Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/91

 over production, and for the prevention of the extension of these estates. They must call upon the industrial proletariat to support the struggles of the agricultural labourers, and, on the other hand they must endeavour to bring the latter into the industrial councils movement.

In view of the enormous importance of the poor peasants for the revolutionary movement, communists must make it their business to join the organisations of the small peasants (agricultural, consumers' and credit co-operatives) in order to revolutionise them and to do away with the apparent conflict of interests between the hired labourers and the poor peasants, which are being exaggerated and put to the fore by the big landowners. The Communists must also concentrate on effecting a close co-operation between the movement and actions of the rural organisations and those of the urban proletariat.

Only by uniting all the revolutionary forces of city and village, the capitalist offensive will be successfully resisted, and, passing from the defensive to the offensive, the final victory will be won.

URING and after the war there developed among colonial and semi-colonial peoples a movement of revolt, which is still making successful progress against the power of world capital. The penetration and intensive colonisation of regions inhabited by black races is becoming the last great problem on the solution of which the further development of capitalism itself depends. French capitalism clearly recognises that the power of French post-war imperialism will be able to maintain itself only through the creation of a French-African Empire, linked up by a Trans-Sahara Railway, whilst America's financial magnates (who are exploiting 12,000,000 negroes at home) are now entering upon a peaceful penetration of Africa. How Britain, for her part, dreads the menace to her position in Africa is shown by the extreme measures taken to crush the Rand Strike. Just as in the Pacific the danger of another world war has become acute owing to the competition of imperialist powers there, so Africa looms ominously as the object of their rival ambitions. Moreover, the war, the Russian revolution, and the great movements of revolt against imperialism on the part of the Asiatic and Mussulman nationalities have roused the consciousness of millions of the negro race, whom capitalism has oppressed and degraded beyond all others for hundreds of years, not only in Africa, but perhaps even more in America.

2. The history of the negro in America fits him for an important rôle in the liberation struggle of the entire African