Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 08:47:28 -0400
From: malecki-AT-algonet.se (Robert Malecki)
Subject: M-G: COCKROACH!Extra ( Good riddance to Mobutu!) 


COCKROACH!Extra ( Good riddance to Mobutu!)

A EZINE FOR POOR AND WORKING CLASS PEOPLE.

WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS.

It is time that the poor and working class people
have a voice on the Internet.

Contributions can be sent to <malecki-AT-algonet.se>
Subscribtions are free at    <malecki-AT-algonet.se>

Now on line! Check out the Home of COCKROACH!

http://www.algonet.se/~malecki

How often this zine will appear depends on you!

Back issues of Cockroach and my book at 
http://www.kmf.org/malecki/
------------------------------------------------------
 Good riddance to Mobutu! 

Proyect reveals his political illusions in Kabila in the following:

> The disengagement that Davidson describes is the number one fact of
> Congolese political life. It is what made it relatively easy for Mobutu to
> be toppled: he lacked a solid social base. On the other hand it is what
> will make Kabila's efforts at reform most difficult. Since the state can be
> the only agency of widespread reform, distrust of it will hamper such
> efforts. For example, in a campaign to eradicate AIDS, the Congo's number
> one problem, the state power backing a well-funded medical agency must be
> mobilized. So will efforts to eradicate Ebola and other devastating
> diseases that are the product of environmental degradation and poor
> nutrition and crowded housing.
> 
There are a number of wrong statements here. Mobutu's regime was not 
easy to topple it lasted some 30 years.  Kabila's efforts at reforms 
have not been made difficult by the lack of a social base.  On the contrary 
this lack of a social base in a developed working class and a 
preponderance of poor peasants, is what makes Kabila chances of 
evading reforms easier. Louis problem is his petty bourgeois romantic 
view that the armed petty bourgeois can of their own volition 
substitute for the working class as the agent of revolution. He 
projects onto  Kabila his  subjective desires.  

Yet the reality is different.  Kabila is no longer claims to be a  'marxist'.
 He is the patron of his rebel army but dependent upon the Tutsi support 
from Uganda and Rwanda.  Has has also made committments to both SA 
and the US about his intentions to oversee a neo-liberal recovery for 
the DRC. He signed contracts with the big mining companies without 
as his army swept through the mineral rich areas of the former Zaire. 
He did not wait for the proposed "Constituent Assembly".   If  a " 
support base"  beyond his army had been  in existence he would have 
had to nationalise these companies. This is why instead of giving Kabila 
any political support as Proyect does, it is necessary for revolutionaries 
to fight for an independent working class and poor peasant "base" to 
press for reforms, and when Kabila as the agent of SA and US capital 
baulks, take power from him.

What is meant by distrust of the state?  Mobutu's state was a 
corrupt semi-colonial  dictatorship. Isnt Kabila's body of armed 
men an inchoate semi-colonial state?
 He has been well received as the liberator of the new DRC.
And there will popular  pressure to eliminate  poverty and 
disease, but the question is can Kabila do this?  To do so means 
heavy state spending when Kabila has already committed himself to the 
neo-liberal IMF plan for economic recovery.  Does Proyect seriously 
think that Kabila's  IMF masters are going to be interested in eradicating 
Aids any more than it is worried about poverty which is its immediate cause in 
Africa?

> There will be enormous imperialist pressure on Kabila to include as many
> such elements as possible. I suspect that he will be pulled in two
> directions at once. On one hand pressure from the masses might pull him in
> the radical direction taken by Angola or Mozambique immediately after the
> Portuguese were thrown out. Pressure from the Congolese capitalist class
> and their imperialist backers will pull him the other. It will be
> interesting to see if they are willing to accept a relatively independent
> ruler in a country the size of the USA east of the Mississippi and
> possessing huge mineral reserves.

