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The Political Thought of Patrice Lumumba* 107
praxis of unification; as Merleau-Ponty said, opposition can easily become betrayal when
it increases discord and disintegration: central government should reduce it, by force if
necessary. From this point of view, strikes or urban riots, however justifiable their
demands might be, are just as dangerous as ethnic conflicts. The latter delay the harvests
and fragment the Congolese land; the former reduce production. For every conceivable
reason, it was indispensable that, in the first years of its childhood, the free Congo should
not fall too far below the Belgian Congo from which it was born: therefore, centralism
carries within itself a policy of social austerity. However, the Incorruptible – whether his
name is Robespierre or Lumumba – must at the same time attack the governing class –
his own class – to maintain its position as the universal class, in other words to prevent it
entering into conflict with the rest of the country by virtue of its demands, lifestyle or too
rapid an accumulation of wealth. That means that every social group is required to
sacrifice its interests to the common interest. Nothing better provided that the common
interest exists. After the tumultuous few months which followed his taking of power,
Castro forced the workers’ unions to end their strikes and take their industrial grievances
to arbitration. But he had just defeated the army of feudal landowners, driven them off
and redistributed their properties to the underprivileged classes through agrarian reform:
by demanding sacrifices from everyone, he invited the rural and urban workers to
recognize their real unity and their common interest, which was the free exploitation of
the island by all for the benefit of all. Put in another way, centralism can only equate
national unity with the common interest if the revolution from which it has emerged is a
socialist one. There was as yet no class struggle proper between the évolués who were
taking power in the Congo and the unskilled workers or the agricultural labourers, but
already the Congolese pseudo-unity was concealing the divergence of interests. Without
knowing it, centralism demands national unity, that abstract minimum which is necessary
for a new society to find time to develop its structures and its strata. But neither the
exploited nor the future exploiters had any intention of sacrificing their concrete demands
to this still uncertain future: the mere existence of the one class prevented the others from
giving way. The proletarians knew how much the ministers earned. For their part, the
ministers and all the évolués would make no concessions to anyone: they had a moral
code based on merit; not to serve themselves first would basically be to sacrifice
themselves to the illiterate masses, that is, to non-militants.
Thus, owing to the absence of a mass movement, an armed struggle and a socialist
programme, centralism, as a unifying praxis, seemed arbitrary to everyone. Everyone
regarded the unity it aimed to establish as a concept without content; each group
preferred its own concrete idea of unity to it, which, in that situation, was a cause of
division. Everyone was against Lumumba: the provincial, federalist parties, the capital,
the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie which he represented and which should have
supported him. What is worse is that the rural population put up with independence on
the condition that they kept their ‘traditional structures’. Very few understood that the
coutumier chiefs were the ‘native’ representatives of the Belgian administration. Now the
kinglets lost everything when the colonists left. The Belgians had bought them and
maintained them in place: this was centralization by division. The Congolese
government’s policy would be to eradicate divisions: it had to create a black
administration, teach the civil servants in Léopoldville and send them everywhere as the