 Fy enw i'r llwyddiad bryddoedd, y llwyddiad bryddoedd. Fe gennym ar Arthyr Ransom. Fe gennym ar y llwyddiad bryddoedd o'r gweithio'r llwyddiad bryddoedd Cymru, y llwyddiad bryddoedd Cymru, a'r llwyddiad bryddoedd y Balshwyth Theatre yn march ar y Ffyrdd 2019. Felly, mae'n gwybod a'r llwyddiad. Mae'n gweithio'r llwyddiad. Mae'n gweithio'r llwyddiad bryddoedd a ddweud ac mae'r llwyddiad bryddoedd, dwi'n ddweud o'r cymdeithasol ymlaen. Felly, mae'r cyfrwyr o'r llwyddiad. Mae'r Ffyrdd Mosgo Sôviot yw'r llwyddiad, y Comitiynau Fyglwyr, y Cyfrwyr Fyglwyr yw'r Llywodraeth Cymru, y Ffyrdd Ymddir Hwyth, a'r cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr. Mae'r cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr yw'r llwyddiad, a'r cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr. Camenef ar y gweithio, byddwch y solum ymlaen o'r ddweud o'r droswyr llwyddiad ymlaen. Yn ymlaen i'r awr o'r cyfrwyr o'r llwyddiad, dwi'n rhaid i'r cyfrwyr, a'r cyfrwyr o'r llwyddiad ymlaen, yn y fwyaf sy'n ei wneud oherwydd sy'n cymdeithasol ymlaen o'r Cyfrwyr, neu ymlaen o'r cyfrwyr o'r llwyddiad ymlaen o'r Brys. Felly, rwy'n ddweud i'r cyfrwyr o'r cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr ac mae'n gallu cyfrwyr symud yma ynglynigol sy'n ymlaen i ymloedg ynglynig, rwy'n ddim yn ymlaen, ac rwy'n ddim yn rhaid yn olyb i'ch cyfrwyr o'r cyfrwyr. Rwy'n credu'n credu'n credu'n credu'n credu'n credu ymlaen i'r cyfrwyr. Prygaf iawn i ddim yn ddigonwch шyfwrdd â'r cyfrwyr rhaid o wneud o amlwg ymlaen i'r cyfrwyr, a geffred eich cyfrwyr. Felly mae'n rhaid i'r cyfrwyr panologol. First things first, why an international, why is it important for us as Marxists? I would say that the history of the working class and the struggle of our class shows that at its high point it has always coincided with internationalism. The birth of the communist movement itself with Marx shows us internationalism has been there since its inception. Now one of the myths about Marx is that he was an academic, kind of just an academic, that he spent his life locked away writing. And he sat in libraries just corresponding with Engels and writing all of these letters but was largely isolated. And this is not true. He did write a lot and he did obviously correspond with Engels. But he was a revolutionary and he actively participated in revolutionary politics. And it was through that participation that Marx was able to develop his ideas in the first place. Marx was exiled from Germany for his political work and eventually he finds himself in Paris where he has encounters with different French socialists, he has meetings with class conscious workers and it's here that he starts to see society in class terms. He begins to read English economists who were trying to understand how capitalism worked. Marx and Engels meet and collaborate in 1844 in Paris and they start to develop their ideas on a proper serious basis. And once they had those ideas in a serious enough manner, they immediately tried to turn towards organised workers in order to win them over to those ideas. That was always a priority of his. So there were many different iterations of the first international before it formally developed different organisations that existed as a precursor. For example, you had the Communist League as an organisation, which was a product of an organisation called the League of the Just, which was originally a German workers organisation. By the way, anyone who's been on the Marx Walk in London probably knows about this because we go through all the different sites that they had and we talk about that in London. But yeah, this was a German workers organisation that actually existed long before Marx and Engels. It was quite utopian socialist Christian even. It had a slogan which was all men are brothers, but eventually under the political leadership of Marx and Engels, they managed to steer them on a better course and they changed the slogan from all men are brothers to working men of all countries unite. And they renamed that organisation the Communist League. And at the second Congress, Marx and Engels were mandated to write a document and that document was the Communist Manifesto, which I'm sure you've all read. And that document really is the founding, if you will, of the Communist movement in a scientific sense for us today. And this was also written just on the eve of 1848 and that revolutionary period that swept across Europe. 1848 ended in defeat and this had an impact on that organisation, on the leaders and the kind of mood and the morale in that organisation. There were divisions between the members of the League on how to take things forward. There were followers of Marx who had a more scientific approach, but there were others who thought you could take power through plots and various other things. So in all these different organisations, there have always been debates and different discussions on how to take things forward. But Marx and Engels had a serious scientific approach and always tried to take the best layers with them. So eventually then, a few years later, in 1864, we finally have the creation of the International Working Men's Association, or as we know it, the first international. And it was founded in St Martin's Hall in London. Not initially as a solely Marxist organisation, it was made up of different types, different