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Black/Red View by John Alan
News & Letters, June 2001
Congo and the market
A war has gone on in the Democratic Republic of Congo since August 1998. It
is the biggest war in the world today. According to "the death census,"
conducted by private American relief organizations, it has claimed the
lives of three million people. This war involves a mixture of many causes,
some going back to the struggle for independence.
Yet in spite of a tremendous loss of life and the catastrophic social
conditions created by this war, the American press has paid little
attention. Neither the Clinton nor the Bush administrations denounced the
genocidal character of the Congo war. Madeleine Albright, Clinton's
secretary of state, in an off-handed way referred to it as "Africa's first
world war." Colin Powell, Bush's secretary of state, has never made a
significant policy statement regarding the Congo.
Powell's failure to do so appears strange. After all, Joseph Kabila, the
new president of Congo and a major participant in the Congo war, has
visited the U.S. to talk to the Bush administration and the UN
secretary-general. He has also visited President Jacques Chirac in Paris
and re-opened talks with the IMF and the World Bank. By all of these
agencies of world capitalism, Joseph Kabila is considered to be more
flexible than his late father, Laurent Kabila.
GRAB FOR RESOURCES
It is difficult to see through the miasma created by the U.S. State
Department and what they make appear as just another ethnic war in the
Congo. One need not be an expert on African affairs, however, to realize
that Joseph Kabila's behind-the-scene meetings with the Bush administration
and the agencies of world capitalism, is nothing less than arriving at a
price they will agree to pay a native autocrat for the right to use the
labor power of the Congo masses to turn the vast natural resources of the
Congo into commodities for the world market.
To cover-up their relentless exploitation of labor and consumption of
natural resources, Powell is now in Africa preaching about democracy to
African leaders. This is the height of hypocrisy. In the 1960s the western
powers, along with the UN, helped initiate an epoch of the most brutal
dictatorship in Congo with their support for war in the copper-rich Katanga
province as well as the murder of independence leader Patrice Lumumba. Now
when they speak of "democracy" what they want in Africa is
"stability"-social peace. The motive then as now is the unfettered ability
of global capital to exploit Africa's natural and human resources.
IMPOSSIBLE DEBTS
Thus, life in Africa today, according to UNICEF, means "that 1.2 billion
people live on less than a dollar a day, including 500 million children. In
many developing nations, funds needed for public health, education, and
improvements in the infrastructure are instead absorbed in debt repayment.
Despite the mythology that Africa drains Western resources, the fact of the
matter is just the opposite. When one combines the debt payment and trade
imbalances, for every one Western dollar that flows into Africa three move
from Africa to the West. In real dollars between 1980 and 1996 Africa paid
off more than double its external debt, and yet found itself three times
more impoverished." (NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER, Dec. 22, 2000)
Africa now is going through a tremendous upheaval of war and all the social
horrors and human suffering that war creates. Yet the truth of the African
revolutions of the 1960s has not died in the memory of many Africans. Today
that revolutionary truth is being used by African leaders as a camouflage
to conceal the plundering of Congo's abundant timber, diamonds, gold,
coffee, and other resource. For example, Uganda has organized and trained a
military force in the Congo which is there to engage in this plunder.
Uganda calls this force MLC, Movement for the Liberation of Congo. Yet the
only liberation in which MLC is involved is the "liberation" of Congo's
resources.
DEVELOPMENT: HUMAN OR CAPITALIST
Africa, after several centuries of revolts against western imperialism,
finally won its political freedom in the 1950s and '60s. Yet its labor
power and its natural resources are still being exploited by world
capitalism. The everyday conditions of life and labor for ordinary Africans
are more oppressive than ever.
Raya Dunayevskaya noted the pull of the world market on the thought and
action of African leaders when she wrote "the tragedy of the African
revolutions began so soon after revolution had succeeded because leaders
were so weighed down with consciousness of technological backwardness that
they turned to one of the two poles of world capital. The isolation from
the masses deepened so that the new rulers began to look at them as mere
labor power."
That happened in spite of the fact that the African masses created the new
era of independence from colonialism and reached for a new road to
development based on their own collective talents. Now that global capital
is a unitary system the pull of the world market is even more immediate and
unquestioned in the minds of all leaders. This makes it all the more
important to return to the liberatory idea that transformed the African
continent and meet it with a philosophy of freedom beyond capitalism.
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