Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone ion which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.—V.I.Lenin
I.L.W.P. BULLETIN
Weekly newspaper of the International Leninist Workers Party (P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL)(GP0 Regd.)
No 483 Wednesday February 22,1989                                10p
Western imperialist humbug overshadows reactionary Islam

There is nothing but hypocrisy piled upon hypocrisy in the antics surrounding Rushdie's novel Satanic Verses. Never has the crap notion of 'artistic rights' (so belaboured in the cause of anti-communism by Western 'freedom of expression' posturing) been so exposed as lying cant.

The much vaunted-'democratic values' of the so-called 'free world' come down to one thing in the end, – the crucial importance to the bourgeois class (led by Western imperialism) for guaranteeing that the capitalist system continues whatever else happens, – and that above everything, communist revolution must be prevented from coming to power.

Only this can explain the extraordinary cautious treatment by bullying Western gunboat colonialism of the mad mullahs in Tehran. These fascist fanatics are a constant irritation to Washington's dream of smoothly manipulating the entire anti-communist world to the CIA's master-plans, but at the same time they are infinitely preferable to revolutionary communism which might have captured power in Iran after the overthrow of the USA's stooge Shah.

All Western behaviour towards this atavistic fundamentalism since then has been governed by these same considerations.

However truly painful and humiliating have been some of Khomeini's posturing pretences of being 'against the Great Satan – US imperialism' to keep the revolutionary Iranian masses under control, – including the seizure of US hostages and the ransacking of its embassy in 1979 to the colossal damage of the CIA's subversive role revealed in captured embassy documents, – Washington has always held back from open warmongering threats to topple the Shi'ite dictatorship in the absence of any reliable alternative to put in its place. These considerations produced the astonishing contradiction of the USA appearing to be waging a limited Gulf naval war against Iran while its Washington bigwigs were secretly supplying arms to the Ayatollahs to suit more devious political purposes.

Imagine the treatment of Gaddafi's Libya if American hostages were seized there and US installations ransacked, and if Libya waged an eight-year-war against an American ally as Iran did against Iraq. Not just Tripoli, and not just Gadafi personally, – but the whole of Libya would have been blitzed to smithereens long since.

Imagine Gaddafi defending the honour of Islam by ordering his faithful to use any means to seek out the infidel Briton Rushdie and kill him. The entire press, political, and orchestrated public chorus would be: "This is too much. This is a threat to all our liberties. This mad-dog regime cannot go on", etc. There would not be mild talk of withdrawing a diplomat or two, or 'suspending' diplomatic relations, but of instant all-out F 1-11 retaliation.

The difference is that Gaddafi is a confused but would-be genuine opponent of Western imperialism. The Ayatollah is a deluded fraud, – with phony religious 'solutions' (just like all other religions).

But Tehran's fascist fanaticism remains a real irritant to the capitalist system. It is a hallmark of the imperialist world in decline and riddled with contradictions. More than mere token 'anti-imperialism' is now required to survive for long as a leadership in the Third World where the masses are heading relentlessly towards communist revolution.

The last-resort fascist 'solution' to head off communist revolution has always represented this threat to the stability of the capitalist system. Fundamentalist Iran is barely comparable to Nazi-led German imperialism for all kinds of reasons, but there are some historical parallels, and the nationalist hatred for Anglo-Saxon domination is real enough, even if only phony 'anti-imperialism'. The mullahs would be as big and vicious imperialists as the Nazis if they had the wherewithal, – and do rule in exactly the same way domestically, butchering all opposition with relish. The ambitious fascist aggressiveness of this demented Islamic self-righteousness, - just like 'master-race' Nazism, - could yet become a real military-political problem for Washington's wish to smoothly control the anti-communist world; but for the moment this particular gang of maniacs in Tehran are a spent force, having humiliatingly failed to wipe out the 'infidel' Saddam Hussein in Iraq despite all the endless boasting of what they would do to him, etc.

Rushdie has caught the full blast of a desperate search by these loonies to find some great stunt around which they can posture outrageously against the 'Western imperialist infidels' once again but without risking any real damage or conflict (they hope) with their military and economic relations with the West on which these holy hypocrites are so dependent.

The bogus 'free West' has the task of showing just the right degree of 'indignation' and 'punishment' for this pathetic further twisting of the imperialist lion's tail but without undermining the CIA's overall game-plan which is to hang onto the ayatollahs until a better alternative capitalist-dictatorship-regime can be found or set up.

It is a different matter entirely, of course, where real opposition to world imperialist domination is concerned, – in the workers states or revolutionary communist regimes, or would-be anti-imperialist nationalists like Gadafi.

Throughout the 71 years of its history, the USSR has only had to not devote scarce publishing space to counter-revolutionary crap and the West has always instantly turned the frustrated 'dissident' into immediate overnight 'literary masterpiece creator' giving endless publicity to the insulting scribble, however 'blasphemously' hostile and provocative against the deeply-held revolutionary values of communist Russia. If Moscow should ever try arranging the international assassination of an offending author, the West would retaliate by encouraging a hero-worshipping industry to be built around him, – (as indeed happened to Trotsky), – not persuade him to make a half-hearted apology in the interests of trade, as has happened to Rushdie.

If it is against communism, then any kind of vicious irrational or insulting behaviour is not only tolerable but praiseworthy. But in relations between the anti-communist states, then a different set of hypocritical 'values' comes into operation, – as this piece of Fleet Street cynicism attempted to assess:

TO DENOUNCE someone else's imperfect polity as "an evil empire" is one thing; to keep agencies to perform dirty tricks in the dark for you, not excluding attempts at assassination, is another: we know about these regrettable lapses, and digest them with a few burps of liberal distress.

But to broadcast: "Who will rid me of this turbulent scribe?" openly across the continents and mean murder in the plainest terms, as the Ayatollah Khomeini did on Tuesday, is really something else, especially when the writer thus condemned to death is in our midst and until two days ago going about his business in the mild and apolitical English literary world — at a publisher's party to launch his young American wife's new novel, or attending the memorial service for his friend Bruce Chatwin.

But yet another criterion applies when the offending publication concerned is of real danger to the West itself.

The tones of 'indignant outrage' from all adherents of the 'free way of life in the West' are noticeably more muted when the dictatorial censorship or exemplary punishment is being dished out to supporters of the Irish national liberation struggle for example.

Then the joking stops, and it becomes 'important' to treat the 'men of violence' as a 'serious matter', etc.

Once the humbug has been stoked up high enough by relentless organised disinformation campaigns through the media, then it becomes possible to impose a complete censorship ban on the reporting of Sinn Féin's own statements or spokesmen just for daring to fight for their country's independence under reunification; or to threaten the very franchise of a major 'independent' TV corporation just for broadcasting an impartial account (and also an impartial investigation into that account) of the SAS death-squad murders in Gibraltar; or to stage Gestapo terror-raids on news studios to wipe out the results of an exposure of 'defence'-spending misappropriations for anti-Soviet warmongering; etc, etc.

