Colonialism has been debated since the end of World War II. The Suez Crisis has forced even the U.S. government to take a stand, on the ground of principles before that of international policy. Even before the Canal dispute resulted in the aborted Anglo-French expedition at the end of last summer, Foster Dulles expounded the anti-colonialist “creed” of the United States: Having Wall Street bankers and Pentagon generals on its side unnerved the Russian-Communist press, for whom the sanctuary of anti-colonialism is the USSR. But repeated votes at the UN on censure motions against England and France in the stands offered the uplifting spectacle of Americans and Russians fraternally united against the representatives of old Europe’s colonialism.

So, is America, the supreme stronghold of capitalist conservation, the atomic gendarme of counterrevolution, also a bastion of anti-colonialism? The Russian-Communist press can not stomach the sudden, but not unforeseen, reversal wrought by the Americans, who, by driving the Anglo-French out of Port Said, wrested the monopoly of pro-Arabism from Russian diplomacy. Less than ever, would they answer this question. We, on the other hand, have no difficulty in doing so. The United States, the superpower of imperialism, does not pretend to be, but is actually the enemy of historical colonialism. As long as U.S. anti-colonialism was only preached by the mouth of Foster Dulles one could have some doubt about it; no more when it happens that the United States, by taking the governments of London and Paris by the throat, forces them to vomit up the residual influences they enjoyed in the Middle East. The anti-colonialist United States is not a paradox. What the Moscow-orchestrated press does not say is that one can be bourgeois and pro-independence of colonial peoples, imperialist and anti-colonialist, in the same way that it is not enough to embrace the anti-colonialist ideologies flaunted by the Bandung countries to be Marxist.

On the ideological level, anti-colonialism is the negative version of bourgeois nationalism, it is the class ideology of the bourgeoisies fighting for the conquest of the nation-state under the conditions determined by the occupation of territory by overseas powers. The social formula of the anti-colonial revolutions is the same as that of the democratic revolutions of Europe: likewise, their anti-colonialist ideology is but the old national principle advocated by the philosophers and agitators of the bourgeois revolutions of the last two centuries. Its particular character is determined by the necessity of adapting to historical conditions in which archaic social relations, peculiar to feudalism or even pre-feudalism, rely on the forces of conservation represented by bureaucratic and military apparatuses of foreign powers. A peculiar character, not an original one. Indeed, the anti-colonialist ideology of the new Afro-Asian states and the insurrectional movements of the colonies are easily assimilated, always on the level of general principles, to the revolutionary ideologies of the bourgeoisies that in other times had to take up arms to enucleate the nation-state from the body of multi-national empires.

Whichever way one views it, the critique of imperialism by Afro-Asian revolutionary movements reaches results diametrically opposed to those reached by the Marxist critique of imperialism. It goes no further than the principle of national sovereignty and non-interference in state affairs. But the ideologues of the bourgeois revolution of Europe and America had already reached this point.

On the historical level, colonialism is a political and social upheaval that marks the convergence between the interests of the former colonial bourgeoisies and the interests of large-scale capitalist production, which tends to permanently enlarge the world market. As such, it favors rather than hinders the preservation of imperialism. Colonialism, that is, the integration of territories and productive forces from overseas into the capitalist sphere of production, represented, in the last decades of the last century, a powerful factor in the development of monopoly capitalism, determining the polarization of economic-productive and political potential in metropolises, and therefore allowing the formation of monstrous states, bulwarks of capitalist preservation.

But as old colonialist Europe lost its industrial and military primacy, the great colonial empires became a hindrance to the development of capitalist productive forces. The concentration of capital reached very high levels in countries (the United States, Germany, Japan, and, finally, Stalinist Russia) that did not possess colonial empires, and soon the newcomers equaled, and eventually surpassed, the old colonial powers: England, France, Holland, Portugal, Belgium. Thus a contradictory historical situation was created: on the one hand, fierce industrial potentials tended toward unlimited expansion and, on the other, economically declining powers that had huge geographical and social spaces but were incapable of transforming them into capitalist markets. In other words, the perpetuation of historical colonialism increased the internal contradictions of the global capitalist sphere of production, while accumulating a no less dangerous revolutionary explosive within the old feudal or semi-feudal structures surviving in the colonies. It exacerbated the ills of capitalist overproduction, rather than alleviating those of pre-capitalist underproduction.

Successive world wars have corrected the deep imbalance. This was to the benefit of bourgeois conservation, regardless of what the Russian-Communist press says, which for years has been presenting anti-colonial revolutions as a surrogate for proletarian revolutions. Huge imperial blocs – considering that the British Commonwealth contained ¼ of the land area and nearly a ¼ of the world's population – were falling apart. Immense social aggregates, previously enclosed within rigid protectionist barriers, were split along ethnic and national dividing lines, giving rise to the states of India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco.