layers gravitated towards it. The former trade unionists, French radicals, followers of Proudhon, Russian anarchists and various others. Nevertheless, given his stature, Marx eventually becomes its outstanding political leader and he drafts the inaugural address for the first international and also the rules to guide its work. From the beginning, Marx really saw it as his task to ensure the proletarian nature and the proletarian character of the first international. He wanted to protect it against the encroachment of capitalist politicians who wanted to use it or would try to use it for their own means or their own ends. He was continually trying to strengthen the working class core of the general council and was also continuously trying to make sure it had a real international representation. So the general rules of the association written by Marx opened with the statement that the emancipation of the working class must be the task of the working class itself. That the struggle for the emancipation of the working class means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties and the abolition of all class rule. The inaugural address, again written by Marx, stressed this working class objective where it says to conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working class and it concludes with the words of the manifesto proletarians of all countries unite. And as a result of this firm stand, a lot of the middle class elements that maybe initially were attracted to the first international by the spring of 1865 had moved away and had abandoned it. But this wasn't an easy or an automatic process. The history of our movement is one of constant theoretical debates and clarifications. And another one of the key theoretical debates that took place in the first international was also between Marxism and anarchism and Marx's debates with Bakunin, the anarchist. In 1864 he had met Marx in London where he learned about the international and wanted to cooperate and get involved. But he held the view that Marx was exaggerating the importance of the working class and wanted to look more towards the intelligentsia, the students and even the lumpen proletariat and middle class representatives as more likely agents for revolution. Now there's a lot that could be said about the discussions there between Marx and Bakunin and just the general history of the debate between Marxist and anarchists which you can look up, those discussions and debates. Eventually Bakunin was forced to take his ideas elsewhere and Marx and Engels continued their work. But big events were going to shake things up. In 1871 in just a few weeks surrounded by enemies you had the working men and women of Paris demonstrating with brilliance that is possible for workers to run society democratically, without capitalists, without bankers or even a standing army. This was of course the great Paris Commune, that great period of history. Marx actually based a lot of his understanding and development of his ideas about the state on the Paris Commune itself. However it was defeated and on top of this in this time period there's a growth in capitalism and upswing and this makes an impact again on the international demoralisation, disputes and so on. Finally in 1876 the general council under Marx and Engels declared what had effectively already become practice which was that it was better to formally bring the first international to an end. But this didn't mean that Marx and Engels were giving up on the idea of an international organisation itself. It was more just the secondary format of the organisation in that time wasn't possible. Marx dies in 1883 a few years later after an illness but the first international survived as an idea. It survived as a programme and so in 1889 we would say it re-emerges on a higher level as the second international. So the second international is established in July 1889 and Engels was involved in the initial stages of this and it's established on the centenary of the fall of the Bastille in the Great French Revolution and this organisation now assembled the best social democratic parties worldwide and it actually formally adhered to the ideas of Marxism so this was a step up from the first international. It's leading party was the social democratic of Germany and that was headed by figures such as Carl Kautzky, August Babel, Wilhelm Liebnacht and all of these people had actually been personally tutored by the likes of Marx and Engels. Kautzky for example had edited Marx's economic writings and had led the battle internationally on important theoretical disputes. He was in many people's eyes the undisputed leading theoretician of the second international. Unfortunately the second international and Kautzky in particular did not meet the tasks demanded of them by history. This organisation really should have been set up to lead the working class in this next period. They should have continued the link and Lenin thought the same. He had great respect for Kautzky and the SPD in fact up until 1914 Lenin had paid homage to the German SPD as the model of revolutionary social democracy and that's because at this time this organisation had over a million members it had 111 deputies in the Reichstag it had the support of a third of the German electorate and had 90 daily newspapers and this huge party apparatus. It was