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.

Last week, left wing capitalists announced, through their decrepit mouthpiece Biden, that their lackeys were finally prepared to forgive a limited amount of student debt. Working people in the U.S. Empire have had predatory loans pushed on them by their own government and the capitalist class for decades, forcing them into impossible repayment contracts and perpetual debt peonage. Many have their loan repayments calculated so that they never repay the loan’s “principal,” instead forever on the hook for the growing interest payments. The plan unveiled by Biden would make $10,000 ($20,000 for those with Pell Grants) of student loan debt held by families making less than $250,000 and individuals making less than $125,000 forgivable by the government. This announcement comes after over a year of pressure from the public for the doddering and largely absent Biden administration to fulfill the promises made on the campaign trail.

The Biden Department of Education has canceled $32 billion in student loan debt since October of 2021. Biden’s lackeys, through their Department of Education, forgave the following debts:

• $7.3 billion to individuals who are now working as public servants;
• $5.8 billion in loans for disabled borrowers; and,
• $11.45 billion in loans for individuals who went to schools that defrauded students.

The new plan dwarfs the prior debt cancellation. It makes, by one estimate, $486.6 billion in debt eligible for loan forgiveness. In total, this brings the regime’s various cancellation and “forgiveness” programs to $518.6 billion. As of the first quarter of 2022, student loan debt stands at $1.75 trillion. Thus, the new plan brings the Biden administration’s debt cancellation or forgiveness to cover just over one fourth of all outstanding student loan debt.

At first, this would seem to go some way toward fulfilling the promise the jackal Biden and his cronies made to the debt-burdened working classes on the campaign trail. In his bid to gain control over the criminal U.S. settler-government, Biden promised full student loan relief — that is, the forgiveness of every penny of the $1.75 trillion owed to the federal government by those earning $125,000 a year or less. Even the reactionary AFL-CIO has been pushing Biden to forgive at least $50,000 in student debt — five times what his Dept. of Education is prepared to forgive.

The difference between the promise — $1.14 trillion dollars (the amount of debt owed by families making less than $97,000) and the $486.6 billion available for forgiveness under this new plan — is huge. We’re used to empty campaign promises by now. That’s the stock and trade of the Democrats, who have to lie to the working classes to whip votes for their dying party. (Republicans don’t need to lie about what they’ll do: they quite boldly proclaim their plans to cut social service programs, launch new wars, and reduce taxes on the wealthiest Americans). In essence, the Biden White House has provided yet another empty promise with their loan forgiveness scheme. Not only does the plan fail to live up to the lofty lies of the campaign trail, it doesn’t even live up to its own numbers. By the time anyone actually receives loan forgiveness, it will be nowhere near the order of $486.6 billion that media outlets are calculating. Why?

You have to apply.

None of the loan forgiveness is automatic. It doesn’t merely happen. That $486.6 billion that Biden is set to forgive is only potential forgiveness. Even if you qualify for debt forgiveness, if you don’t go through the steps the way the government wants you to and the channels the government has provided or pre-approved (and, as we will see, the government has been purposefully vague about how to do these things), you don’t get loan forgiveness.

This method of offering something and then requiring a series of difficult-to-follow steps and extra work to achieve the initial promise (we might call it “weeding people out”), is one that corporate advertisers have used for half a century. We’ve all seen “free” products that you need to send away for, fill out forms to get, or talk to someone on the phone to actually receive. In the same way that cable companies increase their rates and only decreases them again after a long, painful conversation with their representatives, the Biden financiers expect the extra work, the long and complicated processes that people will have to try multiple times, and the fact that people will have to affirmatively apply to greatly reduce the number of individuals that seek and are ultimately granted debt relief. That $486.6 billion dollar number doesn’t take any of this into account.

The window for applying for loan forgiveness is set to begin at some point in October of 2022. There is no set date yet. The loan repayment pause ends on December 31, 2022 and the window to apply for loan forgiveness will close on December 31, 2023. That is, if you do not successfully apply between October of this year and the end of next year, your loan will not be forgiven.

You have to be approved.

Being considered for forgiveness does not mean your loans will be forgiven. Right now, the only published criteria for the forgiveness program is that you, as an individual, have student debt owned by the federal government (it doesn’t apply if your debt was sold to a private collections agency), you have an individual income of $125,000 a year (or, if you’re married, a household income of less than $250,000 a year), and you file your application.

The state hasn’t made any other requirements public, but it has indicated that it will look at past years tax returns to ensure that the applicants really do make less than $125,000 or $250,000 a year. Although Biden and his lackeys have put it out that 43 million people are “eligible” for student loan forgiveness under this new plan, the Biden Department of Education has only pre-authorized 8 million people. That means, for the vast majority of the people Biden claims are eligible, we do not yet know whether they will be approved.

Your loan servicer probably doesn’t understand the way the plan works.

If you have student loan debt, you know you don’t repay the federal government directly. Instead, the government contracts a loan servicer to keep track of your debt, collect your payments, and call you at inopportune times. Policy changes can’t just percolate down from the Department of Education and flow to you directly. The servicers, the managerial middlemen who make their living by serving as the government’s hired leeches, need to enact Department policies, except right now they have no idea what those policies are, how they’ll be applied, or how to make them a reality. Every step of confusion runs to the benefit of Biden and his smirking capitalist handlers.

