struggle in the portuguese colonies by C. GABRIEL_ Below is the second and final installment of an article whose first section was published in INPRECOR No.2, p.9. For information on the latest developments in the negotiations between the Lisbon government and the liberation movements, see the From the Four Corners column in this issue of INPRECOR Today, with the new situation in Portugal, the liberation struggle finds itself unambiguously confronted with the historic alternative: socialist revolution or caricature of revolucontrol the working closs. As for the second function, the results have been meager, in spite of the "shows" that have been put on by Soares. (See the From the Four Corners column in this issue of INPRECOR.) But the bourgeoisie is using all the time it can get to restructure its instruments and homogenize its forces in order to prepare for new battles. The dynamic of the situation will not be determined by the efforts the CP is making on the municipal level and in its many meetings in preparation for future elections. In the context of the existing economic stagnation it is the capacity of the working class to respond that will be the determining factor. For the vanguard, the primary task in face of the chauvinist and opportunist positions of the CP and the SP is to develop the broodest anticolonial campaign and support fo the struggles of the liberation movements. The junta may be able to play on the chauvinist sentiments that exist among layers of the workers. Further, in order to develop an alternative response to the policy of the Union Federation, it is urgent to link demands against inflation, unemployment, and so on, to demands in the struggle against any restriction on the right to strike or on trade-union activity, with the aim of building fighting democratic union organizations. Unless these types of initiatives are taken, there is great risk that the militant but limited struggles will run out of steam, especially since the CP would find it easier to control the whole situation, even if it were to lose some graund in the individual factories. But it would be dangerous for the vanguard to limit its activity to this. Not to give a concrete and immediate response on the question of the regime against the farce of the provisional government and the plan for "elections within one year" would simply amount to refusing to put forward an alternative solution to the one being pushed for by the trodifional organizations. In this sense, the slogan "Immediate election by universal suffrage of all men and women over eighteen living in Portugal of a sovereign constituent assembly and the right of all organizations with no restriction whatsoever to participate in these elections" remoins obsolutely crucial. decisive hour tion. We will examine their response to this alternative by looking at the factors that operate within the liberation movements to determine the political direction of their struggles. The question of social structure By opting for a strategy of "prolonged revolutionary war" the young nationalist leaderships abandoned the priority of work in the cities in order first to gain a base in the countryside bordering the enclave regions. They left on area of commer-
cial activity in which the petty-bourgeoisie (small businessmen, civil servants) were much more numerous than the working class. In Mozambique, for example, workers in small enterprises and plantations constitute 10 percent of the population. In Angola as of 1964 there were 2,840, 000 workers; that represents 13 percent of the population. In the economically developed zones (the coffee-growing region, Cuanza Norte, and UIGE), In which there was no question of launching an armed struggle, the local labor force accounts for only 12 percent of the total of a semiproletarianized labor force composed mostly of migrant peasants. The emergence of the liberation movements therefore took place in zones in which the development of the social structure, while remaining desultory, guaranteed that the petty bourgeoisie would have numerical and political hegemony within the movement. In the countryside, although the penetration by the market economy was uneven, the virtual majority of the population lived by subsistence.* The move to armed struggle therefore meant uprooting the cadres from their original social milieu. Moreover, Cabral explains this move of the nationalist pettybourgeoisie from the towns to the countryside in erroneous terms. Postulating the historic gulf between the formation of the towns and the countryside, he treat the role of the petty bourgeoisie in moral terms. In 1966 during the first conference of OSPAAAL, (Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America), after having denounced the threat of neocolonialism, he declared: "in order not to betray these objectives, the petty bourgeoisie has but one available rood: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness. ... This means that to completely fulfill the role that devolves on it in the national liberation struggle, the revalutionary petty-bourgeoisie must be capable of committing class suicide in order to reappear as revolutionary workers totally identified with the deepest aspirations of the people of which it is a part. " This position of Cabral on the class suicide of the petty bourgeoisie has been little by little challenged within the PAIG. Not only is this concept of suicide false, but the PAIG has in no way achieved in practice the ideological homegeneity that is the natural implication of Cabral's 1966 Likewise, it would be necessary for these comrades to understand the class struggle not only in the restricted arena of the liberated zones, but also in the towns themselves, where in the future the viewpoint of the revolutionary worker" would have to be imposed within a much more complex social structure than exists in the countryside, a social structure in which the market economy has led to the development of social layers hostile to the interests of the proletariat and the poor peasantry. Finally, as we shall see further on, still less has the PAIGC integrated into its analysis the class struggle being waged in West Africa, which also weighs on the development of the young Republic of Guinea. In these writings Cabral does begin an analysis of the social structure, but it clearly seems that this analysis has been * In Guinea among the Balantes, land is the property of the village, the means of production belong to the family or individual. Also in Guinea the Foulas have collective property in land but owe a certain quantity of labur to the chiefs. In this country only the Mandjaks lived in a society of a Feudal type, one introduced by Islamicization, until the arrival of the Portuguese.
