What is the scale and importance of the national liberation movement in the present period?
Dutt measures the problem as 1.7 per cent of the world population, or 52 million, whilst Krushchev and the other leaders of the C.P.S.U. round off this figure to 50 million.
It is difficult to see how Dutt and Krushchev arrive at their figures. Let us take some of the more glaring cases of oppression – althoughh it is impossible to place the national liberation question into any measured gradation of terror and misery:
South Vietnam........................14.49 million
South Korea...........................25.37 million
Congo.................................... 15.36 million
South Africa (non-whites).....13.00 million
Malaysia................................ 9.41 million
Mozambique............................6.28 million
Angola.....................................4.87 million
Southern Rhodesia................ 3.15 million
Aden......................................1.20 million
Laos...................................... 3.00 million
We could go on to add British Guiana, the Philippines, Iraq, and so forth. But even then we should be seeing only part of the whole. Can there be any doubt that when we speak of the national liberation movement – and this is the title of Dutt’s article – we must include the 149 million people of South America, the greater part of the 261 million people of Africa, more than 50 per cent of the 1,721 million of Asia and many millions in Central America (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, and so on)?
Of course, everything depends on your definition. Ernest Burnelle, the leader of the revisionists in the Belgian Communist Party, can write in World Marxist Review (August 1963, p.14) “Take the national liberation movement for example. Thanks to its success the former Belgian Congo is now independent”.
By Burnelle’s standards the colonial liberation struggle is over.
This attempt to minimise the problems and play down the importance at the struggle is significant. It is the starting point in our analysis at the differences between the revisionist and the Marxist attitude to the national liberation movement.
For what is the purpose of relegating the fight for national liberation to a secondary position if not to absolve the rest of the movement from giving it all-out support and to focus attention on some other, allegedly more important and urgent, aspect of the international struggle?
What in fact are the main and immediate centres of struggle in the present world situation?