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The Anti-Imperialist Movement

Resolution of the League Against Imperialism.

The following is a part of the Political Resolution adopted by the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism at its Session in Berlin on June 2nd, 1931.

The resolution deals with the growing anti-imperialist revolts of the colonial masses in Asia, Africa, Latin-America, and other colonial and semi-colonial countries.

All Negro workers, farmers, students and revolutionary intellectuals in Africa and the West Indies, are invited to write to the International Secretariat of the League against Imperialism, 24 Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, or to the British section of the League, 23 Great Ormond Street, London W.C. 1, or to the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 8 Rothesoodstrasse, Hamburg, Germany, for literature and full information on the aims and programme of the League.

The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers endorses this resolution and calls upon the workers of Europe and America throughout the world to support the anti-imperialist struggles of the African, West Indian and other colonial peoples.

Growing Anti-Imperialist Revolt of Colonial Masses.

a) Asia.

The struggle of all the oppressed peoples to release themselves from the yoke of imperialism has increased tremendously in strength and extent. In China millions of peasants under the leadership of the working class have formed their own armies and are now carrying on a heroic struggle against the forces of the counter-revolutionary Kuomintang and against the imperialists. The magnificent struggle of the Chinese workers and peasants for national independence, for the land, and for political power shows all other oppressed and exploited peoples the only way to victory in the struggle against imperialism.

In India the masses of the people are beginning to realise that emancipation from the yoke of British imperialism cannot be won with the treacherous tactics of passivity and non-violence, cannot be won by coming to compromises with the enemy. The working class in India is beginning to use the weapon of the mass strike. It is beginning to understand that a united front of hundreds of millions must be organized together with the broad masses of the toiling peasantry against British imperialism. Amongst the revolutionary youth and the revolutionary intellectuals there is a growing opposition to Gandhism and to "left-wing" social reformism. And at the same time there is an increasing tendency to take up a really revolutionary attitude towards British imperialism.

The oppressed masses of Indo-China are fighting desperately in the foremost ranks of the great anti-imperialist struggle and showing a magnificent front against the fearful white terror waged against them by French imperialism.

The revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle is surging higher and higher in Egypt, Palestine, Marocco, [[sic]] Tripoli, Syria, Algeria and all other Arabian countries. Italian fascism has succeeded in slaughtering tens of thousands of insurrectionary Arabs in Tripoli, but it has not succeeded in breaking their fighting spirit. The revolutionary insurrection of the masses of the Arab people in Spanish Marocco [[sic]]

and its bloody suppression by the provisional government of the bourgeois republicans and the Spanish socialists represents only the beginning of fresh struggles in this section of Arabian territory.

Despite the brutal regime of terror established by Japanese imperialism, the colonial peoples under the Japanese yoke are conducting a heroic struggle for freedom. In Formosa there was an insurrection of the native tribes against the Japanese oppressors.

The workers of the Philippine Islands have now formed their own revolutionary working class party and under its leadership they are taking up the struggle for freedom from the yoke of American imperialism.

Despite the banishment of thousands of Indonesian national-revolutionary fighters against Dutch imperialism, mass demonstrations are taking place in Indonesia under the banner of the struggle for national freedom from the yoke of Dutch imperialism.

b) The Negro Masses.

In South Africa, Madagascar, Kenya Colony, Gambia, Nigeria, the French and Belgian Congo, Guadeloupe, Honduras, San Domingo, the Negro masses have taken up arms in the struggle against imperialism. In South Africa in particular the movement has reached the state of a conscious class struggle on the part of the white and coloured workers (unemployed workers' demonstrations, the May Day demonstrations, strikes, etc.). New exceptional laws, the increasingly frequent confiscation of te land of the natives, the intensified terroristic measures of the white slaveholders, the new wave of terror, lynching and persecutions in the United States have been unable to stem the rising tide of the Negro struggle for emancipation from colonial imperialism. New and tremendous reserves are wheeling into the anti-imperialist fighting front.

c) Latin America.

In the countries of Latin America the anti-imperialist struggle of the workers and peasants against the "revolutionary" movements organized by various groups of capitalists and landowners and their generals, aimed at nothing further than replacing one system of imperialist oppression by another. The ceaselessly growing movement of the masses directs its blows impartially and with equal sharpness against both British and American imperialism.

The fighting in South and Central America, the interventions in China, the support of the Kuomintang government by the United States of America, the barbaric mediaevel persecutions of the Negroes, the slave relations existing in the southern States, etc., show the real face of predatory dollar imperialism.

The Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism sends its fraternal greetings to the heroic fighters for the freedom of Nicaragua who have defied American imperialism weapon in hand for three years.

The Executive Committee denounces the crimes of the Mexican fascist government which is the perfidious instrument of American imperialism and which does not hesitate to organize massacres of the working people. The Executive Committee considers the struggles which are at present taking place in Honduras (great unemployed workers' demonstrations) and in Cuba (mass strikes) to be very important factors in the development of the anti-imperialist struggle. The Executive Committee considers that the necessary conditions for the formation of League sections as mass organizations are present everywhere in the countries of Latin America and appeals for new efforts to widen the mass basis of the anti-imperialist struggle.