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The Communist, Third International or Comintern was founded in 1919 by those few Marxists who believed that the old parties of the left had betrayed the working class cause by supporting their own countries, their own bourgeoisies, in the First World War. This article aims to consider to what extent the Comintern continued to uphold internationalism, concentrating on a specific aspect of the question, one that, at least in western historiography, has been little discussed. In a period when the centre of revolution was moving from Europe to the East, did the Comintern radically break with the entrenched Euro-Centrism of the old parties? It be argued that after an initial period in which it paid far greater attention to the revolutionary movement in the colonies and semi-colonies of imperialism, the Comintern reverted to Euro-centrism, supporting in the Second World War the defence of their imperialist interests around by the allied imperialist powers. The one revolutionary gain of that period, the Chinese revolution of 1949, was achieved by a Communist Party which disregarded the Comintern.

Influenced by developments in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the British Communist Party (CP) began to treat its rivals on the far left, principally the Trotskyists, as class rather than political enemies. Surveillance, including the maintenance of dossiers, began in 1932, but was greatly heightened in the late 1930s, as international tensions, notably the Nazi threat to the Soviet Union, increased. Less attention was paid to the Trotskyists in the later years of the Second World War and in the immediate post-war period, but was intensified during the Party crisis which followed the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party. Later, the CP was faced with additional rivals, the Maoists, to monitor. Surveillance came to an end in the 1970s as sectarian attitudes abated and the CP entered its terminal decline.

For a few years after its foundation in 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) attempted, energetically prompted by the Comintern, to work in solidarity with anticolonial movements in the British Empire. But after the Nazi victory in Germany the Comintern's principal concern was to defend the Soviet Union and the liberal democracies against the threat of fascism. British communists criticized the British Government for failing to defend the Empire against the threat from its imperial rivals. After the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in 1941 they vigorously supported the British war effort, including the defense of Empire. This was not though simply a manifestation of chauvinism. British communists believed that imperialism was suffering a strategic defeat by “progressive” forces and that colonial freedom would follow the defeat of fascism. These chimerical notions were greatly strengthened by the allies' promises of postwar peace, prosperity and international cooperation. In the last year or so of war British communists were clearly worried that these promises would not be redeemed, but nevertheless supported British reassertion of power in such places as Greece, Burma and Malaya. For the great majority of British communists, these were secondary matters when seen in the context of Labour's election victory of 1945 and its promised program of social-imperialist reform.

In the wake of the Teheran Conference of 1943, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) adopted the political line that later became known as “Browderism.” The Party dissolved itself in favor of a loose Communist Political Association, declared an effective end to the class struggle and argued that the war-time alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States could continue into the postwar era. The political content of “Browderism” scarcely changed until the eruption of the Cold War later in the 1940s. The British Communist Party, no less than that of the USA, had seen Teheran as an indication that in the postwar world there need be no return to the fierce class struggle characteristic of the prewar decades. It abandoned the insurrectionary model provided by the Bolsheviks, and set out to provide mettle for the wider labor movement rather than act as a vanguard party. Though some elements on the Party’s left sternly criticized the leadership’s post-Teheran policies, their comprehensive defeat ...

The formation of the Cominform in 1947 was a decisive moment in the Cold War. Although many rank-and-file activists in the Labour and Communist parties in Great Britain and Australia continued to cooperate with each other, the formal relationship between the two parties sharply deteriorated. In Britain, the formation of the Cominform shattered the Communist Party's hopes of post-war class peace. Communists' critical attitude to the Labour Party became openly hostile. However, no fundamental change to Communist Party policy occurred. In industry, the Party became more militant but, generally, continued to pursue an approach that involved collaboration more than confrontation. In Australia, the situation was different. Cominform perspectives significantly altered the position of the Communist Party, which shifted from conciliation to intransigence, from a desire to cooperate with the Labour Party to an intention to 'liquidate' reformism. Enmity was mutual: influenced by both the Cold War environment and the increasingly powerful anti-communist Industrial Groups, the hostility of labour to communism became palpable. The article examines the post-war decline of both communist parties in the context of the interplay between Communist Party policy, Labour Party antagonism, and the international environment of the early Cold War.