Lydia, Isaac and Rudy join Emmanuel Farjoun from Matzpen for a discussion on his 1983 piece Class divisions in Israeli society and how the divisions have changed in the present day. We discuss the changing strength of the Palestinians inside Israel and how that is reflected in their changing political aims, the differences between whiteness in the US and the construction of race in Israel, and the BDS movement internationally.
Isaac and Rudy join Moshé Machover, one of the four founding members of the Israeli Socialist Organization, better known as Matzpen after the name of their publication for a discussion on the group’s origins, how their anti-zionist consciousness originated and developed, their marginalization by Israeli society during the 1967 war and how Arab/Jewish solidarity was built. The conversation then pivots to how the Israeli Class Structure has changed since its early analysis by Matzpen and what that bodes for the future. They also address the topics of diasporism and how Israel compares to other settler (and non-settler) societies in the world.
Further resources:
Youtube documentary on Matzpen, Anti-Zionist Israelis
Moshé’s articles on Belling the Cat, Colonialism and the Natives and Hebrew self-determination . Check out his Weekly Worker archive.
Karl Marx’s own ambiguous and sometimes contradictory views on colonialism meant that the Second International would debate over the correct view on the matter. Donald Parkinson gives an overview of these debates, arguing that Communists today must unite around a clear anti-colonial and anti-imperialist program.
Today, when Marxism seems to be under constant intellectual assault, we hear the claim that Marxism is a Eurocentric ideology, that it is a master narrative of the European world. It could be tempting to simply dismiss this claim on its face. After all, most Marxists today live in the non-European and non-white world, inspired by the role Marxism played in anti-colonial struggles. Yet we should always pay attention to our critics, regardless of how bad-faith they may be. They can help us understand our own blind spots and weaknesses and better understand ourselves. As a result, we should take the question of Eurocentrism seriously and engage in a critical self-reflection of our own ideas. A closer look at both the works of Marx and the history of Marxist politics tells us that there were indeed Eurocentric strains in Marx’s thought. Yet through its capacity to critically assess itself Marxism has, to varying degrees of success, overcome its Eurocentrism to develop a true universalism, against a false universalism that only serves to cover for a deeper European provincialism.
Marxism developed in Europe as a worldview designed to secure the emancipation of the world from class society. This is the source of internal tension within Marxism: on one end there is the universalist scope of Marxism, an ideology designed to unite all of humanity in a common struggle. On the other end, there is the source of Marxism in the continent of Europe, an ideology that was shaped by the specific processes of capitalist development that propelled Europe into an economic power standing above the rest of the world. It would be foolish to simply dismiss charges that Marxism contains Eurocentric elements that exist in tension with its universalism. There is no better example of these tensions in Marxism than the different views on colonialism within the movement.
Colonialism in the history of Marxist thought served as a challenge for Marxism to overcome its own Eurocentrism. Within the works of Marx one can find different approaches to colonialism that could be read as apologetic to colonial expansion or firmly opposed to it, supporting the struggles of colonized people against their dispossession. As a result, the followers of Marx who formed the mass parties that came to be known as the Second International did not have a single position on colonialism that they could take from Marx. There was instead a series of often contradictory positions on colonialism within his work that provided justifications both for supporting colonialism and opposing it. There was also a theoretical heritage within Marxism, economistic developmentalism, that would be used to justify colonialism in the name of socialism.
To better understand these tensions in Marxism, we should examine Marx’s views on colonialism and the first major debates on colonialism in the Second International. These debates are an important part of a greater historical narrative, in which Marxism developed as an ideology in Europe and became the siren song of countless anti-colonial revolts against European domination. Marxism was able to overcome its initial Eurocentrism, but not without a struggle internal to itself and its intellectuals. In better understanding the history of this intellectual struggle, we can better identify the theoretical errors that held Marxism back from becoming a truly universalist worldview, which could serve as a political creed for the emancipation of the world, not only Europe.
To begin, it is necessary to look at Marx’s own views on colonialism and their development over his lifespan. Marx’s views on colonialism were never straightforward, and taken as a whole can be seen as inconsistent and contradictory, leaving room for interpretation. It is this openness for interpretation that allowed colonialism to be an open question for his initial followers. Within Marx one can find, on the one hand, a view of economic development and historical progress suggesting that European colonialism was a harbinger of progress, bringing the “uncivilized world” into “civilization” by laying the seeds for capitalist development and therefore proletarian revolution. And on the other hand, one can find in the later works of Marx the beginnings of an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial politics.
In his well-known Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, Marx comes across as almost a colonial apologist of sorts, pointing to the rise of the capitalist world market as an accomplishment of a historically progressive bourgeoisie, and colonialism as a means through which this world market is established:
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.1
Referencing “Chinese walls”, Marx strongly suggests that England’s First Opium War against China was in the long run historically necessary and progressive, bringing a “barbarian nation” into “civilization”. For Marx in 1848, colonialism wasn’t so much something to be condemned and battled, as it was part of a historical process through which capitalism would conquer the world and create the necessary pre-conditions for a communist future, with all nations passing through a similar route of development. However, with time, Marx’s views on the matter would develop.
After moving to London in 1849, Marx would take up a career as a journalist and wrote a series of articles on non-western societies. One of the first of these was the 1853 piece The British Rule in India. In this article, Marx expresses sympathy with the victims of British colonialism in India, while at the same time seeing British imperialism as essentially progressive, claiming that
“English interference, having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindu spinner and weaver, dissolved these semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, to speak the truth the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”2
Marx suggests that through its colonial process, the British are essentially bringing a stagnant and backward society into history, and only through its interference and disruption of this social formation can India become a real actor on the world stage of history. However, this one-sided view would not remain consistent in Marx himself. The conclusion to his 1853 series of articles on India, The Future Results of British Rule in India, would argue for a social revolution in Britain to challenge colonial policy and also point to the possibility of a movement for national independence from British rule. He would also condemn the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization” which “lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”3
Marx’s ambiguity here can be seen as a result of what the scholar Erica Benner calls a “two-pronged assault on the conflicting reactions of British MP’s to the government-sponsored annexation of ‘native’ Indian states.”4 On one side of this conflict were reformers who denounced the colonization as a crime pure and simple, while on the other end were those who saw colonialism as a historical necessity. For Marx, the former were ineffectual moralists while the latter simply apologists for bourgeois rule under the guise of patriotism. Marx sought to stake out a position between these two camps. To simply morally condemn colonialism seemed to suggest a return to a mythic pre-contact golden age, while to affirm the right of the Empire to annex India would be justifying naked bourgeois interests. By seeking out a position beyond this binary Marx sought to develop a position that would be able to reap the “benefits” of colonization while still looking beyond it.
In the latter years of the 1850’s Marx’s views on colonialism would develop remarkably in contrast to his earlier views. In his 1857-59 series of articles on China and the Second Opium War, any lauding of the progressive effects of colonialism in China is absent. Rather, Marx would focus on heavily condemning French and British colonialism, going so far as to gleefully report the British and French taking 500 casualties and mocking British editorialists who proclaimed their superiority to the Chinese. Marx would also espouse a more anti-colonialist position in his articles on the Indian Revolt of 1857-58, and in a letter to Engels in January, 1858 would tell his close intellectual and political partner that “India is now our best ally.”5
In the course of the 1850s, Marx would move from viewing colonialism as progressive to supporting anti-colonial uprisings. He would likewise support independence for Ireland from Great Britain and Poland from the Russian Empire, agitating for these positions within the First International and the British labor movement. Marx and Engels both would take the position that British workers must support the national liberation of Ireland in order to fight against anti-Irish chauvinism in the labor movement. This was a development from an earlier position that Ireland’s liberation would come through incorporation into a socialist multinational Britain.6 Rather than seeing the separation of Ireland as impossible, it was now inevitable if the unity of the labor movement was to be reached. Only after the separation of Ireland from the British Empire could a multinational socialist state be formed. The merging of nations into a socialist republic would have to occur on the terms of the Irish, not the British:
The first condition for emancipation here – the overthrow of the British landed oligarchy – remains an impossibility, because its bastion here cannot here be stormed so long as it holds its strongly entrenched outpost in Ireland. But once affairs are in the hands of the Irish people itself, once it is made its own legislator and ruler, once it becomes autonomous, the abolition there of the landed aristocracy (to a large extent the persons as the English landlords) will be infinitely easier than here, because in Ireland it is not merely a simple economic question but at the same time a national question, for the landlords there are not, like those in England, the traditional dignitaries and representatives of the nation but its morally hated oppressors.7
From this one can see the development of the Leninist position of the right of nations to self-determination. This position was able to condemn colonialism forthright, without resorting to a moralistic fetishization of traditional pre-colonial society. Marx linked the liberation of the working class in the metropole with the national liberation of the colony, creating a vision of revolution that put agency in the hands of colonized rather than resigning them to passive objects to be liberated by the working class of the more advanced nations. Engels would continue this thesis after the death of Marx in regards to India and other colonies, stating that the proletariat in the metropole could “force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing.” Socialism could not be brought to colonized people through imperialist bayonets; instead the colonies were to be “led as rapidly as possible to independence.”8
From this evidence it is clear that Marx (and Engels) began with a more ambiguous and even positive view of colonialism, and moved to a more critical view, developing the beginnings of an anti-colonial Marxism. Yet these anti-colonial positions were mostly found in fragments throughout letters rather than systematized in popular agitational material. As a result, when developing a politics based on the views of Marx, his followers could selectively pick out specific passages from his works to bolster positions that were apologetic of colonialism. While we should be critical of such a scholastic approach to politics, there can be no doubt that many of the Marxists of the Second International justified their positions on readings of Marx.
In 1889 the foundation of the Second International saw the beginning of an era of Marxism without Marx, and in 1895 without Engels. The wisdom of the founders would soon no longer be a guiding light for the movement, and a new generation of intellectuals would have to carry the torch. The work of Marx and Engels, while providing a theoretical framework for questions like colonialism and imperialism, hardly provided a full, all-encompassing answer to properly deal with these questions. A single party line that could be applied wasn’t developed. It would be up to debate and deliberation within the union to determine the correct way forward.
In 1896, a year after the death of Engels, the debate would flare up, the two most prominent voices in the dispute being the German Eduard Bernstein and the British Belfort Bax. These debates were triggered by rising tensions between Armenians and the Sultan’s regime in Turkey, with Germany poised to intervene in the Armenians’ favor. In his 1896 article German Social Democracy and the Turkish Troubles, Bernstein would argue strongly in favor of supporting the Armenians, using the rhetoric of more “advanced” nations having a historic duty to “civilize savages”. His arguments would be hard to distinguish from the rhetoric of the colonialists themselves, claiming:
Africa harbors tribes who claim the right to trade in slaves and who can be prevented from doing so only by the civilized nations of Europe. Their revolts against the latter do not engage our sympathy and will in certain circumstances evoke our active opposition. The same applies to those barbaric and semi barbaric races who make a regular living invading neighboring agricultural peoples, by stealing cattle, ect. Races who are hostile or incapable of civilization cannot claim our sympathy when they revolt against civilization.9
Bernstein would of course aim to give his blatant colonial apologism a humanitarian aspect, adding, “We will condemn and oppose certain methods of subjugating savages.”10 Yet in the end Bernstein upheld that colonialism was progressive and should be supported, that it was part of a historical process in which backwards societies would be brought into civilization. He therefore argues for German support in the cause of the Armenians against Turkey using this line of thought.
Belfort Bax, an SDF11 theorist who, like Bernstein, was also controversial, would respond to Bernstein with the harshly titled Our German Fabian Convert: or Socialism According to Bernstein. Beginning his response by accusing Bernstein of ‘philistinism’, Bax would go on to attack Bernstein’s arguments on three fronts. The first was that socialism was not the equivalent to what the bourgeois colonialists called civilization but rather its negation, that the “civilization” imposed on colonized populations was nothing of the type socialists should support.
In his second point, Bax would argue that while it was correct that capitalism was a precondition for socialism, it was not necessary for capitalism to be spread to every single corner of the earth:
“The existing European races and their offshoots without spreading themselves beyond their present seats, are quite adequate to effect Social Revolution, meanwhile leaving savage and barbaric communities to work out their own social salvation in their own way. The absorption of such communities into the socialistic world-order would then only be a question of time.”12
This would tie into the third part of Bax’s rebuttal of Bernstein, which was that rather than spreading capitalism to create the preconditions of socialism, colonialism actually gave capitalism a longer lease on life. Capitalist overproduction, an expression of its own internal contradictions, was the motor force behind the drive for capitalist nations to compete for colonial territories and engage in colonial conquests. By opening up new markets for commodities and cheap labor, capitalism would “soften” its internal crisis tendencies, hence delaying the “final crisis” that would allow for its revolutionary destruction. Hence Bax would make the direct opposite argument as Bernstein: rather than supporting colonial ventures, albeit in a “humane” manner, Social Democracy should support all resistance movements against colonialism regardless of how reactionary they may be, as their victory would increase the internal contradictions of capitalism and speed up its demise.
Bernstein’s next response to Bax, Amongst the Philistines: A Rejoinder to Belfort Bax, would primarily repeat his prior arguments: that “savage races” deserve no sympathy from socialists despite the need for condemning the most brutal forms of colonial subjugation. What exact methods of subjugation were acceptable and which weren’t isn’t clarified by Bernstein, the only clear part of this argument being that subjugation was necessary. This time Bernstein would also make references to the works of Marx and Engels, claiming that Bax was an idealist who was ignorant of what their own positions would have been on this matter. This reveals how the contradictory positions on colonialism in the writings of Marx would leave these issues up to open debate.13
The next round of debates between Bax and Bernstein would resume in late 1897, with Bax’s Colonial Policy and Chauvinism. The arguments in this piece show a development in thought in response to the positions of Bernstein, which Bernstein presented as authentically Marxist due to his upholding of capitalism as a progressive force based on free-labor spread through colonialism. Responding to this notion, Bax would argue that the labor regimes in the colonized nations were not in fact progressive regimes based on “free” waged labor, but a system which “combines all the evils of both systems, modern wage-labor and caste-slavery, without possessing the decisive advantage of the latter.”14 He would also claim that the chauvinism associated with the Anglo-Saxon domination which came with colonialism would be an obstacle to a future brotherhood of humanity, by bringing about a world culture dominated by a single ethnic group. This point would be buttressed with a claim that his stance was not merely a moral one based on abstract notions of human rights, but rather one which was based on a concrete strategy to overthrow capitalism.15 Also of importance is to note that Bax would also draw from the writings of Marx and Engels to make these arguments, countering the use of their arguments by Bernstein.
