Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 91st 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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Markin comment on this post:
As noted in my commentary on the Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920), reposted below since it also applies to these theses, such documents give the political movement it is addressed to its marching order. In a general sense, at least. These theses codify those general propositions outlined in the manifesto. Note here that this Second Congress took place as the international working class movement was going through a regroupment process right after World War I between the reformist socialists, the emerging communist vanguard, and the bewildered anarchists. Note also the difference in approaches to the more hardened reformist-led socialist parties, and to the ill-formed but more revolutionary-spirited anarchist formations, especially the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) here in America in their good days.
A manifesto, particularly a political manifesto, and especially a revolutionary communist manifesto like the one that issued out of the historic Second World Congress of the Communist International in 1920 should give a cogent analysis of the world political situation. It should also describe the nature of the period (revolutionary, non-revolutionary, heading toward or away from either, an estimation of the enemy’s capacities, and the obstacles in the way both inside and outside the workers movement (out side the treachery of the liberals and inside the perfidy of the labor bureaucracy resting on the labor bureaucracy). In short, give the international proletariat its marching orders. The Manifesto of the Second World Congress does just those things at a time when the fledgling Communist International was trying to consolidate its vanguard position in the world working class movement. The Communist International then, and for some time after, did yeoman’s work in that regard, not always perfectly but from a revolutionary perspective. Even as it degenerated politically toward the middle and late 1920s there were, as the Leon Trotsky-led International Left Opposition held, reasons, good reasons to adhere to its tenets. Only with the debacle around Hitler’s coming to power in Germany did Trotsky throw in the towel. That seemed right then, and now. I would argue that the Seventh (and last) World Congress in 1935 unquestionably put paid to that notion. We did not need a vanguard national party, or a vanguard revolutionary international party for that matter, to give the lead in the political struggle to the liberal bourgeoisie as the popular frontist politics of the CI proclaimed from that time onward (with a few “left” turns). There was an international for that “strategy”, or rather a mail-drop address, it was (is) called the Second International.
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Lenin's Speech On 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.]
Thursday, March 03, 2011
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 91st Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (1920)-Zinoviev's Opening Address
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 91st Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (1920)-
Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 91st 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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Markin comment on this Second Congress series:
As noted in my commentary on the Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920), reposted below since it also applies to these theses, such documents give the political movement it is addressed to its marching order. In a general sense, at least. These theses codify those general propositions outlined in the manifesto. Note here that this Second Congress took place as the international working class movement was going through a regroupment process right after World War I between the reformist socialists, the emerging communist vanguard, and the bewildered anarchists. Note also the difference in approaches to the more hardened reformist-led socialist parties, and to the ill-formed but more revolutionary-spirited anarchist formations, especially the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) here in America in their good days.
A manifesto, particularly a political manifesto, and especially a revolutionary communist manifesto like the one that issued out of the historic Second World Congress of the Communist International in 1920 should give a cogent analysis of the world political situation. It should also describe the nature of the period (revolutionary, non-revolutionary, heading toward or away from either, an estimation of the enemy’s capacities, and the obstacles in the way both inside and outside the workers movement (out side the treachery of the liberals and inside the perfidy of the labor bureaucracy resting on the labor bureaucracy). In short, give the international proletariat its marching orders. The Manifesto of the Second World Congress does just those things at a time when the fledgling Communist International was trying to consolidate its vanguard position in the world working class movement. The Communist International then, and for some time after, did yeoman’s work in that regard, not always perfectly but from a revolutionary perspective. Even as it degenerated politically toward the middle and late 1920s there were, as the Leon Trotsky-led International Left Opposition held, reasons, good reasons to adhere to its tenets. Only with the debacle around Hitler’s coming to power in Germany did Trotsky throw in the towel. That seemed right then, and now. I would argue that the Seventh (and last) World Congress in 1935 unquestionably put paid to that notion. We did not need a vanguard national party, or a vanguard revolutionary international party for that matter, to give the lead in the political struggle to the liberal bourgeoisie as the popular frontist politics of the CI proclaimed from that time onward (with a few “left” turns). There was an international for that “strategy”, or rather a mail-drop address, it was (is) called the Second International.
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Markin comment:
By all accounts this kind of address by Zinoviev was what he lived for, and why he was valued by Lenin when things were tough during the isolated days of the early part of World War I. He gives a cogent analysis of the world situation in 1920 when things still looked pretty bright for our communist future. Later, when things got more dicey, Ziniviev didn't do so well, nor did a lot of others. But 1920 is Zinoviev's time. American communist leader, James P. Cannon, was right, more still neeed to be written about the man and his role in the pre-war Bolshevik party organization.
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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.
Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 91st 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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Markin comment on this Second Congress series:
As noted in my commentary on the Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920), reposted below since it also applies to these theses, such documents give the political movement it is addressed to its marching order. In a general sense, at least. These theses codify those general propositions outlined in the manifesto. Note here that this Second Congress took place as the international working class movement was going through a regroupment process right after World War I between the reformist socialists, the emerging communist vanguard, and the bewildered anarchists. Note also the difference in approaches to the more hardened reformist-led socialist parties, and to the ill-formed but more revolutionary-spirited anarchist formations, especially the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) here in America in their good days.
A manifesto, particularly a political manifesto, and especially a revolutionary communist manifesto like the one that issued out of the historic Second World Congress of the Communist International in 1920 should give a cogent analysis of the world political situation. It should also describe the nature of the period (revolutionary, non-revolutionary, heading toward or away from either, an estimation of the enemy’s capacities, and the obstacles in the way both inside and outside the workers movement (out side the treachery of the liberals and inside the perfidy of the labor bureaucracy resting on the labor bureaucracy). In short, give the international proletariat its marching orders. The Manifesto of the Second World Congress does just those things at a time when the fledgling Communist International was trying to consolidate its vanguard position in the world working class movement. The Communist International then, and for some time after, did yeoman’s work in that regard, not always perfectly but from a revolutionary perspective. Even as it degenerated politically toward the middle and late 1920s there were, as the Leon Trotsky-led International Left Opposition held, reasons, good reasons to adhere to its tenets. Only with the debacle around Hitler’s coming to power in Germany did Trotsky throw in the towel. That seemed right then, and now. I would argue that the Seventh (and last) World Congress in 1935 unquestionably put paid to that notion. We did not need a vanguard national party, or a vanguard revolutionary international party for that matter, to give the lead in the political struggle to the liberal bourgeoisie as the popular frontist politics of the CI proclaimed from that time onward (with a few “left” turns). There was an international for that “strategy”, or rather a mail-drop address, it was (is) called the Second International.
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Markin comment:
By all accounts this kind of address by Zinoviev was what he lived for, and why he was valued by Lenin when things were tough during the isolated days of the early part of World War I. He gives a cogent analysis of the world situation in 1920 when things still looked pretty bright for our communist future. Later, when things got more dicey, Ziniviev didn't do so well, nor did a lot of others. But 1920 is Zinoviev's time. American communist leader, James P. Cannon, was right, more still neeed to be written about the man and his role in the pre-war Bolshevik party organization.
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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.
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
From The Archives Of The Communist International- On The Organization Question At The Third Congress Of The Communist International (1921) -Introduction-ICL Translator
Markin comment on this article:
In the history of the communist movement, since right from the days of Marx and Engels, the question of the organization of the revolution has been intermingled with all the political questions associated with that struggle. For anarchists and others the organization question is sealed with seven seals (or more) but for those of us who stand in the early Bolshevik tradition handed down from the Russian revolution in 1917 it is key. And that question is linked up, sealed up, if you like, with the notion of a vanguard party. These documents and reports from the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921 are a codification of that experience. For those who think that international imperialism, led by the American monster, will crumble on its own, or worst, can be just patched up brand new with a little tweaking don’t read this material, all other read and re-read this stuff until your eyes are sore.
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Report on Organisation, Comintern 1921
Translator’s Introduction
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Written: by Prometheus Research Library.
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We are proud to publish what appears to be the only complete and accurate English translation of the final text of “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work,” and “Resolution on the Organization of the Communist International,” both Resolutions adopted by the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921. In addition we publish as appendices, also for the first time to our knowledge, English translations of the German stenographic record of the reports on and discussion of these Resolutions at the 22nd and 24th sessions of the Congress.
“Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” is one of the great documents of the international communist movement, standing as the codification of communist organizational practice as it was forged by the Bolsheviks and tested in the light of the world’s first successful proletarian revolution. The Third Congress of the Communist International systematized the Russian Bolshevik experience for the fledgling international communist movement, producing both the Organizational Resolution and the “Theses on Tactics” and serving, in the words of Leon Trotsky, as “the highest school of revolutionary strategy.”[1]
The Third Congress met in Moscow from 22 June to 12 July 1921 when the revolutionary wave which had swept Europe in the wake of World War I had nearly receded. The lack of steeled and tested communist parties had proved decisive to the defeat of proletarian revolutions in Germany, Hungary and in part in Italy. The international Social Democracy, reorganized as the Amsterdam-based Second International and still claiming the allegiance of substantial proletarian forces, had shown itself to be for the time an indispensable tool of bourgeois rule. By 1921 a certain temporary stability had been reimposed on the capitalist world: the ruling classes of Europe had learned some lessons from the Russian Bolshevik victory.
The young and untested communist parties still had to learn their lessons from the victory of the Bolsheviks. The left wing of world Social Democracy, as well as a significant section of the revolutionary syndicalist movement, had been won to the communist banner under the impact of the October Revolution. By 1921 large communist parties existed in many countries, but many were “communist” in little more than name, harboring centrist leaders who had followed their membership into the new International only reluctantly. The “Conditions of Admission to the Communist International” (more popularly known as the Twenty-One Conditions) were adopted by the Comintern’s Second Congress in an attempt to separate out this centrist chaff and make the new parties break both programmatically and organizationally with the reformists. The Twenty-One Conditions established democratic centralism as the organizational basis for the Communist International. Yet democratic-centralist organizational norms were only lightly sketched by the Second Congress, which met in July 1920 in the midst of immense revolutionary ferment. Earlier that year the Red Army had turned back the invading Polish Army of Marshal Pilsudski, and as the Congress opened Soviet troops stood at the gates of Warsaw. It was the hope and expectation of the Soviet government and of the Congress delegates (who closely followed the Red Army’s progress on a map in the Congress hall) that the Red Army’s advance would spark a proletarian revolution in Poland. This would have moved the proletarian revolution west to the borders of Germany, with its still unfinished revolutionary developments. Unfortunately this hope proved unfounded and the Third Congress had to take stock of a more somber world situation.
