West Africa: Under the Heel of French Imperialism

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VHERE THE FRENCH 100 troops, air CHAD 1,200 U.N. peacerebels in fighting LibyanFRENCH GABON MAYOTTE ISLANDS MILITARY 550 troops 4,000 troops AREA FLEET OF 12-27 warships French-speaking West Africa (a misnomer applying to the language of its colonisers and the agents they left behind) is made up of fourthe whole of Europe.

The backwardness of social and economic development and ienced daily by most oxper the grinding poverty CACI population of 70 million is the characteristic result of the direct intervention of imperialism into pre-capitalist economies.

The destruction of the precapitalist modes of production by military occupation and the penetration of monopoly capitalism did not free resources for more efficient production-as had been the case in Europe hundreds of years before when the growth of mercantile capitalism steadily overthrew feudal society.

Profitable investment Instead the new colonial economies were structured in order to serve those limited areas of production which were highly profitable for capitalist investment.

In order to create the conditions for profitable investment in mining, oil wells and certain agricultural crops, the rest of the region was stripped of its productive capacity and self-sufficiency and transformed into a supplier of cheap labour and cheap cash crops.

Forced at gunpoint to pay taxes in cash, the rural population had either to find employment or grow crops for cash.

At the same time local crafts and manufacturing were largely destroyed by the influx of the products of European mass industrial production.

Where once the indigenous population could produce the bare necessities of material existence for chemselves, they were now dependeni :or those on 3 market wholly cont::les = imperialism.

The existence of pockeis of capital-intensive high technology in a sea of backwardness, lack of development and crushing poverty does not mean that capitalism has still to develop in the region.

Neo-colonial states

What it does mean is that capitalism in its highest stage, imperialism, has been able to create neo-colonial states purely for the realisation of profit, and that in these regions profitablity is quite compatible with extremes of backwardness and poverty for the masses.

For this reason capitalism is quite unable to provide any solutions to the problems of rural poverty, lack of industrialisation, ethnic oppression and social backwardness.

The struggle in French Africa against capitalism is the struggle to release the enormous strikes against western Sahara SENEGAL 1,200 troops, air strikes against rebels in western Sahara IVORY COAST 550 troops and advisers PRESENCE and advisers CONFLICT productive _or the capacity region.

Those who argue that the lack of development means that the bourgeois revolution is still to occur, that capitalism has yet to penetrate the rural areas etc., do not base themselves on any understanding of reality, but rather on the need to be able to argue that the petty-bourgeoisie is somehow the class with a progressive role to play.

Multinationals The fact is that the parti"dai aneren nature of the 35 boerem: #hich has orcured m te te- oral countries like those oi Frenon West Africa, has brought about an equally distorted formation of classes.

The great majority of the population lives and works in the rural areas, and many of the numerically small proletariat are migrant workers from the countryside, and often the nationals of neighbouring states.

The local ruling class is the creation of imperialism, acting more as agents of internațional capital rather thạn the' owners of the means of production.

The marginally profitable remains left over by the multinationals leave room only för very tew private entrepreneurs.

The inability of either a native bourgeoisie or of the working class to create their respective dictatorships alone in French West Africa, therefore gives the petty-bourgeoisieadministrators, army officers 1,400 troops backed rebels etc-much greater political ground in which to pursue their own sectional interests.

As an unstable stratum between the two main classes, they are ever poised to co-opt mass struggles in order to block any amanct o1 workers anu of and poor peasants and crush any emergence of an independent working class leadership.

French imperialist troops in Zaire ARE keeping troops REPUBLIC OF AFRICA DJIBOUTI 4,500 troops ZAIRE 700 troops, including 600 in Shaba Province INDIAN OCEAN:

REUNION AND INDIAN OCEAN In moments of desperation the petty-bourgeoisie will even lead limited struggles against imperialism-but will use them purely to force imperialism to offer them better terms in their role as agents.

What are now the fourteen states of French West Africa were once the two colonies of French Equatorial Africa and Young woman in Senegal French West Africa.

The aims of colonisation had been simply to keep competitors out and to force the inhabitants to provide the necessary infrastructure for the profitable. exploitation of the region.

The French imperialists imposed taxation by military force, theréby. forcing the peasants to provide wage labour and grow cash crops in order to pay.

With the taxes raised, the colonisers created the state apparatus needed to maintain control, and the economic infrastructure sufficient for the export of primary goods like minerals, timber, cocoa and groundnuts and the import of manufactured goods that the peasantry were now unable to produce for themselves.

This infrastructure remains basically unchanged. The main difference is when the region was given 'independence' by France it was divided up into fourteen areas according to their economic function-and each of these areas was made into a separate independent state in order to facilitate political control by imperialism after independence.

The three major trading posts and their environs are now imperialism's bastions-Ivory Coast, Gabon and Senegal.

Permanent garrisons They are most closely linked with France, harbour permanent garrisons of French troops (a total of 3,000) and employ migrant labour from the other states. Thirty percent of the wage labourers of Ivory Coast are migrants.

The states of Mali, Upper Volta, Niger and Chad which border on the Saharan desert are simple labour reserves which have been given the status of independent states to facilitate the political control of the working class.

It is among those states which accurately fit neither of these obvious categories that the greatest problems have beca created for imperialism.

These states are based

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around the less "prosperous coastal commercial centres, oI are inland states with mineral wealth.

The central African Republic has over a thousand French troops defending the puppet regime of President Dacko installed last year to suppress growing strikes and demonstrations against the former Bokassa regime.

Political crisis

Mauritania has had four changes of leadership in the last sixteen months-expressing the political crisis brought about by their defeat at the hands of the Polissario national liberation movement of the Sahroui people.

The Ahidjo regime of Cameroon has been severely threatened by a militant trade union movement which won massive wage increases after a general strike in 1976.

