The legacies of national liberation
By David Finkel
To grasp the changes that the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s produced, suppose first that you were looking at a world atlas circa 1960. On the continent of Africa alone, you’d find countries with names like Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, South West Africa, French Equatorial Guinea, Belgian Congo and the like. The transformation from that map to Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, etc. far transcends the names on paper – it marked practically a new epoch, a change every bit as profound as the collapse of Stalinism and the 1990s transition from the Cold War to corporate globalization.
Some aspects of the transformation were not anticipated by classical Marxist theories of imperialism, which had developed in the wake of the late 19th century carving up of the world into colonial empires. For decades thereafter it was assumed that what Lenin called “the highest stage of capitalism” required colonial empire, whether for the looting of raw materials or the export of capital from the metropolitan center. Based on this understanding, it appeared that those competing colonial empires would be dismantled only under the impact of international socialist revolution.
We should state at the outset that for Marxists, the right of nations to self-determination is important for several reasons. First, it is a legitimate democratic right, valid in and of itself whether or not it has direct revolutionary implications. Second, it is often a necessary condition for independent class politics, because the working class in an oppressed or colonized nation tends to see itself having interests in common with “its own” native capitalist class. Third, the struggle for national liberation may indeed bring revolutionary possibilities to the fore both in the oppressed nation and in the oppressor state. In any case, as Marx noted long ago in the case of Britain and Ireland, no working class can free itself while it is a participant in subjugating another people.
By 1960, in any case, the process of decolonization was underway – dismantling the European empires that had carved up much of the globe at the end of the 19th century and had dragged civilization into two world wars. Sometimes the colonial power ceded sovereignty to local elites more or less peacefully, in other cases after years of violent struggle, but in general without social or even political revolution in the imperial power.
Algeria was just achieving independence from France after years of insurgency and bloody repression. The British protectorate in Iraq had been overthrown shortly before (1958). What remained of French as well as British imperial rule in the Middle East had pretty well disintegrated (except the remnant of British-controlled Aden) when the US Eisenhower administration forced them to abandon their joint conquest, with Israel, of the Suez Canal (1956).
Back in Africa, at the southern tip of your 1960 map you’d find the “Union of South Africa.” It was about to separate from the British Commonwealth and rename itself a “Republic” in defiance of worldwide condemnation of apartheid. In appearance, South Africa was globally isolated; in reality, investment was pouring in as international capital saw “stability” following apartheid’s greatest success, the Sharpeville massacre.
The last of the more-or-less intact colonial dominions in Africa was that of the “Portuguese overseas provinces” Angola, Mozambique and Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) as well as the Cape Verde Islands, Macao, Sao Tome and Principe Islands, and East Timor. While claiming these colonies as “provinces,” Portugal was among the worst of the European powers in exploiting its possessions for raw materials while doing nothing to build an infrastructure, economic development or civil service for independent nations to inherit. Only Belgium, with its unspeakable history of genocide and pillage in the Congo, might claim a more vicious record.
Portugal’s tenacity in holding its African possessions – as one Portuguese revolutionary socialist would call it, “the last to leave” – was closely related to the reality of its condition as the most backward of the remaining colonial powers. The liberation struggles of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau would feed back into the revolutionary upheaval that would shake Portugal itself – and for one hopeful moment, would even threaten the stability of capital in Western Europe – in 1974-75. That runs a little ahead of our story, however.
If backward Portugal was an anachronism as classic colonialism was declining, a new paradigm had emerged, centered in the world’s most powerful imperialist state, the United States of America. US imperialism had pretty well perfected the new science of global exploitation without formal colonies. The USA of course had its own colonies, notably Puerto Rico, but its dominion, in Latin America above all, could now be exercised through officially independent but bought-and-paid-for client regimes. This was in general a highly effective strategy, in which massive profits for metropolitan capital were guaranteed by local legal and repressive client machineries – with the power of the US army, navy and Marines well over the horizon to be employed only as the last resort.
It was a successful model, especially at the height of the long postwar capitalist boom, but not without its own difficulties. In our very “backyard” the Cuban revolution of 1959, initially encouraged by Washington on the assumption that an incompetent dictatorship would be replaced by a reliable capitalist coalition government, by 1960 was looking like an unwelcome development. And in another part of the world about which few Americans knew much of anything, “Indochina,” the United States had taken over the management of a country from which French colonialism had been recently expelled – Vietnam.
