Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism: Debates in the Second International, 1900–1910

Praise for Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism

Through this engaging volume, Taber has provided a tremendous resource to the socialist movement and historians of the Second International.

—Eric Blanc, author of Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire, 1892-1917

"Debates in the European congresses of the Second International from 1900 to 1910 might seem a long way from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Yet the Bolsheviks themselves self-identified very strongly as the Russian representatives of ‘revolutionary Social Democracy’ in contrast to international ‘opportunism.’ They insisted that the collapse of the Second International in 1914 was (in Lenin’s words) ‘the collapse of opportunism’—not the collapse of revolutionary Social Democracy. Mike Taber’s invaluable presentation of the clash between the two wings of the Second International on vital issues such as war, colonialism, and women’s suffrage is therefore essential reading for all who seek to understand the outlook of the Bolsheviks and their revolutionary tactics in 1917."

—Lars T. Lih, author of Lenin Rediscovered

These excerpts from the debates at some of the most important congresses of the Second International allow us to see as never before how socialists of the time responded to such crucial issues as supporting anticolonial struggles and women’s rights while opposing militarism and restrictions on immigration—the very issues being so heatedly debated today.

—Peter Hudis, general editor, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg

"This book is a treasure chest for every socialist seeking to understand the history of their movement. Bringing together documents from 1900 to 1910, Mike Taber shows us how socialists more than a century ago analyzed and debated key questions of their time. He also shows us that these are urgent questions for our times: war and militarism; colonialism; immigration; gender rights; and strategies for working-class power. Revolution, Reform, and Opportunism is an invaluable contribution to the history of the socialist movement and Taber does a superb job of illuminating the context of these debates and showing us why they matter today."

—David McNally, author of Blood and Money

Mike Taber offers clear and compelling translations of pivotal debates in the Second International around colonialism, immigration, women’s suffrage, militarism, and political tactics during the first decade of the twentieth century. The debates reflect tensions between some socialists’ racist, nationalist, and misogynistic prejudices and others’ internationalism and desire for the liberation of both working men and working women. The selections in this book illuminate the roots of the 1914 split in the Second International and are relevant to struggles in our time.

—Barbara C. Allen, editor of The Workers’ Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: Documents, 1919-30

Many activists of today face challenges bedeviling socialists a hundred years ago: What should be the relationship between reform and revolution? To what extent should socialists adapt to existing power structures in the quest to ease the impact of multiple crises—and to what extent should they instead redouble their efforts to end the system generating such crises? Mike Taber draws together transcripts of rich and sharp debates from the mass-based Socialist International from 1900 to 1910—a clash of analyses and proposals offering insights to those of our own time who want to change the world.

—Paul Le Blanc, editorial board member, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg

In bringing together the key debates of the Second International in the first decade of the twentieth century, Mike Taber reveals the extraordinary nature of this movement. It is a fascinating and compelling read…Some of the challenges within the Second International are still with us today. This book gives us a chance to reappraise our history and its relevance for today.

—Anne McShane, historian of the Soviet Women’s Movement

"Mike Taber provides yet another illuminating collection of documents, adroitly introduced and carefully compiled. Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism breathes contemporary life into the seemingly timeless clash of revolutionary and reformist sensibilities. Vexing matters such as war and militarism, colonialism and immigration, women’s rights and strategic engagement with bourgeois states remain contentious today. Taber skillfully shows how a mass socialist movement once vigorously debated and disagreed about how to approach these matters."

—Bryan D. Palmer, author of James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938

This book is a must-read. It provides a long overdue wake-up call for the Marxist left, which almost universally dismisses the experience of the Second International as inherently opportunist, with the failures, betrayals, and collapse of August 1914 supposedly written into this body’s DNA. This book underscores just how flawed such an understanding is. The Second International was no monolithic or immutable entity sleepwalking into support for imperialist butchery but a hotbed of factional struggle waged by the forces of ‘revolutionary social democracy’—Russian Bolshevism included—against the opportunist cancer that eventually killed it off. As Taber shows, the leading lights of the revolutionary Marxist tradition never renounced the best aspects of the International’s political legacy but fought for its basic principles to be upheld in the face of the renegade, careerist, and nationalist ‘socialists’ who betrayed them.

