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Defence of the Revolution is always Supreme

By Reason Wafawarova ⋅ © zimbabwemetro.com ⋅ May 10, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Some readers have asked this writer why he does not applaud attacks on corruption as targeted on the Zimbabwean government by both the private Press and also by the Western media. There is absolutely no denial that the scourge of corruption, not only in government, but also in the private sector and the entire social fabric – has reached endemic levels and needs to be addressed without failure as a matter of now.

However, when one is faced with the choice of joining forces with the imperial elites to attack a problem such as corruption is today, it becomes a matter of burning the forest in order to rid it of a bad tree or burning the entire homestead to kill the intruding snake. This writer has exclusively written pieces on the need to fight corruption and one such article, titled Anti-Graft Drive Crucial was published by The Herald on the 8th of August in 2006. In that piece this writer chronicled personal experiences in the civil service and suggested ways of combating such practices from both a policing and administrative point of view.

This writer, being a Marxist by orientation will however never fight from the same corner with imperial forces even if the fight involved endemic corruption. From a Marxist perspective, the defence of any revolution against imperialism is always supreme and the ultimate guide in that war is social justice and equality. While this writer is committed to a total demolition of the network of corruption by the revolutionary forces in Zimbabwe he remains wary of supporting any imperial agenda even when such an agenda is guised in the fight against corruption, human rights abuse or dictatorship. This is purely because imperialism has never had any problems with all these evils unless the ills can serve as a pretext to the opening up of imperial avenues in terms of markets and investment opportunities.

Everyone knows that imperialism has had no problems of note with corruption in Kenya, where imperial capital has been flowing fluently in the last decade and it has had no qualms of note with the Musharaff dictatorship of Pakistan, until he started to show a shift towards the left, and later embarrassing his backers in the US by using military might to cling on to power.

Saddam only became a ruthless dictator when he mistook the imperial master’s power for his own and started giving the imperial golden boys in Israel painful headaches by his anti-Israel rhetoric and through the invasion of Kuwait.

Of course there is nothing the matter with the strict Islamic laws in Saudi Arabia until the day they refuse the US free reign over their oil. Saudi Arabia only needs to stand in the way of the US by interfering with the goings on in the US military base – a base sharply condemned by Osama bin Laden; something that resulted in the stripping of his citizenship in his own motherland.

This writer could give more and more examples but this piece is about why resistance to imperialism is always supreme to everything else in the Marxist perspective the same way the flow of imperialist capital is always supreme to everything else in the context of imperial terms.

To this end this writer will pursue two types of wars as illustrations, namely defensive and aggressive wars on the one hand and national liberation wars on the other.

Imperialist wars are inherently aggressive in nature but the ruling elite in the imperialist countries would always want people to believe that the wars they wage are actually defensive. The contradiction of modern imperialist war is that the ruling elite does require mass mobilisation and the conscription of the working class into its armies and they also require heavy taxation for the funding of wars that virtually benefit only themselves and their partners in the corporate world.

This contradiction is often managed by way of the imperialist ruling elite lying to their own people in order to gain support. Primarily they always claim that they did not want the war but it was unavoidable since it was forced upon them by enemy aggression. To this end they can claim they are only defending their respective nations.

The suspicious video clip produced by the US on the 8th of January claiming that Iranian speed boats had charged towards US naval vessels in the Gulf waters and that someone had shouted “I am coming to you….you will explode after….minutes”, is one good example of the usual US’ “provocative engagement”. The US has a long history of provoking other countries into an action of attack until they can claim aggression as a pretext to wage Washington’s imperialist wars.

They are in Afghanistan and the pretext for invasion in 2001 was that they were going after Osama bin Laden whom they believed was harboured somewhere in the caves of Afghanstan. The action was deemed an act of self-defence because Osama was said to have been responsible for September 11 bombings. The evidence for this cannot be insisted on unless one does not mind ending up being charged under the tough terrorism legislation.

