Vol. 78/No. 21      June 2, 2014

More than 160 years ago, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the young founders of the modern working-class movement, who gave voice to its line of march, charted the birth of capitalism in Europe with unmatched insight and eloquence, as they lived through its heady expansion across the globe. Capital comes into the world, Marx wrote, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and filth.” The constant revolutionizing of the instruments of production that drives its never-ending search for profits is attained at the expense of the lives, limbs, and livelihoods of the class of propertyless laborers it creates.

Throughout each stage of class society, from slavery to feudalism to capitalism, Engels wrote, “every advance in production is at the same time a retrogression in the condition of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority.”

But Marx and Engels were the last to decry the tremendous advances in the productivity of social labor engendered by the rise of capitalism. To the contrary, they had nothing but contempt for those they dubbed “reactionary socialists” who wailed against the inhumanity of the factory system in order to sentimentalize the harsh, life stifling, mind-deadening backwardness of precapitalist society. Globalization, far from an evil to be condemned and resisted, was recognized as the lifeblood of the international working class.

“The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption within every country,” the Communist Manifesto proclaimed. “In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in the material, so also in intellectual production…. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.”

“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years,” the Manifesto continued, “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?”

To see even elements of such a transformation unfolding in parts of Africa today, “dripping from every pore with blood and filth,” is not cause for hand-wringing despair. It is further evidence of the growing size and strength of the working class internationally. “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.”

And wherever on earth this process unfolds, the Manifesto says, this “organization of the proletarians into a class” also gives rise over time to the independent social and political organization of a proletariat that has started to become conscious of itself — to the “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.”

Today the working class in more and more parts of Africa is expanding, as is the migration of working people from one country to another within Africa, as well as to Africa from Asia, the Middle East, and beyond. At the same time, growing numbers of African immigrants are strengthening the working classes of more and more imperialist countries.

The intertwining of all these experiences is of even greater importance today as the most devastating global contraction of capitalist production in some three-quarters of a century accelerates worldwide. The toll already being felt by toilers in the imperialist countries will be worse for those of the semicolonial world, and more destructive than during the last great world capitalist depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Eighty years ago the large majority of the people of Africa, still dominated by European colonial masters, lived on the margins of the world market, at best, where the vicissitudes of capitalist production touched them less directly. Today, as the soaring cost of food and plunging raw materials prices attest — to take but the most obvious examples — that is no longer the case.

Decades of wars, economic, social, and political crises, explosive class battles, and revolutionary struggles lie ahead of us. The international strength, self-consciousness, and political independence of the working class — and the clarity, discipline, and courage of its vanguard — will be decisive to the outcome. As the beginning transformation of Equatorial Guinea helps underscore, the toilers of Africa will have greater weight in shaping that future than ever before.
 
 
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