Introduction 1 What I want to show here is how a number of technological and economic changes, facilitated by European trade with India and China, benefited Europe. The printing press, gunpowder, navigation, and spices from the East Indies contributed to scientific, technological and economic revolutions in the 16th and 17th centuries. World trade fed capitalist commodity production in the Netherlands and Britain. This resulted in capital accumulation leading to the industrial revolutions in Britain and France, and underdevelopment in Africa, lose of its skilled laborers in the slave trade, and the acquisition of commodities produced by wageworkers in Europe consequently retarding Africa's own handicrafts. We need not do an entire analysis of the economics of primitive capital accumulation and the role that the trans-Atlantic slave trade played in it engendering European development and African underdevelopment. Suffice it to refer the readers to: I) Karl Marx: "Capital Vol. II II) W.E.B. Dubois: "The World and Africa" III) Eric Williams: "Capitalism and Slavery" IV) Walter Rodney: "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" The industrial development of England and the Underdevelopment of West Africa were directly related to: A) American plantation systems needing experienced, skilled agricultural laborers, not hunters-gatherers. B) African Slavers needed Guns C) Human beings bartered in Africa, had more value in America than the exchange value of Guns. Assume that in England and in America one gun is equal to one pair of shoes and to one shirt. The merchant goes to Africa, rather than directly to America. Were the merchant capitalist to trade directly with American customers, using monetary forms of exchange, one gun would exchange for one pound of sugar or one pound of coffee. The Triangular Trade between European merchant ships brought guns, and other commodities to costal African kingdoms exchanging them for human beings. These human beings were carried from Africa to America and sold into chattel slavery. Agricultural produce and raw materials were purchased with the money derived from the selling of the slaves. These commodities were then carried from the American colonies and sold to customers in Europe. Produce was sold to merchants; raw materials, e.g. sugar and cotton, were sold to capitalists in Britain to be processed in manufactures and industries, thus directly contributed to the industrial revolution in England. The factors that coalesced in the development of Europe; thus, the Triangular Trade is "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa". The dialectical interaction of trade between Europe and Asia, however, has also to be factored in as very important to the rise of capitalism and industry in Europe. Without gunpowder, and therefore guns, muskets and cannon, there would have been no colonization of the Americas, or the triangular trade. Had it not been for muskets and cannons, the Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors would not have had the capacity to conquer the Americas. The America's natural resources included, as well as the gold used in European economies, agriculture, maize, potatoes, sugar, tobacco, which were important in the world-market and its products in the trans-Atlantic, triangular trade. Potatoes were cheaply produced in great quantities, which together with bread, became the cheap but filling component of English workers and Irish farmer's diets. Africans had been smelting iron for centuries, but had no gunpowder and consequently no gun industry. The Chinese invention and harmless use of 'gun powder' was made into a weapon of violence, war. The brisk arms trade, made all the more necessary that African tribes and feudal warrior kingdoms conquer and present to gun merchants human beings of other tribes to become economic chattel, rather than having members of their own tribe or kingdom become captured, and made into chattel. The depopulation of Africa nor Africa's reliance upon industrial commodities imported from Europe, would not have occurred had it not been for Europe's trade with Asia, and consequently there would have been no colonization and underdevelopment of Africa. The French and British mercantile systems, predicated upon the manufacture and industry in England ,were domestic capitalist commodity production surrounded by colonial crop economies. The emerging capitalist modes of production and distribution in England subordinated the Portuguese and specifically the Spaniard's system of colonial possession of plunder and taxes. 