Course on Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, Part
2b
Genesis of the NDR
The Hammer
and Sickle emblem of the communists was invented in 1917 and 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 equal 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 defeat an
adversary, and equally, to avoid being isolated and defeated by that adversary.
Therefore, 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 on the National & Colonial Question, reported by
V. I. Lenin on 26 July 1920 (download
linked below).
The
founding Congress of the Communist International (“Comintern”) took place in
March, 1919, a little more than a year after the October 1917 Russian
Revolution. The 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 new International (which Lenin had called for in the 1917 “April
Theses”. The Third, Communist International was naturally and explicitly
anti-Imperial and anti-colonial. Its Second Congress (the “2CCI”), held in
1920, was decisive.
In his
report to the 2CCI on the National & 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…”
In this
report 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 these included and still
include the South African NDR.
Please download and read the text via the following
link:
Further
reading:
The Right of Nations to
Self-Determination, 1916, Lenin (14196 words)
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