"The idea that became the Communist International began [...] with the anti-war wing of the Second International and with Lenin’s and Zinoviev’s struggle within this left for an international split. Comintern was able to emerge because of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October 1917 and the survival of the revolutionary regime into 1919, when the 1st Congress of Comintern met. "The result was that Comintern had a double character. On the one hand, it was an International of the anti-war left, attempting to redeem the honour of socialism after the ignominious political collapse of the Second International. On the other, it was a fan club for the Russian Revolution and its leaders. "The fan-club aspect became more prominent with the defeat of the Hungarian and (especially) the German and Italian revolutionary movements. On the one hand, the Russians had the prestige of victory and the material resources of state power. On the other, the Germans had lost some of their most eminent leaders - and the westerners in general had failed where the Russians had succeeded. It was natural for Comintern in these circumstances to become a body that propagated the idea of the Russian Revolution as a universal model. "In international strategy, this had two aspects. The first was that defence of the Soviet regime was the central touchstone of the communist parties’ internationalism. The idea that it might be appropriate to admit the defeat of a proletarian socialist policy in the face of the defeat of the western revolutionary movements of 1919-20 and of peasant resistance in Russia, and carry out a controlled retreat to capitalism, was literally unthinkable to Comintern. "Whether such a retreat was a possible option is doubtful; but the inability of the communist parties to think it probably contributed to the fact that the degeneration of the Soviet regime into open tyranny brought the communist parties down with it. It also produced among the Trotskyists a bizarre body of competing theological dogmas about the Stalinist regime that provided ideology for the Trotskyists’ endless splits."
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 07:46:15 +0000
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