3

MARXISM IN THE AGE OF

IMPERIALISM – THE SECOND
INTERNATIONAL
Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga

It has become commonplace to refer to the Marxism of the Second International (1889–1914)
as the embodiment of an economistic and mechanical interpretation of Marxism. Many factors
have contributed to this misleading perception: the identification of the whole Second Interna-
tional with its reformist wing; the evolution of some of its main theoreticians, such as Kautsky
and the Austro-Marxists, to anti-Bolshevik and non-revolutionary positions; and, finally, the
long shadow of Stalinism, whose leaders developed an interpretation, aimed at fostering their
revolutionary credentials, which described the Second International as a mainly reformist-led
organization to which only a small left wing, led mainly by Lenin, presented an alternative from
the very first hour.
However, a sober analysis of the main writings of the Second International Marxists tends to
dispel such interpretations. First, because the production of that period was so vast, encompass-
ing so many subjects and authors, and involving such different theoretical and political posi-
tions, that it is extremely difficult to prove such general and oversimplifying assertions. Second,
because the Second International grouped organizations that operated mostly in the framework
of a single class party, with political differences expressing themselves as tendencies and cur-
rents of opinion. Any analysis must take into account this diversity if it pretends to be scholarly
rigorous.
This chapter will introduce the reader to some of the main debates of Second International
Marxism on the subject of imperialism, placing them against the background of the major politi-
cal debates of the time. It will challenge another commonplace claim about Second Interna-
tional Marxism, namely that its focus was exclusively Eurocentric. While this claim fits perfectly
with many Social Democrats of that period, there were also many who consistently opposed
this view and argued for an anti-imperialist policy and a sympathetic view toward the struggles
of the indigenous peoples trampled by European expansion.
While the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was undoubtedly the backbone of the
Second International and the model for the rest of its national sections, we will try to avoid an
exclusively German vision of the debates on imperialism by referring to the analyses of some of
the main Congresses and debates of the Second International, as well as to two lesser-known,
non-German national parties that had a particular relationship with their own national imperial-
isms: the French and Italian socialist parties.

51
 Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga

The First Socialist Writings and Debates on Imperialism

One of the first socialist analyses of colonial policy was written by Karl Kautsky (1883). The
article compared the different kinds of colonies, favorably contrasting the settlement colonies
developed by England, which had autonomy and parliamentary institutions, with the grim
record of “exploitation-colonies” (such as India and the German colonies in Africa), where
the natives were exploited by a small group of European merchants, civil servants and military
officials. The article was meant to encourage opposition to German colonial ventures, but its
disregard of the genocide practiced in settlement colonies is striking to a modern reader.
The first major debate on colonialism in the Second International occurred during the revi-
sionist debate (1898–1903), which opposed Eduard Bernstein, the theoretician of reformism, to
Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Belfort Bax, among others.1 Bax, an English socialist who
had already published an essay on “Imperialism vs. Socialism” in The Commonweal back in Febru-
ary 1885, started the debate with Bernstein with an article where he argued against any type of
colonialism, stating that socialists should support the armed struggles of the colonized peoples
(Bax 1896a). Bernstein developed the opposite view in an article in Die neue Zeit, arguing that
socialists could not defend the rights of savages against (capitalist) higher culture (Bernstein 1896).
The debate continued with further articles by both writers. Bax ironically commented on
the alleged incapacity for civilization of the African peoples, who resisted the lure of “Lancashire
‘shoddy,’ adulterated spirits, and other exhilarating products of the höhere Kultur [higher culture]
with the aid of the Maxim gun.” He stated that not all societies had to pass through the capitalist
stage, and that under no circumstances could socialists support the subjugation of peoples stand-
ing at precapitalist stages of development (Bax 1896b, 61–62).
Kautsky, for his part, rejected Bernstein’s pro-colonialist positions with the claim that, rather
than promoting historical progress, modern colonial policy was being pursued by precapitalist
reactionary strata: Junkers, military officers, bureaucrats, speculators and merchants (overlooking
the role of German banks and heavy industry, Kautsky 1898). This view of colonialism as the
product of precapitalist strata was widespread during the first stage of the debate on imperialism.
Two events marked the entry of imperialism into mainstream socialist debate in 1898–99:
the Spanish-American War and the South African (or Boer) War.2 A few years later, the English
writer John A. Hobson, who covered the Boer War as a journalist, published a book that sum-
marized the ideas of liberal anti-imperialism. According to Hobson’s under-consumptionist
views, the driving force for imperialism was the need for capital-exports, which originated in
excessive saving at home. He recommended a policy of wealth redistribution through trade
unionism and progressive taxation to reduce excessive saving by the capitalists, thus eliminating
the need for foreign markets (Hobson 1902). The impact of Hobson’s book on the socialist press
was scarce at first, but it had a big influence on Lenin’s famous work on imperialism, where
Hobson’s statistical data on the disparities in the growth rates of the different empires were used
to refute Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism (Lenin 1964; Kautsky 1914).

New Positions and Debates in the Second International (1900–1907)

A resolution drafted by Luxemburg was approved by the Second International Congress held in
Paris in 1900, which described imperialism as “the same militarism, naval policy, the same hunt
for colonies, the same reaction everywhere, and above all a permanent international war danger.”
The proletariat had to “set against the alliance of imperialist reaction an international protest
movement” (Luxemburg 2000, 807–9).

