Reading Notes

When we think of World War I, we tend to think almost exclusively of the European theatre and certainly not about Africa. Niall Ferguson in his book, "Civilization : The West and the Rest", although a decidedly capitalist supporter, tells us, "The war that began in 1914 was not a war between a few quarrelling European states. It was a war between world empires (socialists would not disagree with that)…In no theatre were the problems of communication more severe than in Africa, and, in the absence of extensive railways and reliable beasts of burden, there was only one solution: men. Over 2 million Africans served in the First World War all of carriers of supplies, weapons and wounded, and although they were far from the fields of Flanders, these forgotten auxiliaries had as hellish a time as the most exposed front-line troops in Europe. Not only were they overworked and underfed; once removed from their usual locales they were every bit as susceptible to disease as their white masters. Roughly a fifth of all Africans employed as carriers died, many of them the victims of the dysentery that ravaged all colonial armies in the field." Ferguson also tells us that as recruits dwindled, the French turned to Africa for manpower in the trenches. The first African elected to the French Assembly, Blaise Diagne became a recruiting agent for the French army. Africans were often sent into enemy gunfire first, whites behind. One in five Africans died in the war, one fifth of those who joined up, compared to 17% for French soldiers.

Despite the establishment line of the book, Ferguson prints Thomas Carlyle's comment on capitalism in his essay, "Past and Present", "…the world has been rushing on with such fiery animation to get work and ever more work done, , it has had no time to think of dividing the wages; and has merely left them to be scrambled for by the Law of the Stronger, law of supply-and-demand, law of Laissez-faire, and other idle Laws and Un-Laws. We call it a society; and go about professing openly the totalise separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named 'fair competition' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings…[it] is not the sole nexus of man with man, - how far from it! Deep, far deeper than Supply-and-demand, are Laws, Obligations sacred as Man's Life itself."

So there!

 

For socialism, John Ayers