The idea that became the Communist International began, as
we have already seen in the fifth article in this series, with the anti-war
wing of the Second International and with Lenin’s and Zinoviev’s struggle
within this left for an international split (Weekly Worker April 20). Comintern
was able to emerge because of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October 1917
and the survival of the revolutionary regime into 1919, when the 1st Congress
of Comintern met.
The result was that Comintern had a double character. On the
one hand, it was an international of the anti-war left, attempting to redeem
the honour of socialism after the ignominious political collapse of the Second
International. On the other, it was a fan club for the Russian Revolution and
its leaders.
The fan-club aspect became more prominent with the defeat of
the Hungarian and (especially) the German and Italian revolutionary movements.
On the one hand, the Russians had the prestige of victory and the material
resources of state power. On the other, the Germans had lost some of their most
eminent leaders - and the westerners in general had failed where the Russians
had succeeded. It was natural for Comintern in these circumstances to become a
body that propagated the idea of the Russian Revolution as a universal model.
In international strategy, this had two aspects. The first
was that defence of the Soviet regime was the central touchstone of the
communist parties’ internationalism. The idea that it might be appropriate to
admit the defeat of a proletarian socialist policy in the face of the
defeat of the western revolutionary movements of 1919-20 and of peasant
resistance in Russia, and carry out a controlled retreat to capitalism, was
literally unthinkable to Comintern.
Whether such a retreat was a possible option is doubtful;
but the inability of the communist parties to think it probably contributed to
the fact that the degeneration of the Soviet regime into open tyranny brought
the communist parties down with it. It also produced among the Trotskyists a
bizarre body of competing theological dogmas about the Stalinist regime that
provided ideology for the Trotskyists’ endless splits.
The second aspect was a political retreat to the idea of a
series of discrete national revolutions. This was a retreat in the first place
because, as we saw in the fifth article, Lenin’s and Zinoviev’s policy of dual
defeatism supposed a struggle by an organised international movement to bring
down the belligerent states simultaneously.
It was a retreat secondly because it was quite clear to the
Russian leadership that the proletariat could not hope to hold power in Russia
for long - how long was uncertain - unless the western workers’ movement came
to their aid. October 1917 was thus a gamble on the German revolution. By
January 1918 this gamble had failed; it was only gradually that the possibility
of ‘hanging on and waiting for the Germans’ for a year or two was transmuted
into the idea of a prolonged period of isolation of the Soviet regime, and from
there in turn into ‘socialism in one country’.
In the third place, Comintern at the outset and down to 1921
expected a generalised European civil war in the short term, and in the civil
war and the 1920 invasion of Poland the Russian CP had been willing to ride
roughshod over national self-determination to carry the arms of the Red Army to
the borders of the former tsarist empire. In 1920 they hoped to carry them to
the eastern border of Germany, ready to intervene if the German communists
could provide the casus belli.1 Only military defeat held them back here (and in Finland and the
Baltic).
By 1921 this policy was effectively over. This fact was
signalled both by the retreat in Russia represented by the New Economic Policy,
and the turn to the struggle to ‘win the masses’ urged on the communist parties
at the 3rd Congress.
The shift into a policy of separate national revolutions -
even if these might turn out to be close together in time - carried with it an increased
emphasis on copying the Russian Revolution. The struggle for soviets;
intervention in the bourgeois parliaments; the struggle to win the trade
unions; the worker-farmer alliance; ‘Bolshevising’ the organisational norms of
communist parties; the united front; the workers’ government; the policy of the
right of the self-determination of nations; and what became ‘transitional
demands’. All these were justified primarily on the basis that they were
validated by the victory of the Russian Revolution, and only secondarily (and
sketchily) on more general, theoretical grounds. There was only one example of
a successful revolution - Russia - and socialists everywhere had to learn from
it.
If it were not for the immediate context of defeats in
Hungary, Germany and Italy, and the general belief that revolutionary crisis
and civil war were on the agenda in the immediate term in the west, this claim
would have been utterly extraordinary. Russia was a country in which the
proletariat was a small minority. Communications in the Russian countryside
were highly patchy, and in many areas the technology in use in agriculture and
the density of market towns was more comparable to the west European 12th
century than to the 16th (let alone the early 20th).
