Revolutionary Socialism - The First World War and Zimmerwald

The First World War and Zimmerwald

However on 4 August 1914 the SPD members of the Reichstag voted for the government’s war budget, while the French and Belgium socialists publicly supported their governments. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, together with a small number of other Marxists opposed to the war, came together in the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915. This conference saw the beginning of the end of the uneasy coexistence of revolutionary socialists and reformist socialists in the Second International. The conference adopted a proposal by Trotsky to avoid an immediate split with the Second International. At first opposed to it, in the end Lenin voted for Trotsky's resolution to avoid a split among anti-war socialists.

In December, 1915 and March, 1916, eighteen Social Democratic representatives, the Haase-Ledebour Group, voted against war credits, and were expelled from the Social Democratic Party. Liebknecht wrote Revolutionary Socialism in Germany in 1916, arguing that this group was not a revolutionary socialist group, despite their refusal to vote for war credits, further defining, in his view, what was meant by a revolutionary socialist.