First Published: Frontline, Vol. 3, No. 17, March 3, 1986.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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True to its Maoist heritage, the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS) is making another effort to sunder the developing bonds of solidarity between anti-imperialists in the U.S. and national liberation movements around the world. With the fortunes of those who still claim allegiance to “Mao Zedong Thought” in terminal decline, today’s attempt to split the international anti-imperialist front has had to proceed with more subtlety than the Red Guard bombast of the 1970s. But LRS’ posture is no less backward for being more skillfully disguised, and thus it requires another round of criticism to drag its underlying class collaboration into the light of day.
The latest objective of LRS’ distress is the growing trend among advanced forces in the U.S. anti-imperialist movement to recognize the African National Congress (ANC) as the vanguard organization of the fight for national liberation in South Africa. LRS’ reckless attempt to impede this political maturation process is crystallized in a commentary by central committee member Karega Hart in the December 6, 1985 issue of Unity. Entitled “Fighting Sectarianism in the U.S. Anti-Apartheid Movement,” the article accuses those who recognize the ANC’s vanguard status of trying to “split and manipulate the anti-apartheid movement” According to LRS, explicit identification of the ANC’ s leading role amounts to U.S. activists chauvinistically imposing their own views on the South African masses and denying the South African people’s right to self-determination. The ideological bottom line of LRS’ position is summed up as follows:
“There is nothing wrong with having opinions about the political strengths or of these [various] liberation forces,” writes LRS. “But should our political opinion of them be the basis for our support or opposition to them? If we support self-determination in South Africa, then we must support every force that is fighting apartheid regardless of our opinion of their politics.”
Such a view appears (as intended) constructive and broadminded. But it has absolutely nothing in common with either the reality of the South African liberation struggle or the effective practice of proletarian internationalism.
Regarding the actual shape of the raging conflict in South Africa pointing to the vanguard role of the ANC is not an artificial imposition, in reality; it is a simple acknowledgement of it. On every level, the ANC is the leading force in the multi-faceted liberation movement. Its minimum program, the Freedom Charter, is the rallying cry for the mass action of millions; its four-pronged strategy of open popular struggle, armed actions, underground organizing and international solidarity has provided the conscious direction anchoring the tremendous upsurge of the last year and a half. The ANC’s black, green and gold flag is the outlawed symbol of resistance nationwide. And ANC leader Nelson Mandela is universally recognized as the individual who would lead the country if any means for democratic choice could be arranged. Based on all these factors and more, the question of the ANC’s vanguard role has been settled in the actual heat of battle – and by the South African masses themselves.
But what if this were not yet the case, and the ANC’s leading role had not yet emerged as indisputable in mass practice? Even under those circumstances, LRS’ twisted arguments about required neutrality between different organizations who put themselves forward as proponents of national liberation would not hold water.
It would still be correct – indeed it would still be necessary – for U.S. activists to exercise our best political judgment about the program, leadership stability and class orientation of the different organizations claiming to stand for national freedom – and extend special solidarity to the force (in some cases it could be more than one) with the most consistent anti-imperialist standpoint Because of this, explicit recognition of the ANC’s leading role was as correct five or ten years ago as it is today.
To be sure, U.S. anti-imperialists who have come to this realization will – and do – work in broad coalitions with opponents of apartheid who are unprepared to make this political leap. (This is why LRS’ charges of sectarianism are so absurd.) But they simultaneously strive to educate the broader front about the specific liberation organization that is driving forward the struggle as a whole, and are eager to raise the level of unity of particular solidarity formations when a broad range of their members are ready to do so. The key point is that building a contingent of the progressive movement explicitly based on solidarity with national liberation vanguards is an indispensable element in giving cohesion and durability to the broad front as a whole.
