Second International

SECOND INTERNATIONAL. Successor to the First International (i.e, the International Workingmen’s Association), the Second International, a federation of mostly European socialist parties and socialistically inclined labor unions, seemed more substantial and less fractured by internal disputes than its short-lived predecessor. Most American socialists, like their European counterparts, considered the German Social Democratic Party as model party, thanks to the German socialists’ growing membership, electoral strength and rigorous internal organization. The International’s generally biannual congresses, invariably held in Europe, offered opportunities for American delegates to meet the famous and to offer their own opinions on international affairs. Only rarely, however, did congress resolutions directly affect the conduct of US socialists at home.

A Marxist-led International Workers’ Congress held in Paris during July, 1889 inaugurated the movement, turning back anarchist efforts to be included. Several of the parties could already boast a rise of socialist parliamentary fortunes, socialist-connected trade union activity, and the consolidation of growing party memberships. Among other noteworthy efforts, the International successfully established May Day (first celebrated in Chicago, in 1886) as the official international workers’ holiday. More generally, it established the idea of socialism as a historic force of great consequence and even respectability, in place of the supposed terroristic threat to society denounced in the mainstream press since 1848. Little noticed by the impressionable Americans, the consolidating Second International also represented a bureaucratic drift into electoral campaigning and institution-building as an accommodation to the apparent stability of capitalism. This drift, culminating in European member parties’ votes for war credits at the outbreak of the European conflict, determined the collapse of the International in 1914.

American socialists could, at first, only view Second International developments from afar. European leaders likewise expressed little enthusiasm for the organized US socialists of the 1990s, that is to say the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). For its part, the financially strapped SLP sent no delegates, allowing itself to be represented by the Germans. Meanwhile, the much desired support of the American Federation of Labor for socialism, urged by Frederick Engels before his death and by Friedrich Sorge, American correspondent of the German Neue Zeit, grew ever further away. Samuel Gompers, who acknowledged his training by First Internationalists, broke with socialist ideas altogether and planted himself squarely in the American two-party tradition. Gompers reinforced his break with socialism by insisting increasingly upon the exclusion of newer immigrants, of women, and of other (e.g., black or Asian) potential competitors to the AFL’s white, male craft workers.

Naturally, then, Second International luminaries warmly greeted the appearance of the Socialist Party, however heterodox its approach to questions such as the private ownership of farms. They still faced the dilemma, however, of two competing American parties, and as in other such cases, sought for years to mediate a merger between the two organizations, each entitled to delegates to any international congress. The effort at merger, pursued with special vigor during the first years of the Industrial Workers of the World, lapsed before 1910.

SLP leader Daniel De Leon had long since become an intractable revolutionary critic of “parliamentarism,” the dependence upon election victories, within the International. However small his own forces, his views coincided with those of Luxemburg, Lenin, and others protesting the “revisionist” trends toward complete reformism, protesting also European socialist apologies for colonialism as beneficial for the colonized, and toward restriction of immigration as unfavorable to organized workers. De Leon’s Flashlights of the Amsterdam Conference (1906), the only substantial document produced by an American on the course of the International, took this critical tack throughout. Yet in the main course of relations, American delegates looked to their more successful European brethren with something bordering on awe, understandably admiring the influence and theoretical sophistication of their betters.

In at least one respect, the International had a pronounced influence in reinforcing a tendency of American socialism. The 1907 Stuttgart conference adopted a resolution encouraging socialists everywhere to “strenuously” agitate for woman suffrage. Viewing this as an official endorsement, socialist women successfully pressed for the devotion of greater party resources to the ongoing struggle for suffrage, and the broadening of party support for an annual Woman’s Day celebration among other special propaganda efforts. Another element in the 1907 resolution, proscribing collaboration of socialists with bourgeois suffrage elements, could not be so carefully followed in the American context, and proved divisive to women’s efforts.

By 1910, the SP’s own Left added its voice to the International when William D. Haywood gained election to the Copenhagen delegation. Victor Berger favored a clause in the resolution presented by the Germans, vetoing the call for a general strike in case of war, while Haywood bitterly (and unsuccessfully) opposed him. Likewise, Haywood took the floor to excoriate the American Federation of Labor and to hail industrial unionism, while Berger and Morris Hillquit defended the labor mainstream. Personal rivalry and factional sparring continued (most notably, over Kate Richards O’Hare’s election to the International Secretariat, to which the SP’s moderate wing adamantly objected) until the outbreak of war rendered the International impotent.

After the war, even Victor Berger opposed US socialist support of a reconvened Second International. A number of the member parties among the neutral nations attempted, during wartime, to reestablish contact, and in 1919 formed a skeletal organization with its first congress the following year. Left socialists launched in 1921 an International Working Union of Socialist Parties, known popularly as the “two and a half” international, in an effort to reunify non-revisionist Socialist and Communist movements. Two years later, the socialist groups merged into the Labor and Socialist International, which drew the interest particularly of European refugees within the badly shrunken SP but lacked the authority to coordinate international opinion even among the amenable parties. It had little effect in the United States and effectively went out of existence in 1940. The revived Socialist International, founded in 1951, has consisted largely of social democratic parties, most prominently and very largely European until recent decades. Badly split over global issues involving colonialism and US foreign policy—especially during the Vietnam War—the SI held on, but only held on, thanks to its member parties’ influence within governing coalitions, or as leading parties in a few nations. With actual industrial production shifting elsewhere, socialist parties faced a dilemma: membership aged, new issues and a new generation seemed to shift away from familiar beliefs and practices.

