THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL

x xy ee 4 fn & RP es, 4 Woman Communard Picture courtesy of the Illustrated London News Picture Library 10

THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL

Attempts were made to revive the I.W.M.A. In 1878 an international bureau was founded after a Congress at Ghent but it only resulted in anew Congress in 1881, after which it expired. More significant were efforts made by groups of French Reformist Socialists [Possibilists], from backgrounds unconnected to the I.W.M.A., to start an International based on the trade unions.

Between 1883 and 1889 they called four World (in fact, again, European and American) Congresses to discuss the demand for an eight-hour working day. Stimulated partly by this and partly by opposition to these Congresses’ refusal to admit political parties, the French Marxists counterposed to the 1889 event an International Congress in Paris. It founded a Labour and Socialist International : The Second International. It was able to do so partly because the world’s Labour and Socialist movement had grown stronger since 1876. Recognizable Marxist parties or groups existed in most West and Central European countries (though not, yet, in Ireland) and in the U.S.A and Argentina. In Britain the skilled workers unions with their reformist leaders were being matched, at last, by more radical organizations of the unskilled. In the German Empire in 1890 the Socialist Party won 1,650,000 votes. Though the numbers of Socialists had increased, the divisions between them had been rationalized. The chief ideological division in the new International was now Clearly between Marxism and Anarchism.

Though there were different degrees of enthusiasm in approaches to the programmes of each, this was as yet an academic question when so much of either programme had to be won.

Outside the International there was a third current, equivalent to that of the British skilled unionists in the I.W.M.A., though distinguished from them by its commitment to independent working-class political organization. Closer to Marxism than to Anarchism, it rejected much of what it regarded as the political dogma of each, committing itself only to lead the workers to improve their lot. They often accepted Marxist economics, but so did many Anarchists. Their chief stronghold was not Britain where, in 1889, there was still little mass support for any Socialist organization, but France.

There the Possibilists held more parliamentary seats than the Impossibilist Marxists. Of the other currents in the I.W.M.A, Lassalleans 11

and Proudhonists had their traditions remain an influence within the mainstreams, particularly German and American Marxism (Lassalleism) and Anarchism (Proudhonism - but unadulturated Proudhonism would be revived as an inspiration for French proto-Fascism, which could accepta Socialism opposed to trade unions and women’s rights).

Blanquism survived as a distinct Current in French Socialism but, weary of preparing for a re-run of the Paris Commune, its members found themselves dividing increasingly on Possibilist-Impossibilist lines. What had not changed was Socialism’s Eurocentrism. During the Second International’s quarter-century of life, only three Afro-Asian countries had their workers represented at its Congresses. These were the white proletariat of South Africa, the new industrial proletariat of Japan and, at the end, the workers of Armenia. This fact was not because the other Afro-Asian countries lacked modernity : though less advanced than Japan, they were developing. Increasingly, Eurocentricity reflected a general political problem in the Second International.

In its early years it looked as if the new body’s major crisis would be a repeat of that which had hastened the collapse of the I.W.M.A. Marxists and Anarchists fought a battle for control. This eas expressed in the programmatic issue of ‘political 12 Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) | action’ : recognition of the State so that the organized workers could seize its power. Against this Marxist idea, the Anarchists posed the view that any State was bound the be the workers’ enemy so their class could only be the loser by having dealings with it. At the new International’s Third Congress at Zurich in 1893, the Marxists had a motion passed limiting affiliation to organizations that accepted political action. This was reaffirmed at the Fourth Congress, in London in 1896.

From then on, the Anarchists were outside the Second International.

Their exclusion came at the same timeas another development moved the organization further to the right.

The French Possibilists abandoned their attempts to form an International and affiliated to the Marxist body. The did not mean that they abandoned their politics. In fact, in this year, these were restated by one of their leaders, Alexandre Millerand (1859-1943), as being the aims of gradual reform within the nation state. This emphasized the fact that, even without the Anarchists, the International was far from being an homogeneous Marxist body. Most French Socialists were influenced by Possibilist views. Most British Socialists were similarly inclined.

The comparative seniority of the latter’s working class, which had caused its union leaders’ opportunism in the 1860s and which had since delayed the appearance of its own independent party, was now ensuring that the one party that made the breakthrough into parliament was the Possibilist Independent Labour Party. Of the genuinely mass affiliates, those of what were then the separate colonies of Australia were similar. Only the mass German Social Democratic Party seemed to provide a bastion of Marxist politics and this appearance was itself being challenged. The party was based mainly in the new Empire’s industrial north : the states of Prussia and Saxony. The country was organized federally, with each state maintaining its own electoral laws. In Prussia, the system was loaded to give extra representation to the landlords (junkers) and hardly any to the workers. The southern states had more nearly democratic franchises but were less industrialized so that the party had a weaker base. These two factors made it seem both possible and necessary for the South German Social Democrats to proceed by collaborating with sections of their class opponents. In 1891, those in Wurttemburg voted with the Liberal State Governmentto pass its budget.

In 1894, this practice was accepted by the Party’s National Congress as being justified by local conditions, despite a protest from old Friedrich | Engels. The next year, the South German tendency suffered a setback. The Party Congress defeated its members’ proposal to adopt a land policy aimed at winning small farmers. This defeat was significant, less in itself than in its revelation of forces far more important to advancing reformism than were the south Germans. For the proposal was not defeated only on its merits, though these were few enough. The Party Leader, the Marxist, Bebel, supported it. It was defeated by the vote of officials from the new Social Democratic trade unions, who preferred to allow the small farmers to be proletarianized (and hopefully, members of their trade unions) rather than make a political effort to win them. They were supported in this, and their assumptions rationalized, by the party’s leading theoretician, Karl Kautsky (1854-1938).

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