THE LEFT AND THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT 5 and the growing dominance of right-wing Social Democracy in the Second International, the two movements remained distant frorm each other. Dadabhai Naoroji, who had presided over the Congress at Calcutta in 1886 (and was to do so again in 1906), appeared at the Amsterdam Congress of the International in 1904, proclaiming the confidence of the Indian nationalists in the support of the British working class; and Madame Cama, friend of revolutionary exiles, unfurled the tricolour (red, white, and green) of Free India at the Stuttgart Congress of the International (1907). But these were, by and large, just episodes. Indeed, at Stuttgart itself an alliance of the left and centre only barely managed to delete from the resolution on the colonial problem a reference to the civilizing colonial mission to be taken over by the metropolitan socialist regimes after capitalism had been overthrown!6 It was the revolutionary Marxists within the Second International, who began to build a vision in which the proletariat' s struggle for socialism would have an indispensable ally in the colonial peoples struggling for national liberation. Lenin gave expression to this understanding in his article "Inflammable Material in World Politics" (1908)7 Surveying recent events in Iran, Turkey, India and China, he identified Japan as a model (and, therefore, a non-socialist or bourgeois-nationalist model) towards which the nations of the East were feeling themselves drawn.8 Yet this did not prevent him from enthusiastically greeting the colonial people as allies against a common enemy, capitalist imperialism. His remarks on India were particularly important, with their reference to the demonstrations and strike in Bombay in protest against the sentencing of "the democrat" Tilak to six years' imprisonment. The event drew from him the confident assertion that "class-conscious workers of Europe now have Asiatic comrades and their number will grow by leaps and bounds".9 SOVIET REVOLUTION AND THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL But until the Soviet revolution of 1917 there did not yet exist a socialist component within the national liberation movement. Even in 1914, Lenin was speaking of "the possible correlations between the bourgeois liberation movements of the oppressed nations and the proletarian emancipation movement of the oppressing nation,"10 as if the former process had to be necessarily bourgeois in character. But "the salvoes of the October Revolution" broke the separation; they did not only bring Marxism-Leninism to China, as Mao Zedong acknowledged,11 but began