The historical cycle of the degeneration of the Third International (III)

THE HISTORICAL CYCLE OF THE DEGENERATION OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL (III)

1920- Occupation of factories in Italy

Following the II Congress of the International, the unrest continued in Italy. During the year, factory occupations had taken place, and this movement became widespread in September. Faced with this situation, the government ordered not to open fire against the workers but to prepare for the siege and wait for the action to demonstrate its own insufficiency, causing the workers to abandon it.

The repressive forces of the State could control the situation as long as the workers remained in their ineffective action within the factories, but they would not have been able to evict them and simultaneously defend the positions of the bourgeois State. The working class enclosed in the factories (whether with or without continued work) posed no danger. In contrast, the working class expelled from the factories and placed in a direct confrontation with the forces of the State would have been a revolutionary threat.

The final result of the action was a situation of defeat, demoralization, and discouragement of the working class. This is the necessary outcome of actions that, presenting themselves as maximalist and definitive, cannot develop in a revolutionary direction because they lack the necessary prerequisites: the overthrow of bourgeois power and the conquest of political power by the proletarian class.

"The factory will be conquered by the working class – and not only by the workers of the respective company, which would be too limited and uncommunist – only after the entire working class has seized political power (...)" (Take the Factory or Take Power?, 1920)

1920- Fusion of the 'Left' of the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party) with the KPD

In December, the fusion of the 'left' of the USPD (Independents) with the KPD takes place. This represents an organizational tactical error in the federalist sense, reflecting the desire to expand influence by any means, even if it undermines the internal political homogeneity of the Party and is achieved through parliamentary dealings with leaders of other currents. The number of 440,000 members reached through this means will not withstand the test of a few months: it will be reduced to less than half (180,000) by the summer of 1921.

1921- Foundation of the Communist Party of Italy

The Communist Abstentionist Faction succeeded in imposing the split, dragging along the left-wing maximalists and the Ordine Nuovo current, establishing the Communist Party of Italy (Section of the 3rd International) on the basis of a strictly Marxist program, in line with the II Congress of the 3^rd International.

July 1914 – Start of World War I (bankruptcy of the II International)
1917 – February and October revolution in Russia
1917 – foreign military intervention and civil war in Russia
March 1918 – Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
November 1918 - Kiel mutiny
November 1918 – End of World War I
December 1918 – Foundation of theCommunist Party of Germany
January 1919 – Assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the social democracy
March 1919 – 1st Congress of the 3rd International
March-August 1919 – Hungarian Soviet Republic (participation of social democrats dynamite it)
April 1919 – Soviet Republic of Bavaria
March-April 1920 – Kapp/Lüttwitz "putsch" + Ruhr uprising
May 1920 - Theses of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction of the PSI
July-August 1920 - II Congress of the 3rd International "21 conditions of admission" (in particular, the 21st)
August 1920 – Defeat of the red army in Warsaw

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September 1920 – Occupation of factories in Italy
December 1920 – Fusion of the 'left' of the USPD with the KPD
January 1921 – Foundation of the Communist Party of Italy
January 1921 – 'Open letter' from KPD to SPD and trade unions
March 1921 – Failure of the March action in Germany
June-July 1921 – III Congress of the 3rd International "conquest of the masses" (of the majority...).
December 1921 – Resolution previous to the 1st Enlarged Executive "political united front"
January 1922 –Theses on the tactics of the Communist Party of Italy (Rome)

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February 1922 – 1st Enlarged Executive
April 1922 – Joint conference with the II International and the II ½ International
June 1922 – 2nd Enlarged Executive "workers' government".
August 1922 – Submission of the CCP to the Kuomintang.
October 1922 – March on Rome
November 1922 – Project of Thesis presented by the CP of Italy to the IV Congress
November-December 1922 – IV Congress of the 3rd International “workers and peasants government”
January 1923 – French occupation of the Ruhr
February 1923 – Arrest of the leaders of the CP of Italy, handpicking of Togliatti for the direction.
June 1923 – "National bolshevism" in Germany
October 1923 – Communist ministers in the governments of Saxony and Thuringia (and ulterior military dissolution)
January 1924 – Death of Lenin
June-July 1924 – V Congress of the 3rd International "bolshevization"
June 1924 – assassination of Matteoti and Aventine pantomime
April 1925 – Hindenburg's presidential election in Germany
January 1926 – Theses of the Left to the III Congress of the Communist Party of Italy (Lyon)
February 1926 – VI Enlarged Executive
March 1926 – Betrayal of the proletarian revolution in China (massacre of Shanghai and Canton in 1927)
May 1926 – Betrayal of the miners' strike in Great Britain (Anglo-Russian Committee)
December 1926 – VII Enlarged Executive "socialism in one country", defeat of the Russian opposition
October 1929 – Crack of 29
1936-1938 – Moscow processes
May 1937 – May events during the Spanish civil war
September 1939 – Start of the 2^nd Imperialist World War II
May 1943 – Formal dissolution of the 3rd International

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From the birth of the Communist Party of Italy (Section of the Communist International) in Livorno 1921, a movement within the International was initiated by the leadership of the KPD (Clara Zetkin and Paul Levi) and supported by the French Communist Party, in defense of Serrati, against the split that had occurred, and for immediate reunification with the Socialist Party^[1]. The centrism that thrived within the International attempted to kill the only Communist Party created in Europe following exactly the pattern set by the II Congress.