The West makes great fun of the Muslim calendar still only having reached the 13th century, but the reality is that capitalist bourgeois hypocrisy has itself not left the Middle Ages far behind when it comes to self-righteous intolerance of any serious challenge to monopoly-imperialism's right to rule.

There was no question of the Foreign Office springing to the defence of Jim Allen and his truly enlightening work Perdition which exposed the unbroken links between Zionism and imperialism even in the period when German imperialism was persecuting Jews as a convenient scapegoat to bolster the Nazi longterm anti—communist warmongering strategy.

Allen's play was hounded off the London stage by Zionist-influenced international monopoly-capitalist pressure, and not a soul lifted a finger to halt this monstrous medieval obscurantism preventing scientific discussion of a very important world political issue. Where were all the representatives of 'firm rational outspokenness when necessary' at that time? They couldn't care less about the serious matters debated in Perdition because of Allen's left views.

The real issue is always one only: Which system is being defended? If it is the Western imperialist system, then all the 'eternal values' are suddenly found to be 'justifying' whatever course of action a majority can be persuaded will be victorious. If it is an anti-communist system but one which likes to posture as partially 'anti-imperialist' like Islamic fundamentalist fascism does,- then the response is hesitant confusion and half-heartedness. If it is the dictatorship of the proletariat, then anything it does on any front is instantly seen as a 'diabolical threat to the whole system of values of the entire civilised world', etc.

Totally abstract notions about non-existent 'rights to publish and to free speech' are completely irrelevant to Western imperialist power diplomacy once any serious threat to its dominance has emerged. Such 'democratic values' are purely kept for combative propaganda offensives against would-be challengers to Western monopoly-capitalist rule.

And bourgeois hypocrisy aside, daft ideas about 'eternal rights to freedom of expression' are an idealist fantasy in any case. There is only one 'freedom' and that is the scientific recognition of historical necessity. The iron laws of incurable capitalist economic crisis and inter-imperialist warmongering dictate that proletarian revolution alone can rescue civilisation (from endless degeneration) via a transitional period (several generations at least) of firmly-ordered proletarian-dictatorship-states before a completely new era of communist self-government can securely replace state structures of all kinds. Only then will it be possible for world society to match up to the only worthwhile definition of 'democracy' which is that the free development of each individual shall be the condition for the free development of all, - in other words where no one at all can be left out of a real equality of opportunity for all to develop how they wish, – a situation not remotely recognisable in the present grotesquely unequal and tyrannical life of the entire 'free' world (which so loves to boast about its 'democratic' system and its 'democratic' values, etc).

The iron laws of historical necessity in an era of tumultuous worldwide capitalist crisis heading unstoppably towards inter-imperialist World War III, have no time at all for the disgusting 'free world' humbug of the West, nor for the opportunist posturing of the cautiously 'subversive' money-making anti-communist scribbler Rushdie, – any more than for the vicious hypocrisy of the barbaric Islamic escapist delusion. All will vanish without trace, and a lot quicker than revisionist-defeatism imagines, – once the world imperialist economic and military monopoly-dictatorship is broken once and for all, – (which itself may come much sooner than is thought, now that Japanese and German imperialist rivalry to US international domination is rapidly surging beyond the point of tolerable equilibrium. The world imperialist engine is too full of steam. It must move rapidly in a new direction, or explode.) 

In terms of scientific revolutionary socialism (Marxism-Leninism), – the only philosophy which can now fit the further development of human society,– the opportunist petty-bourgeois anti-communist scribbler Rushdie is in the same leaky and doomed boat as the humbugging 'free' West and hypocritical Islam. Ignorance of Leninism is a guarantee of all their demises – whether god-fearing or not. The allegedly 'subtler' accommodation to 'modernism' of Christianity versus Islam is not really much difference in terms of its medieval primitivism, as seen for example in the fascist colonialism of intolerant Presbyterianism in the Occupied Zone of Ireland; or the burning of cinemas in France and elsewhere for currently trying to show the Hollywood movie Last Temptation of Christ; or in the worldwide anti-communist rituals of the Moonies and other bizarre cults; or in the grotesquely sleazy fundamentalism of the millionaire-crook TV evangelists in the USA; etc.

Such disturbed behaviour will become more and more a feature of all doomed idealism as the clear superiority and inevitability of scientific socialism makes ever greater strides around the world in a tumult of revolutionary struggle against capitalism's incurable warmongering slump.

Belief in god is the sick benighted hangover from the unscientific past which has hardly begun yet to run into the insuperable barrier to its survival of a really 'modern' international scientific worldview, which the hitherto backward workers states that have been formed have not remotely yet begun to approach providing. But the pace of advance of a scientific materialist outlook is increasing all the time. This present darkest hour for Leninism is just before the dawn of its fullest flourishing worldwide.

International capitalist slump realities are far more important at this stage than instances of overt established Leninism as a guide to how the world-historic class war is going. In this light, the farcical muddle of the Islamic anti-communist mercenaries in Afghanistan is far more significant than the diffident leadership of the hard-pressed PDPA government in Kabul (see below). In this light, the fence-sitting comment by the Afghan socialist state (that gratuitous insults to Islam by Western writers are no great cause for celebration) is no great surprise.

Beleaguered by CIA-organised and capitalist-financed counter-revolution in circumstances where Moscow refused to force a halt to the criminal subversion from across the borders of the Pakistan and Iranian reactionary regimes, – then the PDPA government has enough problems with Islamic backwardness without being in a position to launch all-out anti-religious war against such well-entrenched beliefs and social customs.

Much more important for the Afghan socialist state to be in a position to resolutely champion the cause of scientific advance in terms of winning the argument in favour of universal schooling in Afghanistan and for an end to the blowing up of schools; ditto for a medical and hospital service, and for agricultural cooperatives, and industrial advance, etc, – than feeling secure enough to take sides in the sterile abstract argument between Western imperialism and its Islamic-fascist protégés on the bogus question of 'literary freedom'.

Moscow should come out firmly with a loud Leninist explanation that books don't stop at words,– either at the words in them or the words about them. In fact the last thing that such an international controversy as the Satanic Verses affair is about is the words in the book. All books are political or social arguments in extension of class positions. Ultimately, the real expression of what books stand for is class force. Violent defence against books and authors which represent a class-war threat is as natural and inevitable (on all sides of the argument) as national state defence forces themselves, used in response to similar threats.

What has to be decided in the Rushdie/Islam/Western imperialism conflict is whether any class force involved represents a real way forward for the mass cause of communist revolution or enlightened consciousness in any way. Rushdie's general performance so far (in his opportunist literary career and public personality role) has hardly yet made him capitalism's public enemy number one, and nor will his signature to Charter 88 fake radicalism (hiding continued class-collaboration) do so either.

Although it is not immediately obvious that any serious challenge to the religious obscurantism of Islam needs to have provocative suggestions made about Mohammed's personal life, even in a novel or even in a dream sequence in a novel, — the mere fact of commercial publication of Rushdie's book may yet become a spontaneous incident in a real crisis for the Mosque's reactionary hold on the masses. But the only challenge which can ultimately eclipse the influence of religion (all religions) once and for all is the mass revolutionary consciousness which will be built up around a scientific Leninist movement.

