WHITHER AFRICAN MARXISTS?
Even before the ink dries on my paper, I can hear the cries counter-revolution, undiplomatic, etc. concerning this precis about the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. These cries will come from the counter-revolutionary and petty-bourgeois led African nationalist organisations which are apt to mimic Maoist slogans in return for cash from Peking. As a Marxist in the Pan Africanist Congress of South Africa, I feel it is crucial for all African revolutionaries to point out to the masses the counter-revolutionary character of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. This leadership, like the Soviet bureaucracy is counter-revolutionary. It is difficult not to come to this conclusion. Revolutionaries who do not fear the masses have nothing to lose by accepting and applying the Leninist principle of "criticism and self-criticism'. In his fine Marxist days in the twenties Mao said: "China is in urgent need of a bourgeois democratic revolution and this revolution can be completed under the leadership of the proletariat. Because the proletariat failed to exercise firm leadership in the revolution of 1926-27 which started from Kwangtung and spread towards the Yangtse River, leadership was seized by the comprador and landlord classes and the revolution was replaced by counter-revolution".
Yet in the case of Pakistan recently, the Chinese Communist Party leadership actively and objectively supported the military dictatorship of Yahya Khan and in this way the spread of the national democratic revolution from East Bengal to West Pakistan was ruthlessly halted. Now that Yahya has been ousted, the Chinese leadership supports the Bhutto regime which represents the interests of the comprador and landlord classes of Pakistan.
There is now abolustely no question about the roles of Peking and Moscow with regard to the struggles of the peoples of The Third World. Though the two capitals invariably take what appears to be opposing positions, the net result in each instance is counter-revolution and consolidation of repression and bourgeois rule. As revolutionaires of The Third World, our watchwords should be vigilance and revolution in permanence -Sam Mhlongo Black on red, red on white:
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