: Porcupine Press, 2001), pp. 82-83. However, this was still a very early stage in the debate on of the "mass action" concept. A note on The Dutch and the German Communist Left: This book was published anonymously by the International Communist Current, a Left-Communist organization in 2001. Later, another version of the book was published by the Brill in 2016, this time the author’s name given as Philippe Bourrinet. The ICC claims that the book, which was based on Bourrinet’s PhD dissertation was written in collaboration with the ICC, when Bourrinet was a member of the organization during the period he wrote the dissertation. The ICC argued in an article published in the organization’s journal that it not only financially aided in the writing of the dissertation, but contributed in the writing process itself. Bourrinet himself does not deny the influence of the ICC in the writing process as in the later Brill version, he edited and changed some parts of the dissertation revealing the organization’s influence. In this dissertation all references are to the 2001 version of the book, published anonymously by the ICC. Nevertheless, I included Bourrinet as the author. For more on the polemic. Here is an article presenting the ICC’s criticism of Bourrinet: “Doctor Bourrinet, fraud and self-proclaimed historian” (5 February 2015) internationalism.org. Retrieved from https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201502/12079/doctor-bourrinet-fraudand-self-proclaimed-historian#sdfootnote4anc. 195 Karl Radek also later wrote Luxemburg's work on the mass strike was the beginning of the separation between social democracy and communism. It was, for Radek, the foundational text of the movement that would find the Communist International: "In her brochure on the mass strike that she wrote at the end of 1906, Rosa Luxemburg brought the fruition the lessons of the Russian Revolution for the international working class. This brochure laid the ground for the new phase of socialism. With it began the separation of the Communist movement from Social Democracy." (my translation). Karl Radek, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogiches (Hamburg: 1921) Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/radek/1921/rosakarlleo/index.html.

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whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena. And the law of motion of these phenomena is clear: it does not lie in the mass strike itself nor in its technical details, but in the political and social proportions of the forces of the revolution. 196

For Luxemburg, the Russian mass actions in 1905 and the ensuing revolutionary activism showed three essential things: that the mass action was an international phenomenon; that it combined political and economic struggles; and that it was a political action of the whole working class combining both the organized and unorganized sections. What made the mass strike messy, confusing, and chaotic was the combination of several mass actions in a protracted struggle against the state and the several methods and tactics that the proletarian masses used. In mass actions, economic strikes combined and intermingled with various demands and fused into general political strikes. Such complicated actions could not be "organized" by a minority (party or even trade unions) of the working class. They reflected the anger and maturation of the class (internationally) and the maturation of its consciousness. The party's role could be rather explanatory (or even “spiritual”), in the sense of clarifying the situation. But the technical organization of mass actions was practically impossible just as the organization of revolutions were impossible. For Luxemburg, the emergence of the mass strike in Russia and parts of Europe was not a coincidence. It expressed the intensification of class struggle, a symptom of the emergence of a new historic situation. Simultaneously with the rise of the mass actions, the ruling classes were also becoming more openly reactionary and unable to endure the political presence of the socialists in the legal political arena. While she occasionally criticized the purely passive and timid parliamentarism exercised by the German SPD deputies, her pamphlet did not counterpose mass action as analternative form of struggle to the parliamentary struggle. Rather than defining mass actions and mass strikes as antagonistic forms to parliamentary struggle, she suggested that that emergence of mass actions sharpening of class antagonisms revealed the necessity of Social

196

Rosa Luxemburg, "The Mass Strike, The Political Party and the Trade Unions," in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks ed. Mary-Alice Waters, (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), pp. 181-182.

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Democracy to take a more assertive and offensive positioning, whether in parliaments, street demonstrations or in the workplaces. 197 While defined as a "new tactic," for Luxemburg mass action was still a means to attain democratic and republican political goals, specifically the universal franchise, democratic elections, the freedom of press and of organization.198 Hence, she clearly defined the mass action as distinct and opposed to the syndicalist conception of an antipolitical or apolitical general strike. Nor did she view mass actions as the unbound release of a blind and elemental force, illogical and irrational.199 What Luxemburg targeted in her pamphlet was the "economist" outlook of German trade unions, which opposed "mass action" as dangerous and risky even for political purposes.200 In fact,

197

Ibid. pp. 203-5. Rosa Luxemburg underlined this point and made it very clear that, in her view, the attainment of a parliamentary political order was the first goal of the Russian revolutionary mass strike. Ibid. p. 158. 199 This was especially distinct from how for instance Georges Sorel viewed the "general strike" at about the same time. For Sorel, the general strike was not very different from intellectuals that perceived in mass action as an instinctive, elemental and emotional outbursts. In his "Reflections on Violence" published in book form in 1908, in France, Sorel argued: "Thanks to these men, we know that the general strike is indeed what I have said: the myth in which socialism is wholly comprised, i.e. a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against modern society. Strikes have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, the deepest and the most moving sentiments that they possess; the general strike groups them all in a coordinated picture and, by bringing them together, gives to each one of them its maximum intensity; appealing to their painful memories of particular conflicts, it colours with an intense life all the details of the composition presented to consciousness. We thus obtain that intuition of socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clearness – and we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously." Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 118. Further, Sorel even endorsed Le Bon's claim about the irrationality of the masses, which was markedly in contradiction with Rosa Luxemburg's confidence in the intellectual capacity of the masses: "G[ustave] Le Bon says that it is a mistake to believe in the revolutionary instincts of the crowd, that their tendencies are conservative, that the whole power of socialism lies in the rather muddled state of mind of the bourgeoisie; he is convinced that the masses will always go to a Caesar. There is a good deal of truth in these judgements, which are founded on a very wide knowledge of history, but the theories of G. Le Bon must be corrected in one respect; they are only valid for societies that lack the conception of class struggle." Ibid. p.124. 200 Spontaneous strikes were increasingly becoming widespread in Germany in 1905, as the class struggle intensified. The German Trade Unions developed in the atmosphere of relative calm of the previous decades and the trade union leadership felt the pressure of mass actions as simply to expensive to bear. The SPD affiliated Free Trade Unions spent close to a third of their total funds collected over sixteen years of existence in 1905. Carl Schorske, Germany Social Democracy The Development Of The Great Schism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 28-33. The trade union leaders were notoriously hostile to any kind of collective action that infringed laws or worse potentially went beyond their controls and gave any initiative to ordinary workers, especially unskilled and precarious masses. Michale Hughes wrote: "For example, Ludwig Rexhauser, head of the printers’ union, opposed any discussion of the mass 198

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she used the Russian mass actions as a rhetorical stick against the German trade union leaders who boasted their organizations' strength and aimed to distance themselves from the political and goals of the party. Luxemburg argued that while on the surface the Russian mass strikes may give the impression of a chaotic jumble of protest strikes, economic strikes, street demonstrations, and various forms of protest actions, their ultimate and clearest expression was the striving for the attainment of political democratic rights. Tracing the history of the strike movement in the Russian empire from late 1890s until its apex in 1905, her narrative concluded that even strikes with the humblest demands were rapidly putting Social Democrats at the helm and had gained political leverage against the Tsarist autocracy, thereby growing and magnetically concentrating around themselves the widest and even the least organized sectors of the society. In contrast, the German trade unions were stricken with what she called a "police materialism": they feared combining economic and political action in fear of provoking the hostility of the Prussian state. Turning the table on the German Social Democratic trade-union bureaucracy, which whined about the inadequacy of the formal organizational preparations for mass political actions, Luxemburg argued that even the unorganized and unionized masses were perfectly capable of defending their material and political interests. She argued against trade union leadership that feared the chaotic outcomes that mass strikes bring, endangering the unions' organizational discipline, actually the trade union leaders were breaking the discipline of the movement with their insistence of defending the SPD's political goals.201 Subordination of the trade unions to the political goals of the political party was not an alien notion for the SPD's official line and the party leadership was wary of centrifugal tendencies inside the union bureaucracy.202 Although Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of the trade unions may

strike because ‘one must not put the knife in the hands of the children; then they will not be able to hurt themselves’." Michael Hughes, "‘The Knife In the Hands of the Children’? Debating the Political Mass Strike and Political Citizenship In Imperial Germany," Labor History, 50:2 (May 2009), p.115. 201 Luxemburg, “Mass Strikes,” pp. 159-162. 202 Kautsky in his "Class Struggle" (1892) (written as an explanatory addendum for the SPD's "Erfurt Program" that was adopted in 1891) explained that the legal, parliamentary and trade union struggles were inseparable. Further, the political struggle and the attainment of political power was defined as the highest goal of the proletariat: "Occasionally some one has attempted to oppose the political struggle to the economic, and declared that the proletariat should give its exclusive attention either to the one or the other. The fact is that the two cannot be separated. The economic struggle demands political rights, and these will not fall from heaven. To secure and maintain them, the most vigorous political action is

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have infuriated the union bureaucracy, it was endorsed by the official theoretician of the party, Karl Kautksy. Many Social Democrats who would otherwise oppose mass strikes in their own countries, supported the Russian revolution because for them Russia itself was a backward country. The mass strike was celebrated by the western Social Democrats as an immature but essentially healthyreaction of a young working class, whose inexperience excused its excesses. More importantly, the revolution was also a relief, since it forced the Tsarist regime, the gendarme of reaction, to yield and accept a constitution. In 1905 and 1906, the excitement and the sympathy for the mass action in Russia was too great for the SPD to condemn mass actions. In 1905, the Jena Congress of the German SPD recognized the mass strike as a weapon of last resort. It was officially added to the political arsenal to be used as a defensive method of struggle in case the reactionary classes attempted to curb political gains of the working class. However, the Social Democratic leaders chose to bury the debate with rubber stamp resolutions. When the trade union leadership, which was hostile to any idea of general strike or mass action, pressed the party leadership to reverse the Congress’ decision, Bebel assured them that the decision did not have any practical consequence.203 However, the implications of the difference in radical left’s enthusiasm and the party leadership’s genuine disinterest to practically accept mass actions caused trouble only years later in 1910, over a debate on the party’s electoral strategy.

necessary. The political struggle is, on the other hand, in the last analysis, an economic struggle. Often, in fact, it is directly and openly economic, as when it deals with tariff and factory laws. The political struggle is merely a particular form of the economic struggle, in fact, its most inclusive and vital form." Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co, 1910), Chapter 5. Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/ch05.htm. During the revisionism debate and in the ensuing struggle with the Trade Union bureaucracy, which aimed to secure autonomy from the party and its political goals, Kautsky even more forcefully emphasized the unity of economic and political struggles of the working class. Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and The Socialist Revolution: 1880-1938 (New York: Verso, 1990), pp.151-153. 203 In the 1906 September, Mannheim Party Congress, Bebel said: "If at Jena I enthusiastically recommended the general strike as an ultimate means of struggle, no word of mine can be taken to mean that I am prepared to recommend one for the coming year....I regard the general strike as the ultima ratio, the last, and, remember, the blood-less instrument of our Party, the weapon which we need all our strength and discipline and self-restraint so to employ, as we think the interests of the Party and the people demand. We cannot yet risk that with our present organization." Quoted in Richard Hostetter, "The S.P.D. and the General Strike as an Anti-War Weapon, 1905-1914," The Historian, Volume 13, Issue 1 (1950), p. 39.

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2.

The Second Stage: 1910 as a Turning Point

1910 was a turning point in the European intellectual world. It was a year of “oedipal revolt” against the “family heads” in several intellectual movements. Alfred Adler a member of Viennese psychoanalytical society, revolted against the authority of Sigmund Freud. Adler protested against Freud’s conservative dualism pitting individuals against society, arguing that desires did not have to be repressed in order to reach a harmonious and lawful society. Contrary to Freudian dualism, Adler argued that aggressive urges and destructive behavior resulted from an abusive and oppressive upbringing hindering harmonious socialization of desires.204 The generational conflict had a more literally oedipal (or Elektra complex) dimension in the British context. There the Pankhurst family leading the suffragette movement around the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was about to be dramatically broken up due to conflict among the family members. Emmeline Pankhurst, the family matriarch, and Sylvia, her younger daughter, were in a deep disagreement over tactical questions: should the WSPU use mass action tactics or individual acts of sacrifice and heroism, like hunger strikes, in order to achieve its goal of women's suffrage? Sylvia, who was working among working-class women in east London, favored mass protest demonstrations. Her mother wanted more individualist tactics combining terrorism and lobbyism, a strange mixture of word and deed but both led by heroic and charismatic individual leaders. Eventually, Sylvia broke from the movement and went her own way to form an exclusively poor women’s suffrage organization.205 The division eventually came to surface on the position to be taken on the issue of the First World War. Sylvia, always more attentive to the plight of the working-class women, resisted the war, eventually embracing communism, whereas her mother became content with a promise of exclusively limited suffrage reserved for upper class women. Emmeline Pankhurst even became fiery proponent of war. Both conflicts found their echoes in the conflict among the two prominent figures of Marxism in Germany. As in England, the question revolved around mass action tactics. And like the crisis in the Viennese psychoanalytic movement, this question had deep roots in the question of passions

204

Berhard Handlbauer, The Freud-Adler Controversy (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998), p. 60. Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire, (London: Pluto Books, 2013), p. 38. 205

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and masses. This fight in Germany found its clearest expression in the polemic between Kautsky and Luxemburg. Rosa Luxemburg was depressed and resigned from intervening in the German politics i n 1907.206 But in 1910, she felt compelled and encouraged by a series of mass

206

This was a result of the SPD leadership's decision to bury the mass action concept in the face of the trade union bureaucracy's opposition to the concept. Paul Frölich, one of the first, and still most important biographer and comrade of Luxemburg wrote: "In February 1906, after having discussed the implications of the mass-strike resolution passed by the Jena Party Congress, the Party Executive and the General Commission of the trade unions made a secret agreement to the effect that the resolution should remain a dead letter. In fact, the trade-union leadership had practically taken over the party, and the Party Congress in Mannheim merely confirmed the general watchword: backwards! Rosa Luxemburg took these developments very seriously. Even in Jena she had felt that the old party leaders held views completely different from her own. The Mannheim Congress made it clear to her that these were not temporary aberrations, and that in future she would have to regard Bebel and the great majority of the leading party cadres as enemies. Replying at the beginning of 1907 to Clara Zetkin, who had expressed anxiety over future party policy, she declared: 'Since my return from Russia, I feel rather isolated... I feel the irresolution and the pettiness of our whole party more glaringly and more painfully than ever before. However, I can’t get so excited about these things as you do, because I have already seen with terrible clarity that these things and these people cannot be changed until the situation becomes completely different, and even then I have coolly reflected on the matter before coming to this conclusion - we shall just have to reckon with the inevitable resistance of such people if we want to lead the masses on. The situation is simply this: August [Bebel], and still more so the others, have completely spent themselves on behalf of parliamentarism and in parliamentary struggles. Whenever anything happens which transcends the limits of parliamentarism, they are completely hopeless, no, even worse than that, they try their best to force everything back into the parliamentary mould, and they will furiously attack as an “enemy of the people” anyone who wants to go beyond these limits. The masses, and still more the great mass of comrades, are inwardly tired of parliamentarism, I feel. They would joyously welcome a fresh breeze in party tactics; however, the old experts (Autoritaten), and even more the upper stratum of opportunist editors, deputies, and trade-union leaders, are a dead weight... As long as it was a question of defending themselves against Bernstein & Co., August & Co. put up with our presence and assistance-since they, after all, launching an offensive against opportunism, then the old ones, together with Ede [Bernstein], Vollmar, and David, stand against us.'" Paul Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), pp. 125-126. Another biographer of Luxemburg, J.P. Nettl also wrote: "In the summer of 1907 Rosa Luxemburg spoke repeatedly of chucking up everything: 'I would move instantly to the south and away from Germany if I had the slightest notion how to earn a living', she wrote to a friend. But the recipient did not take this too literally and neither should we; it was a recurring theme engendered by impatience, frustration, and the temperamental hatred of Germany and German attitudes which was never far below the surface. The disgust with German organization, though real enough, was also culturally fashionable; it was this which lent the Latin- or even Swiss-south the unmerited attraction of simply being different, above all for someone who really believed that she had fallen 'straight out of the Renaissance by mistake' into a most unsuitable century!". Only her new job as the teacher in the party school had distracted her from the boring and gloomy atmosphere of the German politics. J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 388.

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demonstrations for reform towards universal suffrage in Prussia to come forward in defense of mass action.207 Rosa Luxemburg was the main spokesperson for the left-wing in 1910, which wanted to go further than street demonstrations and use more radical tactics, especially the mass strike, for winning a general political reform that would get rid of the class-based voting system. In an article that she sent to the official party organs in March 1910 (titled "What Next?"), she presented an assessmentof the question of the right to vote in Prussia. Accordingly, the ongoing street demonstrations organized for the attainment of the expansion of the voting right to the disenfranchised sections ofthe working class required more than street demonstrations. Further, as the participation and the atmosphere of these demonstrations showed, the masses themselves were willing to take this new step towards a mass strike. She did not appeal to the party leadership, but mainly to the rank-and-file of the party. Consistent with the analysis she developed in 1906, she argued that the leadership of the party and the unions could not by themselves decree the mass action; the party organization and members as a whole had to take the step.208 Not only the official party paper, Vorwarts, but even her erstwhile mentor and ally, Karl Kautsky refused to publish the article in Die Neue Zeit.209

207

What triggered this debate was the collapse of the liberal-conservative government over the question of tax legislation. When, due to the increasing burden of the armaments race, a proposal of direct taxation from the property owning classes was raised, the conservatives representing land-owning interests broke with the liberals. Since direct taxation instead of indirect taxation was a central programatic demand of the SPD, factions inside German liberalism contemplated the possibility of an alliance with the Social Democrats. This was a radical situation in German history since it opened for the first time the possibility for a coalition between bourgeois and working class parties. In exchange of compromise, right-wing Social Democrats began to contemplate the possibility of a reform towards universal and equal male suffrage in Prussia. The SPD ranks reacted to the situation with confusion and divisions. While the party Congress in 1909 welcomed the possibility of an alliance for democratic reform and direct taxation, the left-wing and several centrists, including Kautsky himself, refused the tactical scheme advanced by the right-wing in the party since the taxation in question was for funding the armaments. In any case, encouraged by the developments the Prussian branch of the SPD began to organize mass rallies in early 1910 for suffrage reform. For a detailed discussion of the dispute, see: Schorske, German Social Democracy, pp. 147-196. 208 Rosa Luxemburg, “The Next Step” Dortmunder Arbeiterzeitung, 14-15 March 1910. retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1910/03/15.htm. 209 Kautsky initially praised the article, but after a brief pause, he rejected it. Schorske, The German Social Democracy, p. 182.

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This triggered a series of back-and-forth arguments between Kautsky and Luxemburg, in which Luxemburg criticized the official party organs' editors for censuring the debate as well as Kautsky’s reply,which denied the accusation. The details of the debate have been sufficiently covered elsewhere; however, it is necessary to underline here that more than causing a personal breach between Kautsky and Luxemburg, the debate also revealed the incompatibility of the mass action tactic with the Kautkyian strategy of electoral and legal seizure of power.210 Kautsky's opposition to mass action and mass strikes was not based on an absolute rejection of these open forms of class struggle. He argued that mass actions could have been beneficial in backward countries. In 1905, the mass strikes were successful in Russia because the Russian Empire was the weakest government of the world, its administration was corrupt and in disarray. Even the bourgeoisie and the landowners were critical of the government and called for reform. In contrast to that, the German economy and the state was far advanced, its capital and state were well integrated. Here the proletariat faced a more formidable foe. Further, for Kautsky, the situation of the west European proletarian did not resemble the situation of the Russian proletariat. In western Europe, the working class had a long tradition of struggle through which it built massive and

210

For a discussion of the debate, see: Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and The Socialist Revolution. This personal breach was still important, and it required serious determination and courage for Luxemburg to confront the party leadership and especially her mentor, Kautsky. According to Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg was mentally preparing to sever her ties with the German party in 1910: "She encouraged her friends to learn Russian, 'which will soon be the language of the future'. To Konstantin Zetkin, she wrote repeatedly that he should not take the German situation too seriously; since he was not himself German (he was Russian on his father's side) he could never be contaminated by the political dullness of the Reich... The only means of overcoming her depression was to 'throw myself into the thick of the fight and to drug my suffering heart with a real political set-to'. These words were written in the summer of 1910; the mass-strike agitation, quite apart from its effects on German Social Democracy, had its own stimulating and prophylactic effect on Rosa herself, and she was determined never again to stand outside political controversy." Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg. p. 387. In contrast, for Kautsky, distancing himself publicly from Rosa Luxemburg and the radical left in the party was a step towards reconciling and securing his ties with the right-wing in the party, especially the trade-union leadership. Avilo and Gaido wrote: "In a letter to Ryazanov dated January 16, 1910, Kautsky attributed his break with Luxemburg to the need to distance himself from her extremely unpopular image among union leaders: 'I was irritated to see my influence among union leaders paralyzed by the fact that I was identified with Rosa; I think that in order to have good relations between Marxism and the trade unions it is important to show that on this point there is a big distance between Rosa and me. This question is for me the most important thing'." Paula Avila & Daniel Gaido, "Karl Kautsky and the Russian Revolution of 1905: A Debate on the Driving Forces and the Prospects of the Russian Revolution in the Second International," International Critical Thought, 7 (2017), p. 11.

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strong organizations and carved itself a legal space in politics. However, in Russia (and Poland) the proletariat lacked such maturity. Hence, Kautsky saw in the Russian mass strikes an expression of "primitiveness" that could not be transplanted on to the advanced western proletariat. In short, Kautsky perceived parliamentary and electoral struggle as a more mature method of political struggle.211 Rosa Luxemburg replied to this "east vs west" dichotomy with a devastating critique in a polemical pamphlet that she wrote the same year titled Theory and Practice (Die Theorie und Die Praxis). With her witty polemical style, she demonstrated with reference to Kautsky's own articles showing how Kautsky himself (especially to his Road to Power published in 1909) defended the mass strike as a method of struggle not only appropriate, but increasingly necessary also in western Europe, but also increasingly unavoidable, given the intensification of the class struggle in western Europe.212 She further argued that, rather than being a product of "backward" Russian conditions,

211

Karl Kautsky, "Eine Neue Strategie" Die Neue Zeit, (28. Jahrgang, 2. Band, 1910). Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1910/xx/strategie.htm. 212 Rosa Luxemburg explained in detail the change in Kautsky’s perspective: "In his Social Revolution, we read that we will enter a whole lengthy period of revolutionary struggles in which the political mass strike will “surely play a great role” (p.54). The entire pamphlet The Road to Power is devoted to the depiction of the same perspective. Yes, here we have already entered into the revolutionary period. Here Comrade Kautsky reviews the “political testament” of Friedrich Engels and declares the time of the “strategy of attrition,” which consists of legal exploitation of the given state groundwork, to be already past: 'At the beginning of the ’90s, I acknowledged that a peaceful development of proletarian organizations and the proletarian class struggle on the given state groundwork would bring the proletariat farthest forward in the situation of that time. And so you cannot reproach me with a craving for the intoxication of revolution and radicalism when my observation of the present situation leads me to the view that conditions have fundamentally changed since the beginning of the ’90s, that we have every reason to assume we have entered into a period of struggles for the state institutions and state power: struggles which under manifold changes of fortune could be drawn out for decades, whose forms and duration are unforeseeable at present, but which will most probably bring about a considerable increase in the proletariat’s power in the foreseeable future, if not indeed its total power in Western Europe.' And further: 'But in this universal instability, the immediate tasks of the proletariat are clearly given. We have already developed them. There will be no further progress without altering the state groundwork on which we wage the struggle. To most energetically strive for democracy in the Reich, but also in the individual states – specifically in Prussia and Saxony – that is its first task in Germany; its first international task is the struggle against geopolitics and militarism.' As clearly visible as these problems are the means at our command for their solution. To those previously employed is now added the mass strike, which we had already theoretically accepted at the beginning of the ’90s, and whose applicability under favorable circumstances has since then been repeatedly demonstrated. [The Road to Power, pp. 53, 101. My emphasis. R.L.]" Rosa Luxemburg, Theory and Practice (News&Letters, April 1980). Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1910/theory-practice/ch05.htm.

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the mass strike was in fact the expression of the most advanced sectors of the Russian society: its modern industrial proletariat, which, despite being a minority in Russia, was part of the contemporary world working class. Thus, for Luxemburg, its mass strike in 1905 echoed similar mass strikes that happened in the US or western Europe.213 While the polemic between Luxemburg and Kautsky opened a clear breach between the two (at least at a personal level), both still seemed to agree on the political goal of the socialist movement: the acquisition of democratic rights for the proletarian masses inside the existing system of bourgeois parliamentarism. In Luxemburg's polemic, it was not entirely clear why a new historic period necessitated more radical methods, specifically mass strikes, in the class struggle, or even a clear and precise definition of this new period. Further, Luxemburg did not fully elaborate at this stage why the leadership of the social democratic movement in Germany was more and more hesitant to embrace radical mass actions despite the conditions demanded them to do so. Eventually Rosa Luxemburg found herself totally isolated in the leadership of the German party. Kautsky received several letters supporting his position from the leaders of other parties (among others the Belgian and the Austrian parties).214 Many of her opponents in important positions of the social democratic movement, without showing a serious effort to understand and analyze the debate, attributed Luxemburg's criticisms against her old tutor, to her femininity, rigidity and sectarianism. In a letter to Kautsky, Trotsky ensured that the whole Russian party was backing him in the debate and attributed Luxemburg's defense of the mass action to her “typically Russian” east-European sentiments.215 Only the radical left congregated in Bremen and Hamburg, in particular Anton Pannekoek and Karl Radek, staunchly defended Rosa Luxemburg.While Luxemburg gradually retreated from the mass action debate in 1911, Pannekoek (among others) began a

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Ibid. Chapter 4. Adler in a letter to Bebel insulted Luxemburg called her a "poisonous bitch," "clever as a monkey but completely lacking any sense of responsibility": "Sieh die liebe Rosa an - Ich habe ja Gemenheit genug in mir um einige Schadenfreude daran zu haben, was Karl jetzt an seiner Freundin erlebtaber es ist wirklich arg - das giftige Luder wird noch sehr viel Schaden anrichten, um so grosseren, weil sie blitzgescheit ist, warend ihr jedes Gefuhl fur Verantwortung vollstandig felt u. ihr einziges Motiv eine geradezu perverse Rechthaberei ist." Adler an Bebel, 5 August 1910, in (ed.) Friedrich Adler, Victor Adler Briefwechsel mit August Bebel und Karl Kautsky (Wien: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1954), p. 510. 215 Leo Trotsky to Karl Kautsky, 21 July 1910, IISH, D XXII, 68. According to Nettl, this orientalist-nationalist denigration of the pro-mass strike position as "Russian" originally belonged to Trotsky, which later on used by Kautsky in the polemic, Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 433-4. 214

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relentless frontal attack on the new centrist position that Kautsky and the right-wing German tradeunion leadership took, an attack which did not cease until 1914. This opened the final third stage of the debate.

3.

The Third Stage: 1910-1914

This final stage of the mass action debate is arguably one of the most important (if not the most important) and most interesting debates of the Second International, yet it has only received scant attention in the historiography.216 In this final stage, the debate initially started with Anton Pannekoek's retort to Karl Kautsky's polemic against Luxemburg, published in Die Neue Zeit. However, the debate continued and soon spilled beyond the bounds of the Die Neue Zeit and became part of an inner-party struggle. During the struggle, the concept of mass action became the symbol around which the left-radicals mobilized until the First World War put a definitive end to the polemic.217 Pannekoek published several articles attacking Kautsky’s position and in defense of mass action between 1910 and 1914. A renowned Dutch astronomer and a member of the Dutch Social Democratic Party (which was itself formed after a left split from the main party of the Dutch Social Democratic party, Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij or the Social Democratic Workers Party, SDAP), Pannekoek soon emerged as an eloquent defender of the tactic of mass action. In early 1900s, he published various works on different philosophical, ethical, scientific and political aspects of Marxism, which were translated into several languages, works that earned him a

216

The biographers of Kautsky and Pannekoek presented fairly detailed summaries of the debate: Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and The Socialist Revolution; Serge Bricianer, Pannekoek and The Workers' Councils (Saint Louis: Telos Press, 1978); John Gerber, Anton Pannekoek and the Socialism of Workers' SelfEmancipation, 1873-1960 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989); Marinus Antonius M. Boekelman, The Development of the Social and Political Thought of Anton Pannekoek, 1873-1960: From Social Democracy to Council Communism, (Department of Political Economy, University of Toronto: 1980, Unpublished Dissertation). Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, also presented an interesting summary and evaluation of the debate. 217 From 1909-10 until the First World War Pannekoek wrote extensively on the question of mass action. An extensive but non-exhaustive list of his articles has been collected in "Anton Pannekoek Online Archive": http://aaap.be/Pages/Theme-Mass-Strike-Or-Trade-Unions.html.

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reputation as a leading Marxist in the international movement as well as an invitation from the German Party to teach in the prestigious SPD Party School in Berlin. Like Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek was also a "pupil" of Kautsky and, like Luxemburg, his teaching position in the SPD party school was secured by Kautsky despite the party leadership's protests. 218 It was the 19021903 mass strikes in the Netherlands that made him give up his career as an academic and immerse himself into professional political work.219 The spontaneous development of the strike in Netherlands and the 1905 revolution in Russia which followed it convinced Pannekoek that a new era of revolutionary confrontations was opening up and moved him, like his comrades Henrietta RolandHolst and Herman Gorter, to the left of the SDAP. However, after moving to Germany in 1906, like Luxemburg, he became quickly disillusioned with the direction of the German party. Living in the detached middle-class bubble of the German SPD party elite (composed of the trade union leaders, parliamentarians, party editors, and full time party functionaries), he grew alienated from the leadership over time.220 On the one hand, like Luxemburg, he relied on the party for his livelihood; on the other hand, this bond became more of a burden, as he grew politically and theoretically critical of this leadership's conformist legal opposition to the German Government. 221

218

Gerber, Anton Pannekoek and the Socialism of Workers' Self-Emancipation, p. 43. The Prussian police barred him from teaching in Germany in 1907. 219 Pannekoek, though energized by a desire to struggle for the defense of Marxist positions was temperamentally inclined towards a scholarly rather than a "fighter" posture. He wrote to Kautsky that he could best serve as a teacher and that he wanted more to "teach, learn, explain and enlighten wherever they want to hear me." Boekelman, Pannekoek, p.101 and Gerber, Pannekoek, p. 44. 220 Pannekoek later wrote in his memoirs that in Berlin they were virtually isolated from the workers in the party: "... we only saw the notables but not the workers themselves. We spoke to writers, editors, party secretaries and executives, and parliamentarians... but it was as if we lived among the gods... and not among the people. It gave the whole movement an aura of abstraction and rendered a sterility to all thought and argumentation. The world we lived in was a world apart... not the real world. I always felt this was ungratifying, as if I lived... in a phantom world." quoted in Boekelman, Pannekoek, p. 104. Also see: Gerber, Pannekoek, p.72. 221 Between 1908 and 1914, Pannekoek earned his income writing for the party press as a freelance writer. His weekly columns earned him a respectable income and a reputation for his clear and digestible on diverse topics ranging from philosophy to science (evolution). After 1911, the focus of his articles shifted more and more to the question of mass action, unions, party problems, imperialism, and war. At least 26 German and Dutch daily papers published his essays. However, his works have been translated to other languages, several of his essays were translated to English and Russian in this period. In total, he wrote 336 such "press-korrenspondenz" articles. Hans Manfred Bock, "Anton Pannekoek in der Vorkriegs-Sozialdemokratie" in Jahrbuch Arbeiterbewegung Bd.3 (Fischer Tashenbuch Verlag, 1975), pp.126-129.

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Unlike Luxemburg, however, his isolation inside the Social Democratic party apparatus ended when he left Berlin and moved to Bremen. There he joined the Bremen local party branch where, at the invitation of local rank-and-file party radicals, he became a teacher in the party school. Having severed his ties with the party elite, he established closer ties with the militants at the party base, rank-and-file organizers, and left-wing workers. Moving to Bremen was clearly a turning point in Pannekoek's radicalization.222 His articles became sharper, his subjects more concrete, and his style bolder. For instance, during the Bremen dock strike of 1910 and the 1913 wildcat strikes, he became a defender of the striking workers against the union officials, criticized the union bureaucracy, which he argued resembled capitalist managers in terms of their lifestyles and world outlook rather than those of workers and hence they were fearful of militant working class action.223 Being closer to the workers ranks and party militants encouraged him to more boldly and openly articulate his rejection of the union discipline, which, according to Pannekoek, in effect reflected and reproduced the capitalist work discipline.224 When Karl Radek became a contributor to the local Bremer Burger-Zeitung in 1910,225 the Bremen SPD branch was transformed into one of the most formidable centers of the left-radicals inside the German party. Among its ranks were capable intellectuals and a militant working class base; it became effectively a sort of informal political fraction within the SPD. With a solid backing from the working-class militants, a radical paper at its disposal, and a genuine theoretical perspective with an original analysis of world historical situation, this faction took up the battle against Kautsky in 1910 and 1911 where Luxemburg left off. From this point onwards, the debate turned into a radical assault on not only the right-wing of the party and union bureaucracy, but also and mainly against Kautsky and the center. Hence, it should be underlined here that at this point, the mass action debate was no longer an abstract debate between the party's intellectuals, a debate inside Kautsky's circle, between him and his younger pupils, but an expression of a fractional

222

Boekelman, Pannekoek, p. 105. Anton Pannekoek, "Gewerkschaftliche Demokratie" in Zeitungskorrespondenz, Nr. 150, 17. Dezember 1910. Also see: Gerber, Pannekoek, pp.83-4. 224 Karl-Ernst Moring, Die Sozial-demokratische Partei in Bremen 1890-1914: Reformismus und Radikalismus in der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Bremens (Hannover: Verlag Fur Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1968), pp. 137-140. 225 Warren Lerner, Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Stanford University Press, 1970), p. 23. 223

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debate between the radical base of the SPD represented by one of its strongest sections against the center in the party leadership.226 In this new phase, Kautsky develop no new arguments other than those that he had already advanced against Luxemburg in the previous round of the debate.227 Instead, Kautsky consolidated his opposition to the mass action tactic: he formulated more clearly a dualistic conception of mass action as a backwards and primitive form of class struggle, as opposed to his Erfurtian "dual pillar" (parliamentary political struggle and trade unionist economic struggle) as the more advanced form. In his earlier polemic against Luxemburg, Kautsky had already hinted at this duality, arguing that the backward mass actions of 1905 could not be a model of action for advanced western Europe. From 1911, he carried this logic to its conclusion by embracing the pseudo-psychological theories of Le Bon: the masses were chaotic and destructive, easily open to suggestions. They could hardly achieve constructive results and complex political tasks were beyond their capabilities. However, with the emergence of the complex organizational structures of the working class in late nineteenth century in western Europe, this primitive aspect of the mass action was overcome and gave way to mass parliamentary parties and trade unions. From then on, specialists of the socialist movement were defending and advancing the working class' interests in a systematic and orderly manner in all spheres of working class daily life. The supreme political expression of the Erfurtian program's success was the continuing growth of the Social Democraticparties in the democratic parliaments. For Kautsky, this was a consequence of the capitalist development. As capitalism advanced and the socialist movement grew together with it, a "revolution" gradually matured and in fact began happening. This revolution was not as spectacular as Pannekoek (whom Kautsky denounced as "anarchistic" and "childish"228) expected or hoped for, but it was more orderly, peaceful and legal, since it was led by the extraordinary organizational machinery of social democracy and its leading intellectuals and specialists.

226

Moring's, Die Sozial-demokratische Partei in Bremen 1890-1914 presented a detailed analysis of the growth of the Bremen SPD as a bastion of the radical left. 227 According to Bricianer "the controversy [between Luxemburg and Kautsky] in its entirety covers 93 pages of the Neue Zeit, as against 116 of the Kautsky-Pannekoekoek controversy." Bricianer, Pannekoek and the Workers' Councils, p.121, fn. 10. 228 Karl Kautsky, "Der Jungste Radikalismus," Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 1 (1912/13), pp. 436–446. It is interesting to note here the "youth radicalism" accusation was first leveled against Pannekoek in 1912, an accusation which was to be repeated eight years with exact same words, this time by Lenin.

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The radical-left in Bremen responded to Kautsky by overturning this projection of a peaceful historical evolution on its head. According to Radek, an expert of the radical-left on the subject, capitalism was pregnant with a chaotic future in the 20th century. 229 Rather than a peaceful expansion that could enable the further development of the social democratic institutions, he envisioned militarism, an arms race, colonial competition, and tariff walls as a future that pushed capitalist states to embrace more oppressive and violent actions against the working class. According to Radek, what made it difficult for the leaders of the social democratic movement to comprehend this change in the ruling class attitude was its conflation of imperialism with the relative peaceful colonial expansion of European states in the 19th century. The unrivaled expansion of the British Empire created the impression that imperialism was a particular characteristic of the English capitalism.230 In contrast, twentieth century imperialism had a radically different character. First, its historic tendency was not merely to serve the interests of a fraction of the national capital (let alone feudal classes) in a given capitalist country. It served the interests of the whole national capital, merged and unified around finance capital. In contrast to the earlier period, in the new imperialist epoch, imperialist competition did not serve the purpose of extracting exotic commodities to be consumed in the markets of the metropole or the acquisition of new territories as outlets for the export of the European surplus population. In the new epoch, the European capital needed colonial markets to export excess capital in the form of debt, especially to underdeveloped but nominally independent countries like China and the Ottoman Empire, which used the funds thus acquired to purchase arms, railroad infrastructure and military equipment from the imperialist debtor countries.231 As a result, Radek argued, industrial capitalists producing arms and machines also had an interest in the imperialist policy just as did finance capital.232

229

Radek developed the Bremen radical-left's position in a series of pamphlets and essays. The most important of these are: Der deutsche Imperialismus und die Arbeiterklasse, (Bremen: Buchhandlung der Bremer Bürger-Zeitung, March 1912), "Zu unserem Kampfe gegen den Imperialismus", Die Neue Zeit, 30, 2, (May 1912): 194–99, 233–41, 'Wege und Mittel im Kampfe gegen den Imperialismus', Bremer Bürger-Zeitung, (July 1912). 230 Karl Radek, "Our Struggle against Imperialism" (May 1912) in Richard B. Day & Daniel Gaido eds., Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 543. 231 Karl Radek, "German Imperialism and the Working Class" (April 1912) in Day & Gaido, Discovering Imperialism, pp. 535-7. 232 This perspective was a criticism of the hitherto existing social democratic parliamentary strategy. The traditional tactic of the Social Democrats relied on using the divisions inside the national ruling classes.

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As a political consequence of this new imperialism, the traditional social democratic parliamentary tactic (based on pressuring governments by voting against military budgets and increasing taxation in parliaments) became increasingly ineffective. This strategy assumed the existence of a conflict of interest between the liberal-industrial bourgeoisie that favored free-trade and the expansionist aristocratic classes. The Social Democrats had traditionally hoped to increase the breach between these classes by supporting the liberal interests and the free trade policy. 233 Yet, the unification of national capital around finance capital made military production favorable to industrial capitalists as well. Tariff walls also benefited it, by consolidating its hegemony in home markets. Further, armaments race itself created a stable and growing market for capital.234 For the left-radicals, the economic fusion of national capital and the state also found its expression in politics, especially in the eclipse of parliamentary and trade union organizations and the rise of the bureaucratic and technocratic administrations.235 The liberal parties' traditional

Accordingly, the Social Democrats defended a decrease in indirect taxes and free trade, which they assumed was also in the best interest of the "progressive" and liberal industrial capitalists as opposed to the finance and commercial capital. For a more detailed description of the perspective of the traditional Social Democrats, see Ursula Katz, "Karl Kautsky und Abrustungskontroverse in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, 1911-12," International Review of Social History, Volume 11, Issue 2 (August 1966). pp. 197-227. 233 As opposed to the free trade in Britain, in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Bulgaria and Romania protective import duties rose gradually after 1870s following the decline of the global grain prices. These continued to rise as a general trend in continental Europe, until 1900s. Certainly, the European governments were protecting the interests of the landowning aristocrats, but in economic terms, these aristocratic estates were already becoming capitalists producing for the home market. Most importantly, the freedom from serfdom and feudal bondage relations, turned the land owner-peasant relation into a capitalist and worker relation. Richard Evans, The Pursuit of Power, p. 858, pp.868-870. European aristocrats preserved their distinctive sense of class identity and through their (shrinking, but yet still existing) privileges, but economically and politically, the distance separating them from the bourgeoisie decreased as a general trend throughout the last two or three decades before 1914. 234 Rosa Luxemburg, in her Accumulation of Capital, partially built on this perspective arguing that militarist spending itself became an outlet for capital. The state was a reliable and constant purchaser of arms and potentially shored up the domestic economy. Thus, while the state military expenditure increased the tax burden over the working class, it unified different factions of the ruling class, both the military aristocratic elites and the traditionally liberal and hitherto pacifist industrialist classes. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 2.” (London: Verso Books, 2015), ebook: “Chapter 32. Militarism in the Sphere of Capital Accumulation”. 235 Radek wrote in 1912: "What scandalised Kautsky most in our position is that it describes the situation with the formula: Here imperialism – there socialism; that it sees in imperialism the last phase of dying capitalism; that it rejects all illusions about the possibility of reforming imperialism; that it sees a major task of the working class in organising mass-actions against imperialist practice at moments when it is

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support to resist expensive standing armies, armaments and costly bureaucracy was even problematic in the 19th century. Radek argued that, even in the English case where liberalism was arguably strongest in Europe, liberal defense of limited armaments and free trade leaned on the privilege of British colonial possessions that gave a competitive edge to English industrial capitalin the world market, as colonies provided it with cheap raw materials. If a parliamentary strategy to oppose imperialism was problematic in the 19th century, it was impossible in the 20th century.236 Such a strategy dismissed the rise of executive power over the legislative and the increasing importance of discipline that the imperialist competition demanded and imposed over various competing factions of national capital. Left-radicals saw the growth of bureaucracy as a modern phenomenon, a product of the expansion of the modern capitalist state, an expression of the rise of the imperialist state and finance capital and not a backward remnant of absolutism.237 Luxemburg later ridiculed Kautsky for both defending "specialization" in the name of progress and expecting state bureaucracy to shrink as capitalism further developed. 238 It is also necessary to note here that left-radicals were not breaking a radically new ground in their criticism of the Social Democratic leadership as old-fashioned for their confidence in liberal conception of progress and its capacity to limit militarist and bureaucratic expansion of state. Max Weber, a liberal sociologist (who had an unconcealed hostility towards Marxism and especially radicals like

really stirring the masses." Karl Radek, "Ways and Means in the Struggle Against Imperialism," in Day & Gaido, Discovering Imperialism, p. 613. 236 Rosa Luxemburg made a similar observation on the decline of parliamentarism in Europe as early as 1904, however without linking this with the rise of imperialism: "The perfected feudal-bourgeois compromise has, even from the historical standpoint, made parliamentarism into a rudiment, an organ deprived of all function, and, with compelling logic, has also produced all the streaking features of parliamentary decline today. So long as the class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the feudal monarchy lasts, its natural expression is the open party struggle in parliament. But when the compromise has been perfected, bourgeois party struggles in parliament are useless. The conflict of interest among the various groups of the dominant bourgeois-feudal reaction are no longer settled in parliamentary trials of strength, but in the form of string-pulling in the parliamentary back-rooms. What remains of open bourgeois parliamentary struggles is no longer class and party conflicts, but at most, in backward countries such as Austria, brawls between nationalities, i.e., between cliques; their appropriate parliamentary form is the scuffle, the scandal." Rosa Luxemburg, "Social Democracy and Parliamentarism", Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung, 5-6 June 1904. Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/06/05.htm. 237 Karl Radek, "German Imperialism and the Working Class" in Day & Gaido, Discovering Imperialism, p. 533. 238 Rosa Luxemburg, "Perspectives and Projects" (1915). Ibid. pp. 850-3.

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Luxemburg) also saw it impossible to a return to a peaceful era of liberalism and saw in the growing power of bureaucracy a modern tendency of contemporary capitalism.239 Further, for the left-radicals, the simultaneity between the rising hegemony of the bureaucracy, which they viewed as an extension of imperialism, and the rise of party functionaries inside the social democratic movement were symmetrical developments reflecting different facets of capitalism’s decline. Both had their roots in the simultaneous rise of the "new middle class" in declining capitalism. Pannekoek had already explored this new social stratum's rise in his 1909 pamphlet titled Die taktischen Differenzen in der Arbeiterbewegung (The Tactical Differences in the Workers' Movement) published immediately prior to the onset of his debate with Kautsky. According to Pannekoek, in the new imperialist epoch, the bourgeoisie retreated as a class in the face of new insurmountable challenges and contradictions. As a minority class, it could not simply face the technical and intellectual challenges of capitalism on its own. Bureaucracy and a new educated "middle class" filled the vacuum in the political and economic administration thus formed. This stratum, however, was not a class in and of itself. Economically, the educated middle stratum and bureaucracy was a wage-earning class, hence technically they belonged to the proletariat. However, politically, this new middle class took increasingly important roles in the administration of capitalist companies and the state, holding ideological and practical functions that made it politically closer to the bourgeoisie. This social layer's educational background was its capital. It was what gave its members their social positions, which led the new middle-class elements to perceive their social status as the product of individual successes or failures. Middle-class people inclined to see the world as ruled by ideas, they saw personal merit and intelligence as historically determinant subjective forces, in contrast to the proletariat that saw the world as determined by material circumstances and not by individuals' wills. Hence, this new, rising strata and the several layers

239

David Beetham wrote, "Even a liberal such as Max Weber was compelled to admit that there was little similarity between the small-scale competitive capitalism of the classical bourgeois period, and the cartellized, bureaucratized systems of production and labour control of his own day, at least in respect of their implications for political freedom. 'It is ridiculous in the extreme', he wrote in his 1905 study of the prospects for bourgeois democracy in Russia, 'to ascribe to modern advanced capitalism …any affinity with “democracy” or even “freedom” (in any sense of the word). All the forms of development are excluded which in the West put the strong economic interests of the possessing classes in the service of the movement for bourgeois liberty.'" David Beetham, “Civil Society: Market Economy and Democratic Polity” in Peter Burnell and Peter Calvert, eds., Civil Society in Democratization (London: Frank Cass, 2004), p. 79.

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that constituted it (intellectuals, salaried employees, civil servants), lacked a coherent class identity and solidarity that would be necessary in the decisive, coming battles between the major classes of the society. Thus, Pannekoek argued, while the lower ranks of the "new middle class" was prone to a milder, "revisionist" kind of socialism out of resentment of its lowly position, the upper ranks of it inclined to more reactionary bourgeois ideologies.240 For Pannekoek, the divisions over the tactical questions inside the socialist movement found its roots in the growing prevalence of this social layer in the leadership positions of the Social Democratic institutions. Social Democracy was not immune to class conflict within its own organizations, nor was it immune to the influence of non-proletarian ideologies.241 Inside the SPD, the growing influence of the new middling social layer was represented by full-time party officials, union bureaucrats, parliamentarians, and managers of the numerous cooperatives that were attached to the party. Its particular culture, its individualistic aspirations, its pseudo-scientific theories had a crippling effect on the party. Here again, Pannekoek echoed the sentiments and resentments of the radical left rank-and-file party militants. The memoirs of Paul Frölich present an illuminating direct account of this experience. Frölich was a militant party cadre, who worked as an editor in several German SPD party papers until he ended up in Bremen and joined the radicalleft in the local party. He actively took part in the Leipzig socialist movement as a worker in the Leipziker Volkszeitung's editorial offices. Because his parents were long time party members, he had been familiar with the local party scene from his childhood. According to Frölich, the local party in Leipzig was controlled by a secret apparatus (called the "corpora") of party members within the official party. This clandestine circle was a remnant of the old habits from the antisocialist laws period, which kept the party in the underground until 1890. However, according to Frölich, over the next two decades, this old clandestine apparatus took a wholly new function and came to represent a sort of labor bureaucracy within the party, controlling its functions over the heads of the party base and the masses of working class by 1910. Frölich wrote: “As well as the party, the Corpora dominated all other workers' organizations: trade unions, cooperatives, sickness funds, etc. When I was co-opted into this secret organization..., the trade unions had partly escaped this tutelage, but were still subject to it on particularly

240

Anton Pannekoek, "The Tactical Differences" in Bricianer ed., Pannekoek and the Workers' Councils, pp. 107-111. 241 Ibid. p. 115.

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important matters. At the general assemblies of the cooperatives, on the other hand, the reports of committees and supervisory boards were first of all presented to the Corpora, subjected to rigorous criticism, motions decided here for the general assembly, and only then voted through. This was of course also the case with the election of the executive and supervisory board. The management of the state sickness funds, too - which was basically in the hands of workers' representatives - was subject to this control. The employment of staff: cooperative shopkeepers, secretaries, often even lower functions, was decided by the Corpora... This was a way to provide jobs for those comrades who, on account of their political or trade-union activity, had been dismissed by their employer and placed on the blacklist. Workers' organizations that initially had no great importance for the movement as a whole generally stood under the influence of particular party comrades. If one of them became a mass movement, then at least its central leadership automatically came under the control of the Corpora, as with the sports associations for example. Its rule was almost unlimited, in many fields even beyond the Leipzig district.”242

Frölich argued that these older party officers were all convinced socialists. Many belonged to the generation that remembered the times when Marx and Lassalle were alive. However, they had succumbed to the bureaucratic routine brought by the incremental advance of the party's Erfurtian, reformist tactics after 1890. Eventually, they themselves became entangled in the burgeoning party apparatus, becoming part of it as functionaries and semi-bureaucrats. Over time, party positions that were given to the blacklisted militants as a show solidarity turned into soft jobs with better pay. This situation, in turn, generated a spirit of idleness and a sense among the older generation party officials that hard fought battles were a thing of the past. Frölich continued: "The five hundred people who had the Leipzig party so firmly in their hands were the older generation. Their major achievement for the workers' movement, which justified their position of power, rested above all on routine. The general condition of the class and their own social position formed their nature. When Rosa Luxemburg spoke to them of the unavoidability of major economic and political upheavals, they were convinced of this. But this only affected their heads and did not go any deeper. The experience of their whole working life showed them the steady rise of the working class, a far from negligible chain of successes on the part of the party, and despite their intellect, in the depths of their consciousness this chain continued - through to the decisive electoral victory. The majority of them were employed in the workers' movement, with a secure existence somewhat above the general proletarian level. The joke about them ran: 'For them the social question is solved.' They had an unconscious need for 'peace', for peaceful progress along established lines. They wanted to 'continue the old victorious tactics'. One factor particularly encouraged this tendency, the large number of branch managers of the cooperative stores. It was they in particular who were the butt of the discontent. I can still hear the cry that one comrade who was heartily ged up repeated a dozen times after a party meeting in the Volkshaus: 'Always these greedy shopkeepers!'"243

242 243

Paul Frölich, In the Radical Camp: A Political Autobiography, 1890-1921 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), p. 72. Ibid. pp. 73-74.

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For the radical-leftists militants like Frölich or theoreticians like Pannekoek, these functionaries represented an ageing, securely positioned, small upper layer of the working class and middle-class intellectuals. Their material interests drove them to the relative stability of tradeunion and parliamentary tactics of the social democracy, which belonged to the relatively peaceful era of capitalist development of 1890s.244 Pannekoek argued that in contrast to the daily routines represented by this new bureaucracy, mass action tactics offered a concrete path to the future, a path arising from the proletarian class struggle. In contrast to parliamentary and union methods, which kept the masses of workers in a passive position and gave the initiative to an increasingly narrow stratum of official party specialists, intellectuals and bureaucrats, mass actions activated and mobilized the whole working class. Unlike the Social Democratic parties and the unions of 1890s, which were dominated by skilled artisanal workers, in the mass actions of the new century, women, immigrant workers, and working-class youth, all sections that had been previously excluded, were drawn into active political life. Pannekoek criticized Kautsky for dismissing these sections of the class as irrelevant since his Erfurtian strategy did not give any initiative or role to them as historical agents in the class struggle.245 According to Pannekoek, Kautsky had become too rigid to comprehend the class character of the masses in action, seeing in them only a gray mass, almost a mass of lumpenproletariat.246 In a sense, for Pannekoek, Kautsky's resistance to accept the growing influence of the masses in politics, reflected the paranoid anxiety of the middle classes, a fear of the loss of class status,

244

According to Pannekoek, just as the proletarian "instinct," which was formed in the actual daily experience of the whole class and drove it mass actions, SPD leaderships "instinctive" resistance to this new method was born out of its own experience. Its behavior was shaped by the habit of daily parliamentary tactics and bureaucratic habits. These functionaries excelled in their positions as negotiators with the representatives of the capital in unions, bureaucracy, parliaments or in courts. Yet, Pannekoek argued, proletariat only submitted to these forms out of weakness. Only after the defeat of the 1848 Revolutions and 1871 Paris Commune, did the socialist movement grudgingly realized its relative weakness. Hence, it adopted these forms as an expression of a patient strategy realizing its own numeric weakness. Anton Pannekoek, "Der Instikt der Massen," Bremer Bürger-zeitung, 24 August 1912. 245 Anton Pannekoek, "Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics" (1912) in Duncan A. Smart, ed., Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1978), p. 55. 246 Ibid. pp. 53-7.

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the desire to cling on to passing minor privileges, and a narcissism born of the small differences that separated the intellectuals from the working masses.247 In response to Kautsky's claim that mass action could only be destructive and serve destructive goals, Pannekoek accepted this argument, but contextualized it in the wider historical context that gave birth to the mass actions. According to Pannekoek, the crucial issue was imperialism and the role of the state in the imperialist period. In this period, the state’s functions fulfilled the militaristic and violent needs of imperialist capitalism. Mass actions, in contrast, represented a healthy and necessary destructive historical tendency. The state apparatus had to be dismantled and abolished, for it was approaching a point where the state as an instrument of class rule would have no progressive historical role left to play. As Pannekoek wrote: "Hitherto, the progress of the class struggle has been largely due to parliamentary and trade union action, not through direct political conflict with the state. Basically, the battles have been no more than vanguard skirmishes, while the main strength remains uncommitted on both sides. In tomorrow's battles for power, the two classes will have to use their most powerful weapons and draw upon their most effective sources of strength: without such a confrontation there can be no decisive changes in the balance of forces. Faced with a ruling class ready to use bloody repression, the proletariat will resort to mass action in its simplest form, public meetings and street marches, and pass on from these to the most powerful action of all, the mass strike... However, battle must begin again, sooner or later. On the one hand, the government is trying to take back from the masses the rights it was forced to give to them and which are the sources of proletarian power; on the other hand, the masses can declare this war at an end only when they hold the keys to state power... The conflict will cease only when final victory has been won, when the state organization has been completely destroyed. The majority organization will then have proved its superiority by the fact that it has annihilated the organization of the ruling minority."248

The defense of the destruction of the state was radical enough to incite Kautsky’s accusation of anarchism. But perhaps even worse for Kautsky was that Pannekoek was provocatively vague about the organizational form the mass actions should or would take. For Pannekoek, this

247

Kautsky on the other hand was confident that the "new middle class" was a growing progressive social force, and it would support the working class in decisive historical conflicts. Based on a mistaken analysis of the 1912 Reichstag Elections in Germany, in which the SPD received 34% of the popular votes, Kautsky attributed the success in the elections to the support of the "new middle class". However, in 1912 the majority of the social group, which Kautsky dubbed as the "new middle class" actually voted for the right-wing parties instead of Social Democratic candidates, despite the electoral alliance between the middle class Progressive Party and the SPD. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905-1912, pp. 233-4. 248 Anton Pannekoek, "Massenaktion und Revolution," first published in die Neue Zeit. No: XXX (1912). The above English translation is from Bricianer, Pannekoek, p. 125.

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organizational and formal aspect, so central to Kautsky's reasoning, was secondary to the content of the mass action. Despite Kautsky's accusations of anarchism, he adamantly held on to his conceptual separation between the external, organizational forms and the "spiritual" content of the class action.Throughout the debate, Pannekoek emphasized that organization was not merely a formal structure but represented a culture of action. Hence, he emphasized the goals and directions to which mass actions would historically lead. Thus, he did not attempt to present an a priori theoretical formula and was content with the vagueness of the formal organizational aspect of the question. For him, only the future would shape the concrete organizational expression of mass actions. As a Marxist who came to socialism by reading the strongly Hegelian dialectics of Dietzgen, Pannekoek was confident that action should and would precede theory. For him the primary issue was to acknowledge mass action as the active current of the general historical trend. While he was almost deliberately vague on the organizational form of the mass actions, Pannekoek was more precise on the role the socialist party had to play in the mass actions. In one of his last articles in his polemic with Kautsky, "Partei und Masse" (1914), he elaborated on this point. There he observed that since the collapse of the electoral reform movement in 1910-11, a mutually reinforced stasis had gripped both the masses and the party. On the one hand, the party leaders and theoreticians were complaining about the apathy of the masses, their unwillingness to act. And yet paradoxically, they console themselves with the fatalistic and abstract belief that once the material conditions force them, the masses would act to win their political rights. 249 On the other hand, Pannekoek argued, the masses were expecting the party leadership to take the first initiative. Social Democracy had had an immense success in organizing proletarian masses (at this point the party had more than one million members). By joining the party, the individual workers effectively lent their initiative to the party, which he lamented remained immobile. Pannekoek argued that this conundrum could not be resolved by appealing to socialist leaders and uthem to be

249

In a letter to Adler, Kautsky wrote: "It is not the ‘masses, but almost exclusively the intellectuals who preach aggressive mass action. The workers I spoke with have a very different view. This is also confirmed by the reports presented to the party conference. With the exception of Stuttgart, things are pretty calm everywhere... Luxemburg is now giving lectures here on imperialism and militarism, which are poorly attended, 400 to 500 people at most. Others, however, are no better. Even meetings of the unemployed are empty. There is a general apathy. And they want to preach the mass strike!" Kautsky an Adler, (8/10 1913) in Victor Adler Briefwechsel. p. 583.

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more active. Leaders were at best capable of producing moral condemnations of the regime and its reactionary character, which workers already knew. Pannekoek essentially was appealing to the militants at the party base. Only they, the rank-and-file party cadres collectively, had the capacity and the responsibility to initiate action. Without waiting for either the leaders or the unorganized masses, these militants could take the initiative and resolve the duality between the leaders and the masses.250 By taking such a position, yet without explicitly writing so, Pannekoek was asking the militant radical-left at the party to break party discipline, to form itself into a fraction that was capable of taking initiative for mass action when the opportunity presented itself, independent of the party hierarchy. However, before arriving at this position, Pannekoek and the Bremen radical-left had tried to win over the party to its position on mass action and imperialism. During the Chemnitz 1912 National Party Congress of the SPD, this radical-left critique found its most concrete expression. Pannekoek was elected as a delegate to this Congress by the Bremen rank-and-file militants. While he was averse to personally participating in congresses and public polemics by temperament, he felt compelled to lead the radical-left in this confrontation with the party center and the right. Rosa Luxemburg was absent from this Congress, which made his presence as a leading figure of the radical-left more pronounced. Here, Pannekoek and Paul Lensch (the editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, the other main left-wing party paper besides the Bremer Burger-Zeitung) elaborated the radical-left's positions on war, imperialism and mass action. Here, Pannekoek proposed concretely to the Congress to prepare for mass actions in case Germany entered a war. This was the most concrete anti-war proposal that went beyond even the famous Stuttgart Resolution of the Second International. Pannekoek presented the radical-left's case against the traditional Second International line on imperialism. Courts of arbitrations, inter-parliamentary cooperation, and other liberal, legal formulas were ineffective means to struggle against the danger of war and militarism. In opposition to the official party line that reiterated the traditional Second International line (and presented by Hugo Haase, the co-chairman of the SPD together with Philip Scheidemann), Pannekoek argued that all sections of national capital, be they involved in industrial production or finance, had a stake in the defense of imperialism. Arguing against the Haase theses,

250

Anton Pannekoek, "Partei und Masse", Bremer Bürgerzeitung, 04 July 1914.

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who defined imperialism only a sectional policy choice of arms producing capitalists, Pannekoek defended the argument that imperialist competition was not a conscious decision of a group of capitalists in power, but the general, world-historical unconscious death drive of capitalism towards nationalist competition. In this competition, the capitalists were desperately united nationally against other national capitals and the nature of the competition was even in peace time driving the working class living standards down through sanctions and protectionism. He argued: "The struggle against the high cost of living provides a good example. It is an imperialist phenomenon. Gold-production, cartels, protective tariffs, closing of frontiers, domestic reaction and employers’ associations – they all make the high cost of living so oppressive. They drive the masses to revolt and they revolutionise [sic] people’s minds. But they also drive the masses into the streets, as happened last Sunday in Stuttgart. Under the slogan ‘Convene the Reichstag, Open the Borders!’ the masses will ineluctably move forwards to ever more powerful demonstrations until the goal is reached. These mass-actions are, at one and the same time, a struggle for an immediate goal, the alleviation of distress, and a struggle for socialism, because the power, the confidence, the unity of the masses are increased by them. The struggle against domestic reaction is a similar case: massactions are the main weapon in the struggle for universal equal suffrage in Prussia. The danger of war will also inevitably bring in its wake the intervention of the working class in order to lessen its consequences, and mass-actions will play a large role in it. Our standpoint against imperialism also means a very determined struggle, relentlessly and continually pursued in parliament but also, at a certain point, through actions of the masses themselves."251 [emphasis mine]

The alliance of the centrist and the right-wing leadership defeated Pannekoek and the leftradicals in Chemnitz,252 who found themselves virtually isolated, without support from any leading party figures.253 Worse, radicals began to be purged one by one from leadership positions in 1913 in the SPD. On December 1913 Luxemburg and her comrades started publishing their own bulletin

251

Excerpt from Anton Pannekoek's speech in the SPD Party Congress at Chemnitz in 1912, "Debate and Resolution on Imperialism", in ed.s Day and Gaido, Discovering Imperialism, pp. 653-5. 252 "At the Chemnitz congress, the long debates of 1912 with respect to imperialism and war were resolved in favor of the Kautsky view. The left radical position, that imperialism would inevitably lead to war and could be combated only by revolutionary means and in isolation from the bourgeoisie, was rejected." Schorske, German Social Democracy, p.263. 253 Pannekoek wrote in his memoirs that this Congress was a turning point in the party history. In Chemnitz, more clearly than any other previous congress, the party leadership was united against the left-radicals. Kautsky and the older party leaders who stuck to an orthodox position in the revisionism debate of the previous decade, united with the right-wing against the left. Pannekoek also noted that few of the delegates came from working class backgrounds, most were party functionaries and bureaucrats and he attributed the emerging ideological unity against the left, to this social background. Anton Pannekoek, Herinneringen uit de arbeidersbeweging (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1982), p. 168.

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(Die Sozialdemokratische Korrespondenz) in order to remain in contact and let their criticisms be heard in the party ranks. Nevertheless, until the war, the left-radicals refrained from forming a formal fraction inside the party. Yet, the LRI position that would form itself into an international faction after 1914 was more or less clear by 1912: a defense of mass action tactics against war. This was the theoretical kernel of the LRI faction which would organize the Zimmerwald Left in 1915 and later the Communist International in 1919.

C.

The Mass Action Debate in the Russian Social Democratic Movement

While the sharpest and the longest theoretical polemics took place in Germany, the mass action debate was international, and it led to divisions between socialists all over the world. In the Russian Empire, the division between the Bolshevik and the Menshevik factions reflected in very similar terms those in Germany.254 However, in Russia unlike Germany, the sides in the debates also contributed in time to two organizationally distinct and separate parties. Just as the mass action debate began with the retreat of the mass strike movements in Germany, in Russia also the struggle between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came into open after the 1905 Revolution.255 However, also similar to the situation in Germany, not the 1905 Revolution itself, but its retreat triggered the debate.

254

In the historiography, H. Schürer explored this relation between the Dutch-German radicals and the Bolsheviks in an essay published in “Anton Pannekoek and the Origins of Leninism," The Slavonic and East European Review 41.97 (June 1963). This work is indebted to Schurer’s work but unfortunately until recently his work was either dismissed or overlooked. 255 Lenin would later note that Bolshevism as a distinct faction was matured in the 1905 Revolution. Lih wrote on the 1903-4 split that "Pavel Axelrod, leader of the Mensheviks in 1904, did not accuse Lenin of any ideological heresy. Rather (as he wrote to Kautsky trying to explain the Lenin phenomenon), Lenin was just a troublemaker who unfortunately was the 'idol' of the underground praktiki in Russia." Lars Lih, Lenin (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), p. 91. Opponents of the Bolsheviks also concurred: "For bolshevism, as Dan wrote in his appendix to the German edition of Martov’s History of Russian Social Democracy, the crucial period was 1907 to 1913: 'During that time the tactics began to take shape that a decade later became the hallmark of communism.' " Boris Sapir, "Notes and Reflections on the History of Menshevism" in Leopold Haimson ed., From the Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). p. 353.

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A reactionary period set in Russia after 1907. The Stolypin government realized that the peasant masses were not a reliable group, since their representatives, the populist representatives, put forward a radical political and economic program and acted in unison with the Social Democrats. It became apparent that the rowdy radicalism of the Duma in which revolutionary enthusiasms of 1905 dominated could not be reconciled with the views of the Tsar and the landed aristocracy. Thus, the government arrested several socialists in the Duma on the charges of conspiring to overthrow government in June 1907, dissolved the Second Duma elected in 1906, and organized elections for a new Duma with an extremely limited suffrage that severely limited the representation of the peasants and workers. The propertied classes dominated firmly in this new Third Duma, freeing the government from socialist and populist pressure in the legislative assembly. The reactionary turn of 1907 Stolypin Reforms did not mark a return to a full autocracy prior to 1905. Certain democratic rights remained: A parliamentary assembly in the form of Duma nominally existed even though it heavily limited the voting rights of the workers and poor peasants. Trade unions were legalized, but their powers were restricted by certain obstacles: the employees could sue them for compensations caused by the losses incurred due to strikes. Despite the preservation of these limited gains of the revolution, the government unleashed a brutal crackdown on the socialist parties, which were forced to retreat to the underground. Many leading militants and rank-and-file members were either imprisoned or returned to European exile. The restrictions imposed by the Stolypin Reforms on the emerging yet very fragile Russian civil society exacerbated the latent divisions inside the Russian Social Democratic movement. As the German party did after 1891, the Menshevik leadership considered the situation as favorable for a transition into legality along the lines of the "Erfurtian program". Despite its limitations, the autocracy was transformed into a de jure constitutional monarchy. According to the Mensheviks in western Europe, the new albeit limited opportunities presented the possibility of forming mass organizations (mainly trade-unions and other legal organizations) that they could develop in a way similar to those that arose in Germany after 1890. From this perspective, sacrificing socialist

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demands such as the eight-hour working day or democratic republic would be a small price to pay to enjoy the benefits of new legality.256 The Menshevik attempt to emulate and adapt the "western social democratic" Erfurtian strategy to the Russian conditions indirectly expressed the intelligentsia's growing desire to live a "normal life" like their counterparts who lived in western capitalist societies. The exhaustion of the intelligentsia, its disillusionment following the revolution and its defeat could be clearly observed in the party press of the time and memoirs that were written later.257 This post-1907 period was a major crisis especially for the Russian socialist movement. The self-sacrificing aristocratic or bourgeois intellectual committing class suicide to save their people, a trope of Russian revolutionary politics that defined the older generation of populists and Marxists like Kropotkin or Plekhanov or caricaturized by Turgenyev in Fathers and Sons, now gave way to a more individualist middle-class intelligentsia that sought stability and comfort in her personal life, which its class brethren were already enjoying in the west. As with many intellectuals, a growing tendency amongst the Menshevik working class militant "praktiki" was to withdraw from the underground party work and concentrate on building legal trade unions or similar legal civil society organizations. Nevertheless, the Menshevik legal trade unions proved unsuccessful in attracting wide working-class masses to these legal bodies. While the Mensheviks were somewhat successful in organizing highly skilled male workers and skilled artisanal workers in smaller workshops, they were less successful in modern industrial plants with a rapidly growing workforce of unskilled workers and women (especially in the textile

256

Grigori Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party: From the Beginnings to February 1917 (London: New Park Publications, 1973), pp. 144-145. Sapir explains that while after 1907 the Mensheviks were not unanimous about the future strategy the party should follow, they were more or less in agreement that the new conditions presented the possibility to leave the underground. Sapir, "Notes and Reflections on the History of Menshevism", pp. 353-361. 257 A socialist militant, I. P. Denike's case is exemplary of this trend: After 1907 Denike “was attracted by the broader intellectual and social vistas that seemed to open despite, or perhaps because of the 'political stagnation' of the Stolypin years. He felt the need to refurbish his intellectual baggage, now that his fundamental assumptions about Russian society had been repudiated by events. He also felt very deeply the sense of revulsion that affected so many of his contemporaries against their earlier life in the underground - with the blunting of emotions, the psychological distance in human relations, indeed the dulling of all perceptions with this life had caused." Haimson quoted in Ralph Carter Elwood, Russian Social Democracy in the Underground (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), p. 62.

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industry).258 The Menshevik-dominated unions further alienated large sections of the rapidly growing working class with their anti-strike policy. The same held true for their disapproving of wildcat strikes, which they feared threatened the legal status of the unions. The Menshevik’s call for the "liquidation" of all underground, illegal party activity and replacing it with legal, mass organizations also failed to win over many workers and rank-and-file party members.259 "Liquidationism" and the intellectual middle classes' abandonment of socialist politics was partially a response to the rapid decline in the social democratic movement. The party membership fell from about 150,000 in its height in 1906-07 to (according to Trotsky's estimation) about 10,000 in 1910.260 As the party shrank, anger and frustration against the intellectuals and trade unionists grew amongst the remaining seasoned militant core. Militants were complaining that "at the first convenient opportunity... [the intellectuals] retire into trade unions as secretaries, clerks, etc."261 Elwood notes, "frequently, those who chose these paths were the 'old prestigious workers, the acknowledged leaders and instructors of 1905. Among them were the experienced writers and lawyers, the respected party and public workers".262 In this period, the local militants who tried to keep the underground organization afloat flooded the party press with complaints about the "desertion" or the "disinterest" of the intelligentsia. With their absence, local party militants had tremendous difficulty in finding writers for illegal leaflets, safe houses for organizational meetings, and instructors of educational-propagandistic workers' circles.263 Former sympathizers from the upper classes, who had funded the party, were now turning their backs on militants' requests, as in the case of this "rich manufacturer's wife" (as she was described in this report): "One fine day in 1908... [she] announced to me that she was disappointed in our organization, that she was occupied with the study of philosophy, that she no longer believed in historical materialism but had taken up empirio-criticism or something of that sort and considering all things she could no longer support our Bolshevik printshop."264

258

Victoria Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-1914, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 367-9. 259 Ibid. pp. 392-393 and p. 343. 260 Elwood, Russian Social Democracy in the Underground. p. 36. An accurate number for party membership is impossible to estimate due to government repression and the prevalent disorganization in the socialist ranks. 261 Quoted in Elwood. Ibid. p. 61. 262 ibid. 263 Ibid. pp. 61-3. 264 Quoted in Elwood. Ibid. p.63.

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The Bolshevik faction was reborn between 1908 and 1912, as an organized expression of the rank-and-file militants' and workers' reaction to these "liquidationist" tendencies and with the aim of keeping the underground party alive. Save for Lenin, Bolsheviks did not have well-known leaders or militants.265 Younger militants, like Bukharin, joined the party during the insurgent 1905 period and remained with the party, but they were relatively unknown figures. In fact, the party cadres increasingly became proletarianized with the departure of the leaders and intellectuals.266 Many militants felt betrayed by those leaders who chose new careers or work in legal political sphere.267 What distinguished the Bolsheviks from other parties was its programatic conviction that the 1905 Revolution and especially mass actions of that year were proven to be an effective tactic against the autocratic regime. The Bolsheviks perceived the Mensheviks' confidence in the legality granted by the tsarist autocracy as an ideological expression of upper-class intellectual frustration with and weariness from revolutionary activity. From the Bolshevik standpoint, mass action tactics were more effective because they demanded a departure from civil society’s organizational sphere built upon the unreliable tsaristlegality. This was not a full refusal of legal tactics, as Bolsheviks participated in Duma elections and actively worked in the unions. However, Bolsheviks were clearly shifting away from the "Erfurtian" tactics and towards mass action tactics. The tendency in Germany and Russia was similar. In 1910, the German SPD rank-and-file mobilized in mass protests for suffrage reforms and Rosa Luxemburg broke with Kautsky over her defense of mass political strikes with the goal of a "democratic republic." The Bolsheviks were also

265

Many well-known Bolshevik intellectuals, just as the Mensheviks, retreat to solitary intellectual activities. For instance, Bogdanov developed an interest in empiriomonism, started writing science-fiction novels (his novel, "Red Star" was a product of this period) and developed theories similar to Cosmism. Robert Williams, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904-14 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 128-132. 266 This was especially the case in larger urban areas. For example, see: William Chase and J. Arch Getty, “The Moscow Bolshevik Cadres of 1917: A Prosopographic Analysis,” Russian History/Histoire Russe, 5, 1 (1978), pp. 84-105. According to Blanc, between 1917 and 1922 more than half of the Bolshevik Central Committee came from the working class or peasantry. Eric Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working Class Politics Across the Russian Empire, 1882-1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), p. 83. 267 Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion, pp. 341-2.

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distancing themselves more openly from the Menshevik "liquidationists," while defending mass action tactics.268 Lenin's study on the 1905 Revolution (titled "Russian Strike Statistics" published in 1910) gave a firmer and clearer ground to the Bolshevik conception of mass action.269 As Henrietta Roland-Holst and Rosa Luxemburg had already done, Lenin concluded that the highest points of revolutionary activity between 1905 and 1907corresponded to the periods when economic and political strikes merged. In that sense, mass political strikes were strongest and politically successful when they brought larger sections of the working class into their orbit by integrating economic demands. However, since economic demands alienated the industrial bourgeoisie (who traditionally supported liberals), any possibility of alliance with or support for liberals would in practice mean sacrificing the integrity of the mass action tactic and hence, weakening the class unity of the proletariat.270 Thus, mass action tactics ran counter to a purely parliamentary tactic that relied on liberal bourgeoisie to push for democratic rights and reforms in a legal arena and was bound to antagonize the bourgeoisie, or even push it to the side of the autocratic regime. From 1911 onwards, the Bolshevik defense of the mass actions and political mass strikes appeared more clearly in the Bolshevik press as the main tactical mean to defeat the autocracy. This clarification corresponded to the reawakening of the workers' movement after the reactionary period of 1907-1911. Following the massacre of hundreds of striking Lena Gold Mines workers in Siberia, a strike wave enveloped the major cities in Russia. Although the strike wave was not as spectacular as the 1905 wave, it still consistently gained momentum in the following years until 1914, when the war put a stop to it.271 As the Menshevik trade union leaders persisted in resisting the strike action, workers sympathy towards the Bolsheviks grew. Mensheviks began to lose their

268

Despite their suspicions about using legal opportunities, Bolsheviks were not opposed to them. Lenin fought hard to convince the Bolshevik militants work inside trade unions to participate in the election campaigns. 269 Neil Harding described this work as a "masterly article, perhaps the most important he had written for some years... [he] was able for the first time to locate and account for the 1905 revolution within the general structure of his thought." Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought (Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2009), pp. 286-287. 270 V. I. Lenin, "Strike Statistics in Russia" in LCW vol. 16 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1963), pp. 417-418. 271 Leopold Haimson, "Two strike waves in Imperial Russia, 1905-1907, 1912-1914" in Haimson & Tilly, Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an International Perspective, pp. 105-111.

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leadership positions in the trade unions to the Bolsheviks in 1913.272 Emboldened by their success, the Bolsheviks became more determined in their defense of the strike movement. Lenin wrote, "Russian workers’ strike movement is the best barometer of the entire nation-wide emancipation struggle in Russia."273 The implication was that the Menshevik emphasis on the legal work in civil society organizations, as opposed to illegal organizing inside the radical mass action movement, expressed a "liberal-bureaucratic" tendency.274 Bolsheviks condemned the Menshevik tendency to reduce the mass strike movement into a mere economic action, isolating it from its revolutionarypolitical content. To contain and limit the movement in a purely trade-union framework was "perfectly liberal".275 From 1912 onwards, the Bolshevik split with the Mensheviks deepened. In January 1912, a few months before the Lena massacre strike wave, the Bolsheviks held a Party Conference in Prague, where it formed a new Central Committee and a Bureau for the organization of the party work inside Russia. This Conference effectively excluded the Mensheviks, who considered that the illegal party work inside Russia was impossible and harmful. Following this, in October 1913, the thirteen Social Democratic deputies in the Fourth Duma split into two factions, Bolshevik and Menshevik. This split finally urged the Second International leadership to intervene more decisively in order to reconcile different tendencies of the Russian Social Democratic movement. From the ISB's perspective, an official division inside a Social Democratic Party's parliamentary faction in Europe, was more serious than the squabbles among the rank-and-file militants or emigres.276 The ISB

272

Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion, pp. 392-405. Lenin, "Experience Teaches," Pravda No. 15, January 19, 1913 in LCW Vol.18 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975). pp. 519-521. 274 Lenin, "The Illegal Party and Legal Work" Sotsial-Demokrat No. 28–29, November 5 (18), 1912, ibid. pp. 387-396. 275 Lenin, "The Liquidators Oppose Revolutionary Mass Strikes" Sotsial-Demokrat No. 27, June 17 (4), 1912, ibid. pp 116-117. 276 Kautsky spoke at December 1913 ISB Conference in London representing the German party. He argued that the split in the Duma fraction was the climax of the division in the Russian Social Democracy. In his speech, Kautsky casually remarked that the "old party does no longer exist". "Periodisches Bulletin des Internationale Sozialistischen Bureau - Beilage" no.11. p. 5. This was actually very close to the rightwing Menshevik's position, which denied the existence of the party, alienated the rank-and-file militants in Russia and as a result, pushed them to split in January 1912 Prague Conference. Lenin condemned Kautsky in an article published on the London ISB Conference titled "Kautsky's Unpardonable Error". 273

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discussed the Russian question during its 13 and 14 December 1913 sessions of its London Congress with several representatives of different socialist groups from Russia present. Here the Mensheviks criticized the Bolsheviks for sectarianism and inflating minor differences to the point of divisions.277 In response, the Bolsheviks presented a series of conditions for unification. In this list, the Bolsheviks specifically demanded "the renunciation of struggle against the so-called 'strike-hazard'" and "the recognition in practice of an independent tactic of the proletariat and a renunciation of the belittling of the tasks of the laboring class in order to establish blocs with the liberals".278 The December I S B meeting dissolved without any resolution, but the ISB organized another meeting to convene in Brussels in July 1914. In a report prepared for this meeting, the Bolshevik Central Committee explained in a more precise and concrete manner why they defended the mass action tactics and how this required an underground organization. It argued that the programs of all of the bourgeois parties in Russia were based on the rejection of revolutionary tactics and the belief that political reforms were possible under the present monarchy. In contrast, the report continued: "...Our tactics are different. We make use of every reform (insurance, for example) and of every legal society. But we use them to develop the revolutionary consciousness and the revolutionary struggle of the masses. In Russia, where political freedom to this day does not exist, these words have far more direct implications for us than they have in Europe. Our Party conducts revolutionary strikes, which in Russia are growing as in no other country in the world... The combination of political and economic struggle produces the revolutionary strike, which, by rousing the peasant millions, trains them for revolution. Our Party conducts campaigns of revolutionary meetings and revolutionary street demonstrations. For this purpose our Party distributes revolutionary leaflets and an illegal newspaper, the Party’s Central Organ. The ideological unification of all these propaganda and agitation activities among the masses is achieved by the slogans adopted by the supreme bodies of our Party, namely: (1) an eight-hour day; (2) confiscation of the landed estates, and (3) a democratic republic. In the present situation in Russia, where absolute tyranny and despotism prevail and where all laws are suppressed by the tsarist monarchy, only these slogans

According to Lenin, Kautsky was ignorant about the genuine situation in Russia and the ISB leadership were listening to the Menshevik emigres but they were dead to the rank-and-file militants in Russia. V. I. Lenin, "Kautsky’s Unpardonable Error," Proletarskaya Pravda No. 8, December 15, 1913, in LCW Vol.19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977). pp. 546-547. 277 ISB, "Periodisches Bulletin des Internationale Sozialistischen Bureau - Beilage" no.11. p.7. 278 Emphasis in the original: Resolution of a "Group of Organized Marxists" in Proletarskaia Pravda, No. 9, December 30 (17), 1913, Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and The World War, p. 99. The "Group of Organized Marxists" instead of the Central Committee of the RSDRP was used to evade the censure.

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can effectually unite and direct the entire propaganda and agitation of the Party aimed at effectually sustaining the revolutionary working-class movement."279

The Brussels Conference in June 1914 failed to reach a conclusion and the Bolsheviks refused to vote on the resolution prepared by the ISB on the unification.280 The question was deferred to the Vienna Congress of the Second International, but that Congress never took place as the war intervened. Hence, it is impossible to ascertain what the final position of the ISB on the unification question would have been. Still, an interesting confidential letter sent by Martov to Axelrod in June 1914 suggests that the ISB leadership sympathized with the Mensheviks. In this letter, Martov, who was in Petersburg at the time, reports to Axelrod about his meeting with Vandervelde. Vandervelde visited Petersburg to discuss the issues in person and, if possible, to arbitrate between the Social Democratic Duma deputies. According to Martov, while Vandervelde: "...of course adhered strictly to the role of "impartiality," thinking that he has no right even to suggest sympathy with one or the other tendency. Nevertheless, in a private conversation with me (on the whole he conversed chiefly with us) he said: "You can guess of course that my sympathies are with your tendency, but I cannot express this." More than once while we were telling him about the platform of the "consistent" group he interrupted us by remarking, "just like the syndicalists in France. On the whole, we received the impression that during his stay here he learned to distinguish between the "Asiatic" and the "European" orientations."281

Whether Martov was accurate in his depiction of Vandervelde’s views of the ISB is beside the point. The sentiments and the tone in the letter reflect how Martov perceived the Bolsheviks and their tactics (as "Asiatic" and "barbaric") and how these tactics corresponded, in Martov's view, to the divisions inside the international workers' movement ("anarchist" and "syndicalist"). These labels clearly echoed Kautsky's accusations against Luxemburg and Pannekoek in the mass strike debatein Germany. For their part, Mensheviks were clearly aware of the international fracture lines formed over the issue of the mass strike and they took Kautsky’s side in the debate. Yet, the Mensheviks’ opinion on the mass action tactics varied. For instance, a Menshevik publication, Nashe Zaria,

279

"Report of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. to the Brussels Conference and Instructions to the C.C. Delegation" June 1914, in LCW Vol.20 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 495-535. 280 Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and The World War, p. 106. 281 "Letter from Martov to Axelrod", 15 (2) June 1914. Ibid. p. 101.

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asserted that Luxemburg and Pannekoek were attempting to force in Germany "a Bolshevik action plan".282 Some attributed the success of mass action tactics in Russia to the "slave" spirit and ignorance of formerly peasants who just recently entered the working class. Others attributed the workers’ inclination to support mass political strike to the influence of the "intellectual lumpenproletariat" represented by the Bolsheviks.283 In any case, Mensheviks saw Pannekoek, Luxemburg, and others, who defended mass action tactics in Western Europe, in similar terms as they saw the Bolsheviks. For instance, Martov and Trotsky (who was nominally independent from both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, but united with the Mensheviks after 1912 against the Bolsheviks) published articles in the official SPD theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit supporting Kautsky against Luxemburg and Pannekoek. In arguing against Luxemburg, Martov claimed that mass political strike was not only a primitive form of class struggle, but was already dying out in Russia. He claimed that the conditions for "western" and more advanced forms of organizations, especially trade unions were emerging in Russia as well. As the Erfurtian schema proposed, trade unions were already emerging in Russia, and they differentiated economic from political actions. Martov argued that only a "primitive" and "uncultured" tendency (the Bolsheviks) clung to "Blanquist" and "anarchist” tactics of mass action.284 In a 1910 article published in Die Neue Zeit, Trotsky argued that the Bolshevik tactics were essentially anarchistic and they represented the intelligentsia's reaction to the advancing workers movement, in which the intellectuals found themselves isolated and irrelevant.285

282

G. G. Bauman, Lenin i niderlandskiye Tribunisti (Rostov-na-Donu: Izd-vo Rostovskogo Universiteta, 1990), p. 59. 283 Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion, p. 429. 284

J. Martoff, "Die preussische Diskussion und die russische Erfahrung," Die Neue Zeit No.51 (16 September 1910), pp. 907-919. 285 a. L. Trotsky, "Die Entwicklungstendenzen der russischen Sozialdemokratie", Die Neue Zeit, (9 September 1910), No. 50, pp. 862-866. According to Krupskaya, Lenin wanted to reply Martov and Trotsky, but Kautsky refused to publish Lenin's response. Nadezhda Konstantinova Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (Moscow: Foreign Language Pub. House, 1959), p. 212. Lenin indeed sent a letter to Kautsky in 1911 and expressed his desire to publish a response to both Martov and Trotsky. Apparently Kautsky agreed to publish Lenin's article, on the condition that it only engaged with Trotsky's article. Lenin thought the two could not be separated, because both articles revolved around the question of the Russian mass strikes and the Bolshevik tactics. V. I. Lenin, "Letter to Karl Kautsky" 31 January 1911, in LCW Vol. 43 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), pp. 263-265. Kautsky mayhave

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Like the Mensheviks, Bolsheviks also saw the factional struggle inside the Russian Social Democratic movement as a reflection of a general international conflict within the international social democratic movement. Indeed, the evolution of the Bolsheviks followed a very similar pattern to the formation of the radical-left in Germany. Just as in 1910, the German SPD rank-and-file mobilized in mass protests for suffrage reforms and Rosa Luxemburg broke with Kautsky over her defense of mass political strikes, the Bolsheviks were also distancing themselves more openly from the Menshevik "liquidationists." They became increasingly intransigent in their defense of mass action tactics and of its underground party. The Bolsheviks themselves were keenly aware of the similarities. For instance, Lenin praised Pannekoek's prognosis on the social roots ofopportunism in his review of Die taktischen Differenzen in der Arbeiterbewegung, (discussed above). In 1910, Lenin had written an approving review of Pannekoek’s work introducing his ideas to the Russian reading audience. Lenin argued, Pannekoek's analysis of opportunism and its social basis was applicable to Russia as well: "...that Pannekoek illustrates his analysis exclusively by examples taken from West-European history, especially the history of Germany and France, not referring to Russia at all. If at, times it seems that he is alluding to Russia, it is only because the basic tendencies which give rise to definite departures from Marxist tactics are to be observed in our country too, despite the vast difference between Russia and the West in culture, everyday life, and historical and economic development… in every country the bourgeoisie inevitably devises two systems of rule, two methods of fighting for its interests and of maintaining its domination, and these methods at times succeed each other and at times are interwoven in various combinations. The first of these is the method of force, the method which rejects all concessions to the labour movement, the method of supporting all the old and obsolete institutions, the method of irreconcilably rejecting reforms. Such is the nature of the conservative policy which in Western Europe is becoming less and less a policy of the landowning classes and more and more one of the varieties of bourgeois policy in general. The second is the method of “liberalism”, of steps towards the development of political rights, towards reforms, concessions, and so forth... Not infrequently, the bourgeoisie for a certain time achieves its object by a “liberal” policy, which, as Pannekoek justly remarks, is a “more crafty” policy. A part of the workers and a part of their representatives at times allow themselves to be deceived by seeming concessions. The revisionists declare that the doctrine of the class struggle is “antiquated”, or begin to conduct a policy which is in fact a renunciation of the class struggle. The zigzags of bourgeois tactics intensify revisionism within the labour movement and not infrequently bring the differences within the labour movement to the point of an outright split."286

wanted to keep the polemics on the Russian and German parties and the mass action debates in each country separate, but clearly for Lenin at least, that was not possible. 286 V. I. Lenin, "Differences in the European Labour Movement" in LCW Vol.16, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 345-352.

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Lenin was not alone in his criticisms, as H.L. Rappaport’s serialized article titled "International Opportunism and Its Russian Section," published in Sotsial Demokrat, the central organ of the RSDLP made clear.287 According to Rappaport, opportunism was an international trend which manifested itself in the form of liquidationism, a cult of legalism (a theory of gradual historical progress that denies the necessity of revolutionary ruptures), and a general denigration of the masses as ignorant and backward.288 Pannekoek also wrote a special article for the Bolshevik Sotsial Demokrat summarizing the debate on mass action in Germany and focusing on its development from the Russian Revolution in 1905 to the 1910 mass strike polemic between Luxemburg and Kautsky. The fact that Pannekoek wrote an article specifically for a Bolshevik organ is important. His defense of the mass action and political mass strike as the "new tactic" of proletarian class struggle corroborated the Bolsheviks’ stance on the mass strike question in Russia. Mass action, Pannekoek insisted, was not an expression of "backward" conditions or "anarchistic" deviations. It was not a fantastic formulation to topple the ruling class via a "single act." Nor was mass action was a theoretical formulation devised by isolated intellectuals. It was an outgrowth of the class struggle, a tendency towards the fusion of economic and political struggles emerging spontaneously as a result of the evolution of capitalism and class antagonisms. The intensity of the debate in Germany showed, according to Pannekoek, the world-historical importance of the question to the international movement, which faced with the practical task of moving beyond the old methods of struggle.289 The Bolshevik sympathy towards the left radicals in Western Europe was real. Lenin attempted to form an international fractional solidarity with the German radical leftists via Pannekoek

287

Sotsial-Democrat was the central organ of the whole RSDLP, and it was in principle a non-factional organ. It was published abroad (first in Paris and after the war began in Switzerland), hence the Aesopian language that legal publications in Russia had to resort could be avoided. The price paid for this freedom was the organization of an expensive and difficult smuggling operation to get the publication into the Russian Empire. After the publication of the first issue in 1910 January, the Mensheviks retreated from the editorial board following a dispute over an article Lenin wrote. Thus, the Mensheviks themselves left the control of the main party organ to the Bolsheviks. 288 H. L. Rappoport, "Mejdunarodniy Opportunizm i Ego Rossiskaya Sektsiya" Sotsial-Demokrat No. 13. (26/9May 1910), p. 8. 289 Anton Pannekoek, "Spori o Massovoy Stachke v Germanskoy Sots-Dem" Sotsial-Demokrat No. 14, (22/5 July1910), p.7.

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and the Bremer Burger-Zeitung. Lenin’s letter to Plekhanov in 1912 conveys his sympathy. Here, Lenin stated that the Bolshevik position was clearly opposed to Kautsky and stood with the Bremen left-radicals and Pannekoek. Written inthe final stage of the mass action debate in Germany, when the left-radicals proposed mass action methods as a means to fighting against imperialism and militarism, Lenin summarized his position that Kautsky's claim on the impossibility of using mass action against war was unacceptable.290 Lenin wrote: "With Kautsky it turns out to be a pledge against a revolutionary mass strike. This is inadmissible both from the Russian standpoint (there are 100,000 political strikers now in St. Petersburg, with revolutionary meetings and sympathies for the sailors’ mutiny) and from the general European standpoint."291

The Bolshevik CC also supported the left-radicals in the SPD's Chemnitz Congress in 1912. Lenin instructed Lev B. Kamenev, who represented the Bolsheviks in the Congress, to meet with Pannekoek. He wrote: "Can you get Neue Zeit, the latest issues, with Pannekoek and Kautsky articles? If not, write, and we'll send them over. It is necessary to read them before going to Chemnitz and there to look up Pannekoek and make closer contact with him: Kautsky replied to him on some cardinal issues in an extremely opportunist [emphasis in Lenin] way. It is very desirable to make closer contact with the Left (especially Pannekoek...) and to carry on agitation among them for a principled rebuff to Kautsky. It'll be disgraceful if they do not revolt against such opportunism! Unfortunately, they are short of people."292

While this effort at cooperation cannot be considered as a step towards the formation of a united international faction between various radical left groups, it was definitely a step in this direction.

290

Karl Kautsky, “Der Krieg und die Internationale” (War and the International) published in No. 6 of Die Neue Zeit on November 8, 1912, pp. 191–92. In this article, Kautsky argued that mass action could not be used to pressure a government bent on war. Mass action would only isolate the proletariat. Since there were other sections of the population whose interests were against war, Social Democrats had to limit themselves with propagandistic tactics in order to avoid antagonizing these sections. Kautsky had a pessimistic tone in the article. He suggested that the governments could easily provoke chauvinistic and nationalist feelings in populations by utilizing modern propaganda techniques against which the socialists were powerless. 291 V. I. Lenin, "Letter to Plekhanov" 17 November 1912 in LCW Vol. 36, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), pp. 202-203. 292 V. I. Lenin, "To L. B. Kamenev," September 6, 1912 in LCW Vol. 43, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), p. 297. A few years later, G. E. Zinoviev in an essay on the history of the Germany party and internationalism, remembered that Pannekoek represented the left-wing's point in the Congress and, despite having been defeated, defended the mass action tactics and the internationalist position on war. Grigorij Evseevic Zinoviev, Sochineniya Vol. 8: Voyna i Krizis Sotsializma (Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1926), p. 416.

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For Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership, the struggle inside the Second International over the mass action in different countries clearly represented different geographic expressions of the same worldwide division. One of Lenin's last reports presented to the ISB made this clear: "Our differences with the liquidators are the same as those between reformists and revolutionaries everywhere. However, these differences are greatly aggravated and made irreconcilable by the fact that the liquidators, in the legal press, fight against revolutionary slogans. Unity is impossible with a group which, for example, declares in the legal press that the slogan of a republic, or of the confiscation of the big landed estates, is unsuitable for agitation among the masses. In the legal press we cannot refute such propaganda, which is objectively tantamount to betraying socialism and making concessions to liberalism and the monarchy. And the Russian monarchy is such that a few more revolutions will be needed to teach the Russian tsars constitutionalism. There can be no unity between our illegal Party, which secretly organises revolutionary strikes and demonstrations, and the group of publicists who in the legal press call the strike movement a “strike craze”.293

Just eight months after Lenin sent this report to the ISB the First World War began and the Second International collapsed. The mass action debate in central and eastern European social democratic movements had polarized the left-wing and the centrist tendencies before the war. The war itself gave a concrete organizational form to these divisions. The main radical-left tendencies involved in the debate on mass action gathered around the left-wing of the Zimmerwald peace movement. And from 1915, there emerged the nucleus of a new International. The agreement on the necessity of mass action as central to the struggle against the state and war became the basis of the radical-left's international unity.

293

V. I. Lenin, "To Camille Huysmans," January 31/February 1, 1914 in LCW Vol.20, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 74-81.

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V.

Towards a Left-Radical Internationalist Theory

This chapter examines the emergence of the principal positions of the LRI core in the first two years of the World War, the attempts to create a more formal and active international unity among the LRIs, and the reasons why these attempts failed. In the process, it also corrects an almost universal misconception that puts Lenin at the center of the efforts to find a new International at the expense of dismissing to irrelevance the rest of the LRI movement. While it was a very small group, the LRIs were in no way limited to Bolsheviks, nor did the idea of the necessity of a new International come out of Lenin's head. In fact, he was not even at the center of the LRI movement.294 The LRI movement was a truly international movement; in many ways it was more of a west European and North American current than a Russian one. 295 More so than Lenin, it was Radek who was at the center of the LRI network in its first years.

294

A full list of works taking this stance would have to cover almost all the literature on the subject. Here I give only a brief list which shows that this perspective goes beyond politics, generations, and methodologies. Robert Service, “Lenin as a Historical Personality,” in Silvio Pons, ed., The Cambridge History of Communism, Vol. 1, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 127; James Hulse, The Forming of the Communist International, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), pp.1-2. Julius Braunthal, History of the International, Vol. 2, (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), pp. 42-43. This is not only a right-wing cold-war argument. Various strands of the left also argued a similar perspective. See for example: C.L.R. James, The World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 115-117; N. Popov, Outline History of the CPSU Vol. 1 (London: Martin Lawrance Limited, 1935), pp. 329-330. Those who claim that international left radicalism was not Lenin’s creation is a very slim minority in the historiography. Even Craig Nation who wrote that “there was a legitimately international tendency” still considered Lenin as its “driving force”. Craig R. Nation, War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), p. 99. 295 Defining the birth of Bolshevik radicalism as a peculiar product of Russian conditions is an essentialist argument that is repeated over and over. This sometimes borders on racism. For example, Plamenatz claimed that: “Had the influence of Marxism been confined to the West, it would probably have done so much good and little harm. Its authors thought it a revolutionary creed, but its effect among the advanced peoples has been, on the whole, to make revolution unnecessary… [But, contrary to “western Marxism”] Marxism in Russia became the doctrine not of a working-class party but of a group of intellectual malcontents in a country [in which] Bolshevism is the distorted Marxism of a backward society exposed to the impact of the West.” John Plamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975), pp. 417-8. Similar arguments can also be found in: Fainsod, International Socialism, p. 89, and Julius Braunthal, History of the International, vol. 2, pp. 60-61.

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A.

The Left-Radical Internationalists’ Analysis of the War

The regrouping of the organizational core of what became the Communist International happened simultaneously with the development of its political positions. These positions first took shape as reactions to the war and the behavior of the Second International leadership. They first surfaced in different journals that belonged to the LRI groups. Like several different threads coming together to form an authentic pattern, the LRI groups gradually synthesized these ideas through a lively and open debate despite the limited reach of the debate itself. This debate, which broadly took place beginning from late 1914 and continuing through 1916, acted as an incubation process from which the core LRI nucleus emerged. The debate clarified three interrelated points. First, World War I marked the period of decline for capitalism, opening an era of radical class confrontations, wars, and revolutions. Second, in this period, the Second International organizational and political methods were no longer adequate since these took form during the peaceful era of capitalist development. Hence, in the imperialist era of capitalist decline, the Second International organizations "betrayed" the workers. Finally, as a consequence of the previous two theoretical conclusions, a new, third international based on new revolutionary tactics (especially mass action tactics) and new organizational principles (international centralization) had to be formed.

1.

War and Imperialism

At its core, the LRI position rested on a historic analysis that the world war marked the entry of capitalism into its period of decline. This conclusion was rooted in a basic Marxist assertion that every mode of production that had hitherto existed, at a certain point of its development, entered into an existential crisis, expressing itself through upheavals, wars, chaos and revolutions, after which the transition into a new social mode of production becomes both possible and necessary. Such a crisis was the product of a dynamic antagonism between the forces of production inherent to that particular society and their legal, cultural, political expressions, contradictions

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which at a certain point becomes irrepressible.296 The LRIs based their view that the global capitalist relations entered into such a general phase of decline, a period of "wars and revolutions" (as the Communist International would later define it), on two interrelated analytical conclusions: the World War was an imperialist war; and imperialism marked the entry of capitalism into a new world-historical period that heralded its terminal decline. The first LRI member to openly proclaim the definite entry of capitalism into a new and final historic phase was Herman Gorter in his Imperialism, World War and Social Democracy, which was written before the war, but only published after its start with detailed revisions.297 Gorter saw the world war as a historic event that marked the transition of capitalism into its final phase of decline. The most important aspect of the decline for Gorter was organizational. He argued that the capitalist organization of society reached its apex with the formation of cartels, trusts, monopolies, and high finance in the late nineteenth century. These capitalist formations controlled the entire productive and circulative apparatuses swallowing individual capitalists and replacing competition at the enterprise level with militaristic competition between states at an international level. Organizational centralization of capital developed in conjuncture with the geographic spread of capital to the entire planet. By reaching the limit of its geographic expansion, expressing itself

296

For Marx’s view, see Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), pp. 20-21. For the LRIs and later Communists, this historic vision became the foundational axis in their explanation of imperialism and by implication the collapse of the Second International and the necessity of the new international based on new tactics. 297 Herman Gorter actually intended to give the pamphlet as a speech in the 1912 Basel Extraordinary Congress of the Second International but he was not allowed to do so. After the war started, his party, the Dutch SDP published the pamphlet together with his revisions. Herman Gorter, Der Imperialismus, der Weltkrieg und die Sozial-Demokratie, (Amsterdam: Sozial-Demokratischen Partei Hollands, 1915), p. I. The original Dutch version appeared in two publications; the second publication was advertised by the SDP as "the Second Communist Manifesto." The American International Socialist Review attempted to publish a translation. Zinoviev defined Gorter's pamphlet as "excellent" and "there is much truth in this Dutch Marxist's words". See, Zinoviev, “Against the Current”, Riddell, ed., Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 104. Lenin also endorsed the analysis. After reading the Dutch version, he wrote David Wijnkoop, the leader of the SDP in the Netherlands through whom Lenin had a channel of communication with Pannekoek and Gorter, and congratulated Gorter for “the hard knock at the opportunists and Kautsky”. Lenin to Wijnkoop, 12 March 1915, LCW, Vol. 43 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p.451. Gorter's pamphlet was first published in Dutch and quickly translated into German, but the first German printed words expressing the LRI position was a series of articles published in Berner Tagwacht in Bern, Switzerland by Pannekoek in late 1914. This series was putting forward a shared sentiment among many Marxists when it definitely declared the death of the “Second International”.

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in the global imperialist competition, the capitalist system also reached its organizational limit in the form of finance capital.298 Gorter argued that these geographic and organizational limitations exploded in the forms of imperialist wars. What distinguished imperialist wars from the previous forms of warfare was that the imperialist competition was forced to destroy the productive forces rather than expanding them through capture of other, non-capitalist spheres, as had happened previously with other capitalist wars of conquest. In this new stage, inter-capitalist competition took the form of military competition and armament race between capitalist states, which wasted and ultimately destroyed the productive capacity for the sake of producing machines of destruction. The logic of capitalist competition, which hitherto advanced the forces of production, came to a full circle expressing itself in a mortal contradiction in the form of war. Gorter admitted that, while in this imperialist phase, capitalism could potentially have brief periods of peaceful lulls, nevertheless, the general historic tendency was towards violent militaristic competition which replaced "free" and relatively peaceful competition between capitalist powers that marked the earlier, liberal period. Thus Gorter did not disregard the possibility of peaceful intervals in the imperialist epoch. His main point was that with the new epoch, capitalism was overripe for overturning.299 Submitting all states to its own logic of militaristic competition, imperialism turned "all modern states" into agents of destruction "without exception".300

298

Gorter wrote: “Imperialism is the expansion of capitalism all over the world. And achieves this by means of the trusts, the banks, the syndicates, the financial and industrial monopolies… But capitalist development cannot go beyond the monopoly (stage), as there is no path that leads it beyond the earth if capitalism is not spread to the stars. The whole earth is under the rule of the trusts and the organized monopolies; this is the climax of capitalist production... Therefore, capitalism has reached its final stage through the abolition of free competition, the establishment of the financial, industrial and transport monopolies, and imperialism, which spreads its powers throughout the world." Gorter, Der Imperialismus, p. 92. 299 Ibid. p.93. 300 In that sense, Gorter's position differed form Karl Liebknecht's famous slogan, “The main enemy is at home”. For Gorter, the imperialist state, whether one's own or the "enemy's" or even a neutral small country like Holland, were equally counter-revolutionary and all were equally enemies of the world working class. In essence, for Gorter, imperialism undermined the national isolation of the workers in different countries and prepared the ground for a global confrontation between the international working class and the capitalist countries. In this confrontation, the workers could no more have the chance of rooting for a lesser evil. In that sense, the era of 19th century politics, with Social Democrats tactically supporting one side against the other in conflicts between reactionary monarchies (most specifically Russia) and "progressive" bourgeois Republics was over.

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Gorter saw the only hope in proletarian revolution, since for him the proletariat was not merely the victim of imperialist capitalism, a helpless prey of exploitation, but also the very agent that could end imperialist wars, whose interests and even life depended on abolishing capitalism. Further, even though capitalism became a destructive force threatening whole humanity, the potential for socialism was now for the first time a material possibility. He wrote, now "socialism became conceivable," especially "in the most powerful states."301 Since transitioning into socialism required an international struggle on the part of the proletariat and since capitalism was now a destructive force, a force bent on destroying the forces of production for self-preservation, the struggle for socialism was also an active struggle against nationalism, which constituted the ideological basis of imperialist competition. Gorter's pamphlet presented a broad outline, but it was a propagandistic rather than a systematic analytic work.302 In the LRI camp, it was Radek who developed the first detailed analysis of imperialism in its relation to the First World War.303 Already in the last phase of the mass action

301

Gorter specifically singled out Germany and England: "These are the two countries where the largest industrial sectors—steel, coal, machine tools, textiles and, to some extent, food processing and transport—have been enormously centralized and have attained gigantic dimensions. In these countries there is a vast network of trusts and cartels, and it would be easy to centralize other sectors of production, as well. In these countries finance, centralized in the banks, totally dominates industry and transport. We consider these countries to be technologically and materially ripe for socialism." Ibid. pp.87-8. 302 According to Bourrinet, "Gorter did not grasp the capitalist system's decadence as a theoretician, basing himself on a historical and economic study. He analysed its social and cultural effects." Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, p.110. 303 Radek was not the first radical Marxist who put forward an analysis of Imperialism. Rosa Luxemburg had already in 1913 published a substantial work on the subject. However, it was received by the LRIs with certain reservations. For Pannekoek, by developing an economic explanation for the historical necessity of imperialism Luxemburg was erring in two ways. First, contrary to Luxemburg, Pannekoek argued “the search for extra-capitalist markets was as old as capitalism” and so it could not be described as a distinguishing characteristic of the imperialist epoch. Instead, Pannekoek saw the economic root in the overgrowth of the accumulated capital and its difficulty to find profitable outlets for investment in the heartland of capitalism, leading to the export of capital to colonies and non-capitalistic regions or countries. Thus capital export policy and not the search for non-capitalistic markets was the source of the imperialist policy for Pannekoek. Anton Pannekoek, “Review of Rosa Luxemburg: The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Explanation of Imperialism (January 1913)” in Day & Gaido, Discovering Imperialism, pp. 692-693. Day and Gaido wrote: “Pannekoek noted that capital and commodity-exports were ‘intimately linked’, but the question of emphasis was politically significant. If capitalist production depended primarily on commodity-exports, then workers’ jobs would also appear to depend directly on imperialist expansion, ‘an idea that bourgeois politicians willingly advertise in order to turn attention away from capital’s greed for profit’.” Ibid. p. 675. Lenin stated his agreement to Pannekoek, writing to

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debate (between 1911-1914) Radek was the main author among the left-radicals in Germany on the question of imperialism.304 Immediately after the war started, Radek penned his analysis in a couple of articles published in German in anti-war journals, mainly Lichtstrahlen and Neues Leben.305 In his interventions, Radek went further than Gorter. Like Gorter, Radek also defined the world war as a symptom of the explosion of the contradiction between the relations of production and the forces of production. A constant theme in Radek's articles was about how nation states historically came to be the center of capitalism's contradictions. As the most concrete form of capitalist relations of productions, nations provided the legal and political basis for the capital accumulation in its classical western European examples. However, this classical European political form of capitalist development also provided the basis for the violent and destructive competition between the nation states in the form of imperialist wars: “Modern capitalism, which created the national state as the foundation of national economies, has not only woven them together but has also let their tentacles reach out over the seas to countries where there is not yet a capitalist national economy. If the interweaving of capitalist states means antagonisms and community, agreements and struggles, this is a thousand times more the case in relation to the undeveloped countries. No other principle rules the relations between capitalist states more than struggle. Even if an agreement is reached, it is either the result of an earlier struggle or a means for further struggle over position in the world market.”306

For Radek, the imperialist war was historically different than wars of colonial conquest (especially of non-capitalist territories by commercial capitalist powers of the 17th and 18th centuries) in the sense that they expressed a direct military competition between the capitalist states. Thus, Radek argued that the imperialist war concretized a fundamental contradiction: the contradiction between the nation-state (as the political form of the capitalist domination) and globally

him, “I am very pleased to see that on the main point you come to the same conclusion as I did in the polemic with Tugan-Baranovsky and the Narodniki 14 years ago...”Lenin, LCW, Vol. 43, p. 332. 304 Pannekoek wrote about Radek as "their specialist" on imperialism question (ISR) and even Rosa Luxemburg, who otherwise had a deep dislike of Radek, praised and recommended his articles on imperialism. For Radek's contribution to the debate, see the previous chapter in this dissertation. 305 The most important ones are: "Marxismus und Kriegsprobleme" (1914), "Historische Paralellen" (February 1915), "Die Entwicklung der Internationale" (August/September 1915) published in Lichtstrahlen, "Staat, Nation, Imperialismus und Sozialdemokratie" published in Arbeiterpolitik (1916) and "Die Triebkräfte des Imperialismus" (March 1915) published in Neues Leben. 306 Radek, "The Driving Forces of Imperialism" in Day & Gaido, Discovering Imperialism, p. 864.

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interlinked relations of production that moved beyond the scope of the national boundaries. Simply put, the capitalist nation states became too narrow for the further development of the productive forces. The very competition between capitalists, which previously forced them to be inventive and productive, now took militaristic and destructive forms aimed at undermining the very same productive forces. The World War marked the transformation of capitalism into a destructive and parasitic force as it led capitalistic nations into destroying each other’s productive capacities: "This world war... broke out at a stage of economic development at which the capitalist world has already developed so great productive forces that a systematic organization of the economy as a whole is possible. The world war can only be fully appreciated from this point of view. Imperialism cannot and will not unfold the productive forces of society to full development. It only strives for a longer lifespan for capitalism, and that is why today's world war can in no way be compared with the trade wars of the 17th and 18th centuries"307

At this stage, the world was ready to develop a new mode of production. i.e., socialism. Hence for Radek "the World War of imperialism" was "therefore a war against socialism."308 The logical conclusion this led to was that if capitalist states became the agents of a reaction and destruction, then the states themselves must have become reactionary.309 Carrying Radek and Gorter's logic further, Pannekoek argued that if nations and capitalist states in general were too narrow for the further development of the productive forces and if they revealed capitalism’s reactionary and destructive character in the new historic phase, then the world proletariat had to destroy the capitalist states themselves.310 Pannekoek had already conceptualized the mass action

307

Ibid. Karl Radek, “Historiches Parallelen”, Lichtstrahlen no.5, (February 1915), p. 74. 309 For Pannekoek’s analogous views see; Anton Pannekoek, “The Downfall of the International”, The New Review, Vol. II (1914), Nr 11, November 1914, p. 625. 310 One of the last and most important contributions of Pannekoek to this debate was published in the first issue of the joint Zimmerwald Left publication, Vorbote in January 1916 titled “Imperialism and the Tasks of the Proletariat.” Here Pannekoek more explicitly defined the mass action, as an action but at the same time as an expression of the maturation and strengthening of proletariat through struggle as opposed to the State power, representing the minority ruling class. Pannekoek wrote, “State-power is not just a neutral object of the class-struggle, but a weapon and fortress of the bourgeoisie, its strongest prop, without which it could never hold its ground. The struggle of the proletariat is therefore first of all a struggle against state-power.” Further, “All struggles, regardless of whether they immediately end in victory or defeat, contribute to developing the proletariat’s power by clarifying its understanding, strengthening its organisation or doing away with inhibiting traditions. In the previous period, the significance of parliamentarism lay in the fact that it established the first beginnings of proletarian power, brought socialist consciousness to the masses, helped to create organisations, stirred the masses somewhat and, at the same time, undermined the moral prestige of the state. That was not enough to conquer political power, but it 308

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as a struggle against the state before the war. For him, the war only provided the confirmation that the state had turned into a reactionary and destructive instrument at the hands of the capitalists, which had to be destroyed in the new imperialist phase. In summer 1915, Pannekoek's conclusion on the political character of the state in the imperialism epoch was taken up and theorized more deeply by a young Bolshevik, Nikolai Bukharin, in his systematic exploration of the changing relations between imperialism, states, and militarism.311 In an article titled "Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State,"312 Bukharin distinguished two forms of states under capitalism with two different characteristics. During the initial period of industrial capitalism (corresponding to the period before inter-imperialist rivalry between capitalist states), the state did not interfere in the inter-capitalist competition between independent firms.

did make mass-actions possible. Mass-actions will be the means to increase the power of the proletariat further, to its highest level, and at the same time to crush the power of the state... In a mass-strike, the entire organisation of the state can temporarily be thrown out of joint and its functions can devolve upon the organs of the proletariat. In the future, what happened in 1905 in Russia will happen in Western Europe on a much vaster scale.” Anton Pannekoek, “Imperialism and the Tasks of the Proletariat” in Day & Gaido, Discovering Imperialism pp.905-906. 311 Bukharin wrote to Lenin in October 1916: “You may ask: Why discuss this (the question of state) academic question now? And in my opinion, this is the most important and most urgent issue. Pannekoek's great merit is that he, almost the only one, understood the urgency of the problem. A great service was rendered by Pannekoek in that he, almost solely, understood the actuality of the problem (on the state). For everything is now concentrating on the question of the state, about which the masses do not really know what it is. Therefore, and a general statement of the question is necessary.” “Iz Materialov Instituta Marksa-Engel’sa-Lenina”, Bolshevik, no. 22 (1932), pp. 87-89. 312 The history of the publication of this article gives an excellent summary of the LRI world of publications in microcosm and how a web of English, German, Russian, Dutch and Scandinavian language organs formed an international web of discussion and clarification. As Bukharin’s note to the post-revolutionary republication of his article summarizes: “This article was intended for Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, a periodical publication of the Central Committee that began to appear after Kommunist ceased to exist. The editors of the Sbornik did not consider it possible to include the article, suggesting that it developed incorrect views concerning the state... After I received the refusal from Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrat, I wrote a number of short articles, developing the same system of views. These articles appeared in left-radical newspapers: the Dutch De Tribune (the article “De Nieuwe Lyfeigenschap” – “A New Slavery,” on 25 November 1916 and succeeding days); in the organ of Norwegian youth, Klassekampen; in the Bremen journal Arbeiterpolitik..., which appeared during the war; and, finally, in the journal Jugendinternationale (an article under the pseudonym Nota Bene), and in a series of polemical articles (against Dr. Ingerman) in the New York paper Novyi Mir.” N. I. Bukharin, “Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State,” in N. I. Bukharin: Selected Writings on the State and the Transition to Socialism, Stephen F. Cohen, Ken Coates, and Richard B. Day, eds. (London: Routledge, 1982), Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1915/state.htm.

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Bukharin called this period the "liberal" epoch.313 However, in the later imperialist period, the capitalist states intervention was requested by capital itself in order to preserve the competitive edge of national capital. At a social level, this process also corresponded to the decrease in the importance of single individual capitalists as the agents of capital that had marked the earlier phases of capitalist mode of production and rise of the centrality of collective capitalists. The intervention of national banks and financialization of capital through capital mergers drove capitalism towards the disappearance of bourgeois individuals. At this stage, the bourgeois individuals turned into "coupon clippers" or receivers of "shares," whose role and function in the capitalist economy becomes secondary and the production of surplus value faces increasing challenges in a regime of the private property ownership. "The separate capitalist disappears"314 as the capitalists forms a united collective group, increasingly identifying itself with the state. Bukharin identified several different aspects of this "state-capitalist" organism that grew under imperialism. In addition to its function as the guarantor of the continuation of capitalist exploitation, the state also centralizes ideological, administrative, and political functions through education, religion, infrastructure (press and communication), and even scientific research. But the most important role that the capitalist state embraced under imperialism was its military role. For Bukharin, in contrast to the earlier epoch, the state took over the role of organization the whole economy for total war production and mobilization. Bukharin unequivocally condemned those who claimed that state centralization for military competition inadvertently drove societies towards socialism. For Bukharin, the sole purpose of "war socialism" (as practiced by the major imperialist states) was to serve the purpose of intensifying exploitation and thus, it merely benefited the class domination. "To support contemporary state means to support militarism"315 wrote Bukharin and any further strengthening of the modern capitalist state would only embolden its destructive drive. The political power of the proletariat required overcoming of the bourgeois state and the division of the world into separate national political entities.

313

Ibid. Ibid. 315 Ibid. 314

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Initially distant to Bukharin's conclusions on the imperialist state, Lenin gradually came to a similar conclusion.316 In fact, Lenin's major contribution to the debate was on the question of state in the imperialist epoch.317 His theoretical efforts to find a concrete, historical basis for the destruction of the state and especially about what precisely had to replace the state preoccupied him throughout 1916 and 1917. The solution he was looking for was specifically this problem: if the state was an instrument of class oppression, and if the imperialist epoch had to be replaced by communism (i.e. a stateless society) since now the class society had become wholly decadent and reactionary, what kind of a specific institution had to replace the state? 318 His hesitance to embrace to the majority LRI position on the state, at least from the mid- to late-1916 led him to a historical investigation. In this period, Lenin was busily preoccupied with this question.319

316

Bukharin’s biographer Stephan Cohen summarizes Lenin’s evolution: “On February 17, 1917, Lenin suddenly notified another Bolshevik: “I am preparing... an article on the question of Marxism's attitude toward the state. I have reached conclusions much sharper against Kautsky than against Bukharin... Bukharin is much better than Kautsky...” Lenin still had reservations: “Bukharin's errors may ruin this 'just cause' in the struggle with Kautskyism.” But two days later he again announced that despite “small errors” Bukharin was “closer to the truth than Kautsky,” and that he was now prepared to publish Bukharin's essay. His remaining doubts soon disappeared. When Bukharin returned to Moscow in May 1917, Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, relayed a message from the leader. Her first words were: “V.L asked me to: tell you that he no longer has any disagreements with you on the question of the state.” The fullest evidence of Lenin's complete turnabout came later in 1917, when he completed his famous treatise State and Revolution: its arguments and conclusions were Bukharin's. Lenin had decided that “the main, fundamental point in Marxism's teaching on the state” was that “the working class must destroy, smash, explode... the entire state machine.” A new, revolutionary state was required temporarily, but one “constituted so that it rapidly begins to wither away…” Therefore, “we in no way disagree with the anarchists on... the abolition of the state as the goal.” Unabashed, he concluded: “Neither the opportunists nor the Kautskyists wish to see this similarity between Marxism and anarchism, because they have departed from Marxism on this point.” Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: a political biography, 1888-1938 (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 42. Also see: M.C. Howard & J.E. King, A History of Marxian Economics: 1883-1929, Vol. 1 (Princeton, N. J: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 241-255. 317 Lenin did not contribute any original insight into the debate on imperialism before the revolution began in Russia. His major pamphlet "Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism" was not published until 1917. 318 Lenin’s concern over the practicality of abstract theoretical questions, perhaps more than anyone else on the LRI camp, was exemplified most concretely in the debate over the national question. 319 For instance see: Lenin’s letter to Innesa Armand, 19 February 1917: “I have been putting a lot of study recently on the question of the attitude of Marxism to the state. I have collected a lot of material and arrived, it seems to me at very interesting and important conclusions… I would terribly much like to write about this…” Lenin, LCW Vol. 35 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), pp. 288-289.

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He presented his first conclusions in a presentation given to the Swiss students in January 1917 on the anniversary of 1905 revolution. He began by giving a general summary of the strength of the Russian socialist movement. In 1905, the situation did not look very promising: the RSDLP was only a small group, which was labelled as a “sect” by the right-wing socialist opponents of the Bolsheviks: it only had several hundred organizers and several thousand members. Its publications were printed abroad and smuggled with great difficulty and sacrifice. These circumstances, continued Lenin, “gave the narrow-minded and overbearing reformists formal justification for their claim that there was not yet a revolutionary people in Russia.” However, “suddenly” a mass proletarian struggle exploded leading to strikes and armed clashes between the sections of the army. The dormant Russia was transformed by a revolutionary proletariat.320 For Lenin the “principle factor” in this transformation was the mass strike: …the Russian revolution was also a proletarian revolution, not only in the sense that the proletariat was the leading force, the vanguard of the movement, but also in the sense that a specifically proletarian weapon of struggle—the strike—was the principal means of bringing the masses into motion and the most characteristic phenomenon in the wavelike rise of decisive events… The Russian revolution was the first, though certainly not the last, great revolution in which the mass political strike played an extraordinarily important role... It shows that in a revolutionary epoch—I say this without the slightest exaggeration, on the basis of the most accurate data of Russian history—the proletariat can generate fighting energy a hundred times greater than in ordinary, peaceful times.321 [emphasis mine]

This emphasis on the mass strike clearly followed Pannekoek in its emphasis on the mass initiative. Like Pannekoek, Lenin rejected those who denigrated the masses’ intellectual capacity: When the bourgeois gentry and their uncritical echoers, the social-reformists, talk priggishly about the “education” of the masses, they usually mean something schoolmasterly, pedantic, something that demoralises the masses and instils in them bourgeois prejudices… The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will. That is why even reactionaries bad to admit that the year 1905, the year of struggle, the “mad year”, definitely buried patriarchal Russia322.

