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No. 4 - Aug 2026 - Year III Last update Aug 19, 2026 Paperback |
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From the present edition onwards we are going to unify the titles of our two semestral review (Comunismo, in the Italian language, and Communism in the English language) and gradually align their content. Eventually it will be published in other languages.
The two versions should be considered as the continuation of the Marxist research previously presented in the preceding 100 numbers of Comunismo, issued on a regular basis since 1979, and in the 52 issues of Communist Left since 1990.
Alongside this the results of our ongoing studies into the doctrine and the history of the party and the workers’ movement will be presented. We are not talking about lucubrations, discoveries and innovations of some intellectual or other, but rather the impersonal product of a tradition and school of thought that can only flourish within the atmosphere of solidarity and militancy that exists within the communist party.
* * *
The Third International, just over a century ago, wanted its official organ Internationale Presse Corresondenz to be addressed to communists in all countries. First appearing in 1921, and printed successively in Berlin, Vienna and London, it remained on the line of internationalist and revolutionary communism for a few years until eventually becoming an instrument of Russian State propaganda; it was forced to close down in 1938, when Stalinism declared the Communist International dissolved, in preparation for the USSR’s entry into the second imperialist war. Today we have an international party, and no longer an international of parties.
In its first number, of September 24, one can read the following editorial note, which will also characterise this review in perfect continuity.
“With the printing of Internationale Presse Korresondenz we intend to give a faithful picture of the respective economic and political conditions of all countries in order to illustrate the most significant phenomena of the proletarian class struggle, to describe the state and progress of our movement, and also to transmit the communiqués of the Executive Committee destined for the public.
“Contributions by mail need to be provided by the most dedicated and experienced comrades of all countries, in collaboration with their own party. Thanks to the transmission of knowledge of the situation in the individual countries that is as accurate as possible, along with international collaboration in this work, our intention is to strengthen the links between the individual parties and facilitate their cooperation”.
9 May marks the celebration of Russian capitalism – both Stalinist and post-Stalinist – the heir to the counter-revolution
In Russia, as every year, the 9 May holiday was celebrated, marking the ‘Great Patriotic Victory’. The bourgeoisie needs myths, heroes and graves to conceal its petty and selfish interests.
Yet the photograph of the Red Army soldier raising the red flag on the roof of the Reichstag in Berlin continues to symbolise, for a certain section of the ‘left’, the victory of the ‘good’ democratic ‘and/or’ communist forces over the ‘evil’ Nazi-Fascist forces. In reality, the man raising that flag was not liberating the German working class from capitalism, but imposing the yoke of Russian capitalism upon the ruins of German capitalism, bringing to an end a war in which the world proletariat had been the sole true loser.
The Second World War was not a clash between opposing forms of government – democratic and fascist – but between one imperialist bloc and another; a conflict in which the class struggle, which only a few decades earlier had brought the proletariat to power in Russia, was completely sidelined, and in which tens of millions of proletarians were massacred for interests that had nothing to do with them.
In Russia, where a nascent bourgeoisie was establishing itself in the shadow of a centralising state bureaucracy, all the economic categories of capitalism had become firmly established in the economy: goods produced by wage labour – by a social class exploited through the extraction of surplus value – and exchanged on the market via money.
Lenin had already exposed the fraudulent and untenable nature of Stalinist ‘communism’ shortly after the NEP: ‘We make no secret of it: freedom of trade means freedom for capitalism... to a certain extent we are recreating capitalism; it is state capitalism.’ That was in 1921, not 1989! Sixty-eight years before the ‘collapse of communism’ with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Today, the Stalinist myth continues to portray the Second World War as a ‘defensive’ war. In reality, the Russian state’s stance was by no means neutral. Before the German invasion, and through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, it had allied itself with Germany, dividing up territories and spheres of influence, invading Poland, Romania and Finland, behaving like any imperialist marauder. And it confirmed its status as an imperialist marauder at the end of the war in Yalta, where Stalin divided the spoils of war with Truman and Churchill.
Whilst Lenin, with German soldiers on Russian soil – who had also been sent to their deaths by their own bourgeoisie for the sake of mere profit – emerged from the First Imperialist War by accepting the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, banking on revolution in Europe, Stalin plunged the proletariat into the Second: on 17 September 1939, he invaded Poland from the east whilst the Germans did so from the west; after the Germans invaded Russia in June 1941, he allied himself with the ‘democratic’ imperialists of the USA and Great Britain. Herein lies the enormous difference: the former for the international revolution, the latter for imperialist war between nations and domination of the markets.
Under Stalinism, the Fatherland replaced the International, which belonged not only to Lenin but to all the communists – subsequently killed or marginalised – who had been active in the Third International, dissolved, not coincidentally, by Stalin in 1943. Among its members were communists who believed their primary duty was to spread the Soviet revolution far and wide, not the false and impossible ‘socialism in one country’.
The working class has only its own dictatorship to defend; this may still be a national one, but for the working class it is merely a first battle on the road to the victorious uprising of the proletariat throughout the world. Stalinist doctrine – and today’s even more degenerate post-Stalinist version – tells us that ‘the Red Army liberated us from Nazism’. But the army of 1945 was an imperialist army like any other, which had nothing in common with Trotsky’s Red Army of 1918, dedicated to the defence of the first proletarian state, the interests of the international proletariat – that is, the victory of communism in all countries.
It is said that Western Europe was ‘liberated’ by the Americans and Eastern Europe by the Russians. In reality, in both cases there was no liberation whatsoever, and the Second World War – marking the unchallenged triumph of capitalism on a global scale – was a clash between marauders in which the ‘aggressor’ became the ‘victim’ and vice versa. The Russo-Anglo-Saxon victory, in effect, condemned Western Europe to ‘democratic’ capitalism and Eastern Europe to state capitalism, with both sides under military occupation by the victorious imperialist powers.
Lenin reiterates this: ‘The socialist, the revolutionary proletarian, the internationalist reasons as follows: the nature of a war – is it reactionary or revolutionary? – is not determined by who launched the attack or in which country the “enemy” is located, but depends on this: which class is waging the war, and of which policy the war is the continuation’ (“The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky”).
The working people of Budapest and Prague would later come to realise just how little the Russian capitalists’ state differed from the Nazi regime, with invasions and summary executions carried out by the ‘liberators’ against tens of thousands of working people.
Stalinism – which began to take hold within the Russian Communist Party in the second half of the 1920s, following the defeat of the revolution in Europe, whilst capitalism was inevitably gaining ground in the then still underdeveloped Soviet Union – described this as the ‘construction of socialism’ which amounted to the death knell of the revolution in practice and its total overturning at the programmatic level.
Its legacy unfortunately lives on today: a vision and a policy that replaces the class struggle with a struggle ‘between peoples’, which invariably leads to taking sides with one imperialist power or another, and which confuses communism with capitalism, whether more or less state-run (the state now plays a role in every capitalist economy, including that of the United States).
Section 1: Capitalism was born agrarian
Before the English Revolution could explode onto the historical scene, the agrarian revolution in the countryside had to spark the prairie fire. The decline of feudal agriculture and the rise of money-rent would transform the ancient instrument of social reproduction, the peasant family farming unit, into the modern capitalist agricultural firm. Protestantism would serve as the religious vehicle for this first stage which ended feudal absolutism, while political economy would do the same in the second as the impersonal social organizing force of capital struggled to free itself from mercantile & colonial fetters in order to conquer a continent under the banner of unconstrained accumulation.
The Restoration following the English Revolution will be understood to have no more arrested the rise of the capitalist class than the counter-revolution inaugurated by the defeat of the international communist movement in the last century will be seen to have arrested the historical course toward communism. Both were temporary retreats within the transition from one mode of production to another whose conditions are laid and created over the course of titanic shifts in the forces and relations of production long before the political convulsions burst forth into the revolutionary struggle between classes, as history shows the historic course is full of zig-zags but maintains a single causal and deterministic forward trajectory towards predictable communist ends.
20. - The Emergence of Agrarian Capitalism and the Political Economy’s in the Colonies
During the late medieval and early modern period, absolutist States arose as the monarchies played the rising commercial classes against the power of the nobility to exert its royal authority. In England, as feudal revenues declined and Parliament constrained monarchical income, the Crown increasingly relied upon trade duties, administrative fees, and tariffs to finance its developing State power while preserving feudal relations. The two spheres of agricultural production and commerce initially remained separated with the agricultural surplus appropriated by the class of warrior nobles through customary obligations and extra-economic coercion in the form of rents-in-kind. The peasant family productive unit retained the availability of sufficient fruits of its own labor to reproduce itself, remaining a self-sufficient economic unit engaged in limited if any local market activity.
Overtime, however, this dynamic would begin to be transformed with the rise of money-rent and the increasing penetration of market exchange relations into every facet of productive life.
The expanding world market was organized around the circuit of money–commodity–money (M–C–M)—as exemplified by the mercantilist economic doctrines of Thomas Mun in England and Jean-Baptiste Colbert in France— enlarged through conquest, piracy, monopoly, and the control of trade rather than grown through productive labor itself. The English agrarian revolution fundamentally transformed this economic reality by subordinating commerce to the imperatives of capitalist production.
In agricoltura, through the dispossession of independent producers and the emergence of capitalist tenant farming, the social engine of the modern capitalist profit driven enterprise was forged out of the transformation of the paternal peasant family farming unit into the capitalist wage-labor employing agricultural firm; the forefather of the notorious “small family owned business” (see: “Theory of Ground Rent and Agrarian Question in the Marxist Doctrine,” Il Programma Comunista, no. 21, 1954).
Thus, capital emerged as a self-expanding social relation, organizing all of society's productive capacities towards the end of its own accumulation. M-C-M is transformed into M–C … P … C’–M’. Absolutist States adapted to this tectonic transformation by promoting trade monopoly, urbanization, and eventually the concentration of dispossessed labour into manufactures.
It was only after capitalist agriculture had become dominant and the English Revolution had triumphed, that the Physiocrats, followed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, could formulate the first coherent bourgeois political economy, grounding wealth in labour and production rather than circulation. The labour theory of value arose not from philosophical speculation but from the objective triumph of capitalist social relations established by the agrarian revolution, which reduced the reactionary struggles of the feudal nobility in the era, to the final political convulsions of a mode of production already superseded by the development of new productive relations.
21. - Primitive Accumulation and the Yeoman
Primitive accumulation destroyed the fragmented world of independent production and established the socialization of labour through generalized commodity production. Capital thereby created, for the first time, the social pre-conditions for the conscious organization of production on a humanity wide scale, while imprisoning that possibility within the confines of the company firm. Historically, this transition unfolded in a determinate sequence: the expansion of mercantile commerce created the world market, but could not by itself produce capitalism; the agrarian revolution transformed the relations of production through the expropriation of the independent peasantry; the destruction of rural domestic industry thereby created a sufficient home market for industrial capital; and only upon these foundations did the capitalist mode of production complete its domination of society.
The independent peasantry, or English yeomanry, emerged during the dissolution of feudalism as a transitional class between the medieval serf and the capitalist farmer who were indispensable in the process of capitalist primitive accumulation.
Initially rooted in a predominantly subsistence economy, it reproduced the household directly from the land while disposing of it’s limited but growing surplus through local markets. The demographic collapse following the Black Death (1347-1351) created exceptional conditions for its expansion: labour scarcity, abundant cheap land, high grain prices and the weakening of feudal obligations enabled many peasants to consolidate holdings and accumulate modest reserves of livestock, tools, and capital.
As population recovered during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and began to hit natural limits, access to new lands would be required to avert catastrophic social crises.
The Tudor dissolution of the monasteries delivered just the needed salvation, along with a nice boost in royal revenue. Rather than redistributing ecclesiastical estates to the peasantry, Henry VIII transferred them to the Crown, which rapidly sold them to merchants, courtiers, and gentry, transforming Church lands into a vast field for land speculation, expansion of mortgage lending and advancement of capitalist ground rents.
These estates required productive family holdings to clear, cultivate, and improve the land, making the independent peasant the indispensable agent through which formal speculative titles was converted into profitable capitalized property. Landlords initially realized their investment through competitive money-rents and mortgages, as land values rose, so too did mortgages and rents while lease lengths shrivelled, peasant reproduction was progressively subordinated to the market.
While high grain prices and relatively inexpensive land had temporarily sustained the economic independence of the yeoman, the very processes that had created this class would simultaneously undermine its conditions of permanent existence. Land acquired for free by the force of the royal State, sold at the price determined by the future surplus landlords expected to appropriate in the form of money-rent from the market-dependent labour of direct producers. As their initial independence allowed them to invest a greater share of capital into the land, the productivity of their labor increased, the price of grain was then lowered.
As populations grew the price of land and rents increased making it so only the rich peasants could afford it. With smaller incomes and higher rent expenses, the commodification of land therefore progressively dissolved the material basis of independent petty production and accelerated the concentration of landed property. Over time this process led to a mass of dispossessed peasants, allowing for the formation of capitalist landlords, tenant farmers, and ultimately a rural proletariat.
The independent yeoman peasantry, whose democratic aspirations were articulated by the Levellers during the English Revolution, re-emerged in the American colonies at the same time as the capitalist gentry, many of whom were themselves descendents of rich English yeoman, devised its plans for financial windfalls. Here, following the War of Independence, colonial expansion reproduced the English agrarian revolution on a continental scale: the dispossession of Indigenous peoples continually opened new land to speculation, while independent farming households transformed nominal title into productive property through their labour after being forced off of land in the East amid the imposition of money-rents. The wealth generated by this process seemed to confirm the Physiocratic doctrine that land itself was the source of wealth, yet what appeared as the natural productivity of the soil was in fact the historical expression of capitalist relations in agriculture.
22. - Karl Marx and Benjamin Franklin in Dialogue
It was precisely within this society where Marx observed it was "a man of the New World"—Benjamin Franklin—who "for the first time deliberately and clearly... reduces exchange-value to labour-time" (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). Franklin himself wrote that "Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is... most justly measured by labour" (A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, 1729). while recognizing that "so long as land is cheap... Labour can never be cheap where Land is cheap" (Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc., 1751) because "no man continues long as a labourer for others, but gets a Plantation of his own". Jefferson likewise regarded "the small landholders" as "the most precious part of a State", (Notes on the State of Virginia) believing that the continual availability of land would preserve a republic of independent proprietors rather than reproduce the permanent manufacturing proletariat of England, stating “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe”.
John Taylor of Caroline warned that "the accumulation of a great monied interest is a political evil" (An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, 1814), arguing that banks, public debt, and financial speculation corrupted republican liberty by creating artificial dependence. Disturbed by the proletarianization already visible in London and other British manufacturing centers, Jeffersonians regarded Britain's commercial and manufacturing system as an unnatural and premature development that concentrated labor before an independent home market had been formed. Instead, they sought to develop capitalism "naturally" through the expansion of self-sufficient patriarchal households headed by independent proprietors, where families not manufactures constituted the basic units of social reproduction.
When in Europe Franklin tried to convince manufactures not to move operations to America, in one pamphlet stating "Great establishments of manufacture require great numbers of poor to do the work for small wages; these poor are to be found in Europe, but will not be found in America till the lands are all taken up and cultivated, and the excess of people who cannot get land want employment" (Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, 1784). With the bulk of the American founding fathers being landed gentry, heavily vested in land speculation, it makes obvious their economic interests in territorial expansion and defense of a Republic built on independent proprietary farmers against colonial mercantile manufacturing constraints from London.
Perfectly demonstrating the transitional social role the American bourgeois conceptualized their society, Richard Price, one of the English radical Whig thinkers who profoundly influenced Jefferson, Franklin, and other American gentry. In Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, 1784, Price describes the ideal republic as: "The happiest state of man is the middle state between the savage and the refined, or between the wild and the luxurious state; where the inhabitants consist, if I may use the expression, of an independent and hardy yeomanry, all nearly on a level—trained to arms—clothed in homespun—of simple manners—strangers to luxury—drawing plenty from the ground—the rich and the poor, the haughty grandee and the creeping sycophant, equally unknown". This was also Rousseau’s ideal.
In England the transitional nature of the bourgeois republican ideals, emerging out of the agrarian revolution and the English Revolution can be seen in the writing of John Locke. Locke emerged from the upheavals of the English Revolution, within the Whig current that would become the political expression of England's ascendant agrarian bourgeoisie. His doctrines of natural rights, and the social contract would profoundly shape the constitutional development of Britain, the United States, and the ideological foundations of liberal capitalism. He gave the definitive political expression to England's agrarian revolution by grounding property in labour and improvement of land rather than inherited privilege. Locke was the philosopher of the emerging agrarian bourgeoisie, transforming the historically specific social relations of enclosure, commercial agriculture, and market dependence into universal principles of natural right. Locke's ideal society was one dominated by productive landed proprietors and commercially oriented farmers rather than by feudal aristocrats or an industrial bourgeoisie. Indeed, as Marx observed, "Locke's view is all the more important because it was the classical expression of bourgeois society's ideas of right as against feudal society, and moreover his philosophy served as the basis for all the ideas of the whole of subsequent English political economy".
Yet Marx also noted the specifically petty-bourgeois character of Locke's social ideal: "The maximum of value is here at the same time the maximum of use value; i.e., the increase of wealth is shown to depend on each individual's producing as much as possible and consuming as little as possible, so that each possesses as much landed property as possible and employs no more wage-labourers than he himself can supervise" (Theories of Surplus Value, Part I).
In the last act the American bourgeois would take the same “natural” agrarian path to capitalism as England, saving becoming a fully industrialized society until a later period. The two factions of the American bourgeois would emerge around this question. On one side stood the Jeffersonian tendency rooting itself in an alliance between the commercially oriented gentry and the petit-bourgeosis, from which the Democratic Party ultimately emerged, seeking to reproduce capital through free trade, expansionist warfare, and the continual multiplication of independent rural proprietors while maintaining a weak central State and resisting the financial and administrative institutions required for large-scale industry.
Opposed to this was the Hamiltonian tendency, which found political expression first in the Federalists and later in the Whigs and Republicans. Hamilton sought to concentrate labor under capital through State-supported manufacturing, public credit, and national development. Influenced by Hume, he regarded commerce, finance, and industry as instruments of State power. He praised manufactures for providing "additional employment to classes of the community not ordinarily engaged in the business", noting approvingly that women and children formed a large proportion of Britain's factory workforce, and identified "the promoting of emigration from foreign countries" as a principal advantage of industrial development, recognizing that immigrant labor could help overcome the difficulty of proletarianizing a domestic population of independent proprietors.
The conflict therefore concerned two distinct paths of bourgeois development: one dispersing labor across the expanding frontier as independent household proprietors, the other concentrating women, children, immigrants, and increasingly dispossessed farmers into large-scale production, laying the foundations of a permanent wage-earning proletariat.
The reality is that despite the gentry and speculators' rosy ideals of a harmonious yeoman petit-bourgeosis republic, very few wanted to go to the frontiers. Just as in the days of the colonization of Ireland very few volunteered unless they had no other economic options. The frontier was dangerous and a site of constant ongoing warfare. Most families had attempted to recreate stable family and neighborhood networks rather than embrace rugged frontier individualism. On the frontier the family unit acts within a system of militias as an armed camp under harassment from an enemy.
The advertisement of America as a middle class utopia, worked to entice immigration. Immigration was in turn needed to both fuel the existing manufacturers and to create conditions such that moving from the coastal area to a hostile and deadly frontier was the only option available.
23. - Locke and the Bourgeosis Family
For Locke, civil society rested upon households organized under the authority of the male household-head proprietor. This assumption belonged to the wider seventeenth-century patriarchal tradition. William Gouge described the family as a "little commonwealth", encompassing the ordered relations of husband and wife, parents and children, and masters and servants, while Robert Filmer elevated paternal authority into the principle of political sovereignty. Locke rejected Filmer's identification of paternal and political power as descending from the king. Rather, he preserved the authority of the father over wife, children, servants, and slaves as the social foundation of productive property. As Engels later observed, before the large-scale development of capitalist industry, "the family was the industrial unit of society", organizing both production and social reproduction within a single domestic economy. Locke's political theory thus reflected the historical conditions of early agrarian capitalism by treating the patriarchal productive household as the elementary unit of civil society, even as the very social relations it legitimized would eventually give way to the generalized wage-labour and large-scale capitalist production that Marx identified as the mature form of the capitalist mode of production.
In the American colonies, a society still organized around predominantly subsistence-producing patriarchal households increasingly contrasted itself with the advanced manufacturing society developing in England, with its growing masses of wage laborers, declining household independence, and decaying social order, while the British Crown and its mercantile system appeared as a parasitic power appropriating the products of household labor through taxation, monopoly, and imperial regulation under its restrictive mercantile commercial regime.
As Marx later observed in Capital Vol.1 in his discussion of Wakefield and the colonies, "so long... as the labourer can accumulate for himself... capitalist accumulation and the capitalist mode of production are impossible"; the abundance of land continually reproduced independent household proprietors rather than the dependent wage-laborers required by capital.
Yet this republic of independent producers was itself a historically specific bourgeois form. As Marx wrote, "the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class" (The Civil War in the United States, “Die Presse“, Vienna), 7 November 1861), announcing the political ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, even as the social conditions that sustained independent proprietorship would eventually give way to generalized wage labor. As soon as the republic of independent proprietors had occupied all the land and crushed the agrarian slave order, it was truly doomed to become the modern industrialized capitalist dictatorship of wage slavery of which the founding fathers themselves clearly accepted as more or less inevitable in the far flung future.
With the consolidation of industrial capitalism after the Civil War, the classical political economy inherited by Lincoln's generation gave way to vulgar political economy. Whereas Franklin, Hamilton, Carey, and even Lincoln's Republican economists had begun to treat labor as the source of wealth and political economy as the science of national development, the new academic economists increasingly abandoned the labor theory of value in favor of theories centered on utility, equilibrium, and the natural harmony of capitalist relations. Political economy ceased to investigate the historical development of capitalism and instead became an apologetic for its completed forms.
The rise of the corporate firm after the Civil War progressively dissolved the social foundation of Lockean liberalism. Locke had conceived civil society as a contractual voluntary association of independent patriarchal households, each combining property, labor, and political independence. As production shifted from the household to the corporation, the petty proprietor gave way to the wage-earning family, eroding the material basis of the Jeffersonian republic. The bourgeois family survived as an ideological ideal even as industrial capitalism undermined the social relations upon which it had originally rested. Liberal rights, private property, and representative government remained, but they increasingly served a capitalism organized around the large profit driven firm and enterprise rather than the small family proprietary order.
