From Socialist Worker, No. 112, 8 March 1969, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
FIFTY YEARS ago this week, on March 4, 1919, the Third International was founded in Moscow.
It is a date that deserves to be remembered by all who hold dear the ideal of international socialism.
The creation of a new International was the logical outcome of the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
In 1914, the Second International (the remnants of which still exist as an excuse for expense-account trips abroad for Labour Party leaders) had collapsed. ‘Socialist’ leaders in the different countries had lined up behind the slogans of ‘freedom’ and ‘national interest’.
Only a tiny group of pacifists and an even tinier group of revolutionary socialists had managed to put up any opposition to the war.
But from 1917 onwards a new mood came over workers, wearied by the pointless slaughter and inspired by the revolutions in Russia and the creation of workers’ councils there.
The next few years saw a wave of strikes in Britain, mutinies in the British, French and German armed forces, occupation of factories in Italy, revolutionary risings defeated in Hungary and Germany. World revolution seemed to be on the cards.
If is often argued, by both Western and communist historians, that the International founded by Lenin led directly on to Stalin’s Comintern of the 1930s. It is said that from the beginning the International imposed a centralised, Moscow-based leadership on the world working-class movement.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Lenin constantly repeated that the Russian Revolution could not survive unless it spread to Western Europe.
The whole aim of the International was to develop a strong revolutionary movement in Western Europe, which Lenin freely admitted, might rapidly overtake the Russian Revolution.
Certainly the conditions imposed on members of the Third International were tough. But they must be seen in historical context.
Almost all the old labour leaders had betrayed their principles in 1914; a new generation of leaders was appearing, heroic but inexperienced.
Many of the old bureaucrats who had supported the war in 1914 were trying to get on the revolutionary bandwaggon. Many principled revolutionaries, like Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, had sectarian ideas like refusing to work in the mass labour movement.
And time was running out. By the early 1920s the revolutionary wave was dying down and reaction was gaining the upper hand, with the victory of fascism in Italy foreshadowing events elsewhere.
The Russian leaders, with a successful revolution to their credit, fought for a hard line – but they fought honestly in open debate.
Under Stalin the International was turned into an instrument of Russian foreign policy. Congresses were rarely held. Instead Moscow had private talks with Communist leaders in the different leaders in the different countries.
Many of the leaders who founded the Communist Parties of Europe in the early 1920s resigned or were expelled. They were replaced by men loyal to Moscow.
Finally, in 1943, Stalin dissolved the International as a gesture of goodwill to Churchill and Roosevelt.
The Third International made many mistakes in its early years. But they were the mistakes of a mass movement building a new organisation in struggle.
Today, when capitalism is more than ever international in scope, the need for a workers’ international is greater than before.
But it is not enough to set up an international body. This is meaningful only when there is a world-wide struggle of mass movements.
Until then our job is to build a movement at home, and show solidarity to comrades abroad, from Vietnam to France. In so doing, we can be inspired by the early years of the Third International.
Ian Birchall Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 14 January 2021