In the 1910s, the world saw the beginning of possibilities between the worker movements across the world and nationalist anti-colonial liberation movements in colonized nations. However, for Lenin, national anti-colonial movements can only exist as bourgeois movements, for the bulk of these nationalist movements are led by the landowning powerful classes. Thus, even though the bourgeois classes in colonised countries are supporting and leading anti-colonial movements, they simultaneously work in harmony with the imperialist (colonising) bourgeoisie, i.e., it joins the latter in fighting against all revolutionary movements by worker classes (Lenin, “Preliminary Theses on the National-Colonial Question)”). How then were the workers and communists supposed to imagine their future? For them, supporting national movements meant ushering the nation towards capitalistic development.
In their critique of British of rule, the founding fathers of the Indian National Congress had made the Indian people’s poverty a central issue. Dadabhai Naoroji, from 1876 wrote papers, memoranda and pamphlets, statistically presenting the state of misery and tracing its causes to the tribute rendered to Britain, to the de-industrialization generated by Free Trade, and to the over-taxation and currency manipulations by the British regime. The British rule was then responsible for the economic depravation of India, hurting the common workers the most.
Gandhi advocated for an inter-class and inter-caste solidarity between the the dominant zamindars, thakurs (land-owning castes), and factory-owners and workers, to fight together against overthrowing the British: "owners and workers ought to be in a relationship of father to son."
The 1920s in India witnessed general mass strikes by workers across the country over several dominant industries such as cotton mills over issues such as wage issues and working conditions. Some of these were successful, some were not.