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IN JANUARY 1918 Lenin wrote: ‘We are far from having completed even the transitional period from capitalism to socialism. We have never cherished the hope that we could finish it without the aid of the international proletariat. We have never had any illusions on that score ... The final victory of socialism in a single country is of course impossible.’ [1]
In July of the same year he repeated: ‘We never harboured the illusion that the forces of the proletariat and the revolutionary people of one country, however heroic and however organised and disciplined they might be, could overthrow international imperialism. That can be done only by the joint effort of the workers of the world.’ [2]
And again, in March 1919: ‘Complete and final victory ... cannot be achieved in Russia alone; it can be achieved only when the proletariat is victorious in at least all the advanced countries, or, at all events, in some of the largest of the advanced countries. Only then shall we be able to say with absolute confidence that the cause of the proletariat has triumphed, that our first objective – the overthrow of capitalism – has been achieved.’ [3]
Internationalism is the bedrock of socialism, not simply or mainly for sentimental reasons but because capitalism has created a world economy which can be transformed only on a world scale. Anything else is utopianism. The Communist International, which arose out of the Russian revolution of October 1917, was not an optional extra but an essential, indispensible part of that revolution, which, in turn, was part of an international revolutionary upheaval.
Conversely, the events that were to follow ten years later, turning the Comintern – as it had come to be known – into a tool of Russian foreign policy, was part of the strangling of workers’ power inside the USSR by the rising bureaucracy under Stalin.
There is an enormous amount of literature about the Comintern, the Third or Communist International. Some is Stalinist; more is social-democratic; and most is the output of various US universities, promoted by the CIA in the interests of US foreign policy – and doubtless much of this is CIA-financed too. There is, of course, some serious academic writing on the subject, but there is no account of the Comintern written in English from a revolutionary socialist point of view.
Or rather there is no easily available account. Two books – C.L.R. James’s World Revolution, published in 1936, and K. Tilak’s Rise and Fall of the Comintern (1947) – made a start in this direction. Both are inadequate and both are, for pratical purposes, unobtainable. Claudin’s The Communist Movement (1975) is informative but politically weak, where not downright bad. This small book aims to provide, from a revolutionary socialist point of view, an introduction to the Comintern, from its founding conference in 1919 to its winding-up by Stalin in 1943.
In 1932 Trotsky, then a powerless and persecuted exile from the USSR, wrote a statement which was intended to serve as a political basis for an international left opposition to the Communist Parties under Stalin. In it he wrote:
‘The International Left Opposition stands on the ground of the first four congresses of the Comintern. This does not mean that it bows before every letter of its decisions, many of which had a purely conjunctional character and have been contradicted by subsequent events. But all the essential principles (in relation to imperialism and the bourgeois state; to democracy and reformism; problems of insurrection; the dictatorship of the proletariat; on relations with the peasantry and the oppressed nations; Soviets; work in the trade unions; parliamentarianism; the policy of the united front) remain even today the highest expression of proletarian strategy in the epoch of the general crisis of capitalism.’ [4]
The Socialist Workers Party, in Britain, also stands on this ground – which is why the emphasis of this book is on the Comintern’s revolutionary period, the period of the first four congresses and immediately after.
I am greatly indebted to Nigel Harris, who persuaded me to write the book, to Tony Cliff, who subjected the first draft to a severe and valuable criticism, and to Alex Callinicos, Peter Goodwin, Peter Marsden, Steve Pepper, Dave Sherry, Ahmed Sehrawy and Steve Wright, who all contributed to its final shape, although I have not always followed their advice.
Duncan Hallas, April 1985
1. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow 1963–70), vol. 26, pp. 465 and following.
4. Trotsky, Writings 1932–33 (New York 1970), pp. 51–2. [International Pre-Conference of the Left Opposition Presents Thesis, from The Militant, Vol. VI, Nos.16–20, 6–25 March 1933.]
Last updated on 26 July 2018