The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern and also known as the Third International, was founded March 1919 in Moscow. The Comintern was formed on the basis of the 1917 Great October Socialist Revolution and the establishment of Soviet power in Russia, in the environment of emergence of US financial-industrial imperialism (monopoly capitalism) on the world stage. US imperialism sought destruction of lingering feudal relations and completion of the world transition from agriculture to industry. Wall Street imperialism fought to reshape the new world through destruction of the direct colonial system to open up the world to US finance.
The Comintern was organized to unite the world revolution in defense of Soviet power and also sought destruction of the colonial system. The Comintern sought to aid the workers’ struggle in the industrially advanced countries. Its goal was to bring the hundreds of millions of colonial slaves of imperialism into a common revolutionary front with the fighting section of the working class in the industrially advanced countries and Soviet power. The Russian communists and Soviet power inspired the formation of the Communist Party of China. Until the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1921, the Marxist trend outside of Russia was more or less limited to Europe and the Americas.
From 1922 (the birth of Italian fascism) until the opening of World War II, revolution and counter-revolution evolved in a struggle that ultimately lead to the consolidation of European fascism. The Comintern confronted European fascism as the hangman of proletarian revolution. From this point of view, war and fascism were the form the counter-revolution was taking and to which all questions were subordinated. At that time everything, including revolution in the US, was subordinated to the defense of the Soviet Union.
As late as 1930, Europe was still ruled by twelve monarchies, which drove a section of bourgeois democrats who upheld a republican form of government, into the communist movement. The Third International was a hotbed of intense political struggles, divergent class ideologies and different lines of march. Marxists and revolutionaries who were grouped around Lenin’s Bolshevism fought hostile non-Marxist ideologies, including Trotskyism and in the US various doctrines of American exceptionalism.
The Comintern had seven World Congresses between 1919 and 1935. At its last congress in 1935, 65 parties and over 3 million Communists were represented. 785,000 of these revolutionaries resided in the industrially developed countries. Over 2,200,000 Communists were outside of Europe and America.
The Comintern reflected the Leninist strategy of detaching the hundreds of millions of slaves of imperialism from their imperial masters and converting them from a reserve of reaction to a reserve of the proletarian revolution. Leninism and the Comintern broke with the patriotic petty bourgeois ideology of the Second International, for whom only white skinned people were civilized and worthy of serious consideration.
The objective basis for the disintegration of the Third Communist International was the new stage of the industrial revolution, which grew out of the Second World War. Formed on the basis of the world of 1919, the parties of the Comintern completed the mission it was formed to carry out, and it was officially dissolved in May 1943.
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