It is never superfluous, when dealing with things that are happening in former colonial countries that have recently organised themselves into independent states, to reiterate our position on the national question. The national revolution, of which the revolt of non-European peoples against colonialism is the most modern aspect, is in every age and place a historical phenomenon with a multi-class basis. Originating from a social structure which is perpetuating the backward conditions of the semi-feudal agrarian economy, the revolutionary-democratic movement can only be a transitional coalition of the classes that arise, within the backward society, from new and antagonistic forms of production. Neither does the petty bourgeoisie, which is being formed within the old society from the disintegration of semi-feudal relations, have enough strength to lead the revolutionary movement alone, nor can the proletariat take the lead and supplant the bourgeoisie, unless historical circumstances characteristic of the October Revolution in Russia occur.

The proletarian and socialist leadership of the anti-feudal revolution can take place and last on the sole condition that the latter loses its national character, i.e. on the condition that the revolution against local semi-feudalism is intertwined with the anti-capitalist revolution of the international proletariat. The Leninist Third International aimed at this great historical encounter. All Marxists who had enthusiastically supported the proletarian dictatorship that had emerged from October knew that its programme – liquidation of tsarist backwardness and establishment of socialism – would be implemented on the sole condition that the communist revolution was victorious first of all in the bourgeois metropolises of Europe and America. Events have confirmed this scientific prediction in full. The failure of the anti-capitalist revolution in the bourgeois West has not, it is true, prevented the explosion of the gigantic productive energies that tsarism had kept imprisoned, but underlying the superb Russian industrialism of today it is not socialist, i.e. anti-mercantile, anti-salary, anti-business, forms of production that are at work.

The Stalinist press daily extols the national revolution in the colonies as an effect of the Russian revolution. And this cannot be doubted. If the vast Asian space is industrialising, this is also due to the profound repercussions of the Russian proletarian revolution. In the dark night of Asian backwardness, October sounded like a trumpet call, and this was clearly seen in 1920, when delegates from all the Asian peoples oppressed by imperialism rushed to Moscow and embraced the cause of the Communist International. Then the movement took other paths due to the degeneration of the International, but the incontrovertible fact remains that the events promoting renewal that have taken place in Asia and Africa over the last four decades are the outcome of the gigantic historical process initiated by the Russian working class.

While aware of this, Marxists must nevertheless guard against the danger – linked to the persistence of Stalinism in the workers’ movement – of distorting the classical Leninist positions on the national question. As a multi-class movement, the anti-feudal revolution always goes through a period (in Russia it was short-lived, from February to October) in which the political forces of the radical petty-bourgeoisie and the forces of the proletariat counterbalance each other, and which lasts for as long as the armed struggle against the feudal-imperialist reaction is in progress; but once the threat of an offensive return of the ancien régime has vanished, the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat inevitably resumes.

As the Russian experience demonstrates, the proletariat can overthrow the bourgeoisie and take possession of the levers of command of the state provided it is organised into a powerful Marxist revolutionary party that supports – another inescapable condition – its own action in the revolutionary movement of the proletariat in the countries of developed capitalism. Lacking these two prerequisites, the social renewal brought about by the anti-colonial revolt can only be carried out for the benefit of the bourgeois forces and at the expense of the proletariat. Any illusion of an interclass regime, of which Chinese ‘communism’, to which one cannot deny great successes in the field of industrialisation, has become the author and propagator, are therefore utopian and defeatist. Lacking the political dictatorship of the proletariat, lacking the revolutionary attack on the imperialist metropolises, the Afro-Asian proletariat, for as long as the forms proper to capitalism continue (mercantilisation of agricultural products, separation of producers from the means of production, wage-earning, industrial corporatism, etc.) will take upon itself the characteristics of an exploited class. But this does not mean that the workers’ movement, in the society that has emerged from the ruin of colonialism, cannot decisively influence social evolution, even though it does not have control of the state. There is no concession to reformism in this. If in countries where capitalism has totally conquered the field, it is utopianism and counter-revolutionary defeatism to advocate the gradual and legalitarian overthrow of bourgeois power, in the Afro-Asian countries, which have recently won political independence and are only now renewing their worn-out production structures, the historical picture that Marx and Engels found in the type of society that emerged from the anti-feudal revolution is repeated, in which reaction is defeated but not annihilated, new social forms find obstacles to their development in the reactionary survivals, the danger of a feudal restoration has not vanished, and the workers’ movement is forced, while maintaining intact its positions of criticism and open struggle against the bourgeoisie, to support political movements that oppose a return of reaction.

Let us take a particular aspect of the problem: the struggle between national particularism and plurinational associationism, between nationalism and federalism, now underway in Iraq and Guinea.

In the previous article we reiterated the notion that the communist movement cannot look with ‘indifference’ at uprisings such as those of colonial independence, which remain within the economic, social and therefore bourgeois political orbit, but which have revolutionary effects both in that they create a ‘coloured’ proletariat where only ‘tribesmen’ existed, and in that they have repercussions on the entire world order of imperialism, increasing its instability, and therefore the potential for crisis. A particular aspect of this objectively revolutionary process is the tendency towards federation between ex-colonial states, which we now examine in its ups and downs in the light of the evolution of Iraq on the one hand, and ex-French Guinea on the other.

What is happening in these countries shows that the seething political world that has emerged from the victory over colonialism is divided over the question of the ethnic and racial basis of the state: nation-state? Federation of states of equal nationality and language? Continental union of different peoples and races, on the model of the great modern states? Now, it is clear that while the federation projects in Europe are pitifully utopian, and must be mercilessly unmasked by us, the proletarian armies that the communists are expecting to see rise up and fight in the former colonies can only see the light of day on the condition that the economic and social backwardness of the new states is defeated, and this is only possible by overcoming the state fractionation artfully wished for by colonialism, the ‘balkanisation’ of the countries that have become independent.

The Case of Iraq

The formation of nation states does not in fact interest communism as the end point of a historical process, but as the starting point for the development of the social energies compressed by semi-feudalism. Revolutionary communism has an interest in the growth of the forces of the wage-earning proletariat everywhere; therefore, while unmasking the class content of the industrialisation plans of the new Afro-Asian states, it is important that the semi-feudal agrarian reaction – still strong in countries like India, Pakistan, Persia, Iraq, Sudan, etc. – or even economic forms linked to primitive social structures (as in West and Central Africa) should not prevail over local regimes that tend to introduce modern, albeit capitalist, forms of production. In saying this, are we taking a stand in favour of non-proletarian political alignments? This is what scandalises the false Marxists anchored in uncritical indifferentism. But it is clear that it is not a question of supporting the parties of the bourgeois democratic camp in power in the former colonies. What matters is that the movement to liquidate the semi-feudalism and tribal survivals that bar the way to any leap forward in the economy as well as in the social structure is not blocked.

Communists struggle against all forms of reaction; but reaction has in western countries only one subject, the capitalist bourgeoisie, while in the former colonies it is embodied in pre-colonial social strata, and Marxism cannot remain indifferent to the fact that there is a real movement tending to destroy it. Of course, it must guard against confusing its programme and organisation with that of the democratic political camp, in the manner of the Stalinists who, in order to obey Moscow’s foreign policy, make and break alliances with Afro-Asian regimes passing over their class nature.

What we have said allows us to take a stand against certain political tendencies that manifest themselves in Afro-Asian countries without fearing that we might therefore pass for ‘allies’ of other tendencies that oppose the former.

Let us begin, for example, with Iraq. We greeted with satisfaction, last July, the popular uprising that put an end to the corrupt Hashemite dynasty, the traditional tool of British imperialism and agent of local big landlordism. In Iraq, in spite of the super-modern oases of industrialisation (oil fields) the absolute power of the landed aristocracy reigns in its most squalid and ferocious forms. Cultivable land is in the hands of a few large landowners who extract exorbitant rents from the peasants and, since the meagre produce left for the peasant family is insufficient, it is forced to resort to the usury exercised by the same large landowners. Hence the terrible misery that plagues the countryside. Worse still is the case in neighbouring Persia where private landowners, together with the Crown and religious brotherhoods, own 70% of the arable land, and the peasant is forced to give the owner 5/6 of the product.

