Since Africa is of growing importance on the world scenario, both in terms of imperialist appetites and penetration and from the point of view of the wars that these same imperialisms wage there and, consequently, the tragic migrations of whole populations, we consider it useful to take another look at the work our party has carried out on the subject since 1952 onwards. The work takes into account the whole of the African continent, from North to South, West to East, from the so-called southern shores of the Mediterranean to South Africa, from the countries of the Gulf of Guinea to Madagascar and from the Horn of Africa to the Heart of Africa and the sub-Saharan and equatorial regions. In the large body of articles published in our journals in the course of decades, we have traced the history of the Continent, dwelling on its economy, society and the struggles of the young bourgeoisie and the equally young proletariat, right up to the age of decolonization after the Second World War. The history of North Africa, in particular, however one wishes to look at it, is interwoven with that of the Middle East, if only because the territories of the “fertile half moon” right up to Morocco share, at least partially, a history, a language and a religion: the Sinai peninsula and the isthmus of Suez are natural hinges between Asia and Africa and the Mediterranean Sea, which bathes the shores of the most important regions in the two areas, from coast to coast.[1].
To sum up
The dawn of the ‘1900s, with the imperialist development of capitalism already foreseen by Marx and then analysed by Lenin, saw the end of the age of the pure and simple colonial plundering of Africa which had, in previous centuries, accompanied the industrial development of Europe and was soon to lead to the overall massacre of the proletariat’s civilian and military populations. With the help of foreign capital, the young, emerging African bourgeoisies, born in the shadow of colonial dominion, started to lay the bases for the first production facilities and at the same time more or less stable working class formations come into being. After the end of the second world conflict, the age of decolonization opened up for Africa, i.e. the massive and rapid transition of almost all African countries to independence, also favoured by the complex and contradictory processes of “national reconstruction” in which the European bourgeoisies were involved. The African nationalist movements attempt to “define” a political map of Africa: thus the first contrasts emerge and the first clashes between the young, indigenous bourgeoisies and the European, imperialist bourgeoisie. But this is a process with “low revolutionary potential”. The young African bourgeoisies, composed mainly of white-collar workers and military staff, reformed but still the heirs of the previous, colonial régime, lacking any real bases for industrial production apart from mining (those raw materials that are so tempting to European and American imperialism), have neither the power nor the will to make a clear break with the old, indigenous, merchant and moneylending classes. These initial conditions are also joined by lack of organizational or managerial ability, the constant retracing of boundaries by the various imperialisms, the absence or lack of capitals (and thus the impossibility of the “mother country” to fully emancipate itself from one imperialism or the other), the miserable condition of agriculture and above all – at a political level – the lack of any real revolutionary perspective. The battles that nonetheless rage everywhere in Africa’s territory, from North to South, are thus slowed down, contained, repressed: and the potentially more advanced spearheads are eliminated, even physically, in agreement with, and with the complicity of local bourgeoisies and European and American imperialism.
The indigenous bourgeoisie in all its various forms (including the so-called “socialist”) is thus incapable of any true revolutionary action. There do exist extraordinary examples of attempts to attack both the backward conditions of the past and the oppressive dominion of the imperialist present: in the front line, generous as they are desperate, is an extremely young proletariat which is taking shape around the mines and the first, frail industrial settlements, and the poor farmers hungry for land.
Africa’s “revolutionary” movements are thus distributed over the territory according to divisions already introduced by the first colonialists and successive predators. What we called “the awakening of coloured peoples” is the troubled process of moving wider-ranging masses and organizations, with the objective of national liberation against the imperialist bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, the scrambled territory, newly traced and redesigned around a conference table by colonialism and imperialism and accepted by the African and Middle Eastern bourgeoisie, acts as a brake to the course of events. First the cold war and subsequently the detente between Russia and the USA determined the division of the African and Middle Eastern continent in terms of their roles and alliances: to sum up, as dominions.