Bernstein would respond to these arguments with a two-part article, The Struggle of Social Democracy and the Social Revolution. Here he accuses Bax of seeing no deprivations and oppression where capitalism doesn’t exist, essentially holding onto a romantic view of non-capitalist societies. Countering Bax’s argument that the labor regimes introduced in the colonies aren’t progressive and actually based on free labor, Bernstein makes the argument that these initially harsh and un-democratic regimes will naturally evolve into democratic ones as if this tendency is inscribed into capitalism itself. Regardless of the cost, for Bernstein “the savages are better off under European rule.”16
With regards to Bax’s concerns about Anglo-Saxon cultural dominance, Bernstein simply argues that this is countered by France and Germany stepping up to join in as competitors in colonialism. Even if this wasn’t the case, Bernstein sees the cultures victim to colonialism as having no national life of their own, hence being better off assimilated. Not only is this argument obviously chauvinistic in acting as if only Europeans have an authentic culture, but it acts as if the same critique that Bax makes wouldn’t also apply to European dominance and not just Anglo-Saxon dominance.17
Also key to Bernstein’s reply to Bax is his rebuttal of the claim that opposing colonialism will hasten the “final crisis” of capitalism. Bernstein argues against the idea that capitalism will collapse due to its internal crisis tendencies, and argues instead for gradually reforming capitalism to transform it into socialism. It was through this argument that Bernstein would find himself in a political camp that completely diverged from the revolutionary Marxism of the SPD majority, his camp in the party being labelled as “revisionists”.18 Bernstein began from a position of defending colonialism on orthodox Marxist grounds, only to find himself exiting orthodox Marxism in the process.
Karl Kautsky, possibly the most well-respected intellectual voice in the Second International, would initially side with Bernstein in the debate, calling Bax an idealist.19 Yet as the debate progressed Kautsky’s views on colonialism would develop so as to lean more in the direction of Bax’s position in its political conclusion, and point official SPD policy in a more anti-colonial direction. By the time of the 1898 Stuttgart Conference, Kautsky would openly condemn Bernstein’s views. Despite his condemnation of Bernstein, a closer look at Kautsky’s writings on the topic of colonialism reveal a degree of moral ambiguity.
In his 1898 article Past and Recent Colonial Policy, Kautsky lays out his basic framework for understanding colonialism. His argument rests on two basic claims. The first is that industrial capitalists do not have a material interest in colonialism, and instead favor a policy of free trade referred to as Manchesterism. For Kautsky, Manchesterism is not only based on laissez-faire economic policy but also “preaches peace”.20 To the extent that industrial capitalists are interested in colonialism, it is for export markets, which do not always align with colonial policies. Following this claim, Kautsky makes the argument that the class basis for colonialism is basically pre-capitalist aristocratic elites who form the military/colonial bureaucracy and finance/commercial capital. Colonialism is not a policy of the historically progressive industrial capitalist, but a reactionary and backwards policy based on the interests of classes antagonistic to industrial capital. In Kautsky’s analysis:
“the same industrial capitalist, who at home will resist any worker protection law without any qualms, and have no compunction about whipping women and children in his bagnio, becomes a philanthropist in the colonies – an energetic foe of the slave trade and slavery.”21
To explain Germany’s rising interest in imperialism, Kautsky claims that it is to maintain competition with the French and British, whose colonialism is fueled by the pre-capitalist elites and financial capitalists. This argument essentially turns Bernstein’s on its head, countering that colonialism is not a product of capitalism’s progressive tendencies but rather a holdover of reactionary classes. However we can find inconsistent aspects of this argument. For example, he ascribes to settler colonies “based on work” a progressive quality in contrast to colonies based on pure rent extraction. This not only confuses his own argument but reveals moral blindness to the genocidal nature of settler colonialism.22 In 1883 Kautsky would make a similar argument, counterposing the “progressive” and “democratic” colonialism of the USA and England to that of Germany.23 This is in sharp contrast to the arguments made by Bax, which while not purely based on appeals to morality, are strongly based in a moral condemnation of all colonialism. This attitude toward settler-colonialism is also apparent in his 1899 article The War in South Africa, which simultaneously argues for supporting the Boers against the British Empire and asserts, “We, by contrast, condemn modern colonial policy everywhere.”24
The SPD conference in Mainz on September 17-21, 1900 would see the party take up an official resolution on imperialism. Rosa Luxemburg would emerge as a powerful anti-colonial voice, condemning the war against China while urging for active anti-war agitation. The mood of the conference was overall anti-imperialist, with delegates condemning Germany’s intervention in the war against China. Contrary to the views of Bernstein, the resolution passed would state that military conquest was an all-out reactionary policy:
“Social Democracy, as the enemy of any oppression and exploitation of men by men, protests most emphatically against the policy of robbery and conquest. It demands that the desirable and necessary cultural and commercial relations between all peoples of the earth be carried out in such a way that the rights, freedoms and independence of these peoples be respected and protected, and that they be won over for the tasks of modern culture and civilization only by means of education and example. The methods employed at present by the bourgeoisie and the military rulers of all nations are a bloody mockery of culture and civilization.”25
Ultimately it would be the positions more aligned with those of Kautsky and Bax that would win out as the official policy of the SPD. Bernstein would represent a pro-colonialist minority in the party, with some members of the International like Henriette Roland Holst claiming that the mere existence of this minority in the party shouldn’t be tolerated. Days after the Mainz conference the entire International would have a conference in Paris and a similar resolution would be passed, this time with Luxemburg authoring a resolution that not only condemned imperialism but described it as a necessary consequence of capitalism’s newest contradictions.26
The SPD’s Dresden Congress in 1903 and the Sixth International Congress in 1904 would further affirm an anti-imperialist stance. Yet while international congresses were of symbolic importance to the Social Democratic movement (seen as “international workers’ parliaments”), one must take into account the federal structure of the party. Each national party was ultimately autonomous in its decision-making authority, being left to itself to make its own programs and tactical decisions. The congresses were taken seriously by parties but ultimately no central body had the authority to enforce their decisions until the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) was formed at the Paris conference in 1900. Even then, the actual authority of the ISB was ill-defined, and the tendency towards autonomy prevailed. This would mean that parties in the International primarily saw themselves as national parties who served workers on a national basis rather than sections of a single world party.27 The extent to which resolutions would actually be binding on parties was therefore very ambiguous.
In 1907 the SPD would face a disappointing loss in the electoral campaign known as the Hottentot elections. The Hottentot elections occurred in the context of a pro-colonial nationalist fervor caused by the German colonial war and genocide in South-West Africa, where approximately 65,000 Hereros were massacred in the period from 1904-1908. While the number of eligible voters to the Reichstag election had risen significantly (76.1% in 1903 to 84.7% in 1907), the SPD would lose almost half of its delegates in the Reichstag (81 seats to 43 seats).28 Expecting that more eligible voters would mean more electoral success, the results of this defeat would throw the SPD into a period of doubt and reignite debates over colonial policy.
According to Carl E. Schorske the districts the SPD had maintained in the elections were primarily the working class dominated ones. The section of the electorate lost was the salaried professionals and small shopkeepers, who had fallen prey to the nationalist fervor of the German campaign in South-West Africa. According to Kautsky, the bourgeoisie had promoted the future colonial state as a more attractive alternative to socialism for these strata, something Social Democracy had greatly underestimated. The right wing of the party would respond by asserting that excessive radicalism had cost them votes; the more left-wing elements would point to the Hottentot election as proving the unreliable nature of this “petty-bourgeois” stratum. The radicals in the party therefore saw this as a reason to increase attacks on nationalism and colonial policy while the rightists saw it as a reason to push for a softer stance on colonial policy.29
Alexander Parvus, belonging to the left-wing of the party, would write an in-depth study of the colonial question in response to the Hottentot failure, Colonies and Capitalism in Twentieth Century. Unlike Kautsky’s 1898 pamphlet, Parvus would place colonialism in the context of the contradictions of the modern capitalist system, with overproduction, the falling rate of profit and the merging of production and exchange in finance capital as the motor force behind colonial policies, rather than pre-capitalist elites.30 He cited the increasing imperialist policies of the British Empire as symptoms of its decline as a hegemonic world power, scrambling to hold onto supremacy as it collapses.31 From this theoretical study, Parvus came to the conclusion that colonial policies are symptoms of the decline of capitalism that will present the proletariat with an opportunity for revolutionary action. No political support for colonial policy of any kind was acceptable in Parvus’ view.32
Following the Hottentot failure was the Stuttgart Conference of 1907. This conference would see the colonialism debates resume, this time with a victory for the right. The conclusions made by Parvus, that colonialism was a symptom of capitalist crisis that must be combated with revolutionary action, would be rejected by the majority of conference delegates. In a shift to the right, Luxemburg’s anti-imperialist resolution from the 1900 congress would be dropped and replaced through a process of contentious debate.
One of these debates was between two delegates of the German party, Eduard David and George Ledebour. David quotes August Bebel, a highly respected leader of the party, as saying “it makes a big difference how colonial policy is conducted. If representatives of civilized countries come as liberators to the alien peoples in order to bring them the benefits of culture and civilization, then we as Social Democrats will be the first to support such colonizing as a civilizing mission.”33 The fact this quote is from August Bebel, one of the most important leaders of the Social Democratic movement, is revealing. It shows that for many Social Democrats, opposition to colonialism wasn’t opposition to European supremacy and was still premised on the legitimacy of a European civilizing mission. It was merely the methods of colonialism that were opposed, methods that were to be replaced by peaceful ones that would make Europeans welcome missionaries of progress.
Ledebour would respond by polemicizing against Bebel as well as David, arguing that Bebel’s position asserted the possibility that colonial policy could be anything other than the existing horror and inhumanity that it was. Rather than calling for a more “humane” colonialism, he says that only the resistance of the exploited can lessen the brutalities of colonialism. After Ledebour spoke, a delegate from Belgium, Modeste Terwagne, would argue that if the occupation of the Congo were ended that “industry would be seriously damaged” and that “men utilize all the riches of globe, wherever they may be situated.”34
Ledebour and a Dutch Socialist, Hendrick van Kol, would draft a resolution in compromise with the socialist colonizers who condemned existing colonial policy while neglecting to condemn colonial policy under capitalism in general. Terwagne would introduce an amendment that affirmed the potential for a socialist colonial policy that acted as a civilizing force, while David would add another amendment saying that “the congress regards the colonial idea as such as an integral part of the socialist movement’s universal goals for civilization.”35 David’s amendments was rejected and Terwagne’s was incorporated in the final draft which was accepted by a majority of the congress:
“Socialism strives to develop the productive forces of the entire globe and to lead all peoples to the highest form of civilization. The congress therefore does not reject in principle every colonial policy. Under a socialist regime, colonization could be a force for civilization.”36
While the resolution also contained commitments for parliamentary delegates to “fight against merciless exploitation and bondage” and “advocate reforms to improve the lot of the native peoples” it failed to reject colonialism as such and instead aimed to reform the existing colonial occupations. This turn to the right disgusted Luxemburg, Parvus and Kautsky. However, the turn towards what was essentially a pro-colonial stance was a product of democratic deliberation, a process that could be reversed through open debate. By the end of the conference, Kautsky was able to build up a bloc of support that would defeat the original resolution by a vote of 128 against 108, with 10 abstentions. Replacing the original resolution would be a resolution that would state that the congress “condemns the barbaric methods of capitalist colonization” and claim “the civilizing mission that capitalist society claims to serve is no more than a veil for its lust for conquest and exploitation.”37
While an anti-imperialist motion did pass, 128 against 108 was hardly a vast majority of delegates. Russian Social Democrat Vladimir Lenin believed this to be a sign of growing opportunism within Social Democracy, one that needed to be battled against with vigilance. The Stuttgart conference “strikingly showed up socialist opportunism, which succumbs to bourgeois blandishments” and “revealed a negative feature in the European labour movement, one that can do no little harm to the proletarian cause, and for that reason should receive serious attention.”38 Social Democracy was not guaranteed to stick to a strict anti-imperialist platform, and such a stance would have to be battled for in the halls of congresses and in theoretical debates.
Debates on colonialism and imperialism would continue in Social Democracy, reaching an apogee when a majority of SPD Reichstag delegates would vote for war credits at the beginning of World War One, followed by the majority of other Second International parties. Ultimately Lenin’s fear of growing opportunism was proven correct. However, while one could assume that the Social Democrats who voiced opposition to colonialism most consistently would be those who vigorously opposed the war, anti-colonialists like Parvus and Belfort Bax would find themselves amongst the ‘social-patriots’ who rallied behind the war. Arguments for supporting the war would vary. In the case of Parvus it was his conclusion that it was necessary to defend the progressive German state against reactionary Czarism that led him to rally behind the Kaiser.39 If support or rejection of WWI was the ‘final test’ for Social Democrats, positions in the debates over colonialism ultimately would not serve as predictors for who would pass.
It would take the October Revolution, with its radical approach to the national question and solidarity with the struggles of colonial peoples, to truly establish an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist orthodoxy in Marxism. Lenin’s anti-colonial Marxism would inspire national liberation leaders in the colonies like Ho Chi Minh to align with the International Communist movement and deal a blow to Marxist Eurocentrism. While a blow was dealt, it wasn’t quite fatal, as European chauvinism would still haunt Marxist parties throughout the 20th Century, the most famous example being the French Communist Party’s refusal to support Algerian independence at the most crucial moment. In these instances, Euro-chauvinists were continuing an unfortunate tradition within Marxism that contested for legitimacy in the Second International using the writings of Marx himself.
