American "Democracy" and Colonial Oppression

(Quote of the Week)

Radical American journalist John Reed was won to Bolshevism while covering the Russian Revolution in Petrograd in 1917, after which he wrote his classic eyewitness account, Ten Days That Shook the World. We print below an excerpt from an undelivered speech Reed had prepared for the First Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in September 1920 in Baku, capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. Reed attended the Congress as a delegate from the U.S. and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Third (Communist) International, which was founded by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party as the necessary instrumentality to achieve world socialist revolution. Reed died of typhus after returning to Moscow from the Baku Congress.

The workers and peasants of the Philippines, the peoples of Central America and the islands of the Caribbean—they know what it means to live under the rule of “free America.”

Take, for example, the peoples of the Philippines. In 1898 the Filipinos rebelled against the cruel colonial government of Spain, and the Americans helped them. But when the Spaniards had been driven out, the Americans did not want to go away.

Then the Filipinos rose against the Americans, and this time the “liberators” started to kill them, their wives, and children, torturing and eventually conquering them. They seized their land and forced them to work and make profits for American capitalists.

The Americans have promised the Filipinos independence. Soon an independent Filipino republic will be proclaimed. But that does not mean that the American capitalists will leave or that the Filipinos will not continue to work to make profits for them. For the American capitalists have given the Filipino leaders a share of their profits; they have given them government jobs, land, and money. They have created a Filipino capitalist class that also lives on the profits created by the workers—and in whose interest it is to keep the Filipinos in slavery….

These same American capitalists incite the American workers and farmers against each other. They starve and exploit the peoples of Cuba and the Philippines. Savagely they kill American Negroes and burn them alive. And in America itself, American workers are obliged to work under frightful conditions, receiving low wages for a long workday. When they are exhausted and used up they are thrown out onto the street, where they die of hunger….

We appreciate the need for solidarity among all oppressed and toiling peoples, for unity of the revolutionary workers of all the countries of Europe and America under the leadership of the Russian Bolsheviks, in the Communist International. And we say to you, peoples of the East: Do not believe the promises of the American capitalists!

There is only one road to freedom. Unite with the Russian workers and peasants who have overthrown their capitalists and whose Red Army has beaten the foreign imperialists! Follow the red star of the Communist International!

—“Speech by John Reed,” To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920—First Congress of
the Peoples of the East (Pathfinder, 1993)