The Theory and Practice of Proletarian Internationalism

A book about a single word and what a state did to it.

The word is internationalism - the oldest idea in the socialist movement, older than the parties and older than the Russian Revolution: that working people in every country share an interest cutting across their borders and their flags. This volume was produced by the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences, by its section on the philosophical aspects of proletarian internationalism and national relations, and the closing line of its foreword says who it was for - friends abroad.

It sets out, with the calm authority of the Soviet philosophical establishment, exactly what internationalism had come to mean by the middle of the 1970s, and its authors are careful and explicit about the change. They distinguish two terms and rank them: proletarian internationalism and socialist internationalism are of the same type, but the second is a new and higher stage of the first. Proletarian internationalism belonged to the era of the workers' movement under capitalism; socialist internationalism is what the idea becomes once socialist states exist and have interests to defend.

The book supplies both halves of that story, the original idea and its substitute, and the distance between them is the most important thing in it.

Written to hold a line under three pressures at once: detente, the Sino-Soviet split, and the eight years since the tanks went into Prague.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.