The pro-colonial positions found both in Marx and in the Second International have a common theoretical basis that can be identified as Eurocentrism. According to Samir Amin, a key theoretical backdrop to the ideology of Eurocentrism is economism, defined as the view that “economic laws are considered as objective laws imposing themselves on society as forces of nature, or, in other words, as forces outside of the social relationships peculiar to capitalism.”40 Eurocentric economism reifies economic development as an inevitable process that occurs as long as “cultural” factors don’t stand in the way. It sees the uneven development of the world and the backwardness of the periphery as a product of the specific cultures of these societies being inferior to that of Europeans, barriers to economic progress that must be broken down. In contrast, the scientific socialist view sees economic development as a process contested by class struggle and the role of imperialism in reproducing the core/periphery division
In the Eurocentric ideology, the European world is seen as a world of wealth due to its unique culture while the rest of the world is held back by its culture (Asiatic stagnation for example) and only progresses to the extent it copies Europe. History is a progressive march towards modernization, and “it becomes impossible to contemplate any other future for the world other than its progressive Europeanization.”41 The future is shaped and defined by the West, which has everything to teach the rest of the world and nothing to learn from it. As a result, Western capitalism stands as a model for the planet, its mode of development universal for all countries and only held back by internal backwardness when this development fails to take hold. This chauvinist ideology took hold over Bernstein and even Marx at times, seeing the spread of colonialism as a progressive process that would enforce the development of stagnant societies.
According to the ideology of developmental economism, if not for the backwardness of the non-European world the development of capitalism would ultimately homogenize the world. Four-hundred years of global capitalist development has shown the world still heavily divided, not only between bourgeois and proletariat but between core and periphery nations. Capitalism is dominant in almost every country today, and the uneven development of the world still haunts the periphery. Bernstein’s vision of colonialism bringing capitalist “civilization” to the world has come to pass. Yet imperialism still ravages the world, creating what John Smith calls the super-exploitation of the global south by the developed capitalist nations. Capitalism has spread worldwide, but it has formed a global division of labor where the post-colonial proletariat labors for starvation wages to produce super-profits realized in the imperialist countries. According to Smith,
“…the very processes that produced modern, developed, prosperous capitalism in Europe and North America also produced backwardness, underdevelopment, and poverty in the Global South…the accelerated spread of capitalist social relations among Southern nations has been far more effective in dissolving traditional economies and ties to the land than in absorbing into wage labor those made destitute by the process.”42
The historical verdict seems to have been made in favor of the arguments of Bax and the anti-imperialists rather than Bernstein. Yet we must not pretend that this debate is merely of historical importance. Today we face an imperialism more based in systematically enforced economic underdevelopment, which is maintained through imperialist police actions. Rather than direct colonialism, it is primarily economic imperialism of the more informal kind that devastates the world. As a result, the defenders of imperialism amongst the left come in different forms than the likes of Bernstein. They are not the colonial apologists of old but advocates of US intervention as progressive in certain situations or those who refuse to be critical of social democrats who vote for imperialist war budgets. There are also those who refuse to take up demands for the deconstruction of settler-colonial states, like the United States, and the national liberation of those still under settler-colonial occupation, in the name of focusing on bread-and-butter demands. As the socialist movement develops, we must learn from the failures of the Second International to clearly establish an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist position in its ranks, which exists not only on paper but in the class awareness of the rank and file.
Matthew Strupp lays out the politics of revolutionary defeatism in contrast to the approaches of third-campism and third-worldism.
In April 1964, at a luxury hotel overlooking Lake Geneva, a young Jean Ziegler, at that time a communist militant, asked Che Guevara, for whom he was serving as chauffeur, if he could come to the Congo with him as a fighter in the commandante’s upcoming guerilla campaign. Che replied, pointing at the city of Geneva, “Here is the brain of the monster. Your fight is here.”1 Che Guevara, though certainly not a first-world chauvinist, recognized the crucial role communists in the imperialist countries would have to play if the global revolutionary movement were to be successful. How then, as communists in close proximity to the brain of the monster, or in its belly, as Che is reported to have put it on another occasion, can we effectively stand against the interests of “our” imperialist governments? The answer to that question is the policy of revolutionary defeatism. This article will go over the origins and meaning of defeatism, take a look at its complexities with the help of some examples, and take up the challenge posed to it by the politics of both third-worldism and third-campism.
The logic of revolutionary defeatism flows from the basic Marxist premise that the proletariat is an international class, and that in order to triumph on a global scale it needs to coordinate its political struggle internationally. This means that when workers in one country are faced with actions by “their” state that pose a threat to the working class of another country, they must be loyal to their comrades abroad rather than their masters at home. Rather than be content with simple condemnations, they must also pursue an active policy against their state’s ability to victimize the members of their class in the other country. This means strike actions in strategic industries, dissemination of defeatist propaganda in the armed forces, and organizing enlisted soldiers against their officers. In the case of a particularly unpopular or difficult war, all politics tends to be reoriented around the war question, and, if the state has been destabilized by the demands of the war and the ongoing defeatist activity of the workers’ movement, this can lead to an immediate struggle for power and the possibility of proletarian victory. If no such conditions are present, the defeatist policy can serve to train the proletariat and its political movement to oppose the predatory behavior of its state and, in practical terms, blunt the business-end of imperialism and mitigate its devastating consequences for the working class abroad.
This policy of defeatism developed alongside the growth of mass-working class politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the proletarian movement grew to the point where its international policy became a live and important question. There were many positions bandied about in this period, some more or less defeatist, others placing the workers’ movement squarely behind national defense. Many individual socialists, including Marx and Engels, varied in their advocacy of one or another. An early expression of a policy of revolutionary defeatism can be seen in Engels’ 1875 letter to August Bebel, in which he criticizes the newly drafted Gotha Unification Program of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) for downplaying the need for international unity of the workers’ movement. Engels writes:
“…the principle that the workers’ movement is an international one is, to all intents and purposes, utterly denied in respect of the present, and this by men who, for the space of five years and under the most difficult conditions, upheld that principle in the most laudable manner. The German workers’ position in the van of the European movement rests essentially on their genuinely international attitude during the war; no other proletariat would have behaved so well. And now this principle is to be denied by them at a moment when, everywhere abroad, workers are stressing it all the more by reason of the efforts made by governments to suppress every attempt at its practical application in an organisation! And what is left of the internationalism of the workers’ movement? The dim prospect — not even of subsequent co-operation among European workers with a view to their liberation — nay, but of a future ‘international brotherhood of peoples’ — of your Peace League bourgeois ‘United States of Europe’!”2
Engels is congratulating the German workers’ movement for their internationalist behavior in war but chiding them for retreating from this internationalism in their political program. The war he is referring to is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Marx had actually initially been German defensist in this war but changed his position after German troops went on the offensive.3 The German workers’ movement as a whole, though, mostly opposed the war in an admirable fashion, and Engels claims this was the reason for their esteem in the international movement. Not only did its political leaders condemn the war, but its organizations also carried out strikes in vital war industries in the Rhineland. This active stance of opposition to the war and active coordination of international political activity by the working class is what Engels thought was missing from this part of the Gotha Program, and he thought it was a step down from the truly international perspective of the International Workingmens’ Association. Its drafters included the vague internationalist language of the “Peace League bourgeois”, but made no mention of the practical tasks of the movement in this respect. Engels argued that the workers’ movement needed to coordinate its activities on an international scale, and that included acting in an internationalist fashion during war-time.
Nor did Engels limit his expression of a precursor to revolutionary defeatism to wars within Europe, where there was a developed working-class movement that could be destroyed in another country by an invasion from one’s own. He thought it was also applicable in matters of “colonial policy”, and that workers in imperialist countries had the political task of organized opposition to imperialist exploitation. He believed that if they failed in this task they would become political accomplices of their bourgeoisie. In an 1858 letter to Marx he wrote:
“the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat. In the case of a nation which exploits the entire world this is, of course, justified to some extent.”4
These writings of Engels’ express two important features of Lenin’s revolutionary defeatist policy in World War I and that of the Communist International after the war. Namely, the importance of active, organized efforts to hamper the ability of one’s own state to carry out the business of war and imperialism, and the applicability of the policy to both inter-imperialist wars and to colonial and semi-colonial/predatory imperialist wars.
The Second Socialist International received the first major test of its ability to pursue a defeatist policy with the onset of World War One– and it failed spectacularly. Up until that point, the German SPD, the model party of the International, had followed an admirable policy of voting down all state budgets of the German Empire in the Reichstag under the slogan “For this system, not one man and not one penny!”, as Wilhelm Liebknecht declared at the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich.5 This policy allowed the German party to think of its parliamentary activity with a lens of radical opposition, through which they saw themselves as infiltrators in the enemy camp, intent on causing as much trouble for the state and its ability to rule as possible and securing whatever measures they could to benefit the movement outside the parliament. They made use of all the procedural stops they had at their disposal along the way, and used their parliamentary immunity to decry abuses like violence against the workers’ movement and German colonial wars in ways that would otherwise be illegal, though this didn’t keep August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknect, for many years the SPD’s two representatives in the Reichstag, from being convicted of treason and imprisoned for two years for their opposition to the Franco-Prussian War, particularly for linking opposition to German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to support for the Paris Commune.6 This was not a revolutionary defeatist policy in itself and the behavior of socialists in relation to the armed forces in wartime remained untheorized, but it was an important attitude for a party of revolutionaries to adopt towards their own state and its warfighting capacity. Politicians the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has elected in the United States, unfortunately, do not seem to see their activity in the legislature in this way and seem to think they are there more to “get things done” than to “hold things up” for the benefit of the movement. The DSA has also failed to adopt a “not one penny” position on the military budget. A resolution to do so was introduced at the 2019 convention, but was not championed by either of the main factions there.
In August 1914 the SPD’s anti-militarist discipline broke down, as many of its representatives in the Reichstag voted for German war credits and much of the movement fell in line behind the war effort. The same happened in all the other parties of the International in the belligerent countries, with the exception of Russia and Serbia. The divide between those who supported the war and those who opposed it did not follow the existing pre-war political divisions. War socialists were drawn from the right, left, and center of the International. Some made the decision on the basis of “national defense” or out of an unwillingness to become unacceptable to bourgeois politics when they were winning so many reforms for the working class, others to defend French liberty from the Kaiser, or German liberty from the Tsar, still others to defeat British finance capital’s grip on the world, or to spark a revolution, or to train the proletariat in the martial spirit for the waging of the class struggle.7 No matter how they justified it though, these socialists were all feeding the proletariat into the meat grinder of imperialist war. There were no progressive belligerents in the First World War. Categories of “aggressor” and “victim” did not apply. It was, as Lenin put it, an “imperialist war for the division and redivision” of the spoils of global exploitation.8
The immediate reaction of those in the socialist movement opposed to the war after the capitulation of so many of the national parties was to organize a series of conferences at Zimmerwald (1915), Kienthal (1916), and Stockholm (1917), to work out a socialist peace policy. At Zimmerwald there soon emerged a left, who favored a policy of class struggle against the war, essentially a revolutionary defeatist position, since carrying it out would detract from the coherence and fighting ability of the armed forces. Lenin sided with this left but said they hadn’t gone far enough, not only did a policy of class struggle against the war, or as he put it: revolutionary defeatism, need to be put forward, but socialists loyal to the international proletariat had to organize themselves separately in order to be able to carry it out.9 This struggle would be a political one, directed at the armed forces of the capitalist state and aiming for their breakup under the pressure of defeatist propaganda and fraternization between the troops of the belligerent countries. On the concrete form of this struggle Lenin wrote, in November of 1914, in The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International:
“War is no chance happening, no “sin” as is thought by Christian priests (who are no whit behind the opportunists in preaching patriotism, humanity and peace), but an inevitable stage of capitalism, just as legitimate a form of the capitalist way of life as peace is. Present-day war is a people’s war. What follows from this truth is not that we must swim with the “popular” current of chauvinism, but that the class contradictions dividing the nations continue to exist in wartime and manifest themselves in conditions of war. Refusal to serve with the forces, anti-war strikes, etc., are sheer nonsense, the miserable and cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against the armed bourgeoisie, vain yearning for the destruction of capitalism without a desperate civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations.”10
Lenin did not think that the adoption of a revolutionary defeatist position by communists in the imperialist countries was only applicable to the specific conditions of World War I, where the conflict was reactionary on all sides and the proletariat had well developed political organizations in all the belligerent countries who could turn the struggle against the war into an immediate struggle for power. In response to the objection of the Italian socialist leader Serrati to a resolution proposed by the Zimmerwald left that advocated a class struggle against the war, that such a resolution would be moot because the war was likely to end quickly, Lenin said: “I do not agree with Serrati that the resolution will appear either too early or too late. After this war, other, mainly colonial, wars will be waged. Unless the proletariat turns off the social-imperialist way, proletarian solidarity will be completely destroyed; that is why we must determine common tactics.”11 Here, the revolutionary defeatist policy is not simply a path to the immediate struggle for power, as it indeed was in the case of WWI, rather it’s related to the adoption of a particular attitude to the activities of one’s own state in general. For communists in the imperialist countries, this means fighting against the wars your country wages to maintain its grip over its colonies and semi-colonies, using the same tactics you would use in the case of a “dual defeatism” scenario, where communists in all the belligerent countries are defeatist in relation to their country’s war effort, in an inter-imperialist war that is reactionary on all sides.
However, these two scenarios should not be confused. Although Lenin claimed the policy pursued in response to one should be put forward in the case of the other, this should not be extended to the communists in the oppressed country. There is no question of being “defeatist” in relation to a progressive war for national liberation. The Communist International made this clear in condition 8 of its 21 conditions for affiliation:
“Parties in countries whose bourgeoisie possess colonies and oppress other nations must pursue a most well-defined and clear-cut policy in respect of colonies and oppressed nations. Any party wishing to join the Third International must ruthlessly expose the colonial machinations of the imperialists of its “own” country, must support—in deed, not merely in word—every colonial liberation movement, demand the expulsion of its compatriot imperialists from the colonies, inculcate in the hearts of the workers of its own country an attitude of true brotherhood with the working population of the colonies and the oppressed nations, and conduct systematic agitation among the armed forces against all oppression of the colonial peoples.”12
The important point here is that revolutionary defeatism in a predatory imperialist war is only a prescription for communists and proletarian movements in the imperialist countries. Today this means those that benefit from a flow of value coming from global wage arbitrage and the super-exploitation of newly proletarianized former peasants in the former colonial and semi-colonial world. In such a war, the question of defeatism or defensism in the oppressed countries, in the realm of practical policy, is precisely a question for communists in the oppressed countries themselves. This question should be decided on the basis of how best to serve the ends of national liberation and social revolution, taking the particular national political conditions and those of the war into account, but the victory of the oppressed country should be favored over that of the imperialist country.
