"Addition, Not Substitution: The 1920 Revision of the Communist Slogan as a Necessary Strategic Enrichment of Proletarian Internationalism"
Introduction – A clarification
Because certain
pseudo-Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations invoke the anti-imperialist
struggles of our time only in order to distance themselves from them, I have in
several articles recalled the 1920 revision of the communist slogan. I now see
that I did so in a way that invited misunderstanding and misuse, and that I was
not sufficiently clear on the subject. People have commonly read the revision either as a wholesale replacement of "Proletarians of all countries,
unite!" or as a merely tactical concession to the East. Both readings miss
their dialectical unity. This clarification has therefore become a necessity.
The 1920 revision was not a
rejection of the original slogan but a necessary addition to it. It preserved
the proletarian core of the revolutionary subject while expanding that subject
to include the oppressed peoples — an expansion demanded by the stage of
imperialist development and by the strategic requirements of world revolution.
It was, moreover, formulated in struggle: against the Kautskyite evasion of
anti-imperialist war, and against the Luxemburg–Trotskyist tendency that, in
the name of a purer internationalism, emptied the national liberation struggle
of its specific content. The connection is one of strategic logic, not merely
polemical association.
The argument proceeds in four steps: the genesis of the revision in 1920; its theoretical basis; its polemical target; and the documentary record of both slogans after 1920. The conclusion returns to the formula with which I began: the revision was an addition, not a substitution.
The Genesis of the Revision, 1920
The revision did not emerge from
a calm theoretical debate. It emerged from defeat and encirclement. With the
revolution in the West checked, the Soviet Republic found itself surrounded by
the imperialist powers and their proxies. At the same time the colonial East
was in motion — Iran, India, China, Turkey — and the Comintern was compelled to
confront a question it had inherited from the Second International but not
answered: what is the place of the national and colonial struggle in the
world revolution?
The Congress of the Peoples of
the East, held at Baku in September 1920, was the first formal articulation
of the answer. Zinoviev proposed the revised formula, and the congress
established in practice what the slogan expressed in words: that the revolution
had a second front. [Zinoviev,
speech at the Baku Congress, September 1920; Pervyi s"ezd narodov Vostoka
/ The Congress of the Peoples of the East, 1920.]
Lenin's endorsement came two
months later, and its wording is precise. In the speech of 21 November 1920
he says that to the old slogan "must be added" the oppressed peoples
of the world; that the Communist International has issued this slogan "for
the peoples of the East"; and that, from the standpoint of the Communist
Manifesto, the change is "not right"; from the standpoint of
present policy it is right. [Lenin,
"Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks," 21 November 1920
— Russian in PSS 5th ed., vol. 42, pp. __; English in Collected Works, 4th
English ed., vol. 31, pp.]
Two things follow from that
passage, and both are usually lost. First, the justification is explicitly
one of method: not a repudiation of the Manifesto but an application
of its method to conditions the Manifesto did not face. Second,
the slogan is addressed "for the peoples of the East" and is at
the same time the slogan of the Communist International as a whole. To
quote only the first half of the sentence is to capture half of Lenin's
argument.
The Second Congress theses on the
national and colonial question codified the position theoretically:
communists in the colonial world must lead, not abstain from,
bourgeois-democratic national movements. [Second Congress theses; Lenin, "Preliminary Draft
Theses on the National and Colonial Questions," 1920.] That
injunction is the theoretical form of the slogan revision, and the two must be
read together.
The Theoretical Basis: Why the
Addition Was Necessary
The original slogan expressed the
class principle: the proletariat is the leading revolutionary subject. The
revision did not demote the proletariat; it situated it within a broader
alliance. The ECCI's own formulation — that the new formula "must be
added" to the old, not substituted for it — confirms this. (Lenin’s wording in his speech)
The theoretical ground is that
imperialism is a single global system producing two inseparable contradictions:
class exploitation in the metropoles and national oppression in the
colonies. A revolution against imperialism must therefore address both
simultaneously, and the new slogan was the formula of their unity.
Yet the formula's address was
particular. In official usage after 1920 it appears overwhelmingly in a
restricted, East-facing form, directed to the colonies and the oppressed
peoples, while the original slogan continued to function in the imperialist
centres. The new slogan was therefore the slogan of the epoch in its
strategic content and East-facing in its concrete address. That duality
is not an inconsistency; it is the form of a division of strategic labour
between two fronts that could only be united by remaining distinct.
