However, white supremacists face an immediate contradiction due to the essential role of undocumented labor in the U.S. Some capitalists have already begun to beg the president to scale down the raids, complaining that ICE is taking all their best workers and hurting their profit margins. Every fascist accusation against the Global South is an admission², whether directed at Black people in South Afrika for “white genocide” or undocumented people in the imperial core for bringing violence to a society that seeks to exploit and assault them. 

30 years after apartheid, the 7% minority of white settlers continue to occupy 72% of South Afrika’s farmland. Legalistic mechanisms for land reforms have failed to address the problem; only 9% of the land has been returned to the Black people it was stolen from. Before it can return land, the government needs to provide compensation to the white settler. In other words, the law requires the government to pay thieves to return stolen land. Black South Afrikans can’t get their land back because doing so would bankrupt the country. The result? In 2025, South Afrika has the highest wealth inequality of any country in the world. The average Black household owns 5% of the wealth of the average white household. These statistics alone explain why South Afrikan white lobbying groups — who project false claims of supposed “racial persecution” throughout the world  — have spoken out against relocation to the U.S. Relocating white settlers would only hamper domestic settler efforts towards retaking full political power and overturning the basic legal rights won by the Black majority in 1994. One white pensioner spelled the situation out clearly: “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go?” 

Trump’s relocation of white settlers appears to be part of a larger U.S. attack on South Afrika’s government. In 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted the “Land Expropriation Act” —  essentially an eminent domain law which allows the government to repurpose private land for the public benefit. According to the law, land can only be expropriated without compensation in limited scenarios, like when property is unused or abandoned. To this day, no land has been seized in South Africa without compensation. This is the law that Trump claims will cause “white genocide” in South Afrika. The U.S. had already cut off nearly all foreign aid to South Afrika back in February, throwing the country’s healthcare system into a new crisis overnight. 

Although Trump and his imperialist collaborators understand the reformist nature of South Afrika’s government, the country is still centered in the U.S.’ crosshairs because of its rejection of outright western colonial rule. South Afrika has been represented by the ANC (African National Congress) — the party of Nelson Mandela — since the end of apartheid. In all likelihood, the U.S. wants to remove the ANC from power and replace it with one of the more imperialist-friendly parties representing white interests. In its 30 years of rule, the ANC has built strong economic relationships with enemies of the U.S. such as China, Russia, and Iran. The South Afrikan lawsuit against so-called “israel” in the International Court of Justice — supposedly the highest court in the world — continues to isolate the zionist entity, which has lost sympathy even in the West. If the U.S. were to succeed in its regime change effort, they would replace the ANC with a party such as the Democratic Alliance. With its bedrock of white support, this party would be quick to submit to the U.S. by signing extortionist trade deals and dismissing the I.C.J. lawsuit. For Trump, the chance to bully an oppressed country like South Afrika while pandering to the white base at home was too convenient to pass up. 

From within the U.S., we can see how the relocation fiasco is in perfect alignment with the current fascist playbook. The illusions of a multi-racial participatory society in a racist settler colony are dissipating in the face of an explicit preference for white immigration, especially those who show loyalty to the imperial project. I.C.E. agents and deputized local police are snatching undocumented people from their homes and workplaces. The most immediate hurdle to the new terror project lies in the capitalist class itself, who keenly appreciate the essential role of undocumented immigrants in the Amerikan economy. Capitalists in both meatpacking and agriculture economic sectors pleaded directly to Trump that the ICE raids are having a bad effect on business. By working the hardest jobs for the least pay, undocumented workers ensure that Amerikans have access to cheap produce while guaranteeing a steady profit for the capitalist. The class collaboration between these capitalists and Amerikans at large is essential to the arrangement. Without undocumented labor, the already small profit margins in agriculture and meatpacking would vanish, which would then trigger skyrocketing food costs. The takeaway from this is that there was already ample reason to be in the streets before the ICE raids began. Instead of waving the Amerikan flag like the recently-arrived South Afrikan settlers, protesters should agitate based on the general conditions of racial hierarchies in labor. Violent ICE raids will of course continue, although the business enterprises of certain capitalists will now be spared by the Trump regime. The federal and municipal pigs will continue to arrest grandparents, parents, and children. 

While fascists balance the contradictions between their rhetoric and reality, they still agitate their base by attacking a sovereign nation with racist dog whistles. On June 2, 9 more settlers from South Afrika arrived in the U.S, and more will be on the way unless South Afrika bows under the pressure. We must never forget that Land Back is as desperately needed here on Turtle Island as it is in South Afrika. Amerikan fascists feign horror at Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of land repossession. Imagine their response to a real campaign for Land Back on what they consider to be their home territory. 

Spend these summer months engaged in social investigation or engaged in study. USU and the All-Empire Workers’ League are here to join you in struggle with materials and assistance as we work on tangible projects in the real world. Whatever you do, don’t let the summer pass you by as white supremacists continue their push to convert the mass fascist state into its final, deadly form. 

1.  The term “global flea market” is borrowed from George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye (page 118)  ︎
2. For further discussion of colonial psychology, see Chapter 2: The Historical Background in Robert Biel’s Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, with special attention paid to page 32 (local page source) ︎

Capitalist firms infect the African continent like a virus. They leech money and resources from national economies in exchange for a paltry recompense — most of which is divided among the national bourgeois allies of capital. IMF reports are riddled with references to the necessity of so-called “reforms” that promise to resolve the contradictions caused by imperial capital. The IMF requires peripheral countries to prioritize debt servicing at the expense of the well-being of the country’s own citizens.

Education in Decline

As profits for transnational corporations continue to climb, the lives of those who toil and suffer to make those profits possible worsen. A survey of public service employees in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, and Nigeria undertaken by the non-governmental organization ActionAid paints a grim picture. Of all teachers surveyed, 95% said they did not receive sufficient funds from their governments and 73% said they had paid for classroom supplies out of their own pockets. One-hundred percent of Kenyan teachers surveyed reported paying for classroom supplies out of their salaries. The effect of budget constraints on morale have been notable — 42% of the teachers surveyed said they were considering a career change.

As public spending has declined, the percentage of national GDP spent on debt servicing has remained unconscionably high. As the survey above illustrates, in 2024, Nigeria spent 20% of its national income on debt and interest payments, while only 4% was spent on education. Healthcare spending was also a meager 4%. Fully one-quarter of Malawi’s national income went towards loan repayments in the same timeframe, while Kenya dedicated 29% of its GDP to debt servicing, compared to 18% spent on education. Malawi did not report figures for education spending.

Healthcare Costs Go Up, Salaries Go Down

The healthcare sector has not fared any better. Government cuts on public health programs have affected wide swaths of the population of the six countries. “Services that were provided for free before, now we pay for them,” says a Malawian person interviewed by ActionAid. “For example, if an older person has a fracture, she/he pays MK 25,000 (USD $14) to get the service in a government clinic.” The minimum wage in Malawi is roughly USD $50 per month. Many people in Malawi have had to take out personal loans or reduce spending on food to pay for healthcare and transportation to faraway clinics and hospitals.

In Kenya, Linda Mama, a government program that helps new mothers with neonatal care, had half its budget cut in 2024. “We shall be covering the indigent pregnant,” said Dr. Elizabeth Wangia, Director of Health Financing for the Ministry of Health in Kenya. Wangia stated that means testing will be implemented to determine the eligibility of pregnant women to benefit from the program.

Austerity and Its Facilitators

These policies of austerity are not coincidental, but are the brutal expression of “fiscal responsibility” and other liberal economic principles imposed upon other countries by the IMF. An article in African Business magazine stated that the IMF “recommended a change in direction from growth driven by public investment to one in which the private sectors are the engines of growth.” This translates directly to a prioritization of foreign capital at the expense of public spending on the welfare of the citizenry, as can be seen in healthcare cuts in Greece imposed as part of austerity measures implemented after the country’s financial struggles following the 2008 crisis. 

Blame for the negative consequences of those policies are placed on the national bourgeoisie, who obediently debase themselves by stepping into their role as ready-made scapegoats for the failings of international capital. In doing so, they are paradoxically allowed to maintain their position in the national ruling classes. While angry invectives and corruption prosecutions are frequent occurrences in peripheral countries, they very rarely result in permanent expulsion from power structures for the guilty parties.

