Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/63

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through the native organisations of large landowners, as is the case in Persia, Morocco, Egypt, etc. The struggle for the emancipation of the land from feudal dues and feudal obstacles thus assumes the character of a struggle for national emancipation against imperialism and feudal large landownership. (Examples of this are the Moplah rising against the landowners and the British in India in the autumn of 1921 and the revolt of the Sikhs in 1922).

Only the agrarian revolution aiming at the expropriation of the large landowners can rouse the vast peasant masses destined to have a decisive influence in the struggle against imperialism. The fear of agrarian watchwords on the part of the bourgeois nationalists (India, Persia, Egypt) 1s evidence of the close ties existing between the native bourgeoisie with the large feudal and feudal-bourgeois landowners and their ideological and political dependence upon the latter. The hesitation and wavering of this class must be used by the revolutionary elements for systematic criticism and exposure of the lack of resolution of the bourgeois leaders of the nationalist movement. It is precisely this lack of resolution that hinders the organisation of the toiling masses, as is proved by the bankruptcy of the tactics of non-co-operation in India.

The revolutionary movement in the backward countries of the East cannot be successful unless it is based on the action of the masses of the peasantry. For that reason the revolutionary parties in all Eastern countries must define their agrarian programme, which should demand the complete abolition of feudalism and its survivals expressed in the forms of large landownership and tax farming. In order that the peasant masses may be drawn into active participation in the struggle for national liberation, it is necessary to proclaim the radical reform of the basis of landownership. It is necessary also to compel the bourgeois nationalist parties to the greatest extent possible to adopt this revolutionary agrarian programme.

IV. The Labour Movement in the East.

The young labour movement in the East is a product of the development of native capitalism during the last few years. Hitherto the working class in the East, even its fundamental nucleus, has been in a state of transition, on the path from small handicraft to large capitalist industry. In so far as the bourgeois nationalist intelligentzia draws the revolutionary movement of the working class into the struggle against imperialism, this intelligentzia provides the leaders for the embryonic trade union organisations and their sections in the first stages of their development. In the first stages, these movements do not extend beyond the limits of the "common national" interests of bourgeois democracy (strikes against imperialist bureaucracy and administration in China and India). Frequently, as was already shown at the Second

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