"emasculated" for "tactical" reasons that in reality obscure the historic horizon of the struggle. Thus, in 1964 at the seminar held by the Franz Fanon Center in Milan, Cabral declared: ".
but isn't it possible . .. to define the really revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie? As an element of analysis, one could perhaps simply respond: the honest bourgeoisie, that is, the bourgeoisie that, despite all contrary tendencies, contributes to making the fundamental interests of the popular masses of its country its own. "
key to organizations
Peoples Liberation Movement of Angola
MPLA
PAIGC
African Party for the Independence of
Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands
FRELIMO Mozambique Liberation Front
Angola National Liberation Front. The
ANLE
Union of Peoples of North Angola was created in 1954. It later become the Union of Angolan Peoples, and the, after winning over several grouplets, became the
ANLF, which for reasons of diplomacy
Founded the Angolan Revolutionary Government in Exile, which is based in Kinshasa and controlled by Mobutu.
National Union for the Total Independence
UNITA of Angola. It developed in 1966 after a split in the ANLF. It concentrated in the beginning on gaining a base in the south and center of the country. The main criticisms it makes of the MPLA are that the latter has a petty-bourgeois leadership and that it directs the liberated zones from outside.
Liberation Front for the National Indepen-
FLING dence of Guinea. A sort of reactionary grouplet based in Dakar, supported for several years by Senghor, president of
Senegal, and manipulated by the Americans.
United Group of Mozambique. A potential
GUMO third force. Has just declared itself in favor of interracial, interreligious coexistence and for a Lusifano-Afro-Brazilian community!
These insufficiencies of analysis of social structure and class struggle have corollaries on the level of the analysis of the nature and role of the party as well as of the kind of state that should be set up. For the party, Cabral merely observes that the PAIGC has the function of a "movement." Thus, after the death of Cabral, the Executive Committee of the
Struggle declared that the PAIGC united in its ranks all the social layers of our colonized peoples. " Standing mute on the question of the vanguard party, the PAIG becomes flatly ambiguous on the question of the state: "Our party is erecting a Party-State by ensuring its control and politico-administrative management of the liberated regions. " (Vasco Cabral,
January 31, 1973.) This conception of the Party-State, which was developed to its highest point by Sekou Toure and Kwame
Nkrumah, suggests the bonapartist function of the leader's personality and amounts to an old nationalist mystification that has been extensively utilized by the Mobutus and their ilk. Would it then perhaps be necessary to detail the nature
15
AFRICA of the state and the function of the party? If the PAIGC unites "all the social layers of the people" it is a pretty fair bet that the Party-State does not represent simply the "viewpoint of the revolutionary worker. " At least, not until the "suicide" is complete! To be sure, the liberation movements do not today represent fully-formed multiclassist movements. FRELIMO, the PAIGC, and the MPLA are movements with a multiclass conception; but the movements have not yet fulfilled their frontist aspirations, because their stable spheres of influence are limited to the countryside and because the weak layers of petty-bourgeois businessmen in the cities have already linked up with the "democratic" sectors of colonialism (the GUMO in Mozambique or the Democratic Movement in Guinea). Dos Santos referred to this whole debate in his interview with The African Communist (issue no.55). By their own contradictions his words permit us to understand the ambiguities of a multiclass conception of a struggle in which it is increasingly difficult to find a common denominator for "all the layens of the people. " Said Dos Santos: "There is no national bourgeoisie worth talking about. "(p.35.) "But I would say FRELIMO is a front. Not a front of organizations, in spite of the fact that it wos formed by three organizations that dissolved to create a new one. I would say it is a front because if groups together all the social groups or social classes with one aim of eliminating oppression. Everybody -- whether he is involved in the capitalist or troditional sector -- is sufFering humiliation because of racism and economic exploitation, even the tribal chiefs. "(p.35.) "Of course, within almost every national movement there are different types of nationalism. There is the elementary primary one -- what is called primitive nationalism. Some people who take part in the struggle