CARA Manifesto (The Golden Book)
The Third Way and Solution of the Problem of the Congo Basin
Issued by Colonel Muammar Marius Rogér al-Fortier
on behalf of the Central African Revolutionary Assembly https://app.warera.io/party/69f25e3b33fbf341aea6e906
TL;DR: To cut costs, we are creating a new Pacifist-Agrarian party.
Going forward, our humble nation of medicinal plant enthusiasts will work with our partners to maximize value and reduce losses in otherwise non-productive regions.
Readers: The following is a work of political satire and fictional roleplay. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of our players. Any resemblance to real political movements, ideologies, or historical figures is intentional as parody and should be read as such. This document does not endorse, glorify, or advocate for any real-world political ideology or authoritarian governance.
The Golden Book
Muammar Marius Rogér al-Fortier
1
On the Nature of the Present World Order
There are two lies that have governed this world for the past century.
The first lie is Capital. The promise that a man who owns the land may do with it as he pleases, regardless of what grows on it, regardless of who starves beneath it, regardless of the generations whose bones enrich the soil he has turned into a rent ledger. Capital does not feed people. Capital feeds itself.
The second lie is the State. The promise that a government, appointed by procedures designed by those already in power, represents the people who live under it. The State does not represent the farmer. The State taxes the farmer. The State sends the farmer's sons to wars decided in offices the farmer will never enter, for interests the farmer will never share, in the name of a nation the farmer built with his hands and was never invited to govern.
The Central African Revolutionary Assembly (fr. Centrafricaine Assemblée Révolutionnaire Agraire, C.A.R.A.) rejects both lies.
We have watched the world order perform its rituals. We have watched the architects discover, repeatedly and with apparent surprise, that it has no mechanism to stop the powerful from devouring the weak. We have watched colonial projects return under new names and we have watched the same hands that drew the maps in Brussels and Lisbon and Cairo reach back across the centuries to redraw them.
For this we have filed motions, issued statements, written editorials.
Yet unlike the free press it claims to tolerate, the present world order deliberates in rooms with no public address and emerges only to present conclusions. If this is what it calls governance, then the proud people of Central Africa will not petition to be consulted. They shall associate freely without the permission of those who appointed themselves the gatekeepers. This freedom is not a privilege to be granted by a vote behind closed doors.
We are done reporting. We are done condemning.
We are planting.
2
On the Third Way
The Third Way is not a compromise between Capital and the State. It is the rejection of both in favor of something older and more honest: the land, and the people who work it.
Not the people whose voices have been usurped. The people who work it. The seasonal hand who follows the harvest. The migrant who builds a company on foreign soil because the soil at home was exhausted. The worker who crossed a border not to conquer but to plant.
The Central African Republic is a nation of arrivals. This is not a weakness. It is the oldest form of civilization on this continent. People moving toward fertile ground, putting down roots, building something from nothing, and asking only to be left alone to tend what they have grown.
Against us stands the hegemon. They grows large to establish monopolies, and do not offer a fair stake in what grows from the ground beneath their feet to the nations within its sphere. Instead they offer the kind of rate that keeps a nation just solvent enough to remain compliant and just dependent enough to remain controllable.
There are, however, dividends. Variable rates, generous returns, paid faithfully and on time, to the military partners outside Africa who keep the machine running. Gold and iron leaves the continent. The income follows it. The coalition that fights Africa's internal wars of aggression is compensated from the wealth of the soil it helps subjugate. This is not African solidarity. This is a revenue sharing agreement between an African hegemon and its foreign military contractors, dressed in the borrowed language of continental unity.
This is not an alliance. It is a franchise. The franchisee gives up their regions, their sovereignty, their right to determine what grows on their own land, in exchange for a percentage decided by someone else, in a room they were not invited to enter.
C.A.R.A. does not recognize arrangements where nations become dependent in someone else's supply chain. It offers the radical proposition that the people and nations whose land generates the wealth should receive a portion of it proportional to what they contributed.
This is the difference between a hegemon and a partner.
This is the Social Basis of the Third Way.
Not blood. Not borders.
The land. The work. The people.
3
On Extraction
The wealth of the Congo basin is finite at this moment in history. What is held by those who did not earn it is withheld from those who did. This is not inequality. Inequality implies a spectrum. This is theft. The factories built on our soil, the wages paid to our workers at rates set by men in distant offices, the surplus extracted and carried elsewhere... each of these is a subtraction from what belongs to the people of this basin.
The wealth beneath Central African soil did not arrive there for the convenience of distant shareholders. It accumulated over centuries, indifferent to the borders drawn above it and the flags planted in it. It belongs, in the most fundamental sense, to the moment in history in which it is found and owed first to the people living above it.
What the hegemon calls investment, we call a ledger. What they call development, we call a subtraction. The deposit exploited by a hegemon generates income. That income funds a military. That military protects the arrangement. The arrangement perpetuates the extraction. Under this system, the wealth of the basin not grow. Worse, it diminishes the spirit of a nation. What remains is dependency, and dependency, as any farmer knows, is just another word for a harvest that belongs to someone else.
C.A.R.A. does not prohibit extraction. It prohibits extraction without return. The venture capitalist may build here. The industrial partner may occupy our deposits. But the wealth that leaves this soil must leave a portion behind, not as charity, but as a proportional return to the people and the land that produced it.
4
On Partnership
A worker paid a wage to tend another man's field has no stake in what grows there. He will work until the wage is earned and no longer. He will not love the soil. He will not defend it. He will not mourn the harvest that fails or celebrate the one that doesn't.
A partner is different. A partner works because the field is his field, the harvest is his harvest, the failure is his loss and the plenty is his plenty. CARA builds partners, not employees. The cooperatives we establish in the Congo basin will be owned by those who work them. The surplus they generate will be shared among those who generated it. There will be no absentee landlord, no distant shareholder, no Lisbon office taking its percentage before the farmer has eaten.
This principle does not stop at the field's edge. The owner of capital who builds on Central African soil is also a partner. Their investment will be defended, their deposits protected, their right to productive use of the land guaranteed. Not because capital deserves protection for its own sake, but because productive capital serves the people working beneath it, and idle capital serves no one. We do not chase away the builder. We ask only that what is built does not extract without returning.
And between nations, the same principle holds. An industrial partner that shares its returns, that pools its capacity rather than monopolizing it, that treats the sovereignty of its partners as a condition of the arrangement rather than an inconvenience to be managed, will find in Central Africa a willing and loyal counterpart.
The man who builds alone and employs others has chosen the old world.
The man who builds with his neighbors and shares the harvest has chosen ours.
5
On Wolves
The man who burns the field is not a farmer. He is the last reflex of a system already declared illegitimate, funded by hands that have never touched the soil they are paying others to defend. He does not represent the farmers inside the cooperative. He represents the man outside it who is no longer collecting rent.
The revolution is patient with those who are lost. It is not patient with those who are paid.
6
On Assembly
C.A.R.A. shall become an army with a plough. It is the organized will of a people who have decided that the fields will be worked, that the harvest will be shared, and that whoever stands between the farmer and his land will be removed.
The funds we raise from making idle lands productive will build the armies that keep them productive. The armies that keep them productive will defend the cooperatives that distribute the harvest. The cooperatives that distribute the harvest will fund the next army, the next field, the next generation born of this basin who will inherit a region that feeds itself and answers to no one.
For the farmers of the Congo basin, for the people of this soil, for the generations that have watched others grow rich on what they planted: the land is yours. We are coming to give it back.
The revolution is patient, and it remembers.
Muammar Marius Rogér al-Fortier
*
Post Scriptum
