Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Un-natural resources

"Too often the political, ethnic or geographic aspects of war are considered to the exclusion of its economic drivers ... In countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, natural resources must be recognised not only as part of the problem but also as an essential part of the solution," said Mike Davis of Global Witness.

Socialist Banner have been on record that it is indeed economic causes that have been at the root of all conflicts .

The Global Wtness solution calls for UN peacekeepers to be mandated to deal with the economic dimensions of conflict. "The problem with natural resources is not so much the nature of resources themselves, their abundance or their scarcity, but how they are governed, who is able to access them and for what purposes"

Indeed , Socialist Banner agrees that the problem is fundamentally who controls natural resources - a capitalist class through their their respective nation-states , or the workers through a common-wealth of free associations .
Although there is criminal incompetence of Africa’s post-colonial black elites (the people who call themselves presidents, prime ministers, and in some instances kings and princes of the continent have waged war on their own people and plundered the continent’s wealth to ever bulging Bank account in Switzerland), the main problem of the continent is capitalism.

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