Il Programma Comunista No. 14, 1958

The bleak bourgeois apologetics on the primacy of the white race does not stand up to the most timid criticism. We have already identified, in the previous article “Aspects of the African Revolution”, the natural and historical causes of the differentiated development of civilisation in the various continents. It is worthwhile, before going on to take a closer look at the African historical cycle, to add a few more considerations.

If one looks at the results, white civilisation certainly appears as a fast marcher. But what happens, if one compares European civilisation with the other forms of civilisation existing on the planet, bearing in mind the objective factors that have everywhere influenced the passage of the various historical epochs? It can then be seen, as we have already shown, that the white countries, especially Europe, have benefited from absolutely exceptional conditions in their frantic march from the prehistoric cave to the modern (and horrible) capitalist skyscraper. The relative mildness of the Mediterranean climate, which allowed the domestication of flora and fauna with minimum effort, and thus the enucleation of the first productive techniques, the fortunate geographical position, the ease of communication and mercantile and cultural exchange, represented for the development of European civilisation what in agrarian economics represents the differential income for farms that take advantage of more fertile land. Two agricultural holdings, although employing the same techniques, develop differently depending on the geological, hydrographical, geographical conditions of the land to be cultivated. Something similar happens for human civilisations, also because it is the discovery and use of agrarian techniques that marks the transition from prehistory.

It is clear then, taking into account the conditions of privilege enjoyed by Europe, that the speed of development of European civilisation becomes a superstition. The truth is that, as a result of the class struggle, the historical course of Europe has proceeded with exasperating slowness. In Europe, civilisation, i.e. the division into classes, i.e. the multiple historical epochs separating the atavistic communism of mankind from the new proletarian communism, has taken at least forty centuries. This is how long civilisation lasted, which at first benefited from a most fertile humus and later forced the rest of the world to sacrifice itself for its greatness, establishing the most infamous of all colonialisms. Talk about a speed prodigy! It took almost two thousand years to emerge from slavery. It then endured at least eight hundred years of feudalism, nor does it show any desire to do away with the capitalism that has been raging for at least four hundred years, if one takes as its starting point the formation of the world market brought about by the great geographical discoveries. This means, for the Marxist, that no race, like the white race, has suffered so long and so bitterly from the antagonistic class division of society. Where, then, is the claimed superiority of white civilisation? Is it ’superior’ a race that for interminable centuries has practised and suffered the horrible cannibalism of exploitation of man upon man, of class division, of social revenge?

What the boorish apologists for bourgeois racism fail to see, while it is a source of wonderment to scientific minds, what truly appears prodigious is the fact that peoples whom nature seemed to condemn to an eternal prehistory, inhabiting territories cut off from the rest of the world and subject to particularly harsh climatic and geological conditions, have succeeded in giving birth to superior forms of civilisation. It is in these cases that the vitality of communist forms of human coexistence appears in all its creative force, for it is in them that the Marxist thesis that only by organising itself communistically did the human species manage to survive in the epic struggle against nature is supported by incontrovertible evidence. Truly astonishing is the collective effort that was endured by the peoples of black Africa (and the pre-Columbian Americas) in building their civilisation, as they had to struggle with the most unfavourable conditions of the physical environment. If one really wanted to classify the civilisations of the continents, one would, in our opinion, have to give first place to those that lasted the shortest, that is, those that perpetuated the division into classes for the shortest time, shortening the interval of bloodshed and violence that separates primitive from modern communism. Using these criteria, certainly the deified European civilisation would rank last.

Crossroads of races

It cannot be repeated often enough that we are equal enemies of white racism and of any counter-racism developed by the nascent colonial bourgeoisies. Just as we believe that there is no individual ‘responsibility’ in the social process, we likewise reject those reactionary ideologies of race ‘responsibility’ that are at bottom the very essence of racism. The long age of class domination in Europe should certainly not be understood as the ‘fault’ of the white race. The phenomenon must be explained by historical, not psychological causes. The same must be said of non-European civilisations. We only intend to counter the phallic assertions of bourgeois racists and show how facts, dialectically considered, crush their bestial prejudices.

Another caveat we never fail to make is imposed by the attacks on us from other parts of the political horizon. The importance we recognise in the struggle of the anti-colonial movement, which for us is an authentic revolutionary movement, does not make us lose sight for a moment of the decisive function of the Euro-American proletariat in the future attack on the bourgeois State. The communist revolution can begin in countries of developed capitalism, as in those where the national-democratic revolution is of recent date. The Russian socialist revolution, which broke out in a backward country, remains irrefutable proof of this. But it is equally certain that the communist revolution will only be able to say it has definitively conquered the field and routed the capitalist enemy when it has demolished the great capitalist States of Europe and America.

That said, we can move on to the subject of the political struggle today in black Africa. But one feels the need, before descending to the examination of particular situations, to look at the entire history of the continent from above, elaborating on the data already provided. Establishing historical partitions for the sake of ease of study is not an easy matter, not even for a continent such as Africa, which has had a relatively less complicated historical existence due to the shorter duration of civilisation. It seems to us, however, that three great epochs can be distinguished: the first two already passed or in the process of being completed, the third still in its source state, i.e. revolutionary. They are: the epoch of the great continental monarchies, European colonial domination, and the national democratic revolution.

Of course, it is superfluous to warn that the dates and events, as is the case in any historical treatment, do not have the value of a clean break between different phases, since it often happens that dying epochs partly survive in living ones. In fact, the sociological atlas of Africa embraces all forms of social coexistence to the state, except socialism; powerful remnants of primitive, collectivist and anti-proprietary communism tenaciously resist, subsisting alongside private property and capitalist enterprise; old tribal orders perpetuate alongside the harsh contradictions generated by individualism and the molecularisation of the family, which are the basis of the capitalist economy. The task is also made difficult by the fact that the continent has long since lost its original racial homogeneity. This entails no minor difficulties, since the historical partitions we have delimited must also take into account the different social developments marked by populations of non-African origin.

While waiting for ethnographers to finally manage to find their way through the mass of collected data (and they will not be able to do so unless they free themselves from the influences of racist or crypto-racist or unconsciously racist ideologies that paralyses official science), it seems sufficient for our purposes to keep in mind that Africa rests on the dialectical coexistence of three great racial strains: 1) the ancient inhabitants of the continent, that is to say, the races and the numerous Melano-African sub-races, properly indigenous; 2) the Hamito-Semitic populations that include, in addition to the Arabs, the Berbers and the inhabitants of Mauritania and Western Sahara, the Mauri and the Tuareg; 3) migratory currents of European nations (Portuguese, Dutch, French, English).

In this way we have simplified the racial composition of the continent as much as possible, but for our purposes we could not do otherwise. It must be said, however, that the Ethiopian peoples, who, although part of black Africa, speak Semitic or Kushitic languages, are not included in the distribution drawn. It is because of these characteristics that ethnographers consider Ethiopia as a sort of link between black Africa and white Africa. It seems to us, to simplify, that we can say that we have a black Africa, where the predominant racial element is the Negro, and a white – or rather, non-black – Africa, in which either the Arab-Berber (Africa on this side of the southern boundary of the Sahara) or peoples of European origin (Algeria, South African Union) predominate racially and politically.

