Honor The 93rd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Commmunist International- From The International Communist League's Marxist Bulletin Series-"War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International:The Birth of the Comintern (1919)"

War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International:
The Birth of the Comintern (1919)

by George Foster New York, 14 June 1998

This class series will attempt to take to heart comrade Lenin's injunction in "Left-Wing" Communism: rather than simply hailing soviet power and the October Revolution, the real point is to study the experience of the Bolshevik Party in order to assimilate the lessons and international significance of October. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci observed that our capacity to understand the world— and he was referring to class society in particular—is in direct proportion to our ability to intervene in it. And as comrade Robertson recently observed, the lessons of the October Revolution and the Communist International have for us Marxists a very deep validity. They mark the high point of the workers movement, to be contrasted with the current valley in which we today find ourselves situated. This class will consider the First Congress of the Third International which took place in March 1919, in the midst of a civil war in which the October Revolution was fighting for its very life.

The story of the First Congress is mainly the story of the struggle to forge a new revolutionary international following the ignominious collapse of the socialist Second International on 4 August of 1914. It is above all the story of the struggle by Lenin's Bolsheviks to turn the battle against the first imperialist war into a civil war to abolish the capitalist system.

Younger comrades in particular have real difficulty grasping the enormous and traumatic impact of World War I on the bourgeois societies of the time and on the proletariat. From the end of the Franco-Prussian war [1870-1871] until the onset of the first imperialist war, a period of some 43 years elapsed in Europe without a major war. Most of the imperialist combatants who embarked on the First World War assumed it would be very short. The British bourgeoisie in particular was hoping that its rivals on the continent would mutually exhaust each other in a bout of bloodletting and, indeed, looked forward to the war. But it didn't turn out to be a short war.

The war dragged on for over four years. Millions upon millions of proletarians were slaughtered in a war to re-divide the world amongst the various contending imperialists, a war to see who would get how much loot and how much booty. To quote General Sherman: "war is hell." But, if war is
hell, World War I stood out in its grotesque brutality. WWI was fought mainly as a war of attrition, of trench warfare, of bankrupt strategies reflecting the complete bankruptcy of bourgeois society. It was a war in which the proletariat and even the scions of the bourgeoisie were cut down and slaughtered in enormous numbers. For example, the Prussian Junker class was, at the end of the war, a shadow of its former self. Likewise the war decimated the sons of the British ruling class.

To give you an example of the brutality of the situation, in 1916 there was a small salient of the German line projecting into the Entente lines in Belgium at a village called Ypres. The British general in the sector, Sir Douglas Haig, decided to straighten out this little pocket disturbing the geometrical regularity of his front. Over the space of three or four days he lost something like 600,000 men in this endeavor, which did not in any way alter the sanguinary stalemate.

At the beginning of the war there was only one significant republic in continental Europe and that was France. By the end of this war, the face of Europe had changed. Three empires—tsarist Russia, the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary and the Hohenzollern empire of Germany—disappeared from the political map to be replaced by various republics. So it was a very big change. I highly recommend to comrades two books. One is Carl Schorske's book, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, and the other is a book by Richard Watt, a British chemist who wrote history in his spare time, called The Kings Depart.

The ignominious capitulation of the Second International to the imperialist bourgeoisie during the first imperialist war marks the point at which the struggle for the Third International began and it was a struggle from the onset taken up by the Bolsheviks. To understand the Third International and Bolshevism, which went through its final forging in its revolutionary struggle against the first imperial¬ist war, some remarks are in order about the Third International's predecessor, the Second International, about its origins and history and its collapse.

Going back over that history one is struck by an observation made by Jim Cannon about the early, pre-communist socialist movement in the U.S. In The First Ten Years of American Communism, Cannon observed that it took the Bolsheviks and the Communist International to clarify and settle a whole series of political and organizational questions that had bedeviled the movement—questions ranging from the counterposition between direct trade-union action versus parliamentarism to, in the case of the U.S., the black question. In a very real sense, Cannon's observation concerning the American socialists is more generally applicable to the Second International as a whole. That is, if you go back and you examine the history of the Second International, one gets a sense of participants who, in some sense, were sleepwalking.

It took the experience of the Bolsheviks, who had to deal with a wide spectrum of issues and conditions of work (such as the national question, trade-union struggle, legality versus illegality, work in parliament, Soviets, the 1905 mass strikes culminating in the Moscow insurrection), to really forge a new type of party that in its experiences had learned lessons that were valid for the entire workers movement in the imperialist epoch. And Bolshevism, it should be understood, was not born all at once but started as another party in the Second International and, indeed, a party which modeled itself after the preeminent party of the Second International, that is to say the German SPD.

Lenin makes the point that the Second International and the parties which constituted it were very much products of the pre-imperialist epoch, a period of protracted, organic capitalist growth and, as indicated, of peace among the major European powers. If the First International laid the foundation for an international organization of workers, for the preparation of the revolutionary attack on capital, the Second International was an organization, as Lenin remarked, whose growth proceeded in breadth at the cost of a temporary drop in revolutionary consciousness and a strengthening of opportunism in the party.

The SPD and Parliamentarism

The German Social Democracy itself underwent considerable change over these years. In February of 1881, in the period when the Social Democrats in Germany were outlawed by the Anti-Socialist Laws, Karl Kautsky wrote:
"The Social Democratic workers' party has always emphasized that it is a revolutionary party in a sense that it recognizes that it is impossible to resolve the social questions within the existing society.... Even today, we would prefer, if it were possible, to realize the social revolution through the peaceful road.... But if we still harbour this hope today, we have nonetheless ceased to emphasize it, for every one of us knows that it is a Utopia. The most perceptive of our comrades have never believed in the possibility of a peaceful revolution; they have teamed from history that violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.... Today we all know that the popular socialist state can be erected only through a violent overthrow and that it is our duty to uphold consciousness of this among ever broader layers of the people." —quoted in Massimo Salvador!, Karl Kautsky and
the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938, p. 20 (Verso,
1979)

This was the young Karl Kautsky, at the beginning of his career as a Marxist. And by the way, both Kautsky and Bernstein, who were in a real sense the legates of Marx and Engels, were won to Marxism through Engels' work Anti-Duhring. It was the work which actually won key cadre of the Social Democracy to Marxism. Kautsky was to go on to become the editor of Die Neue Zeit, which was the theoretical paper of Social Democracy (and parenthetically, I would point out, he edited it longer than Norden edited WV) and became the preeminent German propagandist for Marxism for the whole period. In fact, he was known as the pope of Marxism and for a long time he was looked up to by Lenin and others as the embodiment of orthodox Marxism. Yet running through the orthodox Marxism of Kautsky was a strong parliamentarist thread which grew organically out of the conditions that the German party experienced.

As a consequence of the German Anti-Socialist Laws the SPD was outlawed from 1874 to 1886. Despite its illegality during this period, the Social Democracy managed to get about 9.1 percent of the votes in parliament. With the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws and the legalization of the party, the party began to grow. Notwithstanding some fits and starts the party began to experience a steady accretion of electoral support, both percentage-wise and in absolute numbers. This led the SPDers to think that German Social Democracy would simply grow organically. Some older comrades may remember that many years ago a comrade plotted three or four years of our growth and from that graph projected that by now we would probably have a billion members. Empirical reality rapidly shattered her illusion, but in the case of the SPD in that period, experience tended to confirm a steady pattern of growth.

A few scant years after the end of the Anti-Socialist Laws, Kautsky was putting forward a very different line from that of 1881. Very much influenced by Darwin and German biologists such as Haeckel, he postulated that socialism would be the natural evolutionary outcome of capitalism—that the working class would grow to be a larger and larger proportion of the populace, that through the votes of these workers, SPD representation would ineluctably grow in parliament and that inevitably Social Democracy would triumph. Kautsky, along with Bernstein, penned the Erfurt Program, a program that all comrades should take the time to read. It is the classic example of the minimum-maximum program of Social Democracy.

The Erfurt Program is also noteworthy for what it does not contain—it consciously avoided the whole issue of the state. Kautsky wrote the theoretical part of Erfurt and Bernstein the practical. By the way, in 1899, Lenin described the Erfurt Program as a Marxist document. But later, reconsidering it in The State and Revolution, and based on his experiences in the intervening period, he came to view it very differently.
Kautsky wrote a commentary on the Erfurt Program and in it he developed his central themes. One of them was the indispensability of parliament as an instrument of government in great states—for all classes—and, therefore, for the proletariat as well as the bourgeoisie and, secondly, for the need to win a majority of parliament, treating elections as the fundamental, strategic avenue to power for the labor movement.

Kautsky posed an indissoluble link between the conquest of state power and the conquest of a majority in parliament, between the defense of the technical importance of parliament and the impossibility of a Paris Commune-type state. He thought that the Social Democracy, its political and social struggles and use of parliamentary legislation for socialist purposes, constituted the very content of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As early as 1892 Kautsky writes:

"In a great modern state, [the proletariat, like the bourgeoisie, can] acquire influence in the administration of the state only through the vehicle of an elected parliament. Direct legislation, at least in a great modern state, cannot render parliament superfluous, [but can only represent a ramification of the administration. Hence the general thesis:] it is absolutely impossible to entrust the entire legislation of the state to it [direct legislation], and it is equally impossible to control or direct the state administration through it. So long as the great modern state exists..."

And notice there is no class character to this state:

"...the central point of political activity will always remain in its parliament. [Now:] the most consistent expression of parliament is the parliamentary republic."
—quoted in Massimo Salvador], ibid, pp. 35-36

And, therefore, the conquest of parliament was indispensable for Social Democracy. This was to be a signpost of German Social Democracy thenceforth, through the whole period up to the first imperialist war.
Now Wilhelm Liebknecht aptly termed the Kaiserine parliament a "fig leaf for absolutism." Germany at this time presented a strange combination of parliamentarism, with rather nominal powers, fronting for absolutist despotism ruling on behalf of German capital. This was reflected in the laws regarding suffrage. On a national level there was direct male suffrage. On the provincial level suffrage rights varied a lot, ranging from places like Prussia, which had a notorious three-class franchise system based on how much direct tax you paid, to some of the southern German states, which eventually had more or less direct suffrage, but were very short on proletarians and had large peasant populations.

It was clear that the German Social Democracy would have to contend on a parliamentary level if it were to be a political party in Germany, and it did so. During the years of the Anti-Socialist Laws, because the parliamentary fraction was granted immunity, it was relatively untouchable, and played a key role in leading the party. This early experience later played its part in reinforcing a tendency to fetishize parliament despite the fact that the Reichstag was impotent and could not compel the imperial government to answer to it. And on the provincial level it was downright bizarre to have parliamentary illusions, for example, if you look at the restricted suffrage in Prussia.

In the Prussian elections in 1913, the SPD got over 775,000 votes, some 28.3 percent of the total. But it only won ten seats in the Prussian parliament. In contrast the Deutsche Volkspartei, which received 6.7 percent of the votes, won 38 seats. The Free Conservative Party, with 2 percent, won 54 seats. The National Liberal Party, with 13 percent, won 73 seats. The Catholic Center Party, with 16 percent, won 103 seats and the German Conservative Party, with 14 percent, won 147 seats. How is this possible? The people who paid the top third in income tax got a third of the seats, etc. That was about 2 or 3 percent of the population. So, there is a certain level at which one's credulity is strained at the evident latching on very early to parliamentary cretinism.

The SPD and the State

Secondly, the SPD was clearly awed by the power of the German state and army. One gets the impression that the experience of the Anti-Socialist Laws resulted in an attitude of "Never again!" The party lived in real fear that it could be outlawed by a stroke of the Kaiser's pen. As the party accrued influence and organizational mass there was a corresponding reluctance to risk this organic growth by displeasing the powers that be. This sentiment went hand-in-hand with the conception of the SPD as the party of the whole class.

When, in 1875, the Marxian wing fused with the Lassalleans, the fusion was codified in the Gotha Program (basically a Lassallean program). When Marx penned his Critique of the Gotha Programmed, that critique was suppressed in Germany. It was suppressed by Rebel, Kautsky and Bernstein, because they were afraid it would provoke a split with the Lassalleans.
Likewise, when the Erfurt Program was penned, Engels wrote a very sharp criticism of it; you can read about it in The State and Revolution. Engels thought it was a very fine program, but the failure of the program to address the key issue of state power fundamentally compromised it. Engels opined that while it might be difficult to raise the demand for a democratic republic, that failure opened the door to politically disarming the party when it had to confront big revolutionary events. Engels' criticisms were suppressed to maintain unity with the opportunists and out of fear that their publication might expose the party to reprisals from the Kaiser's government.