Artistic work of all kinds might indeed play a role of some sort in undermining every variety of establishment (or anti-revolutionary) thinking. Just as much 'artistic' output, however, will bilge forth to prop up the status quo, or befuddle the masses with diversions or confusion. Only scientific socialism can be systematically worked for as the guaranteed essential basis for the ultimate defeat of all subjective idealist illusions including religion and all other bourgeois-feudal philosophical philistinism or irrationalism,– from anarchism to Zen Buddhism.)
 
It is no surprise, of course, that the cringing Labour Party is so relieved to let the Tory Government make all the running on this 'Islamic insult' issue, – fearing as it does the possible loss of several working class Asian seats, and out of its depth anyway in trying to make sense of such a contradictory reactionary mess as this conflict between petty-bourgeois opportunism, imperialism, and fascist fundamentalism.

The Labour MP's gormless suggestion that either the blasphemy laws should be updated to give Islam protection, or they should be abolished so as to "put all religions on an equal footing" could rate as one of the most irrelevant imbecilities of all time, even for these cowardly philistines. 

Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin. Jack Bradshaw

Fake Afghan 'freedom fight' reveals its full reactionary hopelessness

The 'free world' is beginning to get anxious that one of its greatest humiliations is about to emerge since the catastrophic thrashing the full might of US imperialism sustained at the hands of the Indo-Chinese national-liberation struggle led by the Vietnamese revolutionary Communist Party, which set back for decades the disinformation notion that people would always 'choose freedom when given the choice' as opposed to the disciplines of proletarian dictatorship. The generation-long heroic self-sacrificing fight behind the uncompromising leadership of Ho Chi Minh's Central Committee disproved all that.

Now the West is in for a similar traumatic turmoil of trying to put its propaganda wits together again over the appalling upset in store if the Mojahedin fail to topple the Kabul revolutionary government as every scrap of bourgeois misinformation has insisted would be the case as soon as the USSR withdrew its troops. One month was all the idiot British diplomats gave Kabul as they staged their stunt embassy closure.
That was three weeks ago. From the only town the mercenaries did hold briefly, Kunduz, half the population immediately fled in horror, and the Mojahedin shot each other up squabbling over looted plunder. Doubts now fill capitalist press reports, and the Western line has become "Destroy Afghanistan anyway, if it can’t be won". Adam Carr 

There is no alternative government. Nor, on the basis of the weekend shambles of a shura in Islamabad, is there likely to be one for some time. The attention of the world, inevitably, is turning from the sorry spectacle of Afghans trying to achieve political unity of purpose, to other Afghans trying to win a war.

The conventional wisdom is that the Mojahedin must win. They control most of the territory and the allegiance of most of the people. They are lavishly armed, highly motivated, and face an enemy allegedly demoralised by the withdrawal of the Russians. And yet...

The Afghan army may be little more than a rabble, wrapped uneasily round a professional core, but at least it is an army. The Mojahedin, on the other hand, is a label; not an army but an embarrassment of armies, dozens of them, each with its own loyalties and priorities.

Seven of the Mojahedin groups are linked with the seven leaders of the seven groups based in the Pakistan border city of Peshawar. They have received the lion's share of Western publicity and arms. 

They have humbled the retreating superpower. And they have never, in any conventional sense, won a battle. Now this paramilitary ragbag expects, and is expected, to win a war. Even if the Afghan regime forces crumble, the Mojahedin will still have to deal with the hard core of politicised units, the Khad secret police, the Tsarandoi militia, and the so-called Presidential Guard of party members: maybe 30,000 or 40,000 men who know they must fight or die. (And probably, in the end, do both). 

The major problem for the Mojahedin is that they know what they are fighting against, but can have little idea what they are fighting for. All of them, of course, are, serving the cause of Islam. The shura was supposed to add temporal meaning to that cause by naming an interim government. Instead, it has emphasised the number of Islamic choices.

There is the firebrand Islam of Mr Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, favourite son of the Pakistan military establishment. There is the Islam of the Pakistan military establishment, which dreams of a great victory, and a confederation between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

There is the Islam of Mr Younus Khalis, a fundamentalist who detests the Pakistanis. There is the more moderate Islam of the monarchists who complain of a Pakistan-Hekmatyar conspiracy against them. There is the Iranian vision of Islam, embodied in the Shia minority groups who are also fighting the Kabul regime but boycotting the shura. And there is the Islam of the austere Wahabbi sect, with a tiny but fanatical following, floating on a torrent of Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti cash. 

Little wonder that Mr Abdul Haq, one of the most effective military commanders, is exasperated with the politicians. His forces, strongly established in the crags around Kabul, have been starved of US weapons by the Pakistan intelligence service which distributes them and makes sure Mr Hekmatyar's men are favoured. 

The Haq line, echoed by, many commanders, is that military victory will be achieved with or (more likely) without the help of the politicians. And that it will probably come, not with a frontal assault, but with the internal collapse of the beleaguered regime.

Why, they ask, should the Mojahedin fighters and innocent civilians lose their lives to advance the cause of squabbling leaders living comfortably in Peshawar?

Now the Mojahedin groups, organised for the most part along age-old regional and tribal lines, are poked for a final assault on a well-defined target for a cause which defies definition.

And anybody who can foretell the outcome is either a soothsayer or just plain stupid.

Many seasoned and cynical observers say that it was ever thus; that Afghanistan is simply reverting to its pre-Soviet status as an ethnic, linguistic, and cultural stew. Government in Kabul was ever a polite fiction, they say, in a land where true power lay with the maliks (landowners), khans (traditional rulers), mullahs (priests) and all manner of warlords. 

Only now Afghanistan is more heavily armed, per head, than any country on earth. One third of its 16 million people are exiled refugees, another three million are displaced internally, and a million more have been killed. One civil war is already being fought by the Mojahedin against the godless Communists in Kabul. In the worst analysis, the Islamabad shura could provoke a couple more.

Only a couple of days ago, the passions and frustrations of the post-Soviet era flared to the surface in the border city of Peshawar, when several thousand monarchists held a rally to protest against the shura in its present form.

There was much applause for Mr Azizullah Wasifi, a former culture minister under Mr Zahir Shah, who said the shura was unacceptable; an imposition by Pakistan, and against the Afghan national interests.

The same can be heard from a multitude of mouths in Peshawar, but this public proclamation was too much for a bunch of Hesbe-i-Islami fundamentalists.

Shouting "Death to Zahir Shah" they rushed the platform, ripped down microphones, beat up Mr Wasifi and several other elderly men, and for good measure seized and smashed the camera of the watching American CBS news team. Three of the attackers were then shot and critically wounded, and in all 25 people were injured.

The Hesbe-i-Islami also belongs to the alliance. Its leader, Mr Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is ardent for an Islamic republic.