for independence do so not to realize or to satisfy the interest of a small group.... So 1 would say that it is not a question of pitfalls or limitations but of the characteristics of some types of nationalism. "(p.44.) "As always, the task of building a society economically poses the problem of the type of production and distribution, and especially who is going to benefit from what the society produces. "(p.45.) "Gwenjero, Marupa, and Simango were not taking these positions (before their expulsion from FRELIMO -- INPRECOR openly along these lines, but they were driven by a desire for individual political power, by a bourgeois ideology and a desire to build a capitalist type system. "(p.46.) "If we do not follow collectivist attitudes, we will not be able to face the enemy successfully. ... If our organization maintains a true revolutionary leadership, the special circumstances of the process of our liberation open up real possibilities for an advance from liberation to revolution. ... This must be the deferse until the situation has been achieved where the truly revolutionary classes dominate all levels of power. "(pp.48The road is tortuous. To be sure, it is still not known whether FRELIMO the multiclass front has the objective of winning over the layers that Dos Santos denounces here. But all this comes down to an approach to the evolution of the strug gle that, although it is the fruit of an empirical approach, nevertheless is beginning to be theorized. Likewise, in 1964 Cabral made a long analysis of neocolonialism, which he defined as a "defeat for the international workers movement." He ended up by stating that such a situation as neocolonialism "calls for a socialist solution." But it remains true that these tentative approaches to a theorization of the revolutionary process in no way constitute • guarantee. The ganerally significant heterogeneity of the 16 leaderships must be taken into account, as well as the fact that the political direction of the liberation movements will nof be determined by internal factors alone. The whole continental political situation bears down on the movements, and they maintain an opportunist attitude toward that political situation that may well boomerang on them. Internationalism In southern Africa FRELIMO and the MPLA have been faced with a growing military intervention from South Africa and Rhodesia and have found natural allies in the ZAPU, the ZANU (Rhodesia), and the SWAPO (Namibia). They have responded to the internationalization of the conflict that imperialism has provoked by strengthening the relations among the liberation movements. To be sure, the political character of the various movements differs, but os Dos Santos said, "It is an elementary part of the tactics of a struggle such os ours always to disperse the enemy." The real question lies in the relations among the three movements and the African regimes, as well as in these regimes' "diplomatic practices. " African diplomacy bears down very heavily on and strongly preoccupies the leaders of FRELIMO, the PAIGC, and the MPLA. The neighboring countries play an especially important role in this game in which the tactical interests of the liberation movements, the ideological mystifications of supraclass pan-Africanism, and the attempts to imprison the liberation movements in the reactionary straitjacket of the OAU are all intermixed. Three examples would be sufficient to illustrate the importance of the neighboring countries. In the conflict between the FRELIMO majority and the Makonda faction led by Kawandame the mediating presence of a representative of TANU, the governmental party in Tanzania, was required at the FRELIMO congress. The MPLAANLF agreement and the allocation of African aid to the two movements are controlled by a trust composed of N'Gouabi, Mobutu, Kaunda, and Nyerere (respectively the heads of state of the Congo (Brazzaville), Zaire, Zambia, and Tanzania). Finally, in the conflict within the MPLA between Neto and Chipenda, the latter was openly supported by a faction of the Zambian government. In an interview with the magazine Révolution Africaine, Mobutu presented himself os the obligatory intermediary controlling aid to the Angolan people. Senghor (president of Senegal), who actually supports the FLING, today recognizes the PAIC; but he met secretly with Spinola twice before the assassination of Cabral, he puts out propaganda favoring establishment of a Portuguese-speaking community, and he has just recently strengthened relations between his UPS party and the Portuguese Socialist parHow do the liberation movements respond to this problem? It is not an unimportant question. In fact, while we believe that it is necessary to destroy the state of colonial domination through a process of