In 1935, the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow abandoned its “Third Period” policy, first adopted in 1928, which espoused hostility toward political reformism in the name of revolution. The policy anticipated a worldwide crisis that would lead to the breakdown of capitalist and colonial rule, leaving an opening for communist parties across the world to seize power. Fascism was uniformly abhorred and seen as a symptom of this crisis, not its cause. The ideological successes of fascism were attributable, ultimately, to capitalists pulling the emergency brake through total violence, an ultra-nationalistic mutation of their economic system. If communists remained disciplined, independent from liberals and progressives, and were ready to seize the revolutionary moment, the fascist era was bound to pass, the Comintern reasoned.
By 1934, this perception had changed very rapidly. No longer bound just to Italy, fascism reached Germany in 1933 with the Nazi seizure of power. Socialists and communists were among the first to be persecuted. The same happened in the following year in Austria, when workers trying to fight the rise of Engelbert Dollfuss’s imposition of fascist rule were defeated. In France, the French Communist Party raised the alarm as well, fearing that their country was next. It was first the French communists who broke with the Third Period policy, despite pressure from Moscow not to do so. They entered into a “Popular Front” with liberals and progressives. When that strategy later seemed geopolitically advantageous to Moscow, Stalin declared the Popular Front strategy to be that of the whole Comintern.
“Sometime in late 1934 or 1935,” the Black Marxist C. L. R. James reflected, “there was a knock at my door and I went to the door and there was George Padmore… He said, “I’ve left those people you know.” C. L. R. James was shocked. Padmore was referring to the Comintern. Padmore, the Caribbean trade unionist and journalist, was one of the world’s most famous Black communists. He was an ardent anti-fascist as well. Because he believed that fascism was an outgrowth of imperialism, he thought that the best way to fight it was to fight empire.
To the disillusioned anti-imperialists, the new communist strategy of uniting with the grand democracies of Europe meant “that in the future we are going to be soft and not attack strongly the democratic imperialists which are Britain, France and the United States,” to use James’ paraphrase. For publicly reprimanding Moscow, Padmore paid the price. He was stripped from his editorship of the Black newspaper the Negro Worker, and his leadership of the International Trade Committee of Negro Workers, both of which he founded. Heartbroken, Padmore left the Comintern.