3 December, 2025 - Author: Rayner Lysaght
Abridged from a pamphlet, “The First Three Socialist Internationals”, published in 1989. Though idiosyncratic in its slant on some points, this tells the story of the three large-scale efforts so far to make socialism an organised international movement.
Helped by the Russian Liberals, the Tsar did manage to crush the [Russian] Revolution of 1905 with the minimum concession of a Parliament (Duma) with limited powers and elected on a limited franchise. The Austrian Government bought off its own radicalising workers with manhood suffrage. In the USA, the most radical trade union leaders formed the International Workers of the World (IWW) with the support of the SLP.
For the International, the Revolution was followed by intensification of existing tends. Though capitalist Europe did not move to repression immediately, it had done so by 1910. Unlike the IWMA after the Commune, the workers’ movement was now too strong for its world organisation to collapse. Rather, the Revisionist challenge to its politics intensified and was now matched on the Left by revolutionaries, mainly in Eastern Europe, seeking to develop these politics so that the working class could take State power and begin to institute Socialism. In the centre Bebel, Kautsky and their equivalents led a majority into trying to reconcile two increasingly opposite trends. This position came to give its name, Centrism, to the practice of Social Democratic Party bureaucracy.
Revisionism
At first, Revisionism made the advance. In 1906, Auer and the German Social Democratic Party Executive met the trade union leaders and agreed not to call for any future political strike. The following year, at the International’s seventh Congress in Stuttgart, the Executive’s Report included a proposal for it to accept colonialism. The Socialist Party of America and the Labour Parties of Australia and South Africa went further, moving to bar non-white immigration, particularly to their countries. The International was still principled enough to reject these proposals.
However, it could not move decisively the other way. The problems created by colonialism were not faced. Moreover, though there was support for an attack by Luxemburg’s friend and political ally, Klara Zetkin (1857-1932), on the Austrian compromise that fell short of women’s suffrage, proposals for an international campaign for universal suffrage in all the States were shelved.
The most significant debate at Stuttgart concerned the prevention of war. From 1905, each frightened State Government had been trying to consolidate support by calling for national unity against others. Now the International debated four motions, three from tendencies in the French section. The most radical was that debated by Gustave Hervé (1871-1944): influenced by Syndicalism, it called for a general strike in the participating countries. It had the sympathy of Connolly, in America, who tended to Syndicalism, but was attacked not only by the German trade unionists but by Lenin and others of the Revolutionary Left as being impossible and, hence, diversionary. Jules Guesde’s proposal argued that militarism was just another aspect of capitalism and thus not to be opposed in a single campaign. Jaurès and the old Blanquist Edouard Vaillant (1840-1915) called for action against war but recognised a right of national defence. Bebel was close to this position but stressed both the central role of capitalism and went further in distinguishing between offensive and defensive war. In the end, a compromise was passed unanimously. It included two paragraphs drafted by the Leftists Lenin, Luxemburg, and the Russian Centrist Menshevik, Yuli Martov (1873-1923). They provided the theoretical core for the movement from which the Communist International would arise:
“If a war threatens to break out, it is a duty of the working-class in the countries affected and a duty for their Parliamentary representatives, with the aid of the International Bureau as an active and co-ordinating power, to make every effort to prevent war by all means which vary naturally according to the intensity of the class struggle and to the political situation in general.
“Should war break out nonetheless, it is their duty to intervene in order to bring it promptly to an end, and with all their strength to make use of the economic and political crisis created by the war to stir up the deepest strata of the people and precipitate the fall of capitalist domination.”
These guidelines for future action were vague enough but they did represent a position from which Socialists could advance their cause even in the teeth of a crisis such as that which would eventually smash their International.
In the meantime, this continued to grow. Australia had more Labour Governments. The German Social Democrats became the largest single party in the Reichstag. The Socialist Party of America had a member elected to Congress. Yet, increasingly, this organisational advance was accompanied by political fudges by the centre to keep the movement united.
The International’s last two Congresses, Copenhagen (1910) and Basle (1912), showed little political advance and were mainly irrelevant to the debates being conducted within the International’s Left wing. The projected Vienna Congress, which the outbreak of the 1914 War aborted, was expected to move to expel the most vital political part of this wing, Lenin’s Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (Bolshevik). Few of the old guard took part in this new left. In 1908 Kautsky tried to relate the day-to-day struggle to the ultimate revolution. He succeeded less in clarifying the probabilities than in annoying his Party’s leadership. Under pressure from it, he rewrote the offending sections, making the work more moderate. Plekhanov still blocked with Lenin on the need to maintain a tightly-disciplined and conscious working-class political party in Russia: he opposed him on nearly everything else. In the USA, de Leon had failed to win control of the IWW. His party became an isolated sect.