According to the interpretations of Moscow’s false communism, when these states arose, they dealt serious blows to imperialism. This is true only if one considers a particular view of imperialism: the historical colonialism of England, France, Holland. In contrast, when seen through the general interest of capitalism, every victorious Afro-Asian independence movement has broken one of the ties that threatened to strangle capitalist production, that is, the sphere of world production subject to the economic laws of capitalism. With the emergence of new nation-states into history, the capitalist world market was permanently enlarged, and the levees that once obstructed the flood of goods erupting from the productive machinery of the countries of completed capitalism were blown up.

The coming years will show how the demise of historical colonialism has been an invigorating injection into decadent Western capitalism. We already have the example of the Middle East. Everyone can see how the influence of the old imperialist powers retreating from the Region (the latest event being Jordan’s denunciation of the Anglo-Jordanian Treaty) has allowed American capital to invest itself in oil production resulting in oil well production indices rising to unprecedented levels. When one considers that the economy of Western Europe is subordinate to the supplies of petroleum products from the Middle East, one can see how the general interests of bourgeois conservation benefit the substitution of American capital for Anglo-French capital in the Middle East, since England and France lack the financial power necessary to manage the oil wells.

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In previous works, it was shown how the Afro-Asian anti-colonialist regimes are, economically and socially, bourgeois, and that their revolution did not – and could not – overcome the limits of democracy and its ideological derivatives.

On the political level, anti-colonialism takes the abused positions of neutralism. In a world dominated by large military blocs, the Bandung Conference member countries claim to function as an immense Switzerland, “equidistant” from both Eastern and Western imperialisms. Proclamations of principle, however, reconcile poorly with reality. The Afro-Asian countries that have risen to the status of nation-states, despite their commonly flaunted anti-colonialist origins, do not constitute a bloc. There is in fact pan-Chinese nationalism, pan-Arab nationalism, and pan-Indian nationalism.

There already exist “zones of influence” among the “neutrals” who signed the Bandung’s “five points.” This is evidenced by the substantial agreement reached by India and China, despite the absence of explicit diplomatic instruments, which shared influence rights over the small Himalayan states. In the Kingdom of Nepal, located on India’s northeastern frontier, the supreme regulator of both domestic and foreign policy is the New Delhi government, which has repeatedly intervened both through its economic advisors and its troops. Bhutan, a small principality of 300,000 inhabitants, is a protectorate of India, which looks after its foreign and economic affairs, curiously replicating the very principles that colonialist England still follows in Malaya and elsewhere. Then with regard to Sikkim, a formally sovereign statelet that is inhabited by 130,000 Hindus, Nehru’s pan-Indian nationalism does not go for subtlety: the territory is militarily occupied by Indian troops. Well, it is no coincidence then that Indian opposition to the Chinese annexation of Tibet faded, and thus dissipated, as the New Delhi government succeeded in imposing a pro-Indian order on the Himalayan states. To put it briefly, India and China, the two giants of neutralism, do not tolerate the existence of neutral states on their borders: instead, they prefer to agree to share control.

The nationalistic disagreements that divide India and Pakistan over Kashmir, Afghanistan and Pakistan over Pashtunistan, and above all the violent and irreconcilable conflicts that divide the so-called Arab world deserve another discussion. We have extensively discussed this topic in previous articles. Suffice it to say that the “Arab world”, setting aside minor disagreements, is divided into three major state and interstate constructs: the Sherifian empire of Morocco, which tends toward a federation of the Arab states of North Africa; the Baghdad Pact, which was originally a Turkish-Iraqi alliance but later absorbed Pakistan and Iran and received British membership; and finally the Egypt-Saudi Arabia-Syria-Yemen alliance to which Jordan has recently been added.

The purported “bloc” of Bandung countries, even if it were free of internal contradictions, could not seclude itself from the great global struggle between the NATO and Warsaw Pact military coalitions. It could not because the industrialization of Afro-Asian countries is dependent on financial and technical aid from capitalistically advanced countries. Under the present historical conditions, Afro-Asian “neutralism” is then reduced to an empty ideology that has no tangible connection with the actions of the states that flaunt it. And one need only consider the Suez Crisis in the aftermath of the failed Anglo-French attack on Egypt. There has been talk of the parliamentary weight that Afro-Asian votes had in the UN votes for Egypt. Everyone knows, however, that it was the threat of economic sanctions by the United States, which, because of the cut-off in the flow of Middle Eastern oil brought about by the blockage of the Suez Canal, had become Europe’s sole supplier of hydrocarbons. Thus, it has become the absolute arbiter of industry and transportation on the Old Continent.