In “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” the Third Congress expanded upon the organizational norms laid out by the Second Congress. V.I. Lenin explained the purpose and importance of this Organizational Resolution in a letter to the German Communists written shortly after the Third Congress completed its work:
In my opinion, the tactical and organisational resolutions of the Third Congress of the Communist International mark a great step forward. Every effort must be exerted to really put both resolutions into effect. This is a difficult matter, but it can and should be done.
First, the Communists had to proclaim their principles to the world. That was done at the First Congress. It was the first step.
The second step was to give the Communist International organisational form and to draw up conditions for affiliation to it-conditions making for real separation from the Centrists, from the direct and indirect agents of the bourgeoisie within the working-class movement. That was done at the Second Congress.
At the Third Congress it was necessary to start practical, constructive work, to determine concretely, taking account of the practical experience of the communist struggle already begun, exactly what the line of further activity should be in respect of tactics and of organisation. We have taken this third step. We have an army of Communists all over the world. It is still poorly trained and poorly organised. It would be extremely harmful to forget this truth or be afraid of admitting it. Submitting ourselves to a most careful and rigorous test, and studying the experience of our own movement, we must train this army efficiently; we must organise it properly, and test it in all sorts of manoeuvres, all sorts of battles, in attack and in retreat. We cannot win without this long and hard schooling....
In the overwhelming majority of countries, our parties are still very far from being what real Communist Parties should be; they are far from being real vanguards of the genuinely revolutionary and only revolutionary class, with every single member taking part in the struggle, in the movement, in the everyday life of the masses. But we are aware of this defect, we brought it out most strikingly in the Third Congress resolution on the work of the Party.[2]
In fact Lenin played a major role in the drafting of the Organizational Resolution and can rightly be called its ideological author: the Finnish Communist Otto W. Kuusinen wrote the text under Lenin’s direction, sending him the first draft on 6 June 1921. Lenin made detailed suggestions for reworking this draft and all Lenin’s suggested additions, itemized in a letter to Kuusinen written on 10 June, were subsequently incorporated into the Resolution’s final text. According to the editors of the Collected Works, Lenin also read a second draft of the Resolution sent to him in mid-June, before approving yet another draft on 9 July, the day before the Resolution was first discussed by the Congress.[3]
At that point Lenin suggested two additions to the draft Resolution and these number among the revisions made by the Commission on Organization and finally adopted by the Congress on 12 July. Yet the Commission on Organization made a number of other changes to the text approved by Lenin-in particular a whole new section, “On the Organization of Political Struggles,” was added. To understand the reason for this addition one has to understand the major political disputes that took place at the Third Congress. In the first instance these revolved around the recent tactics of the United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD)-the infamous “March Action.”
By 1921 the VKPD had won a following among the coal miners of Mansfeld in central Germany, which was then the country’s center of labor militancy. Strikes and plant occupations swept the region; on 16 March the government deliberately provoked the workers by sending in troops and police. The VKPD responded with a call for armed resistance—a quasi-insurrectionary call. While the workers of Mansfeld fought heroically, if sporadically, in the rest of Germany the VKPD’s call was for the most part unheeded. Yet instead of seeking to retreat in good order, the VKPD made matters worse by calling for a general strike. Isolated strikes by VKPD supporters ensued, and they were easy targets for bourgeois repression. The casualties were very high and a number of VKPD leaders were arrested. Within three months, the VKPD membership dropped by half.
The Comintern had sent the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun (leader of the failed 1919 Revolution in Hungary) to Germany early in March and Kun’s insistence that a communist party always be on the offensive against the bourgeoisie (the so-called “theory of the offensive”) played no small role in inspiring the 1921 “March Action.” Given the disastrous events in Germany, both Lenin and Trotsky saw in Kun’s false “left” current a mortal danger to the future of the Communist International and they resolved to wage a fight against this adventurist current at the Third Congress. According to Clara Zetkin, the leading opponent of the leftists in the German party, before the opening of the Third Congress Lenin spoke to her on the “theory of the offensive” in the following terms:
Is it a theory anyway? Not at all, it is an illusion, it is romanticism, sheer romanticism. That is why it was manufactured in the “land of poets and thinkers,” with the help of my dear Bela, who also belongs to a poetically gifted nation and feels himself obliged to be always more left than the left. We must not versify and dream. We must observe the world economic and political situation soberly, quite soberly, if we wish to take up the struggle against the bourgeoisie and to triumph.[4]
However in the Political Bureau (PB) of the Russian party Grigori Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin (the latter a candidate member) originally supported Kun and failed to see the danger that the adventurist theory posed to the young Communist International. While full documentation of the Political Bureau dispute on this question awaits the opening of the archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, we do have Trotsky’s account:[5] Lenin obtained Lev Kamenev’s support for his and Trotsky’s position, thus securing a majority against the “left” on the five-man PB. However, in the Russian delegation to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) Karl Radek, along with Zinoviev and Bukharin, generally supported the “left.” Trotsky and Lenin drew Kamenev into meetings of the Russian ECCI delegation, though Kamenev was not formally an ECCI member. Trotsky reports that, for a period of time, the two opposing sides met in separate caucuses, indicating a pre-factional situation. The seriousness with which Lenin viewed the situation is clear from his remarks to a meeting of the ECCI which preceded the Third Congress: “But if the Left succeeded in making Béla Kun’s views prevail, that would destroy Communism.”[6]
In the end, however, the members of the Russian delegation apparently came to some agreement among themselves, compromising on the “Theses on Tactics” and for the most part presenting a united face to the Congress. Clara Zetkin says that, prior to the Congress, Lenin lectured her on the necessity of being lenient with the “left."[7] While Lenin spoke against the “theory of the offensive” on the floor of the Congress, for the most part the battle took place in the various Commissions which met in conjunction with the Congress.[8] The compromise formulations adopted in the various resolutions allowed the “left” to save face.
While combatting a real danger on the left, Lenin and Trotsky also had to wage battles against the centrist elements which were still influential in many parties: the sorting-out process initiated by the Twenty-One Conditions had only just begun. The Congress confirmed the expulsion of VKPD leader Paul Levi, who had publicly and slanderously denounced the party’s course in March as a “Bakuninist putsch” (point 51 of the Organizational Resolution, on party discipline, was obviously written—and amended by the Congress—with Levi in mind). On the “March Action” there was a compromise. While condemning the tactical errors of the VKPD, the “Theses on Tactics” also described the “March Action” as a step forward insofar as it represented the heroic response of a section of the German working class, fighting under communist leadership, to an overt provocation by the bourgeois state. Yet Lenin also insisted that the “Theses on Tactics” firmly endorse Levi’s attempt to apply united-front tactics to Germany-the “Open Letter,” which Levi had authored (with help from Radek) before his expulsion and which had been widely denounced as “opportunist” in the German party.[9] The Open Letter, printed in Die Rote Fahne on 8 January 1921, had proposed joint actions of all German working-class organizations (including the Social Democrats) against the bourgeoisie’s attacks on the pitiful living standards of the German proletariat.
With Germany still very unstable and the German party one of the largest in the Comintern, the perspective of world revolution reduced itself in the first instance to the perspective of a German revolution. Lenin was especially concerned that the German party overcome Kun’s adventuristic pseudo-leftism: the “March Action” fiasco had clearly demonstrated that the party had very little idea of how to win leadership of the majority of the working class away from the defenders of the bourgeois order in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), part of the “yellow” Second International based in Amsterdam.
The party had to find the road to the masses. And the VKPD wasn’t the only party in the International in need of guidance on this question. Most parties had to overcome the paralyzing effects of the social-democratic organizational forms that they had inherited with their membership. Thus the Organizational Resolution explains in extensive, sometimes painful, detail the means for forging the reciprocal ties between the party leadership and the membership, and between the membership and the class, which would allow the communists to involve all their members in ongoing work and prove themselves the best leaders of the proletariat in action. As Lenin wrote in his 10 June letter to Kuusinen:
There is no everyday work (revolutionary work) by every member of the Party.
This is the chief drawback.
To change this is the most difficult job of all.
But this is the most important.[10]
In this letter Lenin urged Kuusinen to find a “real German” comrade to improve the German text of the Resolution and read Kuusinen’s report to the Congress. On 11 June Lenin wrote urgently to Zinoviev to make the same point:
I have just read Kuusinen’s theses and one-half of the article (the report)....
I do insist that he and he alone ((i.e., not Béla Kun)) should be allowed to give a report at this congress without fail.
This is necessary.
He knows and thinks (was sehr selten ist unter den Revolutionären)
([which is a great rarity among revolutionaries])
What needs to be done right away is to find one German, a real one, and give him strict instructions
to make stylistic corrections at once,
and dictate the corrected text to a typist.
And at the congress read out for Kuusinen his article-report....
The German will read it out well. The benefit will be enormous.[11]
Thus it was that at the last moment Wilhelm Koenen of the VKPD was drawn into the redrafting of the Resolution. It was Koenen who gave the reports on the Organizational Resolution to the 22nd and 24th sessions of the Third Congress. Koenen had recently come over to the Communists with the Left Wing of the Independent Socialist Party of Germany (USPD) and had given the organizational report at the founding conference of the VKPD in December 1920. Arriving in Moscow in early 1921, Koenen had been co-opted onto the “Smaller Bureau” (Presidium) of the ECCI.[12]
Koenen was certainly a “real German"-and also a supporter of the “theory of the offensive.” In the Report he delivered to the Congress on 10 July (Appendix A, “Report on the Organization Question”) Koenen quotes Béla Kun favorably at least six times and never even mentions Otto Kuusinen or Lenin, the actual authors of the Resolution. Koenen’s opening remarks repeat many of the points that he made in his report to the founding conference of the VKPD.[13] Thus it would appear that the report delivered by Koenen to the Third Congress was not precisely the one prepared by Kuusinen and endorsed by Lenin in his letter to Zinoviev.