All this leads to an original situation that cannot be found elsewhere. Africa is the meeting point of the great human races. The picture widens if one considers that the peoples of Madagascar, of Malaysian origin, and the strong Indian minorities of southern Africa, bring other elements to the continent’s racial melting pot. The Communist International can only welcome this. Under imperialism and the nation-State regime, such conditions keep the fires of raw social contradictions burning permanently. But it is fair to predict that it is precisely in Africa, the classic land of the slave trade and the most infamous race domination, that the world communist revolution will draw its greatest results, in the application of the principles of internationalism. What is certain is that the thesis of an exclusively African Africa is inadmissible. The coexistence of races is now an indelible fact of the continent’s past and future history. The only solution to the problems posed by white racism can only be proletarian internationalism.

1) The great age of continental monarchies. We will have to return to this fascinating subject later, as it deserves much more space than we can give it now. We will content ourselves now with setting its limits.

This epoch, although having the same unhappy ending in the catastrophe caused by colonialism, moves from different conditions in the large areas north and south of the Sahara. For black Africa, the period beginning with the founding of the vast empire of Ghana (4th century AD) is a direct link, although the transition spans a long period of time, to the lowest forms of civilisation. For Mediterranean Africa, on the other hand, it happens at much more advanced stages of civilisation. The Muslim (Arab and Berber) monarchies that implanted themselves in Africa Minor and Egypt inherited the remnants of the Roman Empire, which in the meantime had passed into the hands of the military aristocracies of the barbarians and the empire of Byzantium.

This is the brightest period in the continent’s history. Great prospects for development opened up especially when the large African States of Western Sudan and Guinea came into contact with the Arabs and accepted, in many cases, Islamic evangelisation. In this age, private ownership of land and the means of social production is unknown; the very ancient tribal communism is the foundation of the social existence of the African peoples, north and south of the Sahara, being unaffected by the albeit flourishing trade that takes place across the Sahara and along the great rivers that furrow the Sudanese savannah; the production and consumption of economic goods are all within the sphere of collective labour; the centralised structure of the State does not contaminate the communist forms of the family.

It is certainly not the golden age. Bourgeois cynicism, always ready to sneer at ‘communist utopias’, did not fail to insist on the warfare that is now present in pre-colonial African society. But we know perfectly well that in all phases of civilisation, and even outside the communist tribe, war and the subjugation of the vanquished are widely used. But there is no doubt that the economic exploitation of man, unknown in primitive communism and introduced with civilisation, reaches the height of infamy and hypocrisy under capitalism. Certainly the bestial apartheid policy of the South African racists so close to the hearts of our bourgeoisie is much more repugnant than the slaughter of war committed by Zulu conquerors or the suppression inflicted by nomadic tribesmen on prisoners of war, which they cannot drag along in their transhumance.

The long colonial agony

2) European colonial rule. The era begins practically at the time of Vasco de Gama’s circumnavigation of Africa in 1497-98. It ends in the last decades of the last century, at the onset of the imperialist pathology of capitalism. Then opens the shameful series of colonial wars, which the great European powers waged against the African peoples in order to take complete possession of the continent. Three centuries, then. Three centuries of painful agony for Africa, tormented to death by the slave trade, gold hunting, forced labour, monoculture, the most recent, but no less burning scourge. But they are also three centuries of the courageous struggle of the African peoples, who never bowed to the arrogance of the invader and always stood up to him with the weapons they had.

European colonialism began with the conquest of the coasts and was inaugurated by the Portuguese. The Portuguese, in a way, traced, on a much larger scale and historical scope, the methods of ancient Phoenician colonialism, for which the establishments set up on foreign territories were to serve first and foremost as a port of call for their international shipping lines and as a hub for commercial traffic. Indeed, Vasco de Gama’s aforementioned expedition had the effect of establishing factories and farms on the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea, Angola and East Africa, from Mozambique to the mouths of the Juba River. Actually, already a few years earlier, other Portuguese navigators or those in the service of Portugal; had discovered and occupied the Cape Verde Islands, parts of the coast of the Gulf of Guinea and the archipelago facing it, including the famous islands of Sao Tomè, Principe, Fernando Poo, today very important for cocoa production. The occupation of Angola also dates from this period, but Portuguese imperialism only took shape after the circumnavigation of Africa. Only then did it clarify its historical objectives to itself: the crushing of Venice’s naval supremacy and domination over the routes to India. The control of Africa’s coastline was a secondary aim, in the ingenious conception of the Portuguese conquerors, such as Admirals Almeida and Albuquerque, which was fully revealed when the Arab navy, a business partner of the Venetian Republic, was caught in the Red Sea.

The ships of the Sultan of Egypt transported goods from the fabled Orient to the Red Sea ports, from which they reached Alexandria and other eastern Mediterranean ports by land, the exclusive hunting grounds of the Venetian fleets. The conquest of what today we would call ‘bases’, staggered along the African coast, was to be part of the great strategic plan to strangle rivals in the struggle for the monopoly of trade with the Indies and China. The occupation of Sofala, the building of a powerful fortress on the islet of Mozambique and above all the capture of Socotra at the entrance to the Red Sea and Ormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf paved the way for the Portuguese manoeuvre. At the Battle of Diu, in 1509, the fleet of the Arab-Venetian coalition suffered an irreparable defeat.

The centuries that followed, the 17th and 18th centuries, were the centuries of trafficking. Africa, which had served the Portuguese for the conquest of Asia, continued to play a secondary role, this time for the exploitation of the riches of America. Entire territories of Guyana, Angola and Mozambique were depopulated by force to provide slave labour for American plantations. It seems strange that colonialism was late in embarking on the direct exploitation of African resources, instead throwing itself impetuously onto the American continent, despite the unknowns of the Atlantic crossing. But this can also be explained by the fact that adventures of the kind that happened to Cortez in Pizzarro, who with a handful of men and a few arquebuses conquered enormous empires, could not happen in Africa. If the Europeans were reduced to the coastal strip of Africa for a long time, this was certainly not due to their own calculation, but to the fierce resistance put up by the indigenous States, which, although fallen, fought to the last against the invader.

Penetration into the interior came very late. It took place in the last decades of the 19th century. The European bourgeoisies then had to decide to undertake the inglorious enterprise. It was the time when the great industrial monopolies and banking consortiums of the imperialist phase were being formed. The exasperated exploitation of the metropolitan labour force was causing a surplus of capital that yearned for redeeming investments. Under such conditions, the perpetuation of extra-capitalist economies and social aggregates in Africa and Asia began to represent in the eyes of the European bourgeoisie an assault on the sacred laws of Capital. It was then that European domination, which had long remained entrenched on the coasts, turned to forcing its way into the heart of the continent. It must be said to the imperishable glory of the African peoples that there are no other examples of colonial wars that cost the invaders so dearly. The indigenous States defended themselves valiantly and for a long time, forcing the European powers to withdraw their military expeditions. Certainly, in courage and heroism, they proved far superior to the colonialist bandits, who, with overwhelming forces and deadly weaponry, attacked them from all sides.Particularly bloody were the wars waged by the British against the Zulu nation in 1878-79. Egypt fell into British hands in 1882. A year earlier, France had annexed Tunisia. The Congo, which since 1885 had been proclaimed an ‘independent State’ to be placed under the sovereignty of the Belgian Crown, could only be occupied, in 1892-94, through a two-year military campaign. The island of Madagascar, on which France had imposed a protectorate since 1885, was brutally occupied in 1895, after about a year of war. For their part, the British grabbed in 1895-1900, not without encountering fierce resistance, the territory that was later to be called Rhodesia; the conquest was to result in the piratical war against the two Boer republics (1899), which became colonies of the British Crown. In the same period – the last decade of the century – France was attacking the last indigenous States of Guinea, wanting to have the Guinean colonies join the extreme southern offshoots of Algeria, conquered since 1830. Fierce was the resistance of the Kingdom of Dahomey, which had been founded at the beginning of the 17th century and was subdued after a series of wearisome military campaigns. In the general collapse perished the last great Sudanese State, that of the Mossi, founded eight centuries earlier in the Upper Volta regions.

