PANAFRICANISM, TRADE UNIONS and Revolutionary Marxism
By HÉCTOR LUCERO
The Fourth International has summarized its conceptions on the present singe of the African revolution in the document on the colonial revolution adopted hy the VIth World Congress. However, it is necessary that the revolutionary marxists constantly bring up-to-date their unalvses and that ther study more closely situations and trends to be able lo elaborate concrete programmes for each country or group countries. We publish in this issue a contribution by comrade H. Lucero
Within its present extremely fluid limits, one of the fundamental traits of the African revolution is its unity. Within the framework of an exiraordinary revolutionary dynamism Africa presents today, this unity is reflected above all in the interinfluence and interdependence of various processes, and the preponderance and spread that. are beginning to be acquired by those that express the most progressive and advanced trends in the African tion at this stage.
It is against this background that it is necessary to situate the evolution of the two fundamental tendencies of the present African ional leaderships, such as they have tended to become crystalized in the Monrovia and the Casablanca and of the leaderships in the regions still under direct colonialist domination, as well as the prospects for the workers', trade-union, and revolutionary movement and of the proletarian and revolutionary Marxist left in the African revolution. - THE MONROVIA STATES
The meeting of the 20 states 1 held at Monrovia in May is the most advanced attempt so far to crystalize and give form to a bourgeois or pro-bourgeois current closely associated with European and US imperialism. This current is based on the strata or embryo of a commercial or agrarian bourgeoisie, and even of a national bourgeoisie, which places its hopes of development in an alliance with imperialism, and which is already allied with it to keep the development of the African revolution within capitalist bounds. - The intervention of US imperialism and of French and Britsh imperialism is decisive in this 1 The Cameroons, the Central-African Republic, Chad, the Congo (capital, _Brazzaville), Dahomey, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Lybia, Madagascar, Mauretania,
Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Togo, Tunisia, and Upper Volta.
on these questions. process. Their economic, technical, military, and diplomatic "aid" is aimed at setting up a bourgeois and land-owning ruling class, tied up with and nurtured by the state apparatus, by the aid of which they can keep their semi-colonial or (as they say in Africa) "neo-colonialist" domination, and confront or counterpose the influence of bourgeois-nationalist tendencies and proletarian-revolutionary tendencies. Another aim of this intervention is to slow down or hold back the evolution toward African unity and consolidate existing frontiers, tied up with the interests of ruling classes each present state, maintaining the "Balkanization" of the continent.
The base for this manœuvres located in countries like Nigeria, Senegal, or the Ivory Coast, where a bourgeois class of a certain degree of development and tied up with the export of raw materials imposes its mark on the economic and political development of the country.
The resolutions of the Monrovia Conference, extraordinarily well received by the whole European and US capitalist press for their "prudence" and "moderation," clearly define this tendency.
The Monrovia states avoided any attack on imperialism and "neo-colonialism". The resolutions of Algeria, the Congo, and Angola, set the role which this sector of the African bourgeoisie or embryo bourgeoisie intends to play.
In the case of Algeria, the conference took the position of a "mediator" ', calling on "both sides" to sign peace rapidly, and indirectly giving support to the most conciliatory and pro-imperialist tendencies inside the FLN. In the case of the Congo, it refused to condemn the murder of Lumumba, and distinguished itself from both Tshombe and Gizenga, giving its full support to the intervention of the United Nations and to the Kasavubu government. In the case of Angola, it expressed its support of the nationalists to obtain "autonomy" , thus making a nuance between that and independence.
In an even more clear-cut way, the conference
24 did not utter any condemnation of the French atomic-bomb experiments in the Sahara, limiting itself to deploring "all nuclear tests".
On the level of intra-African relations, conference rejected the idea of the political integration of the African states, replacing it by that of "coöperation" among equals — whose indispensable counterpart is coöperation with the imperialist powers.
Monrovia established five basic points for this coöperation: recognition of the political equality of all independent African states; non-intervention in the domestic problems of other African states; the right for each state to exist and to reluse any attempt at annexation; the right of each state to join with other states if it considers it advisable; respect for the territorial integrity of each state and prohibition to giving asylum to political opponents of other African states who use the country of asylum to undertake subversive actions against their country of origin.
The Monrovia five. points are an attempt to "freeze" or to check the development of the most dynamie forces of the African revolution within the limits of the present states, and to consolidate a capitalist-type evolution their present borders with the aid of imperialism.
But the very fact that, in order to oppose the Pan-Africanism of the embryonic African national bourgeoisie, they have had to resort to a conference and join forces on a continental basis, also indicates the strength of the feeling of unity on which the other sector is based. For all that, it is none the less certain that imperialism and its African allies, after the Congo crisis that shook up the whole of African developments, have at Monrovia made the most serious attempt to unite their forces on a continental scale and to offer a point of support, of strength, and of centralization the pro-imperialist bourgeois tendencies or embryos of tendencies in African states, and also in the regions of East and Central Africa that are on their way to independence. THE CASABLANCA STATES
Fundamentally, the states of the Casablanca group represent the most conscious nationalist tendency of the African bourgeoisie or embryo of a bourgeoisie - according to the case -which sees its prospects in a development outside the control of imperialism, based on the expansion of the domestic market and not exclusive. ly on the export of raw materials.
They represent also the tendency which has developed the most advanced consciousness and to a certain extent the domestic forces for
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL trying to apply it — about the level at which it must act to limit and control the drive of the mass movement in Africa, and which at the same time relies to a limited degree on this movement in order to face imperialism and also relies on the East-West conflict on the world plane to improve its positions in negotiating with imperialism.
The group of the Casablanca Five Ghana,
Morocco, and the United Arab Republic) is the spokesman of Pan-Africanism as a doctrine of the independent and united bourgeois development of Africa. and Nkrumah, spokesmen for this theory, that the development of an African bourgeoisie would be stifled within the limits of the present states and requires a unified market.
