Angolan workers fight S. African invasion

Thousands of Namibia-based South African troops, backed up by massive artillery and air cover, invaded and occupied the southern provinces of Angola last month.

According to the MPLA regime in Angola, the invading force included 6000 troops, scores of tanks and long-range cannon, helicopter gunships and French Mirage fighter-bombers.

This is the biggest of the ongoing cross-border raids launched by the South African government since the full-scale invasion of 1975-76, when the S. African army, acting as the weapon of imperialism, failed in its bid to crush the new Cuban-backed MPLA regime that had come to power on the back of a mass mobilisation of Angolan workers.

Invading forces

Sources in SWAPO, the Namibian nationalist organisation, stated that the June 1980 invasion involved the largest S. African military operation since the second imperialist world war.

Last week the Angolan government reported that over 370 Angolan civilians had been massacred by the invading forces, which continued their sweep through Angolan territory, carrying out economic sabotage and installing the anti-MPLA forces of UNITA in strategic positions near the border.

This was denied by the S. African government, which claimed that its forces had withdrawn after successfully completing their mission—to smash SWAPO’s military network in southern Angola.

Heavy blow

S. African generals claimed that nearly 400 SWAPO fighters were killed and hundreds of tons of equipment captured or destroyed, for the loss of 16 South African soldiers and one helicopter.

Despite the undoubted exaggeration in these blood-stained boasts, the guerrilla army of SWAPO has clearly been dealt a heavy blow.

The indications are that S. African military chiefs were taken aback by the scale of resistance put up by SWAPO. But in the absence of determined support from MPLA and Angolan-based Cuban forces, the balance was heavily tipped against the SWAPO fighters.

The MPLA regime, and the Kremlin bureaucracy which supports it in the maintenance of capitalist relations in Angola, are incapable of providing consistent defence of SWAPO or Angola against S. African attack.

The MPLA government is driven into deepening reliance on imperialism by its inability to meet the demands of an increasingly militant Angolan working class.

The S. African government, with imperialist connivance, is thus able to exploit the instability of the MPLA regime. The military attacks are designed to increase MPLA pressure on SWAPO to further compromise in the anti-colonial struggle.

The Kremlin’s concern is to Angola as part of its world-wide military/diplomatic balancing act with imperialism.

So both reformists and Stalinists largely confined their response to the invasion to within the halls of the UN.

The courage of SWAPO fighters, contrasting sharply with the treacherous class collaboration of their leadership, found an echo in the militant solidarity aroused in the Angolan working class by the predatory attack of the apartheid-capitalist regime.

The fighting instincts of the Angolan proletariat were forcefully demonstrated last week in Luanda, the urban industrial heart of the country, when over 100,000 workers and youth turned out for a rally in protest against the invasion of Angola and in support of SWAPO and the ANC.

The combativity of the Angolan masses sounds a warning to the S. African regime and the imperialist powers, who cannot rely too far on the diversion and control of the working class by the MPLA and its Stalinist backers.

In showing their anger at the S. African attack and their solidarity with SWAPO guerrillas and with the struggles in Namibia and S. Africa itself, Angolan workers and youth are actively seeking a way forward in the struggle against imperialism.

Only revolutionaries armed with a Trotskyist programme and perspective can take forward this spontaneous class solidarity and anger as part of the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism in Angola under revolutionary proletarian leadership.

In taking up the defence of Angola and SWAPO, revolutionary Marxists must stand in the forefront of the military struggle against S. African imperialist aggression.

At the same time, they must take up the political struggle, against all currents of reformism and Stalinism, that is necessary to develop the political and organisational independence of the working class around a revolutionary programme and under a revolutionary leadership.

A key demand to be raised in today’s conditions in Angola is for the arming of the working masses, and the fight must be taken up to develop a workers’ militia to secure the immediate defensive tasks posed by external aggression, and to prepare the way for moving onto the offensive against state power.

In Namibia, the working class has emerged undefeated from a period of struggle in which the S. African state and its agents launched an offensive that effectively crushed SWAPO’s internal organisation.

Steeled in the experience of struggle, and facing growing attacks on its already miserable living standards, the working class is charged with explosive militancy and combativity.

Confidence

The massive development of struggle in S. Africa must have dramatically strengthened the confidence of workers and youth in Namibia.

These developments pose a threat to the reformist ambitions of the SWAPO leadership. The reformist strategy of guerrillaism is the central weapon of this leadership in its attempts to divert working class struggle and control militant workers and youth.

Guerrillaism serves to turn the working class away from reliance on its own massive independent strength, towards reliance on the illusion of salvation by the guerrilla army (hand in hand with the UN).

And it acts at the same time as a militant cover for the reformists and Stalinists to draw militants away from the day-to-day struggles of their class and into the bureaucratic command in the guerrilla army.

While broad layers of the working class look to SWAPO for leadership in struggle, military setbacks like the one suffered in the S. African invasion threaten to demoralise the working class.

And guerrilla actions—whether they involve military setbacks or gains—can divert and thus politically weaken the working class at a time when it is set to move into major open struggles against the state.

It is only by seizing on the consequences of reformist and Stalinist misleadership of the working class that the S. African state and imperialism can currently hope to secure state capitalist control in Namibia.

Last week the S. African government gave the tribalist-bourgeois DTA party a significant extension of political and military powers in Namibia.

At the same time as it seeks, with imperialist connivance, to strengthen its local agents, the S. African government is forced by the continuing strength of the working class to hold open the door to a form of incorporation of SWAPO into the administration of the capitalist state in Namibia.

The deepening crisis of political control posed for the S. African state and imperialism by the movement of mass struggle in Southern Africa—spearheaded by the mighty black working class of South Africa itself—provokes growing frenzy amongst the big bourgeoisie in its search for stable capitalist control.