Arghiri Emmanuel, the law of unequal exchange, and the failures of liberation in the DR Congo (Part One)

There is an ongoing effort to archive the materials of Arghiri Emmanuel (1911-2001), a Greek-French theorist and author of the seminal 1972 critique of imperialism Unequal Exchange. In the process of creating this archive, the Arghiri Emmanuel Association discovered new information about Emmanuel’s time in the Belgian Congo (1937-1941 and 1946-1960), particularly his relationship to Patrice Lumumba and the liberation movement. Here, by combining archival material with biographical information obtained in conversation with Emmanuel’s family and peers, it is revealed that much of Emmanuel’s early political and intellectual development – including his theory of unequal exchange – was heavily influenced by lengthy periods of time in the Belgian Congo, including through personal relationships with prominent anti-colonial figures of the period. This is the first post of a two-part installment; the second post will follow next week.

By Héritier Ilonga

Writing about Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange, Jairus Banaji noted that it is “the closest Marxist counterpart I can think of to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth”. Banaji draws out an important context, situating Emmanuel, born in Greece in 1911, in direct relation to the pre-eminent African anti-colonial theorists of the twentieth century. Our more recent archival research into the life and legacy of Emmanuel adds further validity to this situating of his work, revealing that much of his early political and intellectual development was heavily influenced by lengthy periods of time in the Congo, including through relationships with prominent anti-colonial figures such as Antoine Gizenga and Patrice Lumumba.

There is missing information about Emmanuel’s life, and the attempt to piece together the puzzle continues. But we know that much of his life before writing Unequal Exchange was spent in the Belgian Congo, from 1937-41 and 1946-60. John Brolin’s thesis The Bias of the World: A History of Theories of Unequal Exchange from Mercantilism to Ecology, submitted in 2006, dedicates the entire 13th chapter to Emmanuel’s “formative years” there. Brolin establishes that, driven by poor economic conditions in Greece, Emmanuel participated in commercial endeavors in the Congo, where a large community of Greek traders was already established.

According to Brolin, it would have been easy for Emmanuel to “notice the extreme wage differential between Africans and Europeans” and a “worker solidarity” that broke down on racial lines. From all this, Brolin concludes that it is “unquestionable that Emmanuel drew from his Congolese experience when deciding…on the proper premises for his theory of unequal exchange”.

Patrice Lumumba would have been on the negative side of the racialized hierarchy Emmanuel encountered in the Belgian Congo. The exact circumstances in which Emmanuel met Lumumba are not known, but in 1954, at the same time Emmanuel was in Stanleyville (present day Kisangani), Lumumba became a postal office clerk there, although he was only allowed to obtain third-class status due to colonial race laws. If Lumumba wanted to rise further, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, “it would take him 24 years to reach first class, after which he would stay there until retirement. The European, in contrast, entered this junior rank directly, and could aspire to rise from there to the highest positions”. The shared concern here of Lumumba and Emmanuel was in confronting apartheid.

Based on his experience in the Congo, where he observed “the settler community spent and invested a large part of its income abroad”, Emmanuel would go on to conceptualize unequal exchange as a process through which settlers can be seen as agents who distort and direct the rates of surplus value within one country in favor of a minority (the white settler population). Emmanuel’s intervention is a novel and unique way to understand apartheid as a vehicle for material benefit. For Emmanuel, the unequal exchange between settlers and the colonized in the Congo played out on a global scale between rich and poor nations, where commodities traded between two nations were unevenly valued and overpriced for the richer nation due to its higher standard of living and thus the higher price of its labor power (or wages).

Lumumba’s vision of a Congo, where the limit for the Congolese was not a third-class postal clerk, radically threatened the settlers. Yet a retrospective account reveals that Lumumba’s presentation of his demands often stressed reconciliation. Emmanuel noted when writing later about Lumumba that he was “backed by Belgian high finance, at any rate at first…He was sponsored in all possible ways by the Belgian liberal party, i.e. the party of high finance. It was thanks to this party that he was released from prison in Stanleyville in 1958 before the end of a sentence for embezzlement. It was this party that helped him, financially and otherwise, to found the Congo National Movement (MNC)”, the main desire of which was “the attainment of the country’s independence through peaceful negotiations and within a reasonable period of time”.