During the life of the Second International, which was founded in Paris on the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, 14 July 1889, the German Social Democrats were very hesitant to call any sort of May Day actions because they feared a strike in Germany on May Day would bring the government down on them. So, there was a very peculiar development of a sense of German exceptionalism, a feeling that things were going along swimmingly, the SPD was gaining in parliament, the organization was burgeoning. The mindset was that the party must at all costs avoid a premature confrontation with the bourgeoisie that could spell disaster. Tactical prudence was beginning to evolve into reformist adaptation.
Kautsky and others of the German Social Democrats were always concerned about a general strike because they thought it would be a one-shot proposition in the Kaiser's Germany. It would immediately lead to total confrontation with the bourgeoisie and either the proletariat would triumph or it would be smashed. And, since inevitably the SPD was gaining influence in parliament and expanding its press, trade-union organizations, and sporting groups and hundreds of other associations were growing, why wreck the inevitable march of progress toward socialism?

I have spent some time on the SPD's reformist adaptations because I would like to contrast it with the experience of the Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik experience was needless to say very different.

It's an old saw that "you learn something new every day." But sometimes what you learn is important. Gary Steenson in his book "Not One Man! Not One Penny!" German Social Democracy, 1863-1914 [University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981] reveals a little-known fact:

"One very unusual aspect of the socialist congresses in Germany was the presence at most of them of police officials. These men had the right to interrupt speakers who ventured into forbidden territory, and they could even cancel a session altogether if the discussion got too extreme. But the congressional participants themselves usually knew the allowable limits, and after the end of the antisocialist law, the police officials did not often intervene. Their presence was, nonetheless, a source of embarrassment for the SPD and should have been for the authorities also."
-p. 125

This submission to cop censorship is absolutely breathtaking, and accommodation to it reveals the deep reformist rot that infected the SPD. It should be contrasted with the comportment of the Bolsheviks who took their responsibility to revolutionary Marxism seriously. Commenting on what can be said and what must be said, in 1917 Lenin wrote:

"At times some try to defend Kautsky and Turati by arguing that, legally, they could no more than 'hint' at their opposition to the government, and that the pacifists of this stripe do make such 'hints'. The answer to that is, first, that the impossibility of legally speaking the truth is an argument not in favour of concealing the truth, but in favour of setting up an illegal organisation and press that would be free of police surveillance and censorship. Second, that moments occur in history when a socialist is called upon to break with all legality. Third, that even in the days of serfdom in Russia, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky managed to speak the truth, for example, by their silence on the Manifesto of February 19, 1861, and their ridicule and castigation of the liberals, who made exactly the same kind of speeches as Turati and Kautsky." -Lenin, Collected Works [hereafter CW\ Vol. 23, p. 186

Clearly the SPD's many-years-long accommodation to police censorship played a significant role in its slide into social chauvinism when confronted by the revolutionary tasks imposed by the imperialist war.
The SPD's accommodation to bourgeois legality is all the more surprising given the very real repression the party experienced, particularly in its formative years. Liebknecht and Bebel, for example, opposed the Franco-Prussian war. For their efforts, they were thrown into prison for a couple of years. The party did face a situation of near illegality, even following the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws. Many, many people were arrested for crimes of lese majeste. SPDers were elected to parliament and when they got to Berlin found out their landlady had been told by the government not to rent them a place. Socialists were exiled, under old laws going back to 1850, to tiny provincial towns.

Kautsky summed up in 1888 what we have come to know as the social-democratic worldview when he wrote in A Social Democratic Catechism: "The Social Democracy is a revolutionary party, but it is not a party that makes revolutions...." The SPD's policy was one of revolutionary passivity, of waiting. Kautsky maintained that Social Democrats are not pacifists. The SPD would eventually prevail in parliament and if the bourgeoisie offers resist¬ance the Social Democratic workers would suppress them. But the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was for Kautsky really a question for future generations

The rise of imperialism and the rise of opportunism go hand in hand. Early on, in the heavily peasant areas of south Germany, where the Social Democracy was weaker and where there were fewer proletarians, SPD representatives began to openly adapt to alien class pressures. These pressures reflected themselves nationally when, in 1895, Bebel and Liebknecht, over the vociferous objections of Kautsky, revised the Erfurt Program to "include a demand for democratization of all public institutions, to improve the situation in industry, agriculture and transport within the framework of the present social and state order."
Bernstein, who had lived for 20 years in exile in Britain, while there began to develop fundamental doubts on the possibility or necessity of proletarian revolution, doubts which he later systematized into a general revisionist assault on Marxism. Kautsky, since Bernstein was his good friend, temporized on launching a struggle against this revisionism.

However, eventually the battle was joined, with Kautsky, Luxemburg and Plekhanov weighing in very heavily against Bernstein (who was not handled in the party with kid gloves). Nonetheless, Bernstein and Kautsky both feared a split in the party. Kautsky hoped to ideologically defeat revisionism without a split, arguing that revisionism could be isolated and would cease to be dangerous. This generally was the approach of the Second International in the whole period leading up to the war.
I should mention, by the way, that Kautsky's deep but latent reformist streak found expression in the Second Congress of the Second International in Paris in 1890 when the issue of Millerandism came up. The French socialist politician Millerand had recently accepted a cabinet post in a bourgeois government. Kautsky led the charge against Millerand stating that it was absolutely impermissible to be a minister in a bourgeois government...except under "special circumstances." And the special circumstances were, for example, in the event of a war, where, say, the tsar invaded Germany. Only then, according to Kautsky, would a Social Democrat be compelled to join a government of the enemy class; only unity in defense of the nation made permissible that which in times of peace was impermissible!

Impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution

The 1905 Russian Revolution had an enormous impact on Germany, the class struggle in Germany, on the Social Democracy and on the trade unions. On the left of the party, Rosa Luxemburg saw 1905 through the lens of her experiences in Warsaw, where she went to participate in the revolution. For Luxemburg, the main lesson of the revolution was the efficacy of the mass strike as the road to revolution. She saw the mass strike as the chief instrument for realizing the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Through intervention in these struggles the socialists would win authority and lead the workers to victory. The assault on the capitalist power would not be through parliament, but through a series of convulsive strikes that would clean the party of revisionism and lead to the fall of capital. But while Luxemburg invested the mass strike and spontaneous action by the proletariat with great revolutionary import, she failed to grasp the significance of the Soviets and as well of the real rehearsal for October, the culmination of 1905, which was the Moscow insurrection.

Germany in 1905 experienced massive turmoil. There were thousands and thousands of strikes. There were numerous lockouts by employers. There were militant workers' demonstrations and street fighting between the workers and the police.

Under the impact of both Luxemburg and the events in 1905 in Germany and Russia, Kautsky was driven to the left. He certainly was among the most perceptive of the commentators on what was going on in 1905 in Russia from the outside. Both Lenin and Trotsky claimed Kautsky's analysis supported their views. Kautsky did, indeed, refer to what was going on in Russia as permanent revolution and stated that the unfolding of the revolutionary struggles in Russia turned out to be very different from what he had previously thought. Thus he wrote:

"The [Russian] liberals, can scream all they want about the need for a strong government and regard the growing chaos in Russia with anguished concern; but the revolutionary proletariat has every reason to greet it with the most fervent hopes. This 'chaos' is nothing other than permanent revolution. In the present circumstances it is under revolutionary conditions that the proletariat completes its own maturation most rapidly, develops its intellectual, moral, and economic strength most completely, imprints its own stamp on state and society most profoundly, and obtains the greatest concessions from them. Even though this dominance of the proletariat can only be transitory in a country as economically backward as Russia, it leaves effects that cannot be reversed, and the greater the dominance, the longer they will last.... Permanent revolution is thus exactly what the proletariat in Russia needs."
—quoted in Massimo Salvadori, op. cit., p. 102

Here he is speaking of permanent revolution in the sense of Marx's "Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League."
In January of 1906, Kautsky, basing himself on the experience of the Moscow insurrection, declared that it was now necessary to re-examine Engels' famous preface to Marx's Class Struggle in France, the text of which the German Social Democracy had so often used to justify its own legalism. The reformists had fixated on an observation by Engels that the epoch of barricades and street fighting was definitely over. But Kautsky said that the battle of Moscow, where a small group of insurgents managed to hold out for two weeks against superior forces, indicated that victorious armed struggle by the insurgents was possible because of the mass strike wave, of which he said too little was known in Engels' time. It was precisely the strike wave and struggles around it that had undermined the discipline of the army and those lessons were applicable, not only in Russia, but possibly throughout Europe.

Thus Kautsky swung quite far to the left. But he was still very nervous about a mass strike in Germany, which he thought could only be a one-shot affair—all or nothing. For its part, the German ruling class was also drawing its own class lessons from the events in Russia. The Kaiser thought that it might well be necessary to send an expeditionary force into Russia to rescue his fellow monarch, the tsar, and, as a corollary to that, the Kaiser certainly was planning to suppress the German Social Democracy.

The turmoil surrounding 1905 frightened many of Germany's SPD trade-union leaders. In the main they had a very clear position: "No mass strikes! Nothing out of the ordinary!" These bureaucrats feared that the street demonstrations and turmoil were pulling in unorganized workers who had low consciousness and would threaten the organized and above all orderly German trade-union movement. In May of 1905 in Cologne, the trade unions came out on record against the mass strike.

The stage was thus set for an open division between the party and its affiliated trade unions. At the Jena Congress, the party, under the impact of what was going on in Russia, adopted the mass strike as a political weapon in defense of suffrage rights and the right of association in particular. The mass strike was presented as a means of extending suffrage in places like Prussia and of defending the right of a Social Democratic party to exist and organize in the trade unions. This mass strike resolution carried overwhelmingly, by 287 to 14 votes.

One of those voting against the resolution was a man named Carl Legien who just happened to be the leader of the SPD's trade-union federation. He importuned the party leadership and on 16 February 1906, at a secret meeting of the party and trade unions, the party capitulated to the trade unions.

Basically, the trade unions said to the party: if there are to be mass strikes and the party can't prevent them, it is the party and not the trade unions who should lead them. The trade unions promised to sup¬
port the party to the extent they could, but the party was to bear the brunt not only of the responsibility for leading mass strikes, but also of paying for them.

The very next year in September of 1906, Bebel at the Mannheim Congress declared that without the support of the unions, mass strikes are unthinkable and Legien said "Ja! They are unthinkable!"

At Mannheim the party endorsed the deal cooked up at the earlier secret conference. Bebel, who wielded immense authority in the German movement, pushed the proposal through by a vote of 386 to 5. Among those voting for it were Kitschy, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Following the events of 1905 there was a rise in German imperial ambitions. The German bourgeoisie reacted to 1905 with a great wave of chauvinist propaganda and in the 1907 elections the German Social Democracy got a really cold, wet rag smacked in its face. These were the so-called Hottentots elections and they were the first elections in which imperialist patriotism played a big role. In 1907, many of the petty bourgeois who had previously voted for the Social Democrats, didn't.

The percentage of the SPD votes didn't drop-very much in absolute numbers. It went from 31.7 to 29, but the number of SPD representatives in the Reichstag dropped from 81 to 43. At the time there were numerous political parties in Germany and thus provisions for runoffs if no party obtained a majority of the vote. The Social Democracy willy-nilly had been counting on a large number of petty-bourgeois votes.

In contesting for election in Germany, routinely the SPD had made blocs with the liberals. Where a Social Democrat didn't get in the runoff, SPDers were told to vote for the bourgeois progressive, and an appeal was made to the progressive voters to vote SPD if a socialist was in a runoff. Of course, Social Democrats, being disciplined, got many progressives elected. But following 1905, the progressives' bourgeois base would have nothing to do with these anti-patriotic reds and this bloc didn't work out so well from that standpoint.

The Social Democracy and Imperialist War

Turmoil growing out of events in Russia and the swell in imperialist and patriotic propaganda really drove the party leadership into frenzy. Thus the stage was set for erosion of the historic position of the SPD encapsulated in the slogan of Wilhelm Liebknecht of "not one man, not one penny."

Bebel started talking about being for national defense if Russia invaded Germany and, believe me, the Russian question was as big a bugaboo in Germany in this period as it was in America in the Cold War period. Bebel made a speech in the Reichstag explaining when he would be a defensist, at the same time sugar-coating it with a denunciation of Prussian discipline, mistreatment of soldiers and financial burdens. He was followed by a SPDer by the name of Noske, who contested the accusation that Social Democracy was anti-national or anti-patriotic. Noske said that there is no accusation more unjustified than the claim that the SPD wanted to undermine the discipline of the army. Where in Germany except in the army is there greater discipline than in the Social Democratic Party and the modern trade unions?

"'As a Social Democrat I agree with the honorable Minister of War when he declares that German soldiers must have the best arms.' Finally, he [Kautsky] proclaimed that the Social Democrats would repel any aggression against their country 'with greater determination' than any bourgeois party, that the SPD wanted Germany to be 'armed as well as possible,' and that 'the entire German people' had an 'interest in the military institutions necessary for the defence' of the 'fatherland'."
The quote is from Massimo Salvadori's Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938, p. 119 (1938). Salvadori comments: "There could have been no more public funeral for the anti-militarist propaganda preached by [Karl] Liebknecht."

