Issuing body: Emergency Conference of the Fourth International
The Colonial World and the Second Imperialist War
1. Half the world lives in colonial slavery. Colonies and subject countries cover more than half the earth's surface. More than a billion people, yellow, brown, and black, are subjected to the rule of the tiny minority of super-capitalists who dominate the Western world. The struggle of this great mass of dispossessed people for liberation represents one of the two great progressive forces of modern society. The other is the fight of the proletariat of the advanced countries for its emancipation. The key to the whole strategy of the world socialist revolution lies in the successful conjunction of the two. Nationalism in the Western countries is a weapon of capitalist power, used to pit exploited peoples against one another in wars waged by economic and military means for the sole profit of the capitalists. But in the backward and oppressed countries of the East, nationalist movements form an integral component of the struggle against world imperialism. As such, they must be supported to the fullest extent possible by the working class of the entire Western world. When the workers of East and West, united, proceed to the conquest of power, abolish capitalism, and build a world socialist economy, the great national entities of the world will for the first time be able to live side by side amid a flourishing world culture proudly displaying the multitude of its racial and ethnic petals. That is the image of democracy and equality under world socialism.
2. Under the banner of bourgeois "democracy" and "equality," the great empires were built on the exploitation of the proletariat at home and the enslavement of the impoverished peoples overseas. Throughout the three centuries of their expansion, the capitalist nations waged endless wars to acquire and extend their colonial domains, to defend themselves against the invasions of their rivals, or to crush the revolts of the colonized peoples. In 1914-1918, the great imperialist powers fought to redivide an already-divided world. They succeeded only in hastening the catastrophic decline of the capitalist system. The revolutions that emerged from the war nevertheless failed to establish, in either the advanced Western countries or the backward Eastern countries, the proletarian power that alone could and can reorganize the world on a socialist basis. The workers triumphed and took power only in Russia. Capitalism survived, but only to inflict on the world the fresh agonies of its death throes. Twenty-two years after the armistice of 1918, ravaged by a crisis they were powerless to overcome, the imperialists have once again plunged the world into bloody conflict: Germany, Italy, and Japan, to "expand or die"; Britain, France, and the United States, to defend and strengthen their world hegemony.
3. The present imperialist war is the continuation of the struggle begun in 1914 for control not only of Europe but of the wealth, labor, and markets of both hemispheres, of Africa and Asia, of Latin America and Oceania. Britain is fighting once again to preserve its gigantic empire of 450 million people spread over a quarter of the globe: ten black or yellow slaves for every Briton, 100 square kilometers of dominated territory for every quarter square kilometer of the mother country. France is fighting not only to dominate the European continent but also to control the 75 million slaves of its Asian and African colonies. The lesser slaveholders — Holland, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain — face dismemberment, fully aware that the countries they have hitherto plundered without outside interference are today the stakes of the war. Germany is fighting openly to seize these spoils for itself. Italy, jackal-like, wants its share of the remains. Japan has waged a war of expansion in China for seven years already and is on the verge of conflict with the United States for control of the Pacific, for the riches of China and India. American imperialism, which emerged from the last war as creditor to the world, intends to emerge from this one as its undisputed master. But the final outcome does not depend on the imperialist plunderers alone. They have resumed their armed struggle for world domination. But the war fronts they have opened will crack under the revolutions of the workers of every country. In the empires they seek to conquer or defend, the national and colonial wars and the never wholly defeated revolutions of the years that followed the last war will also be reborn, on an incomparably vaster scale than before.
4. In 1914-1918, Britain and France successfully defended their possessions against the first German challenge. They divided up the German colonies between them and fought over the remains of the Turkish empire. But the war had strained the imperialist world to the point where its weakest link snapped. The October Revolution in Russia shook the whole system. All of Central Europe was thrown into convulsion. In the colonies, nationalist movements, long confined and stillborn, were swept up in the new revolutionary tide. When Versailles revealed the full perfidy concealed behind the Allies' promises of the "self-determination of nations," revolt spread through virtually every vast possession of the imperialist victors. The grievances accumulated and buried in the subject countries during centuries of oppression burst forth in a series of tremendous explosions. For more than ten years, wars of national liberation were fought, the slave battled the master, in almost every dominated country on the face of the earth.
