Honor The 91st Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (The 21 Conditions Congress) Of The CI (July-August 1920)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International
Second Session
July 23
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Lenin opens the session Serrati has the floor to read out the Standing Orders:
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1. The full sessions of the Congress take place between 11 and 3 o'clock and 6 and 9 o'clock.
2. Main speakers will have one hour to present their reports and will receive in addition one half hour to reply to discussion.
3. The same time will be available for the presentation of minority reports.
4. Speakers who raise points on standing orders will have two minutes in which to speak. They may do so only once.
5. Each delegate may speak twice on each question (the first time for ten minutes and the second time for five minutes)
6. Requests to speak must be handed in in writing.
7. Votes on any particular issue will take place on the request of three delegations with full voting rights.
8. Every motion (including motions on Standing Orders) must be placed in writing before the Bureau (in one of the two official languages). The mover will not be allowed to speak until this formality has been carried out.
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Serrati reads out the agenda proposed by the Bureau.
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1. The role and structure of the Communist Party before and after the conquest of power by the proletariat.
2. The trades unions and the works councils.
3. The question of parliamentarism.
4. The national and colonial questions.
5. The agrarian question.
6. Attitude to the new ‘centrist’ currents and conditions for entry into the Communist International.
7. Statutes of the Communist International.
8. The question of organisation (legal and illegal organisations, women’s organisations etc.)
9. The youth movement.
10. Elections.
11. Any Other Business.
Reed: On behalf of 29 Comrades I propose changing the agenda to read as follows: 1. On the role of the Communist Party in the revolution; 2. Parliamentarism; 3. The trade union question. This is a very important matter for us. We must discuss the trade union question very thoroughly and have time to translate and study all the material on it. I move that English should be permitted as an official language in the discussion on this question.
Serrati: On behalf of the Bureau I ask the Congress to reject this motion. The comrades who today are demanding that the trade union question should be dealt with as the third item on the agenda were at first demanding that it should be dealt with first. The Executive Committee was fully conscious of the situation when it drew up the agenda. As far as the question of official languages is concerned we declare that we cannot permit English as an official language as this would make the debates too difficult. The English comrades can as it is speak English and everything will be done to provide an immediate translation.
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Comrade Reed’s motion is put to the vote. It is rejected by a majority of 14 votes
Comrade Zinoviev has the floor on the question of the role and structure of the Communist Party before and after the conquest of power by the proletariat.
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Zinoviev: Comrades, I must unfortunately discuss a question that is somewhat complicated in a language of which I do not have a thorough command. Exhaustive Theses on this question in all four languages are however available and I can therefore limit my present remarks to some of the more important of these theses.
We live at a time when all values are being re-evaluated and in which in many quarters such a question as the role and even the necessity of the party is being denied. It is very strange that even among workers in the advanced countries like Britain, America and France currents are to be seen that do not understand the role of their own political party, or even directly negate it. It is perhaps most characteristic of this difficult situation that such a question is thrown up. I see in this the climax of the crisis that the labour movement and socialism have been undergoing during the war. The fact that this question is raised at all in quite broad layers, and often in quite a sharp form, is the result and the expression of this crisis, of the bankruptcy of the Second International.
You know that a whole number of comrades who have contact with the mass movement and call themselves communists nevertheless negate or misunderstand the Party. We found the most exhaustive expression of their standpoint (or rather of their mood) in Comrade Pannekoek, whose pamphlet on this question we have published and will distribute today or tomorrow. You will find in this pamphlet a blind worship of the masses and the attempt to oppose them as such to the Party. I believe that Pannekoek’s pamphlet is on this question the best propaganda against the group that does not understand or negates the role of the Party, as does for example the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD) I together with Pannekoek.
[KAPD: Formed as the result of a serious split in the KPD in April 1920, the Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands took almost half its membership. The KAPD leadership Fritz Wolfheim, Otto Rühle and Meinrich Laufenberg took up an ultra-left position similar to that of the Dutch ‘Tribunites’, with whom they were associated, in opposition to participation in parliament or work in the reformist unions. Lenin tried to avert the split which seriously weakened the KPD at a critical moment. However, although the KAPD sent two delegates to the Second Congress, Otto Rühle and Otto Merges, they withdrew after a few days. The influence of the KAPD rapidly declined.]What is the Communist Party?
I declared in my Theses: the Communist Party is part of the working class, and moreover the most advanced, class-conscious and therefore most revolutionary part. One can reply to this: that is what it should be like, but it is not always. And that is true. Many parties that belonged to the Second International followed such policies, degenerated so far that in the end the best, the most conscious part of the working class really did not belong to them. And nevertheless I still believe that we must insist that the developing Communist Party organises the best and the most conscious part of the working class. In our opinion it is impossible to oppose the masses to the party in relation to this. You cannot oppose a man’s head to his rump, his right hand to his head. And the party is precisely the head of the working class. Organisation is the right hand of the proletariat in its struggle for emancipation.
In the Russian revolution we have seen masses of thousands, millions. We have worked step by step with them, suffered defeats, won victories. But step by step we have also been able to establish that the masses of the workers could only act successfully when they had a powerfully organised party at their head to show them the way.
Often the comrades who oppose the necessity of the Party feel that they are a ‘left’ opposition. In my opinion this is not the case. It is not an opposition on the left, but the opposite. In this mood against the party is expressed a remnant of bourgeois influence on the Party. The bourgeoisie drinks wine and gives the proletariat water. Every good bourgeois joins a political party as soon as he is 2 1. But to the workers he comes with propaganda against joining parties, and quite often he catches workers hook, line and sinker.
Even now, after three years of revolution, we can still see that quite big layers of the working class, even in Russia, can be caught with this line.
When the bourgeoisie propagandises against joining the party among the working class it is a completely conscious policy. It cannot go to the workers and tell them: ‘come into our bourgeois party’, for the workers would not follow them. So they lay down a ‘theory’ that says to the workers: ‘You do not need a party, you can make do with your trades unions and other organisations. You do not need to rack your brains over political theories.’ And since the bourgeoisie has powerful propaganda media in its hands, like the schools, the press and parliament, it has learnt to alienate quite a big part of the working class from the idea of the Party and talk them into the false idea that the worker needs no party.
The layers that struggle against the Party and think that they are on the left do not understand what is happening and are repeating the things with which the bourgeoisie has injected them over decades. One more thing. The comrades who think that in our epoch it is possible to fight without the leadership of the Party thus prove that they do not really understand the revolutionary epoch, that they mistake it. If they really grasped that we live in an epoch of obstinate, bitter class struggles, the first thing to strike them would be that in such an epoch we need a general staff, a centralised party. It is clear that, after the collapse of the Second International and the failure of a whole series of parties with the German Social Democrats and the French Party in the forefront, that the idea will occur to many workers at such a time that it is the party type of organisation itself that is bankrupt. It is often said that it is the party type of organisation as such that has suffered bankruptcy in this war. To this we reply as follows in point four of the Theses:
The Communist International holds tenaciously to the conviction that the collapse of the old ‘social democratic’ parties of the Second International can under no circumstances be presented as the collapse of the proletariat party type of organisation in general. The epoch of the direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat brings a new party into the world: the Communist Party.
And we insist on this too against the revolutionary syndicalists, whom we regard as friends and brothers, but who take up an erroneous position on this question. The bankruptcy of the social-patriotic parties, the bankruptcy of the Second International, is not the bankruptcy of the party type of organisation. One could turn the tables and say to the syndicalists: ‘Legien has suffered bankruptcy and the so-called “free”, the free yellow trades unions of Germany and the French syndicalists led by Jouhaux have after all also suffered bankruptcy.’ But we would not assume from that that the idea of trades unions is bankrupt. Neither can we say therefore that, because the Second International and a whole series of political parties have suffered bankruptcy, the principle of the party type of organisation is bankrupt. The ‘left’ master of confusion Rühle solemnly declared not long ago that the party type of organisation in general must undergo bankruptcy along with bourgeois democracy. Now this is simply stupidity. The soviet system does not exclude the proletarian party but on the contrary it presupposes a proletarian party; a party to be sure made of different stuff from the social democratic parties of the Second International, that is to say a true Communist Party that organises the vanguard of the working class and through it leads the whole working class to victory.
If we wish to investigate the roots of this negation of the Party, they are as follows: Its deepest roots lie in the fact that on this question we are faced with the effects of bourgeois ideology, that we have been infected by the propaganda the bourgeoisie have been broadcasting for decades saying that the workers can be ‘non-party’, that one does not need to have a political party and that the trades unions are sufficient. That is a concession to the ideology of the bourgeoisie, nothing else.
The second root lies in the fact that a whole series of old social democratic parties have turned in front of our eyes in the epoch of the imperialist war into parties that betray the cause of the working class. We say to our comrades from the ranks of the syndicalists, from the IWW and from the shop stewards’ movement that the sign of the times does not consist in the fact that we should negate the Party. The sign of the epoch in which we live, in which the struggles will become ever harder, ever more obstinate, consists in the fact that we must say: ‘The old parties have been shipwrecked; down with them. Long live the new Communist Party that must be built under new conditions.’ It will be exactly the same with parliamentarism. The betrayal of a whole number of social democratic parliamentarians has made a large part of the working class thorough-going opponents of parliamentarism. But it is already clear that the new epoch must bring forth new personalities, even in the bourgeois parliaments, comrades who emerge as fighters and by their deeds show the working class that there can be true Communists like Karl Liebknecht even in bourgeois parliaments. We will not convince people by the propaganda of words, but by deeds.
A whole series of parties are proving by their activity that a new, truly proletarian party can be built. In our Theses we have told the syndicalists that the propaganda against the necessity of an independent workers’ party that the revolutionary syndicalists and the supporters of the IWW carry out has objectively only contributed to the support of the bourgeoisie and the counter-revolutionary ‘social democrats’. To the extent that the syndicalists and industrialists agitate against the Communist Party, which they wish to replace exclusively by trades unions or some kind of formless ‘general’ workers’ union, they rub shoulders with open opportunists. After the defeat of the 1905 revolution the Russian Mensheviks preached for some years the idea of the so-called workers’ congress, which was to replace the revolutionary party of the working class. ‘Labourites’ of every kind in Britain and America preach to the workers the creation of formless workers’ societies instead of the political party and carry, out in fact completely bourgeois policies. The revolutionary syndicalists and ‘industrialists’ wish to fight against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, but they do not know how. They do not realise that without an independent political party the working class is a rump without a head.
In comparison with the old, stuffy, counter-revolutionary ideology of the Second International, revolutionary syndicalism and ‘industrialism’ mean a step forwards. In comparison, however, with revolutionary Marxism, that is to say with communism, syndicalism and ‘industrialism’ mean a step backwards. The declaration of the German ‘Left’ Communists at their founding congress in April that they were founding a party, but ‘not a party in the traditional sense’, means a mental capitulation to the outlook of syndicalism and industrialism, which is reactionary.
I have spoken to good friends, revolutionary syndicalists, who ten us: ‘We will do everything you propose to us, we will form a soviet government and lead the working class against the bourgeoisie. But the trades unions will do all that. What then do you need a party for?’ I ask these friends: ‘If you really want to form a soviet government, you must immediately have a programme for this government, you must have a programme on the agrarian question, on foreign and domestic policy, you must explain to us what your attitude is going to be towards the middle peasants, how you are going to build up an army, what your programme for education is, and so forth. And as soon as you begin to formulate and establish exactly your attitude on all of these questions you immediately begin to develop into a party!’ We also say exactly the same thing to our non-party workers in Russia.
There are here many thousands of workers who are still non-party, but who support us and go along with us. We organise conferences of such non-party workers, we discuss all the complicated questions with them, we tell them: ‘We must solve the food question, the question of the war against Poland, we must have an answer on the agrarian question and on the question of education. Do you want to find this answer together with us? Yes? Then we want to discuss. If we have a common answer to all these questions then that is precisely a large part of the programme of the Communist Party. If we wish to unite the best elements then we need an organisation. This organisation is the Communist Party.'
We must also say the same thing to the comrades whom yesterday we adopted with full voting rights, who will and must develop into communists. We must tell them that the bigger the class party that we have the quicker and easier will be the path to victory. And since we already have the struggle to fight out, this party should work out its programme, not in the heat of battle, but now, day by day, and gather around itself the best, most conscious elements of the working class so that, when the decisive hour has struck, it can absorb the best elements. In every factory the best people should be members of our party. At first of course they will be in the minority, but since they have a clear programme, since they are the most clear-sighted, since the workers have confidence in them, they will when the hour strikes immediately become the leaders of the mass movement. The struggle that is being prepared is a monstrous struggle, whose real dimensions nobody has yet visualised. Only now are we beginning to understand how big this struggle will be that we have to fight out.
No formless workers’ unions, living from hand to mouth, can show the working class the correct path, but a party that embraces the best out of the working class, that in the course of decades organises itself and forms a firm nucleus. It is for us a matter of organising the vanguard of the working class so that they can really lead the masses in this struggle.
It is logically clear that the comrades who are against forming parties often, without realising it, take their starting point not from an epoch of merciless struggle but from an old peaceful epoch, in which almost all party work was merely propaganda (even if only bad propaganda). They do not understand that, although propaganda must and ought to make up a large part of our party work, it is not the only thing, but that deeds now matter, that the civil war is here, that we must have the revolutionary deed day by day, hour by hour, and cannot make a start with organisations that do not even themselves know today what they will say tomorrow on the acutest questions of proletarian politics.
We need a party. But what kind of party? And here we must say very clearly what we have to say to the elements on the right. We CIO not need a party like the parties of the Second International or a party such as some parties of the centre still are now. Such parties play objectively a reactionary role. It is clear that for example the German Social Democracy plays and has played not a revolutionary but a directly counter-revolutionary role in the true sense of the word. To prove that would be superfluous. It is clear that in Germany the struggle of the working class is now so difficult because there exists there a large, well organised, but bourgeois Social Democratic Party. We do not need parties that continue the worst traditions of the Second International, we do not need parties that have the simple principle of gathering as many members as possible around themselves, which become petty-bourgeois parties, in which the aristocracy of labour is organised, in which very often the bureaucracy of labour becomes a caste and only follows its own interests. We do not need parties which for example put up people who only joined the party yesterday as candidates in elections. We do not need parliamentary factions in which, instead of workers, we have 46 professors, 45 barristers, or more, and of which one must say: 45 barristers: proletarian revolution, you are betrayed! [Applause] We do not need the kind of parliamentary factions there are in Italy and Germany, in which there are people who, at the most important hour – we know this very well – will either stand on the side of the bourgeoisie or sit between two stools and sabotage our struggle. We must follow the social composition of our parties attentively, as if under a lens. We must watch out that anti-proletarian elements do not come to us. We must endeavour to have truly proletarian parties. It is understandable that at present a great number, and not the worst section of the workers – those workers that take the fight against the bourgeoisie honestly – are confused when they see parties like the Social Democratic Party, when they see parliamentary factions like the one in Italy. Italy has nearly reached boiling point. The working class is in favour of communism, but in parliament a man like Turati is still speaking in the name of the party, a man who has carried out bourgeois policies for years and is still doing so. Under these conditions it is understandable that currents arise which negate the party as such. The same is the case with the German Independents who have a parliamentary faction in which men like Henke in the main often say the same thing as Scheidemann but in slightly different words. It is understandable that there too quite good revolutionaries say: ‘Better no party at all than a party like that’. But when they say: ‘Better no party at all than a party like that’, this is an incorrect conclusion. ‘No’, we say, ‘if this or that party is bad, we should at all costs build a good party, we should organise ourselves at first as a minority, we should work step for step to win the best elements of the working class into our ranks.’
When therefore we are asked what kind of party we need we must reply that we have a great number of parties that even want to join the Communist International and of which nevertheless we must say: ‘There you have an example of what a Communist Party should not look like. You should sound the alarm, convince the best part of the working class and purge the party, split it if necessary, and at any price build a truly Communist Party.'
I would like to add one more thing on the question of what kind of party we must have. We must also touch upon the question of organisation in general here.
What kind of party do we need looked at from the point of view of organisation? In each individual case we must accommodate ourselves to the respective circumstances. In the labour movement there are phenomena that emerge in every country, but there are also cases in which we must accommodate ourselves to the prevailing national conditions. I will not talk about these concrete cases. I only want to mention one point. There is a current against the principle of the strict centralisation of the party. There are circles that are in agreement with the need for a party, but not for a centralised party with iron discipline. This is found not only among intellectuals but also among a section of the IWW and the shop stewards. Let us consider the general question of whether or not we really need a centralised party.
People often talk about the experience of the Russian revolution. The most important experience of this revolution consists in the fact that if we had not had a centralised, military, iron-disciplined party, which we organised for twenty years, we would have been beaten twenty times over. That is the experience of the Russian revolution, and every simple worker, every member of our party will confirm it. That is what we have learnt.
You should not take this matter lightly. You should consider what a civil war really means. It is easy to say: ‘Now we start the civil war!’ But it is rather difficult to fight the civil war out, when you must wage it for one, two or three years, when you must send thousands of comrades to the front where thousands are killed, when you have to demand the greatest sacrifices from the members of the Party, when you have to make decisions of enormous importance within 24 hours or even 24 minutes, when you must have the absolute confidence of the workers to achieve anything at all. The fact that we now face a titanic struggle, that now the hour really has struck when the sword speaks against the bourgeoisie, gives us cause to say, in relation not only to the national parties but also to the International: ‘We need a centralised organisation with an iron military discipline.’ Only then will we achieve what we really need. In this respect we must learn from our enemies. We must understand that, in this extremely difficult situation, we can only win if we are really well and tightly organised. We will speak about this in more detail when we come to work out the Statutes of the Communist International and have to discuss the question on an international scale.
Often we hear some comrades say: ‘Yes, as long as we live under the bourgeois order, as long as we have not yet seized power, we do perhaps still really need the party, but when we have won the victory we will not need any party at all.’ I have discussed this with good German Communist workers, have heard their reflections and permit myself once more to appeal to the experience of the Russian Party. Just after we had seized power, after we had formed the government, the role of the Party did not become smaller, but grew from day to day. Never was the significance of the Party so great here in Russia as it is precisely now, after we have carried off the victory. On all important questions real supervision by the party is necessary.
Nowadays people like Kautsky come along and say: ‘There in Russia you have not got the dictatorship of the working class but the dictatorship of the party.’ You would think that this was a criticism of us. Not at all! We have the dictatorship of the working class and for that very reason we also have the dictatorship of the Communist Party. [Applause.] The dictatorship of the Communist Party is only a function, a characteristic, an expression of the dictatorship of the working class. What is our Party? You should not confuse it with other parties that are made up of barristers. It is made up of between 600,000 and 700,000 of the best workers, the vanguard of the proletariat. And it is clear that the affairs of the working class are well looked after by these, its best representatives. That is why the dictatorship of the proletariat is at the same time the dictatorship of the Communist Party. The supervision of the various organisations and the right to purge them belongs to the party. So it has to be during the proletarian revolution. The role of the party does not diminish after the victory, but on the contrary it increases.
The idea of soviets has captured the minds of workers all over the world. The working class is half consciously and half unconsciously of the opinion that humanity is moving towards the soviet system. That is correct. But the conclusion is often drawn from this that when we have soviets we do not need a party; the soviets are supposed to replace the Party, the Party is supposed to be absorbed into the soviets, the Party is supposed to ‘accommodate’ itself to the idea of the soviets. Here too we must call on the experience of the first victorious proletarian revolution. In 1917 in Russia we won the soviets, which for eight months were opposed to working class policies, so quickly precisely because we had a firm, powerful, determined party. And the influence of Communism is so strong in the soviets now because we have a strong party. The soviets do not exclude the Party. On the contrary the Party is their direct precondition. That is the leading force, the most important part, the head, the brain of these soviets. We wish also to tell the comrades quite clearly: Not only when we are speaking of the soviets, but precisely when we already have them, we need a strong Communist Party that will grow from day to day. People often reply to us: ‘Almost the whole of the working class is organised in the Soviets, but only a minority is organised in the Party, and so it will remain.’ So it will not remain, and even now it is already no longer true. In the epoch of the Second International it was often said: ‘The majority of the working class will never be organised within the Social Democratic Party.’ At that time it was correct. As long as power belongs to the bourgeoisie, as long as it rules the press, education, parliament and the arts, a significant part of the working class will be spoilt by the propaganda of the bourgeoisie and their agents and driven into the bourgeois camp. It goes without saying that the bourgeois press robs the party of a part of the working class. But as soon as freedom of the press exists for the working class, as soon as we have the schools in our hands, a time will come, and it is not so far off, when gradually, day by day, big groups in the working class join us in the party, until one day we will have the majority of the working class organised in our party. The perspective is already very different. We therefore need the party even when we have soviets.