320

Lenin, “Lecture on the 1905 Revolution” LCW Vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 236253. 321 Ibid. p. 239. 322 Ibid. p.241.

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A couple of weeks after this speech, Lenin prepared another lecture, this time on the 1917 revolution. This was Lenin’s first statement on the March 1917 revolution and for the first time here he discussed the results of his study on the state and how mass action could gradually destroy the state. In Lenin’s view, the abstract problem of replacing the state with proletarian power was solved by a new form of organization that emerged directly out of the struggle itself. This form was the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.323 The provisional government must not be supported, Lenin insisted, even in the name of “combating the reaction,” as it was also a remnant of the past and had to be discarded. The soviet form was the special organization suited for transition to socialism. Its practice was not characterized by a suffocating legalistic routine which “the betrayers of socialism, the social-patriots, and opportunists of all countries… but a revolutionary organization. It must, first embrace the entire people, and second, combine military and government functions.”324 Until the November Revolution, Lenin increasingly preoccupied himself with the soviet form as the concrete form that the destruction of the state would undergo in the transition of humanity out of the class society (and hence states). Most of his major works in this period (The April Thesis, Letters from Afar) aimed to convince his party comrades first that a parliamentary or republican government form would be reactionary for the contemporary urgent tasks of the working class and, second, that the form that the working class revolutionary power should take was the soviet.325 The result of Lenin’s study on the question of the state, mass action, and the soviet form was the State and Revolution, a work he completed in hiding before the November Revolution. The importance of this work for Lenin cannot be overemphasized. Unsure about his personal fate

323

The Bolsheviks already recognized the soviet form as early as 1915 as “organs of insurrection.” Responding to a request from the St Petersburg Committee of the party, Lenin and others in Switzerland came up with a proposal of “Several Theses” about concrete slogans and tactics for the underground militants in the Russian Empire. It suggested that “Soviets of Workers’ Deputies and similar institutions must be regarded as organs of insurrection, of revolutionary rule. It is only in connection with the development of a mass political strike and with an insurrection, and in the measure of the latter’s preparedness, development and success that such institutions can be of lasting value.” Sotsial-Demokrat, No. 47, 13 October 1915. LCW Vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 402. 324 Lenin, “The Tasks of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in the Russian Revolution: Report of a Lecture”, Ibid pp. 355-361. 325 Lenin, “Theses on the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Current Revolution” a.k.a. “The April Thesis” LCW Vol 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 19-26.

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since he was charged as an enemy spy by the Provisional Government, he left the draft for State and Revolution as his political legacy. The work may have seemed like cryptic Marxology for a reader outside the LRI movement, but it is a simple guidebook on how to practically crush and eliminate state and, in that sense, was an addendum to the LRI theoretical debate on the state. The line of reasoning developed in two stages. First as a continuation of the Pannekoek and Kautsky controversy over the destruction of the state and mass action, Lenin proposes the soviet form as the concrete counter- or anti-state. Second, he elaborated a historical examination of the 19th century root of the debate on the destruction of the state. Here Lenin underlined that Marx and Engels already saw in the 1871 Paris Commune a practical solution to the problem. The soviet form for Lenin, concretized what Pannekoek left in the abstract in his debate with Kautsky.326 For Lenin, the main features of the anti-state soviet form were three-fold: 1. The Soviet was an organ through which the proletarian masses ruled society as a whole. It was a kind of “non-state” or a counter-state. Its primary function was to take concrete steps towards the forceful abolition of classes through destroying the army, the police, arming the working class, and enabling the masses to oversee the functioning of bureaucracy.

326

This was Lenin’s main criticism of Pannekoek; that it lacked “precision and concreteness” about how and by what exact means to destroy the state. V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), p. 154. Others were clearly aware of the intellectual connection between Pannekoek's conceptualization of the mass action and Lenin's vision of the role of soviets as opposed to the state. Radek wrote in 1918: “In this struggle for the road to power the question arose here and there: “In what should the power of the victorious working class be expressed?” But it was nowhere clearly put on the agenda, and for very simple reasons. The question of the mobilization of the workers' battalions, the question of their general aim of marching, but not of the stages to be traversed on the way, was just on the agenda of history. To prove the necessity of the mass strike, the radical socialists pointed to the decline of parliamentarism. They showed how it was becoming more and more a citadel of the capitalist prey hunters: in the republican countries they criticized the Talmir Republic and the Talmocracy in the strongest possible way, and the question often arose: “How do you transform capitalist democracy and its parliamentary organs into Organs of power of the victorious proletariat? “When Anton Pannekoek, the clearest head of Western European socialism, answered the question that one had to smash the capitalist state in its democratic forms and create new organs of power for the working people in the fire of the proletarian revolution, there he was charged by Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxist theorist of the Second International, of anarchism. No matter how correct Pannekoek's answer was, it was only half an answer. It pointed out that the organs of coercion of capital must be smashed, but it did not show which organs of coercion the proletariat would have to form in order to carry out and consolidate its victory." Karl Radek, “Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft” written as a preface to N. Bukharin, Das Programm der Kommunisten, (Zurich: 1918), p. 8.

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2. The Soviet was not a democratic or dictatorial form in an abstract sense. It went beyond this abstractly ahistorical dichotomy. On the one hand, the soviet form certainly had dictatorial features in that it exemplified the rule of one class (the proletariat) over the other (the bourgeoisie). Further in its practical workings, Lenin defined the soviet as unifying the legislative and executive branches in a single organ, the sign of a dictatorial concertation of power par excellence. However, it was also extremely democratic in the sense that all “officials, without exception, [were to be] elected and subject to recall at any time, their salaries reduced to the level of ordinary ‘workmen’s wages’.”327 Hence soviets enabled the participation of the masses into its activity under any conditions. In fact, it invited and required an active and watchful masses to every aspect in order to preserve its character as a mass organ of power. 3. The soviet form was historically transient. Once the capitalist relations of production were destroyed and proletarian vision of a communist society established, it will lose its reason to exist. Hence, Lenin envisioned its main function to first take political power and then regulate and control the process of transforming step by step, the communization of the social relations. While Lenin attempted to develop a concrete and precise definition of the organs of mass action for the period of open proletarian struggle against the state, basing himself only on concrete experience, the historiography has tended to see State and Revolution as an essentially abstract, an even a utopian work. Some historians have considered it to be enigmatic, puzzling, utopian, unfitting to the general body of Lenin’s work and style.328 Few saw the intellectual tradition of the LRI going as far back as 1912 to the debate between the left-wing and the center around Kautsky.329

2.

Left-Radical Internationalists on the “Collapse of the Second International”

The theoretical debate on the question of imperialism and the state developed in tandem with the question of Second International and its reactions to imperialism. In this respect, Gorter’s

327

Lenin, State and Revolution, p. 82. Among others see: Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 353, Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 122, Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 51, Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 195-196. 329 See: Schurer, “Anton Pannekoek and the Origins of Leninism” pp. 427–344. 328

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pamphlet can be taken as the starting point for following the development of the LRI perspective. In his pamphlet on imperialism, Gorter had already succinctly explained the heart of the LRI critique of the Second International writing, "until now, in the struggle and practical policies of the socialists against the governments of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat of each country only faced their national bourgeoisie." However, in the imperialist epoch, the proletariat could not confine itself to a struggle solely limited to its own national bourgeoisie; it had to struggle against the world bourgeoisie as an international class.330 The attitude towards the war was a prime example of the impossibility of a nationally focused socialist-proletarian strategy. By intensifying and exacerbating the class antagonisms, imperialism united the interests of the entire world proletariat against the world’s ruling class in an immediate and direct manner. Gorter argued that national defense and the resistance against invasion put forward as a raison d'etre for defensism and "social peace" policy of the German Social Democracy early in the war, was a lesser threat than imperialism in general. Struggling against the war in the imperialist epoch could only be international mass action, which had to focus on politics at an international level and demanded international organization. As it turned out, this was inconceivable for the Second International. A more detailed analysis of the Social Democratic capitulation in the face of national capital and the national defense policy had been presented by Radek in his Staat, Nation, Imperialismus und Sozialdemokratie.331 Radek identified three different strands of socialist nationalism. The first was "social imperialism." For Radek, "social imperialists"332 constituted the extreme rightwing current inside the Second International that openly opted for a national expansionist policy. The German social-imperialists especially supported an economically unified East-Central Europe

330

Gorter, Der Imperialismus, pp. 32-3. Radek’s article series, Staat, Nation, Imperialismus und Sozialdemokratie was published in Arbeiterpolitik in 1916 in ten installments (numbers 11 to 24). It was later republished in the collection of his wartime articles in 1921: Karl Radek, In den Reihen der deutschen Revolution 1909-1919 Gesammelte Aufsätze u. Abhandlungen (Munchen: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1921). All references given here are to this later work. 332 The intellectual leadership of this current belonged to Die Glocke in Germany. However, this was not solely a "German" current. Radek focused on the differences in Germany since he found the most theoretically elaborate forms of various brands of socialist nationalism in Germany, which existed almost universally. 331

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in the name of "anti-nationalism," that would enable the free movement of the workers and further the development of the forces of production. Yet, the consequence of such a policy would be the strengthening of German national capital. Opposing the social-imperialists stood the social-patriots who were "purely nationalist."333 The social patriotic argument favored the defense of the nation-state as the best framework for the further development of the productive forces. However, countered Radek, even during capitalism’s infancy, nation states did not provide the best framework for the development of capitalist social relations and had a tendency to expand beyond the borders containing "national" communities. In the period of capitalist decay, this tendency to expand was the main reason for the imperialist wars between already developed capitalist powers.334 According to Radek, even in its classical examples (France and Britain), the nation-state did not correspond to a homogenous national-ethnic group and the bourgeoisie solely favored the nation state form because it presented capital with a secure, unified and strong state as a source of political power.335 Finally, Radek also condemned the "social pacifists," the left-centrist current that defended peace between capitalist nation-states as possible and desirable even during the imperialist stage, as equally dangerous. For Radek, social pacifists endorsed the rights of nations to defend themselves as a general principle, while opposing the current war solely because it did not benefit the national capitals as a whole. For Radek, this was an apparent contradiction and made social pacifism especially dangerous for it was a transitory position opening the door to social patriotism. The Bolsheviks held a similar view about the divisions inside the international socialist movement. In an article published in the Sotsial Demokrat, Lenin argued that the world socialist movement had underwent a tri-partite division: "Advocacy of class collaboration; abandonment of the idea of socialist revolution and revolutionary methods of struggle; adaptation to bourgeois nationalism; losing sight of the fact that the borderlines of nationality and country are historically transient; making a fetish of bourgeois legality; renunciation of the class viewpoint and the class struggle, for fear of repelling the “broad masses of the population” (meaning the petty bourgeoisie)—such, doubtlessly, are the ideological foundations of opportunism. And it is from such soil that the present chauvinist and patriotic frame of mind of most Second International leaders has developed. Observers representing the most various points of view have long noted that

333

Ibid. p. 386-387. Ibid. p. 384. 335 Ibid. p. 357. 334

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the opportunists are in fact prevalent in the Second International’s leadership… The trends within socialism have remained the same."336

Gorter’s, Lenin’s, and Radek's critiques underlined the impossibility of a Second International-type federalism and nationally focused evaluation of class struggle in the new, imperialist era. The logical conclusion to which this led the LRIs was that the Second International no longer represented a coherent whole. Pannekoek went one step further and came up with a historic analysis about why and how such inconsistent tendencies inside the same International could develop. For Pannekoek, the collapse of the International resulted from an impossibility of containing the contradictions within it. According to him, all previous Internationals held conflicting tendencies within them. They represented different, even conflicting, but also converging phases in the life of the class. For instance, in the First International there were two main poles: the disgruntled artisans and craftsmen losing their autonomy from the pre-capitalist era with the development of industrialization and the modern proletariat, which was in its infancy and emerging only recently, in a few countries of Europe. Up to a point, differing characters and aspirations of those groups could be contained within the same organization. Pannekoek wrote that their common international goal was to resist reactionary imperial armies to crush the republican and revolutionary experiments as it happened during the Napoleonic wars. These differences, which could be contained for a period, turned into irreconcilable antagonisms when the wars of national unification ended in 1870s, especially in Italy and Germany. From this point onwards, the International fragmented and the bonds uniting it eroded with the fall of the Paris Commune as “the workers of each nation had to shape their struggles according to the local political conditions.”337 The Second International became the expression of this geographic divergence and its doom came when the international goals of the proletariat could no more be formulated separately for each different country, Pannekoek argued. The Second International aspired to prepare the growing proletariat to prepare for the seizure of political power. Yet it had to do this under vastly different conditions as the movement was growing in different parliamentary, monarchical or

336

V.I. Lenin, “The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International” LCW, Volume 21, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p.35-41. First published anonymously in the Sotsial-Demokrat No. 33 November 1, 1914. 337 This article was published in the American LRI journal New Review first in English. Anton Pannekoek (Bremen), “The Downfall of the International,” New Review, Vol. II, No.11, November 1914, p. 623.

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semi-constitutional regimes. This situation resulted in the utilization of separate tactical and strategic accommodations in different countries, for instance, illegal and more militant methods in Russia, open and legal organizations in Britain or Belgium, while the rest positioning somewhere in between these opposing poles. As long as different countries industrialized within the framework of a relatively peaceful capitalist competition, nationally distinct political and economic goals of workers did not come into conflict with the international unity of the proletariat. Yet this federative nature of the International also weakened it in the face of imperialism: “In opposition to the Old International [the First International], whose center of gravity lay in the international policy of the proletariat, the New [Second International] International lacked a clearly defined international policy. It was concerned with questions of internal politics, questions and struggles that were caused by the development of capitalism in each individual country. This had to change when imperialism, with its militaristic armaments, its endless conflicts among the various States, its ever-present menace of war, raised its head. The new international policy must needs be entirely different from that of Marx and Engels. At that time the defense of European democracy against Czarism was the aim of the International. To-day, after the [1905] Russian Revolution, it could only be to defend the proletariat against world-war, to preserve world-peace. The International should, therefore, have become a firm union of the working class parties of all countries against war. The party has always striven toward this end, has always emphasized this phase of its activity. The highest expression of this effort was reached in the International Congress at Basel [1912], where Social Democratic representatives from all countries protested against war and declared that they would do everything in their power to prevent it. But behind this declaration there lay much more fear of war than firm determination to take up the fight against it. Its outward form, the session in the church, the ringing of bells, the avoidance of all discussion as to how and with what means war was to be prevented—all these things betrayed the effort to mesmerize the governments with words and outward appearances, instead of trying to organize the real strength of the proletariat and preparing it for a struggle so difficult and requiring so many sacrifices. And when finally the governments really wanted war, there was neither the strength nor the courage to take up the fight. Internationalism went up in smoke and the International lay in ruins.”338

In a later article published in the journal Vorbote (the joint international organ of the LRIs including the Bolsheviks, Tribunists, Polish and Latvian left-radicals) about a year and a half after writing the above quoted article, Pannekoek sharpened the tone of his criticism of Second International Marxism. The social democratic movement, he wrote, "arose from earlier conditions of a pre-war imperialist period," which had now expired. Social Democrats fought for attainable reforms that did not come into conflict with the general historical direction of the capitalist

338

Ibid. p. 628.

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development and feudal retreat and decay. However, the Social Democratic movement's success in adapting to this earlier period also made it difficult for the Second International to adapt itself to the new conditions, when imperialism altered the rules and shape of the class struggle, ending the peaceful era of capitalist development. An overgrown, lethargic reformism congealed the spirit of the workers, turned them into passive observers just at a time when they had to oppose imperialism actively and massively: “One could no longer manage against imperialism with the old means. In parliament, one could criticise its manifestations (such as armaments, taxes, reaction, the standstill of social legislation), but one could not influence its policy because it was not made by the parliaments but by small groups of people (in Germany, the Kaiser along with some nobles, generals, ministers and bankers; in England, three or four aristocrats and politicians; in France, a few bankers and ministers). The unions could hardly ward off the powerful business associations; all the skill of their officers broke apart against the granite-power of the cartel-magnates. The reactionary election laws could not be shaken through elections alone. New means of struggle were necessary. The proletarian masses themselves had to enter the stage with active methods of struggle.”339

In brief, mass Social Democratic parties focused on legal political reforms in a national context since the socialists at the time thought that the formation of nation-states as the legal framework for the capitalist development had to replace the imperial-monarchical political entities of the feudal era. Yet, such nationally focused pragmatic politics, despite the universalist claims of the Marxist theory that the social democratic movement officially adopted, created a national myopia among the proletariat. Radek argued that, at a certain historical conjuncture, this went against the actual worldwide impact of capitalist development. Capitalism was bustling at a global level and workers were soon to face the consequences of this situation, as happened with the World War: “What happened on the stage of ‘higher politics’ was an object of indignation, protests, and declarations of sympathy, but not something that concerned their own interests... The War is revealing to the popular masses that they depend on what happens in Bombay and the Orange River [in South Africa], in the Sea of Marmara [in Turkey] and in Shandong [a province of eastern China]; it is revealing to them that the age of the isolated nation with its separate struggles is gone, and that world rule, world policy, is the fundamental fact.”340

339

Pannekoek, “Imperialism and the Tasks of the Proletariat,” in Day & Gaido, Discovering Imperialism, pp. 899-900. 340 Radek, “The Driving Forces of Imperialism”, in Day & Gaido, Discovering Imperialism, p. 864.

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In his earlier article on the “Downfall of the International,” Pannekoek underlined the contradiction how the Social Democracy’s success, especially in the advanced west European capitalist countries, also created the conditions for its failures in facing imperialism. Conditions in different countries made the social democratic movement stagnant, made it addicted to the capitalist stability in especially Western Europe. In most European countries, this tendency expressed itself through the growth of several combinations of mass legal organizations: trade unions, parliamentary parties, and cooperatives. Because in Germany the Social Democratic party had a special gigantic organizational machine, completely open to state oversight, it refused to risk an open confrontation with the state’s repressive apparatus, just when imperialism required it to do so. Paradoxically, this success made the social democratic organizations less inclined to transform and adapt to the new imperialist conditions exactly when they had to. Pannekoek wrote; “The rapid growth of the party and labor union organizations has produced an army of parliamentarians, functionaries and officials, who, as a sort of specialists, became the representatives of the traditional methods of struggle and obstructed the adoption of new methods. As the Social Democracy grew in parliamentary strength, the tendency to join hands with portions of the capitalist class for the purpose of winning reforms became more marked... This reformism, which refused to have anything to do with the class struggle of the proletariat gained the upper hand in the Social Democracy of most of the West-European nations—in France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, while in England the Labor Party showed the same tendency without using Socialist phrases. It is true that organization is a condition, a necessary instrument for the victory of the proletariat; but as it becomes stronger there is the dangerous tendency to regard it as the end, instead of as the means to an end, its maintenance becomes the highest aim, and in order to safeguard the organization serious struggles are carefully avoided. This tendency is furthered by the numberless officials and executive heads of the party and the labor unions. In recent years the struggle between these two opposing tendencies in the German Social Democracy came to a head upon several occasions. But each time those who called for revolutionary tactics against the increasing strength of imperialism and pointed to the necessity of mass-actions, were in the minority.”341

Gorter, Pannekoek and others in the LRI camp constantly emphasized that this nationalist myopia created, and in turn fostered, theorized, and propagated by its own social protagonist: a layer of social democratic officials, party and union functionaries, bureaucrats, intellectuals, journalists, parliamentarians, lawyers and all sorts of socialists who turned politics into a profession in the body of bourgeois legalism. The peaceful era of legal and parliamentary struggle had opened

341

Pannekoek, “Downfall of the International,” p. 623.

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a career path for these special "socialist" politicians inside the newly and rapidly developing national bourgeois institutions. Contrasting these new socialists of the Second International with Marx's generation and their pupils, Gorter wrote that the leaders of the social democratic movement themselves became unreliable elements for the defense the socialist goals.342 Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee in exile confirmed Pannekoek's and Gorter's analysis in its central organ Sotsial Demokrat: “Decades of a so-called peaceful epoch have allowed an accumulation of petty-bourgeois and opportunist junk within the socialist parties of all the European countries"... "The particularly rapid growth of this social element of late years is beyond doubt... it includes officials of legal labour unions, parliamentarians and the other intellectuals, who have got themselves easy and comfortable posts in the legal mass movement, some sections of the better paid workers, office employees etc...”343

Zinoviev went further to present a sociological study of this new group in his Social Roots of Opportunism. Zinoviev endorsed Pannekoek’s view that the collapse of the Social Democratic Party model in Germany in the new imperialist epoch was exemplified by the production of a whole social stratum of career politicians and bureaucrats. The nationalist myopia, electoral politics, and the appeal of social democratic politics as a career path opened the door for a professional middle class to enter and define the policy of the social democratic movement. According to Zinoviev, in its quest for electoral victory before the war, the German party acquired a habit of appealing to the “vacillating intermediary layers” among whom the socialists, bourgeoisie, and even the Junkers and conservative parties wanted to enlist as “auxiliary cadres of camp-followers.”344 Referring to a sociological study by Max Weber conducted in 1905 on the electoral constituency of the Social Democratic party, Zinoviev drew the conclusion that at least about a third of the votes

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Gorter, Imperialism. This phase constituted the second phase of the socialist movement, which succeeded the previous theoretical-practical-revolutionary phase. One could call this phase theoretically and practically reformist.” 343 In "What Next?" (Jan 6, 1915) Sotsial-Demokrat, no.36. “When war broke out, the socialists who had threatened the governments with revolution and had called upon the proletariat to bring about that revolution began to refer to what had happened half a century before, and today are justifying socialist support for the governments and the bourgeoisie! The Marxist Gorter is absolutely right in comparing, in his Dutch brochure, Imperialism, the World War and Social-Democracy (p. 84), “radicals” of the Kautsky type with the liberals of 1848, who were courageous in word and traitors in deed.” V. I. Lenin, “The Social-Chauvinists’ Sophisms” Published first in the Sotsial Demokrat No. 41, May 1, 1915. LCW, Vol.21 (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1974), p.186. 344 Zinoviev, Voina i Krisis Sotsialisma, p. 274.

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that the Social Democrats won came from bourgeois or petty-bourgeois social groups in the elections. Many of these were not only far from being socialists, but very “inconsistent democrats” open to patriotic demagogy.345 When the party lost votes in the so-called “Hottentot Elections”346 in 1907, Zinoviev correctly pointed out that this was largely due to the desertion of the progressive middle class, fearing that the Social Democrats’ anti-imperialism went too far and hence they voted for the nationalist, expansionist, and even anti-Semitic right.347 This experience caused the party leadership to be fearful of defending an intransigent anti-colonialist, anti-imperialism too loudly to win over the middle class voting bloc.348 While the party was giving concessions to nationalist-minded middling social layers for electoral success, Zinoviev argued, proponents of this opportunism defended it in the name of democracy, claiming that this electoral policy opened the party to its electoral constituencies. Meanwhile, at the top, the party was increasingly becoming bureaucratized, detached from the control of the working-class masses that it claimed to represent, and gradually came under the control of a middle-class minority. This essentially opportunist bureaucracy or “workers’ aristocracy” was actually composed of a social group, which were “blood brothers” with non-party middle-class electorates. Zinoviev tried to calculate and analyze the number, composition, income and the social network of this group. According to his estimates: “4,000 officials (чиновник), by our count, occupy at least 12,000, if not more, of the most important party and trade union positions. Each one at the same time, usually occupy 23, or even more posts. The official is simultaneously a deputy and an editor, a member of the Landtag and a party secretary, a chairman of a trade union, an editor and a deputy, a chairman of an electoral district, a cooperative administrator, a chairman of an educational commission, a member of the municipality, etc. thus, power in the party and in the unions is accumulated in the hands of these upper 4,000. The course of the whole organizational machine depends on them. They hold in their hands the entire powerful apparatus of the press, organizations, mutual aid, the entire electoral machinery, and so on.”349

345

Ibid. p. 275. 1907 Federal Elections in Germany took place under the shadow of the 1904 genocide committed by the German Empire in its South-West African colony against the Herero people. Pro-colonization parties stirred chauvinistic and colonialist sentiments among the middle classes. The Social Democratic party and the working class remained the only consistent critic of the colonialist policy of the Empire. 347 Carl Schorske, German Social-Democracy, pp. 60-63. 348 Zinoviev, Voina i Krisis Sotsialisma, pp. 275-285. 349 Ibid. p.297-8 346

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This group was exclusively drafted from the workers’ aristocracy: a mishmash of petty bourgeois salon keepers, the new middle class, and specialized, skilled, well-paid upper-crust of the working class. Zinoviev claimed about only one third of the unskilled lower paid workers constituting the majority of the working class had been organized by the Social Democratic party and the trade unions in Germany. Further, he quoted a German academic claiming that one-third to one-half of the party could not even be considered as worker but constituted by petty-bourgeois professions. However, he conceded that quantitatively this may be an exaggeration.350 For a mass party claiming to represent the whole working class, this may be a strange sociological composition. Yet, eventually, Zinoviev argued, the whole policy of Social Democracy came to represent the interests of these layers. Probably worried that such a sociological analysis was difficult to integrate into Marxism, Zinoviev also warned about over-stretching the concepts of workers aristocracy and workers bureaucracy in order not to reach conspiratorial and reductionist conclusions. The workers’ bureaucracy did not consciously lead the movement to a pro-war stance. As it was an outgrowth of the pre-war “peaceful” period of capitalist development, the new layers refused to acknowledge the new reality that imperialism expressed and thus could not oppose the war. However, this did not diminish the need for professional party workers, Zinoviev also warned. To sum up, Zinoviev, Pannekoek, Radek, Gorter, and Lenin could all agree that the August 1914 marked the death of the Second International. It was an organizational death as the main parties and unions of the former International in Europe were now serving the wartime policies of their respective imperialist states. Thus, it was a political death, as socialism, or at least the leadership, was put to the service of nationalism. Finally it was a cultural or “spiritual” death, the death

350

Ibid. p.339. Zinoviev makes an interesting observation about especially one petty-bourgeois group: the saloon keepers or pub owners (трактирщики). Independent working class pubs were an integral part of the social democratic culture in Germany at the time. Many blacklisted socialist organizers opened such pubs frequented by the organized workers. Zinoviev observed that this group of the petty bourgeoisie had an extremely significant influence over the party. In some localities, they constituted between 1 to 5 per cent of the party membership and there were always a couple of pub owners deputies in the Reichstag Fraction of the Party. Ibid. p. 339. While Zinoviev’s claim that these former party veterans turned socialist pub owners had a petty bourgeois influence over the party may be contested, it is still interesting to note here that F. Ebert, organizer of the anti-communist violence after the foundation of the Weimar Republic, rose exactly from the ranks of this layer. He began his rise to the party leadership first as a pub owner.

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of the whole culture of legal permanent mass organizations, the culture of which was a product of capitalist era of peaceful and liberal development. But at its heart, what the collapse signified was the impossibility of the old means of workers’ struggles, parliamentarism, trade unions, and cooperatives to serve in the new era of imperialism. These now had to be adapted to new internationalist means, mass revolutionary actions on a global scale, and if not to be discarded.

3.

Left-Radical Internationalists for a “New Revolutionary International”

While they were harshly critical of the Social Democratic establishment and its leaders, the LRIs did not mince their words when it came to the apparent passivity of the working class in the face of the war either. If the proletariat had been up to the historical challenge in August 1914, then they could have stopped the war, no matter how their leaders or organizations behaved. Merely pointing to a "betrayal" of leaders by explaining integration of the working-class organizations to the state would still give an incomplete picture. In a reverse form, such an explanation would approve the official social democratic doctrine that minimized the capacity of the workingclass masses and exaggerated the centrality of the Social Democratic party leadership and bureaucracy to any action, which was exactly what the LRIs wanted to prove wrong. For the LRIs, the workers’ own docility, their own illusions and weaknesses, their own confidence in their leaders or their own meek and passive protests against the leadership, meant, in short, that the workers themselves were partly to blame for the disaster of war. Again, Gorter did not hedge. He argued that the Second International tactics, the role the union leaders played in negotiations, and politicians in the parliaments created in the masses a docile, passive spirit. "The masses, totally filled with a desire for immediate personal betterment, not revolution, and the leaders reinforced this view in them. For this purpose the masses left everything to the leaders, and themselves became weak and complacent. And the less active, the less self-conscious the masses became, the more the leaders saw themselves as the real bearers of the movement. Increasingly the leaders began to believe that the proletarian action consists above all of the tactics and compromises the leaders devise, and that the means that workers themselves could use were simply the ballot box, payment of union dues, and occasionally a union struggle or a demonstration. The leaders came to believe that the

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masses are actually a passive crowd that must be herded, and the real active force was the leaders themselves.”351

Similarly, in an essay published on 1 May 1915, Pannekoek rhetorically posed the question, whether May Day was worth celebrating anymore, since the working class failed standing up against nationalism and led itself to the butchery of their class comrades in a capitalist war. Answering his own question, Pannekoek reassured readers that the proletariat could stand up again. But, to recover its ground, the working class had to fundamentally change its tactics in the light of the setback it suffered with the war.352 Of fundamental importance here was his emphasis on the workers own capacity to understand their own historic position, strength, and capacity, and to act on these. The workers had to accept that the Second International was dead and gone with it was the old habit of leaving the initiative in theory and practice to a selected few specialist. A new international had to be formed, based on the already emergent, new mass action tactics and a resolute internationalism. In fact, Pannekoek was the first to exclaim this basic LRI position: that a new third international was necessary and, as a logical corollary, workers had to break from the Second International and its parties.353 A new definition of proletarian internationalism based on the masses’ own capacity to act was all the more necessary because (as Radek argued in "The Downfall of the International"), the working class had taken over its own conception of internationalism essentially from the bourgeoisie. The French Revolution and its struggle against reaction posed the question of international solidarity but in a bourgeois sense, in the defense of a bourgeois republic and against feudal domination over the recently born national bourgeois consciousness in Europe. In fact, one of the

351

My translation from: Gorter, Der Imperialismus, p. 63. Anton Pannekoek, "Internationalism" De Tribune, Saturday May 1, 1915, No. 60-61 p.5. 353 In a series of articles published in the Berner Tagwacht between 20 and 22 August 1914, that is immediately after the war began, he wrote: "The Second International is dead. But this ignoble death is no accident; like the downfall of the first International, the collapse of the second is an indication of the fact that its usefulness is at an end. It represents, in fact, the downfall of the old fighting methods of the epoch. Not in the sense that they will disappear or become useless, but in the sense that the whole world now understands that these methods cannot bring the Revolution. They retain their value as preparation, as auxiliary means. But the conquest of power demands new revolutionary forms of struggle." This important article was published first in Berner Tagwacht between 20 and 22 August 1914 in a serialized form and then translated in English and published in the New York journal New Review No.11 in November 1914, and De Nieuwe Tijd later in 1914. 352

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reasons why the First International was founded was explicitly to show solidarity with Polish national revolutionary movement against the Russian and Austria-Hungarian Imperial aspirations.354 The LRIs consistently and intransigently argued that, in the new historic era, the period of capitalist decline, proletarian internationalism against capitalism had to be the foundation stone of the proletarian struggle. Thus the new third international had to "begin where the former failed" and it had to put an emphasis on "extra-parliamentary" mass activity, wrote Radek.355 For Gorter, "what was needed was the revolutionary action of the world's proletarian masses against world capital."356 The new international had to split from the "verbal radicalism" of Kautsky and the social democratic centrists, who disregarded imperialism as a secondary, passing factor.357 Bolshevik exiles rapidly embraced the idea and became the champions of a new third international, to be found by splitting off from the social imperialist, chauvinistic, and centrist-pacifist social democrats.358 In a letter to Alexander Shlyapnikov (the Bolshevik militant who was at that time in Stockholm and maintained the links between the CC Abroad and the underground party in Russia), Lenin wrote: "The only one who has told the workers the truth—although not loudly enough, and sometimes not quite skillfully—is Pannekoek, whose article359 we have sent to you (pass on a translation to the Russians). His words, that if now the “leaders” of the International that was murdered by the opportunists and Kautsky come together and begin “papering over” the cracks, this “will be of no significance whatever”— these are the only socialist words. They are the truth. Bitter, but the truth. And now the workers need the truth, the whole

354

Karl Radek, “Die Entwicklung der Internationale (1)” Lichtstrahlen Nr.14, (8 August 1915), pp. 294295. 355 Karl Radek, “Die Entwicklung der Internationale (2)” Lichtstrahlen Nr.15, (5 September 1915), p. 315. 356 Gorter, Der Imperialismus, p. 33. 357 Ibid. 358 Lenin on Gorter: “When war broke out, the socialists who had threatened the governments with revolution and had called upon the proletariat to bring about that revolution began to refer to what had happened half a century before, and today are justifying socialist support for the governments and the bourgeoisie! The Marxist Gorter is absolutely right in comparing, in his Dutch brochure, Imperialism, the World War and Social-Democracy, “radicals” of the Kautsky type with the liberals of 1848, who were courageous in word and traitors in deed.” First published in Sotsial-Demokrat, No. 41, May 1, 1915 in LCW Vol.21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 183-187. 359 This article is Pannekoek’s “The Dowmfall of the International” discussed above at length.

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truth, more than at any other time, not rotten diplomacy, not playing at “papering over”, not smearing over the evil with India rubber resolutions."360

The LRIs were confident that a new, third international had to be organized and that it had to defend the mass action tactics, split from the opportunistic and right-wing currents in the International, form an internationally unified world party, strictly observe proletarian internationalism, and aim for a world proletarian revolution in deed. Yet what exact shape must this new international take? While the masses themselves had to be active and the new international had to encourage the masses themselves to act, the LRIs that defended this perspective was an extremely small group at the fringe of the Second International. The LRI position coalesced through an international debate in 1915 and 1916 around the common commitment to found a third international based on militant revolutionary tactics. However, it proved more difficult to take the practical steps towards realizing this in practice. In order to investigate this episode, it is first necessary to examine more closely which groups and currents adhered to the basic LRI positions.

B.

The Organizational Formation of the Left-Radical Internationalist Nucleus in the Second International before the War

As with its theoretical discussions, the LRI tendency was also internationally organized. International journals, which were published in Dutch, German, Russian, English, Swedish, and

360

Lenin to Alexander Shlyapnikov, October 27, 1914, in LCW vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), p. 168. Further proof of Lenin's adoption of the idea of a third international and the Bolshevik CC Abroad’s general intellectual proximity to the Dutch radicals can be amply found on the pages of the Bolshevik central organ, Sotsial Demokrat. For instance, as early as December 1914, Lenin wrote in an essay titled "How The International Can Be Restored.": "Such people as Pannekoek are doing more than anyone else for the sincere, not hypocritical restoration of a socialist, not a chauvinist, International. Lenin, “Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism”, Sotsial-Demokrat No. 35, December 12, 1914. published in LCW Vol.21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 94-101. Some historians claimed that these basic points were actually unique to Lenin and some, especially émigrés, point out that by adopting these they isolated themselves. For instance, Craig Nation argued that Lenin's "isolation was to a degree self-imposed", that his "splitting tactics seemed to provide a recipe for sectarianism", that his "aggressive tactical postulates, including the concept of defeatism, were widely considered unnecessarily provocative". Nation, War on War, p. 94.

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Norwegian, provided the organizational infrastructure. The publication and distribution networks of these journals, which relied on international cooperation, constituted the LRI movement in its skeletal form. While over time, disparate oppositional and factional LRI groups in different countries or localities merged into an international fraction, four groups constituted the core organizational LRI nucleus: A group in the Netherlands (SPD of the Netherlands or the so-called Tribunists); German radical left groups in the SPD, especially around the Bremen Party and the Berlin journal Lichtstrahlen; the Warsaw Regional Committee of the SDKPiL; and finally the RSDLP-Bolsheviks, especially its organization abroad around its central organ, the Sotsial-Demokrat. These groups had been in contact since at least 1909. However, the beginning of the war gave an impetus and formal structure to their international factional activities, which had taken root inside the Second International before the war. These groups came to constitute the so-called "Zimmerwald Left" fraction or the left-wing faction of the international socialist peace movement. After the Zimmerwald Peace Conference in September 1915, several other groups (most prominently, left-wing oppositional groups from the neutral countries and the Socialist Youth International) congealed around them. From August 1914, this International Left Radicalism took active steps to constitute itself as a new third international. Yet these efforts came to naught in late 1916 and early 1917 as the internal debates proved, at least temporarily, too divisive to overcome. Finally, the March 1917 Revolution in Russia pushed the international nucleus in a new and unforeseen direction. The effect of this earth-shattering event on the formation of the Third International (Communist International, Comintern) is the subject of the following chapters. This section explores the organizational formation of the Zimmerwald Left fraction and its nucleus from its germination between 1909 until 1914 until its blooming in 1915 and 1916.

1.

Towards an LRI Faction Inside the Second International (1908-1914)

In the years preceding the war, socialists generally viewed divided Second International parties as “backward,” disunity as a temporary setback, which caused a delay in the forward march of the social democratic movement. Specifically, parliamentary success required formal organizational unity to present socialism as a unified alternative to bourgeois and conservative parties at 161

the ballot box. As the case of the German Social Democratic movement revealed in its gradual but definite march towards a parliamentary majority, unity of national social democratic parties at all costs seemed a more promising organizational tactic. This unity came at the expense of preserving clear lines of ideological demarcation. This made a rough inter-party scrimmage bearable for different strands within the socialist parties. As long as the votes in elections increased, different socialist tendencies could grudgingly exist within the same organization. Conscious of this situation, the Second International and its leadership, the ISB, sought ways to unify various national fractured parties. In this order of things, the appearance of the LRI groups and oppositions expressing a new Marxist radicalism (most notably on the defense of mass actions against imperialism) mainly in Netherlands, Germany, Russia, and Poland contained an apparent paradox. On the one hand, the left-wing radicals perceived themselves as defenders of the coherent Marxist view within a growing but, in their view, also degenerating organizational body of social democracy; on the other hand, their opponents in the social democratic movement perceived in these new radicals a dangerous organizational deviationist tendency, a kind of "childish sickness," which risked retarding the movement to an earlier era of isolated sects, a primitive radicalism belonging to an earlier phase of the socialist movement when barricade fights ruled and the upright parliamentary struggles of 1890s were not yet on the horizon. In the decade before the World War, unable at the time to present a clear and immediate political alternative to the established Second International orthodoxy and its parliamentary strategy, the various LRI tendencies opted to stay inside in the Second International. The organizational conclusion of forming strictly revolutionary parties came only after the war began. Still, the LRI revolutionary theory became increasingly incompatible with the prevailing Second International dogma. The LRIs attack on the hegemonic centrist and right-wings in their respective parties increasingly tested the patience of the leaders. After the 1905 Revolution in Russia, the tensions grew so great that in many countries organizational unity became increasingly untenable. Party fractions evolved into splits in the Netherlands, Russian Poland, and Russia. The Dutch LRIs were expelled from the main socialist party in 1909, the Polish LRIs were expelled in 1912, the Bolsheviks formally severed their links with the Menshevik wing of the Russian socialist movement in 1912. The German SPD expelled one of the most well-known LRIs, Karl

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Radek, from the party in 1913. His expulsion did not cause an immediate organizational split, but it definitely revealed fracture lines in the party. On the surface, the organizational reasons for these four cases of split were different. Yet, they expressed in various organizational forms parallel tendencies towards a fractional left-

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radicalism in the Dutch,361 German,362 Polish,363 and Russian364 socialist movements. Hence, the formation of LRI fractions was clearly an international trend, representing a growing tendency after 1909 towards left-wing splits from the mother Social Democratic parties.

361

The first LRI split in the Second International happened in the Dutch socialist movement in 1909. Compared to its German, Belgian and French counterparts in western Europe, the Dutch socialist movement developed at a relatively slower pace due to the retarded development of Dutch capitalism. To a large extend, the Dutch capitalism relied heavily on a parasitic and mercantile exploitation of its colonies rather than industrial growth in the metropole. The Dutch capital exploited its vast Asian colonies, while the population in the Netherlands itself remained in a stagnant economic state compared to the fast-paced development in the latter-half of the nineteenth century in Belgium, Britain, and Germany. Unable to rely on an industrial proletarian mass base, the Dutch socialist movement grew thanks mainly on the contributions of the German immigrant workers and Jewish artisans. Its industrial proletarian base was slow to grow until the second wave of industrial expansion of capitalism that began at the turn of the century. According to Bourrinet, part of the reason for the Marxist intellectuals' lack of influence in the SDAP was that, unlike Lenin or Luxemburg, they were not full-time professional revolutionaries. Bourrinet, Dutch and German Communist Left, pp. 28-36. The Marxist Dutch intellectuals were well known in the International, but they remained isolated inside the Dutch Party. The SDAP leadership was controlled by a rightwing revisionist current congealed around the party's leader Pieter Jelles Troelstra. The Troelstra leadership aimed to increase its influence in the national politics via a parliamentary path and, considering the numerical weakness of the Dutch industrial proletariat, the SDAP leadership was ready and willing to compromise with property holding peasantry and liberal middle classes. This compromise strategy crystallized around a series of amendments to the party program including reform proposals such as land reforms benefiting small land holding peasants and school reforms indulging the liberal bourgeoisie. Specifically, the Troelstra leadership aimed to appeal the peasant constituency by promising land and equipment instead of socialization via a revision of the Marxist program in 1901. Similarly, in early 1900s the party leadership gradually abandoned the Marxist anti-clerical program and supported granting state subsidies to religious schools. The left-wing radicals in the party challenged the leadership's concessions from the Marxist program, but achieved little success. The revision in the party program concerning the land reform was withdrawn in 1905, but the isolation of the left-wing persisted. In the 1909 Congress, the party leadership attempted to hijack the editorship of the journal, which resulted in a split in the party. After a period of confusion and indecision, the splinter group formed its own independent party, the SDP. Erik Hansen, “Crisis in the Party: De Tribune Faction and the Origins of the Dutch Communist Party: 1907-9” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 11 (1976). pp. 43-58. 362 The case of Germany was the reverse of the Dutch case. The German LRI movement before the war remained isolated and fragmented not by leaving but remaining inside the SPD. Certain German left-radical figures had a considerable moral and intellectual authority in the party and they even controlled certain major party branches and papers (Leipziger Volkszeitung and the Bremer Burger Zeitung being the major ones). Yet, inside the core party structure, the left-wing did not and could not form a united opposition group and they remained divided into local and even personal affinity groups. In some cases, these groups were even mutually hostile. Due to its fragmented state, the German left-radicalism remained isolated before and during the World War. The main stronghold of the German left-radicalism was the Bremen branch of the party. Here, the radicals controlled the party press and the party local. In places like Hamburg and Leipzig, the radicals also had a considerable influence in the party apparatus, nevertheless, their influence did not translate itself into an organizational control of the party locale, as it happened in Bremen. A notable local group worth mentioning was the "Borchardt group" around the Lichtstrahlen

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In all the pre-war factional or oppositional struggles inside the Second International, the radical leftists in the Marxist movement formed a loose but cordial network of international solidarity. It would not be an exaggeration to call these several groupings an unofficial and informal left-wing tendency within the Second International. With hindsight, it is possible to view this

journal. Formed around the Prussian Diet representative, Julian Borchardt and the Lichtstrahlen journal he edited, this group mainly brought together intellectuals and party militants in Berlin. Besides the Bremen and Berlin groups, individuals like Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, and Karl Liebknecht, whose names would eventually come to be associated with German radical anti-war movement and the Communist Party, did not form an open and formal opposition until 1917, except for the Bremen party branch. The Bremen party branch of the SPD split in 1916 and played the role of a safe haven for radicals like Pannekoek and Gorter, in a party that was already becoming increasingly hostile against the Left even before the war. 363 In 1911 the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) came close to a split due to internal differences on the tactical and organizational questions between its leaders (mostly residing in Germany, in exile) and the rank-and-file underground militants of the Party in Poland. The opposition in Poland was organized around the Warsaw Committee of the Party. In summer 1911, the SDKPiL’s CC expelled the Warsaw Committee. There seems to be a general consensus in the historiography of the Polish Socialist Movement that Leo Jogiches' heavy-handed methods, his personal rule over the party affairs with an iron fist, his disrespect for open internal party debate was largely responsible for the split that emerged in the SDKPiL between 1908 and 1912. See for example: M. K Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of Poland: An Outline of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 52. Michal Kasprzak, Nationalism and Internationalism: Theory and Practice of Marxist Nationality Policy from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Communist Workers’ Party of Poland. (Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2013), p. 118. Later in 1912 and 1913, the CC of the SDKPiL and especially Jogiches officially demanded from the ISB and the SPD leadership the expulsion of Karl Radek, one of the most notable members of the Warsaw Committee, who was also active in the German SPD. He succeeded. Robert Blobaum, Feliks Dzierzynski and the SDKPiL: A Study of the Origins of Polish Communism. (New York, Columbia University Press, 1984). p. 208. 364 The most well-known radical left break in the Second International was the Bolshevik split in the RSDRP. As explored in the previous chapter, the Bolshevik split was not uniquely an isolated “Russian” affair, nor was it seen as such at the time. The root of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in the RSDRP dates back to the second congress of the party in 1903. However, despite the retrospective priority given to this congress by the official and academic histories of the RSDRP, the Bolshevik and Menshevik tendencies did not form separate parties after this congress. Many members of the party saw it as a misfortune and attempts to amend it ceaselessly persisted until even the 1917 Revolution in Russia. For brief periods, the respective groups in the party attempted to unite around certain common goals. Only after the defeat of the first Russian Revolution in 1905 and the deepening of the party crisis that corresponded to the wider split in the international socialist movement around the mass action question did the definite split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks became official. The split and the formation of a nominally independent Bolshevik RSDRP took place in 1912, merely two years before the war began. The Bolshevik Party conference convened its 1912 Prague declaring the faction as an independent party from the anti-mass strike right-wing Mensheviks (not all the Mensheviks), who defended the foundation of a legal party and the disbandment of the revolutionary underground.

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network or tendency as the nucleus of the wartime Left-Radical Internationalism that eventually formed the Communist International in 1919. The LRIs were aware of the factional character of their various national splits. More than anyone else, Anton Pannekoek worked to clarify the theoretical meaning of this emergent split between the left, center, and right. In an article for de Tribune on the fifth anniversary of the split in the Dutch socialist movement, Pannekoek observed that the split revealed an international tripartite division. On the right, there were the revisionists who aimed to discard what they viewed as the Marxist straitjacket. This right-wing universally found an expression in all socialist parties. It pushed the movement to confess what it was doing in practice: parliamentary and trade-union struggle in legal arena and not a revolutionary socialism. Further, Pannekoek argued, there was a centrist current that hoped to reconcile Marxism and revisionism to preserve organizational unity. As with Kautsky in Germany and Roland-Holst in the Netherlands, who remained in the SDAP at the time of the split, this centrist current prioritized organizational growth instead of clarity and settled for verbal concessions from the right. This "verbal radicalism" was more dangerous for Pannekoek, because it turned the theory into an empty phraseology.365 The solidarity between the Dutch SDP, the Bolsheviks, the Polish Regional Committee, and the Bremen radical leftists on the organizational question reveals that pre-war left-radicalism did not remain solely at the level of intellectual affinity. This can be seen in the active solidarity shown by the Bolsheviks to the Dutch SDP366 and the Polish Regional Committee when they split from their mother parties, in 1908-1909 and 1912 respectively. Similarly, the Bremen branch of the German SPD actively supported both the Dutch and the Polish radical leftists. Finally, all these

365

Anton Pannekoek, “Het strijdend Marxisme”, De Tribune, (5 October 1912), pp. 1-2. Rosa Luxemburg didn’t speak in the SDP’s favor: “Both Singer and Adler proceeded from a number of facts, which I want to mention once again here. First, the split is a fact that has to be taken into account. Secondly, according to Adler himself, the Social-Democratic Party is a socialist Party. Thirdly, it has the incontestable right to participate in international congresses. The S.D.P. itself does not even demand to be allowed to participate in the decisions of the Bureau; it could be granted an advisory vote in the Bureau, as was done in the case of a number of Russian parties. Fourthly, Comrade Adler has found that the votes at international congresses should be divided between the two parties in the Dutch section of the Copenhagen Congress, while the S.D.P. is to be granted the right of appeal to the Congress. Unanimity should be achieved on these four items at this session. I want to add that Comrade Roland Holst mentioned by Troelstra had come out for the acceptance of the S.D.P.’’ in Supplement No. 4 to Leipziger Volkszeitung No. 24, 13 November (1909). 366

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groups closed ranks in the so-called Radek Affair, which occupied the congresses of the SPD in 1912 and 1913 and turned into an international scandal. The Radek affair was the turning point, the last scandal with an international dimension around which the organizational connections that would eventually become the core nucleus of the Communist International be bounded and knotted.

2.

The Turning Point: The Radek Affair (1911-1914)

In retrospect, the first event around which the LRIs bonded organizationally was the socalled Radek Case ("der Fall Radek" as the debate was called in the German left in 1912 and 1913). The informal bonds of solidarity that gave birth to the LRI network in the Zimmerwald Left in 1915 materialized for the first time as this affair unfolded. At first sight, the whole case may seem personal and coincidental.367 However, the affair was also indirectly linked to the imperialism and mass action debates and the political factions inside the international that formed around various positions in those debates. What sparked the Radek case was the organizational crisis in the SDKPiL in Russian Poland. Following the defeat of the 1905 Revolution and the ensuing period of reaction, the SDKPiL retreated into its pre-war clandestine habits. The SDKPiL Central Committee abroad (the executive organ of the party between congresses) re-established a direct control over the party in Russian Poland.368 However, the party was not the conglomeration of circles composed of intellectuals and

367

Marie-Luise Goldbach, Karl Radek und die deutsch-sowjetischen Beziehungen 1918-1923 (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1973), p. 13 and Pierre Broué, The German Revolution (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005), p. 36. 368 The SDKPiL was established in 1894 at its first Congress. It had a considerable international prestige, which it owed mainly to the prominence of its notable leaders. However, the party lacked a solid structure in the Russian Poland and most of its world-known leaders lived in exile and contributed to the life of the parties in the countries they resided, especially in Germany. Formally the party adopted the Erfurt program of the German SPD, which defined the CC as the organizational center of the party between the congresses. However, since the leadership of the SDKPiL resided and concentrated in exile, an impromptu party organ, the "Foreign Committee" took up the tasks of the formal party organs. Under the conditions of illegality and tsarist repression prevailing in Russia, congresses were also irregular, and this made the Foreign Committee even more powerful. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Vol.1 pp. 262-263. The 'party' members of the Polish elite preferred to call themselves a 'society' (Stowarzyszenie)-at least in private communication to each other. Ibid. p. 265.

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autodidact artisans that it was before the revolution. During the 1905 revolution, the SDKPiL considerably expanded numerically among the masses of industrial workers just as the landscape of the socialist politics in Russian Poland was also transformed.369 After the 1905 revolution, a left-wing faction of the PPS (the longtime opponent of the SDKPiL on the left both in terms of its terroristic tactics and its nationalist goals), broke from the main body of the more nationalist PPS led by Josef Pilsudski and came closer to the internationalist positions of the SDKPiL. 370 As a result, a growing tendency in the SDKPiL base demanded tactics adapted that could incorporate the masses into the life of the party. Concretely, this entailed uniting with the PPS-Left and involvement in the budding trade union organizations in Poland. However, the SDKPiL leadership was not prepared to accept such a transformation, which would unavoidably diminish its control. Joining with the PPS-Left would practically necessitate an organizational transformation of the party, which would reduce the personalized control of the Party leaders, like Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, and simultaneously increase the influence of more formal structures, especially the Party Congresses and the local party bodies over the party politics. The SDKPiL before the revolution was a small émigré, largely intellectual party that relied principally on personal connections and organizationally it was composed of friendship circles. Leaders like Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, and Felix Dzershinsky were legendary militants in the party. However, a party of generals without an army could not, by design, have a great influence in Poland, nor give initiative to the rank-and-file. Instead, the traditional strategy of the SDKPiL before the revolution was to influence the sister socialist parties in Germany and Russia, especially by personally cultivating relations and influencing the leaders of these parties.371

369

Blobaum, p. 228, notes that: "The revolution transformed the SDKPiL into a mass party. At the end of 1904, the SDKPiL could count only 1500 members; two years later it was a party of 40,000 strong. The social composition of the party changed as a result of its rapid growth. While the old core of craftsmen and artisans remained, it now became enveloped by a mass of industrial workers, giving the SDKPiL a more truly proletarian but still multinational character. The SDKPiL may have remained slightly behind the PPS in terms of total membership, but it was a more united party than the PPS, and, therefore, it was more consistent in its political agitation and operational tactics." 370 Eric Blanc, “The Rosa Luxemburg Myth: A Critique of Luxemburg’s Politics in Poland (1893-1919),” Historical Materialism., 2018. p. 11. 371 Ibid. p.29.

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The militants of the SDKPiL in Poland around the Warsaw Regional Committee organized an increasingly vocal opposition against this "star system". The Warsaw Committee demanded a reconsideration of the party’s tactics towards the PPS-Left and the mass organizations like trade unions. Fearing losing control of the monopoly over the party affairs, Leo Jogiches and the CC in Berlin resorted to repression against the growing dissent. It unleashed a defamation campaign against the Warsaw Committee and formally disbanded it in 1911. Its leaders were branded as splitters and even as Okhrana agents.372 In the intra-party struggle in Poland, Radek came out in support of the dissident Warsaw Committee and, by association, fell victim to the furry of the Party leadership. As a punishment, Jogiches unearthed an old accusation hurled against Radek by rival PPS members, who had accused him of embezzling the funds of a trade union (or in other accounts, some books owned by the unions) during the 1905 Revolution. Radek was cleared of these accusations by a court of arbitration.373 The lost funds were not accounted for, but a revolution was not the best time suitable for scrupulous bookkeeping. At the time, there was no question about the decision of the court, certainly none on the part of the SDKPiL, to which Radek belonged. All the same, this did not stop the SDKPiL leadership led by Jogiches from expelling him. In this debacle within the SDKPiL, the Bolsheviks took the side of the oppositional SDKPiL Warsaw Regional Committee and Radek. In the January 1913 edition of Sotsial Democrat, Lenin summarized the whole affair in the Polish Party in a very detailed article and openly came out in support of the Warsaw Committee.374 The Bolshevik support for the SDKPiL opposition as laid out in Lenin's essay had two main causes. The first reason was Jogiches treatment of the party rank-and-file. The SDKPiL leadership's disregard for the formal procedures of the party in favor of friendship circles and informal-personal rule of the leaders were behaviors the Bolsheviks

372

Blobaum, Feliks Dzierzynski. p. 210. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg. pp. 585-6. Blanc, "The Rosa Luxemburg Myth". p. 28. 373 As an ironic gesture against the allegations hurled against him, Radek assumed the pseudonym he was most well-known for, "K. Radek", which sounded like kradziez (meaning "theft") in Polish. Radek's comrade during his imprisonment, Ruth Fischer, underlines that this affinity was consciously made. Ruth Fischer, Stalin and the German Communism: A Study in the Origin of the State Party (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). p. 202. 374 Lenin, "The Split Among the Polish Social-Democrats" LCW Vol. 18 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963). pp. 479-484.

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continuously struggled against in the RSDRP since it first split with the Menshevik fractions in 1902. Lenin's critique of Menshevism as a tendency that disregarded systematic and disciplined party work in favor of informal affinities, prioritizing friendship circles over the official party channels (congresses, formal party organizations), were not too dissimilar to the opposition's criticism of the SDKPiL. It is not surprising then that Lenin saw in the Polish party struggle similar tendencies against which he struggled in the Russian social democratic movement. The Bolsheviks’ bitter experience of what was for them a betrayal of the intellectuals in the counter-revolutionary period was fresh in their memories. The second reason was Jogiches’ disregard for the RSDRP's internal procedures. By expelling the Warsaw Committee, Jogiches declared it outside not only of the Polish Social Democracy, but also, by association, the Russian Social Democracy as well. The SDKPiL was a part of the RSDRP and one of its delegates sat on the RSDRP CC. While the Russian and Polish socialists were divided over the question of the Warsaw Committee, the expulsion of Radek, together with the rest of the SDKPiL opposition in 1912, opened a new episode of conflict, spreading the struggle to the international level. The epicenter of this international factional struggle became Germany and the SPD. Radek's pointed criticisms of German imperialism and the SPD's line on the German foreign policy emboldened the left-wing and embarrassed the Party leadership. During the Copenhagen Congress of the Second International (1910), Radek ridiculed the SPD and its Reichstag fraction. He argued the German Party's position defending general disarmament and courts of arbitration were useless tactical means to struggle against imperialism and the danger of war.375 Adding insult to the injury, from this moment on, he became the champion of the left in the internal party debates between tendencies on the imperialism question. Despite his young age, he regularly contributed to the bastions of leftradicalism in the German party press, mainly to the Bremer Burger Zeitung.376

375

International Socialist Congress, ed., Internationaler sozialisten-kongress zu Kopenhagen, 28.august bis 3.september 1910. (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwarts, 1910). p. 99. 376 Among the most notable articles published by Radek in the left-radical journals during this period are: "Die auswärtige Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie" (Bremer Bürger-Zeitung 1909), "Der deutsche Imperialismus und die Arbeiterklasse" (Bremen 1911), "Unser Kampf gegen den Imperialismus" (Neue Zeit, Mai 1912), "Wege und Mittel im Kampfe gegen den Imperialismus" (Bremer Bürger- Zeitung, Beilage 1912). All these articles are compiled after the 1918 November Revolution with the help of the young Austrian Marxist and later one of the leaders of the KPD, Ruth Fischer, and published in Radek, In den Reihen der deutschen Revolution 1909 – 1919.

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Radek's contributions were significant in that they echoed the left-radical criticism against the SPD leadership's line, especially the left-wing's critique of opportunism with the question of imperialism and the German foreign policy. For instance, Paul Frölich wrote that “it was Karl Radek who sought to arouse an understanding of foreign policy in German Social Democracy by systematically following world-political events and by historical investigation of particular imperialist complexes from the international proletarian standpoint.”377 Similarly, one of the central figures of the pre-war Hamburg party radicals, Heinrich Laufenberg (who rapidly moved to the right after the 1918 Revolution and later on became one of the ideologues of the "national Bolshevism" ideology) praised Radek noting that he was the first to depict world historical developments and their ties to the political events.378 Finally, Anton Pannekoek portrayed Radek as their specialist on foreign affairs in the German left-radical camp before the war. All these prominent figures and militants followed different trajectories and parted ways after the war; some became opponents of Radek. These anecdotes highlight Radek's centrality for the radical-left as a militant before the World War. In 1912, Radek's political engagement in the Party's radical left milieu crossed the limit of theoretical criticism, when he was directly involved in the fractional struggle inside the Württemberg branch of the SPD. In Württemberg, the control of the party apparatus was in the hands of the right-wing revisionists, but the city of Goppingen was controlled by the left-radicals. These two tendencies were in a conflict over the control of the Goppingen party paper in 1912. The Goppingen party paper, Freie Volkszeitung (edited by August Thalheimer), was politically independent and an outspoken defender of the left radical views in the party. However, it was in dire financial straits. Threatened with closure and legal action, the SPD party leadership was invited to arbitrate between the Goppingen leftists and the Wurttemberg right-wing leaders who held the key to the party coffers. Coincidentally, the Goppingen paper's editor, Thalheimer, was on leave and Radek was temporarily in charge of editing the Volkszeitung. In the negotiations between the Goppingen leftists and the party leadership represented by Ebert, disagreements turned into a minor scandal. The local left radicals grew suspicious that Ebert was doing the bidding of the

377

Paul Frölich, In the Radical Camp, p. 67. Viktor Aleksandrovic Artemov, Karl Radek: ideii i sud’ba (Voronez: Voronezskij Gosudarstvennyj Universitet, 2000), p. 19. 378

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Württemberg rightists. In a dramatic confrontation, workers in Goppingen stormed the negotiations and forcefully held Ebert as hostage, even barricading the room where the negotiations were taking place. The issue reverberated in the party press throughout Germany, causing a scandal. The left papers echoed Radek's strong criticism of the SPD leadership’s complicity with the rightwing. The whole affair turned into a general conflict in the SPD’s Chemnitz Congress in 1912 and Radek was at the center of it. The Party Executive derided Radek by claiming that he had not even paid his dues to the party, suggesting he was an uncharacteristically bohemian adventurist, an alien in a respectable working-class party. Nationalist tendencies inside the party found a suitable target for their chauvinistic xenophobia against the internationalist left-wing in the person of Radek.379 The Radek case stirred a long debate and Radek found so many enemies that even Bebel was fed up in the end. In this congress, the senior founder of the party said with disdain that he did not want to hear the name of that person anyone, implying Radek without naming him.380 For the small contingent of left-radical delegation in the Chemnitz Congress, the attack on Radek was not personal but political. The Chemnitz Congress also witnessed the confrontation between the left-radicals headed by Pannekoek (as a delegate from Bremen) and the rest of the party. Hence, Johann Knief, a leading left radical militant, a teacher, and an editor of the Bremer Burger-Zeitung, considered the whole Radek case in the Chemnitz Congress as a thinly veiled attack on the radical left.381 Bremen left-radicals stood firmly behind Radek. In the Chemnitz Congress, Pannekoek defended Radek concerning the embezzlement of the union fund by pointing out to the clandestine conditions of the Polish Party in the Russian Empire and the lack of internal party regulations. He argued that Radek was wrongly accused and demanded that the SPD Executive investigate the matter.382 When Pannekoek’s demand was refused, the Bremen left-radicals took the matter into their own hand. The Bremen Party Branch formed an investigative committee that included

379

Liliana Riga, The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 118. 380 H. Schurer, “Radek and the German Revolution”, Part 1, Survey, no. 53, October 1964, p. 61. 381 Gerhard Engel, Johann Knief: ein ınvollendetes Leben (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2011), p. 131. 382 IISG Pannekoek Papers. 200, "Aktensucke zum Fall Radek" pp.1-2, pp. 32-33.

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Pannekoek and Knief. The committee tasked itself with investigating the allegations against Radek and corresponded with the Polish militants, who participated in the court of arbitration set up in 1904 to deal with the Radek case. One of these militants, who acted as a jury in the court of arbitration, Henryk Grossman,383 stated that Radek was already cleared of allegations in 1904. Grossman, who protested the decision of the SDKPiL, stated without leaving any ground for doubts that the behavior of the party leadership towards Radek was unjust even by the standards of the bourgeois legal theory.384 Despite the Bremen left-radicals’ efforts, the SPD Party Executive refused to discuss the Radek case further. At the 1913 Jena Congress, it simply expelled him. The decision was based on a retroactive logic that was invented solely for Radek: It was stated that a party member expelled from a sister party in the International could not be a member of the SPD. This was mockingly called Rex Radek. The Bremen left radicals and others saw in this "Rex Radek" a stick with which to beat the opposition. Many major party figures, even revisionists, protested the treatment of Radek. Karl Liebknecht published a declaration signed by many well-known figures in the party supporting Radek and criticizing his planned expulsion before the 1913 Jena Congress. 385 What weakened the left was Luxemburg's absence in the Congress and her open hostility to Radek. 386 However, eventually it was the SDKPiL leadership's campaign of revenge against Radek that determined the outcome of the Radek case in the SPD. The Radek case cannot be taken as an expression of the formation of a left radical faction inside Germany. Such factional disunity was absent in the German Social Democracy, which was

383

Grossman was a militant of the Polish socialist movement, but after the defeat of the 1905 revolution he left active politics and started to work as an economist in Vienna. He returned to political activity in 1920 when the Polish Communist Party was founded. Ironically, in the 1920s and 1930s, he developed an alternative theory of "capitalism's collapse" that criticized Luxemburg's position that she developed in her Accumulation of Capital. His views are best summarized in Law of the Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System published in 1929. 384 IISG Pannekoek Archives 200, J. Grossman's Letter to the SPD Party Leadership (Josef Domanski) (17 September 1912). 385 Karl Liebknecht, Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, Band 6 (Berlin: Dietz, 1964), p. 395. 386 What may have further alienated Luxemburg could be Radek's criticism of Marchlewski. In 1912, Radek wrote in the German party press criticizing Marchlewski's position on the armaments question. According to Lerner, it was no coincidence that Radek was expelled from the SDKPiL after this polemic. Warren Lerner, Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1970), p. 24.

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firmly held together by a pragmatic bureaucracy and a party executive willing to incorporate and give concessions to oppositions from right and left, plus a federative party structure that helped the leadership to isolate local political differences before they become genuine factions. Only the Bremen branch of the party consistently stood firmly behind Radek until the war. However, and at first sight, the Radek case can be conceived as an expression of the birth of an international factional alignment inside the Second International. The case involved militants from Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Austria-Hungary. It occupied the ISB and was hotly debated in the last two SPD national congresses before the world war. It is not surprising that the network of solidarity woven around Radek presented a microcosm of the LRIs that would in less than two years, in September 1915, turn into an international fraction, the “Zimmerwald Left.” Thus, it signaled the maturation of the coming break. The defense of Radek became a central node around which the original nucleus of the LRI movement and its groups coalesced.

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VI.

The First Steps towards LRI Reorganization: August 1914 to Fall 1915

This chapter aims to answer the question of how the first organizational nucleus of a new, third international emerged between 1914 and 1917 in Europe and North America. The LRI movement, which grew as an international tendency in 1911-1912 out of the mass action debate inside the Second International, was initially a small opposition tendency. Once the war began, it had to grapple with an even starker situation of dispersal and isolation. The sudden outburst of nationalism in the belligerent countries, the disintegration of the ISB leadership, and harsher government persecution all contributed to the LRI’s isolation. However, the LRIs managed to formulate a systematic analysis of the wartime political situation and the broad outlines of a political program for a new international of action (between late 1914 and 1915) and then between 1915 and 1917 took steps for an international reorganization oriented towards founding this new international. These efforts were undertaken by a very small informal but tightly linked group of the LRI nucleus. A group of Russian, Polish, German and Dutch LRIs constituted the core of this movement. Over time, the International Socialist Youth Movement and several other groups joined this core (most notably groups in neutral countries like the US, Switzerland and Scandinavia). However, the cohesion and cooperation inside the LRI movement proved insufficient to create a new international until 1919. Specifically, this chapter examines two parallel initiatives: the centrist-pacifist initiative in Switzerland to convene a peace conference, and the LRI initiative to intervene in this initiative to form a left-wing fraction in this conference. Contrary to the hegemonic historiographic tendency, the chapter shows that the LRI organizational intervention was not restricted to Lenin’s or the Bolshevik’s efforts. Instead, an international organizational center of the LRIs formed around, and in reaction to, the pacifist initiative throughout 1915. Its core constituency consisted of the Dutch, German, Russian, and Polish LRI groups, which acted as an increasingly centralized, international fraction.

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A.

The Shock of War and the Dissolution of the ISB

The first World War started on 4 August 1914, undermining the tranquility that the preceding Bella Époque Europe had enjoyed for decades. The psychological wound that the war opened was not caused solely by the brutality of the military conflict that engulfed the continent. Many Marxists long expected a world imperialist war. What was more damaging to the collective socialist psyche was the fall of the International. With the beginning of the war in August 1914, the central organ of the Second International, the International Socialist Bureau, fell apart as if it was a castle made of sand. The ISB could not fulfill the promise to which it pledged itself in Stuttgart387 (1907) and Copenhagen388 (1910), and Basel (1912), failing even to convene a Bureau plenum to discuss any international directives let alone organizing coordinated action against the war. Major parties of the International ended up supporting the war. The British and French party leaders joined the war cabinets, the German party declared a “class truce” (Burgfrieden) with the ruling classes until the war was over.389

387

The 1907 Stuttgart Resolution of the Second International stated: “In case of war being imminent, the working class and its parliamentary representatives in the countries concerned shall be bound, with the assistance of the International Socialist Bureau, to do all they can to prevent the outbreak of war, using for this purpose the means that appear to them the most effective... In case war should break out notwithstanding, they shall be bound to intervene for its speedy termination, and to employ all their forces to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war in order to rouse the masses of the people and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.” “Amendment to the Resolution on War” in Mike Taber, ed., Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International, 1889-1912 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 20221). pp. 260-264. 388 The Copenhagen Congress of the Second International the Stuttgart Resolution decision and further specified the duties of the socialist parties against war and militarism. Ibid. pp.205-208. 389 The personal trajectory of the head of the German Social Democratic trade union movement is, as Ruth Fischer noted, a good example of the leadership’s attitude: “Carl Legien's story is most revealing for the character of the German labor movement... In founding the General Commission [of trade unions], Legien coalesced into one powerful national body the splintered local guilds. For thirty years, as an inveterate defender of gradualism, he fought first Bebel and Auer, and later Luxemburg and Liebknecht... Legien's political religion can be summed up in his often-quoted slogan against the revolutionary social democratic wing: Generalstreik ist Generalunsinn (A general strike is general nonsense). Legien was the staunchest supporter of the war and the aspirations of the Reich. "In a letter to Jouhaux in November 1914, he wrote that it was thoroughly understandable that after the outbreak of the war the workers in France no less than in Germany sided with their Fatherland." Ludendorff and Hindenburg honored Legien for his patriotism and invited him many times to their headquarters; he was photographed at their side. By these actions he attracted to his person a really virulent hatred.” Fischer, German Communism, p. 124.

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The collapse of the ISB had a profound psychological and ultimately disorganizing effect on the socialist movement. Many ISB leaders who took a pro-war stance belonged to the generation that closely collaborated with Marx and Engels. Socialists like Jules Guesde, Eduard Valliant, Karl Kautsky, or Gyorgy Plekhanov were tutored by Engels and in return tutored the next generation of Marxists. They were legendary figures of the living socialist pantheon. They sometimes violently polemicized with the younger generation of radicals, but their moral authority was undeniable among the socialists. That is why, for example, according to Krupskaya, when he learned about Plekhanov's stance on war, Lenin initially could not believe the news.390 Guesde, another pupil of Engels, declared his support for the French Republic against Germany, arguing that “the nation was the framework of the class struggle today.”391 Similarly, in the anarchist camp, Kropotkin wrote “one could not even remain neutral” against Germany. He believed that the “Allies will win,” which would create a new Europe based on a “Federative Principle.” Kropotkin actually tied his hopes for the anarchist revolution to a victory of British, Russian and French Empires against the German and Austro-Hungarian States.392 In short, the main leading organ of the Second International (and even anarchist movement of the same generation) was politically compromised in August 1914. The Second International leadership’s position had a devastating psychological effect on the socialist militants. Martov wrote to Axelrod: "Little by little one does get used to living in an atmosphere of world catastrophe, but the first few days of its advent knocked me out completely. If the International was weak, its senior member was worse: the German Social Democrats voted in favor of war credits. The Germans have this time utterly and finally besmirched the Marxist banner and have in a scandalous manner liquidated their hegemony in international socialism..."393 Upon reading the news on war, "Kathia Adler, realizing the betrayal by her father-in-law's party of every principle her husband believed in, proposed to Friedrich that they both commit

390

Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 286. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France (Cham: Springer, 1920), p. 149. 392 Jules Humbert-Droz, Der Krieg und die Internationale: die Konferenzen von Zimmerwald und Kienthal (Wien: Europa Verlag, 1964), p. 51. 393 Israel Getzler, Martov: the political biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 138. 391

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suicide."'394 Adler couple were not the only ones that contemplated suicide. Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin also contemplated suicide.395 The despair felt by Martov, the Adlers, Luxemburg, and Zetkin is understandable considering that they were more or less regular participants of its plena. Despite their disagreements, and occasionally strong mutual personal animosities that they held towards their right-wing socialist colleagues in the ISB, they still considered the organization something akin to embodied internationalism, a supreme collective body representing living socialism.396 The ISB’s collapse was also a personal tragedy for the many leading socialist figures. It signified the fall of an entire social and political world, its habits and culture as well as the failure of personal commitments and relations. The whole world in which the social democratic militants operated fell apart. However, the war trauma did not affect every socialist negatively; some Social Democrats even welcomed the war. Shockingly, some of the most outspoken figures of the anti-war left-wing of the International turned into some of the fiercest proponents of national defense almost overnight. Among those late converts were leaders like Mussolini or Gustav Herve, a proponent of general strike against war before it started, enlisted to the army. The French syndicalists, who just days before the war were calling for insurrections if the war started, suddenly made a complete volte face once it started, and began arguing the virtues of the defense of the French republic.397 Among the most well-known and thus most scandalous defections from the left in Germany were

394

Mark Blum, The Austro-Marxists, 1890-1918: A Psychobiographical Study (Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), p.196. 395 Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Vol.2, p. 609. 396 Even after Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky's public squabble over the mass strike question, the tone of which became indeed highly personalized, Luxemburg continued to correspond with the members of the Kautsky household in a very familial and warm tone. Similarly, even on the eve of the war, the strained personal relations had a familial dimension to it. In the last meeting of the ISB on the eve of the war that took place in Paris, Luxemburg wrote on his personal impression of the secretary of the ISB, Camille Huysmans to a comrade: “For ten years we [Huysmans and I] were both members of the International Bureau and for ten years we hated one another. Why? Hard to say. Perhaps he could not abide politically active women; as for me, his impertinent Flemish face probably got on my nerves... The whole time at the restaurant Huysmans looked at me silently and the ten-year-old hatred was transformed into a glowing friendship within the hour. Laughable, in a way. I suppose he finally saw me in a moment of weakness.” Rosa Luxemburg to Hans Diefenbach, (23 June 1917), in The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Georg Adler, Peter Hurdis, and Annelies Laschitza, trans. George Shriver (London: Verso, 2013), (eBook). 397 S. F. Kissin, War and the Marxists: Socialist Theory and Practice in Capitalist Wars, 1848-1918 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), p. 162.

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Konrad Haenisch, the Prussian Landtag deputy, a personal friend both of Radek and Luxemburg, and Paul Lensch, the radical left-wing Reichstag deputy and one time editor of the radical left’s journalistic bastion in Germany, the Leipziger Volkszeitung. Lensch, who sided with Pannekoek in 1912 SPD Party Congress and defended the mass action tactics defined the war in a pamphlet he wrote in December 1914 as a “world revolution” against “British imperialism.”398 Defectors to nationalism among the LRI camp also appeared, including among Bolshevik party emigre groups. For instance, in the biggest section of the Party abroad, the Paris Section, eleven of 94 Bolshevik militants joined the French foreign legion to fight against Germany in the first days of the war.399 Fed up with swimming against the tide, they embraced the passionate zeal of nationalist fervor. The exaltation and joy that the war brought to the pro-war socialists was a drop in the vast stream of a general, pan-European enthusiasm for war. Numerous intellectuals from different backgrounds embraced the war as the salvation from the monotonousness of modern daily life, as a return to an imagined primordial sense of community, a sort of martial camaraderie, a craving for meaning in the destructive pan-continent wide chaos. In that sense, the war brought forth an element of irrational revolt, a rejuvenation of fantasized masculinity castrated by “civilization” felt by many writers, artists and thinkers.400 If, at a certain level, the world war can be defined as an irrational (in the sense that it was purposelessly destructive, nihilistic) revolt of the middle and upper classes of Europe, it also constituted the response of the elites to the debate between the socialists on the mass action debate. For Pannekoek the mass action was a highly resolute, conscious, and only adequate response of the working class against imperialism. Whereas for Kautsky mass action could only be used as a last resort, because in a sense he did not trust that it could be guided in a coherent and rational sense, the bitter irony of 1914 August was that it was the bourgeois and middle-class European intellectuals, not the proletarian masses,401 that proved to be the real irrational social class in 1914.

398

Paul Lensch, Three Years of World Revolution (London, Constable and Company ltd., 1918.), p. 3. A.P. Yakushina, Lenin i zagranichnaya organizatsiya RSDRP. 1905-1917 (Moskva: Mysl’, 1972), p. 252. 400 Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1982). 401 In fact, while it is extremely difficult to assess the proletariat’s reaction to war in the absence of mass actions against it, it is possible to argue that the proletariat in general was less swayed by the nationalist war fervor that effected the intellectual elites. Perhaps, the initial shock of the class in the face of the war 399

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In this gloomy political atmosphere, the German left-radicals, the Dutch Tribunists, the Russian Bolsheviks, and the SDKPiL Rozlamowcy remained intransigently committed to the working class internationalism. The pre-war imperialism and mass action debates had prepared them intellectually.402 However, practical and organizational preparedness was another question, which only a confrontation with the new reality of the world war could test.

B.

The first LRI Reactions and socialist Anti-war Meetings in Switzerland in 1915

Even if the LRIs may have been intellectually prepared for the war, they were not organizationally prepared. Clearly, they could not possibly have grasped how every aspect of daily life in Europe would change. Many LRIs faced isolation and ultimately arrest in the belligerent countries or escaped to a neutral bordering country. Pannekoek barely evaded arrest in Germany. Purely by chance, right before the war started, he went back to the Netherlands for a vacation. Once the war struck, he found himself stranded in his birthplace. The war years proved to be among the

as their organizations’ leaders turned pro-war was expressed in a passive retreat from these organizations. In Germany, the membership of the Social Democratic trade union confederation fell by almost half; in France, the CGT membership fell by a million to 150.000, and the former internationalist now chauvinistic Syndicalist paper, Bataille Socialiste ceased to appear in October 1915. Kissin, War and the Marxists, p. 58. 402 An article published in die Neue Zeit about a year before the war started satirized the official Social Democratic attitude towards imperialism almost with an uncanny accuracy. It is safe to assume that many on the left-wing of the international movement were not caught by surprise when the joke became real: "German Social Democracy is finished. Bebel will be Reichskanzler, Scheidemann will be minister of Colonial Affairs. Gerhard Hildebrand will be rehabilitated to represent the colonies, Noske will head the ministry of War... Military expenditures, colonial expenditures and marine expenditures will be approved by the socialist fraction Parliament without opposition and with happy hearts. Kautsky will have to lay the theoretical foundations for the necessity of imperialism. And when World War finally erupts the General Staff of the armed forces will be replaced by the party executive of German Social Democracy" G. Gamlach quoted in Boekelman, Pannekoek, p. 226. While Bebel died in August 1913 and was saved from making a choice between national patriotism and proletarian internationalism, the rest of the joke remained almost prophetically spot on. Scheidemann and Noske became the government members once the republic was established, the SPD parliamentary fraction really approved (initially, in the first war budget without opposition even from Karl Liebknecht) the wartime military expenditures and Kautsky actually developed a theory of “ultra-imperialism” expounding the possibility of a peaceful era of capitalist imperialism. However, while the left-wing intransigent radicals were prepared mentally and even though they preserved their positions in the face of the events, they also were paralyzed by the coming of the war.

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most difficult of Pannekoek's life. Initially, and clearly naively, expecting war to be short, he settled together with his in-laws’ family house in Arnhem. Searching for a job, Pannekoek started working as a war correspondent for a British paper.403 Lenin and Krupskaya were caught up by the war in the Austria-Hungarian Empire and Lenin spent a few days in prison, as a suspect alien. Only thanks to Victor Adler's404 efforts he was released and allowed to move to neutral Switzerland. Alexandra Kollontai was in Berlin in August 1914. As the sudden eruption of chauvinism engulfed the SPD leadership, she felt increasingly isolated. After her son Mikhail was released from a brief arrest, she escaped to Sweden where she had contacts among the left-wing of the party to evade further harassment.405 As the individual LRI militants tried to find their way out of the belligerent countries and as the LRI nuclei struggled to reform themselves in the neutral countries (Switzerland, Scandinavia, and Netherlands), groups in Germany began to form in clandestine meetings. Radek, together with left-radicals from Hamburg, met with the local comrades in September. It seems at this stage the initial links between the German LRIs were established among the Berlin Lichtstrahlen, Bremen, and Hamburg LRI groups.406 However, some of the most important militants in Bremen (among those were Paul Frölich and Johann Knief) were conscripted and sent to the front in the crucial early months of the war. The German LRI movement was organizationally crippled.407 Under these chaotic conditions, the first LRI efforts concentrated on publishing their initial analysis in any form and outlet they could. Most of those were signed by individuals rather than organizations. As explained above, various journals in neutral countries and independent of LRI

403

When the editors of the paper asked him to focus more on personal aspects of his stories rather than his theoretical interpretations, he quit and soon returned to teaching. Gerber, Pannekoek, p. 109. 404 An otherwise opponent of Lenin. It is interesting that in his writings throughout the war, Lenin directly and personally criticized almost all the notable socialist leaders who yielded to the national defense. However, he reserved Victor Adler from such personal attacks. Maybe this was an expression of gratitude for Victor Adler's hand in his release? 405 Cathy Porter, Alexander Kollontai: A Biography (London: Virago, 1980), pp. 202-3. 406 Georges Haupt and Jean-Jacques Marie, Makers of the Russian Revolution: Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Pr., 1974), p. 370. 407 The right-wing editors of the Hamburger “Echo” mockingly reported that after Anton Pannekoek left Bremen and continued his agitation for mass action only in the Dutch papers, the general meetings in Bremen became much quieter. Heinrich Laufenberg, Fritz Wolffheim, and Carl Herz, Organisation, Krieg und Kritik: Dokumente zu den Hamburger Parteidebatten (Hamburg: Heinrich Laufenberg, 1915), pp. 53-54.

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groups published these. The most important of these journals for the international movement was the Bernese socialist Berner Tagwacht. Its editor, Robert Grimm, enrolled Radek to write on the war and about the reactions in the socialist movement to war. Again, thanks to Radek’s connections with the Dutch radical internationalist, Pannekoek’s first essays on the collapse of the International first appeared in German in this paper. In tandem with these initial publications, the first anti-war meetings in the belligerent countries were informal gatherings in working-class pubs and taverns,408 or in private houses. The first anti-war propaganda materials appeared only at the end of 1914 and in the first months of 1915. In Warsaw, both local SDKPiL factions, the PPS-Left, and the Bund published a leaflet calling the workers to mass action against the war. The four organizations formed a joint action committee, only to dissolve in 1915.409 One of the first publications of German LRIs against the war was a brochure penned by Julian Borchardt, the German LRI, a former Social Democratic deputy in the Prussian Landtag before the war and the editor of Lichstrahlen. Titled Before and After 4 August, Borchardt’s brochure proved popular; three editions appeared by February 1915. Quoting from both pre-war and post-war official declarations of the Social Democratic leaders and theoreticians like Kautsky, Borchardt presented the reader the stark contrast that 4 August 1914 marked.410 Borchardt’s conclusion was that either everything that the Social Democrats defended until 1914 was wrong or that the Social Democracy had abdicated. Hamburg radicals around Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim, who were loosely associated with the Bremen radicals and the Berlin group, also published a propaganda pamphlet, Imperialismus und Demokratie, that condemned the Burgfrieden of the SPD and called for class action against the world war.411 In

408

According to Bois, pubs and bars played an important role, a space for working-class discussion during the war. He cites Kautsky who thought that the taverns “were the bulwarks of proletarian freedom”, which in fact were the only free spaces for public debate in the first months of the war. Marcel Bois, “Netzwerke der Antikrieglinken” in Gegen den Krieg! Für den Sozialismus? (Berlin: Punkower, 2016), p. 44. 409 According to Dziewanowski, the cause was the position to be taken towards a decree that granted greater political autonomy to the Russian Polish regions. The SDKPiL factions opposed this as a political maneuver whereas the PPS-Left, being closer to the Mensheviks, together with the Bund, received it positively with reservations. M.K. Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of Poland, p. 58. 410 Lenin liked the pamphlet. He also frequently posed Kautsky’s pre-war and anti-war writings against each other in his writings, like “Renegade Kautsky”. 411 Heinrich Laufenberg, Imperialismus und Demokratie: ein Wort zum Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Laufenberg, Heinrich, 1914).

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Switzerland, the Bolshevik central organ, Sotsial Demokrat, only appeared in November 1914412 with the fitting heading for its editorial, “Against the Current.” The paper was smuggled to Russia with difficulty, but it played a crucial role in the clarification of the émigré groups of the Bolshevik Party during the war. Finally in December 1914, the Dutch SDP published Gorter’s Imperialism, World War and Social-Democracy,413 which (as discussed previously) became a foundational text for the organizational orientation of the LRI camp. Only after they published their initial anti-war statements could the LRI editorial collectives and small, local groups manage to organize the first conferences and meetings to discuss more deeply the question of war and the situation in the international. Yet these meetings could only be openly organized in the two neutral islands in the middle of the European war: Switzerland and Holland. The Bolshevik émigrés in Europe convened in March 1915 in Bern and the Dutch SDP convened in 1915 June in Utrecht. Both meetings endorsed the basic LRI critique in a more concrete form. The SPD Utrecht Congress rejected “national defense” in large and small capitalist countries in the current imperialist war, including Holland and Belgium. The task ahead was the global destruction of capitalism through proletarian revolution. The Bolshevik Bern conference reached broadly the same conclusions.414 In early spring 1915, it became clear that among the Socialist parties of Europe only the Dutch Tribunist SDP and the Bolshevik organization abroad were more or less clearly on LRI grounds. The main organizational reason for this isolation was that the relative but precarious safety Switzerland and Holland presented to the Tribunists and the Bolsheviks was not available to many others. The isolation of the LRIs and the conditions of war revealed the practical impossibility of organizing socialist activity in a purely national framework. In the belligerent countries, the LRIs had to make the transition into an organizational form that surpassed the national and federative structure of the Second International, not only for political and theoretical reasons but also, simply to publish and distribute propaganda, organize meetings, secure and manage contacts. Without active international solidarity, nationally isolated LRI groups did not have a chance to

412

It was published with the 160 Francs collected by the Paris section of the party in November 1914. Yakushina, Lenin i zagranichnaya organizatsiya RSDRP, p. 268. 413 Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, p. 108. 414 Ibid. pp. 107-108.

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organize themselves against the war. However, even though by early 1915, the Dutch, Russian, Polish, and German left-radicals were all raising their voices in favor of founding a new third international, they were not in a position to take the first steps towards its formation. These LRI groups were forced to actively take steps towards the formation of a new international in response to the pacifist socialists’ international meetings and their efforts to reconstitute the Second International. The most important pacifist international meetings took place in Switzerland in 1915 and 1916 in Bern.

C.

The International Peace Conferences in Bern in 1915

After months of war, by mid-1915, the fronts settled in a bloody stalemate on the western front, where a continuous trench stretched from the English Channel in the north to Switzerland in the South. As it became clear that the war would be prolonged, centrist socialists began testing the waters for a peace conference. The LRIs tried to use the opportunity to present their case for a new international, revolutionary mass action, and a socialist revolution to end the war. Unable to organize themselves independently, the LRIs attempted to participate in these conferences as an international left-wing fraction. In spring 1915, two crucial socialist peace initiatives materialized: the International Conference of Socialist Women (26-28 March 1915), and the International Socialist Youth Conference (5-7 April 1915). Both took place in Bern.415 From an organizational point of view, the significance of these conferences was twofold. First, they were led by the only two remaining active organs of the Second International: the International Socialist Women’s Secretariat (led by Zetkin) and the International Center of Socialist Youth Organizations (ICSYO). Hence, these conferences had a degree of official credibility. But at the same time, paradoxically, both conferences brought together groups that were on the margins of the Second International (representatives of women and young worker organization) from both belligerent and neutral countries. The traditional world

415

The history of both these conferences have been amply covered in the literature. My concern here is to discuss the importance of these conferences in the forming of the Left Radical Internationalism.

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of social democracy until the war emphasized “politics” (with a capital “P”, as opposed to syndicalism), in a narrowly constricted sense, as electoral politics. Under the rubric of such a narrowly defined politics, European working class youth who lacked full political rights, and women, who lacked franchise throughout Europe (with the exception of Norway which granted women suffrage in 1913), remained on the margins of the pre-war, official Social Democratic politics. These conferences expressed a shift in socialist politics by bringing the socialist women and youth to the center. This proved extremely important for the LRI reorganization because the left-radical cause would draw considerable strength from among the organized sections of the socialist women and especially the socialist youth.

1.

International Socialist Anti-War Women’s Conference

While the Socialist Women Conference in Bern was the first truly international socialist meeting organized against the war, Clara Zetkin, the official head of the International Socialist Women’s Association, was initially hesitant to call for an international conference. She persistently resisted an international anti-war factional organization that defied discipline imposed by the national party leaderships. When the group around Rosa Luxemburg gathered in her Berlin apartment in the first days of the war to discuss how to oppose the war and what to make of the official Social Democratic capitulation to war governments, they pleaded with Clara Zetkin for her support. Zetkin responded via a telegram explaining that, in principle, she supported Luxemburg’s internationalist spirit, but refused joint action against the party leadership because she thought “such a protest would be no more than a personal gesture… and now more than ever we have to think and act coolheaded.”416 On 20 August, a little more than two weeks after the war had begun, Zetkin wrote to the Danish Social Democratic leader and parliamentarian, Thorwald Stauning, stating that under the conditions of war an international peace congress was impossible.417

416

Clara Zetkin letter to Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring, 5 August 1914, in Jürgen Kuczynski, Der Ausbruch des ersten Weltkrieges und die deutsche Sozialdemokratie. Chronik und Analyse, (Berlin: Akad. Verlag, 1957), pp. 97-98. 417 A socialist Women’s Conference was already planned before the war to take place in Vienna. Christel Wickert, “Christel Wickert: Ein Dokument zu Clara Zetkins Vorbereitungen der 3. Internationalen

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Persistent appeals from the left-wing internationalist women groups urging her to action finally began softening Zetkin’s resistance to the left’s plan for immediate action. She started assessing the viability of organizing the Women’s Congress at the end of 1914. But she was not convinced by the arguments of left-radical internationalists, like the Bolsheviks Inessa Armand or Alexandra Kollontai, who consistently tried and failed to stir her to action.418 In January, Zetkin wrote to Armand that a congress solely formed by the left-wing resolute internationalists was impossible. Many women “would not attend” or “were unaware of the differences” between the leftwing, anti-war socialists and the right-wing pro-war ones. It is unclear how she came to this conclusion. What is certain is that she did not want to cause a split in the official Social Democratic parties and instead attempted to force a fait accompli on the official party leaderships to accept the legitimacy of the conference by securing “the widest possible attendance.” 419 In order to discuss the plans for a meeting, Zetkin traveled to Amsterdam in February 1915. There she met Anton Pannekoek and Henriette Roland-Holst. She originally planned to meet with the secretary of the ISB, Huysmans, but that did not happen. The Dutch women provided her with necessary funds, and it appears she was convinced that the Swiss and Italian Socialist Parties could help organize a conference in Switzerland. Indeed, Robert Grimm and Angelica Balabanova, 420 respectively

Sozialistischen Frauenkonferenz, Geplant für August 1914 in Wien,” Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte Der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (IWK), no. 3 (1985), 
p. 326. 418 There was a continuous correspondence between the Russian internationalists and Zetkin during 1914 and 1915. In a letter sent by the editorial board of the Bolshevik Women’s journal, Rabotnitsa, Zetkin was reminded that she had a responsibility towards the international socialist women and was urged to convene a conference of the left-wing factions in the international socialist women’s movement as soon as possible. Baevsky, "Borba za III Internatsional do Tsimmervalda," Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia, No. 4, 1934, p. 27. Also, in Gankin and Fisher, eds., The Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 286. 419 Klara Zetkin's letter to I. Armand of January 2, 1915, cited by Baevsky in "Borba za III Internatsional do Tsimmervalda," Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia, No. 4, 1934, p. 28. 420 Angelica Balabanova was a central figure in the socialist anti-war movement and later in the first year of the Communist International. She was born to a wealth merchant family in Ukraine in 1878. As many women who wanted to study at a university level, she went to western Europe to continue her education. There she rapidly rose in the European socialist movement becoming especially close to the Italian Socialist Party leadership. She participated in all the major anti-war conferences organized in Switzerland during the war, became the secretary of the International Socialist Commission in 1917, and later the Communist International in 1919. After 1920 she increasingly grew distant from the Communist movement and in 1930’s became an anti-communist Social Democrat. Branko M Lazitch and Milorad M Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), pp. 16-17. She published four autobiographical accounts of her participation in the anti-war movement: Iz lichnykh vospominanii Tsimmerval'dtsa (Leningrad-Moscow: Izdatel'stvo "Kniga," 1925),

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associated with the leaderships of the Swiss and Italian socialist parties, helped her to establish contacts with the socialist women groups.421 In her plans for the conference, Zetkin aimed to pursue a middle ground between the left and the centrists of the world socialist movement. While she carefully avoided causing any organizational fracture in the body of the official socialist movement (as the left-radicals aimed to do), she nevertheless thought a peace conference could be organized without causing such an organizational break (which the centrists like Kautsky doubted). After her visit to the Netherlands, she wrote to Karl Liebknecht on 9 March informing him that the prospects for a women’s peace conference was positive. She wrote that, while the German party leadership and Victor Adler opposed it, the Dutch were in favor and two English delegates were ready to risk the journey. If, Zetkin argued, “well-intentioned but small groups” of the radical left would not be allowed to take the lead, a majority could be gathered and the party leaderships would be forced to recognize the legitimacy of the meeting.422 Eventually, however, the conference did not convene at an “official” capacity, but only as a conference of individual socialist women. The names of its signatories were not mentioned in its official declarations.423 The International Socialist Women’s Conference took place in late March 1915 in Bern in the Social Democratic Volkshaus, where many other peace conferences were destined to take place until the Russian revolution. The conference showed all the organizational characteristics and problems of similar wartime socialist anti-war meetings: theoretical and political differences were fought over the voting rights, the representativeness of attending delegates, and the wording of the resolutions between an intransigent left-wing, which wanted to cut their ties with the pro-war socialists and a centrist group that wanted to avoid a split at all costs. Like the legal disputes of parliamentary socialism, the centrists (constituting the right-wing of the conference) put the

Erinnerungen und Erlebnisse, (Berlin: E. Laubsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1927), My Life as a Rebel, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938), and Impressions of Lenin, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964). However her memoirs are highly unreliable, but still important. While her earlier memoirs had a strongly pro-Bolshevik explanation of the events, as she moved to the right her memoirs also changed. In her later works, especially her last memoir book, Impressions of Lenin, were extremely anti-communist. 421 Horst Lademacher, ed., Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung: Protokolle und Korrespondenz (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), pp. 40-46. 422 SAPMO-BArch, Nachlass Karl Liebknecht, NY 4001/44, pp. 64-67. 423 Lichtstrahlen, No. 10 (25 April 1915), p. 192.

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emphasis on legitimacy in a formal and legal sense, on the credibility of congress in the socialist camp. Their goal was to push the official socialist leaderships towards a pro-peace stance. Observing the unity of official parties and unions, this strategy gave primacy to party unity over immediate action. In contrast, the left-wing could care less about formalities. Instead, the left-wing expressed a willingness to urgently act to end the war and to reach out directly to the workers over the shoulders of the official leaders with a clear and coherent anti-war, socialist message. In the Women’s Socialist Conference, from the beginning, the group around Grimm, Balabanova, and Zetkin represented the first tendency. They insisted that the resolutions should be worded in a careful manner so that they would not create a breach between the pro-peace currents and the party leaderships. Instead, the resolutions should push the leaders to accept their pre-war pledges to oppose the war by any means possible. The Socialist Women Conference resolution (drafted by Zetkin and discussed among the British and the Dutch before the Conference) stated in its resolution that “the socialist parties of all countries will take it upon themselves, quickly, resolutely, and with clear aim, to lead the peoples in their struggle for peace.”424 It carefully avoided criticizing the party leaderships and leaving the organization of the peace initiative in the hands of the same party leaders who were supporters of their own governments. The left-wing (represented mainly by the Bolsheviks) were opposed to what it considered as a refusal to acknowledge the necessity of a break with the party leaderships and an avoidance to mention the necessity of forming a new international. Opposing the war, the left-wing delegates argued, would necessitate a reorganization of the anti-war movement as an independent international faction carrying out illegal propaganda. For the majority around Zetkin and Balabanova (who was present as the official Menshevik delegate in the conference), this was unacceptable. Eventually, Zetkin’s resolution carried the day, but her fragile health conditions and the repression in Germany425 consigned her to a less active role

424

Beilage zur Berner Tagwacht, No. 77, April 3, 1915, pp. 1-2. Also see: Gankin & Fischer, The Bolsheviks and the World War, pp. 297-300. 425 When she returned Germany, Zetkin was sentenced for two years of imprisonment with the charge of “attempted treason”. For a more detailed and highly sympathetic account of Zetkin’s role in the March 1915 Socialist Women’s Conference, see: Eckhard Muller, “Clara Zetkin und die Internationale Frauenkonferenz im März 1915 in Bern,” in Clara Zetkin in Ihrer Zeit: Neue Fakten, Erkenntnisse, Wertungen. Material des Kolloquiums Anlässlich Ihres 150. Geburtstages am 6. Juli 2007 in Berlin, ed. Ullar Plener (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2008), pp. 54-71

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from that moment until the end of the war. She entrusted the continuation of the Conference’s work to Grimm and Balabanova, the duo who from spring 1915 would play an increasingly central organizational role in the socialist peace movement.

2.

International Socialist Youth Conference in Bern, 1915

Only a week after the Socialist Women’s Conference, the International Socialist Youth Conference (ISCYO) took place in the same Bern Volkshaus. It constituted the second round of confrontations between the left and the centrists on the anti-war action question. However, this time, the left was organizationally stronger as the previous centrist leadership of the ICSYO, proved incapable, compared to Zetkin, of walking the fine line between the left and the center. It soon lost the initiative and the control of the executive organ of the ICSYO to more radical tendencies represented by the Swiss and Scandinavian socialists. In order to organize a conference, the left-leaning youth groups from the neutral countries first took over the official executive of the bureau of the ICSYO. In December 1915, the Scandinavian youth organizations demanded that the bureau of the ICSYO in Vienna (led by Robert Danneberg) immediately call for a peace conference and, if it could not, then hand over the mandate to a committee organized by the Scandinavian youth socialist groups.426 Around the same time, the secretary of the Swiss Socialist Youth Organization, Willi Münzenberg, took steps towards the organization of a conference with the same goal.427 The Swiss and Scandinavian initiatives eventually merged and the Bureau of the ICSYO moved to Switzerland with a mandate to organize an international anti-war socialist youth conference. The Scandinavian and the Swiss youth groups organized the conference under the supervision of Balabanova and Grimm. The youth conference brought together the radical wings of the European Social Democratic youth movements, which further differentiated it from the more centrist dominated Socialist

426

Socialdemokratisk Ungdomsforbud. Kobenhagen, 1 December 1914, Beilage: An die social-demokratischen Jugendorganisationen in Schweden und Norwegen! 427 Letter to Danneberg: Eine international Jugendkonferenz in Bern (International Conference of Socialist Young People’s Organizations in Bern, 1915) Der Jugendliche Arbeiter: Zeitschrift des Reichsverbandes Jugenliche Arbeiter Osterreichs. 14/4 (Vienna, 1915), p. 1.

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Women’s conference. Representatives from several Dutch, Scandinavian, Bulgarian, Swiss, German, Italian, Russian, and Polish428 organizations participated in the conference. All of these organizations were either factions that had been expelled from the official youth movements of their national parties or, at one time or another, had a conflict with these leaderships. The result was that the conference had limited representation. However, unlike the Women’s conference, the Youth conference was an official conference; its manifesto and resolution signed by the delegates in the names of official organizations and had the stamp of the ICSYO. In that sense, the first truly international anti-war socialist conference was the Socialist Youth International conference, which expressed the voice of several organizations and not anonymous individuals, as it happened in the Women’s Conference. Despite its left-leaning composition, Balabanova and Grimm exercised oversight over the conference, which left a mark on its outcome. The conference declaration denounced the war as an imperialist war and rejected any support to the war effort in either belligerent camp in the name of “national defense” as completely alien to the international interests of the working class. Also, the resolution went farther than the 1915 Women’s Conference in denouncing the official Social Democratic “Burgfrieden” policies, condemning the socialist leaders who argued that the class struggle had to cease during the war, and called for an active class struggle against the war. 429 However, the resolution also refused to outline any practical measures about how to struggle against the war. The organizational result of the 1915 Bern Socialist Youth Conference was considerably more important than its resolutions and political statements. The ISCYO Bureau moved to Switzerland, now firmly under the control of the autonomous Swiss and Scandinavian socialist youth groups, which were considerably closer to the LRIs. From this moment on, the ISCYO played an

428

Delegations included Friedrich Notz, Georg Dietrich, and Stirner [Sturm] (Germany); Grimm, Platten, Miinzenberg, and Hans Vogel (Switzerland); Armand and G. I. Safarov [Egorov] [Bolsheviks], Ansgar Olaussen (Norway); Christiansen (Denmark); Bernd Luteraan (the Netherlands); S. Minev (Bulgaria); Amadeo Catanesi (Italy); and Bronislaw Stein [Dabrowski] (Poland). Balabanov also took an active part in the proceedings. No members of the current International Youth Bureau (Danneberg of Austria, Hoglund of Sweden, Hendrik de Man of Belgium, Emanuel Skatula of Bohemia, and Helge Krogh of Norway) took part. 429 “Resolution of the International Socialist Youth Conference at Berne, April 5-7, 1915,” in Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War, pp. 307-308.

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active part in the anti-war socialist movement. The conflict between the international organizational centers and their anti-war politics, and the pro-war national party leaderships began to put pressures on the local oppositional organizations, forcing them to choose between conflicting and increasingly irreconcilable formal-organizational loyalties. For the LRIs specifically, the Socialist Youth Conference was also an important moment, as it enabled the re-establishment of international organizational ties between the Dutch, Polish, German, and Russian core groups. This was partly thanks to the efforts of the delegate representing the Dutch radical socialist youth organization, Barend Luteraan. Luteraan was a member of the Dutch SDP executive, but as the Dutch SDP leadership was ambivalent towards the peace conference, his trip to Switzerland was organized independently of the party and in close collaboration with Herman Gorter.430 Arriving in Bern, Luteraan was received by Radek and brought to a meeting in Lenin’s apartment. As Lenin was peeling potatoes, they talked about Gorter’s health, his latest pamphlet (which Lenin praised), and the outlines of their joint fractional activity in the Socialist Youth Conference.431 In fact, during the conference, the Bolshevik delegation, which had no separate youth organization, was about to be excluded by Grimm and Balabanova. This was averted by Luteraan’s intervention, who insisted on their participation.432 By enabling the re-establishment of the links between the core LRI groups, the Socialist Youth Conference also tested their strength and provided the practical proof that the LRIs could act as a united fractional tendency inside the pacifist-centrist peace movement. The 1915 Bern Socialist Women and Youth Conferences were more important in revealing the organizational dilemma of the world socialist movement than their immediate and long-term political effects. The paradox of the situation was that a formal international socialist meeting basing itself on the moral and organizational authority of the Second International could only be possible by risking conflict with the pro-war national party leaderships. In other words, international socialist unity, at least in the short term, could not be established without risking a split in national parties. However, the radical-lefts themselves were not as yet strong enough to initiate an

430

Bourrniet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, p. 114. Dennis Bos, Vele woningen, maar nergens een thuis: Barend Luteraan (1878-1970) (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1996), p. 32. 432 Ibid. p. 34. 431

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international meeting of their own at that point. In spring 1915, it seemed that the decisive initiative was in the hands of the pacifists to steer the course of the delicate organizational balance between the growing irreconcilable antagonism between the nationalist and internationalist wings of the socialist movement.

D.

The Zimmerwald Moment

In 1915, the LRIs failed to organize an international anti-war meeting, in part because the centrist-pacifist tendencies took the wind from their sails. The development of the war was one factor that pushed the pacifists to organize a hasty anti-war conference. By the end of 1914, the war in the western front was already settling into an unprecedentedly bloody stalemate. Neither of the belligerent blocs seemed to be able to breach the defenses of the other, revealing the devastating possibility of a prolonged war. On the home-fronts of different warring countries, war measures, rationing, and rising cost of living were already beginning to stir discontent in 1915. On the fronts, soldiers were beginning to question the military discipline and even the war itself. The first major sign of soldiers' discontent appeared as the Christmas truce. This settling military deadlock encouraged pacifists to try the waters for reopening diplomatic channels between the belligerent countries via the indirect channel of the official socialist parties. Especially in the neutral countries, Social Democratic party leaders began looking for ways to reestablish links between the socialist leaders in the fighting camps and in that way, establish and preserve open channels for diplomatic peace negotiations between the warring governments. Most of these initial efforts came to naught. This was especially due to the French and Belgian socialist leaders' staunch opposition to any reconciliation with the German and Austrian socialists. Under these conditions the pacifist leaders of neutral country socialists had to either abandon any idea of pro-peace international socialist gathering, at least temporarily, or try to bring together other pacifist leaders from the warring countries, if not the whole Second International leadership. North European socialist leaders opted for the first option; however, in Switzerland a group of leaders tried the latter, at least unofficially.

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The history of the Swiss peace initiative has been well documented.433 On 27 September 1914, the representatives of the Italian and Swiss socialist parties met at Lugano, testing the waters for the organization of an anti-war conference. On 2 October, a senior leader of the Swiss SDP officially wrote to the representatives of the socialist parties both in belligerent and neutral countries to join an effort in reconstructing the ISB, carefully avoiding any criticism of any parties’ prior involvement in the war.434 Soon, it became obvious that it was too early for such a conference. The Entente socialist party leaders adamantly opposed any conference with German and Austrian socialists, the ISB was paralyzed, and the neutral country socialists were also divided on whose country should the initiative of an international reconciliation effort should it take place. Eventually, the Swiss Party officially dropped its plan for a conference in Switzerland. The only remaining option for a conference was to bring together oppositional anti-war groups inside the major socialist parties. But such a fractional meeting had certain political risks for everyone that it might involve. For pacifist socialists, especially from France and Germany, joining a peace conference in Switzerland risked expulsion from their own national parties and hence risked open party division, not to mention persecution and imprisonment in their own countries. These risks restrained centrists like Kautsky from participating in any pacifist congress or conferences. For the centrist organizers of the peace movement in neutral states, the problem was that, in the absence of official representation from the major social democratic parties in belligerent countries, it had to invite more radical but unofficial anti-war socialist factions from the belligerent countries, as it happened in the Socialist Youth Group’s Conference in Bern in spring 1915. This risked upsetting the delicate balance in these parties in favor of the radical wings and in turn upsetting the inter-organizational balance of forces inside the neutral countries themselves. Hence, organizing a truly international socialist anti-war conference required very delicate diplomatic

433

Horst Lademacher’s Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung is a comprehensive (though not complete) document collection including the proceedings, reports and extensive correspondences between Robert Grimm and others involved in the Zimmerwald Peace Movement, based on Robert Grimm Collection in the International Institute of Social History Archives in Amsterdam. Merle Fainsod’s International Socialism, S. Kissin’s War and Marxists, Nishikawa’s Socialists and International Action for Peace and the World War, J. Humbert-Droz, Krieg und Internationale and David Kirby, War, Peace and Revolution: International Socialism at the Crossroads 1914-1918 (Aldershot: Gower, 1986) also present important documents and general summaries of the development of early socialist peace efforts. 434 Kirby, War, Peace and Revolution, p. 69.

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work. To serve the best interests of the pacifists, an international peace conference had to bring in the left-wing factions from the belligerent country socialist parties but restrain them by mild enough political resolutions so as not to disturb the balance of forces in these countries and keep the path for a possible diplomatic peace negotiation and post-war reconciliation between world socialist parties open. The Swiss socialist leader Robert Grimm volunteered to traverse this troubled path between the Scylla and Charybdis of the socialist politics. He was a perfect candidate to organize a general meeting of the world socialist oppositions against the war. Switzerland was a neutral country, where both French and German were spoken in different cantons and where links with French and German socialist movement had deep historical roots. This was crucial because Germany and France were the two main countries whose socialist parties were indispensable for the revival of the old International. Additionally, Grimm’s reputation in the pacifist wing of the anti-war socialist camp was spotless at the beginning of the war. His experience before the war as an international figure and the enormous strength of the socialists in the local Bern435 canton where Grimm was a central figure, already put him at the center of the complex network of anti-war socialist oppositionists (both among pacifist and radical wings). A member of the inter-parliamentary union of the ISB before the war, Grimm was a credible socialist in the eyes of the pacifists. Thirty-three years old when the war started, Robert Grimm was a member of the leadership of Socialist Party of Switzerland (though not a member of the Swiss Socialist Party Executive), a member of the Swiss parliament, leader of the Bern Social Democratic party branch and, last but not the least, the editor of the Bernese German-language social democratic paper Berner Tagwacht, which published the first anti-war, left wing criticisms of the burgfrieden policy. The Berner Tagwacht also published the articles by Karl Radek and Anton Pannekoek as the first internationally renowned authors to criticize socialists’ submissive attitude towards their own governments’ militarism. In Germany, the paper had a substantial influence among the socialists. Due to the military (and also the Social Democratic leadership’s own) censorship in Germany, many oppositional declarations of German Social Democrats were first published in the Berner Tagwacht and then smuggled back into Germany. Considering the centrality of German language for the Socialist

435

Humbert-Droz, Der Krieg und die Internationale, p. 119.

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International, Grimm’s paper occupied a position as one of the most important anti-war papers in 1914. As a result, Grimm had very good personal connections with the German opposition leaders. Various opposition groups first learned about the existence of likeminded groups via articles and reports published in Berner Tagwacht.436 In addition, the paper had a very good reputation in France as well, since the news about German opposition were translated and published from this paper in France. In fact, according to Trotsky, during the first months of the war, French socialists thought the paper was francophone (due to its heavily critical tone towards the German leadership), which added to its reputation in France.437 In addition to his cordial relations with the German, French, and Austrian pacifist and radical leaders, Grimm had one key asset to campaign and organize a peace conference in Switzerland: his excellent relations with the east European emigre leader circles especially with the Mensheviks. Grimm owed this to Switzerland’s strategic location. With the war, the east Europeans in general became the most dynamic force in the whole international socialist movement, many of whom were living in Switzerland in exile or could more or less freely correspond with addresses in the country. In the Zimmerwald movement itself, the most articulate expression of the centrist tendency was put forward by east Europeans. Trotsky penned the Zimmerwald Manifesto together with Henriette Roland-Holst. Martov was a major influence in the Kienthal (or the second Zimmerwald) conference on the side of Robert Grimm. Grimm's contacts with other socialist

436

In a letter that Zetkin wrote to Grimm on 3 December 1914, she stated that “the Tagwacht is a pleasure. We rush on each one of them. Who writes the articles from "Berlin"? Be cordially greeted with your dear wife and the beautiful "Kindergesindei" and Axelrod.” (Clara Zetkin: Letter to Robert Grimm in Lademacher ed, The Zimmerwald Movement Vol. 2, p.10. Trotsky at the time defined Grimm’s Berner Tagwacht as “the unofficial organ of ‘left’ or ‘international’ socialism.” L.D. Trotsky, Voyna i revolyutsia: Krusheniye vtorogo internatsionala i podgotovka tret’ego, vol. 2 (Petrograd: Gosizdat, 1922), pp. 2832. 437 Ibid. While Trotsky was full of praise for Grimm and Morgari, defining them as the sole organizers of the Zimmerwald movement and prominent leaders of the “left” socialism, he added a note to his 1922 collection of his war-time articles that Grimm was actually a “Swiss petty-bourgeois philistine” at the time. He implied that he did not recognize it at the time because, due the radicalism of Berner Tagwacht which published some of the most-radical anti-war socialist tracts. Despite his explanation for his inability to realize Grimm’s “philistinism” when he was in France, he persistently sided with him against the Bolsheviks and coauthored the final version of the Manifesto of the Zimmerwald Conference together with Grimm. This little note is interesting because it reveals how difficult it sometimes could be for individuals to admit that they can change themselves, together with and under the pressure of their environments. Trotsky is certainly not the sole individual to show this tendency, but his case is still a remarkable example.

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movements would have been impossible without the Russian émigrés like Riazanov, Balabanova and Axelrod among others. Practically, Grimm's correspondence network included a great number of east Europeans, who acted as vital links between various tendencies and parties in Europe, be they centrist or radical left. Politically, Grimm was positioned between the center and the left in the Second International. During the pre-war mass action debates, Grimm held a centrist position. Following Kautsky, he acknowledged the importance of mass action but only as a substitute tactic for the parliamentary political struggle.438 For Grimm, small and independent radical left factions could not be the instigators of mass actions for which the support of mass and united organizations (like unions) were necessary.439 Thus, those situated between the left-wing and the center, like Trotsky, Axelrod, and Martov at the time, could trust Grimm to not swing too far to the left, that is to an LRI position akin to Gorter’s, Pannekoek’s, Radek’s or Lenin’s. However, in the spring of 1915, when he began organizing for a socialist peace conference, Grimm was basically acting on his own behalf.440 The Swiss party having failed to establish cooperation with the ISB Secretary Camille Huysmans and the neutral country socialist party leaders dropped all its efforts of convening a conference of neutral country socialists in May 1915.441 The Swiss Social Democrat leaders published a platonic resolution calling for the formation of a sort of European Union and disarmament as the guarantee of peace. They expressed their hope for the restoration of comradely relations between all socialist parties, hopefully, sometime in the future.442 After this gesture, they retreated into inactivity. Following the failure of the attempts to convene a neutral country socialist conference, Grimm proposed to the Swiss SPD party leadership in a meeting on 22 May to convene a conference of oppositional socialist groups in all countries.

438

Christian Voigt, Robert Grimm: Kämpfer, Arbeiterführer, Parlamentarier : eine politische Biografie (Gümligen: Zytglogge, 1980), p. 65. 439 Letter to Riazanov, 24 February, Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung Vol. 2, pp. 450-1. 440 Grimm was a member of the National Rat and hence he was a part of the Party Leadership, but he was not a member of the SPD Switzerland Executive Committee. 441 The planned conference for 30 May 1915 could not be realized because the Dutch, Swedish and Portuguese parties refused, the American Party asked for a delay, and finally the Italian Party itself withdrew because the country was on the verge of entering the war. Horst Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung, Vol.1, p. LIII. 442 Humbert-Droz, Der Krieg und die Internationale, p.115-6.

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Hermann Greulich, the senior leader of the Swiss Social Democratic movement, categorically rejected this proposal as factionalism and divisive at an international level, yet he tacitly left the door open for a “private” unofficial meeting, which would not and could not be openly sponsored by the Swiss Party.443 Grimm took the ambivalent stance of the Swiss party leadership as an unofficial mandate. From late May 1915 onwards, he seized the opportunity and started to work on organizing an unofficial international anti-war socialist conference. He was well positioned to understand that if he did not take the initiative, he would lose it to the LRIs. The Bolshevik and the Polish LRIs were already establishing alternative channels of contacts with France and Germany.444 The experience of the Socialist Women and Socialist Youth Conferences, organized in cooperation with him (and in the case of the Socialist Youth Conference, under his direct supervision), must have convinced Grimm about both the possibility of undertaking a semi-official conference and its potential to hold the LRIs in check. Further, Menshevik leaders, especially Martov and Axelrod, but also Morgari, Balabanova and Zetkin were on Grimm’s side, aiding him in the preparations. The plan for the Zimmerwald Conference was more or less clearly outlined in the personal correspondences between Grimm, Zetkin, Martov, and Axelrod around early May 1915. After the failure of the Swiss SPD plan to convene an official conference conjointly with the ISB, Martov suggested Grimm host an unofficial gathering of the anti-war oppositions from Britain, Poland, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and other countries. Martov, who was at the time in Paris, was in touch with the French opposition. He convinced Grimm that a wide enough conference that would bring together as many opposition groups as possible would be a success, that it could push the ISB to take initiative to organize a plenum, and that a big enough convention would also isolate the LRIs.445 Some centrists were initially less enthusiastic about the practicality of Martov’s plan. Axelrod, for instance, was deeply worried about the involvement of the LRIs, especially the

443

To Grimm’s proposal Greulich responded saying that “The party… cannot call for an opposition meeting. [However] It is possible as a private [meeting].” Ibid. p. 117. 444 According to Lademacher, Radek was in correspondence with Henke in Germany for the preparation of an anti-war socialist conference. Ibid. 445 Martov to Robert Grimm 29 April 1915. Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung. Vol. 2, pp. 5054.

