The document which follows is a translation from the French original. It was sent to us in the facsimile version kept in the NKVD files in Moscow by comrades of the Workers’ Group in the USA (https://www.facebook.com/workersgroup.classline/). The official stamp shows that the NKVD had received it by 8 July 1932 and, no doubt, it later played a part in sealing the ultimate fate of Gavril Miasnikov. Our translation is based on this version. At the time we had forgotten that we already held the same document in the “brochure” Le Groupe ouvrier du Parti communiste russe 1923-37 by our comrade Michel Olivier.(1) We are indebted to his pamphlet for some of the comments which we make here.

The Document’s Take on the Russian Revolution

We don’t intend here to go into the remarkable biography of Gavril Ilyich Miasnikov as this has been done several times by others, like Paul Avrich.(2) The Workers’ Group (of the Russian Communist Party) was more than one individual, however famous and prolific, but this document was a product of Miasnikov’s years of exile from the USSR. It is also more wide-ranging and penetrative in its analysis of the decline of the revolution in Russia than his earlier Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of 1923. Here we just want to make some observations on the document itself to set it in its proper context. Even if we are nine decades too late in responding to Miasnikov’s invitation for criticism, there is no doubt that it is a thought-provoking contribution, both to an understanding of the counter-revolution which followed the isolation of the workers’ revolution in Russia, and to any future programme which the working class furnishes for itself in the next revolutionary wave.

We use the word “programme” advisedly since this document is not just a platform as the title implies, i.e. a series of points gleaned from the past lessons of working class struggle around which a new political organisation is formed. Miasnikov had greater ambitions here. In calling for a Communist Workers' International (perhaps as an echo of the German KAPD’s earlier attempt to do the same?)(3) he poses a series of actions which he considers the working class should follow in order to develop its new revolutionary order. In short it is more a programme for a revolutionary revival of the working class in the 1930s than just a platform for a new communist international in the midst of a terrible counter-revolution.

The ideas in it were, for the most part, not new to Miasnikov. They are the same ones that the Workers’ Group, of which he was the principal animator, had maintained for a decade. And there can be no doubt that what guided Miasnikov above all was his actual experience of the Russian Revolution, a revolution which found him at the very centre of action. As a Bolshevik militant from 1905 onwards, his conclusions are of considerable interest since he could see that the party he had helped build, which he had seen as the epitome of the working class had, from 1920 onwards, taken a wrong course.

Why 1920? Those who have made the most detailed studies of the Revolution usually focus on March 1918 (signing of Brest-Litovsk, adoption of one-man management, etc.) or March 1921 (Kronstadt, adoption of the New Economic Policy, and the failure of the March Action in Germany signalling that the revolutionary wave was dying) as significant turning points. Miasnikov though focuses on the Ninth All-Russian Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) as a “coup d’état” against soviet power. This is a repeated theme in many of the documents that he was involved in drafting.

What happened at the Ninth Party Congress that Miasnikov found to be so significant? He gives a hint in the document:

"The offensive of the global bourgeoisie against the Russian proletariat had shifted the balance in the relations between class forces and moved it from the proletariat to the petty bourgeoisie. This is what has produced this petty bourgeois coup d’état. The decision of the Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) dissolved the few Soviets of Workers’ Deputies that still existed. The proletariat was demoted from its rank of dominant class; the Soviets of Deputies of Workers’ and Peasants’, the cornerstone of the November Revolution, “essential nucleus of the Workers’ State” (Programme of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)), were dissolved and replaced with bureaucracy."

In short, having to fight a war against international capitalism (the Russian Civil War) the working class had been weakened so that by 1920 the interests of the peasantry had come to dominate the Russian Communist Party. This now carried out a “coup d’état” against workers’ soviet power in favour of “bureaucracy”. How accurate was this picture of the situation in 1920?

Miasnikov was not alone in understanding the crisis of the regime as the Civil War appeared to be coming to an end. The Ninth Congress took place in August 1920 and, not for the first time, various groupings on the left of the RCP(B), including the Democratic Centralists and the embryonic Workers Opposition, voiced their disquiet at the direction the revolution had taken since the start of the civil war.

