The recent war, which was, in the last resort, a war on account of colonies, was at the same time a war waged with the help of colonies. To an extent never before equalled the population of the colonies were drawn into the European War. Indians, Negroes, Arabs, Madagascans fought on the European continent—why?—for the right to remain the serfs of England or France.
Never did capitalist domination show itself so shameless, never did the problem of African slavery present itself in such sharpness as now. In Europe itself, Ireland remembered in bloody street fights that it was still an enslaved land, and feels as such. In Madagascar, in Annam, and in other countries the troops of. the bourgeois republic have had, during the war, to suppress more than one revolt of colonial slaves. The revolutionary movement in India has not once come to a halt, and lately it developed into the biggest labour strike in Asia, which the Government of Great Britain answered with the work of the armoured cars.
In this way the colonial question in all its bearings is not only placed on the green table of the Congress of Diplomats in Paris, but is also part of the order of the day in the colonies themselves. The Wilson programme, at the most, only aims at an alteration of the name-plate of colonial slavery. The emancipation of the colonies is only possible in conjunction with the emancipation of the working class of the mother countries. The workers and peasants, not only of Annam, Algiers, and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will only reach the possibility of an independent existence when the workers of England and France have overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau, and taken into their hands the power of the State. In the more developed colonies the present struggle no longer proceeds merely under the banner of national freedom, but takes on at the same time an openly expressed social character. If capitalist Europe has forcibly drawn into the capitalist whirlpool the backward parts of the world, Socialist Europe will come to the aid of the emancipated colonies, with its technical skill, its organisation, its intellectual influence, in order to facilitate their transition to a systematically organised Socialist economy.
Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will also be the hour of your emancipation.
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