Well Proyect's suspicians are not well founded. He resorts to sweeping 
generalisations about the "masses" in which his "scholarship" slips 
badly.  What masses? What is their class composition? How does the 
law of "uneven and combined development" account for the social 
backwardness of the former Zaire?  How does the legacy of artificial 
imperialist partition which cuts accross tribal and regional 
loyalties in central Africa  impact on the new DRC?  
It seems that Proyects front of "scholarship" is nothing but a cover for 
his menshevik politics since as,  Hugh, Malecki and others have pointed 
out on this list before, Proyects programme for the former Zaire was to 
put all ones faith and hopes in Kabila's ability to introduce a 
menshevik democratic stage in the revolution during which, eventually, 
perhaps in the new "African"millenium, workers and peasants could be 
prepared to take the next stage along the route to socialism.
> 
> Efforts must be made to find out as much detailed information about events
> in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as possible in order to make sense
> of things. Perhaps we can have a division of labor? Hugh Rodwell will watch
> and report on television news shows while the rest of us should make the
> effort to read scholarly left-wing publications and books devoted to the
> African class struggle.
> 
Proyect don't kid yourself that your contributions to this list are part of a 
division of labour.  The "scholarship" you talk of unless it is 
integrated into a revolutionary programme for permanent revolution, plays 
only a 
contemplative at best, but counter-revolutionary at worst, role in 
determining the outcome of the struggle in the DRC. Hugh as an 
orthodox Trotskyist is on record on this list as endorsing permanent 
revolution in the former Zaire and all of  Africa. Hugh got Proyect 
taped in a former post when he ironically included as one of Proyects 
political demands: "Where is Zaire?.  Well today he would have to say 
"where was Zaire?".

Dave. [for permanent revolution as well as this list]
 --------------------------------------------------------
Proyect writes;
>
>So Hugh watched the telly last night and learned that there was a man "who
>dutifully thanked the Americans". From this he makes the deduction that
>English will be the new lingua franca of the Democratic Republic of the
>Congo? I guess what he is really trying to tell us is that Kabila threw out
>one imperialism (French) and is now opening the door to another
>(Anglo-American). I can't wait for Hugh to mount a Simon Bolivar type of
>expeditionary force to rescue the Congolese people from the new dictator
>Kabila.

After a first little nip at Hugh and the Simon Bolivar brigade. Mind you 
Proyect is a firm supporter of the FSLN from the beginning who "Trotskyists" 
were warning about and who today at best after giving over power to the 
bougeoisie in elections are now most pre-occupied with rewritting the 
Nicaraguan National Anthym. 
says...
>
>In the meantime, it might help the rest of us Marxists if we paid closer
>attention to the types of difficulties that Kabila is facing based on the
>analysis of Basil Davidson, preeminent scholar of African history and
>politics, rather than television coverage:

Ahh yes! The "preeminent" scholar Basil davidson who's main fame to claim is 
doing such heady nature things along with the National Geographic 
society..How quaint that Proyect shows his real appetite for the petty 
bougeois counter-revolutionary historian who has done absoletely nothing for 
poor and working class people other then give his Victorian Imperialist 
style some sort of bizaar liberal face..
>
>"The Mobutuist paradigm, in other words, may at least to some extent be
>made to yield its own antidote. This has become obvious in rural area of
>production: as in many African states during the 1970s, farmers
>increasingly withdrew from the state economy that abused or oppressed them
>and found ways of producing and trading outside the reach of the state. Now
>in the 1980s the same process of disengagement from the state began to
>flourish in towns as well: a 'disengagement from the state in order to
>escape the excessive appropriations of the ruling class,' in Janet
>MacGaffrey's findings. [Economic Disengagement and Class Formation in
>Zaire" in Rothchild and Chazan's The Precarious Balance, Westview 1988] One
>may read this, if one prefers, as organized theft by those without
>bureaucratic or other executive power. But this would be to miss a good
>deal of MacGaffey's point. For the disengagement in question was not simply
>by persons outside the executive network. Increasingly as poverty struck
>inward, it was disengagement by that same network as well."

