Zimmerwald Conference
The Zimmerwald Conference, held in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, from September 5 to 8, 1915, was the first of three international conferences convened by anti-militarist socialists in response to the outbreak of World War I and the resulting virtual collapse of the Second International. A total of 42 individuals and 11 organizations participated. Those participating in this and later conferences at Kienthal and Stockholm are known as the Zimmerwald movement. The Zimmerwald Conference began the final unraveling of the coalition within the Second International between revolutionary socialists, known as the "Zimmerwald Left" supporting Vladimir Lenin's line, and reformist socialists.
The conference issued a manifesto which denounced the war, blaming it on reactionary capitalist governments, and called for working-class unity and for a peace without annexations or reparations. It also established the International Socialist Commission to work for an end to the hostilities. Lenin opposed the majority, criticizing the adoption of peace as the overriding goal. He instead argued for the fighting to be transformed into socialist revolutions, and for the foundation of a new international, which was realized in the Russian October Revolution of 1917 and in the Comintern, founded 1919.
Background
Socialist discussions on war
When the Second International, the primary international socialist organization before World War I, was founded in 1889, internationalism was one of its central tenets. "The workers have no Fatherland", Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had declared in The Communist Manifesto. Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, in his keynote address at the International's founding congress called upon socialists to be "brothers with a single common enemy private capital, whether it be Prussian, French, or Chinese". Despite this commitment to internationalism and the establishment in 1900 of the International Socialist Bureau based in Brussels to manage the movement's affairs, the International remained but a loose confederation of national organizations, which considered political issues in national terms.The French delegate Edouard Vaillant told the Second International's founding congress that "war, the most tragic product of present economic relations, can only disappear when capitalist production has made way for the emancipation of labor and the international triumph of socialism." Opposition to war became a pillar of its program, but the question of what to do if war broke out would preoccupy socialists throughout the International's history and was the most controversial question discussed among the International's leading figures. Domela Nieuwenhuis from the Netherlands repeatedly suggested calling a general strike and launching an armed uprising if war should break out, but his proposals failed. The Second International did not seriously address the question of how it intended to oppose war until its 1907 congress in Stuttgart, after the 1905–1906 Moroccan Crisis brought the issue to the fore. In Stuttgart, the French Section of the Workers' International suggested employing all possible means to prevent war, including demonstrations, general strikes, and insurrections. The Social Democratic Party of Germany was strongly opposed to any mention of general strikes. As a result, the resolution the congress promulgated was contradictory. It called on workers to "exert every effort to prevent the outbreak of war by means they consider most effective," but eschewed resistance to war as impractical, in favor of organizing opposition. When the 1912 Balkan War threatened to escalate into a wider conflict, the socialists organized a special congress in Basel, not in order to debate, but to protest military escalation. Like the 1907 meeting, it failed to yield any agreement on what tactics to employ in order to prevent war.
The socialist movement was beset by fundamental political disagreements, which led to organizational splits in several countries. The International's wavering on anti-war tactics reflected these political differences. The revisionist right advocated a gradual evolution towards socialism within the framework of the nation-state, defended European colonialism, and supported patriotism. Centrists at times pushed back against these positions, but also supported certain forms of patriotism. The German social democrat August Bebel, for example, was determined "never to abandon a single piece of German soil to the foreigner." The French leader Jean Jaurès criticized Marx and Engels' maxim that the "workers have no Fatherland" as "vain and obscure subtleties" and a "sarcastic negation of history itself." In 1912, Karl Kautsky, one of the chief Marxist theorists, began to push back against the notion that capitalist imperialism necessarily led to militarism and predicted an era of ultra-imperialism in which capitalist cooperation could maintain international peace. The radical left was most decidedly anti-war. It considered war a consequence of imperialism, which became a central concept in the left's analyses. "Imperialism grows in lawlessness and violence, both in aggression against the non-capitalist world and in ever more serious conflicts among the competing capitalist countries. The mere tendency toward imperialism by itself takes forms that make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe", according to Rosa Luxemburg. Vladimir Lenin similarly argued against defending one's nation.
