VI World Congress IC 1928

No 92 International Press Correspondence 1
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Vol. 8 No. 92 PRESS 31 December 1928
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CONTENTS
The Programme of the
Communist International.
Adopted by the VI. World Congress
on 1st September 1928, in Moscow.
_______________
Manifesto of the
VI. World Congress
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The Programme of the

Communist International.
Adopted by the VI. World Congress on
1st September 1928, in Moscow
INTRODUCTION
The epoch of imperialism is the epoch of moribund capitalism.
The world war of 1914-1918 and the general crisis of capitalism to
which it led, being the direct result of the sharp contradictions
between the growth of productive forces of world economy and the
national State barriers which intersect it, have shown and proved that
the material pre-requisites for socialism have already ripened in the
womb of capitalist society that the shell of capitalism has become an
intolerable hindrance to the further development of mankind and that
history has brought to the forefront the task of the revolutionary
overthrow of the yoke of capitalism.
Imperialism subjects large masses of the proletariat of all
countriesfrom the centres of capitalist power to the most remote
comers of the colonial world-to the dictatorship of a finance-capitalist
plutocracy. With elemental force, imperialism exposes and
accentuates all the contradictions of capitalist society; it carries class
oppression to the utmost limits, intensifies the struggle between
capitalist governments, inevitably gives rise to world-wide imperialist
wars that shake the whole prevailing system of relationships to their
foundations and inexorably leads to the World Proletarian
Revolution.
Binding the whole world in chains of finance capital; forcing its
yoke upon the proletariat and the nations and races of all countries
by methods of blood, iron and starvation; sharpening to an
immeasurable degree the exploitation, oppression and enslavement
of the proletariat and confronting it with the immediate task of
conquering power, imperialism creates the necessity for close union
of the workers of all countries, irrespective of State frontiers, and of
differences of nationality, culture, language, race, sex or profession
into a single international army of the proletariat. Thus, while
imperialism develops and completes the process of creating the
material prerequisites for socialism, it at the same time musters the
army of its own grave-diggers and compels the proletariat to
organise in a militant international workers association.
On the other hand, imperialism splits off the best provided for
section of the working class from the main mass of the workers.
Bribed and corrupted by imperialism, this upper stratum of the
working class constitutes the leading element in the social
democratic parties; it is interested in the imperialist plunder of the
colonies, is loyal to its own bourgeoisie and its own imperialist
State, and, in the midst of decisive battles, has fought on the side of
the class enemy of the proletariat. The split that occurred in the
socialist movement in 1914 as a result of this treachery, and the
subsequent treachery of the social democratic parties (which in
reality have become bourgeois labour parties), demonstrated that the
international proletariat will be able to fulfil its historical mission -to
throw off the yoke of imperialism and establish the proletarian
dictatorship only by ruthless struggle against social democracy.
Hence, the organisation of the forces of the international revolution
becomes possible only on the platform of Communism. In opposition
to the opportunist Second International of social democracywhich
has become the agency of imperialism in the ranks of the working
classinevitably rises the Third, Communist International, the
international organisation of the working class, the embodiment of
real unity of the revolutionary workers of the whole world.
The war of 1914-1918 gave rise to the first attempts to establish
a new, revolutionary International, as a counterpoise to the Second,
social-chauvinist International, and as a weapon of resistance to
bellicose imperialism (Zimmerwald and Kienthal). The victorious
proletarian revolution in Russia gave an impetus to the formation of
Communist Parties in the centres of capitalism and in the colonies. In
1919, the Communist International was formed, and for the first time
in world history the most advanced strata of the European and
American proletariat were really united in the process of practical
revolutionary struggle with the proletariat of China and of India and
with the coloured toilers of Africa and America.
As the united and centralised international Party of the
proletariat, the Communist International is the only Party to continue
the principles of the First International, and to carry them out upon
the new foundation of the revolutionary proletarian mass movement.
The experience gathered from the first imperialist world war, from the
subsequent period of revolutionary crises of capitalism, and from the
series of revolutions in Europe and in the colonial countries; the
experience gathered from the dictatorship of the proletariat and the
building up of socialism in the U.S.S.R. and from the work of all the
Sections of the Communist International as recorded in the decisions
of its Congresses; finally, the fact that the struggle between the
imperialist bourgeoisie and the proletariat is more and more
assuming an international character; all this has created a need for a
uniform programme of the Communist International that will be
common for all Sections of the Communist International. This
programme of the Communist International, being the supreme

critical generalisation of the whole body of historical experience of
the international revolutionary proletarian movement, thus becomes
the programme of struggle for World Proletarian Dictatorship,
the programme of struggle for World Communism.
Uniting as it does the revolutionary workers, who lead the
millions of oppressed and exploited against the bourgeoisie and its
socialist agents, the Communist International regards itself as the
historical successor to the Communist League and the First
International led by Marx, and as the inheritor of the best of the pre-
war traditions of the Second International. The First International laid
the ideological foundation for the international proletarian struggle for
socialism. The Second International, in the best period of its
existence, prepared the ground for the expansion of the labour
movement among the masses. The Third, Communist International,
in continuing the work of the First International, and in accepting the
fruits of the work of the Second International, resolutely lopped off
the latters opportunism, social-chauvinism, and bourgeois distortion
of socialism and set out to realise the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In this manner the Communist International continues the glorious
and heroic traditions of the international Labour movement of the
English Chartists and the French insurrectionists of 1831; of the
French and German working class revolutionaries of 1848; of the
immortal warriors and martyrs of the Paris Commune; of the valiant
soldiers of the German, Hungarian and Finnish revolutions; of the
workers under the former Tsarist despotismthe victorious bearers
of the proletarian dictatorship; of the Chinese proletarians-the heroes
of Canton and Shanghai.
Basing itself on the experience of the revolutionary labour
movement of all continents and of all peoples, the Communist
International, in its theoretical and practical work, stands wholly and
unreservedly upon the ground of revolutionary Marxism, and its
further development, Leninism, which is nothing else than Marxism
of the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution.
Advocating and propagating the dialectical Materialism of Marx
and Engels and employing it as a revolutionary method of conceiving
reality, with a view to the revolutionary transformation of this reality,
the Communist International wages an active struggle against all
forms of bourgeois philosophy and against all forms of theoretical
and practical opportunism. Standing on the ground of consistent
proletarian class struggle and subordinating the temporary, partial,
group and national interests of the proletariat to its lasting, general,

international interests, the Communist International mercilessly
exposes all forms of the doctrine of class peace that the reformists
have accepted from the bourgeoisie. Expressing the historical need;
for an international organisation of revolutionary proletarians-the
gravediggers of the capitalist orderthe Communist International is
the only international force that has for its programme the
dictatorship of the proletariat and Communism, and that openly come
out as the organiser of the International Proletarian Revolution.
I. THE WORLD SYSTEM OF CAPITALISM,

ITS DEVELOPMENT AND INEVITABLE DOWNFALL
I. The Dynamic Laws Of Capitalism And The Epoch Of

Industrial Capital
The characteristic features of capitalist society which arose on

the basis of commodity production are the monopoly of the most
important and vital means of production by the capitalist class and
big landlords; the exploitation of the wage labour of the proletariat,
which, being deprived of the means of production is compelled to sell
its labour power; the production of commodities for profit; and, linked
up with all this, the planless and anarchic character of the process of
production as a whole. Exploitation relationships and the economic
domination of the bourgeoisie find their political expression in the
organised capitalist Statethe instrument for the suppression of the
proletariat.
The history of capitalism has entirely confirmed the theories of
Marx and Engels concerning the laws of development of capitalist
society and concerning the contradictions of this development that
must inevitably lead to the downfall of the whole capitalist system.
In its quest for profits the bourgeoisie was compelled to develop
the productive forces on an ever-increasing scale and to strengthen
and expand the domination of capitalist relationships of production.
Thus, the development of capitalism constantly reproduces on a
wider scale all the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system-
primarily, the vital contradiction between tile social character of
labour and private acquisition, between the growth of the productive
forces and tile property relations of capitalism. The predominance of
private property in the means of production and the anarchy
prevailing in the process of production have disturbed tile equilibrium

between the various branches of production; for a growing
contradiction developed between the tendency towards unlimited
expansion of production and the restricted consumption of the
masses of the proletariat (general overproduction), and this resulted
in periodical devastating crises and. mass unemployment among the
proletariat. The predominance of private property also found
expression in the competition that prevailed in each separate
capitalist country as well as in the constantly expanding world
market. This latter form of capitalist rivalry resulted in a number of
wars, which are the inevitable accompaniment of capitalist
development.
On the other hand, the technical and economic advantages of
mass production have resulted in the squeezing out and destruction
in the competitive struggle of the pre-capitalist economic forms and
in the ever-increasing concentration and centralisation of capital. In
the sphere of industry this law of concentration and centralisation of
capital manifested itself primarily in the direct ruin of small
enterprises or alternatively in their being reduced to the position of
auxiliary units of large enterprises. In the domain of agriculture
which, owing to the existence of the monopoly in land and in
absolute rent, must inevitably lag behind the general rate of
development, this law not only found expression in the process of
differentiation that took place among the peasantry and in the
proletarianisation of broad strata of them, but also and mainly in the
open and concealed subordination of small peasant economy to the
domination of big capital. Small farming has been able to maintain a
nominal independence only at the price of extreme intensification of
labour and systematic under consumption.
The ever-growing application of machinery, the constant
improvement in technique and, consequently, the uninterrupted rise
in the organic composition of capital, accompanied by still further
division, increased productivity and intensity of labour, meant also
increased employment of female and child labour, the formation of
enormous industrial reserve armies which are constantly replenished
by the proletarianised peasantry who are forced to leave their
villages as well as by the ruined small and middle urban bourgeoisie.
The collection of a handful of capitalist magnates at one pole of
social relationships and of a gigantic mass of the proletariat at the
other; the constantly increasing rate of exploitation of the working
class, the reproduction on a wider scale of the deepest
contradictions of capitalism and their consequences (crises, wars,

etc.); the constant growth of social inequality, the rising discontent of
the proletariat united and schooled by the mechanism of capitalist
production itself-all this has inevitably undermined the foundations of
capitalism and has brought nearer the day of its collapse.
Simultaneously, a profound change has taken place in the social
and cultural life of capitalist society; the parasitical decadence of the
rentier group of the bourgeoisie; the break up of the family, which
expresses the growing contradiction between the mass participation
of women in social production and the forms of family and domestic
life largely inherited from previous economic epochs; the growing
shallowness and degeneracy o cultural and ideological life resulting
from the minute specialisation of labour, the monstrous forms of
urban life and the restrictedness of rural life; the incapability of the
bourgeoisie, notwithstanding the enormous achievements of the
natural sciences, to create a synthetically scientific philosophy, and
the growth of ideological, mystical and religious superstition, are all
phenomena signalising the approach of the historical end of the
capitalist system.
2. The Era Of Finance Capitalism (Imperialism)
The period of industrial capitalism was, in the main, a period

of, free competition; a period of a relatively smooth evolution and
expansion of capitalism throughout the whole world, when the as yet
unoccupied colonies were being divided up and conquered by armed
force; a period of continuous growth of the inherent contradictions of
capitalism, the burden of which fell mainly upon the systematically
plundered, crushed and oppressed colonial periphery.
Towards the beginning of the 20th century, this period was
replaced by the period of imperialism, during which capitalism
developed spasmodically and conflictingly; free competition rapidly
gave way to monopoly, the previously available colonial lands were
all divided up, and the struggle for a redistribution of colonies and
spheres of influence inevitably began to assume primarily the form of
a struggle by force of arms.
Thus, the full intensity and the truly world-wide extent of the
contradictions of capitalism became most glaringly revealed in the
epoch of imperialism (finance capitalism), which, from the historical
standpoint, a new form of capitalism, a new system of relationships
between the various parts of world capitalist economy and a change

in the relationship between the principal classes of capitalist society.
This new historical period set in as a result of the operation of
the principal dynamic laws of capitalist society. It grew out of the
development of industrial capitalism, and is the historical
continuation of the latter. It sharpened the manifestations of all the
fundamental tendencies and dynamic laws of capitalist development,
of all its fundamental contradictions and antagonisms. The law of the
concentration and centralisation of capital led to the formation of
powerful combines (cartels, syndicates, trusts), to new forms of
gigantic combinations of enterprises, linked up into one system by
the banks. The merging of industrial capital with bank capital, the
absorption of big land ownership into the general system of capital
organisation, and the monopolist character of this form of capitalism
transferred the epoch of industrial capital into the epoch of finance
capital. Free competition of the period of industrial capitalism,
which replaced feudal monopoly and the monopoly of merchant
capital, became itself transformed into finance capital monopoly.
At the same time, although capitalist monopolist organisations grow
out of free competition, they do not eliminate competition, but exist
side by side with it and hover over it, thus giving rise to a series of
exceptionally great and acute contradictions, frictions and conflicts.
The growing use of complex machinery, of chemical processes
and of electrical energy; the resulting higher organic composition of
capital; and the consequent decline in the rate of profit, which only
the biggest monopolist combines are able to counteract for a time by
their policy of high cartel prices, still further stimulate the quest for
colonial super-profits and the struggle for a new division of the world.
Standardised mass production creates a demand for more foreign
markets. The growing demand for raw materials and fuel intensifies
the race for their sources. Lastly, the system of high protection,
which hinders the export of merchandise and secures additional
profit for exported capital, creates additional stimuli to the export of
capital. Export of capital becomes, therefore, the decisive and
specific form of economic contact between the various parts of world
capitalist economy. The total effect of all this is that the monopolist
ownership of colonial markets, of sources of raw materials and of
spheres of investment of capital extremely accentuates the general
unevenness of capitalist development and sharpens the conflicts
between the great powers of finance capital over the re-allocation
of colonies and spheres of influence.
The growth of the productive forces of world economy thus leads

to the further internationalisation of economic life and simultaneously
leads to a struggle for a redistribution of the world, already divided up
among the biggest finance capital States to a change in and
sharpening of the forms of this struggle and to the older method of
bringing down prices being superseded to an increasing degree by
the method of direct force (boycott, high protection, tariff wars, wars
proper, etc.). Consequently, the monopolist form of capitalism is
inevitably accompanied by imperialist wars, which, by the area they
embrace and the destructiveness of their technique, have no parallel
in world history.
3. The Forces Of Imperialism And The Forces Of Revolution
Expressing the tendency for unification of the various sections of

the dominant class, the imperialist form of capitalism places the
broad masses of the proletariat in opposition, not to a single
employer, but, to an increasing degree, to the capitalist class as a
whole and to the capitalist State. On the other hand, this form of
capitalism breaks down the national barriers that have become too
restricted for it, widens the scope of the capitalist State power of the
dominant Great Powers and brings them into opposition to vast
masses of nationally oppressed peoples in the so-called small
nations as well as in the colonies.
Finally, this form of capitalism brings the imperialist States most
sharply into opposition to each other.
This being the case, State power, which is becoming the
dictatorship of the finance-capitalist oligarchy and the expression of
its concentrated might, acquires special significance for the
bourgeoisie. The functions of this multi-national imperialist State
grow in all directions. The development of State capitalist forms,
which facilitate the struggle in foreign markets (mobilisation of
industry for war purposes) as well as the struggle against the
working class; the monstrous growth of militarism (armies, naval and
air fleets, and the employment of chemistry and bacteriology); the
increasing pressure of the imperialist State upon the working class
(the growth of exploitation and direct suppression of the workers on
the one hand and the systematic policy of bribing the bureaucratic
reformist leadership on the other), all this expresses the enormous
growth of the power of the State. Under these circumstances, every
more or less important action of the proletariat becomes transformed

into an action against the State power, i.e., into political action.
Hence, the development of capitalism, and particularly the
imperialist epoch of its development, reproduces the fundamental
contradictions of capitalism on an increasingly magnified scale.
Competition among small capitalists ceases, only to make way for
competition among big capitalists; where competition among big
capitalists subsides, it flares up between gigantic combinations of
capitalist magnates and their governments; local and national crises
become transformed into crises affecting a number of countries and,
subsequently, into world crises; local wars give way to wars between
coalitions of States and to world wars; the class struggle changes
from isolated actions by single groups of workers into nation-wide
conflicts and subsequently, into an international struggle of the world
proletariat against the world bourgeoisie. Finally, two main
revolutionary forces are organising against the organised might of
finance capital-on the one hand the workers in the capitalist
States, on the other hand the victims of the oppression of foreign
capital, the masses of the people in the colonies, marching under
the leadership and the hegemony of the international revolutionary
proletarian movement.
However, this fundamental revolutionary tendency is temporarily
paralysed by the fact that certain sections of the European, North
American and Japanese proletariat are bribed by the imperialist
bourgeoisie, and by the treachery of the national bourgeoisie in the
semi-colonial and colonial countries who are scared by the
revolutionary mass movement. The bourgeoisie in imperialist
countries, able to secure additional surplus profits from the position it
holds in the world market (more developed technique, export of
capital to countries with a higher rate of profit, etc.), and from the
proceeds of its plunder of the colonies and semi-colonies-was able to
raise the wages of its own workers out of these surplus profits, thus
giving these workers an interest in the development of home
capitalism, in the plunder of the colonies and in being loyal to the
imperialist State.
This systematic bribery was and is being very widely practised in
the most powerful imperialist countries and finds most striking
expression in the ideology and practice of the labour aristocracy and
the bureaucratic strata of the working class, i.e., the social
democratic and trade union leaders, who proved to be direct agents
of bourgeois influence among the proletariat and stalwart pillars of

