Cabral, Amílcar

« he was involved with the foundation of Angola's Marxist liberation movement (MPLA) through contacts from his student days. In 1959 Cabral returned to Guinea to take part in a momentous meeting of the PAIGC at which some crucial decisions were taken.

These included shifting the focus of the struggle from urban to rural areas, moving their political headquarters out of the country and promoting the idea of armed struggle against colonial rule.

Moving their headquarters was possible because Guinée , the neighbouring French colony, had recently become independent.

For the remainder of his life Cabral had a home in Guinée and the PAIGC conducted its programme of decolonization from a base there.

From 1960 Cabral primary focus was on the political education of the party's core membership.

Over the next decade the political mobilization of the Guinean peasantry played a central role in the work of the PAIGC. From 1962 the PAIGC developed a guerrilla army trained to work with the peasantry.

The group also built support from village chiefs and elders.

Cabral was involved in the organization of both the war and the party's diplomacy as it sought to gain international support.

He also organized the elections in 1972 which saw the creation of the National Assembly that declared independence eight months after his assassination in January 1973.

The overthrow of the fascist regime in Portugal in the spring of 1974 led to Portugal's recognition of the independence of Guinea and Cape Verde in October of that year. 2 Political theory In 'The Weapon of Theory' (1966), probably his most widely-cited work, Cabral makes a number of quite specific criticisms and modifications of the Marxist tradition, as he understood it.

For example, it cannot be the case that history begins only after the development of classes, as many European Marxists in the post-war period had argued.

He claimed that there were no classes in the Marxist sense in much of Africa, Asia and Latin America before colonialism, or in early European history.

His analysis of Guinean (and other) societies taught him there was not always class struggle throughout history, therefore, something else must have been the 'motive force of history' ([1966] 1980: 123 ) before the existence of class systems.

This force is the mode of production, which means 'the level of the productive forces and the system of ownership' ([1966] 1980: 123 ).

Class struggle did not exist in earlier forms of society in which there was a low level of development of the productive forces, such as technology and no private ownership of land.

Cabral maintained that there was still historical development and offered an analysis of three stages of development of the mode of production, communal, agrarian and then socialist. Within this analysis Cabral thought that European colonialism in Africa and elsewhere interfered with the historical development of African societies.

He saw national liberation as 'the regaining of the historical personality' ([1966] 1980: 130 ) of a people.

Foreign domination of the productive forces of an agrarian colony by. »