Zimmerwald Conference

The conference issued a manifesto which denounced the war, blaming it on reactionary capitalist governments, and called for working-class unity and for a peace without annexations or reparations.

Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, in his keynote address at the International's founding congress called upon socialists to be "brothers with a single common enemy [...] private capital, whether it be Prussian, French, or Chinese".

[5] Domela Nieuwenhuis from the Netherlands repeatedly suggested calling a general strike and launching an armed uprising if war should break out, but his proposals failed.

In Stuttgart, the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) suggested employing all possible means to prevent war, including demonstrations, general strikes, and insurrections.

The French leader Jean Jaurès criticized Marx and Engels' maxim that the "workers have no Fatherland" as "vain and obscure subtleties" and a "sarcastic negation of history itself."

The mere tendency toward imperialism by itself takes forms that make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe", according to Rosa Luxemburg.

Even some on the left of the international socialist movement such as the German Konrad Haenisch, the French Gustave Hervé and Jules Guesde (the latter becoming a government minister), and the Russian Georgi Plekhanov supported this policy.

At the August 1915 national conference of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) an anti-war resolution introduced by Merrheim and Albert Bourderon was voted down seventy-nine to twenty-six.

The conference in Lugano, which involved members of the Swiss SPS and the Italian PSI, denounced the war as "the result of the imperialist policy of the great powers", and called on the ISB to resume its activities.

In Paris, Morgari also held discussions with the Menshevik Julius Martov who convinced him of the necessity of a conference of anti-war socialists independent of the ISB.

In the end, the meeting decided to invite all socialists explicitly opposed to the war, including French and German anti-war centrists such as Haase and Kautsky.

He put significant effort into keeping it secret, reserving the rundown Hotel Beau Séjour in Zimmerwald, a village near Berne, for an "ornithological society".

Ewald Vogtherr, Georg Ledebour, Adolph Hoffmann, Joseph Herzfeld, Minna Reichert, Heinrich Berges, and Gustav Lachenmaier, the first four of whom were Reichstag deputies who had to that point still voted for war credits, represented the minority within the SPD.

[54] Because the Bund did not give its emigrant leaders as much latitude to act on the organization's behalf, his role was limited to that of an observer without voting rights and he did not sign any of the conference's declarations.

From there they left in four coaches for a two-hour ride to Zimmerwald, a small Prealpine village consisting of twenty-one houses some ten kilometers (six miles) to the south.

[63] According to Trotsky, on their way to Zimmerwald the delegates joked that "half a century after the formation of the First International it was still possible to fit all the internationalists in Europe into four coaches", but they were in an optimistic mood.

[66] Karl Liebknecht, the most prominent figure in the socialist resistance against the war, addressed the conference in a letter, which was delivered to Grimm by Liebnecht's wife Sophie, as he was unable to attend himself.

Both French delegates pointed out that the anti-war minorities in both countries had to work together: "If we supported each other, the movement against the war would grow and it could become possible to put an end to the butchery", according to Bourderon.

[73] Lapinski gave the opening statement for the three Polish groups, describing the war-time situation in Poland as "thousand times worse than in Belgium".

Lazzari dismissed Radek's tone as "pretentious", expressed doubt that insurrections could be successful at this time, and was concerned that radicalism could exacerbate the splits within the International.

[89] Grimm reminded the delegates not to take documents from the meeting across international borders and to wait fourteen days before discussing it, so everyone would have time to return to their home country before news spread.

The war had turned Europe into a "gigantic human slaughter-house", while the "most savage barbarity is celebrating its triumph over everything that was previously the pride of mankind", it claims.

It deems "misery and privation, unemployment and want, underfeeding and disease" as well as "intellectual and moral desolation, economic disaster, political reaction" to be the effects of the Great War.

To this end, the manifesto calls on workers to fight "for [their] own cause, for the sacred aims of Socialism, for the salvation of the oppressed nations and the enslaved classes, by means of the irreconcilable working-class struggle".

This statement described the manifesto's insufficiencies, criticizing that it did not denounce opportunism, "the chief culprit of the collapse of the International", and did not set forth any tactics for the struggle against the war.

[111] The manifesto adopted in Kiental, "To the People Driven to Ruin and Death", represented a leftward shift relative to the Zimmerwald movement's previous statements.

At the founding congress, a resolution signed by Lenin, Platten, Radek, Rakovski, and Zinoviev, announced the dissolution of the Zimmerwald movement and its merger with the Comintern.

[122] As "the founding mythos of the Soviet Union", according to Swiss historian Julia Richers,[123] the conference continued to be remembered in the USSR and its sphere of influence.

During the Cold War, a large quantity of letters addressed to "the mayor of Zimmerwald" or "the director of the Lenin museum", which did not exist, arrived from Eastern Europe.

In 1963, the municipality outlawed the installation of any memorial plaques on the territory of Zimmerwald, and in 1973 the house in which Lenin was thought to have slept was razed to make room for a bus stop.