Transnational anti-imperialist organisation of the interwar period
The League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression (; ) was a transnational anti-imperialist organisation in the interwar period. It has also been referred to as the League of Oppressed People, and the World Anti-Imperialist League, or simply and confusingly under the misnomer Anti-Imperialist League.
It was established in the Egmont Palace in Brussels, Belgium, on 10 February 1927, in presence of 175 delegates from around the world. It was significant because it brought together representatives and organisations from the communist world, and anti-colonial organisations and activists from the colonised world. Out of the 175 delegates, 107 were from 37 countries under colonial rule. The Congress aimed at creating a "mass anti-imperialist movement" at a world scale. The organisation was founded with the support of the Communist International (Comintern). Since 1924, the Comintern advocated support of colonial and semi-colonial countries and tried, with difficulties, to find convergences with the left-wing of the Labour and Socialist International and with bourgeois anti-colonial nationalist parties from the colonised world. Another stimulus to create a cross-political cooperation was the revolutionary surge in China since 1923, in which the nationalist Kuomintang was in a united front with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
According to Indian Marxist historian Vijay Prashad, the inclusion of the word "league" in the organisation's name was a direct attack on the League of Nations, which perpetuated colonialism through the mandate system.
At the 1955 Bandung Conference, Sukarno credited the League as the start of an eventually successful worldwide movement against colonialism.
1927 Brussels Conference.
Willi Münzenberg, the German communist and chair of the Workers International Relief, initiated the establishment of the League Against Imperialism. To this end, he invited many personalities from European and American Left and anti-colonial nationalists from the colonised world. Among those present in Brussels were emissaries of the Chinese Kuomintang party in Europe, Jawaharlal Nehru of the Indian National Congress, accompanied by Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Josiah Tshangana Gumede of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, Messali Hadj of the Algerian Étoile Nord-Africaine, and Mohammad Hatta of the Perhimpoenan Indonesia. Moreover, many activists from the European and American Left were present, such as Fenner Brockway, Arthur MacManus, Edo Fimmen, Reginald Bridgeman, and Gabrielle Duchêne, as well as intellectuals such as Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, and Albert Einstein.
Three main points were made in Brussels: the anti-imperialist struggle in China, interventions by the United States in Latin America and the "Negro revendications". The latter were presented at the tribune by the South African Gumede, the Antillean Max Clainville-Bloncourt of the Intercolonial Union, and Lamine Senghor, the president of the Defense Committee of the Negro Race, who denounced the crimes committed by the colonial administration in the Belgian Congo, concluding that:
Imperialist exploitation has as a result the gradual extinction of African races. Their culture is going to be lost. ... For us, the anti-imperialist struggle is identical as anti-capitalist struggle.
Messali Hadj, leader of the Algerian Étoile Nord-Africaine, requested the independence of all of North Africa. A manifesto was addressed "to all colonial peoples, workers and peasants of the world" calling them to organise themselves to struggle "against imperialist ideology".
After the conference, Mohammad Hatta, who was also elected in the Executive Committee of the League, said: "Our foreign propaganda in Brussels is the most important example of what we have done in this field so far." In September 1927, he was arrested by the Dutch authorities for sedition.
The conference saw conflict between representatives from organisations in Mandatory Palestine, Arab nationalist Jamal al-Husayni, Labour Zionist organisation Poale Zion, and the Palestine Communist Party (PCP). Bolshevik revolutionary Georgy Safarov angrily claimed that Zionism was a "British Imperialist Avant-Garde", which, according to Israeli historian Jacob Hen-Tov, reflected the Comintern's opposition towards Zionist activities in Palestine. After long deliberations by the Executive Council, the League ejected the Poale Zion delegation, with the PCP and Arab nationalists from Palestine, Egypt and Syria forming an anti-Zionist bloc for the vote.
The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier makes a small reference to this Congress in his novel "Reasons of State" (1974), in Chapter 7, Part 20. By a dialogue, in a train car, between the Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella, who attended the Congress, and The Student, a communist character in the novel.
1926–1931: difficulties.
The League Against Imperialism was first ignored then boycotted by the Socialist International. Jean Longuet, a member of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), criticised it, calling it "vague Sovietic chitchat" (""). On 12 April 1927, as the Kuomintang armies of Chiang Kai-shek approached Shanghai, their allies carried out a massacre of communists and workers. In December that year, the rightists crushed the Canton Commune. The First United Front between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and the CCP was terminated, sparking the Chinese Civil War, just as the struggle against the Empire of Japan grew crucial, leading up to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
Moreover, the 6th World Congress of the Communist International, in 1928, changed policy directions, denouncing "social fascism" in what it called the "third period of the labour movement". The new "social-fascist" line weighed on the 2nd Congress of the League, gathered in Frankfurt end of July 1929. Eighty-four delegates of "oppressed countries" were present, and the Congress saw a bitter struggle between communists and "reformist-nationalist bourgeois". Divided, the League was basically inoperative until 1935, when the 7th World Congress of the Comintern decided to allow itself to dissolve. Nehru and Hatta had already been excluded, and Einstein, honorary president, had resigned because of "disagreements with the pro-Arab policy of the League in Palestine". In any cases, the League remained composed mainly of intellectuals, and did not succeed in finding popular support.
1932–1936: failure.
The French section never had more than 400 members (in 1932). In 1933, the League published the first issue (out of 13) of the "Oppressed People's Newspaper", calls in favour of Tunisia in 1934 and of Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1937), which had few effects. The League was basically abandoned by the communists. In 1935, the League pooled its resources with the World Committee of Women Against War and Fascism (CMF; ), (whose non-communist sponsors in Britain included Sylvia Pankhurst and Charlotte Despard), and the West-African Union of Negro Workers (UTN; ), to protest repression throughout the European colonial empires.
The League remained the first attempt at an international anti-imperialist organisation, a brief later assumed by the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America headed by Moroccan leader Mehdi Ben Barka.
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