ResoluteReader: Leon Trotsky - The First Five Years of the Communist International (Vol. I)

The setting up of the Communist Third International in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution was a conscious attempt to use the authority and experience of the Bolsheviks in Russia to spread and develop revolution and revolutionary organisation around the world. The leaders of the Russian Revolution, principly Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin had always made it clear that unless revolution spread, Russia's would be left isolated and die. The founding of the International in 1919 took place in a situation when revolution beyond Russia was real. Workers' soviets and revolutionary councils were a reality in countries like Germany, Hungary and many other places.

As one of the most authoritative figures of the revolution, Leon Trotsky's writings from this period, and specifically the writings, speeches and polemics that are part of this collection, are particularly important. They cover an intoxicating moment, when the Russian Revolution was a few years old and in the midst of Imperialist intervention, and when serious debates about revolutionary strategy are taking place. As part of the debates at successive conferences of the Commintern, Trotsky intervenes sharply in the internal discussions of three countries in particular - France, Italy and Germany. In the former there is a real debate about the need to break with the Reformist, opportunist, leaders of social democracy.

In France's case Trotsky writes two letters to leading figures using his personal connections to urge them to come over to the Communist cause. But, the main thrust of his polemic is to challenge the best elements of the working class movement - the anarcho syndicalists - on the need to break with their non-political practices. It is a sharp discussion that challenges the genuine revolutionaries to break with their past, and join the emerging Communist movement in France. It is also urgent, and the speeches drip with the pressure of events. Similar discussions, in slightly different contexts, take place with German and Italian comrades. Both of whom are grappling with the experience of Reformists in their ranks - the sell outs of 1914 and those in their ranks who are more concerned with revolutionary purity over and above the messy business of engaging in struggle.

In Italy in 1920 the revolutionary movement was inspired by the radical pronouncements of the Socialist Party, but these opportunists immediately backtracked when faced with a powerful working class movement leading strikes and occupying workplaces. In Germany similar groups of socialists had diverted the revolution of 1919 into Parliamentary channels, after murdering its best leaders. Some of the discussions at the meetings of the Communist International grapple with the nature of Reformism - a force that had little representation in Russia in 1917, but was a significant force in central and Western Europe based on the history of the Second International. Trostky says:

This epoch of proletarian reformation gave birth to a special apparatus of a labor bureaucracy with special mental habits of its own, with its own routine, pinch-penny ideas, chameleon-like capacity for adaptation, and predisposition to myopia. Comrade Gorter identifies this bureaucratic apparatus with the proletarian masses upon whose backs this apparatus has climbed. Hence flow his idealistic illusions. His thinking is not materialistic, non-historical. He understands the reciprocal relations neither between the class and the temporary historical apparatuses, nor between the past epoch and the present. Comrade Gorter proclaims that the trade unions are bankrupt; that the Social Democracy is bankrupt; that Communism is bankrupt and the working class is bourgeoisified. According to him we must begin anew and start off with – the head, i.e., with select groups, who separate and apart from the old forms of organization will carry unadulterated truth to the proletariat, scrub it clean of all bourgeois prejudices and, finally, spruce it up for the proletarian revolution.

Such debates are hampered by some wrong-headed thinking. In particular there are several early refences to the question of the labour aristocracy. Here Trotsky and others argue that a layer of workers are bought off by super profits from imperialism, and act as a break on the revolutionary movement. Though these workers were some of the most revolutionary in Petrograd in 1917, Germany in 1918-1919 and Britain in 1919. There is some truth though, but the Communist International, at least in this period, doesn't seem to get to grips with the real problem which is the trade union bureacracy who are a conservative brake on struggle due to being removed from the work force.