The party had begun to polarize into an incipient center, a left wing and a very insidious right wing. Karl Liebknecht had become the bete noire not only of the right wing but also of some of the center of the party with the publication of his book Militarism and Anti-Militarism, and for his efforts to organize an anti-militarist youth organization. In fact, Liebknecht's book earned him almost two years in prison—apropos the point about the reality of life in the Kaiser's Germany.

By the way, one must say that aside from Die Neue Zeit, which received a lot of criticism because it contained articles having nothing to do with Germany, German Social Democracy was very provincial in its views. It tended to concern itself mainly with domestic issues.

By 1910, the German Social Democracy panicked before the bourgeoisie's patriotic propaganda offensive. Some SPDers began to entertain the proposition that since they had always been for an income tax, the SPD should therefore support the direct tax, even though the purpose of the direct tax was to raise money for the war budget. The party pulled back from that position, but by 1912, when the party was really in a panic about regaining what it had lost in the elections, operationally it had moved very, very far to the right.

When the issue of the direct tax came up again in 1913 the Kautsky center gave critical support to the social-chauvinists on this issue. Rosa Luxemburg said that if Kautsky urged his followers to vote the direct tax, in a year they would be voting war credits. She was absolutely prophetic in that. When war came on 4 August 1914, the German party, which was the biggest party of the international, capitulated and voted war credits, betraying socialism. Nearly all parties of the Second International from the various belligerent countries followed suit with the honorable exceptions of the Russians, the Italians, the Serbs and, ultimately, a few Germans.

The Second International, to which the SPD was affiliated, was not an international in the Leninist sense. The war revealed it to be an international in little but name, more akin to a bunch of socialist pen pals.

That political rot which precipitated out on 4 August 1914 did not fall from the sky but grew, organically if you will, within the SPD. And there were premonitions of the problems which manifested themselves at earlier Second International congresses.

Thus, the Stuttgart Congress of 1907 actually debated whether there could be a socialist colonial policy. There was a commission in which the majority called for exactly that. That proposal by that commission was only narrowly defeated, by a vote of 128 against 108, with 10 abstentions. It was a near thing. Commenting on it, Lenin said that vote had tremendous significance. First, socialist opportunism, which capitulated before bourgeois charm, had unmasked itself plainly, and, secondly, there became manifest a negative feature of the European labor movement, which is capable of causing great harm to the proletariat.

Half of the SPD delegation at Stuttgart was made up of trade unionists and maintained the position of trade-union independence. And, then, of course, the war question also came up. If you read the Stuttgart resolution on the war, and the subsequent ones culminating in the Basel Manifesto, they all speak about how, to combat war amongst the capitalist powers, the proletariat should use whatever means are at its disposal when necessary.

Lenin objected to the slogan of a mass strike against war. How the proletariat is to conduct the struggle against war depends upon the particular conditions it confronts. Answering a war, he says, depends on the character of the crisis which a war provokes—the choice of means of struggle is made on the basis of these conditions. But the Germans really wanted any reference to any strike action against war deleted, because they opposed anything that would commit them, even on paper, to such a course.

Lenin in contrast stressed that the key thing about the resolution on war and peace was that the struggle must consist in substituting not merely peace for war, but socialism for capitalism. "It is not a matter of preventing the outbreak of war, but a matter of utilizing the crisis resulting from the war to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie." And he, Rosa Luxemburg and, I believe, Martov blocked to amend a resolution by Bebel (which was a very orthodox resolution) because it was possible to read the orthodox postulates of Bebel through opportunist glasses. So Lenin and Luxemburg amended the resolution to say that militarism was the chief weapon of class suppression, to say that agitation among the youth was necessary and indicated, and, third, that the task of the Social Democrats was not only struggle against the outbreak of war, or for an early termination of war which had already broken out, but also to utilize the crisis caused by the war to hasten the downfall of the bourgeoisie.
When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, it found Lenin in Galicia. He couldn't believe the SPD had voted for war credits, thinking it must be police propaganda.

After he managed to make his way back to Switzerland, Lenin's course was set. He and his comrades embarked on an implacable struggle for a new revolutionary international to replace the Second International, now fatally compromised by social chauvinism. The central issue was that the world war was an imperialist war, and that the answer to this war was not "peace," or "no annexations," or "the right of self determination of all nations," but, in fact, to turn this imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war against the bourgeoisie, for socialism.
The war disrupted the Second International for a while, but shortly various national parties, each aligned with its own bourgeoisie, held "antiwar" congresses. First the Entente "socialists," then the central powers "socialists" met. This was followed by the Copenhagen Congress of neutral "socialists." The Bolsheviks at first were not inclined to participate in the Copenhagen Congress because of its demands: peace, no annexations, courts of arbitration and disarmament. But on reconsideration, the Bolsheviks attended Copenhagen to raise five points: socialists out of bourgeois cabinets, no vote for war credits, fraternization of troops, for civil war against the imperialist war, and for illegal organizations that organize for revolutionary propaganda and actions among the proletariat in the struggle for the Third International.

Forging the Third International

It was in the struggle against the social chauvinists and centrists that the Bolsheviks finally hammered out the key points of their international and political and organizational program. To do so it was necessary to swim against a raging stream of social chauvinism. Zinoviev says:
"It was in a manifesto on the arrested Bolshevik Duma fraction that we first advanced the slogan of turning the imperialist war into civil war. At that time, in the camp of the Second International, we were regarded literally as lepers. When we stated that this war had to be turned into a civil war, a war against the bourgeoisie, they seriously began to suggest that we were not quite right in the head."

The first international conference that pulled together socialists from various belligerent countries was, in fact, an international women's conference organized in Switzerland by Clara Zetkin. The Bolsheviks intervened and were voted down. That conference was followed by an international youth conference which also voted down the Bolshevik proposals.

It was only at the Zimmerwald Conference that the Bolsheviks were able to come forward as a weak minority—but a minority which was to become the nucleus of a new Communist Third International. At that conference Ledebour (who was one of the German center) confronted Lenin: "Civil war to end the imperialist war? Well, Lenin, go to Russia and try it there. It's pretty easy to say this in Switzerland." In the Second International all these centrists and chauvinist wiseacres proclaimed that all the Russian workers supported the war and that no one supported the Bolsheviks. During the period of 1915-1916 the Bolsheviks remained an insignificant minority. It was only in 1916 that they began to reestablish real and significant links in Russia.

Lenin was absolutely implacable in hammering on the issue of the imperialist nature of the war and the revolutionary task it demanded. His key point was that the greatest danger to the proletariat and to the chance of revolution were the centrists, with their flowery conceits and illusions.

Take Kautsky, for example. Kautsky had not been a member of the German parliamentary fraction, but he was such a doyen of the party that he was invited to the meeting where they voted war credits. Kautsky had planned to suggest abstention, but when it became clear there was going to be no abstention, he said, fine, let's vote for the war credits and state that our condition is no annexations, blah, blah, blah. Well, the German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg said, that's a good resolution. Let's just take this part out about no annexations. And that was what happened.
Liebknecht originally went along, as a disciplined member of the party, with the vote, but broke immediately thereafter. Once the war began in earnest Kautsky argued it was a war of defense for Germany. In an incredible exercise in muddle-headed obfuscation he argued it was, as well, a war of defense for the French, the Belgians and the British. After all, Social Democrats are not anti-national and can't present themselves to the nation as anti-national. His conclusion—the International is really a peacetime organization! After the war, everyone would get back together! So, to justify his support to voting for war credits, he supported the votes of all Social Democrats for "self-defense."

As the war progressed it became more hideous. And the fighting lasted far longer than anyone had imagined. Social tensions began to rise and the bourgeoisie and the centrists began to get nervous. By 1917 a turn occurred. The war had run its course. Germany had grabbed a fair chunk of territory. None of the combatants had the capacity to squeeze much more blood or sweat out of the proletariat. The Germans were beginning to think they had a chance to split Russia off from Britain and France and do a separate deal.

Kautsky began to worry about the news from the front—that everybody in the trenches supports Liebknecht. Liebknecht had made a famous speech against the war. For his troubles he had been drafted into the army out of parliament and then imprisoned. Luxemburg was arrested soon after Liebknecht. The centrists began to calculate that they were losing their influence. Thus, Kautsky and company began to redouble their offensive for "peace" and broke off from the official Social Democracy to form an independent party.

Lenin's struggle against the war meant not simply struggle against the centrists outside the party, but inside as well. Some Bolsheviks, exemplified by Bukharin's Bogy group, were seduced by the siren peace songs of the centrists. Bukharin and his co-thinkers also had a position against the right of self-determination for nations during the war, because, according to them, the imperialist war had rendered all such questions irrelevant. Lenin characterized this position as a caricature of imperialist economism.

It is very interesting to consider Trotsky's role in the struggle against the social chauvinists. He of course had a solidly internationalist position of opposition to the war. But until quite late in the war Trotsky rather quixotically conciliated various centrists. At times he sought out political blocs with the Mensheviks and for a brief period even hoped to obtain Kautsky's collaboration in the struggle against the war. For these reasons Lenin subjected him to some very harsh criticisms.

Forging the Bolshevik Party

The programmatic intransigence of Lenin laid the foundation for the struggle for October. In this regard let's examine the period of the Bolshevik Party from 1912 to 1914, and contrast it to the evolution of the German Social Democracy. There are three key periods of struggle in the development of Bolshevism: 1895 to 1903 against economism, from 1903 to 1908 against the Mensheviks, and from 1908 to 1914 against the liquidators. The liquidators were the Mensheviks of various stripes and origins who wanted a legal labor party in Russia. Given the conditions in Russia, Lenin made the point that such a party could not be a Marxist revolutionary party.

Certainly Lenin's experience with the German Social Democracy in the Second International in this period was not exactly positive. The SPD-dominated International tried a number of times to foist unity on the Russian Marxists and it was fairly clear from the get-go that Kautsky in particular, like most of the SPD leadership, viewed Lenin as an incurable sectarian enrage.

The Germans were really pro-Martov; they wanted to enforce unity. The last effort at unity was in 1913-14, when the International demanded that all the Russian Marxists get into one room in front of a commission of the International and take steps to unite into one big party. And, by the way, the German Social Democracy also had its fingers on the purse strings of a lot of the money that the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had.
I really enjoyed reading about this conference. Lenin chose Inessa Armand as the Bolshevik representative. Armand was a very elegant and cosmopolitan woman, who spoke several languages, was intelligent, politically hard, and diplomatic. Following Lenin's instructions she told the conference that the Bolsheviks were in favor of unity, however, that unity had conditions attached to it.

"1. All-party resolutions of December 1908 and January 1910 on liquidationism are confirmed in a very resolute and unreserved manner precisely in their application to liquidationism. It is recognized that anyone who writes (especially in the legal press) against 'commending the illegal press' deserves condemnation and cannot be tolerated in the ranks of the illegal party. Only one who sincerely and with all his strength helps the development of the illegal press, of illegal proclamations and so forth, can become a member of the illegal party."
It goes on:

"3. It is recognized that the entry of any group of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party into a bloc or union with another party is absolutely not permissible and incompatible with party membership." —Ganken and Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World
War, pp. 120-121 (Stanford University Press,
1940)

Bundism is to be condemned; it is incompatible with membership; national and cultural autonomy, this again, contradicts the party program; and the failure to recognize the resolutions of the party on that is incompatible with party membership. When Inessa Armand presented these conditions, her presentation was considered the worst of manners from the standpoint of all these Second International Social Democrats. How could the Bolsheviks act like this?

In fact, the reality on the ground in Russia was that there was one Russian Social Democratic Workers Party that mattered, and it was the illegal party of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. By the time that the international was trying to engineer unity among the Russian factions the Bolsheviks had about 80 percent of the active proletariat, in terms of their support, and correspondingly in press circulation.
The influence of the Bolsheviks amongst the Russian proletariat was initially undercut by the outbreak of the war, and indeed the war sharply undercut a rising tide of worker militancy in a number of countries, including Germany and Britain. One of the subsidiary reasons why the various bourgeoisies were not averse to embarking on imperialist war was that they thought it would quench class struggle at home.

The road of development of Bolshevism spans nearly a decade and a half. The fundamental point of this talk is that the October Revolution would not have been possible without the program and the tactics elaborated by the Bolsheviks in the struggle for the Third International and against imperialist war. For it was on the rock of the war that Menshevism, tying itself to the bourgeoisie, broke its neck. Because of the war, once the revolution broke out in Russia there was no room for a formulation akin to the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." In fact, the task that had been set in motion by the outbreak of World War I was that of civil war of the proletariat for socialist revolution.

