Kenya—Colonialism and the Lessons of Independence

[p028] Colonialism and the Lessons of independence by Peter Jay KENYA, LIKE ALL the rest of Africa, like all of Asia with the exceptions of the USSR, Mongolia, China, North Vietnam and North Korea, and like all of Central and South America with the exception of Cuba, is a semi-colony of imperialism. Kenya cannot be seen fully except on the basis of an under- standing of imperialism and of the evolution of its modes of operation. Without this general under- standing no proper appreciation of the particular is possible. Since our knowledge of imperialism in general came through induction in the first instance (the work of Engels, Hobson, Lenin, etc.), the above deductive process is justified. Thenceforth, through the careful study of the particulars and their dialectic sum-total, material is provided for the further development of our understanding of the whole and thence of programmes, policies and tactics in the field of practice. These remarks seemed called for by the fate of all those who, on the spot or from afar, got drunk on ‘independence’ and, staggering from bath to bath in Brussels, New York, Paris, Algiers, Colombo and _ elsewhere, wantonly threw out many babies with but a little bath water. Their behaviour, which led to their adoption by many strange foster mothers and fathers, flowed from a deep lack of theory and, in turn, further decanted their ideological bowls. Their lack of theory led all such persons, talents notwithstanding, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, past history notwithstanding, to a rejection of the content of the first sentence of this article about Kenya. This underscores its import- ance and is at least one reason why the author began with a sentence which should be taken for granted but is, instead, now one both of descrip- tion and of judgement. THE COLOMBO PACT AND THE MOON How is one even to start talking about Kenya and all its problems unless one first talks about the wider problem which contains the local ones? In the ‘old days’ one could rush in unangelically and get down to the business of dealing with the role of the colonial bourgeoisie as agent of imperialism. Nowadays, however, one finds it necessary first to make one’s way through a circle of one’s former friends, fawning on and being fondled by this self- same bourgeoisie, before one can even catch a glimpse of one’s object. What can one do, then, but part this once friendly curtain in order to bare the old object to the view? Hence, the need, for a moment at any rate, to talk about some ex-friends, before talking about the enemy. The Colombo Pact—that small one brewed in the Colombo tea cup between the sadly fallen and humbled Sama Samajists and a house matron of British imperialism*—-was justified to the author *The author refers to the entry into the bourgeois Coalition government of Mrs. Bandaranaike by repre- sentatives of the Ceylon Lanka Sama Samaja Party, which had been a Trotskyist party. ,

[p029] 72 along these lines: ‘You don’t appreciate the diffi- culties of the situation ... the need for tactics... it is different from what we thought it would be.’ Well, of course, everything is ‘different’ at closer view. But is it? You see the moon from 180,000 miles away. You go. there, preferably by Lunik. You get there. It is not what you thought it to be. It is ‘different’. But in what way is it different? Is it made of cheese? Or is it more complex than a distant view showed it to be? Is it a moon or is it not, that is the question. To be sure, ‘independent’ Ceylon (is it really necessary to explain the need for the inverted commas, even these days?) is ‘different’ from our pre-independence conception of it. But is it a difference of degree or one of kind? Is it a semi- colony or is it not? Is it made of cheese? Or is it what we expected it to be: a moon of British imperialism? That is the question. For Ceylon, for Algeria vis-a-vis her French master, for Ghana vis-a-vis the United Africa Company and Whitehall, for Burma, for Egypt, for Kenya. _ Unless you can answer this question categorically, with a yes or with a no, you are void in theory and suicidal in practice. Because if you cannot answer this question, it means you do not know what imperialism is and this means that you do not know what capitalism is. Hence you do not know what you are fighting or whether you are fighting or collaborating. In fact, nor can you, let alone do you, know how to find and make a road to socialism, since this is the negation of something you do not understand and, in fact, are supporting, willy-nilly, at the behest of your ‘new’ theories. These, Labriola would say today, did not come from the sky, but from the moon. EN PASSANT—THE COLONIAL MIDDLE CLASS In the ‘old days’ one would go right ahead and say that Bandaranaike, Ben Bella, Nasser, Nkrumah, Kenyatta and company were managers of various imperialist estates. Bas, as they say in Swahili, i.e., that’s enough. But ‘nowadays’ one has to be much more circumspect if one follows behind the feet of the intellectual belly-dancers curtaining such gentry from the proletarian view. Maybe, they will concede, Kenyatta is ‘different’ (i.e., from Ben Bella or Bandaranaike). But that is a bit awkward, since he is a head of the same Organisation for African Unity (OAU) which Ben Bella helped to father (i.e, the same organisation of African underlings, as anti-imperialists in Africa prefer to call it). It is a bit awkward, too, because Banda- ranaike sat next to Kenyatta at Commonwealth FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 Conferences (which, in the ‘old days’ we would call the den of thieves of the British Empire, but ‘nowadays’ ‘we’ put on a dress suit and take a Finance Portfolio with us when ‘we’ visit, not London, but the ‘City’ and Whitehall, where the real conferences of the ‘International’ now take place). So it is a bit awkward to say Kenyatta is ‘different’, even when he has deported a Chinese journalist and an anti-apartheid South African and even when he brings in the British paratroops to preserve the spirit of ‘Harambee’. For others, however, it is not awkward. It is simple, straight- forward. Tantalising words these, ‘nowadays’. The collaborators love to excuse themselves by saying ‘nothing is simple or straightforward’. Indeed, not. But for others the simple, complex reality is: the Kenyattas, like the others mentioned, represent a colonial middle class acting as an agent (ie., not a passive tool) of imperialism in the latter’s super-exploitation and, through these agent states, <"per-oppression, of the semi-colonial peasantry « id working class. The tasks of national liberation fuse with the tasks of the emancipation of the semi-colonial toilers from si: .er-exploitation. The tasks of national liberation need to be distinguished from its antithesis: African, etc., nationalism. African nationalism is the ideology of the semi-colonial quisling class serving imperialism. African nationalism is the ideological servant of imperial- ism in Africa and, thereby, the twin of Verwoerd- Smith-Salazar white nationalism. From Nkrumah to Kenyatta, the semi-colonial henchmen of imperialism attempt to win support from the workers and landless peasants with the appeal: ‘We are all brothers, all Africans. Let us not fight each other. The spirit of class struggle is alien to the spirit of Harambee, to the spirit of African nationalism.’ African nationalism, being both in theory and practice the policy of class collaboration, is for this reason the best ideological servant which imperialism has in Africa. For the anti-imperialist struggle is basically a class struggle led by the semi-colonial proletariat and the toilers allied to it. And the quisling social groups stand directly in the path of this struggle, seeking to wave it aside with the red, green and black flag of African nationalism. This theory, like that of African socialism, was imported into Africa by the ideologues of imperialism. The main ideas of African socialism, for instance, are believed to have been brought into Tanganyika (before Tanzania was formed) by the Roman Catholic Church, straight from Rome. The idea of African nationalism comes from the

