This article was written at the time of the Korean War (1950-53), which pitted South Korea, supported by the forces of the United Nations led by the American General MacArthur, against North Korea, supported by the People’s Republic of China and the USSR. It concluded with an agreement that created two Koreas. Korea had been occupied by Japan since 1910 and was therefore a source of conflict between the two imperialist victors of the world conflict, the USA and the USSR, which had divided Korea between them. The article answers the question: ‘Would a Russia today that openly attacked the troops of the Western metropolises in the East, at the head of the Chinese, Koreans, Indochinese, Filipinos, and even Arabs, Egyptians and Moroccans, be on the main road of the revolution, as Lenin marked and foresaw it?’.

* * *

The picture of the advancing conflict cannot be presented without the peoples of the East being its protagonists.

These are grouped together in a powerful bloc around Russia and rise up against the Western bloc, which has at its head the great white colonial powers.

It is not only anti-Atlanticists who shout that this was the great Russian revolutionary perspective from the outset: an alliance, on one side, the working class of Western countries, on the other, the oppressed coloured peoples, together with the Soviet state, to overthrow capitalist imperialism. It is the journalists on the American side themselves who, recalling the struggle as it was set out thirty years ago, render homage to their enemy for the powerful historical continuity in its world strategy.

In September 1920, between the second and third Congresses of the 3rd International, firmly rooted in the directives of revolutionary Marxism, was held, as those journalists recall, the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku. Nearly two thousand delegates attended, from China to Egypt, from Persia to Libya.

It is Zinoviev, who moreover did not have the allure of a warrior, who reads the concluding manifesto of the proceedings, he is the president of the Proletarian International, and the men of colour respond to his voice with a single cry, raising swords and scimitars. ‘The Communist International calls on the peoples of the East to overthrow the oppressors of the West by force of arms; to this end, it proclaims a Holy War against them and designates England as the first enemy to be confronted and fought!’. But a similar cry of war is launched against Japan, against which the national insurrection of the Koreans is invoked, while Bolshevik hatred is also declared in Zinoviev’s proclamation against France and America, ‘against the American sharks who have drunk the blood of the workers of the Philippines’ ⁽¹⁾.

Although Zinoviev was executed fifteen years later, today we would simply stand by his challenge, and, according to the papers that quote that fervent appeal, Lenin would have already foreseen from that year that the way forward lay in intensifying the imperial rivalry between Japan and the United States; he would even have offered the latter a military base in Kamchatka ⁽²⁾ to strike the Japanese. We doubt this historical point, but the prospect was explicit (since the theses on the East of the 4th World Communist Congress at the end of 1922; and here we quote first-hand: ‘A new world war in the Pacific is inevitable if the revolution does not prevent it (...) the new war that threatens the world will not only drag in Japan, America and England, but also other capitalist powers such as France and Holland [the struggle in 1941 also had the Dutch East Indies as its theatre, although the metropolis was under German occupation] and everything suggests that it will be still more devastating than the 1914-1918 war’).

Would a Russia today that openly attacked the troops of the Western metropolises in the East, at the head of the Chinese, Koreans, Indochinese, Filipinos, and even Arabs, Egyptians and Moroccans, be on the main road of the revolution, as Lenin marked and foresaw it?

* * *

For the filthy bourgeois of our countries, the yellow peril and the red peril would be one and the same thing, and no other deity, besides the dollar, could save them. But the spectre of the yellow peril is even older. In the early years of the century, Europe was polarising itself into two enemy blocs that prepared the first conflagration of imperial rivalries. Tsarist Russia measured itself against Japan ⁽³⁾, the most advanced of the Asian peoples, precisely for supremacy over those same waters of the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan that are bloodied by today’s war, and European military prestige suffered a serious blow. In fact, the yellow people of Tokyo were, more than the whites of Moscow, advanced on the path to capitalist-type equipment.

That Wilhelm, who was later described as the madman instigator of the first great war, had a passion for painting at the time; and a painting of his showed Germany, clad in Valkyrie armour, summoning the white peoples and pointing out to them the livid light of the Asian threat on the distant horizon. However, the alignment of the powers did not follow the prediction of the emperor who had daubed it: Germany had only Turkey, a Mongol people, on its side; the Russians, French, British, and Italians threw themselves upon it, and the Great Entente was joined by not only America but even Japan and China from other continents.