Lenin's key three works of this period, Imperialism, The State and Revolution, and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, were polemics against the center, internationally, in Social Democracy. In the heat of battle, in Russia and across Europe, when the founding of the Third International took place, it was not easy to get delegates to Moscow, and most of those who turned up were people who either were lucky and made it through or happened to already be there. The delegates to the First Congress were thus necessarily a somewhat eclectic collection of parties and individuals. But it was an historic affirmation of the years of previous struggle and above all of the actual creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat embodied in Soviets. The key resolution at that Congress was, indeed, an upholding of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Kautsky spent the last 20 years of his life as an embittered, anti-Soviet Social Democrat, an apostle of bourgeois democracy, blaming all ills, including German fascism, on Bolshevism. Lenin, for his part, recognized the real issue which the Third International had to turn its attention to and that was the spreading of the October Revolution to other places. I wanted to quote something that he wrote in October of 1918, which I think kind of gives a measure of him as a revolutionist. If you look in the volume that has The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, there is, earlier on, a very short piece by the same name and in it Lenin notes:

"Europe's greatest misfortune and danger is that it has no revolutionary party. It has parties of traitors like -the Scheidemanns, Renaudels, Henderson’s, Webbs and Co., and of servile souls like Kautsky. But it has no revolutionary party.

"Of course* a mighty, popular revolutionary movement may rectify this deficiency, but it is nevertheless a serious misfortune and a grave danger.
"That is why we must do our utmost to expose renegades like Kautsky, thereby supporting the revolutionary groups of genuine internationalist workers, who are to be found in all countries." -CW, Vol. 28, p. 113
It was that task that the founding of the Third International took up.
The German delegation of the newly fledged Communist Party arrived in Moscow with a mandate (adopted before the Spartacus uprising) to oppose the launching of a Third International, because the German Communists could not yet break themselves from the conception of the party of the whole class. They still were mesmerized by the possibility of some sort of unity with various centrists and thought the formation of a new international premature. The German delegation was actually talked out of this position while in Moscow.

That was crucial. It had been a long and difficult struggle, but the banner of international proletarian revolution, besmirched by Social Democracy in 1914, was planted at this founding conference. Its key programmatic element, the dictatorship of the proletariat based on soviet power, was asserted. The struggle to forge new revolutionary parties was launched.

The new parties which adhered to the banner of October reflected a generational split. It was the young workers who had gone through the war who were to become the base of the new International. It was the older workers who tended to stay behind with the Social Democracy. Certainly our tasks today have obvious parallels. The sine qua non is to build parties of a Bolshevik type, to forge an international, and to contest for proletarian power and that really is the only road to new October Revolutions, which is what this class is all about.

Summary following discussion

Markin comment- I have not republished the summary here as there is no context for the statements made during the course of the discussion.
*******
Reading List for Educationals on the Comintern

I. War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International: The Birth of the Comintern

Lenin, "The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War," 6 September 1914,
Collected Works (CW), Vol. 21, pp. 15-19

Lenin, "The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International," 1 November 1914, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 3541 Lenin, "What Next?", 9 January 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 107-114

Lenin, "Letter from the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. to the Editors oiNashe Slovo" 23 March 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 165-168

Lenin, "The Draft Resolution Proposed by the Left Wing at Zimmerwald," prior to 2 September 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 345-348

Lenin, "The First Step," 11 October 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 383-388

Lenin, "Opportunism, and the Collapse of the Second International" end of 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 438-453 Lenin, "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (Theses)," January-February 1916, CW, Vol. 22, pp. 143-156

Lenin, "Thejunius Pamphlet," July 1916, CW, Vol. 22, pp. 305-319

Lenin, "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism," October 1916, CW, Vol. 23, pp. 105-120

Lenin, "Report on Peace, October 26," 8 November 1917, CW, Vol. 26, pp. 249-253

Lenin, "Speech on the International Situation, November 8," 8 November 1918, CW, Vol. 28, pp. 151-164

Lenin, "Letter to the Workers of Europe and America," 21 January 1919, CW, Vol. 28, pp. 429-436

Lenin, "The Third International and Its Place in History," 15 April 1919, CW, Vol. 29, pp. 305-313

Trotsky, "Open Letter to the Editorial Board of 'Kommunist'," 4 June 1915, Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, pp. 235-238 (Monad Press, 1984) Trotsky, "The Work of the Zimmerwald Conference," ibid., pp. 329-331

Trotsky, "Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World," 6 March 1919,
The First Five Years of the Communist International (hereafter FFYCI), Vol. 1, pp. 19-30 Trotsky, "To Comrades of the Spartacus League," 9 March 1919, FFYCI, pp. 3943

Additional Readings:

Lenin, "The Collapse of the Second International," May-June 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 207-259

Lenin, "Political Report of the Central Committee, March 7," 7 March 1918, CW, Vol. 27, pp. 87-109

Lenin, "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," November 1918, CW, Vol. 28, pp. 229-325

Pearce, B., "Lenin and Trotsky on Pacifism and Defeatism," What Is Revolutionary Leadership?, pp. 24-35 (published by Spartacist)

"Toward the Communist International," Lenin and the Vanguard Party, pp. 47-55 (SL/U.S. pamphlet, 1997 edition)

Luxemburg, "The Reconstruction of the International," Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, pp. 183-193

“We don’t want the word peace connected with the word veteran”-paraphrase of a remark by an official parade organizer- “Oh ya, well watch this”- All Out For The Smedley Butler Brigade Veterans For Peace-Initiated Saint Patrick’s PEACE Parade on Sunday March 18th in South Boston

Click on the headline to link to the Smedley Butler Brigade Facebook page.


Veterans For Peace

Call for Help

Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade

Alternative Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice

When: Sunday, March 18-2:00 PM

Where: South Boston- form up outside the Broadway Redline Station

Please join us for our Second Annual Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade, the Alternative Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice.

Once again Veterans for Peace have been denied to walk in the Saint Patrick’s Parade in South Boston. Last year they gave us a reason for the denial, “They did not want the word Peace associated with the word Veteran”. Well last year, in three weeks time, we pulled our own permit and had our own parade with 500 participants. We had to walk one mile behind the traditional parade. We had lead cars with our older vets asGrand Marshals, Vets For Peace, MFSO, Code Pink and numerous other local peace groups.

Also: Seventeen years ago the gay and bisexual groups in Boston were also denied. They were the first groups we reached out to and invited them to walk in our parade. Last year we had Join the Impact with us. We also had church / religious groups, and labor. Last year we stole the press, it was a controversy and we received front page coverage and editorial articles in all of the major newspapers, radio and television reports.

This year we anticipate 2,000 people in our parade, multiple bands, we have a Duck Boat, the Ragging Grannies will be singing from the top of the boat. We have a trolley for older folks not able to walk. We may have floats. We will have multiple street bands, a large religious division, a large labor division and “Occupy Everywhere” division, including Occupy Boston and numerous other Occupy groups.

All we need is you, your VFP chapter, peace groups, GLBT groups, religious and labor groups and Occupy groups. Please come to Boston and join us in this fabulous parade.

Please see the attached flyer and a description of the Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade, it’s history and where we are.

On behalf of the Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade Organizing Committee.

Thank you,
Pat Scanlon (VN 69’)
Coordinator, VFP Chapter 9, Smedley Butler Brigade
patscanlonmusic@yahoo.com
978-475-1776

*******
Markin comment:

As if I needed any extra push to join in this VFP action I have reposted a blog that pretty clearly explains why I am always ready to march with my fellow VFPers, any time any place.

Re-posted From American Left History- Thursday, November 11, 2010

*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!

Markin comment:

Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system that governs us has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.

Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.

Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know, the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old playground “I’ll take my ball and bat and go home” by the "officials" was in the air on that one.

But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in the world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the ‘street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.
************
From Veterans For Peace:

Saint Patrick's Peace Parade

Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice

Saint Patrick, the patron Saint of Ireland was a man of peace. Saint Patrick's Day should be a day to celebrate Saint Patrick and the Irish Heritage of Boston and the contributions of the Irish throughout American history. In Boston the parade should be a day to celebrate the changes in our culture, the ethnic, religious diversity, points of views and politics of our great City of Boston. For on Saint Patrick's Day we are all Irish.

Saint Patrick Day parades have been held in Boston since 1737 (Unofficial parades). In 1901 Evacuation Day was declared a holiday in the City of Boston. Because of the coincidence of the proximity of the two holidays the celebrations were combined and for the past forty years the Allied War Veterans Council have been organizing the Saint Patrick's Day Parade, turning what should be the celebration of Saint Patrick, the Irish Heritage and History into a military parade.

In 2011, the local chapter of Veterans For Peace, the Smedley Butler Brigade submitted an application to march in the traditional Saint Patrick's Day Parade. Veterans For Peace is a national veterans organization with 130 chapters across the country. The Smedley Butler Brigade has over 200 members locally. It's members range from veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq and the Afghanistan War. All Veterans For Peace wanted to do was to march in the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and carry their flags and banners. Their application was denied by the "Allied War Council". When the organizer of the parade, Phil Wuschke, was asked why their application was denied, he stated, "Because they did not want to have the word peace associated with the word Veteran". They were also told that they were too political, as if the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and other activities surrounding the parade are not political.

Veterans For Peace subsequently filed for their own permit for the Saint Patrick's Peace Parade. Seventeen years ago, the gay and bisexual community (GLBT) had also applied to march in the parade and like the veterans were denied. GBLT sued the Allied War Council and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, resulting in the Hurley Decision, named after Wacko Hurley, the ruler supreme of the parade. This decision states that who ever is organizing the parade has the right to say who is in and who can be excluded from the parade, no questions asked. Even though the City of Boston will spend in excess of $300,000.00 in support of this parade, they have no say in who can be in the parade. The Saint Patrick's Day Parade should be sponsored by the City of Boston and not a private group, who have secretive, private meetings, not open to the public and who practice discrimination and exclusion.

In the case of Veterans For Peace, if you are carrying a gun or drive a tank you can be in the parade, if you are a veteran of the US Military and carrying a peace symbol, you are excluded. Once Veterans For Peace had their parade permit in hand the first group they reached out to was the gay and bisexual community in Boston. "You were not allowed to walk in their parade seventeen years ago, how would you like to walk in our parade" The response was immediate and Join the Impact, one of many GLBT organizations in the Boston area enthusiastically joined the Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, the alternative peoples parade. Because of another Massachusetts's Court decision the "Saint Patrick's Peace Parade" had to walk one mile behind the traditional parade. With only three weeks to organize the parade when it steped off this little parade had over 500 participants, grand marshals, a Duck Boat, a band, veterans, peace groups, church groups, GBLT groups, labor groups and more. It was a wonderful parade and was very warmly welcomed by the residents of South Boston.

This year, once again, Veterans For Peace submitted an application to the "Allied War Council" for the inclusion of the small "Saint Patrick's Peace Parade" into the larger parade. Once again the Veterans were denied;

"Your application has been reviewed, we refer you to the Supreme Court ruling on June 19,1995your application to participate in the March 18,2012 Saint Patrick's Day Parade had been denied"

No reason given as to why, just denied. This should be unacceptable to every citizen of Boston, especially the politicians who will be flocking to the Breakfast and Roast on March 18th. This kind of exclusion should not be condoned nor supported by anyone in the City of Boston, especially our elected political leaders.

Just in case the Allied War Council has not noticed, South Boston is no longer a strictly Irish Catholic community. In fact the Irish are no longer a majority in South Boston. The community is much more diverse in 2012 in ethnicity, life styles, religion, points of view and politics then it was forty years ago. Times have changed, the City has changed, the population has changed, social norms have changed. People are much more accepting of those that may be different, have a different religion, customs or ideas. We are a much more inclusive society, everyone that is except the antiquated Allied War Veterans.

It is time for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade to be inclusive of these differing groups. It is time for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade to be reflective of the changes in our culture. It is time for this parade to include groups of differing life styles, points of views and politics or the City of Boston should take back this parade. There is no place in Boston or anywhere in this country for bigotry, hatred, censorship, discrimination and exclusion. This should be a day of celebration, for all the peoples of the great City of Boston to come together, to celebrate Saint Patrick and our Irish History and Heritage. In 2012 this parade should be inclusive and also celebrate what makes us Americans, what makes this country great, our multi-ethnic diversity, differing life-styles, religious affiliations, differing politics and points of views. All of us should wear the green, no one should be excluded, since on Saint Patrick's Day we are all Irish.

In Honor Of The 90th Anniversary Of The 4th Congress Of The Communist International-From The Archives Of The Black Liberation Struggle-The African Blood Brotherhood (1919-1925)-A Report on the American “Negro Problem” for the Communist International By Claude McKay (1922)

Click on the headline to link to the article described in the title.

ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY

The African Blood Brotherhood (...for African Liberation and Redemption) was a radical black liberation organization with ties to the Communist Party. The group was the brainchild of Cyril Briggs, a West Indian-born radical of mixed racial parentage living in New York. Briggs was a staunch exponent of the theory of racial separatism who, after feeling his work had been censored at The Amsterdam New, quit and launched his own monthly magazine The Crusader in November 1918. The African Blood Brotherhood was launched shortly thereafter, early in 1919, beginning with about a score of activists in Harlem and gradually adding membership through the recruiting clout of the magazine, which had a peak circulation of 36,000.

