Moments of Decision

Political History and the Crises of Radicalism

Stephen Eric Bronner

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623564148
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Radicalismo

In this expanded second edition, the radical classic Moments of Decision has been updated more than 20 years since it was first published and received the Michael Harrington Book Award. Reexamining observations made after the fall of communism, Stephen Eric Bronner blends political meditation, philosophical critique, and history lessons to illuminate the monumental crises that shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. A cosmopolitan work that touches on the implications of conflicts ranging from World War I to the Arab Spring, Moments of Decision explores the assumptions of socialist historiography and the character of modernity. In clear, accessible prose, Bronner has revived and revised a seminal work that is ideal for students, scholars, and anyone interested in political history, theory, and international relations. PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS EDITION: "To guess about the future Bronner has rightly looked into the past, going back to the first world war and the momentous split in the labor movement. His book is a learned, lively and inevitably controversial contribution to the political and historical debates of our age."
- Daniel Singer, THE NATION "Stephen Bronner is a distinctive voice on the American left. He combines a deep understanding of working class political history with a passionate interest in devising a democratic strategy for our time, and is willing to take risks in saying just what that strategy should be. Bronner's analysis is both principled and shrewd, unsparing and hopeful. Even where one disagrees with it, one learns."
- Joel Rogers, University of Wisconsin Law School, Editor, POLITICS AND SOCIETY

1

In the Cradle of Modernity: The Labor Movement and World War I

Certain events divide the old from the new. These are events of such magnitude that their influence becomes more apparent only with the passing of time. World War I was such an event. It brought the festering contradictions of more than half a century to the forefront and forced the workers’ movement to come of age. The fourth of August 1914 culminated a period of imperialist rivalry among nations and marked the date on which social democracy ceased to serve as a symbol of radical opposition among the mainstream of society. On that day, social democracy was forced to act and found itself unable to lead; class consciousness, internationalism, and socialist principle were compromised in favor of political realism, nationalism, and organizational timidity. World War I fundamentally altered the map of Europe and ushered in the twentieth century.¹ Begun without ideals, or even coherent ideas, the “great war” uprooted a generation and ultimately gave rise to a strange mixture of unbridled despair and apocalyptic hope. At the cost of unimaginable devastation, 37 million dead and maimed, four empires crumbled while—just as Karl Marx and many of his disciples had predicted—revolution rose like a phoenix from the ashes of crisis.

Social democracy was complicit in bringing about the apocalypse. But it is often forgotten that neither the war nor the domestic balances of power that brought about this disaster were caused due to social democracy. Deciding on how to respond to the former meant deciding on the latter. The decision to support the war was not the product of Marxism’s underestimation of nationalism or the degeneration of social democracy into (what Lenin termed) a “labor aristocracy” with imperialist tendencies. Lingering questions remain about the alternatives that were available. And such questions are legitimate. In the context, however, structural imbalances of power proved decisive. The collapse of international social democracy in 1914 says less about its ideology than political power, the overwhelming fear of repression, its leadership, and its organizational character. By supporting the war, social democracy necessarily concluded a “truce” with those very classes which viewed the impending conflagration as a way to throttle the revolutionary threat seemingly posed by the socialist labor movement. This “truce” resulted in some short-term gains for socialist parties and unions especially in the democratic nations; but that was not so much the case in the monarchies. The radical image of social democracy remained fixed in the minds of its tactical reactionary and ultra nationalist allies.² The truce was never between real partners committed to shaping the destiny of a nation and the labor movement paid a high price for the decision of its leaders. Never again would social democracy exhibit quite the same sense of self-confidence or enjoy the same degree of trust from its constituency. Indeed, World War I would ultimately shatter the “iron unity” of the working class and explode the old teleological assumptions which tied the crisis of capitalism to the victory of socialism.