The simplistic picture of a conflict between human races, descending from opposite continents to conquer hegemony over the world, was therefore incomplete; and in vain it tempts today’s writers, who even allow themselves to imagine a resurgent Carthage taking revenge on Rome, of the nascent uprising from Korea, Tibet, and Indochina spreading throughout the coloured Mediterranean world.

In the Second World War, Germany, having risen up in arms and once again accused of provocation, sees itself opposed, in the name of freedom, by all the rulers and oppressors of the coloured races. Only yellow Japan comes to its side. As for Soviet Russia, it does not initially condemn the declaration of war contained in the ‘Anti-Comintern Pact’ that had united Germany and Japan. It would only enter the war with the latter pro forma, and after the burial had taken place.

With the former an agreement is drawn up, the content of which is precisely the skin of an ‘oppressed nationality’, that of Poland. It takes a considerable effort to see events in the light of that vision, which a third bourgeois columnist attributes to Lenin: the phase of revolutionary national wars of the 19th century – then the phase of revolutionary class wars in Europe and victory in Russia – and finally the third phase: simultaneous national revolutions in the East, class revolutions in the imperialist countries. It takes even greater effort to fit the second period of the last world war into the anti-Western and anti-metropolitan strategy: the holy wars that Moscow was supposed to lead are silenced, and an open alliance, and much more than a few bases, is given to the number one enemy of the revolution, Great Britain, and to the number two enemy, which in that time took its centuries-old rank away from it: North America. In order to save these imperial centres and prevent them from cutting off their own tentacles with which they hold the globe and its coloured peoples captive through Suez and Panama, the flower of the Soviet proletarian youth is thrown into the furnace, signing up to arm it with bills upon bills of indebtedness to world capital ⁽⁴⁾, in lend-lease and loans, or worse still, in gifts.

Today, with the collapse of the German centre, which did not rule over any extra-continental peoples but, alone, attempted to overcome the unified world control of the sea and the air, this remains uncontested in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon metropolises. Only now is it proposed to the vast, but semi-defenceless, masses of the peoples of the East to attack them, holy war is being proclaimed once again, and the forest of scimitars is being invoked against the ruthless threat of a rain of atomic bombs, fanatical but ignorant fighters delude themselves about the sycophantic and treacherous retreat, exposed by the British press itself, of motorised divisions and air fleets in the face of handfuls of men advancing on foot.

Something is fundamentally wrong in all this.

* * *

A small man with a short blond moustache, a calm voice and with bright and clear eyes reads his theses on the national and colonial question from the Kremlin tribune and resolves it in new clarity amid the admiration of the representatives of the proletariat and Marxism around the world. Yes, the Second International had understood nothing of this; it had condemned imperialism, but then had fallen into its clutches because it failed to understand that all forces had to be mobilised against it: in the motherland, the defeatism of social insurrection; in the colonies and semi-colonial countries, national revolt as well. It had fallen into the deception of defending the fatherland, its traitorous leaders had eaten from the plate of imperialism, inviting the workers of modern industry to accept a few crumbs from the ferocious exploitation of millions of people overseas.

Today, we, the Communist International, we, Soviet Russia, we, the communist parties that in all advanced nations strive towards the conquest of power, in declared war against the bourgeoisie and its social-democratic servants, are forming an alliance in the countries of the East between the very young workers’ movement, the nascent communist parties and the revolutionary movements that seek to drive out the imperialist oppressors. In a discussion, in the light of our doctrine, we have decided not to speak of bourgeois democratic movements, but of revolutionary nationalist movements, since we cannot admit alliances with the bourgeois class but only with movements that stand on the terrain of armed insurrection.

The word bourgeois was too strong, but nationalist was just as strong: old socialists such as Serrati and Graziadei expressed their perplexity, one naively, the other subtly.

