THE COMINTERN [3RD INTERNATIONAL]

On the other hand, Lenin recognized far better than his fellow-revolutionaries the nature of the issue of national self-determination. Marx and Engels had seen this according to three overall principles for recognizing the validity of a national claim: the extent of its popular support; its helpfulness to progressive movements in Western Europe; and, not least, its weakening effect on the Russian Empire. Lenin and Luxemburg (with Trotsky closer to the latter) went beyond this to develop more general theories. Luxemburg’s view was coloured by her experience in Poland, where the 1905 Rising had not stimulated nationalism. She rationalized this by referring to the growing independence of world industry and trade which made real national economic independence a mirage. In some cases - such as the Balkan States’ independence form Turkey - national freedom might help social and economic development but in general the most a nation could expect was cultural autonomy. Against this, Lenin insisted on the political nature of national self-determination. Its denial blocked the way to Socialism for the proletariat of both oppressed and oppressor nations. It encouraged the first to concentrate support on movements led by its national bourgeoisie (as in Ireland when Labour — left the leadership of the national struggle after 1916). Even more certainly, for the second, it offered bribes from the product of the exploited nation and developed in it habits of racism and chauvinism.

A third disagreement between Lenin and Luxemburg was their concept of Imperialism. Lenin saw it as centred in the export of capital : Luxemburg in the export of surplus commodities. In practice, they did not argue about it. In all this, Ireland was at the periphery. After 1900 its Socialists moved away from active participation in the International, partly in contempt for the prevailing Centrism but partly, after 1907 as they moved towards the Syndicalist view that the industrial union, rather than the party, was the workers political vanguard. Even so, in 1914 most Irish Socialists opposed their country’s nationalist leaders’ support for the First World War. What was more, Connolly, the Irish movement’s most able theoretician, had positions similar to the International’s left wing on the State, on national self-determination and. on Permanent Revolution. All this was brought to little consequence by his political isolation, expressed most disastrously in his Syndicalist concepts. The International grew and, despite criticism from the Left, so did its bureaucracy, Centrism and Revisionism. Then, in July 1914 on the eve of its Jubilee Congress, the latest Imperialist war scare became a reality. The International could not 24 react. First Austrian Social Democracy voted its Government war credits, then the extreme right wing of Russian Social Democracy (including Plekhanov) and then, most devastatingly, the German Social Democrats, followed by the French (including Guesde and Vaillant and with Herve’s support) and most of the British. Most of these found democratic excuses for their actions.

The Austrians and the Russians recalled Marx’s fears of Tsarist Russia. The French insisted on their superior democratic rights (they had maintained manhood suffrage since 1881) compared to Prussia. The British cited Germany’s breach of Belgian neutrality. Only the Russian war effort could not be masked as democratic. None considered their own States’ colonies and oppressed nations. Revisionism had beaten both Centrism and the Left.

The Second International had ended.

It reappeared after the War, after a series of conferences held by those who could not bring themselves to accept the new Russian Workers’ State, in 1923. Organized on sucha basis it was completely reformist and, in Lenin’s view, by its relationship to its affiliates’ national States, bourgeois. It liquidated itself again with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939; this time it was revived only in 1951. Today, more than the sum of its affiliated parties, the Second International is per se an instrument of the American C.I.A.

It could not agree even to condemn the U.S.A’s occupation of Vietnam.

For over seventy years, the Socialist vanguard has been elsewhere.

THE COMINTERN

It reappeared as the Third International demanded by Lenin when he heard of the disintegration of the Second. For most of the subsequent war he was alone in his demand.

Delegates of his Party attended Congresses of anti-War Socialists in neutral Switzerland at Zimmerwald in 1915 and at Kienthal in 1916. At these, their calls for a purged International were opposed by those who wanted to make it easy for the pro-war Socialists (Social Chauvinists) to reunite them. Lenin isolated the Bolsheviks and their allies further by insisting on Socialists having a duty to turn their imperialist war into civil class war, rather than just calling for peace. Isolated in Ireland, Connolly did just this in Easter 1916. Then, in March 1917, the workers of Russia overthrew the Czar. The country’s bourgeoisie began a struggle to assert its claim to State power over theiremployees. Against 25

this Lenin developed his views to accept Trotsky’s concept of Permanent Revolution and a programme, less than Socialist, but on which the workers could take State power.

Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks. In November they led the workers to establish the world’s first countrywide Workers’ State. Despite Lenin’s early call, it was not until the First World War had ended in November 1918 (and not until a month after a Congress at Berne had started the process of exhuming the Second International) that, in May 1919, what had now become the Communist Party of Russia convoked the founding Congress of the Third, or Communist, International (Comintern). Two points must be understood about the new International. In one important way it was very different from its predecessors. For the first time, more than two Asian countries were represented in a Socialist International. Besides a Japanese Communist Party there was formed, either in time for the founding Congress or in the next four years, the Communist Parties of China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Persia (Iran) and Turkey. As yet these were small, yet they made the Third International more truly international than the first two and were a pledge that, unlike the Second, it would not hesitate to oppose colonialism. But how would colonialism be opposed? How indeed would capitalism be fought. These questions were set by the nature of the International’s non-Russian sections. Although it had been founded by revolutionaries, it was not composed of revolutionary parties. The French Socialist Party had been among the most revisionist before the war. It had been among the firmest in supporting its bourgeoisie war effort; now, it was equally notable in that the majority of its conference delegates voted to affiliate with the Comintern. The Parti Communist Francais being based on this internal majority, its real political change was doubtful. A more subtle confusion was in the position of Socialist Feminists like Luxemburg’s old ally Zetkin and Alexandra Kollantai (1872-1952). Both had opposed the War; Kollantai as the world’s first woman Commissar had decreed for women’s rights beyond the expectations of the Second International.

Whether from age or demoralization, neither would fight to maintain these standards later. On the other hand, Rosa Luxemburg had doubted the need to found the Comintern though she was murdered before its first Congress. Friedrich (Fritz) Adler (1879-1960), leader of Austria’s Anti-War Socialists and killer of that country’s War Minister, wavered between Second and Third International, tried to build a Centrist (Two-and-a Half) International in 1921, but joined the resurrected Second International in 1923.

26. Although the founding of the Comintern was a major move towards a genuine revolutionary World Party of Socialism, its simple existence could not guarantee such a Party. It could be produced only as aresult of a period of revolutionary struggle and sympathetic but firm guidance from the best elements among the Russian Communists. Certainly, the years after 1918, there were plenty of revolutions. The trouble was that, with the considerable exception of the Russians’ struggle against counter-revolution, they were all defeats. Germany and Hungary in 1919, Italy in 1920, Germany again in 1921 all failed to gain for the workers State power.

Save in Hungary, all were defeated by the weakness and treachery of the Revisionists. Instead, they tended to demoralize the vanguard membership, closing doors even against the Left Centrists or Zimmerwald, with their ideas of class collaboration and peace under the bourgeoisie at home and abroad.

The Third Congress the following year passed a set of Guiding Principles for the Communist Parties in their work which, though regarded by Lenin as based too much on the Russian experience, included, even then, useful advice. In 1922 the Fourth Congress agreed to Lenin’s Guiding Principles on the National and Colonial Question, which directed co-operation between - but not amalgamation of - Communist and Revolutionary National bourgeois parties in oppressed States. It also passed proposals for joint action on a principled basis between Communist and other non-revolutionary parties of the working-class where, as in France and Germany, the Communists organized between a quarter and a third of the State’s workers. This was the strategy of the United Front. Yetthe Communist Parties remained weak and under pressure from a reviving bourgeoisie. This was most aggressive and successful in Italy, with the Fascist takeover of 1922.

(The leader of this, Benito Mussolini, 1883-1945 was, like Guesde and Herve in France, a former Left Socialist turned Social Chauvinist).

The non-Russian Communists remained dependent on Russia and were thus open to infection by anew form of bureaucratic degeneration : one that occurred within the Russian Workers’ State as it developed.

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) addressing Red Army Unit