Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 11:02:45 1200+
Subject: Re: M-G: Congo: People wins! 


> From:          "Karl Carlile" <joseph-AT-indigo.ie>
> To:            marxism-general-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Date:          Tue, 25 Mar 1997 20:44:38 +0000
> Subject:       Re: M-G: Congo: People wins! 
> Cc:            marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU,
>                pen-l-AT-anthrax.ecst.csuchico.edu
> Priority:      normal
> Reply-to:      marxism-general-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU


Karl fortunately the real world does not wait for you to devise some 
mechanical addition to your historical scheme of stages of world 
revolution appropriate for sub-Saharan Africa. It is obviously true 
that the working class is underdeveloped in Zaire, that is one of the 
effects of the combined and uneven development of imperialism. That 
is why is is necessary to have a programme that addresses the needs 
of poor peasants as well as workers, and which makes it clear that 
the poor peasants will not find salvation in another, better, more 
humane, bourgeois government, because that will not remove their 
super-exploitation by imperialism,  but like Russia in 1917 has to 
jump over the armchair theoreticians like yourself,  and make a 
permanent revolution.

Dave

> 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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