5. The Allies' world war against Germany continued after 1918 in the form of a world war waged by the Allies against the peoples they intended to keep under their yoke. In response to the Irish demand for freedom, England sent in the Black and Tans. The promises of independence generously granted during the war to the Arab peoples of the Near and Middle East took the form of imperialism's iron yoke, imposed and maintained by bombs, bayonets, and gallows. Nationalist insurrections ravaged Egypt and the rest of the Muslim world. Only the Turks won their independence. The rest of the Levant was forcibly brought under imperialist control. To the nationalist revolts that had begun in India during the war, the British responded in 1919 with the Amritsar massacre, and British guns have never since fallen completely silent in that richest of all colonies. General strikes and uprisings occurred in Kenya, the Congo, and other parts of Africa. The Druze revolt in Syria in 1925 nearly toppled French power. In Morocco, in 1925-1926, the French joined the Spanish in crushing the Rif revolt led by Abd el-Krim. From 1926 to 1930, the French resorted to indiscriminate massacre to stem repeated uprisings in Indochina. In 1926-1927, the workers and peasants of Indonesia rose up against the rule of Dutch "democracy," exercised by whip, machine gun, and bomber. In 1925-1927, China, prey to every power for a century, was convulsed by the greatest of the postwar national revolutions.
6. But imperialism managed to survive the war and to get the better of the colonial uprisings. In Europe, with the exception of Russia, the workers' revolutions were crushed with the help of the traitors of the Social Democratic parties of the Second International. The Russian workers succeeded in repelling the armed intervention of the powers but remained tragically isolated. This isolation, combined with Russia's backwardness, favored the growth of the bureaucracy symbolized by Stalin. The Soviet Union entered its long and painful period of degeneration. Western capitalism entered, in parallel, a period of relative stabilization. This combination of factors allowed the imperialists to emerge victorious from the national and colonial wars that followed the war in Europe.
7. Imperialism maintained its power in the colonies and semi-colonies above all through terror. Thousands were massacred and thousands more perished in prison and in deportation between 1919 and 1929. But brute force alone was no longer enough. With the participation of the broad masses of workers and peasants, the colonial movements grew to a scale hitherto unequalled. The imperialists therefore reached out to the national exploiters (landowners and would-be capitalists) to win them over and use them as shields against the utterly destitute masses. The privileges offered were fairly limited, but sufficient to bring the dominant sections of the various ruling classes of these countries into the imperialist camp. Ireland was granted "Free State" status. India was given a "constitution," and Gandhi rendered the British a signal service by stubbornly diverting the nationalist struggle into the path of compromise. In Egypt, after crushing the nationalist revolt of 1919 with an expeditionary force of 60,000 men, the British eventually came to terms with the national bourgeoisie and granted Egypt a vague semblance of independence. Iraq, and later Syria, became "independent" dependencies. In China, in 1925-1927, workers and peasants rose up in the greatest mass revolt of that decade. But the Communist International, under Stalin's leadership, yoked the workers and peasants to the national bourgeoisie, which in turn came to terms with the imperialists. By uniting to support Chiang Kai-shek against the mass movement, the imperialists succeeded in damming the revolutionary tide that had for a time threatened to drive them definitively from their entrenched positions in Asia.
8. If this procedure offered the imperialist rulers a temporary "solution," it did not resolve the burning problems of the colonial peoples, did not lift them out of backwardness, and left no room for even a relative growth of the productive forces. On the contrary, it accelerated the expropriation of the colonial petty bourgeoisie, the enserfment of the colonial peasantry, and increased the burden on the colonial proletariat. The concessions made by the imperialists to the national exploiters were fairly meagre, but from the onset of the 1929 economic crisis they could not even sustain them. The crisis, on the contrary, exacerbated the antagonisms within the imperialist camp and struck fresh blows against the oppressed peoples. Japan began its expedition into China in 1931. Italy subjugated Ethiopia in 1935. The new rifts among the powers rapidly led to the outbreak of the new world conflict in 1939. For the colonies, the new imperialist war offers only the prospect of intensified exploitation, regardless of whether the old masters remain or new masters take their place.