Trade unions and political parties alike had existed in
Russia before the revolution illegally and on a small scale. The German
Reichstag had limited powers, but looked more or less like a French or
Italian chamber of deputies; the Russian duma was far more limited. There was
little reason to suppose that the tactics that had brought down the fragile and
not very democratic regime of the 1917 provisional governments and the
shallowly rooted Cadet, Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties would
work on the far more deeply entrenched and experienced political parties of
western Europe, the US or even Latin America.
Imitating the Russians was not utterly disastrous, as
attempts to imitate the Maoists in more developed countries were in the 1960s
and 1970s. This is attributable to the fact that most of what the
Russians endeavoured to teach the Comintern in 1920-23 was in fact orthodox
Kautskyism, which the Russians had learned from the German SPD. But there were
exceptions. The worker-peasant alliance was utterly meaningless in the politics
of the western communist parties before 1940, and after 1945 was a force for
conservatism, as the European bourgeoisies turned to subsidising agriculture.
The ‘Bolshevisation’ of the communist parties, and the
savage polemics against Kautsky and others over “classless democracy”, which
became part of the common inheritance of ‘official communism’, Maoism and Trotskyism,
deeply deformed these movements. In the end, the Bonapartist-centralised
dictatorship of the party bureaucracy produced kleptocrats in the USSR and the
countries that copied it. In the western communist parties and the trade unions
associated with them, it produced ordinary labour bureaucrats with more power
to quash dissent than the old socialist bureaucracy had had (a feature
gratefully copied by the social democratic right). In the Trotskyist and Maoist
groups, it produced petty patriarchs and tinpot dictators whose interests in
holding onto their jobs and petty power were an effective obstacle to unity. It
thus turned out to be in the interests of … the capitalist class.
Moreover, casting out “the renegade Kautsky” cut off the
communists from the western European roots of their politics. Lenin and his
co-thinkers’ transmission of the inheritance of the Second International into
Russian politics became Lenin’s unique genius on the party question, feeding
into the cult of the personality of Lenin (and its successors …). Perfectly
ordinary western socialist political divisions, pre-existing the split in the
Second International, had to be cast in Russian terms. Communists began to
speak a language alien to their broader audiences, the language that has
descended into today’s Trot-speak.
Trotsky described Comintern as the “political general staff
of the world revolution”, and the phrase to some extent stuck.2
The idea of a ‘general staff’ was, in fact, taken from the
German imperial armed forces: the Prussian Grosser Generalstab had been
the first such institution, and the imperial version had conducted the
strategic planning that was put into effect in 1914. It carried with it a very
centralised concept of command: the imperial general staff to a considerable
extent micro-managed the particular fronts. In the latter part of World War I
the imperial general staff headed by Hindeburg and Ludendorff became the
effective government of Germany.
This background in Prussian military thought carried with it
a willingness in Comintern’s leadership to micro-manage the national parties.
At the very beginning of the Comintern, the Russians pressed their closest
German co-thinkers for an early split with the Independent Social Democratic
Party (USPD), a decision the German leaders regretted. The ECCI had no
hesitation in issuing instructions to the French Communist Party (PCF) about,
for example, the composition of its leadership and the reorganisation of its
Seine federation, and pressed the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1923 to make
military preparations for an insurrection.3
So far this point is familiar from the Eurocommunists’ and
their followers’ attacks on Comintern and on Trotskyism. It is important,
however, to be clear that the “general staff of world revolution” was not
simply ‘wrong’.
If it had been the case that Europe was on the verge
of generalised civil war, the creation of a European-wide military command
structure capable of giving orders to the national movements would have been
entirely justified. In war that is to go beyond guerrilla harassment of the
enemy to take and hold territory, it is necessary to have a centralised
command. It is also sometimes necessary for units to sacrifice themselves in
diversionary attacks that will enable victory elsewhere (or, for that matter,
in attacks that will lead to breakthroughs by attrition).
It might thus have been justified to wager the KPD on
the possibility that a breakthrough in Germany would bring down the whole
European state system. Trotsky certainly went on thinking so for the rest of
his life, blaming the KPD leadership for fumbling the crises of 1923.
There were two underlying problems. The first is that “war
is the continuation of politics by other means” (Clausewitz). War is not
reducible to politics, nor politics to war. Creating a top-down military
command structure in the Russian Communist Party, Comintern and the other
communist parties tended to eliminate or subordinate the local and sectoral
mediations that link a workers’ party to its broader working class constituency
and feed back on the centre the political ideas and mood current in this
constituency. It thus reduced both the communist parties’ and the Comintern’s
ability to form the political judgments that necessarily underlie
decisions for military action.
Second, the communists were nowhere near having political
majority support in Europe or even in Germany. The task of the communists once
the revolutionary wave of 1919-20 had ebbed was - as Comintern recognised at
the 3rd and 4th Congresses - to win a political majority. It was not to launch
a civil war. A “general staff of world revolution” was therefore inappropriate.
The military-centralist character of Comintern had the
practical effect of making the leaderships of the communist parties dependent
on the Comintern centre in Moscow. This took the form of material dependence in
the case of the small communist parties - such as the CPGB - which received
subsidies from Moscow, and equally in those parties that were illegal, so that
the party leadership was located in Moscow.
But it was equally present in the stronger communist parties
such as the KPD and PCF. The ‘democratic centralist’ character of Comintern -
within the terms of the 1920-21 idea of ‘democratic centralism’ - had the
effect that the leaders of these parties were answerable to and removable by
the Comintern centre. They could not both be in this position and
be answerable to and removable by their own membership.
The problem was accentuated by the fact that the relation to
the Comintern centre in Moscow was necessarily clandestine. In the first place,
if the KPD (or the CPGB) openly took orders from Moscow, prosecution
could follow, all the more if (as in Germany in 1923) the orders were to
prepare for and launch an insurrection. Second, because it was based in
Moscow, the Comintern centre lacked the sort of legitimacy that had been
possessed by the general council of the First International or by the
congresses of the Second. It was all too easy to accuse it of being merely an
instrument of the Russian state.
Clandestinity meant secrecy, and secrecy meant that the
members had even less chance of holding the leaders to account than would have
been the case if there had been open and transparent subordination of the
leaderships of the communist parties to the international centre. There was no
chance, in this regime, of the western communist parties resisting the
development of open bureaucratic tyranny in the USSR and the accompanying
degeneration of Comintern.
In 1919-20 there was a West European Bureau of the
Comintern, based in Amsterdam. It turned out that the Left Communists had a majority,
and their split brought it to an end. The bureau was overlapped with and was
succeeded by an equally short-lived Western European Secretariat, based in
Berlin, involving (at least) Radek and Levi. A Central European Secretariat was
slightly more long-lasting.
The short life of these organisations reflected the fact
that the military or Bonapartist character of the centralism of 1921 was
counterposed to them. Horizontal connections between neighbouring parties, and
sub-centres, would inevitably compromise the pure centralism of the
international. There were to be the national parties and the international
centre.
This structural form reinforced the idea of separate
national revolutions. Formal horizontal collaboration might identify concrete
common political features, or common tasks. The same would be true of
intermediary levels of organisation, such as European (or, by analogy, Latin
American, or Pan-African) conferences and leading committees. Within national
parties such intermediary structures are common, although bureaucratic
centralism tends to close them down or turn them into mere transmission belts
for the centre. Channelling everything through Moscow had the effect, in
contrast, that there could only be national tasks and global tasks - and global
tasks were defined by the view from Moscow.
This background character of Comintern helps to explain the
peculiar character of Trotsky’s decision in 1933 to denounce it as dead for the
purposes of world revolution and call for a new, Fourth, international. The
peculiarity of this decision is the fact that Trotsky denounced the Third
International on the basis of events in a single country (Germany).
The First International had been founded on the explicit basis
of the international tasks of the proletariat as a class; the Second, more
indefinitely, on the basis of the international common character of the
proletariat’s interests and struggles. The Third, at least formally, had been
founded on the failure of the Second in World War I. To denounce the Comintern
and call for a new international on the basis of a defeat in a single country
was therefore something quite new - even if the country, Germany, had been the
historical centre of the Second International and home to one of the strongest
communist parties.