a mighty organisation. However the outbreak of war transformed the situation and on August 4th 1914 you had representatives of the German Social Democratic Party who voted in favour of the war credits in the Reichstag the German parliament together with all of the bourgeois political parties and it's said famously that when Lenin saw a copy of the SPD newspaper which was proclaiming support for this war that he refused to believe it entirely and he thought it was a forgery by the German general staff. Paul Axelrodd who was actually a Menshvik leader he said at the time the news was a terrible stunning blow it appeared as if an earthquake had overcome the international proletariat the tremendous authority of the German social democracy had disappeared with one stroke so we can't underestimate how shocking this was to so many across the international this same organisation had written in their own paper in their own propaganda not long before a direct quote the ruling classes who in peacetime oppress you despise you, exploit you want to use you as cannon fodder they had written that in their paper and yet when the time came and the pressure of bourgeois parliament was put upon them they voted in favour of those war credits they completely capitulated but it was not just them on that day the MPs of the French Socialist Party voted in favour of war credits and in country after country this was repeated this was really the death of the second international and it was one of the greatest betrayals of the working class seen in history and because of this by September of that year there was already talk of the need for a new international at its November 1914 the central committee of the Bolshevik party at its November meeting sorry the central committee of the Bolshevik party was already talking about the need to call for a new proletarian international and it's the following year then very quickly they didn't mess about or wait around in 1915 that the famous Zimmerwald conference is held with 42 delegates attending now this was a gathering of the left wing within the second international amongst them Trotsky and Lenin were there as well as a few others who obviously tried to make sense of the end of the second international but more importantly wanted to set forward a new path for how to reorganise true internationalists and true revolutionaries across Europe who wouldn't be thrown off course by changes in the objective situation and upswings in capitalism which all forms part of the reason as to why the second international degenerated in the way that it did so the Zimmerwald conference is in 1915 and it will take about four more years before the third international is formally born now a lot can and did happen in those four years to accelerate that process the war was dragging on the masses were tired but not just tired in that they weren't interested in politics it's actually that the mood was changing very rapidly people who had been enthusiastic about the war initially were now changing their tune and they were becoming wide open to revolutionary ideas in 1917 we have the February Revolution and eight months later the October Revolution the first successful proletarian revolution in history this is like a lightning rod that workers all over the world can suddenly look towards and then you have a whole series of army mutinies taking place ending with the German revolution itself in 1918 which is what ends the war despite what bourgeois historians or what your history class might teach you there's a whole talk on that tomorrow which you can go to so the years that then followed the first world war saw revolution sweeping the world there's intense class struggle in country after country and all of the old organizations of the working class are being put to the test as workers are moving immediately into strike action there's factory occupations, general strikes and news of all of these events are being celebrated in Russia it truly felt as though workers' power in country after country was suddenly an attainable goal this situation that was testing the old parties of the second international meant that the more radical layers started pushing on their own to form communist parties they wanted to follow the path of the workers in Russia in November 1918 for example the Hungarian Communist Party is formed and in March the following year the Hungarian Soviet Republic is proclaimed the international proletariat clearly is in desperate need of an international an organized force to take things forward and so finally it comes together the third international was the creation of a mass international organization of the working class and it was led by the leaders of the first successful proletarian revolution that truly threatened the future of capitalism itself and it was in March 1919 that they held their founding congress the first congress, I think we've got pictures of it on the wall which you can take a look at later and it had delegates representing 34 parties from 22 countries and they all gathered in Moscow for a four day conference so the congress immediately got down to business its main discussions were concentrating on the present stage of capitalism the character of reformism and the forms that the proletarian revolution would take now this really was a call to arms also to revolutionaries