Dutch comrades have got together with com rades from Surinam and formed an organisation to fight exploitation of Surinam by the imperialist monopolies.
Surinam (Dutch Guinea) is a Dutch South American colony. (Dutch tourist guides give under "Helpful hints": "Never refer to Surinam as a colony; it is a separate self-governing part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.") Its formal status, however, is that of one of the parts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (the others being Holland and the Dutch Antilles); the local autonomy is purely theoretical since foreign affairs and defence are handled by the central government, there is a governor appointed by the Queen and all real power remains in the hands of Dutchmen.
The economy is entirely in the hands of foreign companies, mainly Dutch and American. The distortion is most striking in the case of bauxite, the ore of aluminium, production of which is split between Billiton, a Dutch mining company recently taken over by the oil and chemicals monopoly Shell, and Suralco, a subsidiary of the American Alcoa. The profit made by these companies out of Surinam bauxite (in the imperialist motherland, of course) is equal to 13% of the value of the gross national product of Surinam. Development "aid" from all sources to Surinam amounts to 6% of the GNP. Only 3% of all the ore is refined in the country; the refiner Suralco then sells the aluminium to its parent company at 75% of the world market price. It has been calculated that if this particular trick to switch profits back to the western exploiting countries was applied to the whole of the bauxite, the amount lost would equal more than Surinam's GNP. About half of the profits of Billiton are attributable to the Surinam bauxite operation, yet well over 90% of the company's wages bill is for staff in Holland and other imperialist countries. The price of bauxite is some thousandths of the price of aluminium, yet still bauxite is some three-quarters of Surinam's GNP. The picture in the rest of the economy is similar; the United Fruit Co. is in there, like the Dutch Wageningen, which handles most of the rice; KLM and KNSM dominate external transport by air and sea, and so on. The benefits for the Surinam people produced by all this trade are ruination The Red Mole 16th-31st Oct. 1970 Page 8 and driving off the land of small farmers, backbreaking work for a pittance for workers on the big plantations, an unemployment rate of more than 20% in the towns and correspondingly miserable wages for those who can find work.
Repression-Dutch-Style Dutch colonialism has got away with it so successfully for so long by isolating the country and using divide-and-rule techniques. The country is a Dutch enclave in a Spanish-speaking area; the pidginised Spanish spoken by some of the people is actively suppressed, as it is in the Antilles where it is the majority language. This cuts off the people from progressive ideas circulating in Latin America, and the Dutch channel of communication is so tenuous that it can very easily be controlled by the authorities. United organisation of the people is prevented by allowing the formation of separate political organisations by the ethnic groups, the Negroes and the Hindustanis descended from the cheap Indian and Indonesian labour the more progressive sections of the bourgeoisie imported in the nineteenth century after it forced the plantation owners to stop the slave trade. These organisations then become boot-licking cliques competing for their own share of crumbs from the imperialists, and their only connection with the masses of their respective races is demagogic propaganda, especially around election time. National-bourgeois liberation has even less chance in Surinam than most places; there is no C.P.
In this situation some Dutch leftists and Surinam students in Holland (they have to have them to keep up the mystification about Surinam being an integral part of the Netherlands) heard around the end of last year that the French aluminium company Pechiney was to be granted permission to build an aluminium factory in Zeeland, a province in south Holland. They realised this was an excellent point to hang agitation on and set up the national Aluminium Committee, supported by the Surinam Students Union, the Union of Scientific Workers (Dutch socialist scientists), the Socialist Youth and various Third World and other organisations to fight for a nationalised aluminium industry in Surinam, and against the establishment of yet another factory in an already rich cheap Surinam bauxite. They set up a Zeeland committee to make propaganda there about the ill-effects of the proposed new factory (uses good land; pollution; unsightliness; aluminium production is capital-intensive so very few more jobs, etc.). The national committee handled propaganda in Holland generally and especially among students from Surinam, distributing statements to the press including the above incriminating statistics, publishing an information bulletin, etc. A national congress was organised for May 30; more than 300 delegates attended. Resolutions were adopted against the phoney constitution and the Charter (Statut) embodying it, against the exploiting companies Suralco, Billiton and Reynolds, an American company now trying to get its share of the pickings, against the idea of a joint venture in which imperialist capital would share with Surinam state or private capital the exploitation of a factory to refine the bauxite to alumina, an intermediate product which is not particularly profitable to produce and would have to be sold to factories in the imperialist countries for further refining to aluminium, and for the establishment of an aluminium industry nationalised under democratic control by the people. so that the profits from Surinam bauxite would go to benefit the Surinam people, instead of being used to bribe workers in the imperialist countries or to stimulate the growth of a native capitalism as in the joint venture idea. The demonstration after the congress was joined in solidarity by Cambodia demonstrators who had just been at the U.S. embassy, and was therefore large and militant, ending in a slight brush with the police when some of the demonstrators tried to invade the hotel where the Surinam "government" representative was staying.
A Single Issue Campaign The whole development has been a very good use of the single-issue campaign. The main benefit is the organisation of Surinamers, in the form of students who have been attracted to the campaign, but there is considerable spin-off in Holland too; instead of liberal, white man's burden stuff about "us" having to "aid" our less fortunate brethren, the finger is clearly put on exactly which part of "us" is responsible for keeping the brethren less fortunate, namely the capitalists with the shares in the monopolie and their hired managers who actually do the thinking out of the schemes. It's easy enough to say "underdevelopment is exploitation", bu here it has been clearly explained in full damning detail what that means and how it works: the inexorable logic of profitability forces big business to go on concentrating mor and more capital in the imperialist countries, so that capitalism is incapable of solving the problems of developing the Third World; all it ‹nows how to do is exploit it. So the campaigr puts a few more Dutch intellectuals up agains the wall: there is no easy middle way to keer one's own hands clean, either your fight the system or capitulate to it. So though it does nothing to organise the workers who can eventually smash the system, it provides a few more of the people who can do the organising.
The perspectives for Surinam as seen by the Surinamers leading the campaign are long-tern ones. The country's bauxite is an object of inter-imperialist rivalry, aluminium being a strategic metal; the Common Market imperialis want their share through the older-fashioned Dutch colonial system, while the United States imperialists would prefer more standard neo colonial methods to get theirs, hence their encouragement of the joint-venture idea with its possibility of creating a tame "independent native bourgeois class. In spring 1969 a "gover ment" was toppled because it was leaning a bit too much to one side; it is not impossible that the Americans could push through an "indeper dence movement eventually to shut out their European rivals. But they still have a lot of spade-work to do before that. Whether or not the alternative, socialist perspective cannot be envisaged within the framework of purely national liberation, but only as part of the whole Latin American movement. The Surma socialists' task now is to break down their isolation from that movement and start to organi the people along national rather than race line to end exploitation colonialist or neo-coloniali and fight for a free, socialist Surinam.
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