For many years, Mr Hekmatyar has been the favourite of the Pakistan military and its intelligence service, the ISI. The head of the ISI, Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, is the last survivor of the inner circle of the late dictator, Zia ul-Haq.

After Zia's death in a still unexplained air crash last August, Mr Hekmatyar described himself as an orphan. Many colleagues and onlookers agreed, and believed he would fade from the centre-stage. He is still there, and still being stoutly backed by Gen Gul.

Indeed, many of the so-called moderate Mojahedin see the Islamabad shura as the intended creature of Mr Hekmatyar and Gen Gul. The former is vigorously promoting the cause of Mr Ahmed Shah, the "prime minister" of last year's short-lived provisional government-in-exile, to be confirmed as head of the next Kabul regime.

It is an outcome which the anti-Hekmatyar faction is determined to avoid. Mr Ahmed Shah's government, they point out acidly, was actually dissolved after a few months.

Its only success was in persuading the Saudi Arabians to disgorge handsome amounts of dollars to set up an entirely useless secretariat. Only two of its 15 members had the remotest claim to experience or expertise in government One of them, and many of the others, have since drifted away from Peshawar in disillusion.

The anti-Ahmed Shah forces insist that other candidates will emerge, though they offer no names. For that matter, the entire shura is an almost anonymous affair, in keeping with the far from exacting standards of Afghan democracy.

Dr Beryl Beynori, from Yorkshire, flew here last week with the medical aid in defiance of British government pressure not to help people in areas controlled by the Afghan authorities. She has spent the past few days handing out two tons of medical equipment and drugs.

Although the quantities are relatively small, they are being warmly welcomed here. They amount to the first break in the politically inspired Western boycott of the two million people who live in Kabul, most in miserable conditions.

About 95 foreign charities and aid organisations are working with Afghan refugees in Pakistan or on cross-border operations inside rebel-held territory. But the roughly one million internal refugees who have chosen the relative safety of the capital, and its one million original inhabitants, have been neglected.

Dr Beynon, who runs a Christian charity called the Jacob's Well appeal specialising in aiding people living under Communist governments, says she asked for official British help and was turned down.

"Jeannette Wyeth, the head of the Afghan section at the overseas development administration told me it was government policy not to give help in Afghan government areas," she said. “So I got on and did it myself. Then I was lectured by someone at the Foreign Office who told me the UK was advising people not to go to Kabul."

Several British charities; including Oxfam and Save the Children Fund, have admitted they are uneasy over the one-sided nature of their help

Sectarian black nationalists confess their bankruptcy 

Last week's analysis of the reactionary bankruptcy of the black separatist groups has been stunningly confirmed by their decision now to expel Leninism from their front organisation, the Tottenham Three are Innocent Campaign. Following their decisive political defeat at the public meeting, no other course was realistic for the reactionary opportunists, who can only dig in their heels now they have been so exposed.

In a clear acknowledgement of their weakness they do not even have the honesty to do the deed openly, laughably insisting that by disbanding the current campaign in order to regroup on an exclusively black basis, particularly barring all ILWP members, a 'democratic' campaign can be formed to fight on the specific issue. Quite what is democratic about the sectarian expulsion of revolutionaries from the campaign has not been explained of course.

This is hardly a new phenomenon: in fact it is typical of defeated reformists who can only hope to maintain their posturing niche by refusing all open debate in front of the working class. The ILWP experienced it around some of the swamp-dominated miners' support groups during and after the heroic 1984-5 strike. Any ideology which is not Marxism-Leninism is only in the bourgeois camp and scientific analysis can only make this increasingly clearer to the working class as the political argument gels sharper. The sectarian opportunists who dishonestly pretend to favour revolutionary socialism cannot stand up to Leninist science so have to impose their own fascist censorship of discussion to protect themselves. But like all bourgeois ideology, its very attempt to eliminate the truth exposes itself as much as the vain attempt to maintain a sham democracy of discussion.

The sectarianism of the groups (gathered together in this case as the Black People's Campaign for Justice) is amply proven by just this latest piece of backward closing of ranks. Despite the dispute which surfaced at the public meeting two weeks earlier over tailending popular frontism (which is how they want to run a broad front campaign) as opposed to united frontism (which is what they ignorantly pretend their campaign is), these backward petty bourgeois 'revolutionaries' have still made no attempt whatsoever to discover the truth of the situation, precisely because they cannot handle revolutionary discussion.

Unfortunately for them, the black nationalists' deliberate ignorance on this point leads them to claim that it is sectarian for any other group to make its own revolutionary analysis. Like all unscientific bourgeois idealists, they end up lyingly accusing their revolutionary opponents of precisely their own reactionary position.

The same is true for their dishonest charge of opportunism against the ILWP for telling the truth at the sharpest and most relevant level. But Leninist science sees that it is they who are the opportunists, who set up a front organisation which stifles democratic discussion in order apparently to 'draw in' the least conscious parts of the population. 

Without the revolutionary analysis such a campaign is only an opportunist attempt to head off revolutionary understanding, and one of the most opportunist examples of this is someone who addresses a meeting (whether from the platform or the floor) deliberately suppressing the highest level of understanding hoping to please everyone by presenting the lowest common denominator. This is tailending opportunism, deliberately spreading confusion among the spontaneous working class.

And it does not even work. Operating on this basis, T3 has failed noticeably to enrol any working class support. The Viraj Mendis campaign amply demonstrated the totally uninspiring and demoralising effect of reformist single issue campaigns, as the Bulletin has analysed brilliantly and comprehensively. The idealist reformists of black nationalist politics hate to hear this because it undermines their pedestal.

On the contrary, in their sectarian way it is precisely the black nationalists in T3 who took up then own position on the Viraj Mendis campaign and unilaterally sent a message of support from the T3 campaign without any consultation whatsoever.

Who are the opportunists? And the sectarians? And who are the racists?

The 'new' purged T3 campaign will be 'exclusively black, because all white people are racist and the need is to build a revolutionary movement of black people'. What philistine crap. The need is to build a revolutionary movement to fight imperialism, on as wide a basis as possible. The ANC, who are fighting the most overtly racist form of imperialist oppression and exploitation, would never dream of using such racist sectarian terms. The way these BPCJ-ite racist sectarians love to play the ruling class game of racial exclusivity has been exhaustively dealt with in the Bulletin over the past eight or nine issues in particular. And like the centrist sophists they are the black nationalists invent some new anti communist nonsense which says in the most racist way imaginable that 'black people can't be racist'!!!!

It would be very interesting to hear how they assess, for example, Idi Amin's racist expulsion of the Asian petty bourgeoisie from Uganda (in order to scapegoat one part of the population and confuse the rest into thinking that the economic crisis of chronically unstable, imperialist dominated Uganda was due to 'greedy Asians', in exactly the same way that white Hitler persecuted the white Jews). The chances of such an impossible explanation are pretty remote from such muddleheads.
Imperialism's accelerating international slump, hurtling further into trade war provocations, obscene deprivation and increased fascism on the whole working class, and finally the all out vicious brutality of World War Three, makes the highest and most relentless struggle for scientific revolutionary understanding urgently essential.

