The Second International in France: Millerand and the crisis of Marxism
Jack Wagner
Platypus Review 175 | April 2025
On September 12, 2024, Platypus Affiliated Society member Jack Wagner gave a teach-in at Georgetown University on the Second International in France. A revised version of the teach-in follows.[1]
“Millerandism in France—the biggest experiment in applying revisionist political tactics on a wide, a really national scale—has provided a practical appraisal of revisionism that will never be forgotten by the proletariat all over the world.”
— V.I. Lenin, “Marxism and Revisionism” (1908)[2]
THE TRIUMPH OF the Right-wing Rassemblement National[3] (RN) in the recent 2024 EU elections and Emmanuel Macron’s subsequent call for snap elections prompted the formation of a coalition of center-and-far-Left parties that vowed to save French democracy from the imminent threat of fascism. This coalition, calling itself a Nouveau Front Populaire[4] (NFP), was initially celebrated as a resounding success for its strong electoral performance, thanks to which it gained a plurality of seats in the National Assembly, and its revitalization of the French Left in the wake of NUPES’s crackup in 2022.[5] However, the initial wave of triumphalism quickly gave way to outrage and disillusionment after Macron refused to appoint as prime minister the NFP’s preferred candidate, Lucie Castets, instead picking Michel Barnier of the center-Right party, Les Republicans.[6] Predictably, Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of La France Insoumise,[7] claimed that “the election was stolen from the French people,”[8] while Socialist Party[9] leader Oliver Faure characterized Macron’s decision as a “democratic denial.”[10] Ironically, Barnier’s ability to govern now rests in the hands of RN, who have vowed to support his prime ministership so long as he accedes to their policy demands.
The NFP explicitly recalls the antifascism of the 1930s Popular Front. The former’s electoral success provoked Leftists internationally to openly embrace the Popular Front as a model for emancipatory politics in the present. For example, in a Jacobin article written shortly after the elections, contributing editor Chris Maisano praised the NFP’s appropriation of the original Popular Front, arguing that “the NFP won because it successfully activated the mythic power of the original Popular Front’s antifascist, Republican legacy.”[11]
To be sure, there are those on the French Left who were not so sanguine about the NFP or its historical predecessor. In June 2024, the Ligue Trotskyiste de France proposed a “workers’ united front” between various Trotskyist groups in opposition to the NFP, thus dutifully rehearsing the old Popular Front vs United Front debate. Evidently, this inflection point in neoliberalism’s ongoing crisis is raising the historical legacy of the 1930s Old Left, specifically its Popular Front iteration. Present-day vicissitudes in capitalist politics have compelled the Left to reconsider this history. Despite often possessing opposed readings of it, and despite affirming equally dissimilar moments of it, Trotskyists, Stalinists, and Leftists generally all implicitly accept that the 1930s Old Left constitutes something of a horizon for emancipatory politics.
What must be remembered today, however, is not the Old Left but the Marxism of the Second International. Indeed, it is rather strange that the NFP elicited virtually no discussion of the Second International, even though many of the same key questions posed during the Popular Front were repetitions of those posed during the height of Second International Marxism. If the Left were seriously committed to thinking critically about central problems like the meaning of the bourgeois revolution, democracy, and class-independent politics, it would return to the debates of the Revisionist Dispute, which, in France, raised these questions most sharply during what has come to be known as the Millerand Affair.
The Dreyfus Affair and the Revisionist Dispute
The Millerand Affair was a product of the Dreyfus Affair and the Revisionist Dispute. The former rocked the Third Republic to its core, as French politics practically split into two over the false conviction of Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus. The Dreyfusard camp, made up of liberals, republicans, and socialists, among others, was alarmed by the antisemitism of the anti-Dreyfusards, composed of antisemites, various Right-wing groups, military leaders, and much of the high-ranking clergy. In 1898, a Dreyfusard coalition came to power, promising to save the Republic from the antidemocratic and antisemitic threats posed by the anti-Dreyfusards. The alliance led by Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau was composed of centrists, republicans, liberals, and, controversially, a prominent socialist named Alexandre Millerand.
