Second International (International Workingmen's Association II, 1889–1914)

Class card for the Second International — the transnational confederation of socialist parties, labor parties, and trade unions founded at the Paris Congress of July 14–20 1889 (the centennial of the Bastille's fall). The founding congress split the socialist movement: the Marxist congress (hosted by French Parti Ouvrier) and the Possibilist congress both met simultaneously in Paris, but the Marxist gathering established the ongoing body. The Second International was not a state apparatus, a central executive authority, or a party: it was a federated network of autonomous national parties and unions that shared a common program and met in biennial congresses. Structural grammar: the International Socialist Bureau (ISB, Brussels, permanent secretariat founded 1900) coordinated between congresses. Biennial congresses (Zurich 1893, London 1896, Paris 1900, Amsterdam 1904, Stuttgart 1907, Copenhagen 1910, Basel 1912) passed binding resolutions on international topics: colonial policy, militarism, the general strike, women's suffrage, and most fatally — war and the duties of socialist parties in the event of general European war. May Day (May 1 1890) was the 2nd International's first coordinated international action: a demonstration for the 8-hour workday commemorating the Haymarket affair (May 4 1886, Chicago). May Day became an annual institution — its most durable output as a civilizational machine. Internal pluralism produced three distinct tendencies: (1) Bernsteinian revisionism — Eduard Bernstein's "Evolutionary Socialism" (1899) argued that capitalism was gradually reforming itself, rendering revolution unnecessary; (2) Kautsky orthodoxy — Karl Kautsky defended the Erfurt Programme (1891) against revisionism while opposing revolutionary voluntarism; (3) the revolutionary left — Rosa Luxemburg ("Reform or Revolution", 1900) and later Lenin ("What Is To Be Done?", 1902) insisted on revolutionary rupture and disciplined party organization. The catastrophic collapse of August 1914: when Germany declared war, the SPD Reichstag faction voted 4 August 1914 to approve war credits — directly violating the Stuttgart (1907) resolution that socialist parties must prevent war and turn any war into a socialist revolution. France, Britain, and Belgian socialists followed. The ISB failed to prevent or halt the war. The 2nd International did not formally dissolve but was effectively dead: proletarian internationalism had been subordinated to national mobilization. Post-1914 lineage: a rump "International" continued meeting through the war (Stockholm 1917 peace conference), but the defining successor is Lenin's Communist (Third) International (Comintern, March 1919) — a hostile-takeover successor rejecting the 2nd International's reformism. The Labour and Socialist International (LSI, May 1923, Hamburg) was the reformist continuation; it merged into the Socialist International (SI, Frankfurt 1951), which is nominally extant in 2026. Machine_lifespan choice: the pure 2nd International is 1889–1914 = 25 years (exactly at the floor). The card adopts this boundary; the post-1914 LSI/SI continuation is a distinct (vestigial / de_alignment_reconfig) lineage form. lifecycle_status is proposed; v0.2 candidate for lineage expansion. Cross-era lesson: the 2nd International's failure mode — nationalism > class internationalism under existential crisis — is itself the durable civilizational signal. The LM mutual-aid-network-scale-class inherits the 2nd International's organizational template while attempting to avoid its fatal coupling to state nationalism via non-hierarchical, stateless coordination. [CANON] on all structural dates and organizational facts; [EXTRAP] on cross-era coupling strengths and LM-facing projections.