British historian Hakim Adi’s republished book Pan-Africanism and Communism has drawn sharp critique for its analysis of the Communist International, Africa, and the diaspora between 1919 and 1939.
Stalinist Bureaucracy Transformed the Comintern During the Sixth Congress
The Sixth Congress of the Communist International convened in Moscow between July and September 1928 following the Chinese catastrophe and the expulsion of the Left Opposition from the Soviet Communist Party. According to World Socialist Web Site, this gathering marked a decisive transformation of the Comintern into an instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy under Joseph Stalin.
Historian Alexander Vatlin noted a conspicuous feature of the Congress: the absence of a large part of those leading ideologues of the Russian party who, in their time, belonged to the ‘General Staff of the World Revolution’, but who had supported Zinoviev and Trotsky in 1926-27
. The proceedings changed the ideological direction.
The ‘world revolution’ was now no longer the cardinal point of the Bolsheviks’ ideology and politics, which were more and more turning into Stalinism.
World Socialist Web Site
Senior Stalinist official Dmitry Manuilsky delivered the principal report to sum up the struggle against the Trotskyist Opposition, insisting that Trotskyism was not merely a ‘national’ phenomenon
and that the fight against it had been conducted along the whole international front
, as reported by World Socialist Web Site.
The Sixth Congress Resolution Prioritized the Black Peasantry
The Sixth Congress resolution recognized the revolutionary weight of the black peasantry, designating it as the basic moving force of the revolution in alliance with the working class. However, critics argue this framework imposed a stageist conception of revolution that subordinated colonial communist parties to bourgeois forces.
Writing in December 1931 regarding the rising fascist threat in Europe, Leon Trotsky urged a clear separation of action: No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to strike, and when to strike!
as noted by WSWS.
The Comintern leadership rejected this united front strategy. On March 21, 1933, during Potsdam Day, President Paul von Hindenburg accepted the appointment of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as German chancellor, a political turning point that led to the suppression of the world’s largest communist party outside the USSR and the destruction of German trade unions.
The Seventh Congress Embraced the Popular Front Strategy
Following the defeat in Germany, the Soviet bureaucracy sought diplomatic alliances with France and Britain, leading the Comintern to abandon its class-against-class rhetoric. At the Seventh Congress in 1935, the organization embraced the Popular Front, forming political alliances with sections of the bourgeoisie.
In France, the 1936 electoral victory of the Popular Front—comprising the Communist Party, Léon Blum’s Socialists, and the bourgeois Radical Party—prompted a massive strike wave. According to WSWS, the French Communist Party worked to contain this labor movement while instructing colonial populations that their own liberation must be postponed because French imperialism was now classified as democratic.