But above all bourgeois-national Pan-Africanism is an attempt to prevent or check the devel. opment of the most advanced sectors of the African revolution toward proletarian positions, by shutting them up within nationalist and "anti-imperialist" limits to keep the support of the African mass movement.
This is the explanation of what the bourgeois press of Western Europe calls the "revolutionary positions" of the Casablanca group, who for that matter, as a group, in no case go beyond the limits of bourgeois or petty-borugeois nation. alism. 2
It is a fact that the Casablanca group is not internally homogeneous.
There are, on the one hand, countries like Egypt, Morocco, and Ghana, where a bourgeois elass with a certain degree of development actually exists (even with all its limitations, in Ghana, for example, a relatively numerous workers' movement with its own organizations, differentiated to a greater or lesser degree from the nationalist sector in the government, and also a class of landowners whose presence raises the question of agrarian reform and of land as one of those to be solved by the revolution. 2 The signators of the Casablanca Charter, adopted on 7th January 1961, assert their fidelity to the principles of Bandung and consider that they have "responsibilities toward the [entire] African continent"
The Casablanca Conference decided on the creation of an "African Consultative Assembly", "as soon as the conditions for it had been fulfilled," and that of three com-
(political, bureau and joint military high command are also planned.
decided on: unconditional support of in the Algerian affair, withdrawal of African in Mauritania by Morocco" proval of "any action taken the Congo and unreserved support to authorities of Stanleyville, and a condemnation of "the fictitious state of Mauritania." French nuclear experiments in the Sahara sharply criticized, and Israel was denounced as "an agent of Western imperialism in Africa."
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
There are, on the other hand, Guinea and Mali, where the practical non-existence of a national bourgeois class stresses the Bonapartism of the governing staff between the country's plebeian masses and imperialism. Especially in Guinea, the peculiar character of the planification of the economy, the importance of the na. tionalized sector, the importance of the farm coöperatives, and the forms in which the population takes part in developments, have till now prevented the definite crystalization of a clearly bourgeois state apparatus, and have maintained the dependence of the leading staff on the mobilization of the country's masses.
The "African socialism" invoked by Guinea and Mali for their plans doubtless has a different meaning from the "socialism" as an ideal stage for an indefinite future invoked by Ghana or Senegal. While the former does not exclude the possibility of an evolution 'in the Cuban style", the latter flatly takes the "Indian" road. But even in the case of Guinea, there is no guarantee of a spontaneous and autonomous development toward a non-capitalist state, toward a workers' and peasants' government. And in fact one of the purposes of bringing into existence the Casablanca group in its present form is that of setting bourgeois prospects for this development, by shutting it up within the limits of Pan-African nationalism of the bourgeois type.
The Casablanca group not only approved the principle of "unity of political action", with the resulting measures, but also signed agreements for the unification of Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. But up till now the governing staffs of these countries have not shown that they possess the necessary bases to check centrifugal tendencies and carry much further than mere resolutions these aspirations for unity, which would be one of the first steps toward the unification of first West Africa and later Negro Africa generally.
On the other hand, Pan-Africanism, as the ideology of the embryonic African bourgeoisie, was particularly expressed at the Third Pan-African Conference that met in March 1961 in Cairo, the resolutions of which were politically oriented along the lines of the Casablanca group, even if many of them were considerably more to the left. 3 3 It is obvious that the other line of division cutting through the Casablanca group, the Monrovia group, the Cairo conference, is that between the Arab and AfricanNegro countries - which is connected in particular with the role that the different sectors of the Arab bourgeoisie intends to play in Africa. But this is a problem that lies outside the scope of this article.
25 THE CAIRO CONFERENCE The above-mentioned Pan-African Conference, following on those at Accra and Tunis, attended by more than 50 organizations almost all the African countries.
The key note, the opposite of that at the Monrovia meeting, was the attack on "neo-colonialism". The conterence declared that 'it approves resorting to force to liquidate imperaland pointed to the United States, Germany, Great britain, Belgium, France, Holland, Israel, and South Atrica as the greatest "neo-colonialists" . It denounced as active agencies of "neo-colonialism" "the embassies of the colonialist countries, the personnel . of technical abroad and the personnel of the United Nations, the representatives of the imperialist countries, the tendentious propaganda of the colonialist countries, and the puppet governments used for the development of neo-colonialism".
The conference called on the independent African states to suppress any military base on their territories and to withdraw from any "community" under the patronage of the colonial powers. It made an appeal to speed up the common economic development of the continent and to fight for African unity. Concerning the Congo, it denounced "the machinations of the UN", gave full support to the Gizenga government, declared Lumumba an African hero, and asked for the punishment of his murderers, beginning with Tshombé and Kasavubu. Concerning Algeria, it gave unconditional support to the G PR A and censured any attempt to refuse recognition of Algerian sovereignty over the Sahara. Concerning the Cameroons, it lined up in general with the positions of the rebels of the UPC (Union of the Peoples of the Cameroons) who are keeping up their guerrillas in the Bamileke country. Concerning the Central African Federation, it asked the African states to boycott its economy and to prohibit the use of their respective air spaces country's planes. Concerning South Africa, it recommended economic boycott and breaking off of relations and called for the cessation of South African domination over South-West Africa. It supported the liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies, and especially those in Angola. As for the UN, it denounced its "transformation into a tool of neocolonialism", and called for the reorganization of the secretariat. It demanded 'the immediate release of Jomo Kenyatta and independence for Kenya in 1961.
Concerning Atrican unity, it approved the fol. lowing resolutions: the setting up of an "African Freedom Fund", aimed at giving financial help
26 to the liberation movements in the African continent, whose loans would be repaid by the independent African countries; creation of a Free Africa Radio in a central region of the continent; creation of an African press agency and an African information centre; setting up of an African Experts Committee, to determine a common economic policy for all Africa, a first step toward the economic unity of the continent; establishment of a Committee of African Military Chiefs, to set up plans for joint defense; creation of an intra-African transport enterprise; establishment of an African Consultative Council, formed by the representatives of the parliaments, with a permanent secretary, to establish a "common policy" for all Africa.