Quoting another intellectual guru Proyect points out that it is in fact the 
"land" question which is the burning issue of Zaire. A land bigger then the 
entire western Europe and with hundreds of ethnic minorities left over from 
the devestation of colonial rule!  But instead of taking this question to 
its revolutionary potential and conclusions Proyect writes from his mentor 
Basil davidson. I wonder if he really incudes this asshole as one of the 
"we" Marxists?
>
>(Chapter titled "Pirates in Power" in Basil Davidson's "The Black Man's
>Burden" (Times Books, 1992)
>
>The disengagement that Davidson describes is the number one fact of
>Congolese political life. It is what made it relatively easy for Mobutu to
>be toppled: he lacked a solid social base. On the other hand it is what
>will make Kabila's efforts at reform most difficult. Since the state can be
>the only agency of widespread reform, distrust of it will hamper such
>efforts. For example, in a campaign to eradicate AIDS, the Congo's number
>one problem, the state power backing a well-funded medical agency must be
>mobilized. So will efforts to eradicate Ebola and other devastating
>diseases that are the product of environmental degradation and poor
>nutrition and crowded housing.

Instead of talking about how the bougeois colonial state drove the peasants 
not only away from the state, but in many cases to the point where millions 
actually starrved to death and naturally mobilising these millions and 
arming them connected to a program of land lots to all either collectively 
or individually he has become and advisor of the new administrator of 
colonialism Kabila and how to build a state to eradicate AIDS and Ebola! 
Amazing that our "Marxist" seems to be more worried about building a post 
colonial state to combat disease and not a revolutionary state of armed 
people with a program of land to all and nationalisation of the industries 
and financial institutions connected to immediately taking over all of the 
mining and other imperialist ventures that are wripping off the natural 
resources of this country..

>
>The state that Kabila inherits is one that emerged during the Mobutu
>kleptocracy. Step one of a purging process seems the most easy. It would
>consist of purging officers loyal to the great thief. Even though Lenin
>describes the state as being merely bodies of armed men, this truism will
>be put to the test. Kabila is as bereft of experienced economic, technical
>and professional deputies as the Sandinista or the Bolsheviks were. He will
>be feel pressure to draft experienced Mobutu supporters in his efforts to
>create a new, more responsible state. Yet if you want to finance government
>programs, you need to access public treasuries. The people who can account
>for each dollar unfortunately often have to be people who worked in the
>bank for years and years. Lenin described the agony of trying to eradicate
>such people at the wave of a wand in the writings of the NEP era.

Not really! The problem here is that Kabila has no program. Just and army 
which does not in any wat represent a political solution to the problems 
people are facing in Zaire. If he had a program that could mobilise the 
millions firstly so that everybody has enough to eat, land and power in 
their hands connected to a program of nationalisation of the industries and 
using the powerful South African Trade Unions to help them run these 
operations would certainly be a good start. One would think that Proyect 
thinks that revolution depends on a certain set of pre-conditions. This is 
hardly the case. The point is to arm the population and draw them into 
taking over state power (by smashing it) and build a real state based on 
Soviets and Village committees.. Not acting like some liberal advice giver 
in helping to consolidate a state power (to fight AIDS?) that does not 
represent the armed population.
>
>There will be enormous imperialist pressure on Kabila to include as many
>such elements as possible. I suspect that he will be pulled in two
>directions at once. On one hand pressure from the masses might pull him in
>the radical direction taken by Angola or Mozambique immediately after the
>Portuguese were thrown out. Pressure from the Congolese capitalist class
>and their imperialist backers will pull him the other. It will be
>interesting to see if they are willing to accept a relatively independent
>ruler in a country the size of the USA east of the Mississippi and
>possessing huge mineral reserves.

Who is Proyect trying to fool here. kabila has been quite clear about making 
the point that imperialist operations will not be disturbed. In fact for 
weeks now he has been welcoming these company executives and saying business 
as usual.. And his most powerful ally at this point in turning this popular 
revolution into just another change of the emperors clothes is in fact 
Nelson Mandela who hardly wants to see a link for example with the South 
African Proletariat and the millions of people in Zaire who with arms in 
hand could take over the entire Southern half of Africa and having far 
reaching International impact not in the least in the United States. The 
Archilles heal in the United States is the black population that would 
certainly react if the US were to intervene in a real revolutionary process 
in this part of the world..
>
>Efforts must be made to find out as much detailed information about events
>in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as possible in order to make sense
>of things. Perhaps we can have a division of labor? Hugh Rodwell will watch
>and report on television news shows while the rest of us should make the
>effort to read scholarly left-wing publications and books devoted to the
>African class struggle.

