Reopening Work among Colonial Seamen

The bleak records of work among colonial seamen in Europe generated a lively debate at the ipctw conference in April 1928. The harshest critique on the pitfalls of work among colonial maritime workers came from Auguste Dumay. He accused the rilu for neglecting the colonial question in the maritime industry and for downplaying the potential impact of colonial maritime workers in both anticolonial and antiimperial activities. African and Caribbean mariners consituted the majority of the colonial seamen in France, he noted, but most of them were organised in the Féderation Nationale des Laboureurs de la Mer, a ‘yellow’1 union where the communists had no influence at all. Why where there no representatives from Africa or the Caribbean at the conference, he critically asked, and why where there no representatives of the Arab seamen? Dumay was backed in his criticism by George Hardy who urged the ipctw and its European sections to focus on work among colonial seamen in European ports.2 Dumay’s and Hardy’s criticism resulted in a reorientation and reorganisation of work among colonial seamen. The task of the revolutionary trade union opposition groups within the national maritime trade unions was to demand that membership was to be based on class only, not race or nationality. Maritime transport workers, who had emigrated to and resided in another country, were to be allowed to join a national union based on the principles of equal rights and equal standing.3 However, the ipactw never formulated any directives or issued any instructions on work among colonial seamen after the 1928 Moscow Conference. In part, this might have been due to the total overhaul of communist agitation which followed after the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in JulyAugust 1928. In late 1927, the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ecci) had initiated the ‘left turn’ calling for ‘intensified class struggle’, warning about ‘the treachery of social democracy’ and demanded