Back in 2017, Modern History Review (Vol. 20, No. 1) included a guide to The Marxists Internet Archive (MIA), a vast online collection of materials relating to social and political history: marxists.org. The collection stretches back to the Magna Carta and the Peasants’ Revolt and includes the full text of the key work cited by contemporary opponents of socialism: Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. However, the main focus of MIA is on major documents of the modern left, especially the Marxist movement. It includes writing by many socialist and other thinkers in this tradition, including the complete works of Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. In addition, it has large collections on various left-wing institutions. One of these is devoted to the Communist International (Comintern).
Comintern was founded in Moscow in 1919 in order to help spread the Russian Revolution by overthrowing capitalism on a world scale. It was set up to replace the pre-war Second International (Comintern is sometimes referred to as the Third International), which had tried to bring all major socialist movements together but had exploded in acrimonious debates about supporting or opposing participation in and support for the First World War. Comintern lasted until 1943 when it was disbanded because its hostility to capitalism was incompatible with the wartime Grand Alliance of Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union, and jeopardised Stalin’s hopes that the alliance would continue once the war was over.
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