Víctor M. Lucas | Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
The Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain (PCPE) extends its greetings to the World Anti-imperialist Platform, which is carrying out important work in different localities across several continents, with the purpose of uniting forces to combat the plans and executions of assassinations of heads of state, premeditated killings, homicides, destruction of public infrastructure, forced displacement of populations, and generalized misery promoted by Anglo-American imperialism and Zionism, with the support of the rest of the countries organized around NATO, or through an infamous complicit silence.
Likewise, the PCPE takes advantage of the Conference in Nairobi to greet the Communist Party Marxist Kenya, which, under conditions of extreme difficulty and repression, must confront the class struggle through the supreme effort of all its militants in defense of the interests of the working class and popular sectors.
The history of the African continent in the modern and contemporary eras is established through plunder, the slave trade, and the tragedy caused by the division of its original inhabitants, shaping interventions by the European powers which, on the one hand, served the original formation of capital, and, on the other, brought about the degeneration of lands cultivated with care and knowledge by groups of inhabitants dedicated to agricultural labor, using the surplus of harvested products to exchange for other goods through caravans that had their own markets and meeting places.
Africa, because of its riches, became the scourge of all the European colonial powers, which employed the most savage methods to seize the most precious resources and the slave labor force that would be used as a productive force in the original formation of capitalism in the stages of the aggressive metropolises. Not only were material goods confiscated, but the productive forces themselves were attacked, reducing them de facto and directly affecting the extraction of lower surplus values that pointed toward a future more negative than uncertain. The high productivity, guaranteed by the time devoted to different forms of labor, has also been a burden on the economic and social development of the African continent.
Verified data estimate that between 1550 and 1850 around 100 million Africans were enslaved and sent to the American continent. It is estimated that only 30% arrived at their destination. And these figures are framed within the Atlantic trade toward the lands of the American continent, not including the numbers of young people who worked for the enterprises of the physiocratic stage of the nation-states during the first centuries of the Modern Age, serving the interests of the “East India Companies.”
The narrative shamelessly spread by the colonialists was established for domestic justification and for a culture of acquiescence and socially absorbed complicity. Colonial pretensions concealed the hypocritical notion based on absurd animist postulates supposedly established by Christianity through its Catholic Vatican foundations, or through the more pragmatic positions for capital represented by Protestant and Calvinist currents.
These religious manifestations accompanied plunder, looting, dispossession, and the destruction of the existing social framework. Beyond the clash produced with indigenous rites and customs, the colonial forces employed violence to impose beliefs alien to the people’s sentiments in order to weaken resistance and organized response.
The use of physical violence is the conquerors’ method of “persuasion”; for capitalism, war is not an exception, but an indispensable instrument of domination and subjugation. We must affirm, without possibility of error, that Peace is the true enemy of capital, which, in its final phase of insolent concentration and centralization, takes on the name of imperialism.
The process being developed by imperialism is a consequence of its historical exhaustion, due to the great contradictions that capital experiences within its own dynamic. Conceptually, the crises of capitalism have occurred within the economic-financial framework because of the inability to maintain the rate of profit, whose law experiences a downward tendency that makes its regeneration impossible. Hence war becomes a constant, and the reduction of social expenditures in the budgets of capitalist governments results in increasingly precarious conditions in education, healthcare, and public housing services, principally.
The depressive phases of capitalism have become so constant that the use of old methods seeks once again to recreate the successes of the past that served to neutralize revolutionary consciousness among the most advanced sectors of the working class. The construction of this false social edifice is carried out with the unstable mortar of middle sectors (the so-called “middle class”), which succumb to the internal tensions suffered by every construction, attempting to keep it standing with the exceptional “supports” of governments that fall into vassalage through debt contracted with the international organs of capitalism; indebtedness implies a loss of sovereignty, and this in turn means the limitation or elimination of political freedom.
In every process, dialectics helps us find solutions. Capitalism long ago entered a phase of incapacity to share even a small percentage of wealth with the most impoverished classes and sectors. Scientific and technological development has created the material conditions for socialism. Conquering this knowledge for humanity would mean that the enormous problems affecting a large percentage of the world’s population would be eradicated and cast into the dustbin of history. Hunger, access to potable water, child malnutrition, endemic diseases, among others, would become “horrors” of a past that must never return.
This minimal radiography of the problems generated by the “correct” functioning of capitalism, by itself, expels the mystical solution to the situation of class struggle in almost all the states of the African continent.
At the end of the Second World War, efforts were made to articulate an international process advocating the independence of African and Asian countries that remained imprisoned by their metropolises, most of which formed part of the Allied powers. Thus emerged the Bandung Conference, which opened its sessions in April 1955 and succeeded in proclaiming and encouraging the declaration of independence of all territories subjected to colonial powers. It was not easy, because the aspirations for independence were accompanied by anti-capitalist positions, thus confronting U.S. imperialism, which has carried out excessive interventions to paralyze these aspirations for genuine independence.
When the clash contains elements of criminal harshness, Lenin always reappears in order to obtain the correct answer to the question: What Is To Be Done? Many processes have indeed been undertaken since then. If Bandung attempted to coordinate the struggle through the Organization of Non-Aligned Countries in order to conduct its struggle outside the framework of Cold War confrontation, African countries attempted to organize around the Organization of African Unity, which eventually led to the African Union (AU), constituted in May 2001 with the participation of 54 African states.
This continental organization undertook, and continues to undertake, arduous work. Some countries achieved independence through politically inspiring processes that later lost their initial momentum. It is certainly true that former colonies found support in political processes that took place in the metropolises. It is necessary, without a doubt, to mention the Portuguese colonies that were encouraged by the Carnation Revolution led by the Movement of the Captains of April. Angola and Mozambique had to wage a hard war against the racist vestige of the South African regime, which harassed these countries until its defeat. Beautiful pages of internationalism were written in this war, with the participation of Cuban troops in solidarity, whose intervention in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale (1987–88) was brilliant.
Later, the racist South African regime would also find its political grave. Having been politically sustained by U.S. imperialism and Zionism, the strength of the African National Congress first achieved the release of Nelson Mandela and, after the 1994 elections, the defeat of the apartheid regime became a reality.
Similar situations had occurred in the countries of the Sahel. The assassination of Thomas Sankara in 1987 frustrated the socialist project in Burkina Faso. Earlier, Patrice Lumumba suffered a coup d’état in 1960 while serving as Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, only to be assassinated the following year.
Today, Ibrahim Traoré constantly contends with betrayal and assassination attempts in the project unfolding in Burkina Faso, involving Niger and Mali in the Alliance of Sahel States, which expels American and French imperialist forces from their territories while confronting genuine independence through the defense of the natural resources possessed by their states. Hidden in the tabloids of the Western mass media, the Alliance advances with the strength of its just anti-imperialist cause. Nairobi, with its Conference, must find the instruments to undertake the struggle, which can only be understood as: ¡Hasta la victoria!