National Liberation and the Left
Let’s shift from a global perspective to a few critical struggles which dramatically shaped the thinking of the 1960s and 1970s left, keeping in mind that terms like “national liberation,” “national independence” and even “Third World liberation” were used more or less interchangeably.
(To focus the discussion, I am going to mostly leave aside some important cases of what is sometimes called “internal colonialism” – the Basque nation in Spain, for example – and the question of “settler-colonial” societies such as Israel/Palestine, about which I have previously written for New Socialist. In addition, I won’t touch upon one crucially important national independence movement in our own continent of North America – Quebec – for the obvious reason that New Socialist has access to much more expert analysis of this long struggle.)
First, the Black community in North America drew profound inspiration from the attainment of independence of the new African states. It’s noteworthy that Malcolm X, after his separation from the Nation of Islam, called his new organization the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a name drawn from the Organization of African Unity formed by the African states (OAU, recently renamed the African Union).
It was important at least symbolically that the United Nations ceased to be strictly a rich countries’ club and began to look like the composition of the world’s peoples. Nina Simone, in “Backlash Blues,” culminated her lecture to “Mr. Backlash” (i.e. white racism) with the classic line “The world is full of folks like me/ Who are Black, Red, Yellow and Brown/ Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave with the backlash blues.”
The Civil Rights Movement in the American South developed many of its tactics from the mass defiance campaigns of South Africa, and from an interpretation of Gandhian nonviolent resistance in India against British colonialism. As the radical wing of this movement moved toward Black Power and Black Liberation, including the right of armed self-defense (from Robert F. Williams and the Deacons for Defense to the Black Panther Party), additional sources of inspiration were found in the Cuban and Chinese revolutions as well as armed African liberation struggles.
To be sure, each of these models carried their own contradictions. An absolute insistence on nonviolence, which made a lot of tactical sense in the struggle under conditions of state and Ku Klux Klan terror in the US South, could become a fetish and even alienate part of the movement – as was seen in the angry rejection by many African Americans in the North to Martin Luther King’s statement, “If blood must flow, let it be ours.”
But armed struggle could become a fetish too, and not only in the US. An element of armed self-defense for populations under severe repression and terror – African Americans, indigenous peoples in the United States or Canada, the Nationalist (Catholic) community in Northern Ireland, or the Palestinian people under occupation in their homeland and severe oppression in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon etc. – was precisely that: a necessary defensive component in a larger political struggle.
Tragically, this dynamic bred the illusion that liberation itself could be achieved by an armed vanguard that would free Black people, drive Britain out of the north of Ireland, defeat Zionism, etc. The results of this expectation of armed revolutionary victory were often incredibly destructive (think of the fate of the Black Panther Party, for example, or in the context of the Canadian state the tragedy of the FLQ. When white New Leftists with no social base adopted the notion of “picking up the gun,” the outcome was even more hideous).
The larger point here, however, is that the US Black community has always been more internationalist in its thinking than the population as a whole. The 1960s revival of the US left began with the inspiration drawn from Civil Rights and Black Liberation, movements that already saw themselves as part of an international struggle. And since the Black struggle itself is very much that of an oppressed nation (or nationality, if you prefer that language) within the US, one can say that a national liberation struggle at the heart of US society was central to the recomposition of the 1960s and 70s left.
Beyond this, of course, one struggle above all others dominated the movements of the decade 1965-’75: Vietnam. Here, in contrast to its own postcolonial paradigm, US imperialism had taken over management of the country after the French were defeated and now attempted to suppress Vietnamese aspirations for unity and independence by the direct application of overwhelming military force. The results of this failure would prevent a repetition for almost thirty years – until the messianic-imperial presidential administration of George W. Bush decided that conquering Iraq would begin a transformation of the Middle East…but again, we’re getting ahead.
What Vietnam Taught Us
It’s difficult to convey a full sense of the transformative role of the Vietnam War, but some of the critical dimensions can be briefly described.
The Context of the Cold War. The frozen polarization of the 1950s between the East and West blocs was thawing in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split* and the “normalizing” of US-Soviet rivalry after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, but in US domestic politics the discourse of the Communist Menace still loomed even larger than today’s debate-choking threat of Global Terrorism.
The Role of Liberalism. The massive escalation of US military power in Vietnam from 1964 on, and the bombing of South Vietnam that preceded it, were carried out not by today’s right-wing Republicans but by the liberal Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Race, Class and War. The United States in Vietnam fielded an army of hundreds of thousands of conscripts, drafted from the working class, Black and Latino populations who did not have college student deferments or other escape routes from the draft.
