MAURITIUS AFTER THE VICTORY OFTHE mmm _by C. GABRIEL The results of the legislative elections in Mauritius confirmed the important political influence of the Mauritian Militant Movement (MMM) in the politics of the island. The defeat of the bourgeois parties and the outgoing government coalition, composed of the Labor party and the Muslim Action Committee, mark the bankruptcy of the neocolonial regime. In the end, however, it is a coalition of the Mauritian Social Democratic party and the Labor party that will constitute the new government, a result of shady parliamentary combinations. The ruling class has thus directly attacked the majority vote of the Mauritian masses. The period now opening will be one of growing agitation, strikes and repression, unless the current coalition blows apart during the next several months and is replaced by an accord between the MMM and the Labor party. Coming months will thus be decisive. They will allow us to gauge the real effect of the MMM's electoral victory on the consciousness of the mass movement given the reformist illusions of the MMM and the drive of the masses to win their demands. The right wing asserted its will to resort to intimidation immediately as the election results became known. Conflicting relations among the racial communities can be used to derail a mobilization of the masses at any time. In the final analysis, the many imperialist pressures, a result of the strategic importance of the island, will determine the future attitude of the Mauritian bourgeoisie, which is incapable of going it alone in a test of strength with the masses. Failure of the Labor Party In the elections for independence, held in 1967, the Hindu majority of the country gave the Labor party of Ramgoolam a comfortable lead over the party of the Creole and white bourgeoisies, the Mauritian Social Democratic party (MSDP) led by the reactionary Gaetan Duval. The Muslim minority was divided into two tendencies: one rallied to the MSDP, while the other, grouped around the Muslim Action Committee (MAC), blocked with the Labor party. These elections once again revealed the reactionary function of Mauritian "communalism, " (1) which encourages the racial communities to uncritically follow their leaders and notables. A good part of the indigenous bourgeoisie opposed independence. But it very quickly assimilated the lessons of its electoral defeat. In 1969, thanks to the intervention of Michel Debré, Gaullist deputy from the neighboring island of Réunion, French imperialism managed to work out an understanding between the Labor party and the MSDP. The coalition government was strengthened by the entry of Duval's men from the MSDP. This government, based on a 70-member parliament, included 21 ministers! Duval took over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and proceeded to establish very good relations with South Africa. The government no longer faced any parliamentary opposition. Elections originally scheduled for 1972 were postponed indefinitely. The opposition press was severely attacked and the trade-union movement suffered a series of frontal assaults. By 1971 unemployment had risen to 80,000. The communal balances within the government in no way prevented clashes from occurring between Muslims and While the first few years of independence had allowed the MSDP to make good use of its status as the democratic opposition and to rely on social demagogy, its entry into the government began to erode its credibility, including among the poorest sections of the Creole population. In 1969 the growth of popular discontent, the obvious erosion of the popularity of Ramgoolam's Labor party, and the prospect of coming elections convinced the MSDP to break the government coalition. The Mauritian big bourgeoisie thus permitted itself a certain retreat from a government whose inclination to neocolonial administration had clashed with the social pressure of the workers and small peasants. Rise of the MMM Originally only a grouplet organized under the name Movement of Militant Students, the MMM emerged in 1969 during the visit to Mauritius of Princess Alexandra of Britain, whose husband, one Ogilvy, is a large stockholder in an imperialist trust with interests in Mauritius, the Lonrho group. A demonstration called by the MMM received a good response and polarized the political attention of the youth. The group, led by Paul Beranger, very quickly began expanding and in less than two years succeeded in gaining a substantial base in the working class. The group's propaganda was mainly centered on the struggle against communalism, against electoral illusions, and against capitalist and imperialist domination. Its leftist language won it some support among farteft militants internationally.
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Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean 550 miles (880 kilometers) east of Madagascar, won formal independence from Britain in 1968 after more than 150 years of colonial rule. The official language is English, but French is widely spoken and Creole functions as a lingua franca. Of the total population of about 875, 000 some 400, 000 are Hindu, 220,000 are of mixed European and African ancestry or white; 130, 000 are Muslim. The Hindus and Muslims were brought to the island by British colonizers to work in the sugar plantations, the island's biggest industry.