Millerand was part of the caucus of parliamentary socialists who weren’t aligned with any of the numerous socialist tendencies and parties in France. In the years leading up to 1898, Millerand was increasingly considered an important leader in the evermore confident and increasingly unified French socialist movement.[12] Two years prior, he had given a rousing address to leading French socialists preaching the necessity of socialist unity, which all in attendance received with warm applause. When offered the ministry by Waldeck-Rousseau, Millerand didn’t consult with the other caucus members before accepting, presumably because he expected little backlash. When that backlash did arrive, Millerand, perhaps plausibly, defended his decision on socialist grounds; indeed, the ensuing controversy was quite bewildering for Millerand. Socialists are republicans, aren’t they? They ought to support democracy against the forces of reaction, right?[13]
Millerand’s fateful decision to enter into a bourgeois government threw both the French socialist movement and international Marxism into crisis.The Millerand Affair, as it was called, was a critical moment of Marxism’s great identity crisis. The Revisionist Dispute or Controversy, as it came to be known, arose simultaneously in the great Marxist parties of the Second International, most famously in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) around the 1899 publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism. The Millerand Affair, although less well-known than the controversy in Germany, was nevertheless a particularly acute expression of the Revisionist Dispute that raised a set of altogether unique theoretical and practical questions for Second International Marxism. What was seemingly a mere dispute over tactics, namely whether socialists should join bourgeois governments, instantaneously became one of the opening salvos of the civil war in Marxism. Rosa Luxemburg perceptively characterized the existential threat that the Revisionist Dispute represented for the international socialist movement as such: “In the controversy with Bernstein and his followers, everybody in the Party ought to understand clearly it is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or the use of this or that set of tactics, but of the very existence of the Social-Democratic movement.”[14]
Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Revisionist Dispute is that revisionism, this tendency that threatened “the very existence of the Social-Democratic movement,” appeared at the height of Second International Marxism’s development in Europe. For the orthodox Marxists, this expressed the dialectical character of the Revisionist Dispute, whereby the specter of Marxism’s regression into petit-bourgeois reformism was produced out of Marxism’s success. In turn, this potential regression was understood as pointing beyond itself toward the possibility of a higher form of revolutionary politics.
For the orthodox Marxists, the Dispute was never merely about “defeating” revisionism. Rather, the very existence of a tendency within the socialist workers’ movement like Bernstein’s, which declared the goal of socialism to be nothing and the movement to be everything, presented an opportunity to deepen the socialist movement’s historical (self-)consciousness. Revisionism’s emergence demanded not mere condemnation but, more importantly, explanation in the form of a critical appraisal of the Second International’s development and the specific problems and tasks presented by that development. Thus, the question that the orthodox Marxists posed was not what was wrong with revisionism, but, to the contrary, what truths about the workers’ struggle for socialism were expressed by its emergence within Marxism.
If the Dispute were grasped in this way, the socialist movement might become aware of how its struggle to overcome capitalism was producing within itself tendencies like Bernstein’s, which threatened to liquidate the goal of socialism in favor of reforming capitalism. Only once this level of self-clarification and self-consciousness was reached could the problem of revisionism be transcended in practice. The potential to deepen the movement’s theoretical understanding of both itself and its object, i.e., capitalism, is precisely the source of the rather bizarre optimism expressed in the orthodox Marxists’ polemics against the revisionists. At the exact moment when Marxism appears on the verge of self-destruction, these Marxists are arguing that this development is the precondition for the socialist movement’s further advance.[15]
They reasoned that denouncing the revisionists as “traitors” would miss the point. Politics in capitalism expressed, in alienated form, the crisis of bourgeois society under conditions of industrial capital. In its attempts to overcome capital, the proletariat necessarily produced forms of politics that expressed and transformed but did not necessarily overcome bourgeois society’s crisis. Marx and Engels attempted to make the socialist movement aware of this. According to them, the workers’ demand for socialism in the 19th century was a high symptom of bourgeois society’s crisis, not its antithesis. After observing the key political events of their day, they discovered how the proletariat, precisely through its struggle against capital, affected the transformation of capitalism, a fact which, if not recognized, threatened to reify and obscure the rule of capital. Thus, Marx and Engels set themselves the task of clarifying to the workers’ movement how its very anti-capitalist self-organization and activity was constantly throwing up new obstacles to socialism — in other words, how the project for socialism was self-contradictory.
