The Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the Communist International

The theses and resolutions at the founding First Congress of the Communist International in 1919 focussed on just a few key ideas, summarised in my previous single post. However, the events that had occurred by the time the Second Congress was convened, in Petrograd from 19 July 1920 and then concluding in Moscow on 6 August, meant that discussions were necessary on a range of tactical questions. 

Whilst all the resolutions agreed by the Second Congress are interconnected, they can really only be summarised under separate broad themes. In this post, I have tried to faithfully summarise the key points from the 'Manifesto of the Second Congress', effectively the 'World Perspectives' document agreed by its delegates.

'WORLD PERSPECTIVES' - The Manifesto of the Second World Congress  (1920) 

The First Congress had met at a time when, given the weakened position of the European capitalist powers following the end of the World War, it was hoped that successful proletarian revolutionary movements - in addition to the Russian Revolution - might be able to succeed, despite the weakness of revolutionary parties internationally. However, the events that had taken place between the First and Second Congress had shown that those hopes had been misplaced. 

The German movement had suffered serious defeats, not least in March-April 1919, and the revolutionary leaders Liebknecht and Luxemburg had been murdered at the hands of the victorious reaction. The Hungarian Revolution had also been crushed in August 1919.

In Russia itself, a civil war aimed at defeating the revolution and imposing reaction was still being actively fought. Soviet power had faced both direct armed intervention by forces of the main imperialist powers, and the forces of the reactionary White Armies supported by imperialism. However, by the time of the Second Congress, the organisation and determination of the Red Army, together with the appeal of its revolutionary programme, had started to turn the tide in its favour.

The Congress opened with around 500 delegates present from over 20 different countries, some of its first decisions being to send greetings to the workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, where the Congress was first convened, and also to the Red Army, then advancing into Poland in pursuit of the retreating White Guards. 

It also mourned the thousands of Hungarian workers that had been murdered by the counter-revolutionary regime of Admiral Horthy and called on workers internationally to stop weapons being transported there.

However, the detailed balance sheet of the world situation was contained in the “Manifesto of the Second Congress”, written by Trotsky and signed on 8 August 1920 by Lenin, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Trotsky on behalf of the Russian delegation, alongside delegates from 32 other countries, including Germany, Austria, France, Britain (signed by Quelch, Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst and MacLaine), USA, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, Bulgaria and India. I have summarised the Manifesto below:

I. International Relations After Versailles

The ‘Versailles Treaty’, forced onto defeated Germany in June 1919, had ceded both former German territory and colonies to the Allied victors and had also imposed heavy war reparation payments too. In retrospect, bourgeois historians recognise that this high price demanded by the victorious imperialists from its defeated economic and military rivals, and the disastrous consequences it had for the German economy, were significant factors behind the subsequent rise of Hitler and a further World War. However Trotsky and the Second Congress foresaw in advance that “the Versailles Treaty has created no new balance of power in place of the old”.

The Congress Manifesto also foresaw how, even amongst the ‘victors’, the power of France and Italy had been diminished and that “there remain only two genuine world powers: Great Britain and the United States”.

Interestingly in today’s 2025 context, the Manifesto notes that “the World War has dislodged the United States from its continental conservatism (‘isolationism’). The programme of an ascending national capitalism - ‘America for the Americans’ (the Monroe Doctrine) - has been supplanted by the programme of imperialism: ‘The Whole World for the Americans’ ”.

It continues: “The President of the United States, the great prophet of platitudes [Wilson, not Trump!] has descended from Mount Sinai to conquer Europe … despite the dollar’s excellent foreign exchange rate, the first place on all sea lanes, which connect and divide the nations, continued as heretofore to belong to Great Britain … The ferocious rivalry of these two giants in the field of naval construction is accompanied by a no less ferocious struggle over oil”. 

The Manifesto adds that, amongst the ‘secondary’ powers, “Italy stands hostilely opposed to France and is inclined to support Germany against France, the moment Germany is able to raise her head again. France is eaten by envy of Britain and in order to collect her dividends is ready to set Europe on fire again”. It points out that “these are the most powerful forces working toward and preparing a new world conflict”. 

This first section of the Manifesto concludes by discussing the position of the many small nations promised ‘liberation’ by the major powers during the world war, which had actually resulted in “the complete ruination and enslavement of the Balkan peoples, victors and vanquished alike, and to the Balkanisation of a large part of Europe. Their imperialist interests have impelled the conquerors onto the road of carving out isolated, small national states from the territories of the defeated great powers. There is not even a semblance here of the so-called national principle: imperialism consists of overcoming national frameworks, even those of the major states. The new and tiny bourgeois states are only by-products of imperialism. In order to obtain temporary points of support, imperialism creates a chain of small states, some openly oppressed, others officially protected while really remaining vassal states - Austria, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bohemia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, and so on. Dominating over them with the aid of banks, railways, and coal monopolies, imperialism condemns them to intolerable economic and national hardships, to endless friction and bloody collisions”. 

The Manifesto highlights the ongoing unresolved national question in longer established British dominions too, not least Ireland and India. 

It also adds, “What a savage irony of history there is in the fact that the restoration of Poland - which was part of the programme of revolutionary democracy … has been achieved by imperialism with the object of countering the revolution”. 

Additional Resolutions on Poland, France and the National Question 

A separate resolution on “The Soviet-Polish War” stresses that “Soviet Russia has no intention whatever of conquering the Polish people. At Brest-Litovsk [peace negotiations that had taken place between Germany and Soviet Russia] it was Soviet Russia that insisted upon the independence of Poland … [and] holds the view that self-determination is the absolute inviolable right of the Polish people”.

These points were also developed in the separate “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” drafted by Lenin. These Second Congress Theses stress a number of points that are still certainly worth re-reading today. I have highlighted the following:

(4) “The Communist International's entire policy on the national and the colonial questions should rest primarily on a closer union of the proletarians and the working masses of all nations and countries for a joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow the landowners and the bourgeoisie. This union alone will guarantee victory over capitalism, without which the abolition of national oppression and inequality is impossible”.

(7) “Federation is a transitional form to the complete unity of the working people of different nations. The feasibility of federation has already been demonstrated in practice both by the relations between the R.S.F.S.R. [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic] and other Soviet Republics (the Hungarian, Finnish and Latvian in the past, and the Azerbaijan and Ukrainian at present), and by the relations within the R.S.F.S.R. in respect of nationalities which formerly enjoyed neither statehood nor autonomy (e.g., the Bashkir and Tatar autonomous republics in the R.S.F.S.R., founded in 1919 and 1920 respectively)”.

(8) “It is the task of the Communist International to develop further and also to study and test by experience these new federations, which are arising on the basis of the Soviet system and the Soviet movement. In recognising that federation is a transitional form to complete unity, it is necessary to strive for ever closer federal unity, bearing in mind, first, that the Soviet republics, surrounded as they are by the imperialist powers of the whole world - which from the military standpoint are immeasurably stronger - cannot possibly continue to exist without the closest alliance; second, that a close economic alliance between the Soviet republics is necessary, otherwise the productive forces which have been ruined by imperialism cannot be restored and the well-being of the working people cannot be ensured; third, that there is a tendency towards the creation of a single world economy, as an integral whole and according to a common plan. This tendency has already revealed itself quite clearly under capitalism and is bound to be further developed and consummated under socialism”.

(9) “In all their propaganda and agitation - both within parliament and outside it - the Communist parties must … constantly explain that only the Soviet system is capable of ensuring genuine equality of nations, by uniting first the proletarians and then the whole mass of the working population in the struggle against the bourgeoisie; and, second, that all Communist parties should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and under-privileged nations (for example, Ireland, the American Blacks, etc.) and in the colonies”.

(11) “With regard to the more backward states and nations, in which feudal or patriarchal and patriarchal-peasant relations predominate, it is particularly important to bear in mind:

First, that all Communist parties must assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement in these countries, and that the duty of rendering the most active assistance rests primarily with the workers of the country the backward nation is colonially or financially dependent on*;

Second, the need for a struggle against the clergy and other influential reactionary and medieval elements in backward countries;

Third, the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, and mullahs, etc.;

Fourth, the need, in backward countries, to give special support to the peasant movement against the landowners, against landed proprietorship, and against all manifestations or survivals of feudalism, and to strive to lend the peasant movement the most revolutionary character by establishing the closest possible alliance between the West-European communist proletariat and the revolutionary peasant movement in the East, in the colonies, and in the backward countries generally. It is particularly necessary to exert every effort to apply the basic principles of the Soviet system in countries where pre-capitalist relations predominate - by setting up 'working people's Soviets', etc.;

Fifth, the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form;

Sixth, the need constantly to explain and expose among the broadest working masses of all countries, and particularly of the backward countries, the deception systematically practiced by the imperialist powers, which, under the guise of politically independent states, set up states that are wholly dependent upon them economically, financially and militarily. Under present-day international conditions there is no salvation for dependent and weak nations except in a union of Soviet republics”.

*A letter presented to the delegation attending the Congress from the French Socialist Party by its Praesidium - frank in its criticisms and concerns about the policy and practices of that Party on a number of issues - included the following point on the ‘colonial question’: 

“The French party must ruthlessly expose the activities of the French imperialists in the colonies and support all liberation movements in action, not words. It must popularise the slogan 'Imperialism Out of the Colonies', educate the workers of France to adopt a truly fraternal attitude to the working population of the colonies and carry out systematic agitation against the oppression of the colonies amongst the French troops”.

(12) “The more backward the country, the stronger is the hold of small-scale agricultural production, patriarchalism and isolation, which inevitably lend particular strength and tenacity to the deepest of petty-bourgeois prejudices, i.e., to national egoism and national narrow-mindedness. These prejudices are bound to die out very slowly, for they can disappear only after imperialism and capitalism have disappeared in the advanced countries, and after the entire foundation of the backward countries' economic life has radically changed. It is therefore the duty of the class-conscious communist proletariat of all countries to regard with particular caution and attention the survivals of national sentiments in the countries and among nationalities which have been oppressed the longest; it is equally necessary to make certain concessions with a view to more rapidly overcoming this distrust and these prejudices. Complete victory over capitalism cannot be won unless the proletariat and, following it, the mass of working people in all countries and nations throughout the world voluntarily strive for alliance and unity”.

II. The Economic Situation 

As a necessity in any discussion on World Perspectives, the second section of the Manifesto analysed the post-war economic situation, and whether there would be a recovery after the destruction of labour, materials and world trade brought about by World War One.

In contrast to the way that US capitalism intervened to lay the basis for a capitalist upswing after World War Two, the Manifesto foresaw the economic difficulties that would face capitalism in the inter-war period.

It pointed out how the Versailles Treaty was holding back German recovery, even though its “technology and the high productivity of German labour” were “most important factors in the regeneration of the world economy”. 

It added that France needed to restore its war-torn areas but was struggling with a lack of coal, raw materials and labour, whilst the US bankers continued to demand that France make good on what it owed them in war debts.

It explained (in a trend that repeats itself today in many ways), how “capitalism has degenerated in the course of the war. The systematic extraction of surplus value from the process of production - the foundation of profit economy - seems far too irksome an occupation to Messrs. Bourgeois who have become accustomed to double and decuple their capital within a couple of days by means of speculation, and on the basis of international robbery. …. The narrower the world's productive basis, all the more savage and more wasteful the methods of appropriation [of surplus value]. Rob! This is the last word of capitalist policy that has come to supplant the policies of free trade and protectionism”.

It continued, “the destruction within a few hours of values it had taken years to create, the obscene dance of the billions engaged in by the financial clique which keeps rising higher and higher on heaps of bones and ruins - these object lessons of history are hardly helpful in maintaining within the working class the automatic discipline inherent in wage labour. Bourgeois economists and publicists speak of a 'wave of laziness', which, according to them, is sweeping over Europe and undermining its economic future. The administrators seek to mend matters by granting privileges to the topmost layers of the working class. In vain! In order to revive and further develop its productivity of labour it is necessary to give the working class the assurance that every blow of its hammer will tend to improve its own welfare and raise its level of education, without again subjecting it to the danger of mutual extermination. It can receive this assurance only from the social revolution …

… The rising cost of living is the mightiest factor of revolutionary ferment in all countries. The bourgeoisie of France, Italy, Germany and other states is endeavouring by means of relief payments to ameliorate the destitution caused by high prices, and to check the growth of the strike movement. To recompense the agricultural classes for a part of their expenditure of labour power, the state, already deeply in debt, engages in shady speculation; it steals from itself in order to defer the hour of settlement. Even if certain categories of workers now enjoy higher living standards than they did before the war, this fact does not in any way tally with the actual economic condition of capitalist countries. These ephemeral results are obtained by borrowing fraudulently from the future, which, when it finally arrives, will bring with it catastrophic destitution and calamities”. 

