Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
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 (...)
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 (...)
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. IN LATE JUNE 1921, the Third Congress of the Communist International convened amidst great confusion and contradictory (...)
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 (...)
.John Riddell, ed., Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2011. 1310 pp., €199.00 / $283.00 hardback, ISBN 9789004207783 John Riddell here begins bringing to a close an epic project of over ten years duration – (...)
A review by John Riddell of Zinoviev and Martov : Head to Head in Halle, edited by Ben Lewis and Lars T. Lih. The Thrilla in Halle ! A ringside seat, just for you, as Gregory Zinoviev (in the red trunks) and Julius Martov (his are pale pink) duke it out before delegates of the 700,000-member (...)
The concept of a workers’ government is the awkward child of the early Communist International. The thought it expresses is central to Marxism: that workers must strive to take political power. But in the early Comintern, it was attached to a perspective that was contentious for Marxists then (...)
Until recently, I shared a widely held opinion that the Bolshevik Party of Russia towered above other members of the early Communist International as a source of fruitful political initiatives. However, my work in preparing the English edition of the Comintern’s Fourth Congress, held at the end (...)
The eighth annual conference of Historical Materialism, held in London 10–13 November 2011, featured a coordinated stream of papers on the history of the world Marxist movement during the era of the Communist International (Comintern) (1919-43). The thirty-eight presentations in this stream (...)
Ben Lewis reports on some interesting exchanges at the ’Historical Materialism’ weekend.
The eighth annual Historical Materialism conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies last weekend was a genuine success, with four days rammed full of papers, plenaries and discussions. (...)
The influence of the Communist International was decisive in the early 1920s in winning a generation of black revolutionaries to Marxism. On this the historians agree. But what did this influence consist of, and how was it exerted?
This question was posed by a comment posted to this website (...)
English-language discussion of the Communist International’s 1922 call for workers’ governments has been based on a preliminary draft that was significantly altered before its adoption. Here, probably for the first time in English, is the amended text that the congress actually adopted.
The call (...)
The policy of the united front is among the most effective tools for working class action inherited from the era of VI Lenin and the Russian revolution. As originally formulated by the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern) in December 1921, united front policy called (...)
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