the capitalist system.
By stimulating the growth of the corrupt upper stratum of the
working class, however, imperialism, in the end destroys its influence
upon the working class, because the growing contradictions of
imperialism, the worsening of the conditions of the broad masses of
the workers, the mass unemployment among the proletariat, the
enormous cost of military conflicts and the burdens they entail, the
fact that certain Powers have lost their monopolist position in the
world market, the break-away of the colonies, etc., serve to
undermine the basis of social democracy among the masses.
Similarly, the systematic bribery of the various sections of the
bourgeoisie in the colonies and semi-colonies, their betrayal of the
national-revolutionary movement and their rapprochement with the
imperialist powers can paralyse the development of the revolutionary
crisis only for a time. In the final analysis, this leads to the
intensification of imperialist oppression, to the decline of the
influence of the national bourgeoisie upon the masses of the people,
to the sharpening of the revolutionary crisis, to the unleashing of the
agrarian revolution of the broad masses of the peasantry and to the
creation of conditions favourable for the establishment of the leaders
of the proletariat in the popular mass struggle in the colonies and
dependencies for independence and complete national liberation.
4. Imperialism And The Downfall Of Capitalism
Imperialism has greatly developed the productive forces of world

capitalism. It has completed the preparation of all the material
prerequisites for the socialist organisation of society. By its wars it
has demonstrated that the productive forces of world economy,
which have outgrown the restricted boundaries of imperialist States,
demand the organisation of economy on a world, or international
scale. Imperialism tries to remove this contradiction by hacking a
road with fire and sword towards a single world State-capitalist trust,
which is to organise the whole world economy. This sanguinary
utopia is being extolled by the social democratic ideologists as a
peaceful method of newly, organised capitalism. In reality, this
utopia encounters insurmountable objective obstacles of such
magnitude that capitalism must inevitably fall beneath the weight of
its own contradictions. The law of uneven development of capitalism,
which becomes intensified in the epoch of imperialism, renders firm
and durable international combinations of imperialist powers

impossible. On the other hand, imperialist wars, which are
developing into world wars, and through which the law of the
centralisation of capitalism strives to reach its world limita single
world trust- are accompanied by so much destruction and place such
burdens upon the shoulders of the working class and of the millions
of colonial proletarians and peasants, that capitalism must inevitably
perish beneath the blows of the proletarian revolution long before
this goal is reached.
Being the highest phase of capitalist development, imperialism,
expanding the productive forces of world economy to enormous
dimensions, and re-fashioning the whole world after its own image,
draws within the orbit of finance capitalist exploitation all colonies, all
races and all nations. At the same time, however, the monopolist
form of capital develops increasingly the elements of parasitical
degeneration, decay and decline within capitalism. In destroying, to
some extent, the driving force of competition, by conducting a policy
of cartel prices, and by having undivided mastery of the market,
monopoly capital reveals a tendency to retard the further
development of the forces of production. In squeezing enormous
sums of surplus profit out of the millions of colonial workers and
peasants and in accumulating colossal incomes from this
exploitation, imperialism is creating a type of decaying and
parasitically degenerate rentier-class, as well as whole strata of
parasites who live by clipping coupons. In completing the process of
creating the material pre-requisites for socialism (the concentration
of means of production, the enormous socialisation of labour, the
growth of labour organisations), the epoch of imperialism intensifies
the antagonisms among the Great Powers and gives rise to wars
which cause the break-up of its single world economy. Imperialism is
therefore moribund and decaying capitalism. It is the final stage of
development of the capitalist system. It is the threshold of world
social revolution.
Hence, international proletarian revolution logically emerges out
of the conditions of development of capitalism generally, and out of
its imperialist phase in particular. The capitalist system as a whole is
approaching its final collapse. The dictatorship of finance capital is
perishing to give way to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
II. THE GENERAL CRISIS OF CAPITALISM AND THE

FIRST PHASE OF WORLD REVOLUTION
I. The World War And The Progress Of The Revolutionary
Crisis
The imperialist struggle among the largest capitalist States for

the redistribution of the globe led to the first imperialist world war
(1914-1918). This war shook the whole system of world capitalism
and marked the beginning of the period of its general crisis. The
war bent to its service the entire national economies of the
belligerent countries, thus creating the mailed fist of State capitalism.
It increased unproductive expenditures to enormous dimensions,
destroyed enormous quantities of the means of production and
human labour power, ruined large masses of the population and
imposed incalculable burdens upon the industrial workers, the
peasants and the colonial peoples. It inevitably led to the
intensification of the class struggle, which grew into open,
revolutionary mass action and civil war. The imperialist front was
broken at its weakest link, in Tsarist Russia. The February revolution
of 1917 overthrew the domination of the autocracy of the big land-
owning class. The October revolution overthrew the rule of the
bourgeoisie. This victorious proletarian revolution expropriated the
expropriators, took the means of production from the landlords and
the capitalists, and for the first time in human history set up and
consolidated the dictatorship of the proletariat in an enormous
country. It brought into being a new, Soviet type of State and laid the
foundations for the international proletarian revolution.
The powerful shock to which the whole of world capitalism was
subjected, the sharpening of the class struggle and the direct
influence of the October proletarian revolution gave rise to a series of
revolutions and revolutionary actions on the Continent of Europe as
well as in the colonial and semi-colonial countries: January, 1918,
the proletarian revolution in Finland; August, 1918, the so-called rice
riots in Japan; November, 1918, the revolutions in Austria and
Germany, which overthrew the semi-feudal monarchist regime;
March, 1919, the proletarian revolution in Hungary and the uprising
in Korea; April, 1919, the Soviet Government in Bavaria; January,
1920, the bourgeois-national revolution in Turkey; September, 1920,
the seizure of the factories by the workers in Italy; March, 1921, the
rising of the advanced workers of Germany; September, 1923, the

uprising in Bulgaria; Autumn, 1923, the revolutionary crisis in
Germany; December, 1924, the uprising in Estonia; April, 1923, the
uprising in Morocco; August, 1925, uprising in Syria; May, 1926, the
general strike in England; July, 1927, the proletarian uprising in
Vienna. These events, as well as events like the uprising in
Indonesia, the deep ferment in India, and the great Chinese
revolution, which shook the whole Asiatic continent, are links in one
and the same international revolutionary chain, constituent parts of
the profound general crisis of capitalism. This international
revolutionary process embraced the immediate struggle for the
dictatorship of the proletariat, as well as national wars of liberation
and colonial uprisings against imperialism, which go together with
the agrarian mass movement of millions of peasants. Thus, an
enormous mass of humanity was swept into the revolutionary torrent.
World history entered a new phase of development-a phase of
prolonged general crisis of the capitalist system. In this process, the
unity of world economy found expression in the international
character of the revolution, while the uneven development of its
separate parts was expressed in the different times of the outbreak
of revolution in the different countries.
The first attempts at revolutionary overthrow, which sprang from
the acute crisis of capitalism (1918-1921) ended in the victory and
consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the U.S.S.R. and
in the defeat of the proletariat in a number of other countries. These
defeats were primarily due to the treacherous tactics of the social
democratic and reformist trade union leaders, but they were also due
to the fact that the majority of the working class had not yet accepted
the lead of the Communists and that in a number of important
countries Communist Parties had not yet been established at all. As
a result of these defeats, which created the opportunity for
intensifying the exploitation of the mass of the proletariat and the
colonial peoples, and for severely depressing their standard of living,
the bourgeoisie was able to achieve a partial stabilisation of capitalist
relations.
2. The Revolutionary Crisis And Counter-Revolutionary

Social Democracy
During the progress of the international revolution, the leading

cadres of the social democratic parties and of the reformist trade
unions on the one hand, and the militant capitalist organisations of

the Fascist type on the other, acquired special significance as a
powerful counter-revolutionary force actively fighting against the
revolution and actively supporting the partial stabilisation of
capitalism.
The war crisis of 1914-1918 was accompanied by the
disgraceful collapse of the social democratic Second
International. Acting in complete violation of the thesis of the
Communist Manifesto written by Marx-Engels, that the proletariat
has no fatherland under capitalism and in complete violation of the
anti-war resolutions passed by the Stuttgart and Basle Congresses,
the leaders of the social democratic parties in the various countries,
with a few exceptions, voted for the war credits, came out definitely
in defence of the imperialist fatherland (i.e., the State organisations
of the imperialist bourgeoisie) and instead of combating the
imperialist war, became its loyal soldiers, bards and propagandists
(social-patriotism, which grew into social-imperialism). In the
subsequent period, social democracy supported the predatory
treaties (Brest-Litovsk, Versailles); it actively aligned itself with the
militarists in the bloody suppression of proletarian uprisings (Noske);
it conducted armed warfare against the first proletarian republic
(Soviet Russia); it despicably betrayed the victorious proletariat
(Hungary); it joined the imperialist League of Nations (Albert
Thomas, Paul Boncour, Vandervelde); it openly supported the
imperialist slave-owners against the colonial slaves (the British
Labour Party); it actively supported the most reactionary execu-
tioners of the working class (Bulgaria, Poland); it took upon itself the
initiative in securing the passage of imperialist military laws,
(France); it betrayed the general strike of the British proletariat; it
helped and is still helping to strangle China and India (the
MacDonald Government); it acts as the propagandist for the
imperialist League of Nations; it is capitals herald and organiser in
its struggle against the dictatorship of the proletariat in the U.S.S.R.
(Kautsky, Hilferding).
In its systematic conduct of this counter-revolutionary policy,
social democracy operates on two flanks. The right wing of social
democracy, avowedly counter-revolutionary, is essential for
negotiating and maintaining direct contact with the bourgeoisie; the
left wing is essential for the subtle deception of the workers. While
playing with pacifist and at times even with revolutionary phrases,
left social democracy in practice acts against the workers,
particularly in acute and critical situations (the British I.L.P. and the
left leaders of the General Council during the general strike in
1926; Otto Bauer and Co., at the time of the Vienna uprising), and is
therefore, the most dangerous faction in the social democratic
parties. While serving the interests of the bourgeoisie in the working
class and being wholly in favour of class co-operation and coalition
with the bourgeoisie, social democracy, at certain periods, is
compelled to play the part of an opposition party and even to pretend
that it is defending the class interests of the proletariat in its industrial
struggle. It tries thereby to win the confidence of a section of the
working class and to be in a position more shamefully to betray the
lasting interests of the working class, particularly in the midst of
decisive class battles.
The principal function of social democracy at the present time is
to disrupt the essential militant unity of the proletariat in its struggle
against imperialism. In splitting and disrupting the united front of the
proletarian struggle against capital, social democracy serves as the
mainstay of imperialism in the working class. International social
democracy of all shades; the Second International and its trade
union branch, the Amsterdam Federation of Trade Unions, have thus
become the last reserve of bourgeois society and its most reliable
pillar of support.
3. The Crisis Of Capitalism And Fascism
Side by side with social democracy, with whose aid the

bourgeoisie suppresses the workers or lulls their class vigilance,
stands Fascism.
The epoch of imperialism, the sharpening of the class struggle
and the growth of the elements of civil warparticularly after the
imperialist warled to the bankruptcy of parliamentarism. Hence, the
adoption of new methods and forms of administration (for example,
the system of inner cabinets, the formation of oligarchical groups,
acting behind the scenes, the deterioration and falsification of the
function of popular representation, the restriction and annulment of
democratic liberties, etc.). Under certain special historical
conditions, the progress of this bourgeois, imperialist, reactionary
offensive assumes the form of Fascism. These conditions are:
instability of capitalist relationships; the existence of considerable
declassed social elements, the pauperisation of broad strata of the
urban petty bourgeoisie and of the intelligentsia; discontent among
the rural petty-bourgeoisie and, finally, the constant menace of mass

proletarian action. In order to stabilise and perpetuate its rule, the
bourgeoisie is compelled to an increasing degree to abandon the
parliamentary system in favour of the Fascist system, which is
independent of inter-party arrangements and combinations. The
Fascist system is a system of direct dictatorship, ideologically
marked by the national idea and by representation of the
professions (in reality, representation of the various groups of the
ruling class). It is a system that resorts to a peculiar form of social
demagogy (anti-semitism, occasional sorties against usurers capital
and gestures of impatience with the parliamentary talking shop) in
order to utilise the discontent of the petty bourgeois, the intellectuals
and other strata of society, and to corruptionthe creation of a
compact and well paid hierarchy of Fascist units, a party apparatus
and a bureaucracy. At the same time, Fascism strives to permeate
the working class by recruiting the most backward strata of workers
to its ranks-by playing upon their discontent, by taking advantage of
the inaction of social democracy, etc. The principal aim of Fascism is
to destroy the revolutionary labour vanguard, i.e., the Communist
Sections and leading units of the proletariat. The combination of
social democracy, corruption and active white terror, in conjunction
with extreme imperialist aggression in the sphere of foreign politics,
are the characteristic features of Fascism. In periods of acute crisis
for the bourgeoisie, Fascism resorts to anti-capitalist phraseology,
but, after it has established itself at the helm of State, it casts aside
its anti-capitalist prattle and discloses itself as a terrorist dictatorship
of big capital.
The bourgeoisie resorts either to the method of Fascism or to
the method of coalition with social democracy according to the
changes in the political situation; while social democracy itself, often
plays a Fascist role in periods when the situation is critical for
capitalism.
In the process of development social democracy reveals Fascist
tendencies which, however, do not prevent it, in other political
situations, from acting as a sort of Fronde against the bourgeois
government in the capacity of an opposition party. The Fascist
method and the method of coalition with social democracy are not
the methods usually employed in normal capitalist conditions; they
are the symptoms of the general capitalist crisis, and are employed
by the bourgeoisie in order to stem the advance of the revolution.
4. The Contradictions Of Capitalist Stabilisation And The

Inevitability Of The Revolutionary Collapse Of Capitalism
Experience throughout the post-war historical period has shown

that the stabilisation achieved by the repression of the working class
and the systematic depression of its standard of living can be only a
partial, transient and decaying stabilisation.
The spasmodic and feverish development of technique,
bordering in some countries on a new technical revolution, the
accelerated process of concentration and centralisation of capital,
the formation of giant trusts and of national and international
monopolies, the merging of trusts with the State power and the
growth of world capitalist economy cannot, however, eliminate the
general crisis of the capitalist system. The break up of world
economy into a capitalist and a socialist sector, the shrinking of
markets and the anti-imperialist movement in the colonies intensify
all the contradictions of capitalism, which is developing on a new,
post-war basis. This very technical progress and rationalisation of
industry, the reverse side of which is the closing down and liquidation
of numerous enterprises, the restriction of production, and the
ruthless and destructive exploitation of labour power, leads to
chronic unemployment on a scale never before experienced. The
absolute deterioration of the conditions of the working class becomes
a fact even in certain highly developed capitalist countries. The
growing competition between imperialist countries, the constant
menace of war and the growing intensity of class conflicts prepare
the ground for a new and higher stage of development of the general
crisis of capitalism and of the world proletarian revolution.
As a result of the first round of imperialist wars (the world war of
1914-1918) and of the October victory of the working class in the
former Russian Tsarist Empire, world economy has been split into
two fundamentally hostile camps: the camp of the imperialist
States and the camp of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the
U.S.S.R. The difference in structure and in the class character of the
government in the two camps, the fundamental differences in the
aims each pursues in internal, foreign, economic and cultural policy,
the fundamentally different courses of their development, brings the
capitalist world into sharp conflict with the victorious proletarian
State. Within the framework of a formerly uniform world economy,
two antagonistic systems are now contesting against each other: the
system of capitalism and the system of socialism. The class struggle,

which hitherto was conducted in circumstances when the proletariat
was not in possession of State power, is now being conducted on an
enormous and really world scale; the working class of the world has
now its own State -the one and only fatherland of the international
proletariat. The existence of the Soviet Union and the influence it
exercises upon the toiling and oppressed masses all over the world
is in itself a most striking expression of the profound crisis of the
world capitalist system and of the expansion and intensification of
the class struggle to a degree hitherto without parallel in history.
The capitalist world, powerless to eliminate its inherent
contradictions, strives to establish international associations (the
League of Nations) the main purpose of which is to retard the
irresistible growth of the revolutionary crisis and to strangle the
Soviet Proletarian Republics by war or blockade. At the same time,
all the forces of the revolutionary proletariat and of the oppressed
colonial masses are rallying around the U.S.S.R. The world coalition
of Capital, unstable, internally corroded, but armed to the teeth, is
confronted by a single world coalition of Labour. Thus, as a result of
the first round of imperialist wars a new, fundamental antagonism
has arisen of world historical scope and significance: the
antagonism between the U.S.S.R. and the capitalist world.
Meanwhile, the inherent antagonisms within the capitalist sector
of world economy itself have become intensified. The shifting of the
economic centre of the world to the United States of America and the
fact that the Dollar Republic has become a world exploiter have
caused the relations between United States and European
capitalism, particularly British capitalism, to become strained. The
conflict between Great Britain-the most powerful of the old,
conservative imperialist States and the United States-the greatest of
the young imperialist States, which has already won world hegemony
for itself, is becoming the pivot of the world conflicts among the
finance capitalist States. Germany, though plundered by the
Versailles Peace, is now economically recovered; she is resuming
the path of imperialist politics, and once again she stands out as a
serious competitor on the world market. The Pacific is becoming
involved in a tangle of contradictions which centre mainly around the
antagonism between America and Japan. Simultaneously, the
antagonism of interests among the unstable and constantly changing
groupings of powers is increasing, while the minor powers serve as
auxiliary instruments in the hands of the imperialist giants and their

coalitions.
The growth of the productive capacity of the industrial apparatus
of world capitalism, at a time when the European home markets
have shrunk as a result of the war, of the Soviet Unions dropping out
of the system of purely capitalist intercourse, and of the close
monopoly of the most important sources of raw material and fuel,
leads to ever-widening conflicts between the capitalist States. The
peaceful struggle for oil, rubber, cotton, coal and metals and for a
redistribution of markets and spheres for the export of capital is
inexorably leading to another world war, the destructiveness of
which will increase proportionately to the progress achieved in the
furiously developing technique of war.
Simultaneously, the antagonisms between the imperialist home
countries and the semi-colonial countries are growing. The
relative weakening of European imperialism as a result of the war, of
the development of capitalism in the colonies, of the influence of the
Soviet revolution and the centrifugal tendencies revealed in the
premier maritime and colonial EmpireGreat Britain (Canada,
Australia, South Africa)has helped to stimulate the movement of
rebellion in the colonies and semi-colonies. The great Chinese
revolution, which roused hundreds of millions of the Chinese people
to action, caused an enormous breach in the imperialist system. The
unceasing revolutionary ferment among hundreds of millions of
Indian workers and peasants is threatening to break the domination
of the world citadel of imperialism, Great Britain. The growth of
tendencies directed against the powerful imperialism of the United
States in the Latin American countries threatens to undermine the
expansion of North American capital. Thus, the revolutionary process
in the colonies, which is drawing into the struggle against imperialism
the overwhelming majority of the world's population that is subjected
to the rule of the finance capitalist oligarchy of a few Great Powers
of imperialism, also expresses the profound general crisis of
capitalism. Even in Europe itself, where imperialism has put a
number of small nations under its heel, the national question is a
factor that intensifies the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
Finally, the revolutionary crisis is inexorably maturing in the very
centres of imperialism: the capitalist offensive against the working
class, the attack upon the workers standard of living, upon their
organisations and their political rights, with the growth of white terror,
rouses increasing resistance on the part of the broad masses of the
proletariat and intensifies the class struggle between the working

class and trustified capital. The great battles fought between Labour
and Capital, the accelerated swing to the left of the masses, the
growth in the influence and authority of the Communist Parties; the
enormous growth of sympathy among the broad masses of workers
for the land of the proletarian dictatorship-all this is a clear symptom
of the rise of a new tide in the centres of imperialism.
Thus, the system of world imperialism, and with it the partial
stabilisation of capitalism, is being corroded from various causes:
First, the antagonisms and conflicts between the imperialist States;
second, the rise of the struggle of vast masses in the colonial
countries; third, the action of the revolutionary proletariat in the
imperialist home countries; and lastly, the leadership exercised over
the whole world revolutionary movement by the proletarian
dictatorship in the U.S.S.R. The international revolution is
developing.
Against this revolution, imperialism is gathering its forces.
Expeditions against the colonies, a new world war, a campaign
against the U.S.S.R., are matters which now figure prominently in the
politics of imperialism. This must lead to the release of all the forces
of international revolution and to the inevitable doom of capitalism.
III. THE ULTIMATE AIM OF THE COMMUNIST

