Ebook: The Third International after Lenin

During the first years after its founding in 1919, the Communist
(or Third) International became a movement of working-class
parties from around the world that sought to absorb and apply
the lessons of the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

But by the mid-1920s, a privileged, petty-bourgeois social
layer-whose leading representative came to be Joseph
Stalin-had begun gaining the upper hand in the Communist
Party and Soviet state apparatus, rejecting the revolutionary
internationalist outlook of the Bolshevik Party under Lenin.

The Third International after Lenin is Leon Trotsky's 1928
defense of the Marxist course that had guided the Communist
International in its early years. Writing in the heat of political
battle, Trotsky addresses the key challenge facing working
people today: building communist parties throughout the
world capable of and willing to lead the workers and farmers
to take power.