Comintern: Revolutionary Internationalism in Lenin's Time

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ten” that world victory, a task in which working people inside and
outside soviet territory had an equal stake.
This victory required breaking from and exposing the “socialchauvinist
current” — social democrats who had supported the imperialist
war and, after the war, helped repress workers in order to
rebuild the capitalist state.
The International also criticized those who favoured reuniting
chauvinists and revolutionaries in a single movement.
However, the congress proposed a bloc with revolutionary forces
that previously stood outside the socialist movement but now had
been won to the banner of soviet power.
The resolutions of the Communist International’s founding congress
were far from comprehensive. Very little was said on colonial
liberation, for example, and only a few brief paragraphs on the oppression
of women.
Its main achievement lay in hoisting the banner of the new movement.
This action was swiftly vindicated. In the three months following
the founding congress, mass workers’ parties in Italy, Norway,
Sweden, and Bulgaria joined the International, while parties in
Germany, France, and Britain opened negotiations to join.
On the International’s first anniversary, in March 1920, Lenin was
able to say, “The Communist International has been successful beyond
all expectation.”
Building Revolutionary Parties
In March 1919, the founding congress of the Communist International
called on workers of the world to unite “under the banner of
workers’ councils and the revolutionary struggle for power.”
The appeal succeeded beyond its founders’ expectations. During
the year that followed, organizations representing millions of
workers on several continents declared support for the new International.
Indeed, the International noted in August 1920 that the statements
of support it was receiving had become “rather fashionable.” In
conditions of capitalist collapse and near civil war across most of
Europe, some working class leaders whose course was far from revolutionary
felt compelled to pay lip service to the new International.
Many figures who had betrayed the working class during the First
World War were knocking at the International’s doors.
But little progress had been made in organizing revolutionary-