There was apparently much debate in the drafting commission and the subsequent plenary session on the war responsibility of the Central Powers and the position of Belgium and Serbia.
The resolution adopted by the conference claimed that the war was the product of the antagonisms produced by capitalist society, imperialism and colonial rivalry in which every country had a share of responsibility.
Given the invasion of Belgium and France, a victory in the war for Germany would extinguish liberty, national independence and faith in treaties.
The victory of the Allied Powers must be a victory for popularliberty, for unity, for independence, and autonomy of nations in the peaceful federation of the United States of Europe and the worldAt the end of the resolution the conference condemned the repression against socialist newspapers and parliamentarians in Russia, as well as the national oppression of Finns, Jews and Russian and German Poles.
The Italian party then withdrew its decision to participate and called on the International Socialist Commission to give its opinion of the purposed conference.
The ILP and BSP were still willing, but when the British Labour Party decided to withdraw a few days before the conference was to open, the meeting was cancelled.
After the Council of Soviets had joined the call for the purposed Stockholm conference and made a tour of Allied capitals to make the case, the necessity of convening an Inter-Allied Socialist Conference before the Stockholm one was seated became more imperative, and the final date was set at a meeting of representatives of the French Socialist Party, the British Labour Party and the Soviets at a meeting in Paris on 20–30 July.
No full membership list seems to be available, but some of the known delegates included Emile Vandervelde and Louis de Brouckere of Belgium, Felicia Scratcherd for Greece, Pierre Renaudel, Albert Thomas, Edgard Milhaud, Poisson, Bracke and L. Dubreuilh, and Arthur Henderson, Ramsay MacDonald, Henry Hyndman, Sidney Webb, Hunter Watts, Frederick Gorle, J. Jones and Bernard Shaw.
On 20 September, the Blackpool congress of the British TUC passed a resolution stating that the Stockholm conference would not be successful at this time, but called on their Parliamentary Committee to take steps for an agreement on war aims among the allied workers and that an eventual general congress should be called on the basis of the agreed war aims.
He also stated that the Belgian Party would be able to adhere to the main lines of the memorandum and every effort should be used to secure the concurrence of other allied labor groups.
Messages of support came in from groups in New Zealand, Portugal, Romania, South Africa and the Russian Social Revolutionary Party.
Camille Huysmans read a communication from delegates of the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary Parties stating that they had been refused passports by the Bolshevik government.
Capeta, on behalf of the Italian reformists, stated that he had held informal talks with the Yugoslav delegation and they had come to an agreement over amendments to the memorandum affecting their frontiers.
[17] This implied a complete democratisation of all existing states including removal of "arbitrary powers", elected parliaments, publication of all treaties, abolition of secret diplomacy and the responsibility of foreign policy to the legislature.
[22] Serbia was represented by Dušan A. Popović of the Serbian Social Democratic Party; Greece by Petridis of the General Labor Federation of Piraeus; from the United States, representing the American Federation of Labor were Samuel Gompers, John P. Frey, William Bowen, Edgar Wallace and Charles Baine;[23] the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada sent a single delegate; Romania and Transylvania were represented by a "National committee" which appointed two delegates whom the credentials committee gave consultative status;[24] the Italians were represented by three delegates from the Socialist Union, one from Italian Union of Labor and five from the Democratia Sociale Irredenta, a group of pro-Allied Italian socialists in Austrian Tyrol, who were given consultative status; Great Britain had the largest delegations, with 24 delegates from the Labour Party and 18 from the Trade Union Congress, including Ramsay MacDonald, Sidney Webb, Arthur Henderson; France supplied six each from the SFIO and the CGT; there were six representatives of the Belgian Workers Party and two from the Union of Belgian Workers in France, which included Huysmans, de Broukere and Vandervelde.
In any case the Soviet authorities would not let the representatives of the Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries attend the conference but two communications were received, one from Roubanovich, the other from Axelrod, Gavronsky, Rousanoff and Soukholine.
[26] The second day was taken up largely with the presentation of British and American draft war aims proposals and introduction of resolutions to be sent to the various commissions.
Debate on this raged through the afternoon session of 19 September, and included a speech by Kerensky in which he pleaded for western socialists to support the anti-Bolshevik governments in Russia.
[30] The commission on war aims adopted a statement that combined elements of the British and American proposals and the fourteen points.
There was opposition to this report by Popovitch and Kneeshaw, who did not regard the war necessarily as one between freedom and despotism, and two amendments were offered to change the wording over the circumstances in which they would meet representatives of the German SPD, both of which were voted down.