Revmira writes on the history of socialist and communist international groupings, and makes the case for an international conference of Partyist organisations.
The distinctions of the Marxist and Anarchist tendencies was settled in the split within the International Working Mans Association (the First 1864-1876); the degeneration and betrayal of the Socialist and Labour International (the Second 1889-1914) saw the historic bankruptcy of reformist exposed, the Communist International (the Third or Comintern, 1919-1943) is proclaimed to have been the best of the Communist movement and yet it degenerated and warped into a tool of Stalinist foreign policy until it was no longer useful; the Fourth for a brief period carried on the most open and revolutionary fight for the continuity of Bolshevism, but the Second World War broke it, and the failure of James P. Cannon to live up to the mantle Trotsky’s murder placed on him shattered it into a million myopic pieces. Whilst the syphilitic remnants of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International stumble along barely united, no longer a Secretariat and seemingly only keeping the international around due to the hassle that abolishing it would take, the idea of the Fourth International as the ongoing political current of world revolution as begun by Lenin is long dead and rotted. Whilst a few small groupings scramble around proclaiming the need for a Fifth International, the link is broken. The historical continuity of revolutionary internationalism is shattered; it will not be reforged by any one sect or national grouping. No singular political theory or tradition will reunite the World Communist movement.
The Bolsheviks knew this. When they proclaimed the Communist International in 1919, they rallied masses of the global proletariat to their banner, but they did not merely proclaim themselves and wait for the masses to rally to their banner. The Internationalist fight at Zimmerwald and elsewhere represented the first stirrings of the movement towards the Comintern. This movement was done through regroupment of internationalists, not all of whom were Revolutionary Defeatists. The Comintern was founded by those who would become Council Communists, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, Left Communists, Reformists, Centrists, and even some Anarchists.
The Comintern was not perfect, it was infected with the optimism of those early years when the world proletariat seemed that they were finally completing their task and as such it could never truly take a long-term patient strategy. Nonetheless it remains the height of Communist organising. We do not look to it for the Zinovievite myth of the “general staff of the world revolution” nor do we look to it for the degenerated ruin it became under Stalin.
We look to it for what it was, the International of the revolutionary proletariat. United against capitalism, reformism, and centrism. Nothing since has been able to replace it. MacNair’s claim that the Comintern’s “failure was about the inability of Comintern to think of international tasks except either as immediate civil war, which called for a general staff, or making the national communist parties copy the Russians as the road to victory in a single country”1 is essentially correct. This oscillation between either rabid optimism or bureaucratic nationalism crept out to infect the myriads of groups claiming themselves to be internationals, although some manage to achieve both. The Trotskyist movement is rife with this, with groups slavishly following the tactics of a grouping in one country and generalising it out as a world tactic. The presplit Committee for a Workers International (CWI) was a key example of this, with every section following the strategy laid down by Ted Grant, of entryism into the largest ‘left’ group in the relevant country and building up their presence there.
The detritus of ‘official’ Communism follows a similar pattern. Slavishly maintaining the line laid down ninety years ago at the Seventh (and final) world congress of the Comintern of support to the ‘left’ bourgeois in the fight against fascism and monopoly capital, the questions of a genuine struggle for power are forgotten. Instead the decaying memory of the Comintern, and the heroic struggles of 1917- 1923 are used to prop up a politically bankrupt necrophiliac Stalinist program.
The illegal dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 represented the final victory of the Stalinist project of the subordination of the world revolution to the interests of the Soviet state. The Fourth International could not claim its mantle, and indeed never could. For all its strengths, for all the honour and glory of the Bolshevik-Leninists, they were a sect; a grouping defined by loyalty to the program of Trotsky and doomed by it. Despite the existence of groupings that in many cases often agreed with Trotsky’s critiques, the Left Opposition was never able to truly develop beyond a faction around Trotsky as a person. The International left was isolated, and withdrew into sectarianism and isolation, as the Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Communist Workers Party in Germany, KAPD) during its decline shows.
The Comintern was the only force that could ever unite the Communist movement, allow it to deliberate on a mass level and refine a global strategy, and program of World Revolution. Its destruction shattered any chance of a global strategy, instead a myriad of pathetic groupings has emerged across the world basing their unity around allegiance to certain tactics and select theories, the capacity for genuine internationalist organising and perspectives has been destroyed.
The need for an international is paramount. Communism is an international movement, that is not up for debate. We need an international body, one that lives up to the tasks and duties required of it. One that can live up to the title of the World Party of Socialist Revolution. The question is how do we fight for it?The Communist movement is shattered, in Australia alone, there are roughly 19 or so groups proclaiming themselves to be communist to one extent or the other, though in practical terms, only half of them have any even vague levels of influence. All of them claim to have a certain amount of international connections, and all of them make a mockery of the basic principle of Internationalism, let alone the claim to be the revolutionaryinternational of the world proletariat.
