The Communist International dissolved the Polish Communist Party on fabricated charges [Frank Vol 1, p. 56]. That is the end point of the story Pierre Frank tells in Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste, and it is worth putting first, because everything useful in the two volumes is a way of explaining how an organisation founded to coordinate world revolution ended up destroying one of its own sections to order.
The route runs through one sentence. The IC’s strategy became “subordonnée alors aux besoins de la diplomatie du Kremlin”, subordinate to the needs of the Kremlin’s diplomacy [Frank Vol 1, p. 52].
Frank’s positive proposition follows directly from that, and it is the one most likely to be dismissed by people who could use it. A militant cannot struggle effectively without being integrated into an organisation, even one “réduite en nombre”, reduced in number [Frank Vol 2, p. 897, 65]. The argument for an international is not that you have the forces for one. It is that the alternative is analysing the world alone.
Why an international, at any size
Frank’s account of the founding principle is that the Comintern was to be the centre de gravité, the centre of gravity, of the proletariat’s class organisation, embodying a revolutionary Marxist outlook.
He traces the idea to Marx, who described the First International as the first attempt to provide the international action of the working classes with a central organ [Frank Vol 2, p. 892], and who never abandoned the objective after it collapsed [Frank Vol 1, p. 6]. Lenin pressed the case for a Third International from 1914 onwards, years before it was a realistic prospect [Frank Vol 1, p. 11, 12, 65].
The contemporary argument Frank makes is practical rather than pious. Problems are increasingly international in character, and they “can only be resolved through an international exchange of experiences, lessons, theoretical studies and through a coordination and unification of struggles” [Frank Vol 2, p. 897]. Only an international organisation, tied to mass struggles through its national sections and independent of any state, can analyse the world situation and define a revolutionary world policy [Frank Vol 2, p. 897, 64].
Independent of any state is the operative phrase, and the second volume shows what happens without it.
The united front, and who it was designed for
The early Comintern put serious work into tactics at its Third and Fourth Congresses, and the work came out of concrete experience and argument rather than doctrine [Frank Vol 1, p. 32, 35, 87].
The united front was designed for exactly the position most readers of this will recognise: communist parties that were growing but still a minority, needing to reach the broader working class through the organisations it was actually in, meaning the Social Democratic parties and the reformist trade unions [Frank Vol 1, p. 32, 35, 79].
The method was to propose common action on immediate demands, use the joint struggle to make contact with the masses and to show that the communists took their aspirations seriously, and let the limitations or the betrayals of the reformist leaderships become visible in the course of it [Frank Vol 1, p. 32, 36, 79, 80, 81]. It was understood as the means of escaping the isolation of the revolutionary vanguard and of preventing sectarian error [Frank Vol 1, p. 36, 79, 80].
It was fought over hard. Frank details the debates in Germany after the action de mars [Frank Vol 1, p. 25 to 31], and the arguments with Italian and French delegations that took more dogmatic or ultra-left positions against working with reformist organisations or fighting on partial demands [Frank Vol 1, p. 37, 39, 46].
Lenin and Trotsky held the line on tactical flexibility, and their case was that the majority of the working class has to be won through concrete struggles on everyday questions, rather than addressed from a distance with slogans that are formally correct and abstract [Frank Vol 1, p. 29, 30, 17, 32, 36, 34]. The workers’ government slogan belongs inside this framework, as a possible outcome of united front dynamics rather than a separate demand [Frank Vol 1, p. 35, 39, 85, 87].
The distinction Frank keeps clear, and which is the whole practical content of the tactic, is between a tactical alliance for common action and strategic fusion with reformism.
Party building, without the wave
Frank does not let the early period stand as a model to be copied. The post-war revolutionary wave and the prestige of the Russian Revolution created conditions for rapid growth [Frank Vol 1, p. 16], and even then building the parties took intense organisational work and theoretical education [Frank Vol 1, p. 40, 41, 52].
Later organisations work in a period where the mass revolutionary working-class movement that found expression in the Comintern is absent almost everywhere, and are mostly small propaganda groups, or parties capable of limited actions. The goal of building a revolutionary party does not change. The route to it is longer, and the immediate tasks are different from the ones the early Comintern faced. What carries over is linking theory to practice, developing cadres and rooting the organisation in the working class; what does not carry over is the specific method, which conditions dictate [Frank Vol 1, p. 40, 41, 68 to 74].
How it was destroyed
The internal power struggles in the Russian party, ending in Stalin’s dominance, became déterminantes pour l’IC, determinant for the International [Frank Vol 1, p. 52]. From there the mechanism is visible in three moves.
Bolchévisation, which began as a means of strengthening the parties, became a means of imposing rigid conformity and closing down internal debate, prohibiting tendencies and factions in direct contradiction of the early Comintern’s practice of centralisme démocratique [Frank Vol 1, p. 47].
Strategy was then subordinated to Kremlin diplomacy [Frank Vol 1, p. 52], and the results are datable. The line on the war shifted to follow the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [Frank Vol 2, p. 57, 58, 59]. Significant class struggles in the 1930s went unmentioned when acknowledging them would have cut across Soviet foreign policy [Frank Vol 2, p. 57, 58].
And then the Polish party, dissolved on fabricated charges [Frank Vol 1, p. 56].
Note the order. Internal democracy went first, political independence second, and the destruction of a section third. An organisation that has already prohibited tendencies has removed the only mechanism that could have contested the next two steps.
What a small organisation should take from this
Frank offers his work as a contribution to drawing lessons for the future of the world socialist revolution [Frank Vol 2, p. 60], which is a large claim for a book of committee minutes. The lessons that survive translation into current conditions are narrow and usable.
An international is not a reward for reaching a certain size. It is the instrument for producing an analysis no national organisation can produce alone, and Frank’s case is that a militant outside one, however committed, is not able to struggle effectively.
The united front is the tactic for minorities, which is what makes it the relevant one. Common action with reformist organisations on immediate demands, with the political distinction maintained throughout, is not a dilution of revolutionary politics but the historical method for getting out of isolation.
Internal democracy is the load-bearing wall. It went first in the Comintern, and everything else followed. For a small organisation with few resources it is also the cheapest thing to maintain and the easiest to lose without noticing.
The volumes remain unavailable in English, which is why this account exists.