24. - The Liberation of the Petty Bourgeoisie From Itself Lies in Communism
Today we live in a world where over time, the independent middle classes—small farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, and independent proprietors—continue their historical dissolution by the concentration and centralization of capital. Unlike the bourgeois revolutions of the early modern period the revolutionary subject of the future is no longer the bourgeoisie, upper and petty, but the proletariat itself. As argued in The Historical Function of the Middle Classes and the Intelligentsia (1925), the historical decline of the middle classes cannot be reversed through the restoration of small property. Their only resolution lies in their incorporation into the proletarian movement and the abolition of the capitalist social relations that have rendered their continued existence historically untenable.
The agrarian revolution and primitive accumulation established the conditions for the dominance of the capitalist mode of production by dissolving feudal particularism and generalizing commodity production on a world scale. However violent and ruthless this process was, it was historically inseparable from the development of capitalism, which from its birth emerged as an impersonal, self-expanding social relation that subordinated all of human production to the blind compulsion of the market subordinated to the all pervasive demands of the enterprise for capitals continual accumulation. At that juncture all of society came under the full unconscious sway of capital as a social force over and above humanity. Only with the arrival of the modern proletarian and it’s revolutionary doctrine would the window open for humanity to take control of it’s destiny away from the invisible hand of the market.
In it’s viscous expansion, capitalism transformed the expropriated peasantry of Europe, the enslaved peoples of Africa, the dispossessed peoples of the Americas, and the colonized masses of Asia into the modern world proletariat. Bourgeois ideology fragments this unified historical movement into separate national, racial, and cultural narratives, obscuring their common foundation in the world consuming process of primitive accumulation which has a single origin and from which all of humanity has been victim from which will emerge rotten capital’s gravedigger: the international proletariat. As the recurring crises of capitalism dissolve the remaining illusions of petty proprietorship, bourgeois individualism, and the permanence of the middle strata, the task of the Communist Party is not to invent a new programme but to preserve and reassert the invariant programme of communism, restoring to the proletariat consciousness of its own historical movement—from primitive communism, through class society and capitalism, to the future human community.
25. - The Agricultural Crisis of Feudalism
In Europe, prior to the Black Plague the feudal mode of agricultural production had already begun to exude social rot amid terminal population and productivity decline. Population growth cyclicly led to increasing land fragmentation with each successive generation taking up more land to support itself. Within a mode of production fundamentally based on subsistence family farming access to adequate land to support the family and meet feudal levy obligations was essential. While the customary 'virgate' or 'yardland', the 30 acres was deemed necessary for a small farmer to be self-supporting in this period, two fifths or more of peasant land parcels were often less than 7.5 acres.
At the same time landlords raised rents and the feudal lords demanded labor from peasants' families to work their demesne while the cost of both food and clothing doubled. Peasants survived only by turning pasture into arable land and farming more intensively the small plots they were using. This led to more marginal lands coming under cultivation, in turn leading to declining agricultural productivity which contributed to the outbreak of famines and wars amid a generalized social crisis, as feudal lords resorted to territorial expansion and brigandry to make up for declining rents.
The Black Death would change the balance of power between the feudal social classes; however, it would not fundamentally alter the feudal mode of production's subsistence family unit organization of agricultural production with its host of limitations; hence, the demographic reset, merely reset the clock on its future social crisis to emerge renewed and more intensive in successive period.
After the plague to get new tenants to work their fields, lords had to reduce rents, eliminate servile payments, and pay wages. Free laborers preferred to contract for work by the day. To coerce wage laborers, lords tried-with little success- to enforce long-term contracts with threats of imprisonment. They were forced, however, either to pay day laborers the prevailing wage or to add food and drink to the wage and give annual workers land, pasture rights, and clothing, thus making them independent producers. John Gower, a Kent manor lord stated “for very little they do they demand the highest pay…. Tet a short time ago one performed more service than three do now”.
Richer peasants took advantage of the improved markets population growth brought, buying or leasing land, hiring poor peasants to work their land and selling surpluses at the growing number of market towns and agricultural fairs. To free oneself from agricultural toil, a peasant family would not enlarge the scale of production, but would simply acquire additional landed property worked by other peasant tenants. The profits from the extra land would consist of the rents paid by the tenants. Most peasants, however, overtime owning too little land for subsistence and unable to increase farm production or pasture additional animals turned to wage labor, learned a craft and postponed or avoided marriage.
Feudalism, with its seigneurial dues, was a system wherein the noble lord himself played no role in organizing the productive unit, instead only extracting a surplus for his own consumption and costs of warfare. The surplus appropriated by feudal lords severely limited funds for accumulation which could be invested in further constant capital and land improvement, restricted freedom of movement for peasants and diminished development of the labor market while preventing concentration of land and restricting it to smaller and smaller units over time. The technical level of medieval agriculture production, transport and distribution all contributed to preventing the scale of production from growing beyond the limits of a holding which could be worked by a family with at most one or two hired hands. The true leap in agricultural productivity would not come until the advent of capitalist agricultural enterprise along with its host of technological advances which nevertheless eventually will meet their own point of stagnation and decline in the period of advanced imperialism.
As we say in Theory of Ground Rent and the Agrarian Question in the Marxist Doctrine:
II, 1 - “In small family farming on an almost delimited plot, all members of the family who are able to work do so, and agricultural products are accumulated in specific cycles for consumption by all. Such an economy lives on a perfectly closed island. In the economic sense, no wealth or value enters or leaves; in the physical sense, no product of labour leaves”.
II, 2 - “In the natural economy, there is no exchange or money, only the movement of material products (...) On the famous island, both slave owners, who reap without sowing, and slaves who work can live. Everyone eats the products of the same land, but the slave labourer, through his muscular processes, transforms 4,000 calories arriving from the solar power station and consumes only 2,000. This is nothing other than surplus value measured in units of energy (in man-horsepower or in calories) by Marxists; whereas for economists, the value of the worker’s labour is the market price of the subsistence necessary to keep the worker alive. Hence, they theorise on behalf of those who reap where others have sown. In the machinery of feudal society, the market exists, but the relationship between the two fundamental classes, the workers of the land and the nobles, is not regulated in mercantile terms, and the same is true of the priestly order. In the later Middle Ages, the mercantile fabric comes to be woven ever more densely, yet the bulk of agricultural production functions without having to resort to it”.
I, 5 - “The feudal relation, the serf rendered to the lord a rent in kind or in labour by working days in his lord’s garden and with shares of the produce from his own little plot; hence, we are in a natural economy. The modern lord of the land, the landed proprietor, on the other hand, enjoys a rent in money. At the same time, land ownership, once inviolable, becomes alienable; just as the agricultural labourer, once bound to the land, becomes free. Initially, this process is not determined solely by the unstoppable need to give free rein to the manufacturing productive forces, but is also accompanied by an equal enhancement of the agricultural productive forces”.
“Kautsky: ‘In the feudal epoch, there was no agriculture other than small-scale cultivation, and the lands of the nobility were tilled with the same tools used by the small peasants. Capitalism for the first time has created the possibility of large-scale agriculture, technically more rational than small-scale cultivation’”.
“Lenin clearly establishes that in Marxism, present-day agriculture becomes capitalist in its internal economic structure because its form changes from natural to mercantile”.
“The feudal agrarian economy, characterised, among other things, by the overlapping of agricultural labour with minimal domestic industry, keeps rural production away from the market. The capitalist economy draws the small peasant farm into the mercantile whirlpool. The supposed independence of the very small farm leads to an immensely greater burden of work for the owner of that scrap of land. But, within capitalist limits, one cannot count on the disappearance of small-scale production in agriculture. ‘Small farmers’ co-operatives are naturally a link in economic progress, but they express a transition towards capitalism and not, by any means, towards collectivism, as is often so thought and claimed (Kautsky)”.
As agricultural productivity reached its limit within the feudal system, land clearance was the most typical form of medieval economic expansion. It represented a quantitative, or extensive, type of growth (the multiplication of units of production, rather than the transformation of these units), which was the only sort of growth conceivable in that mode of production. During the late medieval period, the Teutonic expansion eastward established new farming villages across Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and other parts of Eastern Europe by clearing forests, draining marshes, and bringing previously uncultivated land into production. Similar processes of internal colonization occurred throughout western Europe, where landlords and peasants reclaimed woodlands, wetlands, and wastelands for cultivation, increasing the supply of arable land and supporting larger populations.
The commercial expansion of the High and Late Middle Ages laid the foundation for the Renaissance by fostering the rapid growth of towns and an increasingly prosperous urban middle class of merchants, bankers, and skilled artisans. Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the German eastward colonization (Ostsiedlung) established hundreds of new towns under Lübeck and Magdeburg law, while the Hanseatic League linked many of these settlements into an extensive commercial network that integrated the Baltic and North Sea economies. Merchant and craft guilds organized urban production by regulating apprenticeships, maintaining standards of quality, controlling entry into the trades, and coordinating specialized manufacturing. Although most towns produced goods primarily for regional markets, the largest commercial centers increasingly specialized in fine textiles, metalwork, glass, and other high-value manufactures that sustained long-distance commerce. This commercial revival coincided with a machine revolution, during which watermills, windmills, blast furnaces, mechanical hammers, cranes, and other technological innovations substantially increased both agricultural and industrial productivity.
By the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, this phase of urban expansion had largely reached its limits as the supply of easily cultivable land was exhausted, eastward settlement slowed, and Europe entered a prolonged demographic and agrarian crisis. Most towns depended upon an agricultural hinterland that supplied grain, livestock, timber, and raw materials while receiving manufactured goods in return, but this relationship remained organized primarily through feudal rents, customary obligations, municipal privileges, and corporative institutions rather than through capitalist production.
The prosperity generated by commerce also produced a wealthy urban patriciate that increasingly blurred the distinction between merchant and noble, as successful merchants, bankers, and guild leaders invested commercial profits in landed estates to secure both stable incomes and the social prestige associated with landownership. Urban wealth therefore remained constrained by seigneurial taxation, tolls, monopolies, and guild regulations that protected established producers while limiting competition, labor mobility, and capital accumulation. Consequently, after the fourteenth century most medieval towns experienced only modest long-term population growth, while exceptional commercial centers such as London expanded rapidly only during the sixteenth century as England's increasingly commercialized agrarian economy began to outgrow the institutional constraints of feudalism.
Once the agricultural upsurge from territorial extension reached it’s limit a social contradiction was born of the threat to seigneurial income. As the feudal States grew under the mercantile system of distribution, noble lords launched more wars to capture more funds, which in turn cast them further into debts amid declining revenues. Feudal lords increasingly demanded more rent and tax, upwards of 50%. This was not invested in capital or technology but squandered in wars. High surplus extraction led to peasant exhaustion and inability to adequately use animal power and manure. This led to cultivation of worse soils, with fewer animals leading to land being exhausted, the crisis in productivity led to famine and demographic collapse. Debts began to grow. Ecclesiastical communities often was expropriated or settled. What the seigneurial class no longer obtained from the growth in the number of taxpayers, it had to find by increasing the rate of levy in one way or another, even at the risk of upsetting the biological and economic balances by simultaneous retrenchment in self-subsistence and investment in peasant economy and entangling the later in a viscous spiral of decline.
The demographic pressure gave rise to a proliferation of tiny holdings, subject to all the evils of a rural dwarf economy, the most obvious being a waste of effort. The impoverishment of a wide swath of the population led to masses of half-starved agricultural workers. Decreasing productivity and raising production costs and prices, led to further decline.
The leap in rural productivity was the crucial factor in the renaissance.
England illustrates how some urban centers eventually escaped the stagnation that characterized much of late medieval Europe. While the expansion of new towns slowed after the fourteenth century, London, Bristol, and other ports grew rapidly during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as England shifted from exporting raw wool to producing and exporting finished cloth. The Wars of the Roses (1455–1487) substantially weakened much of the old feudal nobility, and the subsequent Tudor consolidation of power curtailed the private military authority of great magnates while strengthening a more centralized State.
Combined with the growth of commercially oriented farming and the enclosure movement, these changes encouraged the expansion of the rural domestic, or "putting-out", system, in which merchant capital supplied wool to peasant households that spun and wove cloth for regional and export markets. Rising agricultural productivity generated marketable surpluses that supported expanding urban populations while releasing labor for rural industry, manufacturing, and trade. These developments rested upon the emergence of market-dependent agrarian property relations, which increasingly compelled both landlords and tenants to compete through commercial production rather than rely upon customary feudal obligations.
London, situated on the navigable Thames and increasingly integrated into North Sea and Atlantic commerce, consequently emerged as Europe's leading entrepôt, concentrating shipping, finance, and overseas trade. Unlike many continental towns whose economies remained constrained by feudal obligations and localized markets, England's expanding commercial agriculture, rural domestic industry, and increasingly integrated home market created the conditions for sustained urban, commercial, and maritime growth.
26. - Enclosure as Expansion
The process of expropriation of church lands and opening up of commons for private ownership, created an ever expanding land markets. As the English Tudor crown sold massive amounts of cheap expropriated church lands to gentry land speculators, more poor peasants obtained mortgages and accumulated in order to purchase land. This led to the development of a growing middle strata of independent proprietary peasantry with aspirations of upward mobility. Since land remained widely available but potential tenants scarce, peasant sellers sometimes themselves granted mortgages, thus allowing poorer families to buy. Under the Tudors upward mobility was easy and tradesmen and yeoman could easily climb up into the ranks of the gentry.
With Tudor dynasty’s embrace of protestantism, with the King as head of the Church of England, and it’s liquidation of the Catholic Church, it forged an alliance with the middle classes against the nobility and its clergy as it worked to develop the autonomous power of the crown, the origins of the autonomous State power and the absolutist State. As apocalyptic Calvinism became the ideology of the rising middle class, gentry and freeman began to replace the clergy’s role as the managers of the State bureaucracy, just as they began to replace them within the ranks of the new church’s established clergy they understood the need for further land conquests and territorial acquisitions as central to their growing prosperity and the realization of the destiny of their class to overthrow the global order of feudalism, which was most epitomized in the Catholic Church itself.
The precursors of what would become the ideology of American Manifest Destiny, would arise in the period of the Reformation under a protestant middle class ideology which viewed the English as God’s Chosen People, the elect who would one day conquer Rome from the anti-christ, liberate and civilize the indians from the papist Spanish, and eventually dream of ridding themselves all together of the noble “Norman Yoke”. The vehicle for this great crusade would be the development of capitalist colonial enterprise and the ignition spark for its engine would be the agricultural revolution which with the birth of the rural middle class, would generate an insatiable thirst for land among the lower land speculating gentry, which would not end until a continent was conquered. The marriage of the upwardly mobile middle class, would lead millions on a quest around the world to drink from its cool waters and escape the fate of being condemned to proletarianization within the inferno of London’s manufactures.
Enclosure of Church lands under Henry the 8th alongside the constant clearing of wastes and forests continued to expand at pace, generating what was known as the golden age of the “yeoman” in England, a middle class who was credited with building the nation in popular lore; however, their precarious economic existence as a transitory social class, was predicated upon the constant opening up of new available lands for farmers. Monasteries were dissolved, yeoman gave money to crown (large amounts had come into hands of land speculators, who then in turn solid it to yeoman.
As we said in our study on the history of the English workers movement (...) The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, & c., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poor folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated. "Pauper ubique jacet" cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through England” (“Origins and History of the English Workers Movement - Primitive Accumulation”, Communist Left, no.10, 1997).
Great land hunger had again developed by Elizabeth’s time, rents and short leases steadily rose, only free hold or copy-hold inheritance went unchanged, voluntary enclosure between landlord and tenant did happen, enclosure of forests and wastes took off in a major way. Elizabethan poor legislation demanded that four acres of land be laid to every cottage or dwelling built for laborers. They tried new fertilizers and maneuvers, rising prices incentivized more productivity, they were more innovative and developed new farm implements, they would often also farm sheep.
Urban grown developed because of rural pressures. London's population swelled from 55,000 in 1520 to 200,000 by 1600.
Families improved vast quantities of wasteland and forest, especially in the thinly populated North; Although rich yeomen might give whole farm to their sons, land division by husbandmen inevitably led to a multiplication of tiny holdings often no larger than a cottage and an acre. Even the eldest of youngest son received the bulk of the fathers land, other siblings inherited a cottage and an acre.
As expansion reached it’s limits, independent proprietary peasants increasingly would be pushed down into the ranks of the proletarian; likewise, middling farmers and gentry would see the limits on their own capital’s accumulation in the face of the larger aristocratic landlords and the parasitic forces of mercantile monopoly.
Thus the thrust for colonization came at the interest of the overall accumulation of the developing national capital. It would soon be that these projects of territorial expansion would be closely linked with a rise of nationalism closely identified with the common man of the “middling sort”.
27. - The Commodification of Land and the Small-Scale Capitalist Farmer
Marx argues that parcelized peasant property represented a contradictory transitional form in which the cultivator was simultaneously labourer, proprietor, and small capitalist. Because the peasant owned rather than leased the soil, rent did not initially appear as a separate deduction from production but accrued directly to the producer. Yet the expansion of commodity exchange progressively undermined this independence. As land became freely alienable through purchase, and sale, its price increasingly represented capitalized rent rather than merely its productive capacity. "The price of land is nothing but capitalized and therefore anticipated rent" (Capital, III). Parcelization thus transformed land into a commodity whose ownership could itself be bought, sold, and pledged as collateral.
The transition from labour services and rent in kind to money rent further accelerated this process by replacing customary obligations with contractual monetary payments. Rather than owing labour directly to the lord, the cultivator increasingly depended upon the successful sale of commodities to meet fixed cash obligations. At the same time, the growth of a land market encouraged the expansion of mortgages and rural credit. Marx observes that under small landed property the peasant often purchased land only by assuming debt, becoming dependent upon "high usurious interest" while "the price of land (...) may rise here to such a point that it makes production impossible" (Capital, III, Ch. 47). Ownership therefore concealed a new form of dependence, as mortgage interest increasingly appropriated surplus labour that had formerly appeared as feudal rent.
Far from preserving peasant independence, parcelization therefore became one of the principal mechanisms through which capital penetrated the countryside. As Property and Capital argues, "the molecular partition of the land" ultimately became "one of the many vehicles capital accumulation uses to expropriate the peasant". Engels similarly maintained that although the dissolution of feudal estates initially appeared revolutionary, small proprietorship ultimately faced "economic ruin in the face of large-scale agriculture". The peasant proprietor increasingly confronted a stark alternative: successful accumulation into the ranks of capitalist farmers employing wage labour, or progressive indebtedness, dispossession, and proletarianization.
Mortgage finance simultaneously dissolved the traditional separation between town and countryside. Since land itself became security for loans, anticipated agricultural rents could be converted into financial assets purchased by merchants, lawyers, officeholders, prosperous yeomen, and commercially minded members of the gentry. Marx identifies usurer's capital as the decisive intermediary in this transformation, arguing that "usury is a powerful lever in developing the preconditions for industrial capital" because it "appropriates the conditions of labour, that is, ruins the owners of the old conditions of labour" (Capital, III, Ch. 36). Elsewhere he emphasizes that usury preyed upon "extravagant members of the upper classes, particularly landowners", while simultaneously extracting wealth from "small producers, mainly the peasant". Mortgage lending therefore transferred landed wealth away from feudal proprietors toward commercially oriented creditors, increasingly subordinating agriculture to merchant and money capital.
These developments formed the agrarian counterpart to England's broader Financial Revolution. The principal participants in mortgage lending, land speculation, and rural credit were not the great feudal magnates but prosperous yeomen, the lesser gentry, lawyers, merchants, officeholders, and urban financiers, who accumulated liquid capital through commerce, government service, and commercial agriculture before investing it in mortgages and landed property. Meanwhile many members of the older aristocracy increasingly mortgaged or sold estates to finance consumption, political obligations, or military expenditures. In London, goldsmith-bankers likewise evolved from artisans into financiers by accepting deposits, extending loans, discounting bills of exchange, and financing both merchants and the Crown.
The growing integration of mortgage lending, commercial credit, and public finance culminated in the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. Enclosure and competitive tenancy therefore represented only one dimension of England's agrarian transformation; equally significant was the fusion of landed property with merchant finance, mortgage credit, and banking, through which capitalist social relations increasingly penetrated the countryside.
(To be continued in the next issue)
Chapter presented at the general meeting in May 2020
4.1 - Eruption of the Working Class
The nationalist “May Fourth Movement” of 1919 was preceded by a series of protests by the working class, which paved the way for its entry onto the political scene, potentially already independent from other classes. These early strikes were motivated by the worsening conditions of Chinese workers at the end of the First World War. Considered a golden age for Chinese national capitalism, the bourgeoisie was then able to take advantage of the temporary lack of Western competition to expand its activities and increase profits. On the contrary, for the working class this meant a deterioration: longer working hours and repeated attempts to lower wages. In addition, since 1914 there had been a steady increase in prices, especially for basic foodstuffs: between the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919, the price of rice almost doubled in southern China.
Although strikes had occurred prior to the events of 1919, in 1917 and 1918, it was from June 1919 onwards that they gained in scale and vigor in various industries and regions of the country. In Shanghai, Japanese and Chinese cotton mills and other Japanese textile industries were involved, as well as metalworkers, the BAT tobacco industry, dockworkers, silk spinners, urban transport workers, and other categories. From July 1919 to July 1920, the Shanghai municipality recorded 54 strikes. In the south, mechanics in Canton and Hong Kong, railway workers in Guangdong, printers in Hong Kong, and telephone workers in Canton went on strike. In the center and north, strikes involved KMA miners, railway workers in Nanjing, metalworkers, postal workers, and rickshaw pullers. They demanded higher wages or fought against wage cuts, layoffs, high living costs, and even for an 8-hour working day. The strikes of 1919-21 achieved significant results, with wages increasing by a minimum of 10% and up to 40%.
These actions were still accompanied by the elemental violence that had characterized the early labor movements, directed against factories and machines as in classic Luddism. The workers' combativeness was also expressed in violent clashes with the police. Although these actions were mostly spontaneous, there were also some early organized initiatives. In particular, it was in the Canton region, where there was a strong corporate tradition, that the workers' struggles were carried out by organized groups. From 1920 to 1922, there were 44 strikes in Canton. These were accompanied by an intense process of unionization: while before 1920 there were only a handful of modern-style unions, by 1922 there were about 100.
