[The following resolution has been submitted by the Leninist Trotskyist Faction for discussion by the ranks of the Fourth International in preparation for the next congress of the worldwide Trotskyist organization. A resolution presenting the International Majority Tendency on the situation in Angola was published in the April 12, 1976, issue of Intercontinental Press (p. 613).]
1. With the invasion mounted by South Africa and the utilization of mercenaries financed primarily by the CIA, imperialist intervention in the Angolan civil war reached a high point at the end of 1975 and beginning of 1976. For revolutionary Marxists and supporters of democratic rights, it was an elementary duty to offer material support to the military struggle against this intervention, and to organize an international campaign under the general slogans of "Hands off Angola!" "South Africa Out of Angola'" and, in view of the threat from American imperialiam because of Havana's aid to the MPLA, "Defend Cuba!"
2. The three main organizations involved in the civil war in Angola (the FNLA-Angola National Liberation Front, the MPLA-Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, and
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UNITA-National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) were nationalist in character.
It was incorrect to characterize the MPLA as more progressive than the UNITA or the FNLA, and to designate it as a "revolutionary petty-bourgeois nationalist current" that should be supported, not only in its military struggle against imperialist intervention but also in its political drive for leadership in Angola against the FLA and the UNITA.
The civil war did not involve a fundamental confrontation between antagonistic class forces in Angola. The three groups were rooted in different nationalities located in different regions of Angola.
The MPLA's base was in the Mbundu areas in north-central Angola and among mestiços (people of mixed African and Portuguese background) across the coun try.
The FNLA's base was among the Bakongo people in the northwestern area of Angola.
The UNA's base was among the Ovimbundu in the central and southern regions of Angola.
The three groups won these positions as a result of their participation in the struggle for independence from Portugal, which began in 1961. Each group contributed significantly to the struggle that eventually forced Portugal out of Angola.
The support offered by the Angolan working class, urban middle class, agricultural workers and poor peasantry, including the most militant layers, to one or another of the three nationalist groups in the 1975-76 civil war tended to follow national, not class differences.
A key element in the war in Angola was the power struggle between the pettybourgeois leaderships of the UNITA, the FNLA, and the MPLA. The imperialists sought to utliize the power struggle to advance their own objectives. They were aided in this by the frictions, fears, and antagonisms existing between the nationalities, and the exploitation of these divisions by the leaderships of the UNITA, the FNLA, and the MPLA.
The bitter conflict between the MPLA and its rivals did not serve to advance the cause of the working class or the struggle for national liberation from imperialist Portugal.
a. The rivalry tended to exacerbate animosities between the different national groups in Angola. The exploitation of these animosities by the three organizations represented a continuation of the divide-and-rule policy long employed by the Portuguese masters. To unify the Angolan masses in struggle against imperialism, an opposite policy was requireddefense of their national rights, including the right of self-determination.
It has been argued that the nationalities in Angola are merely ethnic and regional groupings-not fully developed nationsand that therefore they had no right to self-determination. However, under Lenin and Trotsky the Soviet government guaranteed national rights to peoples who had barely emerged from historically primitive cultures and who lacked many of the national attributes that have developed among the Angolan peoples.
b. The factional rivalry facilitated continued intervention by the imperialists. This was further enhanced by the competition among the three organizations for support from the various imperialist companies in Angola and from other imperialist interests eager to move into Angola.
c. The factional struggle was utilized by the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders and by the imperialist powers to divert the Angolan working masses from fighting for their own class interests. Under cover of the factional struggle each of the groups stepped up attacks on sectors of the workers and peasants of Angola.
3. In the long-range interests of the international socialist movement, revolutionary Marxists had to maintain their political independence from all three groups. Their duty was to help unite the Angolan working class as a whole and seek to develop its class consciousness as the only social force capable of leading the Angolan revolution to victory. The goal was to advance the concrete struggles against imperialism, against capitalist exploitation, for democratic rights and for political independence.