anticapitalist revolution, under African conditions it is not sufficient to construct a Guinean -- or even Mozambiquian -- workers state on the ruins of the colonial administration. Given the historical and economic development of the African countries, it is obvious that the development of the productive • forces, the resistance to the international counterrevolution, the existing demographic exigencies, and so on, require first a regional and later a continental dimension for the building of socialism. A socialist Guinea is a utopia if a revolutionary crisis does not break out during the same period in the neighboring bourgeois states of Senegal and Guinea-Conakry. This implies that the liberation movements not give up the slow work of educating the revolutionary militants who are
Liberated territary. Voting for Guinea-Bissau national assembly. fighting against these regimes. The PAIG's practices in this area have been extremely uneven. The isolation of the Guinean revolution could occur through a right-wing compromise with the neocolonial regimes. If that happens, the PAIG's direction of development could very rapidly turn toward capitulation under the pressure of neocolonialism. A few examples: We have no intention of establishing an identity between Sekou Touré and Leopold Senghor. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the Guinean regime is not the "beacon" of the African revolution. To profit from Guinea-Conakry's support does not necessarily imply an apolitical apolegeticism that runs against the formation and maturing of the African revolutionary movement. But yet! Francisco Mendes declared in Lahore in February 1974 that the Portuguese government was constantly nurturing the dream of attacking "the sister republic of Guinea with the aim of liquidating its popular and revolutionary regime and of this depriving us of the solid rear area that this brother country represents. .. of striking a blow against the unfailing solidarity and unconditional and indefatigable friendship that exists between our two parties and our two states. ...may may the glorious people of the historic "No'... be able to save their triumphant revolution! " Some questions could be asked about the "sister republic," "the uncondifional friendship between our two parties," and the "triumphant revalution. " Is Guinea-Conakry the model? As for the Senegal aspect, the presence of Amilcar Cabral at the congress of the UPS (the reactionary and sole party in that country) was more serious. Still more disturbing was a joint PAIGC-Senegal communiqué reporting the "perfect similarity of views between the two delegations on all subjects raised during the discussions: bilateral links and the situation in Africa and throughout the world. " This is in contradiction with the filthy practices of a Senghor, who proclaims his desire for a Portuguese-speaking (that is, neocolonial) community. Was Senghor among those the PAIC was attacking in this communiqué: "the error of those who wanted to see in the Former commander of the Portuguese colonial war in our country a well-intentioned man capable of orienting Portugal in the direction of neocolonialism"? If does not seem that this was the case, for Senegal played an important role in opening the London negotiations. On the other hand, it must be noted that since the beginning of May the radio station of the "sister republic" of Guinea has only been attacking Spinola, the interlocutor of Senghor, with whom the PAIGC "has no disagreement"! In such a business what becomes of the fasks of clarification that Cabral was aiming at during the OSPAAAL conference when he attacked neocolonialism? But this same Cabral declared in the name of the liberation movements at the eighth conference of African heads of state: "Addis Ababa -- the new flower of the bastion of African independence that is Ethiopia.. our admiration for His Majesty (Haille Selassic). . .. We have followed his splendid work for the liberation and preservation of the independence of his people." As for the Chad regime, which is fully supporting the French intervention against FROLINAT: "In the name of the liberation movements we extend to his excellency President Tombalbaye our own condolences and those of all our people for the human losses already suffered... and (we hope that Tombalbaye will) continue working for the social, economic, and cultural progress of his people." The traditional propaganda of African puppets never misses an opportunity to castigate "foreign ideologies, " a code word for anything that bears a resemblance to Marxism. Nevertheless, at the some conference Cabral declared: "We must also affirm before you that we well understand your concern about "foreign ideologies. We who have taken up arms to fight to liberate our people from any form of foreign domination will never accept anyone's domination, no matter what aid we may receive from abroad. " A PAIG pamphlet reprinting the speech notes that this remark was met with "prolonged applause.