The ABB was a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret fraternity, organized in "posts" with a centralized national organization based in New York City. The group's size has been variously estimated between 1,000 to Briggs' claim of "less than 3,000" members at its peak. In the words of historian Mark Solomon, Briggs' ABB "sought to draw together the themes of race patriotism, anticapitalism, anticolonialism, and organized defense against racist assault. The organization projected fraternity and benevolence, and even offered a program of calisthenics." [pp. 9-10]

The early ABB was an independent radical organization -- not an auxiliary of the Communist Party. That situation changed only in 1921, when Briggs was convinced by Rose Pastor Stokes tojoin the underground CPA, becoming the 3rd black member of that organization. The party sought to make the ABB into a vehicle for mass work among the black working class.

In June of 1921 The Crusader formally announced that it had become the official organ of the African Blood Brotherhood. With Communist Party funds tight in 1922 and Briggs' own financial situation no better, The Crusader was not long for the world, however; publication was terminated in February 1922. In the aftermath Briggs continued to operate the Crusader News Service, providing news material to affiliated publications of the American black press. Briggs later asserted that central to this decision was a desire to fight the ideology of Marcus Garvey and his "back to Africa" movement, which Briggs believed to be bourgeois.

Sometime during the early 1920s the African Black Brotherhood was dissolved, with many of its members merged into the regular Workers Party of America and later into the National Negro Labor College.


[fn. Barbara Bair, "The Crusader" in Buhle et al. (eds), Encyclopedia of the American Left, First Edition, pp. 170-171; Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and Afrioan Americans, 1917-1936, chapters 1&2, passim.; Cyril Briggs, letter to Theodore Draper, Draper Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, box 38.]

In Honor Of The 93rd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-"The Third International After Lenin"

Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the document mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

After the struggle inside the Russian Communist Party in the mid-1920s around internal party democracy and the economics of the transition period the Leon Trotsky-led Left Opposition (and later the International Left Opposition) concentrated on Communist International policies. And chief among them was the contour and fate of the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. While Leon Trotsky was not around to write about the successful revolution of 1949 he did write many polemics on that second revolution and how, in the end, it like in Russian would have to follow the path that he outlined in his Theory Of Permanent Revolution in order to be successful. In the event, although successful, it never developed those soviet forms that would have eased the transition to socialism. This material is still very helpful in sorting things out, and readable.

Out In The Non-Be-Bop 1970s Night-In The Time Of Laura’s Time-Redux

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of LaVern Baker performing her 1950s classic Tomorrow Night.

“Tomorrow night, tomorrow night, will you still say the things you said tonight- a line from LaVern Baker’s song Tomorrow Night.

Walking down the narrow stairs leading to the admission booth at Jacky Fleet’s in old Harvard Square I was suddenly depressed by this thought-how many times lately had I walked down these very stairs looking, looking for what, looking, as Tom Waits says in his song, for the heart of Saturday night, looking recently every night from Monday to Sunday. Looking, not hard looking, not right now anyway after my last nitwit affair but looking for a man who at least had a job, didn’t have another girlfriend or ten, and who wanted to settle down a little, settle down with me a little. Yes, if you really need to know, want to know, I’ve got those late twenties getting just a touch worried old maid blues, and my parents, my straight arrow parents, my mother really, my father just keeps his own counsel between shots of whiskey, keeps badgering me about finding a nice young man. Yes, easy for you to say, Mother. And then she starts on the coming home and finding some farmer-grown boy from high school and X, Y, and Z still asks about me. No thanks that is why I fled to Boston right after college in 1972, and not just because I wanted to get my social worker master’s degree like I told them. And so here I am walking down these skinny stairs again, sigh, yet again.

Jacky’s isn’t a bad place to hang your hat, as my father always likes to say when he finds that one or two places where he feels comfortable enough to stay more than ten minutes before getting the I’ve got to go water the greenhouse plants or something itch. Not a bad place for a woman, a twenty–eight year old woman with college degrees and some aims in life beyond some one-night stand very now and again, or women if my friend and roommate Priscilla decides she is man-hungry enough to make the trip to Harvard Square from the wilds of Watertown and can stand the heavy smoke, mainly cigarette smoke as far as I know, but after a few drinks who knows, that fills the air before half the night is over. Tonight Priscilla is with me because she has a “crush” on Albie St John, the lead singer for the local rock group The Haystraws. And the last time she was here he was giving her that look like he was game for something although he is known around as strictly a for fun guy. And that is okay with Priscilla because she has some guy back home who will marry her when she says the word.

Here is the funny thing though alone, or with Priscilla like tonight, this funky old bar is the only place around where a woman can find a guy who was the least bit presentable to the folks back home, wherever back home was. I’ve met a couple although like I said before things didn’t work out because they were one-night stand guys or already loaded down with girlfriends and I am in no mood to take a ticket. So you can see what desperate straits I am in trying to meet that right guy, or something close. My standards may be a little high for the times but I’m chipping away at then by the day.

Moreover, this place, this Jacky Fleet’s is the only place around that has the kind of music I like, a little country although not Grand Ole Opry country stuff like my parents like, a little bit folkie, kind of left-handed folkie, more like local favorite Eric Andersen folk rock, and a little old time let it rip 1950s rock and roll, like the Haystraws cover, that I never knew anything about when I was a kid since I never got past Rickey Nelson and Bobby Darin, darn him, out in the farm field sticks. Upstate New York, Centerville to be exact, not far out of Albany but it might as well have been a million miles away me picking my sting beans, tomatoes, and whatever else pa grew to keep us from hunger’s door. Not for me this disco stuff, not my style at all, although I love to dance and even took belly dancing lessons even though voluptuous I am not, more just left of skinny and really voluptuous Priscilla calls me skinny. Also my kind of guy never, never would wear an open shirt and some chainy medallion around his neck. Plus, a big plus, Jacky’s has a jukebox for intermissions filled with all kinds of odd-ball songs, real country, stuff, late 1950s rock and roll (the Rickey Nelson/Bobby Vee/Bobby Darin stuff) that nobody but me probably ever heard of unless, of course, you were from Centerville, or a place like that.

After going through mandatory license check and admission fee stuff, saying hi to the waitresses that I know now by name, and Priscilla does too, and the regular bartenders too we find our seats, kind of reserved seats for us where we can sit and not be hassled by guys, or be hassled if something interesting comes along. I have been in kind of a dry spell, outside the occasional minute affair if one could really call some of the things that, for about six months now since I started to work, work doing social work, my profession, if you need to know. That’s what I am trained to do anyway although when I first came to town a few years ago I was, as one beau back then said, “serving them off the arm” in a spaghetti joint over the other side of Cambridge. Strictly a family fare menu, and plenty of college guys, including a few who I wound up dating, low on funds doing the cheap Saturday night date circuit. All in all a no tips situation anyway you cut it, although plenty of guff, a lot of come ons, and extra helpings of “get me this and get me that.”

Before that out in Rochester in college and later after a short stop at hometown Centerville it was nothing but wanna-be cowboy losers, an occasionally low rent dope dealer, some wanna-be musicians, farmer brown farmers, and married guys looking for a little something on a cold night. Ya, I know, I asked for it but a girl gets cold and lonely too. Not just guys, not these days anyway. But I am still pitching, although very low-key that is my public style (some say, say right to my face, prim but that’s only to fend off the losers).

“Laura, what are you having, tonight honey?’ asked my “regular” waitress, Lannie, and then asked Priscilla the same. “Two Rusty Nails” we replied. Tonight, from a quick glance around the room even though it is a Columbus Day holiday night looked like it was going to be a hard-drinking night from the feel of it. That meant on my budget and my capacity about three drinks, max. About the same for Priscilla unless she s real man-hungry. But that is just between us, Lannie, as is her habit, knowing that we are good tippers (the bonds of waitress sisterhood as Priscilla has also “served them off the arm”) brought the drinks right away. And so we settled in get ready to listen to The Haystraws coming up in a while for their first set. Or rather I did Priscilla was looking, looking hard at Albie, and he was looking right back. I guess I will be driving home alone tonight. But as I settled in I noticed that some guy was playing the jukebox like crazy. Like crazy for real. He kept playing about three old timey LaVern Baker songs, Jim Dandy of course, and See See Rider but also about six times in a row her Tomorrow Night. I was kind of glad when the band, like I said, these really good rockers, The Haystraws, began their first set. And so the evening was off, good, bad, or indifferent.

About half way through the set I noticed this jukebox guy kept kind of looking at me, kind of checking me out without being rude about it. You know those little half looks and then look away kind of like kid hide-and-seek and back again. Now I have around long enough to know that I am not bad to look at even if I am a little skinny and I take time to get ready when I go out, especially lately, and although times have been tough lately I am easy to get to know but this guy kind of put me on my guard a little. He was about thirty, neatly bearded which I like and okay for looks, I have been with worst. But what I couldn’t figure, and it bothered me a little even when I tried to avoid his peeks (as he “avoided” mine) is why he was in this place.

Jacky’s, despite its locale in the heart of Harvard Square, is kind of an oasis for country girls like me, or half country girls like Priscilla (from upstate New York too, Utica) and guys the same way although once in a while a Harvard guy (or a guy who says he goes to Harvard. I have met some who made the claim who I don’t think could spell the name, I swear). This guy looked like Harvard Square was his home turf and if he found himself five feet from a street lamp, a library, or a bookstore, he would freak out big time. He might have been an old folkie, he had that feel, or maybe a bluesy kind of guy but he was strictly a city boy and was just cruising this joint.

But here is where the story gets interesting. At intermission Priscilla had to run to the ladies’ room and on the way this guy, Allan Jackson, as I found out later when he introduced himself to me, stopped her and said that her brunette friend looked very nice in her white pants and blouse. He then said to her that he would like to meet me. Priscilla, a veteran of the Laura wars (and I of hers), had the snappy answer ready, “Go introduce yourself, yourself.” And he did start to come over but I kind of turned away to avoid him just in case he had escaped from somewhere (ya, like I said before my luck has been running a little rough lately so I am a little gun-shy).

And this is the every first thing that Allan ever said to me. “I noticed that you kind of perked up when I played LaVern Baker’s Tomorrow Night. Have you been disappointed when things didn’t work out after that first night of promise too, like in the song.” Not an original line, but close. I answered almost automatically, “Yes.” Then he introduced himself and just kind of stood there not trying to sit down or anything like that waiting for me to make the next move as Priscilla came back and said she had run into Albie St. John and he wanted to talk to her (like she was doing him this big favor, like I said I am definitely driving home alone today) before the band came back for a second set. She left and Allan was still standing there, a little ill at ease from his look. Befuddled by his soft non-threatening manner, and soft manners, I was not sure if I wanted him to sit down but then I said, what the hell, he seems nice enough and at least he was not drunk.

So he sat down, and gently, actually very gently, shook my hand and said thank you to me for letting me let him sit at the table. In the flush of that gentle handshake, I swear no man had ever taken my hand in such a manly manner without guile or gimme something, and so I relaxed a little and asked him, not an origin question but I was curious, what brought him to Jacky’s. He started to tell me about his country minute, about finding out abut the wild boys of country music, about Hank Williams (I winched that was my father’s music) about this guy Townes van Zandt and so on. And then he said he was looking for me. I winched again. No, not me exactly, but me as a person who he sensed had been kind of beaten down in the love game lately like he had. He said he saw that look in my face, in my eyes, when he kind of half-checked (I made him laugh when I said we were kid-hide-and-seeking) me out at the jukebox. I said I thought he had fully checked me out but he would only confess to the half. We both laughed at that one.

And after that opening strange to say, because being a country girl, and being brought up in a Methodist-etched household to keep my thoughts to myself, or else, or else Dad would have a fit, I started to talk to him about my troubles lately. And he listened and kept asking more questions, but not in your face questions but questions like he was really interested in the answers and not as some fiendish experiment to take advantage of a simple girl and then I asked him a few things and before we knew it the evening’s entertainment was over and Lannie kept telling us that we had to go. I still had some doubts about this guy, this city boy and his city ways, and his blue eyes that could be true or truly devilish.

As we got up to leave he asked, kind of sheepishly with a little stutter, asked, for my telephone number. No “my place or your place, honey”, or “let’s go down the Charles and have some fun” or “I brought you six drinks (we each brought our own) and so I expect something more” or any of that usual end of the night stuff that I have become somewhat inured to. He simply, softly, said he wanted it because he wanted to call me up tomorrow night. We kind of laughed at that seeing how we met, before we met. I hesitated just a minute and he, sensing my dilemma, started to turn to leave. A guy who knows how to take no for an answer, or the possibility of no, without recrimination or fuss. Wait a minute, Laura. Before he took two steps I blurted it out. And then put it on a cocktail napkin for him. As I passed the glass wet napkin to him he said he would call about seven if that was okay. I said yes. And then he shook my hand, shook it even more gently than when he introduced himself, if that was possible. I flushed again as he headed to the door. Something in that handshake said you had better not let this one get away. Something that said you had better be at the phone at 6:59 PM tomorrow night waiting for his call. And I will be.

