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Comintern
Colonial Politics
‘The Comintern and the Colonies’:
A Communist History Network seminar, Manchester, November 2002
On Friday 15 November 2002, the Communist History Network — in conjunction with the Manchester University International Centre for Labour Studies — organised an afternoon seminar at around the theme ‘The Comintern and the Colonies’. The paper-givers were John Callaghan, Allison Drew and Sobhanlal Datta Gupta. Here John Callaghan summarises his paper: ‘Comintern Colonial Politics’.
The Soviet Union was still largely an isolated state in 1928. In Europe recognition was withheld by Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Luxemburg, and much of the eastern half of the continent. Relations with Britain and China were broken in 1927 and did not exist in any formal sense with most of the Americas, Mexico and Uruguay excepted. Neighbouring states such as Poland, Latvia, Esthonia, and Finland were deeply suspicious of Russia’s revanchiste ambitions, while almost all states continued to regard it as subversive in intent. The Soviet constitution of July 1923 depicted a bipolar world and provided evidence for this perception. The camps of socialism and capitalism were portrayed as fundamentally antagonistic; it was only a matter of time before renewed attempts would be made by the capitalist powers to crush socialism. Soviet diplomacy was designed to delay this for as long as possible and to play off one capitalist state against another by exploiting everything which divided them (the war settlement, the colonial division of the world, economic rivalries and so on). The USSR imagined itself, in this same constitution, if it survived for long enough, as the nucleus of a future world federation of soviet republics as these emerged around the globe. The Comintern was perceived by the foreign powers as the principal device which Russia had designed to achieve this ambition. The Comintern’s failures in Europe by 1924 simply drew attention to the growing importance of the colonial possessions of the capitalist powers in Asia in the Comintern’s calculations — particularly when Moscow concluded a treaty with China in that year. Just as the Soviet Union expected to benefit from the antagonisms of the Great Powers and from the class struggle which divided each of them, so did it expect to gain from the conflict between imperialism and the colonial peoples. In this most ideological of states, it was important that the founding genius of communism had made these connections long before 1917.
On paper at least the Second Congress of the Comintern promoted the national liberation struggle in the colonies to a position of importance it had never before attained. The discussion was continued at Baku in September 1920 where the Comintern convened a Congress of Peoples of the East. Many ambiguities were left unresolved by these early discussions. The most obvious was the question of who were the real revolutionaries? Communists could be counted only in hundreds in the whole of Africa and India in 1920, and Latin America and Asia were little better off from the Comintern’s perspective. Real revolutionaries existed among the nationalists but many of them were doubtful allies. They often preached ideologies hostile to Communism — not just religious obscurantisms but also militantly secular ideas such as those of the Kemalists in Turkey. It was unclear how the Comintern would deal with this problem. The Second Congress expressed hostility to pan-Islamism, contradicting an earlier Bolshevik tactic of seeking to make use of it in the Russian colonies of central Asia. Complaints were later voiced at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern that this belated hostility had damaged opportunities for building communist influence within the Indonesian national movement Sarekat Islam. But such complications were inevitable. The abstractions of the Comintern’s colonial theses offered very little guidance when set against the sheer range and complexity of the conditions found in the colonies. The very social categories employed by the Comintern — drawn exclusively from European experience — were often only rough approximations to the socio-economic realities it set out to comprehend, and sometimes not even that. Where was the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, or the feudal landowner in sub-Saharan Africa, for example? What constituted the nation? How were the communists to cope with the reality of numerous ethnic, religious and linguistic identities and the possible rivalries between them? Appeals to a class consciousness which did not exist would have limited value. Where would the communists stand, if there were two or three or more competing national voices — a likely outcome given the arbitrariness of colonial boundaries? How were the small groups of communists — drawn disproportionately from the educated urban minority — to penetrate the villages: 500,000 of them in India alone? Many of these questions were not even asked at the Second Congress.
But the discussion highlighted a further complication in that considerations of Soviet state interests were identified as an element in the Comintern’s calculations:
‘all events in world politics are necessarily concentrated on one central point, the struggle of the world bourgeoisie against the Russian Soviet Republic, which is rallying round itself both the soviet movements among the advanced workers in all countries and all the national liberation movements in the colonies and among oppressed peoples… our policy must be to bring into being a close alliance of all national and colonial liberation movements with Soviet Russia; the forms taken by this alliance will be determined by the stage of development reached by the communist movement among the proletariat of each country or by the revolutionary liberation movement in the underdeveloped countries and among backward nationalities’.
Though Lenin in 1920 was insistent that proletarian internationalism demanded that the Soviet state shall ‘make the greatest national sacrifices in order to overthrow international capitalism’, the opposite was also true; proletarian internationalism demanded ‘subordination of the proletarian struggle in one country to the interests of the struggle on a world scale’. Since Lenin himself had characterized world politics as being concentrated on the central point of struggle between the world bourgeoisie and the Soviet Republic, it would be an easy matter to convince Communists to support policies which the Russians demanded — on the grounds that these represented the central ‘contradiction’ of the world struggle — even if they were of dubious value to national ‘sections’ of the Comintern, or actually destructive of local political opportunities. This was no hypothetical problem.
Thus a policy already riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions was made worse when the Soviet factor was added to the mix. The myth of ‘Soviet’ development in the backward territories of the former Tsarist empire — that is, social, political and economic progress unheard of in the colonies of Western imperialism — entered the picture to further befuddle the Comintern’s analysis in 1922. Russian experience, argued the Fourth Congress, indicated another way forward for the colonies:
‘Under capitalist rule the backward countries cannot share in the achievements of modern technology and culture without paying, by savage exploitation and oppression, enormous tribute to great Power capital… For backward countries the Soviet system represents the most painless transitional form from primitive conditions of existence to the advanced communist culture…This is proved by the experience of the Soviet structure in the liberated colonies of the Russian empire’.
The many facets of the Comintern’s colonial theses thus offered numerous opportunities for changes of emphasis as circumstances dictated and we have already seen that the changing requirements of Soviet foreign policy provided one of the main motivations for so doing. This factor — what was good for Soviet Russia — grew in importance as the Soviet state survived in isolation and the European communist parties failed to meet the Comintern’s original expectations. The Russian state needed allies in the world and sometimes nationalists — particularly those with a real prospect of power — were attractive candidates for this position. By the Fifth Congress in 1924 the dominant view in Moscow was that the national bourgeoisie was the best hope the Russian state had for finding such useful friends. The colonial national bourgeoisie was, once again, also perceived as the main thorn in the side of Russia’s principal enemies — Britain and France — at a time when Russian foreign policy was also cultivating links with Germany, the other principle ‘revisionist’ power in Europe, which had lost its colonies under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Changing circumstances clearly influenced this political arithmetic and one of the most compelling was the emergence of a friendly nationalist movement in crisis-torn China which the Bolshevik leaders under Stalin perceived as a serious contender for power in that country. While the number of communists in the whole of Asia amounted to a paltry 5,000 or so, an alliance with the nationalists could move millions.
The Soviet state’s policy in China backfired badly when the Kuomintang — which Stalin had ultimately wanted to ‘squeeze like a lemon’ while subordinating the Communists to it in practice — turned on its communist allies in the massacres of April 1927. The Sixth congress of the Comintern attempted to cover up this debacle and in so doing reduced communist colonial policy to total incoherence. The ultra-leftist turn isolated the national sections nearly everywhere and the recovery of the party in China owed nothing to Comintern strategic thinking and nearly everything to the local situation. With this exception, communists could still only be counted in hundreds and thousands in the colonies when the Comintern was dissolved in 1943.