While for Marx and Engels, an ideologically heterogeneous and relatively loosely organized socialist movement was taken up as the object of dialectical critique, by the end of the 19th century, Marxism per se had become dialectical and was thus in need of its own critique. In the SPD, for instance, the two protagonists of the Revisionist Dispute both plausibly claimed the Marxist tradition as their own. On the one side were the orthodox Marxists, and on the other, Bernstein, the executor of Marx’s literary estate who never conceded to the orthodoxy’s charge that he renounced Marxism; thus, it was a dispute firmly within Marxism. France’s revisionist camp similarly bore the stamp of Marxism’s influence, counting amongst its ranks Millerand and Jean Jaurès, who, although not self-avowed Marxists, acknowledged the profound influence of Marx and Marxism on their politics.
Although both cases certainly involved questions of both theory and practice, it is also true that the fundamental questions Bernstein’s book raised were primarily theoretical ones concerning goals, methods, dialectics, etc., while those posed by the Millerand Affair related to the practice of socialist parties, i.e., tactics, coalitions, political judgment, leadership, etc. Lenin, picking up on this, wrote that Millerand “demonstrated” practically what Bernstein had “presented”[16] theoretically.[17] Thus, Marxism’s identity crisis was being experienced as a crisis of both means and ends, theory and practice, which allowed for a clarification of both and their relation to one another. The fact that the crisis manifested internationally and took on various forms corresponded to the fact that Marxism’s development had been genuinely international and was raising to the level of politics all sorts of working-class social activity. The orthodox Marxists duly grasped Bernstein and Millerand as two forms of the same problem. They felt compelled to explain how Marxism itself had become a potential international obstacle to socialism. The fundamental meaning of their orthodoxy was their belief that Marx’s dialectic could be brought to bear on and ultimately resolve its own crisis. This not only required having an account of how revisionism developed within Marxism’s bosom but also of how this moment of potential regression was simultaneously a moment of potential advance in the self-consciousness of the socialist movement.
The landscape of French socialism
In the Third Republic, French socialism was split across ideological, organizational, and strategic lines. One can differentiate six distinct tendencies: anarchism, syndicalism, Blanquism, Marxism, Possibilism, and the Independent Socialists.
(1) Anarchism in France, which found purchase primarily in the trade union movement, traced its roots to Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s mid-century writings and was especially influential for many Communards. In the 1880s and 1890s, anarchists in France and across Europe carried out various terrorist attacks, including political assassinations.
(2) Overlapping but not coextensive with anarchism was French syndicalism. Syndicalists were most noteworthy for their rejection of political parties and parliamentarism. Syndicalism was enormously popular in the trade-union movement, particularly in the largest national federation of trade unions, the Confederation General du Travail[18] (CGT).
(3) Blanquism, named after the famous revolutionary Auguste Blanqui, believed that socialism would come about by a small group of well-trained revolutionaries seizing state power in a revolutionary crisis. Blanquism as an independent tendency was liquidated in the course of the Millerand Affair, during which they merged with the Marxists to form the Parti Socialiste de France[19] (PSdF) in 1902.
(4) Marxism, led by the veteran organizer Jules Guesde, argued that the primary task of French socialists was to build a mass revolutionary socialist party modeled after the SPD. Originally a part of the first socialist party in France, the Federation of the Socialist Workers’ Party of France, the Marxists leave the Federation, accusing it of renouncing the necessity of revolution, and establish the French Workers’ Party.
(5) Possibilism was the perjorative hurled by Guesde at the reformist current in the Federation of the Socialist Workers’ Party, led by Paul Brousse. The Possibilists advocated a gradualist path to socialism, believing in the inherently progressive content of reforms, although, initially, they didn’t reject the need for revolution.[20] Possibilism split into two after Jean Allemane and his followers left the Federation, believing that Brousse and the Possibilist leadership had degenerated into mere reformists.
(6) The Independent Socialists were a loose group of parliamentarians and intellectuals who preached the necessity of socialist unity and remained independent of any one party or tendency. Included among their ranks were Alexandre Millerand and Jean Jaurès.
What is worth underscoring is just how fractured the post-Commune (1871) socialist movement was. Marxism was by no means the dominant tendency in French socialism throughout the last two decades of the 19th century. While its growth in the workers’ movement throughout the 1890s was undeniable, Marxism remained one socialist tendency among many others, all competing for the leadership of the workers’ movement and all claiming the legacy of the French revolutionary tradition.