Perhaps the most interesting speech in this book however is the one that marks the transition from a period of immediate revolution to one where some economic revival in the capitalist nations has seen growing confidence on behalf of the capitalists. This Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International is a remarkable text. Trotsky grapples with both the (hopefully temporary) retreat of the revolution and the changing economic circumstances. In particular he analyses the growth of American capitalism and what that means for the dynamics of global struggle. It's a striking discussion of the impact of World War One, the changing global picture and things like anticolonial movements. In particular Trotsky is discussing whether capitalism "is it either restoring or close to restoring capitalist equilibrium upon new post-war foundations?" His answer was very much that any stability that capitalism was experiencing in 1921 was temporary, and that there were deep seated problems for the system. A prediction that would prove terribly prescient by the end of the decade, and which anticipated the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, even in 1921 he could note the threat of a destabilised middle class hit hard by economic crisis. In the 1930s this class would form the basis of the European fascist movements:

The reformists pinned great hopes upon the so-called middle estate. Engineers, technicians, doctors, lawyers, bookkeepers, accountants, functionaries, civilians and government employes alike, and so on – all these constitute a semi-conservative stratum which stands between capital and labor and which must, in the opinion of reformists, reconcile both sides, while directing and at the same time supporting democratic regimes. This class has suffered even more than the working class during the war and after, that is, its living standards have deteriorated to an even greater degree than the living standards of the working class. The main reason for this is the decline in the purchasing power of money, the depreciation of paper currency. In all European countries this has given rise to sharp discontent among the lowest and even middle ranks of functionaries and the technological intelligentsia.

Trotsky argued that:

America’s productive capacity has grown extraordinarily but her market has vanished because Europe is impoverished and can no longer buy American goods. It is as if Europe had first done everything in her power to help America climb to the topmost rung and then pulled the ladder out.

What would be the consequence? Instability and war. Take this prediction from later in the same 1921 conference:

The last great war was – in its origin, its immediate causes and in its principal participants – a European war. The axis of the struggle was the antagonism between England and Germany. The intervention of the United States extended the framework of the struggle, but it did not divert it from its fundamental course. The European conflict was settled by the resources of the whole world. The war, which in its own way settled the contest between England and Germany and to that extent also the conflict between the United States and Germany, not only failed to solve the question of interrelations between the United States and England but has, for the first time, posed it in its full scope as the basic question of world politics, just as it posed the question of interrelations between the United States and Japan as one of the second order. Thus, the last war was a European prelude to a genuine world war which is to solve the question of who will exercise the rule of imperialist autocracy.

It is a remarkable prediction of war, and war on a far greater scale. What was the answer? That was the question posed by all the early conferences of the Communist International: the building of revolutionary organisation. How to do this, and how that changed as the situation evolved provides some of the clearest and most useful parts of this volume. In The Main Lesson of the Third Congress Trotsky reiterates how the Social Democrats had stopped the revolution in the critical aftermath of the Russian Revolution:

In the most critical year for the bourgeois the year 1919, the proletariat of Europe could have undoubtedly conquered state ower with minimum sacrifices, had there been at its head a genuine revolutionary organizatiom, setting forth clear aims and capably pursuing them, i.e., a strong Communist Party. But there was none. On the contrary, in seeking after the war to conquer new living conditions for itself and in assuming an offensive against bourgeois society, the working class had to drag on its back the parties and trade unions of the Second International, all of whose efforts, both conscious and instinctive, were essentially directed toward the preservation of capitalist society.

Had their been genuine revolutionary organisations that could have been avoided. The failure to do this was not the end of the revolutionary opportunity. The next volume deals with the critical period and the grappling of the Communist International with further threats to revolutionary Russia, and tactics for Communist Parties with significant memberships in periods of low levels of struggle.

There is much in this first volume though, and the clarity of Trotsky's analysis, the honesty of the debate among attendees of the meetings, and the serious attempts to learn how to develop the struggle are fascinating. While these collections are only Trotsky's contributions, and other volumes contain more, we can learn a great deal from them all. I look forward to the second volume.

[346] on the missing revolutionary party