This last is just great! I love it. Our "Marxist" hero and his partner Basil 
Davidson allong with a number of other name droppers so Proyect can once 
again dazzle the petty bougeois intellectuals and neo-Stalinists on the 
list. In fact once again Proyect has proved that he is not a marxist and at 
best a neo-Stalinist looking to block with liberal scholars anywhere in 
order to be and advisor to the new regime in the struggle against aids. Not 
once has he talked about poor and working class people in Africa other then 
as a byline for his real appetite of being a name dropping liberal blowhard 
which says nothing to the African millions. Prepared to block with anybody 
is the line except the real popular revolution of the masses and extending 
it. broadening it and deepening it.. Just and aging ex SWPer turned aging 
new leftist and petty bougeois intellectual.

How long will people on this list actually take this kind of shit to be 
serious revolutionary Marxists politics?  In fact I can quite understand 
that people who support this kind of shit have even the gall to call it 
"marxist"..

Finally South Africa is the key. Unless South Africa and its mighty millions 
of black proletarians are drawn into the struggle in Southern Africa well 
then we are going to see round after round after round of these kinds of 
struggles from time to time as the contending imperialist countries try to 
find new "Bonapartes" who they can make a deal with. It is impossible on the 
African continent to rule at this point with a classical colonial occupation 
along the lines of Britain in  India. Much better to make a deal with a 
section of the population and its leaders in order to hold things under control.

The only way to break this dead end cycle is the development of a 
Pan/African Bolshevik/Leninist tendency in a future revolutionary 
International which sees as its task the liberation of the African masses 
from the imperialist/colonialists and there black political henchman. The 
human material already exists in the form of the South African Proletariat 
which in this part of the world is the vanguard of any long going 
revolutionary change worth mentioning. Although Nigeria and its Proletariat 
and the development of proletariats in other African countries is working in 
a favorable direction.

VICTORY TO THE POPULAR AND DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION IN ZAIRE!!

GOOD RIDDANCE TO MOBUTU'S REGIME! NO TO AND EMPEROR WITH NEW CLOTHES IN THE 
FORM OF KABILA!

FOR POPULAR DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OF THE REVOLUTIONARY FORCES AND THE NEW 
REVOLUTIONARY REGIME! FOR AND ARMING OF THE ENTIRE POPULATION IN DEFENSE OF 
THE REVOLUTION.

NOT JUST THE RAILWAYS! NATIONALIZATION OF THE PRODUCTIVE RESOURCES OF ZAIRE 
UNDER DEMOCRATIC AND POPULAR CONTROL! 

NATIONALISATION OF ALL THE LAND! A PROGRAM FOR REDISTRIBUTION OF THE LAND IN 
BOTH COLLECTIVE AND INDIVIDUAL LOTS TO ALL IN THE AREA IRREGARDLESS OF 
ETHNIC OR TRIBAL BACKGROUND!

A CALL FOR A CONSTITUIT ASSEMBLY TO CARRY OUT THE ABOVE THROUGHOUT THE REGION:

NO OUTSIDE INTERVENTION TO SAVE ZAIRE! IMPERIALISTS GET OUT!

FOR THE CREATION OF A PAN_AFRICAN BOLSHEVIK/LENINIST PARTY
IN A REFORGED TROTSKYIST FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!

FOR A SOCIALIST FEDERATION OF SOUTHERN AND CENTRAL AFRICA!

Warm Regards
Bob Malecki
--------------------------------------------------------

Check Out My HomePage where you can,

Read the book! Ha Ha Ha McNamara,
Vietnam-My Bellybutton is my Crystalball!

Or Get The Latest Issue of,

COCKROACH, a zine for poor and working-class people

http://www.algonet.se/~malecki

Back issues of Cockroach and my book at 
http://www.kmf.org/malecki/

--------------------------------------------------------




     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---