worldwide drawing a sharp line between the revolutionary internationalists of the world and the old reformists of the second international they consciously adopted the title communist to differentiate themselves from the social democrats who had betrayed socialism and they were trying to go back to the communist traditions of Marx and Engels and the communist manifesto itself this was about creating a clean banner we'll come back to that idea towards the end in the communist international it was Lenin and Trotsky who gave all of the main speeches and the main reports Trotsky drafted a manifesto of world revolution that's what you have on your seats which you can take a look at to all the delegates at the first congress Lenin and Trotsky had to make it clear what was the purpose of this organization what was the purpose of this international and that is we stand for the dictatorship of the proletariat we stand for socialist revolution and we fight for Soviet power so the first four congresses of the third international are the most important for us and you could say that the written record of the first four congresses form as some foundational documents for the IMT in terms of what we look towards and there's Trotsky's book about the first five years of the communist international which is an excellent record of all the main debates from those congresses which you can look at I'm not going to go into detail about all of those but we're going to cover the main themes so the early years of the communist international saw very important debates with the young French, German and Italian communist parties over questions of opportunism and sectarianism and this makes sense right you have a revolutionary wave that sweeps across Europe and the communist international was suddenly in a position where it was winning over large sections of the working class in places like France and Italy but it was doing so from these old reformist parties but of course they don't break with all of their reformist baggage that has been around them for a long time even if they have made this initial departure and moved towards the communist party and the fact that they won them over so quickly and it was such a quick process brought with it problems if you think about it the Bolsheviks had 20 years to develop, to go through mistakes and try out different things make mistakes, correct them and so on and so forth but you had the creation of these mass communist parties who were being born in the heat of revolution itself and they were trying to learn very quickly how to orientate themselves and they made a lot of mistakes they had this hangover, a lot of them from the old social democratic organisations and Trotsky in particular spent considerable time in the congresses of the common turn and in articles trying to expose the reformist and careerist layers that were still present in some of these parties in particular the French Communist Party which had a problem with this layer and Lenin as well was very concerned with this rot of reformism which was threatening the communist parties and so eventually he put forward conditions he put forward conditions to join the international as part of a way to get these people out the original draft I think had 19 but it ended with 21 there's a whole session about this at the end of the weekend but in summary Lenin's 21 conditions they're adopted at the second congress and he explains that or puts forward that reformists and centrists needed to be removed from all leading positions of the parties in the trade unions in the parties parliamentary representations in the editorial boards and so on and they all had to be replaced with tested communists when the socialist parties were requesting affiliation to the international they had to change their names to the communist party and this was partly as a way to distinguish themselves from the reformist socialist parties of the communist international but there was another important political difference that was being implemented here they were not named the Italian communist party but the communist party of Italy and there is a distinction there that's important to note it was a message to workers all across the world that the organisation, the international was one single world party there was one single party of the world's working class and that is how those who were approaching the international had to see themselves, not as isolated groups so there are other conditions of course there's 21 of them which you can look at but we'll go into this more in the final session and it is in these first couple of years there's this struggle to shore up the communist parties and make sure they're proletarian just as Marx did in the first international Marx and Engels were obliged to wage they waged a fferocia struggle actually against the followers of the anarchist Bacoonin so when it was founded the communist international it was made up of mainly small forces with inexperienced leadership but by 1921 it had spread to all the continents and gathered hundreds of thousands of members but by the time of the third congress there's a slight change the question of how to win the masses was posed very sharply when you read the documents from the first couple of congresses optimism is just pouring off the pages in terms of the revolutionary potential that exists