p a n d e m o n i u m
d o c u m e n t s

p r e s e n t 


ALADAA

IV National Congress of Studies on Africa  and Asia Culture and Globalization: Economic Crisis, Dependency and Identities.
Mérida, Venezuela
17. - 19. May 2000

Pandemonium Electronic Publications, Mérida, Venezuela, 2000
URL:
http://www.oocities.org/juttafranz/publications00003.html

(DEDICATED TO CARL ZIMMERMAN)
(Translated by: Iris Bühler)

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(Summary of the Paper)

PART I

A. Introduction


As I see it, Africa confronted by Globalization, is a tragedy, historically worse than theinfamous Transatlantic Slave Trade. During the era of the slave trade, the socio-historic order of the day had been the urgent construction of the international division of (mainly physical) labour (of the world market) and the introduction of political exigencies necessary for the coming bourgeois-democratic revolution, aimed at liberal capitalism in the first half of the XIX century. This historic process annihilated the entire African infrastructure, the socio-economic basis of its diverse modes of production, which, by that time, had already existed there, leaving the continent prey to all type of Depredation, Domination, Discrimination and Dehumanization (DDDD) on the part of Europe.

It is no secret at all that the source of wealth, of power and of so-called "progress" is simply the economic exploitation, the depredation of physical and/or intellectual human labour-power. It is also amply known that it is labour-power, and not labour in itself, which is the prime generator of Capital and of Giga-Profits, but at the same time, also of the most horrible and abominable crimes of exploitation, domination, discrimination, misery and poverty, in one word, of DDDD.

De facto, all human problems revolve around the phenomenon of Labour, that is, of exploited Labour Power. Not to take this universal fact into account is equivalent to not to understand, that precisely by means of the economic exploitation of fundamentally physical Labour-Power, for centuries, the African Continent, including all the millions of its pauperized and dehumanized inhabitants, has already been heinously plundered, and will still be pillaged mercilessly for many decades to come..

In Europe, ever since the XII century until today, Labour transformed itself progressively into Capital, forming a contradiction within itself, i.e., Labour versus Capital; hence, it is simply these two dialectical sides of the very same Labour Process -- Labour a n d Capital -- which, for quite some time, will still dominate and determine all global events.

In his book "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa", the Guyanese scientist and historian, Walter Rodney, explained the totality of this brutal and bestial process which covered the "discovery", the "christianization" and the militarization, that is, the total conquest of the African continent. The sum total of African human victims caused by the slave trade throughout five   centuries was not only the massacre and brutal exploitation of newly-estimated 210.000.000 Africans, -- a figure published by The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO (New African, April 2000), -- but in terms of financial  reparations, also the equivalent of more than 777 trillion current American dollars. (New African, November 1999).

What concern this "Holocaust" and its legitimate reclamation for reparations, the IMF, the World Bank, Europe, the United Nations and the United States don't want to hear nothing about it; yes, the African Holocaust does not even appear amongst the themes of minimum democratic global consideration, and even less in the infamous "pardon" which recently the Pope John Paul II requested in the name of the Roman Catholic Church for the global atrocities committed all along its oppressive and dominant history, including the active role which the Catholic Church itself had played in the "Crusades" and the international trade of African slaves.

Since the middle of the XX century, imperialist capitalism experienced a radical restructuring on a world scale, initiating the present phase of globalization, which mainly concerns the exploitation of the human mind, of intellectual labour-power within the context of the present epoch of computer science, informatics, and the computerization of production, distribution and consumption. This process of globalization will change the whole economic, political and social panorama on the planet; also, that what have been the State, the National States, the political significance of geographic regions and their frontiers; all these will fall under the brutal, hovering axe of "global progress". In reality, the entire human production and reproduction with its corresponding socio-economic systems will be subjected to this transformation process, which now already includes and affects the very individual, physical and mental ambit of the human species.

With respect to the modification of physical and mental being, modification of behaviour and thinking, in a unique manner, Aldous Leonard Huxley and George Orwell, in their respective books "Nineteen Eighty Four" (Orwell 1948) and "Brave New World" (Huxley 1932), had
anticipated the logical details and results of a perverted process, which we have just begun to experience, that is, the inhuman end of its diabolical beginning. ...


