Africa and the perspective of international socialism   By Richard Tyler
25 March 2006

*Published below is the first of a two-part report on Africa by Richard
Tyler to an expanded meeting of the *World Socialist Web Site* International
Editorial Board (IEB) held in Sydney from January 22 to 27, 2006. Tyler is a
WSWS correspondent and a member of the Socialist Equality Party in the UK. *

There is probably no other continent that provides so many tragic examples
of the malignant role and legacy of colonialism.

It would not be possible to write a serious history of Africa without
examining the centuries of oppression and exploitation at the hands of the
world's leading capitalist nations, something that is beyond the scope of
this report. But I will attempt to sketch out some of the main political
issues that should inform us in developing our perspectives.

Against those who claim that a solution to the poverty, misery and
oppression of the millions of Africans at the hands of Western corporations,
or their proxy masters in the local bourgeoisie can be found by turning to
nationalism in its many guises—including its Pan-Africanist variety—we
insist that the only realistic perspective is one that links the struggle of
the black working class and peasant masses in Africa to that of working
people in the advanced countries to put an end to the profit system.

At the end of World War II there were only three independent African
countries, but by the 1960s the vast majority were independent.

Now, almost half a century later, it is evident that formal independence has
not brought any lasting improvement to the lives of Africa's poor. Whatever
progress was made in the early years of independence, in fields such as
health and education, by the 1980s poverty began to sharply rise again,
accelerating during the 1990s and into the new millennium.

Statistics produced by the World Bank show Africa's poor are actually
getting poorer, with the average daily income of those living on less than
$1 a day falling from 64 cents in 1981 to 60 cents in 2001. According to the
same source, under-nourishment is also growing in Africa as a whole.

The source of this poverty and hunger cannot be ascribed to so-called
"natural" problems like difficult terrain, poor harvests or a lack of
agricultural machinery and chemicals (as important as such factors are).

Africa's poverty is a direct product of the global capitalist economy. It is
the supreme example of a process Marx described so powerfully:

"Accumulation of wealth at one pole, is therefore, at the same time
accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental
degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that
produces its product in the form of capital."

According to the United Nations, Africa's population of nearly one billion
contains the greatest proportion of people living in absolute poverty,
defined as those living on one dollar a day or less. Under the economic
direction of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the
absolute poverty level has risen—encompassing 47 percent of the continent's
population today, an increase from 42 percent twenty years ago.

Perhaps the single greatest indictment of the role of imperialism in Africa
is the health catastrophe that afflicts the continent in the form of the
AIDS pandemic.

According to UNAIDS, 25.8 million people were infected with HIV/AIDS in
sub-Saharan Africa in 2005—some two thirds of the world total. An estimated
3.2 million more people became infected during that year and 2.4 million
died of AIDS-related diseases.

How little is being done to reduce this terrible toll can be seen in the
figures for those obtaining anti-retroviral (ART) drugs. In six southern
African countries—South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho and
Swaziland—more than 20 percent of the population are HIV infected. There was
some increase in drug provision last year. Yet, according to a study carried
out by the University of Pretoria, out of over 9 million with HIV/AIDS in
these six countries, some 1.4 million need ART drugs but only 208,000 (about
15 percent) are receiving them. It should be noted that this includes two of
the wealthiest countries in Africa—South Africa and Botswana—so the levels
of provision are much lower throughout the rest of the continent.

A series of other initiatives for dealing with the catastrophic situation
has been put forward. The biggest and most expensive publicity stunt was
mounted at the G8 summit last June by U2 frontman Bono, former pop singer
Sir Bob Geldof, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Bush.
Huge media hype was given to the promised cancellation by the IMF, the World
Bank and the African Development Bank over the next 10 years of some $40
billion of debt owed by developing countries.

To put the amount of debt relief in perspective: Africa's total external
debt stands at some $300 billion, yet the amount saved is only about $1.5
billion a year in debt repayments. Moreover, the much-heralded debt
write-off will have to be paid for by giving Western companies unrestricted
license to extract more profits from the impoverished African population.

The debt cancellation will hardly diminish the lucrative returns that
Western banks and governments make out of Africa, with some $15 billion
being paid in debt servicing each year. For the $540 billion received in
loans between 1970 and 2003—much of it going to corrupt Western-backed
dictatorships during the Cold War period—$579 billion has already been paid
back in debt servicing.