Some struggles were particularly significant. In April 1920, Hong Kong mechanics went on strike to demand a 40% wage increase, affecting British boat repair companies, island transport, telecommunications, and metalworking companies. The striking mechanics, led by their professional organization in Canton, forced the British authorities to grant increases of 20 to 32.5%. The following year, encouraged by the success of their comrades in Hong Kong and having separated from the employers who were members of the same association, the Canton mechanics demanded not only wage increases but also an eight-hour working day. The strike achieved significant gains: wage increases of 10 to 40%, a nine-hour working day, and double pay for night work.
The victorious conclusion of the Hong Kong seamen's strike, which, with the solidarity of the entire proletariat of the metropolis, had paralyzed the entire economic life of the colony from January 12 to March 5, 1922, sparked a wave of strikes that affected all the major industrial centers of China. The Yangtze seamen went on strike; in Shanghai, the postmen and workers of the Rihua cotton mills went on strike; in Canton, the salt workers went on strike; in Macao, a general strike of all Chinese workers was proclaimed. In the following months, a movement demanding the immediate objectives of the working class spread throughout China, extending to other categories. Railway workers won a strike in July in Changxindian, with the struggle spreading to all railway lines both to the north and to Hunan and Hubei and, in September, to the Hankow-Canton and Beijing-Mukden lines. Workers at the Yangtze forges and the Anyuan coal mines went on strike. It is difficult to make a complete list of all the struggles of this period, with almost all industrial centers involved.
The movement reached its peak in October 1922 with the strike of 50,000 miners in the five mines of Kailan, where one-fifth of all Chinese coal was extracted, and until the early months of 1923, the working class maintained high levels of mobilization.
4.2 - The Hong Kong Strike of 1922
A major strike by seafarers took place in Hong Kong between January and March 1922, which then spread to other sectors of the workforce. There were several causes for this. Since the beginning of the World War, year after year, while prices rose dramatically, wages remained low, leading many workers to ruin. Although they did the same work, the conditions of Chinese seamen were harsher than those of white seamen, and their wages were lower: humiliation, fines, and mistreatment were constant. Labor was recruited through intermediaries to whom workers were forced to pay bribes. Finally, the presence of a vast industrial reserve army allowed for any abuse under penalty of dismissal. When a seaman lost his job, he was reduced to starvation and sleeping on the streets.
The example of the struggles of their class brothers showed the way forward. Seafarers could come into contact with workers from other countries, thus learning about the global revolutionary wave, and in China itself, victorious workers' struggles were beginning: the mechanics' strike in March 1920 in Hong Kong and other victorious strikes in nearby Canton, such as those in 1921 by mechanics and printers.
The strike was carefully prepared by the seafarers' union: the internal structure was strengthened, a propaganda committee and a section for the defense of the strike were created, an office was opened in Canton to protect the strikers and a resistance fund was organized. Several meetings were organized by union activists and support was sought from unions in other countries.
In September 1921, the seafarers' union presented its platform to shipowners, but received no response. After another futile attempt, on January 12, it resubmitted its demands with an ultimatum. On the same day, the seafarers went on strike en masse, blocking all vessels crossing the inland waters of Guangdong and British, Dutch, French, Japanese, and American ships at the docks. There were 2,000 strikers, but the strike soon spread because the pickets blocked the boats on arrival, and the crews abandoned their ships and joined the strike in solidarity. After the first week, the number of striking seafarers rose to 6,500.
On January 16, the colonial government responded with martial law. At the same time, shipowners presented a counterproposal for wage increases, which was quickly rejected by the sailors. The strike affected not only shipowners but the entire economy of the island, posing a serious threat to the colony because local production was insufficient to meet the needs of its inhabitants, with foodstuffs being imported by sea from mainland China. The strike caused prices to rise by up to 50%.
At the end of January, Hong Kong's porters and dockers called a strike in solidarity with seafarers: all commercial activity was halted, goods remained on the docks, and ships were stuck in the port. The number of strikers reached over 30,000.
With the situation in the colony becoming increasingly critical, several attempts were made to break the strike. The Hong Kong government tried to use both the stick and the carrot. Mediation by the Chambers of Commerce and other associations of the Chinese bourgeoisie in the colony failed, with the seafarers standing firm and united in their positions. The colonial government then outlawed the seamen's union and the organizations of porters and stevedores, arrested their leaders, and placed cannons in front of the seamen's union headquarters. Attempts were then made to hire scabs in the Philippines, India, other countries, and other parts of China. But this attempt to recruit a mass of unemployed workers to replace the strikers also failed, both because these scabs were not experienced sailors and compromised navigation, and because hundreds of these workers were persuaded by the strike committee to give up their jobs.
Hong Kong was completely blockaded. Pickets in other Chinese ports prevented supplies from reaching the colony. The strike spread like an epidemic. Hong Kong was at the center of it: once they entered the port, sailors abandoned their ships. Shipping companies diverted to Shanghai, Singapore, or the Philippines. On February 26, the struggle spread further to all Chinese workers in Hong Kong, who went on strike in solidarity with the sailors: by the beginning of March, there were 120,000 strikers.
The colonial government then ordered all British warships in Chinese ports to sail to Hong Kong. An atmosphere of terror reigned in the city. At this point, the workers began to organize a general exodus to Canton. About 50,000 sailors, porters, dockers, and other workers moved to Canton, where they had a good overall control of the situation. There was great solidarity among the Chinese proletariat, which provided substantial financial aid to the sailors' resistance fund. The petty bourgeoisie and part of the Chinese bourgeoisie also supported the strikers; for example, the Guangdong government itself made funds available.
The colonial government was at an impasse. It had tried everything, but the resistance of the Chinese workers remained unbroken, while the food situation in Hong Kong was becoming dire and the colony's economy was paralyzed. In this favorable context, the seamen's union called a plenary assembly of workers for March 7. A list of demands was sent to the Hong Kong government, which was forced to accept them. The powerful British imperialism yielded to the strength of the Chinese proletariat.
The strike lasted 56 days. It was an economic struggle by the proletariat for wages, but it also had anti-colonial connotations. Its victorious conclusion gave a powerful boost to the entire Chinese labor movement, which found expression in the first National Congress of Trade Unions, convened in Canton on May 1, 1922.
The strike highlighted two fundamental aspects of the class struggle in China. First of all, its victorious conclusion was possible because the struggle was not confined to seafarers: the entire Hong Kong proletariat joined the strike, and workers in other Chinese industrial centers showed their solidarity. It clearly demonstrated that an all-out strike, which transcends the boundaries of the company and the category, can sometimes defeat the bosses, even humiliating the colonial power of imperialism.
Another aspect that emerges from the strike is the vacillating behavior of the Chinese bourgeoisie, which, although interested in greater autonomy at the expense of foreign capitalists, remained tied to foreign powers by a thousand economic interests. As a bourgeoisie, it opposed even the defensive assertions of the working class, but it also feared that the growing proletarian movement, led by its communist party, would overwhelm not only imperialism's hold on the country, but the entire bourgeois class order. Hence its contradictory attitude, that of a class forced to juggle between the aspiration for its own independent national development and the fear of no longer being able to control those social forces which, set in motion by a struggle for liberation from foreigners, might not stop at national emancipation but aim for their own emancipation as a class.
These were powerful lessons for a young proletariat unwilling to back down in the face of the raging class war.
4.3 - Early Organizations
As we have seen, the first economic struggles of the postwar period were mostly led by corporate organizations composed of workers and employers together. In the early 1920s, workers' organizations were affected by the late development of capital in China, still tied to the corporate past and other traditional forms.
The corporate guilds maintained the functions that had characterized them for centuries: strict control over working techniques and their secrets, over the conditions of practice of the profession, and over the prices of products. They also regulated the labor market, deciding wages and the length of the working day. Control over the workforce was guaranteed by the institution of apprenticeship: in order to practice a trade, it was mandatory to undergo a period of three to five years during which the young person was subservient to the master and the regulations of the guilds, imbued with Confucian traditions of respect for the established order and family and social hierarchy. The guild was therefore a mixed organization, a community of small producers including masters and workers. Although they were members of the guild, from which they derived benefits, they were subject to the power of the masters, who held leadership positions in the guild and established all its rules, including respect for discipline. Despite frequent conflicts, the guilds maintained strong internal cohesion.
In addition to the separation by trade, the structure of the guilds was further complicated by distinctions based on regional and provincial origin. In a given city, certain trades were carried out exclusively by a community from a specific area. Alternatively, within the same trade, separate guilds were formed based on origin. This led to a conflict between the guilds and between the workers themselves, which had its roots in the provincial division of China, a result of the country's history. In large cities, associations based on geographical origin were widespread, without social or professional distinctions, composed of wealthy notables, merchants, artisans, skilled workers, laborers, and coolies. These associations, closely controlled by the bourgeoisie, had a strong influence among workers and coolies, helping them to move from one city to another, providing them with accommodation and assisting them in emergencies. With a strong hold on the workers, they played a conciliatory role in conflicts between workers and employers.
Finally, traditional secret societies, long active and powerful in China, continued to exert a certain influence among skilled workers and the urban populace. In previous decades, these secret societies had also mobilized sections of the working class, such as in 1884 during the Franco-Chinese War, when the Triad organized a strike in Hong Kong. In some cases, they had a strong following among workers, such as the Green Gang, formed by sailors and coolies from the Imperial Canal, which ensured the transport of grain from the provinces to the capital, Beijing. But by the early 1920s, these secret societies were only serving the personal ambitions of their leaders and were involved in every illegal and lucrative activity possible in the big cities: arms and drug trafficking, and prostitution. They would be used by the counter-revolution to repress the working class.
Although by the early 1920s all these organizations were in decline, they still retained a certain influence over the young working class, which would have to fight against these traditional structures in order to establish its own class-based organizations.
While traditional guilds still exerted influence over workers, particularly skilled workers, modern organizations began to emerge alongside them, supporting the national aspiration for industrial development. The main activities of these institutions, which brought together employers and workers, concerned the professional training of their members in order to provide Chinese companies with a skilled workforce. This trend gained enormous momentum from 1912 onwards with the establishment of the Republic, which opened up the possibility of economic and political progress for the Chinese bourgeoisie, who sought to involve the working class in the movement for the country's industrial development. Another period of expansion for these organizations was during the First World War: the easing of Western pressure on China allowed for the rapid expansion of capitalism and initiatives to bring wage earners into the fold.
The strikes linked to the May 4 Movement had demonstrated the potential strength of the working class. This led employers to try to channel the labor movement toward interests that were not class-based but rather focused on collaboration with national capital, for a patriotic struggle against foreign economic and political penetration and to support the progress of modern industry and national capitalism. Following the May 4 Movement, the most significant developments were the “industrial promotion” associations, mixed organizations led by employers and with an ambiguous class content. Their main objective was to support industry and national production, within the framework of the campaign launched in May 1919 to boycott Japanese goods. However, these associations also pursued a policy of assistance to workers, for example by setting up savings banks and relief funds, demanding wage increases and reductions in the working day, and even the right to strike. But in fact, they remained far removed from genuine trade union and protest activity.
Changes in the organization of workers had already begun to take shape. In the guilds, workers and apprentices began to meet separately from their masters, and the same began to happen within the industrial proletariat. It was among skilled workers that purely workers' organizations were first formed. Although these organizations were involved in some struggles for their rights, they were mainly devoted to mutual aid, education, and leisure activities. These organizations spread after the strikes that followed May 1919. From these, some genuinely proletarian organizations began to differentiate themselves, such as the mechanics in Shanghai and Guangdong, the seamen in Hong Kong, and the railway workers in central China. They were still structured on the basis of trade rather than industry, and their main activities still included education and mutual aid, but they were separate from the employers, were run by proletarians, and carried out industrial action. Shortly thereafter, with the great wave of strikes that swept China starting in 1921 but especially in 1922, these organizations became true class-based unions.
4.4 - The First Trade Union Congress
The favorable situation that arose after the successful strikes of early 1922 led to the convening in Canton on May 1 of that year of the first national trade union congress, open to all trade union organizations, without any restrictions based on party or political orientation. The initiative was promoted by the Communist Party of China, which at its founding congress in July 1921 had identified among its priorities the need to support the economic struggles of the working class and the creation of workers' unions. To this end, it had formed a Labor Secretariat to organize workers into unions, immediately taking the lead in a number of strikes.
The objectives of the trade union congress were to consolidate the unity of all workers and to discuss the improvement of their conditions by examining the various proposals put forward by the delegates. There were 160 delegates from 12 cities, representing over 100 trade unions and approximately 300,000 members. Various factions were vying for influence over the working class. At least four can be identified: in addition to the communists, there were the anarchists, who still had some influence in the Canton region; the supporters of corporatism, who exercised their influence through various types of industrial promotion organizations; and finally the Kuomintang, which had forged links with workers' sectors in Canton, led some important trade unions, and participated in the congress with many delegates. The congress was characterized by conflict between these tendencies. Despite this, some shared resolutions were reached, including the demand for an eight-hour working day.
The communists, in addition to taking the initiative to convene and organize the congress through the Labor Secretariat, certainly played a leading role within it, and some of the main resolutions of the congress were definitely a victory for the communist trade union movement. First of all, with regard to the principles of trade union organization, the old forms of guilds and secret societies were condemned, and the congress adopted a resolution that trade unions should be organized on an industrial basis rather than by trade. This principle became the rule for the organization of the Chinese class-based trade union.
Another very important resolution concerned solidarity strikes. When a strike broke out, all unions had to be notified and each union had to spread the news, send telegrams of solidarity, and support it financially. The resolution then states: "If the employers resist, the unions must call a solidarity strike, first in nearby factories. If this action does not achieve results, the unions must declare a solidarity strike in all factories in the city. If this step is also insufficient, the whole country must go on general strike".
Finally, one resolution concerned the measures to be taken against the deviant elements of the movement, against those who sided with the employers. These saboteurs of the class struggle were colorfully called “tiger souls” because, according to an ancient Chinese legend, in order to be freed, the souls of men devoured by a tiger are forced to help it prey on other human victims, betraying their own species.
This first congress of Chinese trade unions was certainly important. For the first time, the barriers between the working class were breaking down. The political division of the country, imposed by the intervention of foreign powers and the rule of warlords, also led to regional divisions within the proletariat. At the congress, for the first time, all the workers' organizations in the country came into contact with each other, with common slogans and common principles of organization, praising solidarity, which they spread on a large scale. In addition, the goal of a pan-Chinese federation of trade unions was claimed, which would be implemented three years later. The congress testified to the growing strength of the Chinese working class, which would soon win its place in the international proletarian army in the field of class warfare.
5.1 - The Eastern Question at the Third Congress of the International
The Third Congress of the Communist International, held between June and July 1921, was marked by the realization on the part of the vanguard of world communism that the revolutionary wave that had followed the war was subsiding, allowing the bourgeoisie to resume the offensive, both economically and politically. Furthermore, it was evident that the formation of communist parties on the correct foundations of revolutionary Marxism had not been sufficient to wrest broad sections of the proletariat from the influence of the opportunist parties, which had played a fundamental role in maintaining bourgeois order.
Given this situation, the Congress’s proceedings focused primarily on how to win the proletarian masses over to communism by freeing them from the influence of opportunist parties—an indispensable step for the success of the revolutionary struggle. This issue concerned the communist parties in Europe and America, where the struggle was directly aimed at the proletariat’s seizure of power and the establishment of its dictatorship, which was not to be shared with other social classes. For this reason, the “Eastern Question,” concerning the revolutionary struggle in colonial and semi-colonial countries, did not feature prominently in the Congress’s proceedings, prompting, among other things, the vigorous protest of some delegates.
In any case, the correct approach to the revolutionary struggle in the countries of the East, as affirmed at the Second Congress, remained valid and was confirmed by the Third. For example, the “Theses on the World Situation and the Tasks of the Comintern” adopted at the Congress state:
“The vigorous development of capitalism in the East, especially in India and China, has created new social foundations there for the revolutionary struggle. The bourgeoisie in these countries has strengthened its ties with foreign capital and has thus become an important instrument of its domination. Its struggle against foreign imperialism—the struggle of a very weak competitor—is essentially feeble and weak. The growth of the indigenous proletariat paralyzes the national revolutionary tendencies of the capitalist bourgeoisie, but at the same time the vast peasant masses find revolutionary leaders in the conscious communist vanguard. The combination of military oppression by foreign imperialism, capitalist exploitation by the local and foreign bourgeoisie, and the survival of feudal serfdom creates favorable conditions for the young proletariat of the colonies to develop rapidly and take its rightful place at the head of the peasant revolutionary movement. The revolutionary popular movement in India and other colonies has now become an integral part of the world revolution, just as the proletarian uprising in the capitalist countries of the Old and New Worlds has.”
The International thus reaffirmed certain fundamental principles that were intended to guide the revolutionary struggle in underdeveloped countries. First and foremost, it affirmed the inability of the indigenous bourgeoisie to lead the revolutionary struggle, because it was bound by economic interests to foreign capital—a powerful material link that made it subservient to foreign imperialism and incapable of waging a genuine national struggle. Added to this was the fear of being unable to stop a social movement that would certainly have shattered its own class rule as well.
The second point emphasized was the role of the proletariat as the leader of the peasant revolutionary movement. In backward countries, the proletariat, although still numerically weak, may be the only class capable of leading the peasant masses in the struggle for the bourgeois national revolution. Finally, it was affirmed—a cornerstone of the world communist revolution—that the democratic-revolutionary struggle in the colonies and semi-colonies, which saw the young indigenous proletariat at the head of vast peasant masses, must be linked to the single-class revolution of the proletariat in the capitalist-developed countries.
Stalinism would go on to produce other theories regarding the course of the revolution in backward countries, which would overturn the International’s original and correct perspective. This reversal of historical interpretation and doctrine was a political reflection of the counterrevolution in Russia, which demanded that the world communist movement be subordinated to the development and defense of its national, bourgeois capitalism.
But in 1921, although the first signs of tactical deviations were already emerging at the Third Congress of the International—promptly pointed out by the Communist Left—regarding the tactics toward the old parties of the Second International, the general line did not deviate from the correct Marxist approach. Only when the counterrevolution triumphed in Moscow did the Communist International become an instrument for the pursuit of specific foreign policy objectives of the Russian state.
5.2 - The Risks of Soviet Foreign Policy in China
Our party has always considered erroneous the argument that, even in the period following the Civil War, the Russian state’s international policy was subservient to the needs of domestic capitalist development. The NEP consisted of economic concessions and compromises with domestic and international capitalism—indispensable for averting famine in a backward Russia ravaged by years of war—but without conceding anything on the political front or regarding the prospect of world revolution. The economic concessions and compromises were intended to be entirely temporary, necessary for the development of production in Russia, to allow the Bolsheviks to maintain power while awaiting the next revolutionary upsurge in Europe. The foreign policy of the Soviet state was oriented, on the one hand, toward the signing of trade treaties, and on the other, toward ensuring security against external attacks.
While the proletariat’s revolutionary attempts in the West had been defeated, Soviet Russia had managed to survive the attacks of the White armies and foreign forces, and was poised to bring the civil war to a victorious conclusion. Although the global revolutionary wave had suffered a setback, between 1921 and 1922 the Red Army’s advance eastward allowed Soviet Russia to consolidate its positions in the former tsarist territories in the Far East, with the prospect of extending its influence toward the Pacific.
The communist state’s presence in the Far East had already achieved a significant victory in Outer Mongolia, which had once been part of the Qing Empire and was then claimed by the Chinese government. There, the Red Army, under the command of Ungern-Sternberg, had routed what remained of the last White forces in Siberia. Thus, in July 1921, a Mongolian government was established under the direct protection of the Bolsheviks, with the Red Army and Soviet advisers present. The defeat of the Whites and the withdrawal of the Japanese allowed Russia to consolidate its influence over Outer Mongolia and, between late 1921 and early 1922, led to the signing of a treaty between the Soviet and Mongolian governments.
In Mongolia, the Bolshevik program—supported by local communists—to nationalize land and mines and abolish the privileges of religious orders and the nobility was opposed by the old religious caste, which adopted a pro-Chinese stance in the struggle against Soviet influence. This opposition was defeated and suppressed.
While the communists’ successes in Mongolia strained relations with the Chinese government, they also enabled it to take more decisive action toward China; unlike in the early years of the revolutionary government in Russia, it could now go beyond mere declarations of principle.
The Communists’ interest in China had to take into account the country’s political context, which lacked a strong central power and was divided among foreign powers that pitted the various warlords against one another. Communism could have benefited from the antagonisms between opposing political and military forces, but this was not without the danger of deviating from the international revolutionary line. The risk of communist policy in China—of relying on certain bourgeois groups, and even warlords, who were presumed to be sympathetic to the Soviet state or to play a role in the struggle against foreign powers—could conflict with the pursuit of revolutionary policy, which could rely only on the proletariat and the indigenous revolutionary masses.
Ever since the revolutionary victory in Russia, the Bolsheviks had sought to establish ties with Sun Yat-sen, the leader of Chinese populism and nationalism. Beginning in 1917, Sun Yat-sen had formed a government in Canton to resist the rule of the warlords who controlled the government in Beijing. But Sun Yat-sen’s power was nonetheless secured by the arms of the warlords of the South, who were intent on defending their power against interference from their rivals in the North.
In the early 1920s, attention turned to General Wu Pei-fu, a warlord based in central China and one of the leaders of the Zhili clique. By the end of the summer of 1920, Wu Pei-fu had managed to assert his dominance over the military faction that controlled the Beijing government, leading to the ouster of the Anfu government, another pro-Japanese armed organization
This was viewed favorably in Moscow, as it could have led to a less hostile stance toward the Soviet Union, while hostility toward Japan—and its protégé Zhang Zuolin, the military leader who controlled Manchuria—made him, if not a potential ally, at least a partner with whom to negotiate mutual neutrality.
Wu Pei-fu and his faction had also sought support among the working class, making no secret of their propaganda efforts aimed at workers and promising “labor protection” in their political platform. In particular, Wu Pei-fu’s attention was focused on the railways, which had developed significantly in central China and whose control was of great strategic importance, especially in light of an impending military crisis over control of the Beijing government, as occurred in 1922.
