*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 91st Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Second World Congress (1920)-Manifesto Of The Second Congress

*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 91st Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Second World Congress (1920)-

Honor The 91st Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (The 21 Conditions Congress) Of The CI (July-August 1920)

Markin comment:

Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.

No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.

The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Second Congress of the Communist International

Manifesto
I
International Relations After Versailles
The bourgeoisie throughout the world sorrowfully recalls its yester-years. All of its mainstays in foreign and domestic relations have been either overthrown or shaken. ‘Tomorrow’ looms like a black threat over the exploiters’ world. The imperialist war has completely destroyed the old system of alliances and mutual guarantees which lay at the bottom of the world balance of power and armed peace. The Versailles Treaty has created no new balance of power in place of the old.

First Russia and then Austria-Hungary and Germany were eliminated as factors from the world arena. The mightiest countries which had occupied first places in the system of world seizures found themselves transformed into objects of plunder and dismemberment. Before the victory-flushed imperialism of the Entente there opened up new and vast horizons of colonial exploitation, beginning immediately beyond the Rhine, embracing all of Central and Eastern Europe and extending far to the Pacific Ocean. Are either the Congo or Syria, Egypt or Mexico in any way comparable to the steppes, forests and mountains of Russia and the skilled labour power of Germany? The new colonial programme of the conquerors is self-determined: the workers’ republic in Russia is to be overthrown, Russian raw material is to be plundered, and the German worker coerced into processing it with the aid of German coal, while the armed German entrepreneur acts as overseer – thus assuring a flow of finished products and, with them, profits to the victors. The programme of ‘organising Europe’, advanced by German imperialism at the moment of its greatest military successes, has been inherited by the victorious Entente. When the rulers of the Entente place the defeated bandits of the German Empire in the defendant’s dock, the latter will truly be judged by a ‘court of peers’ – their peers in crime.

But the victors’ camp likewise contains a number of those who have themselves been vanquished. Intoxicated by chauvinist fumes of a victory which she won for others, bourgeois France considers herself the conqueror of Europe. In reality, never before has France and the very foundations of her existence been so slavishly dependent upon the more powerful states – England and North America – as she is today. For Belgium, France prescribes a specific economic and military programme, transforming her weaker ally into an enslaved province, but in relation to England, France herself plays the role of Belgium, only on a somewhat larger scale.

From time to time the English imperialists allow the French usurers to exercise their arbitrary rule within specified limits on the continent. In this way they skilfully divert from themselves, and unload on France, the sharpest indignation of the toilers of Europe and of England herself. The power of ruined and blood-drained France is illusory, almost burlesque in character; sooner or later this will penetrate even into the brains of French social-patriots.

The specific weight of Italy in world affairs has dropped even lower. Without coal, without grain, without raw materials, with her internal equilibrium completely disrupted by the war, bourgeois Italy is incapable, though not from lack of ill will, of fully realising in life her right to plunder and violate even those colonial nooks and corners allotted her by England. japan, torn within her feudal shell by capitalist contradictions, stands on the verge of the profoundest revolutionary crisis which is even now, despite a favourable international situation, paralysing her flight into the imperialist skies.

And so, there remain only two genuine world powers: Great Britain and the United States. English imperialism has rid itself of the Asiatic rivalry of Tsarism and of the terrible German competition. British naval might has reached its zenith. Great Britain encircles continents with a chain of subject peoples. Having laid violent hands upon Finland., Estonia and Latvia, she is depriving Sweden and Norway of their last vestiges of independence and is transforming the Baltic Sea into one of Britain’s bays. She faces no opposition in the North Sea. By means of the Cape Colony, Egypt, India, Persia, Afghanistan, she has transformed the Indian Ocean into a British sea. Ruling the oceans, England controls the continents. Her role as a world power is delimited only by the American Dollar Republic and by – the Russian Soviet Republic.

The World War has completely dislodged the United States from its continental conservatism (isolationism'). The programme of an ascending national capitalism – ‘America for the Americans’ (the Monroe Doctrine) – has been supplanted by the programme of imperialism: ‘The Whole World for the Americans’. After exploiting the war commercially, industrially and through stock market speculation; after coining European blood into neutral profits, America went on to intervene in the war, played the decisive role in bringing about Germany’s debacle, and has poked its fingers into all the questions of European and world politics.

Under the ‘League of Nations’ flag, the United States made an attempt to extend to the other side of the ocean its experience with a federated unification of large, multi-national masses – an attempt to chain to its chariot of gold the peoples of Europe and other parts of the world, and bring them under Washington’s rule. In essence the League of Nations was intended to be a world monopoly corporation, ‘Yankee and Co.'

The President of the United States, the great prophet of platitudes, has descended from Mount Sinai in order to conquer Europe, ‘14 Points’ in hand. Stockbrokers, cabinet members and businessmen never deceived themselves for a moment about the meaning of this new revelation. But by way of compensation the European ‘Socialists’, with doses of Kautskyan brew, have attained a condition of religious ecstasy and accompany Wilson’s sacred ark, dancing like King David.

When the time came to pass to practical questions, it became clear to the American prophet that despite the dollar’s excellent foreign exchange rate, the first place on all sea lanes, which connect and divide the nations, continued as heretofore to belong to Great Britain, for she possesses a more powerful navy, longer transoceanic cables and a far older experience in world pillage. Moreover, on his travels Wilson encountered the Soviet Republic and Communism. The offended American Messiah renounced the League of Nations, which England had converted into one of her diplomatic chancelleries, and turned his back upon Europe.

It would, however, be childish to assume that American imperialism, beaten back by England during its first offensive, will withdraw into the shell of the Monroe Doctrine. No, by continuing to subordinate the Western Hemisphere to itself more and more violently, by transforming the countries of Central and South America into its colonies, the United States, through its two ruling parties – the Democrats and the Republicans – is preparing to create, as a counterweight to the English League of Nations, a league of its own, i.e., a league with North America as the centre of the world system. To begin the job properly, the United States intends during the next three to five years to make its navy more powerful than England’s. Therewith imperialist England is confronted with the question: ‘To be or not to be?’ The ferocious rivalry of these two giants in the field of naval construction is accompanied by a no less ferocious struggle over oil.

France – who had reckoned on playing the role of arbiter between England and the United States, but found herself drawn instead into the British orbit as a second-class satellite – discerns in the League of Nations an intolerable yoke and is seeking a way out by inflaming the antagonisms between England and the United States.

These are the most powerful forces working toward and preparing a new world conflict.

The programme of liberation of small nations, advanced during the war, has led to the complete ruination and enslavement of the Balkan peoples, victors and vanquished alike, and to the Balkanisation of a large part of Europe. Their imperialist interests have impelled the conquerors onto the road of carving out isolated, small national states from the territories of the defeated great powers. There is not even a semblance here of the so-called national principle: imperialism consists of overcoming national frameworks, even those of the major states. The new and tiny bourgeois states are only by-products of imperialism. In order to obtain temporary points of support imperialism creates a chain of small states, some openly oppressed, others officially protected while really remaining vassal states Austria, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bohemia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, and so on. Dominating over them with the aid of banks, railways, and coal monopolies, imperialism condemns them to intolerable economic and national hardships, to endless friction and bloody collisions.

What a savage irony of history is there in the facts that the restoration of Poland – which was part of the programme of revolutionary democracy and which led to the first manifestations of the international proletariat – has been achieved by imperialism with the object of counteracting the revolution; and that ‘democratic’ Poland, whose warrior-pioneers died on all of Europe’s barricades, is today playing the role of a foul and bloody tool in the thievish hands of Anglo-French gangsters – against the first workers’ republic in the world!

Alongside Poland stands ‘democratic’ Czechoslovakia, selling herself to French capitalism, supplying White Guard detachments against Soviet Russia and Soviet Hungary.

The heroic attempt of the Hungarian proletariat to break out of Central Europe’s state and economic chaos onto the road of a Soviet Federation – the only road of salvation – was strangled by the combined forces of capitalist reaction at a time when the proletariat of the strongest states of Europe, deceived by its parties, proved incapable as yet of fulfilling its duty both toward Socialist Hungary and toward itself.

The Soviet government in Budapest was overthrown with the collaboration of the social-traitors who, in their turn, after maintaining themselves in power for three and a half days, were cast aside by the unbridled counter-revolutionary scum whose bloody crimes surpassed those of Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel and other agents of the Entente. But even though temporarily crushed, Soviet Hungary is like a beacon light to all the toilers of Central Europe.

The Turkish people refuse to submit to the ignominious peace terms concocted for them by London despots. In order to enforce these terms, England has armed and incited Greece against Turkey. Thus the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor, Turks and Greeks alike, are condemned to utter devastation and mutual destruction.

In the struggle between the Entente and Turkey, Armenia has played the same programmatic role as Belgium did in the struggle against Germany; as Serbia in the struggle against Austria-Hungary. After the creation of Armenia – lacking any frontiers and without any possibility of remaining alive – Wilson spurned the Armenian mandate proffered him by the League of Nations: Armenia’s soil abounds neither in oil nor platinum. ‘Emancipated’ Armenia is more defenceless today than ever before.

Virtually each one of the newly created ‘national’ states has an irredenta of its own, i.e., its own internal national ulcer.

At the same time, the national struggle within the dominions of the victor countries has reached the peak of intensity. The English bourgeoisie, which seeks to be guardian over the peoples in the four corners of the world, is incapable of solving the Irish question under its very nose.

Even more grave is the national question in the colonies. Egypt, India, Persia are convulsed by insurrections. From the advanced proletarians of Europe and America the colonial toilers are acquiring the slogan: Soviet Federation.

Official, governmental, national, civilised, bourgeois Europe – as it has issued from the war and the Versailles Peace – resembles a lunatic asylum. Artificially split-up little states, whose economy is choking to death within their borders, snarl at one another, and wage wars over harbours, provinces and insignificant towns. They seek the protection of larger states, whose antagonisms are likewise increasing day by day. Italy stands hostilely opposed to France and is inclined to support Germany against France, the moment Germany is able to raise her head again. France is eaten by envy of England and in order to collect her dividends is ready to set Europe on fire again from all four corners. England, with the help of France, keeps Europe in a condition of chaotic impotence, thus untying her own hands for world operations aimed against the United States. The United States allows japan to become mired in Eastern Siberia in order meanwhile to secure by the year 1925 its naval preponderance over Great Britain provided, that is, Britain doesn’t decide to measure forces before then.

In harmony with this picture of world relations Marshal Foch, military oracle of the French bourgeoisie, has issued a warning that the next war will begin where the last one left off, namely, with airplanes and tanks, with automatic arms and machine guns instead of hand weapons, with grenades instead of bayonets.

Workers and peasants of Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Australia! You have suffered ten million dead, twenty million wounded and crippled. Today you at least know what you have gained at this price!

II
The Economic Situation
Meanwhile the impoverishment of mankind proceeds apace. Through its mechanisms the war has destroyed those world economic ties whose development once constituted one of the most important conquests of capitalism. Since the year 1914 England, France and Italy have been cut off from Central Europe and the Near East; since the year 1917 – from Russia.

A few war years destroyed what it took a whole number of generations to create; human labour, expended even to this end, was reduced to a minimum. Throughout these years wherever it was necessary to process existing supplies of raw material into the shape of finished goods, labour was employed primarily to produce the means and tools of destruction.

In those basic branches of economy where mankind enters directly into a struggle against nature’s niggardliness and inertia, in extracting fuel and raw materials from the bowels of the earth, production has steadily waned. The victory of the Entente and the Versailles Peace have not halted the process of economic ruination and decay, but have only altered its paths and forms. The blockade of Soviet Russia and the artificial incitement of civil war on her fertile borderlands have caused and continue to cause incalculable harm to the welfare of all mankind. With a minimum of technical aid, Russia, thanks to her Soviet forms of economy, could supply Europe – and the Communist International attests to this before the entire world with double and triple the quantity of foodstuffs and raw materials that Tsarist Russia used to supply. Instead of this, Anglo-French imperialism has compelled the Toilers’ Republic to devote all its forces to self-defence. In order to deprive the Russian workers of fuel, England has kept her clutches on Baku, whence she has been able to export for her own use only an insignificant portion of the oil output. The rich Donetz coal basin has been periodically laid waste by White Guard bands of the Entente. French engineers and sappers have laboured not little over the destruction of Russian bridges and railways. japan is right now pillaging and devastating Eastern Siberia.

German technology and the high productivity of German labour, these most important factors in the regeneration of world economy, are being even more paralysed after the Versailles Peace than was the case in wartime. The Entente is faced with an insoluble contradiction. In order to exact payment, one must provide the possibility of work. In order to make work possible one must make it possible to live. And giving crushed, dismembered, exhausted Germany the possibility to live means – to make it possible for her to resist. Fear of Germany’s revenge dictates the policy of Foch: a policy of ever tightening the military vice to prevent Germany’s regeneration.

Everywhere there is scarcity; everywhere there is need. Not only Germany’s trade balance but also that of France and England is decidedly on the deficit side. The French national debt has grown to 300 billion francs, of which, according to the reactionary French Senator Gaudin de Villaine, two-thirds accrues from embezzlement, theft, and general chaos.