As from the second half of the 1970s, whilst the effects of the systemic economic crisis are making themselves felt, we can consider the age of African decolonization over. From then onwards, what will increasingly come to the foreground is the class war of the African and Middle-Eastern proletariat against their indigenous bourgeoisies and the allied imperialist metropolises; an economic battle to defend overall living and working conditions, which screams aloud its lack of, and its need for, a political revolutionary perspective. And indeed, it is 1979, with the fierce struggles of the Iranian proletariat, occurring well ahead of the foundation of the so-called “Islamic Republic”, that can be considered the turning point for an entire period of history. Thirty years later, with the widespread rebellions demanding bread and the strong and extended unrest in the textile factories, the mines and the oil-drilling areas, promptly deviated and channelled into the cul de sacs of a massive democratic and petit-bourgeois perspective (the so-called “Arab springs”, from 2007 to 2012, involving Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Yemen), signs of a radical economic and social change start to be seen: the open confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, both local and international. And it is no coincidence that this flares up in the midst of the second largest crisis of over-production in the post-war period and that it is finally crushed by today’s general massacre, which continues to drag on over time (Libya, Syria, Yemen…).
As a consequence of the crisis of the ‘70s, the age we have been living in since the beginning of the ‘80s has opened up the gates to new, imperialist, military intervention: with the Iran-Iraq war and the first Gulf War, followed by the Balkan wars and the second Gulf War of 2003, the massacre of whole populations and territorial destruction gains the upper hand in the Middle-East, from Syria to Yemen. At this stage, the pendulum of migration changes direction: hounded by poverty, corruption, repression and ceaseless massacres by local factions and bands of “legionnaires” bound to one imperialism or the other, enormous masses of people move from the South towards the North and East of the world, leaving an immense hecatomb of death on the bed of the Mediterranean Sea. In the West, grand words like … “globalization”, “technological automation”, “watersheds of civilization”… are on everyone’s lips. On the contrary, what is going on is a hyperbolic growth in world inequality, or that growing poverty (especially proletarian) that Marx indicates as the genuine product of imperialist capitalism. A new cycle of accumulation has started up in Africa, too: a new wave of development (industrial, agricultural, mining, oil production) affects some areas of the African continent, impoverishing others; overall poverty increases and settles in areas that are already densely populated and capitalistically developed; a vast flux of the living dead wanders the African continent, crossing forests and desert areas, migrating indifferently towards the widest variety of countries – an authentic human tsunami fleeing inhuman conditions.
Historical delay: natural conditions and colonization
Let us take a step backwards here. A territorial ethnic-linguistic-economic map of Africa shows the network of relations between groups of human beings – a network of social links and thus of civilizations. North Africa is the meeting point of Greek, Roman and Arab civilizations, whose heritage has had the effect of leavening precapitalist and capitalist development there. The ethnic groups on the Atlantic coast, to the North and South of the Gulf of Guinea, have had more contact with Europeans intent on navigating the African coasts or crossing the Atlantic to the Americas. The areas from the Persian Gulf and the Isthmus of Suez that stretch towards the Indian Ocean had already opened up and been travelling trading routes for a long time: well before colonization, the civilization of the Horn of Africa had experienced a flourishing economy. Sub-Saharan Africa, including the Congo, in turn, played a central role in the exchange between the civilizations of the Nile, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes. Other economies and human groups to the South played a specific role in linking the Sub-Saharan black-Sudanese language area (today’s equatorial and “French” West Africa) to the North and the black-Bantu language area to the South. Dutch merchants were the first to create a settlement in South Africa amongst the indigenous populations and Cape Town was founded as a supply station for vessels belonging to the Dutch East India Company.
