The communist movement from the early 1800s to the 1970s was a subjective intellectual response of revolutionaries, seeking to represent the long-term goal of the proletariat during the period of transition from agriculture to industry. The industrial revolution created new classes evolving in antagonism with feudal society. The new classes (capitalist and proletariat) together constituted the foundation of the social democratic movement. Its goal was the overthrow of monarchy, czar and the political power of the nobility. Birthed as a democratic current within the social-democratic movement, a core of socialistic and communist thinkers was won over to Karl Marx’s science of society (Marxism).
(See, Rally, Comrades!, Revolutionary History and Our Tasks, 2007, http://www.lrna.org/2-pt/articles/v17ed2art2.html)
International, First:
The modern, scientific communist movement began when manufacturing with its small, scattered workshops was replaced by industry with its concentration of thousands of workers in giant factories. This development was the environment for the founding of the Communist League in 1847.
(See on the internet, Frederick Engels, On The History of the Communist League.)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1885hist.htm
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were called upon to write a manifesto for the Communist League, to state its purpose and vision. The Manifesto of the Communist Party remains the greatest programmatic document of scientific communism ever written. The purpose of the Manifesto was to educate revolutionaries in all countries, make them conscious of the historical role of the proletariat as a new social class, and outline the role of the communists as leaders of the advanced class.
In Europe, a period of harsh reaction followed the widespread revolutions of 1848 and their defeat. With the sentencing of the Cologne communists in 1852, a period of the proletarian movement ended. The next stage of revolutionary activity began around fifteen years later with the founding of the First or Workingmen’s International (IWA) in 1864. Its first congress was held in 1866 in Geneva.
The productive capacity of the industrial countries developed rapidly. So long as national production was more or less restricted to the national market, the struggle between the capitalists and the workers intensified year by year. The communist movement grew with strikes and uprisings by the workers. The means of production rapidly went through quantitative growth, and the struggle between the classes subsided somewhat as the capitalists expanded their markets by conquering the economically backward areas of the world, thus creating a new imperialist system. The capitalist class consciously bribed their working class, or rather upper strata of workers, into political and military support. Under these changed conditions, the First International, which was formed on the basis of a previous stage of development of capital and the industrial revolution, was dissolved.
At its peak, the IWA had 5 million members according to police reports, although the official journal reported 8 million members. The sixth Congress of the International was held in Geneva in September 1873, but was considered a failure. The International disbanded three years later, at the 1876 Philadelphia conference.
(See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International.)
International, 2nd:
Between the 1864 founding of the First International and 1900, the world was divided into colonial spheres attached to European great powers. This system of colonialism – the direct colonial system – furthered the spread of capitalist commodity production, alongside the emergence of a new financial architecture. A new form of capital (financial-industrial capital) arose in the United States based on financing the US Civil War and created Yankee or Wall Street imperialism. With growth of the spontaneous working class movement in Europe and America and the beginning of US export of finance capital, the Second International was founded in 1899. The Second International was founded on the basis of the stage of development of the industrial revolution and capitalist productive relations, the birth of modern imperialism and the consolidation of the direct colonial system.
By 1912, the economically undeveloped world (areas of which were at varying stages of development) was conquered. Any further market expansion had to be done by one imperialist power at the expense of another. World War I became the inevitable consequence of the striving for capitalist profits at the expense of one’s competitors. Capitalist states armed themselves for the coming struggle to re-divide an already divided world. Within hours of the declaration of war, almost all the socialist and social democratic parties of the combatant states announced support for their own bourgeoisie as their “own” political states pursued war to acquire colonial possessions and market shares.
Thrown into political conflict based on each party supporting its “own” bourgeois imperialist war efforts, discredited by its support of imperial colonial policy, the Second International split and then collapsed and was formally dissolved in the middle of World War I in 1916.
International, 3rd:
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.
Marxist Glossary Expanded Edition 3.0 can be found on MARS website at the Marxist Glossary for the 21st Century page. Also can be downloaded from the files of the Marxist Glossary Discussion group Facebook page.
I read rhat it was important to understand that the social-democratic parties voted war credits to their respective states in WW1. Today’s, trillion dollars american war machine is a military program that has to be voted with each new presidency. In other words, there is a structure and limit to military spending in the U.S. Congress votes every 4 years for a military program. They do not have limitless access to the public treasury to stage their wars.