The old, so-called classical division of the workers’ organisations into Party, trades unions and co-operative societies is now wrong. There is now another one: Party, soviets, trades unions. Perhaps there will be modifications and new forms. Perhaps this or that revolution will produce something new. This will probably happen, but as far as we can see at the moment, as far as the Russian revolution is an example, the present division runs thus: Communist Party, soviets, trades unions. We must spread Communism in the parliaments, in the trades unions and in the Party organisations. But the leading force, the spirit of the whole movement, is the Party.
Neither the soviet government nor the revolutionising of the trades unions excludes the Party. Perhaps people will tell us that we need a party if the unions are yellow but not if they are good, revolutionary; then we do not need a party. I say – no. Even if the trades unions are revolutionary, even if they are consistently communist through and through, as they are here, we still need the Party.
We have seen a graphic description from the IWW of how they imagine the future. They imagine the whole thing as a Central Council of trades unions at the centre and a whole number of individual trades unions on the periphery. Good. But by what means are they going to seize power? How are they going to form a Red Army? It is surely clear that there is no workers’ revolution without a Red Army? Will they perhaps set up a Red Army on a trade union basis, with an engineering workers’ Red Army parallel with a textile workers’ Red Army, and with a General Council of the Red Armies of all these trades unions? That is impossible. With a structure like that we could not even solve the problem of feeding the army.
We must have a state organisation and this can only be led by the party because a state political organisation is that which embraces the best elements of the working class of the whole country. We have trades unions in Russia which now go hand in hand with us. It was not always so. Before the October revolution the trades unions were in the hands of the Mensheviks; at the beginning of the July days the majority was with the Mensheviks. We formed Communist cells and then factions in the trades unions and now we have the great majority on our side. And nevertheless the role of the party has not diminished but increased. For, to the extent that they are Communist, these trades unions have subordinated themselves to the party, and that is the only way of doing it. Marx himself took this point of view when he said it was wrong to say that the Party only dealt with the political side of the movement and the trades unions the economic. This is not so. In the opinion of Marxism the Communist Party is an organisation that touches all sides of the workers’ movement without exception. It should be the guiding spirit of the soviets and the trades unions, the schools, the co-operatives and all organisations embracing the working class. That is real Marxism.
The Communist Party is not only a political organ, it does not only deal with political questions, it is not an electoral machine in the way the opportunists want it to be, it is an organisation to which the best part of the working class belongs, which guides all the social organs and the struggle of the working class in its full extent and in all its expressions. That is why we say to those here who think that formless workers’ unions can replace the Party: ‘You are not right.’ In this case too we need a Communist, Marxist Party to guide the trades unions, give them fresh blood, show them the way and be their guiding star.
That is why we are of the opinion that the Communist Congress must now say very clearly that sin ce we are faced with the proletarian revolution every worker must be conscious that not only before the seizure of power but also during and after the armed uprising, after we have seized power, we need a Communist Party which, in its composition, is a workers’ party, which does not take in petty-bourgeois elements. It can form temporary political alliances with the latter, but not within the Party. It cannot take in petty-bourgeois elements and form an alliance with them inside the Party. It must carry out parliamentary work in counter-revolutionary parliaments in the spirit of Karl Liebknecht, and send simple revolutionary workers into the parliaments and not skilled barristers who are only really skilled at defending the cause of the bourgeoisie. We must have a party that can always show the soviets the correct path every instant, in every difficult situation.
Comrades, just imagine for a moment that we had had a Communist Party during the Paris Commune in 1871. It is clear why we did not have one. The necessary, important preconditions for it were missing. But if at that time we had had a definite Communist Party, however small, the French working class would perhaps still have been beaten, but it is clear that a great number of the mistakes our French pioneers committed would not have been made. Of course we do not want to diminish the heroism of the Paris Commune, but we want to avoid its mistakes.
A great number of countries now find themselves in a situation where from one day to the next a full-scale uprising can break out. Unless we have everywhere at least a small but conscious Communist Party we will suffer great and unnecessary losses. We must make up for lost time. In countries like Britain and America, where we have no strong Communist Party and where the comrades struggle against a Communist Party this will in time be bitterly regretted. When the fight has begun you will see from the consequences how frivolous it was not to have forged the necessary weapons in time, to have missed out the very thing with which the working class could have been shown the way in time.
I think, Comrades, that I can close my remarks with this and say once more in summing up that, if we want to use the experience of the Russian revolution, we must adopt above all others the idea that we need a Communist Party, and what is more a centralised, an iron-disciplined party. There is no other way during the raging civil war through which we are living. There is no way apart from an iron party cast all in one piece. You should take from the Russian workers the thing that really deserves to be imitated. Certainly, our movement too has great weaknesses. We are conscious of them and do not at all want
to appear as schoolmasters. But I tell you this, that we forged this weapon day by day for twenty years, the Party, the Bolshevik Party, which then became the Communist Party. That is a good example. In the prisons, in Siberia, in exile, in foreign lands – the guiding star was always the Party. The best thing that we have injected into the Russian worker is the love of the Party. For the advanced Russian worker the Party is something sacred, the best system, dearer than his life, more beloved than anything else, the highest, the lodestar. And in this the working class of the whole world should follow that of Russia. [Loud and prolonged applause]
Ramsay (Shop Stewards): I am sorry that, despite all our reports and documents, the Communist International does not seem to be sufficiently informed of what the shop stewards movement really represents. I would remind you what a state of disunity the workers’ organisations were in when the shop stewards movement arose, what efforts the shop stewards movement has made to kindle a communist movement. Even now we are making every effort to do our best for the growth of the communist movement. All our propaganda and all our work is carried out in this direction, and we call on all our members and organisations that belong to the communist tendency to work in this direction.
McLaine (BSP): I suggest that point 6 of the Theses should be changed to add a final sentence which is of especial interest particularly for the British comrades.
[BSP: British Socialist Party. Affiliated to the Labour Party. Founded 1911 as result of a merger of the Social Democratic Party and other socialist groups. It conducted Marxist propaganda but remained small in membership. During the First World War it split over the issue of internationalism and in 1916 the Social chauvinists withdrew. The BSP greeted the Russian Revolution and in 1919 voted for affiliation to the Comintern. In 1920 it joined the newly formed Communist Party.]
We need guidelines on a point that is especially interesting particularly for Britain. In Britain there exists a large workers’ party which is not communist and which embraces various communist parties – the Labour Party. A discussion has arisen among the various parties in Britain on whether the communist parties should remain a part of this party which is not communist and not socialist and to which they are affiliated. The BSP has answered the question in the affirmative. The Labour Party is not socialist but it has at its disposal a large apparatus. It has the press at its disposal and has its representatives in parliament and on the town councils, and it would be suicide to exclude the possibility of propagandising in the trades union movement and everywhere through this big apparatus. The group I represent does not want to commit suicide in this way. We would like to have an appropriate instruction from the Communist International on this. Moreover I must emphasise that. the BSP have been all the more strengthened in their position by the fact that the Labour Party, which is not socialist and not revolutionary, has nevertheless been moving gradually more and more to the left. The fact that, under pressure from the masses, the right-wing leaders and their organisations are gradually disappearing is one more reason for remaining affiliated to this organisation. Before I finish my speech I should like to propose a motion that in all the countries where a non-communist workers’ party is the dominant factor in the labour movement the communist groups should remain affiliated to it in order to carry out propaganda in it for communist ideas and to guide the masses of workers into communist channels. This can only take place on condition that the Communist Party retains its freedom of action and carries on the work of propaganda. This motion is signed by both representatives of the BSP. Finally I would like to refer to the previous speaker’s remarks. I am glad to hear from the representative of the shop stewards movement that they are now determined to help the Communist Party. Up until now the shop stewards movement has had a negative and hostile attitude to the Communist Party. If it is now officially declared that that will no longer be the case and that the shop stewards undertake to help the Communists in future, that can only please the other Communist Parties, especially the BSP.
Pestaña (Spain): The trade union movement as such is much more important than you seem to assume, and moreover both trade union movements, not only the left but also the right. You must not judge them by their degree of separation from communism. Russia is the best example of this. What matters is the spirit of the trades unions, this spirit should be revolutionary. It has been claimed that one of the reasons why the workers do not want a revolutionary party is to be attributed to the influence of the bourgeoisie. It is too easy an explanation to believe that revolutionary currents such as for example syndicalism can simply be described as reactionary without any further ado. That is a mistake. It is also not correct that the leaders of the trades unions say they want to keep away from politics. They do not keep aloof from any work, it is not like that. There were times when the bourgeoisie in Spain pointed out that the working class should become involved in politics because that corresponds to the workers’ interests. The fact that I do not represent a political party makes my position difficult, and for that reason my policies can be misinterpreted. I have never said that the trades unions are an end in themselves. It depends what spirit guides them. I am not in agreement with the opinion that having created a Red Army that stands at its disposal is one of the merits of the Communist Party. That is not the case. I refer to the French Revolution which proves that one always has an army and a political party to help one to power. The main thing is that the trades unions as such are revolutionary and able to fight and are such organisations as will hasten the fight and the revolution.
Tanner (Shop Steward): Comrade Zinoviev placed the main emphasis in his report on the necessity of a Communist Party. This seems to me to be mistaken, as does the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat coincides with the dictatorship of the Communist Party. What has now taken place in Russia cannot be a valid pattern for every country. In Britain for example the situation in general is completely different from the position as it was in Russia before the revolution. The shop stewards mean by dictatorship of the proletariat something very different from what is meant by it in Russia. By that they mean the dictatorship of a minority as represented by the shop stewards. You may not agree with that in particular, but we are of the opinion that we command a larger and a broader layer of class conscious proletarians than is the case in Germany. We are reproached by Comrade McLaine for being apolitical and for refraining from any political activity. That does not correspond with the truth. We are anti-parliamentarian, but that does not mean that we are apolitical. Comrade McLaine was glad that the shop stewards want to work with the BSP. He cannot claim that the BSP is the only revolutionary party in Britain. Very many of those who are now active in the shop stewards movement and in other economic movements opposed the building of the party because they believe and are convinced that it is a waste of time to be active in a political party. They are still in favour of the revolution. Now public opinion seeks to hold workers back from direct action and make them regard parliament as the means to effect their class interests. We were among the first to come out in favour of direct action, and not only for economic but also for political aims. Comrade Zinoviev said that one can only take an active part in the different areas of social and cultural life through a political party. One can also do this in other ways. I will only be able to give a final verdict on my attitude to the revolution when I have been back to Britain and once more compared British and West European conditions with those in Russia. I ask the Russians and the other representatives whether they have not also something to learn from the others, that is to say that one should also learn from the economic movement and the revolutionary movement of other countries and not simply teach them. I refer also to the fact that the political parties have learnt a great deal from other organisations, precisely on the question of direct action. Not long ago political parties opposed direct action. Recently at least their attitude has become different. Finally I would like to emphasise that the Second International collapsed because it was characterless and did not give clear guidelines. I am afraid that the Communist International is falling into the opposite extreme and becoming too dogmatic. All organisations should be given freedom of movement within their own country. The suggestion of using parliament as a means of fighting arouses misgivings in many people. The Communist International must create a wide, broad basis on which the individual parties can reach agreement on the important principled questions. Everything else should be left to each party itself.
Rakosi (Hungary): Soviet Hungary encountered conditions which were, in every respect, more developed than those encountered by Soviet Russia. The Hungarian workers were more intelligent, the country more centralised, the railways more developed, the roads in a better condition and agriculture at a higher stage.
In every respect we stood closer to the Western countries than we did to Soviet Russia. Our experiences confirm however in every point the correctness of the Russian conception of the Communist Party. As long as our Communist Party, following the Russian pattern, was strictly centralised and strictly disciplined and its members were only accepted after certain tests and treated very strictly, our party like the Russian represented the vanguard of the working class. As soon as the party amalgamated with the Social Democrats and thus took into itself the backward part of the proletariat and a large part of the petty bourgeoisie, the party lost this significance.
Moreover, during the setting-up of the dictatorship there arose a monstrous shortage of class-conscious, independent workers. It became necessary to employ all the useable forces of the united party in the different soviets. Thus the party was completely exhausted. So we were forced, even on political questions where we had to appeal to the whole proletariat, to turn to the trades unions which embrace it in its entirety. There thus arose more or less the situation that the IWW people or the shop stewards want: the trade union was also fulfilling the functions of the Party. It emerged that with the dictatorship an enormous change in the function and the tasks of the trades unions came about. The trades unions had to fulfil a whole series of new tasks such as the re-organisation of production, the restoration of work discipline and so forth. They were so heavily engaged in the absorption of a flood of new members that they could not even fulfil these tasks in a satisfactory manner.
After the setting up of the dictatorship new difficulties and shocks will inevitably follow, partly because the trades unions are not in a position to solve correctly the enormous number of pressing questions that face them in the very first hours of the revolution, which gives rise to a certain disruption. We in Hungary were forced by the weakness of the Party to give, in addition to these tasks, political tasks like the formation of the Red Army, education, the distribution of food and suchlike, to the trades unions. But it emerged that these questions could not be solved by them. They did indeed take on these tasks, but in no area did they achieve a satisfactory solution to them. Not only because they were mostly reactionary – there were some trades unions which were revolutionary even before the dictatorship – but also because they were not created to solve political questions. After a few months we were faced with the absolute necessity of forming a strong new Communist Party. We were thus forced, besides the difficult tasks that the dictatorship brought with it, to fulfil another task that had already been solved in Russia before the dictatorship by the presence of a Communist Party.
We were forced to build up in a very short time a party which, in every respect, had to follow the Russian pattern. Internal collapse and the military defeats brought this attempt to nothing. I must however repeat once more that the experience of the Hungarian Soviet republic confirms the Russian experience in every respect. When we diverged from it we committed mistakes and had to pay for them with enormous sacrifices. Later, when we started on the re-organisation of our forces, we saw the greatest weakness of the rule of the soviets in Hungary in the fact that we did not possess a stronger and better disciplined party during the dictatorship. Since then we have started on the organisation of a strictly centralised party with iron discipline. I am convinced that the new party will continue along the lines followed by the Communist Party in Russia in a new Hungarian Soviet Republic, and will support and strengthen the Russian experience.
Wijnkoop (Holland): I am told that I should speak German. I would have preferred to say what I have to say in English as it refers to what the British comrades have said. I do not think it would be wise of the Congress to vote for Comrade McLaine’s addendum. There is nothing about these matters in Comrade Zinoviev’s Theses, and I dare say the British comrades are very glad that there is nothing about them in the Theses, as this permits them to fight out their own affairs in their own country. Now Comrade McLaine comes along and says: We want the International Congress to confirm that we can go into the Labour Party, and one knows that the BSP wishes to remain in the Labour Party. Now I say we should not do that here. It is very difficult to decide, as Comrade Lenin said in his pamphlet Left Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Therefore I want to leave it to the British comrades for the very reason that they are trying to achieve their own Communist Party in England. Comrades Ramsay and Tanner have spoken very well on this question, and they know that the question of the Labour Party can create many problems for unity.
Should the International Congress pronounce in advance in favour of the BSP remaining in the Labour Party, this will mean either that the British Communist Party will not come into being or that it will come into being without the BSP. Neither would in my opinion be a good thing. The Communist Party will have to come into being in Britain with the help of the BSP, and agreement should be reached on the conditions in Britain itself. If we are to accept such an incisive resolution on the British question here you will first of all have to discuss the whole affair, and it will be difficult to broach here the whole story of the special conditions of the Labour Party. I would not like to comment on something else Comrade Tanner said here. My party does not share Comrade Tanner’s point of view, but I would nevertheless like to say that I listened to Comrade Tanner because in his words I detected the desire to come into the Communist International. Comrade Tanner warned us not to be too dogmatic, and he is quite right. In the pamphlet that I mentioned Comrade Lenin warned us not to be too dogmatic on the left. He said that in reality pure dogmatism was only phraseology, and we should avoid phraseology. If you do not accept dogmatism on the right, you must not do so on the left. Comrade Tanner has correctly drawn our attention to the fact that conditions in other countries are very different from those in Russia. The Russian comrades know this very well. We have said often enough that, however difficult it was, the Russian revolution was still easier than the revolution in other countries is going to be. Construction is a different thing from a revolution. You should not follow the Russian example in a doctrinaire way. You should learn from the Russian revolution, but you should not simply impose the Russian pattern on the conditions of Western Europe or America. Comrade Tanner said that we should not be dogmatic but a little flexible and pliant. This is the only way to achieve an International that will and must bring together the really revolutionary groups.
Levi: When we are speaking about the nature of the Party we must start from the contradiction between the Party and the class, which relate the one to the other as subject to object, or as the kernel to the shell, which together form the fruit. If we then ask how the Party is different from the class, we can only say that one thing in particular characterises the Party as such, and that is its clarity; its clear head, its clear aim, its clear and sharply defined nature and its clear, sharply defined programme. If this uniform conception of the sense and the aims of the Party is what we have in mind, then I agree completely with Comrade Zinoviev when he says in his theses: ‘Only if the proletariat has as its leader an organised and tested party, with strongly marked aims and a concretely worked out programme for the next step not only in the area of domestic but also of foreign policy, will the conquest of political power appear not as a coincidental episode but as the starting point to the lasting communist construction of society by the proletariat.’
Just as the kernel withers without the shell, so too the Party must wither and become a sect if it neglects to find ways by which it can penetrate into the life of the revolutionary masses. And I think that, to the extent that we here are communists, we are in agreement that a party must be clear and decisive. We do not need to discuss that here. The main question for us is how we find the way to the masses, and I am of the opinion that we must try all the ways that lead to the masses. These are the trades unions, workers’ councils where such organisations arise, the parliamentary battlefield and even non-party organisations to the extent, at least, that they grow out of the subsoil of social life, out of the social and economic stratification of society. It is because of these reservations that I think I must differ from the main speaker when he says in point six of the Theses: ‘The Communists support in every way the formation of broad, non-party organisations of workers besides the Communist Party. The Communists take as their most important task the systematic work of organisation and education within these broad workers’ organisations. But precisely in order to frame this work correctly and to prevent the enemies of the revolutionary proletariat from taking over these broad workers’ organisations, the advanced Communist workers must always form their own, independent, closed Communist Party.'
There is nothing to meet my reservation in this thesis, and it seems to me that something on these lines must be said, so that the formation of factions of workers and non-party workers’ organisations does not simply become a game, and so that we do not make up new organisational forms that do not grow purely and simply out of economic and social necessity. We must be careful in the highest degree in the formation of new organisations, and where such organisations exist we must avoid spreading them arbitrarily and unconditionally. In saying this I am thinking particularly of Germany, where the trades unions have grown to almost 9 million members and where despite that there were comrades who went so far in the drive for new types of organisation that they tried to mislead us communists into abandoning this big field of work.
I am also of the opinion that we should proceed most carefully with the formation not only of new non-party but also of new party organisations. In this respect we will have to draw many lessons from our history in Germany, from the experience of the German Communists. For that reason too, the question that the British comrades have raised will indeed have to be decided by this Congress.
I am completely of the opinion – and we in the Western European Secretariat stand on this point in complete opposition to the Amsterdam Bureau – that the BSP absolutely must remain in the Labour Party, through which it has a connection with the masses.
[The Western European Secretariat was set up in Berlin in the autumn of 1919 to publish information about the Soviet regime and coordinate the work of Communist Parties. A leading part in its formation was taken by Karl Radek. It seems to have acted independently of the International and to have had little, influence. After the dissolution of the West European Bureau in Amsterdam it took over the functions of that body. The Amsterdam Bureau was set up in February, 1920 to carry on propaganda tor the Communist International in Holland and the Anglo-Saxon countries. It came under the control of the ‘ultra-lefts’ and was closed down in May.]
But one must be especially careful in the creation of new formations that call themselves ‘non-party’. I believe that there are delegates at this Congress who diverge from us Communists on the question of, how far it is necessary to form non-party organisations instead of party organisations with clear aims. I shall leave it to better qualified comrades like the Spanish comrade to answer this question, but I must say that, on the basis moreover of a certain experience, I cannot be optimistic about the result. It seems to me that the controversy between communism on the one hand and the view of the Spanish comrades on the other is not at all in line with the tasks of this Congress, and is not in the interest of what the world today demands of the Communist International: a clear, uniform line. This is not strengthened by the fact that, instead of showing a uniform clear line, we are here discussing questions that the majority of the Western European working class solved decades ago.
On the contrary, the task of the Congress is to tell the British comrades not to scorn the non-party organisations and not to leave the Labour Party. The Congress must show once and for all a uniform clear line for all similar cases.
McLaine: In view of the late hour (10 pm) I move that we adjourn the continuation of the debate until the next session.
Serrati: On behalf of the Bureau I move that we continue the session and ask the commission to explain Comrade Zinoviev’s Theses point for point.
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Comrade Serrati’s motion is put to the vote and passed.
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Serrati: The Italian delegation fully adopts all of Comrade Zinoviev’s Theses because, by analysing Corporatism,’ Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism, Anarchism and Relativism and bringing out the petty-bourgeois spirit of these currents, they fight for the cause of the proletariat, for centralisation and discipline in the name of the establishment of the dictatorship by the Communist Party. But we find that the formulation of some of the Theses is not clear, for example on the question of the middle peasants. The content of this expression must be established more exactly, otherwise we will run into the danger of Possibilism. For those whom we call middle peasants often form the most backward element.
[Serrati uses the word Korporativwesen, but it is not mentioned in the resolution and its meaning is not clear. Relativismus: another term introduced into the debate by Serrati. The Possibilistes were the reformist wing of the French socialist movement at the end of the nineteenth century whose chief figure was Paul Brousse. They aimed for what was ‘possible’ by reforms within capitalist society and, after the style of the Fabians in Britain, emphasised ‘municipal socialism’ – locally owned gasworks, transport, etc. They had some success in local elections in Paris and other towns. Their official name was Fédération des Travailleurs Socialistes – Federation of Socialist Workers. They later joined with other reformist groups in the Parti Socialiste Français and became part of the SFIO in 1905.]
As far as Point 6 is concerned we agree with Comrade Levi’s point of view. The Communists must apply all their energy to build not neutral but Communist organisations, although they have a duty to work in the former as well. Comrade McLaine has asked us to permit the BSP to remain in the Labour Party. But in this case I am personally in agreement with the representatives of the Shop Stewards who regard the Labour Party as a political party. During the war it took a purely political direction, as was proved by Henderson’s activities. And if we permit the Communists to remain in such organisations we are opening the door wide – open once more to Possibilism.
Another point in the Theses says that Communists can also join neutral or even reactionary organisations, for example Christian trades unions. But a Christian trade union is not under any circumstances neutral. To join it means you are a Christian. Then the Congress must also deal with the question of the entry of Communists into the Freemasons, which are a very model of the kind of organisation where the spirit of’ petty-bourgeois radicalism and political opportunism reigns supreme. We ask the Congress to forbid Communists to enter such organisations.
Lenin: Comrades, I should like to make a few comments on the speeches of Comrades Tanner and McLaine. Comrade Tanner spoke of the fact that he and the others were for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but that by that they meant something other than we do here. He said that by the dictatorship of the proletariat we actually mean the dictatorship of the organised and class-conscious minority.
Now it is precisely one of the main characteristics of workers’ political parties that, under the conditions of capitalism where the masses of workers are always exploited and are not in a position to develop their human abilities, they can only include the minority of their class. A political party can only comprise a minority of the class in the same way that really class-conscious workers only form the minority of workers in any capitalist society. Therefore we are forced to recognise that the great mass of workers can only be led and guided by the conscious minority. If Comrade Tanner says he is against the Party but in favour of a revolutionary minority of the most determined and class-conscious proletarians leading the whole proletariat, then I say that in reality there is no difference between our points of view. What is the organised minority? If this minority is really class-conscious and able to lead the masses and give an answer to every question that stands on the agenda, then it is actually the Party. If comrades like Comrade Tanner, who are particularly important for us because they represent a mass movement, which you could scarcely say of the BSP, want a minority that will fight with determination for the dictatorship and educate the mass of workers along these lines, then what they want is a party. Comrade Tanner has spoken of the fact that this minority should lead and organise the whole mass of workers. If Comrade Tanner and the other comrades from the Shop Stewards Movement and the IWW recognise – and we see every day in every discussion with them that they really do recognise – that the conscious Communist minority of the working class can lead the proletariat, then they must admit that this is the meaning of all our resolutions. Then the only difference between us is that they avoid the word ‘party’ because among the British comrades there is a kind of prejudice against the political party. They probably think that a political party is something like the parties of Gompers and Henderson, the professional parliamentarians, the traitors to the working class. If by parliamentarism they mean the present British or American variety of parliamentarism, then we are also opposed to it. We need new, different parties. We need parties that really have constant contact with the masses and are able to lead the masses.
Now I come to the third question that I want to touch on here. Comrade McLaine was in favour of the Communist Party of Britain remaining in the Labour Party. I have already expressed my opinion on this question in my Theses on entry into the Communist International. I left this question unanswered. But after discussing the question with several comrades I have come to the conclusion that remaining in the Labour Party is the only correct tactic. And then Comrade Tanner comes along and tells us not to be too dogmatic. This expression is entirely out of place h ere. Comrade Ramsay says: ‘Let us British comrades decide the question ourselves.’ What kind of International would this be if a small group could come and say: ‘Some of us are in favour, some of us are against. Let us decide for ourselves.’ What then do we need an International for, and a Congress and a discussion? Comrade McLaine spoke only of the role of the political party. But the same applies to the trades unions and to parliamentarism. It is true that the great mass of the best revolutionaries is against affiliation to the Labour Party because they do not accept parliamentarism as a method of struggle. For that reason it would perhaps be best to refer this question to the Commission. It should discuss and study the question, it should whatever happens be decided by the present Congress of the Communist International. We cannot say that this only affects the British Communists. Our general opinion on the correct tactic must be expressed.
Now I shall deal with Comrade McLaine’s arguments concerning the British Labour Party. We must say openly that the Communist Party can be affiliated to the Labour Party if it is free to criticise and to conduct its own policies. That is the most important thing. If Comrade Serrati talks about class collaboration, then I say this is not class collaboration. If the Italian comrades tolerate opportunists like Turati and Co., that is to say bourgeois elements, in the Party, that really is class collaboration. In the case of the Labour Party it is a question of the co-operation of the advanced minority with the great majority of British workers. All trade union members participate in the Labour Party. It is a very unusual formation of a kind that is not found in any other country. It comprises some 6 to 7 million workers in all the trades unions. They are not asked to state their political beliefs. Prove to me, Comrade Serrati, that we will be prevented from exercising our right of criticism there. Only if you prove that will you be able to prove that Comrade McLaine is wrong. The BSP can openly say that Henderson is a traitor and still remain in the Labour Party. This is the collaboration of the vanguard of the working class with the backward workers, the rear-guard. This is so important for the whole movement that we absolutely insist that the British Communists must form a link between the Party, that is the minority of the working class, and the remaining masses of the workers. If the minority does not understand how to lead the masses and make contact with the masses, it is not a party; it is worthless, whether it calls itself a party or a National Shop Stewards’ Committee. As I understand, the British shop stewards have a National Committee, a central leadership, and that itself is a step towards the Party. So if it is not disproved that the British Labour Party consists of proletarians, then this is the collaboration of the vanguard of the working class with the backward workers, and if this collaboration is not developed systematically, the Communist Party is worthless, and in that case there can be no question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. If the Italian comrades have no convincing arguments we will shortly have to make a final decision on the question, and on the basis of what we know we will have to conclude that affiliation is the correct tactic.
Now Comrade Tanner and Comrade Ramsay come along and say that the majority of British Communists will not accept that. Must we then inevitably agree with the majority? Not at all. Perhaps if they have not yet understood the correct tactic we can wait. Even the existence of two parties would be better than leaving the question of the correct tactic unanswered. Naturally they will not claim on the basis of the experience of all the participants in the Congress and of the arguments that have been brought forward that a unified Communist Party can be formed in every country. That is impossible. What we can do is speak our opinion openly and issue guidelines. We must study the question of the British delegation in a special commission and then say that the correct tactic is affiliation to the Labour Party. If the majority is against that we should organise the minority separately. That will be training. If the great mass of British workers still believe in the old tactic, we will test the results at our next Congress. We cannot say that these are purely British questions – that is copying the worst habits of the Second International. We must speak our minds openly. If the Communists in Britain are not agreed and a mass party cannot be built, then a split is inevitable.
Trotsky: Comrades! It may seem fairly strange that three-quarters of a century after the appearance of the Communist Manifesto discussion should arise at an International Communist Congress over whether a party is necessary or not. Comrade Levi has underscored just this aspect of the discussion, pointing out that for the great majority of the Western European and American workers this question was settled long ago, and that in his opinion a discussion of this question will hardly help to clarify the standpoint of the Communist International. For my part I proceed from the assumption that there is a rather sharp contradiction between the march of historical events and the opinion expressed here with such Marxist magnanimity to the effect that the broad masses of workers are already excellently aware of the necessity of the party. It is self-evident that if we were dealing here with Messrs.
Scheidemann, Kautsky or their English co-thinkers, it would, of course, be unnecessary to convince these gentlemen that a party is indispensable to the working class. They have created a party for the working class and handed it over into the service of bourgeois and capitalist society.
But if what we have in mind is the proletarian party, then it is observable that in various countries this party is passing through different stages of its development. In Germany, the classic land of the old Social Democracy, we observe a titanic working class, on a high cultural level, advancing uninterruptedly in its struggle, dragging in its wake sizeable remnants of old traditions. We see, on the other hand, that precisely those parties which pretend to speak in the name of the majority of the working class, the parties of the Second International, which express the moods of a section of the working class, compel us to pose the question whether the party is necessary or not. just because I know that the party is indispensable, and am very well aware of the value of the party, and just because I see Scheidemann on the one side and, on the other, American or Spanish or French syndicalists who not only wish to fight against the bourgeoisie but who, unlike Scheidemann, really want. to tear its head off – for this reason I say that I prefer to discuss with these Spanish, American and French comrades in order to prove to them that the party is indispensable for the fulfilment of the historical mission which is placed upon them – the destruction of the bourgeoisie. I will try to prove this to them in a comradely way, on the basis of my own experience, and not by counterposing to them Scheidemann’s long years of experience and saying that for the majority this question has already been settled. Comrades, we see how great the influence of anti-parliamentary tendencies still is in the old countries of parliamentarianism and democracy, for example France, England, and so on. In France I had the opportunity of personally observing, at the beginning of the war, that the first audacious voices against the war – at the very moment when the Germans stood at the gates of Paris – were raised in the ranks of a small group of French syndicalists. These were the voices of my friends – Monatte, Rosmer and others. At that time it was impossible for us to pose the question of forming the Communist Party: such elements were far too few. But I felt myself a comrade among comrades in the company of Comrades Monatte, Rosmer and others with an anarchistic past.
But what was there in common between me and a Renaudel who excellently understands the need of the party; or an Albert Thomas and other gentlemen whose names I do not even wish to mention in order not to violate the rules of decency.
Comrades, the French syndicalists are conducting revolutionary work within the unions. When I discuss today, for example, with Comrade Rosmer, we have a common ground. The French syndicalists, in defiance of the traditions of democracy and its deceptions have said: ‘We do not want any parties, we stand for proletarian trades unions and for the revolutionary minority within them which applies direct action.’ What the French syndicalists understood by this minority – was not clear even to themselves. It was. a portent of the future development, which, despite their prejudices and illusions, has not hindered these same syndicalist comrades from playing a revolutionary role in France, and from producing that small minority which has come to our International Congress.
What does this minority mean to our friends? It is the chosen section of the French working class, a section with a clear programme and organisation of its own, an organisation where they discuss all questions, and not alone discuss but also decide, and where they are bound by a certain discipline. However, proceeding from the experience of the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie, proceeding from its own experience and the experience of other countries, French syndicalism will be compelled to create the Communist Party.
Comrade Pestaña says: ‘I don’t want to touch this question – I am a syndicalist and I don’t want to talk politics, still less do I want to talk about the party.’ This is extremely interesting. He does not want to talk about the Communist Party so as not to insult the revolution. This means that the criticism of the Communist Party and of its necessity appears to him within the framework of the Russian Revolution as an insult to the revolution. That’s how it is, for in the course of development the Party has become identified with the revolution. It was the same in Hungary.
Comrade Pestaña, who is an influential Spanish syndicalist, came to visit us because there are among us comrades who to one degree or another take their stand on the soil of syndicalism; there are also among us comrades who are, so to speak, parliamentarians, and others who are neither parliamentarians nor syndicalists but who stand for mass action, and so on. But what do we offer him? We offer him an International Communist Party, that is, the unification of the advanced elements of the working class who come together with their experience, share it with the others, criticise one another, adopt decisions, and so on. When Comrade Pestaña returns to Spain with these decisions his comrades will want to know: ‘What did you bring back from Moscow?’ He will then present them with the theses and ask them to vote for or against the resolution; and those Spanish syndicalists, who unite on the basis of the proposed theses, will form nothing else but the Spanish Communist Party.
Today we have received a proposal from the Polish government to conclude peace. Who decides such questions? We have the Council of People’s Commissars but it too must be subject to certain control. Whose control? The control of the working class as a formless, chaotic mass? No. The Central Committee of the party is convened in order to discuss the proposal and to decide whether it ought to be answered. And when we have to conduct war, organise new divisions and find the best elements for them – where do we turn? We turn to the Patty. To the Central Committee. And it issues directives to every local committee pertaining to the assignment of Communists to the front. The same thing applies to the agrarian question, the question of supplies, and all other questions. Who will decide these questions in Spain? The Spanish Communist Party – and I am confident that Comrade Pestaña will be one of the founders of this party.
Comrade Serrati – to whom it is, of course, unnecessary to prove the need of a party, for he is himself the leader of a large party – asks us ironically: ‘Just what do we understand by a middle peasant and a semi-proletarian? and isn’t it opportunism for us to make them various concessions?’ But what is opportunism, comrades? In our country the power is in the hands of the working class, which is under the leadership of the Communist Party and which follows the lead of the party that represents it. But in our country there exists not only the advanced working class, but also various backward and non-party elements who work part of the year in the village and the other part in the factory; there exist various layers of the peasantry. All this has not been created by our party; we inherited it from the feudal and capitalist past. The working class is in power and it says: ‘Now I can’t change all this today or on the morrow; I must make a concession here to backward and barbaric relations.'
Opportunism manifests itself whenever those who represent the toiling class make such concessions to the ruling class as facilitate the latter’s remaining in power. Kautsky reproaches us because our party is seemingly making the greatest concessions to the peasantry. The working class, in power, must hasten the evolutionary process of the greatest part of the peasantry, helping it to pass over from a feudal mode of thinking to communism; and must make concessions to the backward elements. Thus I think that the question for which a solution has been found that appears opportunist to Comrade Serrati is not at all a question that lowers the dignity of the Communist Party of Russia. But even if such were the case, even if we had committed this or that mistake, it would only mean that we are operating in a very complex situation and are compelled to manoeuvre. Power is in our hands but just the same we had to retreat before German imperialism at Brest-Litovsk and, later, before British imperialism. And, in this particular instance, we are manoeuvring between the various layers of the peasantry – some we attract to us, others we repel, while a third layer is crushed by us with an iron hand. This is the manoeuvring of the revolutionary class which is in power and which is capable of committing mistakes, but these mistakes enter into the Party’s inventory – an inventory of the Party which concentrates the entire experience accumulated by the working class. That is how we conceive of our Party. That is how we conceive of our International.
Souchy (Free Workers Union, Germany): In drawing up Theses for the international labour movement we cannot start from theoretical preconceived assumptions, but must recognise the tendencies that are emerging in the labour movement in various countries and attempt to develop them further and in a more revolutionary way. Our theories should be nothing more than the conscious continuation of the tendencies and forms of struggle that arise in the fight of the working class against the bourgeoisie. In Britain that is the shop stewards’ movement, in America the IWW and in Norway the Works Councils. These are all tendencies that are born out of the conditions of the struggle between capital and labour.
It is wrong to try to guide these movements into different paths starting from a theoretical standpoint, saying that these movements are not communist. If we leave the empirical path and take the doctrinaire path we cannot create an international of struggle. For this reason I would not like to theorise so much as to discuss precisely those tendencies that have emerged during the revolution. We must take notice of these tendencies and attempt to develop them. We must try to grasp the soul of the living workers’ movement which has not arisen from the heads of individual theoreticians but has sprung from the heart of the working class itself. If I appear here as the representative of the syndicalists, and have no desire to go into the arguments of the Russian comrades, I must attempt to prove, since syndicalism has been called a semi-bourgeois movement here, to prove that this is not the case. I shall nevertheless have to proceed to the area of theory in order to deal with the theories expounded here.
Thus Comrade Zinoviev claims that the bourgeoisie tells the working class not to organise itself politically and that, if the tendency is present in syndicalism not to organise the workers into a party, it must be traced back to the fact that these prejudices, which derive from the bourgeoisie, determine that tendency in syndicalism. This does not correspond to the facts. What does the bourgeoisie say, for example, about the syndicalist movement, about the IWW and similar movements? Comrade Zinoviev, do you believe that the bourgeoisie would approve of the industrial movement and not attempt to proceed against it in the same way that it does against the political parties? The bourgeoisie does not want the proletariat to found political parties. Does the bourgeoisie want the proletariat to found industrial movements? Not at all.
We can see from the persecution of the syndicalists in every country that this movement is as much feared by the bourgeoisie as any political movement. For this reason we cannot accept the point of view that the industrial movement is not so dangerous for the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, as can be proved from examples, the syndicalist movement is just as damaging to the bourgeoisie as the political revolutionary movement, – even if political parties as such are not feared by the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, political parties are rooted in the bourgeoisie. If we consider the French revolution, we can see that the Jacobins, in whose footsteps the bourgeoisie trod, encouraged the idea of forming political parties. Not the idea of forming industrial parties but that of forming political parties is an inheritance from the bourgeoisie. If we want to juggle with theory I could very easily prove this to you.
Comrade Zinoviev further says that we do not simply want to adopt the old parliamentarism but new forms of it. Here too I do not want to throw light on the question from the theoretical standpoint but to go back to the tendencies that exist in the modern workers’ movement. It must be admitted that the parliamentarian tendency is more and more disappearing among revolutionary workers. On the contrary, a strongly anti-parliamentary tendency is evident in the ranks of the
advanced part of the proletariat. Look at the shop stewards’ movement and the Spanish syndicalists – they are anti-parliamentary. The IWW are absolutely anti-parliamentary. And not only that. You will say that the syndicalists are absolutely insignificant in Germany. But there are over 200,000 of us. I must point out that the idea of anti-parliamentarism is penetrating more and more in Germany, not only through the influence of syndicalist theories but through the revolution itself. We must take notice of this. Most communists in Germany today are anti-parliamentary. We must consider the question in this light and not try, from a doctrinaire theoretical standpoint, to smuggle parliamentarism in by the back door, saying it is good for agitational purposes, when you have just drummed it out of the front door.