Wu Pei-fu did not hesitate to seek the support of local communists, who believed they could exploit these rivalries among conservative factions to strengthen their organization among railway workers. But inserting themselves into the conflicts between the militarists was nothing but an illusion and constituted a dangerous maneuver fraught with tragic consequences. The massacre of the railway workers by Wu Pei-fu’s thugs in February 1923 served as a clear warning to the Chinese proletariat that their only allies could be the millions of peasants hungry for land. The tactic of pitting one militarist clique against another, while it might yield immediate results, risked undermining the development of the revolutionary movement. Even if temporarily at odds with one another, each faction would have made a deal with the enemy—whether internal or foreign—in order to join forces against the proletariat and the rebellious peasant masses.
These maneuvers, which were risky in the early 1920s, when the leaders of world communism were still guiding the proletarian movement toward the international revolution, became a conscious betrayal when the Stalinist counterrevolution subordinated the revolutionary struggle throughout the world to the interests of bourgeois Russia, imposing on China that the proletarian party ally itself with the bourgeoisie, and subjecting the Communist Party and the revolutionary movement to the leadership of the Kuomintang.
Having exploited this alliance for its own purposes, the Kuomintang then carried out the bloody destruction of the Chinese proletariat's organizations.
5.3 - The Washington Conference
The rivalries among China’s warlords were also the result of the broader inter-imperialist struggle for control of the Pacific. World War I had established a new political order in Europe, leaving the situation in the Pacific region virtually unchanged. In reality, it was precisely the consequences of the war in Europe—with the new balance of power among the imperialist powers—that made the Pacific region one of the main fronts in the conflict.
At the time, there were three world powers vying for hegemony in the Pacific. To maintain its supremacy on all the seas, Great Britain needed to establish its dominance in the Pacific as well. Its strength was based on a powerful fleet, but also on the security of its lines of communication to the East, the so-called “Imperial Route,” guaranteed by its possession of a series of bases and control of strategic hubs: Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Aden, Ceylon, and Singapore. But two other major powers bordering the Pacific had emerged: the United States and Japan. The latter had promptly taken advantage of Germany’s defeat to seize its territories in China and the other German colonies in the Pacific: the Caroline, Marshall, and Mariana Islands, thereby managing to infiltrate the U.S. possessions of Hawaii and the Philippines.
For their part, the United States had emerged greatly strengthened from World War I and could now aspire to global supremacy. But it needed a powerful naval fleet to assert itself against rival imperialist powers. Already during World War I, especially from 1916 onward, it had pursued a substantial naval rearmament program, which continued after the war ended. Great Britain and Japan, too, in order to counter the threat posed by American rearmament, responded by expanding their own naval fleets. Just a few years after the end of the world war, the major imperialist powers began an arms race that far exceeded the naval rearmament that had taken place before the war, foreshadowing the imminent outbreak of another conflict.
The most intense rivalry stemmed from the Anglo-American struggle for supremacy on the seas. In this context, Great Britain supported Japan, the United States’ rival in the Pacific. For its part, Japan, alarmed by the U.S. naval buildup and attempts to establish a base on the Chinese coast, clashed with the American “Open Door” policy toward China, which was intended to prevent any Japanese claims on that vast country.
Fearing a possible alliance between Great Britain and Japan, the United States therefore proposed a moratorium on arms for a few years. Consequently, in July 1921, a conference on disarmament and Pacific issues was announced, to be held in Washington toward the end of the year.
In the run-up to the Conference, the International had issued a series of theses exposing the predatory interests of the capitalist powers and asserting that their rivalries could not be resolved.
An analysis of the situation in Great Britain revealed that growing economic competition with the United States was fueling an arms race, which would lead to another world war. But the coming war would leave Great Britain in a more vulnerable position than it had been in the conflict that had just ended, primarily for two reasons. First, because it could not count on its colonies, since these, despite having participated in the world war, had other priorities: Australia feared the growth of Japanese influence and was therefore not in favor of an alliance with Japan, while Canada, for economic reasons and due to its geographical proximity, was interested in maintaining good relations with the United States. Second, because in the event of war, it might have faced France as an adversary; after Germany’s defeat, France was seeking to dominate continental Europe: a France-U.S. alliance with an anti-British agenda was a possibility. The Theses state: “This situation compels the British government to seek an agreement with the United States. The aim of this agreement is the formation of an Anglo-Saxon capitalist trust. The United States would be the center of gravity of this trust, while Japan would bear the brunt of it».
Japan’s position of weakness was highlighted, which was driving it toward an agreement with British imperialism against the United States: “The outcome of the war threatens to deprive the Japanese of the fruits of their victory. Germany’s defeat and the disappearance of Russia as an imperialist power that could have joined Japan in acts of plunder leave Japan with no choice but to rely solely on England for aid against the United States”.
But according to the International’s assessment, this prospect was not feasible because, in the end, faced with a choice between Japan and the United States, Great Britain would have ended up in the arms of its American rival. “The United States views China and Russia as markets to satisfy its enormous need for economic expansion, and as territories to be conquered by American capital investment. The monopoly position enjoyed by the United States as the world’s creditor and, furthermore, the competitiveness of American industry not only against Japanese industry but also against British industry, drive the United States to challenge all the imperialist privileges that the older imperialist states—France, Britain, and Japan—have acquired in the past in China, or those they might acquire in Siberia. The United States, “under the slogan of the ‘open door’ in China... is trying to push Japan back... This policy threatens British interests, albeit to a much lesser extent than Japanese ones. Not only because England is a tougher nut to crack than Japan for American competition, but also because the Pacific issue, vital for Japan, is but one of England’s concerns. Therefore, Japan can count on England only to a certain extent. Forced to choose between Japan and the United States, England will side with the latter. Therefore, the Washington Conference represents an attempt by the United States to wrest the fruits of victory from Japan by diplomatic means.”
In any case, no agreement could eliminate the root causes of the inter-imperialist rivalries among the powers present in Washington, to which must be added the looming conflict not only with the defeated capitalist countries, but also with the colonial peoples and, finally, with Soviet Russia “which represents a breach in the system of capitalist states”. Therefore: “The Executive of the Communist International asserts that the Washington Conference will lead us neither to disarmament nor to a stable peace among nations, and that it represents merely an attempt to reconcile the interests of the great Anglo-Saxon imperialist predators at the expense of the weaker predator, Japan, of China, and of Soviet Russia”. In essence, the International’s assessment of the Washington agreements was that they would certainly not reduce the contradictions among the imperialist powers; on the contrary, Versailles before and Washington now were hastening the approach of the next war.
Finally, in Washington, the five major naval powers of the time (Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy) concluded an agreement to limit naval armaments by establishing a ratio among the world’s five largest navies and determining the total tonnage of each fleet based on the following coefficients: 5 for Great Britain; 5 for the United States; 3 Japan; 1.7 France; 1.7 Italy.
The main outcome of the Washington Agreements was the easing of Anglo-American rivalry over naval supremacy, a goal achieved through a compromise in which each of the parties gained an advantage. The European countries—Great Britain, France, and Italy—which had emerged “victorious” from the conflict, were in favor of limiting naval armaments because they were in a critical economic and social situation, while Europe as a whole had generally been defeated by America. Great Britain could not count on the support of the Dominions for rearmament. However, it secured the abandonment, at least for the time being, of the American program for naval supremacy. For their part, the United States was satisfied with the end of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which was included in the treaty in unofficial terms. While Japan, although it had accepted the status of a third-rate naval power, was advantaged by the fact that it had to deploy its fleet only on the Pacific front, unlike the United States, which was engaged on two oceans, and Great Britain, which even had to ensure the security of its immense lines of communication across all the seas of the globe.
Although the imperialists reached a compromise in Washington on limiting naval armaments, this agreement could not eliminate their rivalries; the Washington agreements were merely a temporary truce that allowed the major imperialist countries to prepare themselves as best they could for the next war.
The real issues underlying the conflicts in the Far East—above all, the exploitation of China—were not resolved decisively; nor, for that matter, would it have been possible to do so through diplomacy. The imperialist powers pledged to respect the status quo in their colonies and mandated territories in the Pacific, and hypocritically guaranteed China’s integrity on the basis of the “Open Door” policy, which allowed all the imperialist predators to feast on a weakened China.
All the powers that had reached an agreement in Washington had more to fear from their own proletariat—which had not yet been subdued and supported Soviet Russia—than from inter-imperialist rivalry; in 1922, Soviet Russia had not yet become a bastion of the global counterrevolution.
For Soviet Russia, which had not been invited to the Conference, while any agreement among the capitalist powers posed a threat to its security, it could also have benefited from inter-imperialist rivalries—and in particular from the rivalry between the United States and Japan—which would have encouraged the latter’s withdrawal from Siberia and weakened its grip on China.
The imperialist powers had barred Soviet Russia from participating in the Washington Conference, thereby preventing it from using diplomacy as a tool. But Russia was then a communist state, whose foreign policy was geared toward the goal of world revolution. Its response to the agreements between the imperialist brigands was a call to arms for all the exploited people of the Far East and the entire world.
5.4 - The Chinese Question at the Congress of the Toilers
In January 1922, at the initiative of the Communist International, the First Congress of Communists and Revolutionary Organizations of the Far East was held in Moscow, coming just over a year after the Baku Congress, where the colonial and semi-colonial peoples had raised their battle cry against imperialist domination.
The Congress was attended by delegates from the major countries of the Far East, with a significant contingent of 52 Korean delegates, 42 from China, 16 from Japan, and others from India, Mongolia, Indonesia, and other regions of Soviet Russia. Only half of them were communists; the rest belonged to nationalist revolutionary organizations, such as the Kuomintang from China.
The Congress stood in opposition to the Washington Conference, where the major imperialist powers had gathered to attempt to resolve their disputes in the Pacific and reach a compromise that would allow them to continue exploiting and oppressing the peoples of the East. In the face of imperialism’s predatory interests, the Communist International reached out to the oppressed peoples of the East, affirming the solidarity of world communism and the proletariat of the most industrially developed capitalist countries with the national-revolutionary movements of the Far East.
From the perspective of the International, the Far Eastern Workers’ Congress was of great importance: “The Communist International understands perfectly well that the union of the advanced proletariat of Europe and America with the awakening of the working masses of the East is absolutely essential to our victory,” Zinoviev declared at the opening of the proceedings.
The contrast with the Second International was also stark, as was the contrast with all the opportunists who, hiding behind a false Marxist rigor, rejected the active role of the exploited masses in the colonized countries against the bourgeois order. They called for the advent of a world revolution, but conceived it as a purely European revolution—one that, moreover, they were undermining and betraying. The revolutionary victory in Russia and the subsequent birth of the Third International had exposed the opportunism of the socialist parties, affirming that the complete victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie was possible only on a global scale—not through a reformist struggle limited to the European continent, but in conjunction with the awakening of the millions of workers and oppressed masses of the East.
The main report at the Congress was delivered by Zinoviev, who outlined the international situation, the results of the recent Washington Conference, and the tasks facing the International. With the end of World War I, inter-imperialist conflicts had spread from Europe to Asia, so that in the immediate future the Asian and Far Eastern question became a priority in world politics. The struggle between imperialist powers in Asia made the revolution in the oppressed countries of the Far East of fundamental importance: Asia thus became not only “the linchpin of world politics,” but also “of the entire liberation movement of the proletariat and the oppressed nations.”
The oppressed peoples of the East had no reason to place any hope in the proclamations of the imperialist powers. The results of the Washington Conference shattered any such illusions. In Washington, essentially, an agreement had been reached among the four major imperialist powers—England, France, the United States, and Japan—which Zinoviev referred to as the “Alliance of the Four Leeches,” who had concluded an armistice to facilitate their oppression of nations.
None of the promises made earlier were kept in Washington: the issue of disarmament, which remains impossible to resolve under the rule of capital; the issue of Korea, which was not even mentioned; the issue of China, resolved according to the American vision of the “open door” policy, which would have facilitated the penetration of American capital capable of asserting itself over its rivals; the issue of Mongolia, overlooked in the discussions in Washington, thereby giving Japanese imperialism the opportunity to sow discord between Mongolia and the Chinese revolutionaries with the proposal to return Mongolia to China. In Washington, the division of the spoils of the last war was essentially confirmed, according to the formula “I’ll steal from this side of the street and turn a blind eye to the fact that you’ll steal from the other side.”
Zinoviev then reviewed the situation in the major Asian countries: China, Korea, and Mongolia. Regarding the situation in China, Zinoviev criticized those Chinese nationalists and certain members of the Kuomintang who “look with hope toward America and American capitalism, expecting precisely from that source that the benefits of democracy and progress will be bestowed upon revolutionary China,” and he warned the revolutionaries of southern China against the mistake of placing the question of Mongolia’s return to China on the agenda.
China was a classic example of the fate that imperialism reserves for weak countries, the prime example of imperialist cynicism and plunder, and the place where the cruelty, ferocity, and barbarity of the so-called civilization of the European powers are most evident.
For the International, the main task in China was to coordinate the movement of the Chinese revolutionary classes in order to resolve “the most basic and simple problem: to drive out all its invaders, to drive out all the oppressors of the Chinese people.” The International, therefore, aware that the struggle against imperialism in China did not yet have a purely communist character, supported the Chinese people’s aspirations for independence from foreign powers.
In Asia, however, the decisive role in the fate of the revolution fell to Japan, the only country in the Far East that had developed a significant industrial base—and consequently a proletarian class—to which were added five million landless peasants. Without a revolutionary movement of the Japanese proletariat, the revolution in Asia would have remained unfinished. In Zinoviev’s words: “The Japanese proletariat holds the key to solving the problem of the Far East. The Japanese bourgeoisie dominates and oppresses many millions of people in the Far East, holding the fate of that entire part of the world in its hands. The only thing that can truly resolve the question of the Far East is the defeat of the Japanese bourgeoisie and the final victory of the revolution in Japan.”
The Asian question concerned the fate of the entire world, for since inter-imperialist tensions had shifted to Asia, it was there that a second world war would break out—a war that no agreement among the great powers could prevent. Only the proletarian revolution could do so. “The quadruple alliance of leeches cannot in any way postpone the hour of the inevitable gigantic war in the Pacific Ocean. This war is inevitable. As surely as day follows night, so the end of the first imperialist war will be followed by a second war, the center of which will revolve around the Far East and the Pacific problem. This war can be avoided only by the proletarian revolution... It will be possible to avoid this war if the young Japanese working class quickly becomes strong enough to grab the Japanese bourgeoisie by the throat, and if, in parallel with this, there is a victorious revolutionary movement in America. If civil war breaks out in America, it will be something far greater than anything we have seen so far... When the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the workers reaches the same level as in Russia, entire cities will be blown to pieces; the American bourgeoisie will fight with such desperation as to produce a terrible catastrophe, in comparison to which the struggle in Russia will seem like child’s play. The resistance of the American bourgeoisie will be very determined. No less determined will be the resistance of the greedy and shrewd Japanese bourgeoisie... Only a parallel and rapid growth of a strong organization of the young workers’ movement in Japan and America will be capable of saving humanity from another war and preventing the tremendous destruction of industry that would result from an unprecedentedly destructive war between America and Japan.”
The International had a clear understanding of its tasks. Given the lag in capitalist development in the countries of the Far East—with the exception of Japan—the conditions for a socialist revolution were not yet ripe, but there was a real possibility for the development of a national revolutionary movement directed against imperialism. The task was to coordinate and unite the struggle of the oppressed non-proletarian masses of the Far East with the industrial and agricultural proletariat of Japan. The revolutionary movement in the Far East would then link up with the struggle of the proletariat in Western countries, which were complicit in the oppression and exploitation of the peoples of the East.
This reaffirmed the Theses of the International adopted at the Second Congress, according to which the victory of the world revolution would depend on uniting the revolutionary forces of the Far East—composed of predominantly non-proletarian masses fighting against national oppression and for independence within a national revolutionary movement—with those of the working class of America and Europe, whose objectives were purely communist in nature.
Zinoviev urged the leaders of the national movement to join the worldwide struggle of the proletariat: “The historical process thus poses the question: either you will win your independence, side by side with the proletariat, or you will win nothing; either you will receive your emancipation from the hands of the proletariat, in coordination with it, under its leadership, or you will be doomed to remain slaves of the British, American, and Japanese factions; or the hundreds of millions of workers in China, Korea, Mongolia, and other countries understand that their ally and leader is the world proletariat and, once and for all, renounce all hopes in any kind of maneuver by the bourgeoisie and imperialism, or their national movements will be doomed to failure, and they will always have the imperialists on their backs sowing civil war and oppression to carve up their country.”
Following Zinoviev’s introduction, the congress proceedings continued with sessions devoted to reports on the situation in each country. The three reports on China outlined the general condition of the country, the situation of the working class, and the economic situation. The history of China’s political oppression—which began with the Opium Wars in 1839—was presented, along with its subsequent political subjugation to foreign powers and economic ruin. The country was divided into spheres of influence controlled by various powers that were strangling the Chinese economy, compounded by the penetration of American capitalism through the imposition of the “open door” policy.
Almost the entire Chinese industry was strictly subordinate to foreign capital and had no independent existence. The financial situation was dire, with a heavy debt burden weighing on the country, and foreigners had taken control of the collection of various duties. Exports consisted mainly of raw materials, and imports were enormous.
All of this had an impact on the people’s living conditions. The situation for the peasants grew increasingly dire: conflicts with Europeans, heavy taxation, and a market controlled by foreigners; then famines and constant civil wars led to the ruin of the peasants, driving them from their land and forcing masses of dispossessed people to enlist in the armies of various warlords.
Furthermore, the importation of manufactured goods from foreign countries had led to the decline of local crafts, which had been a vital source of income for peasant families. Even small and medium-sized business owners were overwhelmed by economic competition from foreign capitalists.
The conditions for the two million Chinese workers were also dire: 12-hour workdays or longer, low wages that often failed to even ensure their families’ survival, brutal exploitation of women and children, the absence of any labor laws, and the presence of foremen, supervisors, and contractors who oppressed the workers in the factories. In short, it was an ideal paradise for foreign and local capitalists, who had a labor force at their disposal to exploit and subjugate without limit. Not to mention the plight of the coolies, the unskilled laborers, with uncertain work and wages, often left without shelter and suffering from hunger.
But beginning in 1919, the Chinese working class had begun to organize itself into unions. At first, some guilds—whose purpose was to limit the growth of the workforce in a particular trade—reorganized themselves as unions; later, genuine unions emerged, serving as the workers’ fighting forces. Moreover, the previous years had signaled a resurgence of the working class, with widespread and numerous strikes in the country’s major industrial areas.
A representative from the Kuomintang was also given the floor to discuss the political situation in China, as was a representative from a women’s organization.
Following the reports on the situation in other Far Eastern countries, Safarov presented a report on the Communists’ position regarding the national and colonial questions and on the Communists’ collaboration with the national-revolutionary parties.
The report described how global capitalism needed to maintain a predatory colonial policy, making the colonial question the most important factor in world politics. As Zinoviev had already stated, the Far East, which had remained on the margins of imperialist competition, had become the target of the great powers, eager to secure its enormous reserves of raw materials and exploit its cheap labor. This made the liberation of colonial and semi-colonial countries through conciliation with the great powers impossible.
This is how Safarov conveyed the Communist International’s appeal to the oppressed nations: “Your liberation lies in your own hands. But you can only triumph by standing shoulder to shoulder with the international proletariat, which is fighting for its own social liberation. The international proletariat knows full well that the capitalist yoke cannot be destroyed across the entire Earth, that the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be established across the globe without having drawn into this great battle for freedom the most backward strata of society, the most backward strata of the proletariat, the very lowest of humanity.”
Safarov then went on to analyze conditions in these countries, focusing extensively on the situation in China. As in other underdeveloped countries, a form of agriculture based on small peasant holdings prevailed in China as well. The arrival of foreign invaders had not altered the old, backward structures that had formed over the centuries; rather, having come to these countries to exploit them, they prevented any possibility of independent development. Foreign capital had conquered the backward countryside, forcing Chinese peasants to remain in a state of servile bondage to the land. Local artisans were rendered unable to compete with European and American manufacturers. Ruined artisans and peasants ended up living in miserable conditions.
Foreign capital had subjugated China, controlling its most important ports, major transportation routes, key industries, and raw materials, which on the one hand led to the country’s industrial backwardness and, on the other, to the brutal exploitation of large numbers of Chinese female workers.
While capitalism had played a revolutionary role in Europe, transforming peasants into proletarians, in underdeveloped countries it did not foster industrial development; on the contrary, it hindered it by every means possible, in order to perpetuate its own predatory interests and keep these countries in a state of underdevelopment as suppliers of raw materials. To this end, global capitalism exploited war and its consequences to tear apart political power in China and shatter the integrity of its territory. The ruin of the Chinese nation was perpetrated by fomenting civil war through support for various warlords: behind every Chinese warlord stood a foreign capitalist. No imperialist country—the United States, England, or Japan—would have supported industrial development in China, because it ran counter to their colonial and capitalist interests.
In this context, the primary task of the revolutionary movement in China was to free the country from foreign domination. Not only the Communists but all sincere Chinese democrats should have relentlessly denounced the various Chinese politicians who were colluding with one of the imperialist powers, particularly the many sympathizers of the United States.
An indispensable condition for liberation from foreign domination was the involvement of the peasant masses: “Without the awakening of these peasant masses, there is no hope for national liberation,” Safarov asserted. To win over the peasant masses to the cause of the revolution, it was necessary to raise the banner of land nationalization. The liberation of China from foreign domination, the nationalization of land, the overthrow of the warlords, the establishment of a single federation and a democratic republic, and the introduction of a uniform income tax—these were the goals for which the Chinese working masses and their advanced elements, the communists, had to struggle.
In China, in fact, the young labor movement was also beginning to gain momentum. Its primary task was to organize genuine trade unions. Since a purely class-based revolution was not on the agenda—but rather a dual revolution—the communists had to support the revolutionary nationalist movement, with the stipulation that such support could exist only to the extent that it was not directed against the proletarian movement, while at the same time strengthening their own class organizations and maintaining their autonomy from the democratic parties and bourgeois elements.