52
 Marxism in the Age of Imperialism

Among German Social Democrats, the first full-scale debate on imperialism took place at
a party congress held in Mainz in September, 1900. The topic was “world-policy” (Weltpoli-
tik), and the interventions dealt mainly with the implications of the South African War and of
Germany’s colonial policy in China. Specific issues were the creation of a German protectorate
in Kiautschou (Jiaozhou), the repression of the Boxer Rebellion by the Western powers and
German military intervention in China, allegedly in retaliation for the assassination of the Ger-
man ambassador. At this congress, Luxemburg emerged as the most perceptive critic of impe-
rialism and its catastrophic potential, portraying the struggle for colonies in world-historical
terms (Luxemburg 2000, 800–4). The resolution adopted by the Mainz congress declared that
Social Democracy was “an enemy of any oppression and exploitation” and protested against the
“policy of robbery and conquest,” calling for peaceful relations between all peoples (SPD 1900,
245). The resolution also recommended the study of the colonial question by the socialist par-
ties, the creation of socialist parties in the colonies and the establishment of relations between
them.3 This represented a defeat for the Bernstein-like revisionist positions in international
Social Democracy, something Bernstein himself admitted (Bernstein 1900). An article by Hein-
rich Cunow (1900), published in Die neue Zeit in the same year, denounced the “imperialist
expansion policy” in Asia.
The next major forum for debating the issue of colonialism was the Dresden Congress of
the SPD, held in September 1903, at which the party officially condemned Bernstein’s revision-
ism and pledged “to carry on more vigorously than ever the fight against militarism, against
the colonial and imperialist policy, against injustice, oppression and exploitation of every kind”
(De Leon 1904, 96–97). A new debate on the colonial question took place at the International
Socialist Congress held in Amsterdam in 1904, which was mostly similar to the Paris debate.
The Amsterdam Congress also condemned the participation of socialist ministers in bourgeois
governments, referring specially to the example of Millerand in France (see following section).
The year 1905 witnessed the radicalization of the workers’ movement everywhere under the
impact of the Russian Revolution. In Germany it was also a year of big labor disputes. In this
scenario the left pushed for the adoption by the SPD of the political mass strike as a weapon in
the struggle for power. This gave rise to a dispute among the union and the party leaderships
that ended at the SPD Congress held in Mannheim in September 1905, where a resolution was
adopted stating that the final decision over launching a general strike would belong to the union
leadership, thus giving it effective veto power over party initiatives (Schorske 1955, 51). The
radical push ended in a conservative backlash led by “the triple alliance of trade-unionists, party
revisionists, and party executive” (Schorske 1955, 85).
Another element pushing for conservatism was the result of the “Hottentot elections” held
in Germany on 25 January 1907, against the background of the genocide of the Namas and
Hereros by German soldiers in present-day Namibia. A chauvinist outburst led to a massive vote
by previously indifferent citizens, which reduced the SPD fraction in the Reichstag from eighty-
one to forty-three deputies, although its number of voters actually increased. It was in this
context that Parvus (Alexander Helphand), Trotsky’s partner in the development of the theory
of permanent revolution, published a brochure on Colonial Policy and the Collapse of Capitalism
(Parvus 1907).
These events are crucial to explain the German delegation’s behavior at the International
Congress held in Stuttgart in August 1907. Most of the SPD delegates supported a draft reso-
lution submitted by the Dutch socialist Henri Van Kol that did not “reject in principle every
colonial policy” and argued that “under a socialist regime, colonization could be a force for civi-
lization.” The Second International should advocate “a positive socialist colonial policy,” because

53
 Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga

the “ultimate consequence” of “the utopian idea of simply abandoning the colonies” would be
“to give the United States back to the Indians” (International Socialist Congress 1907, 27–29).
Many left delegates attacked the idea of a “socialist colonial policy” as a contradiction-in-
terms, among them Kautsky, who went against the majority of his own party, astonished to
witness this division of mankind into “two peoples, one meant to rule and the other to be
ruled,” an idea that he called an argument of slavers and the ruling classes. Finally, a resolution
was adopted at Stuttgart stating that by its “inherent nature, capitalist colonial policy must lead
to enslavement, forced labor, or the extermination of the native population”4; although it was
only approved by a slim majority of 128 votes against 108, thanks to the combined votes of the
delegates of small nations.
An equally important debate on national defense took place at the Stuttgart Congress, where
the SPD leader August Bebel stated that Social Democrats (even, by implication, those of the
imperialist countries) should participate in wars of national defense. Gustave Hervé, from the
French delegation, accused Bebel of going over to revisionism and stated that in a war the capi-
talist press would “unleash such a storm of nationalism that we will not have the strength to
counteract it,” making it impossible to distinguish between defensive and offensive wars. The
intervention of delegates such as Lenin and Luxemburg was crucial to produce a “consensus”
resolution that emphasized the demand of substituting the standing army by a citizen’s militia,
and declared:

Should war break out in spite of all this, it is their [the Socialists’] duty to intercede for
its speedy end, and to strive with all their power to make use of the violent economic
and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse the people, and thereby to hasten
the abolition of capitalist class rule.5

This was the first formulation of what would later become the central idea of the Zimmerwald
Left: turning the imperialist war into civil war.6
The debate on socialist colonial policy was later downplayed by some of the revisionists
and by some members of the SPD executive. In response, Kautsky wrote an important work
(Kautsky 1907), where he argued against Van Kol’s mechanical analysis, pointing out that
modern colonialism, based on capital exports, made the different countries leap over stages of
development. In no way could it be argued, according to Kautsky, that the spread of capitalism
to countries that found themselves at other stages of development was an absolute prerequi-
site for the victory of socialism: this idea stemmed from “European pride and megalomania”
that divided “mankind into lower and higher races” (Kautsky 1907, 46–59). After repeating
his problematic distinction between progressive “work-colonies” and “exploitation-colonies,”
Kautsky stated that socialists “must support equally energetically all native colonial indepen-
dence movements” (Kautsky 1907, 130). However, he also said that many colonial uprisings,
despite the sympathy that socialists had for the rebels, should not be encouraged, in the same
way as socialists did not support pointless proletarian putsches in Europe. Socialists should
resist the extension of colonies and work for the expansion of self-government by the natives
(Kautsky 1907, 76).
In the same year, an influential theoretical work by the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer (1907)
on the national question came out. Bauer’s analysis of colonialism (“capitalist expansionism”)
was secondary to the main theme of his work. His position was ambiguous: on one hand, he
thought imperialism was beneficial for the capitalist economy by better structuring the relation-
ship between productive and unproductive capital, fostering exports and thus enabling a greater
level of domestic activity. On the other hand, imperialism increased prices in the domestic

54
 Marxism in the Age of Imperialism

market through commercial tariffs and negatively affected income distribution at the expense
of the proletariat, while at the same time promoting racism, militarism and the limitation of
parliamentary government.7

