FACING INDEPENDENCE
On February 2 a mass rally attended by 1,400 people was held to celebrate the founding of the new organization. Speakers included Yoshii Iwasawa of the Sanrizuka-Shibayama Peasant Union Against the New International Airport, Eiichi Yamanishi, the oldest Trotskyist cadre in Japan, and others. Kazuo Ishikawa, a Buraku youth who has been imprisoned for many years, sent a solidarity message. Comrade Jiro Fujiwara, a representative of the Japan Revolutionary Communist League, gave a speech entitled "Let's fight together for our world revolution and the communist future. " Comrades Anitar Cheng of the Daily Combatting Bulletin, Rich Finkel of the Young Socialist Alliance, and Leonard Olivier of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire also spoke to the rally. The final speaker was Comrade Ichiro Endo, the JRCL candidate for
CAPE VERDEWhile Guinea-Bissau is independent today, the Cape Verde Islands are independent only on paper. For some time, the Portuguese government exerted pressure to make sure that the UPCV (Union of the Populations of Cape Verde), a puppet group composed of a few notables and prepared to accept the Spinolist principle of a "Portuguese-speaking Africa, 18 would be represented in the government of the future state. One of the consequences of the events of September 28 in Portugal was the disappearance of Spínola and with him his claims on Cape Verde. The archipelago will attain independence on July 5; in the meantime, a government of transition has been set up composed of equal representation from Portugal and the PAIGC. In conformity with the viewpoint of the PAIGC, the process now under way will include general elections to a national constituent assembly. Two main concerns are animating the leadership of the PAIGC during this period of the final phase of colonialism: its political implantation and the process of unification with Guinea-Bissau. We will see further on how these two questions actually encompass the debates on the Guinean and Cape Verdian revolution as a whole. For a number of objective reasons, the armed struggle did not develop in the Cape Verde Islands (inauspicious terrain, repression, low population, large emigration, etc.). Given the backdrop of these difficult conditions, the PAIGC for a long time groped
Sendai municipal parliament. The founding of the new youth organization marks a big step forward for the Japanese Trotskyist movement, a clear expression of the fact that the internal crises of the 1960s have been definitively overcome. All the other far-left and left-centrist tendencies and groups have proven politically bankrupt in the wake of the explosion of student radicalization of 1968-69. The Japanese section of the Fourth International, however, made impressive gains between 1971 and 1974, and the Japanese Trotskyist movement has now entered a new period of growth. The young worker, student, and high-school militants of the Japan Communist Youth League will fight to double and triple the size of their new organization during the coming period.
- by C. GABRIEL for a strategy for the liberation of the archipelago. Preparation for a military invasion, clandestine mobilization, and various other alternatives were considered. In face of such conditions, the PAIGC found it very difficult to gain a base in Cape Verde before the overthrow of the Salazarist regime on April 25, 1974. This fact was indissolubly linked to the social structure of the islands and to the strategic responses that flowed from that structure. The social structure of Cape Verde is more heavily differentiated than that of the Guinean countryside. (See INPRECOR, No. 14-15, December 12, 1974.) There is a class of local landed proprietors, a multitude of semiproletarianized small farmers, and sharecroppers, who represent the majority of the peasantry. Of 36, 309 agricultural establishments, 10,937 are worked by their owners, 8,385 are worked by tenant farmers paying rent, and 16, 987 are run by sharecroppers (the figures are pre-April 25). In addition, there are a significant number of agricultural wageworkers on the large estates, and there are also large- and small-scale traders, a petty bourgeoisie based in civil service and education, a tiny industrial proletariat, and a very large layer of lumpen born in the bosom of colonial rottenness. The bulk of the proletariat emigrated from Cape Verde, generally going to Portugal, where there are now tens of thousands of Cape Verdian workers.
