“With the exception of Sékou Touré's Guinea, the former territories colonised by France south of the Sahara have never achieved real independence.
France offered them the following deal:
‘I grant your territory its independence on condition that you renounce sovereignty in areas such as foreign affairs, foreign trade, strategic raw materials, education, defense, monetary and financial management, etc.’
The African leaders who agreed to sign ‘cooperation agreements’ in all these areas were politicians generally trained in France during the colonial period. Some of them were members of French metropolitan government or parliament. Many of them did not even want their countries to become independent.
General de Gaulle resorted to this neo-colonial scheme because, for him, domination of Africa and control over its resources was a fundamental condition for France's strategic autonomy in the context of the Cold War.
Given this choice, France never allowed peoples in its former colonies to freely choose their own leaders. It is this — a Francophone Africa that, despite nominal independence, remains in many ways under French neo-colonial control — that is often called ‘Françafrique.’
In the long term, the consequences of French imperialism have been chronic underdevelopment in its ex-colonies south of the Sahara, and entrenched, reactionary political systems that do not care about what peoples think or want, even if sometimes they are formally ‘democratic’. As a result, some of the world's richest leaders — often backed by France and the West — govern some of the world's most impoverished nations.
Over the past two centuries, countries with imperialist ambitions have often imposed constraining and harmful monetary and financial arrangements on the territories they dominated —
imposing harsh fixed exchange rate systems;
controlling their foreign exchange reserves,
[controlling their] financial systems, and
the allocation of credit and economic surplus.
Beyond its disciplinary function (the possibility of activating sanctions), monetary imperialism works to reinforce the economic and financial power of dominant countries, which have virtually free access to the human and material resources of the dominated countries.
This monetary imperialism has manifested in diverse ways across the world, from Africa to Asia to Latin American and the Caribbean. As for the CFA franc, originally the Franc of the French colonies in Africa, it was born in 1945 and circulated in the sub-Saharan part of the French empire. In a new economic and financial global order dominated by the US and the US dollar, this colonial currency system allowed France to save its scarce dollar reserves as France could buy all its imports in the CFA zone using its own currency.
It also allowed France to appropriate its colonies’ dollar reserves for its own imports and to contribute to the stabilization of its exchange rate…
This system of monetary imperialism has been maintained unaltered in its working principles ‘thanks to’ the cooperation agreements I referred to above. Today, the two currencies — the West African CFA and the Central African CFA, used by eight and six countries, respectively — are directly pegged to the Euro (previously the French Franc), effectively taking the critical tool of monetary policy out of the hands of the independent governments and putting it under the control of the French Treasury and the eurozone political and monetary authorities.
Insofar as monetary imperialism implies denying nations the power to use domestic money and finance for their own autonomous development, it is an impediment to economic and monetary sovereignty.
Monetary sovereignty…must, in my opinion, be defined in the first instance, in the sense of Modern Money Theory (MMT), in the sense of a government's ability to spend without having an intrinsic financial constraint, but only a limit in terms of availability of real resources.
In the case of the countries of the South, their lower degree of monetary sovereignty reflects a lack of control over their real resources (often stolen by transnational corporations, leading sometimes to the need to issue debt in foreign currencies at high interest rates) and the pursuit of an economic model - extractive in nature - which further reinforces their need to hold US dollars…”—“Monetary imperialism” in Africa, Dr. Ndongo Samba Sylla, author of The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich, opposition to foreign French influence and control of Africa.
“On January 10, French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne unveiled government plans towards pension reforms, which would increase the retirement age in the country from 62 to 64.
In addition, it was proposed that workers will need to have worked for at least 43 years to get a full pension, starting from 2027.
Earlier, the reforms announced by the first government under Emmanuel Macron, which contained similar proposals such as an increase in retirement age, replacing 42 pension systems with one scheme, introduction of a grade point system for ascertaining pension amounts, among other proposals, were vehemently opposed by trade unions and had not been implemented due to the COVID-19 crisis.”
And the interesting part of a forever accumulating global economic system managed by an elected political class and architected and steered by a corporate class, dominated by specific colonising countries and now rising players, is that ordinary people are often made to bear the burden of its regular crises, such as:
the disruption, squeezing or cost-effectiveness of global resource supply, let’s say because of:
liberation movements in Africa that do not want to sell their minerals for a pittance and in complete disregard to their own industries and people,
wars (whether foreign architected or organically created) over minerals, seas and/or land,
imperialist sabotage (e.g. the Nord Stream pipeline),
oversupply,
increasing competition for resources (both natural and human),
changing demand,
credit bubbles etc.
Workers from both the colonised and colonising portions of the world never sit down and discuss the system as a whole.
They never ask themselves at a global working table:
why are you hurt by global capitalism?
why am I hurt by global capitalism?
And how are those two things related?