National Developments

France
The history of French Socialism was characterized by fragmentation and the presence of numer-
ous tendencies. In the 1890s there were five groups: Blanquists, Guesdists, Possibilists, Alleman-
ists and a number of Independent deputies, all of which, despite their differences, tended at that
time to fall into a parliamentary and reformist mold, including collaboration with center-left
republican forces, although the situation was very complex and positions shifted greatly over
time (Moss 1976, 135; Noland 1970, 31).
One of the first major statements on colonialism was made by Jules Guesde’s Parti ouvrier fran-
çais (POF), which described colonial policy as “one of the worst forms of capitalist exploitation”
and protested “against the colonial filibustering expeditions” (POF 1897, 47–48). In contrast
with this schematic but clear condemnation, the positions of Jean Jaurès were ambiguous. He
wrote many articles on Algeria in which he defended the Muslims against colonial abuses, but
only to recommend a policy of assimilation and gradual granting of political rights to the natives
educated in the French school system (Ageron 1963, 29). He argued that, deplorable as colonial-
ism was, it was an unavoidable phenomenon: “all peoples are engaged in colonial expansion . . .
[this] seems as irresistible as a natural law.” His two main recommendations were that socialists
should try to prevent these conflicts from unleashing a war in Europe by fighting their govern-
ments’ “disproportionate” aspirations, as well as struggle for a better treatment of the natives,
mainly through press and public campaigns (Jaurès 1896).
In 1899 Paul Louis, who became one of the main French specialists on the colonial question,8
published an article that contains one of the first French uses of the word “imperialism,” referring
to the protectionist program for the British Empire. Louis emphasized that imperialist policy had
become a common ground of British bourgeois parties. Although he was skeptical about its chances
of success, he considered the mere existence of the imperialist program a great danger, inasmuch it
was “a principle of reorganization for civilized humanity as a whole” (Louis 2011a, 131).
With the coming of the new century, French Socialism went through a new split when
Alexandre Millerand, an Independent socialist, participated in Waldeck-Rousseau’s cabinet of
“republican defense” as Minister of Commerce. The ministerialist fraction included most Inde-
pendents, Possibilists, as well as some Allemanists, whose fraction was decomposing. The Gues-
dists and Blanquists opposed Millerand’s ministerialism, turning away from their own previous
policy of collaboration with republican forces. This led to the failure of two socialist unity
Congresses in 1900 and 1901 (Noland 1970, 115–37).
Two parties eventually emerged: the ministerialist Parti Socialiste Français and the anti-
ministerialist Parti Socialiste de France (Willard 1965, 546). In its general statements, this latter
party had a rather schematic vision of colonialism as the “necessary product” of capitalism, as
well as contradictory views on nationalism, fostering at the same time national defencist and
antipatriotic tendencies (Willard 1965, 557). However, some interesting works were produced
by militants of that party. Paul Lafargue (1903) wrote a book on trusts in America, where he
argued that the appearance of trusts was the result of a dialectical process by which competi-
tion destroyed itself, leading to “industrial integration through a unitary banking organization”
(Lafargue 1903, 98–103). The immobilization of capital and the need to maintain production

55
 Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga

going despite market fluctuations led to an overabundance of means of production (Lafargue

1903, 104–5). The trusts, which acquired growing political power, therefore pushed for imperial
expansion (Lafargue 1903, 14–19). The same year Louis wrote a small article on trusts, empha-
sizing how cartels could sell overseas at low prices, inferior even to production costs, in order to
conquer new markets and dispose of excess production (Louis 1903, 662).
In 1904, Louis wrote a major article on imperialism, using the term to define a historical
phase and arguing that “imperialism and socialism to a very large extent constitute the funda-
mental opposition of our age” (Louis 2011b, 292). Louis emphasized the modern character of
imperialism by noticing that it could appeal to old militaristic and dynastic factors to justify its
aspirations, but that those were not its essential trait; its real driving force was the need to over-
come overproduction and crises. To this end, imperialism combined colonialism and protec-
tionism. He concluded that “imperialism has its remedy in itself. If it must breed war, everything
indicates that the armed conflicts of the future will, immediately or gradually, deal irreparable
blows to the social institutions of the participating countries” (Louis 2011b, 299). An extract of
this article appears in Lenin’s Notebooks on Imperialism (LCW 39: 250–51).
In those years, the journal Le Mouvement socialiste published a few articles with different views
on colonialism. The Dutch Van Kol presented a paternalist view of the colonial peoples, whom
he described as “so sweet and so pacific.” He argued against assimilationist attempts in Algeria,
recommending greater administrative autonomy and relying on traditional Muslim institutions
for the governance of Arabs (Van Kol 1903). From a different perspective on assimilation, Le
mouvement socialiste published an article by Joseph Lagrosillière, a mixed-blood Socialist from
Martinique, who protested against a number of corruption scandals and capitalist abuses in Mar-
tinique but adopted a strictly assimilationist position, defending participation in French political
life (Lagrosillière 1902). In later years he became the main Socialist spokesman in defense of the
rights and of the autonomy obtained by the “old” French colonies, and for the extension of this
system to the new ones.
In 1905, French Socialism was unified in a single party, the Section française de l’Internationale
ouvrière (SFIO), after the defeat of the ministerialists at the Amsterdam Congress (Noland 1970,
165–84). In that year Louis published what became the most popular study of colonialism in
French (Louis 1905). Louis’s brochure was a propaganda tract that stated that the search for
markets, outlets for idle money and new resources, indistinctly, were the driving forces of colo-
nization (Louis 1905, 21). Louis emphasized the growing tendency of the colonial peoples to
rebellion (Louis 1905, 60–69). Seeking to counteract popular colonialist discourse, he stated that
the costs of the colonies were greater than the returns they offered, stressing that they were paid
mostly by the proletariat (Louis 1905, 47–86). His political conclusion was that class contradic-
tions were sharpened by colonialism, through the proletarianization of the colonial peoples and
the disappearance of the smaller capitalist enterprises. Socialists should show their support for
the colonial peoples by emphasizing the solidarity of interests of all “the suffering, the humili-
ated of the world, despite the differences in race, colour and tongue” (Louis 1905, 108–10).
In those years the socialist deputy Gustave Rouanet conducted a strong press campaign from
the journal L’Humanité against colonial scandals and abuses. After the elections of 1906, inter-
est in colonial issues within party circles declined: at the 1907 SFIO Congress in Nancy, two
reports on the subject were presented, one by Rouanet on the indigenous peoples’ condition
and another by Louis (a summary of his book); both were adopted without debate (Haupt and
Rebérioux 1963, 16–17).
An exception to this indifference was the journal edited by Gustave Hervé, La Guerre sociale,
which centered on antipatriotic and anticolonial agitation. One of its first issues featured a
report by “socialist Kabyle” on the expropriation, low salaries and general oppression of Algeria’s

