Uprising in DRC - Burning down the house: Workers attack UN criminals

In late July, hundreds of courageous workers responded to the latest crisis of capitalism by storming United Nations outposts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Workers’ lives everywhere have been made even more precarious by the imperialist bosses’ war in Ukraine, which has triggered astronomical hikes in the costs of fertilizer, food, and fuel. In recent months in the DRC,  an additional million people have fallen below the poverty line (ebrary.ifpri.org). These workers also face ever-mounting terror from mineral-hungry local gangs, government thugs, and Chinese imperialist mining companies. They declared to the world they’d had enough by raiding and setting fire to buildings in three cities that house MONUSCO, the UN’s “stabilization” mission—which has done nothing to make the DRC more stable since it entered the country in 1999. The UN “peacekeepers” responded with live fire that killed more than 30 demonstrators (msn.com, 8/2).
     Much like the storming in Sri Lanka two weeks earlier, the uprising in the DRC reflects the disgust of workers everywhere with the bosses’ political repression, bottomless greed, and vicious exploitation. Capitalism can never provide stability or peace for the international working class. Only communist revolution, led by Progressive Labor Party, can solve the never-ending capitalist crisis of inflation, depressions, and inter-imperialist wars for profit. Only a communist world can stamp out racism, sexism, and the rulers’ state terror.

United Nations “aid” sham
Since the end of World War II, a period of global domination by U.S. imperialism, the United Nations has proven at best ineffective and at worst complicit in making horrific conditions worse for our class. Throughout the world, workers have developed a deep hatred of the UN armed criminals who protect U.S.-aligned imperialist profiteers at the expense of workers’ lives and safety.  After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, racist military forces in MINUSTAH (UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti) raped and terrorized workers. Then-president Bill Clinton and the local crooks in the Haitian ruling class skimmed millions from “aid” projects at the height of a cholera outbreak. In Indonesia, UN-backed gold-mining operations by U.S. and Japanese capitalists used hundreds of tons of toxic mercury that continues to cause birth defects to this day. Today, the UN’s largest military presence, 16,000 uniformed personnel, is stationed in the DRC—not to stop a long-running conflict between warring groups of local bosses, but to help secure the world’s largest reserves of cobalt, an essential ingredient for electric vehicle batteries, computers, and cell phones.
     The deadly battle between rebel guerrilla groups like M23 and various ruling-class factions is about how to best control the super-exploitation of masses of workers in extracting valuable resources. The fury of workers against MONUSCO was manipulated by the DRC Senate president, Modeste Bahati Lukwebo, who has personally welcomed Chinese investors in mining and the beef industry with open arms (All Africa, 12/21/2021; China Mining Association, 3/14).  Ten days before the anti-UN uprising, he led a rally to attack MUNESCO’s failure to pacify M23—and to win his base over to join the Congolese national army, the FARDC, which represents DRC ruling-class interests (The Conversation, 7/28). This is just the latest chapter in a long history of capitalist infighting--instigated by bosses in Rwanda and Uganda as well as in the U.S., Russia, and China—that have made the DRC a tinderbox for decades.

Minerals and mass murder
The DRC has an estimated $24 trillion in untapped deposits of cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, zinc, tin, and potash. The Congo and its riches have played a major role in the modern history of imperialism, from the European imperialist competition of the 19th and early 20th centuries to the U.S. imperial expansion after World War II. In The African Roots of War (1915), the great Black historian W.E.B. Du Bois noted that the scramble for natural resources and cheap labor in Africa in the 1880s was a big part of the tensions that finally erupted in World War I. In a relentless hunt for ivory, rubber, and diamonds, King Leopold of Belgium led the imperialist scramble that created the “Congo Free State”—and a genocide of 10 million deaths.
     During World War II, the U.S. ruling class outmaneuvered Nazi Germany in the Congo to seize control of the world’s top uranium deposit and force workers to labor in radioactive mines. The raw materials from this deadly toil were used in the atomic bombs dropped on children, women, and men in Japan.  In 1961, the U.S.-Soviet race for uranium and copper led the CIA—under an apparent directive from President Dwight Eisenhower (New York Times, 8/2/1981)—to plot the assassination of pro-Soviet Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and consolidate the rule of the pro-U.S. Mobutu Sese Seko (Project Syndicate, 7/29). Today, as the U.S. and Russia remain locked in battle in Ukraine, the Chinese bosses are making inroads from Egypt to the DRC to the Horn of Africa. All three imperialist powers are vying for regional support in an increasingly unstable world order. The inevitable outcome is World War III.

Chinese rulers: thieves and exploiters  
Chinese imperialism is no less dangerous or exploitative for workers across Africa. From 2000 to 2018, the DRC’s capitalist rulers went to China for more than 50 loans, totaling $2.4 billion, to fund power, transport, and mining projects (Ventures Africa, 7/25). As these local bosses failed to repay their loans on time, Chinese companies seized the controlling shares of producing mines.
     While the Chinese imperialists can benefit regardless of which local faction comes out on top, a recent agreement between bosses from the DRC and Uganda for roads threatens to undercut the profits of Rwandan bosses. This is the detonator that reactivated both state-sanctioned and proxy militias like M23 in recent months. MONUSCO, the largest peacekeeping operation in the world, has been useless in containing this two-sided terror, leaving workers with no good choice among misleaders (Deutche Welle, 7/28). As workers stormed multiple MONUSCO offices, the most telling response of the Chinese imperialists was to award its own unit of UN peacekeepers with UN Peace Medals for doing their part in maintaining the status quo (China Military Online, 7/29).

East African comrades: fight for communism!
In recent weeks, in response to years of capitalist super-exploitation, workers across sub-Saharan Africa have been protesting for double-digit wage increases. Their struggle for a decent life has grown even harder with the rising cost of living from the bosses’ war in Ukraine.  But just as local politicians in the DRC misled workers into attacking just the United Nations and not the entire capitalist class, union misleaders from Nigeria to South Africa to Uganda have kept workers in a dead-end reform struggle for higher wages instead of fighting to annihilate all capitalist production.  In East Africa, a group of workers celebrating May Day pointed out the futile nature of all reforms and stressed the need for more workers to join Progressive Labor Party as the only way forward for our class (see CHALLENGE, 8/3). PLP fights to build a mass international base within the working class. We fight to replace the profit-hungry system of capitalism with a society based on our needs as workers. That’s communism. Join Us!