The Communist International
Its Present-Day Relevance
By John Riddell
Below is an excerpt of a talk by John
Riddell, given to The Capitalism Workshop
(www.thecapitalismworkshop.com) in Toronto, on
April 18, 2018. John Riddell is a Marxist
historian who has been active in the
revolutionary socialist movement in Canada,
the U.S., and Europe since the 1960s. He is the
editor of a series of important books about the
history of the Communist International (also
called the Comintern or Third International),
which he has been researching and writing for
more than 35 years. His books in this series
include: “Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary
International”, “The German Revolution and
the Debate on Soviet Power”, “Workers of the
World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!”, “To
See the Dawn! Baku, 1920 First Congress of
the Peoples of the East”, “Toward the United
Front”, and “To the Masses.” His books are
available on following websites
Pathfinder Press: www.pathfinderpress.com
Haymarket Press: www.haymarketbooks.org
To read his complete talk, please visit John
Riddell’s blog: johnriddell.wordpress.com
We found this talk an excellent introduction
to understanding the importance of the
Comintern’s history. In our opinion, these books
are part of the necessary arsenal for today’s
revolutionary socialists as they hold essential
revolutionary socialist thoughts, theories and
debates for developing our strategy and tactics.
While a vast majority of the leftist
movement today is ignoring these treasures
for understanding class struggle, we must
think of Lenin, the leader of the Russian
Revolution, who urged revolutionaries to
develop and understand the methodology
of Marxism and its application of concrete
analysis of the concrete situation. As Fire This
Time Movement for Social Justice, we wish to
propagate how essential and fundamental it is
to study the history of the Comintern for today’s
anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle.
As well as its great relevancy for building
any revolutionary socialist organization
or revolutionary movement to overthrow
capitalism.
As well, since our formation Fire This Time
Movement for Social Justice has worked to
build its policies and activities based on the
first four congresses of the Third International
or Comintern. We encourage our dear readers
to study our basis of unity which we have
written and improved many times in the
last ten years, on page 21 of this issue of Fire
This Time. Part of building an effective and
strong revolutionary socialist organization or
movement includes ideological battles, debates,
and challenges. Lenin once said, Marxism
is a revolutionary theory and therefore
fundamentally polemical. We couldn’t be more
in agreement with Lenin. John Riddell’s
books are an important contribution and
useful tools in the process of critical thinking
and development of a revolutionary socialist
working-class program.
Fire This Time newspaper Editorial Board
Excerpts from John Riddell’s talk:
The Communist International or
Comintern [or Third International] was
the most ambitious expression yet seen of
socialist internationalism, aiming to lead in
achieving workers’ power on a world scale.
It failed in this task. Apart from Lenin,
almost all its founding leaders perished
in Stalin’s frame-up purges of the 1930s.
Stalin dissolved the Comintern in 1943,
and thereafter it was little remembered.
Yet in its prime, the Comintern marked a
high point of revolutionary Marxism as a
global force. Close to a million members
were organized in dozens of political
parties spread across every continent and
coordinated by a leadership and publishing
apparatus in Moscow in the newly
established Soviet republic. Their influence
was extended by allied organizations
focused on youth, women, trade unions,
anti-imperialist solidarity, defense of
victims of oppression, and other fields of
work.
Congresses stretched over several weeks,
and their complete proceedings were
transcribed, translated, and published.
A day’s proceedings hit print within ten
days. Think of it as a Comintern version of
YouTube: thousands of pages of published
debates and documents, plus updates of
news and analysis every few days - in
French, German, Russian, and English.
My work aimed to make the core of this
record available to today’s socialists, in the
belief that the Comintern’s ideas spoke to
our times. The project has never had a base
in the universities; none of us had academic
or professional qualifications. It was an
effort by activists to achieve activist goals:
•To break with the scriptural
approach to early Communist
history, that focuses on Lenin’s
writings, by providing a rich
historical context.