Lenin’s analysis continued calmly, without any perplexity whatsoever. The theses contain his unequivocal data. First of all, ‘a clear understanding of the historical and economic circumstances’ is necessary. Without this fundamental guide, nothing can be understood of the Marxist method, which does not suffer from ideological rules that are good for all times. I, said Serrati, had to fight for six years against the nationalist infatuation with Trieste, which had to be liberated from the Germans, an infatuation that was said to be revolutionary. How can I applaud the Malay national-revolutionary? ⁽⁵⁾ But, historically speaking, a national struggle in Trieste in the situation of 1848 would have had proletarian support because it was revolutionary, in the midst of a Europe that had to emerge from the upheavals of the anti-feudal revolution: thus for the Leninist progressive national wars in Europe until 1870. By 1914, wars were imperialist and reactionary, regardless of whether they have as their theatre the same border, as banner the same ideology; it is the stage of social development that interests us Marxists.

In which historical and economic circumstances did Lenin speak at the Kremlin, and Zinoviev a few months later in Baku? The theses engrave it.

‘The essential aim of the Communist Party is to fight against bourgeois democracy, whose hypocrisy must be exposed’. This hypocrisy conceals the reality of social oppression in the bourgeois world between employer and worker, and the reality of the oppression by the few large imperialist states over their colonies and semi-colonies. In order to establish our strategy in the East, Lenin’s theses reiterate a series of cornerstones. ‘We must put an end to the national illusions of the petty bourgeoisie about the possibility of peaceful coexistence and equality between nations under the capitalist regime’. ‘Without our victory over capitalism, neither national oppression nor social inequality can be abolished’. ‘The current world political situation [1920] puts the dictatorship of the proletariat on the agenda; and all events in international politics inevitably converge around this centre of gravity: the struggle of the international bourgeoisie against the Soviet republic, which must rally around itself, on the one hand, all the advanced workers’ class movements in all countries and, on the other, the national emancipation movements in the colonies and oppressed nations’. The task of the Communist International must take into account ‘the tendency towards the realisation of a world economic plan, the regular implementation of which would be controlled by the victorious proletariat of all countries’.

Other fundamental points underpin the ‘Eastern’ tactic. They could not be more reassuring. ‘The problem of transforming the national proletarian dictatorship (which exists in only one country and therefore cannot exert a decisive influence on world politics) into an international proletarian dictatorship (which would be achieved by at least several advanced countries capable of decisively influencing world politics) becomes topical’. And above all: ‘Workers’ internationalism requires the subordination of the interests of the proletarian struggle in one country to the interests of this struggle throughout the world, and, on the part of the nations that have defeated the bourgeoisie, consent to the greatest national sacrifices with a view to the overthrow of international capital’.

With all this firmly established, and with confidence in the anti-capitalist revolutionary struggle in all bourgeois countries, even the most radical among the European left-wing Marxists shouted their approval of the conclusions of the theses and the speaker’s ironclad dialectic.

* * *

On this basis, Lenin’s historical context can be established in a more authentic manner than that which suits the mainstream press.

The way of life of human associations over the long millennia does not make the peoples of different countries directly dependent on each other, who at times do not meet or even know each other. But when the era of capitalism begins, methods of production and communication have already linked all parts of the earth. The political revolution against feudal powers leaps violently from one end of Europe to the other; there are no longer national histories but a single history, at least for the entire Atlantic part of the continent. The proletarian class appears on the historical scene and fights with the bourgeoisie in its revolutions, participates in a united front for liberal and national conquests, and offers the new masters of society the irregular troops of insurrections and the regular troops of the great wars of national settlement. This is a historical fact, and the 1848 Manifesto itself still makes it a strategic norm for given countries and peoples, such as those still oppressed by Austria and Russia.

There is no need to hide the fact that national action means class coalition: in that phase, capitalists and workers against feudal lords.

Throughout the European field, Marxism closes this phase in 1870. In the Paris Commune, as moreover it had attempted in 1848, the working class denounces the national bloc, fights alone and seizes power, long enough to show that its form is dictatorship.

Since then, anyone in the European field who still invokes national blocs between classes is a traitor: the Third International, the Russian Revolution, Leninism, have put an end to this debate once and for all: in theory, in organisation, in armed struggle.

In the East, regimes are still feudal. What will development be like? Colonial powers have brought their industrial products, and in a few cases their plants, to the coastal margins; local craftsmanship is declining and its elements are pouring into the interior, into agricultural labour: a most wretched peasantry is subject to direct exploitation by indigenous petty lords and indirect exploitation by world capital. Where a local industrial and commercial bourgeoisie arises, it is linked to and dependent on the foreign bourgeoisie. A bloc against foreigners is difficult to form; only in certain countries (such as Morocco) do the feudal chiefs and large landowners themselves join it; in general, the impetus comes from the peasants, from the few workers; and to them is joined, as in Europe in the Romantic era, the category of the intellectuals, divided between traditionalist xenophobia and the attractions of science and white technology. This shapeless mass rises up; its movement creates serious difficulties for the European capitalist class, it has two enemies: the people of the colonies, the proletariat at home.