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Bolsheviks and Radek.446 If the conference would not be as wide enough to isolate the LRIs, which was possible considering the war-time conditions, the mutual hostilities and distrust between the belligerent centrist-pacifist socialists, then there was a danger of losing control of the conference to the left. Axelrod may have some suspicions about Grimm as well, since Radek was writing in the Berner Tagwacht, doubtlessly with Grimm’s permission. He tried to convince Grimm that cooperating with Radek was dangerous and divisive. For Axelrod, Radek was merely a “spineless" person, an "instrument" of Lenin and that he was infatuated by "Asiatic power displays." 447 Not only did he recycle the old racist abuses, he also personally denigrated Bolsheviks. For him, Lenin was a saboteur, almost a deranged person and he was to be kept isolated, at least outside the plans for the conference.448 Taking heed of these incriminatory attacks against the Left, Grimm concealed from the Bolsheviks or other LRIs (for instance Pannekoek or Gorter in the Netherlands) about the preparations, but he did not actively try to hinder their participation. For Grimm, the goal of the conference was to walk the fine line between the pro-war and the LRI socialists, rather than provoking a split. He assured Axelrod that an official conference was not possible and yet “a conference of the oppositional elements did not naturally mean a split” either. 449 The whole point, according to Grimm, was to lay out a plan of a “line of action” applicable for all countries.450 This brief but frank note summarizes the essence of the plan that was laid out for Zimmerwald by Grimm, Martov and others: a conference aimed solely to bring socialists (even only as the representatives of the opposition groups) to make a statement, but not to give the impression of a preparation for the establishment of a new international. Naturally, when the Bolsheviks learned from Radek in late June 1915 about the preparations, they seriously considered it likely that Grimm may try to exclude them from the conference. Aware of the intentions of Grimm to invite Kautsky and other pacifists and to isolate the left, Lenin proposed a counter-plan to Radek: if the LRIs were to be invited they should go, but first, only to form a left-wing fraction of “the supporters of revolutionary action against their own

446

Pavel Axelrod to Robert Grimm 5 May 1915, Ibid., pp. 61-62. Pavel Axelrod to Robert Grimm, 20 May 1915, Ibid. p. 71. 448 See for instance Martov to Grimm quoted in Nation, War on War, p. 77-8. 449 Robert Grimm to Pavel Axelrod, 8 May 1915, Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung. Vol. 2, pp. 64-65. 450 Ibid. 447

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governments” in the conference, and second, “to put before the Kautskian shit-heads our draft resolution.”451 By “us” Lenin meant the Dutch, Russian, Polish, and German left radicals. He wrote confidently that the LRI group, even though small and initially unable to form a majority, would be a good start, in his succinctly formulaic style: “the Dutch+ourselves+the Left Germans+0, and that won’t be too bad, for later it will be not zero, but everyone!”452 Eventually, Grimm invited the Bolsheviks and socialists from other countries to a semiofficial preparatory meeting to draw up an agenda for the planned conference and to finally prepare a list of possible groups and organizations to be invited. The meeting took place on 11 July 1915, in Berne’s Volkshaus. Even at this first meeting, the composition was clearly fractional. Exile groups and individuals without official mandates from their parties boded ill. Eleven delegates were present. Grimm, Morgari and Balabanova453chaired the meeting as the organizers.454 Besides Morgari and Grimm, all the representatives belonged to either Polish, Baltic or Russian factions and parties. All these delegates, except Grimm, were members of political factions inside their own national parties even before the war. Even Balabanova represented the Mensheviks in the International Women’s Conference and not the Italian party of which she was a member. In the preparatory meeting, Morgari and Grimm themselves did not represent their parties in any official capacity, in fact they were present solely as individuals. The composition of the meeting and the absence of delegates from the French and German official party leaderships was revealing in the sense that only the left tendencies were willing to show up even for a mild show of internationalist anti-war solidarity. However, except for Zinoviev, who represented the Bolsheviks, all of the remaining participants at the 11 June meeting hoped

451

The italics are Lenin’s. Lenin to Radek, Late June 1915. LCW Vol. 36, pp. 329-331. Ibid. 453 Balabanova had a dual representative as both a Menshevik and Italian delegate, which is, as I explain, was a new characteristic of the international movement. But, most importantly Menshevik Organizing Committee (OK) and Grimm remained close throughout the organizing of the conferences. Balabanova’s position in the Zimmerwald movement testifies to this. 454 The rest of delegates belonged to organizations from the Russian empire: G. Zinoviev representing the CC of the RSDRP(b); P. B. Axelrod of the Organization Committee of the RSDRP; A. S. Warski of the Main Presidium of the SDPKiL; and M. G. Walecki of the Polish Socialist party (Levitsa) were all emigres residing in Switzerland or France. Lenin urged Zinoviev to resign with a protest if the meeting was a Kautskyist meeting of peace. He expected the Kautsky group to show up in the Conference with the anticipation of a rising anti-war mood among the workers. 452

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and wanted to invite the well-known pacifist leaders, like Kautsky and Haase, who did not even reply to Grimm’s inquiries. The meeting, the majority of whom considered the composition too weak to take any decision, resolved to convene a second, more representative preparatory meeting. For this second preparatory meeting, Zinoviev proposed a list of groups to be invited, all of which belonged to the LRI camp. With the addition of some others, this was essentially the same list that Lenin proposed to Radek in his previously mentioned letter. Zinoviev’s list included: the Tribunists from Holland; Blagoev and the Tesniyaki from Bulgaria; the youth groups and Höglund from Scandinavia; the Lichtstrahlen group from Germany; the SDKPiL opposition from Poland; and the Latvian Social Democratic Party. His proposition was unanimously rejected. 455 The meeting also debated inviting the internationalist anarchists and syndicalists. Zinoviev was positive. He said that the anarchists, like the Marxists, were already divided between internationalist and nationalist wings, which he considered as a validation of the LRI view that the old, pre-imperialist epoch division in the working class movement between Marxism and anarchism was replaced with a new division between revolutionary internationalists and social chauvinists.456 On the other hand, Zinoviev adamantly opposed to the invitation of pacifists like Kautsky and Haase. Voicing the LRI perspective, he said in the meeting that the most important question was to adopt a “clear position of principles” underlining the division in the movement. Those groups and tendencies that voted for the war credits, stood for national defense (as Haase did), and refused the possibility of international solidarity during the world war (as Kautsky did) would only muddy the water and absolve the centrists of their betrayal of the international.457 Grimm and all the rest opposed this. Yet neither Kautsky nor Haase was willing to participate even in a secret and unofficial anti-war meeting. They turned down Grimm’s invitation and did not even respond to his inquiries. Since well-known centrist-pacifists remained largely unresponsive to Grimm’s inquiries, a second preparatory conference did not take place. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik CC Abroad and the SDKPiL opposition threw themselves into an energetic activity to mobilize the LRIs to show up

455

Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung. Vol.1, pp. 31-41. Ibid. 457 Ibid. Zinoviev was instructed by the Bolshevik CC to leave the meeting with protest if Kautsky or Haase were to be present. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii (PSS) 5th Russian Edition Vol.49 (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Politicheskoi Literaturiy, 1970). p. 85. 456

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at the Conference to take place in Switzerland.458 This was an awkward situation because, as the chief organizers, Grimm and Balabanova did not have any official capacity themselves. Yet they aimed to secure the participation of the leaders at the highest levels, if possible official party leaders, or at least leaders belonging to moderate oppositions. They were carefully trying to avoid awakening mistrust in the leaders by inviting radical oppositionists, who might be otherwise willing to participate in an anti-war socialist meeting. In contrast, the Bolsheviks were clearly a party (even though in the Second International’s official perspective, a factional party) and had consistently participated in the ISB plena before the war. Thus, they fulfilled every criterion to be a legitimate party in an internationalist socialist meeting. Yet, Bolsheviks were consistently sidelined by Grimm, who consistently cooperated with the Mensheviks, who were hopelessly divided on the question of war between national defensists on the one hand and anti-war pacifists like Martov on the other. Further, the Bolsheviks were trying to bring in parties and groups that were more or less clearly on the LRI camp, firmly anti-war and against the burgfrieden policies. The foremost among those groups was the Dutch SDP. The SDP was not a member of the ISB before the war, but it always remained an important party, with internationally renowned militants like Gorter and Pannekoek. In reply to Lenin’s insistent requests for a delegate to be sent to Switzerland, Wijnkoop, the leader of the SDP, stated his full agreement with Lenin that without the Tribunists and the Lichtstrahlen groups, the Zimmerwald would be a centrist conference and that they will discuss the issue in the coming Dutch SDP party congress. He even suggested that genuine German leftists in the Rhein region and certain Belgian groups could also be brought to the fold.459 Lenin, overjoyed, wrote Zinoviev "Wijnkoop - vot molodets, a!"460 The Dutch SDP, the Bolsheviks, and the Polish oppositionists in Switzerland opted to contact smaller fractional groups, which were both distant enough from their leadership’s realpolitik calculations, ready to enter a deeper discussion on the collapse of the Second International, and bold enough to proclaim the need for a new International independent of such calculations. The LRIs baseline organizational criterion for joint work in the Zimmerwald conference was the

458

Lenin’s Letter to Zinoviev July 1915, PSS Vol. 49. p. 91. Bauman, Lenin i niderlandskie Tribunisty. p. 90. 460 “Wijnkoop, such a cool dude, huh!”. Ibid. 459

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production of a regular publication. However small a group it might have been, if it could manage to publish a journal from an LRI perspective regularly and with a clear perspective that meant, for at least the Bolsheviks, the group had enough life in it to be represented in an anti-war conference. For the Bolsheviks, publishing required an organizational capacity, while publishing a clear LRI perspective required a level of firmness and commitment, a feat only a handful of groups could undertake at the time. Writing Wijnkoop, Lenin expressed his agreement with Pannekoek that “what we need is not parade statements by the leaders (against which Pannekoek wrote so well), but a consistent revolutionary declaration of principles to help the workers find the right path.”461 In the same letter, he urged Wijnkoop that the SDP should survey the groups in Germany, Belgium, and if possible in Britain to write a joint statement in preparation for the conference, together with the Bolsheviks and the Dutch Tribunists.462 In a letter to Radek, Lenin further explained why for the LRIs a consistent and principled regrouping could be born out of a meeting of fractions, necessarily smaller and even “illegitimate” from the perspective of the official Second International perspective. When a depressed and pessimistic Radek,463 sarcastically challenged the importance of Lichtstrahlen group (the small Berlin LRI group around the journal with the same name) in comparison to Zetkin and her personal influence in Germany and internationally, Lenin responded, arguing that it was principles and consistency, not size that really mattered: “Taking Lichtstrahlen as a group, and considering it more important than Zetkin’s, is not funny. This group includes Borchardt + Radek + contributors to Lichtstrahlen. That is enough. This group has a little journal (while Zetkin and Co. haven’t got one). Borchardt was the first to say publicly: “Die Sozialdemokratie abgedankt” [Social Democracy has abdicated]. That was not propaganda but a most important political act. It was action, and not promise. The most important thing for us (i.e., all the Left) is a clear, complete, precise Prinzipienerklärung [Principled declaration or statement of principles]. Without this all the so-called programs of action464 are nothing but talk and deception. What did the Zetkin

461

Lenin’s letter to Wijnkoop, 30 July 1915, PSS. Vol. 49 p. 114-5. Ibid. 463 Radek at this point seemed to have contemplated enlisting and probably to carrying out an LRI activity in the army, against which Lenin strongly opposed: “I advise you not to enlist. It’s stupid to help the enemy. You will be doing a service to the Scheidemanns. Better emigrate. Really, that will be better. There is now a desperate need of Left-wing workers.” Lenin to Radek, early August 1915, LCW Vol. 36, p. 335. 464 A reference to the centrists consistent attempt to counterpose action to programs and analysis; more on this later. 462

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“resolution of action” in Berne465 come to? Nothing in terms of action! Nothing in terms of principle! The Borchardt group, if it comes forward... with a clear-cut Prinzipienerklärung + a call to revolutionary action, will play an outstanding part in world history. Meanwhile, Zetkin and Co., having everything in their hands (newspapers, journals, connections with Berner Tagwacht, the opportunity of visiting Switzerland, etc.), have done nothing in 10 months to unite the international Left. This is a disgrace… There is need for a Left statement and program so as to develop the “ferment among the masses”. It is necessary because of such ferment. It is necessary so as to transform the “ferment” into a “movement”. It is necessary so as to develop “ferment” in the rotten International. And immediately!”466

With the addition of the German radical leftists, the core LRI group was more or less complete: the Dutch Tribunists, the Russian Bolsheviks, the Polish SDKPiL opposition, and the German radical lefts (around the Lichtstrahlen and especially the Bremen and Hamburg groups). Beside these core groups, the Bolsheviks CC Abroad tried to bring together as many intransigent internationalist Marxist groups with a regular publication. Most importantly, Lenin tried to convince the Scandinavian Youth Socialists via Kollontai,467 who was in Stockholm at the time and had cultivated close comradely relations with the Scandinavian radical leftists.468 Doubtlessly, the Bolsheviks émigrés scattered around in Europe were very well positioned and did their best to bring together an LRI contingent to the Zimmerwald Conference. Why was the Bolshevik CC Abroad so insistent to form a left-wing in a meeting organized by Grimm in collaboration with the Mensheviks and German centrists in summer 1915? Initially, the Bolsheviks were opposed to any meeting with the “Kautskyist shitheads” (as Lenin and others considered them). Lenin expressed his agreement with Pannekoek that repairing the broken pieces of the

465

Here Lenin is referring to the International Socialist Women’s Conference that took place earlier the same year. See above for more detail. 466 Lenin’s letter to Radek, early August 1915, LCW, Vol. 36, p. 334-5. 467 It was thanks to Kollontai that the Bolsheviks in Switzerland learned about the positions of the Swedish radical leftists. Lenin to Kollontai, 22 May 1915, LCW Vol. 35 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), pp. 189-190. 468 “In our opinion, the Left should make a common declaration of principle (1) unquestionably condemning the social-chauvinists and opportunists, (2) giving a programme of revolutionary action (whether to say civil war or revolutionary mass action, is not so important), (3) against the watchword of “defence of the fatherland”, etc. A declaration of principle by the “Left”, in the name of several countries, would have a gigantic significance (of course, not in the spirit of the Zetkin philistinism which she got adopted at the Women’s Conference[5] at Berne; Zetkin evaded the question of condemning social-chauvinism!! out of a desire for “peace” with the Südekums+Kautsky??).” Lenin to Kollontai, 11 July 1915, LCW Vol. 35. pp. 193-194

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international through a meeting of leaders and thereby de facto forgiving the past transgressions could only be a diplomatic public relations stunt. However, the LRI community in Switzerland also watched closely the growing boldness in the ranks of the centrists, which they considered a maneuver on the part of the pacifists to stall the budding growth of the anti-war feelings among the masses before this turned into open mass actions. Kautsky, Bernstein, and Haase published a brief position paper, “Das Gebot der Stunde,” which while denouncing the war, also offered a strategy to the government to leave war if it chose to and laid out a plan for a diplomatic resolution.469 The LRI participants in the Zimmerwald perceived its task as the prevention of the use of socialists as a cannon fodder in an imperialist peace process. Lenin’s letter to Wijnkoop, written in late June and early July, clearly outlines the perspective of the radical left in Switzerland about why the LRIs should participate in the Grimm’s project as an international force: “Kautsky and Co. now want to ‘stifle’ the beginning revolutionary ferment with the help of left-wing phrases and a purely verbal departure from the “August 4th policy”. We are now for peace, these gentlemen will say together with Renaudel and Co., striving to satisfy the revolutionary masses in this way...There is talk of a conference of the Left - and it is more than probable that dirty little souls like Bernstein-Kautsky will use such a conference to deceive the masses again with the help of "passive radicalism"470… We must do something: work out a program for the revolution, expose the idiotic and hypocritical slogan of peace, denounce it, refute it, speak frankly with the workers, in order to tell the truth (without the vile diplomacy of the authorities of the Second International). And the truth is this: either to support the beginning revolutionary ferment and promote it (for this we need the slogan of revolution, civil war, illegal organization, etc.) or to stifle it (for this we need the slogan of peace, ‘condemnation’ of ‘annexations,’ perhaps disarmament, etc.). etc.).”471

In another letter later he sent via Radek and Wijnkoop to the Tribunists, Lenin once again underlined the need that he saw to present a clear LRI front in the conference in order to clearly mark the differences between the centrists and the LRIs. He also wanted to secure the participation of Pannekoek, Gorter and, if possible, the German LRIs to present the LRI case in the meeting with the broadest international force. He wrote:

469

Eduard Bernstein, Hugo Haase & Karl Kautsky, “Das Gebot der Stunde” (19. Juni 1915) in Peter Friedemann ed., Materialien zum politischen Richtungsstreit in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 18901917, Vol. 2, (Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1978), pp. 904–8. 470 “Passive radicalism” here refers to Pannekoek’s criticism of Kautsky in his pre-war polemic with him on the mass action. Lenin consistently used this concept in his writings and speeches throughout the war. 471 Lenin, PSS Vol.49, pp. 83-84.

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“Please acquaint Comrades Pannekoek and Gorter with it and communicate your opinion and that of your Party (or resolution) as soon as possible. In my opinion, this preliminary conference is very important and useful only in the sense that it finally showed the ‘strange’ (to put it mildly) role of some German ‘lefts’... Zetkin wants to go along with HaaseKautsky, but Haase-Kautsky want ‘unity’ (with Südekum: we in Russian we call this "the unity of the lackeys, the split of the revolutionaries," that is, the unity with the national bourgeoisie, the split of the international working class)!! I am sure that this ‘Left’ conference with Zetkin, with Haase, without “Lichtstrahlen” and “Tribunists” is sheer hypocrisy: the objective meaning of this conference is only that, through an imaginary struggle of the ‘Lefts’ (à la Zetkin) with ‘right’ (Whigs and Tories of modern England!) to strengthen the old vile party. We must (together with the Tribunists and some German Lefts, not à la Zetkin - perhaps also with the Latvian Party and the Polish Social Democracy (the so-called opposition)) to do something very hastily, if we do not want to miss this most important moment.”472

The much-anticipated conference finally took place in Zimmerwald, a tiny sleepy village close to Bern in early September 1915. It was an unassuming gathering of 38 delegates. Even the local townsfolk did not realize at the time what was going on and later, when the founding of the Communist International made the name of Zimmerwald world-famous, they found the association at best distasteful.473 Both the Left and the Centrists around Grimm had meager success in rallying their comrades to the meeting. Lenin managed to convince Julian Borchardt from Berlin, Berzin (Winter) from London representing the Latvian Social Democratic Party, Hoglund and Nerman from Sweden and Norway respectively to represent their fractions or groups. However, the absence of the Dutch LRIs was a blow, as Pannekoek and Gorter were globally well-known LRIs, compared to all other LRI delegates including the Bolsheviks.474 Their presence could have potentially influenced the outcome of the conference. This left the Bolsheviks and the Polish opposition in a difficult situation, as they had to defend the LRI line on their own, lacking the prestige of the Dutch left-radicals. If the LRI delegation remained weak, the centrist delegation was far from ideal from Grimm’s perspective. The representation from the German party was restricted to the fractured oppositional groups, French socialism was represented mainly by a few trade union leaders and not by any parliamentary leaders, the British delegation from the ILP and BSP could not arrive

472

Ibid. pp. 87-8. Humbert-Droz, Der Krieg und die Internationale, pp.129-30. 474 The only exception to this may be Radek, whose presence as an LRI only made the left-wing’s situation more difficult due to his reputation especially among the Germans. 473

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because they were denied visas, and there was not a single delegate from Austria-Hungarian Empire. Basically, no official representative was present from the main parties of the Second International. The geographic distribution of the delegates also reflected the weakness and disorganization in the ranks of centrist-opposition in Europe. Italians and East Europeans constituted almost half of the delegates, seventeen among thirty-eight of the delegates.475 The East European delegation was exceptionally strong. It included almost all major tendencies from the Russian and Polish Social Democracy. Some of the most notable figures of both the left and the center tendencies were in Zimmerwald: Martov, Trotsky, Lenin, Zinoviev. According to Radek, the will of the Italian, Polish, and Russian socialists to join in the efforts for the reconstitution of the internationalist links was not mere chance. He thought this was mostly due to the absence of legal institutional integration of the German, Austrian, French and British movements, or to put in another way, "in Italy and Russia the group of privileged workers is very small, and for this reason the great majority of socialist party has remained faithful to socialism.”476 On a different note, the right-wing German Social Democratic Internationale Korrespondenz mocked the heavy East European presence writing, “the organizers of the Conference

475

The Italians were represented by Constantino Lazzari, Angelica Balabanova, G.M. Serrati, O. Morgari, G.E. Modigliani. The east European delegation consisted of several parties from Poland, Russia, Bund and Lettlands. The Russian delegation included two Bolsheviks (V.I. Lenin and G.E. Zinoviev), two Mensheviks (Axelrod and Martov), two SRs (Marc Natanson and Victor Chernov) and Trotsky representing the Paris journal “Nashe Slovo.” The representatives of the Poles were Adolf Warszawski/Warski from the SDKPiL, Stanislaw Lapinski from the PPS-Left, and Radek from the SDKPiL-opposition. Lemansky (Liebman Hersch) joined representing the Bund and Winter (Jan Berzin) the Central Committee of the Social Democracy of the Lettish Region. Charles Naine, Fritz Platten (the acting secretary of the SPS), Robert Grimm, and Carl Moor belonged the Swiss Social Democracy, but they participated without official mandates. From Balkans V.P. Kolarov represented the BSRP-Narrows and C. Rakovski represented the Rumanian SDP. Zeth Höglünd and Ture Nerman participated representing the Swedish and Norwegian LRIs. The only Dutch delegate was Henriette Roland-Holst representing the small “De Internationale” group. Finally, the fragmented German delegation represented three tendencies. Julian Borchardt, the left-radical delegate from Berlin was the editor of the Lichtstrahlen group. Bertha Thalheimer from the Spartakusbund of Rosa Luxemburg was opposed to the Left-wing but could not reconcile with centrism either. Finally, the delegation of the centrist-pacifists led by the Reichstag deputy Georg Ledebour and the Vorwarts editor Ernst Meyer also included Adolp Hoffmann, Minna Reinhart, Heinrich Berges, Gustav Lachenmaier, Josephy Herzfeld, Ewald Vogtherr (the last two were also deputies). Alphonse Merhheim from the Metal Workers Union and Albert Bourderon represented the minority of the French General Confederation of Trade Unions (CGT). 476 Radek, "Einheit oder Spaltung der Partei" in In den Reihen der deutschen Revolution 1909-1919, p. 319.

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racked their brains over the question of representation by the numerous groups and group centers of Russia and Poland… If every Russo-Polish organization and group had had an opportunity to delegate several representatives, these would have had a majority at the Conference and its outcome would have amounted chiefly to the issuing of a manifesto by the Russian émigrés.” 477 Despite the sardonic tone of the German Social Democrats, Russian and Polish delegations in the Zimmerwald Conference were as divided as the German delegations, representing almost all shades of anti-war sentiments that could be found in the international socialist movement. Among historians and contemporaries, it is usually assumed that Lenin (and Radek) were the sole representatives of the left in Zimmerwald. Some have even argued that the left-wing cause was an expression of “Russian characteristics.”478 Others find Lenin as the single force behind the leftist current in the Conference, acting “behind the scene,” plotting and maneuvering in a Machiavellian manner with his submissive minions in his “leftist cabal,” putting forward radical slogans like “turning the imperialist war into civil war.”479 All available documents from the Zimmerwald Conference prove that these assertions are wrong. In fact, the first call for a civil war, for a split in the world socialist movement and founding of a new International that was heard in the conference, came from Germany, from none other than Karl Liebknecht. Liebknecht, who was forcefully

477

Internationale Korrespondenz No.27 October 1, 1915, quoted in Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 321. 478 “All the conflicts inside Zimmerwald group were conflicts between the western and the Russian concept of socialism, pacifism and the labor movement. Lenin was living in a typically and exclusively Russian atmosphere of professional underground work, among people who saw their life’s goal and content in work for the revolution… The clash between Lenin and the Kautsky people at Zimmerwald was simply a clash between the Western and the Russian tradition. But even before this clash, Lenin, apparently, had learnt to hate the western labor movement which so little complied with his revolutionary views. Whereas all the others, including rosa Luxembourg, were frightened by the idea of a split, he welcomed it, as the only means of creating an international after his principles.” Franz Borkenau, Socialism: National and International (London: Routledge, 1942), pp. 135-137. 479 Robert Service, in Smith & Pons, eds., The Cambridge History of Communism, Vol.1. p. 127, portrays Lenin almost like an isolated mad fanatic, acting on his own behalf in the Zimmerwald Conference. While Service’s comment is only one of the latest examples produced in the literature its origins date back at least to the early Cold War if not earlier. For instance, see Julius Braunthal: “Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin had from his early youth been obsessed with one single idea - revolution... Now, with the world war, he thought the great historical chance for world revolution had come. The world war must surely conjure up a world-wide social crisis... Lenin also justified the splitting of the Labour movement, to which task he had now set himself, by a socio-economic theory which sought to prove that in reality the leaders of the Labour parties represented the interests only an upper crust of the working classes... and not those of the broad masses of the proletariat...” Braunthal, History of the International, Vol.1. pp. 42-44.

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recruited into the army as a punishment for his anti-war speeches in the Reichstag, sent a letter directly addressed to the conference. On the first day of the Conference, even before the start of the proceedings, Liebknecht’s letter was read out and, according to Ernst Meyer’s memoirs, it stirred all the delegates with “enthusiasm” except for the centrist Reichstag deputies Ledebour and Hoffmann.480 The letter underlined directly and unambiguously some of the core tenets of the LRI position: “You have two serious duties, a hard task of grim duty and a sacred one of enthusiasm and hope. Settlement of accounts, inexorable settlement of accounts with the deserters and turncoats of the International in Germany, England, France and elsewhere, is imperative… It is necessary to make clear… the principles of our attitude toward the capitalist order of society… It is above all a matter of drawing tactical consequences from these principles – ruthlessly for all countries! Civil war, not civil peace! … The new International will arise; it can arise on the ruins of the old, on a new and firmer foundation. Today, friends, socialists from all countries, you have to lay the foundation stone for the future structure. Pass irreconcilable judgement upon the false socialists! Ruthless urge on those who vacillate or hesitate in all countries, those in Germany as well!”481

This letter encapsulated the perspective of the LRIs (including Lenin and Radek’s) in the conference. Yet, if Liebknecht’s letter’s radicalism could be considered as agitational rather than programmatic, the Norwegian and Swedish Socialist Youth Organizations’ joint declaration did not leave any room for doubt that the political orientation of the LRIs in the conference was not merely a “Russian” or “Leninist” “plot”.482 This resolution presented by Hoglund and Nerman on

480

Meyer quoted in Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War. p. 326 fn. 40. Ibid. pp. 326-8. 482 The Zimmerwald conference and meetings did not debate in depth theoretical questions related to the causes and means to oppose the war. Most of the participants in the Zimmerwald movement agreed on the position that the war was an imperialist war. Certain historians claim that Lenin’s or generally left-wing internationalists positions on defeatism, or Lenin’s slogan “turning the imperialist war into civil war” were too scandalous for the moderate socialists. But, none of these positions were proposed by the Left to the conference. In fact, during the Zimmerwald conferences, Lenin almost always submitted to the general will of the Left and did not act on his own. He defended his positions vehemently, which sometimes contradicted with the majority of the LRI (e.g. on questions like the rights of nations to self-determination or defeatism) but he never defended those in general conferences. For example, the resolution drafted by Lenin and the final resolution submitted to the Zimmerwald conference shows significant differences with the final LRI draft submitted. Further, Lenin’s “civil war” slogan was not even his own personal invention. It was essentially a response to the German party and union leadership’s official burgfrieden (civil peace or civil truce) policy that was adopted at the beginning of the war and summarized the party’s stance that until the war is over socialists should cease fighting the class enemy. Hal Draper reached a similar conclusion, though his reasons were slightly different: “In 1914 the traitors to international socialism are yelling “Civil peace!” No, says Lenin, civil war! In 1914, the traitors are yelling “Defense of the 481

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behalf of their organizations consisted of four brief sections. The first part characterized the war as an imperialist war, argued that capitalism has reached its “highest stage”483 which signified that the conditions for socialist revolutions have matured. The second section condemned “the defense of fatherland in all its forms” in the current historic epoch as completely reactionary. The last, fourth section argued that a lasting peace could only come about with a revolutionary struggle of workers in all the belligerent countries and proposing peace without a revolution was utopian. But it was the third section of the document that was most important because it outlined point by point the “new tactics and methods” of class struggle. These were; “3) The conference should state that the reasons for the destruction of the Second International lay in its reformist spirit, in the spirit of opportunism, which increasingly began to dominate the workers movement, by its tactics, which had overestimated parliamentarianism and underestimated the mass action of the proletariat. It is the task of the conference to stand up in the strongest terms against the spirit of opportunism and reformism only and to stand up for the determination of a revolutionary tactic in the future. And that is: a) As opposed to all the earlier methods and weapons of struggles, like parliamentarianism, the trade union struggle etc. revolutionary mass action of the workers must be brought to the fore... b) The Workers International should no longer have a formal, superficial character, but present an organizational unity. c) Wherever current conditions requires, and the rule of military power make it necessary, the public activity of the Socialists should be supplemented by “illegal" clandestine work. In the struggle against war, the proletariat: d) Should not support budgets and under any circumstances. e) should not conclude "truce" (ministerialism) etc. f) All means are to be used to bring about the fraternization of the soldiers fighting in the trenches. g) Every threat of war and every war should be answered by uprising, by the civil war.”484

Encouraged by these statements, the left-wing presented its own joint resolution and manifesto, both drafted by Radek, and unanimously approved by the LRI fraction. It drew almost verbatim from Liebknecht’s letter. The LRI’s resolution stated that not only the majority Socialist

fatherland!” No, says Lenin, defeat of your own fatherland!” Hal Draper, “The Myth of Lenin’s Revolutionary Defeatism,” New International 19, no. 6 (December 1953), https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1953/defeat/chap3.htm. 483 Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung Vol.1, p. 57. Lenin would later develop this idea in his pamphlet “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism” borrowing the concept verbatim. 484 “Thesis of the Socialdemokratische Ungdomsförbundet Sverge Norge” in Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung Vol.1, pp. 57-60.

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leaders went over to the side of the ruling class by supporting the war, but the centrist-pacifist tendencies also capitulated by insisting on unity with the pro-war socialists while “merely posturing as an opposition”.485 The resolution insisted that this centrist current, which prevailed among the French, Austrian, German opposition leaders, and also some English and Russian leaders was a “more dangerous enemy of the proletariat than the bourgeois advocates of imperialism. By misusing the banner of socialism, it can mislead the less conscious layers of the proletariat.” The resolution called for a “ruthless struggle against both tendencies” and stated the LRI alternative as: “The prelude to the struggle is the fight against the World War and for a rapid end to the mass human slaughter. This fight demands rejection of the war credits; resignation from government ministries; denunciation of the capitalist and anti-socialist character of the war from the parliamentary floor and in the columns of the legal and, where necessary, illegal press; and a merciless struggle against social patriotism. It demands the utilization of every movement of the people called forth by the impact of the war… in order to organize antigovernment street demonstrations, carry out propaganda of international solidarity in the trenches, promote economic strikes, and, where conditions are favorable, to turn them into political strikes. Civil war, not ‘civil peace’, is our slogan. In opposition to all illusions that decisions of diplomats and governments can somehow create the basis of a lasting peace and initiate disarmament, the revolutionary Social Democrats must always explain to the masses that only social revolution can achieve a lasting peace and liberation of humanity.”486

The majority of the conference refused even to discuss the LRI resolutions and proposals, even that of Liebknecht’s, whose prestige as the only socialist Reichstag deputy who had been bold enough to vote against war, they were unable to ignore. In his opening speech, Grimm preemptively drew a line against the LRI proposal saying that the aim of the meeting was not to form a new International but to pave the way for joint action of all socialists from belligerent and neutral countries. The implied argument in Grimm’s speech was that any step towards the formation of a new International was against the spirit of the anti-war action. The conference was to unify, not split, the socialists of all shades of opinion, to initiate action and not to draw up principles or discuss theoretical questions that could only have a divisive role.

485

“Draft Resolution of the World War and the Tasks of Social Democracy, submitted by the Zimmerwald Left to Zimmerwald Conference” (6 September 1915) in Riddell, ed., Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, pp. 298-299. 486 Ibid. For a different translation of the Resolution see Gankin & Fisher, Bolsheviks and the World War, pp. 351-354.

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If a split between the anti-war and pro-war socialists was to be avoided, how could the antiwar socialists act against the war, when some socialists were in the war cabinets and some union leaders were vehemently pro-war nationalists? This question revealed the dilemma of the centrists: they had to either split with the left-wing, which was against the war yet remained in the same parties with the pro-war leaderships or split with the right-wing and thereby risk losing their positions and influence in the established parties. The solution presented by the centrists in the conference did not offer any clear resolution to their contradictory organizational position. The centristpacifist majority in Zimmerwald defended the idea that they had to and could conquer the parties through “legitimate” means (i.e., in official congresses) in time. As long as the conquest of the party by pacifists was possible in the short or even in the long run, the centrists reasoned, splitting would only weaken the anti-war socialist camp. For instance, Ledebour argued that they could not possibly vote “no” in the Reichstag without risking a split.487 Hoffmann speaking the next day (6 September) countered Ledebour by saying that a split in the Reichstag did not necessarily mean a split in the party, implying that the parliamentary fraction could vote no to the budget. In fact, Hoffman presented a rosier picture claiming that the masses were behind them and that, in the next congress, they would conquer the leadership.488 In his intervention, Axelrod said, “The International will revive and develop… through a process of intense, inner party struggles and the splitting off some forces. But we put great emphasis on ensuring that this is not accompanied by major … splits.”489 Merrheim from France blamed the left for desiring to find a new International rather than struggle for peace.490 Instead, Merrheim insisted, the task had to be putting forward general slogans and ensuring the greatest agreement on a widest join activity. However, even assuming that the right-wing leaderships would let the opposition take control of the parties by watching their growth passively (which was not to be the case as the expulsion of the opposition in Germany in 1916 proved), the optimistic assumption behind these arguments against a split was not built on any concrete evidence. It was true that the

487

From the proceedings of the Zimmerwald Conference in Riddell ed., Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 290. 488 Ibid. p. 292. 489 Ibid. p. 294. 490 Ibid. p. 312.

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opposition was growing vocal and bolder, yet, except in certain locals like Berlin or Bremen, it was not about to win the majority anytime soon.491 In fact, even Kautsky himself did not share Ledebour’s optimism, at least privately. In a letter to Adler, he complained about the hold over the party of the right and how it controlled the apparatus, terrorizing even the centrists.492 The French union leaders and the German parliamentarians came up with a joint declaration on the third day of the conference (7 September) that offered their alternative to the left-wing tactics. After noting that the “civil peace being proclaimed in all countries by the profiteers of capitalism, who gave to the war the appearance of a racial struggle, a defense of rights and liberties,” it stated that “Under the pressure of these sentiments a considerable part of the organized and enlightened workers in each country were swept away by nationalism.”493 The passive tone of the statement, sparing the party leaders from any criticism was revealing. It was not precisely clear what the statement proposed to do about those socialists who defended “civil truce,” let alone recognizing the fact that the policy was invented by the socialist leaders. Instead, it merely proposed, “We take upon ourselves the explicit responsibility of acting unceasingly… so that the peace movement may become strong enough to force our governments to stop this slaughter.” Yet, again, it was not clear how, by which specific means, the socialists would repudiate the policy of civil truce and readopt the class struggle. The competing texts presented by the left-wing and the centrists revealed that their approaches towards the organizational question contributed to the division in Zimmerwald. There were two dimensions of this question. The first was the definition of the role of the conference vis-à-vis the international socialist movement: would the conference aim to establish the basis of a new international or would it work for the re-establishment of the old International through the official channels, i.e., the ISB? Second, which form of organization should be considered as components of the new organization? Could the internationalist groups, oppositions, fractions, some

491

F. L. Carsten argues that contrary to Ledebour’s claims, the opposition was not in the majority in the states of Lower Rhine, Saxony but only in major towns but not in the whole regions. He cites police reports as well as the local party meetings’ results where anti-war resolutions were presented to vote. F. L. Carsten, War Against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 44-45. 492 Kautsky’s letter to Adler, 11 February 1915 in Adler, Briefwechsel, pp. 610-611. 493 Riddell ed., Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, pp. 306-307.

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of which organized merely around journals, be considered as legitimate representatives, or should the peace movement strive to win over the official socialist parties as a whole? In a deeper sense, the debate on the organizational question revolved around the role of discipline as an organizational principle. The German deputies (Hoffmann and Ledebour) were criticized by almost all delegates for their loyalty to the party discipline and their consistency in voting for the war credits in the Reichstag. Formal organizational discipline and fidelity to the internationalist principle could no longer be reconciled. For pacifist-centrists, like Kautsky, unity of the formal workers organizations overruled any “theoretical” considerations. “In war” Kautsky wrote, condemning the radical leftists, “discipline is the first requisite not only in the army but also in the party. Not criticism but loyalty is the most important condition for our success today.”494 Indeed loyalty to formal, organizational party discipline was the reason why an otherwise bold and uncompromising internationalist, like Karl Liebknecht, voted for the war budget when it was discussed first in the German Reichstag in 1914. This is also how the centrist delegates from Germany explained their votes for the war budgets. In contrast, the radical leftists considered a formal and rigid conception of organization and organizational discipline as secondary to fidelity to principles.495 The LRIs exalted the courage to openly declare one’s views even against the leading bodies of an organization. In fact, they perceived it as the duty of revolutionaries. Concretely, the LRI approach prioritized a disciplined attachment to the principle over unquestioning obedience and sought a moral unity between the ends and the means: in this case a fidelity to the international interests of the class as opposed to the formal-organizational discipline that national party unity demanded.496

494

Kautsky quoted in Salvadori, Karl Kautsky, (eBook, Chapter VI). Pannekoek explicitly opposed the consciously accepted self-discipline of the proletarian organization and the barracks’ discipline of the military. In his 1909 Tactical Differences Pannekoek distinguished freely accepted self-discipline of the workers to their class organizations, born out of a conscious realization of its collective necessity from the barracks discipline of armies. Bricianer, Pannekoek, pp. 78-9. 496 For instance, in late 1915 and early 1916, Knief and Frölich wrote in the Bremer Bürger-Zeitung that unity without the strict observance of the class struggle principle as opposed to the Burgfrieden policy would be the death of Marxism: “Unity has made the party great. That is certain. But only unity based on class struggle. Any other unity is just a sham, a formula obscuring decay. We have been concerned with unity built on class struggle from the outset and we will not give up this ideal for a moment. Our struggle is directed only towards this unity.” Quoted by Gerhard Engel, “The International Communists of Germany” in Weimar Communism as Mass Movement, p. 31. 495

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However, if the centrist-pacifist position did not offer any clarity about its tactics, neither did the LRIs’ proposed tactics have any chance of immediate success. The LRIs emphasis was on the propaganda and most fundamentally on theoretical clarification, fostering debate among the working-class on the causes of the fall of the Second International and the necessity of a socialist world revolution. The LRIs’ emphasis on mass action required the masses themselves to act against the war; the masses needed to be convinced that their action was the only means to end the war. In an immediate sense, this was not an “action program” comparable to the concrete action program proposed by the centrists. Thus, the centrists did not hesitate to blame the leftists for inaction, a kind of armchair radicalism. In arguing against Radek, Lenin and others, Ledebour criticized them for their inactivity, even risking militants’ lives with their radical slogans while “sitting in neutral Switzerland comfortably.”497 Theory alone, Ledebour argued, was not enough and what the movement required was action. In contrast, the left-wing’s position by its clear demands and guidelines was hindering the action – implicitly suggesting the left-wings tactics were too radical to convince a majority and logically would lead a split. Lenin countered by referring to Pannekoek’s polemic against Kautsky and the centrists. He suggested that the centrists were hiding behind a sort of activism which seemed radical on the surface only thanks to the opaqueness of their actions’ aims and methods. For Lenin, the problem with opportunism was that it was blurring the lines between genuine internationalism with clear principles and goals and the right-wing by proposing spectacular but ultimately unrealistic “immediate actions”. The conference could not reach an accommodation between its left and centrist-pacifist wings. On the contrary, it clarified the existing divisions in the socialist movement rather than overcoming them. But it at least managed to produce an uneasy and temporary compromise between the LRIs and the centrists. The concrete expression of this compromise was the unanimously accepted Zimmerwald Manifesto. The manifesto started by characterizing the war as a “savage barbarism” threatening to destroy human civilization. It blamed imperialism for the war, almost as a process without any subject, without condemning any specific countries or political parties, except a vague reference to “great powers” as the instigators. After that, the Manifesto pleaded with workers to remember their pre-war commitments to internationalism and anti-militarism.

497

Riddell ed., Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 303.

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Similarly, it called on to the Socialist parties of all countries to remember their commitments, correct their previous mistakes, and to begin struggling with “full force” for peace.498 This document can be considered as a temporary victory for the centrists. It did not even oblige the signatories to vote against the war credits in legislative assemblies, if such an “action” contradicted the party discipline. It remained mostly as a statement of intention to fight against the war without promising any practical steps. In the case of German Social Democrats, its most radical conclusion was a declaration against the infringement of the Belgian neutrality and a principled opposition to territorial conquest, which did not really challenge the official pro-war socialist line, as the SPD leadership itself proclaimed and defended the war on the grounds that it was waged for defensive goals and not for conquest. Even the right-wing, pro-war Socialists in Germany mocked the Zimmerwald Manifesto because it wished for peace without explaining how it could be achieved.499 The left-wing noted their discomfort in an amendment to Conference resolution.500 Even if its Manifesto was vaguely worded, the mere fact that the conference took place was important. The Zimmerwald Conference marked a turning point, a major moment that fully clarified three international tendencies existing in the international socialist movement. It also showed that the leaders of the socialist movement from the belligerent countries could come together against the war. Even going beyond this moral effect, the most important result of the conference was the creation of a formal, albeit “temporary”, international center, tasked with organizing the cooperation of the Zimmerwald groups and parties and to act as a secretariat. An unassuming title, the “Internationale Socialistische Kommission” (or Internationale Socialistische Kommission zu Bern, ISK – International Socialist Commission) was picked, after Ledebour’s suggestion, primarily to avoid any suspicion that the goal of this center was building a new international. In the first bulletin of the organization, Grimm, the ISK’s elected secretary, took pains to present the ISK not as a rival to the ISB, but merely as a temporary organ of international cooperation to be active only until the ISB took charge of its duties and could take over the task. 501

498

Riddell, Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, pp. 318-321. German Social Democrats scornfully attacked the Zimmerwald movement as the "Sobelsohsche dritte Internationale" and the "edle Kampfergruppe Grimm-Sobelsohn-Radek-Kradek-Parabellum" see: International Korrespondenz, Oct 12, 1915 and March 7, 1916. 500 Internationales Flugblatter (Zurich: Fritz Platten, 1915). 501 Internationale Sozialistische Komission zu Bern, ISK Bulletin No. 2 (27 November 1915), p. 2. 499

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However, in time, this did not stop either supporters or opponents of the ISK of perceiving it as the crystallization of split in the world socialist movement. Within the official party leaderships in Germany and France, the Zimmerwald Manifesto fell on deaf ears. The official socialist parties censured the news of the conference either willingly (in France) or by outside pressure (in Germany). The ISB secretary Huysmans ridiculed the conference by saying that “it was a meeting of ‘sharpshooters’.” Worse for Hoffmann and the centrist tendency that he represented, the news about the Zimmerwald meeting emboldened the very tendencies that the Grimm leadership and the centrist majority of the conference hoped to keep isolated. In fact, the only groups that wanted to actively affiliate with the ISK were those small radical factions and oppositions that were closer to the LRI positions on the question of a new third international. Those who defended and distributed, in most cases illegally, the Zimmerwald Manifesto were groups that either supported the founding of a new International or groups that split from or were on the verge of splitting from their parties because they considered the Second International to already be defunct. For instance, in Hungary, the only group that distributed the Zimmerwald Manifesto (calling itself “Group of Hungarian Socialists Adhering to Zimmerwald”) was an amalgam of Erwin Szabo’s fractional “Revolutionary Socialists” group that had already split from the Hungarian Social Democratic Party in 1909 and a group of radical shop-stewards from Budapest.502 Everett notes that according to the police reports and contemporaries’ memoirs, Szabo (who was a cousin of Karl Polanyi) was one of the few socialists in Hungary who had ties with the LRIs and followed their journals.503 An Austrian socialist who wrote to Robert Grimm declared his support for the Zimmerwald noting that “an undivided international, with all the worn-out and factional elements, patriots, business politicians and ministers, in short, with people who, in the moment of danger, have become unfaithful to their historical mission and have shamed their past at the expense of our principles, is not an uplifting prospect.”504 For Schau, contrary what Grimm

502

Martin Everett, War and Revolution: The Hungarian Anarchist Movement in World War I and Budapest Commune, 1919 (London: Kate Sharply Library, 2016), p. 11. 503 Ibid. 504 Heinrich Scheu’s letter to Robert Grimm, 21 Sept 1915, Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung. Vol.2, pp. 113-4.

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intended, the Zimmerwald Conference represented “a gathering and organization of groups which have remained faithful to the revolutionary class struggle” in favor of split.505 About a week after the Conference, an independent organization from South Africa which reached the LRI positions more or less independently, wrote to the ISK and declared, “speaking in all humility from this remote corner of the globe, we venture to think that not only does the future of the whole working class movement in every land turn more than ever on the formation of a well-knit, united, executive International Socialist Organization, but that the brightest hopes of an early peace… depend upon action being taken at once to that end by such an organization. We further feel convinced that… together with parties like the Italian Socialist Party and the Russian Social Democratic Party, which we read have throughout remained true to their principles, form the obvious and for the time being the only suitable foundation for such a structure.”506 While the newly found ISK, the purpose of which was to isolate the left-radicals, was bombarded by the same left-radicals around the world with congratulatory letters seeing in its establishment the beginning of a radical split from the Second International, Grimm was desperately trying to pull the centrists into the ISK without success. Complaining to Bertha Thalheimer, an opponent of the LRIs who the liaison between the Spartakists and the ISK was, Grimm wrote that only the Borchardt group in Germany officially applied for membership to the ISK, while HaaseKautsky group was refusing direct contact with the ISK, even as late as March 1916.507 To sum up, despite its organizers’ intentions, the Zimmerwald Conference did not exactly serve Grimm’s and his comrades’ (Martov, Balabanova, Trotsky among others) plans to establish a middle ground for a centrist social democratic anti-war strategy. The centrists in their national parties, who were wary of expulsion by the right and of encouraging the left, remained too paralyzed to take any organizational initiative on their own (or worse, together with the LRIs) to reestablish international socialist bonds. On the other hand, the conference emboldened the LRIs. The core groups saw that it was not alone in its desire to split from the pro-war and centrist socialists, and to find a new, intransigently anti-war International. However, they also realized that this

505

Ibid. D. Ivon Jones (Secretary of the International League of the South African Labour Party) to Oddino Morgari. Ibid. pp. 111-112. 507 Ernst Meyer’s letter to Robert Grimm, Ibid. pp. 470-471. 506

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could not be done by waiting for the maturation of separate LRI national organizations to emerge or the LRI groups to conquer their own national parties. The success of the Zimmerwald Conference revealed both the necessity and possibility of starting the reorganization from the international level. Even if this was not fully realized at a conscious level, the material conditions, the isolation of the national or local groups, as long as they remained autonomous, forced the LRIs to find their organization not from disparate national bases (as the Second International did) but from an international level. This tendency materialized itself in the formation of an international fraction: the so-called “Zimmerwald Left”.

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VII.

The Zimmerwald Left Fraction508

“When the whole is more than its parts, there is organization; when there is less, there is disorganizaiton.” Bogdanov, “Essays on Tektology”

A.

Formation of the Zimmerwald Left

The "Zimmerwald Left" was the name adopted by the LRIs who participated in the Zimmerwald Conference. That name arose out of personal meetings before the conference. The Norwegian Ture Nerman and the Swede Zeth Hoglund passed the German border in early September on their way to Bern for the Zimmerwald Conference. In Berlin, they stayed and spoke with

508

An explanatory note on the use of “fraction” concept in this chapter: Throughout this chapter I will use “fraction” instead of “faction” to identify the LRI groups inside the Zimmerwald Movement in general and their formal, representational grouping inside the Zimmerwald Congresses and meetings in particular. That way, I aim to avoid the normative connotations that the word “faction” has in English. For German and Russian speaking Marxists of the time, the words “Fraktion” or “fraktsiya” did not have any negative normative meaning. The word was simply used to define socialists’ organizational relation acting inside the representative bodies of foreign social classes or class institutions, such as parliaments, meetings, congresses or any other legislative representative bodies. For instance, German SPD delegates in the German Reichstag formed the “SPD Reichstag Fraktion,” a kind of caucus, but submitted itself primarily to the SPD party discipline and formally acknowledged the authority of the party congresses. This use was perfectly normal and understood as the proper method of working class representatives to organize themselves in the representative organs of bourgeois state organizations, denoting their autonomous and legitimately oppositional stance. Similarly, the Zimmerwald Leftists, as this chapter explains, formed themselves as an autonomous and oppositional “fraction” inside the Zimmerwald Movement and they perceived this stance not only perfectly normal, legitimate, and in line with the socialist tradition, but necessary considering their collective antagonism against the majority pacifist-centrist groups of the Zimmerwald movement. Hence, I use “fraction” as it was used in Russian and German socialist movements of the time throughout this dissertation to identify the organizational stance of the Zimmerwald Leftists inside and against the Zimmerwald Movement’s organizational structure in particular and their general organizational relation with other socialist organizations or their congresses and meetings they participated in different national contexts throughout the 1914-1919 period.

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Borchardt for a few days, who joined them.509 The trio arrived in Bern and met with the Radek, Lenin, Zinoviev, Berzin, and Platten on the day preceding the conference in Zimmerwald in order to form a left-wing fraction.510 In this meeting, Radek drafted the Left’s manifesto and Lenin made a presentation, which was followed by a discussion. The eight delegates, representing the Scandinavian youth socialist organizations, the RSDRP(b), the SDKPiL-Rozlamowcy (the SDKPiL opposition group around Luxemburg and Jogiches expelled by the party leadership), the German Lichtstrahlen, the Latvian Social Democratic Party, and Swiss left-radicals formed the core LRI group, or more precisely the left-wing fraction of the Zimmerwald movement. After the conference, the left-wing fraction formalized its organization by creating an Executive Committee for the "Zimmerwald Left". It took responsibility for sustaining the international links and publishing its materials. Lenin, Zinoviev, and Radek constituted the Executive Committee. As Radek noted in his autobiography: “After the conference ended, we held our own conference of the Zimmerwald Left, at which we decided to publish this appeal... sharply criticizing its [the Zimmerwald Conference’s] half-heartedness, and to create our own organization with myself as secretary. The action fund of this organization was set up in the following way. Vladimir Ilyich contributed twenty francs on behalf of the Bolshevik CC, Borchardt another twenty francs in the name of the German radicals, and I borrowed ten francs from Hanecki to contribute for the Polish social democrats. The future Communist International, therefore, had fifty francs at its disposal to conquer the world, but ninety-six francs were needed to print a pamphlet about the conference in German.”511

Eventually, the Zimmerwald Left Executive Committee found the necessary funds for the fraction’s publishing and correspondence requirements by borrowing from a sympathizing Russian businessman. Radek later explained his primary activity was to distribute circulars on all changes in the position and tactics of the centrists: “These were compiled by me and, after they had been critically examined by Lenin and Zinoviev, I copied them out by hand and hectographed them…”512 Bronski, a member of the SDKPiL opposition later explained that the Zimmerwald Left executive committee met regularly together with other militants in Zurich once a week. 513

509

Humbert-Droz, Der Krieg und die Internationale, p. 150. Merrheim and Trotsky, who were present in the meeting, refused to join the Left fraction. 511 Radek “Avtobiographia” in Haupt and Marie, Makers of the Russian Revolution, p. 373. 512 Ibid. pp. 373-4 513 M. Bronski, “Uchastiye Lenina v Shveytsarskom Rabochem Dvijyenii”, Proletarskaya Revoliutsiya no. 27 (1924), p. 37. 510

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These first organizational steps may seem minuscule, but the Zimmerwald Conference and the formation of the "Zimmerwald Left" fraction was a turning point in the history of the LeftRadical Internationalism. Zinoviev later remarked that, "...it was only in Zimmerwald that we succeeded in creating the first compact core of internationalists together with a small group of determined internationalists from other countries. At that time, the Zimmerwalder Linke [Zimmerwald Left] represented a numerically small force…"514 While initially composed of disparate and small oppositional groups that existed especially in the neutral countries, the Zimmerwald Left's formation signified a concrete organizational step towards the founding of a new International, at last formally, as an autonomous international organization, despite the contempt of the majority of the socialists and the fact that the working masses were unaware of it. The first written statement of the Zimmerwald Left fraction was published in German in Bern, with the aid of Fritz Platten, immediately after the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915. This document titled Internationale Flugblatter (essentially a long leaflet) included the documents (the amendments and the draft manifesto) that the Zimmerwald Left presented to the Zimmerwald Conference. It also included an introductory statement, a sort of commentary on the documents, and a summary of the Zimmerwald Left's basic positions written by Radek. International Flugblatter summarized the political and organizational tasks that the Zimmerwald Left fraction set for itself. It was its plan for the founding of a new International. Briefly, the document explained that the Zimmerwald Left fraction, due to the numerical, organizational and theoretical weaknesses of the LRIs, had to remain inside the Zimmerwald Movement in order to avoid condemning itself to sectarian isolation. However, by remaining inside the Zimmerwald Movement, it aimed to open up debate for clarification of key issue —the nature of the war and the proletarian struggle against the war— thereby ultimately preparing the ground for a clearer demarcation between the nationalist and opportunist elements of the Second International and the internationalists, who sought the formation of a new, Third International. For the Zimmerwald Left, the Zimmerwald movement as a whole could not constitute the organizational nucleus of a new Communist International since the majority "either did not wish

514

V. I. Lenin and G. E. Zinoviev, Gegen den Strom: Aufsatze aus den Jahren 1914 - 1916 (Petrograd: Verl. d. Kommunist. Internationale, 1921), p. IX.

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to break with the majority [social democratic] parties or thought such a break could be premature".515 This unwillingness to face the fact that unity with pro-war socialists, or party unity in general, was inconsistent with a coherent internationalism, revealed a fundamental contradiction because, according to the Zimmerwald Leftists, without being prepared for such an organizational break, a clear understanding of the goals, a lucid comprehension of the causes of the downfall of the International would be impossible. As such, the document condemned the timidity and restraint of the Zimmerwald manifesto in refusing to identify the methods of struggle to be used against the war: mass revolutionary action to turn the imperialist war into a civil war and socialist revolution. In contrast to the Zimmerwald Majority, the Zimmerwald Left defined itself as a resolute section, a fraction of international socialism defending: "...with all our energy every revolutionary mass action and of taking up the work of spiritual enlightenment and secret organization... The determining methods of proletarian struggle cannot be the task of small conventicles of leaders... In spite of the shouting of the social patriots that there can be no social-international revolutionary movement during the war... we see... the beginnings... that might develop with the support of revolutionary elements into a mass struggle of the proletariat against the war and capitalism."516

In short, the Zimmerwald Left's first statement defined its task as “spiritual” or propagandistic and oriented itself towards primarily theoretical clarification, for proletarian mass action and against “leader politics,” by systematically building a clandestine cadre organization. Despite its sharp criticisms of the Zimmerwald majority and the boldness of its own alternative, the Zimmerwald Left was conscious of its own organizational limitations and did not attempt to minimize them. As Radek noted, “the fraction did not want to create the illusion that it was already a solid, cohesive force,”517 which explains why it remained a "fraction" inside the Zimmerwald movement and why it did not constitute itself as an independent organization. However, advocating a break with "centrist" elements which they repeatedly condemned while remaining inside the Zimmerwald Movement was an awkward situation, since the Zimmerwald movement did already have and could potentially incorporate more centrists like Kautsky. In practice, Zimmerwald’s orientation could potentially enable a pacifist majority to dominate the

515

Internationales Flugblatt, No. 1, (Zurich: November 1915), p. 1. Ibid. 517 Ibid. 516

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movement. Using this dilemma as a pretext, the Dutch SDP leadership (especially Wijnkoop and Ravesteyn) dragged its feet in joining the Zimmerwald movement, despite the support of the majority of the party's rank-and-file for unity with the Zimmerwald Left fraction.518 In his criticism of his party’s leadership, Pannekoek explained the logic behind creating an international fraction inside the Zimmerwald movement. In his 5 January 1915 article published in De Tribune, the party’s central organ, he conceded that the Zimmerwald movement contained within itself the spirit of the Second International, which was clear in its manifesto. Quoting from a recent article by Kautsky as evidence, Pannekoek argued that the centrists were aware of the growing proletarian undercurrent against the war and hence were attempting to derail the movement by reviving the dead corpse of the Second International. While acknowledging this danger, Pannekoek also warned that the immaturity of the left-radical internationalist perspective made it essential for them to present their perspective in the widest possible arena. This was all the more necessary since the best elements of the revolutionary movement, "the small but intransigent groups of internationalists," like the Bolsheviks, had never given in to nationalism yet they remained in the Zimmerwald. That reality made it the Dutch SPD’s duty to link up with them in organizational solidarity: "on this terrain the SDP can then come into closer union with the groups... that want the same thing and thus give leadership to the emerging revolutionary movement, from which the 3rd International must grow."519 In Pannekoek's view, the break with the Zimmerwald movement had to emerge organically from the real debates and confrontations within the international field, in conferences like Zimmerwald. Lenin's position on the question of joining the Zimmerwald Movement was similar. He conceded that while the Zimmerwald manifesto could potentially represent a step towards a break with opportunist and social chauvinistic tendencies, it remained inconsistent. It represented only the first step of a process which had to be carried further by actively confronting the opportunist tendencies by remaining inside the Zimmerwald Movement. Pannekoek and Lenin bet on the

518

Wijnkoop in an article in Tribune on 2 October 1915 denounced Russian and Polish left-radicals for being wavering. Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, p. 105. He also sent a furious letter to Lenin berating him for participating in the Zimmerwald Conference together with the centrists like Grimm and others. Mathijs Wiessing, Die Holländische Schule des Marxismus: die Tribunisten: Erinnerungen und Dokumente (Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 1980), p. 110. 519 Anton Pannekoek, "Nog eens Zimmerwald," De Tribune (5 January 1916), pp. 2-3.

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hesitations of the centrists to join even the timid position taken in Zimmerwald. Their theoretical analysis had to first be proven in practice fully and without any room for doubt, in an open debate. Covertly responding to the Dutch SDP leaders’ criticisms without naming them, Lenin wrote in his party’s defense that the Bolsheviks did not join Zimmerwald by concealing their differences from its majority. On the contrary, Bolsheviks joined Zimmerwald to raise their differences and criticisms with the centrist-pacifist majority and in order to unite with the German, French, Scandinavian and Swiss minority LRIs. He explained they did not have any illusions about the temporary character of the union of LRI minority and pacifist-centrist majority. It would dissolve as soon as the Kautskyists decide to rejoin with the right-wing majorities in their parties and cease their oppositional, pacifist stance.520 In brief, the Zimmerwald Left essentially defined its goal as demanding clarity on the fundamental goals by remaining inside the Zimmerwald as long as open debate was possible and meaningful. Besides the general conferences and meetings, the most important organizational tool for systematic clarification and debate that the Zimmerwald Leftists used was the publication of a fractional international journal.521 This project was long in preparation. Gorter, Lenin, and Radek were already corresponding about organizing an international journal, published in German under

520

Lenin, “The First Step” first published in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 45–46, (11 October 1915); LCW Vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 387-8. 521 The LRIs never underestimated organizing around the publication of journals, despite the slights of their opponents implying that they were merely representatives of small "journal circles." Bolsheviks were often called by their opponents as Pravdists. The Bolsheviks gladly owned this moniker. Similarly German radical left tendencies were also named by their journals, Spartakus, the name by which the “Internationale” group was and still known for, was the name of its journal. In an age when the main means of mass media was the written word, regular journals and irregular publications, such as leaflets and pamphlets, played an enormous role for the small LRI groups to form relations with the masses. Hence, the best means of tracing its organized presence is through these sources that acted as the nodal connections. To break isolation, these groups amplified their common voice and debates through publishing. Publishing itself, in that sense, was an expression of collective work and solidarity. Lenin was conscious of this. As he explained: “The newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer... With the aid of the newspaper, and in connection to it, a permanent organization will take shape... which will train its members to closely monitor political events, assess their significance and their influence on various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence those events. Just the technical tasks of regularly supplying the newspaper with material and promoting its regular distribution will make it necessary to create a network of local agents of a united party, agents who are in active relationship with each other, who know the general state of affairs...” Lenin, “Where to Begin?” LCW Vol. 5 (1964: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 22-3.

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the editorship of Pannekoek. The Bolshevik CC Abroad was fully in favor of the idea.522 Already in June 1915, the Bolshevik CC Abroad published a Russian journal titled Kommunist that included theoretical articles by Pannekoek, Bukharin, and others about the question of the downfall of the Second International.523 However, the main tool for the fermentation of this clarification and debate at an international level had to be in German, as it was the lingua franca of the international Marxist debate.524 The Zimmerwald Left found a German language official periodical journal in early 1916: Vorbote (Harbinger) proved to be the fraction’s most important collective product. The historical significance of this publication can hardly be exaggerated. For the first time since the war began, an internationally organized union of political parties and groups called for a definite break with the International, not as a suggestion, not in a single country, not as an analysis of a single individual but as an international fraction.525 According the initial plan (prepared jointly by Pannekoek and Radek), the editorship of the Vorbote was to be shared with equal responsibility between the Dutch radicals and “Polish-Russian émigrés” because, Pannekoek thought, these two groups were

522

Bolsheviks were fully in favor of Pannekoek editing the Zimmerwald Left’s fractional international journal. They considered a journal under his editorship could be a potential counterweight to Kautsky’s prestigious and influential Neue Zeit. Lenin’s only reservation was technical. It seems he suggested to the Dutch LRIs that the journal should be published in German and, to avoid censorship it should be published in Switzerland. On this, Lenin wrote: “It would certainly be very good if an international SocialDemocratic journal could be founded under the editorship of Pannekoek. We must fight Neue Zeit’s mean way of defending opportunism of the worst brand by means of sophisms... In my opinion, we should under no circumstances lose any time in doing this. It is necessary, right now, while the war is still on, to tell the whole truth—naturally, not in Germany, but in Switzerland, so that we can speak freely about the revolutionary struggle, without a censorship.” Lenin's letter to Gorter via Wijnkoop (May 5, 1915) in LCW Vol. 43 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), p. 453. 523 Bauman, Lenin i niderlandskie Tribunisti, p. 84. 524 This was the case as late as 1930s when Russia became the center of the Comintern. Radek wrote: "whenever I thought of revolutionary matters I used to think in German, because it was in the German workers' movement that I gained my spurs." Karl Radek, Portraits and Pamphlets (London: Wishart Books, 1935), p. XI. 525 Only two numbers of Vorbote appeared in 1916. A third issue was planned for publication in early January 1917 with articles focusing on the national defense in small countries and disarmament questions. This third issue never appeared either because it had to be delayed due to a lack of funds or because the March Revolution in Russia put the plans for its publication on hold. Karl Radek to Fritz Platten second half of November1916, in Lademacher, ed., Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung, vol. 2, p. 652. Lademacher’s, Gankin’s and Nation’s claims that the publication of Vorbote ceased due to disagreements between Lenin and Radek seem unfounded since disagreements did not hinder their cooperation and publication of the Second Issue of the Vorbote earlier.

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more advanced on theoretical questions compared to the “bigger parties” who were more preoccupied with immediate and practical tasks, and had little patience for debating global-historic questions.526 However, the plan was neither sectarian nor narrow. For Pannekoek, the journal had to strictly commit itself to a principled defense of the necessity of new International, but beyond this, polemics on any theoretical question between authors had to be completely free. 527 Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Lenin and Trotsky, internationalists who stood on the ground of class struggle, all had to be brought on board. Other names that Pannekoek specifically mentioned in his plans were Mehring, Borchardt, Zetkin, Merrheim and Louis Fraina528 from the US, with the possible inclusion of Rothtstein (whom, according to Pannekoek was less politically reliable).529 This openness and inclusivity were necessary to expand the scope of theoretical debates, the clarification of which the Zimmerwald Left considered as an essential political task.

526

Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung Vol. 2, p. 207. The Zimmerwald Left Executive Committee had some hesitations about joining with Roland-Holst. Lenin conceded to joint work only conditionally, if Pannekoek became a co-editor together with Roland-Holst. The sectarian refusal of Trotsky to participate in the venture, must have eased the Bolsheviks' concerns. 527 Ibid. 528 Louis Fraina (Lewis Corey) was born in southern Italy in 1894 and emigrated to New York in 1896. He joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1909. Fraina approached LRI position from a position of artistic sensibility. Beginning his literary carrier as a Marxist art critic, he was a keen observer of the modernist art movements. He neither glorified nor denounced Futurist or Cubist avant-garde tendencies as did many other Marxists. He observed in the new modernist art movements of his time the aesthetic expressions of the capitalist domination's complete realization over the society. Yet, the creation of a mass culture did not necessarily mean for Fraina a "cultural decadence." Giving a twist to the mass action theory of the LRI movement, he observed the development of "automobiles and advertising, movies and vaudeville" as all the outward appearances of the mass culture that fully came to itself in a radical manner in the US, an expression of the mass worker, the central historic agent of the mass action in the European LRI theory. His biographer Paul Buhle wrote: “He was one of those rare figures who spanned, and sought to interpret, the distance and the interplay between working-class life and cultural modernism. He reasoned out class questions, and he interpreted cultural changes as if a barrier did not exist or could be readily crossed by the powers of observation and fertile intellect. And his teleology of societal change consistently culminated in the liberation of the individual self. For these insights alone, he would have been unique among a generation of Winderkinder.” Paul Buhle, A Dreamer’s Paradise Lost: Louis C Fraina/Lewis Corey (1892-1953) And the Decline Of Radicalism In The United States (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995), p. 35. 529 Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung Vol. 2, p. 207. The Bolsheviks were less enthusiastic about the inclusion of Trotsky. In any case, the Spartakists and Trotsky were opposed to collaboration with the Zimmerwald Left. Radek in his letter Roland-Holst had a narrower definition of the contributors. His list of regular contributors as Julian Borchardt, Lenin, and Pannekoek in addition to himself and Holst. Karl Radek to Henriette Roland Holst, 12 October 1915 in Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung Vol. 2, p. 165.

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Radek underlined essential theoretical questions for the journal’s definition of imperialism (with a critical evaluation of Hilferding’s, Luxemburg’s and Kautsky’s conceptions), the reasons for the collapse of the International, and the perspectives for future and new tactics against nationalism, social pacifism, and imperialism.530 Pannekoek further explained these tasks in his introductory editorial to the first issue of the Vorbote as: “First, the question of imperialism, its economic basis, its relation to export capital, to the supply of raw materials, and to heavy industry, its influence on politics, parliament, and bureaucracy, its moral dominance over the bourgeoisie and the press, its significance as a new ideology to the bourgeoisie. Then come questions which concern the proletariat, the causes of its weakness, its psychology, and the phenomena of social imperialism and social pacifism. Further, the question of proletarian fighting tactics; the significance and possibility of parliamentarism, mass action, the tactics of trade unions, reform and partial demands, the future role of organization, as well as questions of nationalism, militarism and colonial policy. There is no task more urgent than the task of elucidating the new problems.”531

For Pannekoek, the Second International’s answers to these new questions were invalidated by its capitulation to imperialism, which made the search for new answer imperative. But this call for theoretical clarification was also a practical political necessity. These theoretical questions were reflections of “the most important and immediate vital questions for the working class of all nations.”532 Thus, while its exclusive focus on theory may initially seem as hair splitting on questions that immediately concerned only the extreme left groups of the socialist movement, the journal for Pannekoek was an answer to the problems facing the widest masses of the world working classes in the new global age of capitalist decline. Confident that in the long term the debate would expand, he wrote, paraphrasing Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “material force can only be broken by material force. But even theory becomes a material force when it takes hold on the masses. The germs of this theory, this new weapon, were already at hand in the defeat of the former practice of imperialism and mass action”.533 The centrality of imperialism in the new

530

Ibid. p. 166. Originally published in Vorbote under the title “Zur Einführung” and soon after translated to English and published in the pro-Zimmerwald Left American journal, Internationalist edited by Fraina and International Socialist Review. This translation is from, Anton Pannekoek, “The Third International”, International Socialist Review, Vol. XVII, (1916-1917), Nr 8 (February 1917), p. 462. 532 Ibid. 533 Ibid. 531

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period and mass actions against imperialism were the two main horizons of new theoretical inquiry that the Vorbote sought to explore. The two main theoretical essays of Vorbote were penned by Pannekoek (titled “Imperialism and the Tasks of the Proletariat”) and by Lenin (titled “Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International”). Both essays reflected the general maturation of the LRI perspective since the first “mass action debate” began in the Second International in 1910 and the ensuing debates on the question of imperialism. Pannekoek’s article had already been published first in Russian translation in the Bolshevik journal Kommunist, which can be regarded as the predecessor of Vorbote. Lenin’s essay reproduced in an abbreviated form another essay, which was also published in the same (and only) issue of Kommunist. Aside from summarizing the general conclusions reached on mass action, the collapse of the International, and imperialism in previous debates among the LRI camp,534 the essays presented two new features of the LRI analysis. After briefly summarizing the various different camps and their positions inside the Socialist movement (being social chauvinists, pacifist-centrists and internationalists), Lenin’s longer essay in Kommunist went on to argue that the tripartite split between those fractions was more or less a continuation of the pre-war split between the left-radicals, center and the right. He focused on the Russian, Dutch, Bulgarian, German, British, Italian, Swedish and Swiss cases and underlined the interconnectedness and continuity of the LRI movement, with the exceptions being the French and Belgian parties, where the left-wing was extremely weak and scattered.535 Vorbote’s second section was devoted to the evolution of the internal struggles within various socialist parties, fittingly titled the “Battlefield of the International.” Articles and reports on the Russian, Dutch, French, Austrian and German parties outlined the balance of forces between the right, center, and the left tendencies and discussed the causes of the imbalances of the Zimmerwald Left’s strengths in these different cases. As it appeared, the LRI current was weakest in Austria and France, where there was a near total absence of a clear organized force behind the Zimmerwald Left’s positions. Koritschoner’s analysis on Austrian case pointed out that even the most determinant anti-war tendency was basically pacifist and was not even an organized fraction

534

See chapter 3 in this dissertation. Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International” first published in Kommunist (June 1915); quoted from LCW, Vol.21, pp. 241-251. 535

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in the party. This tendency was represented by Fritz Adler, the son of Victor Adler, the founder and the leader of the party. The struggle between the anti-war pacifists and the pro-burgfrieden current in the Austrian party was represented respectively by Fritz the son and Victor the father giving the dispute both metaphorically and literally an “intra-family” coloring. According to Koritschoner, the father and son appreciated each other’s sentiments but disagreed on the emphasis: pacifism or party unity. Similarly, in France, the most consistent anti-war positions belonged to individual leaders (like Alphonse Merrheim or Albert Bourderon), who were by no means comparable to Karl Liebknecht in terms of civil courage. Citing the latest French Socialist Party Congress in December 1915, Vorbote reported the isolation of the mildest anti-war leaders and the solid unity of the French party leadership so as to downplay the impression that the party was fractionally divided, or the leadership’s control was challenged. In one dramatic instance in the congress, Bourderon was locked into a separate room until he toned down his criticism of progovernment party line and reconciled with the leadership.536 However, the weakness of the radical left in France and the Austria-Hungarian Empire did not immediately translate into a strength for the centrists or the right-wing. The French report on the Socialist Party Congress explained that in the party rank-and-file there was a growing, though not clearly articulated, anti-war mood. Workers in uniform fresh from the front present in the Congress did not shy away from criticizing the war in concrete terms. According to the same report from Vorbote, when one rank-and-file soldier openly criticized the officers’ treatment of the soldiers and complained how the army reproduced the class relations in the military ranking system, a delegate who also happened to be an army officer and a delegate in the party, shouted him down stirring the tensions in the congress. The Socialist Party had in its ranks both army officers and rank-and-file soldiers. At least symbolically, this incident gave a concrete expression to the contradictions of the class truce policy that the SFIO followed. Further, the report cited the radical decline in both union and party membership (from 93,000 in 1914 to 24,000 in 1915) since the war began.537 In short, while the French Socialist Party leadership managed to firmly remain in

536 537

“Eindrücke vom fransözischen Parteitag”, Vorbote, Vol. 1 (Zurich: January 1916), pp. 54-58. Ibid.

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control of the party and suppressed organized anti-war opposition, it hardly succeeded in convincing the workers and the party ranks of its national defense policy. While the absence of an organized LRI nucleus marked the French and Austria-Hungarian cases as distinct, according to Roland-Holst, the case of Holland constituted an opposite extreme, where a clearly left-radical independent party existed. Yet, it showed considerable resistance to joining the Zimmerwald Left even though the Tribunist leadership in Holland was among the intellectual inspirations for the Zimmerwald Left fraction. Its resistance to acknowledge its own spiritual offspring must have been an embarrassment for Vorbote’s editorial board.538 In the case of Germany, the struggle against social pacifism was fiercest as here the centrist pacifist current was strongest. Vorbote and the Zimmerwald Left in general devoted considerable attention to analyze the widely varied centrist and right-wing opinions and, from the Zimmerwald Left’s perspective, the greatest possible generator of confusion. Paul Frölich’s (using the pseudonym Paul Bremer) report published in the second issue of Vorbote explained that the centrist tactics against the left in Germany was to delay the formation of a fractional opposition promising a change in the leadership through intra-party democracy.539 This flew in the face of the Zimmerwald Left analysis that the right-wing leadership was already integrated into the state and supportive of its national defense and class truce policies. Frölich ridiculed the idea that the party bureaucracy would be willing to wait passively until a party congress and willingly submit itself to a prospective anti-war majority. For him, by urging the left to bid its time rather than taking concrete steps

538

Henriette Roland-Holst, “Der Kampf um Zimmerwald in Holland” Vorbote Vol. 1 ((Zurich: January 1916) pp. 64-68. An editorial note to the article state: “The presentation of the differences between the Dutch Marxists in relation to the Zimmerwald Conference - as given by comrade Holst - seems to us to be partly outdated, since the comrades from the SDP... have declared their solidarity with the Zimmerwald Left.” Ibid. 539 Frölich wrote: “No one can be under the illusion that it will be possible to win a majority at the party congress, where the parliamentary group and the party bureaucracy hold all the power in their hands. But if it were possible to break through the bars of the bureaucratic power apparatus, who can assume that the Scheidemanns and Legiens will submit to the verdict of the party congress ... and embark on a revolutionary course. And if the improbable were to happen that the majority of party comrades could win a majority of the party congress, if the even more improbable were to happen and the Scheidemanns and Legiens, as "loyal democrats", would submit to the verdict of the party congress, so what? Should they be left to steer the Party ship onto revolutionary waters? Who doesn't laugh?” “Paul Bremer” (Paul Frölich), “Die Spaltung der deutschen Sozialdemokratie”, Vorbote Vol. 2 (Zurich: April 1916), pp. 51-59.

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towards building the infrastructure of a fractional organization, the centrist tactic was effectively proposing that the left-wing retreat and lose its organizational bastions inside the SPD. Finally, Zinoviev’s report on the Russian situation revealed that in terms of organizational cohesion, the strongest group belonging to the Zimmerwald Left was the Bolsheviks. What made the difference was the social and economic conditions of the country rather than the party’s political strength. Zinoviev offered several examples showing the success of the Bolsheviks expressing the close ties between the vitality and combativity of the working class in Russia, and further how the Bolsheviks criticism gave a perspective to the class. Yet the Russian proletariat was only a minority of the Russian population, and, in Zinoviev’s view, the backwardness of the Russian society made an isolated leap towards socialism impossible in the country. The revolutionary zeal of the proletariat in an economically backward country and the apparent passivity of the proletariat in western Europe, and the likelihood of a revolutionary transformation in a majority peasant country as opposed to the visible hegemony of the nationalist social democrats over the workers in capitalist West, constituted a crucial paradox. Zinoviev suggested that any revolutionary transformation in Russia could trigger and unite with a socialist revolution in the West, but this prospective resolution merely relegated the problem to a historic contingency. The fundamental theoretical paradox remained unexplained: if imperialism equalized the political tasks of proletarians globally, if it united the proletariat for global action towards world revolution, how to explain the geographical variations? More importantly, did the existence of geographical variations mean variations in tactics? If that was the case, then logically the primary argument of the Zimmerwald Left for the necessity of an internationally centralized third international as opposed to nationally federated Second International in the new imperialist epoch would be a contradiction. Zinoviev was aware of the problem. He insisted that both in Russia and the West the methods of struggle had to be uniform: proletarian mass actions. Yet the question of uniformity of the concrete political goals remained unresolved. This problem surfaced in the debate on the question of national question or more specifically on the question of “rights of nations to self-determination” principle inside the Zimmerwald Left. The second issue of Vorbote devoted itself to this question, which divided the Zimmerwald Left into two clearly distinct tendencies around the debate on the national question.

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All the reports highlighted the organizational weaknesses of the Zimmerwald Left fraction in different geographical contexts. In general, while the masses were gradually growing detached from the official socialist leaders’ support of national defense and moving towards the left, the LRIs were numerically small and organizationally divided. Only in Russia did the Zimmerwald Left have a stronger presence. But the Russian proletariat, as Zinoviev argued, constituted at best a reserve army of the world proletariat as the vanguard of the socialist revolution had to be the Western European proletariat. Under these conditions the Zimmerwald Left was preparing itself for a long-term struggle, “swimming against the tide” of isolation and accusations of sectarianism, preserving its status as an international independent fraction and pushing for clarity. However, both in the west and in Russia, Zinoviev argued, the unifying common theoretical LRI principle remained the defense of revolutionary mass action.540 In the light of its momentary organizational weakness, the Zimmerwald Left’s publications and militants expended considerable effort to explain why their principled stance was not sectarian. In a February 1916 leaflet published in French in Geneva, the Zimmerwald Leftists 541 tried to convince a reluctant anti-war opposition to its position in France on the necessity of a split with both the pro-unity centrist-pacifists and the openly pro-national defense right-wing socialists, by insisting that: “It is untrue to say that “the French are incapable” of carrying on systematic illegal work. Untrue! The French quickly learned to conceal themselves in the trenches; they will quickly

540

Zinoviev wrote: “When the radical left comrades in Germany raise the question of mass action in connection with the workers' struggle for socialism, they are denounced by our Russian opportunists as "syndicalists", "anarchists" and ... as “Bolsheviks”. Here, however, when the Russian Marxists put the revolutionary mass struggle for democracy, as a precondition of socialism, in the foreground, they are called "Blanquists", "Jacobins" and "bourgeois democrats"...In the West one cannot fight as a revolutionary Marxist without putting revolutionary mass action around socialism at the forefront. One cannot be a revolutionary Marxist in Russia without emphasizing the revolutionary mass struggle for a proletarian and plebeian solution to such topical problems as the confiscation of aristocratic lands and the revolutionary overthrow of tsarism... In Germany, the opportunists are ready to recognize everything in Marxism - just not the revolutionary mass struggle for socialism. In Russia, too, the opportunists are ready to recognize everything in Marxism except for the mass revolutionary struggle for democracy.” Vorbote Vol. 2 (Zurich: April 1916), p. 43. 541 This letter was originally written in the form of a letter from Lenin to Safarov, a Bolshevik émigré, who was living in France until his expulsion from the country in early 1916. Lenin, “The Tasks of Opposition in France”, LCW Vol. 22 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 127-130.

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learn the new conditions of illegal work and systematically to prepare for a revolutionary mass movement.”542

Similarly, in Germany the newly established journal of the Bremen LRIs, Arbeiterpolitik, devoted several issues to the question of a principled split. An important article (probably written by Knief) titled “Sectarianism or Clarity” explained that however small the German LRI group, the ISD (International Socialists of Germany, Internationale Sozialisten Deutschlands) may momentarily be, it represented a genuine international current, the Zimmerwald Left. Thus, it had to preserve its independence from the nationalist and centrist-pacifist social democrats in Germany so as to exist as an integral part of the international fraction. Once again organizational unity at an international level is posed against unity at a national level to counter the accusations of sectarianism: “One of the most popular arguments against the left-wing radical criticism... is the suspicion that the main representatives of left-wing radicalism, the International Socialists of Germany543 and the group Internationale, represent nothing more than pointless sectarianism... Both the international socialists in Germany and the group Internationale stand on the same basic ground, as the former stated in the Zimmerwald Left’s Manifesto and the latter in the basic principles of the Spartacus Letters. Thus, both groups have adopted the significant orientation in the spirit of left-wing radicalism, not only for Germany, but also for the new International: this is not a sectarian act, but an act oriented to define a clear direction within the new International. And this direction can only prevail in opposition to the party center. This is the only way for reaching clarification. which is necessary for the recovery of the socialist parties of all countries, if the new International is to be saved from a repetition of the collapse. Not sectarianism, but a political struggle (Richtungskampf), not blurring the boundaries, but clarification, that is the theoretical meaning of left radicalism.”544

It was not only in Germany and Russia that the LRIs defended the necessity of splitting from the Second International and its national parties. Roland-Holst in Holland argued that the necessity of splitting was universal and that it could be derived from the experience of Holland as well. She argued that bringing clarity, explaining patiently why centrist-pacifist and nationalist social democratic positions were irreconcilable with a coherent defense of internationalism, with a defense of working class interests was the paramount task of Marxists during the contemporary imperialist era. She did not expect this clarification to spread among the wider working-class

542

Ibid. p. 130. The general name adopted by German Zimmerwald-Leftists. 544 “Sectiererei oder Klarung”, Arbeiterpolitik No.2, (1 July 1916), p. 12. 543

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masses in the short run. Meanwhile, internationalists had to endure their numerical weaknesses. This was not an expression of sectarianism but a question of principle, as she wrote: “… we made no secret of that in the long run only those elements belong together that have the courage and clarity to break with all traditions, including those of "party discipline" and "party unity," and to defend the point of view of the new socialism, to understand the necessity of mass struggles against imperialist rule and the absolute rejection of national defense in the capitalist states... If the agitation for Zimmerwald has taught us anything here in Holland, it is that every ambiguity, every weakness, every avoidance of the old sentiments and perspectives is not of use to us, but they serve only to our opponents: the social-patriots and social-imperialists. It robs our propaganda of momentum, of the attraction of uniformity and clarity, without bringing even a single person from the ranks of the vacillating elements over to us. Only ruthless openness leads to the goal today. But would not such a ruthless openness would result in division, both nationally and internationally? – Certainly, and we should also make the masses understand the need for a split”545

As the above cited examples clearly prove, the argument for splitting from nationalist and pacifist social democrats was in no way introduced to the International Socialist movement by Lenin or the Bolsheviks. It was neither a Russian idea nor a sectarian principle imposed on the west. The Zimmerwald Left, its aspiration to find a third international cleared of nationalist prejudices represented a global tendency, albeit a small one. Further, the temporary and apparent isolation of the Zimmerwald Left in its early months did not mean that the fraction was stagnant. On the contrary, after the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915, the movement experienced genuine growth. Yet, this growth happened mostly on the margins of the Second International, outside the major socialist parties of the belligerent countries. The second international meeting of the Zimmerwald movement in Kienthal testified to this growth.

B.

The Test of Strength for the Zimmerwald Left: Towards a Second Conference

The test of strength for the Zimmerwald Left fraction came early in 1916, less than half a year after its formation. In a series of international conferences and meetings that took place in the first half of 1916, the three international currents of world socialism (right-wing nationalists,

545

Henriette Roland-Holst, “Der Kamf um Zimmerwald in Holland” Vorbote Vol. 1, pp. 66-8.

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centrist-pacifists, and the left-radical internationalists) congealed around the ISB in Holland, ISK in Berne, and the Zimmerwald Left Executive Committee also in Switzerland respectively. This polarization set the stage for the second Zimmerwald Conference, also known as the Kienthal Conference. Given the brief period that had passed since the original conference, the Kienthal Conference revealed a relative strengthening of the Zimmerwald Left fraction and a considerable weakening of its centrist-pacifist opponents. However, the Zimmerwald Left fraction was still far from achieving the organizational maturity that would allow for the crystallization of a new third international. More than anything, the war itself hastened the confrontation between the three main tendencies of socialism. 1916 witnessed two major battles in the Western Front: Verdun and Somme. In these battles 1.5 million soldiers died, many more were wounded and maimed. These two battles were deliberately engineered disasters for strategic gain by the belligerent global powers (France, Germany and Britain) and they immediately affected the whole earth by traumatizing vast societies as the global western empires drew their soldiers from the colonial as well as from the metropole populations.546 To relieve the pressure in the condensed western fronts, the belligerent empires forced hitherto neutral states to enter the war and further expanded the conflict to Balkans and the Middle East. By expanding the war to escape the military strategic deadlock, the belligerents expanded death and destruction throughout the globe, while also failing to achieve their goals. In the Middle East, battles raged from Armenia and the Kurdistan regions in the north to Persia, Iraq, Palestine. and Egypt. In March 1916, Portugal entered the war on the side of the Allies. Rumania joined the Allies in August, which turned the whole Balkan peninsula into a new battleground. The French and English armies violated Greek neutrality just as Germany had done in Belgium earlier in the war. As the logic of military strategies pushed for more violent escalation and “victory at all costs,” voices in the belligerent governments for peace negotiations failed to create the consensuses among the ruling classes that was necessary to push for a diplomatic peace settlement.547 The reactions of colonial peoples and the working class to the war grew as the blind

546

Jörn Leonhard, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War (Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 2018), p. 388. 547 For the changes in the war aims and failed attempts to a negotiated peace in 1916 see; Mathew Stibbe, “The War From Above: Aims, Strategy and Diplomacy” in Gordon Martel, A Companion to Europe:

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drive for military destruction approached apocalyptic proportions. 1916 witnessed uprisings in Ireland in Easter, Arab uprisings in June, and Tuareg uprisings against the French African colonial rule in December. Food riots and strikes in several German cities,548 and an anti-conscription movement and strikes in Clyde in Britain gave concrete expression to growing and bolder working class discontent. Under the dual pressure of the growing working class discontent and the proliferation of military conflagration, the official socialist party leaders in both the belligerent and neutral countries began to move towards a more pacifist posture. Even though the Social Democratic party leaderships that were closely collaborating with their countries’ governments were not in a position to seek active diplomatic peace negotiations, they were sensitive to the growing pressure from below and had to respond to the increasingly vocal challenge posed by the pacifists and radicals, inside and outside of the Zimmerwald Movement. In 1916, it was no longer an option for the nationalist socialist officials to retain the mantle of leadership by simply ridiculing the anti-war radical left for its smaller size, while entrenching itself in an aggressive nationalist rhetoric. In August 1916, the German SPD executive petitioned the government for an early end to the war and its renouncement of all plans of conquest.549 In September 1916, Ebert and Scheidemann spoke favorably about the reconstitution of the International and talked about a peaceful resolution to the war. In response, the December 1916 SFIO conference resolved that the party would be willing to open to a meeting of an ISB plenum if the SPD declared its war aims.550 While these gestures can be interpreted as maneuvers aiming to preserve internal party unity amidst growing popular and working class resentment, the changing mood found a more authoritative and internationally consequential echo in the ISB’s transition to a more affirmative stance. Being nestled in neutral Holland, the ISB and Huysmans utilized the occasion of the annual SDAP congress in Arnhem in January 1916 to assert the authority of the Second International

1900-1945 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 228-242 and David Stevenson, “War Aims and Peace Negotiations” in Hew Strachan, World War I: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 204-215. 548 In 1916 the number of strikes rose by 70 per cent and the number participants rose by 10 percent compared with the numbers in 1915. Carsten, War Against War, p. 89. 549 Ibid. p. 79. 550 Imlay Talbot, The Practice of Socialist internationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 24-27 and Fainsod, International Socialism and the World War, p. 81.

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orthodoxy once again against the budding left-wing challenges. In their speeches, the right-wing SDAP leaders, Hendrick van Kol and Willem Vilegen, pointedly attacked the Zimmerwald Movement as an intrigue of “small groups” and restated their support for the ISB. Continuing the attack, Huysmans defined the Zimmerwald Conference as an undertaking of a group of “impatient comrades” and said that the news of the Second International’s death was grossly exaggerated. He came out with his alternative peace process with two concrete stages: first, to organize separate congresses of the Allied, Entente, and neutral socialist countries; and second, to invite special delegates of national parties from all camps to the Hague to discuss the issue of peace with the ISB. In broad outlines, the content of Huysmans’ peace programs included the recognition of the rights of all nations to self-determination, establishment of the parliamentary oversight over diplomacy and the abolition of secret diplomacy, courts of arbitration, and finally disarmament. In practice, Huysmans promised a fresh effort to restore the old Second International orthodoxy that the LRIs viewed as glaringly stale.551 Huysmans negotiations with the socialist leaders did not bear fruit, but he did succeed in mobilizing the leading parties affiliated with the ISB, the Second International’s highest official body, to refresh their stand against the ISK. The ISB’s winter offensive forced the ISK in Berne to react. It had two options: either to dissolve itself; or fall in line and support the ISB efforts to convene a plenum or to reject it, which would be an official step in the direction of the formation of a new international in open defiance of the ISB. Grimm, the ISK, and the centrists around him were inclined to the former option552 and the Zimmerwald Left for the latter. To resolve the issue, Grimm invited the affiliated parties delegate to an enlarged ISK meeting to take place in Berne. The meeting, which began in early February 1916, kicked off a whole series of consecutive meetings including, the Kienthal Conference (in April) and another enlarged ISK meeting (in May) in which a confrontation between the Zimmerwald Left fraction and the centrists came to a head before the March 1917 Revolution in Russia.

551

Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War, pp. 372-3, Fainsod, International Socialism and The World War, p. 84, Riddell, Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 507; Masao Nishikawa, Socialists and International Actions for Peace, p. 48. 552 ISK replied that “this committee is not a competitor of the ISB – It has a provisional character and will be dissolved as soon as the ISB begins to struggle against the war in conformity with the decisions of Stuttgart, Copenhagen, and Basel” Riddell, Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 507.

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The 5-8 February 1916 preliminary meeting for the second Zimmerwald Conference secured three concrete victories for the Zimmerwald Left fraction.553 The most significant was that the meeting recognized in principle the right to representation for small minority opposition groups that defied party discipline in their home socialist movements as long as they conducted a systematic organized anti-war propaganda and could prove that to the ISK.554 This was a basic organizational principle of the Zimmerwald Left fraction and it reflected the acceptance of a left-radical position on the question of discipline. The second was the text adopted by the meeting that openly recognized what was practically an open invitation to breach party discipline.555 Finally, an ISK circular and its bulletin openly declared the plan for a Second Zimmerwald anti-war international socialist conference. This went against the centrist-pacifist goal to conceal the plans for the meeting until it took place and to negotiate its planning via secret correspondence between leaders. Instead, the ISK openly appealed to organized socialists over the heads of the official leaderships in a manner exactly and deliberately opposed to the ISB’s habit of operation. By this, it adopted the Zimmerwald Left fraction’s methods. Drawing the balance sheet of the preparatory conference in a private circular sent to the Zimmerwald Left groups, Zinoviev summarized confidentially that the coming conference in late April “would be our [the Zimmerwald Left’s] moment.” He urged his comrades to prepare delegations to be sent to the conference.556 This did not happen. In Kienthal the Zimmerwald Left remained a minority. The circular inviting the Zimmerwald affiliates to the Kienthal Conference also expressed a considerably more explicit left-radical perspective. According to Zinoviev, this final text was heavily influenced by the theses submitted to the ISK by the Spartakists, which more or less openly supported the Zimmerwald Left fraction’s general position. Despite the tactical victories, the

553

Participants were Grimm, Platten, Martov, Martynov, Riazanov, Axelrod, F. Kon, Zinoviev, Lenin, Radek, Lapinsky, Bertha Thalheimer, Hoffmann, Ledebour, Koritschoner, Guilbeaux, Serrati, Modigliani, Balabanoff, Rakovsky, Peluso, Münzenberg. 554 Zinoviev, “Account of the February Conference”, in Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War, pp. 382-3. 555 Zinoviev wrote, “Another important question concerned the next conference of Zimmerwaldists. It was decided to call it openly. This again means our victory over the ‘diplomats’ who did not want it.” Ibid. p. 382. 556 “Pismo tovarish Zinovieva” in Shklovsky, “Tsimmervald” Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya 9-44 (1925), pp. 97-98.

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Zimmerwald Left’s position was not uncontested. The meeting generally avoided organizational questions. The question of mandates and the question of who to invite was debated and, as had happened in Zimmerwald a few months earlier, the majority centrists tried as best they could to exclude the left-radical groups and fractions and to include the major centrist official leaders. In Zimmerwald, Borchardt’s mandate was challenged by the majority centrists, including the Spartakists, on the grounds that Borchardt’s Lichtstrahlen merely represented an educational group in Berlin. In February, once again the mandate of the LRIs was refused even though they were the only group formally pledged to the Zimmerwald and ISK, and they had now an official fraction in Germany, the ISD. Similarly, Grimm resisted the ISYCO’s mandate, even though, from a purely formalistic point of view, the ISYCO was a more conventionally legitimate organization than the ISK of Grimm itself.557 The battle over who to invite and who to accept as legitimate representatives of proletarian organizations could only be settled in the actual conference, which took place in April 1916 in Kienthal. The Kienthal conference revealed that neither side had the numbers to form a majority in the fragmented socialist peace movement.

1.

The Kienthal Conference, 24-30 April 1916

If the original Zimmerwald Conference took the belligerent governments of Europe by surprise, they would be more prepared for the second. Even if it was not within the powers of the governments to stop the Kienthal conference from convening, they did everything in their power to restrict the delegates wishing to participate in it. The German police arrested Ledebour at the Swiss border. Roland-Holst could not pass the border from Holland either through Germany or France. The British BSP delegates could not secure visas from their governments, nor could the Latvian exile party in Britain send a delegation. The Swedish party was split and, as Rakovsky

557

The ICSYO (International Center of the Socialist Youth Organizations) was formed as an international umbrella organization of the growing autonomous social democratic youth groups in Europe in the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International. Radomir Luza, History of the International Socialist Youth Movement (Leyden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1970), p. 19. See below for a more detailed discussion of the ICSYO’s role in the LRI movement.

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informed the conference, the Scandinavian delegation could not attend under the circumstances.558 Only seven of the sixteen designated delegates from Germany were able to cross the border to Switzerland. The English, Dutch, Austrian, Bulgarian, Rumanian, Swedish, Norwegian and the Bundist delegates from east Europe could not manage to participate.559 The absence of the Dutch LRIs was again a marked weakness on the part of the Zimmerwald Left. Even Henriette RolandHolst was absent, though she had delegated her mandate to the Bolsheviks. Similarly, the Latvian party delegated its mandate to Radek. Apart from a bigger contingent representing the Swiss leftradicals, the Zimmerwald Left was represented by roughly the same figures: the Polish and Russian LRI emigres living in Switzerland. Paul Frölich and Inessa Armand respectively tried to present the freshly emerging German and French LRI fractions voices. The small French group 560 whose statement Armand presented did not impress the conference and Frölich’s claim to represent a genuine German LRI fraction, the ISD, was hardly taken seriously.561 Although both the Zimmerwald Left and the centrist tendencies were smaller, and lacking adequate representation, what was markedly different in Kienthal compared to Zimmerwald was the weakness of the middle-of-the-road tendency crystallized around Grimm and its failure to strike a balance between the left-radicals and the centrist-pacifist majority. This failure can be deduced from a close investigation of the contradictory text produced by the Conference on the International Socialist Bureau, arguably the most consequential one.562 The resolution on the ISK consisted of three parts. The first section, veered to the left by listing a long series of condemnations of the ISB: The Chairman of the Executive Committee, Vandervelde, had participated in a war government, acknowledged the principle of national defense of capitalist governments in an imperialist war, renounced internationalist class solidarity,

558

Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung, Vol. 1, p. 273. Gankin & Fischer, The Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 407. 560 The name of this group was “Internationalist Workers Group” and it delegated Inessa Armand to represent it in the Conference. Its claim to representation was not recognized as Armand participated as a part of the Bolshevik delegation. For the resolution of the group, see Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung, Vol. 1, pp. 310-312. 561 As Knief, the main leader of the Bremen radicals was ill, he could not attend the conference and instead the group sent Paul Frölich as its delegate. Die Bremer Linksradikalen: Aus der Geschichte der Bremer Arbeiterbewegung bis 1920 (Bremer Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik, 1979), p. 18. 562 The other texts were a manifesto and a resolution. An analysis of these texts were presented in Nation, War on War, pp. 136-143; Fainsod, International Socialism and the World War, pp. 87-97. 559

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collaborated with the nationalist defensist party leaderships, “made every effort to defeat the revolutionary elements of the International,” and attempted to preserve its authority through paying a lip service to social patriots’ by arranging diplomatic negotiations for separate peace between belligerent countries. Eventually the text obliged the Zimmerwald Conference participants to “expose the real intentions of national socialism” if the ISB organized a plenum as Huysmans claimed it would.563 Despite these strong denunciations of the ISB, the resolution fell short of renouncing the ISB’s authority over the socialist movement. On the contrary, the last and third section of the text merely stated that “the conference recognizes the right of national sections linked with the International Socialist Committee to demand on their own part the calling of an International Socialist Bureau [plenary meeting].”564 While suggesting a joint action to the ISK affiliates in the eventuality of that such a convention would actually take place, it offered no binding position, let alone a refusal to acknowledge the ISB authority even in its current form. The main reason for the Kienthal Conference’s failure to develop a coherent position visa-vis the ISB was that the lines of demarcation between the groups participating in the Conference were too sharp for them to find a middle ground. The centrists and the Zimmerwald Leftists were in an irreconcilable mood. As Edmund Peluso noted, the delegates literally sat opposite each other according to their fractional loyalties, leftists on the left and centrists on the right. In the middle sat the sizable Italian delegation as if to put their bodies between the left and the center fractions to avert a physical fight.565 In the first day’s session, when Brizon speaking in the name of the French delegation told the conference at the end of an hour-long speech that he would vote against military budgets in the National Assembly only on the condition that all German troops are repelled, a ruckus erupted. Münzenberg recounted that Zimmerwald Leftists Frölich and Bronski were so agitated that they were ready to beat Brizon.566 In this tense atmosphere even a facade of unity could not be presented to the outer world. But a contradictory resolution arose after hours of long negotiations and a great deal of political drama.

563

“On the International Socialist Bureau” in Gankin & Fischer, The Bolsheviks and the World War. pp. 426-7. 564 Ibid. p.428. 565 Ibid. p. 409. 566 Ibid. p. 410.

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The inconclusiveness on the vitally important ISB question remained unresolved despite the consecutive attempts of the ISK to present a unified strategy. As a result, from May 1916 on, the International socialist movement was de facto split. On the other hand, the Zimmerwald Left made strides, especially among the neutral countries, but not enough that it could create a new International. While the Zimmerwald Left fraction could not impose itself over the ISK, nor was the ISK in a position to propose an alternative organizational path to the anti-war socialist movement. There remained two visible approaches to the question of the international: either the ISB initiative was to be recognized and the ISK affiliates would return to the fold hoping to conquer the Second International from within; or following the Zimmerwald Left line, they would prepare themselves for a split at an international level and move towards the founding of a third international.

C.

The Growth of the Zimmerwald Left Fraction in 1916

As Trotsky and Martov’s Nashe Slovo commented about the Conference, “the Zimmerwald Left at the second Conference was weaker as an organization than at the first, but the ideas of revolutionary internationalism were more strongly represented than at Zimmerwald.”567 However, inspired partially by the Conference and the confrontations between the left and the center, new groups began to take more formal and concrete shape in the latter part of 1916. The most important of these new groups appeared in Germany around the journal Arbeiterpolitik. Formed in Bremen around seasoned LRI militants like Paul Frölich and Johann Knief, the journal gave a concrete expression of the reforged international links with the Zimmerwald Left fraction. Arbeiterpolitik quickly became the central outlet for the Zimmerwald Left fraction in Germany and an anchor for the increasingly rebellious Bremen radicals. The journal included regular articles from Radek on the German internal party life. Articles by Bolsheviks (including Evgeniy Bosch, Bukharin, Kollontai, Zinoviev and Lenin) and the Dutch Tribunists appeared in the journal regularly. While

567

Gankin & Fischer, The Bolsheviks and the World War. p. 377.

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nominally legal (thanks mainly to the relatively laxer censure laws in liberal Bremen), Arbeiterpolitik expressed a pragmatic attitude combining illegality and legality. The Bremen Zimmerwald Leftists distributed the journal illegally in the army barracks at the fronts, produced propaganda materials, and linked up with youth radicals and Hamburg LRIs. Defining this period as an “idyllic period of underground work,” Frölich described the development of Arbeiterpolitik: “In June 1916, the first issue appeared. The success was above our expectations. In a short while we reached a run of 5000. We could repay our loans and improve the technical resources. Soon we also printed a number of youth newspapers (for Hannover, Berlin, Dresden), which were mainly written by Knief… The Arbeiterpolitik was distributed in almost all major German cities and areas with a radical tradition. Several hundred copies were regularly sent to the front. Sometimes we heard that subscribers there had difficulties. But the paper was legal, passed by the censor, and so the ill will of some superior officers could not prevail. The German military dictatorship was still a relatively harmless affair.”568

Even beyond Germany, the appearance of Arbeiterpolitik encouraged Austrian radical leftists to a more energetic organized activity.569 Zinoviev, who reviewed the journal in the Bolshevik theoretical organ Sbornik Sotsialdemokrata in December 1916, celebrated Arbeiterpolitik’s appearance as “the significance of the appearance of such Social Democratic journals is huge… this (constitutes) the only serious work towards the constitution of the Third International”.570 Arbeiterpolitik’s role as a local expression of a Zimmerwald-Left fraction constituted a general pattern replicated in other countries. Local LRIs in different countries, supported by articles, financial and technical aid from Dutch and Russian, Latvian, Polish LRIs from eastern Europe, organized both to articulate the Zimmerwald Left perspective in their own countries and establish local organizational skeletons around the publications. But what made the Arbeiterpolitik group particularly important was that it gave an independent outlet to the Zimmerwald Left fraction in Germany, which the left-radicals saw as central strategical Gordian Knot of the world revolution. However, the

568

Frölich, In the Radical Camp, pp. 115-6. According to Hans Hautmann, Radek established the contact between the Bremen Leftists via Kneif and the Austrian radicals via Koritzschoner. At the end of 1916 there were 220 subscribers of Arbeiterpolitik in Austria. Hans Hautmann, “Die Revolutionäre: Der Formierungsprozess der linksradikalen Österreich im Epochenjahr 1917, Teil 4),” Alfred Klahr Gesselschaft Mitteilungen 14, no. 4 (December 2007), 2 and 4. Hautmann also noted that Pannekoek’s comrade and collaborator, Josef Strasser, who together wrote an important pamphlet on the national question in 1912 (“Klassenkampf und Nation”), also played an important in the formation of the first Austrian LRI nucleus in 1914. Ibid. p.1. 570 G.Z., “Nelegalniye Gazeti Germanskoy Levoy Oppozitsii” Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, No.2 (December 1916), p. 78. 569

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growth of the Zimmerwald Left fraction happened mostly in the political and geographic peripheries of the socialist movement in 1916. By mid-1916, the Zimmerwald Left's main organizational victory was the fraternal organizational ties it established with the Socialist Youth International and with the budding LRI groups mainly in the neutral countries. These were significant signs that the ice was breaking up for the LRIs, but "spring" was not around the corner yet.

1.

The Youth International and the New Generation of Militants

The first major organization to move towards the Zimmerwald Left's ranks during the war was itself an international organization: the International Center of the Socialist Youth Organizations (ICSYO). Initially a marginal section of the Second International and nominally under the control of the ISB, the ICSYO broke off from the ISB’s tutelage in the first months of the war. Throughout the war the ISCSYO effectively remained the only official international socialist organization with a direct lineage to the Second International. The ICSYO was a unique organization that managed to preserve its formal existence while also carrying out a consistent anti-war internationalist activity. In this dual capacity, the left-radical socialist youth organizations affiliated with the ICSYO contributed enormously to the LRI movement’s organizational and political vitality. While officially the ISCYO remained autonomous, it actively collaborated with the Zimmerwald Left.571 The secretary of the ISCYO, Willi Münzenberg, and other militants of the ISCYO's central bureau in Switzerland joined the Zimmerwald Left and participated in its meetings, distributed its propaganda, and coordinated their activities with the Zimmerwald Left.572 Eventually, the ICSYO joined the Communist International in its entirety in 1919, soon after the latter’s

571

See for example: "When Lenin’s Zimmerwald Left began meeting weekly in Zurich in autumn 1915, Münzenberg accompanied Platten out of curiosity and soon became a regular at the fashionable cafés— the Stüssihof, the Schwarzer Adler, and the Weisser Schwänli—where the group held their political discussions." Sean McMeekin, The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 37. 572 Babette Gross, Willi Münzenberg: A Political Biography (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1974), p. 53.

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foundation. In a way, the radical socialist youth and the ICSYO represented a formal continuity between the Second (at least the left-wing tendencies inside the it) and the Third Internationals.573 During the war years, the ICSYO generously opened the pages of its international central organ, die Jugend Internationale to the contributions of the LRI militants.574 Several articles by prominent members of the Zimmerwald Left and other LRIs found space to express their views in the journal.575 This was the first properly international central organ that had a wide enough distribution network to disseminate the LRI perspective at a truly international scale.576

573

According to Linden, the Social Democrat versus Communist split in the European labor movement between 1917-1923 represented a generational split. While cautious, Linden claims that there was a general social impatience in the post-war and post-Russian revolutionary period among the youth, and sectors of workers who were “interested in quick results”. Linden also cites Laurant who claimed, “the awakening of the unorganized working masses provided Russian Bolshevism with the favourable soil indispensable to it in Central and Western Europe.” Marcel van der Linden, Transnational Labour History: Explorations, (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 88-9. Haupt also emphasized the significance of generational shift in the “leading cadres.” Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism, pp. 81-100. 574 According to Münzenberg, "it is undisputed that the ten numbers of the "Jugend Internationale" are among the most important socialist documents from the war and are one of the most brilliant testimonies to the international revolutionary spirit of socialist youth." The first four issues of the journal were translated into Danish and Swedish, later all issues were translated into Russian. Several articles from the journal were translated into French and published in the Swiss youth socialist organization’s French journal Voix de Jeunes. In total, about 280-300 thousand copies of the journal were distributed internationally. On 1 March 1918, the Swiss government banned the journal after which it ceased publication. Willi Münzenberg, Die Sozialistische Jugendinternationale (Berlin: Verl. Junge Garde, 1919), p. 88. 575 The first issue of the journal that appeared right after the outbreak of the war, included articles by A. Kollontai, Radek and Otto Ruhle. 576 The truly global reach of the ICSYO propaganda activity and the tremendous efforts of the young socialists carrying out this work (most of whom were in their early 20s during the war) can hardly be exaggerated). Here Babette Gross, partner of Willi Münzenberg, the Secretary of the International Bureau of the ICSYO, briefly summarizes these efforts in her biography of Münzenberg: "The Socialist youth groups in the belligerent countries who were opposed to their party leaderships received a flood of illegal material— manifestoes, pamphlets, journals, above all Youth International, the first number of which appeared in September 1915. Every conceivable means was used to smuggle prohibited material into Germany, France or Italy. It was hidden in jam jars, cigar boxes and food parcels. A lively courier service was organized. The Swiss Young Socialists Herzog and Arnold went to Berlin where they established contact with the Spartacist League. A sixteen-year-old Rumanian student, Valeriu Marcu, distributed publications of the International Youth Secretariat in France and his own country. Even a Vatican courier allowed himself to be misused as postman. Some of these people did not travel exclusively in Münzenberg’s service; other oppositional Socialists, Lenin among them, also frequently sent illegal mail with them... It is surprising that travel on such a scale was possible during the war; it was certainly not without danger. Couriers were repeatedly arrested and given prison sentences. In November 1916 the young Socialist Toscani was sentenced to five years imprisonment in Rome for distributing the Youth International. In a trial which took place at the same time in Leipzig couriers were given prison sentences of between three and six months for the same offense." Gross, Willi Münzenberg, pp. 47-48.

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Jugend-Internationale represented more than a propagandistic outlet for the Zimmerwald Leftists. The style and content of Jugend-Internationale differed radically from the Second International’s central organ, the ISB’s International Bulletin. It was not the habit of the ISB to call affiliated organizations to mass actions. The ISB’s bulletin mainly listed on its pages the election results, the socialist votes gained in different countries, and the legislation passed in legislative assemblies thanks to the efforts of the socialist parliamentarians as primary political accomplishments. ISB’s central organ was a bulletin of the leaders, prepared and owned by the ISB secretariat, for the leaders of the Second International, who met regularly in its plena. The ISB bulletin was the highest expression of what the Second International understood by internationalism: an exclusive solidarity formed at the top leadership level with strict control over their own national domains. At its core, the ISB’s International Bulletin was a newsletter for parliamentarians, party chiefs and union bureaucrats presenting to the world an image of a bland but a stable and respectable organization. In stark contrast to the ISB’s bulletin, Jugend-Internationale was agitational, polemical, and theoretical, full of sketches, pictures, and also deep analytical essays. It was distributed in the thousands and read by mostly the party ranks and young socialists. It contained reports sent by the affiliates on the illegal propaganda works on mass actions (demonstrations and strikes), arrests and state oppression, all evidence of a mass militant activity. It also contained criticisms of the national party leaders, unions, and articles on theoretical questions, primarily on the question of imperialism. Additionally, the ICSYO itself organized international anti-war demonstrations in Switzerland and other countries.577 Another of the functions of the ICSYO was the organization of solidarity campaigns. In order to aid the arrested anti-war activists (who were many, especially in Italy) the ISCYO found a "Liebknecht Fund".578 At a more local level, youth organizations affiliated with the ICSYO more openly and defiantly defended the Zimmerwald Left and disseminated its propaganda in several warring and neutral countries, the most notable being Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries.

577

Jacob Herzog, 20 Jahre Arbeiterjugendbewegung der Schweiz (Zurich: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1919). p. 22. 578 McMeekin, The Red Millionaire, p. 32.

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The left-radical youth socialist group in Germany played an especially major role. The socialist youth organizations in Germany were under the strict control of the SPD leadership, which made the struggle against the SPD a difficult and initially a localized task. The first oppositional reading and discussion groups eventually turned into militant local groups, distributing illegal anti-war propaganda materials. These groups finally evolved to form a countrywide, underground organization in 1916. In late April 1916 (around Easter), with the initiative of the Jena antiwar youth group, an illegal pan-German conference of radical socialist youth groups was convened under the cover of a “tracking convention.” The youth groups also invited Karl Liebknecht and Otto Rühle, two radical Social Democratic deputies who had voted against the war in the Reichstag. The conference adopted a resolution presented by Liebknecht and began preparations for the organization of general anti-war demonstrations throughout Germany on May Day. On 1 May 1916, demonstrations occurred throughout German towns during the day; at night, they turned into street battles between the radical socialist youth and the police. Karl Liebknecht was arrested in Berlin in one of these street demonstrations. The 1916 May Day demonstrations became a turning point in the radicalization of the German working class youth against the war. The public display of Burgfrieden was shattered even for a day and more actions and strikes followed in the coming months. The events in which the German left-radical socialist youth played a leading role clearly emboldened the anti-war radical left.579 The Russian situation was not too different from that in Germany. While in the Russian Empire no independent socialist youth organization formally existed, younger Bolshevik cadres were clearly the majority in the Russian underground. The imprisonments and exiles pushed a younger generation of radical Bolsheviks to fill the void left by the repressions of older party notables and cadres. Alexander Shliapnikov, who was a worker turned professional revolutionary in charge of the illegal smuggling network of the Bolshevik materials and militants in and out of

579

Ottokar Luban, “Die Jenaer Konferenz der linkssozialistischen Arbeiterjugend mit Karl Liebknecht am 23. /24. April 1916” in Texte&Argumente (Thuringen: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2006), p. 10. The arrest of the leaders that organized the Jena Youth Conference in1916 did not hinder the activities of the LRI youth in Germany. On the contrary, the leadership of the organization passed to Karl Plattner from Hamburg and Karl Becker from Hanover, both linked with the Bremen Left around Knief and the Arbeiterpolitik journal. Ibid.

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the Russian empire, notes that after the initial repression, the bulk of the illegal militant work was carried out mostly by the young party militants: “The red banner of the workers’ movement passed out of the weakening hands of the old men to a younger and more energetic generation of workers.” Of the Petersburg committee in 1917, only one member was over forty, five were in their thirties, and nine were in their twenties.”580

However, the most important LRI organization that sprung from the youth socialist movements in Europe was in Italy. As the secretary of the ISCYO, Münzenberg wrote: “among all the socialist youth organizations in the warring countries the socialist youth groups in Italy carried out the most self-sacrificially internationalist and rev. [revolutionary] propaganda against the war.”581 In contrast to the German left-radical socialist youth movement, the Italian socialist youth organization, FGIS (Federazione italiana giovanile socialista), consistently remained a bastion of the Socialist Party’s left-radical wing, both before and during the war.582 The organization owed its autonomy and strength thanks to its enormous size.583 But it had also created an effective network of underground militants, and engaged in systematic propaganda work around the organization’s weekly, L’Avanguardia. Among its effective and influential leadership, perhaps the most notable was a young engineer from Naples, Amadeo Bordiga, who later became the founder of the Italian Communist Party.584 From the beginning of the war, the FGIS and the L’Avanguardia carried out active anti-war propaganda. Their rejection of national defense in the imperialist war and call for a “general strike with open insurrectionary character” was almost identical to the Zimmerwald

580

Shlyapnikov quoted in Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), p. 208. 581 Münzenberg, Die Sozialistische Jugendinternationale, p. 63. 582 Thomas Ekman Jørgensen, “The Purest Flame of the Revolution: Working Class Youth and Left Wing Radicalism in Germany and Italy during the Great War,” Labor History 50 (2009), p. 28. 583 According to Jørgensen, the FGIS had 10,000 members, which constituted one fourth of the PSI membership. This shows the great numerical weight of the Italian youth socialist organization in the Italian movement. Ibid. p. 20. 584 Jorgensen wrote, “The Italian youth produced its own thinkers rather than rely on older ones, notably Amadeo Bordiga who would later be one of the founding fathers of Italian communism.” Ibid. p.34 Bordiga’s centrality as a militant in the formation of the war-time Italian LRI movement and later on, the Communist Party, has largely been forgotten. According to his biographer, John E. Chiaradia, whose excellent dissertation reveals that this mostly deliberate effort of forgetting was the work of Bordiga’s rivals in the Italian movement. See: John E Chiaradia, “The Spectral Figure of Amadeo Bordiga: A Case Study in the Decline of Marxism in the West, 1912-1926” (New York: Unpublished Dissertation, New York University, 1973).

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Left’s position, but the FGIS had taken this position even as early as 1914 August, before the formation of the former.585 Once Italy entered the war, the FGIS openly revolted against the pacifist position of the official party leadership (as it was formulated in the slogan “neither support nor challenge the war effort”) and Mussolini’s aggressive nationalism. Instead, the FGIS militants organized a nationwide militant clandestine activity and even distributed its anti-militarist, anti-war propaganda into the military barracks. Some of the socialist youth organizations in the neutral countries also joined the Zimmerwald Left. The Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch youth socialist organizations played major roles in the establishment and the first constitutive year of the Communist International. But it was the Swedish socialist youth that was the strongest in terms of its size and influence. According to Münzenberg, “the Swedish organization most brilliantly developed during the war time. On 1 January 1915, it had 8,860 members; in summer 1918, it had over 20,000. Its organ Stormlockan in 1916 had a circulation of 1,292,7000.”586 The Swedish socialist youth groups were especially keen on keeping Sweden out of the war, if necessary, by mass actions organized independently of the party leadership. They distrusted the party leadership, which was split between pro-France or proGermany fractions. The socialist youth took the initiative to organize an anti-war socialist conference in March 1916 with the participation of 256 delegates representing more than 40,000 organized workers.587 This congress decided to make secret preparations for unlimited strike action throughout the country if the government intervened against Russia in Finland. This conference also organized the publication of a new and independent left-wing journal, Politiken, which rapidly reached a circulation of 30,000 with subscriptions reaching 27,000.588 After this conference the leader of the Swedish socialist youth and a parliamentarian, Zeth Höglund, together with Dr Erik Heden, another socialist deputy and editor in the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s central organ Social Demokraten, were arrested on the charge of treason.589 In an editorial he wrote for the Jugend-Internationale, Radek linked the arrests of Liebknecht and Höglund, and argued that these

585

E. Craver, “The Third Generation: The Young Socialists in Italy, 1907-1915,” Canadian Journal of History, 31 (1996). p. 225. 586 Münzenberg, Die Sozialistische Jugendinternationale, p. 70. 587 “Report on Sweden” in Die Jugend Internationale No.4 (June 1916), p.11. 588 Ibid. pp. 11-12. 589 “Sweden Bericht” ISK Nachrichten No.4 (June 1916), pp. 19-20.

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expressed a direct attack on the young socialists crystallizing the new international as opposed to the old. For Radek, Liebknecht and Höglund, represented a new method of leadership, leadership in action rather than the old parliamentary and pacifist (or openly nationalist) lines of the Second International.590 In response to the arrests of Höglund and other militants, the ICSYO organized a day of action in several countries on 21 May 1916. Mass actions in Denmark, Sweden and Norway took place. Thousands of people also rallied in Switzerland.591 While the left-radical youth organizations played a major role in the expansion of the Zimmerwald Left’s organizational and propagandistic efforts, it must be noted that wartime youth radicalism was not limited to the LRIs. For instance, even in Britain the youth groups, which were not formally tied to any international organization, counted amongst the most militantly active vanguard of the anti-war movement in the country. In Britain, the workers movement itself did not produce a left-radical anti-war internationalist fraction that officially joined the Zimmerwald Left until 1917. However, a militant anti-war youth movement sprung up inside the ILP in the form of a "war resisters" movement. As one of the organizers of the movement who later went on to form the pacifist "war resisters' international" in 1920s, Fenner Brockway wrote: "The Youth Movement is generally considered to date from after the war. Its beginnings are interpreted as a revolt by the younger generation against the civilisation bequeathed to them by their war-making elders. In Britain that revolt began during the war. Until its later stages, the movement of resistance to Conscription was almost entirely organised by young men under twenty-five years of age. Indeed, during 1914 and the earlier part of 1915, the older leaders even in the ILP scouted the idea that Conscription would come. It was in November, 1914, that my wife... made the proposal that those who intended to refuse military service should band themselves together, and we issued an invitation to prospective resisters to join a "No-Consciption Fellowship".592

Why did the socialist youth receive the LRI stance enthusiastically, while the Zimmerwald Left remained relatively isolated within the bulk of the socialist movement? The most straightforward answer may be found in a sociological explanation based on the generational conflict inside the Second International. Historians of the ICSYO593 point to the existence of a brewing inter-

590

Radek, “Höglund und Liebknecht”, Jugend-Internationale no.4 (June 1916), p. 2. Jugend-Internationale no.5 (September 1916), p. 7. 592 Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left: Thirty Years of Platform, Press, Prison and Parliament (London: George Allen & Unwin, LTD, 1942), p. 66. 593 The most comprehensive English language history of the wartime ICSYO and the succeeding Young Communist International has been written by Richard Cornell, Revolutionary Vanguard The Early Years 591

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generational struggle within the Second International, since at least the turn of the century. Accordingly, the birth of a cultural group bonded around a generational category as “youth” signified the growing dissolution of established systems of patronage in the feudal or pre-capitalistic artisanal production, pushing the working class youth into proletarianization and a condition of highly volatile future. The career opportunities of the proletarian youth were less certain compared to those of older generations and their social standing was markedly lower. For the leaders of the Second International who aspired to present the image of bourgeois respectability and who insisted on the fitness of the workers (or at least their representatives) to sit in the national administrative and legislative assemblies together with the bourgeois members of civil society, the emergence of a generation of workers teetering on the brinks of unemployment or worse yet, the rise of “youthful radicalism” was troubling.594 Memoirs of socialist youths testify to the dismissive or outright hostile, and even repressive, attitudes of the leading socialists in official posts towards the socialist youth. Georgy Chicherin595 recounts how Karl Liebknecht once told him that when he inquired about the abuses in the German army, Liegen, (who was a leader of the German trade union movement affiliated with the SPD) responded by saying “if a young man ever gets a slap, then that is not so bad”.596 Indeed, the existence of an independent socialist youth movement that openly defended anti-militarism was almost an embarrassment for the SPD leadership. However, a sociological analysis based on generational conflict cannot alone explain the radical stance that the ISCYO took during the war.597 The most important cause for the political

of the Communist Youth International 1914-1924 (University of Toronto Press, 1982), Also see: Victor Privalov, The Young Communist International and Its Origins (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971) and Luza, History of the International Socialist Youth Movement. 594 Basically, the increasing number of young unmarried men (who were under normal circumstances tended to be absorbed by armies or immigration) was generally seen as an alarming social problem in the previous epochs and in the modern epoch this took the form of “youth delinquency”. 595 Chicherin was initially a Menshevik member of the RSDRP after the Bolshevik-Menshevik split. During the war he took an internationalist position and gradually moved left. After the Russian Revolution, he joined the Bolshevik Party and became the first Commissar of Foreign Affairs in the Sovnarkom. Before the revolution and in the long period of his European exile, Chicherin, among other things was closely involved with the socialist youth movement. 596 Georgy Chicherin, Skizzen aus der Geschichte der Jugend-Internationale, Internationale Jugend-Bibliothek (Berlin: Verlag der Jugend-Internationale, 1919), p. 40. 597 In fact it must be highlighted here that not all socialist youth organizations joined the LRI movement. In Austria and Germany the official socialist youth organizations were under the strict control of the Social Democratic parties and during the war these leaders of the socialist youth remained within the bounds

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radicalization of the socialist youth (if this was in fact a genuine phenomenon) was the question of militarism. The socialist youth organizations were a direct product of the struggle against militarism in early twentieth century socialist movement. The first militant socialist youth organization that produced a model for the rest of the socialist youths was the Belgian Junge Garde that was found as early as 1890s. This organization was founded precisely to defend young working-class recruits against the abuses in the military barracks. Further, it aimed to avert the use of the army against the working-class demonstrations by the state. Karl Liebknecht proposed the implementation of this Belgian model to Germany which caused a great embarrassment to the party leadership. Part of the reason for the resistance of the leadership to the anti-militarist youth was the challenge that it posed to the old Social Democratic goal for the establishment of citizen armies. Leaders like Bebel were so out of touch with the mood of youth socialists that he saw the solution in modernizing the military training. Probably awed by the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, he advocated for the Japanese military training system in a Reichstag speech, praising it by saying that in Japan’s fencing schools “little tykes go at each other with such a fiery zeal … that any European must recognize this gymnastic training for the future defenders of the realm.”598 This hardly appealed to the youth socialists who despised military discipline and systematically tried to undermine it. Hence, the ground was already laid for the conflict between the anti-militarist socialist youth and the established party leaderships whose criticism of militarism hardly accounted for the question of imperialism, but merely restricted itself to a criticism of the army if it remained under the aristocratic tutelage and espoused an ideological heritage of national wars of the nineteenth century. One reason why the LRIs and the Zimmerwald Left appealed to the anti-militarist socialist youth was because they explicitly linked the questions of imperialism, militarism, and youth in their theoretical writings. Once again, Pannekoek had already written on this question before the war. In his articles, Pannekoek underlined the close relation between the emergence of youth as a cultural category and the militaristic pressure to mold and discipline the youth in the age of violent imperialist competition. In his view, as the proletarian youth reacted to this outside militaristic

of the official party doctrine. So equating youth with radicalism would be extremely reductionist and simply false. 598 Bebel quoted in Schorske, German Social Democracy, p. 76.