Squirming bourgeois morality of the 'have the discussion in private, and if you don't win it then the only principled thing to do is leave the campaign' play-the-game-old-chap type, which the T3 black nationalists insist upon, is dangerous playing at politics. This is class war. And all that old crap is on the wrong, and losing, side. 
Build Leninism. Build the ILWP Bulletin.

Sandra Howard

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from Prensa Latina, Tass, Granma, Soviet News, African Communist, Barricada, Czechoslovak Life, etc)

Grim 'free world' realities

GUATEMALA CITY:— The number of girls exploited sexually and at work keeps growing at an alarming rate on Guatemalan streets due to problems caused by a social, economic, political and Ideological system characterized by an unfair distribution of wealth. This was how a group of professionals summed up the problems of working girls and girls walking the streets — subjects which were discussed at a seminar called Situational Diagnosis of Girl Children and Adolescents Working In the Streets sponsored by the Childhope offices, an international movement on behalf of children with several years' work experience in Guatemala.
During the seminar a preliminary report on the subject was made by two Childhope researchers, Vivian Morales de Cardenas and Leticia Tumax, who for several months studied 57 cases of girls aged six to 18 years.
Among the causes of this social phenomenon — according to the study — up to 90 percent of these girls or adolescents come from broken homes and even when living at home, family relations are tense and aggressive. Of the cases under study 40 percent of the girls have left home more than once and 30 percent don't want to go back. 
Fifty percent of the girls have been raped more than once, in most cases by a relative. "When the flirts complain, no one believes them and even when someone believes them, it's the girls who are stigmatized and thrown out or sent to juvenile correction centers, says researcher Tumax.

In Guatemala City there are 52 spots where girls are the victims of labor and sexual exploitation, Childhope's preliminary report goes on to say. Of the 57 cases that were studied, 25 percent belong to a group of affective reference (that is a temporary family of friends). 20 percent live alone and 65 percent have left home at one time or another. Nineteen percent moved in with friends, 13 percent went to boarding, houses and 19 percent stayed in the streets. Thirty-seven percent refuse to go home and 37 percent want to go back but won't because they say that's where the aggressor lives.

The report also states that the girls and adolescents on the streets (they haven't severed their links with their families but spend from eight to ten hours on the streets) and of the streets  (girls who have severed all family ties) come from marginal areas where low-income families live in overcrowded conditions and where 86 percent of the girls have no privacy and sleep with other members of the family.

Nearly all the 57 girls studied have had some sexual experience. Thirty percent have had an abortion and another 30 percent have had more than two; and 25 percent have had a child whom they often give up for adoption. 

The report adds that 85 percent have had venereal diseases and 80 percent eat once a day only; they get little sleep, practice overt or covert prostitution and associate with people with whom they clearly identify, who accept them for what they are. Fifty-seven percent of these girls and adolescents belong to the so-called maras (groups of young people who come from Guatemala City's marginal areas); they share a particular piece of territory and have learned how to defend it. At night they gather in small groups on downtown corners to offer their services.

Ninety percent — the report goes on — are familiar with drugs and 75 percent have taken them more than once.

As to the working girls, the study says they help to feed their families with what they make. Most of them are exploited by grownups and many of them are covert beggars while others sell flowers, chewing gum, cookies or watch over cars in the streets. They are badly fed, are physically and morally assailed, are treated as social outcasts, are emotionally deprived and lack access to basic services due to lack of information.

Most of the girls work at odd jobs, deprived of legal or social control or protection. They are the victims of bio-psycho-social deterioration and exploitation and are included In the critical poverty sector.

Some of the dangers they face are sexual harassment and bronchial, diarrheic and other diseases. Among the group's expectations, they always mention their desire to get an education.

Concerning the prospects of improving their situation, the report indicates that very few institutions work with the girls. They in turn, complain about bad treatment in these places.

To corroborate the above, UNICEF researcher Aydee Alarcón de Arrlola said that many complaints are lodged against most institutions that work with children in Guatemala.

One of these street girls who has had the experience of being in a juvenile correction center wrote the following:  "They ought to have better human relations because the police ladies and the teachers are nasty with us pupils and sometimes they beat us and treat us badly and even let us go without food or punish us in the open backyard at night, with our hands tied, and they should let us use the showers instead of making us stand completely naked under a faucet at 5:30 a.m. only with our towels. They should have beds to sleep on, sheets, towels, soap, clean uniforms."

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from Prensa Latina, Tass, Granma, Soviet News, African Communist, Barricada, Czechoslovak Life, etc)

STRATEGY
In the first part of this article (published in The African Communist, no. 113) we argued that the concept of colonialism of a special type (CST) is integrally related to the general body of Marxist-Leninist theory. In particular, we related this concept to the historical materialist theory of the nation. We then considered why CST, a particular form of bourgeois domination, had emerged historically in South Africa. We concluded the first part by outlining the essential features of CST. We characterised it as a form of bourgeois domination in which the black majority of South Africa is separated, fragmented and subordinated in a variety of ways (economically, politically, socially, culturally), while at the same time being included within the fabric of a relatively advanced capitalist society. This simultaneous exclusion and inclusion, related to the colonial form of domination on the one hand, and the social forces of capitalist production on the other, constitutes the contradictory essence of CST.

In this second instalment on CST we will attempt to illustrate the enormous fruitfulness of this concept for our strategic grasp of the current situation. Far from being outmoded, or faded, it provides us with the theoretical weapons to develop a concrete analysis of the South African struggle.

The Emergence of a Black Bourgeoisie

One of the most repeated criticisms of the CST analysis is that it supposedly fails to take adequate account of the emergence of new classes and strata within the camp of the black oppressed, that it erroneously regards all blacks as part of the people's camp.2

It is certainly true that there have been significant class developments in the last decade amongst blacks, including the emergence of various entrepreneurial/bourgeois strata. However, it is the opponents of the CST analysis who lack the theoretical concepts to explain adequately these developments. For this reason their political guidelines are confused.

Generally speaking, there are in fact two or (depending on how you draw the line) three distinct black bourgeois strata. On the one hand there is an emergent bourgeois stratum that depends for its capital accumulation more or less entirely on its position within the collaborative structures of apartheid – community councils, Bantustan governments, management committees, etc. This particular stratum enriches itself, often through fraud and corruption, using its access to collaborative political structures to allocate funds, land and other resources for personal gain. This stratum is generally distinct from the black bourgeois strata that are emerging 

(i) through township based commercial and service activities. These activities begin often as informal family-based operations – stores, taxi-fleets, beauty parlours, soccer clubs, etc, and sometimes expand into small-scale capitalist enterprises.

(ii) through the professional path – doctors, lawyers, accountants, promoted by the large capitalist corporations on to their boards of directors, or accumulating sufficient funds of their own by way of their professional activities, and then launching themselves into business. These last two strata (represented, for instance, by NAFCOC) tend to identify more readily with the broad national liberation movement. But they are, indeed, recruitable into collaborative structures.