The liquidation of the split was rejected by Lenin, but the III Congress would approve a merger mandate with the PSI if it expelled Turati. In the words of Humbert-Droz: "'Livorno' had become a specter in the International, an example to be avoided at all costs", this was the assessment of the Tolstoyan appointed as delegate for Latin countries by the International about the only Communist Party that had enforced the admission conditions of the II Congress... The merger mandate would be repeated at the IV Congress, after the PSI expelled the reformist right wing of that party but did not come to pass due to a subsequent change within the PSI itself.

1921- Open letter from the KPD to the SPD

P.Levi, who would be expelled from the Party and the International a few months later for his treacherous behavior in the March Action, sent an open letter to the SPD on behalf of the KPD.

This was an early precursor of a method of open letters that became widespread following the tactical deviation of the political united front, which would undermine the 3^rd International by distorting its communist political content.

1921- March Action in Germany

The March events were triggered by the police occupation of a mining district to disarm the workers, to which the KPD responded with an insurrectional call without sufficient preparation, presenting what was a defensive struggle as an offensive one, lacking the appropriate prerequisites. The KPD leadership (P. Levi) publicly criticized the militant fighters as coup-plotters after the defeat when they were being repressed by the bourgeois State.

The March Action in Germany revealed the instability of the KPD's tactic, which shifted from passivity, prior to the outbreak of unforeseen and unprepared events, to subsequent verbal extremism and improvisation. The tactic oscillated abruptly from passivity, inertia, and previous parliamentarism (an "open letter" to the SPD, the governing party, in January of the same year) to an offensive extremism doomed to failure due to a lack of adequate preparation. The arc concluded with regret for the action and public denunciation of its militants.

The real danger was the consolidation of a situational empiricism and eclecticism that reflected the lack of ideological homogeneity, already present in the early days of the German party, and further exacerbated by the hasty merger with the left-wing independents.

1921- III Congress of the 3^rd International

The III Congress[2] was marked by the 'March Action' in Germany and set as its fundamental task the 'conquest of the masses', of the 'majority of the working class'. The Congress's assessment still considered that the proletariat was on the offensive, amidst a somewhat forced and artificial optimism.

Lenin did not see the formula of the 'majority of the working class' as having a democratic connotation: "Of course, we do not give the winning of the majority a formal interpretation, as do the knights of philistine “democracy” of the Two-and-a-Half International. When in Rome, in July 1921, the entire proletariat —the reformist proletariat of the trade unions and the Centrists of Serrati’s party— followed the Communists against the fascists, that was winning over the majority of the working class to our side. This was far, very far, from winning them decisively; it was doing so only partially, only momentarily, only locally. But it was winning over the majority." (A letter to the German Communists, Lenin, August 14^th, 1921). However, the word 'majority' remained, and it did have a democratic connotation for almost the entire International (see the hypertrophied but ineffective Czechoslovak Party with its 400,000 members). In fact, it imposed itself in the tactical deviations that would come shortly after.

In any case, it is an ambiguous and overly broad formula that does not specify where or within what timeframe this majority should be counted and, due to its ambiguity, effectively reinforced the arithmetical democratic conception of party action. As summarized in the Naples Theses (1965): "The III Congress had correctly noted that it was not enough (already in 1921, it could be foreseen that the great revolutionary wave that followed the end of the war in 1918 was cooling down, and that capitalism would attempt counter-offensives, both in the economic and political fields) to have formed communist parties closely committed to the program of violent action, proletarian dictatorship, and the communist state if a large part of the proletarian masses remained susceptible to the influences of opportunist parties, considered by all of us at the time as the worst instruments of the bourgeois counter-revolution, and that had blood on their hands from Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. Nevertheless, the Communist Left did not accept the formula that the 'majority' of the proletariat was an indispensable condition for revolutionary action (discardable as a Blanquist initiative of small parties), as it was never known whether it referred to the true waged proletariat or to the 'people,' including property-owning peasants and micro-capitalists, artisans, and all other petite bourgeoisie. Such a majority formula, with its democratic flavor, aroused the first alarm, unfortunately verified by history, that opportunism might be reborn under the typical banner of homage to the deadly concepts of democracy and electoral counting."

The Left had always agreed on the need to gather the necessary conditions for the Party's influence within the proletariat to undertake offensive action, having accurately expressed the conditions and assessment elements in the Theses of the Abstentionist Communist Faction of the PSI (1920) (III, point 14) and, between March and the Congress, in Party and Class Action (1921), making it clear that the number was a factor but not the only or most decisive one.