—Ben Lewis, founder of Marxism Translated

Over a century ago, socialists wrestled with many of the same questions and conflicts as we do today: how to understand and respond to intra-imperialist war, immigration from capitalism’s periphery to core, colonialism and solidarity with and from the colonized world, women’s rights, and women’s roles in movements for liberation. By including primary source documents as well as speeches from socialists, including Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, Daniel De Leon and others, one feels the presence of live movements being made and remade in the crucible of fiery debate and struggle. Accompanied by Taber’s lucid historical context, this selection of speeches and resolutions from the heyday of early twentieth-century socialism to its fracturing over World War I and reforming during the Bolshevik Revolution is a necessary read both for activists as well as scholars of these early battles against capitalism. Taber has offered twenty-first century socialists, if not a guide to the present, a helpful selection of examples of what earlier generations have exclaimed aloud, as in our world—still riven by war, imperialism, sexism, racism, class exploitation—the struggles and the movements for liberation must find their own answers and paths forward.

—Benjamin Balthaser, author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism and Dedication

Mike Taber has made yet another major contribution—this time by resurrecting some of the earliest socialist debates on crucial issues that continue to challenge us today. This is a fascinating read and a valuable resource for contemporary activists.

—Tom Twiss, author of Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy

The ‘experience of socialists a century ago can provide valuable lessons and examples’ for socialists today because the emergence of the revolutionary trends within the Second International before 1914 anticipated those that arose in the aftermath of the October Revolution, as expressed in the formation of the Third International, writes Mike Taber. Whether Second International debates, in fact, contain invaluable, politically relevant lessons for communist activists today—or are of purely historical interest—is itself a matter of debate. Fortunately, Taber’s documentary collection will help readers decide for themselves.

—John Marot, author of The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History

REFORM,

REVOLUTION,

AND

OPPORTUNISM

DEBATES IN THE SECOND

INTERNATIONAL, 1900–1910

Edited by Mike Taber

Haymarket Books

Chicago, IL

© 2023 Mike Taber

Published in 2023 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

[email protected]

ISBN: 979-8-88890-047-5

Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation, Wallace Action Fund, and Marguerite Casey Foundation.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email [email protected] for more information.

Cover artwork: Colorized photo of Rosa Luxemburg speaking at a public rally in Stuttgart, Germany, held in conjunction with the 1907 congress of the Second International. The original image is from the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), call number BG A40/996.

Cover design by Eric Kerl.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

Contents

Introduction

1. The Debate on Socialist Participation in Government (Millerandism)

Introductory Note on the Millerandism Debate

The Millerandism Debate at the 1900 Paris Congress

Proposed Resolutions

Kautsky Resolution (Adopted)

Guesde-Ferri Resolution

Plenary Debate

The Millerandism Debate at the 1904 Amsterdam Congress

Proposed Resolutions

Dresden-Amsterdam Resolution (Adopted)

Adler-Vandervelde Resolution

Commission Debate

Plenary Debate

2. The Debate on Colonialism

Introductory Note on the Colonialism Debate

The Colonialism Debate at the 1904 Amsterdam Congress

Proposed Resolutions

Dutch Resolution

Plenary Debate

Adopted Resolution

The Colonialism Debate at the 1907 Stuttgart Congress

Proposed Resolutions

Commission Minority Resolution (Adopted by Plenary)

Commission Majority Resolution

Commission Debate

Plenary Debate

3. The Debate on Immigration

Introductory Note on the Immigration Debate

The Immigration Debate at the 1904 Amsterdam Congress

Proposed Resolutions

Commission Majority Resolution

Commission Minority Resolution

Plenary Debate

The Immigration Debate at the 1907 Stuttgart Congress

Proposed Resolutions

Argentine SP Resolution

American SP Resolution

Bund Resolution

Commission Debate

Plenary Debate

Adopted Resolution

4. The Debate on Women’s Suffrage

Introductory Note on the Women’s Suffrage Debate

The Women’s Suffrage Debate at the 1907 Stuttgart Congress

Commission Debate

Plenary Debate

Adopted Resolution

5. The Debate on Militarism and War

Introductory Note on the Militarism and War Debate

The Militarism and War Debate at the 1907 Stuttgart Congress

Proposed Resolutions

Hervé Resolution

Guesde Resolution

Vaillant-Jaurès Resolution

Bebel Resolution

Commission Debate

Adopted Resolution

The Militarism and War Debate at the 1910 Copenhagen Congress

Proposed Resolutions

Social Democratic Party of Germany Report

Independent Labour Party (Britain) Resolution

Social Democratic Federation (Britain) Resolution

Italian SP Resolution

French SP Resolution

Commission Debate

Report to Plenary

Adopted Resolution

Appendix: Lenin on Trends within the Second International

The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart (1907)

The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International (1914)

Glossary

List of Official Congress Proceedings

Notes

Index

Introduction

Why should readers today want to study debates in the Second (Socialist) International from over a century ago? Why should such debates be of interest to political activists in particular?

One reason for the relevance of this material involves the subjects under debate in the present book: war and militarism, women’s rights, immigration, imperialism, and socialist tactics. All remain deeply contested issues and are scenes of ongoing political battle. Studying how an earlier generation of activists confronted these issues can therefore provide insight into socialist principles, tactics, and strategy.

Just as important, however, is the need to study the Second International itself. From 1889 to 1914 that organization, with all its strengths and weaknesses, was an example of a mass socialist movement, embracing the majority of the world’s organized working class. Many thousands today aspire to just such a socialist movement, although their conceptions of it may vary widely.

Serious examination of the Second International, long overdue, is therefore of benefit to activists and scholars alike. My own efforts along these lines are registered in Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International, 1889–1912. Published in 2021 by Haymarket Books, that title collected together in a single volume—for the first time in English—all the resolutions adopted by the Second International’s pre-1914 congresses.

The present book aims to extend that study by featuring excerpts from oral debates at four of these congresses. It is my hope that these two books, taken together, can make an important contribution to assessing the Second International and its legacy.

My aim, above all, is to show the Second International not just as a historical object worthy of study, but as a living movement.

A Revolutionary Working-Class Movement

The modern working-class movement emerged in Europe during the 1840s. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels provided this movement with a political and theoretical foundation, outlined in the Communist Manifesto, with its call of Proletarians of all countries, unite! The movement’s goal was to be the revolutionary transformation of society, carried out by working people.

To advance toward that objective, Marx and Engels worked to promote international working-class organization. In 1847, they joined and became leaders of the Communist League, which had members in a number of European countries. Seventeen years later, in 1864, the two helped establish the International Workingmen’s Association—better known subsequently as the First International—which set out to build a worldwide proletarian movement. Given the primitive state of early working-class organization, the First International had a short lifespan, existing only into the mid-1870s.

The late nineteenth century saw a major increase in the size of the working class in much of Europe and North America, along with the rapid growth of trade unions, socialist political parties, and other forms of proletarian organization. That growth made possible, in 1889, a resumption of the work of the First International on an even larger scale. Although lacking a formal name, the new movement was referred to as the Second International, acknowledging its continuity with the earlier world body. It was formed under the direct guidance of Engels, who, after Marx died in 1883 and until his own death in 1895, was the most widely recognized leader of the world socialist movement, known at the time as Social Democracy.

The Second International was born with an expressly revolutionary aim. A founding resolution declared that the emancipation of labor and humanity cannot occur without the international action of the proletariat—organized in class-based parties—which seizes political power through the expropriation of the capitalist class and the social appropriation of the means of production.

The Socialist International of these years was, as registered in its adopted resolutions, an irreconcilable revolutionary opponent of the capitalist system. While it championed the fight for reforms in the interests of working people—the eight-hour day, state-sponsored insurance and pensions, public education, votes for women, the right to asylum, and many other reform measures—it rejected the idea that capitalism as a system could be reformed. It called for the working class to take political power and expropriate the capitalist owners of the major industries. It insisted that the working class itself was the agent of its own emancipation.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Over the course of the next quarter century, mass working-class parties affiliated to the Second International were built throughout Europe and North America. Many national trade union federations also adhered to it.

Perhaps the Second International’s greatest achievement was to make progress in unifying the international working-class movement under the banner of Marxism. It also helped disseminate and popularize the movement’s strategic aim: the revolutionary overturn of the capitalist ruling class and its replacement by the rule of the proletariat, as a first step toward the establishment of socialism.

The Second International showed the potential power of the organized working class, with tens of millions of members, sympathizers, and voters. Numerous socialist representatives and deputies sat in national parliaments and in regional and local legislative bodies.

Two dates on the calendar today owe their existence to the Second International: May Day, established at the International’s founding congress in 1889 as a show of working-class power and solidarity around the world; and International Women’s Day, created by the Socialist Women’s Movement in 1910 as a worldwide day of action by working women in the fight for full social and political rights.

Along with these strengths and accomplishments, however, there were also important weaknesses that developed within the pre-1914 Second International.

For one thing, even though its resolutions called for the revolutionary replacement of capitalism, the Second International as a whole lacked a clear perspective on the role of revolutionary action in such a transformation. The relationship between reform and revolution became a constant point of friction and debate within its parties.