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CAPE VERDE Such a social structure made very hazardous the sorts of precepts advanced by the PAIG in Guinea according to which social differentiations were insufficient to "speak" of class struggle. The PAIGC, with its multiclass conceptions, appealed pell-mell to the "toilers of the countryside and the cities, students, landowners, lawyers, funcfionaries and employees in commerce, doctors, engineers, teachers and instructors in high schools." The symbolic affirmation that "the land belongs to those who till it" was swamped in an appeal to all "high functionaries and well-to-do farmers and merchants, " who have "the duty (?) to serve our people, the humble, anonymous Cape Verdian, our brother. " (From the call to armed struggle in Cape Verde issued during the first few months of 1969.) More recently, in the "report on the situation in Cape Verde" presented to the United Nations by the PAIGC in March 1974, no reference is made to the question of an eventual redistribution of land after independence. The PAIGC and the mass movement The present situation must thus be viewed through the prism of the nationalist political line of the PAIG, the catastrophic economic sifuation of the islands (which are permanently threatened by famine), and the spontaneous spirit of the mass movement. After April 25, 1974, the PAIG was faced with the imperative necessity of rapidly gaining political hegemony against the right-wing Spinolist currents, whose favorite ideological weapon was denunciation of "Guinean imperialism" on the islands. By all evidence, the PAIGC was victorious on this field and forced the Portuguese army to put a stop to the subversive activities of the Spinolist grouplets. Today the political hegemony of the PAIGC on the islands is an accomplished fact, although it is asserted unevenly. The island of Santiago is especially well controlled and constitutes the nucleus around which the life of the party throughout the islands is organized. However, some islands where the PAIC seems less well organized, So Vincente for example, have benefited from a more rapid rise of the mass movement because of the social problems that are posed there. The movement has taken the most diverse forms on the various islands: In Santiago land has been occupied; in Saint Nicolau the customs and police offices have been occupied; in Santo Antão the local offices of the administrator were seized and transformed into a crêche; in São Vincente a private radio station was occupied. 22
In this framework, the relations between the PAIGC and the Portuguese forces within the coalition government are determined by the relations between the PAIGC and the mass movement. Does the PAIG seek to strengthen the mobilization of the masses, politicize it, and provide it with anticapita list strategic objectives; or, on the other hand, does it "instrumentalize" the movement by retaining the idea of "national reconciliation" in order to utilize the movement tactically against the Portuguese? It definitely seems that the leadership of the PAIGC has chosen the second attitude. For the most part, the PAIG is refusing to counterpose itself to the mobilization of the masses, because establishing the relationship of forces it wants to achieve before July 5 can be carried out successfully only by gaining a deep popular base for the party. But also for the most part, the PAIG is assigning a narrow funcfion to this mobilization: to "support the party." At the Sal airport, for example, the party proposed and organized people's control of outgoing travelers so as to prevent the flight of currency. If was also on the proposal of the party that the São Vincente radio station was occupied and that the dockers there organized vigilance pickets. But when the workers of a construction tool firm wanted to go on strike, the leadership of the PAIG asked them to give up the idea because the government could not satisfy the request for wage increases. In fact, colonialism had established curious contracts between the state and the owner of this factory. It was stipulated that in the event of wage increases being granted the workers, the public treasury and not the employer would pay the supplementary wage bill. The attitude taken by the party was not to denounce this contract, to open the company's books, and to nationalize the enterprise if the owner refused to pay up. It preferred to guarantee "national reconciliation" by aborting the strike. Contradictory relationships between the mass movement and the leadership of the PAIC have also grown up around the agrarian question. Although an agrarian reform project is still awaited, the masses have initiated a movement of occupation of lands, setting up elected committees charged with sharing out various functions. Little by little in various areas there has spread a refusal to pay rent in kind to the "Morgados" (large landed proprietors). The PAIGC, it appears, has supported and even led these movements. It launched the beginning of a purge by calling for the imprisonment of some reactionaries. For example, in the Santa Cruz region of Santiago the banana plantation of Almeida Henriques, a Portuguese, was occupied, and Henriques was thrown into prison. But the mass movement did not at all stop in midstream; one Jorge Querido, a large landed proprietor and former leader of the
PAIGC before April 25, owes his salvation to the intervention of the PAIG national leadership. Finally, in certain areas, like Orgaos (Santiago), the peasant masses are more backward and impose a more flexible approach on the PAIG militants. But for all that, there is no coherent PAIGC policy basing itself on the slogan of an agrarian reform that aims at drawing the poverty-stricken peasant masses into a social revolution. In the absence of such a line, the party's policy remains empirical, motivated by tactical considerations, and very often heterogeneous, depending on the local "sensibilities" of the existing structures. This is true in regard to the agrarian question and the question of economic development as well. Economic aid In face of the catastrophic economic situation, the leadership of the PAIGC has had to settle down to a twofold task: developing an emergency plan of financial and food aid, and developing a plan for industrialization in the medium term. Portugal is extremely reluctant to aid Cape Verde while its own balance of payments is already grossly unbalanced; the direction of the international turn of Sylvinio Daluz in Cape Verde has been to diversify aid sources and to knock on all available doors. It remains to be seen what implications this aid will have on the independence of the future Cape Verdian regime. Food aid from imperialist countries is known to rapidly become an effective weapon used to achieve the goal of political and economic domination. One can quote, for example, the director of the Food for Peace program, who stated that "the rapid arrival of American planes loaded with food after the earthquake disaster in Chile in 1960 did more for relations between Chile and the United States than any other American action taken during recent years." For the American administration, there is a constant and deliberate intent to use food aid as a vehicle for commercial penetration. "Those we aid today will be our customers tomorrow, " said Mac Govers, director of Food for Peace in 1960 and 1961. Although the emergency plan is inevitable, and although aid must be requested from anyone, even from the devil himself, it is nonetheless tragic to see the leadership of the PAIGC asking for imperialist aid at the same time as it is resolutely (!) non-aligned. "Nonalignment" has never prevented the economic laws of the imperialist market from exerting themselves over all the contradictions of a transitional economy emerging from colonialism and devoid of a real anticapita list program.