The October Revolution had brought about the establishment of soviet power and the Bolshevik Party, as the only significant party to unambiguously support “all power to the soviets”, had established themselves as the overwhelmingly working class party in those soviets. Under their inspiration the first 6 months of the revolution saw the extension of soviet power and a great deal of working class initiative. It was not the Bolsheviks who pushed for “nationalisation” of the means of production (the Bolsheviks thought control of the banks would be enough), but the workers in the factory committees who called on the Soviet government to recognise their seizures.

Of course everyone, from Lenin to the workers’ in the factories, knew that without an international revolution there could be no hope of a socialist revolution succeeding in Russia. The whole idea of the October Revolution took that fact as its premise. Its failure to appear is the ultimate explanation of why the revolution failed. No workers’ bastion can hold out against world capitalism in isolation. Stalin’s pronouncement in 1924 that “socialism in one country” was now possible was in fact the epitaph of the October Revolution. However, in those first six months of the revolution such an outcome was unthinkable inside the Russian working class (and not just in the Bolshevik Party). In this period there was an enormous outburst of self-activity of the working class in Russia. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary, Isaak Steinberg, who became Commissar for Justice in this period, described it thus:

"All aspects of existence – social, economic, political, spiritual, moral, familial – were opened to purposeful fashioning by human hands. Ideas for social betterment and progress that had been gathering for generations in Russia and elsewhere seemed to wait on the threshold of the revolution ready to pour forth and permeate the life of the Russian people. The issues were not only social and economic reforms and thoroughgoing political changes: with equal zeal the awakened people turned to the fields of just and education, to art and literature. Everywhere the driving passion was to create something new, to effect a total difference with the “old world” and its civilization. It was one of those uncommon moments of self-perception and self-assertion. The storm passed nobody by; neither those who hailed it as a blessing nor those who spurned it as a curse.(4)"

And through it all Lenin and the Left of the Party sang from the same hymn sheet. Lenin repeatedly encouraged the workers to make the revolution themselves:

"Creative activity at the grassroots is the basic factor of the new public life. Let the workers set up workers' control at their factories. Let them supply the villages with manufactures in exchange for grain… Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach: living creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.(5)"

This was the revolution most Bolsheviks, including Miasnikov and his comrades in the not-yet-formed Workers’ Group, supported. However, from the spring/early summer of 1918 onwards, the revolution began to unravel. Although some historians exaggerate the significance of the setback of signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the real problem lay in the dire economic catastrophe the revolution had inherited from the previous two regimes. The 1917 harvest had been a disaster. Only 12-13% of the normal food supply was reaching the cities. The shortage of food forced many workers to leave work, and the city, to forage for food. Many first generation workers returned to their villages. 40% of the working class had abandoned “Red Petrograd” by April 1918. Of those who remained 60% were unemployed. Any party based in the working class had to share the same fate. Of the 43,000 who were in the Bolshevik Party in Petrograd in October 1917 only 13,472 remained by June 1918.(6)

Many of these were factory committee members, delegates of the working class in the factories. Now the links between them and the factory which delegated them ceased to mean anything. Little wonder then that the lifeblood was being sucked from soviet power at the grassroots even at this early stage. After June 1918 there were fewer new soviet elections. Even some of those which did take place were annulled or ignored as the dictates of war had now been reduced to the single question of support for the Red Army against the Whites and their imperialist backers. And in order to feed the starving workers forcible food requisitioning was employed against the peasantry, leading to what amounted to a class war in the countryside. A new state bureaucracy (aided partly by the members of the old bureaucracy) slowly began to replace local soviet initiative, just as one-man management gradually became the dominant feature of the new economic life in the factories, and the Red Army (where bourgeois military “order” was restored) replaced the workers’ militias. These developments did not immediately kill the revolution but set in train a process which only a world revolution could have reversed. And the longer this held off the deeper the RCP(B) sank towards the mire of counter-revolution.

