Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, Part 7
Dedan Kimathi, 1920-1957
The Armed
People
The practical alternative to
the State that appeared in Paris in the beginning of 1871 was not only the
right of recall and the whole people collectively in power and in perpetual
session. It was also the reappearance of the Armed People in a new kind of
societal framework. So-called Primitive Communism is an Armed People. Here, in
the Paris Commune, was an Armed People in advanced productive circumstances.
The security forces - army
and police - that had existed before the Paris Commune had been paid to support
the bourgeois State and to guarantee the State’s survival by suppressing,
whenever necessary, the working class. These forces were disbanded and not replaced.
With hardly any exceptions, all “separations of powers” were abolished in the
Paris Commune, leaving only one power: The Armed People.
In Chile, in the time of the
Popular Unity government that fell on 11 September 1973, instead of an Armed
People, a virtue was made of disarmament, and a “Peaceful Path” was worshipped
as the new political Golden Calf.
Volodia Teitelboim, in the document attached, and linked below, gives a brief
description, as one of those who was involved, of Chile’s Popular Unity
government and its disastrous end at the hands of traitor fascists who used the
national army to overthrow it. It was a shocking reminder of the purpose of the
“special bodies of armed men” of the bourgeois state.
Teitelboim calls for “A
Reappraisal of the Issue of the Army,” meaning a return to the view of the
Paris Commune, which is mentioned in the first line. This document of
Teitelboim’s is sufficient as the basis for a very good and necessary
discussion.
Like the Chilean Popular
Unity government, ours is a multiclass government underpinned by a class
alliance for common goals. It is a unity-in-action, otherwise called a popular
front.
Why have we in South Africa
survived after 19 years, while the Chileans did not survive after only 1,000
days?
The answer could be that we
are not pacifists. Or, the answer could be that our crisis has not arrived yet.
Or, that we have passed at least one crisis (e.g. in mid-2008, resolved by the
recall of President Mbeki and the resignation of various ministers including
Terror Lekota and Mluleki George), which may not yet be the last.
The next featured text will
be the ANC’s original Strategy and Tactics document of 1969. It unashamedly
embraces armed struggle, and not any starry “Peaceful Path”. South Africans
were in this case in advance of the historic crisis that manifested in Chile.
Four years prior to the Pinochet coup in Chile overthrew the Popular Unity
government led by Salvador Allende, the Morogoro Conference of the ANC had laid
down the necessity for the armed defence of the revolution. We look at this in
the next instalment.
Picture:
There are very few photographs of freedom fighters in formation or in action to
be found on the Internet, whether of MK or any of any other liberation army;
but there are many photographs of freedom fighters in captivity. Full justice
has not yet been done. The picture is of a statue of Dedan Kimathi under the
blue sky of Kenya. AMANDLA!
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: 1,000 Days
of Popular Unity Rule in Chile, 1977, Teitelboim.
