International

INTERNATIONAL. - An association made up of intellectuals and workers with the aim of coordinating the anti-capitalist struggle internationally. The "League of Communists" asserted its internationalist demands as early as 1848. The "International Workingmen's Association" nevertheless came into being only between 1862 and 1864. Historically, three Internationals have succeeded one another or coexisted, plus a fourth, represented by Trotsky, a secessionist from the third or Comintern, not to mention the more recent organization of the Cominform (v.).

I. THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

It is called by antonomasia the "International" and was constituted in London in the autumn of 1864 as the conclusion of contacts between French and English workers' organizations that had taken place on the occasion of the London exhibition of 1862 and in which representatives of other countries, among them Marx, had then taken part. On 1 November 1864 an organizing committee approved the program and the statute, formulated by Marx, of an International League of Workers which was to direct the struggle of the proletariat in the various countries and to spread the principles of communism. A general council was created, in which the workers of the various adhering countries were represented. Marx, representative of Germany, was its directing element.

At the first Congress (Geneva 1866), three fundamental principles were sanctioned, formulated by Marx already in 1864 in his Inaugural Address, which would form the central nucleus of the discussions at the subsequent congresses: the liberation of the workers from economic slavery must be the work of themselves; international collaboration of the workers and rejection of every warmongering policy; conquest of political power in order to dominate the means of production. At Geneva the first notable divergences appeared between Marxists on one side, and minor yet still strong currents (among them the French Proudhonists) on the other. Nevertheless Marx had approved an order of the day which, besides dealing with the labor of minors, the trade unions, the reduction of working hours and cooperation, expressed itself in favor of the international collaboration of the workers in the struggle between capital and labor. At Lausanne (1867), where the political tasks of the proletariat were discussed, both on the internal plane and in the international field, the function of the State and the problem of war, the splits became more evident: if the Marxists, in the majority, had approved Marx's proposal which affirmed the "necessity of the struggle for political liberty," fierce was the opposition of the Proudhonists, in this and in the subsequent Congresses of Brussels (1868) and of Basel (1869), to the principles of more accentuated communism, such as the attribution to the State of the ownership of land, of the means of production and transport, or the conception that saw in the strike a means of struggle not only for social conquests but also to avoid war. Even if at Basel these principles were likewise approved, the fate of the first International was by now sealed, all the more so since it did not succeed in preventing the war of 1870 and the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. While each group of workers tended to act on its own, the split became complete at the Congress of The Hague of 1872, where Bakunin's anarchist principles clashed against the unitary discipline of Marxist communism. Bakunin, expelled, constituted at St-Imier an International of his own, with followers in Spain and in Italy, went so far as to organize an insurrection easily repressed in southern Spain but exhausted itself in a short time. The "orthodox" International had a struggling existence; after the General Council moved to New York, after the Congress (1874), in 1876 at Philadelphia it decided its general dissolution.

II. THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL

The end of the first I. naturally did not exhaust the associational movement of the socialist currents of the various countries; in Germany first, in the other states later, between 1872 and 1888 strong parties with a common social-democratic tendency were formed, distinct from the ordinary workers' leagues of resistance, cooperation, mutual aid, etc. In July 1889 the second I. was created in Paris, which linked all these parties internationally. From its founding congress onward, it advocated the formation of proletarian political parties and urged the avoidance of any understanding with bourgeois parties, even if revolutionary. Unlike the previous one, it did not possess an efficient central power.

At the Brussels Congress (1891), while the necessity of political struggle for the conquest of the State was reaffirmed, the exclusion of the anarchists was sanctioned once again. There followed the Congresses of Zurich (1893), which took a position against militarism, that of London (1896), and that of Paris (1900); at Amsterdam in 1904 the discussion on the problem of war and peace was continued, which, taken up again in 1907 at the Stuttgart Congress, gave occasion for the first clash between the moderate tendency, led by Bebel and Volmar, and the intransigent one, to which Hervé, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg adhered. When Hervé declared himself against all "patriotism," Bebel and Volmar rose up, declaring that the social democrats would defend Germany in the event of an attack. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg sharpened Hervé's thesis in the sense of proposing that, in the event of a war, the socialist parties should hasten its end in order then to exploit the ensuing crisis and bring about the collapse of capitalism.