•To display international
Communism as a working
community and its leadership as a
broad, inclusive team.
•To block the imposition of
authorized interpretations of
workers’ history by facilitating
independent study of primary
sources.
•To highlight the agency of frontline
parties and their forgotten
leaders in shaping the Comintern.
To challenge the then-prevailing
interpretation that Moscow
decided all.
•To display the Comintern’s
politics as a strategic system
for global struggle, embracing
interwoven positions on a wide
spectrum of issues.
•To encourage rapprochement
among revolutionary Marxists of
different schools on the common
ground of early Comintern
positions.
Resonance in our century
When the new International was formed in
1919, hopes were high that workers would
take power within months across much of
Europe. Lenin then wrote that the concept
of soviets has “triumphed throughout
the world,” in a movement of “tens of
millions of workers sweeping everything
from their path.” (Founding the Communist
International, p. 302)
So much has changed since that time. The
revolutionary subject - the working class
- has been weakened under neoliberalism.
The socialist movement has declined
worldwide. There is no immediate prospect
of workers’ power.
Yet already in its first year, the Comintern
began to grapple with how Marxists should
function in a non-revolutionary society. Its
early decisions provide a road map for such
conditions. In that sense, the Comintern
lies on our side of the historical divide
separating us from the time of the Russian
revolution.
After the end of World War 2, world
capitalism went through an era of structural
reform, in which workers won many
gains. Today, however, workers cannot win
significant reforms without confronting the
question of political power.
Questions of strategy now come to
the fore: alliance among dissimilar
movements, intersectionality, links between
revolutionary groups and mass struggles,
expression of socialist politics through
mass-based political parties.
In this context, the Comintern example
is instructive. Its national units were
mass parties closely linked to an even
broader layer of socialist-minded workers.
The parties had wide support among
oppressed and alienated layers outside the
proletariat. They were marked by a close
interrelationship between the party and
the surrounding movement
and class. Most of the time,
each party was divided into
currents reflecting different
outlooks within the working
class as a whole. They
debated such differences
before the working class
as a whole and had a good
record of resolving them
constructively. By and large,
the early Comintern kept
diverse revolutionary forces
joined in a single movement.
That is so different from
what we see today! We have
none of this. But surely, for
socialism to go forward,
we must develop these
capacities.
Crisis of productive system
The Comintern’s formation responded
to a profound crisis of world capitalism
expressed through global war. Marxists
believed that this disaster was rooted in the
contradictions of the productive system.
Three months after the war’s outbreak,
Leon Trotsky advanced this view, rewording
a famous statement of Marx:
The present war is basically a revolt of the
productive forces developed by capitalism
against the nation-state form of their
exploitation. Today the entire globe
has become the arena of a worldwide
economy… [forcing] capitalist states into a
struggle for … the profit interests of each
national bourgeoisie. (Lenin’s Struggle for a
Revolutionary International, p. 150)
Capitalists profited from the war even
as it destroyed the use values on which
production rests.
The present-day trend to environmental
breakdown operates in similar fashion.
Capitalism heaps up profits while destroying
the material basis of production. The crisis
can be remedied - and profitably too -
but only if the nationally based groups of
capitalists act in concert. But that is barred
by what Trotsky called “the nation-state
form of exploitation.” This tends toward
reproducing the conditions identified by
Marx as necessary for social revolution.
The process is slower than in 1914 - yet
fast enough to have figured in the Syrian
catastrophe of this decade.
As things stand, it is hard to see how
calamity can be avoided unless populations
around the world can assert their common
interest in survival and escape from the
prison of a now-dysfunctional productive
system. Although far from a sure thing, it’s
a goal worth pursuing.
Our common task today thus has an uncanny
resemblance to the task
assumed a century ago
by the Communist
International.