Iraq was invaded in 2003 and the pretext was self-defence against a dangerous country with weapons of mass destruction – weapons that were about to destroy the world in 45 minutes according to Tony Blair of Britain. Of course such weapons were never found after the invasion and it has been stupid story after the other to justify the continued occupation of Iraq.

War politics are normally based on both sides trying to pin the label of aggressor on the other side – always trying to prove that the other side fired the first shot. The Vietnam War began with a funny incident in 1964, when the US in a manner exactly reminiscent to what they have been doing to Iran in the Gulf waters – claimed that two US naval vessels were fired upon off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin.

The claim resulted in the US House of Representatives voting 416-0 for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson’s government the authority to take any action deemed necessary to “defend South East Asia from communist aggression”.

Five years later, Pentagon’s declassified records revealed that Johnson had this resolution already written some months before the Guf of Tonkin incident and he had waited to produce it until Washington could substantiate a claim that it had been attacked.

The declassified Pentagon papers even documented that the two US naval vessels in question were off the coast of North Vietnam on spying and kidnapping missions. In this case, even if the Vietnamese did fire at the vessels it still remains absurd to term them aggressors when in fact the vessels they are said to have fired at were themselves in the middle of an act of aggression.

In December 1964, Johnson decided to wedge an air raid on North Vietnam and in February the following year he ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage repeated acts of provocation in what he termed “provocative engagement”.

The US did a series of covert raids whose responsibility they neither accepted nor denied and they were hoping that Vietnam would retaliate. When, after months of this operation, the Vietnamese finally did attack a US base at Pleiku, in South Vietnam, Washington took the chance to wedge the previously planned air war and of course they claimed that they were defending South Vietnam from “communist aggression”.

These days it is the defending of Israel from “terrorist aggression” when the likes of Lebanon or Palestine are routinely bombed.

Now, this example of Vietnam is given to prove a point from a Marxist perspective. Regardless of Washington’s manoeuvring for a war it wanted in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq and even if all the three countries had been the aggressors, the underlying politics of the war cannot change: these are just wars of national liberation on the part of Iraq and Afghanistan just like the Vietnamese war was a just war for national liberation on the part of Vietnam. These remain wars of imperialist conquest on the part of the US and her allies.

Despite the evidently unbearable economic conditions in Zimbabwe, together with the recent political instability and violence, the struggle for land and localised control over the country’s resources remains a struggle for national liberation on the part of the masses of Zimbabwe. Of course there is no explaining away that can ever justify violence. It is simply diabolical and an appalling exhibition of primitivism. The loss of one life is just one too many and cannot be condoned. However the criminal element in any struggle cannot take away the legitimacy in the cause of the struggle.

The sanctions on Zimbabwe, targeted or misdirected, are basically an expression of imperialist conquest and no amount of propaganda or denial can ever wish this reality away.

It is the political goal of the war that defines whether a war is a just war or an unjust war of imperial conquest. The Marxist perspective judges the West’s actions on Zimbabwe based on the political goal of the imperial empire and not on the stated humanitarian goals.

In the same vein the political goal in Zimbabwe’s land reform programme has to be measured against the political goal of Britain and her Western allies in the current bi-lateral diplomatic standoff between the two nations – a standoff that has resulted in illegal EU-Western backed and enforced sanctions that are often veiled as targeted sanctions. If the sanctions on Zimbabwe are indeed targeted, then clearly the target has been dismally missed – only hitting the innocent masses in a manner that leaves even Lucifer pleading for leniency.

The Marxist perspective will always support a policy that results in a goal like giving back stolen land to the landless masses. To this end the Marxist perspective will support the political goal of land redistribution even under the circumstances of allegations of chaos and corruption in the distribution process. Equally the Marxist perspective will criticise these ills within the context of the supported struggle.

To this end there is no way any Marxist worthy of the name, this writer included can ever fight a revolution such as the Zimbabwe land reform programme is, from the same corner with the imperialist. This is not to say the counterrevolutionaries and the corrupt lot in the revolution should not be fought and destroyed. No, they actually deserve no right to live as the Chinese resolve dictates and this writer brooks no mercy for the corrupt people in a people’s revolution even if they were to face the ultimate penalty. However, their unforgivable deeds cannot be license enough to allow imperialist aggression on the revolution. Imperialists come to burn the forest down while revolutionaries want to rid the forest of the bad trees while guarding against imperial conquest to the rich forest. These are the battle lines that all players may need to observe before picking their fighting positions.