56
 Marxism in the Age of Imperialism

indigenous peoples (Rebérioux 1964, 94). On the second diplomatic crisis over Morocco in
1911, which threatened to lead to war between France and Germany, the journal was openly
defeatist on the French side, and defended the patriotism of the indigenous peoples as a neces-
sary stage in their development. The journal built a large network of correspondents, subscribers
and donors among the Arabs of North Africa (Rebérioux 1964, 97). However, its rather puerile
political stand (it routinely called for insurrection at home) did not help the journal build a real
political base, and after 1912 Hervé began to slide into more and more right-wing nationalist
positions.9 In contrast with Hervé, Jaurès defended a “solution” for Morocco based on a joint
exploitation of the country by all European powers (Jaurès 1907).
In the years before the war, French socialism developed the most disparate positions on colo-
nialism, amidst a diminution of press campaigns and meetings dedicated to that issue (Rebérioux
1964, 97). In 1912, the SFIO saw Guesde position himself to the right of Jaurès and Vaillant,
when he supported a project for “socialist colonization” by French workers in Morocco, finally
dropped due to the pressure exerted by his opponents within the party (Bédarida 1974: 31–32).
In those years a polemic took place between Jaurès and Charles Andler, a curious figure
known for his opposition to Marxism and his advocacy of socialism based on consumer-
cooperatives (Prochasson 1989). In that discussion, Andler accused the German socialists of
having sold out to German imperialism. At the same time, he reproached Jaurès for being blind
toward that development.10
The SFIO Congress held in Brest in 1913 witnessed a clash between the different tendencies
on the colonial question, which showed how little a coherent position on the question had crys-
tallized in its ranks. If Édouard Vaillant offered an outright condemnation of colonial enterprises,
and Bracke (Alexandre Desrousseaux) demanded the abandonment of the colonies, Francis de
Pressensé argued that the positions of the socialists should be based on the old policy of assimila-
tion and autonomy for the old colonies, aimed at peoples who were “still in an infantile period”
of their development (Bédarida 1974, 31–32). At the same time, in the International arena the
main SFIO spokesmen (Jaurès and Vaillant) were active in peace initiatives, including propa-
ganda for the general strike in case of war.11 With the assassination of Jaurès on 31 July 1914 and
the outbreak of the First World War, the party fell prey to the chauvinist propaganda against the
“German peril,” a development symbolized by the inclusion of the “orthodox Marxist” Guesde
as a Minister without Portfolio in the “national unity” government of René Viviani.

Italy
A peculiarity of the debates on colonialism in Italy, both in bourgeois and socialist circles, was
that they tended to conflate under the term “colonization” both pacific emigration, mostly
to South and North America, and the conquest of colonies, because colonialism was usually
referred to by its apologists as an outlet for emigration (Choate 2003).
The real involvement of the Italian socialists with the colonial question came after the foun-
dation of the Socialist Party in 1892, particularly as a result of Italy’s attempt to conquer Ethio-
pia, which ended with a sound defeat of the Italian army in the battle of Adwa in 1896 (although
Italy retained Eritrea). In this context an interesting debate took place in Critica Sociale, the most
theoretically oriented Italian socialist journal edited by Filippo Turati, leader of a tendency that
would eventually define itself as reformist. An article by “D’A” (1896) claimed that Italy had
embarked in a useless military adventure at the expense of the Italian and Abyssinian proletarians’
blood, since emigration would not be diverted to Africa and no significant outlet for industry
would be created. Turati (1896) argued that the adventure was led by backward strata, such as the
speculative bourgeoisie and the monarchy, while the industrial bourgeoisie was mostly opposed

57
 Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga

to the initiative owing to its scarce development. A later article in Critica Sociale compared favor-
ably the pacific emigration to South and North America with the bloody African adventures,
emphasizing the unnecessary character of African colonies (Solari 1899).
The first debate on Imperialism proper came a few years later. A correspondent for Critica
Sociale in London, Olindo Malagodi, wrote two articles on American and British imperialism.
Analyzing the British “Khaki Election” of 1900, when the Unionist government won a landslide
by stirring up chauvinism over the South African War, he argued that the results and the tone of
the campaign proved that imperialism in Britain was no longer associated with the aristocracy; if
the old imperialism had been fought against by the bourgeoisie as an obstacle to capitalist devel-
opment, there was now a new imperialism, because the bourgeoisie resorted to militarism and
expansion to extend capitalism (Malagodi 1900). Malagodi extended this analysis to the United
States, which, he argued, had turned from an egalitarian society of settlers into a plutocracy of
monopolies. He concluded that imperialism was a new solution to the contradictions of capital-
ism, by means of which the bourgeoisie tried to attract the proletariat to a policy of conquest
with the lure of higher wages derived from surplus profits (Malagodi 1900).
The editors of Critica Sociale published a critique by Luigi Negro. Negro’s general analysis was
that colonial expansion could prevent capitalist crises but only temporarily, until the new mar-
kets were also saturated, a point where a world crisis would inexorably break out (Negro 1901).
Imperialism was not a new solution to the contradictions of capitalism, but only its development
to its furthest conclusion. He questioned the link between protectionism and imperialism: in
Britain protectionism was defensive, while in the United States it was a relic of old times: the
development of trusts showed that protectionism was no longer needed; on the contrary, free
markets to dispose of the overabundance of capital were required. This analysis was a sort of
anticipation of the Centrist arguments, a little more extreme in its denial of a necessary relation-
ship between Imperialism and protectionism.
Following the Italian elections in 1900, a general strike in Genoa in protest against the clo-
sure of the city’s Chamber of Labour brought down the government. The new government led
by Giovanni Giolitti implemented a policy of nonintervention in labor disputes, which led the
Italian Socialist Party conditionally to support it (Davis 1989, 191). The left-wing tendencies
within the Italian Socialist Party developed during this period of working-class militancy in
opposition to this class-conciliation policy toward the Giolitti government (Riosa 1976, 31–39).
During that period a public discussion arose in Italy over the possible conquest of Libya. In
this context, one of the first openly pro-colonialist positions appeared in Italian socialism, in
an interview given by the famous Marxist and Hegelian scholar Antonio Labriola to Giornale
D’Italia, where he deplored the opportunities that the Italian state had missed for occupying
Egypt and Tunisia, and advocated the occupation of Libya with the usual argument about the
need for securing an outlet for emigration in a land that, unlike Eritrea, offered actual oppor-
tunities for development. This position was rejected in the party journal Avanti in a series of
articles that stressed the meagre economic utility of Libya (Arfé 1967, 205–6).
A second moment of prolific theoretical and political production on the question of Imperi-
alism came with the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 and the conquest in Tripoli. The party leader-
ship did not think that the war would actually start. An example of this attitude was an article
by Turati (1911), which attributed the crisis to the ambition “of a few under-secretaries” that
“sought to realize their ambitions and free themselves both from Giolitti and from socialist par-
liamentary influence.” He declared himself confident that “the farce would not end in drama.”
When the war actually started, the party leadership conducted a campaign against it, but was
overcome by events when the expedition gave place to an economic crisis that turned the agita-
tion against war into actual class struggle (Degl’Innocenti 1972, 470). In the course of the war