The instructions given to the young Chinese working class regarding the relations to be established with the bourgeois democrats were clear: “It must be definitively established that the workers’ movement—the Chinese workers—must follow their own path; they must not align themselves with any democratic party or any bourgeois element. We have no intention of hiding the truth. We know perfectly well that in the near future there will be no major conflicts between us and these bourgeois democratic elements organized within the national revolutionary organization. But at the same time we must tell these bourgeois democratic elements that—since they will strive to crush the Chinese workers’ movement, since they will try to use the Chinese trade unions for their own petty interests and will keep these unions in the old trade-unionist spirit, preaching class harmony between labor and capital—at that point we will wage a determined struggle against them.
We support every national revolutionary movement, but we support it only to the extent that it is not directed against the proletarian movement. We must state: anyone who does not support the national revolutionary movement is a traitor to the cause of the communist proletarian revolution. But on the other hand, we must be aware that anyone who fights against the awakening of the proletarian movement is a traitor to the national cause; anyone who delays the Chinese working class in its efforts to stand on its own two feet and speak its own language is a traitor to its people and to the national cause.”
The working class should not have isolated itself from the peasant masses, but should have united with them by spreading communist ideas. Even though an imminent communist revolution was not on the agenda in China, the Soviets were nonetheless the most appropriate form of organization for the revolutionary struggle of the masses.
Safarov concluded: “Comrades, the main outcome of our Congress and our debate could be that all those who participated in the Congress should have a genuine understanding of the relationship between the national revolutionary movement and the workers’ movement... The revolutionary proletariat cannot entertain the misconception that we support only the proletarian movement in the colonies... The outcome of our discussion must be the clear understanding that the chances of victory for the national revolutionary movement will increase significantly if the proletarian masses play an independent role in this movement, if the proletarian elements of the oppressed nations establish themselves as leaders and standard-bearers in this national-revolutionary struggle.”
As Zinoviev had already argued, Safarov’s report identified the Japanese proletariat as the main force capable of resolving the Far East question.
The Theses, which were approved and drew on the discussions at the congress, followed in the footsteps of the Marxist tradition and reaffirmed the resolutions adopted at the Second Congress of the International regarding the national and colonial question, which provided clear guidelines for the young communist parties of the Far East.
Given the situation in the East, where only Japan had reached an advanced stage of capitalism, the leading role in the revolutionary movement was reserved for the Japanese proletariat, upon whom fell the task of fighting their own imperialism. In China and Korea, on the other hand, it was anticipated that the revolutionary movement would inevitably take the form of a national-revolutionary upheaval in its initial phase. But in supporting this nationalist revolutionary movement, “the communists must at the same time criticize and expose in the most ruthless manner the hesitations and duplicity of the liberal bourgeois elements who, to a greater or lesser extent, tend to do business with competing imperialist groups, to the detriment of the working masses.”
The communist parties of the East were called upon to win over the working masses to their side and to place themselves at the vanguard of the national-revolutionary movement through a tenacious struggle against imperialism waged via class-based organizations and the communist politicization of workers and the semi-proletarian rural masses, thereby uniting the revolutionary nationalist movement in the Far East with the international struggle of the proletariat.
The Communists were tasked with “carrying out preparatory work and spreading propaganda about the Soviets as the sole instruments capable of securing a definitive victory over the yoke of capital and imperialism, in their capacity as organs of the mass revolutionary struggle.”
The proletarian perspective was achievable only in alliance with the vast peasant masses, with the proletariat at their head. “The hegemony of the proletariat over the entire revolutionary movement, and even more so the dictatorship of the proletariat, are impossible unless the proletariat succeeds in winning over to its side the peasant masses, who groan under the oppression of the landlords, warmongers, and bureaucrats, and are barbarically exploited by capitalism. In countries with a predominantly primitive rural economy or a weak industrial base—as is the case in most of the Far East—a broad revolutionary movement is conceivable only on the premise of a close alliance between workers and peasants, an alliance in which the working class is called upon to play a leading role.”
The International reaffirmed the fundamental principles of the struggle in backward countries: a) close unity between the proletarian struggle in the West for purely communist aims and the revolutionary nationalist movements of the East; b) ruthless criticism of the hesitations of the national bourgeoisie, which was too closely tied to imperialism; c) defense of the absolute political and trade-union autonomy of the class; d) alliance of the young proletariat with the peasant masses; e) leading role of the proletariat in the peasant revolution.
As late as early 1922, the program for world revolution—as outlined at the Second Congress in 1920—continued to guide the leadership of the International and reached the exploited masses of the Far East, who were called upon to join the proletariat of the West in a common struggle for the final victory over global capitalism.
(To be continued in the next issue)
In Dante Alighieri we find one of the first attempts by the bourgeoisie, perhaps the very first, to develop its own ideology. The famous opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy read: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark forest / where the straight path was lost”.
To the myriad interpretations offered by Dante scholars, we add one more: if the author finds himself in a situation where nothing can be seen or understood, and no way out can be found, it is because the ideology of the feudal world in which the nascent social class to which he belongs—the bourgeoisie—is immersed, no longer fits. It is an ideology ill-suited to the needs of this new class and its development, as it is an expression of feudal relations that did not contemplate its existence.
The bourgeoisie, whilst objectively revolutionary in relation to feudalism, like all classes that have found themselves in a similar situation throughout history, initially has no awareness of this; it would take several centuries for it to develop its own revolutionary ideology. At its inception, it did not seek to destroy the old order, but to find its place within it, thus developing a worldview that encompassed its own existence within feudal society.
Durante Alighieri, known as Dante, was born in Florence in 1265 into a family of merchants: there has been talk of minor nobility because his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida was a knight in the Second Crusade, but what is certain is that his paternal grandfather Bellincione was a commoner, and that Alighiero di Bellincione, his son and Dante’s father, worked as a money-changer and also as a moneylender. In 1289, Dante took part in the Battle of Campaldino on the side of the Guelphs, mostly Florentines, who defeated the Ghibellines, mostly from Arezzo. From the early 1290s, he became involved in the city’s political affairs, holding public office from 1295, when the ‘Temperamenti’ were enacted. From November 1295 to April 1296, he was a member of the Special Council of the Captain, known as the Council of Thirty-Six, the most select body of the Florentine people. He then served on the Council of One Hundred until the following October.
From 15 June to 15 August 1300, he was one of the seven Priors. In this capacity, to put an end to the internal strife between the ‘Whites’ and the ‘Blacks’, he had eight Black Guelphs and seven White Guelphs sentenced to exile, including his friend Guido Cavalcanti. In November 1301, the Blacks seized power and Dante, who was detained in Rome on an embassy, was sentenced to death in absentia in March 1302, sharing the fate of the Whites to whom he belonged. And Thus began his exile at various courts, which ended with his death in Ravenna in 1321.
The Commune of Florence and the bourgeoisie
Senzanome’s chronicle states that in the Commune of Florence the first Consuls appeared in 1125: two every two months, supported by a Council of 150 Bonomini and, four times a year, by a General Assembly of citizens. From the little we know, it is presumed that the Consuls were representatives of that small urbanised nobility, initially at odds with the merchant classes over control of the city, at least until they merged with them. The guilds of arts and crafts are attested in 1182, although Villani, in his ‘Cronica’, mentions the Guild of Calimala as early as 1150. In 1207, the system shifted from the Consuls to a single Podestà, chosen from outside the city so that he would be uninvolved in the struggle between the various factions and families.
An armed militia was immediately formed by that small nobility which, at least initially, had no interests at odds with those of the emerging bourgeoisie. This soon changed, and as early as 1184 there is evidence of the emergence of Consuls of the militia, to safeguard the interests they represented, considered to be under threat from the People, that is, from the new bourgeoisie.
The latter, along with the Guilds, had been represented since the 1220s by the Popular Societies, which were armed organisations organised on a territorial basis. The Guilds and the People did not coincide constitutionally, but were expressions of the same social base. The first known territorial organisation of the People refers to the Buonomini from 1224.
In the Council of 1224 to the Arti maggiori would be definitively added the Priors of the Arti minori.
The scholar Silvia Diacciati, in her work “The People and the Florentine Political System from the End of the 12th Century to the Mid-13th Century”, writes: «The Priors represented strata of the Florentine artisan world lower than those belonging to the so-called Arti maggiori, although, in all likelihood, they too had attained a respectable economic and social standing. The guilds headed by the Priors, on the other hand, were not required to admit the smaller, humbler artisans into their ranks, nor did they protect their interests: for the time being, these artisans were still excluded from the city’s political life (...) It was only with the seizure of power in 1250 that the Popolo was such that it incorporated all members of the societas Populi, and perhaps even all those who served as foot soldiers in the municipal army.”
As always relations between the classes are sometimes evident and sometimes less so, concealed under institutional forms that reflect them only vaguely. The militia, which represented the aristocratic element, in internal struggles for dominance sought the support of the Popolo, whose organisation most likely arose outside the divisions of the urban patriciate, then between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. The Popolo, whilst at times supporting one or the other faction, remained essentially uninvolved in the civil war provoked by the militia, yet reaped the benefits.
We read further: ‘By the end of the 12th century, the merchants and the middle and wealthy classes, the heart of the Florentine popular movement, were in full economic and social ascendancy thanks to lucrative commercial, credit and craft activities, and yet were excluded from the decision-making process. But particularly vital and numerous elements were also the notaries and judges (…) continuing, however, to exclude the humbler workers’.
Amidst the disputes between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the latter’s government, led by the Uberti family, introduced representatives of the ‘Popolo’ – that is, of the new bourgeoisie – alongside the Podestà around 1244. From 1246, the Podestà was Frederick of Antioch, the illegitimate son of Emperor Frederick II, who naturally supported the Ghibelline party.
But in 1250 the Florentine army was defeated by the exiled Guelphs, and a month later an uprising led by the Popolo drove out the Podestà and the great families who had supported him. The government of the Popolo Vecchio, or ‘First People’, began, in agreement with the Guelph faction. The political institutions were a continuation of the Ghibelline ones of 1244: on the one hand, the Commune with the Podestà and two Councils, and on the other, the Popolo with a Captain, a foreigner like the Podestà, and two further Councils. It was during these years that the towers of the nobles were topped off, and in 1252 the gold coin known as the Florin was introduced.
With the Battle of Montaperti in 1260, the Ghibelline exiles, allied with other cities, defeated Florence and regained power by wresting it from the Guelphs. Pope Urban IV excommunicated the Ghibellines of Florence. This posed a serious problem for banks and trading companies, as good Christians were not obliged to pay debts incurred with the excommunicated, nor, more generally, to conduct business with them.
However, following Manfredi’s defeat at Benevento, the Ghibellines were driven out of Florence in 1266, many of whom, though, would be able to return in 1280. The Popolo took advantage of the tension between the factions to secure institutional changes between 1282 and 1284: the College of the Six Priors of the Guilds, one per district, a Gonfaloniere chosen by the Guilds, a Council, armed units, and their own representatives on the Council of the Podestà.
To keep the magnates, the city’s aristocracy, in check, the Popolo Grasso (‘Fat People’) sought the support of the Popolo Minuto (‘Small People’) around 1287, with laws favourable to the latter. The Popolo Grasso is roughly represented by the seven major guilds, the great merchants, bankers, judges and notaries; the Popolo Minuto, again roughly, by the fourteen minor guilds, artisans and merchants of lesser importance.
Outside the Popolo were the peasants and the urban plebs, consisting of labourers and servants, devoid of any power or representation.
With the Battle of Campaldino in 1289 and the definitive defeat of the Ghibellines, the magnates claimed greater power, given that the victory was largely due to their military prowess. The historian Gino Luzzatto, in his Preface to Dino Compagni’s “Cronica”, writes: «Those disputes involved only a part of the population, and not the largest nor the most important. Whilst among the Grandees, private jealousies and the lust for power maintained a perpetual state of war, the common people, on the other hand, now masters of the Commune, had managed to give it a constitution which, amidst the frequent changes of magistrates, impeded the emergence of major political figures and excessive ambition (...) and, through continuous practice, created a class of people skilled in public affairs”.
The Ordinances of Justice
The anti-magnate policy of the Popolo Grasso, aimed at winning the favour of the common people, culminated in the Ordinances of Justice of January 1293. A list was drawn up of magnate families excluded first from some public posts, then from all of them; laws were enacted that favoured the common people and were unfavourable to the magnates in the areas of taxation, the judiciary, criminal law, etc. Their exclusion from political office did not extend to administrative ones, and in particular military posts: the common people employed the magnates in tasks where they could hardly be replaced. For the Magnates a special prison was built as well. To the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia there was assigned, as Compagni states in his ‘Cronica’, ‘a thousand footmen [fanti], fully armed (…) at the beck and call of the Gonfaloniere’s every command, in the piazza or wherever required’. Luzzatto writes: “The number of ‘fanti della giustizia’, a popular militia tasked with enforcing the new laws against the Magnates, was increased to two thousand during Giano’s priory, and later to four thousand, to which were added eight thousand five hundred foot soldiers from the countryside.”
There is an analogy with the behaviour of the Russian state under proletarian rule as regards the use of bourgeois specialists.
In 1899, whilst still a member of the Socialist Party, Gaetano Salvemini wrote an important text entitled ‘Magnates and Commoners in Florence from 1280 to 1295’: «As the struggle intensified, the Popolo Grasso was necessarily compelled to rely even more heavily on the Popolo Minuto; and the latter, taking advantage of the straits in which the major guilds found themselves—being violently attacked and battered by the Grandees—managed for a time to gain the upper hand over the Popolo Grasso itself; and thus, for the first time in the history of Florence, there was a certain predominance of the minor guilds in the politics of the Commune.”
The nobleman Giano della Bella, one of the principal architects of the Ordinamenti di Giustizia, and Prior and leader of the popular party, remained in power from January 1293 to February 1295, when he left after charges were brought against him; he was subsequently sentenced to death in absentia and excommunicated. The Magnates managed to fall out with both the Popolo Minuto and the Popolo Grasso.
In November 1294, the Priors elected arbitrators tasked with reforming the entire body of legislation by compiling a new Code, which was to replace the Statutes of the Podestà, of the Captain, and of the various Ordinamenti.
The Ordinamenti di Giustizia of 1293 had been an attempt, not very consistent and less still conscious, at exercizing a revolutionary dictatorship of the entire Florentine bourgeoisie over the Magnates. But the unity of purpose between the Popolo Minuto and the Popolo Grasso soon broke down due to mutual distrust, and after the latter, seeing its supremacy threatened, returned to seek allies amongst the Grandees. Dino Compagni, in his ‘Cronica’, writes that “the good citizens”, that is, the Popolo Grasso, were concerned about the unrest and the excessive harshness of Giano’s government, whilst the Popolo Minuto sometimes considered him not radical enough. With Giano’s ousting, the Popolo Grasso regained supremacy, in alliance with the Magnates
In July 1295, following a failed attempt by the Magnates to seize power, the Temperamenti agli Ordinamenti di Giustizia were enacted, which consisted of a relaxation of the measures against the Magnates, but not their abolition. The Magnates, previously excluded from all official posts as they practised no trade and lived off their estates, could now assume various responsabilities on condition they enrolled in one of the guilds, even if not a practioner of its ‘Arte’.
It was on this occasion that Dante, upon enrolling in the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries, delivered a speech in favour of the Temperamenti and joined the city magistrates.
In December 1295, upon the expiry of their term of office, the Priors were pelted with stones and pieces of wood by members of the lesser guilds, who accused them of having betrayed Janus’s way of governing; the same had happened six months earlier, at the end of the term of office of the Priors who had approved the Temperamenti.
Class struggle
The Russian historian Nicola Ottokar wrote a well-documented text in 1926, The Commune of Florence at the End of the 14th Century. Ottokar, of noble birth, had left Russia in 1921, having no sympathy for the revolution, communism or Marxism. He criticised Salvemini’s work which, even in its title, places the class struggle at the root of everything, whereas for the Russian author events are explained by the internal struggle within the city’s political class, in line with the theories of Moscow, Pareto and Max Weber. Admittedly, contrasting the Magnates with the common people, and the ‘Fat People’ with the ‘Small People’, is excessively simplistic, but Salvemini did not deny this. Ottokar is right to point out that the upper echelons of the ‘Fat People’, consisting mainly of judges and notaries, shared many interests with the Magnates, from whom they were often indistinguishable.
According to Luzzatto, there were two types of Magnates: those by birth, or nobles proper, and those by accident, or the upper middle class—wealthy manufacturers[maybe I’m just being pedantic here!] and merchants of low birth who had subsequently been knighted and joined the nobility, whose lifestyle and customs they imitated. Ottokar rightly points out that the representatives of the Popolo Minuto in the priory and other civic institutions were not humble artisans but, whilst belonging to the minor guilds, they held considerable wealth and property within the city walls. Indeed, beyond the struggles between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, between those for and against the Ordinamenti di Giustizia, and later between the Whites and the Blacks, power remained in the hands of ‘powerful commoners’.
Yet all this in no way contradicts the fundamental class struggle; rather, it confirms it. Ottokar’s own study demonstrates that the class struggle did not merely take place between the Magnates and the Popolani, but also between the Popolo Grasso and the Popolo Minuto, and within the latter, and even outside the Popolo, towards those plebeians who had no power or representation. The narrow oligarchy of ‘powerful Popolani’ does not prove the non-existence or insignificance of the bourgeois class in Florence: it is the apparatus of government that manages to express itself at that moment.
The bourgeoisie triumphs over White and Black Guelphs
The outcome of the struggle between the Whites and the Blacks confirms this. The wealthy Cerchi family, of plebeian origin, did not look favourably upon the Ordinamenti di Giustizia, but it seems they remained uninvolved in the ousting of Giano. The animosity towards the Donati family, an expression of the magnate reaction, dated back several years earlier, stemming from issues of supremacy between powerful families, and erupted in 1300.
Luzzatto continues: ‘Florence was once again divided into two hostile camps: on one side the Cerchi with a few nobles, or their consorts, or personal friends, or Ghibellines, along with the majority of the wealthy populace (...) on the other, with the Donati, almost all the forces of the great Guelphs and many of the lesser commoners’.
Pope Boniface VIII sought to impose papal supremacy over Florence and Tuscany; to this end, he supported the Black Guelphs of Corso Donati against the Whites of Vieri de’ Cerchi. In November 1301, with the entry into the city of the papal envoy Charles of Valois, the Blacks seized power. But, Luzzatto continues: “However, the two most important outcomes failed to materialise: the return to power of the magnate class and the subjugation of the city to papal supremacy. Never before had the popular commune demonstrated its vital force so clearly, by successfully resisting such a terrible onslaught and ensuring that both friends and foes respected all its rights and laws (...) Amidst the struggles, crises and temporary anarchy, one thing remains unchanged: the upward trajectory of the popular class».
How historians view Dante
The way historians view Dante is highly varied. Alessandro Barbero speaks of Dante as a giant of literature but one of little originality as a philosopher and a reactionary in politics. This was also the view of Benedetto Croce and Jacques Le Goff. Scholars of the late Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance, Eugenio Garin and Cesare Vasoli, held a different view: they rightly situated Dante on the cusp between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
From Vasoli’s ‘Medieval Philosophy’: «One of the greatest figures of that moment in Western civilisation which brought the long medieval period to a close and paved the way for the advent of humanist culture, Dante Alighieri, as a poet and thinker, is a man who lives on the frontier of two worlds, on the borderline between nostalgia for a great tradition and the almost eschatological anticipation of a new and redeemed age. In him, medieval religiosity and a taste for theological daring blend effortlessly with the keenest interest in the human world and a curiosity about the natural order.”
Garin, in ‘Rinascite e rivoluzioni’: “No longer are Cola di Rienzo and Petrarch the sole origins of the ‘renovatio’ myth, but Dante too (...) Prophetic vision and Joachimite anxieties seem to converge with hermetic inspirations and Savonarolan reformist zeal”.
Indeed, the separation between the man of letters and the poet on the one hand, and the Christian, the philosopher and the politician on the other, makes little sense, as his contemporaries had already realised, starting with Boccaccio. This separation stems from the distinction between structure and poetry, strongly re-proposed by Benedetto Croce in the first quarter of the 20th century. On this point, Giovanni Gentile, the other idealist philosopher of the same era, had a clearer view; he did not approve of such a separation.
On other aspects, Gentile’s position is untenable, such as when he regarded Dante as the founder of Italian philosophy, by referring back, though not agreeing with it, to the Risorgimento vision that Dante was the prophet of Italian unity. This is, of course, nonsense: Dante certainly had the idea of an Italy with linguistic and cultural unity, but certainly not political unity. The concept of the nation arose with the French Revolution and not with the kingdoms of the Middle Ages, as nineteenth-century Romanticism believed.
Anyone investigating a single aspect of Dante will naturally focus on it, but it must be borne in mind that the man of letters, the Christian, the philosopher and the politician are incomprehensible in isolation from one another; and that the very concepts of ‘philosophy’, ‘art’, etc., contrary to Croce’s view, were not the same in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, and even less so today.
Dante and philosophy
For Barbero, as for Croce and others, Dante’s philosophy was a mishmash of little originality. Originality is of no importance to us, but such should also be the case for professional historians: a thought that is lacking in originality allows us to better understand the world that generates it, as it is more closely attuned to it.
As for the ‘mishmash’, Dante’s thought is indeed eclectic and scarcely systematic, but this was a very widespread characteristic of Scholasticism, that is, of medieval Christian philosophy. Whilst it is true that all the philosophers in question revered ‘authorities’—namely Augustine, Aristotle, the Church Fathers, etc., it is also true that they all drew up a personal synthesis of the various authors, who in turn had done the same. In this sense, we can say that they were all original.
Dante was certainly an Aristotelian, with a particular interest in the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’. We can also partly describe him as an Averroist, in that he partly shared Averroes’s view, especially regarding the separation of the realms of faith and reason—a separation far more distinct than the Thomist one—which was subsequently reflected in his political conceptions. He did not agree with Averroes on the concept of a single intellect, which conflicted with the existence of an individual soul, as maintained by Thomas and shared by Dante. In his ‘Paradiso’, he places the Averroist Sigieri of Brabant, who advocated the separation of faith and reason and thus of temporal and spiritual power, but who, regarding the soul, seems to have agreed not with Averroes but with Thomas and Dante.
It must be said that in the first quarter of the 14th century, Thomism did not yet exist as a position recognised by the Church, and that Thomas was just one Christian philosopher among others. Dante’s Aristotelianism was influenced in particular by that of Albertus Magnus, which was strongly imbued with Neoplatonism, in the tradition of Avicenna and Al-Farabi, and also by pseudo-Aristotelian texts such as the ‘De causis’ attributed to the Neoplatonist Proclus, and the ‘Theology of Aristotle’, actually by the Neoplatonist Plotinus. These last two texts were almost certainly reworked in the Abbasid Baghdad of Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi, between the 9th and 10th centuries.