The Lie of Capitalist “Progress”

Austerity programs demanded by the IMF have led to terrible decreases in the quality of life across the so-called “developing” world, even when compared to recent years. Every country surveyed by ActionAid reported a sharp decrease in the availability of medicines. An interviewee from Ethiopia said a 10x increase in the cost of antimalarial medicine sold in private health centers has led to a malaria epidemic in her region. Salaries of public healthcare workers have also decreased, with 87% of healthcare workers surveyed saying they struggled to pay bills, and 63% reporting difficulty paying the rent. 67% percent admitted to buying fewer groceries.

Who fills the empty spaces left when public funds retreat? Who pays the price when the fees demanded by foreign capital are unaffordable? Communities shoulder the burden of caring for those who are too ill to travel or who do not have access to funds necessary to pay for a stay in the hospital. Caring for the sick brings in no salary, but is vitally necessary. Thus the economic power of the exploited diminishes further. As international capital grows fat and bloated off the subsidy of labor granted to them by the workers of the world, the “essential work that is reproducing the human workforce” is done without recompense.

As African governments rush to mollify the IMF with ever-increasing privatization initiatives, imperial capital has profited enormously. German health insurer Allianz, one of the largest health insurance providers in Kenya, announced “another set of record financial results” in 2024 and promised “higher capital-efficient growth in the quarters and years ahead.” Meanwhile, rural Kenyans struggle with trips of up to 30 kilometers to reach a health center and pregnant women throughout Kenya without the means to pay hospital fees give birth at home.

The Credit Trap

International credit rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor tag peripheral countries with high-risk labels that justify exorbitantly high interest rates on any funds loaned. Imperial countries are assessed as low-risk, and thus have access to cheap credit whenever required. A convoluted system of surcharges ensures that full repayment of any loans by a peripheral country remains, for the most part, a practical impossibility. Any requests by peripheral countries for restructuring or an increase in credit are met with demands by the IMF for structural changes to keep the way clear for the flood of capitalist exploitation.

The United States-led world order has greatly improved upon the crude financial manipulations employed by the French and British colonialists in the 19^th century. Debt as a method of extraction has been refined with ruthless efficiency. When debt combines with resource extraction and exportation of capital, the result is utter domination — aided by the sniveling national bourgeois who grovel before their capitalist lords, hoping to be knighted into the imperial ruling class and hating themselves for being born outside of it.

The sum total of imperial promises of jobs and security, of decolonization, of a true partnership among nations, of progress and a gleaming future, is a hollow shell — a great mirage. National economies stagnate, national governments refuse to provide even the minimum for their citizens to live with dignity, and survival itself has become a privilege available only to those with the money to pay for it. Evidence of the failures of capitalism grows more abundant by the day, as even the promises themselves have evaporated, replaced by tough talk of austerity and belt-tightening.

The Deception of Reformist “Solutions”

Groups like ActionAid are incapable of providing a coherent solution to the contradictions of imperial capitalism. Funded by the very states that perpetuate the injustices they investigate, willful avoidance of anything approaching a coherent critical structural analysis is a prerequisite for their existence. While the work done by NGOs and other social action organizations can have material value, they will never recommend a course of action that will lead to the destruction of the political economic system responsible for their very existence.

ActionAid closes the report cited in this article with a bizarre call-to-action that recommends a vague restructuring of the IMF’s global role overseen by the United Nations. This is followed by a list of demands made by the institutions of various countries with the supposed goal of encouraging the capitalists that make up the national ruling classes to act against their interests and prioritize public wellbeing over private sector profit. The IMF itself, in head-splittingly circular logic, proclaims private capital to be the salvation for private capital’s own shortcomings.

The only way to break the oppressive power of imperial states is to break the imperial states themselves. Power must be seized from the exploiting classes by the exploited masses, and every apparatus of oppression must be destroyed, including supra-national entities like the IMF and the bootlicking parasite ruling classes in the periphery that work hand-in-glove with capital to scrap their own countries for parts.

Every promise a capitalist makes will be broken. It is impossible to come to an arrangement with a leech. Capitalism is war, and billions of people around the world are fighting its battles. There is no agreement, no report, no legal document or procedure or set of rules or guidelines that will resolve the brutal contradictions of capitalism in favor of the suffering. The haughty lords of capital only have their position because the work of millions has lifted them to the heights they enjoy. If the capitalist class can be lifted up, it can be toppled, and if the people can organize and fight for a flag or a salary, we can do the same for our future.

Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, and National Liberation

Colonialism in the modern era first developed in the latter years of the 15th century, but reached maturity in the late 19th and early 20th century with the comprehensive colonization of the African continent. In their infancy, colonialism and capitalism developed hand-in-hand, with the resources and profits extracted from the colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade spurring rapid growth in the European economies. In turn, products manufactured in the European metropoles were utilized to further develop the grip of the European economy over the world at large. In essence, capitalism was born with the profits of colonial extraction, and the insatiable capitalist mode of production drove the expansion of the colonialist system.

In its “traditional” form, the colonial economy is primarily an extractive economy, maintained through economic, political, and military domination. The colonial power takes raw materials and other resources from the colonized territory to be shipped back to the “home” country to fuel their burgeoning economies. During the dawn of the era of imperialism (from the 1880s onwards), colonial holdings also served as a sink for the exportation of capital from the European countries, financing international corporations in their advancement of the extraction of resources from the colonial territories. For “traditional” colonialism, the Indigenous population constitutes the labor force for the international corporations. The rapid development of the urban centers in the colonial territories drove the “proletarianization” of the colonized workforce; that is, driving populations from the countryside to the urban centers to engage in the newly imposed capitalist-colonialist economy. The Indigenous people themselves in this context serve as a resource; labor to be exploited for profit, most acute under the slave system in which colonized peoples were literally exchanged as commodities themselves.

Settler colonialism is a distinct form of colonialism. Whereas in the “traditional” colonial economy, extraction of resources is the primary focus of the occupying power and indigenous labor utilized in that extraction is a central component, settler colonialism is concerned with complete control and assimilation of the land as the foundation of a new settler nation. Under settler colonialism, the Indigenous populations are eradicated, in whole or in part, by a series of deliberate policies enacted by the settlers to drive them off the land and claim it for themselves.

In its initial stages, the development of settler colonies on the American continents was driven by rivalries between the last remnants of the European monarchies, which involved religious and military expansionism. The so-called “New World” presented a crisis for the European kingdoms, essentially constituting a new battleground for existing tensions on the continent. At the time, the nascent capitalist system in the form of mercantilism was subordinate to the interests of the monarchs, driven by the need to expand control in the religious sphere, through which the kings justified their “divine right to rule”, and the need to grow the coffers through which they funded their respective armies. An as yet “undiscovered” continent made up of billions of acres of “unclaimed” land presented both an opportunity and a threat to the kingdoms. They could not afford to be left behind while their rivals expanded their power overseas.

What resulted was a mad dash for the direct control of the land, leading to a period of primitive accumulation which increased the wealth and power of the European kingdoms, but also increased the wealth and power of the nascent bourgeoisie which would go on to supplant them in the following centuries. Some of the European powers attempted to engage in “traditional” colonization schemes, but the most successful and the earliest — that of Spain — was settler colonial from its inception and would provide the model for England.

The problem for the Europeans was that this land was not “unclaimed” as they pretended, but was inhabited by millions of Indigenous people organized in thousands of complex societies across both continents. Instead of halting the ambitions of the European economies, a solution was developed, and the Europeans, especially the English, having honed their skills at warfare through centuries of struggle both inside and outside the continent, utilized those skills towards the complete supplanting of the indigenous populations for their own.

Today, the first phase of the settler colonial project in North America is complete. What once was a land of dizzying cultural wealth and complex civilization has been completely supplanted by the US settler colonial empire and its Canadian counterpart. The millions of Indigenous people that once inhabited the continent have been subjected to outright slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and otherwise removed from the land to be corralled into reservations, making way for the fascist global hegemon to thrive. 

Some believe that because the “settlement” of the U.S. is complete, the colonial relation in the country has ceased. On the contrary, through the reservation system and the indigenous reserve labor force kept in perpetual poverty, through the continued subjugation of the Black interior semi-colony by the survival of slavery in the prison industrial complex and the continued denial of land rights in the Black Belt, and through the exploitation of immigrant labor largely consisting of indigenous South and Central Americans, the colonial relation is thriving. This relation is most clear through the antagonization of these colonized populations by the armed wing of the state — the DHS, the BIA, and the federal, state, and municipal police — which takes up its legacy as an occupying colonial military.

The imperial outpost of “israel” is the most readily apparent example of settler colonialism due to the intensity, and thus visibility, of the conflict. Through widespread media coverage of the issue, this genocidal relation is undeniable. Despite billions of dollars being funneled every year into maybe the most advanced propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, the age of social media has allowed the Palestinians to demonstrate their plight for all to see.