The work of restoring the war-ruined areas accomplished in France is a mere drop in this ocean of devastation. Lack of fuel, lack of raw materials and lack of labour-power create insurmountable obstacles.

France needs gold; she needs coal. With his finger pointed at the countless graves of the war cemeteries, the French bourgeois demands his dividends. Germany must pay! After all, Marshal Foch still has enough black-skinned regiments to occupy German cities. Russia must pay! To inoculate the Russian people with this idea, the French government is expending for the devastation of Russia billions originally collected for the regeneration of France.

The international financial agreement, intended to lighten France’s tax burden through a more or less complete annulment of war debts, has not been reached: the United States shows no sign whatever of a desire to make Europe a gift of ten billion dollars.

The issue of paper money assumes ever greater proportions. While in Soviet Russia the growth of paper money and its depreciation, side by side with the simultaneous development of socialised planned distribution of necessities and its ever-expanding payment of wages in kind, signify only one of the results of the withering away of commodity-money economy; in capitalist countries the growing mass of paper money signifies the deepening of economic chaos and an inevitable crash.

The conferences of the Entente travel from one locality to the next; they seek inspiration in all of Europe’s vacation resorts. All hands are outstretched, demanding reimbursement in proportion to the number of men killed in the war. This travelling Stock Exchange of Death, which every two weeks decides anew whether France is to receive 50 or 55 per cent of German indemnities, which Germany cannot possibly pay, is the crowning achievement of the oft-proclaimed ‘organisation of Europe’.

Capitalism has degenerated in the course of the war. The systematic extraction of surplus value from the process of production – the foundation of profit economy – seems far too boresome an occupation to Messrs. Bourgeois who have become accustomed to increase their capital twice and tenfold within a couple of days by means of speculation, and on the basis of international robbery.

The bourgeois has shed certain prejudices which used to hamper him, and has acquired certain habits which he did not formerly possess. The war has inured him to subjecting a whole number of countries to a hunger-blockade, to bombarding from the air and setting fire to cities and villages, expediently spreading the bacilli of cholera, carrying dynamite in diplomatic pouches, counterfeiting his opponent’s currency; he has become accustomed to bribery, espionage and smuggling on a hitherto unequalled scale. The usages of war have been taken over, after the conclusion of peace, as the usages of commerce. The chief commercial operations are fused nowadays with the functions of the state, which steps to the fore as a world robber gang equipped with all the implements of violence.

The narrower the world’s productive basis, all the more savage and more wasteful the methods of appropriation. Rob! Ibis is the last word of capitalist policy that has come to supplant the policies of free trade and protectionism. The raid of the Rumanian gangsters upon Hungary, whence they carried off locomotives and finger-rings, is a fitting symbol of the economic philosophy of Lloyd George and Millerand.

In its domestic economic policy the bourgeoisie scurries to and fro between the programme of more extensive nationalisation, regulations and controls on the one hand, and, on the other, protests against the state intervention which had grown so much during the war. The French parliament is busy trying to square the circle, namely, creating a ‘unified command’ for the republic’s railway network without doing damage to the private capitalist interests of the railway corporations. At the same time, the capitalist press of France is conducting a vicious campaign against ‘Etatism’ which tends to hamper private initiative. The American railways, disorganised by the state during the war, have fallen into an even worse condition with the removal of state control. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has adopted a plank in its platform, promising to keep economic life free from arbitrary government intervention.

That old watchdog of capitalism, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labour, is conducting a campaign against the nationalisation of railroads which is being advocated in America, in France and other countries as a panacea by the simpletons and charlatans of reformism. As a matter of fact, the sporadic violent intrusions of the state into the economy only serve to compete with the pernicious activity of speculators in increasing the chaos of capitalist economy during its epoch of decline. A transfer of the principal branches of industry and transport from the hands of individual trusts into the hands of the ‘nation’, i.e., the bourgeois state, that is, into the hands of the most powerful and predatory capitalist trust, signifies not the elimination of the evil but only its amplification.

The fall of prices and the rise of the rate of exchange are merely superficial and temporary phenomena, occurring against the background of unchecked ruination. The fluctuation of prices does not alter the basic facts: viz., the shortage of raw materials and the decline in the productivity of labour.

After undergoing the frightful hardships of war, the labouring masses are incapable of working with the same intensity under the same conditions. The destruction within a few hours of values it had taken years to create, the obscene dance of the billions engaged in by the financial clique which keeps rising higher and higher on heaps of bones and ruins – these object lessons of history are hardly helpful in maintaining within the working class the automatic discipline inherent in wage labour. Bourgeois economists and publicists speak of a ‘wave of laziness’, which, according to them, is sweeping over Europe and undermining its economic future. The administrators seek to mend matters by granting privileges to the topmost layers of the working class. In vain! In order to revive and further develop its productivity of labour it is necessary to give the working class the assurance that every blow of its hammer will tend to improve its own welfare and raise its level of education, without again subjecting it to the danger of mutual extermination. It can receive this assurance only from the social revolution.

The rising cost of living is the mightiest factor of revolutionary ferment in all countries. The bourgeoisie of France, Italy, Germany and other states is endeavouring by means of relief payments to ameliorate the destitution caused by high prices, and to check the growth of the strike movement. To recompense the agricultural classes for a part of their expenditure of labour power, the state, already deeply in debt, engages in shady speculation; it steals from itself in order to defer the hour of settlement. Even if certain categories of workers now enjoy higher living standards than they did before the war, this fact does not in any way tally with the actual economic condition of capitalist countries. These ephemeral results are obtained by borrowing fraudulently from the future, which, when it finally arrives, will bring with it catastrophic destitution and calamities.

But what about the United States? ‘America is the hope of humanity!’ Through the lips of Millerand, the French bourgeois repeats this phrase of Turgot in the hope of having his own debts remitted, although he himself never remits anyone’s debt. But the United States is incapable of leading Europe out of its economic blind alley. During the last six years, American reserves of raw material have been depleted. The adaptation of American capitalism to the exigencies of the World War has resulted in a narrowing of its industrial foundation. European immigration has stopped. A wave of emigration has deprived American industry of many hundreds of thousands of Germans, Italians, Poles, Serbs, Czechs, who were drawn either by war mobilisation or by the mirages of a newly acquired fatherland. Shortages of raw material and labour power hang over the trans-Atlantic republic and are engendering a profound economic crisis; and as a result, the American proletariat is entering upon a new revolutionary phase of struggle. America is becoming rapidly Europeanised.

Nor have the neutral countries escaped the consequences of war and blockade; like liquid in connected vessels, the economy of interconnected capitalist states, both large and small, both belligerents and neutrals, both victors and vanquished, is tending toward one and the same level – that of poverty, starvation and extinction.

Switzerland lives from hand to mouth and every unexpected event threatens to disrupt her equilibrium. In Scandinavia the abundant influx of gold does not solve the food problem; coal must be obtained from England in dribbles, begging hat in hand. Despite the famine in Europe the fishing industry is living through an unprecedented crisis in Norway. Spain, from where France has pumped men, horses and foodstuffs, is unable to emerge from a grave food scarcity which brings in its train stormy strikes and street demonstrations of the starving masses.

The bourgeoisie firmly relies upon the countryside. Bourgeois economists assert that the welfare of the peasantry has improved extraordinarily. This is an illusion. It is true that the peasants who bring their produce to the market have prospered more or less in all countries during the war. They sold their products at high prices and used cheap money to pay off debts contracted when money was dear. For them this is an obvious advantage. But their economy has become disorganised and depleted during the war. They are in need of manufactured goods, but prices for these have risen in proportion to the declining value of money. The demands of the state budget have become so monstrous that they threaten to devour the peasant with all his land and products. Thus after a period of temporary improvement, the condition of the small peasantry is becoming more and more intolerable. Their dissatisfaction with the outcome of the war will continually increase; and in the guise of the regular army, the peasantry has not a few unpleasant surprises in store for the bourgeoisie.

The economic restoration of Europe, about which its statesmen talk so much, is a lie. Europe is being ruined and the whole world along with it.

On capitalist foundations there is no salvation. The policy of imperialism does not lead to the abolition of want but to its aggravation owing to the predatory waste of existing reserves.

The question of fuel and raw material is an international question which can be solved only on the basis of a planned, collectivist, socialist production.

It is necessary to cancel the state debts. It is necessary to emancipate labour and its products from the monstrous tribute extorted by the world plutocracy. It is necessary to overthrow this plutocracy. It is necessary to remove the state barriers which tend to atomise world economy. The Supreme Economic Council of the Entente imperialists must be replaced by the Supreme Economic Soviet of the world proletariat, to effect the centralised exploitation of all the economic resources of mankind.

It is necessary to destroy imperialism in order to give mankind an opportunity to live.

III
The Bourgeois Regime After the War
The entire energy of the propertied classes is concentrated upon two questions: to maintain themselves in power in the international struggle and to prevent the proletariat from becoming the master of the country. The former political groupings of the bourgeoisie have exhausted their strength on these tasks. Not only in Russia, where the banner of the Cadet Party became at the decisive stage of struggle the banner of all the property owners against the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, but even in countries with an older and deeper-rooted political culture, the former programmes which used to separate diverse layers of the bourgeoisie have disappeared, almost without a trace, prior to the open outbreak of the proletarian revolution.

Lloyd George steps forward as the spokesman for the amalgamation of the Tories, Unionists and Liberals for a joint struggle against the approaching rule of labour. This hoary demagogue singles out the holy church as the central power station whose current equally feeds all the parties of the propertied classes.

In France the epoch of anti-clericalism, so noisy only a brief while ago, seems like a sepulchral ghost. The Radicals, Royalists and Catholics are now constituted in a bloc of ‘national law and order’ against the proletariat that is lifting its head. Ready to extend its hand to every reactionary force, the French government supports the Black-Hundred gangster Wrangel and re-establishes diplomatic relations with the Vatican.

Giolitti, confirmed champion of neutrality and Germanophile, has taken the helm of the Italian government as the joint leader of interventionists, neutralists, clericals and Mazziniists. He is ready to tack and veer on the subordinate questions of domestic and foreign policy in order all the more ruthlessly to repel the offensive of the revolutionary proletarians of city and country. Giolitti’s government rightfully considers itself the last serious stake of the Italian bourgeoisie.

The policy of all the German governments and government parties since Hohenzollern’s downfall has been to find in concert with the Entente ruling classes a common ground of hatred of Bolshevism, that is, of the proletarian revolution.

While the Anglo-French Shylock is tightening more and more savagely the noose around the neck of the German people, the German bourgeoisie, regardless of party affiliations, entreats its enemy to loosen the noose just enough to enable it to strangle the vanguard of the German proletariat with its own hands. This is the gist of the periodic conferences and agreements on disarmament and the delivery of war material.

In America the line of demarcation between the Republicans and the Democrats has been, completely erased. These two powerful political organisations of the exploiters, adapted to the hitherto narrow circle of American relations, revealed their total hollowness the instant the American bourgeoisie entered the arena of world plunder.

Never before have the intrigues of individual leaders and cliques in the opposition and in the Ministries alike – been marked by such open cynicism as now. But at the same time all of the leaders, cliques and parties of the world bourgeoisie are building a united front against the revolutionary proletariat.

Whilst the Social-Democratic blockheads persist in counterposing the ‘peaceable’ road of democracy to the violent road of dictatorship, the last vestiges of democracy are being trampled underfoot and destroyed in every state throughout the world.

Since the war, during which the national electoral bodies played the part of impotent but noisy patriotic stooges for their respective ruling imperialist cliques, the parliaments have fallen into a state of complete prostration. All the important issues are now decided outside the parliaments. Nothing is changed in this respect by the window-dressing display of enlarged parliamentary prerogatives, so solemnly proclaimed by the imperialist mountebanks of Italy and other countries. The real masters of the situation and the rulers of state destiny are – Lord Rothschild and Lord Weir, Morgan and Rockefeller, Schneider and Loucheur, Hugo Stinnes and Felix Deutsch, Rizello and Agnelli – these gold- , coal- , oil- , and metal-kings, who operate behind the scenes and who send their second-rank lieutenants into parliaments to carry out their instructions.

The French parliament – more discredited than any other by its rhetoric of falsehood, cynicism and prostitution, and whose chief amusement lies in the procedure of thrice reading the most insignificant legislative acts – this parliament suddenly learns that the four billions appropriated by it for the restoration of the devastated regions of France had been expended by Clémenceau for entirely different purposes, in particular for the further devastation of Russian regions.

The overwhelming majority of members of the supposedly all-powerful English parliament are scarcely more informed concerning the actual intentions of Lloyd George and Lord Curzon with regard to Soviet Russia, or even France, than are the withered old women in the villages of Bengal.

In the United States, Congress is a docile or disgruntled chorus for the President, who is himself a creature of the electoral machine, which is in its turn the political apparatus of the trusts – incomparably more so since the war than ever before.

