Third International

THIRD INTERNATIONAL. The Third International (Communist International, Comintern, or CI) was formed in March 1919 in the Soviet city of Moscow. It was named the Third International to indicate that it was the successor of two previous internationals.

The First International—the International Workingmen’s Association—was founded in 1864 and led by, among others, Karl Marx, dissolving in 1876. The Second International was founded in 1889. From its beginning there were disputes between advocates of reformist and revolutionary approaches to the end of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist society. All sides formally agreed, however, with Marx and Engels’s assertion that workers had no country, that their national organizations should oppose all wars and the mutual slaughter of each other. This position was asserted especially strongly at the Second International’s Seventh World Congress in 1907 in Stuttgart, Germany. Yet, when World War I broke out across Europe in 1914, most socialist parties supported the war mobilizations of their own governments, including the large German Social Democratic Party, as well as the important sections in France and the United Kingdom. Minority opposition existed in many countries, and as majority positions in several national parties, including the Russian, Italian, and US organizations. Anti-war socialists met in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in 1915, under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, the chair of the Russian Bolshevik Party, to coordinate their anti-war efforts and to discuss the formation of a new international. Lenin at the time called the Second International “a stinking corpse.” The Second International was formally dissolved in 1916.

In the United States. many leading Socialist Party (SP) and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) leaders had been jailed for their opposition to the war, including Eugene Debs, the head of the SP. With the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in the Russian Empire suggesting an insurrectionary path to establishing socialism, many workers and left-wing elements around the world supported and were attracted to the new USSR. In 1919, led by Lenin and Trotsky, dozens of parties and left-wing groupings were invited to the establishment of the Third (Communist) International. The First Congress of the CI in 1919 also highlighted the importance of anti-colonial struggles for national liberation. In 1920, Lenin proposed a strict list of twenty points to which all member parties had to adhere. The first four annual congresses (1919-1922)—although nominally under the chairmanship of Zinoviev—were led by Lenin, and secondarily by Leon Trotsky. The period of 1919-1924—the so-called “first period”—were years of Civil War in Russia and revolutions across Europe, including factory seizures in Italy, a revolution in Hungary which held power for 133 days, and several insurrectionary attempts in Germany in 1919, 1921, and 1923. During 1923, Lenin became incapacitated. He died in January 1924.

After Lenin’s death, Josef Stalin began gaining control of the Bolshevik Party. At the Fifth Congress held in 1924, Stalin, arguing that the revolutionary wave of the first period had ended, declared that the goal was no longer aiding world revolution, but establishing “socialism in one country,” with the main job of member parties of the CI defending the young Soviet Republic. Many on the left criticized this view as a break from Marxism and Lenin, arguing that socialism could not be built alone in an economically backward country.

At the Sixth Congress in 1928, Trotsky and a number of other early Bolshevik leaders were expelled from the Russian Party and the CI. The Sixth Congress declared that a “third period” had begun, that capitalism was disintegrating, and that an upsurge of revolutions was imminent, that other left parties stood in the way as “social fascists.” Trotsky in particular wrote extended analyses of the CI, its policies under Lenin, and critiques of its policies under Stalin. These works include The First Five Years of the Communist International (two volumes), The Third International After Lenin, and writings on Germany, in which he blamed the failure to combat and stop the rise of Hitler to the policies of the CI under Stalin. The coming of the Nazis to power in 1933 in Germany, and the destruction of the world’s largest Communist Party there outside the Soviet Union, led to a reevaluation of CI policies.

The Seventh CI Congress took place in 1935, formally under the leadership of Georgi Dimitrov, former leader of the Bulgarian Party and head of the Central European Section of the CI. Dimitrov had been arrested in 1933, accused of playing a role in burning the German Reichstag. Dimitrov successfully defended himself, with the spotlight of the world press on the trial. He was acquitted and expelled to the Soviet Union, gaining worldwide acclaim for his bravery and successful defense. The Seventh Congress was a complete reversal of third period policies. The Congress declared a “Popular Front,” characterized by the directive to unite with all opposition parties, eventually even “progressive” bourgeois parties. In the United States, this meant supporting, with little criticism, the Roosevelt administration and the Democratic Party, as well as supporting, even at times against its own members, the more conservative leaders of the industrial union movement. To some supporters, this was a welcome move. To others this was a complete betrayal of the heritage of Marx and Lenin. The CI was eventually dissolved in 1943, in a concession to the wartime alliance of the Soviet Union with western countries including the United Kingdom and the United States.

The interpretations of the CI and its various periods cover a huge range. There are, of course, those who dismiss the whole project of socialism and international worker solidarity and reject the CI from the beginning. Others consider the early CI under Lenin—and even after his death—as the most progressive stage. There are yet other who consider the popular front as the most salutary period. In sum, much dispute about the significance and meaning of third period continues into the twenty-first century.

Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking Press, 1957.

Zumoff, Jacob. The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929. Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2015.

Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. Outline History of the Communist International. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/OutlineHistoryOfTheCommunistInternational

Claudin, Fernado. The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.

Goldfield, Michael. The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s & 1940s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Communist International, 1919-1943. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/index.htm

Palmer, Bryan. 2007, 2021. James Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, (2 volumes). Champaign: University of Illinois Press.