INTERNATIONAL-WORLD COMMUNISM
The ultimate aim of the Communist International is to replace
world capitalist economy by a world system of Communism.
Communist society, the basis for which has been prepared by the
whole course of historical development,
is mankind's only way out, for It alone can abolish the contradictions
of the capitalist system which threaten to degrade and destroy the
human race.
Communist society will abolish the class division of society, i.e.,
simultaneously with the abolition of anarchy in production, it will
abolish all forms of exploitation and oppression of man by man.
Society will no longer consist of antagonistic classes in conflict with
each other, but will present a united commonwealth of labour. For
the first time in its history mankind will take its fate into its own
hands. Instead of destroying innumerable human lives and
incalculable wealth in struggles between classes and nations,
mankind will devote all its energy to the struggle against the forces of
nature, to the development and strengthening of its own collective
might.
After abolishing private ownership of the means of production
and converting these means into social property, the world system of
Communism will replace the elemental forces of the world market,
competitive and blind processes of social production, by consciously
organised and planned production for the purpose of satisfying
rapidly growing social needs. With the abolition of competition and
anarchy in production, devastating crises and still more devastating
wars will disappear. Instead of colossal waste of productive forces
and spasmodic development of society-there will be a planned
utilisation of all material resources and a painless economic
development on the basis of unrestricted, smooth and rapid
development of productive forces.
The abolition of private property and the disappearance of
classes will do away with the exploitation of man by man. Work will
cease to be toiling for the benefit of a class enemy: instead of being
merely a means of livelihood it will become a necessity of life: want
and economic inequality, the misery of enslaved classes, and a
wretched standard of life generally will disappear; the hierarchy
created in the division of labour system will be abolished together
with the antagonism between mental and manual labour; and the last
vestige of the social inequality of the sexes will be removed. At the
same time, the organs of class domination, and the State in the first
place, will disappear also. The State, being the embodiment of class
domination, will die out in so far as classes die out, and with it all
measures of coercion will expire.
With the disappearance of classes the monopoly of education in
every form will be abolished. Culture will become the acquirement of
all and the class ideologies of the past will give place to scientific
materialist philosophy. Under such circumstances, the domination of
man over man, in any form, becomes impossible, and a great field
will be opened for the social selection and the harmonious
development of all the talents inherent in humanity.
In Communist society no social restrictions will be imposed upon
the growth of the forces of production. Private ownership in the
means of production, the selfish lust for profits, the artificial retention
of the masses in a state of ignorance, povertywhich retards
technical progress in capitalist society, and unproductive
expenditures will have no place in a Communist society. The most
expedient utilisation of the forces of nature and of the natural

conditions of production in the various parts of the world, the removal
of tile antagonism between town and country, that under capitalism
results from the low technical level of agriculture and its systematic
lagging behind industry; the closest possible co-operation between
science and technique, the utmost encouragement of research work
and the practical application of its results on the widest possible
social scale; planned organisation of scientific work; the application
of the most perfect methods of statistical accounting and planned
regulation of economy; the rapid growth of social needs, which is the
most powerful internal driving force of the whole system all these
will secure the maximum productivity of social labour, which in turn
will release human energy for the powerful development of science
and art.
The development of the productive forces of world Communist
society will make it possible to raise the well-being of the whole of
humanity and to reduce to a minimum the time devoted to material
production and, consequently, will enable culture to flourish as never
before in history. This new culture of a humanity that is united for the
first time in history, and has abolished all State boundaries, will,
unlike capitalist culture, be based upon clear and transparent human
relationships. Hence, it will bury forever all mysticism, religion,
prejudice and superstition and will give a powerful impetus to the
development of all-conquering, scientific knowledge.
This higher stage of Communism, the stage in which
Communist society will have developed on its own foundation, in
which an enormous growth of social productive forces has
accompanied the manifold development of man, in which humanity
has already inscribed on its banner: From earn according to his
abilities to earn according to his needs!presupposes, as an
historical condition precedent, a lower stage of development, the
stage of socialism. At this lower stage, Communist society only just
emerges from capitalist society and bears all the economic, ethical
and intellectual birthmarks it has inherited from the society from
whose womb it is just emerging. The productive forces of socialism
are not yet sufficiently developed to assure a distribution of the
products of labour according to needs: these are distributed
according to the amount of labour expended. Division of labour, i.e.,
the system whereby certain groups perform certain labour functions,
and especially the distinction between mental and manual labour,
still exists. Although classes are abolished, traces of the old class
division of society and, consequently, remnants of the proletarian

State power, coercion, laws, still exist. Consequently, certain traces
of inequality, which have not yet managed to die out altogether, still
remain. The antagonism between town and country has not yet been
entirely removed. But none of these survivals of former society is
protected or defended by any social force. Being the product of a
definite level of development of productive forces, they will disappear
as rapidly as mankind, freed from the fetters of the capitalist system,
subjugates the forces of nature, re-educates itself in the spirit of
Communism, and passes from socialism to complete Communism.
IV. THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION FROM CAPITALISM

TO SOCIALISM AND THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE
PROLETARIAT
I. The Transition Period And The Conquest Of Power By The
Proletariat
Between capitalist society and Communist society a period of

revolutionary transformation intervenes, during which the one
changes into the other. Correspondingly, there is also an intervening
period of political transition, in which the essential State form is the
Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The transition from
the world dictatorship of imperialism to the world dictatorship of the
proletariat extends over a long period of proletarian struggles with
defeats as well as victories; a period of continuous general crisis in
capitalist relationships and growth of social revolutions, i.e., of
proletarian civil wars against the bourgeoisie; a period of national
wars and colonial rebellions which, although not in themselves
revolutionary proletarian socialist movements, are nevertheless,
objectively, in so far as they undermine the domination of
imperialism, constituent parts of the world proletarian revolution; a
period in which capitalist and socialist economic and social systems
exist side by side in peaceful relationships as well as in armed
conflict; a period of formation of a Union of Soviet Republics; a
period of wars of imperialist States against Soviet States; a period in
which the ties between the Soviet States and colonial peoples
become more and more closely established, etc.
Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law
of capitalism. This unevenness is still more pronounced and acute in
the epoch of imperialism. Hence, it follows that the international

proletarian revolution cannot be conceived as a single event
occurring simultaneously all over the world. At first socialism may be
victorious in a few, or even in one single capitalist country. Every
such proletarian victory, however, broadens the basis of the world
revolution and consequently, still further intensifies the general crisis
of capitalism. Thus, the capitalist system as a whole reaches the
point of its final collapse; the dictatorship of finance capital perishes
and gives place to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Bourgeois revolutions brought about the political liberation of a
system of productive relationships which had already established
itself and become economically dominant by transferring political
power from the hands of one class of exploiters to the hands of
another. Proletarian revolution, however, signifies the forcible
invasion of the proletariat into the domain of property relationships of
bourgeois society, the expropriation of the expropriating classes, and
the transference of power to a class that aims at the radical
reconstruction of the economic foundations of society and the
abolition of all exploitation of man by man. The political domination of
the feudal baron., all over the world was broken in a series of
separate bourgeois revolutions that extended over a period of
centuries. The international proletarian revolution, however, although
it will not be a single simultaneous act, but one extending over a
whole epoch, nevertheless-thanks to the closer ties that now exist
between the countries of the world, will accomplish its mission in a
much shorter period of time. Only after the proletariat has achieved
victory and consolidated its power all over the world will a prolonged
period of the intensive construction of socialist world economy set in.
The conquest of power by the Proletariat is a necessary
condition precedent to the growth of socialist forms of economy and
to the cultural growth of the proletariat, which changes its own
nature, perfects itself for the leadership of society in all spheres of
life, and draws into this process of transformation all other classes;
this preparing the ground for the abolition of classes altogether.
In the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and later for
the transformation of the social system, as against the alliance of
capitalists and landlords an alliance of workers and peasants is
formed, under the intellectual and political leadership of the former,
an alliance which serves as the basis for the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
The characteristic features of this transition period as a whole,

are the ruthless suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, the
organisation of socialist construction, the mass training of men and
women in the spirit of socialism and the gradual disappearance of
classes. Only to the extent that these great historical tasks are
fulfilled will society of the transition period become transformed into
Communist society.
Thus, the dictatorship of the world proletariat is an essential
and vital condition precedent to the transformation of world capitalist
economy into socialist economy. This world dictatorship can be
established only when the victory of socialism has been achieved in
certain countries or groups of countries, when the newly established
proletarian republics enter into a federal union with the already
existing proletarian republics, when the number of such federations
has grown and extended also to the colonies which have
emancipated themselves from the yoke of imperialism, and when
these federations of republics have grown finally into a World Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics uniting the whole of mankind under
the hegemony of the international proletariat organised as a State.
The conquest of power by the proletariat does not mean
peacefully capturing the ready-made bourgeois State machinery by
means of a parliamentary majority. The bourgeoisie resorts to every
means of violence and terror to safeguard and strengthen its
predatory property and its political domination. Like the feudal
nobility of the past, the bourgeoisie cannot abandon its historical
position to the new class without a desperate and frantic struggle.
Hence, the violence of the bourgeoisie can be suppressed only by
the stern violence of tile proletariat. The conquest of power by tile
proletariat is tile violent overthrow of bourgeois power, the
destruction of the capitalist State apparatus (bourgeois armies,
police, bureaucratic hierarchy, the judiciary, parliaments, etc.), and
substituting in its place new organs of proletarian power, to serve
primarily as instruments for the suppression of the exploiters.
2. The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat And Its Soviet Form
As has been shown by the experience of the October revolution

of 1917 and by the Hungarian revolution, which immeasurably
enlarged the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, the most
suitable form of proletarian state is the Soviet Statea new type of
State, which differs in principle from the bourgeois State, not only in
its class content, but also in its internal structure. This is precisely the
type of State which, emerging as it does directly out of the broadest
possible mass movement of the toilers, secures the maximum of
mass activity and is, consequently, the surest guarantee of final
victory.
The Soviet form of State, being the highest form of democracy,
namely, proletarian democracy, is the very opposite of bourgeois
democracy, which is bourgeois dictatorship in a masked form. The
Soviet State is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule of a single
classthe proletariat. Unlike bourgeois democracy, proletarian
democracy openly admits its class character and aims avowedly at
the suppression of the exploiters in the interests of the overwhelming
majority of the population. It deprives its class enemies of political
rights and, under special historical conditions, may grant the
proletariat a number of temporary advantages over the diffused petty
bourgeois peasantry in order to strengthen its role of leader. While
disarming and suppressing its class enemies, the proletarian State at
the same time regards this deprivation of political rights and partial
restriction of liberty as temporary measures in the struggle against
the attempts on the part of the exploiters to defend or restore their
privileges. It inscribes on its banner the motto: the proletariat holds
power not for the purpose of perpetuating it, not for the purpose of
protecting narrow craft and professional interests, but for the purpose
of uniting the backward and scattered rural proletariat, the semi-
proletariat and the toiling peasants still more closely with the more
progressive strata of the workers, for the purpose of gradually and
systematically overcoming class divisions altogether. Being an all-
embracing form of the unity and organisation of the masses under
the leadership of the proletariat, the Soviets, in actual fact, draw the
broad masses of the proletariat, the peasants and all toilers into the
struggle for socialism, into the work of building up socialism, and into
the practical administration of the State. In the whole of their work
they rely upon the working class organisations and practice the
principles of broad democracy among the toilers to an extent far
greater and immeasurably more close to the masses than does any
other form of government. The right of electing and recalling
delegates, the combination of the executive with the legislative
power, the electoral system based on a productive and not on a
residential qualification (election by workshops, factories, etc.) all this
secures for the working class and for the broad masses of the toilers
who march under its leadership, systematic, continuous and active
participation in all public affairs-economic, social, political, military

and culturaland marks the sharp difference that exists between the
bourgeois-parliamentary republic and the Soviet dictatorship of the
proletariat.
Bourgeois democracy, with its formal equality of all citizens
before the law, is in reality based on a glaring material and economic
in equality of classes. By leaving inviolable, defending and
strengthening the monopoly of the capitalist and landlord classes in
the vital means of production, bourgeois democracy, as far as the
exploited classes (especially the proletariat) is concerned, converts
this formal equality before the law and these democratic rights and
libertieswhich in practice are curtailed systematically, into a
juridical fiction and, consequently, into a means for deceiving and
enslaving the masses. Being the expression of the political
domination of the bourgeoisie, so-called democracy is therefore
capitalist democracy. By depriving the exploiting classes of the
means of production, by placing the monopoly of these means of
production in the hands of the proletariat as the dominant class in
society, the Soviet State, first and foremost guarantees to the
working class and to the toilers generally the material conditions
for the exercise of these rights by providing them with premises,
public buildings, printing plants, travelling facilities, etc.
In the domain of general political rights the Soviet State, while
depriving the exploiters and the enemies of the people of political
rights, completely abolishes for the first time all inequalities of
citizenship, which under systems of exploitation are based on
distinctions of sex, religion and nationality; in this sphere it
establishes an equality that is not to be found in any bourgeois
country. In this respect also, the dictatorship of the proletariat
steadily lays down the material basis upon which this equality may
be truly exercised by introducing measures for the emancipation of
women, the industrialisation of former colonies, etc.
Soviet democracy, therefore, is proletarian democracy,
democracy of the toiling masses, democracy directed against
the exploiters.
The Soviet State completely disarms the bourgeoisie and
concentrates all arms in the hands of the proletariat; it is the armed
proletarian State. The armed forces under the Soviet State are
organised on a class basis, which corresponds to the general
structure of the proletarian dictatorship, and guarantees the role of
leadership to the industrial proletariat. This organisation, while
maintaining revolutionary discipline ensures to the warriors of the

Red Army and Navy close and constant contacts with the masses of
the toilers, participation m the administration of the country and in the
work of building up socialism.
3. The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat And The