Germany’s belated parliamentarianism, an abortion of the bourgeois revolution, which is itself an abortion of history, suffers in its infancy from every disease peculiar to cretins in their senility. ‘The most-democratic-in-the-world’ Reichstag of Ebert’s republic is impotent, not only before the Marshal’s baton of Foch but even before the stock market manipulations of its own Stinneses, let alone the military plots of its officer clique. German parliamentary democracy is nothing but a void between two dictatorships.

The very composition of the bourgeoisie has undergone profound modifications in the course of the war. Against the background of universal impoverishment throughout the world, the concentration of capital has made a sudden and colossal leap forward. Firms hitherto standing in the shadows have stepped to the forefront. Solidity, stability, a tendency toward ‘reasonable’ compromises, observance of a certain decorum both in exploitation and in the utilisation of its fruits – all this has been washed away by the torrents of the imperialist flood.

To the foreground have stepped the newly rich: war contractors, shoddy profiteers, upstarts, international adventurers, smugglers, refugees from justice bedecked with diamonds, every species of unbridled scum greedy for luxury and capable of any bestiality against the proletarian revolution from which they can expect nothing but the hangman’s noose.

The existing system stands before the masses in all its nakedness as the rule of plutocracy. In America, in France, in England, indulgence in postwar luxury has assumed a maniacal character. Paris, jammed with international patriotic parasites, resembles as admitted by Le Temps, Babylon on the eve of its destruction.

Politics, courts, the press, the arts and the church fall in line with this bourgeoisie. All restraint has been thrown to the winds. Wilson, Clémenceau, Millerand, Lloyd George and Churchill do not shrink from the most brazen deceit and the biggest lie and when caught red-handed they calmly go on to new criminal feats. The classical rules of political duplicity as expounded by old Machiavelli become innocent aphorisms of a provincial simpleton in comparison with those principles which guide bourgeois statesmen today. The law courts, which formerly concealed their bourgeois essence under democratic finery, have now openly become the organs of class brutality and counter-revolutionary provocation. The judges of the Third Republic have, without batting an eyelid, acquitted the murderer of Jaurès. The courts of Germany, which has proclaimed itself a socialist republic, give encouragement to the murderers of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and many other martyrs of the proletariat. The juridical tribunals of bourgeois democracies have become the organs for the solemn legalisation of all the crimes of the White Terror.

The bourgeois press has openly engraved the stamp of bribery, like a trade-mark, on its forehead. The leading newspapers of the world bourgeoisie are monstrous factories of falsehood, libel and spiritual poison.

The moods of the bourgeoisie fluctuate as nervously as the prices on its market. In the initial months following the termination of the war, the international bourgeoisie, especially the French, was shaken by chills and fever from the fear of oncoming Communism. It gauged the degree of its imminent peril by the enormity of the bloody crimes it had committed. But it has been able to withstand the first onslaught. The Socialist parties and the trade unions of the Second International, bound by chains of common guilt to the bourgeoisie, have rendered it their final service by absorbing the first wrathful blow of the toilers. At the price of the complete collapse of the Second International the bourgeoisie has bought a respite. The counter-revolutionary elections to parliament engineered by Clémenceau, a few months of unstable equilibrium, and the failure of the May strike – these sufficed to imbue the French bourgeoisie with confidence in the security of its regime. Its class arrogance has risen to the same heights today as did its fears of yesterday.

Threats have become the bourgeoisie’s sole means of persuasion. The bourgeoisie has no faith in words, it demands deeds: arrests, dispersals (of demonstrations), confiscations, firing squads. Striving to impress the bourgeoisie, bourgeois ministers and parliamentarians pose as men of steel. Lloyd George daily counsels the German ministers to shoot their own Communards, following the example of France in 1871. Any third-rank functionary can bank on tumultuous plaudits in the Chamber of Deputies so long as he concludes his inane report with a few threats addressed to the workers.

While the official state apparatus is being more and more openly transformed into an organisation for the sanguinary suppression of the toilers, alongside it, and under its auspices and at its disposal, various private counter-revolutionary organisations are being formed – for breaking strikes by force, for acts of provocation, for staging frame-up trials, wrecking revolutionary organisations, raiding and seizing Communist institutions, organising pogroms and incendiarism, assassinating revolutionary leaders and other similar measures devoted to the defence of private property and democracy.

Younger sons of landlords and of the big bourgeoisie, petty bourgeois who have lost their bearings, and all other declassed elements, among whom the bourgeois-noble emigres from Soviet Russia occupy the most prominent place, form an inexhaustible reservoir for the guerrilla detachments of the counter-revolution. At their head stands the corps of officers who have gone through the school of the imperialist slaughter.

Some 20,000 professional officers of the Hohenzollern army have formed themselves – especially after the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch into a strong counter-revolutionary nucleus which the German democracy is powerless to dissolve, and which can be crushed only by the sledge-hammer of the proletarian dictatorship. This centralised organisation of the old regime terrorists is supplemented by the White Guard guerrilla detachments organised on the Junker estates.

In the United States organisations like the ‘National Security League’, the ‘Loyal American League’ and other ‘Knights of Liberty’ constitute the storm troops of capitalism, at the extreme wings of which operate the ordinary murder gangs in the person of private detective agencies.

In France the Ligue Civique represents a socially-select organisation of strikebreakers, while the reformist Confederation of Labour has been outlawed.

The officers’ Mafia of White Hungary, which exists clandestinely alongside the government of counter-revolutionary hangmen supported by England, has given the world proletariat a sample of that civilisation and humanitarianism which Wilson and Lloyd George advocate as against the Soviet power and revolutionary violence.

The ‘democratic’ governments of Finland and Georgia, Latvia and Esthonia, are striving might and main to emulate this Hungarian model of perfection.

In Barcelona there is an underground gang of assassins, operating under police orders. And so it goes on, and so it is everywhere.

Even in a defeated and ruined country like Bulgaria, the officers, left without jobs, are uniting into secret societies, biding the first opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism upon the backs and bones of Bulgarian workers.

The programme of smoothing over contradictions, the programme of class collaboration, parliamentary reforms, gradual socialisation and national unity appears like a grim joke in the face of the bourgeois regime as it has emerged from the World War.

The bourgeoisie has entirely abandoned the idea of reconciling the proletariat by means of reform. It corrupts an insignificant labour aristocracy with a few sops and keeps the great masses in subjection by blood and iron.

There is not a single serious issue today which is decided by ballot. Of democracy nothing remains save memories in the skulls of reformists. The entire state organisation is reverting more and more to its primordial form, i.e., detachments of armed men. Instead of counting ballots, the bourgeoisie is busy counting up bayonets, machine guns and cannons which will be at its disposal at the moment when the question of power and property forms is posed point-blank for decision.

There is room for neither collaboration nor mediation. To save ourselves we must overthrow the bourgeoisie. This can be achieved only by the rising of the proletariat.

IV
Soviet Russia
Amidst the unbridled elements, the maelstrom, of chauvinism, avarice and destruction, only the principle of Communism has revealed a great power for life and creativeness. In spite of the fact that in the course of historical development Soviet power has for the first time been established in the most backward and ruined country of Europe, surrounded by a host of mightiest enemies – despite all this, the Soviet power has not only maintained itself in the struggle against such unprecedented odds but it has also demonstrated in action the vast potentialities inherent in Communism. The development and consolidation of the Soviet power in Russia is the most momentous historical fact since the foundation of the Communist International.

In the eyes of class society the creation of an army has usually been regarded as the supreme test of economic and state construction. The strength or weakness of an army is taken as index of the strength or weakness of economy and the state.

The Soviet power has created a mighty armed force while under fire. The Red Army has demonstrated its unquestionable superiority not alone in the struggle against old bourgeois-monarchist Russia,

which imperialism is endeavouring to re-establish by the aid of the White Armies of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, Wrangel, et al., but also in the struggle against the national armies of those ‘democracies’ which world imperialism is implanting for its own benefit (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland).

In the sphere of economy the Soviet Republic has performed a great miracle by virtue of the single fact that it has succeeded in maintaining itself during the first three trying and most difficult years. It remains inviolate and continues to develop because it has torn the instruments of exploitation out of the hands of the bourgeoisie and has transformed them into the means of planned economy.

Amid the roar of battle along her illimitable fronts, Soviet Russia has not let slip a single opportunity for economic and cultural construction. In the interval between the crushing defeat of Denikin and the murderous assault of Poland, the Soviet power undertook an extensive organisation of labour conscription, inaugurated a more precise registration and application of the forces and means of production, attracted sections of the army to the accomplishment of industrial tasks, and above all, began to restore its system of transportation.

Only the monopoly by the socialist state of the necessities of life, coincident with a ruthless struggle against speculation, has saved the Russian cities from starvation and made it possible to supply the Red Army with food. Only the unification by the state of scattered factories, plants, privately-owned railroads and ships has assured the possibility of production and transport.

The concentration of industry and transport in the hands of the state leads, through standardisation, to the socialisation of technology itself. Only upon the principles of socialism is it possible to fix the minimum number of types of locomotives, freight cars and steamships to be manufactured and repaired, and to carry on and periodically standardise mass production of machinery and machine parts, thus securing incalculable advantages from the crucial standpoint of raising the productivity of labour. Economic progress, the scientific organisation of industry, the introduction of the Taylor system divested of its capitalist-sweatshop features – no longer face any obstacles in Soviet Russia, save for those interposed from abroad by imperialist violence.

At the time when national interests, clashing with imperialist encroachments, are a constant source of incessant conflicts, uprisings and wars throughout the world, socialist Russia has shown how painlessly the workers’ state is able to reconcile national requirements with those of economic life, by purging the former of chauvinism and by emancipating the latter from imperialism. Socialism strives to bring about a union of all regions, all provinces and all nationalities by means of a unified economic plan. Economic centralism, freed from the exploitation of one class by another, and of one nation by another and, hence, equally beneficial to all alike, can be instituted without in any way infringing upon the real freedom of national development.

The example of Soviet Russia is enabling the peoples of Central Europe, of the South-Eastern Balkans, of the British dominions, all the oppressed nations and tribes, the Egyptians and the Turks, the Indians and the Persians, the Irish and the Bulgarians to convince themselves of this, that the fraternal collaboration of all the national units of mankind is realisable in life only through a Federation of Soviet Republics.

The revolution has made Russia into the first proletarian state. For the three years of its existence its boundaries have undergone constant change. They have shrunk under the external military pressure of world imperialism. They expanded whenever this pressure relaxed. The struggle for Soviet Russia has become merged with the struggle against world capitalism. The question of Soviet Russia has become the touchstone by which all the organisations of the working class are tested. The German Social Democracy committed its second greatest treachery – greatest in point of infamy since the betrayal of August 4, 1914 – when in obtaining control of the government it sought the protection of Western imperialism instead of seeking an alliance with the revolution in the East. A Soviet Germany united with Soviet Russia would have represented a force exceeding from the very start all the capitalist states put together!

The Communist International has proclaimed the cause of Soviet Russia as its own. The world proletariat will not sheathe its sword until Soviet Russia is incorporated as a link in the World Federation of Soviet Republics.

V
The Proletarian Revolution and the Communist International
Civil war is on the order of the day throughout the world. Its banner is the Soviet Power.

Capitalism has proletarianised immense masses of mankind.

Imperialism has thrown these masses out of balance and started them on the revolutionary road. The very concept of the term ‘masses’ has undergone a change in recent years. Those elements which used to be regarded as the masses in the era of parliamentarianism and trade unionism have now become converted into a labour aristocracy. Millions and tens of millions of those who formerly lived beyond the pale of political life are being transformed today into the revolutionary masses. The war has roused everybody. It has awakened the political interest of the most backward layers; it aroused in them illusions and hopes and it has deceived them. The craft division of labour with its caste spirit, the relative stability of the living standards among the upper proletarian strata, the dumb and apathetic hopelessness among the thickest lower layers, in short, the social foundations of the old forms of the labour movement have receded beyond recall into the past. New millions have been drawn into the struggle.

Women who have lost their husbands and fathers and have been compelled to take their places in labour’s ranks are streaming into the movement. The working youth, which has grown up amid the thunder and lightning of the World War, hails the revolution as its native element.

In different countries the struggle is passing through different stages. But it is the final struggle. Not infrequently the waves of the movement flow into obsolete organisational forms, lending them temporary vitality. Here and there on the surface of the flood old labels and half-obliterated slogans float. Human minds are still filled with much confusion, many shadows, prejudices and illusions. But the movement as a whole is of a profoundly revolutionary character. It is all-embracing and irresistible. It spreads, strengthens and purifies itself; and it is eliminating all the old rubbish. It will not halt before it brings about the rule of the world proletariat.

The basic form of this movement is the strike. Its simplest and most potent cause lies in the rising prices of primary necessities. Not infrequently the strike arises out of isolated local conflicts. It arises as an expression of the masses’ impatience with the parliamentary Socialist mish-mash.