Interpretations of international social democracy’s role in the war remain, far too often, spiced with bad faith—especially when it comes to the Second International. The successor to the First International, in which Marx played a leading role and which existed roughly from 1864 to 1872 (finally being formally terminated in 1876), the new organization served as a focus of unity for the mass-based social-democratic parties which were expanding rapidly throughout much of Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Second International lacked the ability to demand compliance with its resolutions on the part of its national members. Their ability to support their nations in 1914 derived precisely from the organization’s principled commitment to pacifism, democracy, and noninterference in the national affairs of member parties.³ The Second International consciously tried to propagate a pacifist sense of internationalism to oppose those classes which were leading Europe into the abyss. The problem was that internationalism was an ideological and a theoretical rather than a practical matter. What was practical, but required little ideological or theoretical justification, was the antimilitarism of the Left. Nevertheless, in the years preceding 1914, its policy contrasted sharply with the mainstream thinking in all the great powers that war was a legitimate instrument of politics and that it was a vehicle for progress insofar as it resulted in the survival of the fittest.⁴

Social democrats were mostly critical of conservative and liberal preoccupations in Germany with Lebensraum (nationalist expansion) and dominating Mitteleuropa (Middle Europe). They were also mostly staunch opponents of the imperialist policies of England and France. There is little to justify claims that social democracy somehow in equal measure shares the blame for bringing about World War I. It was the political leaders of parties based in very different classes, parties that were often unified by little more than their contempt for social democracy, who led Europe into war. Admittedly, social-democratic attitudes had changed since 1912 when pacifist and internationalist demonstrations were carried out to avert turning the Balkan Wars into an even more severe conflagration. In 1914, however, the social-democratic parties of the “great powers” were essentially presented with a fait accompli. Even had they been willing to contest their governments, nowhere did any of them constitute an electoral majority. Instead of passing one pacifist resolution after another over the years, the Second International might have admitted as much and extended to each member party the right to defend itself on condition that it seek to restore peace as soon as possible. Except for possibly mitigating the ideological aftershock from supporting the war, however, such a strategy would have done nothing to change the actual course of events. In fact, the aftershock was not quite as strong as many would care to think. Social democracy not only survived the war but remained the majority party among the working class, while Marxism continued to influence its thinking well into the 1930s and beyond.

This might be somewhat hard to believe given the popular view of social democratic “betrayal.” Many of the labor movement’s most important activists, like Georgi Plekhanov in Russia, Jules Guesde in France, and Heinrich Cunow in Germany, turned from staunch proletarian internationalists into rabid nationalists. But the perceived truth of a teleological doctrine never depends upon a single political act. That is especially the case given that the decision of social democracy to support the war was endorsed by the overwhelming majority of factions within the international working class. Indeed, support or opposition to the war had less to do with commitment to “Marxism” than is usually supposed. Notables in all factions of the progressive camp differed. One-time syndicalists such as Gustave Hervé and Benito Mussolini, along with reformists like Albert Thomas in France and Gustave Noske in Germany, not only supported the war but nursed crudely imperialist ambitions. Gustav Landauer on the far Left adamantly maintained his pacifism and, as the years wore on, some “revisionists” like Kurt Eisner and Eduard Bernstein joined him. To be sure, radicals like Rosa Luxemburg, Klara Zetkin, Trotsky and Lenin championed the militant antiwar movement. Yet many prominent orthodox Marxists, like Karl Kautsky and Viktor Adler, only voted for war credits with the deepest misgivings and changed their views as the war took its toll. Most committed workers knew that the stands taken on the war cut across ideological lines within the Second International.

Various interpretations attempt to explain its failure to oppose the war. Lenin reached the conclusion that the organization was not suited to exercise discipline over its members and, more questionably, that its leadership was a “labor aristocracy” bought off by imperialist profits and greedy for more. This claim was, even then, empirically questionable and ideologically self-serving, it also mirrors conservative claims regarding the teleological foundations of Marxism and its willingness to sacrifice nations and classes in the name of historical “necessity” in order to bring the capitalist era to an end.⁵ Neither view deals with the practical alternatives and constraints that faced the European labor movement. It was not that social democracy was overly nationalistic, but rather that the foreign policy pursued by the various national players undercut its ability to pursue aims consonant with its democratic-humanist commitments. Certain important leaders of German social democracy like August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein were pro-English in their sentiments and—in keeping with Marx and Engels—decidedly anti-Russian. But the Anglo-French and Anglo-Russian ententes made their call for an English alliance seem ever more abstract as 1914 approached. It also left their party without a clear strategic alternative to the foreign policy offered by the Kaiser when it appeared that the enemies of Germany were mobilizing. Even the staunchest admirers of England were wary when it came to English naval power.⁶ Nonetheless, the humanistic and democratic values of the Second International became manifest in the positions it took on the most important events leading up to the war.

