The League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression (French: Ligue contre l'impérialisme et l'oppression coloniale; German: Liga gegen Kolonialgreuel und Unterdrückung[1]) was a transnational anti-imperialist organisation in the interwar period.
[4] Since 1924, the Comintern advocated support of colonial and semi-colonial countries and tried, with difficulties, to find convergences with the left-wing of the Labour and Socialist International and with bourgeois anti-colonial nationalist parties from the colonised world.
Moreover, many activists from the European and American Left were present, such as Fenner Brockway, Arthur MacManus, Edo Fimmen, Reginald Bridgeman, and Gabrielle Duchêne, as well as intellectuals such as Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, and Albert Einstein.
[10] Bolshevik revolutionary Georgy Safarov angrily claimed that Zionism was a "British Imperialist Avant-Garde", which, according to Israeli historian Jacob Hen-Tov, reflected the Comintern's opposition towards Zionist activities in Palestine.
[2] After long deliberations by the Executive Council, the League ejected the Poale Zion delegation, with the PCP and Arab nationalists from Palestine, Egypt and Syria forming an anti-Zionist bloc for the vote.
The First United Front between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and the CCP was terminated, sparking the Chinese Civil War, just as the struggle against the Empire of Japan grew crucial, leading up to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
In 1935, the League pooled its resources with the World Committee of Women Against War and Fascism (CMF; Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme),[11] (whose non-communist sponsors in Britain included Sylvia Pankhurst and Charlotte Despard),[12] and the West-African Union of Negro Workers (UTN; Union des travailleurs nègres), to protest repression throughout the European colonial empires.
[13] The League remained the first attempt at an international anti-imperialist organisation, a brief later assumed by the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America headed by Moroccan leader Mehdi Ben Barka.