The Polemical Target: Kautsky, Luxemburg, Trotsky
The revision was directed against two positions that,
in different ways, dissolved the anti-imperialist front.
Kautsky’s position
represented the most direct theoretical denial. The theory of
ultra-imperialism held that finance capital could organise itself
internationally into a peaceful cartel, superseding the
inter-imperialist rivalries that produce wars. If wars between imperialist
powers could be superseded by peaceful joint exploitation, the
revolutionary necessity of anti-imperialist wars of national liberation
was also called into question. Lenin's critique in Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of Capitalism and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky was
aimed at precisely this evasion: Kautsky separated politics from economics
and refused to see that imperialist oppression inevitably generates resistance,
including armed resistance. The slogan revision directly countered this. By
adding “oppressed peoples” to the revolutionary subject, Lenin was
affirming that the anti-imperialist struggle was not a secondary or
obsolete question, but a constituent part of the world revolution. The
new slogan was a refusal of Kautsky’s peaceful, reformist horizon.
Lenin's critique of Rosa
Luxemburg on the national question supplies the template for this critique.
Luxemburg argued that the demand for national self-determination was a
“metaphysical” abstraction under capitalism, and that raising it diverted the
proletariat from the class struggle. Lenin’s response was that this position,
whatever its subjective intentions, objectively lent support to Great-Russian
chauvinism by refusing to distinguish between the nationalism of oppressor
nations and the nationalism of oppressed nations. The formal demand for
self-determination was not a concession to bourgeois nationalism; it was the
only way to unite the proletariat of the oppressor nation with the masses of
the oppressed nation in a common revolutionary front. [ Lenin, The Junius Pamphlet, 1916; The Right of
Nations to Self-Determination; Critical Remarks on the National Question.]
A closer look at Lenin’s critique of Rosa Luxemburg and at Trotsky’s
concrete political record supports a stronger conclusion that Trotsky’s verbal
adherence to the national-colonial struggle coexisted with a practical line
that, in its effects, worked against the consolidation of the
anti-imperialist front that the 1920 slogan revision was designed to
express. The revision was therefore not merely a response to Kautsky’s
abstract “ultra-imperialism”; it was also a weapon in the struggle against a
Trotskyist tendency that, in the name of a purer internationalism,
systematically emptied the national liberation struggle of its specific
content. Lenin viewed Trotsky’s method as one-sided internationalism
that, by refusing to engage with the concrete, nationally specific forms
of the anti-imperialist struggle, objectively abdicated leadership of that
struggle to the bourgeoisie or to sectarian abstention.
The test case for the slogan was not 1920 but 1925–1927. The 1920
slogan revision committed the Comintern to the proposition that the oppressed
peoples were a co-constitutive revolutionary force, and that communists
in the colonial world must lead, not abstain from, the anti-imperialist
struggle—including, where necessary, through tactical alliances with
national-revolutionary forces. Trotsky’s line on China was a direct
practical negation of this.
The concrete charge, documented
in the internal Comintern polemics, is that Trotsky reduced the essence of
the anti-imperialist revolution in China to a struggle for customs autonomy,
thereby ignoring the agrarian and peasant character of that revolution.
This is not a secondary disagreement. Customs autonomy was a demand that even
the most reactionary warlords and the Chinese bourgeoisie could endorse. By
centering the revolution on such a demand, Trotsky’s line objectively placed
the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle in the hands of the national
bourgeoisie and denied the possibility of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution growing over into a socialist one under proletarian leadership. Stalin’s critique correctly identified that Trotsky’s schema mechanically
transposed the 1905 Russian model onto a semi-colonial country, failing
to grasp that the national-specific form of the Chinese revolution was an anti-imperialist
agrarian revolution. (Stalin,
"The Prospects of the Revolution in China" (Speech, November 30,
1926), "Questions of the Chinese Revolution, Theses for Propagandists", Article and "The Revolution in China and the Tasks of the Comintern,
speeches" 1927.)