* On the international level, the PAIC nas not been free of opportunism. F. Mendes declared in Lahore at the second Islamic summit held in February 1974: "We are also certain of the victory of the just cause that is dear to our hearts, the liberation of Jerusalem. For our part, we are prepared to make any sacrifice to achieve this goal. For it would be in the interests of men of all faiths in our country and elsewhere who have always seen the faithful of Islam os the guardians of the City of Peace." And there was a bit of shifting about in Cabral's declaration at the United Nations on December 12, 1962: "In struggling and dying for the liberation of our country, we are giving our lives in the current context of international law for the ideal that the UN itself has defined in its charter and resolutions, especially its resolutions on decolonialization. For us, the cnily difference between the Indian soldier, Italian pilot, or Swedish official who died in the Congo and our comrade who dies in Guinea or the Cape Verde Islands is that in acting in his own country in the service of the same ideal, our comrade is but an anonymous fighter for the cause of the United Nations. " Such opportunism augurs ill for the possibility of transcending the national framework of the struggle being led by the PAIGC. In effect, if we were to summarize the above lines, at Lahore, Mendes kept quiet about the so* Still, it must be recognized that the forms of expression in the declaration of PAIG militants do not necessarily represent the views of the entire movement. It is obvious that a certain latitude in terminology is tolerated -- even for certain terms in the movement for which a plurality of opinions on certain questions is recognized and accepted. The quotations cited, then, have an exemplary value, but cannot be taken as an absolute theorization on the part of the whole PAIGC.
17
cial future of Palestine so as to please an audience of assorted Muslim dictators; at the UN Cabral kept quiet about what remains one of the greatest counterrevolutionary blows so as to please the delegates who had voted for the infervention of the UN troops in the Congo; at the OAL he kept quiet about subjects that most of the neocolonial regimes did not want to hear about so as to reassure a bunch of puppets. Towards what. end? Most likely beause of many immediate concerns: diplomatic recognition, UN votes, perhaps a certain neutrality from the most reactionary regimes. But at the same time, all African anti-imperialist youth regard the battle of the PAIGC as the advance guard of the anti-imperialist struggle. What lesson does the PAIGC draw for them by making such compromises with these hated regimes? What is the best long-term guarantee of the victory of the Guinean revolution, the African regimes that support the PAIG like a rope supports o hanging man or the rise of the African revolution? For us the answer is obvious. But what logic motivates this sort of international policy? Finding an answer is not easy. The liberation movements are in no way integral parts of the Stalinist movement, but their international policy is strongly corrupted by Stalinism. InsufFiciently critical of nationalism, they remain especially vulnerable to the diplomatic games and opportunistic conceptions that Stalinism peddles in the name of "tactics." The question of Stalinism The ties of the liberation movements with Stalinism have been woven in two ways. Some present leaders of the liberation movements learned about Marxism through the distorting prism of Stalinism because of their contact with the Portuguese Communist party when they were students in Portugal. But the Portuguese CP has not discarded its social chauvinist position. A resolution passed at its Fifth Congress in 1957 declared: "Today, comrodes, the problem of the Portuguese colonies that did not possess the proconditions for an independent life is no longer posed. " (Ramiro was the reporter.) And in May 1961 the Beira leadership published a manifesto that has never been repudiated by the national leadership and that declares: *Workers, show the employers that only the independence of Angola will serve their interests, for once it is independent Angola will really become a market for our produce. " (Révolution populaire, No.6, December 1965.) So there is nothing astonishing in the fact that Cabral declares that "Portuguese democrats will find it effectively impossible to understand the just demands of our peoples so long as they are not convinced that the thesis of the lack of maturity