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From International Socialism, No.42, February/March 1970, pp.35-37.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
History of the International
Julius Braunthal
Nelson, Vol.1, 95s – Vol.2, 126s
It would be nice to be able to give an unqualified welcome to the appearance of an English translation of Julius Braunthal’s massive study of the Internationals. Considered simply as a work of reference, it possesses all the necessary qualifications required to ensure it a place among the standard tomes on the subject. Comprehensively researched and documented, wide ranging in its references, Braunthal’s survey of the struggles, triumphs and disasters of international socialism from the foundation of the IWMA in 1864 to the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 is uniformly readable and informative. Only very rarely does it degenerate into that cataloguing of names, dates and events which so often mars this kind of narrative study. Of particular value to the English reader is its coverage of Central European politics, in which the author, a veteran Austrian socialist, was himself an active participant.
However, this type of work cannot merely be judged in terms of its usefulness for looking up some obscure individual or confirming a dubious date. It must stand or fall by the nature of its contribution to our understanding of socialist internationalism. Judged by this standard, the work is curiously broken-backed – set against one another, these two volumes seem indicative of nothing less than an acute case of political schizophrenia on the part of their author.
The first book, whose core is the history of the Second International up until 1914, is a serious and thoughtful analysis of the weaknesses and dilemmas of Social-Democracy. As it takes us through the great debates or the International – on the mass strike, on revisionism, on colonialism, and above all on war – and locates their relevance to the political strategy of its component parties, we become acutely aware of the essentially self-deceiving character of this ‘internationalism’. For most of its participants, and above all for the German Social-Democrats (SPD), resolutions at the International served mainly as substitutes for action, and the debates vacillated between the incantation of Marxist formulae and an uneasy awareness of the unlikelihood of their translation into practice. Here Braunthal is particularly useful in bringing out the spirit of ritualism and resignation which characterised the debates on the war issue from as early as the 1891 Brussels Congress.
The Second International was like some great religious gathering where – apart from a few zealots like Lenin and Luxemburg – the faithful sought to gain the consolations of their faith on Sundays for the sins they were to commit in the coming week. Braunthal’s characterisation of the process is simple and essentially accurate. The disease of Social-Democracy lay in the gap between its revolutionary rhetoric and its parliamentary practice, a gap which the International served only to obscure by translating Marxism from the realm of national political action into the nebulous world of international conference resolutions. The cancer was long in incubation, and the extent to which it had eaten away the movement’s revolutionary heart was only fully revealed in 1914, when the mass of Social-Democracy bowed down before the seemingly irresistible tide of nationalism; when, within hours, the arch-opponents of imperialist wars were transformed into the most vociferous of social-chauvinists. On August 4, 1914, the monumental façade of the Second International disintegrated into the dust.
The ‘moment of truth’ in 1914 forms the climax of Braunthal’s first volume, and as one turns from this account of the paralysis of reformism to his equally comprehensive study of Internationalism in the era of war and fascism, the reader is forced to check the cover to see if the book is really by the same author. For we are now confronted by nothing less than an apologia for that same reformist Social-Democracy and a sustained attack on Lenin and the Bolsheviks for destroying the unity of the – non-existent – International, thus opening the floodgates to reaction! The shock is so great that, if one is not careful, it is easy to miss the crucial re-definition of categories by which this transformation is accomplished.
In the interval between Volumes 1 and 2, reformism has become ‘Democratic Socialism’ while revolutionary Marxism is transmogrified into Leninist self-deception or Stalinist terrorism. Though Braunthal spares us the professional anti-communist line that commitment to revolution was itself evidence of Lenin’s intercourse with the Powers of Darkness, his own view is hardly more sophisticated. Lenin is presented as some species of mad Marxist social scientist, hell-bent on the demonstration of ‘the hypothesis of revolution’ regardless of cost or consequence. The usual catalogue of crimes – the suppression of internal opposition in Russia, the invasion of Georgia, the 1920 German putsch – are all presented as logical results of testing the hypothesis, with little or no regard to the barbarous conditions of war communism and the life-or-death significance of revolution in the West for the infant Soviet State. Still, for all his distaste for the intransigent and imperious ideologue, Braunthal still regards Lenin as in some sense part of the fold, albeit the black sheep in a flock of otherwise lily-white lambs, and he only gets into his stride with the tale of the butcheries and stupidities of Stalinism.
Here, not content with the standard recitation of the litany of Stalinist demonology – and God knows, one would have thought there was enough already to satisfy the jaded palate of the most dedicated anti-communist! – Braunthal tries to demonstrate that any and every weakness and mistake of the working-class movement in the inter-war years was virtually the sole and direct responsibility of the Comintern. Even the poor old 1924 Labour Government ‘fell victim to an episode in the Communist propaganda campaign’ (2, p.302), which is a somewhat curious way of glossing the Campbell case and the Zinoviev letter.
Braunthal’s detailed analysis of each situation, from the ‘Third Period’ to the Nazi-Soviet pact, is of course by no means as crude as this summary might suggest. However, whatever the rights and wrongs of the argument in any particular historical case, its overall guiding strategy is as clear as it is disingenuous. If the Communists can be convicted of responsibility for the main crimes of the period, then it follows that the Social-Democrats can have only a marginal share of the blame.
Only in the light of this strategy can one understand the otherwise incredible judgment offered by Braunthal on Weimar Germany:
‘The Social-Democrats had often made mistakes, even fatal mistakes. But the heaviest responsibility for the tragedy of German Socialism lay with the Communist International, as no unbiased historical analysis can possibly deny’ (2, p.389).
Luxemburg and Liebknecht must be pleased to know that the split in their skulls was really only a ‘mistake’, albeit a ‘fatal’ one!
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