The right to sovereignty and national self-determination is not only part of international law but also a democratic right in which nation states determine their political fate free of foreign domination.

It is a right that should be supported by all consistent democrats and yet we all know how selectively this position has been supported by imperialist countries as led by the US – as they arrogantly maintain that such sovereignty is only a privilege for some nations.

By trying to coerce Zimbabwe into a certain form of behaviour through the force of sanctions and isolation, the West has actually created an oppressed nation.
The Marxist position is that an oppressed nation is entitled to self-determination no matter how politically backward or undemocratic its leadership is said to be. National self-determination is not capitalism, socialism nor democracy. It is a fundamental basic right. From a Marxist perspective, this writer supports the Palestinian struggle regardless of the political or religious views of those leading the anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation in that country.

In like manner most countries in Africa and in the developing world have stood by Zimbabwe’s struggle for the emancipation of its poor people regardless of the political views of those leading the revolution in Zimbabwe.

In 1925, Moroccan Rif peasants were led into an armed resistance against French colonial occupation by a tribal and Islamic religious chief Abd el-Krim. In response to this insurrection a leading member of the French Communist Party by the name of Jules Humbert-Droz said,

“The right has protested against the watchword of fraternisation with the insurgent army in the Rif, by invoking the fact that they do not have the same degree of civilisation as the French armies, and that semi-barbarian tribes cannot be fraternised with. It has gone even further, writing that Abd el-Krim has religious and social prejudices that must be fought. Doubtless we must fight the pan-Islamism and the feudalism of colonial peoples, but when French imperialism seizes the throat of the colonial peoples, the role of the Communist Party is not to combat the prejudices of the colonial chiefs, but to fight unfailingly the rapacity of French imperialism.”

In like manner when British imperialism seizes the throat of Zimbabwean people the role of every Zimbabwean is not to combat the perceived corrupt tendencies of directionless Cabinet ministers and government officials, and neither is it combat the perceived dictatorial tendencies of those who might be falling on the path of the revolution. Rather, it is to fight unfailingly the rapacity of British imperialism as supported by all her Western allies.

The victory of the imperialist coalition occupying Iraq and Afghanistan – as well as that of the coalition surrounding Zimbabwe with the power of propaganda and sanctions would only strengthen the world’s most powerful gang of exploiters, whose sole occupation and interest is to expand its economic empire at the expense of what it perceives to be weaker peoples.

Now we have come to a point where some in the Zimbabwean revolution are now so tired of the fight that they now want to claim leadership of the revolution on the assumed merit that they are acceptable to the imperialist camp. That is obviously unacceptable just like the misguided belief that some people can assume the leadership of the country on the basis of their smile or looks. No one looks or smiles like a president. There is a world of difference between a beauty contest and the electing of a country’s president.

The leadership of a nation state, more so a complex one as Zimbabwe is, is not like a beer concert where the fanciest dancer can claim to be the King.

This is a time for maximum focus for the guarding of the gains of independence. However, those in leadership must be on the lookout for reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries within the ranks of the revolution. A revolution that allows itself to nest crooks; thieves and opportunists can only succeed in destroying itself from the core.

It must be remembered that much as we do not support imperial forces in any way there is even more animosity when it comes to corrupt people who enrich themselves at the expense of the poor masses. To the Marxist perspective, these are worse than a million George Bushes put together.

We the masses will not allow the looting of our resources carried in our name or in the name of defending our country. Those bent on such behaviour must be ready for pay back time.

Equally those who identify with imperialists in the name of hunting for our freedom cannot be allowed to lead our country into tragic captivity.

Children of Zimbabwe we are one. Together we shall overcome.

Reason Wafawarova is Metro’s Chief Political Columnist he is based in Sydney, Australia and can be contacted on

wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk.