Lenin and Trotsky’s Comintern: International Party of Revolution

(Quote of the Week)

One hundred years ago this month, the Third (Communist) International—also known as the Comintern—was founded under the guidance of V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, which had led the 1917 October Revolution. Upholding the Marxist program for world socialism, the Comintern rejected the social-patriotism of the Second International, whose leading parties supported their “own” bourgeoisies in interimperialist World War I. Following 1923-24, when the bureaucracy under J.V. Stalin usurped political power in the Soviet Union, the Comintern threw out revolutionary internationalism and went on to adopt the program of “peaceful coexistence” with world imperialism. In 1938, Trotsky and his supporters founded the Fourth International, the party that we of the International Communist League seek to reforge as the instrument to fight for new October Revolutions worldwide.

The First International (1864-72) laid the foundation of an international organisation of the workers for the preparation of their revolutionary attack on capital. The Second International (1889-1914) was an international organisation of the proletarian movement whose growth proceeded in breadth, at the cost of a temporary drop in the revolutionary level, a temporary strengthening of opportunism, which in the end led to the disgraceful collapse of this International....

The Third International has gathered the fruits of the work of the Second International, discarded its opportunist, social-chauvinist, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois dross, and has begun to implement the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The international alliance of the parties which are leading the most revolutionary movement in the world, the movement of the proletariat for the overthrow of the yoke of capital, now rests on an unprecedentedly firm base, in the shape of several Soviet republics, which are implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat and are the embodiment of victory over capitalism on an international scale.

The epoch-making significance of the Third, Communist International lies in its having begun to give effect to Marx’s cardinal slogan, the slogan which sums up the centuries-old development of socialism and the working-class movement, the slogan which is expressed in the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

—V.I. Lenin, “The Third International and Its Place in History” (April 1919)