Proletarian Internationalism - First World War

First World War

The hopes of internationalists such as Lenin, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were dashed by the initial enthusiasm for war. Lenin tried to re-establish socialist unity against the war at the Zimmerwald conference but the majority of delegates took a pacifist rather than a revolutionary position.

In prison, Luxemburg deepened her analysis with the Junius Pamphlet of 1915. In this document she specifically rejects the notion of oppressor and oppressed states: "Imperialism is not the creation of one or any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will."

Proletarian internationalists now argued that the alliances of the First World War had proved that socialism and nationalism were incompatible in the imperialist era, that the concept of national self-determination had become outdated, and in particular, that nationalism would prove to be an obstacle to proletarian unity. Anarcho-syndicalism was a further working class political current that characterised the war as imperialist on all sides, finding organisational expression in the Industrial Workers of the World.

The internationalist perspective influenced the revolutionary wave towards the end of the First World War, notably with Russia's withdrawal from the conflict following the Bolshevik revolution and the revolt in Germany beginning in the naval ports of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven that brought the war to an end in November 1918. However, once this revolutionary wave had receded in the early 1920s, proletarian internationalism was no longer mainstream in working class politics.