Panel 1: Building the Anticolonial State (Online, 14:00-16:00 BST)

Christy Thornton (New York University)

Joshua Simon (Johns Hopkins University)

Esmat Elhalaby (University of Toronto)

Panel 2: Armed Resistance in the History of Anticolonial Thought (16:30-18:30 BST, In-person, University of London, exact location TBD)

Noaman G. Ali (University of Bath)

Jude Lal Fernando (Trinity College Dublin)

Sign-up here and stay tuned for more details soon: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScZHmncPbdMhUJ7uKxVVn0hGKFLwvrwsiovL8Uk0EG5XTZ0rg/viewform?usp=header

On behalf of the London History of Anticolonial Political Thought Project Organising Committee:

Peter Morgan (Cambridge)
Calyx Palmer (KCL)
Chibueze Pipi (KCL)
Tanroop Sandhu (KCL)
Ajmal Waqif (Birkbeck)

Advisory Board
Chloe Ireton (UCL)
Humeira Iqtidar (KCL)
Leslie James (QMUL)
Layli Uddin (QMUL)
Waseem Yaqoob (QMUL)
Musab Younis (Oxford)

I am spoken to of reconciliation. I am spoken to of clemency. Of concord. Of amnesty. Of rediscovered peace, in the absence of appeasement. In the absence of justice and truth.

— Maïssa Bey, Puisque mon cœur est mort (2010)

Reconciliation is one of the most frequently mobilised terms in postcolonial political discourse. It is offered as a promise of closure, a moral endpoint, a signal that historical violence has been sufficiently addressed. But how can reconciliatory dialogues function without attention to the epistemic hierarchies that structure who can speak, who can be heard, and whose suffering counts? Reconciliation requires that the parties involved be able to speak and be heard as credible subjects, that their accounts of violence be granted equal standing. A reconciliatory dialogue can only begin once an epistemic ground exists that is strong enough to bear the weight of centuries of colonial domination, dispossession, and racialised violence. Without such footing, reconciliation collapses into rhetoric. It asks those who have been dispossessed not only to forgive and forget, but to do so on terms that continue to deny the intelligibility of their experience.

Decolonial philosophers such as Charles Mills and Miranda Fricker define epistemic injustice as the systematic devaluation of certain subjects as knowers because of their race, origin, or their position within structures of power. What is at stake here is not only silence but credibility: voices may speak and histories may be told, but they are stripped of the authority that would allow them to count as truth and knowledge.1 This injustice is sustained through racial ignorance, what José Medina, in “Epistemic Injustice and Epistemologies of Ignorance” (2017), details as “the active and contentful form of ignorance, one that creates privileges and epistemic harms by protecting the epistemic agency of some and by blocking the agency of others”.2 Epistemic injustice thus emerges as a direct effect of Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge model, in which power exerts hegemony by controlling truth and dictating what is recognised as knowledge and what is not.

Epistemic injustice is particularly acute in the context of France and Algeria. More than sixty years after independence, there is still no consensus on how to narrate the 132 years of French colonisation. Emmanuel Macron has described it as a “love story” (2022). Others frame it as a nostalgic past that ended with a war euphemised as “events.” Some insist it was a mutually beneficial partnership that simply ended violently. And always the same refrain: before the Algerian War (1954-1962), there was peace between settlers and native Algerians.

If reconciliation requires an equal epistemic footing, the question becomes where such footing can be built. In his 1976 lectures, Michel Foucault calls for a “genealogical investigation” that seeks to excavate “subjugated knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledge, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the level of cognition or scientificity”.3 Yet, his genealogical project has been criticised, most notably by Gayatri Spivak, as another form of epistemic silencing, one that risks reproducing the hierarchies of credibility it claims to dismantle. Foucault himself acknowledges this danger, emphasising that scholarly genealogical investigations remain vulnerable to reinscription within hegemonic discourse.

It is at this impasse that literature can emerge as intervention. Literature allows voices to appear without meeting prevailing standards of evidence, coherence, or authority. Literature, with its polysemic and dialogic use of language, attacks the very foundation of single-truth hegemonic discourse and the very structures that assign credibility. As Sarah Colvin argues in Epistemic Justice and Creative Agency (2022), literature “provide(s) new imaginative possibilities” and holds “a unique capacity to represent things that are unsayable at the time of their production, and to question, challenge, and disturb the very categories through which knowledge has been constituted”.4 It is in this sense that I wish to read Zahia Rahmani’s autofictional novel Moze (2003); as a literary project that intervenes directly in epistemic injustice in the French–Algerian context.

At the centre of the novel stands Moze, Rahmani’s father, a harki, one of the many Algerian auxiliaries who fought alongside the French army during the Algerian War. The term harki, initially a military designation, quickly became synonymous with “traitor.” After the March 1962 ceasefire, it came to signify an entire community when approximately 100,000 harkis fled to France to escape retaliatory violence, only to be subsequently abandoned by the nation that asked them to betray their nation. Denied refugee or repatriated status, many harkis were placed in militarised resettlement camps, often located on the outskirts of French towns and forests, where families lived in isolation for decades. The harki identity thus became one of double rejection: expelled from Algeria and never truly accepted by France.

On 11 November 1991, after decades of silence and non-memory, Moze commits suicide by drowning in a lake before a World War I memorial. His daughter, the unnamed narrator, sets out to retrace the life and death of a father burdened by his harki condition. Through her narrative of fragmented testimonies, she does not seek to recover historical or academic truth, nor to establish her father’s innocence, in which she does not believe. Instead, her aim is to reclaim and restore the very possibility of speech that power had buried: “It must be written. One must speak,” she exclaims in a volcanic tirade:

Speak of what took place! Speak with those who lived it. Speak with them to silence violence, speak so that words may exercise their right, speak so that faces may exist, speak so that tears may finally come, speak so that man may kill no more, speak so that contempt may cease, speak so that man may be reconciled, speak so that weapons may melt away (…) Speak to tell memory, speak so as no longer to feel ashamed, speak so as to be able to look at oneself, speak so as no longer to be afraid, speak so as no longer to be alone, no longer to suffer, speak so as no longer to hate, speak to want to live, to no longer forget one’s father. Speak so as no longer to sully the graves. To silence death….5

Liberating speech becomes an imperative, a defiance against the epistemic dispossession endured by her father, smothered by a silence that marked his very existence: “Moze died in silence and in shame (...) He did not speak. He stopped. He will speak no more. Of what killed him, of what he understood, he said nothing”. Her father died without ever speaking about what ultimately drove him to suicide: “I know that this man was even incapable of saying that he could not speak of what he had experienced” (132). But Moze’s silence is not to be misread as an individual failure. His silence was systemically produced, the outcome of an epistemic violence forced onto harkis, and Algerians at large, after the war.

This violence operates not only through exclusion but through suspension from the very category of the human: “Moze had been downgraded to the status of non-existent in the national registry. Humiliated like the dog he had always been. His mutilated body was not enough, the Algerian army was looking for him, and France ridiculed him again” (48). Here, the narrator exposes how postcolonial regimes of power strip individuals of epistemic credibility through dehumanisation. Moze is described as a being of nothingness: “Neither nomad, nor repatriated, nor wanderer, nor exiled… He was a sort of man” (23).

I read Moze’s suicide as the culmination of this process, the endpoint of what Medina describes as “epistemic death.” Subjected to both self-silencing and enforced silencing, Moze occupied a position in which epistemic death saturated his being even before it killed him: “He was dead before his death,” his daughter observes. “His sobs were his death moaning” (254). His drowning in a lake, a liminal space, materialises the condition he inhabited throughout his existence: suspended between visibility and erasure, France and Algeria, human and non-human.

But if Moze’s life ends in epistemic death, Rahmani’s writing begins precisely there. Through literature, death is no longer a final limit but the condition under which a frozen, dead speech can re-enter circulation. The narrator explicitly positions herself as “speech of death,” declaring, “I am speech of death, swearing not an oath of death, but swearing with death as speech. Moze offered me his” (24).

Let us linger on the symbolism of death in Amazigh mythology to understand the regenerative potential of Rahmani’s literary project. Zahia Rahmani’s family hails from Kabylia, a region home to one of Algeria’s many ethnic minorities grouped under the umbrella term Imazighen. In Amazigh cosmology, death is cyclical and generative. The Taqbaylit saying “l’mut tella”, death exists, defines death as a continuation of life, disrupting the Western life/death binary that underpins dominant epistemologies. Within this cosmic vision, Moze’s drowning acquires an alternative meaning, demanding to be read otherwise. Indeed, in Taqbaylit, aman (water) and iman (soul) share the same root, and in the Kabylian burial ritual of asensi, the washing of the body in spring water initiates the circulation of the soul. The process of cleaning is accompanied by singing and the recitation of oral literature meant to depict the generative effects of death. Through this performative ritual of water and words, the timsensit, the woman who cleanses, is meant to welcome the dead one’s speech and transmit it to their loved ones, sustaining the circulation of words so they do not stagnate and crystallise into epistemic harm.

By dying in a lake, Moze has already begun the process of revitalisation. It is his daughter’s role to continue it, following Amazigh tradition. She indeed situates her project within this tradition when she describes her writing as “an open testamentary execution (which) began with (Moze’s) salute to the dead” (24). Throughout the novel, Moze’s daughter performs the ritual of asensi, positioning herself as timsensit. By becoming “speech of death,” the narrator turns epistemic death against itself, using a transgressive ritual, one forbidden both by French secular rationalism and by Algerian Islamic prohibitions against necromancy.

But epistemic resistance must not end at the liberation of speech. The revitalised dead-speech ought to be relayed in order to challenge mainstream discourse. It must rub shoulders with epistemic hegemonies and canonical texts in order to disrupt and destabilise them. This is precisely what Rahmani does in the third section of the novel, titled “JUSTICE,” where the narrator is summoned before a French commission tasked with reparation. By bringing the harki narrative into the institutional space of the tribunal, the narrator confronts the very structures that once neutralised it.

Entering this space, the narrator frames her testimony as a confession: “Everything I intend to say, I will say it, I swear to tell the whole truth (…) I am going to tell the truth” (108). This declaration recalls the foundational text of French autobiographical writing, Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), which he similarly opens by announcing: “I want to show my fellow men a man in all the truth of nature.” By invoking Rousseau in this intertextual promise, the narrator positions herself as his unlikely successor, seeking to forcefully inscribe the harki narrative within French history. Although, this promise of confession is quickly destabilised. As the trial unfolds in a fragmented, absurd, and unresolved manner, another European literary tradition comes into view: Kafka’s The Trial (1925). Beginning with Rousseau’s faith in objective truth and ending with Kafka’s bureaucratic absurdity, Rahmani frames her narrative around two opposing European literary traditions, placing the harki experience in direct conversation with the European canon.

This subversive insertion of the harki narrative into institutional space generates what José Medina terms “epistemic friction.” In “Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism” (2011), Medina defines epistemic friction as the condition for the insurrection of subjugated knowledges, a friction capable of producing counter-histories and counter-memories that persistently disrupt dominant perspectives.6 In Rahmani’s novel, however, epistemic friction is pushed to its paroxysm: the narrator’s testimony does not merely seek to stand alongside official history as an alternative account of the harki experience, but rather to challenge its authority and coherence outright.

This challenge is staged formally within the text itself. The narrator’s confession unfolds amid paratextual insertions of official historical documents—telegrams, military correspondence, administrative records—but she does not simply present them on the page, she actively rewrites them. After retransmitting Louis Joxe’s infamous 1962 telegram, which prevented the harkis from seeking refuge in France following Algeria’s independence, the narrator crosses out half of it. What remains of the gutted telegram is a single sentence: “Notice to the population: request to urgently remind the High Commissioner.” Official history is not merely corrected, it is disassembled, turned to ridicule. In doing so, the narrator overturns the hierarchy of credibility imposed by regimes of power/knowledge. Her relentless rewriting unsettles the French judge, the central figure of the power-discourse axis, who protests, “Are you not confusing historical truth?” (131). But for Rahmani, historical truth is not the point.

In fact, the narrator’s insistence on unmaking history is accompanied by a distrust of historians, whom she views as complicit in the very silence they claim to repair. When the president of the commission promises a “just revision” of her father’s case, she responds with irony: “I have been wading in this revision since childhood. I have learned what deadlines are… They say it is up to historians to shed light on the past. Look at this political dwarf, pointing. The historians! Can we still think of history as acting outside of any event?” (126). For the narrator, historical and academic inquiry arrives too late and speaks too safely. Most importantly, it demands documentation from those whose lives have already been reduced to paperwork. Her father’s existence, she notes, was compressed into a “black briefcase underneath his bed,” full of files meant to justify his status as a subaltern. Far from offering emancipation, this regime of documentation transformed him into what she calls a “man of papers,” always “pleading”, “pleading the right to plead” (33), making his suffering credible only insofar as it can be filed, documented, reviewed, and archived.

This condemnation of the excessive focus on archival documentation in Rahmani’s novel bears a strong resemblance to Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish (1975), where he describes the archiving and cataloguing of individuals as a key mechanism of control: “the examination procedures were immediately accompanied by a system of intensive recording and cumulative documentation”.7 By forcing marginalised subjects, living in “the shadows of history,” into perpetual visibility, genealogical scholars and historians risk becoming disciplinary guards of a surveillance-like system of verification. In contrast, Rahmani’s choice to write a literary autofiction rather than an autobiography allows her to escape the disciplinary demand for visibility and documentation. Autofiction eludes the pressures of Foucault’s genealogical inquiry and rejects its impulse to expose every corner of opacity. Rather, Rahmani embraces opacity, using a fragmented and disjointed writing style and refusing to answer questions about whether harkis are traitors, victims, innocent, guilty, French, or Algerian.

Instead of offering a single interpretation or a chronological account of the harki experience, Rahmani opens a literary dialogue in which multiple voices circulate on equal footing. In an interview published by Zone Littéraire (2006), Rahmani explains that she seeks to write books that make readers feel “surrounded by voices.” Moze enacts this very ambition. Reading the novel gives the impression of listening to a cacophony of voices speaking at, with, and against one another. In Rahmani’s literary project, the narrator is not a sovereign speaker but a vessel through which the voices of Moze, his wife, his children, his neighbours, the FLN, the army, even France and Algeria, personified, speak. The French judge himself is given a voice when, in a striking reversal, the narrator standing in front of him, decides to let him speak through her: “I speak to him and suddenly comes the urge, the desire to be him. Him, the president of this commission. I turn my back on him, I look at the void and I say, Yes, it was to kill his brother that he betrayed his brother for me” (140–141).

Through this act of literary ventriloquism, Moze erupts as a site of collective enunciation, allowing irreconcilable perspectives to coexist without synthesis. This polyphonic structure, an essential feature of literature according to Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1994), produces a unique form of epistemic friction grounded in irreducible multiplicity.8 It disrupts the monopolization of knowledge and ideological simplification by refusing coherence, transparency, and closure.

It is precisely this formal capacity of literature, its ability to make room for what dominant epistemic regimes cannot tolerate, that enables Rahmani to transform the harki narrative into a sustained site of epistemic resistance.

Hanna Bechiche is a French-Algerian PhD student at the University of Cambridge and a Gates Scholar. Her research brings together matrilineal transmission, Indigenous epistemologies, and ecofeminism in Algerian postcolonial literature to map a kinetic theory of reception. She grew up in the Parisian banlieue (93) and holds BAs from Sorbonne and an MPhil from Cambridge.

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Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was a re-run. The Italian officer and colonial governor of Eritrea, Oreste Baratieri, had already attempted this feat at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. The Italians were better equipped and fortified by the askari, a colonial force of African troops. The Ethiopian forces led by Menelik II numbered roughly 100,000, and far exceeded the Italians. Menelik’s forces had been armed by Russia and France with modern rifles [1] - not in an act of anti-colonial solidarity, but to contain the competing colonial interests in the region. Despite their technological advantage, the Italian forces were decimated. The loss became a crisis of humiliation for Baratieri, having boasted that he would return from battle with Menelik II in a cage. Instead, he was forced to resign, alongside Prime Minister Francesco Crispi. Additionally, they were forced to pay reparations of ten million lire to release captured prisoners and sign the Treaty of Addis Ababa, enshrining the recognition of Ethiopia’s sovereignty. 

This moment remained a thorn in the side of Italian nationalists. The proliferation of colonial conquest and Social Darwinist ideas through Europe heightened this sense of wounded pride. Ethiopia was also a mineral rich nation and offered vast swathes of arable land for Italy’s increasingly destitute southern peasant class. This group had not provided the fervent base for fascism Mussolini had so sought. On the contrary, some on the Left, like Antonio Gramsci, had theorised that alliances between the southern surplus-population and the northern working-class could provide a new historic bloc to usher in an Italian socialist revolution. [2] For Mussolini, capturing Ethiopia would thus restore a wounded national psyche while more closely suturing a thus far unreliable social group to the fascist project.

Mussolini was provided with his opening in December 1934 following a skirmish between askari in Italian-occupied Somalia and a joint British-Ethiopian expedition. Mussolini seized the moment, demanding financial compensation from Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. Selassie, with few weapons and facing an internal crisis of governance at home, turned to the League of Nations to arbitrate the dispute. Ethiopia had joined the League in 1924 after being unanimously voted in. The League Covenant was designed to ensure the protection of member-states from one another. Members were obliged to use embargoes and - if necessary - military force, were one member-state to mobilise their military against another.

The key League members with power to influence Italy’s aggression mostly ignored these legal obligations. Britain placed an arms embargo on Italy and Ethiopia in July 1935 – and later offered large swathes of Ethiopian land to Italy in exchange for their acquiescence. France was similarly acquiescent, seeking to build coalitions with Italy against future German aggression. But perhaps the loudest silence emanated from the USSR, a bulwark against colonialism in the eyes of Communists and socialists globally. The Third International – or Comintern – had oriented itself much more towards an anti-imperialist horizon following the demise of its preceding iteration, the Second International. At the Baku Conference of 1920, Zinoviev had called on the largely Asian participants to wage a “holy war against the British conquerors.” In 1928, the Comintern adopted the Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonial and Semi-Colonial Countries. This document committed Comintern members to forming communist parties in colonial nations – while also supporting cross-class national revolutionary movements within this geography.

The USSR was to shift from a sectarian line, which allowed for full-throated opposition to colonialism, to an anti-fascist Popular Front in 1935. This subordinated their commitment to national liberation to the discipline of realpolitik diplomacy with European nations – including Italy – to contain German aggression. [3] The absence of any state-led intervention to aid Ethiopia demanded the formation of an independent movement composed of dissident Communists, socialists, and Pan-Africanists to act in the face of the onslaught of imperialist-fascism faced by the Ethiopian people. This movement spanned cities and ports across Africa, the Caribbean, the US, and Europe. It drew on a rich repertoire of contention and housed serious disagreement among its actors, who were nonetheless united by the demand:

Hands Off Ethiopia!

In Britain, the International African Friends of Abyssinia (later changed to Ethiopia), or IAFE, provides an insight into the uneasy coalitions anti-imperialist politics brought actors into. The group was founded in 1935 by C.L.R James, Amy Ashwood Garvey, and Chris Braithwaite - a dissident Trinidadian Trotskyist and member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a Pan-Africanist and a committed Communist Barbadian dockworker, respectively. Other notable members included Jomo Kenyatta, Ras T Makonnen, George Padmore, and I.T.A Wallace-Johnson. Padmore, like Braithwaite, had been committed to the cause of Communism and Pan-Africanism – but had been expelled from the Comintern for deriding its abandonment of anti-colonial politics. [4] Others, like Ras T Makonnen, had long adhered to the Garveyist line, rejecting outright any Soviet claims to an anti-colonial mantle.[5] The group first issued a plea to the League of Nations on July 28, 1935, demanding that its members adhere to the organisation’s rules and defend Ethiopia – for which they received no response.

Alongside calls for state-led intervention in the build-up to the invasion, figures like James and Garvey had publicly speculated about the formation of an international brigade, on the model of those mobilised for the Spanish Civil War, but these were quickly sidelined due to the steep repercussions participants in the solidarity movement faced in the U.S. and Britain. James’ own thinking on the necessary tactical intervention required was particularly recusant. Citing Lenin’s own support for Afghan resistance to British invasion, he argued that support for Ethiopia was a necessity, but that it should be materialised through worker’s sanctions alone, such as strikes and boycotts. Any attempt to pressure the British state to impose their own sanctions would draw the country into a war with Italy in which the proletariat of both nations would suffer on the battlefield. [6] It was not until Italy actually invaded Ethiopia on October 3, 1935, that mass worker participation burst forth to meet the moment.

The Longshore Workers’ Branch of the Trinidad Labour Party sparked worker resistance, as they began independently boycotting Italian ships. [7] Following this, trade union federations organised by the USSR’s Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern) provided the networks and resources to rapidly scale-up this action. Established in 1930, the International Seamen and Harbour Workers (ISH) and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) had sought to challenge the class collaborationist tendencies of the International Transport Federation (ITF). ITUCNW even produced its own publication, The Negro Worker, edited by Padmore before his expulsion. The paper was well-received among black maritime workers [8], who used their positions at the key nodes of capitalist circulation to disseminate the publication globally. The ISH then issued a directive for all maritime workers to impose a blockade on Italian goods, amplified through a host of publications including The Negro Worker.

Dockworkers globally heeded the call. In Cape Town and Durban, harbour workers refused to load frozen meats onto steamships bound for Italian encampments. Dockers in San Francisco refused to load Italian steamships. The crew on five Greek ships went on strike. From Bombay to Marseilles, Alexandria to London, Cardiff, Port Said, Bone, and Lüderitz Bay, Namibia – Italian cargo was refused, and Italian ships were harangued in the name of anti-colonial internationalism. [9] In Cardiff, black dockworker Harry O’Connell found himself the subject of disciplinary action by the British state and the Comintern for attempting to foment direct action against the Italian consulate in the city. The Negro Worker covered his persecution, shoring up the political support he required to act as a dissident communist that fought against directives from the British government, Comintern, and the National Union of Seamen (NUS) to which he belonged.

Despite this outpouring of worker-led resistance to colonial fascist invasion, Italy’s brutal occupation of Ethiopia would last until 1941. Nonetheless, there is much to learn from this movement and the events it reacted to. They belong to a recursive history that spans eighty years, in which western states and their socialist parties have so often failed to meaningfully tackle imperialism “abroad” until reconfigured as fascism “at home” [10]. In Britain, two years of continual protests prominently featuring the Palestinian flag have been met with its far-right inversion in the ‘Raise the Colours’ campaign, covering public infrastructure in Union Jacks to accompany now-annual pogroms. Tech utilised and refined in the genocide is being integrated into public services, already operationalised to target migrant and racialised communities throughout the U.S. Across Europe, defence spending and expanding militarisation are the bi-partisan orders of the day, with the defiant exception of Spain.

The task of the broad and fractious coalition bought together under the call for a free Palestine includes connecting upcoming anti-racist battles against fascism at home to the ongoing struggle against British imperialism abroad, from Cyprus to Palestine and Iran. Learning from the twentieth century we must insist that we do not submit one struggle to the other but understand them as part of a singular interconnected project. As with the Hands Off Ethiopia movement, it will require creativity and should take seriously the need to re-aggregate workers’ struggles and tactics with social movements. It will necessarily neither be entirely ‘from above’ nor ‘below’ – but instead, should seek to utilise the resources and networks of established institutions where possible, while breaking from their ossified limitations where necessary. It requires a continued discipline suspicious of moralism, working on principles of sovereignty above and beyond the quagmire concerned largely with the specific political character of subjugated nations. During the Hands off Ethiopia Movement, MPs from the ILP adopted an outlook on the Italian invasion that could be surmised as “neither Addis Ababa nor Rome”, categorising Mussolini and Selassie as dictators both unworthy of support. Trotsky reprimanded them – asserting that Ethiopian sovereignty and its defence was a necessary cause in overturning the imperialist world system, and thus capitalism. [11] Learning from history requires similarly appreciating where our priorities must lie. Finally, our movements must further consolidate a task that has already begun, forging coalitions among contentious actors under the banner of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics.

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[1] ​Bruce Strang, G. (2016). In Collision of Empires: Italy’s Invasion of Ethiopia and its International Impact, Routledge. Routledge. pp. 23-24.

[2] Antonio Gramsci. Some Aspects of the Southern Question (September- November 1926). 313 – 337.

[3] ​Redfern, Neil. (2004). British Communists, the British Empire and the Second World War. International Labor and Working-Class History, 65, 117-135. 117.

[4] Asante, S.K.B, The Impact of the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis of 1935-36 on the Pan-African Movement in Britain. Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, Vol. 13, No. 2 (DECEMBER 1972), pp. 217-227. 217-218.

[5] Williams, Theodore. (2022). Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation. London, New York: Verso. P76.

[6] James, C.L.R (1935, October). I.L.P Abyssinian Policy.

[7] Weiss, Holger (2018) Against Japanese and Italian Imperialism: The Anti-War Campaigns of Communist International Trade Union Organizations, 1931-1936; Moving the Social, 60, p.121-146. 143.

[8] Featherstone, D. (2016). Harry O’Connell, maritime labour and the racialised politics of place. Race & Class, 57(3), 71–87.

[9] Fronczak, Joseph, April 2015, Local People’s Global Politics, Source: Diplomatic History , APRIL 2015, Vol. 39, No. 2 (APRIL 2015), pp. 245-274

[10] It was not without a certain bitterness that black Communists from the U.S. fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade for the Spanish Republicans in 1936 after being denied such an opportunity to do so in Ethiopia. Nor was it lost on them that Moroccan participation in Franco’s forces could be partly attributed to the Republican leaders’ wholesale rejection of anti-colonial politics. See: Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘ “This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do”: African Americans and the Spanish Civil War,’ in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 123–58..

[11] To learn more about this debate, see: Williams, Making the Revolution Global

W.E.B. Du Bois has enjoyed a revival of interest among scholars and activists alike. His writings on the intersections of race, class, imperialism and other axes of social domination continue to prove relevant for much of the crises that beset our present moment in the United States and globally. Among his works, Black Reconstruction in America (1935) has proven especially impactful.1 Written largely as a rebuttal to the Dunning School of historiography—which portrayed this critical period of American history as a tragic lesson in the dangers of Black political radicalism, perceived or otherwise—the text offers an alternative telling of Reconstruction that centres the struggle of Black freedpeople and their allies to usher in genuinely egalitarian democracy in the wake of a brutal civil war. More recently, Black Reconstruction has played a central role in shaping contemporary abolitionist theory and practice in the United States, demonstrating how racial domination and its attendant institutions function as a stabilising mechanism for political and economic power. Such a power, Du Bois observes, cannot be confronted through reform alone, but must be dismantled at its roots through the creation of alternative democratic institutions capable of rendering oppressive institutions obsolete.2

However, the received abolitionist reading of Black Reconstruction misses a crucial component of Du Bois’s evaluation of the American Civil War and Reconstruction; namely, the role of state power as an instrument for facilitating the transition to a more democratic society and for securing the material and political gains of emancipation against an overthrown but not defeated ruling class. While Du Bois was certainly invested in the creation of affirmative democratic institutions capable of supplanting oppressive social structures, he was equally attentive to the coercive capacities required to enforce their provisions in the face of elite sabotage and reactionary violence. To this end, Black Reconstruction pulls heavily from Marxist theory, although many of its insights also press beyond it in several important ways. In fact, Du Bois himself notes that he had initially titled the tenth chapter “The Dictatorship of the Black Proletariat in South Carolina,” believing that “the record of the Negro worker during Reconstruction presents an opportunity to study inductively the Marxian theory of the state.” He ultimately abandoned the term “dictatorship,” recognising that “universal suffrage does not lead to a real dictatorship until workers use their votes consciously to rid themselves of the dominion of private capital” (BR, 381). Nevertheless, Du Bois maintains that the Reconstruction governments in the post-war American South resembled a “dictatorship of labor” in practice as it temporarily placed political power in the hands of an abolitionist movement. Through this state apparatus, Black workers and their allies were able to exercise unprecedented influence over legislation and administration by enforcing civil rights, securing labour protections, and challenging the entrenched power of a restive planter oligarchy.