Expropriation Of The Expropriators
The victorious proletariat utilises the conquest of power as a

lever of economic revolution, i.e., the revolutionary transformation
of the property relations of capitalism into relationships of the
socialist mode of production. The starting point of this great
economic revolution is the expropriation of the landlords and
capitalists, i.e., the conversion of the monopolist property of the
bourgeoisie into the property of the proletarian State.
In this sphere the Communist International advances the
following fundamental tasks of the proletarian dictatorship:
A. Industry, Transport and Communication Services
a) The confiscation and proletarian nationalisation of all large

private capitalist undertakings (factories, works, mines and electric
power stations), and the transference of all State and municipal
enterprises to the Soviets.
b) The confiscation and proletarian nationalisation of private
capitalist railway, waterway, automobile and air transport services
(commercial and passenger air fleet) and the transference of all
State and municipal transport services to the Soviets.
c) The confiscation and proletarian nationalisation of private
capitalist communication services (telegraph, telephones and radio)
and the transference of State and municipal communication services
to the Soviets.
d) The organisation of workers management of industry. The
establishment of State organs for the management of industry with
provision for the close participation of the trade unions in this work of
management. Appropriate functions to be guaranteed for the factory
and works councils.
e) Industrial activity to be directed towards the satisfaction of the
needs of the broad masses of the toilers. The reorganisation of the
branches of industry that formerly served the needs of the ruling
class (luxury trades, etc.). The strengthening of the branches of
industry that will facilitate the development of agriculture, with the

object of strengthening the ties between industry and peasant
economy, of facilitating the development of State farms, and of
accelerating the rate of development of national economy as a
whole.
B. Agriculture
a) The confiscation and proletarian nationalisation of all large

landed estates in town and country (private, church, monastery and
other lands) and the transference of State and municipal landed
property including forests, minerals, lakes, rivers, etc., to the Soviets
with subsequent nationalisation of the whole of the land.
b) The confiscation of all property utilised in production
belonging to large landed estates, such as: buildings, machinery,
etc., cattle, enterprises for the manufacture of agricultural products
(large flour mills, cheese plants, dairy farms, fruit and vegetable
drying plants, etc.).
c) The transfer of large estates, particularly model estates and
those of considerable economic importance to the management of
the organs of the proletarian dictatorship and of the Soviet farm
organisations.
d) Part of the land confiscated from the landlords and others,
particularly where the land was cultivated by the peasants on a
tenant basis and served as a means of holding the peasantry in
economic bondageto be transferred to the use of the peasantry (to
the poor and partly also to the middle strata of the peasantry). The
amount of land to be so transferred to be determined by economic
expediency as well as by the degree of necessity to neutralise the
peasantry and to win them over to the side of the proletariat; this
amount must necessarily vary according to the different
circumstances.
e) Prohibition of buying and selling of land, as a means of
preserving the land for the peasantry and preventing its passing into
the hands of capitalists, land speculators, etc. Offenders against this
law to be severely prosecuted.
f) To combat usury. All transactions entailing terms of bondage
to be annulled. All debts of the exploited strata of the peasantry to be
annulled. The poorest stratum of the peasantry to be relieved from
taxation, etc.
g) Comprehensive State measures for developing the productive

forces of agriculture; the development of rural electrification; the
manufacture of tractors; the production of artificial fertilisers; the
production of pure quality seeds and raising thoroughbred stock on
Soviet farms; the extensive organ is at ion of agricultural credits for
land reclamation, etc.
h) Financial and other support for agricultural co-operation and
for all forms of collective production in the rural districts (co-operative
societies, communes, etc.). Systematic propaganda in favour of
peasant co-operation (selling, credit and supply co-operative
societies) to be based on the mass activity of the peasants
themselves; propaganda in favour of tile transition to large-scale
agricultural production which-owing to the undoubted technical and
economic advantages of large-scale productionprovide the
greatest immediate economic gain and also a method of transition to
socialism most accessible to the broad masses of the toiling
peasants.
C. Trade and Credit
a) The proletarian nationalisation of private banks (the entire

gold reserve, all securities, deposits, etc., to be transferred to the
proletarian State); the proletarian State to take over State, municipal,
etc. banks.
b) The centralisation of banking; all nationalised big banks to be
subordinated to the central State bank.
c) The nationalisation of wholesale trade and large retail trading
enterprises (ware-houses, elevators, stores, stocks of goods, etc.),
and their transfer to the organs of the Soviet State.
d) Every encouragement to be given to consumers co-
operatives as representing an integral part of the distributing
apparatus, while preserving uniformity in their system of work and
securing the active participation of the masses themselves in their
work.
e) The monopoly of foreign trade.
f) The repudiation of State debts to foreign and home capitalists.
D. Conditions of Life, Labour, etc.
a) Reduction of tile working day to seven hours, and to six hours

in industries particularly harmful to the health of the workers. Further
reduction of tile working day and transition to a five-day week in

countries with developed productive forces. The regulation of the
working day to correspond to the increase of the productivity of
labour.
b) Prohibition, as a rule, of night work and employment in
harmful trades for all females. Prohibition of child labour. Prohibition
of overtime.
c) Special reduction of the working day for the youth (a
maximum six-hour day for young persons up to 18 years of age).
Socialist reorganisation of the labour of young persons so as to
combine employment in industry with general and political education.
d) Social insurance in all forms (sickness, old age, accident,
employment, etc.), at State expense (and at the expense of the
owners of private enterprises where they still exist), insurance affairs
to be managed by the insured themselves.
e) Comprehensive measures of hygiene; the organisation of free
medical service. To combat social diseases (alcoholism, venereal
diseases, tuberculosis).
f) Complete equality between men and women before the law
and in social life: a radical reform of marriage and family laws;
recognition of maternity as a social function; protection of mothers
and infants. Initiation of social care and upbringing of infants and
children (crches, kindergarten, childrens homes, etc.). The
establishment of institutions that will gradually relieve the burden of
house drudgery (public kitchens and laundries), and systematic
cultural struggle against the ideology and traditions of female
bondage.
E. Housing
a) The confiscation of big house property.

b) The transfer of confiscated houses to the administration of the
local Soviets.
c) Workers to be removed to bourgeois residential districts.
d) Palaces and large private and public buildings to be placed at
the disposal of labour organisations.
e) The carrying out of an extensive programme of house
construction.
F. National and Colonial Questions
a) The recognition of the right of all nations, irrespective of race,

to complete self-determination, that is, self-determination inclusive of
the right to State separation.
b) The voluntary unification and centralisation of the military and
economic forces of all nations liberated from capitalism for the
purpose of fighting against imperialism and for building up socialist
economy.
c) Wide and determined struggle against the imposition of any
kind of limitation and restriction upon any nationality, nation or race.
Complete equality for all nations and races.
d) The Soviet State to guarantee and support with all the
resources at its command the national cultures of nations liberated
from capitalism, at the same time to carry out a consistent proletarian
policy directed towards the development of the content of such
cultures.
e) Every assistance to be rendered to the economic, political
and cultural growth of the formerly oppressed territories,
dominions and colonies, with the object of transferring them to
socialist lines, so that a durable basis may be laid for complete
national equality.
f) To combat all remnants of chauvinism, national hatred, race
prejudices and other ideological products of feudal and capitalist
barbarism.
G. Means of Ideological Influence
a) The nationalisation of printing plants.

b) The monopoly of newspapers and book-publishing.
c) The nationalisation of big cinema enterprises, theatres, etc.
d) The utilisation of the nationalised means of intellectual
production for the most extensive political and general education of
the toilers and for the building up of a new socialist culture on a
proletarian class basis.
4. The Basis For The Economic Policy Of The Proletarian

Dictatorship
In carrying out all these tasks of the dictatorship of the

proletariat, the following postulates must be borne in mind:
1. The complete abolition of private property in land, and the
nationalisation of the land, cannot be brought about immediately in
the more developed capitalist countries, where the principle of
private property is deep-rooted among a broad strata of the
peasantry. In such countries, the nationalisation of all land can only
be brought about gradually, by means of a series of transitional
measures.
2. Nationalisation of production should not, as a rule, be applied
to small and middle-sized enterprises (peasants, small artisans,
handicrafts, small and medium shops, small manufacturers, etc.).
Firstly, because the proletariat must draw a strict distinction between
the property of the small commodity producer working for himself,
who can and must be gradually brought into the groove of socialist,
construction, and the property of the capitalist exploiter, the
liquidation of which is an essential condition precedent for socialist
construction.
Secondly, because the proletariat, after seizing power, may not
have sufficient organising forces at its disposal, particularly in the
first phases of the dictatorship, for the purpose of destroying
capitalism and at the same time to organise with the smaller and
medium individual units of production on a socialist basis. These
small individual enterprises (primarily peasant enterprises) will be
drawn into the general socialist organisation of production and
distribution only gradually, with the powerful and systematic aid
which the proletarian State will render to organise them in all the
various forms of collective enterprises. Any attempt to break up their
economic system violently and to complete them to adopt collective
methods by force will only lead to harmful results.
3. Owing to the prevalence of a large number of small units of
production (primarily peasant farms, farmers' enterprises, small
artisans, small shopkeepers, etc.) in colonies, semi-colonies and
economically backward countries, where the petty-bourgeois masses
represent the overwhelming majority of the population, and even in
centres of capitalist world industry (the United States of America,
Germany, and to some degree also England), it is necessary, in the
first stage of development to preserve to some extent, market forms
of economic contacts, the money system, etc. The variety of

prevailing economic forms (ranging from socialist large scale industry
to small peasant and artisan enterprises), which unavoidably come
into conflict with each other; the variety of classes and class groups
corresponding to this variety of economic forms, each having
different stimuli for economic activity and conflicting class interests;
and finally, the prevalence in all spheres of economic life, of habits
and traditions inherited from bourgeois society, which cannot be
removed all at onceall this demands that the proletariat, in
exercising its economic leadership, shall properly combine, on the
basis of market relationships, large-scale socialist industry with the
small enterprises of the simple commodity producers, i.e., it must
combine them in such a way as to guarantee the leading role to
socialist industry and at the same time bring about the greatest
possible development of the mass of peasant enterprises. Hence,
the greater the importance of scattered, small peasant labour in the
general economy of the country, the greater will be the volume of
market relations, the smaller will be the significance of directly
planned management, and the greater will be the degree to which
the general economic plan will depend upon forecasts of
uncontrollable economic relations. On the other hand, the smaller the
importance of small production, the greater will be the proportion of
socialised labour, the more powerful will be the concentrated and
socialised means of production, the smaller will be the volume of
market relations, the greater will be the importance of planned
management as compared with uncoordinated management and the
more considerable and universal will be the application of planned
management in the sphere of production and distribution.
Provided the proletarian dictatorship carries out a correct class
policy, i.e., provided proper account is taken of class, relationships,
the technical and economic superiority of large-scale socialised
production, the centralisation of all the most important economic key
positions (industry, transport, large-scale agriculture enterprises,
banks, etc.) in the hands of the proletarian State, planned
management of industry, and the power wielded by the State
apparatus as a whole (the budget, taxes, administrative legislation
and legislation generally), render it possible continuously and
systematically to dislodge private: capital and the new outcrops of
capitalism which, in the period of more or less free commercial and
market relations will emerge in town and country with the
development of simple commodity production (big farmers, kulaks).
At the same time by organising peasant farming on co-operative

lines, and as a result of the growth of collective forms of economy,
the great bulk of the peasant enterprises will be systematically drawn
into the main channel of developing socialism. The outwardly
capitalist forms and methods of economic activity that are bound up
with market relations (money form of accounting, payment for labour
in money, buying and selling, credit and banks, etc.), serve as levers
for the socialist transformation, in so far as they to an increasing
degree serve the consistently socialist type of enterprises, i.e., the
socialist section of economy.
Thus, provided the State carries out a correct policy, market
relations under the proletarian dictatorship destroy themselves in the
process of their own development by helping to dislodge private
capital, by changing the character of peasant economywhat time
the means of production become more and more centralised and
concentrated in the hands of the proletarian Statethey help to
destroy market relations altogether.
In the probable event of capitalist military intervention, and of
prolonged counter-revolutionary wars against the dictatorship of the
proletariat, the necessity will arise for a warCommunist economic
policy (War Communism), which is nothing more nor less than the
organisation of rational consumption for the purpose of military
defence, accompanied by a system of intensified pressure upon the
capitalist groups (confiscation, requisitions, etc.), with the more or
less complete liquidation of freedom of trade and market relations
and a sharp disturbance of the individualist, economic stimuli of the
small producers, which results in a diminution of the productive
forces of the country. This policy of War-Communism, while it
undermines the material basis of the strata of the population in the:
country that are hostile to the working class, secures a rational
distribution of the available supplies and facilitates the military
struggle of the proletarian dictatorship-which is the historical
justification of this policynevertheless, cannot be regarded as the
normal economic policy of the proletarian dictatorship.
5. Dictatorship Of The Proletariat And The Classes
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a continuation of the class

struggle under new conditions. The dictatorship of the proletariat
is a stubborn fight-bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful,
military and economic, pedagogical and administrative-against the
forces and traditions of the old society, against external capitalist

enemies, against the remnants of the exploiting classes within the
country, against the upshoots of the new bourgeoisie that spring up
on the basis of still prevailing commodity production.
After the civil war has been brought to an end the stubborn class
struggle continues in new forms; primarily in the form of a struggle
between the survivals of previous economic systems and fresh
upshoots of them on the one hand, and socialist forms of economy
on the other. The forms of the struggle undergo a cl1ange at various
stages of socialist development, and in the first stages, the struggle,
under certain conditions, may be extremely severe.
In the initial stage of the proletarian dictatorship, the policy of the
proletariat towards other classes and social groups within the country
is determined by the following postulates:
1. The big bourgeoisie and the landowners, a section of the
officer corps, the higher command of the forces, and the higher
bureaucracywho remain loyal to the bourgeoisie and the
landlordsare consistent enemies of the working class against
whom ruthless war must be waged. The organising skill of a certain
section of these strata may be utilised, but as a rule, only after the
dictatorship has been consolidated and all conspiracies and
rebellions of exploiters have been decisively crushed.
2. In regard to the technical intelligentsia, which was brought
up in the spirit of bourgeois traditions and the higher ranks of which
were closely linked up with the commanding apparatus of capital
the proletariat, while ruthlessly suppressing every counter
revolutionary action on the part of hostile sections of the
intelligentsia, must at the same time give consideration to the
necessity of utilising this skilled social force for the work of socialist
construction; It must give every encouragement to the groups that
are neutral, and especially to those that are friendly towards the
proletarian revolution. In widening the economic, technical and
cultural perspectives of socialists, construction to its utmost social
limits, the proletariat must systematically win over the technical
intelligentsia to its side, subject it to its ideological influence and
secure its close co-operation in the work of social reconstruction.
3. In regard to the peasantry, the task of the Communist
Parties, is, while placing its reliance in the agricultural proletariat, to
win over all the exploited and toiling strata of the countryside. The
victorious proletariat must draw strict distinctions between the
various groups among the peasantry, weigh their relative
importance, and render every support to the propertyless and semi-

proletarian sections of the peasantry by transferring to them a part of
the land taken from the big landowners and by helping them in their
struggle against usurers capital, etc. Moreover, the proletariat must
neutralise the middle strata of the peasantry and mercilessly
suppress the slightest opposition on the part of the village
bourgeoisie who ally themselves with the landowners. As its
dictatorship become consolidated and socialist construction
develops, the proletariat must proceed from the policy of
neutralisation to a policy of durable alliance with the masses of
middle peasantry, but must not adopt the viewpoint of sharing power
in any form. The dictatorship of the proletariat implies that the
industrial workers alone are capable of leading the entire mass of the
toilers. On the other hand, while representing the rule of a single
class, the dictatorship or the proletariat at the same time represents
a special form of class alliance between the proletariat, as the
vanguard of the toilers, and the numerous non-proletarian sections of
the toiling masses, or the majority of them. It represents an alliance
for the complete overthrow of capital, for the complete suppression
of the opposition of the bourgeoisie and its attempts at restoration,
an alliance aiming at the complete building up and consolidation of
socialism.
4. The petty urban bourgeoisie, which continuously wavers
between extreme reaction and sympathy for the proletariat, must
likewise be neutralised and as far as possible, won over to the side
of the proletariat. This can be achieved by leaving to them their small
property and permitting a certain measure of free trade, by releasing
them from the bondage of usurious credit and by the proletariat
helping them in all sorts of ways in the struggle against all and every
form of capitalist oppression.
6. Mass Organisations In The System Of Proletarian

Dictatorship
In the process of fulfilling these tasks of the proletarian

dictatorship, a radical change takes place in the tasks and
functions of the mass organisations, particularly of the labour
organisations. Under capitalism, the mass labour organisations, in
which the broad masses of the proletariat were originally organised
and trained, i.e., the trade (industrial) unions, serve as the principal
weapons in the struggle against trustified capital and its State. Under
the proletarian dictatorship, they become transformed into the

principal lever of the State; they become transformed into a school of
Communism by means of which vast masses of the proletariat are
drawn into the work of socialist management of production; they are
transformed into organisations directly connected with all parts of the
State apparatus, influencing all branches of its work, safeguarding
the permanent and day to day interests of the working class and
fighting against bureaucracy in the departments of the State. Thus, in
so far as they promote from their ranks leaders in the work of
construction, drawn into this work of construction broad sections of
the proletariat and aim at combating bureaucracy, which inevitably
arises as a result of the operation of class influences alien to the
proletariat and of the inadequate cultural development of the
masses, the trade unions become the backbone of the proletarian
economic and State organisation as a whole.
Notwithstanding reformist utopias, working class co-operative
organisations under capitalism are doomed to play a very minor
role and in the general environment of the capitalist system not
infrequently degenerate into mere appendages of capitalism. Under
the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, these organisations can
and must become the most important units of the distributing
apparatus.
Lastly, peasant agricultural co-operative organisations
(selling, purchasing, credit and producing), under proper
management, and provided a systematic struggle is carried on
against the capitalist elements, and that really broad masses of the
toilers who follow the lead of the proletariat take a really active part in
their work, can and must become one of the principal organisational
means for linking up town and country. To the extent that they were
able to maintain their existence at all under capitalism, co-operative
peasant enterprises inevitably became transformed into capitalist
enterprises, for they were dependent upon capitalist industry,
capitalist banks and upon capitalist economic environment. Under
the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, such enterprises develop
amidst a different system of relationships, depend upon proletarian
industry, proletarian banks, etc. Thus, provided the proletariat carries
out a proper policy, provided the class struggle is systematically
conducted against the capitalist elements outside as well as inside
the co-operative organisations, and provided socialist industry
exercises its guidance over it, agricultural co-operation will become
one of the principal levers for the socialist transformation and
collectivisation of the countryside. All this, however, does not exclude

the possibility that in certain countries the consumers' societies, and
particularly the agricultural co-operative societies led by the
bourgeoisie and their social-democratic agents will at first be hotbeds
of counter-revolutionary activity and sabotage against the work of
economic construction of the workers revolution.
In the course of this militant and constructive work, carried on
through the medium of these multifarious proletarian organisations
which should serve as effective levers of the Soviet State and the
link between it and the masses of all strata of the working classthe
proletariat secures unity of will and action, and exercises this unity
through the medium of the Communist Party, which plays the
leading role in the system of the proletarian dictatorship.
The party of the proletariat relies directly on the trade unions
and other organisations that embrace the masses of the workers,
and through these relies on the peasantry (Soviets, co-operative
societies, Young Communist League, etc.); by means of these levers
it guides the whole Soviet system. The proletariat can fulfil its role as
organiser of the new society only if the Soviet Government is loyally
supported by all the mass organisations; only if class unity is
maintained, and only under the guidance of the Party.
7. The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat And The Cultural