Outbreak of World War I
On June 28, 1914, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, leading to the outbreak of war on July 28. Socialists were surprised by how quickly the issue escalated to war and their reactions were improvised. Most believed that the war would be short and that their respective nations were engaged in self-defense. On August 4, the Reichstag, Germany's parliament, voted for war credits. The socialist delegates unanimously voted for the measures. The policy of supporting the government's war efforts became known as the Burgfriedenspolitik or civil truce. On the same day, socialists also rallied behind the war in France, where socialist acquiescence became known as the union sacrée. The following day, the Parliamentary Labour Party in the United Kingdom voted to support the government in the war. The socialist parties in most belligerent countries eventually supported their country's war effort. Even some on the left of the international socialist movement such as the German Konrad Haenisch, the French Gustave Hervé and Jules Guesde, and the Russian Georgi Plekhanov supported this policy. Socialists in the initially non-belligerent nations generally denounced the war and insisted their governments remain out of it, but several parties collaborated with their governments to give them war-time powers.Socialists' support for the war partly reflected workers' patriotic sentiments. Before hostilities commenced, there were anti-war demonstrations in all major European cities, including a march of 20,000 in Hamburg on July 28. However, when the war began many welcomed it. According to the French labor leader Alphonse Merrheim, anyone resisting the war might have been shot by French workers, rather than the police. By 1914, the European labor movement was in many ways firmly integrated into the capitalist system it opposed. While advocating revolution, in effect socialism mostly carved out a position for workers within capitalist society. Socialist support for governments at war was the result of this evolution. With this support, socialists hoped to solidify their place within the national community. Even if socialists had tried, they may not have been able to stop the war. Large demonstrations alone likely would not have been enough to force governments to stop the war. They did not have majorities in parliaments, had not prepared for mass strikes, and the way the International was organized did not lend itself to quick coordinated action. Rather than oppose the war and risk being suppressed by their governments, most socialists decided to support their governments in the war.
Socialist support for the war was not universal. Many socialists were shocked by their parties' acquiescence to the war. Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin reportedly considered suicide upon hearing the news. Until August 20, the Romanian socialist press chose to disbelieve reports that the SPD intended to support the German war effort. While most of the right and the center of the socialist movement supported their governments in the war and most of the left was opposed, socialists' responses to the new situation did not neatly follow a left–right split. In Germany, fourteen of the ninety-two socialist Reichstag members were opposed to voting in favor of war credits in the parliamentary fraction's internal caucus, but they bowed to party discipline to make the vote unanimous. Among the fourteen was Hugo Haase, the party co-chairman who announced the socialists' support to the Reichstag. In December 1914, the left-winger Karl Liebknecht flouted party discipline by casting a lone vote against war credits. He became the most prominent socialist opponent of the war in Europe. The left including Liebknecht and Luxemburg formed the International Group which criticized the war and the socialist leadership's support. Fearing that the left would gain support, anti-war centrists including Kautsky and Haase also began to promote peace. In France, the opposition to the war and the union sacrée began to rally in the fall of 1914. The Federation of Metal Workers and its leader Merrheim were at the forefront of the opposition to the war. At the August 1915 national conference of the General Confederation of Labor an anti-war resolution introduced by Merrheim and Albert Bourderon was voted down seventy-nine to twenty-six. There was also an opposition in the SFIO. Overall, the French opposition remained cautious. The Italian Socialist Party was an exception in Europe in that it was as a whole opposed to the war, although a minoritarian pro-war faction led by Benito Mussolini advocated intervention on behalf of the Allies, but he was expelled from the party. Throughout Europe, the socialist opposition to the war was initially weak and fragmented into moderates and revolutionaries. It was hindered by censorship and restrictions on movement and communication that resulted from the war. The progression of the war, popular war fatigue, and the material hardships caused by the war all contributed to the growth of this opposition.
The split in the socialist movement was not just a result of the war, but of the incompatibility between different versions of Marxism that co-existed within the Second International. As the German socialist Philipp Scheidemann later stated: "The war gave rise to a schism within the party, but I believe it would eventually have come to pass even without the war." The war made continuing the Second International's activities impossible. The SFIO and the Belgian Labor Party refused to engage with socialists from the Central Powers and the ISB was paralyzed. Socialists who opposed the war drew a variety of conclusions from what they considered the International's failure. Most felt that pre-war socialism could be revived. P.J. Troelstra from the Netherlands held that the Second International had only been too weak to stop the war and was still alive. Others held that the failure was complete. Luxemburg stated that "everything is lost, all that remains is our honour". Leon Trotsky called the Second International a "rigid shell" from which socialism must be liberated. Lenin denounced it as a "stinking corpse" and, at a Bolshevik conference in Berne in early 1915, called for the formation of a Third International.