The colonial conquest of Africa lasted, as we can see, for three centuries, divided into two distinct periods: the occupation of the coastal strip and, only at the end of the last century, the expulsion of the interior. We have taken Vasco de Gama’s expedition as the opening event of this era. Is there an event after which it can be considered closed? We believe it can be pointed to the Battle of Omdurman, which took place on 2 September 1898, and which practically ended the Mahdist revolt against the British. Chronologically, the colonial conquest continued after Omdurman, if we bear in mind that Morocco came under French protectorate in 1912, only to be completely ‘pacified’ in 1934. But historically the French campaign against Morocco, which never achieved definitive results, can already be considered to be in the transition phase to the new era of the national-democratic revolution. This applies, all the more so, to the ephemeral Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935-1940).

The battle of Omdurman, during which 11,000 fighters of the Mahdist army died and 16,000 were wounded, truly closed an epoch in African history, because in the Mahdist movement, which had its epicentre in eastern Sudan, the living forces of white Muslim and black Africa converged. Imperialism had its intellectual servants hurl all sorts of slanderous accusations against these revolutionaries, who, after the British occupation of Egypt and the prone policy of collaboration with the occupier carried out by the Turkish feudalism that dominated the country, had transferred the centre of resistance to imperialist aggression to the Sudan. It is true, however, that the last battle against the European invasion was fought on the field of Omdurman. It closed one era and opened another.

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Il Programma Comunista No.15, 1958

In the previous episode we distinguished three great epochs in the history of Africa, but for reasons of space we could only deal with the first two: the period that we have defined as the continental monarchies, which arose mainly in western Sudan in a period of time that coincides more or less with the European Middle Ages, and that of colonial domination, which began with the oceanic explorations that opened the era of capitalism in Europe. It remains for us to deal with the third great African epoch, namely the national-democratic revolution that has been shaking the Dark Continent since the end of World War II, in conjunction with and as a consequence of the similar Asian upheavals.

Africa’s awakening will undoubtedly exert a profound influence on the historical evolution of the entire world. No one can foresee all the consequences, but it is certain as of now that the modernisation and industrialisation of the continent will cause great upheavals in the economies of the capitalist States, which will soon be faced with the problem of the supply of raw materials and outlet markets, which they have so far solved by mutilating the African economy and making it an appenitent of the industrial monopolies of Europe and America. The African revolution will fill with dismay the bourgeois world that has come to believe the legends and prejudices it has put into circulation against Africans. Africa has a past of civilisation and progress behind it. When the colonial obstacles are broken (and the long-suppressed energies of nations that perhaps more than any other have had to fight against nature finally have a chance to explain themselves), reactionaries the world over will have to register a crushing defeat.

The revolution on the march

3) Observing the effects of historical upheaval is easy. The reality is there for anyone to see. It is quite different to search for the causes that led to the upheaval. Marxists who aim to ‘modify’, rather than explain, history, cannot avoid studying the causality of historical evolution. As in the physical world, those who know the causes of the occurrence of events can influence their course. It is not superfluous to reiterate the fundamental position of Marxism, whereby the conscious historical agent is the class party, i.e. the theoretical and political vanguard of the class. But we do not need to deal with that question now. The call to it is forced upon us, as we must do for other questions, by the need to react to the tendencies of certain people who prefer, in order not to deal seriously with anti-colonial movements, to deny them any importance and consider them as a reflection of the politics of the great imperialist States that dominate the world stage. The movement in colonial and former colonial countries exists, is real and effective. The revolutionary party cannot ‘change’ it in the Marxist sense because it is prevented from doing so by the current power relations between the classes. But neither could it do so in an inverted situation, if it did not study the mechanism as of now.

What causes, what historical factors set the African national revolution in motion? This question must be answered first of all by highlighting the great tradition of resistance and struggle that African peoples have conducted over three centuries, against the invasion and domination of white slavers and modern capitalists, their worthy descendants, even though they were up against not only the armies of the world’s most aggressive States, but also the presumptuous condemnation of the world’s bourgeois intellectuals, always ready to preach about the primitiveness of the black race and the inevitability of white tutelage. We have dealt with this subject extensively, naturally within the limits allowed by the nature of this work, in the section devoted precisely to the period of colonial rule in Africa.

We now want to deal with the objective conditions that contributed to unblocking the situation on the continent and paving the way for the national movement. What events that took place outside Africa and originated from relations existing outside it, profoundly influenced the course of events, which were to lead to the first achievements of independence? Certainly, foremost among them, the imperialist war.

The second imperialist war provided a confirmation of all that was confusedly stirring in the consciences of the politically more evolved part of the African nations. The extreme social backwardness, the disheartenment of long centuries of harsh oppression, the despair that followed the failure of all attempts to throw off the colonial yoke, had inculcated in the Africans themselves the prejudice, cleverly spread by the class propaganda of the white rulers, that assumed as truth the inability of the African races to govern themselves outside white tutelage. Even today this feeling of inferiority and mistrust peeps out in the programmes and actions of certain African political groupings that seem to be frightened by the idea of taking the government of colonial-ruled territories into their own hands. For too long colonialism had cunningly exploited the differences in language and social customs, the antagonisms between the farming peoples and the herding peoples, between the nomads and the sedentary, and for too long it had preached that such contradictions represented an insurmountable obstacle to the granting of self-government, so that African peoples could free themselves from such prejudices by independent intellectual effort. But the colonialists’ whole castle of lies collapsed miserably when the imperialist war extended to Africa.

What else did the imperialist war demonstrate to the Africans, except that the much fabled civilisation of the white race, presented as the serene order-giver and regulator of the coloured races, was itself torn apart by contradictions far more irremediable and deadly than the internal contrasts of African societies? The white nations that twice set the world ablaze, each time causing tremendous carnage and fearful devastation, could no longer, in the eyes of Africans, play the charade of racism. More importantly, the imperialist conflict broke the united front of colonialism, which had always appeared united, whatever happened in the rest of the world. In fact, the African peoples had to witness not only the savage melee between nations belonging to the same white race, who came to massacre each other ferociously on African soil, but even the splits that occurred in the camp of the colonial powers. This was not enough. At a certain turning point in the conflict, the colonial authorities of a great imperialist power (France) came to take sides on the opposite sides of the civil war. Even less would have sufficed to restore the Africans’ self-confidence and induce them to give consistency of political programme to the long cherished aspirations for independence.

To fully appreciate the profound repercussions that the Second World War had on African politics, one must bear in mind that, before it, Africa had not seen a war fought on the continent between occupying powers. Of course, we mean the last two centuries, although one can go back much further in time and get the same result. Africa was used to seeing the white nations all ganging up against her. There had been no lack in the troubled history of African colonialism of glaring instances of rivalry between European States, such as the dispute that erupted in the first decade of this century between France and Germany over Morocco or, even earlier, between France and Italy over Tunisia. But never before had it come to armed conflict.

The Anglo-Boer war of 1899 itself, although it confronted white States, had been a typical war of colonial aggression. The Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers who had settled in southern Africa for over a century, had broken all ties with their homeland of origin, and had transformed themselves, by exterminating the Cafri, into a native nation.

