Blazingcatfur

In the years before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the descent of much of Europe into “the Great War,” most of the ideologues on the Left assumed that such a war was an impossibility. The workers of the world, they believed, would no longer go to war against one another. Their class solidarity was too strong, far stronger than their national allegiance and their fidelity to artificial borders and superficial ethnic differences. Engels, for one, thought the old ways had been thoroughly demystified and discredited. The “new man”—the Communist man—was better than the old man, more organized and less aggressive toward his own kind. Darwin, Engels insisted, had described “a struggle for existence” that applied to the animal kingdom, not to the expected Communist society. In 1912, the Manifesto of the Extraordinary International Socialist Congress (of the Second International) in Basel put it this way:

“It would be insanity for the governments not to realize that the very idea of the monstros­ity of a world war would inevitably call forth the indignation and the revolt of the working class. The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambi­tions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.”