However, unlike Karl Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat,” Du Bois’s “dictatorship of labor” emerges from a broadly democratic revolution carried out by a heterogeneous coalition of anti-slavery forces. Du Bois initially coined the term “abolition democracy” to refer to this loose coalition of Black workers, abolitionists, segments of the white working class and petty bourgeoisie, as well as other sympathisers, organised under the Radical faction of the Republican Party (a far cry from today’s Republicans). United in its goal to eradicate slavery, the abolition democracy sought to transition the South from a plantation-based economy to an agrarian society organised on the basis of free labour. In this sense, the abolition democracy denoted not only a political alliance, but a concrete program of social, political, and economic reconstruction—most notably the redistribution of land and capital from former ex-Confederate planters to emancipated Black households, colloquially known as “forty acres and a mule.”

For all its radical implications, however, the abolition democracy remained, in Du Bois’s words, “a liberal movement among both laborers and small capitalists” that “saw the danger of slavery to both capital and labor” (BR, 184). Its aims were not to abolish private property or subordinate the means of production to public control, but to universalise the conditions of civic independence through redistributive, egalitarian measures. The revolutionary character of Reconstruction lay precisely in this effort to fulfill the unfinished promises of liberal democracy by severing them from the structures of racial capitalism. Its tragedy, therefore, was not that it betrayed the tenets of liberalism, but that American liberalism proved unable to follow its own principles to their radical conclusions. What lessons, then, does Du Bois’s retelling of Reconstruction history offer us about the necessity—and limits—of state power in sustaining democratic transition?

Slavery and the Civil War

Du Bois emphasises that racial slavery in the United States was sustained not only through economic exploitation, but through an extensive apparatus of coercive state power. He describes the social and political landscape of the antebellum American South as an essentially totalitarian police state that utilised various techniques and institutions, tactics and strategies, to keep the enslaved in bondage and quell any possibility of resistance. The exercise of state power was not only limited to bureaucratic functions, but extended to the whole of white civil society. The deputisation of lower-class whites in the form of slave patrols and overseeing, for instance, were among the most effective means to surveil, discipline, and control enslaved bodies (BR, 27). But even without badge or whip, whites of every station were trained to be ever-vigilant of slave revolts and subversion (along with the looming possibility of Native vengeance), fearing that what they have done to the enslaved, the enslaved would do to them in return.

Whiteness meant access to Black bodies, and Black bodies functioned simultaneously as labour, capital, and property for the capture of rent. But it also meant a kind of sovereign esteem that whites enjoyed from holding the power of life and death over those whom they enslaved—an esteem that emerged from, but could not entirely be reduced to, the mechanisms of political economy. As to whether racial slavery was predicated on the capitalist mode of production or constituted an entirely distinct mode altogether, Du Bois rejected such a question as misleading. Although its relations of production were not organised on the basis of free labour—that is, the sale of labour-power on the market in exchange for wages—the plantation economy of the South was nevertheless integral to the reproduction of the capitalist world economy, supplying cotton, sugar, and other agricultural commodities for industrial production and consumption.

Du Bois further notes that while the planter class was deeply enmeshed within capitalism, its motivations were more aristocratic than bourgeois. As he puts it, the planters “had an interest in consumption rather than production,” and “exploited labor in order that they themselves should live more grandly and not mainly for increasing production” (BR, 35). Unlike the bourgeoisie, the planters were not driven by an imperative to maximise profits but by a more draconian impulse to accumulate status, prestige, and superficial wealth through domination. And while the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern planters were successful business partners for a time, the former increasingly came to view the latter as as purveyors of indulgence and economic inefficiency, while the gentile, self-ennobled planters regarded the Yankee captains of industry as boorish hustlers lucky enough to have stumbled into the ranks of opulence. Much of the early nineteenth century was spent trying to achieve an accommodatable balance of power between these two camps through the equal admission of “free states” and “slave states” from conquered territories in the West. But as the events of Bleeding Kansas and John Brown’s raid made clear, such an equilibrium was untenable: the ruling class was fractured, and a struggle for supremacy over the state ensued.

In this sense, the counterfeit republic known as the “Confederate States of America” was fundamentally a planter-driven, class-collaborationist project that legitimised its existence through notions of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and constitutionally enshrined the right to enslave those deemed racially inferior. This project had its share of sympathisers in the loyal states; so much so, in fact, that upon the Civil War’s outbreak, the Lincoln administration took great pains to frame the reconquest of the South as a war for the preservation of the Union—that is, the preservation of the status quo ante—and not a war of abolition. The war only became an abolitionist crusade when the internal contradictions of slavery inevitably boiled over. The self-emancipatory actions of the enslaved forced the federal government to abandon its neutral stance on the slavery question and to reckon, however peevishly, with abolition as a necessary condition of Union victory. Du Bois famously describes these actions as a “general strike” in which the enslaved withdrew their labour, rushed to the approaching Union lines, and joined the Union Army to confront their oppressors in combat (BR, ch. 4). By destabilising the plantation economy on which the Confederacy depended, the general strike undermined the Southern war effort and, in a decisive blow, won the war for the Union.

The South was utterly devastated; its society, economy, along with its esteem, shattered. If Julia Ward Howe’s harrowing revelation of the end times in the Battle Hymn of the Republic spells true, then God unleashed His terrible wrath upon the country—North and South alike—for the sin of enslaving His children. He demanded payment in full, claiming the burning of cities, the spilling of blood, and the ruin of a society built on human trafficking as recompense. The country submitted its payment in 600,000 souls—and counting. Whether that debt has been redeemed—if it ever can—is a question this country wrestles with to this day.

The Dictatorship of Labour

The abolition of slavery and the subsequent restoration of the Union raised more questions than it settled. For Du Bois, these questions centered around around what he calls “the problem of democracy”:

The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America, lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free, were given schools and the right to vote, what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men, regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship would rule, and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations (BR, 184).

The central issue was not merely whether formerly enslaved people would be incorporated into the polity, but whether democracy itself could survive the extension of political and economic power to the labouring masses without being subverted and hollowed out by ruling elites. Reconstruction, in other words, was a struggle over the scope and substance of democratic rule in a country torn apart by civil war. Amid the ruins, however, there arose an unprecedented opportunity to reconstruct the Union on more solid democratic foundations through the enfranchisement of Black men, the redistribution of wealth, the securing of labour rights, the expansion of civic infrastructure, the establishment of free public education, and so on.

Following the brief yet disastrous ordeal of Presidential Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson’s direction (itself following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination), the abolition democracy was able to wield immense political power to reshape the country in its image. Du Bois notes that the Northern bourgeoisie also emerged from the war enormously powerful, owing to wartime industrial expansion and financial centralisation. This confluence of democratic pressure below and industrialist strength from above created the conditions for Radical Reconstruction. But whereas the abolition democracy sought to utilise federal state power for democratic expansion, the “capitalist autocracy” sought to expand industry into the South without much attachment, if any, to the democratic revolution. The capitalist autocracy “looked upon free Negro labor as a source of profit,” but “did not want for Negro labor any special protection or political power or capital, any more than they wanted this for the Irish, German or Scandinavian labor in the North” (BR, 185).

However, Du Bois writes that the opportune conditions of the post-war political landscape pushed the abolition democracy toward “the conception of a dictatorship of labor, although few of its advocates wholly grasped the fact that this necessarily involved dictatorship by labor over capital and industry” (BR, 185). Because the tattered planter oligarchy and their proxies resisted any and all measures to meaningfully emancipate and enfranchise Black freedpeople—and, in so doing, obstructed the establishment of a free labour regime in the South—the capitalist autocracy was forced, albeit reluctantly, to align with the abolition democracy in its effort to quell ex-Confederate resistance.

The political leaders of the abolition democracy which Du Bois names includes Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Carl Schurz—liberal revolutionaries and statesmen who sought to implement the most comprehensive scheme of emancipation possible (BR, 191–200). However, Du Bois is adamant that it was the Black freedpeople themselves who were the heart and soul of the abolition democracy. After the Civil War, there was an explosion of civic and political participation among the emancipated that immediately refutes the Southern talking point that they were indifferent if not inconvenienced by their newfound status as free people. Instead, freedom was seized upon with remarkable speed and intentionality. Black freedpeople organised mass meetings, formed mutual aid societies and independent churches, helped to establish public schools, and flooded the political arena with petitions and demands. Black freedmen ran for office and served in state and municipal legislatures, passing legislation that expanded civil rights and liberties. It was Black freedpeople, then, who pushed the meaning of abolition to its radical conclusions: citizenship, enfranchisement, legal equality, public education, civil rights, dignity in labour, and economic justice.

But, like Thomas Hobbes’s image of the Leviathan as composed of manifold bodies conglomerated into a singular sovereign will, this network of civic, political, economic, and ecclesiastical organisations had to exert centralised state power in order to secure its gains in the face of planter revanchism and reactionary violence. President Johnson’s inaction against these forces in the immediate wake of the Civil War proved that the removal of coercive institutions from the South would have spelled disaster for those recently emancipated. Although the Confederacy was de jure defeated, its state apparatus endured, lying in wait in the shadows to prey upon Black freedom and reimpose racial subordination in the South. Of course, the abolition democracy did not establish a wholly new state—as Marx envisioned in his writings on revolution; rather, it sought to establish a new regime from within the existing federal apparatus. This, as we have noted, is why Du Bois is careful to stress that Reconstruction was not a proletarian revolution in the strict sense, as the abolition democracy encompassed a complex array of class interests that often conflicted with one another.

Nevertheless, the abolition democracy’s exercise of state power was transformative during its brief existence. One institution that Du Bois praised was the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency established during the Civil War to provide relief, free education, legal support, and economic opportunities to Black freedpeople and even some poor whites. He writes that the Bureau “started upon a dictatorship by which the landowner and the capitalist were to be openly and deliberately curbed and which directed its efforts in the interests of a black and white labor class.” It functioned as a state within a state, as it “made laws, executed them and interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished crimes, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied ends” (BR, 219). While Du Bois was sober about its shortcomings, he nonetheless insisted that the Bureau represented a radical experiment in genuine democratic statecraft, as it was willing to enforce labour rights and discipline capital: “The judicial work of the Bureau consisted in protecting the Negro from violence and outrage, from serfdom, and in defending his right to hold property and enforce his contracts” (BR, 226).

The enemies of Reconstruction were not only numerous but rabid. The tattered planter oligarchy and its proxies—former slave patrols, overseers, and embittered Confederate veterans—answered the abolition democracy’s progressive measures with a campaign of organised terror. Paramilitary organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League proliferated throughout the South, bent on restoring the antebellum racial order through sabotage, intimidation, voter suppression, political assassinations, and outright massacre. For Du Bois, this reactionary violence was not merely a spontaneous eruption of resentment, but a calculated political strategy aimed at overthrowing the Reconstruction state apparatus and disciplining Black labour. It was a veritable counterrevolutionary movement, employing both legal obstruction and extra-legal force to reassert planter rule under new guises. The Freedmen’s Bureau stood as a primary target of this onslaught precisely because it embodied the abolition democracy’s ambitions. By enforcing labour contracts and protecting Black civil rights, the Bureau threatened the political and economic foundations of planter power—making its destruction a central objective of the counterrevolutionary campaign. As such, the Bureau did not shy away from deploying its juridico-military apparatus against those who sought to undermine the new order. But Du Bois writes that this was expected because “in its essence, the bureau was a dictatorship of the army over property for the benefit of labor. It was aimed at the worst methods of exploitation” (BR, 227).

Counterrevolution and the Super-Dictatorship of Capital

The fragile peace between the abolition democracy and the capitalist autocracy did not last. The latter began to fear the growing dictatorship of labour in the South, as it “put such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with the intelligent and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men” (BR, 580). As Northern capital and Southern labour increasingly split over their competing visions of the post-Reconstruction South, the former sought an alliance with its old adversary: the planter class.

On Du Bois’s account, Black workers and their allies were able to gain the political upper hand in the South because of the fracture between the capitalist class and the planter class. But when the economic costs empowering Black (and white) labour outweighed the political costs of aligning with the planters, the capitalist autocracy pursued a strategy of re-triangulation: bring the planters into the capitalist fold and fracture the fragile alliance between Black and white labour in the South. While the planters were reluctant to close ranks with their old rivals, their hatred of Black labour proved greater than their animosity toward Northern capital.

In this sense, the decisive factor for the abolition democracy’s persistence in the face of inter-elite rapprochement was white labour:

[T]he poor whites began a desperate and almost panic-stricken attempt to force themselves into the situation, either as allies of the old planter class which had for them the greatest contempt, or as allies of the carpetbagger capitalist, against whom they had just been fighting in the ranks of the army, and whose attitude toward black labor they did not understand and feared, or even as allies of black labor, which they might use as a club against both planter and capitalist (BR, 610).

Situated between elite consolidation on the one end and Black labour on the other, white labour occupied a unique position. Its political alignment would determine whether the emerging capitalist order would be stabilised through renewed racial hierarchy or overturned through an interracial labour movement. The tragedy, of course, is that the former prevailed. The planters were able to appeal to the racial sympathies of white labour in their quest to re-subjugate Black labour. Du Bois writes that although white labour stood to materially benefit more through an alliance with Black labour, it was compensated with a “public and psychological wage”—a reappearance of the same sovereign esteem that whites enjoyed in the antebellum South from their domination over Black bodies (BR, 700–701).

In tandem with these developments, Du Bois writes that Northern capital was consolidating a “super-dictatorship” that increasingly wrested control of the federal state apparatus away from the abolition democracy. Under the misleading pretext of fighting corruption, this new power set out to strip the power of Reconstruction governments into the hands of elites. Along with repressing the labour movement in the North, turning craft unions against so-called “unskilled labor,” and assimilating the petty bourgeoisie within the industrial behemoth, this super-dictatorship offered the planter class “the withdrawal of the national army and the restoration of political control to property” (BR, 584). As a result:

The military dictatorship was withdrawn, and the representatives of Northern capital gave up all efforts to lead the Negro vote. The new dictatorship became a manipulation of the white labor vote which followed the lines of similar control in the North, while it preceded to deprive the black voter by violence and force any vote at all. The rivalry of these two classes of labor and their competition neutralized the labor vote in the South. The black voter struggled and appealed, but it was in vain. And the United States, re[i]nforced by the increased political power of the South based on disenfranchisement of black voters, took its place to re[i]nforce the capitalistic dictatorship of the United STates, which became the most powerful in the world, and which backed the new industrial imperialism and degraded colored labor the world over (BR, 630).

For Du Bois, these events stand as a lesson in the importance of state power for genuine democratic reconstruction. The problem with the abolition democracy is not that it was excessive in its use of state power, but that it did not go far enough in curbing the planter class, its proxies, and ultimately, the capitalist class as well. As a consequence, the economic revolution could not follow from the political revolution, leaving the gains from the latter vulnerable to counterrevolution. “What liberalism did not understand,” he writes “was that such a revolution was economic and involved force. Those who against the public weal have power cannot be expected to yield save to superior power” (BR, 591). As a result, Northern capital was able to outmaneuver Black labour in the South by finding common cause with the planter class who, in turn, were able to bring poor labour into the fold of white supremacy—and the rest is history.

Conclusion

Thus, Du Bois partly attributes the overthrow of Reconstruction to the fact that the embryonic dictatorship of labour that briefly took hold of the South was unable to be fully birthed. Although the abolition democracy achieved many accomplishments, it was ultimately unable to deliver on its comprehensive program of wealth redistribution and democratisation, allowing antagonistic class interests to persist and regroup: “force alone could dislodge the planters and allied capitalists and firmly fasten labor government on the South” (BR, 682). However, the impacts of this super-dictatorship of capital would also be felt at the global scale. After the overthrow of Reconstruction, Du Bois writes that the United States became an unambiguously “reactionary force” and the “cornerstone of that new imperialism which is subjecting the labor of yellow, brown, and black peoples to the dictation of capitalism organized on a world basis; and it has not only brought nearer the revolution by which capitalism is to be challenged, but also it is transforming the fight to the sinister aspect of a fight on racial lines embittered by awful memories” (BR, 631).

Of course, Du Bois’s analysis of state power is not all-encompassing, and the material conditions of the United States have significantly changed since the Reconstruction era. Moreover, any serious political movement that emerges from the U.S. Left must also centre the contradictions of settler colonialism—for which Du Bois, unfortunately, did not account. But many of the lessons which he extrapolates from the successes and failures of Reconstruction still apply today. The United States never truly recovered from the overthrow of Reconstruction, as we are still reckoning with its consequences in the form of racial inequality, unfettered capitalism, and global imperialism. As the United States plummets deeper into fascism, Du Bois reminds us of the importance of, on the one hand, creating affirmative democratic institutions and, on the other, the means to enforce their provisions in the face of elite sabotage and reactionary violence. “Rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction…Land, Light and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat” (BR, 635).

Matthew Miyagi Tuten (he/him) is PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Oregon, specialising in political philosophy, philosophy of race, and pragmatism. He proudly served as a union steward and Vice President for Organising for the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (American Federation of Teachers local 3544).

…

Freedom. Time. Decolonization. 1945. A time for freedom. The time of freedom. Free time. What kind of freedom? What kind of time? Sovereignty? Self-determination. Anticipation.

Gary Wilder, Freedom Time (2017), p. 135

Earlier last fall, I went by the Chicago Art Institute to look at Raqib Shaw’s monumental work Paradise Lost (2009 – 2025) which the artist has spent the last two decades working on. The autobiographical artwork traces Shaw’s life from childhood to adulthood in the heaven-like and beautiful, yet conflict-ridden and hybrid landscape of Kashmir. The title of the work draws on John Milton’s famous 17^th century poem with the same title, in which Milton lays out the biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve from heaven because of their disobedience to God. Shaw’s artwork can then be regarded as a visual representation of the “Miltonic fall”, where a once harmonious and tranquil world fragmented and broke-down into chaos.

Having sporadically mulled over the Pakistani poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal’s writings and history for the past four years, it struck me as I found myself reflecting on Shaw’s painting, that a similar kind of idea can be seen as central to Iqbal’s political philosophy: How the Western notion of the nation and the nation-state in a spatial and temporal sense constitutes a metaphysical, ethical and civilizational fall. It’s a fall insofar as such a conception of “nation” limits the ability of the oppressed - particularly the Muslims in India according to Iqbal - to think of an open and independent future continuously emerging.

However, Iqbal does not leave us alone to ourselves after our fall. He stretches out a hand and, in what some may call an “artistic” spirit, gives us a paint brush as an incentive to rise up. He wants the Indian Muslim to take charge of a creatively unfolding future. Just as Shaw’s artistic work became a way for him to recount not only the past but also draw out a possible future without limitations to his artistic creativity, Iqbal argues for a somewhat similar and closely connected recognition – especially by the colonized Indian Muslim – of the importance of the creative possibilities that the idea of an open future facilitates. I argue that to comprehend Iqbal’s imagining of the nation, it needs to be understood on a scale that transcends the way we think about it in both spatial and temporal terms. In this essay, I will specifically focus on the temporal aspect of the argument.

Crucial to interpreting Iqbal – a scholar intensely debated and contested until this day - in such a way has been the perspective of anticolonial political theory, as articulated by Karuna Mantena and Adom Getachew (2021). From this lens, Iqbal is read not merely as a thinker who engaged in critiques of the West and Western colonizers, but whose thoughts also included vastly consequential reconstructive ambitions focused on self-criticism of his “own population”, namely the Indians broadly and the Indian Muslims narrowly.

Nation as Beyond Time

Iqbal’s inspiration by Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of time as duration is essential to the formulation of his idea of Islam as not only belonging in the past but also in the future.

According to Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s (2019) and Chad Hillier’s (2015) reading of Iqbal, the essence of the universe is built on change. Here, Iqbal draws upon the ideas of Bergson as expressed in Creative Evolution (1922), where Bergson writes that change is a “holistic” transition from one stage to another, seeing as change in one area inevitably leads to change in another as a continuous process. This leads to the understanding of a ‘reality’ that is based on characteristics such as change and a creative freedom, since the universe or cosmos is not a fixed thing; instead, events and changes that take place in such a ‘reality’ are happening within a dynamic and continuously moving universe. For Iqbal and Bergson, such a “holistic” and creative cosmos that is continuously moving represents time itself, which Bergson termed as duration (Hillier, 2015, 175-179). Central to such a duration, according to Iqbal, then becomes the importance of seeing separate events as parts of a larger “‘organic whole’, as opposed to serial time that is merely the “pulverization of duration by the intellect” (Hillier, 2015, 178).

This dialogue between Iqbal and Bergson may also tell us about Iqbal´s relationship to the idea of having a national history, which – as I will argue - leads to his rejection of the rootedness of a nation in the past, and thus an abandoning of the concept of national history all together. Iqbal referred to and investigated the life of Prophet Muhammad - as I argue in line with Faisal Devji in Muslim Zion (2013) - more as a model for imagining a future society that is freed from its past, rather than looking at and studying the Prophet’s life with regard to its role in a pre-imperial phase lying in the past (Devji, 2013, 111). Here, the Prophet’s story of the hijrah (migration) from Mecca to Medina becomes an interesting site of analysis to argue for such a position.

Having likely drawn upon thinkers like Hegel, Iqbal cautioned Muslims about the seductions of materialism and objects, of which the nation was framed as one of the most dangerous (Devji, 2013, 242).[1] The Prophet’s hijrah from Medina can be seen as him leaving the homeland, and thus a praxis (in so far this event can be recognized as hadith[2]) to be adopted by other Muslims, and where the nation-state as the homeland and a representation of a national past is to be left behind. The foundational nature of the Prophet Muhammad’s hijrah from Mecca to Medina gives the basis for rejecting and abandoning the idea of a nationalized time, where the nation-state inscribes serial time. In the poem “Wataniyat” (patriotism) from the larger collection Bang-e-Dara (The Call of the Marching Bell), Iqbal, for example, talks about “country” as the “new God”, and that this construction of “country” uproots the “Islamic concept of nationality” (Qawmiyat-e-Islam ki jharh khatti hay is se) (Iqbal, Kulliyat-I Iqbal Urdu, p. 121).

Iqbal seems to suggest that the idea of a nation-state is in and of itself a form of idolatry. For instance, in the same poem, Iqbal goes on to write that “abandoning the nation is an act of following the example of the beloved of God” (Hay tark- e-watan sunnat-e mahboob-e ilahi) (Iqbal, Kulliyat-I Iqbal Urdu, p. 121). Hence, the goal becomes to pursue the future by leaving as well as rejecting the nation-state and its national history. Such a rejection allows for a freedom from the past as well as from an identification that relies upon the nation - a type of identification which Iqbal has opposed both in its spatial scale and in its temporal form because it arguably threatens a larger Muslim solidarity that he envisioned as central.

Iqbal stated the following in the Presidential Address in Allahabad: “Islam is itself a destiny and will not suffer a destiny” (Iqbal, 1930). While this address is paradoxically known as the moment when Iqbal clearly articulated the preference for the creation of an independent Pakistani state vi-à-vis India, such a proclamation can also be seen as a further critique of the concept of “serial time”, and thus a rejection of territorial nationalism and the idea of the nation-state. Through this rather enigmatic statement, Iqbal seems to express that Islam in itself is a form of movement and organization that cannot be organized according to an exogenous principle like the nation-state (Diagne, 2019, 64).

Quranic Cosmology as Continuously Emerging

While the Prophet Muhammad’s hijra from Meccah to Medina is one way to think of a starting point for Iqbal’s conception of time as oppositional to the concept of serial-time, another central idea underpinning his view is his interpretation of the Quranic cosmology as something continuously emerging.

In The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1960), Iqbal states:

To my mind nothing is more alien to the Quranic outlook than the idea that the universe is the temporal working out of a pre-conceived plan. As I have pointed out, the universe, according to the Quran, is liable to increase. It is a growing universe and not an already completed product which left the hands of its Makers ages ago, and is now lying stretched in space as a dead mass of matter to which time does nothing, and consequently is nothing. (Iqbal, 1960, 55)

For Iqbal, Islamic thought meeting with Greek and Hellenistic thought is what led the former down the path of contemplation and to the idea of a static cosmology. Such a way of thinking, according to Iqbal, implies that the human is left to do nothing but find contentment in the present. However, this is not the form of cosmology advocated by the Quran, which on the contrary promotes a timeline of continuous emergence and creative creation. This can be seen both from the statement above as well as the Quranic quote from Surah Fatir, “He adds to His creation what He wills”, which is one of the many possible quotations Iqbal has often referred to in support of his point (Diagne, 2019, 72). Hence, according to Iqbal, there is an open world and society in which God’s creation is continuously at work, instead of a God who is absent and leaves everything to predetermined and implemented mechanisms like the nation-state.

Iqbal’s criticism of serial-time implies the belief that there is a forever indeterminacy in the future. Such an indeterminacy, rather than being something negative that may feel like a lingering feeling of unstableness, may on the contrary be desirable and even necessary; even more so if Iqbal is to be interpreted as an anticolonial thinker in a struggle against the European imperialists, because it may give agency to the colonized, especially the Muslim community, to make their own path towards the open future (Diagne, 2010, 49). This perspective on time gives a sense of freedom, in that it arguably provides an opportunity as well as incentive to pursue actions to potentially change one’s current situation, not fully determined by the past nor by the future. As expressed by Iqbal in The Message from the East (1923):

“How nice a thing it were

If every traveler

Who wants to travel far and fast

Could go free from the trammels of the past.

If blind conformity were good,

The Prophet himself would

Have gone the way

Of Arabs in an earlier day” (Iqbal, 1923, 122).

The freedom that comes with a future that is continuous and creatively created rather than set in stone is also expressed in Iqbal´s famous work The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930/1960), in which he perhaps presents his most elaborate ideas regarding the necessity of reconstructing time in light of Quranic cosmology, which he believes is a cosmology that is continuously expanding and thereby continuously evolving. He states, for example, that “[t]o exist in real time is not to be bound by the fetters of serial time, but to create it from moment to moment and to be absolutely free and original in creation. In fact, all creative activity is free activity” (Iqbal, 1960, 50).

Ijtihad is the concept at the center of his understanding of the nation as something to be imagined beyond time, as argued by Diagne (2010). The more technical and pure juridical definition of ijtihad refers to the activity of qualified jurists “producing or justifying a legal judgement” (Qaudri, 2014). In short, ijtihad involves jurists (within Islamic teachings) arriving at a considered decision in relation to a legal case with respect to the context in which the decision takes place (Quadri, 2014). For Iqbal, ijtihad takes on a more metaphysical meaning, with an emphasis on its open-endedness. Put simply, in his work, Iqbal reconstructs the meaning of ijtihad into a specific kind of ‘principle of movement’, where the focus is on the “affirmation that life is innovation” and is continuously emerging and being created as an act of creativity by God, just like the universe in light of Iqbal’s view on Quranic cosmology as ever expanding (Diagne, 2019, 68). It seems like Iqbal is attempting to convey the message that one has to either remain open to the openness of time, both in legal matters as well as in other situations (e.g., as part of the anticolonial struggle against imperialists), or risks remaining stuck in the past and with that, in the present situation. The danger of remaining stuck in the past is arguably why Iqbal expressed so directly that “[a] time-process cannot be conceived as a line already drawn. It is a line in the drawing – an actualization of open possibilities” (Iqbal, 1960, 55). This is arguably what Iqbal’s project around the reconstructing of religious thought in Islam was all about: to expand the notion of time beyond the narrow conceptualization of it within the confines of the nation-state, and to showcase that time is something that requires the refusal to think of existence as a “nostalgic mode” with reference to the past only. The latter aim can be summarized with how he refers to the concept of meliorism, which is “neither optimism nor pessimism but responsibility and action in the recognition of a growing universe” (Diagne, 2010, 48). According to Iqbal, Islam entered a phase in the thirteenth century where it was defined by petrification, which is why the struggle to re-open and reconstruct Islamic thought can be said to have been an important part of Iqbal’s anticolonial agenda (Diagne, 2019, 73). Central to such an independence and autonomy of the Muslim lies his/her consciousness based in ijtihad, which includes “the condition and meaning of the movement of continuous self-creation” (Diagne, 2010, 37). More specifically, Iqbal connects these concepts by referring to the alienating qualities of capitalism that lead to “unconscious selves” among Muslims; the effects of this have to be seen in relation to the colonial situation (of the British) in which the Muslims found themselves, which was based on the pure and complete imitation of the West. According to Iqbal, only Turkey had been successful in shaking off the “shackles” of the West and regained its “self-consciousness” (Diagne, 2010, 37). To attain this self-consciousness, autonomy must be interpreted and understood in terms of the duty of ijtihad “in order to give society back its ability to pursue its own principle within the indefinitely open process of its continuous auto-creation” (Diagne, 2010, 37-38).

