Vol. 72/No. 7      February 18, 2008

BY JACK BARNES  
What I want to focus on here is the Comintern’s integrated view of the world revolution. The Comintern for the first time incorporated two new elements decisive to the revolutionary struggle for workers and farmers governments and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the twentieth century.

First, the victory and consolidation of the Russian Soviet republic fundamentally changed the relationship of class forces in world politics. The Comintern recognized that mobilizing the international working class and its allies to defend this historic revolutionary conquest against imperialism was an integral part of extending the socialist revolution worldwide. “The struggle for Soviet Russia has become merged with the struggle against world capitalism,” the manifesto of the second Comintern congress explained in 1920. “The question of Soviet Russia has become the touchstone by which all the organizations of the working class are tested.”

That 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.”

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.” 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.”

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.  
 
 
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