Printed below is an excerpt from Their Trotsky and Ours by Jack Barnes. A new edition of this article, which originally appeared in New International no. 1 in 1983, has just been published by Pathfinder Press in a book format, with an introduction by the author. The piece below appears in the chapter titled "Marxism, Bolshevism, and the Communist International." Copyright © 2002 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
BY JACK BARNESThat is more true than ever today, when this initial conquest of the world working class has been augmented by the establishment of workers states in China, Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Cuba, with more on the way in the Caribbean and Central America.
Second, the Comintern projected a course toward a truly world socialist revolution for the first time. Before then, the Marxist workers movement had considered socialist revolution to be a realistic perspective only in a relatively small number of industrialized countries, primarily in western Europe and North America. In large part, this had been an accurate reflection of the uneven development of capitalism and growth of the working class on a world scale in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Membership in the Second International was limited almost entirely to European and North American workers parties.
The international workers movement paid a big overhead for this limitation. The composition of the Second International made it harder to resist the growing cancer of racism and apologies for colonialism that wracked major components of it in those years. Lenin always combated this and told the truth about it both while in the Second International and afterwards.
The Comintern recognized that the Russian Revolution had ushered in a new period in the world revolution. It came to the conclusion--following a report by Lenin at its Second Congress and some vigorous debate and discussion--that even the most economically backward countries could "go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage." This was possible if soviet power based on mass organizations and delegated bodies of workers and peasants were established, if the working class exercised leadership in the struggle for national liberation, and if the Soviet government in Russia came to the assistance of such revolutionary regimes "with all the means at its disposal."2
No country in the world, the Comintern said, was doomed to inevitable and indefinite capitalist development with its attendant horrors. The victory of the Bolsheviks and its consequences had put the socialist revolution on the agenda, not just in the industrially advanced countries or a handful of the most developed colonial countries, but worldwide. It was possible to make the revolution--not guaranteed, not easy; in fact, very difficult. But it was possible. This could now be seen.
With that perspective in mind, the Comintern threw its energies into becoming a truly world communist organization. Proletarian Marxist parties could and must be built in every country.
Lenin pointed out in his opening speech to the second Comintern congress that this gathering "merits the title of a World Congress," because "we have here quite a number of representatives of the revolutionary movement in the colonial and backward countries."3 The statutes adopted by that congress proclaimed that the Comintern "breaks once and for all with the traditions of the Second International which, in reality recognized the existence only of people with white skin." It continues, "People of white, yellow, and black skin color--the toilers of the whole earth--are fraternally united in the ranks of the Communist International."4
The Comintern leaders never denied the difficulties involved in this perspective of building a world party and extending the world socialist revolution. But they had confidence in the working class, which had shown what it could accomplish in October 1917. That confidence has been borne out by the subsequent sixty years of this century, as the events in Central America and the Caribbean demonstrate. The Bolshevik-led workers and peasants of Russia had opened the epoch of the world socialist revolution against imperialism--our epoch.
In presenting this integrated view of the world socialist revolution, the Comintern recognized and analyzed both the differences and the interrelationship between the struggle of the toilers of the colonies and oppressed nations for liberation, and that of the proletariat and its allies in the economically advanced capitalist countries.
Unless workers and their organizations in the imperialist countries gave active and unconditional support to national liberation struggles, above all those in the nations oppressed by their own governments, then revolutionary parties could not be built in those imperialist countries. The young proletariat in the oppressed nations would be hindered in coming to the fore of anti-imperialist struggles, and the world revolution could not move forward. The Bolshevik leadership of the Comintern also recognized the necessity of forging the strongest possible alliance of the new Soviet state and the oppressed nations in the struggle against imperialism.
The Comintern leaders were convinced, as Lenin explained at the Third Congress in 1921, that "the movement of the majority of the population of the globe, initially directed towards national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and will...play a very important revolutionary part in the coming phase of the world revolution."5 That expectation has certainly been confirmed by the following decades of world history.
Jack Barnes has been national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party since 1972. He is also a contributing editor to New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory, and the author of many books, pamphlets, and articles.
An organizer of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and actions in defense of Black rights, Barnes joined the Young Socialist Alliance in 1960 and the Socialist Workers Party in 1961. In 1965 he was elected national chairperson of the Young Socialist Alliance and became the director of the SWP and YSA’s work in the growing movement against the Vietnam War. He has been a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party since 1963 and a national officer of the party since 1969. He has carried major responsibilities for the party’s international work for almost forty years.
Beginning in the mid-1970s Barnes led the political turn of the Socialist Workers Party toward opportunities to get the overwhelming majority of its members and leaders into the industrial working class and unions. From that base, party members have built the communist movement while actively engaged with fellow workers in efforts to transform the unions into revolutionary instruments of struggle that defend not only their own membership but the interests of workers and farmers worldwide. The 1978–91 record of this work is published in The Changing Face of U.S. Politics.
Since 1998 Barnes has led the campaign of the SWP and fraternal organizations internationally to build on those advances, responding to openings created by the toughening resistance and actions by vanguard layers of workers and farmers standing up to the bosses’ drive to increase profits on the backs of the producers. The opening of this political effort, and of the adjustments the party is making in its organizational forms among working people engaged in these struggles, is recorded in "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics," the first chapter of Capitalism’s World Disorder. The continuity of this campaign with the struggle for a proletarian party in our time is recorded in this volume, as well as in Cuba and the Coming American Revolution and the preface to the 2002 edition of The History of American Trotskyism, 1928–38.
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