As it was, by 1920 economic chaos was still staring the soviet regime in the face, and some workers, as well as peasants, were beginning to turn against the Bolsheviks. This was reflected in the divisions inside the RCP(B)’s Ninth Party Congress. Whilst Trotsky was once again arguing (as he had at the Eighth Congress in 1919) for compulsory labour through its “militarisation”, the Democratic Centralists were calling for a restoration of the original initiatives of the revolution based on working class self-activity in which the soviets dominated. Members of the future Workers' Opposition (which formed only after the Ninth Congress) also stressed the need for the class to once again be responsible for running the system, but their chosen instrument was the trade union. The role that the trade unions should now play in the organisation of labour was uppermost in the debate in the Ninth Congress.

With the civil war all but won, Trotsky thought that the methods that brought military triumph could be used in the economic sphere as well. Unions should become part of the state’s management for disciplining the workforce (curiously similar to the actual process that was then in train throughout the world as unions passed over from being collective bodies fighting for workers’ living standards to managers of the labour force on behalf of the needs of capitalism). Trotsky’s whole emphasis was on raising production and solving economic problems. If that demanded compulsion and the direction of workers here and there like an army (but now, of industry) that did not conflict with the future establishment of socialism. This separation of ends from means was to become a fixture in Trotsky’s methodology. He had already given a taste of how he expected the unions to operate as state agencies with the formation of the Tsektran union (uniting workers in both rail and water transport under one body). It acted as an agent of the state in the economy. His argument was that as Russia was a “workers’ state” then there was no need for bodies to defend workers against that state. The obvious speciousness of this argument is that if the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was really a “workers’ state” then there would be no need for compulsion let alone militarisation at all.

Opposing Trotsky, the Democratic Centralists and the members of what would soon become the Workers Opposition both pointed out that socialism could only come about by giving free rein once again to the creative energies of the class itself since it was only the working class who could build socialism. The weakness of their position was that the working class as a real force was now much weaker than it had been in the final days of 1917, and once the “self-activity” of the class had died, exhortation alone could not restart the process. In the meantime, the economic crisis was only getting worse. In short, in the absence of a European or even world revolution, and with workers’ more and more dragged into the administration of the state, the Revolution in Russia faced a terrible dilemma. Lenin’s solution was to look at what was practically the most effective way to proceed and initially appeared to fully endorse Trotsky’s position. In his Opening Address to the Ninth Congress he said:

"In our fight against falsehood, we introduced labour conscription and proceeded to unite the working people, not hesitating to use coercion. For no revolution has ever been effected without coercion, and the proletariat has a right to exercise coercion in order to hold its own at all costs."

And he took careful aim at the demands of the Democratic Centralists (specifically Sapronov) for an end to one-man management and the return to a more corporate or collegial management system:

"…we are now being dragged back on a matter that was decided long ago, a matter which the All-Russia Central Executive Committee endorsed and explained, namely, that Soviet socialist democracy and individual management and dictatorship are in no way contradictory, and that the will of a class may sometimes be carried out by a dictator, who sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary. At any rate, the attitude towards the principles of corporate management and individual management was not only explained long ago, but was even endorsed by the All-Russia Central Executive Committee. In this connection our Congress is an illustration of the sad truth that instead of advancing from the explanation of questions of principle to concrete questions, we are advancing backward. Unless we get away from this mistake we shall never solve the economic problem."

However, whilst at the Ninth Party Congress Lenin appeared initially supportive of Trotsky’s idea as a way to solve the economic crisis he eventually came out against Trotsky’s “errors”. Lenin, despite the fact that he generally agreed with measures to make production more efficient, such as the need for one-man management and “scientific methods” of production like Taylorism, understood perfectly well that this would not, in itself, bring about socialism. He rejected both the “syndicalist” suggestions of Tomsky, Lomov and Shliapnikov that the unions should take over the management of production, on the one hand, and Trotsky’s idea to reduce them to a disciplinary force in the working class on the other. At the Ninth Party Congress Lenin had a different view:

"Our trade unions have been of tremendous assistance in building the proletarian state. They were a link between the Party and the unenlightened millions."