[p030] KENYA-—COLONIALISM AND INDEPENDENCE trainees abroad of Social-Democracy in Britain and Western Europe, of Marcus Garveyism at various levels in America, and of vocal civil servant and professional groups indoctrinated in the former colonies themselves. There is very little ‘African’ about it, in consequence of its origin and role. Under the superficial appearance of being rebellious it is deeply stamped with the slave mentality which is native to the aspiring semi-colonial middle class, aspiring to serve and serving its imperialist master, tutor and leader. The verbal and demagogic ‘anti-imperialism’ of this semi-colonial quisling group (whether capital- ist, tribal or feudal in its main social roots) is no more anti-imperialist than Wilson’s ‘socialism’ is socialist. And it is as fatal to equate anti- imperialism with the ‘anti-imperialist?’ demagogy of the Nkrumahs, Nassers, Kenyattas, Sukarnos, etc., as it is to equate socialism with the ‘socialism’ of Social-Democracy. The ‘anti-imperialist’? demagogy of the quislings is not without an important purpose, which may be summed up as the technique of raising their bargaining price in their dealings with their imperialist masters. The louder they shout against imperialism the larger the share of the semi-colonial loot they expect to get from their imperialist masters. It is little more than a hard-bargaining device. This readily explains the periodic ‘turns’ towards the Soviet bloc states, turns which invariably go through 360 degrees back into the arms of the imperialists. Their patronage by both the Chinese and Russian bureaucracies does nothing to diminish this deception of the people, viz., that the ‘anti-imperialists’ are anti- imperialists. More deceived than the ‘people’. however, are those who have confused ‘anti-imperialist’ dema- gogy with anti-imperialism. They, in turn, further . the deception, thereby strengthening the power of the servants of imperialism to deceive the people. Among these deceived deceivers are those who propagate the concept of the ‘Third Camp’, or the ‘Emergent World’ as a mystique existing outside the class struggle and ‘between’ the Anglo-American and Sino-Russian ‘camps’. The reality is that a part of Africa, Latin America, Asia, etc., is in the ‘Western bloc’, namely the semi-colonial quisling layers; and that the semi-colonial toilers, the peoples in the workers’ states and (potentially, at least) the workers in the imperialist states are in the ‘Eastern bloc’. This reality at once makes nonsense of the idea of ‘West’ and ‘East’ (the more so with Japan in the ‘West’) and reveals the non- existence of a ‘Third Force’, or ‘Third Camp’ and 73 the existence of only two socially significant ‘camps’, namely, the imperialist camp and its. opposite and negation: the camp of the semi- colonial toilers, led by the semi-colonial proletariat, the workers’ states and the proletariat in the imperialist states. This is the real international arrangement and alignment. And one of the functions of African, etc., nationalism, of Social- Democracy, of Stalinism and of Liberalism is to obscure and cut across this class division of the world. MARX ON THE COLONIAL SYSTEM What is happening in Kenya and places like Kenya today is the eclipse of the colonial system, of which imperialism is the last phase. A study of the rise of capitalism shows that it was both born and bred by the colonial system. This was quite clear to Marx, of course, but is still not at all clear to so many who go about shouting ‘revolution’ even while they are collaborating with the very mother of capitalism. Shouting ‘revolution’ may deafen others to one’s quiet betrayals and may convince oneself that one is not a traitor, programmes, policies and deeds notwithstanding. Likewise, has it not, from the days of Kautsky and Bernstein, been the most ‘Marxist’ Marxists who have fought Marx’s basic principle of the class struggle and rejected the proletarian .dictatorship? Marx, for this reason, declared that he was ‘not a Marxist’. The author is reluctant to quote from Marx, for the same sort of reason and also for another and in this case more relevant one: quoting Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky is not an argument at all, any more than quoting from Newton, Galileo or Einstein is a valid argument in physics. Indeed physics would be in an incurable mess if mathe- maticians and physicists relied on what the ‘great men’ said as arguments. Yet this is precisely what so often takes the place of an argument in so-called Marxist discussions these days. A quotation from Marx and Co. is a statement by an authority and not an argument. By itself it proves absolutely nothing beyond this. When the author quotes from Marx, etc., it is only in order to present an argu- ment he thinks correct in a much clearer way than he can and to show that his view is worth con- sidering because it was held by an important thinker like Marx. He does not use Marx as a proof, but as a confirmation, of his argument. Marxism is a method, not a church. Marx wrote: ‘The discoveries of gold and silver in America; the extirpation of the indigens in some instances,

[p031] 74 their enslavement in the mines in others; the begin- nings of the conquest and looting of the East Indies; the transformation of Africa into a precinct for the supply of Negroes who were the raw material of the slave trade—these were the incidents that charac- terised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist pro- duction. These were the idyllic processes that formed the chief factors of primary accumulation.’ (Capital, Vol. 1. My emphasis.) ‘Characterised’ and ‘chief factors’ are powerful words to use. And they were a correct description of a fact which most ‘Marxists’ shy away from to this day; a fact dealt with in some detail by an author from Africa, Nxele Afrika, in his recent work Colonialism Today; a fact which is basic to thought and to action in the present world situation, namely, that colonialism has always been and as Nxele Afrika has tried to show, that it remains today the very foundation of the capitalist system. Maybe Marx was wrong. The author thinks that those who think so are wrong, treacherously, dangerously, hopelessly wrong. Without colonial- ism, no capitalism. Without imperialism, no capitalism. In the present world, it is worthwhile reading Capital, and not only Capital, all over again. Now, in terms of this idea that colonialism is the basis of capitalism, it follows that capitalism cannot exist without super-exploitation of colonies or semi-colonies; that therefore the anti-imperialist struggle is basic to the class struggle and not extraneous or auxiliary to the class struggle and that, in consequence of this, one is, in actual fact, not doing anything serious in the struggle for socialism unless one bases oneself squarely on the anti-imperialist class struggle. All else is illusion and deception. What, then, is the anti-imperialist struggle in the fundamental sense? Are the bourgeois, tribal and feudal social groups managing various imperialist estates, be it in Ceylon, Algeria, Ghana or Kenya, are they, the servants of imperialism, anti- imperialist? Is their ‘struggle’ to share in the super-profits made by their masters an anti- imperialist struggle? Or is not the anti-imperialist struggle an international class struggle of the colonial toilers, the workers in the imperialist countries and in the workers’ states against im- perialism and its semi-colonial servants? This is the major question of our times and an answer to it means everything to the vast majority of mankind in the first place—namely, the 14 billion people living in semi-colonial America, Africa and Asia—as well as to the future of the one billion people in the workers’ states and the half billion FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 in the imperialist countries. It is with this question in mind that one tries to look at Kenya today. THE LEADER CULT Arising directly out of the super-profits from the colonial system was the continual betrayal, both during and between world wars, as well as the corruption of increasing layers, of the workers in the imperialist countries. Associated with this went the abandonment of Marxist priniciples and, instead of ‘following’ principles, ex-Marxists followed ‘leaders’. At the same time, in the colonies, especially after their transformation into semi-colonies by a process called ‘independence’, imperialism propped up and in some cases created (as it is doing in Kenya now) an ‘élite’ with its ‘leaders’. Disenchanted with American and European ‘leaders’, the disillusioned turned to more ‘colourful’ ones and there began the cult of finding the ‘best’ leader, the one ‘nearest’ to one’s own ideas, one for whom one would eventu- ally raise funds as Finance Minister or election agent or aid-beggar. This is indeed a dismal form of capitulation in some cases, and of arrogance in others. Arrogance because it is an impertinence bred by the colonial system which made the ‘European’ think himself, the receiver, to be a giver and hence super-capable of ‘advising’ or ‘guiding’ or even ‘leading’ the inferior non- Europeans. In this sense it is an inverted form of chauvinism, as Negrophilism always is. Equally the product of the colonial system was the myth of Western European civilization and its superiority and, with it, the myth of European leadership. Coming straight from the foulest bowels of the colonial system, it long ago entered the socialist movement, inter alia, with the arrogant, chauvinist and presumptuous suggestion, worthy only of rejection with contempt, that the American, ‘European’ or British working class should lead the presumably ‘backward’ colonial peoples in the struggle for socialism. Support, yes. Lead, no. By no entitlement of its past history, by no present act, by no right, position or authority is this conceivable or acceptable. With the exception of part of Russia, of Czechoslovakia and East Germany, ‘backward’ colonial slaves ‘lead’ the ‘advanced’ countries by making the first, and, to date, the only, socialist revolutions in human history. Yet such is the strength to this day, of the colonial system, that, flying in the face of historical fact, the idea of American, European or British working-class leadership is still put forward, however unthinkingly.

[p032] KENYA—COLONIALISM AND INDEPENDENCE In each country, colonial, imperialist, or ruled by Stalinist bureaucracy, the working class must con- struct its own leadership, a party of the Fourth International, with its strategy determined by the international struggle against imperialism and its agents. Lenin and Trotsky long ago established that, for special historical reasons concerning the uneven development of capitalism, especially accentuated under imperialism, the building of such a leadership, and even the taking of workers’ power, occurred first in ‘backward’ countries. But this victory would be frustrated, and could not lead to socialism, without the resolution of the crisis of leadership and workers’ victory in the advanced capitalist countries. COLONIALISM—TAP-ROOT OF CAPITALISM What thas been said thus far can be reduced to this: that internationalism is sheer and mere demagogy, charlatanism and humbug unless it is based four-square on the struggle against imperial- ism which enslaves the vast majority of the inter- national proletariat, namely, the super-exploited colonial and semi-colonial toilers. The super-exploitation of these toilers, con- centrated as they are in vast plantations and mines, etc., creates the super-profits of the capitalist system. These super-profits comprise by far the major proportion of the total profits of the ‘capitalist system taken as a whole. This is shown, in summary form, in the following table (page 36 Colonialism Today, by Nxele Afrika, 1962): TOTAL PROFITS AND SUPER-PROFITS OF THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM 1. Total profits at 7% on total capital of $3,000b. = $210b. 2. Of this, total profits from semi-colonies: (a) at 17.1% plus on $300b. colonial capital $51.3b. (b) Manufacturing profits ‘from raw materials’ $56.0b. (c) Super-profits from U.S. ‘Negroes’ $25.0b. Minimum total $132.3b. (d) As this is the lower limit to the real figures which range to beyond 100%, the Southern African figure of 28% is chosen as nearer to the truth, giving a further $32.7b. Estimated total colonial-type profits $165.0b. which is about three-quarters of all the profits of capitalism. This is the most general economic 75 measure of the utter dependence of capitalism on Latin America, Africa and unliberated Asia. The above-mentioned work concludes with a SUMMARY OF THE WORLD CAPITALIST ECONOMIC POSITION Imp. Countries Col. Countries World 1. Capital (constant plus variable—c plus v) $2,700b. $300b. $3,000b. 2. Profits (s) $45h. to $165b. to $210b. $78b. (max.) $132b. (min.) 3. Wages (v) $460b. $70b. $530b. 4. Rate of surplus 10% to 235% to 40% value (s/v) 16% (max.) 190% (min.) 5. Rate of profit 1.7% to 47% (exe. Th (s/(c plus v)) 2.9% (max.) ‘Negroes’) to 36% (min:) More recent figures confirm this analysis. For example, analyses of Britain’s so-called ‘trade gap’ show that ‘invisible income’ from earnings on shipping, banking, insurance, mercantile services and foreign investments came to £2,570 million in 1964. This is about 80 per cent of total profits made by British capitalism in 1964. Since the war, British capital exports have trebled in nominal value. There is no doubt of the overall accuracy of Afrika’s figures. The political conclusions to be drawn from them are clear, indeed obvious: viz., that the struggle against imperialism and its hench- men managing its semi-colonial hench-states, as they may be called, is the basic class struggle of our epoch. This struggle is centred on the colonial system as the tap-root which anchors the capitalist system. This struggle is not confined to colonial areas but is taken up by the workers in imperialist countries and by the peoples of the workers’ states under the rule of the bureaucracy. The semi-colonies are not ‘epicentres of the world revolution’. In any geographic sense there is no ‘epicentre’. But the colonial question is at the centre of international- ism, and being so it is an international question geographically too (for example, it is taken up by workers and students demonstrating at the Black- pool Labour Party Conference in Britain as well as by workers and peasants in Vietnam). It is from this generalised weltanschauung that we view the particular semi-colony, Kenya. IMPERIALIST DOMINATION OF KENYA’S ECONOMY The President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, summed up the situation for East Africa as a whole,