It seemed, at the end of the last century, that the two hegemonic colonial powers, Great Britain and France, launched in the race for conquest on African soil, had to clash over disagreements in the division of the spoils. On 10 July 1898, a French expedition occupied Fascioda on the Nile. It was clear that France intended to take advantage of the Mahdist uprising, which at that time was facing a supreme confrontation with the Anglo-Egyptian coalition to penetrate eastern Sudan. But the ambitious plan was thwarted by British troops rushing in, having recently finished the massacre of Mahdist revolutionaries at Omdurman. A serious diplomatic incident ensued and it looked as if it would come to conflict; France then preferred to abandon the disputed location.

Evidently, the common interest of the powers in avoiding a conflict that would have benefited the forces of the African revolt contributed to the peaceful resolution of the Fashoda Incident. Any good racist will always be ready to explain that it is not good for the white masters to quarrel in the presence of the negro servant.

Even the First World War, which came to change the geography of colonialism by suppressing German colonisation, had notable repercussions on African politics. Military operations against the Germans, who had remained bottled up in Tanganyika and Togo, did take place, but one can in no way compare them to the gigantic battles that were to fill the whole of Africa with clamour during the Second World War, nor did the Italian conquest of Ethiopia break with tradition. The fascist press, which was incurably addicted to imperial megalomania, took up the theme of a Roman crusade against the ‘perfidious Albion’, but the Italo-British disagreement never left the terrain of Geneva diplomacy. In fact, Fascist imperialism had to contend, in its march towards Addis Ababa, only with the extreme precariousness of the financial and military resources of the government in Rome.

The decisive turning point came at the Second World War. Then a whole past collapsed inexorably. The White Powers that had managed, in spite of their tremendous internal quarrels, to maintain a united front against the colonised peoples, violated the hitherto respected tradition. For four very long years, the opposing armies advanced and retreated in the northern belt, as well as in the very heart of Africa, exterminating each other with the superextra weapons manufactured by the proud white technique. And the coloured races were invited to take part in the slaughter or participated indirectly by working in the rear. But all this was still nothing in the face of what was to come in the aftermath of the military defeat of France, the dominant colonial power in Africa. Following the Franco-German armistice, something unprecedented happened in Africa, which the African peoples had never imagined could happen. Britain and France, having now forgotten about Fashoda, immediately entered into conflict. The cannon shots that on 3 July 1940, the British Home Fleet fired at the French naval squadron, sheltered in the bay of Mers el-Kébir, near Oran, having failed to surrender, reverberated from one end of the continent to the other. We now know that they closed an entire era, the era of the colonisation of Africa.

Starting with the bombing of Mers el-Kébir, it became clear that the powers that dominated in Africa had irrevocably ceased to be the powers that dominated the world; and if their world hegemony collapsed, there was no longer any reason to believe that their domination of Africa would last forever. Revolutions have no other origin. The decadence of the ruling classes begins long before the oppressed classes become aware of it; only selected political minorities come to acquire it. Then, all of a sudden, grandiose events erupt that have the clarity and eloquence of proven truths and then everyone understands what only a few knew.

In September of that same year 1940, De Gaullist forces attempted to take control of the naval squadron in Dakar, but the coup failed. Instead, it served to exacerbate the crisis of colonialism, showing Africans how French power was divided into two opposing political camps. Pétain’s France was pitted against De Gaulle’s France, and the split in metropolitan territory widened to encompass the colonial empire. The colonialist authorities of French Equatorial Africa and West Africa, Madagascar, and possessions and mandates on other continents followed the De Gaulleists and the Vichy government in part. As is well known, the struggle between the opposing factions culminated in Syria and Lebanon, which had remained in the hands of officials loyal to the Vichy government since the armistice. In June 1941, an Anglo-Gaullist expeditionary force from Palestine invaded Syria. Also attacked by British troops returning from having bloodily suppressed the revolt of Iraqi nationalists, the Pétainist authorities ended up demanding an armistice. Madagascar, which was also held by the Pétainists, was invaded and occupied by the British between 5 and 7 May 1942.

In November, the Allied landings in Casablanca, Oran and Algiers opened another chapter in the French civil war. The Pétainist forces garrisoning Algeria and Morocco counter-attacked the Allied expeditionary force, but dispersed after only a few hours of fighting. From then on, Africa witnessed yet another reversal of the political and military front, as the former representatives of the Vichy government deserted the camp and, with timely double-crossing, competed with the De Gaullists who enjoyed American support. The sordid struggle was to end with the murder of Admiral Darlan, who had represented the Vichy government in North Africa until the Allied invasion. Thus ended the glorious ‘civilisation française’. Everything that happened afterwards in the empire, and that would happen afterwards, could not be explained, if one did not evaluate the consequences produced by the imperialist war, which gave the exact measure of the decadence of the colonialist powers.

If the world conflict had unequivocally shown the military and political degradation of Great Britain and France, the post-war period was to lay bare their financial impotence. London and Paris, which had traditionally headed international finance, were joining the ranks of the debtor States vis-à-vis the dollar.

The colonisation of the colonisers

An article by Lord Hailey, which appeared in the May-June issue of the magazine ‘Africa’, provides interesting information about ‘developments in Africa over the last 20 years’. The author is not a Marxist, but recognises the importance of ‘those developments of an economic and social character which in the history of the world have so often preceded, if not directly provoked, important and revolutionary changes in the political field’. Clearly he is an eclectic if he believes that the causes of revolutionary movements can also be found outside the economic and social terrain. But we are more interested in the findings of his studies than in the criteria he uses. After outlining the existing differences between Asia and Africa and drawing the just conclusion that African evolution is hindered by the absence of numerically developed nations, such as exist in Asia, he writes: “This does not mean, however, that Africa continues to occupy the position it occupied, vis-à-vis the rest of the world, in the years before the Second World War”.

What, then, are the economic and social changes brought about by the war? The author makes a quick examination of the conditions existing at the time in the various African territories. In some countries south of the Sahara, there has been a considerable increase in industrial activity. More drastic changes took place in the South African Union. The mining and agricultural industries, classically prevalent in colonial or backward countries, have moved behind the manufacturing industry, which now makes a greater contribution to the national income than the first two. The social consequences of ‘Afrikaaner’ industrialisation are important. Lord Hailey, though he shies away from saying so, provides a materialistic explanation for the racism that rages in South Africa. He observes that increasing industrialisation is forcing entrepreneurs to employ ever-increasing numbers of Africans, and even to give them jobs as semi-skilled and even specialised workers.

Evidently, South African capitalists cannot prevent the emergence of an educated and evolved African proletariat, which can no longer be treated like colonial slaves, but they are concerned, like their colleagues all over the world, to prevent the political evolution of their exploited. And this is very well served by racial segregation, the regime of ‘apartheid’, based on the physical separation of the races. Of course, Lord Hailey uses different language and certainly rejects the ‘ideologies’ of capitalist exploitation, but he cannot avoid explaining the racist phenomenon by economic causes when he writes: “This development (the formation of the

indigenous wage-earner) is important, and it would seem that the fear of its political consequences is precisely the reason for the urgency of giving practical effect to the doctrine of segregation, which the nationalist party shows itself to have”. That seems to be enough, doesn’t it?

So at the head of African industrialisation is South Africa. But also in the Belgian Congo and the Federation of Rhodesia there has been ‘remarkable industrial development’. In all three of these countries, industrial expansion has resulted in ‘an almost spectacular increase in urbanism’. That is, the changes taking place in the mode of production have a direct effect on social conditions. In spite of those who daily discover the overcoming of Marxism, the African revolution continues according to materialist dialectical evolution. For three centuries, the Catholic Church has worked to evangelise Africa, i.e. to change its consciousness, but here the mentality of the ‘natives’ really changes as soon as the old relations of production change. “Even this (the phenomenon of urbanism),” writes our illustrious author, “is significant, because it is corollary to a vast fracture of indigenous customs, and the substitution of new associations for the old traditional ties”.