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pressure, they were also pressured to stop protesting by party leaders of the socialist movement. In an article written soon after the founding of the ICSYO in 1907, Pannekoek attacked the German trade union leader Vliegen who opposed the political organization of the proletarian youth: "Vliegen says the "Youth should be preserved for youth" it seemed as if the evil youth organization wanted to take away a beauty, freedom, carefreeness from the youth. In reality, it is the youth, which you will in any case survive, who sharpen harsh capitalist slaves and exploitation. On the contrary, the fight against this slavery, which is also the activity of the youth organization, is the only thing that brings light and joy into the darkness"599

Pannekoek attributed the association of youth with physical activity to a militaristic perception that viewed the proletariat as fresh soldiers of national armies. As the 19th century liberal zeitgeist of a humanity united in peaceful mercantile competition under capitalism gave way to a more sinister and violent imperialist competition, young males became a commodity, cannon fodder of militaristic competition. Hence the bourgeois praise of "youthful values" emphasizing physical agility and strength.600 For Pannekoek, the socialist youth organizations’ systematic propaganda work against militarism and imperialism was vitally important. Pannekoek was not the only one among the LRIs who voiced such concerns. Like Karl Liebknecht, Henriette Roland-Holst, who joined the Zimmerwald Left in 1916, was an ardent defender of the socialist youth’s cause. Liebknecht and Roland-Holst played an active role in the establishment of the ICSYO in the 1907 Stuttgart Congress of the Second International. Moreover, coincidentally (or not) many LRIs were educators, teachers, and pedagogues. Otto Rühle, the German SPD deputy who was the first to join Liebknecht in voting against the war credits in the Reichstag in 1915, studied and wrote systematically on the pedagogy of proletarian children. Johann Knief, a teacher and a leader of the Bremen LRI grouping and a founder of Arbeiterpolitik, authored many articles on the youth question and supported the radical socialist anti-war local journals and wrote for them.601 Many radical left intellectuals saw in the younger generation of socialists a natural ally in the intra-party struggle against the established trade-union and parliamentary party leaderships.

599

Anton Pannekoek, “Jugendorganisation” Zeitungskorrespondenz, No. 23 (4 July 1908). Anton Pannekoek, “Der Kampf der Jugend” Zeitungskorrespondenz, No. 281 (28 June 1913). 601 Frölich notes in his autobiography that Knief contributed to Bremen, Dresden and Hannover socialist youth papers. Frölich, In the Radical Camp, p. 115. Johann Knief, “die Sozialistische-Jugend,” Arbeiterpolitik No. 2 (1 June 1916), pp. 13-14. 600

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An avant-garde artist and publisher of the left-wing journal Die Aktion in Germany,602 Franz Pfemfert consistently written on the theme of and promoted for a generational struggle. Pfemfert identified the German political parties and the whole cultural and national life with the older generation and called for a "kulturkampf between the youth and the old."603 Although Pfemfert’s conception of generational struggle almost replacing the class struggle did not fit with the LRI theoretical framework, militants of the Zimmerwald Left shared a qualified degree of enthusiasm towards the socialist youth, their organizational autonomy, and potential in the struggle against the right and the centrist wings in the party. Zinoviev did not flatter the youth or formulate a bland duality between its chaotic energy as opposed to stuffy orderliness of the old. He approached the new socialist generation’s organizational break with the older generation’s slide into opportunism in the pre-war German social democracy as an expression of not a sociological but a political revolt against opportunism. Instead, Zinoviev argued that leaders like Scheidemann, representing bureaucracy attempted to portray the demands coming from the rank-and-file for more mass involvement in the political direction of the party as a generational conflict, as an expression of “unreliable” chaotic youthful energy pushing the party into adventurism.604 In contrast to the official Social Democratic view, the LRIs did not equate the youth with physical energy, a duality which revealed an underlying duality between healthy youth and elders, who represented intellectual leadership and maturity. The LRIs rejected this duality as an ideological expression of capitalist division of labor. Instead, the Zimmerwald Leftists urged their young comrades to contribute to the field of theory. An important example of this was the study guide (including a massive reading list) prepared by Bronski-Warszawski, created at the request of the Swiss Socialist Youth Organization. Packed with questions and recommended literature, Bronski’s brochure, The Socialist Propagandist: An Introduction to the Socialist Literature did not sugar coat the intellectual questions facing the movement, nor did he present a ready-made and formulaic reading list. It avoided sectarian indoctrination by inviting the youth socialists to engage with

602

Pfemfert later joined the KPD and, after the split in the notorious Heidelberg Congress in 1920, joined the left-communist KAPD. Like many other artists and intellectuals drawn to left-communist in the early 1920s, he eventually drifted away from active, organized political life. On the Heidelberg Split, see the last chapter in this dissertation. 603 Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 45. 604 Zinoviev, “Sotsialniye Korni Opportunizma,” Voyna i Krizis Sotsializma, Vol. 8, p. 483.

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opponents of the Zimmerwald Left like Kautsky or Bernstein or anarchists like Kropotkin. In short, the pedagogical approach of the Zimmerwald Left, as expressed in Bronski’s work, was inviting the young socialists into an open, independent engagement with history and politics, encouraging them to form their own perspectives.605 Several memoirs of young socialist militants recount how they were treated as equals and taken seriously by the LRI militants. Valeria Marcu, who was a Romanian socialist who roamed around socialist youth circles during the war and who eventually became an anti-communist, remembered years later, how despite his criticisms of the Bolsheviks, Lenin treated young socialists as their equal unlike many other senior party leaders. After his first conversation with Lenin in Switzerland in an émigré cafe, he was invited to Krupskaya’s and Lenin's small apartment, where they spoke for many hours. Marcu wrote: "To be treated as an equal, despite all the sharp criticism, was a new experience for me. The other Russians, with all their patience and friendliness, had always been distant. They contented themselves with expounding their own ideas. They never said: go home, open your mind, try to understand things for yourself, learn. With Lenin I had the impression that I was an important ally, and that I had to study hard to pass the real test of revolution. I did not know then that Lenin spoke seriously to everyone who was interested in serious questions."606

In brief, the ICSYO and the affiliated youth organizations played a vital, albeit often indirect role in the consolidation of the Zimmerwald Left as an international fraction throughout 1916, its precarious first year. In addition to the youth socialist groups, several neutral country socialist groups moved closer to the Zimmerwald Left fraction, which also contributed to the growth and strengthening of the LRI movement.

605

See: M. Bronski, Der Sozialistsische Propagandist: Zur Einfügrung in die Sozialistische Literature (Zurich: Sozialdemokratische Jugendorganisation der Schweiz, 1916). 606 Valeriu Marcu, “Lenin in Zurich: A Memoir” in Foreign Affairs, No. 21, April 1943. Retrieved from: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1943-04-01/lenin-zurich. Similar reminiscences of Lenin and other LRIs, expressing a surprise in their genuine approach to youth appear in other socialist youth militants’ memoirs from the war period. For instance, another young socialist: "The way in which he debated with us resembled the Socratic discussion. And like some of Socrates’ questions Lenin’s questions were not without suggestive formulation and effect. With his constant questions he pushed us into a corner. Our own critical faculties only reappeared when we no longer felt his presence... Our enthusiasm for Lenin resulted from the fact that he took us young people seriously even if he did not agree with us. At last we had met a grown-up, clever man who argued seriously with us." Bohli quoted in Gross, Willi Munzenberg, pp. 50-51.

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2.

LRI Growth in the Neutral Countries and the Role of the Emigres Militants

Following the Zimmerwald Conference, the LRI movement gradually expanded and strengthened its ties with various groups and fractions, especially in the neutral countries: Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and the US.607 The so-called Kegelsklub in Switzerland, the Sverges socialdemokratiska vänsterparti (SSV, The Swedish Social Democratic Left Party), and finally the Socialist Propaganda League (SPL) in the US emerged as new autonomous fractions (or in the case of the SSV, an independent party) that followed the Zimmerwald Left line very closely and collaborated with it in 1916. Inside the Swiss socialist movement, Kegelsklub608 acted as a center of coordination, clarification, and solidarity. Its participants included emigres and war deserters from Germany, Russia, Italy, the Baltics, and Poland. But the bulk of its militants were left-wing militants from the Swiss party and especially its youth movement.609 It was initially formed as an informal discussion club by well-known figures, but activists who were marginal to the positions of power inside the party and union apparatuses in the Swiss socialist movement. Semi-anarchist Fritz Brupbacher, whose unorthodox work on Bakunin and Marx challenged the socialist orthodoxy, and whose work was well received among the young radicals, was a regular participant. Others included Fritz Platten or Willi Münzenberg, both closely associated with the Zimmerwald Left. About thirty to forty people regularly participated in the meetings of the Kegelsklub. The debates were in German with written proceeding taken.610 The group did not have any formal membership status, but new participants

607

The LRIs did not fail to notice the more robust growth of their current in the neutral countries. A report on the situation in Netherlands appeared in Arbeiterpolitik commented that while the crises, divisions and developments of left-wings in the workers movement took similar forms in all countries, in the neutral countries which were not directly engaged in the war, the development was more clear and rapid. “Aus Holland” Arbeiterpolitik No.8 (12 August 1916), p.61. 608 The name “Kegelsklub” meant “bowling club” was a derogatory term used by the right-wing socialist opponents to identify the group, to ridicule its semi-secretive working and its strong emphasis to theoretical discussions. Willi Gautschi, Lenin als Emigrant (Zurich: Benziger Verlag, 1973), p. 194. 609 Participants included “Germans, Münzenberg, Fritz Sauter, Max Barthel and J. Schweide, the Swiss, Alfred Bucher, Edi Meier, Paul Rüegg, Anny Morf and Willy Trostel, the Russians Kharitonov and Tobias Axelrod, the Pole Bronski and the Italian Guiglio Mimiola. Nobs and Platten are said to have appeared infrequently.” Ibid. p. 193. Also see, Hans Ulrich Jost, Linksradikalismus in der deutschen Schweiz 1914-1918 (Bern: Stämpfli, 1973), pp. 67-70. 610 Gautschi, Lenin als Emigrant, p. 194.

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only joined by invitation and a level of discretion was expected in return. In a sense, it a was fractional organization within the Swiss socialist movement bringing together militants from inside and outside the official Swiss organizations with the deliberate aim to collectively provide the workers movement with a left-radical orientation.611 As the war progressed, deserters and exiled militants like Lenin and Radek converged in the Kegelsklub meeting. Though informal and lacking a leader or star figures, the Kegelsklub was serious about discussing politics. After the Zimmerwald Conference, the “club” constituted the basis for the Zimmerwald Left’s intervention into the Swiss socialist politics.612 Eventually, according to Münzenberg, it became “the main nucleus of revolutionary agitation and propaganda in Switzerland. All political and tactical questions were discussed there, and resolutions and theses were worked out which later on were submitted … to party meetings and congresses.”613 As in the Swiss case, the American Zimmerwald Left nucleus emerged on the margins of the official American socialism among small groups who were serious about political discussion and open to engage with unorthodox criticism. Most importantly, if there was an English-speaking left-radicalism in the US during the war, it owed its existence to the International Socialist Review (ISR)614 a journal dedicated to Marxist debate. The ISR was widely circulated for a monthly theoretical journal, reaching sales of about fifty thousand by mid-1912.615 The ISR systematically informed the English-reading American socialists on the divisions developing in Europe and, as the

611

Senn, The Russian Revolution in Switzerland, p. 152. The group acted in unison and organized interventions both at local, national and international levels. Its positions must have been well known and certainly received favorably, because at the 1915 November Aarau Congress of the SPS, the left-wing managed to win over a majority for its anti-war resolutions. A Russian Bolshevik émigré, Kharitonov, attended the congress as an SPS delegate. The Zimmerwald Leftist resolution presented by Graber and Kharitonov won 258 against a minority of 141. Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 534. 612 According to the Swiss police, the Zimmerwald Left in Zurich had no more than 20 members. Bericht des Ersten Staatsanwaltes A. Brunner an den Regierungsrat des Kantons über die Strafuntersuchung wegen des Aufruhrs in Zürich im November 1917 (Zürich: Bucdruckerei zur Alten Universitat, 1919), p. 25. Gautschi referring to memoirs of the participants wrote that the club had about 30 to 40 members. Gautschi, Lenin als Emigrant, p. 194. 613 Willi Munzenberg, S Libknehtom i Leninym: Pyatnadtsat’ let v proletarskom yunosheskom dvizhenii (Moskva: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1930), pp. 134-5. 614 Ruff’s work makes a compelling case for the centrality of the ISR in the American Socialist movement in early 20th Century. Allen Ruff, “We Called Each Other Comrade”: Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers, (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), p. 160. 615 Ibid. p. 172.

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war approached, the ISR moved closer to the left-wing and showed its colors by regularly publishing Dutch Tribunists and especially Pannekoek and eventually the Bolsheviks.616 Once the war started, the American LRI groups in Boston and New York began to coalesce organizationally on the left of the Socialist Party and fused in the left-radical Socialist Propaganda League of America (SPL) in 1915 and 1916. Initially founded by the Boston Branch of the Socialist Party, the main instigator of the SPL was the Latvian speaking section, which was especially strong in the Boston branch. Like the Latvian Branch, other Foreign Language Federations of the Socialist Party founded by groups with strong ties to the European anti-war currents played a pioneering organizational role in the American LRI movement.617 English-speaking American left-radicals, especially Louis Fraina from the New Review, joined the SPL. The last to take a discernible organizational form among the neutral country LRI groups was the Swedish SSV. Formed in May 1917 after the expulsion of the left-wing from the party, it was joined by the Social Democratic Youth Union.618 Initially, the activities of the LRI nuclei in the neutral country parties set themselves a limited goal: forcing the socialist parties to actively oppose the entry of their own countries into the war and, if that proved impossible, at least force the party leadership in legislative

616

Ibid. p. 182. Lenin and Zinoviev’s names were probably first mentioned in the ISR in the English language socialist publications and the first article to discuss the Bolsheviks was an article in the ISR on their pamphlet “Socialism and War”, which was distributed first in the Zimmerwald Conference. This ISR article is also important because it shows that the idea that for a principled defense of internationalism, LRIs had to split from pacifist and nationalist Socialist and Social Democratic organizations was not considered as a “Russian idea”. Instead, the Bolshevik party was defined here as simply another party, which also split (like many others) from “opportunist” and “chauvinistic” currents in their own country: “The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party long ago got rid of its opportunists. These opportunists have now turned Chauvinists. This fact strengthens our conviction that the International must cut loose from these elements...” “International Notes”, International Socialist Review No. 7 (January 1916), p. 137. 617 Theodore Draper noted that the Lettish Socialist Federation was a bastion of left-wing radicalism inside the American socialist movement and constituted an important link between the European and the American LRIs. Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), p. 67. 618 According to Saarela, Swedish and Norwegian LRIs were influenced by Luxemburg’s and Pannekoek’s positions and especially their arguments developed against Kautsky during the mass action debate before the War.” Tauno Saarela, Finnish Communism Revisited (Helsinki: The Finnish Society for Labour History, 2015), pp. 66-7. Also see: Edvard Bull, “Die Entwicklung der Arbeiterbewegung in den drei skandinavischen Ländern 1914-1920” in Carl Grünberg ed., Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung No. 10 (Leipzig: C. Hirschfeld, 1922), p. 347.

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representative bodies to vote against the war credits. For this purpose, the Swiss, American, and Scandinavian LRIs organized fractions to get the local or general party meetings to accept bindings resolutions. In the Socialist Party of the City of Zurich Conference in July 1916, the internationalists from the Kegelsklub presented a series of resolutions demanding the party congress discuss the question of national defense and adopt binding resolutions for the Zurich deputies to vote against national defense budgets and adhere to the Zimmerwald Conference decisions.619 In the US, the first skirmishes between the LRIs and right-wing and the centrists began even earlier. In July 1915, in the Massachusetts Socialist Convention, the left-wing, organized around the Latvian Socialist Federation of the Socialist Party, presented a series of resolutions denouncing American preparations for war against Mexico, active preparations for the establishment of a new third international, and solidarity with the anti-war dissenters in Europe. The resolutions were defeated, but they served as the guiding principles of the SPL that was set up after the convention. 620 In Sweden, the anti-war socialists fractional conference also took place in early 1916, bringing into the open the inter-party struggle. The initially modest goals of the LRIs in neutral countries stirred debate and clarification because the introduction of principled anti-war resolutions in the party meetings forced these latent tensions into the open. By late 1916 and 1917, any remaining facade of party comradeship seemed to be lost given the differences between openly crystallized fractions and the party leaderships in the neutral countries. At the New York Socialist Party Convention In March 1917, the left-wing represented by Louis Fraina called for open resistance and mass action against conscription as the US entry into the war was imminent. The debates turned violent. Louis Wildman, a right-wing delegate, wrote: “This was the stormiest meeting I ever witnessed in a long career of stormy meetings… Fist fights kept breaking out in the hall as partisans of opposing fractions split into little sub-meetings, without benefit of parliamentary procedure to abate their passions. Trotsky was the leader of the fraction which opposed the government’s policy even if it led to civil war, while Hillquit directed the tactics of the moderates.”621 In Switzerland, insults and insinuations of foreign intrigues and interventions were also voiced in the Swiss Party against the Left. According to Lenin, Robert Grimm, now

619

Senn, The Russian Revolution in Switzerland, p. 206. Draper, The Roots of American Communism, p.68. 621 Quoted in Draper. Ibid. p. 84. 620

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openly siding with the official party leadership against the left-wing, accused them of “the most vile things against the ‘foreigners’, against the youth” in the January 7, 1917 Central Committee meeting.622 None of the LRI groups could win over majorities in the neutral countries. However, the seeds of the Communist International for which the Zimmerwald Left had worked germinated first in the neutral countries. The émigré groups adapted themselves and their organizations to the politics of each neutral country. The neutral country LRI groups themselves developed by integrating émigrés and fusing with them. Consequently, the core group of the Communist International began to take shape here. Paradoxically, the east European LRI groups, especially after the war started, were more active abroad, especially in western countries where they lived in exile rather than in the Russian Empire itself. The Bolshevik party is the most obvious example of this situation.623 Until the First World War, the Bolshevik Party divided itself into two organizational branches: the Party abroad and the Party in Russia. Both sections mirrored each other having their own central committees, papers, and local sections. Abroad, these sections were formed in main European urban centers where the Bolsheviks were in exile. Once the war started, the Russian section crumbled as the waves of repression decimated the party. Bolsheviks in Russia were routinely rounded up, imprisoned, and exiled. According to one estimate, the Bolshevik party membership decreased from 6,000 before the war in Petrograd to 100 with the arrests once the war started. 624 Hundreds of Bolshevik militants were recruited into the army and sent to the fronts. 625 The party publications in the Russian Empire had an ephemeral existence until 1917 and the Bolsheviks in Russia could hardly maintain a reliable and working link with the party organs abroad. In contrast, the Bolshevik party abroad managed to preserve its organizational structure more or less intact, even in countries that were Russian allies, such as France and Britain. When the evolution of the Bolshevik Party

622

Lenin, PSS Vol. 49, p. 383. An exception to this could be the Latvian Social Democratic Party. Riga, The Bolsheviks, p. 155. 624 Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917: The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 102-104 625 Ibid. 623

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and its political debates during the war years is mentioned in this work, it generally refers to the party's activities abroad. The Bolsheviks in exile were better organized. Between 1914 and 1917, the party abroad had working Central Committee sections in several countries, and, after November 1914, it managed to produce (with disruptions and irregularity due to legal and financial problems) its central organ, Sotsial Demokrat,626 all with the aid of their comrades from other countries. In short, between 1914 and 1917, there were effectively two Bolshevik Parties: one in Russia, embittered, barely surviving and mostly underground, and one abroad, internationally linked, fused with the other LRI currents, and better organized. However, the Bolshevik Party Abroad did not immediately react to the war as an unwavering and coherently internationalist unit. It survived episodes of repression more or less intact and managed to preserve its organizational infrastructure, yet the initial ideological confusion about the war created some conflicts in the ranks. In the first weeks of the war, the Bolshevik Party's biggest section abroad in Paris lost a significant number of its militants, who were gripped by the nationalist war hysteria and volunteered for the French legions. The section lost eleven of its 94 members to patriotism.627 Though less dramatic, other disagreements and confusions about the war and the question of splitting from the Second International also existed.

626

About two thousand copies of Sotsial-Demokrat were published in 1915, about half of which were distributed to foreign groups and the other half reserved to be distributed in Russia. The weight of the foreign section in the distribution of the main party organ is an indication of the centrality of the Foreign Party in the Bolshevik organization. Y.G. Temkin, Bernskaya konferentsiya zagranichniy sektsii RSDRP: 1915 G. (Moskva: Vishshaya Shkola, 1961), p. 95. 627 Y. Y. Kvachev, V. I. Lenin i zagranichniye sektsii Bolshevikov: 1914 - Fevral 1917 (Minsk: Izdat. V. Shkola, 1971), p. 252. Bolsheviks did not stop debating with those joining the war voluntarily and these members were not expelled. In fact, eventually some of the volunteers later changed their minds and began agitating the Bolshevik view in the army. The Bolshevik attitude on disagreements was not sectarian. Ibid. p. 256. Under the conditions of Tsarist oppression, the Russian party more or less ceased to be an active organization by 1915. Many Bolsheviks remained defensists and those opposed to war were not ‘overtly defeatist’. Despite the time and energy Shlyapnikov devoted to re-establishing the Russian Bureau, the police quickly arrested most of his recruits to it. Even the loss of one link in a chain of communications could take much time to recover from. When he returned to Sweden, he found as well that literature was no longer being smuggled through the route, he had set up just a few months before, due to the discovery of a courier. He had to re-establish the smuggling network before returning to Stockholm. Barbara Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 66.

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The Bolshevik organization in Europe began to discuss the theoretical questions about the collapse of the Second International and the founding of the new international only in early 1915. Disagreements took time to resolve. In September 1914, Karpinsky wrote to Lenin that the International should not be considered to have collapsed. It may have been in a crisis or "it has suffered an ideological political collapse, if you like," but deserting it at this point was too radical a break.628 Hence, it would be misleading to read Lenin’s writings from the earlier months as an expression of the general Bolshevik position. Despite its relative freedom in the neutral states, it took time for the Bolshevik Organization Abroad to reemerge from the initial chaos and confusion that the war created. This gradual recovery happened through an intense debate that took place in meetings and publications across Europe. The émigré Bolsheviks managed to regroup only in early 1915 when the Bolshevik Party Abroad organization convened its international conference, which took place in late February and early April 1915 in Bern. This conference is important not only because it was the only formal Bolshevik Party conference from the start of the war until the March Revolution, but also it elected a central organ (KZO, Committee of the Organization Abroad) and clarified the differences in the Party, which provided grounds for a debate. The self-organization of the émigré groups, as in the case of the Bolsheviks, developed conjointly with the local LRI groups, especially in the neutral countries. In fact, one of the conclusions of the Bolshevik’s Bern Conference was to engage more closely in the lives of the parties where they lived as émigrés. The Conference resolved that “members of the RSDLP sections abroad must enter local socialist groups” and inform these groups about the mood of the Russian workers.629 Another resolution from that conference explained that “It would be a harmful illusion to hope to restore a real Socialist International without a complete organizational separation from opportunists. The Russian Social Democratic Labor party must support every international and mass revolutionary activity of the proletariat, while striving to bring together all anti-chauvinist elements of the International.”630

628

Gankin & Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 146. “Tasks of the Organizations of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party Abroad,”, in Ibid. p. 187. 630 “Bern Conference Resolution on the Character of the War, Defense of the Fatherland, the Collapse of the International, the Third International,” ibid. p. 185. 629

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Having resolved that their task was to prepare and help form active internationalist solidarity links, the Bolsheviks, Latvian Social Democrats, and the Polish SDKPiL opposition members jointly participated in the building fractional groups in Switzerland, Scandinavia, and the US. Kharitonova wrote in her memoirs that many of the émigré Bolsheviks worked in Swiss factories but that they were not very active until around 1915.631 In Switzerland, the Kegelsklub was the most concrete example of a place where émigrés from Russia, Poland, the Balkans, and Germany sat together with the Swiss socialists to devise the strategy that they would pursue in the Swiss party debates. In the US, the SPL was a closely knit community formed by the émigré and American LRIs (from both the foreign and English-speaking sections of the Socialist Party).632 The Dutchman Sebald Rutgers took a prominent role in organizing the SLP. The weekly meetings of the group took place in his home.633 Rutgers brought Louis Fraina on board, to edit the group’s paper The Internationalist. The journal was financed by Rutgers himself and the plan was to turn the journal into the American version of Vorbote.634 In addition to Fraina, Rutgers also invited Sen Katayama, a Japanese socialist immigrant who was single handedly publishing the émigré Japanese LRI journal Heymin, which he personally prepared.635 In a sense, the Dutch radicalism fused in the American soil with their fellow Russian and Latvian LRI movements once again, as the Russian Bolshevik and Latvian left-radical socialist groups coalesced in the SLP. Rutgers not only played an organizational role but also that of a guiding spirit. He was one of the first left-radicals to introduce the positions of the Zimmerwald Left in the US in a long series of articles published in the ISR. Titled the “left-wing,” editors of the ISR introduced this series by defining Rutgers as a militant “for years associated with the best known socialists of Holland and Germany, as a member of the uncompromising Social Democratic Party of Holland, and who [was]

631

Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (SSA) 140.30.1.M1, p. 10. Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (Lincoln: Potomac Books, 2015), p. 163. 633 RGASPI 626-1-5, 110. 634 Buhle, A Dreamers Paradise Lost, p. 56. 635 Sen Katayama, Vospominanija (Moskva: Izdat. Nauka, 1964), pp. 635-636. 632

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in close touch with the European comrades who are planning for a new Socialist Conference.”636 The editorial defined the content of the series as: “...the attitude towards Imperialism and toward Internationalism of the LEFT WING, or revolutionary group, in each of the Socialist parties in Europe today. These groups seem to us to contain within themselves the only hope of a real working class International. We want every reader of the REVIEW to read these articles carefully and discuss them with comrades who have become discouraged and left the Socialist Party. We believe that an overwhelming majority of American Socialists will welcome the plan of action suggested in these articles and will desire to swing the Socialist Party of America into line with the new International that is even now taking definite form. We believe these articles will prove to be the most valuable series we have ever published in the REVIEW. They will put the American comrades, who want a revolutionary organization, in touch with the comrades across the ocean who have like aims and a more definite program.”637

The five consecutive articles by Rutgers that the ISR published (between June and November 1916)638 explained the relations between imperialism and mass actions, as the LRIs saw it. In addition, Bukharin, Berzin, and Kollontai also joined the SPL ranks. Ludwig Lore invited Kollontai to make a speaking tour across the country. Over four and a half months, she attended 123 meetings, speaking in four languages.639 Bukharin also spoke at around thirty meetings explaining

636

Somehow misleadingly, in reference to probably Kienthal. S.J. Rutgers, "The Left Wing: Imperialism," International Socialist Review, (June 1916), p. 728. 638 These articles were: "The Left Wing: Imperialism" (June 1916); "The Left Wing: Economic Causes of Imperialism" (July 1916); "The Left Wing: The Passing of the Old Democracy" (August 1916); "The Left Wing: Mass Action" (October 1916); and "The Left Wing: Mass Action and Mass Democracy” (November 1916). All were published in the ISR. 639 Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai, A Biography: The Lonely Struggle of the Woman Who Defied Lenin (New York: Dial Press, 1980), p. 225. Kollontai also wrote an article, which was probably the first article published in the US in English informing the socialists about the opening breach inside the Zimmerwald Movement preceding the Kienthal Conference. This is how Kollantai explained the split, emphasizing the role of mass action, again revealing both the importance of the concept for the Zimmerwald Left and Kollontai’s assumption that the American left-wing socialists would be familiar enough with the concept to understand the meaning of the split: “Since the Zimmerwald Conference of the internationalspirited socialists has taken place, the patriotic-minded socialists try to make out that the revolutionary internationalist wants nothing else than to annihilate the work of the socialists for these 50 years, wants to split the working class movement... It appears that the poison of nationalism and opportunism has corrupted even the officials of the neutral countries. The executives of the socialist parties in Denmark, Switzerland and Holland not only disapprove the Zimmerwald Conference, but point out that their party never "dreamt" of sending official delegates to a conference that believes in the necessity of a strong class conscious international, that rejects the "civil peace" policy and condemns the alliance with the capitalist government, pursuing an imperialistic war... The Socialists gathered at Zimmerwald had no intention "to split" or harm the movement. Their purpose was, and is, quite an opposite one: by working for peace, by fighting war, by calling the proletarians of all countries to unite on the old battlefield of the class struggle they want to revive the International, to call into life the greatest and indomitable force, international class 637

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the positions of European Zimmerwald Leftists.640 Eventually, the whole New York Section of the Bolshevik Party joined the SPL in early 1917.641 Finally, the east European itinerant revolutionaries were especially active in Scandinavia, (which was dubbed “Spain” in the clandestine Bolshevik correspondences to mislead the police), whose emigre groups had a long history. Scandinavia was the central node in the “northern route” of the Russian revolutionary underground connecting the emigre communities in western and the Empire. The history of this connection predated the founding of the RSDRP.642 Historically, the Scandinavian and the Russian revolutionaries had strong ties, which only deepened during the War. Bolshevik militants like Bukharin, Shlyapnikov, and Kollontai maintained the ties between the Zimmerwald Leftists in Switzerland and Scandinavia. Bukharin, Pyatakaov and Kollontai wrote several articles in the Scandinavian left-radical press and participated in its organizational affairs.643 Émigré militants, like Rutgers, Kollontai, Bukharin, Berzin, both informed the American or Scandinavian LRI movements about the progress of the Zimmerwald Left in Switzerland and

solidarity... "the split" of the Second International is a fact, a hard fact that has to be acknowledged. The split was caused by the war, but the line of division has been drawn not by the rebellious internationalist, but by well experienced official government diplomats. ... this war has taught us that the nationalistic policy, endorsed by the social patriots, is a failure. A new line has to be pointed out, to be drawn. The Zimmerwald conference took the first step to draw this line; the international on the sound basis of anti-militarism (no voting for war credits) internationalism (instead of a formal representation of the national party bodies in the International Socialist Bureau) and revolutionary mass-action (instead of parliamentarism “pure and simple”).” A. Kollontai, “Do Internationalists want a split?” ISR No.7 (Jan 1916). pp. 394-5. 640 Sponsors for the Bukharin's speaking tours included Latvian socialists, the SPL, and the New York Bolsheviks. Bukharin was nominated as a candidate to the Russian Federation of the Socialist Party of the US for the Russian Federation Committee. Akito Yamanouchi, “Internationalized Bolshevism: The Bolsheviks and the International, 1914-1917,” Acta Slavica Iaponica, 7 (1989), p. 24. 641 Ibid. 642 Michael Futrell, Northern Underground: Episodes of Russian Revolutionary Transport and Communications Through Scandinavia and Finland 1863-1917 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963). pp. 9798. 643 Bukharin stayed in the Sweden, Norway and Denmark in late 1915 and much of 1916. Throughout his stay, he contributed to the budding Scandinavian LRI press with several important articles presenting the Zimmerwald Left’s perspective. A Norwegian LRI wrote in his memoirs that they became so familiar with Bukharin that, the Norwegian socialists considered him “more Scandinavian than Russian”. Quoted in Alexander Kan, Nikolai Bucharin und die skandinavische Arbeiterbewegung (Mainz: Decaton Verlag, 1993), p. 39. For a detailed survey of Bukharin’s activities in Scandinavia in 1915 and 1916, see ibid. pp. 23-44.

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other countries and regularly reported back to Switzerland and Germany about the situation in those regions. Rutgers’ articles on the American LRI movement, and especially on the formation of the SPL, appeared in the Dutch and German Zimmerwald Leftists press. In Arbeiterpolitik, he reported that “as soon as the news of the Zimmerwald Conference reached” the US, “the League adopted the position of the Zimmerwald Left.”644 Kollontai also reported directly to Lenin, who was an official member of the Zimmerwald Left Bureau, about the situation in the US. In a letter that she sent on 11 January 1917, she informed Lenin that “the Dutch comrade Rutgers (a Tribunist), Katayama, and our group here have taken a step towards the ‘Zimmerwald Left’. However, Trotsky’s arrival strengthened the Right-wing at our meeting and by the time of my departure the platform of Zimmerwald Left had not yet adopted.” The debates that took place during the previous years in the Swiss Alps were finding an echo across the Atlantic. However, at no point did Lenin or the Bolshevik CC Abroad direct or control the east European émigrés’ activities from a center. Though Lenin always encouraged the east Europeans participation in west European or American parties, he lacked the means and power to exert any influence on these militants. In fact, many influential east European LRIs were either at odds with him on several important questions (Bukharin, Shlyapnikov, and Radek for instance) or simply did not have a stable and direct channel of communication with Lenin.645 In any case, even in Switzerland, the local Bolshevik section could not count more than twenty members who members of the SPS were also.646 The Zimmerwald Left groups in the neutral countries, though remaining small in size, grew more coherent and intransigent in programmatic terms. By the end of 1916, the American SPL was solidly supporting the Zimmerwald Left political line. It adopted a manifesto in a meeting in Boston on November 26 which defined, fully in line with the Zimmerwald Left, that the war opened “new era of great conflicts, impelled by the new form of absolutism — the rule of the

644

Rutgers, “Die Opposition in der American SP”, Arbeiterpolitik, No.14 (7 April 1917). Lenin replied enclosing several copies of a Zimmerwald pamphlet: 'relying on you to distribute it everywhere in America (England's hopeless - it can be sent there from America). Please see local Bolsheviks everywhere, even if only for five minutes. Cheer them up and put them in touch with us." Porter, Kollontai, p. 221. 646 Lenin wrote that here were hardly more than 10 or 15 of Bolsheviks who have been members of the Swiss Socialist Party in “Farewell Letter to the Swiss Workers,” LCW Vol. 23, p. 367. 645

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monarchs of money and the subjugation of a more or less independent class of small capitalists.”647 Accordingly, the war fueled the “elements of wealth production in our present society” and outgrew “the bourgeois forms of existing nations in which they are restricted.”648 This was a global condition, which equalized the terrain of class struggle in all countries: “All groups and classes of the people in every so-called civilized nation are dependent upon the all-powerful financial interests of each nation. There is no difference in this respect between “darkest” Russia, with its autocratic form of government, and “enlightened” United States, with its “democratic” institutions that are distinguished by the denial of free speech and organization and shooting by militia and company thugs...”649

The manifesto argued that in this new imperialist stage when the “workers seek shelter in constitutional guarantees... to use” their political rights “for the betterment of their conditions, they too often find that rights and guarantees are mere ‘scraps of paper’. The capitalist class, with political governments and judicial courts conniving, will tolerate no interference with their class schemes for world domination.” This shifted the grounds for working-class action from parliamentary and legal trade union arenas to revolutionary mass actions because “the real and fixed location of government has been transferred to money exchanges and banking institutions of the money kings.” The manifesto’s strong emphasis on mass action tactics unmistakably revealed the influence of the LRI debates on the question, but it was also tinted by the influence of the IWW’s revolutionary syndicalism. Finally, the text ended by endorsing the urgent necessity of founding a new Third International along the lines advocated by the Zimmerwald Left: “The Socialist Propaganda League of America endorses the position of the Left-Wing Socialists of Europe and pledges itself to work in harmony with them for the upbuilding of the Third International...”650 Similarly, the Swiss Zimmerwald Leftists moved in the direction of a more open fractional activity towards the end of 1916.651 Preparing themselves for the occasion of the coming 1917 Congress of the SPS, the Zimmerwald Leftists produced a text (apparently drafted by Lenin, but

647

“Manifesto of the Socialist Propaganda League of America” (26 November 1916), The Internationalist, Vol. 1, No.1 (Boston, 6 January 1917), p. 2. 648 Ibid. 649 Ibid. 650 Ibid. 651 In contrast to the American Zimmerwald Leftists, in Switzerland, the Zimmerwald Left was admittedly less certain of itself.

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it seems to be the product of a collective debate652) in late October and early November 1916 titled “Tasks of the Left Zimmerwaldists in the Swiss Social-Democratic Party.” Taking a similar methodological approach to that of the SLP in the US, the text started with a global analysis of the contemporary crisis in world capitalism and the war. It stated that in all countries, including neutral Switzerland, the slogan of the national defense had to rejected by the proletariat in favor of revolutionary mass actions: “The proletariat’s answer to war must be propaganda and the preparation and carrying out of revolutionary mass actions for the overthrow of bourgeois rule, the conquest of political power and the achievement of socialist society, which alone will save mankind from wars. The determination to achieve it is maturing in the minds of the workers of all countries with unprecedented rapidity.”653

The text also put forward demands specifically relevant to neutral Switzerland. As the country was a refuge for war deserters and immigrants, the text stated that the proletariat in Switzerland had a special task to show solidarity towards all immigrants. It urged the Swiss Zimmerwald Leftists to defend “compulsory naturalisation of all foreigners” since the Swiss proletariat had a special international role to show solidarity to immigrant workers and war deserters. In addition, Swiss workers, Lenin argued, had to invite foreigners to their own organizations. In the imperialist epoch, this was especially crucial to strengthen the bonds of international solidarity and strengthen the workers against the Swiss bourgeoisie that hoped to exploit and widen the divides between the Swiss and foreign workers.654 All these were later applied in practice in Soviet Russia after the November Revolution.655 Like the question of immigrants, the last and probably most important section of the text defined the Zimmerwald Leftists’ international tasks. It argued that the Swiss Social Democrats had a special responsibility to support with all its force all the international forces of the Zimmerwald Left because Switzerland had a special geo-strategic role enabling the Social Democrats to print and smuggle all the “anti-government” texts to Germany, France, and Italy.656

652

Radek’s letter to Nobs second half of November 1916, in Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung Vol. 2, pp. 649-650. 653 Lenin, “Tasks of the Left Zimmerwaldists in the Swiss Social-Democratic Party” in LCW Vol. 23, p. 139. 654 Ibid. pp. 142, 146. 655 See chapter 7 of this dissertation. 656 Ibid. pp. 147-8.

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Clearly, by the end of 1916, the Zimmerwald Left groups were increasingly vocal in neutral countries. In Switzerland and the US, fractions had formed, and in Sweden an independent party had formed. Each of them identified with a program based on mass actions against the imperialist war and the immediate foundation of a Third International through a split from the Second International. Despite their small sizes, these groups of militants from various national backgrounds formed the backbone of the Zimmerwald Left fraction and, in March 1919, the Communist International.

3.

Some Brief Reflections on the Historical Roots of the Comintern

The composition of the LRI movement and the Zimmerwald-Left fraction as a truly international bond of militants from various backgrounds has been interpreted as a mark of its artificiality. From a Russian nationalist point of view, the development of Marxism in Russia had been interpreted as a western imposition of a non-endemic idea. Dostoevsky was one of the first proponents of this view, but he was not crude. In his sophisticated but still chauvinistic analysis of the budding Russian populist and Marxist radicalism, he identified the source of radical intellectual alienation in the self-indulgent isolation of the very native Russian ruling class from the peasant masses it ruled. In Dostoevsky’s view, radical universalist ideas, like Enlightenment or socialism were exported from the West, but they found a fertile soil in the Russian intelligentsia, which inherited the class disdain of the gentry towards the Russian peasants. In this logic, the more the revolutionary intelligentsia was radicalized the more it became alien to Russia. Taking Herzen as an archetype of non-native socialist revolutionary, Dostoevsky argued that: “Herzen... was a product of our noble class – a gentilhomme russe et citoyen du monde above all – a type which developed in Russia, and which could have sprung up nowhere but in Russia. Herzen did not emigrate; he did not begin Russian emigration; he was born an emigrant. They (meaning Russian revolutionaries) all, akin to him, were ready-born emigrants, even though the majority of them never left Russia. During the hundred and fifty years of the preceding life of the Russian nobility, with very few exceptions, the last roots had rotted, the last ties with Russian soil and Russian truth had disintegrated. History itself, as it were, predestined Herzen to embody, in a most vivid type, this rupture of the

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overwhelming majority of our educated class with the people. In this sense it is an historical type.”657

Dostoevsky’s injured sense of national pride, his reaction against progressive revolutionaries found an echo in a symmetrical but contradictory resentment against the east European émigré revolutionary in western Europe. There, various voices portrayed east European revolutionaries as a sinister and alien conspiratorial force that had come to undermine the stability of class order with their wild revolutionary ideas. Such a view appeared not only in cheap detective novels of the period, but also and even in the discourse of many nationalist-defensist or even pacifist social democrats of the time. Ridiculing the Zimmerwald Left as Russian-Bolshevik or Polish plot was common during the war. After the 1917 November Revolution, this nationalist sentiment fully matured into a paranoid nationalist hatred of communism as an “alien” and “non-native” movement, reaching its peak with Nazism, which was not unique to Germany but shared with variations by European ruling classes in 1930s. The European far-right portrayed communist internationalism as a “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy carried out by rootless cosmopolitan wandering Jew-like figures. This caricature reflected the collective political insecurities felt by the western bourgeoisie in power.658 Probably the most complex and sophisticated criticism of revolutionary internationalism of the Zimmerwald Left was advanced by one of the closest Marxists to it, Martov. In his “World Bolshevism,” written in 1919, on the eve of the founding of the Communist International, Martov carefully tried to avoid reproducing the common nationalist tropes in his condemnation of Bolshevik revolutionary internationalism. He wrote that there was some element of “eastern backwardness” in the Bolshevik internationalism, as it was too hasty and rash, too impatient, etc. He defined this as a “consumer communism” as opposed to a more properly productive Marxist communism, a communism that belonged to an earlier epoch of historical development, when a truly advanced world of communist plenty was unimaginable due to the backwardness of the productive forces and when the only immediately practical goal for a radical critique of class inequality could be conceived in the form a radically equalitarian distributionism, which would only condemn the

657

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The Diary of A Writer (New York: George Braziller, 1919), p. 5. Paul A. Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 82. 658

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society to a crude equality in poverty. But Martov’s anti-Bolshevism was not a counter-revolutionary type reaction; he was in fact very close to the Bolsheviks in many respects. He was neither a Russian nationalist nor a west-European anti-Russian. As an anti-war socialist, Martov himself sat together with the Zimmerwald Leftists in the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences; he wrote in the same émigré journals where he and the Bolsheviks criticized the nationalist Social Democrats. He personally knew the west European left-radical youths, and many of the German, Swiss, French and other Zimmerwald leftists. Thus, he could not but acknowledge the fact that “Bolshevism was a world phenomenon,” that there was nothing particularly Russian, let alone Bolshevik, in the radical internationalism that was growing in Europe, which in 1919 would help give birth to the Communist International. Yet, bent on convicting the LRI movement as a sort of infantile, wild, ultimately half-baked theory of backwardness, he explained its simultaneous emergence in the world socialist movement as being due to the immense damage the World War had caused to the working class. From this perspective, what drove the LRIs was the resentment of the most backward sections of the society angered by the destruction produced by the World War. Its most concrete defenders were the soldiers whose radical desires reflected the youthful radicalism of a generation that was cut off from the working class and its most advanced sections in four long years of war. Thus Martov, in a paradoxical way, ended up arguing that the “World Bolshevism” expressed the retardation of the working class and destruction of the world productive forces caused by years of war. In this logic, the expansion of the LRIs was an expression of the imperialist destruction and its effects on working class consciousness. By this reasoning, Martov’s views echoed that of Kautsky in his pre-war debate with Pannekoek and Luxemburg over the mass action question, when he dismissed the mass action tactics merely as an expression of the least organized, least educated and the most marginal sections of the working class. Vexed by the established parties’ and unions’ loss of authority and confidence among the masses, Martov identified the origins of increasing popularity of the “Bolshevik” left radicalism in this loss. While original and complex, Martov’s anti-Bolshevism could not deny the fact that LRI perspective was an international phenomenon. Nevertheless, the view that left-radical internationalism was an anomalous movement unfit and alien to national political cultures of Europe influenced the academic study of the Zimmerwald-Left and the Comintern. One could argue that the 271

obstinate search for the “national roots” of this movement may explain why the historiography has paid so much attention to what extent various Communist parties were rooted in genuinely “national” movements or transplanted by Russian Bolsheviks.659 In contrast, if the Zimmerwald-Left’s own self-definition and aspiration to be an international current is to be taken seriously, questioning the “nativeness” or “foreignness” of various Zimmerwald Left fractions would reveal itself as a pointless exercise. It should be sufficient to note here that by fusing the migrant and “native” militants in several different countries and localities, the nuclei of the Zimmerwald-Left collectively perceived themselves returning to the genuinely revolutionary tradition of European, American, and Asian communists of the early nineteenth century, who organized themselves on the basis of a universalist spirit, irrespective of their individual national origins. For the left-radical internationalists of the Zimmerwald Left fraction, the Second International’s organizational structure based on independent parties of different nations was a brief interval from this tradition.660 The émigré-exile militants and the neutral country groups in the Zimmerwald Left Fraction’s activities in 1916 left a mark on the future of the LRI movement. Many militants who would play prominent roles in the formation of the Communist International participated in the neutral country LRI fractions and many were former emigres. 661 The central organ of the Communist International between the first and second congresses, the Bureau of Executive Committee of the Communist International (Ispolnitelniy Komitet Kominterna or IKKI) that resided in Moscow and Petrograd after the establishment of the Comintern in March 1919 consisted of many militants whose crucial political experiences was shaped in neutral countries; many were émigrés. Between March 1919 and April 1920, the IKKI Bureau had sixteen members, at least eleven of whom had

659

Peterson describes this paradigm in the historiography as the “centre and periphery” problematic in his historiographic overview: See: Fredrik Peterson, “Historiographical Trends and the Comintern – The Communist International (Comintern) and How it has been Interpreted” (Comintern Working Papers CoWoPo, 2007). Retrieved from: https://www.academia.edu/3098579/Historiographical_Trends_and_the_Comintern. 660 For more on the earlier insurrectionary internationalist traditions of the 19th century, see the first chapter. 661 For instance, Bronski noted that in the Eintracht club, a predecessor of the Kegelsklub in Zurich, a social democratic discussion and educational club “almost all the leaders of international socialism before 1914 had at one time or another belonged to it” Bronski quoted in Senn, The Russian Revolution in Switzerland, p. 10.

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been active in the neutral countries during the war, either as émigrés or as citizens.662 Among those were Zinoviev and Radek, who were members of the Zimmerwald Left Executive Committee and after the founding of the Communist International, became the members of the IKKI Bureau and Secretariat. They represented the clearest continuity between the Zimmerwald Left fraction and the Comintern. Both were active in west European politics for a much longer period than they had been in the Russian Empire. Radek, who was the leading militant on organizational questions in Germany and Austria, became the Comintern’s leading specialist on German affairs. Zinoviev became the Comintern’s Secretary. The assignment of Zinoviev to this key role sometimes confused contemporaries. He was not usually considered one of the most popular Bolsheviks. Because he had been among the small minority in the party that opposed the seizure of power on the eve of the November Revolution, some have viewed him negatively. Many contemporaries who were oblivious to the history of the Zimmerwald Left fraction found his appointment puzzling. Some cynical opponents of the Bolsheviks speculated that Lenin deliberately appointed Zinoviev to control the organization because he was a gray bureaucratic “yes man.” However, such an assessment ignores his role as a member of the Zimmerwald Left Executive Bureau along with Radek and Lenin, and the fact that he participated as the Bolshevik delegate to all the Zimmerwald meetings, conferences, and gatherings. He spoke German fluently and in the German independent Social Democrat’s Halle Congress in October 1920, he made a three-hour speech, impressing even his opponents, one of whom remarked that “this man possesses a demonic power of eloquence”.663 He arguably spilled more ink than probably even Lenin in explaining the Bolshevik position on war and international socialist movement during the war. It would not be controversial to argue that no Bolshevik was more fit to represent the Bolsheviks at the highest level in the Communist International than Zinoviev. Another member of the IKKI Bureau, Maxim M. Litvinov, had been an émigré for at least ten years before the Russian Revolution. He wrote in his autobiography that he had been arrested in “almost all the countries of Europe”.664 A magnificent underground activist, Litvinov was

662

G.M. Adibekov, E.N. Shakhnazarova, and KK Shirinya, Organizatsionnaya struktura Kominterna, 1919-1943 (Moskva: ROSSPEN, 1997), pp. 7-8. 663 Anatoly V. Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes (London: Penguin Press, 1967), pp. 77, 79-80. 664 Haupt and Marie, Makers of the Russian Revolution, p. 160.

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among the organizers of the Bolshevik weapon smuggling operations during and after the 1905 Revolution in Russia. Before and during the war, he was mostly active in London, where he headed the local Bolshevik section. Litvinov was the last Bolshevik delegate to the Second International, as he was the official representative of the RSDRP(b) to the ISB.665 Another IKKI Bureau member, Bukharin, may offer the most characteristic case representing the organizational continuity between the Zimmerwald Left fraction and Communist International. Typically, he belonged to the younger generation of militants who joined the Bolshevik Party around the 1905 Revolution. His short tenure as a party activist in Russia ended with the counter-revolution in 1907-08; his émigré period began soon after. Early in the First World War, he ended up in Switzerland where he remained until 1915, when he moved to Scandinavia. He was a regular contributor to the local LRI publications and established comradely relations with the Scandinavian groups of the Zimmerwald Left. As he was relentlessly chased by the European police in all these countries, he finally crossed the Atlantic and joined the Zimmerwald Left group around Rutgers, Fraina, and others in New York. He returned to Russia after the March Revolution. Like many others in the Communist International IKKI Bureau, he spent most of his active militant life not in Russia but in foreign socialist movements. Berzin was also a founding member of the IKKI Bureau, and, like Bukharin, he was active as a Zimmerwald Leftist in Switzerland, Scandinavia, and the US during the War. The Swiss socialist, Fritz Platten, whose name continuously appeared in the publications of the Zimmerwald Left (such as Internationale Flugblatter or the Vorbote) as the correspondent, was another member of the IKKI Bureau. Mieczyslaw Bronski, who was a member of both the SDKPiL opposition and the Swiss SPS, which he joined in emigration, was at home in the German, Polish, Swiss, and Russian movements in equal measure. Though he did not become an IKKI Bureau member in its first year, he was sent to Germany to help establish the Communist Youth International and the Western European Secretary of the Communist International in Berlin, one of the key organs of the Comintern in the fall 1919.666

665

Zinovy Sheinis, Maxim Litvinov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988), p. 67. Lazitch & Drachkovitch, Lenin and the Comintern Vol.1, p. 147.

666

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In contrast to the cases listed above, only four IKKI Bureau members had been active in eastern Europe during the war and none of those were Bolshevik party members. Only one belonged to a Russian movement,667 while the rest were the members of minority parties in the Russian Empire; one was not even a socialist party member.668 Further, Angelica Balabanova and Julian Marchlewski, both IKKI Bureau members during its first year, were not members of the Zimmerwald Left fraction during the war. The former was closer to the Menshevik internationalists and the latter was a Spartakist and on the SDKPiL Executive. Both participated in the Zimmerwald conferences and positioned themselves between the Zimmerwald Leftists and the centrists. Only after the November Revolution did they join the Zimmerwald Left. Apart from the EKKI Bureau and the Secretariat, some of the most important organs established during Communist International’s first year -its regional bureaus- were also led by LRI militants who had been active in neutral countries during the war. Rutgers, who was an active militant in the American and the Dutch LRI groups, was given the task of leading the Comintern’s West European, Amsterdam Bureau in early 1920, arguably one of its most important organs outside Russia. In addition, both Katayama and Fraina were charged with the founding the American Bureau of the Communist International after the Second Congress of the Communist International in Summer 1920. Similarly, the Zimmerwald Leftists, Zeth Höglünd and Karl Kilbom, led its Scandinavian Bureau, a vital organizational link between the IKKI Bureau in Russia and the Western Bureaus, representing a solid historic continuity dating back to 1915. The point of this cataloging of key Comintern appointments is that leading cadres of the Communist International were directly or indirectly engaged with the Zimmerwald Left fraction. Their national origins played much less of a role than did their political affiliation with the Zimmerwald Left fraction. Perhaps more importantly, the organizational culture and even the embryonic form of the Communist International’s mode of activity began to take shape in these early fractional groups formed in the neutral countries. But this point jumps ahead, so to provide some key connecting links, let us return to struggles of the Zimmerwald Left before the 1917 Revolution and founding of the Comintern.

667

Lev Karakhan, who was a member of Trotsky’s Mezhduraiontsy group. Petr Stuchka from Latvian SDP which was closely associated with the Bolsheviks, Gustav Klinger was a Volga German who joined the party in August 1917 and Yrjo Sirola belonged to the Finnish SDP. 668

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VIII. The Zimmerwald Left Fraction at an Impasse, From March 1917 to March 1919

Between March 1917 and March 1919, the Zimmerwald Left Fraction waited for two years before constituting the Third International. The most apparent reason for this delay was the tumultuousness of this period. Between 1917 and 1919, the world witnessed two revolutions in Russia, a revolution in Germany and another in Hungary, the fall of four great Empires in Europe (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey), countless mass strikes amidst a general world revolutionary situation, the beginning of Paris Peace conference and additionally a great mass of ruling class reprisals against the working class insubordination in a campaign of global mass repression spreading from Siberia in the East to the US in the West. While the international fraction of the Zimmerwald Leftists’ persistence to find the Third International did not waver, the events they encountered put forward new and unexpected problems, both technical and theoretical, limiting their restricted sources to take practical steps for founding the New International. This chapter deals with this two-year lag, focusing on the new challenges the Zimmerwald Leftists faced, how they tried to answer the theoretical and organizational steps they took to reorganize on an international scale. This can be chronologically divided into periods and specific theoretical questions that marked these periods. First, the period was between the March 1917 Revolution and the November 1917 Revolution. Both events shifted the focus of the Zimmerwald Leftists to Russia. In this period, the events drew the east-European émigrés back to Russia and thrust them into revolutionary activity, while the western-European and north American Zimmerwald Leftists scrambled to figure out how to show solidarity with their comrades. Further, for the Zimmerwald Left fraction in general, the international question of the struggle for peace, which had wider implications beyond Russia, gained new dimensions because of the Russian Revolution. As both the right-wing ISB and the centrist ISK in Berne contemplated a new international socialist peace congress, the presence of moderate socialists in the Russian Provisional government gave the critics of the LRIs confidence. At this point a fundamental question that remained unresolved since the Kienthal conference (the attitude towards the convention of a conference by the ISB initiative) forced the Zimmerwald Leftists to wrestle with whether to split or remain inside the Zimmerwald movement. Although they 276

could not come to a unanimous position on this question, the events related to the war and Russian Revolution undermined and incapacitated the ISB and the ISK leaderships by Autumn 1917. Second, the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 posed in concrete terms the question of workers power, but in a way unexpected by the Zimmerwald Leftists—Russia was a predominantly peasant society. Nevertheless, the Zimmerwald Leftists in and abroad Russia considered this as a step towards the anticipated world proletarian revolution and identified the “Soviet” form as an organizational expression of the mass proletarian action against the imperialist war, nation-states, and capitalist exploitation. These events forced the Zimmerwald Leftists to clearly define Soviet power as a universal alternative to parliamentary democracy. The dissolution of the Russian Constituent Assembly in January 1918 played a significant role in this discussion. Third, between December and March 1918 the new Soviet government strove for peace, but it had to face the stark reality that a synchronic proletarian world revolution was not immediately on the horizon. This put the Bolsheviks and the Zimmerwald Leftists in an awkward position: the Bolsheviks positioned themselves in favor of the seizure of power with the promise of an immediate armistice and the expectation that this bold unilateral Soviet action would initiate the workers in the belligerent countries to revolt against the war. That did not happen, at least with sufficient force, which forced the new government to face either a German invasion or agree to a separate peace agreement with Germany and its allies under punishing terms. The situation raised the question for the first time among the Zimmerwald Leftists about what position to take in the face of an isolated proletarian revolution amid a hostile capitalist encroachment. This question preoccupied the Zimmerwald Left, long after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty in March 1918, indeed up to the formation of the Communist International the following year. Finally, the turmoil in Russia between in 1917 and 1918 undermined the Zimmerwald Left Executive’s fragile international network. The technical problem of reorganization in the wake of the evolving revolutionary situation in Russia became an urgent question, but under completely new circumstances: the western capitalist governments no longer viewed the Bolsheviks as were no longer a strange and minuscule émigré group, but as a dangerous enemy. These governments’ attitude towards the Zimmerwald Leftist minorities changed from a condescending disregard and occasional harassment to systematic repression. This dramatically altered the political landscape in which the Zimmerwald Left was accustomed to operating. The relative political freedom the 277

fraction enjoyed in the neutral countries progressively vanished, while Russia, hitherto one of the most oppressive autocratic countries of Europe, became one of the freest countries for the LRIs. The radical shift in the political geography forced the Zimmerwald Leftists to take considerable time to develop new organizational structures and communication links. Initially, the Soviet diplomatic missions in Sweden, Germany and Switzerland constituted the fragile nodal points around which the international movement attempted to reorganize itself in the West. With the German Revolution in November 1918 and the creation of a united LRI party in Germany in December 1918, finally presented more favorable conditions for the organization of the new Third International.

A.

March Revolution and the Question of Socialist (re-)Unification

The revolutionary process that began in Russia in March 1917 dramatically altered the dynamics of the World War, undermined the war’s grinding stability, and opened a political space for different anti-war socialist theories to be tested in practice. However, the anti-war sentiments and positions expressed by different socialist tendencies were not harmonious even before the revolution. The revolution in 1917 only brought them into even sharper conflict. From March 1917 onwards, each of the revolution’s leading political actors’ steps, every new major development affected the inter-socialist struggles between the right, center, and the left tendencies (represented by the ISB, ISK and the Zimmerwald Left) affected the international movement. What happened in Russia further hastened their antagonisms. Since ending the war was a primary aspiration for the revolutionary masses in Russia, antagonisms between different socialist tendencies on the explanation of the war’s causes and their proposals about how to stop the war moved to the center of the mainstream political debate. In Russia, the battleground for these vying socialist programs became the Soviets, the representative organs of mass struggle unifying much of the working class, peasantry, and the soldiers, which opened up a space for a free and dynamic interaction between different brands of socialist theory and the masses. In the international arena, the different socialist tendencies struggled and debated with each other over their competing peace (and/or revolutionary) programs. The centrists demanded a diplomatic solution to war, negotiated between the 278

belligerent governments that were to be pressured into action by the socialist-led masses. The leftradicals demanded peace through revolutionary mass struggle and abolition of the capitalist governments. Finally, the right-wing demanded peace through a military victory of their own governments. After the March Revolution, these programs matured in parallel international negotiations and discussions, which were centralized in Stockholm, and eventually took the form of competing proposals. As Petrograd became the center of the revolution, the neighboring capital of Stockholm became the center of the debate on the internationalist socialist strategy. The evolution of both became intermeshed. In the first weeks following the revolution, the anti-war aspirations of the mass mobilization initially remained buried under the confusion created by the formation of a pro-war Provisional Government, which the bourgeois liberal Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) in collaboration with the national-defensist socialists set up. The March Revolution in Russia began with an International Working Women’s Day (23 February in the old calendar) demonstration in Petrograd, led by the capital city’s working class women protesting the war, the dire scarcity of food and the faltering rationing system. The demonstration rapidly snowballed, triggering a spontaneous general strike, engulfing the city in a mass strike and mass street actions in the following two days. More overtly political demands and general organizational steps for the reorganization of the Soviets (which first appeared in 1905) began to materialize in the midst of these mass actions. Protests spread from factories and workplaces to garrisons. The soldiers and even a section of the officer corps, already discontented with the government and the harsh military discipline, began an open insurgency against the orders coming from the generals to shoot down the workers in the streets. The disgruntled right-wing socialist (Menshevik and SR) and Kadet deputies of the Fourth Duma eventually requested the abdication of Tsar Nikolai II. Except for the bloody Sunday events in the capital of the Empire that took place in March 27 (in the old calendar), Showing a surprising lack of resistance, the Russian monarchy toppled in just five days. The rapidity and the relative ease of the fall of Romanov dynasty revealed its disconnectedness from not only the workers, soldiers, and peasant masses, but also from the bourgeoisie and even some segments of the civil and military bureaucracy. For the liberal Kadet opposition, the autocracy, with its lack of respect for modern bourgeois meritocratic principles and democratic procedures, was outdated. Consequently, the Kadet reasoning went, the Russian autocracy did not 279

have the adequate capacity to lead a modern war. While the Kadets perceived their goal as an effective administration of the war effort on what they believed to be modern, western and liberal lines, the working masses and soldiers sought an end to the war itself.669 The contradiction between the initial liberal Kadet leadership and the revolution did not immediately become apparent after the March Revolution. The two main institutions that the March Revolution gave birth to soviets, formed by the war-weary working masses, and the Provisional Government, representing the pro-war upper classes of the Russian society, were initially led by a closely knit small group of Fourth Duma opposition deputies (Kadets, Mensheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)) acted in unison when it came to the crucial question of the war policy.670 The pro-war Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary (SR) leadership that emerged out of the first Petrograd Soviet majority backed the Provisional Government of Prince Lvov and the Kadet Liberals and shied away from seizing power, despite the fact that the Soviets were riding on a wave of mass actions that offered their leaders popular legitimacy. Nonetheless, at least initially, it seemed there was not adequate ideological ground for a political confrontation between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government. Since the beginning of the war, the Menshevik, SR and Kadet leaders around the Duma opposition were harmoniously united in their moderate, loyal, and nationalist opposition to autocracy and in contradistinction to the war weary masses on the streets, the left-wing and liberal Duma parties, who did not oppose the war itself, strove for an effective management of the war with the goal of a military victory. From the perspective of the Kadet leadership, the March Revolution could potentially give a fresh impetus to the war effort and for the pro-war socialists it was only fitting that the war for national defense should be led by a bourgeois democratic government with soviets playing the role of a loyal opposition.

669

Rex A. Wade, The Russian Search for Peace: February-October 1917 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1969), p.10. 670 The soviets in the March 1917 Revolution were not solely produced by the masses themselves unlike the way they emerged in the 1905 Revolution. Instead, especially the Petrograd Soviet was formed by the collusion of two autonomous initiatives: one represented by the Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviets, the other, the mass initiative, especially of the rank-and-file socialist militants. The Soviet Provisional Executive Committee was composed mostly of the Menshevik and SR intellectuals like the Fourth Duma deputy Nikolai Chkheidze and these leaders initiated the first calls for the election of the soviets. Consequently, in this first period of the revolution, intellectuals took an unusually prominent role in the soviets’ organization. Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), pp.104-6.

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The policy statements of the Provisional Government (hereafter the PG) in the first few weeks of its existence presented the war as a necessary sacrifice imposed on the nation for the defense of its newly acquired political freedoms and popular sovereignty. The initial PG statements did not promise a concrete peace program, but only a continuation of the war in the “defense of democracy,” revealing the ruling class’s hope that a democratic framework for its war program would be more successful in igniting patriotic feelings of the Russian population than had the autocratic ones.671 For the pro-war Socialist leadership of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, the PG’s war aims were acceptable enough, but on the condition that they denounced acquisition of new territories, recognized the rights of nations to self-determination, and took steps towards diplomatic negotiations with the Allied governments that included these war aims. Hence, the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee (hereafter EC) endorsed Prime Minister Prince Lvov’s declaration on 10 April concerning the government war aims that, while stating a firm determination to continue the war in collaboration with Russia’s allies, also argued that the government considered “it to be its right and its duty to declare at this time that the purpose of free Russia is not domination over other nations, or seizure of their national possessions, or forcible occupation of foreign territories, but the establishment of stable peace on the basis of the self-determination of peoples.”672 As the PG laid out it war aims and the balance of power between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet EC settled into a relatively harmonious mode of cooperation in April and May, both institutions followed separate, but in the eyes of its protagonists, complementary foreign policies. The Petrograd Soviet EC for its part stated its aim to take the initiative for

671

For instance, the first declaration of the Provisional Government on the war aims stated: “The Government trusts that the spirit of lofty patriotism, manifested during the struggle of the people against the old regime, will also inspire our valiant soldiers on the field of battle. For its part, the Government will make every effort to provide our army with everything necessary to bring the war to a victorious end. The Government will sacredly observe alliance which bind us to other powers...” 20 March 1917 (New Calendar) in Frank Alfred Golder ed., Documents of Russian History, 1914-1917 (New York: The Century, 1927), p. 311. 672 Ibid. pp. 329-330. The All-Russian Conference of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies endorsed the Lvov Government resolution with a statement adopted on 25 April which explained “The Russian democracy attaches tremendous importance to this act of the Provisional Government, and sees in it a step in the direction of the realization of democratic principles in foreign policy. The Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies will support with energy all the efforts of the Provisional Government along this line...” Ibid. p. 332.

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organizing an international socialist congress to which all the socialist parties would be invited (including the majority, pro-war Social Democratic parties) and which would define the international goals and proposals of the world socialist movement for achieving peace.673 A week after this declaration, the Petrograd Soviet EC issued an international appeal on 15 May. The text demanded action for peace, but only from Russia’s belligerents. It appealed to the German and Austria-Hungarian proletariat to protest their respective governments and force them cease fighting the Russian “revolutionary democracy.” Conspicuously absent from the declaration was a similar pacifist call addressed to the workers in England and France.674 The text argued that, now that it had a democratic government, Russia had a legitimate claim to continue the war in pursuit of its self-defense, implying an abstract logical schematism that irrespective of the specific historical conditions under which the war started, socialists and the working class had a duty to defend a more democratic regime over a less democratic one in wars. This mishmash of right-wing pro-war and centrist-pacifist anti-war socialist arguments was a product of the contradictory political goals of its authors, who aspired to keep their monopoly over the pacifist discourse, while legitimizing their country’s militarist policies. Considering the composition of the Petrograd Soviet, which brought together worker delegates from factories who expressed an unyielding desire to end the war and the Soviet Executive Committee led by the pro-war socialists, it would not be wrong to see this contradiction as an emanation of the early Soviet’s own dilemmas.675 According to Sukhanov, a Social Democratic

673

Ibid. pp. 339-40. Ibid. pp. 325-6. 675 The structure of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the leading soviet in the country, was a complex institution. Workers from factories and soldiers garrisoned in the city sent revocable delegates to the soviet. The soviet discussed both the economic questions concerning the working and living conditions of the workers and soldiers, but it also political questions and produced adequate legislations. It was also an executive organization in defense of the revolution. By the latter half of the March, the number of the soviet delegates reached close to 3,000, two thirds of whom were soldier delegates from the Petrograd garrisons. In April, the Soviet organized a smaller body composed of 600 members, with soldiers and workers having equal number of representatives. However, throughout this early period, the main power rested in the EC of the Soviet, which was, as noted above (see footnote; 2 in this chapter) formed in the first days of the revolution by Menshevik and the SR leaders. The Committee, acting somehow similar to a cabinet, proposed political decisions to the soviets for discussion and approval. For dealing with specific matters, it formed committees and sub-committees. The EC was led by a chairman and two vice-chairmen. In the first days of the revolution the Menshevik Chkheidze acted as the chairman and 674

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leader of the Petrograd Soviet EC with left-wing Menshevik leanings, who was also one of the authors of the Soviet declaration on peace, the text was deliberately written in a way to reconcile the “Zimmerwaldists” and the openly national defensist political lines.676 At the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in June, the right-wing socialist leader of the Petrograd Soviet, Tseretelli, summarized this contradiction when he said “In taking upon itself the fight for universal peace, the Russian revolution has also to take over the war...”677 Under the Menshevik and SR leadership, the Petrograd Soviet EC continued to uphold its contradictory policy on war until a resolutely anti-war Bolshevik leadership gradually took over the Soviet leadership and challenged the war program of the Petrograd Soviet leadership. The most important political product of the Petrograd Soviet EC’s policy was its efforts to organize an international socialist peace conference to which both the neutral and belligerent socialist parties were invited.678 Meanwhile, the ISB and the Dutch official socialist party (SDAP) leadership, which until that moment in the war remained hostile to attempts to convene international socialist peace congresses by the Zimmerwald movement, immediately begun to mobilize in response to the Petrograd Soviet EC’s appeals. The ISB secretary, Huysmans, with the aid and the initiative of the Dutch SDAP leaders moved to Stockholm to establish contact with the Petrograd Soviet EC and began preparing for an international socialist congress to be convened in May 1917.679 Soon after, the Swedish Social Democratic Party chief, Hjalmar Branting, joined the ISB and the SDAP initiative, which led to the formation of a Dutch-Scandinavian Committee for the organization of a

Kerensky himself was a vice-chairman, though he played little active part in the EC’s day to day meetings after he joined the PG. Anweiler, The Soviets. pp. 107-8. 676 Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 206. Sukhanov wrote that he first asked Gorky, who was considerably closer to the Bolsheviks and anti-war centrists like Martov, to write the manifesto, but Tseretelli and Chkheidze were not pleased with the text, so they discarded it. Ibid. pp. 203-6. 677 Tseretelli’s Speech in the Congress 17 June 1917, in Golder, Documents, p. 361. 678 This call was discussed and drafted on the 8 May 1917 session of the EC of the Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers. It stated that the EC of the Petersburg Soviet took it upon itself to organize an International Socialist Conference. It resolved to invite all parties and fractions of the Second International, which Bolsheviks opposed because they were opposed the invitation of social-chauvinistic, pro-war government socialist to attend to a peace conference and abstained from voting for the resolution. The rest of the appeal explained that the conference should take place in a neutral country and the preparatory commission for the conference be seated in Stockholm. Ibid. p. 339–40. 679 Fainsod, International Socialism and the World War, p. 127.

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socialist peace congress.680 The Dutch-Scandinavian initiative had a dual but potentially conflicting strategy. First, like the Soviet appeal, it aimed to bring together socialist parties of Europe for an international congress with the goal of a general peace; second, less openly and more in line with the methods of traditional diplomacy, the Committee members also tried to constitute a backdoor channel for government-level negotiations towards a separate peace between the Central Powers and Russia.681 These aims were conflicting as the former strategy implied a general peace in the long run, through the participation of all socialists who would ideally convince their governments towards open diplomatic negotiations, a project that would take a longer time to mature, while the latter implied a relatively faster but a separate peace between Germany and Russia. A separate peace between Germany and Russia could risk the prolongation of the war by refreshing the German army’s capacity to continue the war, as it would have to cope with only one front in the west. It could even potentially utilize the troops freed in the Eastern front to bring the war to a rapid end by a renewed attack against the Entente, pushing France out of the war before a potential US intervention could shift the balance of forces in favor of the Entente powers.682 The contradiction between these two peace strategies, one based on pacifist socialist views, the other on governmental considerations reflected the equally contradictory character of the alliance between centristpacifist and right-wing social defensist political lines in the International arena around the Stockholm peace congress plans.683

680

Ibid. p. 126. The history of the Dutch-Scandinavian Committee’s activities is well covered in the historiography. See: Fainsod, International Socialism and the World War; David Kirby, “International Socialism and the Question of Peace: The Stockholm Conference of 1917,” The Historical Journal 25, no. 3 (1982): 709–16; Imlay Talbot, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), Masao Nishikawa, Socialists and International Actions for Peace 1914-1923, Politikwissenschaft, Bd. 4 (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2010); Hildamarie Meynell, “The Stockholm Conference of 1917,” International Review of Social History, 5, no. 1/2 (1960), 1–25 and 202-225 681 It must be noted here that the members of the Committee had competinig political leanings. While the Dutch and the Danish delegates were viewed as pro-German, the Swede Branting leaned towards the Entente powers, which raised the suspicions of the German Social Democrats. Kirby, “International Socialism”. 682 The Austrian Foreign Minister Count Czernin wrote in 17 November 1917 that “peace at the earliest moment is necessary for our own salvation and we cannot obtain peace until the Germans get to Paris and they cannot get to Paris unless their Eastern front is free." Otakar Černín, In the World War (London: Cassell, 1919), p. 217. 683 A Danish Socialist, Borbjerg’s mission to Petrograd with the aim of mediating between the Petrograd Soviet, the Dutch-Scandinavian Committee and the German SPD in April expressed in a clear form the

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Alarmed by the March Revolution and suspicious about a potential peace deal that could be brokered the Dutch-Scandinavian Committee between the German and Russian Governments, the Entente governments and official socialist party leaderships collaborated to win over the Petrograd Soviet’s support for the war. They sent several top-level pro-war socialist delegates to Russia. The French Government and SFIO leadership sent several socialist parliamentary deputies and Albert Thomas, a member of the French war cabinet. The Belgian socialist and cabinet member, also de jure ISB leader Emil Vandervelde, accompanied by other Belgian socialist leaders joined the French delegation in Russia.684 The British cabinet member and the Labour MP, Arthur Henderson, was sent with an official capacity to Petrograd in June. However, the failure of the Allied delegations to impress the Soviet masses was so glaring and the Entente socialist delegations image in the Russian socialist movement as a government sponsored pro-war publicity campaign was so undisputed that the resolutely pro-war Russian liberal foreign minister, Miliukov requested the Allied governments to allow the minority socialists in their countries also to travel to Russia to present a more tamed, less overtly nationalist and more pacifist colored perspective for national defense.685 In the end, negotiations in Stockholm and Petrograd gradually moved the French and British official socialist leaders to accept, at least formally, the proposal to participate in an international socialist congress in Stockholm. However, the conditions for participation laid out by the Entente delegates included reservations about the German SPD’s acceptance of the

contradictions of this dual strategy. Approached by the SPD leadership to convey the German Government’s semi-official peace proposal to the Soviet and delegated by the Dutch-Scandinavian Committee to inquire about the Soviet position for an international congress, Borgbjerg’s mission had two purposes. The German proposal to the Soviets included mainly, “a peace without compulsion,” the recognition of an independent Poland and a ceasefire in exchange for the Russian’s commitment to a separate peace with Germany. Meynell, “The Stockholm Conference of 1917” (part 1), pp. 7-8. The Soviet EC’s reaction to Borgbjerg was equally confusing and contradictory. Since the EC backed the PG’s commitment to its alliance with the other Entente powers, the Petrograd Soviet EC categorically refused considering the option of a separate peace. However, the Soviet EC backed the idea of a general peace congress with the participation of the French, British and also the German majority socialist parties. Borgjberg was told by the Soviet EC leaders that his “mission has succeeded” and the Soviet EC could initiate its plans for the International Congress. Philipp Scheidemann, Memoirs of a Social Democrat, Vol.1. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1929), p. 367. 684 Fainsod, International Socialism, pp. 128-9. 685 Hildamarie Meynell has provided ample evidence in her article on the government involvement in the plan. See: Meynell, “The Stockholm Peace Conference”, pp. 4-6. Kirby argued that the Entente governments suspected that the Dutch-Scandinavian Initiative was pro-German. Kirby, “International Socialism and the Question of Peace” p. 710.

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German government’s war guilt. If this was not a political-diplomatic maneuver directly aimed to hinder the realization of the congress plans, it at least made it extremely difficult for the Germans to participate.686 While the negotiations between different majority Social Democratic delegations from both the belligerent and neutral countries dragged on in Stockholm, Petrograd and other European capitals, the joint SR and Menshevik Petrograd Soviet EC diplomatic efforts reached their highest point in June with the merger of the Soviet EC delegation in Stockholm with the Dutch-Scandinavian Committee to constitute a joint Dutch-Scandinavian-Russian Committee. However, by this point, it was too late for a united socialist international peace congress. A series of interrelated developments undermined the Soviet EC’s domestic and international prestige. First, the radicalization of the Soviet masses made the dual policies of the PG and the Soviets increasingly incompatible. In May, a scandal involving the Russian Foreign Minister and Kadet party leader, Pavel Miliukov shook the PG. Miliukov was an ardent defender of the seizure of the Dardanelles for Russia, as agreed upon by the Entente powers before the March Revolution, but which was officially rejected by both the PG and Soviet EC. In a secret telegram sent to the allied diplomats in 18 March 1917, Milikov assured Russia’s commitment to war until victory and hinted that, despite its public discourse, the PG was firmly behind the diplomatic agreements concerning the partition of Turkey.687 When this note became public, it stirred a scandal and ignited mass demonstrations against the “bourgeois ministers” in the PG. Miliukov did not deny his position and, when challenged, he publicly asserted in the Kadet Party Congress in May that “the main thread of my policy was to get the Straits for Russia.”688 In response, the Soviets forced the PG to revise its position and the crisis could only be quelled by Milukov’s resignation of and the formation of a new PG, this time as a coalition between the pro-war socialists and the Kadets led by Kerensky, an independent SR and the vice

686

Opinions vary among the historians if the Allied delegates deliberately attempted to sabotage the congress. Talbot for instance argued that while Henderson genuinely hoped for a congress to make a diplomatic resolution for war possible, the SFIO was deliberately trying to make it impossible for the SPD leadership to participate in the Congress. Talbot, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism. pp. 33-4. Kirby proposed a sounder overall analyisis arguing that the Congress was “doomed from the start”, Kirby, “International Socialism and the Question of Peace”, p. 713. 687 Golder, Documents, pp. 323-4. 688 Ibid. p. 334.

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chairman of the Petrograd Soviet EC. The new coalition PG assured the masses and the soviets that, in line with the Soviet peace policy based on “peace without annexations, without indemnities, and on the basis of self-determination of peoples,” it committed itself to a “democratic peace.” However, in practice, the Kerensky government did not change its position concerning its Entente alliance, nor did it take decisive steps towards the organization of peace negotiations. This contradiction exploded in a new crisis in July, when a new Russian offensive in the eastern Front aimed to show Russia’s allies the PG’s commitment to continue the war effort. However, within days, the Russian army rapidly collapsed, and a semi-spontaneous anti-war insurrection seized Petrograd in early July. Blaming the Bolsheviks with conspiracy and treason against Russia, the PG rapidly suppressed the insurgents, targeting especially the anti-war radical-left. In July, the capital was seized by a right-wing hysteria. Workers and sailors were lynched, and, for a brief moment, the Kerensky government seemed to have recovered its authority and legitimacy. The death penalty in the army, hated by the rank-and-file, was restored. However, the relief that the Russian ruling class felt remained short-lived as the economic chaos in the country deepened. The workers protested the Kerensky government and the Soviet EC which unflinchingly supported it, while the reaction was increasingly and openly growing. Despite the repression, the Bolshevik Party grew strengthened in the local Soviet elections. In early August, the incompatibility between the pro-war government policy and the Soviets became obvious, when the liberal and right-wing forces attempted a coup against Kerensky and the Soviets. The coup was led by Lavr Kornilov, who had been appointed as Commander-in-Chief by Kerensky himself in July. The coup was only halted by the energetic and determinant efforts of Petrograd’s masses and the general unwillingness of the rank-and-file soldiers to move against the Soviets. The consecutive crises that beset the Menshevik-SR-Kadet alliance in April-May, July and August affected right-wing socialist strategy of peace. The Menshevik-SR coalition’s international program rested on a difficult compromise between pacifist slogans (international peace congress, peace without indemnities, rights of nations to self-determination) and a continuation of the militaristic policy inherited from the tsarist autocracy. In organizational terms, this strategy rested on a wager that the working class and peasant masses on the one hand and the pro-war capitalist and middle classes on the other could be reconciled in the form of a coalition between the Soviets and the PG. The Miliukov affair and the collapse of the first PG was the first indication of this 287

strategy’s challenge. The July crisis and the insurrection of the soldiers followed by the Kornilov coup further revealed the difficulty of reconciling increasingly antagonistic class forces in Russia and the untenability of the Menshevik-SR international strategy without such a class truce. In the international and diplomatic arena, the consecutive crisis of the PG in Russia from May to August revealed the precariousness of the Petrograd Soviet EC’s position. The fragility of the Menshevik and the SR leadership in the face of the challenges coming from the left and the right made is less reliable as a diplomatic partner and it seemed less necessary to appease its overtures for peace for the Entente governments and their official socialist leaders. During the Kornilov coup attempt in late August, Entente diplomats in Petrograd either remained passive or openly sided with the extreme right against the Soviets. This further undermined the credibility of the official Menshevik-SR political line, which presented the war as an inter-class, joint democratic struggle against autocracies. By Autumn, the Menshevik-SR Soviet leadership’s authority was eroding fast inside Russia as its international credibility and prestige declined. Thus, by August, the prospects of a socialist peace congress under the supervision of the Dutch-Scandinavian-Russian Committee looked dim. The final blow came when the French, Italian and the British governments denied visas to the delegations that were to attend the planned congress in Sweden in Autumn. While the pacifist-centrist hopes for a reconciliation in the international socialist movement (both between the belligerent country parties and between different tendencies within the parties) began to wane and the ground under the feet of Russian pacifism began to disappear in Russia, the most prestigious international central organization representing the pacifist line, the ISK, also fell into a crisis. As the center of attention of the world socialist movement shifted north, towards Russia, the ISK in Berne also migrated. In response to the ISB’s call for a conference, as mandated by the Kienthal Conference, Grimm’s ISK issued a call to all the Zimmerwald affiliated organizations to send delegations to Stockholm in order to meet and discuss the Soviet and Dutch-Scandinavian plans for an international socialist peace conference.689 Robert Grimm arrived first to Stockholm in 24 April and then moved on to Petrograd after the fall of the first Provisional

689

Fainsod, International Socialism, p. 150.

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Government in May.690 Grimm and Balabanova in their capacity as official representatives of the ISK met with the Russian Zimmerwaldists in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. They spoke in party and soviet meetings. From May to June, Grimm both consented to the framework of the planned Stockholm Conference, though with some reservations especially when it came to the invitation of pro-war government socialists, and also criticized the socialists who joined the Provisional Government for not advocating an immediate cease-fire.691 Soon, however, Grimm fell into disrepute for following a dual strategy, similar to the Dutch-Scandinavian-Russian Committee, dealing secretly with both governments and publicly with socialists. Details of a telegraph communication between Robert Grimm and the Swiss Federal Councilor, Hoffman, about the German peace conditions was leaked to the press in midJune.692 In the correspondence, Grimm conveyed to Hoffman that the mood in Russia was amenable to peace with Germany, if the German army refrained from a new offensive against the Russian lines. Hoffman responded that his counterparts in the German Government were also favorable towards a separate peace with Russia.693 After Hoffman-Grimm telegrams were leaked to the press, the PG declared Grimm persona non grata. He left Russia on 16 June and the right-wing Russian press, seizing the opportunity, branded the whole Zimmerwald movement as a German conspiracy. In Stockholm, Grimm promptly resigned from his position in the ISK. The Zimmerwald parties, having been totally oblivious to Grimm’s personal diplomatic activities on their behalf, refused to condone his activities. An ISK investigating commission formed after the scandal reported in its conclusion that, while there was no evidence that Grimm acted as an agent of German government and his motivation seemed to be a “concern about the fate of the Russian revolution,” it also denounced him noting, “recourse to secret diplomatic methods in order to bring about peace, as practiced by Grimm, is contrary to nature of the Zimmerwald Movement.” Hence it disowned his

690

The delay was caused by Milikov’s rejection to grant Grimm an entry visa. Gankin & Fischer, The Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 615. 691 Ibid. pp. 610-611. Despite his criticisms of the Menshevik policy, Grimm also rebuffed the Bolsheviks’ demand to publish an official statement in the name of the ISK condemning the Menshevik and SR participation in the Russian PG. Ibid. p. 616. This was probably because, Grimm’s position was aligned closely with the Menshevik Internationalists and Martov’s. Kirby, War, Peace and Revolution, p. 123. 692 The telegram was leaked by the French Socialist minister Albert Thomas, Ibid. p. 127. 693 Grimm to Hoffman, 26/27 May 1917 in Gankin and Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 621, Hoffman to Grimm, 3 June 1917, Ibid. pp. 621-2.

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action.694 Disgraced abroad, disowned by the Zimmerwald movement, Grimm vanished from active involvement in the affairs of the international Socialist movement. Grimm’s fall was symptomatic of the general decline in the pacifist-centrist alternative both in international and Russian domestic politics. Two weeks after Grimm was expelled from Russia, the PG started the July military offensive against Germany. The pacifists resolve to reconcile the international socialist movement by utilizing the Soviets and the Dutch-Scandinavian Committee in Stockholm to pressure the governments was weakened. Grimm’s closest ally and supporter in Russia, Martov, found himself marginalized within his own Menshevik party and formed a minority faction, defending until the November Revolution, a policy of reconciliation between the pro-war and anti-war socialists in a socialist only coalition government. Martov did not succeed.695 With the self-imposed defeat of the pacifist-centrist position and indecisiveness in the face of the pro-war socialist’s determination to continue the war, the Zimmerwald Left emerged as the major remaining international anti-war political current. The decline of the pacifist-centrists revealed itself most markedly in the Zimmerwald movement. After Grimm’s resignation, a committee led by the Swedish LRIs took over the ISK. The new ISK composition marked the growing influence of the Zimmerwald Left fraction over the organization, with the inclusion of Zeth Hoglund and other Swedish LRIs in the ISK. Though Angelica Balabanova returned swiftly from Petrograd to Stockholm to replace Grimm in the ISK, she was now surrounded by the Zimmerwald Leftists. Balabanova, who until then acted closely with the centrists in the Zimmerwald movement, from June 1917 onwards went along with the left until the foundation of the Third International. The new ISK formed by a majority of the Zimmerwald Leftists refused any collaboration with the Dutch-Scandinavian-Russian Committee. On 26 June, the ISK criticized the MenshevikSR Soviet EC’s adoption of the slogan, “peace without annexations and indemnities” as an inconsistency, since at that point all the national defensist Social Democrats from the ISB to the German, English and French majorities were officially defending this same slogan. The ISK statement concluded that for a genuine internationalist socialist unity, the Soviet peace slogans were not enough and a refusal of bourgeois diplomatic means and a defense of mass actions in all countries had to

694

Declaration of the Investigating Commission Appointed by the International Socialist Committee, 5 July 1917 in Ibid. pp. 627-9. 695 Getzler, Martov, p. 160.

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be consistently adopted.696 On 11 July, the ISK, after meetings with the Soviet delegation in Stockholm, declared that it would not collaborate with the Dutch-Scandinavian-Russian Committee.697 In 22 July, the ISK openly criticized the Menshevik-SR led Petrograd Soviet’s plans for the congress for being too “obscure and ambiguous.” The statement argued that the Dutch-ScandinavianRussian Committee’s refrain calling an end to the civil truce policies contradicted with the spirit of a socialist anti-war solidarity because socialists could not genuinely gather and discuss peace while defending their own governments’ military actions. The ISK interpreted this unwillingness to openly denounce class truce as a fig leaf for a tendency towards a mutual amnesty between government socialists in the belligerent countries, who the ISK criticized for sharing the burden of responsibility for the war.698 While the centrist-pacifist line was collapsing internationally and in Russia, the Zimmerwald Left was gaining ground in both arenas.

1.

The Zimmerwald Left Between March and September 1917

The turbulent period between March and September was as difficult for the Zimmerwald Left as it was for their centrist and nationalist opponents in the socialist world. Even though the Bolsheviks’ fortunes began to rise from August onwards in Russia, the post-March revolutionary situation radically altered the conditions under which the Zimmerwald Left fraction had operated since the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference. By giving momentum to the renewed efforts for a socialist peace conference, the March Revolution in Russia presented a double challenge to the Zimmerwald Leftists. First, the joint pacifist and right-wing Social Democratic efforts for convening a peace congress in Stockholm could potentially isolate the Zimmerwald Left internationally and, second, the dual power government alliance in Russia isolated, even briefly, the east European Zimmerwald Leftists in Russia. Initially, the emergence of an opportunity for a diplomatic solution

696

Statement of the International Socialist Committee on “Peace without Annexations” 26 June 1917, Gankin and Fischer, The Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 632. 697 Letter from Balabanoff to the Representatives of the Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, 11 July 1917. Ibid. pp. 634-6. 698 “Statement of the International Socialist Committee”. Ibid. pp. 640-642.

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to the war and the rise of a triumphant liberal government in Russia backed by the pro-national defense Socialists in spring 1917 seemingly disproved the Zimmerwald Left fraction’s expectations about the deepening crisis and instability of imperialism. For a brief moment, capitalism seemed to have gained a new lease of life, a chance for peaceful development and even an expansion in the form of a more stable bourgeois democratic system to what until then many considered as the most repressive and backward country, Russia. Even worse for the Zimmerwald Left fraction, the March Revolution disrupted its fragile organizational network by triggering a mass exodus to Russia as the émigré east European LRIs scrambled to find their way back to the country. In this tumultuous period, the Zimmerwald Left fraction first had to reestablish the links between the eastern and western LRIs. As the Bolsheviks crossed borders in the north and east, many of them coalesced in Sweden and here they reestablished their main hub of contacts between Russia and the west: the émigrés reorganized the Central Committee of the RSDRP(b) Bureau Abroad (ZB, Zagranicheskii Buro) in Stockholm. Karl Radek, who was nominally a member of the Polish SDKPiL opposition, headed that group so the bureau was practically an extension of the Zimmerwald Left’s Executive Committee. Here Radek edited Russische Korrespondenz “Prawda,” the organ of the ZB published in German and French, which included translations of the texts and documents from the Bolshevik press in Russia and editorial commentaries penned mostly by Radek himself.699 In September, the bulletin evolved into a more refined publication with a new title, Der Bote der Russische Revolution with the goal of making “the press of our party (the Bolsheviks) accessible to the European comrades, to acquaint the International with the Russian events, with the struggle and the persecutions of our party.”700 The ZB in Stockholm established ties with German and Dutch Zimmerwald Leftists. Lotta Kornfeld, Johann Knief’s partner and a comrade of Radek, acted as one of the liaisons. With the aid of the Dutch Zimmerwald Leftists, the German left-radicals organized the publication of a German paper, der Kampf in Netherlands, which was smuggled back to Germany.701 In the US, the American Zimmerwald Leftists

699

Another member of the ZB of the CC was Jakub Fürstenberg (also known as Yekov Ganetsky, Hanechi and Kuba), a Polish comrade of Radek from the SDKPiL opposition. He took up the organizational and financial tasks of the Bureau. Artemov, Karl Radek, p. 45. 700 “Edtiorial”, Der Bote der Russische Revolution, No. 1 (15 September 1917), p. 1. 701 Bauman, Lenin i niderlandskiye Tribunisti, p. 129; V. A. Artemov, Iogann Knif (Moskva: Myslʹ, 1990), p. 112.

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translated several articles by the Bolsheviks into English. Rutgers and Fraina took up the main editorial work. The Scandinavian radical lefts around the Swedish Left-Social Democratic Party translated and published texts from Russische Korrespondenz “Prawda” and Der Bote der Russische Revolution and aided the ZB in its activities. The ZB managed to establish contacts with the Spartakists in Germany and with the Austrian radical leftists in June.702 With the efforts of the ZB and the aid of the Swedish left-radicals, the Zimmerwald Leftists gradually re-established their international links in the core Zimmerwald Left network in Germany, Switzerland and Russia (via Sweden) and gradually developed a coherent position and analysis of the March Revolution. At a very early date, 24 March 1917, a lead article in Arbeiterpolitik (probably written by Knief) argued that despite the “liberals hope that the revolution they did not want will strengthen the war” effort and despite the claims in the “German social-patriotic press” that the revolution strengthened the resolve for war in Russia, the revolution was in fact a “workers’ revolution” and it was the harbinger of civil wars in Europe to come.703 Arbeiterpolitik was one of the most well-informed Left-Radical publications outside Russia on the Russian affairs as several analytical essays on the Russian socialist movement and the wider working class movement by prominent Bolshevik authors appeared on its pages.704 Following this article, other Left-Radical Internationalist publications followed. The May 1917 issue of Jugend-Internationale published several analytical essays on the March Revolution. One of the most important was an essay by Radek that contextualized the March Revolution in the wider international setting from a comparative perspective and examined the differences between the March Revolution and the earlier bourgeois revolutions. According to Radek, the rapid success of the March Revolution and the apparent unity of the bourgeoisie (represented by the PG) and the working class (represented by the soviets) was temporary and

702

Y.G. Temkin, Lenin i mezhdunarodnaya sotsial-demokratiya, 1914-1917 (Moskva: Nauka, 1968), p. 580. 703 It must be noted that this article was published even before the Bolsheviks took a similar position in their 7th All-Russian Party Conference in May. Arbeiterpolitik No. 12 (24 March 1917), p. 90. 704 For instance in the same issue quoted above, an article by the Bolshevik, Evgenia Bosh, put forward a detailed analysis of the conditions of the Russian working class. Ibid. Altogether in 1917 Arbeiterpolitik published about 60 materials on questions of the revolutionary movement of the Russian proletariat. Individual issues of Arbeiterpolitik were entirely devoted to events in Russia. Artemov, Knif, p.102.

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misleading.705 For Radek, the era of bourgeois revolutions in world-historical terms was opened in 1565 with the Dutch revolution and was closed with the 1848 German Revolution. Following Marx and Engels’ analysis, Radek argued that from this point on the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary zeal receded in the face of the growing working-class militancy and the maturing political independence of the proletariat as a class. Thus, he argued, the Russian March Revolution could not be considered as a “bourgeois revolution” in the classical Marxist sense of the term. Even in the earlier bourgeois revolutions, the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie constituted the main agents fighting monarchist and reactionary governments. In comparison, in the Russian March Revolution, the proletariat more assertively led the revolutionary struggle utilizing mass action methods. Further, Radek identified the seeds of an open civil war that potentially awaited Russia in the divergence between the PG and the working class on the peace question. If the bourgeoisie would oppose the proletarian desire for peace, as Radek predicted they would, the latent conflict of interests between a pro-peace proletariat and a pro-war bourgeoisie would explode in a struggle for power between these classes in Russia. From the Zimmerwald Leftists’ perspective, the Russian Revolution, far from being a sui-generis revolution as a response to particular Russian conditions, was an expression of a general world-historical trend towards working class revolutionary action against decadent capitalism. Pannekoek went further in the analysis on the global prospects and impact of the March Revolution in his essay titled “Russia, Germany, America.” He argued that the fate of the Russian Revolution was entangled with the prospects of an imminent German revolution and the ultimate entry of the American proletariat in the coming world-wide civil war between the proletariat and the capitalist classes. The paradox was that the revolution erupted first in Russia, “the least ripe for socialism” precisely because it was so: in Russia, national capital, due to its relative immaturity, was the least prepared for a full-fledged total war and thus the predatory imperialist war was most destructive and provocative for the population in general, even including the bourgeoisie.706 In contrast, in Germany, despite the fact that its political apparatus was largely a remnant of

705

Radek noted that even the Spartakist Franz Mehring fell into the error of identifying the March Revolution as a bourgeois revolution. Karl Radek, “Die Maien der Revolution” Die Jugend-International No. 8 (1 May 1917), p. 2. 706 Pannekoek “Rusland, Duitschland, Amerika”, De Nieuwe Tijd, 22e Jg. (April 1917) pp. 229-30

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feudalism, the bourgeoisie was firmly positioned behind the state. This made the proletariat in Germany virtually alone in its revolutionary opposition to the war and the state, facing a better organized ruling class. This reality would delay the revolution in Germany.707 Because the struggle in Germany faced a more powerful bourgeois enemy, the situation demanded from the proletariat a more openly anti-capitalist consciousness and will. This made the revolution in Germany both more difficult, but also more important from a global standpoint. Finally, the exhaustion of the European capitalist forces would provoke the American state to enter the fray. This could have potentially extended the life of the world capital. However, Pannekoek argued, while the American capitalist class had rich resources, it was more overtly and violently repressive against its own working class, lacking refined ideological weapons as the European capitalist governments had. Though outwardly democratic, the elections in the US were more blatantly corrupt, the workers regularly faced the violence of the army and private paramilitary forces in strikes, ruling class cruelty was hardly concealed behind a facade of legality, and in general brute force characterized the struggle between classes.708 For Pannekoek, its repressive character and the lack of an adequate army made the US more susceptible to a potential world revolutionary wave, once the proletariat succeeded in Germany. Complementing Pannekoek’s analysis, in her article on the relation between the Russian Revolution and the working classes of the smaller European states, Henriette Roland-Holst argued that with the March Revolution, the prospects for a world revolution were now open, but, as Pannekoek stated, the Gordian knot in Europe was Germany. Until the proletariat moved to mass action and seized political power in Germany, the workers of the small states like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Switzerland, and even Spain could only play a supportive role.709 Lenin reasoned broadly on the same lines in the RSDRP(b) émigrés’ “Farewell Letter to Swiss Workers”, sent to the Jugend-International before their departure from Switzerland. The article stated: “We know perfectly well that the proletariat of Russia is less organised, less prepared and less class-conscious than the proletariat of other countries. It is not its special qualities, but

707

Ibid. p. 232. Ibid. pp. 234-5. 709 Henriette Roland Holst, “Die Russische Revolution und die Kleinstaten” Die Jugend-Internationale No. 8 (1 May 1917), pp. 10-11. 708

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rather the special conjuncture of historical circumstances that for a certain, perhaps very short, time has made the proletariat of Russia the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat of the whole world... Single-handed, the Russian proletariat cannot bring the socialist revolution to a victorious conclusion. But it can give the Russian revolution a mighty sweep that would create the most favorable conditions for a socialist revolution, and would, in a sense, start it. It can facilitate the rise of a situation in which its chief, its most trustworthy and most reliable collaborator, the European and American socialist proletariat, could join the decisive battle”710

Lenin finished with a note on Germany, stating that the proletariat in this country would have to play the central role in the coming world revolutionary confrontation. He specifically singled out two groups, the Zimmerwald Leftists around Arbeiterpolitik and the Spartakusbund, that could potentially play a leading role in the coming revolution and represented the future of German socialism.711 In brief, the Zimmerwald Leftists developed an analysis situating the March Revolution as the first step of the coming world proletarian socialist revolution. From then on, the tempo and the future of the world revolution depended mainly on the German proletariat’s capacity to expand and clarify what the workers started in Russia in a relatively muddled form. As a consequence of its analysis of the post-March Revolution world political situation, the Zimmerwald Left fraction positioned itself in opposition to the centrist and right-wing socialists’ efforts to organize an international peace conference in Stockholm. The French Zimmerwald Leftist and the editor of Demain, Henri Guilbeaux, defined the centrist and right-wing alliance’s efforts as a sham conference of diplomatic maneuvers and placed all his hopes on a conference of the Zimmerwald Leftists to establish a Third International in Petrograd, that would be led by the Bolsheviks and the soviets.712 This was also the general line on the planned Stockholm congress adopted by the German Zimmerwald Leftists around Arbeiterpolitik. On 20 July, the Zimmerwald Left fraction issued a joint statement against participating the Stockholm peace conference signed by the Bolsheviks, SDKPiL, the Bulgaria’s Narrow Social Democrats, the Swedish Youth League, and the Swedish SDLP. This document is especially important since it hints at the maturation of the fraction as an alternative to the pacifist-centrist currents. The declaration stated that the growing strike movement in Germany, Austria, and Hungary,

710

Lenin, “Farewell Letter to Swiss Workers” LCW Vol. 23, pp. 371-2 . First published in German in Die Jugend-Internationale No. 8. 711 Ibid. pp. 372-3. 712 “Stockholm” Arbeiterpolitik No.22 (2 June 1917), p. 166.

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as well as the revolution in Russia, was a validation of the Zimmerwald Leftist conviction that the masses were globally beginning to rise up against the war. Further, the Stockholm conference proposal of the German, Russian, and neutral official Social Democratic leaders was not aimed at organizing an international mass struggle against the capitalist governments, but at providing aid to their own governments and by opening a diplomatic escape route from their respective military deadlocks. Further, the declaration of the Zimmerwald Leftists proposed their own alternative meeting and called all the Zimmerwald Left groups to “expose to the workers the lie and the deceit of the social patriotic conference at Stockholm” and to “disavow... party leaders who belong to the Zimmerwald movement and who, contrary to its aims, seat themselves at the same table with social patriots.” Finally, it called on supporters to “send delegates to Stockholm to discuss with the representatives... and in view of the split of the Zimmerwald movement caused by the vacillating and undecided elements to discuss also the possible unification of all the revolutionary social democratic elements.”713 The Zimmerwald Left’s invitation of the LRI groups to Stockholm was intended, without openly declaring it so, as a concrete step towards finally establishing the Third International. Lenin inquired in a letter to Radek about the prospects for such a meeting that would include Americans, Swedish Left-Radicals, the Dutch LRIs, Arbeiterpolitik group, the Bolsheviks, and the Polish LRIs adding that “if we could speed up an international meeting of the Lefts, the Third International would be established.”714 Although several Zimmerwald Leftists came together in Stockholm in summer 1917, the Bolsheviks’ indecisiveness undermined its goal of finding the Third International. The paradoxical situation that the Zimmerwald Left fraction found itself in spring and summer 1917 was that, while the Russian Revolution pushed the Bolsheviks to the center stage, the Bolsheviks themselves lacked confidence about their capacity to lead the movement towards the formation of a new International on their own. That is why the Russian Zimmerwald Leftists expected the Germans LRIs, which until the end of the 1918 was chronically divided on the question, to unite and lead the movement. Throughout the latter half of 1917, the Bolsheviks rise in prominence in Russia

713

“Appeal of the Zimmerwald Left Against the Stockholm Conference” published first in Russische Korrespondenz, “Prawda”, No. 14 (1917). pp. 154-163. 714 Lenin to Radek, 29 May (11 June), 1917, Lenin, LCW Vol. 43, p. 632.

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coupled with their simultaneous lack of confidence about their capacity to play a leading role in the Zimmerwald Left fraction crippled the movement, thereby hindering the formation of the Third International. For his part, Lenin consistently urged his party to act decisively for the reorganization of a new international. In his April Theses, which was Lenin’s first major intervention to the inner party debates, he urged his comrades to oppose the PG and defend the soviet seizure of power. He also urged the party to take an active initiative in the formation of a Third International. In Lenin’s view these two goals were inseparably linked: a split with the Soviet Executive Committee leadership in Russia had to be simultaneously carried out with a split from the Zimmerwald Movement’s pacifist-centrist majority. From his perspective, Soviet power in Russia was logically inseparable from the world revolutionary movement to be led by a concrete political organization. He tried to convince his Russian party comrades that the establishment of the Third International immediately would boost morale in Germany and Britain715 and that several groups would join the new International. He specifically named the groups associated with the Zimmerwald Left fraction (adding also the Bulgarian Narrows and most importantly the Spartakists). Anticipating the possible criticisms that these were only small groups, that they did not have any political weight in the class comparable to the centrist or right-wing majority Social Democrats, he countered that these groups, which formed the Zimmerwald Left, were an international tendency a “trend” that was bound to grow with the anticipated growth of the working class struggle: “It is not a question of shades of opinion, which certainly exist even among the Lefts. It is a question of trend. The thing is that it is not easy to be an internationalist in deed during a terrible imperialist war. Such people are few; but it is on such people alone that the future of socialism depends; they alone are the leaders of the people...”716

The Bolshevik party first discussed Lenin’s position in the 7th All-Russian Conference of the RSDRP(b) in early May, and in this instance, it overwhelmingly rejected it. The 7th Conference was the first open general party conference since the March Revolution. The agenda included both domestic questions (mainly on the PG, the soviets) and international issues (the Stockholm conference proposal, the relation between the Zimmerwald ISK and the Zimmerwald Left fraction).

715 716

Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution” in LCW Vol. 24, pp. 83-4. Ibid. p. 80.

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The Conference took place at a time when Borbjerg had recently visited Petrograd and brought the dual German (via the SPD) and the Dutch-Scandinavian Committee proposals. The draft resolution presented to the conference on the Borgbjerg proposal and the plans for a Stockholm Congress almost unanimously rejected both as pro-German socialists’ diplomatic maneuvers. Only Victor Nogin, a Bolshevik CC member, and a Petrograd Soviet EC delegate, went against the resolution arguing for participation in the Stockholm Congress. The position of the party towards the Zimmerwald Movement and its centrist-pacifist majority proved to be a thornier issue, giving birth to two positions. The practical aspect of the debate was about what to do vis-a-vis Grimm’s invitation to Stockholm to discuss the Dutch-Scandinavian Committee’s congress plans. Lenin predicting, not incorrectly, that the disagreements between the Zimmerwald Left and the Zimmerwald centrist majority around Grimm, which was evident already in Kienthal, could only result in deadlock. He opposed participating in the meeting. This de facto meant a split. Zinoviev thought the Bolsheviks would not be able to explain such a position to their comrades in the Zimmerwald Left faction and argued for sending a delegate to Stockholm in response to Grimm’s invitation. Lenin’s position was rejected by an overwhelming majority. Lenin was the only delegate in the Conference to oppose participation (there were six abstentions), revealing how the majority of the party thought it was too soon to split from the Zimmerwald Movement.717 Despite these tactical differences, the April Conference defined the party’s long-term goal as the founding of a Third International based on the Zimmerwald Left fraction. Zinoviev, who authored the resolution on the “International Situation and the Tasks of the RSDRP(b),” specifically listed all the “Revolutionary Internationalist” groups standing on or close to the Zimmerwald Left positions as the potential constituents of the future Third International. His list was not long, but it was more flexible and longer than Lenin’s. Zinoviev might have been inclined to include hypothetical “tendencies” in France and Britain, which did not exist at the time or were unrelated to the narrower Zimmerwald Left fraction, to convince his otherwise skeptical party comrades about the viability of founding a new international. Zinoviev’s list was comprised of: in Germany

717

Sed’maya (aprel’skaya) vserossiiskaya konferentsiya RSDRP (bol’shevikov), aprel’ 1917 goda (Moskva: Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS, 1958), p. 234, fn. 299.

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Karl Liebknecht and the Arbeiterpolitik group; in Britain, MacLean, Tom Man and the left-wing of the BSP and ILP; in France, the “Loriot group”; the left-wing of the Italian Party; the Karl Marx Club in Austria; the Socialist Propaganda League publishing The Internationalist in the US; the left-wing group around Hoglund that split from the Swedish Socialist Party; the Tribunist Party in Holland (Zinoviev mentioned only Pannekoek, Gorter and Roland-Holst by name); and the Jugend-Internationale group in Switzerland.718 Apparently, there were some in the Conference who criticized this list as too narrow, that it included only small groups and even in some cases individuals. Responding to the criticisms that these names and groups should not be mentioned in the Party resolution, since some of them were not really influential, Zinoviev insisted; “We were asked to cross out the names and groups... that it would be enough to confine ourselves to defining of the tendency, we were told that some of these groups were not so influential. But in reality this is not the case. These groups have a strong influence: for example, McLean was imprisoned because he alone initiated the revolt of the English miners… the point is not how many … there are (in numerical terms), but what they are. Despite the small number of these individuals and groups, the socialist future belongs to them. The course of history may sweep away one group or another, but the present moment puts forward these left groups, and we welcome them. True, some of the groups are not Marxist, but it would be "sectarianism" if they were therefore "not recognized."... And internationalist anarchists were called to the Zimmerwald Conference - so the old divisions are overcome by life.”719

In short, the April Conference showed that the Bolshevik Party did not oppose Lenin’s perspective in spirit and that Zinoviev’s resolution defending the necessity of founding a new International broadly based on the Zimmerwald Left fraction was accepted. However, the conference shied away from presenting a clear road map, leaving the questions when and how to find the new international undefined. If the Bolsheviks in Russia made a move towards finding the new International in autumn 1917, they could potentially carry the majority of Zimmerwald Left with them. Yet they were still undecided. At this point, Zinoviev argued that the Zimmerwald movement now could move left and be won over, whereas Lenin saw this strategy harmful.720 Even as late as

718

Ibid. p. 230. Ibid. 720 Lenin, LCW Vol. 43, pp. 634-5. 719

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August, some Bolsheviks could still publicly make confusing statements regarding the Stockholm Congress, which the party resolutions openly refused.721 To sum up, the Zimmerwald Left failed to establish the Third International in the critical period between March and November 1917. This did not mean that the Zimmerwald Left ceased its existence as an international fraction. West-European LRIs supported and defended the Bolsheviks. The German, Dutch, American, and Scandinavian Zimmerwald Leftists translated and explained the positions of the Bolsheviks and defined the March Revolution as the opening move of the world proletarian revolution, in terms very similar to those of Lenin. However, the western Zimmerwald Leftists left the initiative and final decision on the question of Zimmerwald Movement and the Stockholm Congress plans to the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks on the other hand were divided with the notable exception of Lenin, who represented a minority position, they lacked the confidence to take the leadership in initiating the Third International, despite the confidence of their west European comrades. This indecisiveness of the Bolshevik Party lost the Zimmerwald Left fraction valuable time in a critical period.

B.

The Seizure of Power by the Soviets in Russia and the Question of Dictatorship

From an international perspective, the November Revolution posed two concrete questions to the Zimmerwald Left: one practical, concerning the timing of the seizure of power by the soviets, the second, more theoretical concerning the form that the proletarian power had to take. If the Bolsheviks were not completely confident about splitting from the centrists organizationally, ceasing their fractional activity in the Zimmerwald Movement, they were equally divided on the question of Soviet power and how to construct it. Should they do so with or without the centrist and right-wing socialists, in a coalition of Soviet parties or independent of them, only with the internationalists or alone? Just as Lenin was for an independent International to be set up by solely

721

Kamenev in a speech he gave in the Soviet CEC on August 19 and spoke in a tone approving of the planned Stockholm Conference and insinuated that the Bolshevik Party changed its position on the matter. This triggered an infuriated reply by Lenin. Lenin, LCW, Vol. 25, pp. 244-246.

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Zimmerwald Left forces, he was also for the establishment of the Soviet power, if necessary, only with the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Even though Lenin could not convince his party to split from the Zimmerwald centrists, the events convinced his party, or rather moved it in the direction that Lenin pointed, for a split from the PG affiliated socialists.

1.

The Question of Timing: When to Seize Power?

The question of when to seize power was a source of intense debate in the Bolshevik Party right up to the point of the November Revolution. An important group of Bolsheviks including the Central Committee members, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Nogin, and well-known figures like Ryazanov, opposed the timing of the November Revolution, fearing it would isolate the Bolsheviks among the socialist parties, who may otherwise be willing to support a socialist-only coalition to be formed by the parties in the soviets.722 However, it must also be emphasized that the debate on the question of timing was directly linked with the question of the world revolution and the overall strength of the Zimmerwald Left fraction as an international current. The Bolsheviks were aware of the growing disparity between the growing influence of their party in Russia and the relative lag in the western Zimmerwald Leftists’ progress. This discrepancy created what at first seemed to be a paradoxical situation since the Russian Revolution was perceived as a part of the world proletarian revolution and its development in Russia brought the workers closer to power, while in the west, the situation remained, on the surface, comparatively stagnant. From August to November 1917, following their reemergence from the wave of repression in July, the Bolshevik party struggled to understand this situation to develop a strategic perspective. The majority concluded that if the proletariat seized power in Russia through an insurrection and pressed forward for the Russia’s unilateral withdrawal from the war, this could change international dynamics in favor of the working class and the revolution could inspire the west European proletarians to undertake more determined revolutionary actions.

722

This debate has been covered in the historiography. Rabinowitch presents almost a minute-by-minute evolution of the Bolshevik position, focusing specifically on the Petrograd scene. Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2017).

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This orientation was first outlined in the Sixth All-Russian RSDRP(B) Congress, which was arguably the most important party meeting of the Bolshevik Party between the March Revolution and the November Revolution. It was the first official congress of the party since the fall of the autocracy, with 157 delegates with voting rights participating from party organizations throughout the country representing 240,000 party members.723 The composition of the new Central Committee elected in the congress reflected a merger of the party forces in Russia and the party abroad, which had played a key role in the Zimmerwald Left fraction. Ten out of twenty-one members of the new CC were former émigrés, who came to Russia after the March Revolution. Berzin and Dzerzshinsky were from the fellow Latvian and Polish left-radical groups respectively, in a sense representing the internationalist aspiration for unity of the eastern LRIs. 724 Kollontai, Bukharin, Artem, and Sokolnikov were well-known Zimmerwald Leftists and former émigré militants, who joined the CC for the first time. Finally, Uritsky and Trotsky were members of the Mezhduraiontsy group, belonging to the current that vacillated between the Zimmerwald Left and the Zimmerwald Centre that joined the Bolsheviks officially in the Sixth Congress. The rest of the CC members were Bolshevik militants who had either been internally exiled or imprisoned militants during the war. The Congress took place at a time when the Bolsheviks were regaining their grounds in the soviets, but the atmosphere of counter-revolutionary repression had not yet eased. Thus, many leaders of the party were either in the underground (Lenin, Zinoviev) or imprisoned (Trotsky, Kamenev) and could not participate in the Congress. Hence, the Congress gave a revealing impression of other lesser-known militants’ views on the vital question of the International.725 With the threat of counter-revolution still looming over the party, one of the main debates in the Sixth Congress was if the dual power situation between the PG and the soviets still existed in Russia. A strong current defended that the repression following the July insurrection represented the Soviet EC leadership’s submission to the counter-revolutionary forces. Delegates questioned

723

According to the official congress report, apart from 157 delegates with voting rights, there were 110 delegates with consultative vote representing 162 party organizations. The membership doubled since the April Party Conference, despite the heavy repression, indicating the recovery and the rise of the party’s influence inside the working class. Shestoi s"ezd RSDRP (Bol’shevikov), Avgust 1917 Goda, Protokoly (Moskva: Gos. Izd-vo politicheskoĭ literatury, 1958), p. VII. 724 “Greetings to the Congress by the Sobraniya Peterburgskoy Groups of SD Poland and Latvia”, Ibid. pp. 178-9. 725 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, pp. 83-90.

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the validity of “All Power to the Soviets!” slogan, a slogan that the Bolsheviks had defended since the spring, when the Soviet leadership itself favored and actively encouraged the government crackdown on working-class protest and the radical left. Instead, this tendency defended an insurrectionary strategy, arguing that there was no legal space left for the working class to utilize for its opposition to the militaristic-liberal authority of the Provisional Government. Others contested this view, arguing that reports of the death of the soviets were greatly exaggerated. Several delegates, who were not forced to go underground after the July days and continued to operate inside the soviets, expressed the view that though the Menshevik-SR leadership may have submitted to the Provisional Government, the mood at the rank-and-file level in general was combative and defiant. Feeling a change in the popular mood, these delegates proposed that the soviets still could actually seize political power. The Soviets’ internal life was still relatively free, debate was still possible, and the Menshevik-SR Soviet leadership could still be replaced peacefully. Others, occupying a middle ground between the peaceful and insurrectionary strategies, people like Bukharin, argued that the soviets could still potentially seize power. But since the bourgeoisie would not be willing to voluntarily give up the political power, this would necessarily involve a violent confrontation that would also make the insurrectionary tactics instrumental.726 In the end, the Congress adopted an insurrectionary strategy outlined in the theses presented by Stalin on the “Current Moment” and, at least briefly, until the Kornilov Coup, the party withdrew using “All Power to the Soviets!” slogan in its daily propaganda, but the question remained open to debate in the party.727 The considerations of the Congress on the Russian situation and the Bolshevik strategy in the country was determined by the international situation. The framework for the debate was Bukharin’s presentation and draft resolution on the “Current Moment and War,” probably the most important resolution of the congress after the report on the “Current Moment” that Stalin presented. Bukharin contextualized the Russian revolution’s prospects in relation to the world war. The war, he argued, still continued because it was geographically expanding to new countries (he gave China and the US as examples). Internally, the war and militarization enabled the ruling classes to subject the workers to ever harsher work discipline and political repression. In this context, the

726 727

Shestoi s"ezd RSDRP (Bol’shevikov), p. 138. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, pp. 89-90.

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Russian revolution had a chance to break the cycle of doom. If the workers in Russia pulled the country out of the war, that would also be an impetus against the ever expanding and deepening war. The workers around the world would have a concrete incentive to break the civil truce. Thus, Bukharin framed the necessity of a second revolution to pull the country out of the war, as an internationalist class duty, an ultimate expression of proletarian solidarity against the war. Nonetheless, Bukharin did not exclude the possibility that once the proletarian seized power in Russia it could be subjected to a foreign military intervention. The bourgeois governments would likely consider the Russian proletarian revolution as lethally dangerous and would attempt to crush it militarily. In that case, Bukharin considered a revolutionary war possible. If the Russian peasantry would be unwilling to support the workers, this would potentially be a defensive revolutionary war, which aimed to hold out until the revolution expanded to Europe. If the conditions after the seizure of power prove more favorable, Bukharin also considered an aggressive revolutionary war aiming to expand revolution also viable. Many critics of the Bukharin and Stalin resolutions in the Congress argued that, if the seizure of power by the proletariat in Russia was conditioned by the prospects of the world revolution, then the realization of the latter was hardly certain, which made the success of the former doubtful. For instance, Kharitonov, a former émigré who played a crucial role in the Swiss Zimmerwald Left’s activities, reasoned that the weakness of Bukharin’s resolution was its disregard for the possibility of a peace between imperialist powers. Similarly, another Bolshevik, Rastopchin, argued that the Russian Revolution rather than giving an impetus to revolutionary movement in the West, eased the political atmosphere as a result of the bourgeois fear of the spread of the revolution. Others also found holes in Bukharin’s general analysis. Smilga contested Bukharin’s argument that the war equalized the objective social conditions in all countries.728 While important, most objections to Bukharin’s resolution were related to tangents and doubts about certain secondary aspects of the overall global analysis. In general, the majority of the congress adopted the Bukharin resolution on the international situation thereby accepting the urgency of the Russian proletariat to seize power for achieving a genuine world peace. This expressed a collective confidence in the Russian workers as the resolution stated:

728

Shestoi s"ezd RSDRP (Bol’shevikov), p. 106.

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“The only way for the international proletariat to really democratically end the war is therefore its conquest of power, and in Russia, its conquest by the workers and the rural poor. Only these classes will be able to break with the capitalists of all countries and actually promote the growth of the international proletarian revolutionary movement, which must abolish not only war, but also capitalist slavery.”729

By adopting this resolution, the Sixth All-Russian Congress of the RSDRP(b) linked the fate of the Russian Revolution to a potential world revolution. However, the debate on the international situation inside the party did not end in August. After Kornilov’s coup attempt, the Bolsheviks emerged triumphantly from the semi-counter-revolutionary atmosphere. Their popularity increased and by September, they had a majority in the Petrograd Soviet. On 25 September, Trotsky replaced Chkheidze as the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet EC. This period opened the way to the final confrontation between the Soviets and the Provisional Government. As the final confrontation approached, the debates in the Central Committee and other central organs of the RSDRP(b) once again put the focus on the internal question. As happened in the Sixth Congress, those opposing and those in favor of a Bolshevik-led revolutionary insurrection referred to the international situation in substantiating their positions in the intra-party debates. While several CC meetings touched upon the issue, specifically on two critical occasions the international question was at the center of the debate: first, the 23 (10) October 1917 and second, 29 (16) October 1917 sessions of the RSDRP(b) Central Committee Sessions. The 23 October session was a turning point because the Bolshevik CC recognized in its resolution the immediate necessity of an armed uprising. The decision for armed insurrection was directly linked to the international situation. The resolution stated: “The CC recognizes that the international position of the Russian revolution (the insurrection in the German navy) an extreme sign of the way the world socialist revolution has grown throughout Europe...”730

A minority in the CC opposed the resolution put forth by Kamenev and Zinoviev. In a long text sent to the central organ on 24 October contesting the CC’s resolution, the minority questioned the validity of the optimistic resolution about an immediate revolutionary upsurge in western Europe and, as a consequence, the possibility of the success of an armed insurrection in Russia. In

729

Ibid. p.197. Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, August 1917-February 1918 (London: Pluto Press, 1974), p. 88. 730

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this text, Kamenev and Zinoviev argued that if the expected class solidarity in the west did not immediately materialize, a revolutionary defensive war would be unavoidable. And in that situation the Russian peasantry could not be trusted to join the defense of the revolution. Kamenev and Zinoviev argued that; “If after taking power now and alone, we are faced (because of the world situation as a whole) with the need to wage a revolutionary war, the soldier masses will leave us in a rash… After forty months of an imperialist war in a country ravaged by the rule marauders, in the midst of the devastation created by Tsarism and perpetuated by bourgeois supremacy, the soldiers are drained and less and less capable of waging a successful revolutionary war against all international capitalism in alliance… The fact that the workers' party had taken power would, undoubtedly, be a blow to Wilhelm. It would be more difficult for him to make war against a revolutionary Russia which was offering an immediate and democratic peace. That is so. But would the blow be hard enough in the situation after Riga, etc., for Russia to shake off the grasp of German imperialism? If the German and British imperialists have begun separate talks (and this is almost beyond doubt) will they not go on with them even after our victory, and will Wilhelm not succeed in reaching Peter then, too? Where are the facts which say that the proletarian party alone (opposed by the petty-bourgeois democrats) must now take the responsibility, the sole responsibility for such a state of affairs and its inevitable consequences?”731

At the heart of Zinoviev and Kamenev’s reasoning was the possibility of the isolation of the proletariat in Russia if it seized power, even temporarily; “International revolt is growing too slow and if we are defeated it will receive a blow: And now we come to the second assertion - that the majority of the international proletariat now supports us. Unfortunately, it is not so... active support (from the west) of proletarian revolution in Russia, declaring war on the whole bourgeois world, is still a very long way. It can do great harm to overestimate one's strength. There is no doubt that much is given to us and much is required of us; But if we stake everything now and suffer defeat, we will also be striking a cruel blow at the international proletarian revolution, which is growing extremely slowly but undoubtedly growing all the same. And yet it is only the growth of revolution in Europe which would make it obligatory for us, with no hesitation at all, to take power into our hands immediately… We do not have the right before history, before the international proletariat, before the Russian revolution and the Russian working class to stake the whole future on the card of an armed insurrection now.”732

These were serious tactical considerations that could not simply be explained away by Zinoviev and Kamenev’s fear of the consequences of a potential defeat of the armed insurrection. However, their alternative, a reconciliation with the defensist and centrist socialists in Russia, could also mean the prolongation of the world war and that was equally unacceptable for the

731 732

Ibid. pp. 91-3. Ibid. pp.93-4.