Cutting across these organizational and ideological divisions was the pressing question of the relationship between the parties and the trade-union movement. Revolutionary syndicalists were mostly opposed to subordinating or aligning the trade-union movement to any party, and maintained an unconditional aversion to politics. They had witnessed the massive growth of industrial trade unions since the founding of the Republic, alongside the national organization of the unions into the CGT — developments that ushered in what would come to be known as the “heroic age of french syndicalism” — and concluded that orienting the labor movement toward party politics could only attenuate working-class militancy.
It was feared that aligning the CGT with either of the various socialist tendencies would ideologically divide the working class and thus hinder its ability to carry out unified economic and political strikes against the capitalist class. The general strike — during which a decisive section of the working class would walk off the job, bring the country to a standstill, and then usher in the social revolution — was the dominant revolutionary strategy put forward by French syndicalists, in part because its success didn’t depend upon a high degree of ideology or propaganda. The workers were constantly striking on the shop floor independent of ideological commitments, and the general strike spoke to this second nature in ways that parliamentary or party politics couldn’t. Many “political socialists,” such as the Possibilists and the Independent Socialists, including Jaurès, supported maintaining the segregation between the political parties and the unions. Jules Guesde and the Marxists, however, took the subordination of the German trade unions to the SPD as a model for how the proletariat’s trade-union consciousness could be raised to a higher political consciousness through the socialist party and thus advocated for the fusion of the CGT with a future united French socialist party.
The hope expressed in Millerand’s 1896 speech to leading French socialists that the socialist movement was on the brink of imminent unification was crushed by the exacerbation of the already existing divisions caused by his entrance into government. French socialism was repartitioned into the Parti Socialiste Français (PSF), led by Jaurès, and the PSdF in 1901–02, led by Guesde. The former, or the Jaurèsistes as they were known, made up of the independent parliamentary socialists and the Right-wing of Possibilism, gave critical support to Millerand’s entrance into the cabinet. The PSdF responded by denouncing Millerand’s actions and accusing the PSF of collaboration with the bourgeoisie. In addition, the Millerand Affair reaggravated the division between the parties and the trade-union movement. For the revolutionary syndicalists, the whole affair emphatically confirmed their suspicions of parliamentary politics and political parties. Politics merely meant consigning the proletariat to being an appendage of the state. After 1899, they were never so sure of their commitment to the CGT’s independence from politicians and their parties.
The bourgeois revolution and the Republic
Millerand’s cabinet position in a bourgeois republic raised the question of how the socialist movement should relate to the bourgeois revolution. Thus, the Millerand Affair necessarily recalled 1789, 1848, and 1871, corresponding to the Great French Revolution, the Revolution of 1848, and the Paris Commune. Socialists on all sides of the Millerand Affair felt tasked to clarify the relationship of socialism to the bourgeois revolutions and how that relationship concerned the concrete political question of whether socialists should enter coalition governments with bourgeois parties. Accordingly, socialists began writing histories of the first French Revolution. In 1901–04, Jean Jaures published his mammoth four-volume Histoire Socialiste de la Revolution Française. In response, Karl Kautsky spent the next few years writing numerous articles about French revolutionary history in the SPD house journal Die Neue Zeit before republishing in 1908 his 1889 essay “Die Klassengegensätze im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution (Class Conflicts in the Era of the French Revolution).” These were followed by various other competing socialist reappraisals of the French Revolution and coincided with the remarkable phenomenon of Leftists calling themselves republican or Jacobin socialists, recalling an earlier moment of French socialist history and further illustrating the degree to which the memory of the French Revolution mediated the dispute.
Jaurès contra Sorel
Jaurès, dismayed by Millerand's entrance into the government, nevertheless felt obliged to offer critical support for it. His Socialist History of the French Revolution (1901), written during the height of the controversy, presented a particular understanding of the relationship between socialism and the French revolutionary-republican tradition that would justify his critical support for Millerand’s decision. About the project, Jaurès wrote: “I wrote this long history of the Revolution up till the 9 Thermidor in the midst of the fight; a fight against the enemies of socialism, the Republic, and democracy. A fight as well among the socialists themselves over the best methods of action and combat. And the further I advanced under the crossfire of that battle the stronger was my conviction that for the proletariat democracy is a great conquest.”[21]
For Jaurès, then, the Millerand Affair posed point-blank the question of the proletariat’s relationship to the French revolutionary tradition, of which the core significance was democracy. He explained how the French Revolution “inadvertently prepared the advent of the proletariat. It realized the two essential conditions for socialism: democracy and capitalism.”[22] Jaurès argued that socialism should aspire to realize the progress toward mass democracy made by the Jacobins and, in so doing, would negate that other legacy of the French Revolution: capitalism. Upholding the legacy of the revolutionary bourgeois-republican tradition and thus the possibility for socialism meant defending the vestiges of democracy in the Third Republic from succumbing to the same fate of the First and Second Republics.
Perhaps the highest theoretical expression of revolutionary syndicalism during its “heroic age,” Georges Sorel, in Reflections on Violence (1908), constructed a scathing and systematic critique of the Jaurèsistes’ support for Millerand, which he understood to be an acute expression of Marxism’s “decomposition” into statist reformism. For Sorel, the Jacobinism of the Jaurèsistes was an ideological obstacle to the proletariat’s ability to independently organize itself for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Jaurès’s democratic justifications of the emergency actions taken by the Jacobins during the Terror reflected the pernicious statism in the socialist movement, the preservation of what Sorel called “the old cult of the state,” which threatened to relinquish the proletariat’s social and political independence and instead make it a dependent of the Bonapartist state.[23] Revealingly, Sorel considered Guesde and the orthodox Marxists to be fellow inductees into the “old cult of the state” alongside the parliamentary socialists because the former, with their commitment to organizing a mass socialist party, were equally guilty of liquidating the proletariat’s independence from the capitalist state. He suspected that the true meaning of the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat was a state dictatorship over the proletariat. From the Millerand Affair, Sorel concluded that only the complete separation of the syndicalist movement from capitalist political forms, i.e., parliaments and parties, would sustain the proletariat’s will to overcome capitalism.
Marxism and the Millerand Affair
In a 1905 article written for Die Neue Zeit, Kautsky characterized the controversy within the French socialist movement as such:
Just like in 1848, today we are dealing with not two but three tendencies in the French socialist movement which exhibit some affinity to those of Blanqui, Louis Blanc, and Proudhon. Yet they are no longer as divided as those tendencies were, and have more in common. The spokesmen of all three parties invoke Marx . . . In the interests of French socialism it is urgently necessary to abolish the one-sidedness of both of these tendencies. This can only occur on the basis of Marxism.[24]
Kautsky tried to grasp the antinomy between Jaurès and Sorel, which he characterized as the antinomy between opportunism and anarchism, as a political symptom of the growth of the socialist movement in France. The existence of opposed socialist understandings of bourgeois revolutionary history allowed Kautsky to clarify, through an immanent critique of these accounts, the relationship between socialism and the bourgeois revolution. Such a clarification, Kautsky believed, would provide the necessary theoretical basis on which the pressing practical-political problems raised by Bernstein and Millerand could be addressed, and the accompanying divisions in France healed.