Particularly notable is a passage from the article we are quoting, and a rather lengthy one, given the space available.

Lord Hailey writes: ‘In a considerable part of East and West Africa industrial development is less marked, but there has been a very significant change in the rural economy. Higher prices have led to the increasing substitution of production for family consumption with crops for sale, and this has resulted in another development: the formation of a hitherto little-known class in the African economy, namely that of the “petty bourgeois”, entrepreneur, trader or commercial employee. And it was precisely this class that gave Asia the most active advocates of political change’.

(We interrupt the quotation for a moment. It is clear that the English scholar has understood what certain people who claim to teach Marxism have failed to understand. Have we not always argued, on the track of Leninism, that the national revolution in the colonies is a democratic movement resting on social classes that have arisen from the decomposition of the old relations, i.e. the radical petty bourgeoisie and the nascent proletariat? Our sour critics claim, on the other hand, that the colonies have only a ‘geographical’ value and that everything that happens in them, even an armed revolt against the occupying powers, is... pure reflection of the rivalries of international imperialism. Evidently, they must think that the formation of new social classes is a matter for... employment offices).

‘In the rural economy, another significant change has taken place. Over vast areas the traditional community land tenure is now giving way to a system of individual land ownership. The consequent limitation of the number of people who continue to have landed interests should tend to produce in Africa, as it produced in Europe in its time, an availability of stable, and therefore more specialised, labour in place of unstable, i.e. seasonal, labour.’

This explains all the bubbling ideological and political movements that make people exclaim: ‘Africa is on the move’. The world war, by tightening relations between Africa and the rest of the world, brought colonialism into deep crisis. As the grip that prevented its deployment loosened, new energies gushed from the social subsoil. The old productive relations, the archaic social structures, the way of life and thinking of the old colonial Africa underwent a seismic shake-up. From the remnants of the abyss has risen modern commerce, from primitive agrarian communism, which had played a glorious function in the past in allowing African civilisations to flourish, has risen small landed property, which is forcible and counter-revolutionary under developed capitalism (and let it be said to the eternal infamy of Italian ‘communists’ who, in order to gain votes, preach the allotment of land) but is a propulsive element in the phases of transition to capitalism. Certainly, it would be preferable for associative, not individual, forms of land ownership to replace the primitive agricultural community, but such a transformation is possible on the condition that political power is in the hands of a proletarian party that assumes the leadership of the democratic revolution. Unfortunately, this condition, at least for now, is absent in Africa: the political leadership of the revolutionary movement remaining in the hands of parties of revolutionary democracy. However, it is undeniable that the African political revolution implies and expresses a profound social revolution.

In the light of these facts, the crisis of colonialism appears in all its irremediability. The new classes that are emerging in Africa can progress and develop (this applies to both the petty-bourgeoisie and the proletariat), provided that the economic and social process that has opened up reaches its stages, one after the other. These new classes personify the tendencies towards industrial progress, towards industrialisation. And that the colonialist authorities cannot help but worry about this is proven by the fact that governments churn out projects for large industrial enterprises at a steady stream, which regularly remain on paper. The example provided by France is edifying.

There is a lot of talk in Paris about the industrial branches to be set up in Africa, the extraction sites of certain minerals and the hydroelectric power stations to be set up along the continent’s great waterways. The oil of Gabon, the phosphates of Senegal and Togo, the manganese of the Middle Congo are on everyone’s lips. Recently, it has been discovered that the Sahara is an enormous reservoir of raw materials, and the talk has also turned to iron from Tindouf, methane from Aïn Salah, oil from Hassi Messaoud, coal from Colomb-Béchar, platinum and diamonds from Hoggar. But the industrial exploitation at the modern level of these potential riches is only conceivable on the condition that the necessary industrial equipment is created, and above all that the infrastructure is put in place (roads, railways, oil pipelines, power lines, logistics services, etc.). This is countered by the capital shortage that France suffers from, it is said. And one often hears it repeated by the good people who enjoy it, figuring that colonial countries organised into independent States would inherit the same problems that colonialism failed to solve. The truth is that the greatest obstacle to the industrialisation of the colonies is precisely the colonial regime, which is founded on customs unions and ‘imperial preferences’. conceived for the sole purpose of preserving the dualism: industrial metropolis – agricultural colony.

The recourse to foreign capital (although still at the draft stage) that one would like to associate with African investments, rather than with the shortage of national capital, is explained by the capitalists’ stubborn decision to preserve the economic criteria governing relations between the metropolis and the colonies. The French publicists, who call on the State to obtain the financial contribution of foreign bankers to implement African industrialisation plans, are careful not to call for the abolition of the systems that allow the metropolitan industrial monopolies to sell their products to the colonies at prices higher than the international market. The French confederation of industry would never allow this; it wants two completely opposite things: to fulfil the feverish needs for progress of African peoples who wish to modernise and industrialise their countries, and to preserve the protectionist trappings that are precisely the cause of colonial backwardness. As usual, the means used to silence the criticism of the metropolitan government by the politically more evolved part of the colonies is the miter policy of the racist colonists in Algiers.

Contradiction of contradictions, France, while tending to scrounge money from foreign banks, brings out De Gaulle’s paranoid nationalism. Since it is clear that Paris is conducting colonial repression in Algeria, Cameroon and elsewhere, thanks to dollars lent by the United States, the world is witnessing a kind of enfeoffment of colonialist powers to American finance. Those who have colonised half the world ask no better than to be colonised by American plutocrats! It is the age of colonisation of the colonisers. But the arrogant French bourgeoisie does not like to be held against it, so it stages the Sérigny-De Gaulle comedy of irreducible nationalism.

* * *

Il Programma Comunista No.16, 1958

To what does the African revolution tend? Having discussed certain important questions related to past history and the social changes taking place on the continent, we believe it is appropriate to conclude this paper by attempting to answer this question. It should probably be better posed in the following terms: is there an ‘African way out’ of pre-capitalism i.e. a different course from that followed by the anti-feudal revolutions that took place up to 1871 in Europe and America and from 1917 to the present day in Eastern Europe and Asia? Or, do the social energies released by the unblocking of the old colonial pre-capitalist relations potentially tend, depending on objective conditions, towards different historical goals? Put differently: is it to be considered inevitable that the process of social revolution now underway in the Afro-Asian countries will result in types of societies qualitatively equal to those represented by the capitalist States of Europe and America?

This question, which we have already answered to some extent in the preceding paragraphs, cannot be answered by relying on the ideological pronouncements and programmatic platforms, both of which are almost always insufficient, that are flaunted by African political parties. If anything, such material can be used to measure the degree to which the subjective forces of the upheaval are aware of its real limits and possibilities.

On the contrary, in order to see clearly, it is necessary to reflect on the objective conditions that are destined to determine Africa’s historical evolution in the future, namely: 1) the degree of development of the productive forces; 2) the situation of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the international proletariat.

We have already established that there is in the African continent an accumulation of quantitative changes of an economic-social order that prelude the revolutionary upheaval typical of pre-capitalist countries. It is now a question of seeing in which historical epoch the African revolution will take place: whether in the epoch of capitalism, which is currently the predominant social form in the world, or in the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat, currently absent everywhere. There is a third alternative. It is possible that the Afro-Asian revolution that is in its initial phase today will intersect with or be joined and overtaken by the socialist revolution of the international proletariat before it concludes its historical cycle.

