In Honor Of The 94^th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-In The Time Of His Time

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Billy Casey woke up in a sweat that early March 1919 night, woke up in a once again sweat that he had earned from his experiences as a doughboy, an American doughboy in France now furloughed home to New York City, awaiting medical discharge from that mustard gas explosion that harried his breathe ever since. Yes, he had had it rough overseas, had seen some stuff and done some stuff he didn’t want to repeat to anybody, stuff that frankly no man should be forced to do, and which he believed, or he came to believe, no man would do even to an animal. He had put some of that behind him but still a little corner would flare up on nights when he was excited and he was excited this night and had been for the past few nights about big doings in Moscow coming up in a few days (or since he wasn’t sure of the dates of the conference, except early March, maybe had already occurred), about creating a new organization to right the wrongs of this wicked old world.  

See, Bill Casey had gotten “religion,”  no not catholicprotestantjewishmuslim religion but the good word-the socialist word , the word that all workingmen, and Bill Casey was nothing if not a working man, were brothers and that the robbers of the world were the only ones who had benefited from the damn war “to end all wars” over in Europe.  And Bill had the destroyed lungs to prove it was not him who had benefited. This new language had been taught to him by a fellow soldier, a fellow doughboy, who had belonged to the American Socialist Party before the war, before he passed away from failed lungs in that French convalescent home Bill was assigned before coming back to America. So when Bill got back to New York the first thing, well maybe not the first, the first being to roll the pillows with his long-suffering girlfriend, Rosie, also nothing if not a daughter of the working class, he marched down to the American Socialist Party office in Greenwich Village (that is where his deceased comrade told him to go since that is where he had been a member) and joined right up.    

Now Bill Casey had never been much for the books, and the materials that he received from the local secretary when he paid his dues and received his membership card seemed a lot more convoluted that the way his hospital pal explained it, but he plugged at it for a while, and that along with the weekly lectures helped him along. And he was going to be in full need of that knowledge because he had landed on his socialist arse (his expression) right at a time when the whole socialist movement was in turmoil. And the big event was the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the fall-out from that event. See Bill’s pal had only known the American Socialist Party before that revolution, and since most of the party had been anti-war before his pal joined up to fight he didn’t know the stuff that was going on between the different factions-basically to stick with the Socialist International or go with the new one, the one that said that the old one was done for and a new Communist International had to be formed to fight for revolutions everywhere. Heady stuff. Stuff to make Bill sweat in anticipation.

And that is where the martyred James Connolly, Bill’s hero from the Easter 1916 uprising in Dublin and a man who had been executed by the bloody British for his part in it, came into it. Or kind of came into it. See the fight over who were the real revolutionaries, the Europeans or the Russians, basically was hard to figure. That is when he met a guy, an Irish guy, a comrade, from one of the factions, Jim Cannon, who put him straight, who told him that if he wanted to get back for that dirty deal he received in France by his own government he had to go with the Russian Bolsheviks and the new international they were trying to form. And Bill Casey respected Jim Cannon, respected the big heavy-drinking Irishman from out in the sticks of Kansas and so he cast his fate with Jim and his communist brethren. And you know what else Jim said to him- he, Bill Casey,  should say at meetings and out on the Union Square and Village soapboxes to one and all what he saw and did in France so people would know, know better the next time the government tried to stuff a war down their throats. Bill Casey didn’t know if he could so that, could avoid some tough night sweats thinking about doing it, but he thought if it stopped some young guy from joining up maybe he would at that…                      

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V. I. Lenin

Founding Of The Communist International

Speech At A Joint Meeting Of The All-Russia Central Executive Committee, The Moscow Soviet, The Moscow Committee Of The Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), The All-Russia Central Council Of Trade Unions, Moscow Trade Unions And Factory Committees To Mark The Founding Of The Communist International

March 6, 1919

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Delivered: 6 March, 1919
First Published: Brief report published in Pravda No. 52, March 7, 1919; Published in full in May 1919 Published according to the verbatim report
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 28, pages 480-484
Translated: Jim Riordan
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters & Robert Cymbala
Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