For Dante, Aristotle is the “master of those who know”, yet he does not for that reason ignore the Augustinian and Franciscan tradition, which is partly present in Thomas himself. The concept of divine illumination set out in the Divine Comedy derives not only from Augustine but also from the Franciscan general Bonaventura da Bagnoregio, and to some extent from the optical studies of Alhazen of Basra, around the turn of the millennium. The Franciscan influence, visible above all in the call for a Church free from temporal power, also entailed Joachimite prophetic undertones, aimed at a new era for the Church and the “earthly city”.
Dante and politics
Dante has been described as reactionary for at least three reasons. The first, of little importance, is his nostalgia for the Florence of his ancestor Cacciaguida, where, according to the poet, virtue reigned, and the ‘accursed flower’—money—had not yet corrupted people with ‘quick profits’. The idealisation of the ‘old days’ is a cliché as old as humanity itself and does not merit much attention. Conversely, the criticism of money and of people seeking ‘quick profits’ should not be overestimated either: one can glimpse in it an acknowledgement of the limits of nascent proto-capitalism, but the criticism was the same as that of the pauperist and heretical movements, starting with the Joachimites and the Spiritual Franciscans.
The second reason, equally flimsy, is that Dante lived off land rents and therefore would not have been part of the new world or the new bourgeois class. The fact that Dante used the money he had inherited—and which was the fruit of his father’s and grandfather’s commercial activities—to purchase land and live off the income does not make him a feudal lord or an outsider to the bourgeois class from which he came. It was a constant trend in the centuries that followed for wealthy bourgeois to acquire land and noble titles, only to imitate the lifestyle of the nobility, and mostly get held in contempt for it. Dante was not ashamed of his origins, he did not imitate the nobles, and he wished to be appreciated for his qualities as a man of letters, a politician and a philosopher.
The third reason is the only truly substantial one, traceable in his works, particularly in the Convivio, the Monarchia and the Divine Comedy: Dante’s conceptions are dominated by the Empire and the Church, the two medieval institutions par excellence, in which Divine Providence was embodied.
In the 5th century, Pope Gelasius had upheld the doctrine of the two swords: the sword of temporal power given by God to the Emperor, and the sword of spiritual power given by God to the Pope. This doctrine was intended to uphold the independence of papal power, then threatened by imperial power: often it was the emperor who appointed the popes, supported by certain families of the Roman nobility, forever at war with one another. Even in the 10th century, popes were effectively appointed by the Ottonian imperial dynasty. After that, the empire grew increasingly weak and the papacy began to assert its supremacy over it through the Investiture Controversy, that is, the struggle over the appointment of bishops; this was particularly the case in the 11th century under Pope Gregory VII and at the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries under Pope Innocent III.
In supporting the papal positions against the empire, the polemicist Manegold of Lautenbach, towards the end of the 11th century, stated that power and property in themselves have no legitimacy, but are merely spoils that fall into the hands of the strongest: power and property become legitimate only when recognised as such by God through the Pope. Interesting words, but ones that obviously had no revolutionary intent. The same applies to a contractual principle of power upheld by Manegold: ‘Since no one is capable of making himself emperor, it is clear that it is the people who raise one above all others so that he may govern and rule the empire with justice (…) Loyalty and respect are due to emperors and kings who protect the realm, but if they turn to the exercise of tyranny, then all obedience and respect cease (…) it is evident that they must be removed from the office granted to them and that the people have the right to free themselves from their rule’.
In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued the Bull ‘Unam Sanctam’, which reaffirmed the supremacy of spiritual power over temporal power, reviving and modifying the doctrine of the two swords. Both swords are now bestowed by God upon the Pope, who then passes that of temporal power to the Emperor, who thus owes his legitimacy to papal approval.
Pope and emperor continued their struggle for supremacy, but both were in decline in the face of the new reality constituted by the kingdoms, the communes, and the bourgeoisie. Dante maintains that both the pope and the emperor receive their sword directly from God, so that both powers are autonomous within their respective spheres. He also employs the metaphor of the two suns, both endowed with their own light that is not a reflection of the other. In his Monarchia he writes: ‘ Man’s end is twofold: just as he alone among all beings shares in incorruptibility and corruptibility, so he alone among all beings is ordered towards two ultimate ends, one of which is his end insofar as he is corruptible, the other insofar as he is incorruptible”.
Man has two ends and two possible forms of happiness: an earthly happiness, with its limitations, attainable through philosophy, and therefore through reason, and a more important supernatural happiness to be attained through faith and divine illumination. As these are two distinct ends, earthly happiness can therefore be attained independently of faith, even though the two ends must not be opposed but must cooperate, with a view to the supernatural end. Aristotelian natural law, the basis of earthly happiness, converges with the patristic conception—and in particular the Augustinian one—of the Empire as a remedy for the human fall caused by original sin.
In this view, shared by Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, property is not a natural right either: in Eden there was no property, which was subsequently introduced because of original sin, to limit its damage. The same applies to temporal power. The Pope therefore guides man towards his supernatural end, whilst the Emperor guides him towards his earthly end.
The figure of the emperor is necessary to bring peace and justice to a world where ‘cupiditas’, that is, the lust for riches, generates hatred and constant wars between cities, between kingdoms, and within them. The empire was seen, and not only by Dante, as a continuation of that of Rome, a manifestation of divine Providence inasmuch as Christ had come into the world within it, under Emperor Augustus. The empire thus constituted that fullness of time in which the ‘earthly city’ met the ‘City of God’. Unlike Augustine, the latter was not man’s sole end. Naturally, all power comes from God, and the emperor, in his autonomy, owes respect to the pope: Dante exhorts Caesar to show Peter the same respect that a son owes to his father.
Also in the Monarchia, he speaks of the Roman people’s right to exercise their ‘imperium’, and confesses his youthful amazement at the Roman people’s conquest of the world, which he then attributed to the violence of arms rather than to Providence.
Dante’s vision refers to Averroes, in that the clear distinction between the realm of faith and the realm of reason was not meant to imply conflict: Averroes said that “the true does not conflict with the true”. The difference lies in the fact that the Cordovan believed that man could individually attain knowledge, even if this belonged to the single intellect—we might say to the species; it was separate from individual men, yet some, a few—philosophers and prophets—could come to contemplate it. The Averroist Giovanni di Jandun takes it a step further in stating that only the collective can attain knowledge. Dante holds a similar view, but one embedded within a political vision absent in Giovanni di Jandun. We read in the Monarchia: “It is therefore evident that the highest power of humanity is the intellectual power or faculty. But since this intellectual power cannot be actualised in a single man or in a particular assembly of men, it is necessary that it be realised in its entirety within the multitude of the human race”. In addition to Averroes and John of Jandun, Marx’s “general intellect” also comes to mind here.
For Dante, therefore, human rational capacities cannot be fully developed by an individual or a group, but only by the human race as a whole. For this to be possible, peace, justice and freedom are necessary, which only the undisputed authority of the empire can guarantee. An undisputed but not ‘absolute’ authority, that is, one not divorced from respect for human and divine law. ‘It is not the citizens who are for the consuls, nor the people for the king, but on the contrary, the consuls are for the citizens and the king is for the people.’
Thomas Aquinas, too, spoke of a universal monarchy, and also of a contractual principle, whereby, if the monarch behaved like a tyrant, pursuing his own interests rather than the welfare of the people and the glory of God, the people could legitimately refuse to obey him, depose him, and even kill him. Where he differs from Dante is in his failure to distinguish between spiritual and temporal power. What Thomas and Albertus Magnus have in common with Dante, however, is the priority given to the civil community over authority: in the translation of Aristotle’s Politics, the Greek term polis is rendered as civitas.
The Monarchia was publicly burned in 1329 on the orders of Pope John XXII, and ended up on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559, remaining there until 1881!
In his Divine Comedy, Dante extols Caesar, Justinian and Virgil, the bard of Augustus. In apparent contradiction, he places Cato of Utica—a pagan who committed suicide in the name of freedom—as the guardian of Purgatory; this would seem to mark a return to the exaltation of municipal freedoms, later renounced in favour of the empire. This is the interpretation of a reactionary Dante. The figure of Cato signified that the ethical and philosophical principles of the ancients were sufficient to achieve earthly happiness, transforming the ‘mob’ into a political community. According to Croce and others, Dante is said to have moved from extolling communal freedoms to renouncing them in the name of the empire, disillusioned by his personal and civic experience. Dante speaks of ‘standing alone’, disillusioned even by the Whites, and this is seen as a renunciation of political commitment. In reality, he realises that politics, which he knows very well, offers no solution to the problems he sees, and that the only thing he can do is abandon a struggle deemed petty, futile and harmful, in order to develop a theory capable of resolving problems that seem intractable: in reality, they are more so than he himself believed.
Prophet of the bourgeoisie
Eugenio Garin was by no means a Marxist, but in his text ‘Rinascite e rivoluzioni’ he happens to offer a Marxist analysis when discussing Petrarch, Humanism and the Renaissance, whilst also referring to Dante. In contrast to Gramsci, Garin quotes—and endorses—an assessment of the Renaissance taken from Engels’s Dialectics of Nature: “It was the greatest progressive upheaval that humanity had experienced up to that point: a period that needed giants and that produced giants: giants in the strength of thought, in passions, in character, in versatility and erudition. The men who founded the modern rule of the bourgeoisie were anything but limited in the bourgeois sense.”
The pre-capitalist mercantile system of the cities and kingdoms of the 13th and 14th centuries entailed a process of alienation and commodification that offered no glimpse of any possible unification between what had been split apart, in the individual as in society. Dante views the society of his time as antagonistic to the sacred and rational order, illuminated by the Christian faith, which he pursues. The fact that the Empire and the Church are at the centre of his reflections makes him appear a reactionary, with his mind turned to the past. The political and philosophical categories he employs are in fact fully rooted in previous centuries, as it is only logical they should be. He remains a man of active participation in civic life and politics, a supporter of municipal freedoms which he does not in fact renounce when he upholds the pre-eminence of the Empire.
In the urban struggle between the sectors of the bourgeoisie to which he belongs, between the bourgeoisie and the great families of the minor and ancient nobility, between city and city, and between kingdom and kingdom, he realises that it is impossible to achieve the peace and tranquillity necessary for ‘earthly happiness’: that is to say, for the prosperity and establishment of the new bourgeois class. This class, in fact, eventually relinquishes the power it has seized in many cities to the benefit of regional lordships and kingdoms, whilst seeking to retain, as far as possible, its own prerogatives, privileges, and municipal freedoms.
But in Dante’s time, the bourgeoisie had not yet come to conceive of such a renunciation. The poet seeks a solution that did not exist in his day, and which would not exist for centuries to come. The Empire, regarded as a solution to the internal struggles for wealth and power, is not the real one, but an ideal empire that should intervene only where the peace, justice and freedom of the cities, or of the kingdoms, were in danger, due to internal or external enemies. In this conception, the cities and kingdoms should retain their laws, and thus their freedoms, privileges and autonomies.
Dante’s universal monarchy is an abstract and ahistorical response to a real problem. The nascent bourgeoisie was torn apart by internal strife, and faced a feudal or post-feudal world that rejected it, yet into which it wished to enter with equal dignity. It could not yet be fully aware of its irreconcilability with that world, and it never would be. Dante represents the attempt to integrate this new social class into the old world, devising an ideology suited to the purpose using the theoretical means available at the time. Through Aristotle he speaks of municipal freedoms; through the empire he speaks of their safeguarding; through transcendence he speaks of immanence. Dante, like the bourgeois class to which he belongs, has his feet firmly planted in the Middle Ages, and his gaze turned towards the future and, unconsciously, towards the complete emancipation of that class from feudal relations of production – an emancipation that would still take many centuries.
(To be continued in the next issue)
| I. | - Development of Capitalism in the Ottoman Empire |
| II. | - The Emergence of Ottoman Socialism and its Left |
| – Zacharias Vezestenis, The Social Question in the East, 1913 – Zacharias Vezestenis, The Economic Consequences of the War, 1913 – Address of the Constantinople Socialist Center to the International Proletariat, 1914 | |
| III. | - The Foundation of the Communist Party of Turkey |
| – Constitution of the Communist Party of Turkey, 1920 – Declaration of the Communist Party of Turkey, 1920 – Baku Congress, 1920, Naciye’s speech – In the East, Ziya, December 8, 1920 – 3rd Congress of the Comintern, 1921, Süleyman Nuri’s speech | |
| IV. | - The Peak of the Communist Party and the Red Unions |
| V. | - The Left in Opposition |
| VI. | - Outside the Party |
| VII. | - Conclusion: What This Tradition Means for Us |
(To be continued in the next issue)
Part one
Struggle for Power in the Two Revolutions
XII
- 121. A further comment on the ‘Dialogue’
- 122. Lenin’s Thinking
- 123. An Uninterrupted Enemy Front
- 124. The Appeal against the Foe
- 125. One War, Twenty Enemies
- 126. The German-Ukrainian Front
- 127. The Cossack, Caucasian Front
- 128. Interventions by the Entente Countries
- 129. Eastern Front: Kolchak and the Czechoslovaks
- 130. Southern Front: Denikin
- 131. Western Front: Yudenich
- 132. Southern Front: Wrangel
- 133. The Russo-Polish War
- 134. The Red Peace
- 135. Lenin’s Maxim Still Holds
[ It is here ]
END OF PART ONE
The Chinese question has always occupied a prominent place in the party’s work. In particular, the revolution of the 1920s. The defeat of communism in China in 1927 had the same impact on the revolutions in the East as the failure of the German Revolution had in Europe. The Party has identified Stalinism – an expression of the counter-revolution that was advancing in Russia and throughout the world – as the main cause of the defeat of the Chinese revolution. In numerous in-depth studies, we have contrasted Stalin’s Menshevik theses with the correct communist and revolutionary programme for China and, more generally, for the countries of the East.
On the question of China – from revolution to counter-revolution – the Left’s reflections and original assessments have stood out from all other justifications for the leap to ‘socialism’ within a narrow national context.
In recent years, we have resumed our study of that revolution in order to examine in greater depth the history of the class struggles from 1920 to 1927, the origins of the Communist Party of China and its early years, the emergence of class-based trade unions, Moscow’s policy – which led to the bloody defeat in China – and the struggle of Trotsky and the Opposition against the betrayal of Stalinism. Alongside this ‘recap’, this Archive will present documents from those years and texts that demonstrate the rejection of Lenin’s theses and the perspectives of the Communist International in the East.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party of China, dated November 1920, is taken from Zhongguo gongchandang xuanyan, in Yida qida qianhou, vol. 1, pp. 1–5, which was itself retranslated into Chinese from the original English text held in the archives of the Chinese Communist Party delegation to the Comintern. Here is Tony Saich’s transcription. The author, Zhang, is thought to be Zhang Tailei, who would go on to take part in the future Congress of the Toilers, for which he was responsible for the Chinese delegation, alongside Mering, and acted as the English translator.
From the 1924 text, written in English, by Ch’en Kung-Po, in The Communist Movement in China, published in 1966 by Octagon Books Inc. of New York, we have drawn the First Programme of the Chinese Communist Party and the First Resolution on the Objectives of the Chinese Communist Party, both adopted at the First Congress in July–August 1921.
These two documents also feature in the publications edited by Tony Saich, alongside the others relating to the First Congress published here. However, we have opted for Ch’en Kung-Po’s original translation from Chinese: the translations in The Rise of Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis, Armonk, New York–London 1984, had too strong a National Socialist flavour.
A Russian-language version of the First Programme of the CPoC was returned by the Russians to the archives of the CCP in 1957, together with copies of the other documents reproduced here. In Points 5, 7, 8, 9 and 12, the word ‘Soviet’ clearly refers to the local Party branch.
At the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the Report of the Beijing Communist Group (“Bejing gongchanzhuyi xiaozu de baogao”, in Yida qianhou, vol. 3, pp. 1–9) and the Report of the Guangzhou Group were delivered, respectively, by Zhang Guotao, in his capacity as senior delegate, and by Chen Gongbo. Here is the translation by the J.K. Fairbank Centre for East Asian Research, edited by Tony Saich.
A copy of their Chinese translation from the Russian, held in Moscow in the archives of the Chinese delegation to the Comintern, has been returned to China.
The other documents published here relate to the two-year period 1921–22, which marked the full emergence of the Chinese working class, with powerful struggles and the formation of the first class-based trade unions.
To document the course of these struggles and the workers’ organisations, we do not have access to the original writings from that period: we have encountered insurmountable difficulties in gaining access to the publications of the Communist Party of China from its early years.
In this archive, the only document we have found in its original Chinese version is the Manifesto of the Labour Secretariat, which announced its establishment in July 1921. This was due to be published immediately in issue 6 of Gongchandang (The Communist), but, due to its irregular publication schedule, it was only printed in the first half of September, probably between the 10th and the 17th, signed ‘Head of the Chinese Workers’ Secretariat, Zhang Teli’ (Zhang Guotao). It had been drafted by Mering (Sneevliet) and subsequently translated into Chinese. We have cross-checked Tony Saich’s translation from Chinese into English (in The Origins of the First United Front in China) against the original.
The Labour Secretariat – whose activities we shall describe in greater detail later in our ongoing work on the origins of the Communist Party of China – was a body established by the young party, which in its early days consisted almost exclusively of intellectuals, in order to establish contact with the Chinese working class. Through the Labour Secretariat, from 1921–22 onwards, the Communist Party of China forged links with the proletariat, participating in – and in some cases leading – their struggles and promoting the organisation of workers into modern class-based trade unions. Its influence grew rapidly, to the extent that it was the Secretariat itself that took the initiative to convene the first congress of Chinese trade unions in May 1922.
The other texts published here are translated from International Press Correspondence, the organ of the Communist International, which, from 1921 onwards, published its official documents and articles on the main issues of interest to the world communist movement. We have selected two articles from InPreCor concerning China: one on the strike movement of 1922, and the other on the process of trade union formation, using the example of the metalworkers’ union in Guangzhou.
On the strike movement, which was particularly prominent in 1922, we are publishing the report that Voytinsky delivered to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in November 1922, which appeared in InPreCor issue 98 of 13 November 1922. It is an account of the widespread strike movement that swept through all of China’s major industrial centres. In particular, the article refers to the massive strike in Hong Kong in the early months of 1922, which is regarded as a watershed in the history of the Chinese labour movement, as its successful conclusion marked the start of a wave of strikes that swept through all the industrial centres and paved the way for the convening of the first congress of Chinese trade unions – an event that broke down all the barriers hindering the organisation of the working class. Also in InPreCor, issue 77 of 8 September 1922, an article was published on the founding of the metalworkers’ union in Canton.
The example of its formation is indicative of the process undergone by class-based trade unionism in China, with the first modern trade unions emerging as distinct from the old forms of organisation – the guilds, provincial associations and secret societies – and which, despite errors and shortcomings during this transition, led to the formation of genuine class-based trade unions, which would become the protagonists of the social war that was to erupt in China in the years that followed. The presence of articles on China in InPreCor – a publication aimed at the communist movement worldwide – clearly testifies to the importance then attached to the Chinese proletariat, its struggles and its organisations, as a unit on the front lines of the world proletarian army in the international struggle for Communism.
Manifesto of the Chinese Communist Party
(November 1920)
Dear Comrades!
This Manifesto was adopted by the Chinese Communist Party last November. Its contents merely constitute a part of the principles of communism; consequently, it has not been published externally, but serves as the criterion for the admission of members. As the original Chinese manuscript of this Manifesto cannot be found here, I have translated it from the English version. Since more than a year has passed since the adoption of this Manifesto, there are naturally areas that now require revision and supplementation. I very much hope that all comrades will study this manifesto carefully, for every communist must pay attention to such an important document—the Communist Manifesto. It will also be put forward for discussion by the communist group within the Chinese delegation to the Far Eastern People’s Congress. The results of this discussion will be submitted to the Chinese Communist Party for reference and adoption.
Chang, 10 December 1921
The Ideals of Communists
A. Views on Economic Matters Communists advocate the socialisation of the means of production—machinery, factories, raw materials, land, transport, etc.—so that they may be held in common and used by society. Once the means of production are socialised, private property and the banking system will naturally cease to exist. The current state of one individual exploiting another will be completely eradicated, for the root cause of exploitation—surplus value—will no longer be obtainable.
B. Views on Political Matters Communists advocate the abolition of the state, as all present-day state institutions and governments are, by their very nature, untenable. This is because the state, the army and the courts serve to protect the interests of the minority and oppress the majority of the working masses; whilst the means of production are privately owned by a minority, this is indeed necessary. Should private property and the monetary system be abolished, the state, the army and the courts would naturally become superfluous.
C. Views on Social Matters Communists seek to ensure that there is only one class in society (that is, no classes at all)—namely, the class of the working masses. Private property is the root of all special interests in present-day society; if no one can accumulate property, then there will be no special classes.
The Aims of Communists
The aim of communists is to create a new society in accordance with communist ideals. However, for our ideal society to have any chance of realisation, the first step must be to eradicate the present capitalist system. To eradicate the capitalist system, there is no alternative but to overthrow the capitalist state by force. The forces of the working masses—the proletariat—are developing and uniting there; these forces will bring about the natural demise of capitalism. These forces continue to grow, and this is precisely the result of class conflict within the capitalist state. The form in which these forces manifest themselves is class struggle.
Class struggle is therefore the instrument for overthrowing capitalism. Class struggle has always existed within human society, though it has undergone several transformations, as it is contingent upon the development of the means of production. It existed in feudal states as well; yet it differs from class struggle under the capitalist state, for under the latter it is particularly acute, with a force capable of shaking the entire world. The growth of this force, becoming ever more solid, will ultimately uproot capitalism. The intensification of this struggle is a law of history.
The task of the Communist Party is to organise and concentrate the forces of this class struggle, so that the forces attacking capitalism grow ever stronger.
This can only be achieved by propagating these ideas among workers, peasants, soldiers, sailors and students; The aim is to organise large industrial unions and unite them into a general federation of trade unions, as well as to establish a revolutionary proletarian party—the Communist Party. The Communist Party will lead the revolutionary proletariat in the struggle against the capitalists and seize state power from them—that power which sustains the capitalist state—and place it in the hands of the workers and peasants, just as the Russian Communist Party did in 1917.