The reason for this lies in the fundamental dynamics of the imperialist system, more specifically, in the sophisticated means finance capital utilizes to maintain its domination over oppressed nations and peoples. Imperialism hardly restricts itself to backing forces in oppressed countries who openly proclaim support for Western capital. Quite the contrary, especially in countries where the broad masses are being rapidly politicized, the best guardians of Washington’s interests are often ones who speak loudest about national sovereignty and the need to reject “foreign influences.” (Marxism, it might be added, is a favorite target of those who favor this brand of “self-determination.”)
Some of these are well-intentioned but unstable, political forces who – in the heat of intense class battle – search for some illusory “middle way” between revolution and counter-revolution or pursue infantile left fantasies under the guise of revolutionary purism. But others are self-conscious and well-paid agents of imperialism. Imperialism may prefer its paid agents, but it is exceedingly skilled at using these honest but confused tendencies as well, and has numerous ways of covertly throwing its weight behind them when its open puppets have outlived their usefulness. When such moments come – as they inevitably do in any intense liberation struggle – the acid test of internationalism is the ability to distinguish the real from the sham among various forces who are all claiming to be “genuine and honest” advocates of national sovereignty. Those who follow LRS’ recipe of “supporting every force” equally are sitting ducks for imperialism when such flashpoints of class battle arrive.
This is precisely the lesson of events in Angola in 1975-76, which LRS is so desperate to distort when It can’t sweep them under the rug altogether. In those key months ten years ago, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA and Holden Roberto’s Front for the National Liberation of Angola (FNLA) – armed and financed by South Africa and the CIA – turned on the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in what amounted to imperialism’s last-ditch attempt to frustrate the national liberation struggle. Fortunately for the people of all southern Africa, the organization which had led the 14-year armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism, with the internationalist aid of Cuban troops, threw back the full-scale UNITA/FNLA/South Africa invasion which followed and consolidated the authority of Angola’s current revolutionary government.
Yet to this day LRS maintains that it was correct to extend solidarity to UNITA and FNLA as well as MPLA in the period leading up to this critical turning point; and even continues to promote the lie that it was the MPLA, Cuba and the Soviet Union rather than the puppets of Pretoria and Washington who sabotaged the “unity” of all three organizations. Thus LRS’ summation of Angola’s moment of liberation – just like its practice at the time – echoes the tune of U.S. imperialism. This tawdry exercise in class collaboration is precisely where LRS’ so-called “non-sectarian” approach to solidarity work must, sooner or later, lead.
But LRS is tenacious if nothing else, and with no hesitation at all advances the same backward logic in an effort to undermine the ANC’s rising influence today. Of course, the ANC’s prestige is too high to allow LRS an audience for the kind of open slanders that its forerunners directed at the MPLA a decade ago. So LRS avoids a frontal assault, and instead takes the tack of promoting the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) as the qualitative equivalent of ANC in terms of the revolutionary character of its program and the extent of its influence. The ANC is damned with faint praise – LRS attributes to it only a passive advocacy of non-racialism – while the PAC – a formation based on narrow nationalism which has historically played a disruptive and splitting role within the anti-apartheid front – is given credit for advocating “Black leadership of the mass struggle and Black self-determination.”
And the fact that the PAC today barely functions within South Africa at all is, of course, never mentioned. Then right on the heels of this shameless distortion of South African reality, LRS piously warns U.S. activists not to “interfere” in that country’s internal affairs!
What is really going on here, of course, has little to do with an ideological commitment to self-determination and everything to do with a political agenda which calls for promoting the PAC and undermining the ANC to the maximum extent the current balance of forces allows. The dead giveaway is that LRS doesn’t really adhere to its own “principle” about “supporting every force” that claims to be fighting apartheid. Zulu chief Gatsha Buthelezi, for example, claims to be the most effective leader in the Black freedom struggle – and his base among South African Blacks is far greater than PAC’s – but he receives not a word of encouragement from LRS.