From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 90th Anniversary Of The Fourth Congress (1922)On The 93rd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (1919)- Documents Of The CI-1923-28

Click on the headline to link to the Communist International Internet Archives documents-1923-28.

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.

From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 90th Anniversary Of The Fourth Congress (1922)On The 93rd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (1919)- J. T. Murphy-The 4th Congress-A Special Report on the Recent World Congress of the Comintern

Click on the headline to link to the Communist International Internet Archives.

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
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J. T. Murphy-The 4th Congress-A Special Report on the Recent World Congress of the Comintern

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Source: The Communist Review, March 1923, Vol. 3, No. 11.
Publisher: The Communist Party of Great Britain
Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid
Proofreader: Dave Tate
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2006). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.

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IN the midst of unexampled enthusiasm on the part of the masses of Petrograd and Moscow the Fourth Congress of the Communist International began its work on the fifth anniversary of the Proletarian Revolution in Russia. The Second and Third Congresses had been wonderfully popular, but the Fourth Congress was accompanied by scenes which surprised friend and foe.

The Narodin Dom of Petrograd was crowded. Our veteran comrade, Clara Zetkin speaks: “Comrades, in the name of the Executive Committee of the Communist International I declare the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International open. The Congress is opened on the fifth anniversary of the greatest historic event of our time, on the day of the fifth anniversary of the decisive and victorious attack of the world proletarian revolution, which, through the Russian Revolution, inflicted the first defeat upon the international bourgeoisie. I declare the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International open.”

Thus our work began.

Comrade Zinovief was then elected chairman of the Congress. The delegations nominated their members to the Presidium. The Presidium was elected and the machinery of the Congress prepared for the four weeks’ hard work ahead. Then we passed from Red Petrograd to old Moscow and its Kremlin.

It is necessary in order to appraise the full significance and importance of this congress to determine first of all its place historically. The First Congress of the Communist International came forth from the flames of the Russian Revolution. The revolutionary wave throughout Europe was in the ascendant. Its organisational tasks were therefore elementary and simple. It was principally a rallying centre for the revolutionary forces of the working class movement of the world. Its rôle was declamatory; to scare the fearful, to trumpet the rallying cry of the revolution throughout the world, to draw together the new vanguard of the working class. The Second Congress met some sixteen months later on the crest of the revolutionary wave, but with all the signs that the highest point had passed. A wonderful response to the calls of the First Congress had now to be assimilated. Old parties and new parties had rallied to the call. The fabric of the old international was in ruins. Even the so-called centre parties were affected, and threw up, as camouflage, the skeleton of another international. The bourgeoisie were rallying, and the old social democratic leaders were coming to their aid. It was a stupendous situation. This congress had to lay the foundations of the Communist International as an organisation, and to hammer out its policy, to guard itself from the Utopias of the “revolutionary left,” to ensure itself as an instrument of revolution from the vagaries of reformism from the “right,” and to pave the way to an International Mass Party of Revolution—the International Communist Party.

The succeeding twelve months revealed how thoroughly this work was tackled. It was a year of splits in the old parties and the rallying of new masses to the Communist International. It was a year wherein “leftism” received heavy defeats in the struggles of the masses in Europe, and wherein the Levism of the “right” received its mortal blow within the ranks of the International. The Third Congress met with large mass parties affiliated to our International, with another year’s revolutionary experience in Europe and a deep depression looming close ahead. The fight with “leftism” was over. The period of splits in the old parties; which had been shaken to their foundations by the revolution, was for the moment at an end. The special problems of the Third Congress were problems of self-examination and the consolidation of the organisation, plus the great task of appraising the international situation correctly and indicating the means of action throughout the depression. The following months were to prove the testing-time of the International. An unprecedented period of economic depression had started throughout the world, and the capitalist class had begun its savage offensive. If the Communist International could survive this period and prove to have a policy commensurate with the objective demands of the slump, as well as one applicable to periods of revolutionary fervour, its future was assured.

The Fourth Congress met, only to reveal the International more powerful and influential than at any time since its birth. It had stood the test of a defensive struggle, and again began to take the measure of its experience in order to the more ably fulfil its historic rôle in the liberation war of the working class against capitalism.

The work of the Congress can be most conveniently divided into five divisions, as follows:—(1) Executive Committee’s report surveying the experiences of the year and indicating the next steps to be taken. (2) Perspectives of the world revolution, five years of the Russian Revolution, the decline of capitalism, the capitalist offensive, the struggle against the Versailles Treaty, etc. (3) Tactical problems, work within the unions, the Red International of Labour Unions, the agrarian problems, the Oriental question, etc. (4) An examination of the parties of the International in action. (5) Progress towards the International Communist Party (a) Organisational developments, (b) the programme of the International.

THE EXECUTIVE REPORT

The organisational growth and work of the central organs of the International reveal the magnitude of the task of building an international party. The problem is not simply one of counting heads and proclaiming the figures of membership. Without a centralised international party acting in unison throughout all its organs the working class cannot hope to conquer. Numbers have flocked to the Communist International, but they have come trailing the democratic traditions of the Second International and the Amsterdam Trades Unions across the path of the internal progress of the Third International as it grows into a centralised party. Nevertheless, the leaders of the International have made it clear in word and deed that the central authority in the International of revolution has no intention of operating simply as a recording instrument of the national parties.

The International now consists of more than fifty parties. Within the last fifteen months the Executive Committee has held thirty meetings. One hundred and forty-four questions have been discussed, ninety-seven being political questions and forty-seven organisational and administrative. The attendance at these meetings has totalled 1,032. Thirty-one commissions consisting of seven to nine members have dealt with special questions. In addition, the Presidium has met 75 times and discussed 735 questions. There have been two sessions of the enlarged Executive Committee wherein each party had double representation. Fifty-four delegates have been sent to various countries, and 129 commissions appointed according to the decisions of the Presidium and the Executive Committee. During the year, parties have been established in Japan, India, China, Turkey and Persia.

In addition, the Executive Committee has been working closely with the Red International of Labour Unions, the Young Communist International, the Co-operatives and the Women’s Secretariat. So much for the organisational aspects of the work done.

The outstanding political events of the last fifteen months have provided severe tests from which we can say with confidence we have emerged successfully. The capitalist offensive has been severe; the diagnosis of the condition of capitalism throughout the world made at the Third Congress has proven correct, and we see no reason to depart from the conclusions arrived at in the Trotsky-Varga thesis on the world’s economic crisis. Indeed, this condition of capitalism is likely to intensify the offensive for some time rather than to modify it. We can say more definitely than ever that we are now in the epoch of the decline of capitalism. Only Russia moves upward. All other countries are suffering the economic and social defections of a dying system.

No one can deny the advance of the Soviet Republic to the position of a great power in world politics. Contrary to all the predictions and desires of her enemies, month by month she has advanced. The introduction of what is known as the new economic policy marks an important stage in the development of the revolution. We are now able to measure the importance and significance of this policy. The problems of the proletariat in the countries where the workers have taken power are obviously different to the problems of that section of the International where power has yet to be achieved. It was one of the most important tasks of this congress to get to grips with this new economic policy and its rôle in the Soviet Republic and its place in the world revolution.

At the moment of its introduction there were many fears and misgivings in the ranks of the International, whilst our enemies proclaimed it to be the reversion to capitalism and the collapse of Communism. Twelve months’ actual experience has proven its value and revealed it as a very necessary part of the revolutionary development of the Soviet Republic, not an accidental part, but a necessary part, applicable in varying degrees to practically all countries after the taking of power by the proletariat.

The all-important task of the workers outside Russia was still the conquest of power. The period under review, however, was a period of universal and continuous retreat, of great losses in the membership of the trades unions, of the alliance of the Social Democrats with the bourgeoisie against the workers and the Communist International. In spite of these things, and although both the bourgeoisie and the Social Democrats have used even the famine in Russia as a weapon against the Communist International, and had spoken with a single voice in favour of the Social Revolutionary terrorists, the Communist International had done more than hold its own. It had made marked progress in a time when its enemies were predicting its decline and disruption.

Several outstanding political events of the year vindicated and proclaimed the Communist International as the real leader of the working class of the world. In 1921, at the Halle Congress, Comrade Zinovief declared to the German Right Independents that, in view of their refusal to accept the 21 conditions of the Communist International, they had thereby gone over to the bourgeoisie and to Noske. This declaration created an uproar among the Right Independents. But 1922 had seen the fusion of the Right Independents with the party of Noske. A swift and dramatic fulfilment of the prediction of 1921.

A further analogous and classic test of the tactics of the Communist International has been seen in Italy, a country now in the limelight of international events by virtue of its recent counter-revolutionary history. At the time of the Leghorn split in the Italian Socialist Party we warned those who turned away from the Comintern that they had the choice of two roads—either they follow the Reformist International and find themselves in the camp of the bourgeoisie; or they will confess their error and return to the Communist International. After terrible experiences and bitter defeats, the recent Rome conference of the Italian Socialist Party fulfilled the prediction of the Comintern, confessed their error, declared the Comintern to be right, and asked to be readmitted to our ranks.

A further important event again fulfilling the prediction of the Comintern is the amalgamation of the Second and the Two-and-a-half Internationals. It is important, because it unifies to a greater degree the activities of the counter-revolution. Comrade Zinovief declared that this amalgamation signifies a new period of White terror against the workers, the artillery preparation for a new onslaught of the international bourgeoisie. It paves the way to a new Gallifet, Noske, Mussolini, for new executioners of the working class. As if to immediately fulfil this prediction, the Hague Conference of “Peace” openly united with the bourgeoisie against the Communists, and the Ruhr crisis has found them in the camp of the imperialists denouncing the Communists.

In the midst of these dramatic events, the Communist International has attempted three important international campaigns, one in connection with famine relief in Russia, one in connection with the trial of the Social Revolutionaries, and the specially important campaign for the United Front. This campaign for the United Front did not proceed without hindrance from within the International. The experience has revealed how far we have rid ourselves of the practices of the Second International, how far the Communist International has progressed towards an International Communist Party.

It is fortunate for the International that this campaign did not involve the fate of hundreds of thousands of our comrades. Had the issue been more serious and the same inner resistance occurred in the ranks of the International, one hesitates to think of the magnitude of the tragedy which would have followed. Two parties, the French and the Italian, have hindered the International in action. To debate the issue at the hour of crisis when the call has gone forth from the central authority of the organisation is simply to turn the Communist International into a replica of the Second International. Debate as much as we like up to the time of decision, but when the decision is taken the International must act as one man. The French Party and the Italian one, along with the other parties of the International, have repeatedly affirmed their adherence to the 21 conditions of membership of the Communist International. Why, then, this failure to put them into practice?

A long list of details could be given from the debates arising out of the examination of the parties, but in the main practically all of them arise from the fact that the Communist International, as in the case of all other organisations, has not tumbled down from above fully equipped according to some foreordained plan, but is made up of the raw material history has offered with much of its past experience and habits of the pre-revolutionary epoch, hampering its efforts to carry through the tasks of the era of revolution. In the clarifying process through which the elements taming into the International of Revolution have to pass, it is of interest and significance to observe that it is only as they pass through the fire of revolutionary experience that they finally rid themselves of the illusions of the past. The best equipped section of the International is certainly the Russian Communist Party, and can we wonder when we remember the colossal problems they have had to tackle or perish, and the marvellous feats they have accomplished. It was not until the German party had passed through great trials and suffered terrible punishment that it ceased to be in a state of crisis and a first-class problem for the International. It is through struggle and defeats that the Italian comrades are solving their problems. It will be through struggle, that the French and other parties will emerge to become real sections of the International Communist Party. At the same time, it must not be thought that their problems are purely French problems or that the Italian problems are purely Italian, and that the International must wait until every section has suffered defeats and bitter awakenings ere the Central Executive or the Congress of the International strives to bring them into line. Not by these means can we build an international party. It is through the daily effort to operate as an international party that we shall succeed in becoming such. Hence the importance of the survey of the year’s experience of the campaign for the United Front and the critical examination of the parties in their attempted application of it.

One thing is quite certain now. There is no opposition to the policy of the United Front in the International, although there are very few parties that have not come under the fire of criticism for actions which either submerged the identity of the International or placed it in the position of the Utopians of the Left. The application of the policy is not simple. It is full of complexities. The fight against the policy is over, and there is no need to dwell on it. The problems of its application cannot be so hurriedly dismissed. The principal danger throughout is that of the submergence of the party on the plea of unity.