The Cape Verdian nation, like the Guinean nation, is today the target of the most sordid blackmail. All sides, whether it be the Stalinist leaderships or the imperialist states, are throwing themselves into trying to take advantage of the difficulties of the PAIGC in order to block any process of radicalization. The Arab oil-producing countries are proposing loans at 1 percent interest - but they are demanding to know in advance the economic or industrial project toward which the aid will go. Other proposals have come from the United States, France, Japan, West Germany, and even South Africa. The Belgian Petrofina company has proposed a refinery for So Vincente, with the state receiving 10 percent of production and having to purchase an additional 10 percent. This agreement is waiting to be signed, but it had already been concluded before April 25 - with the colonial regime. This small archipelago is continuing to stimulate imperialist appetites. Its geographical position is of top importance for NATO. But the stakes go well beyond the strategic role of the Sal airport. In fact, in the uneven development of the liberation struggle in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, it has become obvious that during the past few months the masses of Cape Verde have been able to rapidly catch up to, and even go beyond, the level of mobilization, and above all the level of consciousness, of the Guinean masses. Such a turn is explained both by the social structure of Cape Verde and by the essential contribution made by the rapid politicization of Cape Verdian youth, especially the petty-bourgeois intellectual youth that attended universities in Portugal. This is very different from the situation prevailing in Guinea, where the party had its base essentially among peasant masses outside the urban centers. The question of unification This new uneven development of the political process in the two countries has in a certain sense blown away the fog and thus conferred on the Cape Verde Islands a role that is much more decisive than that conferred on them simply by their location in the Atlantic Ocean. Consequently, it is the development of struggles and debates in the party in Cape Verde that will rebound on the Guinean situation and that will partially orient the unfolding of events in the latter country. This is quite important in broaching the question of unity between Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. For a whole period the PAIG leadership was content to justify the goal of unity solely on the basis of the historical ties between the two populations, especially the ties developed in the process of the struggle waged by the PAIG itself. This is perfectly
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AN ATTEMPTED COUP IN GUINEA
Six nights of curfew have enabled the PAIG to stop an attempted coup organized by a group of former officers of the African commandos, Manuel Gardete (a former Guinean deputy), and Fernando Luna (former president of the Guinean colonial legislative assem-
In INPRECOR No. 14/15 we wrote: "Those who were in the Portuguese military have been disarmed and sent back to their native villages. The pay they had been given (up through
December) constitutes a small piece of capital that will allow them to take up agriculture again. Nevertheless, they are a potential counterrevalutionary force that must not be ignored." In face of these dangers, we counterposed to the PAIG's "national reconciliation" a class analysis of urban Guinean society and the necessity for a popular mobilization around anticapitalist objectives. There is nothing to be gained from hiding from the masses the fact that the collaborator petty bourgeoisie will remain a reactionary social force for a long period; if it is hidden, there is a risk that the masses will not take
And yet, all this seems to astonish Victor Maria Sande, who stated in Dakar on March 24:
"In September, when the PAIG took possession of the zones that had not yet been under its control, it decided not to implement a general policy of purges and to exclude reprisals— in order to move in the direction of national reconciliation. In the long run(?),
Ably). to the streets when the confrontations with reaction come. such a policy will inevitably create some problems." valid and must constitute the principal argument. Nevertheless, to respond to reactionary maneuvers aimed at exacerbating racist prejudices between the two populations it is not sufficient simply to harp on Portuguese-speaking unity and unity in the First of all, it must be recognized that a significant portion of the petty bourgeoisie of the Guinean towns is Cape Verdian and that the expression of anti-Cape Verdian racism against which it is necessary to fight parfially masks an opposition to privileged layers among the poverty-stricken population. On the other side, it would be a serious mistake to ignore the Cape Verdian national question. That is why it is quite positive that some leaders of the PAIGC have for some months publicly affirmed the existence of two nations and their respective rights to self-determination in deciding the question of unity. The only way to block imperialism's attempts to sow division is to take Cape Verdian national