During the civil war, the central task in Angola remained that of constructing a revolutionary-Marxist, working-class party supported by the peasantry and popular masses as the leadership of the national and social struggle. None of the three nationalist groups could be transformed into such a party. A task still to be achieved, the party will have to be built in conscious political struggle against these leaderships and programs, since all three, or possible new combinations of them stand for the maintenance of capitalist property relations, and are committed to defending the interests of the nascent Angolan bourgeoisie.
In the struggle against imperialist intervention a policy based on advancing the interests of the working class might place revolutionary Marxists in a temporary bloc with this or that nationalist grouping in Angola, depending upon the situation. But at all times revolutionary Marxists must retain their political independence from and opposition to the procapitalist and neocolonial policies of such formations.
4. Only the working class can lead the struggle for national liberation from imperialist oppression to a successful conclusion, inasmuch as this requires abolishing capitalism and carrying out the socialist revolution. Bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships who defend capitalist property relations objectively defend imperialist domination, despite their nationalist pretenses. This sets them against the interests of the working class and the toiling masses, and forces them to tighten their links with world imperialism.
The defense of capitalist property relations by the MPLA, the FNLA, and the UNITA, as well as their attempts to win support from imperialist allies, placed them, regardless of the intentions or desires of any individuals, in the position of neocolonial opponents to completing the national liberation struggle.
This was shown in a graphic way when all three groups were in the transitional government from January to July 1975. The MPLA, along with the FNLA and the UNITA, agreed on government decrees imposing antistrike legislation, conscription of combative layers of the working class, and crackdowns against the democratic rights of the working masses.
All three groups showed in practice that they stood on a common neocolonialist program when they accepted the Alvor accords of January 1975, establishing a transitional government under the tutel age of Portuguese imperialism, with formal provisions protecting imperialist property and interests. The three groups reaffirmed this stand when they supported the Nakuru accords in June 1975, which tried to halt the civil war by reiterating the Alvor agreement and further limiting the rights of the masses.
This does not mean that the UNITA, the FNLA, and the MPLA continually carried out frontal assaults on popular mobilizations. At times, the leaderships of these groups, particularly the UNITA and the MPLA, which had more of an urban base than the FNLA, attempted to turn such mobilizations to their own factional advantage in the struggłe against their opponents. However, all three feared these independent mobilizations, agreed on the need to bring them under control, and were ready to use the most brutal forms of oppression if necessary. An example was the MPLA's repression of workers and youth organized in neighborhood committees following the expulsion of the UNITA and the FNLA from Luanda in July 1975.
The MPLA's ties with Portuguese imperialism were shown with particular clarity during the period when the MFA designated Admiral Rosa Coutinho to serve as governor of Angola in late 1974.
During both the Fifth and Sixth provisional governments, the Portuguese armed forces provided military assistance and other aid to the MPLA. When the MPLA expelled the FNLA and the UNITA from Luanda by military force in June 1975, the Portuguese command threatened to use its troops to prevent these groups from reentering the city.
In fact, in a statement issued in March 1975, the MPLA attacked the "passivity of the Portuguese Armed Forces in Angola," implicitly calling on the Portuguese regime to play a more active role. In early May, MPLA President Agostinho Neto said that the Angolan "people continue to wait for the [Portuguese] high commissioner and the Portuguese troops to assume their responsibilities.
When the coalition transitional government in Angola collapsed during the summer of 1975, the Portuguese regime transferred administrative control of the country to MPLA-controlled ministries. And when formal independence was declared in November 1975, the Sixth provisional government gave military equipment to the MPLA regime.
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CABINDA • Ambrizete
Notes
5. The leaders of American imperialism did not see any appreciable difference among the three nationalist factions, either in class character, attitude toward imperialist economic penetration, or social and political program. Even at the height of the American-backed South African aggression in the fall and winter of 1975, the MPLA leaders boasted of their "warm" relations with U.S.-owned Gulf Oil and the