Revolutionaries in Britain and the struggle against imperialist war, Part 2: the Third International
In the first part of this article, written by a sympathiser of the ICC, we examined the struggle of the revolutionary left in Britain against the first world war, looking firstly at its theoretical understanding of capitalism’s entry into its imperialist phase, and then at the organisational struggle for internationalism inside the main Marxist organisation, the British Socialist Party.
We saw how the struggle for internationalism demanded not only a ruthless fight against the nationalism of the enemy class, but also against the influence of opportunism and centrism inside the working class.
In this part, we return to the organisational struggle in the BSP, and then look at the intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle against the war, which laid the basis for their eventual regroupment in a new, revolutionary International.
The organisational struggle for an internationalist position - the dangers of centrism
The BSP leadership’s first tentative efforts to mobilise the party behind the bourgeoisie’s war effort provoked a swift reaction from the internationalists in the party, who found growing support among the membership. The right was forced to prevent this opposition unifying by avoiding a national conference in 1915; at the six regional conferences held instead, the mass of the party rejected both social chauvinist and revolutionary positions, narrowly adopting an ‘india rubber’ resolution which in fact justified the British war effort. Again the leadership survived by allowing the ‘expression of opinion’, but there was a running battle over the party’s press which continued to present the views of the chauvinists, and in 1916 the arch-jingoist Hyndman and his supporters set up a ‘Socialist National Defence Committee’ which effectively operated as an arm of the government in the party; the organisational struggle turned violent and anti-war militants found themselves being set up for state repression by their own leadership.
A split was clearly inevitable, but the opposition - which included both the left and the centre of the party - still hesitated to take the initiative despite gaining a majority on the executive. Within the opposition, there appeared a more clearly defined centrist current, which resolutely avoided any call for action against the war and restricted itself to calls for peace. The Vanguard group around John Maclean called on the party to choose its camp: either the revolutionary left, or Hyndman and the old International. However, with Maclean’s imprisonment and the closure of the Vanguard in 1916 political leadership of the opposition passed by default to the centrist current, which urged peace and called on the Second International to ‘act’. At the 1916 conference, the Hyndmanites were finally isolated and walked out, but even now they were not excluded, and the debates at the conference clearly revealed the centrist confusions of the majority. Essentially the new BSP leadership deeply feared a British military defeat and did all it could to avoid any action that might jeopardise an allied victory.
Zimmerwald: a first step in the regroupment of the internationalists
After the initial shock of the war and the betrayal of social democracy, the question for revolutionaries was whether the old International could be rebuilt or if a new one was now necessary. In practice, with the old International’s leaders now fully backing their respective imperialisms, its central organ, the ‘International Socialist Bureau’ (ISB), was completely impotent. It was eventually on the initiative of the Italian Socialist Party that a first, unofficial international socialist conference was held at Zimmerwald in September 1915. This brought together some of the most important currents of the revolutionary left, including the Bolsheviks, along with representatives of the pacifist centre. The left’s own draft resolutions and anti-war manifesto, which called for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, were rejected by the majority which restricted itself to a call for peace, but the conference acted as an important moment in the regroupment of revolutionaries against the war, enabling the left to establish itself as an organised fraction which later, following a second conference at Kienthal in April 1916, became the nucleus of the Third International.
The BSP executive platonically greeted Zimmerwald but remained opposed to any move to form a new international organisation in opposition to the ISB, while the centre of the party was hesitant in its support, repeating its demand that the ISB ‘act’. In contrast, John Maclean enthusiastically welcomed the Zimmerwald manifesto as a call for “the class war for social democracy” and denounced the ISB’s efforts to keep the sides apart. His émigré collaborator Peter Petroff, with closer links to the movement abroad, was better placed to analyse the political character of the conference, giving it his support while pointing out that its manifesto stopped short of calling for revolutionary action against the war.
The Socialist Labour Party had also been kept informed of the anti-war movement abroad through émigré contacts and supported Zimmerwald as laying the foundations for a new International, denouncing the pro-war socialists with whom all common action was now impossible: “We are at the parting of the ways. Every day the cleavage between the socialists remaining true to the International and the pro-war socialists is becoming more and more marked...”
Sylvia Pankhurst also gave support to Zimmerwald in her paper the Women’s Dreadnought, which was in the process of evolving towards a revolutionary position on the war; its transition to class politics would be marked by the newspaper changing its name to the Workers’ Dreadnought in 1917.
So from their initial isolation, by late 1915 at least some of the scattered revolutionary forces in Britain had taken their first steps towards regroupment at an international level based on a clear political break with the social chauvinists, but also by differentiating themselves - more or less explicitly - from the pacifist centre.
The need for a clear internationalist perspective for the workers’ struggles
The collapse of the Second International and the definitive betrayal of its opportunist right wing, while disarming the working class and temporarily putting a brake on its struggles, did not constitute a decisive blow, and the genuine euphoria with which thousands of workers greeted the war quickly began to evaporate as the bourgeoisie demanded ever greater sacrifices in the name of the war effort.