It originates in the feeling of solidarity with the oppressed of all countries, including one’s own. It combines economic and political slogans. In it are not infrequently combined fragments of reformism with slogans of the programme of social revolution. It dies down, ceases, only in order again to resurrect itself, shaking the foundations of production, keeping the state apparatus under constant strain, and driving the bourgeoisie into all the greater frenzy because it utilises every pretext to send its greetings to Soviet Russia. The premonitions of the exploiters are not unfounded, for this chaotic strike is in reality the social-revolutionary roll call and the mobilisation of the international proletariat.

The profound interdependence between one country and another, which has been so catastrophically revealed during the war, invests with particular significance those branches of labour which serve to connect the various countries, and puts the railroad workers and transport workers in general into a most prominent position. The transport proletarians have had occasion to display some of their power in the boycott of White Hungary and White Poland. The strike and the boycott, methods resorted to by the working class at the dawn of its trade union struggles, i.e., even before it began utilising parliamentarianism, are today assuming unprecedented proportions, acquiring a new and menacing significance, similar to an artillery preparation before the. final attack.

The ever-growing helplessness of an individual before the blind interplay of historic events has driven into the unions not only new strata of working men and women but also white-collar workers, functionaries and petty-bourgeois intellectuals. Prior to the time when the proletarian revolution will of necessity lead to the creation of Soviets, which will immediately assume ascendancy over all of the old labour organisations, the toilers are streaming into the traditional trade, unions, tolerating for the time being their old forms, their official programmes, their ruling aristocracy, but introducing into these organisations an ever-increasing and unprecedented revolutionary pressure of the many-millioned masses.

The lowliest of the lowly – the rural proletarians, the agricultural labourers – are raising their heads. In Italy, Germany and other countries we observe a magnificent growth of the revolutionary movement among the agricultural workers and their fraternal rapprochement with the urban proletariat.

The poorest layers among the peasantry are changing their attitude toward socialism. Whereas the intrigues have remained fruitless which the parliamentary reformists sought to base upon the muzhik’s proprietary prejudices, the genuine revolutionary movement of the proletariat and its implacable struggle against the oppressors have given birth to glimmers of hope in the hearts of the most backward and most benighted and ruined peasant-proprietor.

The ocean of human privation and ignorance is bottomless. Every social layer that rises to the surface leaves beneath it another layer just about to rise. But the vanguard doesn’t have to wait for the ponderous rear to dome up before engaging in battle. The work of awakening, uplifting and educating its most backward layers will be accomplished by the working class only after it is in power.

The toilers of the colonial and semi-colonial countries have awakened. In the boundless areas of India, Egypt, Persia, over which the gigantic octopus of English imperialism sprawls – in this uncharted human ocean vast internal forces are constantly at work, upheaving huge waves that cause tremors in the City’s stocks and hearts.

In the movements of colonial peoples, the social element blends in diverse forms with the national element, but both of them are directed against imperialism. The road from the first stumbling baby steps to the mature forms of struggle is being traversed by the colonies and backward countries in general through a forced march, under the pressure of modem imperialism and under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat.

The fruitful rapprochement of the Mohammedan and non-Mohammedan peoples who are kept shackled under British and foreign domination, the purging of the movement internally by doing away with the influence of the clergy and of chauvinist reaction, the simultaneous struggle against foreign oppressors and their native confederates – the feudal lords, the priests and the usurers – all this is transforming the growing army of the colonial insurrection into a great historical force, into a mighty reserve for the world proletariat.

The pariahs are rising. Their awakened minds avidly gravitate to Soviet Russia, to the barricade battles in the streets of German cities, to the growing strike struggles in Great Britain, to the Communist International.

The Socialist who aids directly or indirectly in perpetuating the privileged position of one nation at the expense of another, who accommodates himself to colonial slavery, who draws a line of distinction between races and colours in the matter of human rights, who helps the bourgeoisie of the metropolis to maintain its rule over the colonies instead of aiding the armed uprising of the colonies; the British Socialist who fails to support by all possible means the uprisings in Ireland, Egypt and India against the London plutocracy such a Socialist deserves to be branded with infamy, if not with a bullet, but in no case merits either a mandate or the confidence of the proletariat.

Yet, the proletariat is being thwarted in its international revolutionary actions not so much by the half-destroyed barbed-wire entanglements that remain set up between the countries since the war, as it is by the egotism, conservatism, stupidity and treachery of the old party and trade union organisations which have climbed upon its back during the preceding epoch.

The leaders of the old trades unions use every means to counteract the revolutionary struggle of the working masses and to paralyse it; or, if they cannot do it otherwise, they take charge of strikes in order all the more surely to nullify them by underhand machinations.

The historical treachery perpetrated by the international Social Democracy is unequalled in the annals of the struggle against oppression. It had its clearest and most terrible consequences in Germany. The defeat of German imperialism was at the same time the defeat of the capitalist system of economy. Save for the proletariat there was no other class that could pretend to state power. The success of the socialist overturn was amply assured by the development of technology and by the numerical strength and the high cultural level of the working class. But the German Social Democracy blocked the road along which this task could be accomplished. By means of intricate manoeuvres in which cunning vied with stupidity, it was able to divert the energy of the proletariat from its natural and necessary task – the conquest of power.

For a number of decades the Social Democracy had laboured to gain the confidence of the proletarian masses only in order to place when the critical moment came and when the existence of bourgeois society was at stake – its entire authority in the service of the exploiters.

The treachery of liberalism and the collapse of bourgeois democracy are insignificant episodes in comparison with the monstrous betrayal of the toiling classes by the Socialist parties. Even the part played by the Church, the central powerhouse of conservatism, as Lloyd George has defined it, is dimmed beside the anti-socialist role of the Second International.

The Social Democracy justified its betrayal of the revolution during the war by the slogan, National Defence. Its counter-revolutionary policy following the conclusion of peace it cloaks with the slogan, Democracy. National Defence and Democracy – here are the solemn formulas of the capitulation of the proletariat to the will of the bourgeoisie!

But !he depths of the fall are far from plumbed by this. In pursuance of its policy of defending the capitalist system, the Social Democracy is compelled, on the heels of the bourgeoisie, to openly trample underfoot both ‘national defence’ and ‘democracy’. Scheidemann and Ebert are licking the hands of French imperialism, whose help they seek against the Soviet revolution. Noske has become the personification of the White Terror of the bourgeois counter-revolution.

Albert Thomas becomes a hired clerk of the League of Nations, that filthy agency of imperialism. Vandervelde, the eloquent incarnation of the superficiality of the Second International which he used to head. becomes the Royal Minister, the confederate of Delacroix member of the Clerical Party, defender of the Belgian Catholic priests and advocate of capitalist atrocities against the Negroes in the Congo.

Henderson, who apes the great men of the bourgeoisie, who appears on the scene now as His Majesty’s Minister and then again as a member of His Majesty’s most loyal Labour opposition; Tom Shaw who demands of the Soviet government documentary proof that there are crooks, thieves and perjurers in the London government – who are all these gentlemen if not the sworn enemies of the working class?

Renner and Seitz, Niemetz and Tuzar, Troelstra and Branting, Dasczinski and Chkheidze – each of them translates the shameful collapse of the Second International into the language of his respective petty-government chicanery.

Finally Karl Kautsky, ex-Marxist and ex-theoretician of the Second International, has become the snivelling privy counsellor for the yellow press of the world.

Under the pressure of the masses the more pliant elements of the old Socialism have changed their appearance and colouring, without changing in essence; they break away or are preparing to break away from the Second International, and meanwhile invariably shrink, as usual, from every genuine mass and revolutionary action and even from every serious preparation for action.

In order to characterise and at the same time brand the actors in this masquerade it suffices to point out that the Polish Socialist Party, led by Dasczinski and patronised by Pilsudski, this party of petty-bourgeois cynicism and chauvinist fanaticism, has announced its break with the Second International.

The leading parliamentary elite of the French Socialist Party, which is now casting its votes against the budget and against the Versailles Treaty, remains in essence one of the mainstays of the bourgeois republic. These gestures of opposition go only so far as is necessary to regain, from time to time, the semi-confidence of the most conservative layers of the proletariat.

So far as the fundamental questions of the class struggle are concerned, French parliamentary Socialism continues as heretofore to disintegrate the will of the proletariat by instilling into the workers the idea that the present moment is not propitious for the conquest of power, because France is too ruined, just as the situation was equally unpropitious yesterday because of the war; while on the eve of the war it was the industrial boom that interfered, and still earlier it was the industrial crisis. Alongside of parliamentary Socialism – and not a whit above it – there is the garrulous and mendacious syndicalism of the firm of Jouhaux & Bros.

The creation of a strong, firmly welded and disciplined Communist Party in France is a life-and-death question for the French proletariat.

In the strikes and uprisings a new generation of workers is being educated and tempered in Germany. They are getting their experience at the price of victims whose number grows in proportion with the length of time during which the Independent Socialist Party continues to remain under the influence of conservative Social Democrats and routinists who keep sighing for the Social Democracy of Bebel’s days, who do not understand the character of the present revolutionary epoch, who flinch from civil war and revolutionary terror, who doddle along at the tail end of events and who live in the expectation of a miracle which is to relieve them of their incapacity. In the heat of battle, the party of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht is teaching the German workers to find the correct road.

Routinism among the summits of the labour movement in England is so ingrained that they have yet even to feel the need of rearming themselves: the leaders of the British Labour Party are stubbornly bent upon remaining within the framework of the Second International.

At a time when the march of events during recent years has undermined the stability of economic life in conservative England and has made her toiling masses most receptive to a revolutionary programme – at such a time, the official machinery of the bourgeois nation: The Royal House of Windsor, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the Church, the trades unions, the Labour Party, George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Henderson – remains intact as a mighty automatic brake upon progress. Only the Communist Party a party free from routine and sectarianism, and closely bound up with the mass organisations – will be able to counterpose the proletarian rank and file to this official aristocracy.

In Italy where the bourgeoisie itself openly admits that the keys to the country’s future destiny are in the hands of the Socialist Party, the policy pursued by the Right Wing headed by Turati is to divert the proletarian revolution, which is developing powerfully, into the channel of parliamentary reforms. At the present moment this internal sabotage represents the greatest menace.

Proletarians of Italy, remember the fate of Hungary, which has entered the annals of history as a terrible warning to the proletariat that in the struggle for power as well as after the conquest of power, it must stand firm on its own feet, sweeping aside all elements of indecision and hesitation and dealing mercilessly with all attempts at treachery!

The upheavals caused by the war, which has brought a profound economic crisis in its wake, have ushered in a new chapter in the labour movement of the United States as well as in the other countries of the Western Hemisphere. The liquidation of the Wilsonian bombast and falsehood is at the same time the liquidation of that American Socialism which was a mixture of pacifist illusions and high-pressure salesmanship and which served as a domesticated supplement from the left to the trade unionism of Gompers and Co. The integration of the revolutionary proletarian parties and organisations of the American continent – from Alaska to Cape Horn – into a firmly-welded American Section of the Communist International, which will stand up against the mighty enemy, US imperialism – this is the task which must and will be accomplished in the struggle against all the forces which the Dollar will mobilise in its own defence.

The governmental and semi-governmental Socialists of various countries have no lack of pretexts on which to ground the charge that the Communists by their intransigent tactics provoke the counter-revolution into action, and help it mobilise its forces. This political accusation is nothing but a belated parody of the hoary plaints of liberalism. The latter always maintained that the independent struggle of the proletariat is driving the rich into the camp of reaction. This is incontestable. If the working class refrained from encroaching upon the foundations of capitalist rule, the bourgeoisie would have no need of repressive measures. The very concept of counter-revolution would have never arisen if revolutions were not known to history. That the uprisings of the proletariat inevitably entail the organisation of the bourgeoisie for self-defence and counter-attack, simply means that the revolution is the struggle between two irreconcilable classes which can end only with the final victory of one of them.

Communism rejects with contempt the policy which consists in keeping the masses inert, in intimidating them with the bludgeon of counter-revolution.

To the disintegration and chaos of the capitalist world, whose death agony threatens to destroy all human culture, the Communist International counterposes the united struggle of the world proletariat for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and for the reconstruction of national and world economy on the basis of a single economic plan, instituted and realised in life by a society of producers, a society of solidarity.

Rallying millions of toilers in all parts of the world round the banner of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet form of government, the Communist International purifies, builds up and organises its own ranks in the fire of the struggle.

The Communist International is the party of the revolutionary education of the world proletariat. It rejects all those organisations and groups which openly or covertly stupefy, demoralise and weaken the proletariat, exhorting it to kneel before the fetishes which are a facade for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: legalism, democracy, national defence, etc.

Neither can the Communist International admit into its ranks those organisations which, after inscribing the dictatorship of the proletariat in their programme, continue to conduct a policy which obviously relies upon a peaceful solution of the historical crisis. Mere recognition of the Soviet system settles nothing. The Soviet form of organisation does not possess any miraculous powers. Revolutionary power lies within the proletariat itself. It is necessary for the proletariat to rise for the conquest of power – then and only then does the Soviet organisation reveal its qualities as the irreplaceable instrument in the hands of the proletariat.