Servicers have an incentive to keep people on the hook. Student loan borrowers are often put into “suspended payment” plans and told they don’t have to start repayment for many years (so they can accrue interest for the lender) and are never told of the income-driven repayment plans that federal law requires these servicers to offer. Loan servicers often enroll borrowers in forgiveness plans that already exist knowing they won’t be eligible. In 2017, the servicer Navient was discovered to have collected $4 billion in incorrectly calculated rates.

Biden Never Intended to Forgive Student Loans

Behind President Biden’s vacant stare and his jackal grin, he is a creature of simple drives and interests. He holds the presidency by the grace of the class he serves, and he has served those class interests well. His extremely long career as a representative of the capitalist class has seen him not only support, but design some of the most repressive laws to make it through the U.S. Senate. Recall that, until 2005, federal student loans were subject to bankruptcy protections. Then-Senator Biden pushed for the so-called “Bankruptcy Abuse Protection and Consumer Protection Act” which made it almost impossible to discharge student loans under bankruptcy.

When he stood before the public and promised to forgive student loans in their entirety, he knew his handlers would never agree to any such thing. Student loans are a powerful tool in the arsenal of capitalist control. The price of tuition has increased exponentially as the logic of capitalism has gutted U.S. higher education and transformed it into an investment opportunity. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1980 the average cost to attend a four-year college full-time (including tuition, fees, room and board, and adjusted for present inflation) was $10,231 every year. As of 2019-20, that average has increased to $54,500.

The average student loan debt owed is $28,950 — more than even the most generous amount of forgiveness Biden is pretending to offer would cover. This loan could be refinanced – but the only way to do that is to give the debt over to a predatory private collections agency. The average household in the U.S. with student loan debt owes $58,957. This ballooning cost of education necessitates taking out loans. The government swept in to provide a financial market for unscrupulous loan servicing companies and capitalists fleece students coming and going: through hugely inflated costs, and through the unfair and impossible-to-repay rates of the loans they’re forced to take to compete in the increasingly narrow job market.

People with student loans have to work. They are forced to work for lower wages than they would otherwise accept. They have to work for longer, and may not be able to retire. This reinforces the power of the capitalists over the working class. Anything that makes labor weaker makes capital stronger.Biden did not ever intend this promise to be something he could fulfill. His handlers knew he needed “progressive” sounding campaign promises that would get fouled up in the details. The only reason that the Biden camp is now offering this hollowed-out loan forgiveness program is the November elections.

This Is A Scheme for Midterms

The Democratic Party is situated to lose badly in the November midterm elections. Biden’s slumbering administration has allowed COVID to surge again, has sent the economy on a roller-coaster, has permitted inflation to run riot, and has, just last week, promised to engage in the kind of economic policy that destroyed the U.S. economy in the 1970s — the “Volcker Shock.”

The Democrats represent the left wing of the capitalists. Since the 1930s, they have attempted to fuse the interests of the working classes, the petit-bourgeoisie, and labor unions with those of the big capitalists by dominating the working classes in a collaborationist party, submerging the real interests of the workers beneath the leadership of the left wing of capital. During the Nixon years, the Republicans surrendered the field when it comes to social issues and the Democrats have positioned themselves as the “progressives,” championing working class values in their speeches without ever following through on the real material change they promised, partly for fear that a communistic revolution might rise up inside U.S. borders. Since the U.S. destruction of the Soviet Union, however, the Democrats have seemed singularly uninterested in providing any relief to the working class. They have no more U.S.S.R.-financed revolution to worry about. Clinton and Obama both turned up their noses and turned up the heat on war and incarceration.

One of the ways the Democrats controlled the workers was to corrupt and undermine the labor movement. State-controlled or infiltrated labor unions integrated with Communist-led unions; the CIA worked to purge Communists from union organizing, the second “Red Scare” drove Communists out of the AFL-CIO, and CIA support for a mafia takeover in union organizing eventually corrupted almost all labor and industrial unions in the U.S. These captured, capitalist-friendly (what are called “business” unions by the I.W.W.) unions were tasked with representing the workers demands while ensuring those demands were never voiced too loudly and the workers remained shouting rather than striking.

Since Biden took office, outside groups have joined voices with the AFL-CIO to demand the administration take action. The ruling clique has become so removed from the everyday needs of the working people that even their pet unions have begun to clamor for the barest consideration.

As though finally waking up to the fact that the party has neglected to do anything noteworthy since the defeat of the reactionary Trump clique in 2020, Democrats have put on a blitz of electioneering. Democrats have war-baited like the best Republicans by flying repeatedly to Taiwan, in violation of agreements with the People’s Republic of China, hoping that the threat of looming war will convince voters (and, more importantly, bourgeois donors) to “stay the course.” This latest feeble noise from the Biden White House is part and parcel of a last-minute plan to bring scorned allies on board: the unions.We cannot allow the naked ambition of the Biden clique to fool us. We must reject these scraps, these illusory crumbs. We do not accept the little the capitalists give us. We must take what we are owed — as the man once said, “Our demands most moderate are: we only want the earth.”