The colonization of Palestine is well-documented by scholars and by the zionists themselves. Following the British acquisition of Mandatory Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, the “holy land” provided a golden opportunity for the zionist conference in Britain to begin their colonial project. Between 1917 and 1948, zionists began in earnest to claim land in Palestine through both purchase and conquest. This process culminated in the infamous Nakba of 1948, in which zionist paramilitaries excised large swaths of the land through genocidal slaughter and ethnic cleansing, killing thousands and driving many hundreds of thousands more from their homes. What resulted was almost 80% of the land of Palestine falling under control of the zionists, driving the displaced Palestinians into refugee centers that became the Gaza Strip and the West Bank territories, an act that was legitimized by the international community’s recognition of the “State of israel”.

Zionist ideology closely resembles the religious settler ideology of Manifest Destiny that drove the lion’s share of the colonization of what would become the western United States. Believing the land to be promised to them by God, settlers push the boundaries of the existing colonial borders, encroaching into land that is still controlled by the indigenous inhabitants, often in violation of the various treaties and agreements previously negotiated between the colonialists and the colonized. When the colonized naturally resist this unlawful expansion, the military forces of the colonial entity intervene on the basis that the settlers constitute civilians and they must be defended from the “violent, uncivilized natives”. Thus, the colonial borders expand and the indigenous are further removed from the land. This practice is utilized to this day in the zionist settlements in the West Bank.

We should not be surprised at the similarity; we should not be surprised that the zionists appear to be brothers in arms to the U.S. ruling class. After all, the same economic exploitation of Indigenous people is the basis for both.

So what is the resolution to the colonial contradiction? Despite settler colonialism constituting a distinct form of colonialism, the solution remains the same: national liberation. The anatomy of the colonial system consists of the economic, social, and political domination of the colonized by the colonizers. To abolish this relation, the political, economic, and social spheres must be taken hold of by the subject nation. In a “traditional” colony, this is easy to envision due to the fact that the majority of the population is Indigenous. The anti-colonial liberation movement in this context must seize control of the state from the colonizers and the bought-off compradors, nationalize the colonial enterprises, and begin the process of developing national self-determination. In the settler colonial context, control of the land is the axis upon which the Indigenous peoples are oppressed and self-determination takes the form of the reclamation of the land from the settlers.

South Africa is a particularly interesting case study on this point. Prior to the takeover of the South African apartheid government by the ANC in the 1990s, South Africa could similarly be described as a settler colonial project. After the apartheid system was overthrown and Mandela elected in 1994 as the first president of the country, a process of land reform was undertaken, but was not taken to completion as it had been in Algeria in the 1960s and in Zimbabwe and other territories that made up the former Rhodesian state in the 1980s. As a result, racial disparity and racial tensions continue to wreak havoc on the South African social and political sphere, with white settlers still owning a disproportionate amount of land relative to their population, leaving millions of indigenous South Africans in poverty. What this tells us is that the land and who controls it is the most important aspect of the settler colonial context.

CPUSA Convention Controversy

This past weekend, June 7–9, the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) held its 2024 national convention in Chicago. Two particularly important results of this conference made a significant stir among communist circles on social media regarding the Party’s position on settler colonialism.

As part of the party’s membership in the International Meeting of Communist Workers’ Parties (IMCWP), the CPUSA invited delegates from several other participant parties to speak at the convention. Included in this group was the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), whose speech, delivered by israeli Knesset Member, Ofer Kassif, was streamed on YouTube and subsequently posted by the Party’s official account on Twitter. In this speech, Kassif began by “providing context” to the situation in the zionist entity, in which he vocally condemned the Palestinian Resistance for its acts on October 7, repeating the rigorously debunked lie that thousands of Israeli citizens were massacred by the Palestinians. Later in his speech, he rightly describes the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a genocide, but ultimately delivers a message that is indistinguishable from the messaging of, say, US Senator Bernie Sanders. In essence, it espouses a political position which can be described as “labor zionism”; the genocide of Palestinians is to be condemned but so are those struggling against it. It is bad to kill Palestinians, but those who are waging a national liberation struggle to overthrow the settler colonial relation are terrorists. Essentially, their position is that the state of “israel” has a right to exist and that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine between 1917 and 1948 is legitimate, but with a left-wing facade. The position of the CPI is further revealed in an article posted on their website in November of 2023, calling for an investigation of war crimes against the Palestinians for sexual crimes committed on October 7, which has since been thoroughly debunked as a conspiracy, a lie spread by the IOF to justify the genocide in Gaza.

The Twitter post of Kassif’s speech received vitriolic backlash from people criticizing the party for inviting the CPI to speak at the convention, especially during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Many CPUSA members took to social media in an effort to do damage control, justifying the invitation of the party with such excuses as CPI being a “fraternal party of the IMCWP”, as if that isn’t an indictment of the IMCWP in its own right!

During the CPUSA’s discussion of the resolutions being adopted at the convention, the question of settler colonialism in the United States was presented. Following this discussion, a CPUSA delegate who was present at the convention tweeted “After an investigation the Communist Party USA has rejected settler colonialism as the primary contradiction in the United States”. Again, backlash from communist circles on social media was responded to by hand-waving and justification by party members, calling any who criticized this decision “ultras” and “wreckers.”

The formulation of this CPUSA resolution is malformed and belies the lack of understanding on the part of the CPUSA delegates and those who rejected it. It is clear that the resolution was raised as a sop, and always designed to be defeated. There is no primary contradiction; this is a mish-mash of Marxist terms. There is, of course, in any situation, a principal contradiction, but this is a question of strategy. The principal contradiction conditions the other, secondary, contradictions, which cannot be resolved without first addressing it.

Party members on Twitter immediately began denying the need for any national liberation struggle in the US. It is clear that, where CPUSA once suffered from extreme white (imperialist) chauvinism, that chauvinism is alive and well.

Social Class and Class Struggle

Defenders of the party’s resolution on Twitter made a point of railing against Anything But Class (ABC) Marxists. While ABC as an ideological trend does constitute a liberal distortion of Marxism, the Nothing But Class (NBC) position lacks any basis in reality. Proponents of NBC argue that all oppression and oppressive institutions arise from capitalism, and thus through waging class struggle, all oppressive contradictions will be resolved. What this deviation ignores is the reality of social classes, and the particularity of the nature of class in the colonial context.

The Wretched of the Earth, written by Martiniquais revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who developed his analysis from his participation in the national liberation struggle against the French settler colonial project in Algeria, argues that in the colonial context a person’s race in part dictates a person’s class. An analysis of the colonial relation reveals this fact to be true. In colonial Africa, all of the enterprises were owned by Europeans, whereas all of the industrial and agricultural workers were African. They were workers and not owners because they were members of an oppressed nation; because of their indigeneity. As a result, class was stratified along national lines, meaning that a national liberation struggle also constitutes a class struggle.

“Identity politics” is a contentious topic among Marxists, with many taking the view that the concept of identity is a liberal distortion that only serves to obfuscate the class struggle. What this leaves out is a robust understanding of what exactly goes into determining someone’s social class. In our white-supremacist cis-hetero-patriarchal settler colony, a person’s identity plays a part in determining a person’s class. If you are a trans person, a Black person, a gay person, or any intersection of the various avenues of oppression, odds are that you are not a member of the bourgeois class. As a result, gender relations, race relations, disability relations; these things all constitute social relations with an objectively identifiable economic base. They are class relations and thus are essential to address when engaging in class struggle.

These are fundamentally not questions of identity. Identity is a social question; the relations that produce these social identities are economic questions.

In the US settler colonial system, Black and Indigenous people are corralled into reservations and ghettos, flushed into the prison system to work as money-printing slaves, and are oppressed along national lines. As a result, a national liberation struggle must be waged as PART of the class struggle. National liberation IS class struggle, and must be taken up and supported by Communists.

When CPUSA and its membership reject an in-depth analysis and discussion of settler colonialism, reject the principles of national liberation, and embrace only a simplified analysis of class, they are, in effect, abandoning the class struggle. 

Do not mistake their behavior. The CPUSA has abandoned the class struggle. At best, they represent a dam holding back a reservoir of committed Communists, straining to fight in the class war. At worst, they represent an active barrier to the advancement of the very movement they claim to lead, and thus serve as an objective pillar of U.S. capitalist-imperialism.