Constructing a strategy
The Comintern’s early
congresses consisted
of a step-by-step effort
to develop a strategic
system ± that is, a
framework of policies
that shaped its parties’
recruitment, education,
and intervention.
Revolutionary strategy
was then defined as “a
combined system of
actions which by their
association, consistency,
and growth must
lead the proletariat to
the conquest of power.” (Trotsky, Third
International after Lenin)
The reverse side of my handout lists
the major elements of early Comintern
strategy, specifying when each element was
adopted. You see the main components:
the Soviet model of workers’ rule, the role
of a revolutionary party, and the process
through which it can gain social hegemony:
alliances with oppressed peoples and social
layers; unity with non-revolutionary forces.
Despite the enormous shift in social context
in the last century, this broad strategic
framework remains relevant today. It does
not tell us what to do; it does not “teach
lessons.” The value of workers’ history lies
rather in expanding the vocabulary of our
imagination. In that spirit, I’m going to
suggest three linkages between Comintern
policies and today’s tasks.
But first, we must note that developing this
strategic system was marked by a convulsive
crisis.
1921: A strategic rift
During the Second Congress in 1920,
the Red Army was advancing victoriously
toward Warsaw, raising hopes in Moscow
that its triumph would spark a German
revolution and thus tilt the world balance
toward socialism. But the Soviet forces were
defeated and forced to retreat. Capitalist
governments regained stability; the workers’
upsurge ebbed. Although the Comintern
built parties of hundreds of thousands
in Germany, France, and beyond, they
remained blocked by the persistent strength
of reform-oriented social democracy.
Within the Comintern, two counterposed
responses were advanced, both originating
in Germany. They later became known as
“the policy of the offensive”
and “the united front.”
The “offensive” referred to
here was a plan to throw
the Communist forces into
a confrontation with the
government in the hope
that a bold initiative would
draw the worker masses
into struggle. This was tried
in Germany in March 1921
with disastrous results. Still,
when the Third Congress
assembled that summer,
supporters of the “offensive”
were in the majority.
“Something is wrong in
the International,” Lenin
told Congress delegates.
“We must say: Stop!
Otherwise the Communist
International is lost.” (To the Masses [Third
World Congress], p. 25)
My Third Congress volume tells a gripping
story of how the International set its course
toward united front policy - that is, a
campaign to unite with non-Communist
workers and their organizations in militant
action. Yet the new policy was not fully
accepted in the ranks, and the debate
erupted again only two years later.
The Third Congress bugbear
The Third Congress marked a shift in
balance between the Russian Communist
Party and the Comintern’s other member
parties. According to the conventional
interpretation, the Russian leaders were
fully in command from the start and their
authority only expanded with the passage
of time. That is a fair description of the later
Stalin years. But during the Comintern’s
early period, there was a trend in the
other direction. Once the Comintern had
built mass parties outside Russia, they
increasingly put their stamp on its debates.
That was evident at the Third and Fourth
Congresses, which were dominated by
debate on initiatives in the Italian and
German parties.
What is centralism?
The Third Congress crisis also reflected a
breakdown in Comintern centralism ± that
is, its ability, on the great issues, to discuss,
decide, and act in concert. The need for
this capacity had been the great lesson of
1914, when the Second International had
collapsed into warring national components.
Still, centralism was often misunderstood as
meaning as a military command structure.
The 1921 breakdown showed the limits of
such top-down leadership, limits that were
± as Clara Zetkin pointed out at the time ±
inherent and unavoidable. The contradiction
was left unresolved, and a few years later the
concept of hierarchical
discipline triumphed.
This misunderstanding
of centralism persists
even today.
Unity against
imperialism
The Comintern
undertook to reorient
global socialism toward
support of antiimperialist
movements
in the colonies and
semi-colonies. Most of
these movements were
“bourgeois” in character,
that is, they did not
challenge capitalist
relations. How should
the Comintern relate to
them? Communists from colonial countries
had conflicting views, and the debate
wound its way through the early congresses.