The Communist International itself may actually have gone too far in the direction of defensism, not in the sense of favoring the victory of the oppressed country, which should always be the case, but in the sense of the relationship of communists in the oppressed countries to their state and to other political forces. Its policy of the anti-imperialist united front was ambiguously formulated and its implementation often involved subordinating the communist parties to the bourgeois nationalist movements. The most notorious example being the case of China, where Comintern directives on the Communist Party’s relationship to the Kuomintang had to be explicitly rejected by Mao and his co-thinkers for the Chinese Revolution to triumph.13 This logic has been taken to the extreme in recent years by the Spartacist League, a far-left sect that has devoted space in their paper to putting forward a position of military support for ISIS: “We take a military side with ISIS when it targets the imperialists and forces acting as their proxies, including the Baghdad government and the Shi’ite militias as well as the Kurdish pesh merga forces in Northern Iraq and the Syrian Kurdish nationalists.”14 The cases of China and modern Iraq and Syria show that sometimes in cases of internal disorder or when the forces “resisting the imperialists” are particularly reactionary, whether the Kuomintang or ISIS, the best option for communists and the anti-imperialist struggle is for communists in the oppressed country to wage a military struggle against both the imperialists and the reactionary forces “resisting” them.
The most successful application of revolutionary defeatist tactics in the US was in the case of the Vietnam war. The best-known images of the anti-war movement in the US are of large public marches and of police repression on college campuses. The truth is that these things were actually pretty ineffective at producing a US defeat and withdrawal. Large demonstrations can do something to turn public opinion against the war and college students were able to take some actions that made a meaningful difference by taking advantage of their positions in a crucial part of the war machine: the university; but these things were not enough to halt the functioning of the most destructive imperialist military in history. We can verify this by comparing the movement against the war in Vietnam with that against the war in Iraq. As with Vietnam, the Iraq war was opposed by millions of demonstrators, including by between 6 and 11 million people on a single day, February 15, 2003, the largest single-day protest in world history; yet the war kept going.15
What was the difference in Vietnam? The answer lies both in the brilliant military strategy of the Vietnamese liberation movement under the leadership of the Communist Party, and in the practical application of a revolutionary defeatist policy by sections of the US far-left and workers’ movement. This meant disrupting the recruitment of the US armed forces, and especially, organizing opposition within the military itself. This resulted in a situation where “search-and-evade” tactics became the ordinary state of affairs for many units, as common soldiers deliberately avoided combat or simulated the appearance and sounds of combat to deceive their officers, over 600 soldiers carried out “fraggings”, murders or attempted murders of their officers, often with frag grenades, and groups of soldiers occasionally carried out organized mutinies. By June 1971 this state of widespread organized resistance to the war led military historian Colonel Robert D. Heinl to write an article titled The Collapse of the Armed Forces, in which he claimed that “The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.”16 This was undeniably a key factor in the breakdown of US warfighting ability in Vietnam and the eventual US withdrawal.
Some insist that the example of war resisters in the US military during the occupation of Vietnam, and by extension, the entire premise of a policy of active revolutionary defeatism, is entirely useless to today’s revolutionary movement because the nature of the US military has been entirely transformed by the transition to an all-volunteer force in the late-70’s and 80’s. What this position misses is the extent to which the claim that the US military is an all-volunteer force is itself an ideological artifice crafted by the US military establishment and the degree to which poverty itself still acts as a draft. The US military does not make public information on the income-levels or class positions of the families from which it recruits, only their geographic distribution. The fact that the localities that enlistees are drawn from are more affluent than average does not rule out that the enlistees themselves may be poor. The higher cost of living in these areas may in fact be an additional stimulus to enlistment, and the fact that military recruiters regularly use material incentives, like the promise of a free education, to prey on working-class kids, is no secret. This means that the class divide in the armed forces has not entirely been eliminated, that officers’ interests still conflict with those of enlistees, and that the possibility of mass war resistance from within the ranks of the armed forces, especially as part of a coordinated working-class struggle against imperialist war, still lies within reach.
With the assassination at the beginning of this year of high ranking Iranian general Qassim Soleimani at the hands of the United States, the prospect of war with Iran became a very real possibility. In fact, a section of the US foreign policy establishment has been hellbent on bombing or invading Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that established the current Iranian regime, and the US has imposed harsh sanctions on Iran that themselves amount to a form of warfare. These sanctions have no doubt contributed to the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak in Iran, which has killed 988 and infected over 16,000, roughly 9 in 10 cases in the Middle East.17 Although the immediate worry about an invasion has died down since January, it’s still important for communists to work out what their response to such an invasion would be, because the threat remains on the table.
The main question is whether a revolutionary defeatist policy in relation to a war with Iran should be pursued or whether a Third-Campist position of “Neither Washington nor Tehran” ought to be put forward. The idea of Third-Campism, in this case, is that the political regimes of the United States and of Iran are both so reactionary that the proletariat has no stake in either side’s victory or defeat in the war and should, therefore, neither support nor actively oppose its prosecution by the imperialists. This approach is flawed. If we were considering a war between two imperialist countries on equal standing, both with reactionary governments, what this leaves out is the benefit that the proletariat in both the belligerent countries could gain by an active pursuit of a revolutionary defeatist policy. Either, it could open up the road to the seizure of power by the proletariat in one or both belligerent countries or it could only serve to train the proletarian movement in each country in the art of carrying out a struggle against “its own” state.
However, in the case of a US attack on Iran, this “soft Third-Campist” position of dual defeatism, like that implied by the left-communist International Communist Current, when it describes the Middle East after the Soleimani assassination as “dominated by [an] imperialist free for all” would also be wrong because it regards both the United States and Iran as imperialist.18 Such a war would not be reactionary and imperialist on both sides, a reactionary war by the US for the reconquest of one of its semi-colonies. It is no coincidence that the US only became hostile to the Iranian government after the ouster of its puppet the Shah, meaning that the Iranian war effort would contain elements of a progressive national liberation struggle. In the case of a US invasion, the main enemy for Iranians is not at home, their main enemy is imperialism. Communists in Iran are, of course, opposed to the political regime of the Islamic Republic for its brutal suppression of the workers’ movement and its political organizations, its regressive stance on women’s rights, and its treatment of national minorities, but they do not think it fights too vigorously against US imperialism.19 Communists in the United States should take the position: “better the defeat of US troops than their victory”, and their task would be to carry out an active policy of revolutionary defeatism against an invasion of Iran. The task of communists in Iran would be to fight off the imperialist invaders by any means necessary, including by opposing any effort by the Iranian government to disarm the Iranian proletariat as it prepares itself to resist an invasion.
There is another political strand that downplays the importance of active revolutionary defeatist politics in the imperialist countries: Third-Worldism. In this case, it is not the desirability of the proletariat in the imperialist countries carrying out a revolutionary defeatist policy that is questioned, but its political inclination to do so. All this leaves us with is joystick or sideline politics, the cheering on of great revolutionaries and great revolutionary movements, but always happening somewhere else. This makes Third-Worldism a self-fulfilling prophecy, the denial of the ability of the proletariat in the imperialist countries to challenge the imperialist bourgeoisie which exploits both them (usually rationalized by saying that proletarians in the imperialist countries are equally exploiters) and their comrade workers around the world, becomes a reason not to organize to do so. Of course a fraction of the super-profits of imperialism is sometimes distributed to workers in the imperialist countries with the aim of purchasing their loyalty to the bourgeois state. Our point is to build a movement capable of credibly offering something better than that: communism.
The idea that politics flows directly from the movement of money is an economist error, if it were true, all communist politics would be pointless, because that factor will never be in our favor. Rather, international working-class consciousness will necessarily be a subjective product of common struggle, including the anti-imperialist struggle. It is likely, as Trotsky argues in his History of the Russian Revolution, that for reasons of combined and uneven development, the world revolution will be sparked in the oppressed countries first, but that process will not ultimately be successful if revolution does not come to the imperialist countries as well.20 Most great Third-World revolutionaries have been clear about this, Che certainly was. Indeed, as the late Egyptian communist, Samir Amin wrote in Imperialism and Unequal Development:
“…Third-Worldism is strictly a European phenomenon [we may say a phenomenon of the imperialist countries]. Its proponents seize upon literary expressions, such as ‘the East wind will prevail over the West wind’ or ‘the storm centers,’ to justify the impossibility of struggle for socialism in the West, rather than grasping the fact that the necessary struggle for socialism passes, in the West, also by way of anti-imperialist struggle in Western society itself… But in no case was Third-Worldism a movement of the Third-World or in the Third-World.”21
Third-Worldism began as an optimistic reaction to successful national liberation struggles in the oppressed countries in the mid-20th century, but to the extent that it exists today, it is simply a symptom of our defeat. Third-Worldism may produce amusing artefacts like That Hate Amerikkka Beat, but it offers nothing to the practical struggle for global proletarian revolution because it refuses to even consider what might need to be done to make revolution in the imperialist countries. None of this is to discount the work of communists in the Third-World, who are doing their part in fighting imperialism and their bourgeoisie. The problem with Third-Worldism is that it’s a poor form of solidarity that looks not to the ways in which one can most practically ensure the final triumph of those one is in solidarity with.
The goal of communists in the imperialist countries should be to create, to quote once again Che Guevara, “two, three… many Vietnams”22, not in the sense Che used it, focoistic guerilla campaigns, but in the sense of successful applications of the revolutionary defeatist policy of class struggle against imperialist war, which killed the US military’s ability to maintain the occupation of that country. This means, in the case of unprogressive war, strikes in war industries, spreading defeatist propaganda in the armed forces, and organizing common soldiers against their officers and the war effort. We must also fight for a truly democratic-republican military policy in peacetime, rejecting foreign intervention by the United States and fighting for the universal arming and military training of the people and the right to freely organize in militias for the proletariat, as well as freedom of speech and association for the ranks of the present-day armed forces. “War is the continuation of politics by other means”23 and now is a time of relative peace, a time for politics, a time to build up our forces, to train them to become a honed weapon of class struggle, and “not to fritter away this daily increasing shock force in vanguard skirmishes.”24 But a time of war is coming, and we must have those “other means” at our disposal, we must be prepared to crush our enemies and to use the destructive and atrocious wars conjured up by the bourgeoisie as opportunities to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, to make war on the ruling class as a road to the seizure of power by the proletariat and the triumph of communism.
Medway Baker reviews and contextualizes a short documentary on struggles of the Wet’suwet’en against the modern Canadian state.
On February 6, the Canadian state’s police force, the RCMP, invaded Wet’suwet’en territories. On February 10, it arrested their Unist’ot’en matriarchs. It is a brutal reminder of the ongoing invasion by settler-colonial forces of the nation’s lands. This comes shortly after the Wet’suwet’en nation invoked their own laws alongside Canadian law to mandate that Coastal GasLink, which is building a pipeline on Wet’suwet’en territory against the wishes of the Wet’suwet’en people, leave their lands. Coastal GasLink has refused to comply and has called on the capitalist state to uphold its interests.
The RCMP was founded under the name North-West Mounted Police in 1873, as an explicitly colonising force, shortly after the Métis Red River Rebellion led by Louis Riel. Its duty was to protect British-Canadian interests in the vast uncolonised expanses, and extend the colonial boot as settlers flocked to occupy indigenous lands. It subjected indigenous nations to colonial law, a task that it continues to fulfill to this day. Later, the RCMP would be used to crush labour revolts and repress communists. It is fundamentally an instrument of the capitalist, settler-colonial Canadian state. The present use of the RCMP to dispossess and repress the Wet’suwet’en people is one incident among countless assaults carried out by this force.
To learn more about this struggle, I watched a short documentary produced by the Wet’suwet’en to spread the message of their fight for peace and survival. I was deeply moved by the plight of this oppressed people, and it hardened my resolve to fight against capitalism and settler-colonialism.
Invasion begins, aptly, with police harassing a Wet’suwet’en woman. It’s a stark image, this meeting at the bridge marking the entrance to the Unist’ot’en territory. Agents of the settler-colonial Canadian state stand threateningly at the border. Behind the woman there are signs declaring “No to colonial violence” and “Defend the yintah!” There is an undeclared war here. On one side, a people who have lived in this area for countless generations, trying to go about their lives in peace. On the other side, an occupying force which seeks to dispossess the Unist’ot’en in the name of capitalist accumulation. Because the Unist’ot’en find themselves in the way of the capitalists’ exploitative ventures, they are no longer citizens with equal rights; they are the enemy of capital, and they must be destroyed.
The woman in question is Freda Huson, a spokesperson of the Unist’ot’en. She and others have been fighting against a proposed pipeline through their unceded lands for years. At a protest in front of a colonial courthouse, she declares, “Everyone needs to stand up, not just indigenous people. Everyone needs to stand up to the political powers that be.” This is fundamentally an internationalist message, a message that all people, all of the dispossessed, must stand up to defend their rights and their lives from the capitalists and their state.
It’s reminiscent of another indigenous freedom fighter’s message, all the way back in 1885. Louis Riel, at the trial where he was sentenced to death for rebelling against British-Canadian colonialism, said,
“When I came into the North West in July, the first of July 1884, I found the Indians suffering. I found the half-breeds [Métis] eating the rotten pork of the Hudson Bay Company and getting sick and weak every day. Although a half-breed, and having no pretension to help the whites, I also paid attention to them. I saw they were deprived of responsible government, I saw that they were deprived of their public liberties. I remembered that half-breed meant white and Indian, and while I paid attention to the suffering Indians and the half-breeds I remembered that the greatest part of my heart and blood was white and I have directed my attention to help the Indians, to help the half-breeds and to help the whites to the best of my ability…. No one can say that the North-West was not suffering last year, particularly the Saskatchewan, for the other parts of the North-West I cannot say so much; but what I have done, and risked, and to which I have exposed myself, rested certainly on the conviction, I had to do, was called upon to do something for my country.
“It is true, gentlemen, I believed for years I had a mission, and when I speak of a mission you will understand me not as trying to play the role of insane before the grand jury so as to have a verdict of acquittal upon that ground. I believe that I have a mission, I believe I had a mission at this very time.”1
Echoing Louis Riel, Huson announces, “I know I’m doing the right thing.”