But that was their sole function. He went on to add that:

"it is essential for the Central Committee to be constituted in such a way as to have a transmission belt to the broad masses of the trade unions (we have 600,000 Party members and 3,000,000 trade union members) to connect the Central Committee simultaneously with the united will of the 600,000 Party members and the 3,000,000 trade union members. We cannot govern without such a transmission belt.(7)"

And at the Eighth Soviet Congress (December 1920) he pointedly distanced himself from Trotsky by pointing to the “bureaucratic” distortions which already existed in the “workers’ state”:

"The whole point is that it is not quite a workers’ state. That is where Comrade Trotsky makes one of his main mistakes … ours is a workers’ state with a bureaucratic twist to it. We have had to mark it with this dismal, shall I say, tag. There you have the reality of the transition.(8)"

He went on to add, a little paradoxically given that he had already said the unions were “part of the state” that unions were “schools of communism and any 'governmentalisation' of them would be a grave mistake as it would undermine the role of the unions in the eyes of the rank and file."(9)

Miasnikov rejected the idea that the unions would be “schools of communism” under the arrangements made at the Ninth Congress. Miasnikov’s position on the unions was not really consistent either. In that very same 1920 he had accurately argued that unions were really unimportant in the life of the working class both before and after the October Revolution:

"Prior to the October revolution of 1917 the trade unions hardly even existed and played no significant role.(10)"

For him, at that time, the only reason to retain unions was to impress workers’ abroad who were massed in unions and still regarded them as workers’ organs. However by 1930 he had concluded that the setting up of the Workers’ and Peasants Inspectorate (Rabkrin), and its strengthening at the Ninth Party Congress, was, in fact, not real workers’ inspection at all but just another bureaucratic answer to bureaucracy. In this he had a point since Lenin himself denounced its failures before he died. In Better Fewer But Better he announced that:

"Let us say frankly that the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection does not at present enjoy the slightest authority. Everybody knows that no other institutions are worse organised than those of our Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, and that under present conditions nothing can be expected from this People’s Commissariat.(11)"

He puts his finger on the problem as one of choosing the right personnel (it seems that the workers chosen for this task were often those who had shown incompetence or proved untrustworthy elsewhere!). Lenin had little faith in it but still stuck to the idea of reforming it. Miasnikov though, despite some contradictory comments in the Draft Platform,(12) had long reached the conclusion that the only solution to the “social bureaucracy” was to allow the soviets to run production, and the cooperatives to deal with distribution whilst the unions role would be precisely to keep a check on what the soviet was doing instead of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate. This would then obviate the need for yet one more layer of bureaucracy. This was his model vision of how the system could move towards socialism.

Miasnikov saw the Ninth Party Congress which confirmed the practice of one-man management and the institution of the Workers and Peasants’ Inspectorate as the final overthrow of soviet power. There is something exaggerated in his talk of a coup d’état, since all the changes took place in the heat of a debate in a Bolshevik Party still full of many different tendencies, but by 1930 Miasnikov could look back on that decision as the moment when he parted company with what was being done in the name of revolution.

The document presented here contains some fine insights made with the benefit of hindsight. For example, by 1930 Miasnikov had come to understand one of the first errors of the Revolution was to create Sovnarkom, or the Council of People’s Commissars, as a government which was above the soviets. His remedy was clearly stated. The soviets themselves should:

"elect an executive committee accompanied by a bureau and necessary sections, but with no bourgeois bureaucratic complement such as a council of ministers or a council of people’s commissars."

In November 1917 though few saw any problem as Sovnarkom took very few initiatives which were not also approved by the All-Russian Soviet Executive Committee (VTsIK).

The other features of the document which readers will readily identify for themselves are his clarity that the USSR had become “state capitalist”, his rejection of the “infamous opposition” of Trotsky, the idea that there would be more than one party in existence (this was in continuity with his constant calls in the period 1920-23 for freedom of the press) and that he still envisages a role for money in the transitional period.

There is much more that we could comment on such as his view that parliament could be used by revolutionaries or his notion that only under socialism would “national liberation” be possible (rather than seeing the need for state and national boundaries to be abolished in a communist world). There is much here that gives food for thought but in the depth of the counter-revolution there was no echo to this Draft Platform. Miasnikov remained in France until 1945 (probably working for a while as a slave worker during the German occupation).

