[The following review appeared in the May 1986 issue of Quatrième Internationale, published quarterly in Paris under the auspices of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. The translation from the French is by Intercontinental Press.]
The Third International was not the product of the Russian Revolution alone. Well before October 1917, the Marxist left carried out a fight for a truly internationalist orientation, first within the Second International, and then, after August 1914 (when Social Democracy rallied to the imperialist war), in calling for the formation of a new International, for which the first steps were the Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916) conferences.
This volume, published by Monad Press (the American SWP's publishing house), is a collection of documents, preceded by short explanatory texts, of this preparatory stage, leading to the Kienthal congress and its consequences. The wealth of documentation, selected by John Riddell, makes it an excellent working tool, which explains in a useful manner the genesis of the Communist International. It includes a large quantity of littleknown or hard-to-find material - texts of Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Liebknecht, and others — as well as Russian writings not translated up to now (of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Pyatakov, Bukharin). This is the first volume of a series that is to cover the period up to the end of 1923, that is, the Leninist epoch of the Comintern.
As John Riddell rightly notes in his preface, Lenin's Collected Works have been available for decades, but very little exists (at least in English) on the debates within the workers' movement on the formation and development of the Third International.
Among the most interesting and leastknown documents, let us mention a debate at the Stuttgart congress (1907) of the Second International on — immigrant workers, which is of burning relevance 80 years later! There we see Morris Hillquit, an American Socialist, oppose the immigration of "foreign" workers — especially Japanese and Chinese — who would be "dangerous competition" for indigenous
(American) workers.
Rejected by other Socialists from the USA (Julius Hammer), this position is criticized especially by the Japanese Socialist Kato Tokijiro, who pointed out: "It is only dire need that drives them [Japanese workers] from their homeland to earn their livelihood in a foreign land. It is the duty of Socialists to welcome these poor brothers, to defend them, and together with them to fight capitalism. The founders of socialism, above all Karl Marx, did not address themselves to individual coun tries, but to all of humanity. Internationalism is inscribed on our banner.
The main reservation that could be made to the historical presentation of the volume and documents is that it offers too linear a view of Lenin's evolution. If it is true that after 1914 Lenin was found leading the fight for a definitive break with the Second International, before the war he still had many illusions in the "orthodox Center," and particularly about the official ideologue of Marxism in the German Social Democratic Party [SPD] and in the whole International: Karl Kautsky.
Already in 1910, however, Rosa Luxemburg had adopted a position openly and polemically critical of Kautskyist centrism, including on international questions, as is shown by her text on the SPD's Jena congress (1913), published in the collection.
The year 1914 signified an important turn in Lenin's political course. This is the moment when he realized the limitations of the Second International's Marxism (Kautsky, Plekhanov, and others), which he was to criticize not only politically, but also in its philosophical foundations (see his 1914 Notebooks on Hegel's logic). In the new edition of this collection, to appear soon, an important addition will be made: Lenin's Oct. 27, 1914, letter to Shlyapnikov, in which he recognized that "Rosa Luxemburg was right when she wrote, long ago, that Kautsky has the 'subservience of a theoretician' — servility, in plainer language, servility to the majority of the Party, to opportunism." This letter contributes toward reestablishing Rosa Luxemburg's pioneering role in the fight against Kautsky's watering down of Marxism, which served as legitimizing ideology for the leadership apparatus of the German and European Social Democracy.