Anti-Imperialism, War and
Peace, Part 2b
Symbol of Class Alliance
Genesis
of the NDR
The Hammer and Sickle emblem of the communists was invented in Russia in
1917. It is a symbol of class alliance
between two distinct classes: proletarian workers, and peasants.
Peasants often work hard and they are often poor, but they are not the
same as the working proletariat of the towns. Nor are they the same as the
rural proletariat. So the hammer and the sickle are not two identical things.
They represent two different things, allied.
Practical politics is always a matter of alliance, and in different
circumstances, different alliances are called for. Communists commonly regard
an alliance between workers and peasants as normal. Proletarian parties have
likewise, in the past, often attempted class alliances with (other) parts of
the bourgeoisie against feudalism, or against colonialism.
Alliances are normal and necessary, in order to isolate and thereby to be
able to defeat an adversary; and equally, to avoid being isolated and defeated
by that adversary. Karl Marx had practiced class alliance from at least 1845
onwards, and had written extensively about it, notably in “The Class Struggles in France”,
the 1850 Address to the
Communist League, and the “18th Brumaire”.
The question of the appropriate alliances in the anti-colonial and
anti-Imperialist struggle was bound to arise.
The origin of the specific type of class alliance that is nowadays
referred to by the term National
Democratic Revolution can be precisely located in the Second Congress of
the Communist International (2CCI), in the discussion in the Commission on the
National and Colonial Question, reported to the plenary by V. I. Lenin on 26 July 1920 (attached).
The first, founding Congress of the Communist International
(“Comintern”) had taken place in March, 1919, a little over a year after the
October 1917 Russian Revolution. It fulfilled the tenth of Lenin’s “April Theses”: “We must take the initiative in creating a revolutionary International”.
The very first “International Working Men’s Association”, of which Karl
Marx had been a founder member in 1864, had been disbanded in 1871 after the
fall of the Paris Commune.
The Second International fell apart in 1914, when most of the
Social-Democratic workers’ parties backed the bourgeois masters of war in the
conflict between the Imperialist powers.
The communists, led by Lenin, had held out against that betrayal. After
the revolutionary victory in Russia they lost very little time before
constructing a Third, Communist International. It was naturally and explicitly
anti-Imperial and anti-colonial, and at its Second Congress (the “2CCI”) in
1920, decisively so.
In his report to the 2CCI on the National and Colonial Question, Lenin
says:
“We have discussed
whether it would be right or wrong, in principle and in theory, to state that
the Communist International and the Communist parties must support the
bourgeois-democratic movement in backward countries. As a result of our
discussion, we have arrived at the unanimous decision to speak of the national-revolutionary movement rather
than of the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ movement. It is beyond doubt that any
national movement can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement, since the
overwhelming mass of the population in the backward countries consist of peasants who represent
bourgeois-capitalist relationships… However, the objections have been
raised that, if we speak of the bourgeois-democratic movement, we shall be
obliterating all distinctions between the reformist and the revolutionary
movements. Yet that distinction has been very clearly revealed of late in the
backward and colonial countries…”
Here we find, for the first time, all the makings of the NDR, including
the name, even if the words are not quite in their present-day order. Lenin
calls it “national-revolutionary”, but he makes it very clear that he is
talking of a democratic class alliance with anti-colonial, anti-Imperialist
elements of the national bourgeoisie in colonial countries.
The 2CCI was followed within two months by the famous “Congress of the Peoples
of the East”, in Baku, in the southern part of what was soon to
become the Soviet Union. This was the first international anti-colonial
conference. It had huge consequences. The remainder of the 20th
century was marked by world-wide National Democratic Revolutions according to
the pattern set by Lenin and his international comrades.
These National Democratic Revolutions
included, and still include, the South African NDR.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Report on
National and Colonial Question, 2CCI, 1920, Lenin.
