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The parties of the Second International spent the years before 1914 passing resolutions against imperialist war. They pledged international working-class solidarity and action to prevent the conflict. In August 1914 the majority of them, and above all their leaderships, lined up behind their own national bourgeoisies and governments and supported the war.
Pierre Frank calls this the failure of August 1914, and it is the event the Communist International was built to answer. The diagnosis the founders reached was not that the resolutions had been insincere. It was structural. A federation of sovereign national parties cannot bind anybody to anything, so its resolutions are predictions rather than commitments, and in a crisis the predictions fail.
That is the question this series keeps returning to, and it is the question facing anyone assembling an international formation now: what, in your organisation, is actually binding?
The source, and why it matters
Frank’s Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste concentrates on the historical events and revolutionary struggles the IC was created to address. He worked mainly from the organisation’s own paper: minutes of congresses and of Executive Committee sessions, the official publications L’Internationale Communiste and Correspondance Internationale, and the debates inside the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). He judged those documents the most suitable material for understanding the IC.
That choice of sources shapes what the history can show. It is strong on what was argued and decided, and it is the record of an organisation talking to itself rather than a view from outside it.
Luxemburg had already named the flaw
Rosa Luxemburg was sharply critical of the Second International’s weaknesses before the collapse, and her conception of the replacement was specific. Decisions on essential problems should be binding, under penalty of exclusion. In April 1916 she put it directly: “It is in the International that the centre of gravity of the class organisation of the proletariat is located.”
She argued against those who wanted the International to remain a loose federative gathering of independent national parties, and she treated this as a central issue for the whole working-class movement rather than a constitutional detail. August 1914 had shown why. An international whose decisions cost nothing to ignore will be ignored at exactly the moment it matters.
October supplied what argument could not
The war exposed the Second International. The October Revolution of 1917 supplied the impulse to replace it. A Bolshevik-led revolution had established a workers’ state, which demonstrated that overthrowing capitalism was possible and not merely correct, and revolutionary movements across the world took the point. Frank’s formulation is that the IC was founded “under the impulse of the October Revolution, on a theoretical foundation, that of revolutionary Marxism.”
Lenin had been arguing the case for years. In the April Theses of April 1917, on his return to Russia, he included the demand: “Renew the International. Take the initiative in creating a revolutionary International, an International against the social-chauvinists and against the ‘centre’.” In a draft platform in May 1917 he was blunter: “The Zimmerwald International has failed, the Third International must be founded.”
Soviet power acted internationally from the start, and the actions are worth noticing because they were practical rather than declaratory. In December 1917 Trotsky oversaw the distribution of a Russian revolutionary daily, in German, into the enemy trenches, to encourage fraternisation. By April 1918 an international congress of prisoners of war met in Moscow, and material was being published for the foreign troops taking part in the imperialist attack on Soviet Russia.
March 1919: a small congress with a large claim
The First Congress met in Moscow in March 1919. Civil war and isolation kept it small. It nevertheless brought together key figures and representatives of the revolutionary movements then emerging, and it made a claim far larger than its attendance.
Lenin’s own account, on 2 March 1919, was that the founding of the Third International in Moscow “has been the consecration of the conquests of the proletarian masses, not only Russian, not only from Russia, but also German, Austrian, Hungarian, Finnish, Swiss, in a word, of the international proletarian masses.” Frank reads the congress the same way.
The stated task was to gather national sections whose job was to lead revolutionary struggles worldwide, overthrow capitalism and establish a socialist society. The central debate was bourgeois democracy against soviets, and the Congress came down for soviet power as the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, treating the appearance of soviets in Germany and elsewhere as verification that this was a real form of proletarian democracy rather than a Russian peculiarity.
Trotsky drafted the Manifesto. The Congress designated an Executive Committee, the ECCI, drawn from the most important countries, with a five-member Bureau of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Rakovsky and Platten.
What to take from the genesis
Three things, and the first two are conditions rather than principles.
A new international becomes necessary when the existing formation cannot meet the crisis in front of it. The test is not whether the old body has bad politics but whether it can act. August 1914 answered that question about the Second International in a fortnight.
A break has to be principled and specific, against opportunism and social-chauvinism by name, or the new body inherits the old body’s habits along with its members.
And the founding question is constitutional. Luxemburg had already identified it, and the Comintern’s answer was national sections of a world organisation rather than an alliance of national parties. That answer produced its own severe problems later in this series. It was, at least, an answer.
What comes next in this series
Later instalments are thematic rather than chronological, so the concepts stay visible. They will cover:
The discussions and decisions of the Second Congress, in particular the 21 Conditions for affiliation, which defined what the revolutionary vanguard party was to be.
The debates on the role, structure and discipline of the party.
The relationship with mass organisations, trade unions and factory committees, and the approach to standing in bourgeois parliaments.
The National and Colonial Questions, and the strategy of Permanent Revolution.