p a n d e m o n i u m
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                                          ALADAA

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

                               AFRICA  TOWARDS  GLOBALIZATION

                                                    (Some General Reflections)

                                                  By   Prof. Dr. Franz J. T. Lee
                                   (DEDICATED  TO  CARL  ZIMMERMAN)

                                                                    ***
                                                    (Summary of the Paper)

                                                                 PART  I

                                               (Translated by:   Iris Bühler)



 

       A. Introduction

        As I see it, Africa confronted by Globalization, is a tragedy, historically worse than the
       infamous 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.  ...
 

       (to be continued ...)


Part II:  B. Some Noteworthy Aspects of the African Continent and its "Future"
                 (TO BE PUBLISHED IN THE NEXT PANDEMONIUM REVIEW)

TO READ PART II,  HERE IS THE LINK:

                   AFRICA: PART II

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