Comrade Trotsky has dealt with the most important points in his speech. Comrade Zinoviev says that the trades unions have no programme for the day following the outbreak of the revolution. He pointed out that the trades unions were not in a position to solve the economic and social tasks. Now I should like to ask what are the chosen organisations that are to reorganise the economic life of a society; some bourgeois elements that come together to form a party, who have no contact with economic life, or the elements that stand at the roots of production and consumption? Everybody must admit that only those organisations that stand in the closest contact with production are called upon to organise economic life and take it in hand. There can be no doubt – we can see it in Russia too – that a gigantic role in economic life devolves upon the trades unions.
Ramsay: I shall be as brief as possible. I speak here as a communist who rejects the standpoint of the BSP and does not recognise affiliation to the Labour Party. I have ascertained that only the BSP represents this point of view. The various other groupings are all against participation in the Labour Party. I think it would be a tactical mistake to give guidelines on this question from here, for you would have to be familiar with the whole situation in Britain to be able to establish that here and give guidelines, and what is more to give the BSP or any other party the right to affiliate to the Labour Party or not. This would do great damage to the British party, for the whole British working class is sick and tired of the tactics of the Labour Party.
Serrati: It has been moved that we close the debate. All those in favour please raise your hands. All those against, please raise your hands. The motion has been carried. The Bureau proposes to nominate a commission this evening to decide this point on the agenda. We propose Comrades:
Fraina, United States of America
Ramsay and McLaine, England
Meyer, Germany
Graziadei, Italy
Bukharin, Russia
Kabakchiev, Bulgaria
Steinhardt, Austria
Wijnkoop, Holland
Zinoviev, Executive of the CI
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Comrade Levi is proposed in place of Comrade Meyer
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All those in favour of this Commission are asked to raise their hands. [The vote takes place] Who is against? [The vote takes place] The Commission is elected. The comrades on the Commission are asked to remain here a few more minutes.
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The session is closed.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 91st Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Second World Congress (1920)- Zinoviev's Opening Address
Honor The 91st Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (The 21 Conditions Congress) Of The CI (July-August 1920)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International
First Session
July 19, 1920
Zinoviev: Comrades, on behalf of the Executive Committee of the Communist International I declare the Second World Congress of the Communist International open. [Stormy, continuous applause, cheers. The orchestra plays the ‘Internationale’.] Comrades, our first words, the words of the workers of the whole world who are gathered here, must be dedicated to the memory of our best friends and leaders who have given their lives in the cause of the Communist International. You know that in the course of the last year there has been no country in which the blood of Communist workers and of the best leaders of the working class has not flowed. It is sufficient to recall the names of our Hungarian friends, it is sufficient to think of Comrades Leviné, Tibor Szamuely, Jogiches and many others who have followed the revolutionaries who fell at the very beginning of the German and Russian revolutions. In Finland, Estonia and Hungary hundreds and thousands of the best sons of the working class have lost their lives in this period. In opening this congress we want above all to honour the memory of our best comrades who have died for the cause of the Communist International.
I propose to the Congress that it rise in honour of the fallen comrades. [All rise. The orchestra plays the funeral march.] We want furthermore to remember today those comrades who are at the present moment languishing in the gaols of various bourgeois republics. We wish to remember our French friends, Comrades Loriot, Monatte and a number of others who were thrown into gaol shortly before the Congress. To the countless fighters of the workers’ revolution who are languishing in German, Hungarian, French, British and American gaols we send hearty greetings. The American Communist workers, who have been particularly cruelly persecuted in the last year, we shake fraternally by the hand. The Communist workers and revolutionaries in general are being literally starved out by the American bourgeoisie. Our friends there cannot find work, they are kept under lock and key. There is no cruelty that is not applied by the American bourgeoisie against the workers who are in the ranks of the Communists or the ranks of the IWW or other revolutionary organisations following the same path as the Communist International.
We express the firm conviction that the words that a French comrade spoke recently, after the arrest of Loriot, Monatte and others, will come true. He said: ‘Yes, we are living at a time when the ruling bourgeoisie, the “democrats”, and the so-called “socialists” are throwing the best leaders of the Communists into gaol; but we are convinced that the roles will soon be reversed and that the working class will soon put into gaol those who are at the moment sitting in bourgeois governments and will bring to power tomorrow those who are being thrown into gaol by the bourgeoisie today.’ [Applause.]
Comrades, it is only a year and a half since the Communist International was founded. It is completely understandable that it had above all to cross swords with the Second International, with which we entered into an immediate struggle. Both enemies and friends must recognise, faced with today’s Congress, which has become a World Congress in the literal sense of the word, faced with the fact that representatives from the whole of Europe and also from America are taking part, that our fight against the Second International has been crowned with success. Today we have a complete right to declare that the Second International has been beaten over the head by the Communist International. [Stormy applause.]
Comrades, what does this fact mean? What does it mean: ‘We have beaten the Second International'? The struggle between us and the Second International is not a struggle of two factions of one revolutionary movement, it is not a struggle of shades of opinion, not a struggle of different tendencies within a homogeneous class camp, it is in fact a struggle of classes. Certainly there are many of our class brothers in the ranks of the Second International. And irrespective of that our struggle against the Second International is not a struggle of factions within a class but something significantly greater.
The collapse of the Second International reflects the collapse of the bourgeois order itself. That is the hinge around which everything turns. We have beaten the Second International because the ‘Twilight of the Gods’ of capitalism has begun. We have beaten the Second International because nowhere in the world can the bourgeoisie execute the testament of the imperialist war, nor will it be able to do so. We have beaten the Second International because the League of Nations and the whole Entente and the entire bourgeoisie are powerless to do anything at all for the restoration of Europe’s economic life.
[The League of Nations was created by the victors of the First World War in 1919 to serve as an instrument of imperialist policy. Helped to prepare the outbreak of the Second World War. Lenin called it the ‘thieves’ kitchen’. The alliance of France, Russia and Britain that fought the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War. It was also joined by Italy, Rumania, Portugal and the United States.]
We have beaten the Second International because the bourgeoisie is powerless to finish the tasks which stand imperiously before it and which it must solve if it does not want to take its historical departure.
Since the first shot in 1914 the Second International has tied its fate to that of the bourgeoisie. The social patriots of every country supported their ‘own’ bourgeoisie and their ‘own’ bourgeois ‘fatherland’.
So it went on until the end of the war. When it was over the Second International once more linked its fate to the bourgeoisie, this time with the group of bourgeois countries who had carried off the victory in the imperialist war.
You remember the first attempt to recreate the Second International when the imperialist bloodbath was over. You remember the conferences in Berne and Lucerne where the so-called leading part of the Second International ‘wished to be associated with’ the League of Nations. The leaders of the ‘resurrected’ Second International hung onto Wilson’s coat-tails. You remember, comrades, that at the Berne conference the Chairman, in opening this conference , greeted Wilson and set him alongside Jaures – an insult to the shade of the fallen tribune of the French workers. When the war was over the Second International wished to unite its fate with the bourgeoisie, and what is more with the section of the bourgeoisie it assumed to be the strongest – the League of Nations. That was its wish. Therefore the blows that the working class of the whole world and its vanguard, the Communist International, have dealt the bourgeoisie in the course of this year have also hit the Second International. The yellow Second International has indissolubly bound its destiny to the class that is sinking before our eyes. That is precisely why our victory over the Second International is of such great significance. It is, I repeat, not the victory of one faction of the workers’ movement over another, it is not the victory of one party over another. No, here we are concerned with something immeasurably greater: every organisation that tries to tie its destiny to the bourgeois class will itself sink. That is the historic meaning of the victory of the Communist International over the Second International. As a young class the working class is a rising star. It is rising to power while the star of the bourgeoisie, which has choked itself on the blood of the working class, is finally setting. The bourgeoisie has become decrepit and is decaying. And as the dying man grasps at the living, so the bourgeoisie clings to the half-dead Second International and strangles it in its deadly embrace. They are both perishing before our eyes. The bourgeoisie like its assistant, the yellow International, is near its end – in the historical sense a year counts as a minute – the death rattles of both are already to be heard. Soon the world will be freed from the bourgeois yoke, from all the organisations that have held the working class in spiritual imprisonment. Soon the international association of workers will be able to start calmly on the construction of a new world on the basis of communism.
Comrades, in the course of this year the idea of ‘democracy’ has faded away before our eyes and is now at its last gasp. I think that the most significant document of the first, founding Congress of the Communist International, indeed the most important document of the Communist movement in recent years generally, is the Theses on Bourgeois Democracy that were adopted by the First Congress. The workers of the whole world and the enlightened part of the peasants and the soldiers have studied them. And the course of events in the last 15 to 16 months has confirmed step by step the correctness of the analysis that the First Congress of the Communist International gave in the evaluation of bourgeois democracy contained in these Theses. When, in the eyes of the whole world, the American bourgeoisie abolished all its own laws and all constitutional guarantees for the working class – it went so far that the Communists, elected on a legal basis according to all the rules of the parliamentary art, are not allowed into parliament but thrown into prison – when America, that classical country of bourgeois democracy, step by step violated the foundations of democracy, this was a visible lesson of how very correct the Communist International was to point out in its programme and in its theses the real historical role of so-called democracy.
Comrades, we have before us the World Congress of the Communist International. At this Congress is represented the vanguard, ready for battle, of workers from all over the world. We will pose to the Congress a number of questions which at present are being disputed inside the international communist movement. We have brought to the Congress a whole number of workers’ organisations which cannot yet be called completely communist and are still crystallising. The international situation of the working class after the long war and the desperate crisis is such that many workers’ organisations are standing at the crossroads; their voice is breaking, as happens in a young man. They have not yet finally established their tactics, they have not yet chosen their final path. We have called upon to work together with us all those workers’ organisations of which we are convinced that they honestly want to fight against capitalism. We will talk to them as to our companions in struggle and in suffering, as to our class brothers who are ready together with us to give their lives for the liberation of the working class. We will not do the same as the Second International, which only knew how to laugh at and persecute revolutionaries with opinions different from their own, which showed a Janus face: to the right – a sweet smile, to the left – spitefully gaping jaws. We are firmly convinced that life educates. The imperialist war taught the workers much. The honest revolutionary elements of syndicalism, anarchism, industrialism and the shop stewards will go over to the side of communism and are already doing so. Our business is to help them to do this faster.
On the other hand there are taking part in our Congress the representatives of the USPD, the French Socialist Party and the Italian Socialist Party who only recently – finally – left the ranks of the Second International.
[The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, formed in 1916-1917 when the Social Democratic Party split. Included centrists led by Kautsky as well as the revolutionary tendency of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. After the ‘Spartacists’ formed the Communist Party in January 1919, a current developed in the USPD which favoured affiliation to the Third international. At its Halle Congress in October 1920, the USPD voted to accept the conditions for entry into the Third International and a united Communist Party was formed. The rump of the USPD continued to function as a centrist party until it returned to the SPD in 1922.
In 1919 the right-wing leadership had taken part in efforts to revive the Second International. During the war the left wing had adhered to Zimmerwald and it called for affiliation to the Third International. At the party congress in February 1920 a large majority voted against affiliation to the Second International but an equally large one voted not to affiliate immediately to the Third. At the Tours Congress a majority favoured affiliation and formed the Communist Party.
The party formally broke with the Second International in March 1919 and at its Bologna congress in October declared support for the Third International but without taking action against Turati and the right wing.]
We are glad to form a communist alliance with the honest revolutionary workers who are in the ranks of these parties.
Comrades, you know that, as the Communist International has grown stronger, about ten big old parties – I shall not list their names – have left the ranks of the Second International. Already a new stage is now beginning: we see that the old parties are not only leaving the Second International but also making immediate attempts to join the Communist International. A number of representatives of these parties are, as I have already said, present here. The Communist Congress will openly broach all the sensitive questions in front of the French and German workers. Under no circumstances will the Communist Congress permit intellectual dishonesty, nor will it make the slightest concessions on principle. The basic questions of the proletarian revolution must be posed sharply. We need clarity, clarity and once more clarity. We will not permit the Communist International simply to become a fashion. The questions on the agenda interest millions of workers. We will put in front of the German workers who belong to the USP13 and the French workers who belong to the French Socialist Party our point of view on all the acute questions of the day. We will wait until the enormous majority of the French and German workers carry out the necessary purge of their ranks and are then able to join the ranks of the Communist International, so that no one can think that this is simply ballast for the Communist International, but that they come to us in order, in common and unanimous work together with us, to carry out the fight against the bourgeoisie.
We intend to lay the Statutes of the Communist International in front of the present Congress. We assume that, just as the Communists, in order to beat the bourgeoisie in their own country, need above all a centralised, powerful, strong party cast all in one piece, so too the time has come to take in hand the creation of such an organisation on the international scale. We are fighting against the international bourgeoisie, against a world of enemies who are armed to the teeth, and we must have an iron international proletarian organisation that is able to beat the enemy everywhere, which must be able to give any one of its troops the greatest possible help at any given moment, which must elaborate the most powerful, flexible and mobile forms of organisation it possibly can in order to face fully armed the enemy it has to fight. In the draft Statutes of the Communist International we quote a sentence from the Statutes of the First International Working Men’s Association, whose leaders were Marx and Engels. In these Statutes Marx and Engels say: ‘If the struggle of the working class has not yet been crowned by success, then this is the case among other things because the workers lack international unity, tight international organisation and mutual support on an international scale.’ Indeed, comrades, that is a simple truth. But we have had to wait for over fifty years, to experience the four years of the bloodbath and all the terrors that humanity has lived through in recent times, for this simple thought not only to be grasped by a few or by individual groups, but for it to enter the flesh and blood of millions of workers. We are firmly convinced that this idea at present has really become the property of the masses. We know that, for victory over the bourgeoisie, it is necessary to make a reality of this simple, elementary idea referred to by the First International, the first International Working Men’s Association, whose traditions and principles we now adopt on many questions in order to turn them into reality. There are present here representatives of the workers and women workers of Petrograd who were the first to begin the uprising in October 1917. I say to you: comrades, today a great historical event is being accomplished in Petrograd. The Second Congress of the Communist International entered history the moment this session was opened. Keep this day in your memory. Know this: that this day is the recompense for all your privation and your courageous and steadfast struggle. Tell your children of this day and describe its significance to them! Imprint this solemn hour on your hearts!
We have a finished event before us, sublime in its simplicity. What could be simpler? The workers of the various countries unite to free themselves from the yoke of the rich. And what could at the same time be more sublime? Comrades, do you not hear the wings of victory beating? Our Earth shall be free. Wage slavery shall be abolished, communism shall triumph ...
Comrades, at the end of my speech I would like to remind you that, in a few months, fifty years will have passed since the first great historical uprising of the European working class which pointed the way for us and for you. I speak of the Paris Commune. I speak of the heroic uprising of the Paris proletariat which, despite all its weaknesses and mistakes (we shall endeavour to avoid them) contributed a golden page in the history of the international proletarian movement and showed us the way that millions of toilers are now taking.
I permit myself to express the hope that by the fiftieth Jubilee of the Paris Commune we will have the Soviet Republic in France. [Loud, stormy applause.]
Comrades, in an article that was written immediately after the founding Congress of the Communist International and carries the title The Perspectives for the International Revolution I said, somewhat over-zealously, that when perhaps only a year had passed we would have already forgotten that a struggle had been carried out in Europe for Soviet power, since this struggle in Europe would already be over and it would have carried over into the rest of the world. A bourgeois German professor has seized hold of this sentence and a few days ago I read an article in which he takes malicious pleasure in quoting this passage and saying: Soon the Second Congress will open. More than a year has passed. It does not look as if the complete victory of the Soviet power has yet come about.
Hereupon we can calmly reply to this learned bourgeois: that is how it really is; probably we allowed ourselves to be carried away; in reality not one year but probably two or three years will be needed for the whole of Europe to become a Soviet republic. But if you yourself are so modest as to regard a reprieve of a year or two as unheard – of good luck, we can only congratulate you on your modesty; and we can express the certainty that, give or take a year or two – we will hold out for a while yet – we will have the international Soviet republic whose leader will be our Communist International.
Long live the working class of the whole world! Long live the Communist International! [Continuous stormy applause.]
Zinoviev: The Congress will proceed to the election of the Presidium. Comrade Bukharin has the floor on behalf of the Executive Committee.
Bukharin: On behalf of the Executive Committee of the Communist International the following candidates are proposed for the Presidium: Levi (Germany), Rosmer (France), Serrati (Italy), Lenin and Zinoviev (Russia).
Zinoviev: Are there any other nominations for the composition of the Presidium? No. The Presidium will be made up as proposed by the Executive Committee of the Communist International: Levi (Germany), Rosmer (France), Serrati (Italy), Lenin and Zinoviev (Russia) have been elected.
Comrades, a whole number of organisations wish to greet our Congress, but we must economise on our time. On behalf of the Executive Committee I propose to give the floor to the representative of the Russian Federative Soviet Republic which today has the great good luck to welcome the Congress on to its territory, to the Chairman of the All Russian Executive Committee, Comrade Kalinin. [Applause.]
Kalinin: Comrades, on behalf of the workers and peasants of Soviet Russia I welcome the Second World Congress of the Communist International. Comrades, members of the Communist International! The Communist Party of the Bolsheviks and the Russian working class have not been pampered in the past by legality and parliamentarism. The last few decades were years of hard, direct struggle by the working class against Russian Tsarism. In this dark period the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks never lost hope that the moment was not far off when the workers would rise under their leadership and overthrow Russian Tsarism and the Russian bourgeoisie. In the last three years, comrades, the Russian working class and the Russian peasantry have made countless sacrifices, they have had to overcome monstrous difficulties and prove the ability to fight unreservedly for the ideals of humanity. And, comrades, this three-year fight has steeled the Russian working class and peasantry and taught them to stand up and fight directly for the interests of the working class. It gave us the opportunity to set up our invincible and renowned Red Army which is at the moment dealing hard blows at the enemy on the Polish Front.
Comrades, the Russian worker and even the backward Russian peasant is better enlightened by the developing struggle against the Russian bourgeoisie and international capital, in which he is participating more and more, than by books and speeches. If earlier it had to be explained to the workers and peasants in propaganda that it was necessary to overthrow the world bourgeoisie too if one wanted to overthrow the Russian bourgeoisie, it is at present clear to every Russian worker and peasant that we are not only fighting against the bourgeoisie of Russia, against the Tsarist landowners – we could have finished them off long ago, we would have had peace long since – but behind their backs stands the world counter-revolution supporting them decisively. And thus it is completely natural that the Russian working class and the mass of the Russian peasants direct their gaze with the greatest attentiveness to the oppressed classes of the West and the oppressed masses of the East. They are awaiting the moment when the oppressed classes in unity with the Russian peasants and the Russian workers will plunge into the direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
From the bottom of my heart I wish that the opening of the Second Congress of the Communist International may become the beginning and the pledge of the direct struggle of the oppressed masses of the East and oppressed classes of the West, of the direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Long live the Second Congress of the Communist International!
Zinoviev: The first item on the agenda is the report of the Executive Committee, the second is the reports of the parties concerned. The Executive Committee has decided with regard to items one and two to confine itself to distributing written reports. Some of the reports of the individual parties have been presented, some are going to be presented. Thus all delegates will be able to familiarise themselves with the written reports. We will proceed to the third item on the agenda: The current international situation and the fundamental tasks of the Communist International.
Comrade Lenin has the floor for the report. [Loud applause. All present rise and applaud. The speaker tries to speak, but the applause and cries in all languages continue. The ovation goes on for a long time.]
Lenin: Comrades, the Theses on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International have been published in all languages and offer nothing materially new (especially for the Russian comrades), for in the main they only extend a few basic features of our revolutionary experience and the lessons of our revolutionary movement to a number of Western countries, to Western Europe. For that reason I shall dwell in my report somewhat longer, even if in brief outline, on the first part of my subject, on the international situation.