And just as the Canadian state invaded the territories controlled by Louis Riel and his comrades, we see armed agents of the state wrestling with Wet’suwet’en freedom fighters. The freedom fighters’ songs of resistance move the heart, as we watch their lands being invaded and their people being attacked. A freedom fighter tells the settler-colonial agents that their courts have no jurisdiction on Wet’suwet’en territory. To no avail. A St’at’imc woman asks the chief agent of the Canadian colonial bourgeoisie, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “When are you going to give us our rights back?” To no avail. A white woman tells Trudeau that the state’s behaviour is “appalling.”
Huson says that it’s “inspiring” to know that people all over the world of all backgrounds are standing up for the rights of the Wet’suwet’en people. Although the national oppression of the Wet’suwet’en and other indigenous nations is at the core of this conflict, it has taken on an internationalist character: people of all nations against capitalist accumulation by dispossession of the Wet’suwet’en nation, people of all nations against the rapacious destruction of the planet which we rely on to survive. This is not a narrow conflict. It is a battle in the greatest conflict humanity has ever faced: the dispossessed peoples of the world against the ruling classes, creation against destruction, life against death.
The mission of the Wet’suwet’en is in line with the communist mission: building a new world, without oppression or exploitation. It is the duty of communists to fight alongside the Wet’suwet’en and other nations oppressed by settler-colonialism against our shared oppressors, the capitalist class. It is the duty of communists to defend the right of national self-determination of these oppressed nations, and that is all they ask. “They are trying to erase us from our own land,” says Huson. She demands only that Wet’suwet’en laws be respected, that her people be allowed to live independently of the settler-colonial society and rebuild their communities on their traditional lands. It would be a crime for us not to defend these rights.
The documentary ends with Huson pronouncing, “I don’t fear anything.” Her message should inspire us all to take action to defend the dispossessed of all backgrounds, and to fight against settler-colonialism and exploitation. Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en freedom fighters! Solidarity with the people of all nations who are fighting for their liberation!
The assault on the Wet’suwet’en peoples and territories is ongoing. Presently, protests and railway blockades are taking place across the Canadian state. To learn more about the Wet’suwet’en struggle and how we can support them, visit https://unistoten.camp/. A full-length documentary is planned to be released later this year.
Translation and introduction by Örsan Şenalp and Asim Khairdean
The below is an attempt to provide an English translation of one of the key texts of the visionary militant Mirsaid Sultan Galiev, written between 1923 – 25 titled Some of our Considerations on the Basis of the Socio-political, Economic, and Cultural Development of the Turkish People of Asia and Europe. 1 We believe that Sultan Galiev’s work and writings are very relevant for today, in the contemporary world, in relation to the important debates about identity politics and the Left, decolonization, political Islam, the re-emergence of the extreme right-wing, Marxism, the Russian Revolution, Bolshevism and the new Eurasianism amongst other things. The presented text is one of the key sources in which Sultan Galiev summarizes the main tenets of his analysis on the current world situation in the given conjuncture (the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution), where he lays down an original and alternative strategy for world revolution. With this we are also publishing two supporting documents from the political trial against him which had begun in 1923, re-opened in 1928 and remained open until the final verdict was made in 1939, sentencing Galiev to execution which took place on January 28, 1940.
A decade in prison and exile divides the two supporting texts: The first document is Galiev’s testimony of December 18, 1928, and the second one is the official sentence which is dated December 8, 1939. Both of these have been translated from the Russian versions. We provide a translation of these documents in order to provide a little bit of historical and materialist context, for not only the text but the conditions of its writing and distribution and its subsequent disappearance and reemergence.
The primary text was found in the early 90s in KGB archives Box. No. 4: Volume No. 2: List No. 1. 2 The text was published in Russian (in Tatarstan) for the first time in 1995, following the opening of the archives to the public, with the following reference and with an introduction written by I. Tagirov: “Nekotorye nashi soobrazheniia ob osnovakh sotsial’no-politicheskogo, ekonomicheskogo i kul’turnogo razvitiia Tyuretskikh narodov Azii i Evropy.” The second time the article was published in 1998, this time with the title “Tezisy ob ob osnovakh sotsial’no-politicheskogo, ekonomicheskogo i kul’turnogo razvitiia Tyuretskikh narodov Azii i Evropy” in Izbrannye Trudy, together with the two accompanying texts we present below. 3
With this translation, we have tried to overcome certain problems that we encountered and we must outline them here. First of all, we had to take as the source material for our translation the Russian text which was published in the 90s. This text was arranged and kept in the archives of the Politburo / GPU and later KGB. It was difficult to determine whether the original text was written in the Tatar language by Sultan Galiev or not. If indeed the original text was in Tatar, then the translation must have been done by the GPU and if that is the case we would not know how much is possibly lost in translation from Tatar to the Russian language. The translation could have done before, during or after the trial, or even after the execution of Galiev. This would imply that the GPU could have modified the text. At any rate, it has several inconsistencies of style and apparent absences such as the abrupt ending and missing second part.
The political and historical context in which the original text was written and received by Soviet authorities and leaders, therefore, generates serious problems about the text too. This text, whose only surviving copy is that produced and kept by the GPU, was the main grounds for Sultan Galiev’s second arrest in 1928. This was under Stalin’s orders, on accusations of anti-party political activity, at the start of the first of the Stalinist purges from the Communist Party which notably Galiev survived for a further decade. During this time he was sent to exile for ten years and sentenced to death on December 8, 1939. The article was seen as the main evidence for the betrayal of Galiev and so it is worth noting some inconsistencies in the references to it by Galiev and by the GPU. For this reason, we have tried to retain the formatting as much as possible.
In his 1928 testimony, Sultan Galiev confesses that he wrote the text in 1923, and completed it in 1925, and although he planned it in two parts he claims that he then gave up on the entire idea, and so did not finish the article.4 However, we understand from his testimony and sentence that the activities he was accused of and he actually undertook were organizational activities in line with the vision already set forth. According to Galiev’s own introduction, the second part was supposed to be where he would outline the practical and organizational aspects of his political strategy, as well as the tactics about how to realize this strategy. Notably, it is the part in which the idea of a Colonial International is supposed to be expounded since this does not appear anywhere in the existing first part but does appear in both Galiev’s testimony and in the GPU’s sentence and was also picked up by Bennigsen. The GPU sentence in particular even mentions aspects of the organizational structure of the CI as outlined in the text which are conspicuously absent from the current version. Such denial as part of Galiev’s testimony might have been an act of survival under the conditions that the author found himself at the time. Obviously, the content could have been direct and sufficient evidence to get him executed immediately. However, in the lack of such evidence, it is the existing text and Galiev’s ongoing activities after 1928 that are presented as the rationale for his sentence and execution in 1939. Although Galiev denies the existence of the second part before his executors, there is a good reason to assume that the text might have been hidden or destroyed by the author, a third party close to him or other interested parties.
This leads to the next problem of the first ever reference to this key text being made in the literature by the curious figure of Alexandre Bennigsen 5, who has established fame as a ‘Cold Warrior’ having led an academic wing of the ‘nation building’ campaign under the coordination of Zbigniew Brzezinski and his right arm Paul Henze.6 This situation creates another enigma around Galiev and the present text. We do not know, for instance, how Bennigsen and his students could have managed to penetrate the KGB archives or learned about the context of the text before the archives were opened in the early 90s. It may well be that Bennigsen or his team had discovered the existence of the text as an outcome of the study of Crimean Tatars in Ottoman Archives, which was led by Bennigsen himself in the Topkapi Palace. 7 In any case, the first reference to the text by Bennigsen, to the archived material seems to be picked up and used as secondary references by others, including French Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson.8 And this reference has made Galiev’s article known to other scholars and researchers who refers to it. Bennigsen and Quelquejay thought of Sultan Galiev as the father of the Third Worldist revolutionism, for his alternative vision crystallized in the present translation about the establishment of a ‘Colonial International”, an “International of the Oppressed Peoples.” Besides this, the controversial notion of ‘Muslim National Communism’ was attributed to Galiev’s overall thought by Bennigsen for the first time and since then the notion was adopted by other authors writing about Galiev. 9 Although Bennigsen and his students have done their work in order to undermine the unity of the USSR within the Cold War framework, by using Galiev; their work has revealed the historical originality of the person of Galiev and his ideas. Galiev’s thinking and political struggle to realize his ideas, by building an alternative to the Comintern was inspired by his version of historical materialism. According to Galiev, he builds his analysis as a revision of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and Marx’s theory of capitalism. He claims to achieving this by using a methodology he claims is a more radical version of dialectical and historical materialism. Galiev renames his methodology as energetic materialism and asserts that such a method of thinking has its roots in the East before it was established by Marx and Engels in the West. Independent of Bennigsen’s objectives, what we see in the below text is Galiev’s is a highly original analysis, that can indeed be seen as a precursor of the work of Frantz Fanon, CLR James, Che Guevara, Andre Gunder Frank, Dependency and World-System theorists. Important to note that, some authors have argued that the original ideas referred to as Galievism are initially based on the thoughts developed by Mollanur Vahidov. Galiev himself confirms this, in his 1923 testimony, by mentioning Validov’s name as his mentor.10 As Bennigsen highlights in 1986, Galiev does not cite or give resource neither for his term energetic materialism nor for the predecessors of this thinking system in the East. It was Alexander Bogdanov however who in his earlier work on empiriomonism synthesized the energetism of Ernest March and William Ostwald with the materialism of Marx and Engels. Curiously, Bogdanov in his magnum opus Tektology also makes a similar claim to that of Galiev that “tektological thinking” has its roots in the Eastern philosophy. 11 Therefore one might assume that it was Bogdanov’s thought which was the source that Galiev did not cite here. Bogdanov’s arrest on similar charges of “counter-revolutionary” activities in September 1923, some months after Galiev’s first arrest in May 1923 might indicate a connection to be further researched.12 More recent work of Craig Brandista 13, and James D. White14 might provide direction for future research.
In any case, all references to the archived text and its published versions in Russian in the English speaking world remained secondary, referring only to the work of Bennigsen. Strikingly, but also probably because of these problems mentioned above, no English translation has been made until now. There may be other reasons that explain the lack of motivation amongst historians for translating Sultan Galiev’s work into English or other European languages, such as Galiev not being as prolific a writer as Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin or other Bolshevik leaders and intelligentsia. After all, Izbrannıe Trudı contains only around 1000 pages of material, collected in one volume, and is mainly composed of official writings which were found in the Soviet archives and published in 1998. However, Galiev was undoubtedly a key political figure, the highest-ranking Muslim amongst the Bolshevik leaders, and one of the first high ranked leader who got arrested and accused with anti-party activities and expelled from the party (as early as 1923). He and his fellows and followers were accused of being ‘Galievists’, bearers of a certain line of thinking and practice. The line of thinking and action that was labeled as ‘Galevist’ was strategically linked to the issues related to the policies on colonies, nationalities, self-determination, approach to agrarian classes, to Islam, and thus to the confrontation with the Imperialism of the West in the East. Therefore the Galiev case was not only related to the spread of the world revolution, but also to the issues of Russian nationalism and practice of revolutionary democracy in the Soviet government itself.15
The overall enigma of the Galiev case and the lack of English translations of at least his key texts motivated us to undertake such an initial effort and make the present translation, even though we cannot read nor write Russian. Of course, we are aware of the fact that this constitutes a problem for the reader with regard to the trustworthiness of the end result. We decided to proceed anyway and then look for solutions to minimize the effects of these problems as much as we could. Our starting point was the early Turkish translations of both the present item (also published in 1998) as well as Turkish translations of other works of Galiev, a selection made from Izbrannıe Trudı and published by Halit Kakınç.17 As one of co-translators of the article below, Örsan Şenalp was then a member of the editorial board of Ulusal and was acquainted with the text and its Turkish translation. Asim Khairdean worked on the English rough translations of the Russian and the Turkish texts. Finally, we compared and corrected the outcomes of two versions and applied this to the two annexed documents as well. Needless to say, ours are just initial translations. Of course, there is still the need for a professional translation by a native English speaker and Russian literate historian.
Before we end, we would like to thank Fabian Tompsett, Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewsky, Matthieu Renault, John Biggart, Craig Brandist, Eric Blanc, and Sebastian Budgen for the suggestions and insight they provided.
The question is put squarely: am I ready to disarm ideologically and organizationally or not? I answer at the beginning, yes, I am ready. What is my armament and what should be my disarmament? My armament consisted of well-known ideas and thoughts, in a certain worldview about the development of the revolutionary movement in the colonies and the work of Soviet power and the Communist Party in the national republics and regions, mainly the Turkic ones, which grew gradually in the course of the development of the revolution in Russia, starting as early as 1917.
This outlook has its own dynamics, the history of its development, which was determined by the peculiar perception of certain moments in the development of the international revolution in general and of party and Soviet work in the national parliaments in particular.
The basic principles of my outlook were laid out by me in my testimonies to the OGPU back in 1923 – when I was arrested on charges of trying to establish contact with Zaki Validov.18 I consider it necessary to repeat them now in brief. The formulation of my views was:
First: The crisis in the development of the world revolution, which forced the party to shrink into the framework of building socialism in one country, is the result of a “reassessment of the significance, on the part of the European Communists, of the role of the Western European proletariat in organizing the world socialist revolution, on the one hand, and in underestimating the significance of national liberation movements in the colonial countries in the system of international revolution, on the other.” 19
Secondly: The Party’s insufficiently firm policy on the national question before the Eleventh Party Congress, 20 in the sense of underestimating its national manifestations in the work in the national parliaments and, as a result, the growth of great-power tendencies, on the one hand, and the discontent of the nationals on this basis, on the other.
As you know, I then recognized as erroneous my attempt to establish contact with Zaki Validov, qualified it as a crime against the party of which I was a member, and declared my readiness to accept the deserved retribution from your hands.
I did not make a clear statement on my part about my renunciation of the assessment, of the course of the development of the revolution, that had developed in my mind.
