The Second International
Proletarian internationalism was perhaps best expressed in the resolution sponsored by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg at the Seventh Congress of the Second International at Stuttgart in 1907. This asserted that:
"Wars between capitalist states are, as a rule, the outcome of their competition on the world market, for each state seeks not only to secure its existing markets, but also to conquer new ones. In this, the subjugation of foreign peoples and countries plays a prominent role. These wars result furthermore from the incessant race for armaments by militarism, one of the chief instruments of bourgeois class rule and of the economic and political subjugation of the working class.
"Wars are favored by the national prejudices which are systematically cultivated among civilized peoples in the interest of the ruling classes for the purpose of distracting the proletarian masses from their own class tasks as well as from their duties of international solidarity.
"Wars, therefore, are part of the very nature of capitalism; they will cease only when the capitalist system is abolished or when the enormous sacrifices in men and money required by the advance in military technique and the indignation called forth by armaments, drive the peoples to abolish this system."
The resolution concluded that:
"If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved, supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau, to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.
"In case war should break out anyway, it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule."
In fact, Luxemburg and Lenin had very different interpretations of the national question. Lenin and the Bolsheviks opposed imperialism and chauvinism by advocating a policy of national self-determination, including the right of oppressed nations to secede from Russia. They believed this would help to create the conditions for unity between the workers in both oppressing and oppressed nations. Specifically, Lenin claimed “The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression and it is this content that we unconditionally support." By contrast, Luxemburg broke with the mainstream Polish Socialist Party (PPS) in 1893 on the national question.
Luxemburg argued in that the nature of Russia had changed since Marx’s day. Russia was now fast developing as a major capitalist nation, while the Polish bourgeoisie now had its interests linked to Russian capitalism. This had opened the possibility of a class alliance between the Polish and Russian working class.
In the event the leading party of the Second International, the SPD, voted overwhelmingly in support of Germany's entry into the First World War by approving war credits on 4 August 1914. Many other member parties of the Second International followed suit by supporting national governments and the Second International was dissolved in 1916. Proletarian internationalists characterized the combination of social democracy and nationalism as social chauvinism.
Read more about this topic: Proletarian Internationalism