in the world but when you get to the last couple of congresses there is a slight tonal change because the objective situation was changing and the communist parties were making mistakes and they were not correcting them so this question of how can we win over the masses correctly and as quickly as possible was becoming very urgent from the point of view of Lenin and Trotsky at this stage there had been a temporary re-stabilisation of capitalism and this initial wave of revolution was coming to an end I explained that there was this battle to rid the parties of reformist elements these hangovers from the past but of course the conditions weren't the same elsewhere it wasn't a battle against reformism in all the different sections that would have made it maybe slightly easier in some countries you actually had much smaller groups who came to the international forming communist parties such as in Britain and a lot of these groups had actually what we would describe as ultra-left tendencies so they already had a healthy distrust of reformism in the existing socialist parties and as such they refused to work with them entirely now Lenin and Trotsky realised that the task of winning the majority of the working class still lay ahead for the international and in most countries it was going to be necessary to find a road to the workers who were still under the influence of reformism and so they felt they needed to combat this ultra-leftism and there are two talks going into this over the course of the weekend the struggle against ultra-leftism itself but also the united front tactic which was put forward by Lenin on how to win those workers over and why the communist party should adopt that tactic and if you think about it this is a vital almost existential question for all communists what is the road to the masses and how can we win them over every delegate when they arrived at the second congress of the common turn was given a copy of Lenin's ultra-left communism and infantile disorder Lenin explained that these ultra-left parties they were being sectarian by separating themselves from the masses who could be won over in the struggle and he described this as infantile because he said this was a sign of their immaturity as a party, they were young and they didn't understand at the same time Lenin also warned against opportunism because ultra-leftism and opportunism have often been two sides of the same coin but in all of these discussions, debates, warnings that Lenin and Trotsky were giving out how did they do so they couldn't just declare it and force the communist parties to change everything about them that would make things much quicker but you're not going to get very far with that kind of method they did it through political arguments they did it through resolutions they did it through patiently explaining with a view always towards educating and raising the level of the comrades their method was to try and use the errors of ultra-leftism to try and help people learn now this is unfortunately not how the common turn continued this is not how all the debates took place and eventually it degenerates the third international the world revolution fails to spread and the young Soviet republic's isolation and backwardness ultimately leads to a crystallisation of a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy which develops in the Soviet Union now the years 1917 to 21 had been years of revolution but then counter-revolution workers in Italy, in Germany, in Hungary they could have taken power but they didn't and each one of these defeats was a severe blow not just to the workers of those countries but the workers of the Soviet Union and ultimately the workers of the world each defeat served to isolate and insulate the Russian revolution further leaving it isolated in its economic and cultural backwardness and Lenin saw this, he could see this coming and Lenin spends the last few months of his life trying to fight the growing bureaucracy and nationalism that he can see developing in the Soviet Union but it wasn't enough it wasn't enough to overcome everything that was happening or the material conditions and in the final analysis we explain that conditions determine consciousness and so by the time of Lenin's death which is in January 1924 the Russian party and by extension the Comintern was no longer what it had been and the 5th Congress really marks as a departure from the early healthy years of the Comintern and it serves as a bridge between Lenin and Trotsky's Comintern and Stalin's Comintern and this is where you see the theory of socialism in one country the madness of the third period and eventually the popular front that come out of Stalinism which there are talks about later this weekend which will cover these in more detail In May, just months after Lenin's death Zenoviev denounces Trotskyism he slanders and lies about Trotsky and his role in the revolution and the civil war and demands that he is expelled from the party but at this stage actually there's a lot of people who remember the truth about Trotsky's role in the revolution Trotsky's just spent the last few years leading many of the discussions in the Comintern so it wasn't easy for them to just try and get rid of him immediately but a serious campaign has conducted nonetheless to undermine him and undermine all the followers of