Kautsky detected an undialectical one-sidedness in both Sorel’s and Jaurès’s opposed accounts of democracy and the bourgeois revolution. For Kautsky, their opposition expressed theoretically the fundamental contradiction embodied in the democratic republic under capitalism. On the one hand, “only the proletariat becomes republican in principle due to its position among the classes of modern” and, consequently, “the proletariat can only come to power in the republic.” On the other hand, “the bourgeoisie is most directly able to exercise its rule in a parliamentary republic or a parliamentary monarchy, whose head is merely decorative. The parliamentary form of government is the one which corresponds to its class interests.” Kautsky continues: “Thus the same republic which forms the basis for the emancipation of the proletariat can at the same time become the basis for the class domination.”[25] The proletariat, the only class that is “republican in principle,” in shedding its blood for the republic thereby created the perfect conditions for its further exploitation. Whereas Jaurès affirmed the democracy and the republic as historic achievements, and whereas Sorel eschewed democracy tout court,[26] Marxists like Kautsky tried to grasp the republic and democracy as contradictory political forms of both freedom and unfreedom. The contradictions between Jaurès’s and Sorel’s perspectives were no mere “error(s) in reasoning” but corresponded to “the contradictions in real society”; they could not be overcome by affirming one side, but only once their historical conditions of possibility had been raised to self-consciousness.[27] For Kautsky, this meant returning to 1848. On Marx’s understanding of that crucial year in socialist history, Kautsky wrote:
But, as Marx noted immediately after the revolution’s conclusion, the only thing the men of 1848 had borrowed from the Jacobins of 1793 was their costumes. While the men of the revolution still believed that the tasks they had to carry out were the same as those of 1793, while they believed that the same forces were at their command and the same methods were called for, the battlefield, weapons, and even the fighters themselves had thoroughly changed. As encouraging as the revolutionary tradition was, it became an obstacle for the new revolution because it hampered the recognition of the real tasks at hand, as well as the means of solving them.[28]
As early as 1848, the “republican superstition” proved an ideological obstacle preventing the workers from recognizing their historically unique task of overcoming capital through independent political struggle. However, some 50 years later, the “republican superstition” was once again, in Kautsky’s words, “duping the workers.”[29] As evidenced by his support for socialists entering into governing coalitions, Jaurès’s understanding of democracy neglected the key political questions of who would lead the democratic movement and how. He thus fell below the level of Marx and Engels’s insights into the 1848 Revolution in France, which clarified the proletariat’s task of leading the bourgeois-democratic revolution as an independent political force. And it was precisely based on these insights that the Second International was founded. The class-neutral republicanism of Jaurès, therefore, threatened to liquidate the historical consciousness gleaned from 1848 and, by extension, undermine the theoretical foundations of the Second International.
Kautsky likewise characterized the turn to anti-political syndicalism as a regression below 1848 levels of historical consciousness. Kautsky wrote that “even if the anti-parliamentarism of the general strike-ists is understandable, it is nonetheless completely wrong . . . As obvious as its dangers are, parliamentarism is necessary.”[30] Sorel’s wholehearted rejection of politics meant abandoning the sphere that “schooled” the workers in the shortcomings of bourgeois parliamentarism and republicanism. It was only through political struggle in various forms that the workers would clarify the necessity of socialism. Moreover, political struggle might entail the creation of opportunism in the party, but this was nonetheless necessary. Sorel’s anarchism was, on this account, self-defeating. While Marxists sympathized with Sorel’s liberal aversion to mass politics, the school of history had taught the proletariat that the socialist party and the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the use of state and political power, were nonetheless necessary.
The re-emergence of republican socialism and its opposite, syndicalist anarchism (Sorel), Kautsky grasped as the repetition of 1848, during which republican socialists like Louis Blanc and anarchists like Proudhon had given insufficient leadership to the nascent Parisian proletariat. If it remained unconscious, the repetition threatened to liquidate the historical experience that the socialist workers’ movement had accumulated since 1848. Party debates and theoretical work, however, allowed the proletariat to become conscious of the historical repetition and thereby gain a greater clarity of its task: to make a revolution that wouldn’t merely repeat the crisis of the bourgeois revolution, but get beyond it.
In accordance with Lenin’s observation that because the problem of opportunism had become international, it demanded a global response, the seemingly national dispute within French socialism was thus put front and center à l’ordre du jour[31] for the international proletariat at the 1900 and 1904 Paris and Amsterdam Congresses of the International, at which the questions raised by the Millerand Affair were intensely debated. At the Congresses, the so-called Kaustky resolution of 1900 and the Dresden-Amsterdam resolution of 1904 condemned Millerand’s actions. They affirmed the necessity of proletarian political independence and a revolutionary transformation of bourgeois society, not its reform. Both passed with narrow majorities, yet the message was clear: the socialist proletariat was to have no interest in administering capitalism. It was an important victory for the Marxists in France, which came on the back of the triumph of the orthodox faction within the SPD at its 1903 Party Congress in Dresden. Jaurès, at first reluctant to yield authority to the International over questions of national tactics, eventually accepted the International’s decision, thus setting the groundwork for the unification of his PSF with the PSdF in the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière[32] (SFIO).