Revolution
The role of organiser of the new human society presupposes

that the proletariat itself will become culturally mature, that it will
trans. form it own nature, that it will continually promote from its
ranks increasing numbers of men and women capable of mastering
science, technique and administration in order to build up socialism
and a new socialist culture.
Bourgeois revolution against feudalism presupposes that a new
class has arisen in the midst of feudal society that is culturally more
advanced than the ruling class, and is already the dominant factor in
economic life. The proletarian revolution, however, develops under
other conditions. Being economically exploited, politically oppressed
and culturally downtrodden under capitalism, the working class
transforms its own nature only in the course of the transition period,
only after it has conquered State power, only by destroying the
bourgeois monopoly of education and mastering all the sciences,
and only after it has gained experience in the great work of
construction. The mass awakening of Communist consciousness,

the cause of socialism itself, calls for a mass change of human
nature, which can be achieved only in the course of the practical
movement, in revolution. Hence revolution is not, only necessary
because there is no other way of overthrowing the ruling class, but
also because only in the process of revolution is the overthrowing
class able to purge itself of the dross of the old society and become
capable of creating a new society.
In destroying the capitalist monopoly of the means of production,
the working class must also destroy the capitalist monopoly of
education, that is, it must take possession of all the schools, from the
elementary schools to the universities. It is particularly important for
the proletariat to train members of the working class as experts in
the sphere of production (engineers, technicians. organisers, etc.),
as well as in the sphere of military affairs, science, art, etc. Parallel
with this work stands the task of raising the general cultural level of
the proletarian masses, of improving their political education, of
raising their general standard of knowledge and technical skill, of
training them in the methods of public work and administration, and
of combating the survivals of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
prejudices, etc.
Only to the extent that the proletariat promotes from its own
ranks a body of men and women capable of occupying the key
positions of socialist construction, only to the extent that this body
grows, and draws increasing numbers of the working class into the
process of revolutionary-cultural transformation and gradually
obliterates the line that divides the proletariat into an advanced and
a backward section will the guarantees be created for successful
socialist construction and against bureaucratic decay and class
degeneracy.
However, in the process of revolution the proletariat not only
changes its own nature, but also the nature of other classes,
primarily the numerous petty-bourgeois strata in town and country
and especially the toiling sections of the peasantry. By drawing the
wide masses into the process of cultural revolution and socialist
construction, by uniting and communistically educating them with all
the means at its disposal, by strongly combating all anti-proletarian
and narrow craft ideologies, and by persistently and systematically
overcoming the general and cultural backwardness of the rural
districts, the working class, on the basis of the developing collective
forms of economy, prepares the way for the complete removal of

class divisions in society.
One of the most important tasks of tasks of the cultural
revolution affecting the wide masses, is the task of systematically
and unswervingly combating religionthe opium of the people. The
proletarian government must withdraw all State support from the
Church, which is the agency of the former ruling class; it must
prevent all church interference in State-organised educational affairs,
and ruthlessly suppress the counter-revolutionary activity of the
ecclesiastical organisations. At the same time, the proletarian State,
while granting liberty of worship and abolishing the privileged
position of the formerly dominant religion, carries on anti-religious
propaganda with all the means at its command and reconstructs the
whole of its educational work, on the basis of scientific materialism.
8. The Struggle For The World Dictatorship Of The

Proletariat And The Principal Types Of Revolution
The international proletarian revolution represents a combination

of processes which vary in time and character; purely proletarian
revolutions; revolutions of a bourgeois-democratic type which grow
into proletarian revolutions; wars for national liberation; colonial
revolutions. The World Dictatorship of the Proletariat comes only
as the final result of the revolutionary process.
The uneven development of capitalism, which became more
accentuated in the period of imperialism, has given rise to a variety
of types of capitalism, to different stages of ripeness of capitalism in
different countries, and to a variety of specific conditions of the
revolutionary process. These circumstances make it historically
inevitable that the proletariat will come to power by a multiplicity
of ways and degrees of rapidity; that a number of countries must
pass through certain transition stages leading to the dictatorship of
the proletariat and must adopt varied forms of socialist construction.
The variety of conditions and ways by which the proletariat will
achieve its dictatorship in the various countries may be divided
schematically into three main types.
Countries of highly-developed capitalism (United States of
America. Germany, Great Britain, etc.), having powerful productive
forces, highly centralised production, with small-scale production
reduced to relative insignificance, and a long established bourgeois-
democratic political system. In such countries the fundamental
political demand of the programme is direct transition to the

dictatorship of the proletariat. In the economic sphere, the most
characteristic demands are: expropriation of the whole of the large-
scale industry; organisation of a large number of State Soviet farms
and, in contrast to this, a relatively small portion of the land to be
transferred to the peasantry; unregulated market relations to be
given comparatively small scope; rapid rate of socialist development
generally, and of collectivisation of peasant farming in particular.
Countries with a medium development of capitalism (Spain,
Portugal, Poland, Hungary, the Balkan countries, etc.), having
numerous survivals of semi-feudal relationships in agriculture,
possessing, to a certain extent, the material pre-requisites for
socialist construction, and in which the bourgeois-democratic reforms
have not yet been completed. In some of these countries a process
of more or less rapid development from bourgeois democratic
revolution to socialist revolution is possible. In others, there may be
types of proletarian revolution which will have a large number of
bourgeois-democratic tasks to fulfil. Hence, in these countries, the
dictatorship of the proletariat may not come about at once, but in the
process of transition from the democratic dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry to the socialist dictatorship of the
proletariat. Where the revolution develops directly as a proletarian
revolution it is presumed that the proletariat exercises leadership
over a broad agrarian peasant movement. In general, the agrarian
revolution plays a most important part in these countries, and in
some cases a decisive role in the process of expropriating large
landed property a considerable portion of the confiscated land is
placed at the disposal of the peasantry; the volume of market
relations prevailing after the victory of the proletariat is considerable;
the task of organising the peasantry along co-operative lines and
later, of combining them in production, occupies an important place
among the tasks of socialist construction. The rate of this
construction is relatively slow.
Colonial and semi-colonial countries (China, India, etc.) and
dependent countries (Argentine, Brazil, etc.), have the rudiments of
and in some cases a considerably developed industry -in the majority
of cases inadequate for independent socialist construction with
feudal medieval relationships, or Asiatic mode of production
relationships prevailing in their economies and in their political
superstructures. In these the principal industrial, commercial and
banking enterprises, the principal means of transport, the large
landed estates (latifundia) plantations, etc., are concentrated in the

hands of foreign imperialist groups. The principal task of such
countries is, on the one hand to fight against the feudal and pre-
capitalist forms of exploitation, and to develop systematically the
peasant agrarian revolution; on the other hand, to fight against
foreign imperialism for national independence. As a rule, transition to
the dictatorship of the proletariat of these countries will be possible
only through a series of preparatory stages, as the outcome of a
whole period of transformation of bourgeois-democratic revolution
into socialist revolution, while in the majority of cases, successful
socialist construction will be possible only if direct support is obtained
from the countries in which the proletarian dictatorship is established.
In still more backward countries, (as in some parts of Africa)
where there are no wage workers or very few, where the majority of
the population still lives in tribal conditions, where survivals of
primitive tribal forms still exist, where the national bourgeoisie is
almost non-existent, there the primary role of foreign imperialism is
that of military occupation and usurpation of land, the central task is
to fight for national independence. Victorious national uprisings in
these countries may open the way for their direct development
towards socialism and their avoidance of the stage of capitalism,
provided real and powerful assistance is rendered them by the
countries in which the proletarian dictatorship is established.
Thus, in the epoch in which the proletariat in the most developed
capitalist countries is confronted with the immediate task of capturing
powerthat in which the dictatorship of the proletariat already
established in the U.S.S.R. is a factor of world significancethe
movement for liberation in colonial and semi-colonial countries,
which was brought into being by the penetration of world capitalism,
may lead to socialist developmentnotwithstanding the immaturity
of social relationships in these countries taken by themselves
provided they receive the assistance and support of the
proletarian dictatorship and of the international proletarian
movement generally.
9. Struggle For The World Dictatorship Of The Proletarian

And Colonial Revolution
The special conditions of the revolutionary struggle prevailing in

colonial and semi-colonial countries, the inevitably long period of
struggle required for the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat
and the peasantry and for the transformation of this dictatorship into
the: dictatorshipof the proletariat, and, finally, the decisive
importance of the national aspects of the struggle, impose, upon the
Communist Parties of these countries a number of special tasks,
which are preparatory stages to the general tasks of the dictatorship
of the proletariat.
The Communist International considers the following to be the
most important of these special tasks:
1. To overthrow the rule of foreign imperialism, of the feudal
rulers and of the landlord bureaucracy.
2. To establish the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and
the peasantry on a Soviet basis.
3. Complete national independence And national unification.
4. Annulment of State debts.
5. Nationalisation of large-scale enterprises (industrial, transport,
banking and others) owned by the imperialists.
6. The confiscation of landlord, church and monastery lands.
The nationalisation of all the land.
7. Introduction of the 8-hour day.
8. The organisation of revolutionary workers and peasants
armies.
In the colonies and semi-colonies where the proletariat is the

leader of and commands hegemony in the struggle, the consistent
bourgeois-democratic revolution will grow into proletarian revolution
in proportion as the struggle develops and becomes more intense
(sabotage by the bourgeoisie, confiscation of the enterprises
belonging to the sabotaging section of the bourgeoisie, which
inevitably extends to the nationalisation of the whole of large-scale
industry). In the colonies where there is no proletariat, the overthrow
of the domination of the imperialists implies the establishment of the
rule of peoples (peasant) Soviets, the confiscation and transfer to
the State of foreign enterprises and lands.
Colonial revolutions and movements for national liberation play
an extremely important part in the struggle against imperialism, and
in the struggle for the conquest of power by the working class.
Colonies and semi-colonies are also important in the transition
period because they represent the world rural district in relation to
the industrial countries, which represent the world city.
Consequently the problem of organising socialist world economy, of
properly combining industry with agriculture is, to a large extent, the
problem of the relation towards the former colonies of imperialism.

The establishment of a fraternal, militant alliance with the
masses of the toilers in the colonies represents one of the
principal tasks the world industrial proletariat must fulfil as
leader in the struggle against imperialism.
Thus, in rousing the workers in the home countries for the
struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the progress of the
world revolution also rouses hundreds of millions of colonial workers
and peasants for the struggle against foreign imperialism. In view of
the existence of centres of socialism represented by Soviet
Republics of growing economic power, the colonies which break
away from imperialism economically gravitate towards and gradually
combine with the industrial centres of world socialism, are drawn into
the current of socialist construction, and by skipping the further stage
of development of capitalism, as a dominating system, obtain
opportunities for rapid economic and cultural progress. The
Peasants Soviets in the backward ex-colonies and the Workers and
Peasants Soviets in the more developed ex-colonies group
themselves politically around the centres of proletarian dictatorship,
join the growing Federation of Soviet Republics, and thus enter the
general system of the world proletarian dictatorship.
Socialism, as the new method of production, thus obtains
worldwide e scope of development.
V. THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT IN

THE U.S.S.R., AND THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL
REVOLUTION
1. The Building Up Of Socialism In The U.S.S.R. And The
Class Struggle
The principal manifestation of the profound crisis of the capitalist

system is the division of world economy into capitalist countries on
the one hand, and countries building up socialism on the other.
Therefore, the internal consolidation of the proletarian dictatorship in
the U.S.S.R., the success achieved in he work of socialist
construction, the growth of the influence and authority of the
U.S.S.R. among the masses of the proletariat and the oppressed
peoples of the colonies, signify the continuation, intensification and
expansion of the International Social Revolution.
Possessing in the country the necessary and sufficient material

pre-requisites not only for the overthrow of the landlord and the
bourgeoisie, but also for the establishment of complete socialism, the
workers of the Soviet Republic, with the aid of the international
proletariat, heroically repelled the attacks of the armed forces of the
internal and foreign counter-revolution, consolidated their alliance
with the bulk of the peasantry and achieved considerable success in
the sphere of socialist construction.
The contacts established between proletarian socialist industry
and small peasant economy, which stimulates the growth of the
productive forces of agriculture, and at the same time assures a
leading role to socialist industry; the linking up of industry with
agriculture in place of capitalist production for the satisfaction of the
unproductive consumption of parasitic classes that was the system
formerly; production, not for capitalist profit, but for the satisfaction of
the growing needs of the masses of the consumers; the growth of
the needs of the masses, which in the final analysis greatly
stimulates the entire productive process; and, finally, the close
concentration of the economic key positions under the command of
the proletarian State, the growth of planned management and the
more economic and expedient distribution of the means of
production that goes with itall this enables the proletariat to make
rapid progress along the road of socialist construction.
In raising the level of the productive forces of the whole
economy of the country, and in steering a straight course for the
industrialisation of the U.S.S.R.the rapidity of which is dictated by
the international and internal situation-the proletariat in the U.S.S.R.,
notwithstanding the systematic attempts on the part of the capitalist
Powers to organise an economic and financial boycott against the
Soviet Republics, at the same time increases the relative share of
the socialised (socialist) section of national economy in the total
means of production in the country, in the total output of industry and
in the total trade turn over.
Thus, with the land nationalised by means of the levers of State
trade and rapidly growing co-operation, and with the increasing
industrialisation of the country, State socialist industry, transport and
banking are more and more guiding the activities of the small and
very small peasant enterprises.
In the sphere of agriculture especially the level of the forces of
production is being raised amidst conditions that restrict the process
of differentiation among the peasantry (nationalisation of the land,
and consequently the prohibition of the sale and purchase of land;

sharply graded progressive taxation; the financing of poor and
middle class peasants' cooperative societies and producers
organisations; laws regulating the hiring of labour; depriving the
kulaks of certain political and public rights; organising the rural poor
in separate organisations. etc.). However, in so far as the productive
forces of socialist industry have not yet grown sufficiently to enable a
broad, new technical base to be laid for agriculture, and
consequently to render possible the immediate and rapid unification
of peasant enterprises into large public enterprises (collective farms),
the kulak class tends to grow and establish, first economic and then
political contacts with the elements of the so-called new
bourgeoisie.
Being in command of the principal economic key positions in the
country, and systematically squeezing out the remnants of urban and
private capital, which has greatly dwindled in the last few years of the
New Economic Policyrestricting in every way the exploiting strata
in the rural districts that arise out of the development of commodity
and money relationships; supporting existing Soviet farms in the rural
districts and establishing new ones; drawing the bulk of the peasant
simple commodity producers, through the medium of rapidly growing
co-operative organisations, into the general system of Soviet
economic organisation, and consequently into the work of socialist
construction, which, in the conditions prevailing under the proletarian
dictatorship, and with the economic leadership of socialist industry, is
identical with the development of socialism; passing from the
process:; of restoration to the process of expanded reproduction of
the entire productive and technical base of the countrythe
proletariat of the U.S.S.R. sets itself, and is already beginning to fulfil
the task of large-scale capital construction (production of means of
production generally, development of heavy industry, and especially
of electrification), and developing still further selling, buying and
credit co-operation, set itself the task of organising the peasantry in
producing co-operatives on a mass scale and on a collectivist basis,
which calls for the powerful material assistance of the proletarian
State.
Thus, being already a decisive economic force determining, in
the main, the entire economic development of the U.S.S.R.,
socialism by that very fact makes still further strides in its
development and systematically overcomes the difficulties that arise
from the petty-bourgeois character of the country and the periods of

temporarily acute class antagonism.
The task of re-equipping industry and the need for large
investments in capital construction, unavoidably give rise to serious
difficulties in the path of socialist development which, in the last
analysis, are to be attributed to the technical and economic
backwardness of the country and to the ruin caused in the years of
the imperialist and civil wars. Notwithstanding this, however, the
standard of living of the working class and of the broad masses of
the toilers is steadily rising and simultaneously with the socialist
rationalisation and scientific organisation of industry, the 7-hour day
is gradually being introduced, which opens up still wider prospects
for the improvement of the conditions of life and labour of the
working class.
Standing on the basis of the economic growth of the U.S.S.R.
and on the steady increase in the relative importance of the socialist
section of industry; never for a moment halting in the struggle against
the kulaks; relying upon the rural poor and maintaining a firm alliance
with the bulk of the middle peasantry, the working class, united and
led by the Communist Party, which has been hardened in
revolutionary battles, draws increasing masses, scores of millions of
toilers into the work of socialist construction. The principal means
employed towards this aim are: the development of broad mass
organisations (the Party, as the guiding force; the trade unions, as
the backbone of the entire system of the proletarian dictatorship; the
Young Communist League; co-operative societies of all types;
working womens and peasant womens organisations; the various
so-called voluntary societies; worker and peasant correspondents
societies; sport, scientific, cultural and educational organisations); full
encouragement of the initiative of the masses and the promotion of
fresh strata of workers to high posts in all spheres of industry and
administration. The steady attraction of the masses into the process
of socialist construction, the constant renovation of the entire State,
economic, trade union and Party apparatus with men and women
fresh from the ranks of the proletariat, the systematic training in the
higher educational establishments and at special courses of workers
generally and young workers in particular as new socialist experts in
all branches of construction all these together serve as one of the
principal guarantees against the bureaucratic ossification or social
degeneration of the stratum of the proletariat directly engaged in
administration.
2. The Significance Of The U.S.S.R. And Its World