[p033] 76 when he said of Tanzania itself: ‘When it comes to actual facts, this country is completely Western in Government, in business, in schools, in everything. The influence of this country is Western.’ (East African Standard, 1.9.64). ‘Western’ (or rather, imperialist) influence in East Africa rests on investments. Giant British monopolies head the list of investors. In Tan- zania, for example, a major investor is Harry Oppenheimer, king of apartheid South Africa’s diamond mines and of Zambia’s copperbelt, and head of a mining empire estimated at close on £1 billion (£1,000,000,000) in capital outlay in Africa, headquarters in London. The Isaac Wolf- son Group, including Ralli Brothers, concluded an investment deal in sisal of £2 million in December 1964. The agreement was made with the Kenya government, for the Taita-Taveta area, with the largest sisal estate in East Africa. In July 1965 the Commonwealth Development Corporation, in association with James Findlay and Co. and G: Williamson Africa Ltd., signed an agreement with the Kenya government to provide the capital for processing green tea leaf grown by African small-holders in the Kericho, Kissi and Kirinyaga districts. ‘The Kenya Government,’ said the agreement, ‘has given certain undertakings to purchase all shares and loans outstanding at face value in the event of any of these factory com- panies failing.’ Brooke Bond Tea own the largest tea and coffee estates in East Africa, and their estates near Nairobi, in the Rift Valley and High- lands, virtually monopolise production. Govern- ment regulations have reintroduced the old British crown colony practice of prohibiting smallholders from growing coffee beans, thus protecting the Brooke Bond monopoly. The Delemare family owns vast estates, despite the pulling down of Lord Delemare’s statue and the re-naming of Delemare Avenue, Nairobi, as Kenyatta Avenue. Not only agriculture (which is almost entirely confined to coffee, tea and sisal) but also banking, commerce and transport are virtually monopolised by British firms. The major banks are British: Barclays, Grindleys and Standard (with its well- known South African connections. Incidentally, despite the ‘boycott’? Standard Bank has recently extended its operations in West Africa as well, even into Nkrumah’s Ghana). Insurance is domi- nated by British firms: Norwich Union, the Old Mutual (another major South African-cum-British company), etc. The largest shipping line, Union Castle, is British plus South African and plies FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 regularly between Mombasa and South Africa ana Portuguese East African ports, despite the ‘boycott’ and despite the protests of the militant Mombasa Dockworkers’ Union. The same applies to the © British-India Line. Both these lines, as well as the Italian Lloyd Triestino Lines, operate various forms of colour bars and segregation with regard to passengers and crew (recruitment, accommoda- tion and pay), and this continues despite dock- workers’ protests. The ‘national’ airline, East African Airways, is British supported and operates side by side with British Overseas Airways, British United Airways, etc. Taken together with British domination of agriculture, this British influence in banking, insurance, shipping and airlines makes the Britsh imperialist economic control of Kenya almost total, in view of the almost total absence of industry (restricted to a few small areas in Nairobi, Nakuru, Mombasa, Kisumu, etc.). The conversion of Kenya from colony to semi- colony meant, inter alia, its penetration by im- perialists other than the old direct overlord. Italy, through the great oil monopoly, Agip, has depots and motels in many districts. In opening Agip House, in Haile Selassie Avenue on December 4, 1964, Kenyatta said: ‘The Agip Company has demonstrated its confidence and trust in the future of Kenya and I assure you that this trust is not wrongly placed.’ At this point it might be added that Cabinet Ministers spend much time opening petrol stations on land leased by them to. the companies, and this is but one rather obvious form of political corruption. Kenyatta himself has ‘risen’ from a small farmer to a large landowner in a matter of three years. Among his ‘presents’ was the title deed to a palace of the Aga Khan, another of Britain’s investors in Kenya. The mayor of Nairobi, Rubia, is director of no less than 12 major companies. Another major form of corruption is the im- perialist-sponsored system of high civil service salaries (as distinct from teachers’ salaries, etc.), semi-free housing, luxury cars and allowances. The upper civil service is rapidly becoming part of the nouveau riche élite and, with rare exceptions, is drenched in corruption. Mwai Kibaki, Assistant Minister for Economic Planning, Kenya, summarised this development: ‘There is a very great danger at the moment that the top one per cent of educated and wealthy Africans will be absorbed into the old order—into the exclusive circles. . . . This rich one per cent being absorbed and integrated into the old structure could ruin everything.’ (Nation, 1.8.65). The ‘exclusive circles’ to which Mwai Kibaki re-

[p034] KENYA—COLONIALISM AND INDEPENDENCE ferred are the imperialist landowners, financiers and other investors from Britain, Western Germany, Italy, the USA, Japan, etc., the mainly Britsh ‘settlers’ who still infest the Highlands, and the ‘overseas aid’ expatriates dominating education and ‘advisory positions’ in the civil service. On December 4, 1964, the Kenya government signed an agreement with West Germany, including a £4,100,000 loan deal with the West German Development Corporation, giving the latter an equity participation in the Kenya Development Finance Company. The bulk was to be devoted to agriculture, thereby maintaining the pre-independ- ence character of Kenya as a primary producer serving the imperialist secondary producers. Com- menting on the agreement, Schlitter, the West German representative, said: ‘The agreement covering investments was the most important item, as this is really a sound basis for any German investor to come here to invest.’ Little has changed since the time of Hobson and Lenin with respect to the fundamental of imperialism: the export of capital for the purpose of super-profits extracted via cheap colonial-type labour. It is taken as axiomatic by anti-imperialists worth their salt that imperialist ‘aid’—as distinct from and opposed to aid from the Soviet Union, the Chinese Peoples’ Republic, etc.—is a continuation of naked imperialist super-exploitation. This motif drove even Karume, Vice-President of Tanzania, to declare not long after the anti-feudal revolt in Zanzibar, that: ‘Zanzibar did not want any foreign investment, because this only took away the people’s wealth. ... Zanzibar was not interested in loans from foreign countries which would only bring in their own people on fat salaries to run the businesses, leaving the local people no better off.’ (East African Standard, 11.5.1964). Oginga Odinga, Vice-President of Kenya, when in China at the same time, said that ‘the imperialists had a strong grip on Kenya through economic domination .. . that is the reason of our coming to you still, to co-operate and to work together to help us to break the backbone of this worst kind of imperialist domination of our country’. Six months later, however, Kenyatta was still assuring the Nairobi Chamber of Commerce: ‘that the government’s aim was not only to continue to work together with private enterprise, but to promote conditions in which private enterprise will thrive’ (My emphasis). THE QUESTION OF NATIONALIZATION Kenyatta, on the same occasion, stated: ‘We con- 77 sider that nationalisation will not serve to advance the cause of African socialism.’ The April 1965 Sessional Paper on African Socialism, adopted by the Kenya Assembly, came out clearly against nationalization except under very special circum- stances. The Paper, which is regarded as the programme of the government, said: ‘The Constitution and the KANU Manifesto make it clear that African Socialism in Kenya does not imply a commitment to indiscriminate nationali- sation.’ (p. 26 of Paper). The Paper went on to argue openly against nation- alization: ‘It should be recognised that if the nation’s limited domestic capital is used to buy existing land, livestock, ‘buildings, machinery and equipment, the nation has no more productive assets than before— only their ownership has changed. What may be lost are the new resources that could have been purchased instead—the new schools, hospitals, roads, water supplies, irrigation schemes, rolling stock, land surveys, housing, lodges, airports and harbour development. ... Further, the money paid for nationalized resources and the people who managed them before nationalisation would most likely leave the country, increasing our foreign exchange and skilled manpower problems. There is also the firm likelihood that nationalisation will discourage additional private investment.’ (page 26, article 76). The fact that foreign investors and ‘white’ settlers send the vast incomes they make in Kenya abroad and that nationalization will keep these funds inside Kenya is not mentioned. Nor is the fact that nationalization will give the government the income for hospitals, schools, surveys and all the rest, which at present goes directly into foreign banks. Nor the fact that nationalization will enable the government to put an end to the mono- poly over Kenya’s economy of raw material pro- duction and exports, and to build up a heavy and manufacturing industrial sector as the base of the economy. At this point, it is worth pointing out that colonialism has persuaded the world that Africa is ideally suited to agriculture. The example of South Africa, where farming comprises less than 20 per cent of national production, adequately disproves this. In fact, Africa is ideally suited geographically and in its mineral resources for heavy and manu- facturing industries, with farming as a mechanised auxiliary. Imperialism stands in the way of this industrial revolution, since it preserves both the character of Africa as a primary producer and the monopoly of Europe and North America as a

[p035] 78 manufacturer. To resume: the Kenya government makes it very clear that nationalization is an anti-imperialist process by warning that it ‘would discourage additional private investment’. It also makes it clear that any nationalization that takes place must be with full compensation: ‘These documents (i.e., Constitution and KANU Manifesto) do commit the Government to prompt payment of full compensation whenever nationalisa- tion is used.’ (Ibid, article 73). This compensation principle, which is guaranteed by a special law enacted in 1964, under strong pressure from West Germany and United States interests, is associated with the Sessional Paper’s stand on private property generally. After naive attacks on Marx (written, we are reliably informed, by an American professor who did the whole Paper as his ‘project’ in Kenya) on pages 7 and 13 of the Paper, it quotes the Constitution: ‘No property of any description shall be com- pulsorily taken possession of, and no interest in or right over property of any description shall be com- pulsorily acquired, except in strictly defined cases where such action would be necessary “to promote the public benefit”—and in the latter case there is guarantee of “prompt payment of full compensa- tion”.’ (page 17, article 50). Regarding compensation for property taken over from European settlers, the position is as follows. Britain gives ‘aid’ to Kenya (e.g., a recent £20 million loan). Kenya then buys land from these ‘settlers’. The settlers then take the money back to England. Britain has thus, in the end, given exactly nothing to Kenya. But now Kenya must start repaying the loan she did not receive and the capital and interest of these repayments are sure, as in the case of British ‘aid’ to India, to cripple the Kenya treasury. This is so well known in Kenya that even the Sessional Paper comments on compensation as follows: ‘The settlement process was inherited from the British and was designed more to aid those Euro- peans who wanted to leave than the Africans who received the land. . . . Many European farmers wished to leave and the United Kingdom Govern- ment was willing to give grants and loans to Kenya to enable them to go... . It is unlikely that Kenya, in accepting the debt burden, has obtained economic benefits of anywhere near the amount of the debt incurred.’ (page 37, article 103. My emphasis). THE LAND QUESTION It is clear that the question of nationalization, or, at least, of expropriation, is intimately related to FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 the whole land question. While Kenyatta and Co. are giving the European ‘settlers’ something for nothing (since they stole the land from the Kenyans in the first instance), they constantly tell the land- less peasants that the ‘government will give nothing freely’. Addressing a baraza (rally) at Kakamega, Kenyatta said: ‘Many of you have refused to pay graduated personal tax (the police massacred anti-tax demon- strators in Wamba in June 1964) and instead now look upon the Government tto give you free educa- tion, free medical services and free everything.’ (Daily Nation, 5.4.65). Two weeks later, Dr. Kiano, Minister for Commerce and Industry, attacked B. M. Kaggia, M.P. for Murang’a and Kenya’s ‘Castro’ in many ways, for declaring: ‘We were struggling to regain our own lands which were stolen by the British colonial govern- ment. We were not fighting for the right to buy our own land.’ (East African Standard, 22.4.65). Kaggia’s stand has to be viewed against the background of the fraud of the ‘land redistribution programme’ of the government, which aimed only at creating a limited landed bourgeoisie of ‘28,000 to 30,000 families’, and had, in its first year, settled a mere 16,000 families (out of 14 million) on the European-owned Highlands, Kenya’s richest farm- ing land. Of these, 550 alone received 294,000 acres, ten times the average and, even so, less than half of the average holding of a small-scale Euro- pean farmer in the Nakuru district. Farm workers were starving, unemployed and landless on farms abandoned by ‘white’ South Africans who left after Uhuru (independence) because they could not raise the capital to buy them. Usual prices for medium farms were £85,000 or thereabouts. The per capita income in Kenya is £20. When he was Minister of Home Affairs, Oginga Odinga was responsible for the forcible eviction of ‘squatters’ from European-owned farms. In September 1964 the government ordered the 250,000 unemployed to return to the land (land that they could not afford to buy) i.e., to swell the land-hungry Reserves—a South African term still used in Kenya. Heroic forest fighters from the Mau Mau rebellion were ordered to ‘pay for settlement’ or starve. The question of expropriation of foreign in- vestors in land-holdings is inseparable from the peasant struggle for land. Within a month of Uhuru (December 1963) 20,000 ‘squatters’ on Euro- pean-owned farms in the Rift valley were reported to be ‘bringing farming to a halt’. The same day