Imperialism is not an "unjust policy" that Western governments can be
persuaded to ameliorate when it applies to the poorest of countries, as
demanded by the NGO professionals, trade union bureaucrats and radical
groups. Finance capital and transnational corporations dominate the economic
life of the entire planet, down to the poorest farmer in Malawi.

The false euphoria generated by Bono and Geldof over the debt package last
summer collapsed in December 2005 at the World Trade Organisation talks in
Korea. The charity Oxfam commented: "Rich countries' interests have
prevailed yet again. The EU and US have betrayed their promises to reform
trade rules to promote development and poor countries have had to fight a
rearguard action simply to keep some of their issues on the table."

Although only a small part of the world total, foreign direct investment in
Africa increased to $18 billion in 2004 from $14 billion the previous year.
According to UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development),
well over half of this investment came from the US, France, Britain, the
Netherlands and South Africa. Most of the investment is in oil and mining
and hardly benefits the local population at all.

The four countries receiving the highest level of investment, over $1
billion each, are oil producers: Nigeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea and
Sudan. Africa's share of US oil imports is expected to increase from 18
percent now to 25 percent in 2015. Chevron (US) and Total (France) are
expected to increase investment.

High prices for copper, diamonds, gold and platinum have also encouraged
rising investment. Tanzania and Ghana are singled out as countries where
there has been a boom in investment in gold mining, but as little as 5
percent of earnings stays within each country. In the service sector,
telecommunications, electricity, transport and water have been privatized
and now opened up to foreign investment in a number of African states.

This emphasizes the fact that when the Western transnationals and
governments step up their investment in key areas of Africa, they have to
ensure they can repatriate the profits gained from exploiting valuable raw
materials such as oil and precious metals.

China is also accelerating its involvement in the continent. An article in *Le
Monde Diplomatique* in May 2005 noted that as the world's second largest
consumer of crude oil, China is bringing in more than 25 percent of its oil
imports from the Gulf of Guinea and Sudan:

"Its thirst is limitless: by 2020 it will be forced to supply 60 percent of
its energy needs from abroad, even from nations such as Chad that has
maintained diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Although in 2004 only 2 percent
of Chinese trade was with Africa, the continent has done particularly well
as China has opened up to the world: during the 1990s, Sino-African trade
grew by 700 percent and since the first China-Africa Forum in Beijing in
2000, more than 40 agreements have been signed, doubling trade to more than
$20 billion over the four years to the end of 2004. By the end of 2005,
China is expected to become Africa's third most important trading partner,
behind the US and France and ahead of the UK."

*Africa and the theory of Permanent Revolution*

Marxists have always led a political struggle for the independent interests
of the working class against the various petty bourgeois and bourgeois
nationalist movements in the colonial and semi-colonial countries.

Under conditions in which the world's markets and resources have been
divided up between the major powers, the national bourgeoisie in Africa has
proved incapable of leading and completing the democratic revolution.
Firstly, this is because it is subordinate to and dependent on the
imperialist countries for investment, productive technique and access to
global markets.

Secondly, the historical experience in Africa has exposed the falsity of the
claims of the Stalinists that the conflict with imperialism produces a
common interest between the classes, so that the anti-imperialist struggle
would be in two stages, the first of which would proceed as a democratic
revolution led by the bourgeoisie.

In 1935, Trotsky wrote to supporters in South Africa opposing the conception
of the Stalinists who had "transformed the program of national liberation
into an empty abstraction that is elevated above the reality of class
relations." As for the African National Congress (ANC), Trotsky insisted:
"The Bolshevik-Leninists unmask before the native masses the inability of
the Congress to achieve the realization of even its own demands, because of
its superficial, conciliatory policy. In contradistinction to the Congress,
the Bolshevik-Leninists develop a program of revolutionary class
struggle" *(Writings
of Leon Trotsky [1934-35],* New York: Pathfinder, 1974, p 252).

As well as the Stalinists, we should mention the key role played by petty
bourgeois radical organizations—particularly the Pabloites—in boosting the
nationalist movements and governments throughout Africa, in presenting them
as a progressive and even socialist way forward for the working class and
peasantry. The most important experience was in relation to Algeria.