The International Socialist Tendency (IST), the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the Committee for Revolutionary International Regroupment (CRIR), the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) (ICL (FI)), the International Coordination of Revolutionary Parties and Organisations (ICOR), the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties (IMCWP). To say that the international left is a shadow of its former self is an understatement that reveals the masterful ambiguities of the English language.
Some of these groups are self-aware enough to not claim to be the International of the working class rather they are tendencies fighting to reforge it. Perhaps the group with the best honour in that sense falls to the ICL (FI) who for all their many faults seem to be seriously reckoning with the problem and process of Communist regroupment. Partisan! #12 outlines the most concreate example of that reckoning.2 But groups like the ICFI (operating under the banner of the Socialist Equality Party), IMCWP, the IST, all represent the worst tendencies of what Mike MacNair has delightfully termed “Oil-Slick Internationalism”.
That is a proclamation of an international with remarkably wide reach and no depth. They’re mirages, a group may be able to claim sections on every continent and be able to issue heart-stirring proclamations on the need for world revolution, but a sect is no less a sect if it is merely confined to the borders of one state or if it stretches out across the world. The recently proclaimed Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) is a good example of this, claiming to have twenty-four sections and nineteen groups building towards becoming one, the loyal followers of Ted Grant and Alan Woods proclaim that they are the International. The first group since Lenin’s Comintern able to truly take on the mantle. They also in their own words currently have 7,127 members worldwide.3
The Comintern, even during its degeneration, represented millions – entire mass sections of the proletariat looked to for it for leadership, for strategy, and for the road forward. Seven thousand is the size of a branch in a major city, not the size of an international, and whilst numbers alone do not determine right, politics is a numbers game, communist politics even more so. We seek to represent the vast majority of the human race, to organise and lead them into taking political and social power to liberate humanity. That requires masses of the proletariat as members of your party and even greater levels not merely being aware of your party but believing in it.
No group today has that. The only one with any material capacity to do so would be the Communist Party of China, and their shamefaced proclamations of Internationalism are barely worth the paper they’re printed on.
We need a World Party.
A party in the sense that we in the RCO and in the broader “Partyist” movement have long defended. A democratic organisation united and based around the classical principles of Leninism, with membership based off acceptance of the program and an acceptance of unity in action around that program. This party cannot be limited to state borders. The world party is the International, it is the hegemonic revolutionary force of the international proletariat. “The Proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”.4 The fight for Communism is the fight for the working class to fight for their own abolishment through first taking power into their own hands, and through that the conscious construction of Communism. This can only be done if the class is aware of their world historic task.
This cannot be done without a party.
The basic principle of the Partyist tendency formed over the past seven was best summed up by Donald Parkinson, “Without a Party, We Have Nothing”.
Now the class struggle does not end without the existence of a party. 1991 did not herald the end to social conflict in Australia, class struggle continues unrelentingly until the abolishment of class itself. But the capacity to fight in it, to further it, deepen and intensify it, that was severely undermined by the dissolution of the Communist Party of Australia, which for all its myriads of flaws (Stalinism, Labourism, constant vacillations and betrayal, helping implement the accord) was the Vanguard party of the Australian proletariat. Now of course the party is not the Vanguard, it never will be. “The vanguard is not a single organization but a layer of the class that exists both within and outside party organizations.”5 Nonetheless, the party represents a key part of the class struggle, in the sense of the struggle for power.
The party is the weapon and the organisational form through which tactical and strategic manoeuvres can be made, it is also the means of transforming the proletariat from merely a class in itself, to a class for itself. A crucial part of Marx’s political thought was the need for the proletariat to be self-aware of their fight for Communism. This consciousness is not one that will emerge spontaneously from the aether. That is the task of the Communist Party.
If we accept this logic, then we must also accept the immediate logical follow-on, if this is an international fight, then we should coordinate our struggles on an international basis with international methods. The fight for a reunified mass Communist Party must operate on the same logic.
We could reconstitute the Communist Party in Australia tomorrow, rally wide swathes of the proletariat to our banner, and send bourgeois politics reeling in shock. If this struggle did not extend beyond Australia, it would be useless.
Capital can tolerate much greater stresses than the resurgence of class struggle in one country, it tolerated the proletariat taking power in Russia and indeed managed to incorporate the USSR into its own structures and base operations, even as it strove successfully to tear down the gains of October and crush any chance of Proletarian resurgence.
The task before us is clear.