PART II

B. Some Noteworthy Aspects of the African Continent and its "Future"

1. The Economic Destruction

Currently, the actual population growth rate of Africa is up to a 3%; higher than the population growth rate of China. If it would continue increasing like that, the African population would surpass within 20 years the population number of China. Already for quite a while the whole world is talking about the danger of the demographic explosion and about the future nutrition crisis. Nearly nobody is worrying about the already existing crisis of misery, poverty and hunger.

There are strong suppositions that in the "International Headquarters" are existing plans for reducing the world population of 6 billion to some "controllable" 2 billion by the half of this century, approximately in the year 2050. Amongst many explications and evidences there might be given for the existence of such planes, yet nobody mentions with any word, that in reality we are dealing here with a dynamism of the very same capitalism in its post-industrial, post-physical-labour phase, which, by the exploitation of Intellectual Labour-Power, is leaving at the margin of the production process billions of workers who don't possess anything else to offer to the market than their Physical Labour-Power which is already obsolete.

The liquidation of a "global reserve army" of physical-labour-forces, which, in the present phase of globalization are now worthless, useless, rubbish for the system in its totality, will be accomplished in the first place exactly by poverty, misery and diseases, to which they necessarily will succumb to, and furthermore by food manipulation and the deliberate releasing of diseases like AIDS, which is a synthetic "virus" of the US war laboratories, having been delivered to Africa precisely by means of the immunization programs of the World Health Organization (WHO). (see: New African, October 1999)

Let us have a brief look at Africa's participation in the world market in terms of labour-force and international trade. Africa provides on a world scale primarily physical (in this case, agricultural and mining) Labour-Power and participates in the commerce of the world market only with a rate of 1%, which is below Latin America, which participates in the world trade with an estimated 2 or 3% of the overall volume. The volume of the inter-African commerce, i.e. between the African nations, expressed in American dollars is less than the annual profits of a multi-national corporation, e.g., the Japan-based Mitsubishi or Exxon Mobile based in the USA. (New African, March 2000). In contrast, there is not a single remotely competitive multinational corporation based in an African country.

The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the massive foreign debts of the African countries and the economy policy of Neoliberalism, all squeezing into the famous globalization, have yet obliterated and ruined all African economic exertions already. Within the last decades, finally, these organisms, including the formal and legal rules established by the WTO (World Trade Organization, formerly GATT - General Agreement on Traffics and Trade), completed the destruction of the delicate African agricultural and economical bases which ever since had been essentially inhibited already by the forced imposition of foreign economic structures into the unfortunate African history.



PART III

2. The Military Annihilation

It is ironic that in the current crisis of Sierra Leone, the country is flooded by a wide variety of weapons, whilst at the same time it lacks all economic conditions for producing even a single bullet. Furthermore it's equally ironic that the five permanent members of the United Nations' Security Council, supposedly the watchmen and guarantors of "world peace", are the biggest and most important producers and traders of arms and armament on a world scale. Their arms equally attack and defend "democracy" in Africa, thus bringing the business of the new century to blossom on the African continent.

The very same, post-apartheid, democratic and reconciliatory South Africa has entered this armament business scenario, producing and trading weapons all over Africa. Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, who have so sharply condemned the "arms race" and the increasing armed inter-African conflicts, preside over one of the most important armament producers and traders on the whole African continent.

Apparently, they have learnt too rapidly from the marvelous world of business á la USA, France, Germany and Great Britain. Long live the reconciliatory South African democracy! Long live the dead and assassinated of the age of Apartheid, in the name of capitalist giga-profits! This is the South Africa for which they have ruined their precious lives and died!

In Africa, the military ambition compared to the international panorama has no importance whatsoever. The overall armament machinery of all national Armed Forces on the African continent is all for nothing at the hour of a foreign military invasion of any Great Power. The African people, apart from the myths of Chaka, historically have not been prepared for wars, neither in Ancient Egypt, nor in the African Empires of Zimbabwe, Ngola, Mali, Bakongo, etc., and even less during the epochs of European colonialism and of Yankee neocolonialism.

