Communists versus colonialism
Conferences about colonialism aren’t unusual today. Universities host them regularly. But the one that took place in September 1920 was different. When the delegates set off for that conference, they were taking their lives in their hands.
As boats from the east made their way across the Caspian Sea towards Baku, they were strafed by British Army warplanes: two delegates were killed. Participants travelling from the west through Russia found that anti-Communist militias had ripped up the tracks, burned down the stations, and threatened to besiege their trains. Borders were closed, and delegates had to sneak through.
The British had good reason to worry about this conference. It was called not just to discuss colonialism, but to end it. The participants were representatives of the international Communist movement and the various national and anti-colonial movements, particularly through Asia and the Middle East.
“The European working class sees now, at every step, that the course of history has united the working people of the East with the workers of the West”, said Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International. That organisation, which united the post-revolutionary Russian government with Communist parties around the world, had called the conference. Zinoviev spoke of two “streams”: the “workers’ proletarian Communist struggle” and the “movement of the oppressed nationalities” that was challenging British and French colonialism. Those two streams, Zinoviev said, must be united into “one single tumultuous, powerful stream that, like the sea, will sweep all obstacles from its path, clearing the land of all the evil from which we have suffered so long”.
European colonialism existed before capitalism, but the two would become inextricably linked, and the growth of each would drive the development of the other. Precious metals from the Americas and slaves from Africa fed the growth of early capitalism in Europe. By the late nineteenth century, industrial capitalism had driven European powers to acquire colonies around the world.
The unending pressure to compete and accumulate profits meant there was no end to the need for raw materials, export markets and armed outposts to ward off rivals and terrorise “the natives”. Continents were carved up and “zones of influence” determined by treaties between Western powers: plans for the division of Africa were finally settled at the Berlin Conference of 1884, without reference to the opinions of any Africans themselves.
In the same period, as capitalism transformed Europe and expanded throughout the globe, the modern anti-capitalist movement came into existence. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, it was impossible to ignore capitalism’s global spread—and its opponents’ necessarily internationalist strategy.
The capitalist class, Marx and Engels wrote, “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the capitalist mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst”. In the broad outlines of this foundational document—more a declaration of principles than a worked-out theory—Marx and Engels still emphasised that capitalism had become a world system, and the socialist movement would be a world movement: the workers had “a world to win”.
But it was over the next decade that Marx and Engels would come to fully understand the promise of anti-colonial movements. At the time of the Manifesto, Europe was entering a wave of revolutions, and colonial questions were not at the forefront of Marx’s mind. When those revolutions receded, leading activists like Marx and Engels became political refugees. Marx made a living writing on world affairs for English-language newspapers. Through this work, as Kevin Anderson traces in his work Marx on the Margins, the 1850s became a time of political discovery for Marx.
The European revolutionary movement was in retreat; many of its key leaders were drifting away from their principles. Marx famously spent this time doing the research that would become Capital. But his journalistic obligations led him to study movements in Asia. During this time, he came to see that not only the global spread of capitalism but also the native populations’ resistance to colonialism could be a powerful revolutionary force.
The Indian rebellion of 1857, in which army officers trained by the British mutinied to lead an uprising against colonial rule, made a powerful impression—especially in comparison to the then dormant European socialist movement. “India”, he wrote to Engels, “is now our best ally”. The uprising in India, Chinese resistance to the British and other anti-colonial movements showed the possibility that world capitalism could be simultaneously challenged on two fronts: a revolutionary socialist workers’ movement combined with rebellions in the colonies.
Marxist anti-colonialism was not simply a matter of supporting the “native” ruling classes, who could try to maintain their own rule under the guise of protecting traditional ways of life. But nor was it a matter of waiting for capitalism to “civilise” the natives and bring them into the world socialist movement. Socialist workers in Europe would have to oppose the oppression wrought by the colonial powers. When, in the 1860s, Marx and Engels helped found the International Workingmen’s Association to bring together the socialist parties of the world, they fought stridently for it to take a position in solidarity with colonised peoples—struggling in particular to encourage English workers to act in solidarity with the Irish national liberation movement.