How do we think that a system of social economy in the East will arrive at socialism? Is it necessary, as in Europe, to wait for a bourgeois revolution with its national movements supported by the working and poor masses, and only then, for the establishment of a local class struggle, of the workers’ movement, of the struggle for power and the Soviets? With such a road, the world proletarian revolution would take centuries and centuries.

In a manner more or less clear, the delegates from the East in 1922 said no, that they did not want to go through capitalism with its infamies, now no longer masked by popular and nationalist parades, but to align themselves with the world revolution of the working classes in the capitalist countries and implement the dictatorship of the non-possessing masses and the Soviet system in their own countries as well.

The Western Marxists accepted the plan. It meant that wherever in the East a struggle breaks out against the local feudal agrarian or theocratic regime, and at the same time against the colonial metropolises, local and international communists would enter into the struggle and support it. Not to establish a bourgeois, autonomous, and local democratic regime, but rather to unleash the permanent revolution, which will only end with a Soviet dictatorship. Marx and Engels, Zinoviev recalled, spreading his arms wide to Serrati’s surprise, always said so: they said it for Germany in 1848!

And so the series of three periods is as follows: support for national insurrections in the metropolises, until 1870. Class insurrectionary struggle in the metropolises, 1871–1917: one sole victory, in Russia. Class struggle in the metropolises and national-popular insurrections in the colonies, with revolutionary Russia at the centre, in a single world strategy that would only stop at the overthrow EVERYWHERE of capitalist power, in Lenin’s time.

The economic and social problem, in a similar perspective, was overcome by the guarantee contained in the ‘unitary world economic plan’. The proletariat, master of power and modern means of production in the West, shares this with the economies of backward countries through a ‘plan’ which, like that already pursued by capitalism today, is unitary, but unlike the latter, does not seek conquest, oppression, extermination, and exploitation.

* * *

The prospect of a possible third world war today IS NOT THIS.

First of all, the concept of worldwide interdependence of struggles was discarded as a doctrine, as a strategy, as an organisation. The Presidium of the Communist International, violating its statutory powers, decided on 15 May 1943 to dissolve the organisation, claiming that international decision-making on the problems of a single country is no longer possible, the situation since 1920 having changed, and each national party must be autonomous. The split of the Communist Party of the United States in November 1940 is approved in the decision! But this had happened in the face of the partition of Poland with Hitler! It is then said that the rupture of the worldwide bond is necessary because, while the parties in the Hitlerian countries must wage a defeatist struggle, those in enemy countries must work for the national bloc: the official words were: ‘to support the war effort of the governments with all their strength’.

Lenin’s grand path, his grand perspective, has therefore fallen, since in the Western field, and no longer in a colony or semi-colony, a bloc is formed, not with nationalist groups rebelling against a government at home or abroad, but with the established, bourgeois, capitalist, imperial government, possessor of overseas colonies. The formula of the alliance of that time, which was crystal clear, has fallen and been overturned: a league of all the enemies of the great capitalist powers of the West.

History is never simple and easy to decipher, and the alignment of states, now that the task is changing again and it is to disrupt (as was done with Hitler) the internal strength of the warmongering governments of America and Europe, will be more or less complicated, as it was on the eve of the other two wars.

Meanwhile, the decision on the dual role of the parties in various states always comes from that Kremlin garrison, which dared to dissolve itself.

But we no longer have, as in Lenin’s programme, the fall of capitalism in America and England as the goal of the alliance of oppressed classes and oppressed peoples. Thus, every path to the ‘international proletarian dictatorship’ and every possibility of that ‘world proletarian economic plan’, which alone could solve the problem of ‘skipping’ the bourgeois regime in China, and not creating it to the benefit of the Chiang Kai-sheks of yesterday, the Mao Tse-tungs of tomorrow (or the Titos of today) is missing. Everything has been renounced, since the tortuous path that allows for ‘peaceful coexistence’ under the capitalist regime is opposed to the main road; because the interests of a first proletarian nation are no longer subordinated to those of victory in the more advanced countries, and the ‘national sacrifices’, demanded and promised by Lenin, are denied, giving way to a common national and state egoism.

