If you don’t know what you’re fighting for you unity is no deeper than what you’re against. That ain’t much. Left to themselves the Italian working class and left dissipated themselves fighting over theory. When the test of experience played out before them. And the Comintern blew its chance to cut the revolutionary forces loose. They got timid. Lost their nerve. Had insufficient confidence in the power of the uprising workers. Whom they could have supported and inspired. But we have to control the! Which they did not. Feeble shit. If it had been Grant leading then forces would have been organized, focused and drilled forward. No stopping until final victory. But the International ever hesitated, failed to commit, show force of leadership. They ever crapped out, lost their mojo, balls, backbone, honour. Thunderous declarations with nothing to back it up. Yet there could have been ample physical intervention. How about China? Or India?. Ripe for armed infiltration.

Didn’t happen.

Thanks, Geoff, for your interesting comment. To my mind, the Bolsheviks were always the strongest and most authoritative party in the International. If they had been ‘totally dominant’, that would have been a sign of trouble — that the International had not taken on real life. The real lesson in this was that you could not think up policy for Italian or French workers from Moscow — nor does that kind of ‘centralism’ work even today, when our ‘download speeds’ are faster than in Lenin’s time. When Moscow did start setting tactical policy, it was a sign that the International was degenerating.

But Bolshevik leaders attending Comintern congresses were sufficiently familiar with the workers’ movement in Western and Central Europe so that they almost always delivered their speeches in French or German, rather than Russian. Trotsky, on one occasion, spoke in French, German, and Russian, one after another, while giving a report that sprawls across dozens of printed pages. Lenin, even when gravely ill in November 1922, spoke in German.

Surely, one reason for the less than totally dominant position of the Russian comrades in the 1922 congress was the demands on the cadre to tackle the crises facing the new Soviet republic. Thus Comintern work could never be the priority. Another reason must be the the complete lack of experience of international work by the great majority of the cadre.

Nevertheless, despite the weaknesses of the Russian input, the dominance of the Russian party is soon demonstrated with ‘Bolshevisation’ from the 5th congress onwards and the complete failure of parties like the CPGB in Britain to show any capacity for independent thought during the campaign against Trotsky and the efforts of Zinoviev to find ‘short cuts’ such as the disastrous Anglo Russian Trade Union Committee.