France closes its last coal mineIn April 2004, France closed its last coal mine where 400 workers had been working. At their peak, French coal mines employed 300,000 people,(1) but as capitalism matured and turned into imperialism, such work was no longer necessary. The BBC pointed out that historically there was a strong socialist and communist influence in the mines. Miners were also active in the resistance war against Nazi occupation. All that is the past. Karl Marx considered miners part of the "productive sector" of workers producing "surplus-value" that underlies all profits, interest and rent (this last one as conceived by economists.) The closing of France's last coal mines means that is one less source of profits for the French imperialists as pointed to by Marx. Today, the French government has pensioned off those who worked 20 or more years in coal mines. According to Marx, such pensions and various paper-shuffling jobs without a basis in the productive sector would eat into profits and cause economic crisis, which imperialism can either meet by expanding through war into the Third World to further exploit people there or by a self-destructive process in the home country involving war and repression. The existence of a mere 400 coal-miners also proves that even if these workers had not been overpaid, there is insufficient material basis for the formation of a French proletariat. There are not enough of the kind of people left of the type Marx was talking about to even talk about a French proletariat. As it stands, the French minimum wage places all of legally working France in the top 10% of income in the world and coal-miners did even better than that. Since more than 80% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power, there is no need for coal.(1) "Electricite de France" already obtained 35% of its revenue from the electricity market outside France and it was aiming for 50%,(2) in a typical process of imperialist globalization. France has practically exhausted its own resources for uranium extraction. What exists is of such poor quality it is not economic to mine it. Traditionally, France has obtained uranium from Gabon and Niger, two Francophone ex-colonies in Africa. As is typical for neo-colonialism, France sends troops to upholds its interests as the situation requires. While there were 400 coal miners in France, there were 3000 uranium miners in Niger in 1990 and fewer now, but still more than 1000.(3) After using up its own uranium ores, France also used up most of Gabon's. So it is that coal's replacement employs more productive sector workers in the Third World than coal did in France. In their heyday, Gabon and Niger provided for a French state-owned company called COGEMA that supplied 25% of the world's enrichment and conversion of uranium supplies. The French company also sold over $5 billion in uranium in 1999, with half the ore supply coming from Niger alone. Now France can also obtain uranium from Au$tralia and other places, but the point remains that French productive sector work has declined. COGEMA has 20,000 people total spread out over 30 countries.(4) That is much less than France's coal industry at its peak and many of those COGEMA workers are not in the imperialist countries. COGEMA is a conscious scheme of the French imperialists to see to France's energy and weapons needs. In 1999 for the figures above, the French government owned 82% of COGEMA. There could hardly be better proof of MIM's line that imperialism has become entirely parasitic except for a few exceptions such as Russia. As we pointed out in MIM Theory in 1997 available on the Internet, "By now we can say China's exports alone involve more industrial workers than the total of all industrial workers in France, Germany and the 'United Kingdom' combined."(5) At that time, COGEMA was wiping out the last of the French miners by replacing them with uranium miners in Niger. Since 1997, the pace of parasitism has increased. The exports of China just to the United $tates increased from $62.5 billion in 1997 to $102.3 billion in 2001.(6) The industrial workers are in China and the rest of the Third World. The consumers are in the imperialist countries. 99% of those calling themselves "Marxist" in the imperialist countries have yet to catch up to these economic facts of life. They prattle on and on about the economic demands of "workers" in the imperialist countries, only to end up obtaining them stock accounts and new excuses for wars on countries with the energy supplies.
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