Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddell's Marxist essays and commentary — The League Against Imperialism was launched in Brussels in 1927 with the goal of forging unity between colonized peoples and workers in the colonizing countries. Initiated by a wing of the Communist International, it was the first attempt to structure international anti-colonial unity. This brief presentation will focus on its origins and the causes of its decline.

An initial wave of anti-imperialist uprisings took place in the first years of the twentieth century (China, Iran, Mexico), but these events did not evoke significant expressions of solidarity in Europe. The situation was changed, however, by the impact of World War 1 and the Russian revolution of 1917. In particular, the new Russian Soviet government stood for liberation of peoples subjected to direct or indirect colonial oppression, which then afflicted almost all of Asia and Africa. Indeed, the Russian uprising was itself in part a revolt of Asiatic peoples oppressed by tsarism.

The Soviet government’s proclamation in 1917 of the right of peoples to self-determination had immense global impact. Self-determination was also a guiding principle of the Communist International (Comintern) from its founding in 1919. The following year the Comintern convened the first transnational gathering of colonized peoples: the First Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan. The Baku Congress in 1920, attended by almost two thousand delegates from Central Asia and the Middle East, adopted resolutions to orient the anti-colonial struggle. In 1922, a similar conference was held for delegates from the Far East.

In 1925, a revolutionary upsurge in China found expression both in mass strikes and in a broad student mobilization. When these two forces came together in joint action in Shanghai, they suffered a lethal attack by the British army, which claimed 52 Chinese fatalities. The International Red Aid, established by the Comintern in 1922, launched a vigorous protest. The campaign was headed by a gifted German Communist, Willi Münzenberg, who insisted on the need for effective educational work among masses of working people who were not yet Communist and not politically aware.

But could working people in Germany, who had suffered so much at the hands of the Treaty of Versailles, be persuaded to take an interest in the fate of the impoverished and despised masses of China?