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The following is an edited version of a talk given at the Online Communist Forum, based in London UK, on 27 March 2022. In it Mike Taber discusses a new book he is preparing, to be published by Haymarket Books.
By Mike Taber
April 3, 2022 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddell Marxist Essays and Commentary — Thanks for the invitation to speak at the Online Communist Forum. Some of you will remember my forum here two years ago, when I spoke about Under the Socialist Banner, then in preparation. That book helped provide a clearer and more rounded picture of what the Second International of 1889–1914 actually was, as registered in its adopted congress resolutions.
It also posed the way the Second International is viewed today by both right-wing and left-wing socialists. Most contemporary social democrats think there was too much Marxism in the pre-1914 Second International, not enough political realism, as they see it. For their part, many left-wing socialists and communists tend to think either that the Second International was fundamentally flawed from the outset, or else they simply don’t give it a lot of attention.