Trotsky and eventually expel them and if you think about and you try and wrap your head around this is how does this take place all these eras of Stalinism the expulsion of Trotsky and then Trotskyism you know why didn't anyone do anything well if you think about it there's tens of thousands of comrades of communists all around Europe all around the world who trusted the Comintern they trusted the Comintern to provide objective and balanced political advice they didn't think that advice was coming forward on the basis of factional interests and so this advice then leads to disaster in one country after another it's clear that the eras of Stalinism concretely resulted in the defeat of the Chinese Revolution of 1925 the defeat of the Spanish Revolution the defeat of the German working class which leads directly to the victory of Hitler and fascist barbarism the Comintern eventually is completely wound up by Stalin in 1943 and he does this as a gesture to the Allies in the war he's basically saying we're no longer interested in revolution and that's it we're just going to kind of back off in that way there was no congress to confirm that decision which was actually against the rules of the Comintern and there was also complete silence from the national communist parties which also shows that this kind of degeneration wasn't just in Russia and it wasn't just coming from Stalin this generation had infected many of the communist parties throughout the whole of the international while Stalin was preparing this dismantling and the ending of the international and he was renouncing the struggle for world socialism on the other hand you had Trotsky who was trying under very difficult conditions to build he was trying to build the fourth international and he was doing that not only to defend the first proletarian revolution to defend October but to try and spread it also beyond its borders now the building of the fourth international was a part of Trotsky's effort to recruit and educate a new generation of genuine Bolsheviks who would be able to finish what the Russian Bolsheviks had started and by the way Trotsky for a long time didn't just immediately go to building the fourth international even when this degeneration and Stalinism began the left opposition didn't immediately seek to set something up but it's actually after Hitler comes to power and not just the victory of Hitler owing to the mistakes of Stalinism but it's the fact that there was no response from the communist party in Germany upon Hitler's victory it was actually complete silence and the German communist party had this mad position of kind of Hitler first and then us and this will expose the role of the social democrats which was the wrong position evidently but it wasn't just the mistake of the leadership again of Russia to the leaders of the German communist party even amongst the rank and file there's no discussion, there's no internal debate of what has happened, was this right, there's no analysis of the understanding of what fascism is and so this was a real lightning rod moment for Trotsky a real change in the situation where he realises you cannot reform this this cannot be reformed in fact something brand new needs to be set up Trotsky recognised he had to keep the banner clean we needed to keep the banner clean of genuine Bolshevism and genuine socialism and he says we will not hand this banner to the masters of falsification if our generation has proven to be too weak to establish socialism on this earth we will give its unstained banner to our children the struggle which looms ahead by far supersedes the significance of individual people factions and parties it is a struggle for the future of all humanity it will be severe it will be long and so the founding of the fourth international in October 1938 takes place and like the ones before it they too had to struggle and Trotsky had to struggle just as Marx fought Bakunin, as Lenin fought the reformist and the opportunists Trotsky had to conduct other struggles in the fourth international against different elements who were distracted and going off in various different ways so in all of these internationals you had outside and inside pressures that were putting these revolutionaries to the test I'm going to end on this point which is that the fourth international had many different forms in different places but the most important thing we need to remember about the fourth international was in essence it was about its ideas and it was about its programme and keeping the banner clean the organisation was secondary it's a secondary question in terms of what is the significance and the importance of the fourth international and what we want to study Trotsky spent all of his time in the last years of his life before he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent trying to educate the scattered forces but the objective situation made this very difficult although obviously the history of our organisation runs straight to the fourth international and the history of British Trotskyism in general and eventually it kind of whitties away but just as I would say despite the formal closure of the first international the first international which survived as an idea today so does the ideas and the programme of the fourth international in the work method and ideas of the IMT Thank you