Weakness
The big weakness of the Left was that its varying answers to the questions it faced kept it divided against itself, weakening what was already numerically small compared to the Centre and the Right. Its members were ready to block with some who can be seen now as its political opponents to defeat other Leftists. By 1910, after five years of repression, the Bolsheviks within Russia itself numbered less than fifty. Lenin blocked with the Right Centrist Plekhanov against the Left Centrist Martov and against Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879-1940), who tried to act as honest broker in Russian Social Democracy between the Bolsheviks and the more Right-wing Mensheviks. Trotsky related better to Kautsky than to Luxemburg and Lenin himself could not understand Luxemburg’s opposition to Kautsky. For her part, she was not too upset when it looked as if Lenin and Bolsheviks would be expelled from the International.
Of all the Left, history would prove Lenin the greatest. His position as citizen of the most oppressive State in Europe made him less ready than his comrades in countries of the West to compromise on the need for revolution. However, he insisted, against the Mensheviks, that this revolution would have to be led by the workers and small farmers who would provide the revolutionary government, rather than by the bourgeoisie. It required an International of tight homogeneous revolutionary parties to lead the workers; though Lenin did not yet realise this, such parties would be as different from German Social Democracy as that was to Britain’s Independent Labour Party. Such parties would be firmly dialectically materialist; the “private” nature of religion [in society] asserted by Marx and Engels and used by Centrists and Revisionists as a party norm could not be maintained as the latter.
Trotsky and to a certain extent Luxemburg recognised that the revolutionary Government [in Russia] would have to move against the capitalists immediately on a social and economic as well as a political front: the strategy of Permanent Revolution.
On the other hand, Lenin recognised well the issue of national self-determination. Marx and Engels had seen this according to three overall principles for recognising the validity of a national claim: the extent of its popular support; its helpfulness to progressive movements in Western Europe; and, not least, its weakening effect on the Russian Empire. Lenin and Luxemburg went beyond this to develop more general theories. Luxemburg’s view was coloured by her experience in Poland, where the 1905 Rising had not stimulated nationalism. She rationalised this by referring to the growing interdependence of world industry and trade which made real national economic independence a mirage. In some cases — such as the Balkan States’ independence from Turkey — national freedom might help social and economic development, but in general the most a nation could expect was autonomy. Against this, Lenin insisted on the political nature of national self-determination. Its denial blocked the way to Socialism for the proletariat of both oppressed and oppressor nations. It encouraged the first to concentrate support on movements led by its national bourgeoisie (as in Ireland when Labour left the leadership of the national struggle after 1916). Even more certainly, for the second, it offered bribes from the product of the exploited nation and developed in it habits of racism and chauvinism.
A third disagreement between Lenin and Luxemburg was their concept of imperialism. Lenin saw it as centred in the export of capital, Luxemburg in the export of surplus commodities. In practice, they did not argue about it.
The International grew and, despite criticism from the Left, so did its bureaucracy, centrism and revisionism. Then, in July 1914 on the eve of its Jubilee Congress, the latest Imperialist war scare became a reality. The International could not react. First Austrian Social Democracy voted its Government war credits, then the extreme right wing of Russian Social Democracy (including Plekhanov) and then, most devastatingly, the German SocialDemocrats, followed by the French (including Guesde and Vaillant. and with Hervé’s support) and most of the British. Most of these found democratic excuses for their actions. The Austrians and the Russians recalled Marx’s fears of Tsarist Russia. The French insisted on their superior democratic rights (they had maintained manhood suffrage since 1881) compared to Prussia. The British cited Germany’s breach of Belgian neutrality. Only the Russian war effort could not be masked as democratic. None considered their own States’ colonies and oppressed nations. Revisionism had beaten both Centrism and the Left. The Second International had ended.
It reappeared after the War, after a series of conferences held by those who could not bring themselves to accept the new Russian Workers’ State, in 1923, organised on such a basis it was completely reformist and, in Lenin’s view, by its relationship to its affiliates’ national States, bourgeois. It liquidated itself again with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939; this time it was revived only in 1951.
The Socialist vanguard reappeared as the Third International demanded by Lenin when he heard of the disintegration of the Second. For most of the subsequent war he was alone in his demand. Delegates of his Party attended Congresses of anti-War Socialists in neutral Switzerland at Zimmerwald in 1915 and at Kienthal in 1916. At these, their calls for a purged International were opposed by those who wanted to make it easy for the pro-war Socialists (social-chauvinists) to reunite them. Lenin isolated the Bolsheviks and their allies further by insisting on Socialists having a duty to turn their imperialist war into civil class war, rather than just calling for peace.
Then, in March 1917, the workers of Russia overthrew the Tsar. The country’s bourgeoisie began a struggle to assert its claim to State power. Against this Lenin developed his views to accept Trotsky’s concept of Permanent Revolution and a programme, less than Socialist, but on which the workers could take State power. Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks. In November they led the workers to establish the world’s first countrywide Workers’ State.
Early
Despite Lenin’s early call, it was not until the First World War had ended in November 1918 (and not until a month after a Congress at Berne had started the process of exhuming the Second International) that, in May 1919, what had now become the Communist Party of Russia convoked the founding Congress of the Third, or Communist, International (Comintern).
Two points must be understood about the new International. In one important way it was very different from its predecessors. For the first time, more than two Asian countries were represented in a Socialist International. Besides a Japanese Communist Party there were formed, either in time for the founding Congress or in the next four years, the Communist Parties of China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Persia (Iran) and Turkey. As yet these were small, yet they made the Third International more truly international than the first two and were a pledge that, unlike the Second, it would not hesitate to oppose colonialism.
But how would colonialism be opposed? How indeed would capitalism be fought. These questions were set by the nature of the International’s non-Russian sections. Although it had been founded by revolutionaries, it was not composed of revolutionary parties. The French Socialist Party had been among the most revisionist before the war. It had been among the firmest in supporting its bourgeois war effort; now, it was equally notable in that the majority of its conference delegates voted to affiliate with the Comintern. The Parti Communiste Français being based on this internal majority, its real political change was doubtful.
A more subtle confusion was in the position of Socialist Feminists like Luxemburg’s old ally Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952). Both had opposed the War; Kollontai as the world’s first woman Commissar had decreed for women’s rights beyond the expectations of the Second International. Whether from age or demoralisation, neither would fight to maintain these standards later. On the other hand, Rosa Luxemburg had doubted the need to found the Comintern though she was murdered before its first Congress.
Friedrich (Fritz) Adler (1879-1960), leader of Austria’s Anti-War Socialists and killer of that country’s War Minister, wavered between Second and Third International, tried to build a Centrist (Two-and-a Half) International in 1921, but joined the resurrected Second International in 1923.
Although the founding of the Comintern was a major move towards a genuine revolutionary World Party of Socialism, its simple existence could not guarantee such a Party. It could be produced only as a result of a period of revolutionary struggle and sympathetic but firm guidance from the best elements among the Russian Communists.
Certainly, the years after 1918, there were plenty of revolutions. The trouble was that, with the considerable exception of the Russians’ struggle against counter-revolution, they were all defeats. Germany and Hungary in 1919, Italy in 1920, Germany again in 1921 all failed to gain for the workers state power. Save in Hungary, all were defeated by the weakness and treachery of the Revisionists.
The Third Congress the following year passed a set of Guiding Principles for the Communist Parties in their work which, though regarded by Lenin as based too much on the Russian experience, included, even then, useful advice.
Principles
The International agreed to Lenin’s Guiding Principles on the National and Colonial Question, which directed co-operation between — but not amalgamation of — Communist and Revolutionary National bourgeois parties in oppressed States. It also passed proposals for joint action on a principled basis between Communist and other non-revolutionary parties of the working-class where, as in France and Germany, the Communists organised between a quarter and a third of the State’s workers. This was the strategy of the United Front.
Yet the Communist Parties remained weak and under pressure from a reviving bourgeoisie. This was most aggressive and successful in Italy, with the Fascist takeover of 1922. (The leader of this, Benito Mussolini, 1883-1945 was, like Guesde and Hervé in France, a former Left Socialist turned Social Chauvinist). The non-Russian Communists remained dependent on Russia and were thus open to infection by a new form of bureaucratic degeneration, one that occurred within the Russian Workers’ State as it developed.
• Note from the editor: Some readers have asked what we mean by “idiosyncratic in its slant on some points”. I have in mind some of Lysaght’s passing comments as, for example, in the last instalment on Karl Kautsky’s book on the agrarian question. Neither Workers’ Liberty nor Lysaght’s group (now called Socialist Democracy, in Ireland) have “lines” on such questions, but I will write some notes for the online version of these articles.
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