colonial reaction.
The events taking place in Angola are causing tremors of alarm throughout the neo-colonial world of South-West Africa. These regimes fear the effects of the Angolan development on the stability of their own regimes. Zaire, for example, plays the role of the strong link in the imperialist chain by arming and giving aid to the rightist FNLA(1). Zambia and Congo have been increasing their factional manipulation of the MPLA(2).
The oil companies, their eyes fixed greedily on the enclave of Cabinda, are closely associated with the FLEC(3). The organisation of African Unity is also attempting to intervene in the direction of a neo-colonial soluton. Meanwhile South Africa understands the dangers inherent in the Angolan situation for its economic interests and its policy of detente with the neo-colonial regimes.
Angola represents an important prize for either the African revolution or neoThe Angolan economy is tied to the other countries in that region and its ethnic groups spill over the various borders. Its strategic position and economic potential make it an absolutely vital area for imperialism.
principle of independence.- thus maintaining its base amongst the urban masses - and aided by the events in Portugal, the MPLA was able to frustrate this plan.
Above all else, the eruption of the Angolan labouring masses onto the political scene, resulting in strikes and big mobilisations in the urban centres, forced the Portuguese bourgeoisie to recognise the right of the Angolan peoples to independence. Angolan woman carrying her shopping passes the dead body of an FLA member lying in the street dismissal of the MPLA from the government.
In recent years there has emerged in the urban centres a young, concentrated and very combative proletariat, the direct product of capitalist exploitation. Its first significant victory over the stalling of the Portuguese Government came with a near spontaneous response of the labouring masses to the racist crimes committed by colonial reaction. This suddenly transformed the balance of forces and enabled tens of thousands of workers to go through the experience of mobilisation and struggles leading to the formation of rank-and-file committees in the neighbourhoods and enable it to grasp the fundamental importance of the emergence of a proletarian social force in the heart of the imperialist apparatus, and it is unable to put forward political responses in class terms.
Nevertheless, its desire to 'put an end to exploitation of man by man' and to establish a 'democratic and popular regime' has a very immediate and precise class content in the urban centres: the power of workers and poor peasants, and an end to capitalist exploitation. Its frontist illusions, however, leave it torn between collaboration with FLA and UNITA in the government and participation in rank-and-file committees at the base; the dynamic of these struggles continues to sharpen the contradictions in the MPLA, increasing the