It seems like the struggle to reopen the idea of time in Islam by reconstructing Islamic thought, as expressed in his work with the same title from 1960, was important for Iqbal, precisely to aid and ensure that the Muslim community attains their self-consciousness and autonomy, which can further be seen as a requirement to achieve true freedom both as part of the anticolonial struggle against the British imperialists, but also to ensure a sustainable way of organizing the Muslim community in the postcolonial moment as a minority part of larger India. This latter point is connected to his advocacy for the federalist demand for the autonomy of the north-western parts of India to constitute a separate state (millat), in order to allow Muslims to develop according to their own self-consciousness and cultural character with basis in ijtihad and other Islamic thought (Sevea, 2014, 163). Unlike other anticolonial thinkers in late colonial India, like Gandhi who arguably looked more to the past of India as a nation as part of forming a motivation for his (nonviolent) anticolonial struggle against the imperialists, Iqbal was doing the opposite with his emphasis on the necessary openness of time, and thereby possibly expressed that the motivation for taking part in the anticolonial struggle should rather come from the openness of the future. That is because if one looks to the past as defining the present and the future, rather than looking at the future as a creative possibility, one will likely remain stuck in the present (both on good and bad terms). Hence, the mere physical removal of the British imperialists is not enough to attain freedom and independence (a notion which Gandhi would probably agree with) if the anticolonial struggle is based on the past, because it hinders both the whole community and the larger society from moving forward. Thus, the Muslim community needs to be a movement with autonomy, where such autonomy is conceived for and by ijtihad - as autonomy both from the British imperialists and within larger India.

What Are We Left With?

The larger relevance of such a project for anticolonial and postcolonial political thought lies in what Getachew and Mantena (2021) term as the effort “to correct the one-sided reception of anticolonialism as simply a critique of the west”. Iqbal, like Gandhi, although having criticized the West for intellectually corrupting the Indian masses, also furthered an agenda for reconstruction very much aimed at “self-criticism” and to “break the collective enthrallment with the West” (Getachew & Mantena, 2021, 4-5). Here, Iqbal’s work on the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930/ 1960), in which he attempts to expand the notion of time, stands as the most useful example. Iqbal’s emphasis on the recognition of time as continuously emerging can be seen as an active effort to motivate Muslims to reject nationalism’s narrow concept of time, which makes the people forever stuck in the past, and the anticolonial struggle an inevitable failure (Iqbal, 1960, 188). The cure to the diagnosis of nationalism, as brought to India by the British imperialists, is to look to the openness of the future and use that as a motivation to challenge “a society motivated by inhuman competition, and a civilization which has lost its spiritual unity by its inner conflict of religious and political values” (Iqbal, 1960, 189). The originality of the anticolonial contributions of Gandhi or Iqbal, then, lie in the ways they extended the inherited categories of nationalism by encouraging the colonized to take the painting brush into their own hands, rather than rejecting such categories simply for the sake of it.

While the analysis of the long-lasting effects of Iqbal’s ideas around ‘nationalism’ and ‘nation’ for South Asia lies outside the scope of this essay, an examination of how ‘successful’ he was in predicting the negative effects of nationalism may be a useful question to understand the contemporary moment of heightened nationalist tendencies throughout the whole region. For instance, to what extent is Iqbal’s prediction that nationalism may potentially lead to an atheistic society correct, when observing the Islamic Republic of Pakistan or the Republic of India today? How do we understand Iqbal in the current moment of pervasive Hindu nationalism in India and Sunni-majoritarianism in Pakistan? The continuous resurgence of the topics of nationalism and national identity is a testament to the continued relevance of examining the thoughts of anticolonial thinkers, like Iqbal, on their own terms.

…

Bibliography

Devji, F. (2013). Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Diagne, S. B. (2019). Postcolonial Bergson. U.S.: Fordham University Press.

Diagne, S. B. (2010). Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal. Dakar: Codseria Book Series.

Gandhi, M. K, (1997). ‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings. Centenary Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Getachew, Adom & Karuna Mantena. (2021). Anticolonialism and the Decolonization of Political Theory. Critical Times, 4(3), 359-388.

Hillier, H.C. (2015). ‘Iqbal, Bergson and the Reconstruction of the Divine Nexus in Political Thought”, H C. Hillier and B. B. Koshul (eds.) in Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Modern Muslim Thought, 168-200. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press.

Iqbal, M. (1923). A Message from the East. Translated by M. Hadi Husain. Link: https://www.allamaiqbal.com/works/poetry/persian/payam/translation/02message.pdf (Last accessed: 01.27.2026)

Iqbal, M. (December 29, 1930). Allahabad. ‘Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s 1930 Presidential Address to the 25^th Session of the All-India Muslim League’: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_iqbal_1930.html (Last Accessed: January 27, 2026).

Iqbal, M. (1960). The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Originally written in 1930. Lahore: Ashraf Press.

Iqbal, M. 1995. Kulliyat-I Iqbal Urdu. Lahore.

Oxford Reference. “Hadith”. Link: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095914816 (Last accessed: 01.27.2026).

Quadri, J. (2014). ‘Itjihad’ in Oxford Bibliographies. Link: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195390155/obo-9780195390155-0096.xml (Kast accessed; 01.27.2026).

Sevea, I. S. (2014). The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in

Late Colonial India. Cambridge University Press.

[1] A similar reference can be found in Hegel’s The Philosophy of History (1991/1837), especially on page 393, where he writes about the disappearance of Christendom from the “scene of history” to never again appear as “one body” as a result of its abandonment of a Holy Land (homeland), which led to the eventual victory of “the West”, although the idea of “the West” remains rather vague.

[2] Hadith refers to the “[r]eport of the words and deeds of [of the prophet] Muhammad and other early Muslims;

considered an authoritative source of revelation, second only to the Quran. (…) They serve as a source of biographical material for Muhammad, contextualization of Quranic revelations, and Islamic law” (Oxford Reference).

Still, a glance at postcolonial literature or critical race studies reveals that Sartre has been largely overlooked in these disciplines. Indeed, among the “founding fathers,” and mothers, of these paradigms one is more likely to find Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. The suspicion that Sartre has not simply been forgotten is affirmed by contemporary scholars such as Jonathan Judaken, Azzedine Haddour, and Robert C. Young, who note that scholarly reflection on Sartre’s role in the development of postcolonial and critical race studies is scarce to the point of being effectively nonexistent.

Wondering why it is so, Judaken points out that Sartre wrote no major piece on the question of race (with the exception of Anti-Semite and the Jew and, we would add, of Black Orpheus), was increasingly out of academic fashion in the 1980s when race studies emerged, and was also a “dead white male”^[1] - a point which seems to have lost none of its relevance today. As for a more philosophical reason for his neglect by postcolonialism, Haddour aptly identifies what he calls Sartre’s “Marxist eschatology,”^[2] i.e., his commitment to the idea of the single supreme human subject who, at the final stage of History, is exposed as being devoid of differences and is dissolved in a classless society. In other words, it appears that Sartre’s relatively late third-worldism prevented him from engaging in properly critical (i.e. postcolonial) ways of reflecting on the question of the subjects, strictly in the plural.

Indeed, subsequent generations of French philosophers from the 1960s up to the millennium were increasingly keen to see him as a philosopher Don Quixote who believed he had found Man at the end of History. To mention but a few of the many critiques addressing his humanism from various eminent intellectual angles, Sartre was depicted as being out of step with the intellectual trends of the 20th century,^[3] missing the point of social sciences,^[4] or even having seriously misunderstood the philosophy, literature and history of his time.^[5] Furthermore, an international cultural icon, Sartre was also the object of criticism coming from far beyond French intellectual milieu or even high academia. As Richard Eyre reminds us, the English feminist writer Angela Carter once asked, “There is one question that every thinking woman in the Western world must have asked herself at one time or another. Why is a nice girl like Simone de Beauvoir sucking up to a boring old fart like Jean-Paul Sartre?”^[6]

If this philosophical and cultural counter-attack was vibrant and in many respects timely and justified, it has also somewhat missed the point. It is not that we wish to “defend” Sartre from being criticized or even rejected as a humanist philosopher. We would like to suggest, however, that by failing to ask whether or not Sartre was a postcolonial thinker (spontaneously assuming a negative response), postcolonial studies fails to take stock of the genealogy of its own critical ontology and some of the political stakes linked to its critical knowledge.

Here we limit ourselves to outlining a hypothesis. In our view, the role that Sartre played in the emergence of postcolonial critique is peculiarly double. That is, it can be seen as both negative and positive, but in any case it should be seen as formative to the development of the discipline. When theorizing about the coming of the single supreme Subject, as the “third-worldist” Sartre did, he undoubtedly reaffirmed, as Martin Heidegger pointed out early on in his Letter on Humanism,^[7] the oldest traditions of Western humanist thought. For example, he stated in his essay entitled Black Orpheus, a preface written in 1948 to an anthology of black poems, that the political resistance movement of Negritude shall eventually be dissolved in order to reach the just human community devoid of racial differences:

In fact, Negritude appears like the up-beat (unaccented beat) of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of Negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself, and these black men who use it know this perfectly well; they know that it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization of the human being in a raceless society. Thus Negritude is for destroying itself, it is a ‘crossing to’ and not an ‘arrival at,’ a means and not an end.”^[8]

That is, Sartre effectively “destroys” racial difference for the sake of “the realization of the human being” who is taken to be single and universal, thus constituting the subject of a society which therefore must be raceless. Similar arguments can be found in his Algerian interventions in which he developed an ontology in which colonizer and colonized constitute two stages in the self-realization of one single subject when arguing, for example, that “In these two inseparable couples – the colonist and the colonized, the torturer and the victim – the second is no more than a manifestation of the first.”^[9] Here, too, racial differences would be transcended in order to realise social justice.

By thus arguing, however, we believe in contrast to Heidegger that Sartre also did a huge disservice to the Western humanist cause. Not only did this gesture give crucial impulse to the later anti-humanist and anti-subjectivist current in French philosophy, cited above, which spectacularly rejected what it saw as the entire (supposedly entirely humanist) Sartrean enterprise. This, in any case, is the reason why we think Sartre negatively shaped the formation of postcolonial reflection. Nevertheless, this gesture also resonated positively with the philosophical agenda of the young Sartre, often forgotten in postcolonial studies, whose writings can be seen as eagerly searching for the theory of the decomposed subject and that of intersubjectivity. In other words, one could argue that it was the young Sartre who proposed the very means by which the philosophical problems linked to the older Sartre’s solipsism can be confronted. For example, in The Transcendence of The Ego, Sartre argued that the ego as such existed exclusively as a correlate of the modular acts of conscience and invited the reader to look outside into the realm of interpersonality in order to find herself, instead of immersing into introspection to discover what is mistakenly considered to constitute her “essence.”^[10] Or in Being and Nothingness^[11] where Sartre famously insisted on the need to choose authenticity, and with it difference, for the self, instead of assimilating herself to the Subject. In his Anti-Semite and the Jew, he further adapted this idea by arguing that in modern French society, the Jew is confronted by the need to live either authentically or to take the “avenues of escape,” i.e. assimilating to the Christian: “the Jew does not escape this rule: authenticity for him is to live to the full his condition as Jew; inauthenticity is to deny it or to attempt to escape from it.”^[12]

To sum up our hypothesis, Sartre demonstrated in his philosophical as well as political writings that all political emancipation with universal ambition is founded on the destruction of the Other as other. He thus effectively paved the way for the emergence of a critical, decomposed anthropology which he was more likely to embrace when he was younger but from which he progressively distanced himself as he grew older. To put it in more Sartrean terms, by increasingly assuming the role and function of negativity in the history of the reflection on the human subject, Sartre has contributed to the intellectual birth of what can be called the postcolonial synthesis, i.e., a critical endeavor to reach political emancipation without dissolving differences and thus preserving the authenticity of the other.

^[1] Jonathan Judaken, „Introduction,” in: Jonathan Judaken (ed.), Race After Sartre. State University of New York Press, 2008. p1.

^[2] Azzedine Haddour, “Introduction: Remembering Sartre,” in: Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism. Translated by Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams. Routledge, 2001. pp28-29.

^[3] Michel Foucault, “L’homme est-il mort?”, in: Arts et Loisirs, No. 38. 15-21 juin, 1966. pp8-9.

^[4] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press, 1966 [1962]. See above all the chapter entitled „History and Dialectic.”

^[5] It is perhaps worth citing Derrida’s less known case that he makes when responding in an interview to a question on his contemporary French society: “What must a society such as ours be if a man [Sartre – S.L.], who in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his time – let’s say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot – who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger and sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure?” Jacques Derrida, Points: Interviews, 1974–1994. Edited by Elisabeth Weber, Translated Peggy Kamuf. Stanford University Press, 1995 [1992]. p122.

^[6] Cited in Richard Eyre, “Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition,” in: Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An essay on phenomenological ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes, Routledge, 2003 [1943]. pX.

^[7] Martin Heidegger, Letter on “Humanism”. In: William McNeil (ed.), Pathmarks. Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi. Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1946]. pp239-276.

^[8] Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus”, in: The Massachusetts Review. Translated by John Maccombie. Vol. 6. Nr. 1. Autumn/Winter 1964-1965 [1948]. p49.

^[9] Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism. Translated by Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams. Routledge, 2001 [1963]. p38.

^[10] Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego. Translated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick. Noonday Press, 1957 [1936].

^[11] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An essay on phenomenological ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. Routledge, 2003 [1943].

^[12] Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. Translated by George J. Becker. Shocken, 1995 [1946]. p65.

Hu Yuzhi and the Malayan Spring

Hu Yuzhi (1896–1986) arrived at Singapore’s postwar crossroads bearing credentials that spanned continents and ideologies. Born to modest Zhejiang origins and shaped under Lu Xun’s tutelage, Hu had emerged by the 1920s as a driving force in China’s new literature movement, championing both the democratic promise of vernacular Chinese and the cosmopolitan vision of Esperanto. His ascent through Shanghai’s publishing world—from early work at the Commercial Press to editorial stewardship of prestigious journals like Eastern Miscellany and World Knowledge—established him as a literary critic of formidable standing. A Sorbonne education in international law, coupled with a homeward transit through the Soviet Union, equipped him with that rarest of combinations: firsthand European experience wedded to profound domestic engagement.

The Japanese occupation of Malaya had forced Hu into a harrowing three-and-a-half-year exile in Sumatra, where he survived under the alias “Zhang Shangfu” as a rice wine brewer while mastering Indonesian sufficiently to compile China’s first Indonesian grammar. His September 1945 return delivered him to a Singapore transformed: British authority lay fractured, communist networks stood emboldened, and the world order hung in precarious equilibrium. Hu moved swiftly to resurrect progressive networks from wartime’s wreckage, launching Nanqiao Daily with Tan Kah Kee’s financial support and establishing the New Nanyang Publishing House from an unassuming Cross Street shophouse.

British colonial intelligence compressed him into operational shorthand—“believed to have contact with the C.P. in Siam”; “has agents throughout Java and Sumatra”—while Victor Purcell, the former Chinese Protectorate official, furnished more vivid portraiture of this “little homunculus of a man with bright eyes like a marmoset,” whose physical presence belied his intellectual stature. Purcell recognized in Hu “an ego in bas relief ”—energetic, ambitious, and determined—whose intellectual project aimed at “reconciling the differences between the various Chinese parties and sections.” That method—his facility across political grammars, both polite liberalism and militant communism—revealed itself under interrogation when Hu expounded on press freedom “for some two and a half hours” before inundating officials with bilingual missives warning that “the withholding of liberties will, ultimately, hurt the British the most.”

Fengxia’s Internationalist Mission

Fengxia—bearing Hu’s editorship, pen name, and publishing imprimatur—presented a sophisticated fusion of political commentary, literary work, and social analysis that Purcell deemed “far above the level of any Chinese journalism which we have had before in Malaya.” The journal’s nomenclature carried symbolic weight: Fengxia derived from the Malay negeri di bawah angin—land below the wind—which had designated these monsoon-swept lands for centuries. But new winds now swept maritime Asia. From “Java, Annam, Burma, and Calcutta” rose battle cries for freedom; soon “the South Pacific and Indian Ocean” would be “swept by unprecedented fierce waves.”

The journal positioned itself between translation and localization, committed to “understand the ‘land below the wind,’ to listen to its oppressed and enslaved voices, and to reflect their wishes and demands.” No publication in postwar Malaya more forcefully articulated decolonizing Asia’s cry for unity: “one billion oppressed people” demanding continental solidarity against imperialism’s dying grip. Across “turbulent Asia,” new nations struggled against old empires and fresh hegemonies, yearning for “peaceful, democratic, and free” futures. Imperialism’s universal character unified seemingly disparate struggles: “China’s problem,Vietnam’s problem, Indonesia’s problem, India’s problem, Burma’s problem” appeared distinct yet proved “completely identical in essence.”

Singapore afforded Hu a panoramic vantage on decolonization’s sweep. The city concentrated Asia’s contradictions: “dozens of different ethnic groups” embodying struggles between democracy and authoritarianism, between ideals and reality, between oppressors and oppressed. Through this crossroads flowed Asia’s revolutionary energies—Indonesian republicans, Chinese communists, Indian nationalists transited here, their ideologies cross-pollinating. Fengxia’s coverage embodied this pan-Asian vision: Burma’s march toward freedom drew praise for Aung San’s magnetism; Vietnam’s anti-colonial war earned fierce support for its resilience; Indonesia commanded extensive reportage, with sympathies reserved for the socialist Sutan Sjahrir and the legendary communist Tan Malaka. Yet India dominated coverage, its continental scale and scattered diaspora echoing China’s own predicament—both nations stalked by famine, fractured by partition, yearning for genuine independence.

The Overseas Chinese Dilemma

The postwar reckoning forced Fengxia to grapple with two related yet distinct questions: what Asian decolonization demanded of China, and what it demanded of the Chinese abroad. The first admitted easy resolution. “China and Asia share inseparable destinies,” the journal proclaimed, demanding reciprocal support between China’s internal revolution and Asia’s independence movements: political solidarity in struggle, economic cooperation in development. Hu’s sweeping narrative of modern China’s “four revolutions”—the Xinhai Revolution, Northern Expedition, Long March, and ongoing Civil War—charted how China’s successive upheavals had inspired anti-colonial movements across the continent. The “two basic tasks of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism,” he argued, belonged not exclusively to China but to “all Asian national revolutions,” creating an “inseparable relationship” between Chinese revolution and Asian nationalism.

The overseas Chinese question proved thornier. In principle, the journal labored to recast the overseas Chinese as bearers of revolution, invoking Nanyang’s “revolutionary legacy” to encourage alliance with local nationalist movements, urging them to “join hands with oppressed nations on the path of genuine freedom.” At the height of postwar possibility, Hu’s “On the Dual Mission of the Overseas Chinese” articulated complementary rather than competing loyalties to Chinese motherland and Southeast Asian homelands. Hu dismissed three partial approaches—economic self-interest, exclusive homeland loyalty, or complete local integration—as insufficient. Promoting Chinese democracy and supporting regional independence, he argued, were not opposing duties but parallel fronts in the continental struggle against empire. Diasporic participation in local struggles, he concluded, strengthened distant China; China’s freedom, in turn, helped “oppressed nations advance toward freedom.” Distance, Hu suggested, was not the diaspora’s burden but its gift to the revolution.

This dream of serving two revolutions foundered on the birth of nations. Fengxia’s advocacy for overseas Chinese participation in nationalist struggles ran against movements increasingly suspicious of foreign influence, forcing stark choices between local citizenship and Chinese allegiance. Hu’s response distinguished four gradients of belonging: temporary sojourners, permanent Nanyang residents, colonial-born Straits Chinese with British or Dutch citizenship, and local-born creoles of “mixed blood.” With three of his four categories rooted in Southeast Asian soil, the balance tipped inexorably toward local citizenship. Hu’s own irresolution surfaced in his Democratic League activism, which marshaled overseas capital and political energy for mainland struggle: “We are all patriotic Chinese with the right to speak as masters of China.” This ambivalence reflected broader sentiment: when surveyed, 98% of overseas Chinese still considered their motherland to be “in Tangshan, in the northern continent, in China.”

In important ways, however, philosophy superseded politics in Hu’s analysis. While his colleagues parsed federation mechanics and constitutional technicalities, Hu retreated into theoretical contemplation, pursuing the deeper question of “national form” (minzu xingshi). Southeast Asia’s historical peculiarity—territories whose plural societies, welded by colonial artifice, exhibited starkly uneven political development—posed novel theoretical questions. Could “national form” exist without the singular nation it ostensibly required? India and China inherited national concepts awaiting modern content; Southeast Asia possessed only plurality awaiting conceptual form. The theoretical challenge—giving form to plurality—demanded dialectical method: “Content and form are contradictory but also unified,” Hu wrote, recognizing that nationalism faltered precisely where it forced plural content into singular form. In Southeast Asia, plurality ascontent would generate its own unprecedented form—adequate to its own complexity, not despite but through its contradictions. In his vision, nations constituted “people’s collectives” organized around shared political, economic, and cultural institutions. Democratic citizenship would spring from institutional commitment rather than the accidents of birth or bonds of blood—participation, not pedigree, as the measure of membership. This theoretical foundation enabled his analytical distinction of nation (minzu) from ethnicity (zhongzu): colonial Malaya’s “three major nations”—Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities with distinct political identities—would transform with independence from national entities into ethnic constituents of unified Malayan nationhood. This model diverged sharply from Soviet federalism’s contingent unity, where constituent republics retained secession rights, and envisioned instead ethnic diversity within national unity—plurality without the possibility of partition.

Hu brought these theoretical insights to bear on contemporary citizenship debates through a crucial distinction: jiaxiang (hometown), designating where overseas Chinese actually lived, worked, and raised families, versus zuguo (homeland), signifying the ancestral China that claimed them through bloodlines. This parsing exposed how Chinese nationality law—still conferring citizenship through patrilineal descent—had become an anachronism, at odds with democratic principles that anchored belonging in territorial presence and civic participation. Hu’s vision ultimately transcended liberalism’s tepid multiculturalism and socialism’s mechanical federalism. For the overseas Chinese, he imagined something unprecedented: full Malayan citizenship within a plural national form, Chinese ethnic identity intact.

The Communist Challenge

The Malayan Communist Party emerged from the war as celebrated anti-fascist veterans, their democratic awakening enabling the party’s first sustained public engagement. Self-styled as the “people’s newspaper,” their flagship publication Voice of the People (Minsheng Bao) pledged to reflect popular struggles while its content addressed material urgencies—food distribution, grocery prices, factory conditions—linking unions across the peninsula through strikes and demonstrations.

The MCP initially shared Fengxia’s vocabulary of international solidarity. They converged on strategic foundations: global revolutionary analysis identifying declining capitalism confronting ascending socialism, and regional coordination recognizing Malaya’s fate as inseparable from Southeast Asian decolonization. Yet by 1947, the party’s rejection of extraterritorial allegiances marked a decisive break with Fengxia’s cosmopolitan vision. The MCP reordered priorities to flow “primarily toward Malaya, secondarily toward ancestral countries,” meaning India or China. While granting the magnetic pull of homeland struggles, party officials declared any privileging of these “partial interests” over Malaya’s self-determination incorrect and counterrevolutionary. Its analysis singled out Malaya’s putative “national bourgeoisie”—these Chinese rubber barons and tin magnates, factory owners and merchant compradors—as revolutionaries of convenience, whose politics were hostage to imperialisms old and new, bound as they were by British credit lines and American market indices. Their revolutionary pretensions, however ardently proclaimed, remained as calculated as they were conditional, their solidarity with China calibrated for commercial advantage, and their class interests precluding genuine support for Malayan revolution.

This logic of “Malayanization” led the MCP toward the work of nurturing Malay nationalism, supporting nascent organizations, and invoking kinship with Indonesia’s anti-colonial struggle. The party wagered heavily on the Malay Nationalist Party, directing cadres to mobilize mass participation and promote unity across all nationalities. By mid-1946, party resolutions insisted that Malayan Chinese surrender their “overseas Chinese character” and dedicate themselves exclusively to local movements. Internal dispatches censured members’ “narrow patriotic perspectives” in their sustained focus on China, while editorial guidelines prioritized Malayan issues, with Southeast Asian concerns receiving secondary attention and China issues merely residual coverage. The factional schism with the China Democratic League—Hu’s political vehicle—tore open for all to witness. The CDL stood accused as “indifferent toward British imperialism,” while the MCP reserved sharpest invective for unnamed critics, almost certainly CCP representatives, who consigned Malaya to the waiting room of revolution: those who deemed it “still backward,” who cast Malayans as uncommitted sojourners, who prescribed “long-term” revolution and glacial progress, and who considered its “revolutionary prospects dim” without Chinese victory—in short, those “making extremely harmful, erroneous arguments” by deferring Malayan agency to Chinese precedent. In practice, this meant the Chinese and Indian communities who had lived as proof of cosmopolitan solidarity must now disown the internationalist commitments that had defined their political identity.

The Literary Battlefield

The tensions between the MCP’s rooted localism and Fengxia’s expansive internationalism, long forestalled out of political courtesy, erupted into open dispute by late 1947, surfacing in the seemingly gossamer concerns of literary purpose. This intellectual tempest forced Chinese thinkers to confront the elemental question of sovereign belonging, with mahua (Malayan Chinese) and huaqiao (overseas Chinese) emerging as incompatible visions. The debate’s center of gravity proved to be cishi cidi—“here and now”—as both aesthetic principle and political commitment.

The debate began with an incendiary polemic “On Malayan Chinese Literature,” published in December 1947 by MCP intellectual Zhou Rong. The essay shattered the tenuous détente with its verdict of double betrayal on part of Hu Yuzhi and his associates: both of artistic integrity and political commitment. Literature without locality, he pronounced, was mere “overseas Chinese literature”—derivative, subordinate, forever gazing elsewhere. His assault proceeded through interlocking propositions: authentic literature must achieve distinctiveness through inhabiting the concrete reality of “here and now”; work lacking such grounding never charted “the leading direction of Malayan Chinese literary creation.”

Zhou’s critique challenged the temporal calculus that ranked China’s “urgent” revolution above Malaya’s “long-term” reform. Distance sufficed for political commentary—“holding newspapers and looking skyward”—but literary creation demanded immersion among “typical characters and typical environments.” His coup de grâce targeted mainland writers stranded in Malayan indifference: while “waiting for the great liberation of the Chinese people,” they generated otiose work, addressing neither the China they had left nor the Malaya they refused to see. “If crossing oceans changes nothing in one’s writing,” Zhou asked, “what was the point of such arduous passage?”

The riposte from Singapore’s literary left proved swift and sophisticated. Li Xuan and Hu Yuzhi—the latter writing under pseudonym—brought genuine philosophical rigor to their defense of universalism. Literature’s authentic mission lay not in local specificity but in exposing “all evil phenomena of this time”—a definition that privileged political content over geographical accident. Colonial Malaya and semi-feudal China were variations on imperialism’s theme: “China has its corrupt officials, Nanyang its amoral merchants; China has its feudal reactionaries, Nanyang its idle literati.”