The Socialist Party of America had maintained membership as one of the few representatives from the continent before the 1980s. When the Socialist Party disintegrated in 1972, Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA) inherited the SI membership alongside other party institutional assets. DSOC (Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee), with contrasting views on the Vietnam War and other subjects, emerged as a potential competitor. Michael Harrington, DSOC chair and already a prestigious figure among international leaders, successfully secured SI membership for his group at the Geneva congress of 1976. Harrington soon became one of the most influential formulators of global programs and perspectives, including support for the Jamaican government of Michael Manley. DSOC used these relations to host several heads of states and thousands of observers for the conference “Eurosocialism in America” in Washington, DC, in 1980.

The Socialist International seemed to thrive. By the middle of the 1970s, two popular and effective leaders took the helm: German Willy Brandt as SI President and Swedish Bernt Carlsson as General Secretary. Over the next decade, the International played a role in helping member parties Spain and Portugal transition back to democracy after decades of fascist rule.

Just as important, the SI extended solidarity with sister parties in and out of exile in countries as distant as Chile, Greece, and South Africa. By the 1980s, social democratic and revolutionary parties such as Nicaragua’s Sandinistas would join, shifting the balance mildly leftward, even as the Israeli affiliate, within ruling coalitions, voted to support settlements in the West Bank, provoking uneasiness among some members. Then, too, the rise of Green parties, especially but not only in Germany, offered non-socialist alternatives to young voters in particular.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, the Socialist International seemed, despite difficulties, to be further consolidating its gains, adding members and observers, especially in the Global South long exploited by the Western nations. The greatest expansion came after the fall of the Soviet bloc. A number of former Communist parties turned “socialist” and a number of other formerly nonaligned left parties joined en mass. Luis Ayala, a Chilean-born diplomat living abroad at the start of his exile, became the General Secretary of the Socialist International in 1989, an office he retains today. His tenure oversaw this expansion but also coincided with the sharp and ultimately devastating rise of neoliberalism.

Despite many hopeful signs, the general decline of democratic, radical dynamism observed so optimistically under the SI Presidency of Brandt from 1976 to 1992, looked increasingly irreversible even or especially within its European heartland. Lacking the threat of Communism, governments and corporations had less need for compromise with blue collar and impoverished populations at home or abroad. Unions were badly diminished when they did not disappear entirely, as manufacturing downsized and moved abroad, a trend sharply accelerated by major “free trade” agreements supported by liberal parties long seen as allies of socialists. “Reform” of government consisted increasingly of rollbacks in social programs and of controls on business practices. Especially devastating for the European parties, newer immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe filled the emerging, lower levels of employment, an underclass largely outside of unionization or social benefits pioneered by socialists.

The notion of a “post-capitalist” future, essential to any vision of gradual transformation, seemed to fade entirely, leaving socialist and labor party leaders in the lamentable status of cooperating with conservatives bent on shrinking the state and offering ever-new inducements to business investments. The catastrophic US invasion of Iraq, the resulting scandals around human rights violations connected with American military actions, not to mention the prospect of accelerating global warming—all were profoundly discouraging to socialist party members and supporters. The rightward turn in many nations and the increased success of nationalist parties among working class populations seemed to leave socialist parties increasingly stranded with a shrinking, older membership. Leftward political turns, toward aggressive socialist positions abandoned for decades, seemed to be followed by regressive rightward turns, as in Britain’s Labour Party. Youthful activists on climate change, racism and other issues turned increasingly to direct action and to other political movements.

The 2015 DSA convention voted, but only narrowly, to stay in the SI. The continued lack of vitality within the SI, as contrasted to DSA’s growing relationships with international left parties and movements outside of the SI, made a departure almost inevitable. DSA withdrew formally from the Socialist International in August, 2017, distancing itself from the adoption of neoliberal policies of member parties. In a remarkable turn of fate, the upsurge of DSA from a few thousand members in 2014 to more than sixty thousand in 2020, rendered it appeared to render it the most dynamic entity in a world of faltering socialist parties. Such a development was unprecedented. Increasingly bereft of their traditional working class basis and unable to secure a place for themselves among the newer, activist Left parties and formations, socialists abroad may now look to the US as a rare example of successful adaptation to twenty-first century conditions. Citing DSA's decision, the Young Democratic Socialists of America left the SI-affiliated International Union of Socialist Youth in 2019.

Braunthal, Julius. History of the International, Volume I, 1864-1919. New York: Praeger, 1967.

History of the International, Volume II, 1914-1943. New York: Praeger, 1967.

History of the International, Volume III, 1943-1968. London. Victor Gollancz, 1980.

De Leon, Daniel. Flashlights on the Amsterdam Conference. New York: New York Labor News Co., 1906.

Trolio, Gerard Di. “Socialist Only in Name,” Jacobin, Dec.28, 2014.

Socialist International Website. https://www.socialistinternational.org