The Congress did not reach agreement on this point and remained divided between those who held it necessary to "defend the fatherland" and the more extremist ones who, above the fatherland, looked to the triumph of the proletariat. While the threats of war were becoming more perceptible and the socialist parties were engaged in averting it, in 1912 an extraordinary congress met at Basel which, in recalling the activity displayed at that time by social democracy in favor of peace, exhorted all workers to bring pressure to bear on the governments of their respective countries so that they would adopt a peaceful foreign policy. The tenth Congress, which was to open in Vienna in Aug. 1914, had the problem of peace on its agenda. It was unable to meet, and the war of '14 brought about the complete split of the second I., inasmuch as the working classes, against an internationalism that at that moment was purely ideal and abstract, made the national exigency of defending the fatherland prevail, postponing until after the conflict the general problem of war and peace. Three tendencies were thus noted: the original one, revolutionary and communist, opposed to the war; the patriotic one, which saw the social revolutionaries and the right-wing Mensheviks line up in the conflict in Russia, the Labour Party in England, the majority of the social democrats in Germany and Austria, the Socialist Party in France and, in Italy, a part of the Socialist Party led by Mussolini (expelled after the founding of the Popolo d'Italia, on 23 Nov. 1914); finally a centrist tendency (Kautsky and Adler, Austrians) which declared itself neither for peace nor for war and constituted the International Socialist Union, which would continue to bear the name of the second I. From 1914 onward the second I. lost part of its importance. In the attempts of the Italian socialist Morgan to revive it at the Conferences of Zimmerwald (Sept. 1915) and of Kienthal (Apr. 1916), the extremist tendency that constituted the third I. prevailed (nor did the proposal of the Scandinavian committee to convene a congress at Stockholm in 1917 meet with a better fate, since it could not take place owing to the refusal of passports by the Allies); in 1919 it sought to join the third I., but was rejected, inasmuch as it did not accept its conditions. There followed the meetings of Lucerne (Aug. 1919) and of Geneva (Aug. 1920), but without appreciable results. In the meantime, the socialist groups that intended to adhere neither to the second nor to the third I. gathered in the so-called I. of Vienna (International Working Union of Socialist Parties), which welcomed within its ranks the German Independent Socialists, the Austrian Social Democrats and the English Labourites. In Apr. 1922 these sought to achieve in Berlin the unification of all the organizations of the proletariat, but this attempt too failed. Between 1921 and 1922 representatives of the English, French, German, Italian and Belgian socialists met in Paris and then in Frankfurt and approved the so-called "Frankfurt decisions," which called for the cancellation of the inter-Allied debts, the end of the inter-Allied occupation of former enemy territories and the reduction of German war debts. On 27 May 1923 the adherents of the second I. and of the I. of Vienna, assembled at Hamburg, decided on the fusion of the two bodies, establishing "beyond the exclusion of the communists" the conditions for the adherence of other parties or political groups. The second I. thus reconstituted, called the Socialist International of Amsterdam, from then on continued to hold periodic meetings, dealing with the most varied problems: from that of the 8-hour working day to the reform of social legislation, from that of peace to that of colonial expansion and raw materials. To its influence and to that of the various socialist parties that were part of it is attributed in part the peace movement that expressed itself in the Locarno agreements (1925) and in the Kellogg Pact (1928).

For the bibliography see below at no. IV.

Angelo Tamborra

III. KOMINTERN

Abbreviation for "Communist International," like "Third International."