The article, from which we re-publish large excerpts in the following lines, printed in our Italian newspaper Il programma comunista in 1958, emphasizes the natural preconditions that were the cause of the historical delay in Africa compared to the economic and political development of Europe and Asia. We read: “Africa, no less than other continents, has participated over the course of the centuries in the social evolution of the human species. If the State is a necessary bridge in the passage from barbarity to civilization, it should be noted that the Africans were familiar with the art of governing themselves, i.e. they were civilized well before slave drivers and missionaries descended on them to Christianize the tropical undergrowth. Flourishing empires, organized on a feudal, hierarchical model, arose in western Sudan, along the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea, in Congolese Africa, in Rhodesia […]. These state jurisdictions governed vast territories and different peoples and entertained trade and diplomatic relations with the whole of Arab Africa and the Mediterranean: proof of the high level attained by African “production techniques”. Before being hurled into the compounds of colonialism, the black peoples went through all the stages of civilization preceding the one introduced by capitalism: cultivation of the land, animal husbandry, industry, commerce […]. Obviously civilization is a process that depends closely on the indefinite enlargement of the sphere of social relations between human beings. Civilization evolves according to whether or not there are the conditions for close and frequent relations between nations and collective groups. And what form of communication could be more profitable than maritime travel? […]. In fact in Europe and in Asia there existed natural conditions for the progress of sea travel and the consequent intensification of intercontinental dealings. Inevitably, the spread of production techniques, i.e. culture, followed behind the arrival of goods. The physical conditions of the world allowed Europe and Asia to become the great receptacles of invigorating currents in the activities of numerous social agglomerations. For the other continents – Africa and above all the Americas – on the other hand, besieged between two oceans uncrossable at the time, these conditions were largely lacking. This is why the Euro-Asiatic civilization progressed more quickly. The peoples progressed socially to different levels not because they were subject to different biological laws, but because they stood in a different relationship to the physical conditions of nature.” [2].
African colonization as a “process of disassociation”
The natural preconditions were subsequently joined by those linked to economic development, doubly tied to the situation of colonization on African ground, which, from a historical point of view, was not a drive towards capitalism, but a process destined to delay its onset even further. In another article, in 1961, we wrote: “Marx speaks of the claim to accumulation of capital, because it is a process of disassociation and not of progressive accumulation of the means of production in the hands of the bourgeoisie […] In Europe it means both the dissolution of feudal models and the formation of the relationship between capital and wage labour, whilst in the countries of black Africa it is essentially a process of dissolution of previous social and economic models, without the intervention of a second stage – that of progress to a superior mode of production; the wealth that has been separated from its previous producers is deviated to the metropolises to be accumulated in monstrous masses. […] Imperialism makes every effort to maintain colonies at the initial stage of accumulation, that of the dissolution of local relations, seized by capital (trusts, foreign companies). […] In the colonies, as in the metropolises, before the process of primitive accumulation begins, there must already be money and goods, i.e. commercial and monetary circulation – the market. In Europe, the classical process of accumulation means the passage from capitalist circulation to production, the transformation of money into capital. In the colonies, the process is limited to the circulation of goods […]: there, money and goods are not transformed into capital through productive wage labour [3].
The formation of the present “national States” in Africa was thus a troubled process. Taking the 1914 situation as a starting point (and leaving out the period when West Africa was placed at the centre of the slave route towards the Americas between the XVIth and XIXth centuries) we find Africa divided up amongst colonizing countries from the extreme North to the South. European intrusion and expansion in Africa takes place by stages and at the centre of the dominion stand Great Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Italy. Immense areas are occupied and divided up with the sole criterion of disposing of mining and agricultural resources to be plundered. At the dawn of the First World War, there is a British Africa (Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya), a French Africa (western and equatorial), a Belgian Africa (Congo) and a German one (Cameroon, Tanzania and Namibia), but also a Portuguese-Spanish Africa (Angola) and an Italian one (Libya, Somalia, Eritrea). The division into separate state entities inevitably broke up nationalities, populations, ethnic groups and tribal organizations, often creating artificial oppositions and friction. The concept of colonization as “civilization” was to justify economic, social, cultural and political violence against the populations: a “declaration of progress”!... In an immense marketing campaign, the European bourgeoisie brought sociologists, philosophers, politicians, religious figures and scientists into play, to justify its enlightened presence: it would be a guarantee for the future, it announced, of great social, political and economic victories… In the meantime, it spread its ideas of racial superiority, superior civilization: i.e. its social Darwinism.