A source within the party shared a section of one of the resolutions to be adopted at the convention with regards to the national sovereignty for Indigenous peoples of the Americas which read:

Therefore be it resolved that the CPUSA fully supports the struggles of the Native American people for full social, economic, and political equality and national sovereignty over Native lands. We demand expansion of federal and state funds and services for all the reservations. We oppose schemes to nullify tribal treaty rights.

While paying lip service to national sovereignty for indigenous nations, this resolution reveals deep issues within the party’s understanding of settler colonialism. In their message of support for the struggles of the Indigenous people of the Americas, CPUSA takes care to specify that this only extends to the borders of so-called “Native land”, a distinction that legitimizes the settler control of land not specified as “Native”. The resolution also calls for the expansion of federal and state funds with regards to the existing reservation system. Instead of calling to abolish this violent colonial institution, the CPUSA takes the position that the system should be expanded! Funneling funds into the existing genocidal reservation system can do nothing but strengthen it in its purpose: exercising control over the indigenous populations held captive inside of them. Additionally, this resolution calls for the upholding of existing treaties between indigenous nations and the US government, with no mention at all as to the nature of those treaties as documents forged through coercion that legitimize the settler control over already-stolen Native lands.

This position is indistinguishable from the “labor zionist” position of the Communist Party of “Israel,” which pays lip service to the plight of the Indigenous Palestinians while at the same time upholding the existing colonial borders taken through wholesale slaughter and ethnic cleansing in 1948 and today. By refusing to acknowledge the nature through which this land was claimed and the illegitimacy of the settler control over it, the CPI and its brethren in the CPUSA effectively condone the genocidal actions taken by the settler system.

Settler colonialism and national liberation are not buzzwords. They are not empty platitudes to be tossed out and then ignored, nor are they secondary issues to be subordinated to an ill-defined “class struggle”. They are class struggle, and any party which seeks to overthrow the settler colonial relation must engage with this from the outset. Settler colonialism is a material relation concerned with control of the land. A communist party in a settler-colony must contend with the question of the land and who controls it. They must take the stance that the reclamation of the land through a national liberation struggle is the issue at hand. Otherwise, they are giving in to settler chauvinism as willful idiots of empire.

What is to be Done?

A problem of this magnitude requires extensive education of general party membership, but the capacity to carry out that education would require a party leadership which has this understanding and is capable of imparting it to others. Many members of the CPUSA, especially the younger ones, have a better understanding of these issues than the old party bureaucrats, but the undemocratic nature of the party —  through measures such as the slate system — prevents that leadership from being replaced. Instead, membership at large is forced to table any attempts at eliciting structural change until the party convention, which is only held every four years, and even then resolutions are laundered through the National Committee before being put to a vote.

With the CPUSA’s rejection of settler colonialism as the principal contradiction, they willingly reveal the settler chauvinism that is eating away at the party’s structure, nullifies its revolutionary capability, and condemns it to serve the forces of reaction. 

We have no Communist party in the United States. Once we accept this, we can then begin the process of building one. National liberation and gender liberation are essential aspects of the class struggle, and we must begin to organize a resolute political structure that understands this fact. In order to engage in class struggle, in order to destroy all existing oppressive relations, we must come together to build a political formation capable of taking on this challenge and building a better world for all people.

The Congo Basin

The Congo Basin lies in the center of Africa, carved out by the Congo River and the tributaries that feed it. It’s a region the size of the European Union, and one of the richest areas on the planet — by mineral wealth. The people who live there are among the poorest on earth. The politicians and academics of the West tell stories about why this is: the people aren’t responsible enough, the elites don’t invest in their own economy, the culture never developed, the government is corrupt, the Congo basin is a natural funnel for inter-regional conflict. These are lies.

So why are the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo so poor, if their country contains sixty percent of the world’s coltan reserves, $24 trillion of gold reserves, the fourth-highest producing diamond mines in the world, and significant reserves of lithium? That requires an explanation of the history of the Congo basin.

In the late 19th century, the world had been divided up by the colonial powers: England, France, Belgium, Portugal. At the end of the 1870s, ninety  percent of Africa was under the control of Africans. The continent of Africa had been plundered for over 300 years by that time — the Transatlantic slave trade had brutalized the continent. From 1445 to 1870, the three slaving powers — Britain, France, and Portugal — transformed Africa into a source for human raw material for the colonies of the so-called New World. This undermined the productive economies within Africa, deforming them to produce not goods for trade, but slaves. “The lines of economic activity attached to foreign trade,” wrote Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “were either destructive, as slavery was, or at best purely extractive.” Those who denied the European slavers were attacked either by local partners of the European powers, or by the Europeans themselves, like Queen Nzinga of the Mbundu, who fought the Portuguese for thirty years. 

By 1885, as the European powers concluded the “scramble for Africa,” writes Chris Harman in A People’s History of the World, that “[t]he number of genuinely independent states outside of Europe and the Americas could be counted on one hand — the remains of the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.”

What became of the Congo?

The Congo Basin was cut apart by three European powers: France, Portugal, and Leopold II of Belgium. King Leopold was a largely ornamental monarch in Belgium, but he had taken the lessons of the other European states seriously, and knew that in order to compete with the colonizing powers, Belgium would need colonies of its own. With his personal fortune, he financed the exploitation and colonization of the greater part of the Congo Basin and created the so-called Congo Free State as his own personal property. By promising the other European powers that he would maintain this central region free of taxes on trade and by claiming he was only interested in “philanthropy,” he was able to convince them to agree to his seizure of the region.

Leopold’s so-called philanthropy — the usual European claptrap about civilizational uplift and economic development — turned out to be the imposition of slave labor, genocidal work conditions, the mutilation of the African Congolese people, and the imposition of a colonial administration comprised entirely of European foreigners, all in the interests of extracting ivory, rubber, and the mineral wealth that the Western world was increasingly coming to rely upon for its technical advances.

Between the forced labor, torture, and ouright murder committed by the colonial administration, as many as fully one half the African population of the Congo Free State may have been killed by Leopold between 1885 and 1908. Failure to meet Leopold’s rubber quotas was an offense punishable by death. The Force Publique, the king’s enforcement army, were required to present the hands of the dead to prove they’d carried out their gruesome task. Failure to meet the quotas could, then, be paid in part in hands; some villages were encouraged to attack others to make up their impossible quotas in the only payment they could gather: human limbs.

This was the punishment of the Congolese for living in one of the richest regions in the world.

Africa’s World War

Between 1996 and 2003, Africa, and more particularly the Congo, which began the war as Zaire but which would emerge as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, were embroiled in a whirlpool of violence, torment, genocide, and blood. The forces unleashed by the Rwandan genocide in 1994 swept through the Congo and continue to be felt in central Africa to this day. These forces — the imposition of European concepts of race and caste, the construction of arbitrary borders in a land that had never known them, the creation by colonial administrations of nationalities in a world of families, tribes, and ethnic groups — were the legacy of the 19th century occupation of Africa. The war was fought by and continues to be fought by Africans in Africa, but it is a war of European creation.

The entire history of the Rwandan genocide is beyond the scope of this article, but it will suffice to establish that the ethnic divisions between Hutus and Tutsis was a thoroughly artificial one established by Belgian race scientists and administrators. Who was a Tutsi? Anyone, during the colonial census, who owned more than ten cows or who had a longer thin nose, high cheekbones, and were over six feet in height. This manufactured ethnic conflict exploded into what was then Zaire.

The Congo had struggled for half a century by then, attempting to wrest its sovereignty from Europe and the U.S. By the 1950s, the people of the Belgian Congo (now a part of the state of Belgium) were demanding their independence and sovereignty. In 1960, the Belgian Congo won its independence, but the state structures were not yet stable.

The Republic of Congo, the state that resulted from the Belgian withdrawal, was immediately riven by civil war. This was the so-called Congo Crisis. The two poles of power in the republic were Patrice Lumumba, the Marxist-Leninist African nationalist on the left and the president, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, on the right. Belgian-backed secessionists rose up in the periphery, and Patrice Lumumba called on Soviet aid. The Congo Crisis thus became a proxy war between the USSR and the U.S. Empire. Lumumba was assassinated by Belgian contractors — likely with assistance by MI6 and the CIA. The murder was part of a coup carried out by the republic’s Chief of Staff of the army, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a U.S. puppet.

With the death of Lumumba and the consolidation of power around Mobutu, the Republic of Congo was renamed Zaire. It received huge aid packages — military, diplomatic, and economic — from the United States Empire and its NATO lackeys France and Belgium, to establish a Congolese bulwark against Communism in Francophone Africa. He was close to the apartheid South African leaders and the zionists in Palestine.