A “Partyist” tendency exists within International Marxism that an established fact. It is one that has only begun to hit its stride and is increasingly collaborative with each other across national lines. The orientation of this movement is towards the reconstitution of mass workers parties united around a program. These parties have a scientific name. They are Communist Parties, sections of the World Party in the international fight for Communism.
International regroupment is increasingly being put on the order of the day for the Communist movement as the threat of war and crisis draws nearer. The annual (from 2022) Meeting of Internationalist Forces demonstrates this, these meetings however reveal nothing more than the stale repetitive debate of the sects,6 whilst some small regroupment efforts have emerged from them (see the ongoing merger of the League for the Fifth International, the International Trotskyist Opposition, and the International Socialist League7) nothing concrete has developed. The RCO and the broader Partyist movement should aim to intervene in these meetings with a perspective on the need for Communist regroupment and the solidification of key programmatic questions of the world movement.
This must be combined with the solidification of the International Partyist movement as a formalised body with organisational connections, discussion, and support. This should not be an oil-slick international subordinating the world movement to the dictates of whichever clique manages to secure leadership. Rather it should be what it is, a tendency within the world Communist movement with a joint strategy, and a joint conception of our tasks and perspectives. Experience, strategies, publications these must be exchanged and debated upon in a more formal setting, with a aim of establishing a method of both intervention as well as discourse and clarification in the world Communist movement and internationalist regroupment.
We should also fight for the development of continental level Communist politics. The stillbirth of the Comintern’s regional Bureaus stagnated any hopes of building up practical local internationalist action, as well as any chances of developing continental level Communist politics. As capitalist politics has developed and the EU has consolidated itself the failure of the Communist movement to move alongside it has been a fundamental failure, and a concession to short sighted bureaucratic nationalism. But even outside of the EU, the political realities of capitalism mean that it is impossible for a struggle on a national level to truly advance the proletariat. The fight for the Communist Party in the European Union is perhaps one of the most obvious areas for struggle, but it is vital to fight for the Communist Party in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia, a world party must be worldwide.“
The struggle for an international is a present, concrete task of communists. It is clear, however, that this struggle cannot be carried on by creating yet another micro- ‘international’. It has to be carried on by fighting, on every occasion that allows, against bureaucratic centralism and the nationalism that goes hand in hand with it, and for the concrete tasks of an international: the global struggle for solidarity in the immediate class struggle, for the symbolic unity of the working class as an international class; and the continental struggle for working class political unification and political power.”8
The capacity to wage this struggle is on a much higher footing than in 2008. It is time that we begin it. By posing the opposition to global sectarianism and forcing the question of regroupment and unity on a world scale, we place the struggle for the Comintern as a key part of our revolutionary activity, and deepen the struggle we wage for Communism, and against the division undermining our movement.
As such I argue that the RCO should aim to organise an international conference as soon as possible. This conference should seek to gather the international Partyist tradition with the aim of electing an international steering committee authorised to publish joint statements, the establishment of an international theoretical journal, and a perspective towards deepening and solidifying our ties. This cannot be an international based off tactics, after all the details of the fight each group wages is different and one tactic can’t be generalised. But lessons can be shared between groupings and discussions can be had on both international tactics, as well as national and local level tactics, these discussions currently aren’t happening, and this is to our own detriment! We lose out from the lack of these discussions, “[t]he question comrades must ask is whether we are nationally bound socialist movements with international connections, or an international socialist movement with national sections”.9 Our struggle is the same in every country, we are fighting to rebuild the communist parties that we need as a section of the world party. The proletariat knows no country, nor do communists. So why should we?
“To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses—no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives—these are the rules of the Fourth International”.10
- MacNair, Mike. Revolutionary Strategy. (November Publications, London, 2008), 146 ↩︎
- “Spartacist League of Australia’s letter to the RCO” in Partisan! , July 2025. ↩︎
- Revolutionary Communist International. “Forged amid global turmoil: the first World Congress of the Revolutionary Communist International” ↩︎
- Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in Selected Works Volume 1. (Progress Publishers, Moscow, Sixth Printing, 1989), 123 ↩︎
- Parkinson, Donald. We need a World Party. (Partisan Press, Brisbane, 2024), 3 ↩︎
- See Internationalist Correspondence Bulletins at internationalistbulletin.com ↩︎
- League for the Fifth International, “For a regroupment of Revolutionaries” ↩︎
- MacNair, Mike. Revolutionary Strategy. 146 ↩︎
- Hall, Roxy. “Their Internationalism and Ours“. In Cosmonaut Magazine, April 2024. ↩︎
- Trotsky, Leon. The Death Agony of Capitalism, and the Tasks of the Fourth International. (Bolshevik press, London,1993), 68. ↩︎
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