Revolutionary Duties
Having defeated Russian imperialism and liberated all the

former colonies and oppressed nations of the Tsarist Empire, and
systematically laid a firm foundation for their cultural and political
development by industrialising their territories; having guaranteed the
juridical position of the Autonomous Territories, Autonomous
republics and Allied Republics in the Constitution of the Union and
having granted in full the right of nations to self-determinationthe
dictatorship of the proletariat in the U.S.S.R., by this guarantees, not
only formal, but also real equality for the different nationalities in the
Union.
Being the land of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of
socialist construction, the land of great working class achievements,
of the union of the workers with the peasants and of a new culture
marching under the banner of Marxism-the U.S.S.R. inevitably
becomes the base of the world movement of all oppressed classes,
the centre of international revolution, the greatest factor in world
history. In the U.S.S.R., the world proletariat for the first time
acquires a country that is really its own, and for the colonial
movements the U.S.S.R. becomes a powerful centre of attraction.
Thus, the U.S.S.R. is an extremely important factor in the
general crisis of capitalism, not only because it has dropped out of
the world capitalist system and has created a basis for a new
socialist system of production, but also because it plays an
exceptionally great revolutionary role generally; it is the international
driving force: of proletarian revolution that impels the proletariat of all
countries to seize power; it is the living example proving that the
working class is not only capable of destroying capitalism, but of
building up socialism as well; it is the prototype of the fraternity of
nationalities in all lands united in the World Union of Socialist
Republics and of the economic unity of the toilers of all countries in a
single world socialist economic system that the world proletariat must
establish when it has captured political power.
The simultaneous existence of two economic systems; the
socialist system in the U.S.S.R. and the capitalist system in other
countries, imposes on the Proletarian State the task of warding off
the blows showered upon it by the capitalist world (boycott,
blockade, etc.), and also compels it to resort to economic
manoeuvring and the utilisation of economic contacts with capitalist

countries (with the aid of the monopoly of foreign trade-which is one
of the fundamental conditions for the successful building up of
socialism. and also with the aid of credits, loans. concessions, etc.).
The principal and fundamental line to be followed in this connection
must be the line of establishing the widest possible contact with
foreign countrieswithin limits determined by their usefulness to the
U.S.S.R., i.e., primarily for strengthening industry in the U.S.S.R., for
laying the base for its own heavy industry and electrification, and
finally, for the development of its socialist engineering industry. Only
to the extent that the economic independence of the U.S.S.R. in the
capitalist environment is secured can solid guarantees be obtained
against the danger that socialist construction in the U.S.S.R, may be
destroyed and that the U.S.S.R, may be transformed into an
appendage of the world capitalist system.
On the other hand, notwithstanding their interest in the markets
of the U.S.S.R., the capitalist States continually vacillate between
their commercial interests and their fear of the growth of the
U.S.S.R., which means the growth of international revolution.
However the principal and fundamental tendency in the policy of
imperialist Powers is to encircle the U.S.S.R. and conduct counter-
revolutionary war against it in order to strangle it and to establish a
world bourgeois terrorist regime.
3. The Duties Of The International Proletariat To The

U.S.S.R.
The systematic imperialist attempts politically to encircle the

U.S.S.R., and the growing danger of an armed attack upon her, do
not, however, prevent the Communist Party of the Soviet Uniona
section of the Communist International and the leader of the
proletarian dictatorship in the U.S.S.R.from fulfilling its
international obligations and from rendering support to all the
oppressed, to the Labour movements in capitalist countries, to
colonial movements against imperialism and to the struggle against
national oppression in every form.
In view of the fact that the U.S.S.R, is the only fatherland of the
international proletariat, the principal bulwark of its achievements
and the most important factor for its international emancipation, the
international proletariat must on its part facilitate the success of the
work of socialist construction in the U.S.S.R., and defend it against

the attacks of the capitalist Powers by all the means in its power.
The world political situation has made the dictatorship of the
proletariat an immediate issue, and all the events of world politics are
inevitably concentrating around one central point, namely, the
struggle of the world bourgeoisie against the Soviet Russian
Republic, which must inevitably group around itself the Soviet
movements of the advanced workers of all countries on the one
hand, and all the national liberation movements of the colonial and
oppressed nationalities on the other, (Lenin.)
In the colonies, and particularly the colonies of any imperialist
attacking the U.S.S.R., the international proletariat must retaliate by
organising bold and determined mass action and struggle for the
overthrow of the imperialist governments with the slogan of:
Dictatorship of the proletariat and alliance with the U.S.S.R.
In the colonies, and particularly the colonies of the imperialist
country attacking the U.S.S.R., every effort must be made to take
advantage of the diversion of the imperialist military forces to
develop an anti-imperialist struggle and to organise revolutionary
action for the purpose of throwing off the yoke of imperialism and of
winning complete independence.
The development of socialism in the U.S.S.R. and the growth of
its international influence not only rouse the hatred of the capitalist
States and their social-democratic agents against it, but also inspire
the toilers all over the world with sympathy towards it, and stimulate
the readiness of the oppressed classes of all countries to fight with
all the means in their power for the land of the proletarian
dictatorship, in the event of an imperialist attack thereupon.
Thus the development of the contradictions within modern world
economy, the development of the general capitalist crisis, and the
imperialist military attack upon the Soviet Union inevitably lead to a
mighty revolutionary outbreak which must overwhelm capitalism in a
number of the so-called civilised countries, unleash the victorious
revolution in the colonies, broaden the base of the proletarian
dictatorship to an enormous degree, and thus, with tremendous
strides bring nearer the final world victory of socialism.
VI. THE STRATEGY AND TACTICS OF THE

COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL IN THE STRUGGLE
FOR THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT
1. Ideologies Among The Working Class Inimical To

Communism
In its fight against capitalism for the dictatorship of the

proletariat, revolutionary Communism encounters numerous
tendencies among the working class, which to a greater or less
degree express the ideological subordination of the proletariat to the
imperialist bourgeoisie, or reflect the ideological influence exercised
upon the proletariat by the petty-bourgeoisie, which at times rebels
against the shackles of finance capital, but is incapable of adopting
sustained and scientifically planned strategy and tactics or of
carrying on the struggle in an organised manner on the basis of the
stern discipline that is characteristic of the proletariat.
The mighty social power of the imperialist State, with its auxiliary
apparatus schools, press, theatre and church is primarily
reflected in the existence of confessional and reformist tendencies
among the working class, which represent the main obstacles on the
road towards the proletarian social revolution.
The Confessional, religiously tinged tendency among the
working class, finds expression in confessional trade unions, which
are frequently connected directly with corresponding bourgeois
political organisations, and are affiliated to one or other of the church
organisations of the dominant class (Catholic trade unions, Young
Mens Christian Association, Jewish Zionist organisations, etc.) All
these tendencies, being the most striking product of the ideological
enslavement of certain strata of the proletariat, bear, in most cases,
a romantic feudal tinge. By sanctifying all the abominations of the
capitalist regime with the holy water of religion, and by terrorising
their flock with the spectre of punishment in the world to come, the
leaders of these organisations serve as the most reactionary units
of the class enemy in the camp of the proletariat.
A cynically commercial, and imperialist-secular mode of
subjecting the proletariat to the ideological influence of the
bourgeoisie is represented by contemporary socialist reformism.
Taking its main gospel from the tablets of imperialist politics, its
model to-day is the deliberately anti-socialist and openly counter-
revolutionary American Federation of Labour. The ideological

dictatorship of the servile American trade union bureaucracy, which
in its turn expresses the ideological dictatorship of the American
dollar, has become, through the medium of British reformism and His
Majesty's Socialists of the British Labour Party, a most important
ingredient in the theory and practice of international social
democracy and of the leaders of the Amsterdam International, while
the leaders of German and Austrian social democracy embellish
these theories with Marxian phraseology in order to cover up their
utter betrayal of Marxism. Socialist reformism, the principal enemy
of revolutionary Communism in the labour movement, which has a
broad organisational base in the social democratic parties and
through these in the reformist trade unions, stands out in its entire
policy and theoretical outlook as a force directed against the
proletarian revolution.
In the sphere of foreign politics, the social democratic parties
actively supported the imperialist war on the pretext of defending the
fatherland. Imperialist expansion and colonial policy received their
wholehearted support. Orientation towards the counter-revolutionary
Holy Alliance of imperialist Powers (The League of Nations),
advocacy of ultra-imperialism, mobilisation of the masses under
pseudo-pacifist slogans, and at the same time, active support of
imperialism in its attacks upon the U.S.S.R. and in the impending
war against the U.S.S.R.are main features of reformist foreign
policy.
In the sphere of home politics, social democracy has set itself
the task of directly co-operating with and supporting the capitalist
regime. Complete support for capitalist rationalisation and
stabilisation, class peace, peace in industry; the policy of
converting the 'labour organisations into organisations of the
employers and of the predatory imperialist State; the practice of so-
called industrial democracy which in fact means complete
subordination to trustified capital; adoration of the imperialist State
and particularly of its false democratic labels; active participation in
the building up of the organs of the imperialist Statepolice, army,
gendarmerie, its class judiciarythe defence of the state against the
encroachments of the revolutionary Communist proletariat; and the
executioner's role played in time of revolutionary crisis-such is the
line of social-democratic reformist home policy. While pretending to
conduct the industrial struggle, reformism considers its function in
this field to be to conduct that struggle in such a manner as to guard
the capitalist class against any kind of shock, of at all events, to

preserve in complete inviolability the foundations of capitalist
property.
In the sphere of theory, social democracy has utterly and
completely betrayed Marxism, having traversed the road from
revisionism to complete liberal bourgeois reformism and avowed
social-imperialism. It has substituted in place of the Marxian theory of
the contradictions of capitalism the bourgeois theory of its
harmonious development; it has pigeon-holed the theory of crisis and
of the pauperisation of the proletariat; it has turned the flaming and
menacing theory of class struggle into prosaic advocacy of class
peace; it has exchanged the theory of growing class antagonisms for
the petty-bourgeois fairy-tale about the democratisation of capital;
in place of the theory of the inevitability of war under capitalism it has
substituted the bourgeois deceit of pacifism and the lying
propaganda of ultra-imperialism; it has exchanged the theory of the
revolutionary downfall of capitalism for the counterfeit coinage of
sound capitalism transforming itself peacefully into socialism; it has
replaced revolution by evolution, the destruction of the bourgeois
State by its active upbuilding, the theory of proletarian dictatorship by
the theory of coalition with the bourgeoisie, the doctrine of
international proletarian solidarityby preaching defence of the
imperialist fatherland; for Marxian dialectical materialism it has
substituted the idealist philosophy and is now engaged in picking up
the crumbs of religion that fall from the table of the bourgeoisie.
Within social democratic reformism a number of tendencies stand
out that are characteristic of the bourgeois degeneracy of social
democracy.
Constructive socialism (MacDonald and Co.), which, by its
very name suggests the struggle against the revolutionary proletariat
and a favourable attitude towards the capitalist system, continues the
liberal philanthropic, anti-revolutionary and bourgeois traditions of
Fabianism (Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw, Lord Olivier,
etc.). While repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat and the use
of violence in the struggle against the bourgeoisie as a matter of
principle, it favours violence in the struggle against the proletariat
and the colonial peoples. While acting as the apologists of the
capitalist State and preaching State capitalism under the guise of
socialism, and in conjunction with the most vulgar ideologists of
imperialism in both hemispheresdeclaring the theory of the class
struggle to be a pre-scientific theory, constructive socialism
ostensibly advocates a moderate programme of nationalisation with

compensation, taxation of land values, death duties, and taxation of
surplus profits as a means of abolishing capitalism. Being resolutely
opposed to the dictator, ship of the proletariat in the U.S.S.R.,
constructive socialism, in complete alliance with the bourgeoisie, is
an active enemy of the Communist proletarian movement and of
colonial revolutions.
A special variety of constructive socialism is co-operativism
or Co-operative Socialism (Charles Gide and Co.), which also
strongly repudiates the class struggle and advocates the co-
operative organisation of consumers as a means of overcoming
capitalism, but which, in fact, does all it can to help the stabilisation
of capitalism. Having at its command an extensive propagandist
apparatus, in the shape of the mass consumers co-operative
organisations, which it employs for the purpose of systematically
influencing the masses, co-operativism carries on a fierce struggle
against the revolutionary Labour movement, hampers it in the
achievement of its aims, and represents to-day one of the most
potent factors in the camp of the reformist counter-revolution.
So-called Guild Socialism (Penty, Orage, Hobson and
others) is an eclectic attempt to unite revolutionary syndicalism with
bourgeois Liberal Fabianism, anarchist decentralisation (national
industrial guilds) with State capitalist centralisation and medieval
guild and craft narrowness with modern capitalism. Starting out with
the obstensible demand for the abolition of the wage system as an
immoral institution which must be abolished by means of workers
control of industry, guild socialism completely ignores the most
important question, viz., the question of power. While striving to unite
workers, intellectuals, and technicians into a federation of national
industrial guilds, and to convert these guilds by peaceful means
(control from within) into organs for the administration or industry
within the framework of the bourgeois State, guild socialism actually
defends the bourgeois State, obscures its class, imperialist and anti-
proletarian character, and allots to it the function of the non-class
representative of the interests of the consumers as against the
guild-organised producers. By its advocacy of functional
democracy, i.e., representation of classes in capitalist society-each
class being presumed to have a definite social and productive
function -guild socialism paves the way for the Fascist corporate
State. By repudiating both parliamentarism and direct action, the
majority of the guild socialists doom the working class to inaction and
passive subordination to the bourgeoisie. Thus guild socialism

represents a peculiar form of trade unionist utopian opportunism, and
as such cannot but play an anti-revolutionary role.
Lastly, Austro-Marxism represents a special variety of social-
democratic reformism. Being a part of the left-wing of social-
democracy, Austro-Marxism represents a most subtle deception of
the masses of the toilers. Prostituting the terminology of Marxism,
while divorcing themselves entirely from the principles of
revolutionary Marxism (the Kantism, Machism, etc., of the Austro-
Marxists in the domain of philosophy), toying with religion, borrowing
the theory of functional democracy from the British reformists,
agreeing with the principle of building up the republic, i.e., building
up the bourgeois State, Austro-Marxism recommends class co-
operation in periods of so-called equilibrium of class forces, i.e.,
precisely at the time when the revolutionary crisis is maturing. This
theory is a justification of coalition with the bourgeoisie for the
overthrow of the proletarian revolution under the guise of defending
democracy against the attacks of reaction. Objectively, and in
practice, the violence which Austro-Marxism admits in cases of
reactionary attacks is converted into reactionary violence against the
proletarian revolution. Hence the functional role of Austro-Marxism
is to deceive the workers already marching towards Communism,
and therefore it is the most dangerous enemy of the proletariat, more
dangerous than the avowed adherents of predatory social
imperialism.
All the above-mentioned tendencies, being constituent parts of
socialist reformism, are agencies of the imperialist bourgeoisie
within the working class itself. But Communism has to contend also
against a number of petty-bourgeois tendencies, which reflect and
express the vacillation of the unstable strata of society (the urban
petty-bourgeoisie, the degenerate city middle class, the slum-
proletariat, the declassed Bohemian intellectuals, the pauperised
artisans, certain strata of the peasantry, etc.). These tendencies,
which are distinguishable by their extreme political instability, often
cover up a right-wing policy which left-wing phraseology, or drop into
adventurism, substitute noisy political gesticulation for objective
estimation of forces. They often tumble from astounding heights of
revolutionary bombast to profound depths of pessimism and
downright capitulation before the enemy. Under certain conditions,
particularly in periods of sharp changes in the political situation and
of forced tern disrupters of the proletarian ranks and consequently, a

drag upon the revolutionary proletarian movement.
Anarchism, the most prominent representatives of which
(Kropotkin, Jean Graves and others) treacherously went over to the
side of the imperialist bourgeoisie in the war of 1914-1918, denies
the necessity for wide, centralised and disciplined proletarian
organisations and thus leaves the proletariat powerless before the
powerful organisations of capital. By its advocacy of individual terror,
it distract the proletariat from the methods of mass organisation and
mass struggle. By repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat in the
name of abstract liberty, anarchism deprives the proletariat of its
most important and sharpest weapon against the bourgeoisie, its
armies, and all its organs of repression. Being remote from mass
movements of any kind in the most important centres of proletarian
struggle, anarchism is steadily being reduced to a sect which, by its
tactics and actions, including its opposition to the dictatorship of the
working class In the U.S.S.R., has objectively joined the united front
of the anti-revolutionary forces.
Revolutionary Syndicalism, many ideologists of which, in
the extremely critical war period went over to the camp of the Fascist
type of anti-parliamentary counter-revolutionaries, or became
peaceful reformists of the social-democratic type, by its repudiation
of political struggle (particularly of revolutionary parliamentarism) and
of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, by its advocacy of
craft decentralisation of the labour movement generally and of the
trade union movement in particular, by its repudiation of the need for,
a proletarian party, and of the necessity for rebellion, and by its
exaggeration of the importance of the general strike (the fold arms
tactics), like anarchism, hinders the revolutionisation of the masses
of the workers wherever it has any influence. Its attacks upon the
U.S.S.R., which logically follow from its repudiation of dictatorship of
the proletariat in general, place it in this respect on a level with social
democracy.
All these tendencies take a common stand with Social
Democracy, the principal enemy of the proletarian revolution, on the
fundamental political issue, viz., the question of the Dictatorship of
the Proletariat. Hence, all of them come out more or less definitely
in a united front with social democracy against the U.S.S.R. On the
other hand social democracy, which has utterly and completely
betrayed Marxism, tends to rely more and more upon the ideology of
the Fabians, of the Constructive Socialists and of the Guild
Socialists. These tendencies are becoming transformed into the

official liberal-reformist ideology of the bourgeois socialism of the
Second International.
In the colonial countries and among the oppressed peoples
and races generally, Communism encounters the influence of
peculiar tendencies in the labour movements which played a useful
role in a definite phase of development, but which, in the new stage
of development, are becoming transformed into a reactionary force.
Sun Yat-Senism in China expressed the ideology of petty-
bourgeois democratic socialism. In the Three Principles
(nationalism, democracy, socialism), the concept people obscured
the concept classes; socialism was presented, not as a specific
mode of production to be carried on by a specific class, i.e., by the
proletariat, but as a vague state of social well-being, while no
connection was made between the struggle against imperialism and
the perspectives of the development of the class struggle. Therefore,
while it played a very useful role in the first stage of the Chinese
revolution, as a consequence of the further process of class
differentiation that has taken place in the country and of the further
progress of the revolution, Sun Yat-Senism has now changed from
being the ideological expression of the development of that
revolution into fetters of its further development. The epigones of
Sun Yat-Senism, by emphasising and exaggerating the very features
of this ideology that have become objectively reactionary, have made
it the official ideology of the Kuomintang, which is now an openly
counter-revolutionary force. The ideological growth of the masses of
the Chinese proletariat and of the toiling peasantry must therefore be
accompanied by determined decisive struggle against the
Kuomintang deception and by opposition to the remnants of the Sun
Yat-Senist ideology.
Tendencies like Gandhism in India, thoroughly imbued with
religious conceptions, idealise the most backward and economically
most reactionary forms of social life, see the solution of the social
problem not in proletarian socialism, but in a reversion to these
backward forms, preach passivity and repudiate the class struggle,
and in the process of the development of the revolution become
transformed into an openly reactionary force. Gandhism is more and
more becoming an ideology directed against mass revolution. It must
be strongly combated by Communism.
Garveyism which formerly was the ideology of the masses, like
Gandhism, has become a hindrance to the revolutionisation of the
Negro masses. Originally advocating social equality for Negroes,

