Old colonial forms of imperialist rule could not withstand the hammer blows of the colonial revolution. Parallel with the ascent of revolutionary China, such countries as India, Ceylon, Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, etc. have gained their independence, with political power passing into the hands of their respective native bourgeoisie.
The imperialist rulers, able in the past to quell with comparative ease the uprisings of unarmed masses, were confronted during and following World War II with revolutionary masses able to enforce their demands arms in hand, arms they acquired in the course of the war and after the Japanese capitulated. This has confronted the imperialists with new problems, and with the search for new forms of domination.
Class relations in the Middle East, Africa and Oceania (Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, etc.) tend to shape up in the same manner as in Asia. With the deepening crisis of outlived capitalism at one pole and the continuing crisis of the proletarian leadership at the other, the native bourgeoisie in these areas as well is impelled to make its bid for power and seek to play an independent role.
The New Relations in the Former Colonies
World War iI laid bare the atrophy of old colonial powers, Great Britain, France, Holland and Japan. The colonial masses carried their struggle for independence to a new climax.
The imperialist belligerents had sought to enlist the support of native populations, first and foremost of the native bourgeoisies. The blows Japan dealt militarily to the Western “democracies,” its “Asia for the Asians” campaign and the solicitation of support, forced both sides to promise native rule and independence. The masses proceeded to make these promises good.
The old forms of colonial rule had to be sacrificed in order to salvage capitalism. Otherwise, in the struggle for independence, the insurgent masses would, as in China, assault the very foundations of imperialist rule, i.e., foreign investments.
There was another reason why the colonial powers transferred power “peacefully” to some of the native bourgeoisies. Once the U.S. gained the ascendancy among the imperialist powers, it required different forms of domination.
The U.S. monopolists with their overwhelming economic, fiscal and military superiority, do not need direct colonial rule, but primarily an opportunity for economic penetration. Hence their wartime pressure on the old imperialist powers to grant self-rule in the colonies in order thus to enable U.S. capital to penetrate these areas.
To beat back the revolutionary masses who had entered the world arena, and to accommodate itself to U.S. demands, Great Britain yielded political rule to the native bourgeoisie in India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon. In this way London salvaged the main thing: British investments, the “commonwealth union,” the sterling bloc, etc.
Wherever the old colonial powers attempted to restore the status quo ante bellum they were taught lessons costly in prestige, money and blood, e.g., the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Indo-China, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria and the British in Egypt, Malaya, etc.
This impasse of the old colonial powers mitigates against stability, feeds the colonial revolution and, simultaneously, adds to the frustration and exasperation of U.S. imperialism.
The fraud of Washington’s attempt to play the role of an “anticolonial” power has been exposed by the ferocity of its intervention against the Chinese revolution, by the Korea war, the intervention in Indochina, the intervention in Guatemala, etc. U.S. pressure in favor of homerule and its backing of colonial despotism are two sides of one and the same policy of counterrevolution, rooted in U.S. imperialism’s belated arrival as aspirant to world dominion.
Confronted with an unforeseen situation, above all in Asia, the heart of the colonial sector of world capitalism, U.S. imperialism needs time to make indispensable adjustments, to bolster the shaky positions of the native bourgeoisies in the colonial areas, etc. These and other considerations determine Washington’s strategy for Asia and the turn of the Eisenhower administration toward new agreements with Moscow and Peking.
The Bandung Conference
The Bandung Conference of April 24-28, 1955 reflected the present stage of the liberating struggle of the colonial masses, the gains as well as the limitations. Represented were 29 countries of Asia and Africa, well over one-half of the world’s population. This conference registered on a global scale the transformations that have already taken place throughout the colonial sector. The Western imperialists were barred from direct participation, so were their most discredited puppets (Chiang Kai-shek and others). The warmest welcome was accorded to the representatives of China, which in the eyes of the colonial people symbolizes the greatest victory thus far over imperialism.
Even Washington’s stooges at Bandung had to join in a demonstration against colonialism and, moreover, had to accept the participation of China, while the U.S. continues to refuse to recognize the Peking government.
Bandung was a blow at the imperialist-dominated UN, discrediting its claim to speak in the name of the former colonial people, and above all of those that still remain under colonial subjection. This intercontinental conference had to solidarize itself with the aspirations and aims of those peoples who still live under “colonialism in many areas of Asia and Africa under whatever form it may take,” thereby spurring this struggle.
