Foreword

The republication of The First Five Years of the Communist International comes at an opportune time, when capitalism is facing the most serious crisis in its whole history. The capitalist world is hurtling towards disaster and this is being felt by billions of workers and youth across the world, who are asking questions about the very future of this system.

There is no way out of this crisis unless the root cause is tackled head on: the capitalist system itself. Unless it is removed, it will continue to condemn humanity to growing poverty, hunger, and war. To achieve this, what is required is an international organisation of the working class, with a clear understanding of the nature of the crisis we face.

The last time a truly mass revolutionary international organisation of the workers existed was shortly after the First World War when the Communist International was created. Its aim was the socialist transformation of the whole world.

We, the genuine Marxists who base ourselves on the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, recognise the first four congresses of the Communist International as genuine forums of Marxist debate, where most of the questions we still face today were hammered out. The resolutions and theses voted at those congresses are a heritage we claim as ours. The debates and speeches of the key leaders are also of extreme relevance today.

Two leaders stood out above all the others, Lenin and Trotsky. Much rewriting of history, with lies and distortions, has been carried out since then. The Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union falsified the role Trotsky had played in the Russian Revolution. The reason for that was that he continued to defend the genuine ideas of Bolshevism, which were a direct threat to the privileges and power that the bureaucracy had acquired in the course of the 1920s.

In 1924, however, Trotsky was still recognised as one of the key leaders of the Communist International and the Soviet Union. Testimony to that is the fact that the present collection of texts was published by the official state publishing house in Moscow in 1924. We are making it available once more, at a time when the urgent task facing the workers of the world is to build a mass revolutionary international organisation like the Communist International.

In this volume, we provide an introduction by Fred Weston that outlines some of the key debates and decisions taken in the first four congresses of the Communist International. This, we hope will serve to place the contribution of Trotsky into the context of the period. Trotsky’s texts, together with the main documents of the first four congresses of the Communist International, should be read and studied carefully by all workers and youth who are seeking a revolutionary way out of the present crisis of capitalism, as they are full of deep insights on the flow of history itself.