When I was released from prison, I, at least, had no clear answer: who, after all, is right on the main issues – I or the party. I remember only one thing: I had made a firm decision to put an end to all my past, in being released from prison and staying in one form or another in the party. I learned about my expulsion from the party, as you know, here at the OGPU, before my release, after you made a written commitment from me to refuse to conduct anti-Party and anti-Soviet work. The message about this had a depressing impression on me. Some hope appeared to me in the possibility of reinstating the rights of a member of the party after being visited by Stalin some time after my release from prison, when I was instructed that this question could be put in about a year. Somewhere in the depths of my soul, there was, in addition, a hope for Vladimir Ilyich. For some reason, it seemed to me that Ilyich would be interested in my business and restore me to the party. I looked forward to his recovery. His death killed this hope in me. Ilyich’s loss for me was, therefore, a double blow. I loved this man as God in my youth. If you searched me, you should find in my papers a small sheet, where I brought my impressions of the deceased, after returning from his funeral. The image I painted on this little piece of paper will forever remain in my soul.
My hope for a return to the party revived after my statement to the Central Control Commission in 1924. The promise of support for my request on the part of Mr. Stalin strengthened this hope in me. The Central Control Commission, as you know, denied me my request. It was the third fresh and heavy blow to me.
The moment of negotiation and consideration of my application to the Central Control Commission coincided with the moment of the withdrawal from Tatarstan of a group of Tatar communists – Mukhtarova, Enbaev, and Gasim Mansurov, comrades close to me through my joint work with them during the revolution. Also from the party, the local Party organization of the People’s Commissariat of the Tatarstan Republic – Yunus Validov and deputy head of the Sovnarkom Comrade Ishak Kazakov, an old revolutionary who worked among us from the days of October. It was also preceded by my open defamation, in the pages of the Tatar and Russian press and in separate pamphlets, as a counter-revolutionary. I learned about the qualification of my act, as objectively counter-revolutionary, on the part of the Second National Meeting under the Central Committee of the Party, a year later, after expelling me from the party, and before that it was not clear to me why such a furious attack was taking place on me as against a counter-revolutionary.
The counter-revolutionary label, glued to me, oppressed me even worse because in my heart I considered myself a Communist, a Leninist, a party member, a revolutionary. I am in all parts of my being protesting against it (in my notes you can find a letter to the Central Committee, which I thought to compose at the same time on this occasion, but for some reason struggled with and abandoned). I considered this a great injustice towards myself and experienced it as the greatest tragedy. To me, all the more, it was hard, that I already experienced a serious tragedy in your prison. After all, I’m not only a revolutionary, but also a person. I, as a revolutionary, signed a death sentence to myself. I considered this to be the greatest act of revolutionary honesty and courage on my part and found, in this, great moral satisfaction for myself. I think you understood that then. But as a man, as an animal organism, I still experienced a heavy sense of death. And under this heavy feeling, I was with you for 2 weeks, while my fate was being decided. You see for yourself – I’m only 36 years old, and almost all my head is gray. You will understand, therefore, that strange feeling of resentment, insult, and humiliation that I experienced, and experienced at moments when I was exposed as a counter-revolutionary. Especially in those cases when this came from the people with whom I once fought alongside, against the opponents of the October Revolution and the Soviet government.
Here is the psychological background on the basis of which I gradually matured the decision to create an independent party, based on the revision of Marxism and Leninism on colonial and national issues. This was also facilitated by the extremely difficult situation that was created around the so-called “right” Tatar and partly Bashkir communists.
The result of this was my initial sketch of a part of the theses on “some issues of economic and cultural development of the Turkic peoples of Europe and Asia.” In them, I wanted to justify the opposition to the communist slogan of national self-determination by the slogan of “the liberation of the colonies through the dictatorship of the colonies over the metropole.” Communism, according to my analysis and a new understanding, was pictured to me as a new and progressive form of European nationalism for the first time, meaning the policy of consolidation and unification of the material and cultural forces of the metropolitan countries under the aegis of the proletariat. In the future, I intended to expand these theses on the colonial question in general, based on the radical revision of the Leninist theory of imperialism and Stalin’s interpretation of it. I speak quite frankly, as I am, in front of you and before history, in the end, one person, but I have nothing to hide. If in your hands during a search I had a pamphlet by V.I. Lenin “Imperialism, as the newest stage of development of capitalism” with my notes on the margins and on the covers, then on them you will be able to form an approximate representation of my understanding of imperialism. According to my theory of imperialism, imperialism is inherent in capitalism in general, regardless of the stage of its development; it seemed to me that in this respect Ilyich nevertheless lacks clarity. From my formulation, therefore, there was a possibility in the theory and practice of the existence of socialist or communist imperialism, since at this stage of its development international capital (which must grow from a revolution into socialism) represents a system of colonial management.
I here ask you not to confuse my concept with the battered and rotten lampoon of Kautsky and the dirty lies of the imperialist bourgeoisie about the “red imperialism of the Soviets.” From my same theses, you will see that I am an irreconcilable enemy both of the world bourgeoisie and Menshevism.
The draft of my theses I first read to Yunus Validov. He insisted on making some amendments, especially with regard to the formulation of the content of the national liberation movement of individual colonial countries (including the Turkic-Tatar nationalities of Soyuzia) and questioned the correctness of the basic slogan of “colonial dictatorship over the metropole,” where we opposed ourselves to the Communist International. Validov then lived in my apartment. He was already expelled from the party. Above him was the threat of a public trial on charges of a criminal offense. We both suffered a great deal. Nevertheless, the discussion of the program for the future of the “International of the Colonial Peoples” was very intensive. Our main provisions were worked out by us, but they are not set out on paper. Tactics and strategy were defined. The social base of our future “Colonial International” party was determined by the workers, peasants and the petty bourgeoisie. Tactically, we stood for the use also of the progressive part of the large national bourgeoisie (the industrial bourgeoisie). It was decided after the trial of Validov, if he was not left in the party, to flee abroad and begin negotiations with underground or semi-legal colonial revolutionary organizations about the establishment of the Bureau of the International in one of the eastern countries. First of all, Validov was to contact Sun-Yat-Sen and then to transfer to India. I had to stay in the USSR and organize a small but strong nucleus here and also go abroad and contact the Fourth International and the anarchist organizations of Europe. Such was our decision before the trial of Validov. Validov in the court kept himself, in my opinion, revolutionary. You know that. The court, as is known, did not resolve in his favor … Nevertheless, we carried out our decision and were then detained ourselves. We once again thoroughly thought out the issue and decided to seek a review of the court’s decision before the Central Control Commission, and in case of a negative decision by him and in this instance, to appeal the decision of the Central Control Commission first to the party congress and then to the Comintern. The decision of Validov in this sense was unshakable. He believed in his own right. I supported him. Before deciding on the fate of Validov, we decided to stay in the USSR, regardless of whether you pursued us or not, whether it was possible for us to go abroad or not, that is, already having made a full break with you (as it should be understood), depending on the outcome of the resolution of the question of leaving him in the party. Severe illness and the subsequent death of Validov however, removed this issue from the order of the day.
The loss of Validov was a heavy blow to me. In him, I lost one of my most loyal friends and support. The son of a serf-peasant, he was a real rebellious and revolutionary slave.
The transcript of his speech at the trial was kept by me. It must have got to you. There on the first page, there should be a signature made by the hand of Validov himself. It spoke about the growth of the right, danger in the country and the need for an organized fight against it. Validov, before death, asked me to reproduce his speech and distribute it among the population. By this way, he wanted to rehabilitate himself after death. I, however, did not do this and kept his speech only as historical material. I did not want to endure our discord with the party in public.
After the death of Validov, I suspended the work on the preparation of the theses. It seemed to me that the planned course of our action was still wrong. In the program we are planning, there was no clarity, firstly, regarding the social entity of the organization we are creating, and secondly, regarding the definition of our attitude to communism as a system, as a principle. It was unclear what we should promise to the colonies liberated from the hegemony of metropolitan countries: communism, or capitalism, or something third “not bourgeois” and how to ensure the organizational triumph of communism as a system in general, if we accept it for the colonies. The question as to the stages in the development of the national liberation movement with regard to communism was also unclear: whether communism was established after the end of the national liberation, or whether its growth coincided with the development of the national liberation movement. And I’ve thought about this for a long time. In addition, I was sick with tuberculosis, which greatly exhausted me and I had to go to the Crimea.
Later, after returning from the Crimea, in the winter of 1925 I read extracts from my theses to Comrade Budayli from the Tatarstan Republic. He also gave readings to Mukhtarov and Enbaev, and even later, it seems in 1926, showed them to their comrade Deren-Ayerly. Reading the theses, I pointed out to my comrades that they represented only a draft outline of my views on the development of the revolutionary movement in the Turkic regions of Europe and Asia. Comrades, agreeing with the analysis of the Turkic world in the system of world economy and politics, resolutely argued against the first part of the theses, regarding the opposition of the colonial communists with Europeans and about the slogan “the dictatorship of the colonies over the metropole.”
I did not show my theses to anyone else. As you can see, the theses are not finished, but among the papers on separate sheets there are rough drafts of the formulations of the remaining parts of the theses, not only in the form of completed and ready-made thoughts but in the form of “possible productions.” In the process of their analysis, their antitheses could also arise.
I did not manage to finish them. I did not have too much time and there was no “Engels” at hand. This is the first point. Secondly, I still did not lose hope for my rehabilitation within the party. For some reason, it seemed to me that the Central Committee of the Party would finally consider my position. This hope grew especially strong in the period when you started talking about “changing the route of the revolution” in terms of a turn towards active participation in the national liberation movement of the colonies, specifically, the Chinese revolution. The result of this was my second letter to T. Stalin at the end of 1925 or the beginning of 1926 with the question of whether it is possible for me to raise the question of restoring my membership in the party and on what conditions. Moreover, even later, under the influence of the experience of the Chinese revolution and the development of the national liberation movement in India and other colonial countries, and also in the USSR itself, the question gradually arose in me as to whether I was really mistaken in the main, namely in determining the revolutionary significance of the theory and practice of Leninism in applying them to resolving the colonial question and hence in determining the revolutionary role of the CPSU(B) and the Comintern, that is, speaking simply, I do not break through an open door.
THE UNION OF THE SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS THE MILITARY BOARD OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNION OF SSR, DECEMBER 8, 1939, CONSISTING OF:
Chairman – Brigouveneurist T. Alekseyeva
Members: Brigvoyenurist Sislina and Comrade Bukanova
As the secretary-lawyer T. Mazur, in a closed court session in the city of Moscow, December 8, 1939, examined the case on charges of – Sultangalieva Mirseida21 Haydar Galievich 1892, the birth of the Bashkir Assr, by nationality Tatar, servant, non-partisan, by the NKVD in 1928 (on June 28, 1930, Col. of the State Political University) a sentence of up to 10 years for criminal activities, is provided for by Articles 58-1a, 58-2 and 58-11 of the Criminal Code.
The preliminary and judicial investigation found that since 1919, Sultan-Galiev is the organizer and the actual leader of the anti-Soviet nationalist group which for many years has been actively fighting against Soviet power and the CPSU(B).
Throughout 1919-1920, Sultan-Galiev was in organizational connection with the well-known nationalists who were in exile: Ibragimov22, Abdurran and others, together with whom they agreed on organizing the struggle against Soviet power on the basis of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism, with the aim of secession from Soviet Russia of the Turkic-Tatar regions and the establishment in them of a bourgeois-democratic Turanian state.
In 1923, Sultan-Galiev M. together with a certain Kara-Sacal, the foundations of a political program common to all the Turkic nationalities of the USSR and the colonial peoples of the foreign East were worked out, a cipher was developed, a password and nicknames were established.
In the period of 1925, Sultan-Galiev wrote a program of struggle under the heading “On the Basics of the Economic, Political and Cultural Development of the Turkic Peoples,” in which he put forward the idea of creating a “colonial International,” with the organization of a special committee for the leadership of the Pan-Turkic movements of the Turkic peoples in the USSR, with branches on the ground, whose task was to organize the preparation of a branch off of the national Turkic republics and regions from the Soviet Union.
Since 1923 and for several years Sultan-Galiev had an organizational relationship with the Trotskyite-Zinoviev underground, contacting them with subversive work, against the CPSU(B) and the Soviet authorities.
In the period 1931-1933. Sultan-Galiev, even while in the Solovetsky camps, did not abandon his criminal activities with like-minded people – Enbaev, Bakiyev, and others – negotiated the creation of the so-called “Turan Workers ‘and Peasants’ Socialist Party.”
In the same year of 1933, Sultan-Galiev undertook the assignment to establish a connection with the leader of the Tatar White emigration Gayaz Iskhakov.
Along with these criminal acts during the period from 1919 to 1928 and from 1934 to the date of his arrest Sultan-Galiev led a large recruitment drive to create anti-Soviet bourgeois-nationalist organizations and groups.
In addition, it was established that since 1922 Sultan-Galiev was connected with the diplomatic representatives of a foreign state who, for espionage purposes, informed about secret decisions of the Central Committee of the CPSU(B) on Eastern issues about secret decisions on the national question, and also gave his consent to the transfer of information about the armed forces of the USSR. He gave the representative of foreign intelligence in 1927 a verbatim report of the so-called “Ryskulov national meeting.”
Recognizing Sultan-Galiev as guilty of the crimes provided for in Articles 58-1a, 58-2 and 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, guided by Articles 319 and 320 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR has agreed:
Sultan-Galiyev Mirsaid Haydar Galiyich to be given the highest measure of criminal punishment – execution, with confiscation of all personal property belonging to him. The verdict is final and not subject to appeal.
A copy of the document was transferred from the Central Archive of the Federal Counterintelligence Service of the Russian Federation.
Before we base the foundations on which we will establish the socio-political, economic, and cultural developments of the Turkic peoples of Asia and Europe in the epoch we are experiencing, we have to, at least briefly, dwell on the methodology of our views on the topic.
To avoid any ambiguity and misunderstanding we must first point out that we approach this particular issue, as well as in general other issues, from the materialist worldview and philosophy. And from the various currents of this revolutionary philosophical school, we dwell on a more radical branch, so-called historical or dialectical materialism. We believe that this branch of materialistic philosophy is the most faithful and scientifically grounded system of cognition of individual phenomena in the social life of human society since with its help we can produce the most correct and accurate analysis of their causes and predict or anticipate their consequences.