The limitations of Bandung found their sharpest expression in the dominant role played by the native capitalist politicians, representing already established governments and interested primarily in maintaining their class in power. Their doctrine of anticolonialism constitutes nothing more than opposition to the direct rule of any country by the imperialist powers. It does not connote the uprooting of all imperialist interests in a subject country, least of all, the driving out of imperialist capital already invested in a country which arises out of its colonial status. On the contrary, as Nehru’s India, Sukarno’s Indonesia, etc., show, their anticolonialism is completely consistent with the continuance of imperialism’s investments in former subject countries.
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The anticolonialism of Nehru and the other native bourgeois rulers rejects the revolutionary uprising of subject people against imperialist rule. In this respect the gist of their anticolonial doctrine is reform, i.e., an “orderly” transfer of power by the imperialist rulers. Thus the doctrine of Nehru and similar capitalist politicians not only differs from revolutionary anticolonialism but stands counterposed to it.
From this standpoint Bandung represents an effort by the native bourgeoisies to freeze the colonial revolution within the existing relations and maintain a status quo. Here Peking sees eye to eye with Nehru and the others.
China’s emergence as a world power has made the Indian bourgeoisie and other native rulers feel protected in a twofold manner. On the one hand, China’s manifest power gives them more bargaining room in relation to the imperialist countries. On the other hand, they use the cover of the Third Chinese Revolution against the masses at home.
Mao’s opportunist line helps perpetuate the rule of Nehru and Co. by helping them subjugate the toilers through their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois organizations. In the quest for a status-quo deal with the imperialists the Chinese Stalinists are pursuing abroad the class-collaborationist line of the “bloc of four classes” they pursued for so long at home. It is the traditional foreign policy of Stalinism, subordinating the needs of the masses to the needs of the bureaucracy.
National Struggle—The First Step
National liberation from imperialist rule is indivisible from the permanent revolution. The Third International in its first resolution on the colonial question stated:
“Foreign oppression is a permanent brake upon the free development of every aspect of social life; for this reason the first step of the revolution must be to overthrow foreign rule. To aid the struggle for the overthrow of foreign rule does not mean to underwrite the nationalist aspirations of the native bourgeoisie. It simply means to clear the road for the proletariat in the colonies to emancipate itself.” (Second World Congress of the CI, 1920). This prognosis of 35 years ago that national struggle is inseparable from social struggle is the reality of our times.
Historical experience has amply demonstrated that national independence is indeed the prelude to proletarian emancipation. To put it differently, in backward countries it is the first sequence of the permanent revolution. Historical experience has confirmed this conclusively.
In China, following the First Revolution of 1911, the young proletariat did not long delay in coming forth as the challenger to the national bourgeoisie. In the Second Revolution of 1925-27 it made its own bid for power. Even after it lost, the bourgeois counterrevolution proved neither stable nor lasting. The Chinese bourgeoisie, headed by Chiang, could eke out only two more decades. For this borrowed time it was indebted to the Stalinists.
In Indochina the struggle against foreign rule was led virtually from the beginning by a proletarian party, the Trotskyists under the leadership of Ta Thu Thau. This uncompromising revolutionary leadership based itself on the program of the permanent revolution. The Stalinists came into the leadership of Indochina’s national revolutionary war by gangster methods. They assassinated the Trotskyist leaders and imposed class-collaborationism on the movement. They opened the country to the return of the French imperialists; they advocated the incorporation of Vietnam in the French Union. The war of more than eight years that followed did not, however, bring the native bourgeoisie to power. Despite U.S. backing, its rule is shaky in the territory ceded to it by the Geneva agreement.
In Indonesia the organized working class is the most powerful and most decisive force. It is bound to come more and more to the fore as the weak bourgeoisie, whom the Stalinists today sustain in power, demonstrates how powerless it is to solve any of the tasks of the democratic revolution.
In Burma, the native bourgeoisie has assumed power, under a “socialist” cover, and has confronted a civil war. Its chances for stability are not bright.
In Pakistan, which has been carved out of the body of India, the Moslem League, in control of the country from the beginning, has discredited itself, lost its mass following, and rules mainly through its military forces, built up and supported by American imperialism.
Even countries as backward as Kenya prove how much explosive power there is in the national question. Here the British sanctioned a native movement, in the hope of channelizing the social struggle. Instead the social struggle erupted into the armed uprising of the Mau Mau.
Again, in the case of British Guiana, London consented to home-rule, only to move immediately to cancel this concession because a workers’ movement gained the ascendancy in the very first elections. In Singapore the same process is asserting itself. The first election resulted in a Labor Party government and the workers underscored this victory by a wave of strikes to improve their working and living conditions.