The pattern is not confined to
China. In Cochinchina, the La Lutte group, rooted in the Saigon
labour movement, opposed the Popular Front and the united front with the
national bourgeoisie, and insisted on an immediate break and the formation of
soviets. The effect, in a colonial economy where the labour movement was small
and the national question decisive, was to divide the anti-imperialist forces
at the moment of their greatest opportunity. The contemporary communist
judgment on that line is recorded in Ho Chi Minh's three letters of 1939 to the
Indochinese Communist Party: "the criminal Trotskyist propaganda has
opened our eyes," he wrote; "between Communists and Trotskyists there
is no tie, absolutely no tie." He names La Lutte as the Trotskyist
formation in Indochina, and describes the French Trotskyists as having
"set a goal to sabotage the Popular Front." The letters survive
because they were published by the Vietnamese Trotskyists themselves — a
provenance that makes them harder to dismiss than a document preserved only by
the side that benefited from them. [Ho Chi Minh, "Three Letters to the
Vietnamese CP, 1939," in Simon Pirani, Vietnam & Trotskyism (1987),
pp. __.]
The effect, in a colonial economy
where the labour movement was small and the national question decisive, was to divide
the anti-imperialist forces at the moment of their greatest opportunity.
The same subordination of the
national content of the struggle to a schema derived from the European
proletarian revolution appears in the Japanese case. Stalin addressed it
directly in his interview with Mr. Fuse of Nichi-Nichi on 4 July 1925:
"It is true
that the Japanese people are the most advanced of the peoples of the East and
that they are interested in the successes of the liberation movement of the
oppressed peoples. An alliance between the Japanese people and the peoples
of the Soviet Union would be a decisive step towards the liberation of
the peoples of the East. Such an alliance would mark the beginning of the
end of the big colonial empires, the beginning of the end of world imperialism.
That alliance would be invincible.”
And immediately after, the
dialectical qualification:.
"But it is
also true that the political and social structure of Japan impels the
Japanese people along the path of imperialism and makes them an instrument
of the enslavement and not of the liberation of the peoples of the East.”
The distinction is exactly the one the 1920
slogan encodes — between the people, whose national strivings are toward
liberation, and the political and social structure that impels them
along the path of imperialism.
[Stalin, "The Revolutionary Movement in the East,"
4 July 1925, trans. [collective], from RGASPI F. 558, op. 11, d. 972, doc. 9,
ll. 105–109; compared with Works, vol. 7, pp. 231–36.]
The dialectical unity of the two
errors becomes clear here. Kautsky denied the necessity of
anti-imperialist wars by positing that finance capital could peacefully
organize the world. Trotsky denied the specificity of the
anti-imperialist stage by insisting that the colonial revolution could only be
conceived as an immediately socialist, proletarian-led process, and that any
alliance with national-revolutionary forces was a betrayal. Kautsky evaded
the anti-imperialist struggle; Trotsky abstractly negated it. Both, in
their different ways, refused to take the anti-imperialist front as a relatively
autonomous and strategically decisive arena of the world revolution. The
1920 slogan revision was the affirmation of that arena. It was not a
concession to reformism; it was the strategic form through which the
proletariat could lead the oppressed peoples without dissolving its class
independence.
Hence the revision of the slogan
was therefore fundamentally connected to the struggle against the
Kautskyite and Trotskyite positions, but not in the sense of a simple
negative reaction. It was the positive strategic expression of the
very front that those positions, in theory and in practice, worked to dissolve.
Lenin’s expansion of the revolutionary subject was not a diplomatic addition;
it was a polemical and organizational weapon. It said, in effect: the proletariat
of the West cannot liberate itself without the oppressed peoples of the East,
and the communists of the East cannot liberate their peoples by abstractly
skipping over the national-democratic stage or by tailing the bourgeoisie.
Trotsky’s practical record on China shows that his verbal internationalism
functioned as a cover for a line that, in its concrete effects, undermined
the anti-imperialist front. To call this “de-prioritization” is to grant it
a coherence it did not possess; it was, in practice, a sabotage
of the front, however subjectively revolutionary its author believed himself to
be.
That is why the revision of
the slogan was neither a rejection of "Proletarians of all countries,
unite!" nor a purely regional adjustment. It was a necessary
addition that preserved the proletarian core while expanding the
revolutionary subject to include the mass anti-imperialist movements that the
Kautskyite and Trotskyite perspectives had marginalized.
