The Comintern and Imperialism: A Balance Sheet

Abstract

The Communist, Third International or Comintern was founded in 1919 by those few Marxists who believed that the old parties of the left had betrayed the working class cause by supporting their own countries, their own bourgeoisies, in the First World War. This article aims to consider to what extent the Comintern continued to uphold internationalism, concentrating on a specific aspect of the question, one that, at least in western historiography, has been little discussed. In a period when the centre of revolution was moving from Europe to the East, did the Comintern radically break with the entrenched Euro-Centrism of the old parties? It be argued that after an initial period in which it paid far greater attention to the revolutionary movement in the colonies and semi-colonies of imperialism, the Comintern reverted to Euro-centrism, supporting in the Second World War the defence of their imperialist interests around by the allied imperialist powers. The one revolutionary gain of that period, the Chinese revolution of 1949, was achieved by a Communist Party which disregarded the Comintern.