The Ceylon Experience
In Ceylon the native bourgeoisie no sooner assumed power than its rule was challenged by the toiling masses, led by the Lanka Samasamaja Party (Trotskyist). The Ceylonese bourgeoisie through its ruling party, the UNP, failed to solve a single one of the burning problems facing the country. What is more, the UNP broke its own election promises, cut rice rations, removed the rice subsidy, hiked prices on basic foodstuffs (rice and sugar in particular), raised rail fares, postal rates and the prices of cloth and cheap cigarettes, abolished the free mid-day meal in schools, shut down the milk-feeding centers, etc. Therewith this capitalist government not only lost the confidence of the mass of the people but roused them to anger. The explosion came in the hartal of August 12, 1953.
Both the Colombo and Moratuwa Town Halls flew the black flag of the hartal. Strikes tied up industry, railways, trams, buses and docks; government and municipal employees joined the hartal, so did the University students.
It was countrywide in scope, involving cities, towns and villages in every province. In twenty-four divisions of the Western, Southern and Sabaragamuwa provinces, the mass movement reached the level of a mass uprising.
The government in panic invoked “a state of emergency,” little different from a declaration of martial law, and prolonged it with the aim of stifling all opposition. The attempt proved unsuccessful.
With the 1953 hartal, a new force has entered the political life of Ceylon—the direct intervention of the masses. As the Ceylonese Trotskyists state: “Our politics hereafter can never be the same as before. The sense of mass power generated in the masses themselves as well as in their opponents ensures this.”
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The Ceylonese bourgeoisie is heading toward increasing collision with the masses. The revolutionary challenge to UNP rule far from decreasing is bound to intensify.
India, The Classic Colonial Country
India gives an outward appearance of a country whose native bourgeoisie is strong and stable. At all events, the odds seem to be in its favor.
The Indian bourgeoisie reaped lush profits from the war and expanded its industrial base. It was further reinforced by its retention of control of the national liberation struggle.
From its inception the Congress Party set up arbitrary limits to the struggle. Its goal was an amiable settlement with the British rulers, via petitions, redress-of-grievances campaigns, pleas for reform, etc. When the elemental mass movement took the road of open struggle, Gandhi elaborated a program designed to give an impression of struggle while in reality curbing it.
His doctrine of nonviolence, passive resistance, etc., served to restrain the revolutionary awakening of the Indian peasantry, the first phases of which are marked by passive resistance.
Each time the masses broke through the barriers imposed by Gandhi’s policy, the Indian bourgeoisie withdrew from the struggle, denounced the “excesses,” and permitted the British to repress the movement. Amid the wartime crisis of British rule, the spontaneous mass uprising of August 9, 1942, the Stalinists sided with the British imperialists against the insurgent masses, denounced the uprising, and thus bolstered the position of the native bourgeoisie.
Gandhi’s policy prevented the Indian masses from driving the British rulers out by revolutionary means. It prolonged British domination and finally facilitated an “orderly” transfer of state power to the native capitalists.
The Indian capitalists today confront the workers and peasants as the country’s rulers. To hold power they must carry through agrarian reforms, abolish the massive survivals of feudalism. They must do more. They must industrialize to raise the living standards. India’s living standards are among the lowest in the world; her population of 370 million is growing at a rate of 1¼% annually.
To carry out agrarian reforms, and industrialize the country, Nehru would have to mobilize the workers and poor peasants for active support against the landlords, the usurers, the gentry, the princes, the Brahmins and other castes. Nehru must shy away from this. It would unleash the revolution, bringing about the downfall of his own capitalist class. That is why he can do no more than put patches on Indian society; that is why the capitalists must rest instead on an alliance with the feudal exploiters against the poor peasants and workers. The native bourgeoisie cannot break its ties with imperialism, either. It must on the contrary lean more and more upon the imperialists.
In the economic life of India, as of the other former colonies, the world arms race is playing a major role. A considerable part of India’s meager national income is being devoured by militarism. Such expenditures tend to rise because of Washington’s aggressive military subsidies to such countries as Pakistan, the Phillipines, Thailand, Turkey, etc. In the interests of self-defense India, just as Burma, Indonesia, Egypt, etc., must keep pace with the growing military strength of their neighbors and rivals. They must unload the costs on the backs of the masses.
The Indian bourgeoisie resorts to nationalizations because private foreign capital dominates the country’s economic life. Lacking the necessary funds the native bourgeoisie uses statization in order to develop branches of industry. These nationalized projects and government planning remain entirely within the capitalism framework.
It is planned misery to provide a stabler home base for the native capitalists. India’s first 5-year plan set as its target an annual increase of 1% of the per capita income, officially estimated at $60. Needless to say the lion’s share of any increase of national income will flow into the coffers of the bourgeoisie.
