isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

CHAPTER VIII
War and the International
THE outbreak of the First World \Var brought to an abrupt end
the golden age of European Liberal capitalism, parliamentarianism,
and reformist socialism which had flourished together in
nearly half a century of peace, interrupted only by minor wars in
the colonies and on the Balkan fringe. Two generations of Europeans
had grown up in the optimistic belief that man had
progressed far enough to secure ascendancy over nature and to
change and perfect his social environment throu,gh argument,
conciliation, and the majority vote. They had also been inclined
to view war as a relic of a barbarous past, to which mankind
would surely not revert. The accumulation of wealth in Europe
as a whole had been so impressive and so rapid that it appeared
to guarantee growing prosperity to all classes of society and to
rule out violent social conflict.
Nowhere were these illusions more deeply seated than in the
Labour movement, especially in the Second lnternationai.
The International had inherited its ideology, its watchwords,
and its symbols from the revolutionary periods of the past
century, from the upheavals of 1848, from the Paris Commune
of 1871, and from the underground struggle of German socialism
against Bismarck. The watchwords and symbols spoke of the
workers' international solidarity and of their irreconcilable class
struggle, culminating in the overthrow of bourgeois government.
The practical work of the Socialist parties had long since ceased
to have much in common with these traditions. Irreconcilable
class struggle had given way to peaceful bargaining and
parliamentary reformism. The more successful these methods,
the closer grew the connexion between the formerly outlawed
Socialist parties and trade unions on the one hand and governments
and associations of employers on the other; and the
more effectively did national interests and viewpoints prevail
over the inherited watchwords of internationalism. Up to
1914 the Socialist parties still managed, on the whole, to
explain and justify their reformist work in customary revolutionary
terms. Their leaders continued to profess Marxism,