Revolutionaries in Britain and the struggle against imperialist war, Part 1: the First World War
In the series The struggle in Britain against imperialist war
The first duty of revolutionaries in the face of capitalist war is to defend the interests of the whole working class, as expressed in the historic slogan of the workers’ movement: “Workers of the world unite!”
The defence of internationalism for revolutionaries has never been an abstract principle; it is an intensely practical struggle, involving a fight for clarity inside the political organisations of the working class, and more widely through intervention in its defensive struggles, often in difficult conditions of state repression and patriotic frenzy.
This article examines the struggle of the revolutionary left in Britain against the first world war, looking firstly at the development of clarity at the theoretical level about the entry of capitalism into its imperialist phase, and then at the organisational struggle for an active anti-war position inside the main ostensibly Marxist organisation, the British Socialist Party.
This struggle for internationalism demanded not only a ruthless fight against the jingoism and nationalism of the enemy class, but also against all signs of opportunism and centrism within the working class. (The history of the different socialist organisations in Britain and their responses to the First World War are dealt with in more detail in the series on the struggle for the class party in Britain - see WR 237, September 2000).
Understanding the new imperialist epoch
The understanding that capitalism had entered into its imperialist phase was the product of a pre-war political struggle waged by the left - in particular the Bolsheviks, the left-wing in the German Socialist Party and the Dutch Tribunists - against the revisionist theories of Bernstein and others on the right-wing of the Second International, who began to argue that capitalism was in fact capable of overcoming its own inner contradictions and that the struggle for gradual reforms alone could result in a peaceful transformation into socialism.
The left in Britain not only participated in this political struggle as an integral part of European social democracy, but also made its own contribution to the Marxist understanding of the changing conditions for the class struggle in the most advanced capitalist countries; as early as the 1880s William Morris identified the rise of imperialism as a response to capitalism’s increasingly desperate need for new markets:
“...the one thing for which our thrice accursed civilisation craves, as the stifling man for fresh air, is new markets; fresh countries must be conquered by it which are not manufacturing and are producers of raw material, so that ‘civilised’ manufactures can be forced on them. All wars now waged, under whatever pretences, are really wars for the great prizes in the world market.”1
The British left fought vigorously against local variants of revisionism, making an explicit link between the tendencies towards state capitalism at home and imperialism abroad: “Imperialism...is in its essence nothing but the application outside the British Isles of that socio-political principle which, when applied at home, leads to ‘state socialism’. That principle is the organisation and the consolidation by the power of the state of...the interests of the capitalist classes.”2
The Socialist Labour Party in particular developed quite a sophisticated analysis of state capitalism, arguing that even the Liberal government’s welfare measures - despite offering some minimal improvements in the conditions of the working class - were fundamentally “a preliminary measure towards the bureaucratic enslavement of the people.”3 For the SLP, the final outbreak of the imperialist world war and the insatiable demands of the war economy greatly intensified this tendency and confirmed the reactionary consequences of any further support for nationalisation or state control:
“Nationalisation or ‘state socialism’ so far from being a method of working class progress to socialism, has become the very life blood and method of the most militant and aggressive imperialism... State control means the highest form of capitalism, and will create the industrial warfare of whole empires and groups of empires... Thus, along the road of nationalisation or state ownership, instead of meeting socialism, freedom and peace, we find competition intensified, wage slavery, militarism, and, in the distance, the bloodstained fields of future battlefields.”4
Three years of bloodstained battlefields enabled the clearest elements the SLP to conclude that capitalism, like the social systems which preceded it, had now definitely entered into its period of decadence.5 Although this conclusion was coloured by a mechanistic vision of the system’s ‘inevitable’ dissolution, it was still based on the solid Marxist position that the war was essentially the product of capitalism’s historic crisis of overproduction. Echoing Rosa Luxemburg, William Paul of the SLP argued that in order to avert this crisis the capitalist class had been forced to divert the productive forces into waste production - in particular of armaments - and finally to go to war in order to re-divide a saturated world market.6
There was also an understanding amongst the clearest revolutionaries that the war could not solve this crisis and that unless the working class was able to destroy capitalism the perspective would be one of further imperialist bloodbaths. On the revolutionary left wing of the BSP, John Maclean was probably the clearest in drawing the lessons of the economic struggle between capitalist states in the new period to ominously predict a second, even more destructive round of butchery, which threw into question the whole basis of any future struggle for reforms:
“The increased output of commodities…will necessitate larger markets abroad, and hence a larger empire. The same will apply to other capitalist countries. This must develop a more intense economic war than led up to the present war, and so precipitate the world into a bloodier business than we are steeped in just now. The temporary advantage the workers may get in shorter hours and higher wages with higher purchasing power will then be swept away in the destruction of millions of good lives and fabulous masses of wealth.”7
These were vital insights by small minorities of the British working class into the roots of the First World War and its profound significance for the struggle for socialism, which gave strength to the left’s organisational struggle for internationalism.