2 Mercantile capitalistic commodity Production originated in Britain and Western European kingdoms, under absolute monarchs, initially in cottage industries. Of course this cannot be fully explicated without taking into account other contributing factors, in England for instance. In the history of England, from the days of the Roman Empire, garment industries were important. The Romans brought sheep to England, and with this, the woolen industry. This was facilitated when Flemish weavers were thrown out of Flanders, and settled in England, improving the methods of production, quality and quantity, of wool production there. Also important was the Bubonic Plague, or rather its consequence of rapid depopulation, losing more than a third of it's landed aristocrats that enabled greater concentration. These developments contributed to the capitalization of the productive forces in agriculture, because both the landed aristocracies and the laboring masses all found it in their practical interest to displace serf labor of the feudal mode of production and appropriation by capitalist commodity production using wageworkers. Merchant capitalists delivered to farm families cloth or wool, that would be spun in their houses, and picked up by these merchants in exchange for money that supplemented the families income enabling farmers and their families to purchase other agricultural produce and manufactured commodities in the towns. This form of piecework concentrated in a specific space facilitated the co-operation epoch. Cottage industry that concentrated a division of labor of the workforce, evolved capitalist commodity production by wageworkers. In the colonies, the mode of production was environmental agriculture, by slave workers. The historical evolution from manufacture to industrial capitalist commodity production by wageworkers, occurred in the framework of mercantilist commodity production, wageworkers in the center surrounded by agriculture and the production of 'raw materials' in the colonies, fed into the industrial center. British-American colonists needed guns and slaves -- to kill indigenous American populations and to control their slaves. The guns industries were the core of the British industrial revolution. Colonial mercantilist systems are predicated upon the Spider-web concept, of an industrial center where the Spider-capitalist industry sits, from the center outward colonies are crop economies dependent upon these industrial centers. The inheritance, literally of the 'nuts and bolts' of production, by manufacture was from co-operations. Co-operations originate in response to rising demand, with developments in circulation of commodities, both tools and means of subsistence. What was done in separate cottage industries as an appendage to farming, where merchant capitalists purchased from and sold to others, are now brought together by capitalist merchants, who now owned the means of production, purchasing labor power that was brought under one roof. These developments thereby progressed from petty-bourgeois cottage capitalism, under feudal relations of production, to capitalistic relations of production predicated upon the selling and buying of labor power. The division of labor, which began in co-operations, achieved greater complexity of detailed labor in manufacture proper. All kinds of new inventions and forms of production facilitated the development of industry, industrial capitalistic commodity production by wageworkers. In mercantile England, one gun was of equal value, say, to one pound of sugar or to a pound of cotton. In Africa, let's say, one gun barters for ten human beings. But, in the American colonies, by the laws of supply and demand, there was a greater demand for slaves compared to sugar and coffee, which were in abundance. The markets in America determined one slave's comparable worth, or corresponded to one pound of sugar, or one pound of coffee. The merchant enters America, not with one gun to be traded for one pound of sugar, or coffee, but ten human beings, which in each case exchange for one pound of sugar or one pound of coffee. Thus, by way of the triangular trade, the English merchant, by way of the mercantile slave trade, took back to England not the equivalent of one gun, with which he began, but the equivalent of ten guns, ten pounds of sugar or coffee. The profitability of the triangular trade further facilitated developments in the gun, and gun related industries: the industrial revolution. Further more, cotton grown in the American South, by slave labor, entered Britain as raw materials engendering the textile industries. This cheaper cloth, because of the textile industry in Britain fed by cotton from slave labor in America, in comparison to traditional African weavers' cloth and clothing requiring less socially necessary labor time in Britain than Africa, drove the African weavers out of business. African dependency on British industrially manufactured guns, clothing, facilitated the relative industrial development in England and underdevelopment in Africa. Africa, participating in the slave trade, collecting and bartering human beings, and in the World Market as importers of industrial commodities from Europe, was stunted at the stage of cottage industries and pre-capitalist economic formations. Whereas the Weapons industries facilitated bourgeois democratic revolutions in Europe, in Africa, guns in the hands of warrior clans and feudal chiefs and kings resulted in the intensification of slave raids on one hand, and tyranny on the other. Warlords and chiefs political interests in the guns, and using the wealth derived from trade with Europeans transformed tribal politics, resulting in powerful kingdoms. Armed tyrants thus ruled several such kingdoms. The slave trade resulted in depopulation in Africa, and the importing of industrially manufactured commodities from Europe retarded Africa's own industrial development. Meanwhile, dynastic and colonial rivalries were flaring up between European