The imperialists frown upon even such nationalizations; their governments greet the projects with hostility; they threaten to cut off funds and clamp on a general economic and political squeeze. In the end the native government is compelled to retreat. In India’s case, the most ambitious part of the plan is to increase steel production fivefold by 1961 (from 1.2 million tons to 6 million). New Delhi “in a move apparently intended to reassure foreign investors . . . decided to allow already established private concerns to expand their steel production” (New York Times, June 5, 1955). The Tata family is dickering with the US. financiers to boost its output to two million tons a year; the Birla group proposes to boost its output by one million tons, thus assuring in advance that one-half of the projected increased steel output will be in private hands, backed by foreign capital.
The program of “planned economy” on capitalist basis cannot accomplish any of the primary objectives claimed by the capitalists, least of all, lead to socialism, as a Nehru demagogically declaims. It will not gain economic independence from private foreign capital and their governments, who play the decisive role in India’s economic life. It cannot develop industry to a level in any way commensurate to the needs of the mass of people, or significantly raise living standards. India’s economy and the economies of other former colonial countries must remain primarily producers of food crops and raw materials and must suffer from both the crisis in the advanced countries as well as their own internal crises.
Historical experience has already exhausted nationalizations as a way out for native rulers. Turkey in the interval between the first and second world wars tried nationalizations on a scale beyond that now envisaged by Nehru & Co. Turkey remains today a semicolony of imperialism. Mexico in the course of her national revolution, employed even more drastic measures, namely, nationalization through expropriation of foreign holdings in oil (British and American). And with what results? Today private foreign capital is reentering the Mexican oil industry. The native capitalists can no more escape the domination of finance capital than a small-scale concern can stand up against the big corporations.
The position of the Indian bourgeoisie under Nehru does not differ essentially from that of the Chinese bourgeoisie under Chiang Kai-shek.
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Can Nehru do in India what Chiang Kai-shek couldn’t do in China? Chiang, too, started out to industrialize. He, too, introduced nationalizations and “planning.” He praised the Russian revolution, and had Russian political and military advisors on his staff, as well as the unqualified support of the Stalinists. Stalin hailed Chiang in terms more laudatory than those Bulganin now bestows on Nehru.
Chiang’s failure was not a personal failure. It was the failure of a bourgeoisie relatively weak in regard to the native proletariat; at the same time, it was too weak to withstand the pressure of the imperialists. The Indian bourgeoisie is basically in the same position.
Peking and Moscow are today giving Nehru the appearance of strength and stability. In addition, Nehru has been made a hero by the neutralist petty-bourgeois tendencies in Western Europe because of his foreign policy. He couples the doctrine of anti-colonialism with “peaceful coexistence.” To the Indian bourgeoisie, “peaceful coexistence” offers a way out for a class that is caught in a squeeze between decayed imperialism and the permanent revolution. Neutralism is the political expression of the Indian bourgeoisie’s fear of the colonial revolution. It is an extension internationally of Gandhi’s doctrine of “passive resistance” at home. That is why Nehru welcomes collaboration with Peking and Moscow in foreign policy.
At the same time, he remains irreconcilable against the native Stalinists. He needs completely free hands on the one hand in relation to the workers at home, and on the other, in relation to the imperialists. “Socialist” Nehru wants no obstacles in his way when he moves against the workers to whom his class cannot grant any significant concessions. “Neutralist” Nehru wants no interference when he is ready to turn against Peking and Moscow. Under conditions of “coexistence” the Indian bourgeoisie, together with the other colonial bourgeoisies, would soon discard neutralism and lean more and more upon the imperialists. It would do so for economic as well as political reasons.
For the Indian bourgeoisie, as for all the other native capitalists, the least possible of regimes is that of bourgeois democracy. “Surrounded by decaying capitalism and enmeshed in the imperialist contradictions, the independence of a backward state inevitably will be semifictitious and its political regime, under the influence of internal class contradictions and external pressure, will unavoidably fall into dictatorship against the people—such is the regime of the ‘People’s’ party in Turkey, the Kuomintang in China; Gandhi’s [read Nehru’s] regime will be similar tomorrow in India” (Trotsky, May 1940).
For the Indian bourgeoisie there is no way out. Its main antagonists are now at home.
There are the peasants. The Indian land problem is more heavily charged than in any other country because of the provincial multiformity of India, the diversified governmental forms and their equally diversified ties with the feudal-caste relations. In India, the tasks of the democratic revolution are saturated with an exceptional revolutionary content precisely because of the massive survival of feudal serfdom, of caste divisions and even of slavery side by side with the irrepressible antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the working class.
