The last conference before the outbreak of World War I, the Second International’s “Extraordinary International Socialist Congress at Basel” from November 24th to the 25th in 1912, represented an extraordinary event in the history of the class struggle, if not for the entire world. At the congress, delegates of the Second International, which were already gripped in a major theoretical crisis, passed a resolution condemning the outbreak of world war. 

In one line towards the end, the congressmen and women exude with camaraderie and exalt with enthusiasm against the war. “The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.” Later the resolution states: “To the capitalist world of exploitation and mass murder, oppose in this way the proletarian world of peace and fraternity of peoples!”

In its appraisal of Russia the resolution states how “[it] is with great joy that the Congress greets the protest strikes of Russian workers as a guarantee that the proletariat of Russia and of Poland is beginning to recover from the blows dealt it by the czarist counterrevolution.” 

“The Congress sees in this the strongest guarantee against the criminal intrigues of czarism,” the resolution continued. 

Although the document mentions strikes, there is no clear theoretical discussion of the role of the proletariat. Despite mentioning Russian strikes, which certainly were a continuation of those from the past, none of the theoretical lessons of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party or the Bolsheviks, which, as Lenin described later, passed through the “dress rehearsal” of the Russian revolution in 1905, appear to be reflected within the document, even though both Lenin and Trotsky, who played a significant role in the 1905 revolution, had already published major works on the subject. 

In 1905 Lenin, who published Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, sought to elucidate the role of the proletariat as more than merely a conduit for the passage of a bourgeois revolution. He posed the question in the following way: “The outcome of the revolution depends on whether the working class will play the part of a subsidiary to the bourgeoisie, a subsidiary that is powerful in the force of its onslaught against the autocracy but impotent politically, or whether it will play the part of leader of the people’s revolution.” It is, of course, to the latter that Lenin dedicates his work as, and the role of educating the masses to this end is “the concrete task of the Social-Democratic proletariat in a democratic revolution.”

Similarly, Trotsky, who described the results and perspectives of the 1905 revolution, expounded on the class nature of that event and attributed the leading role for a socialist revolution in a backwards country not to the bourgeoisie, which is incapable of an advance beyond democracy, but to the proletariat throughout the world. In his book, which took advantage of the debates on the subject of a revolution in permanence, Trotsky’s understanding of the event led to the theory of “permanent revolution,” a major advance in the the theory of Marxism. 

In his book, Trotsky mentions how the failure of European socialist parties to understand the role of the revolutionary party and theory in response to the breakdown of capitalism present a major danger for the proletariat. In his book, Results and Perspectives, Trotksy wrote:

“The European Socialist Parties, particularly the largest of them, the German Social-Democratic Party, have developed their conservatism in proportion as the great masses have embraced socialism and the more these masses have become organized and disciplined. As a consequence of this, Social Democracy as an organization embodying the political experience of the proletariat may at a certain moment become a direct obstacle to open conflict between the workers and bourgeois reaction. In other words, the propagandist-socialist conservatism of the proletarian parties may at a certain moment hold back the direct struggle of the proletariat for power.”

Trotsky’s clairvoyance in regards to the social composition of European socialism could not have been more far sighted, if not for the time before the Second International’s last pre-war congress than for its eventual development after the October revolution. 

While a more thorough explanation of the Second International’s collapse and the failure of European socialism is a subject unto itself, the Second International’s last prewar congress is nonetheless a significant milestone for a call to end war. It could not have come sooner. 

At the time of the resolution, the leaders of the congress believed that the ruling elite throughout Europe fear revolution over the outbreak of war. The resolution states: “The fear of the ruling class a of a proletarian revolution as a result of a world war has proved to be an essential guarantee of peace.” History provided no such guarantee. 

No less than two years later, the spark that ignited World War I was struck in Sarajevo, Bosnia where Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand—heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire— to death along with his wife, Sophie, on June 28, 1914, causing one of the greatest conflicts yet known to man to spread like a conflagration across the European continent. 

While the resolution lacks a coherent theoretical line, especially in its directives to socialists or their socialist parties in specific nations, the resolution’s condemnation of war is relevant for the 21st century. 

The threat of world war and of a nuclear catastrophe like the one the leaders of the Second International’s last pre-war congress sought to avoid through agitation, looms. The Ukraine war is rapidly engulfing the entire world. While the United States of America, Europe and NATO are playing an indirect role in the war through the supply of equipment, weaponry, or money, the shortage of gas, coal, or oil, as a direct result of the breakdown in diplomatic relations with Russia from the war, is effecting not just eastern Europe or the European Union but the entire world. 

Ukraine’s economy is devastated. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides have already died on European soil for the first time since the outbreak of the great wars. The country’s power grid is operating at half capacity and is near collapse and for the first time in the history of mankind Europe is witnessing the greatest displacement of its people from their native land, Ukraine, since World War II.  It is a catastrophe of immense proportions. It is thus in the spirit of the Second International’s last pre-war congress to call for an end to the Ukraine war now!