Great Days [1]¶
Core Argument¶
In this article written for the inaugural issue of the Communist International in May 2019, Leon Trotsky presents the founding congress of the Third International as the culminating expression of a world-historical rupture. The core narrative thrust is that the October Revolution in Russia and the subsequent convocation of the Communist International within the Kremlin walls represent not an accident of history but the logical outcome of imperialism’s internal contradictions, vindicating Marxist theory against the bankrupt reformism of the Second International.
Trotsky opens with a striking image: the grey walls of the Moscow Kremlin, once the seat of tsarist autocracy and priestly reaction, now house the most revolutionary delegates of the international proletariat. This material setting, he argues, is no mere curiosity but the external seal of enormous changes in the world situation over the preceding decade. He draws a sharp historical contrast: in the eras of the First and Second Internationals, tsarist Russia was the chief bulwark of world reaction, and Russian revolutionaries were émigrés condescended to by European opportunist leaders who believed Europe would enjoy a gradual, painless evolution from capitalism to socialism.
The war of August 1914 shattered this illusion. Trotsky argues that imperialist contradictions ripped apart the peaceful integument of capitalism, casting mankind into barbarism. Marxist theory had foreseen this catastrophe, but the social-reformist parties were caught unawares; their leaders could only summon workers to defend bourgeois national states. On 4 August 1914, the Second International ignobly perished. From that moment, genuine revolutionists set the creation of a new International as their task—an International of irreconcilable struggle.
Trotsky’s polemic is directed squarely against the opportunist leaders of the Second International, the “old revolutionary patch-sewers” who tried to preserve old deceits and organisations. He insists that war is the mother of revolution, and the imperialist war was the mother of the proletarian revolution. The Russian working class and its Communist Party have the honour of making the beginning, swinging open the Kremlin doors and lodging the cornerstone of the Third International. The revolutions in Germany, Austria, and Hungary, sealed by the martyrdom of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, have demonstrated that Europe has no roads different from Russia’s. The unity of methods in the struggle for socialism, disclosed in action, guaranteed the creation of the Communist International ideologically and made its convocation unpostponable. Trotsky concludes with a note of revolutionary exultation: the working class has seized the former tsarist empire as its impregnable fortress and is uniting its forces for the final battle.