Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/68

 The Washington Conference was an attempt to obviate this danger, but, as a matter of fact, it succeeded only in rendering the antagonisms between the imperialists more profound and acute. The recent conflict between Wu-Pai-Fu and Chang-Tso-Lin in China was a direct consequence of the failure of Japanese and Anglo-American capitalism to harmonise their interests at Washington. The new world war, which menaces the world will affect not only Japan, America and England, but also other capitalist Powers (France, Holland, etc.) and threatens to be even more destructive than the war of 1914–1918.

The task of the Communist Parties in the colonial and: semi-colonial countries on the Pacific Coast is to conduct an extensive propaganda to explain to the masses the oncoming danger, to call upon them to take up an active struggle for national liberation and to teach them to regard Soviet Russia as the bulwark of all the oppressed and exploited masses.

The Communist Parties in the imperialist countries, America, Japan, England, Australia and Canada, in view of the threatening danger, must not limit themselves merely to a propaganda against war, but must exert all their efforts to remove all the disrupted factors from the labour movement in their respective countries and to prevent the capitalists taking advantage of national and racial antagonisms.

This factor is the immigration question and cheap coloured labour.

The system of indentured labour, to this very day is the main system of recruiting coloured workers for the sugar plantations of the Southern Pacific, to which workers are transported from China and India. This fact has compelled the workers in the imperialist countries to demand anti-immigration laws against coloured workers, as is the case in America and Australia. These prohibition laws deepen the antagonism between white and coloured workers and breaks and weakens the unity of the labour movement.

The Communist Parties of America, Canada and Australia must conduct an energetic campaign against anti-immigration laws, and must explain to the masses of the proletariat in these countries that these laws, by arousing national hatreds in the last resource damages them.

On the other hand, the capitalists desire to repeal the anti-immigration laws in order to maintain the free import of cheap labour, and thus force down the wages of the white workers. This attempted offensive of the capitalists can be successfully everted only by the immigrant workers being absorbed in the existing white labour unions. At the same time, the demand must be put forward for raising the wages of coloured workers to the level of white workers. Such tactics will expose the plans of the capitalists and, at the same time, clearly show to the coloured workers that the international proletariat has no racial prejudices.

In order to carry out these tactics, the representatives of