Another weakness involved the movement’s geographic focus. Despite the fact that the Second International’s reach extended to many countries, it was still predominantly a European and North American movement; in fact, it would never become a truly world organization. The only parties from outside Europe, North America, and Australia that were ever represented at Second International congresses during the 1889–1914 period were from Argentina, Japan, South Africa, and Turkish Armenia. While congress resolutions gave support to various anticolonial struggles, most sections of the movement still had an inadequate appreciation of them.

Similarly, the International’s resolutions often lacked a sufficient assessment of the strategic allies the working class would need in its struggle—from toilers in the colonial world to working farmers and peasants, small shopkeepers, nationally oppressed peoples, and others.

Finally, the Second International came to be characterized by a gap between word and deed, as the day-to-day practice of most of its parties became increasingly dominated by currents with a reformist and nonrevolutionary outlook.

Trends in the Second International

The first open challenges to the Second International’s expressed revolutionary perspective came to public attention in 1899: Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist rejection of Marxism and Alexandre Millerand’s becoming a minister in the capitalist government of France. These are both taken up in the first chapter of this book.

The debate over the perspective and the actions of Bernstein and Millerand was a heated one, involving almost all leaders of the world socialist movement. During the next several years, these two controversies spilled over to other issues as well. In these controversies a revolutionary and class-struggle perspective was counterposed to a class-collaborationist and opporunist one. A centrist middle current also eventually emerged, utilizing Marxist language while giving ground to the reformists in practice.

This division had social causes as well. The workings of imperialism tended to create privileges for a small layer within the working class of the more economically developed capitalist countries. This labor aristocracy became a base for opportunist leaders within Social Democratic parties and for a growing trade union bureaucracy, with a deeply class-collaborationist outlook on many questions.

Nevertheless, the Second International’s unity remained unchallenged throughout this whole period. In the years prior to 1914, even those who would subsequently help create the Communist movement, such as V. I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, never called for a split from the Second International. One reason for this unchallenged unity was that the Second International of the prewar period was not just an international organization of socialists; it was also seen as a sort of world parliament of the working-class movement. Maintaining the existence of this united body was considered by almost all socialists as virtually a matter of principle.

However, that unity came to a sudden end in 1914 with the onset of World War I.

Collapse and Split

In August 1914, the main parties of the Second International renounced past pledges to oppose capitalism’s drive toward war and lined up behind their respective governments’ efforts in World War I, voting for war expenditures and becoming ministers in capitalist governments. With the support of these parties’ leaderships, millions of working people in uniform were sent to their deaths. Such actions were in direct violation of numerous resolutions adopted by international congresses. The Second International itself collapsed entirely, with its main parties supporting different sides in the conflict.

After 1914 the trends within the Second International crystallized into opposing international formations. The majority current gave outright support to the war effort of their countries’ rulers, openly embracing a chauvinist perspective. While the centrist current did not go quite so far and criticized the most blatant aspects of the right-wing majority’s conduct, it nevertheless tended to make excuses for these actions while aiming much of its fire at the left. Finally, the small but growing revolutionary left wing defended socialist internationalism.

The October 1917 revolution in Russia accelerated the international split. The entire working-class movement around the world eventually came down on one side or another: either support for the Bolshevik-led workers’ and peasants’ regime or opposition to revolutionary Russia and support for world capitalism’s efforts to overthrow it.

The social democratic right wing, for its part, formally reconstituted the Second International in 1919. The new version of this body opposed Bolshevik-led Russia as well as the postwar revolutionary upsurge that broke out in numerous countries of Europe and Asia. It became a loose coalition of parties aiming to reform and stabilize world capitalism. As for the centrist forces, in 1921 they created the International Working Union of Socialist Parties—popularly known as the Two-and-a-Half International. That organization had a brief existence, reuniting in 1923 with the Second International, which then relabeled itself the Labor and Socialist International (renamed the Socialist International after World War II).

The reconstituted Second International was far from the revolutionary movement formed in 1889. Rejecting the revolutionary goal adopted at the International’s founding congress, it outlined instead a more modest and nonrevolutionary objective: it is the historic mission of the Labour and Socialist International to defend the international proletariat against exploitation, repression, and violence.¹ For the next century, parties of the Second International shared in the administration of numerous capitalist states. They supported efforts to strengthen capitalism and opposed revolutionary movements around the world, backing numerous imperialist wars against oppressed peoples in Asia and Africa.

Meanwhile, the Third, Communist International (or Comintern) was founded in Moscow in March 1919. Presenting a balance sheet of the old International, V. I. Lenin wrote:

The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism.… The Second International did its share of useful preparatory work in preliminarily organizing the proletarian masses during the long, peaceful period of the most brutal capitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the last third of the nineteenth and the beginning of the