The Documentary Record After 1920
The documentary record shows both
slogans in use, and the pattern of their use is the evidence for the thesis.
The Second Congress proceedings were published under the title Workers of
the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! The Politburo-approved May Day
slogans of 1930 read: "Proletarians of all countries and oppressed peoples
of the colonies..." [Pravda, April 1930]; those for the October
Revolution of 1933: "Proletarians of all countries! Oppressed peoples of
the colonies!..." [Pravda, October 1933].
The original slogan meanwhile
persisted as the state motto of the USSR, as the standard rallying cry of
communist parties, on banners, party cards, and official communications. Its
persistence was not revisionist: it expressed the class principle that remained
valid for the proletariat of the imperialist heartlands. It became revisionist
only when it was used to deny the necessity of anti-imperialist struggle or to
proclaim that such wars were a thing of the past.
It is the division of
strategic labour in which the old
slogan for the class struggle in the centres; new slogan for the
anti-imperialist alliance between centres and periphery. During the Cominform
Period (1947–1956) this division of labor manifested itself in the Cominform
journal: For a Lasting Peace, for a People's Democracy! The overwhelming
use of "proletarians of the West" and "oppressed
peoples of the East" as descriptors of a revolutionary front,
rather than the 1920 slogan as an official masthead. As in all such cases, it
contained within the danger of the
original slogan being used in a reformist, class-collaborationist way — severing
it from anti-imperialist struggle, or as the other side of the coin, the
‘ultra-left’ use of it to sever
the socialist struggle from the
anti-imperialist front.
Conclusion
The revision of the slogan
was an affirmation, addition, not substitution
or abandonment. It was a weapon against
Kautskyite evasion and Trotskyite sabotage, both of which, in different ways,
dissolved the anti-imperialist front. The coexistence of both slogans after
1920 is not evidence of inconsistency or hypocrisy but of a dialectical
unity of differentiated struggles.
The question of whether the
anti-imperialist struggle is central or peripheral to
revolutionary strategy remains alive. The 1920 revision offers a method
of expanding the revolutionary subject without dissolving its class core.
The old slogan without the new becomes sectarian abstention (Trotskyism)
or reformist evasion (Kautskyism). The new slogan without the old
becomes classless populism or bourgeois nationalism. Only their unity
— as addition, not substitution — expresses the full strategic content of the
epoch.
Erdogan A
October 17, 2026
Appendix: List of Documentary Sources for reference
Lenin's
November 1920 speech
(“Our Foreign and Domestic
Position and Party Tasks”: Speech Delivered at the Moscow Gubernia Conference
of the R.C.P.(B.), November 21, 1920).
Zinoviev's Baku Congress
speech (September 1920, Congress of the Peoples of the East).
Second Congress theses on the
national and colonial question (1920).
Lenin, Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions
Adopted theses / congress chapter
ECCI statements on the
slogan (1920s).
Comintern archive, Lenin’s speech
The Communist International journal archive
May Day and October Revolution
slogans (selected years, 1920–1933).
Stalin Works
Comintern publications
using the new slogan as title or masthead.
Second Congress proceedings title: Workers of the World and Oppressed
Peoples, Unite!
Comintern archive
Cominform journal issues (1947–1956)
— survey of slogan usage.
Cominform archive
Lenin's critique of Luxemburg
on the national question.
Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination
Lenin, Critical Remarks on the National Question
Lenin's critique of Kautsky
(Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky).
Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Lenin, Second Congress theses
"Preliminary Draft Theses
on the National and Colonial Questions," 1920.]
Comintern materials on China
(1925–1927) — Trotsky's line and the Stalinist critique.
Comintern and China archive
Trotsky, Problems of the Chinese Revolution
Pravda, April 1930 and
October 1933
Stalin Works
"The Prospects of the
Revolution in China" (Speech, November 30, 1926)
"Questions of the Chinese
Revolution, Theses for Propagandists", Article "
"The Revolution in China
and the Tasks of the Comintern, speeches" 1927.)
La Lutte (1933–39);
secondary literature on Tạ Thu Thâu and the Cochinchina Trotskyists
Ho Chi Minh, "Three
Letters to the Vietnamese CP, 1939," in Simon Pirani, Vietnam &
Trotskyism (1987)