The Manifesto pointed out that the US economy was also not in a position to ‘rescue’ Europe. It was also held back by a lack of raw materials and a lack of cheap labour as many Germans, Italians, Serbs and others had returned to Europe based on illusions of returning prosperity to be won through war. The US economy had also been narrowed by the demands of war production. In short, the Manifesto concluded that “America is becoming rapidly Europeanised”.

The section concluded with the following: “On capitalist foundations there is no salvation. The policy of imperialism does not lead to the abolition of want but to its aggravation owing to the predatory waste of existing reserves. The question of fuel and raw material is an international question which can be solved only on the basis of a planned, collectivist, socialist production. It is necessary to cancel the state debts. It is necessary to emancipate labour and its products from the monstrous tribute extorted by the world plutocracy. It is necessary to overthrow this plutocracy. It is necessary to remove the barriers which tend to atomise world economy. The Supreme Economic Council of the Entente imperialists must be replaced by the Supreme Economic Soviet of the world proletariat, to effect the centralized exploitation of all the economic resources of mankind. It is necessary to destroy imperialism in order to give mankind an opportunity to live”.

III. The Bourgeois Regime After the War

This section of the Manifesto opens with the following statement: “The entire energy of the propertied classes is concentrated upon two questions: to maintain themselves in power in the international struggle and to prevent the proletariat from becoming the master of the country. In conformity with this, the former political groupings of the bourgeoisie have lost their power”. 

It goes on to explain this last sentence in the context of Russia, where all the different groupings of the propertied classes had gathered together under the banner of the Cadet Party; in Britain  where Lloyd George was pushing for amalgamation of the Tories, Unionists and Liberals; in the US where the differences between the Republicans and Democrats was now barely discernible; and in France where the Radicals, Royalists and Catholics were forming a joint bloc despite their previous differences over the Church and State. In all these countries, the various wings of the capitalist class were putting their differences aside in the face of the threat of a rising proletariat.

It adds that, despite the reformist leaders’ naïve faith in the need for the workers’ movement to take “the ‘peaceable' road of democracy” rather than the “violent road of dictatorship”, “the last vestiges of democracy are being trampled underfoot” across the capitalist world: “Since the war, during which the federal electoral bodies played the part of impotent but noisy patriotic stooges for their respective ruling imperialist cliques, the parliaments have fallen into a state of complete prostration. All the important issues are now decided outside the parliaments. Nothing is changed in this respect by the window-dressing of enlarged parliamentary prerogatives … The real masters of the situation and the rulers of state destiny are - Lord Rothschild and Lord Weir, Morgan and Rockefeller … [and their equivalents also listed from the European powers] - these gold, coal-, oil-, and metal-kings who operate behind the scenes and who send their second-rank lieutenants into parliaments to carry out their instructions”.

Trotsky, the author of the Manifesto, points out that the war had led to a rapid concentration of capital in the hands of a layer of newly enriched war contractors, profiteers and adventurers, or, as he sums them up,  “every species of unbridled scum greedy for luxury”. As a result, “solidity, stability, tendency toward ‘reasonable’ compromises, observance of a certain decorum both in exploitation and in the utilisation of its fruits - all this has been washed away.” [sounds familiar?!?]. 

He adds, “Politics, courts, the press, the arts and the church fall in line … The leading newspapers of the world are monstrous factories of falsehood, libel and spiritual poison”.

It also comments not only on the increasingly repressive methods being employed by the official state apparatus, but also how “various private counter-revolutionary organisations are being formed - for breaking strikes by force, for acts of provocation … raiding and seizing Communist institutions, organising pogroms, assassinating revolutionary leaders …” and so on. 

In conclusion, this third section of the Manifesto warns that: “the bourgeoisie has entirely abandoned the idea of reconciling the proletariat by means of reform. It corrupts an insignificant labour aristocracy with a few sops and keeps the great masses in subjection by blood and iron. There is not a single serious issue today which is decided by ballot. Of democracy nothing remains save memories in the skulls of reformists. The entire state organisation is reverting more and more to its primordial form, i.e., detachments of armed men. Instead of counting ballots, the bourgeoisie is busy counting up bayonets, machine gums and cannons which will be at its disposal at the moment when the question of power and property forms is posed pointblank for decision. There is room for neither collaboration nor mediation. To save ourselves we must overthrow the bourgeoisie. This can be achieved only by the rising of the proletariat”.

IV. Soviet Russia 

The next section of the Manifesto contrasts the chaos and oppression across the capitalist world with the creativity and potential for change being offered by Soviet Russia, despite all the difficulties it had faced. This contrast - and the potential that a planned economy would offer - holds even truer today.

The Manifesto sets out how: “In spite of the fact that in the course of historical development Soviet power has for the first time been established in the most backward and ruined country of Europe, surrounded by a host of the most mighty enemies - despite all this, the Soviet power has not only maintained itself in the struggle against such unprecedented odds but it has also demonstrated in action the vast potentialities inherent in Communism. The development and consolidation of the Soviet power in Russia is the most momentous historical fact since the foundation of the Communist International …”.

“... The Soviet power has created a mighty armed force while under fire. The Red Army has demonstrated its unquestionable superiority not only in the struggle against old bourgeois-monarchist Russia, which imperialism is endeavouring to re-establish with the aid of the White Armies of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, Wrangel, et al., but also in the struggle against the national armies of those 'democracies' which world imperialism is implanting for its own benefit (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland) …”

“… In the sphere of economy the Soviet Republic has performed a great miracle by virtue of the single fact that it has succeeded in maintaining itself during the first three trying and most difficult years. It remains inviolate and continues to develop because it has torn the instruments of exploitation out of the hands of the bourgeoisie and has transformed them into the means of planned economy. …” 

“... Soviet Russia has not let slip a single opportunity for economic and cultural construction. … Only the monopoly by the socialist state of the necessities of life, coincident with a ruthless struggle against speculation, has saved the Russian cities from starvation and made it possible to supply the Red Army with food. Only the unification by the state of scattered factories, plants, privately-owned railroads and ships has assured the possibility of production and transport”. 

“The concentration of industry and transport in the hands of the state leads, through standardisation, to the socialization of technology itself. Only upon the principles of socialism is it possible to fix the minimum number of types of locomotives, freight cars and steamships to be manufactured and repaired, and to carry on and periodically standardise mass production of machinery and machine parts, thus securing incalculable advantages from the crucial standpoint of raising the productivity of labour. Economic progress, the scientific organisation of industry, the introduction of the Taylor system [a new capitalist management technique being developed in the US] - divested of its capitalist-sweatshop features - no longer face any obstacles in Soviet Russia, save for those interposed from abroad by imperialist violence”.

It adds, making reference to the earlier section on the National Question: “At the time when national interests, clashing with imperialist encroachments, are a constant source of incessant conflicts, uprisings and wars throughout the world, socialist Russia has shown how painlessly the workers' state is able to reconcile national requirements with those of economic life, by purging the former of chauvinism and by emancipating the latter from imperialism. Socialism strives to bring about union of all regions, all provinces and all nationalities by means of a unified economic plan. Economic centralism, freed from the exploitation of one class by another, and of one nation by another and, hence, equally beneficial to all alike, can be instituted without in any way infringing upon the real freedom of national development”.

This section concluded with the following: “The revolution has made Russia into the first proletarian state. … The question of Soviet Russia has become the touchstone by which all the organisations of the working class are tested. The German Social Democracy committed its second greatest treachery - greatest in point of infamy since the betrayal of August 4, 1914 [when it had supported its own imperialists’ war] - when, in obtaining control of the government, it sought the protection of Western imperialism instead of seeking an alliance with the revolution in the East. A Soviet Germany united with Soviet Russia would have represented a force exceeding from the very start all the capitalist states put together!”

In hindsight, especially knowing how that betrayal of the German Revolution led to the isolation of the Russian Revolution and its subsequent betrayal by the Stalinists, this section still stands out with its full force - as a summary of the potential strengths of a planned economy in comparison to an increasingly chaotic capitalist system in decay.

V. The Proletarian Revolution and the Communist International 

The conclusion to be drawn, of course, in this final section of the Manifesto, was the need for international proletarian revolution to link up with the Russian Revolution in a World Federation of Soviet Republics.

However, the real question was, ‘how could that be achieved’? This concluding part of the Manifesto of the Second World Congress therefore also refers to questions of strategy and tactics that are discussed in more detail in other resolutions - and which I will also seek to summarise in separate posts.

The Trade Unions 

This concluding section first takes up the question of the importance of the trade unions for the revolutionary movement, despite the actions of their present leaders. 

It explains how “the strike and the boycott [such as the refusal by transport workers to load ships with arms intended for attack on Soviet Russia], methods resorted to by the working class at the dawn of it's trade-union struggles, i.e., even before it began utilising parliamentarianism, are today assuming unprecedented proportions, acquiring a new and menacing significance, similar to an artillery barrage before the final attack. The ever-growing helplessness of an individual before the blind inter-play of historic events has driven into the unions not only new strata of working men and women but also white-collar workers, functionaries and petty-bourgeois intellectuals”. 

It adds, “Prior to the time when the proletarian revolution will of necessity lead to the creation of Soviets, which immediately assume ascendancy over all the old labour organisations, the toilers are streaming into the traditional trade unions, tolerating for the time being their old forms, their official programmes, their ruling aristocracy, but introducing into these organisations an ever-increasing and unprecedented revolutionary pressure of the many-millioned masses”

Yes, the Manifesto warns how: “the leaders of the old trade unions use every means to counter the revolutionary struggle of the working masses and to paralyse it; or, if they cannot do it otherwise, they take charge of strikes in order to all the more surely to nullify them by underhand machinations”. 

However, a separate appeal from the Congress to “The Trade Unions of All Countries” asks the questions “How should the revolutionary worker respond to the treachery of the trade-union movement? How must revolutionaries fight the conscious attempts of the leaders to sabotage the movement? By leaving the union, deserting the mass organisations and setting up their own tiny unions? By taking the most revolutionary and active elements out of the unions and abandoning the other millions of workers, who are filled with hatred of the bourgeoisie, to the ideological leadership of the old leaders?”

The appeal responds to these rhetorical questions by answering categorically that, no, “This is a suicidal tactic. This is hari-kiri. The Second Congress of the Communist International is well aware how little the scab leaders are worth and how great is their treachery. Nevertheless, it is sharply and categorically opposed to withdrawing from the mass workers organisations. The Communists must be where the working masses are. Each worker must know and remember that in Western Europe and America social revolution is not possible without the participation of the multi-million-strong army of the trade unions, and that therefore the unions which are acting as a brake on the revolutionary movement have to be won …”. 

“... The working class and its organisations have to be rid of those who, at the height of the conflict between labour and capital, act as strike-breakers towards their class. Not passive withdrawal from the unions, but active struggle within them and the expulsion from them of the treacherous scab leaders - this is the slogan which must be taken up with revolutionary zeal and fought for as hard as possible”, adding that the Communist Party “must recruit all those who recognise the great significance of the events they are witnessing”.

The Colonial Revolution 

This concluding section also again makes reference to the importance of the Colonial Revolution, and how, “in the movements of colonial peoples, the social element blends in diverse forms with the national element, but both of them are directed against imperialism. The road from the first stumbling baby steps to the mature forms of struggle is being traversed by the colonies and backward countries in general through a forced march, under the pressure of modern imperialism and under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat”.

It adds that “the fruitful rapprochement of the Muslim and non-Muslim peoples who are kept shackled under British and foreign domination, the purging of the movement internally by doing away with the influence of the clergy and of chauvinist reaction, the simultaneous struggle against foreign oppressors and their native confederates - the feudal lords, the priests and the usurers - all this is transforming the growing army of the colonial insurrection into a great historical force, into a mighty reserve for the world proletariat”.

