[Following on from our recent post about Pierre Frank’s Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste, here is the introduction to a series of ten articles that will act as a study guide to this extensive work, only a small part of which has been translated into English]. A synthetic final article will bring together the major lessons outlined in Frank’s work
In April 1917, on his return to Russia, Lenin called for “Renewing the International. Taking the initiative to create a revolutionary International, an International against the social-chauvinists and against the ‘centre’.” He put it more bluntly soon after: “The Zimmerwald International has gone bankrupt, the Third International must be founded.”
His own party hesitated.
That detail is the reason for reading Pierre Frank’s history rather than the standard accounts. A body whose founding proposal met resistance inside the Bolshevik Party is not a body that received instructions and carried them out. Some historians have presented the Communist International’s interventions as dictates from Moscow. Frank, working from the organisation’s own record, reconstructs the strategic and theoretical arguments that actually produced its decisions.
This is the introduction to a series of ten articles working through that record, with a final synthetic piece drawing the lessons together. Only a small part of Frank’s work has been translated into English, which is why the series exists.
The event the International was built to answer
The Communist International was founded in March 1919, in response to the crisis in the international workers’ movement set off by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. Frank calls it the failure of August 1914.
The social democratic parties of the Second International had passed pre-war resolutions against the coming conflict. When it came, most of them backed their own national bourgeoisies and governments. That betrayal of international working-class solidarity established the bankruptcy of the Second International and the need for a body that would not do the same thing.
Lenin, who had spent years arguing against opportunism inside the Second International, took the point immediately: the break had to be with the social-chauvinists, and the replacement had to be built.
What turned the argument into an organisation
Argument alone did not do it. The October Revolution of 1917 did, by producing the world’s first workers’ state and with it a concrete base and a working example.
The Soviet government then acted internationally from the start, publishing material in several languages for troops on different fronts to encourage fraternisation, and convening international meetings. Frank’s phrase for this is a very vast internationalist activity, and the point of recording it is that the International grew out of practice rather than out of a resolution.
March 1919
The First Congress met in Moscow in March 1919, into the revolutionary wave crossing Europe after the war. It was small, which the conditions explain, and it was attended by people who would shape the movement for decades.
Frank’s distinction between this and its predecessors is precise: unlike the First and Second Internationals, the IC was founded under the impulse of the October Revolution and “on a theoretical foundation, that of revolutionary Marxism”. Its stated task was to gather national sections that would lead revolutionary struggles worldwide, overthrow capitalism and establish a socialist society.
The central debate was bourgeois democracy against the system of soviets, with the soviets argued for as a higher form of democracy for the working class. The congress adopted foundational documents on that basis, describing the IC as a consolidation of the gains of the international proletariat and, in Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase, the centre of gravity of the proletariat’s class organisation. Frank, writing as a militant rather than a neutral observer, calls it an outline of the indispensable instrument of the world socialist revolution.
It also took positions on the immediate world. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919, was denounced as the instrument of international gendarmes, meaning the English, French and American imperialists, and the League of Nations was described as a league of thieves.
Those are judgements about specific treaties reached within months of the founding. They are the sort of thing an organisation produces when it is analysing, and not the sort of thing it produces when it is waiting to be told.
The warning against sectarianism came first
One theme is present from the beginning and worth flagging, because it contradicts the picture of an ultra-left founding period.
The Comintern, and Lenin in particular, pressed revolutionary parties to work inside mass organisations, especially the trade unions, and warned against sectarian attitudes. Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, written before the Second Congress and informed by early experiences including the March Action in Germany, is a sustained argument against ultra-left tendencies and for winning the masses.
The timing is the point. This was written during an acute revolutionary crisis, by someone who still kept a sharp tactical sense about mass organisations. The patience was not a retreat adopted once the wave passed.
The sources, and why they matter
Frank’s history is built on the International’s own paper: the minutes of its congresses and of its executive committee sessions, the official periodicals l’Internationale communiste and la Correspondance internationale, and the debates inside the Russian Communist Party. He also draws on Trotsky’s analysis.
Those primary sources are now more accessible through work such as the Comintern Publishing Project, which matters for anyone who wants to check this series rather than take it on trust.
The following articles work through the major strategic debates and events of the International’s early and more revolutionary years, and then through its decline and dissolution.
Bibliography
Frank, Pierre. Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste (1919-1943) Tome 1. 1979.
Frank, Pierre. Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste (1919-1943) Tome 2. 1979.
Le Blanc, Paul. Introduction to On revolutionary strategy: From the early Comintern to Daniel Bensaïd, 2025.
James P. Cannon et al. Excerpts from "Defense Policies and Principles", July 1968.
James P. Cannon. Excerpts from "What policy for Revolutionists", May 1969.
Ernest Mandel. Excerpts from "The Leninist Theory of Organization", undated.
Daniel Bensaïd. Excerpts from "Revolutionary Strategy Today", undated.
Antoine Artous. Excerpts from "Daniel Bensaïd ou la politique comme art stratégique", 2011.