The conference asked the "anti-imperialist bloc" to contribute to the economic development of the African countries, "respecting national sovereignty and without political or military conditions" , granting long-term credits at low interest rates, repayable in national currency and not in hard currencies, and putting Africans in all the principal posts in the development projects.
One of the main resolutions was in support of setting up an All-African Federation of Trade Unions, for the entire continent.
In economic matters, the conference took a stand for "the liquidation of the economic bases of colonialism and neo-colonialism and the creation of a national economy". *
The resolutions of the Cairo conference constitute one of the most advanced frameworks accepted by the Pan-Africanism that desires a capitaiist development for Africa. But it is plain that it does not goes beyond those limits, although it approaches them in some resolutions.
These resolutions, at the same time that they reflect the pressure of the Africa mass movement, with its hopes for African unification, including * In the April 1961 Colonial Freedom News, John Eber, representative of the Movement for Colonial Freedom at summary of the measures for economic development approved solutions at Cairo:
Nationalization of the main foreign-owned banks, transport, insurance and industrial concerns; land reform — land to those who cultivate it; credit and technical assistance by the state;
encouragement of mutual aid in agriculture, agricultural producers' coöperatives; 3) control of currency to prevent the exit of capital and and ensure their investment in the country;
and 4) state plans for development, with emphasis on full employment and a high rate of investment internal sources by "austerity" policies; trade with all countries, with a warning that trade with imperialist countries had the danger of neo-colonialist penetration; emphasis on imports of capital goods and the creation of heavy industry.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL in a certain way its socialist aspirations, express the need, for the present leaderships that have a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois base or hope for a bourgeois development, to limit and channel this movement by a "Jacobin" ideology. They are situated, furthermore, in the present international context of the advance of the colonial revolution, the resounding successes of the economy and the technology of the workers' states, and the strengthening of the de facto alliance between the workers' states and the colonial revolution - a context in which these African leading staffs and sectors have to move and act.
The relative weakness of these pro-bourgeois staffs in face of the masses, their need to keep the masses' support in order to stand up to imperialism, the impossibility of planning African development within the framework of "classie capitalism", and at the same time the profound revolutionary dynamism of the situation and the heterogeneity and radicalization of the organizations present — all these were expressed in the Cairo resolutions. Many of them may be considered as part of the program of an anti-imperialist united front, and supported by the proletarian left of the African revolution.
But this left cannot just merge into the Cairo program, become integrated in it without differentiation, and stop setting its own socialist goals, for the revolution and for the building of the workers' and revolutionary organization of the African masses. The Cairo program as a whole does not open up the road to a socialist development; it is not socialist, despite some declarations. Il does not propose nationalizationi without indemnization of the enterprises, expropriation without indemnization of the land, monopoly of foreign trade under workers' control, workers' and people's organs of power, arming of the population in workers' and peasants' militia, etc. It is a program for building a "national economy", not an economy of a socialist, nationalized, and planned type.
The dilemma between an anti-imperialist bourgeois or petty-bourgeois program and an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist workers' program is raised again in the application of one the basic resolutions approved at Cairo, the meeting of a constituent congress of the AllAfrican Federation of Trade Unions. 5 5 The congress met on May 25th at Casablanca, under the patronage of eight founding organizations the Union Marocaine du Travail, the Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens, the Trades Union Congress Ghana, the Egyptian Confederation of Labour, the Union
Travailleurs of Mali, the Union Générale des Travailleurs d'Afrique Confédération des Travailleurs of Guinea, and the Union Générale des
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL THE MASS MOVEMENT AND THE AFRICAN TRADE UNIONS
The pro-bourgeois leaderships of various types who are generally channeling and indeed controlling the African mass movement at the stage depend largely on its pressure and its special and tumultuous forms of expansion in all Negro Africa.
If, in the period preceding independence, the African nationalist parties that are fighting for it and unifying the population behind this struggle are the most widespread form for this control, in the period just before and after independence it becomes more and more important for the nationalist tendencies to control the leaderships of the masses' trade-union movement.
The trade-union movement was born in the African — including the Arab — countries as part of the national movement, including being formally, as in the case of Ghana, one of the branches of the government party.
The slogan of "trade-union independence," which the European trade-union leaderships tried to transfer mechanically to Africa, was felt by the African masses first of all as "independence" from the European trade-union federations, and not as "independence" from the national movement, especially when the slogan came from the trade-union movement of the imperialist metropolis which had not differentiated themelves clearly from the imperialist policy of those countries.
The development of the trade-union movement nevertheless leads it to differentiate itself from the nationalist leaderships — even if it continues to support them — to emphasize more and more the masses' own independent interests, and to call for — as a negotiating mean, also — its own role as the leadership of the organized and inost dynamic sector of the African masses.
Trade-unionism in Africa, as in all colonial and semi-colonial countries, tends to play a political role of its own. In the absence of mass workers' parties, it is the trade unions which in a series of countries tend to carry their representation of the proletariat and the masses over into the political Travailleurs Tunisiens - and attendance delegates 45 trade-union organizations 38 African countries.
The federation's charter, adopted 30th May, says that members of the federation can not be affiliated to international trade-union organisations. It gives members with such affiliations ten months in which to disaffiliate from the international bodies. The charter calls for "positive neutralism" and non-alignment between blocs. It also says that there must be no interference by governments and political parties in trade-union fairs and no interference by international organisations in the running of African trade unions.
27 field. 'The trade-union leaders are obliged to be more and more aware of this pressure. The trade-union, as it gradually reaches a certain developtends to be transformed into the centre concentrating the concerns, problems, and interventions of the masses on all levels. The natural trend is towards a trade-unionism that embraces all categories of the laboring population.
In almost all the African countries where the trade unions have attained a certain degree of development, the most radical wing of the national movement finds its support or bases itself directly or indirectly upon them. Despite their having few members, owing to the continent's lack of industrialization, the African trade unions already form a political centre of the masses, the influence of which may extend much farther than the categnries grouped in their ranks.