In 1920, Lenin expressed the Comintern’s
conclusion:
“We, as Communists, should and will
support bourgeois liberation movements in
the colonies only when they are genuinely
revolutionary, and when their exponents
do not hinder our work of educating and
organizing in a revolutionary spirit.” (Report
on National and Colonial Questions)
After Lenin’s death, the
Comintern backed away
from this conception, with
bad results.
I’d like to suggest three
present-day applications
of this policy. Today, there
are few remaining colonies
in the classical sense, but
imperialism, in recent
decades, has diminished
the limited sovereignty
of post-colonial states.
Should socialists defend
subordinate capitalist
countries that run afoul
of imperialism and come
under attack? Consider Iran.
Also, how should we
relate to insurgent popular
movements today whose social dynamic is
unclear, which may not be, in Lenin’s words,
“genuinely revolutionary?” Consider the socalled
“colour revolutions” in Ukraine and
elsewhere.
Third, the early Comintern also embraced
the revolutionary approach to Black
liberation that we now know as panAfricanism,
later upheld by Cuban Marxists
and by Malcolm X and still a factor in
revolutionary thought today.
The Communist Women’s Movement
During the Comintern’s first years,
structures for work among women were set
up in most sections and coordinated through
a secretariat in Berlin. This movement
encountered what Zetkin, who led this
work, called “open or covert opposition” in
Communist parties. The women heading
up this work were in my view the most able
and resilient international leadership team
produced by the Comintern. Their journal,
Communist Women’s International, was a
formidable educational tool, expressing
the thinking of the International’s most
consistent defenders of united front
policy. (See “The Communist Women’s
Movement”)
In many ways, their movement strikes us
today as incomplete. For example, they wrote
little on sexual violence against women. But
their overall vision was radical. “Private
property is the ultimate and fundamental
cause” of male domination, they said; it must
be replaced by social property. Women must
be “fully integrated into social production,”
and the social reproduction of labour - that
is, issues related to childbirth and childrearing
- revolutionized.
This outlook is inherently intersectional. It
links women’s struggles to those of other
oppressed and exploited sectors. But it goes
further: it sees such movements as joining
in an assault on capitalism itself.
Despite the efforts of
these women, Marxist
movements of that era
remained overwhelmingly
masculine in composition.
And even today, despite
women’s historic gains,
this imbalance is still
found in most Marxist
movements. We should
reflect on why this is so.
The United Front
Now let us consider the
present-day implications
of Comintern’s united
front policy. Its goal
was specific to its time:
to engage with socially
conscious workers who
were loyal to reformist Social Democratic
parties.
United front policy operated on three
interrelated levels.
•First, it referred to an effort to
forge organizational unity with
progressive forces aligned against
Communism in a campaign for
broadly agreed-on goals.
•Second, it advanced a program
of immediate, democratic,
and transitional demands. The
last term, transitional, refers
to demands rooted in today’s
conditions that infringe on
the rights of private property.
Consider a present-day anti-tar
sands protest: it typically demands
“prevent oil spills” and “stop the
pipeline” (immediate demands),
“respect Indigenous land rights”
(democratic), “keep the oil in the
soil” (a confiscation of capitalist
property, and thus transitional)
- a neat combination of three
programmatic levels.
•Third, a call for a workers’
government. That is, a regime of
one or many workers’ organizations
that draws its authority from mass
movements of working people
and acts on their demands. Such
a government might be formed in
parliament but is independent of
the bourgeoisie and can open the
road to true workers’ power.
These concepts are valid beyond the
original context of seeking alliance with
reform-minded workers. They are the core
of a strategic framework for Marxism in
non-revolutionary times. They are highly
controversial, even among those who look
to the early Comintern. They deserve study
and discussion.
