Second International
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Search complete. 53 mentions across 17 episodes found for "Second International".
Oct 26, 2026
Mike MacnairGUEST
So, yeah, Lunakarski is...
Mike MacnairGUEST
What it is good for, though, I think, is just identifying the continuity between Bolshevism and the centre tendency of the Second International.
Mike MacnairGUEST
Yeah.
Daniel TuttHOST
One of the things that's important for Derek and I in our book is the revisitation of the merger thesis.
Chufi GaleazziNARRATOR
Chapter one.
Chufi GaleazziNARRATOR
The Second International.
Chufi GaleazziNARRATOR
January 1919.
Chufi GaleazziNARRATOR
How infinitely little is the best that we can do, and how infinitely important it is that we should do it.
Chufi GaleazziNARRATOR
These were small things in themselves, but symptomatic.
Chufi GaleazziNARRATOR
So great was the anguish and concern at the time of the Stockholm proposal that a great conservative London newspaper headed one of its daily leaders with the words, Hands off the Socialists.
Chufi GaleazziNARRATOR
Whatever may have been the reason for the government's refusal to allow British workmen to meet the workmen of other lands at Stockholm, whether on account of French pressure, which was said, or through fear of impairing the moral of the soldiers, which was inferred, they withdrew their opposition after the armistice, and in January of 1919 we left for Berne and the Second International.
Chufi GaleazziNARRATOR
I have the most vivid recollection of that first journey to Europe after the war, probably because it was the first.
Sasha GongGUEST
Here is the problem.
Sasha GongGUEST
You see, when the Second International also split between socialists who believed in the parliament system and later Lenin, and even within the...
Sasha GongGUEST
the Russian Workers' Demo Socialist Party, it's Manchurian, Bolshevik, they divided.
Sasha GongGUEST
The difference, to me, the real difference between communism and socialism, the form, is they mocked everybody who doesn't believe them enemies.
Jen Big NastyHOST
The necessity of the workers' dictatorship as the sole means to crush the counter-revolution is becoming understood.
Jen Big NastyHOST
The crisis within the post-war second international since fascism in Germany, is only the expression of this process.
Jen Big NastyHOST
As we enter more and more directly into a period of revolutionary conditions, when the working class movement can only be carried forward by revolutionary methods and under illegal conditions or go under the will of the wisp, lights of so-called democratic socialism, that is of socialism by permission of the bourgeoisie, inevitably goes into eclipse and leave the workers in the bog.
Jen Big NastyHOST
Only the clear light of revolutionary socialism burns stronger than ever and shows the path forward.
Jen Big NastyHOST
the issue becomes more and more clearly, no longer even in appearance, a question of two tendencies, of two paths for the working class struggle.
Jen Big NastyHOST
In the sight of all, the Communist International alone leads the working class struggle.
Jen Big NastyHOST
In this situation, even the Second International is compelled hypocritically to recognize the necessity of revolutionary methods and the error of its past policies.
Jen Big NastyHOST
German Social Democracy, in its latest executive manifesto of January 1934, proclaims the error of its path in 1918.
TomHOST
Now, Lenin had already been preparing some material on this subject while he was in exile in Switzerland.
TomHOST
And this was part of his analysis of the collapse of the Second International after its main sections caved to social chauvinism and they supported their imperialist powers during the outbreak of World War I.
TomHOST
And he had compiled his notes in a blue notebook that he had left behind in Sweden on his way back into Russia in April 1917.
TomHOST
And this subject and his notes were so important to him that he asked Kamenev, one of the other Bolshevik leaders, to publish it in case he happened to be killed by the reaction at that time.
TomHOST
But as we'll see, and as I'm sure you all know, all reformists, including our modern day variants, are at best totally ignorant when it comes to dialectical thinking, or very often actively reject it.
TomHOST
But it's impossible to make sense of the world, of a material world that moves dialectically, if you don't have a real grasp of Marx's philosophy.
TomHOST
So faced with the opportunism, the gross class collaboration of the leaders of the Second International, Lenin had aimed to set the record straight as far as what Marx and Engels actually thought about the state.
TomHOST
So much of the book is in the form of a polemic, where he's arguing against other people and ideas, and there's lengthy quotes to clarify the real differences between genuine Marxism and the opportunists, as they were called, who revised Marxism to strip it of its revolutionary content.
Steve CookGUEST
We've mentioned some of them in passing, haven't we, in terms of those organizations represented at the Unity Convention.
Steve CookGUEST
But I think in order to talk about Labour, rather than talking about 1920 and the Unity Convention, we need to go back a further six years to the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and the fact that sadly, the vast majority of what was then the Second International, rather than upholding the spirit and the politics of proletarian internationalism, caved in to the bourgeois governments of their own respective countries and supported an imperialist war.