[p036] KENYA—COLONIALISM AND INDEPENDENCE the European landowner and Minister of Lands, Bruce Mackenzie, announced a plan for a £100 million loan abroad for tea, coffee and sisal in- vestment. Five days later it was reported that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour, Mr, F. Kubai (an ex-detainee with Kenyatta) was investigating complaints by European landowners of ‘a deliberate attempt by former employees to drive European farmers from the area’ (Naivasha district). He stated: ‘The situation is very serious. He told farm workers who attended the barazas to work hard for the European farmers and so help the govern- ment to make a profit.’ (sic!) Two days afterwards, Oginga Odinga accused ‘agitators’ of causing ‘dissatisfaction’ among the 60,000 unemployed and landless in the Rift Valley. During this time the Kenya government was in- voking British ‘aid’ to crush the Lanet ‘mutiny’ of 600 troops and at the same time, Uganda’s quisling, Mbote, called in United Kingdom troops against Jinja ‘mutineers’ and sawmill strikers. By April, a European magistrate in Machakos, still retained by the government, sentenced a leader of Kyame Kya Nyumba_ (loosely: ‘Land and Freedom Army’) to 12 years for ‘oath- giving’ to 1,000 peasants and on April 12 meetings were banned throughout Kenya (including May Day in the first year of Uhuru). On April 2 two ‘forest fighters’ were murdered by police after a fight between the police and 200 peasants in Meru. On March 12, Field-Marshall Mwariama, veteran Mau Mau general, was sentenced to 5 years by a European magistrate in Meru. The peasant struggle did not cease and was still raging when Kenyatta’s police killed Field-Marshall Baimungi, famous Mau Mau general in a battle at Meru on January 26, 1965, about one year after Uhuru and one month after Jamhuri (Republic). A whole nation mourned, but there was rejoicing among the quis- lings, the European ‘settlers’ and the whole apparat of imperialism. We shall return to the question of nationali- zation and confiscation of imperialist interests in Kenya after considering racialist discrimination and education in Kenya, to which this question is as closely connected as it is to the land question. COLOUR DISCRIMINATION IN KENYA Under direct crown colony rule Kenya was a colour-bar colony. There was anti-African and anti-Asian racialist discrimination (with the quarter-million ‘Asians’ used as a buffer between the imperialists and the 84 million ‘Africans’) in every walk of life under direct British rule. There were separate schools, separate hospitals, separate _twice the salary of Africans 79 hotels, cinemas, restaurants and residential areas. There was at first no ‘African’ representation and later special ‘African’ representation in the Assembly and Legislative Council. There were special ‘Native Reserves’, ‘camps’ and locations, as in South Africa. There was an anti-African pass system. Wage-scales were racialist, as in South Africa. There were separation and segregation everywhere. Under the Uhuru Constitution this was made illegal. What is the situation now, nearly two years after Uhuru? The social amenities are not segregated, except on ‘class’ lines, but since wealth remains concentrated in the hands of the imperialists, the European settlers, expatriate officers and a small, artificially stimulated local middle class corrupted by these three foreign groups, only this small layer of Africans, certainly not more than one per cent of the population, can enjoy social equality in real life. Thereby the class structure preserves a de facto colour bar. Apart from this, however, visitors to Embakazi airport, up to recently, still had to declare their ‘race’. There are still, legally, three distinct and separate hospitalisation systems, the worst for Africans, the best for Europeans and in-between for Asians (the luxury hospitals, like Princess Elizabeth Hospital, still retain even their old colonial names, whereas the ‘national’ hospitals like Kenyatta Hospital, have been re-named). There are three types of hospital tax, also along open racialist lines. The de facto wage structure is as before, with Europeans earning from 10 to 100 times the wages of Africans (for one-tenth to one-hundredth of the work). In the first six weeks of Uhuru there were 150 strikes in Kenya and nearly every one raised the question of ‘white domination’ in employment. This has been the recurring theme of strikes at East African Airways (where workers carried placards: ‘Equal pay for equal work. Down with discrimination’), at East African Common Services Organisation, in the Nairobi and other municipal councils, at the Mombasa harbour, in the great railway strike and the subsequent postal strike later this year. It is a constant demand of the Kenya National Union of Teachers that anti-African discrimination in teachers’ salaries must go (British, American and other expatriates earn more than with the same qualifications, even in teaching, and, in conse- quence, the inflow of Peace Corps and Overseas Development and other imperialist-‘aid’-scheme teachers at the same time drains the schools of African teachers who refuse to work for inferior salaries, turning even to private companies for

[p037] 80 employment (where they act as part of the ‘Africanisation’ show-window of the big concerns). The former European, Asian and African primary schools were re-named C, B and A respectively, but the fees structure—that most effective colour bar—was retained. One-third of the education expenditure still goes on ‘European education’, although the Europeans form only one-fortieth of the population and there is still 95 per cent illiteracy among Africans. The pass law still operates against work-seekers flocking to the towns as a result of land-hunger and starvation in the country. (In July 1964 the government planned to find jobs for 50,000 of the 205,000 registered un- employed—and population growth was faster than increase in the rate of employment.) Following massive rallies against unemployment and racialist discrimination in jobs, the government considered an amendment to a Bill, which provided for 12 strokes of the cane for militant union leaders. Again and again, during these rallies, the Minister of Labour, Mwendwa, told workers to support the government for fear that ‘they [foreign in- vestors] would say they could not invest in Kenya because the people were against the government’. Court sentences are openly racialist. Africans are gaoled for years for minor theft and assault, while Europeans are often discharged with a caution or receive light sentences (Pan Africa magazine reports on court cases, first half of 1965). Racialist dis- crimination in education (a major question in terms of a Transitional Programme for Kenya) became a national issue during 1964 and resulted in the deportation in July 1965 of an anti-apartheid South African whose views and victimisation became the focus of the struggle on this issue for some time (Pan Africa, June, July—exposures of racial dis- crimination and white domination at High schools; Nation and East African Standard, July 26-31, 1965; Kenya National Union of Teachers statement, 1964, 1965). As for real attitudes of the Europeans, the situation is not different, in practice, from what it was in Southern Rhodesia. In the words of the former Premier, R. S. Garfield Todd: ‘We brought out the scum of Europe, so long as their skins were a bit white, to fire engines and get drunk and keep the black man down.’ AGAIN: ON NATIONALIZATION When it comes to a Transitional Programme for Kenya the kernel question.is that of nationalization and expropriation of imperialist assets. This is at the base of the major specific demands of the oppressed people of Kenya. These demands are no secret. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 Kaggia, interviewed by Sunday Nation (July 18, 1965) said: ‘There must be full free medical care and free education. These are two things on which the whole of our independence struggle centred.’ He continued: ‘The other thing the President attacked me on was my calling for free land... . This is what we have always believed in. The land belongs to the Africans and it was robbed from us by the British Government.’ (Ibid). Kaggia then went on to say: ‘I reject Communism, as such, entirely’ but favoured co-op and state farms. Mwai Kibake, Assistant Minister of Economic Planning, made it clear that the land question was crucial: ‘The Government loses more sympathy on the land issue than on anything else. . . .’ (Sunday Nation, 1.8.1965). There is the closest interconnection between these popular demands for free land, free medical treatment and free education and also for full employment and the South African boycott. As an illustration of such a connection, we take the relation between education and unemployment. In 1964, of 120,000 children expected to take the Kenya Preliminary Examination (Primary school certificate) only 12,000 were expected to go on to Secondary school and only 17,000 into various employment. The remaining 91,000 would be unemployed (Target, Christian Council, August 1964). In Uganda a monthly Labour Report (January 1964) said: ‘Virtually all the 12,000 youths who had just left school were most unlikely to obtain paid employment.’ Large numbers of graduates, trained abroad, especially in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, etc., are unemployed. This is on top of the fact that about half the children never see the inside of a school at all, and, furthermore, the enrolment in Standard One fell from 182,227 in 1961 to 133,188 in 1964 due to higher school fees, thereby relating schooling to the wage issue. The great estates in Kenya are owned by im- perialist companies. The solution of the land question—the major social demand of the vast majority of the people—is unthinkable without expropriation and nationalization. This does not imply that all land will remain state property. This is understood in the case of most of the big estates, where state, collective or co-operative farming of various kinds, using the experience of the Soviet Union, North Korea, China and Cuba, would satisfy the agrarian demands of the farm- labour peasantry on these farms. (Note that these

[p038] KENYA—COLONIALISM AND INDEPENDENCE labourers are not automatically non-peasant, despite their landlessness. Their main desire, in fact, is land.) In the case of other farming areas there is a great popular peasant demand, springing from land- hunger and the history of dispossession and sub- jugation, for private titles to land. Kaggia’s Achilles heel is his preparedness to allow the government to make the landless peasants eventu- ally pay for such land. The revolutionary demand is that this land is the historic right of the people and they demand free land, without the right either to buy or to sell. (In this regard the practices in North Korea are instructive—where it con- cerned free acquisition of land, but without the right to sell.) Dogmatism by ‘socialists’ against private titles for peasants in the case of very considerable areas and many types of farming in Kenya will have only one result: the alienation of the landless peasant from his proletarian vanguard in the towns, docks and on the plantations. The point of departure.of any agrarian revolution, whatever form is adopted by peasant action and by government law, is the expropriation—in this particular case, without compensation—of the imperialist landowners, and the European ‘settlers’, the nationalization of the big estates and the free re-distribution of the land to those who live and work on it. The failure of the Bandaranaikes and Sukarnos to carry out this nationalization of the plantation owners indexed their function as managers of the tea, coffee and other estates of the imperialists. Because of its association with the agrarian revolution, nationalization in the semi- colonies assumes a much greater significance, a more revolutionary significance, than it does in the imperialist countries. And in the struggle for nationalization, there cannot be the faintest doubt that the African middle class and its capitalist state stands and will continue to stand in ruthless defence of the property of its imperialist masters. The massacre of the post-Uhuru independence guerrillas in Kenya establishes this clearly. However, it is not only its connection with an agrarian programme that makes nationalization significant in semi-colonies. It is equally its con- nection with the fact that the big landowners in countries like Kenya are the imperialists them- selves. This fact makes nationalization an ob- viously anti-imperialist struggle, a class struggle, and not a mere reform at the top. It is an attack upon the tap-root of capitalism: the semi-colonial investments of imperialism. It implies the transfer of landed estates from the oppressor nation to the oppressed nation and it is the bounden duty of the working class in the imperialist country to 81 support the popular semi-colonial struggle for this dispossession of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Any other action would, of course, be chauvinism itself. The question of nationalization has already arisen in Kenya in connection with the ‘boycott’ of South Africa. It is common knowledge that the boycott is meaningless without a struggle against the imperial- ist states and monopolies which control and own South Africa. In particular, it is meaningless without a struggle against the British banks and gold monopolies, since gold is the main export of South Africa. Indeed it is meaningless except within the framework of an anti-imperialist struggle in the round, particularly against British imperial- ism, because South Africa is Britain’s second exporter and importer (second only to the United States). The boycott means little without a struggle against the war-moguls importing uranium from South Africa and exporting arms to South Africa (Britain, USA, Italy, France, West Germany, Spain). Now, in June 1965 the fortnightly maga- zine Pan Africa, published in Nairobi (and sponsored by Kenyatta and Odinga themselves), carried an article which stated that Kenya was allowing South African firms to operate freely in Kenya, and implied that all businesses with South African connections must be nationalized without compensation. This meant, in practice, every major firm in Kenya, since all, through Britain, had the closest financial and commercial links with South Africa. Following this article, a motion was tabled in the Parliament calling for the nationalization of South African firms in Kenya (a motion more limited than the Pan Africa suggestion). This motion was rejected out of hand by the Kenyatta Cabinet, which dec- lared: ‘We are not bandits.’ Thus Kenya joined Banda’s Malawi, Kaunda’s Zambia and Tshombe’s Congo in openly rejecting the boycott. (Less open, but no less factual is the fact that most African states, including Ghana, have financial ties—e.g., through Standard Bank—with the South African Herrenvolk regime.) Regarding the South African boycott not in isolation and not as a farce at the United Nations Organisation or its appendage, Organisation for African Unity, but as an anti- imperialist weapon, nationalization has already be- come an issue between the toilers of Kenya and the quislings serving imperialism. (In the case of Egypt, which is regularly breaking the boycott by allowing ships bound for South Africa to pass through the canal—just as Nasser lets British war- ships go through to crush popular struggles in Aden, East Africa and Malaya—the mis-utilisation of a nationalized asset becomes a further pivot of struggle around this question.)