The Communist International demands the expulsion from the ranks of the labour movement of all those leaders who are directly or indirectly implicated in political collaboration with the bourgeoisie, who directly or indirectly render any assistance to the bourgeoisie. We need leaders who have no other attitude toward bourgeois society than that of mortal hatred, who organise the proletariat for an irreconcilable struggle and who are ready to lead an insurgent army into the battle, who are not going to stop half-way, whatever happens, and who will not shrink from resorting to ruthless measures against all those who may try to stop them by force.

The Communist International is the world party of proletarian uprising and proletarian dictatorship. It has no aims and tasks separate and apart from those of the working class itself. The pretensions of tiny sects, each of which wants to save the working class in its own manner, are alien and hostile to the spirit of the Communist International. It does not possess any panaceas or magic formulas but bases itself on the past and present international experience of the working class; it purges that experience of all blunders and deviations; it generalises the conquests made and recognizes and adopts only such revolutionary formulas as are the formulas of mass action.

The trade union organisation, the economic and political strike, the boycott, the parliamentary and municipal elections, the parliamentary tribunal, legal and illegal agitation, auxiliary bases in the army, the co-operative, the barricade – none of the forms of organisation or of struggle created by the labour movement as it evolves is rejected by the Communist International, nor is any one of them singled out and sanctified as a panacea.

The Soviet system is not an abstract principle opposed by Communists to the principle of parliamentarianism. The Soviet system is a class apparatus which is destined to do away with parliamentarianism and to take its place during the struggle and as a result of the struggle. Waging a merciless struggle against reformism in the trade unions and against parliamentary cretinism and careerism, the Communist International at the same time condemns all sectarian summonses to leave the ranks of the multi-millioned trade union organisations or to turn one’s back upon parliamentary and municipal institutions. The Communists do not separate themselves from the masses who are being deceived and betrayed by the reformists and the patriots, but engage the latter in an irreconcilable struggle within the mass organisations and institutions established by bourgeois society, in order to overthrow them the more surely and the more quickly.

Under the aegis of the Second International the methods of class organisation and of class struggle which were almost exclusively of a legal character have turned out to be, in the last analysis, subject to the control and direction of the bourgeoisie, who use its reformist agency as a bridle on the revolutionary class; the Communist International, on the other hand, tears this bridle out of the hands of the bourgeoisie, conquers all the methods and organisations of the labour movement, unites all of them under its revolutionary leadership and through them puts before the proletariat one single goal, namely, the conquest of power for the abolition of the bourgeois state and for the establishment of a Communist society.

In all his work whether as leader of a revolutionary strike, or as organiser of underground groups, or as secretary of a trade union, or as agitator at mass meetings, whether as deputy, co-operative worker or barricade fighter, the Communist always remains true to himself as a disciplined member of the Communist Party, a zealous fighter, a mortal enemy of capitalist society, its economic foundation, its state forms, its democratic lies, its religion and its morality. He is a self-sacrificing soldier of the proletarian revolution and an indefatigable herald of the new society.

Working men and women! On this earth there is only one banner which is worth fighting and dying for. It is the banner of the Communist International!

Moscow, August 1920
The Second World Congress of the Communist International

*From The UJP Website- A Rally And March In Honor Of International Women's Day

Click on the title to link to a "United For Justice with Peace" (UJP) Website entry for a rally to be held in honor of the 100th Anniversary of the celebration of International Women's Day.

Markin comment:

I am not altogether sure that this is the 100th anniversary (I thought that it was first observed in 1908),but that is neither here nor there. In addition to whatever demands are appropriate on this date around the women question, the economic question and the myriad other concerns we need to address let this one stand out. Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan And Iraq! That is a demand every women, every girl every man and every boy can, and will, rally around.

P.S.- I checked "Wikipedia" and in their entry for IWD they are using 2010 as the date of the first one started by the Socialist International (Second International) in its better days. So, let's mark the 100th in style- that above mentioned style.

*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 91st Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Second World Congress (1920)-Trotsky and Zinoviev's Closing Remarks

Honor The 91st Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (The 21 Conditions Congress) Of The CI (July-August 1920)

Markin comment:

Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.

No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.

The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International

Fifteenth Session
August 7
Kalinin: Comrades, I declare open the joint session of the Second Congress of the Communist International, the All Russian Central Executive Committee, the Moscow Soviet and the plenum of the trades unions and the works councils. [Applause – The Internationale.]


Comrades, the workers and peasants of the Russian Soviet Republic can be proud and happy that the Second Congress of the Communist International takes place in our country. Comrades, for twenty-five years the Second International, which was moderate and stood in more or less friendly, or at least not hostile, relations to the bourgeoisie, triumphed. But it could not meet in Russia. It met in Western Europe, in hired halls. It did not have available the halls that the Second Congress of the Communist International does. As you know, the Second Congress met in gilded halls, in the halls of the great palace of the Kremlin, where only recently the might of Russian Tsarism showed itself. And as this Congress began, the death of the old order and the birth of the new proletarian order was accomplished before our very eyes.

We greet the Second Congress of the Communist International quite particularly because, to a certain extent, it frees us from the political responsibility that the Russian working class and the Russian Communist Party have carried on their shoulders. We already thought and confidently hoped that the revolutionary energy and work of the Russian proletariat would be taken up and carried further by the international proletariat, that we could count on its ready assistance. And today, comrades, in the period of the Second Congress, we see that a certain part of the revolutionary work, a part of the burden, has been transferred from the shoulders of the Russian proletariat to the shoulders of the international working class. That, comrades, is the greatest assistance that the Western European working class could give.

We need not mention here that the French and British proletariat from time to time held up war materials destined for White Poland. We saw the highest expression of solidarity just recently when the revolutionary committee was formed in Poland. While we participate in the revolutionary work and stand continually in the fire of the revolution, we miss out the greatest events which signify a new chapter in the history of the workers’ movement. Without a doubt, the emergence of the Polish proletariat at the moment that White Poland is fighting the Russian Soviet Republic is a new stage, a new phase in the. revolutionary struggle. Apart from the Russian, no proletariat has yet succeeded in seizing power at a time of the bitterest war. Now, however, we see a continuation of the tactics of the Russian proletariat in the way the Polish proletariat is taking up the fight against the Polish bourgeoisie. It is an event of the greatest importance. Not only historians but also political leaders will later learn from it.

We heartily greet the representatives of the Communist International as the best representatives of those proletarian classes that want to help us. We wish them the quickest possible return to the international proletariat and hope that we shall meet the international proletariat as soon as possible on our fighting front. Long live the Communist International. Long live the Second Congress of the Communist International. [Applause.]

The representative of the Scottish workers, Comrade Gallacher, has the floor.


Gallacher: [Speaks in English.]

Chairman: Comrade Radek has the floor to translate.

Radek: Comrades, allow me first of all to say who Comrade Gallacher is who has spoken here, and whom the workers of Moscow do not know as well as they ought to. He is a worker from an area of Britain where there are gigantic munitions factories. He was one of the main leaders of the revolutionary struggle in this area during the war. Together with Comrade McLaine, Comrade Gallacher organised this enormous struggle which was so successful that British ministers find it impossible to speak calmly of Comrade Gallagher.

Comrade Gallacher says that now, when the delegates to the Second Congress are already dispersing, he has received news that the British government is preparing a new attack on Soviet Russia, that the British government intends to appear as the defender of Polish independence. The same British government that pillages and enslaves Ireland, Egypt and India now dares to say that it appears as the defender of Polish independence. This independence is not at all threatened by the Red Army. The British government is using the flag of Polish independence dishonourably, for it is fighting to prevent the uprising of the masses of Polish workers, in order to make it impossible to create soviet power in Warsaw.

Comrade Gallacher is convinced that the threats of the British government will not deter the Russian workers. The Russian revolution has created a powerful Red Army. Comrade Gallacher calls on the whole working class of Russia to support the Red Army as one man, and to think only of supporting this Red Army so that it can break the last resistance of the hostile forces and achieve the final victory. He says that they can now rely, not only on the Red Army, but also on other armies that will come to the defence of Soviet Russia, that is to say the armies of the Western European proletariat, who have got to know Soviet Russia in the last few years, and for whom Soviet Russia has the meaning of a homeland, for it is the first country of the rising sun of socialism.

He says that he himself and his comrades, returning to Britain, will be the link that will call on British workers, not only to fight for the defence of Soviet Russia, but also to fight for the seizure of power by the British working class. [Applause.]

He knows the enormous obstacles that encumber the path of the British revolutionaries. In Britain the compromisers are still strong for whom the blood of the working class is not dear, who have spilled it in the cause of the bourgeoisie and who, when it is a question of the liberation of the proletariat, say: ‘Be careful, spare your blood, do not make sacrifices!’ But however strong these people, these bureaucrats, are in the trades union movement, however strong they are in parliament, he is convinced that the British working class will chase them to the devil, for the British working class is becoming more and more convinced that the only way out of the situation is the path trodden two and a half years ago by the Russian proletariat. In his own name and that of his comrades he swears that, having returned, the British comrades will only have one thought: How to help Soviet Russia in her struggles, how to make it clear to the British working class that here was born the great Red Army on which the Russian working class rests, and that the British workers must unite with Russian workers for a common victory over world imperialism. [Applause.]

Chairman: Comrades, Britain is making efforts to force White Finland into a war with Soviet Russia. I give the floor to the best representative of the Finnish workers, Comrade Manner.

Manner: [Speaks in Finnish.]

Chairman: Comrade Rakhia has the floor to translate.

Rakhia: Comrade Manner, the representative of the Communist Party of Finland at the Second Congress of the Communist International, is one of the oldest leaders of the workers’ movement in Finland. Even when Finland stood under the banner of Social Democracy, Comrade Manner was one of the best representatives of the workers’ movement. At one time he was President of the Diet, when the Finnish workers had 103 out of 200 seats. In 1918, Comrade Manner was President of the Council of Peoples Commissars, in socialist Finland, which fell under the blows of German imperialism.

He greets you, and in your persons the revolutionary proletariat of Russia, and says that he does so at a time when the imperialists of the whole world, under the leadership of the British government and British capital are once more. preparing a blow in order finally to smash Soviet Russia. For this blow they will use all the forces they have to hand, chiefly the small border territories that wait like dogs for the master’s command. At the very moment when the Finnish bourgeoisie is holding peace negotiations at Dorpat with the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, Britain is trying to influence White Guard troops to make them attack Petrograd.

Comrade Manner says that two years ago, in 1918, the Finnish proletariat was the first to follow the call of the Russian proletariat and begin the fight with and alongside the Russian proletariat. At that time the Finnish proletariat had no idea how a revolution is to be carried out, and suffered a defeat. Now, however, after the fearful blows of the terror, the Finnish proletariat, which was beaten two years ago, has learnt that you must have a strongly forged revolutionary organisation if you want to win. Such an organisation which, however small, is well organised, is now present in Finland, and therefore Comrade Manner declares on behalf of the revolutionary proletariat of Finland that, if the Finnish bourgeoisie should dare to carry out Britain’s instructions, and attack Petrograd, the revolutionary proletariat of Finland will fall upon them from the rear. [Applause.]

Two years of fearful White terror have taught the Finnish proletariat one thing: a small country, a country that can hardly be seen on the map, has at least this destiny in the international revolutionary struggle – to die, if its death can help the working class of the whole world to victory, and the Finnish proletariat will know how to do this. [Applause.]

Chairman: The member of the Congress and representative of the Communist Party of Germany Spartakusbund, Comrade Levi, has the floor.


Levi: [Speaks in German.]

Chairman: Comrade Radek has the floor to translate.

Radek: Comrades, since the death of Comrades Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Comrade Levi has led the whole illegal work of the Communist Party of Germany.

He says that world capital was of the opinion that it had ended the World War at Versailles, but that now, after four years of war and a year and a half after the ‘end’ of the war, the whole world is still where it was in August 1914. It is once more faced with a great war which will perhaps break out between Soviet Russia and the Allies, but which cannot leave Germany indifferent, which will draw Germany into the struggle and force the German proletariat and bourgeoisie to participate in the solution of the international question.

The German bourgeoisie returned home defeated from the war. The German bourgeoisie expected a handsome sum from British capital in order to turn once more against the proletariat. Now, however, the German proletariat is no longer the same as it was in 1914, when it accepted the decision of the bourgeoisie without objection, sent its sons to the battlefield for the cause of the bourgeoisie, and at that time did not see its own path. The German proletariat lost millions of its sons on the battlefield. It knows now that capitalism means poverty and death.

When, after four and a half years of the war that the bourgeoisie forced it into, it returned home, it found the streets of Germany stained with the blood of the proletariat for whose liberation Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had died. It grasped that there was no other salvation than revolutionary war, for otherwise slavery would once more be imposed. This proletariat has already learnt how to fight; it has not yet been able to take power into its hands, but it has already learnt how to use the means that stand at its disposal. The position of this proletariat, hundreds and thousands of whom are now thrown out of work onto the streets. is a terrible one, and it will now have to choose between its rum and the fight against the whole capitalist world.