rights into consideration within the context of educating the masses in internationalism. This implies taking into consideration the interests of the Guinean and Cape Verdian popular masses, and not at all the interests of "all classes and layers. " Unification must not allow a Cape Verdian merchant to exploit the workers of Bissau. What we want to speak about is an internationalist unification of the two peoples in struggle. But in that event, it is possible that a Mandjaque peasant in northern Guinea will not understand why 24 he is being spoken to about the common interests he has with the Cape Verdian peasant while he is not being spoken to about his Mandjaque cousin who lives only fifteen miles away on the other side of the Senegalese border. In offering a partial response to the question of unification, the PAIG is avoiding the question of strategic tasks in regard to the whole African revolution. The process of unification of these two countries must be saluted - but without blurring the essential point: The isolation of the Guinean revolution does not end with that unification; ending the isolation depends on the struggles of the whole region. That is why it is perfectly irresponsible of the PAIGC to sign a communiqué with the Senagalese regime in which the two parties "... consider that there are no fundamental reasons (!) justifying a different international policy for the two countries, especially in the African sphere. " The two countries being "conscious of the responsibilities incumbent on them in the maintenance of peace and security in conformity with the principles of the charters of the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity. " (Bissau, January 9.) Further, it is important not to have any illusions about the solidity of unity between Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in the framework of a nationalist state already marked by the stigma of bureaucratism and in which the most diverse tendencies are little by little moving toward confrontation.
The question of unification is also of great importance in stabilizing the authority of the Bonapartist state that is now taking shape. Since a significant part of the national leadership of the PAIC is of Cape Verdian origin, its credibility among the urban masses of Guinea-Bissau requires that anti-Cape Verde chauvinist prejudices be broken down. In Cape Verde, it will be necessary to define the type of army that will be set up; similar definition will be needed for the building of a trade-union movement. The same will be true in determining whether the trade unions will be independent of the party and the state. Unifying Guinea and Cape Verde will be all the more delicate for the leadership of the PAIGC in that the trade-union movements in the fwo countries have attained different degrees of organization and independence of the state apparatus. It will be necessary to choose between allowing one to be "contaminated" by the other or trying to force one to retreat to the level of the other. The political life of the PAIGC in Cape Verde can only be very different from its political life in Guinea-Bissau. The political outlook of the young petty-bourgeois elements who went to Portuguese universities, where they have had contact with Portuguese revolutionary youth, has been broadened considerably. They have to reconcile their attachment and devotion to the nationalism of the PAIG with a search for answers to political questions raised within the workers movement. Such a need can easily lead to pro-Chinese attractions — a petty-bourgeois attraction to the victories of the Chinese revolution over underdevelopment. But such a path, which makes great concessions to gradualist conceptions, adapts to, rather than confronts, the prevailing nationalism. Warnings have already appeared in the PAIGC bulletins published in the Cape Verde Islands against "left and right opportunism"; there have also been long dissertations explaining that the demand for people's power can only mean strengthening of the partyThere will be imperialist plots against the nationa list Cape Verdian leadership. There will be many reactionary intrigues aimed at sweeping this archipelago back into the camp of neocolonialism. Preparation to meet such tests cannot be made by tactically manipulating the mass movement; rather, preparation must be made by systematically developing and politicizing the mass movement, by putting an end to the myth of national reconciliation, by formulating an anticapitalist program in the framework of an integrated strategy for the class struggle in.the whole But the PAIGC is already strongly committed to what it calls "nonalignment, " and for many months African diplomacy has been weaving its net, fostering the line of the strongest inclination of the PAIG's nationalism: opportunism. It is very important for revolutionary Marxists to follow the situation in Cape Verde and GuineaBissau, for the problems that are posed there, the question of unification, for example, must be at the center of our own political strategy in the African continent. February 8, 1975
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we are publishing below the second installment of "The Palace Faces the Crisis. The
MOROCCO THE