Unequally bound

In contrast to the three other reviewers, I'm not particularly interested in "The First 5 Years of the Communist International, Vol. II", that contains early Comintern documents written or edited by Leon Trotsky. And no, I don't deny that this two-volume work *is* interesting for students of early Communist history. It simply isn't my current cup of tea. 

The two volumes are published by Pathfinder Press. There is also an earlier edition published by Monad. Both publishers are associated with the U.S. Socialist Workers' Party.

I posted this review mostly because volume II contains one of the more curious documents in Communist history, "Resolution of the Fourth World Congress on the French Question". It can also be found in "Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International", published by the competing Pluto Press (at one point associated with the British Socialist Workers' Party - no connection to the American group).

"Resolution of the Fourth World Congress on the French Question" contains what might be the only official Communist attack on...wait for it...Freemasonry. Ironically, since conspiracy theorists often claim that "Judeo-Bolsheviks" and Masons somehow go together. A surprisingly large number of French Communists, including high-ranking ones, turned out to be members of Masonic lodges. This unusual state of affairs was probably due to the fact, that the Communists in France were pretty "soft" and heterogeneous - indeed, a *majority* of the old Socialist Party had joined the Communist movement. In France, Freemasonry in the form of Grand Orient lodges was anti-clerical, republican and "progressive", which may explain why even members of the Socialist Party joined it. These people subsequently found themselves inside the Communist movement.

Of course, the Communist International in Moscow wasn't amused. Communist parties, and the international itself, were based on "democratic centralism" and strict discipline. The Fourth Congress of the Comintern (1922) seems to have launched a drive towards more centralization and homogenization within the world Communist movement. The internal discipline of Freemasonry, essentially a secret society, clashed with the discipline of the Communist Party. I guess you could say that Communist Masons are unequally bound! The fact that most Masons were non-Communist and "bourgeois" simply compounded the dual loyalty problem. The solution was simple: expell all Masons, and bar them forever from re-entering the French Communist Party. Only the repentant ones were allowed to stay, but were barred from serving in leading positions for a period of two years. The anti-Masonic resolution says surprisingly little about the philosophical views of the Masons, simply brushing them aside as mysticism and saying that it's grossly immature for a Communist to believe in such things. Together with the Masons, the Comintern also expelled members of the League for the Rights of Man, another "bourgeois" organization with no mystical dimensions.

I'm not sure what happened next, although I suspect that the ban on Masonry is still enforced by most Communist parties. However, few leftist groups really give a damn, since people interested in Masonry are usually singularly uninterested in Communism and Marxism - and, I suppose, vice versa. It's a self-enforcing ban.

And then there are the exceptions... I *did* manage to find one leftist group with a very specific anti-Masonic paranoia: the ultra-small International Communist Current (ICC). The ICC believes in their own version of conspiracy theory, according to which the bourgeoisie has "Machiavellian consciousness", consciously rigs election results even in Western democracies, etc. If so, secret societies must play a prominent role, which indeed they do according to the ICC. The secret societies are also used to attack the Communist movement: witness Bakunin, Mazzini and (surprise) the Grand Orient. Apparently, Martinism is the prime conduit of occult infiltration of the revolutionary movement, etc. etc. See the ICC's article "Workers' Movement: Marxism against Freemasonry", available on the web.

So next time somebody tells you about the grand Communist-Jewish-Masonic conspiracy, slap them in the face with this book and the ICC's article! :D

OK, that was today's lesson in Ashtar Command weird-lore...