The slogan "trade-union independence" takes on new meaning to the degree that it begins to arise from the vanguard sectors of the masses themselves as against the apparatus of the bourgeois or pro-bourgeois party or state. Among the trade-union staffs and cadres which are appearing as the radical and leftist wing of the national movement, socialist ideas begin to find an echo and development, and especially ideas that imply a participation by the masses, through thei organizations, in the leadership of the African revolution.
While the African nationalist leaderships are trying to control and domesticate these tendencies for their own use, the pro-imperialist leaderships ally themselves with the intervention of the agents of European and US imperialism in the African trade-union movement.
The old struggle of imperialism was aimed at preventing and condemning the political role of the African trade-union movement. In this it could count on the support of the leaders of the European and US trade-union movement, and also on that of the Stalinist-controlled World Federation of Trade Unions, both of whom for a long time condemned the "nationalist" deviations of the African trade unions 6 and kept up a paternalistic and limiting attitude toward tradeunionism in the colonies.
At present, the A FL-CIO wing of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICF TU) is trying to control and channel this political role in its own favor, to facilitate the penetration of Yankee imperialism, and to check the independent development of the African masses by means of the control and bribing of the trade-union • leaderships, while 6 A well-documented summary of this policy was made by Georges Fischer, "Syndicats et décolonisation," in Présence Ajricaine, October 1960-January 1961.
28 appearing at the same time opposed to the old "colonialism." Its agent for the African movement, Irving Brown, openly and handsomely subsidizes many African trade-union leaders. The leadership of the German DG B supports this policy. The AFL-CIO is in favor of granting_regional autonomy inside the ICFTU to a regional organization of the African trade unions, thus reconciling the Pan-African tendency with control by the ICFT U.
The British Trade Unions Congress, on the other hand, has used the method of sending out trade-union organizers from the former mothercountry. It is opposed to the trade unions' intervening in politics, asserting that this means opening the door to communism, even when it is done while waving the national flag. It accuses the US unions of trying to build a trade-union movement by controlling and bribing its leaders, while the Americans in their turn accuse the TUC of trying to impose their control by getting the African union movement under way in the mould of British trade-unionism.
Inside the ICFTU there is thus a clash between two methods of pro-imperialist control of trade-unionism in these countries, correspondto the old European paternalistic method and the Yankee method of alliance with a sector of the local bourgeoisie. If the latter method is better adapted to the dynamism of the African situation, it is also certain that its prospects are limited in regard to the nationalist tendency supported by the mass movement, on the one on the other, the revolutionary tendencies that escape from the control of that nationalist wing.
It is for this reason that the I CF TU and its agents have concentrated, in one form or another, their fire against the creation of an independent African federation, and surely they will not accept with resignation the resolutions of the Casablanca congress, to the calling of which they were opposed for at least two years before. This is one of the fundamental battles for the control and development of the African mass movements in the next years. "
Quite apart from the intentions of the pro-bourgeois nationalist leaders, the creation of a Pan-African Trade-Union Federation reflects a deep impulse of the mass movement, and is a profoundly progressive step that shows the weight that the movement in Africa is acquiring 7 As is indicated above, countries such as Ghana, Morocco, and the U A R, whose governments most clearly represent the bourgeois nationalist tendency, are those with the greatest internal weight inside the trade-union movement: 650,000 members in the UMT and the. Moroccan unions, 350,000 in the Ghana TU C, and 300,000 in the Egyptian trade unions.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL as a means of centralizing the economic and struggles of the proletariat and masses. The trade unions take political positions, and appear as an instrument for bringing an independent policy to maturity. They open up the possibility of developing from that startingpoint, as in other semi-colonial countries, embryo organisms of power of the masses.
In all Africa, the development modern economy imposes the objective need of planning. The participation of the trade unions is fundamental for the drive and direction that this planning will develop. The growth of the Pan-African Trade-Union Federation will be a major spur to unification on socialist foundations of the nationalized and planned economy, directed by the toilers themselves, to be introduced new progressive factor in the correlation of forces of the revolution.
For this, the trade unions need to demand an independent political role for themselves. Even when they support the national and anti-imperialist movement, they not identify themselves with it. They are the base of its socialist wing. They are the organization for the wider regrouping of the toilers in this period to impose planning on socialist bases, to struggle for the transformation of the revolution national liberation into the socialist revolution.
Nasser, as representative of the bourgeoisie, contends that the stage following that of political independence is that of economic independence, the "national economy" directed by the local bourgeoisie or embryo bourgeoisie. The African trade unions must be a centre for the preparation of a program, for centralization, and leadership of the struggle for social liberation, for replacement of colonialist society by a workers and peasants' government country and in all Africa, based on the trade unions and workers', organisms, which would manage a nationalized and planned economy. THE POWDER - MAGAZINE IN COLONIAL AREAS.
Not only is the independent development of trade-union movement an element that undermines the attempts at crystalization on pro-imperialist positions at Monrovia or national-bourgeois positions at Casablanca, where today the concerns of the leading sectors of the new African states are concentrated; but the situation in all regions where white colonial domination is still being maintained forms powder-magazine that threatens to blow sky-high all the stabilizing schemes for the African situation and even opens the doors to the
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL beginning of the second revolution all over Africa.
From Angola to Mozambique, from Kenya to South Africa, armed rebellion is smoldering or already whole Portuguese colonial system, white domination in South Africa, in South-West Africa, and in the Rhodeand colonial domination in Kenya Uganda, are exposed to a chain reaction of African insurrection.
The internal explosion in the Congo, provoked by the intervention of Belgian imperialism with the solidarity of world imperialism through the UN, had as one of its goals the "neutralizing" of the revolutionary forces and the setting up of a barrier between independent West Africa and the southern, central, and eastern areas of the continent under white colonial domination. Ethiopia and the Sudan complete the circle in this case.
