This short was produced for the Peoples School for Marxist-Leninist Studies class on R. Palme Dutt’s “Fascism and Social Revolution”. To learn more, visit https://peoplesschool.us/.
What Was the “Third Period”?
The “Third Period” refers to an analysis which was developed at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, or Comintern, in 1928. The analysis at the time was that the struggle between Communists and Capitalists was entering a final stage which necessitated a change in tactics.
The “First Period” began with the proletarian revolutions of the 1910s, of which only the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia survived.
The “Second Period”, which spanned most of the 1920s, consisted of the re-consolidation of the Capitalist forces after these series of revolutions. However, the contradictions present in the Capitalist countries at the time soon brought them to the point of crisis.
The “Third Period”, then, was thought to be the beginning of the final decline of Capitalism, as economic issues compounded to this acute stage in the late 1920s.
The tactics of the “Third Period” matched the Comintern’s view that the working class was in its final assault against Capital. The social democratic parties, which had previous betrayed the proletarian revolutions of the First Period, were referred to as “social fascists”, being identified as the enemies of the Communist movement. Accordingly, Communists advocated the creation of “Red Unions”, which were Communist-led trade unions separate from the larger social democratic, class collaborationist trade unions in the Capitalist countries.
The “Third Period” analysis was changed significantly, however, at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, because of the spread of fascism. The order of the day was now for Communists to work to form the Popular Front, which was a coalition of all anti-fascist forces in society, including the social democrats which had previously been considered the enemy.