Koenen spends the bulk of his Report detailing a number of changes made to the draft Resolution and he explicates some of the Resolution’s points, stressing, for example, the importance of building ties with the revolutionary syndicalist shop stewards movements which then existed in a number of European countries (Koenen had been active in the shop stewards movement in Germany while a leader of the USPD). Yet over half of Koenen’s Report is spent explaining the new section of the Resolution. While Koenen gives lip service to Levi’s “Open Letter,” it is clear from his Report that he viewed this new section, which was incorporated into the final text of the Resolution in a slightly modified form (Section V—“On the Organization of Political Struggles”), as a partial justification of Kun’s “offensive” tactics. Indeed Section V—a highly organizational and hence confused rendition of points better made in the “Theses on Tactics"-is written more turgidly and with much less political depth than the rest of the Organizational Resolution. This section does not appear in the published draft of the Resolution and it is doubtful that it was distributed to the delegates before being introduced to the Congress; we have found no evidence that it was seen by Lenin.[14]
In his 10 July Report Koenen also introduced a Resolution on the Organization of the Communist International. This Resolution, which calls for the strengthening of the Comintern’s Executive Committee, was written at the suggestion of the VKPD delegation. The Congress referred both the draft Organizational Resolution and this new Resolution on the Communist International to a Commission on Organization, which was to meet in two subcommittees the following day.
The Commission on Organization met on 11 July under considerable pressure-they had only one day to make revisions before reporting back to the 24th and final session of the Congress. They made many minor additions and changes to the Resolution, but it is unlikely that by the opening of the 24th session they were able to produce a new printed version incorporating all their changes—even a text in German, which was the language of the draft Resolution and the main language used on the floor of the Congress. Koenen’s report to the 24th session implies that only the change in the section on democratic centralism was available to the delegates. In any event the Congress adopted the Organizational Resolution in this last session as it had been amended by the Commission, including the new section proposed by Koenen. With the Congress now over, the Comintern’s production apparatus must have been under considerable strain to produce the various language texts of the final Resolution before the delegates left Moscow.
It is thus not surprising that there exist discrepancies between the various language versions of the Organizational Resolution and of the Resolution on the Communist International. The stenographic record of the Congress provides the only guide as to the definitive text of these Resolutions, which is why we have appended a translation of the relevant portions of the German-language stenographic report of the Congress.
One provision of the Resolution on the Organization of the Communist International engendered a heated debate at the 24th session, resulting in the only roll-call vote at the Third Congress (see Appendix B). The dispute arose over the composition of the Presidium (at the time called the Smaller Bureau) of the Comintern’s Executive Committee. Point 5 of the draft Resolution allowed the ECCI to co-opt non-ECCI members to its Smaller Bureau. Boris Souvarine, a French delegate speaking in the name of the French, Spanish, Swiss, Yugoslav, Austrian and Australian delegations, opposed this co-option provision. He proposed an amendment limiting Smaller Bureau membership to elected members of the ECCI. Souvarine’s amendment may have been a maneuver against the supporters of the “theory of the offensive”: the only non-ECCI members of the Smaller Bureau at the time were Béla Kun and Koenen himself.[15] Radek, speaking in the name of the entire Russian delegation, vehemently opposed Souvarine’s amendment on the grounds that it did not give the ECCI adequate flexibility. The amendment failed. At that point Zinoviev stepped in with a proposal for a “compromise” which allowed the ECCI to co-opt non-ECCI members to the Smaller Bureau only as an “exception.” Zinoviev’s compromise formulation was adopted overwhelmingly.
We have translated the Resolutions from the German text of the Third Congress Theses published in Hamburg in 1921, the only version which contains Zinoviev’s compromise formulation in the Resolution on the Organization of the CI (see “A Note on the Translation”).
There appears to be one other issue of major controversy relating to the Organizational Resolution at the Third Congress. In Koenen’s Report to the 22nd session (Appendix A, “Report on the Organization Question”), he mentions “certain differences—which, I believe, still cannot be definitively resolved at this Congress—over whether from now on the organizations can finally be built on cells in the factories, as the basis of the organizations.” Koenen goes on to imply that trade-union “cells” would be preferable to “working groups” based on district, or territorial, forms of party organization. Since the bureaucratizing Zinoviev-Stalin faction, and then later the anti-revolutionary Stalin faction, distorted this concept in the direction implied by Koenen, it is worth quoting in full the key provisions of the 1921 Organizational Resolution:
11. In order to carry out daily party work, every party member should as a rule always be part of a smaller working group—a group, a committee, a commission, a board or a collegium, a fraction or cell. Only in this way can party work be properly allocated, directed and carried out.
Participation in the general membership meetings of the local organizations also goes without saying. Under conditions of legality it is not wise to choose to substitute meetings of local delegates for these periodic membership meetings; on the contrary, all members must be required to attend these meetings regularly....
12. Communist nuclei are to be formed for day-to-day work in different areas of party activity: for door-to-door agitation, for party studies, for press work, for literature distribution, for intelligence-gathering, communications, etc.
Communist cells are nuclei for daily communist work in plants and workshops, in trade unions, in workers cooperatives, in military units, etc.—wherever there are at least a few members or candidate members of the Communist Party. If there are several party members in the same plant or trade union, etc., then the cell is expanded into a fraction whose work is directed by the nucleus.
This concept of a disciplined communist working group, variously called a fraction, cell or nucleus-the link between the party and the broad working masses-is key to the Organizational Resolution. In its advocacy of disciplined communist working groups functioning in conjunction with party branches organized on a territorial basis, the Third Congress Resolution follows the organizational norms evolved by the Bolsheviks for work in prerevolutionary Russia:
2. it is desirable that Social Democratic cells in trade unions, which are organized along occupational lines, should function wherever local conditions permit in conjunction with party branches organized on a territorial basis....[16]
In contrast to the resolutions of the later Stalinized Comintern, the Third Congress Organizational Resolution does not require that communist parties abolish all territorial forms of organization and base themselves solely on “cells” in the plants, factories and enterprises. We should note that, given Lenin’s role in the drafting of the Resolution, this could hardly have been an accidental oversight or a misformulation.
The exclusive “occupational cell” form of organization was adopted by the Russian party only in December 1919, i.e., only when it had become the ruling party of the Soviet state, struggling to maintain its proletarian character under Civil War conditions in a largely peasant country. In contrast to the Russian party’s 1919 usage the Third Congress Organizational Resolution, like the Second Congress resolution “Theses on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution” and the Twenty-One Conditions, uses the term “cell” to mean a specific kind of working group-a communist nucleus working in any non-party workers organization.
Only in January 1924, the month Lenin died, did the ECCI issue its first instructions that all parties organize themselves solely on the basis of factory “cells.” At first these instructions remained a dead letter in most parties. However, in the summer of 1924 the Fifth Comintern Congress declared “Bolshevization” of the various national parties to be the most important task of the coming period. After the Fifth Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI in March-April 1925 the “Bolshevization” campaign began in earnest, and it became synonymous with the Comintern’s insistence that all parties divide up their membership, at least on paper, into “cells”—small, easily controlled units. Large territorial membership meetings became rare occurrences—when they were held these meetings became rubber stamps for the expulsion of oppositionists rather than forums for open political debate. Three oppositionists expelled from the French Communist Party in May 1928 described the chaotic reorganization process and the bureaucratization which resulted:
The “Bolshevization” of the party...consisted of officially suppressing the locals and replacing them by artificially creating-on paper only-factory cells, district cells and regional cells. The immediate result of this substitution was to drive thousands of militants away from the party, leaving most of the rest in a state of disarray and totally paralyzing the others by imposing a regime of centralism that was not democratic but bureaucratic, and which wiped out any control by the base of the party over its leadership-resulting in the creation of a veritable caste of functionaries at every level in the party, which gradually substituted for the party itself.[17]
“Bolshevization” proved a very useful organizational device for the Stalinist bureaucratic caste as it obtained its precarious (but still maintained) victory. First the maneuverist Comintern leadership of Zinoviev-Stalin, and then the right-wing faction of Bukharin-Stalin, removed and installed leaderships in the various national parties. In the end all parties had “leaders” whose principal recommendation was slavish loyalty to Stalin’s dictates. Ruth Fischer, an ultraleftist who was installed as the Zinovievite leader of the German party in 1924 (and then expelled from the party in 1926, after Zinoviev had broken with Stalin and formed the Leningrad Opposition), described the process by which the “cell” structure was used to eliminate democratic norms in the German party:
Under the slogan, “Concentrate party work in the factories,” the old stratification of the party into regional assemblies, with town groups and factory cells within the framework of the regional groups, was liquidated. The System Pieck was introduced; party units larger than one single factory cell were formally prohibited, and even large factory cells were split into smaller units of no more than ten to fifteen members. The party was atomized; every coherent group of militants was disintegrated. Convention delegates were thrice screened: first small cell groups elected representatives; these representatives elected delegates to a regional party convention; and only this regional convention had the right finally to elect delegates to the Reich congress.[18]
With the imposition of the exclusive “cell” organization the Stalinized Comintern in fact revived the old social-democratic dichotomy between passive members and active leaders-an evil that the Organizational Resolution had been written to overcome.