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(Stormy ovation.) Comrades, at the First Congress of the Communist International we did not succeed in getting representatives from all countries where this organisation has most faithful friends and where there are workers whose sympathies are entirely with us. Allow me, therefore, to begin with a short quotation which will show you that in reality we have more friends than we can see, than we know and than we were able to assemble here, in Moscow, despite all persecution, despite the entire, seemingly omnipotent, union of the bourgeoisie of the whole world. This persecution has gone to such lengths as to attempt to surround us with a sort of Great Wall of China, and to deport Bolsheviks in dozens from the freest republics of the world. They seem to be scared stiff that ten or a dozen Bolsheviks will infect the whole world. But we, of course, know that this fear is ridiculous—because they have already infected the whole world, because the Russian workers’ struggle has already convinced working people everywhere that the destiny of the world revolution is being decided here,. in Russia.

Comrades, I have here a copy of L’Humanité, a French newspaper whose policy corresponds more to that of our Mensheviks or Right Socialist-Revolutionaries. During the war, this paper was utterly ruthless in its attacks on those who supported our viewpoint. Today it is defending those who during the war went along with their own bourgeoisie. This very newspaper reports in its issue of January 13, 1919, that a mammoth meeting (as the newspaper itself admits) took place in Paris of active party and trade union members of the Seine Federation, i.e., the district nearest to Paris, the centre of the proletarian movement, the centre of all political life in France. The first speaker was Bracke, a socialist who throughout the war took the same line as our Mensheviks and Right-wing defence advocates. He was meek and mild now. Not a word about a single burning issue! He ended by saying that he was against his government’s interference in the struggle of the proletariat of other countries. His words were drowned in applause. The next speaker was a supporter of his, a certain Pierre Laval. He spoke of demobilisation, the burning issue in France today—a country which has probably borne greater sacrifices than any other country in this criminal war. And this country now sees that demobilisation is being dragged out, held up, that there is no desire to carry it through, that preparations are being made for a new war that will obviously demand new sacrifices from the French workers for the sake of settling how much more of the spoils the French or British capitalists will get. The newspaper goes on to say that the crowd listened to the speaker, Pierre Laval, but when he started running down Bolshevism, the protests and excitement stopped the meeting. After that, citizen Pierre Renaudel was refused a hearing, and the meeting ended with a brief statement by citizen Pdricat. He is one of the few people in the French labour movement who in the main is in agreement with us. And so, the newspaper has to admit that the speaker who began to attack the Bolsheviks was immediately pulled up.

Comrades, we have not been able to get even one delegate here directly from France, and only one Frenchman, Comrade Guilbeaux, arrived here, and he with great difficulty. (Stormy applause.) He will speak here today. He spent months in the prisons of that free republic, Switzerland, being accused of having contact with Lenin and preparing a revolution in Switzerland. He was escorted through Germany by gendarmes and officers, for fear, evidently, that he might drop a match that would set Germany on fire. But Germany is ablaze without this match. In France, too, as we can see, there are sympathisers with the Bolshevik movement. The French people are probably among the most experienced, most politically conscious, most active and responsive. They will not allow a speaker at a public meeting to strike a false note: he is stopped. Considering the French temperament, he was lucky not to have been dragged down from the rostrum! Therefore, when a newspaper hostile to us admits what took place at this big meeting we can safely say the French proletariat is on our side.

