Capitalist crisis behind W. African 'anarchy'

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providing sufficient for the nanninliot enneale with and leadership all the large number of tiny states in the past to maintain their procession of coups, civi wars, mass murders and mass starvations.

The last period has seen the overthrow of the regimes in the Central African Republic, Liberia, and Upper Volta; the ousting of Cabral from the government of Guinea Bissau, the war of the Sahroui people led by the Polisario Front against Moroccan occupation; and the Libyan invasion of Chad followed by a massive military response into the area by But the prevailing anarchy which the capitalists portray with racist insinuation as the product of backward peoples, is in fact the anarchy born out of decaying capitalism and its neocolonial system.

These political events occur out of the economic anarchy which drives the oppressed masses . into struggle against puppet governments and weak neo-colonial states.

Imperialism during the colonial period chained the productive capacity of West Africa to the profiteering and plundering of monopoly capital, and enslaved the masses to a system of cash crop and mineral production geared to profit and not the workers needs.

This system is incapable of providing sufficient for the workers and peasants to prevent famine and endemir disease.

Having created the mechanism with which to drain the wealth from West Africa, the colonialists • were to make a strategic retreat when confronted by the growth of the anti-colonial struggle.

Besides leaving the repres sive apparatus of the state to their agents, the colonial masters took the precaution of subdividing the area into a 1, LOS Muruzye 'Western Algeria 20 N S A HARA D .E Mauritania Senegal Mali Niger Gambia Gunea. D.cca. / UoDer t : f Guinea volta 10 N Fi Sierra Leone ivory Bear Nigeria Coast Liberia Ghan; Central Gures large number of tiny states in order to facilitate political control for their agents and also to further ensure the continued dependence of their agents upon imperialist loans and investment.

In this situation of turmoil and anarchy, opportunities now exist for adventurists like Gaddafi to exploit for their own ends.

Moreover because the imperialist nations deliberately weakened the neo-colonial regimes in Libya Egypt SERT Chad Sudan Zaire Uganda Gabon the past to maintaint their dependence they are now being inexorably forced to make more and more open military interventions to prop up these regimes under conditions considerably less favourable twenty years ago.

The current clash of interests between the French imperialists and Colonel Gaddafi of Libya has been imposed on the civil war in Chad that has raged for many years.

Gaddafi Though the innsminliot anneale with indignation at Gaddafi. for climbing into their backyard, it should not be presumed that Gaddafi's motives are pure.

He is cynically using the struggles of Arab and African workers to prop up the unstable basis of his own regime, by using his apparent confrontations with imperialism to bolster his image, and as a pretext to crack down on internal opposition.

His is a dangerous game of disguising his dependence on imperialism with anti-imperialist rhetoric, and one that. is incapable of advancing the mass anti-imperialist struggle one step et while Gaddafi has no answer for the West African masses, there is no way forward within the existing system.

Based on deformed relations of production and totaliy dominated by imperialism, capitalism in West Africa is unable to grant even the most elementary democratic material demands with the result that even partial struggles challenge capitalist profitability.

Only the independent mobilisation of the working class in their own organisations and around their own class interests oppressed layers in West Africa, and confronting the conscious imperialist strategy of national division by which some of the states serve simply as labour reservoirs.

The workers of West Africa are already effectively united by the system of migrant labour and the international nature of capitalist production; the task remains to give political form to this internationalisation by uniting with their own class brothers and sisters around their common interests.

In particular the French working class must be mobilised to combat Giscard's military offensive against the oppressed masses of West Africa, and against Gaddafi's regime.

*French troops out of Africa!

*Imperialist hands off Libya!

*For a workers and peasants government in Chad!

*Build a revolutionary. leadership for the workers of West Africa!

*For a socialist united states of Western Africa!

NEXT WEEK Jim Benson examines the background to the civil war in Chad.