* * *
At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in November-December 1922, Lenin repeatedly stressed the significance of the Organizational Resolution adopted by the Third Congress. According to the editors of Lenin’s Collected Works, throughout November Lenin had “a series of talks with delegates to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International on the organisational pattern of Communist Parties and on the methods and content of their work.”[19] In his only public speech to the Congress, on 13 November, Lenin again spoke about the Organizational Resolution. This was almost the last public speech of his life—he spoke publicly only once more, to the Moscow Soviet on 20 November. It was a major physical effort for Lenin to make his last intervention into the political life of the Communist International: in the words of one Congress delegate Lenin appeared “deeply marked by paralysis.”[20] His speech was by no means an off-the-cuff presentation. Lenin had prepared notes and he stuck to his outline, correcting the German transcript of his remarks at a later date. If Lenin’s December 1922 “Letter to the Congress” is rightly regarded as his last “Testament” to the Russian Bolsheviks, so his last words to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International can be taken with equal seriousness to be his last testament to the international communist movement.[21]
Lenin’s Fourth Congress remarks on the Organizational Resolution are often misrepresented—E.H. Carr, for example, states that Lenin “attacked” the Resolution.[22] On the contrary, Lenin spoke to the urgent necessity of the parties understanding and implementing the Resolution, and his remarks remain today the best testimony as to the crucial significance of “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of the Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” for the international communist movement:
At the Third Congress, in 1921, we adopted a resolution on the organisational structure of the Communist Parties and on the methods and content of their activities. The resolution is an excellent one, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is based on Russian conditions. This is its good point, but it is also its failing. It is its failing because I am sure that no foreigner can read it. I have read it again before saying this. In the first place, it is too long, containing fifty or more points. Foreigners are not usually able to read such things. Secondly, even if they read it, they will not understand it because it is too Russian. Not because it is written in Russian—it has been excellently translated into all languages—but because it is thoroughly imbued with the Russian spirit. And thirdly, if by way of exception some foreigner does understand it, he cannot carry it out. This is its third defect. I have talked with a few of the foreign delegates and hope to discuss matters in detail with a large number of delegates from different countries during the Congress, although I shall not take part in its proceedings, for unfortunately it is impossible for me to do that. I have the impression that we made a big mistake with this resolution, namely, that we blocked our own road to further success. As I have said already, the resolution is excellently drafted; I am prepared to subscribe to every one of its fifty or more points. But we have not learnt how to present our Russian experience to foreigners. All that was said in the resolution has remained a dead letter. If we do not realise this, we shall be unable to move ahead. I think that after five years of the Russian revolution the most important thing for all of us, Russian and foreign comrades alike, is to sit down and study. We have only now obtained the opportunity to do so. I do not know how long this opportunity will last. I do not know for how long the capitalist powers will give us the opportunity to study in peace. But we must take advantage of every moment of respite from fighting, from war, to study, and to study from scratch....
That resolution must be carried out. It cannot be carried out overnight; that is absolutely impossible. The resolution is too Russian, it reflects Russian experience. That is why it is quite unintelligible to foreigners, and they cannot be content with hanging it in a corner like an icon and praying to it. Nothing will be achieved that way. They must assimilate part of the Russian experience. Just how that will be done, I do not know. The fascists in Italy may, for example, render us a great service by showing the Italians that they are not yet sufficiently enlightened and that their country is not yet ensured against the Black Hundreds. Perhaps this will be very useful. We Russians must also find ways and means of explaining the principles of this resolution to the foreigners. Unless we do that, it will be absolutely impossible for them to carry it out. I am sure that in this connection we must tell not only the Russians, but the foreign comrades as well, that the most important thing in the period we are now entering is to study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense, in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that, I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will be not only good, but excellent.[23]
The Organizational Resolution fully embodied Lenin’s final understanding of the means and ways to shape a “communist party” into an authentic revolutionary workers vanguard. Lenin dealt centrally with the case of mass “communist parties” that were still partially digested former social-democratic parties or large components of such parties. In particular he centered on the mass German party—the VKPD—which had resulted after a large majority of the Independent Socialists (USPD) voted to fuse with the Communists at the Halle Congress in October 1920.
“Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” cannot be seen in any way as separate from the working political program of the Communist International in the time of Lenin and Trotsky. Hence the Resolution must be taken together with such defining political documents as Lenin’s 1920 “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder and Trotsky’s Lessons of October (1924). Behind both of these works stands Lenin’s profound and illuminating The State and Revolution written in 1917 (the balance of material from that interrupted work was used somewhat differently in Lenin’s 1918 The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky).
Few declared Marxists, aside from those with an anarcho-syndicalist bent, have taken issue with Lenin’s“Left-Wing” Communism. However, many of those who reject the Comintern founders’ vision of world revolution take issue with Trotsky’s Lessons of October. These revisionists see a revolutionary outcome of the German crisis of 1923 as—at best—improbable. They also dismiss or ignore the revolutionary potential in Bulgaria in 1923, Estonia in 1924, Poland in 1926 (the Pilsudski coup), England in 1926, and the profound revolutionary developments in China in 1925-27. Trotsky’s “lessons” were meant as a warning and a guide for precisely such revolutionary, or pre-revolutionary, situations. Revisionists of Leninism-Trotskyism are always quick to note that none of these situations was brought to a revolutionary conclusion. Such skeptics are at one with the post-Leninist Comintern which only postured and mechanically played at revolution, ensuring the outcome not of mere failure, but of defeat.
With the benefit of almost 70 years of hindsight we can say that “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” has stood the test of time. We might note certain omissions—the Resolution lacks, for example, any mention of the necessity for communists in many parts of the world to compete with nationalists for leadership of the struggle for social liberation (the Comintern was already grappling with the issue of nationalism in the colonial East at the Second Congress). But the Resolution was written for Western Europe, particularly Germany, and here nationalism played a reactionary, more or less fascist, role.
One can hardly fault the Resolution for failing to insist on one of the touchstones of pre-Civil War Bolshevik organizational practice—the right of communists to debate, and run for leadership on the basis of, counterposed political platforms (factional rights). The delegates to the Third Congress could not have anticipated the rise of the bureaucratic caste which would usurp political power in the Soviet Union, using for its own purposes the temporary banning of factions which had been adopted as an emergency measure by the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party in March 1921. This bureaucratic caste, led by Stalin, strangled the revolutionary Communist International, abandoning the struggle for world proletarian revolution in favor of the reactionary/utopian program of building “socialism in one country.”
It was the Trotskyists who retained the revolutionary program which had armed the Communist International under Lenin. Thus it was left to them to fight the rise of Stalinism. Leopold Trepper, Polish Jewish Communist and heroic leader of the Red Orchestra Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied West Europe, paid tribute to the Trotskyists, who fought Stalin because they continued to fight for world proletarian revolution:
Who rose up to voice his outrage?
The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honor. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did. By the time of the great purges, they could only shout their rebellion in the freezing wastelands where they had been dragged in order to be exterminated. In the camps, their conduct was admirable. But their voices were lost in the tundra.
Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not “confess,” for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.[24]
At the end of World War II numerous countries faced revolutionary opportunities, but these were either stillborn or bureaucratically deformed. Since the Spanish Civil War, desperate international imperialism no longer had to rely simply on the decrepit Social Democracy of the Second International.[25] Counterrevolution had a powerful new ally in the thoroughly Stalinized parties who used the enormous prestige of the Red Army’s victory over Nazism and their own role in the anti-Nazi resistance in Western Europe to derail the revolutionary upsurge through their universal strategy of building “popular fronts” with sections of the bourgeoisie. By the time the Comintern itself was officially dissolved in 1943 the Stalinist parties were thoroughly reformist-social democrats of the second mobilization.
The programmatic material, both political and organizational, of the Communist International of Lenin’s time is the concentrated expression of that leadership which did see the Russian Revolution through its many vicissitudes to victory. This material ought, therefore, to be powerfully educative for those in later generations who aspire through necessary social struggle to win socialism on this planet. The highest embodiment of the systematic formulation of the structure and work of Leninist communist parties is found in the Third Congress Resolution here presented, and this formulation stands on the same plane of importance as any of the main political aims of the Communist International. Without the systematic discipline and implementation Lenin called for, the great goals of the movement remain abstract and unobtainable in practice.
Prometheus Research Library
August 1988
Notes
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1. Leon Trotsky, “The School of Revolutionary Strategy” (Speech at a General Party Membership Meeting of the Moscow Organization, July 1921), in The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. II (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1953), 8.
2. V.I. Lenin, “A Letter to the German Communists,” Collected Works (CW), 4th ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960-1970), vol. 32, 519-523.
3. See V.I. Lenin, “Letter to O.W. Kuusinen” and “Letter to O.W. Kuusinen and W. Koenen,” CW vol. 42, 316-318 and 318-319; see also note 368, pp. 567-568.
4. Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 23.
5. Leon Trotsky, “Letter to the Bureau of Party History,” dated 21 October 1927 and circulated by hand in the Soviet Union. This letter was first published in English in The Real Situation in Russia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928); the section on the Third Congress appears on pp. 246-250. Trotsky’s letter was also published in a selection of his works entitled The Stalin School of Falsification (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1937). Trotsky makes no mention of Stalin’s position on the “theory of the offensive,” though Stalin was of course the other full member of the Russian PB at the time.
6. Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914-1924 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1966), 227, citing Rapport du Secrétariat International (1921?), 3-4. Lenin’s speech to this Plenum is not included in the English-language 4th edition of the Collected Works or in the Russian-language 5th edition.
7. Zetkin, op. cit., 24-25. For evidence of the agreement in the Russian delegation see Jan M. Meijer, ed., The Trotsky Papers 1917-1922, vol. II (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), Documents 700, 701, 703-705, pp. 467-479. Werner T. Angress refers to the evident Russian agreement in Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 1921-1923 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 176-177.
8. V.I. Lenin, “Speech in Defence of the Tactics of the Communist International,” CW vol. 32, 468-477.
9. V.I. Lenin, “Remarks on the Draft Theses on Tactics for the Third Congress of the Communist International,” CW vol. 42, 319-323. In this letter to Zinoviev, Lenin says: “All those who have failed to grasp the necessity of the Open Letter tactic should be expelled from the Communist International within a month after its Third Congress.”
