African Masses up Against Crisis

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FROLINAT guerrillas fight French troops in Chad Eritrea and Ethiopia-these are the landmarks of a massive forward movement of workers and peasants with imperialism.

In different parts of the continent, with varying.political situations, the same political conclusions can be drawn.

Workers and peasants are showing their willingness to fight against repressive imperialist-backed regimes.

And they are confronting not a powerless, but an increasingly desperate, imperialism, weakened by its massive economic crisis, and facing the continuous pressure from the working class in the advanced capitalist countries.

Too desperate

But the position of imperialism in Africa is today too desperate for it to rely on its reactionary and left-talking collaborators along with the periodic use of brute force.

It needs its own "left" face. It has got it. And its name is David Owen, Britain's "socialist" foreign minister.

Owen, along with his black American counterpart Andrew Young, now plays a crucial role in heading off the challenges to capitalism which are bursting out all over the African continent.

During the last few weeks of growing imperialist military intervention, Owen has been the soul of "moderation"

Backed by Callaghan, he has urged caution on direct intervention and pledged his support for the unity and independence of Africa and for the Zimbabwean and Namibian freedom struggles.

His lapdog, Evan Luard, has in the House of Commons, accused Tories of being neocolonialists.

All this reformist verbiage is a smokescreen for a massive, secret diplomatic drive to ensure that any future governments of Namibia and Zimbabwe stay safely inside the imperialist system.

This is what all the United Nations and Anglo-American plans are designed to do.

Owen has been quoted more than once as expressing a aesire marion to split the Patriotic Front and isolate ZANU by bringing Nkomo into the "internal settlement"

Though he expresses public commitment to the freedom of Namibia, he does not publicise his meetings with Vorster at which he was, we understand, informed in secret of South Africa's intention to impose a state of emergency before it was implemented And Owen does not repeat north of the Zambesi what he told a reporter in South Africathat in very difficult circumstances he could "understand" the actions necessary to maintain "stability"

But Owen and Young represent imperialism, and for that reason they are forced more and more openly into an alliance with the regime which still represents the only immediate words of congratulation on their "new realism" in relation to the Marxist threat!

The imperialist strategy in Africa is completed by a form of alliance, though a highly unstable one, with Stalinism.

In Zimbabwe, for instance, the Cuban and Soviet Stalinists are party to, and supporters of counter-revolutionary imperialist plans.

Policemen

Elsewhere, although real tensions exist between Stalinism and imperialism because of the latter's permanent hopes of reversing the gains of the 1917 Russian revolution, the Stalinists nonetheless play the role of policemen against the In Angola they have bolstered the bureaucratic regime of Agostino Neto against popular as well as pro-imperialist attack.

In Ethiopia they support the counter-revolutionary slaughter and national oppression carried out by Mengistu's dictatorship.

Stalinists and reformists do political zig-zags from one dictator Or demagogue to another in their search for "progressive" allies in the imperialist camp.

Revolutionaries by contrast base themselves on the, only force capable of carrying through the revolution in Africa -the working class in alliance with a peasantry won to working class leadership.

Undefeated

For all their manoeuvres, neither the imperialists nor the Stalinists have been able to reverse the tide of revolutionary Despite some setbacks, the African workers and peasants remain undefeated.

Because imperialism is a decaying system, its agents and its alties cannot produce any lasting stability.

Unable to grant even the most basic material and political demands of the masses, they are forced more and more to use the weapon of brute force.

But this decadent system will not collapse of its own accord.

Without the building of parties to mobilise workers and peasants in the struggle for the socialist alternative, imperialism will maintain itself through barbarism.

It will do this not alone but in alliance with its collaborators like Shipanga, Motlana, Buthelezi, Leon, Muzorewa and Sithole.

But everywhere the main obstacle to a decisive victory against imperialism is also the same-the political bankruptcy of traditional nationalist, reformist and Stalinist leaderships and programmes.

The leaderships conceal the true nature of the imperialist strategy in Africa.

This strategy is founded, as Zaire events have shown, partly on a willingness . to support or carry out every form of repression.

While, a month ago, the main imperialist powers pretended in public to be considering whether to launch a military intervention in support of the Mobutu dictatorship, they had, through a secret agreement between the USA, France, Britain and Belgium, already commenced an invasion.

While in Paris last week junior minions of these powers staged "disagreements" about how to intervene, Zairean workers and peasants were already being terrorised by troops from Morocco and other African client states, airlifted into Zaire by the USA in a move agreed secretly in advance by the imperialist collective.

While imperialism has no scruples about using agents like Mobutu and King Hassan of Morocco, it uses also the 'progressive" regimes whose "left" anti-imperialist rhetoric is more and more clearly revealed as a facade behind which they maintain exploitative social relations in their own countries and support imperialist designs elsewhere.

Manoeuvre

The most glaring exponent of this kind of fraud is President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, darling of the reformists.

Nyerere is leading the campaign of rhetoric against the interventionist army of open reaction.

But at the same time he is engaged, less publicly, in the imperialist manoeuvre designed to keep Namibia as a capitalist state and head off any struggle which threatens to sever its links with imperialism.

Last week, in a move which can only be designed to strengthen those reformists in SWAPO most receptive to some kind of collaborationist deal with Vorster, Nyerere released a number of SWAPO dissidents previously imprisoned by him.

But Nyerere did not release SWAPO militants willing and ready to take up a struggle against the bureaucratic control exercised by the SWAPO leadership, scores of whom are still reportedly jailed in Tanzania.

He released one time militant Andreas Shipanga, who is now committed to an accommodation with Vorster and imperialism.

At the same moment racist Rhodesian Premier, lan Smith, suddenly decided to legalise ZANU and ZAPU.

This is clearly an attempt to break the Patriotic Front and foster the tensions which the ZANU and ZAPU leaders themselves fuel through their competitive manoeuvres to bureaucratically control the Zimbabwean liberation movement.

Betrayals

As the struggle grows, more and more militants inside and outside these organisations will confront betrayals of leadership which follow from strategies which reject the independent mobilisation of the mass of the oppressed under working class In the Zimbabwean SWAPO freedom fighters Front they will confront leaders like Nkomo.

On the one hand he expresses allegiance to his Soviet and Cuban sponsors; while on the other he calls for a negotiated settlement, for racist leader Smith to play a role in an independent Zimbabwe, and maintains a large part of the ZAPU army as no more than a bargaining counter.

Also in the Patriotic Front they will confront leaders like Mugabe who has publicly praised the treacherous Peking Stalinist bureaucracy and who, to promote his sectional interest over the unity of the oppressed in struggle, has expressed his willingness for a formal alliance with the arch-collaborator Muzorewa.

In SWAPO they will confront a leadership. which accepts the present in Namibia of South African troops even while these are carrying out the murder of SWAPO fighters and civilians, and which looks to imperialism and the United Nations to guarantee a negotiated settlement even when it is the same imperialism which arms the racist troops.

In the South African ANC they will confront a leadership which for 16 years has maintained an alliance with the "progressive" sectors of capital internationally which has left the South African working class defenceless in its day to day struggle against repression Urgent task This crisis of leadership being posed ever more sharply.

The urgent task is now to build a new leadership-a revolutionary party fighting for the political independence of the working class based on a programme of transitional and democratic demands which express the objective interests of the oppressed masses.

Such a programme can form a base for a solid alliance of the peasantry with the working class and leading to the only solution in the interests of the massesthe socialist revolution.

We demand: * An end to secret diplomacy and deals.

*Imperialist troops out of Africa.

*Immediate labour movement blacking of all arms supplies to the racist and imperialist armies.

*No negotiations with imperialism and the UN.

*Build the armed struggle through workers and peasants militias as part of a policy of mobilising the masses.

*Build the independent organisations of the workers and peasants in factories, farms, communities and schools.

* Integrate ZANU and ZAPU armies under a single elected *Demand maximum material support for the liberation struggle from the labour movement in imperialist countries and from the workers' states, (USSR, East Germany, Cuba, *The dissolution of the existing state apparatuses in South Africa.

*The setting up constituent assemblies.

*Build the revolutior

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Pag WHIT RIANS SS, Wed 14 June, 1978 esday racism and fascism because as a body riddled with bourgeois and liberal elements it cannot point to

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Angola, Zimbabwe, Soweto, Western Sahara,

which throughout Africa is coming into confrontation