Comintern Policy Research Articles

Failure in Brazil: From Popular Front to Armed Revolt

Latin America has been one of the less successful arenas for the international communist movement. Until Castro's victory, Iberian America repeatedly proved the graveyard of communist hopes. The explanations given for this failure have been various: inability of Moscow to understand the regional differences in Latin America, Russian unwillingness to risk defeat at the hands of American intervention (as in Guatemala in I954), and a stubborn and unimaginative commitment to the 'legal path' by Latin American communists loath to risk their respectable careers.1 All these explanations have merit, but they should not obscure the question inherent in communist doctrine: how to apply the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution in greatly varying historical circumstances. When is armed insurrection to be preferred to a patient 'legal' strategy ? The answer has varied according to the changing position of the Soviet Union and the shifting opportunities presented by communist parties and their host countries. Latin America during the I930s offers an interesting example of the communist revolutionary's perennial dilemma. During 1934 the Comintern began to move away from the 'sectarian' attitude adopted in I928 and to ponder seriously the extent to which communist parties should co-operate with the noncommunist left. By 1935 the popular front strategy had emerged as official Comintern policy. Although Latin America hardly occupied the centre of Comintern attentions, it offered challenging theoretical and practical problems.

Chinese Communism and the Canton Soviet of 1927

The Canton rising of December 1927 was an event of international significance in Chinese Communist history. In order to understand it in proper perspective it is necessary to trace Comintern policy on rural and urban revolutions in China from 1920 to 1927. From the beginning the Comintern approach to the revolution in the East was different from that in the West. In the West the revolution was one of the industrial proletariat against the bourgeoisie with the rural toilers as the auxiliary revolutionary force. In the East, where there was almost no industrial proletariat or where, in some relatively advanced countries the industrial proletariat was just beginning to grow up, the Comintern supported the native bourgeoisie temporarily and the peasantry permanently in its grand strategy against “capitalist imperialism” and “feudalism” represented chiefly by landlords. While Comintern support for the bourgeoisie of the East was not expected to hinder future communist work against the native bourgeois democratic tendencies, Comintern support for the peasantry was so complete that no communist programme was considered possible in the pre-capitalist countries if it was not based on the peasant movement. The proletarian revolution was not a problem in the East at the outset.

Some Recent Books on the Rise of Chinese Communism

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