Politics of Nationalism. With the Tet offensive of Spring 1968, it became clear to the US public and to political elites that the war could not be “won,” not only because the conscript army was disintegrating on the ground but because of the power of nationalism: The population of South Vietnam had unified in support of the National Liberation Front (NLF) against the US occupation, whether or not they supported the Communist Party that controlled the NLF.
Mass Struggle. Students for a Democratic Society called the first national demonstration for immediate withdrawal, in 1965, and shortly found itself at the forefront of the radical wing of a mass antiwar movement. The fear and loathing of the draft created a huge draft resistance struggle on the campuses and antiwar coffeehouses, and by the late 1960s strong antiwar sentiment had surfaced within the active duty military ranks. All this coincided with the Black urban uprisings and the rise of Women’s Liberation – and stirrings of rank and file discontent in the unions.
What did all this mean for a Left that was just reviving? Many lessons were learned in an incredibly short time, some positive and others deeply contradictory. To list a few:
(i) First and foremost, it was incredibly liberating to learn that the overwhelming power of the American empire could be challenged – and defeated! Nothing in our immediate experience had prepared us for this: There had been the Bay of Pigs in 1961**, of course, but for the US military itself to be defeated in direct battle with a small nation fighting for its independence was unprecedented and awesome.
(ii) American public opinion itself was not monolithic: People could be moved by a combination of moral argumentation and the impact of the human and economic costs of military adventure. Tens of thousands of soldiers returning in body bags mattered, of course, as well as the onset of war-induced inflation; but so did the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese villagers by US troops and the image of the young girl fleeing with her clothes burned off by napalm.
The Vietnam war brought down two US administrations, that of Lyndon Johnson and ultimately Richard Nixon as well. The Watergate crimes that destroyed Nixon were the direct result, after all, of the “Plumbers Unit” created within the bowels of Nixon’s regime to stop the leak of unfavorable information about an unpopular war. Any resemblance to the recently revealed antics of the George W. Bush gang are strictly uncoincidental.
(iii) The antiwar and left activists of the 1960s learned powerful lessons about the imperialist character of liberalism and the Democratic Party – realities that are harder for a newer generation to comprehend when today’s atrocities-in-the-name-of-”freedom” are perpetrated by far-right Republicans. That’s one reason it’s important to study the 1960s: Today’s John Kerry, Hilary Clinton and Joe Lieberman Democrats who oppose the struggle for immediate withdrawal from Iraq are very much in continuity with their party’s history, even if they are out of touch with their own antiwar voting base.
(iv) In dealing with the question of Communism, the Left began to successfully challenge the national consensus that any country or movement, external or internal, that might be run by Communists was deserving of destruction at the hands of US power. Indeed, for the whole US population, the Cold War myth that “losing” Vietnam would cause “falling dominoes” all over Asia suffered huge blows in this struggle. This experience was also contradictory for the Left, however.
Most regrettably, much of the left itself became suffused with the notion that Stalinist parties, like the Vietnamese Communist Party, were vehicles for liberation – not just national liberation but even “socialism.” This notion not only separated the radical Left from most of the US working class population, but was enormously disorienting. For example, it was common to assume that the North Vietnamese and Chinese Communist regimes were fighting shoulder to shoulder in an “anti-imperialist, anti-revisionist front.” In the real world, by 1966-67 these two regimes and parties hated each other, especially as Beijing blocked Soviet aid from reaching Vietnam (to say nothing of how the lunatic factional warfare of the Cultural Revolution was seen by Vietnamese Communists).
Further, taking the Vietnamese leadership as a political model attracted much of the anti-imperialist Left to Stalinist methods. For example, the NLF in southern Vietnam presented itself as a broadly representative national movement. On paper that’s what it was, and its official program promised to preserve southern autonomy and political pluralism following the victory. Real power, however, rested in a Communist Party that was fiercely committed to uniting Vietnam under its own single-party rule. Some on the US Left who understood these realities drew the conclusion that this kind of manipulation was the way to do politics, with disastrous results.
(v) The successful Vietnamese war against the imperialist occupation generated both a certain worship of guerrilla war as THE strategy for revolutionary victory (here again, the Vietnamese and Chinese experiences were absurdly conflated), and a world view sometimes called “Third Worldism,” according to which the revolutionary masses of the Third World would surround and overwhelm the rich countries with their “bought-off and privileged” working classes. (It must be said here that the Vietnamese Communists themselves didn’t make any such argument, although the Maoist regime in China pretended to believe something of the sort, for the benefit of its foreign admirers. But in essence this was a homegrown delusion.)
