Proletarian Internationalism

Proletarian Internationalism
(Coordinator Comment)

From the beginning communists have always emphasized international solidarity. As Marx and Engels expressed in the Communist Manifesto, "Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things ... they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries."

Whatever their disagreements on other issues, the leaders of the Russian Revolution, including Lenin and Trotsky, were confirmed internationalists, believing at the time that revolutions would take place throughout Europe and undermine the efforts of the capitalist countries to destroy the Soviet Union. They rejected the Socialist International because of its nationalist (and effectively pro-capitalist) stance on World War I, and formed instead the Third International which convened for its first congress in Moscow in 1919.

As Lenin described in his article on the Third International, "The First International laid the foundation of the proletarian, international struggle for socialism. The Second International marked a period in which the soil was prepared for the broad, mass spread of the movement in a number of countries. The Third International has gathered the fruits of the work of the Second International, discarded its opportunist, social-chauvinist, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois dross, and has begun to implement the dictatorship of the proletariat."

Although Mao Tse-Tung rejected the heavy-handiness of Stalin's Comintern, he also embraced the basic principle of internationalism. He warned the Chinese against "great-power chauvinism" in his writings on Patriotism and Internationalism. "We must never adopt an arrogant attitude of great-power chauvinism and become conceited because of the victory of our revolution and certain achievements in our construction. Every nation, big or small, has its strong and weak points."

In the second half of the 20th Century, the Soviet Union, as the oldest and richest socialist country, took on the responsibility of supporting revolutionary movements and new socialist countries around the world. In 1969, in the face of the American imperialist war on Vietnam, a meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in Moscow was attended by high-level representatives from parties in over 70 countries, with the conspicuous absence of the Chinese. The documents from that meeting, of great historical interest, are apparently not yet available on the Internet.

Although the 1969 meeting in Moscow was the last great international meeting of Communist and Workers Parties before the collapse of Soviet socialism, less elaborate international meetings of Communist and Workers' Parties continue to this day. For example, a meeting took place in Athens, Greece in June 2003.