International Socialism: 143 The great schism: socialism and war in 1914

Summary

On 4 August 1914 social democratic deputies in both the German Reichstag and the French Chamber of Deputies voted unanimously for war credits.1 Among those who voted on that day were deputies who had, less than a week earlier, met together under the auspices of the Socialist (Second) International to champion peace. The initial anti-war posturing of these representatives reflected the International’s declared policy as articulated at its Stuttgart conference in 1907 and reiterated at its Basel conference of 1912. This policy included not only the demand that socialists should “exert every effort to prevent” war, but also the requirement that they should “utilise the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule”.2 Despite these unanimously agreed guidelines the French and German deputies were not alone in voting to support their governments’ war efforts in the first week of August. Two days earlier Belgian socialists voted to align themselves with their state in an act that was repeated shortly afterwards by the Labour Party representatives in the British parliament, albeit after the removal of Ramsay MacDonald, the party’s anti-war leader. Meanwhile Austrian and Hungarian socialists who had been denied the opportunity of a vote made up for this by publishing an outpouring of bellicose literature in their press.3 It is not that there was no opposition to this rush to patriotism. In fact, 14 of the 92 German socialist deputies who met in a closed session on 3 August opposed the vote for war credits. However, norms of party discipline meant that these opinions were not expressed on the floor of the Reichstag—and ironically it was one of the 14 anti-war deputies, Hugo Haase, who read out the party’s pro-war statement to the Reichstag. Unfortunately, this suppression of anti-war voices was typical within the International. Discounting the tiny Bulgarian and Serbian organisations, among socialists in the belligerent states the only group with a mass base to stand out against the war was the Russian party.