kingdoms, subsequently between capitalist nations. There resulted in centuries of on again off again barbaric wars fought with savage weapons. War is good for business, says the military-industrial complex, which not only exploit's wageworkers but pays those wages with tax monies appropriated from the working classes and toiling masses. This is a goddamn double whammy! Add to this, it is the sons and daughters of the working classes and toiling masses whom bourgeois parliaments send out to kill, and be killed by one another! How dare capitalism's racist politicians and pundits, in Europe and the United States call African politicians corrupt, stupid apes and coconut heads! Certainly, Africa politically is in relative chaos. This chaos, however, is not reducible to psychological profiles of individual heads of state, whether or not they are personally incompetent or/and have delusions of grandeur. It's the economy, stupid! 3 The world-historical techno-economic, and socio-political determinations of the interconnection of Africa's own capitalistic "comprador bourgeoisie" and Western capitalist investors are in possession of Africa's productive forces. It is this cosmopolitan capitalist class rather than inept heads of state that determine economic performances. In league with the profit driven foreign investors in Africa's economy, it is the African capitalists that have run Africa's economics of scale into the dirt. The African economies presently are part and parcel of its world-historical present context, the world-market. The retardation of Africa's technological development is due in part to three centuries of slave trade, exporting major elements of Africa's agricultural population and of artisans, on the one hand, and more than a century of direct colonialism on the other, resulting in neo-colonialism presently. 4 Radical economic problems in Africa demand radical changes in the Continent's economic ownership structures, basing themselves in natural resources and corresponding restructuring of the political state. Corruption in the one-party governments is not the cause but the consequence of economic mismanagement. The classes and investors who own and thus manage the productive forces, (American, European, African), are the one's who manage production and distribution. For instance, the problem of food shortages in Zimbabwe are not so much caused by "Mugabe", that is how long he has held political power or his political rhetoric denouncing "British imperialism". Rather, it is because African traditional agricultural production of means of subsistence has been supplanted by settler-capitalist's agribusinesses producing cash crops, such as tobacco, for instance. Thus, until recently, ZANU-PF has worked with imperialist investors as well as African capitalists. The present land redistribution scheme, in Zimbabwe, has not challenged the operative principle of aissez faire. In the ZANU-PF land redistribution, along capitalist principles, large acres of prime land went to relatives and cronies, and Zimbabwean capitalists, who are still producing for foreign markets rather than producing food for Zimbabwean tables. The African capitalists together with foreign investors have the economic power. It is therefore laissez faire capitalism, as landowners and investors themselves determine what is to be produced, for whom, and how much. Turning over small plots to selected peasants, and large fertile lands to career politicians of ZANU-PF, bureaucrats and chiefs isn't in itself the solution to the problem of Zimbabwe's food shortages. Wageworker's need to become this land's collective owners, producing and distributing means of subsistence managed by the worker's themselves. What is needed in Africa is a radical re-orientation toward the creation of a Continental Federal Republic of Africa, based on common ownership of natural resources together with a Continental infrastructure directly the Public Property of Pan-African workers and peasants, making these citizens of a Federal Republic of Africa shareholders capable of democratizing the natural resources, having voices and votes on what is to be done with it. In this model of democratic capitalism the citizen as equal shareholder might put forward a motion to produce and sell a significant portion of gold or/and diamonds and/or bauxite to the European Union or/and Japan, with contracts that stipulate wage scales that would entice the European, or Japanese capitalist firms to develop in Africa the relevant technologies to access and process the gold, diamonds, or bauxite, including the technology needed to manufacture this technology and relevant spare parts, screws, screwdrivers, &C. and thus in doing so, educating and training African workers and peasants in the process. The gold, diamonds and bauxite, together with the produced means of production relevant to accessing and processing it, remains the Public Property of the All Africa Federal Republic, democratically owned and managed. Thus done, the Africans are realizing that it isn't land as such but technology, related to geo-economic qualities of "land", that is the "basis of independence". The established capacity to build means of producing means of production will enable Africans to further operate those productive forces to get Mammon's