Customer Reviews

The Comintern

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This draws the political lessons from the experiences of mass communist parties in Russia, China, and Western Europe after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917 up until Stalin dissolved the Communist International (Comintern) in 1943. Amazingly, the book has only 200 or so pages.

British politician Lloyd George explained the atmosphere in which the Comintern was formed in 1919: "The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt amongst the workmen against pre-war conditions. The whole existing order in its political, social, and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other. In some countries, like Germany and Russia, the unrest takes the form of open rebellion, in others like France, Great Britain and Italy it takes the shape of strikes and of general disinclination to settle down to work, symptoms which are just as much concerned with the desire for political and social change as with wage demands."

Revolution had toppled the Tsar in Russia and the Kaiser in Germany, workers in Italy occupied factories and almost took power, and communist parties existed across Europe with tens and hundreds of thousands of worker-activists. The problem the Comintern faced was how to win millions of working-class radicals to the theory and practice of Bolshevism and integrate them into a coherent international organization within a few years while the revolutionary wave in Europe reached a crescendo.

Hallas manages to capture the spirit and atmosphere of the time and combine it with an overview of the political debates and problems the Comintern grappled with. This book is really indispensable for anyone who wants to study the history and development of the international communist movement. Hallas also examines Stalin's rise to power and the transformation of the Comintern from an international organization aimed at coordinating the activities of revolutionary socialists across the world into a bureaucratic monstrosity whose politics shifted to reflect the foreign policy objectives of Russia's new ruling class.

The most dramatic and costly consequence of the Comintern's degeneration was Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on Germany in 1933, which could have been prevented if the Germany Communist Party (KPD) had worked systematically with the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) to block his road to power and crush the Nazis before they took power. Instead, the KPD remained passive in the face of the fascist menace, denounced the SPD as "social-fascists," and even welcomed the Nazis seizure of power since it would "spark a revolution."

It is no exaggeration to say that tens of millions of people might not have perished in the Holocaust and World War Two had the KPD moved (with the SPD) to stamp out the fascist menace when they had the opportunity to do so in 1929-1933.

Hallas' work draws both the negative and positive lessons of the Comintern's experience and shows that the principles, strategy, and tactics laid out in the Comintern's early documents are useful and relevant to radicals and socialists today provided they're taken as general guidelines and not a mechanical schemas or dogmas.

Post script (7/21/11): The major weakness of Hallas' book is that it fails to draw the logical conclusion from the many defeats and setbacks of the various mass parties of the early Comintern: namely, that establishing a centralized world party with national sections who are directed by an executive/central committee based thousands of miles away from the scenes of battle is a project doomed to failure. Executive of the Comintern (ECCI) repeatedly intervened in the affairs of its national sections, expelling independent-minded communist leaders for siding with the "wrong" side of factional disputes in the Bolshevik or other parties in the international. The head of the KPD was replaced three times in the space of three years by the ECCI. Is it any wonder that German communists were unable to seize power despite numerous and repeated crises when their party was continually decapitated?