Ian Birchall

is a socialist writer and translator. He is the author of France: the Struggle Goes On (with Tony Cliff, 1968); Workers Against the Monolith (1974); Bailing Out the System (19860; The Spectre of Babeuf (1997); Sartre Against Stalinism (2004); A Rebel’s Guide to Lenin (2005); Tony Cliff: A Marxist For His Time (2011). He has also translated works by Alfred Rosmer and Victor Serge.

The Communist International and Imperialism

The Communist International and Imperialism

The new Soviet state needed allies – either socialism would extend its victory, or exploitation and oppression would continue and new wars would break out. It was with this perspective that the Comintern was founded in 1919, with the object of encouraging world revolution. And with the Baku Congress of September 1920, the Bolsheviks made a symbolic declaration of their opposition to imperialism and attempted to lay the foundations for an organizational expression of this opposition.