Clara Zetkin: The Work of the Third World Congress

of the Communist International

(August 1921)

[My own translation of the German text in "Kommunist, Organ der Vereinigten Kommunistischen Partei Württembergs", 17 August 1921, the issue of 18 August with the second part is missing from the Württemberg State Library. Corrections by English native speakers wound be extremely welcome]

The deliberations and decisions of the most recent meeting of the Third International seem to have a peculiar fate initially in the VKPD. At first, they are not given an unbiased evaluation, but an extremely diverse and contradictory interpretation. And this despite the fact that the complete and flawless texts of the deliberations and decisions are not yet available, indeed to a large extent precisely because such texts are not available. If they were available, many a bold assertion about such and such a "result" of the Congress would burst like a soap bubble.

A blind person can feel with a stick¹ the reason for this joy of interpretation, which is reminiscent of real theological exegesis. It is the clash of opinions unleashed by the March struggles of the Central German workers, or more correctly: by the theory of the revolutionary offensive, by the attitude of the centre. Decided politically by the congress – and decided unequivocally against the fathers and believers of this theory – it continues to have an organisational effect. The necessary tricks of interpretation and slippery slopes with their apparatus of quotations not only make the important factual, political core of the question of dispute recede, but also the result, the work of the Third World Congress of Communist Parties, in which the statement on the March Action is after all only a detail. Typical of this was the meeting of the Central Committee, the nature of which continues to resound in the further treatment of the Congress by the party organisations.

The matter is regrettable. It inhibits the rapid and complete impact of the Congress result, which is of the greatest, far-reaching significance for communist theory and politics. At the same time, however, it hinders the clarifying process of the party's self-understanding of the March Action, the carrying out and conclusion of which is a prerequisite for powerful activity, for communist advances that are as bold as they are superior and prudent. For the position of the Congress on the March struggles and the opposing opinions connected with them can only be correctly grasped and evaluated in the context of the overall work of the Congress. It is the logical expression of the basic conception which dominated the Moscow meeting, it is an organic part of the whole, filled with and shaped by its essence.

The decisions of last year's World Congress of the Communist International were aimed at uniting the communists of each individual country in an ideologically and organisationally unified, firmly-knit party. This aim is synonymous with the clear separation from all elements – right and left – which do not profess the principles of the Communist International. Its realisation is part of the historical maturation of the toiling masses into purposeful and path-knowing carriers of the proletarian liberation struggle. It cannot be completed in the short time span of a barely a year.

So it was a matter of course that this year's congress had to deal with the conditions of the unification of communist organisations and communist-oriented masses into a tightly centralised national party, that it had to turn sharply against opportunist, centrist tendencies and currents on the right as well as against sectarian putschist or – as Trotsky called it – "adventurous" tendencies on the left. Let us recall the negotiations on the state of affairs in Czechoslovakia, in France, England, Italy, America, the statement on the KAP in Germany. Even without being a prophet in Israel, I dare to predict that future congresses of the International will not be spared such disputes either.

However, it is to diminish and belittle the great historical meaning, the significance of our last World Congress, if one refers to "the settling of accounts with opportunism" as its central point, as its main result. Only those who look at the work of the Congress and the world around from the ant hill of factional strife can arrive at this assessment. If one were to adopt this lofty standpoint, one could speak with greater inner justification of a "reckoning with revolutionary romanticism and hyperradicalism". No serious communist will deny that Lenin's and Trotsky's disputes with the relevant currents – even if hotspurs consider these two great independently and creatively thinking revolutionary fighters to be the Wolf's Glen of "Menshevism" – may still claim the outbursts of Zinoviev and Radek against the "half and quarter opportunists" in the communist camp.

The main achievement of the Congress is indisputably the correct attitude of the whole Communist International to the given world economic and world political situation. In theory and in practice, because both are the two sides of one and the same thing and are in closest inner interaction with each other. The correct attitude of the internationally united Communist Parties to the world economic and world political situation should be the firm, solid basis for their comprehensive, revolutionary activity, for their determined onslaught against capitalism and its state.

Thus, Trotsky's report and Trotsky-Varga's Theses on the World Situation and the Tasks of the Communist Parties rightly stood at the beginning of the Congress work. The basic conception represented in it, together with the debates in the plenum, the deliberations of the Commission and the final decision, gave the Third Moscow Congress its special, individual face and gave it a historical significance beyond that of conventional congresses, which are conscientious continuators of work begun and faithful stewards of inherited fundamental and tactical good. The attitude of the communists to the world situation, sharply elaborated by Trotsky, came to the fore in Zinoviev's report and speeches – explanatorily enough mildly toned to the left and accompanied by bellicose melodies against "the open and disguised centrists" among us. It appeared embodied for practice in Lenin's speech and the Russian party's theses on politics, the "inevitable policy of concessions", a modus vivendi, of proletarian soviet power with the peasants in Russia, with the capitalists and capitalist states abroad. It was decisive for the theses on tactics, for Radek's justification and conclusion on them, for the struggle of minds in the tactics commission. Its dominant role for the Congress had been shown in its prelude: in the negotiations of the extended Executive with the delegations of various countries, Lenin's and Trotsky's polemics against the "adventurous" slogans of stormers and stressers in France, the cautious treatment of Czechoslovak matters are particularly characteristic of it.

The conception of the world situation formulated by Trotsky and adopted by the Congress is based on the observation that the world proletarian revolution has not progressed at the rapid pace that most communists expected after the conquest of state power by the Russian proletariat in 1917 and then after the overthrow in the central states in 1918 and the revolutionary struggles in Germany that followed. The bourgeoisie, shaken in its power and in its consciousness of power, reasserted its rule over the proletariat. However, it has not succeeded in restoring the former equilibrium nationally and internationally. The war and its effects have shaken the capitalist economy to its depths. The bourgeois state is cracking and tottering under the consequences. All this – albeit in varying degrees and with divergent individual traits – both among the vanquished, the victors and the neutrals.

The bourgeoisie is at work rebuilding the disintegrated capitalist economy. At the cost of increased boundless exploitation and servitude of the proletariat, with unscrupulous use of all means of power and violence of the bourgeois state and with the support of the opportunists and reformists of the workers' movement. However, the individualist, anarchist nature of the capitalist profit economy prevents the free development and full utilisation of the material and human productive forces and their planned regulation, which are preconditions for overcoming the destruction and disruption brought about by the war. At the same time, it creates between the capitalist victorious states new sharpest world-economic and world-political antagonisms, which in the near future will drive to bloody conflict.

(Conclusion follows.)