4 - The discovery of America

Summary

In 1928, the Comintern made ‘the discovery of America’ as its leaders said. They were not people given to using mots d'esprit, and more than a debatable sense of humour, what the expression revealed was a conception of world historical development and the role of the International in that process. That is, Socialism had to follow the steps of capitalism some four centuries before and thus departing from Europe, should land first in Asia and later in America.

The leaders of the Comintern also wanted to indicate that they had discovered both the United States as a world power and the revolutionary potentialities of the Latin American societies. The United States was a country they felt themselves able to understand as it was an industrialized capitalist society, but in Latin America they were landing in unknown territory. Notwithstanding their lack of knowledge, the Comintern proposed to the inhabitants that they begin a revolutionary process (a euphemism for plain revolution) before knowing what kind of societies they were dealing with, and therefore, what kind of revolution those societies needed. It is easy to understand why the Comintern behaved in this way toward Latin America. Far distant from the centre of world revolution, its revolutionary process was conceived initially as a consequence of European revolution, and as a ‘support’ of the proletarian revolution there and in the United States.