The moment the Entente dares to incite Germany against Soviet Russia, the moment the Entente tries to reach White Poland through Germany, the German proletariat will understand that the decisive hour has struck, and that it must fight for the world revolution. And Comrade Levi is profoundly convinced that the German working class will do this without hesitating. For the struggle to save Soviet Russia is the struggle of the German proletariat against poverty and slavery. He is convinced that the cry that echoes through Russia, the cry: ‘Long live Soviet Russia!’ will find a loud echo in the masses of millions of the German proletariat. And if, in its fight with Poland’s White Army, the Red Army approaches the frontiers of Germany, then it will hear from the other side, over the bayonets, the cry of the German proletariat, the cry: ‘Long live Soviet Russia!’ [Applause.]

Chairman: Comrade Radek has the floor as the representative of the Polish proletariat.

Radek: Comrades, I am convinced that our Red Army will continue to be in a position to deal blows to the Polish landowners who are attacking Soviet Russia, and I am convinced that no efforts on the part of Polish capital and the Polish landowners will be able to stifle the Polish proletariat. In the last few days we have received the news that Pilsudsky’s government, the government of bankrupts, is trying to hold up the course of events by throwing hundreds more Communists in gaol. The majority of the leaders of the Polish Communist movement known to us are now under lock and key, and the Polish government threatens them and their families that, if the Polish White Army has to abandon Warsaw, they will leave the corpses of the Polish communists behind them in the city, just as they already killed our old comrades Wesselowski and Fabrikevitch.

Precisely this cry of desperation from the Polish bourgeoisie proves not only that the Red Army threatens its domination, but that the Polish working class too knows very well that Russia does not threaten the independence of the Polish people, but that she wants to help the Polish workers to sunder the chains forged for them by Poland’s capitalists and the Entente. Poland is now an absolutely dependent country. Even the Polish bourgeoisie is saying at the moment that its army is receiving munitions from the Entente, and that its army is fed with bread that the Entente gives so that Poland can fight.

The campaign, however, that Soviet Russia is fighting against White Poland, is support for Poland and not its conquest. It is the assistance of the Russian working class which for twenty years has fought in alliance with the Polish working class against its enemies and now wants to unite itself once more with the Polish proletariat. Once the Polish insurgents, trying to unite with the Russian revolutionaries, put forward the slogan ‘For our Freedom and Yours.’ We have not buried this slogan. Now we stride forward to victory in order to go to work together to build the temple of socialism with our own hands, with our own strength, in the devastated countries.

Comrades, I am firmly convinced that the Polish proletariat, which throughout has fought side by side with the Moscow and Petrograd proletariat in the front ranks of the Russian revolution, will prove by deeds that it knows how to deal with the terrible, ferocious pressure of the world bourgeoisie. I am certain that our Red Army, which is coming to the assistance of the Polish proletariat with powerful blows, will find there iron divisions of old Polish workers steeled in struggle, who – I am firmly convinced of this – will march as your allies until the final victory. [Applause.]

Trotsky [Stormy ovation – the Internationale is sung.]: Comrades, the Second Congress of the Communist International has met a year and a half after the First Congress. One and a half years are only a few months, but they have more historic content than whole years did previously, and for us the Second Congress of the Communist International is not simply an international period, not simply a parade. Comrades, on the path that leads upwards over obstacles and abysses, we must cast a glance backwards to ascertain the path we have covered, without losing sight of the enemy. We must set up signposts on the path before us and stride forward without delay. And if now we look back over these 17-18 months that lie between the First and the Second Congresses of the International, and check our consciousness, our revolutionary conscience, with the greatest care, we have the right to say that the path that we sketched for ourselves at the First Congress of the International of the World Commune was the correct path, and that, if we have achieved successes, then it was on this path.


If the world proletariat has suffered defeats and has often had to go into retreat, then it was because it did not take the path shown by the Communist International. The 18 months that have passed since the First Congress have drawn a bloody line under this whole epoch of the development of humanity. This epoch had its laws, its methods, its equilibrium, its international relations, its alliances, its struggle, its lies, the democratic lie of official science, the lie of the Church. The World War has drawn up the balance sheet of all this. And the bourgeois classes who hailed the peoples into this world slaughter at the same time promised them a new Testament, a new order, a new regime.

But what do Europe and the whole world show us, what do they look like after the World War, in what condition have they emerged from the workshops of the Versailles Peace? There is not one single basis of support for the bourgeois order. Everything has been thrown into motion, all the supports are tottering, all the state programmes of the bourgeoisie have been crossed out, all the international alliances have been torn up, and the bourgeoisie, trembling before the new day, seeks a way out of this situation created by centuries of robbery and rape, and finds no way out.

Britain, France and the United States promised to give the peoples an international association, the ‘League of Nations’, which would put an end to imperialist collisions, international wars. And now we have the League of Nations before us. Scarcely had it emerged from the chancelleries of the diplomats, when he who was its creator shrank back from it: the American President Wilson. Comrades, only recently, ten or twelve months ago, all the leaders of the Second International were greeting Wilson’s plans and calling on workers to support him. Against this our International was already saying a year and a half ago in Moscow that Wilson’s campaign is an attempt by the American plutocracy, the New York Stock Exchange, to subordinate Europe and the whole world to itself, that the League of Nations will be an international company headed by United States capital. American capital is used to expanding through associations and drawing ever new millions of people into its area of exploitation. And it has attempted to extend its conditions to Europe, Asia and the whole world.

When Wilson, however, came from his great American province to Europe and ran head on into all the life and death questions of the whole world, he saw that Britain had its hand on the helm. Britain has the strongest fleet, the longest telegraph cables, the richest experience in matters of world pillage and rape. And this small-town American, Wilson, who carried the dollar’s excellent international exchange rate not only in his pocket but also on his sleeve, who thought that his Fourteen Points would become the Gospel of the world, stumbled upon the British Navy and on something even more menacing: he stumbled upon Soviet Russia and Communism. Thereupon the troubled American apostle returned to his Mount Sinai, the White House in Washington.

However, comrades, we cannot assume that this means a renunciation of world domination. American capital has no other path. As long as American capital was in the early stages of accumulation, expansion and liberation, it took as its theory the Monroe Doctrine, which said: ‘America for the Americans’, that is to say, let no one dare to intervene in the affairs of America, where American capital alone rules, exploits and robs. The frontiers of America, of the Northern part, which it had made into its colony, became too narrow for American capital. During the war, American heavy industry was raised like a gigantic pillar to heaven, and therefore American capital rejected the slogan ‘America for the Americans’, or rather changed it to say: ‘Not only America, but the whole world for the Americans’. Thereupon it sent forth the Apostle Wilson with a New Testament.

We know that Wilson did not carry out the mission. But the mission has remained. and the American oligarchy is now drawing its conclusions and saying: ‘Our navy is weaker than the British Navy by so many tons and by so many guns of this and that calibre’. And the American Navy Department works out a new programme which by 1925 – many claim even quicker, within three years – will make the American Navy bigger than Britain’s. But what does that mean? Britain’s strength is her navy. Britain guards all the sea lanes, and that gives her the power to plunder the world. Britain’s naval programme consists in this, that at any given time its navy is stronger than those of her two closest rival sea-powers put together. And now America, with its shining dollar, whose exchange rate stands high in the heavens of the stock exchanges, says: ‘In three years my navy must be stronger than Britain’s.’ That means that British imperialism is faced with the question: ‘To be or not to be?’ It further means that Britain and the United States are headed at full steam for a new, great, bloody conflict, for there can be no dual power in the world of imperialist states. The crown of world dominion must, in the final analysis, belong to Britain or America, unless the world proletariat wrenches it from them first. And after four years of terrible world war, which has laid the mightiest states of Central Europe in ruins, which has devastated Europe and ruined the whole world, we see that a new, even more violent struggle is being prepared on the bones of the fallen.

France is Soviet Russia’s main enemy, the bitterest and most rabid enemy of the international proletariat. She now thinks she is a victor, or rather, the simpletons, the petty bourgeoisie, the social patriots, and a deluded section of the working class think that France won. That is a cruel mistake. Long before German imperialism was beaten, Austro-Hungary was a defeated country. It was maintained by German militarism, just as French imperialism was maintained by the Entente. And now France is one of the most exhausted and ruined of the independent countries in the world. France can of course plunder the Black Sea, but only until it is the turn of Britain. France can dictate laws to tiny Belgium, which she has turned into a province. France herself, however, is no more than a big Belgium in her relations with Great Britain. Without American and British support, France would be defenceless both economically and militarily; but in her petty bourgeois obtuseness she raises claims to dominion, and thinks to play the role of chairman and umpire between the United States and Britain. The United States did not even join the League of Nations, and France had to beg on its knees, as if for alms, for a guarantee of its state independence.

And the small nations, the small states? They were all promised freedom and independence, and Britain has laid her imperious hand on all of them: on Finland, as on white Esthonia and Latvia. Where are the remnants of Swedish and Norwegian independence? They have disappeared. What does the Baltic represent? A bay in which Britain takes little outings. What does the Indian Ocean represent, surrounded by peoples who are subjected to Britain? Through Egypt, Persia, Afghanistan and India, the Indian Ocean has become a British lake. From the corpse of Austro-Hungary, from old Tsarist Russia, a whole series of small states have been carved out that are not viable and which the Entente and the League of Nations, that is to say, Britain, for the moment will not allow to die.

We have an Austria nailed to the cross and mangled. We have a Hungary that made the heroic attempt to lead Central Europe out of the chaos and to tread the path of soviet federation, that is to say of a fraternal league of victorious workers in economic, cultural and other respects. She was trampled and thrown back into chaos. We have a Poland, a wretched Poland whose liberation fills the earliest pages of the history of the First International. It was created by moribund imperialism for its dirty purposes and tasks. This democratic republic, for which whole generations of Polish patriots struggled who fled to the West in great waves from Tsarism and fought and died on every barricade of the revolution, this democratic Poland is at present a dirty and bloody tool, in the hands of French capital. Comrades, if the First International in its struggle against Tsarism inscribed an independent Poland on one of the first pages of its history, then Russia, liberated from Tsarism, will now fulfil its great mission and give crucified, violated Poland back to the Polish worker and the Polish peasant. [Applause.]

From all the parliamentary platforms there is talk of the economic reconstruction of Europe. There is no greater lie than this. Europe has been unable to reconstruct herself during the year and a half that have passed since our First Congress. She is incomparably poorer and more hopeless than she was, and with her the whole world. Can Europe be reconstructed without Russian raw materials and Russian corn? Can Europe be reconstructed without German technique, without the German working class? It is impossible. Returning home, the representatives of every country will say: ‘Workers of Europe and of the whole world, on the basis of the little that we have seen, we testify that, if imperialism leaves Soviet Russia in peace, if we come to the aid of Soviet Russia, even only slightly, with our technique, then in two, three, or at the most, five years Soviet Russia will give you six times more corn and raw materials than Tsarist, bourgeois Russia did, precisely because it is a Soviet Republic based on the principles of Communism.’

Hot on the tracks of victory, Anglo-French capital thinks that boundless areas for colonisation lie before it. Tsarism was formerly Britain’s competitor in Asia, and Germany was an even bigger competitor of Britain on the world market. Germany is defeated. Germany is nailed to the cross. Austria even more so. And they believe that the colonies start immediately to the East: the German people, who are subjected to France, and then Soviet Russia. To overrun Soviet Russia, to take Russian raw materials and corn, to force German workers to work like slaves and transform Russian raw materials into finished products that are then at the disposal of Anglo-French capital, that is the dazzling programme of the first period of the League of Nations. And it is trying to carry it out. It is trying to overthrow the Soviet Republic in order to bring our steppes, our lakes, our woods and our subterranean wealth under its control and to use German coal and German labour power to process them.

A year and a half of hard struggle have passed, and with justified pride we can tell our Western European brothers: ‘Your bourgeoisie has not overthrown us, we are still alive, we are receiving you in Moscow.’ And if that is so, then it is only thanks to the powerful efforts of the Russian working class and the army it has created. We know our efforts and our sacrifices, and now the envoys of the working class of the world have become more closely acquainted with them. We must however say that the main reason that we have stood firm is that we felt and knew the growing assistance in Europe, America and every part of the world. Every strike of the Scottish proletariat on the Clyde, every movement in the towns and villages of Ireland, where not only the green flag of Irish nationalism but also the red flag of proletarian struggle is flying, every strike, every protest, every uprising in whatever town in Europe, America or Asia, the powerful movement of Britain’s colonial slaves in India and the growth of the development of consciousness, the growth of one central slogan – the slogan ‘Soviet World Federation’ – that is what gave us the certainty that we are on the right path. That is what, in the darkest hours, when we were surrounded on all sides and it seemed that they would strangle us, permitted us to stand up and say: ‘We are not alone, the proletariat of Europe and Asia and the whole world is with us, we will not give way, we will stand firm.’ And we stood firm. [Applause.]