Put in these terms, it is clear that the Afro-Asian revolution has several outlets in front of it depending on the development of the class struggle in the developed capitalist countries. If the communist revolution delays and bourgeois domination lasts in the world, it can only follow, whatever the leaders of the African movements say, the old ‘way’ of the anti-feudal revolutions (old from the point of view of universal history, new and revolutionary for African history). That is, it will not be able to fail to build, no matter whether in the legal forms of private property or State enterprise, wage-earning industrialism, i.e. capitalism. If, on the other hand, the upheaval were to coincide with the outbreak of the communist revolution in the capitalist metropolises and the political leadership of the anti-colonial movement were to be in the hands of the African proletariat, it would then be possible to take a different path and escape the condemnation of the construction of capitalist industry by entering the new planned economy of socialism. It would then be the case of the anti-feudal and anti-bourgeois ‘double revolution’ that Marx and Engels in 1847 and Lenin in 1917 expected to see grafted onto the trunk of the Germanic and Russian revolutions respectively.

For the degree of consistency of the African proletariat, which we will discuss in a moment, it seems to us, unless the brutal Anglo-French colonialism lasts longer than can be foreseen, that the Afro-Asian revolution will only in the middle of its cycle intersect with the revolution of the international proletariat. But what is really interesting, for the political attitude that the Marxist party must maintain in the face of the anti-colonial revolution, is to be able to reject out of hand the facile arguments of certain people who call themselves Marxist and revolutionary, only because they take a childish position of ultra-leftism in national and colonial affairs. They do not know how to make the proper distinction between the stages of a historical process, and confuse ‘what tends towards capitalism’, i.e. a movement of interests seeking to get rid of feudal (or colonial) fetters, and capitalism, i.e. the closing of the process. They treat with the same criterion the perfected productive and political machines that answer to the names of the great capitalist and imperialist States of Europe and America, and not a social order or a mode of production, a ‘tendency’ to reach that degree of development. Worse still, they are capable of making such a distinction. It means that they are convinced that nothing can prevent the movement that began in Asia and Africa from reaching the capitalist goal. In both cases they are cheap dialecticians and revolutionaries saturated with doubts.

Our critics can do nothing but monotonously repeat that the Afro-Asian revolution is ‘entirely different’ from the anti-feudal revolutions that the ‘Communist Manifesto’ declared they should support. Although they have never substantiated their claims with serious arguments, there is no doubt that there is a substantial difference between today’s revolutionary movements that tend to move away from colonial pre-capitalism and the anti-feudal revolutions of the past. It is a difference that concerns precisely the final outlets of the two orders of revolutions. But it is precisely because the colonial anti-feudal revolution takes place in the epoch of imperialism and increases the historical possibilities of the intersection of the national-democratic revolution with the proletarian-communist revolution, that the Marxist and Leninist doctrine of proletarian support for democratic revolutions remains fully conterminous.

Let us try to clarify the terms of the problem. How do the anti-feudal revolutions of the 16th, 18th and 19th centuries coincide with the anti-colonial revolutions of today? In the fact that in both cases the movement tends to create the nation State as an instrument of struggle against the semi-feudal and pre-feudal orders. How do they differ? In the fact that the Cromwellian and Jacobin revolutions had an exclusive outlet: capitalism; whereas the anti-feudal revolutions that broke out, when the proletariat was already constituted as a class, around 1848, and, a fortiori, those that take place today, can ‘pass over’ to the proletariat, i.e. can flow into the international communist revolution.

Will the liberation of Africa, which seems more difficult than the liberation of Asia, precede the communist revolution in the capitalist metropolises? Will it coincide with it, giving rise to the double anti-feudal and anti-bourgeois revolution? Or will it be joined by the international communist revolution when it has already completed part of its cycle? Certainly none of these three historical possibilities can be ruled out. It is to be hoped that the Anglo-French-Belgian-Portuguese colonialism that holds Africa in an iron grip, excluding of course the independent States of the Arab belt and Guinea, will crack as soon as possible. But it cannot be ruled out that the long colonial agony will be prolonged for a long time yet, as the political inadequacy of African independence and nationalist movements makes one fear. What is of interest above all, as we said, is the position Marxism takes vis-à-vis the movement. One thing is certain: to be absolutely thrown out and rejected as the fruit of pure amateurism is the position of our critics, for whom, we do not know by what supernatural prophetic virtue, the African and Asian evolutionary cycle is completely taken for granted.

For us, who strive to apply the methods of scientific prediction, the capitalist society (not that factory, or that refinery, or those dry docks) of Asia and Africa is a distant link in the evolutionary chain that is now painstakingly beginning to intertwine. Since there are causes – the local socio-economic situation and the general conditions of the class struggle – that determine these effects, we believe that a new evolutionary process will originate if and when one of these causes changes, namely the global domination of capital. For our critics, on the other hand, Afro-Asian capitalism has not only already emerged from its uterine phase and come of age, but has already arrived at the Afro-Asian ‘1871’. Can one then regard these people as serious followers of dialectical materialism?

Support for the national-democratic revolutions in the colonies must be given precisely because the revolutionary cycle is far from over, having just begun. In the period leading up to 1871, the year of the bloody repression of the proletarian Paris Commune, the European democratic revolutionary movement had not yet reached its epilogue; capitalism had not yet come to subjugate the entire field of the social economy; the class domination of the bourgeoisie, which still had to wrest away the remaining positions of the ousted classes and defend itself against the hints of feudal restoration, was not yet an irreversible historical fact. For these reasons, the communists supported democratic republican insurrections. Insofar as they aimed to bury the past, they had a revolutionary content. This support was withdrawn and the proletariat’s insurrectionary energies were reserved exclusively for the communist revolution, when it became clear, from the mountains of dead raised by the executioners of the Commune, that the period of democratic revolution was over in western Europe and capitalism had conquered absolute domination of the State and society.

The same is happening in the former colonies. The new regimes live under the constant threat of a colonial restoration, as the recent Anglo-American armed attack on Lebanon and Jordan, the American occupation of Formosa and many other events in international politics demonstrate. An indigenous bourgeois class is lacking in them ‘at present’, the same industrialisation that proceeds amidst a thousand difficulties is more discussed than implemented. In other words, the withdrawal of the colonialist occupier only marked the beginning of the democratic revolution. That is, the historical conditions under which the European communists worked in the last century and the Russian Bolsheviks in the first two decades of this century are repeated.

To conclude the argument, there are two ways to prevent the formation of capitalism in backward countries: one revolutionary, the other reactionary. Either one works with a view to blocking the development of new economic forces and maintaining the old social relations, and this is the task of the feudal reaction allied to imperialism, or one tends to ‘skip’ capitalism and link the evolution of backward countries to triumphant socialism in the industrialised countries: and this is the work of a revolutionary Marxist. We are sure that the international communist revolution will break out in time to allow the Afro-Asian peoples to skip, if not all, at least the deadliest stages of capitalism. But this can only happen on the condition that communists, denying all support to the parties of rotten Euro-American capitalism, work ‘within’ the Afro-Asian revolution, applying Marxist principles.