However, politically and theoretically it is important to make this general distinction between a corrupt, collaborative bureaucratic black bourgeois stratum whose very existence depends upon the perpetuation of apartheid, and the latter strata which have their horizons (albeit bourgeois horizons) restricted severely by national oppression (Group Areas, cultural disadvantages, etc.). In regard to these latter strata in particular there is a real political battle for allegiance. Those mechanical 'Marxists' who label the black bourgeoisie as a whole as the 'enemy', lump the Sebes, NAFCOC members and the Motlanas all into one heap, and therefore abandon the struggle for allegiance.

Obviously, when making general distinctions between different strata, as we have just done, we are drawing straight lines on to what is really a fluid, developing situation. We are not saying that the particular strata we have distinguished are permanently separate. We need to assess and develop our understanding of these class processes in an ongoing way. However, rather than being defensive, let us turn the issue around. Is it really possible to account scientifically for the emergent, collaborative bureaucratic bourgeoisie without having an understanding of the particular, CST form of domination in our country, of which these elements are the direct products? They are not simply bourgeois, their characteristics cannot simply be deduced from a narrow economic textbook approach.

The Tactics and Strategies of our Struggle

The practical fruitfulness of the CST approach is not limited to this, in fact, secondary question of our struggle. The CST approach, like no other, illuminates all our major tactics and strategies, strengths and strategic weaknesses. We speak of the 'four pillars' of our struggle (the international, the mass democratic, the underground, and the armed struggle) — on each of these fronts the CST analysis serves to explain the reality we confront and to guide our revolutionary activity. Without it we disarm ourselves.

On the international front of struggle, it is the colonial character of the apartheid regime that marks it out as uniquely illegitimate. The regime is fundamentally in violation of international law as it has evolved in the post-2nd World War period. It is no accident that the regime, and its imperialist allies, constantly try to undercut the colonial specification of South African white minority rule. There is a constant juridico-political and ideological struggle to portray the regime as a fully independent, legitimate state, albeit with certain "regrettable" blemishes; to portray South Africa as an African country with typical "developmental" problems, a country combining the "first world and the third". In short, the attempt is to portray our struggle as a civil rights struggle within the framework of the existing system, and the regime itself as the principal agent of the needed "reforms". What is at stake is the very status of our struggle as a fully-fledged national liberation struggle, with all that it implies.

Our struggle for international solidarity and for the complete isolation of the regime turns around the colonial character of the apartheid regime. This regime is not just another authoritarian or even fascist government — one among all too many in the world today. No, the South African apartheid regime is uniquely illegitimate. Our recourse to armed struggle, and the international support we receive for this recourse, are directly linked to this colonial illegitimacy.

Those ultra-leftists and others who wish to throw away the concept of CST on the grounds that South Africa is a capitalist country (as if CST and capitalism were incompatible) play straight into the hands of the imperialists and the apartheid regime in our struggle on the international plane.

However, to argue that it is useful for the international struggle to describe the oppression in South Africa as colonialism of a special type is not, of course, to clinch the argument. Unless CST is indeed an accurate, objective portrayal of the reality in our country, then we are simply jumping on to concepts for pragmatic reasons. Let us now relate the CST approach more fundamentally to the great wave of semi-insurrectionary struggles, the combination of mass democratic, underground and armed struggles within our country over the last period.

Boycotts and CST

One of the major features of our struggle in the last period has been the widespread use of the mass boycott. There have been election boycotts, schools and university boycotts, boycotts of cultural and sports venues, canteen boycotts in hostels, consumer boycotts of both specific products in support of trade union struggles, and against white commerce in general, at least one newspaper boycott, rent and rates boycotts on a national scale (costing the regime an estimated one billion rand), bus boycotts. Within production there have been the equivalent of the boycott — strikes, both specific industrial strikes, as well as several mass national political stayaways. Nowhere else in the world will you find such a widespread, continuous use of the boycott weapon on so many fronts simultaneously. It is no accident, however, that the struggling masses of our country have deployed this weapon — it is one of the most obvious tactics of an included-excluded majority oppressed by CST on the terrain of a relatively advanced capitalist economy.

The boycott is a weapon through which our people use the leverage of their inferior inclusion (as students, workers, consumers, voters for dummy colonial institutions), and the organisational base of their collective exclusion as blacks (within gutter education institutions, bush colleges, hostels, townships, etc.) to inflict blows against the ruling bloc. However, precisely because of the special type of colonialism in place, because of the integral inclusion of our people within the fabric of a single relatively advanced capitalist economy, an unlimited boycott in many sites is not possible. (This limitation does not apply to rent boycotts, obviously, nor to an indefinite boycott of dummy political institutions.)

For instance, a completely independent commercial network under popular control is simply not possible in the present situation. For this reason an indefinite, general consumer boycott is not a viable strategy. This is not to say that such a boycott, for limited aims and for a definite period, has not already shown great possibilities. The 1985 NECC national conference drew similar conclusions regarding education boycotts.

Rudimentary Organs of People's Power

Since late 1984 our struggle has seen a watershed development — the emergence of rudimentary organs of people's power (street committees, village committees, defence committees, neighbourhood health care groups, people's education structures). It is true that our ability to sustain these structures in the face of massive state repression is uneven. But in townships and villages throughout our country the oppressed masses have discovered for themselves and operated for periods of weeks, months, sometimes years at a time the future, grassroots organs of a new democratic South Africa. However short-lived the structures have sometimes been, the experience of expelling the agents of their oppression from the township, of taking democratic control of the streets, of removing serious crime almost completely, has been invaluable. Despite the state of emergency, wherever the space is won in struggle, these rudimentary organs still keep bobbing up again.

Once more it is the CST approach that offers the best general guideline to understanding the character and significance of these rudimentary organs of people's power. Our own national liberation struggle has resemblances to, as well as differences from the conventional liberation struggle against colonialism. Like others, our national democratic struggle is a revolutionary struggle, it is a struggle to remove the existing state structures and replace them with authentic structures of self-determination. Like other national liberation struggles, ours is not a civil rights struggle to win more democratic concessions within the existing system. As with other national liberation struggles, we cannot wait for full liberation before beginning the process of self-government. Wherever we push back the racist colonial ruling bloc, wherever we create pockets of ungovernability, our people have been compelled to develop rudimentary democratic organs of popular power. This is not an academic choice based in some theory. It is a concrete necessity in order to solve the basic problems of organising, defending and consolidating.

However, in our circumstances these developments are happening primarily in townships (both urban and rural), rather than in the classic, remote liberated countryside zones — inaccessible jungles, mountain ranges, amongst isolated peasant communities. In most national liberation struggles the liberation forces begin to build their first rudimentary organs of popular power (clinics, defence committees, village councils, schools) in the remote, inaccessible comers of underdeveloped, third world countries. In these struggles it is the peasantry that conceals, clothes, feeds and supplies the greater part of the person power for the people's army. In most progressive national liberation struggles this century, while the proletariat has been the leading class force, the peasantry has been the main class force. The objective class reality in South Africa is different. Here the peasantry has been decimated as a class force, while there is a large, numerically preponderant working class.