1. History

The split in the international socialist movement was caused particularly by the attitude taken during the First World War by the socialist parties of the various belligerent countries. When these parties voted in their Parliaments in favor of war credits, strong oppositions arose within the same parties. Delegates of these groups of the socialist oppositions of the various belligerent countries met from 5 to 8 Sept. 1915 at Zimmerwald, and from 24 to 30 Apr. 1916 at Kienthal in Switzerland. Although these conferences met in a certain sense under the ideal direction of the Russian émigrés living in Switzerland — Lenin, Trotsky and Radek — nevertheless these did not succeed in having their postulate of transforming the imperialist war into a civil war accepted, nor did they obtain consent for the formation of a new International. They had to content themselves with defining the imperialist character of the war, with condemning the attitude of the "social-patriots" and with demanding as a program a peace without annexations and without reparations.

A decisive step in the development tending toward the founding of the Third International was the Russian Revolution of Nov. 1917. When the Party of Russian Social Democratic Workers, some time after its victory, at its VII Congress (1918), changed its name to that of the Russian Communist Party, the name of Third International was also established, which was therefore to be founded as the "Communist International." The actual founding of the Communist International took place at its I Congress, which was attended, from 2 to 9 March 1919, by representatives of Europe, America, China and Korea. The presence of the representatives of Asia gave the Comintern, from its very founding, a characteristic aspect.

The Communist International, barely founded, immediately set to work, that is, it immediately began the struggle to attain its goal, world revolution: the agitations of the Spartacists in Germany (1919), the founding of the soviet republics in Hungary (March 1919) and Bavaria (Apr. 1919) are its work. Of particular importance for the internal organization of the Comintern was the II Congress (19 July-6 Aug. 1920), in which certain tactical characteristics already manifested themselves, for example, Lenin's tendency to forestall a twofold danger constituted on the one hand by "centrism" (the left wing of the various social democratic parties that wished to adhere to the Comintern), which could represent a danger to the revolutionary spirit, and on the other hand by "radicalism," which Lenin defined as the "infantile disease of communism" (for example, the German communists, who initially gave proof of an extremist attitude). Also of great importance were the discussions on the agrarian question and on national and colonial problems. As the policy of the Comintern there was fixed the line of seeing allies of the proletariat both in the peasants and in the "oppressed colonial peoples" (against Trotsky, who considered the peasants a "reactionary mass," and against Rosa Luxemburg, who believed she could ignore the colonial question). The revolutionary overthrow of the colonial peoples was placed, from that time on, in the forefront of the Comintern's policy, which was all the more understandable in that the revolutionary attempts made in Europe did not obtain the hoped-for success and the absorption of the proletarian class, which in its majority was social democratic, made but scant progress. In order to attract non-communist workers, separating them from their leaders, the Comintern began from the III Congress (Moscow, 5 Nov.-5 Dec. 1922), the last held while Lenin was still alive, the tactic of the "united front." The Trotskyist crisis, which broke out some time after Lenin's death within the Russian Communist Party, was already reflected at the V Congress of the Comintern (17 June-8 July 1924). The struggles that then began within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union against Trotskyism on the one hand and on the other against the deviation toward the right were probably also the cause of the four-year interruption between the V and VI Congresses of the Comintern. The VI Congress took place only after Stalin's triumph over Trotsky, from 17 July to 1 Sept. 1928 in Moscow, and confirmed the decision of the XV Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union concerning the exclusion of the Trotskyist opposition. This congress acquired special importance by accepting the definitive formulation of the program and the statutes of the Comintern. Subsequently, especially from the time Hitler came to power in Germany, the Comintern's principal interest turned to the struggle against fascism and national socialism, while there was above all a return to the tactic of the "united front": thus at the VII World Congress, in Aug. 1935, which in the history of the Comintern is considered the "Congress of the victory of socialism in the U.S.S.R. and of the proletarian united front against fascism and war."

