The Inter-Congolese Dialogue: A Smoke-Filled, Blathering Assembly?
Le Mot du Week-end (26 September 2026)
The state of the country: two forces colliding
Today, the MDW wants to dwell on the dialogue among Congolese people meant to resolve the question of the implosion of the State. The state of the country is that several localities have left the government’s fold and now answer to the M23/AFC rebels, who are under Rwanda’s protection. There are therefore two forces colliding over the shaping of the Congolese State. Centrifugal forces that want to break away from the center (the Capital, Kinshasa). And loyalist forces — centripetal ones — that want to reunite the country around its center of command, Kinshasa.
A dialogue with many faces
To respond to this state of affairs, the idea of an assembly, commonly called the inter-Congolese dialogue, is seen as a proposed solution. This dialogue has taken several paths. For the Catholic and Protestant clergy who initiated it, it was meant to be a gathering to refound the Congolese State. For the political opposition, this gathering had to be inclusive, meaning it had to include all dissenting voices, including those of the armed opposition. Finally, those in power took the initiative, through a presidential decree setting the limits of a potential inter-Congolese dialogue. The decree excludes from participation in this gathering all those who took up arms against their own country. This proposal would be logical under normal circumstances. The rebels retort that they did not take up arms against the country, but against a regime that was destroying the country. Yet a government delegation and one from the rebels are meeting in Switzerland and in Doha, Qatar. In short, the inter-Congolese dialogue has several meanings depending on whether one belongs to civil society, the armed or unarmed political opposition, or those in power.
The MDW’s thesis: against the blathering assembly
For today’s Mot du Weekend, the revolutionary consciousness of Congolese people, or their desire for well-being, will not result from the smoke-filled debates of a blathering general assembly such as the inter-Congolese dialogue. The revolutionary upsurge in Congo will not come out of the debates of the inter-Congolese dialogue; what makes us move forward is not deliberating or positioning ourselves within the subjective debates of surface-level, frothy and lamentable questioning built on the spectacle of an ego gesticulating with subjects, verbs and predicates. The real, objective revolutionary movement of the class, of each one of us, is not a deliberation or a questioning. It is a self-presupposition, it is not a deliberation, because deliberation starts from the narcissistic subject made autonomous by chattering. It is an artificial construction.
For the MDW, the narcissistic elites of the Democratic Republic of Congo clash in a blathering that always ends in delirium over how to organize the alienation and oppression of the people. Dialogue, or blathering, never leads to emancipation. What leads to emancipation is the historical self-presupposition of radical necessity embodied in eros, in voluptuousness, and in the necessity of historical determinism. In January 1959, when ABAKO attacked in the capital, there was no prior deliberation. It is the self-movement of the self-presupposition of necessity, refusing smoke-filled and blathering dialogue, that produces historical action around it. The whole of historical necessity is superior to its deliberating parts because it expresses the fire of historical necessity in motion, which fulfills the destiny of its desire and the desire of its destiny. The principle we defend is that each of us must break out of blathering and bind ourselves to the history of self-presupposition and of determinism, which is the democratic refusal of the blathering assembly, in order to produce impersonal organicity.
Like every general assembly, the inter-Congolese dialogue is the site of lies, deceit and manipulation. Everything that has radically transformed history has come out of the deterministic spontaneity of the organic and impersonal product of the historical action of the proletariat. When one decides not to submit to the government, there is no deliberation. The inter-Congolese dialogue, like assemblies in general, disarms the proletariat. The revolutionary proletariat is an organicity, a historical totality that exceeds each of its members; every revolutionary action is a storm, a tumult that carries everyone beyond themselves and beyond the totality itself, such that a radical infinity is embodied within it; the organic dialectical totality of an autonomous impersonal action. A radical action of impersonal organicity is anti-democratic.
Democracy, blathering and logos
Democracy was born in Greece when the genos of common property broke down, and within that breakdown a new territorial unit emerged — no longer the primitive genos, but the demos of the necessary appropriations of a new economy structured around exchange value. Democracy is the democracy of exchange value — of money as king. The demos of democracy is the population of exchange value. This population of exchange value is called upon to deliberate in blathering assemblies, and out of these assemblies arises a contradiction between blathering and logos.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the MDW affirms that nothing good will come out of an inter-Congolese dialogue — a blathering assembly. The revolutionary flame can only be sustained through a historical action of impersonal organicity. Assemblies sterilize revolutionary radicality.
We want to close with a quotation from Bordigat in The Communism of Blunderers: “Counter-revolution always wants to eliminate physical beings. True revolution does not attack physical beings; it attacks the social relations of alienating reproduction.” In other words, so that social reality is not transformed, individuals are lynched; spectacular butcheries are staged so that social reality itself remains untouched. To leave the state of Congo unchanged, one must wage war or physically eliminate individuals. That is the only way to gun down social relations — one must wage war, and the war of being.
Prof. Patience Kabamba