The Red Flag: A History of Communism (85 page)

Latin America experienced a similar series of student and urban rebellions in the late 1960s, under the banner of a similarly eclectic Romantic Marxism. The failures of the guerrilla revolutions in the mid-1960s had undermined the radical left’s faith in the Cuban model of the rural
foco
, and guerrilla war was now brought to the towns. Che Guevara’s
Guerrilla War
gave way to the
Mini-manual of an Urban Guerrilla
(1969). For its Brazilian author, Carlos Marighella, a former Communist leader and founder, in 1967, of a terrorist organization:

Urban terrorism was strongest in Uruguay and Argentina, where the left faced repressive, conservative military regimes. Some terrorists were Marxist (like the Trotskyist Argentinian People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP)), but others preferred a mixture of populist nationalist and left-wing ideas (such as the Argentinian Montoneros and Uruguayan Tupamaros). The Montoneros and the ERP both benefited from the labour militancy that swept Argentina, as it did in so many other parts of Latin America during the period.
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Left-wing politics now arrived in a curious convoy of vehicles, sometimes rather surprising ones. In Peru it was the military, which took power in 1968 deploying Marxist theory and pro-Third-World rhetoric, and eagerly supported by the Peruvian Communist Party. Other unlikely Marxists included a group of Catholic priests, amongst whom was the Colombian Camillo Torres – ‘Che in a cassock’ as he was called. For Torres, the principles of Christianity, notably ‘love thy neighbour’, ‘coincide in action and in practice with some Marxist-Leninist methods and objectives’.
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Torres, who decided to join a Colombian guerrilla group in the mountains and was killed in 1966, was hardly a typical cleric. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church was so worried about the appeal of Marxism that a meeting of bishops in the Colombian city of Medellín in August 1968 resolved to endorse a socially aware Christianity and fight against the ‘unjust consequences of the excessive inequalities between poor and rich, weak and powerful’.
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The Church authorities were certainly not becoming Marxist, but many ‘liberation theology’ priests believed that the combined teachings of Karl Marx and Jesus Christ made for a complete education.

Against these competitors, the orthodox pro-Soviet Communist parties of Latin America seemed distinctly unattractive, especially as they generally failed to adapt to new realities. Concentrating on the working class, they neglected the rapidly growing ‘under-class’ of urban shanty-dwellers. But they did have some successes, most notably their participation in the 1970 Chilean coalition government of the Socialist Salvador Allende, who had been a supporter of Pedro Cerda’s Spanish-inspired Popular Front in the 1930s.

The Cubans were also losing their appeal on the continent, especially as economic failures and anxieties about Nixon’s election forced them back into Moscow’s embrace. Castro refused to condemn the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and soon he too caved in to Soviet pressure
and abandoned the ambitious mobilizing economic policies the Soviets so disapproved of. The ‘voluntary labour’ and mass mobilizations pursued since the mid-1960s had produced exhaustion and cynicism, and in 1970 Castro was forced to accept a more Modernist, Soviet-style economic regime of labour discipline and wage incentives.
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In 1972, the notion of a separate Cuban model of socialism was dealt a severe blow when Cuba became a member of Comecon. This did not, however, mark the end of Cuba’s activist, independent foreign policy. As the Cubans lost their revolutionary lustre in Latin America, they – together with their new Soviet allies – found new disciples in Africa.

In January 1966, the leader of the Guinean guerrilla movement, Amílcar Cabral, gave an optimistic assessment of the state of the world revolution, whilst also condemning Khrushchev’s old notion that the Third World was a ‘zone of peace’:

The charismatic Cabral was speaking in Havana, at Castro’s ‘First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America’ – the so-called ‘Tricontinental Conference’. It was designed to be a Marxist replacement for Bandung, a declaration that the old socialist Third World was dead and had been reborn in more militant form. After the many setbacks of the mid-1960s, and as Communists were being massacred in Indonesia at that exact same time, not all were convinced that the time was ripe for such assertiveness. But Castro agreed with Cabral: the Americans were losing ground in Vietnam, and the time was right for an intensified armed struggle throughout the world.
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However, it was not just the new international balance of power that radicalized Third World leaders in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Marxist ideas from the West played a role, whether communicated through links with the Portuguese, French or Italian Communist parties, or through students studying abroad, as was the case in Ethiopia.
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Generational change was also important. Many believed that the Bandung generation had not delivered on its promise that a moderate form of socialism would deliver economic development and international prestige. By refusing to challenge local chiefs and ‘tribes’, critics argued, the indigenous socialists had left in place a powerful class of neo-colonial collaborators who merely served the interests of the old imperial powers. As Cabral explained in his long and densely theoretical speech to fellow revolutionaries, ‘the submission of the local “ruling” class to the ruling class of the dominating country limits or prevents the development of the productive forces’.
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Cabral was never a dogmatic Marxist-Leninist, but his fluency in its syntax shows how pervasive the Marxist style of thinking had become amongst much of the African left by the late 1960s.
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And the variety of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ that was to become so powerful there was in many ways reminiscent of 1930s Radical Stalinism, combining, as it did, anti-imperialist nationalism, a model of development that stressed ‘modernity’ and the city over ‘tradition’ and the countryside, and a hard-line willingness to use violence.
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Of course, African Marxist-Leninists accepted that their ‘proletariats’ were tiny, but they still clung to the belief that, given the right policies, they could swiftly build a ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. A coalition of various progressive classes would take power and build heavy industry, and with it a revolutionary proletariat. These Marxist-Leninists claimed to have the solutions to under-development that the indigenous socialists so conspicuously lacked. Only a vanguard party, they argued, would have the will and focus to remove the local elites who were so selfishly holding their countries back; their commitment to ‘class struggle’ allowed them to use the violence so necessary to resist imperialists and dislodge their internal bourgeois allies; and their Marxist internationalism would attract funding from the USSR at a time when the Soviets themselves were moving in a more ‘Stalinist’ direction.

In the last respect at least, the Afro-Communists were right. From the late 1960s, the ideologists in the party Central Committee’s International Department (including Karen Brutents and the future Gorbachev advisers Georgii Shakhnazarov and Vadim Zagladin) began to develop an
analysis of the reasons for Communism’s defeats in the middle part of the decade. They concluded that Khrushchev’s ‘united front’-style policy and belief in peaceful transitions from indigenous socialism to Communism had been far too optimistic. The frequent American interventions had convinced them that only vanguard parties of orthodox Marxist-Leninists could protect the left in the Third World. But far from being pessimistic, they argued that the prospects for Communism were bright. American difficulties in Vietnam would weaken the West’s prestige, whilst continued Western intervention would also strengthen socialism. ‘Bourgeois’ nationalists, they argued, denied true independence by the neo-colonial West, would have to forge alliances with the still small, but growing working-class and peasant movements. Guided by a party vanguard, pro-Communist nationalists would fight ‘reactionary’ nationalists, and then engineer transitions to socialism, even in these ‘backward’ peasant societies.
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In some ways, then, the Soviet response to the setbacks of 1964–6 in the Third World was a milder version of Stalin’s reaction to the failures of the united front in 1927–8: Communists would have to be more sectarian and cohesive; outside the global North, the era was one of ‘struggle’ between the capitalist and Communist worlds, not peaceful coexistence; and domestically the time could be ripe for a rapid advance to socialist states and economies – in the agrarian Third World, as in the peasant Soviet Union forty years earlier.

One of the first regions to experience the full force of Marxist-Leninist rebellion against the Bandung generation was the Middle East. Israel’s defeat of Syria and Egypt in the six-day war of 1967 was a humiliation for Arab socialism throughout the region, whether Syria’s ‘Ba’athism’ or Nasser’s socialism. After the war, the Arab states lost influence over the Palestinian nationalist movement, which they had tried to control by supporting the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. Yasser Arafat’s more radically nationalist Fatah (‘Victory’) group began to displace its rivals, championing a guerrilla struggle inspired by Franz Fanon and the Vietnamese example.
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In 1967 Fatah was joined as a member of the PLO by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which declared itself a fully Marxist-Leninist party in 1969 and received Soviet backing from 1970.
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For these Palestinians, the conflict with American-backed Israel was more than just an Arab affair: it was part of the global struggle against imperialism.

Nasser’s defeat also contributed to the foundation of the first
Marxist-Leninist regime in the region, in South Yemen. One of the main guerrilla nationalist organizations fighting the British, the Nasser-backed National Liberation Front (NLF), had already become disillusioned with its patron from 1965 when Egypt began to withdraw its support. The NLF regarded itself as a radical party, fighting for the rights of small peasants against landowners, and when the British handed over power to the NLF in November 1967, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen declared itself a Marxist-Leninist state.
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The Vietnamese example inevitably encouraged other peasant-based guerrilla movements in many other regions throughout the world. In West Bengal, rural rebellion against landlords in Naxalbari village were joined by Marxist students from Calcutta, encouraged by Beijing’s Cultural Revolution radicalism. The formally pro-Beijing Communist Party of India (Marxist), which had just achieved power in West Bengal, repressed the rebellions, and in 1969 the radical former student Charu Mazumdar formed the militantly Maoist Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) – commonly called the ‘Naxalites’.
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In Portuguese Africa, too, the guerrilla movements moved further towards Marxism, and from 1970, under the leadership of Samora Machel, the Mozambican anti-colonial front – FRELIMO – finally declared itself a socialist movement. Machel, a former nurse from a family with a long anti-colonial tradition, was not a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist of the Agostinho Neto type, but he used Marxist language to express a fundamentally moral critique of the Portuguese.
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And, like the other anti-colonial movements in Portuguese Africa, FRELIMO was conducting a self-consciously Maoist-style ‘people’s war’.
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The ‘people’s war’ strategy involved efforts to win over peasants by establishing rural schools and hospitals, whilst also involving peasants in ‘mass line’-style ‘democracy’. More radical still were the attempts made in guerrilla-liberated areas to dismantle old hierarchies of gender and generation by challenging the power of chiefs and promoting women and younger men in their political organizations and guerrilla bands.
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How far these movements really did mobilize peasants is a matter of debate. Communists could find it very difficult to secure peasant support because the political culture they were imposing seemed very alien. As had been the case in ‘liberated areas’ in 1930s and 1940s China, some peasants benefited from and supported the new order, whilst many more merely put up with Communist rule because they had to.
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The guerrillas
used some violence to control their areas, and the terror seems to have become particularly extensive in parts of Eastern Angola, where the MPLA tried and executed alleged traitors (and even persecuted witches, despite its supposed Marxist hostility to superstition).
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The Angolan movement was the least successful militarily, and in Mozambique, too, the Portuguese were not seriously threatened by an all-out FRELIMO military victory.
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Only in the much smaller and less divided Guinea-Bissau did the PAIGC become a government-in-waiting, securing some three quarters of Guinea-Bissau’s territory by 1972. Even so, all of the rebels could draw from a deep well of dissatisfaction with Portuguese rule. Economic growth caused divisions between those who had benefited from Portuguese rule and those who had not, whilst Portuguese repression alienated many.
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Naturally Portugal – a small, relatively poor country – found it increasingly difficult to sustain these debilitating wars, which by 1968 consumed 40 per cent of the state budget.