Manifesto of the Communist Party

Michael Hoover hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us
Sun Sep 5 17:37:46 PDT 1999



> Would most of the intelligentsia in Guinea Bisseau have been "native"
> officials in the Portuguese administration? Or at any rate, more closely
> tied in with that administration than the bulk of the population. One
> motive they might have had for joining the revolution in a colony (or
> neo-colony) might be reflected in Mao's "China has stood up" --
> i.e., patriotism. William Hinton tells of a middle level CPC cadre
> who could not get rid of his petty-b attitude towards peasants --
> and commited suicide rather than betray them.
> Cabral is one of the great revolutionary theorists of the 20th century.
> And he had quite a bit to say to European marxists.
> Carrol

Cabral included people in the liberal professions, gov't service, teachers, and writers. He focused on stratum whose origin was in colonial era as state functionaries and facilitators of colonial rule (among whom he was intended to become part of when he received a scholarship to study agronomy in Lisbon). AC thought they'd be persuaded to betray their class as they became conscious of the limits of their privileges within the colonial system. AC argued that the weakness of colonialism is that it engenders animosity (and animus) among those it has used as collaborators (who he believed generally aspire to emulate life of foreign minority). Thus did Cabral stress subjective rather than objective conditions in the development of political consciousness.

Among things that AC said to European marxists: he questioned their assumption that class struggle alone determines development of history, he mocked them for their narrow conception of a party as well as for their newly acquired (at the time) Fanonian faith in the spontaneous revolutionary elan of the peasantry, and he noted that they were preoccupied with questions about whether someone was/was not a Marxist, a Marxist_Leninist.

Regarding latter, Cabral would have agreed with Mao's critique (underlining point that revolutionary theory and practice are incompatible with dogmatism) of CPCers who advocated returning to conventional wisdom in war against Kuomintang:

This group of people called themselves Marxist-Leninist, but

had actually not learned even an iota of Marxism-Leninism.

Lenin said that 'the most essential thing in Marxism, the

living soul of Marxism' is 'the concrete analysis of concrete

conditions.' These comrades have forgotten exactly this

point. (_Selected Military Writings_, Foreign Languages Press,

1967, pp. 93-94) Michael Hoover



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