International Socialism
Socialist and communist doctrines have always had, as an important element,
the idea of the international brotherhood of the working classes, in part
because the nation state has been seen as a prop exploited by capitalists. In
addition, the revolutionary years of the 19th and early 20th century seemed to
require world-wide revolution rather than whatStalinwas to call ‘socialism in
one country’. Consequently there have been numerous attempts to set up
international co-operative organizations of the separate national socialist,
communist and revolutionary groups. The two most important have been
the Second and Third Internationals, the latter also known as the Comintern.
(The First International was created in 1864 byMarx, inspired byThe
Communist Manifesto, which he andEngelshad been asked to write on behalf
of a German e ́migre ́ workers’ group in 1848. Largely because Marx tried to
dominate it, and because of disputes with anarchists and syndicalists, it was so
ineffective that it was dissolved in 1876.) The Second International was formed
in Paris in 1889, and though weakened by the First World War (when socialist
parties who had sworn to oppose capitalist wars all rallied to their respective
governments), it was reformed in 1923 and still survives (seeSocialist
International). This International was reformist and social democratic in
nature, and had nothing to do with revolutionary doctrines. It has had no
appreciable effect on either international or domestic policies, and, indeed,
given its ideological nature, has no obvious role to play. Part of the reason for its
uselessness is that from 1919 it had a serious and much more powerfully radical
rival in the Third International.
The Third International was founded atLenin’sinstigation by the newly
victoriousBolshevikgovernment in Moscow to organize and control com-
munist parties throughout Europe. Indeed, the formation of the two most
important Western communist parties, in France and Italy, stems directly from
splits in their respective socialist parties, who were members of the Second
International: in both cases the hard-core revolutionary Marxist elements left
to join Lenin’s Comintern. This body exercised the same autocratic centralized
discipline over the foreign members of the International, under the label of
democratic centralism, as the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist
Party did over its subordinate bodies. Its deliberate revolutionary and Moscow-
inspired temper probably did more to prevent serious united left-wing
governments from coming to power in inter-war Europe than anything else.
Electorates and the Second International parties could not trust members of
the Third International to take proper care of national interests, and the Third
International rejected any reformist road to socialism. It had to be abolished by
Stalin in 1943 to placate his liberal democratic wartime allies, and has never
been replaced by anything equivalent. There had, briefly, been an attempt by
International Socialism