The Soviet Union and the Comintern: Organizing the Dream of a Workers’ World

Marxist communism was an international movement from the moment Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, “Working people of all countries, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Before that, the Haitian, French and American Revolutions had all included a strain of internationalism.
This dream of a workers’ world built on smashing the capitalist institutions of borders and nation-states found its first organizational form in the International Workingmen’s Association, the “First International,” founded in London in 1864 with delegates from several European nations, who drafted Marx to write its program.

A fundamental split between communists and anarchists (in shorthand, Marx and Bakunin, the red and the black) led to Marxists forming the “Second International” (1889-1916), which floundered during World War I because most socialists abandoned internationalism and backed their own capitalist governments in that war.

The Bolsheviks, who not only opposed all capitalist armies in World War I but created a social revolution in the very midst of that war, revived the dream of a workers’ world by backing the “Third International,” the Comintern or Communist International (1919-1943), almost immediately after taking power in Russia, and while still fighting the capitalist expeditionary forces invading Russia to end the revolution.

Defying patriotism, birthing internationalism
The Comintern defied bosses’ patriotism everywhere, condemned the betrayal of internationalism by the Social Democratic parties of the Second International, and called on workers to fight for their class, not their country. It was an organization of communist parties aligned with the Soviet revolution. They planned to take power as the Bolsheviks had in as many regions as possible, unified by the same political thinking and in a single disciplined alliance of all the world’s communist parties.

Unlike the First and Second Internationals, the Comintern had a center and a foundation in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Soviet Union for short), the first workers’ state. The Soviet Union was NOT a “nation” on the bourgeois model, but a union of many socialist republics, regardless of nationality, formed from the huge polyglot territory that had been Tsarist Russia. The very name of the USSR, refused any national name or identity, and implicitly was confined to no one region. It was an indefinitely expanding collection of states where communist workers took power, in principle extending to the whole world.

Because the USSR’s workers’ state existed and defied all efforts to overthrow it, the Comintern gave a newly powerful organizational form to Marx’s dream that “Workers have no country; their country is the entire world.” The USSR was never Russian merely, but “Soviet”—a collective form of government by the working class which could be a model for communist organization of society anywhere in the world.

The Comintern was a major achievement of the Bolshevik Revolution. When one of the Comintern parties, the Chinese Communist Party, established another workers’ state in a second huge area of the world, the dream of a workers’ world looked closer than ever. But the Comintern was never revived, and today both of those gigantic workers’ states have reverted to capitalism with a vengeance. That story of tragic loss includes the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. It was a concession to the capitalist allies during World War II.  The communist parties agreed to suspend communist organizing for social revolution in the allied countries.

The failures and contradictions of the old movement
The Progressive Labor Party believes that a further organizational step needs to be taken—the abandoning of national or nation-state-based communist parties for a single international democratic-centralist party to which all revolutionary communists belong. If we want to smash all borders and the very idea of the nation-state, then our organizing weapon, our communist party, must from the get-go incorporate that principle and refuse to be confined by national borders in its organizing. The USSR and the Comintern contained this idea in principle, but nationalism as an ideology and a culture was too powerful within the communist movement for our comrades of that era, or of the era of the Chinese Revolution, to overcome.

Today the capitalists themselves have created a world more international in social production, distribution, and communication than it has ever been. A communist state or “Soviet” established throughout many regions of the world by revolutionary struggle is more than ever a possibility because of this “globalizing” development of the capitalist system. Capitalist classes still hang on to the nation-state, however, much more than international forms like the United Nations. The capitalists need the nation-state as the basis of their rule by armed force. It is their state monopoly of violence, which they use against workers and against competing capitalists.

It remains for us as communist workers  of every country, of the whole world, to organize ourselves based on a single “Soviet,” idea and to struggle in a single international revolutionary party for that further realization of the old dream of a workers’ world.

When our comrades of the future succeed, it may well be again, as the Bolshevik and Chinese comrades found, in the ruins left by another barbaric global war. War between nations is itself one of the worst – and inevitable -- consequences of the capitalist system. Part of the dream of a workers’ world, made so visible to us by the Bolshevik Revolution, is the end of the wars the capitalists’ system of nation-states has always brought with it.

One world, one party fighting directly for communism
The Second International abandoned internationalism under the stress of World War I., and the Comintern eventually did the same thing, in part under the stress of World War II. They capitulated to nationalism. How many more such wars, and such betrayals, can we bear? Worker-soldiers of ALL armies must be organized by revolutionaries belonging to a single world party, even during a war as the Bolsheviks and the Chinese comrades did in their national armies.

It will be those workers with guns in their hands who build a new and lasting communist international. When they do, they will remember the great step forward towards internationalism taken by the Bolshevik Revolution. We communists of today in the PLP salute the Comintern, and will work in a single unified international party to realize its noble dream.