THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT :

FROM COMINTERN TO COMINFORM .

A REVIEW .

Simon Mohun

INTRODUCTION [1l

It is a commonplace that the history of the international Communist movement is

inextricably linked with the foreign policy of the USSR . For the non-Communist
Party left, the latter history is one of a sequence of policies which abandoned the
revolutionary struggle in order to seek a modus vivendi with capitalism . While the
motive for such policies was to preserve the position of the Soviet bureaucracy,
their consequence was to facilitate the preservation of world capitalism .
Moreover, the circularity of cause and effect in this instance has long been
recognised on the left, albeit with different degrees of emphasis . Thus for his
publishers to claim that Fernando Claudin s book The Communist Movement is the
first Marxist attempt to come to terms with the tragic history of the international
Communist movement, is nonsense, and does Claudin himself a disservice . For
revolutionary Marxists the world over the analysis of this history constitutes the
first step in a reclamation of that heritage that was largely lost with the triumph of
Stalinism in the USSR in the 1920s . That the heritage was not destroyed completely
was due to Trotsky, and, following his assassination, to the Trotskyist movement,
but the isolation of such a tradition from the struggles of the proletariat confined
its influence primarily to the revolutionary intelligentsia . The great merit of
Claudin's book in this context is that he correctly sees his work as a step in the
direction of the creation of a new Marxist revolutionary vanguard . The compre-
hensiveness of his analysis and the large number of questions he poses as to
revolutionary strategy and tactics can therefore only be warmly welcomed .
Claudin was a member of the Spanish Communist Party . A student of
architecture and leader of the Young Communists in Madrid, around 1933 he
became a full-time revolutionary . As for so many others, the year 1956 was for him
a watershed . The revelations of that year prompted the question :

"what sort of Marxism was this of ours, with its two sides, theoretical and
practical, which, instead of helping us to interpret reality, had hidden it from
us and disguised it? In my own case, the answer to this fundamental question


THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT: FROM COMINTERN TO COMINFORM 129

came to light through a long and painful settlement of accounts with twenty-
five years of education in Stalinism, and through a series of conflicts within
the leadership of the Communist Party of Spain, to which I had belonged
since 1947" (Claudin 1975, p . 8) .[2)

Expelled from the Party in 1%5, Claudin was free to devote his energies to the
search for a solution to his question . His book is the first outcome of this search, a
contribution to the Marxist analysis of the political theory and practice of Marxism
since the Bolshevik Revolution . And his starting point is the identification of a
general and irreversible crisis in the world Communist movement, a crisis
commencing during the 1950s and affecting all Stalinist parties, whether they be
instruments for the exercise of power or instruments for the struggle for power .
This identification is coterminous with a critical examination of Stalinist ideology
qua revolutionary ideology and hence an examination of the organisation and
history of the Communist International for the causes of the crisis .

THE CRISIS OF THEORY

Claudin begins with an account of the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 . He

contrasts the Stalinist justification for this drastic step - to cement the alliance of
all freedom-loving nations against the common Nazi enemy (Stalin), to act upon
the recognition that the Comintern's historical experience had revealed the
inadequacy of its structures (ECCI)(3) - with the reality . The International was
dissolved in order to facilitate the success of Stalin's negotiations with Roosevelt
and Churchill, negotiations whose aim was both to secure the Nazi defeat, and
then to partition the world into spheres of influence between the Big Three . But
Claudin considers that Stalin could only dissolve the Comintern because the
latter's analyses of the capitalist world had continually been at variance with
capitalist reality . Moreover, these contradictions had already existed in Lenin's
lifetime . Thus the liquidation of the Comintern, at a crucial moment in world
history for the socialist movement, was premised on what Claudin calls

"the plane of the conceptions that served as the theoretical foundation for
the Comintern's political activity and organic structures" (p . 40) .

At the time of the Comintern's inception, these conceptions had seemed

compelling enough . The contradictions of imperialism had engendered the
complete maturation of the objective conditions for international revolution ; this
would be triggered by revolution in that country where both the concentration of
contradictions was greatest (weakest link in the chain) and there existed a political
instrument adequate theoretically, politically and organisationally, to the task of
the seizure of power, that is, where there existed a Bolshevik Party . Given that- the
victory of revolution in the more advanced capitalist countries of Europe would
determine the successful conclusion of world revolution, it was critically
important in these countries to establish a revolutionary party of the Bolshevik
type . Since the inevitable ebb of the revolutionary tide could not be predicted
with certainty, the Bolsheviks had to encourage and facilitate the formation of
such vanguards with the utmost urgency .