The economic relations of imperialism form the basis of the international situation as it now presents itself. In the course of the twentieth century a new, highest and final stage of capitalism has taken shape. You all know of course that the most characteristic and essential feature of imperialism is the fact that capital has reached enormous dimensions. Giant monopolies have taken the place of free competition. An insignificant number of capitalists have, on occasion, been able to concentrate entire industries in their hands. These have passed into the hands of combines, cartels, syndicates and trusts, frequently international in scale. Thus entire industries, not only in individual countries but all over the world, have fallen into the hands of monopolists either in relation to finance or on the basis of property rights or with reference to production. On this basis there developed an unprecedented domination by a small number of great banks, financial tycoons and magnates who turned even the freest republics into financial monarchies. This was quite openly recognised before the war even by such by no means revolutionary writers as, for example, Lysis in France.
This domination by a handful of capitalists reached its full development when the whole globe had been divided up, not only in the sense that the various sources of raw materials and means of production had been seized by the capitalists, but also in the sense that the preliminary division of the colonies had been concluded. About forty years ago the population of the colonies was scarcely more than 250 million held in subjection by six capitalist powers. Before the war in 1914 the population in the colonies was already assessed at 600 million, and if such countries as Persia, Turkey and China, which are in the position of semi-colonies, are taken in addition, we reach the round figure of a thousand million people who are enslaved through colonial dependence by the richest, most civilised and freest countries. And you know that apart from being directly political and legal, this colonial subjection also involves a whole series of relations of financial and economic dependence and means a whole series of wars which cannot really be called wars because they so often degenerate into butchery, when European and American imperialist troops armed with the most perfected weapons of destruction slaughter the unarmed and defenceless inhabitants of the colonial countries.
It was from this division of the whole world, from this domination by the capitalist monopolies, from this universal power wielded by a very small number of great banks – from 2 to 5 in each state, no more – that the imperialist war of 1914-1918 inevitably sprang. The war was waged for the re-division of the whole world. The war was waged to decide which of the two groups of world powers – the English or the German – was to have the opportunity and the right to pillage, enslave and exploit the whole world. And you know that the war decided this question in favour of the British group. As a result of this war we have an immeasurable sharpening of all the contradictions of capitalism. At a stroke the war relegated some 250 millions of the world’s population to what amounts to colonial status, that is to say Russia, whose population is put at around 130 million, and Austro-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria with no fewer than 120 million. 250 million people in countries which in part, Eke Germany, are among the most advanced, enlightened and cultured and stand technically at the pinnacle of modern progress. Through the Versailles Treaty the war has forced such conditions upon them that advanced nations have fallen into colonial servitude, misery, starvation, ruin and loss of rights. They are bound by the Treaty for many generations into the future and placed under circumstances such as no civilised nation has yet lived under. Thus you have a picture of the world that shows that after the war a population of at least 1,250 million is suddenly subjected to the colonial yoke, to the exploitation of a brutal capitalism. This capitalism once boasted of its love of peace, and perhaps it had some right to do so fifty years ago when the world had not yet been divided up, when the monopolies did not yet rule, when capitalism still had room for comparatively peaceful development without enormous military conflicts.
Now, after this peaceful epoch, the yoke becomes enormously more oppressive. We can already see the return to an even worse colonial and military subjugation than before. For Germany and a whole number of the defeated nations the Versailles Treaty has created conditions which make economic existence physically impossible, deprive them of rights and humiliate them.
How many nations profit from this?
In order to answer this question we must recall that the United States of America, the only country to profit fully from the war, which was transformed from a country burdened with debts into a country to which everybody owed money, has a population of no more than 100 million. The population of japan, who also made great profits by standing aside from the Euro-American conflict and seizing the enormous continent of Asia, is some 50 million. The population of Britain who, next to these countries, made the biggest profits, is about 50 million. And if we add the neutral states who also enriched themselves during the war we have in round figures 250 million.
Thus you have in a few short strokes a picture of the world as it has emerged after the imperialist war. A population of 1,250 million in enslaved colonies; countries like Persia, Turkey and China whose living bodies have been dismembered; countries defeated and turned into colonies. No more than 250 million people five in those countries that have maintained their former position, but they too have become economically dependent upon America and were, during the war, also militarily dependent upon her, for the war involved the whole world and did not permit a single state to remain really neutral. Finally we have a population of no more than 250 million in those countries in which, of course, only the ruling class, the capitalists, profited from the division of the world. The sum total, some 1,750 million people, equals the Earth’s total population. I wanted to remind you of this picture of the world since all the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, of imperialism, that lead to revolution, all the fundamental contradictions in the labour movement that have led to the bitter struggle against the Second International that the Comrade Chairman spoke of – all this is connected with the division of the world’s population.
Certainly these figures illustrate the world economy only in crude outline. And comrades, in reality exploitation by finance capital on the basis of this division of the world’s population has grown even greater.
Not only have the defeated colonial countries fallen into this state of subjugation, but also within each victorious country all the conflicts are taking sharper and sharper form, all the contradictions of capitalism are becoming more acute. I shall give a few examples to sketch what I mean.
Let us take the national debt. We know that the debts of the most important European countries grew no less than sevenfold between 1914 and 1920. I shall quote from another economic source of especially great significance. This is Keynes, the British diplomat and author of the book The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes took part in the peace negotiations at Versailles on behalf of his government and observed them directly from a purely bourgeois point of view; he studied the matter thoroughly step by step; he took part in the discussions as an economist. In the process he arrived at conclusions that are more cogent, graphic and instructive than any that a revolutionary communist could draw because they are drawn by an avowed bourgeois, an implacable enemy of Bolshevism. Like the petty-bourgeois Englishman that he is, he distortedly imagines this Bolshevism to be ferocious and brutal. He has come to the conclusion that, thanks to the Treaty, Europe and the whole world are heading for bankruptcy. He has resigned. He has thrown his book in the government’s face saying: ‘What you are doing is lunacy.’ I shall quote figures from Keynes’s book which by and large show the following.
How do the reciprocal debts of the great powers relate to one another? I shall convert British pounds sterling into gold roubles at a rate of ten gold roubles to one pound sterling. And now we see that the United States has assets of 19,000 million while they have no liabilities at all. Before the war it was indebted to Britain. At the last Congress of the Communist Party of Germany, in his report of April 14, 1920, Comrade Levi correctly referred to the fact that there are now two powers in the world that can act independently: Britain and America. Only America is absolutely financially independent. Before the war it was a debtor, now it emerges as a creditor. All the other world powers are debtors. Britain is reduced to a position where her assets are 17,000 million and her liabilities are 8,000 million. She is already half-way to being a debtor. In addition these assets include some 6,000 million of these assets owed by Russia. The military supplies received by Russia during the war are counted as part of her debt. When recently Krassin, as the representative of the Russian Soviet government, had the opportunity of talking to Lloyd George on the question of the debts, he made it extremely plain to the scholars and statesmen who lead the British government that they were suffering under an illusion if they assumed they were ever going to receive any of these debts. The British diplomat Keynes has already seen through this illusion. It is not merely, or rather not at all, a question of the Russian revolutionary government being unwilling to pay the debts. No government could have paid them, as they are the usurious interest for what has already been paid twenty times over. The very same bourgeois, Keynes, who certainly has no sympathies with the Russian revolutionary movement, says: ‘It is obvious that these debts cannot be taken into account.’
In relation to France Keynes quotes figures that give assets of 3,500 millions but liabilities of 9,500 million. And this was the country of which the French themselves said that it was the world’s moneylender, for her ‘savings’ were colossal; the colonial and financial robbery that brought them a gigantic capital enabled them to lend thousands and thousands of millions, especially to Russia. Gigantic revenues were thus gained. And despite all this, despite her victory, France has fallen into the position of a debtor.
An American bourgeois source quoted by Comrade Braun. a Communist, in his book Who Must Pay the War Debts? (Leipzig 1920) determines the ratio of debts to the national wealth as follows: in England and France they form over 50 per cent of the total national wealth, in Italy the ratio is expressed as from 60 to 70 per cent and in Russia as 90 per cent. But as you know these debts do not disturb us, for we followed Keynes’s excellent advice shortly before his book appeared, and annulled all our debts. [Stormy applause.].
Here however Keynes only displays a common petty-bourgeois idiosyncrasy; in advising annulment of all debts he says that France of course will only gain by it and Britain will not lose very much since in any case there is nothing to be had from Russia. As is only fitting, America will lose, but Keynes counts on American ‘generosity’. In this respect our views diverge from those of Keynes and the rest of the petty-bourgeois pacifists. We think that if we are to manage to annul the debts we will have to put our hopes elsewhere and work in a direction other than faith in the ‘generosity’ of the capitalists.
From these few figures it is evident that the imperialist war has created a situation that is impossible even for the victorious countries. This is also indicated by the enormous disparity between wages and price rises. The Supreme Economic Council, a body that is supposed to protect the bourgeois order internationally from the rising revolution, adopted on March 8 of this year a resolution that ended with an appeal for order, industriousness and thrift, on condition, of course, that the workers remain the slaves of capital. This Supreme Economic Council, the organ of the Entente and of the whole capitalist world, presented the following summary.
On average, food prices in the United States have risen by 120 per cent while wages have only risen by 100 per cent. In Britain food prices have gone up 170 per cent, wages by 130 per cent; in France food prices by 300 per cent and wages by 60 per cent (I am quoting the figures from Comrade Braun’s pamphlet mentioned above and the Supreme Economic Council’s figures from The Times of March 10, 1920).
Clearly, under such conditions the growth of workers’ resentment. the growth of revolutionary moods and ideas and the growth of elemental mass strikes are inevitable, for the workers’ situation is becoming intolerable. The workers are convinced by experience that the capitalists have immeasurably enriched themselves in the war and are loading the burden of its costs and debts onto the workers. We recently learnt by cable that America wishes to deport another 500 Communists to Russia in order to get rid of these ‘dangerous agitators’.
If America deports not 500 but 500,000 Russian, American, Japanese and French ‘agitators’ it would make not the slightest difference, for the disparity between wages and prices, about which they can do nothing, would still remain. They can do nothing about it because private property is strictly safeguarded there, because in their country it is ‘sacred’. Only in Russia has the exploiter’s private property been abolished. The capitalists can do nothing about these disproportionate prices but the workers cannot live with the old wages. This misery cannot be fought with the old methods. No individual strikes, no parliamentary struggle, no vote can achieve anything here, for ‘private property is sacred’ and the capitalists have piled up such debts that the whole world is enslaved by a handful of people while the living conditions of the workers become more and more intolerable. There is no way out apart from the abolition of the ‘private property’ of the exploiter.
In his pamphlet Britain and the World Revolution, valuable extracts from which were published in our Bulletin of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of February 1920, Comrade Lapinsky points out that the export prices of British coal were twice as high as expected in official industrial circles.
Things have gone so far in Lancashire that share prices have risen 400 per cent. The banks’ net profits were at least 40 to 50 per cent, and even then it should be noted that in establishing the banks’ net profits the bank directors can juggle the figures by syphoning off the lion’s share of the net profits as repayments, commissions, etc. Here too, therefore, undeniable economic facts show that a tiny handful of people have grown unbelievably wealthy, that they live in unprecedented, excessive luxury, and that at the same time the poverty of the working class is constantly growing. We must also underline the circumstance that Comrade Levi brought out very graphically in his report, that is to say the change in the value of money. Money is everywhere becoming valueless as a result of debts, the issue of paper money. etc. The same bourgeois source that I have already quoted, the statement of the Supreme Economic Council, calculated that the fall in the value of money in relation to the dollar comes to almost a third in England, two thirds in France and Italy and as much as 96 per cent in Germany.
This fact proves that the mechanism of the international capitalist economy is falling apart completely., The trading relations on which the supply of raw materials and the sale of products rest under capitalism can no longer be maintained, particularly when a single country dominates a whole number of other countries as a result of the change in the value of money. Not one of the richest countries can continue to exist and to trade, because they cannot sell their products and obtain raw materials.
Thus we see America, this richest of all countries, to which all countries are subordinate, unable either to buy or sell. And the same Keynes who waded through all the fire and the water and the confusion of the Versailles negotiations is obliged to acknowledge this impossibility despite his obstinate determination to defend capitalism, despite his hatred of Bolshevism. As I have said, I do not think that there is a single communist or any kind of revolutionary appeal that can compare in its power with Keynes’s lines where Keynes describes Wilson and ‘Wilsonism’ in practice. Wilson was the idol of the petty bourgeois and the pacifists of the Keynes variety, and of a whole number of the heroes of the Second and also of the Two-and-a-half International who swore by the ‘Fourteen Points’ and wrote ‘scholarly’ books on the ‘roots’ of Wilson’s policies, in the hope that Wilson would save the ‘social peace’, reconcile the exploiter with the exploited and bring about social reforms. Keynes has shown graphically what a fool Wilson made of himself, and how all these illusions fell to dust at the encounter with the businesslike, experienced and practical policies of capital personified by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. The working masses are seeing more and more clearly as a result of their living experience, and the learned pedants can now even read in Keynes’s book, that the ‘roots’ of Wilson’s policy were only sanctimonious, petty-bourgeois phrase-mongering and a complete inability to grasp the class struggle.
In consequence of all this, two conditions, two fundamental circumstances have arisen of iron necessity: on the one hand the impoverishment and want of the masses has risen to an unprecedented degree, and that among 1,250 million people, that is 70 per cent of the total world population. This affects the colonial countries and the dependent countries whose inhabitants have no legal rights, whose administration has been handed over to the brigands of finance as a 4 mandate’. And moreover the Versailles Treaty has enslaved the defeated nations for all eternity, just like those secret treaties affecting Russia which, it must be admitted, have the same real force as the bits of paper that say that we owe so many thousands of millions. We have the first case in history of legal backing for the plundering, enslavement, subjugation, impoverishment and starvation of 1,250 million people.
On the other hand the workers in all the creditor nations have found themselves in a situation that is intolerable. The war brought about an intolerable sharpening of all the contradictions of capitalism. This is the source of the deep revolutionary ferment that is constantly growing. For during the war men were placed under the constraint of military discipline, were driven to their deaths or threatened with summary punishment. Conditions during the war gave no opportunity to see economic realities; writers, poets, priests, the whole press dedicated themselves to the glorification of war, and it is only now, when the war is over, that the revelations begin. German imperialism is unmasked with its Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Versailles Treaty is unmasked which was meant to be a victory for imperialism but turned out to be a defeat. Amongst other things, the example of Keynes shows us that thousands and hundreds of thousands of people from the petty bourgeoisie, from among the intellectuals, in short from the ranks of the most highly developed and educated people in Europe and America must take the same path that Keynes trod when he resigned his office and threw into his government’s face a book that unmasked it. Keynes shows what is going on in the consciousness of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people and what will go on as soon as they realise that all the speeches about a ‘war for freedom’ and so on were uninterrupted deceit, that in the final analysis only a very small number of people enriched themselves and the rest were ruined and reduced to slavery. Even the bourgeois Keynes says that it is vital for the salvation of British lives and the British economy to renew free trading relations between Germany and Russia. But how is that to be achieved? By cancelling all debts, as Keynes suggests! The learned economist Keynes is not alone in holding this idea. Millions will come to and reach this idea. And thousands of people will listen when the bourgeois economists say that there is no way out apart from cancelling the debts. And therefore ‘Damn the Bolsheviks’ (who cancelled the debts), let us appeal to America’s ‘generosity'! I think that such an economist and agitator for Bolshevism deserves to be sent a message of thanks in the name of the Congress of the Communist International.
If on the one hand the economic conditions of the masses are becoming intolerable, and if on the other hand the disintegration Keynes describes has set in and is growing in the insignificant minority of all-powerful victor nations, then we can see clearly the maturing of the two preconditions for the world revolution.
We now have before us a more or less complete picture of the whole world. We know what it means to have 1,250 million people robbed of the means of existence and dependent on a handful of the rich. But when on the other hand the League of Nations offered the nations a Covenant that declared an end to war and forbade anybody to disturb the peace, when this Covenant, the last hope of the world’s labouring masses, came into force, it was one of our greatest victories. So long as the Covenant was not in force they said: a country like Germany cannot be subjected to any special conditions. Wait until the Covenant comes out, then you will see how all will be well. And when the Covenant was published the most rabid opponents of Bolshevism had to repudiate it! When the Covenant started to become operative it became apparent that a tiny group of the richest countries Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando and Wilson – had sat down to thread the new relations together. When they put the machinery of the Covenant into operation there was a complete breakdown.
We saw this in the war against Russia. Weak, ruined and crushed, a backward country, Russia proved to be the victor against the world, against the League of the richest and most powerful states dominating the whole world. We had no forces that even in the slightest degree equalled theirs, and yet we were nonetheless the victors. Why? Because there was not a shadow of unity between them, because each power worked against the other. France wanted Russia to pay her debts and threaten Germany. Britain wanted Russia to be divided up. Britain attempted to lay her hands on the Baku oilfields and conclude Treaties with the Russian border states. And among the official British documents there is a book where there are listed with the most extraordinary conscientiousness the names of all the states (there are 14 of them) who six months ago, in December 1919, promised to occupy Moscow and Petrograd. Britain based all her policies on these states, gave loans of millions to these states. Now however all these calculations have come to nothing and all the loans are gone with the wind.
Such are the conditions created by the League of Nations. Every day this Covenant exists provides splendid propaganda for Bolshevism, for the most influential supporters of the capitalist ‘order’ show that on every issue they are putting a spoke in one another’s wheels. A furious wrangle is raging between japan, England, America and France over the division of Turkey, Persia, Mesopotamia and China. The bourgeois press in these countries is full of furious invective and bitter reproaches against their allies for snapping up the booty in front of their noses. We see complete discord among the leaders of this tiny handful of the richest countries. For 1,250 million people it is impossible to live in the way that the most ‘progressive’ and civilised capitalism is trying to make them live, and that is 70 per cent of the population of the entire world. The tiny handful of the richest countries, England, America and japan (who had the opportunity to plunder the Eastern, Asiatic countries, but can have no independent financial and military power without the support of another country), these two or three countries are not able to restore order in the world economic situation and are pursuing policies which are undermining the policies of their partners and participants in the League of Nations. It is from this that the international crisis arises, and these economic roots of the crisis are the main reasons for the brilliant successes of the Communist International.
Comrades, we come now to the question of the revolutionary crisis as the basis of our revolutionary activity. But here we must deal above all with two widely-held errors. On the one hand the bourgeois economists always present this crisis, in the elegant English phrase, as mere ‘unrest’. On the other hand however revolutionaries sometimes try to prove that there is absolutely no way out of the crisis. This is a mistake. There are no absolutely hopeless situations. The bourgeoisie is behaving like an impudent robber who has lost his head; it is committing folly after folly, thus aggravating the situation and hastening its own downfall. All this is the case, but one cannot ‘prove’ that the bourgeoisie has absolutely no possibility of lulling some minority or other of the exploited by means of some small concessions or suppressing the movement or uprising of some section of the oppressed and exploited. The attempt to ‘prove’ ‘absolute’ hopelessness in advance is empty pedantry or juggling With concepts and words. Only experience can provide a real ‘proof of this or similar questions. The bourgeois order is now undergoing an exceptional revolutionary crisis all over the world. We must now ‘prove’ through the practice of the revolutionary parties that they are sufficiently conscious, that they possess sufficient organisation, links with the exploited masses, determination and understanding to utilise this crisis for a successful and victorious revolution.
The preparation of this ‘proof’ is the main reason why we have gathered here for this Congress of the Communist International.
I would like to quote the leader of the British ‘Independent’ Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald, as an example of how strong opportunism still is in the parties which seek to join the Communist International, how far the work of many of the parties is still removed from the preparation of the revolutionary class to exploit the revolutionary crisis. In his book Parliament and Revolution, which deals with the very basic questions that concern us now, MacDonald describes the state of affairs in more or less the spirit of the bourgeois pacifists. He recognises that the revolutionary crisis exists, that the revolutionary mood is growing, that the masses of the workers sympathise with soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat (he is speaking of Britain, mark you) and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the present dictatorship of the British bourgeoisie.
