Revolutionary Communist Front, the French Trotskyist organization) were among a group of militants who had participated in the movements of support to the liberation struggle and were invited to Guinea-Bissau in September, on the occasion of the country's official accession to independence. In this report, two of these comrades deal with a series of questions. For reasons of space, we are unable to publish a section on "the question of the Cape Verde Islands" in this issue of INPRECOR. We will publish it in a future issue. — INPRECOR The welcome accorded us by the PAIGC (African party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands) was extremely warm. The militants of the PAIGC spared no effort in showing us around, helping us, transporting us. It was their way, they said, of thanking all those throughout the world who had organized solidarity with their liberation struggle. Thus, we were granted access to the PAIG's external bases in Ligionchor (Senegal) and Koundara (Guinea-Conakry). We were able to attend the transfer of power from the Portuguese to the PAIGC fighters in Farin. We had every opportunity to study. the situation in the two main cities, Bissau and Bafata. Finally, we were able to meet with Luis Cobral and other leaders of the party in eastern Boa, how far along?
_by F. CAZAL & C. GABRIEL a region that was emptied of its population by the war and where the PAIG today is trying to recreate an economy and resettle the peasants. The economic situation The state in which the Portuguese left the country is catastrophic. Independent Guinea-Bissou is a country mutilated by ten years of war. But more than that, its economic and social structure was profoundly affected by several centuries of colonialism. Guinean society is marked by all the usual characteristics of an underdeveloped and dependent economy: a principally agricultural economy oriented toward the colonial metropolis (with an export monoculture), industrial underdevelopment, low living standard of the masses, illiteracy, lack of trained technicians, high unemployment, and so on. Let us examine some of these features. *An economy dominated by agriculture and oriented toward the satisfaction of the needs of the colonial metropolis. Unlike the other colonies (Angola and Mozambique), where the enormous natural resources forced Portuguese colonialism, whose investment capabilities were limited, to give way to imperialist powers in the exploitation of economic resources, Guinea remained a sort of private preserve for Portugal. The CUF (Compagnie União Fabril, tied to the Melo family), which is associated with big Portuguese private interest groups, held a virtual monopoly on import-export trade, either by itself or through the intermediary of its associated companies; it also remained master of the Guinean econ-
37
GUINEA-BISSAU omy, which was oriented toward the needs of the metropolis. This company possessed its own fleet, its own subsidiary industries, and several thousand employees. Through it, Portuguese colonialism restricted itself to plundering the agricultural resources of the country (rice, peanuts, wood), never undertaking any initiative toward setting up a local industry, not even a limited one. The exploitation of the Guinean peasant was carried out through the monetary mechanism of taxes and the setting of buying prices for agricultural products through an accounting system. This system did not directly atlack collective (village) ownership of the land. The rural population was compelled to cultivate "for cash" a product to be sold at a fixed price and then exported. This export culture tore a serious breach in the original domestic economy, aggravating the poverty and undernourishment of the peasants. The period of the war, while it reduced the area of colonial exploitation (through the extension of the liberated zones), intensified the dependence on the metropolis of the zones within the colonial economy (especially in the urban centers) The problem the PAIGC is now facing is to homogenize the economy while at the same time breaking the ties of dependence on the colonial metropolis. *The low living standards of the rural population. The combined effects of the export monoculture and the rapid extension of the liberated zones strongly diminished production in the rice fields and provoked a genuine food blockade in the zones under Portuguese control. Thus, beginning in 1969 the Portuguese were reduced to importing thousands of tons of rice to feed their troops and the urban population. The departure of the Portuguese troops poses the crucial problem of feeding the urban population, which is incapable of self-subsistence. While feeding the population is a planned process in the liberated zones, shortages have begun to be felt in the cities (in oil, sugar, and soon, rice). This obliges the PAIGC to import the rice necessary to feed these populations and to rapidly plan for increasing agricultural productivity. In addition, the taxes and the compulsory growing of peanuts have led to indebtedness and impoverishment among the peasants. This process of pauperization provoked the beginning of a process of lumpen-proletarianization of the peasants who were in contact with the urban colonial market; but it also, and above all, fostered the rallying of the peasants to the PAIG. *The weakness of the level of development of productive forces and the state of industrial underdevelopment. Economic activity in the cities is limited to commerce and industry tied to colonial exploitation (operation of the ports, import-export, sawmills, rice-shelling factories, cooking oil manufacturing). This activity was directed toward supplying the internal colonial market (retail commerce, breweries, 38 etc.), toward administrative and tertiary activity (generally within the framework of the colonial army), and toward a marginal activity tied to the colonial presence (craftsmen, prostitutes, etc.). Industrial activity was held to a bare minimum (treatment and transformation of food products). All consumption of manufactured products, which had been stimulated in the cities by Spinola as a way of getting a grip on the urban population, stemmed from imports aimed principally at the colons, the Portuguese military, and the urban petty bourgeoisie. *A contorted economy: The specificity of Portuguese colonial exploitation and the victorious development of the national liberation struggle (with the rapid extension of the liberated zones) thus had a double impact on the Guinean economy. This twofold economic reality is clear in the town-country differenfiation, which generally cuts through the entire social structure of the country. The necessities of the colonial wor (the presence of a significant military contingent) and the troding economy engendered the formation of a parasitic economy tied to the existence of the military market. In the urban centers this provoked an artificial swelling of the commercial sector and of a wheeler-dealer commercial petty bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the CUF monopoly on large-scale commerce and the import-export trade and the existence of a small layer of Portuguese coIons monopolizing the small food-processing enterprises limited this Guinean petty bourgeoisie (most often Mestizo or Lebanese, in any case) to an intermediary role in the trade circuit (small-scale internal commerce). The economy of the urban centers was thus directly tied to the colonial presence and to the exploitation of the Guinean peasantry. On the other side, the victorious development of the national liberation struggle, while marginalizing the colonial economic sector (the food blockade), permitted the development of an agricultural economy based on new relations in the liberated zones. To lay the basis for a new economy in the liberated zones, the PAIGC concentrated (a) on redressing the nefarious effects of the export monoculture imposed by the colons by developing cultivation of food products, (b) on starting to construct the bases of a social accumulation that would allow for commercial exchanges aimed at providing products of basic necessity and producing food surpluses to be exported for manufactured products on the basis of barter with a monopoly of foreign trade), and (c) on developing new relations of production (primitive forms of agricultural cooperation). Guinea-Bissau today is characterized by a double economic and social reality. On the one hand the parasitic monetary colonial economy in the urban centers has accentuated the process of social differentiation; on the other hand, in the preceding period,
a communal agricultural economy in which exchange was based on barter blocked the process of social differentiation in the countryside. The fundamental problem today is to homogenize these two sectors economically, politically, and socially. This process necessitates an increase in agricultural production (the only basis for accumulation in the country) and strict control over private commerce (in terms both of prices and of the kinds of imports) in order to avoid the enrichment of the merchants through the black market or through speculation. On the other hand, the introduction of money in the liberated zones creates the objective basis for the development of private accumulation and therefore For the disorganization of the cooperative relations of production. The Guinean peasantry is very little differentiated socially; nevertheless, the appearance of money and the development of agricultural productivity can favor the emergence, beginning from the old feudal structures, of accumulators and can thus accentuate social differentiation. *A material infrastructure linked to the needs of colonialism. The specificity of Portuguese colonial domination, the industrial underdevelopment of Guinea, the presence of a numerically weak layer of European colons, and the generally low level of development of the productive forces have reduced the infrastructure set up by Portuguese colonialism to the most rudimentary level. To this must also be odded the destruction suffered during the colonial war. The total infrastructure amounts to:
- road network composed of a few paved roads (around Bissau) and some trails that are more or less passable depending on the season; a good number of them were closed during the war because they had been mined;
- maritime network limited to a few embarcation points, some ferry boats, and one port af Bissau;
- airport at Bissau and a few random trails around the main camps set up by the Portuguese;
- health system concentrated around the hospital of Bissau and a few first-aid posts in isolated garrisons; the military doctors have returned to Portugal;
- school system composed essentially of the Bissau high school and a few schools in the larger cities (the teachers were either Portuguese officers or priests aftached to Catholic missions);
- national radio run by totally outdated generators. That is the meager total of the infrastructural assets established by several centuries of colonial rule. It is obvious that the economic reconstruction of the country is going to be made more difficult by the sorry state of the road network, which suffered great damage during the war of liberation. But the concentration of the health and educational systems in Bissau poses the problem of decentralization in
AHS order to service the rural population. This makes the problem of the lock of trained personnel emerge quite sharply. *The lack of technicians. The colonial administration was entirely in the hands of the military; only a very narrow place was left for a functionary petty bourgeoisie, which had no future and no real training (a few people employed as middle-level managers in the public services or in the offices of the CUF). In the medical field, for example, there were eighty doctors in Guinea-Bissau, forty of them in the capital, whose population is 80,000 out of a total in the country of 600, 000. (It must be remembered, however, that nearly half the population was living in zones controlled by the PAIGC.) Almost all of these doctors were Portuguese army personnel, and today they have left Guinea. Thus, on the eve of the official recognition of Guinea's independence, a PAIGC official told us that only four Portuguese doctors were staying in Bissau, and several of them had collaborated with the regime and were not trusted by the party. The PAIGC has only a few doctors in its ranks, some of them foreign volunteers (a certain number of medical students are still receiving training abroad), and a few dozen nurses, medical aides, etc. The main problem is therefore to find the aid required to get the hospital infrastructure working and to assure minimum medical assistance to the peasant population dispersed throughout the country. It is also a question (and this is a political problem) of assuring basic medical care for the population (until recently controlled by the Portuguese) that benefited, in the framework of Spfnola's political demagogy, from some medical assistance from Portuguese military doctors beginning in 1968. Frontier hospitals have already been set up in the interior, but to solve the problem the new state of GuineaBissau will have to appeal for international technical aid and will also have to call for the return of Guincan technicians who emigrated and did not participate in the struggle directly. What is necessary in the medical field is also required in the field of education and technology in general. The need for technicians will pose important political problems for the PAIGC (which will have to find ways of exerting political control over the technicians, reach cooperation accords with capitalist states, and get aid from the workers states). These problems can be solved only through decisive economic and political choices. The initial responses advanced so far by the comrades of the PAIGC unfortunately bode ill on this question. But the fundamental point is that the problem of technicians is allowing the PAIGC to justify before the masses its policy of taking over the existing colonial state apparatus. Far from destroying the colonial state apparatus, the PAIGC is contenting itself with utilizing it by placing its own militants at the head of the administration, the radio, the police, and the public services, while retaining
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GUINEA- BISSAU the apparatus forged by colonialism. Moreover, the apathy of the urban masses and the frontist illusions of the PAIGC prevent it from developing a strategy that permits the rapid mobilization of the laboring masses of the cities in order to establish a structure of democratic power. "National Reconstruction" The economic reconstruction of the country will be made very difficult by the present state of the Guinean economy and by the general weakness of the development of the productive forces. The PAIGC militants assert that the reconstruction will be a battle that will be harder to wage than the armed struggle and that it will be based on prior political choices. When we talked with PAIGC militants af all levels it was around these fundamental political choices that the discussion revolved. Today, their main concern is the participation of all social classes in the phase of "national reconstruction. PAIGC General Secretary Aristides Pereira asserted, the state of Guinea-Bissau "will be essentially democratic and will guarantee the participation of all social layers, without distinction of color, religion, or sex, in the management of the affairs of state. " (Le Monde, August 6, 1974-) The frontist political line of the PAIGC is determined by the specific nature of Guinean social structure and the weak level of development of the productive forces. The PAIG remains saturated with the history of its own liberation struggle and its petty-bourgeois origins. The passage to armed struggle (and the mobilization of the peasantry tore the codres from the milieu of their social origin for a time and constituted a radical break with traditional reformist nationalism. Beginning from this point, the development of the struggle in the context of a particular social formation (a peasantry for which the problem of land and social differentiation was not intense) limited the PAIG's understanding of class struggle in the restricted area of the liberated zones. The multiclassist illusions of the PAIGC, which were encouraged by the political weakness of the party's cadres, the weakness of the work toward mobilization in the urban centers, and the PAIG's polifical isolation from the historic gains of the international workers movement, were in part determined by the exclusive relations with the peasantry of the liberated zones. The failure to take into consideration the reality of class relations in the cities explains the PAIG's inability to advance anticapitalist slogans and to develop mass mobilizations in the urban areas. It also prevented it from formulating clear axes for mass mobilization in the Cape Verde Islands, where the social structure is more complex. Nevertheless, the quantitative weakness of the proletariat compared to the peasant mass is not enough 40 to justify the assertion that the class struggle is secondary. There is a speculating and trading petty bourgeoisie in the urban centers, and the introduction of money can favor the emergence of accumulation in the countryside. In face of this social situation, the PAIG's multiclassist conceptions find a social base around which they become concretized. Pedro Pires affirms that the party's return to the urban centers "will strengthen the participation of the petty bourgeoisie in the process of development. Today we are counting on many students and public functionaries. " (Expreso, September 14, 1974.) That is the policy of open arms toward the petty bourgeoisie. Likewise, Luis Cabral told us in eastern Boa that the need for technicians meant that they would have to be granted a privileged economic status ("everything necessary to have them agree to work in Guinea"). And when we expressed surprise that the PAIGC already envisages such social differentiation, this same person responded that this was inev¡table and that "our peasants will understand the necessity for such social inequalities. " These conceptions go along with an economistic and technocratic view of the current problems. Thus, the state and the administration are held to be neutral instruments standing above social divisions and able to give expression to "all social layers, " according to Pereira's formula. In the same way, when we asked about the political control that would have to be exercised over these technicians who are going to benefit from a high living standard, we were told (by Nino Veira) that "politics and technology must not be mixed." The corollary of the PAIG's pragmatism is a "moralistic" view of the struggle against neocolonialism. This point of view is maintained on the one hand through an opportunist vision of the relations among classes and on the other hand through a quasimystica! belief in the effectiveness of the party's principles as an insurmountable rampart against any deviation. Thus, when we asked what would be the party's position in a social conflict between the workers of a factory and their employer, the response was that such a conflict would be impossible, because all classes will have to struggle shoulder to shoulder for national reconstruction. All these factors add up to the existence of a favorable terrain for a rightwing nationalist deviation within the PAIGC. All the more so in that the apoliticism entails a massive tail-endism toward the leadership of the party. During discussions with militants, we were able to observe a sentimental confidence in the leadership "because it will not make any compromises and will remain faithful to the principles of the party." It is not our intention to pass judgment on the honesty of a leadership that has proven its militant courage in fifteen years of struggle; but rather to point out that, confronted with questions like foreign in-
vestment, for example, the PAIG will have to play it very close to the vest. Tail-endism is generally not a solid cement for a party. All the more so in that, as Amilcar Cabral used to say, the PAIGC is more a movement than a party. Furthermore, Luis Cabral defined the PAIGC as "a broad front of national liberation. All those who are fighting in our armed forces are members of the party. To live in our liberated regions is practically to be of the party. The vanguard of the party are the proven cadres. " (La nouvelle revue internationale, September 1971, p. 95.) Given the objective elements tending to determine the future of the Guinean revolution (the weakness of the proletariat, the weight of the urban petty bourgeoisie, the PAIG's lack of political preparedness) and given the multiclassist and economistic conceptions of the PAIGC leadership, only the elaboration of an anticapitalist program permitting the independent mobilization of the workers and the launching of a debate within the party on these themes can enable the PAIGC to avoid the impasse of the "noncapitalist road" and the "democratic national state" in Guinea-Bissau. The cities and the petty bourgeoisie When a city liberates itself, a festival breaks out. But a city liberated by the intervention of external forces generally passes through a period of bewildered torpor that indicates that the population is asking itself how to act. That is what is happening in Guinea-Bissau. " (B. Davidson, Le Monde Diplomatique, October 1974. In fact, the urban population is today taking a wait-and-see attitude. There was no real urban mass movement saluting the accession to independence. No phenomena of mass spontaneity testified to any mobilization. There was nothing symbolizing the fact that Portuguese colonialism had been attacked or destroyed (like emblems, monuments, flags); the transfer of power occurred smoothly. This is an indication of the PAIGC's weak implantation in the cities (in part due to colonial repression), the weakness of the proletariat (in Guinea, there is no equivalent to the industrial proletariat of Angola or Mozambique), and the isolation of the urban masses from the armed struggle, which was waged principally in the countryside. An important problem for the PAIGC is to win an implantation in the urban centers, where the main social bases for any reactionary project are located. The social differentiation in the cities runs along the following lines: *The speculating and commercial petty bourgeoisie, composed above all of Mestizos and Lebanese, which was built up as a commercial intermediary by colonial exploitation and by the local colonial market (retail commerce), but which had only a limited capacity to accumulate, being blocked by the presence of Portuguese colons and the monopoly of the
CUF. Although this layer collaborated with Portuguese colonialism during the struggle, today it is adopting the thesis of national independence, in the framework of which it hopes to prosper. (In Batafa the only external signs of independence were the portraits of Amilcar Cabral hung up in all the shops of the town.) The main danger for the future of the Guinean revolution lies exactly in the economic and social weight of this petty bourgeoisie. *The functionary petty bourgeoisie, including black mercenaries, members of the colonial administration, and functionaries. Those who were in the Portuguese military have been disarmed and sent back to their native villages. The pay they had been given (up through December) constitutes a small piece of capital that will allow them to take up agriculture again. Nevertheless, they are a potential counterrevolutionary force that must not be ignored. The members of the colonial administration have generally been left at their posts. This petty bourgeoisie can hope to use its privileged position in the administration to spread through the state apparatus and take on a political weight there, thus strengthening the most right-wing elements of the PAIGC. *The embryo of the proletariat is concentrated mainly in commercial and port facilities (dockers, fisherman, shipping), in retail trading (low-level employees), in some para-agricultural enterprises (rice-shelling factories, sawmills, breweries), and in construction and services (chauffeurs, cleaners, hospital orderlies). During the national liberation struggle the urban proletariat was isolated by colonial repression, which gave rise to a certain apathy that ruled out the development of workers strikes like those that took place in Luanda in Angola or Lourenço- Marques in Mozambique. *The lumpen proletariat originated from the presence of the colonial market (shoeshine boys, peddlers, prostitutes, chronically unemployed), from the unstabilized state of the Guinean proletariat (part-time workers), and from urbanization (refugees from the war.). The consumption habits and idleness of this lumpen layer that lived on the monetary handouts of the military make it to some extent susceptible to counterrevolutionary reactions. Nevertheless, newly created employment in the small industries and return to the countryside, with the assurance of a decent life for all, could be effective means of mobilizing this layer. That is the objective that has been set by the PAIGG. The PAIGC's frontist strategy finds material for its concretization in the urban centers where a significanf petty bourgeoisie exists. There has been no effort to develop forms of self-organization of the urban masses. In the urban centers the problem is immediately posed in class terms. The PAIGC has
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GUINEA -BISSAU set up "political-administrative committees" composed of militants in order to achieve an implantation in the cities. "Wherever the need was felt, they integrated former African functionaries of the colonial administration into these committees. " (Davidson, Le Monde Diplomatique.) Unlike the committees in the liberated zones, which are democratic organs of collective decision-making (units of cooperation and production), the city committees are not the expression of self-organization of the urban masses on a class basis. There is every possibility of these committees becoming transformed into bodies of municipal management. Only the organization of the workers at the point of production or in the neighborhoods, and their federation on the city level, can lend a different class content to these "political-administrative committees" and allow for a mobilization of the urban masses. But that does not seem to be the present orientation of the PAIGC. Thus, an important problem is raised by the risk of a political conjunction or coalition of interests between the urban petty bourgeoisie and the administration of the state and the party. The osmosis among these various milieus is an element that we were able to observe in some places where a genuine small local elite was beginning to emerge out of the local petty bourgeoisie and the cadres of the PAIGC. In the absence of a clear PAIGC strategy, it appears inevitable that the economic and political power of the urban petty bourgeoisie will be strengthened, and that it will quickly gain a grip on the bodies of the party and the state. That would be preparation for establishing neocolonial relations. Today this process is not complete, but the definition of a coherent strategy abandoning multiclassist illusions will engender a political battle that will decide the future of the Guinean revolution. Bureaucratic tendencies within the PAIGC There is no crystallized bureaucracy as such within the PAIG. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the necessity of mobilizing the peasants compelled the cadres of the party to cut themselves off from their social origin, the petty bourgeoisie, in order to go to live among the peasantry. Further, the relations between the peasant masses and the party were very close. The period of armed struggle did not offer objective bases for the formation of a bureaucracy cut off from the masses. Likewise, the relations between rank-and-file militants and party cadres were fraternal - all the more so in that the PAIGC took measures aimed at limiting the external apparatus of the party as much as possible (by rotating responsibilities and making cadres spend a certain amount of time in the interior). Thus, there was no development of a bureaucratic apparatus external to the struggle, as there has been with the MPLA 42 in Angola, for example. (The latest congress of the MPLA included a good number of "militants" completely out of the struggle.) Nevertheless, in spite of all this, there are some problems, such as that of the borderline elements who "postponed" their return to Guinea after missions abroad and the development of small-scale military potentates in some regions. The latter problem was raised at the 1964 PAIGC congress, which reaffirmed the following principle: We are not military men, but rather armed militants." Threats of bureaucratization have already appeared in the party's mode of functioning and recruitment. The PAIGC is characterized by an administrative type of functioning, in which the division of tasks entails a specialization and an extreme concentration of decision-making power; this is tied to the party's weak functioning on the political level. Thus, when Pedro Pires was asked who was responsible for the negotiations with Portugal and what was the social structure of Guinea-Bissau, his response was preceded by the following warning: "l am not a specialist. I am more adapted to the military aspect of the struggle than to its social aspect." (Expreso, September 14, 1974.) It goes without saying that such functioning strengthens tail-endism and apoliticism in the party, all the more so in that the party's standards of membership are very broad. "For us the party is a national liberation movement, " said José Aranjo, state commissioner and member of the Executive Committee of the struggle. "Any man more than fifteen years of age who wants to struggle for the total liberation of our people can be a party member. There is no ideological inquiry to pass. In this phase of our struggle, recruitment is very broad." (Afrique-Asie, No. 66.) Today, the strengthening of these tendencies can be seen in the following elements: *Concentration of decision-making in the hands of a very small number of individuals, which entails tail-endism and blind confidence in "the fidelity of the leadership to the principles of the PAIGC.". Moreover, before April 25 (and even since then), only a minority of cadres were able to have national appreciation and knowledge of the development of the situation. *The danger that members of the state apparatus will become independent of the masses. In fact, a corps of state representatives is developing today (ambassadors, state commissioners in Bissau, etc.) that already no longer maintain the same relations with the masses that they did during the armed struggle. One reason for this is that it is more difficult for the peasant masses to control their activity (because of the distances that separate the peasants from the town); another is that the absence of self-
organization of the urban masses does not allow for direct control by the workers over the party cadres. The struggle molded a certain type of cadre having a close relationship to the masses; "national reconstruction" and the PAIG's taking over the colonial state apparatus will mold other sorts of cadres. In the cities, the gap is already growing between the living standards of the PAIG soldiers and the living standards of the cadres. The arrival of young elements who come out of the petty bourgeoisie, have not broken with the petty bourgeoisie, and did not experience the struggle itself (technicians returning to the country, students) will strengthen the weight of this tendency within the party. Nevertheless, some militants of the PAIGC have reaffirmed the necessity of transforming the PAIG from a movement into a real vanguard party taking on the task of politicizing the masses. Discussion has been opened within the PAIGC on this point. But for us revolutionary Marxists, the necessity for a politically homogeneous vanguard organization armed with precise orientations for the development of self-organization and active mobilization of the urban and rural workers is on the order of the day right now in Guinea-Bissau. The struggle against neocolonialism must be waged consciously; It is not automatic. The PAIGC and internationalism "It is permanent and intransigent respect for the fundamental principles of African and anti-imperialist unity that has continued to inspire the confidence of the progressive forces of the world in our party and to guarantee, in the final analysis, the matic aid that we have received to advance our the watchwords of our party for a long fime. " (A. Pereira, September 23, 1973, in a speech to the People's National Assembly.) This conception of internationalism bears more resemblance to a petty-bourgeois utilitarian conception of pan-Africanism than it does to a clear understanding of the unity of the struggle of the peoples of the whole world. Is intransigence about the "fundamental principles of African and anti-imperialist unity" supposed to be seen in the opportunism of the PAIG's "practical diplomacy, " which led the party to send representatives to the congress of the reactionary Senegalese party (the UPS) and to the Islamic conference in Lahore (side by side with Iran and Saudi Arabia), and was responsible for the declarations of friendship for Chad President Francois Tombalbaye and Haile Selassie at the Eighth Conference of African Heads of State? Does not the expression "positive neutralism" utilized by Pedro Pires in defining the international policy of the state of Guinea-Bissau betray a profound lack of understanding of the nature of imperialist domination and of the neocolonial states? The desire to maintain independence from the possible political pressure of the "socialist camp" is a healthy sentiment; but when it is expressed as a "neutralism" that makes an abstraction of the character of the neocolonial regimes and their ties with Imperialism and the international economic market, it appears in contradiction with proletarian internationalism. In regard to African unity the PAIGC will have to make a choice: Either clear support to the revolutionary movements that are struggling against colonialism and neocolonialism, Or an orientation toward petty-bourgeois positions of pan-African solidarity that will integrate Guinea into a process of osmosis with the surrounding neocolonial economies through the African Development Bank, the West Africa Association, and the Organization of African Unity. It is obvious that the development of Guinea cannot be conceived in a narrow national framework. Guinea will thus have to establish commercial agreements with the neocolonial states that surround it. But it is appropriate to analyze the political terms that accompany these agreements. When Vasco Cabral, commissioner of the economy and finances, explains that in Africa itself the state of Guinea will belong to "the CDEAO (Committee of West African States), which is now being organized and whose aim is to establish economic independence from other coun tries, " it is easy to see that "intransigence in principles" will not be enough for the PAIGC to avoid all the traps of neocolonialism. The neocolonial countries that surround Guinea-Bissau can act as mediators for imperialism. When Luis Cabral writes to Houphouet-Boigny to express his desire for "active cooperation with the Ivory Coast, " we are entitled to ask whether that is really the term that ought to be applied when addressing this strong link in the neocolonialist chain. Today the PAIGC is taking refuge behind the "principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of others" in order to refuse to express a point of view on the nature of the neocolonial regimes. But tomorrow, when the state of Guinea will have to take a position on the events of international politics, what will its attitude be? How would its press or radio report events like those of 1968 in Dakar (Senegal) or of 1974 in Ethiopia, if Guinea is maintaining good relations with both these states? Will the PAIG respond to the rise of the African revolution with active solidarity with the masses oppressed by the neocolonial regimes? If there is a revolutionary crisis in the region, if revolutionary militants suffer repression at the hands of some neo-
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OUT WITH COVERNMENT colonial puppet, the PAIGC will have to choose between the African bourgeoisie and the masses. The Guinean revolution: how far along? It would be utopian to speak of socialism for GuineaBissau before the country has attained a minimum level of economic development. This view doesn't come from an economistic notion of the transition to socialism; it is simply based on a lucid view of the economic and social state of the country. As we were able to see, the objective situation in Guinea today imposes a certain number of compromises on the PAIGC. Nevertheless, this does not justify any random political explanation for these compromises or the assertion that the class struggle is secondary. The principal task of revolutionary Marxists today is to analyze the class nature of the new state and to make contributions to the debate now opening within the PAIGC over the question: socialism or neocolonialism? Because its power is not based on a real mobilization of the urban working masses, because it has not destroyed the colonial state apparatus in the cities but instead has been content to occupy its key posts, and because it has called for the participation of all classes in the management of the country, thus denying the reality of class antagonisms in Guinea, the PAIGC today represents only a left nationalist regime. But many contradictions will be brought to bear on this heterogeneous movement. •