Emergent dual power structures are, of course, not only a feature of the liberated zones in the typical anti-colonial and anti-imperial national liberation struggles of the 20th century. Dual power structures are a feature of many developing revolutionary situations. Among the classic examples of dual power structures are the city communes in France in 1871 (studied closely by Marx, Engels and Lenin) and the Soviets of 1905 and 1917.

In South Africa the rudimentary people's power structures, although occurring in the context of a national liberation struggle, are marked by some strong resemblances to the French city communes and the Russian working class Soviets. This resemblance has everything to do with the largely urban character of these structures, and, in the Russian case, with the class domination of the proletariat within them. However, our own rudimentary organs of people's power have a particular character. One key to understanding this particularity is to consider the South African township, the major site of our organs of popular power, as a specific product of CST.

CST and the Township

As recently as the early 1970s our military perspectives were still governed by the more traditional pattern of national liberation struggles. This perspective was not just a case of uncritically copying other situations. The perspective was influenced by the great heroic struggles of the South African peasantry in the 1950s and early 1960s (in places like Sekhukhuneland and Pondoland). But since at least 1976, like all serious revolutionaries, we have had to learn from the masses themselves. We have come to see the township (both urban and rural) as our primary (but not of course exclusive) organisational focus — the township as the mass revolutionary base.

Once again, to understand the township we need to have recourse to the CST approach. The black township in our country is the direct and very specific product of CST. In the first part of this century the rural reserves were the major site for the reproduction of labour power for the leading sectors of the capitalist economy. With the virtual collapse of peasant agriculture in these areas, it is the township that has been developed as the major social mechanism for the residential inclusion-exclusion and reproduction of the greater part of the South African proletariat. These townships are located both within the Bantustans and, as segregated group areas, within "white" urban and rural South Africa.

The South African black township bears a certain resemblance to other residential settlements of oppressed groups, but it also has specific features. Like the proletarian red belt suburbs of some West and South European cities (Turin, Paris, etc.), with their own rich revolutionary traditions, the South African township is deliberately distanced from the main commercial, political and administrative centres of the city or town that it services. Like the red belt suburbs, the South African township, generally, is largely proletarian in class composition. However, unlike the red belt suburbs, the township is a racial entity, its inhabitants are defined primarily by race rather than by class. For this reason the township includes a greater diversity of social classes and strata than a red belt suburb.

This difference, together with the greater cultural distance between the township and the ruling bloc, has significant political and military consequences. In the first place, the township is foreign terrain for the white ruling bloc. To control and administer the township it requires a special apparatus depending, in its lower echelons, on lackeys and puppets of all kinds. This collaborative apparatus is, precisely, one of the regime's most vulnerable points. In the last period, the slogan of ungovernability referred most specifically to the elimination of these collaborative structures from the township.

Given the presence of a variety of strata, the township, despite its general impoverishment, has been able under the right circumstances to exert its control over resources, services and networks that would be inaccessible to a more uniformly proletarian suburb. The consumer boycott against white businesses, which had an enormous political impact, particularly in the Karoo and Eastern Cape, was possible to sustain for a period of time precisely because of the presence of a small trading and entrepreneurial stratum within the township, and because of the cultural separateness and solidarity of the township. Similarly, in townships where people's power structures made the most advances in 1985-6, groupings like taxi-drivers were brought into popular structures. The transport resources they owned became available for political and even, at times, military work on a roster basis. 

The South African township is also different in significant ways from the US ghetto, with which it is sometimes compared. The ghetto is typically located within a decaying part of the inner city, home of ethnic minorities and recent immigrants. It is often dominated economically by the informal and service sectors. The closest South African parallel would be the now destroyed District Six. The South African township, although including a variety of classes and strata, is dominated by the industrial proletariat. The township, in fact, is the base from within which the South African working class has begun to exert its organised leadership over other oppressed classes and strata (the black petty bourgeoisie, the emergent black bourgeoisie, professionals, students, youth, etc.).

Although US ghettoes, for instance, have been the focus of some extremely explosive uprisings in the last 30 years, the class composition and the ethnic minority character of their populations distinguish their uprisings from the potentially more organised, sustained and strategically critical role of the South African township in the overall struggle against oppression and exploitation.

Squatter Camps

Finally, the South African township bears certain obvious resemblances to the sprawling squatter camps of many underdeveloped third world societies. The barrios of South America would be one example with their tens of thousands of working and unemployed people, many forced off the land and pouring into industrial and commercial centres in a desperate search for jobs. However, there is one major difference, the barrios are the more or less spontaneous organic constructions of their inhabitants, located generally on the very edges of the town or city. The South African township, by contrast, is typically the deliberate construction of the apartheid regime's CST domination, planned and sited to maximise and streamline the simultaneous inclusion-exclusion of our people. The township is usually built on flat ground, to a geometric grid pattern, with space between matchbox houses and key roads wide enough for military convoys. Surveillance from the air and ground is simple, with sealing off, and containment possibilities and the lines of fire all carefully researched and maximised. The township is also deliberately cut off from the city or town centre, (the focus of political, administrative and financial power) by freeways and networks of rail lines.

Of course, there are notable exceptions — Crossroads, more like the South American barrios, was for periods of time inaccessible to the regime. Its compact squatter camp character made it impossible for the SAP and SADF to patrol in armoured vehicles, and its level of organisation and militancy (for several years at least) made it too dangerous for them to patrol on foot. Short of major military action (and here they were constrained by local and international solidarity) the only way in which Crossroads could be defeated without suffering unacceptable levels of casualties was from the inside, by the action of mercenaries and death squads. This, as we know, the regime finally succeeded in doing, at least temporarily, in 1986.

Crossroads is one of the few South African exceptions that proves the rule about the general, militarily planned pattern of urban black settlement. In the last several years there has been an unparalleled level of militancy and semi-insurrectionary struggle going on in South Africa's townships. For days, weeks, months at a time the regime has lost its ability to rule in localities just 12 kilometres away from the Union Buildings in Pretoria, 10 kilometres away from Parliament in Cape Town, just 15 kilometres away from the headquarters of the Anglo-American Corporation or Jan Smuts International Airport.

Such a relatively high level of struggle on the very doorsteps of the central organs of power would, generally, have produced significant changes in most countries of the world. But in South Africa, as a direct result of CST, and the particular strategic features of the township, this has not been so. CST has created the possibility of the township as a mass revolutionary base, by packing together in impoverished conditions a culturally distinct majority. It has also organised matters, however, in such a way that our struggles of the last ten years have, largely, been contained within these townships.

Overcoming our Major Strategic Weakness

Understanding and highlighting the specific colonial inclusion/exclusion of our people enables us to put our fingers more emphatically on the major strategic weakness of our struggles to date, and the reason for this weakness. In our recent agitational propaganda we have begun to address this problem. In particular, we have been underlining the importance of 'Carrying the war to the white areas'. As a general slogan this is not incorrect, but it remains vague and confusing. In fact, the regime has been quick to exploit the vagueness. The SATV has been suggesting that the ANC and MK are bent upon launching the armed struggle against white schools and residential areas. In this way they hope to terrify wavering whites into continued support for apartheid.

