p r e s e n t s
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)
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