But at the same time, let us state in advance that our belonging to this school – of dialectical, or rather, energetic materialism – should not be interpreted as a blind imitation of the Western European representatives of this school (i.e. the so-called Marxists or Communists), nor a blind copying of all that they think or produce. We do not do this for the following reasons:
You can declare yourself a thousand times a materialist, a Marxist, a Communist or, as is in fashion in Russia now, a Leninist, screaming about it to the whole world, with as much strength and opportunity as you have, and write hundreds and thousands of volumes on hundreds and thousands of topics on this subject, but at the same time not have the slightest dose of true materialism or communism, or a grain of genuine revolutionism in your judgments and conclusions, let alone actions. And we not only do not give any obligations to you but even in spite of all your expectations, we “dare” challenge you for the right to monopolize the idea of dialectical materialism.
So, for example, we find that in the basic questions of the restructuring of the social life of mankind, which are, firstly, the national-colonial question, and secondly, the question of the methods of implementing communism, that is, the social system, where there will be no classes and there will be no exploitation of man by man, Russians, and behind them the West-European Communists at the present time make the grossest mistakes, the result of which may not be the salvation of mankind from the “oppression of anarchy and elements,” but his terrible ruin, impoverishment, and extinction. We agree with them (not always and not on all matters), when they criticize and plunder the rapacious European capitalism by predatory European imperialism; we agree with them when they speak of the reactionary nature of modern European capitalist culture and the need to fight it… but we nevertheless completely disagree with the recipes they have offered, as conclusions from their reasoning about all this. We believe that with the recipe proposing the replacement of the dictatorship over the world of one class of the European public (the bourgeoisie) by its antipode (proletariat), i.e. its other class, there will be no particularly great change in the social life of the oppressed nations of mankind. In any case, if any change occurs, it is not for the better, but for the worse. This will only be a replacement for a less powerful and less organized dictatorship (the centralized dictatorship of the forces united on a European scale) of the same capitalist Europe (including here and America) over the rest of the world. In contrast, we put forward a different proposition – the concept that the material prerequisites for the social reorganization of mankind can be created only by establishing the dictatorship of colonies and semi-colonies over the metropole. Only this way is capable of creating real guarantees for the liberation and emancipation of the productive forces of the globe, chained by Western imperialism.
Proceeding from this methodology, we establish a certain system of questions, the answer to which must give the most correct solution to our main task. We consider the issues through the following topics:
What is the Turkic world in the present-day world economy and politics as a socio-productive organism?
What conditions are lacking (internal and external) for the normal economic, political and cultural development of the Turkic peoples (both in general and their individual branches)?
In what ways can these conditions be achieved, whether through evolutionary development or through revolutionary changes?
Specific methods of work in one direction or another:
a) strategy and tactics,
b) forms of organization.
The question of the place and role of the modern Turkic world in the system of the current international economy and politics is, in our opinion, the main issue from which we can outline the correct solution of our main question about the fundamentals of the socio-political, economic and cultural development of the Turkic peoples of Asia and Europe.
Not knowing exactly what we are, inside the system of existing international social and legal relations and what kind of relations we have, we can not determine what we should become and what should turn into.
An analysis of this question can be started only from the second part of it, i.e. from the question of what is the modern system of international social and legal relations – economic, political and cultural-domestic.
The following factors are the distinguishing points that determine the features of this system:
Analysis of social and legal relations between individual peoples of the world reveals that the nationalities from which modern mankind is formed are sharply divided into two camps that are hostile to each other and unequal in number according to their social and legal situation; in one camp there are peoples constituting only 20-25% of humanity, who have managed to take into their hands almost the entire globe, with all the “living” and dead riches contained in it and on it, and established the monopoly “right” to exploit them; in another camp there are peoples making up 4/5 of all mankind and falling under the economic, political and cultural bondage and slavery of the peoples of the first camp, in other words, the “master” or “civilized” peoples.
In the “civil” language of “gentlemen”, the peoples of the first group are called “civilized,” “civil” nations, called upon to save mankind “from slavery, ignorance, and poverty.” The peoples of the second group in their language are called “savages,” “natives,” etc. and created, according to their “scientific” judgments, to serve the interests of “civilized-nations.” The “natives” and “savages” have not yet invented special terms for the designation of “civilized” peoples and, whether by the “poverty” of their lexicon or lack of scientific understanding, they call them simply “dogs,” “robbers,” “executioners,” and other similar “indecent” and incomprehensible epithets.
The peoples of the first category include the “civilized” peoples of Europe and America, which spread gradually in other parts of the world are generally called “the peoples of the West.” The second group includes the peoples of Asia and Africa and the Aborigines of Australia and America, colonized by Europeans.
Analyzing the relations between the two groups of people, we state that the entire system of economic, political and cultural relations of the peoples of the West (metropolitan countries) to the peoples of the colonies and semi-colonies characterizes the system of slaveholding relations.
A number of conditions, of a historical and natural-geographical nature that influenced the progress of technology and culture of the peoples of the West, conditioned the transition into their hands of the means of economic and cultural communication between the peoples of different parts of the world, in other words the international communications and military-strategic points, thereby creating the prerequisites for the transition into their hands the entire initiative in the development of the world’s political and economic relations between the peoples of Western and Eastern cultures.
By a well-known moment of history, the technology and culture of the peoples of Europe proved to be more viable and rational, from the point of view of the struggle for existence, than that of the hegemons of the world, the Muslim peoples of Asia and Africa, who were settling on them at that time, and allowed them to break up the latter and occupy the necessary bridgeheads, to freely extend their influence to the rest of the Asian and African continent.
World trade routes, trade markets and sources of raw materials, as well as military-strategic points, with few exceptions, were in the hands of the peoples of the West. And the people of the West extended their system of intra-national slavery (if serfdom in the epoch of feudalism was a form of slave-owning economy, then class oppression in the era of capitalism is also slave-owning – the exploitation of man by man, but only in another, reformed form) entirely to their colonies – “black” and “yellow” continents, thus giving an international character to it and transformed it into an “international” system of slavery. The peoples of these continents actually turned into slaves deprived of the right to own the natural wealth of their countries and work for the benefit of their “civil” masters – the people of the metropole.
The colonial-slave-owning character of the modern system of world economy determines entirely its next feature-the deep parasitism and the highly reactionary nature of the entire present culture of the peoples of the West as the main factor in the development of mankind in this epoch. These, the properties of the material culture of the metropolitan countries are expressed in the following two points:
a) The static moment – the monopolistic concentration of the means of production and circulation, and the subjects of consumption that are necessary for humanity, in the hands of the peoples of the metropole.
In the hands of the metropolitan countries with some 300-350 million people has accumulated all the main means of production (factory industry), means of circulation (financial capital and its apparatus), ways and means of transportation and communication (sea routes, railway lines, air messages, telegraph and radiograph); as well as sources of raw materials (oil, coal, ore, animals and plant products) and markets for industrial products. In this respect, the West seems to be a giant octopus, embracing with its tentacles four-fifths of humanity and sucking from it all its vital juices. To this we must add that the octopus is not an ordinary octopus from under the waters of the ocean, but an octopus-armadillo, an octopus warrior, an octopus, a deadly bearer armed with the latest military art and military “inventions” of the West. True, these gains did not increase the courage and bravery of this octopus. But his cowardly cruelty and bloodthirstiness has increased: the octopus now sucks the lifeblood from the living organism of the peoples of the colonies and semi-colonies, enriching one, the smaller, part of the world’s population at the expense of exhaustion, pauperization, degeneration and extinction of the other, the majority.
b) The Dynamic Moment – the parasitic and reactionary character of the material of the metropole from the point of view of the maximum development of the productive forces of mankind.
This moment is closely connected with the first and is its complement and development.
In fact, it is the basis for what the modern culture of metropolitan countries seeks as a regulator of the development of mankind in the current epoch.
If the essence of the material culture of the peoples of the West consisted solely in the monopolistic nature of the modern system of their economy (monopoly capitalism or imperialism), then this as a form of organization of the world economy would be only half bad. But the whole point is that the essence of the material culture of the metropolitan countries, the main internal content of it, that is, the true content of all these “monopoly capitalisms,” “imperialisms” and other social categories of the public of the West is not at all in this static form, but in its dynamic, in the specific tendency of its development.
This trend is that the existence and development of the modern material culture of the peoples of the West is based not only on the preservation of slave-owning and bonded relations to the peoples of the East, in other words on the exploitation of the natural – natural forces and resources of colonies and semi-colonies, but also on the delay of the development of the domestic productive forces of the latter, on the suppression of the growth of their material culture.
What is the basis for the modern culture of the West?
On the monopoly production and sale of goods for the metropolitan countries and colonies, in other words as a monopolist in the world economy and production process.
What is it based on?
On the delay in the development of the domestic economy, in the absence of a national industry of colonies and semi-colonies; in other words on the preservation of the agrarian, purely peasant character of these countries, when they, because of the absence or underdevelopment of national industry, are forced to resort in their economic life to the “help” of the metropolitan countries, in other words, the world monopoly industry.
Specifically, this process consists of the following elements:
a) The provision of the main elements of the economy of the metropole – industry – with cheap raw materials, hence the aggressive policy of the peoples of the West towards the countries of Asia and Africa as sources of raw materials, with all that accompanies this policy and the resulting phenomena: firstly, the ruthless struggle with the remnants of independence of the semi-colonies and the brutal suppression of the slightest manifestation of political independence on the part of the colonies, and secondly, constant competitive wars due to colonial possessions between individual national metropolitan groups. In other words, the development of social contradictions between colonies and metropole, on the one hand, and national conflicts between individual national groups of dictatorial metropole, on the other.
b) The provision of cheap production costs for the factories of industry, by improving the technology of production and exploitation of the labor of industrial workers in the metropolitan areas and subsidiary workers from the colonies. Hence, the existence of class contradictions in metropolitan areas and the emergence of class-based political parties on the basis of these contradictions.
c) The provision of cheap (profitable) markets for the products of the industry of the metropole. Hence, the deepening of the colonial-aggressive policy of the metropolitan countries directed not only to keep the colonies and semi-colonies in their own hands and under their own yoke but also to keep them precisely as permanent markets for the sale of industrial fabrics in the metropole.
The result of this policy is only an even greater aggravation of social contradictions between colonies and metropole, and these contradictions assume the importance of a factor of paramount international importance.
The last element in the process of the dynamics of the material culture of metropolitan countries occupies a particularly important place in the system of established relationships between the metropolitan countries and colonies. This element, being the main active spring of the modern culture of the peoples of the West, simultaneously acts as the main cause of all those social abnormalities that are revealed in the development of modern mankind as a whole.
These abnormalities are obvious and they can only be denied by blind people and political degenerates. They are as follows:
a) The Hostile and unproductive operation of the natural riches of the Earth, in the peculiarities of the resources of colonial and semi-colonies, from the point of view of the general interests of humanity.
This truth hardly requires proofs, it is enough to observe the management of the metropolitan areas, ‘home’, and in the colonies, so as not to be immediately convinced of this.
b) The irrational organization of the global process of production and distribution and as a whole and the unproductive waste of mass human energy.
The means of production, concentrated mainly in the hands of the metropolitan countries, are far from the main sources of raw materials and world markets and thus necessitate the transfer, of raw materials to the means of production, firstly and the products of its processing (goods) to the markets secondly. For example, some wool or leather raw materials from Tibet, India or Afghanistan should get to the UK, turn into cloth, shoes or other goods and then travel back to their “homeland.” Or, for example, Turkestan or Transcaucasian cotton (by the way, together with the Baku oil) must first make a trip to the country of the “civilized” – somewhere in Moscow or Ivanovo-Voznesensk and, turning into a manufactory or something else, to do the opposite (secondary) journey to the same Turkestan or Transcaucasia, and sometimes further – to Persia, Afghanistan, etc. From the point of view of economy of means and human energy, it would be more expedient to act in just the opposite way: to process raw materials into what is necessary for people in its “motherland,” in other words in the colonies and semi-colonies themselves where, incidentally, with the exception of the means of production (which can be moved there from metropolitan areas or organized again), there is a combination of all the necessary conditions for this: raw materials, liquid fuels, unused and extinct human energy, the need for appropriate factories from the population of the colonies, and sending it to “foreign travel” only as is necessary; in other words conforming to the corresponding natural consumer demand from there, not as a “wild” raw material, but as a “civil” commodity.
c) The waste of mass human energy for the constant and regular “protection” of the existing order of things and the structure it requires, in other words, the existing irrationality in the organization of the world economy and the relevance of this social negligence (injustice).
It expresses itself in the rabid militarism of the West, in the monstrous growth of its land, sea, and air armaments and the corps of internal and external guards. The peoples of the West are protected not only from the oppressed peoples of the colonies and semi-colonies and from all sorts of “yellow,” “black” and other “dangers” and “panisms,” but also “from each other.”
d) The delay of the natural development of the productive forces of the colonies and semi-colonies, the majority of the world population. On this ground emerges the social inequality between the peoples of the colonies and the metropole and the prevention of the cultural development of all of modern mankind as a whole.
It is advantageous for Western predatory imperialism to maintain backward forms of economy and social relations in colonial countries. Only on the basis of this backwardness, can the predatory culture of the metropole breathe and develop. To keep the colonial peoples in darkness and oppression and not give them the opportunity to revive culturally is the most real and vital need of the peoples of the West, which have turned into jailers of the freedom of mankind. Hence the social inequality that we see in the position of the peoples of the metropolitan countries, on the one hand, and the peoples of the colonies oppressed by them, on the other. While the peoples of metropolitan countries enjoy all the benefits of culture and all the gains of technology and science, the peoples of the colonial countries, in their mass, are forced to drag out the existence of half-starved slaves and beggars. We see steel and granite skyscrapers on one side and pitiful huts and shacks on the other; cars, trams, buses, trains, steamships and airplanes on one side, pathetic nags and antediluvian airbuses and wagons on the other; electric plows, tractors, steam threshers, melioration, artificial fertilizer fields, etc. on one side and a wooden plow, a shovel, a pickaxe and a pitchfork on the other; electricity, telephone, telegraph and radio on one side, a beam and a kerosene oil lamp and the absence of everything else on the other; fine arts, literature, games and laughter on one side, hopelessness and darkness, constant suffering and tears on the other; satiety, contentment and a secure life on one side, hunger, cold, poverty, disease, death and degeneration on the other.
