File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9705, message 13


From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 13:12:51 +0000
Subject: M-I: Good riddance to Mobutu! 


> Date:          Mon, 19 May 1997 14:10:32 -0500
> To:            marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> From:          Louis Proyect <leata-AT-EarthLink.NET>
> Subject:       Re: M-I: Good riddance to Mobutu! 
> Reply-to:      marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU

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]
 

Dave Bedggood


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