III.

The Second International

In 1889, the centenary of the beginning of the French Revolution, two socialist congresses met in Paris. One of them, Marxist-inspired, inaugurated what came to be known as the Second International. A loose federation of mass parties, the new organization established a coordinating office, the International Socialist Bureau (Brussels), in 1900. The International met nine times at irregular intervals before World War I. At the London Congress of 1896, the anarchists were expelled, leaving the Marxists—above all the German Marxists—in a position of undisputed leadership. The Germans, although they continued to proclaim Marx's revolutionary theories, were now working for reform within Germany's legal framework.

Many French Marxists were taking the same approach. In 1899, the French socialist Alexandre Millerand accepted a post in the nonsocialist cabinet of René Waldeck-Rousseau. In the same year the German socialist leader Eduard Bernstein published his Evolutionary Socialism (trans. 1909), a revision of Marx's teachings that rejected the inevitability of revolution and proposed collaboration with non-Marxist parties to achieve socialist aims. Bernstein's views were opposed by Karl Kautsky, leader of the orthodox German Marxists.

A parallel conflict undermined the International's efforts to prevent a European war. Ideologically committed to peace and internationalism, European socialists could not reconcile themselves to the military defeat of their own nations, within which they constituted recognized subcultures. When World War I broke out in 1914, national allegiances proved to be stronger than class commitments, and most socialists backed the war efforts of their respective governments. This marked the end of the Second International, although efforts to reorganize the group did not end until 1920.