Ultimately, the political neutralism of the Afro-Asian countries, despite its rhetorical flourishes, serves to mask their refusal to deprive themselves of the advantages of playing both sides in relation to the politics of playing both sides in relation to the policies of the world centres of imperialism. It corresponds to the needs in which Afro-Asian governments find themselves. They cannot hope to carry out their plans for industrialization without resorting to subsidies and loans from the states of developed capitalism, and thus without becoming economically dependent on them. But at the same time, they cannot abandon programmatic opposition to imperialism. If they did, they would lose the support of the masses who in the past fought to drive out the colonialist occupiers and who today constitute the backbone of the revolutionary forces fighting for the suppression of the old feudal relations. Under such conditions, formal neutralism is an indispensable guarantee against the disintegration of the state.

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Our conception of anti-colonialism does not prevent us from considering the movements for the formation of nation-states from the ruins of colonial empires as positive historical events and authentic revolutions. Such movements ensure the transition from feudalism, in any case from pre-capitalism, to the modern industrial mode of production, thus bringing about a social revolution. The party of revolutionary communism can only support the Revolution wherever it arises, provided it can discern the true from the false, that is, vulgar reformism from the subversion of existing social relations.

However, there are groups of people who call themselves revolutionary Marxists, who take positions of indifference towards the events occurring within colonial empires and the states that have been formed by their dissolution. Their arguments are roughly: “Korea, Indochina, Algeria, Morocco, and the Suez Canal are scabs of the bourgeois world which the bourgeois themselves will have to scratch. We are not so foolish as to allow ourselves to be caught in the snare of solidarity with the colored peoples to play into the hands of either the Americans or the Russians.”

In essence, such a view denies that the anti-colonialist movement performs a revolutionary function; on the contrary, it reduces the fact of the formation of Afro-Asian nation-states to a consequence of the competitions in which the world’s top imperialist powers, the United States and Russia, are engaged. One could not have a more erroneous view of reality. The Afro-Asian revolutions were, and still are, brought about by objective and subjective conditions, namely colonialist oppression and the unquenchable hatred of the masses for the dual yoke of imperialist exploitation and the despotism of semi-feudal foreign-supported social structures. As Lenin taught, revolutions break out when the ruling power is no longer able to rule and the oppressed masses no longer want to have any part in the old order, then there can be little doubt that the formation of the Afro-Asian nation-states represented a revolution.

As a result of World War II, the colonialist powers could no longer govern their former possessions, and because of the armed revolt of the peoples of color, they were prevented from regaining possession of the lost territories after the end of hostilities. Nor did the revolt merely erase the traces of servitude to the foreigner, but swept away the old political scaffolding to which Asian feudalism still clung.

It cannot be argued, without denying the historical evidence, that Afro-Asian states arose by the decision of the great imperialist centers. Let us examine, for a moment, by exploiting what historical conditions Mao Tse-Tung’s revolution triumphed in China. Forty years of history, and even more if we start counting from the anti-monarchist revolution of 1911, stand to show that the Chinese Civil War began even before the rise of the new Russian imperialism. And in order for the Chinese revolutionary movement to achieve its main goal, namely the establishment of a unified and highly centralized modern state – a highly revolutionary fact in a country like China in which atomized pre-capitalist village production still survives – it was necessary for the Japanese power to be wiped out. Faced with China, Japan has for over fifty years been an insuperable obstacle in the path of revolution, the power that has invariably frustrated every attempt to politically unify China. True, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and much of China came to an end following Japan's defeat in World War II, but the liberation of the territory has been accompanied by a revolutionary movement that is radically changing Chinese society.

Another example, India. How did the new nation-states arise from the break-up of the former Indian empire? Certainly not by the decision of the Great Powers. Here too, the revolt against colonialism, bloodless but no less vigorous, made use of objective conditions. At the origin of the Indian Union, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, there was no civil war or armed seizure of power due to the absence of colonialist authorities, as was the case in Indonesia where the nation-state directly replaced the Japanese occupier. At the root of the dissolution of the former Indian Empire was an act of renunciation by Britain, which was forced in the course of the war to promise independence to the peoples of the great Asian peninsula. While the Nazi-Fascist Axis was directly threatening the Suez Canal, the gateway to the Middle East, dangerous anti-British movements were emerging in India, such as the one headed by Chandra Bose who openly supported Japanese propaganda. And this was taking place as the armies of the Tenno were sweeping towards Burma, having conquered Hong Kong and Singapore. Under such conditions, England was left with no choice: it had to promise independence to Hindus and Muslims. At the end of hostilities it was unable to go back on its promise: to do so, it would have required the old power that was by then merely a memory.