As early as February 1915, workers’ struggles re-emerged, when engineering workers on the Clyde struck for higher wages against the advice of their union executive and formed their own unofficial strike committee. Rent strikes also began. In July, 200,000 South Wales miners struck in defiance of the Munitions Act and forced concessions from the government, while in November 1915 transport workers in Dublin paralysed the docks. Unofficial shop stewards’ committees grew up all over country. The introduction of conscription in 1916 provoked further strikes by Clydeside engineering workers, which were only cut short by the wholesale arrest and imprisonment of the strike leaders (including John Maclean). The centre of resistance now moved to England with a strike by engineering workers in Sheffield in November 1916, and in the following March further repressive government measures led to renewed unrest which spread throughout England, eventually involving over 200,000 workers; the largest strike movement of the war.
In the midst of the slaughter, these struggles - which were echoed abroad - began to open up revolutionary opportunities, and despite their initial isolation, those few revolutionaries who had remained faithful to the cause of the proletariat in 1914 now found opportunities to win a hearing in the workers’ struggles. The group around John Maclean was particularly active in the unofficial strike movements on Clydeside; against the prevalent disdain of British socialists for the class’s immediate struggles, Maclean saw every determined struggle of the workers as a preparation for socialism, and the Vanguard group put its efforts into connecting all the different struggles on immediate issues - wages, rent rises, the ‘dilution’ of skilled labour - into a class-wide offensive to end the war, calling on the Clyde workers to adopt the tactic of the political strike along the lines of the pre-war European mass strikes:
“We rest assured that our comrades in the various works will incessantly urge this aspect on their shopmates, and so prepare the ground for the next great counter-move of our class in the raging class warfare - raging more than even during the Great Unrest period of three or four years ago...the only way to fight the class war is by accepting every challenge of the master class and throwing down more challenges ourselves. Every determined fight binds the workers together more and more, and so prepares for the final conflict. Every battle lifts the curtain more and more, and clears the heads of our class to their robbed and enslaved conditions, and so prepares them for the acceptance of our full gospel of socialism, and the full development of the class struggle to the end of establishing socialism.”
The Vanguard group also intervened in Clyde Workers’ Committee - the body set up by the militant shop stewards to co-ordinate their struggle against the Munitions Act - to urge it to organise mass action against the threat of conscription, but was expelled from its meetings after attacking the leadership’s refusal to deal with the issue of the war, which led Maclean to question its ability to respond to the needs of the class struggle, calling on the workers if necessary to ‘take the initiative into their own hands’. Only the revolutionary left around Maclean consistently intervened in the workers’ struggles to call for a class struggle against the war.
The Socialist Labour Party also had a strong presence on Clydeside, where some of its militants played a leading role in the Clyde Workers’ Committee, but it failed to raise the question of the war or to attempt to give the struggles a revolutionary perspective, pandering instead to the syndicalist ideas of the majority and restricting its intervention to a call for nationalisation and workers’ self-management of the munitions industry. From its initial focus on the fight for women’s suffrage, the small group in the East End of London around Sylvia Pankhurst also moved closer to the workers’ struggles to defend their conditions, actively denouncing the imperialist war at mass demonstrations and leading protests to the government against repression and the hunger and misery imposed on the working class.
In this way, despite all their confusions, through active intervention in the growing struggles against the war revolutionaries gained a small but significant hearing for internationalist positions within the working class, and constituted part of an international movement against the war. The outbreak of revolution in Russia in February 1917 - only three years after capitalism had plunged the world into the massacre - spectacularly confirmed the revolutionary perspective of this movement, and when in November 1918 the bourgeoisie was forced to hurriedly declare an armistice in order to be able to deal with the proletarian threat, the SLP rightly observed that: “For the first time in history a great world war had been ended by the action of the workers.” The imperialist war was turned into a civil war.
Conclusions
War and revolution are vital tests for revolutionaries. By supporting national defence in the imperialist war, the right wing of the workers’ movement - including in Britain the Labour Party and the trade union leadership - passed over to the camp of the bourgeoisie. The centre and the left proved by their continued defence of the basic internationalist interests of the working class that they remained within the proletarian camp, but only the left defended the need for a real struggle against the war.
By breaking with the social chauvinists and identifying with the Zimmerwald movement the left had taken the first necessary steps towards the regroupment of revolutionaries at an international level. However, a political struggle against the centre and the influence of centrism within the ranks of the workers’ movement was still an essential condition for the creation of a new party and a new International.
An equally important condition for this was the presence of revolutionaries within the working class, to intervene in the workers’ struggles and give them a revolutionary direction. It was the workers’ own efforts to defend themselves against the attacks on their conditions that laid the ground for a revolutionary struggle against the war and strengthened the left in its struggle against both chauvinism and social pacifism. MH