Unite Africa with the Anti-Imperialist Camp and Set Course Toward Socialism
Miguel Ángel | Unión Proletaria
With 20% of the continental landmass and 17% of the planet’s population, Africa possesses 33% of the world’s mineral reserves (60 types of minerals: 90% of platinum-group metals reserves, 80% of coltan, 60% of cobalt, 70% of tantalum, 46% of diamonds, 40% of gold) and 24% of the world’s arable land. Therefore, in proportion to its territory and population, it has more natural resources than the other continents. One would expect its production and consumption to be correspondingly greater, and yet this is not the case.
Its annual Gross Domestic Product barely reaches 3% of the world total (its GDP per capita is 17% of the international average); its agricultural production accounts for 9%; its energy consumption, 4%; its share of global trade in goods and services, 3%; and it is the continent with the greatest infrastructure deficit. It depends on the export of raw materials and on fluctuations in their prices.
The social consequence is that 40% of the African population lives below the poverty line (less than 2 USD per day), 300 million people suffer from hunger (one third of the world total), and 43% lack access to electricity.
These few figures illustrate the devastation caused by two centuries of colonial plunder, and also by neocolonialism, since the political independence obtained more than 50 years ago was not sufficient to correct the inherited situation. Not only did the colonial powers refuse to compensate African countries, but they continued and intensified their economic exploitation, accompanied by constant interference and aggression.
Like Latin America, the countries of Africa aspire to a second independence, one with real sovereignty. To achieve it, they need a unity that will strengthen them against the predation and domination of foreign powers. Since the middle of the last century, the slogan of African unity and Pan-Africanism has been raised by all local political forces. The continent’s propertied classes have also used it, in a deceptive manner, to benefit from neocolonial trafficking with the imperialists at the expense of workers and peasants.
If anti-imperialist Pan-Africanism is to triumph, it must emancipate itself from every nationalist bias that harms the revolutionary unity of the exploited people of Africa with those of other countries. Nationalism leads to subordinating them to the exploiters, weakening them, and reinforcing the neocolonial regime. Thirty years ago, Ludo Martens, a Marxist-Leninist and faithful friend of the peoples of the Continent, delivered a report at the 7th Pan-African Congress in which he dissected the history of Pan-Africanism and the diverse conceptions hidden behind this term:
– the reactionary, colonial, and traditional-tribal conception;
– the petty-bourgeois conception, heavily influenced by the academic questioning of Marxism in the West (critical theory, existentialism, structuralism, etc.) and “which dreams of a politically independent and united Africa, but without breaking with … imperialism”;
– the official Pan-Africanism of the big African bourgeoisie integrated into capitalist globalization;
– and “the Pan-Africanism of the African proletariat” (Mulele in the Congo, Osende Afana in Cameroon, Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, the later actions of Nkrumah, etc.).
Ludo Martens considered that the militant proletariat must support the national struggle of oppressed peoples as “an essentially negative task,” that is, against imperialist oppression; but that it must not support nationalism “positively.” His criterion was based on the arguments put forward by Lenin in 1913:
“… the Marxist fully recognizes the historical legitimacy of national movements. But in order that this recognition may not become an apology for nationalism, it must be strictly and exclusively limited to what is progressive in such movements so that it does not contribute to obscuring proletarian consciousness with bourgeois ideology. (…) Militant bourgeois nationalism … brutalizes, deceives, and divides the workers in order to make them trail behind the bourgeoisie, … In every national culture there exist, though undeveloped, elements of democratic and socialist culture, because in every nation there is a working and exploited mass whose conditions of life inevitably give rise to a democratic and socialist ideology. But in every nation there also exists a bourgeois culture (and moreover, in most cases, an ultra-reactionary and clerical one), and not merely in the form of ‘elements,’ but as the dominant culture. Therefore, ‘national culture’ in general is the culture of the landlords, the priests, and the bourgeoisie. (…) we take from each national culture only its democratic and socialist elements…”
This principled position governs the communist tactic to be employed under concrete conditions, which, moreover, have become increasingly complex. The First World War of 1914–1918, the revolutions that followed it, and the civil war in Soviet Russia enabled a more precise understanding of the imperialist enemy and, thanks to this, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party were able to refine their tactics.
