Miguel Afonso Caetano"Revisiting the Comintern from the far side of its 1943 shuttering, one might see a vehicle always doomed to founder, sailing against the tide in a reactionary interwar conjuncture where incipient revolutionary-democratic mass politics became caught between the gears of imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism. For young communists in those electric years, however, the two, three, many Red Octobers that the Third International was charged with fostering — from Jakarta to Managua and from Emilia-Romagna to the Cape of Good Hope — appeared as a concrete, occasionally even imminent political prospect.
Their faith in the practicability of radical global transformation was fortified by daily participation within a real movement of thousands across every continent. For Brigitte Studer, “The Comintern employees who travelled the world on political missions made such internationalism a reality through their own activity, living their internationalism as action.” It is with these Travellers of the World Revolution, and their experience of life in the service of “one of the greatest collective experiments of the twentieth century,” that Studer’s new history of the Comintern is concerned.
Reading good Comintern history conjures the feeling of standing dead in the eye of the twentieth-century hurricane, immersed, nearly engulfed by the epochal storm winds of the age of extremes. Revolution and counterrevolution; communism and anti-communism; fascism and anti-fascism; colonialism and anti-colonialism; mass politics and state bureaucracy; intellectual-cultural innovation and censorship; interstate war and intrastate terror — these were the Olympian forces under whose caprices the foot soldiers of the Comintern lived (and died).”"
https://jacobin.com/2025/02/comintern-history-communism-history-stalinism/
#Communism #Comintern #CommunistInternational #History #Stalinism
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