The Congress expelled P. Levi (the originator of the later widespread practice of 'open letters', in January of the same year) for having criticized the March Action in its defeat, betraying the militants who fought, and confirmed the exclusion of the PSI from the International after the formation of the PC of Italy, although with a merger mandate for the latter if the former expelled its most obvious reformist right.

Lenin later had to admit that during the III Congress, he had positioned himself on the far right out of fear of a shift that was too leftist: "I must confess to a mistake I made at the Third Congress of the Communist International also as a result of over-caution. At that Congress I was on the extreme right flank." (Lenin, Notes of a Publicist, 1922).

In that same text Lenin precisely exposes the content, perspectives, and the situation of the revolution initiated in October 1917:

"Russia’s proletariat rose to a gigantic height in its revolution, not only when it is compared with 1789 and 1793, but also when compared with 1871. We must take stock of what we have done and what we have not as dispassionately, as clearly and as concretely as possible. If we do that we shall be able to keep clear heads. We shall not suffer from nausea, illusions, or despondency.

We wound up the bourgeois-democratic revolution more thoroughly than had ever been done before anywhere in the world. That is a great gain, and no power on earth can deprive us of it. (…) We have created a Soviet type of state and by that we have ushered in a new era in world history, the era of the political rule of the proletariat, which is to supersede the era of bourgeois rule. Nobody can deprive us of this, either, although the Soviet type of state will have the finishing touches put to it only with the aid of the practical experience of the working class of several countries.

But we have not finished building even the foundations of socialist economy and the hostile powers of moribund capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and frankly admit it; for there is nothing more dangerous than illusions (and vertigo, particularly at high altitudes). And there is absolutely nothing terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest despondency, in admitting this bitter truth; for we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism — that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism. We are still alone and in a backward country, a country that was ruined more than others, but we have accomplished a great deal."

1921- Resolution from the Executive of the Third International on the 'United Front'

On December 28^th, 1921, the Executive Committee of the Third International published a resolution in which it revised its assessment of the situation, considering that the bourgeoisie had gone on the offensive (in reality, the phase had changed much earlier) and establishing the tactic of the 'united front' with the Second and Second-and-a-half Internationals.

With this resolution, the method inaugurated by P. Levi in January 1921 (the same one who had been expelled in August for his actions after the 'March Action' ) of sending 'open letters' to the social-democratic parties was resumed.

It is true that the International's resolution insisted on maintaining the absolute independence of the party as an indispensable premise of the political united front: but independence is not a metaphysical category, it is a real fact. And this independence is destroyed not only in the extreme hypothesis of the formation of joint action committees or parliamentary (let alone, as will be demanded later, government) alliances, but also in the more embryonic form of 'open letters' and proposals for common action that are known from the start to be certain to be rejected and, precisely because they are rejected, can be used to unmask the adversary.

The 'political united front' with the social democracy meant reuniting with the traitors of 1914 from whom it had been so difficult to separate, with the executioners of the revolution and murderers of communists in Europe and Russia, with a latent agent of the bourgeoisie, meant forgetting “The function of Social Democracy” (February, 1921). This necessarily had to produce the dual effect of confusing the entire proletariat and dragging the communist parties into the tactics and practical actions of social democracy, de facto sacrificing their political independence.

In the contemporary Theses on the Question of Reparations, there is already an allusion to the possible communist participation in a workers' government, anticipating the subsequent tactical deviation and the disastrous entry into the governments of Saxony and Thuringia in October 1923: "The problem of whether the communists in Germany should or should not enter a workers' government is not a matter of principle but of opportunity [!!!]. The decision on this depends on the degree of strength that the working class possesses at the moment it assumes power and, respectively, on the opportunities to immediately increase this strength."

(The publication of this series, which we began in “The Internationalist Proletarian” n. 12 as a result of the collective study work of the general meeting of August 2023, will continue in the following issues of the review).

[1] In this regard, we refer the reader to the work “A draft for the clarification of the tactical divergences between the I.C. and the Communist Left in Italy” published in two parts in El Comunista No. 63 (September 2019) and in El Comunista No. 66 (July 2021).

[2] After the pressure maneuvers against the newly born Communist Party of Italy (January, 1921), the tactical deviations of the German party (fusion with the left of the USPD in December 1920 and open letters in January 1921) as well as the consequences of the called March action (March, 1921) and before the III Congress (June-July, 1921) which should reflect the weight of all these problems, “Party and class” (April, 1921) and the text “Party and class action” (May, 1921) were published. The reader will find on page 6 of this review a series of extracts from these two fundamental texts in the article “Parties and revolutions are not created, parties and revolutions are led”.

The historical cycle of the degeneration of the Third International

The historical cycle of the degeneration of the Third International (II)

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