(vi) The Third-Worldist illusion fed back into the US Left’s attempts to come to grips with the most important question confronting us – understanding and changing our own society. As noted above, a wing of the Civil Rights movement had evolved to Black Power and toward revolutionary politics; and anger in northern Black communities over police brutality, economic apartheid and the Vietnam war produced a wave of ghetto rebellions. It was entirely correct to see in these developments a potential social insurgency, one which could draw in sectors of militant Black workers as a vanguard of the overall US working class.
It was disastrously mistaken, however, for either white or African American revolutionaries to see this as the actual beginning of a revolution in which the (mythical) Black revolutionary masses represented the extension of the (mythical) Third World revolution into a corrupted and decadent American society. Implicitly or explicitly, the idea arose that the revolution would be carried through by a minority, aided by the enlightened revolutionary elite who allied themselves with the Third World, against the wishes and interests of the reactionary (basically, white working class) majority.
Based on this illusion, much of the 1960s Left passed rapidly into extreme social isolation followed by self-destruction, utter demoralization or an astoundingly rapid relapse into liberalism. Obviously this compresses and simplifies a complex and important history, but in a nutshell this was the rise and tragic failure of the New Left.
From Vietnam to Central America
America’s war in Vietnam was essentially lost by spring 1968, yet the carnage continued till the “fall of Saigon” in 1975. Indeed more Vietnamese probably died between 1969 and 1975 than in the preceding six years – a cautionary lesson for the struggle to end the Iraq war today.
The end of the Vietnam era, however, brought a new wave of liberation struggles and solidarity movements. Portugal was the strongest example of a genuine organic alliance between liberation movements in the colonies and revolutionary militants in the colonial country, in which the victory of the former set in motion a process that very nearly culminated in a workers’ revolution in Portugal itself.
For the North American Left, however, the next truly formative experience of national liberation and solidarity came with the Nicaraguan upheaval of 1977-79 and the Sandinista triumph of July 19, 1979. This opened the wave of Central American popular revolutionary struggles (El Salvador and Guatemala especially), which produced the best solidarity organizing in this writer’s experience in the US Left.
The fact that the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) today, after fifteen years of defeat, has become a thoroughly cynical political party in a corrupt partnership with the right wing must not blind us to the enormous hope that the FSLN’s victory had opened up. Indeed the fact that the Sandinista social base, against all odds and practically without leadership, continues the struggle for social justice, in itself confirms the enduring power of that revolutionary impulse.
The Central American revolutionary movements at their best combined the necessary military struggle against death squads and client governments of US imperialism with powerful social mobilizations of workers’, peasants’, indigenous, women’s and community organizations. Powerful solidarity linkages were built between Central and North American communities, whether through churches, labor groups or solidarity committees. A strong Sanctuary movement arose in US and Canadian cities to shield our brothers and sisters fleeing from death squads – a movement in which thousands of ordinary citizens told the US government: Your laws and your war are crimes against humanity, and you can shove them.
Critical lessons came out of these years of activism. First, while defending the right of oppressed people to engage in armed struggle is an important principle, the level of solidarity with Central America surpassed by far anything that could have been built to support military struggle alone. Second, more than in previous movements, we began to see the importance of US immigrant communities (Salvadoran and Guatemalan in this case) playing a vital role in struggle both for their homelands and inside the US. Third, as inspiring as they were, these movements could not ultimately triumph against overwhelming US-financed-and-organized repression and mass murder, without US society forcing significant changes on government policy.
The experience of the Central American revolutions and solidarity movements were a vast improvement on the militarist “Third Worldism” that arose in the course of the Vietnam-era Left (and the wave of guerillaist enthusiasm inspired by Che Guevara in the same general period). Certainly, the memory remained of the victory of Vietnam against the full might of US imperialism. But that had not been ultimately a victory of guerrilla war in itself; the NLF had been backed up by the powerful conventional army of North Vietnam, which finally won the war, and this in turn could count on open-ended support (whatever you thought of the politics) from the Soviet Union.
National Liberation Today: Africa to Iraq
Finally, then, the end of the Cold War and final collapse of the Soviet Union changed – among many other things—the context in which today’s liberation struggles must operate. Some on the Left regard this change as an unmitigated disaster, but the actual record is mixed. In fact, the disappearance of “the Communist menace” meant that US imperialism no longer had a stake in defending to the bitter end, for example, apartheid in South Africa, Mobutu’s kleptocracy in Zaire or the Suharto gangster dictatorship in Indonesia. At the same time, particularly after 9/11, US imperialism has engaged in a level of aggression in the name of the “Global War on Terror” which was practically unimaginable in the decades of relatively stable “superpower rivalry.”