Mobutu ruled the Congo as a dictator from 1965 until 1998. However, his eccentricities eventually caused him to fall out of favor with the Clinton regime. The west viewed Paul Kagame, the incoming president of Rwanda, as a more stable and desirable comprador. When the Rwandan crisis spilled over into the Congo Basin, Mobutu was finally deposed by the nationalist revolutionary forces of Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Although Kabila was an authentic revolutionary, he was overly dependent on support from Rwanda and Uganda, who wanted to use him to fulfill their own interests. After becoming president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and realigning the country with principles of redistribution, his former backers in Rwanda and Uganda turned on him and began sponsoring new rebel movements in the eastern regions of the Congo.

In 2001, Kabila himself was shot and killed by agents of the Rwandan government, with the approval of, you guessed it, good old Uncle Sam.

Since that date, the DRC has been embroiled in regional conflict with Rwanda and Uganda. Mineral wealth in the country’s east has been stolen by the post-genocide Rwanda government. Although the West sanctimoniously declared the end of the genocide, millions of people have perished in the subsequent regional wars, revenge killings and ethnic cleansing. Violence has wracked this region not despite it being one of the richest areas in raw material, but precisely because of it. The rapacious world-capitalists of the West set the stage, then backed away and raised their hands. “If they want to kill each other over the proceeds,” they slyly say, “that’s on them. Nothing we can do about it.” At the same time, enormous sums of money are turned over to those warlords who can command these minerals for sale on the international market.

Not much has changed since the Belgians accepted disembodied hands instead of rubber to match their quotas.

Coltan

Between 1999 and 2001, Rwanda’s officially recorded coltan production increased tenfold, from 147 tons to 1,300 tons. “Part of the increase in production is due to the opening of new mines,” said a report issued by the South African Institute for Security Studies in 2005. “However,” it went on, “the increase is primarily due to the fraudulent re-export of coltan of Congolese origin.” In 2014, that number was 2,718 tons of ore.

Coltan is short for columbite-tantalite. In appearance it is a dull silver that looks almost like coal. After refining, however, coltan is transformed into a heat-resistant powder known as metallic tantalum. This tantalum powder has unique uses in electrical components: the tantalum electrolytic capacitor. Tantalum capacitors have very high capacitance per volume, meaning they are highly efficient and can be produced at low weights. They were first developed in 1930 and used for the military.

Light-weight electronics are possible because of the tantalum capacitor. Every cell phone and laptop on the market today makes use of tantalum. Almost all computers, in fact, make use of tantalum capacitors, and so do most consumer electronics. Tantalum is in everything.

The conditions under which coltan is mined are more horrific still than the history of colonization might suggest. Mining coltan is hazardous. The diggers and washers used to break the coltan out of the earth and prepare it are primarily Congolese children. In fact, in 2019 an ENACT Africa report found that over 40,000 children aged fourteen and younger are employed by coltan mines in the Congo. These mines are charmingly referred to as “artisanal” because all of the hard labor is done by human beings, rather than machines.

From an International Peace Information Service report in 2020: “In Eastern Congo, a couple, typically parents sustaining a household of six members, working full-time in artisanal mining, can earn around U.S. $202 per month” but would need $243 to cover their expenditures. Coltan sells for roughly $50 per pound. A good coltan miner can produce 2.2 pounds of coltan per day. The typical family reported in the IPIS report would be paid around $6.70 a day — if the two parents each produce 2.2 pounds of coltan during the day and we assume the cost is $50 per pound, they produce $220 in a day but are paid less than one tenth of that value.

There’s an infinitesimally small amount of coltan in a single phone — 40 milligrams, or 0.00009 pounds of the stuff. That’s a half a cent of coltan. For that mere half cent, however, the miner is paid only a tiny fraction. If the miner was paid the value of the coltan, it would cost thirty times what it does; it would make these 40 milligrams of coltan worth not half a cent, but 15 cents. Again, this seems like nothing — until you consider that global smartphone sales in 2022 were roughly 1.4 billion phones. That’s $210,000,000 being sucked out of the Congo, away from the miners who are making it every year just on cellphones alone.

Computers that are used as servers generally have nearly .006 pounds of tantalum in their capacitors. That’s 3 cents of tantalum; again, if the miners in the Congo made in wages what they produced in coltan, that would amount to $9 per machine. Over the 12.15 million server units shipped in 2020, that amounts to $109,350,000 stolen from the Congolese miners and their families.

Other reports indicate that coltan miners can be paid less than $2 per day.

This is true of every electronics product sold in the world today. The money that would go to the coltan mining regions of the world is instead going into the pockets of the wealthy owners and officers of the big mining firms and electronics companies. Why is the Congo poor? Because the West is stealing her wealth, both in the form of stolen wages, and in the youth who are worked to death in the coltan pits of the Eastern Congo.

The Conditions of the Coltan Miners

The eastern regions of the Congo are more or less controlled by mercenaries from Rwanda. The mineral wealth of the DRC is forcibly extracted, often literally at gunpoint, and sent over the border to be exported as Rwandan coltan. A 2022 article by researcher Oluwole Ojewale reports that, as one might expect, that there is a link “between coltan exploitation and large-scale environmental degradation, human rights abuses, violence and death.” This includes “violation of environmental laws, child labour on mining sites, and complicity of mining companies in the abuses of populations at risk.”

At the town of Mwenga in Shabunda, in September of 2020, fifty miners died at the mines. Holes dug by these artisanal miners are rarely covered after mining activities have ceased, leaving scars and wounds in the land that ooze tailings, fill with water, leech into the groundwater. Landslides trap miners underground. When the miners attempt to band together to improve their conditions, as they did in forming the cooperative Cooperamma, the corporations have simply engaged in what amounts to open war that harkens back to the Coal Wars of the late 19th and early 20th century U.S. history.

Child miners face daily exposure to radon, which causes lung cancer. The haphazard mineral certification schemes designed to at least give the appearance that child-miners are not used in coltan mining are often subverted. In the Eastern Congo, where the ore is exported in secret, they are often useless and unenforceable. The children who work in the mines, forced either by economic circumstances or outright threats, are as young as six.

Siddharth Kara, a researcher at Harvard’s school of public health, says “You have to imagine walking around some of these mining areas and dialing back our clock centuries… People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain.” And the stuff is dangerous. “Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe — and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touching and breathing it day in and day out. Young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust.” 

He warns that there is “complete cross-contamination between industrial excavator-derived cobalt and cobalt dug by women and children with their bare hands… Industrial mines, almost all of them, have artisanal miners working, digging in and around them, feeding cobalt into the formal supply chain.”

His conclusion? “The bottom of the supply chain, where almost all the world’s cobalt is coming from, is a horror show.”

“Imagine an entire population of people who cannot survive without scrounging in hazardous conditions for a dollar or two a day. There is no alternative there. The mines have taken over everything. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced because their villages were just bulldozed over to make place for large mining concessions. So you have people with no alternative, no other source of income, no livelihood. Now, add to that the menace in many cases of armed forces pressuring people to dig, parents having to make a painful decision, ‘Do I send my child to school or do we eat today?’ And if they choose the latter, that means bringing all their kids into these toxic pits to dig just to earn that fifty extra cents or a dollar a day, that could mean the difference between eating or not. So, in the 21st century, this is modern-day slavery. It’s not chattel slavery from the 18th century where you can buy and trade people and own title over a person like property. But the level of degradation, the level of exploitation is on par with old-world slavery.”

Who’s Buying?

There are several associations of big businesses that drive coltan exploitation. One of these, for instance, is called Cobalt for Development, and was founded by BMW Group, BASF, Samsung SDI, and Samsung Electronics. Volkswagen joined this association in 2020. Tesla joined Glencore and other corporations in the Fair Cobalt Alliance. These associations are semi-NGOs, designed to whitewash the conditions of cobalt mining in the Congo, much as the Free Trade Coffee movement did to whitewash and hide the brutal exploitation of coffee harvesters in Brazil during the 1990s.

Cobalt is a key part of the drive for “green” energy; the lust for cheap transistors underlies U.S. political incentives like the so-called Green New Deal. The fact of the matter is that, as long as capitalism reigns over the Congo and imperialism reigns over the face of Africa, green technology is soaked in the hot, red blood of Congolese children.

What Is To Be Done?

The partition of Africa was not a natural state-building process. It was imposed from the outside by the colonial powers. These borders cut across ethnic, cultural, and family lines. They have created states that cannot be self-sufficient, so they are forced to rely on their imperial patrons. This is the basis of Pan-Africanism — the desire to unite the political forces of Africa in order to establish an internal economy, internal markets, and internal development. This is a necessary prerequisite to the continent throwing off the shackles of the imperial powers, for without these things no African state will be able to resist the money, promises, and eventually the arms, of the West.