130 CAPITAL & CLASS

Claudin s attack on this schema is two-pronged, both considering the

adequacy of the Leninist party as an instrument for the seizure of power in
conditions very different from those of Tsarist Russia, and assessing the coherence
of the Bolshevik schema for international revolution in the immediate post-war
years . The prongs together thereby expose for him a theoretical crisis in revolu-
tionary Marxism .
The examination of the particular conditions within which the Bolsheviks had
to work is clearly a necessary part of any assessment of the lessons to be learnt
from the Bolshevik experience . In Russian society, a society which exhibited
strong centrifugal tendencies because of Great Russian domination over oppressed
nations and minorities, the proletariat was a tiny fraction scattered in small
concentrations amidst an overwhelmingly peasant population ; hence, in a milieu
of illegality and repression, the structure and activities of the Bolshevik group
could not but develop the almost military features of hierarchical centralisation
and rigid discipline . In the Russian context however, these were not, in Claudin's
opinion, negative developments . The Bolshevik Party was the distinctive product
of the circumstances in which it had to operate ; moreover, its effectiveness and
cohesion were formed and structured by ceaseless political and ideological
struggles both against capital and against the Mensheviks and Social Revolution-
aries . Thus the revolutionary process was characterised by vigour but also by
depth ; revolutionary intellectuals fought for the successful assimilation of
Marxism in the Russian labour movement, and this struggle reveals

"the permanent tension between the tendencies to ultra-centralism and

military discipline on the one hand, and the party's intense theoretical and
political life on the other . Lenin's unusual personality, in which a will to
scientific rigour was combined in remarkable fashion with a will to effective-
ness in struggle, contributed in no small degree to maintaining this dynamic
tension in unity" (p . 117) .

However, such "dynamic tension in unity" was peculiarly a product of

Russian conditions, and while the "Twenty-One Conditions" (which the Second
Congress of the Comintern decided should determine the admission of parties to
its membership) attempted an international assimilation of the Bolshevik
experience, in fact these conditions comprised, for Claudin, an organisational
solution to the political problem of internationalising the Russian Revolution .
Thus his criticisms are essentially concerned with the organisational centralism
which was established, and with the policy of Bolshevisation through splitting ;
they constitute the first prong of his attack on the Bolshevik schema .
The points about organisational centralism are fairly obvious . The ECCI was
perforce based in Moscow and was financially dependent primarily on the Soviet
state . The Russians had a wealth of talent upon which to draw for any particular
issue and invariably put forward a single and consistent viewpoint . By contrast the
other principal delegations, many having had to travel to Moscow secretly, were
by no means unanimous and could thereby by played off one against the other in
both inter- and intra-delegational disputes . Much more important initially, though,
was the theoretical and political authority enjoyed by the Russians, an authority
naturally accruing to those who had successfully demonstrated their revolutionary


THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT : FROM COMINTERN TO COMINFORM 131

abilities . Thus Serrati (of the Italian Socialist Party) asked at the Second Congress,

"What am I compared with Comrade Lenin? He is the leader of the Russian

revolution . I represent a tiny communist socialist party" (Cited in Carr 1953,
p . 199) .

Clearly premised in such an attitude was the absence of any contradiction

between this system of leadership on the one hand, and, on the other, the
complex nationaF reality of each country to which each national section of the
Comintern had to adapt in order that prospects of revolutionary success be
anything other than remote . For Claudin, the contradiction is anything other than
absent and in his support he cites Lenin of 1906 . Lenin wrote an approving preface
to an article of Kautsky's on the driving forces of the Russian revolution in which
he emphasised how essential to the international revolutionary movement was the
help of such authorities as Kautsky, but Lenin then qualified his remarks in the
following way :

"Important though this authority is in widening the horizon of the fighters, it

would be impermissible in the workers' party to claim that the practical and
concrete questions of its immediate policy can be solved by those standing a
long way off . The collective spirit of the progressive class-conscious workers
immediately engaged in the struggle in each country will always remain the
highest authority on all such questions" (p . 116) .

But Claudin fails to recognise sufficiently the relative immaturity of the

various national sections of the International ; such immaturity impelled the ECCI
to intervene in the national sections over questions of revolutionary politics which
should have been axiomatic . It was this same immaturity which the Bolsheviks
considered dictated the necessity of the twenty-first condition for admission to the
International . The point of the splitting policy was not, as Martov claimed,

"to erect a solid wall against the invasion of elements capable of claiming a
share in the taking of decisions for themselves and for their own parties"
(Cited in Care 1953, p. 200) .