The industrial unions of the revolutionary proletariat must, through the method of general strikes, constantly disrupt the capitalist state, so that the enemies of the working masses are progressively weakened. When the moment arrives for the final struggle to seize power from the capitalists, a general strike called by the Communist Party will deal a fatal blow to the capitalist system.
Moreover, once the capitalists have been overthrown, these industrial organisations will become the organs governing the economic life of communist society.
The overthrow of the capitalist government and the transfer of power into the hands of the revolutionary proletariat—this is but one part of the Communist Party’s objective, which has already been achieved; yet the Communist Party’s task remains unfinished, for the class struggle continues, albeit in a different form—namely, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Current State of the Class Struggle
As things stand, the whole world may be regarded as a single capitalist apparatus; consequently, the class struggle in one country can exert the same influence on others. The victory of the Russian proletarian revolution in November 1917 resulted in the transformation of the class struggle in Russia into the form of the dictatorship of the workers and peasants. Consequently, the class struggle in other countries is also becoming increasingly acute, and its trend is towards the same form as the class struggle in Russia—namely, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The transformation of the class struggle in Russia into the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a contingent state of affairs; it is a natural stage in the development of human society. When the capitalists are being overthrown and the creation of a communist society is beginning, this state of affairs is natural. For a certain period, this political situation in Russia is inevitable, and therefore such a situation will inevitably arise in other countries as well. For, when viewed in terms of methods of production and distribution, these countries are all alike—they are all capitalist.
The dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia merely demonstrates the struggle between the forces of the world’s proletariat and the forces of world capitalism, in which one side has now triumphed in part. It would be a grave and utter mistake to imagine that, whilst the proletariat of other nations is still struggling against capitalism and has not yet achieved victory, Russia alone could establish a communist state within its own borders. Since the Russian proletariat cannot immediately establish a communist state, and since capitalism has already been overthrown, it is quite evident that it must defend itself against enemies both at home and abroad. Therefore, only by implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat can the objective of resisting enemies both at home and abroad be achieved. This means using the strength of a single class to create a communist society; this class is destined to shape the future world and, bearing the historical mission, to accomplish this task.
Furthermore, this is not merely a feature of Russia’s historical development, but a feature of the historical development of the entire world; moreover, every country in the world must pass through this phase of class struggle.
The significance of the dictatorship of the proletariat is merely that political power has been seized by the revolutionary proletariat; it certainly does not mean that the remnants of capitalist forces, such as those opposed to the revolution, have been completely eradicated. Nor does it mean that the overthrow of the capitalist regime will result in the easy and straightforward realisation of communism. This is not the case at all; The task of the dictatorship of the proletariat is, on the one hand, to continue to combat the residual forces of capitalism by force, and on the other hand, to devise, by revolutionary means, a multitude of methods for building communism; these methods are formulated by representatives elected by the proletariat—that section of the proletariat possessing the highest class consciousness and revolutionary spirit.
Until the forces of the capitalists throughout the world have been eliminated and the means of production have begun to operate according to communist principles, the dictatorship of the proletariat will still have to forge a path towards communism.
First Congress of the Communist Party of China
July-August 1921
– Programme
1. The Party shall be named the ‘Communist Party of China’.
2. The Party’s programme is as follows:
(a) The revolutionary army must, together with the proletariat, overthrow the regime of the capitalist class and must support the working class [the English draft reads: ‘Overthrow the bourgeoisie with the revolutionary army of the proletariat and rebuild the state by the working class’], until class distinctions in society are eliminated;
(b) We recognise the dictatorship of the proletariat until the end of the class struggle, that is, until the elimination of class distinctions in society;
(c) We shall abolish private ownership by capitalists and confiscate the means of production—machinery, land, factories and semi-finished goods—making them the common property of society;
(d) We shall join the Third International.
3. Our Party recognises the Soviet system of administration, organises workers, peasants and soldiers [the English draft adds the following sentence after this: “and propagates communism”], and acknowledges that the Party’s fundamental political objective is to carry out a social revolution; the Communist Party of China completely severs all ties with the yellow intellectual class and other similar political parties.
4. Any person who acknowledges the Party’s programme and policies and wishes to become a loyal member may, upon the recommendation of one Party member, be admitted as a member and become our comrade, regardless of gender or nationality. However, before joining our ranks, they must sever all ties with parties and groups that seek to oppose the Party’s programme.
5. The procedure for admitting new members is as follows: Probationary members must undergo a probationary period of at least two months under the supervision of the local committee. Upon completion of the probationary period, they may be admitted to the Party only with the consent of the majority of members. If an executive committee exists in the region, approval must be obtained from the executive committee.
6. Whilst the Party operates in secrecy, its key principles and the identity of its members must be kept confidential.
7. Where there are five or more Party members, a committee shall be established.
8. Members of a committee may be transferred to a committee in another locality upon the recommendation of the secretary of the local committee.
9. Local committees with no more than ten members shall have one secretary; those with more than ten members shall have one treasurer, one organiser and one propaganda officer; those with more than thirty members shall elect an executive committee from among the members of the committee. The rules of procedure for the executive committee shall be laid down separately.
10. Where the number of Party members in local organisations of workers, peasants, soldiers and students is large, they may be sent to work in other regions, but must be subject to strict supervision by the local executive committee [The English draft of this clause reads: “10. Where the number of Party members increases, local organisations should, according to their respective professions, utilise organisations of workers, peasants, soldiers and students to carry out activities outside the Party.”].
11. [Omitted — Translator: Original note in the Russian text]
12. The finances, activities and policies of local committees shall be subject to the supervision of the Central Executive Committee.
13. Where the number of Party members in a committee exceeds five hundred, or where five committees are established in the same locality, an Executive Committee comprising ten members shall be appointed by the National Congress of Representatives. If the above requirements cannot be met, a Provisional Central Executive Committee shall be established [the English version of this clause reads: “Where the number of Party members exceeds five hundred, or where five or more local executive committees have been established, a Central Executive Committee comprising ten members elected by the National Congress of Representatives shall be established at a suitable location. If the aforementioned conditions are not yet met, a provisional Central Executive Committee shall be organised to meet the needs.”] Detailed rules regarding the work and organisation of the Executive Committee shall be drawn up separately.
14. Party members shall not hold government office or serve as members of parliament without the Party’s authorisation, unless compelled by law. Soldiers, police officers and civil servants are exempt from this restriction (this clause gave rise to fierce debate at the Second Congress in 1922) [The text in brackets is a note from the original Russian manuscript. The note in the original English manuscript reads: “This clause gave rise to fierce debate and was ultimately deferred for decision at the Second Congress of 1922.”]
15. This Programme may only be amended with the consent of two-thirds of the delegates at the National Congress.
I. Workers’ Organisations
The Party’s fundamental task is to establish industrial trade unions. Where there is more than one industrial sector, trade unions should be organised; in places where there is no large-scale industry but only one or two factories, factory trade unions more suited to local conditions may be established.
The Party should instill the spirit of class struggle within the trade unions. The Party must be vigilant to ensure that trade unions do not become puppets of other political parties. To this end, the Party must be particularly vigilant to ensure that trade unions do not pursue other political lines. As for craft trade unions, Party members should be dispatched without delay to carry out the reorganisation work as soon as possible.
A trade union may only be established if it has more than 200 members, and at least two members of our Party must be sent to work within that union.
II. Propaganda
The publication of all books, daily newspapers, slogans [Russian: “cnoBapH”, interpreted as “encyclopaedia” in the English draft] and leaflets shall be subject to the supervision of the Central Executive Committee or the Provisional Central Executive Committee.
Every local organisation shall have the right to publish local bulletins, daily newspapers, weekly newspapers, leaflets and notices. The publication of all materials, whether central or local, shall be under the leadership of Party members.
No publication, whether central or local, shall carry articles that contravene the Party’s principles, policies and resolutions.
III. Workers’ Schools
As workers’ schools constitute a stage in the process of organising industrial trade unions, such schools shall be established in all industrial sectors; for example, ‘Preparatory Schools for Transport Workers’ and ‘Preparatory Schools for Textile Workers’ shall be established, and so on. In these schools, except in cases of absolute necessity, no courses covering several different subjects shall be taught [the English draft reads: ‘No supplementary schools teaching several different trades shall be established, unless absolutely necessary’].
The school administration and the school committee shall consist entirely of workers. Teachers appointed by the Party may attend meetings of the school committee.
Workers’ schools should gradually evolve into central bodies of the workers’ party; otherwise, there is no need for such schools to exist, and they may be dissolved or reorganised.
The fundamental aim of the schools is to raise workers’ consciousness and make them recognise the necessity of forming trade unions.
IV. Research Bodies for Trade Union Organisation
Such bodies shall be composed of leaders from various industrial sectors, class-conscious workers and Party members, and shall study issues such as the working methods of industrial trade unions.
The primary purpose of establishing such bodies is to educate workers, enabling them to put the ideas of the Communist Party into practice. Particular attention shall be paid to organising workers’ trade unions, supporting workers’ movements in other sectors, and studying the situation of workers’ trade unions and other proletarian organisations.
To ensure the work is carried out more effectively, the research conducted by this body should be divided into the following categories: the history of the labour movement; methods for organising factory workers; the economic theories of Karl Marx; and the current state of the labour movement in various countries. The findings of this research should be published regularly, with particular attention paid to issues concerning the labour movement within China itself.
V. Attitude towards Existing Political Parties
Towards other existing political parties, an independent and combative policy should be adopted [the English draft reads: “Towards all existing political parties, an independent, combative and exclusive attitude should be adopted.”]. In political struggles, in the struggle against warlordism and the bureaucratic system, and in the struggle for freedom of speech, the press and assembly, we must always stand on a completely independent footing, upholding solely the interests of the proletariat and establishing no relations whatsoever with other political parties.
VI. The Party’s Relations with the Third International
The Central Committee of the Party shall report on its work to the Third International on a monthly basis.
When necessary, a plenipotentiary representative shall be sent to the Far Eastern Secretariat of the Third International in Irkutsk. Furthermore, representatives shall be dispatched to the countries of the Far East to discuss the development and coordination of the future course of the class struggle.
Report of the Beijing Communist Organisation
(Zhang Guotao)
Comrades, the Beijing Communist Organisation came into being only ten months ago. Moreover, those who have joined this young organisation are but a handful of intellectuals, most of whom lack revolutionary experience. Due to the changing political situation itself, our entire activity has encountered obstacles; consequently, the results of our work are negligible. We deeply regret that we cannot share more experience with you at this Congress. However, we earnestly hope that this Congress will greatly enrich our experience and provide principled guidance for our future activities as a whole.
Before presenting my report, I shall endeavour to give you a brief overview of social life in Beijing.
I. As you are aware, Beijing is the political centre of northern China and has served as the capital of China for nearly five hundred years. During the Qing Dynasty, many Manchus resided there, and by virtue of their connections with the imperial court, they maintained a lifestyle that defied convention. There are still nearly two hundred thousand such residents today; they are extremely loyal, yet they still do not engage in any fixed occupation. In addition to these idlers, there are civil and military officials of all ranks, along with the various parasites clustering around them; furthermore, there are their families, and some thirty thousand people engaged in all manner of dubious occupations. The population of Beijing does not exceed nine hundred and thirty thousand, and it can be safely said that more than half are idlers. Indeed, one might well say that Beijing is the strangest city in the world.
As we have already mentioned, Beijing is recognised as the so-called political centre; consequently, one might expect the local inhabitants to take an interest in all political matters, yet in reality, this is far from the case. When China was a monarchy, people regarded politics as the personal affair of the emperor. After the revolution, politics came to be regarded as the personal concern of the military—that is, of senior generals and ordinary officers—and of various politicians who pursued only their own ends in the struggle for various privileges. Consequently, political matters continue to be neglected.
Why do the residents of Beijing harbour such a passive attitude? Firstly, the people of Beijing bear in mind the words of ancient philosophers that ‘politics is not the business of the lower classes’; this fatalistic mindset is deeply ingrained in their minds. Secondly, having lived under the yoke of tyranny for thousands of years, a sense of submissiveness and dependence is deeply rooted in their hearts. Finally, as industry is still in its infancy, extreme selfishness prevailed among the workers; they lacked the habit of collective life and were steeped in a conservative traditional spirit. In teahouses or restaurants, one often encountered notices stating ‘Do not discuss state affairs’. This practice of prohibiting all discussion of national political issues seemed to serve as a form of social supervision imposed upon the lower classes.
Following the ‘Literary’ Revolution (the promotion of vernacular Chinese, etc.), intellectuals began to feel, for the first time, the need for new ideals, aspirations and ambitions. At the same time, during the conference to divide the spoils of war, a conflict arose between China and Japan over the Shandong issue, which sparked an unprecedentedly powerful student nationalist movement, namely the ‘May Fourth Movement’. At that time, students made great efforts to arouse the masses’ interest in political events, but these efforts remained fruitless.
Lacking popular support, the student movement gradually waned. This example clearly demonstrates that, even in Beijing—the political centre—the patriotic spirit of the intellectual class had not yet taken root among the proletariat.
The political movements of the intellectuals can broadly be divided into three factions: 1. the democratic movement; 2. guild socialism; 3. the anarchist movement. The supporters of the democratic movement have no fixed organisation. As for the guild socialists, they have only a small number of supporters and thus exert little influence; in order to propagate their confused ideas, they make haphazard use of published newspapers and other periodicals; even the anarchists have not gone as far as these fellows. Pick up any newspaper, even one published by the warlords, and you will find articles filled from cover to cover with a hodgepodge of confused ideas and doctrines such as democracy, guild socialism and anarchism. Naturally, the methods employed by such a movement are unlikely to achieve their aims. As for the anarchists, although they have probably realised how important it is to appeal to the masses, they have no other means at their disposal apart from distributing their pamphlets and serving prison sentences. For example, during the May Fourth Movement last year [the year before last], a group of anarchists had gathered thirty members, yet they were unable to personally organise demonstrations among the workers; they confined themselves to printing a few weekly leaflets, but were unable to organise their distribution properly, and so the distribution was very uneven.
Members of the intellectual class believe that their knowledge will inevitably be utilised in the transformation of society, and that scientific endeavours will secure them positions of influence; consequently, they often yearn for a broad education. They view the proletariat as an ignorant, impoverished and weak class, and thus see them as a means to achieve their own ends. Intellectuals regard themselves as highly significant, whilst the proletariat as insignificant; this tendency is extremely pronounced, and consequently constitutes a major obstacle to the workers’ revolutionary movement.
Comrades, in summary, we face two crucial issues that require immediate attention: firstly, how to arouse political interest among the working class and the poor, how to instil in them a spirit of insurrection, and how to organise them and mobilise the masses for revolutionary work; secondly, how to dispel their desire to become scholars and join the intellectual class, encouraging them instead to participate in the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, and how to make them members of the working class.
The regimes of warlords and bureaucrats are, generally speaking, highly unstable; their horizons are limited to purely selfish ends; they have no fixed political line. Provided the proletariat makes an effort, such a regime can easily be overthrown.
II. The economic situation in Beijing is straightforward. Beijing is a political centre, not an industrial or commercial hub; consequently, in practice, only millionaires hold deposits in banks, whilst entrepreneurs are generally few in number and major businessmen are scarce. Certain larger factories and enterprises—such as editorial offices, publishing houses, the local finance department, precision instrument factories, the Weights and Measures Factory, and the railways—are all government agencies. Therefore, the factory owners and employers here are the government itself. To strengthen the patriotic spirit of the staff in these enterprises and agencies, and to ensure they work tirelessly, the government explains to them that ‘this must be done for the prosperity of the nation’. Naturally, under such circumstances, propaganda work is difficult—far more so, in any case, than dealing with capitalist factory owners. Comrades, please take note of this problem that needs to be resolved.
Among the workers are many rickshaw pullers, numbering between fifty and sixty thousand. Although they do not work for capitalists, they come from the lower classes and, by the nature of their work, are in contact with the broad masses of the population; practical measures must be sought to carry out active propaganda work among them.
III. Oppression is a common occurrence in Beijing: foreigners insulting Chinese people, military officers treating the common people brutally, passengers urging rickshaw pullers on with whips or walking sticks, and so on. I believe that wherever such incidents occur, we must seize the opportunity to stir the revolutionary spirit of the working class.
Government officials, soldiers, bureaucrats and police compete with one another in oppressing the common people: the motorcars of ‘important persons’ may run down pedestrians; they may control traffic at will; they incite the police to suppress the populace arbitrarily. Whenever a certain ‘important person’ steps out, the preservation of his dignity takes precedence. All these examples show just how many excellent opportunities there are to educate the masses!
Now, let us return to the past activities and plans of the Beijing Communist Organisation. We must recognise that when this organisation was established last October, several pseudo-communists infiltrated its ranks; these individuals were, in fact, anarchists who caused us no end of trouble. However, due to their excessively radical rhetoric, they alienated themselves and the entire organisation. After their departure, matters proceeded more smoothly. We are still very short-staffed, and therefore cannot immediately set ourselves broad, militant tasks. We must concentrate all our efforts on propaganda and organisational work amongst the intelligentsia and the working class.
Propaganda Work Amongst the Workers
Industry in Beijing is not yet well developed, and there are no large factories capable of uniting the workers. Under these circumstances, we decided to shift our focus to railway workers. However, as we all come from an intellectual background, there is a considerable distance between us and the working class; therefore, we must first strengthen our internal ties with them. To this end, we decided to establish a workers’ evening school in Changxindian to train two thousand railway workers. This school is not far from Beijing, and three teachers—socialists—teach there.
This school appeared to be a means for us to draw closer to the workers, and a close and friendly bond gradually developed between us; on more than one occasion, we put forward important suggestions to encourage them. As a result, we observed that the idea that various class demands—such as higher wages, shorter working hours and the formation of trade unions—must be raised was steadily gaining ground among the workers. Subsequently, they established a railway workers’ union with a membership of between 340 and 350.
Comrades, we must not limit ourselves to merely establishing trade unions; once a union is formed, we must first guide it to confront the employers. Only in this way will the workers take an interest in their own union and come to believe in its power. The working masses lack education and are illiterate; only one in ten can read a newspaper, so printed propaganda work is naturally very poor. It is clear, therefore, that we must struggle against these difficulties and overcome them at any cost.
In summary, the experience we have gained in this initial, short period is as follows: firstly, to establish friendly relations between those loyal to the workers’ movement and the workers themselves; secondly, to select leaders from among the workers; thirdly, to remind them not to forget the purpose of our organisation, and to use their own trade unions to fight against the employers, thereby intensifying class antagonism; finally, fourthly, we must utilise every opportunity to encourage the masses to hold demonstrations and go on strike.
Naturally, when establishing labour schools, we cannot harbour the illusion of immediately raising the general level of knowledge among the workers, for with our staff’s limited capabilities and meagre funds, this is simply not feasible. In establishing these schools, we aim merely to achieve the first two objectives mentioned above. The school’s primary task is to educate the workers and accustom them to electing from their own ranks conscious and active individuals to manage the affairs of the school and the trade union. Student meetings can provide you with many suitable opportunities for propaganda, and it is particularly important to cultivate the habit of holding such open mass meetings, as these are most effective in instilling a sense of common interest and strict discipline among those in attendance.
What do we teach the workers? We constantly remind them that they are being exploited by their factory-owning capitalists and are forced to live like beasts of burden; secondly, we introduce them to the history of the workers’ movement abroad. We constantly point out to them the significance and methods of organisation, frequently giving them lectures and teaching them to read and write; at the same time, we accustom them to expressing their thoughts in writing, encouraging them to produce written reports on their family life, daily circumstances, and all instances of injustice occurring in the factory. At first, they felt somewhat hesitant, but later, some excellent agitators emerged from their ranks. However, it is extremely difficult to find mentors or true leaders of the working class.
I believe there is no need to establish workers’ schools for every industry; as a first step, such schools should only be established in places where there are neither workers’ organisations nor workers’ leaders. Experience shows that we cannot establish general workers’ schools; we should only set up specialised schools, such as schools for textile workers and railway workers, and so on; such schools are a necessary preparatory stage for the establishment of industrial trade unions.
As for the Jinghan Railway Union, we have been actively engaged in efforts to establish close ties between these workers and ourselves. We also pay particular attention to strike incidents occurring in various regions. As soon as we hear that coal miners or other workers in a certain area have gone on strike, Comrade Luo and I immediately take the train there to offer assistance to the strikers; however, not only do they not believe they can receive help from outsiders, but they suspect us of being spies and fear us, so our attempts have not been successful.
The propaganda publications we produce for the working class are, for the most part, not very long. We frequently encouraged workers to write their own short reports, which we published in full in our own publications or in the general press. Our first publication was the weekly *The Labourer* [*The Voice of Labour*], but after the sixth issue it was banned by the government. Following this persecution, our publication was renamed *The Voice of Benevolence*, but after the third issue it had to cease publication due to a lack of funds. We also published a number of pamphlets, such as *The Workers’ Victory* and *May Day*, which were distributed quite widely. However, our main propaganda work has focused on demands for higher wages and shorter working hours; these demands have now become the most effective battle cries.
I would like to give an example to illustrate the importance of workers holding public demonstrations. As I have already told you, we sowed the first seeds of our propaganda work in Changxindian, and on 1 May last year, a demonstration was held there. The comrades who organised this demonstration deserve praise; on that day, a mass meeting attended by thousands of workers was convened, at which the workers themselves delivered rousing speeches. The meeting lasted for over three hours, yet there were still some workers who did not have time to speak. Following the mass meeting, the procession began; a march of 1,500 workers, marched through the streets, holding aloft banners bearing important slogans, singing revolutionary songs and chanting the slogan ‘Higher wages, shorter working hours’. In the wake of this event, within less than a week, ten minor incidents occurred in the factory workshops which caused great unease amongst the management. Comrades, please note that we must work alongside workers who are as yet undisciplined, and the best way to help them, in my view, is to assist them in organising strikes and demonstrations. We must actively take every measure capable of accelerating this movement.