Another troubled topic is how to balance
the goal of serving the working class as
a whole with that of building one’s own
organization. This is posed every time we
launch a broad campaign. Ideally, the two
aims go hand in hand, but in practice, it is all
too tempting to act in a way that maximizes
potential for recruitment at the cost of a
campaign’s broad effectiveness. That is what
we commonly call “sectarianism.” A small
socialist group focused on its next handful
of recruits often finds that sectarianism pays
- for the small group, but unfortunately not
for the working class.
There is language in some Comintern texts
that could suggest a sectarian reading of
the united front concept. The Comintern
insisted that the united front served both
to build the party and advance the cause of
workers as a whole. It sought to build united
fronts that were inclusive, democratic in
decision making, and consistent in serving
the broader goals of the working class. That
goal is worth pursuing today.
And through all this, working people
globally are claiming their own history as
part of their struggle for emancipation. Let
us all join in pursuing this goal.
Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice
Basis of Unity
Humanity today is threatened by war, economic
crises, starvation, poverty and crime: all created
by the drive of capitalists and imperialist powers
to maximize their profits at the expense of the
people of the world. To oppose each of these
crimes against humanity, we must focus all of our
work and action to build a foundation to advance
the interest of an overall struggle of working and
oppressed people against international capital, its
tools of dividing the working class, and its local
oppressive institutions. The fundamental principle
of the Fire This Time Movement for Social
Justice is to promote in action the unity and
active solidarity of all poor and working people,
locally and internationally. We must recognize
that this principle is meaningless without active
struggle, because the pursuit of this principle goes
sharply against the interest of the ruling capitalist
class and they will use whatever means they have
at their disposal to keep us divided and hostile
amongst ourselves.
Fire This Time is a revolutionary socialist
movement for dismantling capitalism and
imperialism with a mass majority of working
and oppressed people to create a world without
oppression and exploitation. We are a politically
based action organization committed to building
the social and political power of poor and working
people in BC, Canada and internationally. We
believe the only way to effectively challenge the
capitalist and imperialist states and governments
and their corporate agenda is through the
organization of masses of people in motion in
workplaces, communities and in the streets.
We are dedicated to mobilizing and unifying
poor and working people against the all forms
of capitalist governments and their anti-poor,
anti-working class legislation and policies. We
are committed to organizing with working and
poor people from the most attacked and exploited
communities in Canada and beyond: communities
of colour, immigrants, refugees, “illegals”, low-wage
workers, people with disabilities, queer people,
indigenous communities, unemployed people
and low-income families. We oppose all forms of
oppression and exploitation: from sexism to racism,
from homophobia to colonialism and all other
institutions, thought, beliefs, actions and behaviors
that humiliate and demean people to bring hostility
and division amongst us.
Our movement must be integrated in the wider
revolutionary context of international struggle
against capitalism and imperialism; although we
are mainly engaged in local politics, in essence the
scope of our work is internationalist. Supporting
the struggles of oppressed people abroad weakens
the hegemony and power of the capitalist class in
other lands and consequently weakens their rule
at home, therefore aiding the battles of oppressed
people in Canada against their own government.
In addition, the practice of international solidarity
solidifies the co-operation essential in building a
world movement for social justice. We must expand
on this both implicitly and explicitly to make the
connections relevant to people’s daily domestic
struggle, to overcome geographic division, and
to make it clear that when we engage in struggle
we do not struggle alone but alongside millions of
working and poor people around the world. Within
capitalist and imperialist global domination there is
no local struggle that does not have an international
character. Every international is local and every
local is international.
The Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice
will support and engage with other progressive and
revolutionary movements and struggles whether for
immediate or long-term demands, locally, nationally
and internationally in united front or any other
united effort and organizations. Our main goal is
to end poverty and injustice through education,
participation, agitation and direct action. We seek
to reach a collective level of mass consciousness
that allows oppressed people to think socially and
act politically to achieve social justice locally and
internationally by any means necessary.
www.firethistime.net
Back to Article Listing
|