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Bolsheviks. For the majority of the CC, not taking action to end the war, when the chance presented itself, would mean disloyalty to the international proletarian movement. Lenin’s resolution adopted at the CC meeting five days later, on 29 (16) October reflected this perspective noting, “a political analysis of the class struggle both in Russia and in Europe points to the need for a very determined and active policy, which can only be an armed insurrection.”733 Rejecting a compromise with the pro-war socialists, Lenin went on to analyze the situation in Europe and conceded that revolution was even more difficult in Europe than it was in Russia. However, Lenin hoped, if “certain objective facts about the international situation indicate that in acting now we will have the whole European proletariat on our side.” In the ensuing debate, Stalin affirmed Lenin’s perspective: “There are two lines here: one steers for the victory of the revolution and relies on Europe, the second has no faith in the revolution and reckons on being only an opposition.”734 If the future was uncertain and impossible to foretell, then the stakes of the revolution depended on the confidence in the world proletariat. The Bolsheviks in early November acted on this assumption. This confidence directed its action leading to the seizure of power in 6-8 November 1917. The Bolshevik’ hope was that once the Soviets seized power in Russia and declared immediate armistice, the European proletariat would see this as the signal for a mass action, in support of the Russian proletarians with the aim to end the war. The Bolsheviks may not have been confident in their own capacity to lead the international socialist movement to find a new international in 1917, but they were confident in the world proletariat’s capacity to make a revolution and staked their strategic action in Russia on this confidence.735

733

Ibid. p. 97. Ibid. p.104. 735 The Bolshevik outlook stood completely opposed to Mensheviks. Taking Russia in isolation, Mensheviks weighed the future of the Russian revolution on the basis of an essentially national criteria: industrial backwardness and proletariat’s relative weakness led them to prepare for a long period of bourgeois hegemony supposed to develop the country in a capitalist direction. In this calculation there was hardly any active role reserved for the world proletariat to play, nor any consideration given to global issues and especially the question of war. 734

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2.

The Question of Form: Soviets and Proletarian Dictatorship

By November, the Bolshevik party adopted the view that the proletarian seizure of power was necessary, and this was possible only through the transfer of power to the soviets, if necessary through an armed insurrection.736 However, it was still somehow unclear what this meant for the world revolution. Did that mean that the workers in other countries also could seize power through soviets? Could the soviet form be regarded as a universal organizational form of class struggle, also applicable to other countries, even in the developed western European countries? These questions preoccupied the Zimmerwald Left fraction throughout 1918. The debate was settled after the November 1918 Revolution in Germany, in which the workers, soldier and sailors formed workers councils inspired by the example of the Russian soviets. It is possible to deduce that, as late as August 1917, the Bolsheviks were still not clear on the international significance of the soviet form, as conflicting views clashed on the issue in the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Party. In the congress, in the debate on the “All Power to the Soviets!” slogan’s utility in Russia, some, like Djaparidze, passingly remarked that even in England there were those demanding the formation of soviets, implying that the soviet form had an

736

A young Moscow factory worker and later a veteran of the Russian Civil War, Eduard Dune, explained clearly how the Bolshevik workers on the shop floor defined the “Soviet power.” Summarizing the speeches and discussions that took place in his factory in May 1917, at the height of intra-Bolshevik and working class debate on the question of Soviet power, Dune described the scene as; “As well as workers from the factory, migrant workers from the countryside and invalid soldiers who had been demobilized also spoke. Some talked of workers’ power, others said that the new government must give the landlords’ estates to the peasants and bring an end to the futile bloodletting of the war. The meeting continued a long time, but the atmosphere of intense discussion preserved us from exhaustion... For sociologists the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was more complicated than it was for us. We wanted only one thing: the establishment of a revolutionary government that could be trusted and the strengthening of those practices that had been tried and tested by the experience of revolution. We were for land to the peasants, for an end to the bloody war, for everything that workers in other countries wanted. There was no revolution anywhere else as yet, but there would be. Foreign soldiers trusted their officers as little as we trusted ours and would soon follow our example. All those who spoke against power to the soviets were enemies of the revolution, hiding the fact that at a suitable moment they would act against the gains it had brought about. After this momentous meeting we began to pay more attention to the newspapers and literature that were hostile to the soviets and became convinced that the Bolsheviks were right, since the whole of the bourgeois press spoke against them.” Eduard M. Dune, Notes of a Red Guard, ed. Diane Koenker and S. A. Smith (Urbana [Ill.]: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 50.

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international relevance.737 In contrast, for instance, Sokolnikov argued that the soviet was a uniquely Russian institution and could not be offered as an organizational form to western Europe to build the proletarian dictatorship upon.738 Even after the November Revolution the question was not settled for the east European Zimmerwald Leftists. For instance, in his first report to the January Third All Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies on the activities of the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), Lenin reluctantly told that that the Soviet Republic set “an example to all the working people”, but only in taking the first step because the movement in the West had far greater obstacles than the Russian Revolution had. Lenin reasoned “The Russian[s] began” the revolution but it was up to German, French and English workers to finish it, implying that the final mature organizational form of the revolution and its decisive battles had to be waged in the West.739 Later, in his closing speech to the Congress, more specifically referring to the soviet concept, he predicted that “the time is not far off when the working people of all countries will unite into a single worldwide state and join in a common effort to build a new socialist edifice” and “the way to this construction runs through the Soviets, as a form of incipient world revolution.”740 However, just a few weeks later, he took a more cautious stance. The occasion this time was the Seventh Party Congress of the Bolsheviks in March, where Lenin spoke on the change of the party’s name from Social Democrat to Communist. Giving his views on the unfolding revolutionary situation and the civil war between the workers and counter-revolutionary forces in Finland at the time, Lenin explained frankly that in Finland “there were no Soviets but … there is, at any rate, a new type of power, proletarian power.” In his speech, Lenin suggested that what united the Finnish and the Russian revolutions at the time was not the soviet form, as an abstract concept, but the emergence of “a new type of state without bureaucracy, without police, without a regular army, a state in which bourgeois democracy has been replaced by a new democracy, a democracy that brings to the fore the vanguard of the working people, gives them legislative and executive authority, makes them responsible for military defense and creates state machinery that can re-educate

737

Shestoi s"ezd RSDRP (Bol’shevikov), pp.124-5. Ibid. p. 142. 739 Lenin, LCW Vol. 26, pp. 471-2. 740 Ibid. p. 482. 738

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the masses.” In Russia, Lenin continued, this experiment in the proletarian self-government had “scarcely begun and it has begun badly” due to the numerical marginality of the proletariat in the population and the “petty-bourgeois nature” of the country.741 The same cautious tone also dominated Lenin’s perspective when in August 1918, he wrote his “Letter to the American Workers.” Acknowledging that “revolution is developing in different forms and different tempos (and it cannot be otherwise)” in different countries, he warily noted that “the contours of… the world of socialism, are rising before us in the shape of Soviet Republic.” But he also added that “it is not surprising that this world does not come into being ready-made, does not spring forth like Minerva from the head of Jupiter.”742 Only one year after the November Revolution in Russia, after revolution started in Germany and workers and soldiers in Germany themselves organized soviets (or “Rate” in German), the Bolsheviks could speak and write confidently about the international role of the soviets as a model for revolutionary governance.743 In contrast to the Bolsheviks, the western Zimmerwald Leftists quickly and without much second thought accepted the universality of the soviet form. Two days after the November Revolution in Russia, the ISK and the Bolshevik CC Abroad published a joint resolution asking workers to show international support to the Revolution and urged them to “form everywhere Workers' and Soldiers' Councils as organs of your struggle for peace!”744 This was not the first time the Zimmerwald Leftists underlined the importance of the soviet form in their publications. Outside Russia, the German Zimmerwald Leftists were probably among the first groups to explore international significance of the soviet form. Johann Knief, in May 1917, when the Bolshevik party was not wholly clear on the question of soviet power even in Russia, reached the conclusion that a new stage of revolution was beginning in Russia and the goal of the soviets in this new stage was to seize power against the capitalist-imperialist government, thereby also shortening the road to socialism.745 Though Knief did not touch upon the question of the possible international

741

Lenin, LCW Vol 27, p. 132. Lenin, LCW Vol. 28, p. 74. 743 Ibid. p.206 744 “Appeal For the Support of the New Soviet Government” (8 November 1917) ISK Nachrichtendienst, No. 28, (10 November 1917). 745 J. Knief, “Die Zweite Etappe der Russischen Revolution”, Arbeiterpolitik No. 20 (19 May 1917), p.151. 742

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implementation of the soviet form in this early period, it was at least clear that the German Zimmerwald Leftists were keenly aware of their role and potential in the Russian setting. Henriette Roland-Holst went further. She was one of the first western Marxists to consider the soviets as an example and symbol for the world proletariat in its impending struggle for political power. In a revised and expanded edition of her book on the mass strike, the first edition of which was one of the initiators of the whole mass action debate that triggered the division between the centrists like Kautsky and the left-radicals, she discussed the international significance of the Russian soviets in the context of the mass action concept.746 The soviets, for Roland-Holst, were superior mass organizations than previous forms, including trade unions that developed in the 19th century. The trade-unions were never able to overcome the division of the working class into organized and non-organized sections, which in turn led to a duality in the class struggle based on orderly and planned, but extremely limited union actions and spontaneous outbursts of the nonunionized and highly exploited sections of the workers. The soviets finally overcame this division by organizing all workers in a given territory. They thereby managed to harness the revolutionary energy of the masses in an organized and strategic manner. Additionally, for Roland-Holst, the Soviets were far superior in so far as they were not merely organizations designed purely for economic struggle, but also for political struggle of the working class. She envisioned a Socialist World League of Soviets, with the spread of the soviet form to the capitalist countries, thereby finally overcoming the nation-state form and establishing the basis for the overcoming of violent nationalist competition in the form of capitalist-imperialist wars.747 Similarly, in late 1917 and early 1918, Gorter wrote that the Russian Revolution not only taught the world proletariat the need for united international action, but also the organizational form that action had to take worldwide; “It (The Russian Revolution) has discovered the form by which the proletariat can achieve victory: Workers' Councils (Soviets). These it has set up in every village and every province in the country. These Councils have all economic and political power. The Workers' Councils, which will destroy Capitalism and establish Socialism; which will expropriate Capitalism and transfer all power and wealth to Socialism; which will build up Socialism

746

She must have written the additions to the text before the November Revolution because these covers her analysis of the events in Russia until August, focusing especially on the July insurrection. The book was published in February 1918 and this second edition was dedicated to Anton Pannekoek. Henriette Roland-Holst, De revolutionaire Massa-Actie (Rotterdam: W. L. & J. Brusse’s Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1918). 747 Ibid. Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/nederlands/roland-holst/1918/massa-actie/8.htm

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politically and economically: these Councils are the form and expression of the New Society, of the New Humanity. At present they embrace only the struggling, the victorious proletariat; but in the coming time they will comprise the entire human race. The Councils of Labour—of Labour and nothing but Labour—will, in the days to come, be the highest and holiest corporation of humanity. Unity of the national proletariat; unity of the international proletariat; the uniting and organizing of the proletariat into Workers' Councils— these are the three great things the Russian Revolution has taught the workers of the world. If the West European, the North American, the world-proletariat, were united; if they would establish the new International; if they would all revolt at the same time; if they would organize themselves in Workers' Councils and take over all economic and political power—then would the World Revolution be accomplished. Already we see in the not distant future the New International, the great Workers' Council of all the nations of the earth. Already we see the International Workers' Council, the forerunner of the new, free, Communist Humanity.”748

Arbeiterpolitik and the Dutch Zimmerwald Leftists’ embrace of the soviet form was likely informed by the news and analysis reaching them via Stockholm. In this, Radek and Bolshevik ZB played a crucial role. Radek was one of the first to systematically explain the principles and operations of the soviet form of organization in der Bote der Russische Revolution. In an article titled “The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of Delegates” published a few weeks before the November Revolution in Russia, Radek explained the formation of the Petrograd Soviet as an outcome of an “instinctive,” almost organic, political reaction of the working class to the dynamic economic conditions created by capitalism: the soviet amalgamated the masses from a variety of workplaces and factories via their recallable delegates, unifying the entire mass and revolutionary spirit of Petrograd. The Soviet, just as it fought for economic goals (eight-hour workday, better working conditions) also fought for political goals (an end to the war, a Republic). According to Radek, the strength of soviets, in contrast to the parliamentary form, lay not in its legal authority over a specialized branch of an autonomously organized institution of violence (like the police or the army), but in its capacity to mobilize the entire working class mass of the city through its organic and direct connections with the proletarians. In contrast to the parliamentary struggle, where the socialist deputies are detached from the shopfloor, the soviet delegates remained factory workers, which tied them more firmly to their class and its conditions. This made the Soviets more in tune with the mood of the masses and set it apart from parliamentary form of representation. Radek

748

Herman Gorter, The World Revolution (Glasgow: Socialist Information and Research Bureau, 1920), pp. 76-7.

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argued that the Petrograd Soviet represented a universal alternative to the parliamentary form of struggle, despite possible changes and adaptations it may undergo in different local setting, because it rose with the active engagement of the workers in politics, in a continuous, dynamic and mass exchange of opinions. In that sense, the Soviets’ activity may have outwardly and from a superficial perspective looked chaotic, but for Radek, this was unavoidable since the masses’ active interest in politics could only be invigorated in revolutionary periods. Thus, the soviet was a product of revolutionary fermentation periods – again in distinction to the parliamentary form, where the dullness of daily drudgery of wage work excluded and alienated the masses from active political engagement whereas, in a complementary form, the political activity became the exclusive field of a few specialized parliamentary representatives.749 In that the sense, Radek’s analysis tied together the soviets and mass actions, the latter defined as constituting the soul of the former. After the November Revolution, events in Russia gave the theoretical tension between parliamentarism and the soviet form a new immediacy. Under Soviet power, a parliament (the socalled “Constituent Assembly”) elected by universal suffrage could finally convene.750 The Kadet supporters of the Provisional Government, who claimed that the soviet seizure of power was illegitimate were responsible themselves for the delay in the elections of the Constituent Assembly, fully aware that considering their party’s unpopularity in the towns and countryside, they had a slim chance of winning a majority in a democratically elected parliament.751 Thus, paradoxically, the elections to the Constituent Assembly occurred after the November Revolution, a revolution explicitly against the bourgeois form of government. As expected, this first democratic elections

749

Karl Radek: “Der Arbeiter- und Soldatendelegiertenrat” (“The Workers' and Soldiers' Council of Delegates”), Der Bote der russischen Revolution No. 3 (29 September 1917), pp. 1-5. 750 It is ironic that even under the Soviet power, the Right-SR and right-wing parties tried to swindle with the elections whereas in industrial cities the elections went smoothly and orderly. Radkey recounts cases of how especially in isolated villages and countryside the schoolteachers, priests and local notables tried to manipulate peasants to not to vote or outright erase the Bolshevik candidates from the electoral lists. Oliver H. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 44-48. 751 Ibid. p. 92. It must be noted here that a historian of the Constituent Assembly, L. G. Protasov, diverges from this view. Protasov claimed that the PG and Kadet’s delayed the elections of the Constituent Assembly, because they genuinely wished to carefully prepare a democratic election which took too much time. Lev Grigor′evich Protasov, “The All-Russian Constituent Assembly and the Democratic Alternative” in ed. Rex Wade, New Approaches to the Russian Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 251.

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for the first “bourgeois” parliament resulted in the defeat of the bourgeois parties.752 The main electoral competition in the elections and the ensuing struggle inside the Constituent Assembly was between socialists, between the pro-soviet Left SR and Bolshevik factions, and their RightSR and Menshevik opponents. The SR center, confident in the majority it gained in the elections for the Constituent Assembly, assured itself that the November Revolution was merely a transitory phase until the founding of a new government.753 Even in December, the Bolsheviks themselves were unclear about the path to follow about the relationship between the Constituent Assembly and the soviets. Some, like Lenin, were for the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly; he considered soviets far superior organs of democratic representation in any case. Others like Bukharin, briefly thought about expelling the counter-revolutionary deputies from the Assembly and turning it into a revolutionary convention, a formula inspired by the French Revolution.754 The issue at stake was not only the continuation of the soviet power, but also the fate of the decisions that the soviets hurriedly took in the first days of its power. The most important of these was the continuation of the cease-fire that the Petrograd Soviet declared on the day that it seized power. Thus, the form representation (soviets versus parliament or a combination of both) was entangled with the question of peace and the future direction of Russian society at large. On 5 December, in the first and only session of the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks, aiming to secure the gains of the November Revolution put a resolution in front of the pro-war SR majority Constituent Assembly asking it to ratify soviet power and its decisions. When the deputies refused, the Bolshevik caucus left the assembly. After the Bolsheviks left, the Left SRs lingered a bit longer and also left. Finally, the anarchist Kronstadt sailor, Jelezniakov, tasked with the security of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks (it was clearly a Bolshevik ironic gesture to assign

752

The Bolsheviks secured about 10,000,000 votes out of a total of nearly 42,000,000. However, even with their meager success, the anti-Soviet groups from Mensheviks on the left to the extreme-right protofascists on the right could finally find themselves a representative organizational basis. The pogromist extreme right, with its slogan, “Beat the Jews and Save Russia” managed to get a few deputies elected under the cover of the Union of Russian People and Kadet lists. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, p. 11. Nonetheless, in general the parties of the educated middle class, church, old monarchy, bourgeoisie, land owners and bureaucrats failed in the elections. 753 Rex Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 277-8. 754 Ibid. p. 278.

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the security of the parliament to anarchists), at about 4 AM approached to the Chair, SR Chernov, and asked him politely that he and his sailors were tired and the assembly should dissolve. The assembly quietly dispersed after a few protests, which ended the brief life of Russian bourgeois parliamentarism with a whimper. Eventually, after the first session of the Constituent Assembly, the Soviet Central Executive Committee (hereafter CEC) dissolved that Assembly, acknowledging the final transfer of power to the Soviets. Lenin’s Theses from 11 December – discussed and accepted in the Bolshevik CC read in part: “3. For the transition from the bourgeois to the socialist system, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Republic of Soviets (of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies) is not only a higher type of democratic institution (as compared with the usual bourgeois republic crowned by a Constituent Assembly) but is the only form capable of securing the most painless transition to socialism.”755

This was a radical departure from the views of Kautsky and the Social Democratic Erfurtian program. It finalized the breach in the world socialist movement that dated to the mass action debate that had begun about a decade ago.756 As Victor Serge noted, the dissolution of the Constitutive Assembly caused a greater uproar abroad than in Russia. 757 The dictatorship of proletariat concept created a great deal of confusion that the passage of time since the November Revolution has not resolved. The western Zimmerwald Leftists watched the unfolding revolution and its multiple crises closely. In these early days of the revolution, many Zimmerwald Leftists who witnessed the birth of Soviet power in Russia were in an ecstatic state. Pannekoek wrote that was happening in Russia

755

Lenin, “Theses on The Constituent Assembly” LCW Vol. 26, pp. 379-383. None other than Kautsky, the author of the Erfurt program, recognized this as such. In his polemical book about the “Proletarian Dictatorship” directed against the Bolsheviks, he wrote referring to the Erfurt Program that achieving political democracy, meaning parliamentary democracy, was the method for reaching socialism. Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (London: The National Labour Press, 1919). p. 4. 757 Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, p. 148. The confusion about the question persisted in the following decades. For instance, Draper was probably right when he wrote “different people discussing ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ were using a different vocabulary, talking past each other” but he was wrong when he wrote “... Lenin worked out for himself, or invented, a unique definition of ‘dictatorship’ which, as far as I know, came out of his own head.” Hal Draper, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: From Marx to Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), p. 80. 756

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was like the realization of what many considered a vague dream of the Zimmerwald Leftists. It was like experiencing a “utopian novel from the future” in the here and now.758 He wrote, no minute detail, no struggle and difficulty in Russia was alien or trivial. For Fraina in the US, the revolution was the greatest revolution in world history. Roland-Holst, Pannekoek, Gorter, Fraina, Knief and others in their Dutch, German and English LRI publications translated, commented, and theoretically elaborated on the confrontation between the Bolsheviks and their liberal and socialist opponents which ultimately took the form a confrontation between the soviets and the Constituent Assembly. For these LRIs, that was the highest form of class struggle, even though it may have appeared as the tribulations of a country recently emerging from autocracy into a western style capitalist democracy. Pannekoek’s first reflections on the events, published in the Dutch Zimmerwald Leftist journal De Nieuwe Tijd, summarized the conflict in Russia without any a priori, highly theoretical elaborations. Though he was clearly and unapologetically pro-Bolshevik, Pannekoek had an unusual matter-of-fact style in these early analytical writings. In the article that he wrote days after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in Russia, Pannekoek defended the Soviet CEC’s action as unavoidable. If the Soviets did not seize the power and dissolve the Constituent Assembly in December, he calculated that the counter-revolutionaries would have interpret this as a sign of weakness and a counter-revolution, either through Kornilov or some other elements in the army hierarchy, would eliminate the soviets. Even if this did not happen, the peasant soldiers in the front would seize the opportunity created by the laxity in the army discipline to massively leave the ranks, creating a chaotic situation throughout the country. The Bolsheviks, by giving a clear orientation to the unfolding revolutionary situation and giving a clear expression to the worker and peasant masses’ aspirations, in fact did the best that could have been done by a revolutionary party in the given situation. Thus, he ridiculed the Mensheviks, and “all the half-hearted elements (for example, the group of the Novaya Zhizn, Gorky's organ), who shrank back from the great deed of the proletarian dictatorship, resisted it, trying to instill fear, mistrust, and hesitation in the hearts of the people.”759

758

Anton Pannekoek, “De Rusissche Revolutie” De Nieuwe Tijd (19 December 1917), p. 441. Ibid. p. 439.

759

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The Western Zimmerwald Leftists’ enthusiasm about the rise of the soviet power was not shared by their centrist opponents and the dissolution of the Constitution Assembly gave them the reason to berate the Bolsheviks. Kautsky spearheaded the attack. He did not shy away from resorting to racist, orientalist stereotypes about the “east.” Kautsky argued, the defense of the proletarian dictatorship by the Bolsheviks, as opposed to a western style parliamentary socialism, could only lead to an “Asian socialism” or a “Tartar socialism.”760 His categorical objection to a proletariat from a backward country providing an example for the world proletariat was a persistent dogmatic rhetorical theme that he had employed against his Marxist opponents since the mass action debate of 1910. But what was unique in his writings after November 1917 was his more frank rejection of a non-parliamentary strategy for reaching socialism. Defining a parliamentary democracy as a political organization that reached its most developed historic form in western Europe, Kautsky refused to engage with the left-radical arguments that parliamentary democracy was not a classneutral political form. For Kautsky, parliamentary democracy was the ultimate and highest expression of modern, mass political engagement in politics, whereas soviets merely expressed the immaturity of the proletariat in Russia, its unpreparedness to govern by civil means through parliaments, a form suitable to the violent and backward Russian conditions.761 While Kautsky’s position was somewhat consistent with his earlier anti-mass action position, even a supporter of the November Revolution like Rosa Luxemburg had doubts about the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. In her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution written in prison, but only published after her death, she criticized the new Soviet government for dissolving the Constituent Assembly as a dangerous step. Interpreting this as “the elimination of democracy,” she worried that the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly would sever the ties between the wider masses and the revolutionary government. Instead of dissolution, she argued that the Bolsheviks had to push for a re-election, which Luxemburg predicted that would give the Bolsheviks and their Left SR allies a majority.762 Clearly, even in mid-1918, when she put these views on paper, Rosa Luxemburg was either unaware (which is likely considering that she was imprisoned)

760

Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1920), pp. 231-2. Kautsky, The Dictatorship, p. 93. 762 Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution” in Peter Hudis, Kevin Anderson, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks p. 302 and p. 300. 761

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or did not take very seriously the Bolshevik collective agreement on the idea that the soviet form could actually be an instrument of working class political power. In opposition to the left-wing critics of the Soviet power, the Zimmerwald Leftists in Germany, Netherlands, and the US took up its defense in the latter half of 1918. In a major article titled “Bolshevism and Democracy” published in Arbeiterpolitik, Pannekoek, almost verbatim, echoed the Bolshevik position on Soviet power. Democracy, in the sense that it is defined broadly as the “government of people,” was a contradiction in terms, wrote Pannekoek. “People” as an abstract category did not reflect the social reality, which included contradictory class interests, such as those of “exploiters and workers” who “have little or no common concern.” Thus, reasoned Pannekoek, opposing social classes could not have a common will. And if, “according to the strictest, most radical, formal democracy, the workers and bourgeoisie were properly represented in a parliament,” they would not be able to rule together.763 The new historical epoch opened by the imperialist rivalry and the general decline of the capitalist mode of production, eliminated the ground for a class compromise, as workers and the capital had openly antagonistic immediate interests: the former needed peace and socialism, while later needed to mobilize the national economy for war, in order to preserve wage labor relations. Under these conditions, the soviets represented a superior form of mass politics. Pannekoek wrote that soviets in Russia represented: “a form of democracy superior to formal democracy, enabling the masses to express their vital interests… the workers’ councils in the towns, the peasants' councils in the rural areas, the councils charged with various administrations that form the basis of the government... It is the real need to reorganize social life that has led the Russian people to establish this flexible administrative machinery, which also constitutes the organ of the dictatorship of the proletariat in which the bourgeoisie cannot participate. The bourgeoisie will not be excluded in any artificial way from government, for instance, by losing its right to vote; quite simply, it will be barred from this organization, which is based not on the people but on labor… The ex-manager or owner of an industry who cooperates as a technical officer under the guidance of the workers' council can claim equality with other factory personnel. The intellectual workers-doctors, teachers, artists-form their own councils, which collectively decide about matters concerning them. All these councils remain in close, permanent contact with the masses, their membership constantly renewed and replaced. The formation of a new bureaucracy is thus prevented, and a monopoly in administrative skills is broken. In comparison to this true self-government, one sees how even the most democratic of parliaments is unable to create a people's government, and ends up as a government of

763

Arbeiterpolitik, Volume 3, No. 50, December 14, 1918, pp. 303-4. This text was also published as an independent pamphlet by the International Communists of Germany. See for instance: July 1919 edition by the “Ortsgruppe Neumünster der IKD”.

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parliamentarians. Periodically, parliamentarians must win the trust of the people; they gather votes with eloquent speeches and promise-crammed programs; then they are the masters once again. Then, after they escape the direct influence of the masses and face pressure only from their peers, they do as they like throughout the parliamentary session. But only in appearance are they all-powerful; the ministry depends upon bureaucrats. In all the democratic republics of the world, the alleged separation between the legislative and the executive branches is the means of ruling the masses, while giving them the impression that the masses themselves are exercising power, and is therefore the means for ensuring the domination of capital. In France, America, Switzerland, and elsewhere, in spite of all the talk of democracy, the masses are dominated and exploited by capital. And, despite universal suffrage, the masses are reduced to impotence, from which they cannot escape...”764

The American Zimmerwald Leftists around the Socialist Propaganda League were the first to defend and propagate for the soviet form in English, in similar terms used by Pannekoek. Similar to the Dutch and German Zimmerwald Leftists, SPL’s English-language publications had systematically translated articles from the Bolshevik press beginning from spring 1917.765 Towards the end of 1918, Fraina, with the aid of Rutgers and others from the SPL, edited and compiled several Bolshevik texts in two major books summarizing the conclusions of the American Zimmerwald Leftists on the Russian Revolution(s), defending for the first time in the western hemisphere, the Bolsheviks and their position on soviets. Revolutionary Socialism: A Study in Socialist Reconstruction766 and The Proletarian Revolution in Russia were both published in autumn 1918. In these works, echoing Marx, Fraina argued that the proletarian revolution could not take its inspiration from the past bourgeois revolutions. For Fraina, the Russian Revolution was “an incomparably mightier event than any previous revolution: larger in scope and deeper in ultimate meaning than the French Revolution.”767 The Russian Revolution marked a

764

Ibid. The English translation from ed. Bricianer, Pannekoek and the Workers Councils. pp. 151-152. In total, the SPL organs edited by Fraina, (The Class Struggle and the New International) published respectively 62 and 11 articles by various Bolshevik authors between May 1917 and November 1919. Akito Yamaouchi, “The Bolshevik Literature in the USA: From March 1917 Through the Spring of 1919,” Seiyoshigaku, no. 159 (March 1991): 35–51. 766 Fraina acknowledged the Dutch Zimmerwald Leftist Rutgers’ contribution in his preface, writing, “I wish to express the deep appreciation I feel to my good Comrade, S. J. Rutgers, my colleague for one year on The New International, who read the manuscript of this book, making many an acute criticism and suggestion. A member of the revolutionary Social Democratic Party of Holland, Comrade Rutgers’ sojourn of two years in this country and his activity in the Socialist Propaganda League were a source of inspiration and ideas to the comrades associated with him”. Louis C. Fraina, Revolutionary Socialism: A Study in Socialist Reconstruction (New York: The Communist Press Publishers, 1918). p. III. 767 Fraina ed., The Proletarian Revolution in Russia p. V. 765

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“...decisive break with the revolutionary traditions and ideology of the past. To compare it with previous revolutions, fundamentally, is to miss its epochal significance and misrepresent its character and action. There are no real historic standards by which to measure the proletarian revolution in Russia; it is making its own history, creating the standards by which alone this revolution and subsequent proletarian revolution may be measured…”768

According to Fraina, when the soviets dissolved the Constituent Assembly, they were also severing their ties with the moribund traditions of the past bourgeois democratic and republican revolutions. The Constituent Assembly represented the last vestige of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition, concretized as a political demand that became popular after the March Revolution. However, by November, the Soviets rendered it unappealing. Comparing the soviet form and bourgeois democracy, he argued that democracy itself had a class character and that it was not a supra-historical concept beyond class struggle.769 For the Zimmerwald Leftists in the west, the clearest expression of the failure of bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism was the world war. Bourgeois democracy did not prohibit the democratic governments from entering an expansionist war, wrote Gorter. For him, on a question of life and death, like war, bourgeois democracy could be instrumentalized to legitimate a war against the best interests of the working class masses: “...the plutocratic Republic of France is a “democracy”, and world-dominating Britain is a “democracy,” and America, land of trusts and monopolies, armed strikebreakers who organise legal murder of the workers’ leaders, is also a “democracy.” Have they done anything to prevent war? No! England, through her policy under Edward VII. of encircling Germany, helped to bring it on. America joined in as soon as she discovered that it was a fight for world-domination. And will these democracies make peace if they win? If Germany and a stricken Europe threaten them with war, or if the Allies are beaten and Germany at the head of all the nations of Europe threatens them still further, will they make peace? No! In the making of Capital abroad, absolute Monarchies and democratic Republics are alike... In the greed of power, the lust of profit, all nations are alike.”770

The Zimmerwald Left’s theoretical elaborations about the struggle between the Constitutional Assembly and the Soviets came to maturation in latter half of 1918. Zimmerwald Leftists outside Russia brought together the pieces of news and articles that managed to escape the censorship of the tightening political cordon-sanitaire around the new Soviet state. One of the most

768

Ibid. p. VII. Ibid. p. 306-7. 770 Gorter, The World Revolution, p. 35. 769

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important outlets for this information continued to be the ISK’s Nachtsrightendienst. In the last issue of the bulletin, published in August 1918, a summary of the theoretical assimilations of the Bolsheviks (probably written by Bukharin) on Soviet power and its relation to democracy was presented.771 This important text, probably published in German before the translation of Lenin’s State and Revolution, asserted that the Soviet form was the form discovered by the Russian proletariat as the concrete form of the “Dictatorship of Proletariat”. According to Bukharin, as distinct from the formal bourgeois conceptions of democracy, the soviet form was truly universal, both in class terms, giving the masses of working people a political instrument directly under their control, but also in geographic terms. This point was uniquely important because it historicized the overcoming of bourgeois parliamentarism, as an overcoming of geographically narrow and national political institutions by a universal, potentially global power of the proletarian power. Thus, for Bukharin, the Soviet state’s opposition to parliamentarism did not represent a purely abstract difference based on alternative electoral and representational approaches, but a more substantive historical difference in that the Soviets represented the overcoming of national antagonisms, a political instrument that could potentially overcome the division of the world into nation states: “The proletarian democracy is NOT democracy in the old sense of the word” as it was a democracy “innerhalb der arbeitenden Klassen” [within the working class] (theses 11). The parliamentary republic, as its aim was to represent the “united nation” was a capitalistic nationalistic conception. The bourgeoisie needed it to preserve the illusion that national interests belonged to all classes and it let the illusion of national self-government persist. In contrast, the Soviet power rested on the MASS ORGANS of the proletariat. The text then went on enumerating in detail what kind of specific organizations exercise the proletarian power in different political and economical sectors of society.”772

Later, the appearance of Lenin’s State and Revolution in west European languages confirmed (or at least that is how they saw it) the western Zimmerwald Leftists’ interpretations. In it, Lenin gave explicit reference to Pannekoek and his polemics with Kautsky.773 Radek’s pamphlet

771

Angelica Balabanoff, “Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung: 1914-1919,” Archiv Fur Die Geschichte Des Sozialismus Der Arbeiterbewegung, no. XIII (1928), p. 275. 772 “Thesen über die sozialistische Revolution und die Aufgaben des Proletariats wahrend seiner Diktatur in Russland.” Ibid. p. 278. 773 The first German edition outside Russia was probably published in late 1918. The earliest copy I could find is from the October 1918, published by Franz Pfemfert, the editor of the left radical Die Aktion. https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb11127883?page=4,5 In any case, this was the translation of the First Russian edition as the second complete edition of the book (with the addition of the 3rd Section to the Second Chapter) was published in Russia only in December 1918.

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Development of Socialism from Utopia, like Lenin, also endorsed Pannekoek’s position retrospectively, situating the proletarian dictatorship as the missing organizational form in the mass action debate: “In this struggle for power, the question arose here and there: "In what should the power of the victorious working class be expressed?" But it was nowhere clearly put on the agenda, and for very simple reasons. The question of how the worker battalions should be set in motion, the question of their general marching goal, but not of the stages to be passed on the way, was only just on the agenda of history. To prove the necessity of the mass strike, the radical socialists pointed to the decline of parliamentarianism. They showed how it was becoming more and more a citadel of the capitalist plunderers: they severely criticized the fake republic and fake democracy in the republican countries, and the question often arose: “How do you transform capitalist democracy and its parliamentary organs into the organs of power of the victorious proletariat?” When Anton Pannekoek, the clearest head of Western European socialism, answered the question by saying that the capitalist state, even in its democratic forms, should be smashed and new organs of power of the working people in the fire of the proletarian revolution, he was drawn from anarchism by Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxist theorist of the Second International. However correct Pannekoek's answer was, it was only half an answer. It pointed out that the coercive organs of capital must be smashed, but it did not show what coercive organs the proletariat would have to form in order to carry out and consolidate its victory.”774

Meanwhile, in the world of western diplomacy, the dictatorship and democracy question gained a new dimension: the Wilsonian peace program presenting the Entente as the defenders of democracy against the central powers versus the Bolshevik program of world peace through socialism against both the imperialist powers.

774

Karl Radek, Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft, Wien 1918. This was later republished as an introduction to Bukharin’s Das Programm der Kommunisten. Quoting the same passage, H. Schurer wrote “thus, at the end of 1918, Radek hailed Pannekoek, his old comrade-in-arms of Bremen, as one of the forerunners of Leninism”. H. Schurer, “Anton Pannekoek and the Origins of Leninism,” The Slavonic and East European Review 41, no. 97 (June 1963), p. 342.

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IX.

The Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty and the Isolation of the Revolution in the East

While the debates over dictatorship and democracy, soviets versus parliaments, raged on, the new Soviet state worked with a dizzying tempo, issuing more than 950 decrees in its first nine months of rule.775 Among the widely varying decisions of the Soviet CEC were the nationalization of banks and industries, recognition of workers control in the workplace, distribution of land to the peasants, secularization of education, abolition of inheritance on the privately owned means of capitalist production, abolition of feudal titles, unemployment welfare, right to divorce, the right to swift naturalization for aliens, equality to all minority religious and ethnic groups, and the right to national self-determination. Within less than a year, Russia was radically transformed. However, the political and legal changes that the CEC made did not have the power to alleviate the material conditions of the country. The working class in the proletarian centers of Russia hardly fared any better in purely economic terms after the November revolution. On the contrary, as the new Soviet power struggled to transform industry that was militarized in the service of the total war into peacetime production, it faced a dire scarcity of raw materials. The industrial centers were cut off from the agricultural and mining regions in the south by the gathering counter-revolutionary forces. The damage caused by the war on the industrial infrastructure made even a modest recovery difficult. For example, according to the Moscow Food Committee attached to the city Soviet, the city had to produce 100 million rubles worth of products to exchange with the peasants in order to feed the city in March 1918, but it could only produce about 16 million rubles worth of commodities that could be exchanged in February of the same year.776 In Petrograd, the industrial production almost came to a halt as the number of workers employed in industry fell from 406,312 in January 1917 to 120,555 in September 1918, less than a third of the pre-October

775

Yuri Akhapkin, ed., First Decrees of Soviet Power (London: Lawrance & Wishart Ltd, 1970), p.11. William J. Chase, Workers, Society and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918–1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 22. 776

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levels.777 In economic terms, the immediate victors of the November Revolution were not the workers but the peasants, whose land demands were met by the new state’s decrees. Even though the new government did not have the power to immediately change the material circumstances of Russia, it did have it within its powers to take Russia out of the war. The declaration of a unilateral armistice on 8 November 1917, the day after the revolution, was one of its first acts. In this sense, it is possible to recognize the November Revolution as a grand political gesture of proletarian international solidarity. The decree on peace adopted by the Soviet CEC called “all the belligerent peoples and their governments to start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace” without “annexations… and indemnities.” The document emphasized that the Bolsheviks considered it “the greatest of crimes against humanity to continue this war over the issue of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered” and refused to accept any peace settlement based on partition of national territories between major powers. As a method of diplomacy, the Soviet state denounced “secret diplomacy” and demanded the conduct of peace negotiations to be open and public, further declaring that it will begin on its own part to publish secret treaties “endorsed or concluded by the government of landowners and capitalists” during the dual power period, between March and November 1917.778 In order to begin the negotiations, it proposed an immediate armistice. Finally, and most importantly, the Soviet state announced that while the peace negotiations had to be carried out between governments, its ultimate belief was that a lasting peace could only be achieved through unified action of the working classes, singling out the “three most advanced nations of mankind and the largest states participating in the present war, namely, Great Britain, France and Germany.”

777

David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 429. 778 The Soviet and Bolshevik papers began publishing secret government treaties the same day the Soviet Peace decree was published in Izvestiia and Pravda. These documents revealed treaties between the Entente powers involving territorial offers and compensations to Italy, Rumania and Greece in exchange of their support in the war, treaties concerning the partition of Turkey among others. James Bunyan and H.H. Fisher, eds., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1918: Documents and Materials (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1934, p. 242. A particularly scandalous document revealed a secret conference of French, British and German bankers that took place after the March Revolution in Switzerland, in which the bank managers as belligerent powers’ unofficial representatives discussed the possibility of entering into peace negotiations with Germany in order to jointly repress the revolution in Russia. The Class Struggle, March-April 1918, No.2 (New York), p. 224.

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This emphasis on the west European proletariat revealed the influence of the Zimmerwald Leftist internationalist perspective on the Soviet peace strategy.779 An American journalist, Albert Rhys Williams, who witnessed the 8 November CEC session recounted the reactions of ordinary workers, soldiers, and peasants in the audience when Lenin read the declaration of peace: “a burly soldier stood, tears in his eyes as he embraced a worker who had risen and was clapping furiously... A Viborg man, his eyes hollow from lack of sleep, his face gaunt beneath his beard, looked around the hall, dazed, and, crossing himself, muttered: ‘Pust budet konets voine!’ (May it be the end of the war!).”780 Before the draft was voted, Bazarov, a representative of the Rovno Soviet, said: “My Council instructed me to seek a truce on all fronts and a just democratic peace. All the soldiers who are sitting in the trenches, who are sitting in the rear, all the soldiers not only in Russia, but also in all other belligerent countries, will vote for this proposal, just as I will vote”781 Despite the exuberant mood among workers and soldiers, the Entente diplomatic and government circles reacted with displeasure to the Soviet decree on peace. An American diplomat, George Kennan, who worked in the American diplomatic mission during 1920s and 1930s, and influenced the policy of the US government in the first years of the Cold War, wrote in his monumental work on the Soviet-American relations that the Soviet peace declaration was received by the Entente governments as a “bitterly unfriendly,” an “offensive” move, “an act of outright perfidy and betrayal.” Kennan wrote that the new Soviet government offended the Allied governments by its peace terms because it “clearly threatened violation of the formal obligation Russia had assumed in 1914, vis-a-vis the other Entente powers”. Worse, Kennan recounted frankly, it revealed the colonialist mindset of the American, French and British government figures that the Soviet “demand... was not only for a termination of hostilities but for the immediate abolition of the colonial relationship everywhere. In this way the authors of the decree burdened its primary purpose with ulterior demands of an inflammatory and propagandistic nature, bound to be

779

“Decree on Peace, Issued by The Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets” (26 (8) November, 1917) in Akhapkin, ed., First Decrees of Soviet Power, pp. 20-22. 780 Albert Rhys Williams, Journey into Revolution: Petrograd, 1917-1918 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 132. 781 Quoted in S.M. Maiorov, “Oktyabr"skaya revolyutsiya i osushchestvlenie leninskoi politiki mira,” Voprosy Istorii, no. 11 (1957), p. 29.

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offensive and unacceptable to the leading Allied nations.”782 The Soviet government not only offended the Allied governments by its desire to end the war and colonialism, but also by immediately publishing the secret diplomatic agreements about territorial acquisitions. The initial reaction of different social classes to the declaration of unilateral armistice was anticipated by the Zimmerwald Leftists. This anticipation also shaped the Soviet state’s foreign policy throughout the remaining period of the war. In a practical but paradoxical sense, the new Soviet state’s peace policy, like the preceding social pacifist-defensist and Kadet peace policies, was two-tiered. It was addressed to the belligerent states, but it also directly appealed to the world working class. The Bolsheviks were conscious about the contradictory character of this policy. However, while the PG’s and soviet policy during the pre-November period alienated both the working-class and the world diplomatic establishment with its compromise strategy, the Bolsheviks appealed to the world of professional diplomacy only out of necessity in order to reach out to the masses when the direct channels of communication were cut off, not shirking from declaring the Soviet intention to strictly serve only the interest of the world working class for a general peace. In this sense, Soviet diplomacy was “new” or rather, it was a diplomacy from below, carried through mass initiative. Sovnarkom’s first concrete step towards peace came in the form of an instruction to Nikolai Dukhonin, the acting commander-in-chief of the Russian armies that the Soviet state inherited from by then defunct PG, to immediately start armistice negotiations with his counterparts in the belligerent armies on 20 (7) November 1917.783 Encouraged by the diplomatic representatives of the Entente powers, Dukhonin refused, while keeping his post at the Stavka (the Russian Military High-Command set up in the first year of the war).784 Resistance of the Stavka and the Russian top brass did not faze Sovnarkom’s determination to reach an immediate armistice agreement. Instead, the Soviet state initiated a remarkable peace offensive in November, directly delegating the

782

George Frost Kennan, Russia Leaves the War. Vol. 1 of the Soviet-American Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 75. 783 “Order to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, General Dukhonin, to Begin Negotiations for a Truce” (20 November 1917), Dekrety Sovetskoy vlasti: Tom 1, 25 Oktyabrya 1917 - 16 Marta 1918 g., (Moskva: Gos. Izd-vo politicheskoĭ literatury, 1957), p. 53. 784 Dukhonin refused to follow Sovnarkom orders and circulated Allied diplomatic messages in the army, which refused to acknowledge the Sovnarkom as a legitimate government. Maiorov, “Oktyabr"skaya revolyutsiya i osushchestvlenie leninskoi politiki mira,” pp. 31-2.

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initiative of the peace process to the mass of rank-and-file soldiers. In a decree appealing to the soldiers over the heads of the generals and diplomats, Sovnarkom called on the ordinary soldier in the frontline regiments to elect representatives through military committees and soldiers’ soviets and send them across the front to the German trenches so as to establish armistice by themselves.785 Similar to a wildcat strike, this was mass wildcat diplomacy, mass action adapted to the militarypolitical field of international diplomacy. Russian soldiers crossed the trenches and negotiated armistice throughout mid-November and succeeded in effectively undermining, if not ending the war.786 Thus, the Soviet policy of fraternization from below, carried out by soldiers themselves, at least in practice if not de jure, ended the world war on the eastern Front. Once the armistice was settled at the highest level in mid-December, the Soviet government requested a brief period of interval before starting the peace negotiations in order to invite the other Entente governments to the table for a general peace settlement. Through official diplomatic channels, the Soviet state used all its meager might to bring the Entente powers to the negotiation table between November and December 1917. In his capacity as the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Trotsky conducted talks with the unofficial Entente delegates, sent several requests explaining that the Soviet goal was to conduct negotiations for a general peace, and protested the refusal of the

785

The Sovnarkom declaration read, “Soldiers! The cause of peace is in your hands. You will prevent the counter-revolutionary generals from disrupting the great cause of peace, you will surround them with guards to... prevent these generals from evading the judgment that awaits them. You will maintain the strictest revolutionary and military order. Let the regiments in position immediately elect those authorized to formally enter into negotiations on an armistice with the enemy. The Council of People's Commissars gives you the right to do so. Keep us informed of every step of the negotiations by all means. Only the Council of People's Commissars has the right to sign the final armistice agreement. Soldiers! The cause of peace is in your hands. Vigilance, endurance, energy, and the cause of peace will win!” “Radiogram to the army and navy about the dismissal of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, General Dukhonin, with a call to elect plenipotentiaries for truce negotiations.” 22 (9) November 1917, Dekrety Sovetskoy vlasti: Tom 1, pp. 63-5. 786 A historian of the Russian Army, Allan Wildman, explained in detail how this process happened, with the initiative of the ordinary soldiers and he concluded, “as in the case of the Kornilov affair, the soldiers needed little instruction on how to proceed—they needed only to prod their officers and committees to undertake the formal arrangements after they had prepared the ground; the pressure was continued until the agreements were solemnized. At the same time, they could see to it that the negotiations were extended outward and upward until agreements blanketed entire armies and the front, ending in a general armistice and the initiation of peace negotiations between the respective governments. All this was perfectly clear to ordinary soldiers, and the enthusiasm and disciplined restraint they manifested while engaging in appropriate actions is remarkable indeed.” Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army Vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 385.

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Entente governments to even response to his pleas – all in vain. The Entente Governments opposed even recognizing the Soviet government and, in the 28 November Paris Entente summit, they resolved to enter into official talks only with a “stable government” in Russia, clearly perceiving the Soviets’ hold on power as transitory and illegitimate. Further, the British, French, and American governments not only refused to recognize the Soviet government, but immediately began preparations for its overthrow through direct military intervention. Even though these plans did not materialize until summer 1918, the Entente governments aided and supported counter-revolutionary insurgencies in Russia.787 Moreover, by leaving the Soviet state alone and vulnerable in the face of the Quadruple alliance, the Entente governments indirectly, and perhaps deliberately, gave a de facto green light to Germany to impose the harshest possible conditions or an outright military offensive on the Soviets. The Soviet state entered into negotiations alone, on 22 December 1917 in Brest-Litovsk, a Polish fortress that the German high command in charge of the eastern Armies used as its headquarters. However the Soviet delegation788 conscious that its trump card was not diplomatic or military but moral, determined its strategy accordingly.789 The Soviet delegation insisted as a

787

N. Ye. Bistrova, “Russkiy vopros” v 1917 - nachale 1920 g.: Sovetskaya Rossiya i Velikiye Derjavi (Moskva: Tsentr Gumanitarnih Initsiativ, 2016), p. 34 and p. 41. 788 The first Bolshevik delegation included five seasoned revolutionaries (including a Left-SR, Anastasia Bitsenko, who was recently freed from a Siberian prison where she was jailed for shooting and killing Viktor Sakharov, Minister of War during the Russo-Japanese War) and old Zimmerwald Leftist, Sokolnikov), one sailor, one soldier (Nicholas Beilakov), one worker (Obukhov) and one peasant (Roman Stashkov). John Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918 (London: Macmillan and Co, 1938), p. 87. 789 An “Appeal from the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the R.S.F.S.R. to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe” from 19 December explicitly and clearly underlined this strategic view of the Soviet state: “The Council of People’s Commissars, while entering into negotiations with the existing Governments, penetrated as are both sides with imperialist tendencies, has never for a moment turned from the path of social revolution. A true, democratic people’s peace will still have to be struggled for. The first round in this struggle finds in power, everywhere except Russia, the old monarchist and capitalist Governments which were responsible for the present war, and which have not yet accounted before their duped peoples for the waste of blood and treasure. We are forced to begin negotiations with those Governments... In negotiating for peace the Soviet Government has set itself a double task: first, to achieve the speediest possible cessation of the shameful and criminal slaughter which is laying Europe waste and second, to assist with all means at our disposal the working class in all lands to overthrow the sway of capital and seize State power for the purpose of a democratic and socialist reconstruction of Europe and the whole of humanity... It should be clear to socialists in all countries, but especially to socialists in Germany, that there is an irreconcilable difference between the peace programme of

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prerequisite to conduct the negotiations that they had to be open, that its transcripts had to be made available to the press. In modern history, this was the first major international diplomatic meeting where negotiations took place completely open to the public. The Soviet peace terms strongly emphasized the rights of nations to self-determination as a guiding principle. Presented by Adolf Joffe in the first round of negotiations, the terms stated that in the occupied territories and countries, as well as in colonies, all territorial questions had to be resolved by free elections and referendums by the people involved with their full right of separation and independence recognized. The Soviet program unambiguously opposed any one-sided economic punishment brought to bear upon any country as a condition of reaching a general peace, stating that, “economic boycott, economic subjection of one country to another by means of compulsory commercial agreements, separate customs agreements, restricting the freedom to trade of other countries, sea-blockade without directly military purposes, etc.” was “impermissible”.790 In the first phase of the negotiations, from December through January 1918, divisions inside the German government and its allies led the Quadruple alliance delegation in Brest-Litovsk to adopt a position that indulged the Soviet delegation in a political debate about the world peace. However, it is difficult to assess to what degree the wider masses of workers around the world received and were moved by the Soviet message in this period. Sections of the central and eastern European workers in general reacted enthusiastically to the internationalist message from Russia. There were clear signs of rejuvenation in the revolutionary underground. In Linz, Austria, the industrial workers from major factories began clandestine activities to organize workers councils in December 1917 and tried to establish links with the Russian POWs. Following the opening of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations and as a result of the

the Russian workers and peasants and that of the German capitalists, land-owners and generals. If nothing but these two programmes were to meet, peace would obviously be impossible, for the Russian people have not overthrown the monarchy and bourgeoisie in their own land merely to bow before the monarchs and capitalists in other lands. Peace can only be brought nearer, realised and guaranteed, if the voice of the workers makes itself heard, firmly and resolutely, both in Germany and in the lands of her allies. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian and Turkish workers must oppose to the programme of imperialism brought forward by their ruling classes, their own revolutionary programme of agreement and co- operation between the toilers and exploited classes in all countries.” The Soviet Union and Peace (London: Martin Lawrance Limited, 1929), pp. 30-32. 790 Ibid. pp. 33-35.

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intensification of the food crisis in the country in the winter months, spontaneous strikes combining political and economic demands erupted in January in the Austria-Hungarian Empire. On 6 January 1918, thousands of workers in Budapest protested in front of the German embassy for the German government’s apparent refusal to accept the Soviet peace program in Brest-Litovsk.791 In Vienna, a spontaneous general strike erupted in January catching even the Austrian Social Democrats by surprise. The strikers in Vienna formed a workers’ soviet, demanding that the government cease hostilities against Soviet Russia and immediately enter the peace negotiations on Soviet terms. The government officials did not attempt to quell the protests by force and the Austrian Social Democrats dispersed the soviet.792 This ferment in the country and the fear it caused among the Austrian ruling circles determined the attitude of Austria-Hungarian foreign minister, Ottokar Czernin, in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. He was inclined to pursue a softer line on the Soviet state and accede to its demands. This briefly caused a serious schism between Czernin and his German hardliner counterparts. In one remarkable instance during the first days of the negotiations in December, Joffe told Czernin point blank that their actual goal was to raise the revolution in Austria-Hungary as well. Czernin, an aristocratic diplomat unaccustomed to negotiate with revolutionaries and workers, wrote in his diary sarcastically commenting on Joffe’s words that “we shall hardly need any assistance from the good Joffe, I fancy, in bringing about a revolution among ourselves… the people will manage that, if the Entente persist in refusing to come to terms”.793 In Germany, the workers’ reaction to the Soviet peace offensive was less spontaneously sympathetic, but no less militant and significant. Following the momentary success of the Austrian workers, the semi-underground German Obleute (shop stewards) movement led by Richard Müller, a group that opposed the Trade Union bureaucracy from a centrist perspective and stood closer

791

Borislav Chernev, Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe, 1917-1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 112-3. 792 Braunthal, History of the International. Vol. 2, p. 99. According to Hans Hautmann, the January 1918 strikes were “the greatest revolutionary strike action in the whole history of the Austrian labour movement.” Hans Hautmann, “Vienna: A City in the Years of Radical Change 1917-1920” in Chris Wrigley ed. Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe, 1917-1920 (London: Routledge, 1993). p. 93. Trotsky and Joffe in Brest-Litovsk requested from the Austria-Hungarian government permission to go to Vienna and directly address to the Austrian workers, which was, as it could be expected, rejected. Chernev, Twilight of Empire, p. 121. 793 Czernin quoted in Wheeler-Bennett, The Forgotten Peace, p. 113.

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to Haase and Ledebour than either the Bremen Zimmerwald Leftists or Luxemburg, began preparations for a mass strike. This effort bore fruit and led to the biggest strike in Germany since the war began. Whatever the intention of its organizers, in two respects the January strikes in Germany (started on 28 January) clearly echoed the political goals of the revolution in Russia: first, the striking German workers formed a Council composed of delegates from Berlin factories, which then constituted a smaller, executive, Action Committee. If not intentionally, this paralleled the structure of the Petrograd Soviet and its Executive Committee. More immediately, in response to the Soviet delegation’s appeal in Brest-Litovsk, the striking Berlin workers’ Council issued a series of political demands, directly borrowed from the Soviet peace proposal. On top of its list, the Council demanded first “the conclusion of a general peace without annexations and indemnities” and second, “the participation of workers in negotiating this peace” process, a demand that clearly echoed the new, open Soviet diplomacy in spirit.794 The strike movement was so well organized that on its first day, in Berlin alone, about half a million stopped work in the factories. The movement rapidly spread to other cities in the country. However, unlike the Austria-Hungarian Empire, the German government under the tutelage of aggressively anti-socialist and militarist German high-command, began a campaign of heavy repression. Even Scheidemann, a leader of the SPD, who otherwise was an ardent national-defensist, was beaten by the police in a demonstration, probably the first violent encounter he experienced with the police in his long and peaceful parliamentary political career.795 Fearing an escalation of the repression, the Obleute Action Committee called off the strike in a few days, despite its success and despite the widespread determination of the workers to continue the fight. Herman Müller and the Obleute leadership’s willingness to incorporate right-wing Social Democrats to the Action Committee for the sake of socialist unity weakened the resolve of the Berlin workers’ Council, since the right-wing socialists who joined the Action Committee were clearly opposed to the strike and entered the Committee with a determination to end it. As opposed to the Austria-Hungarian government, the strikes and the strike leadership’s swift retreat in the face of repression in

794

Stephen Bailey, “The Berlin Strike of January 1918” Central European History Vol. 13, No. 2 (Jun., 1980), p. 160. 795 Ralf Hoffrogge, Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Muller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 53.

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Germany strengthened the right-wing forces in the Government. Following the repression in Germany, in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, the German delegation began to more aggressively follow an openly annexationist line against the Soviet power. In early January 1918, the strike wave in central and central-eastern Europe receded, which ended the Soviet and east European Zimmerwald Leftists’ hope for an early peace through proletarian mass actions. However, there was certainly an uptick in the workers strike activities and rise in working class combativeness in other countries. This increase continued with ups and downs until the end of 1918. For instance in German-occupied Poland, Soviet power was never more popular than it was after the November Revolution, between late 1917 and early 1918, even among the bourgeois parties and press.796 From January to March, several political strikes and bread riots fusing economic demands with anti-occupation slogans struck Poland.797 In May 1st, mass antiwar demonstrations took place in German-occupied Warsaw, where workers clashed with the German occupation soldiers.798 In Bulgaria, the left-wing Tesniyaki Party’s influence considerably grew after the November Revolution. Its paper’s circulation, distributed via the revolutionary underground in the fronts and among the soldiers, reached 11,500.799 However, when in September 1917 the Bulgarian army in the Macedonian front collapsed, rebelled and began marching Sofia to overthrow the Monarchy, Bulgarian Tesniyaki refused to collaborate with the insurgents on the grounds that it was led by a populist leader, Stamboliski.800 In Finland, which gained its independence from Russia after the November Revolution, the struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie rapidly escalated into a civil war situation. In January and February 1918, the Finnish socialists managed to establish control over the more populous and industrialized southern part of

796

Jacek Lubecki, “Poland and the Russian Revolution of 1917”, in Alexander Marshall, John W. Steinberg, Steven Sabol eds, The Global Impacts of Russia's Great War and Revolution, Book 1: The Arc of Revolution, 1917-1924 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2019), pp. 332-3. 797 I. A. Hrenov, “Iz istorii obrazovaniya i pervogo perioda deyatel’nosti Kommunisticheskoi rabochei partii Pol’shi (1918— 1923 gg.),” Voprosy Istorii, no. 6 (1959), p. 85. 798 M.V. Misko, “Oktyabr’skaya revolyutsiya i vosstanovlenie nezavisimosti Pol’shi v 1918 godu,” Voprosy Istorii, no. 11 (1957), p. 96. 799 Vasil Paraskevov, “The Impact of the October Revolution on Bulgarian Politics”, in Marshall, Steinberg, Sabol eds., The Global Impacts of Russia's Great War and Revolution, Book 1, p. 466. 800 John Bell, The Bulgarian Communist Party from Blagoev to Zhivkov (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), pp. 22-23.

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the country.801 This revolutionary neighbor was violently crushed by the German army and white counter-revolutionaries in spring, following the German offensive. Things were not all quiet on the western front. In Britain, pockets of working-class defiance and overt expressions of sympathy for the November Revolution appeared in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and London. In Wales, miners, railroad and steel workers formed “Workers Councils” inspired by the Russian example and red flags dotted the mining pits.802 In Ireland, the same fraternal sentiment found an echo among workers. In Limerick, the workers organized not only mass demonstrations in support of the Soviet power in early 1918, but also attempted to form their own soviet.803 Similar demonstrations took place in other Irish cities.804 However, most of these “soviets” remained symbolic and despite a growing sympathy among the working-class masses towards the idea of workers’ councils, it seems that a clear understanding of what exactly were the soviets and how they worked was still lacking.805 The French workers seemed to be even less informed about the situation in Russia in late 1917, but a strike movement was growing in several industries in the country coupled with ripples of mutinies in the French army. 806 In brief, workers in Britain and France remained largely unresponsive or (as in the case of January strikes in Germany) indecisively retreated in the crucial period of Brest-Litovsk negotiations between December 1917 and February 1918. In the absence of a swift and massive support from the western European working classes, Russian workers remained isolated. After defeating the strike movement in Germany, the German high-command started a military campaign against Russia in mid-February. A German ultimatum demanded the Soviet state leave the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine and Finland to German control.

801

Marko Tikka, “Finland’s Civil War in Russia”, in Marshall, Steinberg, Sabol eds, The Global Impacts of Russia's Great War and Revolution, Book 1, pp. 84-87. 802 Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales, 1880-1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 175. 803 James Kemmy, “The Limerick Soviet,” Saothar 2 (1976): 45–52 804 Michael Silvestri, “Responses to the Russian Revolution in Revolutionary Ireland, 1917–23”, in Alexander Marshall, John W. Steinberg, Steven Sabol (eds.), The Global Impacts of Russia's Great War and Revolution, Book 2, p. 261 805 Stephen White, “Soviets in Britain: The Leeds Convention of 1917,” International Review of Social History 19, no. 2 (1974): 165–93. 806 Roger Magraw, “Paris 1917-1920: Labour Protest and Popular Politics” in Wrigley ed., The Challenges of Labour, pp. 133-134; N. B. Kuznetsova, “Borba Frantsuzskogo Naroda Protiv Otkritoy Antisovetskoy Interventsii Antanti Vesnoy 1919 Goda, Voprosi Istorii, No. 11 (1957). p.110.

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Practically, the German government turned the rights of nations to self-determination slogan into a weapon against Soviet power by conquering countries that the November revolution had already freed to determine their own fates. This was clearly an expansionist move, but also aimed at destroying the revolutionary fermentation in central-eastern Europe. German Major-General Max Hoffmann, who was also a leading German representative in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, was perfectly clear about the class nature of his government’s military strategy when he wrote in his diary on the eve of the German military attack against Soviet Russia that, “Tomorrow we are going to start hostilities against the Bolsheviks… No other way out is possible, otherwise these brutes will… get together a new revolutionary army and turn the whole of Europe into a pigsty.”807 Without any reliable military forces, the Soviet state yielded to the German ultimatum. On 2-3 March 1918, the Soviet delegation signed the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. The terms of the treaty imposed draconian terms on the young Soviet state: it lost 34 percent of its population, 32 percent of its agricultural land, 54 percent of its industrial basis and 89 percent of its coal mines.808 Lenin named the treaty the “Tilsit Peace.”809 With hindsight, it is possible to say that Lenin proved right and, within a year, the Austria-Hungarian then the German Empires both fell to revolutions. However, in March 1918, the Bolsheviks were bitterly divided, with a significant opposition in the party seeing in the treaty a dishonorable compromise against imperialism.810

807

Wheeler-Bennett, The Forgotten Peace. pp. 243-244. Ibid. p. 269. 809 Lenin, “A Serious Lesson And A Serious Responsibility”, LCW Vol. 27. pp. 83-4. Referring to the treaty signed between Napoleon, Tsar Alexander, and Prussia in 1807, which was signed after the German and Russian forces defeat, but which actually gave time to anti-Napoleonic coalition to recover and launch a successful counter-attack that ultimately led to the downfall of the Napoleonic France 810 The tendency inside the Bolshevik party against the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty constituted itself as a “Left-Communist Opposition.” This “Left-Communist” tendency is generally confused with the later left-communist that split from the Communist International in 1920 and later. However, the “LeftCommunism” of 1918 was not a very coherent tendency formed on the basis of a principled division inside the party but mainly on tangential and conjunctural differences, such as the Brest-Litovsk question, the use of former imperial officiers in the Army, the use of bourgeois intellectuals in the management of factories. By summer 1918, most “left-communists” left their oppositional stances. The most consequential issue that set the left-communists apart from their intra-party opponents was the question of “statecapitalism” and workers control over the industry, which persisted to be an issue of contention inside the Bolshevik Party until 1930. For more about the Russian Left-Communism see; Ronald I. Kowalski, The Bolshevik Party in Conflict: The Left Communist Opposition of 1918 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991) and The Russian Communist Left (London: International Communist Current, 2005). 808

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The Brest-Litovsk negotiations and the resulting peace treaty revealed one profound weakness of the LRI movement. The Zimmerwald Left was too small and too disorganized in the West to give immediate practical aid to the increasingly isolated Soviet state in the east. Its propaganda work was, in general, scattered and the November revolution’s success made the Left Radicals’ organizational strength glaringly obvious. Arguably no crisis faced by the first year of the Soviet power made the absence of a Third International felt more painfully than these first months. The numerical and organizational weakness of the Zimmerwald Leftists in the west did not mean that they remained passive spectators. First, the ISK, now led by Swedish Zimmerwald Leftists and Balabanova, issued an appeal jointly signed by the Bolshevik ZB “to the proletarians of all countries!” The appeal explained that after the “workers and soldiers of Petrograd have chased” their government out, “their first word” was peace, that “they demand the immediate suspension of hostilities, immediate peace negotiations which will lead toward and honest peace without annexations and indemnities on the basis of the right of nations to self-determination.” The appeal warned workers outside Russia that if the revolution in Russia was defeated then the war would likely be prolonged.811 In Germany, Holland, and the US, the Zimmerwald Leftists organized an active propaganda campaign during the Brest-Litovsk negotiations to deliver the Soviet peace message to the workers and soldiers in their own countries, with limited success. Most notably, in Germany, the Bremen left group around Johann Knief and Arbeiterpolitik intensified its propaganda, especially organizing the distribution of anti-war materials in front line regiments and the navy. In a leaflet from February 1918, it called on the soldiers stop fighting the Russians.812 Despite their efforts, the Zimmerwald Left in western Europe and North America largely failed to reach the working masses or at least to stir them into mass actions of solidarity. In spring 1918, the western Zimmerwald Leftists saw in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty not only a major setback for Russian Revolution, but also a symptom of weakness of the world proletariat. If the Soviet state fell, some argued that the European and American workers would be responsible. For

811

“Joint Proclamation of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L. Party (Bolsheviks) and the International Socialist Committee”, (10 November 1917) I.S.K. Nachrichtendienst, No. 28 in Gankin & Fisher ed.s, The Bolsheviks and the World War, pp. 691-2. 812 Artemov, Knif, pp.112-3 and p.119.

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instance, Gorter did not mince words when he accused European and American workers of betraying the Russian Revolution, even though he thought this was only a temporary defeat, a weakness caused by disunity and remained confident in the European proletariat’s revolutionary capacity.813 Similarly, Fraina also criticized U.S. workers, but, for him, the main culprit was the European and American socialist party leaderships, who were “part and parcel of the nationalistic and imperialistic forces of its own national bourgeoisie.” Fraina condemned the international Socialist leaderships for being “corrupt, hesitant, bourgeois, committed to a government policy” and doing “nothing while revolutionary Russia in isolation struggled against desperate odds for a workers’ peace.”814

A.

The International Disorganization of the Zimmerwald Left and Reorganization Attempts, November 1917 to March 1919

The tectonic political shifts from winter 1917 to summer 1918 split the Zimmerwald Left. The impromptu international network of the Zimmerwald Left fraction set up by the Russian, German, Scandinavian, Polish and Dutch LRIs centered in Stockholm was dispersed. While the Zimmerwald Left in eastern and central Europe coalesced around Soviet power and, in some cases, merged with the Bolshevik Party, the numerically smaller western part of the fraction was organizationally weak. Throughout 1918, the actions of the Zimmerwald Left fraction towards reorganization were determined by the existence of a revolutionary power in Russia and the absence of revolutions in the west. In the east, the Zimmerwald Leftists were in power but isolated, whereas in the west they were isolated in semi-obscurity and beset by organizational fractures. In response, 1918 witnessed the Zimmerwald Left fraction’s first attempts towards reconstitution. Considering the geographic divide around an eastern Europe zone of active civil war and a north Atlantic zone of relative civil peace, the tentative organizational structure of the

813

Herman Gorter, The World Revolution (Glasgow: Socialist Information and Research Bureau, 1920), p. 9. 814 Louis Fraina, ed., The Proletarian Revolution in Russia (1918: The Communist Press Publishers), pp. 319-320.

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Zimmerwald Left parties in this period between March 1918 and March 1919 reflected their different priorities and conditions.

1.

East and East-Central Europe in 1918: LRI Organizational Consolidation Around

the Soviet Power

Throughout 1918, Russia and much of eastern Europe became the scene of a civil war and military intervention by the Entente. Yet for the Left Radical Internationalists, they also became the freest region in the world. The most violent scenes of the civil war and foreign intervention were on the borders of the Soviet Russia. In the south and west, Germany and Austria-Hungary occupied the border regions. In July and August, Entente forces landed in the north in Murmansk, England occupied Baku, Japanese armies began their occupation in the east. Petrograd, Moscow, and other proletarian centers nevertheless became, for radicals who were persecuted elsewhere, safe havens. Soviet Russia became a haven not only for the anti-war radicals, but also for millions of war deserters and liberated prisoners of war, radical intellectuals of all stripes, former émigrés from eastern Europe, and immigrant workers from far eastern Asia as well. The first internationalist organizations found in Soviet Russia, which ultimately contributed to the founding of the Third International, were built on this demographic composition. While the Zimmerwald Left’s organizational framework was split in 1917 in two (east and west), the eastern half of the Zimmerwald Left expanded considerably throughout eastern and eastern-central European left-radical political groupings. This expansion concerned primarily the Left-Radical Internationalist groupings formed by the POWs in Russia (mostly among the Austria-Hungarian POWs), émigré groups mainly formed by the minorities from the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire, who escaped the occupying German Army to reconsolidate their organizations with the aid of the Bolsheviks, and other smaller groups formed by politicized minorities of intellectuals and immigrant workers from western Europe, North America and East Asia, who were radicalized by the November Revolution. POWs in Soviet Russia played an important role in the reconstitution of the Internationalist’s organizational ties in 1918. Out of more than 8 million POWs captured in the whole theaters of the First World War, at least 5 million were captured in the eastern front. While estimates vary, 338

the Russian army captured between 2.5 to 2.8 million Austria-Hungarian Soldiers as POWs.815 The Austria-Hungarian POWs in Russia constituted 11% of the adult male population of AustriaHungary. The German POWs constituted the second largest group with about 170,000, followed by the smaller group of Ottoman and Bulgarian POWs respectively. 816 During the war, these POWs lived in hundreds of POW internment camps scattered throughout Russia. POWs in Russia did not spend their time solely in isolation or in guarded camps. A small minority, especially if they were officers or from the upper classes of the Austria-Hungarian or the German society, could enjoy a preferential treatment. A salary was paid to the interned POW officers, which was enough to furnish a relative degree of normalcy in their daily lives. 817 However, most POWs, especially those from working-class and peasant backgrounds labored in agriculture, construction (for example, road building), mining, and industry. Depending on the season, POWs were sent to the villages to work; the luckiest worked for the small peasant holdings and were usually treated humanely. Most, however, worked in industry, construction and mining where the working conditions were considerably worse, and the wages were lowest (ranging from half to two thirds of an ordinary Russian worker’s wage). Business owners preferred to employ POW labor whenever possible due to the inability of the POWs to demand higher wages or better working conditions, in addition to the labor scarcity caused by the war.818 In general, POW living conditions in Russia was “little better than slave labor.”819 The death rates in the Russian POW camp population exceeded any

815

Alon Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford: Berg, 2002), p. 31. 816 The significant numbers of the Austria-Hungarian POWs is sometimes attributed to the large number of defections from the army, especially those soldiers from the Slavic minorities of the empire. Rachamimov contested this argument and attributed the high POW numbers to the character of the war in the eastern Front, which, in contrast to the trench warfare in the western Front, involved rapid front movements and a significantly higher army mobility resulting in massive number of troops falling behind the advancing operational lines, getting encircled and captured. Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War. pp. 34-38. 817 Ibid. pp. 100-101. Otto Bauer is but one example of the treatment granted to officers. 818 According to Rachamimov, by mid-1917 POWs “constituted 60 per cent of iron ore miners, 30 per cent of foundry workers and 28 per cent of peat extractors in Russia.” Further, the POWs constituted 27 per cent of the industrial workforce in central Russia. Ibid. p. 111. 819 John Erickson, “Red Internationalists on the March: The Military Dimension, 1918–22,” in Russia and the Wider World in Historical Perspective, ed. Cathryn Brennan and Murray Frame (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), p. 127.

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other country, reaching 300,000 in total.820 Epidemics, hunger and cold decimated the POW population between 1914 and 1917. The Bolsheviks, as resolute internationalists, were also the most receptive political group to the plight of the POWs. Before the March 1917 Revolution, the Bolshevik underground in Russia organized clandestine links with the prisoners in Russia by smuggling propaganda materials and organizing political cells in the camps. Bolsheviks organized political seminars in the camps and, by 1916, managed to organize a left-radical internationalist clandestine network among the POW camp populations. Following the March Revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to alleviate the material and political situation of the POWs. In an article published in Pravda, Kollontai explained that mutual confidence among the workers of belligerent countries was a condition of peace, and this meant a fraternal treatment of the POWs.821 After the November Revolution, perhaps the most important concrete internationalist act of the Soviet state, aside from it declaration of peace, was its decision to liberate the prisoners of war. POWs were encouraged to build their own political and social organizations. Non-party POWs from central and east-central Europe organized their own soviets on Russian soil and, by the end of 1919, there were 25 “foreigner Soviets” in several localities throughout the country.822 Soviet power not only granted full citizenship rights to immigrants, POWs, and foreigners from working class and peasant background, but integrated them into Soviet society by granting them full political rights. However, politically, the most important internationalist organization that contributed to the founding of the Third International was the Central Federation of Foreign Groups of the Russian Communist Party-Bolshevik (Tsentralnaya Federatsiya Inostrannih Grupp RKP (B) or TsFIG-RKP (B)). TsFIG was formed in May 1918 by five foreign communist groups in Russia, essentially, they were all founded by the POWs: the Hungarian, Rumanian, German, Czechoslovak and Yugoslav Communist Groups.823 Eventually, French, Bulgarian, Italian, and Anglo-American federations of communists joined the TsFIG in 1918 and 1919. One of the main activities of the TsFIG

820

Ivan Volgyes, “Hungarian Prisoners of War in Russia, 1916-1919,” Cahiers Du Monde Russe 14, no. 1–2 (1973), p. 58. 821 Kollontai quoted in Volgyes, “Hungarian Prisoners of War in Russia”, p. 62. 822 B.B. Medvedev, “Federatsiya inostrannikh grupp RKP(B),” in Internantsionalisty: Trudyashshiesya zarubezhnikh stran - uchastniki bor’by za vlast’ Sovetov (Moskva: Izdat. Nauka, 1967), pp. 216-217. 823 Erikson, “Red Internationalists on the March”. p. 129.

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was the organization of the volunteer foreign internationalists for the defense of the Soviet power.824 However, another primary and long-term goal of TsFIG was the organization of the Third International.825 TsFIG organized itself with a considerable degree of autonomy, especially in its editorial and political-educational work. It had a Central Committee, composed of two delegates from each national federation, elected on a recallable mandate. The TsFIG Central Committee included several important internationalists who were to play crucial roles in the founding and the first year of Communist International. Among those were Hungarians Béla Kun and E. Rudnyansky, who were to become leading organizers of the Hungarian Communist Party and later the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. Another, Yugoslavian Milkich, worked in the Soviet embassy in Switzerland and later played a leading role in the formation of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Dutch Sebald Rutgers, represented the Anglo-American group, as a member of the American Socialist Propaganda League, the most prominent English-speaking Zimmerwald Leftist group in the western hemisphere.826 The Sovnarkom assigned a monthly 230,000 rubles to the TsFIG for its activities and between 1918 and 1921, the organization published 150 central and local papers and journals throughout Russia in a dozen languages.827 The organization met for its all-Russian conference just when the first Congress of the Communist International was taking place in Moscow,

824

This subject, hardly touched upon in the English-language literature and almost wholy neglected in the Comintern historiography literature was covered in detail in the Russian historiography. According to one Soviet historian specialized on the subject, until mid-1980s at least 600 books were published in Soviet Russia on the contributions of the Internationalists during the Civil War. A. Ya. Manusevich, Internatsionalisty: Uchastie trudiashchikhsia stran tsentralnoy yugovostochnoy Evropi v bor′bi za zlast′ Sovetov v Rossii, 1917–1920 gg., (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), p. 7. However, though wide and varried, the Russian historiography focused significantly on the foreign internationalists involvement in the Civil War. 825 Medvedev, “Federatsiya inostrannikh grupp RKP(B),” p.176. 826 Ibid. p. 178. 827 Ibid p. 192. Peter Petroff wrote in his autobiography how this world evolved: “The Petrograd and the Moscow POW committees had amalgamated, and the united committee began to organize systematic work among the millions of war prisoners in all parts of Russia and Siberia. Among those very active in that movement was the German Independent Social Democrat Ernst Reuter, who was to play an important part later on in the Weimar Republic. In Berlin, Haase had recommended him to me, but on my return, I found Irma already collaborating with him in Moscow. Further there were Austrian law student Karl Petin and the Paris waiter of Austrian origin Ebenholz who developed into a very capable military organizer. The committee, now restored to its original propagandistic activity, was working on a much larger scale. Consequently, the close contact between its various national sections disappeared and separate meetings were held for each language group instead of combined meetings in four or more languages.” Peter Petroff, “Autobiography” Chapter 16, p. 4 (n.d.), IISG.

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in March 1919, with the participation of 40 delegates from 22 provinces.828 At this point, probably emboldened by the formation of the Communist International, the delegates considered disbanding TsFIG, moving the center of activities to their native countries and expanding the Communist International. While the decision to disband TsFIG did not materialize, the central organizational structure of TsFIG moved to Kiev in mid-1919, with the hope that if the revolution rapidly expanded westward, they could finally establish better links with the European left-radical internationalists through a southern route, via Ukraine.829 Among various national federations, the largest was the Hungarian Federation of Communists, composed mostly of the Hungarian POWs. It played a leading role in the TsFIG’s formation and activities. From the beginning of the war, Hungarian POWs constituted both a huge group among the POWs and an underclass among them. The tsarist government’s deferential treatment of Austria-Hungarian POWs from Slavic backgrounds (in the hope of recruiting them against the Austria-Hungarian Empire), coupled with the preservation of army hierarchy in the camps with officers getting better benefits, made ordinary Hungarian POWs the underclass of an underclass.830 Bolshevik propaganda in the Hungarian language in the camps appealed to the Hungarian prisoners more than any other POW group.831 Consequently, the Hungarian POWs became the first organized POW group both in their support for the Red Guards and the Red Army and their political support for the Bolsheviks. Hungarian POWs fought in Petrograd, Moscow and provincial towns on the side of the Soviets both during the November Revolution and in the following conflicts.832

828

According to the reports presented to this congress, TsFIG and its various national federations represented about 1,700 foreign internationalist communists, but this number may have been unrepresentative of the total group of foreign communists politically active in Soviet Russia in 1919, because numerous foreign communists joined and became active in the Russian Communist Party by this point. Medvedev, “Federatsiya inostrannikh grupp RKP(B),” p. 187. 829 Ibid. pp. 184-5. 830 According to leading a Red Cross relief organizer, Elsa Brandstrom, “Among the war prisoners, the Hungarians formed the largest group... [they] lived in isolation because of their language... suffered the most in the prison-camps... they lived under the least favourable material and hygienic circumstance.” Brandstrom quoted in Volgyes, “Hungarian POWs”, p. 63. 831 Ibid. 832 Lenin touted the “Federation of Foreign Groups”, its success in organizing POWS and others, and its impact abroad in eight party congress in March 1919: “Hundreds of thousands of war prisoners from armies which the imperialists had created solely in their own interests, upon returning to Hungary, Germany and Austria, thoroughly infected those countries with the germs of Bolshevism. And the fact that groups and parties sympathizing with us predominate in those countries is due to work which is not visible on the

342

After POWs, immigrant workers from East Asia played an important role both during the Civil War, and during the establishment of the first East Asian groups of left-radical internationalists. According to one estimate, during the First World War, about three to five hundred thousand Chinese immigrant workers labored in Russia (mostly in Siberia but also in European Russia). 833 During and after the November Revolution, many of these immigrant workers sided with the Bolsheviks. Chinese workers organized into the Red Guards fought in Moscow, Petrograd, and Ural industrial towns during the November Revolution and Chinese volunteer units fought on all the fronts of the Civil War from beginning to end.834 The large number of Chinese immigrant workers were also represented in the soviets by two Chinese immigrants (one of them, Liu Shaozhou, later participated in the Comintern’s founding Congress) and founded several associations, papers, and the Chinese Socialist Workers Party based in Russia.835 Similarly, a Korean socialist group, based on the Korean immigrant population in Siberia and European Russia took form between April 1918 and May 1919, resulting in the formation of a Korean Socialist Party in Vladivostok.836 Besides the central-east European POWs and East Asian immigrant worker groups, a numerically far smaller population of west Europeans and North Americans in Russia also formed internationalist political groupings. These western groups merged with the TsFIG forming the English, American, French and Italian Communist groups of the Bolshevik Party. Though numerically smaller, with merely dozens of members, these west European Communist groups in the TsFIG contributed greatly to communist propaganda efforts. Among those were foreign journalists and diplomats who grew sympathetic to the Soviet revolution and the struggle of the Russian working class in the pre-November days and threw their lot with them. Their impressions on the

surface, and which is only briefly summed up in the report on the organizational activities of the foreign groups in Russia; it constituted one of the most significant features in the activities of the Russian Communist Party as one of the units of the world communist party.” Lenin, LCW Vol. 29, p. 161. 833 N. A. Popov, “Uchastie kitayskih internatsionalnih chastey v zashchite Sovetskoy respubliki v period grazhdanskoy voyni (1918-1920 gg.),” Voprosy Istorii, no. 10 (1957), p. 111. 834 According to Popov, up to 30 to 40 thousand Chinese workers may have fought in the ranks of the Red Army until the end of the Civil War. Ibid. p. 119. 835 Gregor Benton, Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917-1945 (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 23. 836 M.T. Kim, Koreiskie Internatsionalisty v Bor’be Za Blast’ Sovetov Na Dal’nem Vostoke, (1918-1922) (Moskva: Izdat. Nauka, 1979), p. 15.

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Russian Revolution and the inner workings of the workers’ councils informed the pro-Soviet west European and North American public through their leaflets, pamphlets, and journal articles.837 While the TsFIG included mostly the politicized minority of the POWs from Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Empires, LRIs from the territories of former Russian Empire organized themselves into independent political parties. These constituted the Baltic, Polish, Ukrainian, and Finnish Communist Parties. These East European Communist Parties were more closely tied to the Bolsheviks with historical bonds forged during their joint struggle against the Tsarist autocracy, and some of these parties were, at least formally, autonomous sections of the RSDRP(b) before the war. However, especially in the case of Latvian, Finnish or Polish Communist Parties, the East European left-radical parties had distinct historical roots, sui generis organizational cultures, and considerable political autonomy vis-a-vis the Bolsheviks. It would be wrong to reduce them to simple appendages of the Russian Bolsheviks. The practical necessity of solidarity during a violent civil war pushed the east European Communists towards firmer organizational unity. Throughout 1918, the Baltic, Polish, Ukrainian and Finnish regions fell into a more violent, more continuous civil war than the Civil War in Russia, the effects of which were felt indirectly in the heartland of the revolution, through hunger and a crippling logistics crisis. These western, eastern and southern regions of the former Russian Empire were in 1918 and throughout 1919, the main battle zones of the Russian Civil War between the White, Red, and also the Green and Black armies. Paradoxically, these regions were also the least “Russian” regions of the former Tsarist empire in terms of their ethnic and linguistic compositions, yet at the same time they also became the military bastions of the Russian nationalist, anti-Bolshevik, the so-called “democratic counterrevolution” organized by former Russian military aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and their social-democratic allies. Further complicating the situation, these borderlands of the former Russian empire in some cases included some of the most industrialized regions and also some of the most strongly pro-Soviet populations. Latvia and Finland are probably the best cases, where Soviet oriented local

837

Members of these groups were first active in the “Bureau of International Propaganda” organized by Radek and attached to the Narkomindel, before forming their respective groups inside the TsFIG. Among those were John Reed, Albert Rhys Williams, Phillip Price and Louise Bryant, who were well known members of the English speaking group. L.P. Karlov and R.Ya. Tsivlina, “Anglo-amerikanskaya gruppa RKP(b),” in Internantsionalisty: Trudyashshiesya zarubezhnikh stran - uchastniki bor’by za vlast’ sovetov, pp. 539-562.

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non-Russian majorities were repressed by White counter-revolutionaries and foreign interventionists. In fact, Latvia offers one of the most dramatic facets of the “Russian” Civil War, both in terms of its outcome and also in terms of its international significance for the LRI movement and the way it shaped the future organization of the Communist International. Though the November Revolution was generally accepted as the first seizure of power by soviets, it was actually in Latvia that the soviets first came to power. It was not precisely the Russian Bolsheviks but their Latvian comrades, who played a central role in the LRI movement during the war and led this seizure of power. From March 1917, the Latvian Section of the RSDRP(b) emerged in Latvia as the most well-organized and popular party. In the Riga Soviet, at a very early date (March 1917), the Bolsheviks had a clear majority in the Executive Committee.838 Without a revolutionary insurrection, Bolsheviks more or less translated their popularity into a peaceful transition of power to the soviets as there was no strong organized opposition to the Soviet power. The soviets seized power first in Riga, creating the Iskolats Republic (Iskolats is the Latvian abbreviation of The Latvian Soviet Executive), a forerunner of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republics. The fall of Riga in late August to the German army and the ensuing destruction of the Riga Soviet by the occupation forces exerted considerable influence on the events in Russia. The destruction of the Iskolats Republic raised the suspicions of the left-radicals in Russia that the PG was willing to let Germany occupy revolutionary strongholds, including Petrograd, rather than let the soviets seize power peacefully. This suspicion (which is not unfounded) led the Bolshevik’s to formulate their insurrectionary strategy in August. However, the Latvian Radical Left did not have a solely passive influence on the events in Russia, setting merely a negative example. By organizing the Latvian Strelki regiments, Latvian internationalists also played a determining role in the defense of the Soviet revolution at several critical moments in its first few months.839

838

Andrew Ezergailis, The 1917 Revolution in Latvia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 141. 839 According to Ezergailis this ranges from limiting the advance of the Finnish White armies, the dispersal of pro-Constituent Assembly conspiracies, formation of the Red Army and several critical defensive military operations. Andrew Ezergailis, The Latvian Impact on the Bolshevik Revolution, The First Phase: September 1917 to April 1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 6-7.

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Finland and the Finnish Socialist movement constituted a similarly complex and traumatic example for the east European communists. The social and political composition of Finland was distinct from that of the autocratic Russia. Having not experienced the destructive effects of serfdom, Finland joined the Russian Empire only during the Napoleonic Wars early in the 19th century as an autonomous appendage, officially constituting a semi-autonomous Duchy. After the 1905 Revolution, the Grand Duchy of Finland acquired its own autonomous parliament (Sejm) elected based on almost complete male universal suffrage, in which the Finnish Social Democracy held a strong presence. In the 1916 elections that took place in Finland, the Finnish Social Democratic Party managed to win a majority of the Sejm seats.840 Despite their great influence, the Finnish Social Democrats were undecided and unwilling to wage a determined struggle against the bourgeois and landowning classes. Finland formally and peacefully gained its independence after the November Revolution by decree. While the national question was resolved by a decree, social antagonisms remained. The Finnish Social Democratic government did not follow the Russian example and restricted its goal to the establishment of a bourgeois democratic, parliamentary regime, forming the first Social Democratic parliamentary government in Europe. The counter-revolutionary forces in Finland saw in this a compromise they could not accept, but as an opportunity to crush the socialist and working class movement in Finland. Following its independence Finland rapidly fell into a civil war situation. The Finnish Civil War of early 1918 was nasty, brutish, and short. The White counter-revolutionary forces actively supported by Germany massacred thousands of Finnish socialists, repressed workers, and abolished the parliamentary democracy. This experience led a significant group of the Finnish Socialists who managed to escape to Soviet Russia to disown their commitment to parliamentary democracy and adopt the principles of Soviet system. The situation of the Polish internationalists was probably the most dramatic. It would not be an exaggeration to argue that Poland endured the most devastating destruction in Europe during

840

Victor Serge, Year One Of The Russian Revolution (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 197. According to Kirby, the Finnish Social Democratic movement resembled more the German Social Democratic movement in terms of its ideological orientation. In fact, few Finnish socialists read the Bolshevik press or Lenin before the November Revolution. On the sui generis development of the Finnish Social Democratic movement, quite distinct from the Bolsheviks see: David Kirby, “The Finnish Social Democratic Party and the Bolsheviks,” Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. 2/3 (July 1976): 99–113.

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the World War. The battle fronts between Germany and Russia shifted for three years over the country turning Poland into a battle zone. The fate of the Polish internationalists remained the same under both Tsarist and German occupations as they were subjected to constant state repression.841 Against these heavy odds, the establishment of the Soviet power in Russia was a relief for the Polish internationalists, granting the Polish left-radicals a space and freedom for reorganization and to seek moral support. Many Polish radical leftists took refuge in Soviet Russia in this period. The fragmented Polish socialist movement finally managed to unite as a single party in late 1918, bringing together the PPS-Left and the two factions of the SDKPiL, which led to the formation of the Polish Workers’ Communist Party (PWCP). The authenticity and distinctiveness of the PWCP program revealed the intellectual and political freedom the party enjoyed in Soviet Russia, where it operated as an émigré party. 842 Diverging from the Bolshevik majority on the national question and in conformity with the Zimmerwald Left majority, the PWCP in late 1918 perceived the Polish national independence minus a world revolution as something of an anomaly, at odds with international orientation of the proletariat. However, endorsing the seizure of power by the soviets in Russia, the PWCP in line with the Bolsheviks, defined its task as the seizure of political power in Poland by the workers’ Soviets and the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship in order to support the revolution on a European scale, abolishing all national borders.843 Regardless of their long standing differences on the national question with the Bolshevik majority, SDKPiL and later the PWCP received unqualified support from the Bolsheviks. The Polish Commissariat formed in November 1917 under the Sovnarkom to attend the affairs of three million polish immigrants living in Soviet Russia, included

841

In addition to thousands of militants imprisoned in the interwar period, even as late as 1923 more than half of the Polish Communists were behind bars. In the 1920s, imprisoned Polish communists numbered between 11,200 and 15,000; in 1930s this number rose to 20,000. According to Julian Marchlewski 40% of the Party budget was spent on prisoner solidarity. Michal Kasprzak, “Nationalism and Internationalism: Theory and Practice of Marxist Nationality Policy from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Communist Workers’ Party of Poland” (Ottawa: Unpublished Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2013), pp. 186-7. 842 Jacek Lubecki, “Poland and the Russian Revolution of 1917,” in The Global Impacts of Russia’s Great War and Revolution, Book 1: The Arc of Revolution, 1917-1924, ed. Marshall, Steinberg, and Sabol, p. 334. 843 Hrenov, “Iz istorii obrazovaniya i pervogo perioda deyatel’nosti Kommunisticheskoi rabochei partii Pol’shi (1918— 1923 gg.),” pp. 86-7.

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even representatives of PPS-Fraction that followed the nationalist line of Pilsudski. The Pilsudski regime formed a year later would not be so kind to either Polish Communists or the Bolsheviks as it waged war against the Soviet Russia in 1919 and 1920, in alliance with the anti-communist Entente governments.844 Although they followed different paths, all the east European Left-Radical Internationalist movements and parties found themselves victims of counter-revolutionary violence and repression during the period following the November Revolution. In order to preserve and reestablish their political organizations, most east-central European left radicals escaped to Soviet Russia. Here they formed their own Communist organizations, with the active help and encouragement of the Bolsheviks, in the latter half of 1918.845 Towards the end of 1918, these east European parties that experienced intense civil war(s) and occupation earlier than the Bolsheviks, united around what at the time was called the “little International,” establishing the “Communist Organizations of Occupied Territories.” On 10 August, the Lithuanian Communists requested the Bolsheviks to provide the infrastructure for this organization. The Bolsheviks responded quickly to the request and on 19 August, it allowed the Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian and Jewish organizations to form a central bureau of the Communist Organizations of Occupied Territories under the Narkomnats.846 In October, the Bureau was expanded to encompass all the national parties and organizations operating in the occupied regions and countries, with the addition of Finnish, Polish and Ukrainian Communist parties. For the Communist organizations operating illegally under German occupation in eastern Europe, a revolution in their native countries and the world revolution was inexorably linked. If

844

A. Ya. Manusevich, “Pol’skie sotsial-demokraticheskie i drugie revolyutsionnye gruppy v Rossii v bor’be za pobedu uprovhenie Sovetskoi vlasti (oktyabr’ 1917 - yanvar’ 1918 Gg.),” in Iz Istorii Pol’skogo rabochego dvizheniya (Moskva: Izd. Sotsial’no-Ekonomicheskoi Literatury, 1962), pp. 133. 845 Latvian and Estonian Communists already had their organizational networks established in Russia before the World War. The Ukrainian Communist Party, which was not organizationally distinct from the Bolshevik Party until the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, was founded in July 1918. The Communist Party of Finland was founded in 29 August 1918 in Moscow by those Socialists who escaped the White terror in Finland. The Communist Party of Lithuania and Belorussia was founded in Vilnius/Vilna in October 1918. Finally, the Polish Workers Communist Party was formed by the unity congress of the PPS-Left and the SDKPiL, on 16 December 1918. 846 K. L. Seleznev, “Bol’shevistskaya agitatsiya i revoliutsionnoe dvizheniye v germanskoi armii na vostochnom fronte v 1918 g.,” in Noyabr’skaya revoliutsiya v Germanii: Sborniya statei i materialov, ed. D. Kulbakin (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1960), p. 289.

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there was to be unity between the Russian and the coming German Revolutions, a geographic bridge between the two (one potential and the other actual) was necessary and it had to be constructed in eastern Europe. Starting from summer 1918, the Communist organizations of the German-occupied east European territories began to undertake a systematic and increasingly coordinated propaganda activity directed at the German occupation troops. From Estonia in the north to Kiev in the south-east, the east-European internationalists bombarded the German army with calls for fraternization, using thousands of leaflets, pamphlets, organizing open and mass discussions with the rank-and-file German soldiers. By late 1918, the east European Communists managed to establish contacts with the Bremen Zimmerwald Leftists to coordinate their propaganda activities in the German army.847 The success of the internationalist propaganda is hard to quantify. The panic that the German High Command expressed in its internal documents in summer 1918 and the almost instant disintegration of the eastern occupation Army after November Revolution in Germany suggests the effect of the internationalists’ influence. For instance, when the German Army began to disintegrate on the western Front on 8 August, retreating German soldiers shouted at the reservists moving to the front as “strike-breakers”. Ludendorff blamed the “Bolshevik influence” on eastern troops that moved to the west for the deterioration of the morale and the lack of nationalist commitment in the ranks.848 In the eastern occupation Army itself, which was reduced to 500,000 by summer 1918, morale was low. Incidents of mass disobedience was not uncommon even as early as spring 1918, and Soldiers’ Soviets based on the Russian model were popping up throughout the occupied zone. After the news of Revolution in Germany reached the east in November 1918, the German troops almost universally organized Soldiers Soviets and these Soviets demanded the return of the political power in the occupied eastern Europe to the locals, refused orders, and began leaving their posts in order to return to Germany.849 In Poland, which finally gained its

847

Ibid. p. 296. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200), p. 214. 849 Ibid. pp. 212-3 and pp. 215-220. 848

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independence with the retreat of the Central Power occupation, spontaneous workers Soviets were formed.850 To sum up, the foreign internationalists in Russia in 1918 played a considerable role in the organized armed defense of the revolution and the reorganization of a Left-Radical Internationalist nucleus that could reforge the links between eastern European and western European left-radical movements.851 However, the military support of the internationalists should not be exaggerated as there were also counter-revolutionary foreign legions fighting against Soviet power in Russia at the time, and these foreign counter-revolutionary forces commanded equal, if not greater numbers than the pro-Soviet foreign internationalists. Moreover, military force played only a secondary role in the background of a wider political and social confrontation, since from a purely military point of view, Soviet resilience at various critical moments in 1918 against much better armed Entente, German and White counter-revolutionary forces could only be explained as a miracle. Thus, though vital and symbolic, the military support of the foreign internationalists in Soviet Russia was only secondary to their most distinguishing contribution, which was the translation and propagation of the LRI vision to the world outside of the new Soviet state and their selforganization, which later contributed to the formation of the Communist International. 852 By the end of 1918, a genuine third international skeletal organization had already taken form in Russia. Like the east Europeans in Switzerland and other neutral countries during the first years of the World War, the internationalists from the rest of Europe and North America formed an internationally organized, albeit rather geographically diffuse fraction. These “foreigners” were actively involved in the life of the Russian Communist Party, just as the Bolshevik émigrés were actively

850

Jacek Lubecki, “Poland and the Russian Revolution of 1917,” pp. 331-3. While the estimates vary, it is assumed that between at least seven percent and as high as 19 percent of the Red Army in 1918 was formed by various internationalist groups (including the Latvian riflemen). 852 However, it must be noted that, from a purely quantitative point of view, significantly more foreigners fought in the defense of the Soviet power than actively joining the Communist movement. For instance, according to Volgyes’ careful and balanced account, between 80,000 to 100,000 Hungarian POWs fought on the side of the Red Army during the Civil War, yet only a few hundred of them joined the nucleus of the Hungarian Communist Party formed around the TsFIG. Volyges, “Hungarian Prisoners of War”, p. 73. By the end of 1919, the number of TsFIG members (including German, Hungarian, Czechoslovak, Yugoslav, Rumanian, Italian organizations) counted only 1,791 members. Among those Hungarian, German and Czechoslovakian groups were numerically biggest the largest groups with 1,562 members. Medvedev, “Federatsiya inostrannikh grupp RKP(B)”, p. 187. 851

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involved in the life of the Swiss, Scandinavian and American socialist movements and parties before the March Revolution drew them back to Russia. For Bolsheviks and the others, this was only normal and necessary. They did not see the Bolshevik Party as a separate and independent Russian party.853 These internationalists formed the first organizational germs of the Third International after the connections established by Zimmerwald Left collapsed due to isolation. These organizations included TsFIG (mostly organized by the politicized minorities of POWs and immigrant workers), the Bureau of the Communist Organizations of the Occupied regions, and to a lesser extent the Propaganda Bureau organized under the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. In late 1918 and early 1919, with the collapse of the central Powers in central-eastern Europe, these internationalist nuclei gave birth to first Communist organizations that managed to expand Soviet power in Latvia and Hungary. Outside Russia, the Soviets or Workers’ Councils were repressed by the joint forces of the German Freikorps, local nationalists, Entente intervention, and the remnants of the counterrevolutionary Russian ruling class. However, though short-lived, in late 1918 and early 1919, the expansion of the workers power in central and eastern Europe gave communists the hope that the conditions for the world revolution were finally ripening. However, this still required the participation and the formation of communist organizations from the industrialized western countries and especially from Germany.

2.

The First Soviet Attempts to Forge Links with Western European Left Radical In-

ternationalists: London, Berlin, and the Swiss Soviet Diplomatic Missions in 1918

Despite the growing influence of the Soviet revolution, the western European Zimmerwald Leftists remained small and fragmented groups in 1918. Most importantly, in Germany, the persistent split between the Spartakists and Zimmerwald Leftists around the Bremen radicals made the foundation of the Third International untenable, because in 1918, Germany was still the

853

For instance, when the American Zimmerwald Leftist Sebald Rutgers arrived Russia, he was included in the RCP(b) and his date of entry into the party was recorded in his personal file as 1899, the year he joined the Dutch Social Democratic Workers Party. Karlov & Tsivlina, “Anglo-amerikanskaya gruppa RKP(b)”, p. 545.

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spiritual core of the Marxist movement. Without a united German communist party, an international movement could not have the confidence to establish the Third International. But the inability of the Zimmerwald Left organizations to bring themselves to constitute a third international did not deter the Bolsheviks from playing an active role in the international movement. Utilizing Soviet institutions, Bolsheviks directly appealed to the world proletariat, tentatively skipping over the still elusive Third International. The first Soviet structures designed to raise the internationalist spirit of solidarity in the world working class were built around the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel).854 As a general orientation, Sovnarkom perceived the world working class as its constituency and considered solidarity with the world revolutionary movement outside Russia as one of its primary tasks. In December 1917, it explicitly defined this internationalist framework of Narkomindel’s activity and assigned financial resources to it for aiding LRI groups outside Russia. “Bearing in mind the fact that Soviet power stands on the basis of the principles of international solidarity of the proletariat and the brotherhood of the working people of all countries, that the struggle against war and imperialism can only lead to full victory on an international scale, the Council of People's Commissars considers it is necessary to come to the aid of the leftist, internationalist wing of the workers' movement of all countries with all the necessary means, including financial means, regardless of whether these countries are at war with Russia, whether they are allied with it or occupy a neutral position. To this end, the Council of People's Commissars decides to provide foreign representatives of the Foreign Office with two million rubles for the needs of the internationalist revolutionary movement.”855

Despite the Sovnarkom’s desire to support the Left Radical Internationalists abroad, the organizational channel between the remaining LRI groups in the West and those in Russia

854

Narkomindel was arguably the most unique among the other Commissariats in the sense that it did not represent any organizational continuity with the Tsarist bureaucracy and state organizational functions. According to O’Connor, Narkomindel was the first commissariat of the Soviet power to be fully operational. By the end of December, it employed 126 officials, and was the first commissariat to be fully operational. By the autumn of 1918 approximately 340 officials worked in the Commissariat. Timothy Edward O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution: G.V. Chicherin and Soviet Foreign Affairs, 1918-1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988), p. 56. Most of those were political militants and, unlike the other commissariats, there were few tsarist era officials. Rigby, T.H., Lenin’s Government Sovnarkom, 1917-1922 (Cambridge Univ Press, 2008), pp. 63-64. 855 Sovnarkom decree published on 24 December 1917. M.D. Orakhelashvili and V.G. Sorina, eds., Dekrety Oktyabr’skoi revolyutsii: Ot oktyabr’skogo perevorota do rospuska Uchreditel’nogo sobraniya Vol.1 (Moskva: Partiinoe Izdatel’stvo, 1933), pp. 280-1.

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remained severed. The precarious existence of the ISK in Stockholm ceased in 1918. In the first few months of 1918, Russian Bolsheviks were wholly cut off from their comrades in the west.856 To reestablish systematic channels of communications, the Soviet government opened diplomatic missions in several Western capitals in spring 1918, immediately after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.857 Sovnarkom decided (deliberately rejecting the “ambassador” concept as an expression of the nationalist divisions) to send “plenipotentiary representatives” to London (Maxim Litvinov), Stockholm (V. V. Vorovsky), Switzerland (Jan Berzin), and Berlin (Adolf Abramovich Joffe) with the authority to establish political missions. Lenin hoped that the Soviet Missions, especially those in Berlin and Switzerland, would become intellectual centers of political debate. The missions had to play the role of intellectual poles of attraction, bringing clarification to political questions and responding to attacks by the right-wing and the centrist Social Democrats. However, from the start, the Soviet Missions in European capitals were received with antisocialist hostility from the host governments. The London and Stockholm missions were diplomatically and politically isolated, just as Russia was militarily encircled. The least effective of these missions was Litvinov’s London office, not due to any mistake on Litvinov’s part. In London, Litvinov was isolated from Sovnarkom and the Narkomindel in Moscow and remained under constant harassment by the British security services.858 He only learned about his own appointment as the Soviet “plenipotentiary” (or “polpred” in abbreviated form) a few weeks after his

856

Pannekoek, “De Rusissche Revolutie,” p. 441. In December 1917, Sovnarkom demanded foreign consulate personnel to pledge loyalty to the new Soviet Power or to resign their posts. Having met with silence, all the former Tsarist personnel were dismissed. Missions basically replaced these former Tsarist consulates. There was only one exception. A. A. Ivanov, a young anarchist working in the Russian Legation in Beijing. Arrested and exiled after the 1905 revolution in Russia, he studied Chinese at the Ecole des Lengues Orientales Viviantes and was admitted to work in the Tsarist legation at the capacity of a low ranking official. When the Soviet call reached the foreign embassies, he was the only person to respond positively and “found himself promoted suddenly from the lowest place to the highest, as the sole representative of the new revolutionary government”. Due to diplomatic pressure, his office was taken from him, however he became the first official representative of Soviet Russia in China and helped organizing the Chinese communists in those early days. Liu Jianyi, The Origins of the Chinese Communist Party and the Role Played by the Soviet Russia and the Comintern (Unpublished Dissertation, The University of York, 2015), pp. 84-97. 858 A Paris mission was attempted to be founded by Kamenev, but he was denied entry to France. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution Vol. 3, p. 44. 857

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appointment, through the British press. Lacking any instructions or even funds from the Narkomindel, Litvinov had little to do. He kept a modest office, wrote a pamphlet on the Russian Revolution, and gave several interviews to the press.859 However, after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the British government’s attitude turned decisively hostile and eventually he was expelled from Britain in October 1918 without much to show in terms of diplomatic or revolutionary work.860 Vorovsky, who was the head of the Stockholm bureau of the Bolshevik Party before the November Revolution, was an old Bolshevik. He worked in close collaboration with the ISK under Balabanova in Stockholm in 1917 and 1918 and represented the Bolsheviks in the last Zimmerwald conference in Stockholm. Vorovsky’s mission continued the work of the Bolshevik ZB in Stockholm. The Bureau itself was closed on 30 November 1917 after the November Revolution and most of its members returned to Russia, leaving only Vorovsky behind.861 However, in 1918 Stockholm gradually lost the strategic political importance that it had earned in 1917; no longer was it a busy meeting point of returning exiles and other socialists from all over the world attempting to establish contacts with the Soviets. The ISK also lost its function as a nodal point of the socialist peace movement. Balabanova described this as the “third” and last period of the Zimmerwald movement, the function of which was now to restore mainly the psychological relations between the Russian and the western proletarian groups that were broken off due to the blockade.862 Lacking any direct and stable channel with Petrograd, Balabanova left Stockholm for Moscow before moving on to Germany and Switzerland in order to restore contact with the Zimmerwald parties. The ISK’s contacts with the groups outside Germany were either irregular or almost completely broken; this was especially true with the Italian movement.863 Worse, in Stockholm, they were also

859

Hugh D. Phillips, Between The Revolution And The West A Political Biography Of Maxim M. Litvinov (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), p. 20. 860 Sheinis, Maxim Litvinov, p. 106. 861 Most importantly Ganetsky and Radek. Yu. I. Vorobtsova, Deyatelnost’ predstavitel’stva TsK RSDRP (B) v Stokgol’me. (aprel’ - noyabr’ 1917 g.) (Moskva: Politizdat, 1968), p. 148. 862 Angelica Balabanoff, Iz lichnykh vospominanii Tsimmerval’dtsa (Leningrad-Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Kniga,” 1925), pp. 170-1. 863 Angelica Balabanoff, Erinnerungen Und Erlebnisse (Berlin: E. Laubsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1927), p. 283. Also see, Balabanova, My Life as a Rebel, pp. 188-9.

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receiving threats from White counter-revolutionaries and increasingly became targets of anti-Soviet attacks.864 Compared to the Stockholm and London Missions, the Soviet Missions in Switzerland and Berlin operated more consistently and effectively. The Mission in Berlin, while officially a diplomatic establishment, was in practice a revolutionary outpost. It aimed to prepare the ground for the Third International by supporting the left-radical tendency in Germany and urge them to form a united party. Adolf Abramovich Joffe was charged with establishing the Mission in Berlin after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed. He may have been assigned the task because he had already participated in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations together with Trotsky.865 The Mission under Joffe served to attract sympathizers and thus established contacts with Obleute and the Spartakists. It organized meetings with the USPD leaders and recruited the few remaining free Spartakists to work in the Soviet mission. Thus, as the Soviet representative, Joffe refrained from taking a political position inside the German left’s internal struggles, despite the Bolshevik criticism of the USPD. The Berlin mission tried to aid the German radical left in several different ways including providing financial aid. However, probably its most important effort was its pressure on the German government to free the imprisoned revolutionary leaders. In order to liberate the imprisoned Spartakists, Joffe and Chicherin contemplated to organize a prisoner exchange; even to the point

864

Days after she left Stockholm an assassination attempt was made against Balabanova’s house. Balabanoff was expelled from Switzerland in November 1918 and denied reentry into Stockholm. She could not retrieve the documents of the Zimmerwald ISK office. Balabanova, Iz Lichnykh Vospominanii, p. 169; Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution Vol. 3, p. 74. 865 During the 1915 Zimmerwald and 1916 Kienthal conferences, Trotsky had received the support of both the Spartakists and the Haase-Ledebour group, which went on to form the Independent Social Democratic Party in 1917, Hence, unlike the other mission plenipotentiaries, Joffe, via Trotsky, was closer to the former “Zimmerwald Center” in Germany and this may help explain the nature of his assignment. The German LRIs were chronically divided and the Eastern LRIs had to carefully maneuver among the groups in order not to alienate them. Peter Petroff in his memoirs claims that Joffe was completely inadequate. He wrote that Joffe talked over the establishment of the Berlin office with him but was completely preoccupied with merely the formal sides of the affair. Recounting a conversation with Lenin: “I told Lenin “Joffe is now so concerned about frock coats and silk stockings that he is no longer interested in politics”. According to Petroff, Joffe’s assignment was a “concession to Trotsky”. The authenticity of this dialogue is impossible to discern. Petrov’s unpublished autobiography, Chapter 15 p. 38 in IISG Peter Petroff Archives, Joffe committed suicide after Trotsky was expelled from the Party in 1927. Nadezhda Ioffe, Back in Time: My Life, My Fate, My Epoch. The Memoirs of Nadezhda A. Joffe (Oak Park, Mich.: Labor Publications, 1995), p. IX.

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of handing Germany the Tsarist family to secure the freedom of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches.866 Joffe’s socialist contacts in Germany were mainly limited to the leaders of socialist factions and his reports to Moscow about the situation of the German movement were influenced by the impressions these leaders made upon him.867 Despite Joffe’s diplomatic neutrality in the German left’s inner struggles, he had no illusion about the USPD leaders, especially Kautsky, Ledebour, and Haase, and their persistent refusal to commit themselves to a revolutionary strategy for ending the war. Joffe observed that the USPD delegates visiting the Soviet Mission in Berlin were verbally very sympathetic to the Soviet cause but bound their hopes to the Wilsonian program rather than proletarian action for peace and internationalist solidarity.868 If the centrist-pacifist USPD leaders responded to Joffe’s inquiries with a cynical attitude veiled behind a facade of sympathy, the Spartakist leaders responded with desperation born out of their isolation. Repression left the Spartakist leadership incapacitated. Mehring and Zetkin were at the time out of prison but very old, ill, and unable to take active organizational work. Others were in a gloomy mood. As late as September, weeks before the start of the German revolution, Leo Jogiches’ private correspondences revealed a sense of hopelessness in the capacity of the German proletariat to rise up against Prussian militarism.869 Thus, responding to Lenin’s insistent instructions that he should give every support to

866

The idea was Radek’s. Feliks Tych and Ottokar Luban, “Die Spartakusführung zur Politik der Bolschewiki. Ein Kassiber Leo Jogiches’ aus dem Gefängnis an Sophie Liebknecht vom 7. September 1918,” Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung - IWK, no. 33 (1997), p. 93. 867 For a detailed account of Joffe’s contacts in Berlin see: Ottokar Luban, “Russische Bolschewiki und deutsche Linkssozialisten am Vorabend der deutschen Novemberrevolution. Beziehungen und Einflussnahme,” Jahrbuch für historische Kommunismusforschung, (2009), pp. 283-298. Richard Pipes suggests that the Berlin Misson somehow managed to establish a clandestine network all over Germany, infiltrating even in the government, but provides no evidence except a reference to an article by Joffe written in 1919. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). pp. 621-2. 868 Joffe to Lenin (13 October 1918) in, Hermann Weber, Bernhard H. Bayerlein, and Yakov Drabkin, eds., Deutschland, Russland, Komintern Vol. 2. Dokumente (1918 - 1943): nach der Archivrevolution: neuerschlossene Quellen zu der Geschichte der KPD und den deutsch-russischen Beziehungen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), p. 57. 869 In a letter smuggled from prison to Sophie Liebknecht, Jogiches wrote that he did not expect a revolution in Germany soon and estimated that German State could delay defeat in war for one or two more years. Leo Jogiches to Sophie Liebknecht 7 September 1918 in Tych & Luban, “Die Spartakusführung zur Politik der Bolschewiki Ein Kassiber Leo Jogiches' aus dem Gefängnis an Sophie Liebknecht, 7.9.1918”. pp. 92-102.

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the Spartakists, Joffe wrote that the “Spartakists are shattered. An illegal apparatus does not exist... it is very hard to do anything, because the best [militants] are imprisoned and the others are either too immature or too old.”870 Joffe’s lack of confidence in the German socialist leaders capacity to lead the workers solidified over time. He doubted that Soviet or Bolshevik support could do anything to change the situation. He wrote to Lenin summarizing his impressions: “...I have personally talked about it a hundred times with the comrades and have offered them all possible help... You're wrong if you think I don’t care about the money; I give them as much as is necessary and keep insisting that they take more, but what can one do when the Germans are so hopeless: they are simply incapable of illegal and revolutionary work as we understand it, because for the most part they are political philistines... only indulge in revolution verbally. As a revolutionary party, the independents [i.e. USPD] are utterly hopeless and useless; the best of them, like Ledebour, are parliamentarians par excellence, and want to see and understand nothing else; the Spartacus people fear arrests, are mainly young (if not necessarily in years then in revolutionary experience), they can only work under supervision and actually did work when Tyszka [i.e. Leo Jogiches] was still free, and they imagine that if they put out a proclamation now and then (which, by the way, they can't even distribute properly), this is already an extraordinary revolutionary activity.”871

In short, Joffe’s efforts to organize the basis of a new Third International in Germany accomplished very little, as the leading socialists were either uninterested (as in the case of the USPD) or unwilling and unconvinced (as in the case of the Spartakists) to take the lead for it. Compared to the Missions in London, Berlin and Stockholm, the Soviet mission in Switzerland (Bern) was arguably the most openly political.872 Thanks to the strategic independence of Switzerland, it offered the distinct chance to re-establish contacts with several left-radical currents. The Swiss-Berne Mission thereby rapidly became a veritable pole of attraction for the scattered LRI forces in the west. Among the affiliates of the Mission, who collaborated with its work in different periods, were Edmund Peluso, Henri Guilbeaux, Herman Gorter, James Reich, Ilya

870

Joffe’s letter to Lenin, 4 June 1918, in: Dietmar Wulff, “A. A. Joffe und die Russische Außenpolitik 1918. Unveröffentlichte Dokumente (Teil 1: Mai 1918),” Berliner Jahrbuch für Osteuropäische Geschichte 2 (1995), p. 236. 871 Joffe to Lenin (5 September 1918), in Hermann Weber, Jakov Drabkin, Bernhard H. Bayerlein ed.s, Deutschland, Russland, Komintern Vol. 2 (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2015). pp. 44-6. 872 Berzin later wrote in his memoirs how Lenin told him that there was not much to be done in the diplomatic front and hence all efforts should be focused on revolutionary work. Alfred Erich Senn, Diplomacy and Revolution: The Soviet Mission to Switzerland, 1918 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), p. 111.

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Milkich and others, all former Zimmerwaldists or Zimmerwald Leftists. As most of the Mission affiliates were from the Zimmerwald Left fraction, they represented a continuity between the wartime internationalism and the emergent post-war communist movement. Besides these experienced militants, a new generation of Swiss German and Italian youth workers also participated in the Mission’s work. The political work of the Mission was open to the whole LRI movement without a sectarian impulse. There were at least six Left Socialist Revolutionaries associated with the work of the Bureau and some of them were very prominent members of their party, such as Isaac Steinberg or Mark Natanson.873 Considering that they were voluntarily assigned after the SR’s assassination of Count Mirbach and the Left SR attempted coup, which led to the downfall of the coalition between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, it is fair to say that Bolsheviks had no desire or plan to hide what was going on in Russia or to hegemonize the international movement. Lenin had especially high expectations from Herman Gorter, hoping that he would become a theoretical and political leader to orient the LRI movement. He requested Berzin to ask Gorter to compile a reading list on the major contemporary theoretical debates in the western socialist movement.874 Gorter’s World Revolution, which he finished in 1918 and dedicated to Lenin, is a work of this period. He may have consulted to Jan Berzin in its writing, as Gorter came to develop a very close friendship with him.875 Having recognized the danger that the Swiss Mission posed, both Entente and AustriaHungarian governments pressured the Swiss government to expel the mission. “Bolsheviks came from Switzerland” noted the Austrian ambassador to Switzerland and for this reason, the Soviet Mission was a danger to all the adjacent countries.876 Not only the Central powers, but also the Entente and especially French government fought for the expulsion of the Mission. Fears mounted within government circles both inside and outside Switzerland about the secret revolutionary

873

Senn, Diplomacy and Revolution, p. 105 Natanson, born in 1850 participated in the First International and organized the first populist cells, was a part of the famous “Chaykovsky” circle together with Pyotr Kropotkin. 874 Lenin’s correspondence in this period gives ample evidence to this. Lenin requested that Berzin ask Gorter to compile a reading list about major theoretical debates going on in the West at the time (Letter to Berzin October 1918, in Unknown Lenin, Pipes ed., p. 58. Also see: Lenin, LCW Vol. 44, p. 112. 875 Herman de Liagre Böhl, Met al mijn bloed heb ik voor U geleefd: Herman Gorter 1864-1927 (Amsterdam: Balans, 1996), p. 393. 876 Senn, Diplomacy and Revolution, p. 156.

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center in Switzerland aiming to carry the revolution into Italy, Germany and to the Mediterranean.877 When a massive general strike struck Switzerland in November 1918, the Soviet Mission was finally expelled from the country by the Swiss government. Despite their short-lived existence, Soviet Missions in 1918 set a precedent for the Comintern Bureaus which were established in 1919. Like the Soviet missions, Comintern bureaus that were set up the following year would bring together international LRIs with a perspective towards working class solidarity and world revolution. They brought together the revolutionary cadres, led by former Zimmerwald Leftists, that would eventually form the nucleus of the Comintern in its first year. Two individuals who were active in the Swiss mission, Herman Gorter and Jacob Reich, would be assigned to carry out the organizational work of the two most important bureaus: Gorter, to the Amsterdam Comintern Bureau, and Reich to the Western European Secretariat of the Comintern in Berlin. Thus, the Missions represented a link between the Zimmerwald Left and what later became the Comintern. In a sense they represented a middle position between the Zimmerwald International Socialist Commission and the future Comintern Bureaus, operating as international centers of revolutionary initiative and contact hubs. To sum up, 1917 and 1918, put the Zimmerwald Left Fraction in a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, it was a time of success for its theoretical and political ideas, as the November Revolution and the following withdrawal of Russia from the war revealed; on the other hand, it was a time of failure, as the revolutionary turmoil broke the fragile organizational links of the fraction. The east European Zimmerwald Leftists and newly formed East Asian left-radical internationalist groups, headed by the Bolsheviks in Russia, tested several new organizational forms to reforge international ties: the politicized POWs, immigrant workers and émigré groups in Soviet Russia formed several new left-radical groups. The Soviet state stretched its links via Soviet Missions to Germany and Switzerland to reforge and revitalize the broken links with their former Zimmerwald Left comrades. Nevertheless, in the absence of a Third International providing a solid organizational umbrella, and the enduring disunity in the west and especially in Germany all these efforts were at best rudimentary. Thus, in 1918, the Zimmerwald Left fraction found itself globally

877

Ibid. pp. 38-40.