But back to Iraq. The revolution of 13 July had raised many hopes. It seemed then that the Qasim regime wanted on the one hand to be part of the Arab unification movement, following Syria’s example, and on the other hand to transform the internal social structures by initiating a process of economic modernisation. Instead, apart from the abolition of certain mediaeval vestiges, the agrarian reform, which only provided for the limitation of property to 250 hectares and the allocation of land to poor peasants, remained a dead letter. It was a liberal-type reform. As far as foreign policy is concerned, despite the de facto abrogation of the Baghdad Pact (which the government, however, did not have the courage to officially proclaim as having lapsed), the regime has entrenched itself in nationalist positions. The local Nasserist movement, headed by Colonel Arif, has been persecuted; Arif himself, on his return from Bonn, was arrested awaiting trial, and rumours that have not yet been checked suggest that he has already been shot. The funny thing is that the current government seems to be supported by pro-Russian elements and by the Kremlin itself: thus landlordism and nationalism would have the blessing of Khrushchev, who would very... progressively support the anti-federalist tendencies present in Islam.

According to the false Marxists posing as super-Orthodox, whether the current regime continues to rule in Baghdad or whether it is overthrown by the opposition forces demanding the modernisation of the country and its incorporation into a unitary Arab state on the model of the UAR, is a matter of perfect indifference. But does reasoning in this way not break the weapon of the dialectic? Marxists cannot confuse themselves with Nasserists, as the Muscovites have done (only to then support Qasim on Iraqi soil), but neither can they fail to recognise that the Nasserian programme of a unitary Arab state, which would put an end to the ‘Balkanisation’ of the Middle East, from which only imperialism benefits, responds to a real historical need. A great unitary Arab state would aggravate imperialism’s permanent crisis, while it would not be able to resist, due to its age, a workers’ revolutionary wave sweeping through imperialism’s metropolises.

This has nothing to do with the political physiognomy of Nasserism or the intentions of the Egyptian colonel. Nor are we to be scandalised by his dictatorial tendencies: did the European bourgeoisie in destroying the last feudal survivals use milder and less dictatorial methods?

On the other hand, today in the absence of Bolshevik-type parties that could take over the proletarian leadership of the movement in the former colonies, and in the absence of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat in the metropolises, it is ridiculous to expect Afro-Asian regimes struggling against economic and social backwardness to use methods other than those of forced capitalist industrialisation. If the ex-colonies are forced to climb the harsh Calvary of wage labour, for this we, the proletariat of the capitalist metropolises, are mainly responsible, who are unable to free ourselves from opportunist influences and put an end to capitalism. If the Chinese are forced to resort to pre-industrial steel-making systems, this is mainly because the western proletariat is unable to wrest the blast furnaces from the hands of capitalism, establish anti-mercantile socialist production and suppress the market. One cannot expect from backward peoples the socialism that the high civilisations of the West have not yet managed to attain.

But one can be satisfied if, thanks to the renewal efforts of those peoples, the obstacles placed in the way of history by landlordist reaction gradually fall away. When this happens, one is not ‘building’ socialism – not even if the object of the discourse is ‘communist’ China – but laying, willingly or unwillingly, the foundations of a revolution that can only be socialist, i.e. having as its object associated labour, the elimination of production on small parcels of land, the concentration of the means of production, mass consumption.

The case of Guinea

Therefore, we greet with satisfaction events that contrast with the reactionary tendencies emerging, under the influence of imperialism, in some of the Afro-Asian countries. Recent and most interesting of all is the decision of Ghana and former French Guinea to merge into a unitary state. It does justice to all prejudices about African peoples. While bourgeois Europe is falling apart, in the distant Gulf of Guinea, which was once the great emporium of the slave trade, the forces of unity and brotherhood of peoples are making their voices heard. Already on other occasions we have expressed our sympathy for African federalism, which alone can redeem peoples with an ancient history from the backwardness in which they find themselves today, and create, even if unconsciously, the conditions for the emergence of a black proletariat. The initiative of Ghana and Guinea opens up interesting prospects. A great African federation embracing the states that are already independent and those struggling to become so (Nigeria and Togo will be independent in 1960; the other territories subject to France will sooner or later break free) would undoubtedly represent a great historical turning point.

It is a pity that the tyranny of space does not allow us to deal with the subject in more depth, which we will return to in a future article. The purpose of this one was merely to reiterate our position against the indifferentism that still hampers the revolutionary movement, and to show how, while not yielding a single comma of Marxist and Leninist theory on the national question and the programme laid down by the Second Congress of the Communist International, one can participate, albeit not physically, in the great movement for renewal that the end of colonialism has set in motion in the last pre-capitalist areas of the planet.