gained considerable support among the workers. A new party, the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei was organized in 1869 at Eisenach under the leadership of August Bebel (1840–1913) and Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900).
In 1875 the Lassalle and Eisennach parties were united at Gotha to form the Socialist Worker’s party. However, the Gotha Program, which was a compromise between Marxism and Lassalle’s revisionist orientation, was severely criticized by Marx himself. In 1878 Bismarck enacted an emergency law prohibiting socialist meetings and publication, under the pretext of forbidding an environment that could cause an attack on the emperor’s life. The local party organization was dissolved, and many party leaders were forced to emigrate. The crucial issue in the first phase of the International was controversy with the anarchists. In the early 1880s an anarchist association (the Alliance Internationale Ouvriere) came into being; Kropotkin, Malatesta, and Elisee Reclus were included in this group. According to Marx, socialism would restore human individual life in all its fullness, remove political organisms, and thus replace institutionalized oppressive forms of social organization and community with a direct association of individuals.
However, this vision was based on reorganizing civil society in terms of technique and the organization of labor that was already created in the capitalist world rather than on a liquidation of the existing institutional forms. Marx held that the overthrowing of the state and political authority did not mean the destruction of social and industrial organization. The socialization of property would prevent society from degenerating into an apparatus of violence based on injustice and inequality. However, according to anarchists, the aptitude of human beings for friendly cooperation would prevent all injustice, once the institutions of dictatorship and tyranny were liquidated. In opposition to Darwinism, Kropotkin argued for human aid and cooperation, in that the natural inclinations of individuals would ensure the harmony of society. Therefore, the anarchists made attacks on Marxist socialism as a new form of tyranny to replace bourgeois society.198
The last years of the Second International were overwhelmed by the war issue. The question was closely related to nationalism and self-determination. The International had condemned militarism at Brussels in 1891 and at London in 1896. If a war broke out, a large part of the proletariat was to be mobilized and thus fall into the general slaughter. If necessary, they allowed for the possibility of rebellion. However, if the fatherland was attacked, they argued it is the duty of socialists to take part in the defense. The call to strike and rebel was within the reformist policy. The left wing (including Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht) put forward a more radical position: In the case of the outbreak of war, no attempt must be made to stop it; rather the war must be used to overthrow the capitalist system. At the Basel Congress in 1912—while the First Balkan War was breaking out—an antiwar resolution was passed. The delegates dispersed with the slogan “war on war” and in the conviction that the socialist movement was strong enough to prevent the danger of the imperialist war.
The collapse of the International occurred in the face of the 1914 war. German social democrats surrendered to the fatherland’s call to arms. The great majority of socialists in every country of Europe adopted a patriotic attitude in favor of the war policy. The opponents of war were expelled and in April 1917, the Independent German Socialist party (USPD) was formed. Among their membership was Karl Kautski, Hugo Haase (chairman of the SPD since Bebel’s death in 1913), and even revisionists like Eduard Bernstein. In addition, the left wing, which had formed itself into the Spartacus League at the beginning of 1916, joined the USPD.
Although the Swiss Social Democratic Party (SPS) belonged to the First and Second Internationals, the socialist movement in Switzerland underwent a dramatic radicalization at the outbreak of World War I. It was Lenin who exercised the decisive impact on the workers’ movement in Switzerland. On September 5, 1914, Lenin arrived with Nadeshda Krupskaja and her mother in Bern and led a discussion with Robert Grimm on the socialist situation in Switzerland. Lenin was on a campaign to win the young workers for the socialist cause as he did later in Zurich. In February 1916 Lenin and Nadeshda Krupskaja moved from Bern to Zurich and remained there until they returned to Russia in April 1917. Zurich was a great place for Lenin to concentrate on scientific socialist writings in the library there; and in addition, people of a leftist orientation gathered there from all other countries. In Zurich Lenin worked on his book Der Imperialismus als höchstes Stadium des Kapitalismus.199
When the war split the SPS into various fractions, three different groups emerged: the social chauvinists, the left wing of socialists, and the centrists. The social chauvinist group was represented by Gruetliverein, and its direction was under the leadership of people such as Herman Greulich, Paul Pflüger, Gustav Müller, and Johann Sigg. This right wing supported the unconditional defense of the fatherland and Burgfrieden, whereas the left wing struggled against the war and their opponents in Switzerland. Centrists took an opportunistic attitude between the two opposing trends. The left-wing group was represented under the leadership of Münzenberg, Fritz Platten, and people of Revoluzzer. Robert Grimm was one of the most important leaders among leading centrists, who were a majority within the socialist workers’ movement in Switzerland.
Although the SPS officially sent its delegates to the Zimmerwald Conference (September 5 to 8, 1915), some of its representatives, such as Grimm, Platten, and Naine, also freely participated in the conference. The manifesto of Zimmerwald leftists and their resolution Weltkrieg und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie were underwritten by Platten from the Swiss side. Zimmerwald leftists argued that the imperialist war was conditioned by the economic system of capitalism, and the war must be regarded as a necessary result of this economic system. Therefore, Marxism should be further applied and developed toward the stage of late capitalism. Furthermore, the imperialist war must be transformed into a revolutionary civil war through an internationally led class struggle against the bourgeois of all countries. Lenin and Zimmerwald leftists blamed the collapse of the International on treachery and opportunism on the part of the social-democratic leaders. Through this position, Bolshevists and Zimmerwald leftists distanced themselves sharply from all pacifist attempts. In fact, the 1915 Zimmerwald conference paved the way for the foundation of the Third International.
However, a couple months before the Zimerwald conference, a meeting of the Zimmerwald group was held in Bern and Olten. In a meeting of the small Bureau of Zimmerwald union (in winter of 1916) there occurred a sharp contrast between the Grimm-led centrist group and the Bolshevist group. In 1915/16 Zimmerwald leftists in Switzerland penetrated the workers’ movement. In addition, Münzenburg, a director of the Swiss Socialist Youth organization, mentioned that Zimmerwald leftists in the SPS had taken action in close connection with Lenin and his Bolshevik group, with whom they had kept close contact since the fall of 1915.200
According to Münzenberg, the Swiss Socialist Youth followed Lenin’s way to revolution. “After we . . . had known Lenin personally, we gained the firm conviction that he was the right leader, who could point us to the right way to a good revolutionary activity.”201 That the revolution needed an avant-garde fighter was Lenin’s political motto. On the question of revolutionary use of violence, Lenin attacked religious socialists by calling them emotionally tearful social clerics who stood in the way of the working class’s use of violence. Ragaz in turn criticized Leninism as an ideology that led to the necessity of violence. In 1917 the Socialist Youth International published Lenin’s pamphlet Militärprogramm der proletarischen Revolution and Lenin’s Abschiedsbrief an die Schweizer Arbeiter. In opposition to Christian socialists and the centrists of Robert Grimm, who were afraid of using weapons, Lenin said, “the capitalistic society was and is always a shock without end.”202 In spring 1917, the Youth organization deviated from religious socialism by following the socialist theory of Lenin. Zimmerwald leftists gained the first success in the party assembly of November 20 and 21, 1915, in Aarau in the SPS. The resolution of the party
