Let us not be misled. The real cause of the differences which threaten world war is not the spread of socialism or even of the complete socialism which communism envisages. Socialism is spreading all over the world and even in the United States. On no single theory of human progress is there such wide unanimity as in the belief that scientific social planning must guide future industry and that the individual effort in work and the production and distribution of wealth must be subject to social control for the common good.

Against this spread of socialism, one modern institution is working desperately, and that is colonialism and colonialism has been and is and ever will be one of the chief causes of war.

Colonialism is the modern survival of the ancient method of production through the enslavement of the working classes. Through human sympathy and religious faith, slavery faded into serfdom and was about to disappear in Europe during the middle ages when suddenly in newly discovered America and fed by imported black folk from Africa it was born again. This slave system applied to new crops and to materials processed by a newly discovered technique, precipitated an industrial revolution and birthed the modern use of the suddenly increased wealth as capital for making more wealth rather than as consumer goods. Most of the new wealth and power therefore went to the owners of capital but some of it went to the laborers and they increased in intelligence and political power. When this emancipation of the European working class began to spread to yellow labor in Asia and to black slaves in America, colonialism arose as a plan to concentrate and preserve slave labor among the colored races. Colonies were founded in Africa and Asia where under European control, millions of natives were regimented in forced labor with little education, monopolized land, no political power and only primitive techniques. Thus the virtual slavery of a majority of the world’s laborers was prolonged.

But this system could only be maintained with the consent of the enfranchised white working class. To uphold and defend this system, spiritual and physical force was necessary: a race theory which persuaded white labor that it belonged to a superior race with the right to enslave colored people as the only method of preserving civilization and universal militarism designed to hold colonials in control. Thus the working class was split into two complete groups, each helping to hold the other in thrall, the one half-slave, the other only half free. But the white workers were bribed with a share of the vast profits of the colonial system and imbued with a sense of national pride and the glory of imperial rule.

But this industrial system had its inherent dangers: it left in white countries vestigial remains of slave labor, in depressed classes and slums: especially in America, it left millions of black serfs, who could not be removed to colonies, and yet could be held to forced labor only by nullifying the democratic constitution on which the United States was founded. Today in the United States, 15,000,000 such citizens are still in semi-slavery, and form part of an internal colonial system. In China and the Middle East, in the Balkans and South America, and even in leading civilized countries this degradation of depressed workers continues as part of the modern industrial process.

This system of colonialism, semi-colonialism and depressed classes with economic control centered in the hands of rich, gifted and powerful individuals and social classes, put the control of the governments of most countries in their hands and neutralized democratic government. This kept alive the idea, which science and technique increasingly denied, that poverty of the masses was the inevitable foundation of modern culture.

This colonial system and its half-concealed counterparts in the so-called “backward” lands and in the slums of the most civilized states became the main cause of war and fear of war. Colonial revolt, however futile, was a continuing danger. Internal servile revolt, strikes and labor unrest, and crime called for vast police power and arbitrary court procedure. But even greater danger arose from the greed and envy of the ruling nations who resented the colonial monopolies of the great empires. The determination of Germany and Italy to share the colonial wealth monopolized by Britain and France precipitated the first world war, which brought the whole industrial system to the brink of bankruptcy. The Russian working class seized this opportunity to revolt and sought by a system to abolish poverty without colonial slavery: by planned work and more equitable distribution of wealth. She was attacked by fourteen countries over a period of twenty-eight years and consequently has not yet had fair chance to fully carry out her bold experiment.

Meantime, the industrial system of Europe and America was so weakened by war and depression, unemployment and disease, that planned dictatorship arose in Germany and Italy, with wide sympathy in Britain and the United States to save it. The unexpected result was a wider and more terrible world war—a war neither planned nor expected, with no one cause and no result, save that the Union of Soviet Republics now rose to its full stature of promise and by throwing all of her power to the defense of Western Europe and America, gave thirty million lives to save the world from Adolf Hitler. The clear result of this victory of socialism over dictatorship was to herald the certain beginning of the end of colonialism: India was freed, China threw off western domination, the West Indies seized beginnings of political power and East Europe seized ownership of its land and natural resources.