Garveyism subsequently developed into a peculiar form of Negro
Zionism which, instead of fighting American imperialism, advanced
the slogan: Back to Africa! This dangerous ideology, which bears
not a single genuine democratic trait, and which toys with the
aristocratic attributes of a non-existent Negro kingdom, must be
strongly resisted, for it is not a help but a hindrance to the mass
Negro struggle for liberation against American imperialism.
Standing out against all these tendencies is Proletarian
Communism. The sublime ideology of the international revolutionary
working class, it differs from all these tendencies, and primarily from
social democracy, in that, in complete harmony with the teachings of
Marx and Engels, it conducts a theoretical and practical
revolutionary struggle for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and
in the struggle, applies all forms of proletarian mass action.
2. The Fundamental Tasks Of Communist Strategy And

Tactics
The successful struggle of the Communist International for the

dictatorship of the proletariat presupposes the existence in every
country of a compact Communist Party, hardened in the struggle,
disciplined, centralised, and closely linked up with the masses.
The Party is the vanguard of the working class, and consists of
the best, most class-conscious, most active and most courageous
members of that class. It incorporates the whole body of experience
of the proletarian struggle. Basing itself upon the revolutionary theory
of Marxism and representing the general and lasting interests of the
whole of the working class, the Party personifies the unity of
proletarian principles, of proletarian will and of proletarian
revolutionary action. It is a revolutionary organisation, bound by an
iron discipline and strict revolutionary rules of democratic centralism-
which can be carried out owing to the class-consciousness of the
proletarian vanguardto its loyalty to the revolution, its ability to
maintain inseparable ties with the proletarian masses and to its
correct political leadership, which is constantly verified and clarified
by the experiences of the masses themselves.
In order that it may fulfil its historic mission of achieving the
dictatorship of the proletariat, the Communist Party must first of all
set itself to accomplish the following fundamental strategic aims:
Extend its influence over the majority of the members of its

own class, including working women and the working youth. To
achieve this the Communist Party must secure predominant
influence in the broad mass proletarian organisations (Soviets, trade
unions, factory councils, co-operative societies, sport organisations,
cultural organisations, etc.). It is particularly important for this
purpose of winning over the majority of the proletariat, to capture the
trade unions, which are genuine mass working-class organisations
closely bound up with the everyday struggles of the working class.
To work in reactionary trade unions and skilfully to capture them, to
win the confidence of the broad masses of the industrially organised
workers, and to remove from their posts and replace the reformist
leaders, are all important tasks m the preparatory period.
The achievement of the dictatorship of the proletariat
presupposes also that the proletariat acquires hegemony over wide
sections of the toiling masses. To accomplish this the Communist
Party must extend its influence over the masses of the urban and
rural poor, over the lower strata of the intelligentsia, and over the so-
called small man, i.e., the petty-bourgeois strata generally. It is
particularly important that work be earned on for the purpose of
extending the Partys influence over the peasantry. The Communist
Party must secure for itself the whole-hearted support of that stratum
of the rural population that stands closest to the proletariat, i.e., the
agricultural labourers and the rural poor. To this end the agricultural
labourers must be organised in separate organisations; all possible
support must be given them in their struggles against the rural
bourgeoisie, and strenuous work must be carried on among the
small allotment farmers and small peasants. In regard to the middle
strata of the peasantry in developed capitalist countries, the
Communist Parties must conduct a policy to secure their neutrality.
The fulfilment of all these tasks by the proletariat-the champion of the
interests of the whole people and the leader of the broad masses in
their struggle against the oppression of finance capital -is an
essential condition precedent for the victorious Communist
revolution.
The tasks of the Communist International connected with the
revolutionary struggle in colonies, semi-colonies and
dependencies are extremely important strategical tasks in the world
proletarian struggle. The colonial struggle presupposes that the
broad masses of the working class and of the peasantry in the
colonies must be won over to the banner of the revolution; but this
cannot be achieved unless the closest co-operation is maintained

between the proletariat in the oppressing countries and the toiling
masses in the oppressed countries.
While organising under the banner of the proletarian dictatorship
the revolution against imperialism in the so-called civilised States,
the Communist International supports every movement
againstimperialist violence in the colonies, semi-colonies and
dependencies themselves (for example, Latin-America); it carries on
propaganda against all forms of chauvinism and against the
imperialist maltreatment of enslaved peoples and races, big and
small (treatment of negroes, yellow labour, anti-semitism, etc.), and
supports their struggles against the bourgeoisie of the oppressing
nations. The Communist International especially combats the
chauvinism that is preached in the Empire-owning countries by the
imperialist bourgeoisie, as well as by its social-democratic agency,
the Second International, and constantly holds up in contrast to the
practises of the imperialist bourgeoisie the practice of the Soviet
Union, which has established relations of fraternity and equality
among the nationalities inhabiting it.
The Communist Parties in the imperialist countries must
render systematic aid to the colonial revolutionary liberation
movement, and to the movement of oppressed nationalities
generally. The duty of rendering active support to these movements
rests primarily upon the workers in the countries upon which the
oppressed nations are economically, financially or politically
dependent. The Communist Parties must openly recognise the right
of the colonies to separation and their right to carry on propaganda
for this separation, i.e., propaganda in favour of the independence of
the colonies from the imperialist State. They must recognise their
right of armed defence against imperialism (i.e., the right of rebellion
and revolutionary war) and advocate and give active support to this
defence by all the means in their power. The Communist Parties
must adopt this line of policy in regard to all oppressed nations.
The Communist Parties in the colonial and semi-colonial
countries must carry on a bold and consistent struggle against
foreign imperialism and unfailingly conduct propaganda in favour of
friendship and unity with the proletariat in the imperialist countries.
They must openly advance, conduct propaganda for and carry out
the slogan of agrarian revolution, rouse the broad masses of the
peasantry for the overthrow of the landlords and combat the
reactionary and medieval influence of the priesthood, of the

missionaries and other similar elements.
In these countries, the principal task is to organise the workers
and the peasantry independently (to establish class Communist
Parties of the proletariat, trade unions, peasant leagues and
committees andin a revolutionary situation, Soviets, etc.), and to
free them from the influence of the national bourgeoisie, with whom
temporary agreements may be made only on the condition that they,
the bourgeoisie, do not hamper the revolutionary organisation of the
workers and peasants, and that they carry on a genuine struggle
against imperialism.
In determining its line of tactics, each Communist Party must
take into account the concrete internal and external situation, the co.
relation of class forces, the degree of stability and strength of the
bourgeoisie, the degree of preparedness of the proletariat, the
position taken up by the various intermediary strata, etc., in its
country. The Party determines slogans and methods of struggle in
accordance with these circumstances, with the view to organising
and mobilising the masses on the broadest possible scale and on the
highest possible level of this struggle.
When a revolutionary situation is developing, the Party
advances certain transitional slogans and partial demands
corresponding to the concrete situation; but these demands and
slogans must be bent to the revolutionary aim of capturing power
and of overthrowing bourgeois capitalist society. The Party must
neither stand aloof from the daily needs and struggles of the working
class nor confine its activities exclusively to them. The task of the
Party is to utilise these minor everyday needs as a starting point
from which to lead the working class to the revolutionary struggle
for power.
When the revolutionary tide is rising, when the ruling classes are
disorganised, the masses are in a state of revolutionary ferment, the
intermediary strata are inclining towards the proletariat and the
masses are ready for action and for sacrifice, the Party of the
proletariat is confronted with the task of leading the masses to a
direct attack upon the bourgeois State. This it does by carrying on
propaganda in favour of increasingly radical transitional slogans (for
Soviets, workers control of industry, for peasant committees, for the
seizure of the big landed properties, for disarming the bourgeoisie
and arming the proletariat, etc.), and by organising mass action,
upon which, all branches of Party agitation and propaganda,
including parliamentary activity, must be concentrated. This mass

action includes: strikes; a combination of strikes and demonstrations;
a combination of strikes and armed demonstrations and finally, the
general strike conjointly with armed insurrection against the State
power of the bourgeoisie. The latter form of struggle, which is the
supreme form, must be conducted according to the rules of war; it
presupposes a plan of campaign, offensive fighting operations and
unbounded devotion and heroism on the part of the proletariat. An
absolutely essential condition precedent for this form of action is the
organisation of the broad masses into militant units, which, by their
very form, embrace and set into action the largest possible numbers
of toilers (Councils of Workers Deputies, Soldiers Councils, etc.),
and intensified revolutionary work in the army and the navy.
In passing over to new and more radical slogans, the Parties
must be guided by the fundamental role of the political tactics of
Leninism, which call for ability to lead the masses to revolutionary
positions in such a manner that the masses may, by their own
experience, convince themselves of the correctness of the Party line.
Failure to observe this rule must inevitably lead to isolation from the
masses, to putschism, to the ideological degeneration of
Communism into leftist dogmatism, and to petty bourgeois to
revolutionary adventurism. Failure to take advantage of the
culminating point in the development of the revolutionary situation,
when the Party of the proletariat is called upon to conduct a bold and
determined attack upon the enemy, is not less dangerous. To allow
that opportunity to slip by and to fail to start rebellion at that point,
means to allow the initiative to pass to the enemy and to doom the
revolution to defeat.
When the revolutionary tide is not rising, the Communist
Parties must advance partial slogans and demands that correspond
to the everyday needs of the toilers, and combine them with the
fundamental tasks of the Communist International. The Communist
Parties must not, however, at such a time, advance transitional
slogans that are applicable only to revolutionary situations (for
example workers' control of industry, etc.). To advance such slogans
when there is no revolutionary situation means to transform them
into slogans that favour merging with the capitalist system of
organisation. Partial demands and slogans form generally an
essential part of correct tactics; but certain transitional slogans go
inseparably with a revolutionary situation. Repudiation of partial
demands and transitional slogans on principle, however, is
incompatible with the tactical principles of Communism, for in effect,

such repudiation condemns the Party to inaction and isolates it from
the masses. United front tactics also occupy an important place in
the tactics of the Communist Parties throughout the whole pre-
revolutionary period as a means towards achieving success in the
struggle against capital, towards the class mobilisation of the masses
and the exposure and isolation of the reformist leaders.
The correct application of united front tactics and the fulfilment of
the general task of winning over the masses presupposes in their
turn systematic and persistent work in the trade unions and other
mass proletarian organisations. It is the bounden duty of every,
Communist to belong to a trade union, even a most reactionary one,
provided it is a mass organisation. Only by constant and persistent
work in the trade unions and in the factories for the steadfast and
energetic defence of the interests of the workers, together with
ruthless struggle against the reformist bureaucracy, will it be possible
to win the leadership in the workers struggle and to win the
industrially organised workers over to the side of the Party.
Unlike the reformists) whose policy is to split the trade unions,
the Communists defend trade union unity nationally and
internationally on the basis of the class struggle, and render every
support to and strengthen the work of the Red Trade Union
International.
In championing universally the current everyday needs of the
masses of the workers and of the toilers generally, in utilising the
bourgeois parliament as a platform for revolutionary agitation and
propaganda, and subordinating all partial tasks to the struggle for the
dictatorship of the proletariat, the Parties of the Communist
International advance partial demands and slogans in the following
main spheres:
In the sphere of Labour, in the narrow meaning of the term, i.e.,
questions concerned with the industrial struggle (the fight against
the trustified capital offensive, wages questions, the working day,
compulsory arbitration, unemployment), which grow into questions
of the general political struggle, big industrial conflicts, fight for the
right to organise, right to strike, etc.; in the sphere of politics proper:
taxation, high cost of living, Fascism, persecution of revolutionary
parties, white terror and current politics generally; and finally in the
sphere of world politics, viz., attitude towards the U.S.S.R. and
colonial revolutions, struggle for the unity of the international trade
union movement, struggle against imperialism and the war danger,

and systematic preparation for the fight against imperialist war.
In the sphere of the peasant problem, the partial demands are
those appertaining to taxation, peasant mortgage indebtedness,
struggle against usurers capital) the land hunger of the peasant
smallholders, rent, the metayer (crop-sharing) system). Starting out
from these partial needs, the Communist Party must sharpen the
respective slogans and broaden them out into the slogans:
confiscation of large estates, and workers and peasants
government (the synonym for the proletarian dictatorship in
developed capitalist countries and for a democratic dictatorship of
the proletariat and peasantry in backward countries and in certain
colonies).
Systematic work must also be carried on among the proletarian
and peasant youth (mainly through the Young Communist
International and its Sections) and also among working women and
peasant women. This work must concern itself with the special
conditions of life and struggle of the working and peasant women,
and their demands must be linked up with the general demands and
fighting slogans of the proletariat.
In the struggle against colonial oppression, the Communist
Parties in the colonies must advance partial demands that
correspond to the special circumstances prevailing in each country
such as: complete equality for all nations and races; abolition of all
privileges for foreigners; the right of association for workers and
peasants; reduction of the working day; prohibition of child labour;
prohibition of usury and of all transactions entailing bondage;
reduction and abolition of rent; reduction of taxation; refusal to pay
taxes, etc. All these partial slogans must be subordinate to the
fundamental demands of the Communist Parties such as: complete
political national independence and the expulsion of the imperialists;
workers and peasants government, the land to the whole people,
eight hour day, etc. The Communist Parties in imperialist
countries, while supporting the struggle proceeding in the colonies,
must carry on a campaign in their own respective countries for the
withdrawal of imperialist troops, conduct propaganda in the army and
navy in defence of the oppressed countries fighting for their
liberation, mobilise the masses to refuse to transport troops and
munitions, and in connection with this, to organise strikes and other
forms of mass protest, etc.
The Communist International must devote itself especially to

systematic preparation for the struggle against the danger of
imperialist wars. Ruthless exposure of social chauvinism, of social
imperialism and of pacifist phrase-mongering intended to camouflage
the imperialist plans of the bourgeoisie; propaganda in favour of the
principal slogans of the Communist International; everyday
organisational work in connection with this in the course of- which
constitutional methods must unfailingly be combined with
unconstitutional methods; organised work in the army and navy-such
must be the activity of the Communist Parties in this connection. The
fundamental slogans of the Communist International in this
connection must be the following: Convert imperialist war into civil
war; defeat the home imperialist government; defend the U.S.S.R.
and the colonies by every possible means in the event of imperialist
war against them. It is the bounden duty of all Sections of the
Communist International, and of everyone of its members, to carry
on propaganda for these slogans, to expose the socialistic
sophisms and the socialistic camouflage of the League of Nations,
and constantly to keep to the front the experiences of the war of
1914-1918.
In order that revolutionary work and revolutionary action may be
co-ordinated and in order that these activities may be guided most
successfully, the international proletariat must be bound by
international class discipline, for which first of all, it is most
important to have the strictest international discipline in the
Communist ranks.
This international Communist discipline must find expression in
the subordination of the partial and local interests of the movement
to its general and lasting interests and in the strict fulfilment, by all
members, of the decisions passed by the leading bodies of the Com-
munist International.
Unlike the social-democratic Second International, each Section
of which submits to the discipline of its own, national bourgeoisie
and of its own fatherland, the Sections of the Communist
International submit to only one discipline, viz., international
proletarian discipline, which guarantees victory in the struggle of the
worlds workers for world proletarian dictatorship. Unlike the Second
International, which splits the trade unions, fights against colonial
peoples, and practices unity with the bourgeoisie, the Communist
International is an organisation that guards proletarian unity in all
countries and the unity of the toilers of all races and all peoples in
their struggle against the yoke of imperialism.
Despite the bloody terror of the bourgeoisie, the Communists
fight with courage and devotion on all sectors of the international
class front, in the firm conviction that the victory of the proletariat is
inevitable and cannot be averted.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
They openly declare that their aims can be attained only by the
forcible overthrow of all the existing social conditions. Let the
ruling class tremble at a Communistic revolution. The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a
world to win.
Workers of all countries, unite!
_________________________
Manifesto of the VI. World Congress of the