I am going to read another short quotation, from an Italian newspaper. The attempts to isolate us from the rest of the world are so great that we very rarely receive socialist newspapers from abroad. It is a rare thing to receive a copy of the Italian newspaper Avanti!, the organ of the Italian Socialist Party, a party which participated in Zimmerwald, fought against the war and has now resolved not to attend the yellow congress in Berne, the congress of the old International, which was to be attended by people who had helped their governments to prolong this criminal war. To this day, Avanti! is under strict censorship. But in this issue, which arrived here by chance, I read an item on party life in a small locality called Cavriago (probably a remote spot because it cannot be located on the map). It appears that the workers there adopted a resolution supporting their newspaper for its uncompromising stand and declared their approval of the German Spartacists. Then follow the words “Sovietisti russi” which, even though they are in Italian, can be understood all over the world. They sent greetings to the Russian “Sovietisti” and expressed the wish that the programme of the Russian and German revolutionaries should be adopted throughout the world and serve to carry the fight against the bourgeoisie and military domination to a conclusion. When you read a resolution like that, adopted in some Italian Poshekhonye,’82 you have every right to say to yourself that the Italian people are on our side, the Italian people understand what the Russian “Sovietisti” are, what the programme of the Russian “Sovietisti” and the German Spartacists is. Yet at that time we had no such programme! We had no common programme with the German Spartacists, but the Italian workers rejected all they had seen in their bourgeois press, which, bribed as it is by the millionaires and multimillionaires, spreads slander about us in millions of copies. It failed to deceive the Italian workers, who grasped what the Spartacists and the “Sovietisti” were and declared that they sympathised with their programme, at a time when this programme did not exist. That is why we found our task so easy at this Congress. All we had to do was to record as a programme what had already been implanted in the minds and hearts of the workers, even those cast away in some remote spot and cut off from us by police and military cordons. That is why we have been able to reach concerted decisions on all the main issues with such ease and complete unanimity. And we are fully convinced that these decisions will meet with a powerful response among workers elsewhere.

The Soviet movement, comrades, is the form which has been won in Russia, which is now spreading throughout the world and the very name of which gives the workers a complete programme. I hope that we, having had the good fortune to develop the Soviet form to victory, will not become swelled-headed about it.

We know very well that the reason we were the first to take part in a Soviet proletarian revolution was not because we were as well or better prepared than other workers, but because we were worse prepared. This is why we were faced with the most savage and decrepit enemy, and it is this that accounted for the outward scale of the revolution. But we also know that the Soviets exist here to this day, that they are grappling with gigantic difficulties which originate from an inadequate cultural level and from the burden that has weighed down on us for more than a year, on us who stand alone at our posts, at a time when we are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and when, as you know perfectly well, harrowing ordeals, the hardships of famine and terrible suffering have befallen us.


Those who directly or indirectly side with the bourgeoisie often try to appeal to the workers and provoke indignation among them by pointing to the severe sufferings of the workers today. And we tell them: yes, these sufferings are evere and we do not conceal them from you. We tell the workers that, and they know it well from their own experience. You can see we are fighting not only to win socialism for ourselves, not only to ensure that our children shall only recollect capitalists and landowners as prehistoric monsters; we are fighting to ensure that the workers of the whole world triumph together with us.

And this First Congress of the Communist International, which has made the point that throughout the world the Soviets are winning the sympathy of the workers, shows us that the victory of the world communist revolution is assured. (Applause.) The bourgeoisie will continue to vent their fury in a number of countries; the bourgeoisie there are just beginning to prepare the destruction of the best people, the best representatives of socialism, as is evident from the brutal murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the whiteguards. These sacrifices are inevitable. We seek no agreement with the bourgeoisie, we are marching to the final and decisive battle against them. But we know that after the ordeal, agony and distress of the war, when the people throughout the world are fighting for demobilisation, when they feel they have been betrayed and appreciate how incredibly heavy the burden of taxation is that has been placed upon them by the capitalists who killed tens of millions of people to decide who would receive more of the profits—we know that these brigands’ rule is at an end!

Now that the meaning of the word “Soviet” is understood by everybody, the victory of the communist revolution is assured. The comrades present in this hall saw the founding of the first Soviet republic; now they see the founding of the Third, Communist International (applause), and they will all see the founding of the World Federative Republic of Soviets. (Applause.)

 

Brief report published; in Pravda No. 52, March 7, 1919; Published in full in May 1919 Published according to the verbatim report