But MacDonald remains a thoroughgoing bourgeois pacifist and compromiser, a petty bourgeois who dreams of a government that stands above the classes. Like all the liars, sophists and pedants of the bourgeoisie, MacDonald recognises the class struggle as a fact to be written about. MacDonald is silent on the experience of Kerensky, of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia, on the similar experiences in Hungary and Germany and so on, the experience of the formation of a ‘democratic’ government allegedly above the classes. MacDonald lulls his party and the workers who are unfortunate enough to think that this bourgeois is a socialist and that this philistine is a leader with the following words: ‘We know that all this (i.e. the revolutionary crisis, the revolutionary ferment) will pass ... will settle down.’ The war inevitably provoked the crisis, but after the war it will all ‘settle down’, if not all at once.
And the man that writes this is the leader of a party that wants to join the Communist International. We have here a revelation – all the more valuable for its extreme frankness – of what can be seen no less often in the leading layers of the French Socialist Party and the German Independent Socialist Party, and of the fact that it is not only a lack of understanding but an unwillingness to utilise the revolutionary crisis in a revolutionary way, or in other words it is a lack of understanding how and of willingness to carry out a revolutionary preparation of the Party and the class for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is the basic fault in many parties that have now left the Second International. For this particular reason I am spending a greater amount of time on the Theses that I have put before the Congress, in order to define if possible more exactly and more concretely the tasks of the preparation for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
One further example. A new book against Bolshevism was recently published. Unusual numbers of such books are now appearing in Europe and America, but the more books that appear against Bolshevism the stronger and quicker sympathies for it will grow among the masses. The book I am talking about here is Otto Bauer’s Bolshevism or Social-Democracy. Here the Germans are graphically shown what precisely the Mensheviks are whose contemptible role in the Russian revolution is well enough known to workers all over the world. Otto Bauer has supplied us with a thoroughly Menshevik pamphlet although he tries to conceal his sympathy with Menshevism. It is now necessary to spread a precise knowledge of Menshevism in Europe and America, for it is the generic term for all those allegedly socialist, social-democratic and other tendencies that are hostile to and oppose Bolshevism. It would be boring if we Russians described to the Europeans what Menshevism is. Otto Bauer has really shown it in his book, and we thank in advance all those bourgeois and opportunist publishers who publish it and translate it into different languages. Bauer’s book is a useful if rather unique supplement to the text books of communism. Take any paragraph, any argument you like in Bauer’s book and you will see in it what Menshevism looks like, how it is the same fundamental outlook that the representatives of socialism, the friends of Kerensky, Scheidemann, and so on, have translated into deeds. This is a task that could usefully and successfully be set at ‘examinations’ to test whether somebody has assimilated communism. If you cannot solve this task you are not yet a communist and it would be better if you did not yet join the Communist Party. [Applause.]
Otto Bauer has expressed the essential content of international opportunism in an excellent manner in a single phrase for which, if we had a free hand in Vienna, we would erect a memorial for him while he is still alive. ‘To use force in the class struggle in modern democracy,’ says Bauer, ‘would be violating the social relationship of forces.’
No doubt you think this sounds strange and incomprehensible? Here you have an example of what Marxism can be reduced to, to what banality and defence of the exploiters revolutionary theory can be reduced. It takes the German variety of the petty-bourgeois outlook to create the ‘theory’ that the ‘social relationship of forces’ are number, organisation, place in the process of production and distribution, activity and education. If the village labourer or the urban worker commits an act of revolutionary violence against the landlord and the capitalist, this is not at all the dictatorship of the proletariat, not at all an act of violence against the exploiters and oppressors of the people. Nothing of the kind. It is ‘violating the social relationship of forces’.
Possibly my example is somewhat humorous. But by the very nature of modem opportunism its struggle against Bolshevism turns to humour. The most urgent and useful task for Europe and America is to divert the working class and all its more thoughtful members into the struggle of international Menshevism (the MacDonalds, Otto Bauers and Co.) against Bolshevism.
We must ask how the persistence of this current in Europe is to be explained and why this opportunism is stronger in Western Europe than it is here. This is the case because the more advanced countries made and make their culture possible at the expense of thousands of millions of oppressed people, because the capitalists of these countries make more profits than just from plundering the workers of their own country.
Before the war it was calculated that the three richest countries Britain, France and Germany – made from 8,000 to 10,000 million francs each year from their capital investments abroad alone, not counting what they made from other sources.
It goes without saying that alms of at least 5,000 million from this hefty sum can be thrown to the labour leaders and the labour aristocracy in all imaginable forms of bribes. The whole thing amounts to bribery anyway. It can be done in thousands of different ways: by improving the cultural facilities in the great centres, by creating educational facilities, by providing thousands of jobs and official positions for the leaders of the Co-operative Societies and the trades unions and for parliamentary leaders. And all this goes on everywhere modern civilised capitalist relations exist. These super-profits of thousands of millions form the economic basis on which opportunism in the labour movement is built. In America, Britain and France we encounter much more obstinacy on the part of the opportunist leaders, the leading layers of the working class, the aristocracy of labour. They put up the strongest opposition to the Communist movement. For that reason we must be prepared for the fact that the liberation of the European and American workers’ parties from this evil will be much more difficult than it was here. We know that since the formation of the Communist International we have already achieved enormous successes in the process of curing this disease, but we have not yet finished the job; the purging of the workers’ parties, the revolutionary parties throughout the world, from bourgeois influence, from the opportunists in their own ranks, is far from complete.
I shall not go into detail on how this should concretely be done. This is what the Theses I have already published deal with. My aim is only to point out the deep economic roots of this phenomenon. This disease is protracted, its cure has taken a long time, longer than the optimists could have hoped for. Opportunism is our main enemy. The opportunism in the upper layers of the working class is not proletarian but bourgeois socialism. The practical proof of this is the fact that the leaders who belong to the opportunist tendency inside the workers’ movement defend the bourgeoisie better than the bourgeoisie itself. Without their support the bourgeoisie could not defend itself against the workers . This is proved not only by the history of the Kerensky government in Russia but also by the democratic republic in Germany led by its social-democratic government and by Albert Thomas’s relations with his bourgeois government. It is proved by the corresponding experiences in Britain and the United States. Here is our main enemy and we have to defeat this enemy. We must go away from the Congress with the firm resolve to carry on this struggle right to the end in every party. That is our main task. In comparison with this task the correction of the mistakes of the ‘left’ trend in Communism will be an easy one. In a whole series of countries we can observe the phenomenon of anti-parliamentarism, which is less a product of the petty bourgeoisie than of a few advance guards of the working class who spread it out of contempt for the old parliamentarism, out of a justifiable, correct and downright urgently needed contempt for the behaviour of the parliamentary leaders in Britain. France, Italy, in all countries. It is necessary for the Communist International to give practical hints on this, to acquaint the comrades more fully with the Russian experience, with the significance of the really proletarian revolutionary party. Our work lies in the fulfilment of this task. But then the struggle with the faults of the proletarian movement will be a thousand times easier than the struggle with the bourgeoisie which, in the guise of the reformists, has found its way into the old parties of the Second International and carries out all their work not in the proletarian but in the bourgeois spirit.
Finally, comrades, I want to raise one more point. The Comrade Chairman has already spoken of the fact that the Congress truly deserves the name of a World Congress. I believe that it has a particular right to call itself that because there are among us not a few representatives of the revolutionary movement in the backward colonial countries. It is only a modest beginning, but the important thing is the fact that the beginning has been made. The unification of the revolutionary proletarians of the advanced capitalist nations with the revolutionary masses of the countries which have no or almost no proletariat, with the oppressed masses of the Eastern colonial countries, this unification will follow on from the present Congress. And cementing this unification – and I am convinced that we will do so depends on us. World Imperialism must fall when the revolutionary impetus of the exploited and subjugated workers inside each country defeats the opposition of the petty-bourgeois elements and the influence of the numerically small aristocracy of labour, and unites with the revolutionary pressure of the hundreds of millions of people who previously stood outside history and were only regarded as its object.
The imperialist war helped the revolution; the bourgeoisie withdrew soldiers from the colonies and the backward countries to take part in the war. The British bourgeoisie impressed upon the Indian peasants that it was their duty to defend Great Britain as soldiers against Germany. The French bourgeoisie impressed upon the soldiers from the French colonies that they, the Negroes, had to defend France. They taught them how to use arms. This is extremely useful knowledge: we can be very grateful to the bourgeoisie for it and thank them on behalf of all Russian peasants and workers and of the Russian Red Army in particular. The imperialist war dragged all the dependent peoples along with it into world history. One of our important tasks is to consider how to lay the foundation stone of the organisation of the Soviet movement in the non-capitalist countries. Soviets are possible there too; they will not be councils of workers but councils of peasants or of labouring people.
This will require a lot of work; mistakes will be inevitable; we will encounter many difficulties along this path. The main task of the Second Congress will be to work out practical guidelines so that the work, which has up to now been taking place in an unorganised way among hundreds of millions of people, can become organised, unified and systematic.
A little more than a year has passed since the First Congress of the Communist International, and in this time we have defeated the Second International. The ideas of soviets are not now spread only among the workers of the civilised countries, known to them and understood by them. Workers all over the world laugh at those super-clever people, among whom there are not a few who call themselves socialists, who learnedly or half learnedly condemn the ‘soviet system’ as the systematic Germans love to express it, or the ‘soviet idea’, as the British guild socialists love to say. This philosophising about the ‘soviet system’ or the ‘soviet idea’ not infrequently clogs the vision and the understanding of workers. But they cast this pedantic conflict aside and seize the weapon that the soviets give them. The understanding of the role and the significance of the soviets has now spread to the countries of the East.
A start has been made on the soviet movement throughout the East, throughout Asia.
The principle that the exploited should rise against their exploiters and form soviets is not too complicated. This will become clear to hundreds of millions of the oppressed and exploited masses throughout the world through the experience that we have made in two and a half years of the Soviet Republic in Russia and since the First Congress of the Communist International. If we in Russia now are not seldom forced to reach compromises and to wait, since we are weaker than the international imperialists, we nonetheless know that we are defending the interests of 1,250 million people. We are still held back by old prejudices and old ignorance, but they are disappearing by the hour. We are defending and representing more and more forcefully 70 per cent of the population of the Earth, the labouring and exploited masses. With pride we can say: at the first Congress we were only really propagandists. We sketched the basic ideas, the call to struggle to the international proletariat. We asked merely: where are the people to feel capable of taking this path? Now the advanced proletariat everywhere is on our side. Everywhere there are proletarian armies, even if they are poorly organised and in need of reorganisation. And if our comrades internationally help us to create a unified army, no shortcomings can hold us back from our intention. This work is the cause of the proletarian world revolution, the work of creating the world Soviet Republic. [Long continuous applause. The orchestra plays the ‘Internationale’.]
Zinoviev: Comrade Lenin’s speech will not be translated into the other languages during the session. The written translation of his speech will be distributed among the delegates. [Thereupon he gives the floor to Comrade Rosmer.]
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International
First Session
July 19, 1920
Zinoviev: Comrades, on behalf of the Executive Committee of the Communist International I declare the Second World Congress of the Communist International open. [Stormy, continuous applause, cheers. The orchestra plays the ‘Internationale’.] Comrades, our first words, the words of the workers of the whole world who are gathered here, must be dedicated to the memory of our best friends and leaders who have given their lives in the cause of the Communist International. You know that in the course of the last year there has been no country in which the blood of Communist workers and of the best leaders of the working class has not flowed. It is sufficient to recall the names of our Hungarian friends, it is sufficient to think of Comrades Leviné, Tibor Szamuely, Jogiches and many others who have followed the revolutionaries who fell at the very beginning of the German and Russian revolutions. In Finland, Estonia and Hungary hundreds and thousands of the best sons of the working class have lost their lives in this period. In opening this congress we want above all to honour the memory of our best comrades who have died for the cause of the Communist International.
I propose to the Congress that it rise in honour of the fallen comrades. [All rise. The orchestra plays the funeral march.] We want furthermore to remember today those comrades who are at the present moment languishing in the gaols of various bourgeois republics. We wish to remember our French friends, Comrades Loriot, Monatte and a number of others who were thrown into gaol shortly before the Congress. To the countless fighters of the workers’ revolution who are languishing in German, Hungarian, French, British and American gaols we send hearty greetings. The American Communist workers, who have been particularly cruelly persecuted in the last year, we shake fraternally by the hand. The Communist workers and revolutionaries in general are being literally starved out by the American bourgeoisie. Our friends there cannot find work, they are kept under lock and key. There is no cruelty that is not applied by the American bourgeoisie against the workers who are in the ranks of the Communists or the ranks of the IWW or other revolutionary organisations following the same path as the Communist International.
We express the firm conviction that the words that a French comrade spoke recently, after the arrest of Loriot, Monatte and others, will come true. He said: ‘Yes, we are living at a time when the ruling bourgeoisie, the “democrats”, and the so-called “socialists” are throwing the best leaders of the Communists into gaol; but we are convinced that the roles will soon be reversed and that the working class will soon put into gaol those who are at the moment sitting in bourgeois governments and will bring to power tomorrow those who are being thrown into gaol by the bourgeoisie today.’ [Applause.]
Comrades, it is only a year and a half since the Communist International was founded. It is completely understandable that it had above all to cross swords with the Second International, with which we entered into an immediate struggle. Both enemies and friends must recognise, faced with today’s Congress, which has become a World Congress in the literal sense of the word, faced with the fact that representatives from the whole of Europe and also from America are taking part, that our fight against the Second International has been crowned with success. Today we have a complete right to declare that the Second International has been beaten over the head by the Communist International. [Stormy applause.]
Comrades, what does this fact mean? What does it mean: ‘We have beaten the Second International'? The struggle between us and the Second International is not a struggle of two factions of one revolutionary movement, it is not a struggle of shades of opinion, not a struggle of different tendencies within a homogeneous class camp, it is in fact a struggle of classes. Certainly there are many of our class brothers in the ranks of the Second International. And irrespective of that our struggle against the Second International is not a struggle of factions within a class but something significantly greater.
The collapse of the Second International reflects the collapse of the bourgeois order itself. That is the hinge around which everything turns. We have beaten the Second International because the ‘Twilight of the Gods’ of capitalism has begun. We have beaten the Second International because nowhere in the world can the bourgeoisie execute the testament of the imperialist war, nor will it be able to do so. We have beaten the Second International because the League of Nations and the whole Entente and the entire bourgeoisie are powerless to do anything at all for the restoration of Europe’s economic life.
[The League of Nations was created by the victors of the First World War in 1919 to serve as an instrument of imperialist policy. Helped to prepare the outbreak of the Second World War. Lenin called it the ‘thieves’ kitchen’. The alliance of France, Russia and Britain that fought the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War. It was also joined by Italy, Rumania, Portugal and the United States.]
We have beaten the Second International because the bourgeoisie is powerless to finish the tasks which stand imperiously before it and which it must solve if it does not want to take its historical departure.
Since the first shot in 1914 the Second International has tied its fate to that of the bourgeoisie. The social patriots of every country supported their ‘own’ bourgeoisie and their ‘own’ bourgeois ‘fatherland’.
So it went on until the end of the war. When it was over the Second International once more linked its fate to the bourgeoisie, this time with the group of bourgeois countries who had carried off the victory in the imperialist war.
You remember the first attempt to recreate the Second International when the imperialist bloodbath was over. You remember the conferences in Berne and Lucerne where the so-called leading part of the Second International ‘wished to be associated with’ the League of Nations. The leaders of the ‘resurrected’ Second International hung onto Wilson’s coat-tails. You remember, comrades, that at the Berne conference the Chairman, in opening this conference , greeted Wilson and set him alongside Jaures – an insult to the shade of the fallen tribune of the French workers. When the war was over the Second International wished to unite its fate with the bourgeoisie, and what is more with the section of the bourgeoisie it assumed to be the strongest – the League of Nations. That was its wish. Therefore the blows that the working class of the whole world and its vanguard, the Communist International, have dealt the bourgeoisie in the course of this year have also hit the Second International. The yellow Second International has indissolubly bound its destiny to the class that is sinking before our eyes. That is precisely why our victory over the Second International is of such great significance. It is, I repeat, not the victory of one faction of the workers’ movement over another, it is not the victory of one party over another. No, here we are concerned with something immeasurably greater: every organisation that tries to tie its destiny to the bourgeois class will itself sink. That is the historic meaning of the victory of the Communist International over the Second International. As a young class the working class is a rising star. It is rising to power while the star of the bourgeoisie, which has choked itself on the blood of the working class, is finally setting. The bourgeoisie has become decrepit and is decaying. And as the dying man grasps at the living, so the bourgeoisie clings to the half-dead Second International and strangles it in its deadly embrace. They are both perishing before our eyes. The bourgeoisie like its assistant, the yellow International, is near its end – in the historical sense a year counts as a minute – the death rattles of both are already to be heard. Soon the world will be freed from the bourgeois yoke, from all the organisations that have held the working class in spiritual imprisonment. Soon the international association of workers will be able to start calmly on the construction of a new world on the basis of communism.
Comrades, in the course of this year the idea of ‘democracy’ has faded away before our eyes and is now at its last gasp. I think that the most significant document of the first, founding Congress of the Communist International, indeed the most important document of the Communist movement in recent years generally, is the Theses on Bourgeois Democracy that were adopted by the First Congress. The workers of the whole world and the enlightened part of the peasants and the soldiers have studied them. And the course of events in the last 15 to 16 months has confirmed step by step the correctness of the analysis that the First Congress of the Communist International gave in the evaluation of bourgeois democracy contained in these Theses. When, in the eyes of the whole world, the American bourgeoisie abolished all its own laws and all constitutional guarantees for the working class – it went so far that the Communists, elected on a legal basis according to all the rules of the parliamentary art, are not allowed into parliament but thrown into prison – when America, that classical country of bourgeois democracy, step by step violated the foundations of democracy, this was a visible lesson of how very correct the Communist International was to point out in its programme and in its theses the real historical role of so-called democracy.
Comrades, we have before us the World Congress of the Communist International. At this Congress is represented the vanguard, ready for battle, of workers from all over the world. We will pose to the Congress a number of questions which at present are being disputed inside the international communist movement. We have brought to the Congress a whole number of workers’ organisations which cannot yet be called completely communist and are still crystallising. The international situation of the working class after the long war and the desperate crisis is such that many workers’ organisations are standing at the crossroads; their voice is breaking, as happens in a young man. They have not yet finally established their tactics, they have not yet chosen their final path. We have called upon to work together with us all those workers’ organisations of which we are convinced that they honestly want to fight against capitalism. We will talk to them as to our companions in struggle and in suffering, as to our class brothers who are ready together with us to give their lives for the liberation of the working class. We will not do the same as the Second International, which only knew how to laugh at and persecute revolutionaries with opinions different from their own, which showed a Janus face: to the right – a sweet smile, to the left – spitefully gaping jaws. We are firmly convinced that life educates. The imperialist war taught the workers much. The honest revolutionary elements of syndicalism, anarchism, industrialism and the shop stewards will go over to the side of communism and are already doing so. Our business is to help them to do this faster.
On the other hand there are taking part in our Congress the representatives of the USPD, the French Socialist Party and the Italian Socialist Party who only recently – finally – left the ranks of the Second International.
[The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, formed in 1916-1917 when the Social Democratic Party split. Included centrists led by Kautsky as well as the revolutionary tendency of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. After the ‘Spartacists’ formed the Communist Party in January 1919, a current developed in the USPD which favoured affiliation to the Third international. At its Halle Congress in October 1920, the USPD voted to accept the conditions for entry into the Third International and a united Communist Party was formed. The rump of the USPD continued to function as a centrist party until it returned to the SPD in 1922.