Hu’s contribution, appearing under the condescending title “Friend, You’ve Entered a Dead End!,” masked philosophical rigor beneath avuncular bemusement. His crucial insight separated form from content with lapidary precision: “Literary forms may reflect ethnic particularity, while content must remain international.” Chinese literary forms could voice struggles recognizable in any colonial context without aesthetic dilution. His examples disproved geographical determinism: Lu Xun, who “never visited Malaya,” had captured Malayan Chinese reality more profoundly than any local literature; Gorky authored Russian masterpieces from Italian exile; Gogol’s The Government Inspector still reflected “the reality of here and now” when staged in Shanghai or Singapore.

Employing a horn-shaped diagram, Hu traced Zhou’s path from reasonable premise—“literature requires its own identity”—through progressive narrowing to its farcical terminus: demands for “British authorities to deport foreign-born Chinese writers.” The force of this reductio ad absurdum revealed that cultural nationalism, taken to its endpoint, coincided with colonial exclusion. By severing Malaya from global struggle—“drawing a circle isolating Malaya from the world”—Zhou had committed not intellectual error alone but political betrayal of internationalist solidarity.

The Twilight of Internationalism

For all their sophistication, however, the internationalists misread history’s direction. They saw anti-colonial struggles as variations on a theme, assumed literature’s borderless currency, and dismissed local specificity as parochialism—convictions soon drowned by decolonization’s particularist tide. They could not know the Emergency would make their ideals not just obsolete but seditious, internationalism itself the first casualty of political repression.

Fengxia represented the last moment when it seemed possible to imagine an anticolonial politics that refused the choice between narrow nationalism and colonial cosmopolitanism. Hu Yuzhi’s vision—plural content generating its own adequate form, a nation capacious enough to contain its contradictions without resolving them into false unity—offered a path not taken. The journal’s pages preserve not just the historical record of a forgotten debate but the ghost of an alternative future, one where solidarity across borders mighthave survived the transition to independence, where the Chinese diaspora might have found belonging without erasure, where the universal and particular might have achieved their promised dialectical resolution.

That this vision failed makes it no less significant. In our own moment of resurgent nationalisms and fractured solidarities, Fengxia’s internationalist dream—however brief its flowering—reminds us that the particularist logic of nation-states was not inevitable. Other futures were once possible, and might be again.

…

Kelvin Ng is a PhD candidate and Fox International Fellow at Yale University

Less than twenty years later, the same Romero again directed Mexico’s mission in Washington. As in the 1860s, European empires were on the march, although their attention had shifted to West Africa. At the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, diplomats from Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium—informally representing the inchoate Congo Free State of King Leopold II—sought to justify a new scramble for colonies. The delegates in Berlin proposed and approved a doctrine known as “effective occupation” to regulate competing colonial claims among themselves, without consulting the people who lived in the territories they claimed to control.

Influential Latin American diplomats, including representatives from monarchical and imperial Brazil, recoiled at the threat this new doctrine posed to the countries of Latin America, which held expansive territorial claims but often exercised limited control over dispersed populations of indigenous peoples and foreign migrants. The Argentine jurist Carlos Calvo, then the most renowned Latin American international lawyer in Europe, warned that requiring effective and permanent governance could prompt great powers to back adventurers and agitators who might help them assert colonial claims in the New World. Alarmed, Colombia’s Ricardo Becerra sought to rally Spanish American diplomats, beginning with Romero, to convene a counter-conference that would repudiate the Berlin doctrine and reaffirm the region’s territorial norm of uti possidetis. Because Latin American states held that they inherited the administrative boundaries of their former Iberian colonial jurisdictions, their dominion rested on abstract colonial claims rather than on continuous or effective control. Soon, however, many of these same figures made their peace with empire, provided that expansion targeted Africa rather than the Americas. Romero set aside Becerra’s proposal. Calvo attended the Berlin Conference, where, instead of acting as an anti-imperial critic, he defended the legitimacy of Portuguese colonialism in West Africa. By late 1885, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico had acceded to Leopold’s request that they establish diplomatic relations with the Congo Free State, which he governed from his palace outside Brussels.

With this contrast in mind, how should we understand Latin American contributions to early anti-colonial discourses? Which is the real Romero—the young advocate of Mexicans’ right to determine their own government or the later pragmatist willing to accommodate empire elsewhere? Which is the real Calvo—the celebrated author of non-interventionist doctrines or the jurist who defended Portuguese claims in Africa? The answer, perhaps uneasily, is both, and not merely because diplomacy allows for exceptions, inconsistency, or even hypocrisy. It is because the doctrines that would later be reframed as anti-colonial foundations were, in the nineteenth century, inseparable from widespread elite support for colonization on terms suited to Latin America’s own interests.

The fields of international relations, history, and political thought have in recent years produced a growing number of correctives to the longstanding marginalization of Latin America. Solidaristic impulses and opposition to empire, reaching back to the independence wars of the early nineteenth century and the 1826 Panama Congress, offer compelling precedents for later anti-imperial world-making, especially in defence of territorial integrity and sovereign equality. The line, it seems, can be drawn from Liberator Simón Bolívar to Cuban nationalist José Martí and the Cold War revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Later critics of U.S. imperialism, from Hugo Chávez to Gustavo Petro, have explicitly claimed this lineage. In academia, this portrayal of a long Latin American tradition cast in heroic resistance to predatory empires has found prominent recent expression in Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin’s magnum opus, America, América.

There is more than a grain of truth in this interpretation. As the first group of states to emerge from European colonialism, Latin America has a solid claim to historical precedence. During the nineteenth century, the region’s diplomats, politicians, and publicists advanced principles that later became central to liberal internationalist projects and their more radical alternatives. These ideals, including sovereign equality, non-intervention, universal participation, and international law that applied equally to the weak and the strong, developed from the interplay of Latin America’s domestic struggles over legitimate political order and the region’s international liminality. Together they formed a shared rhetorical and symbolic repertoire that we have elsewhere termed “republican internationalism.”

If we read history backwards, it becomes a small step to conclude, as Grandin does, that “Latin America had done the unthinkable: it had forced the great powers to recognize the sovereign equality of all nations, abrogated the doctrine of conquest, and provided a model for a world system organized around the presumption of mutual interests rather than inherent antagonisms” (Grandin 2025, p. 590). Yet approaching Latin American history and political thought primarily as a mirror to (U.S.) empire creates a distorted picture of the region’s past. Hagiographic narratives and efforts to locate Latin American origins for later international principles obscure facts that are uncomfortable from today’s vantage point. Throughout the nineteenth century, and often well into the twentieth, many of the same Latin American elites who articulated seemingly progressive norms were firmly in favour of colonization, once that term is understood in its historical context. The anti-imperialism they invoked abroad was closely tied to support for a different form of conquest and colonialism at home. State-supported settlement of Europeans on lands from which indigenous communities had been fraudulently or violently dispossessed, often quite recently, was central to political projects of the very republican internationalists who eloquently defended self-determination and sovereign equality in Washington or Paris.

There were some important exceptions, perhaps none more prominent than the Chilean republican Francisco Bilbao. Deeply moved by his experiences in France during the 1848 “Spring of Nations”, Bilbao advocated a radical egalitarianism that cut across class and racial divisions. Internationally, he embraced an ethic of fraternity to be realized through a Latin American confederation capable of resisting foreign imperialism. In the 1850s, he denounced U.S. support for the filibuster William Walker’s settler colonial schemes in Nicaragua. In the 1860s, he railed against the dangers of European imperialism in Santo Domingo, Mexico, and the South Pacific. Yet although Bilbao became an inspirational figure, his internationalist vision was exceptional for the mid-nineteenth century. He remained far from power and spent much of his short adult life in restless exile.

More often, however, the two tendencies went hand in hand, as seen in the figure of Carlos Calvo. As an international jurist, Calvo is associated with the “Calvo clause”, which holds that national courts should have primacy in resolving disputes with foreign investors. His goal was to end the common nineteenth-century practice in which dissatisfied foreign nationals appealed to their home governments for diplomatic or even military intervention to force Latin American states to compensate them. The problem was widely recognized. In 1856, the Mexican liberal journalist and diplomat Francisco Zarco lamented that “the profession of foreign claimant has become one of the most lucrative in all of America, and the European diplomatic missions are, with few exceptions, reduced to the agency of audacious speculators, or smugglers, and of speculators who wrap themselves in the flags of powerful nations.” Worse still, such disputes offered pretexts for more sweeping interventions, as had already happened in Mexico and as occurred again in 1861, when Britain, France, and Spain launched a joint expedition after Mexico declared a moratorium on foreign debt payments. That episode ultimately allowed France to pursue the broader project that culminated in installing Maximilian on the Mexican throne.

These international principles were rooted in a different, republican notion of sovereignty. For many Spanish Americans of the period, this was also connected to a virulent antagonism to monarchism although not, it seems, for Calvo personally, who spared no flattery for Napoleon III even while French troops ravaged Mexico. Calvo and his contemporaries hoped to weaken empire using legal measures that later became foundations for claims to national self-determination. Yet this was a particular form of self-determination, one intended to be exercised by a narrow circle of liberal and largely creole elites. Before his posting to Berlin, Calvo spent years as Argentina’s immigration commissioner in Paris. In that role, and later in Berlin, he promoted and organized European emigration intended to settle and civilize the South American interior.

Calvo was a vocal supporter of Argentina’s military campaigns against indigenous polities and an advocate for policies intended to whiten the country. He was certainly not alone. Like the famed Argentine writer and later president Domingo Sarmiento, these figures shared teleological and universalistic notions of progress. They differed mainly on who had the authority to civilize within Latin America. At stake was whether the new republics counted as proper nationalities, a debate shaped by figures such as Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, who linked statehood to nationality, and Johann Bluntschli, who set out influential criteria for true nations. Their ideas quickly circulated in Latin America, where diplomats and jurists argued that if their republics met these standards, European powers had no right to civilize or reorder them. European migrants, however, were welcomed and prized, regarded by Calvo, Sarmiento, Romero, and many others as a shortcut to modernity. These interconnected ideas imagined the future of the nation in increasingly explicit racial terms. Sarmiento famously framed Argentina’s path as a struggle between civilization and barbarity. In 1879, he declared that “Our Indians, like all other savages remaining in the modern world, are on the wrong side of history, condemned to ultimate extinction.”

This strand of violent settler colonialism was evident across nineteenth-century Latin America, as it was in the United States. All as these countries expanded their frontiers through force. Very often, the same people who championed proto-anti-colonial principles of equality, law, fraternity, and non-intervention, also defended and enacted the violent dispossession of indigenous peoples. The arguments appeared side by side in the same diplomatic dispatches, and this is no accident. These republican internationalists envisioned an international order that would protect the survival and prosperity of weak states while also advancing their own projects of rule and their particular visions of progress.

Tom Long is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Warwick. He’s the author of Latin America Confronts the United States: Asymmetry and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and of A Small State’s Guide to Influence in World Politics (Oxford University Press, 2022), and co-editor of North American Regionalism: Stagnation, Decline, or Renewal? (with Eric Hershberg, University of New Mexico Press, 2023). His articles appear in journals including American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Security, World Politics, International Affairs, Past & Present, and the Journal of Global History. He holds a PhD from American University.

Carsten-Andreas Schulz is an Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and International Studies and Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on Latin American contributions to the development of international norms and institutions, with articles appearing in American Political Science Review, International Organization, European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, among others. He holds a DPhil from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Together, Tom and Carsten are currently working on the book, Republican Internationalism: Latin America and the Making of the Modern International Order, 1861-1919.

Arguments such as Césaire’s resonate across Black anti-colonial thought more widely. Various thinkers have grappled with the issues of what kind of economic, social and political institutions would replace colonialism; the place of traditional African cultures and customs within those institutions; and the relationship between former colonies and metropoles in a decolonised world. In Césaire’s account, a new modernity must be created: one that would combine ‘the productive power of modern times’ with ‘the fraternity of olden days’. Like many other Black anti-colonial thinkers, while recognising the impossibility of a return to the precolonial past, he argued that communalistic African traditions would contribute to the building of a new modernity based on equality and a ‘true humanism’.

Césaire’s vision of decolonisation was one in which capitalist-colonial modernity would be replaced with a socialist modernity. Indeed, socialist ideas have been central to the history of Black anti-colonial thought. For such thinkers, actually-existing modernity was characterised by colonialism, oppression and exploitation. While discourses of human freedom and equality abounded, capitalism had proven itself woefully incapable of delivering on these promises. The republican ideals that animated revolutions in France and the United States in the late eighteenth century have long provided important intellectual and rhetorical frameworks for abolitionists and anti-colonialists. As the Black American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, asked in 1852, ‘Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?’ Nevertheless, during the twentieth century, Black radical thinkers increasingly adopted socialist, rather than liberal or republican, ideas. This was inspired, in part, by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which was accompanied by a commitment to supporting anti-colonial struggles and the right of nations to self-determination. Socialism offered, for many Black activists and intellectuals, a much more promising model for liberation than seeking reform within the capitalist systems of the European empires or the United States. (Yet Black anti-colonialists did not simply adopt socialist and Marxist ideas as they already existed. In the words of Frantz Fanon – a Martinican intellectual who participated in and theorised the Algerian Revolution – ‘Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem’.) This essay considers how African histories and cultures were theorised and mobilised by a number of twentieth-century anti-colonial thinkers, and in so doing argues that even as these thinkers looked to the past, they did so with their eyes firmly directed towards socialist futures.

African socialism

The African socialist ideas and policies of the 1960s provide some examples of how anti-colonial thinkers have attempted to reconcile socialist modernity with the African past. African socialist theories were associated with the nation-building projects of politicians such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika/Tanzania, among others. These theories were diverse, but what each had in common was a belief that socialism was inherent to traditional African life. Such traditions had been disrupted by European colonialism, but could be rekindled as the basis of a socialist modernity. What matters in our readings of African socialist thought is not so much whether or not these depictions of a communal, egalitarian African past were accurate, but rather, in the words of the scholar Anthony Bogues, ‘how the past and the conception of tradition functioned in their political thought’.

Julius Nyerere led Tanganyika to independence in 1961, and, after the union with Zanzibar, became president of Tanzania in 1964. The core of Nyerere’s political philosophy was ujamaa (‘familyhood’), which he argued had its roots in ‘traditional African society’. Socialism was, for Nyerere, ‘an attitude of mind’, which was indigenous to Africa. In this formulation, then, African socialism was not based on importations from Europe but instead on the rediscovery and repurposing of African ways of living and thinking. While traditional African society had its problems – most notably gender inequality and poverty – the African socialists of the twentieth century aimed ‘to ensure that the advantages of modern knowledge and modern methods are achieved, but without the spread of capitalism’. Through this process, according to Nyerere, the negative features of earlier African societies could be avoided, and a modern socialist society created. In practical terms, this would entail nationalisations, cooperative agriculture and self-reliance.

Kwame Nkrumah’s vision of African socialism was somewhat different to Nyerere’s. Nkrumah led Ghana to independence in 1957. His African socialist ideas were most clearly expressed in Consciencism (1964). Like Nyerere, he believed that ‘The traditional face of Africa includes an attitude towards man which can only be described … as being socialist’, that class stratification was alien to Africa, and that ‘colonialism came and changed all this’. He argued that African history could ‘become a pointer at the ideology which should guide and direct African reconstruction’. This ‘reconstruction’ was not a return to the past. Rather, it was the creation of a new society based in part on the African past. According to Nkrumah, African communalism was the ‘social-political ancestor’ of socialism, which, ‘guided by the principles underlying communalism, adopts procedures and measures made necessary by demographic and technological developments’. Under African socialism, the technical knowledge produced under capitalism and colonialism would be put to use to serve the interests of the masses. For Nkrumah, unlike Nyerere, this meant large-scale industrialisation projects. Later in the 1960s, after being overthrown by a right-wing coup in 1966, Nkrumah began to revise his perspectives on precolonial African societies and to distance himself from the metaphysical foundations of some African socialist philosophies. He nevertheless continued to argue that the communalist and humanist ‘spirit’ of ‘traditional African society’ was worth recapturing.

Amílcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and the role of culture in national liberation

Amílcar Cabral was one of the leaders of the national liberation movements of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde. Unlike figures such as Nkrumah and Nyerere, Cabral had to consider how to build an effective anti-colonial movement in the face of an especially intransigent and violently-maintained colonialism. Independence would only come to Portuguese colonies in Africa through the waging of protracted wars in the 1960s and 1970s.

Cabral’s understanding of culture was materialist. The mode of production was the ‘material base’ of culture. Culture was therefore dynamic, and would change according to material conditions. It could also itself act as a determinant of history. Cabral did not care for the revival of a ‘traditional’ culture. What mattered was that culture had a ‘mass character’. It was the role of the national liberation movement to distinguish ‘the positive from the negative, the progressive from the reactionary’. While assimilated indigenous elites had to ‘return to the source’ of indigenous culture, this was not in order to return to the past or to traditions, but rather to combat ‘the pretended supremacy of the culture of the dominant power over that of the dominated people’. Indeed, Cabral sought the ‘progressive liquidation of the tribal mentality’. In its place, a new revolutionary culture would be made through struggle, one that was both modern and rejected European cultural supremacy.

Frantz Fanon, also writing in the context of a war of national liberation, makes for a productive comparison with Cabral. While Cabral and Fanon held different ideas about the revolutionary subject, there were some notable affinities between their ideas about culture, the African past, and national liberation. Fanon differentiated between ossified ‘custom’ and dynamic ‘culture’. He similarly affirmed the creative power of struggle in forging new cultures, rejecting the idea that national culture was a ‘folklore’, and arguing instead that the ‘colonized man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope’. Cabral and Fanon drew selectively and instrumentally on culture and history in the pursuit of a new, decolonised, socialist modernity.

Conclusion

Many Black anti-colonial thinkers have confronted the question of modernity, and the place of the African past and traditions within modernity. There has been diversity in answering these questions. Anti-colonial concepts of modernity are manifold, but have usually been tied to questions of economic and technological development, and political equality, rights and freedoms. Thinkers have scrutinised under which conditions equality, rights and freedoms can be universalised, and how the benefits of development might be shared by all. While many Black anti-colonialists have sought to recover elements of the African past, a major strain of anti-colonial thought has argued that there could be no return. Instead, as in Nyerere’s ujamaa philosophy, Nkrumah’s concept of ‘African reconstruction’, or Cabral’s urge to ‘return to the source’, any recovery of African traditions would play a role in the creation of a new, socialist modernity.

Theo Williams is a historian of Black radicalism, and anti-colonialism, teaching social history at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation (2022), which shows how the Pan-Africanism of Black activists reconfigured the politics of the British socialist movement.

October 22, 2025: Book Panel - Stephen Legg’s ‘Spaces of Anticolonialism’. Stephen Legg (Nottingham), Tanroop Sandhu (QMUL), Romola Sanyal (LSE), Philippa Williams (QMUL).

November 13, 2025: “Post-war activism in the metropole”. Iain Stewart (UCL) and Owen Dowling (Cambridge).

January 12, 2026: “Bringing the War Home: Gulf Solidarity Campaigns against Britain’s Dirty War in Dhofar, 1965-75”. Kimia Talebi (York).

February 9, 2026: “Anticolonial Resistance to Imperial Invasion”. Ajmal Waqif (Birkbeck) and Andrew Arsan (Cambridge).

March 9, 2026: “The Black Atlantic against the French Empire”. Jesus Ruiz (Vanderbilt) and Melanie Lamotte (Duke).

April 8, 2026: “Anticolonial worldmaking and its limits (?)” Jackqueline Frost (UoL in Paris) and Poorvi Bellur (Princeton).

May 18, 2026: “Anticolonial Praxis in South Asian Islam”. Samia Khatun (SOAS), Faridah Zaman (Oxford), and Mahdi Chowdhury (Harvard).

June 22, 2026: “Marxism across the Tropics”. Arwa Awan (Oberlin) and Lin Hongxuan (National University of Singapore).

The utopias of the anti-colonial period “have gradually withered into post-colonial nightmares,” but I am not convinced they have lost all of their disruptive potential.[5] There has been an understandable turn in recent historiography towards an examination of anti-colonial ‘afterlives’ and alternatives to teleological narratives which lead directly to the nation-states of today.[6] These studies look back at the lasting legacies of the colonial and struggles against it; the roads not taken, and the unattained dreams of those heady days. In turning to the past, to more expansive visions of what independence could have meant, historians can, in Walter Benjamin’s words, fan “the spark of hope in the past.”[7] This requires recognizing that there was, and is, as Edward Said put it, “a consistent intellectual trend within the [anti-colonial] nationalist consensus that is vitally critical,” and it contains “the possibility of a more generous and pluralistic vision of the world, in which imperialism courses on…but the opportunities for liberation are open.”[8]

To spark the imagination, to begin thinking of the way things might be different, we might start by “brushing history against the grain”; seeking those moments where an alternative history, and thus an alternative present and future, “flares up briefly”.[9] As David Scott writes, a conscious re-appraisal of the past can “enable a critical rethinking of the present we inhabit such as to open up new ways of thinking about possible futures.”[10] Of course, he is correct in warning against the unthinking transference of interwar anti-colonial utopianism into our ‘post’-colonial present; we inhabit quite different “problem-spaces”, and thus have different questions, answers, and expectations.[11] Scott is right to point out the way that Western capitalist modernity has conditioned the very possibilities of thought of all that live in its temporal snare, and his meditations on the “tragic” emplotment of colonial enlightenment and the antimonies of anti-colonial struggle are striking and convincing.[12] However, I feel that he is too quick to state “that the narrative of revolution is inseparable from the larger narrative of modernity…[and] categories such as ‘nation,’ ‘sovereignty,’ ‘progress,’ ‘reason,’ and so on.”[13] By relying too heavily on Reinhart Koselleck’s definition of modern revolution, he closes off the continued existence of revolutionary expectation which do not conform to the future-oriented concept that Koselleck defines.

Furthermore, while Scott’s focus on the productive power of modernity- its ability to influence even the construction of opposition and perceived alternatives- is a sobering reminder of the power of dominant discourses and imaginations, it feels too all-encompassing. The power that Scott gives to ‘modernity’ can lead to a feeling of intellectual paralysis. It is better to keep in mind that “there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems, no matter how deeply they saturate society.”[14] While modernities, even of the subaltern variety, do indeed “actively help to construct new choices which themselves are constitutive of new creative subjectivities,” no dominating system is omniscient.[15]

I agree with David Scott when he says “there is no overcoming this ambiguous inheritance of enlightenment. There is only the everlasting negotiation with it.”[17] However, I think some of the key conceptual tools in this negotiation can come from focusing on the fissures and cracks within this all-imposing construct of ‘colonial enlightenment’; it was never monolithic, never unchallenged and, I believe, never entirely hegemonic. A focus on the struggles that sought alternatives to our post-colonial present, with a keen eye on how those less imbricated in the structures of colonial knowledge production and intellectual life- that is, subaltern classes and their allies- thought is an indispensable tool in this task.

Reinhart Koselleck declared that, since the French Revolution, “revolution obviously no longer returned to given conditions or possibilities, but has, since 1789, led forward into an unknown future. The nature of this future is so obscure that its recognition and mastery have become the constant task of politics.”[18] In many ways, this is true; the philosophy of progress and a break with the past is a constant in post-1789 political thought and was dominant for centuries. However, this was not- and is not- the only temporal disposition in revolutionary politics, especially not in the colonial world. In India, for example, there were “immensely varied entry points into early communism,” and that meant revolution, communism, and freedom represented different things to different people.[19] Manu Goswami cites the case of Ayudhya Prasad, an interwar Indian Communist, who came to leftist politics from “anarchic peasant traditions in northern India.”[20] His ideal of revolution was quite different from the forward-looking archetype that Koselleck put forth: “the first idea of Communist society was taken from the collective production and distribution which prevailed in primitive society,” he argued, and “in India communism is not a foreign question but a matter of re-establishing the old relations on the basis of the advanced mode of production today…it is about smashing the capitalist relations imported in the last century. ”[21] To some Sikhs, like Sohan Singh Josh, communism had its roots in the philosophy of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism.[22] Leftist politics could easily blend with idealized constructions of a pre-colonial past and, even if these visions were romanticized and themselves the product of ‘modern’ readings of history, it speaks to a different kind of temporality in Indian communism. As Manu Goswami put it:

It has become a cliché to consider communism only in terms of its radical futurity, its prophetic promise to bring about the dawn of a new day. The appeal of early communism was more varied, though, than an abstract futurity whose successive defeats, in turn, spawned a kind of melancholia about the past futures of the European left. Communism was perceived in colonial and peripheral worlds as having preceded the rise of homogenizing industrial capitalism. It was understood less as a mere symptom of the new than as the activation of forms of universality coextensive with a heterogenous lived present…the temporal appeal of communism was that it offered at once a future plenitude and an uncanny return, a concept that faded into the background in later understandings.[23]

The presence of the past in political imagination was hardly a phenomenon restricted to India. As Cedric Robinson noted, in Black Marxism, during colonial slavery, many of the enslaved wished for nothing more than “a repair of the discontinuity produced by enslavement and transportation”; liberation meant an escape from ‘History’ as conceived in Western teleology, not a progression alongside a linear time-scale.[24] During the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, “the Zapatistas were not interested in building the future as modern, technological society…their utopia lay in the past, not in the future.”[25] Even now, the neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, speak of walking “putting one foot in the past and the other in the future.”[26] Leaders of Indigenous movements like Evo Morales, Enzo Traverso writes, “act politically in a secular world, but they know that their historical role is also intertwined with a temporality that does not belong to Western history.”[27] The Russian Revolution, despite its productivism and ‘modernizing’ agenda, was seen by both friends and foes of the USSR as “ectopic- a phenomenon untimely and outside its proper place-, [and] its explosive potential became an obsessive concern for imperial authorities.”[28]

Bringing to the fore the “dynamic anarchronies” of anti-colonial liberatory horizons can challenge the logic of ‘progress’, and complicate Koselleck’s framing of revolutionary temporality.[29] The peoples of the Global South and the formerly colonized world are “conscripts of modernity”, and their prospects for liberation have been compromised and shaped by the very conditions of their imprisonment in colonial and oppressive structures. However, whenever capitalist ‘modernity’ has sought to conscript those who remain outside its grasp there has always been and will always be resistance; desertion, revolution, and a stubborn refusal to be moulded into the perfect ‘modern’ subject. Even if the visions of history that resistance movements draw upon are themselves inseparable from the effects of colonial capitalism (I do not believe there is an entirely ‘autonomous’ space outside these logics), there is more to the subjective imagination of anti-colonialism than a focus on colonial enlightenment and modernity can fully capture.

In a colonial setting, it is not merely a mastery of the future that becomes the goal of politics. In many ways, the past also becomes an open field; on the one hand, the colonized will quite often recognize the unreliability of imperialist narratives of the past and, on the other, there is the struggle between a reckoning with or a romanticism about the pre-colonial world. The past becomes as pregnant with possibility as the future. It is alternatively something to celebrate, to return to, to reject, to grapple with, to be ashamed of, or to be proud of. It bears repeating that in our ‘post’-colonial setting, the disjuncture between what was dreamed of during anti-colonial movements, and what resulted- the fact that imperialism, state repression, poverty, and injustice are still with us- can be the starting point for a productive intellectual endeavour. For us, too, the past can become a resource and something to struggle over: did something go wrong? Was this the only path out of coloniality that could have been taken? What alternatives were dreamt of, and are they still relevant? There can be no rote repetition of generations past, and David Scott helps us see the contradictions of modernity as well as the dangers of reading historic texts without resituating them to our present. However, there is still some value to be wrung out of the emplotment of ultimate anti-colonial overcoming, of substantive liberation.

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The Time of Capital

In Futures Past, Reinhart Koselleck explores how the concept of historia magistrae vitae- the notion that history had lessons to impart for readers in the present- was apparently made redundant by the acceleration of historical change after the onset of modernity- the modern was “breaking free of the continuity of an earlier mode of time”.[30] Essentially, the world was changing so quickly that the past was increasingly detached from the present and the future. In many ways, this holds true. Technological progress has reshaped the world in truly staggering ways. However, Koselleck also wrote about how, in the aftermath of 1789, “a new space of expectation was constituted whose perspective was traced out by points referring back to different phases of the past revolution.”[31] In a way, by attempting to carry out failed revolutions anew, there was a return to earlier cyclical ideas of history. However, there are important material reasons for why this phenomenon might appear under capitalism and that is what Enzo Traverso describes as the “cyclical time” of capital.[32]

He argues, quite convincingly, that there are multiple temporalities in the works of Karl Marx. First, there is the “linear, homogenous and abstract time of production.”[33] Then, there is the “time of production and circulation”.[34] At the same time, there is the march of time that is internal to capital’s logics and functioning; the “cyclical time of the expanded reproduction of capital and the circulation of its exchange values.”[35] It is the cyclical time of capitalism that gives it, and those who live under its sway, a unique temporal disposition. The nature of capitalism is constantly in flux and technologies, modes of production, and class relations are never static. Yet, the characteristics and contradictions of this economic system remain; the ceaseless extraction of surplus-value, recurrent overproduction and economic crises can be seen as characteristics of a unique temporal regime.

Contemporary struggles against this system also often refer to past movements: their symbols, their songs, their icons, and their vocabulary are borrowed from twentieth century socialist movements. Cloaking oneself in the garb of revolutions past is hardly limited to the anti-capitalist Left. The French revolutionaries of 1789 sought to, as Marx put it, “conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”[36] Marx identified the manner in which even that first ‘modern’ revolution, which Koselleck takes to the be the defining point at which revolutionary temporality became tied to a distant and unknown future, sought to conjure “up the dead of world history”, and was driven by a desire to recreate a romanticized past.[37]

A similar spirit has persisted. Whether it is the use of Victor Jara’s songs by protestors in Chile, or Indian farmers invoking Bhagat Singh, “the awakening of the dead…served [and serves] the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old…of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.”[38] Marx felt that the socialist revolution could not “take its poetry from the past but only from the future”, thereby echoing Koselleck’s idea of the radical futurity of ‘modern’ revolutionary imagination.[39] Yet despite this injunction, the allure of the past is too strong for people to ignore. In some cases, as Chris Moffat puts it, “living communities can experience [the] present through an active sense of responsibility to the dead.”[40] Movements from the past, especially those that failed to achieve their stated aims or were defeated, continue to make their presence felt and can have a tangible impact on politics in the here and now. Perhaps Enzo Traverso put it best when he said:

Working through the past is unavoidable, not only because there are so many skeletons in the closet, but also because we cannot ignore the claim that the past has on us. Blasting the continuum of history, revolutions rescue the past. They will contain in themselves - whether they will be aware of it or not - the experiences of their ancestors. That is another reason why we need to meditate upon their history.[41]

[1] David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2.

[2] Ibid, 2.

[3] Walter Benjamin, ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”, WBSW, VOL. 4, 402, as cited Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History (London: Verso Books, 2021), 77.

[4] Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2014), as cited in Ajay Singh Chaudhary, ‘The Long Now’, Late Light, 2021, https://late-light.com/issues/issue-1/the-long-now.

[5] Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, 2.

[6] For example, see Christopher J. Lee, Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, Ohio University Research in International Studies. Global and Comparative Studies Series, number 11 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Sara Salem, Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony, The Global Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108868969.; Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108693875; Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

[7] Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), 255.

[8] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 278, 294.

[9] Ibid, 255-256.

[10] Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, 50.

[11] Ibid, 4.

[12] See Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, especially chapter 5.

[13] Ibid, 89.

[14] Edward Said, ‘Traveling Theory’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), 247.

[15] Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, 117.

[16] Ibid, 129.

[17] Ibid, 175.

[18] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Columbia University Press, 2004), 72.

[19] Manu Goswami, ‘A Communism of Intelligence: Early Communism in Late Imperial India’, Diacritics 48, no. 2 (2020), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/797662, 100.

[20] Ibid, 100.

[21] Meerut Conspiracy Case 1929-32, 536, as cited in Ibid, 100.

[22] Ibid, 100.

[23] Ibid, 103-104. For more on the narrowing of the diversity and malleability of early Indian Communism- how it became stultified, narrow, and orthodox in response to Stalinism and the Meerut Trial, see A. Raza, ‘Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Meerut and the Creation of “Official” Communism in India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 3 (1 January 2013): 316–30, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-2378112.

[24] Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd ed. (United Kingdom: Penguin Classics, 2021), I.

[25] Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History, 65-6.

[26] Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 74.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Goswami, ‘A Communism of Intelligence: Early Communism in Late Imperial India’, 98.

[29] Ibid, 92..

[30] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Columbia University Press, 2004), 31.

[31] Ibid, 41.

[32] Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History, 378.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1937), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Chris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108655194, 5.

[41] Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History, 31.

What is of general interest to the readers of the Antiquary, the epigraphist tells us, is the historical and political value of these songs for governance, which could provide a “genuine native view” of the system of administration and the measures taken to enforce it. These songs, “never meant for European ears,” but on the tongue of most of the villagers in the south of Belgaum and north of Dharwad paint “ingenuous illustrations” of the local officers, magistrates, and even Queen Victoria herself, he notes. Additionally, on account of being composed by “uneducated rustics,” these songs are considered to hold linguistic insights about “the vernacular as it is actually spoken,” not accessible in the “artificial compositions” given to written records in Kanarese or Sanskrit. Admixtures from Marathi, Urdu, and borrowed English terms are fitted into the four-syllabic prosody common to Kanarese (Kannada). His collection comprises lamentations of the final downfall of places of renown, commemorations of rebellions, reflections on the introduction of the Income Tax, and the mounting tensions between cultivators and moneylenders (Fleet 1885, 293–95).

Two pieces with sheet music are discussed below and reproduced on the piano.

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Uprising in Kittur

‘The Ballad of the Insurrection of Rayanna of Sangolli’ recounts the events following the imposition of the Doctrine of Lapse – under which royal vassals of the East India Company would be directly annexed if they did not have an heir – upon the Kittur principality. The Desai of Kittur held hereditary office as a vassal under Peshwa rule and had continued to hold his Zamindari [fief] under Company rule with cash allowances and honorary gifts restored, until his death without an heir (Stokes 1870, 77–79). Rayanna, a Sanadi – a bearer of rent-free title in exchange for service to the Desai, had his first foray with the British East India Company in 1824, fighting alongside the widow of the Desai. This tale recounts his second attempt at armed conflict provoked by the confiscation of rent-free service lands in 1829[1]. Said to have acted alongside the adopted son and heir of Kittur, Rayanna rode through several villages, adding to his numbers all those disaffected by British taxation, looting the Kucheris[2] and destroying the records at Bidi and Sampgaon, mounting a full-scale rebellion, resulting in the death of the collector and political agent of Dharwad[3], Sr. John Thackeray. Although hesitant at first to call in the military as it was a matter of honorary titles[4], when Rayanna continued his raids, the government eventually raised the regular troops. Despite their efforts, Rayanna continued his raids, until he was eventually betrayed by other claimants to the title. “He was condemned to hang at Nandagud, the scene of his chief robbery” writes H.J. Stokes (85) who also notes that close to his burial sprang a Banyan tree under whose shade a temple was erected, and Rayanna was deified.

The version of the Ballad that Fleet records is signed off by the bard Basava of Mandala-Heballi, who sings of being an eyewitness to the events described. The pastiche, based on prevalent narrative tropes within which colonial power is described, is interesting. The Magistrate in Dharwad is narrated to have momentarily left his seat of power (gaddi) in frustration “throwing down his hat, and biting his wrist, and gnashing his teeth” on hearing about these unfolding disturbances – the poet’s way of suggesting the insurrectionists were not far from unseating the British. Queen Victoria is anachronistically narrated to be part of the unfolding events. Powerful and wise, she immediately realises the severity of the matter, responding to the letter from Dharwad in person. Although the events took place during the reign of King George the IV, the inclusion of Queen Victoria as a character in the story plays an important part in the mimetic representation of sovereign power. Not only is it used as a stand-in for a name of a ruler that the villagers were familiar with by the 1880s, the establishing of proximity and familiarity with the figure of the sovereign, giving a sensory association and a voice to her gives us pause to examine the notion of sovereign power and legitimacy in the feudatory. Subsequently, the Magistrate is narrated to immediately recognize the beauty on Rayanna’s face along with a messianic recognition of nobility and bravery in him when he is presented before the court in chains. The judgement of his gut is to set him free but the men who have betrayed Rayanna to answer the Company’s promise of rewards beg the Magistrate to put him to death, fearing for their lives. The song suggests that before the official letter from the sovereign arrives, Rayanna is hastily put to death. In its narrative imagination, the Magistrate laments alongside the villagers and even pays out 10 rupees to have Rayanna buried.

The Disarmament Act

The Disarmament Act of 1857 was passed as an immediate consequence of the revolt of 1857. Orders were issued to confiscate all weapons of every description. The ballad of ‘The Bedas of Halagali’ recounts the refusal of the villagers to surrender their arms. The Bedas, recorded as professional hunters by Fleet, resented the measures imposed upon them despite the fact that the state of Mudhol, of which Halagali was a part, had not participated in the revolt. Fleet pegs this disturbance to a hasty implementation upon people “who were not even yet fully accustomed to the security of the British rule” as well as to their race and caste for having a “turbulent disposition” (356). Upon quelling the resistance, the village is burnt as punishment.

In this ballad, the very first verse establishes the government as distant and foreign with the orders coming from Vilayat (Europe). The ballad chronicles long lists of items lost to the Kumpani Sarkara (EIC government) as if to memorialize it. The different types of swords and shields passed down through generations or bought with great difficulty upon incurring debts, the material they are made of, the distinct decorations they are adorned with and memories they held in relation to these weapons are recounted. The question of masculine power and honor are also invoked. The promise of hereditary property upon disarming is contrasted with the value, dignity and honor the weapons brought them. The bard asks, “were not the rich men in great anxiety” (Fleet 1887, 357) having kept their land but given up its means of protection? The fear that the government was baiting them to give up arms, leaving them defenseless and without access to negotiation, pervades the narrative as they repeatedly fight off promissory speeches. The four rebels who vow to take on the Kumpani [Company] soldiers are narrated to have inflicted heavy losses upon the British even as they are continuously subjected to a barrage of bullets. Hebalak Saheb (Magistrate Willam Havelock) is narrated to have tried to trick them into surrender while Kar Saheb (Lt. Alexander Kerr) is named for his cruelty. When the battle is lost, all the household items, jewels, tools and clothes that are either burnt or looted are listed. The village is said to be obliterated without remainder in the closing verse.

As Borati (2014) notes not all ballads were stories of rebellion or disaffection towards the British, and several Ballads sang praises of the might of the Empire like they would have about the previous rulers and at times there were more pointed appraisals of particular policies or officers, slipping in a demand or two between laurels. The reining in of rich and powerful native elites is recounted in some stories. Banal matters of administration are sometimes rendered in song, underscoring how important it was to their lives. The Song of Bijaraya, for instance, praises Thomas Munro for introducing a system that is thought to have brought justice. The song celebrates the way he assessed and surveyed the lands for taxation and abided by his promised treaty.

The ballads in Kannada provide a fresh provocation to examine the penetration of the Empire and the complex and variegated history it occasioned – where simple caricatures, painted then, can themselves act against the simplistic caricatures invoked now.

Piano rendered by Gabel Mascarenhas.

Boratti, Vijay. 2014. ‘The British in the Folklore of Colonial Karnataka’. Folklore 125 (3): 344–52.

Fleet, J.F. 1885. ‘A Selection of Kanarese Ballads’. In The Indian Antiquary: A Journal of Oriental Research, edited by J.F. Fleet and C.T. Richard, VOL XIV.-1885. Swati Publications 1984.

Fleet, J.F. 1887. ‘A Selection of Kanarese Ballads’. In The Indian Antiquary: A Journal of Oriental Research, edited by J.F. Fleet and C.T. Richard, VOL XVI.-1887. Swati Publications 1984.

Inagaki, Haruki. 2021. The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India: Judicial Politics in the Early Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan.

Skaria, Ajay. 1999. Hybrid Histories: Forest, Frontiers and Wilderness in Western India. Oxford University Press.

Stokes, H. J. 1870. An Historical Account of the Belgaum District in the Bombay Presidency. Education Society’s Press.

[1] Before the EIC, certain communities, the hill tribes in particular, provided the services of watchmen to the chiefs in the plains. In exchange, they were given rent-free lands which were cultivated by the village headmen and the dues (giras) extracted. When the dues weren’t paid, the tribal chiefs would raid the plains as a means of payment and negotiation. See. (Skaria 1999).

[2] Courts or offices for administration of secular matters of commerce.

[3] Dharwad was in particular focus for administrative restructuring as the EIC sought to expand the cotton plantations in the region.

[4] There was a growing consensus in the Bombay government that ‘natives of rank’ should be co-opted to police the region and control the raiders. See. (Inagaki 2021, 65–90).

…

Since the publication of Adom Getachew’s 2019 book, World-making after Empire, the language of “world-making” has become one of the major prisms through which scholars understand decolonization in the historic Third World. As C.L.R. James observed in 1968, “the world ushered in by Christopher Columbus…no longer exists” and a new world of social relations would take its place. But the destruction of Columbus’s world through global liberation struggles coincided with the near destruction of the world itself by nuclear means. While the radical transformation and expansion of human sovereignty on a world scale lay at the heart of anticolonial movements of the 1960s, these contended with the menace of hitherto unforeseen human destructiveness in the invention and proliferation of atomic weapons. I am therefore interested in the contemporaneous quality of the process of world-making in national liberation and “world-breaking” in nuclear annihilation. We are all now well-aware of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous 1945 citation from The Bhagavad Gita: “Now, I am become death. Destroyer of worlds.”

Of course, modern forms of colonialism have always involved world-breaking and world-making. Malcom Ferdinand, in his book Decolonial ecology, reveals the colonial and environmental facture of the transatlantic slave trade as a linked historical process, showing how the destruction of human life worlds through slavery and colonialism involved the concomitant destitution of the general ecology. A prime example of this is France’s nuclear testing in the Algerian Sahara before and after the war of independence, causing durable toxicity within the desert ecosystem. Ferdinand’s book alerts us to Frantz Fanon’s concern with nuclear arms and Fanon’s understanding that they will forever shape the potentiality of human freedom and condition our relations with the earth. Fanon would not live to see a properly Caribbean critique of nuclear arms, present during the height of anticolonial struggles in the mid 1960s. In 1962, Revolutionary Cuba became the center of global nuclear conflict during the October Missile Crisis, still considered the moment when the world came closest to terrestrial annihilation, thus putting the archipelago at the heart of tensions between worldmaking and world-breaking. In the wake of this event, and throughout the next decade and a half, Caribbean writers, politicians and intellectuals wrote about and discussed the reality of building a new anticolonial or socialist world against the backdrop of planetary apocalypse. I want to draw our attention to how the destruction of the human species—and all others with it—at the hands of the human species itself, should feel eerily familiar to our present climate predicament. This political analogy comes into sharp relief in a time marked by renewed Cold War tensions and new Cold Wars, by military attacks on nuclear energy infrastructure and threats of nuclear strikes. Definitively, ours is a time when the risk of nuclear war merges with the on-going and exponential ecological crisis. It is therefore worthwhile to return to the nuclear dimension of the Cold War for thinking anti-imperialism today.

Especially after the invention of the hydrogen bomb in the mid-1950s, the human-made destructiveness of nuclear arms generated an existential and metaphysical crisis whose traces one finds globally across post-war thought and culture. We can look to Chris Marker’s La Jetée from 1962, whose release before the October crisis has been described as prophetic. We can look as well to German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders’s major work, The Obsolescence of Man, wherein Anders forges the concept of “supraliminarity” to describe the upper limit of conceptual incomprehensibility produced by nuclear catastrophe. Supraliminarity names our sheer cognitive inability to apprehend the degree of death and destruction caused by atomic arms. In Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, the speaker tells us: “200,000 morts, 80,000 blessé en neuf seconds…y’aura dix milles dégrées sur la terre, dix milles soleils dira-t-on” [200,000 dead, 80,000 wounded in nine seconds...there would be ten thousand degrees on earth, ten thousand suns you might say...]. The sense that such events are not of this earth, and that they contravene a fundamental form of earth inhabitation, led intellectuals and activists around the world to formulate a socio-ecological sensibility concerned with the effects of unearthly nuclear reactions contaminating the air, water and soil. This ecological sensibility, attentive to new environmental problems like radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing made people increasingly aware that nuclear physics had shifted the autonomy of earth systems into human hands, hands which we were unable to control or mitigate their creations, precipitating what we now call the Anthropocene.

In the Caribbean, the metaphysical sense of a general terrestrial apocalypse is less strong than a posture of anti-imperialist revolt against nuclear states, supplemented by the telluric, socio-ecological force of national liberation. In these struggles, people bond with the earth through guerilla engagements using their land’s singular resources. They struggle against an enemy who represents the destruction of a connection, sacred or otherwise, between the human and the wider ecology. A focus on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 reveals a generalized Caribbean concern with nuclear weapons and especially the ecological dimensions of destruction. This anti-nuclear ecology indexes an attention not just to the destruction of human civilization but of all non-human life and indeed non-living matter. Between 1966 and 1975, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam made a series of books with French poets on nuclear themes. In one, the poet René Char translated his own anti-nuclear activism into a new vision of humanity’s place among the supernumerary beings of the earth. The proximity and therefore toxicity of weapons implanted in the earth parallels a concern with the toxicity of resource extraction, when the radioactive isotopes buried there are brought to the surface. In Une saison au Congo from 1966, Aimé Césaire draws upon the commercial interest in uranium mining for nuclear weapons, linking it to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. It is widely known that uranium from the Congo was used in the bomb dropped over Hiroshima in 1945. Throughout the period, the ability to corner the uranium market was of upmost importance to colonial and neocolonial powers during that phase of the Cold War that overlapped with hot wars of liberation in the Third World. What all these examples reveal is that Caribbean writers, artists and intellectuals saw in nuclear war the annihilation of the human and non-human future world and sought a political and aesthetic expression for this catastrophe.

With the proliferation of nuclear arms, neocolonial states in the 1960s became potential atomic world-destroyers, especially of the Third-World worlds they frequently targeted. Marxist historian and social theorist Mike Davis claims that imperialism itself became nuclear during the phase of anticolonial liberation struggles he says opens with the Cuban Revolution of 1959. This revolution drew many Caribbean writers and artists into its orbit. One such writer was the major Haitian poet, René Depestre, who in late 1959 fled the US-backed Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti to live in Cuba and take up a place in the revolutionary cultural sphere. Depestre, a hero of Haiti’s 1946 mass revolt “Les cinq glorieuses,” had by this time published many books of poetry in both France and Haiti and had been at the center of debates among Black intellectuals in the pages of the magazine Présence Africaine concerning African and Afro-Caribbean national culture during the 1950s. Despite Haiti’s inclusion within the rubric of Latin America, Depestre’s status as a Black, francophone intellectual in the largely white Havana cultural sphere was peculiar, both elevating him through tokenization and excluding him through the racism that Castro had supposedly eliminated in the Anti-racist Campaign of 1961.

Between 1964 and 1965, Depestre composed a long book of poetry entitled Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien [A Rainbow for the Christian West] which he subtitled a “vodún mystery poem.” The speaker of the book is a Black poet, Depestre himself, who summons the loas or the vodún gods of Haiti to follow him on a magical crusade to the US Deep South. There, he targets a white, aristocratic southern family—an Alabama judge, his Westpoint Cadet son, his Panama ambassador son, and his five daughters whom Depestre converts to anti-racism through sexual temptation and rebellion. He undertakes his vengeance against the family’s men in the form of a vodún ceremony. Drawing on avant-garde poetic forms developed by Césaire’s surrealism of the 1940s and spoken through a variety of theatrical voices, the reality of Jim Crow apartheid is palpable here, showing us Négritude’s imaginary of white Christianity, the confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. But it also squares easily in the context of anti-Yankee sentiment espoused by Cuban revolutionary leaders, for whom the USA is the supreme enemy. Taken at a glance, Depestre’s book weaves the history of transatlantic slavery, specifically the survival of West African spirituality in the middle-passage with a Cuban revolutionary anti-imperialism focused on struggles against racial apartheid, especially in the US and South Africa. It is fitting then, that the whole work concludes with a staged encounter between the vegetal loas gods of the post-plantation universe and the atomic gods of the hydrogen bomb.

In one of the final sections of the book, “Pour un nouvel âge du coeur humain” [For a New Age of the Human Heart], we find a medium length verse poem called “Les dieux atomiques d’Omaha” [The Atomic Gods of Omaha]. Omaha here references the home of Strategic Air Command, the command-and-control hub of the US nuclear weapons system. Depestre opens the poem, writing:

Mes dieux et moi nous voici à Omaha
Nos vies sont brusquement si lourdes à porter
Que nos jambes avancent à peine. C’est ici
Que l’homme avec ardeur prépare la fin de l’homme
Voici la gomme que peut effacer la vie

[My gods and I are now in Omaha!
Our lives are suddenly so heavy to bear
That our legs hardly go forward
Here Man passionately prepares the end of man
Here is the eraser that can rub out life]

The poet and the loas have been magically transported to Strategic Air Command in Omaha in the same way they were magically transported to the house of the Alabama judge. Depestre continues:

Ils sont là sous nos yeux les merveilleux robots
Ils sont prêts. Ils ont bonne mémoire. Ils savent
où il faut frapper. Ce sont des géographes
de génie […]

[They are there before our eyes the fantastic robots
They are ready. They have a good memory. They know
Where they must strike. They are geographers
Of genius]

There is here, like in René Char’s anti-nuclear poetry of the same period, the notion that nuclear weapons instigate a malevolent cartography, transfiguring the earth into a sort of two-dimensional evil map, dispelling its depth, complexity and meaning for the sake of automated destruction (think of the map in the film Dr. Strangelove). In Depestre’s poem, the telluric loas recoil in horror at the sight of the atomic gods. Through narrative technique, we see them seeing the weapons for the first time, these “fabricants de soleils homicides” [creators of homicidal suns].

This comment registers, as we saw in Duras’s script, the knowledge of basic nuclear science, that the sun is itself a huge and constant thermo-nuclear explosion. A hydrogen bomb thus represents the sun exploding in miniature upon the earth. The atomic gods, like the loas, are found at the threshold between the earth and the cosmos. The loas are described in the poem as “les anges verts de la terre et du ciel” [green angels of the earth and the sky]. The atomic gods are composed of earth metals—uranium, radium, plutonium, thorium—while producing reactions of an extraterrestrial nature. Both the atomic gods and the loas are “of the earth” while exceeding it within separate animistic pantheons. Depestre seems to place these two sets of cosmo-poetic beings in the framework of a transcendental struggle between good and evil, between life and death, a sort of star war (if you like) between the resistance and the empire, both keepers of the Force.

Depestre’s speaker, the poet, explores the names of the atomic gods, referring to them as Atlas, Titans, Polaris, Minutemen, Nike-Zeus, Sidewinder and Hound-Dog. He draws on the poeticity of nomination in military technology of the period—Triton, Jupiter, Peacekeeper, etc.—which have a post-modern poetic character of combining Greek or Roman mythology with pop culture Americana and occasional rococo patriotism. To put it another way, the poet judges these names dense enough for the lyric poem and they serve a properly aesthetic function here. If you thought my Star Wars reference was a bit reaching, see where Depestre calls the nukes “les assassins de l’espace et du temps” [murderers of space and of time]. Are we talking Sith Lords or a quiet inversion of Rimbaud’s “le temps des assassins” [the time of murderers] (from “Matinée d’ivresse”)? In any event, Duras’s aforementioned “200,000 dead in nine seconds” gives “the assassins of space and time” a strong dimension of political realism.

Next, Depestre’s speaker tells us, “Je traduis pour mes dieux / Les messages secrets / Que ces missiles envoient à la terre” [I translate for my gods / The secret messages / These missiles send to earth]. The poet as shaman translating the secret language of the gods is a major literary trope we find in its secular form throughout Surrealism. But it is worth decoding what Depestre means here: the loas do not speak the language of the atomic gods and cannot decipher their messages. They are, in the form of epistolary missiles, themselves, messages sent to the earth. According to the metaphor, their explosion upon terrestrial targets is the same as letters arriving. The next section performs the translation that Depestre indicates here. The nukes say to the earth:

A bas l’être humain
A bas les étoiles
A bas le maïs et le blé
A bas la pluie et la neige
A bas le cheval, le chien et la colombe
A bas le rossignol et le papillon…

[Down with human beings
Down with stars
Down with corn and wheat
Down with rain and snow
Down with horse and dog and dove
Down with nightingale and butterfly…]

Employing the anaphora “À bas” [down with], the missiles’ missives produce a litany which calls for the demise of the earth’s natural world enumerated through specific flora, fauna, weather and celestial objects. The litanical form then dilates to include human-created objects “pupitre, radar, cahier, drap” [desk, radar, notebooks, bedsheets] systems of mathematical knowledge, historical figures, and human experiences and affects—“l’orgasme, la nostalgie, la liberté” [the orgasm, nostalgia, liberty]. The mixing of all these different named things is progressive, later precipitating non-human and human-created combinations: “le coq et le cinéma” / “le nénuphar et la bonté” [cock and cinema / water-lily and goodness] until the abrupt end of the anaphora with: “Demain, la Bombe H !” [Tomorrow the H Bomb!]. Fittingly, the H Bomb is placed at the end of the seemingly infinite list of destructible things—of which this list is itself synecdochal—and its placement there thus concretely represents the end of innumerable things upon the earth.

The final section of the poem depicts the loas curling up like children against Depestre’s speaker from fear of the atomic gods, who he calls “Les dieux de l’eau lourde et de cobalt” [Gods of heavy water and cobalt] with reference to fissionable materials. He tells us that despite their god-like strength when facing the KKK and “des autres rois du coton et du pétrole” [other kings of cotton and oil], Depestre’s “dieux agraires” [agrarian gods] are no match for those who bring about “la révolution de la cendre…la terre déshabillée par les bombes H” [the revolution of ashes…the earth disrobed by H Bombs]. The overwhelming fear and sense of helplessness with which Depestre leaves the reader at the poem’s end seems in perfect measure with the Caribbean world of the mid-1960s, a world of fragile sovereignty and partisanship menaced by immense world-breaking technologies. Despite the threat of nuclear retaliation, the Cubans triumphed against a conventional US invasion during the Bay of Pigs, as the Viet Cong did in 1975 at the end of a war whose horrors are famously described as apocalyptic. In precisely the same period as Depestre’s book, the poet Ghérasim Luca wrote to Wifredo Lam, saying: “The economically weak were the apocalyptically strong but the Earth, having your island at its epicenter, still trembles in all its limbs. Ever since, the world has been living against the backdrop of its own end, an end which desperately needs to be formulated.” It is my sense that the end described here and the end that we are living through, in the form of the climate crisis, are profoundly connected, that imperial war in all its guises and the obliteration of the living earth are but two faces of a single process, a process which desperately needs to be formulated.

The Baku Congress, Azerbaijan, 1920. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

A novelty of the Communist International, particularly in comparison to other “Internationals,” was its extensive reach in the colonial world. As the Comintern leadership made abundantly clear, they took great pride in the presence of militants from Mexico to Korea, to Egypt, and Indonesia in their ranks. They underlined, time and again, the contrast between the Communist International and its predecessor, the Second International, whose international congresses hosted almost exclusively European socialists.[3] This was, while hardly amounting to full equality, an attempt to organize across the color and colonial lines as one of the Comintern’s self-proclaimed distinctive points. The years between 1920 Baku Congress and the 1927 Brussels Conference, two occasions where non-communist anticolonial militants and groups came together on the initiative of the Communist International, marked the peak point of these efforts. As Grigorii Zinoviev, the Comintern’s chairman, put it in the 1920 Baku Congress: “We are mindful that in this world live not only people with white skin; not only Europeans, whom the Second International was particularly concerned with. […] The Communist International is sure that under its flag will rally not only the proletarians of Europe but also […] the hundreds of millions of peasants who live in Asia, our Near and Far East.”[4] An eloquent sign of the novelty was the bold modification of Karl Marx’s famous slogan, “Workers of all countries, unite” in the Communist Manifesto into “Workers of all countries, and the oppressed peoples of the whole world unite” at the Baku Congress of 1920.[5]

Anti-colonial origins of the Comintern

However, I believe focusing exclusively on the Comintern as an anticolonial platform, without the other side of the coin, gives us an imperfect picture. Before examining the novelty of Comintern from an anticolonial perspective, it is worthwhile to begin with the anticolonial origins of the organization. Here, it is useful to ask the right kind of “why” questions before engaging with the “how” – i.e., how the Comintern represented a novel anticolonial platform and how anticolonial militants utilized this newly found tool. So, why would the Comintern make a deliberate effort to bridge the gap between “Eastern” anticolonialism and Western working-class militancy, whereas its socialist predecessors showed scant interest in it? Even the fact that the question can be posed in this manner, identifying two bridgeable units in the Western working class and Eastern anticolonialism, deserves attention. Here, an oft-neglected part of the equation is the collective agency asserted by the colonial world in the wake of the Soviet Revolution in 1917, both within and beyond the Russian Empire.

Somewhat provocatively, then, we can assert that 1916, in that regard, should be a central date in the (pre-)history of the Comintern, in addition to the Soviet Revolution in 1917, Comintern’s foundation in 1919, the Baku Congress in 1920, the Brussels Conference in 1927 and so on, to get a better sense of its novel anticolonialism. Famously, 1916 was the year when the colonial peripheries of at least three empires involved in World War I rose up in revolts. Russian Central Asia – then known as Turkestan – took up arms in that year against forced mobilization.[6] Not incidentally, one of the participants of the Baku Congress mentioned above, Turar Ryskulov, was a veteran of the 1916 rebellion. He would join the communist party a year later, before becoming the future chairman of Soviet Turkestan, showing direct continuity between anticolonial uprising and the emerging communist tradition, beyond intellectual influence on individual leaders.[7] In Ireland, it was the year of the Easter Rising.[8] Just a few months later, the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule would launch with British backing.[9] The intellectual history of the Bolshevik leadership’s responses to these almost-simultaneous events deserves to be explored as part of a fully developed research agenda. However, for my purposes here, it is sufficient to note that a whole array of political actors, including the Bolshevik leadership and Vladimir Lenin himself, took good note of this novel factor of international politics. It is notable that following the Easter Rising, he would update his earlier draft on national self-determination with a sub-section dedicated to Easter Rising.”[10] It is also worth recalling that his oft-quoted point that “Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it” (emphasis in the original text) was written on that occasion, as part of his defense of the Easter Rising in Ireland, particularly against Karl Radek.[11] It was this context, created by the collective agency of colonized peoples, that catapulted anticolonialism, not simply as a knee-jerk reaction to European colonization, but rather as a political force in its own right. Thus, in the context of the post-WWI conjectural crisis, any challenger of the imperialist-capitalist order had to account for the potentiality of anticolonial agents as the makers and breakers of international politics. The Comintern’s anticolonial turn should be understood as informed by this broader context.

Comintern’s anti-colonialism

After establishing the anticolonial origins of the Comintern, now a few words about how, in turn, the organization contributed to global anticolonialism. The Comintern’s history offers ample room to reframe the narrative around anticolonial militants themselves. Thus, I wish to ask if we can reconstrue the history of the Communist International, not from its Moscow center, but from the perspective of its anticolonial supporters as a project of anticolonial internationalism. Put differently, I want to understand why the Communist International was relevant for Middle Eastern anticolonial militants – both those who ended up within the ranks of the Comintern and those who forged uneasy alliances with this global communist polity, without ever adhering to it.

Hence, when taking anticolonial agency as the focal point, we can argue that the Communist International appeared utterly different from a Middle Eastern vantage point: it may have been the potential harbinger of a social revolution for European and North American communist parties. However, at the same time, for many anticolonial militants and organizations drifting towards its orbit, the Communist International was a global entity capable of bringing about their national liberation. Yet, this was not merely an opportunistic alliance, and the promise of social revolution in “the West” was not irrelevant to those who adhered to this project in the colonial world. Rather, the social upheaval in the West and the new geopolitical order it could have entailed was a necessary–but not sufficient–condition for the emergence and survival of the post-colonial world they imagined. Hence, the global vision of the International was central to making it tempting for the colonial world.

Additionally, these new optics would enable us to view Comintern-anticolonialist interaction in the 1920s not merely as a diplomatic move by the Soviet Union, but as part of the broader continuum of anticolonial politics. As I argue in my forthcoming book, The Making of Communism in the Middle East, the majority of the first generation of communist militants in the Middle East and North Africa cut their political teeth in national liberation politics before turning to communism, from the 1919 Egyptian Revolution to the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925. This was no mere coincidence: they often came to the Comintern and its parties with their national liberation aspirations intact, and in turn, feeding this orientation into the nascent global communist movement. If the Comintern represented an anticolonial orientation in global politics, even with all its imperfections, the center of this story should be this generation of anticolonial militants and the collective agency asserted in the preceding anticolonial rebellions. On this basis, we can step back to understand the Comintern not simply within the continuum of European socialism, but as an attempt to sublate socialist and anticolonial politics of the pre-war years. Yet, it also remains true that, particularly in the Middle Eastern case, the gravitation from anticolonialism to Comintern politics was important yet not massive to the extent of making the Comintern the main proponent of the anticolonial politics – unlike, say, what would later happen in Indonesia or Vietnam. Hence, the emergence of the Comintern in the Middle East could be seen as an imperfect sublation of various anticolonial traditions.

Share Discourse on Anti-Colonialism

… and its afterlives

The emergence of the communist movement as a new anticolonial actor in the Middle East not only had an effect on those militants who continued their anticolonial militancy using this platform: In the time period between the Baku Congress in 1920 and the Brussels Congress in 1927 almost every major non-communist anticolonial movement in the region collaborated with the Communist International. Ironically, the Brussels Congress in 1927 and the formation of the League against Imperialism, which arguably constituted the zenith of the anticolonial-communist alliance, were also the swan song of the period where the Comintern served as the privileged platform of anticolonial internationalism. Particularly after the 6^th Comintern Congress in 1928, world communism underwent a shift in orientation, marked by the emergence of the so-called “Third Period” and “Class against Class” politics in the late 1920s, which led to the abandonment of alliances with non-communist anticolonial groups. This change, and the ensuing disenchantment with the Comintern as a potential ally/platform for the anticolonial project, spelled the end of this particular rapprochement – but not that of anticolonial efforts to find European allies, which could help them bring about the post-colonial regional order they sought. Put differently, a Comintern-shaped political vacuum emerged in the alliances of Middle Eastern anticolonial politics. The vacuum would soon be filled: Mussolini replaced Lenin, Rome and Berlin replaced Moscow.

Take the case of Ottoman-born Lebanese notable Amir Shakib Arslan. He was one of the most prominent spokespeople of pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism in the wake of the First World War and had been in contact with the Communist International throughout the 1920s. According to Comintern accounts, in 1921, Shakib Arslan contacted them to give a speech at the Comintern Congress that year.[12] Although he never took the floor at a Comintern congress, he visited Moscow in 1921.[13] In a few years, he was reportedly in discussions with Palestinian and French communist parties in Geneva.[14] Consequently, as the Syrian representative, Arslan took part in the founding congress of the Comintern-linked League against Imperialism in Brussels.[15] He was also present at the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution in Moscow.[16] However, after that point, Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy replaced the World Communist Party as Arslan’s privileged interlocutor.[17] In the heat of the Second World War, he became one of the contributors of Barid al-Sharq (The Eastern Post), the Arabic mouthpiece of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, published in Berlin.

Arslan’s case was perhaps extreme – not all went from the Comintern-linked events to an alliance with world fascism. But it was telltale, as it symbolized how, while the anticolonial nationalists of the region drifted towards the Comintern and Moscow in the 1920s, as of the 1930s, Rome and, most of all, Berlin replaced it.[18] In the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, Mirza Kuchek Khan in Iran, Shakib Arslan in Syria/Lebanon, Emir Khaled in Algeria, Hizb al-Watani in Egypt, or Destour Party in Tunisia, and its leader Sheikh Abdelaziz Taalbi were in touch with the Comintern or the Soviet Union to varying extents. A decade later, the most prominent anticolonialists (including Amin al-Husayni from Palestine and Fawzi al-Qawuqji from Lebanon) would start to actively collaborate with the fascist bloc. However, this shift indicates something more than spurious arguments about an inherent affinity between Middle Eastern anticolonialism and European fascism.

The volte-face of the late 1920s brought a premature end to the still not fully-fledged alliances between revolutionary nationalists of the region and global communism. Colonial archives of the 1920s are replete with expressions of – often overblown – fears of a possible convergence between the communists and anticolonial groups. Was this ever a possibility? Or could there be a historical bloc, in Gramscian terms, between communism and anticolonialism? As attested by historiography, the post-Second World War era indeed saw a rekindling of affection between two global movements. However, before the demise of world fascism, at least in the 1930s, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy increasingly became the privileged partners of Middle Eastern anticolonialism, more than Soviet communism. Was this inevitable? I do not wish to enter the realm of historical speculation. However, there is a case to be made that reframing the “Middle Eastern” Communist International, as a platform of anticolonial internationalism could offer us a better understanding of the region’s history in the interwar years, including the increasing fascination with fascism in the 1930s.

[1] For some of the most impressive and innovative works in the last decade or so, see Serge Wolikow, L’Internationale communiste: le Komintern ou le rêve déchu du parti mondial de la révolution (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2010); Brigitte Studer, The Transnational World of the Cominternians (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Aleksandr Vatlin, Vtoroĭ Kongress Kominterna: Tochka Otscheta Istorii Mirovogo Kommunizma (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 2018).

[2] Holger Weiss, A Global Radical Waterfront: The International Propaganda Committee of Transport Workers and the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers, 1921-1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2021); Burak Sayim, “Transregional by Design: The Early Communist Press in the Middle East and Global Revolutionary Networks,” Journal of Global History 18, no. 2 (July 2023): 216–35; Brigitte Studer, Travelers of the World Revolution: Hope, Struggle and Defeat: The Communist International and the Global Fight for Freedom (London: Verso Books, 2023).

[3] Mike Taber, ed., Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International, 1889-1912 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).

[4] John Riddell, ed., To See the Dawn : Baku, 1920 - First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1993), 50.

[5] Riddell, 219, emphasis is mine.

[6] For a comprehensive compliation with a somewhat apologist line for the Russian empire, see IU A. Petrov, ed., Turkestanskoe Vosstanie 1916 g. Fakty i Interpretatsii (Moscow: Institut Rossiĭskoĭ Istorii, 2016); Also; Aminat Chokobaeva, Cloé Drieu, and Alexander Morrison, eds., The Central Asian Revolt of 1916: A Collapsing Empire in the Age of War and Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

[7] Riddell, To See the Dawn, 332.

[8] Riddell, 332.

[9] Jonathan Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 78–88.

[10] V. I. Lenin, “The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up”, July 1916, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm, compare it with V. I. Lenin, "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination", January-February 1916, “https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm,

[11] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/irishmr/vol04/no14/lenin.html

[12] Rüstem Aziz, Mustafa Suphi’ler: şahsî dosyası, değerlendirmeler, anmalar (Istanbul: TÜSTAV, 2009), 18.

[13] William L. Cleveland, Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 41–44.

[14] For the French take on Arslan-Comintern connection: Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de La Courneuve, Paris, hereafter CADC, Afrique 1917-1940, Affaires Musulmans, Bobine 534, Folder 20, Documents 235-238, “La propagande communiste dans les pays musulmans”, February 16, 1925; for the communist account of the discussion between Arslan and communists; RGASPI, f. 495, op. 84, d. 13, ll. 2, Report by Joseph Berger, June 26, 1925.

[15] RGASPI, f. 542, op. 1, d. 14, ll. 31 and 57-59, “Emir Chekib Arslan”, December 10-11, 1927.

[16] Cleveland, Islam Against the West, 76.

[17] Ibid, 135–59.

[18] David Motadel, “The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire,” The American Historical Review 124, no. 3 (June 2019): 843–77.

Post the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1793, the formerly enslaved, now known as cultivateurs, resented and even abandoned their work on plantations. Toussaint Louverture, the primary leader of Haitian revolutionaries until 1802, had asked and cajoled the cultivateurs to return to work as nicely as possible, but agriculture was undeniably less productive than it had been, and as a result Saint-Domingue’s economy was suffering. In his 22^nd March 1795 speech, known as “Toussaint L’Ouverture to his Brothers and Sisters in Varettes”, Louverture emphasised his loyalty to France as he castigated the citizens of Varettes for not living up to French ideals. In this speech, which opened with the address, “Brothers and Sisters”, Louverture declared, “You should never again forget the decrees of the National Convention. Its principles, its love for freedom, are invariable, and henceforth there can exist no possibility of the destruction of this sacred edifice”. In this opening declaration, Louverture explicitly tied the liberty that these citizens now enjoyed to the National Convention, and its continued existence. Implicit is the sense that if their rights were only secured as long as the National Convention stood, then in order to protect those rights, they must support and protect the institution of the National Convention as well. Having referred to the citizens he was confronting as his brothers and sisters, Louverture extended this familial metaphor by asserting that “the French are our brothers”, in an effort to create a wider shared sense of community, and again reinforcing the underlying basis of his argument: that they were all French citizens now, and therefore ought to help each other as citizens. Louverture openly declared his lack of interest in holding any of them accountable for previously siding with “the English, the Spanish, and the royalists [who] are ferocious beasts”, perhaps unsurprisingly given his own previous dalliance with the Spanish, but instead stated “you have returned to the Republic, and so the past is now forgotten”. Indeed, to return all those who had faltered to the fold was both a duty and a “sacred maxim”. While Louverture offered this amnesty easily, he did not suggest that returning to the role of republican citizen was easy or done without cost, instead laying out the duties and obligations of citizenship:

“Your duty is now to contribute with all your moral and physical might to strengthen your parish and to make flourish therein the principles of holy liberty.”

This ultimatum is followed by a list of articles, the most interesting of which is the sixth:

“Sixth Article – Work is necessary, it is a virtue. It is the general good of the state. Every lazy and errant man will be arrested to be punished by the law. But service is also conditional and will be paid a just wage.”

This sixth article gets at the heart of Louverture’s fundamental problem with legislating liberty - the difficulty of establishing a much needed and mandatory workforce, while maintaining the principle of freedom from slavery that was so fundamental to the Haitian Revolution. It clearly sets up the idea that a form of forced labour is a necessary obligation of citizenship, while still trying to clearly differentiate it from the institution of slavery. Louverture’s attempt to do this, especially difficult given he was predominantly requiring ex-slaves to return to the very same plantations on which they had been enslaved, was done through the lens of republicanism; to work was a civic duty, both moral and physical, and necessary to maintain the French Republic, which in turn was required to maintain their liberty from slavery.

This plea to French civic values had clearly not done enough, as on 12^th October 1800, Louverture announced his somewhat controversial labour decree; controversial because it was deemed by many to be a return to forced labour. Louverture couched his policies in duty, declaring, “Citizens, it is necessary to consecrate all our moments to the prosperity of St Domingo, to the public tranquillity, and consequently to the welfare of our fellow citizens”. From the beginning of the decree, Louverture was once again overtly tying citizenship both to duty, and to the continued wellbeing and survival of all those on Saint-Domingue. This suggests that Louverture understood that his labour decree might face criticism, and was trying to pre-empt complaints by emphasising his belief that certain duties or roles could simultaneously be critical to the functioning of society, undesirable, and a necessary obligation of citizenship. This is further reinforced by his repeated comparison between the role of cultivateur and soldier: “whereas a soldier cannot leave his company, his battalion, or half-brigade, and enter into another without the severest punishment, unless provided with permission provided in due form by his Chief; cultivateurs are forbidden to quit their respective plantation without a lawful permission”. This comparison is pointed, as Louverture highlighted the severity with which deserting soldiers were treated. In doing so, he implied that the roles of cultivateur and soldier are equally valuable to the continued welfare of Saint-Domingue, a significant implication given the amount of warfare and conflict seen in Saint-Domingue since 1791.

Louverture went on to declare that the cultivateurs had been flouting these laws without punishment or consequence, despite its detrimental effect on Saint-Domingue. To Louverture, the cultivateurs who had left their plantations and refused to work were inherently “in a state of open hostility to society”, as he deemed their continued labour in the fields to be crucial to both agriculture and trade. While many cultivateurs argued that the ability to leave plantations or travel around Saint-Domingue at will was a key aspect of the liberty fought for since the initial slave uprising, Louverture viewed these actions as being justified by merely “the pretext of freedom”. To Louverture, the age-old debate between liberty and licence was the true cause of the cultivateurs’ problems. Although the actions and complaints of the cultivateurs were being done in the name of exercising liberty, the inherent selfishness of flouting the duties of citizenship meant that these actions could not be seen as those of true liberty. The articles which this labour decree imposed continue on to draw parallels between cultivateurs and soldiers, stating not only that cultivateurs must do “their duty in the same manner as soldiers” but that any who do “not perform with assiduity the duties required of them shall be arrested and punished as severely as soldiers deviating from their duty”. Indeed, Louverture’s labour decree did not merely compare cultivateurs to soldiers, he decreed that any cultivateurs found to disobey the labour decree would be forcibly drafted into the army, turning these errant cultivateurs directly into soldiers, making them eligible for court-martial. Louverture’s decree ends with the statement “[L]iberty cannot exist without industry”. This declaration seems to pre-empt the cultivateurs who could not and would not view being forced to stay and work on the very same plantation they had been enslaved upon as a form of liberty, regardless of changed conditions and financial compensation. Throughout this decree, Louverture was clearly arguing for the freedom of the state as taking precedence over the personal freedoms of the individual, clinging to his interpretation of the neo-classical republican model of liberty.

This increasing clash between Louverture’s idea of liberty as French citizenship and the liberty wanted by the other citizens of Saint-Domingue was further highlighted on 25^th November 1801, with what Victor Schoelcher dubbed “Toussaint’s dictatorial proclamation”. This decree gave strict rules and regulations to be followed, criticising in depth the current “negligence” and “idleness” of the citizens of Saint-Domingue. Louverture declares that “as soon as a child can walk, he must be employed on the estates in some useful work, instead of being sent to the city” whereupon he would be taught immorality and licentiousness. This somewhat drastic order comes from Louverture’s belief that “it is necessary for the military commanders and magistrates to be inexorable toward this class of men [formerly enslaved]; it is necessary to compel them in spite of themselves, to be useful to a society that, without the strictest vigilance, they would plague”. This statement, with its echoing tones of the French justification of civilising missions, is particularly interesting given Louverture’s personal history as one born enslaved. His decree goes on to attempt to control all aspects of daily life, from labour to location, allowing very little room for freedom of movement or choice, and yet it is all done with the intention to “restore the prosperity of our country in order to assure the liberty of my fellow citizens”. Once again, we see the degree to which the failing economy weighed on Louverture, and his understanding that they would not be able to maintain their free society without returning, at least temporarily, to the plantation fields.

Crucial to understanding Louverture’s aims for Saint-Domingue is his 1801 Constitution, which, while never ratified, laid out his intentions for Saint-Domingue’s future. It also, inadvertently, led to the ultimate destruction of Saint-Domingue, and the creation of the independent nation state of Haiti. Throughout his constitution, Louverture focused on establishing a new social hierarchy and infrastructure, distinct from the deeply racialised one that had permeated Saint-Domingue before the outset of the Haitian Revolution. Most crucial to this, was Article 3:

“There cannot exist slaves on this territory; servitude is forever abolished, All men are born, live and die free and French.”

Article 3 not only permanently banned the existence of slaves and the institution of slavery, but it did so while reinforcing Saint-Domingue’s role as a French colony. The phrase “libres et français” once again highlights the crux of Louverture’s ideology at this point: the way in which liberty and French citizenship were inherently entangled. As such, we can see that Louverture’s 1801 Constitution was intended to reform Saint-Domingue into a free state, while still maintaining its position as a subservient colony within the French Empire. Fundamental to this state-building, and indeed Louverture’s definition and understanding of freedom, was the issue of agriculture. As previously discussed, Saint-Domingue was, prior to the revolution, an extremely productive and wealthy plantation colony, and as a result of that plantation slavery affected every aspect of life in Saint-Domingue, especially its economy. Even before the 1801 Constitution, Louverture had repeatedly reinforced the importance of the plantations to Saint-Domingue’s economy, and thus to its continued survival. This too was codified in the 1801 Constitution; despite the definitive declaration in Article 3 that “servitude is forever abolished”, Article 76 states that there was indeed still service owed:

“[The colony] proclaims that all citizens owe their service to the ground which nourishes them, or that saw them born, to the maintenance of liberty, equality, and property, every time the law calls on them to defend them.”

This article, the penultimate in the constitution, is very revealing about Louverture’s priorities. The tricolon “de la liberté, de l’égalité et de la propriété” echoes the calling words of the French Revolution, yet drops ‘fraternité’ in favour of ‘propriété’ to emphasise the importance of property; this economic twist on the revolutionary byword not only suggests that the financial importance of property had become engrained within Louverture’s ideology, but also that this would help to assuage fears of those who owned property in Saint-Domingue before the revolution, both grand blancs and wealthy gens de couleur, that they would lose all standing under the new system. Louverture’s differentiation between “servitude” and “services” is crucial, as it gets to the heart of his understanding of liberty. While servitude, meaning slavery, was permanently banned, each citizen had a duty and a responsibility to the nation state, to be fulfilled through acts of service. Although the precise nature of these services was not exhaustively defined within the constitution, it is clear from the debt owed “to the ground which nourishes” that manual labour in the fields was one such mandatory service.

Title VI of the 1801 Constitution focuses “On crops and commerce”, and outlines Louverture’s plan for agricultural legislation. Before the 1801 Constitution, Louverture had attempted to encourage cultivateurs back to work, and proposed labour laws on multiple occasions. His speeches and letters had likewise made it clear that he was deeply preoccupied with how to maintain Saint-Domingue, which had a plantation economy, without violating the liberty of the formerly enslaved. As previously discussed, Louverture proposed that working the fields was part of the mandatory duties of citizenship. This constitution highlights the importance that Louverture ascribed to agriculture, and the new framework which he believed would best support Saint-Domingue. Article 14, the first in this section, once again reinforces this: “The colony, essentially being agricultural, cannot suffer the least interruption in its work on its crops”. Again, we see that the maintenance of agriculture, and thus of Saint-Domingue’s economy, was of critical importance to Louverture. In stating this in such a manner, Louverture was once again reinforcing that Saint-Domingue’s very survival depended on its continued agricultural output, the same argument he used to motivate cultivateurs in his 1800 Labour decree.

In Articles 15 and 16, Louverture strongly tied the cultivateurs to the family model, declaring both that “each dwelling is a factory” and that “each cultivateur and worker is a member of the family”. This association between family and work was a factor in Louverture’s banning of divorce, argued Lorelle Semley, and was ultimately an attempt to keep property rights with the cultivateurs. Certainly while Louverture declared that “the proprietor of the land…is necessarily the father”, he also stated that despite this hierarchy each so-called family member “shares the income” from that land. This reframing of the land-owner as a paternal figure in a shared family hierarchy can also be seen as a way to further distance plantation labour as cultivateurs from plantation labour under slavery.

Article 16 continues with the assertion, “All changes of the dwelling on the part of the cultivateurs leads to the ruin of the crops”. This claim implies within it that freedom of movement for the cultivateurs was in itself a threat to Saint-Domingue’s security. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Louverture follows this with the intention to use the police to stop cultivateurs from moving domiciles, something that he describes as “a vice that is as harmful to the colony as it is contrary to the public order”. Despite the assurance that all workers would be paid, this legislation against freedom of movement is clearly a restriction on personal liberty that seems to follow the legacy of slavery. We are again seeing Louverture’s attempts to frame personal and individual liberties as licence, in order to maintain stricter control of the labour force. Keeping cultivateurs in the same location would ensure that they would predominantly have to work on the very same plantations on which they had been enslaved, and they would not be free to sell their labour to those offering higher wages or kinder treatment. Given Louverture’s reassurances regarding property, they would very likely be working on fields that were still owned by their own former owners. In order to maintain the agricultural economy of Saint-Domingue within this constitution, Louverture was in many ways proposing a remarkably similar labour system to that which had existed under slavery, with the caveats of financial compensation and an attempt to eliminate legal racial prejudice.

The expedition to Saint-Domingue by Charles Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, was focused on trying to regain control in Saint-Domingue. To Napoleon, Louverture’s 1801 Constitution, despite its many caveats, return to forced labour, and emphasis on remaining within the French Empire, was an outrageous overstep. Louverture himself broke with France, predominantly upon recognising that the French forces intended to re-instate slavery, and was captured and imprisoned. Ultimately, the English had to intervene to help broker a deal to get the remaining French troops out of Saint-Domingue just prior to Haitian Independence in 1804. It was a dramatic and sudden shift from barely five years prior, when the people of Saint-Domingue had been proud citizens of France. While not everyone in the colony had been satisfied with the liberty they would receive as French citizens, it had seemed possible to reform from there, to change the situation and legislation of Saint-Domingue to fit its circumstances, rather than merely apply French rule without change. Louverture in particular had many ideas on how best to resolve the dual issues of labour and economy with liberty. Saint-Domingue remained both agriculturally and institutionally a plantation economy, and thus depended on the continued maintenance of its plantations to provide food and money to the island. In order to ensure the continuation of Saint-Domingue, Louverture was focused on the active duties of citizenship, and how that would provide the liberty of the state, if not the personal licence of the individual. His repeated attempts at drafting labour laws on this subject, culminating in the unused 1801 Constitution, show his difficulty in trying to balance an idea of liberty that would be more widely accepted, and his own argument that the liberty of the state was compatible with ongoing forced labour. Throughout his time with the revolutionary forces, Louverture’s leadership was not uncontested, and the accusation that he wanted to preserve the ancien regime has continued on into the wider historiography. His successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, may have successfully led Haiti to independence, but he too would ultimately fall as a result of discontent at his labour practices. While technically a new nation-state based on liberty, Haiti ultimately had the same institutional problems as Saint-Domingue: it was built on the bones of plantation slavery, and there was no easy way to encourage its workforce when the labourers themselves had been promised liberty.

Rahul Sankrityayan (9 April 1893 – 14 April 1963), who underwent several significant ideological transformations over the course of his life—from Arya Samajist to Gandhian, then to Buddhist, and finally to Marxist—wrote the story “Rekha Bhagat” as part of his most celebrated work, Volga Se Ganga (1942), during the twenty-nine months he spent in Hazaribagh and Deoli jails between 1940 and 1942. “Rekha Bhagat” portrays the life of a peasant whose everyday struggles with poverty and exploitation ultimately erupt into a violent rebellion against the landlord. “With the rise of mass politics in 1920s India,” as Prathama Banerjee rightly points out, political articulations, including poetry and prose, had come “to be recast around questions of labor and hunger.”1 Political action had come to be understood “after the image of labor,” with political activists increasingly identified as “workers” or “karmis.”2 Both Gandhi and the communists invoked the question of labor to articulate their political actions. For Gandhi, labor was a moral and manual activity that must be defended against modern science, technology, and intellectualism. He formulated his concepts of fasting as everyday discipline, charkha as a symbol of personal and national economic self-reliance, and satyagraha as a moral-political form of resistance on the basis of an essentialized understanding of the human body and manual labor. For the communists, on the other hand, labor was the source of society’s productive potential, and its value could only be fully realized through social and economic revolution for the working class.