Of course, this is not to say that the crisis of Marxism was ever resolved — it was not — not in France, nor Germany, and definitely not internationally. The Second International’s commitment to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, as ratified in the 1900 and 1904 resolutions, certainly didn’t translate to reality, as the events of 1914–19 can attest. In France, the divisions created by the Millerand Affair between the political socialists and the trade-union movement were never fully healed. The separation of the two remained a subject of continuous controversy within the SFIO, with the revisionist wing upholding the political independence of the unions and the Marxists advocating for their subordination to the party.[33]
Conclusion
Returning to the present day, it is obvious that the present “crises” in capitalist politics don’t present a possibility for the Left like the crisis in socialist politics during the Revisionist Dispute did. In the absence of a class-conscious international labor movement, and under conditions of severe theoretical regression, today’s Left is resigned to being a hyperexcitable yet fundamentally impotent spectator to the transformations of capitalist politics. Nevertheless, the Left remains insistent on indulging in the history and language of Marxism to accompany its spectacular enchantment to capitalist politics. It is, therefore, appropriate that throughout the crisis of neoliberalism, the Left has oscillated between the 1930s and 1960s as historical touchstones — the Popular Front and the New Left, for instance, have each had their moment in the sun with the Millennials and now with the Zoomers. During both periods, the Left, however obliquely, recalled the memory of an earlier period when socialist political movements were organized independently of capitalist parties and the state but ultimately failed to reconstitute such a political reality.
In his 2018 article for the Platypus Review, Mitchell Abidor, reflecting on the experiences of 1968 in France, asked if the intergenerational conflict that arose in the 60s between the Old Left and the New Left could ever be overcome, whether future iterations of the Left were resigned to endlessly repeating these two moments.[34] Abidor identified the question of the revolutionary subject of history as the primary cause of the division between the Old and New Lefts. The former upheld the Stalinized and bureaucratized communist parties and labor unions as the legitimate political organs of the working class, while the latter looked for a revolutionary subject outside the working classes of the advanced capitalist world. It seems that the Millennial Left answered Abidor’s question with a resounding No — that the Left’s “intergenerational division” will not be overcome. Indeed, we cannot claim that the question of who the revolutionary subject of history is was answered any more convincingly by the Millennial Left than by the New Left.[35] In his attempts to reconsider the history of the Left in France, Abidor can only reach back to the two familiar historical touchstones, the 30 and the 60s. In so doing, in conjunction with the present Leftist discourse around the NFP, he represses the memory of the Second International, which actually was able to constitute a revolutionary subject.
In effect, this historical amnesia concerning the Marxism of the Second International betrays a profound pessimism in the Left’s ability to transform present reality. The Second International fundamentally transformed social and political reality by organizing an international workers’ movement to carry out international socialist revolution. When this goal seemed threatened, the Left critically and ruthlessly confronted the meaning of its efforts to transform society. With an optimism perhaps incomprehensible today, orthodox Marxists believed that the moment of Marxism’s potential regression pointed beyond itself to new possibilities for revolutionary politics. In contrast, the degraded objective and subjective historical conditions of the 1930s provided little opportunity for such politics. Unlike the Revisionist Dispute, which was the product of the success of Marxism, the debates over the Popular Front were fundamentally conditioned by Marxism’s degeneration after the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917–19. Consequently, the deceptively similar questions raised by the Popular Front were necessarily addressed in degraded terms, which, far from advancing revolutionary possibilities, instead “served to sacrifice the possibility of a socialist revolution.”[36] Yet, even if it takes the form of counter-identifying with it, the Left remains intent on inheriting that legacy, thus betraying an unforced conservative resignation to its own irrelevance in the present.[37] |P
[1] Video of the teach-in is available at <https://www.youtube.com/live/VdjoxGrHMpE>.
[2] V. I Lenin, “Marxism and Revisionism” (1908), in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 29–39, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/apr/03.htm>.
[3] National Rally, founded in 1972.
[4] New Popular Front, launched in 2024.
[5] Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale (New Ecological and Social People’s Union).
[6] The Republicans (France), founded in 2015 by Nicolas Sarkozy.
[7] France Unbowed, launched in 2016.
[8] “‘Election has been stolen’: Far left and right react to Barnier as PM,” France 24, September 5, 2024, <https://f24.my/AZpM>.
[9] Parti socialiste, founded in 1969.
[10] “Olivier Faure affirme qu'aucun membre du PS ne participera au gouvernement Barnier,” Entrevue (September 6, 2024), <https://entrevue.fr/olivier-faure-affirme-quaucun-membre-du-ps-ne-participera-au-gouvernement-barnier/>.