Nevertheless, the revolution is blossoming out in new forms — which in their turn will stimulate new future revolutionary developments in the Congo. In Angola real guerrilla developing. In South Africa, there are guerrilla activities in Pondoland, and the entire situation is reaching a point of tension close to a general explosion, despite the desperate efforts of the traditional leaderships to limit and channel the struggle by "peaceful" and "non-violent" means. In South-West Africa, the pressure of the Angola revolution is spreading.
In the regions under British colonial dominatto jettison all the plans of the Colonial Office towards an alliance with a new African ruling sector, an example of which would be the present evolution of Tanganyika with Julius Nyerere. Particularly in Southern Rhodesia and the Central African Federation, the racist white settler are opposing a furious resistance and are thereby preparing (and preparing themselves for) a real armed struggle, being disposed to resist their backs to the wall, like their twins in South
In this whole area the settlers and the mining companies, who exploit Negro labor on scale, are the heart of the white resistance. This locates the problem at the same time on immensely revolutionary 'bases: the African insurrection is aimed, not only against white colonial domination, but simultaneously against capitalist and landowner exploitation personified by the heads of the enterprises and the white settlers and kept up by racism and discrimination in its most inhuman and brutal forms.
In all eastern, central, and southern Africa,
24 and especially in countries such as Kenya or Rhodesia, the problem of the land is at the centre of the revolution. The expulsion of the white settlers and the restoration of the lands seized from the Africans is the first slogan of revolution in Kenya. If imperialism resistant about freeigg Jomo Kenyatta, it is because it knows that his release risks being consi. dered by the African population of Kenya as the settling accounts about the land question and as the final blow against imperialist domination in all of eastern Africa.
revolution against white colonialist domination in this area takes on the clearest form of peasant revolution. The guerrillas of Angola, like those of Pondoland in South Africa, like those of the Cameroons farther north, like (a few years ago) those in the Mau-Mau rebellion, are the forerunners of the spread of the African revolution, is aimed directly - even though not consciously — against any attempt at setting up in these a "comprador" bourgeoisie or a regime of a feudo-capitalist type allied to imperialism.
The guerrilla activities are centralizing the struggle of the peasant masses and form a centre of reference and of stimulation for the detribalized masses in the cities, particularly in South Africa. The African peasant mobilization cannot stop at the reconquest of the lands. Its radical character arises from the fact that white domination is closely identified with capitalist exploitation. The solution of the land problem by revolutionary means requires the destruction of the whole apparatus of white domination. In South Africa it raises the question of the ownership and administration of the mines and fac- or it the lat tories, of the whole economic apparatus. The reseizure of the lands means simultaneously the seizure of the mines and factories by the Africans, and raises the question of the nature of the new power.
In South Africa especially, the smashing failure of reformist and peaceful methods for decades, together with the development of the revolution in the rest of the continent, helps radicalize the whole situation. Despite their preponderance in the traditional African leaderships, influenced by Ghandi-ism and white liberals, the conciliatory tendencies in the African movement, such as the African National Congress and its allies, are in retreat in the consciousness of the masses.
The tendencies that favor armed action, together with the class mobilization of the African proletarians in South Africa are winning authority among the African masses of the country and are leading considerable sectors of them. In the new stage of the South African revolution now
30 beginning, the weight and preponderance of these tendencies, which already take their stand on general socialist bases, will increase.
From now on and in the course of the struggle, these tendencies must work up and make definite a concrete workers' and socialist program, to centralize the various non-European class forces, - workers' and peasants' — on a national rather than merely regional or tribal scale, with the prospect of a workers' and peasants' government that administers a nationalized and planned economy.
This development will put the whole African revolution on new bases, will incorporate the most dynamic and powerful proletarian force in all Africa — the South African proletariat - on a socialist program, and will contribute to giving a proletarian centre to the whole African mass movement.
At the other end of Africa, the future of the Algerian Republic will have a decisive weight in the evolution of the African revolution, both in the forms that it takes on organizationally, and in the inevitable differentiation that will be set up between the pro-bourgeois tendencies who favor association with imperialism, and the proletarian and plebeian tendencies, centred in the UGTA which proclaim themselves "anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist." THE PRESENT PREMISES OF THE AFRICAN REVOLUTION
To the question "capitalist road or socialist road?" in Africa, the answer "socialist road" appears in a more and more exclusive form. Even the pro-bourgeois and pro-capitalist tendencies are forced to reject the classic diagrams and to adopt the "socialist" label.
But it is as far a cry from Nkrumah's "socialism" to the socialism of the African masses as from his "Pan-Africanism" to theirs.
The fundamental problems of African development - industrialization, living | standards, the land question, increase in production, unification of the African-Negro nation — cannot even begin to be tackled with the methods of "classic" capitalism. Even for the right wing of the African national movement it is out of the question for Africa to be able to repeat the pattern of capitalist development of the Western industrial countries.
In Africa there is a kind of shifting of positions. While the representatives of the "comprador" bourgeoisie and landowner and bourgeois sectors imperialism, whose position pressed at Monrovia, tend to imitate the parliamand state institutions of the Western bourgeoisie, the representatives of the African
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL nationalist bourgeoisie are playing the "neutral" card for all it is worth and are using a "socialist" vocabulary. What is more, they are adopting a pattention by eleme heimited tos thy ousthe
Menshevism, then by Stalinism: i e, first a stage industrial capitalist development the country, then — in an indefinite future — a stage of development toward socialism. Such is Nkrumah's "socialism."
But the need to construct a modern society in Africa does not permit of any capitalist stage. A modern state cannot be a capitalist state, the industrial development of a backward country is not possible by the methods of private ownership of industrial enterprises, market anarchy, commercial and industrial domination of foreign capital, agrarian backwardness, while leaving "anti-capitalism" for an unspecified future.
