Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World [1]¶
Core Argument¶
Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World
This foundational document of the Third International opens by proclaiming itself the direct heir to the programme Marx and Engels had issued seventy-two years earlier. It argues that the imperialist war was not an accident but a deliberate provocation, engineered principally by Great Britain, which manipulated diplomatic signals to ensure conflict, with the United States later intervening as a gleeful third partner only to secure victory. The war, the manifesto contends, has shattered any illusion of a gradual transition to capitalism; mass impoverishment has become physiological and biological. Finance capital has militarised itself entirely and can no longer function except through blood and iron. The state-isation of economic life is irreversible, and the only question is whether the imperialist state or the victorious proletariat will control it. The phantom independence of small states has collapsed, and only proletarian revolution can guarantee them a free existence. Colonial populations were drawn into the war as slaves, and their emancipation depends on working-class victory in the metropolises. Bourgeois democracy is exposed as a sham, with decisions made by the financial oligarchy behind parliamentary façades. The proletariat must therefore create its own apparatus—the workers’ Soviets—as the instrument for revolutionary intervention and the conquest of state power.
Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies must be built and strengthened in all countries, counterposed to the bourgeois state apparatus. Through Soviets, the working class can avoid the decomposition caused by war, starvation, and treachery, and can most surely take power. The imperialist state and military system are foundering; imperialist war is passing into civil war, pitting class against class. Bourgeois wails against civil war and Red Terror are hypocritical, for civil war is imposed on the working class by exploiters who resist every forward step. Communists do not provoke civil war artificially but seek to shorten it and assure proletarian victory, which necessitates the timely arming of workers and the disarming of the bourgeoisie, creating a communist army like the Red Army. The Second International collapsed in 1914, its leading parties having become auxiliary organs of the bourgeois state. This applies also to the Socialist Centre—including the Independent Party of Germany and the Mensheviks—which seeks to re-establish the Second International’s opportunism. The struggle against the Centre is indispensable for the struggle against imperialism. The Third International is the International of revolutionary realisation, of the deed. Its task is to overthrow bourgeois order and erect the socialist order.