[11] Chris Maisano, “The Passions and the Interests,” Jacobin (July 19, 2024), <https://jacobin.com/2024/07/left-strategy-antifascism-npf-popular-front>.
[12] In the 1898 legislative elections, for instance, the socialists won more than 800,000 votes, a significant increase from the 1893 elections.
[13] It is worth remembering that Eduard Bernstein was just as surprised over the controversy that his book Evolutionary Socialism (1899) provoked. The theory Bernstein laid out was meant to be nothing more than an update of Marxism in accordance with changed historical conditions.
[14] Rosa Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution (1900/1908), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/index.htm>.
[15] See the final chapter of Luxemburg’s Social Reform or Revolution and the first footnote of chapter 1 of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1902).
[16] Lenin, What is to be Done?
[17] The reason for this difference is relatively obvious. In Germany, the Bismarckian constitution precluded the possibility of a socialist minister. The German parliament, the Reichstag, was mostly subordinate to the Imperial Chancellor, who could run the government with the bare minimum support in parliament. For all its growth and organization, the SPD couldn’t obtain any proportional degree of parliamentary power. Thus, they used this situation to their advantage by using parliament as a national soap box to consistently denounce bourgeois government while capturing a mass audience. In France, however, the Third Republic offered ample opportunities for socialists to wield parliamentary power. The prime minister could not run his government or pass legislation without the support of parliament, and, therefore, socialist parliamentarians necessarily played a role in the constitution of governmental power. Therefore, the Revisionist Dispute reared its head in a different form in France than in Germany. In France, the defense of the Republic was a concrete practical question that had concrete practical consequences for the socialists in parliament. So were the questions of entering a bourgeois government or forming coalitions with bourgeois parties. The controversy took on a more or less theoretical character in Germany, where wielding political power in the capitalist state was impossible.
[18] General Confederation of Labour, founded in 1895.
[19] Socialist Party of France, formed in the 1902 merger of the (Marxist) Parti Ouvrier Français (French Workers’ Party) and the (Blanquist) Parti socialiste révolutionnaire (Socialist Revolutionary Party).
[20] “Possibilist” was initially a pejorative that Guesde hurled at Paul Brousse and his followers for what he considered to be their reformism, which the latter later appropriated.
[21] Jean Jaurès, “How Should we Judge the Revolutionaries,” in Socialist History of the Revolution (1901), trans. Mitchell Abidor, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/jaures/index.htm>.
[22] Jaurès, “Introduction,” in Socialist History of the French Revolution.
[23] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 103.
[24] Karl Kautsky, “The Republic and Social Democracy in France,” in Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, ed. and trans. Ben Lewis (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020), 268.
[25] Ibid., 159.
[26] [French] Simply, just, without qualification, etc.
[27] Kautsky, “The Republic,” 159.
[28] Ibid., 173.
[29] Ibid., 160.
[30] Ibid., 266–67.
[31] [French] On the agenda; literally, on the order of the day.
[32] French Section of the Workers’ International.
[33] Still incensed by the considerable support Millerand received from within the socialist camp and buoyed by the considerable growth of the syndicalist movement, the CGT reaffirmed its independence from the SFIO in the 1906 Amiens Resolution and would maintain its independence until it became a “mass organization” of the Parti communiste français (French Communist Party) (PCF) in the 1930s.
[34] Mitchell Abidor, “May ‘68 in France and the hidden war within the Left,” Platypus Review 109 (September 2018), <https://platypus1917.org/2018/09/04/may-68-in-france-and-the-hidden-war-within-the-left/>.
[35] Bernie Sanders, for example, with his progressive New Dealism and his history as a streetfighting student activist, seemed to be the incarnation of both moments and in whom all parts of the Millennial Left could see something they liked.
[36] Ligue Trotskyiste de France, “Le Front populaire de Juin 36: Comment le PCF a saboté la Ppossibilité d’une révolution ouvrière,” Le Bolchevik 179 (March 2007), <https://old.iclfi.org/francais/lebol/179/frontpopulaire.html>.
[37] And yet, we mustn’t forget that there were moments during the Millennial Left when it felt itself tasked by the Marxism of the Second International. This raises the problem of the repression of the Millennial Left’s own history and its own once-utopian horizons.