This danger arises from a lack of thorough understanding the rôle of the party, and it is one to which we have to give special attention. The Communist Party of Great Britain came in for a little rough handling on this question by Comrade Radek, on behalf of the Executive Committee. The general election here has provided us with a fund of experience to test how far the party and its leaders have grasped the implications of the policy. Running throughout the party there appears to be the notion that the party exists only to become a Left Wing of the Labour Party, that we ought not even to criticise its leaders, that everything should be submerged to the idea of getting the Labour Party into power via Parliament. In addition, there are many pursuing a policy of hiding the fact that it is the Communist Party which is giving a lead; they object to programmes for the unions or other labour organisations going forth in the name of the party. I have heard since my return from the Congress the following expression repeated at meeting after meeting, “We are prepared to support any party standing for so, and so,” which seems to indicate an attitude which completely obscures the independent role of the Party. I have looked through the election material of members of the Party, and in some cases it would be difficult to discover from the printed matter issued that they were members of the Party. Had the Executive Committee of the Communist International received this election data before the Congress I am convinced that the critcism the Party received would have been much more stringent. We should neither aim at being a subterranean party existing to draft programmes on the quiet, or a Party which has for its goal the election of a Labour Government through a hush-hush policy. These things are not the application of the United Front policy, but political confusion.

It is to be regretted that our party is not the only one suffering from these defects. The debates on the Executive report and the capitalist offensive made that perfectly clear. Again and again, throughout the debates on the unions, the agrarian question, the problems of the parties, there was a recurrence to this central theme and its many manifestations. The essential conclusions of the debates were as follows:—(1) The opponents of the United Front Policy in the International were wrong in assuming they could carry out the tasks of the International without winning the majority of the masses to their support. (2) It was wrong for any of the supporters of the policy of the United Front Policy to assume that it meant that the Party had to lose its identity in the cry for unity. These parties were directed again to the theses issued by the Executive Committee, especially to paragraph 18, which reads:—

“The Executive Committee of the Communist International counts as a primary and fundamental condition, of general application to the Communist Parties of all countries, that every Communist Party which enters into any agreement with the parties of the Second or Two-and-a-half International should retain absolute independence for the expression of its views and the criticism of its opponents. . . While supporting the watch-word of the maximum unity of the working class organisations, Communists, in every practical action taken against the capitalist front, must not on any account refrain from putting forward their views, which are only the logical expression of the defence of the interests of the working class as a whole.”

(3) In order to make clear the policy of the International to the masses, and to rally them to our side in the struggle, we have to utilise every means of approach, both the direct and the indirect appeal, to approach their present leaders at the same time as the masses with our proposals for the defence and prosecution of the interests of the workers both as a means to rally the masses and to expose clearly the character of their leadership. The demand for a Workers’ Government is not a demand which should smother the Communist Parties, but a slogan to rally the masses against capitalism by means of which the Parties can reveal the true character of the conquest the workers have to achieve. (4) The demand for the Workers’ Government is not of universal application. The Workers’ Government is not an historical necessity, but an historical possibility. Nor is the Labour Government a pseudonym for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but a possible means leading to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. (5) The form of a Workers’ Government is not necessarily the Parliamentary form, nor does it follow that a Soviet Government is necessarily a true Workers’ Government. We must not be confused by forms or labels. Our aim is the Dictatorship of the proletariat and the defeat of the bourgeoisie. Comrade Zinovief summed up the situation admirably as follows: “We will say to the workers: Do you want a Workers’ Government, if so, well and good, we are ready to come to an agreement even with the social democrats, though we warn you that they are going to betray you. We favour a Workers’ Government, but under the one condition that you be ready to fight with us against the bourgeoisie. If this is your wish, then we will take up the fight against the bourgeoisie; and if the Workers’ Government results from the struggle, it will stand on sound principles, and will be a real beginning to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

There is nothing here which justifies reformist opportunism or the lowering of the Communist standard for the purpose of getting a seat in Parliament either as an unemployed candidate or a Labour Party candidate.

One other important phase of the struggle which has a direct bearing upon the condition of our Party, as well as upon many others in the International, is the struggle for the factory committees. At the moment they are in the forefront of the German movement. Comrade Zinovief stated in his report that no Communist Party could be a bona-fide Communist Party without it had succeeded in establishing nuclei in the factories, the mines, etc.; no movement could be considered a bona-fide workers’ movement that did not succeed in establishing factory councils.’

To this statement I took exception, not so much with regard to its assertion concerning the parties, but with regard to the creation of factory councils. With nearly 2,000,000 unemployed in Great Britain, among whom are the best elements upon whom we had to depend for the formation of factory councils, it was not to be expected that the factory committees would be the natural outlet for those who were left in the factories. The very attempt to form factory committees would lead to dismissal. Only when Germany was free from unemployment or the situation very revolutionary did we find factory councils playing an important rôle. Comrade Zinovief admitted the difficulties, but insisted that they must be overcome.

The need for making the factories and workshops the most important centres for our Communist activity and the importance of establishing Party nuclei within them cannot be over estimated. I am inclined to think, after several weeks’ renewal of contact with the Party and an examination of its election records, along with the records of other party activities, that the party has lost contact in this direction. There are no party nuclei in the factories. We must ponder over this part of the report and ask ourselves whether this lack of contact with the factories has not something to do with the marked tendencies towards formal democracy in our ranks. The attitude of “We are prepared to support any party which stands for, etc. . . ” haunts me. We have got to have those party nuclei in the factories, and pave the way to the factory councils.

The same issues were raised in the debate on our work within the unions, and again let it be understood that it is not a question of formal organisation, but of the means to revolutionise the masses. Even when allowance is made for unemployment, there are far more workers in the factories, etc., than there are unemployed, or even than in the trades unions. This issue was raised as sharply in the Red International Congress as in the Comintern Congress. And here let me dispose of the notion which has been running through the minds of many party members in this country as in others—that there is any intention or ever was any intention of winding up the Red International of Labour Unions. The Red International is necessary to the international working class movement. It has increased its influence, and will increase its influence the more sharply the revolutionary issues are brought to the forefront of the experiences of the masses. It is a necessary rallying centre for the revolutionary unions of the world in their struggle against Amsterdam and their progress towards Communism.

In order to overcome the prejudices of the syndicalists of France a concession was made by the R.I.L.U. Congress. Instead of insisting upon the unions affiliated to the R.I.L.U. having an organisational contact with the Communist Party in the respective countries, this is now optional. This has been taken by some to mean no contact with the Communist parties whatever. This notion we must combat with all our might. The best way of ensuring the unity of action between the two organisations is for the Party membership to push ahead with its nuclei organisation within the Red International, as in every other organisation, demonstrating by organised work that the Communist International is the actual leader of the proletariat in all its struggles.

The debates on the Executive report covered briefly practically all the tactical problems of the parties of the international. The essentials of the debates which I have indicated formed the basis of all the discussions concerning the parties for which there is not space to deal in detail. The Executive Committee’s report was agreed upon as confirming the leadership during the interval between the Third and Fourth Congresses and the Decisions of the Third Congress.

The reports on this section of the Congress proceedings were the most interesting of all. The leaders of the International took the floor, and how gladly we greeted our Comrade Lenin’s return. In his usual business-like way he proceeded straight to the subject to hand, though warning us that he intended to limit himself to only one part of the subject under discussion, viz., The New Economic Policy in Russia. In his speech to the Fourth Congress he disposed of the critics of the Russian Revolution in such a way that we feel that any subsequent attack can only be the result of an absolute refusal to face facts. Comrade Lenin’s speech along with the speeches of Comrades Clara Zetkin, Trotsky and Bela Kun constitute a masterly survey which leaves little more to be said about the fundamental features and the unfolding of the Russian Revolution.

Comrade Zetkin’s speech[1] ought to have come first. She gave the historical setting of the revolution in relation to the European working class movement. She illustrated the effect of the development of imperialism during the latter part of the nineteenth century, showing how it had created a new political orientation within the ranks of labour away from the path of revolution to reformism; and how it propounded the theory that revolution was not necessary to secure the emancipation of labour. Then came its collapse with the imperialist war of 1914-18 and its revival under the banner of capitalist reconstruction, holding out hopes of better times for the workers by peaceful collaboration with the capitalists. Throughout the whole of its history it had been actively eliminating the will to revolution.

Into this atmosphere the Russian Revolution came like a thunderbolt to begin the process of liquidating throughout the world the revisionism, and reformism which had so long ensnared the workers. The Russian proletariat struck the first mighty blow of the world revolution against capitalism. Its progress through the varying tempos of the world revolutionary developments had provided the working class with tremendous lessons, demonstrated the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the use of force, the supreme need of the party of revolution, the necessity of knowing how to use the peasantry to aid the proletarian revolution, how to advance and how to retreat.

Comrade Lenin took up the theme of the New Economic Policy, and placed it once and for all in its correct revolutionary setting. He referred to his analysis of the Russian situation in 1918, when he declared that for Russia to advance to State capitalism under the dictatorship of the Proletariat would be a marked advance for that country. And, here he incidentally referred to the discussion of the programme of the International and the necessity for all parties not only to consider plans of advance, but also plans of retreat. The volition of the revolution had taken them further than it was possible for them to consolidate. In February, 1921, they were nearer a rupture with the masses of the population than at any time since the beginning of the Revolution. They had gone too far. The masses had sensed that before they had taken the measure of the situation. Hence the New Economic Policy.

The fundamentals of the economic situation had not altered since 1918, and they took up the theses enunciated then, and elaborated them with a greater certainty and completeness. They were now witness to an all-round revival. The famine had been a terrible blow. Nevertheless, with the introduction of this policy the peasants had liquidated the famine and paid their taxes. The light industries had made and were making rapid progress. The revival of the heavy industry was their greatest problem. Without substantial State aid these could not revive. There had been much talk concerning the concessions. But these concessions up to now existed mainly on paper. There was much cry, but little wool. Capitalism refused its loans, the workers and peasants of Russia were culturally backward—they were isolated. Yet they were winning in spite of errors.

There has been much talk about our errors, and apparently by people who have little reason to be noisy concerning errors. There is one great difference between the errors of the Bolsheviks and the errors of the bourgeoisie and their followers in the Second and Two and a-Half Internationals. The Bolsheviks say 2 plus 2 equals 5. Now, that is an error that can be corrected. But our opponents say 2 plus 2 equals a burning candle.

Much has been said about our famous rouble. Very well. Since the introduction of our New Economic Policy we stabilised the rouble for a period of three months. In 1922 we have stabilised it for a period of five months. The progress is in the right direction and compares very favourably indeed with the dancing exchanges of the capitalist countries of the West. We shall stabilise the rouble, and we shall revive the heavy industry, even if there be no loans from the capitalist countries, although it may take a longer period. Already we have saved 20,000,000 gold roubles for our heavy industries. We need many millions more. We shall get them by persistent work and economy. By these means the proletarian State will be strengthened, and the path to Communism assured.

The rôle of the New Economic Policy is therefore perfectly clear as a transition measure for securing the willing co-operation of the peasantry with the town proletariat in those countries where agriculture is backward or has assumed forms of a peasant proprietary character. It is therefore not simply a measure forced upon Russia, but an historical necessity in many countries, if not, indeed, for every country, pending the growth within the new social order of the economic foundations of higher forms of agricultural or industrial organisation leading on to Communism.

Comrade Trotsky developed this theme as follows. He said: “The possibilities of the upbuilding of the socialist economic system, when the essential conquest of political power has been achieved, are limited by the degree to which the productive forms have been developed, the general cultural level of the proletariat, and the political situation, national and international.”

On the international situation there arose an interesting controversy. The subject of the capitalist offensive can hardly be disassociated from the international crisis of capitalism, nor can the struggle against the Versailles Treaty. Comrade Trotsky, in a too-brief survey of the international situation (having devoted the greater part of his speech to the Russian revolution), argued that capitalism is in a state of constant crisis, whilst the working class is not ready to end the crisis by seizing power. The crisis is not maintained at the same tempo. It had its ups and downs which would continue for some time. Within that period we should witness a period of Wilsonism in Europe under the pacific leadership of the Social Democratic Labour Parties, either in alliance with Liberals or without such an alliance. During this period we should have to guard against this social pacificism entering the ranks of the Communist International. The dangers from the Right were more pressing under these circumstances than any danger from the left. This does not mean that capitalism is finding a solution to its problems. The nineteenth century was the epoch of concessions to the working class. 1914 ushered in the epoch when these concessions could no longer be made. The forces of production had outgrown the old framework and the capitalists could find no solution to their problems. The period of pacifism could only be short lived. It was the last flicker of a candle burning itself out.

Comrades Friedlander, of Austria, and Ravenstem, of Holland, challenged this diagnosis of the situation, and argued that, rather than a period of pacifism, the whole tempo of the revolution would be quickened by the violent action of the reactionary movements which had manifested themselves most powerfully in recent days. The rise of Facism in Italy, Germany, and other countries, the aggressive attitude of the French Government, the ascendency of the reactionaries in Britain in the form of the Conservative, government, etc. Everything, they declared pointed to more violent actions and crises rather than to the possibilities of any pacific period.

