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.