May Day Manifesto of the ECCI¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: May Day Manifesto of the ECCI (21 April 1921)
This manifesto, issued by the Executive Committee of the Communist International, addresses the world working class at a moment of apparent capitalist consolidation but underlying systemic crisis. Its core argument is that the bourgeoisie has proven utterly incapable of restoring the world economy after the war, and that the apparent respite for capital is illusory. The document insists that the world revolution is not defeated but advancing, and that the task of communists is to prepare for imminent, sharpened mass struggles rather than retreat into propaganda or parliamentary gradualism.
The manifesto opens by contrasting bourgeois triumphalism with the objective reality of devastation. In the defeated capitalist countries—Germany, Austria, Hungary—famine reigns, currencies collapse, and foreign predators strip the remnants of national wealth. In the victor countries, the picture is no better: four million unemployed in America, two million in Britain, economic chaos in France, and relentless strike waves. Lloyd George, the manifesto notes, has assembled armed forces to break the coal miners should they be joined by railway and transport workers. The key claim is that capital cannot organise the world economy; it can only compound old contradictions with new ones. The Entente powers, having extracted reparations under the guise of war guilt, are already preparing fresh conflicts: British capital eyes American naval armaments with distrust, while Britain and Japan rearm against each other. The “wild beast of world war” is readying another leap.
The manifesto’s polemical thrust is directed at three targets. First, the open social-patriots—Scheidemann, Renaudel, Henderson—who continue to invoke “defence of the fatherland and democracy.” Second, the centrists of the Two-and-a-Half International (Adler, Bauer, Longuet, Dittmann, Hilferding, Wallhead), who, the manifesto charges, waste time discussing the “special conditions” that supposedly excuse betrayal, rather than acting. Third, the reformists and centrists within each national labour movement—Turati, D’Aragona, MacDonald—who are incapable of fighting even for “a crumb of stale bread,” let alone the dictatorship of the proletariat. The manifesto mocks Vandervelde, the Second International leader and Belgian minister, for cynically endorsing the dispatch of Senegalese troops across the Rhine.
Evidence for the revolution’s advance is presented in concrete terms. Soviet Russia, despite seven years of war and severe want, remains unconquered; Britain, the “stronghold of counter-revolution,” has been forced to sign a trade agreement with the “Moscow robbers.” The White Terror in Spain and Serbia reveals bourgeois insecurity. In Italy, fascist bands are sowing a storm; the German Orgesch organisation is a perpetual warning to workers to arm themselves. Poland holds 7,000 communists in prison, yet strikes continue—proof that there will be no calm “until a bridge is thrown across from revolutionary Russia to revolutionary Germany.” In France, hundreds of thousands of workers have embraced communism, despite nationalist intoxication.
The manifesto concludes with a call to action. The Third Congress of the Communist International will not engage in “melancholic contemplation” but in steeling the weapon and purging elements that would blunt it. The slogan is “No softening of our attacks, but an offensive by broad columns along a still broader front.” Communists must place themselves at the head of the masses in their daily struggles, demonstrating that reformists deceive and that capital will not grant even the minimum necessary for survival. The document warns that the period of slow agitation is over; the era of “ever-sharpening mass revolutionary battles” has begun. Any day, the assault of the communist vanguard may carry the broad masses with it, making the conquest of power the task of the hour.