Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/65

 colonies formerly comprising the Russian Empire. Only a Soviet form of administration is able to guarantee the consistent fulfilment of the agrarian peasant revolution. The specific conditions of agriculture in certain countries of the East (artificial irrigation) maintained in the past by a peculiar organisation of collective co-operation on a feudal-patriarchal basis and disrupted by predatory capitalism, demands also a State organisation of such a type as would be able systematically and in an organised manner to serve public needs. As a consequence of special climatic and historical conditions, the co-operation of small producers in the East is destined to play an important rôle in the transitional period.

The objective tasks of colonial revolutions exceed the limit of bourgeois democracy by the very fact a decisive victory is incompatible with the domination of world imperialism. While the native bourgeoisie and bourgeois intelligentsia are the pioneers of colonial revolutionary movements, with the entry of proletarian and semi-proletarian peasant masses into these movements, the rich bourgeoisie and bourgeois landlords begin to leave it as the social interests of the masses assume prominence. The young proletariat of the colonies is still confronted by a prolonged struggle over a whole historical epoch, a struggle against imperialist exploitation, and against its own ruling classes, striving to secure in its own hands the monopoly of all the advantages of industrial and cultural development and to maintain the masses of the toilers in their previous "primitive" state.

The struggle to_secure influence over the peasant masses should prepare the native proletariat for the rôle of political leader. Only after having accomplished this preparatory work on its own training and that of the social classes closely allied to itself will it be possible to advance against bourgeois democracy, which, amidst the conditions of the backward East, bears a more hypocritical character than in the West.

The refusal of the Communists in the colonies to participate against imperialist oppression on the-pretext of alleged "defence" of independent class interest, is opportunism of the worst kind calculated only to discredit the proletarian revolution in the East. Not less harmful must be recognised the attempt to isolate oneself from the immediate and everyday interests of the working class for the sake of "national unity" or "civil peace" with bourgeois democracy. The Communist and working-class parties in the colonies and semi-colonial countries are confronted by a two-fold task: on the one hand, to fight for the most radical solutions of the problems of bourgeois democratic revolution, directed to the conquest of political independence, and, on the other, to organise the workers and peasants to fight for their special class interest, during which they must take advantage of the antagonism existing in the nationalist bourgeois democratic camp. In putting forward special demands, these parties stimulate and