To end this overly hasty overview, I would point to three crucial aspects of today’s realities pertaining to the legacies and the future of national liberation struggles. These should not be seen as finished conclusions, but as bare sketches pointing to important new discussions.
(1) First, we need to understand that the right of national self-determination remains as valid as ever in the new global capitalism – but it is not synonymous with socialism. Indeed, national independence by itself doesn’t resolve fundamental issues that can only be addressed on the basis of working class power. As John Saul puts it in his important and thoughtful new book, The Next Liberation Struggle (2005), examining the legacies of Africa’s liberation struggles: “We also know that the liberation of Southern Africa has fulfilled little of the promise of negating the counter-developmental hegemony of global capitalism that revolutionary nationalism in the ex-Portuguese colonies and Zimbabwe and a working-class-driven transformation in South Africa seemed possibly to portend.”
South Africa is indeed a case in point here. The African National Congress has been the democratically elected government for a decade and more now; yet the majority of Black South Africans are poorer than before under the impact of neoliberal privatization schemes embraced by the ANC at the dictates of international capital.
In Zimbabwe, obviously, the picture is unimaginably worse. Nothing could more graphically illustrate the disastrous consequences of the single-party state and one-man rule than the degeneration of ZANU-PF from the liberation movement of the 1970s to today’s fascist gangster cult. Robert Mugabe, who should have been his country’s Nelson Mandela, has instead become its Papa Doc*** – something especially painful for those of us who engaged in political solidarity and fundraising for ZANU during the liberation war.
(2) Today’s struggles of nations in “the global South” obviously have everything to do with the issues of “Free Trade” and corporate globalization. By their very nature, these struggles cannot be fought by individual nations on their own. They absolutely require alliances and blocs of nations on the sharp end of the “Free Trade” stick, and they require linkages with the global justice movements that have erupted since the Seattle events of 1999.
With some important exceptions such as the above-mentioned Puerto Rico, classic colonies are mainly a thing of the past. What we see today is the onset of a promising anti-neoliberal revolt. Whether or not they fit into the standard definition of “national liberation struggles,” we must look to the Bolivian indigenous people’s revolt against water privatization, Guatemala’s indigenous resistance to the ravages of the (Canadian-based) Glamis gold mining corporation, and the “Bolivarian Revolution” of Venezuela under president Hugo Chavez, as expressions of the growing resistance.
In no way, incidentally, do I mean here to identify Chavez’s government with socialism-from-below (least of all is it based on structures of working class power!). It is important to recognize, however, that what initially appeared as a kind of retro-populist caudillo politics has gone much further in opening space for popular mobilization – ironically, at the same time that the Workers Party government in Brazil, elected on the strength of labor and social movements, is trying to shut that space down. History remains full of surprises.
(3) Finally, we come to the Bush gang’s rampage through Afghanistan and Iraq. Seizing upon the opportunity afforded by 9/11, this administration assigned itself a messianic mandate: to “make the Middle East what Latin America used to be, a big American lake” as my friend Sam Farber aptly put it. The plan, of course, was a whole banquet of “regime change” with Afghanistan as the appetizer, Iraq the soup, Iran the main course and then Syria for dessert. As we now know, it’s all gone down the windpipe the wrong way.
The lesson so far is catastrophic all around. Far from demonstrating unlimited power, US imperialism is choking on Iraq. But the picture is not pretty for “our side” either. The traditional forces of national liberation – the left, the labor movement, progressive Arab nationalism – are virtually prostrate in Iraq and the Arab world generally. This has left the field of resistance mainly to Baathist, Islamist or religious-totalitarian fanatic forces.
The dynamic of the “global war on terror” has best been described by the Marxist author Gilbert Achcar as a symbiotic “clash of barbarisms,” in which the “counter-barbarism” of religious-fanatic terrorism feeds on the catastrophic destruction of small nations and the world’s poor by uncontrolled imperial military and corporate domination.
In some bizarre sense, we seem to have come full circle. In an age where classic colonial conquest had become an anachronism, the imperial state that virtually invented and perfected “neocolonialism” has brutally reminded us that naked military conquest and looting of resources (for the natives’ good, of course, not our own greed) remains on the agenda.
With old questions of self-determination still unresolved and so many new ones from “free trade” to catastrophic climate change on the agenda, the new century promises to be as turbulent as the last.