The Pabloite support for the FLN regime in Algeria became a major issue,
when, in the late 1950s and early 60s the American Trotskyists of the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were moving toward uniting with the Pabloites.
Following the Pabloites, the SWP attempted to portray the petty bourgeois
nationalist governments in Algeria and Cuba as progressive and
revolutionary. In *Trotskyism Betrayed*, written in 1962, the British
Socialist Labour League attacked the SWP's opportunist line:

"It [the FLN] is bound hand and foot by its relationship with world
imperialism. This relationship prevents it from satisfying the social
demands of the Algerian masses or from consolidating its power for a
prolonged period. The need is for a proletarian movement against the FLN
leaders, against the Evian agreement [the deal between the FLN and the
French granting nominal independence], to continue the struggle for
independence: which means, for the masses, not only peace but also bread and
land" ( *Trotskyism versus Revisionism*, London: New Park Publications, Vol.
3, p. 248).

Having once opposed the opportunist line of the Pabloites, the Workers
Revolutionary Party (WRP) leaders Healy, Banda and Slaughter presented a
perspective in 1979 that virtually abandoned drawing any class distinctions
in the semi-colonial countries. Like the Pabloites, the WRP now made the
so-called "armed struggle" the touchstone for evaluating the
anti-imperialist credentials of various bourgeois nationalists.

The *Fourth International* magazine, "How the Workers Revolutionary Party
betrayed Trotskyism" documents the impact of this abandonment of
revolutionary internationalism in the chapters dealing with the WRP's
betrayal of the Zimbabwean revolution.

The WRP boosted the Patriotic Front leaders Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo,
presenting them as the bearers of social progress in Zimbabwe:

"Rather than stating clearly that the Zimbabwean bourgeoisie is incapable of
securing genuine national independence and that it will prosecute the armed
struggle only within the limits of its class interest, the [WRP
perspectives] document hitched the fate of the working class to the policies
of the bourgeoisie" ("How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed
Trotskyism 1973-1985", *Fourth International*, Volume 13. No 1, Summer 1986,
p. 48).

The WRP's claim that a "workers and peasants government" could be
established under the aegis of the bourgeois Patriotic Front, "constituted a
Pabloite deception of the working class, which assisted in the
disorientation of the Zimbabwean masses and left them unprepared for the
treachery of the Patriotic Front leaders" (p. 48).

This diagnosis has proved all too tragically correct.

The catastrophic impact of imperialism in Africa over the past two decades,
the absolute impoverishment, the virtual absence of public healthcare and
education, and the looting of the continent's vast resources by Western
corporations could not have taken place without the willing support and
collaboration of the various bourgeois nationalist regimes that hold sway in
Africa.

Beginning in the early 1980s, African leaders such as Jerry Rawlings in
Ghana abandoned their socialist rhetoric and accepted IMF structural
adjustment programmes. In 1985, Julius Nyerere admitted the failure of his
version of "African Socialism" and resigned as president of Tanzania. The
next year, Tanzania accepted an IMF programme.

By 1990, forty African countries had accepted rigorous IMF restructuring
policies. This included currency devaluations—an average drop of 50
percent—selling off government-owned industries and slashing public
spending. Health services and education systems were privatized, and
governments competed with each other for Western investment and trade deals.


Throughout Africa, free-market capitalism, or what became known as the
"Washington consensus," was implemented with drastic results for millions of
African peasants and workers.

At the other pole, a local elite has been able to acquire fabulous wealth,
for example, in South Africa. Under President Mbeki, the ANC government is
fully committed to free-market policies. A small group of former ANC
leaders, the so-called "waBenzi" (a person who drives a Mercedes Benz), have
enriched themselves by getting shares in the big mining corporations under
the programme of "black economic empowerment" in deals worth billions of
dollars.

In an article last year titled, "The New Rand Lords,"* Time* magazine noted
that the imposing Rand Club in downtown Johannesburg, where South Africa's
mining magnates and millionaires have been meeting for more than a century,
has some new members:

"A black elite has crossed over from politics and the ruling African
National Congress (A.N.C.): Rand Club members include Cyril Ramaphosa, 52,
one of South Africa's richest men, who was once touted as a possible
successor to Nelson Mandela."

Ramaphosa, many may remember, was once the leader of the South African
miners' union.

The existence of the Soviet Union and the Cold War that developed during the
1960s and 1970s placed certain limits on the depredations of imperialism. In
Africa, it meant that to a limited extent, the national bourgeoisie could
rest on the Soviet Union (and to some degree China), gaining access to a
range of military hardware. As a consequence, many of these bourgeois
nationalists even claimed to be Marxist. But this was merely a form of
pseudo independence from imperialism.