Under these terms, as it was base opportunism, perfectly analogous to that of the Second International which in 1914 wanted national blocs, total support for the governments at war in the anti-German alliance, thus, with all Leninist guarantees destroyed and renounced, the national alliance in the countries of the East has become so, as has the ‘bloc of the four classes’ which embraces the local bourgeois of industry and commerce and commits them to a long future of capitalist economic activity. Support for Mao Tse-tung’s regime in war is as reactionary as it was for Roosevelt’s regime, and as was – in Lenin’s time – support for the Kaiserist empire or the French Republic in war.

* * *

The Marxist left warned in time that the broad outline of the historical perspective of the revolutionary class does not change, from the moment it appears in society as a result of new productive forces until it reaches the definitive dispersion of the old relations of production.

But the majority of the working class today seems to follow the school that claims to change the great perspectives, under the pretext that the study of new situations and experiences requires it. Revisionism at the end of the last century defended itself in no different a manner, assuming that the peaceful forms of bourgeois development suggested abandoning the means of armed struggle and dictatorship that Marx predicted.

The thirty years following Lenin’s death could have taught us anything, except that global interdependence, and that of established states and social economies, has slowed down. If this were the case, how could Russian leaders have embraced and committed themselves at Yalta, at Potsdam, to the most modern policy of war, which has wanted the vanquished, annihilated and destroyed on the world stage, under the true international dictatorship of the victorious bloc? Which has elevated the deception, even greater than that of the 1918 Wilsonian League, of the United Nations, in whose palace, while blood flows on the fields of Korea, sparkling wine flows in the glasses of those who toast with calm smiles, the adversaries of the new holy wars?

It therefore makes no sense to propose to the working class a perspective that confines it to the narrow scope of national issues.

The theory that swaps the global socialist plan for socialism in one country, which argues that it is possible for not only hypothetical proletarian states to coexist with bourgeois states, but also for opposing centres of established military power to coexist before global capitalism is defeated, this theory is nothing different from the ‘petty-bourgeois theory of the legal equality of nations under the capitalist system’ denounced in Lenin’s 1920 theses; nothing has changed from the programmes of the League for Peace and Freedom of Mazzini, of Kossuth, denounced in Marx’s 1864 theses.

Since Capital is less than ever willing to renounce its unitary world plan for power, and moves to tighten the chains upon the working class of all ‘prosperous’ and poor countries again, and the subjugation of smaller states and the immense colonial masses, any theory of coexistence and any great global agitation for peace amounts to complicity with that plan of starvation and oppression.

Any attempt at a holy war as a call to defend against an assault that seeks to upset that impossible balance, made after decades and decades of renouncing the supreme demand to destroy the imperialist centres from their foundations, can have no real content other than the sacrifice of the efforts of partisans and rebels for the purposes of imperialism, which will exploit them no differently from the American one presented in 1943 as one of the champions of world freedom.

But the majority of the global working class, however, is currently falling for the deception of the campaign for Peace, and perhaps tomorrow it would fall for that of a new and futile partisan sacrifice; it is not returning to its autonomous revolutionary perspective, as it did after 1918.

Perhaps we need to wait for the other Lenin, and it was Lenin, as the cold Zinoviev slipped out saying in a moment of lyricism, ‘l’homme qui vient tous les cinq-cents ans’?

Five hundred years, now that major magazines draw their enlightenment, for a no less coarse public, from cycles as short as Ike’s rise from ‘scrum half’ to Atlantic generalissimo, or the changing of the guard in the alcoves of political leaders?

The path of communism, which does not end in the life cycle of men or even of generations, will not have need of so much, because the anti-fascist and anti-German Western bloc of yesterday and the Eastern bloc of today, self-styled anti-capitalist, which no longer pursues a world socialist republic but a national and popular democracy, more false than that proclaimed by Washington, let it be given the same definition that Lenin gave to social nationalism in 1914: treason. And let it be given by a reconstituted unity of organisation and struggle of the exploited and oppressed of all countries.

And until then, there is no peace that is desirable, there is no war that is not infamous.