58
 Marxism in the Age of Imperialism

the reformists tended to divide into two fractions, the “Left Reformists” led by Turati and the
“Right Reformists” led by Ivanoe Bonomi. The left launched an attack against both fractions
from the pages of the journal Soffita (subtitled Giornale della Frazione Rivoluzionaria Intransigente),
which contained many articles on the war, whose content, however, was mostly of agitation,
with little theoretical analysis.12
This situation stimulated intellectual production on imperialism and the colonial question.
Many syndicalist intellectuals slid into chauvinism, like Arturo Labriola (Arfé 1967, 206) and
Robert Michels (Trocini 2007), by arguing that Italy was a “proletarian” nation and therefore
had the right to participate in the partition of the world.
In this context a study on Eritrea was published by Alessandro Schiavi (1912). He made a
thorough survey of the literature on colonialism, noting the contradiction between the pub-
lic discourse about the need for colonies as an outlet for emigration and more realistic works
that pointed out that indigenous labor was required; others admitted that most of the money
acquired through colonial exploitation was actually employed in keeping the colony. The budget
was mostly provided by the state, always pushing for increases in military spending. Spontaneous
emigration to the colonies had halted, because of the competence of the much cheaper indig-
enous labor and because South America was a much more alluring destination. Capital exports
to the colonies had also almost ceased after mining prospects proved illusory. Italian colonialism
was a failure on its own terms.
Another article in Critica Sociale by Ugo Mondolfo summarized the ideas of a work by Genn-
aro Mondaini, a colonialist that had managed to survive in the margins of the Socialist Party.
Mondaini’s book, published in 1911, presented an apologetic view of colonialism after the exam-
ple of Van Kol, defending colonial expansion. Mondaini considered pacific penetration in the
colonies an illusion, and defended armed intervention. Mondolfo retorted that the main goal
of colonialism was to secure outlets against competitors. Socialists did not oppose the pacific
penetration of capitalism; their opposition to colonialism was due to the fact that the needs satis-
fied by colonialism could just as well be satisfied by free trade. This response is an example of
the weakness of some left reformist condemnations of colonialism as a product of protectionism
(Mondolfo 1912).
In this situation, the left gained the upper hand among the party youth and finally in the
party leadership itself, at a time when the right-wing reformist deputies were voting for the
treaty of Libyan annexation. At the Congress of Reggio Emilia held in 1912, the maximal-
ist left took over the leadership of the Italian Socialist Party (the old leftist Costantino Lazzari
was named Party Secretary) and the right reformists (including Bonomi and Mondaini) were
expelled (Craver 1996). When the First World War broke out, the Italian Socialist Party was
one of the few sections of the Second International to declare itself neutral and non-supportive
of the war effort.

The International Confronts the Approaching War

The Center-Left Rift

In 1910 a split between two tendencies, with profound international consequences, took place
within the Social Democratic Party of Germany. A mass struggle was developing at that time
over the demand for equal universal suffrage in Prussia, were a three-class voting system was
in place. A sort of repetition of the debate of 1905 occurred, with Luxemburg calling for the
employment of the mass political strike to achieve that demand. This time, however, Kautsky
was her opponent, arguing against direct action and in favor of a “strategy of attrition,” which

59
 Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga

he saw as the only correct policy in a situation where the proletariat did not have the mass of the
people behind it. According to Kautsky, Social Democracy should concentrate in winning the
next Reichstag elections rather than engaging in imprudent strikes. Kautsky called his position
a center one, opposed both to the “statesman’s impatience” of the revisionists and the “rebel’s
impatience” of the left (Schorske 1955, 173–85). This happened at a period of growing war
danger in Europe, with conflicts like the Italo-Turkish War (1911–12), the Second Moroccan
crisis (1911) and the Balkan Wars (1912–13).
In terms of the debate on imperialism and the war, the center began to argue that imperial-
ism was not an inevitable stage in the development of capitalism, but a policy pursued by only a
part of the bourgeoisie; following this line of reasoning, the Congress of the International that
met in Copenhagen from 28 August to 3 September 1910 approved a resolution that argued that
the reformist demands for general disarmament agreements and international courts of arbitra-
tion for international disputes should be made mandatory.13 In 1911 the SPD deputies in the
Reichstag proposed a new disarmament agreement. Kautsky supported this initiative with an
article that asserted the existence of anti-war sections of the bourgeoisie with which the prole-
tariat should make a common front in order to effectively oppose war; he explicitly attacked the
idea that war “is strictly linked to the nature of capitalism and is therefore inevitable” (Kautsky
1911, 99). Luxemburg responded with an article that argued that imperialism was “the highest
and last stage of capitalist development”; the task of Social Democracy was therefore to demon-
strate the impracticable nature of disarmament agreements and warn against illusions regarding
the alleged pacifism of sections of the bourgeoisie (Luxemburg 2011).

The Second Moroccan Crisis

The second Moroccan crisis erupted in 1911, when both France and Germany sent troops to the
country, allegedly to protect their citizens and interests during a rebellion against the Sultan. The
Bureau of the International consulted Bebel on the convenience of convening an international
meeting of socialist parties of the countries involved in the crisis, but his secretary (Bebel was
absent) responded emphasizing the inconvenience of taking action on that subject in an elec-
tion year, when the issue could be used against the SPD in the midst of a chauvinist outburst in
Germany. Luxemburg, who as a member of the International Secretariat had received a copy of
the letter of Bebel’s secretary, published it in the Leipziger Volkszeitung, creating a scandal in the
German SPD. The Party Executive finally called for a demonstration, but too late, because the
conflict ended in an agreement that delivered Cameroon to Germany in exchange for leaving
Morocco to France (Schorske 1955, 198–201). The crisis was seen by many as an example of
the SPD leadership’s impotence in the face of a real war crisis.

