Poster of the Comintern. File photo.
By Alan Freeman and Radhika Desai – May 1, 2023
Capital organises globally yet workers do not. As the US-led NATO powers escalate the Ukraine conflict into a new world war, this imbalance is becoming intolerable.
This paper presents the case for a worldwide anti-imperialist Left, representing ordinary people committed to a just and peaceful multipolar world order. This will serve both the national interest of every country, and the general interest of humanity.
We base our case on an historical assessment of the last such organization, the Communist International or Comintern for short, founded in 1919 and dissolved in 1943, and its two predecessors, the International Working Men’s Association or ‘First International’, founded in 1864 and dissolved in 1872, and the Second or “Socialist” International, founded in 1889 and dissolved in 1914.
The Comintern, the third attempt at a single world organisation of the working class, was as much a child of the world-historic 1917 revolution as the Soviet Union. Many Russians, including President Vladimir Putin, are reconsidering the wisdom of dissolving the USSR; it is time to also reassess the decision to abandon the project of an international organisation of propertyless people.
Our case is controversial because in the West, those parties that identify as “Left,” headed by the allegedly left-leaning US Democratic Party, almost unanimously endorse the US-led proxy war on Russia.
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Further confusion arises because many governments of the Right, such as India, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, actively oppose sanctions, promote alternative trading relations to those hitherto imposed by the USA, and insist that Russia’s legitimate security concerns be given due consideration.
This has led many in the nationalist wing of Russian politics to conclude that the interests of their country require alliances with the parties of the Western Right–notably the Trumpist Republican Party. Conversely the Western “Left” parties justify their support for NATO’s war aims as necessary to defeat Right wing forces, with whom they lump the current Russian government.
The entire paper may be read and downloaded here.
