THE HEROIC DAYS OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL- THE FIRST FIVE YEARS OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL, LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, VOLUME I and II

BOOK REVIEW

THE FIRST FIVE YEARS OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL, LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, VOLUME I and II

World War I was a watershed for modern history in many ways. For the purposes of this review the following point is a predicate for understanding the revolutionary socialist response to that war during and immediately after it. The failure of the bulk of the European social democracy organized in the Socialist International - representing the masses of their respective working classes- to not only not oppose their own ruling classes’plunges into war, which would be a minimal practical expectation, but to go over and directly support their own respective ruling classes in that war indicated that sometime had gone very wrong in the European labor movement in the previous period. This failure was most famously demonstrated when the entire parliamentary fraction of the German Social Democratic party voted for the war credits for the Kaiser on August 4, 1914. This action initially left the anti-war elements of international social democracy, including Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht almost totally isolated. As the carnage of that war mounted in endless and senseless slaughter on both sides it became clear that a new political alignment in the labor movement was necessary. The old, basically useless Socialist International (also known as the Second International), which in its time held some promise of bringing in the new socialist order, needed to give way to a new revolutionary International. That eventually occurred in 1919 in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia with the foundation of the Communist International (also known as the Third International). Horror of horrors, particularly for reformists of all stripes, this meant that the international labor movement, one way or another, had to split into its reformist and revolutionary components.

It was during the war that Trotsky’s and Lenin’s political positions coalesced, although not without some lingering differences, and as a result they drew closer and began the process of several years, only ended by Lenin’s death, of close political collaboration. This is also the period of their close collaboration around the central questions facing the new International: who should (and who should not) be allowed in it; what strategic and tactical positions should be taken; and, what types of organizational forms should be the norm. These volumes contain many of Trotsky’s personal contributions to the debates in the International in the form of reports to its first four Congresses, manifestos, and additional polemics concerning the work of various national sections of the Comintern. Much of the public writing of the early period of the Comintern was Trotsky’s work and therefore it is doubly important to read to get a flavor of what the beleaguered Soviet leadership was thinking at the time.

Of particular interest the reader should note Trotsky speeches and summaries surrounding the Third World Congress. That is a time, 1921, when the signals were clear that the immediate post-war revolutionary upsurge was, at least temporarily and not necessarily everywhere, ebbing and therefore the tasks of the young Communist Parties was to go to the masses which were for the most part still under the influence of the Social Democratic Parties. However, the aim was not to just to go to those masses in a bid to outdo the socialists at their parliamentary game but to win the masses for the struggle for state power, for a workers government. This is the heyday of Lenin’s tactic of the united front, an idea that has been misused more than once, many times willfully, by communist to gain influence.

Another aspect of the Third Congress worth mentioning was the fight over the way to analyze the apparently ultra-left March 1921 actions of the young, inexperienced and poorly led German Communist party. That is, in essence, the question of the unlamented party leader of the time Paul Levi whose ‘plight’ later generations of reformist socialists have latched on in order to chart the point of the definitive degeneration of the Comintern. That action and Levi’s fate, however, are more properly a question which I will address as part of a review of the aborted German Revolution of 1923 in a later review.

I have headlined this review with the title the Heroic Age of the Communist International. Why? One can clearly see a dividing line in the history of the organization as a vehicle for revolution. The activities of the first Four Congresses represented the accumulated wisdom of the experiences of the Russian Revolution and the failure of the other efforts in Europe to pull off a socialist revolution, centrally in Germany from 1918-23. In that period the mistakes, egregious as some of them were, were mistakes due to political immaturity, carelessness, or a misunderstanding of the situation on the ground. But it was, however, still an organization committed to making an international revolution. Later after the death of Lenin, the defeat of the Left Opposition and its international allies in the Soviet Communist Party and the International, and as the process of Stalinization in both the Soviet Union and the Communist International set in this dramatically changed. The Communist International became, for all intents and purposes, merely an adjunct for Soviet foreign policy. In short, it consciously became anti-revolutionary, and as the case of Spain in the 1930’s demonstrated, at times counter-revolutionary. However, that is the wave of the future. Here read what the Communist International was like, warts and all, in its glory days.