Germany and Britain 

Amongst other countries, it comments on developments in Germany and the treachery perpetrated by the ‘Social Democrats’ of the Second International who “had laboured to gain the confidence of the proletarian masses only in order to place - when the critical moment came and when the existence of bourgeois society was at stake - its entire authority in the service of the exploiters” but trusts (hopes that sadly would not be fulfilled) that “in the heat of battle, the party of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht is teaching the German workers to find the correct road”. 

As for Britain, it notes that “routinism among the summits of the labour movement in Britain in so ingrained that they have yet even to feel the need to rearm themselves: the leaders of the British Labour Party are stubbornly bent upon remaining within the framework of the Second International. At a time when the march of events during recent years has undermined the stability of economic life in conservative England and has made her toiling masses most receptive to a revolutionary programme - at such a time, the official machinery of the bourgeois nation: the Royal House of Windsor, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the Church, the trade unions, the Labour Party, George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury and [the right-wing Labour MP] Henderson - remains intact as a mighty automatic brake upon progress. Only the Communist Party - a party free from routine and sectarianism, and closely bound up with the mass organisations will be able to counterpose the proletarian rank and file to this official aristocracy”.

A Revolutionary International 

This section comments that “the governmental and semi-governmental Socialists of various countries have no lack of pretexts on which to ground the charge that the Communists by their intransigent tactics provoke the counter-revolution into action, and help to mobilise its forces” but adds that, yes, “if the working class refrained from encroaching upon the foundations of capitalist rule, the bourgeoisie would have no need of repressive measures. The very concept of counter-revolution would never have arisen if revolutions were not known to history. That the uprisings of the proletariat inevitably entail the organisation of the bourgeoisie for self-defence and counter-attack, simply means that the revolution is the struggle between two irreconcilable classes which can end only with the final victory of one of them. Communism rejects with contempt the policy which consists in keeping the masses inert, in intimidating them with the bludgeon of counter-revolution”.

The Manifesto declares that, “to the disintegration and chaos of the capitalist world, whose death agony threatens to destroy all human culture, the Communist International counterposes the united struggle of the world proletariat for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and for the reconstruction of national and world economy on the basis of a single economic plan, instituted and realised in life by a society of producers, a society of solidarity”.

It adds that, “the Communist International is the party of the revolutionary education of the world proletariat. It rejects all groups which openly or covertly stupefy, demoralise and weaken the proletariat” … and also, (referring to those parties who were breaking with the betrayers of the Second International but failing to draw the necessary conclusions about the revolutionary strategy of required), “neither can the Communist International admit into its ranks those organisations which, after inscribing the dictatorship of the proletariat in their programme, continue to conduct a policy which obviously relies upon a peaceful solution to the historical crisis. Mere recognition of the Soviet system settles nothing. The Soviet form of organisation does not possess any miraculous powers. Revolutionary power lies within the proletariat itself. It is necessary for the proletariat to rise for the conquest of power - then and only then does the Soviet organisation reveal its qualities as the irreplaceable instrument in the hands of proletariat” .

It also “demands the expulsion from the ranks of the labour movement of all those leaders who are directly or indirectly implicated in political collaboration with the bourgeoisie. We need leaders who have no other attitude toward bourgeois society than that of mortal hatred, who organise the proletariat for an irreconcilable struggle and who are ready to lead an insurgent army into the battle, who are not going to stop half-way, whatever happens, and who will not shrink from resorting to ruthless measures against all those who may try to stop them by force”.

Against Sectarianism and Ultra-Leftism

But the Manifesto also warns against ultra-left sectarianism, stating that “The Communist International is the world party of proletarian uprising and proletarian dictatorship. It has no aims and tasks separate and apart from those of the working class itself. The pretensions of tiny sects, each of which wants to save the working class in its own manner, are alien and hostile to the spirit of the Communist International. It does not possess any panaceas or magic formulas but bases itself on the past and present international experience of the working class; it purges that experience of all blunders and deviations; it generalises the conquests made, and recognises and adopts only such revolutionary formulas as are the formulas of mass action …”.

“... The trade-union organisation, the economic and political strike, the boycott, the parliamentary and municipal elections, the parliamentary tribunal, legal and illegal agitation, auxiliary bases in the army, the co-operative, the barricade - none of the forms of organisation or of struggle created by the labour movement as it evolves is rejected by the Communist International, nor is any one of them singled out and sanctified as a panacea”.

On participation in elections, the Manifesto adds that “The Soviet system is not an abstract principle opposed by Communists to the principle of parliamentarianism. The Soviet system is a class apparatus which is destined to do away with parliamentarianism and to take its place during the struggle and as a result of the struggle. Waging a merciless struggle against reformism in the trade unions and parliamentary cretinism and careerism, the Communist International at the same time condemns all sectarian summonses to leave the ranks of the multi-millioned trade union organisations or to turn one's back upon parliamentary and municipal institutions…”

“... The Communists do not separate themselves from the masses who are being deceived and betrayed by the reformists and the patriots, but engage the latter in an irreconcilable struggle within the mass organisations and institutions established by bourgeois society, in order to overthrow them the more surely and the more quickly. Whereas, under the aegis of the Second International, the methods of class organisation and of class struggle which were almost exclusively of a legal character have turned out to be, in the last analysis, subject to the control and direction of the bourgeoisie, who use its reformist agency as a bridle on the revolutionary class, the Communist International, on the other hand, tears this bridle out of the hands of the bourgeoisie, conquers all the methods and organisations of the labour movement, unites all of them under its revolutionary leadership and through them puts before the proletariat one single goal, namely, the conquest of power for the abolition of the bourgeois state and for the establishment of a Communist society”.

And finally, it describes the work of an individual revolutionary member of the Communist International in this way: “In all this work whether as leader of a revolutionary strike, or as organiser of underground groups, or as secretary of a trade union, or as agitator at mass meetings, whether as deputy, co-operative worker or barricade fighter, the Communist always remains true to himself as a disciplined member of the Communist Party, a zealous fighter, a mortal enemy of capitalist society, its economic foundation, its state forms, its democratic lies, its religion and its morality. He is a self-sacrificing soldier of the proletarian revolution and an indefatigable herald of the new society”.

And it is with this important guidance that the ‘Manifesto of the Second World Congress’ concludes, over the signatures of delegates from 33 different countries. 

Whilst developments since 1920 may have changed and rechanged World Perspectives many times, the core of this guidance remains of great importance for revolutionary socialists today.

Socialism and Democracy - revisiting the Theses of the First Congress of the 3rd International

Socialism and Democracy 

The decisions taken by the first four Congresses of the Third International remain a key resource for socialists to study and apply in today's struggles. In this post, I summarise what the Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos agreed by the First Congress of 1919 can teach workers and youth today about how 'democracy' under capitalism differs from the system of genuine workers' democracy that would operate in a socialist society.

Capitalist politicians, journalists and historians have always sought to confuse and dissuade workers and youth from socialist ideas by insisting that socialism is 'undemocratic'.

Trotsky, one of the key leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, answered these accusations in the ‘Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World’, written for its First Congress in March 1919.

It’s definitely worth restating the words of that Manifesto today: “The entire bourgeois world accuses the Communists of destroying freedom and political democracy. These are lies. Upon assuming power, the proletariat merely lays bear the complete impossibility of employing the methods of bourgeois democracy and creates the condition and forms of a new and much higher workers' democracy”. 

The First Congress of the Communist International

This First Congress, bringing together delegates from  19 countries to build a new ‘Third International’ of revolutionary socialists, met at a time when the rulers of the capitalist powers were showing just how quickly they can ditch ‘democracy’ when they feel that they are under serious threat. 

Not only were the imperialist powers aiming their usual journalistic and political weaponry against the threat of socialist revolution, they were mobilising their military weaponry too. That's because they were desperate to crush the fledgling workers' state created by the October Russian Revolution of 1917.

As the Congress' theses on ‘The International Situation and the Policy of the Entente’ explained,“From the first day of the October revolution … the Entente powers took the side of the counter-revolutionary parties … They have seized Siberia, the Urals, the coastal areas of European Russia, the Caucasus and a part of Turkestan. The Allies have taken … raw materials … stolen the gold reserves of the Russian state … contrived to blow up bridges, railways and trains, thereby obstructing the distribution of food supplies. The allies have supplied money, arms and military aid to the reactionary generals Denikin, Kolchak and Krasnov, who have hanged and shot thousands of workers and peasants … The Entente has openly proclaimed the principles of 'economic encirclement', that is, of starving to death the revolutionary republic of workers and peasants”.

Lenin, the other key leader of the Russian Revolution, explained in the Congress' ‘Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy’, how, in the capitalist powers’ own countries, Communists were being “exiled, persecuted and thrown into prison”. In Germany, “the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg … assassinated by officers and capitalists with impunity” had exposed how so-called capitalist democracy was in fact operating a “bourgeois dictatorship”.

In short, when it came to defending their class privileges against any kind of serious threat, capitalism was quick to dispense with ‘democratic’ norms and instead rely on repression and military force. 

Yet, hypocritically, as Lenin pointed out, “faced with the growth of the revolutionary workers' movement in every country, the bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers' organisations are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defence of the rule of the exploiters. Condemnation of dictatorship and defence of democracy are particularly prominent among these arguments. The falsity and hypocrisy of this argument … are obvious to all who refuse to betray the fundamental principles of socialism”.

The limitations of capitalist democracy 

Lenin's theses set out how the repression employed by the capitalist class during times of civil war and revolutionary threats to their rule was only an extension of the lack of genuine democracy to be found at all times under capitalism.

Lenin emphasised that in any class society, such as capitalist society, it was wrong to speak about “‘democracy in general’, without posing the question of the class concerned”. He explained that, under capitalist democracy, the ‘liberty and equality’ extended to the capitalist class is very different to that available to the working class.

Lenin gives some specific examples. 

Para.7 of the Theses states that: “The workers know perfectly well that, even in the most democratic bourgeois republic, 'freedom of assembly' is a hollow phrase, for the rich have the best public and private buildings at their disposal, and enough leisure to assemble at meetings, which are protected by the bourgeois machine of power. The rural and urban workers and the small peasants - the overwhelming majority of the population - are denied all these things. As long as that state of affairs prevails, 'equality', i.e., 'pure democracy', is a fraud”.

Para.8 adds that “ 'Freedom of the press' is another of the principal slogans of pure democracy'. And here, too, the workers know … that this freedom is a deception while the printing-presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists, and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply and cynically the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example.”

Para.4 sums up the Marxist theory of the State stating that, “in explaining the class nature of bourgeois civilisation, bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system, all socialists have expressed the idea formulated with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels, namely, that the most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists.”

Workers' Democracy 

In contrast, Lenin stresses that, under a socialist democracy, workers would have both the time and the resources needed for genuine freedom to organise. The working day would be reduced and equal access provided to meeting spaces, public printing presses and stocks of paper [rights that now, of course, would extend to digital spaces and media platforms too].

In Para.13, Lenin stresses that workers' democracy, based on the organisation of Soviet-type bodies such as workers' councils or shop steward committees, would provide “an unparalleled extension of the actual enjoyment of democracy by those oppressed by capitalism - the toiling classes … i.e., the vast majority of the population” and present to them “greater practical opportunities for enjoying democratic rights and liberties than ever existed before, even approximately, in the best and the most democratic bourgeois republics”.

Lenin goes on in the next paragraph to explain that “the substance of Soviet government is that the permanent and only foundation of state power, the entire machinery of state, is the mass-scale organisation of the classes oppressed by capitalism, i.e., the workers and the semi-proletarians (peasants who do not exploit the labour of others and regularly resort to the sale of at least a part of their own labour-power). It is the people who even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, while possessing equal rights by law, have in fact been debarred by thousands of devices and subterfuges from participation in political life and enjoyment of democratic rights and liberties, that are now drawn into constant and unfailing, moreover, decisive, participation in the democratic administration of the state”.