During the Second World War though, he did call for the defence of the USSR, which shows that his analysis of its state capitalism did not logically carry over into seeing it as part of the imperialist alliance system, despite its membership of the League of Nations after 1934, and its division of Poland in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. His support for the USSR in the war and the fact that his three sons died fighting for it may have led him to believe there was no danger in accepting an invitation to return to Moscow at the end of the war. He was to be quickly disillusioned. He was immediately arrested on arrival, interrogated for several days(13) then found guilty of treason. The sentence was passed with no right of appeal, and he was shot on 16 November 1945.

We leave to others to make their own judgements about the character and political judgement of this extraordinarily tenacious worker turned theoretician. He was, after all, one of the few Bolshevik oppositionists not to condemn the Kronstadt rebellion and it has to be recognised that he continued to fight all his life for the ideals which the “November Revolution” (he always used the new calendar) had promised. This document serves as his final testament.

Pictured: Miasnikov (centre) in the Perm Provincial Committee of the RCP(B), 1920

Notes to the Introduction

(1) It can be found online at http://www.leftcommunism.org/spip.php?article142&lang=fr.

(2) Beside the work cited above readers can consult P. Bourrinet, http://www.left-dis.nl/f/biomiasni.pdf, and in English Paul Avrich, https://libcom.org/library/bolshevik-opposition-lenin-paul-avrich, and Malcolm Archibald, https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/bzkjbz, as well as the book The Russian Communist Left 1918-30 (International Communist Current).

(3) The organisation was founded in 1922, following a split in the KAPD, by members of the Essen Tendency, including Herman Gorter and Karl Schr?der, the Berlin Faction holding that the formation of an international was premature. It was joined by Sylvia Pankhurst's Communist Workers’ Party, the Communist Workers’ Party of the Netherlands, the Left Communists in Russia (who accordingly renamed themselves the Communist Workers’ Party), the Communist Workers’ Group in Russia and some communists in Belgium and Bulgaria. The Communist Workers' Group left it over its refusal to countenance a united front with the Comintern and it virtually ceased to exist in 1927 with the demise of the Essen Tendency though publications were still put out in its name in Holland in the early 1930s. The current document appears to be an attempt to revitalise that project (in 1928 Miasnikov's Worker’s Group, Sapranov’s ‘Group of Fifteen’, and remnants of the Workers’ Opposition, held a conference which resolved to “constitute the central bureau of the Workers’ Group as the central organising bureau for Communist Workers’ Parties of the USSR", see: https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2010-06-09/the-bolshevik-left-and-w…).

(4) Quoted in R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 39

(5) Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 26, p.288

(6) S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd, p. 244

(7) All quotes previous to this one taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/mar/29.htm

(8) Lenin, The Trade Unions, The Present Situation and Trotsky’s Mistakes https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm

(9) See R. V Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, p.132

(10) https://www.marxists.org/archive/miasnikov/1920/same-different-way.htm

(11) https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/02.htm

(12) In Part 1 of the document of the Draft Platform (point 3) he seems to suggest the unions will actually run production which was closer to the position of the Workers’ Opposition with which many of the Workers’ Group had been associated.

(13) The transcript of which can be found in Archibald (above) and at https://www.marxists.org/archive/miasnikov/1945/interrogation.htm

== Draft Platform and Statutes of the Communist Workers’ International

Preface

The development of the forces of production, which the bourgeoisie has feebly championed, has made every national economy a part of the global economy, whilst the proletarian movement has become international.

The tasks of the national movement are the same as those of the international movement, and, conversely, the tasks of the international proletarian movement are those of the national movement.

Two rival Internationals, the Second and the Third, grouping millions of proletarians together, claim to represent the working class of the whole world.

