>>2795564>Every national liberation war, no matter how just, eventually found itself capitulating to the new imperialismThis is a matter of internal revisionism and class collaborationism rather than a matter of the external strength of imperialism. Between internal and external contradictions it is always the internal that is decisive. Imperialism can be powerful, but it cannot stand against greater internal unity and political clarity. In the Tanzanian context, for example, we saw the furthest possible extent of unity between the workers and petty bourgeoisie. In this we saw Pan-African unity put into practice in the merger of Tanganyika and the People's Republic of Zanzibar, a historically progressive move recognizing the borders set by formal "independence" granted by Europe as being illegitimate. What halted this progress wasn't then a reaction by Europe and the US, but the rapid formation of a new bureaucratic bourgeoisie within the once-revolutionary TANU Party enabled by its revisionism. This revisionism is exemplified in Julius Nyerere's
Ujamaa, where he states that class struggle is a phenomena
external to Africa, and that it doesn't exist within African society independent of Europe. As such, capitulation took place not simply because imperialism is powerful, but because of internal weaknesses in the revolution. This
does not mean that they shouldn't have tried in the first place, or that they should have waited for some future moment where imperialism was weaker. Rather, future Tanzanian revolutionaries will have to consolidate the good (TANU's vision of unity and economic self-sufficiency) and reject the bad (TANU's rejection of class struggle).
This is a truth that rings within every revolution back to the Paris Commune, and why the Cultural Revolution in China remains so important. Now, neither Marx nor we look at the Paris Commune and conclude that it was simply doomed from the start due to the strength of this or that Empire. Marx's insights are so valuable because he looked deeper than that, at the internal weaknesses, and formulated the dictatorship of the proletariat as the solution. He didn't conclude that the revolutionaries should have defeated Britain or Germany or whoever first, but instead were not properly organized and unified
internally to consoli
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