Militant blacks commemorate the Soweto uprising of 1976 where 600 died (DR)
deeply involved in Mozambique and Angola. In fact, the Mozambique rebels have managed to disrupt petroleum supplies to Zimbabwe by terrorist bombings, and thereby contribute to instability in the neighboring country as well.
Africa in the world crisis
The history of capitalist and imperialist domination of Black Africa has been a
In every respect, what happens in South Africa is decisive for the revolution in Black Africa. It is the political and military bulwark of imperialism in the area. It is by far the most developed of all the Black African countries, of which it is essentially one, although it has a white ruling class.
South Africa continues to dominate all of southern Africa economically. It is also one of the world's most important storehouses of key raw materials. And particularly brutal and bloody one - in Black from the enslavement of tens of millions of Black Africans shipped to the Americas, to the working of hundreds of thousands of people to death for the private fortune of a Belgian bourgeois king, to the establishment of a unique system of industrial helotry in South Africa.
This past of unrestrained exploitation has left an extraordinarily distorted and contradictory capitalist structure in Black Africa, prone to continual violent breakdowns.
One obvious symptom of this is the number of forcibly uprooted people in Africa, which is by far the highest in the world. This is "the continent of refugees."
In the last years, wars and civil wars have become endemic in a whole series of African countries, from EthiopiaSomalia to Mozambique and across the continent to Angola and Namibia.
It was to be expected that the onset of a worldwide crisis of the capitalist economy would have dramatic effects on the rickety structures in Africa. Some of these effects are already beginning to
Africa has been swelled by hundreds of thousands of workers and their families expelled from Nigeria as a result of the falling price of oil. This exodus, moreover, is bound to have a chain-reaction effect of economic and social collapse.
In the last days, news has begun to come out of massive slaughter in a region of Zimbabwe, which has been touted as the great success story of a negotiated settlement between imperialists, white + ›lonialists, and representatives Black African organizations.
It has become absolutely clear that the aspirations of the peoples of Zimbabwe have not been met and that the country has been freed from neo-colonialism. In fact, another civil war, with an ethnic aspect, could be developing there.
In connection with conflict in Zimbabwe, there is already speculation in the international press that the South Africa regime may extend a long hand into the country to stoke the flames.
The South African racists are already so it holds a vital strategic place in the world imperialist system as a whole and not even just in Africa.
Moreover, the very structures that have made South Africa a paradise for capitalists and a reliable ally of imperialism make peaceful evolution and therefore long-term stability impossible. They lead to the accumulation of explosive contradictions, making South Africa one of the biggest time bombs in the world capitalist and imperialist system.
All these points are explained in detail in the Fourth International resolution published in this issue, which represents some years of work and thought by revolutionists involved with the revolution in Black Africa.
This document brings together considerable concrete information. It also is a landmark of the application of revolutionary Marxism to key questions of the social revolution in Black Africa. And as such it will be a point of reference for revolutionists in dealing with the explosions that are building up in Black Africa in the age of the worldwide economic crisis of capitalism.
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VOSTOOM 10 196 shock international public opinion. In recent weeks, the mass of refugees