Marxist Studies for cadre education no. g. The First Four Congresses of the Communist International A class series given for comrades of the International Communist League (FI) War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International: The Birth of the Comintern (1919) The Second Congress (1920): Forging a Revolutionary International The Third Congress (1921): Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization The Fourth Congress (1922): The "Workers Government" and the Road to the German Revolution Spartacist Publishing Company August 2003 Box 1377, GPO US$4.00 • Cdn$5.25 New York, NY 10116 Mex$12 • €3.00 • £2.25 U.S.A. R12 • ¥400 • A$5.00 ®E~1087.M 3 Table of Contents page -Editorial Note, 12 August 2003 ............................................. 5 The First Four Congresses of the Communist International -War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International: The Birth of the Comintern (1919) by George Foster, 14June 1998 ............................. 7 -The Second Congress (1920): Forging a Revolutionary International by Steve Henderson, 19 July 1998 ......................................... 19 -Remarks on the National and Colonial Questions by Jim Robertson, 11 July 1998 .......................................... 36 -The Third Congress (1921): Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization by Reuben Samuels, 5 September 1998 ..................................... 38 -The Fourth Congress (1922): The "Workers Government" and the Road to the German Revolution by T. Marlow, 23 January 1999 ....................... 51 Appendices -Chronology of Events (1912-1924) ........................................... 68 -Reading List for Educationals on the Comintern ................................. 74 5 Editorial Note This volume of Marxist Studies contains the transcripts of four classes given in 1998-99 throughout the International Communist League (ICL) as mandated in a motion by the International Secretariat on 26 February 1998. The classes deal with each of the first four congresses of the Communist International and were given as part of ongoing party education. They cover only some of the major political disputes at the congresses and are not meant as an exhaustive study of the period, rather as guides for further study. Readers are encouraged to refer to the list of books and articles that formed the basis of these educationals and which has been appended at the end of this bulletin. For reference purposes, we have also included a general chronology of events of the period between the emergency congress of the Second Interna­ tional in November 1912 and Lenin's death in 1924. A key document voted at the Third Congress of the Comintern-Guidelines on the Organizational Structure oj Communist Parties, on the Methods and Con­ tent oj Their Work-has been published by the ICL in Prometheus Research Series Ko. 1 (August 1988) and represents the crystallization of Bolshevik practices which enabled them to make the October Revolution. The educational on the Fourth Congress was also part of ongoing internal discussion in the ICL over the Comintern's confused discussion of the "workers government" slogan and over the revolutionary situation in Germany in 1923. Continuing study and debate allowed us to arrive at a fuller evaluation of the German events which is contained in "Rearming Bolshevism: A Trotskyist Cri­ tique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern" in quadrilingual Spartacist (English edition No. 56, Spring 2001). Each transcript has been edited for publication purposes. -12 August 2003 War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International: The Birth of the Comintern (1919) by George Foster New York, 14 June 1998 This class series will attempt to take to heart com­ hell, World War I stood out in its grotesque bru­ rade Lenin's injunction in "Left. Wing" Communism: tality. WWI was fought mainly as a war of attrition, rather than simply hailing soviet power and the of trench warfare, of bankrupt strategies reflecting October Revolution, the real point is to study the the complete bankruptcy of bourgeois society. It experience of the Bolshevik Party in order to assim­ was a war in which the proletariat and even the ilate the lessons and international significance of scions of the bourgeoisie were cut down and slaugh­ October. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci tered in enormous numbers. For example, the observed that our capacity to understand the world­ Prussian Junker class was, at the end of the war, a and he was referring to class society in particular-is shadow of its former self. Likewise the war deci­ in direct proportion to our ability to intervene in it. mated the sons of the British ruling class. And as comrade Robertson recently observed, the To give you an example of the brutality of the lessons of the October Revolution and the Com­ situation, in 1916 there was a small salient of the munist International have for us Marxists a very German line projecting into the Entente lines in deep validity. They mark the high point of the work­ Belgium at a village called Ypres. The British gen­ ers movement, to be contrasted with the current val­ eral in the sector, Sir Douglas Haig, decided to ley in which we today fmd ourselves situated. This straighten out this little pocket disturbing the geo­ class will consider the First Congress of the Third metrical regularity of his front. Over the space of International which took place in March 1919, in the three or four days he lost something like 600,000 midst of a civil war in which the October Revolution men in this endeavor, which did not in any way alter was fighting for its very life. the sanguinary stalemate. The story of the First Congress is mainly the At the beginning of the war there was only one story of the struggle to forge a new revolutionary significant republic in continental Europe and that international following the ignominious collapse of was France. By the end of this war, the face of the socialist Second International on 4 August of Europe had changed. Three empires-tsarist Russia, 1914. It is above all the story of the struggle by the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary and the Hohen­ Lenin's Bolsheviks to turn the battle against the zollern empire of Germany-disappeared from the first imperialist war into a civil war to abolish the political map to be replaced by various republics. So capitalist system. it was a very big change. I highly recommend to Younger comrades in particular have real diffi­ comrades two books. One is Carl Schorske's book, culty grasping the enormous and traumatic impact German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, and the other of World War I on the bourgeois societies of the is a book by Richard Watt, a British chemist who time and on the proletariat. From the end of the wrote history in his spare time, called The Kings Franco-Prussian war [1870·1871] until the onset of Depart. the first imperialist war, a period of some 43 years The ignominious capitulation of the Second elapsed in Europe without a major war. Most of the International to the imperialist bourgeoisie during imperialist combatants who embarked on the First the first imperialist war marks the point at which World War assumed it would be very short. The the struggle for the Third International began and British bourgeoisie in particular was hoping that its it was a struggle from the onset taken up by the Bol­ rivals on the continent would mutually exhaust sheviks. To understand the Third International and each other in a bout of bloodletting and, indeed, Bolshevism, which went through its final forging in looked forward to the war. But it didn't turn out to its revolutionary struggle against the first imperial­ be a short war. ist war, some remarks are in order about the Third The war dragged on for over four years. Mil· International's predecessor, the Second Interna­ lions upon millions of proletarians were slaugh­ tional, about its origins and history and its collapse. tered in a war to re-divide the world amongst the Going back over that history one is struck by an various contending imperialists, a war to see who observation made by Jim Cannon about the early, would get how much loot and how much booty. To pre-communist socialist movement in the U.S. In quote General Sherman: "war is helL" But, if war is The First Ten Years of American Communism, Can- 7 8 non observed that it took the Bolsheviks and the perceptive of our comrades have never believed Communist International to clarify and settle a in the possibility of a peaceful revolution; they whole series of political and organizational ques­ have learned from history that violence is the tions that had bedeviled the movement-questions midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one .... Today we all know that the popu­ ranging from the counter position between direct lar socialist state can be erected only through trade-union action versus parliamentarism to, in the a violent overthrow and that it is our duty to case of the U.S., the black question. In a very real uphold consciousness of this among ever sense, Cannon's observation concerning the Amer­ broader layers of the people." ican socialists is more generally applicable to the -quoted in Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and Second International as a whole. That is, if you go the Socialist Revolution 1880·1938, p. 20 (Verso, back and you examine the history of the Second 1979) International, one gets a sense of participants who, This was the young Karl Kautsky, at the beginning in some sense, were sleepwalking. of his career as a Marxist. And by the way, both It took the experience of the Bolsheviks, who Kautsky and Bernstein, who were in a real sense the had to deal with a wide spectrum of issues and con­ legates of Marx and Engels, were won to Marxism ditions of work (such as the national question, through Engels' work Anti.Dilhring.