AFTER THE COMINTERN

rialists far more certainly than it had been in the Popular Front era. The Comintern had lost any real importance as a representative body of Socialist Revolutionaries. For the U.S.S.R orders from Moscow, as such, were quite as effective as anything the Comintern could do.

Yet it remained as the symbol of world revolution and an affront to democratic imperialism. So, in May 1943, Stalin liquidated it. Manuilsky became Foreign Minister for the Ukranian Soviet Republic and Dimitrov prepared to return to his native Bulgaria with the Red Army which installed him there as Prime Minister from 1945. Unlike the Second International, the Third has never been revived. Between 1947 and 1956, a shadow of it, the Cominform, acted as sorting office for mail between Moscow and its client parties. Only the year after this body had been dissolved as a gesture, this time, of de-Stalinisation by Stalin’s successor, Nikita Kruschev (1894-1971), was there a World Congress of Communist Parties, mainly to take stock after the Hungarian Rising against Russian domination. Another Congress was held in 1961, this time to unite world Stalinism alongside Moscow and Peking. These Congresses emphasized merely that world Stalinism was divided. In any case, they were Congresses of Parties, not of a single International Organization as such. Since then, too, these Congresses have been held on a regional rather than a completely International basis : a retreat to the norms of the Second International, again without any such body in existence. An exception occurred in 1978 when Moscow tried to nullify a new threat of division in the form of Euro- Communism. The Congress was held not at Moscow but in East Berlin, as a sop to the Euro-Communists. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan the following year did more than the Congress to weaken Euro-Communism by dividing its advocates. 36 After The Comintern Yet this is not all. As early as Pilsudsky’s Polish coup in 1926, Trotsky had remarked that the Comintern was aiding rather than thwarting counter-revolution. This became truer over the following years until, in 1933, he proclaimed the need for a Fourth International.

It continued until the Comintern ended formally ten years later. To point to the moral, it was only after that event that revolution began to advance successfully again to produce new claimants to the heritage of the Third International.

Despite Trotsky’s own expectations, the excesses of the Nazi terror helped provoke Russia to mobilize against it. Its own nationalized economy enabled it not only to survive the Second World War but to export revolution on the bayonets of the Red Army as far as the centre of Germany. The Governments thus founded were open clients of the U.S.S.R. Thecautious Stalin agreed to persuade Communist Parties elsewhere not to claim State power. The one exception to this strategy was Yugoslavia which had been divided, like Germany and Austria, into spheres of influence with the Imperialists. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia, led by Josip Tito (1894- 1980) ignored this agreement, seized State power and, later, broke altogether with Russia. Tito made no attempt to extend his political influence abroad. Instead he settled for trying to build Socialism in his own country as a buffer between imperialism and international mainstream Stalinism. The limitations of this approach were soon revealed. In 1950 he supported the United States’ inspired war to prevent South Korea being united to the North Korea People’s Republic. Before all this, in 1949, despite continuing pessimism on the part of its Russian allies, the Communist Party of China, headed by Mao Dzedong (1893-1976) seized control of its country from the palsied hands of the Kuomintang. This created a potential rival more formidable than Yugoslavia to Russia’s claim for allegiance as being a Socialist party in a single country.

Perhaps recognizing this or perhaps extending to China the dominance the U.S.S.R maintained over other Workers’ States, Stalin maintained what was an effective colonial authority there, even maintaining direct semi-colonial rule around he Manchurian city of Port Arthur.

After his death, his successors renegotiated Russia’s relationship with China to give the latter equal status.

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Its Government, building what it saw as Socialism in its own one country, was not satisfied. From 1956 it began to draw away from its earlier acceptance of Russian policies. At first, and ironically considering his attitude, the Chinese Government defended Stalin against his heirs’ denunciations. Then the polemic deepened qualitatively as China’s less developed bureaucratic regime attacked the Russian’s increased concentration on peaceful co-existence with imperialism rather than encouraging world revolution.

In 1960 Russian technologists were withdrawn from China. In 1961 the International Congress of the Communist Parties held in Moscow for that purpose condemned the Chinese political line. This reflected the attitude of the majority of Communist Parties though some (like that of Rumania) were less enthusiastic than others. Only the Communist Parties of the Workers’ State of Albania, of Indonesia and of New Zealand opposed Russia, though Maoist tendencies developed within most others. The Chinese international perspective was in itself more realistic than that of Moscow. The trouble was that it did not develop beyond third period Stalinism into revolutionary Marxism. Its split with Russia arose, indeed, partly from its belief that it could build Socialism in its own single country. It attacked Russia for trying to maintain a centralized 38 international Communist movement, not because of the undoubted bureaucracy of its approach, but in the name of the independence of each national Communist Party. So, having split from Russia, China did not seek to recreate a Comintern but continued as Stalin had done after 1943. It limited its influence further by tending to throw it behind the smallest sects that supported it within any one country. In practice, Maoism proved no more successful after 1949 than the third period of Stalinism on which it modelled itself. The Communist Party of Indonesia led its followers to be massacred in 1965. Worse still, when a pro-Chinese body did take State power in Kampuchea in 1975, the results were almost as disastrous as if it had failed. Moreover, China’s hostility to Russia deepened to the point where the U.S.S.R was seen not just as an appeaser of the imperialists but as a greater danger than they to peace and Socialism. To stop it, China was ready to sign any Hitler-Stalin pacts. Since Mao’s death it has retreated from this position but a Beijing Comintern is less possible than ever. In 1959 there occurred the Cuban revolution. It triumphed under leadership that was quite separate from the country’s Stalinist party. The same leadership is still distinct from mainstream Stalinism, During its first ten years of State power it made a serious attempt to build a separate international organization and to advance thereby the world revolution. The trouble here was the essential eclecticism of what must be called Castroism , after the Cuban Premier Fidel Castro (1925-). This involved the new International’s being a Tri- Continental one - based on the guerrillaist movements of the three continents of the Third (or Colonial) World and taking little notice of developed countries or even formally Leninist Parties. After two Congresses it disappeared, as its own impotence and Cuba’s economic weakness forced its initiators closer to Russia. This alignment had further unfortunate results. Cuba defended the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Its leaders made no Clear criticism of the disastrous Chilean Unidad Popular. (It supported a military Government in Peru). More recently, it sent troops to support the bourgeois (but pro- Russian) military junta in Ethiopia in its oppressions of subject peoples.

Today it supports the military junta in Poland. Nonetheless, Cuba has not - perhaps _ 39 because of its leadership’s empiricism - centred its perspectives around protecting itself for its building of Socialism within its own boundaries. It retains the aim of spreading the revolution and, from 1979, ithas contributed towards this end around the Carribean Sea through supplying aid to revolutionary Nicaragua and Grenada. Such victories, if continued and extended (and Grenada has been defeated) can only reduce Cuban dependence on the Russian bureaucracy. . Finally, of the major international working class victories there remains that of Indochina. This has been spearheaded (save for the early fiasco in Kampuchea) by parties associated formally with Russia.

Whether and how they will outgrow this it is too early to judge.

At the moment, then, the World Revolution advances empirically, and more through the weakness of the exploiters than through the strength of the revolutionaries. Its speed can increase only with the development of mass support for an International Party for its advance.

Such a party is being built. It is the Fourth International.