Workers and oppressed peoples worldwide unite!
https://themilitant.com/2020/09/26/workers-and-oppressed-peoples-worldwide-unite/
October 5, 2020
V.I. Lenin, center, Bolshevik leader of Russian Revolution, addresses
Second Congress of Communist International in St. Petersburg, 1920.
First four Comintern congresses left a legacy of revolutionary
working-class program and strategy still crucial for workers today.
HUMBERT-DROZ ARCHIVES
V.I. Lenin, center, Bolshevik leader of Russian Revolution, addresses
Second Congress of Communist International in St. Petersburg, 1920.
First four Comintern congresses left a legacy of revolutionary
working-class program and strategy still crucial for workers today.
One of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for September is The Socialist
Workers Party in World War II by James P. Cannon. Cannon was a founding
leader of the American Communist Party in 1919 and served on the
executive committee of the Communist International. He was expelled from
the CP after it was taken over by Stalinist leadership. He went on to
become national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. He joined the
international fight led by Leon Trotsky against the counterrevolution
against Lenin’s course carried through by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet
Union and the Communist International. The excerpt is from a 1943
article, “The End of the Comintern and the Prospects of Labor
Internationalism.” Copyright © 1975 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by
permission.
BY JAMES P. CANNON
So far nobody has discussed the question from the point of view which
brought the Communist International into existence, that is, from the
point of view of organizing and furthering the worldwide struggle of the
proletariat for emancipation from capitalism. But it is this point of
view that I want to bring to the discussion here this evening.
Of course, the announcement of the formal dissolution of the Comintern
is simply the news account of a burial that is ten years overdue. …
This belated burial of the corpse of the Comintern is a climax, we might
say, to a long sequence of events which has extended over two decades.
These events, in their highlights, can be noted: the death of Lenin; the
promulgation for the first time, in 1924, of the theory of socialism in
one country; the bureaucratization of the Comintern and all of its
parties; the expulsion of the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition, first in
the Russian party and then in the other parties of the Comintern; the
capitulation of the Communist Party of Germany, with its 600,000 members
and its six million voters, without a struggle and without a fight, to
Hitler fascism in 1933; the organized, systematic betrayal of the
proletariat of the world in the interest of the diplomatic policy of the
Kremlin; the murder of the Old Bolsheviks; the assassination of Trotsky;
the betrayal of the proletariat in the Second World War, first to Hitler
and then to Roosevelt and Churchill.
Since the beginning of the war the Comintern, the unburied Comintern,
was silent as the grave. Now it is formally buried, and that, at least,
is a good thing. … By the formal burial of the Comintern, Stalin, for
once on the international arena, has unconsciously performed a
progressive act.
The bourgeois press and public generally, the political leaders and
spokesmen, are very well pleased with the recent pronouncement, even if
they understand that it is only a formality. They have good reason to be
pleased. The dissolution of the Comintern, and the cynical repudiation
of internationalism and the international proletarian organization, is
an ideological victory of vast importance for capitalism and reactionary
nationalism. …
They have good reason to applaud the action of Stalin, taken through his
puppets in the so-called Executive Committee of the nonexistent
Comintern, because the renunciation of internationalism is a
renunciation of the basic premises of scientific socialism. It is a
renunciation of the cardinal doctrine which has guided and inspired the
struggle of the workers for generations, since Marx’s day. The modern
movement of international socialism began with the Communist Manifesto
in 1848, ninety-five years ago, with its battle cry: Workers of the
World Unite! The Communist Manifesto proclaimed the doctrine that the
emancipation of the workers could be achieved only by their common
actions on an international scale. Against the cardinal principle and
battle cry of Marx and Engels, and of all revolutionary socialists since
that time — Workers of the World Unite! — Stalin has announced a motto
of his own: Disband your international organization; give up all thought
of international collaboration; support your own imperialists; and
confine your activities to the national framework of the country in
which you are enslaved.
Internationalism was not a dogma invented by Marx and Engels, but a
recognition of the reality of the modern world. It proceeds from the
fact that the economy of modern society is a world unit requiring
international cooperation and division of labor for the further
development of the productive forces. The class struggle arising from
the class division between workers and exploiters within the countries
requires class unity of the workers on an international scale. From the
beginning, the program of scientific socialism has called for the
international collaboration of the workers and oppressed peoples in the
different countries, with all their different levels of development, in
order that each might contribute their strength as well as their
weakness to a united world program and world cooperative action. The
Communist Manifesto called for common efforts of the workers in all
countries for the common goal of workers’ emancipation.
After the downfall of feudalism, the national states played a
progressive role as the arena for the development and expansion of the
forces of production in the heyday of capitalism. But these very
national states, whose sanctity is proclaimed by Stalin in 1943, became
obsolete long ago. They have become barriers to the full operation of
the productive forces and the source of inevitable wars. The whole
pressure of historic necessity is for the breaking down of the
artificial national barriers, not for their preservation.
Just as the petty states and principalities and arbitrarily divided
sections of the old countries under feudalism had to give way to the
consolidated, centralized national states in order to create a broader
arena for the development of the productive forces, so, in the same way,
the artificially divided national states have to give way to the
federation of states. In the future course of development this must lead
eventually to a world federation operating world economy as a whole
without class and nationalistic divisions. From this it follows
irrevocably that such an order can be created only by the international
collaboration and the joint struggle of the workers in the various
countries against their own bourgeoisie at home and against capitalism
as a world system.
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Robert G. Ingersoll
“Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never
inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the
Church does neither.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll,