"The policy of the Communist International on national and colonial
questions must be chiefly to bring about a union of the proletarian
and working masses of all nations and countries for a joint revolutionary
struggle leading to the overthrow of capitalism". In these words
the thesis of the Second Congress lays down the goal towards which
any special methods applicable in particular circumstances, such
as support of national liberation movements, peasant movements etc.,
are intended to lead up.16 As clause 11 says, such support (especially
on the part of the workers in the Home or imperialist countries)
should be given "for the exclusive purpose of uniting the various
units of the future proletarian parties there". Clause 12: "The
victory over capitalism cannot be fully achieved and carried to its
ultimate goal unless the proletariat and the toiling masses of all
nations of the world rally of their own accord in a close and concordant
union".
The supplementary theses say the same. "The masses of non-European
subjected countries are inseparably connected with the proletarian
movement in Europe, as a consequence or the centralisation of world
capitalism" (No. 1). "The mission of the C.I. is to organise
the working class of the whole world" (No. 5). "The Communist
parties of the different imperialist countries must work in conjunction
with the proletarian parties of the colonies" (No. 8).

Not much progress has yet been made in "Colonial countries" with
this "United Front" of world labour. The European workers
and the workers of subject races or dependent countries are not yet
cooperating at all closely. To the delight of the capitalists, they
are strangers, even antagonists to each other. Between the workers
and the Home or Imperialist countries and those of India or China,
for example, there is as yet no real labour union.

In the Pacific the North American and Australian workers are concerned
less to cooperate with the Chinese and Japanese workers than to exclude
them from their countries as dangerous competitors. In South Africa
there is a great gulf fixed between the white and the black workers
who jostle together in the country, and local barricades are thrown
up entrenching the whites against black competition - and even vice
versa. In the United States the negro workers are oppressed and lynched
by the whites. Everywhere workers of
European race are ready as often as not to take up arms against non-European
workers as such. In South Africa, again, we had the strange spectacle
this year of white miners on strike instructing their black fellow
workers to remain at work, i.e., to scab!

And yet the whites and the non-white workers, when comprised in one
country or Empire, may be called not merely fellow workers but fellow
countrymen; we may fairly say, for instance, that the workers of
the British Empire, "British workmen" in fact, are mostly
brown or black men - "natives". Why then the antagonism?
The common reply is "colour prejudice". That is certainly
potent enough; and the Thesis says "The struggle against deep-rooted
petty bourgeois national prejudices, manifesting themselves in various
forms such as race hatred, national antagonism and anti-semitism" -
we might add "nigrophobia" etc. - "must be brought
to the foreground". But actual race prejudice plays a less conspicuous
part where, as in Europe or Australia, the opposing races are not
in direct contact with each other; thus in Europe colour prejudice
is quite weak. The truth is that the prejudice itself is largely
based on economic grounds; it is the result of competition in the
labour market, and is most acute where such competition is most keenly
felt.

This problem of "cheap labour" of subject or dependent
coloured race is the one common feature of "colonial questions",
though, of course, it arises also in connection with countries that
are not "colonies" such as China and Japan. How can the
better paid workers of European race be expected to unite with the
cheaper labourers who take the bread out of their mouths? And on
the other hand how can the cheap labourers cooperate with the better
paid worker who habitually becomes their masters' accomplice in "keeping
them in their place", closing various avenues of employment
to them and even objecting to give them "equal pay for equal
work"? How can the Japanese, African or Indian worker be expected
to support a movement of men associated with a "White Australia" policy,
a "colour bar", an embargo on Lascar sailors, or an anti-Asiatic
immigration law? Not but what these things may be justified, but
the coloured workers are not likely to see the point of them readily.
Why, even in Soviet Russia today, in concerns involving no exploitation
for profit, the employee at say 20-30 millions a month can see no
justice in others getting 200-300 millions and "riding" as
they say "on our necks". Nor does cooperation eventuate
even where the competition is not consciously realised. The European
workers, for instance, do not yet fully realise how they are injured
by colonial labour competition; but they do not any the more for
that combine with colonial labour. British congresses may occasionally
wave distant greetings to the workers of India; but they still acquiesce
in their grinding exploitation in effect, they ignore the coloured
labourers of the world as fellow workers.

How are these obstacles to be overcome? The Supplementary Thesis
No. 7 says: "The C.I. and the parties affected must struggle
to develop class consciousness in the working masses of the colonies";
and the importance of this is evidenced by the capitalists' profound
dread of working class agitation among "natives". But even
such agitation or organization does not of itself produce the World
United Labour Front, the "joint struggle", the cooperation
and "union of the working masses of all countries" not
withstanding cumulative disparities of race, colour, language, pay,
grade, standard of living and civilisation, such as is required by
the C.I. Rather it seems that some atmosphere of cooperation is necessary
before propaganda among the subject or dependent races can flourish;
at any rate the two things are interdependent. In S. Africa and the
U.S.A., at any rate, the majority of the white workers at present
show violent hostility to the very idea of communist propaganda among
the blacks, making such propaganda almost impossible for want of
the white workers' approval; so much so that Communists in South
Africa sometimes feel constrained to say;

"Let us leave the natives alone, let them develop on their own lines";
whereas that can only mean "leave them to the sole influence
of the capitalists, who will develop them on their own capitalist
lines". We cannot leave the coloured workers alone. Men who
are good enough to exploit are good enough to organise; especially
in view of the enormous proportion of the world's profit that is
made from the exploitation of this cheap coloured labour, and therefore
the enormous potential anti-capitalist power of such labour - and
under Communism this numerical proportion will be at least maintained:
the great majority of the workers under communism will also be "natives".
But again, even if the white workers should ask for the cooperation
of the yellows or blacks, in some industrial dispute for instance,
the latter will not unnaturally suspect that they are simply to be
made use of and then left in the lurch again as usual after the whites
have got what they wanted out of them. And yet the mutual advantage
of industrial cooperation is obvious, for instance, between the workers
of Europe and those of the Colonial countries (witness the French
colonial scabs at Havre), still more perhaps between European and
non-European workers in one country, as in the U.S.A. and South Africa.

The Communist Parties in the various countries, with the C.I. as
the guiding hand, must therefore pay special attention to bridging
this weakening estrangement, exactly as the estrangement in the U.S.A.
between "100% American" workers and the cheap immigrant
workers from South or Eastern Europe, or between skilled and unskilled
workers anywhere, must be bridged. Solidarity and comradeship must
be established for common effort against the common enemy. But now
we hear the cry: "What, would you make the natives equal to
the whites?" - for even that, and not merely making the white
equal to the native, is objected to. Well, although questions of "social" equality
may be dismissed as petty bourgeois, reactionary and irrelevant,
because real equality can only be achieved after, not before, the
revolution, yet there can be no doubt that in-as-much as inequality
is a bar to cooperation, an attempt must be made before, not after,
the revolution to mitigate it so far as necessary to facilitate cooperation,
- and by levelling up rather than levelling down which means that
higher paid workers must support every demand of the cheaper workers
for better pay. But, says the cheap coloured labourer, I too must
live, whereas if I stipulate for nothing less than the white man's
wage, I shall not get a job; to which the white worker retorts, if
you come into my job (or my country) on a competitive basis, you
can always bring my wages down and actually undercut me and take
my job away - you are actually doing it all the time - and I too
must live. Such obstacles, though mutually inconsistent, are not
easy to surmount. But it is impossible to achieve a United Front
by ignoring them and leaving each section to concentrate on entrenching
itself against the other, with all-white trade unions on the one
hand, and all-black trade unions (languishing for want of European
support, as in South Africa) on the other. Admitting that it is not
possible under capitalism to level up all wages, and that even if
it were, the revolution cannot wait for such world wide equality,
yet neither is it possible under capitalism to maintain the present
glaring wage inequality and prevent the higher from being pulled
down by the lower. The Communist movement is less concerned to seek
measures designed to make capitalism tolerable to one or another
section of workers than to marshal all possible forces for attack
on the ruling class.

With this sole object before us, we should patiently and persistently
promote conferences between the conflicting elements all over the
world with a view to mutual recognition, popularisation of propaganda
and organisation among the coloured workers, and in particular, some
approach to a modus vivendi purely in order to facilitate a joint
plan of campaign and a wholehearted and militant cooperation in the
fight. The modus vivendi will be based probably on the principle
of equal pay (at European rates) for equal work - not a Communist
principle, but we are dealing with a fighting front under capitalism.
Absolute "fairness" will be impossible even on this basis,
but at least the ice can be broken. And if concessions are to be
given, they should, as the Thesis says, be given rather to the underdog,
so as to remove his distrust; e.g., sympathetic strikes should be
called first in support of the coloured rather than the white workers'
demands. And again, "proletarian internationalisation demands
the subordination of the interests of the proletarian struggle in
one country" (e.g., Australia, and, we might add, "in one
section of the workers" e.g., the white workers of South Africa) "to
the interests of that struggle on an international scale". Of
course it is only when accompanied by a revolutionary outlook that
any such modus vivendi can succeed. The point is not equality but
solidarity.

A start is being made in the right direction with the Pacific Labour
Congress next year. Similar foregatherings should be developed both
on a small local scale and, say, within the British, French and Dutch
Empires (Home and Colonial workers) respectively, and finally on
a world scale. Negro Congresses and Oriental congresses as such no
doubt serve a useful purpose, but more useful still for the object
now in view is the confronting of these elements with the workers
of the imperialist races, the yellow, brown and black with the whites,
the common labourers with the "aristocrats of labour" who,
often the more servile and ignorant of the two from a proletarian
point of view, have the most to learn and unlearn at such mixed conferences.

In cases like South, West and East Africa, or the Pacific taken as
one unit, or the United States, where a real national liberation
movement of the coloured races is hardly practical politics and a
peasant movement with any hope of success hardly exists among the
coloured peoples, the only revolutionary movement of the subject
races is the movement of their workers organised as workers. At least
that movement must be stressed as an additional weapon, and not necessarily
one to be postponed in order of time, for the Labour movement nothing
comes first, all arms must be brought into action at once. And as
the Supplementary Thesis says, "we must in any case struggle
against control by bourgeois democratic national movements over the
mass action of poor and ignorant peasants and workers for their liberation
from all sorts of exploitation."

"Only a Soviet regime can give the nations real equality". National
liberation movements, only stepping stones at best, and relevant
only because in the countries to be liberated there are workers being
exploited, are often destined, even if successful, to prove disappointing,
besides failing to attract, if not alienating, the sympathy of the
workers of other countries. It is as workers that whites and natives
find their point of contact as well as of repulsion. The proletarian
movement is, or eventually becomes, the strongest revolutionary weapon
in every country; it is the One "Feste Burg", now and hereafter,
of the oppressed and exploited of the whole world.