At the time of the VII Congress the Comintern comprised 76 parties (of which 26 legal and 50 illegal). To these parties adhered 3,141,000 members, of whom 785,000 in the capitalist countries, the others in the U.S.S.R. To these must be added 3,753,000 members of the communist youth organizations.

Against the Comintern, Germany, Italy and Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact (Rome, 6 Nov. 1937).

2. Organization, program and tactics

The Comintern is "a single world communist party" which is composed of the "communist parties of the various countries" (§ 1 of the statutes). This world party is bound by an "iron revolutionary discipline" (Great Soviet Encyclopedia, XXXIII [1938], col. 717); "all the resolutions of the Congress of the Comintern, as well as the resolutions of the executive committee, are obligatory for all the parties belonging to the Comintern" (The II Congress of the Comintern, Vienna 1920, p. 114 ff.). But not only are the individual sections subjected, observing the most rigorous obedience, to the direction of the Comintern, but also every single member of the communist party of any country whatsoever, inasmuch as one of the conditions for being a member states precisely that he "submits to any resolution taken by the party and by the Comintern" (Protocol of the VI World Congress of the Comintern, IV, Hamburg n.d., p. 101). The supreme organ of the Comintern is the World Congress and, in the interval between congresses, the Executive Committee, whose resolutions "are obligatory for all the sections and must be executed immediately" (Statutes, § 13). The individual sections may raise protests against the deliberations of the executive committee on the occasion of the subsequent World Congress of the Comintern, but until that moment these deliberations must be executed. The leading section of the Comintern is the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks of the U.S.S.R., whose predominant position is assured by the fact that the number of representatives of a section was calculated on the basis of the number of members of the section represented and, as has already been noted, the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. proves to be by far the strongest party.

The rigid unity of this world party was aimed at not only by means of a blind obedience to the central direction, but also, from the very beginnings, by means of an intense and obligatory information service which on the one hand started from the individual sections to inform the center, and on the other hand bound the various sections to one another: "The sections of the Comintern, especially the sections of the metropolitan countries and of their colonies, as well as the sections of two neighboring countries, must maintain close mutual relations both organizational and informational" (Protocol... cit., p. 106). It is precisely this point that suggests a continuity that exists, despite all formal divergences, between the Comintern and the Cominform.

In its program the Comintern rests entirely on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, insisting therefore on all the specific differences between Leninist Marxism and that of the Second International. First of all it opposes the thesis of "revisionism," according to which Marxism as a social and economic system can be separated from its philosophical and conceptual basis: "The Comintern defends and propagates the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels and applies it, as the revolutionary method of cognition of reality, for its revolutionary transformation" (Protocollo... cit., p. 147). Moreover the term Marxism means, for the Comintern, essentially the doctrine of the violent, revolutionary overthrow of the social order: "Basing itself on the historical experiences of the revolutionary proletarian movement of all continents and of all peoples, the Comintern in its theoretical and practical awareness rests unconditionally on revolutionary Marxism and its further evolution, Leninism, which is nothing other than Marxism in the epoch of imperialism and of the proletarian revolution" (ibid.). The conquest of power by the proletariat, in the Comintern's concept, is "by no means a conquest achieved by obtaining the parliamentary majority... The power of the bourgeoisie cannot be broken except through the resolute application of violence by the proletariat" (Protocollo... cit., p. 65 ff.).

According to art. 1 of the statutes, the goal of this struggle is the "establishment of the world dictatorship of the proletariat" and "the creation of a world federation of socialist soviet republics in order to eliminate classes completely or to realize socialism, the first stage of communist society."

Although the formation of communist society, according to the concept of historical materialism (v.), will come about as the logical result of historical evolution, nevertheless this will be realized not without the conscious contribution of man and, indeed, will require the active struggle, fought with all energies, of the communists. "A communist party must, therefore, in its tendency to have only truly active members, demand of each of them that he place his forces and his time, as far as he may dispose of them and considering the conditions in which he finds himself, at the disposal of the Party and that he dedicate every effort of his in favor of this service" (Tesi e risoluzioni del III Congresso mondiale del Komintern, ed. of the Communist International, 1921, p. 110).