10. V.I. Lenin, “Letter to O.W. Kuusinen,” CW vol. 42, 317.
11. V.I. Lenin, “To G.Y. Zinoviev,” CW vol. 45, 185-186.
12. Koenen was not appointed to the ECCI or re-elected to the VKPD’s Zentralausschuß following the Congress. However, he remained a real leader of the German Party through its Stalinist degeneration, serving on and off on the party’s leading committee until 1953 when he was censured and removed as head of the party organization in Saxony. He died, an East German “elder statesman,” in 1963. See Branko Lazitch and Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, rev. ed. (Stanford, Cal.: The Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 222.
13. Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Vereinigungsparteitages der U.S.P.D. (Linke) und der KPD (Spartakusbund) (Berlin: Frankes Verlag, G.m.b.H., 1921), 108-121.
14. A copy of the draft Resolution exists in French translation in the Library of the Institute Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan: O.W. Kuusinen and W. Koenen, Thèses sur la structure et l’organisation des partis communistes (Moscow: Section de la Presse de l’Internationale Communiste, 1921).
15. For a list of the membership of the ECCI and the Smaller Bureau, see Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International 1919-1943: Documents, vol. I (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 453-454.
16. “On the Character and Organizational Forms of Party Work,” resolution adopted by the 1912 Prague Conference of the RSDLP, in The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 1898-October 1917, ed. Ralph Carter Elwood, vol. I of Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, general ed. Robert H. McNeal (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1974), 149.
17. Marcel Fourrier, Francis Gérard and Pierre Naville, “Sur l’organisation du parti,” theses appended to “Lettre au 6e Congrès mondial de l’Internationale communiste,” dated 1 July 1928 and published in Pierre Naville, L’Entre-deux guerres: La lutte des classes en France 1927-1939 (Paris: Etudes et Documentation Internationales, 1975), 62. Translation by PRL.
Pierre Naville and Francis Gérard (better known as Gérard Rosenthal) were from the time of their expulsion from the Communist Party until WWII leading figures in the Trotskyist movement in France.
18. Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 503. After their expulsion Fischer and her compatriot Arkadi Maslow formed the German Leninbund, maintaining a sort of pseudo-leftist, maneuverist brand of politics into the early 1930s. They took refuge in Paris after Hitler came to power, and Fischer passed briefly through the Trotskyist movement in the mid-1930s. She spent most of WWII in the United States and died in Paris in 1961.
19. “The Life and Work of V.I. Lenin, Outstanding Dates (August 1921-January 1924),” in CW vol. 33, 555.
20. Alfred Rosmer, Lenin’s Moscow (London: Pluto Press, 1971), 169.
21. Lenin’s “Letter to the Congress” is printed in CW vol. 36, 593-597. The notes for Lenin’s speech to the Fourth Congress can be found in the same volume, 585-587.
22. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, vol. 3 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953), 393. In the same vein see also Rosmer, op. cit., 170 and to a lesser extent Degras, op. cit., 257.
23. V.I. Lenin, “Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution,” CW vol. 33, 430-432.
24. Leopold Trepper, The Great Game: Memoirs of the Spy Hitler Couldn’t Silence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 55-56. Trepper was won to Communism in Poland (in his words) “in the glow of October.” He attended Comintern school in Moscow, eventually joining Soviet Intelligence. As he wrote, “Between the hammer of Hitler and the anvil of Stalin, the path was a narrow one for those of us who still believed in the Revolution.”
After his heroic service in WWII, Trepper arrived in Moscow only to be imprisoned for ten years in Lubianka. Freed after Stalin’s death, Trepper returned to Poland where, in the early 1970s, he was the victim of an anti-Semitic campaign by the Stalinists. He was allowed to leave Poland in 1973 only after an international campaign of protest. He died in 1982.
25. On the Stalinists in Spain see, e.g., the material in Revolutionary History (London) vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1988).
In the history of the communist movement, since right from the days of Marx and Engels, the question of the organization of the revolution has been intermingled with all the political questions associated with that struggle. For anarchists and others the organization question is sealed with seven seals (or more) but for those of us who stand in the early Bolshevik tradition handed down from the Russian revolution in 1917 it is key. And that question is linked up, sealed up, if you like, with the notion of a vanguard party. These documents and reports from the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921 are a codification of that experience. For those who think that international imperialism, led by the American monster, will crumble on its own, or worst, can be just patched up brand new with a little tweaking don’t read this material, all other read and re-read this stuff until your eyes are sore.
*******
Report on Organisation, Comintern 1921
Translator’s Introduction
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Written: by Prometheus Research Library.
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We are proud to publish what appears to be the only complete and accurate English translation of the final text of “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work,” and “Resolution on the Organization of the Communist International,” both Resolutions adopted by the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921. In addition we publish as appendices, also for the first time to our knowledge, English translations of the German stenographic record of the reports on and discussion of these Resolutions at the 22nd and 24th sessions of the Congress.
“Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” is one of the great documents of the international communist movement, standing as the codification of communist organizational practice as it was forged by the Bolsheviks and tested in the light of the world’s first successful proletarian revolution. The Third Congress of the Communist International systematized the Russian Bolshevik experience for the fledgling international communist movement, producing both the Organizational Resolution and the “Theses on Tactics” and serving, in the words of Leon Trotsky, as “the highest school of revolutionary strategy.”[1]
The Third Congress met in Moscow from 22 June to 12 July 1921 when the revolutionary wave which had swept Europe in the wake of World War I had nearly receded. The lack of steeled and tested communist parties had proved decisive to the defeat of proletarian revolutions in Germany, Hungary and in part in Italy. The international Social Democracy, reorganized as the Amsterdam-based Second International and still claiming the allegiance of substantial proletarian forces, had shown itself to be for the time an indispensable tool of bourgeois rule. By 1921 a certain temporary stability had been reimposed on the capitalist world: the ruling classes of Europe had learned some lessons from the Russian Bolshevik victory.
The young and untested communist parties still had to learn their lessons from the victory of the Bolsheviks. The left wing of world Social Democracy, as well as a significant section of the revolutionary syndicalist movement, had been won to the communist banner under the impact of the October Revolution. By 1921 large communist parties existed in many countries, but many were “communist” in little more than name, harboring centrist leaders who had followed their membership into the new International only reluctantly. The “Conditions of Admission to the Communist International” (more popularly known as the Twenty-One Conditions) were adopted by the Comintern’s Second Congress in an attempt to separate out this centrist chaff and make the new parties break both programmatically and organizationally with the reformists. The Twenty-One Conditions established democratic centralism as the organizational basis for the Communist International. Yet democratic-centralist organizational norms were only lightly sketched by the Second Congress, which met in July 1920 in the midst of immense revolutionary ferment. Earlier that year the Red Army had turned back the invading Polish Army of Marshal Pilsudski, and as the Congress opened Soviet troops stood at the gates of Warsaw. It was the hope and expectation of the Soviet government and of the Congress delegates (who closely followed the Red Army’s progress on a map in the Congress hall) that the Red Army’s advance would spark a proletarian revolution in Poland. This would have moved the proletarian revolution west to the borders of Germany, with its still unfinished revolutionary developments. Unfortunately this hope proved unfounded and the Third Congress had to take stock of a more somber world situation.
In “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” the Third Congress expanded upon the organizational norms laid out by the Second Congress. V.I. Lenin explained the purpose and importance of this Organizational Resolution in a letter to the German Communists written shortly after the Third Congress completed its work:
In my opinion, the tactical and organisational resolutions of the Third Congress of the Communist International mark a great step forward. Every effort must be exerted to really put both resolutions into effect. This is a difficult matter, but it can and should be done.
First, the Communists had to proclaim their principles to the world. That was done at the First Congress. It was the first step.
The second step was to give the Communist International organisational form and to draw up conditions for affiliation to it-conditions making for real separation from the Centrists, from the direct and indirect agents of the bourgeoisie within the working-class movement. That was done at the Second Congress.
At the Third Congress it was necessary to start practical, constructive work, to determine concretely, taking account of the practical experience of the communist struggle already begun, exactly what the line of further activity should be in respect of tactics and of organisation. We have taken this third step. We have an army of Communists all over the world. It is still poorly trained and poorly organised. It would be extremely harmful to forget this truth or be afraid of admitting it. Submitting ourselves to a most careful and rigorous test, and studying the experience of our own movement, we must train this army efficiently; we must organise it properly, and test it in all sorts of manoeuvres, all sorts of battles, in attack and in retreat. We cannot win without this long and hard schooling....
In the overwhelming majority of countries, our parties are still very far from being what real Communist Parties should be; they are far from being real vanguards of the genuinely revolutionary and only revolutionary class, with every single member taking part in the struggle, in the movement, in the everyday life of the masses. But we are aware of this defect, we brought it out most strikingly in the Third Congress resolution on the work of the Party.[2]
In fact Lenin played a major role in the drafting of the Organizational Resolution and can rightly be called its ideological author: the Finnish Communist Otto W. Kuusinen wrote the text under Lenin’s direction, sending him the first draft on 6 June 1921. Lenin made detailed suggestions for reworking this draft and all Lenin’s suggested additions, itemized in a letter to Kuusinen written on 10 June, were subsequently incorporated into the Resolution’s final text. According to the editors of the Collected Works, Lenin also read a second draft of the Resolution sent to him in mid-June, before approving yet another draft on 9 July, the day before the Resolution was first discussed by the Congress.[3]
At that point Lenin suggested two additions to the draft Resolution and these number among the revisions made by the Commission on Organization and finally adopted by the Congress on 12 July. Yet the Commission on Organization made a number of other changes to the text approved by Lenin-in particular a whole new section, “On the Organization of Political Struggles,” was added. To understand the reason for this addition one has to understand the major political disputes that took place at the Third Congress. In the first instance these revolved around the recent tactics of the United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD)-the infamous “March Action.”
By 1921 the VKPD had won a following among the coal miners of Mansfeld in central Germany, which was then the country’s center of labor militancy. Strikes and plant occupations swept the region; on 16 March the government deliberately provoked the workers by sending in troops and police. The VKPD responded with a call for armed resistance—a quasi-insurrectionary call. While the workers of Mansfeld fought heroically, if sporadically, in the rest of Germany the VKPD’s call was for the most part unheeded. Yet instead of seeking to retreat in good order, the VKPD made matters worse by calling for a general strike. Isolated strikes by VKPD supporters ensued, and they were easy targets for bourgeois repression. The casualties were very high and a number of VKPD leaders were arrested. Within three months, the VKPD membership dropped by half.