“One of Labour’s first measures on taking office in July last year was the axing of winter fuel payments to 10 million pensioners. But the £1.3 billion saved annually was ridiculed by corporate media outlets as chickenfeed.
They demanded far harsher attacks on welfare to pay for military spending…
Labour’s assault on welfare follows last week’s announcement axing NHS England, part of Labour’s plans to privatise the National Health Service. Labour is emulating the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency…
Starmer began this week with an op-ed statement in business newspaper City A.M. saying of Labour’s deregulation and cuts agenda: ‘It will take years of discipline, focus and a willingness to make tough choices. But my government is taking on that challenge to bring back the animal spirits of the private sector, and to make Britain the best place in the world to start and build a business.’
Starmer has explicitly linked the gutting of public spending and the destruction of the welfare state with preparation for war and the government’s massive increase in military spending, declaring ‘now more than ever, national security is economic security… And you’re not strong if you lose control of your public finances.’”—Britain’s Labour government announces savage welfare cuts targeting sick and disabled, Robert Stevens, 18 Mar 2025, wsw.org
These austerity cuts seen all over the world, in both developed and developing countries, are not peculiar to any particular country.
They are symptomatic of the system as a whole and the leaders of the system, especially the colonial country leaders (historically dominant leaders) and whichever rising dominant players. Instead of considering the broader implications of the system, we scramble to mimic each other’s strategy changes and/or rush to bed down colonialism in the lands that are not ours.
When nationalist leaders come to the fore, it is often “you” (the voting majority) are meant to be against the schmuck next to you (the voting minority) who lives on the same street, shops at the same grocery store and who is earning the whittled-down wage like you.
They paint a picture of ethno-or-religious-or-language strength, while encouraging you to ignore:
the truths of the colonial capitalist system and its inherent instability and degradation of global relationships and environment, and
the very likely future crises that cannot easily be painted over with Ra-Ra Great Britannia songs.
WHETHER NATIONALIST-LEANING OR NOT, TO CURE THEIR CREDIBILITY PROBLEM OF IGNORING THE SYSTEM AS A WHOLE, ELITES RELY ON WAR, BLIND FOLLOWING AND DOMINATION AT HOME
If nationalists—whether right-wing or not—promise you increased industrialisation and new industries, what happens when there’s a resource supply crunch?
Think about it…
They’ve promised you a better, brighter future as a lone planet floating in a void of competing threats so what can they do:
If it’s a resource war, they can use your tax monies to finance,
either side of the war that is more amenable to working with them,
sending your sons and daughters of the working class to join the war or get you to manufacture “I am Robot” drones to kill any militants, maybe even a few hundred civilians, that stand in the way of silence and continued supply, or
the incumbent or winning side to gain favour and ensure flight of resources despite the war.
If it’s a liberation movement, they can use your tax monies to finance,
separatist movements that can stage a coup or assassinate the popular leader,
civil unrest through media campaigns, or
sending your sons and daughters of the working class into battle with the liberation movement or get you to manufacture “I am Robot” drones to hopefully kill off as “all lives matter” radicals as possible.
They can use sanctions and tariffs or just carpet bomb entire countries while simultaneously picking a obedient servant who will be made lord and master of the supply side, even if he slaughters people in the soon to be or current democratic state.
Do you see where I am going with this?
Take national pride out of the picture, if the system is dependent on the harming of the workers class everywhere in the world, it’s not a choice you, we, us are making.
It is a choice that is being made and narrated to us.
Because whether African workers die starving or die because your country funded a rebel movement or a terrorist group or military action, your working class in the colonial countries lose money that was meant to be spent on uplifting your lives, rather than sending your neighbours into or building drones and closing your eyes to the wars in foreign countries.
The system does not need a reset. It needs a worker conference and a reimagining from the ground up.
The only true leadership comes from those who understand that the harm is felt on both sides. And it is being felt most by the world’s class majority.
The workers of the world and their families.
As it stands, everything we see is a continuation of systemic problems that cannot be isolated into:
orchestrated attacks on Syria,
orchestrated attacks on Congo,
orchestrated attacks on Sahel states such as Burkino Faso,
orchestrated attacks on Venezuela,
orchestrated threats on South Africa,
orchestrated plans of attack on China, Mexico, Canada, Greenland, Panama, or
orchestrated attacks on the working class of the UK, Germany and the US.
It’s happening not because we don’t know better but because we don’t know any other way beside colonialism, neo-colonialism, often violent imperialism such as proxy wars and economic class repression and scapegoating.
We do not have the kind of leadership that can imagine a new system for us.
What they sell to working families are back and forth spotlights on national infamy, racialised economics and ethnic-focussed social issues, protectionist policies for the extremely class comfortable who often hold monopolistic interests and war. Always war.
Either against the people who are their voting public or the people their voters get to ignore. Often, its both.
Worker against worker.
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