The Platform of the Communist International

http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/1st-congress/platform.htm
http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/1st-congress/platform.htm
Publisher:  Third International (Comintern)
Year Published:  1919
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX7209

Adopted by the founding congress of the Third International, March 1919.

Abstract: 
Excerpt:
Communism is now rising from the ruins of the capitalist system; this new system is the only way out of the historic crisis that faces humanity. Opportunists who put forward the utopian demand for the reconstruction of the capitalist economic system in order to defer socialisation only postpone a resolution of the crisis and create the possibility of utter ruin. Communist revolution is the best - is indeed the only possible - means by which society's truly productive force, the proletariat, and society itself can be saved.

Proletarian dictatorship does not involve any sharing out of the means of production and exchange. On the contrary, the greatest possible centralisation of the productive forces and the subordination of all production to a single plan is the aim.

The first steps towards the socialisation of the whole economy include: the socialisation of the apparatus of those big banks at present controlling production; the seizure of all the economic institutions of the capitalist state by bringing them under the control of proletarian state power; the nationalisation of all industries organised in syndicates and trusts and of those branches of industry in which the concentration and centralisation of capital makes nationalisation technically possible; and the nationalisation of agricultural estates and their transformation into publicly managed agricultural units.

Subject Headings

Insert T_CxShareButtonsHorizontal.html here