Here, in the heart of the world-imperialist beast, the country to which all that cheap coltan is flowing, we must encourage solidarity with our African siblings. We must oppose our own government and its corporations at every turn, wherever we can. We must demand, through direct action and public pressure, legislation that makes it difficult for the corporations profiting off of the blood of children. And we must never forget that the very foundations of our world are mired in the blood of the exploited — not only here within the empire, but abroad in the Global South.

In subject and colonized countries, wars of national liberation sometimes take the form of semi-revolutionary or revolutionary military seizures of power. The putative “democratic” elements in countries deeply compromised by neo-colonial hegemony, like those of Niger, are a mere cover for imperialist control. National militaries, however, generally have long traditions of national pride; it is sometimes from the oppressed-national military tradition that national liberation finds its most fertile soil.

Upon receiving news of the coup, Macron decried it as, “completely illegitimate and profoundly dangerous for the Nigeriens, Niger and the whole region.” However, Macron, as the official representative of French imperialism, could never admit to the simple fact  that the Council’s seizure is not dangerous to Nigeriens, Niger, or the region; it’s dangerous to France and Western interests.

Niger has been a cornerstone of French imperial policy in Africa since the 19th century. It straddles the Sahel and Sahara regions, and shares an immense land border with Nigeria to the south. Niger has served as the military staging ground for French excursions into neighboring regions, what are now Chad and Mali, since the old imperial powers crassly divided Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884. Although Niger was granted nominal independence from France in 1960, there have been few years when French compradors, those among the neo-colonial ruling class who help siphon-off the wealth of the national economy and ship it to Paris, were not in charge.

Today, Niger supplies 25% of the uranium used in the EU’s nuclear power generation. 35% of the uranium for France’s nuclear reactors comes from Niger. Meanwhile, only 14% of Niger’s population of 25.25 million have reasonable access to electricity, while 62% have no access whatsoever. Hundreds of thousands of Nigeriens live exposed to radioactive waste leftover from the mining process. France has never displayed any alarm over the radioactive tailings its empire leaves behind. The French “alarm” over this coup is blatantly cynical and self-interested, not motivated by genuine concern for the Nigeriens, for whom the French government has never before displayed an ounce of sympathy. More accurately, France fears the loss of modern comforts, which are only possible due to its exploitation of Africa’s natural resources. The French may soon experience the rolling blackouts and brownouts that they’ve forced on Nigeriens for decades.

Perhaps even more alarming to France than the loss of access to resources is the potential disruption to its currency hegemony over West Africa. Mohamed Bazoum, the deposed president, had been a pliant and steady leader of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA), which controls the West African Franc. Forcing its former colonies to use a currency pegged to the Euro locks African nations into accepting trade deals that any honest person would simply call theft. Recently, African radicals such as Julius Malema, President of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in South Africa, have proposed creating a Pan-African currency backed by Africa’s natural resources. The prospect of this currency terrifies the empire. Recently leaked emails of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton of the U.S. Empire revealed NATO killed Gaddafi in part to stop the formation of a Pan-African gold-backed currency like the one proposed by Malema. The U.S. and its NATO allies are willing to go to great lengths to stop a Pan-African union.

Significantly, this coup also symbolizes Niger’s rejection of American and French influence on its military affairs, and a rejection of the NATO client, Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) dominance over the region. Western mouthpieces such as Anthony Blinken, the American Secretary of State, have lamented the deterioration of the “security situation” in Niger, but his words sound hollow. After all, General Tchiani directly cited French and American ineptitude in conflicts with Islamic militants as one of the reasons for the coup in the first place!

The real concern for France and America is that Niger will follow Mali and Burkina Faso’s example: expel Western troops from its borders and turn to Russia’s Wagner Group for military assistance. Symbolically, the coup was carried out when Bazoum declined to personally attend the Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg. After the coup, there were some pro-Russia demonstrations in the Nigerien capital, Niamey, and Wagner Group’s leader Prigozhin lauded the coup’s success. The loss of Niger as a Western client would be devastating for American military power in West Africa. America’s six bases in Niger, the most it has in a single African country, are strategically positioned to secure its share of uranium, and serve as the command hub for all American operations across Western Africa.

In a further act of hypocrisy, western powers also criticized the deleterious socio-economic impact that the coup could have on Niger, but supported the fierce sanctions that their puppet ECOWAS immediately imposed against the country. France, America, and ECOWAS are so panic stricken over their loss of control (and of uranium) that they are threatening a military intervention if Bazoum is not restored to power within a week. Meanwhile, Mali and Burkina Faso have pledged to militarily support Niger in the event of an intervention against the new government.

Sanctions and threat of military intervention, against an already impoverished and exploited nation, must be unequivocally condemned. Western pontification about Niger’s security and socioeconomic situation should be exposed as the sardonic ruse it is. Have no illusions — The United States Empire, and its partner, France, only care about Niger insofar as they can continue to exploit it. The people of Niger, all victims of French colonialism, and colonized people the world over, must be free to overthrow their oppressors, claim their national wealth, and seek national development on their own terms.

At the present time, the press is conducting a campaign against the Chinese; it is howling about the savage yellow race and its hostility towards civilisation…. Journalists who crawl on their bellies before the government and the money-bags are straining every nerve to rouse the hatred of the people against China.

The President of France, Emanuel Macron, denounced the “new imperialism” of China and the U.S. Empire in an address during the first official visit of a French head of state to Vanuatu on Thursday, July 27. Macron’s comments referred to the emerging cold war between the People’s Republic of China and the United States-led Western world-imperialist axis.

What imperialism could the president of the colonialist Republic of France possibly denounce?

France conquered vast swathes of North America and several Caribbean islands. France’s “first” colonial empire receded after a series of humiliating defeats in 18th-century inter-colonialist wars. Its remaining possessions were rocked by the anti-colonial legislation of the French revolutionary Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and the anti-colonial rebellion of Toussaint L’Ouverture on the island of Saint-Domingue — what is now Haiti —only for the “second” empire to resurge in the 19th century, with the conquest of most of the Maghreb, much of west and north-central Africa, Madagascar, southeast Asia, and — not coincidentally — many Pacific islands.

At its height, France’s empire was the world’s second-largest, trailing Britain.

As France’s empire fell apart in the decades following the Second World War, it shifted from “classic,” direct, colonialism to neocolonialism, recolonizing newly independent countries indirectly through finance. During the Cold War, France orchestrated assassinations and coups to overthrow several anti-colonial leaders whose programs of independent economic development, self-reliance, and political nonalignment threatened French hegemony.

For example, in 1987 the “republican” French government sponsored a coup d’etat of the former French colony of Burkina Faso to overthrow and murder Thomas Sankara, a Marxist and Pan-Africanist who led his country toward self-reliance as its first president.

Today, fourteen African countries use either the West African franc or Central African franc, currencies pegged to the euro — keeping these countries dependent on the European Central Bank and hyper-exploited by the European Union.

France has never paid reparations to its former colonies. On the contrary, it has extracted colonial “debts.” Haiti, for example, was forced to pay France as much as $30 billion in “exchange” for its freedom.

France’s last formal colonies, including several Caribbean and Pacific islands, were folded into so-called “Overseas France,” ruled from Paris with limited autonomy. Today, “Overseas France” has a combined population of nearly three million people.

Vanuatu, formerly known as the “New Hebrides,” won independence from Britain and France in 1980. France doggedly refused to grant independence to the nearby Pacific islands of so-called “New Caledonia,” despite the rise of an enduring popular independence movement; today, New Caledonia remains a French overseas territory. France would repeatedly rebuke Vanuatu for supporting New Caledonia’s independence struggle throughout the 1980’s.

Macron, like all imperialist politicians, is blatantly fork-tongued. He proudly leads one the very “new imperialist” powers he hypocritically denounces.

The French president isn’t serious about countering imperialism; he is its agent. His statements should be taken for what they are: the capering of a U.S. running-dog dancing to the tune of the organ grinder in Washington. What tune? The Biden regime has been fomenting war fever and building support for hawkish anti-Chinese policies since he took office. As the Eurozone finds itself yoked ever more inexorably to the U.S. Empire — one of the results of the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine — its contemptuous little imperialists fall in line behind their leader. Macron isn’t complaining about a “new imperialism,” he’s proposing it.