This result was so astounding, and so clear a threat to imperialism and slave labor that instead of world recognition of the fact that this end of colonialism was the only development to end war, we are today rushing pell-mell into a third world war, not as most persons seem to think, by arming, marching and making fantastic munitions to develop the rival strength of two great nations but by trying behind this false facade desperately and frantically to build a new colonialism in Africa. War may be preparing in Europe and in the United States, but its seeds are being sown in Africa, where British, American, French and Belgian wealth is trying to rebuild an old world economy on slave labor. On slave labor which will continue to compete with the best paid labor of the world and accumulate more wealth in private control which can be used in the future as in the past to kill democracy in Europe and America and to stop the inevitable spread of planned industry and the just distribution of wealth rather than an anarchy of business enterprise based on force and chance.

Before this rebirth of colonialism, the United Nations stand dumb and helpless, mumbling formulas on human rights and denying the wretched even the right to complain. Even organized labor is too blind to see the cloud rising to destroy it. British labor dreams of security and wealth by bribing oil barons of the Middle East and letting them fatten on the filth and flies of their pauper populations. The American labor unions smashed the world federation not for fear of Russia but for fear of the black delegates from Africa and the Indies demanding the end of colonialism and equal wage for equal work.Footnote ¹

Foremost in this fight to re-enslave human labor are two “democracies”: the Union of South Africa and the United States of America—both with the fatal initials—USA. Nowhere on earth since the birth of Christ has a nation expressed a more repulsive plan to degrade human beings than the Union of South Africa today: complete disfranchisement of six million black workers by two million white parasites: no trade unions for blacks, limited education, poverty and disease unequalled in any civilized land.

North from this blatant tyranny and inspired by it, the Rhodesias and Kenya demand as a right the ownership of ten millions of blacks with only such rights as local whites controlling government, land and labor, choose to give them. Into such a continent, with its nine million black slaves of Belgium, its twenty-four million serfs of France, its seven million slaves in dispute between Egypt and Britain and Britain’s own fifty millions of West Africa, comes the wealth of the world today seeking investment at percentages they would not dare demand at home and led by the most experienced exploiter of helpless people, Unilever, to plant and reap: to build and dam: to whip and drive: and reap such riches out of a re-enslaved Africa, as to build a monopoly of world industry able to control modern culture even more effectively than before the First World War.Footnote ²

Leading this new colonial imperialism comes my own native land, built by my fathers’ toil and blood, the United States. The United States is a great nation: rich by grace of god and prosperous by the hard work of its humblest citizens. And these citizens were not made up of the elect of the earth: of nobles and aristocrats: of the learned and gifted. No. America was peopled by the lowest of men. The humblest of human strains: by slaves and paupers. Even in part by jailbirds and prostitutes: beggars and outcasts: as well as by honest, hard-working peasants. Out of this material she has built a powerful nation, which is in itself the highest proof of the possibilities of human kind. How is it that upon soil such as this arose modern slavery with unparalleled exploitation of natural resources and today a frightful militarism on the vastest scale ever known to man and threatening to bribe and coerce and rule mankind? Why is it that today Americans are the greatest employers of colonial labor in the world, and are stretching every sinew to control all the labor and profit of Europe, Asia and Africa?

It is because we are too new to be wise, too impatient to be intelligent: too rich to be humble and too boastful to have good manners. We crucified the prophets who warned us of Negro slavery until that slavery plunged us into bloody, costly and unnecessary civil war. Today when the grandchildren of these slaves are struggling and crawling to the light and demanding the rights of free men, Congress laughs at our just demands and the president of the United States goes fishing. Yet the nation knows we are right. It knows we are ruled by corporate wealth. But it does not know how or what is the possible alternative. It is deliberately misled by a prostituted press, a controlled educational system, a body of frightened scientists and artists and by such waste of funds on war that little is left for schools, hospitals, flood control and rationally planned economy. Drunk with power we are leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery which once ruined us and to a third world war which will ruin the world.

How can we stop this descent into hell? By halting in its tracks this new world-wide raid on Africa! By stopping world war in abolishing the colonial seeds of war and the slavery of human toil. To save the world—save Africa!