Propaganda Work Among the Intellectuals
We have attempted to expand our propaganda work among the intellectual classes, but as the printing works are now under surveillance, we are unable to publish our materials. We have translated a number of pamphlets, such as *The Russian Revolution and the Class Struggle* and *The Communist Manifesto*, but our translations have not yet been printed. We have only distributed copies of *The Communist Manifesto* and *Talks on Economics* printed in Shanghai. Although the magazine *Dawn* is published under the responsibility of one of our comrades, it is not purely our publication, but rather a mixed-content journal. We have published a number of translated articles and original works; when Professor Russell lectured in Shanghai and promoted guild socialism, we organised a public debate and presented our views as his opponents. We have frequently had to engage in public disputes with anarchists and Social Democrats, though we rarely participate in written polemics; most of these disputes take the form of public debates or private conversations.
In recent years, the number of public primary schools in Beijing has increased significantly. Previously, these schools imparted patriotic education to pupils; we have done our utmost to encourage these schools to engage in communist propaganda, and have achieved some success in this regard.
My report is drawing to a close, but I have a few more words to say. Although we are currently devoting all our energy to the work of organising and educating the masses, we must at the same time pay attention to propaganda work among the intellectuals. Comrades, the dark political situation and the corrupt society that surrounds us, the many intolerable social injustices and the dire economic conditions—all these are factors that could easily trigger a revolutionary outbreak. Whether we can harness the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat, which is easily aroused, and whether we can steer the democratic political revolution onto the path of the working class’s social revolution—all this will depend on the extent of our efforts to struggle under the red banner. This founding congress must specifically resolve all the tasks before us and draw up a practical work plan. The responsibility of the congress appears to be no small matter.
Report of the Guangzhou Communist Party
(Chen Gongbo)
I. Last Year
Last year, there was no organisation here, nor was it possible to find anyone capable of carrying out organisational work in Guangzhou. When we returned to Guangzhou, we founded the daily newspaper *Guangdong Qunbao*, but it cannot be said that *Guangdong Qunbao* constituted an organisation; it was a propaganda organ. At that time, Guangzhou was under the rule of the Guangxi clique, who brutally suppressed all movements, and as we were also facing financial difficulties, it was impossible to make any progress.
Towards the end of last year, B and Peslin arrived in Guangzhou, established the Russian News Agency, took steps to organise trade unions, and published articles in the weekly *The Labourer*. Comrade Huang Lingshuang introduced them to the revolutionary circles of Guangzhou, and as a result, they found themselves surrounded by anarchists. Although a Communist Party was organised, it would be more accurate to describe it as an anarchist Communist Party rather than a Communist Party. Of the nine members of the Party’s Executive Committee, seven were anarchists; only Comrades Minol and Peslin were communists. Due to differences of opinion, Tan Pingshan, Tan Zhitang and I refused to join this group. The newspaper they published was called *The Labourer*, with a circulation of three thousand copies. At this time, two workers’ organisations emerged in Guangzhou: the Machinery Workers’ Club and the Kuanshan [Foshan?] Workers’ Club. Kuanshan was a small town some fifty miles from Guangzhou. Each of these organisations had between forty and fifty members. As we were not members of the Party, we are unable to provide a detailed report on its affairs.
In January, Comrade Chen Duxiu arrived in Guangzhou, accompanied by Comrade B. They engaged in a very heated debate, concluding that we must rid ourselves of the anarchists; it was at this very moment that the anarchists withdrew from the Party. We then set about establishing a genuine Communist Party and declared the daily newspaper *The Socialist* to be the official organ for the Party’s propaganda work. There were nine Party members in total, including Chen Duxiu, Minol and Peslin.
Most regrettably, we were in dire need of funds. *The Labourer* had ceased publication, and the two workers’ unions had also been forced to close. This was because: firstly, of financial difficulties; and secondly, anarchist ideas had become widespread within the unions.
II. Current Situation
At present, our official propaganda organ is the daily *The Socialist*, which costs seven hundred yuan a month and is very difficult to sustain. In addition, we have a Marxist Study Group comprising over eighty members, twenty per cent of whom are law students, twenty per cent are students from higher and secondary educational institutions, and the remainder are members of various political and editorial groups. There are no workers in these groups, as it is difficult for us to establish contact with them. Establishing contact with the rank and file of soldiers is even more difficult. Ten per cent of Party members’ monthly income is set aside to support the monthly *Communist* and to cover the costs of the workers’ evening school.
In Guangzhou, we have established a School for Machinists. With the assistance of the school’s seven members of the Administrative Committee, we have propagated our principles and hope to increase the number of such schools. Furthermore, a Training Institute for Propagandists has been established under the direct leadership of the Propaganda Committee, and I have been appointed as its director. This institute is the principal institution for social education in Guangdong Province, and many of its instructors are our comrades. We hope to establish workers’ evening schools and schools for organising workers as annexes to the training institute. However, the existence of this institute depends on political connections, and we can only make use of these connections for the time being.
III. Future Proposals
1. Recruiting New Party Members
The number of Party members in Guangzhou is small, which means we must pay greater attention to this aspect of our work. However, at the outset of our work, we are reluctant to recruit new members rashly. The situation in Guangzhou is very different from that in other places. Leaving aside the masses of soldiers and workers for the moment, it can be said that university students are either sympathetic to secretive anarchism or are manipulated by the Kuomintang. Because of these difficulties, we must be particularly resolute. In the future, we intend to recruit new members from certain Marxist groups, from the School of Mechanical Workers, and from the Training Institute for Propagandists. Others may also wish to join our Party, but that is beyond our current plans and cannot be discussed at present.
2. Establishing Trade Unions
This issue is even more difficult, for over the past year the number of trade unions has risen to over a hundred; yet all these unions have been tainted by anarchism or are manipulated by the Kuomintang. There is no need to dwell on the anarchists, as there are only five or six of them in Guangzhou in total, three of whom are soon to leave for France. It should also be noted that, generally speaking, the anarchists have no organisation whatsoever. Our struggle against the Kuomintang is far more difficult. This is because the workers have long-standing ties with the Kuomintang; as early as ten years ago, they sought to spread their ideas and influence among the masses of workers and soldiers, and last year they incited workers to strike in support of General Chen. Many members of this party consider themselves socialists. The Central Committee of the Kuomintang has a Propaganda Department dedicated to liaising with workers, particularly metalworkers and machine operators.
Our primary task in organising the workers is to establish a mechanical workers’ union and a railway workers’ club. We are currently taking steps to organise a teachers’ union.
Although we have superficial ties with the Kuomintang, we are still making every effort to organise trade unions independently. At present, we have links with certain trade unions, such as the Barbers’ Union; we are taking effective measures to gain influence within the Machinists’ Union, and it appears our efforts will be successful.
3. Establishment of Workers’ Schools
(a) Trade Union Schools – The plan for establishing such schools is as follows: all trade unions are requested to send two representatives each to attend the school two or three times a week. The courses taught at the school include: trade union organisation, the history of the labour movement, and the current state of the labour movement in Europe and America, etc. We believe that after two or three months, this school will certainly achieve great success, and many trade unions will be satisfied with our work.
(b) Workers’ Evening Schools – At present, only one school is directly led by our comrades, whilst many schools are organised by workers associated with us; however, these schools are not particularly outstanding. The Mechanical Workers’ Union has the greatest influence in Guangzhou, and there are many supporters of ours within that union. Once we have achieved complete success at this school, we will set about working on the other schools.
4. Propaganda Work Among Peasants
Comrade Chu Nuocheng, a member of the Marxist Group, has founded *The New Village* in order to realise communist ideals; we must do everything in our power to help him expand its influence and reach.
5. Contacts with Soldiers
We have deliberately placed this section last, as there are no genuine soldiers in Guangzhou, and the soldiers in our army are either scoundrels or bandits. They are dangerous, and we must treat them with particular caution. Many officers are held in high regard amongst us; before long, we shall win them over to our side.
Declaration of the Chinese Labour Secretariat
Head, Zhang Teli and 26 members
September 1921
Capitalism in each of China’s large trading-ports is in a state of development and developments in any place throughout the world are linked. Everyday, new forms of production systems are destroying old production methods. Everyday, workers are being concentrated in the factories making them secondary to machines. Under these new forms of production systems ordinary male and female labourers are just the same as beasts of burden. They sell their labour power to capitalist expropriators in exchange for an extremely low wage. Their wage, earned through blood and sweat, for the most part cannot sustain their livelihood, and one can find cold and starving workers everywhere. No matter whether day or night, hundreds of thousands of small children must work in the textile factories etc. for shifts of usually over 12 hours a day. Under this exploitative system, their health is sacrificed and certainly they have no chance for education. From an extremely young age, they have already become developers of natural resources for both Chinese and foreign capitalists. They have become a new type of slave for the capitalists. If these painful work conditions are increased for this group of men, women, and children, it will certainly compel them to organize and turn on their masters - the exploiters - in order to strengthen the struggle. This is absolutely certain.
However, the labourers have no organization, or only meaningless, state-controlled union organizations. Naturally, this kind of unity cannot satisfy the needs of self-defense or resistance. Moreover, it is out of the question that workers could divide themselves into a Ningpo, a Guangdong, a Jiangbei group, etc. This is a method to divide them. How can one grasp this kind of organisation and struggle against the capitalists? Workers come only under one industry. They are not divided by region, whether they are male or female, old or young. All will be organised into one industrial association. Because only this single kind of organisation can be considered strong, we must adopt this organisational form. Only then can workers use their organisational strength to engage in struggle and work for the reform of their position.
The Chinese Labour Secretariat has been developed from a few labour organisations in Shanghai - China’s industrial centre. It is a general organisation that seeks to link up each labour association. Its tasks are to develop labour organisations, to propagate the necessity of such organisations among the workers, to unite with or reform existing organisations, to realise workers’ class-consciousness, and, moreover, to establish close relations between Chinese and foreign workers. But these undertakings need everyone’s participation. Therefore, we call on already existing labour organisations to join this Secretariat and advance together with us.
Companions of the labouring world! From experience abroad, we know that when we take up our tasks we shall certainly encounter many difficulties. The biggest difficulty is the lack of knowledge of our class. But the capitalist system in China is developing day-by-day. We are strongly convinced that the labourer’s organisation can also develop and increase its strength day by day. Moreover, we are convinced that the future shall be a workers’ world. China’s workers! We must lose no time in organising the labour association!
The Chinese Metalworkers Union in Canton
Red International Labour Unions
International Press Correspondence, n.77, September 8, 1922
The strongest and best organized union throughout China is without doubt the Metal Workers’ Union in Canton. This union particularly was involved in serious struggles. Thousands of its members have borne various punishments for their participation in the class struggles of the union. The union has been involved in many strikes and has not suffered a single defeat. Although it was founded but recently, and it lacks the leaders who can guide its work into the right channels, it has none the less recognized that the emancipation of the working class is the concern of the workers’ themselves.
The union was actually founded in the year of 1909. But at that time the development of the workers’ organizations was quite impossible in consequence of the difficulties placed in their way by the then existing government of the Manchu Dynasty. Until 1917, therefore, the union existed only in name. When China became a republic, the Canton metal workers called a general conference at Hong Kong in order to consider the question of reviving the activities of the union. In the course of a very short space of time, the metal workers of Canton collected about 100,000 Dollars. In a few years the union became the centre of the labor movement for the whole of China, including the district of Nang-Yuang.
The membership of the Union - in all numbering 156,000 - comprises the workers of Canton (16,900) as well as those of other towns. The union is divided into ten sub-sections, for draughtsmen, modellers, founders, turners, moulders, steel workers, copper workers, machinists, electro-technical workers, and stokers. The affairs of the union are transacted by an executive committee consisting of ten members, to which each of the ten sections elects three additional members. The executive committee elects a chairman and the members of the whole union elect a special union president.
The resources of the union are derived from the current contributions of the members. At the time of a strike, special collections are taken which serve to procure provisions for the strikers. A large building is at present in course of erection, which will contain the whole business premises of the union, and whose cost of construction will amount to about 100,000 dollars.
The union is endeavoring to instruct its members in the economic sciences, to found schools and set up a press. The executive committee has set itself the following tasks which are to be realized in the near future: 1. To found schools for mechanics. 2. To publish a monthly journal for mechanics. 3. To publish a weekly journal. 4. To build a model factory for mechanics. 5. To erect a hospital for workers. 6. To organize a technical school. 7. To establish a savings bank for workers. 8. A sanatorium for tuberculous workers. 9. To erect a convalescent home for aged people. 10. To organize Kindergartens.
During the last two years three strikes were carried out in the city of Canton. The first strike broke out in May, in consequence of the workers demanding higher wages. The strike ended successfully; the wages were increased by about 32.5%. The second strike took place in November 1920, for the purpose of supporting the province of Canton in its fight for self government. This strike also achieved its purpose. The third strike broke out in May 1921, when the workers demanded a further increase in wages and a reduction of the working hours. Here too, a complete victory was won in which the workers at the same time compelled the employers to make good the earnings lost during the strike. In this manner the Metal Workers’ Union of Canton conducts its propaganda, not only by word and writing, but also by deed.
The Canton Metal Workers’ Union, in spite of many a failing and errors, constitutes an important factor in the development of the labor movement in China. The union is still very young. It is still necessary to instill a true class-consciousness into the members of the union. Only then will it be able to unfold the banner of the social revolution, and bring the struggle to a successful conclusion by the abolition of capitalism.
The Labor Movement in China
By G. Voytinsky
International Press Correspondence, n.98, November 13, 1922
The beginning of the current year will be an ever-memorable period for the Labor movement in China.
On the 13th January of this year the Chinese seamen in Hongkong entered on a strike. The strike which extended to the workers in various branches of production, and drew into the struggle against English and inland capital over 100,000 men lasted for about two months and ended with the victory of the strikers.
The strike of Honkong was without a doubt an historical event for the Labor Movement of China from which the Chinese proletariat will count the further stages in its struggle against capital. The expression: “Before the Hongkong Strike” and “after the Hongkong strike” will from now on denote an epoch in the Chinese labor movement.
The response to this first organized and victorious uprising of the Chinese workers is still felt over the whole of the gigantic area of China.
Immediately after and even during the Hongkong strike, strike movements began in Canton and its surroundings; afterwards the strike wave swept to Shanghai, Hankau, the Peking-Hankau railway line, Tianjin and finally touched the Portuguese colony in South China and the island of Makao.
It was finally ended by the strike of the postal employees in Shanghai and a strike in one of the English tobacco factories.
The Hongkong strike of the Chinese seamen and dockworkers therefore merits the thorough attention of all who wish to have a correct understanding of the rise of the Chinese Labor movement. This movement will, under the Chinese conditions very rapidly become a gigantic factor in the struggle for the national independence of China, for its liberation from the chains of imperialism.
In any event the imperialists are giving this event their serious attention. The English press in China which hitherto every time the workers demanded better treatment or an increase of a copper cent in their wages, only sneered at the Chinese “Coolie”, at this “rabble”, this time treated the question of the strike with seriousness and uneasiness. The question was even brought up in the English parliament and many imperialists threatened the dispatching of troops into chinese towns. And in truth English imperialism had reason to fear. The Hongkong strike which commenced with the demand of the seamen for an increase of their wages by 30 to 48 per cent developed very quickly into an anti-imperialist action. Literally the whole of the Chinese population surrounded the strikers with an atmosphere of sympathy and support. The government of South China supported the strikers and endeavored to make use of the strike for the movement for national emancipation. The threats of the English governor in Hongkong frightened neither the strikers nor the Southern Chinese government.
We can judge from the English press for the period from January to March of this year of the character and extent of this strike.
The following is an approximate account derived from the piecing together of all the information taken from the English papers and periodicals appearing in China.
At first only 10,000 seamen went on strike. After some days the strikers began to leave Hongkong and to betake themselves to Canton i. e. into Chinese territory where they knew they would be in a friendly atmosphere and where they could be free from repression on the part of the English imperialists.
Immediately after the arrival of the first group of strikers, the working population of Canton and in particular the workers organizations, of which there are 150 in Canton, began to organize Relief activity for the strikers, housing room and provisions were supplied.
The government party of the South, “Gominden” organized meetings in favour of the strikers, where the idea of national independence and the struggle against the militarists of the north was proclaimed. The communist organisations also and the union of communist youth made use of the situation for the holding of a number of meetings and assemblies.
Meanwhile the number of strikers grew more and more and all ships which left hongkong proceeded to Canton. On the 1st February the number of strikers already amounted to about 40,000 and in the harbour of Hongkong there lay idle 166 ocean steamers with a tonnage of over 280,000. Entire workers organisations such as The Porters Guild, the Dockers and even the Hotel Workers’ Unions ceased work out of sympathy towards the striking seamen. It is interesting to note that this strike extended to the lower Chines officials and to the clerks in the offices of the English firms.
In one word the strike, in consequence of the peculiar conditions in China became not merely a fight against capital, but partook of the character of a national struggle.
The class character of the fight however became ever more clearer from day to day.
This was expressed in the first place by the fact that it was chiefly the Chinese worker organised in unions that were drawn into the struggle. Thus the Mechanics Union of Hongkong right from the beginning put forward the demand that the Seamen’s claims be granted and threatened to strike in case of refusal. This union jointly with the Railway workers union convened a full meeting at which it was decided, to appeal by measure of a circular to all Chinese railway workers to demand a wage increase of 30 per cent which should be devoted to the support of the striking seamen.
The railwaymen on the Kanton-Hangkou line made use of this opportunity and submitted to their administration a series of other demands, among, them, the regulation of the question of the engaging and dismissal of workers.
The Seamen’s strike found a response not only among the working masses of South China but also in the industrial cities of northern and central China.
On the Peking-Hangkou line, the railwaymen attached placards to the tenders of the locomotives bearing the inscription: “We are supporting the Seamen of Hongkong.”
The Typographical workers of Hongkong entered the strike “in order to prevent the imperialists from printing false reports upon the strike.” On the Peking-Mugden (the northern part of China and Manchuria), Peking-Seyan, and Peking-Hangkau lines a number of meetings were organized for the support of the strikers.
In Schanghai where the English attempted to introduce strike breakers, the trade union councils fought successfully against this attempt.
The above mentioned facts are of enormous importance for the Chinese labor movement. It is still a generally known fact that the working masses of China, like the whole of the Chinese population in general suffer from a provincial patriotism in the worst sense of the word. The printers in Shanghai who, for example are natives of Canton and are united according to their province maintain the most hostile relations with the workers in the same industry who happen to be natives of Peking or Shanghai. Here it is not only a question of difference of speech, but the general aversion of the Southerner to the Northerner also plays a part.
The strike of Hongkong issued for the first time in China the slogans of class solidarity on a national scale, slogans which proved to be stronger than the prejudices and traditions of provincialism. The class interests manifested themselves in such a concrete form, that this strike will leave behind it inerradicable traces in the uniting of the whole of the Chinese proletariat.
Not less important however is another factor of the Chinese Labor movement, which was realized for the first time in the Hongkong strike - that is the question of the recognition of the trade unions and the representation of the workers exclusively through the same.
The cause of the putting forward of this demand was the action of the English government who, immediately after the declaration of the strike dissolved the railwaymen’s union and declared it to be an illegal organisation. The seamen threupon grasped the full of importance of the attack directed against their union and declared in their negotiations with employers, that before they would proceed to Hongkong to discuss the question of the increase of wages, the recognition of the seaman’s union must form the basis of the negotiations and that the representatives of the union would conduct the negotiations with the capitalists. The seamen demanded at the same time the engagement of workers exclusively according to the rules of the union, as well as guarantees against subsequent penalization, and the reengagement of all strikers. The longer the strike lasted the more clearly formulated and far reaching became the demands of the seamen. To the demand for the increase of wages for instance there was added the demand that this increase should extend to those seamen who up to this time were at sea and that the increase should be paid from the 1st January of this year.
The demand for the recognition of the union and the engagement of workers through the union, brought for the first time in China the question of the class unity of the working class in its full extent, right to the forefront. As a result the system of craft unionism as also the system of workers private co-operative societies received a decided blow. The seamen of Hongkong during the strike perceived with perfect clearness, that they must have their own class organization and that the creation of an organizatory federation with the seamen’s unions of all other harbour towns in South, Central and North China was an absolute necessity. The delegations which were sent by the striking seamen to all Chinese ports prove this.
The whole experience of the Hongkong strike was naturally turned to good account not only by the seamen.
The strike possessed an enormous revolutionary importance for the whole Chinese proletariat. It may be assumed that the victory of the seamen has made a complete and final end of the idea of the invincibility of foreign, and chiefly English capital, among the working masses of China. In fact this victory was the occasion of a series of further strikes which we have already referred to which took place after the Hongkong strike.
The Hongkong strike makes the way clear for the formation of a labor movement through class organisations.
Upon examination of the above cited strikes a certain quality can be detected which is common to all. It is the fact which we mentioned at the outset: the Chinese labor movement is at the same time a movement for national emancipation.
The labor organizations are at present the pioneers in the struggle against imperialism. In any case the Chinese bourgeoisie merely joined in the struggle of the Chinese workers against foreign capital, but the initiative proceeded no longer from them as was for example the case in 1919 when the boycott of Japanese goods organized by the young offsprings of the Chinese Bourgoisie, by the Chinese students and the commercial world raged like a tornado over the whole of China.
This year, in addition to the Hongkong strike and also in a yet greater measure in the strike of Makoa there was a movement against foreign imperialism in China, and thereupon the Chinese bourgeoisie joined in this movement and afforded the strikers help.
When however the strike wave swept from the outer to the interior Chinese districts, the relations of the bourgeoisie to the working class naturally suffered. The book-printers strike in Canton serves as an example of this, which as a consequence of the repressions of the “revolutionary” government of the south was discontinued.
It is therefore not surprising that the resolution proposed at the Trade union congress in Canton at the beginning of the year regarding the recognition of the southern government was rejected by the workers.
The Chinese labor movement, as is to be seen from the above, in addition to the fight against the colonial policy of the imperialists. i. e. for national liberation, conducts the fight against the exploitation of labor on the part of inland capital. The fact that at present the labor organizations constitute the most active force in the struggle against foreign capitalism and imperialism in China proves the growth of these organizations and their continually growing importance in the political life of the Chinese people.
The Chinese working masses are therefore beginning to become conscious of their power and reveal their strength in organized form. This was the case recently when the railwaymen on the Peking-Hanghau line declared that they would stop the traffic should the northern troops be sent against south China.
It may be taken for granted that the organized Chinese proletariat will demand greater economic and political rights from the Chinese bourgeoisie the more it takes active part in the struggle against the common enemy of the Chinese people, against world imperialism.