1.Bordiga’s report can be found in Riddell, ed., Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 (Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 402–23.
2.Dimitrov’s report can be found in VII Congress of the Communist International: Abridged Stenographic Report of Proceedings (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939), 126–29. It can also be accessed at Marxists Internet Archive.
3.The Communist, no. 6, June 1936, 489.
4.Trotsky’s basic writings on the rise of Nazism in Germany can be found in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971). Much of this material is also accessible online at Marxists Internet Archive.
5.The four published volumes containing Comintern congress proceedings and edited by John Riddell are Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987); Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings of the Second Congress, 1920 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991); To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921 (Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016); and Toward the United Front. The three supplementary volumes are Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International 1907–1916 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1984); The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1986); and To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920—First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1993).
The Struggle Against Fascism
1.Miklós Horthy was the leader of the counterrevolutionary regime in Hungary following the overthrow of the Hungarian soviet government that had existed from March to August 1919.
2.Otto Bauer was the leader and theoretician of the Austrian Social Democratic Party. He was part of the centrist Two-and-a-Half International that had merged with the right-wing Second International at a congress in Hamburg on May 21–25, 1923.
3.Georgia, formerly part of the tsarist empire, became independent following the October 1917 Russian Revolution, with a government led by the Menshevik Party that was hostile to Soviet Russia. On February 16, 1921, Red Army troops entered Georgia in support of a local rebellion by pro-soviet forces. Georgia soon became an independent Soviet republic linked by treaty with Russia.
A portion of Armenia, formerly divided between the Ottoman and Russian empires, became independent after the First World War, under the rule of the Dashnaks, a nationalist party. In September 1920 Turkish forces attacked the country; in November, as Armenian military resistance collapsed, Soviet troops entered the country in support of a rebellion by pro-Soviet forces, leading to the creation of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic.
4.For the September 1920 Italian factory occupations, see the introduction.
5.A reference to the fascists’ “March on Rome” of October 22–29, 1922, at the conclusion of which Mussolini was asked to form a cabinet.
6.On July 31, 1922, the Alleanza del Lavoro—grouping the CGL federation and other unions—declared a general strike against the Mussolini regime, to begin the following day. Coming after waves of fascist attacks carried out with virtual impunity and amid growing working-class demoralization, the poorly organized strike met with a weak response by workers, as well as fierce repression. As a result, the leaders capitulated and called off the strike on August 3.
7.A reference to the Ninth Congress of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, which met in Rome May 12–19, 1923.
8.Wilhelm Groener was Germany’s railway minister, who had taken actions to suppress a nationwide strike of rail workers in February 1922.
9.The Italian Nationalist Association joined Mussolini’s Fascist Party in March 1923.
10.A reference to the Christian-democratic Italian People’s Party.
11.A reference to the fascist unions, called corporations, which were supposedly “common organizations” of labor and capital.
12.The Versailles peace treaty signed June 28, 1919, between Allied powers and Germany, included among its provisions, the transfer of 10 percent of Germany’s territory to France, Belgium, Denmark, and Poland, and called for Germany to pay $33 billion ($461 billion in 2016 dollars) in reparations to the Entente powers.
13.Hugo Stinnes was one of the most prominent members of Germany’s capitalist class, with a vast, multifaceted economic empire.
14.On January 11, 1923, 60,000 French and Belgian troops invaded and occupied the Ruhr region of Germany—the center of its steel and coal production—in an attempt to exact war reparations following Germany’s failure to pay them under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. The occupation lasted into 1925.
15.Literally “trampled cheese spreads out but does not grow strong.” From Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan. The lines that follow clarify Goethe’s meaning: “Hammer it firmly into a strong mold and it takes on form—a strong brick for construction.”
16.A reference to the Proletarische Hundertschaften (sometimes translated as “proletarian hundreds”), which were workers’ militias for self-defense against the threat of rightist paramilitary attacks and assassinations. They were first organized on the initiative of the factory-council movement in Central Germany in February 1923. The German Communist Party sought to build these into a national united-front movement that could also be utilized in the fight for revolutionary power. By May 1923 tens of thousands of workers were enrolled in their ranks.
