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Neocolonial Slavery and World Socialist Revolution

The year 2014 marks the centenary of World War I (1914-18) and the 75th anniversary of World War II (1939-45), two bloody interimperialist conflagrations through which the rulers of the advanced capitalist countries sought to redivide the world. We print below excerpts from a resolution adopted by a May 1940 Emergency Conference of the Trotskyist Fourth International, which linked the struggle for liberation in the colonial and semicolonial world with the fight for proletarian revolution in North America, Europe and Japan.

Under the banner of bourgeois “democracy” and bourgeois “equality,” the great capitalist empires were built upon the exploitation of the proletariat at home and the enslavement of weaker peoples overseas. In the three centuries of their growth, the capitalist nations warred constantly to acquire and expand their colonial domains, to defend them against the raids of rivals, or to suppress revolts of the colonial peoples. In 1914-18, the great imperialist powers fought to redivide an already divided world. They succeeded only in hastening the catastrophic decline of the capitalist system. The revolutions the war engendered, however, failed to establish in the advanced West and the backward East the proletarian power which could and can alone reorganize the world on a socialist basis. The workers won and held power only in backward Russia. Capitalism survived, but only to subject the world to the further agonies of its passing. Twenty-two years after the armistice of 1918, contorted by a crisis they were powerless to surmount, the imperialists plunged the world once more into bloody conflict—Germany, Italy, and Japan to “expand or die”—England, France, and the United States to defend and extend their world hegemony….

In the colonies, in the past, imperialist rule has meant the stifling of economic development and the perpetuation of backward economic and social relations in their most oppressive forms. If an imperialist “solution” of the present world conflict is imposed, a still greater rate of exploitation will be forced upon the colonies and the thralldom of the past deepened multifold. The Western Allies once more offer promises of “freedom” and “cooperation” after they win the present war. But acceptance of such promises only paves the way for the crueler deceptions of the Versailles [treaty at end of WWI] of tomorrow. Germany, for its part, does not bother with deceptive illusions but fights openly to rule the peoples it can conquer by blood and iron alone.

The hopes of liberation of the colonial peoples are therefore bound up even more decisively than ever before with the emancipation of the workers of the whole world. The colonies shall be freed, politically, economically, and culturally, only when the workers of the advanced countries put an end to capitalist rule and set out together with the backward peoples to reorganize world economy on a new level, gearing it to social needs and not to monopolist profits. Only in this way will the colonial and semicolonial countries be enabled to emerge from their varying stages of backwardness and take their places as integral sections of an advancing world socialist commonwealth. Drawn belatedly into the orbit of world economy, the backward countries have to take a gigantic leap forward, economically and politically, to come abreast of the advanced nations. Their backwardness is expressed most cruelly in the preservation of feudal and semifeudal agrarian relations holding in fetters the vast peasant millions. The imperialists superimposed upon these the fetters of monopoly capital, acting either directly or through native agencies (like the compradores and later the bankers of China). Thus the effort to realize the most elementary reorganization of society along national, democratic lines brings the colonial masses into collision with world imperialism.

The national bourgeoisie in the backward countries is incapable of effecting this transformation, even in a partial manner, because it means uprooting the structure of exploitation upon which their own position in society rests. The Russian Revolution of 1917 produced proof positive that a backward country can take this great leap forward only if the working class is capable of assuming the leadership of the agrarian revolution and guiding the democratic struggle to a socialist solution under proletarian power.

—“The Colonial World and the Second Imperialist War” (May 1940), reprinted in Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years (1933-40) (Pathfinder Press, 1973)