GenZedong

These sorts of patriotic splits are dangerous to workers parties (esp in western countries) and can weaken them to the often simultaneous rise of fascist movements. From Fascism in Germany: How Hitler Destroyed the World’s Most Powerful Labour Movement by Robert Black:

The transition from what Trotsky called the SPD’s ‘legitimate patriotism to their own party’ to a conception of ‘national’ socialism and finally, after 4 August 1914, to a position of national defence, was a complex process which had its roots not only in the treachery of leaders, but the evolution of an entire stratum of the German working class:

"If we leave aside the hardened bureaucrats, careerists, parliamentary sharpers, and political crooks in general, the social patriotism of the rank-and-file Social Democrat was derived precisely from the belief in building German socialism. It is impossible to think that hundreds of thousands of rank and file Social Democrats… wanted to defend the Hohenzollerns or the bourgeoisie. No. They wanted to protect German industry, the German railways and highways, German technology and culture, and especially the organisations of the German working class, as the necessary and sufficient national prerequisite for socialism."

The great tragedy was that their devotion to the goal of a future socialist Germany was cruelly and cynically exploited by both their class enemies and their own leaders to serve the ends of an all too real imperialist present.

Thus workers read in the German trade union journal Correspondenzblatt that:

"…the policy of 4 August accords with the most vital interests of the trade unions; it keeps all foreign invasion at bay, it protects us against the dismemberment of the German lands, against the destruction of flourishing branches of the German economy, and against an adverse outcome of the war, which would saddle us with reparations for decades to come."

The political responsibility for such a line, which undoubtedly found an echo amongst wide layers of trade unionists in the early period of the war at least, lay largely with the Kautsky ‘centre’ which had mis-educated entire generations of workers to believe that patriotism and an evasive attitude towards the struggle for power could coexist with the SPD’s formal adherence to socialist internationalism and the Marxist theory of the state. For as the preceding chapter attempts to show, the seeds which ripened into the fruit of 4 August were sown in the period of party expansion which followed the lapsing of the anti-socialist laws in 1890. When confronted by the magnitude of their betrayal, the more sophisticated party leaders attempted to evade their own responsibility before the German and international movement - one they had solemnly accepted at a succession of Socialist International congresses - by blaming the working class for a situation which they themselves had helped to create.