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disunited amidst success in Russia. The next chapter examines how the Zimmerwald Leftists’ and broadly the LRI movement’s efforts to finally overcome its disunity and laid the groundwork for the founding of the Third International in March 1919.

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X.

The First Comintern Congress in Moscow, March 1919

This chapter argues that the Third International, which was founded in March 1919, represented an outgrowth of the original LRI nucleus, that began to form in the mass action debates in the Second International between 1911 and 1914 and then congealed around the Zimmerwald Left fraction in 1915 and 1916. Joined by various emergent Asian and European political groups, formed mostly by POWs and immigrant workers, this Zimmerwald Left fraction grew and matured in 1917 and 1918, expanding in east and central Europe and Asia. This chapter also explores the debates and conclusions of the March 1919 Congress that founded the Third International. The most important theoretical subject on the agenda of the Congress was the question of proletarian dictatorship, sealed its theoretical break from the Social Democratic movement and concluded the mass action debate that started in 1900s. Finally, in 1919, the LRIs globally emerged as a clearly organized, distinct, and unified movement defending mass action for the seizure of power by the working class masses through mass organs of struggle (soviets or councils) in the declining stage of capitalist mode of production. The First Congress of the Communist International convened in March 1919. It constituted the climax of the LRI activity, which soon after its founding began its painful process of disintegration and internal fracturing because the LRIs failed to come to a collective agreement about its strategy and tactics had to be.

A.

On the Timing and Location of the Founding Congress: Why Moscow and Why March 1919

Compared to the pre-war Second International congresses with hundreds of delegates from huge mass parties and unions, there were a little more than fifty delegates present at the March 1919 founding Congress of the Comintern; most of them represented small or recently established groups. This has led many historians to regard the congress as an event dominated by the Bolsheviks that represented a state propaganda campaign serving the Soviet state interests. Those 361

historians less inclined to accept this “Bolshevik totalitarianism” assumption argued that the Congress represented a major Bolshevik “achievement”. Indeed, the historiography so far has regarded the congress as an objectively “Bolshevik centered” event. This “Bolshevik centered” approach rests on four concrete assumptions: First, those attending the congress were not the representatives of independent, authentic home-grown movements, but rather those who were in the orbit of the Bolsheviks, or even recruited and organized by the Bolsheviks.878 Hence, the congress did not represent a genuine organizational step in the development of an autonomous international created by consent.879 Second, some historians claimed that, aside from the Bolsheviks, the largest group, the German Spartakists, objected to the founding of a new International. Hence, the argument goes, the new international was from its beginning sectarian and/or under the control of a Bolshevik leadership.880 The third argument for the “Bolshevik centeredness” thesis is that the Congress did not make any original theoretical or tactical contributions to the LRI movement and consequently, it had a merely or primarily propaganda function aimed to endorse Bolsheviks’ or even Lenin’s theories.881 Finally, this interpretation argues that the congress convened early or prematurely

878

Many historians who authored canonical works on the subject reproduced this view. See: Hulse, The Forming of the Communist International, p. 52; Lazitch and Drachkovitch, Lenin and the Comintern, p. 74; Serge Wolikow, Komünist Enternasyonal (1919-1943) Komintern Veya Yıkılan Dünya Devrimi Partisi Hayalleri (Istanbul: Yordam, 2016), p. 232-3; Georges Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism 1871-1914: Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 83. 879 Historians accepting this assumption usually argue that the authentic organizational step was taken only in the Second Congress of the Comintern in Summer 1920. See: S. A. Smith and Alexander Vatlin, “Comintern,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, S. A. Smith ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 190, Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 13-4; Gunther Nollau, International Communism and World Revolution: History & Methods (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), p. 44. 880 For this line of argument, see for example: Ottokar Luban, “Rosa Luxemburg and the Founding of the Communist International” (paper presented at the 8th Historical Materialism Annual Conference, London, 2013), pp. 1–8. 881 For this approach both “Leninists” and anti-Leninists can be cited. Among the most prominent examples of the Lenin-centric school are Lukacs, (“The Comintern was to be the Bolshevik party – Lenin’s concept of the party – on a world scale”), György Lukács, Lenin (London: N.L.B., 1970), p. 56; McDermott & Agnew, The Comintern, p. 15-6, (“The new International found purely on the basis of Lenin’s will power”); Braunthal, History of the Internationals Vol. 2 p. 162; (“the outcome [of the congress] gave the Bolsheviks, as Lenin himself said later, to announce their principles to the world”) Nollau, International Communism, p. 45; Hulse, The Forming of the Communist International, p. 22.

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because organic and independent national Communist parties were either not present or just emerging in several different countries. As a result, some argue that the congress generally represented a Machiavellian intrigue or a breach in the socialist movement engineered and imposed by the Bolsheviks rather than representing a genuine division. Viewed from a different perspective, the First Congress represented an international movement’s conscious response to an emerging global situation: the ending of the war, but the persistence of the world crisis in the form of an international working class revolutionary wave. Moreover, the congress represented a real international movement that took shape and form during the war. In a way, it was more akin to the earlier forms of revolutionary organizations, such as the Communist League or the First International, in its organizational structure—small, clandestine, and international—than rather formal and spectacular Second International. Yet it was still something new, especially in terms of its global program and strategy. If anything, one might argue that its founding was late, rather than being rushed or premature. In 1919, the first opening clashes of the world revolution had already ended in several major countries and in others, the wave was already receding. The small number of delegates participating in it was not a deliberate Bolshevik conspiracy to dominate the congress or a lack of interest in the Communist International, but caused mainly by the repression of LRIs in their native countries, the difficulty of arranging an illegal trip to Russia, and the fact that the western LRIs were still not accustomed to the underground organizational activity due to decades-long social democratic habits and confidence in legality. Finally, the March 1919 Congress systematized and gave a clear expression to years long LRI theoretical debates, in particular and most clearly in the positions it reached on parliamentarism and soviet systems.

1.

Why March 1919?

By the end of 1918, a radical transformation began in the world-historical conditions that gave rise to the Zimmerwald Left fraction. First, the war came to an end, but the end of the war did not immediately give way to peace. Instead, central Europe descended into a chaotic civil war, triggering the collapse of German and Austria-Hungarian Empires. Uprisings and the formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils (soviets or Rate as they were called in Germany) spread to 363

Germany and Austria. By September 1918, the German Army was teetering on the brink of collapse. Earlier, in August, troops on the German western front began to chaotically retreat after the battle of Amiens. Aided by the fresh American forces, the underfed, under-armed and numerically weak German army finally pulled out of France. In September, Ludendorff convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II to begin the transition to a constitutional monarchist regime. This conciliatory gesture towards Wilsonian liberalism paved the way for a dovish government that could facilitate the peace negotiations. In early October, a liberal government supported by the right-wing Social Democrats, progressives, and the Catholic minority parties was formed. One demonstration for the empire’s bitter situation was the German High Command’s sending of Major Baron von der Bussche to the Reichstag to explain to a shocked audience that the war could not be won by Germany and to urge the representatives to start peace negotiations with the Entente.882 By this point Bulgaria was already on the verge of collapse. Faced with an allied offensive from Macedonia, the Bulgarian government decided to declare a unilateral ceasefire and entered into separate peace negotiations. In early November, Austria-Hungarian Empire also broke its alliance with Germany and signed a ceasefire agreement with Italy. Finally, there came the German collapse in November 1918, but it was not in an orderly fashion, as the military High Command had hoped. One of many examples of the unfolding disorder was the mutiny of the Germany Navy in the north. The Navy had laid dormant in Kiel throughout the war and the coming defeat prompted the German navy captains and officers to launch a vain, kamikaze attack against the British fleet. This in turn met with a massive and coordinated refusal by the sailors to obey orders. Sailors unfurled red flags, arrested their officers, and a wave of soldiers’ soviets and workers soviets, similar to the Russian example, formed first in northern towns before expanding southward throughout Germany. An armistice was declared in November 1918, at the same time Germany entered into a revolution, ending the First World War only to start the German Civil War. Faced with the chaotic collapse of their belligerents, the victorious Entente power governments gathered in Paris in January 1919 and, acting almost as a world government, started peace

882

Lawrence Sondhaus, World War One: The Global Revolution, Second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), eBook: Chapter 13.

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talks to determine the fate of the world.883 A major concern of this conference was to quell the working-class and social upheaval expanding in Europe. The Paris Conference focused on the German, Russian and the wider east European national questions. The participants were divided on the Russian question as the British delegation was content with an isolated and small revolutionary Russia, whereas the French delegation aimed for crushing the Soviet power, if necessary, by direct military intervention.884 In the end, to deal with Russia, a Wilsonian solution was implemented. In place of the large multi-ethnic empires that dominated east and central Europe, the American president Woodrow Wilson proposed the reconstruction of Europe based on the rights of nations to self-determination principle, mirroring the Soviet peace proposal of 1917.885 What distinguished the Wilsonian program was its proposal for a parliamentary type of national sovereignty as opposed to the competing Soviet conception of mass worker and peasant political rule based on councils. This national, parliamentarian project was reserved only for white Europe, as Wilson carefully disregarded the colonized people, mostly controlled by the Entente colonialist governments including the US itself.886 The undeclared goal was to create a cordon sanitaire on the western borders of Soviet Russia constituted by a ring of small ethno-national states to barricade European capitalism from the westward spread of proletarian revolution or “the Bolshevik bacilli” as Churchill called it. That way, small, ethno-nationalist parliamentary regimes ruled by local anti-communist elites were recognized as the sovereigns along an arch from Finland in the

883

Macmillan in her work on the Versailles Treaty explained that the representatives of the Entente governments indeed perceived themselves and acted as a world government. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 57-58. 884 Ibid. p. 74. 885 French press was very explicit and open about how it was necessary for the Entente governments to utilize nationalism against communist internationalist class solidarity. For a summary see: Arno Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-1918 (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1964), pp. 382-3. 886 In Paris, the attitude was clearly dismissive of the African and Chinese delegates, and other colonial peoples who had hoped to find a sympathetic ear for their demands. Their hopes were in vain. Among those there were people like Ho Chi Minh, whose disillusionment with the European and American dominant class racism contributed to his future political trajectory. Web du Bois, who was also present, could not even arrange for an official meeting to discuss his modest proposals among the European delegation, let alone with Wilson, who, coming from a Virginian upper-class background himself, did not believe that his proposal for the rights of self-determination extended much beyond white, Christian Europeans. Jay M. Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 50-55.

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north to the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, an enlarged Rumania, and finally an artificially created Yugoslavia in the South.887 Another interrelated question the Entente Governments faced was the German question. The difficulty for the Entente governments was engineering a German state weak enough to not pose a military challenge to the security of France, but strong and confident enough to deter the working class from taking power and uniting with the Soviet power in Russia. As Lloyd George put it, if a revolution led by the Spartakists in Germany succeeded, “it is inevitable that she should throw in her lot with the Russian Bolsheviks” and that would mean the beginning of the end for capitalism.888 Thus, the British and American delegations were willing to propose Germany peace terms that would not entail crippling her capacity to struggle with Soviet Russia abroad and proletarian revolt inside the country. The Entente governments in Paris found a receptive counterpart in the new German Provisional Government formed after the November Revolution. This new Social Democratic coalition government was formed by the centrist USPD together with the right-wing nationalist SPD. It was wholly sympathetic to the Wilsonian agenda. While Wilson’s proposed League of Nations, an important component of his peace program, limited its appeal to a strictly European and racial brand of ethno-nationalism, it contributed to the resurrection of the by-then dissolved and defunct Second International. The pre-war international strategy of the Second International was found upon the perspective that a pan-European parliament could secure peace in Europe. Liberals and Social Democrats had both hoped and expected that such a continental parliament, once established, would peacefully resolve international conflicts. The Wilsonian conception of the League of Nations gave a new lease of life to this ideal. Wilson became the champion of European social democracy and all the centrist and right-wing

887

E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), pp. 31-34. 888 Quoted in Anthony Read, The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism (London: Pimlico, 2009), p. 160. American official view was similar to the British. As early as 25 November 1918, William Bullitt wrote to the Secretary of State Robert Lansing warning him that “Unless we support the Ebert Government a little more strongly than the Russian Bolsheviki are supporting the Spartakusbund, Germany will become Bolshevist. Austria and Hungary will follow Germany’s example. And the remainder of Europe will not long escape infection.” Bullitt quoted in Arno Mayer, Arno J. Mayer, The Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 (Knopf, 1967), p. 259.

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social democrats enthusiastically embraced his program. Fabian theoretician Beatrice Webb wrote that “the British Labour party was Wilson’s one supporter in Europe,”889 but that was not quite true as the French Social Democrats (even the Longuet group whom the Bolsheviks trusted as an ally) “hailed the President as their leader.” In Germany, the Wilsonian program performed a function of “powerful beacon of hope to many Independents as well as to the SPD. Bernstein, Haase, and Kautsky relied on Wilson quite as much as their Allied counterparts.”890 Their hopes restored with the start of the Paris peace negotiations, the right-wing and centrist Social Democratic leaders of Europe convened in Bern in February 1919.891 One declared aim of the Bern Conference was the organization of a pan-European Social Democratic intervention in the Paris negotiations of the Entente governments. In addition to supporting the League of Nations as a “safeguard” for the world peace, Social Democrats envisioned the new international institution as an international government of the civilized world and themselves as its opposition. The League of Nations, the Social Democrats hoped, could “civilize” the backward and colonial nations. In other words, instead of proposing the dismantling of European colonialism, Social Democrats hoped to establish an international oversight to avert military competition and possible new world wars to be waged over colonies.892 A second goal of the Bern Conference was to take a position on the Bolsheviks and the soviet system in general. Representatives of the British Labour Party, right-wing of SFIO, and SPD tried to convince the conference participants to unite in condemnation of Bolshevism and Soviets. Albert Thomas and Branting pushed for a resolution against the “dictatorship of the proletariat” conception. This proved to be a divisive issue because the main centrist parties, especially USPD and the left-wing of the SFIO, were reluctant to take an openly hostile position against the Bolsheviks. Even though those opposed to condemning the Bolsheviks were a small minority in the conference, the Social Democrat leaders in Bern hesitated at that moment to take an openly

889

Mayer, Wilson vs Lenin, p. 388. Ibid. p. 390 and pp. 391-2. 891 Participants included representatives from several major European Social Democratic parties, including the SPD, the USPD, the SFIO and the British Labour Party. 892 “Die Resolution Der Internationalen Arbeiter- Und Sozialistenkonferenz in Bern (3-10 Februar 1919)” (Basel: Herausgegeben vom Presskomitee der Konferenz, 1919), pp. 5-6. 890

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hostile position.893 In the USPD or the SFIO, the soviet concept and the Bolsheviks were extremely popular among the party bases and an open condemnation of the Russian revolution in accord with the Entente governments could potentially split these parties. However, centrist German and Austrian Social Democrats managed to produce a type of alternative to the soviet system without openly condemning it. Skilled in producing conciliatory formulations to keep left and right wings of Social Democratic movement inside the same party before the war, USPD’s policy on workers councils was probably its last great historical achievement in the centrist tradition of mixing abstract verbal radicalism with practical “business as usual” politics. Kautsky and Max Adler produced a kind “Erfurtian Councilism” based on an amalgam of SPD’s pre-war Erfurt program with the soviet system, granting a role to the soviets or councils, even though this was only a minor role.894 Accordingly, under a superior parliamentary regime, which would not trumpet over the ruling classes, but peacefully coexist with them, the soviets should essentially play an economic role akin to trade unions and cooperatives for the unorganized masses on the margins of social democracy. Kautsky regarded the soviet form as an expression of the backward or “Asiatic” masses’ more passionate but politically uneducated spirit. In a similar vein, Kautsky thought that in Western Europe, the soviet form was most enthusiastically embraced by the youth, unskilled, semiskilled or lumpen strata lacking a political education and patience, which exploded due to the hardships of the war. Thus, Kautsky and his USPD party, by embracing the soviet form, even only formally, diffused it into the old Erfurtian Social Democratic program. This centrist Social Democratic Erfurtian Councilism was like the Menshevik perception of an idealized dual power situation. In that sense, the “Erfurtian Councilism” of Kautsky and the centrist European Social Democrats aimed to freeze the class struggle, in a situation similar to the one prevailed between the March and November Revolutions in the Russian context.895 Erfurtian Councilism fit neatly with the demands of the Entente powers and it was lenient enough to give at least a symbolic place to the soviets or councils, appeasing the mass workers who were sympathetic to Soviet power. However, it left the political power to national parliaments that would be

893

Braunthal, History of the International, Vol.2, pp. 155-6. This concept is advanced by Nicholas Vrousalis in, “Erfurt plus Councils: The Distinctive Relevance of the German Revolution of 1918-19,” Socialist History 55, no. 29019 (2019): 27–46. 895 Ibid. 894

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dominated by the right-wing socialists and bourgeois national parties. The implementation of this program could potentially fulfill the main political condition of the American government (implementation of parliamentary governments in Europe) in exchange of food and financial aid to the governments of devastated, hunger and pandemic-stricken central European countries.896 This conception, an amalgam of the Soviet systems and parliamentarism, constituted the most important theoretical challenge to left-radical internationalism in 1919 and 1920. By developing such a synthesis of soviet and parliamentary forms, supposedly more suitable to the West, Kautsky posed a major challenge to the westward march of the council form both in practice (considering that the November revolution was a struggle between the soviet and parliament forms) and in theory (the LRIs elaborated the principle that the soviet and parliament forms were historically irreconcilable). Potential harmonious and peaceful co-existence of the soviet and the parliamentary forms became a programmatic principle of the Social Democrats vacillating between the Communists and the Social Democrats first in Germany and then elsewhere from 1918 onwards. The USPD in Germany and centrists Social Democrats of central Europe in general, took up this Kautskyian program.897 As the centrists aimed, while the soviets (rate in German) practically took over the state power after the November revolution in Germany, they did not use this power to systematically dismantle the state bureaucracy and the army as the Bolsheviks did and the LRIs wanted to do. Instead, the majority of the Social Democratic delegates handed the power over to a cabinet dominated by the nationalist Social Democrats headed by Ebert. Ebert in turn came to an agreement with the military high command, annulled the popular demand to democratize the military and prepared for an orderly transition to a democratic parliamentary regime. The USPD, Kautsky’s party, supported the Ebert cabinet in this critical post-revolutionary juncture. With the Second International reconstituted in Europe behind a Wilsonian Program and the Paris Conference bringing together the Entente governments now free to organize an attack against Soviet power in Russia and anywhere else it might rise, further delaying the founding of a Third International ran the risk of losing the chance of founding it for an unforeseeable future. Several threats loomed over Russia. A German state liberated from the burden of waging a war in the west,

896

Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking, p. 260. These considerations informed Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech and strategy. 897 Vrousalis “Erfurt plus Councils”, pp. 27-46.

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if it could come to an agreement with the Entente, could accept the role of a spearhead against the Bolsheviks in the east in a White counter-revolutionary crusade.898 The foundations of such a strategy was already laid in the Ostpolitik – popular among certain Junker and bureaucratic circles. Colonizing Russia for Germany faced with the very realistic possibility of losing its colonies remained a persistent option on the table of the policymakers for the coming decades.899 The German Social Democrats, in fact, struck the first blow against the Bolsheviks. While still members of the coalition government of Prince Max von Baden, they had agreed that Germany would have to play on the allied fear of Bolshevism to obtain a more lenient peace. They intended to portray the Reich as the last barrier of "civilization" against Bolshevik "barbarism."900 In addition to an open military intervention, Soviet Russia still had to live under Entente sanctions and had to struggle with the White counter-insurgency financed and supported also by the Entente powers. Because of these pressures, if an isolated Soviet power fell and counter-revolution prevailed, the LRI forces could find themselves too dispersed, if not too demoralized, to organize a new third international. While these pressures pushed the LRIs to constitute the Third International in early 1919, spread of the revolution in Germany and wider central Europe constituted a pull factor. The Bolsheviks endured the dire consequences Brest-Litovsk Treaty, ensuring Civil War and their own political isolation with the expectation of a revolution in Germany. Anticipating the revolution in Germany, Lenin wrote to Sverdlov and Trotsky in October 1918 urging them to begin preparations to aid the German proletarians by any means necessary. Lenin wrote; “We are all ready to die to help the German workers advance the revolution which has begun in Germany... we must have by the spring [1919] an army of 3 million to help the international workers revolution”901

898

By this point Soviet power was temporarily established in the Baltic republics. German SPD government aided the bourgeois forces by sending freikorps volunteer units. British government also aided the Latvian and Estonian bourgeois forces. Richard K. Debo, Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918-1921 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), p. 17. 899 Hitler openly talked about it. Ironically, after the second world war, Operation Roll Back revived this. For recent studies of Operation Roll Back, see: Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000). 900 Debo, Survival and Consolidation, p. 13. 901 Lenin, LCW Vol. 35, p. 364-5.

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However, without a united LRI organization in Germany to guide not only the German revolutionary movement but also to claim the leadership in the international movement, a movement that the Bolsheviks could directly address themselves, the Soviet state had very limited options.902 German LRIs themselves stepped up their attempts to forge unity in Germany in late 1918. First, in late August 1917 the German Zimmerwald Leftists tried to constitute the International Socialist Party of Germany (Internationale Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands, ISPD) in a clandestine meeting in Berlin. The meeting resolved to form a new German Zimmerwald Leftist party as a member of the “nascent Third International.” However, the police dispersed clandestine meeting before it could finish its proceedings.903 Following this, in November 1918, north German LRIs led by Johann Knief found the International Communists of Germany (IKD) based in Bremen around a new publication (der Kommunist). The group organized its first congresses in Berlin in November 1918, fully endorsing the Zimmerwald Left program based on mass actions, soviets, and the Third International. Finally in late December 1918, the IKD and Spartakists organized a joint congress in Berlin. The Congress ended up founding the German Communist Party – Spartakus (KPD-S), uniting all the LRI forces in Germany together with the Spartakists. When finally, the KPD-S, a united communist or LRI party in Germany fully bringing together all the most consistent internationalists including the Spartakists emerged, the most important obstacle for a genuine international LRI congress disappeared. On 12 January, Lenin penned a message addressed to the European and North American workers noting that the foundation of a Communist Party in Germany led by Liebknecht and Luxemburg had an international significance and it practically meant that the Third International now had a solid foundation: “When the German Spartakusbund with its world-famous and world-renowned leaders, with such faithful champions of the working class as Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Klara Zetkin, Franz Mehring, finally broke its link with socialists of the type of Scheidemann and Sudekum, with those social-chauvinists… when the Spartakusbund called itself the "Communist Party of Germany", then the foundation of a... Third International, a

902

Lenin wrote in 11 October that “Europe’s greatest misfortune and danger is that it has no revolutionary party. It has parties of traitors like the Scheidemanns, Henaudels, Hendersons, Webbs and Co., and of servile souls like Kautsky. But it has no revolutionary party.” Here, when he wrote “Europe … has no revolutionary party” he very likely had first of all Germany in mind. Lenin, LCW Vol. 28, pp. 104-112. 903 Engel, “The International Communists of Germany, 1916-1919”, p. 36.

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Communist International, became a fact. Formally this foundation has not yet been made secure, but in fact the Third International now already exists.”904

From late December onwards, the Bolsheviks took up the initiative to finally begin the preparations for an international “Communist” (the self-adopted name of Left-Radical Internationalists from late 1918 onwards) congress in Moscow, with the clear aim of finding the Third International.

2.

Why Moscow?

From an LRI perspective, Moscow was an unlikely place for an international communist congress. Traditionally, the Social Democratic congresses often convened in small countries where the Social Democratic movement was strongest and the bourgeoisie tended to be more liberal, or sympathetic to pacifism.905 Hence, it was customary to convene international congresses in countries where the Social Democratic parties had enjoyed recent electoral successes and had achieved certain degree of political respect and legitimacy. Indeed, these were meetings of a movement the center of which was increasingly aiming to be the left-wing of a European parliament. Therefore, the location of congress was chosen with these and other considerations, such as to be close to the center of European pacifist-bourgeois democracy. The Bolsheviks had also expected to organize the first congress in the West; among the possible candidates were Amsterdam or Berlin.906 However, the LRIs could not possibly convene a congress, even in a neutral, small European country (such as the Netherlands or Switzerland),

904

Lenin, LCW Vol. 28, pp. 453-4. Lenin’s view was shared by others. For instance, Zinoviev wrote that the founding of the Third International could be considered as 1918 December, when the German Communist Party was formed. He wrote in 1919 that “when in May 1918, the Bolshevik Party in Russia, then already in power, changed its name to the Russian Communist Party, and when, a few months later, the German Spartacists, who already boasted of a glorious past, also assumed the name of “German Communist Party,” it became clear to every revolutionist that the Third International had been born. All we had to do in 1919 was to register the fact of its birth.” Zinoviev, “Vistas of the Proletarian Revolution”, The Communist International no.1 (1919), p. 22. 905 Until 1914 five congresses convened in Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands or Switzerland and four in France, England, Germany. The last one scheduled for 1914 was planned to take place in Vienna but the congress could not convene due to the war. 906 Lenin’s Letter to Chicherin (27-28 December 1918) in LCW Vol. 42, pp. 119-121.

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since the conditions of civil war and the Western governments’ hostile attitudes precluded this. Further, a congress that aimed to find a third international was not intended to be a symbolic gesture, a theatrical prequel for revolutionary mass actions to happen in an indefinite future, as the Second International Congresses were. The LRIs were already in revolutionary situations in eastern and central Europe, or they were anticipating them in the foreseeable future in the rest of the world. They needed a debate on the concrete world situation and clear-cut answers to urgent, practical questions. That is why a huge, spectacular meeting (in a western European capital) of hundreds of delegates was not only unnecessary but logistically impossible. While Western Europe was not viable, a congress in Russia had its advantages. First, Russia at this point was the only place where freedom of expression for the LRIs existed. Second, despite the blockade, an LRI core and international network had already materialized in Moscow, just as it happened in Switzerland or Nordic countries during the war. Gradually, after the November revolution, a second wave of migration began, this time often consisting of revolutionaries from the Western European and North American countries, reversing the tide. As explored in a previous chapter, these émigrés formed internationalist organizations in Soviet Russia. This itself was not unusual as the Bolsheviks themselves had a dual organizational structure during the war: an émigré organization abroad and an organization in Russia, the latter being weaker due to the repression. Of the many such émigrés and exiles were some of considerable political stature and worth mentioning as they participated in the founding Congress of the Communist International. Fritz Platten who had barely escaped arrest after a massive strike in Switzerland in 1918 (the biggest strike movement in the country’s history) was a member of the Zimmerwald Left fraction since its founding. He was in fact the official editor of its first bulletin in 1915. Jacques Sadoul, a military expert who joined the soviet movement, was tried for treason in France and faced court martial if he returned France. Christian Rakovsky, a prominent internationalist and a well-known leader of the Balkan socialist movement, had been in a Romanian prison when the revolution struck in 1917 and workers and insurgent soldiers released him from the prison. The Finnish Communist Party delegates were refugees in the Soviet Russia, survivors of a bloody White terror that crushed the peacefully constituted Finnish Socialist Republic. Balabanoff, the official secretary of the Zimmerwald movement had been expelled from Switzerland in November 1918 and had been denied 373

reentry into Stockholm, was also in Russia at the time. As no place was safe enough for the LRIs, the most suitable location for an international communist conference in Europe in early 1919 was Moscow. Yet reaching Russia was always difficult, especially for those suspected of being “Bolsheviks.” The Soviet government had to go through lengthy negotiations with separate European states that imprisoned political radicals to secure their release and safe passage to Soviet Russia. Victor Serge’s case is symptomatic in that regard. The French government had put Serge, one of the first cadres of the Comintern organization, into a concentration camp for his radical views earlier during the war. His recounting of his release and hopes for reaching Soviet Russia conveys many of the points discussed here: “So, for the revolutionary workers of Western Europe, the October revolution was a spectacular revelation. It gave them more than an example to follow, more than a boundless source of hope; it gave them a body of doctrine, methods of struggle, an education; it gave them leaders. From 1917 on, there were many of us in the Latin countries who recognized all this, albeit in a confused fashion. We were looking for our road towards the Russian Revolution, from which we were separated by many miles and by frontiers bristling with cannon—and perhaps even more by the pernicious traditions of reformist socialism and the childish illusions of anarchism which had grown up in reaction to it. So my journey towards Communism lasted some 12 years. My journey towards the endangered city lasted 17 months. On January 5, 1919, as evening fell, some twenty of us, surrounded by police, left the concentration camp at Précigné in France. Freezing cold and thin from hunger, dressed in old threadbare clothes, we went out joyfully into the cold night. We were twenty “Bolsheviks” who had been interned for many months and who were now to be exchanged with the Soviet government for officers from the French military mission in Moscow who had been held prisoner until now.”907

Like Serge, for many LRIs in Europe and beyond, seeing the actual land of Soviet power firsthand had a great appeal. A congress gathered in Moscow was not only advantageous for security reasons, but also for reasons of morale. However, for Bolsheviks in Russia, a congress in Moscow was not preferable. An ideal location would be a western capital. A congress in Berlin or Paris would seal the victory of the proletarian revolution in Europe and probably in the whole world. Bolsheviks in 1919 were eager to be relieved of the burden of responsibility for organizing the new International, since, in their mind, the real leadership of the organization should be taken over by west European workers, ideally the German proletariat. Yet this was not an option and

907

Victor Serge, Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia, 1919-1921 (Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2011), p. 61.

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delegates from several European and American LRI groups began their long march to the temporary capital of the world revolutionary wave in late 1918 and early 1919.

B.

The Congress’ Composition

Preparations began in December 1918 for an international communist congress to find the Third International in Moscow in early 1919. Coming out with a concrete list of groups to be invited to the congress took considerable time. East and central European LRIs in Soviet Russia debated for about three weeks in December and January on specifically who to invite and what should be the concrete aim of the Congress. Two important documents (both published and widely available for decades but remain understudied) sheds light on this process: first, Lenin’s letter to Chicherin from 27 or 28 December 1918, and second, the final Letter of Invitation to Congress dated 24 January 1919 signed by Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Austrian, Latvian, Finnish and American communists residing in Moscow. These texts show that first, in continuation with the Zimmerwald Left, the core group to be invited to the congress consisted of those groups and parties that belonged to the Zimmerwald Left, which already operated as an international organizational fraction since 1915. These groups defended mass actions against the war and proletarian revolution through the seizure of political power by the Soviets since 1917. Hence, the congress was deliberately aimed to be a small but principled gathering of the core LRI grouping. Second, despite defining a strict organizational framework, the texts also left the door open to internationalist anarchists, syndicalists, and any other party or group that previously belonged to the Zimmerwald Center but showed a willingness to move left or at least remained open to discussing common issues with the LRIs and that refused to support Erfurtian Councilism and Wilsonian policy of encirclement against Soviet power in Russia. Most organizations that fit the second category consisted of Southern European and British Socialist parties and syndicalists from the western hemisphere. When the founding congress of the Third International finally convened on 2 March 1919, it succeeded in bringing together the core LRI groups. While the invited organizations from Britain and Italy did not manage to send delegations and the anarchists were wholly absent, the Congress could legitimately claim to be in continuity with the Zimmerwald Left fraction. 375

1.

Who Was Invited and Why?

In late 1918, it was clear that if an international congress of the LRIs had to take place in Russia, it would involve a small number of delegates from small groups and parties. However, this did not deter Bolsheviks. In his letter to a concerned Chicherin, Lenin wrote: “It would be immeasurably stupid to ‘wait’ for a ‘large’ number of participants’ and to be ‘embarrassed’ by the fact that at present there are ‘few’. For just now such a conference will be a moral force, independently of the number of participants, while later it may be hushed up.”908 Lenin’s aphorism “better fewer but better” conveyed the logic behind who and what types of people to invite to the congress. Lenin’s insistence on organizing a congress even though it would represent only small numbers was consistent with the position on the LRI unity that he had held since 1914. The Zimmerwald Left fraction, from its inception in 1915, remained a small but principled international grouping concerned with clarity over immediate success and short-term growth. From the beginning, even since the mass action debates of 1911-1914, the LRIs constituted a numerically small core group constituted by the Dutch Tribunists, the Bolsheviks, the German, Polish and Baltic leftradicals. After 1914, this core group grew with the participation of the International Socialist Youth movement and the Swedish and the Norwegian left-wing socialists. Around the periphery of this core group, which was centered in Switzerland during the war, several central European, Balkan and American left-wing groups coalesced. All these groups collaborated more determinately after the 1917 Revolution. Lenin insisted several times that this core international group (however small it was) was enough to form the new International, yet he could not convince his party earlier in 1917. Finally, in 1918, when the German Communist Party united the German LRIs and Spartakists after a prolonged process of debate, interrupted by constant hesitations and waves of government repressions, many Bolsheviks were convinced that, for that moment, there existed the best constellation of people that they could have to find the new International. But how was the formal process of organizing the congress and inviting delegates to proceed? The Bolsheviks began to make preparations for an official congress after they received a Spartacist representative from Germany, Eduard Fuchs, who made a clandestine journey to Soviet

908

Lenin, LCW Vol 35, p. 321.

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Russia in late 1918.909 Following this meeting, in his 27 December 1918 note to Chicherin, Lenin outlined his suggestions about the practical and formal steps to be taken for the congress. 910 It included (besides suggestions on the date and location for the congress) two practical suggestions on the platform and a list of criteria for the invitations. The platform, Lenin proposed, had to be an amalgam of the KPD-S program (“Was will der Spartakusbund?”) and the Bolshevik Party program, and it should be written by Bukharin. When Bukharin actually wrote this program (together with the Spartakist delegate Hugo Eberlein), which was accepted as the Platform of the Communist International, he also included the “Dutch Tribunists” in addition to the Spartakists and the Bolsheviks as the leading parties that were united on the basis of the same principles.911 According to Lenin, the main LRI groups essentially shared two core principles. First, they all accepted that the imperialist war was a historical turning point, which necessitated the proletariat to take political power from the bourgeoisie, which its senseless military rampage now headed the forces of international reaction. Second, proletarian power had to be a “dictatorship” exercised by the workers’ councils, temporarily depriving the bourgeoisie of political rights until the world revolution succeeded and the political power of the proletariat was consolidated. In addition, the invited organizations had to be willing to find a new international and, by implication, to split from the Second International once and for all. Whether they were small groups, mass parties or even just factions within or without Social Democratic parties, all of those invited had to be resolutely for a break with the Social Democrats. In addition, all groups invited had to have a clear history not tainted by nationalism or pacifism. Those organizations that “supported the bourgeois governments during the imperialist war directly or indirectly” were to be excluded from the congress. Further, the invited organizations had to be clearly in support of a socialist revolution (not in the

909

On 25 December 1918, Lenin met with Eduard Fuchs, a Spartacist representative from Germany. According to Lazitch and Drachkovich, this convinced Lenin to call for the Comintern congress. Lazitch and Drachkovitch, Lenin and the Comintern, pp. 52-53. Other notable delegates to arrive at this juncture included Rutgers in late September 1918, Balabanova in early October 1918 from Sweden, and Goldstein from Bulgaria representing Tesnyaki in late November. 910 This key document has been available for a long time, however it was usually overlooked and essentially utilized as to show the definite date for the decision to convene the congress. 911 John Riddell, ed., Founding the Communist International, p. 127. According to Bourrinet, Wijnkoop refused to go to Moscow, “just like he did in the Zimmerwald”. Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, p. 116.

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distant future but immediately, “now”, as Lenin emphasized). And finally, all had to accept the principle of soviet power as opposed to bourgeois parliamentarism because soviet power was a political form that was “higher and closer” to socialism.912 Beyond these basic principles, Lenin defined the broad outlines of the organizational criteria in this same letter. According to Lenin, the primary criterion was not numerical strength, but rather agreement and unity on the basis of an action platform found on the above summarized principles. He identified various organizational types that could be considered for invitation. These ranged from major political parties to groups or factions within the official Social Democratic parties. Lenin categorized these organizations into three: “- Parties and groups we have good reason to consider as already sharing the platform of the Third International and as being sufficiently unanimous on the question of formally founding the Third International, - parties close to this, from whom we expect alignment and affiliation, - groups and currents within the social-patriotic parties more or less close to Bolshevism.”913

Provided that the basic theoretical points are accepted, Lenin was very flexible on the types of organizations that could participate in the congress, which was not a long list anyway. In the list that he drew up in late December, twenty organizations were specifically identified fitting to one of the three categories quoted above: 1) Organizations that were inside Zimmerwald Left fraction between 1915 and 1918 or organizations founded by the Zimmerwald Left fraction constituents. Most of these organizations adopted the name “Communist” as opposed to “Social Democrat” in mid- to late-1918. These were, in central and western Europe, the Communist Parties of Germany,914 Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, in eastern Europe, the Communist Parties of Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland. The latter were all engaged in the Civil War and hence working in close cooperation even though the Bolsheviks were part of a soviet structure that held political power whereas the rest remained in the underground. Finally, Lenin’s list included the Left Social

912

Lenin’s Letter to Chicherin (27-28 December 1918) in LCW Vol. 42, pp. 119-121. Ibid. 914 Coincidentally, on the same day Chicherin wrote his reply and comments to Lenin’s letter, the Spartakists actually split from the USPD! It seems Lenin had good reasons to predict that the Spartakists would not take long to break from the Independents. 913

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Democrats of Sweden, which was a part of the Zimmerwald Left fraction as an independent party since 1917. 2) The second category included groups or parties that had a history of collaboration with the Zimmerwald Left (especially in the Zimmerwald or Kienthal conferences), but which did not yet officially rename themselves as “Communists” and remained autonomous or undecided between the Zimmerwald Left and the Zimmerwald Center as of 1918. Lenin specifically named the American Socialist Propaganda League, the Tesnyaki of Bulgaria, the Rumanian Socialist Party, “The Socialist Party of Scotland”, the Norwegian Workers Party, “the Danish S.D. group (Marie Nielsen)” the “syndicalists”, the British Socialist Party, and the Italian Socialist Party. This was a heterogenous mix. The closest groups to the Zimmerwald Left positions were the American SPL (which was openly pro-Zimmerwald Left since 1916), the Tesnyaki, Rumanian Socialist Party, and the Norwegian Workers Party. The Italian Socialist Party and the BSP were themselves factionally divided but strongly leant towards the left. However, they were not organically linked with the Zimmerwald Left fraction and neither sent a delegation to the Congress. It is unclear if they even received the official invitation. 3) Finally, Lenin’s list included two factions that were still inside main social democratic bodies: “the left wing in the Swiss Social-Democratic Party” and “Loriot’s group in France”. The Swiss radical left was a part of the Zimmerwald Left fraction since 1915. Lenin probably was not aware, but some of its leading members were already expelled from the Swiss Social Democratic Party and were organizing themselves as an independent communist organization. They actually managed to send a delegate to the Congress. The “Loriot group” had a more ambiguous position and stood between the Zimmerwald Left and Center. Hardly any of these organizations were of the same stature and organizational characteristics. Some were mass, legal parliamentary parties controlling, in some measure, their respective countries’ trade unions and cooperative movements, very similar to the Second International Social Democratic parties (the Norwegian Party is the best example here). However, most of these organizations were illegal parties or groups, some of which were in the midst of an open mass or armed struggle against their own national governments (for example, the newly formed Baltic, Finnish, Polish, Belarussian or Ukrainian Communist Parties). In between were those factions or groups akin to the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik party, groups that had split or were on the verge of 379

a split from the main Social Democratic parties and essentially cadre organizations in formation. Further, Lenin did not specify what he meant by “syndicalists,” as it was a very broad category. The Bolsheviks finally drafted a full and complete list of groups to be invited in late January 1919.915 In the final draft (probably written by Bukharin) of the Invitation to the Congress, thirty-nine groups, currents and parties were specifically named. The composition of this list more clearly shows the perceived geographic and political-organizational character of the communist movement in early 1919.916 These can be grouped into four categories: the groups that were inside the Zimmerwald Left fraction; the groups that were inside the Zimmerwald Movement but did not join the Zimmerwald Left; the socialist parties and syndicalist organizations from the English and Spanish speaking countries that were not part of the Zimmerwald movement, but took anti-war positions during the First World War; and finally, left-radical groups and parties from Asia, former territories of the Russian Empire and eastern Europe that were formed after the November Revolution. The first group included Communist Parties from central and eastern Europe, the Communist Party of the Netherlands, the Swedish Left SDP and the American SPL. Almost all of these parties and groups had split from or formed factional groups in their mother national Social Democratic Parties before the November Revolution in 1917 or from countries where unified social democratic parties did not exist. Many of these groups and parties took left-wing positions during the mass action debates, belonged to the Zimmerwald Left during the war, and supported the Bolsheviks in 1917. With only two exceptions (the international socialist youth organization led by Willi Münzenberg, the ICSYO, and the Japanese Socialist group around Sen Katayama), all the invited groups from this first category were represented in the congress. The second major category consisted of groups and parties that participated in the Zimmerwald Movement but either vacillated between the Zimmerwald Left and the Zimmerwald Center

915

The call first was first published on 24 January 1919 in the Soviet press. While it was printed in translation in Austria on 29 January and in Hungary on 30 January, a preliminary draft of the call was only published in Bremen on 4 February, while the final version was only printed in the KPD’s main daily newspaper on 25 February in a circular of the Italian Socialist youth in February. But other invited groups never saw the call. The British SLP, for example, only learned of the congress one month after it had concluded. For the full and final list of the invited groups to the Founding Congress see: Appendix B. 916 See Appendix B for a complete list of the parties that were invited and attended to the Congress.

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or did not belong to either and positioned themselves somewhere in between. These included the Bulgarian (Tesniyaki), Serbian, Rumanian, Portuguese, and Italian Socialist parties. While all the Balkan groups were represented in the Congress, the Italian and the Portuguese parties were not. This was probably because they did not have time to prepare for sending a delegation by the time they received the invitation or did not receive an invitation at all, which is likely considering the extreme conditions of isolation of Soviet power endured in 1919. The third category included socialists, anarchists or revolutionary syndicalists from mostly the Spanish, English, and Portuguese speaking countries. Even though organizations and parties in this category did not participate in the Zimmerwald movement, many of them took anti-war positions that could be described as close to the Zimmerwald or Zimmerwald-Left positions. The historical weakness of the Marxist movement in these countries hindered the emergence of genuine LRI tendencies during the mass action debates before the war. However, pro-mass action tendencies found an expression outside the Marxist movement and inside in revolutionary-syndicalist or anarchist-syndicalist currents that developed in these countries, synchronically with the LRI movement. In the preparations for the Zimmerwald Conference, Bolsheviks suggested their invitation, but this was rejected at the time. The founding Congress of the Third International was the first official attempt of the Zimmerwald Left to forge a connection with these syndicalist currents. However, none of these organizations were represented in the Congress. This fact reveals the weakness of organizational ties between the LRIs and the syndicalists or more broadly LRIs and the radical movements in Southern Europe and Latin America. Finally, a fourth category included groups and parties that were not listed in the 24 January letter of invitation but represented in the Congress with delegates. These were mostly organizations that were found after the November Revolution in Soviet Russia by immigrant workers, groups representing minorities of the former Russian Empire and former POWs, Chinese, Korean, Turkic, Caucasian, Iranian, Hungarian Communist and/or workers organizations fall into this category. To sum up, the First Congress of the Communist International in concrete organizational terms was the first genuine international congress of the Zimmerwald Left. Nevertheless, it was not a purely sectarian affair, as it approached the anarchist, syndicalist or even some centrist socialist parties. However, only those organizations with strong history of LRI organizational

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cooperation dating back to the pre-war mass action debates could manage to send representatives to Moscow.

2.

Composition of the Congress

Julius Martov, the Menshevik leader, closely observed the development of the Communist International. He concluded that the Third International was doomed from the beginning. In a letter to Karl Kautsky, he wrote that it would not be able to define the goals, “methods and organizational forms” of its own struggle, since they were nothing but a bunch of “syndicalists, anarchists, simple putschists, Proudhonists, Jacobin-Blanquists and Bakuninist-communists, nothing but naïve revolutionary elements.”917 There is an element of truth in this denigrating definition. When compared to the gatherings of the Second International, which used to bring together parliamentarians, lawyers and trade union bureaucrats as esteemed members of European civil society, the first Comintern Congress was unusual in every sense. Among the participants of the First Congress were many non-Europeans, war deserters, and young and immigrant workers. There were few who had belonged to a trade union let alone leading one, few who had campaigned for a parliamentary election. In short, few who had shared the common experiences defining the culture of typical leading Social Democrats in many Western European countries. Among the delegates only the Norwegian Emil Stang and the Sebald Rutgers from the Netherlands belonged to a party whose leaders held parliamentary seats at the time the congress took place. In fact, both men despised the parliamentarians.

917

Martov to Kautksy June 1920, Nikolaevsky Collection, Hoover Archives, box 51, f.14. Historiography, especially during the Cold War reproduced Martov’s cynicism boundlessly. A left-wing historian, Georges Haupt has a similar view about the Founding Congress: “foundation congress of the Communist International or its international apparatus in the years when it was taking shape… contained considerable number of insignificant personalities of people born of the occasion, chosen on the basis of a chance trip to Moscow or an improvised mandate.” Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism, p. 83. Similarly, Ulam also defined the Bolshevik delegation as a “galaxy of stars” while, for instance Poles were represented by Jan Unschlicht whose “fellow and superior” Pole comrade “Dzerzhinsky… presumably too busy”. Adam Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1973, (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 113.

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However, it would be misleading to consider that this heterodox mixture did not have any common experience of organization and action rooted in the Social Democratic tradition. Many of these radicals had had organizational contacts with each other since at least the first Zimmerwald Conference in 1915 and throughout the war. Clearly, the Zimmerwald movement had a reputable claim to the heritage of the Second International, as it was the only international core of the antiwar socialists that managed to preserve an international organizational continuity throughout the war. In fact, the Zimmerwald ISK was represented by its Secretary, Angelica Balabanova. Due to her years of activity in the Italian socialist movement, the credentials committee inquired if she could represent the Italian Socialist Party, which she refused.918 Overall, six participants in the Congress had participated in at least one of three Zimmerwald Conferences. In that sense there was a continuity between the Zimmerwald movement and the Congress. Among the delegates, there were some well-known Social Democratic leaders, whose presence represented a revolt against the older generation of the Social Democratic leaders. Some LRIs who founded the new International rejected “grey-haired authority” of the old leaders, as Helmut Gruber, the Austrian delegate noted.919 Swiss Fritz Platten argued, “’Men of no importance’ of the Third International will prove that their significance will and value is well known. Hollow sounding old names we cannot count among us, but we can the names of Trotsky, Lenin, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rakovsky, Sirola, Grimlund and others who are more feared by the bourgeoisie than Huysmans, Branting, Renaudel, Bissolatti, Scheidemann, Wels etc.”920 Many of the delegates had come to political maturity in a period when bitter debates between the left, center and right Social Democrats polarized the movement. The World War further transformed the Social Democratic movement and ultimately shattered its old customs, a disillusionment that many must have carried over into the postwar years. Hence, compared to the older generation of the Social Democratic leadership, which had lived in a peaceful and prospering Europe for decades, the generation of the LRIs that came together in Moscow had seen Europe descend into chaos, nationalist

918

Later she attributed this offer to the arbitrariness of the congress, but in her earlier memoirs she did not make such a claim. Angelica Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel (New York: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1968), pp. 216-217. 919 Helmut Gruber, “The Next Step”, The Communist International no.1 (1919), p. 34. 920 Fritz Platten, “Third International”, The Communist International, No.1 (1919), pp. 34-5.

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hatred, and an unimaginable violence. As Chart 1 indicates, most of the delegates were in their 30s (slightly more than the 45% delegates) and 30% were older than 40. Fewer than 5% were older than 50. Figure 1 Age distribution of delegates to First Comintern Congress in March 1919

Percentage 50.00 45.00 40.00 35.00 30.00 25.00 20.00 15.00 10.00 5.00 0.00 Unknown

20s

30s

40s

50s

Source: RGASPI 488-1-12, 13; John Riddell, ed., Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987); Wladislaw Hedeler and Aleksandr Vatlin, eds., Die Weltpartei aus Moskau: Der Gründungskongress der kommunistischen Internationale 1919. Prokoll und Neue dokumente (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008); Branko M Lazitch and Milorad M Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986).

The most obvious difference between the delegates present in the first Congress and the traditional Social Democratic leaderships was the prevalent culture of a new type of internationalism in the Congress. With the exception of the Finnish Social Democrats, almost all delegates of the first Comintern Congress had reached political maturity in socialist movements outside their country of birth. German-speaking Social Democratic parties (be they in Germany, German Austria or German speaking Switzerland) were home to many east Europeans before the war. Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Stalin, Chicherinm, Kollontai all lived in large German-speaking cities, and many had actively participated in the lives of the local socialist movements in these cities. Vienna, for instance, was a major destination for many of the east Europeans. Depending on the period, those from the Russian empire, be they the earlier generation that experienced exile at the turn of 384

the 19th century, or Bukharin’s generation, that went into exile after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, often travelled the western road and often spent time in Vienna. Indeed, most of the Bolsheviks who attended the founding congress of the Comintern had spent a good deal of their political life in exile and interacted with the western Social Democratic movement. Lenin and Zinoviev had participated in the life of the Swiss Social Democratic movement extensively. Chicherin worked closely with the International Socialist Youth Movement and played an active role in the British socialist movement. He was in fact the Nashe Slovo’s correspondent for Britain during the war and many LRI supporters on the continent read his articles on MacLean and the radical Scottish socialist movement extensively. Although he kept his distance from the LRI movement, Trotsky spent a great deal of time in the Austria-Hungarian, German, French, and American socialist movements. Bukharin and Kollontai (who participated the Congress as an observer) were both active in the Scandinavian and American LRI circles, writing in their journals, giving speeches, and organizing with them. They remained especially close with the Scandinavians after the war. The only Bolshevik delegates who did not live for any length abroad during the war were Stalin, Serafima Gropner, and Ossinsky-Obolensky: Gropner arrived in Russia in 1916 to carry out underground work, Stalin was in exile in Siberia, and Ossinsky-Oblensky was among the few Bolsheviks who remained in the underground and evaded arrest throughout the war. Yet, this émigré internationalist culture was not an exclusively Bolshevik phenomenon, as Rutgers’s case illustrates.921 Their relative youth coupled with the life of an itinerant revolutionary meant that many of these revolutionaries lacked the means of participating in the traditional lifestyles of a typical Social Democratic party or trade union official. Lacking citizenship in their places of exile or immigration, these revolutionaries rarely campaigned for socialist candidates or ran for offices themselves. Instead, most mingled with the youth and rank-and-file groups closer to the left-wing abroad. Further, once the war started, participating in elections became out of question for internationalist Marxists even in the most democratic countries and even in some neutral countries. Most outspoken radical internationalist parliamentarians were jailed during the war: John Maclean in

921

Rutgers, who brought with him a solidarity message from the Japanese socialists to Russia on his way from the US to support the Bolsheviks, represented both the American SPL and the Dutch SDP in the Congress. RGASPI, 488-1-3.

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Britain, Zeth Hoglund in Sweden, Karl Liebknecht in Germany, Eugen Debs in the US. Thus, excluded from legal politics at a national level, the survival of mass, legal socialist parties on the LRI lines was practically impossible during the war. In the Second International Congresses before the war, exiles representing their national parties were generally exceptions and these exiles were mostly east Europeans. In the March 1919 Congress, the situation was reversed. In most cases, the exiles were other Europeans in Russia. Sirola, a representative of the Communist Party of Finland, explained in his report how the war and Russian Revolutions changed the political geography of European socialism: “The Finnish Communist Party was founded at a Moscow congress at the end of August by exiles. But we are living in a completely new type of exile: one in a socialist country. We, who were radicals and left radicals, acquired our communist beliefs by studying our own revolutionary experiences, by getting to know the theoretical work of the Russian comrades, and particularly through the living example of the communist organizational work being carried out here on Russian soil.”922

The Finnish delegation was not unique. Many other delegates, especially those form Europe, were either exiles in Russia or represented groups that were driven to underground by state persecution. Most of the French delegates were exiles. For instance, Henri Guilbeaux, representing the French Zimmerwald Leftists and the editor of Demain, had been living in exile since the beginning of the war. Like the political exiles, a significant group among the Congress delegates were immigrant workers. Before the war, such workers gravitated to radical politics in reaction to the restrictions placed on immigrant and unskilled laborers, both by employers and union officials, and hence rarely affiliated with the traditional craft unionism based on legalistic approach. One of the most famous examples of such militant immigrant workers were the IWW “hobos” who organized militant industrial unions before the war, especially in the western US. In the founding Congress, Karl Steinhardt, a sailor and a worker, who represented the Austrian Communists exemplified such immigrant worker militants. Steinhardt was a long-time radical. Born in 1875, he worked primarily on large ocean liners, but he had also lived in London and Hamburg. It was in Hamburg that he became acquainted with the radical left of north Germany, especially Bremen left-radicalism, and

922

Riddell, ed., Founding the Communist International, p.71.

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became politically active.923 In addition, Chinese and Korean immigrant workers were represented by three delegates in the founding Congress. Another special group of delegates were those who had been POWs in Russia or Germany during the war. In total, there were five former POW delegates in the congress, representing several parties and groups.924 As noted in a previous chapter, many soldiers in Europe and beyond experience POW conditions during the First World War and these included a significant number of militants who constituted Communist Parties and also fought with the Red Army supporting the Soviet Power in Russia in the critical moments of the Civil War. Those LRI delegates who had been émigré workers, had lived in exile, or had experienced being POWs were a truly international group and the delegate composition represented these characteristics. Among the delegates, only the Nordic (Swedish, Finn and Norwegian) delegates and Boris Reinstein from the US (who was himself originally an immigrant from Russia) represented settled groups. The rest, in different times politically matured in exile or emigration, or in POW confinement. The regional composition of the delegates showed that that the center of gravity of socialism had moved eastward, that is away from the traditional epicenter of the workers’ movement. This shift was not solely because the Congress occurred in Moscow, but represented a growing awareness of revolutionary potential, especially in the old European empires and colonial lands. In both areas, mass strikes and workers’ councils or soviets came into being. The Russian LRIs years of underground activity abroad enabled them to play the role of a cementing factor in bringing together eastern and Asian revolutionaries with the historic European core of the workers movement. Indeed, for the first time in the history of the workers movement a significant number of delegates were from Asia in an international congress. Most of these delegates belonged to Turkic or Caucasian minorities of the former Russian Empire. A British shop-stewards delegate succinctly expressed this new epicenter as:

923

Lazitch and Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, p. 446; and Fischer, Stalin and the German Communism, p. 100 fn. 16. 924 These were Endre Rudnyanszky representing the CP of Hungary, Kazir Gedris representing the CP of Lithuania and Belorussia, Gustav Klinger representing the CP of the German Colonists in Russia in the Volga Region, Jaroslav Handlir representing the Czech Communist Group and Mustafa Suphi representing the Turkish Communists. In addition Jacques Sadoul, a defector to the Communist cause, represented the French Communist Group in Russia.

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“The old saying that “east is east and west is west” proved to be just so much nonsense in Moscow, which has become the Mecca of the nations and races of the world. Centuries upon centuries typical of successive social systems are reflected upon its architecture, while over its cobbled streets, the drozsky, the tramcar and the motor car compete for service… Not merely east and west meet here but all times, all peoples, politics and religions... Russian workers – I visited one factory of special interest. A self-governing co-operative workshop shipped from the USA by Russian born workers who migrated back after the revolution. With perfect English.”925

Table 5 Distribution of delegates in the First Congress of the Comintern based on their organizations’ geographic composition. Region

Number of Delegates

Percentage

Western and Northern Europe, North America Russia

9

17

10

19

Balkans

3

06

Eastern and Central Europe, Baltic and Finland Asia, Caucasus & Turkic Total

17

33

13

25

52

100

Source: RGASPI 488-1-12, 13; John Riddell, ed., Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987); Wladislaw Hedeler and Aleksandr Vatlin, eds., Die Weltpartei Aus Moskau: Der Gründungskongress der kommunistischen Internationale 1919. Prokoll und neue Dokumente (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008); Branko M Lazitch and Milorad M Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986).

Despite all these, it is undeniable that the Russian Bolsheviks had a huge presence in the Congress.926 Many historians interpreted this as a sign of Russian domination in the new organization.927 However, as discussed above, first, the composition of the Congress represented more the social characteristics of the LRI and the Zimmerwald Left fraction and second, the composition

925

J. T. (John Thomas) Murphy, New Horizons (London: John Lane, 1941), p. 156. Among others, V.I. Lenin, L. Trotsky, Grigori Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Georgii Chicherin, Vorovsky, and Valerian Osinsky participated in the Congress as representatives of the Bolshevik Party. 927 For one of the latest expression of this interpretation see: Wladislaw Hedeler and Alexander Vatlin, “Komintern und kommunistische Bewegung in der Vorkriegszeit”, Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (2008). 926

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of the delegates showed the significance of militants sharing a long exile activity background, or immigrant workers and POWs – a new characteristic of the new generation of militants. To sum up, the founding Congress of the Third International was a small affair in purely numerical terms. Yet it was definitely not a purely Russian or Bolshevik affair. Despite its conscious and deliberate continuity with the Zimmerwald Left, the Congress also opened its door to the left-wing groups from Britain and Spanish speaking countries that were hitherto distant from the Zimmerwald Left for one reason or another. While these groups could not participate in the congress, in the following year, links with the syndicalists were forged.

C.

The Agenda of the Congress

The Congress lasted only five days, which was a brief event compared to later Comintern congresses and earlier Second International Congresses. The brevity of the debates and small number of resolutions and texts produced by the event gave reason for some historians and opponents of the Bolsheviks to conclude that these materials are insignificant or superficial propagandistic materials at best.928 However, a serious an analysis of the documents produced by the Congress reveal that the Comintern represented the maturation of a new internationalist culture in terms of its political analysis and outlook, and that the congress and its texts were the first major LRI response to transition from world war to world peace. Some resolutions, especially Lenin’s resolution and theses on “Bourgeois Democracy and the Proletarian Dictatorship”, were not discussed at length because after the third day, when Lenin’s resolutions were presented, several new delegates managed to pass the cordon sanitaire around Russia and arrived at the Congress. These new delegates put the founding of a new international on the agenda as a more pressing matter. In the fourth and fifth days, the Congress debated the question and finally decided that it was time to

928

Historiography has been largely dismissive of the theoretical efforts of the congress. For instance, regarding the First Congress documents, Hulse wrote; “...none of these documents of the first congress contained any new basic theory; thy were restatements of previously expressed Leninist ideas in a form and in circumstances which, it was hoped, would appeal to a wider audience than ever before.” Hulse, The Forming of the Communist International, p. 2.

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declare the founding of the Third International. Immediately after that, the participants began preparations for the consolidating the new International.

1.

The Assessment of the Post-War Situation

The three main contemporary developments that the Congress tackled were the Paris Peace Conference, Bern Social Democratic Conference, and the White Terror that was raging in central and eastern Europe. The news of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht following a mass action in Berlin was only a few weeks old. For the left-radicals all over the world, the murder of two symbolic leaders of world Marxist movement by paramilitary forces under the control of a Social Democratic government must have been both shocking and a grudging confirmation of their judgements about the Social Democrats. For the participants of the 1919 Moscow Congress, the Wilsonian program, Social Democratic Erfurtian Councilism, and the White Terror were all interrelated and all represented a global ruling class’ reaction against the rise of Soviet power and spread of mass proletarian actions in Europe. Fritz Platten, who was in Bern when the Social Democratic conference was in session, presented the main report on the subject followed by Zinoviev’s resolution. Platten reported a fair but critical account of the situation in Bern. He also informed the Congress about his failed efforts to convince the former Zimmerwald movement participant Social Democrats in Bern to protest against the denunciations of the Bolsheviks. Zinoviev’s resolution validated the tripartite division of the socialist movement into right, center, and left wings in the new post-war era. The right-wing socialists were condemned as “class enemies of the proletariat.” He defined the centrists as continuing their compromise policy with the right-wing and called splitting from them as defined as an “absolute historical necessity.” The third group, the left radicals, were now defined as “communists” in continuity with the Zimmerwald Left: “This current [communists] remained a minority in the Second International, where it defended the Marxist-communist viewpoint on the war and the tasks of the proletariat... The Left Radical group in Germany (which later became the Spartacus group), the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Tribunists in Holland, the youth organization in Sweden, and the left wing of the youth International in several countries together formed the first nucleus of the new International. This tendency remained loyal to the interests of the working class and

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proclaimed from the beginning of the war the slogan: "transform the imperialist war into a civil war”. This current has now constituted itself as the Third International.”929

The Congress condemned the Entente powers actions in similar terms. From the perspective of the Congress participants, if the Bern Conference of the Social Democrats expressed the reunification of the centrist and right-wing social democrats in opposition to communists under the new post-war conditions, the League of Nations project and the Paris Peace Conference represented the unification of victorious world capitalist powers in opposition to the insurgent world proletariat. Bolshevik Ossinsky presented the report on the Entente powers. The Congress delegates were not alone in their condemnation of Wilsonian liberalism and European Social Democracy as primarily anti-communist political ideologies. One of the prominent leaders of the German LRIs, Johann Knief, penned his major political work, Vom Zussammenbruch des deutschen Imperialismus bis zum Beginn der proletarischen Revolution (From the Collapse of the German Imperialism to the Beginning of the Proletarian Revolution) in late 1918. This work was published in January 1919 and thousands of copies were distributed throughout Germany. In it, Knief developed a thorough criticism of both the USPD and SPD. He pointed out the contradictory stance of the Social Democrats arguing that the Erfurt Program itself included the arming of the proletariat as a political goal, as a safeguard against ruling class repression, yet the Social Democratic government was disarming the workers.930 Pannekoek also wrote extensively in the Dutch and German LRI press on the Paris Peace Conference. Criticizing the Wilsonian Program, he argued that Wilsonian discourse, presumably defending an international legal order based on courts of arbitration and a League of Nations, elevated methods that the American ruling class employed in its struggle against the workers inside the US to a world diplomatic level. He wrote in his “Wilson Program” that the use of laws and courts to give a legal pretext for violent repression of strikes, was a tradition of the American capitalists.931 Similarly, for Pannekoek, the pro-Wilsonian Social Democratic denunciation of Bolshevism as violent and backward was an

929

Riddell, ed., Founding the Communist International, p. 202. Johann Knief, Vom Zussammenbruch des deutschen Imperialismus bis zum Beginn der proletarischen Revolution (Berlin: 1919), p. 17. 931 Anton Pannekoek, “Das Wilsonsche Programm”. This article was first published in Die Nieuwe Tijd, 1918 and then simultaneously in German in Vienna and Moscow. Retrieved from: http://aaap.be/Pages/Pannekoek-Inventory.html. 930

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excuse to contain class antagonisms in a legal-parliamentary framework. He argued that under the current historical conditions, when the transition into socialism from capitalism was a global necessity, the proletariat could not actually share political power with the bourgeoisie, a class whose interest rested in the preservation of the capitalist social relations: The goal of our politics, the necessary work of socialist construction of society now is so completely opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie that they will try to prevent and hinder this work as much as possible... Once it is clear to the working masses that they want to use their political hegemony to expand socialism, they must exclude the bourgeoisie from the government; Capitalist interests can not have a say [in such a process]. This does not correspond to a formal democracy; but in practice a higher, better democracy, workers' democracy, which represents the vital interests of the masses. This is what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what used to be called communism and is now called Bolshevism. This is what now being carried out on a large scale in Russia, following the first example of the Paris Commune in 1871.932

An examination of the various individual reports presented to the Congress shows that all delegates perceived an acute situation and a global civil war imminent. In this global civil war between classes, workers councils would be confronting bourgeois national parliaments. The Norwegian Emil Stang reported to the congress that since summer 1918, there were actual workers Soviets in Norway and the Norwegian Workers Party was debating whether they should seize power.933 Eberlein explained that in Germany the workers were confused – a majority of the German workers thought it would be enough to replace the old state officials with social democratic ones. However, there were councils (rate) in Germany too and the Spartakists were preparing themselves for a systematic propaganda inside them to explain the workers that they should seize power through soviets and mass action by crushing the old state apparatus.934 Rudnyanzsky,

932

Pannekoek, “Bolschewismus und Demokratie”, Arbeiterpolitik. No. 50 (14 December 1918), pp. 3034. Just nine days after Pannekoek’s above quoted article got published, an article by Lenin, “Democracy and Dictatorship” appeared in Russian on 23 December 1918 in Pravda. Like Pannekoek, Lenin condemned the formal attachment to “pure parliamentary democracy”, and the official “leaders” of the socialist movement rejection of the soviet form as a new form of proletarian dictatorship. Lenin’s other criticisms of Kautsky repeated almost word by word, what Pannekoek wrote in German. It seems very unlikely that Lenin knew of Pannekoek’s article given that Lenin’s works were only published in German in 1919 and Pannekoek’s were published in Russian in January 1919 and that there were no direct links between Western Europe and Soviet Russia at the time. On these central theoretical issues, it seems clear that an international LRI core was emerging. 933 Riddell ed, Founding the Communist International, p. 73. 934 Ibid. p. 52.

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representing Hungarian Communists, claimed that there were already soviets in major cities in Hungary and most worker soviets were pro-communist. The Hungarian CP was aiming to form soldiers’ soviets and increase its influence in the peasant soviets.935 A few weeks after the Congress, the Hungarian CP seized the power in Hungary. In Switzerland the Forderung group around Herzog, a supporter of the Zimmerwald Left since 1915, were organizing among soldiers in the army.936 Rutgers reported that the newly formed Communist Party of the Netherlands had organized “underground councils in different army detachments.”937 Fineberg argued that in Britain, the Shop Stewards movement, which was organizing wildcat strikes against the dictates of the Trade Union bureaucracy, represented an organizational structure very similar to the Soviet movement.938 Reports on the world situation the Paris and Bern conferences, and the national reports presented to the Congress, underlined the prevalent mood in the Congress, an excited expectation of a worldwide class war waged between proletarians united in councils and bourgeois classes united in national parliaments. The theoretical expression of this heightened expectation of a worldwide class war found itself in the debate on proletarian dictatorship.

2.

Soviet Dictatorship versus Parliamentary Democracy

Arguably the most important theoretical challenge that the Congress had to answer was the centrist Erfurtian Councilism, a vision of conciliation between national parliamentarism and the soviet system. As many delegates repeatedly emphasized, the Communist International had to be able to explain why parliamentarism and soviets were incompatible, if that was to be the foundation stone of the Third International. Lenin presented this explanation in his “Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Lenin’s theses started by arguing that “condemnation of dictatorship and defense of democracy” in abstract was the most recent and most pronounced attempt of the

935

Ibid. pp. 79-81. Ibid. p. 81. 937 Ibid. p. 90. 938 Ibid. p. 108. 936

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bourgeoisie and social democrats to confuse the working class.939 In reality, the theses argued, democratic and dictatorial organizational forms were not antagonistic poles, but historical, albeit transient positions of classes that utilized them in relation to their opponents and within themselves. For instance, in ancient Greek republics, free medieval cities, and early modern European democracies, democratic governments of slave-owning, artisanal, and bourgeois classes constituted themselves in violent opposition and generally through the utilization of dictatorial means against other classes. Lenin drew from his broad historical analysis the general conclusion that “no oppressed class ever did or could achieve power without going through a period dictatorship” including the western bourgeoisie, which, in order to constitute itself as the ruling class had to first break the resistance of the former ruling classes, aristocrats and monarchs through revolutions. For Lenin, these first, primitive forms of democracy, whether in ancient Greek republican or modern bourgeois forms, expressed a minoritarian rule of an exploiting class over the majority of society that could not be taken as a model form for “the most profound revolution in human history,” the proletarian revolution. The theses listed ample cases of violence and repression against the proletariat in the contemporary bourgeois democratic parliamentarian regimes. Anti-war radicals and communists were hunted down, and workers strikes were systematically suppressed in democratic Switzerland, the US, and France. In one of the most democratic regimes of Europe, Germany, the leaders of the Communist Party, Liebknecht and Luxemburg, were murdered without impunity. Pogroms, lynch mobs, and racism was prevalent in western democracies. Freedom of assembly for the exploited workers was curbed and freedom of speech and press was restricted to the property-owning classes, indirectly, by the material constraints of the capitalist market relations. In contrast, the theses defined the proletarian dictatorship as a “dictatorship” in the sense of aiming to reverse these conditions. In Lenin’s vision, masses of workers would expropriate the papers, social facilities, and everything that curbed their participation in political and social life through mass organs of power – soviets or councils. In order to achieve this direct access to the levers of power, the Soviets would abolish police, professional military service, bureaucracy, in short, the whole apparatus of state. The growing intensity of class struggle throughout the world

939

Ibid. p. 150.

394

itself pushed the working class towards such radical measures and there was no room for compromise for either class since, as Lenin wrote, “Marxists have always maintained that the more developed, the ‘purer’ democracy is, the more naked, acute, and merciless the class struggle becomes, and the ‘purer’ the capitalist oppression and bourgeois dictatorship.” The proletariat dictatorship was the means to defend the working masses against the violent resistance of the ruling classes, a transitory, extraordinary measure until the whole ruling class yielded its political power. In such a conflict, there was no middle group, no compromise available, and parliamentary democracy, as the political ground of class compromise, could not be suitable for the workers to exercise their political power. The proletariat dictatorship, exercised through councils, was internally democratic. It embraced the vision to “unite and lead the scattered and backward sections of the working and exploited population” whereas externally, it was viewed as dictatorial in the sense that it immediately broke up and totally destroyed “the old, i.e., bourgeois, bureaucratic and judicial machinery” in short “the state power” itself. Lenin’s theses were accepted unanimously, without much discussion. The lack of discussion was not due to Bolshevik intrigue or the delegates’ docility. As explained above, the theses gave an expression to the LRI experience and theoretical conclusions accumulated over the past decade. It was not uniquely a Russian phenomenon as western LRIs simultaneously reached similar conclusions with Lenin. Lenin’s theses merely recorded the common consensus of the wider international left-radical movement.

3.

Founding of the International

For clarity’s sake, this work has referred to March 1919 Congress as the first Comintern Congress, but in reality, the issue of whether to approve the founding of the Third International was the subject of heated debate. On the surface, the central obstacle was the position of the Spartakists. Hugo Eberlein, the Spartakist delegate in the Congress, was not sent with a mandate for the establishment of the International and during the debates, he insisted that the Congress should refrain from taking the step for the official announcement of the new International’s founding. This did not mean that the Spartakists were opposed to the founding of a Third International in principle. In 18 November 1918, after the start of the German Revolution, one of the most 395

important demands of the Spartakists was the immediate convocation of a world proletarian congress in Germany to underline the socialist and international orientation of the revolution because “only in the International, in the world revolution of the proletariat, is the future of the German revolution anchored.”940 The founding Congress of the German Communist Party in December 1918, resolved that the party supported an international revolutionary seizure of power by workers and soldiers councils and that it opposed participation in the Bern Social Democratic conference.941 Eberlein himself was not arguing against the founding of the International from a principled position but merely suggested that the meeting should make an official call for another congress to be convened soon.942 Eberlein’s reservation was that the absence of communist parties in western Europe, specifically in France, Britain, Spain, Belgium and Portugal, made it “difficult” if not impossible to declare the founding of the new International in March 1919.943 Initially, in the discussion preceding the Congress, Eberlein’s argument was accepted.944 However, as new delegates arrived, the mood in the Congress changed. On 4 March, in the third day of the Congress, the newly arrived Rakovsky (representing both the Bulgarian Narrows and the Rumanian Socialists), Gruber (Austrian Communist), Grimlund (Swedish Left-Radical Socialist), and Rudnyanszky (Hungarian Communist Party) presented a motion to reopen the debate on the founding of the new International. They had four arguments. First, the global struggle for the dictatorship of proletariat required communist unity based on a single platform. Second, in light of the pacifist and right-wing Social Democrats renewed efforts for unity, which culminated in the Bern Conference, Communists had to explain that they definitely finalized the break with Social Democracy in this Congress, by founding an independent new International. Otherwise, it could be interpreted as a weakness of the LRIs.945 The Spartakist delegate, Eberlein, spoke at length against the motion. For him, an international center was already present, and all the pro-council/soviet tendencies had already broken

940

Rosa Luxemburg “Der Anfang” in Rosa Luxemburg: Gesammelte Werke, B. 4 (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2000), p. 398. 941 Hermann Weber, ed., Die Grundung der KPD: Protokoll und Materialien des Grundungsparteitages der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands, 1918-1919 (Berlin: Dietz, 1993), p. 265. 942 Riddell ed, Founding the Communist International, p. 170. 943 Ibid. p. 169. 944 Ibid. p. 39. 945 Ibid., p. 167.

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away from the Second International. If there were any group vacillating between the Communist and the Social Democratic tendencies of the Second International, Eberlein told his listeners, “these will not be stopped by the Third International, and if that is where they go nevertheless, then that is where they belong”.946 Eberlein’s primary concern about the founding of the new International was organizational, by which he meant that it was necessary to have large mass parties.947 In his opinion, the LRI groups or tendencies were not enough to find the new International officially. He recited all the reports presented to the Congress from different groups and assessed that their numerical strength was too weak. Eberlein argued that the reliable forces of the Zimmerwald movement were “only a small part of the left-wing.” In Sweden, “there was not yet a purely communist party,” in Switzerland and other countries “parties have yet to be founded, and the comrades here can therefore speak only in the name of groupings.” He claimed that the American delegates could not yet say “which parties would be behind” them, the Balkan Federation’s claim to represent Greece and Serbia was dubious, and there were not even delegates from Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Only the Finnish, Russian, Swedish, Austrian and Hungarian parties were, in his view, real parties, who “stand with you today”. He concluded that “so few organizations are involved in founding the Third International that it is difficult to go before the public” and he called upon the meeting not to act hastily.948 Several other delegates spoke in opposition to Eberlein and in favor of founding the Third International. Zinoviev raised the point that the Bolsheviks and the LRI were defending a split and had advocated the founding of a new international since the beginning of the war. Zinoviev insisted that the point of departure should not be “the assumption that we are too weak” (numerically), but that the key was the theoretical maturity and the will to confront organizationally the Social

946

Ibid. p. 168. For example, Julius Braunthal in his History of the International Vol.2 (1974, p. 181) formulated a fundamentally wrong thesis: “Rosa Luxemburg, supported by Jogiches, Levinê and Levi, had protested passionately against Lenin's plan... She demanded that the founding of the International be awaited, until mass parties, especially in Western Europe, prepare to join them... She was determined, even at the risk of breaking with Lenin, to thwart his plan. At their request, Eugen Levinê and Hugo Eberlein were delegated with the mission to the congress; to protest against the founding of the Communist International with the threat that if it were to be constituted nevertheless, the Spartacist League would not join it.” 948 Riddell ed, Founding the Communist International, p. 169. Later in 1929, Eberlein argued that at the time the delay he suggested was only a few months, that the founding congress could be held no later than June 1919 (The Communist International (1929) p. 436-7. 947

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Democrats gathered in Berne.949 Then Balabanoff spoke as the representative of the Zimmerwald ISK. She spoke confidently that the whole Zimmerwald organization would support the founding of the new International and she endorsed the immediate founding of the International. Moreover, she argued that the Zimmerwald movement had been a defensive one, which did not suit to a revolutionary epoch that had opened with the Russian and German revolutions. Hence a new International was only timely, even though it may not yet have won the masses. 950 Other delegates also voiced their support. Otto Grimlund from the Swedish Left Party argued that “It surprises me that Comrade Albert [Eberlein], who comes from Germany, can have doubts, and that he will not or cannot see that only by founding the Communist International can the proletariat hope to find a firm footing. I welcome the Third International and believe it our duty and obligation to constitute it immediately.”951 Josef Unszlicht representing the Polish Workers Communist Party argued that “Such a central body [Comintern] would unite the efforts of all Communist parties, cement the revolutionary movement of different countries, and prompt the already existing Communist parties in different countries to move toward uniting with us.”952 Jukka Rahja from Finland put the need for a new international in starker terms: “The problem is that in every country a struggle between two dictatorships is under way: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat. So far there has been no international center to unify this struggle.”953 Rakovsky, Rudnyanszky and Sadoul also spoke for immediately founding the Third International. Rakovsky and other delegates gave the example of the First International, arguing that it was found by a very limited number of delegates. This was not exactly very accurate, since in 1864, the working class still constituted a minority in many major countries in Europe. Yet his point was “to give direction” without giving concession to formal considerations.954 Finally, when the decision was voted, with the abstention of Eberlein, all delegates agreed to proceed to the founding of the Third International.955 Thus at the end of the third day of the Congress, on 4 March

949

Riddell ed, Founding the Communist International, pp. 170-1. Ibid. p. 173. 951 Ibid. p. 173. 952 Ibid. p. 174. 953 Ibid. p. 176. 954 Ibid. p. 177. 955 Ibid. pp. 180-1. 950

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1919, the Communist International was officially founded. The aspiration of the LRIs, the goal that the Zimmerwald Left fraction had set for itself and strove for since 1915, was finally realized. Next, the congress declared the dissolution of the Zimmerwald movement, which it stated “has outlived its usefulness. Everything that was truly revolutionary in the Zimmerwald Association is passing over to the Communist International”.956

D.

Conclusion

The Comintern platform adopted by the Congress broke new ground in terms of its form. As Bukharin explained to his audience, the Second International congresses generally started with broad and abstract definitions of capitalism. This was, in a way, unavoidable, since during nineteenth century, capitalist development followed very different patterns in different parts of the world. These regional or national differences in the development of capitalism made anything but broad statements unavoidable. Further, as a gathering of legal organizations or organizations oriented towards legal activities, the Second International debated theoretical issues from a juridical perspective. Debates that may seem semantic occupied pedantic Social Democratic leaders seasoned in legal fights in courts and parliaments. Further, each national party had to fight in a different legal setting, so the decisions had to be adjusted and the wording, the formal aspect of questions, took precedence over the content. This had always frustrated the left-wing in the international, which was naturally more dismissive about attempts for accommodation to a condition, a sort of truce between classes, which they considered historically transitional. However, the war had leveled the proverbial playing field. In 1919, the new International had to start with a concrete and global analysis (the concrete and global now in practical harmony due to the war) of world capitalism, its decline and imperialism.957 Another difference between the old and the new Internationals was what one might call the definition of political success or progress. The Second International evaluated its achievements

956 957

Ibid. p. 182. Ibid. p.121.

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and defeats in in terms of the achievement of concrete reforms, such as legislation improving workers’ living conditions, increases in votes, and trade union successes. The Second International Congress reports had very concrete and quantifiable results that served to evaluate, and in some cases justify, its tactics. In contrast, the speeches in the Third International’s first congress reported no such empirical orientation. The discourse of the delegates was full of remarks about “instincts”, “mood” and “spirit” of the proletarians. This was not an expression of mere temperamental shift. Delegates reported concrete actions (demonstrations, strikes, mass strikes, confrontations, formation of soviets or simply the lack of them) which did not lend themselves to quantifiable measurements. As such, the reports and debate spoke in the language of “mass action,” the theory of which was elaborated during the war and widely assimilated by 1919. In short, while the Second International lacked clarity in theory and a concrete analysis of capitalism, it had at least very concrete measures to assess its successes and failings. In contrast, even though the Communist International had a very concrete definition of its aims and a clear analysis of why those goals were important, it was ambiguous about the concrete means of reaching its goals.958 Pierre Pascal participated in the founding Congress as a member of the French Communist Group of the Bolshevik Party attached to the TsFIG. Like Jacques Sadoul, he was an officer sent to Russia during the war by his government, but like many thousand others, after the March and November Revolutions, he joined the revolution in the service of Soviets renouncing his loyalty to bourgeois nationalism.959 He penned his impression of the Bolsheviks and Lenin upon the founding of the Comintern in his memoirs; “I saw Lenin on the day of triumph to which he had devoted a lifetime of thought, toil, and struggle, finally came true. It was early March 1919, with the founding of the Third International… his efforts had been crowned with success. In the few words that I heard him

958

This was most evident in the debates in the founding Congress on the trade union question, or the evasion of a debate on the trade union question. Several delegates opposed workers councils as alternatives to what they perceived as narrow, defunct and bureaucratic trade unions. A not insignificant tendency wanted the addition of a specific article to the Comintern platform specifically about the trade unions and their counter-revolutionary character in the new historical epoch. As the Congress could not reach an agreement on the question, it postponed the debate on trade unions to the next congress when more delegates representing western countries where trade unions were stronger would be present. 959 Fr.-X. Coquin, “Witness to His Age: Pierre Pascal (1890-1983), Political and Intellectual Evolution,” Russian History 21, no. 2 (1994), pp. 134–43.

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speak I perceived that joy of creation known to one who has undertaken a colossal task with awesome responsibilities.”960

Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration that his part in the founding of the Third International was the crowning achievement of Lenin’s political life, at least as he probably saw it. Behind the Soviet seizure of power in 1917 was a conscious wager that the world revolution would come. The founding of the Third International could not by itself guarantee the success of world revolution and in hindsight, it was not. However, it finally broke the two year-long isolation of the east European LRIs. In the west both the Dutch and the German communists (former LRIs) greeted the news with joy.961 However, the LRI unity proved very short lived. As the next chapters explore, the LRIs wager on a rapid success for the world revolution was lost in 1920s and simultaneously their organizational unity fell apart.

960

Lazitch and Drachkovitch, Lenin and the Comintern, pp. 84-5. In contrast, in Germany the Social Democrats were upset by the news. The central organ of the SPD, Vorwarts, interpreted the establishment of a Third International as a signal for the invasion of Germany. From Vorwarts, (16 March 1919) in Hedeler and Vatlin, eds., Die Weltpartei aus Moskau, p. 274. 961

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XI.

The First Year of the Comintern: The Creation of the Comintern Bureaus, 1919

In its first year, the organizational structure of the Communist International synthesized two distinct elements of the 19th century socialist traditions. First, it revived the underground methods of the early 19th century revolutionary tradition that still lived in eastern Europe and adapted it to the new conditions of war-torn Europe. Second, it transformed the organizational characteristics of the ISB from a federation representing national Social Democratic mass parties into an international organ functioning across borders, irrespective of national differences. In contrast to the ISB, the Comintern did not focus on balancing, sustaining, or keeping the peace among separate national movements by recognizing them as distinct and independent entities. Rather, the new International stressed solidarity, both class and party, and insisted that all its members show interest in the parties and movements of other countries. In its first year, an abstract tension between center versus periphery or rank-and-file versus center never expressed itself, at least between different national groups, as the Comintern’s stated goal was to diminish localist and nationalist fragmentation. The immediate problem facing the Comintern in the spring and summer of 1919 was the asynchrony between its eastern and western European sections. When the revolution seemed to be advancing rapidly in central Europe, the communists in Soviet Russia were embroiled in a Civil War and unable to respond effectively. As that revolutionary wave ebbed, Moscow found itself unable to analyze the situations in a timely manner and to respond appropriately. To address this situation, the Comintern repeatedly attempted to move its center of activity to the west by creating international centers. In 1919, these centers were generally called Communist International Bureaus. It is curious why Communists chose the concept of “bureau” to define their international centers. The most obvious answer may be its contemporary prevalent use. In 1910s, international organizations generally had “bureaus.” However, for a movement that was sensitive and hostile towards “bureaucratism” and radically critical about bureaucracies in the Second International’s parties, this label may seem inappropriate. Still, despite its affinity with the negatively connoted “bureaucracy,” bureau retained a sense of rationality, clearly defined responsibility, a formally 402

limited exercise of power as opposed to arbitrariness, irresponsibility and boundless centralized power. Further, even though the term “bureau” may have been borrowed from the bourgeois organizational culture of the time, the highest organ of the Second International (between congresses) was the “International Socialist Bureau.” For the LRIs, the problem of the ISB was not its overarching bureaucracy (that was a problem for the national parties that were bound to the ISB), but rather its weakness and lack of executive power vis-à-vis national party and union bureaucracies. Hence, although it may sound paradoxical, one can appreciate that from the perspective of the LRIs, an “international bureau” could serve as an antidote to “bureaucracy” or bureaucratism. Indeed, the idea of an international bureau as an executive organ powerful enough to check the independence and arbitrariness of national party and union leaderships sheltered by local particularities, traditions, and red tape made sense to many in the LRI. In any case, the fact remains that early Comintern bureaus were short-lived and their precarious and semi-legal status never allowed them to develop anything resembling a bureaucratic tradition, even assuming that they had such a potential. The Second Congress of the Communist International in the summer of 1920 marked the highest point for the Bureau system; after that it gradually began to dissolve. From 1920 onwards, the LRI movement as it was formed in 1915 also started to fall apart. However just before that downward moment began, the bureau system and the LRI had a moment of notable success—the establishment of the Amsterdam Bureau of the Communist International. This success unfolded in two stages. The first stage began with the establishment of several bureaus in Europe in spring 1919 and ended in summer 1919, following the defeat of the Hungarian revolution and the dissolution or forced movement of these bureaus. The second stage began with the formation of the Amsterdam Bureau, which was built on the harsh experiences of the first stage, in late 1919 and came to an end with the dissolution of the Amsterdam Bureau in spring 1920.

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A.

Asynchronic Development of the Global Class Conflict and the First Stage of the Bureau System: Summer-Spring, 1919

In the first month of the Comintern’s existence, from March to April 1919, events in Europe gave the Comintern ample hope for the prospects of the world revolution. The Red Army recaptured Ukraine in April. In Central Europe, the Communist Party of Hungary together with the Social Democratic Party seized power in Budapest on 21 March. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was declared on 7 April, and that same day Odessa was liberated from the French occupation by the Red Army. In April 1919, one month after the founding of the Comintern and a year after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, revolution seemed to be rapidly advancing. However, this sudden leap forward outstripped the ability of the new Comintern to react and influence the events in a timely manner. While the organization was officially founded in March 1919, it lacked a structure to coordinate communists’ efforts in various revolutionary hotspots. Events moved at a dizzying pace and the Comintern lacked solid channels of communication with the new western centers of advancing revolutionary activity. 962 Letters had to travel for weeks via intermediaries in Stockholm and other couriers. Even if letters from Soviet Russia reached their destination, a response could take a couple of more weeks. 963 Telegram and radio provided a faster alternative. Therefore, in order to establish a channel of communication with the revolutionaries in the west, the Comintern began preparations to establish its own radio station on 3 April.964 But radio communication was also unreliable since it could easily be intercepted by the counter-revolutionary forces. Communist militants in Berlin even tried to buy cheap planes to fly over the hostile Polish and Baltic states and thereby break the new Soviet Republic’s isolation.965

962

Victor Serge wrote: “All we received in the way of foreign newspapers were a few copies bought in Helsinki by smugglers who crossed the front lines especially for the purpose.” Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, (New York: NYRB, 2012), p. 119. 963 In the Second Comintern Congress in 1920, Levi remarked that “Nowhere else [except Russia] … does it take ten days for letters or newspapers to arrive – even from Germany.” John Riddell, ed., “Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!” Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991), p. 683 964 RGASPI, 495-1-1, l. 4. 965 RGASPI, 495-18-3, l. 21.

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A chronic problem of technical asynchrony surfaced once again, similar to the situation following the November Revolution. From Moscow’s perspective, the ideal option would be to unite the revolutionaries by merging the emerging soviets in central Europe with the Russian soviets by direct armed intervention. But the tide in the Russian Civil War turned too quickly to allow this to happen. After the liberation of Odessa, in April 1919, the Red Army began to retreat from western Ukraine to face gathering White counter-revolutionary challenges in the south and the east.966 The Comintern had to try and find other means to unite with the LRIs in the western revolutionary centers. These technical and physical obstacles revealed a deeper fracture: the separate paths followed by the different soviet revolutions. In Bavaria, Germany, and Hungary, the struggle between the soviets and the state played out differently than it did in Russia. While in Russia, disunity and disorientation of the bourgeoise, rapid disintegration of the state institutions, and the conjuncture of various world events played into the hands of the soviets, in central Europe, the situation was the reverse. In the revolutionary wave that erupted in 1917, the role of the military was crucial. By the end of the war, masses of armed workers constituted a serious liability rather than an element of security for various states. Demobilization revolts shook even the victorious British and French armies in 1918 and 1919.967 However, the situation in 1917 Russia was uniquely different than the rest of the world in one crucial aspect: the revolution happened during the war. Once the revolution started in March, the pro-soviet forces found ample time to propagate for immediate peace and wrestle the control of the army from the state, while the Provisional Government fought on two fronts: against the revolution and against the Central powers. The Russian Provisional Government

966

The Red Army would once again try, unsuccessfully, to bring aid militarily to the revolting workers in the West in the spring. When the Bolsheviks became aware of the new rounds of strikes in Germany in 1920, Lenin sent a telegram to Stalin, who was leading the Revolution Military Soviet in the Southern Front, noting: “Just came the news from Berlin that Spartacists seized part of Berlin and there is battle. It is not certain who won yet, but we have to seize Crimea as soon as possible so that we can free a hand in case the Civil War in Germany forces us to move to west to help the communists.” Lenin to Revolutionary Military Soviet Southern Front (Stalin), 17 March 1920, in. The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, ed. Richard Pipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 78-9. 967 More than a million soldiers were still in the British army both inside the country and in France by the end of the war. In January a wave of soldiers’ protests and strikes spread to almost all barracks against delays in the demobilization making a direct military intervention against the soviets almost impossible. Andrew Rothstein, The Soldiers’ Strike of 1919 (London: MacMillan, 1980), pp. 30-81.

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had to watch helplessly the spread of revolutionary support in barracks knowing full well that demobilizing the army was not an option.968 In contrast, in Germany and the states born out of Austro-Hungary’s collapse, the governments rapidly took charge of the task of demobilizing the armies and organizing reliable paramilitary forces against their own populations. In Germany, while the soldiers were systematically demobilized (and also spontaneously demobilized on their own), the right-wing junior officers, the numbers of which had risen to 270,000 by the end of the war, began organizing paramilitary freikorps groups. Many of these paramilitary groups were already tested in fights against the Poles and radicals in the eastern and Baltic German towns in 1918.969 Further, despite the demobilization, in Germany (with the notable exception of the navy970) the military hierarchy remained intact. Part of the reason for that was the class character of the Germany army: the German army was consciously designed to avert a class rebellion and guard it from anti-militarist propaganda. It disproportionately relied on peasants and, in the officer corps, landowning Junkers to exclude socialist, urban workers or liberal leaning middle classes.971 When in power, the SPD allowed the army hierarchy to remain intact and the unemployed officers to organized into freikorps, to which even the otherwise conservative trade-union leadership objected. The army and the trade unions would play a crucial role in the suppression of the councils throughout 1919 and 1920. In contrast, in Russia, from the first days of the March revolution, there

968

A principle difference was the role of the army. In Russia between the March and November revolutions, military discipline continuously deteriorated whereas “red guards” units attached to the soviets continuously gained strength and confidence. Rex Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University press, 1986), pp. 309-310. 969 Robert Gerwarth, “Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated States of Central Europe,” in War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War ed. Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 53-63. 970 Navy ships required specialized personnel, hence the navy had to recruit organized workers with socialist leanings. 971 Volkhard Mosler, “An Army in Revolt: Germany 1918-19,” in Arms and the People: Popular Movements and the Military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring, ed. Mike Gonzales and Houman Barekat (London: Pluto Press, 2013), p. 36. Karl Retzlaw wrote in his autobiographical history of the KPD that these remarks by Bismarck were thought in military schools: “I mistrust the population of the big cities… I do not find true Prussian people there. However, should the big cities ever rise up again, the true Prussians will know how to teach them obedience even if it means wiping them of the face of the earth”. Retzlaw, in All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution ed. Gabrierl Kuhn (Oakland: PM press, 2012), p. 127.

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was an intense struggle between the soviets and the Provisional Government over the control of the army; in this struggle, the soviets prevailed.972 The demobilization of the armies and the formation of counter-revolutionary paramilitary groups could not have happened without peace. Between March and November Revolutions, the question of peace played a central role in leading to a breach between the soviets and the Provisional Government in Russia and defined the political content of the dual power situation. The peace question made a conflict between the government and the soviets unavoidable. Soviets with an increasing clarity and determination became the poles for the struggle for peace, whereas the Provisional Government and the leading centrist socialists continued the war effort in order to retain their position in the Entente alliance. In Germany and Hungary, however, the parties that held the political power were the ones which themselves declared the armistice, but did so on the Entente’s terms and not those of the revolutionary LRI, as happened in Russia.973 This blurred the antagonism between the soviets and the Social Democratic governments. In Hungary, the peace led certain bourgeois and Social Democratic parties to seek an accord with Bolshevism against the Entente, when they were forced to make harsh territorial and economic concessions by the Entente. Similarly, in Germany the confusion led to the emergence of ideologies like “national Bolshevism” among the communists, which advocated an alliance between the German army and communists.974 Another difference between the Russian and the central European revolutions, which may seem merely coincidental at first, but had immediate consequence, was the presence of parliaments. In Russia, where the soviets managed to seize power, the national elections for a constituent

972

Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket books, 2008), pp. 199-200. Paul Frölich, a leader of the KPD-S described how the peace accord with the Entente took away the most immediate and unifying goal of the communists in contradistinction to the Bolsheviks’ immediate peace slogan in Russia: “…history provided the government with no direct or imperative objective that could be brought about only by revolution. Peace and land were the two great slogans which carried the Russian Revolution to victory, but in 1918 peace was already a fact, and defeated German imperialism was prepared to pay anything for it, providing it could retain power at home; and although a broad section of the small-hold peasants made a rather precarious living, land hunger was not strong enough to rouse the rural areas into revolt. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 263. 974 Although the small group attracted to the idea of National Bolshevism was expelled from the KAPD ranks in 1920, it lingered on as a political current, especially inside the KPD. Even Radek, flirted with the idea. Ruth Fisher cryptically admits that the influence of the National Bolshevism persisted in the KPD throughout the 1920s. Fisher, Stalin and German Communism, p. 66. 973

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assembly, a form of parliamentary body, could only take place after the November revolution. The Provisional Government that ruled until then lacked democratic legitimacy. In contrast, for instance, in Germany the parliamentary elections were held only weeks after the November revolution, in January 1919. Even Paul Levi, who was in the minority defending the participation of the KPD in the elections admitted that the National Assembly gave the anti-Soviet counter-revolution a leadership, a pole around which to re-group: The National Assembly is the banner of counter-revolution. The National Assembly is conceived as a fortress that the counter-revolution is seeking to build, and in which it wants to withdraw with all its defenses intact: with Ebert and Scheidemann, with all its generals, with Hindenburg and Gröner, with all its economic powers, with Stinnes and Thyssen and the directors of the Deutsche Bank, it intends to seek its survival in the National Assembly. It needs the National Assembly as the anchor to which it will be able to tie once more its floating bark. Comrades, we are perfectly clear about all this. There is not the least difference between you and us on this score. We know quite exactly that the path of the proletariat to victory can only pass over the corpse of the National Assembly.975

The problem for the Rate or the soviets were not merely a question of legitimacy. It was the question of who would exert power over the armed forces. While in Russia, the soviets could manage to secure some measure of control over the disintegrating army, in Germany, the formation of the Parliament gave Ebert government a chance to take this control back from the soldiers’ councils. In fact, in Germany, the decision on the control over the army was the only radical programmatic element that the First German Council Convention produced (just like it was the first radical step of the Soviet state in Russia). This decision, which Ebert de facto trampled, was wholly ignored and rejected after the January elections. These general conjunctural contrasts between Russian and German (and other central European) revolutions also collided with other organizational and social differences that were detrimental to the Communists in the west. Broadly, on an east and west axis, as they moved westward the councils encountered less support and more opposition from the non-proletarian social classes. Similarly, Communists saw their forces more scattered and divided the further to the west one went. Not only was the bourgeoisie stronger and better organized, but also the working class was more isolated in the west compared to Russia. The shifting positions that peasants took in Russia

975

Paul Levi, “Report on the Parliamentary Question in the Founding Congress of the KPD”, In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi, ed David Fernbach (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 36-7.

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and central Europe vis-à-vis the soviets is a clear example of this difference. On a surface level, Russia, Hungary, Bavaria, and even the “red Berlin” in Brandenburg had similar demographic conditions: in all, working class was concentrated in densely populated industrial urban zones, scattered amidst a surrounding peasant-dominated countryside. While in Russia an unresolved peasant question persisted, in Hungary and Bavaria, the land issue did not have such a deep social urgency.976 Hence, while the Russian peasantry tended to support pro-soviet SRs and Left-SRs in the struggle for power between the soviets and the Provisional Government during and before the November revolution, in Bavaria and Hungary the countryside generally watched the power struggle passively, although on occasion it actively supported the counter-revolution.977 In general, the working class in the west faced the counter-revolution alone, without the support or sometimes even with the outright hostility of the peasantry.978 Furthermore, divisions among the LRIs and Communists, and efforts to resolve them took different forms in the west than they did in Russia. In the Russian empire, the chronic pre-war division within the Social Democratic movement paradoxically helped clarify ideological lines of divisions much earlier. The same was not true of the German KPD and even less so for the Bavarian and Hungarian Communist parties. Each of these parties were formed after the fall of monarchies and right before the Soviets’ seizure of power. Even the parties themselves could not have a chance to discuss major questions internally, whereas the Bolsheviks openly and freely discussed the meaning of the Soviet power for months before they actually decided on their tactics. Even

976

In Hungary, land was mostly concentrated at the hands of the landowning aristocracy. According to Siklos four fifth of the agricultural lands belonged to big estates. Andras Siklos, Revolution in Hungary and the Dissolution of the Multinational State 1918, (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988), p. 59. However, other historians suggested that “as a result of the 1848 revolutions” there were a substantial number of landed peasantry in Hungary. Gyorgy Borsanyi and Janos Kende, The History of the Working Class Movement in Hungary (Corvina, 1988), p. 50. 977 For Bavaria, see: Volker Weidermann, Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power, Germany, 1918 (Pushkin Press: 2018), ebook: Chapter 3. For Hungary, see: Zsuza Nagy, “Budapest and the Revolutions of 1918 and 1919” in Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe, 1917-1920 Chris Wrigley ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 73. 978 Even in Bulgaria, where the peasants constituted the majority of the population and where an independent radical left party (Tesnyaki) very similar to the Bolsheviks had existed since before the war, there was a general mistrust between the Marxists and the populist-peasant parties. Unlike in Russia, the Tesnyaki never considered the possibility of forming an alliance with the peasant populist Agrarian party, as the Bolsheviks did with the left-SRs after the November Revolution in 1917. Hulse, The Forming of the Communist International, p. 63.

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after the party settled the question, those who objected to the majority vote openly debated their positions in the press. The collective intellectual discussion moved towards further clarification, despite the political repression. In contrast, the leaderships of the KPD and the Communist Party of Hungary took decisions on crucial strategic decisions independent of the party bases. Béla Kun’s acceptance of a joint coalition government sowed conflict and personal distrust inside his party, which continued well into 1930s. More critically, Liebknecht’s decision to participate in the attempted seizure of power, without the knowledge of Luxemburg let alone the party base, stands in stark contrast to the Bolsheviks and highlights the lack of a coherent party sensibility at the time. Worse, in the founding congress of the KPD, the delegates contested almost all the strategic proposals of the party leadership, thereby revealing a fundamental gulf between the Zentrale and the base.979 In brief, the newly emerging Communist parties in central Europe had considerably less time to elaborate and explain how their principles and goals differed from the Social Democrats. Another division that further widened the split in western Europe was generational. While in the east and especially in Russia, the Bolshevik party succeeded in unifying successive generations of revolutionaries, in the west the political split between the LRIs and the Social Democrats sometimes took the form of a generational split. In the east, the Bolshevik Party emerged as unifying force that brought together the left-wings of important debates amongst several generations of revolutionaries. The Bolshevik party unified a generational continuum: specifically, three generations of revolutionaries (the older generation which joined before 1904, the generation of the 1905 revolution, and the generation of the 1917 revolution) were organized in a single party.980 The success of the party was also partially due to its ability to contain within itself potential generational conflicts. In the west, however, the LRI nuclei of the emerging communist movement sometimes took the form of a generational split. For instance, many Communist parties were initially formed by the socialist youth groups (in Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden) or the impetus of the youth wings was a major factor in several parties’ move towards the Comintern. Many militants of these youth groups felt they were fighting against a more or less unified and hostile

979

Particularly contentious were Paul Levi’s report on the general elections and Rosa Luxemburg’s report on the program and specifically its denunciation of political terror in principle. See: Weber, ed., Die Grundung der KPD. 980 Shestoi s"ezd RSDRP (Bol’shevikov), p. 295.

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older generation of Social Democrats who clung on to their antiquated doctrines. Karl Plattner, a leading young war-time member of German youth anti-war opposition wrote: “The German proletariat was not revolutionary because it had been educated in the spirit of the counterrevolution. Order and conformity were the two central values taught by the socialist pedagogues and their subordinates to the masses of workers going through the schools of the trade unions and the social democratic parties of… Haase and Kautsky... The young ones, the new generation of workers, have a different spirit. They say to the older generations: “You have paid a heavy price for going through these social democratic schools!” But the older generations have internalized this spirit and they depend on it despite all the punishment that came with it.”981

In brief, the revolutions in the Central Europe were riddled with paradoxes, which, in a strange contrast, the Russian example with its apparent straightforwardness and simplicity totally lacked. While outwardly, the Russian case presented a simple model of struggle that pitted the soviets and Communists against the Social Democrats and national bourgeois parliaments, in central Europe this configuration and positions seemed to have been blurred. In Russia, the soviets and the Provisional Government increasingly antagonized and polarized the pro- and anti-Soviet forces with clearly distinct programs around the question of war and peace. However, in Central Europe in 1919, among the defenders of the soviet power, one could find defenders of parliamentary democracy. Those defending the Wilsonian peace program could become pro-Soviet overnight, as it happened in Hungary, once they felt their states would not be treated justly in the Paris

981

Karl Plattner, in All Power to the Workers Councils! ed. Kuhn. p.165. In his memoirs, Stephan Zweig, himself a pacifist akin to Haase and Ledebour, captured the reverse feeling of how older generation centrists alienation from the youth and how they saw the rising youth radicalism: “The post-war generation emancipated itself with a violent wrench from the established order and revolted against every tradition, determined to mold its own fate, to abandon bygones and to soar into the future. It was to be a quite new world in which fresh regulations were to govern every phase of life; and, as was to be expected, the new life began with gross excesses. Anybody or anything older than they were was put on the shelf. Children as young as eleven or twelve went off in organized Wandervogel troops which were well instructed in matters of sex, and travelled about the country, as far as Italy and the North Sea. Following the Russian pattern, “pupils’ councils” were set up in the schools and these supervised the teachers and upset the curriculum, for it was the intention as well as their will to study only what pleased them. They revolted against every legitimated form for the mere pleasure of revolting, even against the order of nature, against the eternal polarity of the sexes. The girls adopted “boyish bobs” so that they were indistinguishable from boys; the young men for their part shaved in an effort to seem girlish: homosexuality and lesbianism became the fashion, not from an inner instinct but by way of protest against the traditional and normal expressions of love.” Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (London: Cassell and Company LTD, 1947), p. 228.

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Peace Conference. Anger born of trampled national pride could not, of course, lead to internationalism.

1.

The Comintern’s Response to the Asynchrony

As they were aware of the differences between Russia and central Europe, Bolsheviks did not even try to impose their will on the western soviets and newly formed Communist parties. They did not assume to guide or supervise these movements or communists in any respect. Moscow’s position was essentially limited to inquiries and a consistent effort to generalize the theoretical conclusions of the struggle, to explain and clarify the paradoxes of the global class struggle. For instance, after the revolution in Hungary in 1919, in his letter to Béla Kun, Lenin clearly warned him that “it would be a mistake given the specific conditions in Hungary to imitate our Russian tactic in all details.”982 Similarly, in his assessment of the first congress of Third International, he wrote that “… history is moving along paths that are anything but smooth, simple and straightforward.”983 In March 1920, he wrote that “Europe is not moving towards revolution the way we did, although essentially Europe is going through the same experience.”984 Beyond the principles accepted by the first Comintern Congress (most importantly, the superiority of the soviet organizational form over the national-parliamentary form, and the formulation of the hegemonic international conflict as the one between the Wilsonian liberalism and communist internationalism), Bolsheviks were open to any suggestions and formulations on tactics, strategy and experimentation. In that regard, Braunthal recounts when Polish communists criticized the Bolshevik methods in Russia, Lenin responded “you will do it in a different way,’ the latter replied “no, we will do the same thing, but better than you.” Lenin remarked: “to such an argument I had absolutely nothing to object.”985 Or, when George Landsbury, Christian pacifist and socialist editor of the Daily Herald, wrote "in Britain it would not be necessary to wade in blood to carry out the revolution,”' Lenin replied that he did not believe in this, “but do it if you

982

Lenin, LCW Vol.29, p. 227. Ibid. pp. 305-13. 984 Lenin, LCW Vol.30, pp. 417-25. 985 Ibid. 983

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can”.986 Lenin most clearly summarized his position at the Eighth Party Congress when he stated that: “It would be absurd to set up our revolution as the ideal for all countries, to imagine that it has made a number of brilliant discoveries and has introduced a heap of socialist innovations... We acquired practical experience in taking the first steps towards destroying capitalism in a country where specific relations exist between the proletariat and the peasants. Nothing more. If we behave like the frog in the fable and become puffed up with conceit, we shall only make ourselves the laughing-stock of the world, we shall be mere braggarts.”987

However, this did not mean the abandonment of the soviet idea or the principle of proletarian dictatorship. As the first Congress of the Comintern clearly laid out, the LRIs were firmly convinced that the new proletarian organs of struggle were to be general assemblies (soviet, Rate, or council), which united the whole working class and transformed both its economic and political aspirations into mass actions. What might potentially differ in various contexts was the form of struggle between the soviets and the state. In Russia, where there was neither a firm parliamentary tradition with its hegemonic bourgeois culture nor strong trade unions with entrenched bureaucratic and legalistic apparatuses, the soviets did not really have strong rivals. In the west, or almost universally throughout 1917-1921 period, when soviets or similar organs emerged, their relations with different state political institutions varied enormously. Instead of attempting to “rule” the world communist movement or artificially lead the soviets and revolutionary movements abroad, the Bolsheviks and the Comintern’s leaders attempted to move the center of the Comintern westward, especially to centers like Amsterdam and Berlin, to countries and regions that it considered the proletariat to be more advanced and experienced than in Russia. Bolsheviks did so because they anticipated the expansion of the revolution and in the expectation and hope that the western communists would solve their tactical problems themselves. This effort found its concrete expression in what may be conceptualized as the “system of international centers.”

986

Braunthal, The History of the International Vol.2, History of the International Vol.2, p. 18. Lenin LCW Vol.29, p.192.

987

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2.

The System of Bureaus as an Internationally Centralized Network

To overcome the asynchronicity, Comintern decided to move its center of activity westward, to the emerging cores of the revolutionary movement. An Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) constituted after the founding Congress already had two bureaus in Petrograd and Moscow. Members of the ECCI Bureau in Petrograd were contemplating ways to expand and, if possible, to move the Comintern structure to the west and south at least since early April 1919. The Petrograd ECCI Bureau took a concrete step in its two meetings on 14 April. Present in these meetings were Litvinov, Vorovsky, Balabanova, Klinger, Zinoviev, and several others who also attended the first Congress; also attending were those who were active in the work of the missions or foreign bureaus in 1918, people such as Berzin, Guilbeaux, Milkich, Reich, Rudash, all seasoned Zimmerwald Leftists. Zinoviev argued that “the center of gravity of the revolutionary movement was shifting south”, which meant that the center of the Comintern also had to move in order to “expand the circle of comrades.” For that reason, a new set of “international bureaus” had to be created. Yet in these initial meetings no concrete decision was reached apart from the proposal for locations for the new bureaus, specifically in Kiev, Scandinavia, Hungary, and Bavaria. With these additions to the already existing Moscow and Petrograd bureaus, a circle encompassing the expanding revolutionary arc in central and eastern Europe would be created.988 The ECCI plan was to create the bureaus as nodes in an inter-connected network, each of which was supposed to work in closely collaborative manner with their counterparts. That way an international regrouping of communists on a regional basis could be possible. This entailed an organizational rejection of the nation-state as a basis of operation. This organizational strategy was imposed on the International for practical reasons, but it was also a deliberate political choice. International centralization rather than a nation state-based framework, an organization expanding from the global to local rather than the reverse, was first of all a pragmatic response to the collapse of post-war states in central and eastern Europe, and second, a deliberate political choice pointing to the international revolutionary goals of the organization. After 1918, several new nation states (the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia) were formed in eastern Europe and

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RGASPI 495-1-1, ll. 8-10.

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each of these struggled with its neighbors (and most of them with Soviet Russia) over borders, territory and influence. Other states, like Rumania and Greece, increased their territories at the expense of their neighbors and Ukraine emerged first as a nation state, then in the form of a soviet republic. The fluidity of borders coupled with zones of persistent anti-communist paramilitary activity encircling the western and southern borders of the Soviet republic(s) made nation-state-based communist organization practically dangerous and inappropriate. Under these conditions, communists aimed to organize their international headquarters in industrial urban centers with sizable working-class populations. Doing so minimized the risk of exposure to paramilitary threats that ravaged the countryside, where the overriding apathy of the peasantry to issues beyond the horizon of their villages gave a free hand to the counter-revolutionary violent elements. Hence, the ECCI Petrograd Bureau proposed to build the Comintern network from proletarian bastions like Vienna, Sofia, Odessa, and Budapest outwards, thereby skipping over national borders and the rural areas dominated by right-wing paramilitary forces. Bureaus, once securely established in these centers, were to form an interlinked chain between regions portioned according to their wider roles in the global revolutionary strategy. The April plan of the ECCI’s Petrograd Bureau initially included the establishment of four such bureaus: The southern or the “Kiev Bureau” was to form a link between the Ukrainian and Russian soviets and the wider Mediterranean region via the Balkans. The northern bureau in Stockholm was to bring together the Nordic left radicals (Swedish, Norwegian, Finland, Denmark) and mediate the relations among the wider North Atlantic communist milieu. Bureaus in Hungary and Bavaria were to be established in the revolutionary urban centers of Budapest and Munich, so as to connect the Central European revolutions with the Eastern European revolutions, and thereby thrust the Comintern into the newly emerging soviet centers.989 The composition of the bureaus reflected their internationalist orientation. Triumvirates were assigned to head each bureau. The members were determined not on the basis of local-national criteria, but on the basis of an internationalist outlook expressing the wider, world-strategic goals of these centers. In almost all cases, these were LRI militants who had joined the

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RGASPI 495-1-1, l. 24.

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Zimmerwald Left and later the Comintern, militants with proven loyalty to an internationalist perspective. The composition of these would be990: -Hungarian Bureau: Lazslo Rudash, Béla Kun, and Ossinsky-Obolensky. -Scandinavian Bureau: Zeth Hoglund, Fredrik Strom, Karl Kilbom. -Southern Bureau: Angelica Balabanova, Christian Rakovsky, Jaques Sadoul.

a)

The Southern or the Ukrainian Bureau The Southern Bureau of the Comintern was the most active of all the Comintern Bureaus

in this initial stage. This was a result of both the support it could receive from Russia and also in the hope that the counter-revolutionary encirclement around the Soviet Russia could be broken in the South. Formed following the Red Army’s advance in Ukraine, the Southern Bureau revived the old “southern route” that the Bolsheviks used as an underground channel to reach Russia during the tsarist period from Italy and Europe via Balkans with the help of Italian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Romanian radicals. Balabanova, Rakovsky and Sadoul were to form this bureau in Kiev. These were the three most well-known (all formerly non-Bolsheviks) LRIs and, thanks to their personal backgrounds, they had the capacity to organize a Mediterranean-Balkan connection between the western and Russian communists. Rakovsky was a long-time leader and representative of the small Romanian movement; he was also well-informed on and involved in the Balkan movement in general. Balabanova had strong ties with the Italian socialist movement established in her years of work in the movement before the war, not to mention her role as the secretary of the Zimmerwald ISK. Sadoul’s work was elemental to coordinate the internationalist propaganda among the French troops that had landed in Odessa to suppress the revolution. The Bureau organized an underground section in Odessa when it was under the French occupation. The main organizer of this section was Vladimir “Degot” Diegotte, an old Bolshevik

990

No names were specified for the Bavarian Bureau. Ibid. This composition reflected both the continuation of the LRI movement and its expansion since the 1917 November Revolution. There were four former “Zimmerwald Leftist” (Ossinsky, Hoglund, Strom, Killbom), three new recruits who were active in the Foreign Bureaus of the Bolshevik Party since the early days of the Civil War (Sadoul, Rudash, Kun). Finally, Rakovsky and Balabanova were formerly held a position somewhere between the Zimmerwald Left and the centrist social democrats, and after 1917 moved to left.

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who was particularly experienced in underground organization.991 The Odessa section of the Southern Kiev Bureau provided the best location to establish contacts with the Balkans and, via the Balkans, with the western Mediterranean ports. It was the old link in the “southern route” connecting the exiled Bolshevik party with Russia before the revolution. Also, the sympathy of the occupying French naval sailors made Bureau’s work easier. At this point, the Communists were carrying out a very successful propaganda on the French vessels in the Odessa port.992 One primary function of the bureau was smuggling. It smuggled literature, money and agents to and from the Balkans, Turkey, Italy, France and Soviet Russia. At the height of its activity, the bureau had German, Polish, Yugoslavian, Czech and Hungarian subsections in Kiev and French, English, Italian, Spanish, Armenian, Turkish, Muslim, Rumanian, Bulgarian, Greek, German and Polish subsections in Odessa.993 These subsections typically consisted of two to five communists; one or two serving as the “presidium” and one to three as “agitators.”994 That way the bureau unified in its body a wider central, east European, and Mediterranean Communist group propagating organizational debate. Perhaps the most concrete organizational achievement of the Southern Bureau was in the Balkans. By the summer of 1919, most Balkans delegates to the first Comintern Congress were active in the Southern Bureau.995 The bureau also formed an underground channel of

991

V. Degot was an experienced underground organizer. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 as a worker in Odessa. After the 1905 revolution he fled to Paris, where he attended the party school for underground workers that was established in 1909 in Locarno. He carried out underground work in the “southern route”, the illegal channel between Mediterranean and Russia via Ukraine. Lazitch and Drachkovitch ed., Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, pp.88-9. 992 Degot, who organized the distribution of propaganda literature in the French fleet recounted in his memoirs that not only the sailors but even the naval officers received them enthusiastically, allowing them to freely board naval ships. Vladimir Degot, V “svobodnom” podpolye: Vospominaniya o podpolnoy rabote za granitsey v 1919-1921 Godah (Moscow: GosIzdat, 1923), p.13. 993 Report by Sadoul sent to Berzin, (Summer 1919), RGASPI 502-1-7, ll. 19-23. 994 Ibid. l. 25. 995 Christian Rakovsky, Ilja Milkich and Stojan Djorov. Rakovsky was active in the Zimmerwald movement; Milkich represented the Serbian and later Yugoslavian Party in the First Congress. Milkich also worked in the Swiss mission in 1918 under Berzin. Djorov was, as many others in the LRI movement was active in several different parties in different countries: he belonged to both the Bulgarian Tesnyaki and the Bolshevik Party. He was a member of the Bolshevik underground in Odessa in 1908. After the November Revolution he became the president of the Bulgarian group within the Foreign Communist Federation of the Bolshevik Party. In Odessa he also recruited Bulgarian internationalists to the Red Army. Lazitch and Drachkovitch ed., Bibliographical Dictionary of the Comintern, p.96.

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communication with LRIs in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania and Turkey.996 On 15 January 1920, the Bureau’s work in the Balkans gave its first fruit: A conference of the Balkan Socialist Federation, composed of the Bulgarian Communist Party (‘Narrow Socialists’), the Socialist Labor Party (Communists) of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Labor Party of Greece, and the Rumanian Socialist Party, was held in Bulgaria. Building on the experience of the Balkan wars, these Balkan parties were among some of the most consistent internationalists in the world socialist movement, and they held firm to both their radical anti-war opposition and international connections. The Balkan conference endorsed the Communist International’s diagnosis that imperialism had created a worldwide revolutionary situation. Under these conditions the conference decided to “coordinate their actions, and using their influence on the popular masses of the Balkans, to give all possible support to the Russian Socialist Soviet Republic in the coming proletarian Socialist Revolution in Europe and to paralyze thereby the counter-revolutionary forces moved against it from the Balkans or through the Balkans.”997 Further, the conference expressed its decision to join the Third International in terms akin to the resolutions of the founding congress in March, emphasizing the rejection of opportunism, defense of the soviet power, and the necessity of building an international revolutionary unity that went beyond national divisions: “1. The Balkan Communist Federation, consisting of the Communist and Socialist parties of Bulgaria, Servia (sic.), Greece and Rumania, joins the Third Communist International and forms its Balkan section, accepting the principles and methods of the revolutionary class struggle and the proletarian dictatorship based on the Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Councils. 2. The Balkan Socialist Federation, as the union of the Balkan Communist and Socialist parties was called up till now, will be hereafter called the ‘Balkan Communist Federation’.”998

Despite these successful organizational and propaganda efforts achieved in a brief period, the Southern Bureau began to struggle after Denikin’s offensive. In August, with the advance of the White Armies from the south, the Odessa subsection of the Kiev Bureau, unable to operate

996

Degot, V “Svobodnom” Podpolye p.12. Also see: RGASPI, 502-1-7, ll. 60-65. Two Serbian communists from the Belgrade Federation of Communist youth organization reached Harkiv in 1920 via alternative routes bringing reports of the Yugoslavian movement with them. One travelled via Greece, Turkey and Caucasia Ibid. l. 119. The contact between Bulgaria was probably the strongest and most persistent. Ibid. l. 60-65. 997 Leften Stavros Stavrianos, Balkan Federation: A History of the Movement toward Balkan Unity in Modern Times (Menasha Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing Company, 1944), pp. 303-306. 998 Ibid.

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long under the White occupation, dissolved itself; by the end of the year, most of its militants escaped abroad. Degot and several others followed him to Romania and then, via Istanbul, which was occupied by the Allied forces at the time, moved to Italy and France.999

b)

The Scandinavian Bureau While the Southern Bureau began reviving the “southern underground,” the Scandinavian

Bureau was busy with revitalizing the “northern underground.” The Scandinavian Bureau was luckier than its Kievan sister because it built on an uninterrupted foundation that had emerged in 1914. Its organizers, Zeth Hoglund, Fredrik Strom, Karl Kilbom, were all actively involved in the Zimmerwald Left and, together with Balabanova, had headed the ISK since 1917. Like the Balkan parties, the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian LRI parties organized a conference in Stockholm in December 1919. That conference also expressed solidarity with the Russian revolution and the Communist International.1000 In 1919, Finnish revolutionary exiles fleeing the counter-revolution also joined the activities of the Bureau. The experiences of this group of militants provided the bureau with dynamism; it gave an impetus for the devising of serious plans to carry the already tense class war situation in Scandinavia to the next level: a pan-Scandinavian revolution. For this purpose, the Scandinavian Bureau in 1919 and early 1920 developed plans for establishing a “North European International Red Army.”1001 This was probably the most radical action in the modern history of the Nordic region and the closest it ever came to a civil war-like situation. The Scandinavian Bureau made preparations for an active insurrectionary strategy throughout the region. While aspects of its history still remain obscure, the Scandinavian Bureau found a “Scandinavian Committee of the Communist International.” Together with the experienced Finnish communist veteran refugees of the Finnish Civil War, this committee drew up an ambitious plan for establishing a Scandinavian Soviet. It developed a “Nordic War Plan” for an armed uprising starting from the north and uniting with militant strikers in industrial zones. This semi-guerilla operation required “several shock troops of 100-150” Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish

999

Degot, V “Svobodnom” Podpolye. Saarela, Finnish Communism Visited, pp. 66-7. 1001 Ainur Elmgren, “The Socialist Soviet Republic of Scandinavia,” Ajalooline Ajakiri 3, no. 153 (2015), p. 300. 1000

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revolutionaries. The plan never materialized and was eventually discovered by the Swedish police. After that, the Scandinavian bureau remained primarily a financial and communication organ. It organized the voyages of international delegates to Comintern congresses, and Comintern militants to and from the Soviet Russia1002. The Comintern’s other bureaus established in this initial period were less successful. In the summer of 1919, the Hungarian Soviet was encircled and invaded by the Rumanian troops supported by France. In the ensuing White terror, most of the surviving Hungarian Communist Party members escaped to Vienna. In May, the Bavarian soviet also collapsed following a joint Freikorps and Social Democratic military coup. Thousands of Bavarian communists were executed on the spot or imprisoned. All this happened within months of the ECCI decision to establish the Bavarian and the Hungarian bureaus. Soon after, the Kiev Bureau also retreated with the Red Army and its members dispersed to Europe following Denikin’s advance in August 1919. The Bureau system, which had only come into being in April, collapsed by autumn 1919. However, the relative success of the Northern and Southern Bureaus during their brief heyday opened inroads to Balkans and northern Europe. Instead of abandoning the international centralization system altogether, the Comintern adapted to the new conditions. With the revolution wave retreating, a new bureau system designed more towards theoretical clarification, reorientation, and global propaganda began to be built.

