Death of socialism
Tibor Szamuely
Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International Georges Haupt (OUP £5.00) 1914 is beyond doubt the blackest date of our century, perhaps of many centuries to come. The further it recedes in time the greater the shadow it casts over us. It marks the end of a civilisation that, whatever its shortcomings, however brief its fifty-year span, was the most tranquil and hopeful era in the history of the world since the Age of the Arttonines (if Gibbon is to be believed). It was a world where intelligent men could honestly believe in the unimpeded progress of mankind through peace, science and education to a splendid and fulfilling future. Anyone who proclaims similar faith today is either a fool or a knave.
The most striking feature of that lost world was a genuine feeling of internationalism. Men and ideas travelled freely across frontiers, mingling with each other easily and unaffectedly. People really did think of themselves as Europeans — not in the present-day bastardised sense of belonging to a selfish and artificial "economic community" strung out along the fringe of the Eurasian land-mass, but as members of a common great tradition. Life was not perfect, but there was a sense of security and well-being and confidence in the ability of mankind to avert disaster. Never was there a generation facing a more hopeful future. And all the while, noticed only by a handful, a hellish boil was growing on the body of Europe. It burst in July 1914.
There is a general impression, strongly supported by progressive-minded historians, that the "long Edwardian summer" concerned only the idle rich, that it was all a matter of strawberries-andcream and charmingly innocent young ladies on sunlit Oxford lawns, while out of the sunlight a savagely exploited working class toiled hopelessly away, neither knowing nor caring about the satisfied and confident world of their social betters. This picture may be widely accepted, it may even be backed up by formidable stntisticAl tables and selected excerpts from contemporary memoirs — it still remains untrue. For what was -remarkable about the pre-1914 era was that the working class had at last become a force in the world. It was the great age of international socialism. The Second International spoke in the council chambers of the world with the proud assurance of a body representing the industrial working class of all the developed countries.
The working class, as Marx had taught his disciples, possessed no trace of national feelings; it recognised no country for its own; it stood for the unity of working people regardless of national barriers. Socialism was internationalist by definition, and it was the great influence of the International and of its leaders that helped convince many of the stability of peace and the impossibility of war. The working class would, quite simply, prevent war. They would close down the munitions factories, stop the trains, refuse to deliver the call-up notices. This was believed by many — the International had even been put forward for the Nobel peace prize in 1913, and, though they were disappointed at not getting it, there was every indication that it would be theirs in 1914.
International socialism, together with all the illusions it had fostered, was one of the first and most tragic casualties of war. Within hours the International was exposed — to use a popular phrase of a later Marxist movement — as a paper tiger, and collapsed ignominously.
Professor Haupt's book is devoted to this dramatic episode (though, to be fair to him, he has managed to make it sound dull as ditchwater). It is the expanded text of his introduction, written a few years ago, to a collection of unpublished documents about the International. Expanding a scholarly essay is almost always a mistake: too much padding is put in. True enough, most of the book is taken up by a minute and acutely boring account of the development of the International's line on war. None of it is of any significance.
Professor Haupt writes in the impenetrably cocooned manner of the Marxian scholar. Socialist debates and Marxist manifestoes have an immense intrinsic importance of their own, regardless of whether or not they caused the slightest ripple in the outside world. Thus, the meeting of European socialist leaders in Brussels in October 1912 was "of tremendous importance." On the contrary, it was of no importance whatsoever.
The only interesting section of the book deals with the final grim session of the International Socialist Bureau in Brussels on July 29 and 30, 1914 (the minutes have not been published before). The armies were already on the march, the clouds of rhetoric had disappeared, and suddenly the socialist leaders emerged as a group of bewildered gentlemen without the faintest idea of what to do. Every word spoken on the sixth floor of the Maison du Peuple was a nail in the coffin of international socialism. Only the British and Russian delegates swore that their proletariat would obey the International's instructions down to the last detail. They could afford it, since their influence in their own countries was virtually nil. The Frenchman explained that his working class was unutterably opposed to any war, but if Germany attacked they would have to fight. The German stated that, much as his proletariat loathed all wars, they would defend their country against Russia. The only person who saw things as they really were was old Victor Adler of Austria: his party was quite incapable of any action, he said, and the Bureau should not count on the Austrian proletariat.
Victor Adler was by far the wisest of the lot. Not only did he have no illusions about international proletarian solidarity — in another famous episode (not mentioned by Professor Haupt, who has no time for such levities) he warned Count Berchtold, foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, that war would lead to revolution in Russia, perhaps even in the Habsburg monarchy. To which Berchtold ironically replied: "And who, pray, would lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr Bronstein, sitting over there at the Cafe Central?" Mr Bronstein, as many people know, later acquired a considerable reputation under the name of Trotsky.
The Second International had come to an end, and on August 4 the German Social Democratic Reichstag deputies voted unanimously in support of war credits. Other socialists followed suit. The great illusion was over. After the war the survivors made a half-hearted attempt to revive the Inter national. The Bolsheviks founded their own Third International, while for a time there was even a strange little thing called the 24 International. All in vain. International socialism had been killed stone dead. And socialism without internationalism became just a ghastly caricature of the original noble concept. If it exists at all today it is in the form either of a Hitlero-StalinoBrezhnevian concentration camp, or of the elitist twitterings of fashionable and fatuous colour-supplement wedgerybennery.
One question remains — the only im portant one. Why did the magnificent dream of proletarian internationalism, of any internationalism, dissolve forever at the first rat-tat-tat of the lethal machinegun? Professor Haupt tries to tackle it: he casts a few longing glances at various conspiracy theories, then devotes some pages to general sociological waffle. Given his terms of reference one could hardly expect much better.
The only possible explanation is still that of Winston Churchill in The World Crisis: But there was a strange temper in the air Unsatisfied by material prosperity the nations turned restlessly towards strife internal or external. National passions, unduly exalted in the decline of religion, burned beneath the surface of nearly every land with fierce, if shrouded, fires. Almost one might think the world wished to suffer. Certainly men were everywhere eager to dare.
These are the words not of a scholar or social scientist but of a great leader of men. He may not have known any sociology but he understood all about original sin
Previous page