gold, diamonds and bauxite to sell on the world market at standard prices, to fund the electrification of All of Africa. The purchase of the relevant means of producing the means of construction of equipment needed to build electrical power throughout Africa, again stipulates in the contract the education and training of Africans as physicists and engineers, as well as the teaching of manual skills. Again, the entire water and power, electrical and nuclear energy industries remains the Public Property of the All Africa Federal Republic, democratically owned and managed Another group might propose that at the same time Africa sell oil, having purchasers build the infrastructure and refineries there in Africa, as Pan-African Public Property, stipulating in the contract that Africans be educated in the relevant sciences, as well as technical skills. The drilling and processing of oil, together with the gold, diamonds and bauxite industries, will enable Africans to go on to other projects, fully funded by Africa's Public Development Fund, enabling Africa to invest billions in medical facilities throughout all of Africa, hospitals and medical schools, chemist and pharmaceutical industries, that will be Public Property of All Africans, meaning free health care, in patient and out patient, surgery and post-op follow-up, and free access to all medicines, with African pharmaceutical industries all over the continent. Other geological and tropical gifts of Nature, among a great variety of wealth of Africa's economically exploitable natural resources, will enable Africa's economists, engineers, technicians and ethicists to propose projects to the African electorate and citizen shareholders, and to suggest further self-development programs. It is pay as you go, financed by cash on the barrel head to produce industries needed to produce the means of producing means of production and acquisition of that wealth as an alternative to ruthless laissez faire robber-baron capitalism characterized by exploitation and bloody wars in Europe and America on one hand, and repressive bureaucratic state monopoly capitalism by wageworkers in the former Soviet Union on the other. Africans, from the local village to the District, Regional and Federal systems will be brought into debates regarding development and economic issues as well as political and social issues. These debates would be held for a definite period, translated into relevant languages, providing all with access, but not just to read polemics, but to engage in critical thinking, debate and polemics on local, District, Regional and Federal television and radio. By public broadcast ownership, the masses of the citizenry will have free access to cable and network television, radio and worldwide Internet connections. Public free access to major communications forums, and the right of all speakers to be heard by major audiences differs fundamentally from America, where significant, i.e. national and international press and media in actuality are restricted to capitalist owners of the means of communication. Freedom of the press is essential to the political health of democracy. By 'free' press is not meant the right of the reader and listeners to stay "informed" by supposedly reading and hearing "all sides", which really amounts a variation of the same perspective. This is not 'free press and media', restricted to those who own publishing and publication businesses, and their journalists hired to spit out market interests and patriotic rhetoric. Truly free, publicly owned press and media has free access to television, radio and literature publications without censorship or litmus tests speaking to the African masses in their hundreds of millions. The objective is for African workers and peasants of both genders, without regard to race, religion, or ethnicity to be brought into the political and intellectual process with passion. Exhaustive, participatory debates and polemics will transform African workers and peasants from ignorant bystanders into the most informed critical thinkers in the world. In these debates one stands or falls on the power of reason and the strength of their understanding. Some are no more equal than others: titles are irrelevant. Presently, the ruling politicians use the title's of their approved agents to intimidate or convince people on that basis alone, as an "expert", "professor", "doctor", "pollster" and so on. This is to provoke servility and humility among the masses of the working classes and poor, as did medieval titles of church and state hierarchies -- lord, sir, bishop, cardinal, prince, king and pope. Modern means of mass communication is potentially a leveler, an equalizer for every argument that must stand or fall on its own logic, or lack thereof. What working people need today is not servility but audacity. This is of course a practical question as well as a political issue. It is because the capitalist class owns the material forces of production and dominates the state that their paid propagandists regurgitate one another in the press and media. To free themselves from the lying propaganda regurgitations of bourgeois political ideologists, Africa's working classes and toiling masses need to have many news sources, and to have access to present their ideas, whether