In 1919 the right-wing leadership had taken part in efforts to revive the Second International. During the war the left wing had adhered to Zimmerwald and it called for affiliation to the Third International. At the party congress in February 1920 a large majority voted against affiliation to the Second International but an equally large one voted not to affiliate immediately to the Third. At the Tours Congress a majority favoured affiliation and formed the Communist Party.
The party formally broke with the Second International in March 1919 and at its Bologna congress in October declared support for the Third International but without taking action against Turati and the right wing.]
We are glad to form a communist alliance with the honest revolutionary workers who are in the ranks of these parties.
Comrades, you know that, as the Communist International has grown stronger, about ten big old parties – I shall not list their names – have left the ranks of the Second International. Already a new stage is now beginning: we see that the old parties are not only leaving the Second International but also making immediate attempts to join the Communist International. A number of representatives of these parties are, as I have already said, present here. The Communist Congress will openly broach all the sensitive questions in front of the French and German workers. Under no circumstances will the Communist Congress permit intellectual dishonesty, nor will it make the slightest concessions on principle. The basic questions of the proletarian revolution must be posed sharply. We need clarity, clarity and once more clarity. We will not permit the Communist International simply to become a fashion. The questions on the agenda interest millions of workers. We will put in front of the German workers who belong to the USP13 and the French workers who belong to the French Socialist Party our point of view on all the acute questions of the day. We will wait until the enormous majority of the French and German workers carry out the necessary purge of their ranks and are then able to join the ranks of the Communist International, so that no one can think that this is simply ballast for the Communist International, but that they come to us in order, in common and unanimous work together with us, to carry out the fight against the bourgeoisie.
We intend to lay the Statutes of the Communist International in front of the present Congress. We assume that, just as the Communists, in order to beat the bourgeoisie in their own country, need above all a centralised, powerful, strong party cast all in one piece, so too the time has come to take in hand the creation of such an organisation on the international scale. We are fighting against the international bourgeoisie, against a world of enemies who are armed to the teeth, and we must have an iron international proletarian organisation that is able to beat the enemy everywhere, which must be able to give any one of its troops the greatest possible help at any given moment, which must elaborate the most powerful, flexible and mobile forms of organisation it possibly can in order to face fully armed the enemy it has to fight. In the draft Statutes of the Communist International we quote a sentence from the Statutes of the First International Working Men’s Association, whose leaders were Marx and Engels. In these Statutes Marx and Engels say: ‘If the struggle of the working class has not yet been crowned by success, then this is the case among other things because the workers lack international unity, tight international organisation and mutual support on an international scale.’ Indeed, comrades, that is a simple truth. But we have had to wait for over fifty years, to experience the four years of the bloodbath and all the terrors that humanity has lived through in recent times, for this simple thought not only to be grasped by a few or by individual groups, but for it to enter the flesh and blood of millions of workers. We are firmly convinced that this idea at present has really become the property of the masses. We know that, for victory over the bourgeoisie, it is necessary to make a reality of this simple, elementary idea referred to by the First International, the first International Working Men’s Association, whose traditions and principles we now adopt on many questions in order to turn them into reality. There are present here representatives of the workers and women workers of Petrograd who were the first to begin the uprising in October 1917. I say to you: comrades, today a great historical event is being accomplished in Petrograd. The Second Congress of the Communist International entered history the moment this session was opened. Keep this day in your memory. Know this: that this day is the recompense for all your privation and your courageous and steadfast struggle. Tell your children of this day and describe its significance to them! Imprint this solemn hour on your hearts!
We have a finished event before us, sublime in its simplicity. What could be simpler? The workers of the various countries unite to free themselves from the yoke of the rich. And what could at the same time be more sublime? Comrades, do you not hear the wings of victory beating? Our Earth shall be free. Wage slavery shall be abolished, communism shall triumph ...
Comrades, at the end of my speech I would like to remind you that, in a few months, fifty years will have passed since the first great historical uprising of the European working class which pointed the way for us and for you. I speak of the Paris Commune. I speak of the heroic uprising of the Paris proletariat which, despite all its weaknesses and mistakes (we shall endeavour to avoid them) contributed a golden page in the history of the international proletarian movement and showed us the way that millions of toilers are now taking.
I permit myself to express the hope that by the fiftieth Jubilee of the Paris Commune we will have the Soviet Republic in France. [Loud, stormy applause.]
Comrades, in an article that was written immediately after the founding Congress of the Communist International and carries the title The Perspectives for the International Revolution I said, somewhat over-zealously, that when perhaps only a year had passed we would have already forgotten that a struggle had been carried out in Europe for Soviet power, since this struggle in Europe would already be over and it would have carried over into the rest of the world. A bourgeois German professor has seized hold of this sentence and a few days ago I read an article in which he takes malicious pleasure in quoting this passage and saying: Soon the Second Congress will open. More than a year has passed. It does not look as if the complete victory of the Soviet power has yet come about.
Hereupon we can calmly reply to this learned bourgeois: that is how it really is; probably we allowed ourselves to be carried away; in reality not one year but probably two or three years will be needed for the whole of Europe to become a Soviet republic. But if you yourself are so modest as to regard a reprieve of a year or two as unheard – of good luck, we can only congratulate you on your modesty; and we can express the certainty that, give or take a year or two – we will hold out for a while yet – we will have the international Soviet republic whose leader will be our Communist International.
Long live the working class of the whole world! Long live the Communist International! [Continuous stormy applause.]
Zinoviev: The Congress will proceed to the election of the Presidium. Comrade Bukharin has the floor on behalf of the Executive Committee.
Bukharin: On behalf of the Executive Committee of the Communist International the following candidates are proposed for the Presidium: Levi (Germany), Rosmer (France), Serrati (Italy), Lenin and Zinoviev (Russia).
Zinoviev: Are there any other nominations for the composition of the Presidium? No. The Presidium will be made up as proposed by the Executive Committee of the Communist International: Levi (Germany), Rosmer (France), Serrati (Italy), Lenin and Zinoviev (Russia) have been elected.
Comrades, a whole number of organisations wish to greet our Congress, but we must economise on our time. On behalf of the Executive Committee I propose to give the floor to the representative of the Russian Federative Soviet Republic which today has the great good luck to welcome the Congress on to its territory, to the Chairman of the All Russian Executive Committee, Comrade Kalinin. [Applause.]
Kalinin: Comrades, on behalf of the workers and peasants of Soviet Russia I welcome the Second World Congress of the Communist International. Comrades, members of the Communist International! The Communist Party of the Bolsheviks and the Russian working class have not been pampered in the past by legality and parliamentarism. The last few decades were years of hard, direct struggle by the working class against Russian Tsarism. In this dark period the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks never lost hope that the moment was not far off when the workers would rise under their leadership and overthrow Russian Tsarism and the Russian bourgeoisie. In the last three years, comrades, the Russian working class and the Russian peasantry have made countless sacrifices, they have had to overcome monstrous difficulties and prove the ability to fight unreservedly for the ideals of humanity. And, comrades, this three-year fight has steeled the Russian working class and peasantry and taught them to stand up and fight directly for the interests of the working class. It gave us the opportunity to set up our invincible and renowned Red Army which is at the moment dealing hard blows at the enemy on the Polish Front.
Comrades, the Russian worker and even the backward Russian peasant is better enlightened by the developing struggle against the Russian bourgeoisie and international capital, in which he is participating more and more, than by books and speeches. If earlier it had to be explained to the workers and peasants in propaganda that it was necessary to overthrow the world bourgeoisie too if one wanted to overthrow the Russian bourgeoisie, it is at present clear to every Russian worker and peasant that we are not only fighting against the bourgeoisie of Russia, against the Tsarist landowners – we could have finished them off long ago, we would have had peace long since – but behind their backs stands the world counter-revolution supporting them decisively. And thus it is completely natural that the Russian working class and the mass of the Russian peasants direct their gaze with the greatest attentiveness to the oppressed classes of the West and the oppressed masses of the East. They are awaiting the moment when the oppressed classes in unity with the Russian peasants and the Russian workers will plunge into the direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
From the bottom of my heart I wish that the opening of the Second Congress of the Communist International may become the beginning and the pledge of the direct struggle of the oppressed masses of the East and oppressed classes of the West, of the direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Long live the Second Congress of the Communist International!
Zinoviev: The first item on the agenda is the report of the Executive Committee, the second is the reports of the parties concerned. The Executive Committee has decided with regard to items one and two to confine itself to distributing written reports. Some of the reports of the individual parties have been presented, some are going to be presented. Thus all delegates will be able to familiarise themselves with the written reports. We will proceed to the third item on the agenda: The current international situation and the fundamental tasks of the Communist International.
Comrade Lenin has the floor for the report. [Loud applause. All present rise and applaud. The speaker tries to speak, but the applause and cries in all languages continue. The ovation goes on for a long time.]
Lenin: Comrades, the Theses on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International have been published in all languages and offer nothing materially new (especially for the Russian comrades), for in the main they only extend a few basic features of our revolutionary experience and the lessons of our revolutionary movement to a number of Western countries, to Western Europe. For that reason I shall dwell in my report somewhat longer, even if in brief outline, on the first part of my subject, on the international situation.
The economic relations of imperialism form the basis of the international situation as it now presents itself. In the course of the twentieth century a new, highest and final stage of capitalism has taken shape. You all know of course that the most characteristic and essential feature of imperialism is the fact that capital has reached enormous dimensions. Giant monopolies have taken the place of free competition. An insignificant number of capitalists have, on occasion, been able to concentrate entire industries in their hands. These have passed into the hands of combines, cartels, syndicates and trusts, frequently international in scale. Thus entire industries, not only in individual countries but all over the world, have fallen into the hands of monopolists either in relation to finance or on the basis of property rights or with reference to production. On this basis there developed an unprecedented domination by a small number of great banks, financial tycoons and magnates who turned even the freest republics into financial monarchies. This was quite openly recognised before the war even by such by no means revolutionary writers as, for example, Lysis in France.
This domination by a handful of capitalists reached its full development when the whole globe had been divided up, not only in the sense that the various sources of raw materials and means of production had been seized by the capitalists, but also in the sense that the preliminary division of the colonies had been concluded. About forty years ago the population of the colonies was scarcely more than 250 million held in subjection by six capitalist powers. Before the war in 1914 the population in the colonies was already assessed at 600 million, and if such countries as Persia, Turkey and China, which are in the position of semi-colonies, are taken in addition, we reach the round figure of a thousand million people who are enslaved through colonial dependence by the richest, most civilised and freest countries. And you know that apart from being directly political and legal, this colonial subjection also involves a whole series of relations of financial and economic dependence and means a whole series of wars which cannot really be called wars because they so often degenerate into butchery, when European and American imperialist troops armed with the most perfected weapons of destruction slaughter the unarmed and defenceless inhabitants of the colonial countries.
It was from this division of the whole world, from this domination by the capitalist monopolies, from this universal power wielded by a very small number of great banks – from 2 to 5 in each state, no more – that the imperialist war of 1914-1918 inevitably sprang. The war was waged for the re-division of the whole world. The war was waged to decide which of the two groups of world powers – the English or the German – was to have the opportunity and the right to pillage, enslave and exploit the whole world. And you know that the war decided this question in favour of the British group. As a result of this war we have an immeasurable sharpening of all the contradictions of capitalism. At a stroke the war relegated some 250 millions of the world’s population to what amounts to colonial status, that is to say Russia, whose population is put at around 130 million, and Austro-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria with no fewer than 120 million. 250 million people in countries which in part, Eke Germany, are among the most advanced, enlightened and cultured and stand technically at the pinnacle of modern progress. Through the Versailles Treaty the war has forced such conditions upon them that advanced nations have fallen into colonial servitude, misery, starvation, ruin and loss of rights. They are bound by the Treaty for many generations into the future and placed under circumstances such as no civilised nation has yet lived under. Thus you have a picture of the world that shows that after the war a population of at least 1,250 million is suddenly subjected to the colonial yoke, to the exploitation of a brutal capitalism. This capitalism once boasted of its love of peace, and perhaps it had some right to do so fifty years ago when the world had not yet been divided up, when the monopolies did not yet rule, when capitalism still had room for comparatively peaceful development without enormous military conflicts.
Now, after this peaceful epoch, the yoke becomes enormously more oppressive. We can already see the return to an even worse colonial and military subjugation than before. For Germany and a whole number of the defeated nations the Versailles Treaty has created conditions which make economic existence physically impossible, deprive them of rights and humiliate them.
How many nations profit from this?
In order to answer this question we must recall that the United States of America, the only country to profit fully from the war, which was transformed from a country burdened with debts into a country to which everybody owed money, has a population of no more than 100 million. The population of japan, who also made great profits by standing aside from the Euro-American conflict and seizing the enormous continent of Asia, is some 50 million. The population of Britain who, next to these countries, made the biggest profits, is about 50 million. And if we add the neutral states who also enriched themselves during the war we have in round figures 250 million.
Thus you have in a few short strokes a picture of the world as it has emerged after the imperialist war. A population of 1,250 million in enslaved colonies; countries like Persia, Turkey and China whose living bodies have been dismembered; countries defeated and turned into colonies. No more than 250 million people five in those countries that have maintained their former position, but they too have become economically dependent upon America and were, during the war, also militarily dependent upon her, for the war involved the whole world and did not permit a single state to remain really neutral. Finally we have a population of no more than 250 million in those countries in which, of course, only the ruling class, the capitalists, profited from the division of the world. The sum total, some 1,750 million people, equals the Earth’s total population. I wanted to remind you of this picture of the world since all the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, of imperialism, that lead to revolution, all the fundamental contradictions in the labour movement that have led to the bitter struggle against the Second International that the Comrade Chairman spoke of – all this is connected with the division of the world’s population.
Certainly these figures illustrate the world economy only in crude outline. And comrades, in reality exploitation by finance capital on the basis of this division of the world’s population has grown even greater.
Not only have the defeated colonial countries fallen into this state of subjugation, but also within each victorious country all the conflicts are taking sharper and sharper form, all the contradictions of capitalism are becoming more acute. I shall give a few examples to sketch what I mean.
Let us take the national debt. We know that the debts of the most important European countries grew no less than sevenfold between 1914 and 1920. I shall quote from another economic source of especially great significance. This is Keynes, the British diplomat and author of the book The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes took part in the peace negotiations at Versailles on behalf of his government and observed them directly from a purely bourgeois point of view; he studied the matter thoroughly step by step; he took part in the discussions as an economist. In the process he arrived at conclusions that are more cogent, graphic and instructive than any that a revolutionary communist could draw because they are drawn by an avowed bourgeois, an implacable enemy of Bolshevism. Like the petty-bourgeois Englishman that he is, he distortedly imagines this Bolshevism to be ferocious and brutal. He has come to the conclusion that, thanks to the Treaty, Europe and the whole world are heading for bankruptcy. He has resigned. He has thrown his book in the government’s face saying: ‘What you are doing is lunacy.’ I shall quote figures from Keynes’s book which by and large show the following.
How do the reciprocal debts of the great powers relate to one another? I shall convert British pounds sterling into gold roubles at a rate of ten gold roubles to one pound sterling. And now we see that the United States has assets of 19,000 million while they have no liabilities at all. Before the war it was indebted to Britain. At the last Congress of the Communist Party of Germany, in his report of April 14, 1920, Comrade Levi correctly referred to the fact that there are now two powers in the world that can act independently: Britain and America. Only America is absolutely financially independent. Before the war it was a debtor, now it emerges as a creditor. All the other world powers are debtors. Britain is reduced to a position where her assets are 17,000 million and her liabilities are 8,000 million. She is already half-way to being a debtor. In addition these assets include some 6,000 million of these assets owed by Russia. The military supplies received by Russia during the war are counted as part of her debt. When recently Krassin, as the representative of the Russian Soviet government, had the opportunity of talking to Lloyd George on the question of the debts, he made it extremely plain to the scholars and statesmen who lead the British government that they were suffering under an illusion if they assumed they were ever going to receive any of these debts. The British diplomat Keynes has already seen through this illusion. It is not merely, or rather not at all, a question of the Russian revolutionary government being unwilling to pay the debts. No government could have paid them, as they are the usurious interest for what has already been paid twenty times over. The very same bourgeois, Keynes, who certainly has no sympathies with the Russian revolutionary movement, says: ‘It is obvious that these debts cannot be taken into account.’
In relation to France Keynes quotes figures that give assets of 3,500 millions but liabilities of 9,500 million. And this was the country of which the French themselves said that it was the world’s moneylender, for her ‘savings’ were colossal; the colonial and financial robbery that brought them a gigantic capital enabled them to lend thousands and thousands of millions, especially to Russia. Gigantic revenues were thus gained. And despite all this, despite her victory, France has fallen into the position of a debtor.
An American bourgeois source quoted by Comrade Braun. a Communist, in his book Who Must Pay the War Debts? (Leipzig 1920) determines the ratio of debts to the national wealth as follows: in England and France they form over 50 per cent of the total national wealth, in Italy the ratio is expressed as from 60 to 70 per cent and in Russia as 90 per cent. But as you know these debts do not disturb us, for we followed Keynes’s excellent advice shortly before his book appeared, and annulled all our debts. [Stormy applause.].
Here however Keynes only displays a common petty-bourgeois idiosyncrasy; in advising annulment of all debts he says that France of course will only gain by it and Britain will not lose very much since in any case there is nothing to be had from Russia. As is only fitting, America will lose, but Keynes counts on American ‘generosity’. In this respect our views diverge from those of Keynes and the rest of the petty-bourgeois pacifists. We think that if we are to manage to annul the debts we will have to put our hopes elsewhere and work in a direction other than faith in the ‘generosity’ of the capitalists.
From these few figures it is evident that the imperialist war has created a situation that is impossible even for the victorious countries. This is also indicated by the enormous disparity between wages and price rises. The Supreme Economic Council, a body that is supposed to protect the bourgeois order internationally from the rising revolution, adopted on March 8 of this year a resolution that ended with an appeal for order, industriousness and thrift, on condition, of course, that the workers remain the slaves of capital. This Supreme Economic Council, the organ of the Entente and of the whole capitalist world, presented the following summary.
On average, food prices in the United States have risen by 120 per cent while wages have only risen by 100 per cent. In Britain food prices have gone up 170 per cent, wages by 130 per cent; in France food prices by 300 per cent and wages by 60 per cent (I am quoting the figures from Comrade Braun’s pamphlet mentioned above and the Supreme Economic Council’s figures from The Times of March 10, 1920).
Clearly, under such conditions the growth of workers’ resentment. the growth of revolutionary moods and ideas and the growth of elemental mass strikes are inevitable, for the workers’ situation is becoming intolerable. The workers are convinced by experience that the capitalists have immeasurably enriched themselves in the war and are loading the burden of its costs and debts onto the workers. We recently learnt by cable that America wishes to deport another 500 Communists to Russia in order to get rid of these ‘dangerous agitators’.
If America deports not 500 but 500,000 Russian, American, Japanese and French ‘agitators’ it would make not the slightest difference, for the disparity between wages and prices, about which they can do nothing, would still remain. They can do nothing about it because private property is strictly safeguarded there, because in their country it is ‘sacred’. Only in Russia has the exploiter’s private property been abolished. The capitalists can do nothing about these disproportionate prices but the workers cannot live with the old wages. This misery cannot be fought with the old methods. No individual strikes, no parliamentary struggle, no vote can achieve anything here, for ‘private property is sacred’ and the capitalists have piled up such debts that the whole world is enslaved by a handful of people while the living conditions of the workers become more and more intolerable. There is no way out apart from the abolition of the ‘private property’ of the exploiter.
In his pamphlet Britain and the World Revolution, valuable extracts from which were published in our Bulletin of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of February 1920, Comrade Lapinsky points out that the export prices of British coal were twice as high as expected in official industrial circles.