Steve CookGUEST
So in 1914, on the eve of that First World War, which was to sweep millions of British workers into the armed forces to kill or be killed by their fellow workers of other lands, there was a profound contradiction, one which remains, in my opinion, within the British Labour movement.
Steve CookGUEST
On the one hand, there were great mass organizations, the trade unions, the TUC, the cooperative movement with all of its manifold societies, the Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party, which, uh, for those of you who don't know about it, was the left social democratic wing of the socialist-- of, of the Labour Party, and it maintained a, an autonomous existence within the Labour Party.
Steve CookGUEST
So here we have socialism without the masses.
Steve CookGUEST
Mass organizations without socialism on one hand, socialism without the masses on the other.
Steve CookGUEST
With the war, all the oft-voted and oft-applauded resolutions against war of the Second International, which I just referred to, were very quickly forgotten.
Steve CookGUEST
The official trade union movement, as, uh, Beatrice and Sidney Webb put it, became part of the social machi-machinery of state.
Shawn GudeGUEST
And it, it's, it's in the US, but it's around the world really.
Shawn GudeGUEST
I mean, this is the time of what they call the Second International.
Shawn GudeGUEST
And so you have these rising, um, European socialist parties too organize the working class, winning political democracy in European countries.
Shawn GudeGUEST
And then, you know, fighting for, um, fighting for socialism, um, as an extension of democracy to the economic sphere.
Brahim RouabahGUEST
So that's as far as the regional and the global sort of you context and in terms now of Western, you know, that's also, it depends how long you want to go back.
Brahim RouabahGUEST
Do we want to talk about the Western left, like the left that condemns the forces that are actually resisting imperialism like Iran and writes letters to the prisoners without knowing who the originators are? Are we talking about the contemporary folks? Are we talking about the French Communist Party that actually never supported the Algerian liberation struggle? Are we talking about the Second International and those kinds of politics in the 20th century? But there is, I think, something even even within sections of the anti-imperialist left.
Brahim RouabahGUEST
So I'm not going to talk about the anti-imperialist left.
Brahim RouabahGUEST
I think that is enough that was said about that.
Jen Big NastyHOST
Fascism in one form or another is not altogether impossible, even in countries like France and England." End quote.
Jen Big NastyHOST
But even as late as 1928, the Second International still clung to its theory of, quote, "The two Europes and of dictatorship," end quote, as only possible in, quote, unquote, "backward countries." Vandervel, chairman of the Second International, declared at its Brussels Congress in 1928, quote, "A great captain of industry recently said to us," quote within a quote, [laughs] "If without ta-taking into account political frontiers, you trace an imaginary line from Kovno to Bilbao, passing through Krakow and Florence, you will find before you two Europes.
Jen Big NastyHOST
The one in which horsepower dominates, the other where it is the living horse, the one where there are parliaments, and the one where there are dictators." End quote.
Jen Big NastyHOST
It is in reality exclusively that the latter economically and politically backward Europe that dictatorships more or less brutal, more or less hypocritical abound, whether veiled or no, by a sham national representation.
Jen Big NastyHOST
End quote.
Jen Big NastyHOST
Three years later, in 1931, the Second International had to admit the incorrectness of this theory, and to report to the Vienna Congress in 1931, the executive declared, quote, "Fascism has overstepped the limits, which but a few years previously appeared to be drawn for it by the development of modern technique.
Jen Big NastyHOST
Whereas it was believed that the time that fascism was confined to those countries, which instead of," you know, quote within a quote, [laughs] uh, "instead of horsepower, the living horse dominates." End quote.
Jen Big NastyHOST
"The fascist danger has now penetrated to countries in which industry was highly developed." End quote.
Luke PickerelHOST
I mentioned how I had gotten at least a superficial lesson on the Russian Revolution and Lenin, but not been taught anything about their work in the parliamentary arena.
Luke PickerelHOST
Why do you think that's the case? Before I turn it on over to you, my suspicion is that in general, the left doesn't talk much about the second international.
Luke PickerelHOST
And, you know, all of this was part of the Second International.
Luke PickerelHOST
But the Second International gets tarred with the renegade Kautsky, and he did renege on previous positions and the votes for war credits in 1914, which, you know, was disastrous.
Luke PickerelHOST
So what do you think explains this lack of investigation? And do you think this sort of general, I don't know if amnesia is the right word, around the Second International is part of it, perhaps? Yeah, the small,
August NimtzGUEST
what, 25-page pamphlet that the Socialist Workers Party published in 1973.
August NimtzGUEST
It was a response, in many ways, to, there was a, I'm trying to remember, the Guardian, a paper of the Progressive Labor Party.
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