We must, indeed, take seriously the task of carrying our struggle out of its general containment within the townships, not by ignoring the townships, but by using them as our mass revolutionary bases, as our springboards for this task. This means, above all, directing the struggle much more substantially at the commercial, communications, productive and administrative networks of the ruling bloc. We need to direct our blows in such a way that we increasingly disrupt, paralyse and confuse the enemy in his own base. But what does that actually mean? It means several things.

In the first place, everything we have so far said should underline the absolutely crucial role of the black working class in our struggle. Ironically, the CST analysis is sometimes accused of side-lining the working class, of being 'populist' in its orientation. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the CST approach underlines more substantially than any other the absolutely central role the black working class must play in our struggle.

The South African working class has all the classic features that are underlined by Marxism-Leninism. It is the one class which, because of its numbers, collective discipline and strategic position in capitalist production, has the capacity to carry the revolution through to its fullest conclusions. However, over and above this, in South Africa the black proletariat is also the one significant social group amongst the oppressed majority that is daily transported into the very centres of economic power, and on whom economic wealth finally rests.

This strategic fact must be grasped more clearly. The mobilisation, organisation, political education and insurrectionary capacity of our working class must be enhanced. The industrial centre must feature more centrally in our political and military planning.

In the last period there have been some developments that point to a growing awareness of this. We have seen, for instance, the deployment of the factory occupation (the siyalala) tactic which, unlike the traditional strike which generally sees the dispersal of the strikers back to the township, poses more directly questions about worker control over the means of production. Through community solidarity with the siyalala (the bringing of blankets and food, for instance) the township and its civic structures are brought to the factory, the isolation and containment of the township starts to be reversed.

We have also seen the increasing combination of strategies and organisational levels focussed around industrial action. The 1987 SATS strike offers an outstanding example — while the railway and airport workers mounted an heroic, trade union-based struggle, the youth of the townships burnt out large numbers of SATS trains with homemade petrol bombs, and MK cadres blasted rail lines and signalling equipment with high explosives. Here again worker struggles, centred in the first instance on point of production grievances, combined with supportive actions from other sectors, carried our struggle beyond the townships. Indeed in this particular case we can see how, once we spread our struggle into the key power networks of the ruling bloc we can rapidly dislocate the enemy's manoeuvrability. In the course of the SATS strike factories as far afield as Durban and Cape Town (where there was little direct action) were badly disrupted by shortages of supplies. This, of course, was hushed up by the apartheid regime, which desperately hopes that we will not learn from our own victories.

When considering the question of carrying the struggle into the power centres of the ruling bloc, another important feature of our working class must be noted. The organisation of Coloured and Indian workers into progressive COSATU trade unions has generally lagged behind the organisation of African workers. There are many reasons why this must be corrected, not least because of the strategic situation of many Coloured and Indian working class townships. In the Western Cape, for instance, there are several significant working class Coloured townships that are located, literally, in amongst factories. In the Western Cape uprisings in the latter part of 1985 it was these areas that presented particular problems for the SAP and SADF. The ability of the security forces to simply seal off and contain these townships was impeded by the presence within them of white-owned capitalist firms. These factories were also more easily attacked during this period.

Town and City Centres

When we speak of carrying our struggle into the power centres of the ruling bloc, we mean also that we must give much more attention to the town and city centres, the focus of administration, communications and consumer networks. In the last few years we have shown an ability to assemble up to 70,000 people, marching under the banners of the ANC and SACP. But once more these mass rallies have been confined generally to the townships. True, there have been some forays into town centres. During the SATS and NUM strikes workers assembled in and around their trade union offices. In 1985 squads of youth militants in the Transvaal would travel into the Johannesburg central business district at midday on a Friday and make lightning stoning strikes at shops before dispersing into the crowds. These last actions caused significant disruptions, and the SAP experienced some difficulty in preventing these actions.

Is it possible to assemble large numbers of people in town and city centres? We need to think more carefully about how to make use of the cover of thousands of workers and shoppers coming into town. This means launching city based actions at times when this social cover is maximised. We must build up the skills and confidence of our militants, developing their ability to operate in town centres. Our youth militants know their township streets very well, and naturally gravitate to these. But we need also to build up a streetwise, city-based revolutionary knowledge as well. Our militants must learn how to use the cover of the city, where security forces are inhibited from firing wildly by the presence of white-owned department stores and white shoppers. We must learn the art, not just of the burning tyre barricade in the township street, but the barricade of the city centre traffic jam, caused by the simultaneous sabotaging of key traffic lights all over the city, or the stalling of a hijacked car or bus at a key intersection at rush-hour.

In short, we need to be thinking much more thoroughly in insurrectionary terms. We need to be thinking of all the vulnerable networks of the town and city — its rail lines, traffic lights, its phone cables, its freeways, its commercial banks. We need to be thinking of combined actions — industrial strikes, mass rallies, sabotage actions right across the city. All of this will not be possible to mount at a single stroke. We need to build experience, confidence and organisation at a mass level.

One further qualification must be added. Although we have underlined the strategic significance of the town and city centre, this does not mean that rural areas have no revolutionary significance. Our ability to mount, supply and win insurrectionary struggles in the urban areas depends to some extent on the degree to which we have stretched and pinned down enemy forces throughout our country. In our general revolutionary strategy, the national liberation movement correctly attaches considerable importance to political work and armed struggle in the rural areas.

Conclusion

We have used the CST approach to highlight and explain the major strategic weakness of our struggle in the last few years. What we have been saying, however, points also to our major strategic strength. In reply to the critics of his two states of emergency, PW Botha in 1985 and 1986 kept warning ominously that the states of emergency were only a small part of his repressive arsenal. "So far", he kept repeating, "we have only lifted our little finger."

In a sense, P W Botha is not wrong. Although thousands of our people have been gunned down, and 40 000 have been detained, the regime can be said not to have unleashed its full fire-power on our townships. The regime has not used artillery, fighter bombers, naval gunnery or rocket launchers on our townships. But we should have no doubt about its physical capacity to do these things. There is billions of rands worth of damage in southern Angola, flattened villages, clinics, factories, bridges that testify to the apartheid regime's military capacity. But what P W Botha is not mentioning when he lifts up his little finger is the key strategic difference between villages in Angola and townships in South Africa. It is one thing to annihilate Angolan communities, it is another to flatten Soweto, or Kwazekele. For these latter places, like hundreds of other South African townships, house the very workforce that labours in the factories, mines and farms that feed, clothe, fund, equip and transport the SADF and SAP. And here we return to the central contradiction of CST.

It is no accident that whatever the difficulties facing our struggle, – in the ranks of relatively advanced capitalist countries South Africa is one of the weakest links. All the characteristic contradictions of bourgeois rule are sharpened and intensified in our country by the presence of a colonially oppressed majority within the very fabric of a capitalist mode of production.