Communist International
To the Workers of the World! To All Workers and Peasants!
To All Oppressed Colonial Peoples!
To the Soldiers and Sailors of the Capitalist Armies and Navies!
Comrades, Fellow workers!
The Sixth Congress of the Communist International, the

representative of the revolutionary workers all over the world, of all
nations, peoples and races. Appeals to you from Moscow, the red
capital of the new world, to prepare yourselves for a struggle against
the ever more insolent forces of capitalism.
The master of the world, capital, which exploits the labour power
of the workers in the most brutal fashion, which sucks out their
strength, which turns the proletarian into a unit of capitalist
technique, which wears out its proletarian slaves in the process of
production, which places the most wonderful discoveries of science
in the service of the golden calf, which introduces ever more
complicated and splendid machines, which introduces to an ever
increasing extent the conveyor and flings millions of workers on to
the streets, which gives them stones instead of bread, capital is now
marching into the struggle against the rights and freedom of the
working class. It is pressing the standard of living of the workers
down ever lower, raising the bloody sword of the white terror and
preparing for a new world war under the cloak of lying and bombastic
phrases of world peace.
Imperialism has once again placed the question of war upon the
agenda. From day to day the competition between the great powers
and their finance-capitalist cliques is sharpening. Their attacks upon
the colonies are becoming ever more brutal, their attempts to
encircle the tremendous body of the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics ever more determined.
The United States of America, at whose gateway the great
statue of liberty rears its head to the sky, is laying its hands more
firmly on new countries and continents, including also lands
belonging to its chief rival Great Britain. American capitalism, firmly
seated upon the treasuries bursting with gold recently minted from
the blood and horror of the late imperialist war, is attempting to

undermine the Republic of Mexico, is sending punitive expeditions to
Nicaragua and stations its warships in Chinese harbours. American
capitalism has fettered a number of European and South American
countries with the gold chains of credit, and does not hesitate to call
these countries sharply to heel like dogs when they show any sign of
resisting its sacred will.
Along the coasts of the Pacific Ocean and in the boundless
territories of China, American capitalism collides with the predatory,
insolent, cunning and deceitful imperialism of Japan, whose troops
have occupied a considerable part of China. Japanese imperialism is
carrying on a war of extermination against all the forces of the
Chinese people which are not prepared to subordinate themselves to
its barbaric regime of terror. Millions of Chinese workers, peasants
and handworkers are bowed down under the iron yoke of Japanese
imperialism, which is brutally crushing the Chinese people and
preparing for a terrible duel with its American rival and at the same
time purchasing itself a breathing space with provocative excesses
against the Soviet Union.
These excesses form a link in the chain of the general hostility of
the imperialist States to the State of the proletarian dictatorship,
which is alive and developing, carrying out constructive work
everywhere regardless of the venomous howls of rage and the
threatening rattle of sabres in the camp of the enemies who would
like to intimidate the land of the socialist dictatorship of the workers
and force it to its knees.
Despite all the contradictions and antagonisms which exist
between the capitalist powers, and despite their deep and growing
mutual hatred, they are preparing, with Great Britain at their head, a
war against the Soviet Union. They are systematically preparing for
war. They are preparing for war with all the means at their disposal.
Every hour is filled with war preparations. The attempts of a number
of powers, from the powerful United States to pitiful Austria, the
mutilated invalid in the ranks of the European nations, to blockade
the Soviet Union financially, the breaking off of diplomatic relations
with the Soviet Union by Great Britain, the conclusion of diplomatic
and military alliances against the Soviet Union, the constant
provocative threats of the Republic of Marshal Pilsudski, this insolent
militarist who has placed the so-called representation of the people
into the category of prostitution and who rattles with the sabre to the
same degree as he licks the boots of the generals and ministers of
Great Britain and France, the almost open work of the General Staffs
of the Entente in the Baltic States and in Roumania, and finally the
insolent provocations of Japanese imperialism all these things
must act as a warning to all honest workers, for all proletarians and
for all the oppressed all over the world who see in the Soviet Union
their Fatherland wrung from the hands of the capitalists and rich
landowners by the hot blood of the sons of the working class.
The civilised robbers, the bloodhounds of the General Staffs,
the swindlers of secret diplomacy, the Bank magnates and the Trust
kings who are carrying on a criminal war in China, bombarding
Chinese towns, occupying Chinese territory, robbing the Chinese
people of the means of its existence and destroying its most active
sons, preparing attacks upon each other, organising their forces for a
common action against the Soviet Union, arming themselves to the
teeth, on land, on the sea and in the air, who are using science to
prepare the most barbarous, destructive and inhuman war which will
stifle the workers with poison gas and slaughter them in great agony
with artificially infected sicknesses, who conduct monkey trials
against the teachings of Darwin, the most prominent contributor to
science in the nineteenth century, who issue laws against
dangerous ideas, who murdered Sacco and Vanzetti in the electric
chair, such a horrible atrocity that millions held their breath in anxiety
only to groan for vengeance and curse the murderers, these civilised
robbers, with their scholastic and non-scholastic lackeys, are raising
a howl about the barbarism of the Bolsheviks and about their own
love of peace.
The history of humanity has never known anything so
hypocritical and sanctimonious, so lying and disgusting as the
present ideology of modern pacifist imperialism, whose foreign
political tasks consist in the most criminal, most barbarous, most
counter-revolutionary, most destructive form of warfare ever known.
The more furious the armament race becomes, the more energetic
become the official and unofficial agents of imperialism in their howls
of peace and in the production of peace pacts and in the
organisation of conferences and discussions, in the elaboration of
projects and proposals for peace.
The League of Nations, the product of Versailles, the most
shameless robber treaty of the last decade, cloaks the warlike work
of its members by working out projects for disarmament. The Soviet
Union has exposed this game: the great friends of peace refused to
disarm when their bluff was called. The diplomatic comedy turned
into a vulgar farce. The mask of peace fell to the ground and the
brutal features of imperialism were revealed to the whole world.
The League of Nations is first of all a counter-revolutionary
organisation, but it is also directed against America. In consequence,
Dollar imperialism has put its own pact
upon the agenda through the mouth or its agents. The hegemony at
American capitalism, which possesses the most modern machinery,
the greatest gold resources and the best military technique, must
secure its juridical recognition. War is outlawed. Japan is not
carrying an war against China, but only protecting its interests, the
U.S.A. is not conducting war against Nicaragua, but only
maintaining order. All the capitalist countries are not arming for war,
but only to maintain civilisation.
The business managers at imperialist policy who are attempting
to conceal their imperialist desires and warlike intentions with a cloud
of pacifist pacts and by the narcotic poison at pacifist phrases, are at
the same time doing everything possible to cast the workers into
chains and to break the backbone of the revolutionary movement in
the colonies and to weaken the Hinterland at the Soviet Republics.
The signs of the times are terror and corruption, a ruthless
exploitation of the workers, the corruption of their leaders, a united
front against the mass-organisations at the workers when they
threaten to become dangerous, the policy of disruption in the ranks
at the workers, the increasing attacks of the police upon the
Communist Parties, etc. A wave of repression in Great Britain, the
United States, France and Japan meets with a terrible wave of terror
in Italy and in the Balkans and with mass executions in China. The
bloody axe of bourgeois civilisation is at work unceasingly. The
imperialist murderers survey their victims without moving an eyelid,
although they feel inwardly that thousands of fighters crying for
vengeance will a rise in their stead.
In this period, when the whole air smells of powder and lead,
when the antagonisms at capitalism are strained to their utmost,
when the class struggle of the proletariat is intensified, when the
million masses of the colonial slaves are rising, when ever new
columns of the toilers are mobilising to defend the Soviet Union, the
bulwark of the movement for freedom, in this period the treacherous
role of the Second International, the social democracy and its
Amsterdam department, the I.FT.U., advances once again into the
foreground.
From the standpoint of the class interests of the proletariat it is
more than ever necessary today for the workers to realise their class
independence and to realise that their interests are diametrically
opposed to the interests of the capitalists and the capitalist States. A
proletarian counter-attack is the only possible answer to the insolent
attacks of capitalism, to the inhuman exploitation of labour power, to
the unemployment, to the policy of dissolving the working class
organisations and to the fascist terror. And in this period the high
priests of the Social Democratic Parties, who have shamelessly
betrayed all the old traditions of the class struggle and who tread the
elementary pride of the proletariat into the dust, in this period they
preach the collaboration at the classes, industrial peace and
economic democracy. Peace and democracy under the iron-shod
heel of trust capitalism! Industrial peace in economy and coalition
with the bourgeoisie in politics, that is the treacherous sum of social
democratic wisdom.
From the standpoint of the class interests of the proletariat it is
more than ever necessary at the present time to expose every
warlike action of the bourgeoisie, to draw the attention of the masses
to the danger of war and to sound the alarm. And in this period the
social democratic politicians are building armoured cruisers, acting
as the initiators of brutal military laws, grovel before militarism,
actively improve the capitalist armies, praise the imperialist League
of Nations, slander the U.S.S.R., praise the deceptive and deceitful
document of the hangmen of Sacco and Vanzetti and are full of foul
pacifist slime. Whilst they themselves are whitewashing as well as
they can the military preparations of the imperialists, they at the
same time accuse the Soviet Union of imperialism. The social
democrats, the heroes of 1914, are already grovelling before the
imperialist General Staffs. Already their hands are outstretched to
receive the reward for their work on the day when they join the ranks
of the bourgeoisie in a war against the soldiers of the proletarian
revolution.
From the standpoint of the class-interests of the proletariat the
unity of the industrial proletariat with the working masses in the
colonies is more necessary than ever before. In this question
however the social democrats are on the side of the exploiters, on
the side of the imperialists, on the side of the imperialist robber
States and their agents. The French socialists supported their
government when the French troops razed the villages of the Riffi
and laid Syrian towns in ruins with the heavy artillery fire. The
government of MacDonald appeared openly as the oppressor of
India and Egypt. Members of the Labour Party now in India are
fulfilling the direct instructions of the British bourgeoisie. All social
democratic parties are supporting their own governments in the
Chinese question and only allow themselves a polite and respectful
criticism when the pressure of the masses forces their hands. The
Brussels Congress of the Second International, which failed to
support the Kuomintang in the period of its revolutionary struggles,
openly sided with the Kuomintang after it had become the
bloodhound of imperialism and the hangman of the Chinese working
class. In the colonial question the Brussels congress made decisions
which were practically copied from the documents of the League of
Nations.
The social democracy has thus become the chief force which
makes for separating the workers in the industrial countries from the
toiling masses in the colonies.
Finally, from the standpoint of the interests of the proletariat as a
class, the unity of the working class is more than ever necessary.
The struggle against the powerful organised enemy, against the
gigantic trusts, against the state power of capitalism, which protects
the interests of the finance-capitalist oligarchy, the maximum of unity
in the ranks of the workers is necessary. But just at this present
moment the social democratic agency of the imperialist bourgeoisie
is at work to carry out its instructions and disrupt the ranks of the
workers! The leaders of the social democratic parties and of the
reformist trade unions, the heralds of unity with the bourgeoisie and
its trusts, the apostles of industrial peace and political coalition with
the representatives of the banks and the stock exchange, are doing
everything possible to expel the communists and all revolutionary
proletarians from the mass organisations of the working class. They
are splitting the trade unions, they are splitting the sport
organisations, they are smashing up the ranks of the proletarian
free-thinkers. The more they fight for unity with the bourgeoisie, the
more brutal becomes their struggle against the unity of the working
class.
The Communist International appeals to all workers and to all
toilers to close their ranks still more firmly, to fight for the unity of the
whole working class, to fight for the unity of the workers with the
peasants and to fight for the alliance of the workers with the
oppressed colonial peoples in the struggle against the exploitation
and oppression of the class enemy.
The Sixth World Congress of the Communist International
adopted an international programme which is binding equally for all

sections. For the first time since the existence of the revolutionary
working class movement, the working class will have a document in
its hand whose passage are law for the millions of organised workers
in all countries and amongst all races and nations of the globe. This
document is not one of peaceful grovelling before the bourgeoisie; it
is not a document making for dishonourable peace with the
bourgeoisie. It is not a declaration of pharisaical degenerate and
treacherous unity with the bourgeoisie, a unity which means nothing
but the desertion of the ranks of the proletariat for the camp of the
enemy, desertion, treachery and renegacy. This programme is the
guiding star of millions of exploited and oppressed toilers in the
struggle against the oppressors, in the struggle of the proletarian
masses, in the struggle of the white, black and yellow toilers in the
tropics, in the farthest corners of the earth, in the plantations, in the
factories, in the mines and on the railways, in the woods and in the
deserts, in the large towns and in the country, everywhere where the
class-struggle is being carried on. It is the programme of the unity of
the working class and of a life and death fight with the bourgeoisie. It
is the programme of the inevitable world dictatorship of the
proletariat.
The Communist International appeals to all toilers to rally closely
around the banner of the class struggle, the proletarian revolution
and the dictatorship of the working class. With the exertion of all its
energy the capital work has again reared itself up upon the backs of
the workers exploited by the gigantic slave machine of capitalism.
Under the crack of slave whips capitalism has emerged from the
ruins of the first imperialist world war. But capitalism is beginning to
suffocate under the weight of its own contradictions, its historical fate
drives it once again with tremendous elemental force into the vortex
of tremendous catastrophes, the deadly breath of which will scorch
the whole world. The imperialist cliques, which are afraid of their own
historical fate, but are nevertheless its instruments, the capitalist
cliques who cannot decide to let loose the cogs of war, but who are
nevertheless doing everything possible to break the chains and let
loose the carnage, the imperialist cliques who are frying to deceive
everyone with murmurs of peace and pacifism, but whose fingers are
at the same time feeling for the trigger, are driving the world steadily
to the brink of a new and terrible catastrophe.
The Communist International appeals to all toilers to arise in
their own defence. Now at once, day for day, the ranks of the fighters
must be set up, the masses of the toilers must be mobilised, loyal
messengers of the working class sent into the armies and the fleets
of capitalism to prepare the soldiers and sailors to turn their guns in
the hour when imperialism calls upon them to slaughter each other,
against the imperialists themselves, the best target during the
imperialist war.
The imperialist beast with its dull eyes can only see the historical
past and is unable to penetrate the curtain which hides the future. It
is consoling itself with the comparative state of peace which prevails
in Europe, which from time to time is given an injection of life-giving
gold elixir from the transatlantic vampire, the United States. But the
sober glance of the proletariat, which has felt all the glories of
capitalist rationalisation and all the burdens of industrial peace
upon its own skin, can see clearly the gigantic accumulation of
capitalist contradictions and the steady and rapid intensification of
the class struggle everywhere. The General Strike in Great Britain,
the insurrection in Vienna, the strikes in Germany, the electoral
results in France and Germany, the reaction of the German workers
to the new treachery of the social democrats in the armoured cruiser
question, the violent resistance put up by the Chinese workers and
peasants, the growing thunder of the revolutionary volcano in India,
which is already sending up preliminary smoke signals, the steadily
growing dissatisfaction in South America, the growth of self-
confidence amongst the Negroes and thousands of other signs, do
they not show that the mole of history is burrowing?
The Communist International appeals to all toilers, and in
particular to the industrial workers, to take up the struggle for every
inch of ground that has been won, to fight against the offensive of
capitalism, to fight against the ruthless exploitation of capitalism, to
fight against the enslavement of the proletariat, to fight against the
policy of the imperialists and against imperialist war. The Communist
International appeals to all workers and to all oppressed peoples
devotedly to defend the Chinese revolution, whose heroes and
martyrs have fallen under the axe of the executioner. The
Communist International appeals to all honest proletarians to form a
wall of iron around the Soviet Union against which imperialism is
raising the sword of war. The Communist International appeals for
increased watchfulness and for a direct fight against the pacifist lies
and pacifist deception. The Communist International appeals for a
complete break with the bourgeoisie and for the unity of the ranks of
the workers in a ruthless struggle against the class enemies of the
proletariat.
Against the Social democratic unity with the bourgeoisie for

the class unity of the proletarians!
Against social imperialism for the heroic support of our
brothers in the colonies!
Against the pacifist lies for the devoted fight against imperialist
war!
Against reformism and fascism for the proletarian revolution!
Long live the proletarian dictatorship in the Soviet Union!
Long live the proletarian world revolution!
Moscow, 1st September 1928.
Sixth World Congress of the Communist International.
________________________
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No 92 International Press Correspondence 1

Elektronik Tarama ve Dzenleme;

The Programme of the

programme of the Communist International, being the supreme

group and national interests of the proletariat to its lasting, general,

I. THE WORLD SYSTEM OF CAPITALISM,

I. The Dynamic Laws Of Capitalism And The Epoch Of

The characteristic features of capitalist society which arose on

prevailing in the process of production have disturbed tile equilibrium

contradictions of capitalism and their consequences (crises, wars,

2. The Era Of Finance Capitalism (Imperialism)

The period of industrial capitalism was, in the main, a period

between the various parts of world capitalist economy and a change

The growth of the productive forces of world economy thus leads

3. The Forces Of Imperialism And The Forces Of Revolution

Expressing the tendency for unification of the various sections of

more or less important action of the proletariat becomes transformed

of bourgeois influence among the proletariat and stalwart pillars of

4. Imperialism And The Downfall Of Capitalism

Imperialism has greatly developed the productive forces of world

and durable international combinations of imperialist powers

II. THE GENERAL CRISIS OF CAPITALISM AND THE

The imperialist struggle among the largest capitalist States for

rising of the advanced workers of Germany; September, 1923, the

2. The Revolutionary Crisis And Counter-Revolutionary

During the progress of the international revolution, the leading

unions on the one hand, and the militant capitalist organisations of

3. The Crisis Of Capitalism And Fascism

Side by side with social democracy, with whose aid the

the rural petty-bourgeoisie and, finally, the constant menace of mass

4. The Contradictions Of Capitalist Stabilisation And The

Experience throughout the post-war historical period has shown

system of capitalism and the system of socialism. The class struggle,

auxiliary instruments in the hands of the imperialist giants and their

proletariat and intensifies the class struggle between the working

III. THE ULTIMATE AIM OF THE COMMUNIST

expedient utilisation of the forces of nature and of the natural

division of society and, consequently, remnants of the proletarian

IV. THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION FROM CAPITALISM

Between capitalist society and Communist society a period of

the epoch of imperialism. Hence, it follows that the international

The characteristic features of this transition period as a whole,

2. The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat And Its Soviet Form

As has been shown by the experience of the October revolution

participation in all public affairs-economic, social, political, military

maintaining revolutionary discipline ensures to the warriors of the

3. The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat And The

The victorious proletariat utilises the conquest of power as a

A. Industry, Transport and Communication Services

a) The confiscation and proletarian nationalisation of all large

industry that will facilitate the development of agriculture, with the

a) The confiscation and proletarian nationalisation of all large

g) Comprehensive State measures for developing the productive

C. Trade and Credit

a) The proletarian nationalisation of private banks (the entire

D. Conditions of Life, Labour, etc.

a) Reduction of tile working day to seven hours, and to six hours

reduction of tile working day and transition to a five-day week in

a) The confiscation of big house property.