Even before the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, free-market
policies had gained the ascendancy across the continent.

As historian William R. Keylor notes in his *The Twentieth Century World—An
international history*: "The Soviet-American competition in Africa that had
emerged so unexpectedly during the second half of the seventies proved to be
short-lived because of Moscow's inability to supplement its military aid
with much in the way of economic support (such as trade, loans and
investments). In particular, the inconvertibility of East bloc currencies
precluded the expansion of African trade with Comecon countries [Council for
Mutual Economic Assistance (1949-91), which economically linked the USSR
with Eastern Europe and later Mongolia, Cuba and Vietnam] beyond the
customary bilateral barter schemes" (p 423).

In the 1980s, a series of African regimes—including Egypt, Sudan, Somalia
and Guinea—that had previously welcomed the support of the Eastern bloc
rapidly broke with their erstwhile benefactors, sending the Soviet
"advisors" packing. Instead, they turned to London, Paris, Tokyo and New
York in search of finance.

Keylor observes: "The Western bloc, due to its dominant position in the
international economic system from which Africa could not, or would not,
shake free, continued to exercise the dominant external influence on the
continent during the 1980s" (ibid).

The past period has witnessed an increasing number of conflicts and wars of
an ethnic, tribalist or religious character. Whole regions have come to be
dominated by criminal gangs or warlords, leading to the break up of many of
the states established in the 1960s, such as the Ivory Coast, amid a bitter
struggle for control over strategic assets.

In bloody clashes between neighbouring countries—as in the Congo—tens of
thousands have been killed in the fratricidal struggle for the control of
valuable commodities, resulting in new terms being coined, such as "resource
wars" and "conflict diamonds".

In 1994, the world was horrified to find that Rwanda, a tiny country in the
heart of Africa, was run by a regime of one tribal grouping that was seeking
the total extermination of another tribe. With systematic planning, the Hutu
Power regime, as it was called, killed some 800,000 or more Tutsis in a
three-month period.

This kind of tribalism was essentially the creation of the imperialists who
used divide-and-rule methods to run their colonies—in this case the Belgians
who ruled through the minority Tutsis—and the Western powers that continued
to use it to exert their influence after independence.

The true reason for UN inaction in Rwanda was that the warring factions each
had the support of different imperialist powers, either openly or covertly.
The French were backing the government, while the US, through Uganda, was
tacitly backing the RPF rebels, the largely Tutsi movement that had taken
over much of the country.

Military engagement in Africa by various great powers has been rising in the
more recent past.

I would like to quote briefly from a paper entitled, "External Relations and
Africa", drawn up the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which describes
itself as "the Intelligence Community's centre for strategic thinking within
the US government" and provides the president and senior policy makers with
analyses of foreign policy issues:

"Military engagement has shifted from direct support of proxy regimes or
movements during the Cold War to a combination of capacity-building and,
especially post-9/11, direct American military involvement in basing areas
such as Djibouti."

A section deals with "Future Trends in External Engagement with Africa".
Here, couched in the rhetoric of the "war on terror," the authors outline
some of the factors leading to increased "military engagement by external
powers". One of the prime reasons they cite is "the increasing importance of
the oil sector in especially but not exclusively US policy calculations on
Africa. Importantly, most of Africa's oil producers are not OPEC
members—notably Angola, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo-Brazzaville and
Cameroon."

The US is not the only imperialist power seeking to assert itself militarily
in Africa.

In 2000, Britain sent 1,000 troops into Sierra Leone to deal with the
Revolutionary United Front (RUF), run by Charles Taylor in neighbouring
Liberia. The RUF controlled the extraction of diamonds, looting and
terrorising the population. Most of these troops have been withdrawn, but
Britain still directs things or "advises", as it is euphemistically called.

Similarly in neighbouring Ivory Coast, the French sent in 5,000 troops to
deal with a civil war between the largely Christian south and Muslim north.
As we meet this week, Ivory Coast has once again witnessed an outbreak of
internecine violence.

China is also increasingly involved in African military affairs. It sold an
estimated $1 billion worth of arms to Ethiopia and Eritrea during their
border conflict between 1998 and 2000. It has also sold arms to Sudan,
helicopters to Mali and Angola, and military materiel to Namibia, Sierra
Leone and Mozambique.