The Comintern had sent the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun (leader of the failed 1919 Revolution in Hungary) to Germany early in March and Kun’s insistence that a communist party always be on the offensive against the bourgeoisie (the so-called “theory of the offensive”) played no small role in inspiring the 1921 “March Action.” Given the disastrous events in Germany, both Lenin and Trotsky saw in Kun’s false “left” current a mortal danger to the future of the Communist International and they resolved to wage a fight against this adventurist current at the Third Congress. According to Clara Zetkin, the leading opponent of the leftists in the German party, before the opening of the Third Congress Lenin spoke to her on the “theory of the offensive” in the following terms:
Is it a theory anyway? Not at all, it is an illusion, it is romanticism, sheer romanticism. That is why it was manufactured in the “land of poets and thinkers,” with the help of my dear Bela, who also belongs to a poetically gifted nation and feels himself obliged to be always more left than the left. We must not versify and dream. We must observe the world economic and political situation soberly, quite soberly, if we wish to take up the struggle against the bourgeoisie and to triumph.[4]
However in the Political Bureau (PB) of the Russian party Grigori Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin (the latter a candidate member) originally supported Kun and failed to see the danger that the adventurist theory posed to the young Communist International. While full documentation of the Political Bureau dispute on this question awaits the opening of the archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, we do have Trotsky’s account:[5] Lenin obtained Lev Kamenev’s support for his and Trotsky’s position, thus securing a majority against the “left” on the five-man PB. However, in the Russian delegation to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) Karl Radek, along with Zinoviev and Bukharin, generally supported the “left.” Trotsky and Lenin drew Kamenev into meetings of the Russian ECCI delegation, though Kamenev was not formally an ECCI member. Trotsky reports that, for a period of time, the two opposing sides met in separate caucuses, indicating a pre-factional situation. The seriousness with which Lenin viewed the situation is clear from his remarks to a meeting of the ECCI which preceded the Third Congress: “But if the Left succeeded in making Béla Kun’s views prevail, that would destroy Communism.”[6]
In the end, however, the members of the Russian delegation apparently came to some agreement among themselves, compromising on the “Theses on Tactics” and for the most part presenting a united face to the Congress. Clara Zetkin says that, prior to the Congress, Lenin lectured her on the necessity of being lenient with the “left."[7] While Lenin spoke against the “theory of the offensive” on the floor of the Congress, for the most part the battle took place in the various Commissions which met in conjunction with the Congress.[8] The compromise formulations adopted in the various resolutions allowed the “left” to save face.
While combatting a real danger on the left, Lenin and Trotsky also had to wage battles against the centrist elements which were still influential in many parties: the sorting-out process initiated by the Twenty-One Conditions had only just begun. The Congress confirmed the expulsion of VKPD leader Paul Levi, who had publicly and slanderously denounced the party’s course in March as a “Bakuninist putsch” (point 51 of the Organizational Resolution, on party discipline, was obviously written—and amended by the Congress—with Levi in mind). On the “March Action” there was a compromise. While condemning the tactical errors of the VKPD, the “Theses on Tactics” also described the “March Action” as a step forward insofar as it represented the heroic response of a section of the German working class, fighting under communist leadership, to an overt provocation by the bourgeois state. Yet Lenin also insisted that the “Theses on Tactics” firmly endorse Levi’s attempt to apply united-front tactics to Germany-the “Open Letter,” which Levi had authored (with help from Radek) before his expulsion and which had been widely denounced as “opportunist” in the German party.[9] The Open Letter, printed in Die Rote Fahne on 8 January 1921, had proposed joint actions of all German working-class organizations (including the Social Democrats) against the bourgeoisie’s attacks on the pitiful living standards of the German proletariat.
With Germany still very unstable and the German party one of the largest in the Comintern, the perspective of world revolution reduced itself in the first instance to the perspective of a German revolution. Lenin was especially concerned that the German party overcome Kun’s adventuristic pseudo-leftism: the “March Action” fiasco had clearly demonstrated that the party had very little idea of how to win leadership of the majority of the working class away from the defenders of the bourgeois order in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), part of the “yellow” Second International based in Amsterdam.
The party had to find the road to the masses. And the VKPD wasn’t the only party in the International in need of guidance on this question. Most parties had to overcome the paralyzing effects of the social-democratic organizational forms that they had inherited with their membership. Thus the Organizational Resolution explains in extensive, sometimes painful, detail the means for forging the reciprocal ties between the party leadership and the membership, and between the membership and the class, which would allow the communists to involve all their members in ongoing work and prove themselves the best leaders of the proletariat in action. As Lenin wrote in his 10 June letter to Kuusinen:
There is no everyday work (revolutionary work) by every member of the Party.
This is the chief drawback.
To change this is the most difficult job of all.
But this is the most important.[10]
In this letter Lenin urged Kuusinen to find a “real German” comrade to improve the German text of the Resolution and read Kuusinen’s report to the Congress. On 11 June Lenin wrote urgently to Zinoviev to make the same point:
I have just read Kuusinen’s theses and one-half of the article (the report)....
I do insist that he and he alone ((i.e., not Béla Kun)) should be allowed to give a report at this congress without fail.
This is necessary.
He knows and thinks (was sehr selten ist unter den Revolutionären)
([which is a great rarity among revolutionaries])
What needs to be done right away is to find one German, a real one, and give him strict instructions
to make stylistic corrections at once,
and dictate the corrected text to a typist.
And at the congress read out for Kuusinen his article-report....
The German will read it out well. The benefit will be enormous.[11]
Thus it was that at the last moment Wilhelm Koenen of the VKPD was drawn into the redrafting of the Resolution. It was Koenen who gave the reports on the Organizational Resolution to the 22nd and 24th sessions of the Third Congress. Koenen had recently come over to the Communists with the Left Wing of the Independent Socialist Party of Germany (USPD) and had given the organizational report at the founding conference of the VKPD in December 1920. Arriving in Moscow in early 1921, Koenen had been co-opted onto the “Smaller Bureau” (Presidium) of the ECCI.[12]
Koenen was certainly a “real German"-and also a supporter of the “theory of the offensive.” In the Report he delivered to the Congress on 10 July (Appendix A, “Report on the Organization Question”) Koenen quotes Béla Kun favorably at least six times and never even mentions Otto Kuusinen or Lenin, the actual authors of the Resolution. Koenen’s opening remarks repeat many of the points that he made in his report to the founding conference of the VKPD.[13] Thus it would appear that the report delivered by Koenen to the Third Congress was not precisely the one prepared by Kuusinen and endorsed by Lenin in his letter to Zinoviev.
Koenen spends the bulk of his Report detailing a number of changes made to the draft Resolution and he explicates some of the Resolution’s points, stressing, for example, the importance of building ties with the revolutionary syndicalist shop stewards movements which then existed in a number of European countries (Koenen had been active in the shop stewards movement in Germany while a leader of the USPD). Yet over half of Koenen’s Report is spent explaining the new section of the Resolution. While Koenen gives lip service to Levi’s “Open Letter,” it is clear from his Report that he viewed this new section, which was incorporated into the final text of the Resolution in a slightly modified form (Section V—“On the Organization of Political Struggles”), as a partial justification of Kun’s “offensive” tactics. Indeed Section V—a highly organizational and hence confused rendition of points better made in the “Theses on Tactics"-is written more turgidly and with much less political depth than the rest of the Organizational Resolution. This section does not appear in the published draft of the Resolution and it is doubtful that it was distributed to the delegates before being introduced to the Congress; we have found no evidence that it was seen by Lenin.[14]
In his 10 July Report Koenen also introduced a Resolution on the Organization of the Communist International. This Resolution, which calls for the strengthening of the Comintern’s Executive Committee, was written at the suggestion of the VKPD delegation. The Congress referred both the draft Organizational Resolution and this new Resolution on the Communist International to a Commission on Organization, which was to meet in two subcommittees the following day.
The Commission on Organization met on 11 July under considerable pressure-they had only one day to make revisions before reporting back to the 24th and final session of the Congress. They made many minor additions and changes to the Resolution, but it is unlikely that by the opening of the 24th session they were able to produce a new printed version incorporating all their changes—even a text in German, which was the language of the draft Resolution and the main language used on the floor of the Congress. Koenen’s report to the 24th session implies that only the change in the section on democratic centralism was available to the delegates. In any event the Congress adopted the Organizational Resolution in this last session as it had been amended by the Commission, including the new section proposed by Koenen. With the Congress now over, the Comintern’s production apparatus must have been under considerable strain to produce the various language texts of the final Resolution before the delegates left Moscow.
It is thus not surprising that there exist discrepancies between the various language versions of the Organizational Resolution and of the Resolution on the Communist International. The stenographic record of the Congress provides the only guide as to the definitive text of these Resolutions, which is why we have appended a translation of the relevant portions of the German-language stenographic report of the Congress.
One provision of the Resolution on the Organization of the Communist International engendered a heated debate at the 24th session, resulting in the only roll-call vote at the Third Congress (see Appendix B). The dispute arose over the composition of the Presidium (at the time called the Smaller Bureau) of the Comintern’s Executive Committee. Point 5 of the draft Resolution allowed the ECCI to co-opt non-ECCI members to its Smaller Bureau. Boris Souvarine, a French delegate speaking in the name of the French, Spanish, Swiss, Yugoslav, Austrian and Australian delegations, opposed this co-option provision. He proposed an amendment limiting Smaller Bureau membership to elected members of the ECCI. Souvarine’s amendment may have been a maneuver against the supporters of the “theory of the offensive”: the only non-ECCI members of the Smaller Bureau at the time were Béla Kun and Koenen himself.[15] Radek, speaking in the name of the entire Russian delegation, vehemently opposed Souvarine’s amendment on the grounds that it did not give the ECCI adequate flexibility. The amendment failed. At that point Zinoviev stepped in with a proposal for a “compromise” which allowed the ECCI to co-opt non-ECCI members to the Smaller Bureau only as an “exception.” Zinoviev’s compromise formulation was adopted overwhelmingly.