Rather it was to expose the connection between imperialism and opportunism in

the labour movement, a connection which had fatally flawed the Second Inter-
national .(4] It was to discredit and expel from the revolutionary workers'
movement those such as Kautsky, Hilferding, Turati, Longuet and MacDonald,
who had capitulated to social chauvinism . Hence a divorce had to be effected
within the centrist parties, particularly the German USPD, the Italian PSI and the
British ILP, splitting the leadership from the rank and file, and thereby attracting
the latter into the ranks of the Third International .
However, Claudin makes some trenchant criticisms of the practice of the
splitting policy . Clearly there is nothing undesirable about a split in the labour
movement if it emerges as the outcome of a sustained political and ideological
struggle against capital, as indeed it must emerge if that struggle is to be success-
fully pursued . But the practice of the adherents to the Third International, on the


132 CAPITAL & CLASS

basis of the "Twenty-One Conditions", was to organise splits in a mechanical way,

and thereby, according to Claudin, "to create chemically pure Bolshevik parties
overnight" (p . 109) . To engage in such a procedure was seriously to misunderstand
the relationship between leaders and rank and file in the cultural milieu of
Western Europe . Of course such splits were necessary, even critical, but as the
outcome of a political struggle rather than the imposition of an organisational'
procedure . The pursuit of the latter in Western European conditions could only
have the effect of splitting communists, not from the opportunists, but from the
body of the labour movement, because the basis of such a movement was

"a working class which had for decades been trained in the reformist spirit, in
parliamentary and trade-union activity - a working class which, in its great
majority, had supported the 'traitor' leaders in entering into union sacree with
their respective bourgeoisies" (p . 109) .

This then is the burden of the second prong of Claudin's attack on the
Bolshevik schema : the Bolsheviks overemphasised the possibilities of revolution in
the West because of an underestimation of the depth of reformism in the working
class. The issue is not simply a question of recognising that the conditions of
bourgeois legality, democracy and constitutionalism pertaining in Western Europe
required a different strategy and tactics from that appropriate to Tsarist Russia .
Indeed, on one level, Lenin explicitly denied the meaningfulness of such a
difference : his "ultra-left" writings on parliamentary tactics were developed not
only in response to Russian conditions but also in implacable hostility to the
reformist illusions of German Social Democracy and thereby of the Second Inter-
national . For example, he declared that after the imperialist war of 1914-18,

"defence of direct or indirect alliances with the bourgeoisie of one's own

country against the revolutionary proletariat and the 'Soviet' movement, and
defence of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarianism against
'Soviet power' became the principal manifestations of those intolerable and
treacherous compromises, whose sum total constituted an opportunism fatal
to the revolutionary proletariat and its cause" (Lenin, Vol . 31, p . 69) .(5]

Of course Lenin was not arguing that communists should not use bourgeois
parliaments ; but the only point of such parliamentarianism was to win mass
support . Yet since the parliamentary game in each country was played according
to different and constantly changing rules, it was unlikely that the pursuit of a
single set of instructions from Moscow would facilitate success in that game .
Recollections of Bolshevik tactics towards the Tsarist Duma, and a uniform
instruction from the Second Congress to "utilise bourgeois state institutions in
order to destroy them" (Cited in Carr 1953, p . 200) - just as British Communists
were to support Labour leaders with their votes as the rope supports the hanging
man, since Labour in power would destroy all illusions as to the true political
function of Labour leaders - were no substitute for a detailed analysis of the ways
whereby the loyalty of the Western proletariat to their social democratic order and
its state institutions could be subverted in each country .
Thus the problem was not merely one of organisational over-centralisation . It


THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT: FROM COMINTERN TO COMINFORM 133

was also that the bourgeoisie had for decades "educated" its proletariat into a
proper understanding of the theory and practice of bourgeois democracy . Hence a
tabula rasa conception of political backwardness could not be ascribed to the
proletariat in the bourgeois democracies . Rather, in these countries the establish-
ment of a revolutionary consciousness involved the active transformation of an
already well-developed political consciousness, since this latter was encapsulated
by an acceptance of the validity and appropriateness of bourgeois democracy . . (6]
Western workers did not perceive themselves as having nothing to lose but their
chains . They had a standard of living, tenaciously won through trade union
struggle, which they were unwilling to sacrifice lightly to what they saw as the
chimera of revolution, involving as it must war and civil war . Hence, as Claudin
points out, with the ebb of the revolutionary tide, economist and reformist
attitudes reasserted themselves among the majority of workers . Consequently,
Communist Parties could either maintain doctrinal purity at the expense of
political isolation from the labour movement, or could enter existing Social
Democratic Parties in order to win influence from within ; but the latter course
involved the compromise of loyalty, albeit temporary and conditional, to the
bourgeois world, thereby inviting the charge of treachery and dishonesty so
damaging to Communist prospects of mass support .
Accordingly, the practice of the "Twenty-One Conditions" meant that to
break with reformism in the prescribed manner also meant to break with the mass
of the workers . Communists appeared as splitters, as responsible for divisions
within the working class, and, on the whole, Communist Parties were confined to
minority sections of the working class . The Comintern's response was the united
front tactic, adopted by the ECCI in December 1921, following the Third Congress
in June and July of that year . But this tactic implied a situation in which
Communist Parties, formed through the break with reformist traitors, were
instructed to form common fronts with these same traitors . The policy of the-
united front seemed more than a tactical adjustment to a new situation - with no
fundamental analysis of the problems of post-war capitalism or of the roots of
reformism to guide them, some revolutionaries became disillusioned with what
they saw as the betrayal of Comintern principles . Many others, however, never
wholly convinced by Bolshevism, were much happier with the united front tactic,
interpreted as the reinstatement of the well-tried maximum-minimum principle of
pre-war social democracy. Claudin's argument is therefore that

"This underestimation of the penetration of reformism into the Western

proletariat was a symptom of theoretical shortcomings that were to have an
effect on the political plane in the way that the new revolutionary party was
created, the way its structures and mode of working were conceived and its
tasks worked out" (p . 58) .

For Lenin and the Bolsheviks the 1914-18 War provided evidence enough that
world capitalism in its imperialist stage had arrived at a terminal situation .
However, Claudin considers that too much stress was placed on the destructive
aspect of the contradictions of capitalism, and too little recognition given to the
role of these contradictions in adapting capitalism to its own dynamic through a
transformation of its elements via the restructuring of capital . Thus it was not only


134 CAPITAL & CLASS

imperialism qua colonial exploitation which provided the material basis for
reformism in the labour movement ; such a basis was also provided by the
structural transformation of capitalism through the development of the productive
forces . The Bolshevik conception of a capitalism which was "moribund", with a
revolutionary proletariat which merely lacked a party capable of organising and
directing the irresistible revolutionary process, was refuted by the historical
process itself, refuted both in the specific conjunctural sense and, for Claudin, in a
general theoretical sense . Claudin sees this as a crisis in theory, pointing to the
objective immaturity, not of the capability of the productive forces to provide the
adequate material basis for the socialist transformation of society, but rather of
revolution itself . Necessary conditions for the maturity of revolution are both the
existence of productive forces which can support the new order and the inability
of capitalism to develop new productive forces . The immaturity of revolution in
Western Europe is shown by the failure of the second condition, and it is this
which constitutes the material basis of reformist ideology : reformism is "secreted
organically by the system's capacity to develop the productive forces" (p . 100) .
Hence what is necessary is that the system be revealed incapable of further
developing the forces of production without a revolutionary transformation of the
relations which structure such development . Only then do sections of the intelli-
gentsia search for a theory adequate to the solution of the crisis . Thus mid-
nineteenth century Germany had Marx and Engels, early twentieth century Russia
had Lenin, and China from the late 1920s had Mao . However, the terminal nature
of all these societies was the result of contradictions between capitalist and pre-
capitalist elements . In the nineteenth century German case, the working class had
not yet developed sufficiently to prevent a capitalist resolution of these contra-
dictions, but in the twentieth century imperialist world, permanent revolution
ensured their resolution in terms of an uninterrupted transition from autocracy to
proletarian revolution . By contrast, advanced capitalist countries lack a complete
theory of revolution . Such is the thrust of Claudin's argument - the Bolsheviks
failed to recognise this absence, and hence failed to recognise the existence of a
crisis in Marxist theory, its material content and its practical consequences .
Claudin's argument is thus a complex one, relating on the one hand the
splitting policy adopted by the Comintern towards the European working
classes, with, on the other hand, the theoretical paucity of the Comintern's
analysis of reformism among those same working classes . However, his argument
is centrally ambivalent . For if the splitting policy was a mistake, then either the
European Social Democratic Parties were not in fact irreversibly tied to their own
bourgeoisies, or, if they were, there was no alternative to reformism since the
objective conditions did not allow of the possibility of socialist revolution . Either
approach capitulates to reformism through an inability to comprehend the nature
of the state and the processes, pace Claudin's argument, whereby bourgeois rule is
maintained . It thereby fatally compromises the ideological independence of the
working class, for everyday politics are constrained to conform to the limits
defined by the self-expansion of capital .
Claudin never confronts this difficulty . Instead, on the one hand, he correctly
criticises the tendencies towards fatalistic and catastrophic Marxism which
emerged in the first years of the Comintern ; and he demonstrates, as a precon-
dition for the determination of revolutionary strategy and tactics in the West, the


THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT: FROM COMINTERN TO COMINFORM 135

necessity of an account of reformism in those social formations in which

bourgeois rule engenders mass consent to its continuance . On the other hand, he
proceeds to link these correct points to an attack which caricatures the Leninist
theory of the party, interpreting Marx's view of revolution as the self-emancipation
of the class and contrasting it with what he sees as Lenin's substitution of the party
for the class as prime mover (pp . 624-38) . Hence thus far, Claudin's theses amount
to a stimulating and sophisticated apologia for a left social democracy .

THE CRISIS OF POLICY

But Claudin's book is very much more than this . For it is also a detailed and
convincing account of the consequences of the transmission of the degeneration
of the Bolshevik Party through the Comintern to the latter 's constituent national
sections .
Claudin rightly points out that until 1922-3, there was a consistent attempt to
apply the principles of proletarian internationalism to Comintern activity . Indeed,
as long as revolutionary Marxism remained the method and world revolution the
goal, internationalism survived, despite the "impermissible" interference of the
Bolsheviks in the political activity and internal organisation of the various national
sections . The contradictions between the general theory of world revolution and
the specificity of historical development, and between the centralised structure of
the Comintern and the national differences of its sections - these contradictions
were essentially attenuated by the genuine commitment to revolutionary
Marxism . Hence while for Claudin,

"The Cominterni s theoretical paralysis may be explicable 'in the final

instance' by the objective immaturity of the revolution in advanced capitalist
society . even so, we must concern ourselves above all with those other
'instances' that contributed to accentuating and aggravating the effects of the
'final' one" (p . 102) .

These other "instances" are dominated by the consequences of the theory of

socialism in one country, the subordination of revolutionary internationalism to a
reactionary national standpoint .
Now these consequences have been drawn in the past, especially by Trotsky
1928, 1930, and by Deutscher 1%7, and have been related to the degeneration of
the Russian Revolution in the 1920s .[7) Of this latter process itself, Claudin gives
the most cursory treatment . His analyses of the mode of production in the USSR
are slight and limited to remarks rather than to argument . Thus he talks of

"the Stalinist model, in which the abolition of capitalist property did not
mean the taking over of the means of production by the workers themselves,
but their exploitation by a new privileged social group, whose bureaucratic
domination was based on ideological mystification, the abolition of political
liberties and the most enormous police apparatus in history" (p . 389) .

And his most detailed analysis runs as follows :



136 CAPITAL & CLASS

"Neither capitalist nor socialist, it was based on the exploitation of the main
means of production by a new type of social class which began to grow up out
of the elements capable of taking on the most useful and most urgent
functions in a ruined and starving country, the organisation and control of the
economy . Believing subjectively - at least for a time - that it was building
socialism and embodied the dictatorship of the proletariat, that it was putting
Marxism into practice, this new ruling class became the real beneficiary of the
means of production, immune to any intervention or control by the mass of
the workers, and gradually acquired the subjective characteristics of a
dominant class" (p . 599) .

His lack of clarity thus produces a phraseology that is very loose, particularly as
regards this

"new ruling class which established itself on the ruins of the democracy of
the soviets" (p .641) .[8)

It is not at all clear from Claudin s analysis why such a rapid development of the
forces of production took place in the USSR, for he has no analysis of the dynamic
of post-capitalist societies upon which to predicate a discussion of their social
structure . Consequently, it is not clear why, for example, -

"At the end of the 1940s . . the socio-political structures had already come
into contradiction with the level reached by the productive forces and with
the needs of their further development" (p . 599) .

Now in fairness to Claudin, it should be said that it was not part of his
intention to write a general analysis of the Soviet regime under Stalin, because he
identifies the general crisis of the Communist movement as occurring historically
at its periphery, being exposed by the failure of the Comintern . This failure was
further cumulated by the failure of the Western Communist Parties after 1945 ; and
only when the internal contradictions of the Soviet regime came to a head in 1956
did the partial and peripheral crises merge with the crisis at the centre to form one
single generalised crisis of the whole Communist movement .[9)
Within this framework, Claudin quite correctly remarks that Stalin's triumph

"signified, in the last analysis, that the world revolution, in all of its phases
and episodes, was to be subordinated to the requirements of building social-
ism in the USSR . Let us be clear about this . Revolution, wherever it really
appears, does not bow to any authority or theory . What was made to bow
was the political and theoretical activity of the Comintern, of its national
sections . The Comintern's ultra-centralised structures, with its all-powerful
Executive Committee at the top of the pyramid, itself supervised by the Soviet
party leadership, constituted the ideal mechanism for ensuring this subordin-
ation in practice" (p . 57) .