Resolution on Fascism
1.International Red Aid, established by the Comintern in late 1922, defended class-war prisoners worldwide. Clara Zetkin served from 1925 as its president.
Appendix A
1.The term “dictatorship of the proletariat” signifies the democratic rule of working people imposing their will against the violent resistance of the exploiting class.
1.Protokoll Fünfter Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale (Hamburg: Carl Hoym Nachf., 1924), 66–67.
2.From late 1922 on, Lenin had initiated a broad fight within the Soviet leadership around a number of issues, including the national question, defense of the monopoly of foreign trade, and the alliance with the peasantry. At the root of many of these questions was the growing bureaucratization of the Communist Party, whose general secretary was Stalin. To wage this fight, Lenin had formed a bloc with Trotsky, urging him to champion their common positions on these questions within the party leadership, and he had called for Stalin to be removed as general secretary.
3.For Trotsky’s view of these controversies, see Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1996), part 2, section 4, 107–15.
4.In his report to the June 1923 ECCI meeting, Zinoviev admitted, “At the time, to be sure, I did have reservations” about the united-front policy. In Mike Taber, ed., The Communist International at a Crossroads: Plenums of the Communist International Executive Committee, 1922–1923 (Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill, 2017).
5.Protokoll Fünfter Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale, 335–39. For the record of the Fourth Congress, see Toward the United Front, Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.
6.Tânia Puschnerat, Clara Zetkin: Bürgerlichkeit und Marxismus (Essen: Klartext, 2003), 296.
7.For the text of Zetkin’s letter, see www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/zetkin/1927/10/zkkpd.html.
8.Puschnerat, 305–6.
9.Gilbert Badia, Clara Zetkin, féministe sans frontières (Paris: Les Éditions ouvrières, 1993), 276–78.
10.Ibid., 278. For the text of Zetkin’s letter, see Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, 6 (1991), 787–88.
11.Zetkin’s 3,500-word text was published in Internationale Presse-Korrespondenz, vol. 8, no. 64, 1172–73 and no. 65, 1189–90. For a quite different criticism of the draft program, see Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin.
12.Puschnerat, 364–66. The entire proceedings of this ECCI meeting are found in Tânia Ünlüdag, “Die Tragödie einer Kämpferin für die Arbeiterbewegung,” IWK 33 (1997), 337–47. For the controversy involving Kun and Zetkin in 1921, see To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International.
13.Puschnerat, 370.
14.Ibid., 370–72, 377, 380.
15.The “theory of the offensive” was advanced by majority leaders in the KPD following the adventurist “March Action” of 1921 to justify their policies in launching that action and to propose that such policies continue. The theory called on Communists to radicalize their slogans and initiate minority actions that could sweep the hesitant workers into action.
16.Zetkin’s record of her discussions with Lenin on the Third Congress is included in To the Masses, 1137–48. The entire text of Zetkin’s Reminiscences of Lenin can be found on the Marxists Internet Archive site.
17.Puschnerat, 381.
18.Ibid., 378.
19.One exception has been noted. In 1932 Zetkin assented to her editor’s insertion into a message of greetings she had written of a reference to Stalin as an “outstanding and brilliant leader.” See Puschnerat, 384.
20.Badia, 288–89, Puschnerat, 374.
21.Puschnerat, 376.
22.Zetkin had defended Luxemburg at the March 1926 ECCI plenum against similar attacks made in the German party. Her speech was published in the record of the plenum.
23.Puschnerat, 377; Badia, 282, 290.
24.Badia, 300–301.
25.Ibid., 264.
26.Ibid., 302–3.
27.Translated from www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/zetkin/1932/08/alterspraes.html. For the entire text of Zetkin’s Reichstag speech, see Mike Jones and Ben Lewis, ed., Clara Zetkin: Letters and Writings (London: Merlin Press, 2015), 169–73, or Philip S. Foner, ed., Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 170–75.