Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - Lenin, The Great Strategist of the Class War - tr. Alexander Bittleman (1924).pdf/41



ENIN was the creator and the driving force of the Third Communist International, which he began building during the very first days of the world war. The moment the Parties of the Second IntenationalInternational [sic] began openly to support their Governments, Lenin issued the following slogan: "The Second International is dead; long live the Third International." He was one of the organizers of the conference of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, where he formulated the basis for the left wing. During the years of war he ruthlessly opposed and attacked every shade of opportunism, particularly the meaningless pacifist abortion of Kautsky. But it was only after the October Revolution that conditions became ripe for the Third International, conditions which laid the national, territorial, social, and political foundations for the International of action. The Russian experiences served the Communist International as the guiding line of its policies.

However, Lenin did not reject in an offhand manner everything that was created by the Second International. He understood how to differentiate between what was valuable and what was not. In his article entitled "The Third International and Its Place in History" he said the following:

"The First International laid the foundation for the international proletarian struggle for socialism. The Second International constitutes the epoch in which the ground has been prepared in a number of countries for a mass movement. The Third International utilizes the results of the activities of the Second International, breaks with the opportunistic, social-chauvinistic, and petty-bourgeois tendencies, and begins to realize the dictatorship of the proletariat."

In the same article Lenin explains what he considered the foundation of the Third International:

"The historic world significance of the Communist International consists in this, that it begins to put into effect the things which Marx has proven theoretically to be a necessity, thereby realizing the consequences produced by the socialist and labor movement, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat."

Lenin gave the Communist International not only its ideological direction by formulating many of the theses adopted by the Comintern, which have drawn the attention of the Communist Parties to the importance of the agrarian and colonial questions, to the mutual relations between the dictatorship and capitalist democracy; but he also participated directly and actively in the