And the great majority of his book is devoted to an immanent critique of the theory
of socialism in one country . In considerable detail he analyses the German


THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT : FROM COMINTERN TO COMINFORM 137

experience from 1918 to 1933, and this, together with a critique of the
Comintern's politics in the "third period", amply confirms Trotsky's comments
of 1936:

"The fact is that in its capacity as leader of the Communist International the
nationally limited and conservative, ignorant and irresponsible Soviet bureau-
cracy has brought nothing but misfortune to the workers' movement of the
world . As though in historic justice, the present international position of the
Soviet Union is determined to a far higher degree by the consequences of the
defeat of the world proletariat than by the successes of an isolated socialist
construction . It is sufficient to recall that the defeat of the Chinese revolution
in 1925-7, which untied the hands of Japanese militarism in the East, and the
shattering of the German proletariat which led to the triumph of Hitler and
the mad growth of German militarism are alike the fruits of the policy of the
Communist International" (Trotsky 1937, p . 183) .

Following the turn to popular front politics via the Seventh Congress of the
Comintern, Claudin examines the ensuing debacles in Spain and in France,
considers the Comintern's policy towards colonialism, and details the catastrophic
effects of its policies in China . He then concludes his analysis of the pre-war period
with a discussion of the Nazi-Soviet pact, which Claudin regards as having
facilitated the German conquest of Europe through its contribution to the
demoralisation of the opponents of Fascism . He cites Molotov's speech of 31
October, 1939 :

"Our relations with Germany have radically improved . Here development has
proceeded along the line of strengthening our friendly relations, extending
our practical cooperation and rendering Germany political support in her
efforts for peace . . . We have always held that a strong Germany is an indis-
pensable condition for durable peace in Europe" (p . 296) .

And in August 1940 Molotov announced to the Supreme Soviet,

"The good neighbourly and friendly relations that have been established
between the Soviet Union and Germany are not based on fortuitous consider-
ations of a transient nature, but on the fundamental interests of both the
USSR and Germany" (p . 297) .(10)

Since Soviet archives are not freely open to historians, Claudin speculates that
Soviet policy towards Hitler from 1939 to 1941 was no different from his policy
towards the USA from 1943 to the present - that is, a policy aimed at partitioning
the world between the USSR and the dominant imperialist power of the time, and
then conserving that partition . As regards this particular case, Claudin remarks,

"Of all the 'turns' made by the Comintern, none was more contrary to the
interests of the working class movement or more prejudicial to the Comintern
itself than the one that resulted from the Soviet-German pact of August
1939" (p. 294) .


138 CAPITAL & CLASS

Each thematic episode in the history of the international Communist

movement vividly demonstrates the practical consequences of the theory of
socialism in one country . If Claudin shows this clearly in the period to 1941, he is
especially convincing in the period after World War Two . He begins his account of
the "zenith of Stalinism" with a discussion of the reformism of the PCF and the
PCI, and its role in a post-war settlement which made Western Europe safe for
capital . His analysis of the period after 1943 when the Red Army had decisive
military superiority in Europe and when the radical wing of the Resistance had
reached the peak of its influence is especially illuminating . Under directions from
Moscow, the authority of the Gaullists was recognised in France, and that of the
Christian Democrats in Italy ; no hindrance was placed in the way of the crushing
of the Greek Revolution ; and only the independence of the Communists in
Yugoslavia enabled them to withstand Soviet pressure . Thus, as Claudin
comments,

"Stalin, with the help of Western Communist leaders who faithfully applied
his policies, made an invaluable contribution to solving the difficult problem
which faced the leaders of Anglo-American capitalism from 1939 onwards -
how to defeat their dangerous German rivals while still avoiding the danger
of revolution in the vital centres of European capitalism" (p . 435) .

Claudin then continues with an examination of the relationships between the

USSR and other Eastern and South-Eastern European countries, and with an
analysis of the Chinese Revolution . Finally, he considers the policies pursued by
the USSR towards the West from 1943 through to the early 'fifties . The unifying
theme of all of these concrete analyses is how Stalin's policies involved

"sacrificing the possibilities created by the defeat of the Fascist powers and
the bankruptcy of the other capitalist states of Continental Europe, in favour
of a lasting partition of the world into 'spheres of influence' of the USSR and
the USA" (p . 304) .