The development of a native feudo-bourgeois or bourgeois class, based on the ownership of the land of industry, on the control of trade and the administration of the state apparatus, i e, in the manner of Houphouet-Boigny on the Ivory Coast or Nkrumah in Ghana, slows down the essential dynamism of the African revolution and increases dependence on outside "aid" and the direct investment of imperialist capital.
Planning is an objective necessity for the development of the economy of the African countries. It runs up against serious obstacles, among them the lack of capital, technical cadres, an adequate substructure 8, etc.
This renders even more necessary the intervention and participation of the African masses, who, as against the weak and embryonic native bourgeoisie, are the essential motor of the revolution.
precondition required to possible to carry out this planning and partici. pation is above all the existence of a decisive nucleus of nationalized economy in the nascent industrial sector, the organization of exploitation by of coöperatives communes which assimilate the traditional structures of African agrarian society and permit the expansion of production; and, above all, a political precondition: the intervention of the masses by means of their own organizations — neighborhood and town committees, trade unions, etc — in the planning and managing of economic development.
Any attempt to build and strengthen a bourgeoisie state apparatus and a privileged owning class, ie, to impose a capitalist frame, goes 8 Charles Bettelheim refers to these obstacles in his article "Planification économique en Afrique Noire", in "Cahiers Internationaux", January-February 1961.
this disorder, which is also the disorder of the men and
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL against this intervention of the masses, checks the force that is essential for economic development, and raises new barriers and obstacles.
As much as or more than that of the people's committees, the intervention of the trade unions is fundamental in this planning, as well as in the management of nationalized industry. The trade unions — even with their limited present development — represent the sector most connected with a socialist development of the economy, the basis a proletarian, non-capitalist leadership. They further represent the sector that is not tied down by the special interests of the present and artificial borders frontiers, unlike not only the local possessing classes but also the staff linked with the state apparatus. The trade unions are the most homogeneous and unconditionally Pan-Africa sector, most tied up with the outlook for a united African development
It is only this basis that it is possible to raise, concretely no masser are mature estion whether the African masses are to begin the construction of socialism. In spite of their illiteracy, in spite of the conservative weight of traditional African agrarian cultures, the readiness to accept and the acceptance of socialism by the African masses appears to be a quite natural thing. In a certain sense, the old cultures that are falling apart together with tribal society offer less resistance than the respect for or belief in the effectiveness of the capitalist state apparatus introduced by the reformist leaderships among vast sectors of the toilers in highly industrialized countries.
In all Africa without exception, not only the social structures but the consciousness of the masses is living through a process of transformation of an inexhaustible dynamism. The experiences since independence, of the alliance of the local pro-bourgeois sectors with "neo. colonialism," of the imperialist manœuvres of Belgium and the UN in the Congo, of the assassination of Lumumba, have been lived through, discussed, and assimilated in every corner of the continent, no matter how cut-off or illiterate its inhabitants may seem, with much greater rapidity and understanding than by large sectors of the Western proletariat. • The of the first Sputnik, like that of the "Lunik," and that of first cosmic flight brought off by the USSR, has reached the very depths of the African continent in revolution, as the Chinese experience or the triumph of the Cuban revolution have reached there too.
That experience that assimilation is still disorderly, and still lack a centre. But in
31 economy, the transport, the administration, and of the peasant masses' uncontrolled detribalization and urbanization, revolutionary consciousness is also ripening.
Capitalism is totally incapable of imposing order on this process, of setting up a functioning bourgeois state that impresses or even wins a certain respect in the eyes of the masses. It is incapable of replacing the collapsed order of the old tribal structures, on the one hand, and of colonial domination on the other, by order of a capitalist type.
Only the autonomous participation and organization of the masses can bring order into this development, into the transformation and disappearance of tribal and colonial society. In a whole series of countries, the most concentrated nucleus of this autonomous intervention at present is the trade unions, and then its alliance with the left wing of the national movement on a workers' and socialist program.
The African cadres are being formed by jumping over stages, in great leaps, in a process of permanent revolution that tackles not only objective relities but also subjective consciousness and development. A number of those cadres are getting incorporated in modern organization, organizing the socialist revolution.
This explains the dynamism, daring, capacity for quick understanding, inventiveness, and spirit of initiative, decisiveness, and resourcefulness, that many of these cadres, recently incorporated in the revolutionary movement, are showing in the most varied circumstances. These cadres are growing mature for the permanent revolution, not on the basis of old polemies, but from their own living daily experience and from the requirements and the dynamism of African revolution, the basis of a movement of millions and millions whose violent desire for human dignity — as deep as or deeper than that shown in the greatest mass movements in historin since it was formed by centuries of slavery the modern world - cannot pacified reformist solutions that capitalism is incapable of giving in Africa. There is the real root of socialism in Africa and also the possibility of beginning right now to build it. THE SOCIALIST PROGRAM AND THE FORCES OF THE SECOND AFRICAN REVOLUTION
The "Monrovia Charter" and the "Casablanca Charter" are to advance the intentions of the present African nationalist leaderships to build a dyke — even though at different levels - for the African revolution. Both attempts have their their forces in the trade-union
32 leaderships, with the support either of the ICFTU, the A FL-CIO, the British TU C, or the German DG B, or of the national state apparatuses or their agents or ideologists in the African labor movement.
French imperialism with its policy of "association," British imperialism with its policy of "independence by stages" (setting up first a dominant native sector allied with its own interest), US imperialism with its intervention by trade-union agents Irving Brown), its diplomatic envoys, its investment: and "aid" plans, and its men in the African state apparatuses — also do not disdain, to the degree that they have to retreat on other fields, to deal with the most direct representatives of the nationalist bourgeoisie, such as Nkrumah, as has already been seen in the past.
The crystalization of the old African leaderships of countries that have reached independence or ire on the road to it by agreement with imperialism, on positions of resistance to the further development of the revolution, creates the conditions for the differentiation growth of proletarian socialist ideas, and of socialist forces, in the national movement. These ideas and forces tend to differentiate themselves within the "national front," whether in the left or the youth of the nationalist parties, or in the trade unions.
