Communism around the globe

• The establishment of the USSR gives Communism a home base to operate from in 1919
• In 1919 the World's Marxists will convene in Bern, Switzerland in 3rd Communist International, and here a permanent split develops
  • Social Democrats: mild Marxists, union, participate in government welfare state, health care, head party in Weimar Republic, Samuel J Gompers and Eugene V Debs in the US
  • Hardcore Communists: revolutionary overthrow of capitalists and imperialist regimes, Lenin, Trotsky, Bolsheviks
• Communists triumph at the 3rd International and remove it permanently to Moscow.
• The Comintern
  • They rename the 3rd International Convention the Comintern, and it becomes the world Revolutionary center.
  • The Center of the World Communism is headed by Grigori Zinoviev, who funds and supports communism across the world
  • The Comintern provides aid, arms, and ideology to other communists movements in the West after 1918
  • They eventually failed in Germany (Spartakist) and in Hungary (Bela Kun) due to the aberration of those other Marxists, the Social Democrats in traditional political parties.
  • After 1921, their focus in the west is the defeat of the "Mensheviks" in the class war.
  • The Comintern finds fertile ground as an agent of anti-imperialism more so than the anti-capitalism. In Asia they also do not have a competitive form of Marxism to fight.
  • Asia will see the spread of Communism most effectively due in no small part to the proximity of USSR.