France will never willingly relinquish its colonies. Like other humiliated junior-partners in U.S.-led Western imperialism, the French capitalists are threatened by China’s meteoric rise and the world’s emerging multipolarity. Two of France’s neocolonies — Burkina Faso and Mali — already seek to extricate themselves from French control, and are bettering their relations with the West’s enemy, Russia.

Despite Macron’s efforts, history will keep marching all the same. Imperialism will continue to suffer interminable crises and decline. South–South cooperation will only strengthen. And in time, through struggle and solidarity, the wretched of the Earth will overcome their oppressors and reclaim their freedom.

The People’s Republic of China has once again reaffirmed its solidarity with the peoples of Africa through its continued commitment to mutual cooperation with 53 African countries and the African Union.

On August 18, Wang Yi, State Councilor and Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, addressed a virtual conference of the Forum on China–Africa Coordination (FOCAC), attended by African and Chinese leaders. FM Wang reflected on the progress made in recent years through FOCAC towards shared sustainable development goals, achieving peace and stability, facilitating cultural and academic exchange, ameliorating food crises, and ending the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa, and outlined the Communist Party of China’s vision for “building a China–Africa community with a shared future in the new era.”

FOCAC is the main forum through which China–Africa political, economic, technological, and other multilateral cooperation is facilitated. FOCAC was founded in October 2000, following years of diplomatic coordination efforts between members of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to today’s African Union, and the People’s Republic of China. Last month’s meeting concerned the implementation of follow-up actions of the 8th Ministerial Conference of FOCAC, held in November 2021.

Today, all African countries, with one exception, plus the African Union Commission (the central governing body of the African Union) are members of FOCAC.

The one exception is the Kingdom of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, currently ruled by Africa’s last absolute monarchy. The reactionary, autocratic monarchy has made the country heavily dependent on Taiwan for capital investments and foreign aid; in order to maintain its close ties with Taiwan, Eswatini maintains no diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, and does not recognize the PRC as a legitimate state. In recent years, the struggle of the Swazi people for democracy has grown into a rising revolutionary movement, led in part by the Communist Party of Swaziland, that is threatening to overthrow the autocracy and establish a republic. The People’s Republic of China has been accused by the Taiwanese government and the Western imperialist press of supporting revolutionary-democratic forces in Swaziland, but this is highly unlikely, given the CPC’s commitment to non-interventionist international policy. However, the Communist Party of Swaziland has expressed solidarity with China in the face of heightened U.S. imperialist provocations in Taiwan.

A Vision of China–Africa Cooperation for the “New Era”

At the 2021 FOCAC 8th Ministerial Conference, representatives of the 53 African member countries, the African Union Commission, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) released their joint plan for “mid- to long-term cooperation,” the China–Africa Cooperative Vision 2035. The document ties together the PRC’s own “Vision 2035,” the African Union’s “2063 Agenda,” and the United Nations “Agenda 2030” Sustainable Development Goals. In addition to outlining a plan for multilateral China–Africa fair trade through China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), and for “promoting a new development paradigm featuring transformation and growth to advance industries in China and Africa,” the China–Africa Cooperative Vision 2035 also makes concrete, practical commitments to “developing a new green growth model for common eco-development,” to sharing technological and medical resources, and to “creating a new chapter in people-to-people exchanges for common cultural prosperity in China and Africa.”

Toward these shared aims, at the FOCAC 8th Ministerial Conference, PRC President Xi Jinping announced the launch of nine programs:

1. A medical program. China will donate 600 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to Africa and send 1,500 Chinese medical personnel.
2. A poverty reduction and agricultural development program. China will set up agrotechnology centers across Africa, staffed by 500 Chinese agricultural experts.
3. A trade promotion program. China will work with the African Continental Free Trade Area to expand the BRI and will broadly remove tariffs for underdeveloped countries.
4. An investment promotion program. The Chinese government will encourage businesses to invest in Africa towards African industrialization goals.
5. A digital innovation program. China and Africa will expand cooperation in technological development and promote African businesses through e-commerce.
6. A green development program. China will support eco-development initiatives in Africa, such as the African Union’s “Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel” initiative, which, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, aims to reverse land degradation and desertification, improve food security and livelihoods for the populations of more than 20 Sahelian countries, and contribute to climate change mitigation.
7. A capacity building program. China will help build and upgrade 10 schools in Africa, provide training to 10,000 African professionals, launch vocational programs for African students, and open 800,000 jobs in African countries.
8. A cultural and people-to-people exchange program. China will promote tourism to and from Africa, hold film festivals, and host China–Africa women’s and youth forums.
9. A peace and security program. China will provide military assistance to the African Union in ongoing efforts to combat terrorism across the African continent.

Speaking at the August 2022 Coordinators’ Meeting on the Implementation of Follow-up Actions, 6 months after the FOCAC 8th Ministerial Conference, PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi said,

We are pleased to see that, despite the evolving international situation, rising global challenges and repeated external disturbances, China and Africa have stayed our course in enhancing solidarity and focusing on cooperation. We have made good progress in implementing the outcomes of the conference…

In the face of the various forms of hegemonic and bullying practices, China and Africa have stood with each other shoulder to shoulder. China appreciates the firm commitment of African countries to the one-China principle and your strong support for China’s efforts to safeguard sovereignty, security and territorial integrity. China has also spoken up for our African brothers at the UN and other multilateral settings, upholding justice and opposing unwarranted interference and unilateral sanctions against Africa. In solidarity and coordination, China and Africa have become a pillar force in defending the legitimate rights and interests of developing countries, upholding the purposes of the UN Charter, and advocating multilateralism and international fairness and justice.

The “hegemonic and bullying practices” condemned by FM Wang are a reference to the policies of the Western imperialist powers, led by the United States of America, and can be summed up in one word: Neo-colonialism.

South–South Cooperation versus Neo-Colonialism

FM Wang also promised that China would waive outstanding debts owed by 17 African countries since 2021. The debts arose from 23 interest-free loans issued through China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The promise to waive these loans means that the 17 African countries will not be expected to repay China for its developmental aid.

China has been harshly criticized in the Western press and by Western politicians and economists for its interest-free loans to Africa; some have characterized these loans as “debt-traps,” meant to render Africa dependent on China in the long-term.

The truth, however, is that most African countries are severely indebted not to the People’s Republic of China, but to Western imperialist countries, such as the U.S. and France. For several decades, Western powers have used global financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, to issue predatory loans, with extremely high interest rates, knowing full-well that the loans won’t be repaid and that the borrowing countries will only become further indebted, while remaining badly underdeveloped and impoverished. Moreover, the imperialist loans always come with strings attached — conditions forced on the borrowing countries. These conditions are designed to hinder economic development, worsen wealth inequality, eliminate protections for workers and entrench modern slavery, facilitate unequal trade, and cheaply strip borrowing countries of their natural resources — all for the benefit of the highly-developed imperialist countries. For instance, IMF loans frequently require the governments of borrowing countries to cut public spending (funding for transport, education, healthcare, etc.), privatize their natural resources, and allow Western companies to freely buy up their land and to establish mines, plantations, and factories that pay dollar-per-day wages or use slave-labor. In the process, the world’s least developed regions, including most of Africa, have suffered ecological devastation, causing widespread droughts, famines, and desertification.

This process, by which the imperialist powers keep underdeveloped countries and regions indebted, dependent, and indirectly controlled, is known as neo-colonialism.

Kwame Nkrumah, the Marxist-Leninist and pan-Africanist revolutionary, political leader, and theoretician, who served as the first President of Ghana and led his country’s struggle for independence against Britain, characterized neo-colonialism as “imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage.” According to Nkrumah, in the introduction to his authoritative 1965 book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism,

The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.

Neo-colonialism developed in the decades following the end of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations (1945), during the wave of decolonization that spread across Africa in the 1950s and ‘60s, when most African countries gained their independence from the colonial empires of Europe. Neo-colonialism is an outgrowth of capitalist imperialism, the contemporary world-system, in which a handful of advanced capitalist countries use their superior economic and military might to conquer and exploit colonies, and to bring less developed, economically dependent countries into their spheres of influence. Capitalism grew out of modern colonialism, and so did capitalist imperialism. From the mid-1400s to the late-1800s, the West-European colonial empires exploited Africa as a source of cheap slave-labor for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, developing their European mother countries and their “New World” settler colonies, while leaving Africa in a pre-feudal, slavery-based stage of development. But as capitalism developed in Europe, the old, indirect mode of exploitation was no longer sufficient to continue expanding and accumulating wealth. During the 1880s, the West-European colonial empires began a campaign called the “Scramble for Africa,” directly conquering every pre-colonial African state, with the exception of the Ethiopian Empire, amounting to 90% of the continent’s landmass. This “Scramble for Africa” was at the heart of the emerging world-system of capitalist imperialism. By the end of the 19th Century, the competing capitalist empires of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States of America had divided up most of the rest of the world into directly ruled colonies and indirectly ruled client-states. This competition resulted in a series of devastating inter-imperialist wars, the largest of which were the First and Second World Wars.