But to the degree that these forces remain within the national program, within the leadership of the nationalist movements, only as their left wing, their role tends to be the following: to express the discontent of the rank and file and its desire to go forward with a socialist outlook, but at the same time to form a safety valve for this pressure without breaking with the national reformist leadership. It is completely certain that this break cannot be artificial or made by limited sectors which would condemn themselves to isolation. But neither can they accept indefinitely and passively a prospect which would be, these left forces grow and become preponderant, a "unity blackmail" by the reformist national leadership.
In a certain way, the Cairo resolutions reflect this dual aspect. But only by escaping from this subjection can the organizations of the African masses have the possibility of fighting for the most positive and anti-imperialist aspects of the resolutions, without remaining prisoners of the pro-bourgeois nationalist ideology.
The independent development of the trade unions and the trade-union federations, on the one hand, and the development of guerrilla fighting and the concentration of the peasant revolution on armed struggle, on the other, are the main forces that from now on will tend to break
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL these patterns, to burst through the dykes of the pro-imperialist or reformist-national leaderships, and to open up a revolutionary and socialist channel to the always tumultuous wave of the African revolution.
It is fundamentally on the development of these forces that depends the fate of a staff like that of Sekou Touré and the Guinea experiment, which the most conscious bourgeois bourgeois sectors of the Casablanca group are seeking to hem within their own limits, preventing it from joining up with new centres of revolutionary development. Both tendencies are represented in the Guinean staff.
These forces will also be decisive for a new rising stage of the revolution in the Congo, where the concentrated action of world imperialism has not been able to destroy the endurance of the centralizing forces, despite their lacking adequate means and parties for their expression and development.
In the face of Monrovia and Casablanca, in the face of imperialist manoeuvres in East Africa, the problem that is raised is the program to centralize and unify the socialist forces of the revolution on an African scale. And program signifies means, methods, and forces to carry them forward.
The program is inevitably based on the prospect of the Socialist United States of Negro Africa, as the Sixth World Congress of the Fourth International presented it. °
The basis for development must be a fundamental nucleus of nationalized economy, through the nationalization without indemnification of the great colonial imperialist enterprises, and the development of nationalized industries under workers' administration. The payment of indemnifications to the expropriated enterprises, from being a "tactical" measure to calm down обом imperialism, as it is presented by some reformist leaderships, only serves to load a heavy mortgage on the future success of nationalization and on the weak economy of the country, and to maintain the ties of dependence and the sabotaging imperialism in the economy. Foreign industries may be set up within the framework of the plan, always provided that the margin of profit remain reasonable and limited, and that most of it be reinvested within the counintegrating the industry in the national economy under workers' control.
The monopoly of foreign trade under workers' control is indispensable for any development plan 9 See the entire section on Negro Africa in the resolution, "The Colonial Revoluticn: Its Balance-Sheet, Its Problems, and Its Prospects," FOURTH INTERNATIONAL n° 12, -Winter 1960-61, pp 41-43.
in countries like these, where this trade is of a the particular aspects and problems which worry
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL disproportionate weight in the economy. That, together with the nationalization of banking and credit under workers' control, is the basis for investment and planning of resources by the state.
when the peculiarities of each country are taken into account, farm coöperatives or communes are the general framework for the development of agricultural production, integrating and surpassing the old African agrarian structures. But a fundamental role is also played by stute aid of every sort to the peasant coöperatives or communes, as well as to the small peasantry, and state centralization and marketing of farm prowith the collaboration of the peasant organizations: "Investment in labor," the mobilization of all the human resources which today are underemployed or not employed at all, will to a large extent replace, as experience has shown, the lack of big capital for agricultural development in the first stage.
But this "investment" and mobilization are impossible without the direct and leading participation of the urban and rural masses in the revolution, in the management of the state and the economy. In the very last instance, the political level that the whole problem of economic development is to be solved at the present stage of the revolution in Africa.
It is by the participation of these masses that it will be possible to work up the economic plan, beginning with a census of the people's needs, with an order of priorities, in order to set up a plan that harmonizes the needs of development and accumulation with the most urgent needs of the population, and the utilizable resources.
The raising of the standard of living, not only by the fight against illiteracy and the development of education, but in all ways — wages, housing, full employment, medical attention, communications, ete — cannot occupy a merely secondary place in the priorities, as it does in the "austerity" projects of various African governments, an "austerity" that certainly reach as far as the stratum of state functionaries, and, linked up with them, the tradesmen and private beneficiaries of state credit, et al.
There is need of a raw-materials pool among the African states, so as to negotiate under the best possible conditions about the price of their products on the world market, as well as other measures aimed at pooling technicians and other resources needed for development.
An economy of this type will permit a thorough use of the aid coming from the workers' states in the form of money, machines, technicians, etc.
In each country it is necessary to work up on this basis a transitional program, which studies
33 and stir up the masses, from question of wages and working conditions to the problems of the emancipation of women, the overcoming and assimilation of tribal peculiarities and rivalries, ete. The backward state of the economy, measures that check the revolution and the centralized mobilization of the masses, contribute to giving nutriment to regional and tribal disputes. The forces that are being uselessly wasted in these can be reabsorbed and used only through the centralization of the revolutionary forces with this program and these methods.
One of the bases for the support and growth of the embryonic African bourgeoisie, and of its class ideologies and cadres, is the development of an army and a staff of privileged officers. This is a force constructed and aimed directly against the masses and their organizations. It is necessary everywhere to bring up the question of dissolving the army and replacing it by the people in arms, the arming of the toilers of town and country, organized in workers', peasants' , and people's militia, who elect their own officers, as was done in the Cuban revolution.
All these economic and political measures require the direct intervention of the masses through their own organizations: trade unions, urban and rural committees, etc. In Africa, as everywhere and even more than elsewhere, there is no social force or organizational artifice that can replace this. THE TRADE UNIONS, THE MASS WORKERS' PARTY, AND THE REVOLUTIONARY MARXIST PARTY.
The centre for the development of this program, for the regrouping of those forces inclined to carry forward a socialist program, is formed today by the peasant guerrilla movements where these exist or are being prepared, and, more generally, the trade unions. These, though still controlled by leaderships favorable to the nationalist tendencies, tend to intervene politically, reflecting the pressure and positions of the masses.
This intervention must be stimulated. It must be extended — everywhere that the trade-union movement has attained a certain level of development — not only to its independence from the state and from the nationalist parties, but to its kers, volitical expression, the formation of wor-
For labor parties based on the trade-union movement, with union support, with a workers' and socialist program for the revolution. The labor party based on the trade unions would be the conscious expression of the political tendency of the trade-union organizations, and it can be the political instrument for the alliance between
34 the urban and rural masses, beyond the control of the bourgeois or pro-bourgeois tendencies. It is the means for developing and expending the political maturity of the masses, and of the socialist forces.
At present the leadership of the forces that can form anti-imperialist united-front alliances the hands of pro-bourgeois sectors, as the Cairo meeting, among others, has shown.
The autonomous development of the workers' movement, through trade-union independence, the Pan-African trade-union federation, and the formation of labor parties based on the trade unions, and its alliance with the peasants and the peasant guerrillas, will permit the socialist forces to be independent in every anti-imperialist united front, will give them the means to prevent the worker, peasaut, and plebeian forces from being subjected to the interests and leadership of the bourgeois and pro-bourgeois sectors.
It will also provide the means for the development of organisms for popular action and intervention in the leadership of the revolution and of the state (committees of every sort at different levels), against attempts to "freeze" the intervention of the masses in the African revolution and to consolidate state apparatuses separated from the masses and incapable of organizing, planning, and spurring on African development.
The position of Stalinism and Moscow, up till this last period, had been to support the African nationalist leaderships and to subordinate to them independent movement of the masses. Only in the very last stage have they begun to raise the question of the need for the independent organization of Communist Parties, 10 with the program, however, of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, by stages, and a front with the national bourgeoisie and its agents during the whole of what they consider the "bourgeois democratic stage" of the revolution.
This is tantamount to subjecting the independent movement of the masses to the present leadership of the Nkrumah sort, in the best or cases to assigning it a simple role of "bringing" pressure on the national bourgeoisie, to preparing new catastrophes like that the CP suffered in Egypt, to cite just one example.
The socialist forces of the African evolution need to organize there a revolutionary Marxist party on the basis of each country and further. more on a Pan-African scale.
The independent political expression of tht trade unions can be ensured by their own labor 10 See Walter Markov (professor at Leipzig University), "Mouvement national et classes sociales dans le TiersMonde," in Cahiers Internationaux, March-April 1961. May 1960
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL party, based on the unions, in those countries where the unions bases for this exist. Such a party should comprise all the workers' tendencies
Neri including the revolutionary Marxist, Trotskyist tendency — of the workers' movement.
But the political expression and action of the African revolutionary Marxist vanguard ean be ensured only the organization everywhere of the revolutionary Marxist party, the Bolshevik political organization of the vanguard, which develops the whole revolutionary i Marxist program of the African revolution, which builds the staff of African Bolshevik cadres, which intervenes to stimulate or lead, where that is possible, all revolutionary processes, educating the vanguard' of the masses in the ideas and the complete internationalist program of Trotskyism, of the per. manent revolution, of the Fourth International.
Without isolating itself from the living forces of the revolution in the channels through which they are moving, developing, where necessary and possible, the left tendencies in the nationalist movement, getting integrated in the organizations of the peasant guerrillas, spurring on the development of mass labor parties based on the unions and possibly entering them with at least part of revolutionary Marxist party must nevertheless be the centre of incentive, initiative, and conscious Marxist leadership of the vanguard forces of the revolution. One of its tasks is to work for the regroupment on an African scale of the forces and organizations in each country that claim to be proletarian socialist and internationalist, differentiated or on the way to becoming differentiated from the so-called "socialism" of the African bourgeoisie.
The most enormous pressures - of world imperialism, of African nationalism, of Stalinism, of Moscow or Pekin - are turned on Africa. There is direct or indirect pressure on the revolutionary movement and on the revolutionary vanguard, on the trade unions, and on the mass movement.
The development of the trade unions and their centralization on an All-African or partial scale, the development of guerrilla activity, push the revolution up to higher levels, but at the same time increase these pressures.
This renders more necessary than ever the task of developing and organizing the revolutionary Marxist forces, to spur on the alliance of the trade unions and the left wing of the national movement in the independent states with the peasant war of liberation that is smoldering in in South Africa, that has burst out in Angola, that is threatening to burst out in Kenya, which will upset all the plans for stabilizing the African situation.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
These forces must provide the program and build and unify on the African scale the cadres for this struggle, for this alliance, and for this next stage of the revolution in Africa. They must be the pole of attraction and the initiators of regroupment of the whole most revolutionary sector of African society in movement. They must help to demonstrate the program in practice, in encouraging from below all sorts initiatives and actions of solidarity with the other African movements: strikes, demonstrations, the organization and sending of militia to support the guerrillas, the shipment of all sort of
The rich complexity of the whole process now going on in Africa creates the conditions whereby a relatively small group of revolutionary Marxist cadres, organized in a party, may have a very tolt, and indeed decisive, weight in the process -
35
Stalinism and a whole sector of the nationalist left have practically abandoned this task, and lack the program and outlook to carry it forward.
The program and organization of the Fourth International are the instrument, that must be immensely developed, beginning from the present level, to carry forward these tasks in the next stage of the African revolution, to give drive to the regroupment of the socialist, workers, and revolutionary forces, to unify the African lutionary Marxist movement with the experienre and the organized forces of revolutionary Marxism in the world, and particularly in the centres of the colonial revolution, so that these forces can make their weight felt in the whole process now going on in Africa.
May 1961.