national liberation

Rosa Luxemburg argued before World War One that in the epoch of imperialism national liberation stands opposed to working class liberation. The recent death of Zimbabwe’s national liberation hero, Robert Mugabe, the conditions of the Zimbabwe working class, and the hellish state of the country as a whole, is yet another wretched demonstration of how true this is.

The victory of the ANC in the South African election has yet again shown it is the capitalists’ chosen party for running South African capitalism. Its primary role is organising and enforcing the exploitation of the working class even when this means downing strikes in bloodshed as we saw at Marikana in 2012 (see leftcom.org).

Just one month following Kenya's official independence, Jomo Kenyatta invited British troops to put down a mutiny of soldiers who were conducting a sit-down protest against the continued presence of British officers in the army and low pay. In the same week, the British also put down mutinies with similar demands in Julius Nyerere's Tanzania and Milton Obote's Uganda, also at invitation. All three armies had originated in the King's African Rifles.

They no longer hit the headlines but the Palestinian “Great Return Marches” along the Gaza border with Israel continue. Since March 22 the world has been witnessing yet more horrific scenes in the long conflict between the Israeli state and the dispossessed Palestinians on whose land that state was built. By June 2 the continual shooting of Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza by an Israeli Defence Force (IDF), safely bunkered inside its own border, had produced 124 dead and at least 13,000 wounded. In all that time only one Israeli soldier has been injured.