This is a long period of bourgeois economic and social colonization, the modern expression of the charter of Human and Citizens’ Rights, which, after Napoleon’s undertakings in Egypt and through his Civil Code, was to impose itself right up to the first world conflict and from then on to the second. At this turning point the young African bourgeoisie was called upon to fight colonial links by the use of force. The dawn of the new States was to demand a huge and organized force of enormous numbers of combatants entering the battlefield, area by area and zone by zone. Abstract ideas of Freedom, also fuelled by pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism would be the ideologies and ideal, universal aspirations of this bourgeoisie: but they would never have the driving power that the “national heroes” predicted or imagined; indeed: they would gradually obstacle the path to the development of capitalism and thus the class organization of the proletariat – the military and political gap within the bourgeois agents concerned, indigenous and imperialist, was too great. It was to be the forces and relations of production that were appearing and establishing themselves, that would open up the path to capitalist development, slowly but inexorably: then, however, to shut it up into miserably national compounds. The great imperialist metropolises tried in every conceivable way to block, slow down, deviate the social and production forces, both at a material level and at the level of superstructure, keeping them in the twilight zone of primitive accumulation, only destined to emerge very slowly from the trader’s chrysalis towards an economic development that in the end was not to be a “victory of the human spirit” but a process determined by the battle between the ascending African bourgeois class and the imperialist class.
The political bases were as follows: which classes could ensure “national liberation” in the fight against the imperialist metropolises? Could the newborn African proletariat and the mass of poor peasants enter the scene as avant-garde fighters and, at the same time, would the young African bourgeoisie be capable of directing the alliance formed by the classes in question and interested in the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist revolution, in a revolutionary sense? There could be only one answer, dense with dramatic implications: this could only be done by the revolutionary proletariat directed by its own party.
To speak of “African nations” before decolonialization is nonsense, just as it is to speak of “modern social classes” in the strict sense of the term. The former and the latter arise together. The trading and monetary forms characterizing the pre-capitalist age are forcefully introduced from outside and the production relations with their old forms of ownership act as a brake to capitalist development. It was a matter of transforming family and tribal structures, ancient and age-old civilizations, nameless States and organizations not regulated by any law of rights except for tradition, but also stiffened and consolidated property rights, perhaps set up with the support of the colonizers. The transition from a micro agriculture to agriculture grounded on industrial development and money, through agrarian reform (forms of collective ownership), was immensely difficult to initiate. As we know, the European nations formed when they left feudalism behind them and it took them four or five centuries to settle, through the transition period of merchant trading and the insertion of the usurer system, crossing the phase of primitive accumulation and the formal subordination of work to capital. In Africa, then, the slow and difficult exit from the more primitive, more or less feudal or backward, more or less mercantile forms of community towards a capitalist structure and the modern national model, comes as no surprise.
The long, active and aggressive hand of modern imperialism also played a negative role in the formation of the “African nations”: there was no lack of clashes between the dawning bourgeoisie and the old ruling classes, clashes between the various “constitutional forms” (federal and centralist), the massacres between different populations, the competing appetites of the great powers, wars of a modern nature and the now mature struggles between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The rapid pace at which decolonization was initiated, with its “national heroes” [4], demanded great determination, from the young African bourgeoisie which was, however, characterized by its basic fragility, as indicated at the beginning of this article and, above all, by the fear of several countries sinking into a general state of modern poverty: the division into modern social classes would not generate a process of harmonious development because, by subjugating and exploiting the proletariat and the mass of landless peasants, the gap between wealth and poverty would grow rapidly and, with it, the terror at the growth of the proletariat, the historical enemy of the bourgeoisie, would increase.
Anticolonial uprisings: proletarian strategy and indifference
In another article in 1953, we wrote: “Marxists worthy of the name refuse to accept that colonial and backward countries must pass through the infamous bourgeois revolution, in order to arrive at socialism. They openly support the possibility and necessity of the ‘leap’ from pre-capitalism to socialism in the colonial countries of Africa, Asia, Oceania, as in the semi-colonial and backward countries of South America. An identical strategy indicated by Marx and Engels for Germany in 1848 and by Lenin and the Bolsheviks for Russia in 1917. The indispensable condition for this leap, yesterday for Germany and Russia and today for backward colonial countries, is for the dictatorship of the proletariat to triumph in the powerful countries with super-industrialized capitalism: yesterday England, today the social-geographic area embracing all of Europe, including Russia, and North America. Only if the immense industrial potential of these areas is kept firmly in hand, will the proletarian revolution be able to allow the economy of social relations to advance in backward colonial countries ‘leaping over’ the capitalist phase.”
We continued: “From this gigantic, strategic plan, the criterion to be adopted as a political attitude towards the nationalist uprisings in the colonies follows coherently. If the international revolutionary movement is launched in the supreme struggle against the centres of world imperialism for the seizing of power in Europe and America, and the class war against the capitalist metropolises is going on, as it was in 1917-’20, it is clear that the struggles in the imperialist background, i.e. the national-popular uprisings in the colonies, take their part in the revolutionary strategy of the world proletarian party, since they contribute to undoing the defences of imperialism and broadening the class war. Once the capitalist fortress has been laid low, the triumphant proletarian revolution will work to get rid of the remaining traces of petit-bourgeois nationalism without upheavals. How? The reply for a Marxist can only be: by placing the colonial countries, finally freed of century-old oppression, in the ‘proletarian, world economic plan’.”
And, note!, we pointed out: “It is one thing to refuse to rent out the proletarian party to bourgeois back-peddling, and quite another to deny the objective influence, exercised by the eventually successful separation of the pluri-national colonial countries from their states, on the maturation process of the pre-conditions for the final collapse of capitalism. The fusion of peoples, without which socialism is inconceivable, will not be obtained by mere constitutional measures (federation, confederation, etc.), but by absorbing and depersonalizing the national economies into a world economic plan. This will be opposed by petit-bourgeois national prejudices, which draw sustenance from the social environment determined by micro agricultural production and from the backward dispersion of the proletariat. Consequently, if the backward and colonial countries succeed, taking advantage of imperialist contradictions, in separating themselves from state, metropolitan contexts, this sort of back-peddling, since it aims at a capitalist concentration of the means of production, creating a national industry that does away with feudal and patriarchal remains, must necessarily concentrate the indigenous proletariat into huge masses, creating new recruits for the future revolution. On the other hand, experience of an independent national government will serve to cure the exploited masses of the nationalist infatuations inculcated by the dawning indigenous bourgeoisie, which sooner or later will be forced to show its real face as an exploiter no less oppressive than the white rulers. […] Let the national revolutions come in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Indochina, Malaysia, let an acceleration of the pace of capitalism’s integral development come in China, India, Bolivia, Brazil etc., if it is not possible (in these countries) to make the revolutionary ‘leap’ over capitalism. Does this mean that we applaud Mao-tse-tung or Pandit Nehru or Paz Estensoro? Fools may say so but this means they have grasped nothing of the Marxist dialectics they comically claim to represent. As if Marx, in his famous passage on the mole, rejoicing at the progressive centralization of the bourgeois state machinery, in which he saw the preconditions for the proletariat’s frontal attack, were expressing admiration and political support for the evolution of bourgeois totalitarianism! No! The separation of national States from their old, white-dominated, imperial context and the establishment of indigenous executive power founded on the bourgeoisie, clarifies class relations and rudely denies the rebellious alliance of classes against the white oppressor, opposing the national State to the Proletariat. Any measure taken to strengthen power makes social contradictions more acute, concentrating against it the exploited and the oppressed, convinced of the need for a world revolution of the masses. Just as Marx did not take the side of the Third Empire or Napoleon III, though glad of the continual concentration of government power in the hands of the French bourgeoisie, which thus revealed the true face of capitalist political monopoly and encouraged the proletariat to become aware of it, so we do not, either actively or passively, take the side of the political forces that are setting up the monstrous bourgeois state machinery in the colonies and backward countries” [5].
When our party focused on the revolutionary events in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, it was correct to propose, as in 1917 in Russia, the same tactics of the dual revolution, of the permanent revolution. It was generous: it believed in the young African proletariat making its appearance on the stage of history, and hoped that the effects of Stalinism would not manage to suffocate its fighting instincts and class sentiment. But it was well aware that it was not possible for the proletariat to undertake a leap as considerable as Russia’s without the help of the class party. The history of the movements of liberation from colonialism has confirmed that the African and Middle-Eastern proletariat could provide the energy for the historical leap forward but not act as the guide of the liberation process. The young forces of the militant African bourgeoisie that had formed in the capitalist metropolises and learned from Stalinism not the path to socialism but the “national path to capitalism”, had thus already been “educated” by history. Stalinism meant the theory and political tactics that deliver the proletarian class war into the hands of the bourgeois counter-revolution. Thus the revolutionary process proved to be far more arduous than that of Lenin’s Russia, since Stalin’s counter-revolution had left layers of rubble covering the principles, objectives and economic and political organization of the proletariat. It was a confirmation that, when their historical moment comes, as happened during the course of the French revolution, bourgeois revolutions are not even really the work of the bourgeoisie, but of the peasant and proletarian masses, the disinherited and the poor. Our party clung to this sentiment, this hope, to make the “tree of life” (that of the permanent, active, revolutionary process) richer than theory permitted. Nonetheless, we knew that these masses would not be able to lead to the socialist objective without political direction, or the High Command that had proved so extremely successful after the first World War.
Denying a possible extension of the class war, denying the necessary bond between the international proletarian class movement and the movement of the coloured peoples: this is the indifference that, as we again wrote in our 1961 article, barricaded itself “behind the pretext that the colonial uprisings have bourgeois origins and ideological (and in part social) content and are open to manoeuvres by the opposing forces of imperialism. And here is the vile danger: it is this very indifference (which then, on the terrain of the class war, means going over to the enemy side) of the revolutionary proletariat and, worse still, its Party, that blocks the process of radicalization of the colonial uprisings, restricting their prospects in a framework of bourgeois programmes and social forces, thus exposing them to the possibility of cynical exploitation by big capital entrenched on the slopes of the White House or the Kremlin. It means giving up the mission entrusted to it not by Marx, Engels or Lenin, but by the history of which it is the spokesperson, impoverishing a historical phenomenon pregnant with future potential.” (our italics).
And again: “For years, almost daily, the rough fist of the “coloureds” has been hammering on the door, not of the bourgeoisie, but of the metropolitan proletarians; and it is not a metaphorical hammering, since the Belgian proletarians in 1961, or the French in the great strikes of past years respond and responded, whether they knew it or not, to the “wave of disorder” emanating from the undergrowth of the Congo or the Algerian Bled; the response comes intermittently over the immense range of the proletarian class; it does not come from its party, or, when it does, it is the opposite to the great revolutionary tradition; it is the bleating response of democracy, conciliating, diplomatic, patriotic, or the no less vile response of haughty and self-sufficient ‘indifference’. Bourgeois uprisings! And nonetheless, the first bell of warning in the Congo, in 1945, as in 1959-60, came from huge strikes, clearly not by the bourgeoisie, but by authentic proletarians […]. Or weren’t the horizons of February 1848 and February 1917 bourgeois? Wouldn’t the ‘first Russian revolution’ certainly have fallen prey to imperialism and war, if the Bolsheviks hadn’t set themselves the task of leading it beyond itself and had, instead, closed themselves in some stupid stronghold of indifference? The West’s revolutionary proletariat has to regain the time and space so tragically lost in pursuing the mirage of democratic solutions to a problem which, on a world scale, can only be solved by the communist revolution. It cannot demand of the colonial uprisings what depends on itself alone.
“But even like this,” we continued, “it salutes them passionately: even like this, because, as the only spark of life in a dead present, they unhinge the international balance of the established order […], by catapulting gigantic masses into the arena of history – and these include proletarian masses – which up to now have vegetated in an “isolation without history”, because, even though they might be reduced – though Marxist dialectics refuse to reduce them – to purely bourgeois uprisings, they would raise within them the gravediggers that the decadent West, immersed in its idiotic and murderous prosperity, cradles in a sleep even more obtuse than that provoked by the “soporific drug called opium”; to sum up, in the tradition of over a century of history, they are revolutionaries despite themselves. Which, for today’s bourgeois and radically indifferent elements, as for those ridiculed by Marx in a letter to Engels in 1853, is quite shocking, quite scandalous: not for us, not for Marxists worthy of the name!” [6].
Independence and so-called “national socialism”
The African and Middle-Eastern bourgeoisies that in the 1960s boasted of a “socialist society” in their countries, because they belonged to the Russian imperialist block and baptized it so by virtue of the “independence” gained or thought to have been gained, proved powerless, and it could not have been otherwise, to deal with the energy that the African and Arab proletariat expressed in those years. Our work on the “national issue” clarified point by point the infamy and betrayal of Stalinism. All the forms of “African socialism” (Egyptian, Tunisian, Algerian, Congolese, etc.) have been marked by the illusion of being able to avoid capitalist hell: the dawning petit-bourgeoisie, both industrial and agrarian, has attempted to escape the fate of being crushed by emerging industrial bourgeois forces, whilst the parasite bourgeois forces bound to the ownership of raw materials and land found the most suitable ground for accumulation from property and financial capital income.
Their “socialism” was none other than the economy of small independent producers and small economies individually exchanging products and obliged either to fail miserably or to develop by differentiating themselves increasingly, creating together the big, state complexes and monocultures demanded by the great, world, industrial and agricultural capital and pushing financial parasitism as far as possible. Only a close combination of the struggles by the proletariat in the metropolises and those in the suburbs of the world in Asia, the Middle East and Africa could have indicated the prospect of socialism and traced it decisively. We wrote then, that in the period between the two world wars, the African social classes had not yet become clearly differentiated: society was still at a pre-capitalist stage and thus well below its recent condition in which the proletarian masses have developed with the rise of factories and economic organizations, though still unable to fully defend their living and working conditions. With the introduction of industrialism and the modern division of labour, the African states did not come across the pleasures of social division into antagonist classes until later. What lacked was the active element of the revolution, the communist party, which, by linking the proletarian revolution of the advanced countries to the battles of the African proletariat, could have produced a landslide effect towards socialism. Stalinism had the disastrous effect of making the African proletariat and even that of imperialist countries believe in a “socialist” Ghana or Mali, a “socialist” Algeria, Libya and Egypt, a “socialist” Congo or Angola…
The introduction of so-called “socialism” was none other than a matter of “ideological declarations” and not of great, international class struggles. In turn, what else, could the East European countries, economically more advanced than the African countries, have become - born as they were under Russian dominion as a consequence of the world sharing out territory between the winners of the second world war - if not a “socialist” swamp, born by decree and pitifully ending up in the sewers?
Concluding (for now)
In this article – based on the hard work of the party that developed over the ‘50s and ‘60s – we have traced the main features of the historical-economic evolution of Africa and the long periods of time over which, in that immense area and at different stages, there emerged the drive allowing ancient structures and primitive social forms, later becoming pre-capitalist, to give rise to a new mode of production. We have stressed the historical delay in the evolution of Africa, due to adverse, natural conditions and the colonization that the European bourgeoisie undertook against the populations of Africa, enslaving them and subjugating them and thus dominating them economically – a process not of progressive economic accumulation but of dissociation, destined to aggravate this very delay. The subsequent anti-colonial uprisings, directed by the indigenous bourgeoisie (devoid of any great historical effect) against the “mother countries’” already imperialist bourgeoisies, were nurtured mainly by the action and forces of the avant-garde classes, poor peasants and the proletariat, which were forced to fight also against colonialist opportunism and indifference with regard to the struggle itself. Formal independence thus made it possible to subjugate the proletariat and so-called “national socialism” was the ground on which Stalinism was sown, in order to cut off any attempt at revolutionary class war. The closure of the colonial age, around the mid-1970s, gave rise to a long period (at least two decades) over which the proletariat began to gain its own experience in terms of fighting to defend its living and working conditions.
The economic crisis at the beginning of the new century (2000-1) and the more profound crisis beginning in 2007-8 produced the first effects with any heavy social impact on the area of North-Africa or, more specifically, on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Here, a combative proletariat, with many years of fighting experience behind it, made a vigorous comeback onto the scene, as we have demonstrated on several occasions over past years[7]. Unfortunately, lacking a revolutionary pole of reference (not only in that area, but also, and above all, in the “advanced” capitalist metropolises), those courageous and desperate fights were harnessed and channelled into the dead end of petit-bourgeois, democratic claims (the so-called “Arab springs”). We see the results in Libya, in Egypt and above all in Syria, where blood has been shed for years now in a massacre without precedent perpetrated by all the forces in the field. The “Arab springs” were thus the first signs of processes that will continue to bring death and destruction to the entire southern shore of the Mediterranean.
But the proletarian battles have not ceased: they smoulder under the ashes, beneath the rubble and the cemeteries of ill-fated illusions, only to blaze up again suddenly, lighting the scene once more. We shall certainly be speaking about them again. Most importantly, we work and shall continue to work, so that African and Middle-Eastern proletarians are no longer alone, as they have been for decades, facing the complicity of all the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois counter-revolutionary forces, whether fake socialists or openly declared imperialists.
[1] For further details, we refer to the rich bibliography quoted in these pages.
[2] “Aspetti della rivoluzione africana”, Il programma comunista, n.12,13/1958.
[3] “Incandescente risveglio delle ‘genti di colore’ nella visione marxista. Rapporti collegati alla riunione di Bologna del 12-13/11/1960”, Il programma comunista, nn. 1-2/1961.
[4] We should like to quote them, remembering that for us the value of individual names, derives merely from their being symbols of social forces: Naguib and Nasser (Egypt), Burghiba (Tunisia), Lumumba (Congo), Sankara (Burkina Faso), Ben Bella (Algeria), Neto (Angola), Mandela and Biko (South Africa), Kenyatta (Kenya), Senghor (Senegal), Nyerere (Tanzania), Azikiwe (Nigeria), Nkrumah (Ghana), Cabral (Guinea-Bissau)…
[5] “Moti coloniali e rivoluzione proletaria”, Il programma comunista, n°2/1953.
[6] “Incandescente risveglio delle ‘genti di colore’ nella visione marxista. Rapporti collegati alla riunione di Bologna del 12-13/11/1960”, cit. The letter from Marx to Engels is of 14 June 1853 (Marx-Engels, Opere complete, Vol.XXXIX, pp.281-283.
[7] For those wishing to go further, in no.5-6/2017 of this newspaper a bibliography is quoted of our articles on North Africa, published over the decade 2007-2017.
International Communist Party