Europe cannot be reconstructed without Russia and without Germany. To reconstruct Germany she must be allowed to live, to feed herself to work. But if crucified and oppressed Germany is not allowed to live, to feed herself and to work, then she will rise up against French imperialism. And therefore French imperialism, which only knows one commandment – pay up! Germany must pay up! Russia must pay up! – these French usurers are prepared to set fire to the world from all four corners if only they receive their interest payments properly. And they have one single prescription for realising the terms of the Versailles Treaty. This prescription is the Senegalese, the African Negroes and Arabs they send over the Rhine to occupy German cities. And if too little coal comes to France from Germany, if the German gold does not arrive on time, the French bourgeoisie grinds its teeth and says: ‘Why don’t they pay up on time? Has Marshal Foch no blacks left?’

Comrades, we greet at this Congress Comrade Roy, the representative of the toiling masses of India. [Applause] I hope, comrades, that at the Third Congress of our International African Communists, Arabs, Senegalese and other Negro peoples from the colonial possessions of France and Britain will be among us. Today four or five hundred Senegalese brought our Russian soldiers, who were slaves in France for years, back to the harbours of Odessa. Despite the precautionary measures that were taken to keep the Senegalese away from the Russian soldiers, we know that no foreign regiment, no foreign company has ever entered a Russian harbour with impunity.

Comrades, the policies of Marshal Foch who supplies sea-planes to Wrangel, who helps Poland in her hopeless struggle, these policies will not restore the economy of Europe, these are the policies of a gambler who has hopelessly gambled away everything, who has already gambled away millions. Only recently the French parliament discovered that, of the 4,000 million francs set aside for the reconstruction of the devastated Northern departments of France, Clémenceau has only spent 11/2 million for this purpose, and that he has used 3,998 1/2 million, not for the reconstruction of the devastated departments of France, but for the devastation of the Gubernias and Districts of Russia. These policies, this squandering of thousands of millions, are the policies of a gambler who is possessed by the hope of winning something on the last throw, and who usually wins nothing. At the present moment we can say with quiet certainty that the hour is at hand when, in alliance with the French proletariat, we will break the bank of the French banker. [Applause.]

The Senegalese in Odessa harbour, the French Generals in Warsaw are perhaps still there, but they are facing West, not East any more. [Stormy applause.] Altogether they will not increase by a single pood the amount of coal and other raw materials, the amount of corn that France needs.

The whole world is suffering from the deepest crisis, the lack of fuel and raw materials, and the fact that during the war the whole of labour was directed not at creating values but at their destruction cannot fail to bear results, for the most basic labour is that in which men apply their thoughts and their machines to taking the most important materials, corn and coal, from the bosom of the earth. This labour has constantly fallen. Now the whole policy of world production must be aimed at securing free trade with Germany, Russia and Austro-Hungary. All countries have survived up to now on the supplies remaining to them, and the whole policy of imperialism amounts to trading relations in the coming year standing under the sign of mutual exclusion. Now, moreover, we have the policy of robbery; but we have seen that during the many months that the British were in Baku they only succeeded in taking away a few million poods of oil, while they could have taken some tens of millions of poods. The world economy suffered its greatest losses when the British and French mercenaries devastated the Don area, when the French blew up the bridges and wrecked the railway lines, when British battleships blockaded the shipping lanes to every country and thus undermined production. Those are the last word in the Entente’s economic policy.

Therefore, comrades, when we look back over a year and a half of our work in the Soviet economy, when we know all its shortcomings, all its wants, we have no cause to mask these shortcomings, but unfold this picture of our work before all our Western brothers, the Americans and the other representatives of all countries, all parts of the world. I think that if anybody came here with any doubts, he will have convinced himself that we have chosen the right path, and that the only possible way out of the poverty of the world is the planned socialisation of the world economy, the removal of all artificial state obstacles and barriers, and the pursuit of the policies that are necessary for a unified economy. And comrades, if we were able, despite the war and the blockade, not only to supply our army, but also to live for the last three years, especially the last year and a half – this fact alone is the greatest historical fact – then we were able to do so thanks to the circumstance that our economy was based on the principles of communism.

Finally, comrades, if we proceed from the questions of international politics and the economy to the questions of the political struggle, then we must say that the path sketched out by the First Congress of the Communist International was the correct path and that it has been confirmed by experience m all its basic features. If there are still honest thinking workers who still expect something from democracy, then it is an empty phantom. Where is there a democracy in Europe? The new-born democracy of Germany possesses the democratic form of suffrage. At its head stands the social-democrat Ebert. This democracy murders the best labour leaders, the best representatives of the working class, in whose names Comrade Levi has spoken. Who rules there? The magnates of capital who do their most important business in the caves of the stock exchange. During the war the French bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie of other countries still clung on to a few remnants of the old democratic ideology. The bourgeoisie had to deceive the workers, it spoke of defence of the fatherland, it said that this war would be the last one, it spoke of a League of Nations. Now, however, after the war and the Versailles Peace, when the hangman has shown himself in all his nakedness, when the toiling masses are robbed and brought to beggary, now the last remnants of this ideology are thrown aside, now the bourgeoisie itself almost renounces any reference to the Old Testament of democracy which earlier served it to deceive the working class, now it demands a firm, steel-hard will.

We can take any parliamentary report of any country we have to hand, and we see that the most miserable bourgeois minister, any petty official, can harvest a storm of applause if he wants to by shaking a threatening fist in the direction of the revolutionary proletariat. From its proteges, servants and ministers the bourgeoisie demands blood and iron; for it has grasped that we – we: the whole world have entered not the epoch of parliamentary arbitration between the classes, but the epoch of relentless and hard struggle ... And what did the working class, that is to say, the part of it that returned home from the war, find at home? The working class found in its towns and villages a new bourgeoisie, even more brazen and bloody than the one it left behind. War contractors, internationally known black-marketeers, have climbed up, parvenus with a dubious past, who have robbed millions and more millions and thousands of millions by speculation in blood. This rapacious and unbridled scum have polluted the air of the European and American towns with their poisoned breath. Their ostentation has taken on the form of a reckless fever, the recklessness of the drunkard, a nervous delirium. The workers have returned home from the trenches and see before them this ‘bourgeoisie dorée’ that has taken possession of everything, that tramples on everything, that wants to enjoy everything, that is ready at any given moment to shoot the working class down with its cannons merely in order to secure the possibility of living, ruling and enjoying.

And the outrage of the working class is fanned in every country to ever brighter flames. The rise in prices produces strikes and demonstrations by the starving workers. And what a great factor in the labour movement, in the history of the whole of mankind, is the circumstance that women, the subjugated slaves, have awoken and that the proletarian youth are arising in ever greater masses, are coming to our aid and relieving us. With the women and the revolutionary youth a new powerful stream of revolutionary lava is poured into the revolutionary movement of the world proletariat, which will bring new, inexhaustible supplies of energy to the movement of the Communist International. [Applause.]

Comrades, there is no doubt that the proletariat of every country would already be in power if there were not between it and the masses, between the revolutionary masses and the advanced groups of the revolutionary masses, still a big, strong, sophisticated machine, still the parties of the Second International and the trades unions of the world who, in the epoch of the decay, of the death of the bourgeoisie, have placed their apparatus in the service of that bourgeoisie. Precisely the Second International, which bound its fate to the fate of the bourgeoisie by mutual guarantees during the war, has assumed responsibility for the old world and has intercepted the first rush of rebellion and indignation on the part of the toiling masses. Its authority has sunk, it has fallen apart. Larger and larger parts, millions of the toiling masses, are splitting from it. But the first rush of the proletariat against bourgeois society, the first outbreak of rebellion, was met by the Second International like a buffer. And if the German working class has suffered and will suffer tens of thousands of victims, then German social democracy is guilty. At the most responsible moment in world history, it was transformed into a counter-revolutionary apparatus, just as all the leading parties of Second International have been transformed into a counter-revolutionary apparatus in the service of bourgeois society.

And if we look back over the whole of past history and seek counter-revolutionary forces there, we can find nothing comparable. We know the world history of the Catholic Church which, like all other churches, was a mighty tool, a strong and mighty means, in the hands of the possessing classes for the defence of their privileges and dominion. But the services that the world church and world catholicism performed for the possessing classes are nothing compared with the role played by the parties of the Second International at the critical moment of world history. For decades they led the working class, enjoyed its confidence, organised it and sustained it with their authority. But at the moment the working class had to harness all its ability to act to its liberation from the yoke of capital, they used this apparatus to tie the working class hand and foot, to make them not only the material, physical slaves of world capital, but also its intellectual slaves.

As we hold the Second Congress here in Moscow, there meets in Geneva the Congress of the Second International which, in its programme and its spirit – opposes itself to our International of the Red Proletarian Commune. And from this day on, from this Congress on, from these two Congresses on, the split inside the world working class will be carried out with tenfold speed. Programme against programme, tactics against tactics, method against method. We, the Communist International, forced the German Independent Social Democratic Party, which hesitated and vacillated, and whose upper layers are still vacillating to this day, to send its representatives here through the pressure of the German working class. The Party of French parliamentary socialism was also forced by the revolt of the proletarian masses to send envoys to us. But we will not agree to any concessions: The Communist International is not an International of compromises and agreements. We have a banner and a programme. Whoever wants to can place himself under this banner. That is what we told the representatives of the German Independent Social Democratic Party and of the French parliamentary party. We asked them: ‘Do you hope to introduce reforms through your parliaments that will gradually lead to the realm of socialism?’ We asked that ironically, for the facts of life have already given us the bitter answer. And if the German Independent Party and even the Party of French parliamentary socialism have not yet learnt to lead the proletariat on the path of the civil war and the proletarian dictatorship, they have at least already learnt to place no more faith in the path of parliamentary reformism. And the French and German workers have learnt to place no more faith in their hesitant and vacillating leaders.

This Congress that coincides with the Congress of the Second International, which – and that is important and significant for us and for the workers of the whole world – coincides with the threatening struggles that the Entente is waging against the Soviet Republic through the medium of white Poland; this Congress, that coincides with the glorious victories of the Red Army on the Southern and South Western fronts, will set up big signposts for the further development of the proletarian world revolution. In its decisions this Congress has drawn up a balance sheet of the whole experience of the working class of the world. This Congress turns to the working men and women of the whole world with a manifesto whose essential content I have set out here in my report, a manifesto that will be published in every language, which draws up a balance sheet of the work of imperialism in the field of international relations and in the economic field, which correctly assesses the last remnants of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarism and shows the proletariat of the whole world and the subjugated toiling masses of the colonial countries the sure, clear and distinct path of struggle.

And what joy, what pride, do we workers of Moscow and of the whole of Russia feel that the best fighters of the working class of the world have been able to meet for a second time in our country, that we have been able, on the basis of our experience, to help them to forge their weapons. With your hands, comrades, we have fanned a blaze in our Moscow forge. In this blaze we have heated the proletarian steel to white heat, we have worked it with the hammer of our proletarian soviet revolution, we have tempered it with the experience of the civil war and forged a splendid, and incomparable sword for the international proletariat. We will arm ourselves with this sword, we will arm the others with it. We say to the workers of the whole world: ‘We have forged a strong sword in the Moscow fire. Take it in your hands and plunge it into the heart of world capital.’ [Applause.]

Zinoviev: Comrades, during the last fourteen days meetings have taken place in Moscow of the representatives of the workers’ organisations of the whole world and during this whole time we have seen how the fraternal league of workers of the whole world has become firmer each day.

When we first raised the question of the possibility of illegally convening the Congress in Moscow some time ago, many were doubtful of the success of this plan. They very thought of it seemed daring for it goes without saying that the bourgeoisie of the whole world persecutes its worst enemy, the Communist International, with the greatest hatred, with all the scourges possible.

But comrades, the striving of workers all over the world to reach us was so great, the cry ‘to Moscow’ was so general, that despite the resistance of the world bourgeoisie, despite all the obstacles that were placed in our way, as you see, the Congress convened and we can now say in front of the whole world that this Congress was completely successful and that it was a world Congress of the proletariat. [Applause.]

Comrades. just as the earth, after a long drought, pants for rain, so the workers of the world pant for the end of the accursed war, for unification. This striving of the workers for unification is the greatest factor in world history. It is the driving force of the Communist International. The class consciousness of workers all over the world expresses itself in this: they recognise that they can only achieve what history has promised them in close unity. This consciousness is the most important world-historical life-force of the Communist International and thanks to it we have succeeded in holding the Congress although the blockade has only just been lifted, although it still exists in part, and although our comrades have to work illegally in a whole series of countries.

The register of the delegations fills several pages. I shall only mention the countries that were represented. [He reads out the list.] From some of these countries we only had a few representatives, but nevertheless the delegations represent everything that exists throughout the world of vital revolutionary fighting spirit. Of great importance is the circumstance that among us there are not only representatives of the European and American proletariat but also representatives of the workers and the poorest peasants of the whole East – of Turkey, Persia, India, the British colonies and so forth. In this we see proof of the fact that the movement in the East is beginning and that it will also develop further, that no power in the world will succeed in holding this movement back, which in India has a purely proletarian character. These movements will unite with those of Europe and America to deliver the death-blow to capitalism.