The Chemnitz Congress

The debate on imperialism had a new chapter at the Chemnitz congress of the SPD, held against
the background of the elections of 12 January 1912: Social-Democratic candidates received
approximately 4,250,000 votes (34.8 percent of the total votes), dramatically increasing the
party’s representation in the Reichstag from 43 to 110 deputies. The debate on imperialism
at the Chemnitz congress centered around Hugo Haase’s draft resolution and his speech on
behalf of the executive, where he argued that imperialism’s tendency to lead to a war between
the major capitalist powers went alongside a series of counter-tendencies, including economic
integration, international cartels and the growing power of the proletariat. The sole fact of the
existence of bourgeois politicians and governments that strived for disarmament, like the English

60
 Marxism in the Age of Imperialism

government, proved, according to Haase, that war was not an inescapable consequence of capi-
talism. The domestic consequences of imperialism, protectionism and the rising cost of living,
had to be countered through a struggle of the proletariat in favor of free trade.
Since Luxemburg absented herself from the congress, the main polemicist for the left was Paul
Lensch, who argued that, while war was indeed not absolutely inevitable, the only real counter-
tendency was the proletariat’s struggle. The other tendencies mentioned by Haase were reaction-
ary, because the British government did not pursue disarmament selflessly but as a reaction to
the growth of German military power; Social Democrats should not strive to preserve the era of
British supremacy and free trade already overcome by economic development. At the same time,
Lensch countered the reformist demand for disarmament with the left demand for the militia: in
all imperialist countries big mass armies had developed, which created the conditions for their
transformation into citizens’ militias; disarmament was not only utopian but reactionary, because
its realization would lead to the appearance of small armies of “praetorian guards.” Haase’s resolu-
tion, however, was finally approved by the Chemnitz congress (Haase et al. 2011).

The Balkan Wars and the Basle Congress

The Balkan Wars, a struggle of the emerging European nation-states of the peninsula both
against the remnants of Ottoman rule in Europe and among themselves (in the Second Balkan
War 1913) gave rise to a political shift in international socialism. If traditionally the International
had supported the status quo in the Balkans, the First Balkan War (1912–13) led to a mostly
Austrian-led move toward a new position, supporting the Balkan peoples’ independence while
rejecting any demand that could compromise Austrian territorial integrity (Roebke-Berens
1981). An emergency Congress held in Basle in November 1912 approved a Manifesto that
contained a precise analysis of the situation and the imperial rivalries involved, as well as a call
for political action and demonstrations to prevent the outbreak of a European war.14
After the conflict ended, however, a feeling began to spread among the Social Democratic
parties that Haupt called the “illusion of détente”: the idea that, as the war crises were overcome
in 1913, a durable agreement between the imperialist powers had been reached, and that the
task of Social Democracy was to support this understanding to avert World War (Haupt 1972,
103–8). The leading organizations and currents of Social Democracy therefore came to expect a
repetition of the Balkan events; that is to say, a similarly short and manageable crisis. The rise of
theoretical and political Centrism was crucial to elaborating and spreading this prognosis. The
socialist parties were thus left unprepared for the state of siege, the suppression of democratic
freedoms and the chauvinist outbursts that followed the declaration of war in August 1914;
conditions that led most of those parties to support their “own” governments in the war effort.

The Major Theoretical Works

The book of the Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital (1910), was the major theo-
retical contribution of the period: a very complex work that is the subject of intense debate to
this very day. Hilferding’s book stressed that the concentration of capital tended to create larger
combinations in which the displacement of labor by machinery tied up capital for a steadily
lengthening turnover period. Since fixed capital could not be readily reallocated elsewhere in
the event of falling prices, large firms became more dependent on the banks in order to adjust
to short-run market changes, while the banks in turn protected their growing investment in
industry by collaborating in the formation of trusts and cartels. Thus “finance capital” emerged
from the fusion of money-capital and industrial capital. The centralized control of output meant

61
 Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga

that organized capital could artificially raise its own profits at the expense of the unorganized
firms in the home market, making the latter carry most of the burdens of crises. As an unlim-
ited expansion in output would lower the rate of profit, strict constraints on investment in the
home-market tended to arise: that was the fundamental cause of the capital-export drive, the
ultimate cause of imperialism.
Hilferding thought cartels could not modify capitalism’s crisis-pone nature; indeed they even
intensified the tendency to overproduction. At the same time, Hilferding analyzed the possibility
of the development of an international “general cartel” that would regulate the entire production.
But if the idea was economically conceivable, it was, according to Hilferding, “in social and polit-
ical terms . . . impossible” (Hilferding 1981, 296–97), because of the instability of international
agreements between cartels, which were a “truce rather than an enduring community of interest,
since . . . every variation in the market relations between states alters the basis of the agreement”
(Hilferding 1981, 313). Hilferding’s critique of imperialism appears in the last section of his book,
where he dealt with the export of capital and the struggle for economic territory and with the
changes in commercial policy, class structure and class struggles brought about by imperialism.
Hilferding’s work was regarded as a decisive economic refutation of revisionism, winning the
praise of both center and left authors.15 However Finance Capital left open the door for turning
the analysis of the mere likelihood of a general cartel into a concrete forecast for the future: that
step was taken by Kautsky (2011). With the war already under way, Kautsky predicted that the
end of the conflict would usher in a phase of “ultra-imperialism,” characterized by the extension
of cartelization into foreign policy and resulting in the creation of a federation of the strongest
capitalist states that would thereby renounce armed conflicts. In that way, Kautsky defined impe-
rialism as a policy that could be pursued or not by the developed capitalist states, rather than as
an inevitable result of capitalist development.
Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1913) was the other major attempt to provide
a comprehensive theoretical account of imperialism. She tried to substantiate the left’s main idea,
namely that imperialism was an unavoidable consequence of capitalism rather than a reversible
policy, but in an idiosyncratic way: she criticized Marx’s schemes of expanded reproduction,
arguing that they did not account for real capitalist production conditions (in particular, rising
productivity), and thus could not explain how a growing demand, necessary for the realization
of the accumulated part of surplus-value, came into being. She reached the conclusion that this
part of surplus-value necessarily needed an external buyer to be realized. According to Lux-
emburg, capitalism therefore had a permanent need for expansion, and the destruction of pre-
capitalist “natural economy” (based on the expropriation of land, the forced proletarianization
of indigenous labor and the replacement of peasant by capitalist production in the countryside)
created the conditions for expanded markets, in a never-ending primitive accumulation process.
The imperialist phase was the moment when competition for the remaining places of the Earth
still in conditions of “natural economy” intensified, resulting in conflicts between the major
capitalist powers and, ultimately, a world war.
Although Luxemburg’s work contained valuable historical and economic insights, its basic
economic argument failed to convince almost all the important theoreticians of the Second
International, from the right, the center and the left (with a few exceptions, such as Franz
Mehring). Lenin saw in her argument a revival of the Narodnik theories that he had fiercely
fought against years before.16 For his own evaluation, Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism (1917) drew on Hilferding’s analysis, emphasizing the emergence of finance capital,
the falling rate of profit, the export of capital and the uneven development of capitalism as the
driving forces of imperialism.