[p039] 82 In the case of the great popular outcry for free education, nationalization becomes again a demand which unifies the struggle on a common programme. Most of primary education in Kenya, as elsewhere in semi-colonial Africa—is owned as well as controlled directly by missionaries. The major ‘ex-European’ high schools are controlled directly by all-European Boards of Governors and many are owned by these boards as well. It is widely understood in Kenya that free education is not possible and with it the breakdown of racial segre- gation in education, without a government take- over in toto of both ownership and direct control of all schools at all levels. This demand for the nationalization of education may perhaps be in- sufficiently appreciated in ‘developed’ countries, but in the semi-colonies it is a burning and revolu- tionary issue. On this issue, the Kenyatta govern- ment has already repeatedly taken its stand: in support of the Boards of Governors and the missionaries (quite apart from and in addition to its humiliating subordination to the imperialist in- doctrination agencies such as “Teachers for East Africa’ from the Ministry for Overseas Develop- ment, Whitehall, the ‘Peace Corps’, Washington, and the system of ‘advisers’ and ‘expatriate officers’ befouling education in Kenya). Nationalization of imperialist companies like East African Power and Lighting Company, norm- ally a foregone conclusion, is ‘being stubbornly delayed by the government. Mere talk of nationalization of foreign trade and of the banks has already brought angry responses from the merchants of Harambee. The question of nationalization is the dividing line, in terms of a Transitional Programme, between collaborators and foes of imperialism. Regarding South Africa it has some time ago become an issue heralding a struggle yet to come: viz., should the national liberation movement nationalize the gold mines, etc., or not? Those opposed to this have already offered themselves in advance as lackeys of imperialism at the moment of a critical rupture in South Africa. Those who pooh-pooh, belittle or oppose nationalization in the semi-colonies are opposing the expropriation of the imperialist bour- geoisie, the transfer of their property to the robbed countries and the easing of the passage to socialism in these countries. To put the matter bluntly in a particular case: it is historically more important for the British working class to call for and support the demand for the nationalization of British copper companies in Zambia by the Kaunda government than to call for the nationalization of steel in England by the Wilson government. When this FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 happens a great day will dawn for the toilers of Africa. AFRICAN SOCIALISM Finally, a few words about African socialism. This shibboleth has been adequately ridiculed by students of the Lumumba Institute and by certain unionists. Some have called it a ‘mask for Euro- pean capitalism’—a fair enough description. One aspect, however, may call for comment: namely, the appeal to the old, outmoded tribal spirit of mutual aid and co-operation in order to justify its opposite: class collaboration. The Swahili term used by Kenyatta for confusing these two _ historically different concepts is Harambee (‘let’s all pull together’, so to speak). For those—and there are many—with illusions about African socialism it is enough to quote Dr. Kiano, Minister of Com- merce and Industry, who said: ‘People who believed in the class struggle would not work together in the spirit of harambee as championed by the Prime Minister, Mr. Kenyatta. The spirit of co-operation between employers and employees must always be preferred instead of the spirit of the class struggle which some misguided workers tried to preach.’ (East African Standard, 3.11.64). Kenya, however, is filled mainly with ‘misguided workers’. Already a Socialist Party has been mooted. There is some serious and quiet con- sideration of a Workers’ and Peasants’ Party in class opposition to the party of the semi-colonial bourgeoisie in alliance with imperialism, namely, the Kenya Africa National Union (KANU). The mortal fear of the imperialists and their semi- colonial henchmen, as it repeats over and over again, is the class struggle and Marxism. In Kenya this means: the anti-imperialist struggle as the historically necessary and inevitable road to social- ism, under the leadership of a Marxist Party within a mass movement of the semi-colonial proletariat leading the peasantry and supported by the peoples of the workers’ states and the workers in the imperialist countries. Through What Stage Are We Passing? Speech made to the 5th All-Union Congress of Medical and Veterinary Workers on June 21, 1924. Price: Two shillings NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST, LONDON, S.W.4

[p040] The struggle for Marxism by Tim Wohlforth 83 iv) American Trotskyism without Trotsky A. AMERICAN RADICALISM REASSERTS ITSELF—1940-1945 Within a few short months of the fundamental split with the Shachtman-Burnham-Abern faction in 1940, the Socialist Workers Party was to receive another severe blow, the death of Trotsky. This was a particularly difficult blow to the movement, for it came precisely at a time when Trotsky was beginning to make what could have been his most important contribution to the development of the American Trotskyist movement. While his role in the 1940 factional struggle was essential in order to save the movement, his role after the split was becoming critical to the process of developing that which was saved. But this learning process was terminated by Stalin’s axe and the party was forced to carry on as best it could on its own resources— not the least of these being what it had learned from Trotsky in the preceding period. It was not an easy period in which to learn, for World War II was going full blast and the United States was being drawn increasingly into the bloody battle. The American movement was largely cut off from active collaboration with Trotskyists in other parts of the world and virtually the entire responsibility for the continuation of the Fourth International fell on to its shoulders. Nor was the Situation within the United States an easy one. The war boom was beginning to eat at the militancy of the working class, and pro-war chauvinism was rampant in the country as a whole. Soon the party itself was to feel directly the weight of state persecution. No, it was not an easy time to learn, but revolutionaries are not revolutionaries if they cannot survive difficult times. Forced to rely on its own resources, it is quite natural that that element in American Trotskyism, most specifically reflected in Cannon himself and those close to him, which was both the strength and the weakness of the American movement, should re-assert itself—American radicalism. American radicalism, as we have seen, is not a homogeneous tradition but rather a combination of some quite contradictory outlooks. The two most important of these are populism, the struggle of ‘democracy’ against plutocracy, and syndicalism, the elemental class-consciousness of an emerging working class. We will see the various ways these divergent

[p041] The struggle Tor