NATIONALISM, INTERNATIONALISM AND REVOLUTION

Undoubtedly, Claudin is sympathetic to the Trotskyist perspective ; but critically

sympathetic . He contrasts Stalin's subordination of the process of world revolution
to the building of socialism in the USSR with Trotsky's view of the dependence of
the latter on the former in the immediate future . However, what was wrong with
Trotsky's analysis was that it viewed class antagonisms, whether national or inter-
national, as absolute, and underestimated the complexity of the mediation of such
antagonisms. For example, the historical experience of the Second World War
showed how inter-imperialist rivalries could, within limits, supercede national and
international- class contradictions ; that Stalin could operate within these limits,
making concessions not at the expense of a restoration of capitalism in Russia -
as Trotsky thought inevitable without European revolution - but at the expense of
that revolutionary struggle in capitalist countries, shows what Claudin calls "the
real basis" (p . 83) giving substance to Stalin's national socialism . Rather than


THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT: FROM COMINTERN TO COMINFORM 139

European revolution deciding the fate of the USSR, the historical experience to
date of the converse demonstrates the relative autonomy of the October
Revolution from world revolution . Trotsky's weakness . according to Claudin, is to
reduce this autonomy to its most modest proportions, whereas Stalin's theory of
national socialism, itself an empirical generalisation of this autonomy, renders it
absolute .
For Claudin, the recognition of relative autonomy is another aspect of the
crisis in revolutionary theory, a crisis which the Fourth International has ignored as
much as the Third, a crisis exposed by the fidelity of the majority of the proletariat
in the West to social democracy and by the proofs given by capital of its ability to
restructure itself (both politically and economically) through its crises . Conse-
quently, what is required is the conscious recognition of the reciprocal relative
autonomy of revolutions and the conscious recognition of the limits of that
autonomy . The major problem of "defence of the USSR" could then be posed in
terms not of the unconditional acceptance of the Soviet model, but of mutual
collaboration and support, in terms appropriate to the different concrete
conditions within which each Communist Party has to operate .
It is here that the tension within Claudin's book is most apparent . For his
concrete analyses vividly relate the antithetical substitution of Stalinism for
Marxism to the failure of the Comintern's theory and practice, and demonstrate
how the substitution of the national for the international framework situates
Communist Parties firmly upon the terrain of reformist ideology . And yet his
theoretical analysis propels Claudin himself in the direction of reformism, in the
direction of rendering relative autonomy absolute . For he sees the roots of the
problem - an essentially pre-Stalinist overcentralisation of the Comintern in
conditions in which the latter's view of the world was blinkered by experience of
Russian conditions which were of little relevance to revolutionaries elsewhere -
as Leninist rather than Stalinist . Instead of sharply drawing the dividing line
between Lenin and Stalin, the drift of Claudin's argument forces him to attempt, in
his conclusion, to draw it between Marx and Lenin, thereby ascribing the
Bolshevik experience to the primordial nature of Russian civil society .
But this is the first step of a slide into the politics of the Second International .
It follows that there is a danger that, despite its damning historical analyses,
Claudin's book might be quite acceptable to those Communists who are rapidly
distancing themselves from the Soviet Union . For it could be used as justification
for the progressive abandonment of the Leninist emphases on the dictatorship of
the proletariat, democratic centralism, the class nature of the state, and revolu-
tionary internationalism . In their place appear inter-class alliances in governments
of advanced democracy, a supra-class concept of democracy, •a dangerous
flirtation with pluralist theories of the state, and a moralistic internationalism
coupled with the belief in national solutions to economic crisis . Thus the
ambivalence at the heart of Claudin's book is ultimately a treacherous one ; it
would indeed be ironic if his book contributed to that very substitution of
nationalism for internationalism which his concrete analyses so eloquently
condemn .
And yet Claudin's book is by no means the failure that this suggests . For he
repeatedly demonstrates just how the tactic of the popular front before the War,
and the anti-monopoly alliance after the War constituted an elementary class


140 CAPITAL & CLASS

betrayal . Electoralism, parliamentary cretinism, class collaboration on a national

scale; peaceful coexistence, class collaboration on an international scale ; such
was and is Communist politics .[11) At the Nineteenth Congress of the CPSU in
October 1952, Stalin advised the various Western Communist leaders present,

"If you wish to be patriots and become the leading force in your countries,
you must raise the banner of national independence and national sover-
eignty, of bourgeois democratic freedoms and peace" (p . 597) .

