Second International’s verbal radicalism masked its reformist inaction on the war

Evidence

International socialism was in fact motivated by conflicting impulses and its policy was characterized by ambiguities which socialists at the time preferred to ignore. They found refuge in short-term solutions and compromises, thereby avoiding the issues that would have forced them to take a stand. ‘The International’s total inability to oppose the war’ had its roots in the organization’s many contradictions in the foundations and in the theoretical weaknesses of a preventive strategy that determined the concrete forms of socialist attitudes and policies. Based on the majority’s view of imperialism, on an interpretation which the facts belied, the International’s pacifist strategy was characterized by marked contradictions: an awareness of new stages in the evolution of capitalism; an appreciation of the immediacy of the threat and a basic optimism as to the outcome of the crisis that ignored the possibility of a universal clash. … It is impossible to say whether the leaders of the International were the captives of their own myths or whether their reaction was the classical manifestation of that characteristic trait of the Second International: reformist practice screened behind verbal radicalism. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2221

Categorization

• XREF: Context for why the socialist Left failed Black workers and why the Black radical tradition could not be absorbed into European socialism. — connects to: A US-funded network coordinates free-market activism globally like an ideological International — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 417