The Afro-Asian states were formed through a long and bloody struggle against imperialism. Such a struggle would have been impossible had it not been fueled by the broad masses, which not abstract ideological principles but the brutal reality of exploitation and oppression threw into revolt.

In the present historical conditions, characterized by the absence of the revolutionary proletariat, anti-colonial revolutions could not go beyond the limits of democratic and national revolution. In Tsarist Russia, the revolution went further because at the head of the movement was a proletarian revolutionary party, which is lacking at present in former colonial countries, and unfortunately also in capitalist metropolises.

The Afro-Asian revolutions, considered from this point of view, stand on solid ground. They do, to return to the objections of our contradictors, play their own “game,” even if they lean at times toward the Americans or toward the Russians. What revolutionary Marxism must do is to ascertain whether the “game” played by the young anti-colonialist democracies has revolutionary “stakes.” As far as we are concerned, we have no difficulty in answering in the affirmative. Regimes that work to demolish the old political scaffolding and antiquated pre-capitalist modes of production, introducing associated labor and the modern industrial proletariat, those regimes work revolutionarily.

The difference between our evaluations of anti-colonialism and those of our counterparts and enemies consists of this: for the Russian-Communist press – which confuses Afro-Asian revolutionary democracy with socialism or unknown preludes to it – anti-colonial revolutions are an end point. The same criterion guides American-brand anti-colonialists. For us, anti-colonial revolution is a starting point, or rather the historical stage through which colonial and former colonial peoples must necessarily pass in order to arrive at socialism. This does not mean that we are hiding from the fact that the proletarian revolution, when it arrives, find itself confronting the very same nation-states that are, today, indispensable for the transition from Asian feudalism to modern capitalist industrialism.

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More grounded in reality than the denial of the revolutionary nature of former colonial states is being skeptical of their independence. Can states that are blatantly dependent on foreign finance and technology be considered “independent”?

In our view, the question of a state’s economic independence is not necessarily linked to the question of its social content and historical function. It is not proven that an economically non-independent state is incapable of performing a revolutionary function. The industrialization of the huge social spaces of the large Asian states is a revolutionary fact, despite the fact that it is made possible by the capital investments made by states of advanced capitalism. This is the case with China and India, which respectively benefit from the capital ceded by Russia and international financial bodies.

But, on closer examination, is economic independence, in the reality of the world market, not a concept of vulgar political metaphysics? What productive organism, not only of Afro-Asian countries, but of the capitalist sphere itself, can consider itself independent of the rest of the world? Certainly it is precisely the countries of developed industrialism that are subject more than others to the fluctuations of the world market. Just think of the consequences that the closure of the Suez Canal has caused in the European economy. The interruption of the flow of Middle Eastern oil has demonstrated precisely that a cataclysmic world market fluctuation can produce greater ruin in highly industrialized countries than in others, which, due to a lack of historical development, live on the margins of the great currents of world commercial traffic. In this respect, the highly developed England is less dependent than the highly backward Afghanistan.

The bourgeois revolution proved, and one only has to reread the Communist Manifesto to be convinced, that with the advent of the world market, the epoch of independent productive organisms has vanished forever. If ever there was a historical epoch in which economic independence made sense, that was feudalism, in which the production of social life took place in “closed islands.” In contrast to feudalism, the bourgeois revolution represents not the affirmation of the principle of economic independence, but its negation, taking place in the sense of the suppression of fragmented, non-communicating productive systems isolated from one another.

Now what trend can be seen in the anti-colonialist movement? Precisely that of erasing the antiquated semi-feudal village economies. Of no other significance, to take one example, is the gigantic plan of railway construction undertaken by the Chinese government, which, when completed, will serve to connect the remote territories of Central Asia to the developed coastal belt, or in other words, to the world market. In this way, China’s semi-feudal village will truly cease to be independent.

Can Marxism remain indifferent to such events? Certainly not. They are revolutionary events. Along with the railroad, industry (albeit capitalist) penetrates into Chinese Turkestan or the Indochinese jungle or the wild Assam, and with it the modern proletariat.

Political independence, a common expression in political language, is an approximate and conventional concept. It is meant to mean nothing more than that the state machinery is not geared into a vast supranational mechanism – as was the case with the viceroyalty of the Indies, subordinate to the British Crown – but originates from the social structure delimited by the political frontiers of the state. The transition from one condition to the other is accompanied, in the Afro-Asian countries, by a profound revolution.

Of course, the general principle allows for exceptions, such as certain Arab states, where, in spite of political independence, even slavery-like forms are perpetuated, as is the case in Saudi Arabia.

Political independence, for the great former colonial states, meant a nation-state. And this is the historical goal of the bourgeois revolution: the nation-state. Without a bourgeois nation-state, feudal “quantity” cannot transform into bourgeois-capitalist “quality”.