By its whole nature – its theory and moreover its deeds – the Second International is not a workers’ International, but an anti-worker, anti-proletarian one. Far from reaching for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and for the victory of the domination of the proletariat, it endeavours, through clichés about socialism and the struggle, to reconcile the proletariat with the regime of exploitation, by making socialism out to be some sort of Christian paradise. It seeks to suffocate the inextinguishable revolt of the proletariat against the system of wage slavery. The socialist rhetoric aims to make the proletariat believe that the Second International opposes the regime of exploitation; meanwhile, appearing to fight it for miniscule reforms, for a more tolerable capitalism, is supposed to prove the congruence of its actions and its words. It wants, by way of these reforms, to make capitalism less barbaric in its exploitation, and, consequently, less abhorrent and more durable. But if, in spite of all the efforts of the Second International, the proletariat seeks to shake off the yoke of slavery and to commit itself to the path of revolution, the parties of the Second International, all the while following their policy of socialist rhetoric and reformist struggles, will resort to a more decisive argument to keep the proletariat in its place: repression by force.

There is no bourgeois country whose representatives in the Second International are not officially at the service of the bourgeois state as vigilant guardians of the regime of exploitation, supervisors, watchdogs and tamers of the proletariat. The Gallifets, executioners and butchers of the bourgeoisie are undoubtedly exceeded by the bloody reprisals against the proletariat by Noske’s socialist executioners and butchers. However, the latter are as yet only most noted and the Second International has not said its final word. The Severings and Zöergiebels of all countries continue the work of their glorious predecessors in their apparent goal of breaking all records, the fruits of which are now apparent.(14) The role of the Second International in the defence of capital is so important that it can be stated, without fear of error, that it has saved, and continues to protect the bourgeoisie from the attacks of the proletariat. The dissolution of the Second International would leave the path to revolution free to the victorious proletariat. The fall of the Second International will mark the fall of bourgeois domination and the triumph of the revolution.

The Third International, born in the torment of wars and revolutions, had in its hands all the ingredients it needed to make it the leadership of the proletariat, but, since it tied itself to the fate of the November Revolution in Russia, it became the International of the bureaucracy, whose ideals and special methods it soon adopted. It fights against the bourgeoisie and the Second International, not for a Workers’ State, but for state capitalism, for a state and a bureaucratic rule with a one-party administrative system. It seeks to overthrow the bourgeoisie in order to replace it, not with the organised proletariat as a class, but with bureaucracy. It has to dominate in production (economic rule) and in the state (political rule). It wants to get there by revolution, thanks to which a single party formed of all their functionaries would then become the omnipotent sovereign. It stifles with violence every proletarian tendency that puts itself forward as the dominant class. It strips the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia of their minimum rights and legal liberties in the forms that bourgeois countries afford them: freedom of organisation, freedom of the press, of speech, of meeting, etc., and passes off its own domination as that of the proletariat.

The acute crisis of the Communist International and the appearance of several organisations which have split from it are a testament not to a crisis in Marxism and communism, but to a crisis of social-bureaucracy. And this fact indicates the growing need felt by the proletarian masses for a proletarian political organisation which would be their own, which could march under the flag of the workers’ revolution, of the struggle for the specific interests of the working class, for the Workers’ State.

Communist Workers’ Parties and organisations clearly leaning towards an international alliance have arisen and continue to arise in various countries. The Workers’ Group of the USSR understood the necessity of a definitive break from the organisation of the Communist International and, from a simple fraction of the Russian Bolshevik Communist Party, has transformed itself into an independent party, the Communist Workers’ Party, thus turning itself towards founding the Communist Workers’ International.

But the Communist Workers’ International could not be born and avoid being subjected to the massacre of innocents perpetrated by one of the other of the Internationals if it had not been supplied with a “passport”, a “residence permit”, a political birth certificate, with both a programme and tactics. It is only thus that it could be called to play a great historic role in the future struggles of the proletariat against the world of the exploiters.

Why is the Communist Workers’ International entering into struggle? How should it fight? Only the ideas responding to these questions in a concrete form justify the existence of the Communist Workers’ International.

We must respond clearly and not settle for the clichés about the Workers’ State, the dictatorship of the proletariat and workers’ democracy, hackneyed by the bureaucracy of the USSR, or the clichés about socialism and struggle, of which the Second International is hypocritically charged.

Following the decisions of its governing bodies and in order to satisfy the pressing needs of the proletariat, the foreign representation of the Provisional Central Bureau of the Organisation proposes for the attention of comrades a Draft for the Platform of the Communist Workers’ International.

However we must recognise that we possess neither the infallibility of the Roman Pope, nor that of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), nor ev