Patrice Lumumba by Leo Zeilig

Author:Leo Zeilig [Leo Zeilig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908446022
Publisher: HopeRoad
Published: 2012-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Nationalism, independence and class

The inability of the MNC to adequately give voice to the complaints that came from workers, trade unionist and those who sought an outlet for their economic and social demands, reveals a problem with the politics of independence. The MNC – with Lumumba at its centre – could only reply with the battle-cry ‘immediate independence’. The party did not have the political vocabulary to construct a programme of social transformation that could envisage more than ‘independence’.

Even though the demand for independence was a radical slogan it contained many contradictions. Lumumba was the figurehead of this radicalising movement and saw a new state powering development in an independent Congo, with, if possible, Belgian and foreign assistance. Essentially the struggle was a democratic one; it sought elections to a new state, but the Congolese would remain employees in mostly foreign-owned companies, in a country whose very creation was an extremely recent colonial invention.

Consistent with national liberation movements across the continent at the time the objective was not to fundamentally upset the status quo. The world was divided into nations, and the struggle for national liberation was an attempt to establish an independent territory for capitalist or – in the cases of those states looking to the Soviet Union – state capitalist development. In this context all national classes had to unite as the project of liberation insisted on unity.

Lumumba’s ideas fitted perfectly into these holes. For several years he had shunned any notion of ‘class struggle’, which was to him a metropolitan idea imported from Belgium. In 1956 he wrote: Let poor Belgium keep its ideological squabbles. The Congo needs something other than petty wranglings. Let us all unite, Catholics, Liberals, Socialist, Christians, Protestants, Atheists, to achieve real peace in this country. On socialist ideas he was dismissive: Our country has much greater need of ‘builders’ than of squabblers, pamphleteers and purveyors of communist slogans.112 His position on many things changed, but on these questions it did not: an independent Congo must remain united. One easy way of arguing for unity in a society divided by class, was to deny the very existence of classes. For Lumumba – in his rhetoric at least – the class struggle simply did not exist.

There was no serious attempt to organise among trade unionist, or to build a political project on the ability of workers and the ‘rural masses’ to destabilise the colonial economy, through strikes and occupations. The resting place for the independence struggle was in the nation state, which occupied a space in a fiercely competitive world system. This much Lumumba knew. He understood that the real battle to build up the Congolese state would come after independence; in preparation he explained that the Congolese would have to tighten their belts. Lumumba was beating a familiar drum: Tomorrow, it is work … We must redouble our efforts. We must drink one bottle of beer in place of two … We must mobilise ourselves to create a national economy.113

Other nationalist leaders had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.