62
 Marxism in the Age of Imperialism

Conclusion
The writings of Marx and Engels did not contain a theory of imperialism; it therefore had to be
developed by Marx’s disciples of the Second International period, under the impact of a series
of events that started with the Spanish-American and South African wars and ended with the
First World War. In this chapter we have surveyed the political debates surrounding imperialism,
from the clash between revisionism and Marxism in the first years of the International, to the
center-left rift and the rise of Centrism in the years before the war, to the particular national
forms that these differences assumed in France and Italy. We have also traced the gradual and
contradictory origins of the theory of imperialism, which began as a series of empirical analyses
of particular events and finally crystallized as a unified and theoretically grounded theory in the
works of Hilferding and Lenin.

Notes
1. See Tudor and Tudor (1988).
2. For British socialist writings see the articles in The Social Democrat (1900, 1901, 1902). For an index:
www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/social-democrat/index.htm
3. See Day and Gaido (2011, 21–2), for an English version of the resolution.
4. See Day and Gaido (2011, 28), for an English version of the resolution.
5. See an English version of the resolution in Joll (1974, 206–8).
6. See Nation (1989) and Gankin and Fisher (1940) for the story of this idea.
7. See Quiroga and Scattolini (2016) for a detailed analysis.
8. A more detailed study of Louis can be found in Quiroga (2016).
9. See Loughlin (2001) for fuller account of his trajectory.
10. The documents would be later published in Andler (1918).
11. This is developed in detail in Haupt (1972).
12. Soffita can be consulted online at http://digitale.alessandrina.it/PeriodicoScheda.aspx?id_testata=33
13. The full resolution is in Riddell (1984, 70).
14. See www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1912/basel-manifesto.htm for an English
version.
15. See Bauer (2011) and Karski (Marchlewski) (2011).
16. See Gaido and Quiroga (2013) for a detailed interpretation.

Bibliography
Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1963. “Jaurès et les socialistes français devant la question algérienne (de 1895 à
1914).” Le Mouvement social 42 (January–March): 3–29.
Andler, Charles. 1918. Le socialisme impérialiste dans l’Allemagne contemporaine: dossier d’une polémique avec Jean
Jaurès (1912–1913). Paris: Bossard.
Arfé, Gaetano. 1967. “Italie: Les socialistes, l’Ethiopie et la Libye.” In Haupt and Rebérioux 1967, 193–211.
Bauer, Otto. 2000 (1907). The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press.
Bauer, Otto. 2011. “Finance Capital.” In Day and Gaido 2011, 413–40.
Bax, Ernest Belfort. 1896a. “The True Aims of ‘Imperial Extension’ and ‘Colonial Enterprise.’” Justice (1
May): 7–8.
Bax, Ernest Belfort. 1896b. “Our German Fabian Convert; or, Socialism According to Bernstein.” Justice
(7 November). In Tudor and Tudor 1988, 61–64.
Bédarida, François. 1974. “Perspectives Sur Le Mouvement Ouvrier et L’imperialisme En France Au
Temps de La Conquete Coloniale.” Le Mouvement Social 86 (January).
Bernstein, Eduard. 1896. “Amongst the Philistines: A Rejoinder to Belfort Bax.” Justice (14 November). In
Tudor and Tudor 1988, 65–68.
Bernstein, Eduard. 1900. “Paris und Mainz.” Sozialistische Monatshefte 4(11) (November): 709–18.

63
 Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga

Choate, Mark I. 2003. “From Territorial to Ethnographic Colonies and Back Again: The Politics of Italian
Expansion, 1890–1912.” Modern Italy 8(1): 65–75.
Craver, Earlene. 1996. “The Third Generation: The Young Socialists in Italy, 1907–1915.” Canadian Journal
of History 31(2): 199–226.
Cunow, Heinrich. 2011 (1900). “Trade Agreements and Imperialist Expansion Policy.” In Day and Gaido
2011, 177–94.
D’A., G. 1896. “Becchi e bastonati: l’impresa d’Africa e la borghesia italiana.” Critica Sociale 6(2): 17–18.
Davis, John A. 1989. “Socialism and the Working Classes in Italy before 1914.” In Labour and Socialist Move-
ments in Europe Before 1914, edited by Dick Geary, 198–207. Oxford: Berghahn.
Day, Richard B., and Daniel Gaido, eds. 2011. Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I.
Leiden: Brill.
Degl’Innocenti, Maurizio. 1972. “La guerra libica, la crisi del riformismo e la vittoria degli intransigenti.”
Studi Storici 13(3): 466–516.
De Leon, Daniel. 1904. Flashlights of the Amsterdam International Socialist Congress. New York: New York
Labor News.
Gaido, Daniel, and Manuel Quiroga. 2013. “The Early Reception of Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of Impe-
rialism.” Capital & Class 37(3): 437–55.
Gankin, Olga H., and Henry F. Harold. 1940. The Bolsheviks and the World War: The Origin of the Third
International. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Haase, Hugo, et al. 2011 (1912). “SPD Party Congress at Chemnitz, ‘Debate and Resolution on Imperial-
ism.’” In Day and Gaido 2011, 623–74.
Haupt, Georges, and Madeleine Rebérioux. 1963. “L’attitude de l’Internationale.” Le Mouvement Social 45
(October): 7–37.
Haupt, Georges, and Madeleine Rebérioux. 1967. La Deuxième internationale et l’Orient. Paris: Éditions Cujas.
Haupt, Georges. 1972. Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press.
Hilferding, Rudolf. 1981 (1910). Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development.
London: Routledge.
Hobson, John A. 1902. Imperialism: A Study. London: James Nisbet.
International Socialist Congress. 1907. Internationaler Sozialisten-Kongress zu Stuttgart, 18. bis 24. August
1907. Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts.
Jaurès, Jean. 1896. “Les compétitions coloniales.” La Petite République (17 May).
Jaurès, Jean. 1907. “France and Morocco.” Social Democrat (May): 295–96.
Joll, James. 1974. The Second International, 1889–1914. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Karski [Marchlewski, Julian]. 2011 (1910). “Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase
of Capitalist Development.” In Day and Gaido 2011, 425–40.
Kautsky, Karl. 1883. “Auswanderung and Kolonisation.” Die neue Zeit 1: 365–70, 395–404.
Kautsky, Karl. 1898. “Ältere und neuere Kolonialpolitik.” Die neue Zeit 16(1) (March): 769–81, 801–16.
Kautsky, Karl. 1907. Sozialismus und Kolonialpolitik. Eine Auseinandersetzung. Berlin: Vorwärts. English ver-
sion: Socialism and Colonial Policy: An Analysis. Belfast: Athol Books, 1975.
Kautsky, Karl. 1911. “Krieg und Frieden. Betrachtungen zur Maifeier.” Die neue Zeit 29 (April): 97–107.
Kautsky, Karl. 1912. “Der erste Mai und der Kampf gegen den Militarismus.” Die neue Zeit 30(2): 97–109.
Kautsky, Karl. 2011 (1914). “Imperialism.” In Day and Gaido 2011, 753–74.
Lafargue, Paul. 1903. Les trusts américains: leur action-économique-sociale-politique. Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière.
Lagrosillière, Joseph. 1902. “Les scandales capitalistes et administratifs de la Martinique.” Le Mouvement
socialiste 108, 109 and 110 (November/December).
Lenin, V.I. 1964 (1917). “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” In LCW 22: 185–304.
Loughlin, Michael B. 2001. “Gustave Hervé’s Transition from Socialism to National Socialism: Another
Example of French Fascism?” Journal of Contemporary History 36(1): 5–39.
Louis, Paul. 1903. “Les bases de l’impérialisme.” La Renaissance Latine 3(2) (15 Septembre): 644–78.
Louis, Paul. 1905. Le colonialisme. Paris: Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition.
Louis, Paul. 2011a (1899). “Anglo-Saxon Imperialism.” In Day and Gaido 2011, 129–46.
Louis, Paul. 2011b (1904). “Essay on Imperialism.” In Day and Gaido 2011, 291–300.
Luxemburg, Rosa. 2000. Gesammelte Werke. Band 1.2. Edited by Annelies Laschitza, et al. Berlin: Dietz
Verlag.
Luxemburg, Rosa. 2011 (1911). “Peace Utopias.” In Day and Gaido 2011, 441–58.