MAURITIUS In 1973 a draft government program published by the group affirmed that "the Marxism that inspires us, which comes to us from the best of Marx himself, Lenin, Gransci, Luxemburg, or Mao, is a Marxism profoundly corrected by libertarian thought. " Nevertheless, the diffuse ideological influence of May 1968 in France did not reduce the deep empiricism and political eclecticism of the MMM. In September 1970 a legislative by-election enabled the MMM to take another step forward in its propaganda efforts: The MMM candidate, Dev Virahswmy, was elected by a 5,000-vote majority. In 1971, when he government timidly lifted a state of emergency in favor of a repressive low known as the Public Order Act, the MMM once again won success, this time during municipal elections in Curepipe and Beau Bassin. A strike wave which paralyzed the country between August and September 1971 revealed the base the MMM had won through the General Workers Union (GWU, the central trade-union federation. The prospect of general elections at that time left no doubt that the MMM would be victorious. Cautiously, the government opened discussions with Beranger. Representatives of the World Bank went so far as to state that they wanted to meet with him come what may. At the time the MMM had about sixty urban and rural
Equateur 50° Iles Comores République Malgache 28 branches and controlled the councils of about thirty villages (out of a total of ninety-five), among them the twelve largest villages, with populations sometimes exceeding 12,000. Toward the end of 1971 the general staff of the MMM began emphasizing the perspective of taking over the government. They established a "shadow cabinet" in the manner of the British opposition and concentrated their efforts on election campaigns. The government, under imperialist pressure, decreed a state of emergency, suspended the thirteen unions of the GWU, intimidated the militants of the MMM, and postponed elections. Brutality, assaults, imprisonments, and trials were used one after the other to drive the movement back. But the regime's resources for action remained very weak, so the thugs of the MSDP and the fascist grouplets furnished necessary aid for the repression. The MMM moved into a period of partial clandestinity. The electoral victory
The present government program of the MMM is entitled,
"For a Free and Socialist Mauritius. " Its preamble generally lays out a non-capitalist perspective and defines a possible MMM government as a five-year transition one. Nevertheless, a reading of the program leaves no doubt about the reformist character of the MMM:
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*The modification of the relations between the government and the masses is conceived of only in terms of improving the rules of bourgeois democracy, in spite of a few harmless sentences about self-management.
*It mentions only restriction of the resources of the indigenous bourgeoisie; the problem of imperialism is generally dealt with only in regard to imperialism's military presence.
*It is strongly inspired by the reformist policy being pursued in Europe, especially in Portugal and France. It contains many references to the Common Program of the left in France.
* The nationalization program (transport, docks, and five sugar refineries, with compensation) represents merely a reformist desire to rationalize the relations between the state and the capitalist market.
*Its immediate perspective is the establishment of a "working arrangement" among employers, the state, and the workers. The program itself indicates that this agreement will involve "conflict. " It remains to be seen what the terms of the conflict would be. To justify this policy of class collaboration, the program naively claims, "as in France, for example, a distinction must be made between the so-called progressive employers (assembled in France in organizations like Entreprise et Progrès or Centre des Jeunes Dirigeants d'Entreprise) and the hidebound reactionaries as here and elsewhere. "(2) The MMM makes no attempt to conceal its long-term perspectives, writing, "while it (the MMM's model society) resolutely rejects capitalism, it is not that of the state socialism of the countries of the East. " There is no doubt that this is not a profession of antibureaucratic faith, but rather a strategic option against the formation of a workers state. The MMM describes what would happen if it acceded to the government in these terms: It would be "judged above all, during the months that followed its assumption of power, on the basis of its day to day economic performance, that is, its capacity to halt inflation, raise the standard of living, bring order to the present disorder of the COLAS and wages, develop employment, etc. " Objectives that are not easily compatible with the relations the MMM intends to establish with the employers. Impact of the electoral victory Nonetheless, the electoral victory of the MMM takes on extreme importance for the country and even the region. There is no doubt that the great mass of workers consider the MMM's victory as their own. Political life in Mauritius already made big advances during the electoral campaign. Some of the MMM candidates presented genuine anticapitalist propaganda before enthusiastic and attentive audiences. It is essentially against this that the right is preparing its blows. The Labor party- MSDP government is a minority government. It is not excluded that the MMM may engage in negotiations with the Labor party. But such a possibility may be placed in question by the outbreak of mass mobilization aimed at imposing a government of the