The strategy of perfecting bourgeois democracy, of regulating the anarchy of

capitalist production, of distributing differently surplus value, is a strategy upon
which Rosa Luxemburg trenchantly commented in 1899 :

"Revisionism does not expect to see the contradictions of capitalism mature .

It does not propose to suppress these contradictions through a revolutionary
transformation . It wants to lessen, to attenuate, the capitalist contradictions .
So that the antagonism existing between production and exchange is to be
mollified by the cessation of crises . . . The antagonism between Capital and
Labour is to be adjusted by bettering the situation of the workers and by the
conservation of the middle classes . And the contradiction between the class
State and society is to be liquidated through increased State control and the
progress of democracy" (Luxemburg 1972, pp . 66-7) .

In contrast, what is required is a strategy directed not against capitalists, but rather
against capital . In the absence of such a strategy, capital can use Communist
politics to recreate the conditions for its reproduction ; it can make seeming
political compromises (thus France and Italy, 1944-7) which in fact re-establish
rather than sacrifice the interests of capital . And as for the performance of the
bourgeois allies sought by Western Communist Parties, alliances across class lines
which seek to supercede the class struggle itself in varieties of "historic
compromise", the stage is continually set for a repetition of the situation which
Trotsky described with regard to Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang :

"they betrayed not their class but our illusions" (p . 282) .

The history of the international Communist movement is a tragic lesson in the

consequences of the abandonment of the fundamentals of revolutionary inter-
nationalism, and Claudin's book exposes this in its entirety . On these grounds
alone, and despite its internal contradictions which it ultimately fails to surmount,
Claudin's book deserves the widest possible readership .

NOTES

1 Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement : From Comintern To Cominform .

Peregrine, Harmondsworth, 1975 . 831pp . E4 .75 .


THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT : FROM COMINTERN TO COMINFORM 141

I am grateful for referees' comments on an earlier draft, but all responsibility

for content must remain my own .
2 All page references hereafter are to Claudin 1975 . unless otherwise stated .
3 Executive Committee of the Communist International .
4 See, for example, Lenin, Collected Works, Vol . 31, pp . 42, 43 and 46 .
5 But see also Lenin, Vol . 33, pp . 430-32 .
6 Varga in 1922 and Bordiga in 1926 also forcefully pointed out the differences
between Russian conditions and conditions elsewhere . See Carr 1964, pp. 498
and 501-3 .
7 This relation is not to date a completely successful one . Its rigorous establish-
ment requires an analysis of the Soviet mode of production, its dynamic, and
its relation to the world economy . This is a task which remains to be performed
with the requisite degree of precision .
8 See also pp . 395, 452 and 618-19 .
9 This general crisis is to be the subject of two further volumes by Claudin, the
first covering the period from the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU to the Sino-
Soviet split, and the second, from that split to the present .
10 It may be objected that a Marxist analysis should focus on what people do and
not on how they rationalise their actions . In this case, see Medvedev 1972,
pp . 440-52 .
11 Which is not of course to say that revolutionaries are against alliances and in
favour of nuclear war . It is another merit of Claudin's book that he demon-
strates that such canards have no place in any serious discussion of the strategy
and tactics of revolutionary struggle .

REFERENCES

Carr, E .H . (1953) The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Vol . Three. Macmillan,

London .
(1964) Socialism In One Country 1924-1926, Vol . Three . Macmillan,
London .
Claudin, F . (1975) The Communist Movement : From Comintern To Cominform .
Peregrine, Harmondsworth .
Deutscher, l . (1967) Stalin, A Political Biography, Oxford University Press,
London .
Lenin, V .I . (1960-70) Collected Works, Vols . 31 and 33, (Fourth ed .) Lawrence and
Wishart, London .
Luxemburg, R . (1972) Selected Political Writings, Ed . R . Looker, Jonathan Cape,
London .
Medvedev, R . (1972) Let History judge, Macmillan, London .
Trotsky, L.D . (1928) The Draft Programme of the Communist International - A
Criticism of Fundamentals. In The Third International After Lenin, Pathfinder
Press, New York, 1970 .
(1930) Introduction to the German Edition of The Permanent Revolution .


1 42 CAPITAL & CLASS

In The Permanent Revolution & Results And Prospects, Merit Publishers,

New York, 1969 .
Trotsky, L .D . (1937) The Revolution Betrayed, Faber and Faber, London .

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