Comrade Radek, who gave a masterly survey of the international situation, said that these comrades were looking too closely at the immediate situation. Comrade Trotsky looked over a much longer period, and, he did not differ with him. It is true that the capitalist offensive is extending and intensifying along the whole political and economic front, and its climax has not yet been reached. The question arises: What prospect of success has such an offensive? This wave of counter-revolution is not the outcome of a period of general economic revival, but represents an attempt to effect the forcible arrest of economic decay. The counter-revolution cannot bring bread and peace. We have, therefore, to do now with an offensive, which has no prospect of victory, however ruthless it may be. The social basis of this counter-revolution is very narrow. It lacks the élan, it lacks the affiliations, and it lacks the foundation which would render possible a long and victorious campaign.

Comrade Trotsky followed the discussion with a long article in the Congress paper, called the Bolshevik, in which he answered that there is hardly any ground for the categorical assertion that the proletarian revolution in Germany will be victorious before the internal and external difficulties of France will bring about a governmental and parliamentary crisis. Elections would return the Left bloc. The repercussion would deal a heavy blow at the conservative government in England, strengthen the opposition of the Labour Party, and in all probability lead to a crisis, elections, and a victory for the Labour Party, either alone or in league with the Independent Liberals. The social democrats of Germany would immediately quit their semi-opposition, and begin the “linking up of the great democracies of the West,” bring Scheideman back to power, etc. That such a regime could only be short-lived was obvious. To us the bourgeoisie is not a mere stone precipitated into the abyss, but a live historical force which struggles and resorts to manœuvres, and we must be prepared to grasp all the methods they employ, and understand all the measures they adopt if we would finally precipitate them into the abyss.

Following on this diagnosis of the situation Comrade Radek again developed the application of the policy of the United Front, and analysed again the demand for a Workers’ government, and in the process making perfectly clear that we had to face the situation as stated in the words of Clara Zetkin: “The aims and trends of any historical development are plainly to be seen. But the tempo depends mainly upon the subjective energies of the historical process, upon the revolutionary consciousness and activities of the proletarian masses.” “In the estimate of this factor so many imponderabilities are concerned that it is impossible to prophesy confidently concerning the tempo of the world revolution.” But whether slow or quick, it is the duty of the Communist International to be in the forefront of the fight leading to the conquest of power.

I do not propose to deal with these questions in this survey of the Congress. With regard to the first problems, in no case was there the introduction of entirely new issues. The theses presented were in the main an elaboration of the theses of the Second and Third Congresses, more especially the Second Congress. To attempt, to summarise them here would take too much space. An abridged edition of the Congress proceedings is prepared, and it will be better to follow the reports therein than to attempt to further condense them into an article.

With regard to an examination of the parties, many came under close scrutiny, chief of which were the French and Italian parties. In both cases agreements were arrived at with the delegations to bring the parties more in line with the requirements of the Communist International, the constitution of which both parties had repeatedly affirmed. In both cases there were questions of political confusion, the ridding of the parties of social democratic notions carried forward from the parties of the Second International. In the case of the Italian party, led by Bordiga, who had not yet rid himself of the absentee philosophy arising from his earlier anti-parliamentary outlook. The full story of the Italian and French[2] party developments are worthy of special articles for the study of every member of the party here.

Comrade Schuler, on behalf of the Y.C.I., gave an interesting report of the struggles of the Youth to build up their International. And it should be mentioned that our party did not shine in that report. We were told that the Youth had to work hard to persuade the party of the necessity of developing the Youth movement, and that it had been impossible to get an article in our party organs dealing with the organisation of the Youth.[3] This attitude of indifference to the Youth has been a characteristic of quite a number of the parties of the adult International. Nevertheless, the Youth International has established itself and grown in power. Its tasks were defined at its second congress as follows: (1) To defend the economic needs of the Youth; (2) To educate the Youth systematically in the Marxian doctrine; (3) To carry on anti-militarist campaigns among the young workers in and outside the bourgeois armies.

Since the Second Congress great strides had been made in these tasks. The Young Communist Press reflected better to-day than at any time previous, the daily struggles of the young workers, whilst we can safely say that the Young Communist Leagues of Germany, Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and Denmark are becoming real militant organisations. It is interesting to note that the Communist Youth organisations in France and Czecho-Slovakia have been suppressed by the State, whilst the adult parties have remained quite legal.

The time is urgent as never before for the closest working arrrangements between the Youth organisations and the adult parties. The Communist International therefore declares, “That the United Front of the young and the adult workers for a common struggle against capitalism and reaction is an absolute necessity, and calls upon its parties and the entire working class to stand for the interest and demands of the working class youth as well as for their own, and to make them the subject of their daily struggle.”

Four comrades, led by Comrade Zetkin, reported on this question of work amongst women, and again our party came in for severe criticism. But first let Comrade Zetkin address a few words as introduction, for she says the work of the Women’s Secretariat is misunderstood by our own comrades in the International.

“They misunderstand the work of the Communist among the women and the tasks of the national sections and of the International in this connection. This, with some, the remains of an old view, with others it is wilful prejudice because they do not sympathise with our cause and even partly oppose it. The International Women’s Secretariat is not, as many believe, the union of independent organisations of the women’s movements, but a branch of the Executive of the Communist International. It conducts the activity not only in constant co-operation with the Executive, but under its immediate leadership: It has nothing to do with any feminist tendencies. It exists for systematic Communist propaganda amongst women.”

Having made the position clear as to the task of the women’s section, it will be well for us to reflect on the criticism of our party.

“In England, organisation for conducting systematic agitation among the feminine proletariat is altogether lacking. The Communist Party of England excused itself by its weakness, and has continually refused or postponed the setting up of a special body for systematic agitation among the women. All the exhortations of the International Women’s Secretariat have been in vain. No Women’s Secretariat was established; the only thing that was done was to appoint a woman comrade as general party agitator. Our women comrades have organised various meetings for the political education of women out of their own feeble means. . . . The British section of the International cannot remain indifferent to the fact that millions of proletarian women are organised in suffrage societies, trades unions of the old type, in consumers’ co-operatives and in the Labour Party.”

Need I quote more? Comrade Hertha Sterm supplemented these observations, and there is no doubt that we have to be up and doing. Without the women, no revolution can hope to be successful. There are big possibilities here. Time and again the working women of this country have shown themselves capable of great actions, in rent strikes, in evictions, in strikes and in general agitation. Harnessed to the party they can be a power not to be despised. We are striving to make amends for our shortcomings. Since the Congress, the Party Executive has appointed a comrade to immediately get to work with the formation of the Women’s Secretariat of the Party.

The discussion on the programme of the International revealed a sharp division in the ranks of the leaders of the International on the question as to whether temporary measures should appear in the programme of the International. In this discussion, Bukharin opposed Varga and Thalheimer of Germany. This is an issue upon which every party will have to make itself clear during the ensuing months. So far, only a few parties have submitted programmes for consideration and incorporation in the International programme. All parties are now instructed to have their programmes in the hands of the Executive Committee of the International three months before the next Congress, when the complete programme of the International will be formulated. Meanwhile, the programmes that have been submitted will be printed and issued throughout the International for discussion.

I will content myself, therefore, with a statement of the most important difference. Bukharin takes the following position with regard to the insertion of temporary demands in the programme “Temporary measures, such as the policy of the United Front, the slogan of the Workers’ Government, should not be put in our programme. These slogans are required by the present defensive situation of the proletariat; to put them in our programme is a retreat from our offensive.” Thalheimer opposed as follows: “The present period of transformation is one of the most important on the way to revolution. In this period the Comintern must not fail in its duty. The inclusion of immediate demands is theoretically admissable so long as the theories upon which the demands are made are correct. Shortly before the October revolution, Comrade Lenin himself favoured the adoption of a programme of minimum demands.”

These are the starting points for the development of the arguments of the respective positions. We shall have to return to this subject again, sufficient for the moment to set the party thinking on these issues.

THE BUILDING OF THE INTERNATIONAL PARTY

Probably the most important development arising out of the Congress arises from the decisions taken concerning the Executive Committee. It was decided, that the time had arrived to make a further stride in the direction of the International Communist Party. This consists in the reorganisation of the Central Executive on the basis of a centralised party. Instead of the Executive consisting of a number of representatives of various parties, the Executive has now to be elected by the International Congress. “It shall consist of the President, 24 members and 10 substitutes.” This is the most important blow at the federaldstic notions in the International, which is followed up by the ruling that “no binding mandates are permitted, and such will be declared invalid, because such mandates contradict the spirit of an international, centralised, proletarian world party.”

In future, delegates sent from the various countries will go to the Congress, not simply to express the point of view of a particular party, but to be members of an international congress surveying and contributing to the solution of the problems of the International as a whole. It has been a habit of the majority of the delegates to survey the International from a national point of view rather than the reverse, just as it is a habit here for members of the party to start off their observations, “Well, so far as we on the Clyde are concerned . . . ,” “We in the provinces are of the opinion, etc. . .” I for one shall be, glad when we can drop the name Communist Party of Great Britain, Communist Party of Russia, etc., and we can speak clearly and act in the name of an International Communist Party. But even in this case it is “a long way to Tipperary.” We have to grow into it and step by step eliminate the things which impede our steps and take such measures as will positively build the organisation we require as the most effective instrument of the international working class.

By centralisation the International does not mean losing contact, and the experience of the last year has seen the development of means for more lively contact than hitherto. During the year the E. C. convened what were called enlarged executive committees. Their value has been thoroughly appreciated, and the Fourth Congress determined that there should be regular meetings of the enlarged Executive every four months. This enlarged Executive shall consist of (1) 25 members of the E.C.; (2) of three additional representatives from each of the following parties: Germany, France, Russia, Czecho-Slovakia, and Italy, also the Y.C.I. and, the Red International of Labour Unions; (3) of two additional representatives from England, Poland, America, Bulgaria and Norway; (4) one representative from each of the other countries that are entitled to vote.

In addition, in order to make the International more and more an efficient organ of struggle, the Congress ruled that “it is desirable for the purpose of mutual information and for coordinated work that the more important sections of neighbouring countries shall mutually-exchange representatives.“

Again, let no member of the party think that careerists are going to stand much chance in the Communist International. “The Congress, in the most decisive manner, condemns all cases of resignations tendered by individual comrades of the various central committees and by entire groups of such members. The Congress considers such resignations as the greatest disorganisation of the Communist movement. Every leading post in a Communist Party belongs not to the bearer of the mandate, but to the Communist International as a whole. The Congress resolves: Elected members of central bodies of a section can resign their mandate only with the consent of the Executive. Resignations accepted by a party central committee without the consent of the Executive Committee are invalid.”

These important decisions begin to operate now. The new Central Committee of the International was elected at the Congress, whilst, in the selection of the Executive, toleration was shown to the old arrangement, the Central Executive now represents the International as a whole. The next Congress will see little toleration for the federalism of the past. With these important steps towards the International Communist Party, the Congress closed on December 3rd.

We had had four weeks of constant meetings, discussions, self-examination. For detailed consideration of problems there has been no Congress to surpass it. To convey all in an article for a magazine is impossible. But to sum up: The Congress reviewed the work of the last fifteen months and found the leadership of the Executive to be good. It examined the decisions of the Third Congress in the light of this experience, and found them correct. The details of tactics in relation to the organisations of labour and the particular problems with which they had to deal had received detailed attention. Many parties of the International had been closely examined with a view to helping them in their efforts to become more efficient sections of the International. Bold measures have been initiated in the reorganisation of the International in terms of an International Communist Party. And the preliminary discussions of the programme of the Communist International have given a lead to the parties to complete the process of formulating the work to be accomplished. A great work and a great Congress, contributing greatly to the one cause which is worthy of all the efforts that have been put forth—the triumph of the working class in world-wide Communism.

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Notes

1. A verbatim report of this magnificent speech by Clara Zetkin appeared in last month’s REVIEW.

2. Readers of the REVIEW are advised to study the inner struggles of the French party which have been ably dealt with by E. Verney. See the November number and a special article which appears in this issue. We shall deal with the Italian party in a future number.—Ed.

3. This sweeping statement, which appeared in the report submitted by Comrade Schuler, is not true so far as the COMMUNIST REVIEW is concerned. And the E.C. of the Y.C.L. in Britain have already written to the Editor of the COMMUNIST REVIEW to assure him that he is not involved in the charge put forward by their international delegate. Although the COMMUNIST REVIEW has never received one single article from the Y.C.L., we were able to procure a splendid historical outline of the growth of the Youth Movement by Comrade Leontieff. This lengthy article was published in the REVIEW and the type was offered to the Y.C.L., free of charge, to enable them to issue it as a pamphlet. This offer, for some reason, was not accepted. Our readers also know that the REVIEW, of its own accord, helps to push the sale of the Young Communist by publishing a free advertisement every month.—Editor of COMMUNIST REVIEW.

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