Hello everyone and welcome to this week's hinge point on Danny Besner here as

always with Matt Christmas. So on today's episode we're going to explore what is probably one of the most

consequential decisions in modern history and certainly in the history of the left, which was the

social democratic party of Germany or SPD's decision to vote for war credits in World War One and

essentially to abandon the international class struggle, which had been the basic, you know, the

teleology, the telos of Marxism. So World War One breaks out in June 1914 and Matt, why don't you

describe a little what happened? Why did this war break out? What was going on? Who did what?

Well, it was the culmination of a process of military buildup between the various imperial states of

Europe as they scrambled for access to the resources of the globe, but also the territory within Europe

itself. It was a period when the relatively recently united German Empire was making a effort to

gain parity or to even eclipse the power of England on the high seas. And where all of this

bringsmanship was being carried out in the context of these alliance systems between states meant to

prevent any one power from becoming too polligerent. But what ended up happening is that it was that

very alliance system that triggered a continent-wide conflagration, which began after the assassination of

the Austrian era to the throne, Franz Fernand in Sarajevo by Serb Nationalists, because the

war's approximate cause was what Bismarck predicted it would be some damn business in the Balkans,

because the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans had led to a scramble for control of

those territories by the European powers. Russia was seeking to position itself as the guardian

of Slavs everywhere and was looking to try to make a grab for the Dardanelles while Austria-Hungary

was trying to keep its multi-ethnic empire together and to extend its influence into Bosnia.

And so you get the end of this concert of Europe, this post-Napolianic piece. It wasn't actually much

of a piece and I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point. There was actually quite a few wars

...