B.

The Reorganization of International Centers and the Formation of the Amsterdam Bureau

By the end of 1919, the revolutionary hopes of spring were dashed by the counter-revolutionary offensive. Communists lost many militants, leaders, and organizations to repression. The organizations that were just emerging from the underground once again retreated into illegality in many countries, especially in Central Europe. A gloomy mood descended on the recently born

1002

Ajakiri, The Socialist Soviet Republic of Scandinavia”, pp. 299-306.

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Third International. The pages of the journal Communist International, the central organ of the Comintern, were filled with obituaries of Comintern leaders and militants.1003 At one point, even the fall of Petrograd and Moscow seemed imminent. By October, Yudenich’s and Denikin’s forces were threatening the capitals of revolution. The Bolsheviks began preparing to go underground once again. Victor Serge, who was at this point working in the Petrograd Bureau of the Comintern, recalled those gloomy winter weeks when the communists were preparing themselves psychologically for defeat: “The proletariat seemed to be advancing only from one defeat to another, and they knew it. Would 1919 be an ill-omened date? How could we resist everywhere? Could we avoid sacrificing Petrograd? At a certain moment there were grave doubts... My friend M. saw Lenin during these days. Vladimir Ilyich had his usual calm, solid forehead, his usual brisk laugh, jovial and sarcastic: “Well, what about it?” he said, with a triumphant burst of laughter. ‘We’ll go back to underground activity.’”1004

The secretary of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee, Elena Stasova, undertook the preparations for going underground once again.1005 Under these conditions the Comintern organization focused on self-preservation. The Bolsheviks were determined to keep the Comintern alive even if the young Soviet state fell and to prepare it for a longer struggle for the world revolution. For this purpose, the ECCI decided establishing a bureau in the Netherlands because it was one of the strongest intellectual bastions of LRIs. Pannekoek, Gorter and Roland-Holst, who were but the most well-known, but hardly the only militants and theoreticians of the new International, would be its key leaders. A neutral state also had potential advantages. As Rutgers wrote in the Communist International: “The neutral states always represent a danger for world capital during periods of imperialist war: they form the hiding place of revolutionary centers for their propaganda. It is they which make censorship to a certain extent impossible, spoil the campaigns of lies so carefully carried out by capital’s hired hacks.”1006

1003

The first issues of the Communist International devoted several pages to obituaries of the Comintern militants. Victor Serge’s memoirs gives a very intimate description of lives and deaths of the Comintern workers in the first year of the organization. Serge himself was one of the first and handful Comintern workers. See: Serge, Memoirs, pp. 104-5. 1004 Victor Serge, Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia, 1919-1921 (Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2011), p. 72. 1005 Lazitch and Drachkovitch, Lenin and the Comintern, p. 165. 1006 Sebald Rutgers, “The League of Nations and the Small Nations” The Communist International no.6 (1919), p. 837.

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By the fall of 1919, a few other small European countries seemed like viable locations to organize a Comintern center. Stockholm, a major center of the LRI activity following the 1917 Revolutions, became a dangerous place for the communists by 1919. Counter-revolutionary Swedish paramilitary organizations attempted to assassinate several Soviet delegates and LRIs.1007 Switzerland also did not guarantee relative security anymore. A new bureau in Switzerland, the most likely candidate due to its long historical role in international revolutionary underground, was no longer available for the Communists. Frittz Platten, who was sent to Switzerland immediately after the founding congress of the Comintern, was arrested while crossing the border in Finland on 8 April.1008 After protests by the Soviet government, he was released through an exchange on 14 May, only to be arrested again on his way to Switzerland, this time via Romania. He finally reached his destination in the spring of 1920, only to be arrested a third time by the Swiss authorities.1009 After huge strikes influenced by communists in 1918, the Swiss expelled the Soviet mission in 1919, which was established by Berzin. If traditional Swiss democracy turned anti-communist, other locations proved even more impossible for the Comintern to operate openly. The states newly formed after the fall of the former Austro-Hungarian empire were eager to receive American and Entente support for their claims of sovereignty and hence, they were resolutely anti-communist. Even the Kemalist Turkish government, which received generous Soviet support in its war against Greece, supported by the Entente, and murdered the leadership of the Turkish Communist Party in 1921, while they were crossing the border into Turkey. The Entente states were almost impossible. France was heading an anticommunist crusade with its pro-intervention policy. Britain, while less enthusiastic about military intervention, continued to imprison and persecute radicals. The Red Scare was in full swing in the US. While the Comintern still operated in these countries clandestinely and sought to coordinate its underground groups via a system of couriers, it could not set up open international centers. The Netherlands was one of the few remaining western countries where both a strong and significant LRI minority and a chance of semi-legal work for international coordination still existed.

1007

Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel, p. 182. The Communist International No. 1, (1919). p. 138. 1009 Hulse, The Forming of the Communist International, p. 31. 1008

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Sebald Rutgers was chosen to be the secretary of the new bureau and was sent to Amsterdam. Rutgers was one of the best candidates for the task. He was one of the few western revolutionaries who had carried out illegal work in several different countries. He was a practical man, an engineer, a background that Lenin and other Bolshevik underground workers would appreciate. He personally knew the famous Dutch radicals who the Bolsheviks deeply trusted. He had helped organizing the American left radicals’ journals during the war. Besides the extensive contacts among the Dutch radicals, Rutgers himself had personal contacts with Japanese and Indonesian movements as well. As a capable organizer, it is not surprising that Rutgers was the only western European that the Comintern sent to Europe as an emissary with a special mission. In his memoirs, Rutgers captured the intense and dramatic historical situation in the Soviet Russia that led to the decision to establish the Amsterdam Bureau: “On October 14, 1919 the day of my departure [for Amsterdam], at 3:00 in the morning, Lenin called me in for a final talk. Denikin was just then threatening Orel [about 325 kilometers away from Moscow] and all during our conversation Lenin was in touch with the front over a direct line. He was constantly called to the telephone. The situation that night was very serious and turbulent, and Lenin told me that, if Tula [about 170 kilometres south of Moscow] were taken, Moscow would fall too. His words to me were, ‘If on your way you hear that Tula has been taken, you can tell our foreign comrades that we shall probably have to fall back the Urals’.”1010

The Amsterdam Bureau was to act as an emergency alternative, a substitute bureau, in case the ECCI and the Comintern bureaus in Russia had to dissolve. The decision (formally taken on 28 September 1919) to establish it granted exceptional powers to the bureau. No other single Comintern institution was entrusted with such authority and independence. The ECCI entrusted Rutgers with the task of organizing the Bureau in coordination with Henriette Roland Holst, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, and two leaders of the newly renamed Communist Party of Netherlands.1011 The new Bureau could act independently in the name of the Third International and make decisions without consulting any other Comintern body. In this capacity, Rutgers could act as a plenipotentiary representative of the ECCI. Further, it was tasked with establishing contacts with the communists in “all countries.” It was also given the responsibility to organize the Comintern’s publishing operations and an archive. Finally, the Amsterdam Bureau was given the mandate to

1010 1011

Sebald Rutgers, “Vstrechi s Leninym,” Istorik Marksist no.2-3 (1935), p.90. (the former SDP of Netherlands).

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organize a Conference of the International in consultation with the Scandinavian bureau, if possible, in January 1920. For all these purposes, the Bureau was given 20 million rubles.1012 The Bureau’s most important tasks were twofold. First to organize a conference and lay the groundwork for an international congress of the Comintern. Second, to prepare the ground for the “gradual transference” of the Comintern organization to the West.1013 The fact that Soviet Russia faced a serious existential threat by the autumn of 1919 cannot itself explain why the ECCI and the Bolsheviks established such a powerful foreign bureau (even without the slightest knowledge of or a consultation with the Dutch Communists who were assigned to the task) outside of the Soviet Russia. The decision clearly shows the deep confidence that the Dutch radicals enjoyed: when it was a matter of life and death, the Bolsheviks entrusted the most treasured organizational achievement of the world revolutionary movement, the Comintern, to these Dutch intellectuals and revolutionaries.1014 Further, choosing “theoreticians” that belonged the LRI camp in its war time isolation as opposed to activist leaders (like Kun), who recently rose from obscurity, or new recruits to the LRI camp from the former Zimmerwald center (like Balabanova or Rakovsky) to head the new Bureau, marked its role as an assurance against defeat. The Bolsheviks probably thought that a period of retreat (even if not defeat) approached and probably expected this to lead to a shrinking of the communist camp to its war-time numbers. If Soviet Russia fell and the Bolshevik party was liquidated, the new Bureau was to prepare the movement for the coming period and would lead the international movement until the time the

1012

RGASPI, 495-1-1, l. 78. RGASPI, 497-2-3, ll. 2-3. 1014 Ironically, despite the discovery of these documents, the hegemonic tendency in the literature still interprets the establishment of the bureaus from a cold war perspective. Before the opening of the archives, the hegemonic Cold War paradigm was to consider the establishment of the bureaus, to be either irrelevant and experimental episodes in the life of the organization, or Moscow’s attempt to control the movement outside the Soviet Russia, or merely the result of technical limitations. Despite the discovery of the complexity of the relations and much archival evidence pointing to the contrary, some historians still tend to interpret the relations between the Bureau and the ECCI through the same Cold War lenses. For instance, despite his meticulous reading of the relations between the Amsterdam Bureau, the ECCI and several other communist centers in Europe, Gerrit Voerman still considers the Amsterdam Bureau project as a Moscow centric practice, despite his acknowledgement of the trust the Bolsheviks and especially Lenin had towards the Dutch LRIs. Gerrit Voerman, “Proletarian Competition. The Amsterdam Bureau and its German Counterpart, 1919–1920” Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (2007), pp. 201220. 1013

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reactionary tide receded. There can be no clearer statement of the Bolsheviks’ and Comintern’s commitment to world revolution than to entrust its future to trusted comrades who did not belong to the Bolshevik party or had even set foot in Russia before. The first statement of the Amsterdam Bureau, which was written by Rutgers, highlights the new central role assigned to it. It deserves to be fully cited here: “Just about a year ago the Communist International was organized in Moscow. A product of the revolutionary struggle, it could have no other birthplace than the capital and center of the revolution in action. To our Russian comrades, Russian problems always assumed the form of world problems, they knew their victory dependent upon the results of the proletariat class war all over the world. The Communist International was considered the organized expression of the world revolution in which the Soviet Republic held the exposed front. But general headquarters, the Executive Committee in Moscow, realized the growing importance of revolutionary developments in the West and the necessity for Western Europe and America to organize its own struggle and its own unity in this struggle. The idea of calling a second international congress in Moscow therefore was rejected and in the beginning of October 1919, it was decided to form a Branch Bureau in Amsterdam, the main task of which would be to prepare an international Conference in Western Europe. As Holland was considered the best place to meet in and comrades in Holland were known by their revolutionary tactics of over ten years to express the essentials of the communist international, I was sent to Amsterdam to organize a Bureau, to which Moscow nominated our comrades Gorter, Roland Holst, Pannekoek, van Ravestayn, Wynkoop and myself.”1015

Ultimately, Soviet Russia did not collapse, and the Civil War turned in favor of the soviets in the end. By the end of 1919, the White offensive had begun to turn into a complete rout. While 1920 brought new, internal problems to the Soviets, including a war with Poland, at least the intervention and Civil War had entered its last phase and the military threat to the revolution seemed quenched. Nevertheless, the Amsterdam Bureau was not liquidated. It started functioning in late November and engaged in extraordinary organizational activity in its brief existence. When Rutgers arrived in Holland, he promptly began organizing the Bureau. First, he gathered the five Communists that the Petrograd Comintern Bureau had identified as the new leadership to a meeting on 22 November. It soon became clear that the old wounds inside the group were still raw. The meeting ended with a bitter verbal fight between Gorter and van Ravesteyn. Afterwards, Rutgers began meeting with each separately.1016 This hindered the Bureau’s capacity but Pannekoek and Roland-Holst remained firmly involved while Gorter stood aloof. The Bureau hired

1015 1016

RGASPI, 497-1-1, l. 68. Ibid. l. 300.

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five personnel (an office manager and four secretaries) and another person in Rotterdam, who began organizing the archives as instructed by the ECCI. 1017 According to the arrangement that Rutgers made in Berlin with “James,”1018 the publication and distribution of the Comintern press would be organized in Berlin, whereas the Amsterdam Bureau would edit the publications (in three languages; German, French and English) and a press bulletin in addition to organizing the archive. One of Rutgers’ tasks was to financially support Gorter and Pannekoek, (along with Roland-Holst), so that they could devote themselves full time to Comintern activity as professional revolutionaries. However, Gorter was ill and in a deep personal and political discord with the Communist Party of the Netherlands leadership and Pannekoek preferred living a modest life independently of a “political income.”1019 Instead, Pannekoek continued to work as a university lecturer. The strategic focus of the Amsterdam Bureau was to reach out to all the regions and countries that were outside Moscow’s reach. They included Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. And in fact, it did quite well by establishing links with groups in Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Belgium, France, Luxemburg, Bulgaria, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Poland, the US, Australia, Japan, South Africa, and the Dutch East Indies. Amsterdam Bureau’s sphere of activity covered much of the English and Spanish speaking world where the argot of the Comintern (which was until then mostly in the Germanic and Slavic speaking world) was yet unfamiliar. The radical left, especially in the Spanish speaking world, was dominated by anarchists and syndicalists. To develop its contact with this world, the Amsterdam Bureau reached out first to syndicalists and anarchists. It also established direct links with the American IWW, and issued several declarations and leaflets against the systematic repression that the Wobblies faced in the US, which it viewed as a counterpart of the repression that the Bolsheviks faced under Tsarism. 1020 It argued that the task of

1017

Ibid. Probably a reference to a Comintern agent (also known as “Thomas”) sent to establish a Comintern Secretariat in Berlin. 1019 In his autobiography, Pannekoek wrote that the Bolsheviks invited him to Russia to continue his political and theoretical work. Accordingly, Pannekoek refused, because did not want to tie himself financially to a political organization again (as it happened in Germany before the World War) in order to be completely free to express his disagreements. Pannekoek, Herinneringen Uit de Arbeidersbeweging (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1982), p. 196. 1020 Message of solidarity of the Executive Committee of the Amsterdam Sub-bureau of the Communist International, (March 1920), RGASPI, 497-2-2, l. 54. 1018

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American Communists had to be to carry out the task which “the IWW first took in hand.”1021 To strengthen the collaboration between the IWW and the Communists, the Bureau invited the IWW to the Second Congress of the Communist International1022 and invited them to a discussion to join the Communist Party in the US. A complete merger between the American syndicalists, the IWW, and the Communists, a merger for which the Bureau had hoped, did not materialize. However, the American IWW connection proved vital for the organization of the first nuclei of the Comintern in Latin America and Spain. The first success of this link between English and Spanish-speaking radicals germinated in Mexico. Mexico during the war constituted a haven for the radicals of all stripes: the anti-militarist IWW or socialist draft evaders from the US, revolutionary syndicalists, and even a former antiBritish Indian nationalist turned Marxist, M. N. Roy, ended up here and freely engaged in politics. All these arrivals energized and reshaped a Spanish and English bilingual group congregated in and around the Socialist Party of the Mexico Region (SPMR). Among these left radicals arriving to the Mexican scene, M. N. Roy’s was the most intellectually stimulating for the party. He was an unusual LRI, despite the important role he played in the first few years of the Comintern. Neither from Europe, nor with a past in the socialist movement, Roy was born into an Indian Brahmin family and sent abroad by his Indian nationalist organization to establish contact and seek arms and funds from the German Empire for a nationalist uprising in 1915.1023 He only returned to India years later, but by that time he was thoroughly changed from an Indian nationalist to an internationalist communist. When he arrived in Mexico after several adventures, including an escape from the grip of American authorities seeking him for conspiratorial activities against their British allies, he was already a Marxist. But unlike many others, he had several international contacts and funds available to him, which were entrusted to him for the Indian nationalist cause. He put both to the use of the international working-class cause.1024 The Mexican Party organized a

1021

Ibid. l. 55. RGASPI, 497-2-2, l.219. The Bureau’s contact with the American syndicalists was established through the Charles Kerr Publishers, the publisher of the International Socialist Review that had a special place in the American left for opening the American left to the LRI views in the prewar period. Rutgers had contacts with Kerr publishers and wrote several articles to the ISR. 1023 M. N. Roy, Memoirs (Bombay: Allied Publishers Private LTD, 1964), pp. 3-14. 1024 Ibid. p. 76 and p. 98. 1022

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conference in 1918 and plans were already underway to establish a “Pan-American Socialist International,”1025 when another radical from the old world, this time a Bolshevik named Borodin,1026 arrived in Mexico. Borodin’s arrival broke the Mexican Party’s isolation from the revolutionary Russia and brought them up to date on the events in eastern Europe. With Borodin’s encouragement, Roy and Charles Philips (going by the aliases Jesus Ramirez and Manuel Gomez), an American draft dodger and Wobbly working in the Mexican movement since 1917, decided to leave Mexico to meet with communists in Europe in December 1919.1027 Borodin and Phillips first arrived in Spain, while Roy arrived later. After a few weeks, Borodin headed to Amsterdam to meet with the Bureau and present his reports, leaving Phillips (who, unlike Borodin, knew Spanish) to discuss with the Spanish radical left. Here Phillips managed to organize the nucleus of the Spanish Communist Party mostly around a faction that broke from the Socialist Youth Organization.1028 While in Mexico the impetus came from outside, in Africa, the LRI nucleus the International Socialist League (S.A.) approached the Amsterdam Bureau on its own, in early 1920. This was a group that had split from the South African Labour Party during the war over issues that were almost identical to other European Left Radical Internationalists. They had rejected the nationalist Social Democrat’s support for war and established an internationalist group. After the November Revolution, they turned their gaze to Russia and attempted to form links with the Soviet

1025

There was already an Argentinian organization, International Socialist Party (ISPA) which was organized in January 1918 with the aim of founding a “continental Comintern” for South America. This organization applied for affiliation with the Comintern in April 1919. It is unclear if, when and to what degree the Communist International was aware of this organization’s existence. Lazar and Victor Kheyfets, “Michael Borodin. The First Comintern Emissary to Latin America (Part One)”, The International Newsletter of Historical Studies on Comintern, Communism and Stalinism Vol. II no.4-5 (1994/95), p.147. 1026 Borodin was an old Bolshevik who participated in the 1905 Revolution and who represented Riga in the first Russian Social Democratic Party Congress after the revolution. However, following the defeat, he seems to have been drifted from activity in the party until the 1917 Revolutions. After the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, he migrated to the US and settled in Chicago. 1027 Coincidentally, from then on, the developments in Mexico changed the party’s fate for the worse. The conflicts surrounding the presidential succession endangered the party’s activities. However, the communist youth group, again organized by immigrants and native Mexicans, Jose C Valades and the Swiss socialist Edgar Woog, proved resilient and formed the core of the party. See: Barry Carr, “Marxism and Anarchism in the Formation of the Mexican Communist Party, 1910-19,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 63, No. 2 (May, 1983), pp. 277-305 1028 Charles Shipman, It Had to Be Revolution: Memoirs of an American Radical (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp.82-91.

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state. However, what was unique to the South African LRIs were their position on the race question. Racism in South Africa was never challenged by the hegemonic Social Democratic movement before. The South African Labour Party was predominantly white and counted as members specialized artisanal workers whose wages were considerably higher than Africans and Indian immigrant workers. Conscious of their privileges, skilled white workers were adamantly determined to hold on to them, even if that meant undermining class solidarity. In a sense, the South African LRIs came to a similar conclusion as Pannekoek, Lenin, and European LRIs on the nature of this segment of the working class. For them also the conservatism and complicity with the predominant racism among the white skilled worker minority was a product of their social status as an aristocracy of labor that identified with the interests of the ruling class rather than with their own class. Like the Zimmerwald Left, the South African LRIs around the International Socialist League found the roots of national defense during the war and opportunism in this small layer of “workers’ aristocracy.” To disrupt the race line in the working-class movement and against the Labour Party which epitomized it, they found an industrial union to organize the mostly unskilled black workers in 1916.1029 This group eventually formed the first African Communist nucleus south of Sahara. In Asia, Japan and Indonesia were the major centers of the LRI activity in 1919-1920. The links between the Asian and European LRIs were older than those with Africa. Even before the war, the Japanese socialists, through the Japanese émigré community in the US, had established links with the left-wing of the American Socialist Party and the Dutch radicals. Sen Katayama, the leader of the American-Japanese socialist groups, was a close friend and comrade of Rutgers. For a period during the First World War, Katayama and his daughter lived together with the Rutgers family and the Rutgers left their children in the care of the Japanese socialists before leaving Japan in 1917 on their difficult journey en route to Soviet Russia through Siberia. Once back in Amsterdam in 1919, Rutgers revived those connections and published the first anti-interventionist propaganda leaflets1030 produced by the American-Japanese LRIs in the US.

1029

Edward Roux, Time Longer than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (London: Victor Gollancz LTD, 1949). 1030 “A Protest of Japanese Socialists in America against the Occupation of Vladivostok by the Japanese Army in April”. RGASPI, 487-2-2, ll.125-129.

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Like South Africa and Mexico, Indonesia also had a relatively large European population (by at least Asian standards) and this proved to be a fertile ground for the growth of the socialist movement. However, in contrast to prevalent racism in the South African Labour Party, the Dutch colonial Social Democrats approached Indonesian population more openly and fraternally. As one of the leaders of the Dutch Social Democrats, Henyk Sneevliet’s defense of Indonesian journalists imprisoned by the colonial authorities earned him the sympathy of Indonesians.1031 After the Russian and German revolutions, the influence of the Indonesian LRI groups grew significantly, to such an extent that they even managed to lead a short-lived workers’ and sailors’ council in Java. After this soviet’s defeat, Sneevliet and many others were expelled from Indonesia and went back to Netherlands in December 1918.1032 The South African, Mexican, and Indonesian groups – all syndicalist-type radical organizations and illegal or semi-legal political groups – were organizationally very similar to Bolsheviks. There was no stable trade union movement in these countries. Sailors or adventurous proletarian youth from Europe mingled with colonial unskilled workers forming industrial type organizations. The elasticity of these organizations combined with the weak hold of nationalism gave these groups a youthful internationalist spirit. In these hinterlands of the socialist movement, away from the giant socialist organizations of Europe, which were well entrenched in their respective national cultures with full grown bureaucracies, a culture of internationalism bloomed and gave birth to a distinct type of internationalist LRI militant: a radical who is comfortable in different cultural and political settings, able to speak in different languages, and not bound by national or racial prejudices. For these cosmopolitan LRI militants, Amsterdam rather than Moscow was the first beacon of the Comintern; it was not only an accessible center but was also a window to the revolutionary Russia. It is true that the contacts were not numerous and those that existed were at best small clusters. However, when militants like Sneevliet and Borodin reached Amsterdam, they brought with them plans to develop the Bureau’s network system to other continents. Concretely, the Amsterdam Bureau began preparations for Pan-American and Asian Bureaus of the Comintern. Like

1031

Tony Saich and Fritjof Tichelman, “Henk Sneevliet: A Dutch Revolutionary on the World Stage,” Journal of Communist Studies 1, no. 2 (June 1, 1985): 170–93, p.173. 1032 Ibid. pp. 174-175.

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Amsterdam Bureau, these new Asian and American bureaus aimed to organize and centralize the LRI forces and to coordinate intercontinental communist networks beyond national boundaries. The Amsterdam Bureau’s efforts involved much more work than technical and coordinating activities. The Bureau attached an equal importance to inviting Asian, Latin American, and African LRIs to theoretical and political work, encouraging and urging them to develop, clarify, and shape the Comintern’s general understanding of the world revolution and its tactics. Two crucial observations led the Bureau to put a special emphasis on the reflections of communists from non-European regions. The first was that the slow maturation of the European revolution led the Bureau to investigate other possible paths for the world revolution. The second grew out of the example of the Russian revolution. The Amsterdam Bureau reasoned that in regions like Russia, where the national bourgeois classes had arrived more recently on the historical stage and were still struggling to establish ideological hegemony, the revolution may have had a chance of advancing more rapidly because it might face less resistance from other classes. The Amsterdam Bureau’s members invited their non-European comrades to reflect upon the validity of these assumptions. An example of the Bureau’s concern and approach to these LRI groups is succinctly expressed in Rutgers’ letter to the Japanese LRIs sent in 1920: “Some of us here are now inclined to believe that difficulties in the older capitalist countries to overcome bourgeois civilization and bourgeois institutions are so great that the less capitalistic developed countries of the East, including Russia, offer a better chance and may precede in the new development. Such communists remember that civilization has in former times also changed its center from East to West and from South to North and that even in animal development, new species do not develop from those adopted themselves most perfectly to their surroundings, but from more primitive species that have more possibilities for adaptation to new circumstances. This however is not without more to transmit into social life and we should be very careful with such examples. But still there is some fundamental truth in it and it throws more attention towards the East. It may be remembered that instinctively the Russians always have paid more attention to the East than our Western friends in general. In an over-industrialized country, it is even materially impossible to build a new economic life without outside assistance and interference (food and raw-materials). But this is not even the worst, since the greatest difficulty is to break the monopoly of science and leadership, and bourgeois culture in general. Of course, all this should by no means diminish our activities here: to the contrary, the world will have to change all around and strenuous efforts will be required everywhere. But it may emphasize for our eastern friends their responsibilities and stimulate their activities. It would be a dangerous mood to expect too much from others, more dangerous if possibilities are that a great part of the common task will fall on own shoulders. I cannot judge whether Japan is already so far overpowered by capitalist organization and spirit, that difficulties there are almost equal

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to those in Western Europe and that we have to look more to the subjugated races of China and India.”1033

Pannekoek was hardly alone in his belief that the Asian, Latin American and African people could play a crucial and determining role in pushing forward the world revolution and, by so doing, disprove the racist claims suggesting that people in the colonial lands were ignorant and incapable. For example, later in 1920, in his “World Revolution and Communist Tactics”, Pannekoek drew the conclusion that: “We now see why it is that the primacy of Western Europe and America – which the bourgeoisie is pleased to attribute to the intellectual and moral superiority of their race – will evaporate, and where we can foresee it shifting to new countries, where the masses are not poisoned by the fug of a bourgeois ideology, where the beginnings of industrial development have raised the mind from its former slumber and a communist sense of solidarity has awoken, where the raw materials are available to use the most advanced technology inherited from capitalism for a renewal of the traditional forms of production, where oppression elicits the development of the qualities fostered by struggle, but where no overpowerful bourgeoisie can obstruct this process of regeneration – it is such countries that will be the centers of the new communist world. Russia, itself half a continent when taken in conjunction with Siberia, already stands first in line. But these conditions are also present to a greater or lesser extent in other countries of the East, in India, in China. Although there may be other sources of immaturity, these Asian countries must not be overlooked in considering the communist world revolution… The Russian revolution is the beginning of the great revolt by Asia against the Western European capital concentrated in England. As a rule, we in Western Europe only consider the effects which it has here, where the advanced theoretical development of the Russian revolutionaries has made them the teachers of the proletariat as it reaches towards communism… The interests of Asia are in essence the interests of the human race. Eight hundred million people live in Russia, China and India, in the Sibero-Russian plain and the fertile valleys of the Ganges and the Yangtse Kiang, more than half the population of the earth and almost three times as many as in the part of Europe under capitalist domination…”1034

However, despite Pannekoek’s personal views, the Bureau refrained from making any further generalizations beyond its insistence on the importance, indeed centrality, of non-European countries and colonies for a world revolutionary strategy. What it lacked was a clear understanding of the anti-colonial movements’ role in the world revolutionary movement. On this point there was a conflict among the Bureau’s contacts. Specifically, M. N. Roy and H. Sneevliet stood on opposite

1033

RGASPI, 487-2-2, ll. 179-180. Anton Pannekoek, “World Revolution and Communist Tactics” in D.A. Smart, ed., Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1978), p. 137. 1034

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ends on the question of an alliance between the colonial proletarians and pro-independence national bourgeois movements. Coming out of the Indian national liberation movement and having first-hand knowledge about how Central American regimes were ruled, Roy’s experiences convinced him that an alliance between young colonial bourgeoisie and workers would only be the ruin of the workers.1035 He defended an independent class organization, without any alliances with bourgeois colonial liberation movements. He argued that, even in the colonies or semi-colony republics, the native bourgeoisie was as decadent and tied to imperialism as they were in the capitalist centers. Especially in the Latin American republics, “perennial civil wars” triggered by military coups pointed to, according to Roy, the degeneracy and lack of a progressive perspective of the south American ruling classes.1036 Roy claimed that the working class and the educated urban middle class were “disgusted with the prevailing state of affairs” and this disgust pushed the proletarians into syndicalism and away from politics at a national level.1037 For Roy, an alliance between workers and the bourgeoisie in Latin American was impossible. Sneevliet’s experience in Indonesia and the political conclusions he drew from it were wholly different than Roy’s. Even before the “Muslim Communist” Sultan Galiev, the idea of a political alliance between Muslim anti-colonialism and communism appeared in the Dutch East Indies. Here the small LRI group (the ISDV), which numbered about twenty before the war, entered and won a great many members of the “Serakat Islam” organization (about 20,000). This huge influx helped the CPI (Communist Party of Indonesia) to become the largest colonial Communist Party when it was founded in 1920. However, it was unclear if the majority of the party understood communism in the same way as did other communists inside the Comintern. It seems

1035

In his memoirs Roy wrote: “As a matter of fact, in Mexico I realized, what I could not do in China, that national independence was not the cure for all the evils of any country. These thoughts raised in my own mind a question which provided the clue for a better understanding of Indian history... The poverty of the Indian masses was the result of economic exploitation by British imperialism and native feudalism. The liberation of the Indian masses, therefore, required not only the overthrow of British imperialism but subversion of the feudal-patriarchal order which constituted the social foundation of the foreign political rule. The corollary was that India needed a social revolution not mere national independence.” Roy, Memoirs, p. 76. 1036 Ibid. pp. 107-108. 1037 Ibid.

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that for many newcomers, the official adoption of the “communist” name was a way to rename their organization with a less foreign and Dutch sounding name than the ISDV, which apparently sounded too Dutch.1038 What especially worried some in the LRI camp was the ambivalence towards pan-Islamist, anti-colonial movements. The brief CPI program1039 rejected any alliance with bourgeois (native or otherwise) class parties, however it did not have any word on pan-Asian or pan-Islamist movements or their class characters.1040 The Amsterdam Bureau refrained from intervening in this question. Pannekoek hoped that the intelligentsias of the Asian peoples could potentially choose to ally themselves with the proletariat. Until the war, Asian intelligentsia hoped to establish independent nation-states of their own, modeled on the capitalist west, wrote Pannekoek. However, with the decline of capitalism, this intelligentsia could change position and side with the new rising class, the world proletariat and the Soviet state. If that happened, the world revolution could potentially succeed sooner. 1041 In short, for Pannekoek and Rutgers, it was it was too soon in 1920 to take a position on the Asian anti-colonial movements.

C.

The Amsterdam Conference and the North Atlantic LRI Scene

Despite its global perspective, the Amsterdam Bureau concentrated its activity most intensely and busily in the North Atlantic region. The Bureau sent its best-known militants to neighboring countries to engage with all socialist groups. These representatives contacted all groups and parties without distinction (including the Social Democrats and anarchists) to assess their positions on the Russian Revolution and Soviet power. Herman Gorter was sent to Germany, Henriette

1038

Ruth Thomas McVey, The Rise of Indonesian Communism (Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1965), pp. 46-47. 1039 Probably drafted by H. Sneevliet. 1040 “Program of the Communist Party of India” RGASPI, 497-2-11, ll. 7-9. “India” here refers to the “Dutch East Indies” in other words, Indonesia. 1041 Anton Pannekoek, “World Revolution and Communist Tactics”, p. 140.

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Roland-Holst to Belgium and France, and Gerrit Mannoury to Britain. 1042 A complete list of the groups and parties that the Amsterdam Bureau established contacts includes numerous groups from 23 countries.1043 Certainly, there were differences between the links it managed to establish with various groups. For instance, in a report sent to Berzin in March 1920, Rutgers explained that the Bureau managed to form regular ties with the British, American, Belgian, Spanish, and Swiss1044 groups by means of both couriers and correspondence. In contrast, relations with the Scandinavian parties and groups were only maintained through irregular correspondence. While Gorter remained in Germany for a prolonged period, contacts with Czechoslovakia were also established. But with the Balkan countries, Poland, and Austria, relations were only indirect. Finally, there was virtually no contact with Italy.1045 These multiple contacts were established in merely a few weeks of the Bureau’s founding, with virtually little funding or external aid, in a post-war Europe that was ridden with a deep political and economic crisis. Further, the Amsterdam Bureau also managed to undertake organizing an international conference in early February, which was one of its primary tasks assigned to it by the ECCI. But the Amsterdam Conference of the Communist International, which reflected all the weaknesses of the Bureau, was an organizational failure. Even its organizers admitted this. After scandalous reports in the Dutch press about a “secret” communist conference funded by “Russian gold” and its conspiring to overthrow the Dutch government, (accusations repeated by the Dutch Social Democratic party daily Het Volk1046, the conference had to continue secretly. However, the Bureau members who lacked adequate underground skills to avoid the police, could not protect

1042

A mathematics professor in the University of Amsterdam and a member of the newly formed Dutch Communist Party. According to a letter sent by Rutgers to the Norwegian LP and the Swedish Left-Socialist Party (16 January 1920) another delegate was apparently sent to Switzerland whose name was not mentioned in the letter. RGASPI, 497-2-3, l.. 4a. 1043 Akito Yamanouchi, “The Early Comintern in Amsterdam, New York and Mexico City”, The Shien or the journal of History No.147 (March 2010), pp. 99-139. 1044 In fact the young CP of Switzerland, after the repression in Switzerland started publishing its paper in the Netherlands where the German Left-Radicals had already established an underground publishing infrastructure in collaboration with the Dutch Radicals during the war. For Herzog’s reoırt on the Swiss Communist Party see: RGASPI, 487-1-5, ll. 80-86. 1045 RGASPI, 497-2-8, ll. 3-4. 1046 Bulletin of the Sub-Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International, No.2 (Amsterdam: March 1920), p. 2.

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the delegates; several of them were arrested and questioned by the Dutch police.1047 As Pannekoek wrote in his memoirs: “Here, we lacked any talent for conspiracy: at lunchtime we swarmed into a cafe with a garden and continued our discussions in several languages at table. We must surely have given the public the impression of an international conference”1048

This organizational weakness reveals a key difference between western LRIs and eastern LRIs. The lack of secrecy in the organization of the conference was a “western” weakness. Accustomed to big and festive socialist meetings that took place with comparatively little police harassment in the decades before the war, the west European socialists lacked skills and experience required of clandestine work.1049 Tellingly, it was the only Bolshevik in the conference, Borodin, who unearthed the police surveillance setup.1050 If the organizational weaknesses can be attributed to the western conditions and organizational inexperience, its results, mood, and achievements can also be attributed to the western conditions. While numerically small and clumsy in its underground organization, this conference was the first truly cross-Atlantic gathering of the international radical left. Delegates representing left radical and communist groups were present from the US, Mexico, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, and the Dutch Indies were present.1051 If the conference had not been broken up, more delegates from Austria or Germany might have arrived, as they were

1047

Ibid. Pannekoek, Herinneringen, p. 198. 1049 Bulletin of the Sub-Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International, No.2, p. 2. It must be noted that many delegates blamed Wijnkoop personally for mishandling the organization of the conference. US Department of State, War Department, 1920 (Washington, DC: 10058-24-89), p. 6. 1050 Murphy, New Horizons, p. 87. The Dutch police were not the only police state agency surveilling the conference. Jacob Nosowitsky, a member of the American Communist Party, who accompanied Fraina in his journey to Amsterdam was a government agent working for both the American Department of Justice and and the Scotland Yard. Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism, pp. 227-228. 1051 The full list of delegates: Fraina (the US), John Hodgson, Frederick Willis, John T. Murphy and Sylvia Pankhurst (Britain), Borodin and Rutgers (given mandate by the ECCI) from Russia, Stucke (Germany), Eduard L.H. v Overstraaten (Belgium), Richard Andre Manuel (Hungary), J. Herzog (Switzerland), David Wijnkoop, Henriette Roland-Holst, Herman Gorter, v. Ravesteyn, Anton Pannekoek, Johann Volkhoff, William van Leuven, Anna Augasta de Wit, Gerrit Mannoury, Petrus Francis van Hoorn, Mrs Rutgers (the Netherlands), Tjean Sioe Kwa (China), H.J.M. Sneevliet (Indonesia). Other Dutch radicals and a Christian Socialist Dutch MP, Kamerlid Kruyt took part as an observer. Helena Ankersmit and Augusta de Wit acted as translaters. Gerrit Voerman, De Meridiaan van Moskou: de CPN en de Communistische Internationale, 1919-1930 (Amsterdam: L.J. Veen, 2001), p. 81. 1048

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on their way. The Yugoslav, French, and Spanish LRIs (in Spain the party was just formed at the time) and the left factions of the German, Swiss communist movements managed to send delegations. Hungary was represented by Andre Manuel, a recently arrived émigré from the defeated Hungarian Soviet Republic. The Austrian party also attempted to send a delegate, but he turned back to Vienna when, as he prepared to cross the border in Bremen, he learned that the police disbanded the conference. From the Indonesian Communist Party Sneevliet and a Chinese from Singapore, Kwa Yoan Sioe, represented Southeast Asia, who were the first to represent Southeast Asia in an international socialist conference.1052 The significance of the Amsterdam Conference is easy to miss, but hard to overemphasize. This was the only major Comintern conference that happened in the “west” following the halt in the advancing revolution in central Europe. Although Communists from the east were mostly absent, it was the most representative LRI conference reflecting western European tendencies to have happened since 1915.1053 It is true that the representation in the conference was skewed towards the left-wing in the communist movement. Many groups who joined the Comintern later were not present. Yet, as noted in the previous chapters, this made the conference more clearly representative of the original international Zimmerwald Left fraction. In fact, this was actually the first ever Zimmerwald Left conference with the presence of representatives from the Dutch, German, Swiss, and the US core groups, minus, ironically the east European Zimmerwald Leftists. The meeting of the old-guard LRIs of the Zimmerwald Left gave the opportunity to concretize a global response to the new situation created by the asynchronic development of the world revolution. The end of the western revolution, the continuous divisions among the Communists, and the urgency they felt to aid the Russian soviets were constant problems. On top of that, a new development, the gradual drift of the centrist Social Democratic parties towards the possibility of an affiliation with the Comintern constituted a new and complex problem requiring an urgent response.

1052

Bulletin of the Sub-Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International, No.2, p. 3. This was the first International conference that Gorter and Pannekoek, two major LRI figures still in the west, participated since 1914. American and British LRI groups were never represented in a previous conference or congress in a similar capacity. 1053

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Hence, the agenda of the conference was defined by a dual challenge that the Comintern faced after the high hopes of its first months waned. First was the question of unity. In the west, several Social Democratic parties were moving towards affiliation with the Comintern. Moreover, communist groups were either divided (as in the US, Germany, Britain) or had not yet broken with the centrists in their parties (Italy, France). The second problem was related to the first: the defeat of the Hungarian, German, and Bavarian Soviets and the failure of Comintern to initiate a global mass strike against the encirclement of the Soviet state and intervention in east and central Europe called for a tactical reevaluation. Both questions were especially urgent in western Europe, where doubts and confusion about the Comintern’s principles reigned supreme and the centrist Social Democrat’s conciliatory mood seemed to be offering an exit from the deadlock. Both developments required a response and the Amsterdam Bureau, as mandated by the ECCI, took the initiative.

1.

The Challenge of Centrist Social Democracy

In late 1919 and early 1920, Europe’s economic and social situation appeared to be improving, yet only slightly. Since the war, global trade had declined by 24.6% in real terms. Europe’s share in world trade in 1920 declined from 60% in 1913 to 39.4% by 1920.1054 Worse still, almost all Europe was struggling with hunger. The food shortages reached famine levels in a vast region in Central and Eastern Europe including the Soviet Republic. 1055 Mass lethal epidemics resurfaced. Spanish Flu, which rapidly travelled from country to country on the back of modern transportation infrastructures, claimed between 50 to 100 million lives. Fearing an uprising in Austrian capital, the Office of International Relief and Mutual Understanding, an organization created in tandem with the League of Nations with the American government’s backing, organized one of

1054

David Jacks, “The First Great Trade Collapse: The effects of World War I on International Trade in the Short and Long Run” in The Economics of the Great War: A Centennial Perspective Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison ed.s (London: CEPR Press, 2018), pp. 176-8. 1055 For instance, “by January 1919, 800 Germans a day were dying of hunger”. Donny Gluckstein, The Western Soviets: Workers’ Councils versus Parliament 1915-1920 (London: Bookmarks, 1985), p. 123.

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the first international aid campaigns to these “sober, hard-working people” who were considered “worth saving” since the country “guarded the west from the inroads of the Eastern barbarians.”1056 John Maynard Keynes, who was a disillusioned member of the British delegation in the Paris conference, resigned from his government post in disgust because of the disregard that the Allied governments showed to the future of Europe. Later in 1919, he published a work denouncing these governments titled “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” which earned him considerable fame. Keynes was not a Marxist, but he argued that if the victors continued to punish Eastern and Central Europe economically for the war, that policy would only deepen the social crisis and eventually inflame the revolution. Europe was a densely populated, economically and technically highly integrated region of the world. A relatively large proportion of the continent’s population was employed in a developed industrial production system tied to the world market, and it was fed and supplied from the outside by a complex network of intercontinental transportation and trade. If, as the Entente governments in Paris did, wrote Keynes, the population was squeezed with trade blockades, the consequence would be widespread hunger and certain mass death. When it comes to choose between life and death, people would revolt, Keynes feared: “Men will not always die quietly. For starvation, which brings to some lethargy and a helpless despair, drives other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and to a mad despair. And these in their distress may overturn the remnants of organisation, and submerge civilisation itself in their attempts to satisfy desperately the overwhelming needs of the individual.”1057

As Keynes feared, since 1917, there had been a considerable rise in the working-class militancy especially for economic goals. However, this militancy did not immediately transform into a political radicalization. Instead, the wider masses of western workers turned towards the centrist Social Democrats presented to them on the ballot. Partially due to the extended suffrage, to the weakening of the center-liberal parties, and to the general sympathy towards Soviet Russia, Social Democratic parties (SPD and the USPD) generally gained electoral successes in the elections. For instance, in the June 1920 Reichstag elections, the centrist USPD more than doubled its share of

1056

Quotes from the reports of the agency from: Patricia Clavin, “International Organisation and World War I”, in Broadberry and Harrison eds., The Economics of the Great War: A Centennial Perspective (London: CEPR Press, 2018), p. 170. 1057 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p.176.

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the votes and its seats in the Reichstag rose from 22 to 84. Most of these were former SPD voters. In France, the SFIO votes fell in the first post-war elections, but its membership grew considerably between 1918 and 1920 from thirty-five thousand to a hundred seventy thousand.1058 In Italy, PSI secured a major victory in the November 1919 elections. In this election, socialists won 32% of the votes and number of PSI seats rose from 52 to 156 in the parliament, thanks partially to the middle-class votes and the electoral reform that granted male universal suffrage.1059 In Britain, the Labour Party’s share of the votes rose from about 2 million in 1910, to 2.244 million in 1918, and to 4.236 million in 1922.1060 Paradoxically, the numerical growth and electoral successes of the centrist Social Democratic parties ran parallel to a growing sympathy towards and a desire to affiliate with the Comintern. The pro-Comintern mood was strongest within the PSI, the majority being for affiliation.1061 In the SFIO, while a small minority expressed such sympathy in 1919, the pro-Comintern tendency grew to one-third in the party’s 1920 Strasbourg congress, and by the end of that year, a majority.1062 In the USPD, a pro-Comintern tendency also rapidly grew. At the heart of this paradox lies the asynchronicity of the world revolutionary upsurge. In Russia, Bolsheviks grew rapidly from a small and scattered party to a mass party within a year in 1917. The same did not happen in western Europe. In the west, the LRIs and communist groups remained comparatively small, and their existence was known to only the most radical sections of the working class. Unified and well developed Social Democratic parties with long historic traditions and deep social roots made the rapid growth of the young communist movement impossible in the west. Hence, while the majority of the western workers were probably not aware of the smaller left-radical factions’ existence or activities in their own countries, they were certainly aware of the Bolshevik party. This bizarre situation enabled the main Social Democratic parties to keep their left and right wings united in 1919 and 1920, giving them an opportunity gain electoral victories in the short run. As pressure

1058

Albert S. Lindemann, The Red Years: European Socialism versus Bolshevism, 1919-1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p.193. 1059 SFIO wasn’t as successful in the elections compared to other socialist parties. 1060 Braunthal, The History of the International Vol.2, p. 184. 1061 Admiration for the Bolshevik Revolution within the PSI was so unqualified that there was little debate about it within the party, at least not in comparison to the debates within other western socialist parties. Lindemann, The Red Years, p. 53. 1062 Ibid. p. 100.

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from the party ranks grew to affiliate with the Comintern in the SFIO, PSI and the USPD, leaderships in 1919 accepted certain Comintern slogans and adopted certain Comintern principles to their own programs. Erfurt Councilism was a product of this period. Although this grafting was only superficial, Social Democratic leaders hoped to establish inner-party peace and present the Comintern a fait accompli to accept these parties into the new International on their terms or risk appearing sectarian and doctrinaire, hence losing the sympathy of the west European working class. The Amsterdam Bureau took up the new challenge posed to the Comintern by their old rivals, the centrist Social Democratic parties. In order to competently tackle the situation, the Bureau had to further clarify the Comintern position on parliamentarism and unity with the centrists, which were broadly defined in the Moscow founding congress in March. Further, it also had to elaborate on the trade union question, which was not debated in the Comintern’s first Congress. The quesstion was deferred to a later international meeting in which more representatives from the western communist organizations, who were more familiar with the situation, would be present. Nonetheless, participants of the Amsterdam Conference of the Amsterdam Bureau tried to develop answers to the challenge of the centrist Social Democracy and specifically elaborate more clearcut positions in relation to the questions of parliamentarism, trade unions and centrist Social Democratic parties in general.

2.

Parliamentarism

The question of parliaments and their utility for the revolution was the most urgent and practical question that Communists in western Europe and North America faced between 1917 and early 1920s. The ECCI’s position, which was typical of this early period, was lenient and flexible, and left ample room for the western Communists to decide the position that they would take because ultimately this was partially a “western” question. Parliamentary bourgeois culture was a “western” political tradition, an invention of the nineteenth century European conditions.1063 This

1063

For example, in the European context, Rosa Luxemburg defined the role of parliament in the 19th Century context as an arbiter of struggle between the aristocracy, which held the executive power and the

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leniency was expressed in the theses Zinoviev penned on parliamentarism, which was published in the Amsterdam Bureau’s bulletin.1064 As the East European Communists expected the revolution to spread westward in a matter of months or at least a few years in early 1919, Zinoviev’s views were close to an endorsement of anti-parliamentary tactics. But the ECCI also cautioned that variations in the speed and tempo of the revolution in different countries are to be expected and hence it left the practical implementation of the Comintern principle on parliamentarism to each Communist party.1065 The Amsterdam Bureau in its comments on Zinoviev’s theses1066 acceded to the Petrograd ECCI that any boycott or participation in elections should be left to the party immediately concerned. However, granting national autonomy on a such crucial matter was akin to the Second International federalism, which resulted in its theoretical eclecticism, and which eventually caused, in the eyes of the LRIs and Communists, its doom in the face of the world war. This clearly went against the Amsteradam Bureau’s own incessant emphasis on the necessity of international unity at the theoretical and tactical levels and must have unsettled the Bureau’s theoreticians. Hence, they also felt obliged to state that “… main lines laid down by the Moscow Secretariat have not since proved sufficient in all practical cases.” After reporting the KPD-S’ decision to boycott the elections in Germany in January 1919, the Amsterdam Bureau’s Bulletin confidently stated that soviets and national parliaments in the coming epoch of class conflicts would constitute the organizational centers of the two antagonistic classes (proletariat and the bourgeoisie) and that exposing the bourgeois, counterrevolutionary character of “bourgeois democracy” was an urgent, primary task of the Communists:

bourgeoisie, having economic supremacy, held the legislative power in the state. For Luxemburg, parliament was a particular expression of the bourgeois struggle against feudalism, a struggle that was already won by the bourgeoisie. Rosa Luxemburg, “Sozialdemokratie und Parlamentarismus” (1904), Gessamelte Weke Band 1.2 (Berlin: Dietz, 2000), p. 449. 1064 “...when the capitalistic system of production has broken down, and society is in a state of revolution, parliamentary action gradually loses importance as compared with the action of the masses themselves. When then, parliament becomes the centre and organ of the counterrevolution, whilst on the other hand, the laboring class builds up the instruments of its power in the soviets, it may even prove necessary to abstain from all and any participation in parliamentary action.” Bulletin of the Provisional Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International, No.1, p. 3. 1065 This can also be interpreted as a concession to KPD, the German section, whose leadership was proparliamentary action. See: Chapter 10. 1066 The comments were probably written by Pannekoek; they were published in the same issue of the bulletin. Bulletin of the Provisional Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International, No.1, p. 3.

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“…in the first place and as a general rule, the working class in the midst of a revolution is to build up its own organs, and participation in the parliamentary elections or parliamentary action not only are of no avail whatever for this purpose, but, whilst diverting the workers thoughts from their own constructive activities, may even possibly weaken this their most important action. In the second place and in the particular [German] instance, this bourgeois parliament would as a matter of course, serve as a political centre of the bourgeoisie against the proletarian dictatorship. This reality had to be exposed: the mask of a democratic representation of the whole people, under which this parliament might have deceived the people, had to be torn off: this it was, which by the boycott they pronounced against the Parliament, the communistic party opposed to do.”1067

Indeed, many groups and parties in western Europe committed to the Comintern had been consistently moving towards anti-parliamentary positions since 1917. By the time the Amsterdam conference convened, the British WSF, the American CP represented by Fraina, the Swiss CP, the left-wing pro-Comintern group around Bordiga in Italy, and a part of the German and Dutch CPs were firmly abstentionist. In Poland, the Polish Communist Party boycotted the elections held in March 1918.1068 In Bulgaria, the strongest Balkan affiliate of the Comintern, the Tesnyaki only decided to participate in the elections after great debates at its May 1919 Congress. 1069 As noted above, in Germany the founding KPD congress decided to abstain from participating in the first post-revolutionary elections.1070 While the Amsterdam Conference itself could not discuss the question in a formal meeting, since the threat of a police raid forced it to dissolve, the delegates still continued to debate theoretical matters in the ensuing informal and dispersed meetings.1071 Detailed reports prepared by the participants provide a more or less clear picture about their attitudes.1072 The British WSF,

1067

Ibid. Philippe Bourrniet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, p. 180. 1069 Hulse, The Forming of the Communist International, p. 64. 1070 This was, however, after a great controversy and protest against Zentrale’s thesis presented by Levi, which supported participation in the elections. Weber, ed., Die Grundung der KPD, pp. 96-137. After the death of the party leadership, the new party leadership and especially Paul Levi and Clara Zetkin (who was at the time a USP MP in the Reichstag) attempted to reverse this decision. This caused a great upheaval in the party – which is discussed in the next chapter in detail. 1071 These debates and meetings continued in clandestine hiding where the delegates hid. These debates, however, cannot be considered as formal meetings in any form that could substitute for a conference. Murphy, New Horizons, pp. 88-90. 1072 Pannekoek’s “World Revolution and Communist Tactics” which was written and published immediately afterwards the conference can actually be considered as an informal general theoretical balance sheet of the Amsterdam Bureau’s activity and a general left-wing synthesis of the conference debates. It is extensively referenced above on the Asian, African and American questions – which were all based on a 1068

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represented in the conference by Sylvia Pankhurst, was one of the staunchest opponents to Communist participation in the bourgeois parliamentary elections. The WSF’s move towards abstentionism happened gradually and slowly. Following the November revolution, WSF was a resolute supporter of the Bolshevik’s dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. Still, the WSF lent support to SLP’s shop steward candidates and John MacLean in the November 1918 parliamentary elections in Britain. By 1919, however, the WSF was firmly on the anti-parliamentary grounds.1073 For former women suffragists like Sylvia Pankhurst and others from the WSF, who had devoted years of militant activity to gaining women the right to vote, this transition cannot merely be explained by a euphoric sense of excitement about the soviet model and Bolshevism. As Pankhurst’s report indicated, the WSF saw anti-parliamentary tactic as necessary, considering the asymmetry between the political experience of the British parliament and the ruling class that it represented on the one hand, and the inexperience of the Communists and those moving towards communism who, at that point, still could not form a unified party. The proletariat had to build its own, independent mass organs of struggle. The WSF report presented by Pankhurst summarized the situation as: “… the British parliament has provided itself with rules to prevent its being used as a propaganda platform by those who come not to secure reformist legislation but to attack the constitution and Parliament itself... The British movement was so long steeped in reformist Parliamentarism that the major part of those who, under the glamour of Russia’s success, accept the broad principles of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Third International the Soviets instead of parliament and the overthrow of capitalism by Revolution have not grasped the idea of the destructive Parliamentary action advocated by convinced communists. To send such comrades into Parliament is to court a very serious setback for the new communist party. I must say in all seriousness that if the running of Parliamentary candidates by newly formed communist Parties is encouraged, it will seriously retard the development of effective communist parties in those countries where this mistake is made… The greatest struggle before us is that of making the organized workers realize that socialism cannot be obtained by capturing a majority of seats in Parliament but by the revolutionary seizure of power and the establishment of soviets.”1074

Similarly, Fraina’s report, which was the most detailed report presented to the conference, put forward a damning critique of American democracy. According to the report, American

general conclusion from the debates that took place between the Bureau members and the LRIs from these continents dating back to a pre-war period. 1073 Mark Shipway, Anti-Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers’ Councils in Britain’ 1917-45 (London: MacMillan Press, 1988), pp. 4-7. 1074 WSF’s “Report on the British Movement”, RGASPI, 497-1-5, l.15.

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democracy was essentially a racist, xenophobic slave regime just like it was in ancient Athens or other early slave societies, which thrived on the violent exploitation of black, native, and immigrant proletarian populations. Its “democratic” institutions were designed to conceal and perpetuate this exploitation. The report argued: “American capitalism inherits the brutal traditions of frontier warfare and the shameless butchery of the Indian aborigines; while out of the conquest of the West developed that savagery in action and contempt of the law which is a fundamental American characteristic. Two other factors preserved these traditions and strengthened them as means of action against the working class; the fact that the American proletariat consists of overwhelmingly of the Negro and immigrants – people whom the American of the ruling class considers as a lower order of the human race, beasts of burden and helots. The alien character of the American working class developed a repression of labor comparable to the colonial labor policy of Imperialism – the Negro and the immigrants being the “reject” races. Labor in its development has met with the bloody repression of the government: strikes have been ruthlessly crushed by military force, the murder of the proletariat being apparently and indispensable phase of American labor policy. This savage repression developed co-incidentally with a really general political democracy; but the masses of the proletariat were excluded from this democracy: American democracy historically is a perfect demonstration of bourgeois democracy being a means for the promotion of capitalism and capitalist supremacy.”1075

While the above reports exemplified a significant communist opposition to the parliamentary tactic in American or British contexts, there were also conference participants who defended it. Among them were certain delegates from the Dutch party, which itself had two MPs (Wijnkoop and van Ravestein) in the Dutch parliament. Yet, it would not be an exaggeration to state that the overall mood in the conference favored abstaining from parliamentary politics.1076 Pannekoek’s World Revolution and Communist Tactics, which may be seen as an unofficial report of the Bureau’s left-wing, succinctly synthesized in general international terms the emerging electoral abstentionist perspective in different countries. According to him, the problem with parliamentary tactics was primarily its over-reliance on the leaders, single charismatic individuals who potentially created among the masses of proletarians the belief that they do not need to actively engage

1075

RGASPI, 497-1-5, ll.54-60. The Belgium, Swiss, American and half of the British (the WSF and the shop stewards) delegations, based on the reports that they presented, could be expected to vote for an abstentionist position. The Dutch party was clearly divided on that score. The German delegate from Bremen belonged to the leftwing. Overall, the composition of the conference’s delegates suggests a clear anti-parliamentarian majority. 1076

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in politics themselves. This critique, however, did not stem from an anarchistic or syndicalist distrust towards political parties. It called for a different type of political engagement, the masses’ own involvement in politics, as made a reality by and through the soviets. In that sense, Pannekoek’s analysis updated and adapted the left-wing’s pre-war mass action theory to the current conditions: “…parliamentary activity is the paradigm of struggles in which only the leaders are actively involved and in which the masses themselves play a subordinate role. It consists in individual deputies carrying on the main battle; this is bound to arouse the illusion among the masses that others can do their fighting for them… Parliamentarianism inevitably tends to inhibit the autonomous activity by the masses that is necessary for revolution…”1077

3.

Trade Unions

The second major issue on the Amsterdam Conference agenda was the trade union question. In the first Comintern Congress, the question of trade unions was debated inconclusively. One reason was that the majority of the delegates were from Asia and eastern Europe may have thought that the question had to be settled by communists who had more experience on the problem. In most Asian countries, trade unionism was barely developing or did not even exist. For instance, in the Russian Empire the trade unions were generally weaker and regularly faced repression before the March Revolution.1078 Radicals like the Bolsheviks rarely had a hold on these traditionally conservative organizations before the revolution.1079 Whatever the reason, the ECCI produced only a very brief resolution on the trade union question to be discussed by the Comintern

1077

Pannekoek, “World Revolution and Communist Tactics”, in Smart ed. Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism, p. 111. 1078 Before 1917, there were merely 14 small trade unions 11 of which were illegal. Donny Gluckstein, The Western Soviets, p. 25. 1079 After the revolution, trade unions’ role and relation to the state became a cause of serious controversy in Soviet Russia. In a way, many Bolsheviks also saw unions as essentially administrative institutions even under the proletarian dictatorship. In 1918 January First All Russian Trade Union Congress a minority supported the trade union autonomy from the state and the party. Trotsky, on the other hand demanded the statization of the unions and their integration into the state administration. In response, an intra-Bolshevik Party opposition, the so-called “Workers Opposition” also emerged against the statization of the unions. The debate continued throughout the Civil War. R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, (New York: Clarion Books, 1969), pp. 119-125.

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sections. Reflecting on the general mood of distrust towards the traditional trade unions in the first congress, the theses stated that; “…in countries where big industry has vigorously developed the trade-unions have become colossal organizations ruled by a conservative bureaucracy of officials, whose policy it is to prevent conflicts, to effect compromise with the employers by means of wage-agreements, and to keep industrial peace. During the war they have enlisted the trade-unions into the service of the imperialistic governments and helped to force the workers down under the yoke of army service and war industry. After the war they have sided with the bourgeoisies against the proletarian revolution. Wherever in the revolution the trade-unions under their leaders become the tools of the capitalistic system against the revolutionary workers, they must be fought with the utmost energy, in the first place by organizing the revolutionary opposition within the trade-unions, and in the second, wherever conditions are sufficiently developed, by forming new organizations.”1080

With the collapse of the central European revolutions, the criticism of trade unions were becoming more pronounced. Rudnyanski from the Hungarian Communist group, wrote that the experience of the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution in summer 1919, left no room for doubt about the counter-revolutionary nature of trade unions. He wrote in an article published in the Comintern’s central organ that: “… the German Communists in especial, insisted that during and after the proletarian revolution the trade unions would be useless, for in most cases said these comrades, the trade unions were led by Social Democrats whose temperament had become essentially middle class. The history of the Hungarian Soviet Republic during the four months of its existence, and the history of what happened since its temporary overthrow, suffice to show that in the proletarian revolution such trade unions, those which have become inspired with a middleclass mentality, can play a definitely counter-revolutionary part. The opportunist maneuvers of the unions, their leaning towards compromise with the bourgeoisie, sapped the foundations of the Soviet Republic, and the republic fell when the trade unions placed themselves at the head of the counter-revolution… Shortly before the proletarian revolution in Hungary the predominance of bourgeois trends in the trade unions was accentuated by the adhesion to the SDP of whole groups of persons belonging to the lower middle class and the middle class. The university professors, the sculptors, the civil servants, the army officers etc… formed their own unions: and this mass devoid of working-class consciousness, permeated with petty bourgeois opinions and aspirations, became one of the main props of the opportunist leaders.”1081

1080

By these “new organizations,” Zinoviev meant revolutionary syndicalist organizations like the IWW or the so-called “factory organizations” formed in Germany. Bulletin of the Provisional Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International, No.1, p. 4. 1081 A Rudnyanski, “The Trade Unions and the Counter-Revolution in Hungary,” Communist International no. 5 (1919): pp. 27-8.

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In the west, Communists were simultaneously reaching a similar conclusion about the trade unions and the Amsterdam Conference reflected this tendency. If the struggle against autocracy educated the eastern LRIs in underground organization, in the west several LRI groups were born in a struggle against the traditional craft unionism, its legalistic reformism, bureaucratic clumsiness, and hostility to radical and new mass action tactics. Hence, antagonism towards trade unions was much wider, if not unanimous, than it was on the question of parliamentarism. The Amsterdam conference conveyed this position in clear terms and on this question at least there was general unanimity among the delegates. The theses presented by Fraina were adopted unanimously by the conference: “The trade unions arose during the epoch of small industry, with its consequent division of the workers into crafts or trades. The artisan conception prevailed that a workers’ craft or skill was a form of property, developing a property and petty bourgeois ideology; and this, together with the circumstance that trade unionism acquired power during a period of intense national economic development. (1870-1900) produced the concept of limiting the proletarian struggle within the limits of capitalism and the nation. – That is why [they] excluded the bulk of unskilled workers – upper layers of the working class. – aristocracy of labor… The aristocracy of labor dominant in trade unionism accepts Imperialism, uses the unions to assist Capitalism in “stabilizing” labor in industry, and becomes the source of the corrupt ideology of social imperialism. The decisive factor in the collapse of the old International was the immersion of socialism in trade-unionism, with its practice of socialimperialism, petty bourgeois democracy and its fundamental counter-revolutionary tendency. Trade unionism … is impotent … since the division of the workers into craft or trade organizations split them into innumerable unions, each antagonistic to the other, making hopeless the struggle against concentrated capitalism, which largely expropriates the worker of his skill, eliminates the craft divisions of small industry, and brings masses of the proletariat together regardless of particular occupational functions.”1082

In the new imperialist epoch, the conference proposed, Communists should leave the unions and focus their energies on building and participating in unitary working-class organs of struggle, such as “forming of organizations such as the Shop Stewards, Workers Committees, economic Workers Councils and direct branches of the Communist Party in the shops, mills and mines, which are not only means for moving the masses and the unions to more revolutionary action but which at the moment of crisis may develop into Soviets.” However, this did not mean that the conference embraced syndicalism in any form. On the contrary, the resolution argued that the syndicalist principle that “industrial unionism alone is necessary for the conquest of capitalism

1082

Bulletin of the Sub-Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International, No.2, pp. 6-7.

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must be decisively rejected,” that “the conquest of the power of the state … by the revolutionary proletariat” was still necessary. Hence, it rejected the syndicalist principle that any form of union could “grow into” socialism.1083 As one of the Belgian delegates stated, the endorsement of organizational forms such as workers committees, shop stewards, or economic workers councils was an expression of a deliberate desire to avoid “doctrinal strictness” on organizational forms. The experience of the previous five years proved to many LRIs that, in several different countries, rank-and-file workers formed economic struggle organizations on their own behalf without the instigation of any party leadership or against the traditional union leaderships. For example, in 1915 in Clyde and then throughout whole Britain, or in Germany even before the war, rank-and-file union members were waging a struggle against the professional union bureaucrats. During the war, as the trade-union leaderships stopped listening to the grievances of the workers on the shop floor in the name of “social peace,” factory delegates formed their own organs of struggle. Crossing trade and company boundaries, they called these underground organizational forms as “shop stewards committees” or the “obleute” in Germany, which after 1917 even led to the formation or at least an enthusiastic defense of “economic soviets.”1084 Several delegates in the Amsterdam Conference had been either directly members of such movements or engaged with the syndicalist and shop stewards’ movements during and before the war (for example, Murphy from Britain) and they perceived them as potential councils. Despite their popularity, the stubborn refusal of shop stewards’ movement leaders to adopt directly political goals, particularly against war and the state, was a thorny issue that caused bitter distrust between the LRI and the syndicalist or obleute type movements. That was why, while endorsing spontaneous workers organizations and their importance, the delegates were cautious in their approval and found it necessary to emphasize that these organs by themselves were not enough to abolish capitalism.

1083 1084

Ibid. p.7. Gluckstein, The Western Soviets, p. 103.

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4.

The Question of Party Unity

Implicit in the debates on parliamentarism and trade unionism was the question of the relations between the Social Democrats and Communists. Firmly rejecting parliamentarism and trade unionism, the conference was essentially leading towards a complete break with the two primary methods of political and economic struggle of the traditional Second International parties. This was the international left-wing’s response to the tendencies inside the SFIO, USPD, PSI, and the British labor movement, which strove to find a common ground with these centrist or rightwing socialist parties and the Comintern. The debate on the question of unity was to seal, at least in the eyes of the delegates present at the Amsterdam Conference, a final and complete break with Social Democracy that the conference position on parliamentarism had already suggested. The conference debate on the question of unity opened with a discussion of a resolution presented by Wijnkoop, which was essentially a restatement of the first Comintern Congress position on the question. However, he left the decision and practical aspects of these principles’ implementation to each political party.1085 In the ensuing debate, Wijkoop’s resolution was opposed by a resolute left-wing, which considered it insufficient. By this point, centrists in the USPD and SFIO were beginning to retreat from their opposition to the principle of “proletarian dictatorship” that they so adamantly held onto in the February 1919 Bern conference. Thus, Fraina defined Wijnkoop’s resolution as so broad and uncertain that it would only “help the opportunists” who would want to join the new International.1086 Since, many Social Democratic parties already accepted these principles on paper (with moderations and reservations), without either expelling wartime centrists or the rightists or making any change in their parliamentary orientation, accepting the Wijnkoop resolution would amount to a superficial unity. It would practically mean

1085

Wijnkoop’s resolution proposed that any unity with the Comintern was to be based on these principles; “1- Class war of the workers without any compromise with bourgeois and social patriotic parties. 2Direct action of the working masses as a means of conquering power. 3- Dictatorship pf the proletariat. 4Soviet constitution as the proper form of proletarian democracy. The question of organization and tactics upon which unanimity has not yet has been arrived at, are to be cleared up within the Party by discussion and examination of the facts.” Bulletin of the Sub-Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International, No.2, p.7. 1086 Ibid.

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transforming the Comintern into a replica of the Second International with merely the exclusion of the British Labour Party and the SPD – the only major European Social Democratic parties that still openly rejected proletarian dictatorship and council system. Moreover, Fraina reasoned, even these two right-wing parties could probably join at one point, if the practical implementation of these principles was left to each party, as point four of the Wijnkoop resolution suggested. An alternative resolution presented by Fraina, attempted to clarify this question and bar the centrist’s entry to the Comintern without leaving any doubt and room for compromises. According to Fraina the right-wing and the centrist Social Democrats were most dangerous when they catered to the left. A split with these currents was an absolute, international necessity. His resolution called for an urgent split from those groups which were still inside the old reformist and opportunist parties. Fraina’s insistence upon a strict anti-centrist and internationalist line stemmed from the experiences of the war time struggle of the LRIs: isolated in their separate national contexts, censured by the national Social Democratic party leaderships, the Zimmerwald Left groups formed themselves into an internationally centralized organization. Their experience led them to conclude that the principles would become powerless when the “national” or local considerations prevailed in organizational matters. An intra-national unity with parties and groups that oscillated during the war was akin to weakening the international unity for the sake of a numerical strength in different given national settings. In the conference, the tension between the defenders of national autonomy and international centralization sparked off a tense debate on the British question. The British delegation was the only national delegation that had representatives from almost all tendencies that were more or less on the left with a sympathetic position towards the Comintern: the “centrist” national currents (the BSP delegates Willis and Hodgson) in the conference (along with the support of some of the hosting Dutch, like Wijnkoop) represented the group that wanted affiliation with the Comintern, without breaking the British left’s links with the Labour Party, which was against the dictatorship of the proletariat principle accepted in March 1919 Moscow Congress. Pankhurst represented the left-wing of the British movement; she opposed this BSP position. She posed international unity as opposed to national unity, defending cohesion at an international, Comintern level, a unity based on principle as opposed to the unity of all Social Democratic groups at various different national 451

levels. The BSP delegates refused to endorse the resolute split that Fraina’s thesis demanded. Against that Willis insinuated that the British conditions were uniquely different, as that the question of affiliation with the Labour Party “must not be decided beforehand by outsiders, but by the new party itself.”1087 If a Communist Party in Britain would not affiliate with the Labour Party, Willis argued, it would isolate itself from the working class. In contrast, for Pankhurst and Murphy, joining a party that belonged to the Second International was inadmissible and “absurd.”1088 Clearly echoing the war-time Zimmerwald Leftist analysis by describing the mainstream Social Democratic parties as having been captured by labor aristocracies and middle-class intellectuals, Murphy argued that “as liberalism [was] overwhelmed by the war, the Labour Party appears to be the only refuge of the lower middle class.”1089 The Labour Party was “essentially reformist aiming at state control under capitalism and political democracy under capitalism.”1090 Further, Murhpy even opposed unity with the Independent Labour Party (ILP). While the base of the centrist ILP was being drawn towards the Third International, its leadership was pacifist and “in this there is the great danger of an organizational body accepting new (communist) principles whilst their leaders think in the old way… (and in the case of an unprincipled unity) there may be witnessed the swamping of the Third International by the muddle headed leaders of the Second International.”1091 The American and German delegations sided with Murphy and Pankhurst on this point. In the end, the Fraina’s resolution was eventually accepted by a majority of the conference, despite the opposition of a minority of the British and Dutch delegates, thereby securing a victory for the left-wing position in the conference. However, this was only a temporary victory. Inside the Communist movement, the question was not settled with the conference resolution and the following Congresses of the Comintern did not recognize it.

1087

Ibid. p. 8. Ibid. 1089 RGASPI, 497-1-5, l. 4. 1090 Ibid. l. 3. 1091 Ibid. ll. 4-6. It is not difficult to understand the reasons for this distrust towards ILP leadership. For instance, for Philip Snowden, a prominent ILP leader, Bolshevism was mere insurrectionism and “crazy”. He told in 1920 that “affiliation with the Third International would mean accepting a commitment to a crazy and useless attempt at armed revolutionary violence as the system of Socialism, autocracy instead of democracy…” Braunthal, The History of the International Vol.2. pp.1 83-4. 1088

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The left-wing supporters argued against the tide of a rash union with the centrists, who during the war opposed the left, but now, when the revolutionary tide was ebbing and when the sympathy towards the Soviets was nevertheless rising, saw no reason to fear joining the Comintern. Further, the left-wing delegates expressed a worry that wavering elements inside the communist movement could well prove unreliable in challenging times. They were worried that the failure of initial expectations of rapid success would push them in unexpected political ways. Such a situation might lead them to admit Social Democrats into the Comintern, in order to cope with a stagnant situation and to show a superficial numerical growth. Such reactions to the fear of the moment might well inundate the parties with confused elements. For the left, such actions represented an impulsive tactic, which could only hamper the revolution. Yet, lacking unanimity and time to finish its proceedings, the Amsterdam Conference could not adopt a decisive position on the question.

5.

International Action

For the Bureau, by 1920, the most bitter conclusion from the events of the preceding three years was that revolution in Russia would not be the beginning of a worldwide wave of revolutions, at least in the short run. In the preceding months, the Comintern had called for solidarity actions and mass strikes against Entente interventions in Soviet Russia, all of which had failed to stir European workers to mass action.1092 At this point, all the attempts by the Bureau and Communists to kindle the western European proletariat’s spirit into a general and widespread mass solidarity actions for Russia, Hungary, and Germany had failed. The Bureau had to draw the balance sheet of what from its standpoint increasingly looked like a temporary retreat or setback. As the reports reached Amsterdam and debates with several Communists deepened in Amsterdam, the situation became clearer. According to the Bureau’s estimation, the struggle, especially in Europe, faced several challenges. For example, in Central Europe, Pannekoek wrote, the working class and peasant masses were not yet mature enough to see the necessity of an

1092

In July and November 1919, before the suppression of the Hungarian revolution and the white offensive in the Ukraine. Bulletin of the Provisional Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International, No.1.

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internationally coordinated world proletarian revolution and Communists were in no position to force the revolution by other means, if the masses lacked self-consciousness.1093 While in Central Europe the situation was chaotic, for the Bureau, the ruling classes in Britain and the US looked even more firmly entrenched. There too, the situation demanded even more patience. In his report on Britain, Mannoury soberly concluded that “Revolution will be tried later here than in other countries but will earlier succeed. If the British government would try to take very drastic measures against Russia (sending troops and conscription) the resistance would be enormous and a communist revolution almost certain. This case however is very improbable.”1094 Fraina’s report echoed a similar verdict on the situation in the US: “a revolution in Europe may pull Britain to itself but not the US. In the US a long struggle would have to be waged, most of all at an ideological level and the US would eventually become the main enemy of a communist Europe.”1095 He even contemplated a world war between those two. Fraina argued the American expansion into Latin America through the Monroe Doctrine was in essence a preparatory stage for such a general confrontation.1096 The conference debated if the Eastern European Soviets could accelerate the revolution by direct intervention, or might it be that the Red Army could turn the tables and advance the revolution militarily? Initially, Fraina was enthusiastic about the prospect of the Red Army importing the revolution. He presented an addendum on the resolution on Intervention in Russia, which stated that: “…the imperialist government in order to justify their own aggression, attribute aggressive designs to the Soviet Government of Russia. Soviet Russia realizes that revolutions are not produced by alien aggression, but by the development of the internal forces of a country. SR [Soviet Russia] now wages a defensive war, forced upon her by the imperialist positions. This war will cease the moment the imperialist governments accept peace on the terms repeatedly made public by the SR. Should however the imperialist’s opposition compel S.R. to transform her defensive war into a military offensive either in the East or in the West, then this becomes a phase in the international class struggle and we call upon the workers in the nations involved not to resist the Soviet army, but to rise in revolt against their bourgeoisie and establish their own Soviet Republic.”1097

1093

Pannekoek, “World Revolution and Communist Tactics,” Smart, ed. Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism, p. 118. 1094 RGASPI, 497-1-5, l. 39. 1095 Ibid. l. 65. 1096 Ibid. 1097 Bulletin of the Sub-Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International, No.2, p.6.

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Rutgers and Wijnkoop opposed this resolution. Rutgers explained that the “Soviet Russia will never march into a country where there has not already a revolution developed. Our Russian friends want peace not only for their own reconstruction, but also because they do not believe in bringing about revolutions by outside interference.”1098 This clarification must have been reasonable enough for Fraina, since he withdrew his addendum from the debate upon Rutgers’ opposition.1099 No one except Fraina supported the idea of defending a militarily advanced revolution and the debate ended. If an external force, such as the Red Army, did not have a chance to speed the revolution up, then the Amsterdam Conference was left with no alternative but to accept the prospect that the world revolution was not immediately on the agenda. All the reports and debates in the conference pointed out that the Comintern had to prepare for a long-term struggle. According to Pannekoek, the coming period had to be a period of patient ideological work that could potentially take decades before the masses take to resolute revolutionary action. This called for endurance and firmness in the face of temptations to earn quick victories, whether that be through adventurist or seemingly “radical” actions or winning majorities via alliances with Social Democrats and gaining influence in other mass organizations.1100

1098

Ibid. Ironically, however, Fraina proved right that the Soviet Russia would indeed attempt to expand revolution westward. That occurred in Poland in the summer of 1920, after the fortunes of the Civil War began to turn in favor of the Red Army. Surprisingly, many Bolsheviks, including Lenin, even briefly, hoped that this could finally begin the long-awaited world revolution. 1100 In his “World Revolution and Communist Tactics”, Pannekoek attributes such impatience to speed the revolution up before letting things run their course as a classical trait opportunism: “Opportunism does not necessarily mean a pliant, conciliatory attitude and vocabulary, nor radicalism a more acerbic manner; on the contrary, lack of clear, principled tactics is all too often concealed in rabidly strident language; and indeed, in revolutionary situations, it is characteristic of opportunism to suddenly set all its hopes on the great revolutionary deed. Its essence lies in always considering the immediate questions, not what lies in the future, and to fix on the superficial aspects of phenomena rather than seeing the determinant deeper bases. When the forces are not immediately adequate for the attainment of a certain goal, it tends to make for that goal by another way, by roundabout means, rather than strengthen those forces. For its goal is immediate success, and to that it sacrifices the conditions for lasting success in the future. It seeks justification in the fact that by forming alliances with other ‘progressive’ groups and by making concessions to outdated conceptions, it is often possible to gain power or at least split the enemy, the coalition of capitalist classes, and thus bring about conditions more favorable for the struggle. But power in such cases always turns out to be an illusion, personal power exercised by individual leaders and not the power of the 1099

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The Bureau asserted, it would take time, maybe decades, for the proletariat to “learn to act internationally” since “it was not yet aware of the colossal changes that brought [about] this necessity since the war”.1101 In order to shed the illusions about the utility of bourgeois democratic methods and actions limited to separate national settings, a long period of ideological and spiritual struggle was necessary. These “illusions” that bound the proletariat to national politics were, for the Amsterdam Bureau and the Amsterdam Conference, hindrances in the forging of an international sense of class unity. Several members of the Bureau viewed the acquisition of a truly international sense, an internationalist “spirit”, elemental for the further advancement of the proletariat. By 1920, international centers or ‘bureaus’ appeared as the practical forms that made it possible for Communists to prepare themselves to meet this new requirement. As international bodies, the bureaus would systematize and spread what the LRIs were already doing for years: establish and link groups of LRIs that spread out all over the world and unite them inside a system of International centers. It seems at least two new bureaus, one for Americas and one for Asia, were on the table. The American Bureau of the Comintern, proposed by Fraina and Borodin, was probably to be located in Mexico uniting Americas. It appears a similar bureau was conceived for Asia, to be located in Indonesia. In the end, a Comintern Asian Bureau was set up in Central Asia to be headed by Roy.

D.

Conclusion

The activities of the Amsterdam Bureau constituted the culmination of the Comintern’s first year. That Bureau continued the work of the first international centers established by the

proletarian class; this contradiction brings nothing but confusion, corruption and conflict in its wake.” Pannekoek, “World Revolution and Communist Tactics,” Smart, ed. Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism, pp. 99-100. 1101 Pannekoek wrote: “The influence of bourgeois culture did not only entail a habitual confidence in bourgeois democracy but also blinded the masses towards the colossal change in capitalism happened since the war, its transformation into an international system where national politics lost its primacy.” Pannekoek argued the bourgeoisie was acting in unison, in organizing military interventions against working class revolutions. Masses also had to learn and act internationally. Anton Pannekoek, “The Universal Crisis”, The Call, (5 February 1920), p.2.

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Comintern. Despite the brevity of its existence, it proved more durable and successful. However, cracks in the newly born communist movement were already emerging. The Amsterdam Bureau’s actions and the conference’s results would stir great polarization inside the movement. Towards the summer of 1920, frictions, especially inside the Western communist movement, would lead to the formation of two opposing wings on almost all the questions settled and debated—or not settled—by the Amsterdam Conference. The emergence of these splits divided the LRI movement, which had helped to create the Comintern in 1919. The next chapter discusses this final stage in the life of the LRI movement.

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XII.

The Splits in the Central and West European Communist Parties and the Collapse of the Comintern Bureau System, 1919-1920

In 1919, the LRIs finally managed to form the Communist International, the world political-organization that they struggled for since 1914. They established several international "bureaus" around which to unify and centralize the world movement in order to overcome regional and national differences. One of the main bureaus, the Amsterdam Bureau, opened the organization to new continents beyond Europe: the Americas, Africa and south Asia. Despite these efforts and great hopes, 1919 ended with major defeats for the revolutionary movement. The workers councils lost all power in central Europe (Hungary, Germany, and Bavaria among others). In 1920, major strike waves were crushed in Germany and in Italy; by the end of the year, the last hopes for a revolutionary transformation in Europe were almost totally dashed. In 1920, the halt of the Red Army’s advance in Poland, the last major attempt to expand the proletarian revolution via military means and break the cordon sanitaire around Russia, also ended in defeat. This was effectively a turning point for the world revolutionary movement that had begun in 1917, but which from 1919-20 onwards began its decline. The decline of the revolutionary movement and the violent global counter-revolutionary terror that communists confronted pushed the movement into a new defensive political posture. The LRIs were used to isolation, but what made them distinct from other socialists was crystal clear: they advocated internationalism as opposed to national defense. The struggle during the First World War was a test of endurance, when the LRIs were on the margins. However, between 1917 and 1919, as the war came to an end and as the question of political power appeared as a practical question, the LRIs suddenly found themselves in the eye of the storm. They had to formulate their international goals more clearly at a time when their sole responsibility was not only holding on to their principles, but also the additional burden of ruling one sixth of the earth. The Communist International was born of the intersection of these two periods: at a time when the ice of isolation was thawing and when the question of proletarian dictatorship was (at least in theory) on the global political agenda.

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From 1919 onwards, the LRIs had to respond to a new and unexpected problem: the Comintern's popularity was growing all over the world, breaking the LRI's isolation. However, this popularity did not express itself in the growth and consolidation of the Comintern, but rather as a rank-and-file desire that emerged in the centrist European Social Democratic parties, a pressure that pushed their leaders towards a more fraternal attitude towards Soviet Russia. By the end of 1919, in several centrist socialist parties, most importantly in France, Germany, and Italy, demands to join the Comintern grew. This created an awkward situation both for the centrist Social Democratic leaders and the Comintern, since their organizational split dated to the war years, a split which laid the basis of the Comintern itself. Clearly, the recently politicized masses that swelled the ranks of the centrist parties of Europe did not fully see that Comintern was the product of a conscious rejection of the mass socialist parties. By the end of the war, the west European masses were more concerned with unity in struggles, especially with immediate economic goals, more than the seizure of power. The relatively new political divisions in the socialist movement were not obvious to the masses, nor to all leaders. In short, sympathy towards the Bolsheviks among the masses was genuine, but it did not express itself in concrete forms that the Communists expected or hoped it should take. Worse for the Comintern, as the proletarian masses became less and less prone to radical mass actions, mass strikes and forming soviets, the Comintern's call for proletarian dictatorship stood increasingly counter to the general historical trend of the ebbing class struggle. No one in the Comintern could see at the time that 1919 was a turning point, the beginning of the decline of the world revolutionary wave, even though the revolution was already giving way to counter-revolution (as it happened in Hungary and Bavaria). That reality only became clearer in 1920 and 1921 (especially in Italy and in Germany). If the coming of the defeat was a pattern only discernible retrospectively,1102 it was clearly impossible to see in the paradoxical behaviors of the masses an expression of the declining revolutionary momentum. This paradox most clearly

1102

For instance, Trotsky admitted that the defeat of the revolution in Europe was a fact in late 1920 and early 1921, in a speech he gave to a session of the Communist fraction of the Tenth All-Union Congress of the Soviets in December 1922. Leon Trotsky, "Report on the Communist International", Fourth International. New York, Vol.4 No. 8(36), August 1943, pp. 245-250. Pannekoek marked the date of defeat even earlier: "From 1918 to the present day, every chapter of European history could be headed: The Defeat of the Revolution." Pannekoek's "Principle and Tactic", an essay written by Anton Pannekoek and published in the KAPD journal KAZ in 1927, as quoted in Bricianer, Pannekoek and Workers' Councils, p. 231.

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surfaced in the restraint shown by the masses from joining the Communist parties on the one hand, and the pressure they put on their Social Democratic leaders to join the Communist International on the other hand. Explanations of this paradoxical situation varied within the Comintern. A significant tendency saw in this a merely pedagogical problem, a riddle that could be solved by simply winning over the mass organizations, a temporary stall or a natural zigzag in the maturation of class consciousness. Some reasoned that the masses would, by their own experiences, see that their parties and leaders were not attuned to communist principles and would eventually get rid of them, almost as a natural process, as a plant gets rid of its first pair of leaves once it reaches a certain level of development. Hence in time, these reformist organizations would become revolutionary communists. The defenders of this tactical line reasoned that history could move in zigzags, but nevertheless it was moving towards the revolution. A temporary compromise would not halt that fact. In contrast to this optimistic view, an opposing current saw this vision as opportunistic and dangerous. From this perspective, despite the quantitative and temporary strength of the mass Social Democratic parties, parliamentary parties, and trade unions, these organizations could not be utilized for revolutionary purposes. This second current argued that it was best to stick to revolutionary principles and methods, even though it meant temporary isolation. This "principled" current felt the changing political climate even if did not openly admit it: trying to conquer Social Democratic institutions (the same institutions that supported the war and the post-war counterrevolutions) was at best a self-deception or worse a Machiavellian mistake that could lead to confusion among the masses. It would ultimately blur the fundamental difference between Social Democracy and Communism. This in turn would only reverse the achievements gained by establishing the Comintern, the most important of which was drawing a clear line between Communists and Social Democrats, thereby creating the same problem that the Comintern was intended to resolve by its creation. These two currents—one that aimed to conquer the existing organizations, ignoring the possibility of a waning, let alone a defeat of the revolution, and the other opposed intransigently to this strategy and warning that easy tactical victories could only prove illusory—emerged first in Western Europe, but soon formed increasingly antagonistic poles inside the Comintern. The first was represented by the German Communist Party leadership, which had a very significant 460

influence in the Comintern and other tendencies grouped around it, whereas the second tendency was polarized around the Amsterdam Bureau of the Communist International. Their conflict climaxed in 1920 and opened the way for the first major split in the Comintern and the preceding Zimmerwald Left tendency since its formation in 1915.

A.

Defeat of the Global Workers’ Movement and Divisions in the LRI Movement

Arguably, the most disorienting defeat for the revolutionary movement in 1919 and 1920 was the one suffered in Germany, where the greatest hopes of the movement rested. This was not only a political but also a psychological defeat. Besides the strategic centrality of Germany for the world revolution, it had the most organized and politically conscious section of the world’s working class. The KPD was the strongest section of the Comintern outside Russia, and its leadership was the only one with a reputation that could match the Bolshevik Party. The Bolsheviks themselves were hoping for a merger of the Russian Soviets with the German Soviets since 1917 to redeem the Soviet power in Russia.1103 Hence, the defeats that the revolution suffered in Germany in the first half of 1919 had the most devastating effect on the Comintern. One may even argue that the ecstatic and exuberant mood of the founding Congress in March 1919, despite the repression in Berlin and the deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, revealed the incomprehensibility of such a deep defeat. Accepting it would not only mean that the Comintern was born too late to lead a successful world revolution, but even a crucial justification for the November Revolution would become questionable. Hence, it is necessary to analyze the depth of the counter-revolution and the mark it left on the Comintern's collective psyche. The counter-revolution in Germany was set into motion almost immediately after the November 1918 Revolution. The new post-revolutionary government formed by the USPD and the SPD perceived the armed revolutionaries' presence in the capital as a threat. Hence, it began to

1103

In KPD’s founding congress, Radek, who participated as the Bolshevik delegate, underlined the necessity of merging the two revolutions for the survival of both throughout his speech. Weber, ed. Die Grundung Der KPD, pp. 85-6.

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disperse the revolutionary and republican mutinous military units as early as December 1918 and January 1919. This led to growing tension between the government and the rebellious soldiers and workers. This tension eventually exploded in a series of intense and spontaneous skirmishes in Berlin. In this struggle, the government increasingly relied on the recently established Freikorps units, organized mainly by demobilized Junker officers and extreme right-wing groups in the army, whose loyalty to the government was questionable (as shown by the attempted right-wing Kapp putsch that happened in 1920), but whose hatred of communism and the working class was certain. The issues of contention between the radical left and the German socialist government changed over time, but the root political cause of the conflict centered on the definition of the regime. The radical left aimed to create a soviet or workers' council based socialist order, as in Russia, whereas the right-wing and the centrist socialists in government wanted to build a parliamentary democracy, along the liberal lines as proposed by the Wilsonian peace program. While the former pushed for a merger with the existing revolutionary Soviets in the east, the latter aspired to a merger with the new liberal order promised by the Wilson administration in the US. This conflict unfolded in an international context: the German government hoped to secure the support of American government as the least hostile government among the victorious allies, whereas the radical-left's conscious choice was a merger of Russian and German soviets to proceed towards world socialist order without further delay. Surprised and disoriented by the deep frictions among socialists, the majority of the workers initially remained undecided. In the heady January days following the November Revolution, aware that masses were not clearly on its side, the KPD leadership itself remained wary of any attempt to prematurely seizure power. However, the situation remained unstable, since the SPD government felt itself threatened by the KPDs influence and the presence of armed revolutionaries in Berlin. The SPD's systematic liquidation of revolutionary guards caused a spontaneous series of protests in Berlin. In this heated atmosphere, a small minority, the shop-stewards in the USPD and a faction inside the KPD led by Karl Liebknecht, pushed for demonstrations, occupations, and

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insurrectionary action against the SPD. Meanwhile even Rosa Luxemburg and the majority of the KPD leadership considered revolutionary action to be premature.1104 However, while the events pushed the KPD and SPD into conflict, the majority of workers in Germany during the early weeks of the revolution, were not eager to join a fight that they saw as a family squabble. The memory of the long repression suffered under a capitalist regime and an aristocratic state must have been fresh in the minds of the many workers. The official split between Social Democrats and Communists were too fresh and the ending of the war may have also lessened the passionate intensity of conflict between the internationalists, pacifists and social chauvinists in the eyes of the workers. The German workers seemed more willing to support a joint socialist government (including Communists on the left and trade unions and the SPD on the right), a scenario that neither the Social Democrats nor the communists could accept. The paradoxical result was that even though soviets nominally existed across Germany, the socialist delegates in them readily lent the power that they had to the right-wing socialists who opposed the soviets and preferred a parliamentary democracy instead. So, while many workers were sympathetic to the idea of soviets, their leaders were often hostile to it, and the tired and hungry masses seemed largely unaware of the contradictions between different socialist parties and their programs.1105 During this intense early period, when the political future of Germany hung in the balance, the counter-revolutionary forces showed stronger unity and determination in action against their common enemy, the workers and the Communists. Despite their relative weakness, Communists

1104

Ottokar Luban, "Rosa at a Loss. The KPD Leadership and the Berlin Uprising of January 1919: Myths and Reality" Revolutionary History Vol.8 No.4 (2009), p. 45. 1105 Rosa Luxemburg brilliantly explained this as the main weakness of the Revolution in Germany in her speech in the KPD's founding congress: “... on November 10 our revolutionists allowed to slip from their grasp nearly half the instruments of power they had seized on November 9... The weeks that have elapsed between November 9 and the present day have been weeks filled with multiform illusions. The primary illusion of the workers and soldiers who made the revolution was their belief in the possibility of unity under the banner of what passes by the name of socialism. What could be more characteristic of the internal weakness of the revolution of November 9 than the fact that at the very outset the leadership passed in no small part into the hands of persons who a few hours before the revolution broke out had regarded it as their chief duty to issue warnings against revolution... to attempt to make revolution impossible - into the hands of such as Ebert, Scheidemann, and Haase. One of the leading ideas of the revolution of November 9 was that of uniting the various socialist trends. The union was to be effected by acclamation. This was an illusion which had to be bloodily avenged, and the events of the last few days have brought a bitter awakening from our dreams." Mary-Alice Waters ed., Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (Pathfinder Press: New York, 1970), p. 415.

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were turned into a scapegoat and boogeymen by the mass media, from the extreme right to the center, even including the Social Democrats. Communists were stigmatized as dangerous aliens, "Jewish" (hence anti-Semitism was already mixed with anti-communism in this period) and Bolshevik plotters, who were preparing for an illegitimate coup, from which would emerge chaos and a bloody red terror.1106 Faced with the struggles of daily life, the working class remained largely passive. Utilizing the divisions, confusions and the general paralysis among the workers, the SDP government relied on the recently formed, extremely violent Freikorps divisions to crush the radical-left in January. Repression soon spread to other cities, wherever local workers and soldiers’ councils held any semblance of power or the radical left played a key role in local politics. Throughout Germany, the SPD utilized local and political divisions amongst the ranks of the workers and the inexperience of the communists, and provoked a series of insurrections, which were then rapidly crushed by the growing Freikorps units. In Bremen, the stronghold of the left-radicals during the war, the Freikorps crushed the local soviet in February, even though the soviet had offered little practical resistance to the government. In February, a number of strikes gradually turned into a wave of struggle in the industrial Ruhr region, and gradually spread to Halle, Saxony and Berlin. Unlike the January insurrection in Berlin and the Bremen soviet, these strikes mainly had economic goals and even the Social Democratic trade unions participated in them. Still, as happened in Berlin and Bremen earlier, here too the Freikorps crushed the movement. Finally, in April and May, the Freikorps crushed the last remaining soviet in Germany, the Munich Council, once again with the endorsement and the political guidance of the Social Democratic Party. During this "rolling wave of repression,"1107 Communists were specifically and violently targeted, even though they neither led all the insurrections and strikes, nor were in the majority by any stretch.

1106

On the hysterical obsession and fear that the German bourgeoisie collectively associated with the name of Karl Liebknecht and its exacerbation after the November Revolution, see: Mark Jones, Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918-1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 102. 1107 The concept belongs to Sebastian Haffner. In his classic work on the German Revolution, he wrote: “The Civil War set the points for the unhappy history of the Weimar Republic to which it gave birth, and the rise of the Third Reich which it spawned. For it left the old social democratic movement irreversibly split, deprived... the SPD of all chances of future left-wing alliances and forced it into the position of a perpetual minority; and in the Freikorps, the volunteer battalions who waged and won the war for the

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Despite lacking the means and influence to be the leader of a nation-wide working class movement, the right-wing and left-wing press alike presented KPD-S as the main scapegoat for the Civil War.1108 This wide anti-communist consensus among the ruling classes freed the government's hand to normalize the execution of Communists or those who were suspected of being Communists. A young rank-in-file KPD member who witnessed this period and endured imprisonment and torture by Freikorps wrote in his memoirs: "In 1918–1919, the social democratic Vorwärts wrote more about the alleged terror of the Spartacus League than the bourgeois press did. There was no “terror.” No one was murdered, nothing was looted. What was called “terror” was the dissatisfaction and the anxiety of the masses and the almost daily demonstrations and political assemblies that frightened the government. Some of those were organized by the Spartacus League to prevent the return of the Kaiser’s reactionary caste of public servants and generals, but the daily gatherings in front of the food stamp, unemployment, and welfare offices were spontaneous protests of a population demanding food, fuel, medicines, etc. The government and local authorities, incapable to satisfy these needs caused by daily hardship, argued that everything would become even worse if the Spartacists took power: in that case, the Entente would not only intensify its blockade but renew military operations. The press was more than happy to publish such claims. “Spartacus” turned into a very broad derogatory term and was used like “Sozi” in the old days and “Jew” sometime later."1109

As a result of the counter-revolutionary carnage and systematic repression, the recently formed and unprepared KPD went underground. Yet even this retreat was chaotic. The organization could not avoid decapitation of its central organ, the Zentrale (the Central Committee). Freikorps units murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January. 1110 They killed Leo

Social Democratic Government, it gave birth to the frame of mind and attitudes of the future SA and SS, which were often their direct successors. The Civil War of 1919 is thus a pivotal event in Germany twentieth-century history... The bloody phenomenon rolled sluggishly across Germany without ever affecting the whole country at once. The slow fire always broke out somewhere when it had just been stamped out somewhere else.” Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918-1919 (Chicago: Banner Press, 1986), pp. 152-3 1108 “Whenever a window breaks or a tire bursts, every philistine's hair stands on end and shivers run down his spine because he knows that the "Spartakus gang" is coming!” wrote Rosa Luxemburg mockingly in November 1918. "The Usual Game" in All Power To Councils, ed Kuhn, p.84. 1109 Karl Retzlaw, “Noske and the Beginning of the Comrades' Murders” in All Power To The Councils, ed. Kuhn, p.129. 1110 There is little doubt today that the murders were carried out with the knowledge and permission of the SDP government and Gustav Noske, who was a Social Democrat responsible for the military affairs of government and after the January 1919 elections became the defense minister of the first Weimar government. Klaus Gietinger in his meticulous study on the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht wrote: “This [Noske] was a man whose political motto could be: ‘Articles [of the law] count for nothing, the only thing that counts is success.’ A pre-fascist figure,... who did not hesitate to write at the end of the Second World

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Jogiches, the organizational brain of the KPD, in March. Demoralized and ill, Franz Mehring, the senior historian of the socialist movement who threw his lot with the Spartakusbund when the war began, died in his sickbed in January. Eugene Levine, another possible candidate for the leadership was executed in June after the defeat of the Munich Soviet, which he led in its final days. Johann Knieff, arguably the most well-known figure of the German Zimmerwald Leftists, died in a hospital bed early in 1919, after leading the defeated Bremen Soviet. The rest of the Zentrale and the KPD leading cadres were either imprisoned or went underground. Herman Duncker later wrote to his wife, Kate Duncker (both members of the first Zentrale and close friends of Rosa Luxemburg), that the murders left the party "orphaned".1111 He recalled years later still having nightmares about persecution carried out by their former Social Democratic "comrades".1112 Revolutionaries were not alien to government repression. Since Gracchus Babeuf, who one might consider the first communist revolutionary, for merely uttering communist views one faced the risk of persecution everywhere. In fact, it can be argued that the modern repressive apparatuses and police forces developed in tandem with and against the development of radical socialist movements themselves.1113 What was unique in the repression of 1919 in Germany though was that this counter-revolutionary terror legitimized itself through its claim to secure democracy, which was politically overseen by a Social Democratic party that called itself Marxist. While it was nothing new for democratic regimes to carry out anti-socialist repression (as it happened in Switzerland, Britain, France or in US in this same period), a counter-revolutionary terror organized by a Social Democratic government was definitely a new phenomenon. Further, while a democratic and constitutionalist state repression against revolutionary forces on this scale and violence was new in European history, it was not the result of a blood feud between rival sister movements (Communists and Social Democrats) for the inheritance of their political ancestors. Following the 1918 revolution, “democracy” became a slogan unifying all

War: ‘And I cleared away the scum and cleaned up as fast as was possible at the time’, who belonged to those who openly wondered ‘whether anyone was going to put the troublemakers out of action’.” Klaus Gietinger, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, (New York: Verso, 2019), p. 193. 1111 Letter from Herman Duncker to Kate Duncker, 18 December 1919, SAPMO-BArch, NY 4445-143, p. 208. 1112 Letter from Herman Duncker to Kate Duncker, 14 May 1921, SAPMO-BArch, NY 4445-145, p. 127. 1113 See for instance; Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 61.

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political tendencies in German politics in a spectrum ranging from Social Democrats and liberals on the left to ultra-nationalists and aristocratic conservatives on the right, united against Communists and the idea of council (rate) power.1114 In fact, immediately after the revolution in November 1918, all political parties in Germany (including the extreme right-wing and monarchist parties) rapidly adopted democratic and constitutionalist slogans, uniting around the SDP against the common enemy of "Bolshevism" and "proletarian, soviet dictatorship".1115 Communists and defenders of the idea of council power were branded as putschists as "enemies of democracy".1116 Democracy became the hammer with which the counter-revolution struck the defenders of council rule. It gave the ultra-nationalist Freikorps units, who openly paraded racist symbols and insignia like swastika, later popularized by the Nazis,1117 an air of legitimacy and legality. The SPD legitimized this anti-communist policy in much the same way as it defended prowar policy during the First World War. Just as it defended a nationalist "class truce" policy during the war, the SPD after the 1918 November revolution called a halt to the class struggle in Germany, this time against the alleged internal enemies. Replacing the defense of the nation slogan with the defense of democracy legitimized the class truce against the nation's "internal enemies". As a prominent Social Democrat and a theoretician of the SPD's nationalist right-wing, Eduard David

1114

A German historian put this in a different way as: “constitutionalism naturally implied rejecting communist attempts to impose socialism by force, and thus ‘defence against Bolshevism was the strongest tie that bound together the men of the old and new regimes in Germany.’.” Susanne Miller quoted in Ben Fowkes, The German Left and the Weimar Republic: A Selection of Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p.15. 1115 An American historian and a contemporary of the events, Ralph Haswell Lutz, noted on the first Weimar elections: “Not since the election of the French National Assembly in 1871 had such an election campaign as this one occurred in Europe. The loss of the war and the revolution had rendered the platforms of the imperial parties obsolete, so that they differed little from the Socialists in their avowed political principles. Hans Delbruch asserted that 'there was little to choose between the parties, since all denounced anarchy and championed democracy.'” Ralph Haswell Lutz, The German Revolution, (California: Stanford University Press, 1922), pp.107-116. 1116 Rosa Luxemburg keenly observed how democracy and constitutionalism concepts were utilized for a campaign against communists: “’Calm! Order! Order! Calm!’ This is what we hear from all sides, be it government or the bourgeoisie. It is particularly popular to evoke the dangers of ‘anarchy’ and of ‘putschism,’ which is usual for the bourgeoisie worried about its safes, its property, and its profits.” Rosa Luxemburg, 'Der Anfang" Rote Fahne no3. (18 November1918), The English translation in All Power to the Councils, ed. Kuhn, p. 83. 1117 For instance, the swastika was embroidered on the helmets of the freikorps "Ehrhardt Brigade" which played prominent role in the counter-revolution and the Kapp putsch. Bernd Langer, Revolution und bewaffnete Aufstande in Deutschland: 1919-1923 (Gottingen: AktivDruck Verlag, 2009), p.271.

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noted, the new democratic regime required the cessation of the class war to preserve the peace, just as the Empire demanded it during the war to continue the war: “People point to the antagonism between the interests of capital and those of the workers, people say an economic struggle arises out of this which excludes any real internal pacification. No one can close his eyes to this source of sharp political antagonisms and conflicts. But the new constitution should point the way to peace in this respect too. Not only political democracy but economic democracy is anchored in it. The system of economic organisation which is laid down in it and should shortly find legal expression points the way to an organisation of the economy which will overcome the hostile antagonism between capital and labour.”1118

As Eduard David argued, gradually, the new "democratic" order consolidated itself by crushing the councils and communists, by silencing any open class action with force, and almost each step in the escalation of the counter-revolutionary violence proved to be a milestone in the development of the new political institutions of the Weimar regime. The murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and the mass killings and arrests of revolutionaries, preceded the 1919 January general elections in Germany. The Social Democratic regime presented these murders as a necessary measure to secure the safety of elections: to save democracy and constitutionalism from "putschism" and red terror, the Ebert government argued. The elections in turn strengthened the Weimar regime and enabled the consolidation of the bourgeois parties, which were previously shaken by the November Revolution, but now were rejuvenated, on a new legalized terrain: the Reichstag, the German parliament created in 1919. The election victory of the SPD after the first election further emboldened Ebert, Noske, and their middle class supporters. After the elections, Noske and the new parliament demanded the workers' and soldiers' councils to dissolve. Yet it was the same councils that had made the revolution in November 1918 and demanded the convening of a national assembly and elections in the first place.1119 The parliamentary democratic form of the brutal counter-revolutionary terror and government persecution in Germany caused great confusion within the ranks of the battered KPD. A polarization over the interpretation of the KPD's past faults and mistakes, and its future orientation gradually came to the fore in the inner-party debates. A minority tendency formed around the

1118

Eduard David's speech quoted in The German Left and The Weimar Republic, ed, Fowkes, p. 53. For a detailed explanation of how the Ebert government used the constitutional processes as a lever and legitimatizing cover for the repression see: Haffner, Failure of a Revolution, pp.155-6. 1119

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position that diagnosed the KPD's fault in its immediate, adventurist actions of its early days and saw in the counter-revolution a painful price paid for this tactic. Strangely echoing the Social Democratic accusations leveled against the party, this tendency also perceived a direct link between the party's intransigent behavior in its founding congress (especially in its radical rejection of parliamentarism and trade unions) and the defeat that the party suffered.1120 This analysis, shared by most remaining Spartakist leaders, put the responsibility on Liebknecht for the defeat of the KPD and deaths of its leaders. In fact, after the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Mathilde Jacob wrote to Zetkin in late January that "my hatred of Karl [Liebknecht] is wellfounded. For me it is an emotional thing... Our best people hate him."1121 In her memoirs, Jacob persisted in her resentment and lamented that "they", meaning Luxemburg's inner circle, failed to separate her from Karl Liebknecht. Jacob's diagnosis, which seemed to be shared by Luxemburg's inner circle (including Levi, Zetkin, Jogiches among others), was that the sober mind of Luxemburg was diluted by the hazy and emotional attitude of Liebknecht and the youthful radicalism in the party that he represented, which drove the party to futile insurrectionary actions and ultimately to defeat.1122 According to Ottokar Luban, the Spartakist’s leading circle even contemplated removing Liebknecht after the January 1919 insurrection. More strangely, during his interrogation after the defeat of the January insurrection, Paul Levi did not hesitate to put the blame on Liebknecht personally for the attempted insurrection in January 1919 and told the prosecutor that the Zentrale of the party, except for the maverick Liebknecht, was against the attempt.1123 Luxemburg's inner circle was only a small group and the KPD continued to revere Karl Liebknecht as a martyr, at least in front of the public. Yet, this inner circle was important. Indeed, this minority, which grouped around some other key members of Rosa Luxemburg's immediate circle of friends (most importantly Clara Zetkin, one of Luxemburg's oldest friends and her secretary, Mathilde Jacob, her former lawyer, Paul Levi and some other surviving members of the first

1120

This has been extensively discussed by Luban, a historian of the KPD. Luban, "Rosa at a Loss”, pp. 46-48. 1121 Ibid. p. 47. 1122 Mathilde Jacob, Rosa Luxemburg: An Intimate Portrait (London: Heretic Books, 2000), p. 102. 1123 Luban, "Rosa at a Loss”, pp. 46-8.

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Central Committee), formed itself as a new Zentrale1124 and thereby claimed the mantle of the party leadership. The consolidation of this tendency happened gradually, during the summer and autumn of 1919. In 1919, at the height of the Civil War, the group barely maintained itself by first relocating to Frankfurt (which was relatively safer) and then to Leipzig. Despite its claim to the leadership, the new Zentrale could not form regular contacts with the party base and branches.1125 Further, this was an odd group, since Zetkin was not even a party member at the time. In fact, she was even opposed to the founding of the party in 1918 and considered it a mistake (even "idiotic" according to Fritz Heckert).1126 Nor was Levi very popular in the party.1127 Only after May 1919, when the Civil War had cooled down and the budding council movement was crushed by the Social Democratic government, could Levi finally return to Berlin and begin consolidating the new Zentrale's claim to the party leadership. Here, the new Zentrale reestablished contacts with Karl Radek, who was in prison and who was to become one of the leading figures who helped devise the party's new orientation. In short, the new Zentrale can only be regarded as an unlikely product of the counter-revolution and the party’s defeat. Prior to then, an organ with such a composition to lead the KPD was hardly conceivable. This self-appointed Zentrale had a very negative attitude towards the future prospects of the party, if it clung to its past revolutionary intransigence. The party's original sin, for this group, was to follow the immature behavior of Liebknecht, its intransigent insurrectionism. But it viewed

1124

The members of the new Zentrale were: October 1919: Heinrich Brandler, Hugo Eberlein, Paul Frölich, Paul Levi, Ernst Meyer, August Thalheimer, Clara Zetkin. Paul Levi and Clara Zetkin stood out among this new mostly young group of militants as the most senior militants. 1125 Jacob, Rosa Luxemburg, pp.108-9. 1126 John Riddell (ed.) To the Masses! Proceedings of The Third Conress of the Communist International, 1921 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 493. Proceedings of the Third Congress. Against Heckert Zetkin responded by arguing that she was not aware at the time that the party was founded and later, after the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Jogiches asked her to wait until the USPD congress to join the KPD. ibid p. 596 About Zetkin's opposition to the founding of the KDP see also Ottokar Luban, “Der Einfluss Clara Zetkins Auf Die Spartakusgruppe 1914-1918,” in Clara Zetkin in Ihrer Zeit ed. Plener, pp. 84-5. Later, in 1937 Zetkin came to regret her participation in certain KPD actions, Tania Unludag-Puschnerat, “A German Communist: Clara Zetkin” in Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen & Andrew Flinn eds., Agents of the Revolution. New Biographical Approaches to the History of International Communism in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, (Oxford: Oxford Universtiy Press, 2005), p. 94. 1127 Levi was a professional lawyer. He defended Luxemburg in 1913. During the war he appeared in Germany and met with Lenin. In the KPD-S' founding congress he presented the Zentrale's resolution on parliamentary question which was defeated by a majority of the delegates. David Fernbach ed., In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 1-7.

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this mistake as an expression of overconfidence in the masses. Radical mass actions and a communist strategy based purely on masses' initiative were unreliable.1128 If the masses could not be relied upon and if the mass action could not be the sole tactical option, the party itself had to assume the task of mobilizing its members and even holding the masses back if the situation was deemed unfavorable. This new emphasis on the party and its role, this new relative distrust towards mass action, found its most concrete expression in Radek's Die Entwicklung der deutschen Revolution und die Aufgaben der kommunistischen Partei, which was published in early 1920. Here, contrasting party leadership with the mass initiative, he explained that the party had to “hold back” and tame the working class masses so that they would not “waste” their energy in pointless mass actions.1129 According to Radek and the new Zentrale, now the party had to outgrow the early enthusiasms of the revolutionary period, leave aside its vision of an intransigent, head-on assault on the state and capital, and adopt a strategy based on realistic perspectives. For Radek, the new Weimar democracy, despite its sworn hostility to communists and despite the fact that a counter-revolutionary suppression of soviets was its founding act, could still be utilized. For the new Zentrale group, two new specific bits of evidence proved the viability of this new "realpolitik" strategy. First, while remaining largely passive to revolutionary appeals, the working-class masses were still moving to the left, even though in a slow and confused way. The strongest evidence for this was the growing influence of the USPD, as opposed to the SPD, its openly anti-communist sister party, among the working class.1130 Further, despite its centrism and originally anti-Bolshevik program, the USPD was forced to move left under the pressure of its expanding membership base. In fact, it was the fresh recruits in the USPD ranks that brought an increasing pressure to the leadership

1128

In late 1919 the KPD party leadership was probably convinced that the German Revolution was defeated. A speech given by Levi to a clandestine party meeting that took place in Summer 1919 portrayed a very dark situation. Levi argued that the revolution had “entered a creeping stage”, the great masses became unreliable, and “the revolution has apparently reached a dead end, such that we must speak of a dying back of the revolution.” Fernbach ed., In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 10. 1129 Karl Radek, Die Entwicklung der deutschen Revolution und die Aufgaben der kommunistischen Partei, (Hamburg: 1920), p. 13. 1130 The USPD membership rose from 300,000 in 1919 to 893,928 in 1920. While the SPD votes drastically declined in the second Reichstag election June 1920 elections from 37.9% in 1919 to 21.7%, the USPD share of the votes rose from 7.6% in 1919 to 17.9%. Fowkes ed., The German Left and the Weimar Republic, pp. 331-3.

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towards affiliation with the Comintern.1131 In addition to the growth of left-wing parties, Radek interpreted the increasing level of trade union membership in certain West European and North American countries as an additional sign of the growth of the masses' radicalization.1132 The masses were joining big and legal mass organizations, Radek argued, because they knew no other way to respond to the attacks of capitalism on their daily circumstances. As a result, the Communists should not dismiss parliamentarism, reactionary trade unions, nor even the centrist Social Democratic parties in principle. Rather, they should find ways to utilize them for the revolution, if possible, by winning over their leadership, and if not, by breaking and dividing their leaderships. According to this logic, if the historic movement was not developing at the speed and in the direction that Communists expected (i.e., if revolutionary organs of struggle, such as soviets were not created), the growth of the left-wing parties and trade unions still proved that the history was moving in a progressive direction. Hence, despite the unexpected manifestations of this current, Communists had to move along with it in order to utilize it, to lead the masses wherever they were, even though this might entail a return to the parliaments, trade unions and even uniting with certain Social Democratic parties. In this new period, according to the Zentrale, the party had to be flexible, and the leadership had to hold all the tactical options to use them whenever the opportunity presented itself for their optimal use.1133 This tactical flexibility demanded strong leadership and a disciplined party to carry out the leadership's decisions; only this could enhance the leadership's capacity to maneuver. A direct implication of this new reorientation was the rejection of the founding principles of the KPD. The first congress of the KPD had rejected both participation in bourgeois parliamentary elections and working inside the reactionary trade unions.1134 Instead it recognized the Rate or soviets/councils as both the organs of struggle and political power of the working class in the new historic epoch of capitalist decadence. Likewise, the mass action and mass struggle were defined as the essential tool that the working class held. Elsewhere in the same congress, the resolution on the

1131

Robert Wheeler, "German Labor and the Comintern: A Problem of Generations?" Journal of Social History, Vol.7 No.3 (Oxford University Press, Spring, 1974), pp. 312-313. 1132 "Radek's Report on the Trade Unions and Factory Committees" in Riddell ed., Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, pp. 590-605. 1133 Karl Radek, Die Entwicklung der deutschen Revolution, pp. 27-8. 1134 Kuhn ed., All Power to the Councils, p. 103.

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political role of the soviets stated that parliamentary democracy was not a suitable means for the attainment of the proletarian dictatorship goal: “Democracy does not mean to have wage slaves sitting next to capitalists and rural proletarians next to Junkers to discuss life in false parliamentarian equality. Democracy means that millions of proletarians grasp the power of the state—all of its power—with their mighty fists in order to smash it on the ruling classes’ head like or his hammer. All else is merely betrayal of the people.”1135

Clearly, at its founding, the party viewed its task as defining and clarifying the paths— mass actions and soviets—that would lead the working class to power. In contrast, the new Zentrale now claimed that these radical principles were imposed upon the party by its immature membership led by putschist tendencies. Yet, the Zentrale's new position (that the party's failure was due to its "putschism" or "immaturity" and certain "syndicalist" tendencies in it were responsible for this, that a new more "realpolitik" revision in tactics were necessary) was hard to sell to the party base. In fact, the leadership’s support of this theory became clear during the Heidelberg Congress, the second congress of the party and the first congress after the repression in October 1919, which was held illegally. The Heidelberg Congress was the testing ground for the leadership's new line. In a series of theses presented to the congress (without prior debate), the Zentrale reduced parliamentary, trade union questions to tactical questions. Accordingly, the Zentrale demanded the Congress accept the leadership's now expanded authority on these questions. The Zentrale also demanded the Congress to accept that it was up to the Zentrale to decide when it was opportune to participate in the parliamentary elections.1136 Similarly, the Zentrale proposed to use the trade unions as recruitment grounds and if possible, to conquer unions. All of these meant an open and radical shift from the founding principles of the organization. Despite the radical changes that it demanded from the party, the Zentrale hardly gave it the opportunity to discuss this new orientation. In fact, to the contrary, the very organization of the Congress revealed the growing distrust towards the masses, even the party masses, among the Zentrale members and the leadership. Due to the haphazard manner in which the Congress was organized, delegates from the local party branches did not have time to discuss Zentrale’s thesis in detail. Further, several delegates could not have a chance to participate in the illegal Congress'

1135 1136

Ibid. "Levi's Theses on Parliamentarism" in Fowkes ed., The German Left, p. 87.

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debates. Instead, the theses of the Zentrale were forced on the party as a fait accompli and an ultimatum declared that those opposing delegates or the party branches would be expelled. Further, following the Congress, a majority of the party members found themselves outside of the party1137 and condemned by the Zentrale as "syndicalist" or "anti-party".1138 This was the first time in the history of the Comintern that a left-wing tendency was expelled. This self-styled expulsion sent shock waves that reverberated throughout the Comintern and triggered off further cracks in its tectonic plates along similar lines.

B.

The Splintering of the KPD and Formation of the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD)

The expelled opposition was by no means a homogenous group. Several different factions united around their opposition to the Zentrale’s parliamentary and trade union tactics of the and the manner in which the Zentrale imposed its authority over the party. Among them were Otto Ruhle's Dresden group and Frantz Pfemfert's group in Berlin, which rapidly moved to a position rejecting the necessity of a political party,1139 and a “National Bolshevik” tendency in Hamburg around Laufenberg and Wolfheim that advocated a class truce in Germany and an alliance with Soviet Russia. For these “national Bolsheviks” the German nation as a whole was exploited by the Entente, hence the “revolt” of a “proletarian nation” could only legitimately be expressed as a war against the Western allies.1140 Once the opposition formed the KAPD (Kommunistische

1137

The Zentrale expelled the opposition in the second, Heidelberg congress of the party, for refusing to accept its new tactical opening. With what amounted to an inner party coup against the party, the Zentrale, which was not elected by a previous congress, granted itself overwhelming voting rights against the delegation. Some of the opposition delegates could not even attend to the congress, since the Zentrale kept its meeting secret to exclude them. This was the first time that sectarian methods and inner party intrigue were used against party comrades in the Comintern in a political dispute. This congress and its results ultimately grew into an international dispute and led to the breaking up of the LRI movement. 1138 Pierre Broue, The German Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 325. 1139 Pfemfert's Die Aktion was a prominent avant-garde journal. Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, pp.144-145. These tendencies drew the ridicule by Lenin in his Left-Communism: A Childish Sickness. 1140 Broue, The German Revolution, pp. 325-6.

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Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, the Communist Workers' Party of Germany) into a well-defined party, it expelled supporters of the national Bolshevik and anti-party tendencies.1141 However, the presence of national Bolshevik and anti-party tendencies in the KAPD’s founding congress caused distrust and confusion in the Comintern towards the opposition in Germany. Some of the harshest criticisms raised by Lenin in his "Left-Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder" were actually towards these currents. Levi and Radek utilized the presence of these currents and the heterogeneity of the opposition to discredit it as anti-party and syndicalist. Although these groups were expelled from the opposition in 1920, the stigma attached to it as a confused, heterogenous and voluntarist group of artists and bohemian intellectuals remained. Yet, the core of the opposition was neither anti-party, nor syndicalist. This group formed the basis of a new, second Communist party, the KAPD. Rather than being "anti-party" or "syndicalist", the KAPD clearly accepted the necessity of a centralized party organization and expelled Otto Ruhle's group, which wanted to diffuse the party into syndicalist factory unions. On the party question itself, the KAPD adopted the following thesis in its 1921 Congress: “The historically determined form of organisation which groups together the most conscious and prepared proletarian fighters is the Party. Since the historical task of the proletarian revolution is communism, this party, in its programme and in its ideology, can only be a communist party. The communist party must have a thoroughly worked out programmatic basis and must be organised and disciplined in its entirety from below, as a unified will. It must be the head and weapon of the revolution... The main task of the communist party, just as much before as after the seizure of power, is, in the confusion and fluctuations of the proletarian revolution, to be the one clear and unflinching compass towards communism. The communist party must show the masses the way in all situations, not only in words but also in deeds. In all the issues of the political struggle before the seizure of power, it must bring out in the clearest way the difference between reforms and revolution, must brand every deviation to reformism as a betrayal of the revolution, and of the working class, and as giving new lease of life to the old system of profit. Just as there can be no community of interest between exploiter and exploited, so can there be no unity between reform and revolution. Social democratic reformism - whatever mask it might choose to

1141

Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, pp. 201-2. In the second congress of the left-communist KAPD (summer 1920), all the tendencies that supported an alliance with national bourgeoisie, even with the excuse of a joint struggle together with the Soviet Russia against the Entente states were unanimously rejected. Clemens Klockner, ed., Protokoll des 1. Ordentlichen Parteitages des Kommunistischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands vom 1. bis 4. August in Berlin (Darmstadt: Verlag fur wissenschaftliche Publikationen, 1981), pp. 20-22.