Can we justify this state of affairs? Can we call it a normal position, normal order? No, and again no! From the point of view of any morality, this is an expression of the greatest social abnormality and glaring world social injustice.
We would be incomplete in our analysis of the material culture of metropolitan countries if we leave unanswered yet another question, namely: where is the modern material culture of the peoples of the metropolitan countries headed and what does it want to become? This question is closely connected to the dynamics of the development of this culture and reveals one of the most characteristic and significant features of it, determining the prospects for the development of the world for the entire immediate era. We define this line as the desire for consolidation, in other words to the centralized unification of the disparate national-material cultures (capital) of the peoples of the metropole.
Does this desire exist?
Yes, it does. The recent international imperialist war, revolutionary cataclysms in Russia and other countries after the war, today’s “diplomatic” struggle between certain groups of “victorious” countries, the feverish work of the separate political parties of the peoples of the West are all the most diverse manifestations of this aspiration.
This aspiration is under pressure from the following two contradictions:
1) The discrepancy between the existing structure of the material culture of the peoples of metropolitan countries (nationally scattered, often proprietary or anarchic capitalist) of its internal essence, in other words, the needs of these people in a more organized and improved robbery and exploitation of the peoples of the colonies and semi-colonies;
2) In connection with this, the emergence in the colonies of material and political prerequisites for national independence and social emancipation from the yoke of the metropolitan countries; strengthening the so-called national liberation movement of the colonies.
We take the first contradiction. What is it specifically expressed in? It expresses itself in the fact that the existing order, the existing structure of the foundations of the material culture of the peoples of metropolitan countries cannot provide them with impunity, regular and, most importantly, full exploitation of the peoples of the colonies. The material needs of the peoples of metropolitan countries have outgrown the existing form of their material culture. The robbery and sucking of juices from the body of enslaved humanity, produced individually, without a single plan and a centralized will, are not effective enough in terms of productivity and not only do not give the maximum expected results, but even contrary to the will of the robbers, are fraught with all sorts of surprises. It turns out that such a system of exploitation of colonies and semi-colonies and the rest of the oppressed part of mankind cannot stop the complete circulation of blood in their bodies. They continue to maintain their vitality, continue to live, breathe, and sometimes, when their enslavers are engaged in a fight among themselves because of someone else’s good, they even dare to oppose them. Can the peoples of the West afford such a “luxury” on the part of the peoples of the colonies? Of course not. Whether they want to or not, the question of changing the internal structure of their material culture, the question of the transition to a new, higher, more organized and perfect forms of management, rises before them and it can not be otherwise!
What is the essence of the internal structure of the material culture of the metropolitan countries of the lived (passing) era? Its essence lies in two provisions: private property within nations and private property between nations, in other words, the relative disunity of the means of production and circulation of the accumulated wealth both within the nations themselves, and between individual nations.
Let us take the first position – private property within nations. What results does it give in the course of developing the material culture of the peoples of the West? Firstly, competition between individual owners (capitalists) and their associations (trusts, syndicates, cartels, etc.) or even among whole industries themselves. In pursuit of profit and of bigger profit shares they mutually struggle among themselves and a significant part of their energy goes to the organization of this struggle and this competition. True, this competition, being the only and necessary part of capitalism based on private property in general, plays a generally progressive role in the concentration and centralization of capital. Nevertheless, on a social scale, under the condition of the existence of colonies aspiring for independent development, it is for metropolitan countries a factor that weakens their exploitative power over the former. If, for example, any capitalist enterprise of England is sent to work in India, then it must spend part of its capital to fight a similar British enterprise or joint-stock company and lose a certain percentage of its forces and capabilities on this. Due to non-centralization and non-unity on a national scale, the plundering of British capital in India does not fully and completely bring about the effect and results that it could give in case of centralization.
The principle of private ownership inevitably gives birth to another factor that is negative from the point of view of the power of the peoples of the metropolitan countries, namely, the class struggle based on intra-national class inequality. Against the backdrop of the class struggle in the West, there were three main political trends reflecting the ideology of the respective main classes of metropolitan countries: conservatism, the political ideology of the big bourgeoisie; liberalism as a political ideology of the middle and petty bourgeoisie and socialism as the ideology of the working class. The struggle of these classes among themselves, reflecting, in fact, and to a certain extent, their desire for political power, cannot but weaken at some moments the offensive strength of the peoples of the metropolitan countries in relation to the colonies. Here we can give an example of the defeat of Russia during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, when the presence of a rather pronounced class struggle within Russia (the liberal Russian commercial and industrial bourgeoisie came up with a number of political requirements with respect to the feudal landlord, Russian workers came out with political demands both in relation to that and to the other) was the main prerequisite for the defeat of Russian troops in the theater of military operations.
The opposite example is the classic example of the victory of the reborn Turkey over the gangs of international imperialism in 1922, largely conditioned by the fact that if the insurgent Turkey was a monolithic national whole, uniting all classes of the Turkish people in one fiery impulse of the struggle for national independence, then the camp of opponents – Europe – was a bubbling volcano of national and class contradictions.
And here we have to state that the fight of classes inside the metropole in the modern conditions of their development is again a weakening the future preventative force of the hegemony of the west.
The second contradiction – private property between the metropolitan nations – is also a similar factor. In other words, the national fragmentation of their material culture, giving rise to the strongest national competition and national struggle between them. The presence of this factor greatly hinders the position of the peoples of metropolitan countries as the hegemons of the world. It weakens their general pressure on the colonies and leaves for them the possibility of movement and maneuver. What is the basis of the preservation of Turkey’s independence, the revival of Afghanistan’s independence, the strengthening of the elements of Egypt’s independence? What is the basis for the strengthening of the national liberation movement in India, Morocco, China, etc.? What is the basis for the revival of some old (Poland) and the emergence of new state formations (Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland) in Europe itself? What is the basis for strengthening the national liberation movement of non-Russian nationalities in Russia?
All this is, to a large extent, based precisely on the national disunity of the material culture of the West. The struggle of the peoples of the metropole among themselves because of primacy and because of hegemony over the world contributes only to ease their pressure on the colony and opens up the possibility for the latter to struggle for political independence.
Let us pass to the analysis of the second contradiction, i.e. Liberation movement of the Colonies and Semicolonies. Is there really such a movement and if “yes,” is it really growing and progressing? We will answer this with the language of facts.
Japan: Half a century ago, Japan was a small semi-colonial country, which could not even think about participating in international politics. But when it came to awakening, how she crushed the thunder of the peoples of Asia and the gendarme of Europe, the hardened feudal imperialist, tsarist Russia. Ten years have not passed since Japan participates in the beating of Europe, as Germany’s next imperialist power, by Russia. For the time being, at least, Germany has been knocked out of the rut. And now Japan is forming a bloc with France, China and Russia against England. The combination may change, but the fact remains. If these plans are justified, then the next day she will participate in the formation of a bloc against the transatlantic power – America. And this is quite natural. Japan can not remain forever on its islands. The future of the Japanese people requires opening doors to Siberia for resettlement and the doors of China and other countries for the allotment of Japanese commercial and industrial capital. It is in her interest to smash the giants of European imperialism by parts.
Turkey: Even the notorious enemies of the long-suffering Turkish people are now clear what is happening in this country: a healthy process of national revival. Those who doubted, or did not believe it, experienced it on their own skin. The bayonets of the Turkish workers and peasants and the Turkish progressive intelligentsia, dedicated to the cause of the national revival of Turkey, have taught those who should think realistically. Four hundred years ago, Russian tsars had to defeat the Kazan Khanate, the citadel of the northern Turks, and through the corpses of the Tatar fighters, step further – to the East. Then the Western European imperialists had to defeat the southern Ottoman Turks to open their way to the same East. Was not the desperate attack of Turkey on their side preceding the advance of the peoples of the West to the East? To become the real masters of the situation in Asia and Africa, the peoples of Europe had to step over the corpses of the Ottoman fighters. The fall of Kazan under the onslaught of the Russians occurred not in one day. Dozens of times they attacked it, and the conquest of Tatarstan is preceded by dozens of years of struggle between the then two northern titans: Kazan and Moscow. The winners did not immediately manage to consolidate their gain. It took several decades of uninterrupted guerrilla warfare between the victors and the vanquished, with all the horrors of extermination and slaughter, until the will of the vanquished was finally broken. Europe needed hundreds of years of struggle against the southern Turks to weaken them and take away from them the Balkans, Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, etc. The rulers of Europe failed and will not be able to break Turkey. She is alive and will live. We think that she will not only live, but will also breathe life into those former parts that were torn away from her by the violence of Europe, to the rest of the Middle East.
China: China, this oldest nation of all the old peoples of the world, slept for a long time, but finally opened its eyes. He is awakening now. Awakening from centuries of hibernation, he lies on the bed and straightens his numb joints. But he will soon rise to his feet. No power can keep him in bed now. What is happening in recent years in China, this is a deep indication of the revival of these people. The Chinese people managed to make a revolution in 1911. She will also be able to complete the next revolution, after which the unified parts of China will merge into a mighty steel fist, after the impact of whose punch the peoples of the West will hardly recover. The periodic outbreaks of the civil war in China are only a prelude to the great concert of the revival of the four hundred million Chinese people. Let tens and hundreds of thousands of victims perish in this bloody struggle of the Chinese people; these sacrifices are unavoidable and they will not be wasted for nothing. Civil wars in China are only a manifestation of the great process of consolidating the Chinese nation, which will require for its completion, not one more decade.
India: India awakens as well. The process of rebuilding India is more painful than the process of China’s rebirth. And this is quite understandable: after all, India is a colony of the most powerful of European bandits – England. But no matter how terrible the old sea pirate is, it can not resist the liberation movement of India. Through repression, bribery, provocations and diplomatic tricks, England will be able, perhaps, to delay the process of emancipation of India, but it can not completely stop it.
The liberation movement of India is wavy. The rise of revolutionary sentiments alternate with their decline. But one thing is clear: any such temporary “decline” in the revolutionary mood of the Indian people is only a shift, followed by a new upsurge and a new wave of revolutionary sentiments, stronger and more formidable. We have no doubt that eventually, the day will come when the revolutionary wave of the liberation movement of India will break through all the artificial dams that Britain has barred from it and the whole world, Egypt, Morocco, and the colonies of Russia will be influenced by its flooding. It strengthens the general chorus of revolutionary efforts for liberation from the oppression of the West and the movement of Egypt, Morocco and the colonies of Russia is no different from the revolutionary liberation movement of China, India, Turkey, etc. All of them occur under the slogan of emancipation from imperialism, or rather, the hegemony of the peoples of the West. It differs only in its shape and pace: it is stronger or weaker, faster or slower, more stormy or calmer, larger or less than the movement of the former, depending on which country, under what historical conditions and with what kind of driving forces it occurs.
We will not dwell in more detail on the movement of Egypt, Morocco and other African or Asian colonies of the West, because these are well known in their basic features. Here we will highlight the movement of the colonial peoples of Russia. We note that the liberation movement in the colonies of Russia (Turkestan, the Caucasus, Ukraine, the Crimea, Belarus, the Turkic-Finnish and Mongolian peoples) is evident. If the defeat of tsarist Russia by Japan in 1904, which caused the revolution of 1905, contributed to the awakening of national self-consciousness of the colonial, oppressed peoples of this country, its defeat on the Western and Caucasian fronts in the world war that caused the revolution of 1917 only deepened the process of the liberation movements of these peoples. The facts of the separation of Poland, Finland and the small Baltic states from Russia; the facts of the emergence of the Tatar, Bashkir, Kirghiz, Central Asian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian and other republics, as well as a dozen autonomous national regions, systematically fighting for the expansion of sovereignty rights, eloquently confirm this position. And no matter how much the pan-Russians and their supporters (under whatever mask they may be: under the guise of “democrats” or “communists”) seek to eliminate this movement, no matter how much they try to reduce their role to the role of ordinary Russian provinces, or to its weakening, they have not yet succeeded in doing so, and will not be able to, no matter how clever the frauds are, invented by them, in the direction of combating the growing activity of the “nationals” in their struggle for national independence. So far, all this has produced only the opposite results.
By establishing the USSR, the pan-Russians would like to restore, in fact, a single, indivisible Russia, the hegemony of the Great Russians over other peoples, but not a year later did all the nations declared their loud protest against the centralistic tendencies of pan-Russian Moscow (the session of the Council of Nationalities of the last session of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR).
Wanting to weaken Turkestan, economically and politically, Moscow is dismembering the Turanian peoples today into small separate tribes, but in less than two years, the dismembered parts of Turan 24 will talk about restoring unity and unite into a stronger, more powerful and organized state unit. Today, Russia separates Mongolia from China. She wants to “tame” this country to herself. And Mongolia does not mind succumbing to Moscow’s embrace. But what Mongolia will say tomorrow, when it gets to its feet and strengthens its “Khuruldan”25, it is still unknown. From the experience of the last revolution in Russia, we came to the conclusion that no matter what class in Russia came to power, none of them would be able to restore the former “greatness” and power of this country. Russia as a multinational state and the state of the Russians inevitably goes to disintegration and to dismemberment. One of two things: either it (Russia) will be dismembered into its constituent national parts and form several new and independent state organisms, or the Russian sovereignty in Russia will be replaced by the collective sovereignty of the “nations,” in other words, the dictatorship of the Russian people over all other people will be replaced with the dictatorship of these latter people over the Russian people. This is a historical inevitability as a derivative of a combination. Rather, the first will happen, and if the second happens, it will still be just a transition to the first. The former Russia, which was restored under the present form of the USSR, will not last long. It is transitory and temporary.
These are only the last sighs, the last convulsions of the dying. Against the backdrop of the disintegration of Russia, the figures of the following national state entities are quite distinct: Ukraine (with Crimea and Belarus), the Caucus can exist as a union of the North Caucasus with Transcaucasia, Turan (as an alliance of Tatarstan, Bashkiria, Kyrgyzstan and a federation of Turkestan republics), Siberia and Great Russia. We do not consider Finland, Poland and the small Baltic states that have already separated from Russia.
Thus, the facts of the liberation movement of the colonies and semi-colonies are evident. It exists and it is real, it progresses and develops.
Where are the reasons and the material basis of this movement? From what does it arise and what is its real essence and sum of international social and legal mutual relations?26