The Indian working class is young, but it already has a great tradition of militancy. It is not procapitalist, on the contrary, it is socialist minded. It is highly concentrated and organized. The workers have available the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, for India is now one of the biggest markets for Marxist literature because the bourgeoisie is in no position as yet to prohibit it.
The main obstacle in the workers’ path are the Stalinists and the Social Democrats. The road for the success of the native bourgeoisie was cleared by the Kremlin which completely demoralized the workers’ vanguard by ascribing to the Indian bourgeoisie a revolutionary role and by the class-collaborationist line of the “People’s Front.” The brazen Stalinist support of Nehru today will clear the road for class struggle policies and the building of the Trotskyist party in India.
Conclusion
The overwhelming majority of mankind who up to now have been the object of Western politics have proclaimed that henceforward they themselves are on the arena as the subject of politics, as a determining force in the world.
The new class relations in the colonies find their most concentrated expression in India, the classic colonial country. The colonial revolution has up to now been conditioned by this, that the working class in the metropolitan centers has been immobilized by the Stalinist and Social Democratic class-collaborationist bureaucracies. There has thus been no fusion of the liberating struggle of the colonial people and the socialist struggle of the Western workers. To cite one instance, while the French bourgeoisie was waging for more than eight years a losing war in Indo-China, the Social Democrats and the Stalinists in France assured the imperialist bourgeoisie social peace at home.
The national bourgeoisies have been aided thereby. Moreover in countries such as India, the Socialists and the Stalinists played a major role in immobilizing the native proletariat, paving the way for Nehru’s ascendancy. The national bourgeoisies have likewise been able to take advantage of the temporary stalemate between imperialism and the Soviet bloc, and their being wooed by both the Stalinists and the imperialists.
In defense of their interests and particularly in the interests of military self-defense, the Peking and Moscow bureaucracies are quite capable of undertaking progressive measures, especially so in periods of open rift with the imperialists. But in defense of the self-same bureaucratic interests, they will, as they have systematically demonstrated, sacrifice and betray the revolutionary masses and their own Stalinist parties for the sake of diplomatic agreements with the imperialists.
Right now the buildup they are giving Nehru, their prostration before him, is cutting the Indian CP to ribbons, as witness the March 1955 defeat suffered in the Andhra elections by the Indian CP. It had excellent chances of winning control of the Andhra provincial government until Peking and Moscow pulled the rug from under the CP and assured victory to the Congress Party.
People’s Frontism can be invested with a semblance of plausibility in the eyes of the masses in the course of struggle against colonial rule. But once the national bourgeoisie assumes power the bankruptcy of class-collaborationism is quickly laid bare.
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There is no material basis for class-collaborationism in colonial countries. The traditional labor bureaucracies in advanced countries can impose such policies so long as the imperialist bourgeoisie is able to raise living standards and grant reforms. Impoverished backward countries cannot afford it. This tends to invest the struggles of the colonial proletariat with the sharpest forms, and renders colonial workers all the more ready to follow the leadership of the revolutionary party. Events are proving this in Ceylon.
In Ceylon a revolutionary mass party is on the scene. Three forces come into play therewith. First, as against the LSSP neither the native bourgeoisie nor the Stalinists can hope to control or decisively influence the workers or the mass movement. “Secondly, the Stalinists have no disguise for their reformist policies. In Ceylon everytime the CP turns toward collaboration with the capitalist class,” say the Ceylonese Trotskyists, “the LSSP, with its policy of consistent class struggle, is able to expose the CP before the masses as a betrayer of the working class and the mass movement. Indeed the masses themselves discover the betrayal.” Finally, there is a third and even more fundamental force. “The aim of the new CP line is impossible of achievement. The capitalist class of Ceylon despite any protestation from any quarter, cannot be kept neutral in a war between imperialism on the one side and the USSR and the associated states on the other.”
With their opportunist line the Stalinists will come into ever greater collision with the insurgent masses. Right now the French CP is in open conflict with the embattled Algerian movement of national liberation. At the 1955 May Day meeting held by the French Stalinists at Vincennes, outside Paris, the Algerian workers walked out in a body when they were refused a speaker of their own choice; the Stalinists gave the platform instead to a right-wing Algerian conciliationist.
It is to the credit of the French Trotskyists that they have come to the fore as the only consistent militant fighters against French colonialism in North Africa.
The next stage will witness ever growing conflict between the masses and the ruling national bourgeoisie. In this conflict will be forged the leadership for workers’ emancipation. It will not come from the defenders of the status quo but only from the partisans of the permanent revolution.
The Fourth International has every reason to look forward with optimism toward the growth of the Trotskyist parties in the colonies.