Translated by: Juan R. Fajardo,
2016.
Source of the text: Translated from Historia de la
crisis mundial, in Obras Completas, volume 8, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/historia_de_la_crisis_mundial/index.htm
Editorial Note: This text is available in print as
part of: José Carlos Mariátegui,
History of the World Crisis and Other
Writings, Marxists Internet Archive Publications (2017); ISBN
978-0-692-88676-2.
Tonight’s subject is revolutionary and nationalist agitation in the East. I have already explained the connection which exists between the European crisis and the insurrection of the East. Some European statesmen find a cure for the economic ills of the West in a more methodical, more scientific, and more intense exploitation of the Eastern world. They have a bold plan to extract from the colonial nations the necessary resources for the healing and restoration of the capitalist nations; that the laborers of India, Egypt, Africa or colonial America produce the money needed to grant better wages to the laborers of England, France, Germany, the United States, etc. European capitalism dreams of tying European workers to its enterprise of exploiting the colonial peoples. Europe tries to rebuild its wealth – dilapidated during the war – with the colonies’ tribute. Western capitalism cannot get the Western proletariat to be resigned to a miserable and impoverished quality of life. It sees that the European proletariat is unwilling to bear brunt of the war’s economic obligations, and must thus engage in the colonial enterprise of reorganizing and widening the exploitation of the Eastern peoples. European capitalism tries to drown Europe’s social revolution with the distribution among European workers of the utilities gained from the exploitation of colonial workers. That the three hundred million inhabitants of Western Europe and the United States enslave the one and a half billion inhabitants of the rest of the world, is what European and North American capitalism’s program comes down to. To the enslavement of the backward and uneducated majority for the benefit of the world’s evolved and educated minority. But this plan is too simplistic to be carried out. Several factors get in its way.
Europe has long preached the right of peoples to freedom and independence. The latest war was waged by England, by France, by the United States, and by Italy, in the name of freedom and democracy, against imperialism and conquest. Alongside European soldiers, many African and Asian soldiers fought for these myths and these principles. These myths and these principles – which Allied and North American capitalism has so imprudently and disproportionately abused – have set roots in the East. Today, invoking European doctrine, India, Egypt, Persia, North Africa, demand recognition of their right to self-determination. In the name of the ideology, of the doctrine, which Europe has taught them and which Europe has preached, Asia and Africa wish to be independent from Europe’s oversight. There is, moreover, another psychological reason for insurrection of the East. Until before the war, the Eastern populations had a superstitious respect for the European societies, for Western civilization, who created so many wonders and were depositories of so much culture. The war and its consequences have lessened, have weakened, much of that superstitious respect. The peoples of the East have seen the peoples of Europe fight, tear apart, and devour one another with such cruelty, such ferocity, and such evil, that they have stopped believing in their superiority and progressiveness. More than its material authority over Asia and Africa, Europe has lost its moral authority. It still has enough weapons to impose itself, but its moral weapons grow fewer every day.
Besides, the moral consciousness of the Western countries has advanced too much for a policy of conquest and oppression to be defended and consented to by the masses of the people. Earlier, the proletariat did not offer effective or heartfelt resistance to the colonizing and imperialist policy of its governments. The English, French, German workers were more or less indifferent toward the fate of Asian and African workers. Socialism was an international doctrine, but its internationalism ended at the confines of the West, at the edges of Western civilization. Socialists and syndicalists spoke of freeing humanity, but in practice they were but interested in Western humanity. Western workers tacitly considered the slavery of colonial workers to be natural. Western men – raised, after all, within the prejudices of Western civilization – saw Eastern workers as barbarous. All this was natural and just. Western civilization then lived too proud of itself. Then, one did not speak of Western and Eastern civilizations, but only of civilization. Then, the dominant culture did not admit to the existence of two civilizations, it did not allow for the equality of civilizations, nor for any of those concepts now imposed by cultural relativism. Then, at the edges of Western civilization began Egyptian barbarism, Asian barbarism, Chinese barbarism, Turkish barbarism. All that was not Western, all that was not European, was barbarous. It was natural and logical, therefore, that within this ideological climate, Western socialism and the Western proletariat would also turn internationalism into a practically European doctrine. In the First International only European and North American workers were represented. The vanguards of South American workers, and of other workers brought into the Western world’s orbit, joined the Second International, but the Second International was still an International of Western workers, a phenomenon of European civilization and society. All this was natural and just, moreover, because the socialist doctrine, the proletarian doctrine, was a creation, a product, of European and Western civilization.
I’ve already said, when briefly lecturing about the crisis of democracy, that socialist and proletarian doctrine is capitalist and bourgeois society’s child. Bourgeois society was generated and matured in the belly of medieval and aristocratic society. In the same way, proletarian society is today generated and growing in the belly of bourgeois society. Therefore, the social struggle does not have the same character among the peoples of the West and the peoples of the East, and the socialist doctrine, the proletarian doctrine, is fruit of the Western peoples’ problems; a way of resolving them. The solution appears where the problem is. The solution cannot be put forward where the problem does not yet exist. In the Western countries, the solution has been put forth because there is a problem. Socialism and syndicalism, the theories which impassion the European masses, thus left the Asian masses, the Eastern masses, indifferent. There therefore did not exist, in the world, any solidarity between the exploited masses, but solidarity between the socialist masses. Such was the sense, such was the reach, and such was the breadth, of the old internationals – of the First International and of the Second International. And, it is thus that the European toiling masses did not energetically fight against the colonization of the toiling masses of the East, who are so different in their customs, their sentiments, and their leadership. Today, that feeling has changed. Socialists begin to understand that the social revolution must not be an European revolution but a world revolution. The social revolution’s leaders note and understand the maneuvers of capitalism – which seeks, in the colonies, the resources and means of avoiding or putting-off social revolution in Europe – and they strive to fight against capitalism, not just in Europe, not just in the West, but also in the colonies. The Third International’s tactic is inspired by this new orientation. The Third International stimulates and foments insurrection among the peoples of the East, even if such an insurrection lacks a proletarian and class-based character, and is, rather, a nationalist insurrection. Many socialists have had polemics with the Third International on precisely this colonial question. Without understanding the decisive character that the emancipation of the colonies in the capitalist domain has on the social revolution, those socialists have objected to the cooperation which the Third International extends to that political emancipation of the colonies. Their reasons are thus: Socialism must embrace only socialist movements, and the rebellion of the peoples of the East is a nationalist rebellion. It is not a proletarian insurrection, but a bourgeois insurrection. The Turks, the Persians, the Egyptians, don’t struggle to bring socialism about in their countries, but to become politically independent from England and Europe. The proletarians fight and agitate amidst those peoples, hidden among and mixed with the bourgeois. In the East there is no social warfare, but rather, political wars, wars of independence. Socialism has nothing in common with those nationalist insurrections which do not aim to free the proletariat from capitalism, but to free the Indian, or Persian, or Egyptian, bourgeoisie from the English bourgeoisie. That is what is maintained by some socialist leaders who do not sense, who do not see, all the historic value, the social value, of the insurrection of the East. At a memorable congress – the Halle Congress – speaking in name of the Third International, Zinoviev defended its the colonial policies from attack by Hilferding, a socialist leader and current Finance Minister.
Zinoviev said then,
“The Second International was limited to white men; the Third does not divide men according to color. If you want a world revolution, if you want to free the proletariat from the chains of capitalism, you must not think solely of Europe. You must direct your gaze also toward Asia. Hilferding will deprecatingly say: ‘These Asians, these Tartars, these Chinese!’ Comrades, I say to you: A world revolution is not possible if we do not also set foot in Asia. Four times as many men live there than in Europe, and these men are oppressed and mistreated, as we are. Will we draw them in, bring them closer to socialism, or should we not do so? If Marx said that an European revolution without England would seem only a storm in a teacup, we say that any proletarian revolution without Asia is not a world revolution. And this, for us, is very important. I am also European, as you are, but I feel that Europe is a small part of the world. At the Moscow Congress we understood what we were, until now, missing in the proletarian movement. There, we sensed what is needed for the coming of the world revolution, and that is the awakening of the oppressed masses of Asia. I confess: When I saw hundreds of Persians and Turks sing the Internationale with us in Baku, I felt tears in my eyes. I heard then the breath of the world revolution.”[1]
It is because of all this that the Third International is not, nor has wished to be, an exclusively European international. Delegates from the Chinese Workers Party and of the Korean Workers Union attended the founding congress of the Third International. Delegates from Persia, Turkestan, Armenia, and other Eastern peoples attended the congresses that followed, and on the 14th of August of 1920 there convened in Baku that great Congress of the Peoples of the East – to which Zinoviev alludes – attended by delegates of 24 Eastern peoples. At that congress the foundations for an International of the East were laid. Not of a socialist International, but of a solely revolutionary and insurrectional one.
Under pressure of these events and these ideas, the same reformist
socialists, the same democratic socialists, so full of old Western prejudices,
have ended up being more interested in the colonial question than before. They
have started to recognize the need for the proletariat to seriously concern
itself with fighting oppression in the East and to support the right of these
peoples to self-determination. This new attitude by the socialist parties
inhibits and prevents the great capitalist nations from employing the force of
military expeditions against the peoples of the East. And so, we saw last year
that England, challenged by Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, could not respond to this
challenge with war operations. The English Labour Party began to violently
agitate against sending troops to the East. The English dominions – Australia,
Transvaal – declared their intention to withhold consent to an attack on Turkey.
The English government found itself forced to deal with Turkey, to give in to
Turkey, whom at other times it would have crushed without pity. Similarly, three
years ago we saw the Italian proletariat resolutely oppose the occupation of
Albania by Italy. The Italian government was forced to remove its troops from
Albanian soil, and to sign a friendship treaty with little Albania. These events
reveal a new situation in the world. This new situation can be summarized with
three observations: 1st) Europe lacks the material authority to subject the
colonial peoples; 2nd) Europe has lost its old moral authority over those
peoples; 3rd) The moral conscience of the European nations does not, in this
period, allow the capitalist regime a brutally oppressive and conquering policy
toward the East. There are, in other words, the necessary historical conditions
and political elements for the East to become independent, for the East free
itself. Just as, at the start of the last century, the peoples of America became
independent from Europe’s political dominion, because the world situation was
propitious and opportune for their liberation, so too will the peoples of the
East shake off Europe’s political domination, because the world situation is
propitious and opportune for their liberation.
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[1] Ben Lewis and Lars Lih have published a translation of Zinoviev’s entire speech in Zinoviev & Martov: Head to Head in Halle (2011). - Trans.