Foreword¶
Core Argument¶
The foreword situates the republication of The First Five Years of the Communist International within the context of capitalism’s most severe systemic crisis, arguing that no resolution is possible without the abolition of the capitalist system itself. The core narrative thrust is that the working class requires a mass revolutionary international organisation to achieve this, and that the last genuine example of such an organisation was the Communist International (Comintern) in its early years. The text asserts that the first four congresses of the Comintern represent authentic forums of Marxist debate, where the fundamental questions still confronting revolutionaries today were thrashed out. The resolutions, theses, and speeches from this period are claimed as a living heritage, not merely historical artefacts.
Key claims include the necessity of an internationalist perspective to combat the root causes of poverty, hunger, and war, and the insistence that the Stalinist bureaucracy systematically falsified history, particularly the role of Leon Trotsky in the Russian Revolution. The foreword argues that this falsification occurred because Trotsky’s defence of genuine Bolshevism threatened the privileges and power the bureaucracy had consolidated during the 1920s. Evidence for Trotsky’s contemporary standing is provided by noting that the present collection was originally published by the official Soviet state publishing house in Moscow in 1924, when he was still recognised as a key leader of both the Comintern and the Soviet Union.
The historical context drawn upon is the period immediately following the First World War, when the Comintern was created with the aim of achieving the socialist transformation of the entire world. The theoretical context is explicitly Marxist, grounding itself in the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. The polemical thrust is directed against the Stalinist rewriting of history and against the bureaucratic degeneration that supplanted revolutionary internationalism. The foreword also implicitly argues against reformist or gradualist approaches to the present crisis, insisting that only a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism suffices. An introduction by Fred Weston is included in the volume to contextualise Trotsky’s contributions within the key debates and decisions of the first four congresses, and the text concludes by urging workers and youth to study these materials for insights into the flow of history and a revolutionary way out of the current crisis.