The Question of International

On the occasion of 100th anniversary of the founding of the Third International (Comintern) we are re-publishing The Question of International by Elif Çağlı. The Third International was founded in March 1919 on the basis of the conception of Bolshevik organising and struggle shaped under Lenin’s leadership. Despite various weaknesses, it played an important role in Lenin’s time as the revolutionary international organisation of the world working class. However, a fast bureaucratic counter-revolution that took place after Lenin’s death in Russia resulting in the overthrow of the workers’ power cut the revolutionary life blood of the Third International. And with the bureaucracy rising to the position of ruling class and settling in the chair of power under Stalin’s leadership it ceased to be the revolutionary international organisation of the working class. After this period, policies of affiliated Communist Parties were geared to the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and Comintern was made into an apparatus of these class collaborationist policies. Without even convening a single congress after the seventh congress in 1935, this apparatus was closed in 1943 on Stalin’s orders when it became a fetter for the Stalinist bureaucracy even in its disgraceful state in which it had been reduced to a mere nameplate.

As Çağlı remarked in her article, the international dimension of the revolutionary struggle and the effort to create a corresponding international organisation has become way more important at present when capitalism is mired in a historical system crisis. She points out to revolutionary essentials that such an organisation must be built upon, an organisation desperately needed by the world working class.