Communist International

The **Communist International** (**Comintern**), known also as the **Third International**, is an international organization that advocates for world communism. The Comintern resolved at its Second Congress to "struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state". The Comintern had been preceded by the 1916 dissolution of the Second International.

## Organizational history

### Failure of the Second International

While the differences had been evident for decades, the Great War proved the issue that finally divided the revolutionary and reformist wings of the workers' movement. The socialist movement had been historically anti-militarist and internationalist and therefore opposed workers serving as cannon fodder for the bourgeois governments at war, this was especially true since the Triple Alliance comprised two empires while the Triple Entente gathered France and Britain into an alliance with Russia. Karl Marx's *Communist Manifesto* had stated that "the working class has no country" and exclaimed, "Proletarians of all countries, unite!". Massive majorities voted in favor of resolutions for the Second International to call upon the international working class to resist war if it were declared.

Nevertheless, within hours of the declarations of war almost all the socialist parties of the combatant states announced their support for the war. The only exceptions were the socialist parties of the Balkans and the British Labour Party. To Vladimir Lenin's surprise, even the Social Democratic Party of Germany voted in favor of war credits. The assassination of French Socialist Jean Jaurès on 31 July 1914 killed the last hope of peace by removing one of the few leaders who possessed enough influence on the international socialist movement to prevent it from segmenting itself along national lines and supporting governments of national unity.

Socialist parties in neutral countries mostly supported neutrality rather than total opposition to the war. On the other hand, during the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference Lenin organized opposition to the imperialist war into a movement that became known as the Zimmerwald Left and published the pamphlet *Socialism and War* in which he called all socialists who collaborated with their national governments social-chauvinists, i.e. socialists in word, but chauvinists indeed. The Zimmerwald Left produced no practical advice for how to initiate a socialist revolt.

The International divided into a revolutionary left and a reformist right, with a center group wavering between those poles. Lenin condemned much of the center as social pacifists for several reasons, including their voting for war credits despite opposing the war. Lenin's term social pacifist aimed in particular at Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Independent Labour Party in Britain, who opposed the war on grounds of pacifism, but did not actively resist it.

Discredited by its passivity towards world events, the Second International dissolved in the middle of the war in 1916. In 1917, Lenin published the *April Theses* which openly supported revolutionary defeatism, i.e. the Bolsheviks pronounced themselves in favor of the defeat of Russia which would permit them to move directly to the stage of a revolutionary insurrection.

### Impact of the Russian Revolution

The victory of the Russian Communist Party in the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 was felt throughout the world and an alternative path to power to parliamentary politics was demonstrated. With much of Europe on the verge of economic and political collapse in the aftermath of the carnage of World War I, revolutionary sentiments were widespread. The Russian Bolsheviks headed by Lenin believed that unless socialist revolution swept Europe, they would be crushed by the military might of world capitalism just as the Paris Commune had been crushed by force of arms in 1871. The Bolsheviks believed that this required a new international to foment revolution in Europe and around the world.

### Founding Congress

The Comintern was founded at a Congress held in Moscow on 2–6 March 1919 against the backdrop of the Russian Civil War. There were 52 delegates present from 34 parties. They decided to form an Executive Committee with representatives of the most important sections and that other parties joining the International would have their own representatives. The Congress decided that the Executive Committee would elect a five-member bureau to run the daily affairs of the International. However, such a bureau was not formed and Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Christian Rakovsky later delegated the task of managing the International to Grigory Zinoviev as the Chairman of the Executive. Zinoviev was assisted by Angelica Balabanoff, acting as the secretary of the International, Victor L. Kibaltchitch and Vladmir Ossipovich Mazin. Lenin, Trotsky, and Alexandra Kollontai presented material. The main topic of discussion was the difference between bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the situation in Germany was also discussed.

The following parties and movements were invited to the Founding Congress:

* Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
* Communist Party of Germany
* Communist Party of German Austria
* Hungarian Communist Workers' Party (in power in Béla Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic)
* Communist Party of Finland
* Polish Communist Workers’ Party
* Communist Party of Estonia
* Communist Party of Latvia
* Communist Party of Lithuania
* Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Byelorussia
* Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (Ukrainian section of Russian Communist Party)
* The revolutionary elements of the Czech social democracy
* Social Democratic and Labour Party of Bulgaria (*Tesnyatsi*)
* Socialist Party of Romania
* Left-wing of the Serbian Social Democratic Party
* Social Democratic Left Party of Sweden
* The Norwegian Labour Party
* For Denmark, the Klassekampen group
* Communist Party of the Netherlands
* Revolutionary elements of the Belgian Labour Party (who would create the Communist Party of Belgium in 1921)
* Groups and organizations within the French socialist and syndicalist movements
* Left-wing within the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland
* Italian Socialist Party
* Revolutionary elements of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party
* Revolutionary elements of the Portuguese Socialist Party
* British socialist parties (particularly the current represented by John Maclean)
* Socialist Labour Party (United Kingdom)
* Industrial Workers of the World (United Kingdom)
* Revolutionary elements of the workers' organizations of Ireland
* Revolutionary elements among the Shop stewards (United Kingdom)
* Socialist Labor Party (United States)
* Left elements of the Socialist Party of America (the tendency represented by the Socialist Propaganda League of America)
* Industrial Workers of the World (United States)
* Industrial Workers of the World (Australia)
* Workers' International Industrial Union (United States)
* The Socialist groups of Tokyo and Yokohama (Japan, represented by Sen Katayama)
* Communist Party of the Philippines
* Socialist Youth International (represented by Willi Münzenberg)

Of these, the following attended (see list of delegates of the 1st Comintern Congress): the communist parties of Russia, Germany, German Austria, Hungary, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Byelorussia, Estonia, Armenia, the Volga German region; the Swedish Social Democratic Left Party (the opposition), Balkan Revolutionary People's of Russia; Zimmerwald Left Wing of France; the Czech, Bulgarian, Yugoslav, British, French and Swiss Communist Groups; the Dutch Social-Democratic Group; Socialist Propaganda League and the Socialist Labor Party of America; Socialist Workers' Party of China; Korean Workers' Union, Turkestan, Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijanian and Persian Sections of the Central Bureau of the Eastern People's and the Zimmerwald Commission.

Zinoviev served as the first Chairman of the Comintern's Executive Committee from 1919 to 1926, but its dominant figure until his death in January 1924 was Lenin, whose strategy for revolution had been laid out in *What Is to Be Done?* (1902). The central policy of the Comintern under Lenin's leadership was that Communist parties should be established across the world to aid the international proletarian revolution. The parties also shared his principle of democratic centralism (freedom of discussion, unity of action), namely that parties would make decisions democratically, but uphold in a disciplined fashion whatever decision was made. In this period, the Comintern was promoted as the general staff of the world revolution.