It is clear that ‘forever wars’ for imperial plunder can be stopped only by international working class solidarity in action. But how? What can we learn from history? During World War 1, the famous Zimmerwald Conference brought together ostensibly anti-war workers’ parties. The Zimmerwald Left, led by V.I. Lenin, paved the way for the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the launch of the Communist International in 1919. Instead of liberal pacifism, the position of the Z Left was ‘No War but Class War.’
The anti-war gathering, 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 collapse of the Second International. Those participating in this and later conferences at Kienthal and Stockholm are known as the Zimmerwald movement. The Conference began the final unraveling of the unprincipled amalgam within the Second International between revolutionary socialists, known as the “Zimmerwald Left” who supported Vladimir Lenin‘s line, and the 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. However, Lenin opposed the conference majority. He criticized 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.
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 (ISB) 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 forefront. In Stuttgart, the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) suggested employing all possible means to prevent war, including demonstrations, general strikes, and insurrections. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 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 rejected resistance to war as impractical, instead favoring the organizing of political 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 splits in several countries. The International’s wavering on anti-war tactics reflected these political differences. The revisionist right wing 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 leads to militarism. He 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. This 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 and Leon Trotsky similarly argued against the idea of defending one’s own nation.
It is increasingly evident today that a high priority is to unite the anti-capitalist left globally — to forge a worldwide anti-imperialist, anti-war united front.