J. T. Murphy
Source: Workers’ Life, March 22, 1929
Publisher: Communist Party of Great Britain
Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
[Beginning last week and lasting until May Day the Communist Party of Great Britain is taking part in a world campaign of recruiting to strengthen the ranks of the Communist International. Here in Britain the “High Spots” of the campaign will be the “Red week-ends” in April, referred to on page three.]
THE Tenth Anniversary Campaign of the Communist International would be a complete failure were it to be regarded simply as a commerative campaign. It must be much more than that. We must use the glorious past, the ten years of splendid struggle and achievement, to drive home the immediate requirements of the working class in the present world crisis.
The first and foremost lesson of the history of the Communist International is that it was born in the midst of war and revolution. The war of 1914-18 ended with the Proletarian Revolution triumphant in one country. In that country there existed a Communist Party capable of leading the revolution. It showed the only way to end war and that is to end the dictatorship of the capitalist class by conquering it.
In the countries such its Germany, where there were no experienced Communist Parties, the revolutions which followed in the track of the war were defeated because the masses were under the control of Labour Parties which joined forces with the bourgeoisie to prevent the workers taking power.
Our task in this campaign, in the face of the growing war danger and all the war preparation is to show the workers how to fight for peace.
No one questions now the terrible fact that war is coming nearer. Every capitalist paper discusses it as inevitable, and either demands “preparedness” or pathetically utters pious prayers that it may not come.
The capitalist Governments hate Soviet Russia and plot ceaselessly against her. They hate each other and race each other in mechanising the armies in building poisons gas factories, and in developing air fleets of deadly striking power.
And the campaign for rationalisation is as much a war measure as any of Mr. MacDonald’s cruisers. It is a scheme to mobilise and harness the workers to the State’s war-apparatus with the help of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy.
The leading Party of the Communist International has shown that peace is to be secured not by pacifist-prayers and protests but by disarming the capitalist class and strengthening the power of the working class. The defence of the Soviet Union becomes at once a dominating issue as the means of fortifying the working class of the world. To defend the Soviet Union is therefore an essential feature of this campaign.
The whole experience of the Communist International has shown quite clearly that the greatest obstacle to the working class action is Social Democracy or “Labouralism.” It betrayed the working class of the whole world in the last war and is now the most powerful tool of the capitalist class preparing for the next war.
There can be therefore no preparation for the war of the workers upon the war makers without an intensification of the campaign of exposure of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy.
The fight against capitalist rationalisation must also be in the forefront of the Tenth Anniversary Campaign of the Communist International, especially for our section.
The whole of this campaign is linked up with the question of the role of the Colonies in war time. To miss the significance of the development now taking place in India, the provocation in the Bombay dispute, the passing of anti-trade union legislation, the anti-Communist enactments, etc., would be criminal.
In war time the aim of imperialism is the extension of its Colonial frontiers. In war time the aim of the subject nations struggling to be free can only be to intensify their liberation struggle. The fight against the war danger involves, therefore, the development of the united front of the workers of all lands with the workers and toiling peasants and oppressed Colonial and semi-Colonial people’s.
Our Party will conduct its campaign along these lines as the most effective means of celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Communist International. The main issues are:—
The struggle against the war danger;
The defence of the Soviet Union as the bulwark of the world revolution;
The fight against capitalist rationalisation and the treachery of the reformists;
The struggle for the united front of the workers with the oppressed colonial masses towards the Revolutionary Workers’ Government.