Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
On 23 June 1921, a gathering of about 20 Communists in Moscow founded an international association to unify “revolutionary proletarian sports and gymnastics organizations … into support centers for the proletariat in its class struggle.”[1]
Merging sports and class struggle on a global scale? A (...)
Launched in 1923 in Moscow, the Peasant International, or Krestintern, was at least in organizational terms perhaps the least successful of the auxiliary bodies built by the Communist International (Comintern).
Within two years of its foundation, attention to the Peasant International “visibly (...)
Among the Communist International’s “auxiliary” work areas, the workers’ cooperatives were unique in terms of the Communists’ focus on working through a mainstream, reformist-dominated movement. The Comintern made no attempt to form a separate International of revolutionary-led cooperatives.
This (...)
The Comintern’s youth wing, sometimes referred to by its Russian acronym, KIM, was the direct continuation of the International Union of Socialist Youth Organization founded in 1907 under the aegis of the Second International.
When the outbreak of war in 1914 shattered the world socialist (...)
From its inception, the modern socialist movement upheld the social equality of women and opposed the pervasive discrimination to which they were subjected. The socialist movement itself, however, was overwhelmingly masculine in composition, and its members were far from immune to male (...)
By John Riddell: Clustered around the early Communist International’s world congresses were gatherings of an array of related organizations, ranging from the massive Red International of Trade Unions (RILU) to a small gathering of Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) enthusiasts.
These auxiliary (...)
By John Riddell: “In the 1920s, the Red International of Labour Unions was by far the most powerful and important of the auxiliary organizations related to the Comintern,” according to its historian, Reiner Tosstorff.[1] E.H. Carr goes further, suggesting that the Red International “sometimes (...)
The International Workers’ Aid (IWA), also known by its Russian acronym MRP, was launched as an emergency campaign to help alleviate a widespread famine in Soviet Russia. Founded in Berlin on September 12, it grew into a global movement seeking not only to assist economic construction in the (...)
“Fellow women workers and peasants, wake up and finally start acting”
From “Manifesto to working women around the world”, 10 July 1921
A hundred years ago, in 1921, the Second [Third] International Communist Women’s Congress was held in Moscow. Its “Мanifesto to working women around the world” (...)
The Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, organized by the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow and Petrograd in January-February 1922 was attended by delegations from China, Korea, Mongolia, the short-lived Far Eastern Republic, and Japan, as well as individual delegates from India (...)
A century ago this month, the new Soviet government summoned anti-colonial revolutionaries from across Asia to a gathering in Baku. The Baku Congress proved to be a watershed in the fight against European colonial domination and the rise of the Global South.
In Baku, Azerbaijan, one hundred (...)
The revolutionary activists who founded the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 had little contact with movements for national and colonial liberation outside Russia. Nonetheless, only a year later, in July 1920, the Comintern adopted a far-reaching strategy for national and social (...)
In 1917, the mass slaughter of World War 1 weighed on working people like a nightmare.
Then, in November, word spread that the working people of Russia had assumed governmental power. “It was like a bolt from the blue when the news came … of the establishing of the Soviet Government,” Canadian (...)
Review: To The Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921. Edited and translated by John Riddell. Brill, 2015, 1299 pages, $517 hardcover.
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IN LATE JUNE 1921, the Third Congress of the Communist International convened amidst great (...)
In a comment on this [John Riddell’s] website , Jara Handala raised a number of questions regarding the evolution of the Comintern’s position on fascism, a topic touched on in my article Weighing the Legacy of Lenin’s Comintern . I do not know of any full treatment of this topic in English. I am (...)
Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922. Edited and translated by John Riddell Haymarket Books, 2012, 1310 pages, $55 paperback.
WHEN THE COMMUNIST International was founded in March 1919, the world was in a time of revolutionary (...)
We have been having study sessions in Toronto on Toward the United Front, my book publishing the Fourth Comintern Congress proceedings, now available in paperback from Haymarket Books. Here’s my account of a recent session on discussion of anti-colonial struggle at the congress, reprinted from (...)
The newly published proceedings of the Communist International’s Fourth Congress, Toward the United Front, makes it possible for any socialist activist or independent researcher to make the acquaintance of a wide spectrum of revolutionaries of the 1920s, both prominent and obscure. No guide or (...)
On September 7, 2012, Toronto socialists presented and discussed the thoughts of delegates to the Communist International’s Fourth World Congress, 90 years earlier, on the freedom struggle in the colonies and semi-colonies. Six of these short talks are reproduced below, with the presenters’ (...)
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has committed one more utterly reprehensible action. Had there been a significant revolutionary Marxist alternative rooted in the working class and gathering in its fold a considerable part (even though a minority) of the revolutionary vanguard elements of (...)
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