64
 Marxism in the Age of Imperialism

Luxemburg, Rosa. 2015 (1913). “The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Theory
of Imperialism.” In The Complete Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II, Economic Writings 2, edited by
Peter Hudis and Paul Le Blanc. London: Verso.
Malagodi, Olindo. 1900. “Trionfi imperialisti I: Le elezioni inglesi, Trionfi Imperialisti II: Le elezioni
americane.” Critica Sociale X(22) (Novembre): 338–9, and (24) (Dicembre): 373–5.
Mondolfo, Ugo G. 1912. “Politica coloniale e socialismo.” Critica Sociale 22(7): 102–5.
Moss, Bernard H. 1976. The Origins of the French Labor Movement, 1830–1914: The Socialism of Skilled Work-
ers. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nation, R. Craig. 1989. War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist International-
ism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Negro, Luigi. 1901. “Nuova soluzione sociale? L’imperialismo americano e O. M.” Critica Sociale 11(1): 7–9.
Noland, Aaron. 1970. The Founding of the French Socialist Party (1893–1905). New York: H. Fertig.
Parvus [Alexander Helphand]. 2011 (1907). “Before the Hottentot Elections” (Selections). In Day and
Gaido 2011, 331–46.
POF [Parti Ouvrier Français]. 1897. Quinzième congrès national du Parti ouvrier tenu à Paris du 10 au 13 juillet
1897. Lille: P. Lagrange.
Prochasson, Christophe. 1989. “Sur La Réception Du Marxisme En France: Le Cas Andler (1890–1920).”
Revue de Synthèse 110(1): 85–108.
Quiroga, Manuel. 2016. “Teorías del imperialismo y marxismo en el socialismo francés temprano: El caso
de Paul Louis (1896–1907).” Izquierdas (Chile) 27: 342–67.
Quiroga, Manuel, and Darío Scattolini. 2016. “Teoría y política de Otto Bauer sobre el imperialismo y las
crisis (1904–1914).” Izquierdas (Chile) 30: 258–87.
Rebérioux, Madeleine. 1964. “La gauche socialiste française: ‘La Guerre Sociale’ et ‘Le Mouvement
Socialiste’ face au problème colonial.” Le Mouvement Social 46 (January): 91–103.
Rebérioux, Madeleine. 1967. “France: Diversité des options à la veille de la guerre.” In Haupt and Rebéri-
oux 1967, 136–65.
Riddell, John, ed. 1984. Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International. New York: Monad.
Riosa, Alceo. 1976. Il sindacalismo rivoluzionario in Italia e la lotta politica nel Partito socialista dell’età giolittiana.
Bari: De Donato.
Roebke-Berens, Ruth. 1981. “Austrian Social Democratic Peace Policy and the Balkan Crises of 1912–1913.”
Peace & Change 7(1–2): 17–27.
Schiavi, Alessandro. 1912. “Dall’Eritrea alla Libia.” Critica Sociale 22(6): 83–5; (7): 99–102.
Schorske, Carl E. 1955. German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Solari, Gioele. 1899. “L’espansione coloniale italiana: a proposito di una recente pubblicazione.” Critica
Sociale 9(13): 203–4.
SPD [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands]. 1900. Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages abge-
halten zu Mainz vom 17. bis 21. September: 245: Resolution zum Referat über Weltpolitik.
Trocini, Federico. 2007. Tra internazionalismo e nazionalismo: Robert Michels e i dilemmi del socialismo di fronte
alla guerra e all’imperialismo (1900–1915). Roma: Aracne.
Tudor, Henry, and J.M. Tudor, eds. 1988. Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate 1896–1898.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turati, Filippo. 1896. “Becchi e bastonati: l’impresa d’Africa e la borghesia italiana.” Critica Sociale 7(2): 18–19.
Turati, Filippo. 1911. “Da Jena al Marocco e a Tripoli passando per Roma.” Critica Sociale 21(18): 273–75.
Van Kol, Henri. 1903. “L’Algérie et la politique coloniale.” Le Mouvement socialiste 119 (April): 1–23 and
120 (May): 96–117.
Willard, Claude. 1965. Les guesdistes: le mouvement socialiste en France, 1893–1905. Paris: Éditions sociales.

65