In Para.15 Lenin adds that “the equality of citizens, irrespective of sex, religion, race, or nationality, which bourgeois democracy everywhere has always promised but never effected, and never could effect because of the domination of capital, is given immediate and full effect by the Soviet system … The fact is that this can only be done by a government of the workers, who are not interested in the means of production being privately owned and in the fight for their division and redivision”.

‘Dictatorial’ socialism? Answering the capitalist lies

But what about the accusations from the capitalist world that, far from being democratic, the Bolsheviks were (in the civil war conditions that they faced), resorting to ‘Red Terror’ and ‘dictatorship’ ? 

Trotsky answers as follows in his Manifesto: “The wails of the bourgeois world against civil war and against Red Terror represent the most monstrous hypocrisy yet known in the history of political struggles. There would be no civil war if the clique of exploiters who have brought mankind to the very brink of ruin did not resist every forward step of the toiling masses, if they did not organise conspiracies and assassinations, and did not summon armed assistance from without in order to maintain or restore their thievish privileges”. 

Trotsky continues, “Civil war is imposed upon the working class by its mortal enemies. Without renouncing itself and its own future, which is the future of all mankind, the working class cannot fail to answer blow for blow. While never provoking civil war artificially, the Communist parties seek to shorten as much as possible the duration of civil war whenever the latter does arrive with iron necessity; they seek to reduce to a minimum the number of victims and, above all, to assure victory to the proletariat. Hence flows the necessity of disarming the bourgeoisie in time, of arming the workers in time, of creating in time the Communist army to defend the workers' power”. 

And so, when Lenin talks of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, he certainly isn't proposing a regime without workers' democracy, simply one where the working class defends its hard won gains from the resistance of its previous exploiters, resistance taking the form in Russia at that time of the civil war instigated by the capitalist powers.

Lenin stresses that considering just ‘democracy in general' without considering its class basis is also false when considering ‘dictatorship in general’ too. When having to defend the gains of the revolution from capitalist attacks, “it is not a question of ‘dictatorship in general’, but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, i.e., the proletariat, over its oppressors and exploiters, i.e., the bourgeoisie, in order to overcome the resistance offered by the exploiters in their fight to maintain their domination”.

Lenin continues (in Para.3) to explain that “history teaches us that no oppressed class ever did, or could, achieve power without going through a period of dictatorship, i.e., the conquest of political power and forcible suppression of the resistance always offered by the exploiters - a resistance that is most desperate, most furious, and that stops at nothing. The bourgeoisie … won power in the advanced countries through a series of insurrections, civil wars, and the forcible suppression of kings, feudal lords, slaveowners and their attempts at restoration.”

Lenin castigates those supposed ‘socialists’ that were joining with the capitalist class in condemning the Bolsheviks and the Russian working-class for putting into practice such a ‘proletarian dictatorship’. Lenin describes their actions as a “denial of the proletariat's right to its own, proletarian, revolution” amounting to a “defence of bourgeois reformism at the very historical juncture when bourgeois reformism throughout the world has collapsed and the war has created a revolutionary situation”.

Lenin's adds (Para.7) that “When the bourgeoisie were revolutionary, they did not, either in England in 1649 or in France in 1793, grant 'freedom of assembly’ to the monarchists and nobles, who summoned foreign troops and 'assembled' to organise attempts at restoration. If the present-day bourgeoisie, who have long since become reactionary, demand from the proletariat advance guarantees of 'freedom of assembly' for the exploiters, whatever the resistance offered by the capitalists to being expropriated, the workers will only laugh at their hypocrisy”.

He concludes (Para.12) that, given the circumstances, “proletarian dictatorship is not only an absolutely legitimate means of overthrowing the exploiters and suppressing their resistance, but also absolutely necessary to the entire mass of the working people, being their only defence against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is preparing new wars. … In capitalist society, whenever there is any serious aggravation of the class struggle intrinsic to that society, there can be no alternative but the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dreams of some third way are reactionary, petty-bourgeois lamentations.”

Lenin also points out (Para.13) how the forms of democracy have “inevitably changed over the centuries as one ruling class replaced another. Democracy assumed different forms and was applied in different degrees in the ancient republics of Greece, the medieval cities and the advanced capitalist countries. It would be sheer nonsense to think that the most profound revolution in human history, the first case in the world of power being transferred from the exploiting minority to the exploited majority, could tak place within the time-worn framework of the old, bourgeois, parliamentary democracy, without drastic changes, without the creation of new forms of democracy, new institutions that embody the new conditions for applying democracy”.

Lenin goes on to emphasise (Para.14) that “proletarian dictatorship is similar to the dictatorship of other classes in that it arises out of the need, as every other dictatorship does, to forcibly suppress the resistance of the class that is losing its political sway. The fundamental distinction between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of other classes - landlord dictatorship in the Middle Ages and bourgeois dictatorship in all the civilized capitalist countries - consists in the fact that the dictatorship of the landowners and bourgeoisie was the forcible suppression of the resistance offered by the vast majority of the population, namely, the working people. In contrast, proletarian dictatorship is the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, i.e., an insignificant minority of the population, the landowners and capitalists”.

Only a temporary ‘dictatorship' 

Lenin’s theses also include a reminder of the theory of the State developed by Marx and Engels i.e., that, having successfully suppressed the attempts by the old exploiters to crush the new workers' state, and having started to develop a workers' democracy and socialist economy to address poverty and inequality, the need for any ‘proletarian dictatorship’ - and, eventually, any state power at all - ends - so that the state “withers away’.

Lenin explains (Para 20) that “destruction of state power is the aim set by all socialists, including Marx above all. Genuine democracy, i.e., liberty and equality, is unrealisable unless this aim is achieved. But its practical achievement is possible only through Soviet, or proletarian, democracy, for by enlisting the mass organisations of the working people in constant and unfailing participation in the administration of the state, it immediately begins to prepare the complete withering away of any state”.

This important idea is also set out in another document agreed by the First Congress, the “Platform of the Communist International”, which states the following in the section on ‘Democracy and Dictatorship’: “The proletarian state is, like every other state, an apparatus of repression, but its repression is directed against the enemies of the working class. Its purpose is to break, once and for all, the resistance of the exploiters, who will stop at nothing in their desperate struggle to drown the revolution in rivers of blood. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which gives this class the leading position in society, is, however, a temporary form of government. As the resistance of the bourgeoisie is overcome, its property expropriated, and its members gradually drawn into working for society, so the proletarian dictatorship disappears, the state withers away and the division of society into classes is ended”.

The ‘Platform’ also adds this useful explanation of how the capitalist class seeks to conceal its own ‘bourgeois dictatorship’, whereas the working-class can be open about how it intends to use its organisation and power to end their exploitation: “So-called democracy, i.e. bourgeois democracy, is nothing but the veiled dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The much-vaunted 'general will of the people' is no more a reality than 'the people' or 'the nation'. Classes exist and they have conflicting and incompatible aspirations. But as the bourgeoisie represents an insignificant minority it makes use of this illusion, this imaginary concept, in order to consolidate its rule over the working class. Behind this mask of eloquence it can impose its class will. The proletariat, which forms the vast majority of the population is, on the contrary, completely open about using the class power of its mass organisations and Soviets to eliminate the privileges of the bourgeoisie and guarantee the transition to the classless, communist society”.

The Nature of Soviet Power

Both Lenin’s Theses and Trotsky’s Manifesto set out how a new form of state organisation has to replace the old bourgeois state machine. 

Lenin (Para.16) explains that “the old, i.e., bourgeois, democracy and the parliamentary system were so organised that it was the mass of working people who were kept farthest away from the machinery of government. Soviet power, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other hand, is so organised as to bring the working people close to the machinery of government. That, too, is the purpose of combining the legislative and executive authority under the Soviet organisation of the state and of replacing territorial constituencies by production units - the factory”.

He goes on (Para.19) to point out that “The Paris Commune [the first ever example of a workers’ government in March-May 1871] took the first epoch-making step along this path. The Soviet system has taken the second”.

Trotsky's Manifesto explains that “the proletariat is compelled to create its own apparatus designed first and foremost to cement the inner ties of the working class and to assure the possibility of its revolutionary intervention into the future development of mankind. This apparatus is represented by the Workers' Soviets … a broad organisation which embraces the working masses independently of trade or level of political development already attained; a flexible apparatus which permits of continual renovation and extension; and is capable of attracting into its orbit ever newer layers, opening wide its doors to the toiling layers in the city and the country who are close to the proletariat. This irreplaceable organisation of working-class self-rule, this organisation of its struggle for and later of its conquest of state power, has been tested in the experience of various countries and constitutes the mightiest conquest and weapon of the proletariat in our epoch”. 

The tasks facing the International

What lessons did Lenin and Trotsky draw from their analysis for the coming struggle?

Trotsky makes clear that, while fundamentally aiming to replace limited capitalist democracy with genuine workers' democracy, “in those countries where historical development provided the opportunity, the working class has utilised the regime of political democracy in order to organise against capitalism”. 

However, Trotsky also warns that, unlike the advanced layers of the working-class, “broad intermediate masses not only in the villages but also in the cities are being held back by capitalism, lagging entire epochs behind historical development”. These layers - peasants, small farmers and the like - are more easily duped by bourgeois lies and demagogy into continuing to give their support to capitalist parties, so maintaining the current situation whereby “on all the basic questions which determine the destinies of the peoples, the financial oligarchy makes the decision behind the back of parliamentary democracy”

But, while not underestimating those dangers, Trotsky expresses his confidence that “in those countries where the toiling masses live a conscious life, Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies are now being built and will continue to be built. To strengthen the Soviets, to raise their authority, to counterpose them to the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie - this is today the most important task of the class-conscious and honest workers of all countries”. 

Trotsky continues, “through the medium of Soviets, the working class will be able to come to power most surely and easily in all countries where the Soviets are able to rally the majority of the toilers. Through the medium of Soviets the working class, having conquered power, will exercise its sway over all spheres of the country's economic and cultural life, as is the case at present in Russia”

Lenin ends his theses on a similar vein, making three practical proposals, all concerned with the key task of developing Soviet-type organisations in those countries where the International could influence developments within the workers’ movement.

Firstly, Lenin warns that “one of the most important tasks confronting the West-European comrades is to explain to the people the meaning, importance and necessity of the Soviet system. There is a sort of misunderstanding of this question … [reflecting] the mood of the backward sections of the German proletariat. The same thing took place in our country: during the first eight months of the Russian revolution the question of the Soviet organisation was very much discussed, and the workers did not understand what the new system was and whether the Soviets could be transformed into a state machine”. 

He adds, “now we see that in Hungary and Switzerland the question is much more acute. On the one hand, this is very good: it gives us the firm conviction that in the West-European states the revolution is advancing more quickly and will yield great victories. On the other hand, a certain danger is concealed in it, namely, that the struggle will be so precipitous that the minds of the mass of workers will not keep pace with this development. Even now the significance of the Soviet system is not clear to a large mass of the politically educated German workers, because they have been trained in the spirit of the parliamentary system and amid bourgeois prejudices.” [Note: shortly after the First Congress, a Hungarian Soviet Republic was indeed declared but it was defeated within a few months].

Lenin's second proposal was about the importance of developing Soviets in rural areas amongst farm labourers and poor peasants, not just workers' soviets in the cities. He writes that “victory can only be considered assured when not only the urban workers, but also the rural proletarians are organised, and organised not as before - in trade unions and co-operative societies - but in Soviets”. 

His third point is to stress that “winning a Communist majority in the Soviets is the principal task in all countries in which Soviet government is not yet victorious. … We, as the organised section of the working class, as a party, strive and must strive to gain a majority in the Soviets. Then our victory will be assured and no power on earth will be able to do anything against the communist revolution. If we do not, victory will not be secured so easily, and it will not be durable”.

Applying these ideas today

The resolutions of this First Congress of 1919 were written at a time when, as Trotsky put it in ‘The First Five Years of the Communist International’, “there was a certain justification for reckoning and hoping that the semi-spontaneous onset of the working class might overthrow the bourgeoisie before the latter succeeded in finding a new orientation and new post-war points of support. Such moods and expectations were by and large justified by the objective situation at the time”. 

However, events, not least the defeats of the German and Hungarian Revolutions of 1919, confirmed that successful revolutionary change required the requisite revolutionary leadership, leadership that had not been developed in other countries in the way that the Bolsheviks had succeeded in building in Russia. 