This strategic position was based on the idea of an international revolutionary movement of workers, which respected no borders and aimed to overthrow all capitalist states. Naturally, such a movement would be the enemy of any nation that tried to extend its state power to rule over colonies and steal their wealth. But over the coming decades, the socialist movement, organised in the Second International, split into two wings.
On the one hand, figures such as Eduard Bernstein—often described as “moderates”—would argue that revolution was impossible and unnecessary, and that socialists should avoid conflict and work through existing institutions. They would also become supporters of colonial projects. Opposing them were figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, who put opposition to colonialism at the centre of their revolutionary politics. Both saw colonialism—and competition for overseas influence—as central to the logic of capitalism, its drive to war and its tendency to economic collapse.
When World War One broke out in 1914, these revolutionaries also saw anti-colonialism as central to the strategy for socialist revolution. Luxemburg, writing from jail, condemned capitalism not only for its contemporary war, but for its atrocities in the colonies: “This same imperialism doomed tens of thousands of Hereros to destruction”.
Lenin—exiled from Russia—wrote to revolutionaries at home, advising them to put this question to the working class: “Are you willing to pay these gentry, the capitalists, hundreds of millions of roubles [the Russian currency] every year for a war waged for the division of the African colonies, Turkey, etc.?” He proposed “workers and peasants’ peace terms” to end the war: “liberation of all colonies; liberation of all dependent, oppressed and unequal nations”.
When the Russian workers seized power at the end of 1917, this program was put into action. Almost immediately, the new revolutionary government published its Decree on Peace, describing “this war over the issue of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered” to be “the greatest of crimes against humanity”. To the German state, Russia’s negotiators, led by Leon Trotsky, proposed peace on the basis that “colonial questions” be resolved by removing all troops and organising referendums of the colonial populations to decide their future.
Unsurprisingly, the terms were not accepted by the German imperialist powers, or any others. Instead, the Marxist movement—which was being reorganised into separate revolutionary Communist parties inspired by the Russian example—would have to reach out to the oppressed colonial populations themselves.
“We do not want to become like the ‘heroes’ of the Second International”, Zinoviev told the anti-colonial conference in Baku in 1920. “We are mindful that in this world live not only people with white skin ... We want to put an end to the rule of capital everywhere in the world. And this will become possible only when we have lit the fire of revolution not merely in Europe and America but throughout the world, and when all the working people of Asia and Africa march with us.”
Of course, this was easier said than done—and even saying it was difficult, when the world’s imperialist powers were trying to eliminate the new Russian revolutionary government using the same techniques of mass slaughter and starvation they had learned in their colonial territories.
But there were serious political challenges, too. The anti-colonial movements were based in economically underdeveloped countries and could be strongly influenced by local landlords and capitalists. Outside Russia, the European revolutionary movement was still too small and weak to challenge its own ruling classes. The global alliance between socialists and anti-colonial movements was an important strategic goal; implementing it required a level of strength and organisation that had not yet been reached.
“If the struggle in Persia, India, and Turkey were merely to bring to power the capitalists and landlords of those countries, with their national parliaments and senates, the masses of the people would have gained nothing”, argued a Russian delegate, Pavlovich. “Every newly formed state would be rapidly drawn, by the very course of events and the iron logic of the laws of capitalist economy, into the vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics.”
This vision of communist anti-colonialism inspired generations of fighters—but it has not yet been realised. The imperialist blockade of Russia had the desired effect: the revolutionary movement was starved out and replaced with the bureaucracy of Joseph Stalin. Zinoviev himself ended up in Stalin’s prisons, as would “all the speakers from Asia at the Baku congress who were within Stalin’s reach and whose fate is known”, according to the historian John Riddell.
Stalin’s “Communist” movement retained the language of anti-colonialism when it suited its interests. But the idea of a simultaneous global movement to wipe out capitalism and colonialism in “one single tumultuous, powerful stream” of resistance became an occasional rhetorical device, not a strategic reality.
Now, the “vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics” has absorbed most of the post-colonial nations. Some, like India, are happily supplying arms to Israel. Others, like Iran, collaborate with Russia’s foreign military adventures. China even pursues its own internal settler-colonial project in Xinjiang. The world remains in need of the strategy shaped by Marx: a global anti-capitalist revolution to liberate the oppressed all over the world.