A revolution thwarted by the cleric class

It would be facile to conclude that Lumumba and the MNC failed because they chose reformism over revolution. But the priority of unity reflected legitimate fears about the settlers, and their willingness to destroy the Congo if they could not maintain their privileges. Even before independence, Moise Tshombe’s Confédération des associations tribales du Katanga (CONAKAT) was collaborating with settlers who would see the Congo balkanized. Emmanuel points out that “militant white settlers had tried to secede long before Tshombe”, with a “first attempt made in 1946”. By 1960, with stirrings of possible independence, Charles Bonte, an extremist settler, planter, and leader of the Union des Colons de la Province Orientale (UNICOL), “toured the Congo openly preaching the adoption of the South African model”. Secessionist conspirators were in “contact with politicians in Northern Rhodesia”. This atmosphere of tension clarifies how essential Lumumba’s positioning by 1960 was; the direct threat was the settlers.

When Emmanuel and Lumumba joined forces, perhaps around 1955, this shared concern likely motivated their collaboration. In 1958, it is plausible that Emmanuel’s work helped inform the economic program of the MNC’s first charter, although this is speculative pending further information on his exact work alongside Lumumba. Points from this charter were echoed in a speech in Leopoldville (present day Kinshasa) in December of that year, when Lumumba argued that “the Congo’s attainment of its independence will both stabilize the Congolese economy and constitute a solid guarantee for foreign investments…the reinvestment within the country of all the profits made by national companies, and the speeding up of the program of industrialization”. The objective was not to telegraph the endgame, or reveal the whole hand. Lumumba and Emmanuel believed in playing a long game against imperialism.

A newly discovered article from 1961, written by Emmanuel but with no clear recipient, reveals the situation the two were confronted with at the dawn of independence. Prior to independence, the article details, the Belgian Congo’s entire annual revenue “was divided approximately in half between the 110,000 Whites on the one hand and the 14 million Blacks on the other”. A colony would “necessarily have to pay its foreign technicians at a high price, but the retribution of the whites in the Belgian Congo had exceeded anything that could be thought of as an expatriation bonus”. The wage hierarchy that created unequal exchange was enabled when “white people were needed in positions where no special qualification was necessary, other than the color of the skin”.

Emmanuel saw that the immediate issue to address in the newly independent Congo of 1960 was this racial hierarchy, which “could have given the independence movement a social content to mobilize the Congolese masses on a specific and immediate objective. Rarely in the history of revolutions have the demands of a people been presented in such clear terms.” The inability, however, to capitalize on this advantage for the revolution was multifaceted. Emmanuel criticizes “the left-wing parties in the respective metropolitan countries” for their “mechanical transposition into the colonies of slogans from the anti-monopoly struggle as waged within the metropolises.” But he is also critical of the Congolese évolué class (those who had ‘evolved’ through education and upward mobility to become a nascent bourgeoisie). Lumumba’s policy of Africanization, meant to undo the settler state, suffered roadblocks when the parliament first convened in June 1960 and immediately voted to raise the salaries of its members to FC 500,000. Lumumba presciently declared this a “ruinous folly”. Emmanuel describes the “monopolization of the revolution by the clerics” as “the cause of the catastrophe which occurred in the aftermath of independence.”

The crisis that emerged, with soldiers rising up against Lumumba, was primarily driven by the fact that the masses “wanted the Africanization of the executives…but what exasperated them was this fantastic festival of notables, who, overnight, carved out salaries of five hundred thousand francs a month, who drove in Cadillacs and who took the places and looks of the colonialists they had just dislodged, while [soldiers] were excluded from sharing the cake.”

When we return to the “first and essential question” to understand the failure of the post-Independence situation, according to Emmanuel, we understand that it was equally the fault of the settlers, who claimed half of the national income, and “the elites who rushed to claim the other 25 billion”. Africanization, “which could be used both to raise the standard of living of the masses and to increase investments and the rate of expansion”, was unsuccessful principally because “the mass was amorphous and unorganized”. Without the ability to ally with the soldiers “and their guns”, who in the end fell to the “know-how and political momentum” of the comprador class, the masses were left directionless.

The influence of the Congo on Emmanuel’s intellectual development

Emmanuel prefigures many of his later analyses of the production of capitalist social relations under colonialism through this encounter in the Congo. He writes that “when the White man came with his payrolls and his learned calculations, counting the hours and the days, [the colonized] ended up vaguely understanding that the more he worked, the more money he gained at the end of the week, but he never fully admitted this system as the natural order of things.” The Congolese masses refused to accept capitalist social relations. The proletariat and the wage stood as unnatural, foreign impositions brought in by colonialism. Furthermore, in Emmanuel’s analysis, the idea of “free” contractual relations for one’s labor benefited the White settler class that could inflate the worth of its labor power by force.