Since Ancient Greek and medieval times, war has essentially been a European monopoly. For the first time in the history of Africa, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo -- the African José Martí and Simón Bolívar -- and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, proposed the construction of an African continental army, an idea that Europe, the United States and the United Nations didn’t appreciate. Consequently, by means of their respective intelligence organisms and covert operations, each effort of this kind has been suffocated by inhibition or assassination of the promoters of such ideas. Today, the sterile Organization of African Unity (OAU commences recovering its memory of Africa's revolutionary 1960's, and, although it is already too late, it is trying to resurrect the dream of a united African military defense.

However, the OAU does not know that Africa has already lost its quota in the "Challenger" towards the epoch of Informatics, Intellectual Labour and Globalized Militarism. Also, the "sacred" Pan-African desires of Patrice Lumumba and of Kwame Nkrumah to found a United Nations of Africa have vanished into the Nothing of the era of globalized capitalism; the agenda of globalized capitalism excludes the unification of Africa, on the contrary, it includes the disappearance of Africa from the map of the world. In fact, on the economic map. the "Dark Continent" does not even appear as a shadow existence.  


PART IV

3. The Political Liquidation

African Nationalism, which was born after World War I and is still surviving in the South Africa of Mandela and Mbeki, was always characterized as "anti-imperialist", "pro-capitalist", "pro-Stalinist", "pro-liberal", "pro-democratic", "pro-Gandhist" and "anti-Trotskyist". Also, today, it is the most retarded, obsolete and reactionary African policy.

After World War II, during the epoch of de-colonization which in reality was the era of neocolonization -- on the one side -- economic independence, but actually Yankee economic dependence -- and on the other side -- Pan-Africanism with its extreme left of African Socialism (Nkrumah, Nasser, Sekou Touré, Obote). In his book, "Africa Must Unite," Nkrumah described the following essential goals of Pan-Africanism:

For Africa:

. A Common Market
. A Common Currency
. A Currency Zone
. A Central Bank
. A Continental Communication System
. A Continental Armed Force

Similar to the case of Lumumba and other radical African leaders, Nkrumah was attacked in the bourgeois world press as a megalomaniac and authoritarian politician. Finally, in a joint covert operation involving diverse intelligence agencies, including the CIA, and various organizations of military conspiracy, he was destituted by means of a coup d'etat. Sadly, all liberation movements on the African continent -- in the Congo, South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe, Namibia, etc., -- terminated in the same virulent political, economic and social corruption, against which they pretended to fight.

C. Conclusion

Finally, let us conclude with a brief description of the situation in Africa and its future vis-a-vis Globalization using the following example:

In the 1950's, various European and USA multinational corporations collaborated with the United Nations, and with the military and intelligence services of various countries of the "free world" to spoil Patrice Lumumba's emancipatory efforts to liberate the Congo politically and economically. Lumumba, the popular leader, was massacred in cold blood, and substituted by the notorious imperialist tyrant and puppet, Mobutu Sese Seko, who, during the Cold War, was ordered to suffocate any Communist revolutionary intentions in Central Africa.


After more than 30 years of Mobutu's loyal compliance to destabilization, and after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, he lost his political utility, and his masters dropped him like a hot potato. His former European and USA pay-masters operated by military means from Rwanda and Uganda in supporting the new substitute, Laurent Kabila. When Kabila showed that he wasn't a valid performer of the political puppet role, the Western interests turned against him, operating once more from and through the same countries, Rwanda and Uganda, targeting his overthrow.

At the end of the millennium, a Pan-African war broke out, involving the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Angola (New African, October, 1998). Probably, and similar to the case of Sierra Leone, the United Nations' military force of rapid execution (their "peace corps" or "blue helmets") will have to intervene in the near future. The carefully contrived economic, political, social and military chaos which is ruling the African continent may be a mirror of what is to be expected in other parts of the formerly named "Third World", currently called "Emerging Markets" - which should rather be called "markets in emergency." For Latin America, as well as for Africa, it may be too late to review the priorities in its integration agenda.

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