Pre-capitalist society and the proletariat

It was necessary to preface this with a statement of Marxist positions, because we must now deal with African political movements and judge which of them have advanced positions and which others follow insufficient directives. And let us leave to our critics the pseudo-Marxist quirk of dismissing all anti-colonial movements as a bloc. Having reaffirmed that Marxism, in the face of revolution in backward and colonial countries, sets its position in coherence with the principle of the ‘double revolution’ or in anticipation of the future fusion of the national revolutionary movement with the greater and more decisive battle of the proletarian communist revolution, we can safely make political choices between the parties and programmes of the anti-colonialist camp. It is clear that our support, even if it is currently only theoretical adherence, must be given to the movements, whose action favours, no matter if unconsciously, the struggle that the Afro-Asian proletariat is destined to conduct within the new class societies that are being formed on the ruins of colonialism.

Before doing so, it will be useful to point out another important characteristic of anti-colonial movements: the extreme numerical weakness of the indigenous proletariat. This is especially true for Africa. Of course, the comparison is to be made with other social areas that had in common with the Afro-Asian peoples a delayed social development, whereby they were able to emerge from pre-capitalism, while the extreme phase of capitalism had already taken over in the major States of the world. As a term of comparison, nothing can serve better than tsarist Russia and, subordinately, imperial China. Indeed, in both of these countries the working class was born, even before the bourgeois revolution matured, and reached a political maturity that made it possible for it, despite its numerical depletion, to take over the leadership of the revolutionary movement.

Our movement, in its fundamental theoretical treatises on the Russian revolution, gave a comprehensive explanation of the formation of the working class in the Russian pre-capitalist social environment. It has been proved in it how the tsarist State itself, which was founded on social classes whose interests dictated the preservation of pre-capitalist forms of production, was induced, for reasons of military security. to introduce into Russia the modern means of communication that are the basis of industrialisation (railways, telegraphs, etc.) and certain industrial branches indispensable to the production of modern armaments. In other words, it was the State that introduced capitalism into Russia several decades before Stalinist tyranny, the ruthless executor of the second wave of State capitalism, brought the industrialisation of the vast country to a head. The revolutions of 1905 and 1917, in which the proletariat superbly replaced the cowardly bourgeoisie, victoriously leading the terrible struggle against tsarist reaction, stand as proof of how a proletariat numerically weak, but armed with Marxist theory, can take over the leadership of the anti-feudal revolution and even go beyond it, paving the way for the socialist revolution, which triumphed in Russia in October 1917, had to submit to the capitalist counter-revolution of Stalinism, which sordid Khrushchevism is continuing, this does not invalidate, but proves the validity of the theory of the ‘double revolution’. This can be initiated and conducted validly by the meagre proletariat of the pre-capitalist country, but it can only win on condition that the proletariats of the capitalist countries seize power. In the final analysis, Stalinism won in Russia because capitalism managed in the first post-war period to resist and endure in the rest of the world.

Imperial China, another major country in terms of physical size and historical tradition, but lagging hugely behind in the path of capitalist revolution, also experienced a similar phenomenon. However, the drastic undermining of the authority of the State, besieged on all sides by imperialist marauders and subjected to the mortifying regime of ‘unequal treaties’, was to prevent the first elements of capitalism from reaching proportions comparable to those in Russia. The capitalist factory entered the country only a few years before the Republican revolution broke out. And the fact that the Chinese revolution has had a tormented development, made up of laborious advances and sudden disasters, until it blossomed into the current pseudo-communist regime, is mainly explained by the extreme numerical weakness of the proletariat and its insufficient political preparation. However, the emergence of a combative and resolute communist party immediately after the founding of the Third International and the great struggles it sustained over an entire thirty years, demonstrate how much of a part the proletariat played in the Chinese anti-feudal revolution, in spite of the revisionist degeneration of the Maoist ruling bureaucracy.

Compared to Russia and China, the other anti-feudal revolutions that have taken place over the past half-century have had a completely different course. What has been missing in them, as a driving and guiding element, is the socialist proletariat.

This was especially the case in countries subjected to colonial rule and forced incorporation into large imperialist States. The main cause of this phenomenon is to be found in the fact that the historical element which, as we have seen, deterministically brings about important changes in pre-bourgeois society, namely the independent State, has disappeared. What we are saying may seem strange to non-dialectical minds, but it is a never-violated law of historical evolution that decadent societies themselves produce the explosive forces that will determine their collapse. Colonialism, and its feudal allies-servants, have not been able to prevent the emergence in the colonies and backward countries of new classes, such as the commercial and intellectual petty bourgeoisie – and we have seen that in Africa this phenomenon is in full development – but the objective conditions of colonial domination have allowed the industrial proletariat to develop less rapidly, Indeed, in many regions of Africa the industrial wage-earner is almost entirely absent. Certainly this would not have happened if colonial domination had not wiped out all forms of independent statehood for a long time, replacing the old local power apparatuses with its rapacious peripheral bureaucracies, emanations of metropolitan capitalist interests.

It is worthwhile, at the risk of repeating ourselves, to return to this question. The State, which is the organ of the exercise of class power, must put the problem of the constant improvement of weaponry before any requirement. Arms production is the utmost concern of the State, which is permanently mobilised to perfect the organisation of defence against the internal enemy and external rivals. But does not placing the technology of arms production at the level of the most threatening States on the other side of the border mean that the pre-capitalist State is forced to adopt the industrial methods in force in capitalist countries? Thus, societies that are on this side of capitalism and doggedly tend to remain there present important elements of modern industrialism. In them, therefore, capitalism and thus wage labour, and thus the proletariat, pre-exist the anti-feudal revolution. In pre-feudal societies that lack, on the other hand, independent State systems, industrialism, and hence the proletariat, are missing. It follows that in the latter, the industrial cycle will only begin after the triumph of the anti-colonial revolution. This applies to the former colonial Asian countries and especially to black Africa.

The resounding example of how the pre-bourgeois State contributes decisively to the introduction of the first elements of capitalist industrialism into the backward social environment from which it is expressed, was given in the early years of this century by Japan, The lightning-fast Russo-Nipponese conflict was resoundingly won by Japanese weapons, which proved to be extraordinarily perfected and adapted to modern warfare. This was to prove how the State of Tokyo, which until 1904 no one in the world understood to be less than secondary, had been able to import capitalist industrial technology into the country. The victory over Russia and the conquest of Manchuria did the rest. Thus Japan became the most powerful State and the only industrial power in Asia.

If the anti-feudal revolution in the colonies proceeds asthmatically, if the struggle of the ‘coloured peoples’ is a mixture of armed action and diplomatic haggling with imperialist gangsterism, this is precisely because the powerful proletarian revolutionary leaven is missing. The movement moves forward with exasperating discontinuity, stopping at every small advance to offer truces and compromises to the reactionary camp. One only has to look at what is happening in the Arab countries. After every abrupt change, be it the successful blow against the Suez Canal Company or the Egyptian-Syrian unification or the Iraqi revolution, the Nasserite pan-Arabists, instead of exploiting their success, hasten to proclaim a ‘cease-fire’, fearing to upset the potentates of imperialism more than permissible, fearing above all to be overruled by the starving multitudes.

There is nothing in them that can hold a candle to the magnificent struggles that gave greatness to historical upheavals, such as the remembered anti-feudal revolutions of Russia and China. And it is easy to understand why. In these battles, the leading role fell to the industrial proletariat, the most revolutionary class to appear in history, the only one capable of conducting a ‘double revolution’. Instead, the circumspection and uncertainty, the tendency to compromise and rhetoric, that characterised the anti-colonial revolution betrayed the petty-bourgeois hand. Movements that are directed, due to the physical absence of the proletariat, by the petty-bourgeoisie could not behave any other way. Evidently, the petty-bourgeois intellectuals of the colonies, who dream of the independent national State and industrialisation, have inherited very little of the revolutionary attitudes revealed by the organisers of the European Jacobin Communes. There is in it the indelible mark of the ‘inferiority complex’ (pardon the expression) it feels in the face of the arrogant bourgeoisies of the imperialist and colonialist metropolises themselves.

