"Before the war there were many who were more or less ignorant of the international labor movement but who nevertheless turned to it for salvation when the threat of war arose. They hoped that the workers would never permit a war"
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Branting is puncturing a comforting prewar fantasy: that “the workers” were an automatic moral veto on catastrophe. The line is built like a quiet rebuke. He starts with “many who were more or less ignorant,” a deliberately soft phrasing that still lands as an indictment of armchair internationalism - people who didn’t really understand labor politics yet treated the international movement like an emergency escape hatch once the drums began. The word “salvation” is doing sharp work here, framing the hope not as strategy but as secular religion: a last-minute faith placed in solidarity as if it were providence.
The subtext is painful because it admits how seductive that story was. Socialist and labor internationals before World War I traded on the promise that shared class interests could outmuscle national chauvinism. Branting, a Swedish Social Democrat who later led Sweden and won the Nobel Peace Prize, is writing from the aftermath of that promise collapsing in 1914, when much of Europe’s labor leadership either backed their own governments or proved powerless to stop mobilization. “They hoped” becomes almost accusatory: hope replaced planning, and belief replaced an honest reading of how nationalism, state coercion, and mass media can reorganize loyalties overnight.
Contextually, this is the melancholy of the Second International’s failure compressed into two sentences. Branting isn’t sneering at the labor movement; he’s warning against outsourcing responsibility to it. The intent is to strip away the myth of an inevitable, unified working-class front and force a harder question: if solidarity is to matter, it has to be organized long before the crisis - and it has to contend with the state’s ability to turn citizens into soldiers faster than movements can turn workers into internationalists.
The subtext is painful because it admits how seductive that story was. Socialist and labor internationals before World War I traded on the promise that shared class interests could outmuscle national chauvinism. Branting, a Swedish Social Democrat who later led Sweden and won the Nobel Peace Prize, is writing from the aftermath of that promise collapsing in 1914, when much of Europe’s labor leadership either backed their own governments or proved powerless to stop mobilization. “They hoped” becomes almost accusatory: hope replaced planning, and belief replaced an honest reading of how nationalism, state coercion, and mass media can reorganize loyalties overnight.
Contextually, this is the melancholy of the Second International’s failure compressed into two sentences. Branting isn’t sneering at the labor movement; he’s warning against outsourcing responsibility to it. The intent is to strip away the myth of an inevitable, unified working-class front and force a harder question: if solidarity is to matter, it has to be organized long before the crisis - and it has to contend with the state’s ability to turn citizens into soldiers faster than movements can turn workers into internationalists.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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