The frenchman is a strange creature. What can we say about it with any certainty? Some things we know for sure: It is highly xenophobic, belligerent, prone to attack without provocation, and exhibits very little awareness of irony, as evinced, for instance, by past anti-gay protests undertaken by strapping, shirtless young men.

Having established at least that irony is not the frenchman’s strong suit, enter neoliberal ideologue (and shit De Gaulle impersonator) Macron who, in a G20 speech that shocked no one, pulled out many of the ancient french canards against Africa, including, but not limited to “they have too many children” and “it’s a civilization problem”. (Note: some very sad liberals have pointed out that civilisationnel does not have the same connotation in French as in English, to which we say c’est des conneries.)

Our readers do not need to be reminded of the absolute holocaust that was french colonialism, nor the paternal dominance france maintains over its former possessions to this day. Suffice it to say that when a bomb goes off in Paris, we know precisely why there are no tears in Senegal or Haiti or Vietnam. But I digress.



King Leopold’s Ghost—I mean, Macron, was speaking in response to Ivorian journalist Philippe Kouhoun, who asked how much the G20 are willing to invest to “save Africa”, and why there was no Marshall Plan for the continent. (Of course, we know why there is no Marshall Plan for Africa; because it does not benefit western imperialism at this time.)

Macron’s crowning statement—that “you can decide to spend billions of euros, [but] you will not stabilize anything”—is quite telling. This is standard Bell Curve stuff —that inborn deficiencies cannot be overcome with accommodation (aren’t you glad they didn’t elect the racist?)—but I think we can work with it. We need only apply the same logic to the parasites.

As Marxists, we know that (as Eleanor Marx summarized) “all classes, from kings and queens to music-masters and greengrocers,” live off of the “sum total of the surplus value created by the immediate producers, for which they are not paid.” This includes entire nations, chief among which the core imperialists, whose primary “productive” sectors are dwarfed by their secondary, tertiary and quaternary industries that specialize in ‘moving around’ surplus value—those whose revenues and wages are “earned by performing some function not actually productive”. These nations, obviously, live off the surplus value of the 85+% of the world’s industrial workers located in the global south, whose blood and sweat subsidizes the Macrons and the shirtless anti-gay revels and Eurovision and, well, everything, basically.

I think the solution is clear, then. Mr. Macron, and the whole gaggle of parasites-in-chief, should repatriate all wealth built on the backs of the global south, for the trillions of euros a year they siphon off will not stabilize anything (except, of course, the parasite-peace bought between labor and capital in the imperialist world), for the problems of france and the u.$. and their partners in crime, are indeed civilizational, in that their “civilization” represents an abattoir of oppressed human labor, wherein the blood of the world proletariat is siphoned and parceled out.