Although labor became an explicit framework for political action only with the rise of mass movements in the 1920s, vernacular intellectuals across South Asia had already begun, by the late nineteenth century, to implicitly frame their political claims in terms of the productive potential of human beings. As Andrew Sartori points out, in the context of colonial Bengal, until the mid-nineteenth century, Bengalis focused their critique of the empire on the Company’s interventions, which they believed had restricted Bengal’s entry into the free market. By the late nineteenth century, however, the focus shifted toward demanding greater industrial and manufacturing development in India, so that Indian productive potential—land and labor—would not be exploited solely for British imperial interests. Chandranath Bose (1844–1910), Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909), and Bholanath Chandra (1822–1910), among many others, were of the opinion that “British imperial rule institutionalized the ex­ploitation of Indian labor by British capital. The economy of Britain was industrialized…while India’s was primarily agricultural.”3 They appealed for “political interventions to effect a change in its condition.” By the turn of the century, however, aggressive nationalists, led by Aurobindo Ghosh (1872–1950) and Bipin Chandra Pal (1858–1932), expressed doubts that the British would ever implement such benevolent policies. They argued that the best possible way forward was to reject foreign manufactures and endorse Swadeshi products “that could reunify the functional harmony of Indian land, Indian labor, and Indian capital and thereby unleash the nation’s productive capacities.”4 Hence, labor as a source of national wealth—and its exploitation as a cause of poverty—formed the conceptual basis for articulating various political claims, ranging from nationalist and Satyagrahi movements to communist and other ideological currents.

Although framed within the discourse of poverty, socialists from the 1920s onwards formulated their political language and action not only against the colonial government but also against indigenous capitalists and landlords. Moreover, while Gandhi conceptualized labor as realization of ‘embodied’ human essence, communist conceptualized it as ‘weapons’ of transformation.5 A passage from Kazi Nazrul Islam’s Mrityukhuda (1930) serves as a poignant example of the poetic or aesthetic conception of labor by communists:

“How can I say you have no weapons? Coachman, you have your whip to tame wild horses. Can you not tame humans? Mason, you build majestic palaces with your tools . . . can you not build heaven on earth for the exploited? My sweeper, scavenger brothers, you make yourselves untouchable by breathing the toxic air and give us life by purifying the atmosphere. Can you not use your brooms to sweep away the filth and poison in our minds? My peasant brother, your plow makes the earth bloom, can you not make fertile the sterile hearts of inhuman humans?”6

Similarly, another vernacular communist from the Hindi region, Rahul Sankrityayan, in his prose “Rekha Bhagat”—set during a period of imperial restructuring—depicts the East India Company’s transformation of rural economies and political systems, particularly through the imposition of the Zamindari system: a property regime formalized under the Permanent Settlement of 1793, which conferred absolute proprietorship over vast tracts of land to a class of landholders. In the story, Rekha Bhagat is portrayed as a peasant whose land and produce are being seized by the landlord. This was a time when the self-governance of village panchayats was being systematically undermined, as the East India Company empowered zamindars to mediate social issues and conflicts. Rekha Bhagat and his family had endured a famine caused by prolonged drought, which had driven much of the region’s population into starvation. Rekha expressed his feelings, as narrated by Sankrityayan: “Formerly there had been a government which contended itself with a lower revenue at such times; but now, under the Company’s government, there was the tyrannous rule of the landlords from whose watchmen and bailiffs not even pumpkins grown on a cottage roof were safe.”7 Rekha was unable to feed his newborn child, Sukhari8, and his wife, Mangri, whose body had been reduced to skin and bone. At the same time, Rekha learns that in the landlord’s house, not a single child is thin, and they are eating rice stored from seven years ago. One day, Rekha shouted at a watchman who had come to collect the produce and dismissed him without giving him any pumpkins. This act of defiance made the landlord anxious, fearing that Rekha’s behavior might set a precedent for the entire village. As a result, the landlord decided to teach Rekha a lesson. He ordered his five chosen ruffians to “go and milk that bastard’s [Rekha’s] wife instead.” In front of several villagers, they tied Rekha up and “held his screaming wife’s breasts and actually forced a trickle of milk into a cup.” After this humiliation, Rekha vowed,

“...If our village Panchayat was still alive, the Emperor (a king) himself would not have dared to do this. But they shall pay for this insult. If the true blood of the Ahirs [a lower/peasantry caste] is in my veins, there will be no one left alive in the families of the Patwari and the Rampur man [the landlord] to weep for them….”

He fulfilled his vow and killed everyone in their families. Sankrityayan concludes the story with an interrogative question: “How many Rekhas did the tyrant Cornwallis stir up?”9

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To conclude, Rahul Sankrityayan’s story “Rekha Bhagat” offers a compelling example of the socialist intervention in the ongoing discourse on national poverty, hunger, and the labor question. Although the conceptual premise can be situated within the framework of labor as a source of wealth and its exploitation as a cause of poverty, his intervention—vis-à-vis the socialist discourse—differed in both the articulation and the location of politics. Socialists framed the question of labor not merely as a tool of productivity and a source of (national) wealth, but also as a historical agency of (militant) resistance and social transformation—a position that further contrasted with Gandhi’s moral and political resistance rooted in the practice of bodily penance. Moreover, through the story of “Rekha Bhagat,” Sankrityayan also implicitly signals the emerging assertion of peasant castes, albeit without exploring it in detail—an aspect that would later become a significant feature of Indian politics in the post-independence period.

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Vishal Verma is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His doctoral research takes a multidisciplinary approach to explore the conceptual and historical entanglement of Buddhism and caste, drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and economic thought.

Since its triumph in 2018, the current Morena government has made efforts to recognise some of the more overlooked progressive figures from Mexico’s past. In 2019, for instance, Valentín Campa Salazar (1904-1999) – a radical independent Marxist union leader - was reburied in the Panteón de Dolores alongside a panoply of revolutionary heroes. He is also about to have a brand new Metro stop named after him, another classic mark of political sanitisation. I have written elsewhere about the construction of the broader pantheon of revolutionary-national heroes, but on the whole the more awkward, recalcitrant representatives of the left have to go through many hoops to be allowed to enter. 2022 was the Year of Ricardo Flores Magón, the anarchist revolutionary precursor, while 2019 and 2023 paid homage to the widely-celebrated Zapata and the less-widely-celebrated but well-remembered Pancho Villa. President López Obrador’s final year in charge, 2024, was designated the Year of Felipe Carrillo Puerto.

Felipe Carrillo Puerto is not a Mexican revolutionary known by too many outside the country, but those who do know him usually think of him fondly. Known – not unproblematically - as ‘the apostle of the Indians’ by his admirers, Carrillo Puerto was an energetic radical who while of largely creole descent, fashioned himself as a committed representative of the Mayan population. He is closely identified with the Socialist Party of the Southeast; although it was established by Salvador Alvarado in 1916, Carrillo Puerto was party president from 1917 and governed Yucatán as its leader from 1920-4. This party was a (mostly) effective coalition between urban labourers, campesinos and some reforming middling sorts. While Alvarado had made some strides in labour and education, Carrillo Puerto wanted to bring about a wide-ranging socialist revolution. He claimed inspiration from the Russian Revolution and openly admired Bolshevism, though as Sarah Osten has shown, the definitions of socialism and communism circulating in Mexico at this time were often vague and varied considerably.

Carrillo Puerto’s life – and with it, his reforms – came to an abrupt end in January 1924. That winter Mexico was rocked by a series of uprisings which are traditionally grouped together under the umbrella of the ‘de la Huerta Rebellion’. There is not room here to unpack why this name is misleading, but suffice to say there were many different things going on, and local conflicts were often decisive. In Yucatán, conservative elites as well as some other social sectors had been increasingly (and violently) opposed to Carrillo Puerto, not only in the face of redistributive reforms and tentative moves towards gender equality, but also the creation of armed resistance leagues. The broader national conflicts allowed local rebels to overrun urban centres and chase Carrillo Puerto from power; he was captured and executed (along with three of his thirteen siblings) by insurgents.

Like many of his revolutionary contemporaries, Carrillo Puerto was more a man of action than a prolific author. He did, though, leave some significant writings, and these demonstrate an optimistic vision of Mexico’s future. The revolution’s more radical impulses were largely tamed by its institutionalisation, but Carrillo Puerto clung to a transformative socialist programme. Pushed by his sister Elvia, he backed feminist campaigns in social policy and electoral reform. Moreover he was committed to indigenous agency in a way that set him apart from the two dominant trends in Mexican politics: racist contempt for ‘the Indian’ on the one hand, and paternalistic, depoliticising indigenismo on the other.

Mexico – A Promise

Shortly before his death, Carrillo Puerto had contributed an article entitled ‘The New Yucatán’ for a special issue of The Survey Graphic devoted to Mexico, eventually published on May 1^st 1924. This issue was subtitled ‘A Promise’, and this promise was outlined by Frank Tannenbaum in the opening essay as follows: “There is a future in Mexico, a cultural future that may well prove the greatest Renaissance in the contemporary world”.[1] This theme was picked up in an even more florid manner in the closing editorial, which directly analogised Mexico’s post-revolutionary milieu with “the Italian Renaissance” and equated “Bocaccio, Leonardo, Galileo…. [with] Rivera, Gamio, Vasconcelos, Atl and others”.[2] However, there was a related, secondary ‘promise’ sent back to Mexico by Tannenbaum on behalf of the United States, and perhaps the non-Mexican world more generally: “We need to stand humbly before a people come to life”.[3] This double promise – of Mexico’s great potential, and of its neighbours’ obligation to respect Mexico’s development path – framed this special issue, reflecting the balance of Mexican and non-Mexican contributors.

As the contributor notes for the issue suggested, early 1924 was an important moment for post-revolutionary Mexico. The government had successfully overcome the aforementioned ‘delahuertista’ rebellion and – in its postrevolutionary form – had at last been recognised by the United States. This is alluded to in the editorial, which aims to memorialise those who kept faith in Mexico-U.S. relations during the tense years – the publisher John Murray, labour leader Samuel Gompers, and journalists John Kenneth Turner, John Reed and Lincoln Steffans are all afforded special mention.

Within the Survey Graphic special, there existed a diverse collection of Mexican voices, including: the muralist Diego Rivera, Felipe Carrillo Puerto - both socialists, though of rather different types; anthropologist Manuel Gamio; anticlerical statist and incoming president Plutarco Elías Calles; and education minister and future author of La Raza Cosmica, José Vasconcelos. Even in, say, 1920 there had existed a vast - probably irreconcilable - gulf in socio-political opinion within this group. The rebellion in support of Adolfo de la Huerta which took place in late 1923 – the winter preceding the Survey Graphic issue’s publication - had only exacerbated many of these conflicts, heaping authoritarian-liberal divisions on top of existing (and uneven) urban-rural, clerical-anticlerical and capital-labour splits (though in fact none of these conflicts fell neatly along pro- or anti-delahuertista lines). In the case of Vasconcelos it would mean resigning his position as Secretary of Public Education in open opposition to Calles less than two months after the issue was published.

Mayan Racial Resuscitation

Carrillo Puerto’s contribution includes a photograph of ‘Maya Ruins in Yucatan’, captioned as follows: “These are the monuments of our past and the promise of our future”.^[4] Here we can find something close to an anticipation of decoloniality; a politics which does not fetishise the past but acknowledges its value (in an often hostile present) while imagining a route to the future which circumvents colonial predispositions. “Yucatán is Maya,” he unambiguously declares, a cultural revenge whereby “the conquered Indian has conquered his conqueror.” This was evidenced with reference to quotidian practice - “the Spaniard in Yucatan has absorbed much of our habits of life… [and] the mestizo… wears our dress and sings our songs”.[5] While superficially this might resemble the faddish appropriation of Mexico’s cultural elite, in its local context it was a material and social assault on the longstanding oppression of the Maya peoples. Carrillo Puerto rejected his political contemporaries’ conception of indigenous Mexicans as a “repressed, despised, and forgotten caste”.[6] While Carrillo Puerto acknowledged that through coercive, racialised labour regimes indigenous Mexicans had been subjected to “cultural and spiritual stagnation,” this was a temporary condition – a continuing colonial atrocity – which he was determined to overturn.[7]

One must note that Carrillo Puerto’s version of pre-revolutionary Yucatán is simplistic. ‘The Indian’ is essentialised and flattened, “rooted to the land like a tree and sold with the soil he tilled. He owned nothing. He had nothing. He was nobody, and his voice could not be raised in defense of even the most important things in his own life”.[8] Yet this portrayal is in the service of a proto-decolonial future. Carrillo Puerto argues for a complete transformation of the Yucatán economy, replacing monocrop henequen production (in the hands of the ‘two thousand hacendados’ who would overthrow and kill him) with an autonomous federation of communes which, at the time of his death, was growing.

This was not quite state socialism, since - initially at least – there was no aim fully to transcend capitalism. Nevertheless, through “economic independence and greater self reliance” Mayan agency would be assured.[9] Communal organisation went far beyond the economic sphere; most fundamental for Carrillo Puerto were the Ligas de Resistencia, the levée-en-masse of revolutionary Yucatán. “More than a political party… more than a social organization… more than an educational institution… more than an instrument for government [… a Liga] is all of these combined”.[10] In theory the Ligas would have served as a vital defensive militia, defending the southeast against delahuertista rebellion. However, in late 1923 they remained poorly armed; the revolt spread throughout the region far faster than the central government anticipated, and within weeks, Carrillo Puerto was captured and killed. In popular and official memory, though, he lives on.

…

Bill Booth is a historian of twentieth century Latin America at University College London, with a particular focus on Mexico and U.S.-Latin American relations.

[1] F. Tannenbaum, “Mexico – A Promise” in The Survey Graphic, 52:3, 01/05/1924, p.129

[2] Editorial in The Survey Graphic, 52:3, 01/05/1924, p.186

[3] Tannenbaum., p.129

[4] F. Carrillo Puerto, “The New Yucatan” in The Survey Graphic, 52:3, 01/05/1924, p.140

[5] ibid., p.138

[6] Carlos Ortega, quoted in Rick A. López, ‘The India Bonita Contest of 1921 and the Ethnicization of Mexican National Culture’ in Hispanic American Historical Review, 82:2 (2002), p.308

[7] Carrillo Puerto., p.138

[8] ibid., p.138

[9] ibid., p.141

[10] ibid., p.141

                  Evelyn Trent (1892-1970). (Courtesy, Marxists Internet Archive)

Trent’s initiation into revolutionary politics in the first instance was during her time as a student at Stanford University between 1912 and 1916, where she came into contact with a circle of Indian radical exiles coalesced around the writer Dhan Gopal Muhkerji.[2] One of these exiles was M.N. Roy, who was already a wanted man across the British Empire for his political activities and had travelled to the US under the fake identity of ‘Father Martin’, a supposed theologian from French-controlled Pondicherry, using a fake passport provided by his German contacts. Trent subsequently travelled to New York where she worked as an assistant to one of the foremost Indian nationalists of the time, Lala Lajpat Rai, who would be crucial in building her knowledge on the colonial question, particularly with regard to the Indian context. The entry of the US into the First World War meant an increasing crackdown on anti-British political organising by Indians in the US. It is at this point that Trent marries Roy and together they bolt off to Mexico which, since the Mexican Revolution of 1910, was undergoing a period of profound upheaval of its existing socio-political and economic order. Given that British and US intelligence were now closely monitoring and clamping down on the activities of Indian anti-imperialists, particularly due to the reported German links within some parts of the movement, Trent and Roy were among several Indian nationalists who arrived in Mexico in 1917 and made it the temporary home of their anti-colonial organising. Trent’s time in Mexico would prove both formative and productive, since for her it became a site to experience revolution in practice rather than just theory, marking her significant entry into active political organising. For instance, it was in Mexico that Trent not only began her studies in Marxism, but to incorporate its insights into her analysis of anti-colonial struggles. When in Mexico, Trent and M.N. Roy formed the ‘Friends of India League’ to advocate for freedom for India, Trent having been appointed the Director of this League.[3] Roy and Trent were also instrumental in the formation of the Mexican Communist Party in 1920, the first communist party outside of the USSR. Into a Marxist intervention on the colonial question, Trent crucially brought to bear the question of gender and gender equality. Accordingly, she helped found the Consejo Feminista Mexicano in the second half of 1919 and was an active participant in the feminist organising wing of the Mexican Socialist Party.[4]

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It was in Mexico, that Trent came into contact with the famous Soviet revolutionary, Mikhail Borodin – one of the leading agents of the Comintern and also an advisor to Sun Yat-Sen. It was Borodin who recommended that Lenin invite both Roy and Trent to attend the Second World Congress of the Communist International to be held in Moscow in 1920. Interestingly, Roy participated in the Congress as the Mexican delegate while Trent joined as the Indian delegate.[5] This event went down in the annals of history as cementing Roy’s global position as one of the most important interlocutors on the nature and strategies of anti-colonial resistance and for vitally redirecting the colonial policy of the Comintern. Lenin tasked Roy with critiquing his draft on ‘The National and Colonial Question’. Roy fundamentally opposed Lenin’s assertion that Communist parties should support bourgeois-democratic liberation movements, by citing the Indian National Congress (INC) as an example of ‘unreliable’ nationalist movements led by socially conservative elites.[6] Instead, Roy argued that in colonies like India, the Comintern should focus on supporting revolutionary liberation movements and organising the popular masses for class struggle, rather than aligning with potentially reactionary nationalist leaders. While the adoption of Roy’s recommended amendment, his foundational influence on the Comintern’s national and colonial policy, and his meteoric rise within its ranks have been widely documented, Trent’s contributions have often been eclipsed by the legend of the Roy-Lenin debate. As will be explored in later sections of this piece, indeed, much of Roy’s critique of bourgeois nationalism in the debate echoes the core arguments of a manifesto he co-authored with Trent (writing under the alias of Santi Devi) in Berlin while they were en route to Moscow from Mexico.

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The leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, including Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek, viewed India as a crucial site for the spread of world revolution and as part of this commitment, the Comintern supported revolutionary efforts for India, including the establishment of a political and military training school in Tashkent in 1920 under Roy’s leadership.[7] Trent was an instructor in this training school. During her time there, Trent, in collaboration with Roy and other Indian leftists, was instrumental in founding the Communist Party of India and drafting its constitution. The Tashkent military school was, however, short-lived. In 1921, it was moved to Moscow and renamed the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), offering political education to anti-colonialists globally. Trent was one of KUTV’s first instructors, teaching courses on feminism and revolutionary history in English to students from India, China, Korea, and Soviet Central Asia.[8] In 1921, Trent moved to Europe, primarily settling in Paris, where she produced much of her writing on India, whilst working as the editor of the Communist Party of India’s newspaper Vanguard. During this time, she closely analysed the unfolding anti-colonial politics in the country, particularly the onset of the Non-Cooperation Movement and the growing calls for civil disobedience. While not an exhaustive account by any means, the subsequent sections of this piece present a three-part analysis of the key elements of her theory on imperialism, anti-colonial struggles, and strategies of resistance.

The Limits of Political Nationalism: Trent’s Call for a Social Revolution

Trent was sharply critical of nationalism and nationalist politics, arguing about the ‘worthlessness’ of ‘mere political independence’ and representative governance within the confines of global capitalism, since self-determination for India under these conditions would merely encourage the idea of bourgeois nationalism and bourgeois democracy.[9] In this vein, in most of her writings Trent makes a clear distinction between a political revolution and a social revolution. For Trent, under any scheme of self-determination, a political revolution in the absence of a concomitant (if not predominant) social revolution would be meaningless, since it would mean the continuation of exploitation by other means – simply amounting to the replacement of an exploitative foreign bourgeoisie by a native one. Accordingly, for her it was then reasonable to conclude that the ‘native princes, landholders, factory owners, moneylenders, who would control the government, would not be less oppressive than the foreigner.’[10] Distinguishing between the political and social revolutions, Trent writes,

Today there are two tendencies in the Indian movement, distinct in principles and aims. The nationalists advocate an autonomous India and incite the masses to overthrow the foreign exploiter upon a vague democratic programme or no programme at all. The real revolutionary movement stands for the economic emancipation of the workers and rests on the growing strength of a class conscious industrial proletariat and landless peasantry. This latter movement is too big for the bourgeois leaders and can only be satisfied with the social revolution.[11]

For Trent therefore, any liberation struggle would have to be a class-based one, as bourgeois nationalism would only lead to the perpetuation of capitalist exploitation of the already marginalised. As such, she exhorts the peasants and emerging Indian proletariat to ‘always be indifferent to purely nationalist aspirations.’[12] Only a ‘purely proletarian movement conducted on the lines of the class-struggle against capitalist exploitation, both foreign and native’, would amount to true self-determination and independence.[13]

Indian Anti-Colonial Nationalism: A New Illusion?

In her writings, Trent identifies two predominant mainstream strands of the nationalist movement in India – the moderates within the INC and the majority Gandhi-led faction. She offers a stringent critique of both for not only their inability to incorporate the needs of the peasants and working class of the country, but indeed, for actively manipulating and co-opting them into a form of nationalism that would eventually be harmful for them.

At one end of the spectrum Trent identifies the moderates of the INC, who she perceives as primarily pursuing a naïve legalistic, constitutional approach that would inevitably be ineffective in the face of an empire as powerful and structurally coercive as the British Empire. During the early 1920s, with the Non-Cooperation Movement coming to an end, the rift between the moderate faction (led by leaders like Motilal Nehru and C.R. Das) and the Gandhi-led faction, had come to a head on the eve of the Gaya session of the INC. The moderate faction, often referred to as the ‘pro-changers’, believed in contesting elections to provincial councils and facilitating reforms from within the existing political system, while the ‘no-changers’ led by Gandhi called for a complete boycott of elections. Reflecting on the presidential address made by C.R. Das – former President of the INC and subsequently the founder of the Swaraj Party – in 1922 at the Gaya Congress, Trent wrote,

Here spoke the product of bourgeois English education, quoting English historical precedent to substantiate his country’s claims to freedom, and hoisting the British rulers of India on their own petard, so to speak, by proving from the Revolutions of 1640 and 1688 the legal right of a people to rebel… were British rule in India a mere question of legal quibbling, the representatives of that haughty Empire must withdraw in confusion, and leave India bag and baggage for sheer lack of any adequate defence. But, unfortunately, British rule in India is based, not upon the justification of law courts, but upon the strength of armies, and Mr. Das would have done better to have based his arguments upon the latter supposition, or to have saved his breath.[14]

Perhaps slightly uncharitably, Trent argues that in their inability and indeed, unwillingness, to recognise the ‘social and economic forces involved’, the moderates symbolise the ‘Dantons, the Patrick Henrys, and the Garibaldis of the Indian Revolution, whose unexpressed and as yet half-conscious purpose it is to usher into power the Indian bourgeoisie.’[15] Just as the eloquent proclamations of Liberté, égalité, fraternité during the French Revolution subordinated the demands of the French peasantry and urban proletariat under those of the bourgeoisie, for Trent, similar ‘idealistic abstractions’ such as Swaraj (self-rule) barely concealed the vested interests of the native bourgeoisie. She argues that in order to ‘escape from the metaphysical toils of orthodox Gandhism’, the moderates fall ‘into the meshes of bourgeois rationalism.’[16]

Her sternest and most extensive critique, however, was reserved for Gandhi or what she termed ‘Gandhism as a political force’.[17] In his effort to straddle together a united nationalist movement, Trent accused Gandhi of betraying the revolutionary appeals of the peasants and industrial workers of India. Writing particularly in the period after Gandhi’s call to stop the Non-Cooperation Movement after violence erupted in Chauri Chaura, Trent argues that Gandhi, through his notion of ‘transcendental’ politics, actively culled the revolutionary and emancipatory potential of the anti-colonial movement – thereby leading the ‘revolution back to the blind alley of reformism.’[18] Gandhi’s ‘transcendental’ politics is variously referred to by Trent in her writings in two primary ways. In the first instance, she uses this framing to characterise his efforts to create a unified but artificial and temporary cross-class ‘national’ movement. Secondly, she uses this to refer to his abstract, spiritualised theorisations of self-rule, satyagraha (soul-force), sacrifice, non-violence, non-cooperation, as well as moral and spiritual victories.[19]

The spirit of revolt, which stringent economic conditions fostered by the war, augmented and caused to burst forth in violent manifestations on the part of the agricultural and industrial proletariat, was seized upon by the National Congress and exploited for its own political purposes. The personality of Mr. Gandhi greatly assisted in prolonging this artificial hold of the Congress over these rebellious social elements. It was not until repeated betrayals of the interests of the Indian workers and peasants by the Congress leaders, culminating in the Bardoli Resolutions of the Congress Working Committee, which renounced all revolutionary mass-action on the part of the people and clearly repudiated their most urgent economic demands, that the true social affiliation and class-aims of the National Congress became clear.[20]

In this regard, claims that Swaraj would offer an alternative, radical, and uniquely Indian form of political organisation are met with significant scepticism by Trent. The model of a radically decentralised government based on the revival of the ancient Indian model of Panchayats (village-level political community) was espoused by leaders like Gandhi and to some extent leaders like C.R. Das. Such idealised versions of grassroots democracy, according to Trent, are out of sync with the twentieth century, given the deeply and irrevocably internationalised system of production, distribution, and exchange that characterise this age.[21] More importantly, for Trent, rather than being unique, versions of such ‘idealised’ forms of grassroots democracy have existed in multiple societies across the world. She argues that in the absence of meaningful economic emancipation of the masses and an upturning of the existing bases of social power, such versions of democracy would degenerate to nothing but localised domination of the marginalised classes in a style reminiscent of feudal societies. According to her, ‘Gandhism’ has no plans for the elimination of classes or class strife – indeed, she quotes Gandhi as stating ‘the rich and poor will always be with us.’ Her main critique of Gandhi’s plan for socio-political reform was that it was geared toward softening and ameliorating exploitation and injustice through the application of principles based on ambiguously defined brotherhood and moral responsibility. She states that in these visions of idealised grass-roots democracy, ‘philanthropy would take the place of justice.’[22]

Imperial Capitalism: Trent’s Vision of International Solidarity

Trent insisted on the inherently global, structural, and interconnected nature of imperialism. As such, in her reading, any anti-colonial struggle by necessity had to be internationalised. She insisted on this internationalisation of struggle in two broad ways – first, in terms of solidarity among oppressed classes in the metropole and colonies; second, the understanding that since what she called ‘imperial capitalism’ operated as a global structure, resistance to it had to be global as well and could not be confined to isolated enclaves of autonomy. Her analysis of the Indian context is consistently linked to the larger international struggle of workers with a ‘common fate’ and the interlinked nature of ‘imperial capitalism’ is reiterated often. For instance, writing about the Bombay textile workers strike in 1924, she demonstrates this interlinkage,

And upon the payment of a living wage to the Indian textile workers depends the future well-being of the textile workers of Great Britain, whom the Indian workers are being forced, against their will, to undercut. The Bombay strike is but another instance of the fact that the international proletariat must hang together or they will hang separately.’[23]

Specifically appealing to the British working class, who she argues have been co-opted into the very imperialistic capitalism that exploits them, she exhorts,

The loss of the colonies might alarm orthodox trade union psychology with the threat of unemployment, but a class-conscious revolutionary proletariat, aiming at the total destruction of capitalist ownership and the establishment of a communist state, cannot but welcome such a collapse of the present system since it would lead to the economic bankruptcy of capitalism – a condition necessary for its final overthrow.[24]

In her analysis, therefore, independence of the colonies and dependencies was an indispensable next step in the international proletariat movement, since such abolition would strike at the economic core of empire and ‘world capitalism.’[25]

She is decidedly sceptical of international cooperative efforts like those of the League of Nations to effectively intervene as a positive force in quelling international conflict. She asserts that ‘both in its original idea and in actuality, [the League] is grounded on the status quo of industrial civilisation. Its mode of operation is arbitration and compromise with the existing order.’[26] For her, the League, symbolising an ‘organised impotence’, cannot be a fundamental source of transformation for subject nations and classes, when indeed, the League was created to ‘prohibit any revolutionary change from below’, and it is presently ‘concerned mainly in perpetuating the existing system under the guide of humanitarianism.’[27]

Retreat from Radical Politics and the Legacy of Her Thought

From around 1927 onwards, Trent starts moving away from political organising and consciously tones down the incorporation of a markedly Marxist analysis in her writing. While some may argue that this was precipitated by her divorce from Roy, based on her personal correspondence drawn from this time, this seems to be as much a decision borne from both pragmatism and a sense of frustration with the organisational aspect of radical politics. Returning to California after her divorce, Trent started working as a correspondent on world affairs for the San Francisco Chronicle. However, this job was hard to come by for Trent due to her past political activities and writings alongside the increasing suspicion and paranoia toward communism within the US. For instance, writing to famous Dutch socialist revolutionary Henk Sneevliet, Trent notes, having returned to the US,

My activities abroad had been such as to render it very difficult for me to obtain work for which I was adapted by education and training. I had lost my citizenship and this fact closed a good many avenues of employment as well as made my position extremely uncertain. I had some trouble with the authorities and would have much more did I show any disposition to be active in any way… Had I attempted to be active I would have been deported at once.[28]

In the same letter, she writes that she was ‘tired of abstract theories’ and deterred as much by the internal state of radical political movements in the US as much as the fear of pushback from the government. Trent writes,

I had not the heart, even if I had possessed the strength, energy and enthusiasm, to begin all over again in the movement here. I attended the Convention in Chicago on my way west, and have never in my life witnessed such sorry and disgusting quarrels, intrigues and useless discussions. They are hopelessly divided and split up into a thousand little factions. Spies are plentiful and the whole impression was one of disgust.[29]

Revisiting Evelyn Trent’s thought and contributions deepens our understanding of how many women, from diverse backgrounds, played a pivotal role in radical internationalism in the twentieth century. Trent, both as an intellectual and activist, not only critiqued imperialism but also actively contributed to shaping anti-colonial resistance and strategies through her intersectional approach. An ‘interstitial thinker’ in her own right, Trent can be seen navigating multiple spaces of action and thought – simultaneously local and global, feminist and revolutionary, Western and non-Western.