MMM alone. The November 24 issue of the MMM's newspaper, Le Militant, published a long article on the elections in its "tribune libre" column. The author, speaking in the name of revolutionary Marxism, ended his argumentation this way: "It is not enough simply to call for a vote for the MMM, for what would happen 'after' the elections would be decisive. Beginning right now, while asking for a vote for the MMM, we must put forward a whole series of demands that the workers have the right to expect from an MMM government and which should be met. We explain to the workers that they must organize themselves and mobilize to guarantee that these demands be met, that they must be ready to struggle against internal and external reaction. "We tell the workers that socialism will exist only if they eventually succeed in establishing workers control in industry and agriculture, if private property in the means of production is abolished, if workers democracy exists not only in the trade unions, but also in all political institutions, if women in fact enjoy the same rights as men in all domains, etc. "But we also know that we will be capable of advancing these ideas before a 'great number of workers' and militants in an 'effective' and not purely propagandist way only if favorable conditions exist in which to do so. We believe that an electoral victory of the MMM would help to create such conditions and we are convinced that a victory of Labor-MAC or the MSDP would make this work a thousand times more difficult. For us it is not excluded that the dynamic of the class struggle after an (almost certain) victory of the MMM could unleash broad vanguard forces on which one could base oneself in building a mass revolutionary party, essential for intervening in the revolutionary process leading toward the creation of a workers state in Mauritius and Rodrigues. " December 24, 1976 FOOTNOTES: 1. Every candidate for the Assembly is required to list which community he or she belongs to. The Assembly contains eight "corrective" seats aimed at reestablishing the communal equilibrium if necessary. In fact, it was thanks to this provision that these elections were able to lead to a MSDP-Labor government. Traditionally, the parties affirm their particular "defense" of this or that community, the Labor party for the Hindus, the MAC for the Muslims, etc. This political game has been codified institutionally and the bourgeoisie has regularly been able to counterpose one group to another in order to divide and weaken the mass movement. 2. As far as the managers and the petty bourgeoisie are concerned, the MMM's program takes up Garaudy's idea of a "historic bloc."
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'BLACK STRUGGLE'
A JOURNAL AGAINST RACISM
The year 1976 saw the development of an ominous wave of racism in Britain. The shifting policy of the ruling class on questions of immigration and social spending, the rise of several fascist or fascistic organizations with a significant audience in some sections of the working class, and the chauvinist thread that runs through the ideology of the Labour leadership, including the Labour left, have combined to make racism one of the major challenges to the revolutionary movement
Meeting that challenge will be facilitated by the appearance of a new magazine, Black Struggle,
"a journal against racism and capitalism, " which will be published four times yearly. The journal is produced by an editorial collective made up of individuals from various political groups as well as independent militants. An editorial statement published in the first issue of Black
Struggle explains the purpose of the project: "The events and their consequences which have unfolded and developed in the past months in relation to the black presence in this country and the black struggle against the oppression and exploitation of this racist society have served to give even greater urgency to a project conceived of well before the heights of anti-black sentiment.
That there is a need for a journal written by active militants which takes up the major questions facing the struggle of blacks in a capitalist society infested with racism is verified by the limi-
The specific aim of the journal is "to provide political analysis of the prevailing situation. .
(and) to answer and pose both strategical and tactical questions and problems arising out of the struggle. " It will provide a forum of political debate and discussion for militants in the struggle
Although the collective publishing Black Struggle does not have a fully elaborated political line, it is based on agreement on a series of fundamental points. These are: opposition to all immigration controls; for black self-defense against racist attacks and for active support for black self-defense on the part of the labor movement; against any platform for fascists and racists; for an end to racist policies inside the labor movement, which requires intense activity within the labor movement by black and socialist workers for the defense and advancement of the specific interests of super-exploited black workers and the general interests of the entire working class;
against discriminatory fees for overseas students; for anti-racist action by the labor movement;
In addition to the editorial statement, the first issue (32 pages plus an 8-page supplement) contains articles on current tasks of the anti-racist movement, the development of contemporary fascist organizations in Britain, an account of the racist attacks in Southall and the response of the community and the left, and various reports from key areas of activity around the country.
Also, there is an international section containing articles on Jamaica, India, South Africa, and the fight against racism in Boston in the United States. The international section will be a regular feature of the journal. Finally, there are reviews of books and other publications dealing
Copies of Black Struggle, 20 pence each, are available from Black Struggle, 15 Portland
Road, London N15, Britain. Subscription information may be obtained from the same address.
tations of existing publications. "
against racism in all its varieties.
for socialist policies against capitalism in general.
with the problem of racism.
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