Trotsky seems to have imagined that the Comintern would be
defined for ever by the disaster in Germany, as the Second International was
defined for ever by August 1914. The choice to support the existing states in
war did indeed turn out to be a permanent choice that defines Labourite and
socialist parties to this day.
But 1933 was not comparable to August 1914. By 1935 the
Comintern had abandoned the sectarian ‘third period’ politics that led to the
disaster of 1933 and turned to the people’s front policy.4 In spite of a brief return to the
‘third period’ in the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939-41, the people’s
front was to be the main strategic line of ‘official communism’ permanently
(and still is today). The ‘third period’ and its role in the disaster in
Germany has become a matter of interest to historians and Trotskyists.
The 1933 call for a Fourth International was therefore
plainly premature. It was only with the people’s front turn, as the communists
more and more plainly abandoned both working class political independence and
criticism of the social democrats, that the Trotskyists’ project began to win
broader support. Even then, the growth was limited: the ‘Fourth International’
founded in 1938 could account for about 7,500 organised militants worldwide.5
Part of the explanation for Trotsky’s premature call for the
Fourth International is that - as can be seen from his writings in the 1930s -
he had become fully convinced that Lenin was right and he was wrong between
1903 and 1917. He was therefore determined not to do anything that could
amount to conciliationism or postponing the necessary struggle to create a new
party and a new international.
There is, however, another and in some ways more fundamental
aspect. Trotsky’s conception both of the International Left Opposition (ILO),
formed in 1930, and of the projected Fourth International as a revival and
continuation of the Comintern of 1919-23. The documents of the first four
congresses of the Comintern were part of the ILO’s platform and of its
successor, the International Communist League.
This unavoidably meant that the ILO, ICL and ‘Fourth
International’ carried in their roots the ideas of a chain of national
revolutions (starting, now, perhaps somewhere other than in Russia) and of an
international whose tasks were mainly to create parties of the ‘Bolshevik type’
in every country. On the one hand, this meant that defeats and disasters in
single countries formed the real basis of the critique of the Comintern -
and of those, such as the Spanish POUM and French PSOP, with whom the
Trotskyists broke on the road to the ‘Fourth International’.
On the other, the idea of tasks of the international as
such in constructing international unity of the working class in action
had no strategic ground in the Trotskyists’ ideas. A tiny group, of course,
could do little practical along these lines. But the ‘Fourth International’ was
bound to appear as a micro-miniature Comintern with a leftist version of
Comintern strategy.
The ‘Fourth International’ also inherited from the Third the
utter centrality to its identity and programme of the defence of the Russian
Revolution and hence of the USSR in wars with capitalist states. In 1939-40
this position was to split it down the middle over the Russo-Finnish war and
the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, with Trotsky insisting that the
minority (in the US and elsewhere) should not have the right to express its
views in public. The minority took a third of the membership of the US
Socialist Workers Party, the largest group represented at the 1938 congress,
and half the ‘international executive committee’ elected at that congress.
The refusal to accept public factions in 1940 was in
contradiction with the Trotskyists’ own history. The Trotskyist movement had
originated in the 1920s as an illegal public faction of the Russian Communist
Party and the ILO launched in 1930 had been an illegal public faction of
Comintern. The Russian oppositions, indeed, had had as part of their core
politics a critique of bureaucratism, albeit one that was cautious and
imperfectly articulate.
Part of this critique survived in the culture Trotsky sought
to create in the ILO and ICL. The 1933 resolution, ‘The International Left
Opposition, its tasks and methods’, said that: “The foundation of party
democracy is timely and complete information, available to all members
of the organisation and covering all the important questions of their life and
struggle. Discipline can be built up only on a conscious assimilation of
the policies of the organisation by all its members and on confidence in the
leadership. Such confidence can be won only gradually, in the course of common
struggle and reciprocal influence …
“The frequent practical objections, based on the ‘loss of
time’ in abiding by democratic methods, amount to short-sighted opportunism.
The education and consolidation of the organisation is a most important task.
Neither time nor effort should be spared for its fulfilment. Moreover, party
democracy, as the only conceivable guarantee against unprincipled conflicts and
unmotivated splits, in the last analysis does not increase the overhead costs
of development, but reduces them. Only through constant and conscientious
adherence to the methods of democracy can the leadership undertake important
steps on its own responsibility in truly emergency cases without provoking
disorganisation or dissatisfaction.”6
These statements are a standing rebuke to the post-war
Trotskyists.
