Issuing body: Conference for the Fourth International (Geneva)
To the Enslaved Peoples of Morocco
To all colonial peoples oppressed by the imperialists.
You, like us, proletarians the whole world over, suffer the same ills, the same sufferings, the same chains: those of imperialist slavery.
There was a time when the imperialist bandits of Europe and of the other continents, under the growing pressure of the revolutionary organizations of the proletarians they exploit in their own countries, sought to solve their difficulties at the expense of the colonized peoples. By making themselves the supporters of the imperialist pirates in conquering and dominating you, the workers of Europe and of the other oppressor countries made themselves, unknowingly, the accomplices of their own exploiters. For a people that oppresses another people cannot itself be free.
But since then capitalism has grown old. It is everywhere in full decomposition. It is no longer capable of ensuring the development of world human society. Only the socialist solution can bring the world out of its present chaos and give humanity its free flowering. Yet the imperialist bandits have no thought of disappearing. And after having used the proletarians of their own countries to subjugate and exploit you, they now have recourse to you to fight and defeat the proletarians who are rising up against them to free the world from the imperialist chains. Such is the case in Spain today.
Woe to you, oppressed peoples of Morocco and of the other colonized countries, if, in your turn, you make yourselves the accomplices of your imperialist oppressors. The road to your liberation — like that of the workers of the imperialist countries — lies in the common struggle against capitalist exploitation.
Only the alliance of the oppressed peoples with the proletarians of the oppressor countries can free both from the domination of their common enemies: the capitalists of the entire world.
Let us take as demonstration only the following facts.
Italian imperialism has made Abyssinia its bloody prey. Never before have such infamous methods been employed in the conquest of other countries. The Negus appealed to the League of Nations. But how could this society of bandits, created to sanction the present partition of the world, listen to the appeal of the Abyssinian people; how could it prevent the Italian pirates from establishing themselves on the Ethiopian plateau? What was needed was to rouse the oppressed peoples of Africa to throw all the imperialist bandits into the sea; what was needed was to bring about the union of the oppressed peoples with the working class of Europe and of the other continents.
The same is true of what is happening in Palestine. The British government has taken hold of Palestine to protect the route to India and its oil interests in Mesopotamia. In order to keep this position, the British imperialist bandits stoke racial hatred between Jews and Arabs, ceaselessly provoking bloody struggles between the one and the other. So long as the Jewish workers make themselves the accomplices of the capitalists, agents of British imperialism; so long as the Arab workers do not seek the alliance of the Jewish workers and of their brothers in India to defeat their common enemy: British imperialism — the latter, posing as peacemaker between them, will not cease to coin money from their blood by making them slaughter one another.
In the Far East, we find ourselves confronted every day with fresh Japanese aggressions in China. Just like Italian imperialism, Japanese imperialism seeks to divert the people it oppresses on its own territory from revolutionary struggle by driving it to the conquest of other peoples in China. The French imperialism of the Blums and the Daladiers is no gentler in Indochina, in North Africa, in Syria — everywhere that, under the shadow of its tricolour flag, it exploits and oppresses the peoples of the conquered countries.
As in 1914, a new imperialist war is on the point of breaking out for a new partition of the world. The same imperialists who are preparing this new war have no scruples about arming the colonial peoples when it is a matter of leading them against the people risen up in their own country, as is the case in Spain today. Thus we see that the struggle for national liberation and the socialist revolution are closely bound together.
Peace means the liberation of the oppressed peoples.
The liberation of the oppressed peoples means the overthrow of world capitalism: the international socialist revolution.
To bar the road to fascism in Europe and on the other continents means holding out a hand to the oppressed peoples, freeing the colonial peoples.
The organizations fighting for the Fourth International, faithful to the teaching of Lenin and of the October revolution, hold out a fraternal hand to the peoples fighting for their national emancipation.
The Fourth International salutes the heroic struggle of the Ethiopian people against Mussolini's bombs and flame-throwers and against the treachery of the League of Nations; it supports the Arab people in its efforts to free itself from British domination.
Ireland, in 1919 and 1921, and today Egypt, show that even minimal concessions can be wrung from the imperialists only through revolutionary mass struggle.[1]
The Fourth International condemns the policy of the Second International, which continues to adopt resolutions on the right of nations to self-determination while at the same time supporting its own capitalists in the domination of the colonial peoples. The Labour government of MacDonald in Great Britain and that of Vandervelde in Belgium treated the colonial peoples in the same way as the conservative or other governments; while the Popular Front governments in France and Spain continue the exploitation of the colonies without change. Had the Popular Front government in Spain taken immediate measures to help the Moroccan peoples free themselves, fascism would never have had a base from which to attack the Spanish workers and peasants.
The Third International is the principal inspirer of the Popular Front and of its reactionary policy. It calls on the workers and peasants of the whole world to fight for democracy against fascism. The worker in the factories of Bombay, the Hindu peasant, the millions of native Africans stripped of their land and toiling in the imperialist mines for 10 shillings a month, will refuse to be deceived by the Third International into taking up arms for any imperialist power whatsoever, whether democratic or fascist. They will instead seize the occasion to fight boldly and mercilessly for their own national and economic freedom.
The Fourth International declares to them that its sections in Europe, Asia, Africa and America will all carry on their struggle against their own imperialism, in time of war as in time of peace, and will fight together with all the colonial peoples for the overthrow of their common enemy — world capitalism.
## Notes
1. The struggles in Ireland against the English occupation, 1919–1921, led to the establishment of the Irish Free State in July 1921. The anti-imperialist mobilizations in Egypt forced England to end its direct political control of the country by signing the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of August 1936. [Editorial footnote, R. Prager]