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the international labour movement today.
The Colonial Revolution and Civil War in South Yemen
THE CIVIL war in South Yemen illustrated the processes that are taking place in the colonial countries today, the processes of the colonial revolution. At the same time it shows the degeneration of Stalinism and the peculiar character of proletarian bonapartism, ie. a move to militarypolice dictatorship on the basis of state ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
The processes were shown clearly during the course of the revolution in South Yemen since 1967. The overthrow of British imperialism, which was forced to retreat from Aden and South Yemen because of the movement of the masses, marked the beginning of the revolution in South Yemen. However on the basis of bourgeois democracy, with the crisis which exists
By Ted Grant
of world capitalism, a crisis above all in the colonial areas, it was clearly revealed that the bourgeois and petitbourgeois democrats were incapable of taking action against landlordism and carrying the bourgeois democratic revolution to a conclusion.
Thus the most revolutionary wing of the revolutionary forces was compelled to take power into its own hands. But in order to eliminate feudalism and landlordism they were compelled to go further and eliminate capitalism or rather those elements of capitalism that existed in South Yemen at that time.
South Yemen declared itself a
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"Marxist" state, ie. in reality it was a military-police-bonapartist dictatorship, basing itself on a nationalised economy but with the support of the overwhelming majority, especially of the active population. "The Yemeni revolutionaries had as their model the revolution in Cuba, in Russia and of course in China.
But South. Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world. Despite covering an area equal in size to Bri tain, it only has a tiny population of two million. It had few naturai resources, although now apparenti! oi has been discovered straddling the border between South and North. Yemen. Clearly on the basis of the Yemen economy alone it mas not possi. ble to solve the problems which faced the workers and peasants. ie. the peo-
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