These lessons are reflected in the decisions taken by the Second Congress of the Third International which met in 1920, which I will look at in further posts. However, the way events developed in practice after the First Congress in no way detract from the general arguments set out above about the difference between bourgeois and workers' democracy.

Today, it is even more vital that we answer the lies of capitalism and use the ideas laid out in the resolutions of the First Congress to expose the lack of genuine democracy under bourgeois rule, and to explain how a genuine workers' democracy would operate. 

Practice, rather than theory, will prove the precise form in which ‘Soviet’ organisation will develop - whether through workers' councils, shop steward or strike committees for example. 

But Lenin’s insistence at the First Congress on the need, as revolutionary movements emerge, for such organisations to be built, and for the genuinely revolutionary forces to win majority support within them, is still as important as ever if we are to succeed in the struggle to build a socialist society today.

South Korea - The Tiger Strikes (1997) - Part Three

 In 1997, the CWI (Committee for a Workers' International) produced a detailed pamphlet reporting from the mass struggles of the South Korean working-class in the winter of 1996/97. With struggle again taking place in South Korea, it seems timely to share the contents of this pamphlet again. 

 Part Three, the final part of the three posts sharing the contents of the pamphlet on this blog, covering pages 46 to 63, is posted below. Its author was Clare Doyle, writing under the pseudonym 'Ann Cook'. It presents a Marxist analysis on the way forward for the developing workers' movement and the need to build an independent working-class party with a socialist programme:

A PRICE TO PAY

The thousands of dismissed workers in practically every profession are testament to the vicious anti-union policies of South Korea's bosses but they are also witness to the tenacity of Korean workers in their fight to establish their basic rights. A leader of a strike can expect that by the end of the struggle he will be outside the factory gates forever (unless he becomes a full-timer for the union). It is also pretty certain that he will have to do at least a short period in prison as punishment for his efforts.

Ryu Pang-san is Chair of the Seoul branch of the Korea Telecom union (KTTU) and a leader of the KPSU (Korean Public Service Unions) that brings together unions affiliated to both the national federations and some that are in neither. It links up 150,000 workers on the subway, in broadcasting, at the airport, the Mint etc. with the telecom workers. In 1996, the KPSU conducted a victorious struggle against the government-imposed 3% wage celling and won reinstatement of a number of dismissed workers. On 10^th January 1997, well into the general strike, Ryu Pang-sang was released from three months' detention.

"The main reason for arresting me was because I am a representative of militant unions - to weaken the KTTU and also the KPSU. The government's suppression has focused on the KTTU because telecommunications are very important for the maintenance of Korean industry. Our union is well known for being a radical union. It has 50,000 members and is the largest single union to date. In 1994 I was elected union president by the direct voting of grassroots members. Last 4th October the KPSU formed an organisation to fight the labour laws, and I was appointed by the executive of the KTTU to chair the campaign. I was arrested on 19^th October, two weeks after being elected to this body. This was my second time in prison. I immediately got organising in the detention centre. I was able to communicate with other 'prisoners of conscience'. Every day we had 'meetings' or 'rallies' - twice a day shouting to each other. I was threatened with having family visits withdrawn if I did not take off a protest ribbon I had made with a biro and paper. I went on hunger strike twice and was kept in solitary confinement. The cell was so small I couldn't lie down straight. (He indicated the breadth and width with bent arms.) There was no actual torture, but this was the hardest time for me. It was very cold - minus 15 and no heat allowed. All ten of my toes were frozen. They were swollen and black. After my release they improved but are not yet (two weeks later) perfect. I have to put ointment on every day. It was so cold in prison that I was not able to read. I had no gloves ... books but no gloves! I wore socks as gloves. The food in prison is terrible, for example, 'tuna soup' but no tuna. I lost two kilos this time. One of our Telecom leaders is in prison at the moment. On 12th December the new leadership was elected and on the 13th he was arrested ... I was in prison over Christmas. We were given chocolate – a third of a bar this size". He indicates two bent thumbs by one and a half bent thumbs. Generosity at Christmas time!"

In 'normal' times, according to the KCTU, the number of arrests of trade unionists 'peaks' between April and July - the season of wage bargaining and industrial action. Their appeal for help, sent out on the internet last spring headed "Send Back Our Colleagues!", explains that recently, because of international criticism of its repressive labour laws, the government has tended to use other laws. The National Security law was mostly reserved to deal with "those who possess and read publications that criticise Korean society or support the viewpoint of authority for socialism".

At the time of the 1996 National Assembly elections - also from April to July - there was a noticeable increase in arrests for "participation in anti-state organisations". That same summer, a sanctioned demonstration was blockaded by police because one of the protesters was "wearing a mask resembling the president". Students are constantly harassed by the police and arrested on the slightest infringement of the law - "publishing a phrase from the 'Communist Manifesto' of Marx and Engels in a student year planner or wearing a T-shirt bearing the name of a North Korean university.

The human rights organisation, Min Ka Hyop, is heavily involved in campaigning for an end to political arrests as well as torture. One of its reports gives details of the vicious application of the Military Service Law. Young men who are not willing to do three years in the army or the (military) riot police are bound into uninterrupted 'service' for a company for five years. If, even after four years and eleven months, they are involved in union activity and dismissed, they must immediately enrol in the army or go to jail.

Life for a poem

Perhaps the most renowned political prisoner is Park No-hae, the poet whose work is loved and recited throughout the movement. He wrote a poem that was deemed to have praised Kim Il-sung – the self-titled 'Great Leader' in North Korea. After its publication, Park and his wife, Kim Chin-ju were forced to go underground. A detailed appeal for his release explains that while in hiding they met members of the workers' organisation, Sa No Maeng and took part in protests and labour organising:

“Kim Chin-ju was arrested on the 5th March 1991 while waiting to meet her mother in a department store. Park was arrested five days later while riding in a lorry with other Sa No Maeng members. He was charged with leading an 'anti-state' organisation – a crime punishable by death - and with 'disseminating socialist propaganda', 'establishing a political party representing the working-class' and 'setting up revolutionary cells on major industrial sites' ... While in prison he was tortured and deprived of sleep for several days at a time. His books were banned, and he attempted suicide. Although the prosecution was pushing for the 'maximum penalty', it was decided that it would not look good on Korea's human rights record if someone as famous as Park No-hae was executed. Instead, he was sentenced to life in prison - the stiffest sentence given to someone not charged with espionage since Roh Tae-woo took office."

Democrat-dictator

Park No-hae's is the best known case – nationally and internationally - but many hundreds less known are locked up or constantly in fear of arrest. When the KCTU gives details of trade unionists on police wanted lists they indicate the "date of hunting". And all this under the 'democrat' Kim Young-sam who was himself sought by the police on many occasions. That was when he and Kim Dae-jung (now leader of the main opposition party) were involved in the struggle against dictators who trample on basic human rights.

Kim Dae-jung faced the death sentence in 1980 for his part in the Kwangju uprising and was only saved by US 'intervention'. This - the man who could win the presidential elections on 18th December 1997 as a direct result of the general strike – [MPD: He did, gaining 40% of the vote] now seems to be more at home in the company of Kim Jong-pil, leader of the United Liberal Democrats (ULD), than with workers or former comrades of the democracy movement. Kim Jong-pil is none other than the founder of the Korean CIA, at the beginning of Park Chung-hee's reign of terror. (He built it up from a force of 3,000 'employees' in 1961 to no fewer than 370,000 in 1964).

Police brutality

In the South Korea of today, there is hair-raising evidence that people totally unconnected with the labour movement can find themselves becoming the victims of sometimes lethal police brutality. On 15^th February this year newspapers reported on the deaths of two "poor people" at the hands of local police. Min Byong-il, a street-seller from the village of Kugali, had been 'questioned' about his trading licence. When his barrow was confiscated, and he demanded it back from the police he was beaten so badly that his skull was broken and two operations could not save him. Lee Jong-ho, a citizen of Bupyong, simply complained about the police making a noise in his neighbourhood at night and keeping him awake. He, too, was beaten senseless and left brain-dead. Both had made the mistake of answering back, in effect challenging the 'infallibility' of the local police.

The same day that these reports appeared, the "Kim Hyung-chan Support Group" was to be seen at the KCTU's Saturday demo at Seoul Station. On their stall were gruesome pictures of a body and limbs covered in the most horrific burns and blisters. Pursuing their vigorous campaign, these young people were demanding that police and NSPA officers be brought to justice for the nightmare experience of a young student. Never himself involved in any kind of illegal organisation, he had come within a hair's breadth of losing his life after being mercilessly beaten to reveal things he knew nothing about. Once the police realised they had the wrong man, far from releasing and compensating him, they set about trying to ensure their 'mistake' would never come to light. Bound and gagged, he was transferred to the dreaded cells of the National Security Planning Agency. The sight of the bath and the taps used in the infamous cases of students being tortured to death made him realise what fate his persecutors had in mind for him. The only way he could now see of getting out alive was to set himself alight from the kerosene stove and scream to be taken to hospital. He did survive to tell the tale, severely scarred and scathed by the ordeal. But his torturers and their protectors remain unpunished.

Abuse of power to end?

How long will this situation last? The unnerving thing about a police state is the arbitrary abuse of power and the brutal way in which revenge is sought for even the slightest humiliation. If this applies to the forces of the state, it applies also to the bosses. The government and the president too would try and get their own back on the working class, if they can recover from the devastating blows they have been dealt in the recent period.

How long will the 'Mothers of the Tortured' have to make their regular Thursday pilgrimage to Pagoda Park, to face the taunts and jeers of the riot police who resemble so much their own sons who have died or disappeared in police custody? How long before Lee So-sun, the mother of Chun Tae-il - indeed, the "Mother of the movement", as she is known - can walk at the head of a demonstration without fear of state vengeance for her audacity? (Now aged 70, she has had six spells in jail – ten years in total since 1970. Her neck is bent permanently in the shape of an 'S' as the result of torture).

Hopefully, this great strike and the emergence onto the scene of history of an organised, united, combative South Korean working class that has demonstrated its decisive weight in society will have changed the balance of forces irrevocably in the direction of lasting reforms. Basic democratic rights could now be partially restored as a result of the movement and the pressure of 'world opinion' but at issue has also been the fundamental way in which society is organised.

CHALLENGING THE SYSTEM

How far did the general strike go in challenging the powers-that-be – this "first political general strike" that so many were proud to have participated in?

General strikes

The demonstrations of December 1996 and January '97 did not reach the scale of the 'Great Struggle' in 1987. The strike itself involved less than 10% of Korea's workforce and did not bring the country to a standstill. Nevertheless, it was the most general strike of recent years in that it involved various unions from different sectors of the economy and, since it was against the lawmakers and the power brokers behind them, it was clearly a political general strike - the first in half a century.

Marxists have explained how there can be general strikes in which the working class challenges the rulers for power and which, given a bold, far-sighted leadership, can lead on to revolution. There are others which can start and finish without posing the question of power. When it takes place in the context of a working class going forward and developing its level of organisation, even if not all the demands of a strike movement are met, it marks a positive step forward. Speaking of a general strike in Belgium, Lenin wrote: "The achievement of the strike is not so much the fragment of a victory over the government as the success of the organisation, discipline, fighting spirit and enthusiasm for the struggle displayed by the mass of the Belgian working class".

There can be strikes which end in defeat, like that in 1926 in Britain, when the movement is considerably thrown back. Each strike must be examined in all its particularities. As Lenin also explained, "In any strike which arises out of the very nature of capitalist society, the workers, by stating their demands jointly and refusing to submit to the 'money-bags', cease to be slaves, become human beings and put forward the demand to become masters ... not to work and live as the landlords and capitalists want them to ... They begin to undermine their supremacy".

The political nature of the South Korean strike movement was universally recognised, but many questions remain. What exactly was achieved by this huge exertion of energy against the rule of the Chaebol? When the Korean workers shouted "Down with Kim Young-sam!" "Dissolve the New Korea Party!" and "End the Chaebol economy!" did they have an idea of what to put in their place?

Lenin pointed out: "Strikes teach the workers to think of the struggle of the whole working class against the whole class of factory owners and against the arbitrary police government ... Every strike brings thoughts of socialism very forcibly to the worker's mind". But if in South Korea those thoughts were not articulated - not expressed in so many words - is it because those words are banned by law or is it because the worm of doubt has eaten away at the leaders' confidence in the theory and practice of socialism?

Nature of KCTU

In the absence of any legal mass party of the workers, it is a trade union federation - the KCTU -that has taken on some of the tasks and attributes of a party. The leaders of the KCTU have been steeled in struggle and imprisonment. They are trusted by the members and humble in their approach. The leaders take no more than the average wage of a worker. Many have been victimised and some take far less than they earned on the tools. It is not a bureaucratised leadership. During the strike the Central Committee would meet regularly to decide on the plans for the next phase of struggle. At the national conference in February there was admittedly little discussion (the tradition is to argue before and after but agree at the conference itself). But there was no junketing and banquets, only rousing speeches and stirring songs to fire the spirits for the next round of battle.

The constitution of the KCTU, its aims, platform and programme (all available on the internet) show that an organisation "forged" as it says "through struggle and sacrifice", goes a long way in challenging the system. It fights for a whole series of basic democratic rights like free speech, the freedom to organise, freedom of assembly and the press plus a 40-hour week, full employment, equal pay, decent wages, a full welfare system and much more.

History, however, has shown that even if capitalism is forced by the workers' movement to grant such demands, it cannot guarantee all of them and the ‘lust’ for profit will constantly drive it to undermine each one of them.

Some of the KCTU material hints that an alternative to the 'Chaebol economy' could be one of a 'regulated' market economy. It talks of "protecting the small and medium-sized businesses" and seems to envisage the conglomerates being broken up and the smaller private owners being somehow persuaded to honour a code of moral conduct in favour of their employees. The KCTU's own statistics and experience show that at present it is precisely the medium and small companies who are the most vicious in denying workers their fundamental rights.

The alternative would be to argue for taking at least the 30 biggest conglomerates and the banks into democratic public ownership, and doing away with the pernicious system of sub-contracting. Then their employees and other workers could be involved in deciding, through regularly elected representatives, what happens within these 'empires' and in the economy as a whole. If small employers say they cannot pay decent wages and honour labour codes without help, this should be examined by workers' representatives. If they are found to be working forthe big firms, those firms should be made to pay up. If not, and they are performing a useful service, they should be able to claim some kind of assistance and encouraged to look for efficient, cooperative ways of carrying on their business.

Different views

At the head of the KCTU are leaders with quite varying views. There are those for a socialist transformation as the only solution to workers' problems and those who are, by their own admission, 'reformists'. The latter stop far short of launching a struggle to take the giant Chaebol out of private hands and seem content to aim towards 'the German model'. By this they mean strong trade unions accepting and operating in a capitalist environment, participating in management. Unfortunately, this also means taking responsibility for unpopular profit-motivated decisions about redundancies, wages etc.

The KCTU is keen to learn from workers' experiences in other countries. It is highly conscious of the importance of international solidarity and anxious to make direct links with workers throughout the world. But on issues like the 'Social Clause' in international trade agreements, there are also different points of view. There is a big danger entailed in trusting the direct and indirect representatives of the bosses to improve the lot of workers in any country. Issues like child labour, bonded labour and poverty wages must be fought head-on by the labour movement - nationally and internationally. Apparently magnanimous stipulations in trade agreements can be used as forms of protectionism for firms based in the richer nations.

The complete opening up of South Korea to what would amount to 'economic invasion' by US or any other imperialism would cause considerable further hardship for working people and must be opposed. But the KCTU must insist that decisions about controls and subsidies are not made in the interests of protecting inefficient Korean capitalists who can push up prices at workers' expense. Solutions put forward in the labour movement must be based on the need to fight for control in the economy to be taken into the hands of the working people – the majority in society.

On international links, there is an urgent need to forge direct contacts between organised workers in different countries - working in the same industries or for the same multinational companies. Exchange of information and experience internationally together with solidarity action are essential for the success of the workers' movement. But the KCTU and other Korean labour movement bodies and projects should harbour no illusions about the aims of organisations like the ICFTU, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation or others who profess a touching concern for their plight. There is a saying, "If you sup with the devil, use a long spoon!" Accept the offers of help in terms of finance and resources by all means but be sure there are no strings attached. Workers must guard against rich benefactors posing as friends of the movement trying to dictate the direction in which the emerging trade union movement of South Korea should go. Trade Union leaders and European Social Democrats are notorious for their devious ways of acting, in reality, as defenders of the exploiting classes. It was such gentlemen as these who wined and dined the leaders of many a political general strike - against the Franco dictatorship in the Spain of the 1970s, against the South African apartheid regime. They beguiled them with sweet talk about the advantages of the 'social' market and the wisdom of co-operating with the bosses - those very bosses who were the power behind the regimes they had been fighting for decades.

Members of the Committee for a Workers' International also discussed with some of these brave fighters at the height of their struggles, including leaders of the South African mineworkers and COSATU. But rather than fight things to a finish, these once-courageous leaders took the line of least resistance. They not only swallowed the arguments about capitalism, but turned their backs on the struggle for socialism. They betrayed the aspirations of their members. Some of them crossed the class divide completely, giving up the movement to become owners of businesses themselves and line their own pockets as employers of other people's labour.

This must serve as a warning that even the best-intentioned leaders, like those of the KCTU, if they fail to adopt a programme and method of struggle that challenges capitalism, they will inevitably move to the right. Inherent in reformism is betrayal.

How much further?

But the KCTU, some of its leaders will object, is only a union federation and not a party. It cannot lead a bid to change society. Others will disagree. Theoretically, as Trotsky explained, in the inter-war period, there is no laid-down prescription for what kind of body could be the instrument for workers taking power. In Russia it was the workers' and peasants' soviets, in Germany it could be factory committees, in Britain at one point the trade unions and, in the last century, even parliament. The main precondition for success is that workers are on the move, the ruling class is in crisis, the middle class firmly on the side of the proletariat and a far-sighted leadership, known and trusted because of its past record, is rooted in the working class.

As things stood in South Korea even at the end of January 1997, was it possible for the movement to have been taken further? The 'heavy battalions' cannot be kept constantly on a war footing without the perspective of a fairly swift victory. As workers' leaders in Hyundai Precision Instruments explained a month later:

"We couldn't have carried on indefinitely. We had already lost a month's wages. Other sections like telecom workers were not being called into the strike. We had to shoulder the main burden ... And then 'Hanbogate' broke and the Hwang defection and the killing in strange circumstances in Seoul of a prominent defector from the North. All that detracted from our struggle".

And these distractions were no accident. It is a tried and tested method of South Korean regimes. When in difficulty, engineer a defection and start up a scare campaign. 'Hanbogate' itself was probably also "engineered". The company had already been in trouble for more than a year and could surely have been kept going at least for another few months. There is widespread speculation about how this hare was released - some say by members of Kim Young-sam's own Minju faction to save him from the wrath of the striking working class. Others say by members of the right-wing faction within his party who wanted to see him thoroughly discredited and unable to put the man of his choice in to run for president in the December elections. (This could be particularly important if he wants to avoid the fate of the last two heads of state - imprisonment.)

Either way you could say (and some did) that a skilful leadership of the movement could have used both issues to its advantage and gone onto the offensive. The scare stories about the economy being in danger and about a "communist conspiracy" should not have been able to shake the confidence of the working class in action. There were those amongst the seasoned South Korean activists who felt the strike should not have been scaled down when it was. The government had been weakened possibly irrecoverably and then it was let off the hook.

Socialist Challenge

If a party had been in position - a genuine socialist party with deep roots in the working class and a leadership prepared to push things to a conclusion - how would it have fared? In attacking the Chaebol as the culprits for ruining the economy, the leaders of the KCTU and the campaigning groups around them are pushing at an open door in South Korean society. The official ideology is that no classes exist but the gap between rich and poor is ever widening. It is no exaggeration to say that everyone knows that the Chaebol, the state and the government are in league together to squeeze the maximum they can get out of a hard-working and long-suffering proletariat. An American newspaper quoted Hu In-suk, "a 44 year-old housewife, looking on at a rally in Seoul", as saying; "The labour law only reflects what big business wants ... I support the strikers all the way."

Had the president's ratings not rocketed when he jailed his predecessors for their part in the bloody Kwangju massacre and put on trial some of the richest, most corrupt and powerful heads of the Chaebol? People had grown angry over the failure to investigate and punish notoriously anti-union companies. There was the Korea Automobile Insurance Corporation. It was discovered that Assembly members on the Labour Commission looking into the firm's activities had been given bribes hidden in fruit baskets. And now, in the Hanbo case, the chairman of the fourteenth largest conglomerate had been caught sending gifts of $460,000 to the chairmen of two of Korea's largest banks stuffed into instant noodle boxes.

Enough was surely enough! Wasn't this the time to get rid of the lot of them? Wasn't this just final proof that the system was rotten to the core and didn’t deserve to survive? A party could have demanded that, instead of the superficial investigations by parliamentarians and lawyers into the scandal, there should be a tribunal of workers' representatives. There were a quarter of a million jobs at risk at Hanbo and its sub-contractors. The $7 billion of public money that went to bail out the banks would come from workers' pockets, one way or another. Attempts to use the crisis to bully workers into dropping their action - the need to save the stricken economy from collapse and so on - could have been pre-empted by propaganda that immediately put the blame squarely on the Chaebol for everything that was happening.

A party could have articulated the feelings of millions, and put them like this: "We are tired of labouring to line the pockets of these infamous fraudsters. It is these same Chaebol that are demanding that we pay for their survival. We say 'no', we can run society without these parasites. They have created these giant conglomerates and run them like mini-kingdoms. We will fight for them to become public property run on principles of workers' control and workers' management. We will set up those people's committees again and show that we can create a workers' government. We will organise a plan to be implemented not through terror and coercion by generals and their bankers but drawn up and operated on thoroughly democratic and co-operative principles by elected representatives of all the working people".

Working class decisive

There are those who say such ideas are 'old-fashioned' - what the socialist theoreticians had to say is no longer valid and the industrial working class counts for nothing anymore. Let them look at this strike and what this strike has proved! Every participant and observer comments, as if with one voice, that, as distinct from the movement of '87, the industrial working class was the driving force.

Those who work in the giant factories of the top Chaebol may be a minority in the workforce, but the power they can wield has been proven for all who have eyes to see. It is the actions of these layers of workers that have emboldened the many individuals and groups well versed in Marxism, forced until now to operate in conditions of clandestinity and speak only half the truth. Protesters and campaigners have gone further than ever before in lampooning the government, in condemning the Chaebol economy and in demanding the president's resignation. So what stayed the hands of the strike leaders?

Scaling the strike down towards the end of January to give the government and the Assembly a chance to rescind the laws may in itself not have been a bad tactic especially given that only certain sections were involved in all-out action. They were already beginning to resent having to bear the brunt of the bosses' revenge and the loss of wages while other sections were still at work. But even though the strike had moved into another gear with the Wednesday and Saturday action, sections of the government and the police were feeling humiliated by the lifting of the arrest warrants and the possibility of a climb-down. Indecision gripped the government.

A 'classical' revolutionary situation had not developed but all the elements were there in embryo. It was, to use a racing analogy, the 'first time out' for the KCTU in terms of a political general strike. The country had not been paralysed. Big factories were occupied but transport was rarely stopped. (If the leaders had wanted all-out action, they probably would have found, as was the case in the French general strike of 1995, that 'the public' would have been overwhelmingly on the side of the workers in spite of inconvenience to their lives). The movement had been strong enough to draw the middle layers of society to its side but not to split the forces of the state. Things did not reach that stage.

While the workers held the moral high-ground in society, there was not a situation of dual power with representative bodies thrown up by workers that vie with existing state organs for control in society. Though badly debilitated, the government was not totally suspended in mid-air. The ruling class had been severely shaken but still held the reins of power. But at least the outlines of a pre-revolutionary situation were taking shape and a powerful desire was developing in the hearts of working people for finishing with the government and throwing the Chaebol giants off their backs.