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wear - is today the greatest obstacle to the revolution, and the last hope of the ruling class.”1142

As the KAPD's theses on the party question reveals, there was no genuine difference between the KPD Zentrale and the KAPD on the necessity of a centralized Communist party. The difference was rather in the definition of the party's role. In contrast to the KPD Zentrale, the KAPD considered the party's role to be a bulwark against opportunism and the influence of bourgeois ideologies (such as "centrism", the nemesis of the Comintern in its first year) among the proletarian masses, especially in the earlier stages of the struggle for the power. Accordingly, the very influence of Social Democracy and other bourgeois ideologies forced the communist perspective to flourish only among a minority of the class. For the KAPD, the defense of these principles was the primary reason why this minority had to form itself as a party, as the vanguard of the working class.1143 Clearly then, the party question was not the main difference between the opposition (and later the KAPD) and the KPD as the Zentrale claimed. The underlying cause of the dispute was in the analysis of the general world historical situation of capitalism and class struggle. While the Zentrale saw in the democratic Weimar establishment a confused yet still a positive development that the party and its leadership could and should utilize, the opposition generally saw in the Weimar regime a step backwards, a regime built over the defeat of the working class and the illusions about "truce" between antagonistic classes. In 1927, Anton Pannekoek (who remained influential within the KAPD until its dissolution in 1930s) retrospectively wrote that the parliamentary democratic regimes established after the First World War were an expression of the counter-revolution that could be utilized by communists.1144 In contrast to the KPD-Zentrale's assertion that the internal divisions among the ruling class could be utilized to create a majority, the KAPD considered the working class and Communists as alone against the unified anti-communist bloc of all other classes. Any attempt to utilize the ruling class’ internal divisions in favor of the working class by using tactical compromises towards one

1142

"KAPD’s Theses on the Role of the Party in the Proletarian Revolution (1921)" International Review, No. 41 (2nd quarter 1985). retrieved from: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/041/KAPD-Theses-Party1921 1143 Ibid. 1144 Anton Pannekoek, in Bricianer ed., Anton Pannekoek, p. 232.

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section of it against another with the hope of weakening it, would only lead to a confusion inside the working class, diluting its resolve and clarity of purpose. Hence, the KAPD condemned the Zentrale tactics as an expression of opportunism. For the left-wing, the party's tactical accommodations could not solve working-class impotence in the face of the world historic crisis. The party could not leap over the difficulties by employing masterful and brilliant tactics, artificially designed and imposed from the top. Seeking such a route would likely result in an erratic search, a constant improvisation on the one hand between various contradictory actions and confusing vacillations between military-revolutionary experiments, coups, and armed struggle solely organized by a minority within the class in order to hasten and push the rest of the class and into "tactical" alliances, fronts with other social classes, and political maneuvering on the other. With the defeat of one tactic, the leadership would have to unavoidably swing to the other extreme in order compensate, moving from defeat to defeat in a confusing series of zigzags. By these vacillations between “coupism” and “conciliationism” the party would create further confusion, distrust, and exhaustion rather than bringing clarity of purpose and unity to the class.1145 Hence, while the party would appear on the surface as an active agent, it would become the victim of the tide of bourgeois politics. There was no immediate, tactical solution to overcome the delay of the revolution and the mass party, nor would the tactics that Levi and Radek advocated substitute for the mass action of the working class or compensate for its absence. As a result, the opposition perceived tactical efforts at unity with the USPD for the sake of winning artificial majorities as a dangerous opportunist illusion.1146 Instead of devising such tactics, the KAPD perceived the party's role as moral or even "spiritual". And like Radek, the KAPD argued that capitalism was a collapsing system, a mode of production in its "death crisis." The material conditions for the revolution had already matured, at least in western Europe. The revolution only lacked the subjective factor: the proletariat's will, clarity, determination, purpose, unity, and self-confidence. For the KAPD, the proletariat could

1145

Pannekoek explained this in his criticism of Radek, as a form “new Blanquism”, which was first published in the Bremen opposition's paper. Anton Pannekoek, "Der neue Blanquismus," Der Kommunist no. 27 (Bremen, 1920). 1146 Pannekoek, "World Revolution and Communist Tactics" in Smart ed., Pannekoek and Gorter's Marxism, pp. 98-100.

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not achieve these by its leaders' clever tactics but only in struggle, which had to develop over time. Meanwhile, the party had to be crystal clear about the general goals of the class (seizure of power through a mass uprising directed by the mass organs of struggle, councils), had to accept remaining in a minority for a foreseeable future, and stay firm throughout this process until the class developed fully its identity and clarified its goals. This was to be a long process because it required building proletarian self-confidence, a sense of confidence in its own historic mission (communism), a task that no organizational or tactical shortcut could avoid. This profound theoretical and political strife within the German movement was not however unique to the German section of the Comintern. The divisions in Germany actually reflected the fractures within the entire communist movement. The uniqueness of the German case was that its role as the epicenter of the revolutionary struggle and the importance attached to the German KPD by the Comintern. Once the crack in the organizational tissue of the German party brought fundamental political differences into the open, differences in other parties and groups with similar unresolved questions regarding the role of the party, leadership, trade unions, parliaments and the approach towards the centrist parties, relevant all over Europe and the US, also surfaced, although different local and national circumstances colored each a bit differently. This situation threatened the Comintern with dissolution.

C.

The Fractional Struggle inside Germany turns into a Fractional Struggle inside the

Communist International: the KPD Zentrale versus the Amsterdam Bureau of the Comintern

The inner struggle that divided the German party gradually spread to the Comintern in 1920 and 1921. In a sense, the factionalism in Germany exposed the political fault lines of the other Comintern sections in Europe. In France, Britain and Italy, where communists either still did not split from the former socialist parties or dispersed into small fractions without a unified Communist party, the debate on how to approach the USPD was immediately relevant. The question was whether the Communists had to find new and independent parties or stay in the former ones and attempt to come to an understanding with their leaderships. 478

However, more than its content, the form that the fractional struggle took proved divisive. This growing factional rift inside the Comintern expressed itself in the form of a polarization of the bureaus of the Comintern, that is inside international bureau system established in 1919. As a result, while the whole organizational structure of the Comintern was built with the intention of tying different regions into a united and centralized world movement, the political conflict began to divide the bureaus themselves along political lines. The conflict even posed the risk of dividing the organization into geographically divided sections, or two different world communist organizations with opposing political orientations. The central poles in this conflict were the Amsterdam Bureau, defending the KAPD and its positions, and the Berlin Secretariat of the Communist International (which was also called the Berlin Bureau and established about the same time as the Amsterdam Bureau) expressing the KPD Zentrale’s positions. The conflict came out into open when the Amsterdam Bureau first produced a detailed analysis of the situation in Germany and presented its conclusions in its bulletin's first issue. For its lucidity and clarity, this brief analysis that concretely summarizes all the main issues at stakes in Germany deserves to be quoted at length: "At a secret conference in the end of October 1919, the Zentrale proposed theses which were to define the tactics of Communism; whosoever voted against them was to cease to be a member of the party. The opposition protested, claiming that the conference had been taken unawares by the proposal of these theses, so that the members were not prepared to pronounce on them. The minority of the conference rejected them and were excluded from the party. To this opposition belong the strongest sections: Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, etc. it comprises about half the members of the KPD. According to the opposition these dealings of the Zentrale were cunning tricks to split up the opposition, which, in the question of parliamentarism constituted the majority of the party, and might have dismissed the Zentrale... The opposition does not admit its expulsion, nor has it formed a separate party yet, only a loose link. Many other sections do not consider the decrees of the conference as lawful, and demand a new conference... In the present state of Germany the opposition is against participation in parliamentary action. The Zentrale wishes to take part in the next Reichstag-elections. The opposition wages a sharp contest against the independent Social democrats of the USP. The Zentrale wishes to join forces with the independents (whom it considers almost as communists) after they shall have shelved their conservative leaders. A main factor in the antithesis is the attitude towards the big unions, (the leaders of which, Legien, Schlicke, Bauer, are the most powerful supporters of the Ebert government, and some of them ministers). The independents wish to dismiss these social-patriotic leaders, and to substitute [for] them members of their own party. The opposition wishes to smash the bureaucratic organization of the union, and to substitute to it a new form of union on the basis of the industrial union instead of the craft-union) ... At first the Zentrale likewise recommended withdrawal from the big unions... now it recommends the formation of revolutionary groups of opposition within the unions. The opposition considers the industrial organizations including all workers, irrespective of party-membership, as the firm basis for

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the political power of the working class, and as the organs for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The functions of the "Communist Party" will consist in discerning the aims, in directing the masses and in educating them on class lines but not in governing. The Zentrale criticizes this attitude as implying a belief that by means of a new form of organization it will be possible to avoid a revolution as the forcible means of conquering the power; and furthermore, as debasing the "Communist Party" to the level of a harmless educational union. The Zentrale considers it to be the task of the "Communist Party" to call the masses to the battle when the time has come; the dictatorship of the proletariat is embodied in the dictatorship of the "Communist Party". The opposition condemns this as a policy of artificially organized outbreaks, for it is from the ranks of the masses that action must break out, and it is only then that communism can come forward and take the lead. The Zentrale says: the opposition is syndicalistic, because it rejects parliamentarism; it considers the "Communist Party as superfluous, and it substitutes the federalism of industrial organizations for the rigidly centralized revolutionary party. The opposition says: the principle of the conquest of the political power by the proletariat, as well as the recognition of the need for centralization of the proletarian state, divides us from syndicalism whilst our conception of the functions of the industrial organizations exactly coincides with that of the Russian soviet-system."1147

The Amsterdam Bureau's February report cited above carefully refrained from openly taking sides, playing the role of a mediator assigned to it by the ECCI. Nonetheless, this public neutrality barely veiled the growing tensions between the Berlin and Amsterdam bureaus. The critical turning point was the February Conference of the Amsterdam Bureau.1148 The results and the theses adopted at this conference on the parliamentary and trade union questions, and on the relations with the centrist Social Democrats aligned very closely with the German Left. The German party opposition, while on paper excluded from the KPD, was endorsed by the Comintern's Western European headquarters. The KPD Zentrale delegates, who arrived late at the Conference, refused to accept its decisions, and even expressed opposition to the Amsterdam Bureau’s centrality in the Comintern structure. The Zentrale demanded that such a bureau could not be led by the Dutch radicals and instead the organizational center of the Comintern had to move to Germany. From then on, the conflict began boiling.1149

1147

Karl Horner (Anton Pannekoek), "The Differences in the Communist Party of Germany", Bulletin of the Amsterdam Bureau of the Communist International No.1, p. 8. 1148 This has been extensively discussed in the previous chapter. 1149 Pursuing the conference results, Rutgers wrote to Winter in Berlin that the Zentrale's "new opportunism" was worrying and inquired about the ECCI's position. Clearly, the Dutch Bureau expected the Bolsheviks to endorse them. Rutgers to Winter (15 February 1920), RGASPI, 497-2-2, l. 294.

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Initially, the Zentrale lacked organizational leverage inside the Comintern. It also lacked the prestige and theoretical depth that the Amsterdam Bureau enjoyed in the international movement.1150 Most importantly, the Bureaus had a more important function in the Comintern's first year than did the national sections because as regional international organs, they had executive powers over the national sections. Hence, at least on paper, the Zentrale, as a national party leadership opposing a territorial bureau of the Comintern, was at a disadvantage. To confront the Amsterdam Bureau, it either needed the support of the ECCI or the backing of a Comintern Congress. The Zentrale found in the Berlin Bureau (or the so-called "Western European Secretariat" - WES) located in Berlin, the leverage it needed for such a confrontation. The decision to establish the West European Secretariat (WES) was taken at the same time as the Amsterdam Bureau, in November 8, 1919.1151 However, WES initially remained politically dormant and worked only as a facilitator for Comintern publishing in German. Due to the chaos and the Civil War reigning in Germany at the time, the WES remained largely politically quiet, at least until the Zentrale saw in it a means to struggle against the left-wing internationally. Following the defeats that the KPD and German proletariat had suffered since early 1919, the old Dutch radical group around the Amsterdam Bureau was in the best position to serve as a guiding center. In contrast to the Amsterdam Bureau, the ECCI felt that it could not assign anyone to lead the Berlin WES because the German party was in shambles and its prominent leaders were dead, imprisoned or their fates were unknown to Moscow. Hence, the WES did not have the political weight of the Amsterdam Bureau, and its role was generally restricted to a technical one: coordination of the activities of the Comintern, mediation of conflicts, distribution of the Comintern funds and resources, especially for legal publications and providing information and reports on the movement for the International.1152

1150

Pannekoek, Gorter and Roland-Holst were both members of the Amsterdam Bureau and also nominally among the "editors" of the Comintern's central organ The Communist International, a position which did not mean actual control but revealed the prestige of the Dutch radicals in the movement. 1151 RGASPI, 495-18-33, ll. 20-21. 1152 Ibid. Also see: E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. 3 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985), pp. 135-6.

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To establish the WES, the ECCI had sent Yakov Reich (who used “Comrade Thomas” as his pseudonym) to Berlin.1153 However, when he arrived in Berlin in late autumn, immediately after the KPD’s Heidelberg Congress, he found the organization in complete disarray. 1154 Reich soon realized that the Comintern’s financial resources were indispensable for the survival of the Zentrale. Despite Reich's personal distaste for Levi's “individualist” and “dilettante” manners,1155 Reich and the WES rapidly came under the political influence of the Zentrale and its imprisoned advisor, Radek. Throughout this period, Reich essentially kept his criticisms and discontent with the KPD Zentrale to special reports that he sent to the ECCI. Otherwise, he dutifully carried out his tasks as the WES' organizer.1156 In short, the WES played a passive role in the affairs of the German Communist movement, restricting itself mainly to financially supporting the Zentrale and organizing the technical affairs of the Comintern. Although the WES proved vital for the Zentrale, the Zentrale for its part did not initially show a great interest in the political and especially the

1153

The decision was taken on April 29, 1919, ECCI Small Bureau meeting. RGASPI, 495-1-1, l.25. Reich was born in Galicia and belonged to the new generations of young militants that eagerly supported the Bolsheviks and radical mass action tactics. As a student in Switzerland, he joined the LRI ranks during the war. He worked in the Soviet embassy in Bern until it was closed down by the Swiss authorities in 1918 after the Entente authorities threatened the Swiss authorities. There he worked as the editor in chief of the Soviet information bulletin, the "Russische Nachrichten". Later he worked in the founding of the Comintern in 1919 and participated in its first congress. Lazitch and Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, pp. 389-390. He was a perfect candidate to implement the ECCI directives as he came from a background familiar with the complex world of the central and eastern European LRI movements and with a great organizational and clandestine work experience in the movement despite his young age (he was 33 by the time he was sent to Berlin). 1154 In an interview Boris Nicholaevsky in 1935, Reich told him that "I arrived in Berlin at the end of the autumn of 1919. There was no Communist organization worthy of the name. The arrests had disorganized everything." Boris Nicolaevsky, “Jakob Reich, ‘The First Years of the Communist International,’” Revolutionary History 5, no. 2 (Spring 1994), pp. 2–36. 1155 Ibid. Reich recounts that, “When in disagreement with the majority at meetings of the Central Committee, he [Levi] would often declare that if they did not go along with what he thought necessary he would return to Frankfurt and resume his work as a lawyer.” Boris Nicolaevsky, “Jakob Reich”, p. 19. 1156 Lazitch and Drachkovitch claimed that the WES was essentially an "instrument serving [Russians]" from its inception. Lenin and the Comintern, p.169. As evidence, they cite a speech made in the April 1920 KAPD founding congress criticizing the WES. However, the ECCI and Lenin was against the expulsion of the opposition and the KPD leadership, hence Lazitch and Drachkovitch's evidence is irrelevant at best. Further, they presented a distorted image of the debate that took place in the KAPD conference vis-a-vis the Bolsheviks. In fact, the speaker in the cited KAPD congress did not criticize the ECCI attitude but the WES secretary and stated that WES was wholly under the control of Levi. Kommunistische Arbeiter-Zeitung (KAZ), No.90 (23 April 1920), p. 7.

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international tasks of the Bureau, such as organizing and establishing contacts with other groups of the Comintern and helping to centralize them on an international level.1157 The Zentrale's engagement with wider Comintern work systematically started only after the Amsterdam Bureau's intervention in the division in the German movement, especially after the Heidelberg Congress. The ECCI and Lenin criticized the expulsion and the manner in which the Zentrale treated the party comrades. In order to mediate the conflict, the ECCI requested the Amsterdam Bureau to intervene.1158 Yet, the Amsterdam Bureau's intervention brought on the animosity of the Zentrale, and it fired back using the WES. Initially, in order to hinder the Amsterdam Bureau from intervening into Germany's affairs, the Zentrale proposed to divide up the spheres of influence of the bureaus into two: The Amsterdam Bureau should be in charge of the West European and American affairs of the Comintern, while leaving the central Europe to the WES. 1159 In a letter sent to the Amsterdam Bureau (16 January 1920), the WES (signed by “Dr. Levi, M. Gordon, Bronski”) provided a theoretical foundation for this division. The WES argued that defense of proletarian dictatorship was not enough of a principle dividing line; a more concrete tactical guideline for the Comintern was necessary. And such a guideline had to take into consideration that the revolution was advancing at different tempos in different countries. In some countries the mass struggle was advancing slowly and, in such countries, parliamentarism was a necessity. These countries were specifically, "Germany, German Austria, England, Italy, Switzerland and etc."1160 Rejection of utilizing parliamentarism could only be legitimate as the decline of capitalism reached an intense point when it took the form of a political crisis.1161 Hence, according to the

1157

One of the few actions of the WES that could be counted as internationally significant was the organization of an impromptu conference in Frankfurt-am-Main in late 1919 with some militants who were at the time happened to be in Germany (Bronsky, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Valeria Marcu). The only documents left from this meeting were published in the Russian edition of Communist International no. 7-8, as the "Manifesto of the WES". These documents basically restated the Zentrale positions on trade unions and parliamentarism formulated in the Heidelberg Congress of the party. 1158 Trotter [Rutgers] to Winter [Berzin], 20th December 1919, in: RGASPI, 495-18-3, ll. 50-53. 1159 It seems this proposal came from Reich himself. RGASPI, 497-2-8, ll. 2-4. 1160 RGASPI, 499-1-3, ll. 6-7. It is unclear what criteria WES had in determining these countries as suitable for Communists to utilize parliaments. Probably, the simple reason was that in these countries, parties or organizations affiliated with Comintern existed and they could legally run candidates in the elections. 1161 Ibid.

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WES, the Amsterdam Bureau's positions on trade unions, social democracy, and parliamentarism were not applicable in several European countries. Yet, for the Amsterdam Bureau, shifting tactics along geographic lines would contradict the principle of internationalism. International unity demanded tactical unity and rejecting this would consequently lead to a relapse into Second International federalism. For the Amsterdam Bureau, it was an “absolute necessity of international unity of tactics in the imperialist era” as a whole (hence not differentiating this epoch's effect according to geographical categories), and hence it opposed the WES proposal of national autonomy in tactical matters.1162 The Amsterdam Bureau saw a question of principle in what the WES viewed as tactical questions. The differences could not be reconciled, and conflict became unavoidable. The first open skirmishes between the two Bureaus took place in technical, organizational, and financial spheres. The Amsterdam Bureau criticized the Zentrale for obstructing its intervention and suggested to the ECCI that it admit both KPD and the opposition to the Comintern on equal status. Further, the Bureau criticized the Zentrale for withholding the financial sources of the Comintern allocated to the groups and parties by the ECCI that opposed the Zentrale line.1163 The WES and the Zentrale were especially ruthless in their financial policy towards the opposition and even the Amsterdam Bureau. The Amsterdam Bureau's secretary, Rutgers, despite his increasingly vocal protests against the WES' uncomradely attitude, could not secure any of the funds allocated to the Amsterdam Bureau from the WES.1164 Similarly, the Berlin WES also punished the International Communist Youth Organization centered in Berlin, when it held back the funds that the Comintern had allocated to it because of its organizational autonomy and its left-leaning politics. Hence, the WES denied financial support to the youth groups led by Münzenberg that had, from its inception, been so significant in the LRI movement and which played a central role in the founding of many Communist parties.1165 In Germany itself, the WES’ hoarding of ECCI funds became the main reason why the KAPD resorted to armed robberies against banks and corporations. Members of the KAPD's illegal

1162

RGASPI, 497-1-6, l. 92. Rutgers letter to Winter (20 December 1919), RGASPI, 495-18-3, ll. 50-53. 1164 Voerman, "Proletarian Competition”, pp. 207-208. 1165 Gross, Willi Munzenberg, p.93. 1163

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armed wing included the so-called “Red Robin Hood” Max Hoelz. Despite Hoelz’s popularity, glamour, and independence even to the point of recklessness, the KAPD's "expropriation" actions were very business-like and surprisingly carefully designed to avoid harming individuals, contrary to the popular “reckless armed vigilante” perception of the KAPD.1166 Ironically, while Paul Levi denounced these actions as anarchistic, before the revolution, the Bolsheviks themselves had to resort similar means to secure funding for the party. However, control over the funds was not the only means that the WES used against the left-wing opposition tendencies. It also effectively attempted to form a coalition of centrist Socialist Party leaders that were bound to participate in the Second Congress of the Comintern to outnumber the left-wing so as to form a right-wing faction in the Congress. By April 1920, the struggle was on the verge of splitting the western LRIs organizationally, politically, and theoretically. Two international poles around the Amsterdam Bureau and the WES had already formed and most parties were either already split or on the verge of splitting. The paradoxical situation created by the retreat in the revolutionary wave and increasing sympathy among the working masses towards the Bolsheviks made this conflict more confusing. At this point, the one remaining crucial factor that could resolve the conflict was the eastern Communists’, especially the Bolshevik's attitude, as they were now enjoying the peak of their popularity. They would probably have preferred active support in the form of actual sister soviet republics in Europe rather than being left alone as the custodians of revolutionary principles, yet this was their temporally historical conundrum.

D.

The ECCI Position: Moscow between Berlin and Amsterdam

From the beginning of the internal strife within the Comintern, the Bolsheviks took a conciliatory position. Criticizing both the left and the right wings, the Bolsheviks and especially the Moscow and the Petrograd Bureaus of the Comintern positioned themselves in the center. The

1166

Gary Roth, Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 31.

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ECCI neither endorsed the hasty expulsion of the KAPD, nor its rejection of parliamentarism and trade unions as a matter of principle. In his letter addressed to the KPD Zentrale on the split that occurred in the Heidelberg Congress, Lenin wrote: “The only thing that seems incredible is... that with 25 votes against 18, you expelled the minority, which, they tell us, then set up a party of its own. I know very little about this breakaway opposition, for I have seen only a few issues of the Berlin Rote Fahne... Given agreement on the basic issue (for Soviet rule, against bourgeois parliamentarism), unity, in my opinion, is possible and necessary, just as a split is necessary with the Kautskyites. If the split was inevitable, efforts should be made not to deepen it, but to approach the Executive Committee of the Third International for mediation and to make the “Lefts” formulate their differences in theses and in a pamphlet. Restoration of unity in the Communist Party of Germany is both possible and necessary from the international standpoint.”1167

The ECCI pursued a similar line over the course of the spring and summer: on the one hand recognizing the leftists as genuine comrades, on the other hand recognizing the KPD Zentrale's authority and autonomy in defining its own tactics. Through a series of letters, articles and declarations, the ECCI, especially Zinoviev, criticized the left-wing's rejection of parliamentarism and participation in reactionary trade-unions as matters of principle, but also condemned the rightwing KPD leadership's hostile treatment of the left. Meanwhile, the ECCI carefully tried to traverse a neutral position in the conflict by advancing its own independent position. The ECCI report to the Second Congress concerning its activities gives a glimpse how this difficult position occupied the ECCI: "The Executive Committee has tried to take a particularly active part in the debates that have arisen among leading figures of in the workers' movement in Germany. The committee received a special delegation from the new Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD)... In a spirit of openness and comradeship, it pointed out to the supporters of the Communist Workers Party of Germany the colossal errors that their party was making and that their congress has made. The Executive Committee is aware, however, that there are many honest, self-sacrificing, and fighting workers within the ranks of the KAPD. In view of this it has invited the KAPD to the congress of the Communist International. The committee also pointed out the organizational blunders and some serious political mistakes made by the [Zentrale] of the old German Communist Party (Spartacus League) on organizational matters, on the trade union question (the Zentrale's vacillations a few months ago on whether or not Communists should be active in unions), and on the political line of the Spartacus League Zentrale during the Kapp putsch (the Zentrale's famous declaration

1167

Lenin, "October 28, 1919. Letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany Regarding the Split" in LCW Vol. 30 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), pp. 87-88. When Lenin wrote the letter, the left-wing in Germany had not yet constituted itself as a party.

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about a "purely workers' government," "loyal opposition," and so on). The Executive Committee has not abandoned hope that it will quite soon be able to put an end to the split in the ranks of the Communists in Germany."1168

ECCI's conciliatory tone and activity stemmed from its concern about the organizational unity rather than the theoretical content of the dispute. In a sense, if the left-wing around the Amsterdam Bureau perceived that the division in Germany and Comintern was over matters of principle and the Berlin WES saw it as merely an issue of tactics, the ECCI saw it as organizational question. The ECCI considered that if genuine grounds for open debate could be set up, the strained atmosphere could be soothed. The ECCI's report for the Second Congress further substantiated its view of the centrality of organization with a quantitative analysis: the root of the problem was in the rapid growth of the new International, at a time that it still lacked an adequate organizational structure. As the report admitted, the organizational disunity was not only caused by the inexperience of the western Communists, but also partly the inefficiency of the ECCI itself. Although designed to include representatives from several major sections of the organization, the ECCI remained mostly a Bolshevik organ, despite its attempts to include Communists from other groups. The immediate cause for this was the Allied cordon sanitaire around Soviet Russia.1169 The blockade not only made the movement of Communist delegates difficult and communication almost impossible between the ECCI and the other sections, but also made the publication of the central organ of the organization (The Communist International) extremely precarious and difficult.1170 Under these conditions, the ECCI in effect remained mainly an eastern entity. However, by putting the emphasis on the technical and organizational side of the conflict brewing inside the organization, the ECCI indirectly trivialized the roles of the Bureaus it had established in 1919, when the solution for the organizational divide was seen as being regional Bureaus. Now, in 1920, reneging its earlier formulation of the Bureaus' roles,1171 the ECCI

1168

"Report of the Executive Committee of the Communist International" in Riddell, ed. Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, pp. 81-82. 1169 Ibid. pp. 72-74. 1170 The report stated that only the Russian and the German edition of the journal could be somewhat regularly published. The situation of the French and the English language editions were "unknown". Ibid. p76. 1171 See Chapter 9 of this dissertation above on the Comintern organizational structure in its first year.

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criticized the Amsterdam Bureau harshly for overstepping its "purely subsidiary" 1172 functions as an "organ of communication" and by its intervening in the German Party's affairs, after which the ECCI renounced the Amsterdam Bureau's mandate.1173 Paradoxically, by denouncing the Amsterdam Bureau, by denouncing the left-wing in the debate as ideologically confused, the ECCI was also denouncing the only medium—its own regional Bureau in Amsterdam—that had the capacity to organizationally intervene and clarify the positions of the left.1174 After the split at the KPD’s Heidelberg Congress, the ECCI itself requested Rutgers to mediate the conflict and intervene on Comintern's behalf. Hence, while the ECCI's claim that the Amsterdam Bureau overstepped its organizational role was clearly wrong, something which the ECCI probably did to distance itself from the “ultraleftism of the Amsterdam Bureau,” the ECCI saw the Amsterdam Bureau's support for the leftwing as organizationally irresponsible. The ECCI’s preferred strategy was to resolve the debate by deemphasizing the political differences and emphasizing the organizational unanimity and homogeneity of Comintern's structure. Nevertheless, whichever path the ECCI chose, the nature of the political questions was divisive enough and the Amsterdam Bureau did not have any organizational or technical power to amplify the division more than it already had. This complex situation highlighted the weakness of the ECCI's conciliatory middle-ground solution, which aimed to resolve the conflict through formal, organizational methods that were practically difficult to implement without further pushing the political antagonisms towards an organizational split. However, by early 1920, the ECCI found itself in a corner and isolated, and this may explain its stiff and contradictory response. Since the ECCI itself was isolated, it had only two other means left to it to react to the situation. Using the so-called "emissaries" that it sent to the west, it could seek a more direct approach towards mediation. Failing that, it could convene a world congress of the organization. The Bolshevik emissaries, however, were themselves divided and split

1172

Riddell, ed. Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, p. 90. Gerrit Voerman, "Proletarian Competition”, p.216. 1174 It is interesting to note here that articles by many prominent figures of the European left-wing members of the Comintern continued to appear in the organization’s central organ, The Communist International. In fact, Pannekoek, Gorter and Roland-Holst's names were counted among the "editors" of the journal, which was a show of respect rather than an actual authority. But it still reveals that for the ECCI the political differences were transitory, at least at this point. 1173

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into two camps: those who sided with the left or the Amsterdam Bureau, and those who sided with the WES. Only a few sought to steer a middle course as the ECCI aimed. For instance, in Germany, Reich and Bronsky were clearly on the side of the WES. However, other emissaries sided with the left. For example, Zacks Gladnev, who was at the time of the conflict working in Hamburg as a Comintern agent, actively participated in the organization of the left-wing opposition.1175 These divisions among the Comintern emissaries extended beyond Germany. At the Second Congress, Jacob Herzog, a Swiss left-wing delegate recounted how a Comintern emissary that was sent to Bulgaria to intervene in the developing conflict in the Bulgarian Communist Party on the side of the WES and in defense of its tactics, but decided to side with the left-wing while there.1176 Similarly, in Italy, Degot, who was one of the organizers of the Kievan Bureau of the Comintern in 1919 and who was sent to Italy to re-establish the “Southern Route,” ended up supporting the left-wing around Bordiga inside the PSI, whereas another Comintern delegate supported the centrist wing that opposed the expulsion of the right-wing from the Socialist Party.1177 Finally, in Britain, the ECCI’s two Finnish emissaries, having worked with Pankhurst and her group around the "Workers' Dreadnought" soon found each other on opposing sides of the parliamentary and the Labor Party question: one of them began defending the left-wing's position advocated by Sylvia Pankhurst, which was against affiliation with the Labour Party and against parliamentary tactics (similar to the left-wing currents elsewhere), while the other emissary defended the centrist tactics of the WES.1178 Such behavior makes clear that the ECCI's Bolshevik delegates in Europe did not play a determining role, let alone impose the will of the ECCI.1179 Faced with the impossibility of intervening in the situation in western Europe, through correspondence, declarations or delegations, the ECCI was left with only one other option to effectively intervene: organize a new world congress of the Comintern on the Soviet soil. When the Comintern was founded, the Bolsheviks' hope had been that the next Congress would take place

1175

E. H. Carr, "Radek's ‘political salon’ in Berlin 1919", Soviet Studies, 3:4 (1952), p. 422. Riddell, ed. Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, pp. 452-3. 1177 Lazitch & Drachkovitch, Lenin and the Comintern, pp. 160-1. 1178 Kevin Morgan and Tauno Saarela, “Northern Underground Revisited: Finnish Reds and the Origins of British Communism,” European History Quarterly 29, No. 2 (1 April 1999), pp. 179–215, 1179 In that sense at least in 1919 and 1920, the Comintern agents were not directing the European parties in a Machiavellian manner. An example of such an interpretation can be found in, Robert Service, Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West (London: MacMillan, 2011), p. 452. 1176

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somewhere in western Europe, if not in Berlin, depending on the revolutionary situation, at least in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam Conference was actually a preparatory stage for that, but it revealed how inexperienced the Amsterdam Bureau members were to organize a congress. Further, the political tension between the Berlin and Amsterdam Bureaus meant that a congress organized by either of the bureaus would likely mean formally sealing the organizational division at the expense of the other. In fact, an attempt had been made to organize another conference in Norway at the initiative of the WES, which did not take place, probably due to the fractional tensions between the Bureaus.1180 Hence, the ECCI dissolved the Amsterdam Bureau,1181 but at the same time, it began preparations for the Congress, a process that began immediately after the formation of the KAPD and the final emergence of two formally distinct Communist parties in Germany. The call for the Congress was immediately issued after this and it invited the delegates, from all tendencies, to come to Russia in June.1182 Considering how the Allied blockade made it difficult for such a voyage, the ECCI's decision to organize a Congress in 1920 Summer, reveals the sense of urgency the Bolsheviks felt in the face of a looming split in the Comintern.

1180

A few months before the Second Congress of the Communist International, the Amsterdam Bureau managed to establish contacts with the Scandinavian Bureau of the Communist International in Stockholm. Thus, it attempted to circumvent the WES in order to establish direct contacts with Moscow, yet by this time the ECCI had already began preparations to disband the Bureaus rife with internal strife. However, it seems with Pannekoek's suggestion, Rutgers tried to convene an impromptu pre-congress, almost a factional meeting of the European left tendencies from Switzerland, Britain, Netherlands and the Scandinavians in Christiania, with the goal of presenting a united front of the left in the Second Comintern Congress. However, this meeting did not take place, due probably to technical difficulties. Voerman, de Meridiaan van Moskou, pp. 93-94. 1181 The decision was taken in the ECCI meeting on April 25, 1920. It appears from Rutgers letters and the Amsterdam Bureau’ protest that this decision caused a great confusion in the Dutch radical movement. RGASPI, 497-1-9, ll. 29-31. 1182 The preparations for the convocation of a congress began in early April. The Bolshevik Party leadership received the theses produced by the KAPD's founding congress in 3 April 1920. In a letter to the Plenum of RCP(B) CC on April 8, 1920, Lenin urged that it immediately begin the preparations for the Second Congress. Aleksander Vatlin, Vtoroy kongress kominterna: Tochka otscheta istorii miravogo kommunizma (Moskva: Rosspen, 2018), pp. 23-4.

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1.

Lenin's “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”

The ECCI called the Second Congress primarily to resolve the conflict brewing inside the Comintern. If the Second Congress represented intervention in form, Lenin's famous polemical pamphlet, “The 'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder” was its theoretical content. Lenin completed the pamphlet in a hurry in April. It was a single draft which was then immediately published, probably without a revision.1183 He was in a rush. His sources were limited to the Communist International and certain other fragmentary publications from western Europe that had appeared between January and March.1184 His haste points to a sense of urgency, which explains the lack of concrete details and several revisions added in the form of appendices after the publication of the first edition. Lenin compensated for the lack of details and depth with a polemical impact and force. If shocking the communists was truly one of his goals in writing the “Infantile Disorder,” Lenin succeeded. The pamphlet had a colossal effect on the delegates arriving from Europe, almost akin to a scandal. In fact, many autobiographical accounts of foreign delegates express utter surprise upon having read Lenin's pamphlet, which was translated into several languages and awaited the foreign delegates as they arrived their rooms in Moscow. Mark Shipman, an American-Mexican delegate explained his reaction thus: “In its pages Lenin ridiculed two tactics common to the revolutionary labour movement, tactics that many counted as articles of faith: abstention from "bourgeois parliaments" and abstention from work in such established "reactionary labor organizations" as the AFL and British Labour Party... Delegates were open mouthed, almost scandalized as they read the pamphlet. Any author but Lenin - the expounder, organizer, and engineer of revolution – they would have proclaimed an errant opportunist. Throughout the world, the Bolsheviks

1183

Sevriugina and Surovtseva, "Iz istorii sozdaniia V.I. Leninum knigi "Detskaya Bolezn "Leviznu" v Kommunizme." Voprosu Istorii KPSS, no 3 (1960). pp.9-24 1184 From the sources Lenin used to criticize the left-wing position, it appears certain that he seriously lacked a concrete and in-depth knowledge of its arguments. Apart from the Amsterdam Bulletin's first issue (which was published before the Amsterdam Conference and hence did not give an expression to the left-wing position in its fully developed form anyway), his only other sources on the German Left were the publication of a "Local Group in Frankfurt" (which I could not locate the original text) and a text by Laufenberg published in the Hamburg Kommunistische Arbeiterzeitung titled "The Dissolution of the Party" (Feb 7, 1920, no. 32). Neither of these texts could have possibly informed Lenin about the German Left's positions. Laufenberg was even expelled after the founding of the KAPD and represented a tendency, which later became "national Bolshevik" and severely denounced by the KAPD itself.

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stood for "direct action" as opposed to the bread & butter tactics of unionism, and for working class action as opposed to the parliaments. In country after country revolutionists had been encouraged to split and again to split, rather than remain minorities within "backward" labour organizations. Wasn't the Second Congress itself the result of a split within the Second International? If ultra-leftism was a disease, then a lot of the arriving delegates had caught it - myself included.”1185

This seemingly sudden turn in Lenin's thinking has generally been attributed to Radek's influence.1186 During his time in prison in Germany, Radek was one of the main theoreticians of the new Zentrale line that sought accommodation with the centrist Social Democrats and the leftwing expelled from the party. Following his release from prison in January 1920, Radek returned to the Soviet Russia. His views must have influenced Bolsheviks hungry for information. Since the formation of the Zimmerwald Left, Lenin’s respect for Radek's opinions on the German question was well known in the Comintern. In fact, the left-wing initially doubted if Lenin was presented with a misleading picture on the German situation by Radek,1187 so much so that Pannekoek thought that Lenin's pamphlet actually reflected Radek's influence, possibly even written by Radek himself.1188 However, Lenin's pamphlet was different both in tone and substance from Radek's and Zentrale's frontal attack against the left-wing. In contrast to Zentrale’s accusations against the leftwing, Lenin's nuanced criticism refrained from identifying the opposition as "syndicalistic" or "anarchistic". Consistent with this conciliatory approach towards the "left communists," his first reaction to the news of the budding conflict was to play down its importance. In his letter from October 10, 1919 to "Italian, French and German Communists" Lenin wrote: "The differences among the Communists are differences between representatives of a mass movement that has grown with incredible rapidity; and the Communists have a single, common, granite-like foundation - recognition of the proletarian revolution and of the

1185

Shipman, It Had to Be Revolution, pp. 107-8. For instance Alexander Vatlin argues that Lenin owed the formulation of "childish sickness" (infantile disorder) to Radek who developed this first in Moabit, during his imprisonment. Alexander Vatlin, Komintern: ideyi, resheniye, sudbi (Moskva: Rosspen, 2009), p. 256. 1187 Rutgers, who was the correspondent of the Amsterdam Bureau with the ECCI sought in vain to find a sympathetic ear in the Bolshevik leadership to counterbalance Radek and WES actions. In February he wrote to the ECCI asking for support, "What do you and Bukharin or others think about this new opportunism". RGASPI, 497-2-2, l. 293. 1188 Pannekoek, "World Revolution and Communist Tactics", Smart ed., Pannekoek and Gorter's Marxism, pp. 142-3. 1186

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struggle against bourgeois-democratic illusions and bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism, and recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat and Soviet Power".1189

By contrast, the differences between the Communists and the Social Democrats were "really irreconcilable."1190 Hence, in the last months of 1919, Lenin essentially perceived the differences between various tendencies amongst western European communists as a tactical question about the utilization of the limited legal possibilities available to them. He expected that the transitory phase in which Communists could have a limited access to the legal political arena in western democracies would come to a close in the immediate future, with the progress of the revolution and with the increasing crystallization of the class antagonisms. Consequently, Lenin considered the division over the parliamentary question as trivial, a "matter of growing pains,"1191 that the movement would soon overcome, if not through a theoretical maturation, at least under the pressure of the circumstances. One way or another, the unavoidable government clampdown—already underway in several western countries— or the development of the revolution would resolve the division. However, when Radek arrived in Moscow in 1920 and as the tensions in Europe between the left-wing and the right-wing became more complicated, entangled as they were with issues about trade unions and the relations between the Communist Parties and the centrist Social Democrats, Lenin was forced to further elaborate his position. In "Left-Wing Communism," Lenin revised his tone and more seriously conceded the danger of a split in the international, but he still did not change his previous assertion that nothing fundamental divided the “left-wing communists” from the Comintern. In fact, despite the dramatic title, Lenin did not actually present a total condemnation of the “left-wing communists” in the pamphlet. For Lenin, “left-communism” was still not an especially dangerous tendency. On the contrary, he wrote: “There is... nothing surprising,

1189

"Greeting to German, French and Italian Communists" in Lenin LCW vol. 29, p. 55. Lenin wrote that "There can be no peace, no joint work, between the proletarian revolutionaries and the philistines, who like those of 1848, worship at the shrine of bourgeois ‘democracy’ without understanding its bourgeois nature". Ibid. p.54. 1191 Ibid. p. 57. He had a point since in most west European countries communists were driven to the underground, in the US there was practically an anti-communist witch hunt, which reached its climax with the Palmer raids and the deportation of thousands of radicals. 1190

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new, or terrible in the ‘infantile disorder’ of ‘Left-wing communism’ among the Germans. The ailment involves no danger, and after it the organism even becomes more robust.”1192 Further, Lenin consistently praised the “left-communists” in the text for their dedication to the cause, their honesty, and resolute stance against opportunism. For the left-wing in his party before the war, he had written that, “among [the Lefts] there were splendid revolutionaries who subsequently were (and still are) commendable members of the Communist Party.”1193 In the pamphlet, Lenin rarely missed an opportunity to praise the militants of the left-wing from other countries. In his view, the left-wing communists were among the “best propagandists,” their hostility towards the Social Democrats were "completely understandable and justified.” Citing an article attacking the Labour Party and trade-union leadership in Britain that rejected affiliation with these bodies, which was written by a British shop-steward, Willi Gallacher (who was not actually a leftcommunist), Lenin wrote that it was “full of a noble and working-class hatred for the bourgeois “class politicians.” Similarly, Lenin praised the Italian “left-communists,” especially Amadeo Bordiga by name.1194 Lenin shared some of the sentiments if not the whole position that the left-wing held about the bourgeois legal institutions that they opposed joining. On parliaments, he wrote, “in Western Europe and America, parliament has become most odious to the revolutionary vanguard of the working class. That cannot be denied.” He agreed that the “parliaments were politically obsolete”

1192

Lenin, "Left-Wing Communism" in LCW Vol. 31, p.45. Many former "left-communists" or "lefts" who split or opposed Lenin's tactics after the 1905 revolution, during the 1908-09 split of the Vperyod group or during the Brest negotiations held central positions in the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet administration. These included Lunacharshky, the first commissar for public enlightenment, Leonid Krasin, holding a major role in the Commissariat of Foreign Trade and Bukharin among others. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks, p. 185. 1194 Bordiga represented another irreconcilable current in Italy, which was opposing unity with the rightwing of the socialist party. Eventually, he became a leading figure in the founding of the Italian Communist Party after its split from the ISP. On Bordiga and the conflict in the Italian Socialist Party, Lenin endorsed Bordiga’s position writing, “the correctness of the demand by Comrade Bordiga and his friends on Il Soviet, who are insisting that the Italian Socialist Party, if it really wants to be for the Third International, should drum Turati and Co. out of its ranks and become a Communist Party both in name and in deed.” Lenin, LCW Vol. 31, p.112. 1193

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even if they were not practically obsolete, having a weight psychologically in the eyes of the masses.1195 In general, Lenin admitted that in western Europe, "which is imbued with most deep-rooted legalistic, constitutionalist and bourgeois-democratic prejudices," parliaments and trade union leaderships crystallized the material institutional basis of opportunism. The uniqueness of western Europe and North America was that here, an opportunistic layer of “workers' aristocracy” was tasked by the imperialist states to distract and stall the working class. In a sense, Lenin not only shared the left-wing hostility towards “leaders” in the west, but he also agreed that this opportunist “leadership” had to be combatted.1196 Consequently, Lenin actually saw in left-communism a healthy reaction to a certain extent, a reaction to the opportunist currents that the LRIs had been struggling against since 1914.1197 If on so many levels Lenin agreed with the left-wing, why did he insist on defending the practical necessity of parliamentary and trade union work? The answer is that Lenin refused to perceive these as questions of principles. Despite giving in to their criticisms, Lenin still argued that both the parliamentary question and the trade question were merely “tactical” issues. They were not important enough to divide the Communist movement, unlike for instance the question of internationalism and war. Hence, communists could be flexible and boycott or participate in elections depending on the given conditions, which were bound to change rapidly. For Lenin, the criteria for the applicability of a particular tactic in each context was not its pragmatic value. For instance, the viability of gaining or spreading the communist influence using

1195

Ibid. p. 59. Similarly, for trade-unions in the West, Lenin wrote: "In countries more advanced than Russia, a certain reactionism in the trade unions has been and was bound to be manifested in a far greater measure than in our country. Our Mensheviks found support in the trade unions (and to some extent still do so in a small number of unions), as a result of the latter’s craft narrow-mindedness, craft selfishness and opportunism. The Mensheviks of the West have acquired a much firmer footing in the trade unions; there the craft-union, narrow-minded, selfish, case-hardened, covetous, and petty-bourgeois “labour aristocracy”, imperialist-minded, and imperialist-corrupted, has developed into a much stronger section than in our country. That is incontestable." p. 51. 1196 Ibid. p.55 and pp. 42-3. 1197 For example, he wrote: “...of course, the mistake of Left doctrinairism in communism is at present a thousand times less dangerous and less significant than that of Right doctrinairism (i.e., social-chauvinism and Kautskyism); but, after all, that is only due to the fact that Left communism is a very young trend, is only just coming into being. It is only for this reason that, under certain conditions, the disease can be easily eradicated, and we must set to work with the utmost energy to eradicate it.” Ibid. p.103

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parliaments was not his concern, since such an abstract notion of influence or politics was alien to his Marxism. As long as parliaments existed, only the bourgeoisie, as the ruling class, could rule over them, as he noted in his thesis on Bourgeois Democracy and Proletarian Dictatorship at the first Comintern congress in 1919. His defining criterion for the practical utility of parliaments was historical. To be more precise, for Lenin, what defined the utility of a tactic for a political party was the general historic course: if world history moved in the direction of a proletarian revolution, if conditions and the class struggle pointed in an escalation of the class struggle in favor of the progressive class, then Marxists' role was to give a conscious expression to this movement by analyzing the moments that concretized it, to formulate and explain to the workers their general historical tasks. Under such conditions, the mistakes of revolutionaries did not have the potential to change the course of historical evolution, merely to give it conscious expression. In April 1920, Lenin still thought that fortune was on the side of the world proletarian revolution. In an optimistic final note to “Left-Wing Communism,” he wrote that world revolution was “developing in scope and depth with... splendid rapidity”.1198 However, while holding on to the conviction that he had held since 1917 on the certainty of the coming world revolution, Lenin was not as confident about its form as he was in 1917. If the masses were moving left and in general in a revolutionary direction, then eventually at some point they had to seize power. The Comintern's founding declaration was that proletarian power could only take the form of soviets or councils. However, now in 1920, it seemed Lenin had doubts, because the same leftward moving masses were joining in the trade-unions and opportunist mass socialist parties. This could either be the sign of passing of revolutionary fervor, a stalling of revolution, or maybe worse, the pendulum of history was swinging towards the counter-revolution (a prospect that was hard to accept in the middle of the Civil War) or simply the spirit of history was acting in slightly mysterious and unexpected ways. For Lenin, the latter was the case. He wrote: “The Communists must exert every effort to direct the working-class movement and social development in general along the straightest and shortest road to the victory of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world-wide scale. That is an incontestable truth. But it is enough to take one little step farther—a step that might seem to be in the same direction—and truth turns into error. We have only to say, as the German and British Left Communists do, that we recognise only one road, only the direct road, and that we will not permit tacking, conciliatory manoeuvres, or compromising—and it will

1198

Ibid. p.104.

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be a mistake which may cause, and in part has already caused and is causing, very grave prejudices to communism. Right doctrinairism persisted in recognising only the old forms, and became utterly bankrupt, for it did not notice the new content. Left doctrinairism persists in the unconditional repudiation of certain old forms, failing to see that the new content is forcing its way through all and sundry forms, that it is our duty as Communists to master all forms, to learn how, with the maximum rapidity, to supplement one form with another, to substitute one for another, and to adapt our tactics to any such change that does not come from our class or from our efforts.”1199

As this concluding remark from Lenin's "Left-Wing Communism" suggests, Lenin was still making clear that defending that Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat was the "content" of the proletarian revolution. While the world revolution was still on the immediate agenda, the path leading to it, the "forms" of the revolution, may have to be adjusted to the temporary situations and specific national contexts. This presentation creates certain problems and contradictions that Lenin had to overcome to bridge the differences between himself and the left in the west. First, if the main enemy of the working class in the imperialist metropole countries was opportunism, why not a head on attack on them and instead of a submission to the organizational forms (parliamentary mass parties, trade unions) that opportunists hang on to, as the left-wing demanded? Second, if the proletarian revolution demanded an internationally unified strategy,1200 why defend separate tactics in advanced capitalist countries? Finally, if the world revolution was still on the agenda, was it still necessary and possible in the new imperialist epoch when capitalism entered its decline to defend tactics such as parliamentarism peculiar to capitalisms peaceful period of development? Lenin's solution to these interconnected set of riddles was to propose “compromise” as a tactical tool. The necessity of making compromises and retreats when marching straight ahead was not a political option for a revolutionary party. This necessity of compromise had such a centrality in Lenin's argument that the whole pamphlet can be read as a treatise on the necessity of including compromises as a necessary element of Communist tactics. For Lenin, first of all, compromises were internationally necessary, and communists everywhere could potentially find themselves in situations where compromise becomes unavoidable. Second, even after the success of a proletarian revolution, temporary retreats of revolutionary forces in the form of compromises were

1199

Ibid. p.103. Ibid. p.60.

1200

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unavoidable.1201 Obviously, Lenin's case here is shakier since a compromise towards world imperialism by a ruling proletarian dictatorship (as in the case of Lenin's example, the Brest Litovsk treaty) is totally on a different level than a compromise made by a revolutionary party towards an opportunist party (ruling as it was in Germany in 1919, or in opposition as it was in Italy) in a given country where the bourgeois state remained intact. Yet, for Lenin these were mere details. For him, compromises were only temporary, expressing short intervals until the unevenness in the development of world revolutionary movement is somehow smoothed, by allowing relatively slower parts of the world revolutionary movement to catch up with the rest, and by buying time for the more advanced sections, which are brought to an impasse due to geographical or social isolation. In Lenin’s vision, the success of temporary a compromise in the long run depended on the enemy’s weakness. Compromises aimed to divide the enemy, or intensify their divisions, and thereby to sow conflict within the ruling class. In that sense, these tactics relied more on divisions among the ruling class than the strength of the proletariat to take on the ruling class in a general struggle.1202 Hence, Lenin, unlike Levi or Radek, admitted that parliamentarism, entering reactionary trade unions or merging with the centrist Social Democratic parties were indeed compromises. However, his logic was that letting the class enemy strengthen temporarily would only lead to the emergence of its contradictions faster, bring its downfall sooner, and bring into the open the conflicting class interests. This logic was soon to be contested in the Second Congress of the Communist International.

E.

Conclusion

By mid-1920, especially following the bloody defeat of the German Revolution, the Comintern was at a crossroads. Communists felt that they either had to accommodate themselves to the defeat by changing tactics to speed up the tempo of the world revolution, to the point of

1201

Ibid. pp. 68-9.. Ibid. p. 95.

1202

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compromising from its principles, or prepare themselves for a long, maybe even decades long, period of struggle with potential defeats and advances ahead, while sticking to their principles without flinching. Three distinct tendencies inside the Comintern emerged at this juncture. The first tendency around the WES, proposed a full retreat, up to the point of uniting with some former centrist Social Democrats. This implied watering down, if not fully renouncing, the anti-parliamentary orientation of the First Comintern Congress in 1919. A second tendency around the Amsterdam Bureau and especially its left-wing figures, advocated a sober but challenging opposing line: instead of diluting the principles, they advocated preparing the Comintern for a longer period of class struggle and acceptance of the fact that the 1917-1920 period was only one among many upsurges in the class struggle, which had then temporarily and globally receded. To better prepare for the future, the left-wing suggested preserving the clarity of the principles and the message of the Comintern, without compromise. The Moscow and the Petrograd Bureaus of the Comintern and the Bolsheviks attempted to find a middle ground between those two poles. Stressing the necessity of organizational unity, the Bolsheviks urged the left-wing oppositions to remain inside the Communist parties and accept compromises. These three positions soon clashed in the Second World Congress of the Communist International, where none fully prevailed. In fact, the Second Congress proved to be the last united joint meeting of these three tendencies that emerged from the Zimmerwald Left movement.

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XIII. The Second Comintern Congress (1920) and the Split in the Comintern

The Second Congress of the Comintern was the most spectacular LRI international gathering since the inception of the movement in 1915. Delegates representing groups and parties from 37 countries were present, for the first-time bringing communists together from Asia, Americas, Africa, and Europe together.1203 But, this Congress was also the most conflict ridden and divided LRI gathering since 1915. In fact, the organization of the Congress was the last united act of the LRI core group that built the Zimmerwald Left before the beginning of its gradual and painful process of disintegration. Several tendencies polarized around the three main International Bureaus (the by-then defunct Amsterdam Bureau, the ECCI, and the Berlin Bureau or the so-called WES) that had struggled without resolution throughout the previous year. The strife continued during the Congress over tactics, principles, and theory, yet none of the factions could claim a definite victory, and eventually they all had to settle on an uneasy and shaky compromise.

A.

The Tendencies Represented in the Congress

Three main tendencies crystallized in the congress. The Left-wing, whose position was in general summed as: opposing merging with the Social Democratic mass parties; opposing re-joining reactionary trade unions (which, during the First World War participated in the management of labor in the governments and continued this cooperation after the war); and opposing participation in national parliamentary elections for bourgeois state bodies. The left-wing almost unanimously argued that the Communists' goals (proletarian seizure of power through revolution) had to cohere to their tactics and the tactical tools for the proletarian power could only be mass action, mass insurgency, and the formation of organs of proletarian struggle and power: the soviets. However, beyond these, there was little unity in the left's ranks. In fact, the left-wing arrived at the congress

1203

Riddell ed., Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, pp. 839-843.

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as a very heterogeneous group that was already internally divided. Main tendencies included the syndicalists from the IWW and the Spanish CNT. Despite being yet unaffiliated with the Comintern, the syndicalists were sizable group that could not be overlooked, constituting about one eighth of the Congress’ participants.1204 While close to the left on almost all issues, the utility of revolutionary unions (as opposed to traditional trade unions) was not accepted by all on the left. Further, complicating the merger of the syndicalists with the left was the syndicalists’ rejection of political parties. This would drive Amadeo Bordiga, representing the minority pro-Comintern tendency in the Italian Socialist Party away from the left, losing the left potentially its greatest orator and leader. Another strong contingent was the youth groups representing twelve different sections of the Socialist Youth Movement, which was headed by Willi Münzenberg. Münzenberg and the Socialist Youth Movement had the honor of being among some of the first groups to rally behind the Zimmerwald Left in 1915. Along with the youth groups, the major left-wing tendency (representing a generational cohort from similar personal and organizational backgrounds more than being an organizational group itself) was the seasoned LRI militants from western Europe and North America. They constituted the small nuclei, groups, or cadre parties most of which formed during the World War. Despite representing small groups, these had a significant political weight as many were among the organizers of the core Zimmerwald Left group. While having similar positions on trade unions and parliamentarism, many LRI groups refrained from being associated with the syndicalists.1205 Further, this left-wing hesitated to present a united, factional front in the congress. Coming to grips with the fact that their positions markedly diverged from their old comrades in the Bolshevik party, they were forced to formulate their own positions despite being hesitant to give the impression of an organizational bloc, especially against the Bolsheviks.

1204

Most syndicalists were from Latin countries where the LRIs historically remained weak, with the notable exception of Augustin Souchy, who represented the German anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers’ Union in the Second Congress. Ibid. pp. 8 and 580. 1205 Alfred Rosmer, representing the French pro-Comintern syndicalist movement met with Bordiga on his way to Moscow. Bordiga clearly disassociated himself from any current that opposed the necessity of political parties. If Rosmer had any thought about forming a bloc that must have dissuaded him.

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Arguably the most crucial weakness of the left-wing was the absence of its internationally renowned figures (for example, Anton Pannekoek1206 and Herman Gorter) in the Congress. These more experienced and older LRI figures could possibly match Lenin, if not in popularity at least in terms of experience. Further, they could have represented the Amsterdam Bureau (if not organizationally at least in spirit) and its positions in Congress. Their absence clearly contributed to the disunity of the left-wing. Even worse, the absence of the KAPD delegation was a terrible blow for the cause of the left. These absences served as symptoms, if not directly contributed to, the historic division that emerged in the left-communist ranks.1207 The second tendency, the Center, agreed with the left-wing on the danger of opportunist deviation that may emerge from tactics such as participation in parliaments, joining trade unions, and merging with the centrist mass Social Democratic parties. However, it also argued that great masses of laborers still belonged to these organizations, and they did not support an outright refusal of using parliaments or uniting with the centrist Social Democrats. Such an intransigence could possibly lead to the isolation of the Comintern, which would reduce it to a sectarian organization in the eyes of the masses. The Center tendency's solution was organizational: forming a firm but flexible international leadership cadre capable of knowing when to retreat and when to advance, depending on the tempo and direction of the given historical situation. This Center group was almost exclusively comprised of the Bolsheviks and the eastern LRIs that had acted in organizational unison since the beginning of the Civil War. These were mainly communists from territories of the former Russian Empire as well as from Asian nationalities bordering Russia, which formed sizable migrant worker communities in Russia.1208 Hardly

1206

In his absence, Pannekoek’s most important critical work, his World Revolution and Communist Tactics (1920) was translated and distributed in the Congress by the ECCI, together with Lenin's work. Riddell, ed. Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, p.143. 1207 Since 1914, works of Pannekoek and Gorter were translated in several LRI publications. Had they been present, they could have played the role of uniting, for instance the abstentionist Italian left represented by Bordiga and the more syndicalistically inclined British and American delegations. Their absence in this crucial turning point was a harsh blow to left-wing communism. As a political current, they remain in disunity to this day, as "Bordigists", (now mostly defunct) council communists with the exception of few organizations (namely the International Communist Current and the International Communist Tendency, the two international organizations which perceive themselves as inheritors of the international left communist traditions both German-Dutch and also Italian, Russian and British). 1208 Among the 30 delegates representing the colonial and Asian groups and peoples, only M. N. Roy and Henryk Sneevliet belonged to groups developed organizationally independent from the Bolsheviks. ibid.

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any disagreement or dissension surfaced among this contingent against the Bolshevik positions in the Congress. The Bolshevik themselves acted as a united bloc. The third tendency, the Right, constituted the so-called centrist leaderships representing the main European Social Democratic parties. They constituted the right-wing in the Comintern Congress, yet they were the moderate centrists of their own national parties. Delegates from big major Social Democratic parties of Europe—the French SFIO, the German USPD and the Italian PSI— constituted the main representatives of this group. The official delegations of these parties resisted expelling the right-wing groups from inside their own national parties for having not supported internationalist principles during the First World War. They wanted a clean slate, a pardon for any past political compromises towards nationalism committed by any socialist, who, understanding their mistake, now committed to join the Comintern. In fact, forced to go to Moscow by the rising sympathy towards the Comintern within their ranks, the right-wing's main preoccupation was to find a middle ground with the Comintern, flexible enough on "tactics" so that they could preserve unity, while avoiding a split between lefts and rights in their own parties. Hence, in their parties, the right-wing of the Congress represented a particular form of centrism, a veritable middle ground between anti-radical, right-wing socialists and intransigent, left-wing socialists that wanted to split. Being in the middle of those clashing forces in their national parties, they represented a leadership whose last hope was to retain their position as party leaders by coming to an understanding with the Comintern. If the Comintern endorsed unity, then the radicals had to follow, and the conflicts would be quieted. In 1920, the historical situation was advantageous for this right-wing. The defeat of major revolutionary upheavals made giving concessions to communists less immediately risky, which in turn made it easier for them to convince the socialists in their own parties who were hostile to the Bolsheviks, to join the Comintern. The formula offered to these more openly anti-communist social democrats was simple: adopting radical Comintern slogans without implementing them in practice. A similar compromise was also the de facto foundation of the Second International parties before the war, where they endorsed radical decisions that were not carried out. This was not such a difficult position to sell to the right-wing socialists. Headed by the Italian Socialist Party, French SFIO, and the German USPD, this small but important right-wing delegation (which also represented a center between Communists and Social Democrats in France, Germany and Italy) aimed 503

to negotiate with the Comintern. Their hope was that the Comintern would grant their parties' autonomy and unity as a condition of joining the Comintern. Even though the KPD Zentrale delegation sometimes criticized the USPD in the Congress, these parties were tacitly encouraged and supported by the WES in this strategy.1209

B.

The Second Congress Debates

The Congress debates revolved around four main questions: the contemporary world historic analysis, parliamentarism, trade unions, and the question of affiliation with the centrist Social Democratic parties. While the last three items of the agenda were considered as "tactical", the first item was the most important in determining the approach to take on the others. The Comintern was founded upon the position that a general, world-historic period of capitalist collapse began in 1914, and this new period was defined as an epoch of wars and revolutions. The problematic issue was to define more precisely what did that meant for different countries, especially in the short run. The left and the center tendencies had serious disagreements over this question.

1.

The Bolsheviks’ Approach

A certain tendency in historiography has tended to ignore the tripartite division in the Comintern’s Second Congress period in favor of a simpler but reductionist East versus West duality. In this dualist vision, the central problematic was to assess to what degree and in what manner the important decisions were taken in the organization: from the center in the east, in Moscow, or from the periphery, elsewhere. Put another way, would decisions be made democratically or in an "authoritarian" manner? This duality reflected a certain Cold War interpretation of Comintern history,

1209

During the Congress Levi, Radek, and Zinoviev encouraged the participation of the USPD delegates to the Congress meetings in private and in the congress sessions. Levi openly ridiculed those who opposed the participation of the centrist party delegations. Albert Lindemann, "Entering the Comintern: Negotiations Between the Bolsheviks and Western Socialists at the Congress of the Communist International, 1920" Russian History, I, 2 (1974), pp.149-152.

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especially with the advent of the Cold War conception of "totalitarianism."1210 However, for the western and eastern members of the Comintern in 1919 and 1920, the concepts of "power" or "centralism" had radically different connotations than they did in the Cold War context. Even minority tendencies (whether from left or right) conceived of "centralism" as a healthy organizational principle, the alternative of which was seen as a deviation towards nationalist federalism that had disrupted the international solidarity during the First World War. The opposite of centralism was not perceived as "democracy," but as narrow-minded localism or nationalism. Hence, Communists from different continents and countries proudly adhered to the centralizing principle of the Comintern, which upheld worldwide unity as a testimony to its commitment to proletarian internationalism.1211 The treatment received by some Social Democratic leaders from the western European parties in the congress, which sometimes was harsh, have generally been interpreted as a sign of the emerging Bolshevik authoritarianism concealed in the centralization principle. For instance, there is no doubt that the delegates of the French SFIO (Cachin and Frossard) were coldly received. After the duo arrived in Moscow for the Congress, they were invited to a public gathering in the Moscow Theater as a part of preparatory celebrations for the Congress. Taking the stage after Cachin spoke, Bukharin and Kamenev made a forceful denunciation of the war-time chauvinism of Cachin (they called him a "traitor" and a "coward" for his support of the war). As a successful public speaker, Cachin was not used to being humiliated in front of left-wing crowds. He burst into tears.1212 Other Social Democratic delegates present in the Congress did not experience such severe embarrassments. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) remained pacifist throughout the war. Its official

1210

Abbott Gleason highlights the political and ideological roots of the "totalitarianism" conception in the field of Soviet studies. On this, see: Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. p.121. 1211 Zinoviev's opening speech: We need clarity, clarity and more clarity. We will not permit the Communist International to become merely a fad... In order to defeat the bourgeoisie in their own country, Communists need above all a centralized, vigorous, strong party, cast in a single pour. And, in our view, the time has come to begin creating such an organization on an international scale, as well. We are fighting the international bourgeoisie, a whole world of enemies, armed to the teeth, and we must have an iron international proletarian organization able to defeat the enemy everywhere. It must b able at any moment to offer the greatest possible assistance to any of its units. It must devise the most powerful, flexible, and mobile forms of organization so that it can be fully armed when it confronts the enemy it must fight." Riddell, ed. Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, p.103. 1212 Albert Lindemann, "Socialist Impressions of Soviet Russia, 1920" Russian History, I, 1 (1974), p. 38.

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slogan was "neither support nor sabotage" even though the left-wing of the party headed by Amadeo Bordiga strongly challenged it on the same grounds as the Zimmerwald Left. This saved them from harsh condemnations,1213 but they were not saved from criticism. Yet, most hostility towards these "centrists" came from left-wing west European delegates, in most cases from delegates from their own countries and not from the Bolsheviks or other east Europeans. In fact, the Congress floor witnessed several altercations between western left-wing tendencies (“left communists” and syndicalists) and western Social Democrats, who constituted the main body of the right-wing grouping. While Cachin was singled out for his strident chauvinism during the war, he was especially disliked by the west Europeans and Americans. For instance, Alfred Rosmer (the French syndicalist) was infuriated with Cachin’s presence in the Congress. According to John Reed, he complained that "even allowing Cachin past the Soviet border had been impermissible" and at each meeting with Rosmer, he said, "Can you imagine? He's still here!" 1214

If the west European left and right tendencies were hostile and distrustful towards each other, the Bolshevik attitude was in general moderate and, in fact, accommodating. This has often been interpreted as a cynical tactic to convert delegates, a tactic Bolsheviks used to coerce the right-wing leaders to comply with the Bolshevik demands by using the radical left as a stick. 1215 Yet, this interpretation reads too much into intentions and covert agendas. The professed reason for the Bolsheviks' invitation of the right-wing Social Democratic leaders to the Congress was to open up the floor for a genuine debate and inquire if unity with the former centrist Social Democrats could be possible, as WES defended. A clear demonstration of this open attitude was Lenin's conciliatory mood and behavior during the Congress, which he showed towards almost all delegates. Several times Lenin retreated from his positions, conceding mistakes by both his party and the International.

1213

For example, Lindemann attributes the more cordial treatment that the ISP delegation (which was headed by Serrati, the chief of the party) received to Italian's cultural affinity and to the social historical factors, e.g. both parties were from countries with a heavily peasant population and culture. Ibid. p.31. 1214 Riddell, ed. Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, p. 33. 1215 For example, see; Lindemann, "Entering the Comintern”, pp. 136-167.

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One of the most important examples of Lenin’s conciliatory position was his concession towards the Indian delegate Roy, who was very young and a relatively obscure delegate. Roy raised his opposition against Lenin's theses on the national and colonial question in the fourth and fifth sessions of the Congress. Roy essentially criticized Lenin's confident expectation of a merger between colonial national movements and the proletariat in advanced countries against capitalism. He argued that national liberation movements were bourgeois through and through, and they would crush any proletarian communist objective the first chance they had. Their goals were merely the creation of independent capitalist countries and nothing more. He criticized Lenin’s naiveté and ignorance about the conditions prevailing in Asia and colonial countries.1216 As a solitary delegate who did not formally represent any organization from Asia and as a relatively recent convert to communism, Roy's challenge to Lenin's theses could have easily be overlooked, if the Bolsheviks really had authoritarian inclinations. In 1920, their respectability was paramount and very few delegates were overtly interested in the colonial question. However, Lenin was prepared to concede ground, which surprised even Roy himself.1217 Lenin's fraternal attitude towards Roy was not a unique and isolated gesture. On several important political and theoretical questions deliberated in the congress, Lenin was ready to make concessions and most importantly pushed the Bolshevik delegation to compromise.1218

1216

Roy, Memoirs, p. 379. As Roy later wrote in his autobiography: “Lenin finally amazed me by proposing that, after a general discussion in the commission set up to examine the question [colonial question], he would move that his theses as well as mine should be recommended for adoption by the Congress. Thereupon I agreed to formulate my critical notes and positive ideas in a document, which, I insisted, should be presented not as the alternative, but as the supplementary Theses. Lenin agreed with the remark that we were exploring a new ground and should suspend final judgment pending practical experience... Lenin created a sensation by declaring that prolonged discussion with me had made him doubtful about his own Theses; therefore, he proposed that both the drafts should be considered together as the greatest possible approximation to a theoretically sound and factually valid approach to the problem...” Ibid. pp. 380-2. 1218 For instance, Alfred Rosmer, the French syndicalist, wrote his first impressions of Lenin and his readiness to concede to a criticism or change a position: “The same day that I returned to Moscow, I was called to the Kremlin by Lenin. He was anxious to make direct contact with the delegates, to get to know each of them personally, and to ask them questions... One of the things that struck me most at this first meeting was the relaxed atmosphere that was established from the first words of the conversation, and which was kept up throughout it. And also his simplicity, the way he could say to me, whom he hardly knew: 'I must have written something stupid.” Alfred Rosmer, Moscow Under Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 43. 1217

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This general attitude, the Bolshevik willingness to take seriously even the least known delegates representing the smallest groups, was not a “tactic” devised for the extraordinarily tense situation in the Congress. The Bolsheviks themselves were a relatively tiny group who had been dismissed by their older and large sister parties in Europe until very recently. The same was true for other former Zimmerwald Left parties. However, the Bolsheviks’ attempts to preserve unity via fraternal debate, theoretical clarification, and creation of a unifying and centralized political program did not bear fruit. As we shall see, the delegates could not reach agreement on parliamentarism, the trade union question, or the question of party unity. Despite the tentative agreement on the "Twenty-one Conditions" that aimed to unify the movement around as a basic platform, the western European and the north American sections began to crumble. However, this was less to do with the Bolshevik authoritarianism or anarchistic tendencies of the left-wing tendencies in the west. Instead, the slowdown in the world revolutionary movement and the resulting discord inside the Comintern played a determining role in this fracturing.

C.

The Source of Discord: The Meridian Thesis and the Question of the Tempo of the World Revolution

By 1920, communists everywhere had to face the stark reality that the world revolutionary wave was approaching its end. It is only retrospectively possible to clearly appreciate that the climax of the world revolutionary situation was reached in 1919, and from 1920 onwards that momentum was lost. However, even in 1920, the most optimist communists could not deny the fact that the tempo of the world revolutionary upsurge was at least slowing. In the absence of a global world revolution and soviets only succeeding to preserve their hold on political power in Russia, the weakness of the initial revolutionary wave begged for an explanation. An explanation was not only necessary to define the tactics of the Comintern, but also for the legitimacy of the organization. The failure or impossibility of world revolution meant that the existence of the Comintern was superfluous. In the Second Congress, two distinct and competing diagnoses emerged in response to the apparent setback in the world revolution. One emphasized a temporal asynchronicity: the world 508

revolution was globally moving in the same direction, but each country was moving at a different pace. Russia proved to be the fastest, whereas the other countries were only slowly slouching towards the same goal. The second diagnosis pointed to a global retreat in the revolutionary wave. Accordingly, the world revolution appeared to be a slowly maturing process with advances and retreats, the final success of which would probably take decades to come. The implication was that the Russian success was an anomaly and not the norm. Lenin was the most distinct and pronounced author of the first diagnosis and the left-wing advanced and developed the latter. It took considerable time for Lenin to conclude that the Russian pattern was a universal model for the advancing revolutionary wave in other countries. For instance, in the spring of 1919, in the 8th Party Congress he declared, "each nation is traveling in the same historical direction, but by very different zigzag and bypaths."1219 In March 23, he wrote to Béla Kun in Hungary, who was freshly released from prison to become the leader of the newly established Hungarian Soviet Republic, warning him that "it would be a mistake given the specific conditions in Hungary to imitate our Russian tactics in all details... I must warn you against this mistake." 1220 In an article on the "Third International and its place in history," he reiterated "history is moving along paths that are anything but smooth, simple and straight."1221 Thus at least until mid-1919, Lenin did not consider the developmental pattern of the Russian case would be replicated. In the Comintern’s Second Congress, Lenin’s position was radically changed. Here in his speeches to the Congress, he defended the position that what distinguished Russia from the rest of the world, and especially from western Europe, was the speed of the process and not its direction. According to that, what stalled the progress of the revolution in the Entente countries specifically was the strength of the opportunist socialist current. Like the Mensheviks, these currents represented a middle ground group between Soviet power and bourgeois democracy, but what made the western European opportunists stronger and more influential than the Mensheviks was the relative stronger position of the national capital to which they were attached. In other words, the opportunist current and its social basis, the labor aristocracy, was better financed, bigger and more self-

1219

Lenin, "Left-Wing Communism" in Lenin: Collected Works Vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), pp. 97-140. 1220 Riddell ed, Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, p. 227. 1221 Ibid. pp. 305-13.

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confident in England, the US, and France among others and they owed this strength to the imperialist loot their own states could extract from the colonized world.1222 The strength of opportunism may have caused a delay in the revolution’s schedule in the west, but it was nevertheless moving in the same direction. Lenin defined the revolution's temporary setbacks as analogous to the Russian Revolution's temporary setbacks. In a sense, the western revolution was passing through the first temporary retreat that the Bolsheviks had experienced after the 1905 Revolution. This would necessarily be followed by another 1917. Lenin first expressed this view in a speech at a meeting of the Moscow Soviet in celebration of the Third International's first anniversary: "In the early period of the revolution many entertained the hope that the socialist revolution would begin in Western Europe immediately after the imperialist war ended... Things did not turn out that way, revolution did not succeed so quickly . . . , and it now has to follow the whole path of development that we began even before the first revolution, before 1905; for it was only due to more than ten years having passed before 1917 that we were capable of leading the proletariat... Owing to historical developments... we were able to begin the revolution with ease... and with the experience of this year behind us we can say to ourselves that in other countries, where the workers are more developed, where there is more industry, where the workers are far more numerous, the revolution has developed more slowly. It has taken our path, but at a much slower pace."1223

In his view, the struggle in other countries had to follow the same pattern as the Russian Revolution. In the new stage, there had to be a struggle between Communists and Social Democrats analogous to the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries that the Bolsheviks had to wage a struggle against after 1905. Lenin remarked: "Europe is not moving towards revolution the way we did, although essentially Europe is going through the same experience. In its own way, every country must go through the same experience. In its own way, every country must go through, and has begun to go through, an internal struggle against its own Mensheviks and against its own opportunists and Socialist-Revolutionaries, which exist under different names to a greater or lesser degree in all countries.'1224

1222

Riddell, ed. Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, pp.108-109. V. I. Lenin, "Speech at a Meeting of the Moscow Soviet in Celebration of the First Anniversary of the Third International March 6, 1920," LCW Vol. 30, pp.417-8. 1224 Ibid. p. 423. 1223

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This was the first time Lenin formulated a universal pattern of proletarian revolution applicable for every country. He was to systematize this in the "Left-Wing Communism" in a more detailed fashion.1225 By explaining the discrepancy between the success in Russia and the defeats in western Europe as a temporal difference along the same universal path, Lenin not only presented a reassuring schema of development but also, at least on paper, resolved an existential problem for the Comintern: the revolution was still on the immediate historic agenda and the revolutionary epoch that opened up by 1917 in Russia was still alive, the path was still open and a new counter-revolutionary era was out of the question. This position became the essential theoretical touchstone of Lenin's whole line of argument in the Second Congress. His whole position on the necessity of compromises rested on the example of the Bolsheviks case in Russia taken as a template of sorts. It was the similarity of the world historical situation to the period through which the Bolsheviks had passed after 1907 that legitimized the compromise solutions Lenin suggested to the western left radicals. Further, he clearly envisioned the applicability of this temporary retreat to be relevant only for a short period, at most a few years, after which the revolutionary period would resume. Lenin's solution did not convince everyone, especially the left-wing contingent in the Second Congress. For the left-wing, the inapplicability of Lenin's tactics was not due to a historicaltheoretical rejection of viability of the world revolution. Far from it. The left-wing also defended the universal necessity of a world proletarian revolution and the assumption that it was on the immediate historic agenda everywhere in the world. Rather, they distinctly argued that the Bolshevik methods were inapplicable in the West. The Bolshevik experience was a singular one that could not be repeated. The strength of the labor aristocracy in the West was not a mere temporal problem that delayed the revolution, it was the cause of a qualitative difference that required different tactics for the revolution in the West. In the Second Congress, this idea was most succinctly expressed by Amadeo Bordiga in his polemical debate with Lenin on the parliamentary question:

1225

Accordingly, the Bolshevik party and the Russian revolution had to follow several consecutive stages. These stages were defined broadly as: first, the formative stage between 1903-1905; the second stage was the first revolution between 1905-1907; the third was the years of reaction between 1907-1910, which was the stage into which Europe has passed. Following this, Lenin envisioned three more stages: a period of revival, another stage like the world war years, and finally the revolution. While Lenin did not consider this schematically, he envisioned a similar pattern of development.

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"The tactical experience of the Russian revolution cannot be transported to other countries where bourgeois democracy has functioned for many years and where the revolutionary crisis will consist simply of a direct transition from that political system to the dictatorship of the proletariat... The revolutionary problem in western Europe requires first breaking out of the limits of bourgeois democracy and demonstrating the deceitfulness of the bourgeoisie’s claim that every political struggle should take place within the parliamentary machinery. It requires waging the struggle in a new way - by direct revolutionary action to conquer power."1226

For Bordiga, the main problem was Lenin's presentation of the Russian pattern as a global blueprint for the world revolution. He argued that when the Bolsheviks participated in Duma in 1907, the proletarian revolution was not yet on the world historic agenda, and that "there was no revolutionary period, bourgeois power appeared well established and there were no symptoms of the proletariat’s possibility of a more or less imminent revolutionary conquest of power."1227 In that sense, the pre-1914 tactics of the Bolshevik party was as relevant as the pre-1914 tactics of any other Social Democratic party in the new historic epoch of "wars and revolutions": almost nil. This criticism of Lenin's thesis was more fully developed by Pannekoek in his "World Revolution and Communist Tactics". In a sense, Pannekoek's whole pamphlet was a validation of "soviets" as model institutions giving a universal organizational form to the "mass action," with a caveat: Pannekoek explained the success in Russia as a result of the impossibility of other political and economic actions (unions, parliamentary parties) due to the sui generis conditions prevailing in Russia (the Tsarist autocracy and the weakness of bourgeois institutions in Russia). In that sense, the Russian example was important not because it showed how the revolution would come about in the west, but because of the mere fact that it happened at all. A revolution in western

1226

Riddell, ed. Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, pp. 434-5. Immediately after the Congress, Bordiga developed this point further in his fraction's journal in Italy, "Il Soviet". Bordiga was keenly aware that a firm and universal position on tactical questions was the founding stone of the Communist International. Hence, he knew that a criticism of inapplicability of Lenin's tactics in western Europe, by extension meant that those tactics must have also been wrong in Russia. Amadeo Bordiga, “Lenin and Abstentionism,” (originally published in Italian in) Il Soviet, (23 August 1920). The English translation is retrieved from: https://libriincogniti.wordpress.com/2020/08/23/il-soviet-lenin-and-abstentionism/ 1227 Amadeo Bordiga, "Lenin and Parliamentarism," (originally published in Italian in) Il Soviet, (21 August 1920). The English translation is retrieved from: https://libriincogniti.wordpress.com/2020/08/21/ilsoviet-lenin-and-parliamentarianism/

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Europe had to face more serious difficulties (especially ideological), but Russian example was still spiritually important.1228 Herman Gorter later elaborated this comparison between the east and the west in explaining the rapid success of the revolution "the east of the Elbe" in contrast to its being stalled in the west because of ideological obstacles. Together with a delegation representing the KAPD, Gorter travelled to Moscow to convince the Bolsheviks about the impossibility of compromise with the wellestablished western Social Democratic parties. In a 20 December 1920 meeting with the ECCI Bureau, he defended this as the "Meridian thesis": a line divided Europe, starting from Königsberg and passing through Warsaw to the south and ending in Venice. Gorter argued that to the east of this line, a mere 3% of the population were proletarian; surrounding them was a vast sea of peasants who stood as potential allies. In contrast, in the west, a more numerous proletarian populations faced a hostile confederation of all other social classes alone. The tactical alliances that were possible in the East had no chance of success in the West.1229 Following these two diagnoses of the world situation, two poles emerged in the Second Congress. One pole defended the position that the Russian revolution was the first in a line of successive revolutions: the future revolutions would necessarily follow the Russian example almost mot-à-mot. The important thing was to follow the Bolshevik model in different phases. In the other pole, the western left-wing delegates claimed the problem was not temporal but spatial. Different geographic regions of the world had to pass through synchronic yet different forms of struggle. Ultimately the world would reach a soviet form of proletarian dictatorship via a revolutionary civil war, but in the west the means to attain this had to be sharper, clearer, and the struggle would be more difficult due to the entrenched position of the labor aristocracy, the strength of opportunism, and the firmer hold of the bourgeois ideology over the masses. Ironically, neither the temporal asynchronicity of the world revolution assumed by Lenin and others, nor the spatial one which the westerners believed to exist were as consequential as they thought. It was true that the revolution was successful in Russia. But the social and political problems faced by the revolution in Russia were not so different than those faced by communists in

1228

Pannekoek, "World Revolution and Communist Tactics" in Pannekoek and Gorter's Marxism ed. Smart, p. 97. 1229 RGASPI, 495-1-20, ll. 2-3.

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western Europe. Several questions, such as the role of the trade unions, intelligentsia, and unity with the left socialist or social democratic parties, were also crucial issues. The role of the trade unions in the Soviet system became a great controversy in the Bolshevik Party, especially in 1920. The Soviet system relied on the unions to administer the industry and manage the economy. Tensions arose in 1920 when Trotsky proposed using the unions to "militarize" and discipline labor. A left opposition in the Bolshevik Party vehemently protested such proposals, which they viewed as a tendency towards bureaucratization, a tendency that was already received in the party with alarm.1230 While the Bolsheviks were splitting hair over the troubling question of the relation between the unions and the administration of its collapsing economy, in the West, the trade unions were openly but quietly, and with less protest, on their way to becoming the official organizations of labor management. In Weimar Germany, the employers’ associations signed an accord of mutual agreement already in 1918. In exchange for recognizing the Social Democratic trade unions as official economic representatives of the working class, the employers received a promise of continuation of war-time social peace in the shop floor.1231 Several European and American states (democratic or authoritarian) resorted to corporatist techniques of labor management. If one aspect of this was the acknowledgement of the labor unions to a recognized position in the state, the other aspect was the utilization of more modern and technocratic techniques in disciplining the work regimes.1232 The rise and spread of technocratic management techniques and its agents (engineers, scientific managers, etc.) in the west had its parallels in Russia, where the party and the soviet administration debated intensely the role of the intelligentsia and specialists in the administration of the workplaces and factories. One of the key questions was whether the scientific management could be reconcilable with the political goals of the Soviet power. Another question that absorbed the attention of the Bolsheviks and the Comintern during 1919 and 1920 was the unity with the socialist parties from the regions of the former Russian Empire. A prime example of this was the case of the Ukrainian Borotbist party. Formed in summer

1230

Robert Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp.121-3. 1231 "The Agreement for Co-Operation Made on 15 November 1918 Between 21 Employers’ Associations and 7 Trade Unions" The German Left and the Weimar Republic, Ben Fowkes ed. pp.18-21. 1232 Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade After WWI (Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 580-586.

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1919, the "Borotbists" (after their journal "Borotba" or "Struggle") were a mixture of independent left SDs, SRs, and some independent communists in Ukraine. In late 1919 and early 1920, the Comintern and that party discussed unity. Eventually, an alliance between Communists and Borotbists was forged to win over the Ukrainian peasantry, as Borotbists had much firmer roots in the countryside. Yet, the ECCI did not agree to the Borotbists' demand to join the Comintern.1233 Similar alliances with socialists from national minority groups, most importantly with the Muslim socialist groups, were also formed.1234 In 1919 and 1920, the Bolshevik unification with ex-Socialist Revolutionaries was novel (with the exception of the short alliance between the Left-SRs and the Bolsheviks after the November Revolution, which was not a merger anyway). In this sense, Crispien was not terribly off the mark: the question of compromise and unity was on the agenda in a civil war region like Ukraine. The only major contested question that was not immediately relevant for Soviet Russia was the question of parliamentarism. Clearly, bourgeois democratic institutions did not exist in the Soviet regions. However, neither did they exist in several European colonies. Further, in many independent non-European countries, communist organizations were already outlawed from participating in parliamentary elections. Such was the case in Switzerland, where communists faced violent persecution,1235 and in Kemalist Turkey, even though the Kemalist regime received serious financial and military aid from Soviet Russia in its war against the Entente states. Hence, one could argue that even the parliamentary question was not a clear-cut dividing line between the regions where the Soviets held power and the rest of the world. In fact, few who attended the Second Congress paid much attention to what one might call the Russian Question, that is the dire realities in the young Soviet state. Even the left-wing

1233

Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question (London: MacMillan Press, 1999) pp.116-

125 1234

Ibid. pp. 125-134. Mustafa Kemal was disturbed by the loyal opposition of the Turkish Communist Party (TCP). Utilizing the Soviet's defeat in Poland, Kemalists began first a campaign of defamations against the TCP. In January 1921 the Communist party leadership was expelled from the country and 15 leaders of the party including Mustafa Suphi, the head of the party central committee, were massacred on a boat after they were forced to leave Turkey. Even though he Kemalist government did not actually assume the responsibility, this marks the beginning of the first anti-communist witch hunts in Turkey that became systematic and regular. Loren Goldner, Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 83-84. 1235

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delegates refrained from or showed little interest in bringing up questions concerning Russia, however for different reasons: they tended to attribute Lenin’s and ECCI’s conciliatory positions on parliamentarism, trade unions and unity, to their inability to grasp the conditions and realities in western Europe. If the delegates from abroad refrained from engaging in debates related to the situation in the Soviet Russia, the hosts also preferred to remain as silent observers in the debates of the Congress. Apart from the ECCI representatives and the Bolsheviks who presented the party theses (such as Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin and Lenin), few east European delegates actively participated in the proceedings. In sum, the Congress faced a conundrum. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks insisted on generalized international tactics, but to achieve that goal they proposed compromise solutions between the right and the left. The left, however, opted for a complete break with the right-wing, yet advocated it only in the most industrialized heartlands of capitalism (western Europe and North America). Both the defense of international generalized principles and organizational harmony at world level (which Bolsheviks defended) and a full break both in theory and practice with the Social Democracy (which the predominantly left-wing advocated) had been principled LRI positions since 1915. Still, in 1920, these principles were in apparent discordance in the form of a conflict between the so-called “left-communists” and the Bolsheviks (at least those Bolsheviks who represented the party in the Congress). The paradox was the contradiction created by the universal claims of the Comintern and the geographical variation it admitted as necessary to preserve the unity of the organization created a divide. Accepting such a geographical differentiation presented an existential problem for the Comintern. The organization's founding principle was that under the conditions of imperialism, Communist principles had to be internationally homogenized, they had to be valid everywhere. If this internationalist principle was still valid, then the geographical division had to either reflect a lack of clarity which had not been properly understood in theory or only a difference of degree. This made it impossible to find a middle ground—if one tendency was right then the others had to be wrong—a conclusion which neither tendency was ready to admit in 1920. In fact, in 1920, the left and the right wings of Europe were willing to find a compromise and draw Bolsheviks to their side against the other. The Meridian thesis and the geographical divide arguments enabled these respective tendencies to find such a middle ground

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compromise, which paradoxically while retaining the international unity organizationally, made the relevance of internationalism principle theoretically questionable. The conflict between the three tendencies expressed itself most clearly in three main questions: parliaments, trade unions, and the structure of the Comintern sections (parties). Let us now turn to them.

1.

The Parliamentary Question

The debate on the parliamentary question continued for two sessions and was mostly a debate between the Bolsheviks (Bukharin, Lenin, Radek) and the European "left-wing" consisting of Shablin from Bulgaria, Bordiga from Italy, Gallacher and Murphy from Britain, Souchy from Germany, and Herzog from Switzerland. Bukharin presented the ECCIs thesis and Bordiga presented a minority thesis of the opposition. Throughout the debate, the Bolsheviks found themselves in the awkward position of defending “revolutionary parliamentarism.” What made it awkward was that the concept was first used by the Second International before the war, which amounted to rejecting forming government coalitions with bourgeois parties and using the parliamentary forum primarily for propagandistic purposes. Bukharin presented the Bolshevik’s case. He argued that the First World War opened a new epoch, the period of capitalist collapse and civil war, which completely changed the political terrain. In the previous period of capitalist development, political parties enjoyed a certain degree of legal autonomy vis-a-vis the state. Yet in the new period of “state capitalism,” reformist Social Democratic parties became appendages of the state, helping it to organize and suppress the working class in the interests of the “national defense”.1236 Examining the USPD, the SFIO, and the PSI’s positions, Bukharin harshly condemned them for reconciling with this trend by letting rightwing and nationalist Social Democrats to sit in parliamentary seats that belonged to their parties in the name of the working class. Bukharin even said that anti-parliamentarism in principle was much preferable to the existing use of parliaments.1237

1236 1237

Riddell, ed. Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, pp. 422-3. Ibid. p. 426.

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Despite all this, Bukharin still claimed that “we revolutionary Communists say that it is possible to go into the bourgeois parliaments in order to try to break them up from within.” He suggested that the left-wing was anti-parliamentary out of fear of potential repression that it might face if they use the parliamentary arena for radical posturing: “Comrade Bordiga says it is technically impossible... but he must prove that... Try it first - create some scandals; let them arrest you; have a political trial in the grand style. You have done none of that.”1238 If, Bukharin reasoned, the lefts really trusted their parties, they would be able to bar the opportunists from taking up parliamentary seats and they would be able to get Communists like Liebknecht and Hoglund elected. Bordiga replied by maintaining that the question was not about fear or making self-sacrificial heroic gestures in the parliaments. Liebknecht’s and Hoglund’s heroic anti-militaristic gestures in the parliaments during the war were exceptions in a “long series of betrayals by the Social Democrats”. Counterposing bravery or individual heroism was the mirror image Social Democratic timidity as both relied on single individual representatives rather than the masses themselves. Instead, the whole parliamentary field of activity, as a substitute for revolutionary action, had to be abandoned.1239 Bordiga argued that his position was distinct from anarcho-syndicalism because syndicalism rejected all parliamentary political activity in principle. The left-wing, on the other hand, based its position on an analysis of the historic epoch (imperialism or the period of "decay of capitalism"), which as Bukharin himself admitted, turned parliaments into organs of deception in the hands of the dominant classes. This was especially the case for the countries where bourgeois democratic tradition long dominated the parliaments. Bordiga stated: “Great clarity is needed in propaganda; the masses need a clear and simple mode of expression. Starting from Marxist principles, we propose that, in countries where the democratic order has long since developed, the agitation for the dictatorship of the proletariat should be built up on the spreading of the boycott of the elections and of the bourgeois democratic organs. The great importance that is ascribed to electoral activity in practice contains a double danger: on the one hand it gives the impression that is the main activity, and on the other it absorbs all the party’s forces, which paralyses the work of all the other branches of the Party. The social democrats are not the only ones who ascribe a great importance to the elections.”1240

1238

Ibid. p. 429 Ibid. pp.437-9 and pp.434-5. 1240 Ibid. p.435. 1239

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Responding to Bukharin's argument that the Bolsheviks managed to practice revolutionary parliamentarism in Russia before the war, Swiss Herzog argued that this was basically irrelevant. Pre-war Russia could not be perceived as a model, since many LRI positions were clarified during the war, including the basic principles about the necessity for the proletarian seizure of power in the age of imperialism. Rather than the Bolsheviks’ determination, it was the material conditions in Russia that made the development of a reformist-parliamentarian current difficult. In contrast, it was exactly the long enduring tradition of western democracy and republicanism that was responsible for the slow development of the revolution.1241 It should be noted that, even though the Bolsheviks pushed for the acceptance of parliaments as an arena for political struggle, they by no means objected the left-wing’s main analysis. Lenin was even ready to admit the impossibility of utilizing parliaments in bourgeois democratic countries in certain cases. He stated that his main concern was establishing and maintaining contact with the masses and any means that provided this, whether it be parliament or something else, must be utilized by Communists.1242 Eventually, the question was tied to the tempo of the revolution. Bukharin argued in his final remarks that, if the tempo of the revolution was fast enough, then this itself could have been the guarantee against parliamentary corruption. Forming centralized and disciplined parties would be a further guarantee of protecting the security of the parties against degeneration. Bukharin did not explain what would happen if the reverse was the case, that is, if the revolution did not proceed rapidly and smoothly. When the debate ended, the Bukharin resolution carried by an overwhelming majority.1243 Both the left-wing and the center around the Bolsheviks felt confident that they would be able to convince each other on the parliamentary question over time, once futility of the other side's position is shown in practical experience. Since they both defined these as tactical questions, the difference did not seem unbridgeable. Accepting defeat in the Congress, Bordiga stated in his final speech in the session on the parliamentary question that he agreed “with Comrade Bukharin: this question cannot and must not lead to a split in the Marxist movement. If the Communist

1241

Ibid. p.451. Ibid. p.169. 1243 According to Bordiga the Bukharin resolution received 80 votes for and 11 against. The official congress documents states it was adopted by a majority over 7 opposing votes. Ibid. p. 469. 1242

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International decides to take upon itself the creation of communist parliamentarism, we will submit to its decision. We do not believe that this plan will succeed, but we declare that we will do nothing to disrupt this work. I hope that the next congress of the Communist International will not have to debate the results of parliamentary activity but will examine instead victories of the communist revolution in a large number of countries.”1244

2.

Trade Unions

The debate on the trade union question was similar in some ways to that on the parliamentary question. Radek presented the Bolshevik position. Once again, he started by acknowledging that the trade union leadership outside of the Soviet state proved to be integrated into the state by its chauvinistic social peace policy during the war and its pro-Wilsonian peace program at the war’s end. Radek claimed the necessity of such a strategy was proven by the fact that, especially in Germany, masses were still flocking to the trade unions, as the increase in trade union membership showed. Radek claimed any call by the Communists “to leave the old corrupt unions” and form new industrial factory and shop floor organizations (as the KAPD was doing in Germany) was a childish attempt to evade the difficult job of entering and conquering the unions from within.1245 In short, Radek defended the position that the trade unions could and must still be conquered. Radek's position confounded the left-wing delegates, especially from the Anglophone countries. Their puzzlement rapidly turned into anger. As the most ardent defenders of the soviet revolution since 1917, the left-wing in the US and Britain consistently pushed the idea that workers’ councils were the new forms of proletarian struggle organizations which, in contrast to the hegemonic trade unions, united all sections of the working class in mass actions. In their minds, soviets were both organs of struggle and organs of power, overcoming the old Second International

1244

Ibid. p.440. Another left-wing opponent of the Bolshevik position on parliamentarism was Sylvia Pankhurst representing the British left-communists, who were familiar with both with the Dutch and German left radicals and Bordiga's abstentionist communists. However, since she arrived congress relatively late, she could not intervene in the debate on the parliamentary question in the earlier sessions when it was discussed. 1245 Ibid. p. 602.

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distinction between political and economic goals in the actual struggle. In addition, the trade unions especially in the U.S. were organs of a relatively better-off minority section of the working class (or the “labor aristocracy”), since unions deliberately avoided to organize the immigrant, black and unskilled workers. One of the American delegates, John Reed protested Radek's arguments as too abstract and argued that the American internationalist LRI movement developed outside and against the tradition craft unions, but inside the IWW for good reasons. Any attempt at “boring from within” the old trade unions always ended in failure no matter how hard it was tried in the past. The leftists criticized Radek for not understanding western European, and especially British and American, conditions where trade-unions were representative of a “labour aristocracy”1246 completely lost to the revolutionary cause of the world working class. There was a tone of empiricism in the American and British delegates criticisms of traditional trade unionism. They gave examples, delved into specifics, explained their position by an arithmetic that should have revealed the hopelessness of relying on trade unions for a revolutionary struggle. Radek dismissed all these arguments as un-Marxist, ahistorical, and arbitrary. Past failures of conquering the unions and breaking the resistance of skilled, highly paid workers towards radical action were bound to change. He rigidly explained that in the current imperialist epoch, the general crisis of world capitalism would soon make the apolitical trade union reformism impossible, since even the workers whose conditions were relatively better were bound to decline and this would open to doors wide for the communists to conquer the trade unions. The American proIWW radicals, the British shop steward, and syndicalist left-wing delegates attempted to counter this by giving countless concrete examples of how the trade-unions were corrupt and how extraunion organizations were the only means that radical politics could find an expression itself in the working class movement. But all these attempts to disprove the possibility of Radek’s strategy could not challenge Radek’s logic as they lacked a general Marxist analysis of why the trade unions were not organs of working class struggle in the new historical epoch. They remained too

1246

For the minority report on the trade unions and factory committees presented by Fraina see: Ibid. pp. 606-611.

521

empiricist for the taste of continental European Marxists. The Anglo-Americans remained isolated even from the other left-wing delegates, like Bordiga.1247 The American and British delegations, frustrated by their isolation, angrily protested and even threatened to boycott the session because they believed Radek was trying to curb their voice by byzantine maneuvers, mistranslations, and petty intrigues. Despite remaining in the minority and despite lacking an eloquent and experienced Marxist speaker like Bordiga, the left-wing on the trade union question was more insistent and the presence of syndicalists made it more difficult for the center to rely on its voting strength to quell the left's opposition.1248 The Bolsheviks made what could be conceived of as a concession to the left. In the final theses adopted on the trade union movement, the left-wing's criticisms were acknowledged where it was written that “International Social Democracy turned out to be, with exceptions, not a tool of revolutionary proletarian struggle to overthrow capitalism but an organization that serves the bourgeoisie by holding back the proletariat from revolution. For the same reasons, the trade unions in wartime became in most cases part of the bourgeoisie's war apparatus, helping it squeeze as much as possible out of the working class so that war could be waged as vigorously as possible in the interests of capitalist profit.”1249 Yet, the same thesis also stated that the peace time conditions were bound to change the situation: “During the war unions became instruments for influencing the working masses in the interests of the bourgeoisie. Now they are becoming instruments for the

1247

Alfred Rosmer, a French syndicalist delegate in the congress, recounts in his memoirs how Bordiga tried to keep his distance from syndicalists. On his way to Moscow for the Second World Congress, when he stopped in Italy to meet the radicals, he encountered a completely inapproachable Bordiga: "in Milan, I asked for Bordiga whom I imagined to have a position quite close to ours. He was the leader of the abstentionist faction and defended his position brilliantly in his tendency's weekly II Soviet. Contrary to my expectations he was concerned to differentiate himself immediately and clearly from us. With his extraordinary volubility, which in congresses brought shorthand writers to despair, he explained to me that he was not at all in agreement with us, that he considered revolutionary syndicalism to be an erroneous, antiMarxist and hence dangerous theory. I was surprised at this unexpected outburst; at least I now had no further doubts on the position of this group of anti-parliamentarists." Rosmer, Moscow Under Lenin, p. 20. 1248 The British Shop Stewards delegate, Murphy, wrote that “Lenin had an admiration for the IWW as fine and courageous fighters but thought they would pay dearly for their mistaken attitude to politics. I gave him an account of the Shop Stewards Movement and he was alarmed when I told him of our conceptions of the role of a political party. He set himself out to explain the kind of party he though was necessary to lead the workers in the struggle for power and later gave much attention to this question when he met [p130] other shop stewards.” Murphy, New Horizons, p.129. 1249 Riddell, ed. Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, p.626.

522

destruction of capitalism.” The unions still had to be conquered. Beyond this verbal attempt of reconciliation, the theses also made an exception for countries like Britain and the US.1250 This compromise stood in contradiction with the basic Comintern principle shared by both the center around the Bolsheviks and the left-wing, who demanded unitary tactics based on a unitary analysis and synthesis of the general, world-historical situation (and not merely different countries). As it was with the parliamentary question, this it was only a temporary solution to the divergence that emerged in the congress.

3.

Party and Unity

In total, the debates on the parliamentary and trade union questions together took five sessions (sessions 9, 10, 11, 12, 15). In contrast, the organizational question spread to seven sessions (sessions 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 14 and 16) producing intense debates on several abstract and practical issues involving almost all the European delegations. While the center and many on the left considered parliamentary and union questions as tactical, temporary, even experimental decisions open to revision, the question of unity with the mass Social Democratic parties was viewed as a crucial, even an existential one. In these debates, the center was led by Levi, Radek, and though less passionately, by the Bolsheviks and the eastern LRIs.1251 While the left-wing opposed any unification with the Social Democratic organizations in principle, the center, partially in order to soften the left's opposition, put forward certain preconditions for any mass social democratic party requesting unification with the Comintern. The famous Twenty-One Conditions for joining the Comintern was a product of this calculation. In return, the right-wing, attempted to ease the conditions of admission. However, this tripartite debate was extremely tense and difficult for all the parties involved. Even the mere presence of a “right-wing” in the Congress (mainly formed by representatives of the “centrist social democrats", the SFIO, the USPD and the PSI), who were sent to

1250

Ibid. p. 627 and pp. 629-30. This meant, mainly joining the Labour Party in Britain, unification with the French Socialist Party in France and the Independent Socialist Party in Germany. These were not the only parties in question but they were the main ones. 1251

523

negotiate the conditions of entry to the Comintern by their parties, irritated the left-wing delegation more than the Bolsheviks' abrupt defense of parliamentarism or trade unions questions. This leftwing sentiment was especially strong among the French Communists in the Congress as there was no communist party in France at this point and the acceptance of the SFIO as the French Section would mean the melting away of the existing communist groups into this party. In debates on unity, Raymond Lefebvre from the Committee for the Third International argued: “Comrades, at the Strasbourg congress, the Socialist Party decided to make contact with a certain number of Socialist parties so as, in the words of the French Socialist Party majority, to reconstruct the International. One of these visits was to have been to Moscow, to the seat of the Third International, and it was in the course of one of these visits that Comrades Cachin and Frossard, dazzled by the prestige of the Russian revolution, appear to have completely changed their view, abandoning the one they had when they came here. The other day at this very table we heard our comrade Cachin say, 'Reconstruction, what an absurd word.' That is clear and jarring condemnation of an entire past.”1252

After giving several examples of the SFIO leaders previous anti-communist statements, the party's hostility towards the Comintern, and its opposition to the conception of the proletarian dictatorship, Lefebvre argued that: “... it is not strange that the best revolutionary forces turned away from the party in disgust. At congresses, the Third International tendency is always accused of wanting to destroy unity. We, however, responded that we cannot destroy what does not exist—and unity does not exist... The conversion of our comrades Cachin and Frossard is only an individual act. They will return to France and their declarations will be received with ardent attention. But given their long opportunist past and pliable spirit ..., I strongly fear that in steering the party toward the Third International they may well suggest a minimum program that would have the very serious drawback for us in France of being a purely platonic adherence to the Third International, and for you, comrades, the infinitely more serious drawback of allowing the treasonous spirit of the Second International to enter here."1253

Similarly, Guilbeaux argued the presence of the former pro-war and pacifist Social Democrats highlighted a danger of degeneration existing in the new International: 1254 One of the oldest LRI militants, Jacob Herzog, raised similar concerns. Summarizing how Swiss Social Democracy expelled communists within its ranks as early as 1918, he recounted how now certain centrist

1252

Ibid. p.315. Ibid. pp. 319-20. 1254 Ibid p. 331-3. 1253

524

leaders in the party, like Robert Grimm (the old opponent of the Left-Zimmerwald movement from 1915), began moving leftward in 1919. Herzog argued: "There is a considerable danger that a large number and opportunist elements will come into the Communist International, and these elements could easily gain upper hand in it. The danger must be combated very forcefully, and we must apply the same principle to the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland that we employ against the Independents [USPD] and the French Party. Only by screening these elements rigorously can we prevent the seeds of corruption from entering the Communist International and weakening its revolutionary activity among the masses in the years ahead."1255

One of the most penetrating and perceptive criticisms of the center was put forward, once again by Bordiga. Turning the table on the Bolsheviks, Bordiga argued that any attempt to "hasten" the course of history carried with it an almost infantile voluntarism, an under-appreciation of the general historic tendencies of capitalist decline. Therefore, no tactical accommodation, no short cut, no clever plan could hasten the process whereby the masses break with their Social Democratic parties. Hence, putting the demarcation line between "reformists" and "revolutionaries" was misleading, since reformism itself was impossible in the imperialist epoch. The only possible strategy for Communists was to stick to the initial analysis of the Communist International and continue to openly struggle against social democrats which were essentially the left-wing of the state and reject any compromise towards them in order to prepare the proletarian for the revolutionary period.1256 In response, the Bolsheviks pushed the same line of argument that they put forth throughout the Congress in different forms: that the masses were not forming soviets or moving in the same direction with the Communists but instead voting for left-wing Social Democrats in the elections and joining the Social Democratic trade unions. This revealed a historic course, albeit temporarily, that strengthened legal mass organizations of the old, nineteenth century type. Until the tide turns, the Comintern had to flow with it. Moving against the historic course and swimming in the opposite direction that the masses were moving would be an infantile rejection of reality. For the Bolsheviks this did not have to offer a gloomy prospect. On the contrary, Lenin argued, the presence of the Social Democratic leaders in the Congress, who abhorred the Comintern just one year ago, revealed that the masses were moving towards the Comintern, even though

1255

Ibid p. 232-5. Ibid. pp. 329-331.

1256

525

this was still expressed in a confused and contradictory manner. Refusing this would be turning the masses away, just because they were confused. What needed to be done was to lay out a clear set of guidelines for the centrists’ leaders to follow, so that they would be forced to either move in a revolutionary direction, whether they wanted it or not, or to expose themselves as traitors. This organizational solution to a political problem was concretized in the “Twenty-One Conditions” that very specifically defined the procedure of joining the Comintern. In a sense, the so-called "Twenty-One Conditions" was the last major concession that the center tendency in the Congress gave to the left-wing. The left-wing itself made the conditions as hard as possible1257 with the aim of barring the most unreliable Social Democrats from entering the Comintern. The conditions, which were essentially a detailed list of organizational measures, were to constrain, if not expel all the former Social Democratic party leaders. Editors, parliamentarians, party and union bureaucrats all had to submit themselves to strict discipline and be always answerable to the Communist Party’s base. A strict organizational control over the leaders, from below, by the party members, was reinforced by the Comintern oversight from above. Sometimes interpreted as a sign of "authoritarianism," the "Twenty-One Conditions" actually aimed to crush the entrenched power of party elites and bureaucrats that thrived before the First World War as opposed to the party base in the Second International parties. However, as with the other compromise solutions of the Congress, this organizational solution to a fundamental theoretical divergence between the left-wing around the former west European LRIs and the center, mainly around the Bolsheviks and the east European LRIs, proved short-lived. In fact, shorter than anybody at the time may have expected. Most studies of the Comintern’s Second Congress view the Twenty-one Conditions as the key outcome, as the evidence that the Bolsheviks sought to assert their authority. But such was not the case. Rather they sought to restrict right-wing parties from joining the Comintern and grant the LRIs what they thought would be more power to influence the organization. Such was the view in 1920.

1257

Bordiga himself was involved in the process. Ibid. p. 42.

526

D.

Conclusion: The Gradual Tripartite Dissolution of the LRI Movement

What were the practical results of the Comintern's compromise solutions on party, parliamentarism, and union questions after the Second World Congress? First, the parliamentary tactic proved to be a disaster in its first year. As the Congress decided, Communist parties and candidates entered elections in all countries where they were not outlawed. For instance, even in the heart of British radical district, Clydeside, even John Maclean could not get elected; he received fewer votes than the Labour Party candidate.1258 In Austria, where the anti-parliamentary current was strong and only accepted the Comintern decision to enter elections out of a loyalty to the Comintern, the Communist Party did poorly in the election, receiving less than 1% of the votes in the first elections after the war. In Germany itself, where the party expelled the anti-parliamentary opposition in 1919 thereby triggering the whole debate in the International, the KPD only managed to put four candidates into the Reichstag in the June 1920 elections (including Paul Levi and Clara Zetkin). The KPD received merely 2.09% of the total votes. In fact, throughout the inter-war period, the only Communist Parties that could manage to receive even slightly over 10% of the votes in national legislative elections were the Bulgarian, French, and Czechoslovakian parties. The only exception, which came much later, was the German KPD which saw its vote share peak to 16.9% in 1932. In most other countries, however, the Communist share of the votes in parliamentary elections remained generally negligible throughout the inter-war period.1259 In short, entering parliamentary elections with the slogan "down with parliamentarism" did not manage to draw the masses away from the established Social Democratic parties. Similarly, despite what Lenin and Radek expected, Communist parties failed to conquer any major trade union organizations, especially in western Europe and North America. Nor did the growth of the trade unions in western Europe offer any sign of working class radicalization. While

1258

Neil Redfern, Class or Nation: Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars (I.B.Tauris, 2005), p.

55. 1259

Alan de Bromhead, Barry Eichengreen, and Kevin H. O’Rourke, “Political Extremism in the 1920s and 1930s: Do German Lessons Generalize?,” The Journal of Economic History 73, no. 2 (2013), 371– 406.

527

syndicalist trends (like the IWW or the CNT) still represented a major force, they remained opposed to any affiliation to the existing Social Democratic trade unions. In fact, in most cases they were founded upon a split with the existing hegemonic union structures. While the Profintern managed to win over some syndicalists, in the course of 1920s, most syndicalists split from the Comintern because they opposed the Comintern's "Bolshevization" tactics.1260 Failing to conquer the trade unions from within, the Comintern could not solidify its alliance with the syndicalists. The Comintern tactics on unity with the left-wing Social Democratic parties appeared to more successful, at least in the short term, and had more enduring results than its positions on the trade union and parliamentary questions. The British Labour Party refused to admit Communists but this was an exception. Large sections of the major centrist parties in Europe (USPD in Germany, SFIO in France, PSI in Italy) joined the Comintern and these formed the backbones of the new parties or boosted the numbers of the existing ones. Yet, this victory also remained temporary. Over the 1920s, the membership base of the newly found parties through mergers with or splits from centrist parties wildly fluctuated.1261 Worse, the "Twenty-One Conditions" did not guarantee these new parties’ firmness and fidelity to the communist principles.1262 In the Second Congress both the Bolsheviks and the "left-wing" were more or less in agreement that the decisions of the Congress were not invariable rules set in stone; if proven faulty by the practical experience, they were open to change and criticism. Yet, after 1920, the west European and North American left-wing communists found themselves increasingly isolated. It is impossible to summarize here the history of the "left communist" splits from the Comintern. What is certain is that after 1920, most original LRI groupings in Europe which, together with the Bolsheviks helped found the Comintern, began splitting from the organization. As this dissertation argues,

1260

Reiner Tosstorff, “The Syndicalist Encounter with Bolshevism,” Anarchist Studies 17, no. 2 (2009), p.24. 1261 See: Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 20-21. David Kirby, “Zimmerwald and the Origins of the Third International" in International Communism and The Communist International: 1919-1943, ed. Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p.26. 1262 For instance, Braunthal wrote that the conflict ridden French party formed by the majority of the SFIO could hardly manage to reach a consensus over the meaning of the communist theory and quoted an injoke among the French socialists writing, "in the judgement of their [FCP's] own party organ it consisted of 20 percent Jauresim, 10 percent Marxism, 20 percent Leninism, 20 percent Trotskyism and 30 percent confusion". Braunthal, History of the International Vol. 2, p. 195.

528

the Comintern itself was a joint product of Bolsheviks and the some of the currents which later on became left-communists. During the First World War, the LRI movement was too far away from the world revolution, yet they intransigently held onto their principles. After 1917 they perceived the world revolution so close within their reach yet constantly escaping their grasp.

529

XIV. Conclusion

This dissertation argues that the formation of the Communist International in 1919 was the outcome of an immense struggle carried out by small groups of what I have called as “Left Radical Internationalists” throughout the world in the 1910s. What united these LRI groups were their confidence in the international working class, in its capacity to pull humanity out of war, exploitation and national divisions, and create a world communist society. Against overwhelming odds, this small current managed to lead a revolution in Russia and finally form its world organization, the Comintern. However, the defeats and repression it suffered, especially in Germany, which constituted the strategically central heart of the LRI revolutionary strategy, caused great demoralization and confusion. Facing what they hoped was a temporary defeat the LRIs, in 1920 they divided over their future strategy. Some, the left-communist current in Germany and Netherlands, expecting the struggle to spread for decades, braced themselves for a longer period of advances and retreats in the class struggle, during which aimed to preserve the theoretical acquisitions of the movement, namely its defense of mass actions and soviet forms against parliamentarism and trade unionism. Others, especially the Bolsheviks, called for a retreat, even at the expense of certain principles, to gather forces hoping that this could bring about a quicker victory. In the end, the disagreement proved too divisive. After the Second Congress of the Comintern, the original nucleus of the Comintern began to peel off. In Germany and the Netherlands, many who belonged to the core LRI grouping formed Communist Workers Parties. Although these CWPs collaborated with the Comintern until 1922 and 1923, participating in the Comintern Congresses, eventually they completely left the Comintern. Disillusioned, many German and Dutch left-communists in 1930s began to define the Russian Revolution as a “bourgeois revolution” and the Bolsheviks as “bourgeois”. This rift in the original LRI movement obscured the common roots of the Communist International in the international left-radical movement and its common struggle inside the Second International. This dissertation offers an attempt to analyze the origins of the Comintern beyond narrow and nationally defined frameworks or frameworks centered on single individuals. By re-centering the focus of research on the Comintern to its common and international origins inside the Second 530

International, future research can uncover a deeper history that was until now buried under methodological prejudices and unquestioned conventions.

531

Table 6 - Appendix A: Industrial Employment in several European Countries between 1870 and 1914 (in thousands)1263 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

2199 10.8 (1869) Belgium 968 20.04 (1866) Bulgaria

2275

10.2

2881

12.15

3139

12.1

3628

12.69

971

17.59

1103

18.17

1264

18.88

1577

21.24

-

-

-

-

-

-

180

4.14

Denmark 373

20.89

451

22.9

534

24.58

Finland

-

-

48

2.32

-

-

275 11.22 (1901) 95 3.57

297 10.77 (1911) 137 4.65

France

3170 8.32 (1866)

-

-

5394 14.09 (1896)

5844 15.19 (1901)

6931 17.68 (1911)

Germany

-

6253 13.82 (1882) 1264

8091 (1895) 864 4.91

10985 16.91 (1907) 1265 1089 5.65

-

-

1533

7.33

443 8.56 (1881) 4245 14.91 (1881)

-

-

-

-

-

3990 12.28 (1901)

416 9.47 (1911) 4637 13.37 (1911)

-

-

515 11.41 (1889)

607 11.89 (1899)

740 12.63 (1909)

Norway 129 7.09 (1875)

-

-

177 8.84 (1891)

243

245

10.24

Poland

-

-

557

9.34

Austria

-

Hungary 697 4.49 (1869) Ireland 567 10.47 (1871) Italy 3325 12.40 (1871) Netherlands

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

521 (1897)

Portugal -

-

-

-

599

11.83

525

1263

-

10.84

9.58

All calculations are based on the data collected by Mitchell. B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Sta-tistics: Europe, 1750-1993 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 3-11 and pp.145-162. 1264 Relative estimate based on the1880 census data. 1265 Relative estimate based on the 1910 census data.

532

(1911) Romania -

-

-

-

-

-

-

Russia

-

-

-

-

-

-

4650 3.67 (1897)

Spain

898 5.4 (1877)

1116 6.35 (1887)

-

-

1027

5.52

1034

5.18

174

-

263

5.49

413

8.03

565

10.23

-

-

551

18.88

660

28.50

816

21.74

Sweden 127

3.04

Switzer- land UK 5600 (1871)

6175 (1881)

1266

7068 (1891)

(See below for descriptions of numbered columns) 1= Number of Industrial workers in 1870 2= Percentage in the total population in 1870 3= Number of Industrial workers in 1880 4= Percentage in the total population in 1880 5= Number of Industrial workers in 1890 6= Percentage in the total population in 1890 7= Number of Industrial workers in 1900 8= Percentage in the total population in 1900 9= Number of Industrial workers in 1910 10= Percentage in the total population in 1900

1266

Relative estimate based on the 1888 population census.

533

8341 (1901)

-

318 4.39 (1913) -

9473 (1911)

Table 7 Appendix B: Groups and Parties in the Founding (2-6 March 1919) Congress of the

Attendance at the First Congress

Listed in the Official 24 January 1919 Invitation

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

United Party

Yes

Yes

United Party

Yes

Yes

Political position during the war

Internal faction -

PartyGroup Name

Type of Organization

Com-munist International

Spartakusbund

Between Zimmerwald Center

Split after 1917

and Zimmerwald Left The Communist

Zimmerwald

Independent Fac-

Party of Russia

Left

tion before 1914

(Bolshevik) CP of German

pro-Zimmerwald Internal faction -

Austria

Left

Split after 1917

CP of Poland

Zimmerwald

Divided national

Left

party factions fused after 1917

CP of Finland

Formerly Zim-

Split after the Civil

merwald Center.

War in Finland

Zimmerwald Left after the Civil War. The Bulgarian

Between Zim-

Independent Fac-

Social Demo-

merwald Center

tion before 1914

cratic Party

and Zimmerwald

(Tesniyaki)

Left.

The Left-wing of Zimmerwald the Serbian SDP

Center

The Rumanian

Zimmerwald

SDP

Center 534

Dutch CP

Zimmerwald

Independent faction

Yes (without

Left

before 1914

official man-

Yes

date) CP of Ukraine

Zimmerwald

Independent faction

Yes

Yes

Left

before 1914

Norwegian La-

Zimmerwald

United Party

Yes

Yes

bour Party

Left

The Left Swe-

Zimmerwald

Split between 1914-

Yes

Yes

dish Social De-

Left

1917 – formed an Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

United Party

No

Yes

United Party

No

Yes

United Party

No

Yes

mocracy The Communist

independent faction Formed in 1918

Formed after 1917,

Workers Party of

merged with social

Hungary

democrats in 1919

Left Swiss SDs

Zimmerwald

Internal opposition.

Left

Split after 1917

Klassenkampen Journal (Denmark) Socialist Propa-

Zimmerwald left

Independent Fac-

ganda League

tion between 1914-

(left wing forces

1917

of the American SP) Italian Socialist

Zimmerwald

Party

Center

Left forces of the Zimmerwald Portuguese So-

Center

cialist Party Left forces of the Outside ZimSpanish Socialist merwald 535

Party The left socialist

Outside Zim-

Divided Party

Yes (without

of the British So- merwald

official man-

cialist Party*

date)

British SLP

Outside Zim-

Independent Fac-

merwald

tion before 1914

CPs of Latvia,

Zimmerwald

Lithuania and

Left

Yes

No

Yes

Formed in 1918

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Belorussia, Estonia, Latvia Left Groups in

Zimmerwald

External faction

France (Demain)

Left

around journal

The Revolution-

Outside Zim-

United Party

No

Yes

ary elements of

merwald

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes

the Belgian Workers Party IWW and Syndi-

Outside Zim-

Revolutionary Syn-

calists (British,

merwald

dicalist – non-party

British Shop

Outside Zim-

Syndicalist – non-

Stewards

merwald

party

Japanese Social-

Zimmerwald

Independent groups

ists (Group

Left

and journal around

American, Australian and Irish Groups

around

Sen Katayama

Katayama) Socialist Youth

Zimmerwald

Independent Inter-

International

Left

national faction be-

(Munzenberg)

tween 1914-1917 536

Sections of the

Formed in 1918

Formed after 1917

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Central Bureau of Eastern Peoples Chinese Socialist * Workers Party Korean Workers

*

Party International So-

Zimmerwald

International Or-

cialist Commit-

Center until

ganization

tee

1917. Zimmerwald Left after 1917

SOURCES: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/1st-congress/invitation.htm#n03, RGASPI 488-1-12, 13; John Riddell, ed., Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987); Wladislaw Hedeler and Aleksandr Vatlin, eds., Die Weltpartei aus Moskau: Der Gründungskongress der kommunistischen Internationale 1919. Prokoll und neue Dokumente (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008); Branko M Lazitch and Milorad M Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986).

537

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