Following the Second World War, however, the U.S. Empire emerged as the unrivaled hegemon, beginning an era of unipolar imperialism that is only now, in the 21st Century, coming to a violent end. With the decolonization of most of the world by the 1970s, the imperialist powers shifted from direct control of their former colonies to indirect control through financial institutions. This is the situation suffered by most African countries, as well as most nominally independent, underdeveloped countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Pacific, and southeast Asia.

In stark contrast to the “hegemonic and bullying practices” of the Western imperialist powers and their global financial institutions, the People’s Republic of China issues interest-free loans, meaning that borrowing countries can’t be debt-trapped by high interest rates, and issues loans on a mutual basis, without forcing borrowing countries to bend to conditions imposed by a foreign power. The PRC also frequently waives debts owed by African countries that are unable to repay Chinese loans. FM Wang’s promise to waive the interest-free loan debts owed by 17 African countries to China is not out of the ordinary for the People’s Republic of China; the promise is a typical expression of the Communist Party of China’s cooperative internationalism.

It is true that China, as a politically united and fully sovereign country that has a rapidly developing economy, augmented by some advanced-capitalist centers in its major cities, and maintains a powerful military, is more powerful than the African Union. The African Union, by contrast, has not yet achieved complete political unification, and its member states have not yet achieved true sovereignty, because they remain dominated by the West through neo-colonialism. Moreover, the whole African continent, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, has inherited a far more brutal legacy of colonialism than East Asia, and therefore must overcome far worse underdevelopment. It is also true that, especially since the 2010s, the PRC has taken on a leadership role in global development. However, in contrast to the Western powers, it is clear that the goal of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is not to use its economic and military power to colonize, exploit, underdevelop, and impoverish Africa.

It is also true that there will inevitably arise conflicts between Chinese capital and African labor. Capital and labor are always at odds; we Marxists call this contradiction. However, in those cases where open conflict has arisen from the contradiction between African labor and Chinese capital, the CPC has generally sided with African labor, punishing Chinese businesses that fail to uphold their promises. The contradiction between Chinese capital and African labor will take the form of struggle by the African proletariat against Chinese bosses, and we should always stand in solidarity with the proletariat. But the principal contradiction acting upon the African continent is the contradiction between Africa and Western imperialism.

Finally, it is true that the CPC committed grave injustices during the Cold War, such as invading Vietnam in 1979 and supporting the mujahidin in Afghanistan in the 1980s. These actions stemmed from the Sino-Soviet Split, in which relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China deteriorated and turned hostile. The CPC falsely characterized the Soviet Union as “social imperialist” and the “main enemy” of the world’s revolutions; this was the CPC’s justification for entering into an alliance with the U.S. Empire — against the Soviet Union — during the Cold War. During the Cold War, the PRC actively undermined Soviet-backed revolutions in some Third World countries by providing support to counter-revolutionaries. In siding with the U.S. Empire against the Soviet Union, and by inventing and propagating the fiction of “Soviet social imperialism,” the CPC entered into an alliance with actual imperialism, and did immeasurable harm to liberation movements and socialist revolutions across the Third World.

However, since the end of the Cold War, the Communist Party of China has pursued an international policy guided by its Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, enshrined in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China: (1) mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, (2) mutual non-aggression, (3) mutual non-interference in internal affairs, (4) equality and mutual benefit, and (5) peaceful coexistence. In accordance with these constitutional principles, the CPC has pursued what it calls “South–South cooperation” — a reference to the “Global South,” a broad catch-all for most of the world’s underdeveloped and developing countries.

In sum, the nature of China–Africa cooperation is not neo-colonialism, but mutual development through internationalist South–South cooperation.

The Basis of China–Africa Solidarity

South–South cooperation, as pursued by the People’s Republic of China and partnered countries and intergovernmental bodies through the Belt and Road Initiative, has the effect of weakening the influence of the Western imperialist powers over Global South countries and the world’s markets. This stands to benefit both China and Africa.

The founding mission of the Organization of African Unity, now carried forward by the African Union, was to liberate the African continent from colonialism and to eliminate all surviving vestiges of colonial rule. Pan-Africanists sought to develop a politically united, self-reliant, and prosperous Africa, and to thereby achieve true political and economic independence from the Western imperialist powers that had colonized, exploited, and violently oppressed Africa for centuries. The OAU also sought to end the regimes of white-colonizer minority-rule that then remained in some African countries, such as South Africa and Zimbabwe. Towards these aims, the member-states of the OAU, and now the African Union, have fostered closer cooperation on Africa’s economic development, towards the goals of African self-sufficiency, peace, the elimination of poverty, and the achievement of ecologically sustainable prosperity. Especially during the 1990s, the OAU sought closer cooperation with China. By fostering internationalist China–Africa cooperation, pan-Africanists hoped to free the continent from its dependence on the financial institutions of Western imperialism, and to thereby liberate Africa, once and for all, from neo-colonialism.

The African Union continues to advance the pan-Africanist vision of a sovereign, self-reliant, democratic, pluralistic, and truly United Africa, and therefore objectively represents a progressive force, with immense revolutionary potential. For it is only through pan-African unity that the African continent can self-emancipate, at last throwing off the shackles of imperialism, carry forward sustainable economic development towards the eradication of poverty, secure the right to self-determination for all the indigenous peoples of Africa, repair Africa’s ecology, eliminate war across the continent, and establish a truly democratic African society. It is only by connecting and developing African industry and trade that the continent can break free of its imperialist chains. All the indigenous peoples of Africa have a shared destiny, not because of any “biological” features, but because of a shared history of oppression and a shared future of liberation.

Communists on every continent owe their solidarity to the pan-African struggle and the struggle of all imperialized peoples against neo-colonialism. 

At the same time, South–South cooperation, including China–Africa cooperation, is an integral aspect of the CPC’s mission to develop an advanced socialist economy in China, in accordance with the strategy of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. These efforts have become increasingly unified under the Belt and Road Initiative. The 2018 Beijing Declaration, unanimously adopted by the member-states of FOCAC, explicitly centers the Belt and Road Initiative in the future of China–Africa cooperation.

This process has been termed “alter-globalization” by some economists. In actuality, it is nothing more or less than the inevitable decay of unipolar world imperialism, led by the United States of America, giving way to the formation of a multipolar world. As emerging imperialist powers like the Russian Federation and the monarchies of the Arab Gulf increasingly break with and challenge American hegemony, the power of the American imperialist axis will decline, and world imperialism will again become fractured by inter-imperialist competition and war. The post-Cold War order is finally coming to an end, one crisis at a time.

Capitalist imperialism is now on its last leg. New imperialist powers will emerge, but the whole capitalist-imperialist world-system is already crumbling, and its final demise is inevitable. For five centuries, the development, expansion, and accumulation of capital has depended on the opening of new markets through the conquest of new territories, the establishment of new colonies, and the most brutal exploitation of billions of colonially oppressed people.

But we live in a rapidly decolonizing world. The colonial and formerly colonial peoples of the world are pursuing independence and sovereignty through self-reliance; self-reliance, through development; development, through cooperation — this time, on a mutual and internationalist, rather than an unequal and imperialist, basis. Africa is marching towards unification, and united, will never again be conquered or enslaved. Former strongholds of American imperialism across Asia, Africa, and even Europe are daily undermined by the ascendance of China and its Belt and Road Initiative. The oppressed of Latin America are rebelling against a century and more of Yankee imperialism. Even the U.S. Empire, the world-imperialist behemoth, is not safe: The oppressed of this country demonstrated in 2020 our preparedness to bring the enemy state to its knees. The oppressed masses of the U.S. Empire are consciously realizing that in order to secure our own liberation, we must fight for the liberation of the Third World.

The death knell of imperialism has been sounded. Without a world to carve up among themselves, without colonies to plunder, the capitalist empires will be drawn further into competition with each other, and the era of multipolarity, of inter-imperialist wars, will resume. From our historical vantage-point, we can confidently predict that the next inter-imperialist “World War” will be the last.

Death to imperialism!

Long live African unity!

Long live Chinese socialism!

Long live China–Africa cooperation, friendship, and solidarity!