Things have gone so far in Lancashire that share prices have risen 400 per cent. The banks’ net profits were at least 40 to 50 per cent, and even then it should be noted that in establishing the banks’ net profits the bank directors can juggle the figures by syphoning off the lion’s share of the net profits as repayments, commissions, etc. Here too, therefore, undeniable economic facts show that a tiny handful of people have grown unbelievably wealthy, that they live in unprecedented, excessive luxury, and that at the same time the poverty of the working class is constantly growing. We must also underline the circumstance that Comrade Levi brought out very graphically in his report, that is to say the change in the value of money. Money is everywhere becoming valueless as a result of debts, the issue of paper money. etc. The same bourgeois source that I have already quoted, the statement of the Supreme Economic Council, calculated that the fall in the value of money in relation to the dollar comes to almost a third in England, two thirds in France and Italy and as much as 96 per cent in Germany.
This fact proves that the mechanism of the international capitalist economy is falling apart completely., The trading relations on which the supply of raw materials and the sale of products rest under capitalism can no longer be maintained, particularly when a single country dominates a whole number of other countries as a result of the change in the value of money. Not one of the richest countries can continue to exist and to trade, because they cannot sell their products and obtain raw materials.
Thus we see America, this richest of all countries, to which all countries are subordinate, unable either to buy or sell. And the same Keynes who waded through all the fire and the water and the confusion of the Versailles negotiations is obliged to acknowledge this impossibility despite his obstinate determination to defend capitalism, despite his hatred of Bolshevism. As I have said, I do not think that there is a single communist or any kind of revolutionary appeal that can compare in its power with Keynes’s lines where Keynes describes Wilson and ‘Wilsonism’ in practice. Wilson was the idol of the petty bourgeois and the pacifists of the Keynes variety, and of a whole number of the heroes of the Second and also of the Two-and-a-half International who swore by the ‘Fourteen Points’ and wrote ‘scholarly’ books on the ‘roots’ of Wilson’s policies, in the hope that Wilson would save the ‘social peace’, reconcile the exploiter with the exploited and bring about social reforms. Keynes has shown graphically what a fool Wilson made of himself, and how all these illusions fell to dust at the encounter with the businesslike, experienced and practical policies of capital personified by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. The working masses are seeing more and more clearly as a result of their living experience, and the learned pedants can now even read in Keynes’s book, that the ‘roots’ of Wilson’s policy were only sanctimonious, petty-bourgeois phrase-mongering and a complete inability to grasp the class struggle.
In consequence of all this, two conditions, two fundamental circumstances have arisen of iron necessity: on the one hand the impoverishment and want of the masses has risen to an unprecedented degree, and that among 1,250 million people, that is 70 per cent of the total world population. This affects the colonial countries and the dependent countries whose inhabitants have no legal rights, whose administration has been handed over to the brigands of finance as a 4 mandate’. And moreover the Versailles Treaty has enslaved the defeated nations for all eternity, just like those secret treaties affecting Russia which, it must be admitted, have the same real force as the bits of paper that say that we owe so many thousands of millions. We have the first case in history of legal backing for the plundering, enslavement, subjugation, impoverishment and starvation of 1,250 million people.
On the other hand the workers in all the creditor nations have found themselves in a situation that is intolerable. The war brought about an intolerable sharpening of all the contradictions of capitalism. This is the source of the deep revolutionary ferment that is constantly growing. For during the war men were placed under the constraint of military discipline, were driven to their deaths or threatened with summary punishment. Conditions during the war gave no opportunity to see economic realities; writers, poets, priests, the whole press dedicated themselves to the glorification of war, and it is only now, when the war is over, that the revelations begin. German imperialism is unmasked with its Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Versailles Treaty is unmasked which was meant to be a victory for imperialism but turned out to be a defeat. Amongst other things, the example of Keynes shows us that thousands and hundreds of thousands of people from the petty bourgeoisie, from among the intellectuals, in short from the ranks of the most highly developed and educated people in Europe and America must take the same path that Keynes trod when he resigned his office and threw into his government’s face a book that unmasked it. Keynes shows what is going on in the consciousness of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people and what will go on as soon as they realise that all the speeches about a ‘war for freedom’ and so on were uninterrupted deceit, that in the final analysis only a very small number of people enriched themselves and the rest were ruined and reduced to slavery. Even the bourgeois Keynes says that it is vital for the salvation of British lives and the British economy to renew free trading relations between Germany and Russia. But how is that to be achieved? By cancelling all debts, as Keynes suggests! The learned economist Keynes is not alone in holding this idea. Millions will come to and reach this idea. And thousands of people will listen when the bourgeois economists say that there is no way out apart from cancelling the debts. And therefore ‘Damn the Bolsheviks’ (who cancelled the debts), let us appeal to America’s ‘generosity'! I think that such an economist and agitator for Bolshevism deserves to be sent a message of thanks in the name of the Congress of the Communist International.
If on the one hand the economic conditions of the masses are becoming intolerable, and if on the other hand the disintegration Keynes describes has set in and is growing in the insignificant minority of all-powerful victor nations, then we can see clearly the maturing of the two preconditions for the world revolution.
We now have before us a more or less complete picture of the whole world. We know what it means to have 1,250 million people robbed of the means of existence and dependent on a handful of the rich. But when on the other hand the League of Nations offered the nations a Covenant that declared an end to war and forbade anybody to disturb the peace, when this Covenant, the last hope of the world’s labouring masses, came into force, it was one of our greatest victories. So long as the Covenant was not in force they said: a country like Germany cannot be subjected to any special conditions. Wait until the Covenant comes out, then you will see how all will be well. And when the Covenant was published the most rabid opponents of Bolshevism had to repudiate it! When the Covenant started to become operative it became apparent that a tiny group of the richest countries Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando and Wilson – had sat down to thread the new relations together. When they put the machinery of the Covenant into operation there was a complete breakdown.
We saw this in the war against Russia. Weak, ruined and crushed, a backward country, Russia proved to be the victor against the world, against the League of the richest and most powerful states dominating the whole world. We had no forces that even in the slightest degree equalled theirs, and yet we were nonetheless the victors. Why? Because there was not a shadow of unity between them, because each power worked against the other. France wanted Russia to pay her debts and threaten Germany. Britain wanted Russia to be divided up. Britain attempted to lay her hands on the Baku oilfields and conclude Treaties with the Russian border states. And among the official British documents there is a book where there are listed with the most extraordinary conscientiousness the names of all the states (there are 14 of them) who six months ago, in December 1919, promised to occupy Moscow and Petrograd. Britain based all her policies on these states, gave loans of millions to these states. Now however all these calculations have come to nothing and all the loans are gone with the wind.
Such are the conditions created by the League of Nations. Every day this Covenant exists provides splendid propaganda for Bolshevism, for the most influential supporters of the capitalist ‘order’ show that on every issue they are putting a spoke in one another’s wheels. A furious wrangle is raging between japan, England, America and France over the division of Turkey, Persia, Mesopotamia and China. The bourgeois press in these countries is full of furious invective and bitter reproaches against their allies for snapping up the booty in front of their noses. We see complete discord among the leaders of this tiny handful of the richest countries. For 1,250 million people it is impossible to live in the way that the most ‘progressive’ and civilised capitalism is trying to make them live, and that is 70 per cent of the population of the entire world. The tiny handful of the richest countries, England, America and japan (who had the opportunity to plunder the Eastern, Asiatic countries, but can have no independent financial and military power without the support of another country), these two or three countries are not able to restore order in the world economic situation and are pursuing policies which are undermining the policies of their partners and participants in the League of Nations. It is from this that the international crisis arises, and these economic roots of the crisis are the main reasons for the brilliant successes of the Communist International.
Comrades, we come now to the question of the revolutionary crisis as the basis of our revolutionary activity. But here we must deal above all with two widely-held errors. On the one hand the bourgeois economists always present this crisis, in the elegant English phrase, as mere ‘unrest’. On the other hand however revolutionaries sometimes try to prove that there is absolutely no way out of the crisis. This is a mistake. There are no absolutely hopeless situations. The bourgeoisie is behaving like an impudent robber who has lost his head; it is committing folly after folly, thus aggravating the situation and hastening its own downfall. All this is the case, but one cannot ‘prove’ that the bourgeoisie has absolutely no possibility of lulling some minority or other of the exploited by means of some small concessions or suppressing the movement or uprising of some section of the oppressed and exploited. The attempt to ‘prove’ ‘absolute’ hopelessness in advance is empty pedantry or juggling With concepts and words. Only experience can provide a real ‘proof of this or similar questions. The bourgeois order is now undergoing an exceptional revolutionary crisis all over the world. We must now ‘prove’ through the practice of the revolutionary parties that they are sufficiently conscious, that they possess sufficient organisation, links with the exploited masses, determination and understanding to utilise this crisis for a successful and victorious revolution.
The preparation of this ‘proof’ is the main reason why we have gathered here for this Congress of the Communist International.
I would like to quote the leader of the British ‘Independent’ Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald, as an example of how strong opportunism still is in the parties which seek to join the Communist International, how far the work of many of the parties is still removed from the preparation of the revolutionary class to exploit the revolutionary crisis. In his book Parliament and Revolution, which deals with the very basic questions that concern us now, MacDonald describes the state of affairs in more or less the spirit of the bourgeois pacifists. He recognises that the revolutionary crisis exists, that the revolutionary mood is growing, that the masses of the workers sympathise with soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat (he is speaking of Britain, mark you) and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the present dictatorship of the British bourgeoisie.
But MacDonald remains a thoroughgoing bourgeois pacifist and compromiser, a petty bourgeois who dreams of a government that stands above the classes. Like all the liars, sophists and pedants of the bourgeoisie, MacDonald recognises the class struggle as a fact to be written about. MacDonald is silent on the experience of Kerensky, of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia, on the similar experiences in Hungary and Germany and so on, the experience of the formation of a ‘democratic’ government allegedly above the classes. MacDonald lulls his party and the workers who are unfortunate enough to think that this bourgeois is a socialist and that this philistine is a leader with the following words: ‘We know that all this (i.e. the revolutionary crisis, the revolutionary ferment) will pass ... will settle down.’ The war inevitably provoked the crisis, but after the war it will all ‘settle down’, if not all at once.
And the man that writes this is the leader of a party that wants to join the Communist International. We have here a revelation – all the more valuable for its extreme frankness – of what can be seen no less often in the leading layers of the French Socialist Party and the German Independent Socialist Party, and of the fact that it is not only a lack of understanding but an unwillingness to utilise the revolutionary crisis in a revolutionary way, or in other words it is a lack of understanding how and of willingness to carry out a revolutionary preparation of the Party and the class for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is the basic fault in many parties that have now left the Second International. For this particular reason I am spending a greater amount of time on the Theses that I have put before the Congress, in order to define if possible more exactly and more concretely the tasks of the preparation for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
One further example. A new book against Bolshevism was recently published. Unusual numbers of such books are now appearing in Europe and America, but the more books that appear against Bolshevism the stronger and quicker sympathies for it will grow among the masses. The book I am talking about here is Otto Bauer’s Bolshevism or Social-Democracy. Here the Germans are graphically shown what precisely the Mensheviks are whose contemptible role in the Russian revolution is well enough known to workers all over the world. Otto Bauer has supplied us with a thoroughly Menshevik pamphlet although he tries to conceal his sympathy with Menshevism. It is now necessary to spread a precise knowledge of Menshevism in Europe and America, for it is the generic term for all those allegedly socialist, social-democratic and other tendencies that are hostile to and oppose Bolshevism. It would be boring if we Russians described to the Europeans what Menshevism is. Otto Bauer has really shown it in his book, and we thank in advance all those bourgeois and opportunist publishers who publish it and translate it into different languages. Bauer’s book is a useful if rather unique supplement to the text books of communism. Take any paragraph, any argument you like in Bauer’s book and you will see in it what Menshevism looks like, how it is the same fundamental outlook that the representatives of socialism, the friends of Kerensky, Scheidemann, and so on, have translated into deeds. This is a task that could usefully and successfully be set at ‘examinations’ to test whether somebody has assimilated communism. If you cannot solve this task you are not yet a communist and it would be better if you did not yet join the Communist Party. [Applause.]
Otto Bauer has expressed the essential content of international opportunism in an excellent manner in a single phrase for which, if we had a free hand in Vienna, we would erect a memorial for him while he is still alive. ‘To use force in the class struggle in modern democracy,’ says Bauer, ‘would be violating the social relationship of forces.’
No doubt you think this sounds strange and incomprehensible? Here you have an example of what Marxism can be reduced to, to what banality and defence of the exploiters revolutionary theory can be reduced. It takes the German variety of the petty-bourgeois outlook to create the ‘theory’ that the ‘social relationship of forces’ are number, organisation, place in the process of production and distribution, activity and education. If the village labourer or the urban worker commits an act of revolutionary violence against the landlord and the capitalist, this is not at all the dictatorship of the proletariat, not at all an act of violence against the exploiters and oppressors of the people. Nothing of the kind. It is ‘violating the social relationship of forces’.
Possibly my example is somewhat humorous. But by the very nature of modem opportunism its struggle against Bolshevism turns to humour. The most urgent and useful task for Europe and America is to divert the working class and all its more thoughtful members into the struggle of international Menshevism (the MacDonalds, Otto Bauers and Co.) against Bolshevism.
We must ask how the persistence of this current in Europe is to be explained and why this opportunism is stronger in Western Europe than it is here. This is the case because the more advanced countries made and make their culture possible at the expense of thousands of millions of oppressed people, because the capitalists of these countries make more profits than just from plundering the workers of their own country.
Before the war it was calculated that the three richest countries Britain, France and Germany – made from 8,000 to 10,000 million francs each year from their capital investments abroad alone, not counting what they made from other sources.
It goes without saying that alms of at least 5,000 million from this hefty sum can be thrown to the labour leaders and the labour aristocracy in all imaginable forms of bribes. The whole thing amounts to bribery anyway. It can be done in thousands of different ways: by improving the cultural facilities in the great centres, by creating educational facilities, by providing thousands of jobs and official positions for the leaders of the Co-operative Societies and the trades unions and for parliamentary leaders. And all this goes on everywhere modern civilised capitalist relations exist. These super-profits of thousands of millions form the economic basis on which opportunism in the labour movement is built. In America, Britain and France we encounter much more obstinacy on the part of the opportunist leaders, the leading layers of the working class, the aristocracy of labour. They put up the strongest opposition to the Communist movement. For that reason we must be prepared for the fact that the liberation of the European and American workers’ parties from this evil will be much more difficult than it was here. We know that since the formation of the Communist International we have already achieved enormous successes in the process of curing this disease, but we have not yet finished the job; the purging of the workers’ parties, the revolutionary parties throughout the world, from bourgeois influence, from the opportunists in their own ranks, is far from complete.
I shall not go into detail on how this should concretely be done. This is what the Theses I have already published deal with. My aim is only to point out the deep economic roots of this phenomenon. This disease is protracted, its cure has taken a long time, longer than the optimists could have hoped for. Opportunism is our main enemy. The opportunism in the upper layers of the working class is not proletarian but bourgeois socialism. The practical proof of this is the fact that the leaders who belong to the opportunist tendency inside the workers’ movement defend the bourgeoisie better than the bourgeoisie itself. Without their support the bourgeoisie could not defend itself against the workers . This is proved not only by the history of the Kerensky government in Russia but also by the democratic republic in Germany led by its social-democratic government and by Albert Thomas’s relations with his bourgeois government. It is proved by the corresponding experiences in Britain and the United States. Here is our main enemy and we have to defeat this enemy. We must go away from the Congress with the firm resolve to carry on this struggle right to the end in every party. That is our main task. In comparison with this task the correction of the mistakes of the ‘left’ trend in Communism will be an easy one. In a whole series of countries we can observe the phenomenon of anti-parliamentarism, which is less a product of the petty bourgeoisie than of a few advance guards of the working class who spread it out of contempt for the old parliamentarism, out of a justifiable, correct and downright urgently needed contempt for the behaviour of the parliamentary leaders in Britain. France, Italy, in all countries. It is necessary for the Communist International to give practical hints on this, to acquaint the comrades more fully with the Russian experience, with the significance of the really proletarian revolutionary party. Our work lies in the fulfilment of this task. But then the struggle with the faults of the proletarian movement will be a thousand times easier than the struggle with the bourgeoisie which, in the guise of the reformists, has found its way into the old parties of the Second International and carries out all their work not in the proletarian but in the bourgeois spirit.
Finally, comrades, I want to raise one more point. The Comrade Chairman has already spoken of the fact that the Congress truly deserves the name of a World Congress. I believe that it has a particular right to call itself that because there are among us not a few representatives of the revolutionary movement in the backward colonial countries. It is only a modest beginning, but the important thing is the fact that the beginning has been made. The unification of the revolutionary proletarians of the advanced capitalist nations with the revolutionary masses of the countries which have no or almost no proletariat, with the oppressed masses of the Eastern colonial countries, this unification will follow on from the present Congress. And cementing this unification – and I am convinced that we will do so depends on us. World Imperialism must fall when the revolutionary impetus of the exploited and subjugated workers inside each country defeats the opposition of the petty-bourgeois elements and the influence of the numerically small aristocracy of labour, and unites with the revolutionary pressure of the hundreds of millions of people who previously stood outside history and were only regarded as its object.
The imperialist war helped the revolution; the bourgeoisie withdrew soldiers from the colonies and the backward countries to take part in the war. The British bourgeoisie impressed upon the Indian peasants that it was their duty to defend Great Britain as soldiers against Germany. The French bourgeoisie impressed upon the soldiers from the French colonies that they, the Negroes, had to defend France. They taught them how to use arms. This is extremely useful knowledge: we can be very grateful to the bourgeoisie for it and thank them on behalf of all Russian peasants and workers and of the Russian Red Army in particular. The imperialist war dragged all the dependent peoples along with it into world history. One of our important tasks is to consider how to lay the foundation stone of the organisation of the Soviet movement in the non-capitalist countries. Soviets are possible there too; they will not be councils of workers but councils of peasants or of labouring people.
This will require a lot of work; mistakes will be inevitable; we will encounter many difficulties along this path. The main task of the Second Congress will be to work out practical guidelines so that the work, which has up to now been taking place in an unorganised way among hundreds of millions of people, can become organised, unified and systematic.
A little more than a year has passed since the First Congress of the Communist International, and in this time we have defeated the Second International. The ideas of soviets are not now spread only among the workers of the civilised countries, known to them and understood by them. Workers all over the world laugh at those super-clever people, among whom there are not a few who call themselves socialists, who learnedly or half learnedly condemn the ‘soviet system’ as the systematic Germans love to express it, or the ‘soviet idea’, as the British guild socialists love to say. This philosophising about the ‘soviet system’ or the ‘soviet idea’ not infrequently clogs the vision and the understanding of workers. But they cast this pedantic conflict aside and seize the weapon that the soviets give them. The understanding of the role and the significance of the soviets has now spread to the countries of the East.
A start has been made on the soviet movement throughout the East, throughout Asia.
The principle that the exploited should rise against their exploiters and form soviets is not too complicated. This will become clear to hundreds of millions of the oppressed and exploited masses throughout the world through the experience that we have made in two and a half years of the Soviet Republic in Russia and since the First Congress of the Communist International. If we in Russia now are not seldom forced to reach compromises and to wait, since we are weaker than the international imperialists, we nonetheless know that we are defending the interests of 1,250 million people. We are still held back by old prejudices and old ignorance, but they are disappearing by the hour. We are defending and representing more and more forcefully 70 per cent of the population of the Earth, the labouring and exploited masses. With pride we can say: at the first Congress we were only really propagandists. We sketched the basic ideas, the call to struggle to the international proletariat. We asked merely: where are the people to feel capable of taking this path? Now the advanced proletariat everywhere is on our side. Everywhere there are proletarian armies, even if they are poorly organised and in need of reorganisation. And if our comrades internationally help us to create a unified army, no shortcomings can hold us back from our intention. This work is the cause of the proletarian world revolution, the work of creating the world Soviet Republic. [Long continuous applause. The orchestra plays the ‘Internationale’.]
Zinoviev: Comrade Lenin’s speech will not be translated into the other languages during the session. The written translation of his speech will be distributed among the delegates. [Thereupon he gives the floor to Comrade Rosmer.]
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