Although still on a relatively small scale, via various UN missions, China
has stationed more than 1,500 troops across the continent, primarily in the
Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia.

Another country with significant Chinese involvement is Zimbabwe, the only
African regime that has proved somewhat less amenable to Western free-market
demands. But the actions of the regime of President Robert Mugabe also
demonstrate the complete bankruptcy of nationalism. After following IMF
directives and collaborating with the West since taking power in 1979, the
Zimbabwe government faced a deepening economic crisis in the late 1990s. In
order to out-manoeuvre the Western-backed opposition, Mugabe organised land
seizures and drove out some of the white farmers. Tobacco production on
these farms—Zimbabwe's main export—has since virtually disintegrated.

Mugabe promised a national revival of the economy based on indigenous
agriculture. But with Western banks and investors withdrawing support and
run-away inflation there was no money to provide the seeds, fertilisers and
expertise for the new farmers. As a result, more than half the population
now face starvation and the economy is on the brink of collapse.

An article on the web site of the US-based Council on Foreign Relations,
which publishes *Foreign Affairs*, outlines China's close relationship with
Zimbabwe:

"China is the principal supporter of the Mugabe regime, which is reviled in
the international community for Mugabe's ruthless crushing of the opposition
and his most recent removal of hundreds of thousands of city residents to
the rural areas, with no respect for life, health, or satisfactory
alternative arrangements. China is investing in minerals, roads and farming,
and supplying Mugabe with jets and other armaments. 'Zimbabwe is all but
owned by China,' say some observers. 'In return for a rare hand of
friendship in an increasingly hostile world, Mugabe has offered Chinese
companies almost anything they want, regardless of payback'" (
http://www.cfr.org/publication/8436/chinas_rising_role_in_africa.html
- _edn7<http://www.cfr.org/publication/8436/chinas_rising_role_in_africa.html%20-%20_edn7>
).

*The dead end of Pan-Africanism*

In the period after World War II, there was a build up of working class
organisation and massive strike struggles. This was part of an international
revolutionary wave in the immediate post-war years, which swept through
India, China, and whole parts of Europe. By that time, there were some huge
concentrations of workers in Africa, especially in mining, and there was a
series of big strike battles. Thousands of miners in South Africa organised
themselves against the British mine owners. In the Congo, up to a million
miners worked in the copper and diamond mines, and it was also where uranium
for the atomic bomb was mined.

Many such movements were brutally suppressed, but it was also recognised in
London and Paris that political mechanisms had to be found to keep this
movement under control. The British government worked with the Trade Union
Congress to send conservative trade union leaders to its colonies to show
Africans how to set up collective bargaining arrangements and all the other
bureaucratic mechanisms to police the working class. And the very small
nationalist organisations—virtually non-existent in the French colonies—were
encouraged to come to the head of the mass opposition movements.

A British Foreign Office document at the time pointed out: "Pan-Africanism,
in itself, is not necessarily a force that we need regard with suspicion and
fear. On the contrary, if we can avoid alienating it and guide it on lines
generally sympathetic to the free world, it may well prove in the longer
term a strong, indigenous barrier to the penetration of Africa by the Soviet
Union."

Kwame Nkrumah was the first Pan-African leader to be put in power in Ghana
in 1957. His journey from prison cell to government was a pattern that was
to be followed in most of the British and French colonies in Africa, as
London and Paris sought to maintain their power through a system of indirect
rule.

For all their declarations of unity, the Pan-Africanists accepted the
division of the continent into more than 50 states, accepting borders drawn
up by the colonialists. These borders were completely irrational from any
geographical standpoint—or even drawn on the reactionary basis of ethnic
homogeneity, which has now been seized on by separatist movements—and were
manipulated to facilitate imperialist intrigues.

The real threat to the continuing imperialist domination of Africa was that
the movement of the working class in the post-war period could get out of
control and overthrow capitalist property relations. Here, Stalinism played
an invidious role, giving support to bourgeois nationalism and betraying the
socialist revolution in Africa as it did elsewhere.

George Padmore, the principal theoretician behind Nkrumah and the British
Pan Africanists, had been an international leader of the Communist Party and
a devoted supporter of Stalin. His job in Moscow in the early 1930s was to
serve on a special committee investigating the Chinese Communist Party to
root out "Trotskyists" and oppositionists to the Stalinist line. This was
after the Stalin leadership had betrayed the 1927 Chinese revolution by
completely subordinating the Communist Party there to the nationalist
Kuomintang, a betrayal in which thousands of Communists were murdered by the
nationalist forces.