Such is precisely the impression one gets from examining the programmes of African political parties. The reader will not expect us to make a detailed examination of African political parties and their evolution here. This would be out of keeping with the character of the present work, which only intended to deal in a general manner with the main issues related to the African revolution. Instead, we will continue to follow this criterion, reserving the right to chronicle the political movements that have arisen in Asia since the end of the Second World War elsewhere.

The African Triple Question
Union, Federation or Independence?

As we mentioned in the title of this section, African parties can be divided according to the answer they give to the triple question: union with the metropolis, federation with it, or independence? Naturally, these political and programmatic demarcation lines run through the parties considered individually, as well as between region and region.

1) Unionism. – This is the political tendency that is least dangerous for the preservation of the colonial regime and the ‘presence’ of colonialists in the territory. Of course, the ideological justifications for this position vary from party to party, from place to place. But it can be said that the different interpretations do not, in our opinion, erase the fact that unionism, i.e. the preservation on a new legal basis of the relationship between metropolis and colony, resolves itself at best into a banal form of self-government, which the shrewd British colonial policy has already made us familiar with. Self-government provides, in fact, for the internal political autonomy of the subject peoples, but reserves to the metropolis the right to administer the foreign affairs of the country, as well as retaining defence management and financial control. As we can see, it is a matter of wresting from the colonialist bureaucracies less than what the bourgeois State grants to the ‘regional authorities’.

Interested in this reactionary form of government are the “collaborationist” elements of the local feudal castes and of the political apparatus sold out to the colonialists, such as the movements of the various M’Bida or Grunitzkys prevailing in the shadow of the French bayonets in Togo or Cameroon, or those elements of the petty bourgeoisie that is subservient to the interests of the foreign capitalist monopolies, as was the case in imperial China for the “compradore”.

2) Federalism. – This is a typical product of the mentality of the educated petty-bourgeoisie who are incapable of conceiving historical evolution except in a voluntaristic and sentimental manner. It is no coincidence that federalist utopias find their most fertile breeding ground in the brains of poets and other intellectuals living in West Sudan, which is also the most politically advanced region of Black Africa.

Federalism is a middle way between unionism and independence. Its proponents strive for State independence of colonial territories, but do not feel like breaking completely with the metropolis. Once again, acting in the followers of federalism, in spite of rhetorical declamations, is the distrust in the possibility of African peoples autonomously valorising the resources of their territories. And it must be acknowledged that this concern is not unfounded, given that industrialisation requires the solution of formidable problems, such as the investment of huge amounts of capital, professional education of the labour force, etc. But it is also certain that these problems remain almost insoluble as long as the colonialist power maintains its control over colonial possessions in one way or another.

The fundamental concept of federalism, which of course allows for various interpretations and versions, is that the emerging independent African State should be part of a larger federal body comprising the same power that currently occupies the colonial territory. One is not sure whether to think of a kind of Afro-European United States or a new edition for Africa of the British Commonwealth. It is clear, however, that the theorists of federalism are incapable of original political thought and echo, in their intellectualistic game, experiences that have had their day. Imagine that the head of the ‘African Convention’, Senegal’s largest party, the poet Senghor, is even the author of a project that envisages the incorporation of the Franco-African federation into a superior confederal body destined to accommodate a vague federation of Asian States, once subject to French rule!

It is to be hoped that the totalitarian and nationalist turn marked in French State policy by the advent of De Gaullism will serve to dispel such utopias. We wonder how it is possible to think that France, which so ferociously massacres the Algerian fellagha, and has freed itself of democratic hypocrisies in order to do so, could accept the federalists’ plans. One must, however, recognise the good side of federalism, consisting in the fight against the dangers of territorial fragmentation. The splitting up of Africa was solemnly sanctioned at the Congress of Berlin, at the conclusion of which the colonialist powers (England, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, etc.) reciprocally acknowledged the robberies perpetrated on the continent.

The French first divided their African domains into the large administrative sections of West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, with capitals in Dakar, Brazzaville and Madagascar respectively. Secondly, they subdivided these huge possessions into numerous territories and provinces. Not a few times did it happen that one and the same ethnic or linguistic make-up was broken up by an absurd administrative barrier. Of course, it is in the fundamental interest of Africans that such divisions be erased and the splitting of lineages and languages be overcome within broad federal bodies. That is to say, federalism is an element of progress, but if it is conceived as a means of uniting African peoples and as a guarantee against a ‘balkanisation’ – to use Senghor’s apt definition – of Africa, which would only benefit imperialism, it is otherwise nothing but utopia. To explain it better, it is desirable that the African peoples, freed from the colonialist yoke, unite in a federal State, which would allow the peaceful coexistence of the races; but the thesis of a Franco-African federation, which would perpetuate the usurpations of French imperialism, is to be opposed.

Yet within the R.D.A. (Rassemblement Democratique Africaine) itself, the largest political movement in Black Africa, which together with the ‘African Convention’, have made themselves the architects of the unification of the political parties in French Black Africa, there is a current that advocates a Franco-African Federation, with the aggravating thesis of the individual adhesion of the various territories of the AEF and AOF. A representative of this current, fortunately a minority, is the president of the R.D.A. himself, Houphuet Boigny, who seems to be an obligatory ingredient of the various Parisian ministries, having been part of some governments of the defunct parliamentary regime, and having been accepted into the current De Gaulle government. It is no coincidence that Houphouët-Boigny’s political ideas are liked by Parisian democrats and totalitarians, so ready to embrace each other tenderly when there is colonial prey to be saved. There is no need to explain that the type of federation desired by the R.D.A. president coincides perfectly with the unionist programme, i.e. the verbal suppression of colonialism.

3) Independence. – Needless to say, our sympathies go out to those fighting in this field: to the revolutionaries of Madagascar, tens of thousands of whom perished in the 1947 insurrection, to the Algerian insurgents, to the Cameroon guerrillas fighting under the leadership of the ‘Union of Cameroonian Peoples’, to the left of the DRA. They openly call for the liquidation of laissez-faire colonial rule and full political independence. The federalists also call for independence, but when one examines the means and ways, by which they say they can achieve it, one becomes convinced that their political positions are infected with opportunism. On the other hand, it is not legitimate to be suspicious of those who say they are determined to fight against colonialism, holding their weapons in their hands.

The proletariat instinctively stands with all the oppressed who decide to take on their oppressors in an extreme struggle. The words of the ‘Communist Manifesto’ that say: ‘Communists generally support every revolutionary movement directed against existing social and political condition’ have not yet faded. The African independence fighters are oppressed people who struggle revolutionarily against the backward social conditions that colonialism arrogantly tends to perpetuate. That is why the communist proletariat is with them.

It is clear that due to the special historical conditions we have outlined above, only the foundation of a nation State can set in motion the process of the formation of industrialism and thus give birth to the African proletariat. In every epoch of class struggle, the class that grows as an economic determinant is destined, sooner or later, to take command of society. By supporting the Afro-Asian revolutions, the international proletariat fosters the emergence of new conditions, which will draw from a social material in ferment new proletarian levers. And this, while the monopolistic degeneration of capitalism increasingly reduces the capitalist bourgeoisie class to a handful of exploiters. In this sense, the anti-colonial revolution brings the communist revolution closer.