Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 20:44:38 +0000
Subject: Re: M-G: Congo: People wins! 


DAVID: Do the people win?  The people win if they can take control
of the popular struggle against the Mobutu regime and prevent Kabila
>from setting up another imperialist client regime. Kabila may have a
long track record as a rebel, but he looks today like any other
nationalist leader trying to  win control of the mineral resources
of Zaire from the corrupt, dictatorial Mobutu clique, in order to
offer his services to imperialism.  

KARL: It is questionable as to whether one can talk of a modern
industrial  working class as existing in Zaire in any real
substantive sense. Sub-Saharan Africa has been experiencing a feeble
accumulation of capital. Capital inflows to this region have
diminished to a trickle. It is the lack of even moderate
industrialisation in this region that constitutes a key factor in
the poverty, wars and instability that dogs this region. 

Consequently to simply focus in on  most recent and most conspicuous
crisis, as David does, gets marxism nowhere. What is needed is an
understanding of why and how sub-Saharan Africa in particular, and
perhaps even virtually the entire continent, has experienced what
many commentators would describe as de-industrialisation. Marxism
promotes the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall as a
central law of contemporary capitalism. Yet if this law is operating
why is that industrial capital is failing to migrate to sub-Saharan
Africa where the general rate of profit, logically speaking,is higher
than in the so-called core economies such as the States, Europe and
Japan. Indeed capital flows are are heavily concentrated between the
imperialist economies despite claims by marxism that the Tendency of
the Rate of Profit to fall is a law. Until marxism offers a valid
explanation of economic conditions in sub-Saharan Africa it will have
essentially offered nothing in the way of an explanation of world
economic conditions.

An analysis of events in Zaire must be placed within the context of 
an overall analysis of conditions in sub-Saraharan Africa.
                                      




                          Yours etc.,
                                     Karl   


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