Shreya Bhattacharya is a Candidate for the PhD in Politics and International Studies at SOAS, and Editor vol. 52, Millennium Journal of International Studies

[1] Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (New York Routledge, 2010), xiii, xxi.

[2] Jesse Olsavsky, ‘Evelyn Trent Was One of America’s Great Revolutionaries,’ Jacobin, March 9, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/03/evelyn-trent-india-mexico-revolution

[3] N. Innaiah, Evelyn Trent alias Shanthi Devi, Founder Member of Exile Indian Communist Party (Hyderabad, India: V. Komala, 1995), 16, British Library archive reference LC: 95911105.

[4] Barry Carr, ‘Marxism and Anarchism in the Formation of the Mexican Communist Party, 1910-19,’ Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 2 (1983): 291, https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-63.2.277

[5] N. Innaiah, Evelyn Trent alias Shanthi Devi, 19.

[6] For more on this, see John P. Haithcox, ‘The Roy-Lenin Debate on Colonial Policy: A New Interpretation,’ The Journal of Asian Studies 23, 1 (1963): 93-101.

[7] Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 73.

[8] Jesse Olsavsky, ‘Evelyn Trent Was One of America’s Great Revolutionaries’.

[9] Manabendra Nath Roy, Abani Mukherji, and Santi Devi, ‘An Indian Communist Manifesto,’ Glasgow Socialist, June 24, 1920.

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid

[12] Ibid

[13] Evelyn Trent, ‘The Metamorphosis of Mr. C. Das,’ Labour Monthly 4, no. 6 (June 1923): 374.

[14] Evelyn Trent, ‘The Metamorphosis of Mr. C. Das,’ 365.

[15] Ibid, 369.

[16] Ibid, 374.

[17] Evelyn Trent, ‘The Debacle of Gandhism,’ International Press Correspondence 2, no. 78 (September 1922): 586-588.

[18] Evelyn Trent, ‘Mahatma Gandhi Revolutionary or Counter-Revolutionary? A Reply to Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse,’ Labour Monthly 5, no. 3 (September 1923).

[19] See for instance: Evelyn Trent, ‘Looking for New Illusions,’ International Press Correspondence 3, no. 59 [37] (September 1923): 657-658.

[20] M.N. Roy & Evelyn Trent, ‘The Colonies: A Review of the Indian Situation,’ International Press Correspondence 2, no. 97 (November 1922): 758.

[21] Ibid, 370.

[22] Evelyn Trent, ‘Three Leaders of Men – Wilson, Gandhi and Lenin,’ Daily Worker, III, May 1924, Chicago.

[23] Evelyn Trent, ‘Some Facts About the Bombay Strike,’ Labour Monthly 6, no. 5 (May 1924).

[24] M.N. Roy, Abani Mukherji, and Santi Devi, ‘An Indian Communist Manifesto.’

[25] Ibid

[26] Evelyn Trent, ‘Three Leaders of Men – Wilson, Gandhi and Lenin.’

[27] Ibid

[28] Evelyn Trent, Letter to Henk Sneevliet, 1927, transcribed from a copy contained in the Evelyn Trent Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, https://www.marxists.org/archive/roy-evelyn/1927/march/13.htm

[29] Ibid

The LAI was founded at a large congress in February 1927 at the initiative of the Communist International functionary Willi Münzenberg. Münzenberg and his colleagues envisioned the organisation as a “neutral intermediary” between the European left and global anti-colonial nationalists. Members included Albert Einstein, Lamine Senghor, Diego Rivera, Romain Rolland, Ellen Wilkinson, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Madame Sun Yat-Sen. The organisation was headquartered first in Berlin and then in London, with over a dozen national and local sections around the world. The LAI’s members came from elite political circles and the working class alike, and their tactics included experimental artistic practices, disruptive public protest, high-level political negotiation, smuggled magazines and letters, and flash-mob style skits in town squares. State and police records show that European governments worried about the new alliance between “native” rebellion and working-class agitation saw the LAI as a real threat. The group faded away in 1937, absorbed into Europe’s left-wing and humanitarian milieu as institutional support dried up and European politics became oriented against (and towards) fascism. In their outlooks and everyday practices, the LAI’s members troubled the idea of a unified international order, a global economic system, and the framework of the sovereign nation state.

The LAI was stitched into the fabric of the international left by way of its members’ strategic and solidaristic ties to anti-colonial nationalist movements, trade unions, communist parties, and other organisations around the world. By the 1930s, what had begun as a Comintern-funded organisation designed to coordinate a mass anti-imperialist movement of workers instead functioned largely as a centre for political education, through its periodicals and other written materials. Its members were positioned at the meeting place between the LAI’s two global adversaries, capitalism and imperialism, and described fascism as a force which emerged out of this confluence. They tried to unravel the relationship between the complex political processes unfurling around them for what they hoped was an increasingly concerned public, willing to pursue a militant anti-fascist politics. These processes were neither abstract nor remote: the LAI’s writers and strategists drew on developments they observed in their home countries to track the spread and evolution of fascism in real time. In these materials, LAI members tracked the features of fascism as it grew in real time, including militant expansionism, racism and aggression towards “national minorities”, and promises of material redistribution in an attempt to win over “the masses.”5 Many saw this fascism as a process, rather than a coherent ideology – as something that could be built up and used by powerful people in any part of the world. It is in marking the distinction (and blurriness) between fascism, imperialism, and capitalism that the political stakes of the organisation’s mission came into view in its final years.6 It is also how the LAI was eventually eclipsed.7

Fascism 1.0

We can locate a rich sedimentation of the analogy between colonialism outside of Europe and violence within Europe since the earliest moments of the First World War, such as in Rosa Luxemburg’s 1915 Junius Pamphlet:

“The world war is a turning point. For the first time, the ravening beasts set loose upon all quarters of the globe by capitalist Europe have broken into Europe itself. […] Only today has this “civilized world” become aware that the bite of the imperialist beast brings death, that its very breath is infamy. Only now has [the civilized world] recognized this, after the beast’s ripping talons have clawed its own mother’s lap, the bourgeois civilization of Europe itself.”8

At the LAI’s founding congress in Brussels in 1927, five years after the rise of Italy’s fascist regime, the trade unionist Guido Miglioli warned other delegates of the global threat posed by the politics that had come to dominate his home country. Miglioli had begun his political career in the Catholic peasant movement, before leaving Italy in 1926 and settling in France, where he would join the Committee Against War and Fascism in 1933. At Brussels, Miglioli made a speech describing the relationship of Italian fascism to the colonial world. “In China a gigantic revolution is at hand. In China, they are throwing a decisive card down into the history of human redemption. It is against this movement that Italian fascism sends with its boastful pride its intimidating ships and its homicidal weapons.”9 In early 1927, the Chinese nationalists of the Kuomintang (KMT) were in the middle of the Northern Expedition, and representatives of the KMT at the Brussels Congress were celebrated many times during the proceedings as defenders of the anti-imperialist cause in Asia.10 Migioli also tried to debunk a key fascist myth: he warned the audience that Italian fascism only cynically pretended to defend Catholics and their ideals and noted with “a profound sadness” a recent article in a Catholic journal in Belgium which had bought into this ploy. He insisted that the same fascism that persecuted priests and destroyed Catholic organizations in Italy could not be trusted. Migliolo went on to describe the reason why Italian fascism was so expansionist: “Italian fascism tries to find in the outsider the cause of the internal crisis into which fascism itself plunged the country. As this crisis deepens, fascism will set its eyes on [expanding] the country’s borders.”

Miglioli’s appeal to the other delegates for support in the Italian workers’ anti-fascist struggle also relied on the fact that their enemies were certainly cooperating. He drew delegates’ attention to the “penetration” of Italian bankers and foreign affairs specialists into China, remarking that Italian fascism was playing into the hands of older imperialist powers like England, which sought greater control of Asia through both territorial and financial means.11 “In fascism,” Miglioli said, “England has found the convenient instrument of its imperialist policy, and with it, nourishes Italian imperialism, which like the imperialism of any poor country emerging from a state of deep economic and social crisis, is ready to seize any opportunity of war and robbery.” Even before the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, which unequivocally signalled to observers the expansionist aims of the fascist state, this veteran of the earliest anti-fascist movement emphasised the distinction between the older, more established British imperialism and the scrambled and opportunistic Italian imperialism born of the fascist upheaval. This distinction would be repeated by other activists over the next decade, as the LAI became a unique site for the synthesis of anti-fascist and anti-colonial politics.

In the mid-1930s, the French section of the LAI produced a pamphlet explaining this relationship in greater detail, called Colonialisme et Fascisme. Extracts of this text were published serially in issues of the LAI newspaper Journal des Peuples Opprimés, over several issues in 1934. Its authors argued that “colonialism and fascism were entwined in a satanic dance” and that any struggle against the one must include the other.12 The authors stated their intent: “we are here in service of the anti-fascist movement of France, and we wish, with you, to analyze the situation and with you, remedy it, in the shared interest of French and colonial workers.”13 They insisted that the anti-fascist movement could not forget the problem of colonialism. Mussolini’s desire for another Roman Empire had a modern twist, as he “proclaimed openly that the future of fascism was in colonial expansion” as he “turned his eyes to Africa and Asia.”14 The thrust behind this desire, the authors argued, was the competition over colonial territories that preceded the rise of fascism in Europe.

Similarly, Adolf Hitler’s designs on the Saar, the Austrian border, and the west of the Soviet Union were also evidence of the expansionist logic of German fascism. The Japanese empire was also expansionist, as the incursions into Manchuria and Korea showed. Imperialism, they argued, was “fascism’s generator” – a force which transformed the older form of imperialism into a particular kind of regime in certain places. All three places also demonstrated internal characteristics of fascism – an absolutist regime, the dictatorship of finance capital, and the suppression of civil liberties. The acceleration of capitalist accumulation, coupled with a rise in antagonisms among the poor as a result of rising inequality, meant that dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler would be able to direct this anger towards the military expansion of their respective states – which the pamphlet’s authors warned could very well happen in France. Already, they pointed out, the racialised “national hatred” that fascism used in order to maintain its power was already growing in France, and right-wing propaganda was feeding off it.15 Because imperialism was the “generator of wars and fascism,” the LAI argued that the two groups of people left behind by fascism’s relationship to finance capital – the workers of Europe and the colonised peoples of Asia and Africa – needed to form a single front, as if the enemy “were attacked on two fronts, it would surely succumb.”16

Fascism’s contagion

In the autumn of 1934, three events took place in quick succession. On 13th September, the Polish government withdrew from the League of Nations Minorities Treaty.17 On 9th October, King Alexander I of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille by the Bulgarian Vlado Chernozemski. And for two weeks in October, Asturian and Catalan workers struck in opposition to the electoral victory of the conservative Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right. These events, together with the continued pogroms against Jews, required special attention to minority rights in the face of the fascist threat, the LAI argued, and vigilance on fascism’s spread even further afield. The LAI described, for example, the Spanish conservatives’ victory as the “fascisation” of yet another country’s political regime.18 In the October 1934 issue of the Journal des Peuples Opprimés, the editors wrote: “these events are intimately linked to the larger problem of national minorities. They show the importance of this problem for world peace and the fight against fascism.”19 Fascist states such as Italy, Hungary, and Germany would not hesitate to “use national oppression as a spark” in their incitements to war.20 Only the “liberation of oppressed nationalities” could “normalise” the situation and remove from the fascists “their modes of provocation.” This meant that the causes of anti-imperialism and anti-fascism were fundamentally linked.

The involvement of colonial troops in combat by fascist European powers was key to the LAI’s analysis of the relationship between fascism and imperialism. While imperialism had morphed into a highly specific form in Germany, Italy, and Japan, the invasion of neighbouring territories had furnished fascist governments with the means to protect their borders and expand further. The use of colonial troops in the Spanish Civil War was widely reported on by the LAI’s press. In February 1935, the Journal des Peuples Opprimés commented that the defeat of the Republican troops in Asturias in particular had been achieved through the previous century’s conquest of Morocco, and the deployment of Moroccan troops across Spain during the conflict.21 The unnamed reporter deplored the fact that while the European workers in Spanish Morocco were in “magnificent solidarity” with the general strike taking place at that time in Spain, they were not sufficiently great in number to make a change to Morocco on their own. The reporter regretted the fact that their “anti-fascist brothers” in Spain were not doing what was necessary to win to our sides the indigènes that their own imperialism was exploiting.”22

Writers also attributed the rise of the appeal of fascism outside Europe to the failures of an organised anti-colonial left. In specific cases, they argued, the presence of imperialism would also lead to the development of fascism inside an existing nationalist movement. Members of the LAI reported often on the incursions of fascism as a distinct political phenomenon in the colonies, where they were concerned about its appeal among “the masses” especially in the absence of a militant left revolutionary movement. Their concerns stemmed from the apparent appeal of fascist practices in the colonies as a counter to the influence of the old imperial powers, such as the presence of paramilitaries, and calls for “living space” that echoed the Nazi slogan of “Lebensraum.”

In 1932, the Japanese communist Sen Katayama described the situation in Japan as a struggle between the “masses” and the imperial government. Katayama had co-founded the Japanese Communist Party in 1922 and spent most of his life in the United States and Soviet Union, where he sat on the executive committee of the Comintern.23 In 1927, he attended the Brussels Congress and spoke on the threat to the world revolution from imperial Japan. For The Anti-Imperialist Review, he wrote that not only did the Japanese government’s designs on Korea, China, and Taiwan threaten the revolution in China, but it also “dragged down the living conditions of the toiling masses of Japan.”24 The reason behind the war, Katayama argued, was the lack of natural resources, especially iron, coal, and oil, in Japan itself.

According to Katayama, this is what spurred the imperial government to seek an expansion of “the sphere of her influence.”25 He described the “80,000 starving agrarian masses in the famine districts (northwestern part of Japan) where tens of thousands of them are actually existing only by chewing grass roots and tree trunks etc., without any proper relief, and whose sons and brothers are fighting – against whom and for what? – in Manchuria and Shanghai.”26 Spurred by the Japanese section of the LAI, Katayama reported, “scores of demonstrations” were being held, thousands strong in the working-class districts of Tokyo, Osaka, and in other cities and villages as well. At the old centres of power, he remarked, such as the “imperial University of Tokyo, hitherto the citadel for producing defenders and brains for the ruling class,” an anti-war demonstration of 1000 students took place. By emphasizing the toll that the war in China was taking on the poor of Japan, and describing the opposition to the war from working-class people and students in particular, Katayama brought the geopolitical conflict together with class conflict. The nature of the conflict for Katayama and others in LAI writings was imperialist first and foremost; however, as his critique of the Social Democrats shows, fascism’s corrupting influence on reform-minded politicians was a distinctly contemporary twist. He quoted from the recent resolution of Japan’s social democrats, the Shakai Minshuto, on the “Manchurian and Mongolian Question”: “for the protection of the right to live of the Japanese masses the infringement of our rights and interests which are guaranteed by treaties in Manchuria and Mongolia is unwarranted.”27 The protection of these “rights and interests,” Katayama argued, was a cover for their designs on territorial expansion at the cost of the lives of the Japanese poor sent as soldiers and the fate of the Chinese revolution.28

Halfway around the world, an Egyptian writer known as “Abdelrahman” wrote about the creeping appeal of fascism among both the “masses and intellectuals” in his country. (This writer is likely Abdul Rahman Fahmi, founder of the short-lived Confederation of Trade Unions in Egypt and secretary of the Wafd Central Committee).29 In the LAI’s Journal des Peuples Opprimés, Abdelrahman explained that this creep was because of the crisis of leadership in the Wafd party, which the Journal described as the “national reformist movement” in Egypt.30 Quoting a member of Wafd, Ahmed Mahr, Abdelrahman wrote that “the political struggle since 1930 by passive means has not been in line with the actual situation. Patriots must mount an active politics.” Among the working class, “the danger of fascism was no less,” Abdelrahman went on. He pointed to a recent demonstration by the paramilitary youth group Young Egypt as evidence of the attitude of Hitlerism, and the absence of a “patriotic” and “active” political organisation among Egypt’s nationalists. The growth of both the new royalist Ittihad Party and the “greenshirts” of Young Egypt were evidence, for Abdelrahman, of the failure of the Egyptian left to effectively guide the “masses” to a politics of national self-determination devoid of the right-wing impulses of the European masses.

This article was accompanied by an editor’s note, in which the LAI’s French editors aired their disagreements with the position of their Egyptian correspondent. They began: “We are in perfect agreement with the conclusion of this article, but we have some reservations on the general ideas.” The conclusion of the article had been that the Egyptian people needed to return to the policy of 1919-1922, when the Wafd “genuinely fought England, when the Egyptian people fought imperialism and won by revolt the few liberties quick it has, instead of letting themselves be duped in search of getting along with the oppressor on the terrain of the politics of reconciliation.” Abdelrahman’s critique of the Wafd was clearly suitable to the French section’s editors, as it was in line with their concern for a militant and communist anti-colonial nationalist movement in the colonies.

However, the editor’s note objected to the narrative Abdelrahman had given of the development of fascism in Egypt on two counts. First, the editors urged “our Egyptian friends [to] remember English policy in Egypt since 1922” and not to attribute the latest developments simply to King Fuad I. Second, they argued that “we cannot talk of the fascisation of a national movement in the colonies. Fascism, in its historical and economic sense, itself is a product of imperialism.” This disagreement with Abdelrahman’s observations about the tendency that concerned him among the Egyptian “masses” is indeed fundamental, and it reflects the conviction that there could be no isolated fascism in a colonized place – it was always a response to imperialism. The editors’ reference to the “historical and economic” aspects of fascism suggests too that what was at stake here was not merely the identification of elements of fascist aesthetics or practices such as the “greenshirts”, but rather the meaning of the process described as “fascisation”. This process referred to the transformation of a non-fascist political movement, usually one for national liberation or social reform, into a markedly “fascist” one. For instance, Sen Katayama had written fervently of this process taking root among the social democrats in Japan in 1932. From the caveat that followed these two quasi-corrections by the Journal’s editors, what was at stake for the organisation was the difference between resigning an anti-colonial nationalist movement wholesale to a process of transformation by fascism and assigning its influence to a bourgeois element within it. The editors wrote that besides their two corrections to Abdelrahman’s article, they recognized the risk posed by the fact that “certain parts of the indigenous bourgeoisie are ready to form pacts with any fascist imperialism”. The presence of “extremely active propaganda from Italian, German and Japanese fascism in the colonies” continued to be a cause for concern.31

By writing about the appeal of fascist rhetoric and policies among colonized people, these writers disrupted the historical and historiographical commonplace that the politics of the colonies tended inexorably towards anti-colonial liberation. The risk, first of “reformist nationalism” and then full-blown fascism among the peoples of the colonial world, was at once a specifically ideological and geopolitical appeal to the leadership of communist parties in the coming liberation struggles, as well as a sober assessment of the ambiguities in anti-colonial politics.

Sharing the meal

In December 1935, C.L.R. James arrived at Connolly Mallin Hall in Dublin, to give a speech titled “European imperialism swallows Abyssinia and Britain decides to share the meal.”32 James highlighted the involvement of the British in the spoils of the invasion, refuting the idea that European countries were merely scandalised observers to this violation of international law, their hands sadly tied. The distinction between fascism and imperialism was significant, but according to many anti-colonial thinkers, fascism existed in a historical relationship with imperialism rather than as an aberration in European politics. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia afforded activists the perfect example of how fascism and imperialism were interconnected. It also sparked a global campaign, “Hands Off Ethiopia”, which drew on existing networks of anti-colonial and left politics in Europe.33 The Martinican writer and journalist Paulette Nardal served as the secretary general of the Paris-based Ethiopian Action Committee in 1935. Nardal described the group in a letter to the President of the French Ligue de droits de l’homme as “a group of people of colour about to create a movement of public opinion in favour of the independence of Ethiopia.”34 In 1935, the Inter-colonial Committee for the Defence of the Ethiopian People formed a special committee for the “coordination of Black and Arab Associations” in Paris. This coordinating committee included several organisations, including the LAI as well as the Étoile Nord-Africaine (ENA), the Ligue de défense de la race nègre (LDRN), and the Union des travailleurs nègres (UTN). The LAI’s executive, now located in London after the Berlin secretariat’s expulsion in 1933, was led by the British socialist Reginald Bridgeman. The new executive tasked itself with informing the public of the causes of the invasion.

The International Secretariat’s assessment of the invasion described it as “the conflict of rival imperialisms.”35 Britain and Japan both had “economic and political interests” in East Africa, and the “preoccupation” of Europe with Italy could provide an opportunity to Nazi Germany in its designs on Austria or the Soviet Union.36 They lamented that the “last independent territory in Africa” was indeed “tempting bait for the imperialist powers, hungry for markets and sources of raw material and mineral wealth.”37 After describing these resources, which included chromite, gold, platinum, copper, mica, wheat, and cotton, and the geography of the region, the authors detailed the diplomatic history of European incursions into East Africa. These included the 1906 Three-Power Treaty, the secret 1915 Treaty of London, and the “thieves’ agreement between Italy and Britain” reached in 1919. These agreements highlighted the complicity of the British government in the Italian invasion, over a period of 35 years, argued the authors. The economic crisis of 1929 led to widespread dissatisfaction with the Italian fascist regime, which became the force behind a new imperialist drive in Africa,” they argued – the Great Depression forming the catalyst for a geopolitical situation that had been orchestrated in large part by a “conspiracy” between Great Britain and Italy. The rift between Britain and Italy in the League of Nations over the question of Ethiopia, they argued, came about because the British government realized the Italians had decided to move ahead with the invasion with French support. Britain taking on the role of “champion of the League of Nations against Italy’s unilateral aggression”, the authors argued, was mere hypocrisy, as the British government was “in the process of violating every provision in the Covenant of the League of Nations by negotiating the Anglo-German Naval Pact”.38 The invasion was also a cause for concern for “Japanese capitalism” which was “undoubtedly perturbed at the prospect of losing the large and growing market for Japanese goods in Abyssinia”.39 These geopolitical and diplomatic machinations led to one conclusion: “A danger greater than the Italian aggression is a joint imperialist invasion of Abyssinia, and it is against this, as well as against the Italian threat, that the international anti-imperialist movement must be on guard.”40

The authors of the pamphlet drew together the particular material interests that each of the major imperial powers had in the region, in order to de-emphasize the uniqueness of the Italian invasion. Instead, they took pains to describe the “war danger” as a class war, between the imperialist-capitalists and “the international working-class.”41 Just as the authors used the history of treaties and agreements between European powers to depict each as part of a single bloc out for markets and resources, they referred to “sympathetic demonstrations…in India and among the Negro peoples generally…throughout the colonial world.”42 A chronological summary of Ethiopian history taken from the handbooks of the Historical Section of the British Foreign Office appended the text, beginning with the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and ending with the Walwal incident in 1934. Extracts from treaties between European powers and Ethiopia also bolstered the text; this marshalling of evidence was intended to demonstrate the long history of independent Ethiopia and its more recent “betrayal” by Europe. The marshalling of facts and figures in this argument continued in LAI members’ reporting on instances of what they considered fascist politics in the colonies, to further make the argument that fascism had a global reach and so, like imperialism, required a global struggle.

The boomerang, before/after Césaire

The LAI produced materials for the public that furthered a line of analysis that is most often traced to the political thought of the postwar moment: that the horrors of the fascism originated in Europe’s own (colonial) past. Among this argument’s most famous postwar proponents is the Martinican poet, writer, and politician Aimé Césaire. Césaire wrote in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) that the violence of capitalism and colonialism was returning to Europe in the form of fascist violence because “at the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler.”43 He argued that the “European colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved” for the people of Algeria, India, and Africa had ricocheted back into Europe, in a “boomerang effect”.44 He ended with the following call:

“The salvation of Europe is not a matter of a revolution in methods. It is a matter of the Revolution – the one which, until such time as there is a classless society, will substitute for the narrow tyranny of a dehumanized bourgeoisie the preponderance of the only class that still has a universal mission, because it suffers in its flesh from all the wrongs of history, from all the universal wrongs: the proletariat.”45

With a synoptic view of the destruction wrought by the Second World War, Césaire thus traced the origins of both colonialism and fascism from bourgeois capitalism in Europe to the only way out: revolution.

Already in the 1930s, as we have seen, political activists in the LAI used their organisation to swap notes on their observations of the spread of fascist rhetoric and political practices from Japan to Egypt, while insisting on the relationship between capitalism, imperialism and fascism. Their arguments about this entanglement were drawn from their observations of what made rich and poor alike apparently flock to this new “satanic dance”.46 The aim of the LAI’s public materials was, as always, to draw together disparate elements of political life in metropolitan Europe, around the causes of anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism, and to render them as a single struggle. This is why dense theoretical pamphlets like Colonialism and Fascism (1935) were also published serially in LAI newspapers, and anti-fascist rallies always included a word on fascism’s origins – to knit together a mass movement capable of meeting fascism in the streets.

The painter, ceramicist, furniture designer, and anarchist Francis Jourdain wrote about one of the many difficulties in building such a movement in the July 1933 issue of Chaînes, the newspaper of the French section of the LAI. He narrated for the reader a (perhaps fictional) social encounter he had with a scholar, who disagreed with the kind of worldview the LAI argued for in its periodicals and pamphlets.

“The other day I met a young historian who is writing a thesis on the origins of fascism. He is a republican. He is a democrat. He is a liberal. He dislikes Hitler and Mussolini. I suggested he acquire a good history of French colonisation; there is no better preparation for the voyage. My interlocutor found my pleasantries distasteful. He is a historian. But above all, he is a republican, a democrat, a liberal. He doesn’t want to know by which republican and democratic measures his Republic had conquered and kept a domain that today is 50 times larger than the one which she inherited. My historian turned on his heels and left.”

Dr. Disha Karnad Jani is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Training Group (RTG) “World Politics” at Universität Bielefeld, Germany.