The most varied shadings of the labour movement were represented at our Congress. At the present moment the labour movement is still in a process of fermentation and crystallisation. That is understandable. After the terrible crisis that the working class of the world has experienced, after the gigantic collapse of the Second International and after the blood-letting that was carried out on the workers of the whole world, it is completely understandable that there cannot now be complete political clarity among the workers. But if the working class was united, if it was completely clear about its fundamental tasks, we would have defeated the bourgeoisie long ago. The curse of our class is this: part of our brothers were for many decades deceived by our enemies; another part is organised in associations which actually help the bourgeoisie. In some countries the working class today is in a certain sense at a parting of the ways. After the fearful storm that was unleashed on mankind during the imperialist war, it seeks the correct way. We have set ourselves the task of uniting all the vital, rich and powerful forces that the working class can muster under the banner of the Communist International for the struggle against the bourgeoisie. We have intentionally also called upon the organisations that have not taken on complete form to enter the Communist International.

Representatives of the best section of the syndicalists, representatives of the best section of the anarchists, have taken part in our Congress. In our midst there are representatives of the shop stewards of Britain, of the Austrian factory committees and representatives of the IWW. The mainstream of the world labour movement flows in the river-bed of communism. We see a mighty communist stream before us. But besides it also, a series of smaller rivers must flow into the great stream of the Communist International. We see a whole number of such proletarian movements which are still in ferment, that are only half turned towards us, which are in many ways infected with anarchist and syndicalist prejudices, which do not entirely share our programme but which nevertheless fight with us against the bourgeoisie and on whom we look as brothers. We break with the hated traditions of the Second International which treated badly the revolutionary workers, the best fighters. When in the Second International there were a handful of venerable representatives of the yellow imperialist bodies and other organisations, at every attempt by this or that group of workers to dare to subject the policies of the Second International to criticism, the door was slammed shut. We open our doors wide to all honest proletarian, revolutionary organisations which today are not yet communist, but which tomorrow will be, which today are ready, arms in hand, to fight together with us against world capital. [Applause.]

Apart from the group which in the opinion of some formed an opposition from the left – but which in reality was not at all revolutionary-minded since for the working class, for communism, there can be no opposition from the left – there took part in our Congress a group of penitent sinners. I mean the representatives of the French Socialist Party, of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and of the Italian Socialist Party. All these parties are among those big workers’ organisations who still stand with one foot in the old camp but which attempt to take a new path. It seems to me that our Congress gained an even greater significance from the fact that these representatives of old parties appeared before it, that some of them asked for an amnesty and would have been glad to receive from the Communist International the answer: ‘Guilty under extenuating circumstances.’ Insofar, however, as it is a question of leaders who are responsible for the imperialist war, we have adopted a completely irreconcilable position. You have read our answer to the French Socialist Party, the letter which we have them to take on their way so that they could study it at their leisure In it we gave an exact description of all the characteristics of the French Socialist Party in the person of the leaders of their yellow socialists. What we gave them was what the Germans call a Steckbrief. That is to say a letter from which any honest worker can immediately recognise the criminal who at the moment stands in the path of the world proletariat; a letter that says: ‘See, you workers, this is what a leader of the working class should not look like.’

Comrades, there is a significant number of workers in the ranks of the French Party. 50,000 copies of its central press organ are printed. The party of the Independents in Germany numbers around a million members. Some 11,000 members of the party, predominantly workers, are languishing in jail. It goes without saying that the workers who are languishing in the jails of the German Republic fill us with the greatest respect and we are prepared to take our hats off to them. Of course what we say to the ranks of the German Independent Party is the same as what we say to the French Socialist Party. We try to make their mistakes clear to them. We try to unify with them.

Comrades, in this connection the Congress has worked out a whole number of Conditions (there are 21 of them) for admission to the Communist International. Comrades, I think that when you have become acquainted with these Conditions, you will say with us that it can truly be said if it is not easy for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then, I hope, it will not be easy for the supporters of the Centre who are always going to remain such, to slip through these 21 Conditions set up by the Communist International. [Applause.] We have set these Conditions so that the workers in the ranks of the French Socialist Party, the USPD and of the American and of the Italian Socialist parties, all organised workers in general, know what the international staff of the proletarian revolution is demanding of them so that they can drive them into a corner and receive an answer on all the questions mentioned in the conditions. And, comrades, we hope that these Conditions will achieve their purpose. If we were told a year and a half ago that the Communist International ran the danger of having too few members, then now we are faced with a different danger.

For many the Communist International is becoming a fashion. The Brussels International which is now meeting in Geneva has, it is said, taken the decision to declare a General Strike. It seems that the Second International wants to follow in the footsteps of Moscow. We do not know how many living ghosts have gathered there, but it is clear to everybody that the Second International now represents a heap of ruins and that among the old leaders of these crown-socialists, as they could be called, there are many who always want to be with the majority and to lean upon some power or other. On the international scale this power is now the Communist International. They want to lean on us, to make concessions in words and thus assure themselves a certain autonomy in order to carry on with the old routine. We hope that our second Congress of the Communist International has shut the door sufficiently firmly to these gentlemen. We hope that the decisions we have taken will be sufficient to draw such a line between the parties that all workers who honestly want to fight for communism will step into our ranks, but everything that is rotten will fly like chaff into the dustbin and will never again hold back the advance of the working class.

A whole series of questions has been dealt with by the Second Congress, the most important of which was the question of the role of the Communist Party. It is not necessary to prove its necessity in a hall in which I may say a great majority of Communist Party members are gathered. But at an international Congress where representatives of the most different countries with completely different histories, with different traditions, were present, it was necessary finally to clarify the role and the significance of the Communist parties. The old parties have gone bankrupt and it is understandable that they have dinned into a number of workers the thought that it is not the Second International that collapsed but the policy of the leaders in general. It was necessary to become clear on the role and the significance of the proletarian revolution and I hope that you realise that it was a great victory when the best representatives of revolutionary syndicalism voted for our resolutions as did also the best representatives of other workers’ organisations.

Now we must say to the syndicalist workers, the anarchists and other elements who did not believe in the significance of the Party, ‘You did not believe that there could be other parties than the Scheidemanns, that there is a real workers’ party which leads the working class in the fight against capital. Look here and convince yourselves. Here is the Communist Party of Russia. That is the work of the Russian worker. Here is the Hungarian Communist Party. There is the German party of the Spartacists; see what they have done for the enlightenment of the German working class. There are the Communist parties of a whole series of countries. Look and learn. Here is an example of what we are striving for. We must build such parties!

The national and colonial question was also discussed and it seems to me that the resolution passed unanimously on this question similarly signifies a great moral victory for us. You know that the Second International approached the question of so-called national policies, that in general a policy of patience was suggested and that in 1907 the majority spoke out in favour of socialists supporting the policy of so-called cultural nationalism. Towards the peoples of the black and yellow races the Second International adopted an attitude calculated to arouse the deepest mistrust in these peoples. The Communist International had to return to the traditions of the First International. It was its duty to say, and it did say, that it did not only want to be an International of the toilers of the white race but also an International of the toilers of the black and yellow races, an International of the toilers of the whole world. [Applause.] I am convinced that the fraternal alliance that we have concluded in the Congress with the representatives of India, Korea, Turkey and a whole number of other countries will strike to the heart of international capital. This is the greatest conquest of the working class.

We have also discussed the question of the trades unions. You know that in Moscow we have created the first international cell of the trade union federation. I contend that this also has a general historical significance for the whole world. The last support of capitalism is the yellow Amsterdam labour organisation. If we bring the best part of the workers of this organisation to us what we thus achieve is that the Second International will lose the masses and that we will gather around us everything that is vital in the working class. At the Congress we had to carry out a sharp polemic with a number of our English and American comrades who have had to fight against the enormous betrayal of their leaders, who have no strong Communist Party and who have broken with parliamentarism. The Second Congress of the Communist International had told all these parties what the most important thing for them is. As the experiences of the Russian Revolution teach us – remember this in England and America! – the most important thing of all is to stay in the midst of the masses of workers. You will often go wrong with them, but never leave the mass organisations of the working class, however reactionary they may be at any given moment.

The bourgeois state we must destroy. But the workers’ organisations, on the contrary, we must conquer, transform and take into our ranks, otherwise the victory of Communism is impossible. We have already broken many lances with some of our comrades on this question. But what the Communist International has said on this becomes a law for all, including the comrades who defended a different point of view. The aim of the Communist International is to found a Communist Party in every country so that all the currents of the present healthy, revolutionary, proletarian movements come together into one mighty river. And those who know what enormous authority the Communist International possesses in the eyes of the world working class will not doubt that this task will be easy to perform and that a successful unification will be achieved.

Comrades, it would be of special interest to draw up a comparison between what happened at our Congress and what is being done in bourgeois circles. Comrade Trotsky has clearly depicted what is happening in the upper layers of the ruling bourgeoisie. Comrades, is it not significant that while we in Moscow, within a short space of time have reached agreement on a whole number of important questions with workers who have come here from Australia and America despite differences in culture, history and tradition, and feel that our fraternal alliance is becoming firmer with every hour, is it not significant that in the same period among bourgeois ruling circles each group is trying to put a spoke in the other’s wheel. The British bourgeoisie rages at us and attempts to outwit its French rivals. They persecute each other and are not in a position to create unity.

In 1919, the Second International attempted to come back to life by binding its fate to the ‘League of Nations’ according to the old principle: ‘There is no animal stronger than the cat.’ By thus leaning on the League of Nations it believed it would obtain decades of world domination. A year and a few months have passed and we can already see the League of Nations collapsing before our eyes, turning into a fiction where all elbow each other and deceive each other. The Second International tied its fate to the League of Nations with which it will go under, whose bankruptcy it will share. At the same time, however, the true international fraternity of workers with the toiling peasantry is growing. I am profoundly convinced that the Second World Congress will be the precursor of another world congress, the World Congress of Soviet Republics. [Applause.]

Comrades, it is a significant fact that the only resolution that was adopted unanimously without the slightest debate by all representatives was the resolution on the soviets. Because the soviet idea, the idea of the creation of a soviet state, of this form of the proletarian dictatorship, has penetrated into the broadest masses of workers and into the lowest layers and has won millions and tens of millions of workers. There not only needs to be no conflict about it at the World Congress, but there does not even need to be discussion. Much rather, this idea is our fundamental conquest. Comrades, the idea of soviets is a simple thought but it forms the firm iron foundation on which our Communist International stands.

Our work is approaching its end. We have exchanged our experiences with the representatives of the most varied countries. We have considered a series of contested questions. We have mapped out the path that we shall have to follow in struggle in the course of long months. We do not know what blows of fate lie in wait for this or that of our sister parties. But one thing we do know; that we will build up an organisation which at any given moment will give the workers of the whole world the greatest possible help. We have adopted the Statutes of the Communist International. That is no mere formality. It is confirmation of the fact that we are creating a unified, international Communist Party with branches in all the various countries. [Applause.]

In these Statutes we remember the words of the Statutes of the First International, founded by Karl Marx? the words: ‘If the working class is now in chains and not free then that is because up to now there has been no unity in the working class and the workers of different countries have not proceeded in solidarity.’ That is a simple truth, a simple thought, and yet it took several decades for the working class of the whole world to assimilate this thought. And we have added in the Statutes of the Communist International: ‘Remember the imperialist war and its countless victims! This is the first appeal of the Communist International to every toiler wherever he may live and whatever language he may speak. If you support capitalism you can have new wars. Our international fraternity was born after difficult experiences. If you want to take responsible decisions think of the imperialist murders that destroyed workers’ organisations and cost tens of millions of workers their lives and which can reignite any moment if we do not destroy capitalism.’

The adoption of the Statutes means that we have finally closed our ranks, that we have an international fraternity of workers, that we possess an organisation, centralised on an international scale, welded together with blood. And we will tell our comrades that so that they understand how we in Russia had to create in the civil war a centralised organisation of iron cast in one piece, with military discipline which was often very difficult for individual party members and demanded the greatest effort and sacrifice.

In the same way we must create on an international scale an international organisation that is cast in one piece with the same iron discipline and the same centralisation, with unconditional mutual confidence and with the same unselfish preparedness for self-sacrifice for the common cause of the victory of the proletarian revolution. [Applause.]

Comrades are travelling from here to a number of countries where states of emergency, prison, punishment and betrayal on the part of the Western European social democracy and of capitalism’s hirelings are waiting for them. We wish our comrades courage for this struggle and we ask them in difficult moments to think of this, that the Soviet Republic is prepared to share everything that it possesses with them. The Communist Party of Russia thinks it an honourable duty to come to the aid of sister parties with everything that it has. To those of our brothers who are now setting off to carry out the highest historical mission and the highest historical tasks that have ever faced the proletariat, we wish courage, strength and certainty.

Long live the Communist International. Long live our comrades who are setting off to the bourgeois countries to carry out propaganda for world communism. [Stormy applause. Cheers.]


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Comrade Kalinin declares the session closed.