The reason is that LRS – in this case like almost every other U. S. opponent of apartheid – has made a political judgment that whatever Buthelezi claims his actual line and practice show he cannot contribute to the struggle for liberation. Once LRS is willing to make this judgment it is the height of demagogy to pretend that its opposition to acknowledging the ANC’s vanguard role is based on ideological principle instead of disagreement with the ANC and affinity for the PAC.
(The LRS’s sophistry is also revealed in its attempt to invoke the liberation movement in El Salvador to buttress its argument. According to LRS, the fact that the anti-imperialist activists in the U.S, extend solidarity to the FMLN as a whole, rather than exclusively to one of the five revolutionary parties that comprise it, is proof positive that it is a matter of principle to avoid making judgments between liberation forces. But LRS has its logic all wrong: the relevant analogy here is not comparing the five constituent organizations that make up the unified FMLN, but comparing the FMLN as a whole to the small super-revolutionary sects in EI Salvador that have split away from it. These groups claim to be genuine liberation forces who are critical of the FMLN’s willingness to explore a negotiated solution to the conflict. Applying LRS’ criteria of “supporting every force” who claims to stand for national liberation, one would have to extend solidarity to these groupings and deny recognition of vanguard status to the FMLN. The LRS knows that it would be political suicide to suggest such a course in the Central America solidarity movement, and suddenly the sacred principles it defends against supporters of the ANC mysteriously disappear.)
At this point the reader is undoubtedly wondering what possible political motivation is strong enough to produce such a tortuous exercise in illogicality and distortion. The answer, as with so much other drivel emanating from Maoism, is LRS’ view of the Soviet Union.
LRS itself admits that the Soviet Union lies at the heart of this issue – although, as with every other point in this controversy, it turns both facts and logic upside down. According to LRS, the reason for the growing trend to recognize the ANC is that some forces want to “gain more leverage for their pro-Soviet views.” The truth is, however, that the reason LRS opposes acknowledgment of the ANC’s vanguard status (and the reason it so bitterly attacked the MPLA a decade ago) is this Maoist sect’s intractable hostility to Soviet socialism. LRS simply cannot accept the fact that a liberation organization which enjoys close ties with the socialist community can effectively lead the fight for freedom from imperialism. The ideological corruption flowing from this anti-Soviet zealotry has become so pervasive that LRS will promote virtually any distortion of reality in its effort to pretend the facts fit its prejudices. And in the case of the ANC, LRS is thrown into a particular frenzy because that organization has an explicit strategic alliance with the South African Communist Party (SACP). While the ANC is a broad-based revolutionary organization, the SACP has played an instrumental role in its development and in articulating the specific interests of the South African working class within the multi-class national liberation front. And the SACP has a long history of defending proletarian internationalism, orthodox Marxism-Leninism and the socialist camp.
Thus LRS does in fact have good reason to be upset.
Facing the fact that parties within the mainstream of the international communist movement are playing leading roles in national liberation struggles undercuts everything LRS’ cherished “Mao Ze-Dong Thought” is based on and eliminates the very reason for the Maoist trend’s existence. This is precisely the dilemma that led to the demise of every “pro-China” U.S. sect except LRS over the last decade, and it is the time-bomb ticking away at the core of LRS’ line today.
As Karega Hart’s Unity article demonstrates, the LRS leadership has become skilled at building walls of obfuscation in a last-ditch attempt to prevent this bomb from going off. But it is a vain effort. The political imperatives of waging struggle against imperialism are pushing activists the world over to strive for ever-closer bonds between national liberation vanguards, progressive forces in the advanced capitalist countries and the socialist community. The trend toward explicit recognition of the ANC’s vanguard role in South Africa is part and parcel of this process, and it is irreversible and unstoppable. Ten years ago U.S. Maoism’s open slanders of the MPLA proved the beginning of that trend’s decline; today’s backs tabbing of the ANC may well prove its last sorry hurrah.
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Phil Gardiner is a member of the Line of March Black Liberation Commission active in the anti-apartheid movement.