The regime has responded with vicious repression, and has taken around fifteen thousand political prisoners. Last November government troops murdered two hundred villagers in Ndole near the Chad border, who had revolted against local government officials.

In the coastal states of Guinea, Benin and the Congo, "left' sections of the petty-bourgeoisie have seized power.

In Guinea, Sekou Toure based himself on trade union support to resist the more blatant aspects of the French neo colonial solution.

De Gaulle responded by a total French withdrawl, even to the extent of destroying office equipment.

Sekou Toure, unable to back down because of his working class base, was forced to nationalise the foreign owned sections of the economy.

After half-hearted support from the Stalinists of the Soviet Union, Guinea reopenes Later and is now dependent upon French and Arab capital, with whom the state corporations are in partnership.

In the Congo, middle ranking officers seized power in 1969 in coalition with those sections of the petty-bourgeoisie excluded from the former government, and the Congolese Workers Party (PCT) presented an increasingly left face to the militant working class.

Now officially MarxistLeninist', the regime has maintained itself despite a general strike in 1976 and endless clashes with workers and students.

The regime is closely tied economically to France and is strongly supported by Cuba which maintains three hundred troops in Brazzaville the capital, provides technical assistance and hundred students in Havana.

As well as the internal opposition of the working class the Nguesoo regime faces constant attempts to restablise it economically by French imperialism and right wing exiles in the neighbouring states.

The people's republic of Benin is likewise MarxistLeninist' and ruled by military junta. French Presiaent Giscard Th is regime took power in 1976 and faced an abortive coup attempt by right wing exiles supported by Moroccan and French mercenaries in 1977.

Throughout French West Africa the ruling class is weak and powerless to effect the necessary social and economic transformation of their countries that alone would strengthen them.

Close links

The worsening trade conditions that they now experience as part of the world capitalist recession forces these regimes to attempt closer regional co-operation through such organisations as OCAM (Commercial Organisation of Africa and Mauritius) and ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) and to at the same time to seek close links with imperialism through ACP/EEC consultative Assembly which meets in Lome (capital city of Togo) to regulate trade relationships with Europe.

While these regimes seek to force concessions from imperialism they must simultaneously seek closer links to ensure their own survival.

The contradictory pressures that this has placed upon ruling classes of several of the Francophone states have forced them to create 'left' regime to head off the development of mass anti-imperialist struggle.

Petty bourgeois

Workers and militants under conditions of extreme unevenness of capitalist development have especially to guard against those who disguise their petty-bourgeois class interests behind anti-imperialist rhetoric.

The petty-bourgeois agents of international capital try to consolidate their own interests through left-nationalist proggrammes of nationalisation and pseudo-communalisation agriculture.

Such actions are not one step in the direction of socialism under workers control but are the only objective basis for the furtherance of the class interests of weak petty-bourgeois being squeezed between the dictates of imperialism and the growing demands of the oppressed masses.

The rapturous applause given to Castro in the United Nations last October as chairman of the "non-aligned nations' was given by the representatives of the neo-colonial regimes for good reasons.

For it is they, and not the working class who stand to benefit from Stalinist foreign policy, as the Beninois and Congolese workers have already discovered.

In Upper Volta there is a French protege Bokassa total wage force of 36,000 working inside the borders of the country, while many thousands more work in the neighbouring states where they are even more subject to arbitrary repression than in their own country.

In none of the fourteen states are organisations of the working class allowed to exist independently of the ruling party.

Official trade union leaders are appointed by the regimes, and militant action is viciously repressed.

In the guise of anti-imperialist campaigns of Africanisation ('authenticisation') the regimes whip up nationalist and ethnic prejudices to try and turn worker against worker, peasant against peasant.

With no rights to organise and restriction on their freedom of movement the agents of imperialism seek to keep the workers divided and unable to rise up with one voice against capitalist exploitation, repres sion and degradation.

While the workers are denied the right to organise acrosS national boundaries the petty-bourgeoisie have no such scruples for themselves.

Organisations like ECOWAS are the mutual aid societies of the regimes, designed specifically to prop up ailing governments and maintain capitalist stability in the area.

Such organisations are also important for providing the cover for direct intervention by the imperialist nations.

Historically the most impor tant of these organisations for the Francophone states has been OCAM for it provides .a common currency used by most of the ex-French colonies and facilitates the use of the 17,000 French troops stationed French mirage jet Africa.

It is through OCAM that France has arranged her military interventions in Angola, Zaire, the Central African Republic and Chad in the last four years.

For the petty-bourgeoisie it is such co-operation that is the real meaning of Pan Africanism -namely the unity of imperialism's agents in the face of the struggle of the oppressed masses.

However it is only the oppressed, under the leadership of the working class, who can give real meaning to. the genuine desire for African unity, by ending both national and ethnic oppression and the domination of imperialism.

Self-determination

It is the working class alone that can give the necessary leadership for the struggle to throw off the shackles of imperialism and give genuine rights of self-determination to all the national/ethnic groups of the area.

It is only the working class Polisario guerrillas Puge 7 who can lead the peasantry in the struggle to overthrow capitalist oppression.

Workers and militants therefore have to address themselves to the task of drawing in a peasantry living under diverse conditions into the struggle against the common enemy.

The need for an international workers' . party in French West Africa is necessary at every stage of the struggle for the independent interests of the working class and the building of a socialist society.

The balkanisation of the region by imperialism cannot be allowed to stand in the way of unity of the oppressed masses.

The national proletariats, with their meagre resources and organisation must be welded into one mighty force capable of leading the peasantry, oppressed national groups, youth and students in order to deliver the death blow to imperialism and capitalist oppression in Africa.

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SOCIALIST PRESS. Wednesday 4 June 1980

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