THE THREE INTERNATIONALS

Hokitika Guardian, 28 November 1929, Page 8

THE THREE INTERNATIONALS

(Auckland Star.)

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that at the prosnt moment the Third International is the most powerful political organisation in the world. Its emissaries and agents and spies are in every land pushing ;their propaganda insidiously and energetically and diffusing far and wide the spiril of revolt against everything that the modern world has come to associate with the idea of civilisation. But more than this as a factor in international affairs, the Third International exercises a potent influence on the relations between the Great Power • and iti is chiefly because the Soviet Government cannot and will not dissociate itself from these malign activities that America and Britain have so long declined diplomatic relations with Russia, and that the whole Empire is now watching the Labour Government’s tentative "rapprochement” with the gravest apprehension for the future.

How has it come about that an organisation which has no definite political standing, and has not generally been identified with any special' political authority, can exercise such far-reaching influence on the course of world affairs? To answer this question it is necessary to turn the pages of European history backward over at least eighty years. The International whose headquarters are now located at Moscow is the third organisation to bear this title, and is united to its predecessors by their comm,(Vi, faith in the teachings yff Karl Marx. It is eighty years since Marx and Engels issued the famous Communist manifesto in which they called upon "the workers of the world” to unite against their masters and by overthrowing capitalism to prepare the way for the new millennium of power, peace and happiness for the wage-earners; and it was on the basis of these doctrines that the First International was founded. Starting in 1864, the First International adopted the principles of the Communist Manifesto as its profession of faith. It was speedily convulsed and eventually rent in two bv an .agitation lied by Bakunin, the Russian Anarchist, in favour of his own negative and destructive doctrines! and though the Marxists survived the conflict, the First Internaional finally collapsed as the result of tho failure of the French Commune in 1871 and the ’discredit that this sanguinary revolt had brought upon the Socialist cause. But the doctrines of Marx spread far and wide, more especially in Central Europe, and in 1889 the Second lnteirnatioual was founded, chiefly through the efforts of the German Social Democrats. It eventually included 27 countries and claimed a membership of over twelve millions. It met in conference every three years, but in the intervals its \\ork was done by a permanent Socialist Bureau, which carried out its resolutions and superintended the diffusion of Marxist teachings throughout tho world. To summarine these doctines it is sufficient to say that they implied the destruction of private capitalism by a world-wide revolution which would set up a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” in absolute control of social, political and industrial affairs. The title "international” implied not so much co-operation between workers in different countries as the submergence of all racial and national distinctions and the unity or solidarity of wage-earners everywhere. This in its turn implied that workers everywhere would refuse to fight against their brothers of other lands in wars engineered by capitalists or politicians or kings; and it was on this rock that the Second International was in its turn shipwrecked. For when the Groat" War broke out the call of patriotism and the tradition of national duty proved stronger than the voice of Marx, and most of the (Socialists, even in Germany, joined manfully in the fray. At first the groups forming the Second International divided simply into Pacifists and Nationalists; but in 1915. at a conference held at Zimmerwaid, the anti-war Socialists began to separate themselves .from all iothcr Socialist bodies by preaching the need for prompt and vigorous action against a decayed and discredited "capitalist” civilisation. It was at the Zimmerwaid Conference that Lenin, already well known as an extremist in Russia, made himself conspicuous by insisting on a definite line of demarcation between the moderate German Socialists and the "left wingers” who maintained the Marxist dogma in its most extreme logical form. Various attempts were made, at Stockholm and elsewhere, to heal the breach, but the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917 gave Lenin his opportunity. Bv the end of the year the Bolsheviks had practical control of Russia, and in January, 1919, invitations] were issued from Moscow for a conference at which the Third or Communist International was fiaubv founded. Meantime the more moderate Marxian Socialists held a conference at Berne in February, 191;).. and reconstructed the old Second Intelnational as far as possible on j tlie original lines. A furious controversy ensued between the two organisations.. Kautsky for the German SoeudcJs denouncing Bolshevism, and Lenin insisting that the Bolsheviks arc tho only true and lineal heirs and exponents of the Marxist tradition. Tbe '

adherents of the Second International believe in "evolutionary” Socialism by slow and peaceful means. But the Third International is aggressive and militant, it maintains the necessity for a "cataclysmic” revolution, and it is this propagation of violent and destructive revolutionary teaching that gives it tho importance it has acquired in the eyes of the world to-day.