as individuals, unions, or parties. Cable networks and the worldwide web make it possible to establish many public mediums of communication. To pay for this networking and establish town halls to present responsible speakers, it might be democratically decided by the African citizenry to expand cable and web access to every African home. Developing industrial access to, and processing of e.g. oil, platinum, graphite, industrial diamonds or other natural resource of Africa could pay this for. These commodities could thereupon be competitively priced and sold on the world-market. No secrets and back door dealing will be tolerated. By these improvements in communication, citizen participation in the democratic process will be in practice, in Africa, what is in the United States today only theory. All of Africa will have complete information and able to vote on every economic policy, as well as resolution of political and judicial issues. Any number of options presently impossible will be possible once all the post colonial states and borders will have been eliminated, for instance relocation of farmers to even more fertile farmland, or the Bedouin to other grazing territories. These can be temporary resettlements, as scientists check and reverse Sahara desertification. There are still other, perhaps even more creative solutions that can be suggested in town hall and village community meetings. Farmers and cattlemen on Local, District, Regional and Federal cable networks 24/7 can debate the issue if they want to. All of Africa will be absorbed into this debate, seeking nonviolent solutions to solvable economic problems. The tribal leaders and village elders, scientists, trade unionists and ordinary citizens participate in these debates and polemics, freely. The Federal Parliamentarians assigned to mediating this regional problem finally organizes regional balloting, comprising all the people of the region. The vote decides the issue. The Americans, the British, Israel and the UN will not be permitted to interfere; African solutions for African problems preclude arms and military training from outsiders. African solutions for African problems are predicated upon Consensus, and Democracy decided by majority decision. The positive functioning of tribal leaders and village elders in resolving this problem, rather than being excluded or manipulated by global powers as they are today, would indicate positive benefits of reviving traditional advisory councils associated with Local, District, Regional and Federal Parliaments. The African Federal Republic may come to include, in its Constitution, Rights and Duties of self-sustaining tribal leaders and village elders. 5 The cancellation of national debt has generated a lot of clucking among the chattering classes, among both European/Americans and Africans/African Americans. I think that this could generate useful discussions, of profound significance were we to use it as a practical context and starting point in the discussion of Africa's future in response to the issues raised by Fubara David-West. I will take it from the standpoint of Pan-African politics of economics. The windfall from debt cancellation must be invested in a program directed at continental economic integration building an intercontinental infrastructure, operating from the philosophical premise "Africa for Africans", based on the utilitarian principle of policies promoting the greatest good for the greatest number. An intercontinental infrastructure in production related to the Pan-African agenda to finance a cohesive bureaucratic structure initiated by the African Union. The money freed up by these debt cancellations should be used for all of Africa in a common fund, allocated from each African government to the African Union to be used specifically on creating the material and political infrastructure required for the creation of one All-Africa Federal Republic. This money must be set aside, separate and apart from government to government aid and chicanery. The political federation of states could be comprised of Local, District, Regional and Federal Parliaments, with parallel advisory bodies of tribal elders and/or representatives. The various ethnic groups could be given some degree of relative cultural autonomy, since all existing colonial borders and governments will be abolished. Tribal elders and/or chiefs in the same local, district, regional and federal spaces will have observer status at the various parliamentary bodies, and right to speak. Only elected representatives can vote. The members of parliament at every level will be elected as individuals or representatives of parties, on the principle of free, open competitive elections to parliaments, on the principle of proportional representation, of course. The scenario to follow is an outline of a "blueprint", according to the challenge outlined by Fubara David-West. I know I have immediate, automatic critics, which is fine. However, I request those who do their criticisms do so based on what I have actually written, as a concept, and not red herrings on this or that detail, or/and clairvoyant ad hominem attacks, which in any case I will ignore. Full Article: http://laborpartypraxis.org/Pan-Africa.html _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