For the strategy and tactics of the Comintern the Leninist principle of the unequal development of capitalism in the various countries was the norm. According to this principle the victory of communism was not to be conceived as a single act to be realized simultaneously in all countries; on the contrary, one should be content with the possibility that socialism might be realized in a few countries or even in a single country. But this does not mean that the leadership of the Comintern, and Zinoviev in particular, was not convinced, especially in the first years after the Russian revolution, of the imminent advent of world revolution. Indeed it was precisely in it that the Comintern had, for some time, seen the only way out of the internal difficulties of the young Soviet Union. To the same extent, however, in which the immediate realization of world revolution proved impossible, the possibility of the advent of socialism in a single country was admitted, and this was one of the principal points of conflict between Stalin and Trotsky, who aimed directly at world revolution.

But this by no means signified a renunciation of world revolution, for whose realization two roads were taken into consideration: the outbreak of an imperialist war and the preparation of individual revolutions in the various countries. As for the first road, it was simply a matter of making good use of the opportunity that would result for communism from a new war that would bring the whole bourgeois world to ruin and complete destruction. In the second case the principal task was seen in the absorption of the proletarian masses through the destruction of social democracy. The twelfth plenary meeting of the Executive Committee of the Comintern declared: "Only when the main blow is concentrated against social democracy, this principal social pillar of the bourgeoisie, will it be possible successfully to defeat and overthrow the major enemy of the proletarian class: the bourgeoisie" (L'I. comunista, 1932, 9-10, p. 384).

For this goal, of attracting the proletarian masses by drawing them away from their social-democratic leaders, two tactical means must especially serve: the tactic of the "united front" constituted from below and the tactic of "contingent demands." In the tactic of the united front it was only apparently a matter of an agreement with the leaders of social democracy, whereas in reality this united front was by no means to be a coalition; it was not to be constructed from above, but from below. The task consisted in the tactic of paralyzing all the other leaders and of removing them by unmasking them as "mediocrities" or presenting them as "cowards," as "ambitious" and "social traitors." In this sense Molotov at the tenth plenary session of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, in July 1929, insisted on "the extraordinary importance of the tactic of the united front" in its new forms, in its exact execution "from below," and specified: "Today more than ever the tactic of coalitions between revolutionary and reformist organizations is inadmissible and harmful. With all the greater energy must one insist on the importance of the struggle for the predominance of the communist parties in the actions of the masses" (Protocollo della 10ª seduta plenaria del Comitato esecutivo del Komintern, Hamburg n.d., p. 417). At the VI World Congress of the Comintern it was decided: "The intensification of the struggle against social democracy shifts the principal weight decisively toward the united front organized from below, but does not dispense communists from the duty of distinguishing between misguided social-democratic proletarians and the leaders of social democracy who have taken on the part of servants of imperialism" (Protocollo... cit., IV, p. 30).