Different leadership

It is difficult to say whether a different leadership of the movement could have fulfilled these aspirations. Before launching a challenge for power it would have had to probe and test the ground through its own agitation, carefully selecting the slogans of the hour and conducting a dialogue with every section of the working class. The middle class, once it sensed a fight to the finish would overwhelmingly have sided with the workers. The forces of the state, even the hated riot police, could have been neutralised or even persuaded to go into revolt as sections of the Korean army have done more than once before in history.

On the other hand, it might have turned out that even a leadership using such methods and standing openly for socialist change, on weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of the movement, could have judged it necessary to limit the strike to the single aim of annulling the new laws and regard it as a dress rehearsal for future battles. But it is clear that even to guarantee the abolition of these anti-trade union and anti-working class measures, much more was and will be needed.

If there had been a moment when a different leadership, in place before things got to this stage, could possibly have made a bolder challenge, the opportunity was fast slipping away. Once the scale of the bribes-for-loans scandal was being revealed and leading members of the ruling party were being arrested, the headlines had been captured and the desired diversionary effect had been achieved. The leaders of the KCTU made threats about renewing the strike if the Labour law was not annulled but it is doubtful whether they were still in a position to re-mobilise the movement. Industrial action is not like a tap that can be turned off and on at will.

And, as if to make assurance doubly sure, there was the Hwang Jang-yop defection from the North. The announcement was undoubtedly premature – given that he was not yet out of China, let alone in the safety of South Korea - and rushed into, not only to distract attention from the KCTU Congress. It just so happened that the students were due to return to the universities after their long winter break and the much-quoted letter, supposedly written by Hwang, appealed to the students not to be beguiled into joining the protest against the government.

The vast publicity around his statement was no doubt aimed at trying to intimidate the working class with scare stories about 40,000 agents of the North being at work in South Korean society. This figure is exactly the same as that given in a report drawn up for the Public Prosecutor's Office last October. (It had talked of "10,000 core leftists and 30,000 more lukewarm 'pinkos" who had either sent letters to the North or accessed North Korea's home-page on the internet).

Outcome

But this first attempt at a generalised strike showed that workers and leaders alike lacked experience. The KCTU admitted as much. Having threatened to renew the strike action on a number of occasions before the labour laws were finally agreed, the KCTU leadership decided to concentrate on firming up its position in the factories during the period of wage negotiations and to launch a general offensive from 1st May. The law as amended by no means satisfied their demands. While it made some concessions on the right of the KCTU to negotiate and to call strikes it insisted on the 'no work, no pay' principle being applied to strikers and trade union officials alike and gave employers the right to take-on substitute labour during a dispute from among "other non-striking workers in the same business".

In the event, the KCTU's May offensive was also dropped, and energy was invested in preparing to stand a candidate in the presidential elections. Whether it will be a totally independent trade union candidate or a joint candidate with the present opposition parties is not, at the time of going to print, decided. The outcome of this inevitably heated discussion will say a great deal about the leadership of the movement. [MPD: KCTU President Kwon Yong-kil stood as the ‘People's Victory for 21st Century’ presidential candidate. This then became the ‘Democratic Labour Party’ in 2000. See: https://socialismtoday.org/archive/47/skorea.html ]

THE WAY AHEAD

Given the state of the economy and with the bosses trying to hold wage rises at the same level as last year, struggles are inevitable. The trade unions are intact but the organised workers did not finish the job. They will want to strengthen their forces at factory level and consolidate industrial unions and federations. Genuine workers' organisations internationally will follow each struggle with keen interest and with the aim of giving the maximum solidarity. They will back the teachers and the civil servants in their fight for legality. They will loudly condemn all the anti-trade union activities of the bosses and the state and energetically campaign for the release of all political prisoners.

Undoubtedly, Korean workers will build on their confidence in the manner of 1987 - more strikes, more victories, more union organisation. But today their struggles will take place against the background of a fall in growth rates as compared with the dazzling expansion of the late 1980s. Union membership figures show that in the slow-down of 1992 and the concomitant closures and redundancies, the unions suffered a considerable set-back. But today, with the winter general strike under their belt, they would be less prepared to accept arguments about the need to pull together in the interests of the economy. The next general strike will be different; the question will be posed for the most active layers of fighting against the system.

But they need an alternative to fight for. That of the KCTU - protection of medium and small businesses and a campaign against monopolies is not sufficient. In small and medium workplaces the accident rate is the highest and the wages the lowest. The KCTU will enter into struggle after struggle but they will stop short of an all-out offensive if they accept the capitalist way of doing things and don't adopt a socialist alternative. That is what the international bourgeois want, including their Social Democratic friends around the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the ICFTU etc.

These people will assist in setting up strong trade unions to operate within the system - negotiate, participate etc. They will put money into human rights organisations, foreign workers' organisations and even a party. Their aim is to ride the tiger of the combative Korean workers' movement that is in the process of throwing off organisations like the FKTU and the so-called democratic parties with whom they have done business in the past. They want to tame the movement to stop it setting a bad example to others.

Political Alternative

The January strikes not only posed the question of a political alternative, they actually prepared the ground for its formation. The leaders may hesitate in setting up a party, citing the experiences of 1988, of 1992, even of 1996, when candidates of the left or of the trade union movement had been put forward and received very small electoral support. But all parties start with a small turn-out.

First time round, the British Labour Party in 1906 received no more than 5% of the vote. But in the context of a big strike struggle and a social movement, a workers' party can develop very rapidly. The Party of Workers (PT ) in Brazil was born out of the massive metalworkers' strikes of 1978. Properly founded in 1980, it received a modest percent of the vote in elections the first time it fielded any candidates - a total of 650,000. Three years later in '89, its candidate for president, Lula, was not far short of victory with 31 million votes in the second round run-off with the traditional right wing candidate who got 35 million. The Greek Socialist Party - PASOK - first stood in elections in 1974 and was in power by 1981 with a 48% share of the vote.

The KCTU is committed in its programme to building "a party which fights for the interests of the working class" and along with many other organisations is in discussion as to how it should be built. The setting up of a workers' party would be a huge step forward. But it is not a question of creating yet another party just to put people into parliament or local government or even the president's position just for them to get in and forget all about the people who put them there. How many participants of the 1987 Democracy Struggle have ended up in the present ruling party to continue to hold the working class in chains? The only way to ensure that the "people's representatives" stay faithful to the people would be through the democratic election within the party of all candidates and their commitment to take no privileges - no wage higher than the average skilled worker and expenses vetted by the movement, plus mechanisms for removing them if they fail to carry out the party's policies.

Class, party and programme

But if, as one of the KCTU's documents explains, the working class is the majority in society and has played the leading role in the recent movements against the government, then it requires a party which is prepared to be unashamedly based on the working class. A party is needed which will champion every demand of the trade unions and the movement - all the basic democratic rights, trade union and human rights - and go further. South Korea's own experiences demonstrate that, for all the professions of the democratic politicians, without a challenge to the rule of capital, these rights remain dispensable.

Only when the rule of capital is ended, only when the assets of the Chaebol and the banks become the property of the majority, can the majority decide how best to use them. With planning based not on bribery, power politics and the enrichment of a few but on control by democratically elected workers' representatives, both at the factory and the state level, it would be possible to put an end to the abuse and humiliation of centuries. Insisting on the eight- hour day and fully participating in decision-making, working people in Korea would decide how best to organise relations with each other and with the outside world. This is not a dream but a necessity.

Collapse of Stalinism

As everywhere in the world, the doubters and detractors will say "but look at your planned economies, they have collapsed!" In South Korea there were not a few activists who looked in the past to the Soviet Union as a model to which they aspired. They were told it was 'socialism' both by those who attacked it and those who unconditionally defended it. Now apparently capitalism had shown itself superior and this was disorientating. They did not have access to all the facts and arguments that give a clear explanation of the objective reasons for the rise as well as the collapse of the Stalinist system and leave the ideas of socialism basically intact.

The bureaucratically-controlled 'workers' states' came about because of the degeneration of the Russian revolution - the isolation, the backwardness, the inexperience of the working class and the usurpation of power by a privileged caste. A planned economy without the oxygen of workers' democracy, explained Trotsky, will eventually suffocate under the weight of the central bureaucracy that cannot adapt to new techniques or allow individual initiative to be expressed. To save their privileges and their dominance in society, which the planned economies could no longer guarantee, and to fend off a revolt from below, the communist parties of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and, in reality, of China - the parties of the bureaucracies - took the road of the market. The vast majority of the bureaucrats preferred to turn themselves into capitalists than to be thrown off like an old coat by a movement of workers in the direction of socialism.

The state in the North

Millions of ordinary people in the South yearn for their country to be reunited but genuinely fear the so-called communism of the North. Based on a philosophy which in itself is a total distortion of Marxism ("Juché" or "self-reliance"), it has taken the cult of the personality to extremes. The leader of the nation for 40 years, Kim Il-sung, was credited with the infallibility and special powers of a demi-god while the mass of the people saw their country fall into the depths of poverty and total isolation.

There are those activists in the South who, willing things to be otherwise, argue that descriptions of life in North Korea are merely propaganda churned out by the paranoically anti-Communist government and its imperialist backers. They adopt the attitude of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and envy what they see as a simple, moral and Chaebol-free land. But that is not sufficient.

It is true that the economy of the North grew faster than that of the South in the period after the war, demonstrating the advantage of state-ownership and planning. But the attempt to build a planned economy on the basis of autarchic rule and isolated in one small country proved to be a failure even before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now the country is literally a disaster area with eight to nine million of a 25 million population already on the danger list and dying through starvation. The 'Far Eastern Economic Review talks of women cooking wild grass and tree bark for food. People are keeping the bodies of their dead for a few days before burial in order not to risk them being dug up and used as food by the desperately hungry people around them!

North Korea has an army one million strong and the defector Hwang Jang-yop says his mission in leaving the country (where he was general secretary of the ruling Workers' Party) was to prevent a frightened and desperate North Korea from going to war with the South. But soldiers must not only be fed (and there are stories that rice aid from abroad is going only to them) they must have a will to fight.

Who can help? Even China, going over to capitalism, now has fewer links with the North than it has with the Chaebol-dominated economy. South Korea is one of Beijing's biggest trading partners and the fourth largest investor in China. Two-way trade has rocketed from nothing to nearly $20 billion. That between China and North Korea is dwindling – last year $566 million. The Chinese president meets South Korea's president Kim Young-sam every year but has never met North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il.

As more and more harrowing stories about life in the North reach Seoul, used as always by the regime as "proof" of the evils of "communism", there is a widespread urge amongst ordinary people to give physical assistance. But, having fostered the idea itself in mid-April, the Kim Young-sam government tried to stop street collections. The organisers – the church and various 'left' groups – were overwhelmed with the response and were blamed for fomenting criticism of the government's policy towards the North. Kim Young-sam cannot be too confident on this score as he has changed his unification minister five times.

Reunification

All South Korean regimes, from the dictators to the pseudo-democrats, have claimed to be in favour of reunification but unquestionably entirely on terms dictated by imperialism as a whole and South Korean capitalism itself. Many hold that the quibbling over aid to the North is in order to bully Kim Jong-il's regime into submission. Kim Young-sam claims to be reluctant to give succour to an enemy which has so recently (last year) "sent marine commandos to invade". The North's leaders must come to the negotiating table first and make a peace agreement. (Technically for them the Korean war has not yet ended).

If the North Korean regime, facing famine at home and cold shoulders all around it, virtually collapses into South Korea it will cost the economy of the Chaebol far more than the reunification of Germany cost capitalist West Germany. The United States would be forced to put in large sums of money to shore up a united capitalist Korea. The population of the North is half that of the South, compared with East Germany's being one-quarter that of West Germany. It has a per capita income of at most one-tenth that of South Korea. Most of the population is now receiving less than 200 grammes of food a day, far less than the United Nations prescribes for refugees in Africa. 90% of the country's livestock has gone - traded or slaughtered. While South Korea is the eleventh largest economy in the world, North Korea "would not make it into the top 500 centrally managed economic units in the world" (Economist - 'The World in 1997').

No socialist could be against Korean reunification if it is carried out in the interests of the people. Many hundreds of thousands of families are still cruelly separated by the line that cuts the body of their country in two. World imperialism with the collusion of the Soviet bureaucracy, imposed this artificial arrangement solely in the interest of maintaining their own sphere of influence in the region - literally dividing a nation and ruling as much of it as possible.