This was the case even during the Limoges Congress of 1906, where certain French Marxists opposed the view that the International either could or should prevent the outbreak of war. Jules Guesde and his followers (mostly in the trade unions) argued that war and militarism were the “inevitable” consequence of capitalism and that only its destruction could eradicate them. They opposed the pacifism of reformists like Jean Jaurés and the antiwar stance of Edouard Vaillant (another orthodox Marxist and veteran of the Paris Commune) by insisting that antimilitarist propaganda would divert attention from the most crucial issue, namely, the struggle against capitalism. Even Guesde, however, called upon workers to make war “almost impossible” by struggling to shorten the period of compulsory military service, oppose all financial credits for the armed forces, and institute a national militia. It did not matter. His position was defeated in a vote of the French Party. Pacifism also triumphed at the Stuttgart Congress of 1907, where Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Julius Martov sponsored the most famous of the antiwar resolutions identified with the Second International.⁷

Support for the war by the member parties of the Second International was also justified less on the basis of imperialist ambitions than democratic grounds. German and Austrian social democrats could thus view the war as an assault on the arch-reactionary Russian Czar. Orthodox Marxists in France meanwhile highlighted their Jacobin roots by calling for defense of the Third Republic against the autocratic Kaiser.⁸ This kind of self-justification among pro-war socialists only increased following Imperial Russia’s defeat and America’s entry into the war. It only follows that this same opposition to antidemocratic regimes should have appeared in the condemnation of the Bolshevik Revolution by many orthodox Marxists who had supported their respective nation-states in the bitter struggle.

Of course, there were some who saw the war as a chance to avenge old wrongs, capture still disputed territories, or further imperialist ambitions. But “socialism” had little to do with any of this. In fact, it is those “pragmatic” reformists on the right wing of the labor movement who bear the most responsibility for abandoning socialist principles and surrendering the political independence of their parties to existing regimes. Especially in Germany, these reformists were the most vocal supporters of imperialist politics and economic protectionism within social democracy, who, following the nasty split between the two wings of the radical faction led by Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg in 1910, had come to dominate the party by 1914.⁹ It was they who believed that the war would enable social democracy to cement that “partnership” for which they had always longed. These moderates and careerists exulted at the chance to enter the world of “real politics” and expel Marx from the movement his doctrines had helped to inspire.

But even this skews the argument. It was not social democracy that set the international or the domestic stage on which the terrible drama would unfold. During the weeks following the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife on 28 June 1914, by a Serbian nationalist, as in the decades before, nowhere did socialists exert an influence on foreign policy. Even the Reichstag, it is worth noting, had no knowledge about the diplomatic negotiations taking place between the European Great Powers following the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Leaders of the various parties basically knew little more than what they read in the already censored newspapers.¹⁰ As secret military strategies like the von Schlieffen Plan were being formulated behind the scenes, an intense chauvinist propaganda campaign began with rumors that the enemy had mobilized. Perhaps more than any other event, in fact, the outbreak of the World War I speaks directly to the dangers of secret diplomacy—which both Kant and Marx warned against—as well as to the need for a democratically accountable foreign policy.

This global conflict was actually the culmination of “great power” imperialist policies which were carried on for nearly half a century and ultimately reach back to the defeat of Napoleon.¹¹ Its architects were old school diplomats who had trained under legendary figures of nineteenth-century diplomacy like Andrassy, Bismarck, Cavour, Disraeli, and Gorchakov.¹² Not one of the apprentices was a figure of the first rank; not one was capable of subordinating concern with particular national interests to a general policy designed to mitigate the tendencies toward war.¹³ All of them understood 1914 in terms of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. This 6-month conflict was the last war Europe had experienced and the long peace that ensued was marked by lingering national resentments and an increasingly romantic view of war. Maintaining an unquestioned belief in balance-of-power and raison d’etat, assuming that each nation threatened the liberty of the others, the “great powers” openly practiced imperialism and tacitly considered it their right to intervene in the affairs of smaller states; indeed, more than 9 million square miles were added to the colonial possessions of the great European powers during the 40 years leading up to World War I.¹⁴ Spiced by traditional hatreds, a rigid system of alliances determined by men of another era drew their nations to the brink of war and then back again in a grandiose game of “chicken.” It remains unclear whether the flag followed trade o...