In the tactic of contingent demands, the communist does not address himself only to the proletarian masses, whom he seeks to radicalize, but also to non-proletarian masses, to whom he presents himself as the most energetic and effective defender of their interests; in this tactic those elements of the communist program that are considered unacceptable are concealed with great art, case by case, while a partial demand, taken from the general program, is presented as one of the essential pillars of the communist program. This system was employed especially among the peasants and the colonial peoples. In dealing with the peasants, the program of the Comintern considers the following contingent demands: "The policy of taxes, mortgage indebtedness, the struggle against usurious capital, the lack of land for poor peasants, rent, rights of usufruct, etc. Starting from these partial demands, the Communist Party must intensify its claims until it unites them in the watchword of the confiscation of the latifundia and in that of the government of workers and peasants" (Protocollo... cit., p. 98). In this way everything is first promised to the peasant, telling him that he will receive all the land, only to collectivize it rapidly thereafter, that is, to expropriate him in such a way that the peasant ends up losing everything. Thus the communists always found something to offer to the various classes of the population: to socialists, Marxism and the class struggle; to democrats, "true democracy"; to radicals, the struggle against the obscurantism of the Church and the secularization of schools; to liberals, the struggle for the rights of man and in particular for civil liberties (one may recall, for example, the liberal accents that the communist press still recently struck on the occasion of the decree of the Holy Office against communism), which liberties will later be exploited without scruple for communist propaganda; to nationalists and patriots, the most effective representation of national interests (for example, the propaganda recently unleashed by the communists, within the framework of the struggle against the Marshall Plan, against the partial renunciation of sovereignty), and even to Christian believers the idea of social justice and the pathos of the universal "love of neighbor," and, in recent times, to all the peoples of Europe weary of wars, the propaganda for peace. Thus everyone, without explicitly desiring the advent of communism, will contribute to its realization.

3. Dissolution

This world Party of the communists, directed in centralized fashion from Moscow and bent with iron discipline toward the realization of world revolution, was naturally bound to make the collaboration of the Soviet Union with the Allies more difficult during the Second World War. Therefore, in order to guarantee in all the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition "a general national strengthening and the mobilization of the masses in favor of a possibly rapid victory over the enemy," the presidium of the Comintern adopted on 15 May 1943 the resolution to dissolve itself. Stalin himself justified the dissolution by the necessity, on the one hand, of neutralizing the anti-Comintern pact and the propaganda connected with it, and, on the other, of eliminating any appearance that the communist parties in the various countries might act solely on the basis of orders received from Moscow.

Gustavo A. Wetter

IV. THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

It was constituted following the split from the Comintern of the extremist current, represented principally by Trotsky. When, following the Revolution of Oct. (1917), the communist leaders of the third I. took power in Russia, they felt all its weight and responsibility and were forced to bend their ideology and revolutionary programs, both internally and in the international field, to the demands of practical life. This seemed to Trotsky incompatible with the original idea of Marx and of Lenin, who saw the fulfillment of communism only in a world revolution and not, as Stalin intended, in the so-called "communism in one country" (cf. La révolution trahie, Paris 1936).

Shortly before Lenin's death, against the tendencies toward pronounced bureaucratism within the party and the Soviet State, undoubtedly imposed at that particular moment by the demands of reconstruction, Trotsky on 8 March 1923 addressed to the party a letter in which he demanded: freedom of discussion of political and economic problems; implementation of democracy within the party, with elections and not appointments, free rein for the forces of youth, etc. Stalin, not at all inclined to make the forces of the U.S.S.R. serve the realization of the idea of "permanent revolution," inasmuch as he was invested with precise responsibilities of government, little by little, through a struggle lasting fully five years, excluded Trotsky and his current from all political activity. Relegated to Kazakhstan in 1928, in 1929 Trotsky found refuge abroad. In France, he founded in 1931 the "Internationalist Communist League" (the so-called Leninist communists), which had as the basis of its doctrine the "pure" and "authentic" interpretation of Lenin's communism against Stalin's adaptation. From 1934 to 1936 the purges ordered by Stalin within the Russian Communist Party and the third I. accentuated the secessions of opponents in favor of the Trotskyist fourth I., so much so that at the Paris Congress of 1936 there were present over 600 delegates, representatives of about 126 organizations. The fourth

I. thus accentuated its extremist and revolutionary tendencies. Bound to an idea personified by Trotsky, the assassination of the latter near Mexico City (20 Aug. 1940) and the world war seem to have taken from it the possibility of a vital development. Nevertheless some dissident groups still take some inspiration from Trotskyist ideological positions.

For the moral and religious evaluation of this whole movement, v. BOLSCEVISMO; COMUNISMO; SOCIALISMO.

Angelo Tamborra