No socialist, however critical of the bureaucracy and the elite in the North, would welcome a delayed victory of imperialism in the form of a 'surrender' of state ownership and planning. While the people of the North are desperately in need of food and working people in the South are prepared to make sacrifices to help, aid programmes organised by the United Nations or other organisations of capitalism are bound to have strings attached. Socialists vigorously oppose the privatisation of industry and land.

They would argue for full democratic rights and give full backing for workers to establish control in their workplaces and manage the economy and society through genuinely elected representatives. While thus pressing for the overthrow of the ruling elite, they would have to argue for North Korea, at least initially, to maintain its own identity, probably in a federation of the two states with the freedom of all Koreans to travel. The right of self-determination must be upheld and a united movement of the Korean working class built with the aim of organising the voluntary re-unification of Korea on a socialist basis. The decision must be that of the people of North and South, arrived at in a totally democratic manner.

The "Bogey"

Some 'nationalist' activists in the South paint foreign imperialism as the main enemy, implying that Koreans of all classes can struggle together to eliminate it. Later can come the struggle for socialism. Indeed, the Korean nation has endured enormous suffering under decades of direct and indirect colonial rule. The movement will never forgive or forget. It has to demand that US troops be completely withdrawn, that all the assets of American and Japanese imperialism be taken into public ownership and that the country be re-unified. But the now fully-fledged Korean capitalist class is integrally bound up with foreign capital. It will use the very same methods of economic exploitation and state repression, with or without that 'special relationship' with Washington and Tokyo. The struggle against imperialism means a struggle against Korean capitalism.

The present Southern regime wants unification on its own terms, that is with the imposition of capitalist market relations. Socialists must oppose this. They must fight for democratic rights in the North and the South and for unification without the rule of the Chaebol. The fight for re-unification must be linked precisely to the fight for socialism - the elimination of rule by a handful of capitalist families in the South and by a small bureaucratic 'dynasty' in the North.

It sometimes seems as if the bourgeois South prefers to keep things as they are. A separate capitalist North Korea is unlikely to develop, but if it did, in itself it would not represent a powerful rival to the South. It is most likely to be 'absorbed'. But not only would this cause big problems for the South Korean economy. If the planned economy was dismantled, the rather useful "bogey" over the border would be gone. What conspiracy theories could be used then against the workers' and students' movements to try and deter them from the ideas of socialism and communism?

Although this excuse for intimidation has allowed regimes in the South literally to get away with murder, in some cases, the fact that the South Korean regime so ruthlessly punishes "pro-North activities", tends to attract some of the most rebellious youth towards those very activities. There is also a well-grounded and deep-seated hostility to imperialism amongst wide layers of the population. But some activists feel that the lives of many valiant young fighters have been wrecked unnecessarily as a result of incorrect tactics that have laid the movement open to state provocation.

National Liberation (NL), the organisation behind last summer's confrontation at Yonsei University, has been against linking up the struggle of the students and the fight for the expulsion of imperialism from the peninsula with the workers' movement for an end to the Chaebol economy in the South. The NL leadership, in its blind drive for unification on Pyongyang's terms and following its false Juché doctrine, abandons the class struggle and, in effect, also excuses the monstrous rule of the ruling clique in the North. It argues for a struggle of all Koreans, in the North and South and abroad - i.e. Koreans of all classes - against foreign domination. This is the Stalinist theory of two stages - first the national liberation struggle against imperialism, then the class struggle against the bosses and for socialism. It was this treacherous policy that delivered the leaders of the Chinese working class into the murderous hands of the Chiang Kai Shek nationalists in 1927 and was responsible for the slaughter of up to two million members of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965.

The other tendency in student politics was PD or 'People's Democracy' which, while arguing for "broad coalitions" of forces, recognises the main enemy as the Chaebol and the main force for change as the proletariat. These, the two best known trends in student politics, have long fed the debates in every corner of the movement - particularly in the underground and semi-legal organisations that abound in the conditions of political persecution.

Cross-class alliances

When the question of a new party is under discussion, there are those, including in the KCTU, who also argue for a cross-class coalition involving members of Kim Dae-jung's NCNP (National Congress for New Politics) party. While Kim Dae-jung may have slightly more "radical" credentials than Kim Young-sam, he has failed to live up to the most modest expectations of his party's supporters even in the course of this great strike. He said at the parliamentary symposium on 17th January that democracy must be fully developed in order to crush communism. As soon as "Hanbogate" broke he was forced to admit receiving $292,000 to use his influence in favour of this now fallen pillar of Chaebol capitalism.

When, as happens quite frequently, he is accused in the yellow press of association with the regime in the North he does not use the opportunity to condemn his accusers. He says nothing of the right to free speech, free association, let alone the right to advocate an alternative system. He is well known for singing the praises not of North Korea but of capitalist Germany.

The Korean people can no longer put their trust in any of the "Kims". Kim Jong-pil, leader of the smaller ULD, is no "friend of the people" either. Few will forget his role in the police butchery under the Chun Doo-whan regime as founder of the Korean CIA.

Independent Working Class Party

A new independent party must be forged to champion the interests of the class that has created "Korea Inc." and borne it on its back. Of course, in the absence of such a party the church has also become a channel for the expression of discontent in the population. It has provided a protective cover against state repression for many of the labour movement's activists. Its bravest representatives are themselves no strangers to police brutality and prison walls.

Professors, lawyers, doctors have all played an important role in giving valuable moral and practical support. But, if, by the unanimous opinion of all the participants, in the recent movement it is the organised workers who now call the shots with their strikes and demonstrations, surely it is they who should call the shots in any party that is the very product and natural expression of that movement. Its leaders should not be squeamish about the facts of life.

Two great classes are ranged against each other. Intermediary classes and friends of the movement will align themselves with the strongest force. If they see the workers moving to transform society along lines which give them the truest freedom of action and best opportunity to develop their own talents, they will back them. Small farmers and shopkeepers would find life under the rule of democratically elected workers' representatives far preferable to today's struggle for existence, when debts are always going up and incomes going down.

A government that had taken over the giant Chaebol and the banks would be in a position to extend cheap credit to these layers. Its "envoys" would agitate amongst them for the most co-operative, safe and efficient use of equipment, of land and of buildings for the production, storing and distribution of food and other essential consumer goods. Decisions would be made according to what ordinary people needed in order to live a comfortable existence and not for the profit of a few in order for them to live in luxury.

Capitalism's Alternative

Surely these ideas have not lost their validity. Look at the horrible prospects if capitalism, large-scale or small-scale, is left to run things its own way! World capitalism will exert relentless pressure to open up the Korean economy to the icy winds of globalisation, to loosen state control over trade, banking, investment and over wages policy. These measures will be accepted by the South Korean industrialists and financiers. If they can drive ahead with deregulation and "liberalisation" at the expense of the living and working conditions of the mass of the population.

The much-demanded reform of the banking system has been predicted to be about to put a third of all bank workers out of a job through mergers and acquisitions ('Economic Report'). Some economists predict a leap in the general level of unemployment from 2-6% within a very short space of time. The Korean bourgeoisie have already participated in the globalisation process themselves. An explosion of overseas direct investment is taking place. Hyundai is responsible for the building in Oregon of the largest memory chip factory in the world. Daewoo is spending $6 billion to establish production outside Korea over the three years until the end of the century. Six South Korean firms are now among the 200 largest in the world.

According to the Samsung Economic Research Institute, at least 200,000 jobs producing for the home market, have been lost to areas of cheaper labour in South East Asia. A shoe factory employing 20,000 workers in Pusan, the largest in the world in the 1980s, is now closed and the work transferred. Multinationals like Nike and Reebok have moved on to places like the Philippines, Vietnam, China and Indonesia.

Even here they have found resistance to their super-exploitation strategies. Towards the end of April this year, half the 10,000 workers employed by a Nike sub-contractor in Tangerang, Indonesia were involved in mass protests at the factory – burning cars, smashing windows, doors and furniture at the firm's refusal to pay even the agreed $2.50 a day minimum wage.

'Reform' of the South Korean financial system - increasing the cost of borrowing in an attempt to reduce the over-indebtedness of Korean firms - it is feared would itself lead to recession. At present, direct foreign investment in Korea is still low. The entry of foreign capital would mean further problems for the Korean bourgeois. Lifting subsidies and protection would lead to many more collapses. Continuing them would leave Korean capitalism inefficient. Without the state protection of the past - in the form of tax wavers, over-generous credit arrangements and other more dubious methods - many more jobs would go.

If capitalist commentators now say that the state is an encumbrance pointing to 11,000 different bureaucratic regulations, they at least recognise its dominant role. They admit the absence of their beloved "free play of market forces". The state involvement was all right when it was fuelling growth but now, with the dramatic collapse of exports, it is the over-involvement of the state that is to blame. The South Korean economy is described as so top-heavy that it resembles "Schwarzenegger's body on the legs of Woody Allen"!

Globalise the Struggle!

As long as capitalism survives it will try to solve its problems at the workers' expense. Globalisation – the "centrepiece of the presidency", as the KCTU puts it - means "sharing the suffering". Workers will not be fobbed off by any anti-luxury campaign aimed at protecting Korea's domestic market. They know (and figures from the National Statistics Office in Seoul bear them out) that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. The more contact they have with workers elsewhere, the more they see this as a world-wide phenomenon. A greater awareness of what is happening in the world feeds conclusions about the need for the "globalisation" of the struggle.

As the general strike, with all its phases subsided, attention was turned to the annual wage battles and, particularly amongst the activists and trade union leaders, to the question of taking political initiatives. The 'great strike' was followed by the 'great debate' over putting forward a candidate for the presidential elections on 18th December and over the creation of a party. Illusions still persist that the best chance of workers interests being pursued would be through joining forces with the existing opposition parties. But the KCTU's own press statements during the strike movement condemned the parliamentary opposition for dragging its feet and for "looking over their shoulders for the wishes of the big business".

An independent class position would be much more consistent with all the KCTU propaganda that puts the blame for workers' problems squarely at the feet of the Chaebol. If, for example, the known and respected leader of the strike, Kwon Yong-kil was put forward as a presidential candidate, he could get a big response. [MPD: Kwon Yong-kil did stand as the ‘People's Victory for 21st Century’ presidential candidate]. A bold campaign could be taken into every working-class area and industrial estate, championing the demands of the movement and explaining the 'dictatorship' of big business.

Clear demands

A party could be rapidly put together around the demands for an end to repression and corruption, for a living wage and shorter hours, for jobs and homes for all. It could link them with the need to take the 30 biggest Chaebol out of the hands of their super-rich founding families. It could convince workers not to trust any of the parties who defend them and to organise themselves for the democratic control and running of society.

Any party arising from the winter strike movement and created by its participants will represent a giant step forward. Whether it is based on clearly socialist principles depends on how far its founders can be persuaded to go. But it would seem that, in the context of a struggle that has embraced many diverse groupings within its sweep, convinced socialists would have a place in such a party. Provided they prove their worth in any and every struggle of the working class, they will find great scope for arguing the position of genuine Marxism.

There are some similarities to the situation in Russia as the 20th century began; but there are huge differences. On the verge of a new millennium, the Korean working class starts from a far higher industrial and cultural plane. Its weight in society and experience at organisation is far greater. The literacy rate is higher now than that of the USA. What could be done if all of Korea's modern technology was harnessed to need and not to profit?

The Korean working class has a proud history. In the 'Great Political General Strike' they have once again proved their mettle. The workers of Korea have brought to the attention of the world how far there is to go before their country becomes the paradise that many made it out to be. Only through transforming society along socialist lines as argued in this pamphlet can the long years of sacrifice be rewarded.

Not a moment should be lost in struggling to create a leadership that is capable and worthy of that task. Only the programme of socialism embodies the aspirations of the movement and safeguards its traditions. In the spirit of its message to the KCTU in January, the CWI pledges its fullest support to all engaged in this endeavour and applauds the courage and tenacity of Korea's class fighters. They remain an inspiration to all those who struggle against injustice and oppression and towards the final goal of a socialist world. Solidarity!

End of the pamphlet

The first part of the pamphlet, covering pages 1 to 27, can be found here and the second part, covering pages 28 to 45, here.