Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

XI. THIS GREAT
HUMANITY HAS CRIED
"ENOUGH! 9 9
Parasitism is still the principal characteristic of
Euro-Amerikan society. Only now the crude parasitism of
the early settler conquest society has grown into and merged
its blood with the greater parasitism of world imperialism.
The imperialist oppressor nations of North
Amerika, Western Europe and Japan have in the post-
World War I1 years reached a mass standard of living unparalleled
in human history. These nations of the imperialist
metropolis are choked in an orgy of extravagance,
of fetishistic "consumerism," of industrial production
without limit. Even now, in the lengthening shadows of
imperialism's twilight, in the confusion of the U.S. Empire's
decline, the settler masses still can hardly believe that
their revels are drawing to an end.
It must be emphasized that Euro-Arnerikan society
is not self-supporting. The imperialist mythology is that
factories simply multiply themselves, that trains beget
airlines and mines beget computers. In other words, that
the enormous material wealth of the imperialist metropolis
is supposedly self-generated, and supposedly comes to
birth clean of blood.
The unprecedented rise in the wealth of the oppressor
nations is directly and solely based on the increased
immiseration of the oppressed nations on a global scale.
The looting and killing of early colonialism continue in a
more sophisticated and rationalized system of neocolonialism.
But continue they do. It was Karl Marx, a
century and a half ago, who first defined the accumulation
of world capital as rising out of an accumulation of world
proletarianization, oppression and misery.
"The greater the social wealth, the functioning of
capital, the extent-and energy of its growth, and therefore,
also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness
of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army..
.the more extensive, finally, the Lazarus-layers of the
working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater
is the official pauperism. This is the absolute general law
of capitalist accumulation ... It establishes an accumulation
of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of
capital. " (I)
Zaire, for example, is the richest mineralproducing
nation in the entire world, its great mines overshadowing
even such nations as Azania and Canada. The
Belgian, French, British and Euro-Amerikan imperialists
have taken literally billions of dollars in copper, diamonds,
cobalt and other minerals out of Zaire since the anticolonial
Lumumba government was destroyed in 1960-61.
This frenzy of looting has so infected the neo-colonial
Mobutu regime that the Belgians laughingly call their allies
a "kleptocracy. " In a typical little amusement during the
Winter of 1982, Zaire's President Mobutu and his entourage
of 93 wives, concubines, servants and bodyguards
spent $2 million visiting Disneyworld. His make-believe
government is perpetually bankrupt, unable to pay even its
phone bills, permanently indebted to Western banks. And
the Afrikan masses, how do they relate to this great
wealth? Real wages in Zaire have declined by 80% between
1960-1978. This is the source of the wealth. (2) In Zaire, as
in Ghana, Philippines, Mexico and elsewhere in the neocolonial
world, the bottom half live worse than they did
twenty years ago. For that matter, worse than they did five
centuries ago.
The majority of the world's population, the proletarian
and peasant masses of the neo-colonial Third
World, exist under conditions of increasing hunger and
landlessness, of increasing terror and dislocation. Millions
have died that Euro-Amerikans may walk on the moon;
people die of hunger and disease that Euro-Amerikans
may overeat. This is the bloody secret at the roots of imperialist
technological prosperity.
Just as unequal treaties, arrived at through invasion
and gunboat diplomacy, were common mechanisms
of global capital transfer for much of the 19th Century, so
today unequal trade in the imperialist world market effectively
strips and plunders the neo-colonial world. This is
well known, and we need only discuss it in a brief, general
way.
The amazing, post-World War I1 economic
recovery of the imperialist powers was not solely a process
of creation, but also a process of extraction and transfer.
Western Europe was refertilized and rebuilt in large part
with new capital extracted from the Third World, extracted
under a process of involuntarily tightening trade
terms. In the 1960s Sekou Toure of Guinea pointed out:
"In the course of the last ten years alone, the
prices of industrial goods in international trade have increased
by 24%, while the prices of raw materials have
fallen by 5%. In other words, the underdeveloped countries
exporting raw materials were, towards the end of the
fifties, purchasing one-third less industrial goods for a
determined quantity of raw materials, as compared with
133 ten years ago."