We have translated the Resolutions from the German text of the Third Congress Theses published in Hamburg in 1921, the only version which contains Zinoviev’s compromise formulation in the Resolution on the Organization of the CI (see “A Note on the Translation”).
There appears to be one other issue of major controversy relating to the Organizational Resolution at the Third Congress. In Koenen’s Report to the 22nd session (Appendix A, “Report on the Organization Question”), he mentions “certain differences—which, I believe, still cannot be definitively resolved at this Congress—over whether from now on the organizations can finally be built on cells in the factories, as the basis of the organizations.” Koenen goes on to imply that trade-union “cells” would be preferable to “working groups” based on district, or territorial, forms of party organization. Since the bureaucratizing Zinoviev-Stalin faction, and then later the anti-revolutionary Stalin faction, distorted this concept in the direction implied by Koenen, it is worth quoting in full the key provisions of the 1921 Organizational Resolution:
11. In order to carry out daily party work, every party member should as a rule always be part of a smaller working group—a group, a committee, a commission, a board or a collegium, a fraction or cell. Only in this way can party work be properly allocated, directed and carried out.
Participation in the general membership meetings of the local organizations also goes without saying. Under conditions of legality it is not wise to choose to substitute meetings of local delegates for these periodic membership meetings; on the contrary, all members must be required to attend these meetings regularly....
12. Communist nuclei are to be formed for day-to-day work in different areas of party activity: for door-to-door agitation, for party studies, for press work, for literature distribution, for intelligence-gathering, communications, etc.
Communist cells are nuclei for daily communist work in plants and workshops, in trade unions, in workers cooperatives, in military units, etc.—wherever there are at least a few members or candidate members of the Communist Party. If there are several party members in the same plant or trade union, etc., then the cell is expanded into a fraction whose work is directed by the nucleus.
This concept of a disciplined communist working group, variously called a fraction, cell or nucleus-the link between the party and the broad working masses-is key to the Organizational Resolution. In its advocacy of disciplined communist working groups functioning in conjunction with party branches organized on a territorial basis, the Third Congress Resolution follows the organizational norms evolved by the Bolsheviks for work in prerevolutionary Russia:
2. it is desirable that Social Democratic cells in trade unions, which are organized along occupational lines, should function wherever local conditions permit in conjunction with party branches organized on a territorial basis....[16]
In contrast to the resolutions of the later Stalinized Comintern, the Third Congress Organizational Resolution does not require that communist parties abolish all territorial forms of organization and base themselves solely on “cells” in the plants, factories and enterprises. We should note that, given Lenin’s role in the drafting of the Resolution, this could hardly have been an accidental oversight or a misformulation.
The exclusive “occupational cell” form of organization was adopted by the Russian party only in December 1919, i.e., only when it had become the ruling party of the Soviet state, struggling to maintain its proletarian character under Civil War conditions in a largely peasant country. In contrast to the Russian party’s 1919 usage the Third Congress Organizational Resolution, like the Second Congress resolution “Theses on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution” and the Twenty-One Conditions, uses the term “cell” to mean a specific kind of working group-a communist nucleus working in any non-party workers organization.
Only in January 1924, the month Lenin died, did the ECCI issue its first instructions that all parties organize themselves solely on the basis of factory “cells.” At first these instructions remained a dead letter in most parties. However, in the summer of 1924 the Fifth Comintern Congress declared “Bolshevization” of the various national parties to be the most important task of the coming period. After the Fifth Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI in March-April 1925 the “Bolshevization” campaign began in earnest, and it became synonymous with the Comintern’s insistence that all parties divide up their membership, at least on paper, into “cells”—small, easily controlled units. Large territorial membership meetings became rare occurrences—when they were held these meetings became rubber stamps for the expulsion of oppositionists rather than forums for open political debate. Three oppositionists expelled from the French Communist Party in May 1928 described the chaotic reorganization process and the bureaucratization which resulted:
The “Bolshevization” of the party...consisted of officially suppressing the locals and replacing them by artificially creating-on paper only-factory cells, district cells and regional cells. The immediate result of this substitution was to drive thousands of militants away from the party, leaving most of the rest in a state of disarray and totally paralyzing the others by imposing a regime of centralism that was not democratic but bureaucratic, and which wiped out any control by the base of the party over its leadership-resulting in the creation of a veritable caste of functionaries at every level in the party, which gradually substituted for the party itself.[17]
“Bolshevization” proved a very useful organizational device for the Stalinist bureaucratic caste as it obtained its precarious (but still maintained) victory. First the maneuverist Comintern leadership of Zinoviev-Stalin, and then the right-wing faction of Bukharin-Stalin, removed and installed leaderships in the various national parties. In the end all parties had “leaders” whose principal recommendation was slavish loyalty to Stalin’s dictates. Ruth Fischer, an ultraleftist who was installed as the Zinovievite leader of the German party in 1924 (and then expelled from the party in 1926, after Zinoviev had broken with Stalin and formed the Leningrad Opposition), described the process by which the “cell” structure was used to eliminate democratic norms in the German party:
Under the slogan, “Concentrate party work in the factories,” the old stratification of the party into regional assemblies, with town groups and factory cells within the framework of the regional groups, was liquidated. The System Pieck was introduced; party units larger than one single factory cell were formally prohibited, and even large factory cells were split into smaller units of no more than ten to fifteen members. The party was atomized; every coherent group of militants was disintegrated. Convention delegates were thrice screened: first small cell groups elected representatives; these representatives elected delegates to a regional party convention; and only this regional convention had the right finally to elect delegates to the Reich congress.[18]
With the imposition of the exclusive “cell” organization the Stalinized Comintern in fact revived the old social-democratic dichotomy between passive members and active leaders-an evil that the Organizational Resolution had been written to overcome.
* * *
At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in November-December 1922, Lenin repeatedly stressed the significance of the Organizational Resolution adopted by the Third Congress. According to the editors of Lenin’s Collected Works, throughout November Lenin had “a series of talks with delegates to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International on the organisational pattern of Communist Parties and on the methods and content of their work.”[19] In his only public speech to the Congress, on 13 November, Lenin again spoke about the Organizational Resolution. This was almost the last public speech of his life—he spoke publicly only once more, to the Moscow Soviet on 20 November. It was a major physical effort for Lenin to make his last intervention into the political life of the Communist International: in the words of one Congress delegate Lenin appeared “deeply marked by paralysis.”[20] His speech was by no means an off-the-cuff presentation. Lenin had prepared notes and he stuck to his outline, correcting the German transcript of his remarks at a later date. If Lenin’s December 1922 “Letter to the Congress” is rightly regarded as his last “Testament” to the Russian Bolsheviks, so his last words to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International can be taken with equal seriousness to be his last testament to the international communist movement.[21]
Lenin’s Fourth Congress remarks on the Organizational Resolution are often misrepresented—E.H. Carr, for example, states that Lenin “attacked” the Resolution.[22] On the contrary, Lenin spoke to the urgent necessity of the parties understanding and implementing the Resolution, and his remarks remain today the best testimony as to the crucial significance of “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of the Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” for the international communist movement:
At the Third Congress, in 1921, we adopted a resolution on the organisational structure of the Communist Parties and on the methods and content of their activities. The resolution is an excellent one, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is based on Russian conditions. This is its good point, but it is also its failing. It is its failing because I am sure that no foreigner can read it. I have read it again before saying this. In the first place, it is too long, containing fifty or more points. Foreigners are not usually able to read such things. Secondly, even if they read it, they will not understand it because it is too Russian. Not because it is written in Russian—it has been excellently translated into all languages—but because it is thoroughly imbued with the Russian spirit. And thirdly, if by way of exception some foreigner does understand it, he cannot carry it out. This is its third defect. I have talked with a few of the foreign delegates and hope to discuss matters in detail with a large number of delegates from different countries during the Congress, although I shall not take part in its proceedings, for unfortunately it is impossible for me to do that. I have the impression that we made a big mistake with this resolution, namely, that we blocked our own road to further success. As I have said already, the resolution is excellently drafted; I am prepared to subscribe to every one of its fifty or more points. But we have not learnt how to present our Russian experience to foreigners. All that was said in the resolution has remained a dead letter. If we do not realise this, we shall be unable to move ahead. I think that after five years of the Russian revolution the most important thing for all of us, Russian and foreign comrades alike, is to sit down and study. We have only now obtained the opportunity to do so. I do not know how long this opportunity will last. I do not know for how long the capitalist powers will give us the opportunity to study in peace. But we must take advantage of every moment of respite from fighting, from war, to study, and to study from scratch....
That resolution must be carried out. It cannot be carried out overnight; that is absolutely impossible. The resolution is too Russian, it reflects Russian experience. That is why it is quite unintelligible to foreigners, and they cannot be content with hanging it in a corner like an icon and praying to it. Nothing will be achieved that way. They must assimilate part of the Russian experience. Just how that will be done, I do not know. The fascists in Italy may, for example, render us a great service by showing the Italians that they are not yet sufficiently enlightened and that their country is not yet ensured against the Black Hundreds. Perhaps this will be very useful. We Russians must also find ways and means of explaining the principles of this resolution to the foreigners. Unless we do that, it will be absolutely impossible for them to carry it out. I am sure that in this connection we must tell not only the Russians, but the foreign comrades as well, that the most important thing in the period we are now entering is to study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense, in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that, I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will be not only good, but excellent.[23]
The Organizational Resolution fully embodied Lenin’s final understanding of the means and ways to shape a “communist party” into an authentic revolutionary workers vanguard. Lenin dealt centrally with the case of mass “communist parties” that were still partially digested former social-democratic parties or large components of such parties. In particular he centered on the mass German party—the VKPD—which had resulted after a large majority of the Independent Socialists (USPD) voted to fuse with the Communists at the Halle Congress in October 1920.
“Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” cannot be seen in any way as separate from the working political program of the Communist International in the time of Lenin and Trotsky. Hence the Resolution must be taken together with such defining political documents as Lenin’s 1920 “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder and Trotsky’s Lessons of October (1924). Behind both of these works stands Lenin’s profound and illuminating The State and Revolution written in 1917 (the balance of material from that interrupted work was used somewhat differently in Lenin’s 1918 The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky).
Few declared Marxists, aside from those with an anarcho-syndicalist bent, have taken issue with Lenin’s“Left-Wing” Communism. However, many of those who reject the Comintern founders’ vision of world revolution take issue with Trotsky’s Lessons of October. These revisionists see a revolutionary outcome of the German crisis of 1923 as—at best—improbable. They also dismiss or ignore the revolutionary potential in Bulgaria in 1923, Estonia in 1924, Poland in 1926 (the Pilsudski coup), England in 1926, and the profound revolutionary developments in China in 1925-27. Trotsky’s “lessons” were meant as a warning and a guide for precisely such revolutionary, or pre-revolutionary, situations. Revisionists of Leninism-Trotskyism are always quick to note that none of these situations was brought to a revolutionary conclusion. Such skeptics are at one with the post-Leninist Comintern which only postured and mechanically played at revolution, ensuring the outcome not of mere failure, but of defeat.
With the benefit of almost 70 years of hindsight we can say that “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” has stood the test of time. We might note certain omissions—the Resolution lacks, for example, any mention of the necessity for communists in many parts of the world to compete with nationalists for leadership of the struggle for social liberation (the Comintern was already grappling with the issue of nationalism in the colonial East at the Second Congress). But the Resolution was written for Western Europe, particularly Germany, and here nationalism played a reactionary, more or less fascist, role.
One can hardly fault the Resolution for failing to insist on one of the touchstones of pre-Civil War Bolshevik organizational practice—the right of communists to debate, and run for leadership on the basis of, counterposed political platforms (factional rights). The delegates to the Third Congress could not have anticipated the rise of the bureaucratic caste which would usurp political power in the Soviet Union, using for its own purposes the temporary banning of factions which had been adopted as an emergency measure by the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party in March 1921. This bureaucratic caste, led by Stalin, strangled the revolutionary Communist International, abandoning the struggle for world proletarian revolution in favor of the reactionary/utopian program of building “socialism in one country.”
It was the Trotskyists who retained the revolutionary program which had armed the Communist International under Lenin. Thus it was left to them to fight the rise of Stalinism. Leopold Trepper, Polish Jewish Communist and heroic leader of the Red Orchestra Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied West Europe, paid tribute to the Trotskyists, who fought Stalin because they continued to fight for world proletarian revolution:
Who rose up to voice his outrage?
The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honor. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did. By the time of the great purges, they could only shout their rebellion in the freezing wastelands where they had been dragged in order to be exterminated. In the camps, their conduct was admirable. But their voices were lost in the tundra.
Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not “confess,” for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.[24]
At the end of World War II numerous countries faced revolutionary opportunities, but these were either stillborn or bureaucratically deformed. Since the Spanish Civil War, desperate international imperialism no longer had to rely simply on the decrepit Social Democracy of the Second International.[25] Counterrevolution had a powerful new ally in the thoroughly Stalinized parties who used the enormous prestige of the Red Army’s victory over Nazism and their own role in the anti-Nazi resistance in Western Europe to derail the revolutionary upsurge through their universal strategy of building “popular fronts” with sections of the bourgeoisie. By the time the Comintern itself was officially dissolved in 1943 the Stalinist parties were thoroughly reformist-social democrats of the second mobilization.
The programmatic material, both political and organizational, of the Communist International of Lenin’s time is the concentrated expression of that leadership which did see the Russian Revolution through its many vicissitudes to victory. This material ought, therefore, to be powerfully educative for those in later generations who aspire through necessary social struggle to win socialism on this planet. The highest embodiment of the systematic formulation of the structure and work of Leninist communist parties is found in the Third Congress Resolution here presented, and this formulation stands on the same plane of importance as any of the main political aims of the Communist International. Without the systematic discipline and implementation Lenin called for, the great goals of the movement remain abstract and unobtainable in practice.
Prometheus Research Library
August 1988
Notes
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1. Leon Trotsky, “The School of Revolutionary Strategy” (Speech at a General Party Membership Meeting of the Moscow Organization, July 1921), in The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. II (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1953), 8.
2. V.I. Lenin, “A Letter to the German Communists,” Collected Works (CW), 4th ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960-1970), vol. 32, 519-523.
3. See V.I. Lenin, “Letter to O.W. Kuusinen” and “Letter to O.W. Kuusinen and W. Koenen,” CW vol. 42, 316-318 and 318-319; see also note 368, pp. 567-568.
4. Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 23.
5. Leon Trotsky, “Letter to the Bureau of Party History,” dated 21 October 1927 and circulated by hand in the Soviet Union. This letter was first published in English in The Real Situation in Russia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928); the section on the Third Congress appears on pp. 246-250. Trotsky’s letter was also published in a selection of his works entitled The Stalin School of Falsification (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1937). Trotsky makes no mention of Stalin’s position on the “theory of the offensive,” though Stalin was of course the other full member of the Russian PB at the time.
6. Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914-1924 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1966), 227, citing Rapport du Secrétariat International (1921?), 3-4. Lenin’s speech to this Plenum is not included in the English-language 4th edition of the Collected Works or in the Russian-language 5th edition.
7. Zetkin, op. cit., 24-25. For evidence of the agreement in the Russian delegation see Jan M. Meijer, ed., The Trotsky Papers 1917-1922, vol. II (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), Documents 700, 701, 703-705, pp. 467-479. Werner T. Angress refers to the evident Russian agreement in Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 1921-1923 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 176-177.
8. V.I. Lenin, “Speech in Defence of the Tactics of the Communist International,” CW vol. 32, 468-477.
9. V.I. Lenin, “Remarks on the Draft Theses on Tactics for the Third Congress of the Communist International,” CW vol. 42, 319-323. In this letter to Zinoviev, Lenin says: “All those who have failed to grasp the necessity of the Open Letter tactic should be expelled from the Communist International within a month after its Third Congress.”
10. V.I. Lenin, “Letter to O.W. Kuusinen,” CW vol. 42, 317.
11. V.I. Lenin, “To G.Y. Zinoviev,” CW vol. 45, 185-186.
12. Koenen was not appointed to the ECCI or re-elected to the VKPD’s Zentralausschuß following the Congress. However, he remained a real leader of the German Party through its Stalinist degeneration, serving on and off on the party’s leading committee until 1953 when he was censured and removed as head of the party organization in Saxony. He died, an East German “elder statesman,” in 1963. See Branko Lazitch and Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, rev. ed. (Stanford, Cal.: The Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 222.
13. Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Vereinigungsparteitages der U.S.P.D. (Linke) und der KPD (Spartakusbund) (Berlin: Frankes Verlag, G.m.b.H., 1921), 108-121.
14. A copy of the draft Resolution exists in French translation in the Library of the Institute Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan: O.W. Kuusinen and W. Koenen, Thèses sur la structure et l’organisation des partis communistes (Moscow: Section de la Presse de l’Internationale Communiste, 1921).
15. For a list of the membership of the ECCI and the Smaller Bureau, see Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International 1919-1943: Documents, vol. I (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 453-454.
16. “On the Character and Organizational Forms of Party Work,” resolution adopted by the 1912 Prague Conference of the RSDLP, in The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 1898-October 1917, ed. Ralph Carter Elwood, vol. I of Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, general ed. Robert H. McNeal (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1974), 149.
17. Marcel Fourrier, Francis Gérard and Pierre Naville, “Sur l’organisation du parti,” theses appended to “Lettre au 6e Congrès mondial de l’Internationale communiste,” dated 1 July 1928 and published in Pierre Naville, L’Entre-deux guerres: La lutte des classes en France 1927-1939 (Paris: Etudes et Documentation Internationales, 1975), 62. Translation by PRL.
Pierre Naville and Francis Gérard (better known as Gérard Rosenthal) were from the time of their expulsion from the Communist Party until WWII leading figures in the Trotskyist movement in France.
18. Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 503. After their expulsion Fischer and her compatriot Arkadi Maslow formed the German Leninbund, maintaining a sort of pseudo-leftist, maneuverist brand of politics into the early 1930s. They took refuge in Paris after Hitler came to power, and Fischer passed briefly through the Trotskyist movement in the mid-1930s. She spent most of WWII in the United States and died in Paris in 1961.
19. “The Life and Work of V.I. Lenin, Outstanding Dates (August 1921-January 1924),” in CW vol. 33, 555.
20. Alfred Rosmer, Lenin’s Moscow (London: Pluto Press, 1971), 169.
21. Lenin’s “Letter to the Congress” is printed in CW vol. 36, 593-597. The notes for Lenin’s speech to the Fourth Congress can be found in the same volume, 585-587.
22. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, vol. 3 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953), 393. In the same vein see also Rosmer, op. cit., 170 and to a lesser extent Degras, op. cit., 257.
23. V.I. Lenin, “Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution,” CW vol. 33, 430-432.
24. Leopold Trepper, The Great Game: Memoirs of the Spy Hitler Couldn’t Silence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 55-56. Trepper was won to Communism in Poland (in his words) “in the glow of October.” He attended Comintern school in Moscow, eventually joining Soviet Intelligence. As he wrote, “Between the hammer of Hitler and the anvil of Stalin, the path was a narrow one for those of us who still believed in the Revolution.”
After his heroic service in WWII, Trepper arrived in Moscow only to be imprisoned for ten years in Lubianka. Freed after Stalin’s death, Trepper returned to Poland where, in the early 1970s, he was the victim of an anti-Semitic campaign by the Stalinists. He was allowed to leave Poland in 1973 only after an international campaign of protest. He died in 1982.
25. On the Stalinists in Spain see, e.g., the material in Revolutionary History (London) vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1988).
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