9. Capitalism has already fully demonstrated on a world scale that, as a system of organization, it no longer corresponds to the development of the productive forces. It can no longer even guarantee the workers of the advanced countries the bare minimum for subsistence. Should it manage to survive this war, the totalitarian form it had already assumed in the poor countries (Italy, Germany, the Balkans) even before the conflict will soon become general. Although the war is only just beginning, this process is already clearly visible in France and Britain. In the colonies, imperialist rule has in the past choked off economic development and perpetuated the backwardness of economic and social relations in their most oppressive forms. Should an imperialist "solution" to the present world conflict be imposed, an even higher rate of exploitation will be imposed on the colonies, and the servitude of the past will be reinforced and multiplied many times over. The Western Allies are once again making promises of "freedom" and "cooperation" for the day after their victory in this war. But to believe such promises is to open the way to the cruel disappointments of the Versailles of the future. Germany, for its part, does not trouble itself with deceptive illusions but fights openly to dominate the peoples it can conquer only by fire and sword.
10. The hopes for the liberation of the colonial peoples are thus bound up more clearly than ever with the emancipation of the workers of the whole world. The colonies will be liberated politically, economically, and culturally only when the workers of the advanced countries put an end to capitalist power and, together with the backward peoples, undertake the reorganization of the world economy on a new footing, directing it toward social needs rather than monopoly profits. Only in this way will the colonial and semi-colonial countries be able to emerge from their various degrees of backwardness and take their place as an integral part of an advancing world socialist republic. Belatedly drawn into the orbit of the world economy, these countries must accomplish a gigantic leap forward, economically and politically, to bring themselves into line with the other nations. Their backwardness finds its most cruel expression in the persistence of feudal and semi-feudal relations that shackle multitudes of peasants. To this yoke the imperialists have added that of monopoly capital, acting either directly or through their local agents (such as the compradores, and later the bankers, of China). Thus the slightest attempt at even the most elementary reorganization of society on national, democratic lines brings the colonial masses into conflict with world imperialism.
11. The national bourgeoisie of the backward countries is incapable of carrying out this transformation, even partially, since it would mean the abolition of the very system of exploitation on which its own position in society rests. The Russian Revolution of 1917 provided positive proof that a backward country can make this great leap forward only if the working class is capable of taking the leadership of the agrarian revolution and directing the democratic struggle toward a socialist solution under proletarian power. The abortive national struggles of the colonial countries from 1919 to 1931, in India and China as elsewhere, were led by the national bourgeoisie. They served only to confirm that national and democratic revolutions in the colonies can be carried through to success only by the proletariat in collaboration with the workers of the advanced countries. The national and democratic transformation of the backward countries will be possible only within a socialist world.
12. Nonetheless, democratic and transitional slogans remain just as valid, especially in the relatively more advanced dominated countries such as China and India. The slogan of a national or constituent assembly remains the most powerful lever for bringing the masses into struggle. But in raising this slogan, the revolutionary party of the workers must invest it with the full content of the agrarian revolution and the struggle for national liberation. Otherwise it becomes an easy tool of deception in the hands of the national bourgeoisie, as happened in China with the help of the Comintern in 1927, and happens again today. The democratic struggle must not be left in the hands of the national bourgeoisie; rather, in a situation of a rising mass movement, it must find expression in the creation of workers', peasants', and soldiers' councils at the local, provincial, and national levels, serving as organs of mass struggle and, sooner or later, as organs of workers' power. Only such a power, opposed to that of the national bourgeoisie, will be capable of carrying the democratic revolution through to completion by freeing the peasants — and the land itself — from the grip of both native and foreign exploiters.
13. In this struggle, the guiding line of the workers' party must be to preserve its own independence and that of the working class as a separate and distinct political force. In China, in 1927, the Comintern subordinated the Chinese Communist Party to the bourgeois-national Kuomintang, the Chinese working class to the national bourgeoisie, and in the end the latter succeeded in crushing the mass movement in exchange for a few crumbs from the imperialist table. Although the conditions of struggle vary considerably from one colony to another, above all according to the degree of backwardness, the Chinese experience of 1925-1927 remains a classic example, a salutary lesson for all who fight for the liberation of the oppressed peoples of the East. The proletariat of India and China will guide the entire colonial world and will, in turn, draw strength, direction, and support from the workers of the West. For it is only in this way that the world will be conquered, rebuilt, and freed forever from war and oppression, from hunger and ignorance.