The organisational struggle for internationalism
In Britain, the earliest and most consistent defender of a revolutionary position against the war was the group around John Maclean and the Glasgow District Council of the British Socialist Party. The BSP led by Hyndman, a notorious pro-imperialist, had declared its wholehearted support for Britain’s entry into the war and called for an allied victory; a position endorsed by representatives of the left and centre in the party.
But even as the BSP was proclaiming its support for King and Country, Maclean and his supporters were carrying out anti-war propaganda at factory gates on Clydeside, where mass meetings of workers passed resolutions calling for an end to the war and sent fraternal greetings to workers of all nations.8 In September 1914, Maclean argued that: “Our first business is to hate the British capitalist system that, with ‘business as usual’, means the continued robbery of the workers... It is our business as socialists to develop ‘class patriotism’, refusing to murder one another for a sordid world capitalism.”9 In the first issue of his own paper the Vanguard - started as a riposte to Hyndman’s pro-war Justice – Maclean set out his belief that the only alternative to war now was revolution: “Nothing but world socialism will do. This monstrous war shows that the day of social pottering or reform is past... We do not think national wars are of benefit to the workers so we shall oppose all national wars as we oppose this one. The only war that is worth fighting is the class war...” 10 Unless this war ended in revolution, further world imperialist wars were inevitable.
Maclean’s clear internationalist tendency, however, co-existed in a party still controlled by a rabidly chauvinist leadership. A determined struggle for the organisation was necessary, in order to exclude those who had betrayed internationalism and to win over the whole party to a revolutionary position against the war.
In the decade before the war, the left wing of the BSP had waged a bitter internal struggle against the growing chauvinism of the party leadership. In particular, the left fought to disassociate the party from Hyndman’s public advocacy of a big navy and to obtain its adherence to the official position of the Second International against war. The left was strongest in East London, and in Scotland where Maclean and the Glasgow branches carried out anti-militarist propaganda. In both areas, émigré Marxists with invaluable experience of the organisational struggles in Russian and East European social democracy played a leading role. The left was successful in gaining representation on the party’s executive, and in late 1912 narrowly won endorsement for its own clear rejection of militarism and imperialism.11 But, in the face of a counter-attack by the right, the opposition revealed a fatal tendency to vacillate; two of its representatives failed to attend the next executive meeting in February 1913, giving the leadership a majority of one in voting to suspend the resolution and to allow the party to decide on the question of maintaining a British Navy. At the 1913 party conference, the centre in the party did all it could to prevent a split on such a ‘non-essential point’, proposing that members should be “free to hold any opinion they like on subjects apart from socialism”! As one delegate bluntly put it: “first and foremost they must have socialist unity.” In the end, the left’s anti-militarist resolution was never voted on and Hyndman, while still airing his ‘strong conviction’ that a very powerful navy was ‘indispensable’ to Britain, agreed to keep quiet for the sake of the party. In a display of phoney unity, a resolution was then adopted, pledging the BSP to oppose the growth of militarism as an integral part of the Second International. For the left this proved a Pyrrhic victory. The right, in danger of losing its grip on the party, had been rescued by centrist conciliation.12 The working class paid heavily for this failure; at the outbreak of the first imperialist world war one of the very few Marxist organisations in Britain - so painfully built up during the preceding period of capitalist prosperity - remained in the hands of a right-wing chauvinist clique which proceeded to offer its enthusiastic support to the slaughter, dragging the whole notion of proletarian internationalism down into the mud with it.
In the second part of this article we will take up the story of this organisational struggle, and look at the intervention of revolutionaries in the revival of class struggle against the war, which laid the basis for regroupment at an international level resulting in the nucleus of a new revolutionary International. MH
Notes
1 Commonweal, 19 February 1887.
2 Theodore Rothstein, Social Democrat, 15 December 1901, p.360.
3 Socialist, October 1913.
4 Socialist, October 1916.
5 William Paul, The State: Its Origin and Function, SLP Press, 1917.
6 See, for example, Socialist, May 1917.
7 John Maclean, The war after the war, Scottish Labour College pamphlet, 1917, reprinted in Nan Milton (Ed.), Op. Cit., p.135.
8 Letter from ‘JM’, Justice, 17 August 1914.
9 Justice, 17 September 1914.
10 Vanguard, October 1915.
11 See ‘Resolution at a meeting of the Executive Committee on 14 December 1912’, BSP Report of the Second Annual Conference, 1913, p.37.
12 BSP Report of the Second Annual Conference, 1913, pp.16-18.