A congress established by Vladimir Lenin as a way of claiming communist leadership of the international socialist movement.
The Third (or Communist) International (Comintern) was established in 1919, during the height of the Russian civil war, as an alternative to a potentially resurgent Second (or Socialist) International. Held in Moscow, the founding congress was intended to have diverse representation from the world’s socialist camps, yet the vagaries of the civil war impeded a number of delegates from reaching the congress, thus necessitating a significantly reduced agenda. It was not until the second congress, held the following year that the firm differentiation between socialist and communist parties was delineated with the adoption of the “Twenty-one Conditions” for Comintern membership.
Efforts at fomenting revolution during the 1920s failed, despite the growing strength of the internationalist movement, and resulted in the abandonment of the Twenty-one Conditions in 1935. Shortly thereafter, the Comintern began to form coalitions, or “popular fronts,” with bourgeois parties, primarily in western Europe, and faced increased conflict from established regimes, most notably those of fascist Germany and Japan. To pacify its Western Allies during World War II, the Soviet Union dissolved the Comintern in 1943.
During its brief existence, the overall impact of the Comintern with regard to world trade was relatively insignificant. As the Comintern’s prime purpose was the coordination of the world socialist movement, most policies dealt with political rather than economic issues. Only with respect to trade unionism did the Comintern speak to issues of world trade. In particular, European trade unions dominated by anarcho-syndicalists (members of a movement that supported the notion of “stateless socialism,” a free socialist economic system) adhered to Comintern policies regarding the coordination of international efforts to foment revolution by inducing strikes that would disrupt production of goods, thus impacting the system of world trade.
A naive belief on the part of the Soviet masters of the Comintern that global revolution was afoot led them to adopt policies that actually undermined revolutionary movements and activities. By the late 1930s, the Comintern had lost control of the world socialist movement. Its dissolution in 1943 ensured that the Soviets would not affect international trade, at least not through this organization, nor was there evidence that any other viable communist organization could carry out the same.
Sean Michael Cox
See also: Communism.
Lazitch, Branko, and Milorad M. Drachkovitch. Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern. Stanford: Hoover Institute, 1986.
McDermott, Kevin, and Jeremy Agnew. The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.