for selfIt is therefore obvious that the relations with the Portuguese CP vary according to the individual. The PAIGC fraternally received the support of the Revolutionary Brigades (who had managed to acquire some maps of the general staff by an armed action) in spite of the Stalinist slanders against the Portuguese far left. But Stalinist pressure can be exerted most easily through the military support from the workers states, through the military training given young cadre, and through the pressure that builds up because of the importance of material aid to the armed struggle. It is through these two methods that a "Stalinoid" conception of international politics has little by little crept in - a result of opportunism and pressure, but without the liberation movements losing organizational independence. In fact, the liberation movements have been able to diversify
18 their sources of support, particularly by addressing both Moscow and Peking. But the rotten attitude of the Stalinists partally limits the sympathetic responses that the military aid from the workers states could generate within the liberation movements. We could mention, for example, the trade between Portugal and Poland, in which the latter has delivered boats, among other things, to the former. Or the current attitude of Peking, which, in the grip of its support to Mobutu, has just extended its "good wishes" to the ANLF after a trip by Holden to China. In fact, the weight of Stalinism is exerted above all by the central role of the workers states in a diplomatic game that the liberation movements play only with difficulty. Both for objective reasons of African social development during the 1950s and for subjective reasons relating to Moscow's foreign policy, the Stalinists did not establish real Communist parties that were Stalinist in their organizational functioning, political line, and fies with the Soviet bureaucracy (except in South Africa). Whether it be the PAl in Senegal, the Mauritian CP composed of a few merchants and registered in the book of trademarks like a soap powder, the AKFM in Madagascar, the CP of Réunion, or the CP influence in the UPC of the Camaroons, in no case (whatever the differences among all these examples may be) is it possible to speak of the existence of a real Stalinist organization or tendency. And to this must be added the systemmatic coincidence between Stalinist politics (democratic and national revolution) and the preoccupation of petty-bourgeois nationalism (national union for real independence). There is every reason to believe that organizations like the AKEM in Madagascar representing the interests of the Merina petty-bourgeoisie are sufficient for Moscow's defense of its diplomatic interests in Africa. Thus, in our view the "penetration" of Stalinism into the liberation movements of the Portuguese colonies (revolufionary nationalist movements) corresponds to a certain vision of the world political field and to an ossified appreciation of the world revolutionary process. Finally, in the future it will be important to take account of the analysis that the leaderships of the liberation movements make of the policy of the Portuguese Communist and Socialist parties in relation to the work of the Portuguese far left on the colonial question. It is in fact quite possible that a section of the liberation movements will become increasingly sensitive to the themes developed by the Portuguese revolutionary movement if the latter takes up its responsibilities against any neocolonialist liquidation. That is why the construction of the Liga Comunista Internacionalista (Internationalist Communist League), the Portuguese sympathizing group of the Fourth International, is not unrelated to our discussions with the militants of the liberation movements. Nevertheless, on such an important question as this, the heterogeneity of the liberation movements will play an important role. The grodualist schemos of Stalinism will be able to find a resonance with the multiclassist conceptions of the left nafionalist tendencies, while the more conscious elements will -begin to approach the revolutionary workers movement, either through analyzing the Portuguese situation or by becoming conscious of the internationalist tasks in Africa. Many other elements will come into play in the future. We can analyze only the main ones. Some, in the present situation, can only be mentioned. Thus, it will be necessary to make an analysis of the UNITA group, which has a base in southern Angola and, on the basis of rather imprecise positions, opposes the
MPLA as "led by halfbreeds and petty -bourgeois elements."
It will also be necessary to detail the role and importance of groups like the GUMO in Mozambique that could well play a third-force role.