Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/61

 these from world economic intercourse. The demand for national and economic independence put forward by the nationalist movements in the colonies serves to express the needs of bourgeois development in these countries. The growth of native productive forces in these colonies, therefore, causes an irreconcilable antagonism of interests between itself and world imperialism; for the essence of imperialism consists in using the varying levels of development of productive force in various parts of the economic world for the purpose of extracting monopoly excess profits.

'''II. Conditions of the Struggle.'''

The backwardness of the colonies is reflected in the motley character of the Nationalist Revolutionary movements against imperialism, which, in their turn, reflect the varying states of transition from feudal and feudal-patriarchal relations to capitalism. This variety of conditions makes its impression upon the ideology of these movements. To the extent that capitalism in the colonial countries arises and develops from feudal bases in hybrid imperfect and intermediary forms, which gives predominance, above all, to merchant capitalism, the rise of bourgeois democracy from feudal-bureaucratic and feudal-agrarian elements proceeds often by devious and protracted paths. This represents the chief obstacle for successful mass struggles against imperialist oppression as the foreign imperialists in all the backward countries convert the feudal (and partly also the semi-feudal, semi-bourgeois) upper classes of native society into agents of their domination (military governors—Tutchuns—in China, the native aristocracy and tax farmers—the Zimendars and Talugdars in India, the feudal bureaucracy in Persia, the agrarian—planter capitalist formations in Egypt, etc.).

For that reason the dominant classes in the colonies and the semi-colonial countries are incapable and unwilling to lead the struggle against imperialism as this struggle is converted into a revolutionary mass movement. Only where the feudal-patriarchal system has not decayed to such an extent as to completely separate the native aristocracy from the mass of the people, as among the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, can those upper classes take up the active leadership of the struggle against imperialist violence (Mesopotamia, Morocco, Mongolia).

In Moslem countries the nationalist movement at first expresses its ideology in religio-political watchwords of pan-Islamism, which enables diplomats and officials of the Great Powers to exploit the prejudices and ignorance of the masses of the people to combat this movement (British Imperialism's gains of pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism, the British plan of transferring the Khaliphate to India and the gambling of French imperialism with its "Moslem sympathies"), With the growth and expansion of the national liberation movement