Padmore only broke from the Communist Party in the later 1930s when it
became clear that Stalin had no real interest in the nationalist movements
in Africa or anywhere else, except as pawns in the deals he was trying to
make with imperialism. But Padmore's ideas remained those he learnt under
Stalin—that there would first be a national democratic revolution and that
socialism would only come at some unspecified future date.

The representatives of the newly independent African states met in the
Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, in May 1963 to found the Organisation of
African Unity (OAU). Under the OAU charter, African unity was to be secured
by accepting the absolute inviolability of the political borders drawn up by
the previous colonial masters!

The professions of unity did not prove of lasting value. The economic crisis
that gripped Africa in the 1970s also heralded a wave of bitter armed
conflicts, within and between numbers of African states. As William Keylor
pointed out:

"Two of these confrontations, the civil war in Chad and the rivalry between
Morocco and Algeria over the former Spanish Sahara, reduced to a shambles
the Pan-African ideal of the sanctity of frontiers and the sovereignty of
postcolonial states" ( *The Twentieth Century World—An international history
*, p. 419).

The OAU was wound up in 2002 and replaced by the African Union. The new
organisation professed many of the same Pan-Africanist aims of its
predecessor, including the "accelerated socio-economic integration of the
continent" and defence of the "sovereignty, territorial integrity and
independence of its Member States".

However, the African Union has signed up to the New Partnership for African
Development (NEPAD) economic platform, promoting the full integration of
Africa into the world capitalist economy. Supported by the G8 powers, it
forms a convenient lever to use on behalf of the major corporations in what
is a continuous trade war designed to open up the continent's markets.

*Conclusion*

A balance sheet of Africa's almost 50-year experiment with programmes based
on various forms of nationalism can now be drawn.

Far from the national bourgeoisie and various petty bourgeois national
movements offering a way out of the poverty and misery confronting millions
of Africans, they have acted to suppress the development of a genuine
struggle for social and political emancipation and have ensured that Africa
remains in thrall to the international banks and corporations.

The nation-states over which they have presided did not and do not provide a
viable means of securing the interests of the African masses, given the
continued domination of the continent by imperialism.

While for a brief period, they were able to lean on the Stalinist
bureaucracy in Moscow, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its policy of
economic autarky exposed the real relations between the African bourgeoisie
and the imperialist powers.

The local elites have mostly dropped their radical nationalist rhetoric, and
now vie to secure direct links to one or other of the imperialist powers as
a means of ensuring their own privileged existence.

Imperialist domination of the globe fuels class antagonisms in the
under-developed countries of Africa. Precisely because the penetration of
the transnational corporations has spurred the development of the
proletariat, the opposition of the national bourgeoisie in Africa to
imperialism has always been conditional and entirely secondary to the
necessity of suppressing an independent movement of the working class that
might threaten its own survival. The goal of the national bourgeoisie is
limited to seeking a better arrangement with the imperialist powers,
allowing it a greater share in the exploitation of the workers and peasants.


At the start of our discussions at this International Editorial Board
meeting, the question was posed: could a future Africa witness the sort of
rapid capitalist economic expansion now in progress in China?

What is clear is that a new "scramble for Africa" is already underway, with
the former colonial powers such as Britain and France seeking to reassert
their interests, while America is also intervening aggressively. Added to
this already potentially explosive mixture is the growing penetration of
Africa by China, which is seeking both to secure its own access to critical
raw materials, particularly oil, and to establish vast new markets for its
goods.

This renewed involvement in Africa is not for the benefit of millions of
African workers and peasants, but at their expense.

Moreover, the vast continent is once again becoming a battleground, where
rival corporations, imperialist powers, their local representatives and
military forces collide in ever more bloody conflicts.

The struggle to end the imperialist domination of Africa and overcome its
bitter legacy must be led by the working class, in alliance with the
peasantry, in a revolutionary struggle for power.

However, the survival of proletarian power in one or more of the
under-developed countries and the necessary construction of socialism is
unthinkable without a common struggle with the working class in the advanced
countries to overthrow imperialism in its heartlands, and above all the
United States.

Nowhere is the internationalist perspective advanced by the Fourth
International as urgent and necessary as in Africa.

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