‘Toward the United Front’ now available in paperback

A popularly priced paperback edition of the Communist International Fourth Congress proceedings is now available from Haymarket Books.

The Chicago-based socialist publisher is shipping Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922, edited by John Riddell, for US$55 per copy.

This 1,300-page book introduces readers to a rich spectrum of the world’s revolutionary leaders at a dramatic moment in working-class history. Their triumphs, their blunders, their quarrels and their reconciliations are played out on the stage of a one-month-long world congress. The entire debate, transcribed at the time in four languages, is now available for the first time in English, along with an extensive readers’ guide, 500 biographies, commentary, and a detailed index.

Five study guides on the congress, each suitable for use in a single discussion, are available at Self-guided tours of revolutionary history.

Some of the main themes of this book are summarized on this website at:

• The Comintern’s unknown decision on workers’ governments
• Black liberation and the Communist International
• The Comintern in 1922: The periphery pushes back
• A ‘workers’ government’ as a step toward socialism

During the year since the library edition of the 1,310-page book was printed by Brill Academic Publishers, it has won wide attention as a rich source of documents and analysis of the early Communist International:

Reviewers comments:

‘An immense and masterful editorial effort’

Riddell has here pulled off an immense and masterful editorial effort, comparing past publications of these proceedings in the four main languages of the Comintern – English, French, German and Russian … The work involved in clarifying the differences between texts, providing more accurate annotation, and correcting the misspelling of names and providing relevant biographical details is immense, and should earn the gratitude of generations of scholars for many years to come. —Alexander Marshall, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

‘An invaluable work of reference’

We should be very grateful to John Riddell and his team of collaborators for making available, for the first time in a full English version, the minutes of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern … [F]or anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th century [Toward the United Front] will be an invaluable work of reference, and no library with pretensions to serious historical coverage should be without it … —Ian Birchall, International Socialism

‘A joy and a surprise‘

Meeting the personalities of these figures through this book is a joy and a surprise. It is delightful to find Radek bantering jokingly with Bukharin. On another occasion a long-winded delegate gets silenced at the end of a long day not by a vote but by the whole congress singing the “Internationale”. As sharp as debates became, they were never destructive. [Toward the United Front] will allow activists to bring the voices of these great revolutionaries into their own homes. —Barry Healy, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal