In the second part of ‘The Accumulation of Capital’, a few years before the 1914-18 world war, Rosa Luxemburg painted a tragic picture of the expansion of capitalism in the continents with primitive economies, in those now referred to as ‘depressed areas’. It is a story of violent upheavals in the natural economies and societies, of the fierce exploitation of labour, of the brutalisation of the masses, on whom the benefits of ‘modern civilisation’ have allegedly been bestowed, and of the creation of gigantic ‘industrial reserves’ of displaced people; in short it is a similar picture, albeit in different settings and for different reasons, to the primitive accumulation that occurred in England, revived in Marx’s searing pages in the first book of ‘Capital’.

Yesterday’s history and today’s history, which the latest events in Kenya and South Africa corroborate. In Kenya, the shift of the British imperial axis from India to the Dark Continent prompted, on the one hand, the intensive development of industrial-type cultivation on the large white farms, and on the other hand, a process of increasing industrialisation in the population centres. The two processes exerted parallel influences on the indigenous population.

The first, by reducing the already narrow margin of fertile land available to the black communities, by revolutionising the methods of culture, and by invading and stripping areas of virgin land would upset the traditional balance of closeted agrarian environments which were basically self-sufficient, uprooting from the land an increasing number of direct cultivators, along with indigenous people living within a system of natural economy (hunters, gatherers, etc).

The second process assimilated the rural masses into the ‘cities’, who, for better or worse, had lived on the land and found support and protection in the tribe, and converted them into masses of ‘free’ sellers of labour-power, into helpless and defenceless proletarians.

In both cases, what the capitalist ‘civilisation’ of the whites meant for the natives was intensive exploitation, destruction of relationships that still guaranteed the individual relative security, a life of constant uncertainty, and also less consumption in relation to the higher degree of physical energy expended.

The backlash to this violent erosion of natural forms of economy and of the societies corresponding to them can be seen in the uprisings in Kenya, to which the white ‘civilisers’ – capitalism – would react with another form of violence: armed repression, mass arrests, and deportations. But the origin of indigenous discontent is not because of the ‘prohibition on magic dances’, nor will the truncheon resolve it: the phenomenon is the same as that accompanying the early stages of colonisation in Algeria and South Africa, China and Egypt: it is the revolutionizing, as brutal as it is rapid, which is provoked in the primitive economic and social structures by capitalist expansion, by the superimposition of a scientific and cynical barbarism on the naive barbarism of static economies and ancestral societies.

In South Africa, we are several rungs higher. Here, the upheaval in the primitive economies goes back further: the indigenous reaction takes the form of great strikes in the factories, and major unrest in the towns and on the farms. But to the normal reflexes of an advanced industrial regime there is allied here, exalting the ferocity of it all as it does so, the progressive erosion of the natural economies, which transforms ever new natives into proletarians, ever new ‘primitives’ into the most modern of those exploited by capital, and, as if that were not enough, tends to isolate them along the colour lines of a bestial racism (so much for German racism, South Africa is part of the much vaunted democratic British Commonwealth!). And the situation for the natives is destined to get worse, insofar as South Africa is becoming the epicentre of a new industrial investment fever – the uranium fever, which, discovered in the Rand gold seams, attracts and will continue to attract American and British capital to South Africa, prompting the creation of gigantic new industrial plants, giving new life to fading mining companies, and breaking the circle of residual primitive economic and social islands, all in the name of the new ‘atomic age’.

In fact, a recent agreement between the South African, US and British governments provides for the granting of large US-British loans to local mining companies for the construction of new plants to exploit the uranium deposits. This will be the starting point of a new process of erosion of the surviving areas of primitive economy and of a further exploitation of the already proletarianised indigenous masses, now called upon to sweat in the mines and factories to ensure profits for ‘national’ and foreign capital.

Is it any surprise, after all this, that there is agitation and unrest on the Dark Continent?