Source: Published in To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921 (https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/897-to-the-masses), pp. 1007-1008
Translation: Translation team organized by John Riddell
HTML Markup: David Walters & Andy Blunden for the Marxists Internet Archive, 2018
Copyright: John Riddell, 2017. Republished here with permission
The Communist International Executive should be constituted in such a way as to enable it to take a position on all questions posed for action by the proletariat.[1] The Executive must go beyond the general appeals it has been publishing on such critical issues. More and more, it must find the road to practical initiatives that enable its sections to take unified organisational and propagandistic steps on disputed questions of international politics. The Communist International must mature into an International of the deed, an international leadership of the common daily struggle waged by the revolutionary proletariat in every country. The prerequisites for this are:
1.) Parties affiliated to the Communist International must make every effort to maintain close and active ties with the Executive. They must appoint their best representatives to serve on the Executive. What is more, they must exercise judgement and persistence in providing the Executive with good information, so the Executive can take a position based on actual documents and basic materials relating to political problems as they arise. The Executive must establish specialised departments to process this material effectively. In addition, the Executive should establish an international economic and statistical institute for the workers’ movement and for communism.
2.) The affiliated parties must maintain intimate informational and organisational ties with each other, especially when they are neighbours with an equal stake in capitalist antagonisms. At present, this common relationship in action can best be initiated through the exchange of delegates to important conferences and of appropriately chosen members. Such an exchange of members must become an ongoing programme of all efficient sections.
3.) The Executive will help the national sections fuse, as they must, into a unified international party of proletarian propaganda and action by publishing a political newsletter in Western Europe in all the more important languages. This newsletter must present an increasingly clear and cohesive analysis of Communist ideas and provide reliable, regular information that gives national sections a basis to respond simultaneously and actively.[2]
4.) The Executive can give organisational backing to efforts to forge a genuine International of effective daily struggle by sending representatives with full powers to the sections. The task of such emissaries is to inform the Executive regarding the particular conditions in which the Communist parties of the capitalist and colonial countries are struggling. In addition, they must ensure that the parties remain in close contact with the Executive and with each other, in order to increase effectiveness on both sides. The Executive and the individual affiliated parties should also ensure that communication between them takes place not only personally, through trusted representatives, but also through written correspondence. This should be more frequent and more timely than has been the case in the past, so that a common position can be adopted on all the major political issues.
5.) In order to be able to carry out this much increased activity, the Executive must be substantially expanded. Each section granted forty votes in the congress and the Executive of the Communist Youth International will receive two places; each section granted twenty or thirty votes will receive one place. The Communist Party of Russia will have five places, as before. Representatives of other sections will have consultative vote. The chair of the Executive will be chosen by the congress. The Executive will be instructed to engage three secretaries, drawn if possible from different sections. In addition, members of the Executive sent from the sections are required to take part in carrying out the work of the divisions relating to their country or by serving as reporters responsible for the work of entire topic areas. Members of the administrative Small Bureau will be chosen by the Executive, as a rule from among the Executive’s members. Exceptions are permissible in special circumstances.
6.) The Executive will be based in Russia, the first proletarian state. The Executive will, however, seek to widen its influence through conferences organised outside Russia, in order to consolidate and centralise its organisational and political leadership of the International as a whole.
1. The draft of this resolution presented in session 22 began with two sentences, most of which were deleted in the final version. Here is the draft version of these sentences, with subsequently deleted passages italicised:
The Third World Congress notes that the development of the Communist International has reached the point where it can make the transition from the stage of influencing the masses of the capitalist and colonial countries to that of a more and more tightly organised and genuine political and organisational leadership of the revolutionary proletarian forces around the world. The Communist International Executive should be constituted in such a way as to enable it to take a position on all questions posed for action by the proletariat, such as the increasingly urgent problems of mass unemployment; the increasing hostility and violence of political relations among capitalist governments (sanctions threatened and imposed, peace treaties, and the new world armaments race between the United States, Britain, and Japan).
2. In September 1921 the Comintern established a German-language newsletter Inprekorr (Internationale Presse-Korrespondenz), published several times a week. The following month the newsletter began to be published in English as Inprecorr (International Press Correspondence).