The “petty-bourgeois national illusions about the possibility of peaceful coexistence and national equality under capitalism” had collapsed, and henceforth the proletarian revolution in each country would “combine” with national wars against international imperialism.
Given these real conditions, still valid today, the revolutionary proletariat must “enter into a temporary alliance with the bourgeois democracy of the colonial and backward countries, but must not merge with it and must unconditionally maintain the independence of the proletarian movement even in its most embryonic forms.” Therefore, “we should support, and will support, bourgeois liberation movements in the colonies only if these movements are truly revolutionary, only if their representatives do not prevent us from educating and organizing the peasants and the broad masses of the exploited in a revolutionary spirit.” And “we must assume the role of leaders.”
It is entirely evident that the national movement which today confronts imperialism—both in weakened countries and on the part of powers such as China and Russia—is revolutionary, at least in an objective sense, in the face of the accelerated tendency toward reaction on the part of the West. Furthermore, it offers us communists greater freedom for propaganda and organization, provided that we give proper priority to the struggle against foreign domination.
Since the secular oppression of colonized nations has provoked resentment and distrust among their peoples toward the oppressor nations, including their proletariat, communists must “demonstrate particular circumspection and attention” toward their national feelings and “make certain concessions” in order to encourage “a voluntary aspiration toward alliance and unity.”
In work with the bourgeois strata of oppressed nations, Lenin gave priority to the peasantry and warned that “the task is not to fight capitalism, but the survivals of medievalism.” In those countries, revolution matures “to the extent that the industrial and railway proletariat develops, and, on the other hand, as imperialist oppression increases.”
He also considered that the victory of Soviet Russia made possible a slower pace in the revolutionary transformation of backward countries:
“We had to open the first breach in the wall of world capitalism. That breach is open. (…) You … do not have to open breaches, but to create the new with greater prudence and system, taking advantage of the international situation … favorable to you. (…) You must not copy our tactics, but analyze for yourselves the causes of their peculiarities, the conditions and results of these tactics, applying under local conditions not the letter but the spirit, the meaning, the lessons provided by the experience of the period 1917–1921. In the economic sphere, you must immediately rely on exchange with the capitalist world, without bargaining: it does not matter if tens of millions worth of the most valuable minerals pass into their hands. You must immediately seek to improve the condition of the peasants and begin large-scale electrification and irrigation projects. Irrigation is what is most necessary and what above all will transform the territory, uplift it, bury the past, and consolidate the transition toward socialism.”
Unlike Lenin’s times, both Ludo Martens in the 1990s and we in the present have been forced to recognize that the political strength of the international proletariat has retreated enormously. But unlike the period from Lenin to Ludo Martens, today we can benefit from a situation of decay in the imperialist camp and strengthening of the anti-imperialist camp, made up of the alliance between socialist countries or countries with a strong socialist heritage, sovereign countries, and national liberation movements. The concrete situation has become such that it has rendered prophetic the words spoken by Lenin in one of his final interventions: “The fate of all Western civilization now depends to an enormous degree on the incorporation of the working masses of the East into political life.”
Today’s communist proletarians have the duty to support, on pain of betrayal, the objectively revolutionary action of this anti-imperialist camp being built under the joint leadership of socialist states and patriotic national bourgeoisies. And, in addition to our loyal support for this alliance, we have the specific strategic task of strengthening it by providing it with a positive perspective through the revival of the revolutionary movement of the worker and peasant masses, both in the oppressor nations and in the oppressed nations.
Long live anti-imperialist unity!
Long live the revolutionary struggle of workers and peasants for socialism!