The attacks on the White settlers’ standard of living in the Congo, led by Lumumba as part of the decolonization process and a hallmark of his program to modernize the Congo, opened up for Emmanuel the possibility of a transition to a “superior” societal organization, inspired and drawing upon the pre-colonial tribe but also modern and able to enforce planning not subject to the whims of paternalist bias in favor of one “tribe” over another, whether based on race or ethnicity.

It was only by recognizing the absence of this schematization in Marxism that Emmanuel could understand the prospects for building socialism in the decolonizing world, and indeed see these prospects as more advanced than in the industrial countries which would supposedly be the “first” to become socialist. To Emmanuel, “the whole history of imperialism and colonization demonstrates plainly that the opposition between backward peoples and the small White settler is the worst of all; and our refusal to allow for it in our classical descriptions of the class struggle will not eliminate this ‘stubborn fact’”. Emmanuel insisted that ignoring this formulation, whereby class-reductionism elides any understanding of the feudal carry-over of personal domination into the colonial context, “makes for grave misunderstandings and prevents any true dialogue between revolutionary Marxism and the decolonized peoples”.

Put in this context, Lumumba’s political philosophy makes sense. If he consistently rejected the allegation that he was a communist, and yet was constantly perceived as such by Belgium, the US, and the settlers, then perhaps his program was indeed revolutionary. Lumumba constantly stressed technical aid; he desired to develop the productive forces to create a truly socialized economy. This demand for centralization (of both the state and the economy) was the most progressive road to socialism, against the anarchy, secessionism, and parasitism which faced him by both the settlers and those who desired to reject the Congolese nation as such for a federalist one. Even Sartre, who criticized Lumumba’s “Jacobin” centralism, could agree that “federalism is the worm in the fruit that will spoil everything, for imperialism will immediately exploit”.

But how could this have been achieved in the chaos after independence? Lumumba had appealed to “Western technicians to come to Africa not to dominate us but to serve and aid our countries” in a speech at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria on March 22, 1959. In particular, as Ira Dworkin reveals, Lumumba saw recruiting Afro-diasporic technicians as a way to further the Pan-African project and the development of the Congo. During Lumumba’s only trip to the US, he “used a lecture at Howard University” to insist that “in the future…this university [will] send [graduates and technicians] to Africa, to help their ancestors, dentists and doctors and engineers with all possible skills.” During the trip, Lumumba “signed an agreement with Phelps Stokes Fund…ensuring the recruitment of skilled African Americans to work in the Congo.” And Lumumba’s government recruited others in the Pan-African diaspora to come to the Congo, such as Haitian technicians (including the parents of Raoul Peck, the director of the biopic Lumumba, who moved to live with his family in the Congo in 1961).

Such technical support would not have been possible without control over the state. But Emmanuel had cautioned that without the masses at the helm, technical aid to develop the means of production could only occur on a limited basis. Emmanuel had gone so far as to write in 1961 that without the masses seizing power, Lumumba’s slogan ‘Equal Pay for Equal Work’, a program of redistribution, “meant the perpetuation of colonialism with a change of the color of exploiters.” We can perceive the “perpetuation” of colonialism as meaning the continued dominance of the settler state and its exigencies, including the “dead weight” and “parasitism” that resulted in an external outflow of capital, often back to the metropole. Examples of this include neocolonial dictator Joseph Mobutu’s Concorde-flown shopping trips to Paris, paid for by billions embezzled from the Congo.

Emmanuel would go on to write in 1979 that “as a consequence of a decolonization carried out without mass struggle, which removed the White settlers or neutralized them politically, a state machine fabricated out of nothing has been taken over and run by an ‘élite’. This élite…constitutes a highly privileged social group, standing against an undifferentiated mass of poor peasants and urban proletarians. This group[’s] goal is nothing but its own perpetuation.”

Héritier Ilonga is a researcher focused on the history and political economy of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and part of the Arghiri Emmanuel Association, a collective which researches unequal exchange and trade economics in the Global South.

Featured Photograph: A portrait of Arghiri Emmanuel (Arghiri Emmanuel Association).