The German Revolution of 1923 failed, and the Communist International spent the following period arguing about why. The debate inside the Comintern and the KPD turned on errors of strategy, of timing, and of a leadership that was not ready. Two years later the Second Chinese Revolution began, and the Comintern directed the Chinese communists into the Kuomintang, a policy whose consequences by 1927 were catastrophic.
Paul Le Blanc’s talk in Berlin set out four responsibilities for Marxists now: understand and engage with the working class, settle the question of revolutionary organisation, develop an activist orientation, and hold to revolutionary internationalism. It is a good list. It is also a list of exactly what the Comintern set out to do, which means there already exists a full-scale test of all four, run for two decades across every continent, with the results written down.
The fifth responsibility is to read the results. Understanding why the Comintern failed matters at least as much as upholding internationalism as a principle, and it is the piece most often missing from socialist education today.
Internationalism has a history, not only a principle
The Comintern is not background to the question of internationalism. It is the laboratory where organisation, strategy and international solidarity were built and tested under pressure, from an ambitious founding through to dissolution.
Its degeneration was tied to the growth of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and inside the Bolshevik party. Lenin fought that bureaucracy and treated it as a serious danger. Bolshevisation, which began as an attempt to build disciplined parties, became a mechanism of centralisation and of imposing the Soviet party’s line, and it worked against the flexibility and the genuine internationalism it was supposed to serve. Socialism in One Country then supplied the doctrine that made the subordination official.
An activist who has only the principle has no way to recognise any of that happening again. An activist who knows the sequence has a checklist.
The tactics were specific, and so were their failures
Le Blanc calls for an activist orientation. The early Comintern built two tools for exactly that job: the United Front, and the Workers’ Government. Both were attempts to close the gap between immediate struggles and the fight for power, uniting working-class forces and giving a name to transitional forms of government.
The Workers’ Government was an algebraic formula, and it attracted sharply counterposed interpretations. That ambiguity was fought over at the Fourth and Fifth Congresses. Anyone reaching for either tactic today inherits both the tool and the unresolved argument about what it means, and is better off knowing that in advance than discovering it in a coalition meeting.
Bureaucracy is an internal question before it is an external one
The question of revolutionary organisation contains a permanent fight against bureaucratic deformation. Lenin worried about the professional dangers of power and about combating bureaucracy inside both party and state. The ban on factions belongs in the same file: he presented it as temporary and circumstantial, a measure for a peasant country under siege, not a model of party life.
Trotsky later raised democracy in the party and the right of tendencies as a safeguard against bureaucratic control, and raised it precisely because the party now held power. The Comintern’s history says that a revolutionary organisation keeps its character only through continuous vigilance and real internal democracy, disciplined but genuine. Organisational form is not a neutral container for good politics.
Defeats teach more than victories
Learning from failure is how an activist orientation gets built. The German defeat of 1923 and the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925 to 1927 are the two cases to start from, along with the Popular Front experiences. Pierre Frank’s history of the Comintern treats these setbacks as the material from which current strategy should be informed, which is a stronger claim than it sounds: not that we should feel chastened by them, but that they are evidence.
Each defeat shows something that cannot be derived from first principles. What a revolutionary situation actually looks like from inside. What an unprepared leadership does. What follows from an incorrect political line, and what follows from passivity.
Everything is judged by the struggle for power
Daniel Bensaïd, in Revolutionary Strategy Today, notes that Lenin’s focus on organisational and tactical questions was driven by an obsession with the struggle for power. Pierre Frank’s history judges the Comintern’s debates on strategy, organisation and internationalism by the same measure: what did they contribute to taking power? The party is the mediation between theory and practice for that purpose.
This is the gravity that holds the other four responsibilities in place. Without the aim of overthrowing capitalism, understanding the class becomes sociology, building an organisation becomes administration, and an activist orientation becomes a diary.
What to do with this
Concretely: put the Comintern on the education programme, and teach its decline rather than its founding. Its origins, its congresses, its strategic debates, and then the bureaucratisation and the subordination to the priorities of the Soviet state.
That is a harder syllabus than internationalism in the abstract, and it is the one that equips people to notice the same pressures at work in whatever international body they are actually part of. Le Blanc’s four responsibilities are a compass. The Comintern is the map of the ground, including the places where earlier expeditions went into the water.