The aspirations of the 1933 resolution were at least partly
reflected in the conduct of the international secretariats of the ILO and ICL
and in Trotsky’s correspondence. The secretariats were willing to accept
partial splits and public fights in the sections, and Trotsky urged the
creation of horizontal relations between the sections (ie, that their debates
should be carried into the other sections) as well as vertical
section-secretariat relations.
However, Trotsky’s response to the 1939-40 minority that
rejected Soviet-defencism was bureaucratic centralist, and it drew on the idea
of splits as purging and proletarianising the movement that had been initiated
in the split in the Second International, as we saw in the sixth article in
this series (Weekly Worker April 27). Trotsky was assassinated in 1940.
His writings on the US 1939-40 split thus left, as his last legacy to the
post-war Trotskyists, bureaucratic centralism and the idea of the
‘proletarianising’ and ‘purging’ split.
In the world between the opening of the cold war in 1948,
and the beginning of the open political crisis of the USSR in the 1980s,
‘official communism’ appeared to be a strategic way forward for the
global working class, and apolitical trade unionism and social democratic
coalitionism appeared to be a strategic way forward for the working
class in the imperialist countries.
Although Comintern had been wound up in 1943, the ‘official
communists’ had a form of international, the Cominform: the CPSU had discovered
that a ‘consultative’ international secured freedom from accountability as
effectively as an open bureaucratic dictatorship and with fewer overhead costs.
This situation posed to the Trotskyists the question: what
was their international for? In 1953, they split between the ‘Pabloite’
advocates of a tactic of large-scale fraction work in the communist parties,
and their ‘anti-Pabloite’ opponents, who insisted on building parties
organisationally separate from the ‘official communists’ among the milieux of
the French socialists, British Bevanites and Rooseveltian Democrat trade
unionists.
The split was characterised by bureaucratic centralism on
both sides, as first the international executive committee expelled the
majority of the French section, and then the US SWP and British section
expelled minorities in their organisations that supported the ‘Pabloite’
international majority.
The minority formed an ‘international committee’, but turned
out to be unable to produce anything more than occasional liaison meetings
between the French, British and US full-timers. In due course the national
components went their separate ways, with the usual round of expulsions. Each
created an openly bureaucratic centralist ‘Trotintern’, or a formally ‘consultative’
‘Trotinform’, with its own party in the role of the CPSU.
This was the legacy of Comintern’s ‘chain of revolutions’
idea and the ‘leading role’ in Comintern of the ‘most advanced’ party, with the
American , British and French each imagining that they were the ‘most
advanced’.
The ‘Pabloites’ (after 1960, the Mandelites) did a little
better: they preserved the forms of an international organisation with
centre, leadership, international congresses and press, and a degree of
internal democracy in their organisation. In the early 1970s, they even began
to develop continental perspectives and centres and horizontal relations
between sections. But if you asked them what their international was for,
the only answer they could give was to be a “centre where the international
experiences of the mass movement and of the revolution are progressively
assimilated”.7
At the end of the day this is to say no more than the Fourth
International must exist because it must. Their international had become the
Mandelites’ sectarian shibboleth, which distinguished them from their
Trotskyist competitors in individual countries.
The insistence of the Mandelites that no-one could be a
Trotskyist without the Fourth International pressed the national groups (even
quite large ones such as the French Lutte Ouvrière, British Militant and
SWP) to create their own. The 1953 split and - all the more - the 1971 split
between the British and French anti-Pabloites had the effect of legitimising
multiple ‘internationals’ among Trotskyists. At this point we have arrived at
today’s world of Trotskyist sect ‘internationals’, although the full baroque
elaboration was not to arrive until the 1980s.
The ‘Trotinforms’ are, like the Cominform, just as much
creatures of bureaucratic centralism as Comintern and the ‘Fourth
International’ in its most centralist period. For example, the British SWP’s
International Socialist Tendency is not formally ‘democratic centralist’ (ie,
bureaucratic-centralist), but this ‘tendency’ can nonetheless expel the US
International Socialist Organization for … supporting a minority faction in
Greece.8
The need for an international is posed because the working
class has concrete, immediate, practical international tasks. These are tasks of
class solidarity - because the bourgeoisie uses national divisions in the
working class to defeat strikes, etc. They are also tasks of formulating an
independent class perspective on world affairs. These were the lessons of the
First International.
The need for an international is also posed because the
working class can only really understand its own strength and become conscious
as a class for itself as an international class. This was the lesson of the
symbolic role of the Second International.
In the third place, the need for an international is posed
because the working class cannot take power in a single country and wait for
the proletariat of other countries to come to its aid. This is the fundamental
lesson of the degeneration and collapse of Comintern and the eventual fall of
the ‘socialist countries’. It was a lesson that was not learned by the
Trotskyists.
The strategic task that this lesson poses for an
international is an internationally united struggle of the working class for
political power.
It should be apparent that the objective political
conditions do not yet exist for such a struggle. But they do exist for continental
united struggles for political power, which fight for continental unification:
a Communist Party of Europe, a Pan-African Communist Party, and so on. A
dynamic towards the continental unification of politics is already visible in
bourgeois politics, not just in Europe, and in the Latin American
‘Bolivarians’. It is even present in an utterly deformed and reactionary manner
in the islamist movement in the Middle East.
Comintern was not sterilised by the decision to split from
the social democrats. It was sterilised by bureaucratic centralism, the idea of
a chain of national revolutions and the Comintern as a fan club for the Russians.
Its failure was about the inability of Comintern to think of international
tasks except either as immediate civil war, which called for a general staff,
or making the national communist parties copy the Russians as the road to
victory in a single country.
The Trotskyists’ 1933 call for a new international was
premature. But it was not this premature split that turned their project into a
swarm of malignant international sects. Rather it was their too great faithfulness
to the ideas of the early Comintern, which committed them to the same
bureaucratic centralism and the same idea of a chain of national revolutions.
This in turn produced the ‘anti-Pabloite’ ‘Trotinterns’ and ‘Trotinforms’ on
the one hand, and the Mandelite empty form of an international without
political tasks on the other.
The struggle for an international is a present, concrete
task of communists. It is clear, however, that this struggle cannot be carried
on by creating yet another micro-‘international’. It has to be carried on by fighting,
on every occasion that allows, against bureaucratic centralism and the
nationalism that goes hand in hand with it, and for the concrete tasks
of an international: the global struggle for solidarity in the immediate class
struggle, for the symbolic unity of the working class as an international
class; and the continental struggle for working class political unification and
political power.
1. The speech by Lenin on Poland and article by Tukhachevsky
on the Red Army provide clear illustrations. See Al Richardson (ed) In
defence of the Russian Revolution book 4.
2. ‘Speech at the ceremonial meeting in the military academy
of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army devoted to the fourth anniversary of the
academy, December 7 1922’, www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1922-mil/ch15.htm.
3. For several items on France, see L Trotsky First five
years of the Communist International
www.marxists.org.uk/archive/trotsky/works/1924/ffyci-2/index.htm. On Germany, L
Trotsky The Third International after Lenin www.marxists.org.uk/archive/trotsky/works/1928-3rd/ti04.htm#b3.
Jones, ‘German communist history’ letter What Next No4,
www.whatnextjournal.co.uk, reports the claim of KPD leader Brandler that
detailed timetables for a German insurrection were settled in Moscow, and
confirms it from work in Russian archives published by historians in the 1990s.
4. Discussion in Weekly Worker March 31 2005.
On the historical details of the turn, Haslam Historical Journal Vol 22,
pp673-691 is illuminating.
5. Minutes of the founding congress, in Documents of the
Fourth International (1973), p289. The figures are probably an
underestimate, since the list shows several organisations for which the
secretariat did not have figures. However, it is most unlikely that the real
numbers were much above 15,000 worldwide.
6. Documents of the Fourth International p29.
7. Mandel in ‘Ten theses’ (1951) in Towards a history of
the Fourth International Vol 4, part 4; variant forms have been consistently
repeated by the Mandelites down to the present day.
8. Weekly
Worker October 9
2003.
First published in Weekly Worker